Ally Oop Through the Ulysses Trees Read online

  Carrie, at the donut shop, served him his black coffee and chocolate donuts without being asked. Jag pondered strange women, shovels, and High Bluff Island while he ate. He wondered why Carrie was doing the afternoon shift on a Saturday. He might want to check that Tom wasn't getting rough with her again. New earrings, he noticed. Tom tended to buy her new jewelry when he got sober and apologetic.

  Afterward he drove over to the "town archives." Her name was Josephine Bryne, and she was older than the trees, and worked at the registry office. He parked behind the building, and took the stairs to the basement.

  In the brightly lit registry office Josie looked up from a map of the Township of Cramahe. She was obviously trying not to smile as he pulled out a small bouquet of daisies he'd snatched from the registry building parking lot. He held them out and grinned at her in silence.

  "You can't fool an old lady with flowers." She took them, though, and filled an antique Orange Crush bottle with water for them. "You've come for purposes of ultimate evil, I can tell. Probably sold the town to the Hamilton Mafia when nobody was watching you."

  "You know about the Hamilton Mafia deal?" His face showed mortification.

  "God damn right I do. Hope you got more than ten bucks for the whole town."

  "Over a thousand for the town, Josie." Jag paused for effect. "But I had to throw in the town beer store. "

  "You took them, Jag. They'll get you for that."

  "Josie," he said, getting more serious, "is there anything worth digging for, in the area?"

  "Other than worms, or the source of the Nile?"

  "Out towards the park, say, or the island offshore?"

  "Daigen's Island? If you were really stupid, maybe." She paused. "The government calls it High Bluff Island, now."

  "How so?"

  She rolled up the map and set it aside. "Buy an old lady a coffee at Bud's and I'll tell you a story of pirates and treasure that will curl your hair." She looked at him. "What's left of it, anyway."

  In the booth beside the window at Bud's they made small talk about the people passing until the coffee arrived. Jag inspected the registry clerk. It was said she'd have retired fifteen years ago if she hadn't been so valuable to the town. Or, some said, if she hadn't known so much about people's private dealings. Jag shook his head. He could see himself, someday, in the same office, poring over a map of someone's bad land deal. At the rate he was going, he'd catch up to her in about ten years. He ordered fries, coffee, and a donut.

  When the coffee came, Josie pulled a small aspirin bottle from her purse, opened it, and poured clear liquid into her cup. Jag raised a thick eyebrow. "London Dry aspirin for my old bones," she answered his question.

  "So what's on the island?"

  "It was known as Treasure Island for a couple of years after the war," she said.

  He watched her sip the coffee, unable to imagine what it tasted like. "There was treasure there?" Bud's was mostly full, with a crowd of young teens making noise in the far corner. Bud's seemed to specialize in bad, greasy food, and coffee that tasted like old tires had been added to the mix. But it was brightly lit, and on the main street, so people sensed that it was the most cheerful place in town.

  "I doubt it. Paul Daigen lived there for about thirty years, and ran a small farm. You know the kind. A couple of Jersey cows, an acre of corn for the cow, and a couple of acres of vegetables, mostly beets."

  "Beets?"

  "Beets. God knows why. He'd sell them to the local canning place – we had two canners, then, but he didn't make much money from the farm."

  "Poor?"

  "Lived poor. But every couple of years he'd buy a new car. Brand new, and always paid cash for it. Paid the Smiths to keep it at their place on the mainland. Not that he needed a car much. He spent most of the time on the island."

  "So where did his money come from?" The cop waved for a plate of French fries. "Smuggling?"

  "Possible. He was there during prohibition, although none of my sources connect him with the trade. Most people think he just didn't associate with anybody enough to be a smuggler. Probably inherited it before he bought the place."

  "And I suppose local rumor had him with big bucks in a tin can buried in the yard." Jag knew how small towns worked.

  Josie smiled, the creases on her ancient face rolling into small ranges of mountains, uplifted by inner forces. "Fifty thousand dollars in a strongbox below his bed, they used to tell each other. That may not sound like much now, but a thousand dollars was an average year's wage, then."

