Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 04 - A Cold Blooded Business

by A Cold Blooded Business(lit)

  The four exchanged slightly sheepish glances. "Actually," Rebecca said apologetically, "we're not that good. There's been a rash of stuff from St. Lawrence through the U lately. The St. Lawrence islanders are digging up every square foot of ground that'll take a shovel, looking for artifacts to sell." "Yeah," Chris said in disgust, "I spent last summer on St. Lawrence.

  You ought to see it. People been digging up so many graves, the place looks like it's been carpet bombed."

  "The reverence one is likely to have for their ancestors decreases in direct proportion to how hungry their children are at the time," Karen said, her voice tart. "St. Lawrence Island doesn't have exactly what you'd call a booming economy."

  "Yeah," Kevin agreed, "and it's the same story in a lot of the villages all over the state. These folks used to make a pretty good living off the land and the sea. Now they've got the Fish and Game breathing down their necks, and the processors screaming discrimination, and they're lucky if they can get their nets wet twice a week. Not that there's anything in the water worth catching anymore, since the long-liners started dragging up the bottom of the ocean out in the Doughnut Hole and selling it off to Japan."

  "I know, I know," Chris said impatiently, "I don't mean to judge. But they're destroying their own heritage. What are we, if we're not the product of thousands of years of evolution, and if we don't know how we got where we are--"

  "How are we supposed to know where we're going?" the other three said in chorus.

  Chris flushed and laughed. "Nice to know you've been paying attention."

  "You're right, though," Rebecca said, sobering. "It is nothing more than cultural cannibalism."

  She looked accusingly at Kate. The other three followed suit, and for a moment Kate felt like she'd been caught robbing a grave. "It isn't mine," she said, her voice rising a little. "It belongs to a friend."

  They didn't say anything. "Honest. I didn't dig it up out of my grandmother's grave, in fact, she's still living, so I couldn't have.

  It's not for sale." "Wait till somebody makes an offer," Chris said cynical iykate looked down at the little seal. "How much would something like this go for?"

  "The Detroit Institute of Arts paid fifty-five thousand dollars for an ivory figure from Point Hope, no questions asked."

  Kate was incredulous. "How much?"

  "Fifty-five thousand individual United States greenback dollar bills."

  .

  "Bullshit," she said involuntarily.

  "It's true," Chris insisted.

  Kevin nodded glum agreement. "Sotheby's auctioned off a stone lamp from Kodiak for fifteen grand a while back." Shaken, Kate said, "It's no wonder there's a black market in the stuff if it's going for prices like that." She thought. "But wait a minute, didn't I read somewhere that they passed a federal act making that illegal?"

  "The Archaeological Resources Protection Act," Karen said, nodding.

  "Actually, it was passed in 1979, but they beefed up the penalties recently." She looked at Rebecca. "You're our resident legal expert, Becky. What is it now, twenty grand maximum in fines and two years in jail for a first offense?"

  "And up to a hundred grand for a second," Rebecca confirmed, nodding.

  "But it doesn't apply to buying and selling, only to the pot hunting itself, and only on sites located on public lands." "Shit," Kevin said, disgusted, "most of the state of Alaska is public land. How are you supposed to police 591,000 square miles, most of it wilderness, with eleven park rangers equipped with nothing but a writ?"

  "The worst part of it is, the diggers move things," Chris said.

  "Move things?"

  "Yeah." He pointed at the seal Kate held. "That alone doesn't interest us much. It's a beautiful example of the carver's art, it'd probably sell for a hell of a lot of money in Detroit or New York, but our interest would be in where it was found." He saw Kate's uncomprehending look and elaborated. "Where it was found geographically, of course, like where in Alaska, but especially where in relation to the rest of the dig. This"--he held up the seal--"this was probably an amulet, a charm for a seal hunter, to bring, him good luck on a hunting trip, to honor the animal he was hunting. Maybe he wore it around his neck, maybe it was attached to his visor, maybe it was fixed to his kayak. We'd have a better way of knowing for sure if we could see where it was found."

  "Like if it was found near the remains of a kayak, you'd be pretty sure it was a kayak charm," Kate said, "whereas if it was found in a grave around a skeleton's neck, you'd know it was a personal charm. And that would tell you something about who and what the guy in the grave was."

  He gave her an approving smile and Kate was proud she'd said a smart thing, but his smile didn't last long. "The way it stands now, it's a charmer of a charm but it doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know. Like this little bear we found. Come on, I'll show you." He led the way back to the trailer and pulled a drop cloth from the corner of one table, revealing three ulu blades, fragments of various wooden bowls and a thread spool shaped from ivory, but no bear. "Where is it?" He looked around, pulling sheets back from the other tables, one after another, revealing an extensive collection of objects made from rock, bone, wood, ivory and skin, but still no bear. "Doggone it, you guys, where's the bear we found week before last? The little ivory one? The polar bear?"

