Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  Lily tilted her head at me. “Darling, you stole this bag and two others. So you think they have something to do with something. We both know that diamond indicator minerals help geologists find diamond mines. Jimmy Angel is a geologist. He’s been looking for diamonds. Conclusion: these minerals have something to do with that.”

  I got up and leaned on the iron railing that ran around the terrace. The girl in the kayak had finished the course, and the guy on the bike was yelling something to her from the shore. A pair of tundra swans coasted in and landed by a rocky point.

  Why was Lily here? It had been her idea to come with me. At one point she’d said we needed to work on “learning to be a couple.” Not surprising in a relationship in which calculation and betrayal traded places with passion according to the demands of the moment—a condition Lily called “interpersonal challenges.” She could master any jargon and deploy it in service of her story. But what exactly was that story? It had something to do with Mei and Fan.

  It wasn’t just a case of Mei remembering Lily from long ago. They’d been in touch more recently. I was sure of it. In Vancouver, they’d fallen straight into an intense dialogue the second Wu was out the door. It was clear they knew what ground to cover. In the record I’d got back from Tommy, our translators had managed to extract only a few words and phrases from the poor recording. “Pipes” had been one. “Diamond indicators” another. “Garnets” came up twice.

  Those two had been in touch. Luc knew it too. He’d said that Mei asked for Lily, but he sure hadn’t looked surprised.

  And where did Mitzi fit in? Lily had known about her before we got to Yellowknife. How? Lily had no mining background. She was an industrial-scale diamond thief. And suddenly she’s all about pyrope garnets?

  “I’m trying to remember where you picked up your interest in exploration geology.”

  She took me by the shoulders and turned me to face her, so I could look into her eyes and see her deep sincerity. The breeze ran its fingers through her hair, and the tips of her elvish ears peeped into view. I smelled her toothpaste again. Her lips were slightly parted, and the easiest thing in the world would have been to lean forward and kiss them. Instead, I reminded myself that before she was twenty, Lily had devised a scheme of rounding off diamond weights that allowed her to steal millions of dollars’ worth of rough from the Russian state diamond sorting facility in Mirny. More than one male had been given a chance to stare deeply into those gray eyes and find sincerity. When I kept my distance, a twitch of annoyance wrinkled her forehead. She drew back and tilted her chin at me.

  “Sue me for taking an interest, Alex. For trying to move closer. Believe it or not, I’m still trying to untie at least a few of the knots tangled up inside you. You grew up with these minerals. It’s too bad your father was a bastard. He made a discovery that changed the world. When I knew we were coming here, I read up on his work. It seemed obvious that a prospector who’d disappeared in a diamond field might have been looking for diamonds, and those”—she pointed at the garnets on the table—“are how you look.” She put her hands on her hips. “If they weren’t important, you wouldn’t have stolen them.”

  She wanted me to tell her that the garnets pointed to a diamond discovery, so she could advance whatever scheme she had. How could it be any other way between us? We were shaped to fit matching holes inside each other’s hearts. That wasn’t the same as trust.

  “There’s something valuable up there,” I said. “Otherwise people wouldn’t be trying to kill us. Maybe it’s a diamond mine. We can’t tell that from a bag of garnets. There were dozens of targets on the big wall map Jimmy Angel had. But the mineral samples are coded. Mitzi said she didn’t know the code.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “No. But that’s not proof of anything. Prospectors always think they’re on the trail of a big find, and they’re always secretive about it. That doesn’t mean they’ve got a discovery. They get it wrong more than they get it right.”

  The girl in the kayak heard it first. I saw her turn and stare at the sky. The guy with the stopwatch got off his bike and looked in the same direction. A low, hoarse whisper slid into the sky. The sound advanced through the air like a warning of approaching doom. The lake seemed to shudder as the noise grew into a thunder. A giant aircraft with its landing gear down went booming past and sank below the trees. The squeal of its tires as it landed and the roar of air brakes tore the day to shreds.

  Two silver shapes flashed by, followed by the scream of their jets. The Canadian F-18s. They flicked across the sun and flew above the airport, almost grazing the soaring tail fin of the landed plane. The F-18s cut into a hard turn and slipped away. The roar of the massive aircraft’s engines died to a whine as it trundled onto a taxiway.