  "I'd think it would be dangerous, out on an island all by yourself." The cop shifted his bulk in the narrow wooden bench and pushed the plate of chips towards her.

  She nodded, and added some ketchup to the corner of the plate nearest her. "People thought so, until they found the Mulloney brothers' boat on the beach one morning." She looked him right in the eye. "Everybody knew the Mulloney boys had robbed a couple of banks in Gratton, but it was never proven. So we all assumed that they'd try to lean on Paul Daigen some dark night to help them smuggle cigarettes across the lake. Them or some other of the Gosport crowd."

  She held up her cup for another coffee. "They never found the bodies. Never floated to shore, and the cops even did a search of the island. Daigen denied ever seeing the boat. But people left him pretty well alone, after that.

  When he died, oh, about 1948, there were a few people who looked around for the money. A few of us." She looked up from the coffee. "After a while, it got to be a party thing. Going out to the island and digging around." She suddenly sounded wistful. "Had some interesting times there, till all them service guys started settling down and I married Al."

  "Anyone find anything?"

  She snorted. "If they did, I never heard anything about it. There sure wasn't anyone who got a new car unexpectedly, or bought a new house with money no one knew he had."

  "You'd have known."

  She smiled. "Probably."

  "And if someone wanted to look for the treasure now?"

  She laughed. "They bulldozed the house and barn when the island became part of the park. They've arrested a couple of people for trying to dig there. It's a bird sanctuary most of the spring and summer."

  "Not much hope?"

  "Not much hope. You can't even see where the old house used to be, any more. And we searched the island pretty well."

  "Even in the deep bushes."

  "Especially in the deep bushes, in the afternoons."

  "So, no treasure?"

  "Other than what young people find in bushes on a summer afternoon?"

  "Other than that."

  "Maybe if she's looking for flying saucers."

  "Pardon?" Jag squinted hard.

  "There was a report more than twenty years ago. Bunch of people living down on Popham Bay claim they saw a UFO land around there. Either in the bay or on High Bluff Island."

  "You think it's true?"

  She snorted. "Depends on how much of Mulloney imports they were drinking. Or smoking."

  "Maybe we'd better get you back to the office," the cop laughed.

  "No hurry. The sons-of-bitches can fire me, for all I care."

  "You'd end up in Gosport."

  "Suits me. I could get my medicine at discount prices from the Mulloney boys. Or their grandsons. "Besides," she said, "It's Sunday. The place is supposed to be closed."

  Jag escorted Josie back to her office. A couple of people waited patiently outside the locked door.

  He checked his watch. Four o'clock. Maybe tomorrow he'd just see where this Laura Singer person was staying in town.

  ****

  Toronto

  At a downtown park. The park is on church property, and is frequented by the homeless.

  Three days before Button Day

  “Quite the planet, isn’t it?” the old guy said, farting loudly. “Kee-rist,” he added, “can you believe this body I picked up? What was I thinking?” The park was br
ight in the late-summer sunshine.

  “What, indeed, were you thinking?” Tom Barents asked, although it had been one of those questions that nobody was supposed to answer. Especially on a bench in a park on the corner of Queen and Church in Toronto. Tom knew the place well; he'd once (in his crazy days) spent most of a week here trying to figure out which of the bums in the park were actually sleeper agents for someone's World Domination Project. It had seemed important to him at the time to be able to figure out who was in disguise.

  A lot of the guys hanging out on benches or sleeping under trees in the park were certifiable nutcases and some of the rest were alcoholics kept from total dementia only by the difficulty of getting more booze. The guy beside Tom looked relatively sober at the moment, though he smelled pretty rank and needed a total beauty makeover.

  “Fact of the matter,” he said, “I wasn’t. First time on Earth and maybe I should have read the reports of the last couple of guys that got sent here, but no, I had to figure I’d just zip in and occupy some dude who nobody’d be too concerned about.” He peeled back the top of a dirty paper bag and took a sip of water from the neck of a plastic Glacier bottle. That was the first unusual thing Tom had seen him do. If you haven’t got alcohol in a paper bag, you shouldn’t have a paper bag, Tom knew– it just attracts moochers. For a moment, Tom wondered if he'd forgotten his meds that morning.

