New Brunswick, Canada
WHEN THE SECOND WORLD WAR ENDED, COLONEL BLAIR CYR, through a variety of organizations, helped to bring Dutch, Polish and Latvian families to Canada. There was much red tape that he knew how to ignore and families in his care were processed quickly. Blair Cyr tried to keep in touch with as many of these people as he could. On occasion, out of the blue, someone would get a phone call, and Mr. Cyr would be on the line.
Blair Cyr was a known benefactor, though he never spoke or took credit for it. Neither for the most part did his sons, or his grandsons. Thirteen Dutch families benefited from his kindness.
A Dutch family, the Vanderflutin, immigrated to Canada in early 1947, one family in a group of thirty-one. For a time the father, Dug Vanderflutin, became somewhat of a fixture in the lives of the Cyrs.
He was, as the expression goes, a wheeler-dealer. In fact he had managed to immigrate to Canada with a good deal.
Dug Vanderflutin tried to open up companies in the States, tried to buy and sell gold, even tried to find the fortune at Oak Island, where one of his colleagues was killed. A Mi’kmaq worker he had hired to help build a tunnel to the gold—or where he thought the gold should be, with the map he had. Dug Vanderflutin made it back out, but his Mi’kmaq friend did not. It was one of the unfortunate incidents in his life.
In 1960 he told Mr. Cyr he had some paintings. One was a Matisse, and there were two Picassos and a Monet.
“I am broke,” he said. “If you can help me with this, I’d be grateful—”
Mr. Blair Cyr bought them for a lot of money, and donated them to the newly opened Beaverbrook Art Gallery. With those funds Vanderflutin opened a mining operation in northern New Brunswick, against the wishes of almost everyone.
He did not understand mining. There were strikes, one lasting almost eight months, and by the late sixties the talk of shafts and blasts and tailing ponds infuriated him, and he moved on.
It seemed the whole thing went belly up, though he held on to it as best he could. Then he tried a shipping venture to and from Venezuela, but he needed the docks of Saint John, and there was certain trouble with the port authorities over the tanker Caracas Albión, which dropped anchor in 1968 and never left port for over a year, with many of the sailors, Filipino and Chinese, complaining of beatings and asking for asylum.
Dug moved on to other things. He tried farming in Saskatchewan—a farm of 160 hectares, much of it useless, and one of the first to attempt canola, which lamed out with blackleg; his last venture was importing jewellery from India, which he sold to immigrant stores in Montreal. Still, he was a mover—and as a mover, he always moved on. In a way he had abandoned his wife and child in far-off Saskatchewan in order to be adventurous. But, perhaps in a more secretive way, to escape his past.
At the last of it, he was tired, overweight, drank to excess in bars in New York, and by the late sixties was rumoured to have something going with running guns to the Irish Republican Army from depots in Sweden.
Still, Blair Cyr forgave him the rumoured IRA business and would often say: “He was a saboteur in Norway to help British shipping in 1942 and ’43, and he blew up depots, so you have to think of it that way, I suppose.”
There was, however, something Mr. Cyr did not know. That is, it would take time to discover who this Vanderflutin actually was, where those paintings actually had come from. That there was in fact another Vanderflutin from the same Dutch village, whom Blair Cyr had confused with this man.
This Dug Vanderflutin died suddenly, alone, almost broke and fairly forgotten in 1971.
The son’s name was Ernest. Blair Cyr wrote to him, informing him of his father’s death. They offered to buy his father’s assets if the son did not want to continue with them.
The son wrote back, that he was still in university, still finishing his doctorate, but would think it over:
“I will bide my time and look for the right buyer—” he wrote.
They wondered, since they had floated many a loan, why they were not the right buyer. But he was young and full of green, and they never responded.
Still, the offer remained open, and it seemed though Ernest looked in many places for another offer, he did not find it. There was only one family interested enough in the ore mine in New Brunswick to make an offer.
So finally this Ernest Vanderflutin went back to his father’s old friends.
