Midnight come again (30 page)

"You sure are a nosy bitch," he said without heat.

"Thank you," she said sweetly.

"You know something else?"

"What?"

"This is the first time since I got here that I've seen the real Kate looking back at me."

"What?"

He stood up and began unbuttoning his shirt. "You're late for work, and I'm late for my shower." Deliberately he summoned up the shark's grin, all teeth and appetite and no discernible trace of sincerity. "Unless you'd care to stick around and wash my back?"

The door was still vibrating resentfully on its hinges a full minute later when he grabbed his ditty bag and headed up to the public showers at the terminal, trying not to wish she'd accepted his invitation to join him.

But it had stopped her from asking any more damn questions, hadn't it?

Dangling time like the poise Of a dancer's heel --Petition for Nuclear Freeze The chess board was oak, the chessmen ivory. Oak and ivory both were stained and dark. The pieces left were divided up about equally, white in front of Kamyanka, black in front of Glukhov. The air was thick with smoke.

They were sitting in the wardroom of the Kosygin. "When do we meet?"

"At eleven o'clock."

"Where?"

"He will come here."

Glukhov moved a pawn. "I am nervous about this, I admit it."

"Don't be. It's all about money, and we have enough."

"It is a great deal of risk," Glukhov said.

"We have a great deal of money."

Glukhov grinned. "And we will have more. Especially when we sell off the rest of the plutonium." He had been angry when Kamyanka had told him the true contents of the truck as they were driving away from the base, but his first sip of a Starbucks cup of the day, with cream and sugar, bought on the free and entrepreneur-friendly soil of the United States of America in the form of Sea-Tac International Airport, had soothed his conscience to an indistinguishable murmur.

Kamyanka moved his bishop to take Glukhov's queen.

Glukhov's grin faded. He studied the board. "An odd thing this afternoon," he said, trying to figure out a way through the impenetrable white defense to move his pawn to the last square.

"Really?" Kamyanka was bored. He'd masterminded the theft of the rubles to pay for the plutonium to resell it for enough money to finance his entry into the fields of commerce and trade in the United States, that acknowledged pacesetter of free markets. Planning fascinated him; operations did not.

He was even more bored with Glukhov, who was insisting they speak English all the time, so as to prepare him for his imminent retirement to a townhouse condominium on a golf course in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Unfortunately, he could not be rid of the general just yet, because the general was the one who had met Senator Christopher Overmore when the general had been stationed in Vladivostok in 1997. There had been a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing between Alaska and Siberia since the Wall came down, something Kamyanka had noticed himself when it began as a possibly lucrative opportunity. Glukhov and Ovennore shared an interest in vodka, girls and money, and had kept in touch ever since.

Overmore and his brother-in-law's bank were the last part of the plan to fall into place.

No, he couldn't do without Glukhov.

Yet.

"I go to the library this afternoon, as you know."

"No, I didn't know."

"Oh, I am a great reader," Glukhov assured him. "I mention before my interest in the great American authors, like Judith Krantz. Everyone read these. They teach much about life in America. I will be ready!" He beamed.

"Uh-huh." Kamyanka had never heard of any of them but then he'd never read a book in his life, either.

"There was a woman in the library." Kamyanka stifled a yawn, and moved a knight in front of Glukhov's advancing pawn.

"She was asking for Senator Overmore." Kamyanka paused with his hand on his knight. "What?"

"She was in--" Glukhov searched for the right word, failed to find it, and had to lapse into Russian. "She was in the reference section. The librarian was helping her find out about Senator Overmore." He regained his English. "I hear them talk." He corrected himself. '. I hear them talking."

Kamyanka released the knight. "What did she want to know?"

"She doesn't say, but she is in that place for two hours. She takes many notes." Glukhov took the knight with his pawn, and tried unsuccessfully to hide his triumph.

Kamyanka took the pawn with his bishop. "Checkmate."

