Kelp said, “But nothing in front.”
Irwin, sounding aggrieved, said, “We’re not getting anything in front!”
“Well, that’s you,” Kelp told him.
Guilderpost explained. “We’re operating, I’m sorry to say, with a rather tight budget.”
Dortmunder said, “So make your offer.”
Tiny said, “But don’t make the first offer too small, you don’t wanna startle me.”
Little Feather and Guilderpost and Irwin looked at one another, apparently none of them wanting to say the number they must have earlier agreed on, and then Little Feather shook her head and said, “We’ve got to offer more.”
Guilderpost nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right.”
“We have to add,” Little Feather said, “a zero.”
Irwin, still aggrieved, cried, “That much?”
“So you’re going,” Dortmunder said, “from ten grand to a hundred. Ten grand would have been an insult, I’m glad you didn’t say it.”
Little Feather said, “But I won’t go above a hundred. It isn’t a negotiation. We become partners, here today, or we become enemies.” Smiling at Tiny, she said, “The old Indian lore I heard says, if there’s gonna be an explosion close by, drop to the ground and lie flat, and maybe you’ll be okay.”
Tiny nodded. “What does the lore say if you’re lying on it?”
Guilderpost said, “Now, we three have a contract between us—”
“Among,” Little Feather said.
“You’re kidding,” Kelp said to Guilderpost.
Guilderpost seemed a little pompous, a little defensive. “It just seemed a good idea to have our understanding in writing.”
Dortmunder said, “It has never seemed to me a good idea to put anything in writing.”
Guilderpost said, “So you don’t feel you need a contract.”
“If we ever got a question,” Dortmunder assured him, “we’ll send Tiny to ask it.”
“We know what we’re talking about,” Kelp said, and offered his cheerful smile to Little Feather. “When you get yours, we each get a hundred K.”
“Right,” she said.
Kelp turned his smile on Guilderpost. “And now,” he said, “the long-awaited story.”
Guilderpost nodded. “Yes. Fine. But first, you’ll have to bear with a brief history lesson.”
“I love school,” Kelp said.
“In school,” Guilderpost said, “do you remember the French and Indian War?”
“Remind me,” Kelp said.
“Essentially,” Guilderpost reminded him, “it’s how France lost Canada. French and English settlers fought one another from 1754 to 1760. It seemed a very big thing to the people here, but it was actually just a small part of the conflict called the Seven Years War, involving virtually all of the European powers, fought in Europe and America and India. In the American part of the war, both sides made alliances with Indian tribes that did much of the actual fighting. In northern New York State, there were three small tribes that had always been subjugated by the five larger and more powerful tribes of the Iroquois Nation. These three tribes, to free themselves from the Iroquois, made treaties with the English settlers and fought for them, and then renewed the alliance a few years later, fighting for the colonists against the British in the American Revolution. The three tribes were given land in New York State, near the Canadian border, to be their sovereign state forever, but of course the white men reneged on all such treaties, and soon the logging interests moved in, fought the tribes, defeated them, and took over the land.”
Irwin said, “There’s so much wickedness in this world, you know what I mean?”
“We know,” Kelp assured him.
Dortmunder said, “Little Feather’s an Indian.”
“We’re coming to that, John,” Guilderpost said. “In the last thirty years or so, the American courts have been redressing many of those wrongs done so long ago. Indians are getting their sacred tribal lands back—”
Dortmunder said, “And putting casinos on them.”
Irwin said, “Yeah, sacred tribal lands and casinos just seem to go together naturally, like apple pie and ice cream.”
“The tribes have their own sovereignty,” Guilderpost said, “their own laws, and casinos are extremely lucrative.”
Little Feather laughed, a sound like shaking a bag of walnuts. “This time,” she said, “the Indians win.”
“The three tribes I’ve been telling you about,” Guilderpost said, “the Pottaknobbees, the Oshkawa and the Kiota, won their cause back in the sixties, and have been operating a thriving casino on their land up by the Canadian border for nearly thirty years now. The tribes had almost died out, but now they’re coming back, or at least two of them are. At the time of the settlement, there were only three known full-blooded Pottaknobbees left in the world, and at this point, so far as anyone knows, there are none.”
“Wait a minute,” Dortmunder said. “I’m getting it.”
“Anastasia,” Tiny said.
Dortmunder said, “That’s it.”
Grinning, Kelp pointed at Little Feather. “You’re the last of the Pottaknobbees.”
“You bet,” she said.
Tiny said, “But you can’t do Anastasia no more. They do DNA now, they can prove you’re not it.”
Dortmunder said, “No, Tiny, that’s what the scheme is, that’s the body we dug up.” To Guilderpost, he said, “Joseph Redcorn was a Pottaknobbee, right?”
“Definitely,” Guilderpost said.
Dortmunder said, “And we took him outta there, and we put in . . .” He pointed at Little Feather.
Who said, “My grampa.”
Guilderpost said, “The arrangement is, the tribes share equally in the casino profits, and then the tribal elders distribute the money to their own people. For a long time, there’ve been only two shares to distribute.”
Dortmunder looked at Little Feather with new respect. “A third,” he said.
Little Feather smiled, like sunrise. “A third of the casino,” she said, “from day one.”
11
You hardly know you’re leaving the United States. On your way to Dannemora in upstate New York, near the Canadian border, famous as the home of Clinton State Prison, you turn left at the big billboard covered by a not very good painting of a few Indians in a canoe on some body of water, either a river or a lake, surrounded by pine tree–covered mountains. It’s either sunrise or sunset, or possibly the mountains are on fire. Printed across this picture, in great thick letters speckled white and tan and black, apparently in an effort to make it seem as though the letters are made of hides of some kind, is the announcement:
WORLD-FAMOUS
SILVER CHASM CASINO
Native American Owned & Operated With Pride
5 Mi.
This billboard is brightly illuminated at night, which makes it seem rather worse than by day. At its top and bottom, arrows have been added, also lit up at night, which point leftward at a well-maintained two-lane concrete road that curves away into the primeval forest.
You are deep in the Adirondacks here, in the state-operated Adirondack Forest Preserve, but once you make that left turn, you have departed the United States of America and entered the Silver Chasm Indian Reservation, home of the Oshkawa and the Kiota, and until recently, also home of the Pottaknobbee. This is a sovereign state, answerable to no one but itself.
As you drive along the neat curving road, at first you see nothing but forest, beautiful, silent, deep, unchanged for a thousand years. Then you round a curve and all at once, in front of you, flanking both sides of the road, are suddenly a pair of competing shopping centers, with big signs promising tax-free cigarettes, beer, whiskey, or whatever you want. Indian blankets made in Taiwan are also available, and illustrated editions of Hiawatha, and miniature birch-bark canoes made in a factory outside Chicago and stamped in red “Souvenir of Silver Chasm Indian Reservation.” Both shopping centers do very well.