Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  Wu reddened and sat back and folded his arms.

  Luc opened the folder and took her quickly through the attack in the Barrens. He placed the events in the context of Jimmy Angel’s disappearance and mentioned the flurry of legal activity to take control of Jimmy’s company, Angel Minerals. I watched Mei closely as he did. A frown creased her forehead, and her lips tightened when Luc described the final assault. He closed the folder.

  “You and your brother own the company that made the investment in Angel Minerals,” Luc said. “Now you’re trying to take control.” He spread his hands. “Then the attack.”

  “Golly,” Mei said. “That’s horrible.” She looked at Lily with real concern. “How terrifying.”

  Wu’s phone pinged. “Ah,” he said, picking it up and tapping the screen. “Fan’s here. He’s on his way in from the airport. He’ll be here in twenty minutes. We must wait.”

  Mei stared at Wu’s phone. For a moment she seemed stunned, as if a snake had suddenly slithered into view and coiled itself around Wu’s hand. A strand of hair came loose and drifted in front of her face. She unfastened a clip and tucked the hair back into place and snapped the clip shut again. It made a sharp, clean sound, and it seemed to bring her back to the present. And here’s what happened.

  Mei looked pointedly at Lily. Lily met her eyes, then turned her head to glance at Luc. Luc shot a quick look at the plainclothes guy with the earpiece. It was like watching a pinball racket around inside its box, dropping into one hole and springing out of another. Earpiece stepped over to Wu and said, “Excuse me, sir. Her Honor has asked to see you.”

  Wu frowned and checked his watch. “In court?”

  “In her chambers, sir.”

  Wu looked puzzled. “We’ll have to go,” he said to Mei.

  “Did she ask for me?” Mei said to Earpiece.

  “No, ma’am.”

  Wu stared around desperately. He couldn’t ignore a summons from the judge. He scowled at Luc and me as he got to his feet. “Say nothing!” he told Mei.

  The second he was out the door, Mei snatched up her bag and moved to the chair beside Lily. They began to mutter back and forth in what sounded like a mixture of Chinese and Russian in which I recognized only the words diamond and Mitzi.

  “The judge thing,” I said to Luc. “Bullshit, right?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do I get to find out what’s going on?”

  “You can always ask,” he said tiredly. “You’re the one who lives with her.”

  13

  Don’t be such a bear,” Lily said as she balanced a martini glass on the two-inch-wide railing. “I’ve already told you I knew her from when I was in Mirny. They were trying to fast-track into diamonds. I had a lot of product to sell. We met.”

  “But that was years ago. I’ve never heard you even mention her, and she’s the most famous woman in Asia.”

  “Abused and railroaded by your government!”

  “Don’t try to change the subject. Suddenly we’re all piled in a plane—you and me and Luc—rushing off to Vancouver. The second her lawyer gets tricked into leaving the room, you’re into a secret huddle. What the hell is going on?”

  “She needs advice from someone, Alex. Is it so strange she’d turn to me?”

  I sure thought so. She handed me a beer and went inside. We’d checked out of the hotel and moved to an apartment in a building that rented furnished suites. The main room opened to a terrace that overlooked a little lake with rocky bluffs. Beyond the martini glass, a girl with blonde hair flashing in the setting sun paddled a kayak furiously up the lake.

  Lily returned with a bottle of vodka straight from the freezer. She looked better. I’d taken her to the hospital when we got back from Vancouver. They’d tidied up her cheek. She’d gone to bed and slept for ten hours straight. As soon as she got up she phoned a spa and asked for someone to come over for a mani-pedi. “And hair,” she’d added. The nails-and-hair guys made a big fuss over Lily’s pointy ears—“perfect!”—and murmured their approval of the cosmetics she’d looted from the jet. So sure, she looked good. But she was roped together tight, and I wasn’t fooled by the way she was trying to blow off her previous connection to Mei.