Glukhov's face fell. He studied the board with dismay, trying to see where he'd gone wrong.

"What did she look like?" Kamyanka said.

"What? Who?"

"The woman in the library. What did she look like?"

"Oh." Glukhov sat back with a sigh. "I don't know. Like all the women here. Small, dark." "Short hair or long?" Glukhov thought. "Short."

Kamyanka took a careful breath. "Did she look anything like the woman on board the other day?" Glukhov looked blank, and Kamyanka elaborated.

"The woman at the crew's party? The woman Yuri said was asking questions about Burianovich? The only woman who has been* on board this vessel since we docked? That woman?" Glukhov blinked. "I suppose it could be. I hadn't thought. Yes, I guess it was," he said, marveling. Footsteps sounded in the passageway, and Kamyanka rose to his feet, Glukhov a beat behind him.

"Senator!" Glukhov surged forward, hand outstretched. "Is delight to see you again!"

"Armin! Your English is wonderful! You must have worked very hard."

Overmore pushed back the enveloping hood of his dark blue sweatshirt and smacked his hands together. "Where's the vodka?"

The Here came in late, delayed by an emergency caused by a Reeve Aleutian 727 limping into Anchorage from Dutch Harbor on one engine. All traffic had been suspended as the 727 dumped fuel over the upper Inlet.

They'd landed safely, and when they rolled to a stop the pilot turned to the crew and said, "Let's show a little class, boys and girls, put on your jackets and caps and straighten your ties."

All this Larry Maciarello related to Kate with relish. Pilots loved stories about near disasters. Actual crashes were okay so long as they knew no one on board and could second-guess the pilot, but near disasters, where everyone walked away, were best. Larry would be reflying the Reeve flight for years, and so would every other pilot who heard about it. Before too long, they'd have been on board, and before much longer, in the left seat.

He helped move the load of groceries out of the Here and onto the back of the AC flatbed. "I hear you're really Kate Shugak," the driver of the flatbed said to Kate.

She looked at him.

His smile faded. "Yeah, well, I guess it doesn't matter much," he mumbled, backing up to the cab. He climbed in and the flatbed would have kicked dirt if the apron of the airport hadn't been paved.

"Kate Shugak?" Larry said behind her. "What, you're here incognito?"

She turned to see him smiling. "Kind of like Mata Hari." Kate looked at him. "Uh-huh," she said.

"Kind of sexy, having an alias. Like your scar."

The next thing she knew he had grabbed her and was trying to kiss her.

It wasn't necessarily disgusting, but it was irritating. "Larry, knock it off." She squirmed. He countersquirmed. "Larry, damn it, I mean it, knock it off!" She stiff-armed his shoulders and he retaliated by grabbing her waist and pulling her in tight.

"Okay," she said through her teeth, "that's-- mmmph--it."

She raised both feet off the ground, and suddenly he was holding her entire weight with two hands. It threw him off balance and he staggered back a step. He couldn't hold her and she slid down. She got her feet planted just in time and stood straight up fast without bothering to move away first.

The top of her head connected with his jaw. His teeth snapped together with enough force to chip two of them. His head flew back and they both heard the distinctive Snick! as his back went out. He shrieked. There was no other word for it. Kate found herself free. One hand went to his head, one to his lower back. "Ouch, oh damn, oh shit, oh damn! Look what you did to me, oh god, my back, my head, my back!"

He looked to be in real and serious pain, and Kate began to feel sorry for him, just a little, not a lot. He wasn't a big bad wolf, after all; in the predator hierarchy he barely ranked at rabbit. "Look, Larry--"

"Don't touch me!" he shrieked again. "Don't help me, don't come near me!"

He hobbled away, moaning.

Kate turned to see Mutt standing in the doorway of the hangar. "You were a big help." One eyebrow quirked. Like you needed it, the amused yellow gaze said.

