“Yes, well, that’s the other part of the problem. He wasn’t convicted in Alaska of anything, so far as I know.”
“Where did he stand trial?”
“California.” If he hadn’t been lying about it to Hammett. “He was arrested on the dock in Seattle.”
“Ah.” Brendan folded his hands over his substantial belly. “Also difficult. But again, not impossible.” He leered again. “Especially if you’re willing to put out for it.”
Kate had to laugh. “Brendan,” she said, drawing out the syllables of his name.
“Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
Her pocket gave out with the first six bars of Jimmy Buffett’s “Volcano.” Brendan’s eyebrows went sky high. “Why, Kate, have you joined the real world at last?”
She fumbled it out. Of course it was Jim. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said. “Got your message. Never mind posting the love letters on the Internet. Wait till I get home and we can take some nude photographs.”
“Let me have your cell number, Kate,” Brendan said, raising his voice, “so I can talk dirty to you whenever I want.”
“Who’s that?” Jim said.
“Brendan,” Kate said, getting up and going out into the hall. As she closed the door, Brendan sang, loudly and off-key, “When I’m calling you-ooo-ooo, will you answer too-ooo-ooo…”
She leaned against the wall in the corridor and ignored the glances of a couple of law clerks who passed within warbling range of the assistant district attorney with the most time served in the building.
Jim’s voice cooled noticeably. “Brendan, huh?”
Kate smiled to herself. “Yeah. He’s helping me with something.”
“I’ll bet. What? You’ve got a case?”
“Sort of. It has to do with Old Sam.” She didn’t want to get into it on the phone. “What’s going on down there?”
“Buried him on Thursday. Read the will on Monday.”
A week ago for the funeral, and four days ago for the will, and he was still there and not here. She wanted to ask him why he wasn’t on a plane north already. “Anything unexpected?” she said.
“No. Well, not much. Something I need to clear up.”
And then he’d be home? If Alaska still was home. “Touching base with old friends?”
“A few,” he said. “There aren’t that many left.”
“Sylvia Hernandez one of them?” Kate said, and kicked herself for it.
“She came to the funeral,” he said.
The quality of the following silence made her wait.
“And we went surfing yesterday.”
“Surfer dude back on the board,” Kate said, after a moment.
“Yeah.”
Determined to at least act like the altruist she most emphatically was not, she said, “Feel good?”
“Felt great.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “In Alaska the whole idea is to stay out of the water. It required some getting used to when I moved there.”
Immersion in Alaskan waters generally resulted in hypothermia followed almost immediately by death. It was quick, you could say that for it. “I did hear that they’ve starting surfing on a beach near Yakutat,” she said. “In dry suits.”
“Yeah, I’d heard that, too.” His voice lacked enthusiasm.
The door opened and Brendan stuck his head out. “When you hear my love call ringing clear…”
“Jesus,” Jim said.
“Yeah,” Kate said. “Later?”
“Later,” he said.
She hung up and followed Brendan back into his office. “So?”
“So where’s Jim that he’s calling you on your cell phone?”
“California. His dad died.”
Brendan’s bushy eyebrows rose again. “Oh. Sorry to hear that.” The eyebrows lowered and his grin was evil. “So you’re here in my town all alone.”
She had to laugh again. “Yes, I am, alone and at your mercy.”
He looked at the clock on the wall. “Miracle of miracles, I get out of here on time today. May I take you to dinner, where I will wine you and dine you and attempt to take ruthless advantage of you in your abandoned state?”
“You may,” she said.
“Orso’s, seven o’clock, and for you I’ll even put on a clean tie,” he said, and handed her a printout that proved to be the prison record of Herbert Elmer “Mac” McCullough, convicted felon.
“Brendan,” Kate said, “take me now.”
