A Cold Blooded Business

by Dana Stabenow

  Kate eventually got her cranapple juice, straight, but things were never quite as friendly out after that, and she left as soon as the glass was empty.

  She went back to her room, getting madder with every step.

  No matter how many times she’d been through the same reaction it never failed to annoy her. First surprise, then suspicion, lastly hostility. So she didn’t want a drink. So what was the almighty goddam big deal? She didn’t drink at all, ever. Her mother and her father had both been alcoholics. Her cousin Martin was a living, breathing object lesson in substance abuse. Alcohol and all its attendant problems had been the ruination of village life in Alaska and was decimating her race, and it was her choice to stay away from it. It was also her right, but it was almost impossible to convince some people of that.

  It had been the same in college, at parties with people passing joints around. Kate had always refused, and her classmates had regarded her if not with suspicion, then as something more than a prude and something less than a self-made saint. It was just another way she was different, along with the color of her skin and the smarts that kept her on the dean’s list for four years in a row. When she wouldn’t go out on a toot with the boys at Quantico, she got the same reaction. She was tired of it.

  Slamming the door of her room behind her, she pulled her clothes off and flounced into bed. As she stretched up an arm to turn off the light, she remembered the boy in the Fourth Avenue bar, and her anger evaporated.

  At least she had a choice. At least she could say no.

  *

  The next morning she rose early, hooked three doughnuts over the fingers of one hand and filled the largest paper cup she could find full of coffee, half and half and two packets of sugar, and retired to the library with yesterday’s Anchorage Daily News she had scrounged from the front desk clerk. Arranging herself on one of the easy chairs in front of the window overlooking the parking lot, she found The New York Times crossword puzzle, unlimbered her pen and began not filling in answers to clues like “medieval goblet” and “Jewish month.” The coffee and the doughnuts (one chocolate, one old-fashioned, one glazed) went a long way toward easing her feeling of ignorance.

  Persian money? She wondered how big the ivory bear was that had been lost. She wondered how big the stone lamp was, too. She wondered how many security guards were versed in the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. She wondered how many of them would recognize a bona fide Native Alaskan American Indian artifact if it bit them on the seat of the pants.

  Latvian citizen? She thought of her otter, and how perfect it was, and how tiny. She thought of the old man’s carvings, and how perfect they were, and how tiny. Small in Oban, she read, and filled in w-e-e. Yes, they certainly were wee. Wee, sma’ creatures. Wee, sma’ and easy to smuggle. She remembered the story Chris had told her about the $55,000 ivory figure and bit the end of her pen. Pound for pound, Alaskan Indian artifacts were as lucrative as drugs. Maybe more so.

  “N.Y.C. transit system” blocked every attempt to be solved. Kate threw down the puzzle in disgust, invoking a curse on that rampantly geographical chauvinist Eugene T. Maleska and all his progeny. A movement outside caught her eye and she looked up.

  There was, for a change, no fog and no falling snow and no great amount of wind to blow the snow lying on the ground, and the view in the early morning light was perfectly clear. The public relations van, used for tours when a tour group consisted of ten members or less, was plugged into the end of the bull rail closest to the Base Camp’s front door. Next to it stood Otto Leckerd and Toni Hartzler. At first Kate assumed they were taking a fond farewell after a romantic evening and almost averted her eyes. Then she saw the box. It was a small, battered cardboard box, and Otto was trying to take it away from Toni. Toni held it out of reach, talking rapidly.

  Without thinking, Kate rose to her feet and went to stand in front of the window. Otto made another grab for the box, and it looked as if he was yelling. They both hung on to it, both talking at once.

  Kate was watching Otto’s face over Toni’s shoulder when his expression changed. He had seen her. She made an elaborate show of drinking coffee, looking up and catching sight of them for the first time and giving a friendly wave. She left the window in a leisurely manner and went to examine the books locked behind glass on the library shelf. A handwritten card announced that the key was available from the clerk at the front desk. The biography of MacArthur by William Manchester looked interesting. Author and subject had both spent a lot of time in the South Pacific, as soldiers in the same theater of the same war, so it might even be accurate. She tried to see Otto’s and Toni’s reflection in the glass but the angle was wrong and there wasn’t enough light anyway.

