The Shaman's Knife (7 page)

The Inuit, tenants for thousands of years? No vote.

Anyway, never mind the politics, the governor-general's trip was seen by the media as exotic enough to cover. Among those zigzagging from one set of inhabited snowbanks to another, sometimes two or three in one day, were representatives of
Time
magazine,
The Times
of London,
The New York Times
, the
Ottawa Journal
, the
Globe and Mail
, the
Montreal Star
, CBC, and CTV, in addition to the governor-general's wife, male secretary, and a few other civilians. The media people no doubt got what they wanted, but my people on the ground waiting for the big event were plainly puzzled. They had envisioned the queen's representative as someone in a grand uniform, chest covered with medals, maybe carrying a sword and wearing a cocked hat (with earflaps?). When this friendly former politician wearing a parka over a tweed suit stepped down from the vice-regal aircraft our people kept looking over his shoulder to see where the real guy was.

I'm almost ashamed now to remember what was a really
serious
showing-the-flag stop on that trip: the distant early warning (DEW) line station near Hall Beach. The DEW line had been built with U.S. money and for years was operated and controlled by U.S. forces. At lunch, the U.S. major in command presented the gov-gen with a nice but not spectacular soapstone carving. I had to smile. It was like, “Sir, this here carving is a souvenir of your own country we'd like you to keep as a memento of how our two nations get along together.”

The press people were not exactly riveted by the obligatory speeches, but were obliged to sit through them. Sight of the carving made some of them think of their loved ones at home, who would be expecting presents not bought at some United Cigar store. Some asked me to find out if there were any more carvings around, for sale.

While the lunch was still going on I obediently scouted around among the GIs and was steered to the workshop of a middle-aged and squatty Inuk carver named Simeonie, who took me to a room where a dozen or so pieces, a few his but mostly not, were set out on a simple wooden table. I stopped in front of a carving in dark gray stone of a crouching hunter with his spear poised at a sealhole. I could not leave. A little card leaning against the carving read: “Hunter at Seal Hole, Jonassie Oquataq, $55.” (This was long ago.) All I had was sixty dollars, six tens. Simeonie couldn't make change. “Gimme the fifty,” he said, shrugging.

The media people and others were to come in later and buy, but as I put my carving in my knapsack Simeonie laughed. “You beat the white men to the best piece.” It now sits on a mahogany table in my own room in Ottawa. Lois loves the piece as well. She occasionally moves it to the living room, but soon I move it back. Family law has some fine points on joint ownership, and if Lois sometime decides she could do better in the way of a husband, which I wouldn't blame her for, I sure as hell don't want to wind up with a judge saying, “Okay, you get first chance with the saw, Matteesie. It was your fifty bucks—you takin' the hunter or the sealhole?”

One recent Jonassie that I had seen, and so had Lois, was a larger-than-lifesize gyrfalcon of the same black or very dark gray stone. It was at a show in Ottawa, priced at three thousand dollars. For some reason Jonassie had chosen to withdraw it, not to sell. There was a story in the art sections of Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa newspapers speculating on why, with a lot of stuff about the gyrfalcon having a special place in Inuit tribal and shamanistic beliefs, and mentioning in passing that Jonassie was a shaman.

Thinking this way, it occurred to me that if any old-time shaman of my youth had donned his mask and rattled his bones and charms down there below us on the ice of Padliak Inlet or Albert Edward Bay and proclaimed that one day an Inuk dressed like a Mountie inspector would be passing overhead three miles up, he might have been regarded even by the faithful with at least mild suspicion.

Then my thoughts came back to the present. The bodies in that Twin Otter. It hadn't occurred to me before, but did now, that RCMP regulations called for bodies in murder investigations to be under police guard at all times, when being moved. When the thought did strike me, I actually wondered who was guarding them on the way out . . . the other corporal, Bouvier, whom I'd never met?

Meantime, every time I thought of the way the shit was going to fly when I got Barker alone, it was very good for my mental health. I never once thought of the other possibility, that Barker had gone out with the bodies himself. That is what turned out to be true.

