Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  Anchorage had grown from the military outpost from which Sam had transited to and from the Aleutians during the war to a bustling city of fifty thousand, with an air force base, an army base, a high-end residential district south of town, and farther south even a suburb. Spenard, Emil said with a wink, where all the action was. Sam made a noncommittal reply, eying the house in front of which the Cadillac was sliding ponderously to a halt. Two stories high, it had bow windows in both front corners connected by a large porch whose roof was held up by ornate wooden columns. Everything was painted white, reminiscent of Greek temples seen in schoolbooks.

  Be hard to find the front door in a snowstorm, was Sam’s first thought.

  Erland opened the door as they came up the steps. Now that Sam was over the first shock, he saw that Erland was older than he’d thought from their first meeting, although that might have had something to do with the sullen expression Erland had worn then. No kid liked being scolded in public. This was not a boy, this was a young man near college age, and today his expression was carefully pleasant, his handshake brief but firm.

  “And this is my daughter, Victoria,” Emil said jovially.

  The daughter looked nothing like her brother or her father. She was tall, with a chin too large for beauty, thick blond hair shoulder-length in a well-manner pageboy, and steady blue eyes.

  “Where’s your mother?” Emil said. “Dorothy? Dorothy!”

  “In here, Emil.”

  They followed the voice into what proved to be a dining room. It held the longest table lined with the most chairs Sam had ever seen. It was proving to be a day of firsts for him, and it wasn’t over yet.

  Dorothy, the genetic template from which her daughter had been constructed, was bent over the table, setting out china and flatware.

  “Dorothy, this here’s Sam Dementieff,” Emil said.

  Dorothy straightened up and turned, a practiced smile at the ready. Dressed in a yellow shirtdress and heels, diamonds sparkling in her ears and on her hands, Dorothy was the consummate society hostess, ready to welcome one extra guest or twenty for dinner at a moment’s notice.

  But the smile faded when her eyes met Sam’s. Her face went paper white, and she reached blindly for the back of a chair. She recovered herself in an instant, and went on to serve a tasty dinner of meat loaf, canned green beans, and potatoes, with apple pie and ice cream for dessert. If her smile was more rigid, her gaze when she looked at Sam more set, then surely only he noticed.

  But notice he did. After dinner the kids vanished upstairs and Emil took a phone call in his study. Sam got up to help when Dorothy started to clear the table. “No,” she said quickly. “Really, there’s no need.”

  He pursued her into the kitchen. “Mac McCullough,” he said. “Was that his name?”

  She was standing at the sink, her back to him, but he could see her shudder.

  “He was my father, too,” he said. “Is he still—Do you know how I could get in touch with him?”

  She cast a quick look over her shoulder toward the door. “He’s dead,” she said.

  He was silent for a moment, assimilating the news. He’d had plenty of time to mourn Mac’s death, from the moment he’d received the package from Hammett until that morning in Seattle when Pete Pappardelle had told him Mac had come looking for the icon after the war. “When did he die?”

  She cast another glance over her shoulder. “Not here.”

  “Where, then?”

  Emil’s cheerful bellow sounded. “Sam! Sam! Come on in here. Let’s light up and set a spell!”

  Sam looked at her. “The Fly By Night in Spenard, tomorrow morning,” she said quickly. “I’ll try to be there by nine.”

  “Sam!”

  Sam joined Emil in his study, a square, dark-paneled room at the front of the house. There was a large mahogany desk and a leather chair in one corner, a slate fireplace in another, and a series of tall, glass-topped display cases spaced at intervals around the walls. Seeing Sam’s interest, Emil said, “I’ve been collecting Alaskana since I came into the country. See this? It’s a storyknife. Made of ivory. Brought that back from a trip to Bethel just last year. Even Marcellus Bell doesn’t have one of them yet.” Emil chuckled. “Little kids tell stories with it on the Y-K. And this of course is an oosik.” Painful dig in the ribs. “Guessing I don’t have to tell you what that’s for.”

