Ice Run (22 page)

She led us both through the bar, out onto the cold street. The snow was falling even harder now. There was nothing but the faint light coming from the front window, a light at the small hotel in the middle of the block, another far down at the end of the street. Everything else was dark. Empty buildings. Mountains of snow.

We stopped to breathe in the cold air, all three of us. Outside the bar it was quiet. A faint wind made the snow swirl around our heads.

“Natalie, what are we doing?”

“You’ll see,” she said. “You have to trust me.”

“What do you mean, Simon Grant’s going to tell us? He’s dead. I mean, not like your stepfather. I went to Simon Grant’s funeral.”

“Please, Alex. Just come with me before you say anything else.”

I turned to Vinnie. “Just go,” he said to me. “She asked you to trust her.”

“Vinnie, you come with us,” she said. “I’d like you to hear this, too.”

She set off down the street, back toward the center of town, moving quickly down the path we had just cut with our sleds. I zipped up my ridiculous suit and tried to keep up with her. I was tired, more tired than I wanted to admit to myself.

“Where are we going?” I said. “The Grants’ place is up the other way.”

“We’re not going to the Grants’ place,” she said.

She stopped in front of the hotel in the middle of the block, the Chippewa. She pulled the door open and held it for us. A woman came to the counter in the tiny lobby, rubbing her eyes and looking past us, out the front door.

“Still snowing out there?” she said. She was a big woman, in her sixties. I would have bet anything she was an Ojibwa.

“You could say that, Mrs. Larusso,” Natalie said. “We’re going up to my room for a while.”

“Are you sure, hon? We have other rooms, you know.”

“No, we’ll be fine.”

“We always have empty rooms in February.”

“We’ll let you know if we need one, Mrs. Larusso. Thank you.”

“Natalie,” I said, “why are we going up to your room?”

“Just shut up for once,” she said. “Please. Just stop talking.”

“Natalie …”

“I swear,” she said, taking my hand in hers, “if you say one more word, I’m gonna hit you right in the mouth.”

She hit the elevator button, waited exactly one second, and then opened the door to the stairwell.

“I always hated elevators,” she said, and pulled me into the stairwell. Vinnie followed. As we went up the stairs behind her, I couldn’t help but think of the last time we had been in a hotel together, and everything that had happened since then. Her room was on the third floor. It was small, dominated by a queen-sized bed with an elaborate iron frame. She took her coat off.

“Natalie,” I said. “Will you please tell us what’s going on?”

“Take that stupid snowmobile suit off,” she said. “You, too, Vinnie.”

“All right,” I said. “If that means you’re finally gonna talk to us.” I unzipped the suit.

“Sit down,” she said, “and watch this.”

There was a television on top of the dresser. She turned it on. A commercial was just ending, then
Monday Night Football
came back on. Before I could say anything, she picked up an overnight bag from the floor and pulled out a video cassette.

“Will you both sit down, please?”

When we were both sitting on the edge of the bed, she put the videocassette into the VCR port that was built into the bottom of the television. The football game was replaced by a hospital room. A man was sitting up in a bed, his hands folded in his lap. He was looking at the camera.

“What is this?” I said. Then I recognized the man. He was a slightly younger Simon Grant.

Another man appeared. It was Marty Grant. His face loomed huge in the frame as he adjusted the camera angle.

She hit the fast-forward button. The two men stayed in place, Simon Grant in the bed, Marty in the chair next to him. Their heads and hands moved in a blur as Natalie scanned through the tape.

“Martin, I know why you’re doing this,” Simon Grant said as soon as the tape speed went back to normal. “You think I’ll be dead by the end of the week.”

She hit the fast-forward again. “Simon Grant had a heart attack about ten years ago. Marty wanted to get a tape of him talking about his life, in case he wasn’t around much longer.”

“How did you get this?” I said.

She looked at me. “Marty gave it to me.”

Before I could ask her anything else, she put the tape back to normal speed again. “Okay, this is about where we want it,” she said. “Listen.”

Marty was laughing hard at something his father had just told him. “You gotta be kidding me, Pops. She actually fell for that?”

“Only for fifty-five years. God bless her.”

“Okay, if that’s the best thing you ever did in your life,” Marty said, “then tell me the worst thing you ever did.”

Natalie moved away from the television. She went to the window and looked out at the darkness as the tape kept playing.

