Icy Clutches

by Aaron Elkins

  "Steven Fisk,” John said.

  "—Steven...how the hell did you know?"

  John's happy laugh burbled from the receiver. “I read it in a book."

  "Damn, you spoiled my big scene,” Gideon muttered. “What do you mean, you—"

  "Gotta run. I'll pick you guys up at the airport at five. Tell you all about it then."

  There was time for a late lunch at the Fiddlehead, just down the block on West Willoughby. There, in a country-kitchen atmosphere of knotty-pine paneling, flowered wallpaper, and the smell of baking bread, he sat at a butcher-block table wolfing down black bean soup with wedges of dark rye bread and wondered how John had come up with Steven Fisk. Well, at least it was a good thing they'd arrived at the same conclusion.

  Restored, he caught the bus to the airport an hour before the flight for Gustavus. Twenty minutes later Julie arrived, having spent her truant afternoon on a bus tour of Juneau's major tourist attraction.

  Mendenhall Glacier.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 18

  * * * *

  John didn't believe in keeping things mysterious. Before the borrowed green Park Service car had pulled out of the parking area at the Gustavus Airport he was handing a sheaf of papers to Gideon and Julie, who were in back.

  "Tremaine's manuscript,” he announced.

  "You're kidding,” Gideon said. “Where'd you find it? I figured it was on the bottom of the bay."

  "It isn't the one that was stolen,” Julian Minor explained from the driver's seat. “It's a copy, faxed from Los Angeles."

  "There's a fax machine up here?” Julie asked.

  "Faxed to Juneau, then flown here,” John explained. “I got to thinking, maybe the guy used a word processor, and if he did there'd be a disk someplace, and maybe if our L.A. guys got into his safe deposit box they'd find it. And they did."

  "Good thinking,” Gideon said, opening the folder.

  "I believe it was my idea, John,” Minor said mildly.

  "Hey, are we a team, or what? Turn to where the paper clip is, Doc. That's where he talks about it."

  Gideon opened the folder and spread it so that both he and Julie could read.

  Even now, writing in comfort and security during the twilight of my life, it stands out in my mind with a real and terrible clarity. Not the great cataclysm itself; not the endless day and night I lay, crushed and broken, locked in the freezing, blue-white embrace of the ice; not even the miraculous, dimly perceived appearance of my rescuers the next day, long after I had given up hope and longed only for oblivion from pain.

  No, what I need only close my eyes to call up in harrowing detail is an image rooted not in the great forces of nature, but in the equally ungovernable passions of men. In the blinking of an eye, everything—the sexual jealousies and antipathies of the last several days; the exasperation over Walter's costly errors; the natural tensions that arise in any isolated group which has been in too-intimate contact for too long under too-trying circumstances—all of it came to an explosive, tragic head over an incident so trivial as to be absurd.

  Until that moment the day had gone well, due, I think, to my one-more-fight-and-you-flunk warning before we started. James was affecting his brooding-genius mood: quiet, aloof, darkly contemplative—and wisely keeping his distance from both Steven and Jocelyn. For his part, Steven was doing his Zorro imitation: all handsome, flashing smiles, cavalier unconcern, and graceful bounds from boulder to boulder, Jocelyn was...well, Jocelyn was Jocelyn: vague, placid, and off somewhere in her own thought-free world. Thus far, our excursion had produced nothing more traumatic than Walter's gallant but ultimately unsuccessful battle with a fierce mosquito, which had cost us the pleasures of his company.

  The tragic incident to which I refer occurred a little before 2:00 P.M., as we made our slow way back across the glacier, having successfully concluded our resampling in the area beyond its eastern lateral moraine. I should explain that our pace was slowed not by massive obstacles or yawning abysses (despite the pompous and officious warnings of the Park Service); on the contrary, we proceeded slowly because we were tired and warm—even on a glacier, the temperature in late July can reach the sixties—and because walking across the surface of Tirku is something like walking on a colossal natural garbage heap. No smooth, pristine ice field, this. One has constantly to pick one's way among the litter of “erratics"—boulders scraped from the flanks of the mountains above. It is all gritty black ice and debris, rocks and bumps, depressions and ruts.

