The Shaman's Knife (5 page)

There's one thing I didn't do right then, but only realized later that I should have: send an order that the bodies were not to be moved until I'd seen them.

I looked at air schedules. Not good. Regular commercial flights by First Air went to Sanirarsipaaq a few times a week, but from Iqaluit in the eastern Arctic, not from Yellowknife. There was one today, west from Iqaluit with stops at Igloolik, Pelly Bay, Spence Bay, Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay, and Sanirarsipaaq before terminating in Inuvik. Meaning that to catch that flight I had to get to Cambridge Bay, with no scheduled flight that I knew of that would get me to Cambridge from Yellowknife.

I went to the headquarters dispatcher, a sergeant I knew well. He asked about my mother. I told him, hurriedly, then asked, “Anything flying today to Cambridge quick? Charter, medivac, anything?”

He looked at me sharply the way some people do when dealing with a problem that must be solved fast. “You wanta get to Sanirarsipaaq. Just missed a Twin Otter charter from here straight in there a few hours ago. Well. We still got one chance.” He picked up his phone and dialed. “Shit. Busy.” Immediately he began to dial again. “If this works it'll be very sudden. Get your luggage into the hotel lobby. I'll call you there in a few minutes.”

The hotel was only a minute or two away. I was in the lobby checking out when the desk clerk said, “Matteesie, call for you,” and passed me the phone. It was my friend the dispatcher. He'd known when he spoke to me that a Cessna Citation had been chartered to fly the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories out to begin a trial in Cambridge Bay starting tomorrow morning. What he hadn't known was whether there was a spare seat, or someone he could bump. Whatever he'd done, there was room for me. The Citation would drop the court in Cambridge but couldn't go on with me to Sanirarsipaaq because it had to head back right away for another charter somewhere else. It was due to leave in less than an hour. I should get to the airport right away. He gave me all that very fast.

“It'll be a tight squeeze at Cambridge,” he said, “but I'll get on to First Air to hold their Sanirarsipaaq flight there for you.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“No problem.”

Some busy guys are like that. Work their ass off and then shrug. All in a day's work.

I passed the phone back to the hotel clerk, thinking. Buster had asked me to call him back. In case it took time to track him down I'd be better calling from the airport. If I didn't get him from there I could call from Cambridge Bay.

On the taxi ride to the airport I pored over again in my mind what I knew of the case so far, coming to admit that the stakes were partly personal, even a lot personal. I'm normally objective about my work, but I had a totally unobjective hatred for whoever hurt my mother. The murders weren't all that nice, either, and I would pay attention to that, but also I wanted to look into the eyes of whoever had knocked my mother on her back ninety bloody years of living after she'd been born in an igloo on the shore of Herschel Island. My intent did not involve beating hell out of someone. If it came to that, I might get the hell beaten out of me, which would be counterproductive. I wanted it to be cold turkey, looking into guilty eyes, letting whoever it was known that retribution would be swift.

Not a hell of a lot to ask. Especially when I knew deep down that if my mother's frail condition had got worse and she had not lived, I might be tempted to kill whoever was responsible. Tit-for-tat murders do not all happen in Northern Ireland, or in the hills of Kentucky. Blood feuds were part of many an Inuit settlement's past.

The Citation was on the tarmac. Its pilot, a fit-looking middle-aged man with silvery hair under his cap, was watching for me in the terminal. Somebody else (it turned out to have been Erika) had been bumped from the flight, Buster's emissaries being very high in the priority line. “The court hasn't arrived yet,” the pilot said crisply. “When they get here follow them out right away and we'll go. Weather is chancy as hell around Cambridge right now.”

I went to the pay phone and called Buster. Old Ironsides said she'd find him. A minute or two later Buster came on.

“Matty! Look, I have something else to tell you. Might be important. Our press relations officer has had a lot of calls from media people in the east asking who they can call in Sanirarsipaaq for an update on those murders. He's been giving out the detachment's phone number because as we both know, some officers on the scene like to get their own names in the paper. This morning one of the reporters called Sanirarsipaaq with questions about shamanism. He specifically asked Bouvier about a rumor that the murders had a shamanistic connection. You know reporters. Two murders and shamanism too, they'll be peeing their pants. This guy wouldn't say where the rumor came from.”

