The Ambitious City (2 page)

Weaving swiftly through traffic as he descended the mountain, MacNeice thought about the waterfront regeneration project the mayor had mentioned. In 2012 the country would mark the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, and if Maybank could pull this off, it would inject new revenue into the city, both through construction and afterwards, when the tourists arrived. Specifically what it was going to be MacNeice wasn’t sure. Like many people in Dundurn he’d been skeptical that the feds and the province would invest heavily in a city known nationwide for its dead or dying manufacturing sector. Industry, it was understood, was the city’s only reason for being. In the much sought after “new economy,” it seemed to be accepted that Dundurn would be collateral damage.

Maybank had given quirky instructions on how to find the trailer: “Go past the blast furnace, past all the long rows of rusty red buildings, all the way to the end of life as you know it—and then turn left.” MacNeice pulled up next to the shiny black Lincoln Town Car and looked out to the bay, where the cormorants were diving for lake fish dumb enough to come through the canal. Stepping out of the Chevy and walking over to the wooden steps of the first trailer, he noticed the fusion of smells, dominated by oil and chemicals and topped off with marine decay—it wasn’t unpleasant. But then, the wind was blowing the sulphur fumes from the steel plant up over the city and not over the water.

The door to the trailer swung open and Mayor Bob stepped out with his winning smile, firm handshake and shoulder clasp. “Mac, welcome to the future—the Museum of the Great Lakes. Come on inside; it smells like rat shit out here. In a couple of years,
though, it’ll be all candy floss and coconut oil, I promise you.”

“Stop campaigning, Bob. I’m here, and you’ve already won the election.”

“Ah, but the secret is—to never stop.” He smiled broadly and opened the door for MacNeice.

Waiting for them inside were three people introduced as Julia Marchetti, Maybank’s head of communications, Terence Young, the project architect, and Howard Ellis, the project’s principal engineer. MacNeice shook their hands and looked back at Maybank for an explanation.

“We have a great opportunity with this project, Mac. We have the support of all three levels of government, as well as the United States Congress and Senate and the U.S. Navy—they’re responsible for marine war graves. They all know this will be unique in North America and in the world.”

“Raising the two ships and gifting them to Dundurn was signed into law decades ago,” Young said enthusiastically, “but the technology to do it didn’t exist back then. What’s keeping those ships and everything on them in mint condition is the temperature down there—it’s just above freezing year-round. Bring them up, and in a few weeks they’ll disintegrate right before your eyes.” He moved his hands as if to say
poof
. “Today we have the technology to refrigerate them, from the bottom of the lake to their arrival here. Imagine a huge aquarium—one-inch-thick plate glass, shrouded in blue light. To be precise, they’ll be in the same conditions as now, but on view forever.”

As Maybank slid an aerial site view across the table and opened the architectural renderings, MacNeice said, “Excuse me, but I’m a homicide detective. You need to get to the point, Bob—what am I doing here?”

For a moment the mayor looked angry. Then he smiled and said, “Okay, Mac, here’s the point. In a routine check of the scans
showing the bottom of the wharf, Ellis discovered something.” He nodded to the engineer.

Ellis came over to MacNeice. “Once we’d dropped the wall on the bay side and began pumping the water out, we started making weekly scans of the progress: bird’s-eye views of the dock. That wall behind the mayor represents scans from the past four months. As you can see, there’s nothing unusual.”

MacNeice looked over at the wall. The soft blue-grey scans all looked the same.

Ellis began laying prints on the table. “These are the latest scans—the time frame is seven days.” He laid them down in sequence. The first two looked the same as those on the wall, but numbers three to five were different. “You can see forms emerging here, here, here, here and here.” He put another print down and pointed to a rounded lump. “We’re pumping sludge day and night; this was yesterday morning and that form is getting clearer. I mean, it’s still below the surface but it’ll be dry on the bottom by tomorrow.” He put the last output on the table with a modest flourish. “This is from this morning.” MacNeice could feel Maybank’s eyes on him, waiting for a reaction.

