by James Abel
Plus side: I planted microphones in the Quonset hut during the evening—one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen area off the living room—that should pick up conversation in either place. I’m receiving talk in the hut loud and clear.
Both Marine doctors and the submarine engineer Karen Vleska may need to be killed.
FIVE
Merlin Toovik was making whale bombs when I interrupted him at eight the next morning after I heard from Valley Girl. He was at a wooden worktable in his small, cramped, detached garage, wearing a lightweight Seattle Seahawks jacket and jeans in thirty-five degree weather, concentrating and staring down at a foot-long copper-shaped missile lying on a coffee-stained blotter, tilted open at the tiny warhead area on top. I knew better than to interrupt while he poured black explosive powder from a spigoted plastic bottle into the finned missile.
When he was screwing the cap back, I said, “You didn’t tell me everything, Merlin. Why not?”
“Found out about the FBI, huh?” He laid the missile aside and opened the cap of a second one.
“Merlin, not just that. He worked for you?”
The police chief looked up, visibly impressed, the muscles on his shoulders and arms straining against the fabric of the jacket. “How’d you find that out?” he asked, starting on a second missile.
I’d found out because “North Slope Police Department” was written on the dead man’s federal income tax form, but I did not say that. I said, “Merlin, what was one of your detectives doing pretending to work for the Harmons? Yesterday you chewed me out for keeping things from you.”
“Technically, no lie. He did work for them.”
“I put my neck on the line for you.”
“Look, I can’t make a mistake on these bombs, Joe, or a few more relatives will be killed when we fire one and it doesn’t work, or blows too soon. Give me a minute. Then we’ll have coffee in the house and I’ll explain.”
I folded my arms and watched, fascinated by the process despite my irritation, as he loaded two more whale bombs. Whaling captains were the most-respected men in the community. They ran crews of a dozen men, mostly relatives, and went out twice a year to harvest the big bowheads migrating past Barrow, using motorboats in fall, and paddling twenty-foot-long sealskin boats in spring, launched directly off the shore bound ice.
At fifty, Merlin was considered young, not yet an elder. Shotguns hung in racks on the wall. There were two snowmobiles outside; fishing nets were drying in the yard. I saw three sets of rubber boots, two outboard motors against a wall, grease-smeared oilcans, clean fishing hooks.
“Do you know how these whale bombs work, Joe?”
Answer the question. Don’t push him. He’s testing you. You’re on North Slope time here, not D.C. time.
“Tell me, Merlin.”
He stood and stretched, getting the tension in his muscles out, and then he strode to the wall and easily hefted an evil-looking harpoon, about six feet long. The wooden shaft ended in a steel, wickedly barbed arrow-shaped protuberance.
“Most people think the harpoon is the whole thing, but it’s just the steel part on top. Look down the shaft and we come to this little plunger, see? A trigger. See it?”
I want to know about your cousin, not the damn harpoon.
“Yes, I see it.”
“Well, if the harpooner throws well and hits the bowhead—you only have a few seconds to do it before it dives—and you aim just behind the head . . . the harpoon goes in up to the plunger, then the whale’s skin depresses the plunger, the plunger acts as a trigger, and the trigger fires the missile from the wooden shaft. A good throw blows up the heart. No suffering. Quick death.”
“Then the whole wooden shaft there is a gun?”
“That’s right. Hollow inside.” He placed the harpoon back on the rack. “There! That ought to do it,” Merlin said. “These things are humane. The harpoon stays in, and the shaft floats away, so we can recover it. The harpoon is attached to a floating buoy that marks the whale’s location if it dives and tries to get away, still alive.”
“Merlin, I’m not here to talk about hunting.”
“Sure you are.” Merlin signaled me to follow him into the house, walking out the door. Over his big shoulder he said, “Just a different kind. Clay worked for the mayor, actually. He kept tabs on visitors. Too many of them are like you, Colonel. They don’t tell us the whole truth about why they’re here, just what they want us to know.”
Well! He had a point there, I had to admit.
