Росс Макдональд - The Dark Tunnel

I said, “I teach a course in Swift and Fielding. Compared with them you’re mealy-mouthed.”

“My God, Gordon,” Fenton roared, “did you hear that? I’m mealy-mouthed.”

The mid-afternoon traffic was light and we were already in the suburbs. When we reached the airport, the Chicago plane was landing. Gordon had just time to give Fenton a few instructions and to say to me:

“If you find out anything let us know. Call the Detroit or Chicago field office and reverse the charges.”

He shook my hand and walked up the ramp and ducked into the plane. A ground attendant lifted the ramp and shut the aluminum door behind him. I stood with Fenton and watched the great plane change from an incongruous winged turtle on the ground to a bird in the sky.

Fenton shook hands and said, “See you again, Branch.” He went back to Gordon’s car and drove away.

I picked up the ticket I had reserved and went into the waiting-room to wait for the Toronto plane.

EARLY TWILIGHT HUNG OVER the city like a thin, grey haze and made the lake a sheet of striated lead, stretching to a leaden horizon, when I landed at the Toronto Airport. I took a taxi to the Union Station. Down the long, drab streets the neons trembled in the gathering air, glowing blue and red and green with a quiet, inhuman lustre.

At the station a ticket-clerk told me I had nearly five hours to wait. The next train that would make the Kirkland Lake connection at Churchill left Toronto at 11:30 that night. I wouldn’t get to Kirkland Lake until two o’clock the next day.

I found a phone-booth and called the airport, but there was no seat available on any plane going anywhere. I went back to the ticket-clerk and bought a coach ticket, which was the only kind I could buy. That meant I had to sit up all night.

I went through the tunnel from the station to the Royal York, ate a quick dinner in the grill, and hired a room to sleep in until my train left. I was hatless and suitcaseless and wild-eyed, and the desk-clerk looked at me suspiciously. I mollified him by paying in advance.

“I’d like to be called at 11:10,” I said. “I have to catch the North Bay train.”

“Yessir, you shall be called,” he said, and signaled to a bellboy.

I followed the bellboy across the huge lobby to the elevators, but before I got to them something took hold of my attention and stopped me in my tracks. It was a newspaper folded inside out and left by someone on the seat of a leather armchair. At the top of the page that was showing there was a picture of Wendell Willkie.

I picked up the paper and saw that it was yesterday’s Globe and Mail, opened at page eight. I scanned the columns. It was the third column from which Peter Schneider had torn the clipping. Where the empty space had been in Peter’s copy there was nothing but a patent medicine advertisement offering solace to those undergoing change of life.

The bellboy was waiting by the elevators with a blank, intolerant expression on his sharp jockey’s face. I was just about to throw the paper down and follow him, when I thought of something that made me realize what a hell of an amateur detective I was. It was the simple staggering fact that newspapers are printed on two sides.

I turned the page and the heading I was looking for blazed black in my eyes. The bellboy kept on waiting while I read:

Unidentified Woman Regains Consciousness

Injured Woman in Kirkland Lake Hospital

Unable to Remember Name.

Kirkland Lake, Sept. 22 (C.P.): – The unidentified woman who two days ago was found, suffering from exposure and concussion, on the outskirts of this Northern Ontario mining town has regained consciousness. Although hospital authorities state that she has every chance of complete recovery, she is suffering from temporary amnesia as a result of her injury, and is unable to identify herself.

The injured woman, an attractive red-head in her late twenties, was undoubtedly a victim of foul play according to police. She was found unconscious in an old mine shaft south of the city on the night of September 20, by a group of boys who were playing there. She had not been assaulted, but her appearance suggested that she had been struck on the head with a blunt instrument and flung into the shallow shaft. She was dressed in men’s clothes of good quality but there were no personal effects or money on her person when she was found.

Police assign robbery as the motive, but have been unable to apprehend the author of the brutal attack. Sergeant Norris E. Collins, of the R.C.M.P., has advanced the theory that one of the prisoners who escaped from the Bonamy prison camp on September 20 may have been responsible for the vicious attack on the unknown woman. The Bonamy camp is only a few miles from the scene of the crime. (See p. 3 for an account of the capture of the German escapees, only one of whom is still at large.)

According to Dr. R. A. Sandiman, resident physician at Kirkland Lake Hospital, the injured woman speaks English with a slight German accent and frequently lapses into German as if it were her native tongue. Anyone who can supply information which may help to identify her is asked to communicate with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Kirkland Lake.

I stood and looked at the date on which she had been found. September 20. It twisted in my mind like a key, but no door opened. This must be the woman that the Kirkland Lake police had put under guard. My first thought was that Gordon was right and it couldn’t be Ruth after all. After the night and day I had gone through, insane coincidence seemed more probable than any kind of luck.

I noticed that the bellboy was still waiting and told him to leave my room-key at the desk.

He saw the look on my face and said, “Is anything wrong, sir?”

“Plenty. But there’s nothing you can do about it.”

He started away and I said, “Yes, there is. Where’s the tavern?”

“Right this way, sir,” and he led me to the copper-gleaming tavern on the basement floor.

I sat down at a corner table and ordered a quart of Molson’s Ale. Despair was dragging me down by the heels but the hot fingers of hope had me by the nape of the neck. The ale ballasted me but the wild pulling in two directions went on. A graph of my feelings for the next few hours would have looked like the Manhattan skyline.

One question I could not get around. If the woman wasn’t Ruth, why had Peter Schneider torn out the clipping about her? If the woman who had been in the Kirkland Lake Hospital for three days was Ruth Esch, it was not Ruth I had seen trading blows and kisses with Peter Schneider. Somebody else had helped him to murder Alec Judd and Herman Schneider.

After a while the ale slowed down the alternating swing of my feelings and I went up to my room to try to sleep. The two-hour sleep I got was as restful as a surfboard ride. Finally, the beetle-green motorboat that was dragging me over the dream-waves of hope and despair stopped with a grinding of gears and I answered the telephone.

The switchboard girl said it was 11:10 and I had twenty minutes to catch my train.

I put on the rest of my clothes over the underwear I had slept in, went down to the desk and checked out, and walked quickly through the brightly lighted tunnel to the station. I had time for a cup of coffee at the lunchbar before the train left for North Bay.

It took eight hours to get to North Bay, which was just a little better than halfway to Kirkland Lake. The dusty red plush seats of the old coach were crowded with civilians who looked as sleepy as I felt and soldiers who laughed and sang all night. Nobody got any sleep but I achieved a partial coma that made the trip unreal enough to bear. Farms and forests and dimly shining lakes slipped past the window for hours and merged with the images of my half-conscious dreams. When the mind is held awake on the point of sleep, an imagined face will take a hundred shapes, changing like a movie fadeout and fadein from beauty to ugliness, from gracious intelligence to idiot evil and back again to virtue and beauty. A goddess, a leering devil, a Victory of Samothrace, a sexless imbecile, a sweet young girl, a gross hag. The obscene amorphous masks changed constantly behind my eyes and cold sweat ran down the back of my neck. I sat and watched Ruth’s face change all night.