The scan revealed four long columns lying on their sides, two circular and two square. They could now see that the rounded lump was an automobile—an old automobile. MacNeice picked up the print and studied it closely. “Looks like it’s from the thirties.”

“Very good, Mac,” said the mayor. “I’m told it’s a 1935 Packard 120 sedan.”

“Those columns are what, seven or eight feet long?” MacNeice asked Ellis.

“The square ones are concrete—six feet, six inches, by scale to the output. And the round ones—where you can just make out a spiral pattern—those are eight-foot Sonotubes filled with concrete.”

“Sonotubes … like poster tubes?”

“Exactly. They’re used as formwork for concrete columns. However”—Ellis pointed at the end of a round-sectioned column—“construction columns are reinforced with steel rods, but these appear to be solid concrete.” He moved away to let MacNeice draw the conclusion that everyone else in the trailer had already reached.

MacNeice looked over at the mayor, who nodded. “Howard thinks the square columns may have been down there for half a century or more. But the Sonotubes are recent. If you look at the one on the right, the wrapping is unwinding in that gunk.”

“What’s this got to do with me, Bob?” MacNeice was staring at the sequence of prints.

“Julia, can you, Ellis and Young leave us for a moment, please.” The mayor waited till they had closed the door behind them. “You’re the best, and I need you. This project is too important to the city for it to be derailed by this kind of drama. Our funding depends on everything going smoothly.”

“Chain of command, Bob.”

“I’m the mayor, for fuck’s sake!” Maybank snapped. “Tell me what you need and I’ll make things happen. Start by telling me what we should do now, for chrissakes. If this becomes a crime scene, the media will be all over us.”

“If it’s a crime scene, it’s their job to be all over you. And if it’s a crime scene you’ll have plenty of cops down here too.”

“I don’t want plenty of cops. I want you.” The mayor leaned towards him over the table. “I’m just trying to do what’s best for this city, Mac, and if that car and some of those columns have been down there for more than half a century, how is turning this into a media circus going to help Dundurn? We’ve been Canada’s armpit all our lives. This project will get us off our knees and back into the game.”

“Quit mixing your metaphors and grab that aerial view of the site.”

When Maybank set the large colour print down in front of him, MacNeice put his finger on a rail line located at the northwest corner of the wharf. “As fast as you can, get City Works to erect a tent, say thirty by fifty feet, right here. Make sure it has sides and air conditioning; in fact, get a refrigeration truck and park it there”—he tapped the image. “You’ll need twenty-four-hour security you can trust, but don’t use the police.” He picked up a pen and drew the rectangles of the tent and the truck. “Use your cranes to lift the columns up onto the carts that run on that track, and roll them into the tent. Put the Packard in there too.”

He put the pen down on the drawing. “One more thing. You’ve already lost the media game, Bob. Every one of those workers grew up around here, or has heard from those who did. They’re the same stories you and I grew up with—about the mob, the bay, the cement overshoes. You’ve cleared them from the site but you can’t clear their heads of what they’re sure is happening here.”

“What do you recommend I do, then?”

“If I were you, I’d ask Julia Marchetti to write a terrific story about how it’s part of the great history of Dundurn—a tough steel city born of the same spirit of daring and survival that two hundred years earlier inspired our country to victory in the War of 1812. Dundurn is our Bronx, or Brooklyn; it was never a quiet, innocent town.”

“You made up that shit just now?”

MacNeice smiled, looked briefly out the window and headed for the door.

“But Mac, you’ll do the investigation for me, right?”

“I can’t promise that. We’re short-staffed, and you know that—you approved the Police Services budget. I can’t give you a commitment. Get that tent up, get those things in there, get a couple of men you can trust with jackhammers, and then call me.”

—

Back at his desk, MacNeice went online to read more about the
Hamilton
and the
Scourge
. One of the schooners had originally been British, and as often happened in times of conflict, it had been captured and renamed. Its origin wouldn’t have been lost on the crews, however; the figurehead on the
Scourge
was its original namesake, Lord Nelson. The
Hamilton’s
was the goddess Diana, though she looked to MacNeice more like a character out of
Pride and Prejudice
. The photographs of the shipwrecks were notable for their absence of wreckage. Both ships were upright, their masts still in position, cutlasses, sabres and boarding axes all neatly stowed. While the cannons had rolled about with the impact of the squall, they looked ready to roll back on command.

