White Heat (7 page)

    Simeonie
held Edie's gaze. Now was the time for her to speak up. She drew breath then,
for an instant, caught Sammy's eye, and thought she saw him give her a tiny,
almost imperceptible nod.

    'Since
the hunter's death was a rare and unfortunate accident,' Simeonie continued,
'the council of Elders hats concluded that there will be no need to revoke Edie
Kiglatuk's guiding licence.'

    So
there it was. The deal she had just wordlessly struck to give credence to the
lie and keep her job. She bit her lip and reminded herself that she was doing
this for Joe.

    Sammy
accompanied Edie and Joe back to Edie's house. Nobody spoke on the way. Edie
sensed her ex-husband had insisted on stringing along because he was gofering
for Simeonie. Maybe the mayor had asked him to make sure they didn't call Derek
Palliser until a formal announcement had been made. She couldn't blame Sammy.
She knew when she married him that he would always live in his brother's
shadow. Now she understood why Simeonie had gone to speak to Taylor at the
hotel. He'd struck some kind of deal with him too. You had to take your hat off
to the fellow. He was slick.

    At
the house, Joe made directly for his room, saying he was tired and would skip
supper, but the real reason, Edie was sure, was that he was disgusted: with the
process, with the council of Elders, and even, or maybe especially, with her
and Sammy. She heated seal soup while Sammy flicked through the TV channels
until he found an old episode of
NYPD Blue.
They ate their food on the
sofa in awkward silence. She wasn't going to open old wounds by tackling him
about what had just happened. He still thought her leaving him was an act of
betrayal, not, as she saw it, a means of survival. He would see what had just
happened as a bit of truth-tinkering for greater ends. And maybe that's exactly
what it was.

    Derek
Palliser bent down in the gravel to get a better look at Jono Toolik's
graffitied sealskins.

    'What
did I tell you?' said Jono Toolik, in triumphant tone. 'Vandalism.'

    There
was no arguing with the evidence. Someone had branded the word
iquq,
shit, in middle of the skin where there would be no disguising it. And there
was more - two
iquqs,
three
itiqs,
asshole and, towards the
bottom of the pile, a
qitiqthlimaqtisi arit,
fuck you, or more
accurately, fock you, since whoever had created it couldn't spell.

    'Listen,'
Derek sighed, 'why don't you just store your skins under lock and key for a
while?' Jesus Jones. Smalltown politics. He felt in need of a cigarette and
reached into his pocket for his Lucky Strikes.

    'Oh
no.' Jono Toolik wasn't going to let him off so easily. He jabbed a finger at
the skin branded
qitiqthlimaqtisi,
pulled it out and swung it in front
of Derek's face like a pendulum. 'This is a threat to my livelihood, I know who
did it and I want him arrested.'

    Derek
knew who did it too, and in an hour from now, when news of the incident had
done the rounds in Kuujuaq, everyone else would: Tom Silliq. The Tooliks and
the Silliqs had been mortal enemies for about four hundred and fifty years.
When they weren't busy pissing one another off, they were recounting tales of
the historical injustices perpetrated

    Upon
them centuries before by the scumbags on the other side.

    Derek
took a cigarette from his pack, lit it and waited for Jono Toolik to kick off.
Whatever he was about to say, Derek had heard it before. He'd um and ah to give
an impression of attentiveness and use the time to take a smoke and think about
lemmings.

    He
was probably thinking too much about lemmings. People were beginning to tease
him about it, but thinking about lemmings stopped him dwelling on how Misha
Ludnova had ruined his life. For three summers she had burrowed into his heart
and now she was gone there was nothing left but a hole. Initially, she'd come
up to help lead a bunch of summer camps for kids. She'd been hopeless at it, of
course, forever complaining about the conditions at camp and the squandering of
her artistic talents on children who were more interested in killing caribou
than painting them. Despite all this, perhaps in some perverse way because of
it, within the first week of her arrival, Derek had fallen hopelessly in love.
Her looks had only added to his feelings for her: her long, slender limbs,
spring sky eyes and hair the colour of cotton grass in the fall. Even though
she'd shown no interest whatsoever in him that first summer, he'd nurtured the
hope that she'd change her mind when she returned the next year, as indeed she
did. It was during that second summer that Maria Kunuk's boy had nearly drowned
while in Misha's care - or, rather, lack of it; there had been an outcry in the
village and a call for her to be let go. But he'd stood up for her, pointing
out that Kuujuaq was a dangerous place to live and that what had happened had
nothing to do with Misha and everything to do with the Arctic. The Kuujuaq
council of Elders had imposed a line, and it was not long after Derek paid it
that Misha began to take an interest in him. By the time she left at the end of
that summer, she'd made him giddy, like a man half his thirty-nine years and
he'd been fool enough — or vain enough — to suppose she loved him.

    The
third summer she came up to be with Derek and to paint. Her real vocation, she
said, was as an artist, and she'd persuaded some foundation or other to sponsor
her to
work on a project 'negotiating the interface between global
warming and the disappearance of selfhood', whatever that meant. Turned out the
sponsorship was more in the way of an honour than any financial award, so Derek
had invited her to move in with him. They'd spent what Derek had thought was a
blissful summer together, after which Misha had gone back to Yellowknife and
refused to return his calls.

