Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 04 - A Cold Blooded Business

by A Cold Blooded Business(lit)

  "Okay," Kate said agreeably, and nodded at Mutt, who, after a long, considering look that caused the younger woman to back up a step, shouldered through the swinging glass door and took up a position directly outside. Kate smiled. "Okay?"

  The young woman's gaze moved from Mutt to Kate, falling to the open collar of her shirt. At the sight of the scar her face lost color.

  "Uh, certainly." A significant harrumph came from behind the counter.

  "Certainly," she said in a stronger voice, shocked gaze unable to lift itself from the scar. "My name is Yvonne. Was there something I could help you with?"

  "No, thanks, Yvonne, I just saw the picture in the window and wanted to take a closer look." She looked over Yvonne's shoulder and her eyes widened. "Oh," she breathed. "That would be by the same hand, wouldn't it?"

  "Yes." Yvonne followed Kate to a red and purple monstrosity that covered most of one wall. Kate stared, enraptured. It was a sunset.

  Maybe. The paint appeared to have been applied with a trowel. She looked closer. Something resembling medical gauze and mirrored chips of glass and what might have been a razor blade had been incorporated into the globs of paint. In another corner a syringe with a broken needle had been glued to the canvas. Not a sunset, after all, Kate decided, but the residue of a run with Jerry Mcisaac . She couldn't quite reconcile that theory with the peony in a third corner, though. A lily she could have understood, but not a peony.

  "Quite an interesting technique, wouldn't you say?" Yvonne said brightly, next to her. "Carroll is one of our most promising young artists. Notice how the effrontery of line clashes with the insolence of color, and how his choice of supplementary media connect the two to make a statement."

  Kate hung on every word. "I hadn't quite seen it that way," she said, adding earnestly, "And what statement would that be, exactly?"

  Yvonne started to tell her and was stopped by another meaningful harrumph. Kate repressed a grin and stepped back, immensely relieved that she'd already justified her expense account. There were some things even RPetco's money did not deserve to be spent on.

  The door opened behind them, and Kate turned, curious to see who else had been suckered inside by the putative picture in the window.

  He was an old man, dressed in dirty jeans and a red wool shirt frayed at the elbows. He had no coat. His face was dark and seamed, his black hair lank, his eyes rheumy and he needed a shave. A battered cardboard box under one arm, he stopped just inside the door, converged upon by both dress-for-success suits in the same moment. "Yes, sir, may I help you?" the older woman said. Her tone was sure she couldn't.

  He held out the box. His movements were slow, made so by age or alcohol or both. "This is my work."

  "We don't buy art," the older woman said.

  "This is my work," the old man repeated, his voice rising.

  The woman's voice raised to match his. "We don't buy art. Go down to Taheta or one of the other shops. We don't buy art."

  The old man seemed bewildered by the force of her reply. "This is my work. All I want is two hundred dollars to get home."

  The woman's voice rose to a shout. "We have no money to buy art! Go to Taheta!"

  "All I want is to get home!"

  Kate pushed between the two women. "Let me see, uncle," she said to the old man, her voice gentle.

  She could smell the alcohol coming off him from where she stood, but he held himself erect. When he saw Kate, his bleary eyes widened. He spoke a phrase and she shook her head. "I'm sorry, uncle, I have no Yupik.

  Please, show me your work." To Yvonne's boss, she said, "Mind if we sit here for a moment?"

  She did, but something in Kate's cool gaze gave her pause. "Of course not," she said finally, forcing an insincere smile. She glanced through the glass door, obviously nervous that another legitimate customer might be discouraged from entering her gallery when they saw the customers she was currently entertaining. There was only Mutt, who yawned at her through the glass door, displaying her fangs to advantage, and she retreated hurriedly behind the counter.

  Kate slipped a hand beneath the old man's elbow and guided him to one of the chairs against the wall. "Sit, uncle."

  "I just want to go home," he said, his voice exhausted of energy.

  "I know," she said. "I know. Please, show me what you have."

  The cardboard box was filled with pieces of ivory carved into animal figures. There were walruses and caribou and bears and salmon and otters. The best piece was a sleek, fat seal, with an impish, grinning human face peeking out of the fur on his back. All were old, very old, yellow in color and cracked, their edges worn smooth.

  Kate replaced the little seal with a reverent hand. "Uncle," she said, looking up at him, "where did you get these?"

  "They are my work." He refused to meet her eyes, but a tinge of red crept up into his cheeks, and she knew. She folded the lid of the box down and reached for her wallet. The little otter and the books had dug a big hole in her reserve of cash. She debated whether to take him over to the other gallery, and rejected the notion at once. If she could keep him from selling them, she would. "Here's forty dollars.