  Sam moved on to another case. “What’s this?”

  “That? Why, that’s a Sydney Laurence. Got it off the bartender down at the 515. Laurence used to go in there and drink, and then he’d whip out a little painting to pay off his bar tab.”

  The subject was a blue and white church with a dome surmounted by a cross, standing high on a hill overlooking blue water, with the hint of a mountain or mountains in the background. The colors glowed like gemstones. “Where’s the church?”

  Emil shrugged. “Beats me. Kenai, Ninilchik, maybe Seldovia. It’s a Laurence, is all I know. From what I hear he was all over the place. Say, if you’re interested in Russian stuff, I got a shitload of that. Look here.”

  Sam joined Emil in front of another display case crowded with babushka dolls and amber. The amber was polished and set in rings and bracelets or carved into flowers and animals. There was one piece in its natural state, rough and lumpy, with a speck inside it that proved to be an imprisoned insect.

  Next to the lump of amber sat a Russian icon.

  There were three panels, all featuring the Virgin. On the left she cradled the baby Jesus in her arms, in the center she was holding the adult Jesus at the foot of the cross, and on the right she was on her knees, arms upraised to a Jesus arrayed in sunbeams, ascending to heaven, a rolled stone in the background. The illustrations were impressed on sheets of soft metal that might be gold. The frame was wood covered with gilt and studded with dull, uncut stones set in more of that same soft metal.

  “Nice, huh? Picked her up in a junk shop in Seattle a while back.”

  The Sainted Mary, the bride gift of Victoria Kookesh, the purchase price of Lev Kookesh’s chieftainship, and the long-lost heritage of the Niniltna Native tribe stared up at Sam, all three sets of her gilt eyes filled with foreseen pain.

  * * *

  The Fly By Night was a bar on the edge of Spenard Lake that was sufficiently dark inside for Dorothy not to be recognized. Still, she had tucked her hair beneath a brimmed hat pulled low over her eyes, had removed all of her jewelry including her wedding ring, and had wrapped herself in a nondescript black cloth coat. She wore dull oxford shoes with rubber soles that did not squeak.

  It looked like a costume she had worn before. The bartender didn’t give her a second glance, and she slid into the booth in the corner, her back to the door, her shoulder to the room.

  “How’s a lady like you know about a place like this?” Sam said.

  “I used to work here,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. He rallied. “Coffee?”

  She nodded, and he fetched two cups from the bar. Once he regained his seat, he didn’t beat around the bush. “Mac McCullough is Erland’s father.”

  She didn’t, either. “Yes.” A little bitterly, she added, “Anyone who looks at him can see that.”

  “Does Emil know?”

  “I don’t know how he can’t.” For a moment her face dropped its perfect housewife veil, and her eyes looked unutterably weary. “But he’s never said a word.”

  “How did you meet Mac?”

  It was the fall of 1939, before the war had reached Alaska, but the U.S. Army was moving into Anchorage in force and the town was booming. He was then traveling under the name of Marvin Mackenzie, retaining the nickname Mac, and had introduced himself as being an independent businessman with interests in natural resource extraction. Emil invited him to one of his mixer dinners, and there he had met Dorothy.

  “Emil,” she started to say, and stopped.

  Sam wasn’t interested in her relationship with her husband, good or bad, but he was aware that t
he price for the truth might be hearing Dorothy’s confession, and he was prepared to listen. She was stronger than that, though, laying out the specifics in matter-of-fact terms. “We met for almost six months, long enough for Mac to tell me his real name, and why he was here.”

  “Why was he?” Sam said, although he thought he knew.

  She shrugged. “Something out of my husband’s Alaskana collection. He wasn’t specific.”

  “Did he want you to help him steal it?”

  She met his eyes. “Yes,” she said, her voice bleak.

  He was silent.

  “It was over then, of course. I told him never to contact me again. A month later, I realized I was pregnant.”