We passed outside and entered his one-story wooden house through a cold room—called a cunnychuck—where we left our shoes among hanging jackets, muddy boots, parkas, and anoraks. The living room was hot, from gas heat, and I smelled coffee brewing. A TV was on, tuned to MSNBC. The couch and sitting chair were Haitian cotton. The pile was colored gold. There was an exercise walker, from where Merlin’s wife, Edith, waved to me. She wore spandex pants, a long floral-motif snow shirt, and sneakers and she was glued by earbud to Al Sharpton on MSNBC. The walls were decorated as in most homes I’d visited here, packed with family photos: graduation shots of nephews and nieces, high school football shot on a blue Astroturf field, Hawaii shots of Merlin and Edith on vacation—looking miserable in the heat—a shot of Merlin’s crew on the ice, carving up a harvested bowhead with half the town helping. People atop the whale wielding carving knives affixed to long poles. People loading meat onto sleds. A smiling hunter holding out a piece of heart. I saw Clay Qaqulik in back.
Inside homes you always met extended families, in person, or in photos that filled up walls.
Merlin said, putting two thick ceramic mugs on the kitchen table, “Straight talk?”
“Straight talk.”
“Clay was doing fine at the FBI until a North Slope case came up. Walrus ivory smuggling. Couple of low-rent jerks from Nome coming up with machine guns and a boat, leaving carcasses behind, harvesting the tusks and shipping pieces to Chicago, claiming they came from elephants. Know what the FBI did when the complaint came in?”
“What?”
“Laughed, Joe. That’s what Clay told me his supervisor did: laughed. ‘Fucking walruses,’ the guy told Clay. ‘We’ve got drugs coming in from Panama. We’ve got threats against the vice president when he visits Juneau next month. We’ve got bank robbers in Anchorage—and you want to go look for a couple of guys shooting walruses? Give it to ATF.’ Clay quit the next day.”
“What was he doing for you?”
“Not me, Joe. Us! The people who need walruses and whales to eat. Over half our food comes from subsistence hunting. And more than that, our culture. Walruses aren’t just something to look at in a zoo, man. Not here. They’re who we are for four thousand years.”
He gestured tiredly at Al Sharpton on TV, who was haranguing a Republican senator about an upcoming vote on aid to the Central African Republic.
“That gets more play than us,” he said.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Merlin went to a different cupboard and opened it and instead of cups and saucers pulled out a three-foot-long rolled-up paper, like a blueprint, which he spread on the checkered tablecloth, after pushing away the remains of a pancake breakfast. He weighed the paper down with a sugar bowl on one end, a maple syrup bottle on the other. It was a map showing the North Slope borough, the same shape as the admiral’s topographical depiction in Washington, only the admiral’s map showed a cute caribou and a wolf on the bottom, and highlighted the wilderness, lakes and mountains—the vast, open possibility. Merlin’s map showed the same area in plain, gridded white—as if the earth had been wiped away and what remained were perfect squares laid out as mathematically as in a Los Angeles real-estate guide. The squares were numbered. The tundra, lakes, and mountains had been reduced to mere geometry. I read out loud. “‘Land allocation in the North Slope.’”
“
Joe, our heroes here are Eben Hopson and Willie Hensley, who created the borough so we’d have some power over people who want to rip this place apart. They were fought by the state, the oil companies, by anyone who wanted access to land. But we won. And now we have our own borough. We can tax companies. That gives us money to pay lobbyists in Washington, lawyers, and scientists of our own to counter whoever wants to run over us. Greenpeace wants to stop our whaling. Interior wants us to stop eating birds. Oil companies want to drill offshore. Well, it’s not so easy to come in and do whatever you want anymore. But it is always a fight. Hell, Joe, do you know how we became Americans in the first place? Russia sold us to you. No one asked us first.”
“You don’t want to be Americans?”
“Of course we want to be Americans. We’ve got the highest percentage of veterans in our population than anywhere else in the U.S. But like every other damn community, we want some power over our own fate.”
“How did Detective Clay Qaqulik fit in to this?”
