Though Not Dead (37 page)

Sam had gone red, then white, and then red again. “I have to find it.” He swallowed hard. There were so many reasons why. He settled on the least painful of them. “If only to know the end of the story.”

Pappardelle subjected him to another sharp scrutiny before a nod of acquiescence. “Very well. Decision is one trait in which you need no instruction or improvement.” He bent over the ledger. “I also bought several items from a third passenger off the
Baranof,
a young man I would guess to be about your age now.” Pappardelle’s glance swept Sam from head to toe. “He was a little taller than you are, with much the same build and a certain similarity of countenance.”

Sam felt the heat rise up the back of his neck. Again, he remembered Hammett’s asking if he and Mac were brothers. Had everyone in the cutthroats seen the resemblance? And if so, why hadn’t he?

Pappardelle continued in a meditative tone. “I remember particularly because of the variety of items he had for sale, and because of the haste which he exhibited.”

“He was on the lam,” Sam said shortly.

“Ah. ‘On the lam.’ ” Pappardelle repeated the phrase as if it was the first time it had come his way. “Yes, well, that would explain it. At any rate, this Mr.—”

“McCullough.”

Pappardelle didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. “No. No, the name he gave me was Mr. Smith.”

“Original.”

“There are in fact many Smiths in this world,” Pappardelle said serenely. “There was no reason Mr. Herbert Smith could not have been one of them.”

He’d kept his first name, Sam thought. Probably easier to remember when someone called it. “He sold you the icon?”

“He did.”

“Can you remember what the icon looked like?”

“Certainly. It was one of very few examples of Russian iconography that has ever come my way. And of course I made notes.” Pappardelle adjusted his spectacles and read out loud. “ ‘A Russian Marian icon, that is to say, an icon depicting the figure of the Virgin Mary. A triptych of three wooden panels hinged together, eight inches high and eighteen inches wide overall. The images themselves made of gold carved into bas-relief depicting first, mother and child, second, Mary at the foot of the cross, and third, Mary at the Ascension. The frame inlaid with rough-cut stones and gold filigree. The date on the back is September 1, 5508 BC, which is not the date of manufacture, but the date Eastern Orthodoxy regarded as the day the world was created by God.’ An interesting fact but of little use in estimating the age of the icon itself.”

Sam didn’t care about the age of the icon. “How much did he shake you down for it?”

Pappardelle looked reproving. “He did not ‘shake me down,’ as you call it. I paid him two hundred dollars, and I was happy to get it at that price. It was a very rare piece. I have never seen anything like it since.”

The reverential way Pappardelle spoke the words jolted Sam out of his bitter reflections. “If this icon was so very rare, and you say that you’re not a fence, why did you buy it? You must have known Mac stole it.”

Pappardelle sighed. “That day, may I be forgiven my arrogance, I considered myself the lesser of two evils.”

“Say what?”

Pappardelle sighed again. “I was not the only curio dealer on the docks that day. A Mr. Armstrong was also there, a gentleman whose dealings I am afraid would not have borne close scrutiny. And, alas, did not for very much longer. One of his clients took umbrage at—”

Sam didn’t care about Mr. Armstrong and clients with or without umbrage, whatever the hell that was. “Did you sell it?”

“I did, eventually. It remained in the shop for many years.” He smiled. “I confess, I was content to have it so.” His brow wrinkled. “At the risk of sounding fanciful, young man, some objects carry with them their own sense of … let us say vitality. I remember once a pair of African harps that came into my possession, formed in the shapes of men, with elongated legs for the strings and tiny, laughing heads for the keys. They made me smile, just looking at them. One could imagine the artists carving them with the express view of making people dance when they were completed.” He smiled in remembrance.

“And the icon?” Sam said.

“Ah, the icon. It presented an entirely different feeling, one of…” Pappardelle hesitated. “Spirituality, though I hasten to add, a spirituality not of a demanding or minatory nature. Rather, one of hope, and trust.” His hand made a small, dismissive wave. “It may be that over time, such objects take on the hopes and fears of the people who treasure them. Who can say? It sounds far-fetched, I know. Yet I tell you such objects do exist.”

Sam leaned forward. “Who bought it?”

