Dead in the Water (4 page)

She passed a crab processor, a surimi plant, another processor, another surimi plant, making her way down the gravel road that paralleled the beach and the rectangular harbor. She dodged a red Ford pickup with a supercab crammed with an indeterminate amount of people in bright yellow rain gear, and came upon a group of fishermen, identical in jeans, plaid shirts, shoepaks, navy-blue knit watch caps and unshaven faces. They stood in the middle of the road, oblivious to the trucks and vans rattling impatiently around them. They were all talking at once, at the tops of their voices, and punctuating their words with vociferous gesticulation. Kate paused to listen.

The man at the center of the group shook his head adamantly and held up ten fingers.

"Forget it!" one of the other men exclaimed. He had a dark, full beard that did little to conceal his choler. "Fifty and not a penny more!"

Kate, craning her neck, saw that the man at the center of the group had a bundle of loose fur beneath one arm.

He held it up and it resolved itself into a hat, the kind seen in illustrations of winter life in Moscow. The fur was long and deep brown, almost black in color. The man showed it around the circle, allowing the prospective buyers to finger it admiringly. There were murmurs of appreciation at its softness and shine. Kate realized the scruffy guy must be off the big Russian processor anchored in the harbor, and was in the act of trying to raise some spending money. She elbowed forward for a closer look at the fur.

"Fifty," the fisherman who had bid last repeated.

The Russian, obdurate, shook his head and held up ten fingers again,

"Goddammit!" The fisherman was frustrated. A friend standing next to him said something in a low voice and he gave his head an impatient shake, "I forgot her birthday, I've gotta send her something or she'll throw all my clothes out the window like she did last time. She's into that ethnic shit, she'll love a Russian hat from a real Russian. Okay, sixty." He held up six fingers.

The Russian stood firm at a hundred. He couldn't speak a word of English but he knew a desperate man when he saw one. He was right; the fisherman eventually peeled five grimy twenties from a roll that would have choked a hippopotamus and exchanged them for the hat.

Kate waited until the men had moved on before going to stand next to the Russian fisherman. "What kind of fur was it?" she asked.

He was counting his money, laboriously, licking his fingers between each bill. Unsatisfied with the first count, or perhaps disbelieving it, he counted a second time before looking up, his face split with an immense grin. It widened when he saw Kate, and he fired a stream of Russian in her direction.

She spread her hands and gave him a rueful smile that he had no problem interpreting and that left him undiscouraged. He pantomimed chugalugging a drink and looked at her hopefully, a big, rumpled, enthusiastic puppy dog. "Oh-kay?" he said, evidently the limit of his English vocabulary.

What the hell, she thought. Might as well provide herself with some cover in case she ran into someone else off the Avilda. The prospect of meeting Jack with an enormous Russian in tow also had its appeal. "You know the Shipwreck?" she suggested out loud, and the Russian's grin threatened to split his face in two. It appeared he knew the Shipwreck. Kate smiled, shrugged and nodded.

Without further ado her new friend placed a massive and proprietary arm around her shoulder and urged her down the road.

"Wait a minute," she said, holding up both hands. He halted, his face failing ludicrously. "No, it's okay, I'll go with you, I'm going that way anyway. But the hat." She demonstrated, pulling off her own, a baseball cap with the Niniltna Native Association logo stitched across the front. She pointed after the other fishermen, patted the canvas on her hat and rubbed her fingers together. "What was it made of? Your hat?"

He hesitated, looking at her.

"It's all right, I'm just curious," she assured him. "I do a little trapping myself. What was it?"

Still he hesitated. Kate wet her lips and gave him her best smile and his reservations dissolved. He looked around to make sure no one was looking, and held one hand at his side, palm down. "Woof," he said.

She laughed. "That's what I thought." She remembered Mutt and her smile faded, but he laughed back at her and offered his arm again. She took it. He would have steered her directly for the Shipwreck if she hadn't just as firmly steered him first to the Alyeska Trading Company, an all-purpose general store selling everything from California oranges to Stanley screwdrivers to Nikon cameras to Levi's jeans. Kate was there to buy dental floss but her Russian admirer took one look at the crowded shelves and fell in love, and Kate spent the next thirty minutes trailing after him up one aisle and down the next. He swooned over the coffee. He agonized over the relative merits of Marlboros and unfiltered Camels.