“Well, helpful Clay Qaqulik guided an Arkansas senator out to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and listened to him on his cell phone, telling someone to try to get a gigantic open-pit mine in the place. Cook Clay Qaqulik made breakfast for the visiting president of the Northern Lights Drill Company, of Sweden, who, ignoring the Eskimo menial, bragged to advisers that even though he’d promised to build a pipeline if they found oil offshore, he’d move the oil by ship, save on taxes, cheat us. To them, Clay was a quaint piece of landscape, a dumb rube, and they said things around him that he reported. Well, I bet that Swede was surprised when Senator Maxwell demanded that they sign a paper promising a pipeline.
“Joe. I like you. Hell, you, Karen, and Eddie probably saved a few hundred lives here last summer. But you still didn’t tell us why you’re really here until yesterday.”
“Clay was a spy for you, you’re saying.”
“He was my cousin and a trained investigator and he was undercover for me. He helped out.”
“Spying on the Harmons.”
“No,” Merlin said, frowning, pouring coffee, stirring in sugar. “He was on another kind of case with them. Actually, he was trying to protect them.”
“From what?”
Merlin sipped his coffee, made a face, dumped in more sugar. “Clay believed that someone has been trying to stop their work all summer,” Merlin said. “He hangs out at the base and he decided, too many accidents. Too many delays. But why? Why them? Something is going on!”
“Like what?”
A shrug. “Who knows? Something small and personal? Something bigger? Someone trying to keep them from going somewhere, doing something, seeing something related to us? Either way, if someone is breaking equipment, starting fires, that’s a crime. And now, on top of that, the kid’s on the phone. ‘We’re all sick.’”
I thought about it. It made sense. I sat and sipped coffee, and let the acid spread warmth into my stomach.
Merlin said, “Anyway, right now you and I ought to get to the office. Major Nakamura has something to show us.”
I started. Why didn’t you tell me that right away?
Merlin added, “While you were parking your truck, my friend, he found the diary.”
I’d shut my phone off so any ringing wouldn’t disturb me grilling Merlin. The police chief was grinning now, enjoying this part. I sighed. “Okay, Merlin. You win.”
Merlin changed out of a T-shirt and into a button-up. He added a bolo tie with a walrus-ivory clip, a carved hunter. He kissed Edith good-bye as she walked on the slow-moving treadmill. He took a paper bag lunch from the refrigerator and put on an anorak against the thirty-six degree cold, whereas I needed a parka. I followed him outside. He stared at the ocean for a moment, across the street, beyond the beach. It was black, frothy with wavelets.
“Hmm, see that sky, Joe?”
“What about it?”
“Surely you smell that?”
I sniffed. “Pancakes?”
“Winter’s coming,” said Merlin, tapping his nose.
“Any day now,” I answered.
“No, in about twelve hours,” he said. “By tonight that ocean out there will slush and ice.”
• • •
I DROVE FAST, FOLLOWING MERLIN, MY RENTED TWELVE-YEAR-OLD FORD Explorer eating up the six miles of dirt-and-gravel road; past city garages and yellow bulldozers waiting for winter, past the blue Astroturf football field donated by a Florida woman for Barrow’s high school, into the triangular mass of streets and past a restaurant that had once been a whaler trading station, abutting the beach, fronted by a bleaching bowhead skull—a popular spot for tourist photos.
I passed another tourist attraction: a signpost on a pole, nailed with wooden arrows pointing in all directions. They read: SEATTLE, 1,960 MILES. LOS ANGELES, 2,945 MILES. AYACUCHO, PERU, 7,691 MILES. PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, 4,966. WASHINGTON, D.C., 3,600.
Many Barrow streets lacked street signs. Homes were designated by number for postal deliveries. We passed the Osaka restaurant where Karen loved the sushi. Backyards were little museums for people who loved the outdoors, filled with sleds, SUVs, hanging racks for drying fish or caribou hides. The tallest structures in town, grouped around one intersection, were Borough Hall, the Wells Fargo Bank building; the Iñupiat owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; and the two-story police station, in front of which we parked. Jail cells upstairs.
There was no need at this time of year to plug the engine into one of the electric heating sockets situated in rows outside any public building, like hitching posts in Old West towns.
Eddie sat in Merlin’s small office, at Kelley’s laptop. Its cover open, pasted with a mass of stickers depicting singing stars: Ed Sheeran, Meghan Trainor.
