The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17

by Lisa Scottoline

  To my astonishment, Omar spoke to him in Russian, and then Thanh joined the conversation. I finally realized that this was a Russian mob operation after all. Probably George, Gord, Scarface, and Omar were Uzbeks or something. Where Thanh fit in was puzzling, but he spoke Russian, so he was definitely part of the organization.

  While my mind was occupied with trying to sort this out, the bursts of Russian became an unintelligible background noise, and thus I was surprised when Yuri suddenly jumped on Omar, bringing him to the ground, and started to pummel his face with his big fist. After a moment of shocked hesitation, I tried to pull the big Russian off, but it wasn’t until Thanh helped me that we were able to stop Yuri from totally demolishing Omar’s face. Even the two of us had difficulty restraining the bastard—he kept trying to break loose to get at Omar again, all the while screaming what I recognized as curses that called into question the sexual practices of Omar’s mother. It took George to finally resolve the conflict. He simply pulled the gun that I had seen once before, issued a terse command in a low, guttural voice, and Yuri slunk off to his cave. The remains of his dinner lay spilled in the snow, so I suspect he supplemented his meal from his flask.

  Omar sat on the snow, blood dripping between his fingers as he held his face. Thanh and I convinced him to let us inspect the damage; his right eye was swollen shut, a front tooth had been knocked out, and blood was streaming from his nose and mouth. As far as I could tell, his nose wasn’t broken. I fixed him up as best I could. By this time it was dark, and everyone drifted off to their caves to sleep, except for Thanh, who stayed behind to clean up and help with preparing food for the next day.

  “Where did you learn Russian?” I asked him.

  He looked at me, and for a moment I thought I had made a mistake. “University,” he finally said.

  It seemed that getting information from Thanh was hopeless, and we finished our task in silence. I was about to go to my cave, but to my surprise, Thanh sat down on one of the seats we had carved out of the snow. He pulled something from his pocket. His headlamp revealed that it was five cigarettes inside a plastic bag. He carefully took one out, found a lighter, and lit it. There was evident pleasure in his features as he inhaled deeply.

  “Why did you visit Vietnam?” he asked, looking at me through the tendrils of smoke drifting out of his nostrils.

  “I was climbing in Asia, and I had always wanted to see the country. I heard about what the Americans did...”

  His face turned hard, and he inhaled deeply. Then he turned off his headlamp, so I could no longer make out his features. His voice had a haunting quality, disembodied, as if a specter from the past had replaced the material presence that he had presented to my eyes a few moments before.

  “You don’t know what the Americans did. Nobody really understands.”

  I was standing near him. I had switched off my headlamp earlier, and I waited in silence, not moving, not even breathing. The dark night congealed around us, except for the orange glow from the tip of Thanh’s cigarette. Time stood still.

  “I loved my sister. She was ten years older, like a second mother. The American soldiers came to my father’s restaurant, and she served them food.”

  There was a long silence. The cigarette glowed bright, faded, glowed bright again.

  “I tried to pull him off her, but I was small, only four years old. He smelled like rotten milk. I didn’t understand until I was much older what the soldier did. When my father found out, he went to the colonel. They offered him money, and my mother said to take it. Two weeks later my sister walked into the river.” The orange tip of the cigarette described an arc in the blackness and was extinguished. I heard his footsteps crunching in the snow as he headed for his cave.

  I stood there, motionless, for a long time.

  I woke the next morning and lay snuggled in my warm sleeping bag. I could hear that the wind had picked up during the night; the storm had regained some of its fury. I turned over on my stomach and saw the weak gray light of dawn filtered by swirling snow. I could barely make out Yuri’s bulky form as he crawled out of his cave and lumbered toward the cave occupied by George.

  The memory of the events of the previous day shot through me as if I had just grabbed a high-voltage cable. We had to get Gord to a hospital right away. At best we were two days from civilization, considering that we would have to carry him in some kind of toboggan. We were running out of food, and the storm would make travel almost impossible. My incompetence had created this crisis.

  I shot out of my cave, and was just pulling on my jacket when I saw that Yuri and George were dragging Gord out of Yuri’s cave. I rushed over and immediately saw that Gord was dead.

  “Froze,” George said. Though Gord’s face was as white as alabaster, I could still see traces of dried foam at the corners of his lips. Only once before in my life, during my druggie days in Berkeley, had I seen a face like that.

  “I’ll make a toboggan,” I said.

  “What for?” George asked.

  “How else are we going to carry him?”

  George and Yuri exchanged glances, and suddenly I realized how naive I had been. What did I expect? That they would take Gord to the U.S. authorities for an autopsy?

  The realization that I was party to murder hit me with the force of a ten-ton truck. I stood frozen, while George and Yuri dragged the body off into the swirling snow.

  I’m ashamed to say that I went back to my snow cave, took off my jacket and boots, and crawled back into the warmth of my sleeping bag. I fell asleep immediately.

  When I woke again, I felt like I had been drugged. My limbs were leaden, and I had lost the desire to ever move again. I lay there for what seemed like a long time, my head pulled into the cocoon of my sleeping bag, my eyes squeezed shut. I kept hoping it had all been a bad dream, but the howling of the wind outside pulled me back to the inescapable reality of total failure, of my culpability.