  “Where from?” Tom asked him.

  He waved his hand at the sky. “Up. Over. Long ways away. You Earth people got no name for it, or even for that part of the sky.”

  “Been planetbound long?” Tom wasn’t really interested. The chances of the guy being a space alien were rather small, and the chances of him being an imaginative old drunk were an awful lot larger.

  “Twenty-three years and some. I'm still getting used to the longer year and shorter day.” He looked around the park. “Took me one month to get tired of this body and a year to really hate it.” He looked at Tom. “Booze turned out to be not so bad after all, once a month or so.” He tapped his chest. “This body goes by the name of Al Lamson. He appears to have been a loser for most of his life.”

  Tom nodded. That category fit a lot of people these days. It surely included alcoholics who wanted to be space aliens. Anything to keep from blaming yourself or Goddamn God for your own mistakes. Tom decided not to leave. “Don’t like the planet?” It was a slow afternoon.

  “Planet’s okay, but people don’t talk to bums in the park, which is seriously hampering my research project.”

  “Got much time to go?”

  “Couple of years, then Al can have his damn body back. The only thing I like about it is the smell. Can’t say many people agree with me on that on, though.”

  Tom said nothing.

  Al, the guy with an alien in him, turned to look at Tom. He closed one eye, then the other. “Tom Barents,” he said. “Forty-eight years old this summer. People call you, ‘Mad Tom’ and the social workers can’t decide if you’re sane or not. Got a grudge against God; the one you don’t believe in.”

  “Can you blame me? How did you know who I am?"

  “Nope. Your string of bad luck defies the odds and none of it was your doing. So it was either just that you’re a really unlucky guy or someone’s out to get you. And I knew who you were because you were hanging around here suspiciously a few years back. Had to check you out; there are alien-hunters around you know. 'Alien Hunters International', they call themselves."

  "Lots of you space aliens around?" Tom watched a mother maneuver a baby carriage past a man with a paper bag who had abruptly decided to sit on the pavement.

  "Can't tell you. We won't communicate with each other until it's time to go home."

  “Gonna take me with you when you go home?”

  Al shook his head, or the alien shook Al's head. "I hear someone did that once. Didn’t work out so hot.” He winced. “I guess they passed a law after that.”

  “I betcha,” Tom said. The guy had most of it right, but that didn’t prove piss-all. “Best planet I’ve ever been on, myself,” Tom added. “And worst.”

  “Can’t say the same, myself, for either.”

  “Seen a lot of planets, then?” Tom wanted to see how inventive this guy was. It would be his chance to ramble on while Tom ignored him. He’d probably have planets full of oversexed babes, to start, then work up to dragons or something.

  “Eight planets, and a few other things that weren’t – space colonies and such, I guess you’d call them. No place I’d want to settle on, but it’s a job.”

  “Places with beautiful women?”

  “No.” He looked around. “Other species are just variations on ugly, smelly, and silly, even when you get used to them. You guys run about average, maybe a bit high on the ugly scale and way up there on the silly charts.”

  Tom nodded. He’d come to that conclusion himself a long time ago, and didn’t have to travel on a UFO to figure it out. “They believe in God out there?”

  “Can’t talk about that. That and technology. Rules.”

  “Might give us humans an edge up?”

  Al scowled and took a drink of water. “The universe has quite enough silliness in it without putting humanity into it. Besides, Earth's scheduled to be designated an entertainment zone, sort of like that movie, The Truman Show."

  Tom rolled his eyes.

  ****

  Chesapeake Bay

  Not far off Windmill Point.