I wondered if Erika Hall was maybe stringing for an eastern paper and had raised the shamanism matter.

“Anyway,” Buster went on, “Corporal Bouvier stonewalled the guy but did call our information officer to say that sometime overnight a note addressed to Barker was found pinned to the notice board at the rec hall. Nobody saw it being put there. The note wasn't signed, but named and blamed a shaman named Jonassie . . . know him?”

“Jonassie Oquataq, yeah. He's a shaman, all right, and a master carver. He did that green soapstone polar bear and walrus item in your office. Has stuff in the best Inuit art collections in the world—Winnipeg Art Gallery, UBC, National Gallery, and others.”

I didn't mention right then to Buster a rather light note, when talking about shamans: that this shaman's twin brother was an Anglican priest in some other community, I wasn't sure which. The Anglicans had opened their ranks to Inuit, with a good deal of success that the Catholics couldn't possibly counter because Anglican priests can get married, or whatever. To your average Inuit, that makes some sense, while they feel that Roman Catholic celibacy rules are not quite of this world. Which might, of course, be the idea.

“Anyway,” Buster went on, “this note said that this Jonassie had used his shamanistic powers to cause the murders. Not sure whether the media knows about that yet, but” . . . drily . . .“no doubt they soon will.”

Two things you could say about anyone trying to hook shamanism into the murders. One possibility was that the note-writer was Inuit and believed that shamans had that kind of power. The other was that if a guy involved in the murders was trying a red-herring game, bringing in the threat of voodoo-type shamanism was a way to go. Even people who didn't believe in shamanism have been known to feel a shiver at the idea that shamans can influence the relationship between humans and their environment, and cause a man to die without ever feeling ill, or a woman to rise from a coma.

I shrugged. A crank note, what the hell? But on second thought maybe not from a crank. There was what Erika had said about their stringer hearing rumors. If someone was writing accusatory notes, they could be spreading rumors, too. Or what they believed to be facts.

Buster went on. “One more thing I see in my morning report came in from Sanirarsipaaq on a bad line, or whoever transcribed it didn't seem to get it right. It
seems
to say that the guy who was murdered, and who worked at the hotel, had just been paid, but that the money we found on him was more than his pay. Of course, he could have had the extra on him when he was paid.

“But that's where the stuff gets puzzling—saying something not clear at all that there actually might have been more money than that in his pocket when he was killed, or being killed, because some bills were bloodstained and others not, as if somebody took some money but not all, screwing up the bloodstain patterns.”

Luckily, I didn't have to solve that puzzle right then. Across the lobby I saw the Citation pilot storm in from the tarmac and glare around. When he saw me at the phone he came toward me jabbing his index finger meaningfully at his watch. The gesture was an unmistakable, “Come on, for Chrissake!”

Buster was still talking. I interrupted. “Sir,” I said, “I've gotta go, plane's leaving, pilot's going nuts at me.”

The pilot was right beside me and heard that as I hung up. But I needed another minute or two. “Look, I'm sorry, but it's murder business, the judge'll understand,” I said. “I'll be right with you.”

He stamped off and didn't look back. The next call was still at least partly murder business. I was giving the Inuvik CBC number to the operator, praying that Maxine would answer on the first ring, which she did. “I'm off to see the wizard,” I said. “If you hear anything meaningful from your million sources, will you call me in Sanirarsipaaq? Either the hotel or the detachment.”

She laughed. “Million sources, sure,” she said.

I trotted out to catch up to the pilot. “Sorry about that,” I called, tucking my head down against the driving snow and taking two steps to his one. “I saw the sheriff, court clerk, court reporter, crown attorney, defense lawyer go out, some others with them, but I must have missed the judge. Didn't know I was the last.”

Letting me go up the Citation's steps first as if otherwise I might disappear on him, he growled, “That's what they all say.”