The Cyrs came forward and bought the mining company and folded it into their mining concerns called Tarsco—this company owned the iron ore considerations of New Brunswick, a potash mine in Nova Scotia, a gold mine in northern Ontario—and almost as an afterthought, with the purchase of Vanderflutin enterprises, a small out-of-the-way coal mine in Mexico.
Ernest never knew his father’s dealings—his trafficking in gold and his search for treasure at Oak Island. But the offer he got from Cyr, and the offer he had to take, was far less than he assumed it would be. He felt cheated out of a fortune by the Cyr family. He was bitter about this, and about how much he was paid when he sold it to them.
MINER NUMBER T-70909, PEDRO SONORA, COULDN’T SAVE ANYONE. After the bump he ran up the rail past the elongated drift that they called “the sky is falling” toward the lanterns pitched and dangling, broken on the side of cracking timbers. He was fifteen hundred feet away from safety, a small feeble light the colour of soft tin, way, way up in the tunnel.
He heard something like shovelfuls of coal falling around him. Confused, he thought men were still throwing shovelfuls of coal into the railcars at the side of the drift. Then down the side tunnel he could hear men shouting. Someone—was it Jorge?—carried another man on his shoulders, but then fell to his knees, and was covered above his head in ten seconds, with his hands in the air, all his fingers extended so one could count out loud on them, and his helmet light still glowing while the man was being buried.
Then there was a sudden silence—almost an awesome silence—and Pedro could hear someone, whoever, saying a prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe. There was a shrine in the mine, at the cross-section of tunnels, where people put in money on their way deeper, and blessed themselves on their way back up. Those who forgot or did not, then worried about bad luck. Now Pedro thought, someone had not blessed himself, and a bump had come.
It was Pedro’s oldest son’s fourteenth birthday today. He had bought him a little tape recorder because his son liked to go into the woods and record birds and sell the recordings to American tourists. Pedro had given it to him just before he entered the shaft.
And he had said:
“Cuida de tu hermano—esta noche tenemos una fiesta.”
Take care of your brother—we will have a party tonight.
Pedro was forty-three years old. His wife had died of cancer two years before. They were people who had lived simply, attended Mass, worked at jobs, worried about crime, and did all they could to be decent.
When his wife was dying, she was rag and bag of bones, and sat on the steps outside their apartment to get fresh air. That is where, when lifting Florin to sit on her knee, she fell over, bled from the mouth, and was carried into bed. Victor, her oldest, ran to get her a glass of water. And then the priest. She died that night, holding prayer beads in her hand.
His two sons were all he had, and he loved them dearly. He loved them more than dearly. He loved them with all his heart.
Pedro would someday be known as the hero of the Amigo disaster—he would be written about. He would be the one great moment in their darkest hour. That is, he would be like the First Servant, in King Lear, the kind of man C. S. Lewis wrote about, who didn’t have great plans about great things but did his duty come what may. That is, Pedro didn’t pretend to know how the script of his life was going to turn out—he only did what he could to honour it.
But this was not for Pedro to know.
He would be stuck in a pocket of air for eight days.
The mine’s owners would call off the search after three. At that time Pedro and twelve other men would hear the bulldozers closing off the opening three hundred metres above. They would look at each other—with their feeble lamps still glowing.
When the Mexican families became outraged that their loved ones might still be alive—might still be praying to be rescued—the Mexican government was silent. Then the government became very angry. They sent the army in to bring discipline back to the town. How would these people—these ignorant people—know anything about a coal mine?
After two weeks of outrage Señor Carlos DeRolfo, Amigo’s president and CEO, supervisor and co-owner, said he had done all he could. No one looked more sorrowful than Mr. Carlos DeRolfo at this time.
The international investor still owning part of this mine’s enormous debt was the Canadian company Tarsco. The Mexican company was called Amigo. The Amigo board of governors had been extracting far too much coal, leaving the air saturated with methane gas. But there was a secret Amigo’s owners had not revealed to the Mexican people: Tarsco had assumed the greater part of this debt so Amigo could refurbish and reinvest in safety. More than assuming the debt, they had given Amigo another fourteen million dollars in order to upgrade standards. They had then closed the mine down in 2001 until these upgrades were completed. After the new upgrades were completed with this fourteen million, and a list of upgrades was sent off to the mining authorities, the mine was allowed to reopen.