1946
Seattle
Sam found the man Mac had sold his loot to only after months spent slogging through the Seattle rain. In the story Mac had referred to the man he’d sold the contents of his pack to as Pappy, but no one on the docks today had heard of anyone by that name, so Sam starting asking for anyone who had been in the trade in the 1920s, especially street dealers. One day, in a little store on Sixth Avenue that reeked of quaintness, the man behind the counter listened to his question with a fascinated gaze fixed on Sam’s mouth and said, “Oh gosh, I don’t know, I’m sure. I just moved up from the Bay Area myself.”
He might have fluttered his eyelashes. He did invite Sam to dinner. His name was Kyle Blanchette. Sam was always hungry in those days, so he went. It was perhaps the civility of his refusal to Kyle’s suggestion at the end of the evening that might have inspired further information. “Of course, there is old Pietro Pappardelle. Have you been to his place yet? No?” He grimaced. “Well, his shop is rather low end, but he is known to be the ne plus ultra authority whenever one of us is thinking of buying something of whose provenance we aren’t quite sure.” Kyle fluttered his lashes again. “I suppose there are those who could call him Pappy.”
Tomorrow’s Treasures was located on a dingy side street in the relatively new neighborhood of Fremont, a long streetcar ride and across a bridge from downtown. Like everywhere else in Seattle it was going through the postwar building boom, and the street-level shop in the sagging three-story building looked not much longer for this world. Inevitably, it would be leveled to make room for apartments for returning GIs and their brides.
A bell tinkled when Old Sam went in the door. It tinkled again when he had to step back before he knocked over a dusty porcelain bull with a gold ring through his nose. The bull was perched precariously on a tall table with a round, tiny top that did not look the least bit stable on its three long-stemmed legs.
The interior of the shop was dimly lit and crammed full of other such traps. Sam trod warily into this brittle knickknack jungle, and after a near collision with a mahogany armoire with a corniced top and lethal corners for a man of his height and a cautious sidle past a whatnot filled with china rebels in gray suits dancing the waltz with belles in hoop skirts, he achieved the relative safety of the counter that stood against the back wall. The wall was pierced by a doorway over which a dusty curtain made of flowered cotton hung from a dirty white piece of string wound around nails at either end.
“Hello?” he said. There was a tarnished brass bell on the counter. He raised it and gave a little jingle. “Hello?”
There was movement behind the curtain. It twitched back to reveal a short, stubby man with a bulbous nose, a red face, and eyes set so closely together that for a moment Sam thought he was cross-eyed. “Yes?”
“Mr. Pappardelle?”
“Yes?”
Old Sam would have thought of a more tactful way to approach the object of his Outside exile, but Samuel Leviticus Dementieff was a young man both in love and in a hurry. “Also known as Pappy?”
The near-together eyes narrowed. “I always appreciate at least an introduction to the person with whom I converse.”
“My name’s Sam Dementieff,” Sam said. “You might have met my—my father down on the docks in 1920 when he got off a steamer from Alaska.”
“Really. Young man, I have better things to do today than—”
“Mr. Pappardelle, he died in the war. He left a, uh, a letter for me, saying that he’d s
old what he had in his pack that day in 1920 to a man on the Seattle docks named Pappy. I was hoping that was you.”
“Whether it is or it isn’t is none of—”
“If it is, he sold you something he shouldn’t have. It was a family heirloom. He stole it.”
Pappardelle’s red face got redder. “If you are implying that I acted as a receiver of stolen goods—”
“No, sir,” Sam said, although he’d seen enough shifty glances during the quest that led him to the door of Tomorrow’s Treasures to have strong doubts about the entire profession of antiques dealing. “No, sir, nothing like that. Back then you couldn’t have known, I understand that. I’m just trying to track it down, to find out who has it now, so I can get it back to the original owners.”