  When she looked around again, very casually, Toni was alone and closing the passenger door of the van. Kate caught a glimpse of the box sitting in the front seat. Her eyes narrowed, trying to make out the writing on the side, but it was too far and all she got an impression of was a logo in red and white. She watched from the corner of her eye as Toni unplugged the headbolt heater, climbed in the driver’s side and drove around the Base Camp module and out of sight.

  Kate wheeled and moved rapidly through the lounge and down the hallway that led to a service entrance in back of the kitchen. The Base Camp buildings were assembled from smaller modules, all of which had fire doors at every corner with stairways leading down the exterior walls. Kate hit the door bar on the run and took the stairs outside two at a time. She was at the northwest corner of the main module; around the northwest corner of the fire/safety module she caught the red gleam of taillights before the pilings holding everything off the gravel pad blocked them out. The building was so large, and required so many pilings to hold it up, that it was impossible to see through to the gravel pad on the other side of the building.

  Breath coming out in frosty puffs, shivering a little in the cold air, she trotted forward, beneath the fire/safety module, to thread her way through the pilings. According to Toni the architects, in recognition of the unrelenting force of the omnipresent onshore wind, had aerodynamically designed the Base Camp modules to minimize snowdrifts and, accordingly, snow removal. They had done a superb job, transforming housing for 474 workers into a series of what were essentially huge, cubic airfoils; there were no drifts beneath the copper-colored module, only a dry, hard crust upon which the rubber soles of her safety boots squeaked, tread as lightly as she might. Surrounded as she was by the metal siding of the building overhead and the metal sheaths of the concrete pilings, every squeak bounced back at her, multiplied ten times, so that at first she missed the low mutter of the van ahead.

  It came again and this time she heard it. She went up on tiptoe, sneaked up on a piling and peered around.

  The van was in park with the engine idling, stopped in front of the fire/safety garage. There was no traffic on the Backbone beyond and no sight or sound of anyone but the three of them. Through the open window came Toni’s voice, not loud enough for Kate to make out the words. She could hear Jerry clearly. “No, I won’t do it,” he said, and there was as much fear as there was anger in his tone. Toni’s voice came again, a soft, soothing murmur. “No,” Jerry repeated, this time with less force. “Dammit, Toni, it’s getting too dangerous.” Toni said something and he mumbled something more, all of which was lost to Kate except for the words “—good, the best, I’m telling you, we can’t take any more chances—”

  A drift of wind caught the rumble of the engine and wafted it toward Kate, muffling the rest of his words. Toni spoke again; Jerry’s head drooped in a clear sign of defeat. Toni handed him the box through the window and he accepted it without looking up.

  The sole of Kate’s boot slipped on the hard-packed snow, her body shifted and hit the metal of the piling with a dull thud. A white fox exploded out of the snow directly in front of her, running flat out, tail streaming behind it, right beneath the van and out the other side. There was a kind of combination clop-crunch and on Kate’s r
ight a caribou cow with two of last year’s calves shot from beneath the module, trotted in front of the van and across the pad.

  At the van both heads turned as one to look at what had startled the animals, and Jerry took a step in her direction. Kate broke and ran, dodging back and forth between pilings in the hope she wouldn’t be seen, or at the very least recognized. She hammered up the stairwell only to find the fire door didn’t open from the outside. Taking the steps two at a time on the way back down, she ducked beneath the main Base Camp module and headed through the pilings for the front entrance. Rounding the corner, she remembered the security guard stationed at the door and bypassed it for the garages. She was in luck; Cale Yarborough was just backing out. She gave the field manager a cheery wave as he looked askance at her plaid shirt, jeans and no coat. A quick trot through the administration offices, up the back stairs, and she was in the library with her feet up on the table, coffee cup in hand, hard at work on the crossword puzzle when Toni walked in.

