The woman’s voice raised to match his. “We don’t buy art. Go down to Taheta or one of the other shops. We don’t buy art.”
The old man seemed bewildered by the force of her reply. “This is my work. All I want is two hundred dollars to get home.”
The woman’s voice rose to a shout. “We have no money to buy art! Go to Taheta!”
“All I want is to get home!”
Kate pushed between the two women. “Let me see, uncle,” she said to the old man, her voice gentle.
She could smell the alcohol coming off him from where she stood, but he held himself erect. When he saw Kate, his bleary eyes widened. He spoke a phrase and she shook her head. “I’m sorry, uncle, I have no Yupik. Please, show me your work.” To Yvonne’s boss, she said, “Mind if we sit here for a moment?”
She did, but something in Kate’s cool gaze gave her pause. “Of course not,” she said finally, forcing an insincere smile. She glanced through the glass door, obviously nervous that another legitimate customer might be discouraged from entering her gallery when they saw the customers she was currently entertaining. There was only Mutt, who yawned at her through the glass door, displaying her fangs to advantage, and she retreated hurriedly behind the counter.
Kate slipped a hand beneath the old man’s elbow and guided him to one of the chairs against the wall. “Sit, uncle.”
“I just want to go home,” he said, his voice exhausted of energy.
“I know,” she said. “I know. Please, show me what you have.”
The cardboard box was filled with pieces of ivory carved into animal figures. There were walruses and caribou and bears and salmon and otters. The best piece was a sleek, fat seal, with an impish, grinning human face peeking out of the fur on his back. All were old, very old, yellow in color and cracked, their edges worn smooth.
Kate replaced the little seal with a reverent hand. “Uncle,” she said, looking up at him, “where did you get these?”
“They are my work.” He refused to meet her eyes, but a tinge of red crept up into his cheeks, and she knew. She folded the lid of the box down and reached for her wallet. The little otter and the books had dug a big hole in her reserve of cash. She debated whether to take him over to the other gallery, and rejected the notion at once. If she could keep him from selling them, she would. “Here’s forty dollars. No, uncle, keep your work. It is too good to sell. Take it home.”
“I can’t get home,” he muttered, shoving the box back at her. “I don’t have any money.”
She folded his hand around the bills, and spoke slowly, holding his rheumy eyes with hers. “This is all I have right now. I’ll get more, and meet you in front of the Army-Navy Surplus store tomorrow morning. I’ll give you a ride to the airport and put you on a plane. Where do you live, uncle? What is your village?”
He looked at her, dazed. “Savoonga. I just want to go home.”
Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island, at the southern entrance to the Bering Strait and closer to the Chukotsk Peninsula of Siberia than to the Seward Peninsula of Alaska. Gambell was on St. Lawrence Island, too. Instinctively she reached inside her jacket and touched the box holding the little otter.
There were restive movements from behind the counter. In a calming voice Kate repeated her words and hoped they got through. Again, he pressed the box on her, and this time she took it. She was afraid of what he’d do with it if she didn’t.
They went outside together. He smiled when he saw Mutt and said something to her in Yupik. Mutt ducked her head, flattened her ears, gave her tail an ingratiating wag and even went so far as to give a small yip in salute. The old man smiled kindly at both of them in farewell. “Don’t forget, uncle, tomorrow morning,” Kate called. “In front of Army-Navy, about ten o’clock. All right?”
He raised a hand and shuffled off. To Mutt Kate said, “And when did you learn to speak Yupik? I thought you only spoke Aleut.”
Mutt raised a superior eyebrow and didn’t reply in either tongue.
Kate spent her last two dollars on a cafe mocha double tall and walked the two and a half blocks to the Downtown Deli, juggling bag, box and coffee cup and trying hard not to feel depressed. It was too early in the year for the tourists to have taken over as was their invariable habit, and Jack had already found them a table. From the expression of restrained fury on his face it had not been a good morning. She slid into the booth and eyed him warily. “Hi.”