Pappardelle eyed him for a long moment. Sam met his gaze without flinching, letting Pappardelle look him over. The threadbare state of his clothes, the gauntness of his countenance, the directness of his gaze—one or all of these things must have made an impression, because Pappardelle suddenly relaxed into a different man altogether, one much more like the man described by Sam’s dinner date of the night before. “Please come through here, Mr. Demon—Demented—”
“Dementieff,” Sam said, “but please just call me Sam,” and ducked beneath the low door frame to follow Pappardelle into an apartment with a kitchenette, a sofa bed, and a tiny bathroom glimpsed through an open door. A back door led presumably to an alley. This back room was if possible even more crowded than the front room, with everything Pappardelle hadn’t managed to wedge into the shop on the other side of the curtain crammed in here. A Victorian tea set with a cracked milk jug. A fake diamond necklace (at least Sam assumed it was fake or it would have been locked away in a safe, not left on a table between the butter and the sugar bowl). A pair of logger’s lifting tongs. A brass ship’s compass set on gimbals in a teak box that had seen infinitely better days.
He liked the look of the compass, but that wasn’t why he was here. “Mr. Pappardelle—”
Pappardelle waved him to a seat. “I haven’t had my coffee yet this morning, young man, and I refuse to talk business until I am fully awake.” He busied himself with a percolator while Sam removed a stack of Life magazines, a lace tablecloth, a box of firecrackers, and a tabby cat from an aged wing chair. It had a high back and was upholstered in a revolting shade of dark red leather that looked like dried blood.
He seated himself nevertheless, and in due time and with due ceremony was served with the best cup of coffee he’d had since coming to Seattle, and then Pappardelle got to work on breakfast, ham and eggs and potatoes and thick slices of toast soaked in butter. Sam had been making good wages on the docks, but every penny he could spare was going into the bank for his return journey home and his stake once he got there, and he’d been skimping on meals. The second full spread in less than twenty-four hours required his complete attention.
When he sat back Pappardelle was regarding him with approval. “It is good to see a man enjoy his food,” he said, and topped up Sam’s mug with fresh coffee. “Now let’s hear your story, young man. I have an ear for stories, and it tells me that yours will be a good one.”
Pappardelle’s near-together eyes were shrewd but kind, and Sam remembered what his date had said the night before. The ne plus ultra authority whenever one of us is thinking of buying something of whose provenance we aren’t quite sure. His instincts told him that he would receive no honesty from this man unless he was prepared to share some of his own. “I told you the truth, Mr. Pappardelle. I’m trying to track down a family heirloom.”
He told Pappardelle the story of the stolen icon, beginning with the flu pandemic and its decimation of Kanuyaq and Niniltna, the funeral potlatch, the display of the tribal relic and its subsequent disappearance. He gave a detailed physical description of Mac, and the exact date of the sale.
“Hmm,” Pappardelle said at the end. “And how did you come by that specific date, young man?”
“Like I told you, sir. My father left me a letter.”
“He died, you said.” The older man’s face wore an expression that was hard to read.
“Yes, sir. In the war.” It was close enough to the truth.
Pappardelle subjected him to a steady, narrow-eyed look. After some minutes he said, “Yes, well, perhaps you will tell me the truth of that one day, because it sounds like the most interesting part of your story.” He sighed. “But then the parts left out are always the most interesting.” He pushed himself out of a basket chair that creaked alarmingly under the pressure and moved nimbly through his overcrowded living quarters to a massive oak bookcase that took up all of one wall. He beckoned, and Sam edged cautiously through the accumulation to stand next to him.
“One of my proudest acquisitions,” Pappardelle said. The bookcase’s trim was carved with vines and leaves and flowers, the pulls were solid brass, and the glass in the doors was convex so that the titles of the books inside were magnified to the person reading them from the outside.
Sam had never seen such a thing and said so.
Pappardelle ran a caressing hand down the wood. “I could have sold this ten times over—in fact, there is a gentleman with a summer home on Lake Washington who has made three offers on it—but I can’t bear to part with it. At least not yet.” He sighed. “It is a great mistake in this business to fall in love with your stock. You end up dead in a room other people can’t get into for the clutter.”
Sam cast a glance around the room and refrained from the obvious reply.