  No, uncle, keep your work. It is too good to sell. Take it home."

  "I can't get home," he muttered, shoving the box back at her. "I don't have any money."

  She folded his hand around the bills, and spoke slowly, holding his rheumy eyes with hers. "This is all I have right now. I'll get more, and meet you in front of the Army-Navy Surplus store tomorrow morning. I'll give you a ride to the airport and put you on a plane. Where do you live, uncle? What is your village?"

  He looked at her, dazed. "Savoonga. I just want to go home."

  Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island, at the southern entrance to the Bering Strait and closer to the Chukotsk Peninsula of Siberia than to the Seward Peninsula of Alaska. Gambell was on St. Lawrence Island, too.

  Instinctively she reached inside her jacket and touched the box holding the little otter.

  There were restive movements from behind the counter. In a calming voice Kate repeated her words and hoped they got through. Again, he pressed the box on her, and this time she took it. She was afraid of what he'd do with it if she didn't.

  They went outside together. He smiled when he saw Mutt and said something to her in Yupik. Mutt ducked her head, flattened her ears, gave her tail an ingratiating wag and even went so far as to give a small yip in salute. The old man smiled kindly at both of them in farewell. "Don't forget, uncle, tomorrow morning," Kate called. "In front of Army-Navy, about ten o'clock. All right?"

  He raised a hand and shuffled off. To Mutt Kate said, "And when did you learn to speak Yupik? I thought you only spoke Aleut."

  Mutt raised a superior eyebrow and didn't reply in either tongue.

  Kate spent her last two dollars on a cafe mocha double tall and walked the two and a half blocks to the Downtown Deli, juggling bag, box and coffee cup and trying hard not to feel depressed.

  It was too early in the year for the tourists to have taken over as was their invariable habit, and Jack had already found them a table.

  From the expression of restrained fury on his face it had not been a good morning. She slid into the booth and eyed him warily. "Hi."

  The waiter, also the owner, also a former mayor of Anchorage, bustled up with two beers and set them both in front of Jack. He saw Kate and paused, pushing straight black hair out of his eyes. "Kate. Long time no see."

  "How are you, Tony? I voted for you for governor, what the hell happened?"

  He laughed. "I don't know. Never underestimate the call of the weird in Alaskan politics."

  Kate thought of their sitting governor and agreed wholeheartedly.

  "What can I get you?"

  "Coffee, with cream."

  "Can do."

  The ex-mayor left and Kate looked across at Jack, who was finishing his first beer. "What happened this morning to turn you into the Grinch?" He drained his bottle, burped and said one word. "Jane."r />
  "Ah." Kate's coffee arrived and she doctored it heavily with cream and sugar. It was best to keep her blood sugar up when Jane was the subject under discussion. She ordered a Reuben (she was in Anchorage, after all, Alaska's stand in for Sodom and Gomorrah, she might as well act like it). Jack ordered a roast beef-tomato-cream cheese combination that was hell on the cholesterol and made Kate wish instantly that she'd ordered it instead. "What'd she want?"

  He snorted. "This time? Only the title to the duplex."

  "What?"

  "You know I wanted to put it on the market last year?" "I thought you had."

  "So did I," he said grimly. "Remember I offered to split the profit with her fifty-fifty?" "I remember," Kate said. She also remembered the reservations she'd had about the plan at the time. She offered the same opinion now she had then: none.

  He nodded again, this time at an official-looking envelope lying on the table that showed signs of being wrung as if it were a substitute for someone's neck. "Today she tells me she's retained an attorney. He tells me she told him that I told her that the duplex was her retirement fund.

  He's filed papers and clouded the title, so now I can't sell it." He jerked a contemptuous thumb. "And she showed up at the office today to inform me that if I sign the title over to her, and pay her thirty thousand dollars, that she'll call him off." He glared at her. "It's not funny, Kate. Now I've got to get an attorney and defend the title to something I've owned for twenty years!"

  "You never should have let her stay there rent-free after the divorce,"

  Kate couldn't help saying.

  "If it wasn't for Johnny I wouldn't have." She said nothing and he glared at her again. "Shut up, okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Just shut the hell up."

  The sandwiches arrived. Jack's looked good but Kate's tasted like fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and she closed her eyes in momentary ecstasy.

  Around a mouthful of roast beef Jack said indistinctly, "If you say I told you so, I will kill you." "Mmmphmmm," Kate said, more interested at that moment in pastrami.

  He relaxed enough to give half a grin. "What have you been up to this morning?"

  She swallowed. "Justifying my expense account."