  When I emerged, the full force of the storm hit me. I had to lean forward to move toward the kitchen, and I couldn’t see more than a couple of meters as fat flakes were whipped into my face.

  As I got closer, I saw that the whole group was gathered in the kitchen, with their packs in a circle. Were these people totally insane? There was no way we could move in such a storm. I trudged toward the group, and I could hear snatches of loud conversation above the wind but could not make out any words. I noticed that Gord’s pack was in the middle of the circle, and they were dividing up the contents among the other packs. George was just removing something; it looked like a blue metal canister. I stopped. Why would they have the drugs in metal containers? George carried the small canister as if it were quite heavy, in fact as if it were solid metal.

  They had their backs to me and, with the wind howling, did not notice my approach. I quickly retreated to my cave, crawled in, and lay there thinking for a long time. Being an incompetent guide was one thing; there’s no excuse for being profoundly stupid.

  I had drifted off to sleep again, and awoke to George yelling at me to wake up. He had stuck his head into my little cave and was shaking my shoulder with a grip that was unnecessarily rough.

  When I emerged, the group was assembled in the kitchen, ready to move. It was snowing, but the wind had died down. There was a small pile of personal gear—sleeping bags and clothes—which George told me to put into my pack.

  I tried to talk them out of moving with such poor visibility.

  “What do you suggest,” George asked, “that we sit here and starve to death?”

  We made slow progress for the remainder of the day. The packs were heavier, the terrain steep, and what had happened to Gord made everyone cautious. I noticed that even Scarface, who was clearly the most experienced in the mountains, was not as fluid in his motions.

  Fat flakes of snow floated down steadily, creating a many-layered arras in front of us. But we managed to descend most of the way as it started to get dark. The curtain of snow had thinned out, and as we stoo
d on a ridge, I saw the vast flat expanse of a glacier below us. Beyond that, I knew, was one more range, and then the U.S. border. With any luck, our ordeal would be over in two days.

  I woke the next morning to find that a dense fog had settled onto the landscape. The view of the glacier from the previous evening had been replaced by a claustrophobia-inducing closeness.

  We had to make do with a sparse breakfast, and I could not hide from the others that beyond that evening, we would be running on empty. Yuri was particularly vocal in his complaints, and he no longer hid his drinking.

  Because of the fog, it took us much longer than I had anticipated to descend to the glacier. Dusk caused the mist to congeal around us; we were now on the glacier, but still had most of it to cross.

  The setting of the invisible sun was marked only by a gradual attenuation of the already meager light. I dropped my pack, and the others came up behind me and unloaded their burdens as well. George, who had been at the back of the line, saw us standing there and said, “It’s not time to stop yet.”

  “It’s getting dark. I can’t see where we’re going,” I pointed out.

  “We have GPS. We gotta keep moving.”

  “Go ahead, George. You can lead the way.”

  “How much longer to the border?”

  “At this rate, two more days.” This raised a chorus of groans.

  “Two more days, two more days. You always say two more days. Are we even going in the right direction?” George asked.

  “You have the GPS. You tell me.”

  “We’re out of food,” Yuri put in.

  I turned to him. “Going ahead in the dark is suicide. The glacier is full of crevasses. Better to go slow and get there alive.”

  I used up the last of our food to make a thin, confused stew that night. Yuri supplemented his portion with his inexhaustible supply of vodka. He sat there, whittling on some wood that he had picked up the day before. His drinking had never created any signs of inebriation in the past, but tonight the strokes of his knife became more and more savage, and an insane expression gradually suffused his face.

  I was cleaning up the dishes and had my back to the group, but listened to the conversation, trying to pick out words from Russian that would at least indicate the general topic of the discussion. Omar drifted over to help me; his face was still a mess from the beating Yuri had administered.

  “What kind of name is Sierra, anyway?” he asked at one point.

  “I changed it when I came to Canada. My original name is James.”

  “You’re not Canadian?”

  “Nah. I’m a draft dodger.”

  “From the States?” I turned to look at him. He seemed quite agitated.

  “From the States?” he repeated.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You’re American!”

  “I’ve been here thirty-seven years. I’m a Canadian citizen.”

  Omar stared at me from the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut and then walked back to the others, who were still conversing in Russian. I was about to head off to sleep when I was confronted by George, Omar, and Thanh.

  George started. “You’re American.”

  “No, I’m a Canadian citizen. What the fuck’s the difference, anyway?”

  Their angry expressions told me that there was a difference.

  “I came here a long time ago so I wouldn’t be drafted.”

  “But you’re American,” George insisted.

  I decided to change tack. “Look, I have a warrant for my arrest in the U.S. for selling dope, in addition to being a draft dodger. That’s why I can only take you a short way past the border. But I’ll get you and your cargo there. I don’t care that you’re carrying drugs. I used to be a dealer myself.” I had never before exaggerated my involvement with drugs.