  A Lockheed C-5 Galaxy. The US Air Force’s main strategic heavy lifter. It can carry a battalion with all its war-fighting equipment. It can carry helicopters and Bradley fighting vehicles. I wondered what it could be carrying that anybody in Yellowknife would want, and I wasn’t the only one asking the question. Three quarters of a mile away, on the main road from the city, a line of vehicles with flashing roof lights sped toward the airport.

  Then my cellphone pinged. A bush pilot had found Jimmy’s plane.

  18

  A flat gray sky sat on the Barrens like an iron lid. The lakes glowed like dull metal. We droned northeast below the cloud. The bleak landscape rippled with flashes of white as the caribou fled in panic from the low-flying plane. The pewter sheet of Lac de Gras slid into view.

  No one spoke in the cabin. Mitzi sat with Pete in the first row behind the cockpit. She already occupied the lonely space of someone isolated by a death. No one expected to find Jimmy alive. The pilot who’d spotted the plane had reported a wrecked camp and no sign of life. Mitzi’s face was the same carved mask it had been since she’d arrived at the dock and boarded the police flight.

  I sat with Luc. In the row behind us were a sergeant; Luc’s sidekick, Cedric; and another officer. Two crime-scene techs and a photographer sat in the back. Everyone stared fixedly out the window or quietly inspected their equipment. A sense of shame suffused the cabin, as if we were the ones bringing death to Mitzi.

  We reached the far shore of the lake and crossed a ridge. The plane bumped hard on an updraft. Beyond the ridge was the big, ragged bay that extended north from the main body of the lake. One of the exploration targets marked on the wall map had been at the foot of an inlet of the huge bay. I took out my phone and scrolled through the map until I found it. I looked out the window to match the shoreline with the tiny image, and compared it to the one I’d taken from the dead sniper. They were the same.

  The inlet ended in an unusually shaped cove—a half-circle so geometrically perfect it looked as if it had been cut from the shore with a sharp knife. Clip Bay. We splashed down and taxied in.

  A burly figure in greasy overalls waited on the beach beside his plane. Wisps of his thin gray hair lifted in the breeze. He stood behind the flare he’d planted in the gravel to show the pilot the best place to come in. His hands were shoved in his pockets, and he blinked back tears when Mitzi came ashore.

  “Mitz,” he said, but his mouth started to quiver, and he clamped it shut.

  She stopped in front of him and put a hand on his broad chest. “It’s OK, Billy,” she said to the old pilot. They stood silently together for a moment. It struck me what a small society they were, who made their lives up here. And how diminished by a single death.

  An esker loomed behind the wreckage of the camp. A land breeze stirred the tattered shreds of canvas. Jimmy’s Beaver creaked against a mooring line. The camouflage drooped forlornly. The second mooring line had come loose, and the plane lay sideways to the narrow beach. It shuddered as successive waves pushed it against the shore.

  “Is he here, Billy?” Mitzi said.

  “I think he might be,” he said hoarsely. He took a breath before he gestured at a scattering of something a hundred
feet away, at the base of a granite bluff.

  Fragments of bone were strewn around on the rocky soil. A body had been devoured by animals. A jaw studded with teeth, partially hidden by rags. Boots with the leather gnawed. A steel-cased watch with the khaki nylon strap intact. Mitzi knelt down and picked it up, held it to her ear, then slipped it in a pocket. One of the crime-scene techs started to object, but the sergeant, a ramrod with a moustache like a clump of steel wool, shot him a look and shook his head.

  “Can I have a minute?” Mitzi said. Her voice was low but steady. She had already come to this place in her mind.

  * * *

  “She knew he was dead,” Luc said. We were standing beside a patch of scraped ground between the tent and the shore. Mitzi and Pete had made their way around the site and were now sitting on boulders on the little ridge to the right of the camp.

  “We all knew,” I said.

  He nodded. “One of the techs says there’s a bear skull by the camp, with what looks like a bullet hole.” He stared around. “Where the human remains are, not much to go on. The animals don’t leave much. Wolves will eat the bones. The tech’s going to comb the site for scat.”

