A Cold-Blooded Business (19 page)

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.

Slamming the door of her room behind her, she pulled her clothes off and flounced into bed. As she stretched up an arm to turn off the light, she remembered the boy in the Fourth Avenue bar, and her anger evaporated.

At least she had a choice. At least she could say no.

The next morning she rose early, hooked three doughnuts over the fingers of one hand and filled the largest paper cup she could find full of coffee, half and half and two packets of sugar, and retired to the library with yesterday's Anchorage Daily News she had scrounged from the front desk clerk. Arranging herself on one of the easy chairs in front of the window overlooking the parking lot, she found The New York Times crossword puzzle, unlimbered her pen and began not filling in answers to clues like "medieval goblet" and

"Jewish month." The coffee and the doughnuts (one chocolate, one old-fashioned, one glazed) went a long way toward easing her feeling of ignorance.

Persian money? She wondered how big the ivory bear was that had been lost. She wondered how big the stone lamp was, too. She wondered how many security guards were versed in the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. She wondered how many of them would recognize a bona fide Native Alaskan American Indian artifact if it bit them on the seat of the pants.

Latvian citizen? She thought of her otter, and how perfect it was, and how tiny. She thought of the old man's carvings, and how perfect they were, and how tiny. Small in Oban, she read, and filled in we-e. Yes, they certainly were wee. Wee, small creatures. Wee, small and easy to smuggle. She remembered the story Chris had told her about the $55,000 ivory figure and bit the end of her pen. Pound for pound, Alaskan Indian artifacts were as lucrative as drugs. Maybe more so.

"N. Y.C. transit system" blocked every attempt to be solved. Kate threw down the puzzle in disgust, invoking a curse on that rampantly geographical chauvinist Eugene T. Maleska and all his progeny. A movement outside caught her eye and she looked up.

There was, for a change, no fog and no falling snow and no ' amount of wind to blow the snow lying on the ground, and the view in the early morning light was perfectly clear. The public relations van, used for tours when a tour group consisted of ten members or less, was plugged into the end of the bull rail closest to the Base Camp's front door.

Next to it stood Otto Leckerd and Toni Hartzler. At first Kate assumed they were taking a fond farewell after a romantic evening and almost averted her eyes. Then she saw the box. It was a small, battered cardboard box, and Otto was trying to take it away from Toni.

Toni held it out of reach, talking rapidly.

Without thinking, Kate rose to her feet and went to stand in front of the window. Otto made another grab for the box, and it looked as if he was yelling. They both hung on to it, both talking at once.

Kate was watching Otto's face over Toni's shoulder when his expression changed. He had seen her. She made an elaborate show of drinking coffee, looking up and catching sight of them for the first time and giving a friendly wave. She left the window in a leisurely manner and went to examine the books locked behind glass on the library shelf. A handwritten card announced that the key was available from the clerk at the front desk. The biography of Macarthur by William Manchester looked interesting. Author and subject had both spent a lot of time in the South Pacific, as soldiers in the same theater of the same war, so it might even be accurate. She tried to see Otto's and Toni's reflection in the glass but the angle was wrong and there wasn't enough light anyway.

When she looked around again, very casually, Toni was alone and closing the passenger door of the van. Kate caught a glimpse of the box sitting in the front seat. Her eyes narrowed, trying to make out the writing on the side, but it was too far and all she got an impression of was a logo in red and white. She watched from the corner of her eye as Toni unplugged the head bolt heater, climbed in the driver's side and drove around the Base Camp module and out of sight.

Kate wheeled and moved rapidly through the lounge and down the hallway that led to a service entrance in back of the kitchen. The Base Camp buildings were assembled from smaller modules, all of which had fire doors at every corner with stairways leading down the exterior walls.

Kate hit the door bar on the run and took the stairs outside two at a time. She was at the northwest corner of the main module; around the northwest corner of the fire safety module she caught the red gleam of taillights before the pilings holding everything off the gravel pad blocked them out. The building was so large, and required so many pilings to hold it up, that it was impossible to see through to the gravel pad on the other side of the building.

