White Heat (42 page)

    Edie
felt herself smile. This was good news. Her instincts told her that Beloil
wouldn't stop until Belovsky had got what he wanted, but this at least bought
everyone some time.

    'Did
they say anything about why they were up there?'

    'Who,
the police?'

    Edie
corrected her: 'The Russians.'

    'Same
as before. That they were only interested in digging around the foundations of
sod huts. They said they didn't know they had disturbed graves. But the
pictures were clear.'

    'I'm
glad they're gone,' she said. If they'd found the wallet, the Russians would
know that Maggie Kiglatuk was not who she said she was.

    'Did
you check those diaries I mentioned in my note?'

    Qila
said: 'Yeah. I found a copy in the library. You were right about Karlovsky. He
did meet with Welatok.' She let out a short, ironic laugh. 'That
qalunaat
wrote a
lot,
too much. He was, what do you say, a wind sack.'

    'A
windbag.'

    'Yes,
a puffed-up old windbag. But he knew your great- great-great-grandfather. They
met in Etah. For a while Welatok guided him, but then he decided not to do it
any more.'

    'Did
Karlovsky say why Welatok changed his mind?'

    'You
know how it is, Edie. One minute he complains the natives are hard to read, the
next that we're simple-minded as seals. Karlovsky says Welatok had some kind of
stone. The
qalunaat
had never seen anything like it before.' She paused.
'Is this helpful?'

    'Yes,
yes,' Edie said, sounding encouraging. Hadn't Mike Nungaq said that the
fragment in her possession was chipped from something larger?

    'OK,
then, there's more.'

    'I'm
all ears.'

    'Ears?
What?'

    'Listening,
Qila, I'm listening.'

    'Oh.
Well, now, this stone. Karlovsky wanted it, but Welatok wouldn't trade it with
him. He offered Welatok two rifles, but Welatok didn't hand it over. He said
some other
qalunaat
had betrayed him and he wouldn't trade with them any
more.'

    'Fairfax.'
Edie steadied herself. The story was finally coming together.

    Qila
said: 'Who?'

    'It
doesn't matter.'

    'So Welatok
decides he won't guide Karlovsky any more and leaves camp. Karlovsky tries to
follow Welatok into the interior, but there is no game and his dogs begin to
starve, so he has to turn back. This is what he says anyway.'

    'You
don't believe it?'

    'No.
I think Karlovsky caught up with Welatok, killed him and took all his things,
including the stone.'

    'How
do you figure that?' The version passed down in the family was that Welatok had
died out on the land of starvation, or cold, or both.

    Qila
sounded a little put out. 'I haven't just invented this story, if that's what
you mean. I have evidence.'

    Suddenly
Edie could see why the
puikaktuq
seemed to be Joe and yet not Joe. The
vision that had come to her was the spirit of Joe and Welatok, two murdered
souls calling to her from the other world.

    'Karlovsky
talks about shooting some of the weaker dogs and feeding them to the others on
the journey back from the interior, but he went out with a twelve-dog team, so
he must have got more dogs from somewhere, or there would not have been enough
to return to Etah.'

    'You
think he took Welatok's dogs.'

    'Not
just dogs, the stone, everything. The diary ends not long after Karlovsky tried
to buy the stone from Welatok but the introduction says Karlovsky got lost in a
storm shortly after his return and his body was never found. It says that some
Inuit fellas turned up with Karlovsky's notebook and sold it to the rescue
party who came looking for him. But I don't think that's how it happened.'

    'Why
not?'

    'It
was June. No storms up in Etah in June. I think Inuit found out what Karlovsky
had done to Welatok and killed him.'

    Edie
listened and thought hard. Robbery, low theft, was almost never a motivation
for murder in Inuit culture as it was in the west, but revenge, yes. Inuit were
big on revenge.

    'So
the Russians weren't looking for Welatok's grave?'

    'No,
they were looking for Karlovsky's.'

    'Then
why didn't they just say that?'

    'Because
they would have drawn more attention to themselves,' Qila said.

    Edie
thought about this and realized she was right. Felix Wagner, Andy Taylor and
the two Russian men all wanted the same thing, but the Russians had been
smarter about it. Andy Taylor might have thought it was the perfect cover
bringing Bill Fairfax up to the Arctic, but with all the fuss there would have
been in the western press, it was an act of suicide. Once the Russians got wind
of it, Taylor didn't stand a chance. Disinterring a few natives might make the
Russians unpopular in Greenland, but, as a news story, it wouldn't travel.

    What
was still puzzling was why the Russians had had to resort to such measures in
the first place. If they had shot Taylor and dismembered his body, why hadn't
they found the stone around his neck?

    Edie
was ending the call as Mike appeared from the back of the store.

    'Asking
first would have been nice.' He sounded a little put out.

    'I'm
sorry, you were busy. I'll reimburse you, but it might have to wait.'

    Mike
threw her a disapproving look.

    'Mike,
I owe you.'

    'You
got that right,' he said.