Pappardelle closed the book and pushed his spectacles back up on his head. “I will give you his name so long as you guarantee me that you will approach him in a civilized manner.” His smile took the sting out of the words. “I might have had my doubts about the provenance of the item, but I gave him no reason to believe he might be purchasing stolen goods. He bought it in good faith.”

“Yeah, yeah, I promise not to beat it out of him,” Sam said.

“There is no need for sarcasm, young man. The gentleman bought it in 1937.” Pappardelle wrote down the name and handed it to Sam. He hesitated again, as one trying to make up his mind. “One more thing which you may find of interest.”

“Yes?”

Pappardelle’s look was solemn, and a little wary. “You are not the first person to inquire after this particular object.”

Twenty-three

At the restaurant that evening, Brendan got himself on the outside of a bottle of wine while they worked their way through caprese, insalata Orso, and petite filet mignon with Cambozola cheese. In between bites he caught Kate up on the doings of everyone she’d ever worked with in town, who’d been transferred, promoted, or fired, who’d been caught screwing whom on whose desk. She was cheered to hear that Steve Sayles had retired to a cabin on a trout creek in northern Idaho. “You know I never did hear that whole story,” Brendan said.

“I gave a statement. There was an inquest.”

“Kate.”

She gave a slight shrug and looked into the cup that held her after-dinner coffee. “You know he was first on the scene.”

Brendan maintained a hopeful silence, and Kate drained her cup and signaled for a refill. When the waiter had gone, she said, “I was working a child molestation case because the assistant DA prosecuting the case—Phillips? Rafferty? Klein, that was it—Klein was uncomfortable with some of the work the investigating officer had done. Jack wanted me to dot all the
i
’s and cross all the
t
’s before she took the case to court and the judge bounced half the evidence as fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Brendan made an encouraging noise.

Kate watched the traffic on Fifth Avenue pass by outside the windows, a lot of cars and trucks and semis moving very fast, rushing to catch the next light before it turned red. Someone had once said that Anchorage was a city best seen at thirty-five miles an hour, and Fifth Avenue was like a microcosm of Anchorage itself, two hundred and eighty thousand people in a hurry. Where the hell were they all going?

She’d lived among them for almost six years, doing the best job she could, until she couldn’t do it anymore. “I spent some time on the phone with witnesses, checking their statements, talked to the lab about the physical evidence, and then I went out to the perp’s house. The kids had been removed by then, of course, and I talked to them again, but Jack wanted me to evaluate the perp personally. He always liked my take on an interview.” She met Brendan’s eyes, from which all amusement had vanished. “The thing is, Brendan, the son of a bitch knew I was coming. I had called him. He must have gone out and grabbed the first kid he saw.”

“Whoa,” Brendan said. “You didn’t make him grab that kid, Kate.”

“Didn’t I?” she said. “I could hear the kid begging from outside the door. ‘Please don’t. Please don’t. Please.’ ”

She looked down into her mug again, stirring the contents so that the half-and-half formed a creamy spiral in the inky blankness. “I don’t remember kicking the door in, but I saw the photographs of it hanging half off its hinges later, so I must have. He was doing the kid five feet from the door, facing it. He was holding a knife to the kid’s throat, and he was grinning at me.”

She was silent. “And then?” he said. He’d asked, he was by God going to hear it all.

Her hand came up to touch the white, roped scar on her throat. The husk on her voice had thickened when she spoke again. “I went for the knife. He got this in before I took it away from him and killed him with it.” She raised the coffee cup halfway to her lips and paused. “It was a good knife, one of those fancy filet knives, razor-edge stainless-steel blade with a wooden handle, a pattern inset with dyed wood, veneered all shiny. I’ll never forget how pretty it was.”

The conversation seemed isolated in a pool of silence. The waiters going by with laden plates, other diners laughing and talking, the scrape of a spoon across the bottom of a bowl, none of it penetrated to this table.

“But you know what I remember most?” she said, still in that detached tone. “How easy the knife went in. Just slid right in, under his ribs and into his heart. I was watching his face. Have you ever seen someone die, Brendan? It’s an exit, a departure, I don’t know, like their soul walks away.”

“Not my part of the job,” he said. “Thank god.”

“It wasn’t enough for me,” she said to her coffee. “It was way too easy. I wanted to carve his heart out and feed it to Raven.”

