Orest Stelmach - The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

The phone calls and text messages Bobby had received during April appeared under current usage. Nadia studied the phone numbers. She recognized most of them: Derek, Iryna, her office, her cell, their apartment, the Fordham hockey coach, and three other hockey teammates. Iryna’s number appeared more often as time passed. The first of the month she texted him twice. The day Bobby was arrested she texted him twelve times. That bothered her less than it would have before she’d met the girl, but Nadia’s blood pressure still spiked.

Five phone calls were placed to Bobby on the day Iryna said he’d answered the phone and turned white. One was from Nadia, the other from the hockey coach. Nadia didn’t recognize the other three numbers. The first had a 718 area code. Nadia searched the Internet.

Brooklyn.

She dialed the number.

A woman with a Slavic accent answered. “Hello, Café Glechik, how can I help you?”

Nadia entered “Glechik” into the computer and searched. “Are you a restaurant?” she said.

“Yes.” Annoyed now. “How can I help you?”

“Do you do a big takeout business?”

“Yes. What would you like?”

“Thank you.” Nadia hung up.

The search brought up a supposed Ukrainian restaurant in Brighton Beach. The sour cherry dumplings looked tempting, but half the dishes were Russian. The owners were from Odesa near the Black Sea. That explained the Russian influence. That must have been the takeout Iryna and Bobby ate for dinner.

The next number had a 551 area code. Northern New Jersey. Nadia dialed the number.

It rang five times. A man with a gruff voice picked up.

“You called Bobby Kungenook’s cell phone on April eleventh,” Nadia said. “Who are you?”

“Who am I?” He paused. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Bobby’s legal guardian. He’s a minor. Do you want to tell me who you are or do you want me to—”

The voice mellowed. “Ms. Tesla?”

“That’s right.”

“This is Tom Dowd. The NHL hockey scout. We met after the game in Coney Island this year.”

Nadia remembered. “Why are you calling Bobby without my knowledge?”

Dowd mumbled an apology. Nadia warned him not to call Bobby without asking her permission first.

“How’s that thing going with his arrest?” Dowd said.

“It’s a misunderstanding,” Nadia said. “We’re looking forward to our day in court.”

The third number had an area code of 713. Houston, Texas. That made no sense. Nadia dialed the number and got the automated answering service for the parks and recreation department. That made even less sense.

Nadia checked the log again. The number 44 was printed to the far left of the entry. The country code for England. She searched for international call information on the web. A call from a landline contained ten digits and two to five more for an area code. A call from a mobile phone contained only ten digits. There was no area code. That meant it was a call from a cell phone.

Nadia dialed the number.

“The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

She cursed under her breath. Prepaid cell phone, she guessed. This was the call that Iryna had described. The one that made Bobby blanch. Valentine was from England. The call came from London. It was too much a coincidence to be anything else.

Afterward she checked his outgoing calls. She found nothing suspicious, leaving her with one logical conclusion based on her previous discovery.

The answers to her questions were in London.

LAUREN SAT BESIDE the pilot in the helicopter’s cockpit. The engine droned. Blades whirred. Headphones muffled the noise. A microphone mouthpiece extended from the side of her headgear to her lips. She’d met with Ambrose’s cousin at the Kotzebue Airport. That woman, in turn, had given Lauren a hot lead on Bobby Kungenook. Now she was en route to Anchorage in pursuit of that lead.

The pilot’s name was Dan Garner. He had the complexion of a leather bomber jacket.

“My father was a bush pilot, and my granddaddy was a bush pilot before him,” Garner said. “Yes, ma’am. Before he became a pilot, my granddaddy worked for Wyatt Earp right around the turn of the century. During the Nome Gold Rush.”

Lauren flashed him a look of disbelief. “ The Wyatt Earp?”

“The one and only. That was around 1895, about fifteen years after he and Doc Holliday shot those cowboys in the parking lot outside the O.K. Corral. Tombstone was a silver-mining boom town, you see. And Wyatt Earp had business interests in mining and gambling.”

“How did he end up in Alaska?”

“The Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon triggered a stampede in 1880. He came with the former mayor of Tombstone.”

“How’d they do?”

“By the time they got there the beach gold was gone. You needed sophisticated equipment to mine what was left.”

“So they struck out.”

“Hardly. They opened a saloon, catered to the miners with food and prostitutes and the other basic necessities of life, and went back to California four years later with a hundred grand.”

Lauren had never heard of anyone referring to prostitutes as one of life’s basic necessities. She cast an uncertain glance in Garner’s direction. “How about that.”

“The smart ones don’t gamble. The smart ones supply the gamblers with their basic needs.”

“Is that what a bush pilot does?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Bring supplies to remote areas of Alaska? Bring whatever the people need?”

“That’s right. Living in Alaska is a gamble. That means everyone’s a gambler in Alaska. It takes an adventuresome heart to live here. Plenty of gamblers in Nome back then. Jack London, the writer. And Swiftwater Bill Gates, the fortune hunter.”

“Bill Gates? No relation, I’m sure.”

“No, but William H. Gates I, grandfather of Mr. Microsoft, was at the gold fields in Nome at the same time as Swiftwater Bill.”

Lauren couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. “I’m going to have to look that one up.”

Garner nodded as though pleased she couldn’t read him. “The Nome Gold Rush was pretty much a bust, too. Then the Eskimos got bent out of shape because the white folks hunted their moose and their caribou, and the smaller game, too. They said the white man made it harder for them to survive. Can you believe that? Truth is it was time for them to learn they’re part of America, and America is the white man’s country.”

Lauren paused to make sure she’d heard him correctly, then fantasized about kicking the door open and sending him flying into the rotors. “How much longer to Anchorage?”

“About half an hour. What brought you to Nome, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I’m a sports reporter. I’m working on a story about a high school boy in New York. He’s a promising hockey player, a once-in-a-lifetime prospect. And he’s from Kotzebue.”

“You’re kidding me. What’s his name?”

“Bobby Kungenook.” Lauren eyed Garner. “Ever hear of him?”

He pursed his lips, then shook his head. “No. Sorry. If he was that good you’d think we’d have heard about him in Nome.”

“Exactly. No one knows anything about this boy. He was given up for adoption at an early age but there’s no record of it. It looks to me as though he was born in Kotzebue, went to live with someone who speaks fluent Ukrainian, and showed up in New York City at age seventeen.”

“Ukrainian?”

“And Russian.”

“Plenty of Russian history in Alaska, that’s for sure. If he’s an Inupiaq, his parents might have tried to find a home for him with another Inupiaq family. If they failed, no white American family would take one of theirs, so it makes sense it would be some sort of Russian.”