Seven Silent Men (21 page)

Lookout Bluff is a far smaller and less imposing cliff than Warbonnet Ridge. Quite a few oldtimers recall when the city limits ended at Lookout Bluff. One or two even remember back to the days when Lookout Bluff was named Sentinel Bluff and Warbonnet Ridge was known as Lookout Ridge.

What no one, except a geologist, could be expected to know was that the Bonnet, as Warbonnet Ridge is generally called, was actually a coxcomb, a fifty- to ninety-six-yard-wide crown on a rock formation meandering northeast from the Salem Plateau and ending here on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River. The specific “rock” which the Bonnet fronts runs inland nearly three-quarters of a mile. In 1935 it was hollowed out.

Only a fraction of Prairie Port's population was old enough to have lived through the Rooseveltan era of WPA and CCC. In those Depression years and in this particular area, the singular job-creating project was MVA, the Mississippi Valley Authority … an ill-conceived predecessor to the Tennessee Valley Authority. Beyond building pyramids for the pure and Keynesian sake of putting people to work, MVA hoped to convert the untamed Mississippi River into a source of inexpensive hydroelectric power for lower Missouri and Illinois, northern Arkansas and Mississippi and western Kentucky and Tennessee. The project was also intended to provide lower Missouri with flood-control systems and mammoth-scale irrigation. Another objective was to somehow drain off underground leakage responsible for intermittent explosions of the salses, or mud volcanoes, at the township of Prairie Port, which in 1935 had a population of forty-six thousand inhabitants.

It was the core of the master plan that was faulty. Rather than build a dam in Tomahawk Hills just west of the Bonnet, behind which raw water power to turn turbines could be stored, the forgotten architects of MVA concocted what can only be ponderously described as an anti-gravitation bypass-infusion scheme. For whatever the explanation, the Mississippi flowed with extreme rapidity around one midstream island and two river bends. The Bonnet stood on the outer arc of the second, and southerly, of these curves, Cyclone Bend. The intention of the engineers was to divert portions of the river, at the point of highest water velocity, directly into the waiting path of reaction turbines.

One area of high water speed was along the semi-arid riverbank of the valley lying at Warbonnet Ridge's immediate north. Here construction began on a series of canals which were to shunt river torrents into the turbines without losing a milliwatt of potential power. Basic, straight-edge geography and a New Dealish desire to, wherever possible, maximize work gangs, dictated the best place to station the first set of turbines … inside Warbonnet Ridge.

Huge chambers and channels and shafts were hollowed out of the massive granite formation on which the ridge rested. Pipes and valves and generators and pumps and Francis Reaction Turbines and ventilators and lighting and elevators were installed in the underground, six-level-deep hydroelectric plant. Boring and installation went on even farther down in the rock … all the space and equipment needed to operate the main terminus for both the flood-control and irrigation systems.

A second engineering feat, equally as remarkable as what had been achieved within Warbonnet Ridge, was the most extraneous of the project. The southward underground tunnels, needed to control lowland flooding as well as to provide irrigation, could very well have been dug out of the soft earth west of the riverfront palisades. Instead, the engineers chose to bore the wide subterranean channel within the rock palisades themselves. The rationale for this at the time was that the rocks were veined by caves and caverns, which if incorporated as part of the drainage-irrigation system could save appreciable construction costs and time. Chopping and blasting through the palisades proved infinitely more expensive and time-consuming as tunneling to the west would have, caused numbers of cave-ins and accidents, accidentally killed three workers and injured many more and missed connecting with Prairie Port's sewerage and water systems, which had been the original target, by a full one-eighth of a mile. Nor did the engineers bother connecting into the drainage and water systems at the time. Their energies veered due west, burrowed through the earth and caves and caverns under the western-section of Prairie Port searching for the elusive underground rivers of mud responsible for the intermittent eruptions.

A monumental and scandalously expensive undertaking occurred when the State of Missouri came to the rescue and built an eighth-of-a-mile-long tunnel under Lookout Bluff linking the MVA system to underground water and sewerage passageways of Prairie Port.

