“I always do,” she said. “Brendan, at the party, what should I watch out for?”
“Assholes.”
She laughed, and started out again for Turnagain with a lighter heart.
The Turnagain neighborhood had been one of the first residential suburbs of Anchorage and one of the hardest hit during the 1964 earthquake, magnitude 9.2 on the Richter scale. Half of it fell into Turnagain Arm and the other half just felt apart. Frantic to keep people in the state following the earthquake, the city traded home owners in the area for property up on what was now Hillside, the west-facing slopes of the Chugach Mountains, where now, if you didn’t have five thousand square feet beneath one roof, including the indoor swimming pool and the marijuana grow, you weren’t shit. For example, Charlotte Bannister Muravieff lived on Hillside.
Of course, twenty years later waterfront property again began looking good to people with short memories and a greedy turn of mind, and the previous owners of property below the Turnagain Bluff successfully challenged the city for title to that property. Now, the rich and powerful were building mansions on what was essentially in midquake quicksand, and since Alaska sat on the northern edge of the Ring of Fire and experienced literally at least one earthquake per day, the future was ripe with the possibility of violent death, not to mention potential litigation. “Ah, Alaska,” Kate said out loud, threading the Subaru down the switchback. “The land of opportunity, and of opportunists.”
Mutt yipped agreement. “What do you know about it?” Kate asked her as they emerged from the trees to a vast parking lot in back of a house the size of the Hyatt Regency Maui. The view was superb, though, a gentle slope of green grass down to the coastal trail, after which the land gave way to mud flats and Knik Arm. It was a lovely evening, and the Knik was placid as a pond. On the far side of the water, Susitna, the sleeping lady, lay in peaceful repose, and beyond her Foraker and Denali scratched at the sky.
“Might be worth it,” Kate said after a few moments’ judicial study, “might just be worth living with the constant prospect of eminent death to have this view.”
This from a woman who hated to get her feet wet on a hunt. Mutt gave this observation the credulity it deserved, shoving past Kate when she opened the door. Kate left a window open for her and didn’t bother locking the car.
The front door of the mansion was actually two, reached by a wide set of stairs that spilled to either side in graceful arcs around a carefully tended grouping of flowers arranged by hue and height. Sidelights and a fanlight let a gentle interior glow leach through, and Kate could hear the sound of many voices and the tinkling of glasses. She supposed it might sound inviting to some.
She looked down at Mutt. “Want to come in?”
Mutt bared her teeth.
“Okay, try not to get into too much trouble,” Kate said, and at a hand signal Mutt was off the porch and into the underbrush like an arrow from a bow.
Someone cleared his throat. Kate looked around and beheld a young man in what looked like a bellhop’s uniform, an ingratiating smile on his face. “May I park your car?” he said.
“It’s already parked,” Kate said, and headed up the steps.
He nipped ahead of her and opened the door. She eyed him suspiciously. His smile stayed in place. The door remained open. “Thanks,” she said after a moment.
She went in, and the gates of mercy closed behind her.
The room was large, the biggest private room she’d been in, with floor-to-ceiling windows framing the spectacular view and hardwood floors polished to a shine bright enough to hurt your eyes. Not that Kate could admire either the view or the shine, because the room was jammed with what seemed to her appalled eyes like simply hundreds of people. Most of the men were in suits. Most of the women were in black, with the only variables the depth of the neckline and the height of the hemline. There was a lot of loud jewelry flashing from ears and wrists, and everybody had big hair, even the men. There was an occasional black face and a few more Native ones, but this could not be construed in any way by even the most nearsighted viewer as a multicultural gathering. Kate could feel her skin getting darker by the second.
They were all talking at the tops of their voices. The resulting roar sounded like a 747 on takeoff. It took a few moments for Kate’s ears to accustom themselves to the cacophony.
“Excuse me? Mr. Mayor, I’m so glad to have this opportunity to shake your hand and tell you what a fine job I think you’re doing for the city. You’ve got my vote all the way.”
“That’s great. I’m not the mayor, but I’ll be sure to tell him when I see him.”
“Down to there and up to here. She couldn’t be more obvious if she was wearing her own billboard.”
“That’s not what they taught us at Harvard.” Modest laugh. “I’m sorry, I went to Harvard. MBA. With honors.”
“I believe you mentioned that already. Seven or eight times.”
“Erland was telling me the other day that he’s bidding on the leases opening up in the Beaufort next year.”
“He thinks the tax breaks are getting through, then?”
“-and now he’s going for full custody, and how he can ask for that with a straight face with that bimbo he’s got living in his brand-new house-”
“Sounds like you could use an attorney. Mine took Phil to the cleaners for me. I’ve got his card here somewhere-”
“It’s buried so deep in committee it’ll never see daylight again.”
“Who sits on that committee? Maybe Erland’ll make a few calls.”
“Harvard, schmarvard. Wharton’s the place you want your kids to go to if you want them to learn anything about making money.” Modest laugh. “Class of ‘eighty-eight. I’ll make a few calls for you.”
“The union is just going to have to suck it up. The state can’t foot the entire insurance bill. People are going to have to ante up their share. I’m telling you, it’s not an option. If they don’t like it, they can get a job in the private sector.”
“The legislature makes one move on the permanent fund and Jay is going to rise up out of Lake Clark like Saint George coming after the dragon.”
“I keep thinking if we just explain to people, educate them-”
“We’ve been sucking at the federal tit since Seward bought Alaska from Russia. We don’t know how to do anything else.”
“Erland says all we have to do is cut the fat out of the budget.”
“So we got a granite countertop and, would you believe it, they’ve put it in three times and they’ve broken it every single time.”
“Sounds like you could use a better contractor. Let me give you my card.”
“I come from Seldovia. There used to be five goddamn canneries in Seldovia when I was growing up. You know where the name comes from? Seldevoy. Russian word, means herring town. No goddamn herring in Seldovia anymore. Not much goddamn salmon left, either. We used to be able to pull goddamn king crab right out of Seldovia Bay. They aren’t even in the Kachemak anymore. What, you never read the book Cod?”
“Yeah, but that was the Atlantic.”
“The Pacific’s just another ocean. I’m telling you, we need to go to a thousand-mile limit and start arming the goddamn Coast Guard with cannons so they can sink a few of those goddamn fish processors. And I ain’t talking about just the foreign processors, either, ”cause the American processors are just as bad, if not goddamn worse.“
“Well, as long as I can pull a king salmon out of the Kenai, I’m happy.”
“Global warming’s a myth.”
“Right, and so’s the Pribilofs remaining ice-free year-round, and golfing in Palmer in January.”
“They were acting like they were at a slumber party, instead of prosecuting a rape-murder, with the victim’s family right there in the courtroom. I sent the DA an E-mail and told her so.”