Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variation

After nearly a minute, I asked, “He never came round?”

Hamp Fisher shook his head.

Hamp Fisher’s account of the death of Dermot Keogh quite dampened conversation for a good ten minutes after he finished. While looking at the wooded headlands alongside Wanda III , I thought of Wally Skeat, the Grantham TV broadcaster, from whom I’d first heard the name of the cellist at the end of April, the first anniversary of his death. I watched Hamp as he refilled my glass. I watched him with Peggy and got a good sense of their relationship through small things like the way he refreshed her drink and cleared away crumbs on the sundappled table with his napkin. Small things, but they penetrated to the heart of his affection for her. Peggy remained a little aloof from this, but I didn’t doubt her attachment to him. Again it was little things: when he pulled on a sweater, the way she tucked the label in at the back.

It was a big, comfortable navy blue sweater from Cornwall. I saw that much before the white tag was tidied away. I was wishing that I had brought something warm with me. A rank of dark clouds had come between us and the sun. It looked temporary, but my shoulders and back felt the chill. I began rubbing my elbows, I thought with some subtlety, but Peggy got up and returned with a white Aran sweater and another for herself.

“You mentioned the two divers who went down to the wreck with you and Mr. Keogh. Were many of his friends chosen as casually? I gather that they went on the fatal dive simply because they were in the right place at the right time.”

“What you say was certainly true of them. They just happened to be passing through. Diving that early in the year doesn’t often find dozens of enthusiasts to choose among. But, in general, you’re right too. Lots of Dermot’s friends were just ordinary people he happened to like.”

“Oh, Hamp, Dermot had other kinds of friends too. There were people he met at NTC and from Sony in the States, sure, but there were other musician friends, architects, painters, horse-breeders-you name it. But, usually they came up later in the year. About this time. Just when the weather is perfect and the last thing you want to think of is a sound stage.”

“What people from NTC?” I asked.

“There was quite a colony here last year and the year before that.” Hamp covered his chin with both hands, as though that helped him to see the faces from those vanished summers. “Let’s see, let’s see.”

“Philip Rankin came up a lot our first summer, although we didn’t see much of him.” Peggy was adding a plastic nose guard to her sunglasses. “He says he’s allergic to the sun.”

“Yes, and Ken Trebitsch comes up regularly. He rebuilt an old boathouse and lives above a small fleet. Remember, he introduced that lawyer, Ray Devlin. Dermot took quite a shine to Devlin. In the end it worked out to be an important relationship. Devlin’s firm handled all of Dermot’s contracts in the U.S. and in Canada. Eventually, Ray designed Dermot’s will.”

“When would that have been?”

“Oh, well before the spring three years back, I’d say. Yes, Ray was on the scene quite a bit then, but not here the following summer. Old Evans at the marina thought Rankin and Devlin should be banned from operating boats on the lake.”

“Oh, Hamp, Ray was lots of fun, once you got him to shed that bogus courtroom manner of his. You couldn’t ask him to pass the salt at first without being crossexamined.” We laughed at that.

“Yes,” Hamp said, nodding his head. “We missed him the summer before last. He wasn’t around really. There are always other people. One forgets. I will say this, Dermot thought him a very likeable chap.”

“But you didn’t warm to him, Hamp?”

“Me? Oh, I’m still a bit stand-offish, you know. Habit of a lifetime. I have to work at it. I work hard, and I’ve got a good teacher.” Peggy took Hamp’s hand. They smiled at one another and then both, a bit sheepishly, at me.

“We thought we’d drive to the Inn at the Falls for dinner, Benny. I hope that you’ll be able to join us.” I tried to make an excuse, but it was torn away before I’d fixed it firmly to the mast. Hamp knew that the kitchen at Norchris Lodge wasn’t in operation yet and that if I wasn’t going to eat with them, it was because I’d chosen to eat elsewhere alone. When he put it like that, I accepted. What else could I do?

But first, we returned to the cottage. “Cottage” isn’t really an adequate word for this mansion in the woods. It was made of squared logs with fieldstone and other masonry at strategic intervals. The massive fireplace had openings in four rooms. The interior was simply furnished except when you examined the pine closely and discovered that even the kitchen chairs were Early Canadian antiques. While wandering about on my own, according to my hosts’ invitation, I discovered a series of rooms in the back. They were filled with electronic equipment — phones, fax machines, computers, e-mail, the Internet-all manned by three men in shorts and T-shirts. Hamp’s empire was awake and active, even while Hamp was cruising in Wanda III .

After a swim, the inaugural swim in my new suit, off Peggy and Hamp’s dock, I opened the Dermot Keogh book where I’d folded down the page. I let the strong, late-afternoon sun dry me as I half-dozed on a white deck chair. Later, as soon as I’d showered and dressed, I excused myself for an hour or two while they read or napped. I told them I was going off to “explore.” I didn’t know exactly what I was going to explore, but I was feeling a growing connection between pieces of what I had been learning up here. It was the sort of exploration I had to do, or I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I’d been there before. There may have been no connection between the deaths I was hearing about, but I knew I had to exhaust the possibility. Peggy offered me a butterfly net to aid me in my great work. More practically, Hamp let me borrow his sleek black BMW, since my car was still back in town.

The marina in Bala was less rustic than Ifor Evans’s establishment on Segwin Bay. The paint on the clapboard siding was fresher, the sheds for stored boats looked more permanent. It was the same lake, of course, but the highway passing through Bala carried more traffic. A large sign advertising a big American-built outboard motor dominated the cedar-shingled roof of the boathouse. It eclipsed the older and much more modest sign: McCordick Brothers’ Marina. There were extensive docking wharves, most of them empty on this sunny afternoon. There was a sense of languid bustle, of sun-fried picnic hampers, of children smeared with sunblock, of orange life preservers and of the faint smell of gasoline on the wind. Sun reflected from glass, chrome and water as the remaining flotilla in the slips moved with the breeze off the lake, metal rings sounding musically on the tall masts. I parked where Hamp’s car could be seen and walked into that back part of the marina sacred to scuba diving. Here were tanks and suits, regulators, masks, fins and other paraphernalia of the deep. I asked a sunbleached blond kid in cut-off jeans who was in charge of the underwater gear.

“I’ll get Stan,” he said, and off he went like Peter Rabbit through a cabbage patch. He didn’t come back, but he sent along a lean six-footer in a white T-shirt with the printed slogan “Charles Wells, premium bitter” sitting over his heart. He was tanned all over, as far as I could see. From the look of him, you’d have thought the McCordicks would put him on the pink cabin-cruiser runabout detail. He couldn’t miss with the ladies.

I was frank with him to start with; gave him my name and calling. What the hell, I thought, maybe he’ll enter into the spirit of my investigation. I gave him a short version of what Hamp Fisher had told me about the dive to the S.S. Waome a year ago. He remembered the whole thing, of course, from the coming of the Provincial Police to the exit of the reporters and TV trucks. Stan relived the event as he’d experienced it, and, what the hell, I let him. Then he asked me some good questions, which I tried to answer precisely.