Bad News Page 7

Kelp said, “Start off anytime, guys.”

  Guilderpost said, “Shouldn’t you, uh, Tiny, shouldn’t you put the pin back in now?”

  “Nah, I’m fine here,” Tiny told him.

  Irwin said, “But what if you forget, or stumble, or whatever?”

  “Tough on us all, I guess,” Tiny said. “Little Feather, you still got the pin?”

  She held it up, a round copper-colored ring in the sunlight.

  “Good,” Tiny said, and turned to Guilderpost to say, “Start here.”

  “Very well,” Guilderpost said. “But I must say I find that hand grenade distracting.”

  “I’ll think about the hand grenade,” Tiny promised, “you think about your story.”

  “Before the story,” Little Feather said, “there’s one thing we got to get straight.”

  “Money,” Dortmunder said.

  “You read my mind,” Little Feather told him. Gesturing at Guilderpost and Irwin, she said, “I’m hooked up with these two, and it’s a third each, and each of us puts in a third, one way or another. Guilderpost thought it up, Irwin’s Mr. Science, and I’m the goods. Now you birds come along, and I can see where maybe you’re useful, but I’m not doing any more shares. I’m not into this for a sixth.” Nodding at Tiny, she said, “You’re gonna have to wear that hand grenade the rest of your life, if you think you’re gonna hold me up for a share.”

  Dortmunder said, “So you have a different idea.”

  “An offer,” Little Feather said. “A cash buyout, once it’s over.”

  Kelp said, “But nothing in front.”

  Irwin, sounding aggrieved, said, “We’re not getting anything in front!”

  “Well, that’s you,” Kelp told him.

  Guilderpost explained. “We’re operating, I’m sorry to say, with a rather tight budget.”

  Dortmunder said, “So make your offer.”

  Tiny said, “But don’t make the first offer too small, you don’t wanna startle me.”

  Little Feather and Guilderpost and Irwin looked at one another, apparently none of them wanting to say the number they must have earlier agreed on, and then Little Feather shook her head and said, “We’ve got to offer more.”

  Guilderpost nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right.”

  “We have to add,” Little Feather said, “a zero.”

  Irwin, still aggrieved, cried, “That much?”

  “So you’re going,” Dortmunder said, “from ten grand to a hundred. Ten grand would have been an insult, I’m glad you didn’t say it.”

  Little Feather said, “But I won’t go above a hundred. It isn’t a negotiation. We become partners, here today, or we become enemies.” Smiling at Tiny, she said, “The old Indian lore I heard says, if there’s gonna be an explosion close by, drop to the ground and lie flat, and maybe you’ll be okay.”

  Tiny nodded. “What does the lore say if you’re lying on it?”

  Guilderpost said, “Now, we three have a contract between us—”

  “Among,” Little Feather said.

  “You’re kidding,” Kelp said to Guilderpost.

  Guilderpost seemed a little pompous, a little defensive. “It just seemed a good idea to have our understanding in writing.”

  Dortmunder said, “It has never seemed to me a good idea to put anything in writing.”

  Guilderpost said, “So you don’t feel you need a contract.”

  “If we ever got a question,” Dortmunder assured him, “we’ll send Tiny to ask it.”

  “We know what we’re talking about,” Kelp said, and offered his cheerful smile to Little Feather. “When you get yours, we each get a hundred K.”

  “Right,” she said.

  Kelp turned his smile on Guilderpost. “And now,” he said, “the long-awaited story.”

  Guilderpost nodded. “Yes. Fine. But first, you’ll have to bear with a brief history lesson.”

  “I love school,” Kelp said.

  “In school,” Guilderpost said, “do you remember the French and Indian War?”

  “Remind me,” Kelp said.