  Mac McCullough made a habit of running out on women he’d left in the family way, Sam thought.

  “I—I wanted help in getting rid of it. I tried to find Mac. And then I heard that he had joined the army.”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  She paled, and swallowed hard. “Once,” she said, her voice very low. “After the war. It was the fall of 1945. He had been wounded in the war.”

  Saving my life, Sam thought.

  “He’d been sent Outside to a veteran’s hospital for treatment. He said that was why he hadn’t been in touch.”

  Sam could tell she hadn’t believed Mac, but Sam thought Mac might have been telling the truth this time. “He still wanted the icon,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And he was still hoping you would help him.”

  “Yes,” she said. She took a deep breath and let it out. “I might have,” she said. “After Erland was born, after Emil…” She paused. “Life became … difficult,” she said. “Mac promised he would take me away.”

  With great difficulty Sam repressed a snort of disbelief.

  “I was so careful,” she said, her voice the barest whisper of sound. “But Anchorage was such a small town then. Someone must have seen us, and told Emil.”

  “What happened?”

  Her fingers shredded the cocktail napkin. In a dull voice she said, “There was an accident in Kenai, on one of the drilling rigs. Emil was taking a group of businessmen on a tour. Three of them were killed.”

  “And Mac was one of them.”

  “Yes.”

  Sam wondered what Emil had against the other two victims. Maybe nothing. Maybe he just considered them collateral damage, the regrettable but necessary price of removing a rival from the field of action.

  It was a considerably different portrait of the man with the welcoming smile and the bottomless hospitality.

  The bartender brought the coffeepot to refill their mugs. “Anything else?”

  “No, thanks,” Sam said, and the bartender went away again. “So, you think Emil knows about Mac, and about Erland?” About me? he thought.

  “He has never said anything,” she repeated, and aged ten years in the saying. She looked at her watch. “I must go, Mr. Dementieff, or I will be missed.”

  She moved across the floor, a walking shadow that vanished on the other side of the door.

  * * *

  The Freya was scheduled to pick up freight in Seattle, and Sam had no choice but to undock and head south. He wasn’t too worried, as he didn’t see Emil unloading the icon anytime soon. Emil was a collector, and Sam had spent enough time with Pete and Kyle to know that collectors were known and to a certain extent made by their acquisitiveness and their possessiveness. At long last, he knew where the icon was. It was safe enough there, for the moment.

  In Seattle, he had a sudden inspiration and shared it with Kyle. “Certainly,” said Kyle, adding, with a ravishing twinkle, “For a commission.”

  Sam left him with a genial curse on him and all his heirs. He was back in Seattle a month later, to be met at the dock by a very sober Kyle. “No dice,” he told Sam. “Bannister says it isn’t for sale, at any price.”

  Sam was silent for a moment. “Wait a couple of months, let him get used to the idea,” he said at last. “Then ask him again.”

  But a year later, the answer was still the same.

  On impulse, Sam went home for the first time in fifteen years.

  Everyone was older, married, parents. Some were divorced, widowed, dead. Most of them were living subsistence lives based on salmon fishing in the summer and hunting and trapping in the winter. Many others had moved, to Fairbanks, Anchorage, even Outside. “No money, no jobs,” Ekaterina said when he went to see her. “In ten years, Niniltna will be a ghost town. There is nothing to keep us here.” She looked grim. “And the ones who do stay are forgetting their culture. They see in the magazines what life is like in other places. They want pretty clothes and fast cars and television. They don’t want to hunt moose or sew skins or learn to dance. They want to speak English, not Athabascan or Alutiiq or Eyak.” She paused, and said softly, “We have nothing to offer them, Sam.”

  He let the news of his return percolate through the village before going to see Joyce. She received him with composure, and he fought his way through the lace ruffles and the china teacups to a seat as she made him coffee without asking. When he drank, he realized that she had remembered his preferred ratio of evaporated milk to sugar exactly. “I could have quit drinking coffee since the last time you saw me,” he said.

