"If I can be of any further help, please don't hesitate to call me."
"I'll do that," Seagram grunted. "Thanks again."
After he hung up, he dropped his head in his hands and slouched in the chair. He sat that way not moving for perhaps two full minutes. Then he laid his hands on the desk and smiled a wide, smug grin.
Two different men very well could have existed with the same surname and birth year who worked in the same state at the same occupation. That part of the puzzle might have been a coincidence. But not the connection, the glorious 365-to-l longshot connection that mysteriously tied the two men together and made them one. Hobart's recorded death and the old newspaper found by Sid Koplin in the Bednaya Mountain mine bore the same date November 17, 1911.
He pushed the intercom switch for his secretary. "Barbara, put through a call to Mel Donner at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver."
"Any message if he isn't in?"
"Just leave word for him to call me on my private line when he returns."
"Shall do."
"And one more thing, book me on United's early morning flight tomorrow to Los Angeles."
"Yes, sir."
He clicked the switch to off and leaned back in the chair thoughtfully. Adeline Hobart, over ninety years old. He hoped to God she wasn't senile.
13
Donner didn't normally stay in a downtown hotel. He preferred the more inconspicuous setting of a garden variety motel closer to the suburbs, but Seagram had insisted on the grounds that local cooperation comes more easily to an investigator when he lets it be known that he has a room in the city's oldest and most prestigious building. Investigator, the word nauseated him. If one of his fellow professors on the University of Southern California campus had told him five years ago that his doctorate in physics would lead him to play such a clandestine role, he'd have choked laughing. Donner wasn't laughing now. The Sicilian Project was far too vital to the country's interests to risk a leak through outside help. He and Seagram had designed and created the project on their own, and it was agreed that they'd take it as far as they could alone.
He left his rented Plymouth with the parking attendant and walked across Tremont Place, through the hotel's old-fashioned revolving doors, and into the pleasantly ornate lobby, where the young mustachioed assistant manager gave him a message without so much as a smile. Donner took it without so much as a thank you, then made his way to the elevators and his room.
He slammed the door and threw the room key and Seagram's message on the desk and turned on the television. It had been a long and tiresome day, and his bodily systems were still operating on Washington, D.C. time. He dialed room service and ordered dinner, then kicked off his shoes, loosened his tie, and sagged onto the bed.
For perhaps the tenth time he began going over the photocopy of the old newspaper page. It made very interesting reading; if, that is, Donner's interest lay in advertisements for piano tuners, electric belts for rupture, and strange malady remedies, along with editorials on the Denver City Council's determination to clear such-and-such street of sinful houses of entertainment, or intriguing little inserts guaranteed to make feminine readers of the early 1900s gasp in innocent horror.
CORONER'S REPORT
Last week, the habitués of the Paris Morgue were greatly puzzled by a curious India-rubber leg that lay exposed for recognition on one of the slabs. It appears that the body of an elegantly dressed woman, apparently aged about 50, had been found in the Seine, but the body was so decomposed that it could not be kept. It was remarked, however, that the left leg, amputated at the thigh, had been replaced by an ingeniously constructed India-rubber leg, which was exhibited in the hope that it might lead to the identification of the owner.
Donner smiled at the quaint piece of history and turned his attention to the upper-right-hand section of the page, the part that Koplin had said was missing from the paper he'd discovered on Novaya Zemlya.
DISASTER AT THE MINES
Tragedy struck like a vengeful wraith early this morning when a dynamite blast set off a cave-in at the Little Angel Mine near Central City, trapping nine men of the first shift, including the well-known and respected mining engineer, Joshua Hays Brewster.
The weary and haggard rescue crews report that hope of finding the men alive is black indeed. Bull Mahoney, the intrepid foreman of the Satan Mine, made a herculean effort to reach the trapped miners, but was turned back by a wall of tidal water that inundated the main shaft.
"Them poor fellows is goners sure," Mahoney stated to reporters at the disaster scene. "The water has gushed up near two levels above where they was working. They surely was drowned like rats before they knew what hit them."
The silent and sorrowful throng milling around the mine entrance woefully bemoaned the chilling likelihood that this is one time when the bodies of the lost men will not be recovered and brought to the "grass" for decent burial.
It is reliably known that it was Mr. Brewster's intent to re-open the Little Angel Mine which had been closed since 1881. Friends and business associates say that Brewster often boasted that the original digging had missed the high-grade lode, and with luck and fortitude, he was going to be the discoverer.
When reached for comment, Mr. Ernest Bloeser, now retired and former owner of the Little Angel Mine, said on the front porch of his home in Golden, "That mine was dogged by bad luck from the day I opened it. All it ever turned out to be was a low-grade ore shoot which never did turn a profit." Mr. Bloeser further stated, "I think Brewster was dead wrong. There was never any indication of the mother lode. I am astounded that a man of his reputation could think so."