  Kevin pointed. "It was on that table, on the corner there, right next to the lamp with the walrus head, yesterday."

  Chris straightened, frowning. "Well, it's not there now. Neither is the lamp."

  "What?"

  The four of them turned the trailer upside down, but they couldn't find either the bear or the lamp. The team was deeply upset at the discovery.

  "Those were two of our best pieces," Rebecca said, near tears.

  Chris put a comforting arm around her. "Cheer up, Becky. Look, I know I locked the door last night when we left. They were good pieces, the best. Otto probably took them for safekeeping. Try not to worry about it until we talk to him."

  "Where is Otto?" Kate asked.

  "He stayed behind at the Base Camp this morning," Chris told her. "Said he had to make some phone calls, do some paperwork."

  Wake up slow with Toni, Kate thought.

  Chris walked her to her truck. She climbed in and rolled down the window. "Chris," she said. "What do you think really happened to them?

  To the missing artifacts?"

  "I don't know." He kicked at a lump of snow. "I'd hate to think--I just don't know." She asked a question she knew he didn't want to answer.

  "Has anything else gone missing lately?" He met her eyes, his own troubled, but she was right, he didn't reply. "You think they might have been stolen?"

  He shrugged, saving himself the need to say it out loud.

  "You trust your people?"

  "Of course," he said, "of course I trust them," but his indignation sounded forced and he contradicted himself with his next breath. "They auctioned off a wooden Tlingit bowl at Christie's last week for five thousand dollars. Our staff archaeologists barely make minimum wage.

  How can we compete with that?"

  "Appeal to people's finer feelings," Kate suggested, only half facetiously.

  "People don't have any finer feelings when it comes to cold hard cash,"

  Chris said morosely.

  Kate's inconvenient memory kicked in with Ekaterina's enraged expression, and the words that went with it, Shame on you, Katya. "No," she agreed, "I guess we don't."

  A mile or so from the dugout she stopped the truck and looked back. At that distance the mound of the roof blended into the horizon, indistinguishable but for the scurrying figures around it. At that distance the mound might be a landed whale, and the figures the crew that had landed it, yesterday or a thousand years ago.

  Behind the mound the stone calm was barely discernible. The wellhead stood out in clear relief, and ten miles beyond it the gas flares at the Central Compression Plant burned without ceasing.

  She was corralled by Harri
s Perry at the door of the Base Camp and, along with the other three B Shift roustabouts, detailed to help clean up a crude spill on Z Pad. A wellhead valve had malfunctioned and Z Pad was right on the Kuparuk River, so the cleanup was a matter of some urgency. Black gook stretched out in a pool twenty feet across and the smell of sulfur made Kate's eyes water. The in-house environmentalist was there with a response list attached to a clipboard, and succeeded so well in getting in everyone's way that one of Kate's fellow roustabouts, a burly, taciturn man in his fifties, shouldered her into an open lead in the otherwise frozen river. The environmentalist emerged bawling, sloshed to her Suburban, slammed inside and kicked gravel fifty yards peeling out. The other two roustabouts promised the burly man a night out on the town their next week in. Kate was careful to add her congratulations to those of her coworkers. The Kuparuk River looked cold and Kate had always had an innate aversion to getting her feet wet.

  "Greenies," the burly man said with loathing. "For a thousand years it was a frozen wasteland. Now all of a sudden it's the goddam delicate tundra."

  The rest of the afternoon was spent laying out absorbent pads, with Kate doing most of the work under the disinterested gaze of three self-appointed supervisors, who all made a lot of money that afternoon sitting in a truck chewing toothpicks.

  She recounted the afternoon's activities to Dale and Toni over dinner, not forgetting what had happened the last time she had brought a grievance to this table. Dale said instantly, "Prudhoe Bay, Where Conservation and Corporation Meet."

  "Oil Field or Wildlife Refuge?" Toni retaliated. "Only Your Stockbroker Knows for Sure." She sipped her coffee reflectively and added, "I don't know why we don't just quit the Slope and go into advertising. We're wasted here."

  "Speaking of wasted," Dale said, "how was that Seattle SWAT team you toured last month? I forgot to ask."

  "Actually, not a bad bunch of guys. For hired killers."

  After dinner Toni carried Kate off to a pinochle game with Warren Rice and Sue Jordan. Kate lost twenty bucks, partly because she never failed in her belief that her partner had everything she needed to make a run, mostly because she'd always been more interested in the players than in the cards.

  Halfway through the third game Otto Leckerd materialized and Hartzler abandoned shooting the moon for going there. "Otto," Kate called after the lovers.

  He turned to look at her, hand brushing but not quite holding Toni's.

