Though Not Dead (51 page)

“How’s a lady like you know about a place like this?” Sam said.

“I used to work here,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. He rallied. “Coffee?”

She nodded, and he fetched two cups from the bar. Once he regained his seat, he didn’t beat around the bush. “Mac McCullough is Erland’s father.”

She didn’t, either. “Yes.” A little bitterly, she added, “Anyone who looks at him can see that.”

“Does Emil know?”

“I don’t know how he can’t.” For a moment her face dropped its perfect housewife veil, and her eyes looked unutterably weary. “But he’s never said a word.”

“How did you meet Mac?”

It was the fall of 1939, before the war had reached Alaska, but the U.S. Army was moving into Anchorage in force and the town was booming. He was then traveling under the name of Marvin Mackenzie, retaining the nickname Mac, and had introduced himself as being an independent businessman with interests in natural resource extraction. Emil invited him to one of his mixer dinners, and there he had met Dorothy.

“Emil,” she started to say, and stopped.

Sam wasn’t interested in her relationship with her husband, good or bad, but he was aware that the price for the truth might be hearing Dorothy’s confession, and he was prepared to listen. She was stronger than that, though, laying out the specifics in matter-of-fact terms. “We met for almost six months, long enough for Mac to tell me his real name, and why he was here.”

“Why was he?” Sam said, although he thought he knew.

She shrugged. “Something out of my husband’s Alaskana collection. He wasn’t specific.”

“Did he want you to help him steal it?”

She met his eyes. “Yes,” she said, her voice bleak.

He was silent.

“It was over then, of course. I told him never to contact me again. A month later, I realized I was pregnant.”

Mac McCullough made a habit of running out on women he’d left in the family way, Sam thought.

“I—I wanted help in getting rid of it. I tried to find Mac. And then I heard that he had joined the army.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

She paled, and swallowed hard. “Once,” she said, her voice very low. “After the war. It was the fall of 1945. He had been wounded in the war.”

Saving my life, Sam thought.

“He’d been sent Outside to a veteran’s hospital for treatment. He said that was why he hadn’t been in touch.”

Sam could tell she hadn’t believed Mac, but Sam thought Mac might have been telling the truth this time. “He still wanted the icon,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And he was still hoping you would help him.”

“Yes,” she said. She took a deep breath and let it out. “I might have,” she said. “After Erland was born, after Emil…” She paused. “Life became … difficult,” she said. “Mac promised he would take me away.”

With great difficulty Sam repressed a snort of disbelief.

“I was so careful,” she said, her voice the barest whisper of sound. “But Anchorage was such a small town then. Someone must have seen us, and told Emil.”

“What happened?”

Her fingers shredded the cocktail napkin. In a dull voice she said, “There was an accident in Kenai, on one of the drilling rigs. Emil was taking a group of businessmen on a tour. Three of them were killed.”

“And Mac was one of them.”

“Yes.”

Sam wondered what Emil had against the other two victims. Maybe nothing. Maybe he just considered them collateral damage, the regrettable but necessary price of removing a rival from the field of action.

It was a considerably different portrait of the man with the welcoming smile and the bottomless hospitality.

The bartender brought the coffeepot to refill their mugs. “Anything else?”

“No, thanks,” Sam said, and the bartender went away again. “So, you think Emil knows about Mac, and about Erland?” About me? he thought.

“He has never said anything,” she repeated, and aged ten years in the saying. She looked at her watch. “I must go, Mr. Dementieff, or I will be missed.”

She moved across the floor, a walking shadow that vanished on the other side of the door.

*   *   *

The
Freya
was scheduled to pick up freight in Seattle, and Sam had no choice but to undock and head south. He wasn’t too worried, as he didn’t see Emil unloading the icon anytime soon. Emil was a collector, and Sam had spent enough time with Pete and Kyle to know that collectors were known and to a certain extent made by their acquisitiveness and their possessiveness. At long last, he knew where the icon was. It was safe enough there, for the moment.

In Seattle, he had a sudden inspiration and shared it with Kyle. “Certainly,” said Kyle, adding, with a ravishing twinkle, “For a commission.”