    The
most painful part of all this was not that he had been used; it was the fact
that knowing he'd been used made no difference to his feelings.
There is no
getting around it, when it comes to that woman I'm a sap.
Even now, months
since she'd left, he could still see no future for himself that did not involve
some continuation of his saphood. Though he was embarrassed to admit this, even
to himself, he'd spent far too much of the winter thinking long and hard about
how he might win her back and concluded that he had two options. The first was
to crack some high profile crime that would get his name in the papers and
result in a promotion. He might even be able to persuade his bosses to grant
him a secondment to Yellowknife. Being one of only two police on an island the
size of Great Britain and a population of a couple of hundred gave you a lot of
freedom but it stopped you from plugging into anything bigger than the
small-time hustle going on around your ears. No one in Kuujuaq or any of the
other tiny settlements making up the population of Ellesmere Island and the
surrounding areas had done anything worth investigating. There was that event
in Autisaq a few weeks back, the death of the
qalunaat
hunter – what was
his name - Wagoner? - but the case didn't have any of the right ingredients to
qualify as high-profile. It wasn't as though Wagoner had been a movie star or
some big-time politician. Besides, the council of Elders had made it clear that
they wouldn't welcome him opening up the case. He'd read the report and knew
perfectly well that the chances of a man being killed by his own bullet
ricocheting off a rock were about as slim as a slice of ice in a hot kettle,
but he also knew how dependent Autisaq was on its hunting and guiding business
and he'd taken the decision not to interfere. A fudging of the facts only
became a cover-up when someone challenged it, and no one had.

    The
only guaranteed way to get himself back on Misha's radar in the foreseeable
future was to follow the second option and persuade the editor of one of the
big scientific Journals,
Nature,
maybe, to publish his lemming research.
'To do that, he needed to be wasting less of his time mediating centuries old
feuds and more of it in the field.

    Derek
Palliser finished his cigarette. The time had come to assert himself. He let
himself be pushed around too often. He'd been too passive, too keen not to
ruffle any feathers. Now was his chance to change all that. The place to start
was right here, right now, by putting a stop to this ridiculous fight between
the Toolik and Silliq clans. Drawing himself up to his full height, which was
considerably higher than Jono Toolik, he expressed regret about the sealskins
but explained that next time he expected the Tooliks and the Silliqs to resolve
their petty disputes themselves, without involving the police.

    Stunned
by this new, less pliant, Palliser, Toolik took a pace back and blinked. His
mouth pumped like a beached fish. For a moment Derek thought the man was going
to punch him out. But he'd expended so much energy over the years playing along
with small town politics, to absolve himself now felt nothing short of
revelatory. The two men eyed one another for a minute or two, Jono Toolik's
face a smear of disgust. Then, spitting on the ice path beside him, the hunter
turned and went back into his house, banging the door to the snow porch behind
him.

    Derek
shoved his hands in his pockets and trudged back to his little office in the
prefabricated A frame that served as the Kuujuaq detachment. It was at times
like these that he wished he'd taken up that job offer he'd had from a visiting
Russian geologist, cleaning oil derricks in Novosibirsk. 'Plenty money for a
man who don't mind the cold!' the geologist had said.

    Grabbing
a mug of tea, he slumped down in his chair and stared into the middle distance.
He was not quick to anger, but the midget-sized problems of small-town life
seemed intolerable all of a sudden. He felt horribly stuck. Picking up his mug
he downed the last of the tea and rehearsed in his mind his resolve to act. At
that moment the door yawned open and Constable Stevie Killik burst in, bringing
with him a savage blast of icy air.

    'That
Toolik fellow is a walrus dick,' Stevie said, stamping the cold out of his
feet. Derek's sidekick was by nature a mild-mannered man. If he called anyone a
walrus dick it was because they were.

    'Let
me guess, Tom Silliq's had a word with you.'

    'Right.'
Stevie pulled off his glove liners and went to put the kettle on. 'Want some
tea?'

    Derek
stared into his mug. The emptiness unsettled him. 'Sure thing,' he said
finally.

    While
they waited for the water to boil, the two men swapped stories. Tom Silliq had
approached Stevie on the ice road by the cemetery, in a very agitated state,
claiming Jono Toolik had sent two of his half-starved huskies to raid his meat
store. The dogs had gnawed through most of a haunch of caribou and several
seals, torn open sacks of the dog biscuits Silliq kept for his own dogs, and
pissed up against a stack of walrus heads, ruining hundreds of dollars' worth
of meat and dog chow. When Stevie had asked whether Silliq had actually seen
the dogs himself, he said he'd dreamed about them.

    'So
you told him there was a principle in law called burden of proof.'

    'Sure.'

    'And?'

    'He
called me something unrepeatable.' Stevie shook his head. 'Sometimes I don't
know why I do this job,'

    'Maybe
it has something to do with the fact that there aren't any other jobs for about
a thousand kilometres in any direction?'

    'Not
true, D.' Stevie perked up. The two of them spent many happy hours fantasizing
about jobs they might have had in some parallel universe in the south. 'They're
always needing someone to drive the night-honey truck.'

    'Oh,
how could I forget the opportunity to wade around knee-deep in Tom Silliq's
shit.'

    'We
both got the experience, boss.'

    Stevie
disappeared into the kitchenette.

    Derek
went over to the fax machine and flipped through the pile of faxes. The High
Arctic Police Service was the smallest of several indigenous forces,
independent of the RCMP, but licensed to use certain centralized RCMP services
like supplies and police labs. Once a quarter the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
headquarters in Ottawa sent out routine faxes requesting various administrative
forms and reports, which the Kuujuaq detachment routinely ignored. The current
pile dated back three years. No one at RCMP HQ seemed to notice. From time to
time Derek went through them to make sure he hadn't missed anything urgent. The
act of flipping and scanning the pages gave him thinking time.

    Whoever's
dogs had broken into Tom Silliq's shed, the complaint called for action. In his
new, more forthright guise, Derek felt motivated to take some. Make a stand.
People couldn't be allowed to leave their sled dogs untethered at night. The
animals weren't house pets. On more than one occasion huskies had got out and
mauled young children. Derek was damned if that was going to happen on his
watch.