  Three days before Button Day

  He’d once been second in command of the Central Intelligence Agency, but now he was just “John Smith," an old dude with a fancy cottage on Chesapeake Bay. And a sailboat named Obsession, because you don’t have a fancy cottage on that bay without a nice boat or six. Obsession floated a half kilometre offshore on this calm day. The sails were down, and John sat on the back with a line over the side. Beside him, on a matching lawn chair with a matching fishing rod sat a fellow still in the Agency (known as The Company to insiders). That day, he called himself, "Lee." They sipped Forty Creek Canadian whisky and talked. On the table between them was a black-and-white picture of a sonar scan.

  The occasional fish bit on the line, was retrieved, was removed from the barbless hook, and was returned with a splash to the water. A couple of seagulls and a heron flew by just to check the boat out. John wasn’t absolutely convinced that the Agency, or its army equivalent, hadn’t developed flying microphones that looked like water birds, but it seemed unlikely. And Obsession herself was a bug-free boat; John was pretty sure of that. So, eventually, after he’d brought out sandwiches for his guest, he broached the subject at hand, picking up the photo and handing it to Lee.

  Lee set his fishing rod into a holder and examined the photo. He looked up at John. “Means nothing to me.”

  “Back in the day,” John began, taking a sip of whiskey and ignoring the sandwiches until he realized Lee wouldn’t eat before his host, “the Company did the odd thing that wasn’t strictly within its charter.” He looked at Lee, and the two men smiled. The Company had been illegally spying on Americans in America since its founding, at the specific request of every American president except Jimmy Carter.

  “You’re probably aware, by now,” John said, “of the rather, er, tenuous relationship between the Company and the President.”

  Lee smiled again but didn’t say anything. This was common knowledge. For each president, the CIA had a different unofficial charter. For each president, there were different rules about passing on information. Some presidents wanted to know everything that the Company did. Some didn't: they wanted “plausible deniability," so that they could look the public in the face, if it came to that, and honestly say they didn’t know such an evil was being done. Some presidents never contacted the Agency at all, not trusting anything the CIA claimed to know. Some presidents had limited the Company to spying. Others had found it perfectly suitable that certain people overseas be terminated without trial, in order that the US of A remain th
e bastion of liberty and a shining beacon to other countries. “What do you think of the President?” Lee asked instead of replying.

  “Another loser.” John started to take another sip of whisky, then thought the better of it, taking a pill from a small bottle first. “I guess that’s what you get nowadays.”

  The CIA had a spotty record at best, often missing coming events completely. A succession of Presidents had appointed outsiders, usually friends from the military, to run the Agency, on the theory that the CIA needed to be ‘shaken up." After the cold war ended, it had been shaken up enough that there were few old hands left and even the Soviet moles were taking their pensions. Lee took a small goldeye off his hook and threw it back. “So how can I help you,” he asked.

  “Once or twice,” John said, “the Company was of assistance in helping the military carry out some operation that hasn’t reached the ears of anybody but the senior brass and, of course, the Soviets.”

  Lee said nothing. If half the rumours that went around Langley were true, the Agency had done as much covering up as spying. Planning cover for military ops was pretty standard stuff.

  John went on. “At the height of the cold war, we were aware that the opposition was improving the accuracy of its missiles dramatically. The top brass went looking for places to hide them.” A sip of whiskey. “At one time we considered putting nuclear subs with a few Polaris missiles into Lake Superior. The Russians would know they were there, but not close enough to be sure of taking them out in a first strike.”

  Lee picked up the picture. “Doesn’t look like a sub to me.”

  “We canned the idea of subs in the Great Lakes because the Canadians would raise a stink. They’re like that.” He looked at Lee. “Someone came up with a discount idea.” He jabbed at the picture. “Small launcher. One Polaris missile. Set on the bottom of the lake.”

  Lee nodded. “They thought it would work?”

  “They didn’t care. As long as it might work, that was enough to help deter the Soviets from a first strike. Hell, if it had come to war, half the missiles we had would have blown up in their silos on launch or have gone into the nearest schoolyard. The chemicals in those things get old and the mice get into the wiring. All we wanted was for the opposition to know that there were some that might work, and that they didn’t know quite where they were.”