  “We can figure out what ate him,” I said. “The question is what killed him.”

  I could see a garnet on the ground. I thought that Jimmy must have sampled the scene, because the ground was scraped bare, and I saw a stake and a length of twine nearby. It seemed strange that he’d have missed a garnet, so obvious that I could see it still there, two weeks after his disappearance.

  The forensic techs had put on white nylon suits and split the scene. One was picking his way carefully through the remains while the other busied himself with the devastated tent.

  Cedric crunched across the gravel. “Sir,” he said to Luc when he reached us. “I think you should see what we found on the plane.”

  Luc strode off after him. I stepped over to the clear space near the scattered stakes, scooped up the garnet and a handful of loose dirt, and followed.

  The sergeant indicated a hole in the metal rung of the ladder. He’d marked it for the techs with a strip of flagging tape. The metal was peeled away at the edge of the hole, as if it had been blown apart.

  “High-impact bullet?” Luc said.

  “Looks like it, sir. And the angle, the way the metal is torn—if it was a bullet, it hit the top of the step.”

  “OK.”

  “Well, sir, that would mean it was a high-angle shot.”

  We all swung around at the same time, scanning the esker first and panning around to the granite ridge. And there, standing now, was Pete. When he saw us looking, he waved.

  Five minutes later, the sergeant and I, Luc and Cedric were all gasping for breath on the ridge while Pete pointed out two pale marks on the top of a boulder, where the lichen had been scraped away.

  “Bipod,” I said.

  He nodded. “Sniper. And right here is where he made a place to kneel.” The shooter had shoved some gravel aside and placed a smooth stone behind the boulder. I looked around at the ground, but Pete shook his head. “No casings. I checked.”

  * * *

  The crime-scene techs were finishing up at the campsite when I joined Mitzi on the ridge. The pilot who’d discovered Jimmy’s plane had flown out. He’d offered Mitzi a lift, but she’d wanted to stay.

  “It’s OK,” she said when I sat down. She took a deep breath, as if to steady herself. “You know, this is where he’d want to die. He loved this more than he loved anything.” Her gaze roamed the lakes and the distant ridges. “He kept everyone away,” she said. “He didn’t even like me calling him Dad. He said we were all the same, just matter born of matter. The elements that make up the rock are what made us. The elements came from the furnace of the stars.” She gave me a sad smile. “That’s how he talked. He made it seem like you were watching creation happen. I didn’t really have a mom. She died when I was a kid. I don’t remember her. Dad said the earth was my mother.” Suddenly a look of the purest hatred swarmed into her face. She turned away to hide it.

  The wind picked up. It stirred the water and tore holes in the cloud. Where the sun broke through, it paved the water with a silver light. From the ridge you could see how perfect the shoreline below us was—the neat arc at the end of the inlet.

  “You know it’s a pipe, don’t you,” she said.

  “I guessed. How did it go undiscovered for so long? It’s in the heart of the main discovery zone.”

  “Look where it is. The first pipe discovered in the Arctic was under a small, round lake. Prospectors learned to look for targets like that and drill them through the ice in winter. This doesn’t look like a round target. Only when you look at the shore from above can you see the circle continue under the water.”

  “Where the water’s black.”

  “Uh-huh. Perfect shape for a pipe.”

  “And the black lines on the wall map.” I’d been thinking about them, remembering what my father had told me about the Canadian discovery. “Those lines marked the flow of the glaciers.”

  Her expression changed. Some of the loneliness left her face. She got up, walked a few paces, knelt down on the rock, and traced her fingers along a straight, even depression. It was one of a series of parallel grooves that creased the granite surface of the ridge.

  “These are the lines,” she said. “You can find these marks all over the Barrens. They show the exact direction that the glaciers advanced ten thousand years ago.” She looked up at the forbidding landscape, the miles of gray rock broken by frigid, gunmetal lakes. “The land was scraped and scoured by the passage of the glaciers. It’s the glaciers that revealed the diamond pipes.”

  It wasn’t only geology she was talking about. It was her childhood.