  In summer, things are at their worst because of the meltwater rivulets that cut shallow, meandering furrows into the grimy ice, necessitating numerous leaps (the streams are seldom wider than four feet) or tiresome deviations. It was at one of these rivulets that the trouble occurred; an inconsequential V-shaped channel two or three feet wide, with perhaps eight inches of water flowing along its bottom. Leaping it would have been an easy matter except that the far bank rose some four feet higher than the near one and overhung it like a protruding upper lip. Making it up that bank without getting our feet wet was the problem.

  Steven, always ready to demonstrate his physical abilities, clambered up with the aid of his ice ax. Then he knelt while the rest of us, one at a time, extended our own axes to him, grasping the handle while he held firmly to the head, providing support while we scrambled up the bank. It was neither a dangerous nor a difficult maneuver. Jocelyn went first, then I did, both without incident. Then it was James's turn. Steven held out the handle. James grasped it, stretched one leg across the stream to prop his foot against the opposite bank, and began to haul himself up.

  Whether by accident or design I cannot say—no one can say—but just as James's back foot came off the ice the ax slipped from Steven's hand. James dropped straight into the stream. There was no danger—the fall was a matter of a foot or two—and although getting wet during glacier travel is not generally a laughing matter, James had barely been moistened, having landed on his elbows and knees in only a few inches of water. In any case, hypothermia was hardly a problem with the temperature where it was and the plane due to pick us up in an hour.

  "Sorry about that,” Steven said, choking down his laughter.

  James crouched on all fours, still holding the ice ax, his black hair tumbling over his forehead, glowering up at Steven from under dark eyebrows.

  It was an uneasy moment, but I think we would have gotten through it had Jocelyn not giggled. An innocent, genuinely amused giggle to be sure; but understandably it stung James. He swiped hotly at Steven's legs with the wooden handle of the ice ax, Steven grabbed it, James tugged, and Steven went tumbling down the bank head-over-heels, missing the stream but landing squarely and surely painfully—on the seat of his pants. He was on his feet at once, his face stiff with anger. James brandished the ice ax in warning, but I could see his heart wasn't in it. He was already regretting his impulsive act of a moment before. By nature a sulker and not a fighter, he'd been thoroughly cowed by Steven in their brief altercation a few days earlier and he hardly wanted another one.

  Steven was another story. His eyes were glittering with pugnacity.

  "That's enough!” I said forcefully. “Steven, stop there. James, put down the ax."

  I might have been speaking to the wind, for all the good it did. Steven thrust the palms of both hands violently against James's upper chest, as bellicose young males do, and James staggered back a few steps. He lifted the ax again. “I'm warning you,” he said in a strangled voice.

  Steven sneered, or perhaps it was a snarl, and moved forward. I jumped down from the bank and made swiftly for them. “Gentlemen—!"

  Too late. Steve's big fist smashed into James's face with a strange, flat sound. Blood spurted from his nose. His orange sunglasses hung briefly from one ear, then dropped to the ice. I managed to leap between them, grabbing for the ax, but one or the other—they both outweighed me by sixty pounds—sent me sprawling. Helplessly, disbelievingly, I watched James lash
out with the ice ax. The flat of the heavy adze portion struck Steven full in the mouth, and the chin that was so square and strong a moment before was suddenly collapsed and formless, like the face of a plastic doll trodden on by a child. A dull, doglike whine came from Jocelyn. Steven's eyes rolled up under his lids and he fell forward, blindly wrapping his arms around James while he slid to his knees, his arms loosely around James's legs, his ruined mouth leaving a long, bright smear of blood on James's trousers.

  Whether from jealousy or horror, murderous revenge or simple blood lust—certainly not from fear of the thickly moaning, virtually insensible Steven—James raised the ice ax with the unmistakable, appalling intention of bringing it down on the lolling head at his knees.

  "James!” I cried, floundering to my feet, and launched myself at him. But the distance was too great, the time too short. Before my flailing arms could stop him, the awful weapon moved in its brief, flashing arc, deeply burying its point in Steven's head in a scene so horrible it is beyond my power, and my desire as well, to set it down in detail. Suffice it to say that the blow ended Steven's young life beyond any possibility of doubt.

