“Please move the Zamboni off the ice,” the voice announced.
“What the—” But she was already turning the wheel and gunning the engine up to its full ten miles per hour. The racket from the chopper was deafening, and bits of snow and ice skittered every which way across the rink.
As soon as she’d driven down the ramp and into the municipal garage, where the city kept everything from its snowplows to its ambulance, she switched off the engine and raced back outside.
The helicopter, its wheels extended like an insect’s legs, was lowering itself onto the ice that she had just finished polishing. What could this possibly be about? Please God, not another news crew dispatched to recap the Neptune disaster and interview the sole survivor, Harley Vane. Like a lot of people, she didn’t even believe Harley’s account, but the truth, unfortunately, lay somewhere at the bottom of the Bering Sea.
The rotors were turned off, and as they wheezed into silence, the hatchway opened, and a burly man with glasses stepped out. He slipped on the ice and landed with a smack on his rump. Laughing, he was helped up by another man, lean and tall, who guided him toward the steel bleachers. Nika crunched across the hard-packed snow and hollered, “Who are you?”
The two men noticed her for the first time. The tall one had dark eyes, dark hair, and reminded her of long-distance runners she had known — and dated — in college. He moved across the slippery ice with a becoming assurance and agility, but he didn’t reply.
“And who told you,” she went on, “that you could land on our hockey rink?”
Pulling off a glove, he extended his hand. “Frank Slater,” he said, “and sorry about the rink. But we were low on fuel when we saw your lights.”
“Lucky there wasn’t a game on.”
“And I am Vassily Kozak,” the professor said, bowing his head, “of the Trofimuk United Institute of Geology, Geophysics and Mineralogy. It is a part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.”
Now Nika was more puzzled than ever.
“We’re here on some important business,” Slater said, and though she ought to be used to it by now, her back went up at the slight hint of condescension in his voice. Because she was a woman, and young, and, to be fair, had been caught driving the Zamboni, he was just assuming she was some underling.
“I need to talk to the mayor of Port Orlov,” he said, showing her a bulky sealed envelope addressed to the city hall. “Could you show me where to find him?”
“Is the mayor expecting you?” she said, as sweetly as she could muster.
“I’m afraid not.”
“You came all this way, in the biggest chopper I’ve ever seen, without making an appointment?”
“There wasn’t time.”
“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.”