 

Suddenly the flight got bumpier. O'Kennedy's voice came on the intercom: “Seat belts! This might get worse. We're in descent, coming in to land.” For minutes we pitched and yawed around, losing altitude. The mourners gripped their seat arms and hung on. I could still see nothing. It was like flying through gray soup. Then suddenly the cloud got wispy and I saw the landing strip feet away, much too close. The engines roared us back up out of there. On the second try we came through the cloud the same way, saw the landing strip about twenty feet away, bumped down, braked like hell, and I realized that I hadn't been breathing a lot, if at all, in the last few seconds.

We turned to taxi back. O'Kennedy appeared through the cargo-compartment door and strolled through the cabin. His smile made even some of the mourners look relieved. “Never in doubt,” he said, then laughed and paused by me to say in a low voice, “Just about wore out my prayer beads.”

“No wonder you're not going to take off in this stuff.”

“Dead right. But like I said, we've been told this weather is movin' through, so we have, although they've been wrong before. A couple of hours, they say, three at the most—just time for a flutter at the roulette tables, ha ha. Or maybe take the stewardess to the hotel and fool around a little.” He caught Father Lovering's disapproving gaze. “Just a joke, father.”

As we taxied back through the heavy ground drift I was remembering a lot. The other time I'd been here, when our RCAF Hercules rumbled deafeningly out of the sky on the governor-general's trip, we'd landed on a small lake a bit inland and pulled up to where a dozen natives had tramped out a place in the snow.

When we got to town then on a fleet of snowmobiles the only buildings were the Hudson Bay post, the community hall, and some prefab houses called 512s because that was their square footage, thirty-two feet by sixteen, among a scattering of caribou-skin tents. The official reception was in the community hall, built on pilings that went down to the permafrost, so that the area under the building was open. One Inuk, caught by a call of nature, calmly and naturally had ducked under the overhang, whipped his pants down, and defecated. I noticed the shock that ran through the official party. The journalists normally had been great on making notes about clashes in culture. I later learned that only one, from the
Toronto Globe and Mail
, had written the story of the man relieving himself in full sight of the vice-regal party. His editor had cut it. Apparently some culture clashes were just too strong for southern comfort.

Over the years I'd seen all the changes, here and elsewhere. Now we bumped along toward a real terminal, a building exactly the same as others throughout the north, all brought in by sealift barge, factory-built with everything including electric lights and toilets.

I pulled on my parka, looking around at others standing up and reaching into the overhead rack for their belongings. Once during the flight I had thought, what if the murderer had fled out of here and now for whatever reason was coming back? I looked around carefully but there was no way of telling. O'Kennedy stood by to get the door open while our pilot wheeled the Hawker Siddeley in a half circle in front of the building like a reckless kid parking a bicycle. Maybe he was mad about having to hang around here a bit instead of hightailing it for Inuvik. A toothless little old Inuit granny behind the terminal window ducked out of sight as the wingtip swung by and stopped a few scant feet from the glass. She rose into view again, a laughing mass of wrinkles and an extended arm pointing out this close call.

The instant we stopped, a big man in a blue RCMP parka strode out of the door into the storm. I knew he wasn't Corporal Barker. I'd met Barker years ago in Inuvik; his build and gait had reminded me of a football player I used to know in Edmonton, bowlegged and pigeon-toed, almost impossible to knock down. This one was a good deal taller and heavier than Barker, moon-faced, wearing round-rimmed glasses and somehow exuding vigor. I'd never seen him before.

I was first off. “Bouvier,” he introduced himself with a nod of his head, almost a bow. “Welcome, Inspector.”

He reached for my bag as O'Kennedy handed it down, then grinned, gesturing to the wingtip's proximity to the window. “That would've been just what we need!”

I wasn't sure what he meant. Having this aircraft crippled by bashing up a wingtip couldn't have any effect on the murder investigation, that I could think of.

“What do you mean?”

We were hurrying for the terminal. He looked at me strangely.

“If the wing had been damaged it would have meant Sadie Barker couldn't get out!” he called over his shoulder as we got through the door and out of the wind.