Kate retired to the office to make some coffee. All the planes were in the barn or at the dock for the night, save the DC-3, which was on the ground in Iliamna while the Native association board whooped it up with the Iliamna association board. Kate wondered who Cal Kemper had found to seduce. There was always someone.

Unfortunately, with nothing coming in or going out, that left only paperwork. She brought the various logs up to date, aircraft, engine and business, and entered future trips on the four calendars on the wall of the hangar, one for each plane. It was going to be a busy July. She toted up checks amounting to seven thousand dollars--a slow day--made out a deposit slip and tucked them into an envelope for Baird to take to the bank the next day, if he didn't forget.

The Alaska First Bank of Bering, that was. Kate wondered if she should hint Baird into banking elsewhere. She wondered if the bank were FDIC insured. The FBI had no jurisdiction over banks that weren't.

For all she knew, Baird and Sullivan were drinking buddies. Best to leave it alone for now, watch what happened, but she might have to take steps at some point. Baird was often obnoxious in both his personal and his professional habits and he showered far too rarely to suit Kate, but he worked hard to make his business a success, and he didn't deserve to lose it all to a crooked banker.

She was going to have to tell Jim about Sullivan, though, and Overmore, and soon. She would have earlier if he hadn't reverted to his usual pain-in-the-ass persona. It was only a hunch, backed by some interesting coincidences and some even more interesting past history. If she could just hold onto her temper long enough in Jim's presence to get the words out. It didn't occur to her until much later how long it had been since she'd lost her temper.

It was four in the morning when she yawned and decided it was time to stretch her legs on the way to the outhouse. Mutt, laid out on a rug in the hangar like a sack of potatoes, opened one eye to a slit and promptly closed it again as Kate went past.

It was late enough to do her business with the door open, and she sat for a few moments and contemplated the distant lights of Bering, three miles to the northeast, nearly obscured by the length of the swamp grass and the density of the alders between. A small town, tight knit, as witness the continuous flow of people in and out of the Chevak house the day before. It reminded her of Niniltna. On a larger scale, of course, as Niniltna had less than five hundred people and Bering had over five thousand.

But it had the same kind of village feeling. If everybody knew everybody else's business, then everybody was ready to help in times of trouble.

And they were just as ready to help celebrate in times of joy. The four aunties and their quilting bee, who provided every new bride in the Park with a handmade quilt on her wedding day. Dinah's had had the cover of one of her favorite books painstakingly embroidered in every square, twelve squares in all. Bernie, the bar owner who pretended a fidelity to the bottom line that was proved false time and again, when he refused to serve alcohol to women he knew were pregnant, when he cut off known drunks well before closing time, and confiscated their truck keys into the bargain, when he memorized the birth dates of every kid in the local school and threw them steadily and repeatedly out the door of the Roadhouse when they tried to be their way in. George Perry, who rivaled Jim Chopin for skirt-chasing but who had been known to get up at five a.m. on a February morning to preheat the engine on his Cessna so it would take off in twenty-below weather and the Niniltna High School student council could get to a conference in Anchorage.

Bobby, who pirated radio air to broadcast snippets of Park news, who'd been born, who got married and who died, and notices for the bake sales and car washes the basketball team staged to earn money for away games.

Dinah, who edited home videos for Park rats to send to relatives Outside, accepting for payment a quart of blueberries or a promise of one of next year's kings. Mandy and Chick, who brought glory to Niniltna when they raced in the Iditarod.

Old Sam, who had been with her on the hunt, who'd helped get Demetri down from the ridge in spite of a bullet wound and a broken arm, who had helped bring back Jack's body. Old Sam, that crusty Alaskan old fart, who'd been the only one whose company she'd been able to tolerate on the homestead last winter.

Why, I miss them, she thought, surprised.

The horizon brightened. She remembered a poem, one of Roethke's. In a dark time, the eye begins to see, in broad day the midnight come again, something like that. What was the other line? All natural shapes blazing unnatural light? Some people might call the Arctic's midnight sun unnatural light.