  The brunette as usual looked perfectly groomed and composed, but Kate noticed her breath was coming a little fast. She smiled widely and tried by sheer force of will to slow her own rapid heartbeat. “Morning. You don’t happen to know a three-letter word for the New York City transit system, do you?”

  “Good morning. MTA, maybe? Like Charlie on the?”

  Kate frowned. “I think that was Boston. ‘Now you citizens of Boston, don’t you think it’s a scandal—’ “

  “‘How the people have to pay and pay,’” Toni chanted. Together they sang, “‘Fight the fare increase, vote for George O’Brien, and get Charlie off the MTA!’” They both laughed and Kate thought what a pity it was how much she liked this woman. “I thought I saw you up here,” Toni said, nodding toward the bull rail.

  “Oh, was that you down there? I saw somebody wave and just to be on the safe side I waved back.”

  She smiled again. Toni returned it, eyes flickering down Kate’s relaxed body. “You look comfortable.”

  Kate folded the newspaper and gave her a suspicious look. “Do I detect a warning in that observation? As in not to get too comfortable?”

  Toni looked wounded. She was very good at it. “Who, me?” She grinned, and for the first time Kate noticed what a practiced grin it was, all flash and sharp upper incisors. “Just be at the office at ten. We have to be out at the airport by ten forty-five.”

  “Who’s coming?”

  “A bunch of state supreme court justices and their wives and their court administrators.” She paused. “Sixty-three of them.”

  On that superb exit line she departed.

  Kate blew out a deep, relieved breath, letting the paper fall to her lap, and looked down at her feet, propped on the table and crossed at the ankles.

  Snow was melting from the toe of one safety boot to form a tiny puddle on the tabletop.

  *

  The room to Toni’s door was locked. Kate slid the master key she had filched from the pegboard in Ann McCord’s office into the keyhole. The door resisted. There was a footstep down the hall, and Kate grasped the knob and twisted it with all her strength. It gave and she slipped inside Toni’s room just as the outer door to the suite began to open. Soundlessly, she closed the door without releasing the knob. The outer door closed, followed by the door to the bathroom. She released the knob.

  The toilet flushed. The bathroom door opened and steps went into the next room. Some rustling movements were followed by steps coming out again. Kate heard a shower turn on full force, relaxed, and turned to survey the room.

  It was exactly like any other room in the RPetCo Hilton: a built-in captain’s bed with drawers beneath, a built-in bookshelf over the head of the bed, and two closets. A counter ran from the bookshelves to the opposite wall, where there were a row of drawers stacked beneath it and a shelf and a mirror above. Between bookshelf and mirror was a window, this one facing west.

  Kate tossed the drawers first and didn’t find anything beyond some dirty underwear that probably belonged to Toni’s alternate, since they were BVDs. The closets were next; same result, a lot of neatly hung blazers and slacks, a pair of Birkenstock sandals and a box of Tide.

  There was a selection of books on the shelf above the head of the bed. Like Jerry McIsaac, Kate had her own set of laws and the first one was, “You Are What You Read.” On Toni’s shelf there was a first edition of Crossroads of Continents. A trade paperback edition of Russia-America, the Forgotten Frontier. An old edition of Inuit, which Kate opened to find many of the pages dog-eared and much of the text underlined. “Eskimo carvers rarely began with a specific object in mind,” she read. “Instead, they studied the blank, turning it over and over in their hands, until they saw one or more images. They then released them by shaping the blank into these forms.”

  The same way Michelangelo sculpted “David” and the “Pieta,” Kate thought, half a world and a millennium away. She shut the book and replaced it on the shelf. An object on the shelf above caught her eye, and she stood on tiptoe to see.

  It was a length of baleen, the long, black, tapered gill of a whale. This one was old, with drawings inscribed on its side that looked like a group of motion dancers, some hunched down with arms outstretched, others beating drums. It was amazing how much life and movement had been captured by the artist. Kate turned the piece over to see if he’d signed it. He hadn’t, which made her think this sample must be very old indeed.

  She debated taking the baleen out to the archaeological dig and having Chris look at it, then rejected the notion as too risky. Kate replaced the baleen, wondering again how much Jerry had told Toni of her previous life.