Sam left him with a genial curse on him and all his heirs. He was back in Seattle a month later, to be met at the dock by a very sober Kyle. “No dice,” he told Sam. “Bannister says it isn’t for sale, at any price.”

Sam was silent for a moment. “Wait a couple of months, let him get used to the idea,” he said at last. “Then ask him again.”

But a year later, the answer was still the same.

On impulse, Sam went home for the first time in fifteen years.

Everyone was older, married, parents. Some were divorced, widowed, dead. Most of them were living subsistence lives based on salmon fishing in the summer and hunting and trapping in the winter. Many others had moved, to Fairbanks, Anchorage, even Outside. “No money, no jobs,” Ekaterina said when he went to see her. “In ten years, Niniltna will be a ghost town. There is nothing to keep us here.” She looked grim. “And the ones who do stay are forgetting their culture. They see in the magazines what life is like in other places. They want pretty clothes and fast cars and television. They don’t want to hunt moose or sew skins or learn to dance. They want to speak English, not Athabascan or Alutiiq or Eyak.” She paused, and said softly, “We have nothing to offer them, Sam.”

He let the news of his return percolate through the village before going to see Joyce. She received him with composure, and he fought his way through the lace ruffles and the china teacups to a seat as she made him coffee without asking. When he drank, he realized that she had remembered his preferred ratio of evaporated milk to sugar exactly. “I could have quit drinking coffee since the last time you saw me,” he said.

She was older, thinner, quieter, but her smile had lost none of its radiance. “Not you,” she said softly.

He looked at the armoire in the corner. “Glad to see Heiman’s got it here from Valdez.”

She turned her head to follow his eyes. “Yes. A wonderful thing, Samuel. I thank you. And for the tea set that came inside it.” She touched her cup, smiling.

He shifted in his seat. “Yeah, well, I met a guy who sold old stuff,” he said, “and I remembered you liked old stuff. And I’ve got a boat now, so I could bring it up myself.”

“That
Freya
,” she said, nodding.

He was unsurprised. There was no more efficient means of communication than the Bush telegraph. He doubted that there was very little he had done in the time since he’d been away that had not beaten him home. He told her about the
Freya,
about the work that he had done, was doing. “Where next you go?” she said.

He shifted again. “The money’s good in the oil fields. But I do hear tell there might be better money in government contracts out on the Chain.”

“Them islands like in the war?”

“Yeah.”

Her brow puckered. “Bad weather.”

He grinned. “But good money.”

A faint shrug. “Money not everything.”

He put the fragile teacup with its delicate rose tracery gently in its equally fragile saucer. “Are you asking me to come home, Joyce?”

She said nothing, regarding him steadily out of unblinking dark eyes.

“Because so far as I know, I got nothing to come home for,” he said.

Remembered pain clouded her eyes, and he was ashamed of himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Joyce.”

She did not hold out her hand, or her arms, when he took his leave.

He flung away from Niniltna that same night, hitching a ride on a Heiman freight truck to Valdez, where the
Freya
was waiting for him.

Emil was on the dock on his next trip to Nikiski, as jovial as ever, and took Sam to the Ace of Clubs for a beer and a burger. He let fall the information that he would be in Nikiski for the next three days, meeting with his partners in the Swanson River oil leases. He did his best to chivvy Sam into buying a piece of the pie—“Atlantic’s going to buy us out. It’s a sure bet, Sam”—but Sam laughed and refused to be drawn in.

That evening, Tex told him to pick up a load of cement that had been landed in Seward and shipped by train to Anchorage. It was needed on Swanson River pronto.

The
Freya
undocked on the next tide.

*   *   *

He waited until three o’clock, sitting motionless beneath a spruce tree, the last one left standing on the block, thick branches creating a pocket of darkness around the trunk. The street was dead quiet this winter night, the sides of the streets high with berms of snow. The last light had gone out in the house four hours before.

It wasn’t much different from stalking a moose.

Or one of the Japanese soldiers holding out on Attu.

He slid out from beneath the spruce, a slight wind setting the branches rustling and creaking, making the tree a friend to him, hiding the slightest sound of his passage. He drifted up the steps and used the darkness of the porch to jimmy the lock on the front door. It wasn’t a neighborhood accustomed to illegal entry, and the door opened easily. He felt his way into the study, opening and closing the door behind him, and trod across the room to where memory told him the Sainted Mary waited for him.