  She produced her otter, and he fingered it appreciatively. "Nice piece of work."

  "I think so." She touched a fingertip to the otter's head.

  He gave her a sharp look. After a moment he said, "It's found money, Kate. You're supposed to blow it. Like the Permanent Fund dividend.

  It's required." She shrugged, and he nodded at the box. "What's in there?" She told him of the old man in the art gallery.

  "Ivory?" Jack was interested. "I heard somewhere that scrap ivory sells for as much as a hundred fifty dollars a pound Outside."

  "This isn't scrap."

  "May I?" He pulled the box toward him and looked inside. "Holy shit.

  I guess not." He handled the little charms one at a time, admiring the fierce lines of an eagle, grinning at the crafty expression of a raven, whistling when he saw the seal. "I'll say it isn't. What's this little face on its back?" Kate thought back to the stories and legends learned at Ekaterina's knee. "The Aleuts believed that animals possessed souls that could change into human form. Hunters would see these, they called them anua, in the fur or the feathers or the eyes of what they were hunting."

  He held the little figurine higher to examine it more closely. "What was this for?"

  Kate shrugged. "Could have been any number of things. Since it's a seal, maybe as a decoration for a harpoon, but it served more than a decorative purpose."

  "How so?"

  Kate took another bite of sandwich and said thickly, "Say an Eskimo hunter went seal hunting, and he used a harpoon. He would decorate the harpoon in honor of the seal, to please its anua. The anua lived on after the seal died, transferring to another, as yet unborn animal.

  The hunter believed the anua remembered how it was treated in its previous life."

  "So if it was treated well in this one--" Kate nodded. "It would be willing to feed the hunter again in the next." "Anua," he said, his brow creasing. "I remember. Anua was the name of that island, down the Chain.

  Where those two guys were killed." Kate nodded. Jack looked down at the tiny face grinning up at him from the back of the ivory seal. "He sure has character, doesn't he? Looks like Puck." He handed the charm back to her. "He dig it out of his backyard, you think?"

  "Out of his family's graveyard, more likely," Kate said, sighing. She put down the seal and picked up her otter. "Who flies to St. Lawrence nowadays?"

  "I don't know. Cape Smythe Air from Nome to Gambell, probably. Mark Air from Anchorage to Nome."

  "After what they did to Wien Air Alaska, you couldn't get me on a Mark Air jet at gunpoint," she said promptly.

  "You're not the one doing the flying," he pointed out.

  "No," she said, but she didn't sound all that certain.

  He sat up. "You aren't, are you? You're not feeling like you have to personally escort him home?"

  She shifted in her seat. "I don't know. I've never been to St. Lawrence Island. I'll never make this kind of money again. Maybe I should." She set the otter on the table next to the seal. The seal was the color of old ocher, lined with tiny cracks, bearing its weight of culture and tradition with a life force undimmed by the passing of the years. Next to it, the otter was the color of fresh cream, every etched line sharp and clear, the heritage of the past and a legacy for the future captured by the carver's art in a three-inch piece of ivory.

  "I could pay my compliments to Wilson Oozeva personally."

  Jack wet his forefinger and picked up crumbs of bread, licking them off one at a time. Without looking at her he said, "He won't be there tomorrow, you know."

  She looked out the window. "Maybe. Maybe not."

  His voice was gentle but inexorable. "You shouldn't have given him the money. You know he headed straight for the nearest bar."

  "Maybe," she said, her eyes fixed on the foot traffic passing in front of the restaurant, at Mutt waiting patiently next to the door. One man paused as if to give her an approving pat on the head, met that unblinking yellow stare, thought better of it and moved on. "Maybe not."

  Her profile was obdurate, the line of her mouth stubborn. He sighed and drained his second beer. "What are you going to do with that?" He nodded at the box.

  "Keep it for him."

  "What if you never see him again?" She shot him an annoyed glance. He persisted. "That stuff belongs in a museum, Kate."

  Kate picked up the seal again, admiring the taut spotted skin stretched smoothly over a layer of fat, its round nose, its delicately carved flippers. She remembered Olga Shapsnikoff, on a day in October of the previous year, in a town far out on the Aleutian Chain, answering Kate when Kate had said much the same thing of an ivory story knife wielded by her daughter.

  It's a beautiful thing, Auntie, Kate had said. And valuable. It should be in a museum.

  Its spirit would die, locked up in a place where it was never touched, Olga had replied.

  "Maybe," Kate said slowly.

  "And maybe not," Jack said, nodding his head as if he understood everything when in fact he understood nothing at all. He was good at it; with Kate, he got plenty of practice. "What are your plans for the afternoon?"