    Back
home, Edie made herself an extra-sweet brew and tried to think back over the
months to Wagner's death. Everything she'd discovered so far suggested that the
two Russians, Skinny and the blond one, were passengers on the green plane Joe
had spotted. They knew Andy Taylor had the stone and the diary. How they knew,
she wasn't sure. Perhaps Taylor had been playing the same game as his boss,
Wagner, courting both sides. In the process of hunting Taylor had the Russians
spotted Joe? Perhaps they'd tried to kill him too, but had lost him in the
snow. Conscious that they'd been seen, they could have contacted their mole in
Autisaq. That person had gone to the nursing station and, finding it empty,
taken enough Vicodin to kill a man, and a hypodermic, sought Joe out and made
sure he would never wake up again.

    Frustrated
in their attempts to retrieve the stone with the minimum fuss, she imagined
that the Russians were forced to start looking elsewhere. From Karlovsky's
diaries they'd deduced that Welatok had another stone and worked out that
Karlovsky had taken it. All they had to do was to locate Karlovsky's grave
among the many scattered in the tundra around the old settlement of Etah and
hope that the stone had been buried with him.

    As
for the local agent, the executioner, everything pointed to Simeonie Inukpuk:
his reluctance to investigate the deaths, the regular payments to some bogus
children's foundation, the sudden burst of spending on consultants and fancy
election posters and the web history suggesting that he at least knew about
Zemmer. But how was she going to prove it? And even if she did, who would
listen?

    She
fried some char, stuck
The Gold Rush
on the DVD player and sat down with
her supper. She'd just started eating when sudden, unexplained sounds of
someone moving about in the snow porch stopped her. Suddenly all she could hear
was her own quickened breathing. She was reaching for the door of the utility
room, where she'd left her rifle, when a voice called out, 'Edie?' and the
inner door to the snow porch swung open.

    Auntie
Martie. For a moment the two women stood and stared at one another, then Martie
began to laugh.

    'Shit,
you look like you just saw a ghost!'

    Swinging
over, she gave her favourite niece a long, hard hug.

    'How
you doing, Little Bear?'

    Edie
smiled. 'Sometimes I'm OK.' She motioned for her aunt to sit and brought her
over a brew and some fried char.

    Martie
looked at the tea. 'On the wagon again?'

    Edie
nodded. 'A coupla months.'

    Martie
patted her on the knee. 'Good for you.' She picked at her food and gave her a
thumbs-up.

    'You
heard about the old man?' she said. 'He was a crazy old walrus, but I was kinda
fond of him. I guess you know that back in the day Koperkuj and me, well. . .'
She put the fish plate down on the floor by the sofa. She looked terrible, Edie
thought, not eating either. Not like Martie. The woman usually had a big appetite.

    'I
don't guess you got a glass of Mist?'

    Edie
shook her head.

    'A
beer then?'

    'Uh
nuh.'

    'Thing
is, about the old man. You know he had some ...' She hesitated, searching for
the right words. 'What I'm saying, he had some goings on.'

    If
there was a story, Edie wanted to hear it.

    'That
glasshouse business?' Martie began.

    'He
was in that?' This was the first Edie had heard. Another thing Willa had cut
her out of.

    Martie:
'It got hauled away. The boss at the science station, he got it torn down. But
the old man, see, he wanted to start afresh, set it up somewhere else. Said he
had a diamond he could sell, get the capital together.'

    'Oh.'
Somehow this changed everything. 'You think that's why he went missing?'

    Martie
was trying to get to something, but she hadn't got there yet. 'Why are you
coming to me with this now?' Edie said.

    Marie
shrugged. 'I guess I only just remembered.'

    Edie
sensed it was her turn to truth-tell. 'The diamond, Auntie Martie, I traded it
with the old man.'

    'You
did? Where d'you get something like that?'

    'I
don't think it's real, leastwise I don't know. He had a trinket, a stone, I
wanted it.'

    'A
stone?' Martie seemed puzzled. 'You traded a diamond for a stone?'

    Edie opened
her mouth then realized that she'd never be able to explain it all. She was
already half way to the snow porch by the time Martie said, 'Hey, where are you
running off to?'

    'Wait
for me here, Martie?'

    'You
tell me where you're going!'

    'To
Willa.'

    Martie
shrugged. As Edie walked down the street she could hear her aunt muttering,
'Crazy emeffing Little Bear.'

    Edie
found Minnie in her usual place on the sofa, surrounded by bottles. She
hollered, 'Get out, bitch.'

    'Top
o' the morning to you too.' Edie sailed past her and headed towards Willa's
room.

    Minnie
tried to rise, then she gave up the struggle and flapped her fists
disconsolately instead.

    To
Edie's relief, her stepson was sitting on his bed, playing video games. She
stood at the doorway.

    'Fuck
off, Edie.'

    Edie
felt a sharp pain dig her heart. She swallowed back the desire to reach across
and hold him.

    'What
was the old man doing in your little glasshouse project?'

    For a
second he looked up, thinking to deny it.

    'I
don't know why he's disappeared, that what you think?' He went back to the
game. His voice was strangely calm. 'In any case, they want me, they can come
and get me.'

    'If
who want you, Willa? What the hell?'

    Edie
took a deep breath to calm herself. Could it only have been a few months ago
that Autisaq was as calm as a lake? Now it was as stormy as a northwest wind.