  The three of them exchanged glances. Whatever it was that they were going to do next, it didn’t happen, because suddenly there was a burst of loud Russian from behind them. Yuri was half standing, knife in one hand, wood in the other, roaring at Scarface. I could make out only one word of his tirade—Taliban. The insane expression on Yuri’s face was terrifying, even from where I stood. His face was a deep red, glistening with sweat, and his eyes were tiny brown spots. His bristly hair stood on end like threatening porcupine’s quills.

  Scarface was sitting, impassive, except that the scar was like a white lightning bolt against the livid color that suffused the rest of his face.

  Though he was in a posture to spring on Scarface with the knife, it was unclear whether Yuri actually intended to do so. Nevertheless, in a motion that my eyes could barely follow, Scarface reached inside his parka, pulled out a black gun, and shot Yuri square in the forehead. The bullet went out the back of his skull with a spurt of blood, and Yuri, still in a squat, tumbled over backward.

  For a moment it was as if I were in a wax museum that was displaying a tableau frozen in time. Only the crimson stain seeping from Yuri’s head into the snow got larger. Scarface sat rigidly pointing his gun to where Yuri had been, and my three interrogators, half turned toward him, looked like statues with their torsos awkwardly twisted.

  Then everyone exploded into action. George confirmed that Yuri was dead, kicking the knife in his hand away from the body, and then started shouting at Scarface, who stood with his right arm hanging limply but still clutching the gun.

  They ignored me while they stripped Yuri’s body. His skin was as white as the snow around him, but I noticed a large reddish area on his back, as if he had a sunburn. Omar and Thanh burned the bloodstained clothes while Scarface and George dragged the naked body off somewhere into the darkness. The red stain in the snow was covered up, and by the time those two returned, the camp looked entirely normal. Scarface sat down and rapidly disassembled and cleaned his gun and put it back together. This was a man who knew his weapon.

  Suddenly I was the one who felt out of his depth, as a military atmosphere suffused the camp. George issued terse orders, and the others carried them out without question. They soon turned their attention to me. My ankles and wrists were tied, and George decided that he liked my company after all, because he crawled into my cave with his sleeping bag next to mine. He had a rope tied to his wrist, the other end of which was looped around my throat. I awoke several times during the night to the sensation that I was suffocating; whenever George turned over, the loop would tighten around my neck, and I’d be forced to turn with him. Needless to say, I did not get much sleep. I guess Lana was right—I have issues about getting close.

  When George and I did our synchronized crawl out of the snow cave the next morning, we were greeted by fog that was, if anything, more dense than the day before. This was surprising. It was rare for conditions to stay stable for such an extended period, because weather systems in the mountains tend to evolve rapidly. True, we were on the glacier, which forms an extended flat area and is more conducive to allowing a stable system.

  Not that I could even tell that we were on the glacier. I could barely make out the openings to the snow caves where the others were sleeping, just five meters from me.

  Our remaining provisions consisted of some coffee and a tiny bag of oatmeal, and George let me off my leash only long enough so that I could melt snow and prepare this travesty of a breakfast.

  As I went about my tasks, I pondered my situation. I thought seriously about just making a break and leaving them. Surviving without my pack would have been difficult, but not impossible. In any case, I had little doubt that George would dispose of me once I led them across the border.

  However, even if I abandoned the group, there was a chance that they would survive to carry out their mission. Scarface clearly had mountaineering skills. I had to chuckle at my dilemma. Owen and the other self-righteous activists always said that we all have to choose sides at some point. Circumstances sometimes force us to make surprising choices.

  As I ruminated on this, my foot came in contact with something hard that was wedged into the crack
under a block of snow that I was using as a makeshift counter. I bent down. In the dim light of dawn I saw the dark handle of Yuri’s knife that George had kicked away from that inert body. Looking around to make sure no one observed me, I tucked the knife inside my parka.

  Later, the process of dividing up the contents of Yuri’s pack took place. George tied me up again, leaving me inside my snow cave, but even in the mist it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t drugs they were transporting. As I peered out the opening, I could make out another blue metal canister, and something square that must have been a piece of electronics inside a layer of cushioning.

  Soon we were under way again. Even under less bizarre circumstances it would have been advisable to rope ourselves together. If any of us fell into a crevasse, the others would prevent him from falling too far.

  The storm a few days previously had dumped a large amount of snow over the area. This meant that the crevasses were difficult to detect. Over the winter, a snow bridge often forms over a crack in the ice. As long as it’s cold, these snow bridges are strong enough to support a person crossing them. In spring, the bridges melt, revealing the gaping openings in the deep ice of the glacier. The most dangerous time is in between. The snow hides the traps but is not strong enough to support someone crossing over them.

  We trudged along almost in lockstep, one long rope looped through the climbing harnesses that we all wore. I was in the lead, with George behind me, followed by Omar, Thanh, and then Scarface at the back.

  Progress was slow, because of the poor visibility. Scarface had the GPS, and he occasionally shouted to me if I wandered too far from the correct heading. His voice sounded as if it came from another world, muffled by the fog. I could see no more than a couple of meters ahead, and when I looked back, I could see George, but Omar was a dark blur, and my eyes could not penetrate to see Thanh or Scarface.