“Why's she going anyway, ahead of Steve?”

He stopped so quickly that I ran into him. Earlier I had half-assumed that Bouvier had been inside with the bodies locked up in the Twin Otter at Cambridge. I was just about to ask who had gone with them when Bouvier looked at me with a mixture of surprise and amusement.

“He's already gone. Went out as guard on the bodies. Saved himself an airfare. Sadie's going to catch up to him via Inuvik and another flight to Yellowknife.”

I had a moment of righteous fury that the guy who'd been in charge when the murders took place, the guy with all the local knowledge, now obviously had
chosen
not to stick around and give me a few hours of his valuable time. I wanted to know more, but that could come later. In only a few more steps I progressed to a guilty feeling of relief that I was not going to have to deal with Barker. As simple as that. Now the job was just to find out who had committed murder.

Inside the terminal Bouvier greeted some of the others there with a minimum loss of progress toward the door, until I touched his arm and said, “Not so fast. I want to look around.” I moved over against a wall where I had a good view of the dozens of people who had come to meet the plane, and also those who'd got off. Most of them were greeting mourners, but not all. One man came out of the men's toilet and looked directly at me and then quickly away. He was wearing a Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap. When he took it off briefly to adjust it, he had a very high forehead ending about halfway up his scalp in well-trimmed hair that covered his ears neatly, like half a skull cap.

I said to Bouvier, “Who's that half-bald guy?”

He saw the direction of my gaze. The man had turned away and was heading for the door with a cheerful-looking young Inuk wearing the kind of hard hat that construction workers use.

“Don't know. Never saw him before that I can remember. The other guy, Donald Thrasher, everybody calls Hard Hat because he's never without it.”

Then, out of the ladies' came by all odds the most noticeable female in the crowd, not only because she was tall, maybe five feet ten or eleven, and strongly built, but because under her open parka she wore a thigh-length skirt and patterned tights that showed a great deal of long, shapely, well-groomed leg above classy winter boots. She looked around and immediately headed toward us just as I was asking, “Who's that?”

By then she was standing beside me. “Hi, Maisie,” Bouvier said, then the obvious, because she sure as hell wasn't dressed for Sanirarsipaaq or environs. “You look as if you're going somewhere.”

“Just out for a few days,” she said. I think her voice would be called contralto. Anyway, pleasantly low. She seemed more than a little distracted. “I wanted to see you and ask that if anything happens about the murders, will you make sure Mother phones and let me know?”

“Sure . . .” He introduced me and she reached out and shook my hand. She had a strong grasp, a large hand. Her nervousness was plain, and her words came with a rush. “I thought this plane was going to turn right around and go again! Mother told me I was crazy to come out so early but I've got a job interview in Inuvik and it drives me nuts sitting around the hotel, everything reminding me . . . I didn't want to miss the flight because of this damn weather and now I hear it'll be an hour or two, maybe more.” She looked from Bouvier to me and back. “Anything new at all?”

Bouvier shook his head. “Want a ride back in with us?” She shook her head. “I'll wait, I've got a book.” She moved through the thinning crowd to a chair where she sat and lighted a cigarette, inhaled deeply, fiddled with trying to pull her skirt down a little over her legs and sat staring at the wingtip so close to the window, obviously lost in thoughts of her own. She wasn't pretty, far from it, but striking. Large nose, generous mouth. Her hair was short and fair with tight curls. A woman no one was likely to ignore.

“Her mother runs the hotel,” Bouvier said. “She and Dennis Raakwap were pretty close, working around the hotel together.”

“Close?” I asked.

He shrugged. “As friends, it seemed. But maybe more. Worked together, sometimes played together, about the same age.”

“You interview her after it happened?”

“Yeah, but not much more than asking did Dennis seem worried lately, or did he have any enemies that she knew of.”

“Did he?”

“Not that she knew, she said.” “You believe her?”

“Not entirely. But we sort of filed her away in case something came up that we could ask about specifically. At the time she seemed pretty rattled, naturally.”

