The white wolverine cont.., p.1
The White Wolverine Contract, page 1
The White Wolverine Contract
A Joe Gall Mystery
Philip Atlee
Man is the only animal with temerity enough to hunt the wolverine. All other predatory species found it dangerous and unprofitable long ago.
In deep snow, a forty-pound wolverine can attack and kill an adult bull moose weighing a ton. …
Chapter One
The sidewalks of downtown Vancouver were packed with hordes of fake Christs. These languid replicas were considerably dirtier than their prototype, and even in October most of them trudged barefooted through the spittle and slimy cigar butts. Their girl-women moved with them in tight jeans, faded tie-dyed shirts or blouses, and head-bands.
Youth was the name of the hippie horde, although some of the unkempt dropouts were in their thirties or even forties. Most of them had drifted into Vancouver from the Unites States. Hitchhiking in with little or no funds and a back-pack of meager possessions, they had infested the back alleys and public conveniences of the beautiful Canadian seaport all summer.
Considering the fact that the hippie-lemmings had almost immediately become public charges, only a few trying for jobs where unemployment was already high, their unwilling hosts treated them with considerable restraint. A few muttered imprecations were to be heard when Vancouver residents stumbled over the hairy invaders as they huddled on stairways, lounged in busy doorways, and lay stoned and vacantly dreaming in public parks.
Now the indolent hippie beast was slouching, not toward Jerusalem, but Jericho. That was the name of the empty barracks at the city’s outskirt to which they were being herded. The government of British Columbia had recently evicted them from a downtown arsenal where they slept until noon without segregation of the sexes, and openly turned on night and day with speed, hash, pot, and cocaine. No attempt had been made to conceal their drug use; indeed they flaunted it before reporters and were photographed for news broadcasts giggling, slack-mouthed, and firing off absurd demands that they be given a large amount of society’s largess. But not until noon, please, after they had awakened….
Many of them were psychotic, displayed severe personality disorders, and the rate of venereal infection was high and climbing. The few volunteer doctors and nurses who tried to combat it had no success because of the incidence of reinfection.
I knew all these facts because I had been sitting for two hours in the Mozart Konditorei on Robson Strasse with a Chinese girl named Kelly. (Of course her name wasn’t Kelly. It was Miss Wu. And the Robson Strasse was really Robson Street, on Vancouver’s glittering west side.)
Man cannot live by nomenclature alone. Miss Wu was Kelly because she had decided that would be a groovy thing for a healthy, shapely girl to call herself. The street was the Strasse because for blocks it featured specialty shops and stores selling European foods and products. German, Dutch, Austrian, Swiss: they were solid foreign enclaves in a city of many foreign colonies.
Not far away was a high-rise apartment building, the Johann Strauss, and a few blocks from that was the handsome new tower of the Rembrandt Hotel. As Kelly pointed these things out, I nodded and said it beat naming such structures after bankers or politicians.
“Watch, please!” Her hand touched my elbow, and I turned toward the direction her other slender hand was pointing. I didn’t see anything interesting. Late afternoon traffic along Robson Strasse, with the employed worthies hurrying home and the hippies weaving through, around, and obstructing them. A sluice of one-way traffic toward North Vancouver featuring mostly European imports, an astonishing number of small Japanese cars including the Mazda (about which I had never heard), and many Jaguars and British sports cars. Occasionally, a Rolls purred by; many of these were waxed vintage models.
“So?” I asked. The Konditorei was a great little place for tea, crumpets, and tortes, but it had no license to serve beer or alcoholic drinks, and I was developing a dangerous bloat from tea and pastry.
“That postal box on the corner, by the Seamen’s Institute,” she commanded. “The red one. Every afternoon an unknown lady from one of the big luxury apartment towers comes down and leaves a foil-wrapped package, a big one, on top of the letter box. Tucked into it is a short, unsigned note asking that the package be taken as a gift by anyone who needs food.”