  Jocelyn and I stared at each other, unable to speak. Steven lay crumpled at James's feet, the awful pick still imbedded in its gruesome wound. Oddly, it was James at whom I could not bring myself to look.

  "James—,” I finally croaked, and then stopped, not knowing what I intended to say.

  It was then that I felt the first vibrations in my legs and imagined that I was trembling. It would hardly have been surprising, considering what had just happened. But no, I told myself, I wasn't going to give way under the strain. It was up to me to remain cool and rational. I shifted my feet and willed the shuddering to stop. My boots crunched on the ice. The trembling continued.

  "James,” I said again, “I want you to—"

  At that moment the sound struck: a metallic, shearing, impossible noise, as if a giant bridge were being wrenched apart behind me. Jocelyn's eyes, focused dazedly on me until then, sprang open as she stared slack-jawed over my shoulder. I whirled around just in time to see the immense, striated lobe of dirty-gray ice detach itself from the overhanging cornice atop Tlingit Ridge three-quarters of a mile to the southeast, crack into three gigantic segments, and begin to slip down.

  I was unable to tear my eyes away from the grim, apocalyptic vision. An ice avalanche is not like a snow avalanche. There is no long, graceful, white cascade into the valley below; no thick, creamy tendrils spewing clouds of white, powdery snow as they flow majestically downhill. Ninety million tons of ice falls very much like ninety million tons of rock, plummeting gracelessly in a titanic, closely packed mass, with a force beyond comprehension.

  I was still staring when the ice beneath my boots dropped two feet, wobbling my knees, then rebounded, flinging me sideways into the air as if I were standing on a blanket flicked by some playful giant. I skittered drunkenly over the surface of the glacier, grabbing at boulders, feeling that I might be flung off the very planet itself if I didn't catch hold. Twisting, I landed heavily on my right shoulder. My arm must have gone dead instantly, but I was too shocked by what was happening around me to notice.

  In all directions the rough surface of the ice was splitting into jagged crevasses, snapping and banging, and emitting puffs of white as it cracked open. Underneath, the ground pitched, tossing like a rubber raft on the open sea. With my left hand I held convulsively to an icy outcropping, dazed and unable to get up.

  As if in a dream I saw Jocelyn sliding by me, spinning like a top on the seat of her pants, down a slope that hadn't been there a few seconds before, toward a crevasse that was even then splitting open to receive her like a dreadful mouth. I tried to reach for her but to my astonishment my arm wouldn't work, and I couldn't loosen the hold of my other hand or I would go sliding after her.

  Desperately I kicked out for her with my feet. “Get hold of my legs!” I shouted (I could not hear my voice over the roar), but she only stared back, blank-eyed and dumb with shock or terror, and I had to watch, stupefied and powerless, as she slipped smoothly over the edge of the great crack and simply disappeared. A second later Steven's body slithered heavily down the same slope, the handle of the ice ax jutting up from his skull, bobbing hideously. Dogging her in death as in life, he too flopped over the brink a moment before the ice convulsed again, and the sides of the crevasse shifted, grinding back against each other with a ragged screech that sealed these two tragic lovers—what was left of them—together for eternity.

  And while this was happening I could see James on the other side of the crevasse, desperately fighting for his balance on the shifting, splintering ice; falling, then stumbling to his feet, only to be knocked down again by the incredible upheaval. For an instant his panicked eyes locked with mine, and then he was lost to sight, driven headfirst, despite his frenzied scuttling, into a jumble of sharp black boulders and broken ice.

  A sharp wind spattered my face from the direction of the avalanche and I lifted my head to see an almost spherical gray cloud already blotting out the mountains and expanding in every direction, like a motion picture of an atomic-bomb blast. Caught up in this exploding cloud, chunks of ice the size of trucks were hurtling toward me, bouncing in mesmerizing, slow parabolas of two and three hundred feet.

