A Cold War

by Alan Russell

  “I’m sure I’ll meet a few of them.”

  “That’s guaranteed.”

  Nina and Dana arrived at their hotel at 9:30 at night, which was 1:30 a.m. East Coast time. The front desk clerk warned them that the hotel restaurant closed at ten, and if they wanted to get dinner, they’d better hurry.

  “Do you have twenty-four-hour room service?” asked Dana.

  The clerk hid a smile and said, “We don’t have any room service.”

  “Tell me my room has a bathtub,” said Dana.

  The clerk’s mouth contorted in a grimace. “I’m afraid we only have showers in the rooms.”

  “What about a minibar?” asked Dana.

  With a shake of his head, the clerk said, “I’m sorry,” but then added, “We do have snack machines on each floor, and down this hallway you’ll find an indoor pool and spa.”

  As they started their ascent to their adjoining rooms on the third floor, Nina said, “I’m not hungry, but if you want company I’ll go with you to the restaurant.”

  “Let me guess: you’re not hungry because while I was getting a bag of peanuts, they served you a meal on the flight to Fairbanks.”

  “They did,” Nina admitted. “But I only ate half of it. The doggie bag is yours if you want it.”

  “Woof,” said Dana. “I knew my Oliver Twist imitation would work on you. But I suppose you ordered rabbit food?”

  Dana liked to complain that Nina’s vegetarian diet cramped their restaurant choices. “Pasta primavera.”

  “At least that’s better than tofu,” said Dana. “Hand it over.”

  They made a quick stop at the vending machines near the elevator, and Dana took stock of their selection. “This is beginning to look like a better dinner than I usually have. In fact, I’m going to splurge and make it a three-course meal. I’ll have an appetizer of M&M’s, then your pasta entrée, and a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup dessert.”

  When they got to their room, Dana was delighted to find out that Nina’s room was the same size as hers. “They must not have gotten the memo about constructing a presidential suite for your stay.”

  “Whatever you say, Oliver.”

  “Should we plan on breakfast at seven?”

  “That sounds good.”

  “I’m glad you think so. I’m going to be jet-lagged and out of sorts. Of course, that’s dependent on my not being in a diabetic coma. The nearness of those vending machines isn’t a good thing.”

  Nina inserted her key card into the door. “Does a coma mean you won’t be snoring so loudly tonight?”

  As Nina opened her door, Dana began to loudly hum “Hail to the Chief.”

  Nina pretended to ignore the musical salutation, but a minute later, she crept out of her room and affixed a paper sign to Dana’s door: PRESIDENT BELZER STAYED HERE.

  Their full agenda kept the two women running for all of the next day. When they returned to their hotel in the late afternoon, Dana said she had to take a nap before she fell over.

  “Why don’t you knock on my door around seven?” she said. “We’ll figure out our dinner plans then.”

  Nina said that sounded good, and then she did her usual—took a brisk walk interspersed with making calls. She never liked being cooped up for extended periods. However, making calls in Fairbanks didn’t prove as easy as in New York City. Her eyes stayed more focused on her cell phone’s signal than where she was going. Her phone was playing hide-and-seek: the bars kept teasing her, one moment indicating she could make a call, the next moment showing no service.

  She considered starting back to the hotel to call Terrence, but resisted the idea, knowing she’d feel stir-crazy without getting her full walk in. The day had grown progressively colder and windier, and she bundled her windbreaker closer to her. She’d been warned that in Alaska the September temperature could range from twenty-five degrees to seventy-five. At the moment it was closer to the former, but despite the cold, it felt good to be out in the open.

  The weather seemed to have discouraged all pedestrians save for a homeless man camped on the corner. He was a block over, but she could hear him mumbling to himself, and she tried to make sense of his singsong words:

  “The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

  But the queerest they ever did see

  Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

  I cremated Sam McGee.”

  Another harmless crank, Nina thought. Once more she jabbed at the redial icon, and this time heard her call going through. At last, some good luck. She tapped the phone with her engagement ring. The diamond was overly large, almost embarrassingly so; its seven flawless carats glittered.

  Nina was calling Terrence’s private line. It was almost eight o’clock in Washington DC, but Terrence was a workaholic. He rarely left his office before nine o’clock. His staff also put in long hours.

  She waited for five rings, worried she might lose the connection before someone answered. Her patience was finally rewarded.

  “Thank you for calling Congressman Donnelly’s office. This is Brenda. May I help you?”

  “Hi, Brenda, it’s Nina. Does he have thirty seconds?”

  “For you, Nina, he might even have a minute.”

  “Be still, my heart.”

  Brenda laughed before putting her on hold.

  The homeless man was still doing his mumbling, and while waiting for her fiancé to get on the line, Nina was forced to listen to his ramblings. The man’s volume had ballooned:

  “He turned to me and ‘Cap,’ says he, ‘I’ll cash in this trip, I guess;

  And if I do, I’m asking that you won’t refuse my last request.’”

  A familiar voice came on the line: “Nanook of the North?”