I watched the red postal box on the next corner. There did seem to be an inordinate number of hippies pressing toward it. Casually, lounging past each other into doorways, inching toward the corner.
“It holds a fabulous meal, you see,” Kelly rushed on, her dark eyes alive with excitement. “Caviar, smoked salmon and sturgeon, cheeses, biscuits…. Enough of a meal for several people, really.”
When the Chinese girl said “really” it came out as “rally,” and I mimicked her. She stuck out her tongue at me, and sat with her face cradled in both hands, waiting for the small miracle to arrive. Kelly Wu was about twenty-seven, tall for a Chinese girl. She moved often, and her breasts swung freely under the thin blouse when she did. They were obviously unconfined, and her dark skirt was short enough to show that she was wearing pantyhose.
“Oh, frig that,” I said. “I’d rather look at your legs.”
Her face, still cradled in her hands, turned to survey me briefly. “Your remark, with its Freudian implications in the first phrase, is not really the thing, Mr. Gardner.”
She angled her head to the other side and thrust her shapely legs into full view. The modish shoes had blunt toes, and she waggled them.
“They aren’t bad, are they?” she asked. “Still, I must ask you not to be such a toilet-mouthed Yank, in my presence.”
“Right,” I said, getting up. “Pardon.”
I walked back through the crowded tables topped by spotless napery to the can. While my distended bladder was discharging oolong, I wondered how long this badinage was going to last. Kelly Wu was the secretary of J. Donald Atwater, a Vancouver alderman and millionaire real estate man. Her employer was a showboat of the highest order, according to report, and would rather be dead than out of the public eye.
J. Donald Atwater was what the news photographers call a “lens louse.” At the recent dedication of a huge tower being built in the center of Vancouver, he had upstaged the mayor by leaping out onto the final girder while it was being swung into place, on the twenty-eighth floor. Actually riding the damned thing as it was craned and bolted into place. The rest of the dedication party had been completely forgotten while the photographers shot J. Donald, gripping the swinging steel beam on all fours….
So, an eccentric: every government has them. The difference was that J. Donald Atwater, a Canadian born in British Columbia, had for years been a bristling supporter of the theory that his province should voluntarily withdraw from the Canadian Federal Union and join the United States of America. For most of these years this treasonous suggestion had been ignored because he was a powerhouse in municipal good works. The Vancouver press reported his antics faithfully, if often with tongue in cheek, as a valuable civic leader. It was this odd predilection of his, British Columbia’s union with the States, which had brought me to Vancouver.
The idea that British Columbia should become one of the United States is not held by even a strong minority of that province’s citizens, but those who champion the cause are highly vocal. The west coast of Canada came late to unity with the prairie and eastern provinces, and many people in British Columbia honestly feel that their section has long been slighted by Ontario and Quebec. And in the past few decades, many U.S. ranchers have removed to the upland caribou ranges and many Yank businessmen to Vancouver and Victoria.
As in all the rest of Canada, the dominant economic force comes from below the border. A majority interest in nearly all large businesses is owned by U.S. corporations. Add to these factors the social pressure of a severe recession in the province and the flocking in of hippies and métis seeking the balmy climate, and you have a specious but enthusiastic nucleus for separation from the federal union centered in Ottawa.
As I stared at my lean visage in the mirror, regretting the ravages of time and the scar tissue, I could still not help admiring the essential mobility of the reflected face. That wide brow could have encompassed any thought.
Actually, while I dried my hands on the virgin towel I was wondering, if I played my tarot cards just right, whether or not I could peel the blunt-toed shoes and beige pantyhose off Miss Wu….
I wound my way back through the Konditorei tables, and found Kelly jabbing her fingers again. Still at the postal box on the far corner. There was an aluminum-foil-wrapped package on it, and hippies began to materialize out of doorways, alleys, and across the Robo-Wash parking lot.