  “Essentially,” Guilderpost reminded him, “it’s how France lost Canada. French and English settlers fought one another from 1754 to 1760. It seemed a very big thing to the people here, but it was actually just a small part of the conflict called the Seven Years War, involving virtually all of the European powers, fought in Europe and America and India. In the American part of the war, both sides made alliances with Indian tribes that did much of the actual fighting. In northern New York State, there were three small tribes that had always been subjugated by the five larger and more powerful tribes of the Iroquois Nation. These three tribes, to free themselves from the Iroquois, made treaties with the English settlers and fought for them, and then renewed the alliance a few years later, fighting for the colonists against the British in the American Revolution. The three tribes were given land in New York State, near the Canadian border, to be their sovereign state forever, but of course the white men reneged on all such treaties, and soon the logging interests moved in, fought the tribes, defeated them, and took over the land.”

  Irwin said, “There’s so much wickedness in this world, you know what I mean?”

  “We know,” Kelp assured him.

  Dortmunder said, “Little Feather’s an Indian.”

  “We’re coming to that, John,” Guilderpost said. “In the last thirty years or so, the American courts have been redressing many of those wrongs done so long ago. Indians are getting their sacred tribal lands back—”

  Dortmunder said, “And putting casinos on them.”

  Irwin said, “Yeah, sacred tribal lands and casinos just seem to go together naturally, like apple pie and ice cream.”

  “The tribes have their own sovereignty,” Guilderpost said, “their own laws, and casinos are extremely lucrative.”

  Little Feather laughed, a sound like shaking a bag of walnuts. “This time,” she said, “the Indians win.”

  “The three tribes I’ve been telling you about,” Guilderpost said, “the Pottaknobbees, the Oshkawa and the Kiota, won their cause back in the sixties, and have been operating a thriving casino on their land up by the Canadian border for nearly thirty years now. The tribes had almost died out, but now they’re coming back, or at least two of them are. At the time of the settlement, there were only three known full-blooded Pottaknobbees left in the world, and at this point, so far as anyone knows, there are none.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dortmunder said. “I’m getting it.”

  “Anastasia,” Tiny said.

  Dortmunder said, “That’s it.”

  Grinning, Kelp pointed at Little Feather. “You’re the last of the Pottaknobbees.”

  “You bet,” she said.

  Tiny said, “But you can’t do Anastasia no more. They do DNA now, they can prove you’re not it.”

  Dortmunder said, “No, Tiny, that’s what the scheme is, that’s the body we dug up.” To Guilderpost, he said, “Joseph Redcorn was a Pottaknobbee, right?”

  “Definitely,” Guilderpost said.

  Dortmunder said, “And we took him outta there, and we put in . . .” He pointed at Little Feather.

  Who said, “My grampa.”

  Guilderpost said, “The arrangement is, the tribes share equally in the casino profits, and then the tribal elders distribute the money to their own people. For a long time, there’ve been only two shares to distribute.”

  Dortmunder looked at Little Feather with new respect. “A third,” he said.

  Little Feather smiled, like sunrise. “A third of the casino,” she said, “from day one.”

  11

  * * *

  You hardly know you’re leaving the United States. On your way to Dannemora in upstate New York, near the Canadian border, famous as the home of Clinton State Prison, you turn left at the big billboard covered by a not very good painting of a few Indians in a canoe on some body of water, either a river or a lake, surrounded by pine tree–covered moun
tains. It’s either sunrise or sunset, or possibly the mountains are on fire. Printed across this picture, in great thick letters speckled white and tan and black, apparently in an effort to make it seem as though the letters are made of hides of some kind, is the announcement:

  WORLD-FAMOUS

  SILVER CHASM CASINO

  Native American Owned & Operated With Pride

  5 Mi.

  This billboard is brightly illuminated at night, which makes it seem rather worse than by day. At its top and bottom, arrows have been added, also lit up at night, which point leftward at a well-maintained two-lane concrete road that curves away into the primeval forest.

  You are deep in the Adirondacks here, in the state-operated Adirondack Forest Preserve, but once you make that left turn, you have departed the United States of America and entered the Silver Chasm Indian Reservation, home of the Oshkawa and the Kiota, and until recently, also home of the Pottaknobbee. This is a sovereign state, answerable to no one but itself.