  She could picture Terrence with his big Irish smile that so many people found irresistible. “Ah, the Donnelly wit,” she said.

  “Do I detect a cold wind from the north?”

  “I could understand how that might scare a politician full of hot air. You know how it is when cold air meets hot; there’s always a storm.”

  Terrence laughed. “You can take the girl out of Smith, but not the Smith out of the girl.”

  “You have that right.”

  “How was your luncheon?” he asked. “Did they serve caribou steaks or filet of moose?”

  “Judging by the comments around me, I believe either would have been preferable to the chicken.”

  “The fried-chicken circuit is good training for you.” Behind his laughter was political truth.

  “As long as they bring me a fruit plate or dinner salad, I suppose I’ll survive.”

  “And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;

  Then ‘Here,’ said I, with a sudden cry, ‘is my cre-ma-tor-eum.’”

  She covered one ear in the hopes of drowning out the homeless man’s gibberish.

  Terrence asked, “Have you had a chance to see the sights?”

  “I toured the Museum of the North this morning,” she said, “and made a few business appearances, but for most of the day I’ve been stuck in meetings. I was told, though, that Fairbanks has more cracked windshields per capita than anywhere in the US. And I also learned I would have to travel south from here in order to get to the North Pole.”

  “Will you be visiting there by flying reindeer or by dogsled?”

  “Don’t laugh,” she said. “One of my quick stops today was the Dog Mushing Museum.”

  “I can see you on the Iditarod Trail.”

  “I can see you in the doghouse.”

  The homeless man was still reciting verse as if he were some kind of poet laureate. Nina would have moved away but for fear of losing her signal.

  “Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;

  Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher.”

  “I can’t wait to hear about all your adventures,” said Terrence. “When you get back tomorrow, I’ll have some ch
illed champagne waiting for you.”

  “Don’t talk to me about anything chilled. It’s freezing here.”

  “Okay, then I’ll have a fire waiting for you, and hot chocolate.”

  “If I didn’t know better, Congressman, I might suspect you of ulterior motives.”

  In and out of her ears, like the buzzing of an annoying mosquito, the words to the poem droned on:

  “I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: ‘I’ll just take a peep inside.

  I guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked’; . . . then the door I opened wide.”

  “There’s nothing ulterior about my motives. When it comes to you, they’re very blatant.”

  “That’s just great!”

  “Whoa,” Terrence said. “My libidinous thoughts are great?”

  “I’m sorry,” Nina said, flustered. “I’ll have to take a rain check on your thoughts, and I mean that literally. I’m outside, and it’s begun to pour, with a little sleet mixed in. And naturally I didn’t think to wear a hat.”

  She raised a hand over her head, but it was an ineffective shield against the sleet.

  “And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;

  And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: ‘Please close that door.

  It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm—

  Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.’”

  “What did you say? Nina, I think we’re breaking up.”

  The connection went dead.

  At least she’d gotten through. Nina slid her phone into her blazer pocket. Maybe it was just as well the call had been interrupted—there never seemed to be a good way to finish their phone conversations. The romantic dance at the end never felt quite right to her. Terrence always professed his love, and then she did the same with a nagging feeling of discomfort. There was a part of her that had always expected she’d be swept off her feet by the man she was going to marry—ridiculous, she knew. Everyone said that she and Terrence were perfect together. It was only in romance novels that fireworks went off, wasn’t it? That kind of overblown sentiment just wasn’t realistic.

  When their engagement was announced, all the female staff on Entertainment Tonight had worn black armbands “mourning” that Terrence Donnelly was now off the market. And all of Nina’s friends told her how lucky she was. Nina wished she was as excited as other people seemed to be.

  The sleet continued to fall. Of course, she wasn’t wearing a raincoat. It wasn’t easy dressing for this climate.

  She looked around. There were no cabs; Fairbanks wasn’t New York City. At least her hotel was only a few blocks away. But which way was it? She tried to orient herself by the proximity of the Chena River. From where she was, she could see the Federal Building. That way. She’d get back, change, and run on a treadmill—assuming the hotel had a gym.

  The sleet began coming down even harder. God, her hair was going to be a mess, and her makeup was probably already running. At least there were no paparazzi in Fairbanks. The bedraggled look was not in keeping with the Donnelly image.

  Around her the street was quiet. The natives had probably read the signs of the sky and known it was going to storm. Even that homeless man had found shelter. Nina tucked her chin to her chest and began walking. Sleet in September, she thought. That seemed wrong.

  Two-by-fours and construction material blocked the right side of the sidewalk. Nina stepped to her left, and her foot caught on something.

  She fell, hard, with no chance to cushion the fall with her hands. Her chin slammed into the asphalt, and she cried out. The pain she felt was quickly replaced with anger and embarrassment. How could she have been so clumsy?

