Badger Games (12 page)

“Not an unreasonable assumption,” the colonel agreed.

“You said something about Ostro's notion of what Franko was doing up there,” Helen said.

“Yes, the agency didn't buy it,” the colonel said, “and it didn't amount to much. He thought he was a scholar.”

“A scholar?” Helen said. “What kind of a scholar? You mean an ethnologist, or something? Some kind of social scientist?”

The colonel made a slight grimace, almost a frown. “No,” he said, “maybe something more in the way of an amateur, a fellow who is just looking at things, a man of curiosity. I can't say I bought it, either. I just don't know. Maybe he was—or is—a bird-watcher.”

The colonel was amused to observe Helen rolling her eyes.

Joe was thinking about Butte. It was a city of about twenty-five thousand, he thought, and maybe another five or so in the surrounding valleys who might show up from time to time. He was supposed to hang around and hope to see someone he couldn't really identify if he did see him.

“What the heck,” he said, “it can't be that hard.”

J
oe Service owned property down in the Ruby Valley, thirty-five or forty miles south of the city of Butte, as the eagle flies, fifty by highway. The nearest town was a village called Tinstar. Joe's property was situated on Garland Butte. The Garland family had ranched a sizable spread there for at least three generations, but the Garlands weren't there anymore. Old Mrs. Garland, a widow, had died in a tragic run-in with a crazy woman she'd befriended.

A couple of years before her death, Mrs. Garland had sold a section of her property to a young man named Joe Humann. This was one of Joe Service's aliases. The turbulence surrounding Joe Service had caught her up, though only a few realized that Mrs. Garland's death was linked to Joe's problems.

Joe Service certainly knew it. He was not big on remorse, but he'd liked Mrs. Garland. She was the best kind of neighbor, helpful but not nosy, rarely to be seen or heard. His chief regret, however, was for his hideaway in the mountains of Montana. It was the ideal retreat, a place he could flee to after his typically hectic forays into the affairs of the mob, in Detroit or Los Angeles or points in between. The colonel had exploited Joe's unabashed affection for the
place when he'd offered the Butte mission. But now, the closer they got to Butte, the less attractive it seemed.

There had been some excellent moments on the road from Detroit—not a straight road by any means. The weather was good. They had a new vehicle, an SUV that Helen had insisted on buying. Joe had preferred a Toyota 4-Runner, or a Range Rover … but Helen had put her foot down. There was no way she was buying anything but Detroit iron—the very thought! She opted for a powerful Dodge Durango, a take-no-prisoners four-wheel-drive outfit—hardly a useful feature on the interstate. But at least he'd talked her out of the red one. Cops stop red cars at least 50 percent more often than black ones, was his theory. They got one in bottle green, although it was called something else. And, after all, they had driven some “blue highways,” through Wisconsin and Minnesota, and even gotten onto some fairly rough tracks in back country in the Dakotas and eastern Montana … just lollygagging, sightseeing.

Helen thought that as long as the colonel wasn't in any hurry, neither should they be. Joe's initial eagerness to get back to what he called his “Hole-in-the-Wall” had begun to modulate into a classical approach/retreat syndrome by the time they got to the Yellowstone River.

He discussed the matter with Helen. “The colonel says we're secure,” he observed, “but what does that mean? Do you trust him? I'm not even sure what we're supposed to do with this Franko when we catch up to him. As for the Hole-in-the-Wall, the last time I was up there was after that deal in Salt Lake. I was kind of riding a high, you know what I mean? And I was just there for a few hours. It was fine—the place was a mess, the house burned down and all—but the hot pool was nice.”

Helen had been thinking, too, and especially about the hot pool. It was an idyllic spot, a beautiful little thermal spring just over the ridge from where Joe's house had been. But her memories of the
pool weren't entirely pleasant. She had been attacked and almost murdered in that pool. In the event, she had overcome her attacker. But it would never be the same. She didn't know if she could bring herself to plunge into that pool again, certainly not with the same blithe confidence as before.