Dismissing the best Timex had to offer with a decisive shake of his head, he was investigating the workings of a Canon Sureshot when Kate looked up and saw Harry Gault over by the meat counter, talking rapidly in a low voice to a short man with Asian features. He looked stubborn, Harry angry, and they both looked somehow furtive.

Kate had begun an unobtrusive drift in their direction when half a dozen of her new Russian friend's shipmates rolled in the door and engulfed the two of them. Harry looked up at the shouts and laughter. Caught looking at him, Kate met his eyes calmly and nodded hello. His eyebrows snapped together, he scowled and ushered the Asian man down an aisle and out of sight.

The Russians looked from Kate to their shipmate and back again and there was a considerable wagging of eyebrows and a lot of talk recognizable as ribald -in any language. One of them asked her a question. Of course it meant nothing to her and she shook her head helplessly. Her newfound bosom buddy held up one finger in inspiration and poked himself in the chest.

"Anatoly! Anatoly!"

"You're Anatoly," she said, nodding. He pointed at her and waited. "Kate. I'm Kate."

He looked puzzled for a moment. "Kate?" Dawn broke.

"Ekaterina!" She nodded, and jumped when the entire crew shouted her name with one voice, causing heads to turn all over the store. Anatoly, noticing her alarmed expression, grabbed her hand and hauled her over to the window. He pointed at the processor anchored in the harbor, a squat, ungraceful ship that towered over its harbor mates, looking like an immense gray gull with its head tucked beneath one wing. "Ekaterina!"

He pointed from the boat to Kate and back again.

"Ekaterina! Ekaterina!"

"Ekaterina!" his shipmates yelled, beaming at her.

A light went on over Kate's head. "You mean your boat's name is Ekaterina, too?"

He nodded excitedly. "Ekaterina! Ekaterina!"

"Well, it's nice to meet you, Ekaterina," she said to the boat, "and you, too, Anatoly." She held out her hand.

He was at least six feet tall and seemed six feet wide, so when he put his hands on her upper arms and lifted her without seeming effort she was unsurprised, if a bit startled. He kissed her, great smacking kisses on both cheeks and mouth, before setting her back down on her feet. There was a cheer from his shipmates and Kate could feel herself flushing, but she had to laugh. "Well, thank you. Nice to meet you, too.

I think."

Eventually Anatoly decided on a Sony boombox and a selection of Top Ten cassette tapes, leaving Kate to wonder how Hammer was going to go over in Magadan.

With the boombox clutched firmly beneath one arm and Kate beneath his other, Anatoly plotted a course for the door, followed by laughing, chattering shipmates similarly laden with packages. Kate felt like she was leading a parade. -As they exited the store, what looked like an entire ship's company of Japanese fishermen flooded in and headed straight for the meat counter. So that was why everything in the store was priced in yen, too, Kate thought, and wondered why the store's owners didn't price their products in rubles as well.

The Shipwreck Bar had been a Dutch watering hole for time immemorial, which at this longitude meant since at least before World War 11. A cargo ship for Alaska Steam, she'd been conscripted by General Samuel Buckner to supply troops rushed to the Aleutians following Pearl Harbor. A gale drove her ashore during her first year of service. The SeaBees restored her to an upright position, filled her hold with concrete for ballast, reconditioned her generator and used her for a barracks during the war. Abandoned for two decades, when the crab fishing picked up in the sixties a local businessman acquired her as government surplus and remodeled her into a restaurant, hotel and bar.

Double doors were cut into the side of the hull. Kate entered first, only to dodge back out of the way of a fisherman slow dancing with a bar stool, eyes closed and cheek to seat. Jimmy Buffet was wishing he had a pencil-thin mustache and about thirty fishermen were crowded around the jukebox, leaning up against it and each other and singing along in an enthusiastic if tuneless chorus. Grimy windows cut through the hull looked out over the docks and boats of the harbor, tables were scattered around the room with a lavish hand, the floor was filthy with spilled beer and cigarette butts, and Kate couldn't even see the bar with all the bodies crowded up against it. Her eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom, she conservatively estimated about one woman for every twelve men in the place. She further estimated that at thirty-one years of age she was by far the oldest person in the room, save perhaps the bartender. He was a wrinkled little man with an anxious expression between the creases, who seemed to be the only waiter and was in constant motion between bar and tables.