  “Try to stay with me,” she said, bombing a generous slug of vodka into the glass trembling on the railing. She plucked up a white linen napkin and drenched it in vermouth. Then she held it stretched taut above the martini glass and blew through it. Lily’s life was governed by a set of certitudes. One was that God took care of people who expressed devotion to Him in the form of large cash donations to the Catholic Church; another, that blowing through a vermouth-soaked cloth deposited a layer of vermouth atoms onto a surface of super-chilled vodka, creating the perfect martini. She tossed the napkin aside, took a sip, and sat down beside me on the wicker sofa, where she crossed her rippling ballerina’s legs.

  “When I was still in Mirny,” she said, “Fan and Mei were just starting out. The new Chinese middle class were crazy for diamonds. The Indian polishers were just opening their first factories in China. The twins thought they could muscle in. They persuaded the Chinese government to back them. By buying cheaper stolen goods directly from me, they thought they could beat the Indians on price and steal the Chinese market.”

  “And you cheated them.”

  Lily held out the glass to admire it. The vodka shimmered like liquid ice. “It’s all ancient history. Now I’m in a position to help.”

  “Fan didn’t seem to think it was ancient history. He called you a swindler.”

  We’d run into him in the hall when we were leaving and he was rushing in the door, a volcano of rage that erupted at his sister, at the shame-faced Wu, at us.

  “He didn’t have to hit the cat.”

  Fan had grabbed Mei’s arm and shaken her and shouted into her face in Chinese. Her purse wasn’t fully closed. The tiny animal had thrust out his head, flattened his ears, and hissed ferociously at Fan, who’d lashed out and struck him with the back of his hand.

  Lily wasn’t telling me much. She and Mei been ready for that meeting. Luc too, or it wouldn’t have happened. I had no doubt the room had been wired to the max. I’d done the best I could with the mike I had inside my shirt. I’d sent the recording to Tommy but hadn’t heard back yet.

  “Here’s the real question,” I said. “What’s in this for the twins? Just iDragon by itself is a $100 billion company. Even if the generals own most of it, the twins are very rich. Why this urgent interest in a diamond mine?”

  Lily stared at her martini. Her face had a somber look. She took a sip and set the glass down carefully. “I made a fool of them. This is a chance for them to wipe that out. Those people are all about face.”

  “Thanks for that penetrating analysis of the Asian mind.”

  Maybe I sounded harsher than I meant to. She tried to smile, but it didn’t work. Never mind the mani-pedi, she’d been roughed up. It was going to take more than good nails and a martini to make her a hundred percent again. But I had a problem. Someone was trying to kill me. Whoever it was had been trying to kill me since I’d set foot in Yellowknife. I didn’t think the reason was going to turn out to be that China’s generals wanted to help their boy feel better about being a chump.

  “Come on, Lily. The bigger picture. What are the twins going to do with a diamond mine? They’re going to use it as a wedge. They’ll take out one competitor, and then the next, and in the end they’ll control the whole Canadian Arctic diamond field.”

  She finished her martini and gave me a despairing look. I’d been raking her over the coals since we got back. Like an interrogator, asking the same questions over and over, ready to seize on any discrepancy.

  “I can’t go on, Alex,” she said. “I know you’re angry. I can’t help that.” She got up and seized my hand. “We have to get out of here.”

  * * *

  We left the apartment and took the elevator down to the parking garage. Lily thumbed a button on the key
s. The F350 beeped and flashed its lights, and the doors unlocked with a clunk. She sprang eagerly into the cab and waved a wand at the garage door. It rumbled open. We thundered out onto the street. She put the windows down, filling the cab with the rush of evening air.

  She took a roundabout route that circled the lake and skirted the airport. We left the city behind and flew out along a narrow highway that wound through the forest. Lakes shivered through the trees. The sun was getting lower in the west, slashing the road with ragged shadows. The wind peeled Lily’s skirt from her thighs. Her face relaxed as the massive truck devoured the road. A sign for a canoe launch appeared at the side of the road. Lily stabbed the brakes. The tires squealed and the truck slewed around, and we shot down the rough track in a storm of dirt. The rutted trail bent through the woods until it ended at the shore of a sparkling lake. She turned off the engine and gazed at the wrinkled surface twitching in the sun. The deep silence of the forest poured around us. It wrapped us in a soundlessness made more profound by the ticking of the engine as it cooled. She unbuckled her seat belt and let it snap away. She turned to me and yanked my T-shirt over my head, twisted out of her skirt, and flowed across the cab. She straddled me and pulled my face to her breasts.