“That’s a tough question,” the older man said.

“It’s just between you and me,” Marty said, sneaking a wink at the camera.

“I lived a long life, son.”

“Come on, Pops. How bad could it be? It’s not like you ever killed somebody.”

There was a long silence.

“Yes, son, I did.”

Marty stopped smiling.

“Pops …”

“I’ll tell you about it, Martin. I think it’s about time.”

“You’re serious?”

“Let me tell you something about hate, son. I’ve learned a lot about hate in my life. Hell, I lived on it for years. It’s what kept me going, every day, when I was a young man. I hated how poor I was when I was growing up, how I didn’t have a father. How I had to go out and work from when I was ten years old. This was during the Great Depression, you understand. You don’t know what it was like back then. I’m glad you don’t. I’m glad you never had to see times like that. A man would do anything just to earn a little money, so he could feed his family. I hated having to live like that, and seeing what it was doing to my mother, how it was making her an old woman when she was forty. Later on, when I was working on the docks, I hated the men I was working for. I hated the way they took advantage of us whenever they could, like we were nothing more than animals.”

Marty Grant was leaning forward in his chair, his elbows on his legs. He didn’t move an inch. He sat there and listened to his father.

“I suppose, looking back on it, all that hatred in my heart, it was sort of like a fuel, if you know what I mean. It kept me going. I don’t know if I would have been able to survive, or work so hard, or later, when I was in the union … We had to fight so hard, son. Maybe I
needed
that hatred. But damn, what it did to me. What a price to pay. All those years…”

Natalie kept looking out the window. She was as still as Marty’s image on the tape.

“There was one man in particular, son. This goes back to 1929, when they still had Prohibition. People used to bring liquor across the border all the time. I bet you didn’t know that a lot of the rum-running happened right here on the border between Michigan and Ontario. Most of it was down by Detroit, of course. That’s where the gangs were. Capone’s men and Bugs Moran and the Purple Gang … God, you can’t even imagine, son. It was a different country back then. Anyway, my father and his brother, they got involved in this. They knew these other men in Canada who would bring good whiskey across. My father and uncle would meet them and pay them for the whiskey, and then they’d sell it. In the summer, they’d come over in these wooden boats. Then, when the river froze, they’d bring it over on a sled.”

Mrs. DeMarco’s words came back to me. The ice run.

“There was one night…”

Simon Grant stopped. He cleared his throat.

“It was New Year’s Eve, the last night of 1929. The Ojibway Hotel was still brand-new. They were having this big party. I guess the manager there had been asking my father if he could get some whiskey for him, but the weather had been so bad .. . The men from Canada couldn’t get through, not until the weather broke on New Year’s Eve itself. I don’t know how much my father felt like doing it that night, but the money must have been good. He and my uncle went over to get it…”

Grant stopped again. He coughed a few times and then kept going.

“I was just a little kid, you understand. I didn’t hear the real story until later. Apparently, what happened was, some of the gangsters down in Detroit finally got wind of what was going on up here. They hadn’t been bothering with it way up here in the U.P. But now with the new hotel and the big parties and everything … Somehow they heard of this big load of whiskey coming across. They knew exactly where the meeting would be, out on the St. Marys River. They took the whiskey and the money and they killed everybody. My father and my uncle, they never came home. That was December of 1929, remember. The stock market had just crashed a couple of months before that. The next few years.. . The next few years were tough, son.”

Grant shook his head slowly.

“My little sister …”

Marty finally looked up at him.

“Her name was Victoria. She would have been your aunt. You never got to meet her. She died of pneumonia when she was eight years old. I was ten. She was. ..”

He had to stop for a while.

“God, how long ago was that?” he said. “You should have seen this little shack we were living in. It wasn’t fit to be a henhouse. My little sister, she was just…”

His voice broke.

“This angel. I remember her like …”

He put his hand in front of his face, then let it fall back to his lap.

“So when, 1972 … That’s forty-three years later. You were in high school back then. I get this call from a man named Albert DeMarco.”

I looked over at Natalie. She didn’t turn around.