  A second later the vanguard of the blast was on me, howling and strafing my face with freezing, burning grit. I shut my eyes to it just as a spate of ice spicules were driven into my face. I could feel them sticking out of my cheeks like nails. A sharp piece of ice or rock struck my knee and I screamed with pain. Something hit my wrist, and something far larger crashed and squealed along the ice a few yards away. The wind was terrific, screaming in my ears, rasping my bloodied face, tearing at my handhold.

  I huddled behind the small outcropping as well as I could, but a piece of flying debris struck me in the temple with paralyzing force. Numbly, I watched my good hand loosen its grip, flutter tentatively, and drop to my side, palm up, fingers loosely curled. I seemed to be outside my own body now, looking down on myself with no more than a dispassionate curiosity. Feet first, unresisting, I slid slowly down a gentle incline toward the turquoise gash of a newly opened crevasse.

  I resigned myself to meet my maker.

  "It does fit what you found, doesn't it?” Julie said, looking up. “The ice ax, the jaw injuries, everything."

  Gideon finished the page and nodded. “All the skeletal evidence supports it. I'd have to guess this is pretty much the way it happened.” To himself he admitted a keen sense of disappointment. No profound, complex motives had come to light, no unexpected twists; just another squalid, brutal homicide, prompted by nothing more than sex, and revenge, and the searing, momentary heat of rage. The usual.

  "Not necessarily,” Minor said, keeping his eyes carefully on the road. “What happened to Steven Fisk, yes; who did it to him, no."

  "You mean maybe it was Tremaine who killed him? And then blamed it on James?"

  "Exactly. Who is there to argue the point?"

  "That could be,” John agreed. “Steve was complaining about Tremaine ripping off his ideas. Maybe this was how Tremaine shut him up.” He glanced over his shoulder at Gideon. “I hear these scientist types can get a little uptight about that stuff."

  "Maybe,” Gideon said, “but I don't think it was Tremaine who swung the ax. He would have been forty or so at the time, and a small, fragile forty at that; he couldn't have been more than 135 pounds. Steven was a muscular twenty-five-year-old 200-pounder."

  "I should think that an ice ax might compensate for any disparities,” Minor put in.

  "As far as the blow to the back of the skull goes, sure. But what about the one to the front of the jaw? Did Steven just stand there and let Tremaine belt him? From everything we've heard, he wasn't exactly a pacifist. And he had an ice ax of his own."

  "Hum,” Minor said.

  "If Tremaine didn't do it,” Julie said, “which he says he didn't, then why did he
cover it up all these years?"

  "That's in here,” John said, taking back the manuscript and leafing through the pages. “Well, I can't find it, but he talks about how he knows he made some mistakes the way he ran the project, and the personal relations were lousy and all, and he deserves the blame for the whole thing because he was the director, and he was afraid that if people found out somebody actually got murdered, he'd never direct another project."

  "So why is he suddenly willing to tell everything now?"

  "That,’ John said, “isn't in here."

  "It doesn't seem so hard to figure out,” said Gideon. “Scandals and murders sell books, and Tremaine had a book to sell. None of this could hurt his botanical career anymore. If anything, it would have made him more popular than ever. He comes off looking pretty good, at least the way he tells it."

  "Yeah, that's probably right, Doc."

  "But wouldn't the police have come after him, once it came out? For withholding evidence or something?” Julie asked.

  "Maybe, maybe not,” John said. “Anyway, what could they do to him? What would be the point?"

  "Besides,” Minor said dryly, “anything they did do would hardly be harmful to sales."

  Julie nodded. “Okay, but look: If he was going to tell all this anyway, why did he pretend he didn't remember the ice ax a few days ago? Why did he get so angry when the murder was discovered?” She held up a hand before anyone could answer. “Wait...he wanted the book to make a splash when it came out. He didn't want the story leaking out piece by piece before he was ready."

  "Could we get back to now?” asked John, whose interest in the old murder had always been limited. “Can anybody tell me what's so important about this thing?” He slapped the manuscript. “What's the big deal? Why would anybody steal it? Why would somebody kill Tremaine over it? So what if it got published? Who'd give a damn?"

  "Well,” Julie said hesitantly, “one person—I'm just thinking out loud—one person who'd care would be Gerald Pratt. He wouldn't be too happy about his brother being labeled a murderer."