  The shower shut off and she slid from the room and the suite. She stood a moment, holding the knob of the suite door, listening. The person in the shower was whistling softly to himself. The shower door opened, the door to the second bedroom closed. She relaxed.

  “Hey.”

  She turned to see Ann McCord watching her with a frown on her face, clipboard and pencil in hand. Next to her was a cart filled with folded towels and squirt bottles of cleaning products.

  “Oh,” Kate said. “Hello.”

  Ann’s eyes flickered from the number on the suite’s door and back to Kate. “I thought your room was 786.”

  Kate summoned up a smile and stepped closer. “It is. Toni wanted me to get her something out of her room.”

  Ann looked at Kate’s empty hands. “Oh?”

  Kate shrugged. “It wasn’t there.” She tried another smile. “She probably left it in the van. You know Toni.”

  Ann regarded her without replying. “Well,” Kate said, “gotta go. I’m driving the bus for Toni today. Bunch of judges coming up.”

  She walked down the hall, her spine itching from Ann’s hard stare all the way around the corner. Detouring on her way to Ann’s office to drop off the master key, she went out to the bull rail. When she reached the PR van she stopped, turned and looked up. The library alcove was clearly visible through the windows; table, chairs, shelves and books. She could almost make out the title of the Manchester book on MacArthur.

  *

  The judges, wives and administrators were a delightful surprise; intelligent, articulate and appreciative of every attention. The day passed quickly, and when Kate pulled up at the Base Camp to drop Toni off, the brunette gave her an affable smile, thanked her for her help and vanished in the front door without further ado. Kate, relieved, pulled the bus around to the bull rail and swept it out and washed all the windows in gratitude.

  When she finished she had mud up to her eyebrows and no feeling left in any of four alternate extremities, so she knocked off work early, went to her room to grab a towel and her swimsuit and headed for the pool room. She showered quickly, donned her suit and went through to the sauna. The thermostat next to the door indicated that it was on and already occupied by someone who liked it hot. She opened the door and went in.

  In the dim light of the single, shaded bulb she saw a woman, short a
nd solid without being in the least bit fat. She had a large flat face with prominent cheekbones and a pronounced version of Kate’s own hint of epicanthic eye fold. She was seated at the end of the bench, and looked up as Kate entered.

  “Hello,” Kate said.

  “Hello.”

  Something held Kate where she stood, looking at the lines drawn by time and experience in that marvelous old face, the clear steadiness of the unflinching brown eyes. “You’re Cindy Sovalik.”

  “And you are Kate Shugak.” Her English had an Inupiat accent, thick through the vowels and hard on the consonants.

  “Yes.” Kate sat down at the opposite end of the bench. “I’ve heard of you, auntie.”

  “I’ve heard of you, too,” Cindy said, and called her a word Kate didn’t understand but, given Cindy’s age, did not question. It didn’t sound uncomplimentary. In English, Cindy said, “Ekaterina Shugak is your grandmother.”

  Kate ladled water on the fake coals. Steam hissed up and enveloped them both. She sighed and leaned back against the wall. “Yes, auntie.”

  “I see her every year at AFN. A strong woman.”

  “Yes, auntie.” Kate ladled more water on the coals.

  “And a wise one. She has much to teach.”

  Cindy’s voice was calm but stern, with just a hint of— what? Warning? Reproof? Kate paused, ladle outstretched. Brown eyes met hers unflinchingly. What did this old woman know about her, about her relationship with her grandmother?

  Kate tore her eyes away and emptied the ladle, setting it aside and leaning back against the wooden wall. The heat and moisture seeped in through her skin to flesh and bone, opening her pores, unknotting her muscles, soothing her nerves. All that bouncing over rough gravel roads, the constant growl of the engine, the incessant chatter in the seats behind her, the high-pitched scream of gas through pipes, the clank of thrown chain and the ubiquitous mutter of the television, all these irritants melted, dissolved in and dissipated by the hot, rising steam. Kate closed her eyes. Her shoulders relaxed. She breathed deeply, emptying her mind of thought, and let herself float.