The waiter, also the owner, also a former mayor of Anchorage, bustled up with two beers and set them both in front of Jack. He saw Kate and paused, pushing straight black hair out of his eyes. “Kate. Long time no see.”
“How are you, Tony? I voted for you for governor, what the hell happened?”
He laughed. “I don’t know. Never underestimate the call of the weird in Alaskan politics.”
Kate thought of their sitting governor and agreed wholeheartedly.
“What can I get you?”
“Coffee, with cream.”
“Can do.”
The ex-mayor left and Kate looked across at Jack, who was finishing his first beer. “What happened this morning to turn you into the Grinch?”
He drained his bottle, burped and said one word. “Jane.”
“Ah.” Kate’s coffee arrived and she doctored it heavily with cream and sugar. It was best to keep her blood sugar up when Jane was the subject under discussion. She ordered a Reuben (she was in Anchorage, after all, Alaska’s stand-in for Sodom and Gomorrah, she might as well act like it). Jack ordered a roast beef-tomato-cream cheese combination that was hell on the cholesterol and made Kate wish instantly that she’d ordered it instead. “What’d she want?”
He snorted. ‘This time? Only the title to the duplex.”
“What?”
“You know I wanted to put it on the market last year?”
“I thought you had.”
“So did I,” he said grimly. “Remember I offered to split the profit with her fifty-fifty?”
“I remember,” Kate said. She also remembered the reservations she’d had about the plan at the time. She offered the same opinion now she had then: none.
He nodded again, this time at an official-looking envelope lying on the table that showed signs of being wrung as if it were a substitute for someone’s neck. “Today she tells me she’s retained an attorney. He tells me she told him that I told her that the duplex was her retirement fund. He’s filed papers and clouded the title, so now I can’t sell it.” He jerked a contemptuous thumb. “And she showed up at the office today to inform me that if I sign the title over to her, and pay her thirty thousand dollars, that she’ll call him off.” He glared at her. “It’s not funny, Kate. Now I’ve got to get an attorney and defend the title to something I’ve owned for twenty years!”
“You never should have let her stay there rent-free after the divorce,” Kate couldn’t help saying.
“If it wasn’t for Johnny I wouldn’t have.” She said nothing and he glared at her again. “Shut up, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Just shut the hell up.”
The sandwiches arrived. Jack’s looked good but Kate’s tasted like fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and she closed her eyes in momentary ecstasy.
Around a mouthful of roast beef Jack said indistinctly, “If you say I told you so, I will kill you.”
“Mmmphmmm,” Kate said, more interested at that moment in pastrami.
He relaxed enough to give half a grin. “What have you been up to this morning?”
She swallowed. “Justifying my expense account.”
She produced her otter, and he fingered it appreciatively. “Nice piece of work.”
“I think so.” She touched a fingertip to the otter’s head.
He gave her a sharp look. After a moment he said, “It’s found money, Kate. You’re supposed to blow it. Like the Permanent Fund dividend. It’s required.” She shrugged, and he nodded at the box. “What’s in there?”
She told hi
m of the old man in the art gallery.
“Ivory?” Jack was interested. “I heard somewhere that scrap ivory sells for as much as a hundred fifty dollars a pound Outside.”
“This isn’t scrap.”
“May I?” He pulled the box toward him and looked inside. “Holy shit. I guess not.” He handled the little charms one at a time, admiring the fierce lines of an eagle, grinning at the crafty expression of a raven, whistling when he saw the seal. “I’ll say it isn’t. What’s this little face on its back?”
Kate thought back to the stories and legends learned at Ekaterina’s knee. “The Aleuts believed that animals possessed souls that could change into human form. Hunters would see these, they called them anua, in the fur or the feathers or the eyes of what they were hunting.”
He held the little figurine higher to examine it more closely. “What was this for?”
Kate shrugged. “Could have been any number of things. Since it’s a seal, maybe as a decoration for a harpoon, but it served more than a decorative purpose.”
“How so?”