  She touched her chin; there would be an ugly rash there, no doubt, that makeup wouldn’t be able to completely cover. Thank goodness no one had been around to witness her humiliation. As she started to rise, she felt a tug at her ankle and saw that there was some kind of wire entwined around it. That explained why she’d fallen. Somehow her leg had gotten snared. She reached for the wire just as a figure loomed over her. Something hard struck the back of her head.

  Dazed, she tried to fight off the hands that reached roughly for her. She tried to scream, but the hands pressed a rag over her nose and mouth. As her lungs breathed in its fumes and consciousness ebbed, Nina heard a familiar voice, but this time the voice was speaking into her ear:

  “There are strange things done in the midnight sun

  By the men who moil for gold;

  The Arctic trails have their secret tales

  That would make your blood run cold;

  The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

  But the queerest they ever did see

  Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

  I cremated Sam McGee.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Nina drifted in and out of consciousness. She didn’t really want to awaken. As awful as her dreams had been, she had a sense that the world would look even worse with her eyes open.

  Underlying her foreboding was a dull, throbbing pain that seemed to touch every part of her body. She used that pain to try to center her thoughts. Her hand hurt—more than her head, more than anything else. The slightest movement sent pain surging up her arm. Nina struggled to open her eyes. They felt weighted down. Her eyelids trembled, but at last she raised them. Her efforts weren’t rewarded. There was a blindfold covering her eyes.

  She reached up with her hands to remove it, a motion that caused so much agony that she almost blacked out. Something was terribly wrong with her left hand. Nina shifted around, but there wasn’t any position that brought her relief from the pain. Her throat was so dry it hurt to breathe. Even her groaning hurt, but the sounds kept involuntarily escaping her mouth.

  She wasn’t sure if she heard something or just sensed it, but she was suddenly sure someone was standing over her. She stopped groaning, even stopped breathing, in order to better hear.

  “If you need anything,” said a man’s voice, “I’m right here.”

  “Wa—wa—”

  Her lips were too parched and her mouth too dry to ask more than that, but it was enough. She felt the touch of a water bottle on her lips and raised her head to drink from it, sucking greedily until the bottle was pulled away from her.

  “Not too much,” he said. “I don’t want you throwing up again.”

  It took Nina several moments to arrange the words in her mind and then say them: “What happened?”

  “You’ve been abducted. A ransom request has been sent to your family.”

  She tried to digest the information. She was too numb and too disoriented to be shocked. “Why?”

  “For money,” he said. “If you do everything I say, you’ll be released safely.”

  Focusing, doing her best to concentrate, she said, “My hand.” A painful swallow, and then a last push to finish her thought: “It hurts.”

  “I’ll give you some meds.”

  “Why does—it hurt—so?”

  “Because along with the ransom note,” he said, “I sent your ring finger. Now your family knows how serious I am.”

  I sent your ring finger. His words echoed in her head. At first she couldn’t make sense of them. When she did, when she realized what he’d done to her, she blacked out.

  Nina had no idea how much time passed before she awakened again. At one point she had found herself being jostled about and realized she was in a moving car, but her consciousness was brief.

  When she awakened, the blindfold was no longer covering her eyes, and she struggled to raise her head and look around. She was weak; there wasn’t a part of her body that didn’t hurt.

  She struggled to a sitting position. She was outside, but it was too dark to see much. Beneath her was a tarp, on top of which were several blankets. It was cold enough that her breathing produced a vapor trail.

  Her movements b
rought the man—the butcher who’d cut off her finger—to Nina’s side. Her abductor was big and bearded, and Nina realized she’d seen him before. He was the same man who’d been uttering that awful poem on the streets of Fairbanks. At the time she’d thought he was crazy and homeless. Now he didn’t look either of those things. He looked dangerous.

  “I made you some broth,” he said, offering her a steaming cup.

  Nina didn’t respond. This creature had maimed her. She shifted her gaze from her bandaged hand to him. He didn’t turn away in shame, but instead stared at her with his hard, black eyes in a familiar way that made her shudder. She hated his insinuating glance. Who was he to look at her in such a way? Nina tried not to show him how afraid she was. The pain in her hand sparked her anger.

  “What kind of animal are you that you could mutilate my finger?”

  “I’m the kind of animal that means business.”

  “Business?” she asked.

  “Nothing hurries up a ransom delivery like a finger.”

  He spoke as if he knew this for a fact. There was no apology, no commiseration, no regret about what he’d done. This wasn’t a man, Nina decided. This was a monster.

  “You didn’t need to hurt me. My family and my fiancé would have paid without your act of brutality.”

  “Now they’ll pay that much quicker. That will be good for me and good for you. If they pay quick enough, they might even be able to reattach that finger of yours.”

  Nina glommed onto his last words. “What do you mean?”

  “It was a clean cut, taken right below the joint. That’s the trick. You have to know where and how to cut. I rubbed my hunting knife with alcohol before I did it. A surgeon couldn’t have removed it any better.”

  The calm way in which he described his brutal act sent icy tendrils through her chest. Fear—and a small thread of hope. If she cooperated, her finger could be reattached.

  “It was actually a lot more work sending off your finger than taking it off.”