  As you drive along the neat curving road, at first you see nothing but forest, beautiful, silent, deep, unchanged for a thousand years. Then you round a curve and all at once, in front of you, flanking both sides of the road, are suddenly a pair of competing shopping centers, with big signs promising tax-free cigarettes, beer, whiskey, or whatever you want. Indian blankets made in Taiwan are also available, and illustrated editions of Hiawatha, and miniature birch-bark canoes made in a factory outside Chicago and stamped in red “Souvenir of Silver Chasm Indian Reservation.” Both shopping centers do very well.

  Then there’s more forest, as though the shopping centers had only been a horrible mirage, until, around another curve, you come upon a development of small neat tract houses on grids to both sides of the road, surrounded by forest; this is Paradise, home of most of the Kiota. (Most of the Oshkawa live in another part of the forest.)

  Beyond Paradise, there’s another bit of undisturbed forest and then a vast clearing, which is a parking lot. Signs direct you to enter, to park your car in any available slot, lock it, and wait beside it. Small buses constantly circle the parking area, picking up the new arrivals and driving them the last half mile to the casino itself, a low black-and-silver construction that makes a halfhearted attempt to look like an Art Deco log cabin.

  The casino building is enormous, but because it’s low, mostly one story high, with some upstairs offices toward the rear, and because it’s surrounded by trees and tasteful plantings, it’s hard to get a clear idea of just how big it is. But once inside, you begin to realize that the wide, bright, low-ceilinged spaces just go on and on. What seems to be acres of slot machines and poker machines spread off to infinity in one direction, while craps tables and blackjack tables march in long green lines in another. Then there are restaurants, poker rooms, baccarat tables, lounges, bars, and a number of playrooms where the kiddies can be looked after while Mom and Dad are losing the farm.

  The casino is not itself a hotel, though there are four motels spaced nearby, and all do well, even in the depths of winter, though they’re expected to do better yet once the casino management completes its plan for a motorized subway system to link up parking area, motels, and the main building.

  Casino management these days consists of two men. One, Roger Fox, is Oshkawa, while the other, Frank Oglanda, is Kiota. Both are sleek, smooth men in their fifties, their thick black hair slicked back, cigars in their blazer pockets, heavy rings on most of their thick fingers, a smile of contentment almost always visible on both their round faces.

  And why not? The casino mints money, they have no government to look over their shoulders, the tribes are happy so long as they all get their “shares” regular as clockwork, and nobody in the world has any reason or desire to examine just how Fox and Oglanda manage casino affairs.

  But that happy situation all began to change on Monday, November 27, when a letter arrived from the United States, addressed simply, “Casino Managers, Silver Chasm Casino, Silver Chasm Indian Reservation.” Fox was first in the office that afternoon—neither man was ever in the office in the morning—and he read the letter with surprise, unease, and distaste. Twenty minutes later, when Oglanda arrived, Fox carried the letter from his own office to his partner’s, and said, “Look at this.”

  Oglanda took the letter, but kept his eyes on the unwonted frown on Fox’s face. “Something wrong?”

  “You tell me.”

  Oglanda removed the letter from its envelope, opened it, and read:

  Sirs,

  My name is Little Feather Redcorn. I am fifty percent Pottaknobbee, through my mother, Doeface Redcorn, who was born in the village of Chasm in upstate New York, near Dannemora, on September 9, 1942. My mother’s mother, Harriet Littlefoot Redcorn, left Chasm in 1945, when word came from the government that her husband, my grandfather, Bearpaw Redcorn, was reported missing in action when his destroyer was sunk in the South Pacific.

  My grandmother lived in the West for many years, mainly around Los Angeles, where she worked as a waitress, and raised her daughter, my mother, Doeface Redcorn. I believe Harriet Redcorn died somewhere in California or Oregon around 1960, but I don’t know the details.

  Doeface had a brief marriage with a full-blooded Choctee in 1970, of which I am the result. They lived together on the reservation for a while, but the marriage was not a good one. My mother soon got a divorce and went back to her maiden name, and she never saw Henry Track-Of-Skunk again.

  My mother and I didn’t get along well when I was in my teens, I’m sorry to say, and eventually I left her in Pomona and went away to Las Vegas to live on my own. I had some success in show business in Las Vegas, but I had no more contact with my mother. I later heard that she had died, but I don’t know the circumstances or where she is buried.

