Though Not Dead (24 page)

Mac had known many women in his life, and not beginning with the upstairs maid, either. Elizaveta was in that moment he first laid eyes on her gaunt and sallow, with hollow eyes and phlegmy breath, so it wasn’t as if she had overwhelmed him with her pulchritude. And she could barely speak, so it wasn’t as if she had charmed him with witty repartee.

But he looked at her, and he knew.

Well, Sam thought, he was like his father in that respect, at least.

Every moment he spent chopping wood for the house, every second he stayed in Niniltna to scrounge food for Elizaveta, every hour spent helping her lay out her parents and clean the meetinghouse was one moment closer to the discovery of his thefts.

Or to the Pinkertons catching up with him. They’d been on Mac’s trail ever since that incident with the bank in San Francisco, and although he hadn’t gone into the details with Hammett he’d made it clear he was one step ahead of them when he shipped out on that northbound steamer. They or someone like them had been sniffing around Dawson City, which was when he’d nipped over the border. He was a Canadian citizen who’d committed his crimes on U.S. soil—well, most of them, but he didn’t go into detail there, either—and both nations were out for his blood.

Sam wondered if Mac had changed his name, if perhaps he had been born under something other than McCullough. Not that Sam had any intention of hunting up long-lost relatives in British Columbia who it didn’t sound like would be happy to acknowledge a son of his father’s get anyway.

Mac knew it was madness to stay one more day in Niniltna, one more hour. And yet stay he did, nursing Elizaveta and helping her with the aftermath of the epidemic and her parent’s deaths. The inevitable happened. When she told him she was in the family way he panicked.

But he didn’t run. No, he did not run.

At least not at first. So far as he knew this was his only child, and while he had always considered himself immune to romantic notions like love and marriage, Elizaveta was special to him in a way no woman had ever been before. He had to provide for them both somehow.

How does a thief solve his problems?

He does what he does best. He steals.

So Mac stole the Cross of Gold Nugget, which he had not bothered with before because it was so damn big, twenty pounds and six ounces of pure gold. The morning after the potlatch he slipped out of town and up into the mountains, where he had discovered a difficult but traversable pass into Canada when he’d staked his gold claim. So far as he knew it was unknown to anyone save himself. He had regarded it as a back door, in the event that Niniltna and Kanuyaq grew too hot to hold him and for whatever reason the road to Ahtna was not an option.

Mac had always had a fondness for back doors, and owed his minimal amount of jail time to date to including one in all of his various schemes.

So he stole the Cross of Gold, planning to hock it in Canada and bring the money back to Elizaveta and the child. On the way out the door, he picked up the Sainted Mary, the tribal icon on display at the big wake. It was there and so was he, and he’d need some walking-around money when he got to Canada.

What does a thief do best? He steals.

The weather had had other ideas, though. A late spring storm lasting three days filled the pass with twenty feet of snow. He’d nearly frozen to death, and came stumbling back down on numb feet to make the shelter of his claim cabin in the nick of time. Tiny, ramshackle, it warmed up only when enough snow drifted against the walls to keep the wind from whistling through. He holed up there to thaw out, and the storm lasted long enough for him to think the situation through and make some plans.

He stayed at the claim until the weather cleared. He hid the Cross of Gold (he hadn’t told Hammett where) and then snuck back down to Niniltna to see Elizaveta.

Where he found that she had left Niniltna with Quinto Dementieff two days before.

Poor bastard, Sam might have thought, if he’d been in a more forgiving mood. As it was, he thought if Mac had really meant to come back he would at least have left Elizaveta a note saying so.

It had hit Mac pretty hard at first, but after he thought it over he decided Elizaveta had made the right decision. He wasn’t the type to settle down, and if she was going to raise their child in anything like civilized surroundings, she needed a man who could. He’d met Quinto at the potlatch, and he had seemed to be a good man. He would treat Elizaveta and the baby right.

But Mac was still determined to do right by them himself, and to Mac, that meant money. He was carrying quite a haul in his pack, and the price would be better Outside. By far and away the majority of the stampeders never hit it big, and most of them spent their last dime on the ticket south. When they debarked in Seattle or Portland or San Francisco they were ready to sell off whatever they had left for money to get the rest of the way home, and there were always people on the docks, waiting for them with a wad of cash.