 

As soon as we had reached cruising altitude and the Supreme Court people had settled into their various ways of passing the time, Mr. Justice Charles Ferguson Litterick, fifty-five, known in the trade (to crooks, lawyers, court officials, and police) simply as Charlie, ambled back toward me from his seat by the flight deck. He had been away from the western Arctic for a year, working in Ottawa as an adviser on land claims matters. I'd read in
News/North
about him coming back by choice, saying in an interview that this time he was here for keeps and Ottawa could find its way out of its own tangles. He had a shock of thick white hair, black eyebrows, a hooked nose, and a limp that, as he once explained in a bar association speech, had been caused by jumping out of a second-story window to get away from an angry mob of defense lawyers.

This Citation seated eight comfortably, four to a side. The triangular spaces between each set of back-to-back bucket seats had doors and were used as lockers for inflight supplies. The charter companies were responsible for stocking serve-yourself in-flight food and drink, as ordered by the client.

“Well, now,” said the judge to no one in particular, bending to open the locker door he'd been heading for, “I wonder what we have here?” He pulled out a six-pack of Heineken and put it on the floor. Reaching farther, he produced cans of Coke and 7-Up and packaged sandwiches, put all beside the six-pack, and eyed rather longingly a small box packed with a couple of dozen minis of vodka, Scotch, rum, rye, gin, plus a few liqueurs; but he settled for a beer and offered me one, which I accepted.

“Anyone else for beer or pop?” he called along the cabin.

There was some desultory reaction. Cans were passed. He sat on one of the seat arms near me as we opened the beers. “You seem to have a lively one going at Sanirarsipaaq.”

I nodded, swallowing my first mouthful.

“Tough about your mother,” he said. “How is she?”

“Still fairly frail. Not quite out of the woods yet.”

“She got any idea who she saw, the guy that ran her down?”

That touched what had become my raw nerve. “No. And I sure as hell don't want anybody to get the idea that part of her recovery might be to remember who it was.” I paused, then told him about my worry on that score, and the guard I'd had posted.

His quick shrewd glance into my eyes told me that he understood. I knew that now, when that particular point came up in the legal fraternity—did she or didn't she see anybody she knew?—Charlie would shoot it down.

We sipped our beer. I'd been in his court from time to time and we'd had a few drinks together here and there across the north. This happened usually in privacy, in a hotel room or an aircraft. There are very few bars in the north outside of Yellowknife, Inuvik, and Iqaluit. Even if there were, we try to discourage the idea some people have that the police and courts are one and the same thing, or at least on the same side.

Still, some fraternization was by mutual consent or impossible to avoid. On this flight the crown attorney and defense lawyer were going into their briefcases only a few feet apart. Lawyers in the Northwest Territories might battle in a courtroom by day, but they couldn't easily keep it up while riding on the same aircraft to the next case, or playing cards or talking shop over drinks on layovers. When the court was on one of its almost weekly circuits into the hinterlands, everybody shared what jokes came along.

Once, for instance, Charlie had woken up in the hotel at Cambridge Bay with an urgent need to go to the bathroom down the hall. His red judicial robes had been the first thing grabbable to cover himself (he slept naked), and he had neglected to take his key when he hurried out of the door, which blew shut and locked behind him.

The image of Charlie naked except for his robes of office knocking on the manager's door with this flimsy story of needing her keys was a story that went through the north like wildfire. She was a known target (so far believed to have been impregnable) for lustful males, skilled at beating off even the most plausible male attempts at making a pass. Describing this event for me the last time I was in Cambridge, she had added her own dry touch. “I would never have expected a judge to be so inventive.”

I know he enjoyed that aspect of the story himself, and sometimes would add, “Nearly made it, you know.”

I asked, “What's the case you've got tomorrow in Cambridge?”

