Inhaltsangabe
"The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold."
-Robert W. Service, "The Cremation of Sam McGee"
Jack Mabie claims to be the meanest man in Alaska, yet the old sourdough seems to be just one of the crusty geezers in every roadhouse bewildered by how his lawless frontier life has morphed into the pastel 1950s world of martini cocktail bars up and down Fairbanks' Second Avenue.
Sonia Petrievich, an editor at The Gold, her father Hank's weekly pro-statehood paper, learns through the mukluk telegraph about Jack's gleeful account of murders and robberies and shell games during the gold rush days. Her breezy March 1957 profile lets Jack revel in newfound notoriety.
Edna Ferber, not completely satisfied with her forthcoming novel Ice Palace, has just returned for further research and is fascinated by Jack and his wild tales. Plus the previous summer, young Athabascan lawyer Noah West, a war hero and Sonia's lover, bent on bettering the lives of Alaskan Natives, had sharpened Edna's sense of a corner of the territory she'd ignored: "I felt I'd lost sight of the real Alaska, the heartless icebox in the North, the blank-eyed old-timers still haunted by gold... I'd forgotten Alaska is still frontier...a violent, mysterious world below the glossy skin I'd written about."
When Jack is found beaten to death, Noah becomes a suspect. Two violent deaths follow. Edna, Noah's advocate, decides she needs to clear his name, believing the murders are connected. As debates over potential statehood rage, Edna begins unearthing scandals and sordid stories hidden in Fairbanks but also dating back to village life in Fort Yukon and down into the Lower 48.
What horrible secrets carried from the Arctic Circle have led to so many murders? And what novelist could stand aside from this story?
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for over three decades. His short stories and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, America, Hartford Monthly, and Journal of Popular Culture. A longtime devotee of mystery novels, he fondly recalls discovering Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason series in a family bookcase, and his immediate obsession with the whodunit world. www.edifkovic.com
Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
Run Cold
An Edna Ferber Mystery
By Ed IfkovicPoisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 2019 Ed Ifkovic
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4642-1115-7All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
Jack Mabie claimed he was the meanest man in Alaska. Yet the old man said it with a smart-aleck grin on his whiskered face, his watery eyes dancing with mischief. But something else was in those eyes — cruelty. I shivered, turned away. Miffed by my silence, he cleared his throat and repeated it. "Takes a lot of gumption and spit to get folks to hate your guts, ma'am."
I smiled at him. "Strangely, I get my enemies to hate me simply by being myself."
The old sourdough irritated me. First impression, indeed, but my first impressions were reliable. Not that I didn't believe he'd been a notorious frontier bad man from the icebox of the Yukon — there seemed to be a baker's dozen of such crusty geezers in every tin-roofed log-cabin roadhouse across the desolate Alaskan landscape — but Jack Mabie savored a reputation constructed decades ago in his younger years, lawlessness now recollected in a new world he had trouble understanding. The simple, venal soul of the old-time pioneer had watched as his frontier morphed into the pastel 1950s world of martini cocktail bars up and down Fairbanks' Second Avenue, pink and turquoise colors blinding a man who'd once only dreamed in gold.
A man in his late seventies — skinny as taut barbed wire, untrimmed whiskers tinted dirty yellow and charcoal, rheumy eyes in bloodshot sockets, scraggly hair dropping over his frayed flannel collar — he wore a drunkard's perpetual hangdog expression. A small man, slightly taller than my own five feet, but hunched over, a bony left shoulder prominent now, a jawline that sagged and trembled, the result of a stroke he'd suffered during the last dark winter. Discovered half-dead in a wilderness cabin near Chena, delirious, feverish, he'd been carted to Fairbanks and restored to his grumpy self. He'd been forced to live in the Frontier Home, a house of craggy prospectors, wizened trappers, doddering men who drifted from their cot-like beds to the makeshift squalid bars nearby, like Omar's, a log-cabin shanty with fireweed growing from its sod roof. In the hazy blue light of morning, ambling through the ice fog that lay across the town like dust on old furniture, they'd stumble back for a fitful sleep and dream of timber wolves baying at the Northern Lights.
Jack Mabie wasn't happy there. City lights — and Fairbanks had more blinding neon and sparkle than he remembered — made him antsy.