Two years and two months after it began, the MVA project was abandoned. Not one drop of river water had flowed into the turbines or through huge underground channels built for irrigation. Sections of the flood-drainage system were being tested, but like everything else, that too was shut down. Closed off with temporary wood barriers, but not permanently sealed, were the 12.6 miles of arterial tunnels linking the ridge with the water and sewerage systems of Prairie Port.

At the time the hydroelectric project was aborted, reforestation began. Thousands of federally paid unemployed descended on the recently constructed diversionary canals north of the Ridge, filled in some, remodeled others, planted trees and shrubs and created, in a formerly semi-arid valley, fifty square miles of forest and lagoons and streams. These legions then moved into the partially wooded Tomahawk Hills west of the Ridge and worked their wonders again.

Soon all that was left was the ridge itself: Lookout Ridge, according to the map titling of that day. As barren a slanting slab of granite clifftop and shrub as exsited in the territory. Labor gangs shoveled into place a solid earth bridge connecting Low Tip with the hills below. Built a single-lane roadway up the bridge and on across the entire length of the ridge to Tall Tip. Reforesters swarmed forward with their picks and spades and seedlings and earth-laden dump trucks and flatbeds lugging full-grown or near to full-grown trees. And whatever was set into the thick blanket of clifftop soil seemed to batten, grew wildly, provided as unindigenous a display of species as ever had collected anywhere along the entire Mississippi. Dense stands of red oak and blue ash and white ash and elder. Paper birch and black walnut. Hawthorn and horse chestnut and linden and sycamore and cherry. Maple and hazel and dogwood. Willow and hickory. Even a redwood. Lush along the man-laid ground were briers and hedges and vines and flowers, both wild and domestic … berry and juniper and honeysuckle and grape and rose and bluebell and sweet William. At any daylight moment from spring to October the ridge was a profusion of shapes and hues. In the fall the colors exploded. No explosion was more magnificent than that at Tall Tip. For some reason the trees at the northern and widest part of the ridge had grown taller than the rest, were, as winter neared, more multitudinous in colors, more tumultuously bright. Looking up from the far bank of the river to the north ridge, one fall day long past, a local newspaper writer was reminded, by the form and coloration of the forest at Tall Tip, of an Indian headdress. Of a warbonnet. He said so in print. Other locals began calling the place by that name. The 1947 city plat of Prairie Port cites the cliff as Warbonnet Ridge rather than Lookout Ridge, as had been the case on the previously printed official city map in 1937. On the 1947 plat the former Sentinel Bluff is titled Lookout Bluff …

Jez Jessup had little curiosity and less knowledge about how the names evolved as he drove toward the single-lane highway leading up to Low Tip. His attention, after fifteen miles of circuitous small talk, had come to focus on the latest snippet of resident office scuttlebutt: Billy Yates's run-in with Denis Corticun.

“Swiss cheese?” Jessup repeated. “All you said was Swiss cheese and Corticun filed a complaint about you with Strom?”

“Swiss cheese got his attention. The Jewish bit knocked his wind out.”

“What Jewish bit?”

“My Jewish bit.”

“Make sense.”

“I'm Jewish.”

“Since when?”

“Birth and possibly before.”

“T'hell you say?” Jez just couldn't believe it. “You sure don't look like any Jewish person I ever saw.”

“I'll get a nose job.”

Jessup flashed his puckish grin. “I think you're kinda cute as is. So you say the teletype report is as full of holes as Swiss cheese and that you're a Jewish person and then what?”

“I go downstairs with the report and give it to Strom, and he tells me Corticun has filed a complaint about my being insubordinate and not wearing an identification card. It's the first I ever heard about needing an identification badge on the twelfth floor and I think it's the first Strom ever heard too, because he tells me to forget it. That's all there was to it.”

“You, should have bashed Corticun, like you bashed the cops in Columbus.” The grin widened.

“Should have kept my mouth shut,” Yates sighed.

“You did just fine. He apologized, didn't he?”

“I still should have kept my mouth shut.”

“If you shoulda done anything, it's not malign Swiss cheese. Swiss is my favorite.”

“Then you ought to read that report.”

“I did. Didn't seem all that cheesy to me. Or holey.”