In Central City, the last message proclaimed that if the situation is in the eternal graces of the almighty, the opening will be sealed as a tomb and the missing men will rest in blackness through the ages, never again to see the "grass" or sunlight.
The grim reaper's list of the men caught up in this most terrible of disasters is as follows:
Joshua Hays Brewster, Denver
Alvin Coulter, Fairplay
Thomas Price, Leadville
Charles P. Widney, Cripple Creek
Vernon S. Hall, Denver
John Caldwell, Central City
Walter Schmidt, Aspen
Warner E. O'Deming, Denver
Jason C. Hobart, Boulder
May God watch over these brave toilers of the mountains.
No matter how many times Donner's eyes traveled over the old news type, they always came back to the last name among the missing miners. Slowly, like a man in a trance, he laid the paper in his lap, picked up the phone and dialed long distance.
14
"The Monte Cristo!" Harry Young exclaimed delightedly. "I heartily endorse the Monte Cristo. The Roquefort dressing is also excellent. But first, I'd like a martini, very dry, with a twist."
"Monte Cristo sandwich and Roquefort on your salad. Yes, sir," the young waitress repeated, bending over the table so that her short skirt rode up to reveal a pair of white panties. "And you, sir?"
"I'll take the same." Donner nodded. "Only I'll start with a Manhattan on the rocks."
Young peered over the top of his glasses as the waitress hurried to the kitchen. "If only someone would give me that for Christmas," he said, smiling.
Young was a skinny little man. In decades past he would have been called an overdressed, silly old fool. Now he was an alert, eager-faced seventy-eight-year-old bon vivant with a practiced eye for beauty. He sat across the booth table from Donner in a blue turtleneck and patterned, doubleknit sportscoat.
"Mr. Donner!" he said happily. "This is indeed a pleasure. The Broker is my favorite restaurant." He waved his hand at the walnut-paneled walls and booths. "This was once a bank vault, you know."
"So I noticed when I had to duck through the five-ton door."
"You should come here for dinner. They give you an enormous tray of shrimp for an appetizer." He fairly beamed at the thought.
"I'll bear that
in mind on my next visit."
"Well, sir." Young looked at him steadily. "What's on your mind?"
"I have a few questions."
Young's eyebrows raised above his glasses. "Oh my, now you have tickled my curiosity. You're not with the FBI are you? Over the phone you simply said you were with the federal government."
"No, I'm not with the FBI. And I'm not on the payroll of Internal Revenue, either. My department is welfare. It's my job to track down the authenticity of pension claims."
"Then how can I help you?"
"My particular project at the moment is the investigation of a seventy-six-year-old mining accident that took the lives of nine men. One of the victim's descendants has filed for a pension. I'm here to check the validity of the claim. Your name, Mr. Young, was recommended to me by the State Historical Society, which glowingly described you as a walking encyclopedia on Western mining history."
"A bit of an exaggeration," Young said, "but I'm flattered, nonetheless."
The drinks arrived and they sipped them for a minute. Donner took the time to study the pictures of turn-of-the-century Colorado silver kings that hung on the walls. Their faces all projected the same intense stare, as if they were trying to melt the camera lens with their wealth-fortified arrogance.
"Tell me, Mr. Donner, how can anyone file a pension claim on a seventy-six-year-old accident?"
"It seems the widow didn't receive all she was entitled to," Donner said, skating onto unsure ice. "Her daughter is demanding the back pay, so to speak."
"I see," Young said. He stared across the table speculatively and then began idly tapping his spoon against a plate. "Which of the men who were lost in the Little Angel disaster are you interested in?"
"My compliments," Donner said, avoiding the stare and unfolding his napkin self-consciously. "You don't miss a trick."
"It's nothing, really. A seventy-six-year-old mining accident. Nine men missing. It could only be the Little Angel disaster."
"The man's name was Brewster."
Young stared at him an extra moment, then stopped the plate-tapping and banged his spoon against the table top. "Joshua Hays Brewster," he murmured the name. "Born to William Buck Brewster and Hettie Masters in Sidney, Nebraska, on April 4 . . . or was it April 5, 1878."
Donner's eyes opened wide. "How could you possibly know all that?"
"Oh, I know that and much more." Young smiled. "Mining engineers, or the Lace-Boot Brigade, as they were once known, are a rather cliquish group. It's one of the few professions where sons follow fathers and also marry sisters or daughters of other mining engineers."
"Are you about to say that you were related to Joshua Hays Brewster?"
"My uncle." Young grinned.
The ice parted and Donner fell through.
"You look like you could stand another drink, Mr. Donner." Young signaled to the waitress for another round. "Needless to say, there is no daughter who is seeking a claim to a pension; my mother's brother died a childless bachelor."
"Liars never prosper," Donner said with a thin smile. "I'm sorry if I've embarrassed you by foolishly painting myself into a corner."