Newfound notoriety came to him when Sonia Petrievich, editor at The Gold, her father Hank's weekly paper, learned through the mukluk telegraph about the meanest man in Alaska. Her breezy profile on Jack, filled with the over-the-top bravado and swollen exaggeration he generously provided, garnered attention. His cavalier account of strings of murders and robberies and shell games was a whole basket of evil gleefully recalled.
Suddenly, after dragging his feet on the frozen pavement and staggering back to the Frontier Home as the midnight sun hurt his eyes, Jack was greeted with hearty cheer and backslapping camaraderie, and offered shots of whiskey and beer. A septuagenarian outlaw, the guy in the black hat from the old Republic Westerns out of Hollywood, was now applauded.
Jack became a ragtag remnant of old Alaska, the gold rush days. The Klondike of '98. Fairbanks in '02. He reveled in it. He ratcheted up his stories of meanness — he boasted of murders he'd happily committed, his arthritic fingers counting them off, and got away with. "Don't got law on the Chilkoot Trail." As Sonia quoted him, "Ain't no peace officer around when you hang a man you don't like."
I'd first met Sonia Petrievich last summer when I visited Fairbanks doing research for my book, Ice Palace. For a week she was my constant guide, a warm, spirited woman who became my friend. Arm in arm, we wandered through Fairbanks streets, talking. I'd met her father years back in New York, a savvy newsman I'd taken a liking to, so I was not surprised I found his daughter frank and engaging and ready for battle. When I left, I had no plans to return, but a year later, driven, I flew back. Ice Palace was scheduled for publication the next year, in the spring of 1958, but Alaska drew me back — loose ends, haunting stories, unanswered questions.
I'd arrived yesterday, a chilly March day, slept the long night in my room at the Nordale, only to have Sonia meet me in the lobby the next afternoon and insist I meet Jack — "the meanest man in Alaska. Today. You can't say no. An original."
"I've met a dozen old-timers, Sonia. They tell me the same story."
Her eyes got wide with amusement. "He claims he's killed — indifferently murdered — dozens of men up North. Decades back."
I sighed. "Every pioneer I've met makes up stories, trying to top the one just before. Bonanza Creek. The gold rush of '98 was their idea. They dreamed it. They found the biggest gold nugget in recorded history in the golden sands of Nome. They almost married Klondike Kate."
Laughing, she held up her hand. "The meanest man in Alaska." Her fingers drummed the article she'd written in The Gold — as part of a popular series called "White Silence," the title taken from a Jack London story of the bitter Arctic — and announced, "I've interviewed eight old men so far ...he's the cream of the crop." She'd leaned in, confidential, "Edna, he's a gold mine."
"Yes," I told her, "the one he never found."
So, one day after touching down in Alaska, I found myself in the Model Café, sitting across from Sonia and Jack, Sonia grinning mischievously and Jack obviously a little tipsy at two in the afternoon. Sonia and I munched on moose-burgers while Jack kept looking toward the bar.
Jack had demanded we meet him at a sawdust dive near the Frontier Home. Sonia described it as a peeled log-cabin tavern with Western-style swinging doors and a giant chromolithograph of a spangled dance-hall girl hanging over the bar. I'd balked at that. Exhausted from my trip across the country — New York to Seattle to Fairbanks — I had little patience with the tinny jukebox ditties of tractor infidelity and hoedown romance. No, I'd said, the Model Café was a pleasant coffee shop I recalled from last summer, perfect for conversation.
Of course, there was little conversation. Jack eyed me closely, his look sassy. "So I'm gonna be in your book, lady?" Before I could answer, he mumbled, "You gonna pay me, yeah?"
I didn't answer at first, but finally said, flatly, "No."
That surprised him, but he barely suppressed a belch, looked at Sonia as though she'd betrayed him, shrugged his shoulders, and whined, "But I'm the meanest man in Alaska."
I counted a second. "You've already said that."
His eyes got wide. "And you ain't believing me?"
I tilted my head to the side. "Why should I?"
"Lady," he sucked in his breath, "I'm a dangerous man." He hesitated. "Was, maybe ... before that goddamn stroke." Then, reconsidering, "Still am." A deep sigh, almost an afterthought. "Mean."
I caught Sonia's eye. She was enjoying this.
From a satchel she'd slipped over the back of her chair, Sonia pulled out a clipping of her profile of Jack and spread it on the table. Jack, squinting, grinned, showing a mouth of missing teeth, blackened teeth, an ugly blister on his lip. He pointed. "See?"
I already knew the piece but glanced down.
The Legend of Jack...
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