  She was older, thinner, quieter, but her smile had lost none of its radiance. “Not you,” she said softly.

  He looked at the armoire in the corner. “Glad to see Heiman’s got it here from Valdez.”

  She turned her head to follow his eyes. “Yes. A wonderful thing, Samuel. I thank you. And for the tea set that came inside it.” She touched her cup, smiling.

  He shifted in his seat. “Yeah, well, I met a guy who sold old stuff,” he said, “and I remembered you liked old stuff. And I’ve got a boat now, so I could bring it up myself.”

  “That Freya,” she said, nodding.

  He was unsurprised. There was no more efficient means of communication than the Bush telegraph. He doubted that there was very little he had done in the time since he’d been away that had not beaten him home. He told her about the Freya, about the work that he had done, was doing. “Where next you go?” she said.

  He shifted again. “The money’s good in the oil fields. But I do hear tell there might be better money in government contracts out on the Chain.”

  “Them islands like in the war?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her brow puckered. “Bad weather.”

  He grinned. “But good money.”

  A faint shrug. “Money not everything.”

  He put the fragile teacup with its delicate rose tracery gently in its equally fragile saucer. “Are you asking me to come home, Joyce?”

  She said nothing, regarding him steadily out of unblinking dark eyes.

  “Because so far as I know, I got nothing to come home for,” he said.

  Remembered pain clouded her eyes, and he was ashamed of himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Joyce.”

  She did not hold out her hand, or her arms, when he took his leave.

  He flung away from Niniltna that same night, hitching a ride on a Heiman freight truck to Valdez, where the Freya was waiting for him.

  Emil was on the dock on his next trip to Nikiski, as jovial as ever, and took Sam to the Ace of Clubs for a beer and a burger. He let fall the information that he would be in Nikiski for the next three days, meeting with his partners in the Swanson River oil leases. He did his best to chivvy Sam into buying a piece of the pie—“Atlantic’s going to buy us out. It’s a sure bet, Sam”—but Sam laughed and refused to be drawn in.

  That evening, Tex told him to pick up a load of cement that had been landed in Seward and shipped by train to Anchorage. It was needed on Swanson River pronto.

  The Freya undocked on the next tide.

  * * *

  He waited until three o’clock, sitting motionless beneath a spruce tree, the last one left standing on the block, thick branches creating a pocket
of darkness around the trunk. The street was dead quiet this winter night, the sides of the streets high with berms of snow. The last light had gone out in the house four hours before.

  It wasn’t much different from stalking a moose.

  Or one of the Japanese soldiers holding out on Attu.

  He slid out from beneath the spruce, a slight wind setting the branches rustling and creaking, making the tree a friend to him, hiding the slightest sound of his passage. He drifted up the steps and used the darkness of the porch to jimmy the lock on the front door. It wasn’t a neighborhood accustomed to illegal entry, and the door opened easily. He felt his way into the study, opening and closing the door behind him, and trod across the room to where memory told him the Sainted Mary waited for him.

  A light clicked on. He whirled, crouching, one arm thrown up against the brightness.

  Emil rose from the chair behind his desk. “Hello, Sam.”

  It took a moment for Sam’s pupils to contract. When they did, he saw that Emil was smiling, satisfied with the successful springing of his trap. “I can’t believe you came in the front door. A professional burglar would have used the back. But then I suppose you aren’t a professional, are you? Unlike your father.”

  Sam straightened. He made no answer.

  “Did you think I didn’t see the expression on your face when I showed her to you? Did you think I didn’t know you were the one who wanted to buy her? Did you think I didn’t know what Mac was really after when he seduced my wife?” He saw the expression on Sam’s face and gave a soundless laugh. “Oh yes, I know. I’ve always known.”

  He came out from behind the desk, and Sam saw the revolver in his hand. He straightened, falling back a step to balance his weight, to prepare to attack. He didn’t think Emil was bluffing, but he had not come all this way to go down without a fight.