Neither Chesna nor Michael liked the idea of leaving the guns and ammunition with a man they didn’t know, but neither did they wish to risk the weapons being found if the village was inspected by the crewmen of that flying boat. Reluctantly they got off the truck. “You go in there.” Hurks pointed toward the house. Its door glistened with a shellac of dried seal blubber. “Rest. Eat. Walt.” He put the truck into gear and drove away through the mud.
Michael opened the door and entered. His hair brushed a little waterfall of silver bells nailed at the top of the threshold, and they jingled as merrily as Christmas Eve. The bells caught in Chesna’s hair, too, and they dragged over Lazaris’s stubbled scalp. The inside of the house was gloomy and smelled of fish and dried mud. Nets hung from the walls, and here and there a crooked picture clipped from a magazine was stuck on a nail. A small fire glowed at the center of a cast-iron stove.
“Hello?” Michael called. “Anyone here?”
Springs squalled. On an old brown sofa was a large mound of dirty clothes. The mound had begun to quiver, and as the new arrivals watched they saw it sit up, the sofa’s springs straining.
“Saint Peter’s ghost!” Lazaris breathed. “What is that?”
Whatever it was, it reached for a bottle of vodka on the floor beside it. A large brown hand uncorked the bottle, lifted it, and there was the sound of liquid gurgling down a gullet. Then a belch. The mound struggled to stand, and rose up to well over six feet.
“Welcome!” The voice was husky and slurred. A woman’s voice. “Welcome!” She came toward them, into the stove’s ruddy light. The floorboards creaked under her, and Michael was surprised they didn’t collapse altogether. The woman had to be two hundred and fifty pounds, if an ounce, and perhaps six feet two inches tall. She approached them, a wobbling mountain on legs. “Welcome!” she said once more, either deficient in sense or language. Her broad, wrinkled face grinned, displaying a mouth that held three teeth. She had the almond-shaped eyes of an Eskimo, yet her eyes-set in nests of wrinkles-were pale blue. Her skin was coppery brown, and her lank, straight hair-cropped as if beneath an oversized bowl-was a brassy orange: the commingling, Michael realized, of generations of Eskimo and Nordic genes, battling for dominance. She was quite an extraordinary-looking woman, standing there grinning and wrapped in folds of multicolored blankets. Michael judged her to be in her late forties or early fifties, given the wrinkles in her face and the gray amid the orange hair.
She offered the vodka bottle. “Welcome?” she asked, a gold pin stuck in one of her nostrils.
“Welcome!” Lazaris said as he snatched the bottle from her hand and swallowed the clear fire. He paused to make a respectful whistling noise, then went back to his guzzling. Michael pried the bottle out of his fingers and returned it to the woman, who licked the neck’s rim and took another slug.
“What’s your name?” Chesna asked, speaking German. The woman shook her head. “Your name?” Chesna tried her luck at Norwegian, though she knew very little of the language. She pressed a hand against her breastbone. “Chesna.” Pointed at Michael. “Michael.” Then at the happy Russian. “Lazaris.”
“Ah!” The woman nodded gleefully. She pointed between her massive thighs. “Kitty!” she said. “Welcome!”
“A man could get in a hell of a lot of trouble around here,” Lazaris observed sagely.
The cabin, if not exactly clean, was at least warm. Michael took off his parka and hung it on a wall hook while Chesna tried to communicate with the huge, rather tipsy Eskinordic. The best she could do was understand that the woman lived here, and that there were plenty of bottles of vodka.
The door opened, and the bells chimed. Hurks closed the door behind him. “Well!” he said as he peeled off his heavy coat. “I see you’ve met Kitty!”
Kitty grinned at him, drank the rest of the bottle, and flopped down on the sofa with a splintering crash.
“She’s a bit hard on the furniture,” Hurks admitted, “but she’s pleasant enough. Who’s in charge among you?”
“I am,” Chesna said.
“All right.” Hurks spoke to Kitty in a singsong dialect that sounded to Michael like a mixture of grunts and clicks. Kitty nodded, her grin gone, and stared at Chesna. “I’ve told her who you are,” Hurks said. “She’s been expecting you.”