  * * *

  Afterward she clung to me. She wound the fingers of one hand into my hair and with the other grasped my back. She gasped and began to shudder. I felt hot tears on my shoulder. She pressed her face into my neck to stifle her sobs, until a long, terrible cry wrenched itself from her body and she abandoned herself to fear and pain.

  “I thought we would die out there in the plane,” she sobbed, and after another tremor shook her, “Alex, I’m afraid.”

  We swam out into the icy lake. The coldness of the water calmed her. We sat on the rocks to dry. In the deep blue sky a single cloud caught fire, its top scalloped in orange flame. We inhaled the fragrant air.

  “The forest smell reminds me of Siberia,” she said. I thought she must be thinking of her childhood, until she said, “I met them at a dacha near Mirny.”

  It took me a moment to realize she was talking about the twins.

  “Mei and Fan?”

  “Yes.” She laid her head against my chest. “I never did business at the dacha. It was a retreat. But when Mei made contact with me, they were already in the city.”

  “And you wanted to keep the contact secret.”

  “Until I knew how to proceed.”

  She meant until she figured out how to cheat the oligarchs out of a share.

  “So you met them both.”

  “Yes, but only spoke to her. She could speak a little Russian, and I hadn’t let them know I could speak English.”

  “To keep them at a disadvantage.”

  “Of course. It made Fan angry that only she and I were talking. He kept interrupting her for explanations. He was afraid of being cheated, even though they had an expert with them.”

  “He was afraid the expert would sell them out.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I guess he did.”

  “Of course. I gave him a cut.”

  “And the twins got a few hundred thousand carats of garbage.”

  She put her hand against my chest. “I wish we could be different with each other.”

  “You could always start by telling me the truth.”

  She pressed her lips against my chest and nestled her head again. “But then I would be the only one doing so.”

  “Maybe it would start a trend.”

  We dressed. She handed me the keys. I drove slowly out through the trees and onto the paved highway that led back to town. Lily opened her purse and took out a small bag of cosmetics and angled the rearview mirror. By the time we got back to Yellowknife, she didn’t look like a woman who had cried. Or had anything to cry about. Lily often accused me of locking my emotions away with my past. I don’t think she saw it in herself. She believed her tendency to erupt into the moment meant she was in touch with herself. But eruptions don’t reveal the past. They bury it.

  She applied the last touch of lipstick, smacked her lips at the mirror, and practiced shaping her mouth into a smile.

  14

  M itzi waited for us on a bench at the end of a pier. She looked like a figure in a Hopper painting, alone and stark, separated from the rest of humankind by a force field of personal isolation. The marina was near the floatplane dock. As we walked out, a plane flashed past behind her with a roar and landed in the channel.

  Her dark brown hair hung in a tangled mop. A shaved patch on her scalp was stained orange by surgical disinfectant. A neat row of black stitches closed the wound where a splinter had cut her head. Like us, she was peppered with tiny cuts. A bandage covered her most serious wound, the gash inside her thigh. She finished a can of root beer, crushed it in her hand, and tossed it in a garbage bin. She tried not to wince when she stood up.

  “Hey, guys.” She brushed the hair from her eyes. She looked even younger than she was. Lily grabbed her and gave her a fierce hug. Mitzi made an awkward move to disengage, and stumbled on the bad leg. “I know,” she said. “Sorry. I mean, thanks.” She turned away with a red face. Her shoulders heaved as she drew a deep breath. She rummaged around in her bin of disguises and managed to find a scrap of a grin. We got into her boat and motored out onto the dark water.

  Mitzi lived on a houseboat in Yellowknife Bay. She went back and forth from the marina in a fiberglass inboard with a small wheelhouse and a freight deck that took up the back half of the boat. When we were underway she left the wheel for a moment and stepped from under the canopy. She swept the sky for incoming planes. Satisfied, she turned across the channel and increased power. A thin blue film of exhaust crawled behind us on the wake. Mitzi stood at the wheel, in the same cargo shorts and faded denim jacket with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair blew around in the breeze, the orange stripe of the scalp wound flaring into view. She gathered solitariness around her like a cloak.