“This man tells me, all these years later, that his father was out on that ice, too. He knew all about it. He told me something else that I had never heard before. He told me that the gangsters let one of the men live. That man must have made a deal with them. My father and uncle get killed … the man’s partner, Mr. DeMarco, he gets killed … and Luc Reynaud, he’s the one man who made it back home—he works directly with the gangsters from that point on. I asked this man why he was telling me this now. He says it was something he thought I should know. Of course, I knew there was more to it. Eventually, this Mr. DeMarco, he gets around to telling me that the Reynaud family was fabulously wealthy, that they had all this money from way back, during the last few years of rum-running, supplying the gangsters in Michigan, buying gold during the Depression … this whole story the man’s telling me. A big house and horses, a whole estate up there in Blind River, Ontario. All this built up on that one night Reynaud sold out my father and my uncle, and DeMarco’s father, too. He tells me all this and then he finally gets to the point. Luc Reynaud’s spoiled brat son, Jean Reynaud, was coming down for a big party at the Ojibway on New Year’s Eve. He told me if he was in my shoes, he’d want to know about it.”

“Pops,” Marty said, finally speaking up. “Are you telling me this was the man …”

“DeMarco wanted me to kill him. That was pretty obvious. I told him I didn’t run errands for cowards, told him if he wanted Reynaud dead he should kill the man himself. That’s what I told him. But at the same time … let’s just say I was curious about meeting the son of the man who killed my father. So I went to the hotel that night. There he was, all dressed up. He was real smooth. He had this old hat on. A gray homburg. I went up to him at the bar and I introduced myself. I asked him if he knew who I was. He said no, he didn’t. I told him I liked his hat. He told me it had belonged to his father. I asked him if he knew how his father had made all his money. He sort of looked at me funny, and then he told me that his father had made all his money by milking cows. I asked him if he was sure about that. He put his two fists up, started moving them up and down, like he was milking a cow. He said, that’s where the milk comes from, sir. Just like that. He started laughing. Then he bought me a drink. He slapped me on the back and said, Happy New Year to you, sir. Then he walked away. I just sat there for a while, thinking about what he had said, drinking the beer he bought me. Milking cows, he said.”

Simon Grant stopped for a while to let that sink in. Marty Grant stared at the hospital floor.

“When it was just about midnight, he came over and slapped me on the back again. He asked me if he could buy me another drink. I said, no thanks, but you should come outside and see the fireworks over the river. We went out in back. He asked me where the fireworks were. I said they’re right here and I shot him in the head.”

“You had a gun,” Marty said.

“Yes.”

“You brought it with you, I mean.”

“I always carried a gun. It was 1929.”

“Pops, I can’t believe any of this. I can’t.”

“That next summer, I went out to Blind River. First thing I wanted to do was see this big Reynaud estate that DeMarco had told me about. It was just a little farmhouse. Jean Reynaud was telling the truth. His father
did
make his money milking cows. That fancy suit he had on that night, that hat.. . those were probably the only nice clothes he owned. I knocked on the door, but nobody was home. I’m not sure what I would have done if Luc Reynaud had been there. I mean, this whole story about him getting rich off the gangsters, it obviously didn’t happen that way. But still, he was the one man who came home alive that night. My father was murdered out on the ice. And DeMarco’s father. They died on the ice and they stayed there all winter until it melted. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I would have sat old Luc Reynaud down and made him tell me. Then when he was done, I would have told him I had taken away his son, just like he had taken away my father.”

“What if he had nothing to do with it?” Marty said. “What if the gangsters just decided to let him go?”

“I don’t think that could have happened, son. You’ve got to remember who we’re talking about.”

“Pops …” Marty shook his head.

“I ended up going to the next house down the road, and it turns out that was the DeMarcos’ house. I met Albert’s mother, this tiny little woman living all by herself. She was friendly, so I got to talking to her. I asked her some questions about her family. She told me about her husband, and about Luc Reynaud coming back alone that night. For some reason, she didn’t think that was suspicious. Or maybe she did. Hell, maybe she knew exactly what had happened and she just wasn’t gonna say it. Not to me. Anyway, I asked about her son, Albert. Turned out he had just gotten married to Jean Reynaud’s widow. I even got to see their wedding picture. Grace, her name was. What a beauty. All of a sudden it made sense to me. This man had used me. He wanted Jean Reynaud out of the way, and he knew I was the only other man in the world who could hate that family as much as he did. So now I hated all of them. The Reynauds. The DeMarcos. I hated myself, too. It never ends.”