However, Carlos DeRolfo, his wife and other board members had secretly spent most of that money on themselves—that is, the entire fourteen million—thinking not only that they would not be caught but that what they did would be considered legitimate if they had the right paperwork in place. (They had been robbing this mine, and misappropriating the legitimate offers of financial assistance, for years.)
A man named Hulk Hernández oversaw this transfer of funds for them into certain bank accounts, and became the chief inspector of the mine. The people of Oathoa relied upon him to tell them the truth, and Mr. Hernández did.
What was in their favour was this. The transfer of money had happened a few minutes before 9/11. It was wired from New York, and any record of it was probably lost. Warren, the oldest grandson of Blair Cyr, and the man who had wired these funds, had died in that attack as well. Days and then weeks passed, and no one knew about this transfer, and how much money was actually given.
DeRolfo had a new indoor-outdoor swimming pool and had built his wife her own chapel, where he had the local and quite pious priest come to say Mass. He had a stable of eight Arabian horses.
Once a day, after the implosion, Mr. Hernández held a press conference, where he read from a chart. He showed the routes the rescuers took, the impediments they had to face, the damage that supposedly had been done.
A few weeks after the implosion a safety group was formed to look into the cause of the disaster. It had many people in the town involved. They were to recommend changes to mining and decide who was responsible. They were also going to decide who would receive the majority of the compensation that the mining company said they would offer. Carlos DeRolfo’s wife sat on this board, along with Hulk Hernández. She told them of the amount of safety measures they had installed, the work they had done—and her suggestion was that if anyone was at fault, it was the international company Tarsco, which wanted too much coal extracted from the mine. She blessed herself, and cried when she spoke.
“Thousands of tonnes of coal,” she said.
However, all during this time, all during the days of agony just after the collapse of the mine, during those days of prayers and masses after this implosion, Carlos DeRolfo and his wife were hoping to locate one small boy, a boy about fourteen years of age, named Victor Sonora.
Carlos went to the school to find him, but the boy did not show up there.
“Hijo de puta. Hijo de puta,” he would repeat.
Son of a bitch.
Carlos would tell other children:
“It is not important, but if you see him, and he is available to see me, tell him I am at home.” And he would look rather fatherly at the boys he spoke to. Especially the boy’s best friend, Ángel Gloton, who Carlos had a managerial interest in as a young junior lightweight.
He took Ángel Gloton aside and said:
“Tell our friend Victor I have a lot of money for him—if he wants to see me. I want him to know I am looking out for him—he is an orphan now, and has lost his father, and he has a little brother.”
But the truth was much, much different. Why Carlos wanted to see Victor Sonora was because Victor had recorded something on his new tape recorder. Something that proved the men were still alive when the search was suspended. This would become known, but it would take time. Victor had been sitting on the steps of the old school, playing with this tape recorder, when the accident happened, and like so many he had rushed to the mine. Later that day he turned his tape recorder on, to keep a record of the rescue. And a sound was recorded that proved men were calling for help.
Twice Victor had tried to get this tape to someone who would listen—and twice he realized that the policeman Erappo Pole was waiting for him. Why? He did not know, but he believed something was not right. In fact was terribly wrong. So not able to go to the police he would hide, with the tape recorder and his little brother, Florin, and wonder what to do. When Ángel saw him, and told Victor that Carlos DeRolfo wanted to speak with him, Victor knew he was in trouble, and the tape he had on him was a dangerous tape. He finally decided to take it to a tourist, and believed that would save his father.
Then a strange event happened. Young Victor Sonora was found dead in the bedroom of a Canadian woman’s villa.
And Mary Cyr, the granddaughter of Blair Cyr, found herself in a Mexican jail in that small town of Oathoa; a woman who on paper was partial owner of this mine.