Pappardelle opened the glass doors and ran a finger down the spines of a set of red ledgers that took up the middle shelf, each with a year in gilt letters on the spine. They ran all the way from the present year back to 1901. He smiled at Sam’s expression. “What, you thought I did not keep records? Are you familiar with the word provenance?”
The first time he’d heard it said out loud was last night. Sam said, “No, sir.”
“It is a fancy way of saying where the item you buy or sell comes from,” Pappardelle said. “In the antiques trade, the history of the item is often even more valuable than the item itself. For example, if you have a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, one way to authenticate it is to have a record of how the letter got from Thomas Jefferson to you. Family members, heirs, dealers, collectors, names, and dates of acquisition—they can be listed in inventories, bequeathed in wills.” Pappardelle’s bulbous nose almost twitched. “Every item in my store, every item I’ve ever bought, has its own story.”
“And how complete the story is directly affects how much you can charge for it,” Sam said.
Pappardelle beamed at Sam as if he were a teacher and Sam were a particularly bright student. His formal style of speech and his deliberate diction bespoke a formal education, and he wasn’t shy to display it, although never on this day or on any of the other days Sam spent in his company did he ever by word, look, or deed belittle Sam for his lack of same. Instructive, yes. Patronizing, never. “Exactly,” he said.
He pulled out the volume for 1919 with something of a flourish and wove a path back to his basket chair. He set the heavy volume on his legs, moved his spectacles from the top of his head to the tip of his nose, and opened the ledger to peer nearsightedly at the pages.
This time Sam paused before sitting down, wondering for the first time what the history of the wing chair was, and if the color of the cracked leather had been accidental, deliberate, or simply a result of the chair’s sitting too long in front of a sunny window. Who had put a cigar down on the right arm to cause that burn? Who had let the cat scratch at the left front leg? Who had worn the comfortable hollow in the seat? Was the hard lump in the back by accident or intent, part of a design determined to make an entire generation sit bolt upright?
He sat down. “What’s the story on that compass?” he said.
Pappardelle raised his head to give the compass a fond look. “Ah yes,” he said. “That particular piece is almost a hun
dred years old, according to a marine salvage expert I know. The man who sold it to me swore it was out of the CSS Shenandoah. Are you familiar with the vessel?”
Sam frowned. “The name sounds like I ought to be.”
Pappardelle nodded. “And quite right, too, given your own provenance.” He chuckled over his little joke. “The CSS Shenandoah was the ship purposed by the Confederate states to attack and sink Yankee whalers in the Pacific Ocean, with the stated object of doing harm to the Northern states’ economy.”
Sam sat up. “That’s right,” he said. “I served in the Aleutians during the war. There wasn’t a lot to do, so every now and then to keep the enlisted out of trouble the brass would get the big idea to have educational talks by anyone they could sucker out of the ranks. Some of them actually were kind of interesting. One night this Signal Corps guy from Tacoma—what was his name? Morgan, that was it. Anyway, Morgan was some kind of writer or professor or something in real life and he gave us a talk about how the last shot fired in the American Civil War was fired in the Aleutians.”
“By the CSS Shenandoah.” Again, Pappardelle looked delighted at his star pupil’s intelligence.
Sam put a tentative finger on the compass and gave it a gentle push. It swung on its gimbals and righted itself. According to it, he was facing north. “And this compass was off that ship?”
“Alas,” Pappardelle said regretfully, “I am unable to trace it to the Shenandoah specifically, though my marine salvage expert does not rule out that possibility. He is certain it is of that era, and has provided me with documentation to that effect.”
“Why isn’t it out in the shop?”
“I like it,” Pappardelle said. “I like looking at it and wondering how it came into the hands of the man who brought it in the door. I wonder how many ensigns—or is it bosuns?—stood their night watch before it. I wonder what happened to the ship it came out of, if she was delivered to the unmerciful hands of the ship breakers or if she survives, one day perhaps to sail into this very port.” His smile was wry and self-deprecating.
Though Not Dead Page 28