“Jez, nothing makes sense in it. First off, we are expected to believe two bank presidents and a high Treasury Department official conspired to keep secret the theft of money for over forty-eight hours.”

“Bank presidents are the first to fib about anything to do with money.” Jez spoke matter-of-factly. “Particularly their own money. And how many government officials, Treasury Department or Bureau of Cuckoo Clocks, won't commit grand perjury rather than admit they made a mistake? Wake up, turkey. Live in the world around you.”

“I'll give you bank presidents,” Yates conceded. “What about coincidence? Suddenly thirty-one million dollars in untraceable bills finds its way into the bank vault at Prairie Port because of not one coincidence, but two. Two acts of God. Two breakdowns. First off, the incinerator used to burn unfit currency at the Fed Bank branch in New Orleans breaks down. Not only breaks down but seems unrepairable. Thirty-one million dollars in old bills piles up and nobody yet knows when the incinerators will be working.

“Act of God number two: the truck hired to take the money to an incinerator in St. Louis also breaks down. Presto, the truck limps into the nearest port-of-call, Mormon State National Bank. If you want a third coincidence, count in the missing list of serial numbers. The chief honcho of the Fed Bank in New Orleans, for some mysterious reason, makes up only two inventory lists of serial numbers for the hundred-dollar bills in the shipment. He keeps one copy and gives the other copy to one of the truck drivers. Or so he thinks. The banker finds the truck has driven off with both copies of the inventory list. Whammo, the envelope with both inventory lists, the only two lists that exist, is left inside the vault and is stolen along with everything else. Jez, how the hell far do you want to be carrying acts of God? And there's one other point of, if not coincidence, then contradiction. The armored truck leaves New Orleans for St. Louis with explicit instructions that if trouble occurs only one person is to be contacted—Arthur G. Klines, the assistant Treasury Department director, who not only engaged the truck in the first place, but solely arranged for the transfer of money from New Orleans to St. Louis. The truck does run into trouble, and Klines is there to take the phone calls and direct them to make an emergency stop at Prairie Port … drop the thirty-one million off at Mormon State until repairs can be made. But what happens the second time the truck calls him? When on Sunday the truck, after repairs, is en route back to the bank to pick up the money and continue its trip to St. Louis? Klines isn't there to get the truck's phone calls saying they've learned the bank has been robbed. All day Sunday, August twenty-second, Klines is unavailable to the truck crew as well as the bank president of Mormon State and the vice-president who heads the New Orleans Fed Bank. Klines, the maker of the plan, the core of the operation, can't be reached for twelve hours. So what say, old turkey? You still think that report isn't Swiss cheese?”

Jessup scratched at his neck. “You have a favorite sports team, Yates?”

“A few.”

“Any of 'em ever great teams?”

“What's this got to do with the report?”

“Ever remember a great team that could do no wrong? Was perfect in all respects? Then one game everything goes haywire. The team suddenly can't do nothing right. It makes error after error. Mistakes a ten-year-old kid is smart enough not to make? For no rhyme or reason it all falls apart? Seems to me what's true for the team could be true for the transfer of that money, and more so. When mere mortal men start screwing up, sometimes there's no end in sight. Dumb error begets dumber error.”

The car sped up the approach bridge and onto the one-lane asphalt roadway atop Warbonnet Ridge. Trees pressed in from both sides, blocked out the sun, made the narrow pavement seem a dark stream meandering through lush shrubbery on a great cavern's floor.

“Could be that you're right and I'm wrong,” Jessup said. “That Corticun's flying squad of headquarters agents got everything fouled up. But we'll know better when the individual reports that summary was written from come in. Anything else on your mind I can help with?”

There was, but Yates shook his head.

Jez pulled the car to a stop on a concrete observation platform jutting out beyond cliff's edge three hundred feet above the river. Ahead, through the lazy morning mist, the mighty Mississippi wound northward across an infinite panorama of flatland and forest and farm. Directly below the platform, along the Missouri bank, were the clearly defined outlines of the long-abandoned canals and water basins built by the MVA thirty-four years before. Inland and stretching across tens of miles of hilly, tree-choked terrain, lay a huge reservoir lake.