She met his eyes. “Then I looked up and saw the kid. Four years old. He’d jammed himself into a corner. He’d managed to pull his jeans back up, but he was too terrified to cry, too terrified to run. He’d been kidnapped and raped and then been an eyewitness to a murder committed within range of the blood spatter. My blood, the perp’s, I still don’t know. I stretched a hand out to him before I went horizontal, and he screamed.” A brief pause. “I’ll never forget that, either.”

She drank coffee. “I woke up in the hospital the next day, to the news that Sayles had been first on the scene and that he was trying his damnedest to make it out to be a case of voluntary manslaughter. Said I’d gone there with intent.”

“I remember that part,” Brendan said.

“The charge went away after a while.” Her smile was twisted. “And after not very much longer, so did I.”

Beneath the table, Mutt’s weight pressed comfortingly against her leg.

Brendan said, “The charge went away after Jack Morgan beat the crap out of him.”

“What?” Kate, jerked out of her reverie, stared at him. “I didn’t know that.”

“It wasn’t generally known. I wouldn’t have known it myself if Jack hadn’t been working a case of mine and I hadn’t seen him the very next day. Sayles got in a couple shots. I backed Jack into a corner and weaseled it out of him. Sayles hung out at the Pioneer Bar. Jack waited three nights for him to come out alone and nailed him in the parking lot on the way to his car.”

Kate put a hand on Mutt’s head, scratching mechanically behind her ears. “I can’t believe it. Jack wasn’t a brawler.”

“You’d never have known it,” Brendan said cheerfully. “I visited Sayles in the hospital.”

“He put Sayles in the hospital?” Kate’s voice scaled up.

Brendan grinned. “He looked a lot worse than Jack did, believe me. Couple of cracked ribs and a fractured collarbone, as I remember. And shiners way worse than yours.”

“You should have seen them a week ago,” Kate said. “And Sayles didn’t have him up on charges?”

Brendan tried to look modest and failed. “I had a word with his watch commander.”

Kate’s full lips indented at the corners.

“Go ahead, laugh,” he said, “you know you want to.”

She did, throwing back her head and letting loose with a husky rumble that raised the hair on the back of every male neck in the room. Beneath the table Mutt’s pressure eased. Kate looked at Brendan. “Thanks.”

And Brendan McCord tried not to wriggle all over because Kate Shugak thought he’d done a smart thing.

*   *   *

Kate’s cell phone rang at nine o’clock the next morning and she answered without looking at the screen. “Jim?”

“Um, is this Kate Shugak?”

Jim hadn’t called her back yesterday, and when she’d tried to call him she’d gotten his voice mail again. “Yes,” she said with a patience she felt it was a pity no one was there to witness. “Who is this?”

“Lazary. Lazary Kuznetsov.”

It took her a moment to remember the Old Believer research assistant at the museum. “Yes, of course, Lazary.” She walked into the kitchen and turned on the electric kettle. “How can I help you?”

“I didn’t want to say anything yesterday in case it didn’t work out, but my great-uncle is, well, he was a priest. A Russian Orthodox priest.”

“Was? Is he dead?”

“No, just retired.”

“And…” Kate put coffee in a filter and set the filter on a mug that said “Speed Limit 186,000 Miles per Second. It’s Not Just a Good Idea. IT’S THE LAW!” Jack Morgan had been an astronomy nut, something he’d passed on to his son.

“And iconography is sort of a hobby of his.”

“Is it.” The kettle boiled and Kate poured hot water through the filter. “Does he live in Anchorage?”

“Yes.”

“Would he talk to me?” Being that she was an unbeliever, and a woman to boot.

“He said he would.” Lazary hesitated. “He’s pretty old, Ms. Shugak, and a little wandery. I don’t know if he can help you. But in his time, he knew icons chapter and verse.”

He gave her the address and told her that Uncle Vladik was at his best in the morning. She looked at the clock and said, “You can tell him I’ll be there in an hour. And Lazary? Thanks.”

*   *   *

It was a group home for elderly gentlemen who wore their pants belted around their armpits. Their assisted living came in the shape of a formidable dragon with helmet hair rinsed a defiant and brassy blond who examined Kate’s driver’s license with minute attention before grudgingly allowing her and Mutt entry, admonishing them in stern accents not to tire the good father. Mutt looked as cowed as Kate felt.