The legislature failed to impeach, which did not come as a great shock to the citizens of Alaska, who had become inured to this kind of behavior in the thirty-five years since statehood. Five years later the legislature even reimbursed him $302,653 for his legal fees, not much of a shock, either.
He did fail of reelection, and nowadays occupied himself by running his hotel and dispensing political patronage at the behest of the present occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He'd always been skilled at keeping a foot in both political houses; it was good for business.
He, along with the current occupant of the governor's mansion, was very much in evidence at the Raven party. So were both U.S. senators and most of the legislature, Alaska's lone congressman of course phoning in his regrets from a duck hunt in Oregon, or maybe an elk hunt in Montana, no one was really sure. There were oil company executives and legislative aides and lobbyists from Russia, Korea and Japan rubbing shoulders with anyone who'd ever held political office in the last thirty-five years, or who'd ever been indicted for bribery, fraud and racketeering since statehood, which pretty much amounted to the same thing. The tribes were out in force; Yupik, Inupiat, Aleut, Athabaskan, Tsimshian, Haida and Tlingit, attired in their best bibs and fuckers and somewhat stiff and self-conscious in consequence.
There were two buffet tables loaded with stuffed mushrooms and boiled shrimp and raw oysters and cheese cubes and crackers and cubed cantaloupe and whole strawberries and olives and pickles and salad peppers. Two standing rib roasts were presided over by two chefs in tall white hats wielding carving knives the size of machetes. Before each buffet was a long line of people with plates. There were four bars with even longer lines in front of them. The sobriety movement was gaining momentum but there was still a long way to go. For every Native who signed the sobriety movement pledge there was another who backslid, and for every village that voted to go dry there were ten others who voted to stay wet.
Ekaterina sat in state at a table in the geographical center of the room, the focus of the longest line of all. Kate, standing in the doorway next to Jack and for the moment forgetting her silk, lace and bugle bead misery, looked across the room at her grandmother with a frown in her eyes. "What?" Jack said.
"Nothing, probably. It's just that she usually works a room on her feet." Her grandmother looked exhausted, her face drawn and strained.
Her spine was as straight as ever, though, even at this distance. She bestowed a gracious smile on the next person waiting to speak to her, appeared to listen to what he had to say with a complete and total absorption, and at the end of the audience murmured a few words that caused the man to back away from her with a proud, pleased and somewhat dazed expression on his face.
"So she's sitting down," Jack said, "she's had a busy day, and in the last month she's lost two board members, not to mention which she's about a hundred years old. You'd be tired, too. Let's pay our respects and then we can grab some grub. I'm starving. I never knew shopping was such hard work."
They walked inside.
Conversation, if it did not actually die, definitely slowed. Heads turned. Drinks paused halfway to mouths. Forks were suspended in mid-air. Hands touched shoulders, elbows nudged sides, heads nodded in their direction.
Well, in Kate's direction, Jack thought, always fair minded. He didn't blame them. He felt a grin forming and repressed it. His ass was hanging out over the edge as it was.
Kate got three steps into the room before the first successful intercept. "Hello, Kate." The man stopped her forward motion by the simple expedient of stepping into her path and grasping her hand. She looked down at the hand, puzzled, and back up at him. He gave her a smile that reminded her of Alana, all teeth and pasteurized, processed charm. "Nice to see you again." "Oh," she said. She vaguely remembered meeting him that morning at the convention, what the hell was his name?
He worked for the state, didn't he, something in the Fish and Game. "Uh, hello."
"Mike Lonsdale," he said, "we met this morning."
"Of course, Mike Lonsdale," she said, adding insincerely, "nice to meet you again." She moved as if to go around him. He held on to her hand so she couldn't. Surprised, she looked at him again and saw that he was considering her with an interest that was neither professional nor brotherly. There were two other men standing at his shoulder with the same expression on their faces, obviously waiting their turn.
Uncomprehending and a little alarmed, she turned to Jack for guidance.
Jack, who had just discovered that dressing up your lady and taking her out on the town to show her off could have its down side, looked as if he had bitten into a fresh lemon.
It took Kate a minute to catch on. When she did, a long, slow smile, rich with mischief, spread across her face. Payback time, the smile said, as clearly as if she had shouted the words out loud. Jack's expression changed from fresh lemon to fingernail-scraped blackboard, and Kate's smile turned positively beatific. She turned that smile on Mike Lonsdale and his two friends, and as Jack watched in paralyzed disbelief, the three men gained a foot each in height, a hulk in shoulder-width and their palms covered with hair.
Kate's progress across the room slowed to a deliberate stroll. Jack was convinced there wasn't a man in the room who didn't scurry over to renew an old acquaintance, gain a new one or just plain slobber. Kate turned no one away. One idiot actually kissed her hand, another asked if she were staying in the hotel and if so what was her room number, a third invited her to dinner, lunch or breakfast, whatever she preferred, and expressed a preference for dinner himself, followed by breakfast later.