A light clicked on. He whirled, crouching, one arm thrown up against the brightness.

Emil rose from the chair behind his desk. “Hello, Sam.”

It took a moment for Sam’s pupils to contract. When they did, he saw that Emil was smiling, satisfied with the successful springing of his trap. “I can’t believe you came in the front door. A professional burglar would have used the back. But then I suppose you aren’t a professional, are you? Unlike your father.”

Sam straightened. He made no answer.

“Did you think I didn’t see the expression on your face when I showed her to you? Did you think I didn’t know you were the one who wanted to buy her? Did you think I didn’t know what Mac was really after when he seduced my wife?” He saw the expression on Sam’s face and gave a soundless laugh. “Oh yes, I know. I’ve always known.”

He came out from behind the desk, and Sam saw the revolver in his hand. He straightened, falling back a step to balance his weight, to prepare to attack. He didn’t think Emil was bluffing, but he had not come all this way to go down without a fight.

“And now here comes Mac’s son.” He laughed again at Sam’s expression. “What is this attraction my little Russian lady holds for the men in your family, Sam?” His smile was taunting. “I knew the minute I saw you that you were another of Mac’s get, half brother to the cuckoo in my own nest. Oh yes,” he said, watching Sam’s face, “Erland knows. I made sure of that. It’s why he can’t bear to look at you.”

He looked at the glass case and back at Sam, raising an eyebrow. “Really, for a while there I thought I was going to have to give you an engraved invitation. It’s been over a year.”

“You told Tex to send me to Anchorage,” Sam said.

Emil rolled his eyes. “Really, Sam.” He held up the revolver. “Isn’t that a little beside the point?”

“That icon belongs to my family,” Sam said. “Give it to me and let me go. I give you my word you’ll never see me again.”

The smile hardened. “The icon is mine,” Emil said softly. “As my wife is mine. As my son is mine.” He gestured with the pistol. “Back up.”

Sam backed up, all the while watching Emil, waiting for the moment that would surely come, because if every Japanese soldier in the Aleutians with an Arisaka 99 hadn’t been able to take him down, this smug asshole in a three-piece suit didn’t stand a chance.

“Open the case,” Emil said.

Because he had to to get to the icon, Sam opened the case. The Lady stared up at him with her eternal, mournful gaze.

She looked suddenly familiar to him.

She looked like Joyce.

“Take the icon out,” Emil said.

“I’m going to be found shot dead with it in my hand, is that the idea?”

“Take it out,” Emil said, no longer smiling.

Sam reached inside the case and brought out one of the babushka dolls instead and in the same continuous motion threw it directly at Emil’s head.

Emil let out a startled cry and flung up both hands in instinctive reaction. Sam launched himself forward, hitting Emil in the gut with a hard shoulder. Emil staggered backward and his heel caught the edge of the rug. He tripped, and both men fell against the desk. There was a sickening thud, and then both men crashed to the floor.

“You son of a bitch,” Sam said, gasping for breath. He levered himself up on his knees, pulling his arm back, curling his hand into a fist. “You son of a—”

But Emil wasn’t fighting. Emil wasn’t moving. Emil was unconscious, with a well of red blood sheeting down the side of his face from where the back of his head had hit the edge of the desk.

Sam was dimly aware of shouts and cries and the thud of feet from upstairs, and his one instinct was to get away. He blundered to his feet and staggered over to the display case to grab the Lady and stuff her inside his parka. He pulled his hood up and headed for the door.

Footsteps were thudding down the stairs behind him. “Dad? Dad!”

Sam recognized Erland’s voice and kept going, through the front door, down the steps, and out into the dark, clutching the Sainted Mary to him as he ran.

Thirty-two

It had been a long drive, but not an unpleasant one, especially when he was able to get off I-5 onto the state highways and back roads. Rolling hills thickly forested with pine and spruce and cottonwood and redwood—he had forgotten how tall trees could get, and how thick their trunks. Acres and acres of tilled land, hay and wheat and Christmas trees. He stopped at a roadside stand for tomatoes warm from the vine, bought salt and pepper from a general store, and found a pullout next to a little creek in which to have lunch.