Kate took another bite of sandwich and said thickly, “Say an Eskimo hunter went seal hunting, and he used a harpoon. He would decorate the harpoon in honor of the seal, to please its anua. The anua lived on after the seal died, transferring to another, as yet unborn animal. The hunter believed the anua remembered how it was treated in its previous life.”
“So if it was treated well in this one—”
Kate nodded. “It would be willing to feed the hunter again in the next.”
“Anua,” he said, his brow creasing. “I remember. Anua was the name of that island, down the Chain. Where those two guys were killed.” Kate nodded. Jack looked down at the tiny face grinning up at him from the back of the ivory seal. “He sure has character, doesn’t he? Looks like Puck.” He handed the charm back to her. “He dig it out of his backyard, you think?”
“Out of his family’s graveyard, more likely,” Kate said, sighing. She put down the seal and picked up her otter. “Who flies to St. Lawrence nowadays?”
“I don’t know. Cape Smythe Air from Nome to Gambell, probably. MarkAir from Anchorage to Nome.”
“After what they did to Wien Air Alaska, you couldn’t get me on a MarkAir jet at gunpoint,” she said promptly.
“You’re not the one doing the flying,” he pointed out.
“No,” she said, but she didn’t sound all that certain.
He sat up. “You aren’t, are you? You’re not feeling like you have to personally escort him home?”
She shifted in her seat. “I don’t know. I’ve never been to St. Lawrence Island. I’ll never make this kind of money again. Maybe I should.” She set the otter on the table next to the seal. The seal was the color of old ocher, lined with tiny cracks, bearing its weight of culture and tradition with a life force undimmed by the passing of the years. Next to it, the otter was the color of fresh cream, every etched line sharp and clear, the heritage of the past and a legacy for the future captured by the carver’s art in a three-inch piece of ivory. “I could pay my compliments to Wilson Oozeva personally.”
Jack wet his forefinger and picked up crumbs of bread, licking them off one at a time. Without looking at her he said, “He won’t be there tomorrow, you know.”
She looked out the window. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
His voice was gentle but inexorable. “You shouldn’t have given him the money. You know he headed straight for the nearest bar.”
“Maybe,” she said, her eyes fixed on the foot traffic passing in front of the restaurant, at Mutt waiting patiently next to the door. One man paused as if to give her an approving pat on the head, met that unblinking yellow stare, thought better of it and moved on. “Maybe not.”
Her profile was obdurate, the line of her mouth stubborn. He sighed and drained his second beer. “What are you going to do with that?” He nodded at the box.
“Keep it for him.”
“What if you never see him again?” She shot him an annoyed glance. He persisted. “That stuff belongs in a museum, Kate.”
Kate picked up the seal again, admiring the taut spotted skin stretched smoothly over a layer of fat, its round nose, its delicately carved flippers. She remembered Olga Shapsnikoff, on a day in October of the previous year, in a town far out on the Aleutian Chain, answering Kate when Kate had said much the same thing of an ivory storyknife wielded by her daughter.
It’s a beautiful thing, Auntie, Kate had said. And valuable. It should be in a museum.
Its spirit would die, locked up in a place where it was never touched, Olga had replied.
“Maybe,” Kate said slowly.
“And maybe not,” Jack said, nodding his head as if he understood everything when in fact he understood nothing at all. He was good at it; with Kate, he got plenty of practice. “What are your plans for the afternoon?”
She put the seal back in the box and forced a smile. “You’ve got cable. I figured I’d channel-surf. Find me an old John Wayne movie while I wait for Childress to deliver that paperwork.”
He made a face. “Can’t you think of anything better to do?”
She looked him over, letting her gaze linger in places. “Uh-huh, but not alone.”
He told himself he was too old to blush and made a business of examining the face of his watch. “Gotta go.”
“Chicken,” she said softly.
“Late,” he retorted. “Want the Blazer? I can get a lift home.”
She looked at the box and the sack of books. “Sounds good.” On the street Jack said, “By the way, I called Axenia this morning.”
“Oh.”
He looked at her quizzically. “Such enthusiasm. I thought you’d want to see her.”
“I do,” she said.