Breath coming out in frosty puffs, shivering a little in the cold air, she trotted forward, beneath the fire safety module, to thread her way through the pilings. According to Toni the architects, in recognition of the unrelenting force of the omnipresent onshore wind, had aerodynamically designed the Base Camp modules to minimize snowdrifts and, accordingly, snow removal. They had done a superb job, transforming housing for 474 workers into a series of what were essentially huge, cubic airfoils; there were no drifts beneath the copper-colored module, only a dry, hard crust upon which the rubber soles of her safety boots squeaked, tread as lightly as she might. Surrounded as she was by the metal siding of the building overhead and the metal sheaths of the concrete pilings, every squeak bounced back at her, multiplied ten times, so that at first she missed the low mutter of the van ahead.

It came again and this time she heard it. She went up on tiptoe, sneaked up on a piling and peered around.

The van was in park with the engine idling, stopped in front of the fire safety garage. There was no traffic on the Backbone beyond and no sight or sound of anyone but the three of them. Through the open window came Toni's voice, not loud enough for Kate to make out the words. She could hear Jerry clearly. "No, I won't do it," he said, and there was as much fear as there was anger in his tone. Toni's voice came again, a soft, soothing murmur. "No," Jerry repeated, this time with less force.

"Dammit, Toni, it's getting too dangerous." Toni said something and he mumbled something more, all of which was lost to Kate except for the words "--good, the best, I'm telling you, we can't take any more chances--"

A drift of wind caught the rumble of the engine and wafted it toward Kate, muffling the rest of his words. Toni spoke again; Jerry's head drooped in a clear sign of defeat. Toni handed him the box through the window and he accepted it without looking up.

The sole of Kate's boot slipped on the hard-packed snow, her body shifted and hit the metal of the piling with a dull thud. A white fox exploded out of the snow directly in front of her, running flat out, tail streaming behind it, right beneath the van and out the other side.

There was a kind of combination clop-crunch and on Kate's right a caribou cow with two of last year's calves shot from beneath the module, trotted in front of the van and across the pad.

At the van both heads turned as one to look at what had startled the animals, and Jerry took a step in her direction. Kate broke and ran, dodging back and forth between pilings in the hope she wouldn't be seen, or at the very least recognized. She hammered up the stairwell only to find the fire door didn't open from the outside. Taking the steps two at a time on the way back down, she ducked beneath the main Base Camp module and headed through the pilings for the front entrance.

Rounding the corner, she remembered the security guard stationed at the door and bypassed it for the garages. She was in luck; Cale Yarborough was just backing out. She gave the field manager a cheery wave as he looked askance at her plaid shirt, jeans and no coat. A quick trot through the administration offices, up the back stairs, and she was in the library with her feet up on the table, coffee cup in hand, hard at work on the crossword puzzle when Toni walked in.

The brunette as usual looked perfectly groomed and composed, but Kate noticed her breath was coming a little fast. She smiled widely and tried by sheer force of will to slow her own rapid heartbeat. "Morning.

You don't happen to know a three-letter word for the New York City transit system, do you?"

"Good morning. MTA, maybe? Like Charlie on the?"

Kate frowned. "I think that was Boston. "Now you citizens of Boston, don't you think it's a scandal--' "

"

"How the people have to pay and pay,"

" Toni chanted. Together they sang, "

"Fight the fare increase, vote for George O'Brien, and get Charlie off the MTA!" " They both laughed and Kate thought what a pity it was how much she liked this woman. "I thought I saw you up here," Toni said, nodding toward the bull rail

"Oh, was that you down there? I saw somebody wave and just to be on the safe side I waved back." She smiled again. Toni returned it, eyes flickering down Kate's relaxed body. "You look comfortable."

Kate folded the newspaper and gave her a suspicious look. "Do I detect a warning in that observation? As in not to get too comfortable?"

Toni looked wounded. She was very good at it. "Who, me?" She grinned, and for the first time Kate noticed what a practiced grin it was, all flash and sharp upper incisors. "Just be at the office at ten. We have to be out at the airport by ten forty-five."