She fluttered her eyelashes at the hand kisser, seemed genuinely to regret her lack of a hotel room for the benefit of the room number asker, and actually giggled at the guy who wanted her for breakfast.
Jack wasn't sure he'd ever heard Kate Shugak giggle before. He stood it as long as he could before growling, "I'm going to get something to eat."
Her hand held in the sweaty clasp of an RPetco executive who was trying earnestly to get her to promise him a dance later in the evening, Kate watched the rigid line of Jack's spine as he stalked off to the buffet with a satisfied smile on her face. The oil man requested her attention.
"Huh? What? Dance? I don't dance. Yeah, yeah, nice to meet you, see you later." She pulled free and threaded through the crowd to her grandmother's table.
Ekaterina looked around from a polite flourish of arms with a state senator and saw Kate. Her eyes widened. Her jaw might even have dropped.
"Katya?" She fumbled at her breast for the chain which held her reading glasses and raised them to her eyes. The eyes, magnified by the reading lenses, blinked. "Katya?"
It was remarkable how an evening she had regarded as nothing more than a disaster in the making was turning into nothing less than joy unconfined. "Emaa," Kate said with a bland smile. "What a nice party."
Just for the hell of it she bent over and kissed Ekaterina on the cheek.
Ekaterina reared back as if Kate had bit her. Her stunned expression indicated that she still wasn't entirely convinced of Kate's identity.
"You look--" Ekaterina hesitated, and said doubtfully, "--beautiful?" It wasn't a word she'd ever used in connection with her granddaughter before.
"Why, thank you, emaa," Kate said, genial to the point of jocularity.
"So do you."
And Ekaterina did, she looked elegant and gracious and dignified. Her dress was made of dull navy blue silk, buttoned up the front with ivory buttons, lace at the neck and wrists, the skirt softly gathered in graceful folds. Her hair knotted smoothly at the nape of her neck, she looked near enough like a queen to explain the reception line. Did Kate but know it, she herself looked near enough like a princess to double the line.
Ekaterina knew it, and pulled herself together. The startled look faded, to be replaced by something more appraising. The next thing Kate knew, she was standing next to her grandmother and bestowing identical gracious smiles and brief handshakes as each n
ew and used mendicant, leech, moocher, parasite and even the occasional genuine friend and/or relative came up to pay their respects. It was the convention all over again, until she was cut neatly out of the receiving line by Mike Lonsdale, in hot competition with Porthos and Aramis. The three men did everything short of balancing a rubber ball on their noses to gain her attention. Not since the Shipwreck Bar in Dutch Harbor a year ago had she been the object of so much determined flirtation, and in the Shipwreck she had been in jeans and sneakers and able to hold her own.
Silk and lace and bugle beads had the most demoralizing affect, but before she had time to identify it music sounded somewhere and Jack reappeared to grab her arm. "Let's dance."
"Are you kidding? You don't dance," she said, hanging back. "And neither do I, or have you forgotten that's the reason you fell in love with me in the first place?" "Time we learned then," he said, halting in the middle of the dance floor to scoop her up into a comprehensive embrace.
He was five foot sixteen, she was barely five feet and in their present position he was hunched over like Quasimodo while her toes barely scraped the floor.
Quasimodo's idea of dancing was an inelegant shuffle that took them back two steps and forward one, with an infrequent quarter turn thrown in at random intervals just for show.
When she managed to un flatten her nose from his breastbone she gave him a smile so sweet he could feel teeth dissolving in his mouth and said in a voice equally saccharine, "The only reason I don't kick you in the balls is because we're the only ones out here and people would see." She smiled again, wider, showing all her teeth, reminding him of nothing so much as Mutt in a bad mood. "But don't worry. It'll keep."
Poor Jack was afraid that it would. The music ended and with fresh misery he realized that staking his claim to the first dance only proclaimed her availability for subsequent dances. Men, hundreds of them, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them, skulked at the edge of the dance floor, waiting only for him to turn Kate loose before they attacked. Even in the dim light he could see the gleam of fangs, the shine of saliva, taloned hands extending rapaciously out for his girl' Jesus Christ," he said.
"What?" Kate leaned her head back to look up.
His face was blank with amazement. "I'm jealous." She grinned, and it was a wide, satisfied grin that took up her whole face. "No shit." "I can't believe it," he said, still amazed. "I'm actually jealous of you.
I don't fucking believe it."
"Me neither," she said cheerfully.
Their eyes met and they burst out laughing, so hard it brought them to a halt in the center of the dance floor. When Jack got his breath back he lifted Kate up off the floor to hold her nose to nose. "Who you going home with, woman?"