  However, I do know that I am Pottaknobbee of the Redcorn clan, through my mother, Doeface, my grandmother Harriet Littlefoot Redcorn, and my great-grandfather Joseph Redcorn.

  Recently, I read an article in Modern Maturity at my dentist’s office about the casino at Silver Chasm and how the Pottaknobbee are part of the owners of the casino, except there aren’t any Pottaknobbees anymore. But I am Pottaknobbee. Shouldn’t I receive something from the casino?

  I have come east to learn more about my situation at Silver Chasm. I am staying now at Whispering Pines Campground outside Plattsburgh, where the phone number is 555-2795. I will phone you Tuesday afternoon, by which time you should have received this letter.

  I am very excited at the idea of being united at last with my own people, after having lived my entire life far away.

  Sincerely,

  Little Feather Redcorn

  “It’s a phony,” Oglanda said when he’d finished reading. Disdainfully, he dropped the letter onto his desk.

  “I certainly hope it’s a phony,” Fox said.

  “No, Roger,” Oglanda said, “listen to me.” Tapping the letter with a hard finger, he said, “This claim is a phony, a definite phony. Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Oglanda told him, “if this woman is telling the truth, and she’s even fifty percent Pottaknobbee, we’re going to have to show her the books.”

  “Oh,” Fox said. He picked up the letter, frowned over it. “You’re right,” he said. “No question. An absolute phony.”

  12

  * * *

  Dortmunder said, “What’s in it for me?”

  “Money,” Kelp suggested.

  “That isn’t what I mean,” Dortmunder said.

  Tiny said, “Money isn’t what you mean?”

  “That’s right,” Dortmunder said. “Not this time.”

  These three were seated in their sitting room as the fire sputtered through green wood in the fireplace and mostly white glistened outside the small windows. They had found this three-bedroom bed-and-breakfast just outside Chazy and had taken the whole thing on a very good weekly rental, because this wasn’t yet quite ski season in what, with rare simple truth, t
he locals called the North Country. Though it seemed to Dortmunder there was enough snow out there on the lawns and streets and car roofs and pine trees for any skier to ski on. But what did he know? His only outside winter sport was slipping on the ice while trying to get to the car. (Extra points if you’re carrying groceries. Double points if the groceries include beer bottles.)

  Their hosts in the bed-and-breakfast were an elderly male couple who lived at the downstairs back and wore many heavy wool sweaters and scarves; with their wrinkled red faces on top, they looked mostly like baked apples on sheep. These were Gregory and Tom, and other than producing fine stick-to-your-ribs breakfasts of pancakes and fried eggs and French toast and lots of bacon and orange juice and a huge coffeemaker full of java, they tended to stay in their own part of the house. They had a French-Canadian maid, a large young woman named Odille, who did the laundry and cleaned the rooms while singing “Frère Jacques” over and over to herself.

  Today, Monday, November 27, was their third day here, and Tom had informed them that winter rates would kick in two weeks from now, if they were still in residence. They’d promised to take that into account when considering their future plans.

  So far, there hadn’t been much to do. They’d driven north the same day the trio in the motor home had come up here to turn themselves into a solo in the motor home. Little Feather was the only one in occupancy over there in Whispering Pines, while Guilderpost and Irwin had moved into a motel just south of Plattsburgh, where they had picture-window views of the wind howling down out of Canada and across Lake Champlain and into their rooms.

  Although Tea Cosy, which in fact was the name on the small hanging sign outside the bed-and-breakfast, was the most comfortable venue among the three available to the conspirators, with its comfy, warm sitting room, where even Tiny could feel uncrowded, Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny had all agreed they didn’t particularly want Guilderpost and Irwin to know where they were, so meetings were taking place in Guilderpost’s room at the motel. In the meantime, Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny kept body and soul together, and dealt with the modest rent at the Tea Cosy, by committing the occasional minor felony, around and about. Enough to get on with, but not enough to lead local officials to create a task force. It was a living.