“A charge of abduction. The father and mother shared custody of the children. Last summer when the father had the two kids and was supposed to get them to Edmonton at a certain date, he didn't show up. She called the police and he was picked up in Manitoba going home from work, he's a roofer, to where his sister was looking after the kids on a farm. He'd been offered a week's extra work, money he needed, and figured it was no big deal. He'd been late before and so had she without either taking it to court. White people's malice. Natives wouldn't have been so stupid.” He waved around, taking in the aircraft, Cambridge Bay ahead, Yellowknife behind, and a lot of tundra in between. “So there's all this expense. Pity the poor taxpayer . . .” He sighed. “Anyway, you know any more about the Sanirarsipaaq murders than the rest of us?”

I still didn't know much, I told him.

“I had a trial there a few years ago, you know,” he said. “I gave a guy named Davidee Ayulaq four years for raping his sister. Nasty bastard, obviously, but very plausible. Might have got off, or a lighter sentence, in some courts. Apparently they'd had sex when she was younger, more like fooling around, more kids than there were beds. Then when she was older and smarter, about fourteen or fifteen, it happened again. She fought but I guess she wasn't any match and he tied her hands behind her and raped her.”

I sighed. There was nothing much to say. I hate the incest and other rough stuff, but it exists. Booze and sniffing glue or gasoline or whatever is available can contribute.

Charlie shook his head and sipped his beer. “Of course, various kinds of sex abuse in families happen, not only in the north. But not many have this kid's guts. She decided to hell with her parents and went to the police, who questioned the parents and Davidee, all of whom denied everything. When it became obvious that the police were going to let it drop, she set fire to her parents' house. One of those plywood jobs, went up like wildfire.”

He laughed. “Sorry, I have to laugh,” he said, explaining. “So she gets charged with arson! Her case was on one of my circuits. She pleaded guilty but seemed like a decent kid. I asked her why she'd set the house on fire. She told me it had been set so someone would listen to her about the rape. So I did listen and after a lot of questioning and some other kids backing her up, I acquitted her of arson and charged him with rape. All on the same circuit. It seems he'd been sexually abused himself before being adopted. Something like that. Anyway, there wasn't only this one instance with him. Later I gave him four years and stipulated that he couldn't go back there when he got out.”

When Charlie went back to his seat I thought about it, more or less idly. Charlie's ruling that Davidee could never return to his home settlement had the weight of long custom behind it. Long before white man's law arrived, when a person in a nomadic community did something bad enough—murder, theft, some other serious breach of the community's rules and customs—it was the elders in the community who sat in judgment. The most serious penalty they could enforce was banishment. The offender would simply be turned out of the settlement. Could freeze, starve, whatever, but couldn't return. Modern judges in our Arctic, Charlie and others, tend where possible to make some kind of a marriage between Canadian law and native customs; in this case Charlie added permanent banishment to the four-year sentence.

We had long since swung easterly out of Yellowknife, banked to the northeast, and crossed the treeline. No longer could I see open spots marking rocks or clearings, where the snow and ice melt faster. Sometimes I could distinguish certain landmarks, Artillery Lake for one, I knew the shape of it from the air; a few places in the Thelon game sanctuary; and when we swung north, the Back River.

I thought idly that if I were down there traveling by dogsled or snowmobile, not too cold, I'd see the tracks and know what animals had been by, would think about them and watch the trails they took, maybe stop to inspect some droppings, or where scattered feathers had been left behind by a fox eating a ptarmigan or bits of fur from a rabbit; the signs of how life went for animals. The longer the hours of daylight the more they moved around; now, in spring, the days were getting longer and longer.

Yet it's not my favorite time of year, early April, as the spring breakup nears. Soon the ice would become suspect; in a few weeks some would be too rotten for aircraft to land on. Trappers coming in with their winter furs sometimes left it too late and were stranded with their dog teams (rare now) or snowmobiles beside open water until an aircraft with pontoons responded to a radio call and went looking.

Today, with a howling wind on the surface raising clouds of ground drift, it was still winter. In that wind I'd be hunting for a ridge, the bank of a frozen stream or lake, anything that would help me make camp at least slightly protected. Then I'd get myself all snug and tucked in and maybe wake up a few hours later to a sodden tent and water dripping from that same ridge. A spring thaw could be like that.