For the men caught below, there had been no hope. The water had rushed through the gun ports, over the sides and down the hatches, blocking their escape. Those who’d been on watch or sleeping on deck were likely washed overboard, where their only chance for survival was to swim for it or climb aboard the only lifeboat, itself full of water. Some knew how to swim but many others did not, and since the only floating debris was another man struggling to stay afloat, the loss of life was high.

He googled the recovery research that had been done when they were found, and was surprised to learn that the
Mary Rose
, King Henry
VIII’S
flagship, was the first reference. When he and Kate were in Britain on their honeymoon, she had taken him to see it, or what was left of it, in an enormous permanent tent. The huge, skeletal remains rested under a perpetual shower of polyethylene glycol, a water-based wax solution. People in yellow rain gear climbed about on scaffolding doing research or checking for further decay, as the visitors looked on, somewhat bewildered, from the dry side of a Plexiglas wall. “She’d be sawdust in no time if they stopped,” a young Australian seaman explained.

“The worms are dormant now, but they’d spring to life like maggots on a carcass if it stopped rainin’ in there.”

MacNeice shut down the computer. He had no interest in thinking about his honeymoon.

As he drove home along Main Street and up the narrow mountain road to the stone cottage, thoughts of his past ricocheted around his brain. As quickly as he’d hunt one down and banish it, another would appear. Parking in front of the cottage, he suddenly remembered making love to Kate on an island in Georgian Bay. Her flesh had seemed so alive to his touch and so smooth against the moss, lichen and grey rocks. Under cedars where the lower branches were dead and the bark was flaking off, she was whole and fresh and white. He could see the shadows of the branches tracing lines across her stomach and down her legs, and how she used one arm to shield her eyes from the sun. They’d just been swimming, and droplets of water beaded her lower belly—he’d kissed those first. He remembered her groan, coming from somewhere deep inside …

He worked hard to turn these memories off. When such images appeared, it helped MacNeice to think of a dark, crusty scab. It’s never easy to let nature take its course during healing. You’re always tempted to ease the itch and pick at the edges, but you can’t stop till it’s bleeding again—and then it takes even longer to heal. In his kitchen he opened a bottle of wine and sat down at the table so he was facing the fridge, fearful that if he were to look out to the forest that sloped away behind his home, those northern images of Kate would flood back and he wouldn’t get to sleep. Or if he did, the all too familiar nightmares would wake him again.

MacNeice had hidden or removed everything in the place that reminded him of his dead wife, but there was no place to hide from the memories born of his relentlessly acute talent for observation. He recalled the smell of the sunblock on her skin as he leaned down
to kiss her belly … He tried thinking about the sunken ships and drowning men, and that helped, and so did Charlie Haden singing “Wayfaring Stranger” on the stereo in the living room. At last the music slowly took the images of Kate away, leaving him weary enough to head to bed.

The call came at six in the morning.

“MacNeice.”

“It’s Bob. Just wanted you to know it’ll all be in place by noon. I’ll stay away, but I want regular reports.”

“I take it you’ve spoken to the Deputy Chief?”

“Yes. Wallace told me how busy you guys are. I’ll say this only to you, Mac, but if you need any additional resources to help on this, ask me and I’ll deliver—that’s a promise.”

“You might wish you hadn’t said that.”

“Just clean this up.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

He sat up in bed, yawned several times and realized that he’d dodged a bullet by not dreaming of Kate. Swinging his feet to the floor, he thought about calling Swetsky to ask for Vertesi back, but if the car and the columns were just discarded trash, there’d be no need. He’d just have to check it out.

M
AC
N
EICE WAS PARKED
at the south end of a large party tent. Its sides were down and three burly guys in mock cop uniforms stood outside staring at him. Two of them looked like bouncers from the Boogy Bin, moonlighting for some extra cash.

His phone rang, and when he answered, DC Wallace said, “So, who do you need down there?”