“She has?” Chesna shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Kitty’s going to take you to Skarpa Island,” Hurks explained. He went to a cupboard and brought out a box of shortbread biscuits.
“What?” Chesna glanced at the woman, who was smiling with her eyes closed and the empty bottle clutched against her belly. “She’s… she’s a drunk!”
“So? We’re all drunks up here nowadays.” He took a beat-up coffeepot from a table, shook it to slosh the liquid around, and then set it atop the stove. “Kitty knows the water, and she knows Skarpa Island, too. Me, I don’t know a damned thing about boats. I can’t even swim. Which would be beside the point, I suppose, if you bumped a mine.”
“You’re saying that if we want to get to Skarpa, we have to put our lives in her hands?”
“That’s it,” Hurks said.
“Skarpa!” Kitty’s eyes opened. Her voice was a low, guttural growl. “Skarpa dirty bad! Patoo!” She spat on the floor. “Nazee boys! Patoo!” Another wad of spit hit the stained planks.
“Besides,” Hurks went on, “it’s Kitty’s boat. She used to be the best fisherman for a hundred miles around. She says she used to be able to hear the fish sing, and when she learned their songs and sang back, they swam into her nets by the ton.”
“I’m not interested in singing fish,” Chesna said coolly. “I’m interested in patrol boats, searchlights, and mines.”
“Oh, Kitty knows where those are, too.” He brought tin cups down from their hooks. “Kitty used to live on Skarpa Island, before the Nazis came. She and her husband and six sons.”
There was a clink as the empty vodka bottle was tossed aside. It landed in the corner, near three others. Kitty dug into the folds of the sofa, and her hand emerged gripping a fresh bottle. She pulled the cork out with her remaining teeth, tipped the bottle, and drank.
“What happened to her family?” Michael asked.
“The Nazis… shall we say… recruited them to help build that big son-of-a-bitch chemical plant. They also recruited every other able-bodied person from Kitty’s village. And Kitty herself, of course, since she’s strong as an ox. They also built an airfield and flew in slave labor. Anyway, the Nazis executed everyone who did the work. Kitty’s got two bullets in her. They hurt her sometimes when the weather turns really cold.” He touched the pot. “Coffee will have to be black, I’m afraid. We’re out of cream and sugar.” He began to pour coffee for them; it came out thick and sludgy. “Kitty lay with the corpses for three or four days. She’s not exactly sure how long it was. When she decided she wasn’t going to die, she got up and found a rowboat. I met her in forty-two, when my ship went down with a torpedo in the guts. I was a merchant marine seaman, and thank God I got to a raft.” He gave the first cup to Chesna, then offered her some shortbread.
“What did the Nazis do with the bodies?” Chesna took the coffee and a biscuit.
Hurks asked Kitty, again using that grunt-click language. Kitty replied in a quiet, drunken voice. “They left them for the wolves,” Hurks said. He offered the box to Michael. “Biscuit?”
Along with the muscular coffee and the shortbread, Hurks produced a packet of dried, leathery mutton that Michael found tasty, but Chesna and Lazaris had difficulty swallowing. “We’ll have a good pot of stew tonight,” Hurks promised. “Squid, onions, and potatoes. Very tasty, with a lot of salt and pepper.”
“I won’t eat a squid!” Lazaris said as he shrugged off his parka and sat down at a table, his coffee cup before him. He shuddered. “Damn things look like a cock after a night in a Moscow whorehouse!” He reached for his cup. “No, I’ll just eat the onions and pota-”
There was a movement, very fast, behind him. He saw the glint of a blade, and Kitty’s huge bulk falling over him like an avalanche.
“Don’t move!” Hurks shouted-and then the blade was thrust down, before either Michael or Chesna could get to the Russian’s aid.
The knife, its wickedly hooked blade used for skinning seals, slammed into the scarred tabletop, between Lazari’s outstretched second and third fingers. It missed the flesh, but Lazaris jerked his hand to his chest and squalled like a cat with a burning tail.
His scream was followed by another: a scream of hoarse, drunken laughter. Kitty wrenched the knife out of the table-top and did a merry dance around the room like a massive and deadly whirligig.