Some of them were openly hurrying toward the red mail box when a door opened suddenly in a saloon across the street. From the licensed premises late afternoon bar drinkers broke across the street on the dead run. There were young clerks among them, laboring men in dirty coveralls, and cab drivers with caps askew on their heads.
The men streaming from the bar were racing the hippies to the free meal on the postal box. Seeing their intention, the hairy ones gave up the pretense that they just happened to be in the neighborhood. They bolted forward, and the two dissident streams of running people collided. A small riot erupted.
A young man in mod attire, one of the first out of the saloon door, captured the prize. Lifted the foil-wrapped package and danced around, holding it aloft. Whirling.
When the wave hit him, he threw the food to the cur
A few irresolute hippies stood staring at the rich food stomped into pulp, but after a few cars had whirled it around, they trudged away.
At the table beside me, Kelly Wu unleashed a string of quiet oaths which would have made a logger or a mule-skinner nod with appreciation.
“All they did,” she said, simmering down, “was destroy a meal for several people.” I didn’t answer, and the slanted eyes swung on me over an outraged, full mouth. “And you belong to the same club.”
I shrugged, “Mas o menos. Look, can’t we go wait somewhere else? I mean, where we can get a drink? These tortes are killing me.”
“No,” she answered coldly, “Mr. Atwater told us to wait here for a message, and that’s what we’ll do. I’m on overtime, too, you know.”
“Yes, of course.” An hour before, J. Donald Atwater had delivered another inflammatory speech to his colleagues in the Vancouver municipal government. This one, however, was wilder than most; he had called for a plebiscite in British Columbia, to decide on immediate secession from the Canadian Federal Government, in order to petition for entrance into the United States. As its fifty-first state. If successfully concluded, this act would have given the U.S. an unbroken Pacific shoreline from Alaska to Mexico, and would add rich and almost untapped mineral treasures to our Yank domain.
Kelly Wu went to the can, threading her way through the tables like a ballerina.
Alderman Atwater had staked Kelly Wu and me out in this teahouse to monitor his actions after he delivered the speech. He might be justified in his fear of danger. Neal Pearsall, head of the agency’s action division, had sent me in on short notice.
Robson Strasse was darkening beyond the glass windows. Kelly Wu came flouncing back, settled herself with a good deal more show of pantyhose than was necessary, and smiled at me. We ordered more tea.
From our streetside table, we could see the tremendous bloom of night jewelry, across Burrard Inlet on the far shores. The fine harbor went from glinting black water to a ring of twinkling slopes, and the thin line of lights snaking up the far mountain to the Grouse Mountain cable car. The bridge span sparkled; unseen now beyond the Lion’s Gate were the peaks which gave it a name…
“What will J. Donald be doing now?” I asked.
“Oh …” She glanced at her watch. “He’ll have had dinner, after three martinis. His wife will be cautioning him to put on another sweater before he takes his walk…”
“Oh?”
“Yes, Mr. Gardner.”
“What are we supposed to be waiting for?”
“He thinks he will be hurt, tonight, because of the speech.”
“So we have to spend our lives here, waiting to hear if he got low-bridged for his opinions?”
“Well …” She hesitated. “We might wait in my apartment.”
“Let’s do that.”
When I had attracted the attention of the waitress, I paid the bill, and Kelly Wu and I went out onto Robson and caught a cab. She had a lovely apartment, and I sipped cognac while she vanished into its bathroom. At my elbow on the coffee table was an opened small carton of cigarillos, Willem twos, made in Holland. I tried one.
Kelly came back in a thin robe. She stopped before me, and I picked her up and was carrying her into the darkened bedroom when the telephone began ringing.…
Chapter Two
“Yes?” The tall Chinese girl listened, one arm held over her bared breasts. Her dark hair was tousled. While I watched, her lips flattened, and she said “Oh, no!” Then listened again.