  "What?"

  "You find those missing artifacts out at the dig?"

  "What missing artifacts?"

  "You know, the ivory bear, the stone lamp? Chris and the others told me about losing them. Have you found them yet?"

  She watched with interest as the color left his face, leaving it a pasty white, and kept watching as the color flooded back in, turning him a tomato-red. Her gaze shifted to Toni, who was looking at her with a considering expression, brows slightly puckered. As soon as Toni noticed Kate looking, her forehead resumed its usual porcelain-smooth perfection. She hooked her arm through Otto's and pressed it to her side. "What's all this? Have your little spirits been walking off with artifacts?"

  Otto met Toni's eyes and his flush began to fade. "Not that I know of," he said, trying on a smile for size. It was a good attempt but it fit tight across the chest. He looked back at Kate. "No, we haven't found them," he told her. "We think they got mixed in with another shipment to the university by mistake. I put a call into the department. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they turn up." He smiled at Kate again, a better effort this time. She smiled back, thinking, I'm sure it will be. She wasn't as sure precisely where they would turn up.

  Ann Mccord wandered through as the pinochle game broke up and invited Kate to a party in Gideon's room. Kate was tired and all she wanted was bed, but she was on the Slope to find a drug dealer and a late-night party seemed a likely lead. When she stepped in the door to see a bag of cocaine being cut on the counter by one of the kitchen helpers, she was sure of it. Half a dozen other people crowded into the room cheered him on. He finished drawing lines with a razor blade and held the now nearly empty bag up and inspected it. "Actually, I'm getting a little low.

  Going to have to resupply pretty soon."

  He looked at Ann, who grinned and shrugged. "No problem. Plenty more where that came from."

  Gideon grinned and made room for Kate in front of the counter. He gestured to the mirror. "Special guests first."

  Kate shook her head. "No, thanks."

  He looked surprised. "Oh. You sure?"

  Kate nodded. "Yeah."

  "Well." Gideon turned to a small refrigerator mounted on the wall above his bed, a site most Base Camp residents reserved for televisions. "A beer, then. Or wine, I've got some great chardonnay."

  "There hasn't been a good chardonnay made since 1981," Ann told him.

  Gideon made a face at her. "Some cabernet, then. Joe Heitz. I don't offer Joe to just anybody."

  Kate shook her head. "I'd take some juice, if you've got any."

  Gideon looked askance, and turned to rummage in the refrigerator. "I don't know, I--oh. Here. Some cranapple okay?"

  "Fine."

  "I could dress it up a little for you." Gideon hefted a bottle of vodka from the shelf at the opposite end of the bed.

  Kate, tired of shaking her head, said baldly, "No."

  He looked at her. "You don't want a line, wine or a shot. What's the matter with you, you some kind of narc?"

  It was a remark made too close for comfort. Kate forced a laugh.

  "Yeah, you're all under arrest. Up against the wall."

  On the phone a young man in kitchen whites was saying Wearily, "That's right, Warren, I want to talk to Australia." Conversation quite naturally ground to a halt around him and Kate took an unobtrusive breath of relief. "Who? I don't care, just somebody with a sink."

  With gentle fingers Gideon pried the phone out of his hands. "Wade?

  Wade?" Wade had a hard time focusing. "Wade? Why do you want to talk to Australia?"

  Wade blinked a few times. "Because?"

  "Why?" Gideon repeated.

  "Because," Wade said, "I want to find out why the water goes clockwise down the drain up here and counter clockwise down there." He flung out a thumb that nearly impaled the woman next to him. "Martha just got back and she says it does and I want to know why, is all."

  Another man offered to call his sister in Uruguay and see if she knew, and an argument immediately erupted over whether Uruguay was enough

  "down there" to qualify.

  Kate eventually got her cranapple juice, straight, but things were never quite as friendly out after that, and she left as soon as the glass was empty.

  She went back to her room, getting madder with every step.

  No matter how many times she'd been through the same reaction it never failed to annoy her. First surprise, then suspicion, lastly hostility.

  So she didn't want a drink. So what was the almighty goddam big deal?

  She didn't drink at all, ever. Her mother and her father had both been alcoholics. Her cousin Martin was a living, breathing object lesson in substance abuse. Alcohol and all its attendant problems had been the ruination of village life in Alaska and was decimating her race, and it was her choice to stay away from it. It was also her right, but it was almost impossible to convince some people of that.

  It had been the same in college, at parties with people passing joints around. Kate had always refused, and her classmates had regarded her if not with suspicion, then as something more than a prude and something less than a self-made saint. It was just another way she was different, along with the color of her skin and the smarts that kept her on the dean's list for four years in a row. When she wouldn't go out on a toot with the boys at Quantico, she got the same reaction. She was tired of it.