  As we crossed the bay, brightly painted houses appeared, their west-facing sides ignited by the sinking sun. The houses sat on platforms moored to rocky islands or anchored just offshore in the shelter of the land. A few were shacks, squatting on rafts and patched with sheets of corrugated tin. Most were in better shape—two- and even three-story houses surrounded by decks with planters full of flowers. Some had balconies on the upper floors. A fleet of watercraft bobbed against the platforms—aluminum fishing boats; wooden scows with huge outboards for ferrying building supplies and fuel; canoes and kayaks and sailboats rocking on the swell.

  We pulled in beside a steel barge with a white clapboard house on top. A wooden landing stage was moored to the barge, and a flight of steps led up to a deck covered in Astroturf. Pete was scraping at the grill of a gas barbecue, an empty sling hanging from his neck. He clicked the starter button, and blue jets of gas sprang to life. He shoved his right arm back in the sling.

  “Pete,” Lily said. “You flew through an attack by trained assassins. Both your arms were injured. You managed to land on rocks without killing us.” Her skirt was rippling in the breeze, and the tips of her ears were peeking from her dark curls. She unveiled the smile she’d been working on since we stepped aboard the boat. “Plus”—she tapped him on the chest—“you cook! Women have fantasies about men like you.” She cocked her head at Mitzi. “Can I have him when you’re done?”

  “It seems kind of greedy,” Mitzi said. “Haven’t you got one already?”

  “But he can’t cook,” Lily said sadly. “I’m not saying he isn’t great, but just at the one thing.”

  Pete and I stared into space while the women finished batting practice. Finally the coals were ready, and the meat hissed onto the grill. The topic turned to why caribou backstrap was better than filet mignon and how the great herds that roamed the Arctic were vanishing.

  “Except in Russia,” Lily said. “One of the Siberian herds has more than half a million animals.”

  She put her knife and fork on the sid
e of her plate and gazed across the water. “This reminds me of my home,” she said. Her voice was somber now. “Mirny is on the same latitude as Yellowknife. If we traveled west in a straight line, we would come to my city.” She smiled, but her face had taken on a tragic look. Lily hated Mirny. She had barely survived the torture she’d suffered there. But it wasn’t really Mirny she was thinking of, or even Russia. She was thinking of the enchanted country of her childhood. The sun had set; the afterglow was fading from the sky. The little city glowed in the tea-colored light. “I’ve seen the sky turn just this color,” Lily murmured.

  No high spirits now. From anyone. The mood was sinking into the encroaching night. I could see the exhaustion taking over Mitzi’s face. The EMT guys at the diamond mine had stabilized her and hooked up an IV saline drip so her blood pressure wouldn’t crash. They’d medivacked her out to Yellowknife in a stupor. The ER docs at the hospital in town had put her under and spent three hours in the OR, untangling the hardened mess created by the blood-clotting spray and picking splinters and bits of cloth out of the wounds. Now the crooked smile had turned into a grimace, and her skin had a sheen of perspiration. She picked up some plates and headed for the house. I grabbed a few things and followed her in.

  “This isn’t going to stop,” I said. “The people behind the attack—they’re not done with you.”

  She rinsed the plates and put them on the counter, took a platter from me and rinsed that too. When she was done, she leaned against the counter and stared out the window.

  “Where do we even start?” she said.

  “We start with you telling me what Jimmy found.”

  15

  We left the house and entered Jimmy Angel’s diamond lab. Mitzi closed the heavy door behind us. It locked automatically, the bolt shooting home with a spring-driven thunk. The fluorescent bulbs flickered for a moment before flooding the room with a strong, harsh light. A bench with a microscope and diamond scales stood in a corner. Clear Ziploc bags with mineral samples sat on some cabinets. But the most striking feature of the room was on the walls—a fantastic composition of line and color that blazed around us.