He avoided Niniltna (whose residents had to have noticed by now that certain items were missing), and by various furtive ways he hied himself to Seward to take the first boat that spring. He’d sold everything in his pack to the first man on the Seattle docks who’d had enough cash money, and according to Hammett’s story he was just about to buy a ticket back north on the proceeds when the law clapped him on the shoulder.

Right, Sam thought.

Mac was extradited to California, where he was tried and convicted of bank robbery, grand theft, and involuntary manslaughter, which last was what got him the bulk of his sentence. He said he hadn’t done it. Old Sam believed that about as much as he believed the rest of the story.

From San Quentin Mac had a letter smuggled out and sent to Elizaveta in Cordova. In it he told her to keep his mining claim, to restake it or homestead it if need be.

This Sam did believe, because his mother was the one who had insisted that he claim his homestead there, in nosebleed country, where the rock was so solid a spud would have to sprout wings to grow in place. Sam, at first incredulous, had demanded to know why there, of all the godforsaken places. Elizaveta wouldn’t tell him, afraid, Sam realized now, of his reaction to the news of his true parentage. Quinto Dementieff had been a good man and a good father who never by word or deed hinted that Sam wasn’t his son by blood. He’d died in a dockside accident while Sam was in the Aleutians. Sam had loved him very much and had grieved his loss.

In the story, Mac didn’t say if he told Elizaveta about the Cross of Gold. He also didn’t say if Mac told her where he had hidden it on the claim. Gold nuts never gave up a claim, or a find.

Or, evidently, a stolen object.

When Mac was released in 1941, he did in fact come north once more, intending, so the manuscript read, to sell the Cross of Gold and give the money to Elizaveta. But then the Japanese invaded the Aleutians and the army was looking for men wise in the ways of the Alaskan backwoods, hardy men skilled in survival. Mac, for what Sam was certain was only the second time in his life, was spurred to an act of altruism and volunteered for the Alaska Scouts. He very carefully didn’t tell them about the case of tuberculosis he’d picked up in San Quentin because he’d completely recovered and was fit as a fiddle.

Sam remembered Mac laying in that hospital bed in Adak, his cheeks flushed and his hollow cough, and the terse message accompanying the manuscript, informing him of Mac’s death. He hadn’t even lived to get off Adak.

Not completely recovered. No.

In spite of himself, as he walked the streets and alleys and neighborhoods of Seattle, braving the separate gauntlets of junk shop and junkyard, Old Sam wondered if Mac had recognized him in boot. Had he intentionally befriended the man he recognized as his son? Who had Mac saved from that Jap sniper that day, Old Sam, his buddy, or his son Sam?

You brothers?
Even Hammett had seen the resemblance.

But Mac hadn’t said. And now Old Sam would never know.

Seventeen

“It’s almost Dickensian,” Kate said, looking up from the last page. “I mean, what are the odds, Auntie? That Old Sam would wind up fighting alongside the man who was his real father? And that his father would save his life?”

“That!” Out came the forefinger again. “That the worse thing!”

“What?” Kate said, feeling skewered.

Auntie Joy waved agitated hands. “That Samuel find out Quinto not his father. Why his real father tell him this story? Samuel never know elsewise.”

“Don’t you think it’s better to know than not know, Auntie?”

“No!” Auntie Joy became if anything even more upset. “Blood makes no father. Love, care, being there”—again Auntie Joy thumped the table hard enough to make the china jump, and this time there was a concerned whine from the other side of the door—“that make a parent. This man!” She made a scornful gesture at the manuscript sitting in Kate’s lap. “This man only—this man only a—a—” She couldn’t think of anything opprobrious enough to say.

“This man was only a sperm donor?” Kate said.

“Yes!” Thump. China teeth chattered. “Exactly right. Sperm donor. He donate sperm—unwanted!—and then he run. Pah!” It wasn’t a word with enough force to describe the extent of her contempt. “Quinto worth ten of that useless man.”

Kate wasn’t so sure. Elizaveta Kookesh had married Quinto Dementieff less than a month after Mac McCullough had disappeared. If Mac had come back to find Elizaveta not only gone but married and gone, why wouldn’t he leave?

And he had saved Old Sam’s life on Attu. For that alone Kate could forgive him much.

Auntie Joy’s level of indignation could have much more to do with the depth of her feeling for Sam than it did her contempt for his father.

And possibly the theft of the icon. Auntie Joy was very much a daughter of her tribe. “What about this icon, Auntie?”