"Can you enlighten me?"
"I would prefer not to."
"You are from the government?" Young asked.
Donner showed him his credentials.
"Then, may I ask why you're investigating my long-dead uncle?"
"I would prefer not to," Donner repeated. "Not at this time, at any rate."
"What do you wish to know?"
"Whatever you can tell me about Joshua Hays Brewster and the Little Angel accident."
The drinks came along with the salad. Donner agreed that the dressing was excellent. They ate in silence. When Young had finished and wiped his tiny white mustache, he took a deep breath and relaxed against the backrest of the booth.
"My uncle was typical of the men who developed the mines in the early nineteen hundreds; white, eager, and middle class, and except for his small size-he stood only five feet two-he could easily have passed for what the novelists of the day vividly depicted as a gentlemanly, two-fisted, devil-may-care, adventurous mining engineer, complete with shining boots, jodhpurs, and a Smokey-the-Bear ranger hat."
"You make him sound like a hero from an old Saturday matinee serial."
"A fictional hero could never have measured up," Young said. "The field is highly specialized today, of course, but an engineer of the old school had to be as tough as the rock he mined, and he had to be versatile-mechanic, electrician, surveyor, metallurgist, geologist, lawyer, arbitrator between penny-pinching management and muscle-brained workers. This was the kind of man it took to run a mine. This was Joshua Hays Brewster."
Donner kept silent, slowly swirling the liquor around in his glass.
"After my uncle graduated from the School of Mines," Young continued, "he followed his profession in the Klondike, Australia, and Russia before returning to the Rockies in 1908 to manage the Sour Rock and Buffalo, a pair of mines at Leadville owned by a group of French financiers in Paris who never laid eyes on Colorado."
"The French owned mining claims in the States?"
"Yes. Their capital flowed heavily throughout the West. Gold and silver, cattle, sheep, real estate; you name it, they had a finger in it."
"What possessed Brewster to reopen the Little Angel?"
"That's a strange story in itself," Young said. "The mine was worthless. The Alabama Burrow, three hundred yards away, coughed up two million dollars in silver before the water in the lower levels began running ahead of the pumps. That was the shaft that hit the high-grade lode. The Little Angel never came close." Young paused to sip at his drink and then stared at it as though he were seeing a vague image in the ice cubes. "When my uncle advertised his intentions to reopen the mine to anyone who would listen, people who knew him well were shocked. Yes, Mr. Donner, shocked. Joshua Hays Brewster was a cautious man, a man of painstaking detail. His every move was carefully calculated in terms of success. He never played the odds unless they were steeply in his favor. For him to publicly announce such a hare-brained scheme was unthinkable. The mere act was considered by all to be that of a madman."
"Maybe he found some clue the others had missed."
Young shook his head. "I've been a geologist for over sixty years, Mr. Donner, and a damned good one. I've re-entered and examined the Little Angel down to the flooded levels, and analyzed every accessible inch of the Alabama Burrow, and I'm telling you positively and unequivocally there is no untapped vein of silver down there now, nor was there one in 1911."
The Monte Cristo sandwiches came and the salad plates were whisked away.
"Are you suggesting your uncle went insane?"
"The possibility has occurred to me. Brain tumors were generally undiagnosed in those days."
"So were nervous breakdowns."
Young wolfed the first quarter of his sandwich and drained his second martini. "How is your Monte Cristo, Mr. Donner?"
Donner forced a few bites. "Excellent, and yours?"
"Grandly delicious. Would you like my private theory? Don't bother to be polite; you can laugh without embarrassment. Everyone else does when they hear it."
"I promise you I won't laugh," Donner said, his tone dead serious.
"Be sure to dip your Monte Cristo in the grape jam, Mr. Donner. It heightens the pleasure. Now then, as I've mentioned, my uncle was a man of great detail, a keen observer of his work, his surroundings and accomplishments. I've collected most of his diaries and notebooks; they fill a goodly portion of my study's bookshelves. His remarks concerning the Sour Rock and the Buffalo mines, for example, take up five hundred and twenty-seven pages of exacting sketches and neatly legible handwriting. The pages in the notebook that come under the heading of the 'Little Angel Mine', however, are totally blank."
"He left nothing behind regarding the Little Angel, not even a letter, perhaps?"
Young shrugged and shook his head. "It was as though there was nothing to
record. It was as though Joshua Hays Brewster and his eight-man crew went down into the bowels of the earth never intending to return."
"What are you suggesting?"
"Ridiculous as it seems," Young admitted, "the thought of mass suicide once darted through my mind. Extensive research showed me that all nine men were either bachelors or widowers. Most were itinerant loners who drifted from digging to digging, looking for any excuse to move on when they became bored or disenchanted with the foreman or mine management. They had little to live for once they became too old to work the mines."