She realized that she'd been avoiding thinking about it. It was good that Joe had brought it up. “What are you thinking?” she said. “Just forget about the place?”

They were in a hotel in a small town in central Montana, an hour or so west of Billings, no more than a three-hour drive to Butte. They were sprawled naked on the queen-sized bed in a room on the second floor. It was the oddest hotel Helen had ever stayed in, or even heard of. It was an old cowboy hotel, they decided. There was a sink and a toilet in their room, but the real bathroom was across the hall. This wasn't much of a privacy problem: nobody else seemed to be in the hotel. It was clean and decorated in an amusing mélange of cowboy chic and 1920s moderne—cane furniture, Charlie Russell prints on the walls, but art deco slipshade chandeliers.

The great draw here was clearly the restaurant downstairs. It was reputed to be great, and it certainly had been occupied for one seating at least. Good rack of lamb, excellent wines. They were told that movie stars stayed here when they were filming nearby, which was fairly often. Hunters and fishermen also kept the place booked, but they were just between seasons, it seemed—“Come November you couldn't get a room here for five hundred dollars,” the desk clerk had claimed. Besides elk hunters, a movie was scheduled in a few months, when Redford was due in town.

But for Helen's money, the thing that would bring her back was the massive bathroom with its enormous shower and the sauna. This was as modern as it could be, showers with jets at all angles, heat lamps, great fluffy towels on heated racks, lots of mirrors, and good lighting. She was grateful to the movie stars, if they were responsible
for the decoration. The sauna was brilliant, with its aromatic cedar paneling and benches.

“There's no place to stay there,” Joe said, idly stroking her back. “I have bad feelings about it. The folks around there may not be so friendly. Maybe we should just avoid it. Find somewhere new. It'd be all right to take a run up there, clean out some stuff I've got stashed.” He was thinking about an abandoned mine, above the house site, where he'd stored a few useful things, like money, some guns, and—he had a vivid flash—the desiccated corpse of an unknown man.

“Hate to give up the hot springs,” he said. “When I was there I took a long soak and didn't give a thought to the problem of returning, or rebuilding. I was too out of it. There's some cops around, too …”

“You mean Mulheisen,” Helen said. “He's in Detroit.”

“He knows about the place,” Joe said. “The colonel might be able to head off the other cops, but I don't think he can do anything about Mulheisen. And there are some local cops, sheriff's deputies. I'd bet Mulheisen made some good contacts there. They'd sure give him a buzz if they find out we're back … and they'll hear, probably within hours. Hell, I don't even know if we ought to stay in Butte, though it's not so likely that we'll be noticed there.”

There was also a woman in Butte, but he didn't mention her to Helen. He was pretty sure that Helen had no knowledge of the nurse, Cateyo. She'd been a useful ally when Joe was extricating himself from his problems. He wasn't eager to encounter her again. He'd made a few promises …

Helen saw his point about the place, all right. Mulheisen was a real cop, a detective on the Detroit police force. Seemingly a simple, not too bright fellow, just a precinct sergeant, but somehow always in one's way. “We can find someplace,” she said. An idea occurred to her: “Maybe we could stay here.”

“You mean rent this room?” Joe thought about it. “It's too far from Butte, almost two hundred miles. Quite a commute.”

“How much time do we actually have to spend in Butte?” she asked. She suddenly didn't have much appetite for this. It had seemed like fun, in the beginning, but now she felt an uncertain dread. Maybe she was picking up Joe's vibes.

Joe considered. A few days poking around, maybe another few days following up leads. If they weren't going to fix up the old spread down in the Ruby Valley, maybe they wouldn't be spending so much time in Montana, after all. But if not, why had they come? He had plenty of money. Helen was loaded as well. They could go to … South America. He'd never been to South America. Brazil seemed suddenly attractive, maybe Argentina. Buenos Aires? Chile?

“What about the colonel?” Helen said.

“Gotta say good-bye to him someday,” Joe said. “Funny, but the farther I get from that guy, the less I look forward to seeing him again. Let's just bag it … fly to Hawaii.”