Auntie Joy’s indignation abated a little, to be replaced by something that looked like reverence. “The Sainted Mary. Yes.”

Kate had heard some of this from Demetri but she wanted Auntie Joy’s unadulterated perspective. Demetri was two generations removed from the icon, Auntie Joy only one. “The Sainted Mary?”

“My parents call it that. A holy thing, Katya.” This punctuated by an empathetic nod. “A holy thing. I never see, of course,” she said apologetically, like it was her fault. “But a holy thing for sure, touched by God’s grace. You sick, you pray, you healed.”

Kate thought that the original Latin might have been a little corrupted there but she didn’t say so. “It had healing properties?”

“Oh yes,” Auntie Joy said. “My mother say Aloysius Peterson blind until he kneel to pray before the Sainted Mary. She give him his sight back. A miracle.” Kate didn’t think her expression changed but Auntie Joy said again, with more force this time, “A miracle, Katya.”

Kate, less interested in alleged miracles than in tracking the chain of custody, said, “Who kept the Sainted Mary?”

“Chief keep. Always with the chief the Sainted Mary stay. When he home, she with him. When he fish, she with him. When he travel, she with him. His responsibility always.”

“So anybody who owned the Sainted Mary was the de facto chief of the tribe.”

Auntie Joy looked shocked. “Not owned, Katya. The Sainted Mary never owned. Chief part mother, part father, part tribe.” She gave Kate a meaningful glance.

Present company excepted, Kate thought. If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve. Except she had. “The chief was voted in?” she said. “And then he got the Sainted Mary?”

Auntie Joy looked dissatisfied with this description, but she nodded. “Sainted Mary part of chief job since the Sainted Mary comes to the people.”

“When was that, exactly?”

Auntie Joy was impatient was such pedantry. “Not matter, Katya. My mother say Raven bring her over the sea to her true home. I say God does. He see our need, He provide like always.”

“Got it,” Kate said. “And then Old Sam’s father stole it.”

“Yes.” Auntie Joy gave a solemn nod. “Very bad for chief’s daughter, Elizaveta.”

“So bad she’d marry a man maybe more to get out of town than to give her baby a name?” Really, Kate thought as the last phrase came out of her mouth, the middle ages are never very far away from any of us.

Auntie Joy shook her head. “No, Katya. My mother say Quinto love Elizaveta always. Before, after One-Bucket.” She paused. “My father say Quinto a fool.”

There speaks the man who sold you into marital slavery, Kate thought. I’ll consider the source. She leafed through the manuscript again, pausing to read a paragraph here and there. It was a sober, linear recitation of a man’s life—simple, straightforward, with no pretensions to literary style or grace. There might even be a hint of someone taking dictation. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t signed. Still, the juxtaposition of Old Sam and the man who invented noir was impossible to ignore. “Auntie, I’m no expert, but this could be an original, previously unknown manuscript by a very famous American writer. You probably don’t know him, but—”

Auntie Joy’s eyes flashed. “I not stupid, Katya,” she said sharply. “I go to school. I can read.”

“You’ve read Dashiell Hammett?” Kate said, too surprised for tact. She’d thought Auntie Joy’s primary recreational reading consisted of the Bible and
True Romance
magazines.

“No,” Auntie Joy said, still defiant. “But I watch Humphrey Bogart.”

Kate laughed, and after a moment, Auntie Joy relaxed and laughed, too.

“Okay, Auntie. I’m sorry if I sounded patronizing. I didn’t mean to.”

Auntie Joy, gracious in victory, said, “So who this Hammett is?”

“He invented the hard-boiled detective in mysteries,” Kate said, remembering Ben Gunn’s near adoration of the writer. “And you’re right, he is best known for
The Maltese Falcon
.”

Auntie Joy loved the old movies. On the shelves above the secret drawer in the armoire were a television, a DVD player, and a movie library, most of it films in black-and-white. Ekaterina, Kate’s grandmother and Auntie Joy’s cousin, had held an after-school open house for all the grade-schoolers in Niniltna, featuring fry bread right out of the pan, Nestlé’s cocoa made with evaporated milk, and stories about the Trickster. Since her death, Auntie Joy had stepped in as the default after-school special, although Kate heard that it was now tea with milk, shortbread, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing to
Swing Time
on the television. She was willing to bet it was just as well-attended, though. Auntie Joy had a fatal attraction for anyone under the age of twelve. And for most over it.