One of those tables became free and Anatoly and his shipmates herded their prize female across the room in a proprietary manner that made Kate feel like the single houri in a harem otherwise filled with very needy sheiks.

A chair was produced and she got to sit in it for all of thirty seconds before Anatoly had her out on the dance floor. He was promptly cut in on by one of his friends, and he by a third, and so on. They rotated her through the entire crew several times and what had to have been most of the jukebox's repertoire before Kate, flushed and laughing, protested. Anatoly, her current partner, became all concern and ushered her solicitously back to her chair, its current occupant removed by the scruff of his neck. Anatoly rattled off something to his shipmates and there was a concerted rush to the bar. Almost instantaneously on the table before her appeared a Michelob, a Rainier, an Olympia, three shot glasses brimming with a clear liquid and one mixed drink with a slice of pineapple hooked over one side of the glass and a tiny pink paper parasol draped over the other.

Kate looked from the drinks to her escorts. "Thank you, but-"

Anatoly said firmly, "Spasiba.

"I beg your pardon."

" 'Dank you,' nyet, " he said. "Spasiba.

"Oh. I see." Kate waved a hand over the table and said, "Spasiba, then, spasiba very much, but I don't drink." She pointed at the assorted glasses and bottles and back to herself, all the while shaking her head from side to side. "I don't drink." She couldn't help laughing at their crestfallen faces. With a firm hand she moved each drink to a place more or less in front of one of them and before any of them could beat her to it rose to her feet in search of something tall, cold and nonalcoholic.

"Hi, honey," some jerk at the next table smirked. He patted his lap suggestively. "Have a seat." She ignored him, and someone jerkier seated next to him growled,

"Got something against Americans, girlie?" She ignored him, too, only to be brought up short against a barrel chest clad in brilliant orange and green plaid wool. She took a deep breath and looked up, prepared to defend her virtue at all costs, only to encounter a pair of mild brown eyes in a moon-shaped face. "Name the Beach Boys," he demanded.

"I-what?"

"Name the Beach Boys," he repeated. He swayed a little on his feet. There wasn't room enough for him to fall down, for which Kate was profoundly grateful.

"The Beach Boys," she said. "Well, there was Mike Love, and the Wilson brothers-"

"Which one's still dead?"

" 'Still dead!1 "

The moon face looked disapproving, "What's the matter, I don't speak English good enough for you? Which Beach Boy's still dead?"

Kate offered him a conciliatory smile. "I'm sorry. I don't know which one's still dead."

The moon-faced man buffed out an impatient sigh.

"Don't anyone in this bar know nothing about the legends of our own time? Jesus!" He looked back at Kate and said with exaggerated patience, "D for Dennis. D for dead. Simple. Get it?"

"Got it," Kate said solemnly.

"D for Dennis. D for dead." The moon face crumpled and a tear ran down his cheek. "Goddammit."

It was like that all the way across the bar, and the journey took time and persistence and some strong elbow work. When she finally got through she could see why.

She stood stiff and still, barely breathing.

Someone had dribbled a thin line of white powder on the bar, a line that extended the entire twenty-foot length of the scarred wood. About one fisherman per inch was snorting it up through straws, thin glass tubes and rolled-up hundred-dollar bills with all the finesse of a bunch of enthusiastic hogs working their way through a cornucopian trough.

Kate was not exactly a virgin when it came to understanding the effects of rash and reckless youth combined with too much money, but this blatant display was something even beyond her ken. As she stood there, stunned, an amused voice drawled, "Like a toot, little lady?"

She turned to see a man with a grin like a hungry shark standing next to her, and she remained so astounded that he mistook her silence for interest. An expansive sweep of one arm took in the bar. "Go ahead, the party's on me." He looked her over with a predatory eye. What he saw must have pleased him, for he gave the bulging bag in front of him a possesive pat, grinned that shark's grin again and said, "Plenty more where this came from.

Maybe we can work out a little something in trade?"