Helen was game. But for some reason, they didn't go. Neither could be accused of conventional attitudes toward duty, but … perhaps it was nothing more than curiosity. Instead, they wrestled.

In the morning, they lingered over the remains of their elegant breakfast of omelettes and toast and fruit, gratefully restored from the exertions of the night. At last Joe said, “Well, if we're going to find our wandering scholar, let's do it.” Some three hours later, the fancy Durango swept around a curve coming down off the Home-stake Pass, and the entire Silver Bow Valley opened up before them, a thousand feet below.

Butte was unlike most cities: from any of its approaches you could see the city laid out across an enormous canvas before you. It sprawled from the mountains in the north down into the valley. A Detroit or a Los Angeles was just endless habitation and industry,
stretching into a haze, even when you approached from twenty thousand feet. They were vastly larger cities, of course, and that's the problem: one can see no end of city. It can seem to be an inescapable trap to its citizens.

Joe Service considered that one attractive aspect of Butte was that you could see it all in its physical setting, the city in the frame around the canvas. The mountains and highlands on either side, especially the great, craggy ridge of the Continental Divide to the east, which they were now descending. But there was no ignoring the enormous abandoned pit mine, smack in the heart of the town. And now there were extended terraces of a new, active pit.

The golden dome on Holy Trinity Eastern Orthodox Church gleamed in the sun. The rest of the city sprawled up the great hill, surrounding the monstrous open-pit copper mines. A few old gallows frames—old hoists left over from more than a century of underground mining—also caught one's eye from the highway, and then the chalk-white towers of Immaculate Conception Catholic church, and beyond that the extensive brick campus of the state technological university—the “School of Mines,” as it was inevitably known.

Butte was not the typical modern western town, aglow with the familiar icons of American popular commercial culture, the fast-food emporia, the big box malls. It had those, of course, and contemporary neighborhoods of modest ranch houses and working-class bungalows, but there were also the older brick apartment buildings, the hotels and department stores, now run-down. It was a place that evoked an earlier industrial culture, dominated by a single enterprise—the mining company—now long gone, but its imprint still visible. An odd mixture of the old and the new, a sense of a history. It resembled eastern rust-belt cities, though it was rapidly giving way to the new consumer culture. Still, it was quintessentially a working-class town.

Joe and Helen were depressed, despite the brilliant sunshine, the clear air, and the magnificent sweep of the massive Continental Divide. They had occupied themselves for several days with a kind of goofy American tourist travel, visiting natural monuments, enjoying the remarkable scenery from the Great Lakes, across the forests, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, the plains. Indeed, just moments before they had still been in the great American back country, driving through a spectacular panorama of jumbled rocks and canyons, the forest looming above them, the mountains rearing on all sides. They'd been carefree, on vacation. Now all of a sudden, here was the workaday world. They had to go to work, and they weren't eager for it.

They checked into the old Finlen Hotel, uptown. It stood in the very midst of the old city. It wasn't very popular, they found. Most people stayed in the big motels down near the interstate. But the Finlen had been refurbished fairly recently, it appeared. They had a large, pleasant room, with good views of the city and the mountains, the pits.

Ordinarily, when working for the mob, Joe would have been provided with more local contacts than he wanted. Usually, he'd avoid them, preferring to dig out things on his own. There were people here, he knew, who had mob connections—no doubt they could provide him with useful information. But he had no intention of contacting them. It would just be a further complication; he still had some unresolved issues with the mob.

No, as usual, he'd do his own research, find out about these Serbian refugees the colonel had mentioned, visit the church, talk to the Serbian priest, look through the phone book and figure out where the Serbs lived, who they were. It was just that, for once, he felt a little uncertain, a little too isolated. But he had Helen, he reminded himself. She could certainly help him with the Serbian community.

Helen could see Joe was still a little down. “Why don't I go over to the church?” she suggested. She could talk to the priest; she was familiar with these churches from childhood. She could even speak Serbian. She'd visited the church when she'd been here before, although she had not told Joe that. She remembered the priest as being from Detroit, in fact.