Eddie looked up. He seemed exhausted. On Merlin’s leather couch I saw rumpled bedding. He’s probably been here all night. “The diary is several files, some written, some recorded. All labeled something else. She would have made a pretty good researcher, One.”
He’d given me downtime with Karen, while he and Merlin’s computer guy went through file after file in the laptop last night. The remains of a delivered breakfast from Osaka—eggs on muffins, bacon, coffee, hash browns, and a big cup of OJ—sat on the blotter on Merlin’s desk.
“This is as good as any research you’d see at Harvard, Uno.”
“Tell me the symptoms?”
Eddie sat back, reached out, hit a button.
“Oh, man, listen to this.”
Kelley said, in the recording, “The little prickly feelings in my fingers are getting worse. I’m having trouble walking sometimes, losing feeling in my left leg, below the knee. I tap it. It’s numb.”
“Nerve problems,” whispered Eddie, making a list while Merlin and I hung over his shoulder, riveted to the frail voice. Kelley quavering but staying focused. The kid sick and scared, but diligently making her “observations” file.
“Dad said we all have a flu or a cold and he broke out the five-day Zithromax. But that makes no sense. How come if we all have the same thing, we show different symptoms?”
“Name them,” I urged the voice, the living speaking to the dead, to the past, to the void.
“I think it’s the water. The bottled water tastes funny. Like there’s metal in it or something. Scratchy. It hurts my throat. Mom said she saw the redheaded woman back in Barrow, in the airport, with our supplies. I bet that woman put something in the water. Water! I feel disgusting. I won’t take a shower. My hair is so gross that I got angry at the mirror and broke it, when I saw myself. Ugh!!!!”
Eddie looked up. “Water tasted funny? Or her taste buds changed?”
“Write them both down. Also, irritability.”
“But is that a symptom? Or is she just pissed off?”
“Just write it!”
Eddie said, “Maybe you caught it, Uno, spe
aking of irritability. What redheaded woman is she talking about?”
“It’s got to be that Greenpeace girl,” Merlin answered, frowning, hands on his hips. Outside the office, through glass, door closed, uniformed police officers were staring in at us. “From Anchorage. Tilda Swann. A Brit. She’s also in PETA, an animal lover. Stop the whaling. Save the bears. Save the seals. The Iñupiats can go to hell.”
“But why target scientists working on lakes?”
“I’m just telling you who Kelley’s probably talking about. Firebrand is more like it. Odds are it’s her.”
Click. The girl’s recorded voice said:
“I don’t like the way Clay Qaqulik looks at Mom. He stares at her in the way that boys watch Jackie DiNardi in school. I saw him touching himself when she wasn’t looking. I’m getting afraid of Clay. He’s angry all the time, not like he used to be. He got on a four-wheeler yesterday and drove it in circles, faster and faster, crazy, laughing, on the tundra. He keeps cleaning his shotgun. Last night he kept staring into the lake for a long time. I asked him what’s in there, and he didn’t answer, just looked up fast, muttering about imminnauraq, little people. I walked away. I was shaking. I couldn’t even open the door latch, because my fingers wouldn’t work right. I’m scared!”
Merlin looked baffled. “Clay doesn’t get angry. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen my cousin angry.”
“Mood changes,” said Eddie, writing: Headaches, hallucinations possibly, paranoia?
“It started three days ago. We all have fevers. I told Dad we should go back to Barrow, but he’s so crazy because we’re behind schedule, after so many accidents all summer, and we still have three more sites to collect samples from before we can go home.
“And the fighting. Mom and Dad NEVER fight, unless it’s over Dad’s stupid labeling on his ice cream or Mom’s terrible driving. Family peace is like end-of-the-world important with them. It’s like they’re one brain/two people, like Borg people saying the same thing. Like, Can I go over to Ellen’s for dinner, Dad? ‘ASK YOUR MOTHER, HONEY.’ Can we have pizza, Mom? ‘WHATEVER YOUR FATHER SAYS, DEAR!’ And now they’re fighting over the samples, the weather, and especially about Clay and . . . Oh, my God! OH, MY GOD! I think maybe Mom had SEX with him. Nononono!!!!! DISGUSTING!!!!”