It didn’t sound much like it to him. “Good. I invited her to dinner Saturday night.”
Three days and two nights away. She might be ready by then. “How nice.”
They walked down to the Captain Cook Hotel’s parking garage and found the Blazer, and Jack kissed her good-bye with enough promise to make her look forward to five o’clock.
Back home, she rummaged through the chest freezer in Jack’s garage and found Mutt a bone with a roast still attached. Jack would curse them both, but who had shot the caribou in the first place? Shot, skinned, gutted, cut and wrapped, she might add, overlooking the fact that Jack had been along on that hunt. Leaving Mutt and bone on the porch, she went inside and curled up with one of the morning’s purchases, Susan Faludi’s Backlash, not the most restful book she could have chosen after a week in male-dominated Prudhoe Bay. She turned a page and the phone rang. Kate picked it up. “Hello?”
“Hi,” a young voice trembling on the verge of tears said. “Is this Kate?”
“Yes,” Kate said. She sat up, book slipping from her lap. “Johnny?”
“Yes. Dad told me you were in town.”
“For a little while. How are you?” There was a sniff and a gulp. “Johnny? Are you all right?” This time there was a definite sob. “Johnny, where are you?”
She heard traffic in the background, another sniff. “At the 7-Eleven.”
“The one down the road from the duplex? On the corner of Lake Otis and Northern Lights?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing there? Why aren’t you in school?”
“It’s an in-service day, nobody’s in school except teachers.”
“Then why aren’t you at home?” No answer except a sniffle. “Where’s your mom?”
“I don’t know.”
Kate didn’t like the sound of that. “Do you want me to come get you?”
The young voice quavered. “Would you? Please? I called Dad’s office but he wasn’t there. I thought he might be home.”
“Wait right there, Johnny,” Kate said. “Don’t move. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
She was there in ten. The thin, towheaded boy with the tear-streaked face was waiting for her outside as s
he pulled up. She put the Blazer into park and swung out the door in the same motion. He was dressed in T-shirt and Technicolor jams and nothing else. “Johnny, where’s your coat? And where the hell are your shoes?”
He looked at his feet, curled bare on the sidewalk in front of the store. He mumbled an answer and Kate leaned forward. “What?”
His face was pinched, his voice numb and exhausted. “She took them. When I said I was going to Dad’s. She took my shoes and socks away and hid them.”
He shivered, hugging himself, and Kate collected her wits and hustled him into the Blazer. They detoured on their way to Jack’s by way of Fred Meyer’s, where Kate bought the boy a pair of Air Jordans, not having spent any of RPetCo’s money yet that afternoon. At first Johnny objected but when she explained the situation he got into the spirit of things and they went for broke on an official NFL Seahawks jacket. She bought him clean underwear and a couple of Markie Mark T-shirts while she was at it. She was eyeing a Nintendo Game Boy when she came to and took herself and the boy firmly in tow and got the hell out of there.
Back at Jack’s, she made a tuna sandwich and poured out a glass of orange juice, and was pleased when Johnny showed enough spirit to make a face at the juice and ask for Coke. She gave him the same answer she had given his father. “Real women drink Diet 7UP.”
He shuddered. “Yuk.”
She watched him chew in silence for a few minutes. “You want to talk about it?”
He looked down at his plate. “No.”
Johnny was about a foot taller than she remembered and consequently would have approximately three thousand more exposed nerve endings per square inch. Kate wasn’t so old that she couldn’t remember the feeling. “Okay,” she said equably, rising. “Finish your sandwich. Your dad ought to be home around five or five-thirty.” She paused. “You want to call your mother? Tell her where you are?”
“No.”
Kate kept her voice gentle. “She’ll be worried about you.”
“She won’t be worried, she’ll be mad. She’ll know I came here.”
Oh-kay, Kate thought. “Okay,” she said. Johnny was warm, clothed, fed and, for the moment, safe. Let Jane worry. “Come on into the living room when you’re done. We’ll watch a movie.”
A Cold Blooded Business Page 11