"I always dance with the one that brung me," she said, eyes crossed and solemn as a judge.
He let her down. "Good. Keep that in mind the next time that yo-yo shows up asking for your room number."
"I'll try."
"By the way," he said, as the music began again and others finally began to join them on the floor, "I don't believe I mentioned it before, but you look flat-out, drop-dead gorgeous. In fact, you look good enough to eat alive, which I intend to do as soon as I get you home."
She laughed again, and she was still laughing when somebody cut in and whisked her away. Jack, by damn, marched over to Ekaterina's table and said with a grin, "Ekaterina? Would you like to dance?" and she was so flabbergasted at his audacity that she found herself out on the floor before she knew what had happened. When Kate glimpsed them over her partner's shoulder, her grandmother was smiling up at Jack with what in the dim light of the cavernous room, looked like genuine affection. Kate didn't think her reaction to the sight would maim her dance partner for life, although for a while he did.
A deejay hired for the evening waded through a stack of CDs, everything from the Ronettes to Nirvana. The music went on nonstop and Kate barely had time to snatch a few bites of food between songs before another man shanghaied her out on the dance floor again. Somewhat to her own surprise, she discovered she was enjoying herself. Previously, all of Kate's dancing had taken place at pot latches and spirit days and other tribal celebrations. It wasn't that there weren't dances at high school; there were, but she had never joined in because she disliked being pawed and she had quickly discovered that pawing was what teenage boys were best at. The other dancing, the spirit dancing, the motion dancing, that was different. That kind of dance served a cultural and communal purpose, retelling a story, celebrating a birth, giving thanks for a good fishing season, summoning the spirits of the dead for a final farewell. It was danced without partners, or rather with many partners, as one of a group, as part of the whole. There was a reason they called it spirit dancing.
There were similarities between the two, she thought, looking around at the gesticulating, jiving crowd of rambunctious par tiers but there were more differences, not least of which the goal of this kind of dancing seemed to be to persuade participants into another activity, less spiritual in purpose and more horizontal in nature. Nothing wrong with that, Kate decided, and whirled from one partner to the next, laughing as she tried to keep off people's feet, her partner's and whoever else was foolish enough to wander into range.
Around ten o'clock, over the shoulder of her current partner, she saw Axenia swirl by in Lew Mathisen's embrace. Axenia was wearing black velvet cut down to here and up to there, rhinestones glittered from her ears and her hair was swept up into some elaborate superstructure that rivaled the cabins of some boats Kate had worked on. Far from shuffling, Lew and Axenia were dancing smoothly, gracefully, as if they'd taken lessons and had been practicing together. Kate wondered what else he was teaching her.
While she was watching, Lew saw someone, waved, whispered to Axenia and led her off the floor. Kate followed Lew's glance and saw a short, slender man whose three piece attire could only be described as dapper.
He had a mustache and a goatee and a full head of gray hair slicked back into a dramatic pompadour, a heavy gold chain stretched across his vest, and his patent leather wingtips were polished to an even higher gloss than Kate's. She recognized him at once. It was Edgar P. Dischner, an attorney who had ridden into town on the shoulders of the Kenai oil discoveries in the 1950s and had been involved in every shady speculation in Alaskan business and politics since. He had defended Governor Hickfield on his influence-peddling charge and had orchestrated the legislative payback of the governor's legal expenses, most of which he'd pocketed in fees. He was on retainer for a half dozen oil companies, he'd lobbied in Juneau against every oil tax proposed in the legislature and when his lobbying efforts failed he brought suit against the state in federal court, several of which suits were still pending but which pretty much everyone in the know confidently expected to be settled this side of a trial for figures not less than seven in number.
Mathisen and Axenia came up to Dischner. Everybody seemed awfully glad to see everyone else, and when two more couples joined the little group there was a tremendous amount of hand-shaking and back-slapping. One of the newcomers was Billy Mike, another Harvey Meganack, both with their wives. Betty wore a ruffled number that would have been more appropriate on a sixth-grader going to church and had applied makeup with a trowel, and Darlene, a sedate matron of some fifty-six years of age, sported tight fitting, silver-studded black leather that was no doubt the latest in punk rock. She'd spiked her hair to match, spraying all the gray pink, and the expression on her husband's face whenever he dared look at her was worth all the pain and suffering Kate had incurred during her afternoon of forced shopping.
She wondered where Harvey had stashed the trophy blonde he'd brought to Mama Nicco's, and lo and behold the next man to show was John King, who had not mislaid his trophy brunette, or--Kate craned her neck to see--his mustard-yellow, silver-toed cowboy boots, either, which didn't match his double-breasted, raw silk suit. Tonight the trophy brunette was wearing a white dress with no back and a skirt like a tutu.
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 06 - Blood Will Tell Page 14