“She got a lot of boyfriends? I'd guess so.”

“I don't think so. A few passes by hotel guests, maybe, but nobody local that I know of. She'd tower over most of them—except Dennis, he was five nine or ten, just a little shorter than she is. Anyway, they worked together. I got the idea that was about it.”

I looked at her again, filing it away, and kept on checking the others. Any who did meet my eyes did so without reaction. Then there was a quick exodus, head-down dashes through the wild wind to board snowmobiles, Honda all-terrain vehicles, pickups, vans. The half-bald man revved up a yellow snowmobile while Hard Hat climbed on behind.

About then a short, stocky Inuk with thick, graying hair and a drooping moustache rushed in, glanced around, and walked quickly to Father Lovering. They embraced. Looked to be in their sixties.

“Is the man with the priest his brother?”

“Yes. Jonassie the carver.”

“And shaman.”

A quick look at me, then, “Yeah.”

They left together with the tail end of the mourners, a group of them crowding into a dirty brown van, with Jonassie getting into the driver's seat.

I took one more look at Maisie, settled into a corner with a book that she was not reading. I'd be talking to her, for sure, but I'd have to do some homework before I'd be likely to get anything out of her that Bouvier and Barker hadn't. The next plane back would be Friday. If it seemed seriously warranted, I could get her back faster.

I figured by then I'd seen what there was to see. “Let's go.”

Outside we ducked our heads into the wind and headed for the blue police van with the RCMP crest on the side, parked with its engine running. In a few seconds we were skidding out of there, the heater fan roaring.

“About Barker taking off!” Bouvier roared over the noise from the heater fan.

“Yeah?” I said.

“You're probably thinking that he shouldn't have.”

“Right.”

“He couldn't help it, entirely. Really wanted to stay around until we'd got somewhere in the investigation, but . . .”

“But what, for God's sake?”

For a moment he had to concentrate on his driving, the slippery road. A snowmobile suddenly appeared out of the murk, going too fast. Bouvier swore, swinging the van to the right, then came back to Barker.

“At first he was going to stay. The morning after the murders, we'd been up all night of course, he told me and told Sadie, his wife, she'd come to the detachment with some sandwiches, that he was going
nowhere
until we got the guy who'd done it. Sadie went ape, right there in front of me, about how they'd had these reservations for six months, Yellowknife to Vancouver to see a sister she has there and then on to Honolulu. And how she already had a substitute teacher to fill in for her at the school, and
they were going!
Period.”

An oncoming Jeep-type vehicle skidded, spun around, and straightened out, the driver waving at us cheerily as he kept on toward the airport.

Bouvier said, “Anyway, all day Saturday, we were interviewing, checking, chasing people, a lot of stuff you can read in our notes, and Steve was still holding out against Sadie, and she was still screaming at him. On the phone and in person.”

Bouvier looked at me, as if expecting a reaction. I had none. He turned back to watching the road, steering carefully on what was sometimes glare ice. Once when he had to brake, the van turned two complete circles. After that he pulled over to the side of the road, turned down the heater fan, looked at me, and sighed.

“May as well stop and get it all off my chest without having to drive, too . . . So he kept on swearing he wasn't going anywhere. Then late Sunday or early Monday he got the word from Ottawa that you would be coming to take charge. Natural enough, because he was going out and I was new. But that's when Sadie got the upper hand, with a lot of stuff about how would he feel taking orders from you.” He said the next words carefully. “You, a goddamn native, she said. Maybe you know about the way he talks—this is his town, what he says goes, all that stuff. Great white father. It can be really irritating, but that is Steve Barker. Half the people in town will be laughing now, making jokes, like Steve might be tough but what Sadie says goes.”

He paused. “That would really hurt him, the snickering.”

We sat there at the side of the road, other vehicles passing both toward the airport and away from it. I thought we might as well clear the decks from my side, too. I was still bothered, plenty, about what had been done under Barker's orders, or at least his jurisdiction, letting the bodies out of here before I arrived. It might never be a factor again, but I wanted Corporal Bouvier to know something.