  The last of the cloud had blown away. The inlet shone and the huge bay beyond it. A dozen miles away, the wrinkled sheet of Lac de Gras glittered in the sun.

  “In the last ice age, glaciers formed and came south across the Barrens. Hundreds of thousands of tons of ice pressed down on the rock.” She stroked the clean, concave depression that ran downhill beside her. “When the ice slid over the softer rock of the diamond pipes, it gouged out that softer rock and smeared it over the granite in trains. Ten thousand years later, when the ice age ended and the glaciers melted away, the water filled the depressions left by the gouged-out pipes. Instead of pipes, all we saw were lakes.”

  And Jimmy Angel figured it out. In 1991 he tracked a smear of minerals to the edge of a small round lake. In the winter he came back. He hauled a drill rig up the ice road and dragged it onto the lake. He drilled through the ice and through the mud. He hit boulders. He bent the drill and hauled it up, replaced the shaft and sent it down again. And he hit a diamond pipe.

  “By that time he was so far in debt that other people owned the discovery,” Mitzi said. “He spent his lifetime trying to find another.”

  The wind picked up. It moaned across the immensity of rock where Jimmy Angel had spent his life, and where it ended. The cold wind carried the first message of the coming winter. Of the planet tilting its northern face to the darkness. Of the brevity and hopelessness of life.

  Grief took over Mitzi’s face in a swift assault that drew down her mouth and made her lips tremble. A bitter sob escaped her. She buried her face in her hands and wept as only orphans weep, with the certainty that nothing can ever console them.

  On the flight back she became stern and unapproachable again. She’d passed through the dark valley and wanted to show she’d come out the other side. Except she hadn’t. Waiting on the dock was Wu. This time he’d come with the police, and he explained to Mitzi exactly how much of her father’s property she could call her own.

  None.

  19

  Those Chinese bastards are up to something with the Canadians,” Tommy yelled as we pulled out of Teterboro airport and got on the I-80 for New York City. “I’m telling you, they’re dating our girl, and the way we’re starting to see it
, she’s ready to two-time us if the price is right.”

  He had to shout because he had the top down, and the noise of the traffic heading into the city and the rush of night air as we merged onto the freeway at eighty made normal conversation impossible. Also, Tommy liked to shout.

  “That Chinese shyster rolled over Mitzi Angel, and the Canadians didn’t do a thing to stop him. She’s an American citizen,” Tommy bellowed, stabbing a thick finger in my direction. “An American citizen blatantly stripped of her inheritance rights by the people who murdered her father.” He was really booming now, sucking in oratorical power from the rushing air and painting his picture of a helpless American preyed upon by foreigners. In his head, Tommy was always addressing a jury. What he really thought was anybody’s guess. It would come out when he was ready.

  The seizure of Jimmy Angel’s company and assets went down with stunning speed. A stack of writs with red court seals was handed to Mitzi when she got off the plane. By the time she got home there was nothing left. The map was gone. The garnets, gone. She was instructed that the house, office, and the barge itself were the property of a company she did not control.

  “But I’m a member of the board,” she’d said.

  “At a special meeting duly held today in the law offices of the company’s counsel,” Wu told her, “a quorum of directors voted to replace you. Thank you for your past services.”

  Nothing put Tommy in a better mood than the prospect of a fight. He fell on the legal case with savage pleasure, as if it had been a runner trying to get by him on the field. But he’d have been in a good mood anyway. His car guru had finally located a 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz to replace the one he’d wrecked last year. The real reason Tommy had come out to Teterboro to pick me up was to show off the car.

  The massive tail fins and restored coachwork gleamed under a fresh coat of Dakota Red. The Caddy carved a hole in the traffic. We cannoned through the E-ZPass tollbooth and onto the George Washington Bridge. Tommy wore a vintage lilac bowling shirt with the name “Dream Boy” stitched on the pocket in flowing script. The shirt rippled in the wind as he waved his catcher’s-mitt hand at the dash and listed the car’s attributes. I’d already heard about the Hydra-Matic transmission and the 364-cubic-inch engine when he had the last one, but pointing that out would accomplish nothing.