“Right,” she said, skeptically. “Email is so slow these days.”
The professor was looking around with interest, and he said to them both, “Would you forgive me if I went for a short walk? I would like to stretch my legs.”
“No problem,” Nika said. “It’s hard to get lost in Port Orlov. The street’s that way,” she said, pointing off to one side of the big clumsy buildings, raised on cinder blocks, that comprised the community center. To Slater, she said, “You can follow me.”
They picked their way across the hard, uneven ground and entered the center. Geordie, her nephew, was sitting at a computer console, plowing his way through a bag of potato chips.
“Why don’t you bring us some coffee?” she said. “And knock off the chips.”
She led Slater down the hall, past the community bulletin board covered with ads for craft workshops and used ski gear, and into an office with battered metal furniture and a ceiling made of white acoustical tiles, several of which were sagging.
“Have a seat, Mr. Slater,” she said, shrugging off her coat and hat.
“Actually, it’s Dr. Slater,” he said, in an offhand tone that carried a welcome touch of humility. “I’m here from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington.”
If she hadn’t guessed already, now she knew that this was a serious matter.
Geordie waddled in with the cups of coffee and a couple of nondairy creamers.
“You can just leave those there,” she said, clearing a space on the desk by shoving stacks of papers around. Slater took off his own coat and put the envelope down on a free corner.
“I should warn you,” he said, “another chopper will be arriving tomorrow morning, so if there’s anyplace in particular you’d like it to land, just let me know.”
At least he was being accommodating, she thought, despite all the mystery. But two helicopters?
“So what’s all this about?” she said.
“It’s best, I think, if any information was disseminated from your own mayor’s office.”
“In that case,” she said, picking up the envelope, and using a whalebone letter opener, “let’s see what we’ve got.”
He started to protest, even raising one hand to take the envelope back, but the smile on her lips must have given her away.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’re N. J. Tincook—the mayor?”
She pulled out the folder inside. “Nikaluk Jane Tincook, but most folks just call me Nika. Nice to meet you,” she said, though her eyes were fixed on the official warnings, and top secret clearance stamps, on the cover of the report. The title alone was enough to knock her out of her chair. “AFIP Project Plan, St. Peter’s Island, Alaska (17th District): Geological Survey, Exhumation, Core Sampling, and Viral Analysis Procedures.” And the report attached, she saw from a quick riffle through the pages, must have been sixty or seventy pages long, all of it in dense, single-spaced prose, with elaborate footnotes, indices, charts, and diagrams. The last time she’d had to wade through something like this was in grad school at Berkeley. “You expect me to read this now?” she said. “And make sense of it?”
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“Then why didn’t you send it on in advance?”
“Because, as you’ve seen from the cover clearances, we’re trying to stay under the radar as much as possible.”
“Why?” She was starting to feel exasperated again, and it looked like Dr. Slater could see it. He sipped his coffee, and then, in a very calm and deliberate tone, said, “Let me explain.” She had the sense that he had done this kind of thing many times before, that he was used to talking to people who had been, for reasons he was not at liberty to explain, kept in the dark.
As he laid out the case before her, her suspicions were confirmed. The stuff about the coffin lid and Harley Vane she already knew, just as she knew most of what he told her about the old Russian colony. She had grown up in Port Orlov; everyone there knew that a sect of crazy Russians had once inhabited the island and that they’d been wiped out in 1918 by the Spanish flu. She even knew that the sect had been followers of the mad monk Rasputin, who was said to have bewitched the royal family of Russia, the Romanovs, in the years before the Revolution. But out of politeness, and curiosity about where all this was going, she let him run on. As the grandma who raised her had always said, God gave us only one mouth, but two ears. So listen.
Truth be told, she also liked the sound of his voice, now that he was talking to her like an equal.
“Rasputin’s patron saint was St. Peter,” Slater explained.
And see, she thought, that was something she hadn’t known.
“The coffin lid bore an impression of the saint, holding the keys to Heaven and Hell. That’s one way we knew where it came from.”