Kelly cradled the phone, snatched at some clothes, and as she went toward the bathroom said that the caller had been Rachel Atwater, the alderman’s wife. Atwater had been severely beaten, bound, and tossed into the sea in Eagle Harbor. He was now on his way to the emergency ward of St. Paul’s Hospital.
“Jesus,” I commented, lighting another of the little Dutch cigars. “They pay off fast around here.”
Kelly came out of the bathroom wearing black pants, a dark cashmere sweater, and a rakish, flat-brimmed matador’s hat. When I began to hum “Lady of Spain, I Adore You,” she shook her head and said that my geography was pretty crazy. But the impish lightness was gone.
We got a cab, went wheeling down Robson, and turned right toward Burrard and the old hospital. A police guard at the emergency ward door barred me, but Kelly said I was with her, so he waved me by. There were no patients in sight, no activity at all in the bleak room smelling of blood, urine, and disinfectants. Kelly found a nurse down the hall, and she reported that Alderman Atwater had just been taken up to surgery.
We went up to the fourth floor and found more police guards. This time they were RCMPs, and denied both of us entry. When Kelly explained who she was, and produced identification, they suggested that she go around to the gallery. St. Paul’s was a teaching hospital, and had an observation gallery above the main surgical room. We walked around to its entrance, Kelly explained again, saying that I was an American associate of Alderman Atwater, and we were admitted.
The subject of this close guard was on the table, and had already been draped. The surgical field was on the right side of the head, above the ear, which was matted with dried blood. What we could see of Atwater’s face was waxen pale. The anesthesiologist had already put him under, and was checking his cylinders and insufflator bladder. The instrument nurse was waiting at her station, but the surgical team had not come in from scrubbing.
The oval observation gallery hung close to the surgical table, but was about nine feet above the floor below. Four reporters were waiting with us, but photographers had been barred. In addition, there were several men in suits whom I took to be doctors, three young interns in rumpled white work clothes, and two nurses.
Kelly Wu, the chic Spanish matador, walked over to one of the interns and asked him how badly Atwater was hurt.
“We’re not sure, Miss. That’s why we’ve got him up here. Somebody pounded him around the head pretty good, I know that much, because I was on duty in Emergency when they brought him in. There’s one definite skull fracture just above the right hairline….”
I moved over to one of the reporters, and asked him what had happened to the Alderman. He had been scribbling in a notebook, and glanced up with disinterested eyes.
“You are?” he inquired.
I said that I was a business associate of Atwater, and showed him my phony U.S. passport in the name of Gardner. Added that Miss Wu, the Alderman’s secretary, would vouch for me.
“Hey, Kelly!” shouted the reporter. “You know this Yank?”
The Chinese girl was still talking to the intern, but she turned and nodded. The reporter flipped back through his notebook and gave me what he had, speaking without emphasis.
“After delivering another of his pro-American speeches before this afternoon’s council meeting, Atwater went to his office, then to his home. West side of Vancouver, above Eagle Harbor. Had dinner at six o’clock then took his red Irish setter down to the beach for a stroll.
“Walked about a half mile. When turning back, was set upon by persons unknown, beaten viciously, and when unconscious was bound and a jute bag put over his head and wired around his throat. If they had waited another twenty minutes, the assailants would not have been seen. Twilight was nearly full, but a police guard stationed above the beach saw the altercation and ran down toward it
“The attackers saw him coming and splashed through the surf to board a waiting launch. The guard fished J. Donald Atwater out of the water, but was hampered by his pedigreed setter, which had done absolutely nothing while his master was being kicked and hammered senseless by strangers. So much for good breeding, and man’s best friend.
“At 7:21 P.M., Atwater was loaded into an ambulance and driven to St. Paul’s Hospital. The jute sack, when removed, was found to be stitched on both sides and tied at the upper corners. On it were faded letters resembling ‘HPS-38/41 VANCOUVER’, with a diamond containing the numeral ‘4’ underneath….”