I was still staring down at the ground drift like swirling fog below, when the crown attorney, tall, thin, young, came back to where I was. He held a sheaf of papers in his hands, possibly so he wouldn't be leaving them where the defense lawyer could get a glimpse of what an airtight case he was building. He helped himself to a sandwich and regarded a mini of rum thoughtfully, but put it back. He asked about my mother and a few questions about the murders. “Any leads?”

“I should know better in a couple of days.”

He smiled. “You should be able to pick up a clue or two by keeping track of who leaves town when they hear who's arriving to take charge.”

A jokey compliment.

He finished his sandwich, ducked so his head wouldn't scrape the ceiling, went back to his seat.

The defense lawyer then paid his courtesy call. His manner struck me as being like that of a cocky schoolboy. No hesitation about whether he should have a drink. He poured a mini of vodka into a plastic glass, added 7-Up, sipped it, then laughed. I didn't like the sound of the laugh. Couldn't say why. I just instinctively thought that some mockery was about to come.

“This place Sanirarsipaaq, the murder place, I was there once,” he opened. “Great case! Appointed by the court to defend an old lady charged with cashing her husband's old age pension checks after he froze to death out on a hunt. Turned out she didn't know he was dead and just was waiting for him to come home! She'd been saving all the money for him! Case dismissed.”

He laughed, shaking his head at the comedy of it all. I couldn't see what was funny, the poor old lady.

“And the hotel there, four to a room, Jesus! I laughed the first time I saw the Sanirarsipaaq hotel ad in the yellow pages: ‘Accommodation for sixteen in four rooms!' Four to a room!”

What the Christ did he think a hotel in Sanirarsipaaq was going to be like, the great old Chateau Laurier in Ottawa?

“Where you from?” I asked.

“Vancouver,” he said, still chuckling. “Why?”

I considered saying that I'd thought maybe he was from Toronto, the deadliest insult you could hand a guy from Vancouver. Instead, I tried an indirect route. Sometimes that works with his kind.

“The hotel suits me all right,” I said, looking him in the eye without a flicker.

Dismissively, “Well, I guess you'd be used to it. I wasn't.”

“It isn't that entirely,” I said. “But, you know, when I'm in Sanirarsipaaq I have three women I sleep with. Four to a room cuts out a lot of travel time, you know, dragging your ass back and forth between the igloos.”

He stared at me, thought I might be kidding, looked uneasy in case I wasn't, decided not, cleared his throat and seemed about to say something, then to think better of it. Back in his seat he took some papers from his briefcase and looked back at me searchingly.

Among the other court people, one was a very thin woman, I'd guess around fifty, who chain-smoked. As I had everybody else pigeonholed, she had to be the court clerk, her job to read charges and generally manage court routine and traditional procedures. When she wasn't smoking or talking, and briefly held the cigarette away from her mouth, she nervously chewed the inside of her lower lip.

The sheriff's office guy I knew slightly. He was sleeping, or at least had his eyes closed and his head against the backrest. He was stocky, maybe midfifties. I knew at least his first name, Bob. One of his jobs was to keep order in the court, make sure the Canadian flag was on a stand behind the judge, and other court niceties.

One other woman, youngish, sturdy (she probably would call it overweight), with really a nice face, was the court reporter. When I caught her eye she smiled, waved, and called, “Hi, Matteesie!!” and I called back, “Hi, Deborah!”

She came from south, Edmonton, or somewhere, and had a cousin who'd been a pro hockey player.

The sky was fairly clear, even sunny at times, showing up the increasingly active ground drift. One thing for sure, the signs of spring that I'd seen this morning in Yellowknife, the salty slush in front of the hotel, the foot or two of open water around the frozen bay down in Old Town, hadn't made it yet into the Barrens.

I went back to what Buster had said about the note blaming shamanism for the murders. Soon I went into a sort of reverie, or trance. This sometimes happens to me. Once in a quiet time with my mother, just the two of us, when I was trying to explain something that I had dreamed, or daydreamed, and was sure it was important if I could remember it, my mother told me that this happens with shamans, that they listen to what a problem is and then go far, far away in their minds and learn something that no one else knew.