Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
“What are you thinking?”
Annika had drawn closer while he’d been plunged into his black thoughts. Her scent was like the beach, slightly salty, redolent of freshly washed dark places. Her heat made the hair on his arms stand on end.
He hesitated only moments. “To be honest, I was thinking about my daughter.”
“Emma, yes, Alli told me. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Those words, so often repeated by cops all over the world in whatever language, including himself, took on an altogether different aspect when Annika spoke them because there was genuine emotion behind them.
“Thanks.”
“Alli seems to miss her almost as much as you do.”
“They were very close,” Jack said. “In fact, at school they were everything to one another.”
“What a tragedy.” It was unclear from her tone whether she was talking about the two friends or about herself. Possibly it was both, coming together at the junction of present life and memory. “Jack, let me ask you a question. What if you see a truth no one around you sees? What if everyone, including teachers, friends—former friends!—think you’re a liar and a freak?”
“I think that’s what happened to Emma,” Jack said. “I know it happened to me.”
“You’re not sure?”
“I’m ashamed to say that was another thing about her I don’t know.”
“Don’t be ashamed. You loved your daughter, there’s nothing more important, is there?”
“No, I don’t believe there is.”
He heard a rustle of the bedsheets, then felt her hand take his. It was cool and slim and dry, and yet it created an electric shock that ran all the way through him.
“Did you feel that?” she whispered. “I felt it.”
He turned his head to find that she was looking at him.
“I can’t see the color of your eyes,” he said. “It’s an amber that glows as if with a light inside it.”
She moved her head off her pillow and onto his. “Better?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me more about Emma.”
Jack thought a moment, considered whether he should answer such an intimate question. “She loved music,” he said at length, “blues and rock. And she loved the philosopher-poets like Blake.”
Annika looked at him questioningly. “And?”
“My knowledge of her only goes so far.”
“All this is in your memory.” Annika said this with a curious intensity. “You remember her.”
“Yes, but more as a dream, really, the way you dream when you’re at war, to take yourself away from painful reality.”
“Yes, a war,” she said, as if she understood him completely. “In war you do what you have to do.” But her voice carried a note of insincerity or self-delusion, as if this were a sentence she told herself over and over until, for her, it became the truth. Then, unaccountably, her voice softened. “Nothing is ever what it was, do you recognize this? Every moment immediately dissolves into the next one, seconds and minutes are diluted until your past becomes what you want it to be, as if memory and dreams become so intertwined you can’t tell them apart.”
“The terrible moments become less so as the present dissolves the past into memory.”
“Yes, that’s it exactly.” She moved even closer to him, her smooth, aromatic skin brushing against his. “This is how we survive. The terror dissolves like dreams when we wake up and go about our daily routine.”
“I wish Alli felt that way, but I know she doesn’t.”
Another silence consumed them. Apart from the hiss of an occasional vehicle passing by outside, there were no street sounds, not even a dog’s querulous bark.
After a time, she sighed. “I’m tired.”
“Go to sleep, Annika.”
“Put your hand on me. I want to feel you, I want to be connected . . .”
Reaching out, he cupped his hand over the tender ridge of her hip, soft as silk. She stirred languorously, and his hand slid to the top of her thigh, hard-muscled and powerful. He could feel his heart beating slowly. It felt good to be near her, their warmth mingling. The soughing of her breath came to him like wind in the trees or distant birds calling to one another.
“There’s no time for us now,” she whispered, but she might already have been asleep.
“I
T
’
S CALLED
a
sulitsa
or, less commonly,
dzheridom
,” Bogdan Boyer said. He was the antiques dealer Dr. Sosymenko had recommended. His shop was in Gorodetskogo, near the Maidan Metro stop, though they had driven from the apartment, after dying Alli’s hair dirty blond and wolfing down a hasty breakfast, because it wasn’t conveniently located near the Metro.
Boyer, a small man with the pinched, avid face and busy hands of an inveterate collector, turned the murder weapon over and over under a large magnifying glass with an illuminated fluorescent ring. He sat scrunched on a high stool, much as Bob Cratchit must have sat hunched over his ink-stained desk in his dismal little cell, as Charles Dickens described his tanklike workspace.
“The
sulitsa
is one of what’s known collectively as splitting weapons, because—see here, how the point is diamond-shaped, beautifully functional—they were forged to pierce armor,” Boyer said, warming to the task Annika had given him.
“This is a missile spear, though it was also used for close-to stabbing, hence it’s nickname, ‘the lunger.’ Weapons like this one and the much larger boar-spear, which had a spade-shaped point, were used by Russian soldiers as far back as 1378 in a fierce battle in Ryazansk along the Vozhe. The Russian Cossacks, the mounted regiments, used these splitting weapons to defeat the invading Tatar army.”
He looked up at Annika. “It’s interesting, but I can’t give you much for it. Apart from a collector here or there and possibly a museum, there’s no market for these things. Besides, it’s incomplete.”
“Incomplete?” Jack said. He was keeping an eye on Alli, who was rummaging through the bowels of the overcrowded, overheated shop. “What do you mean?”
“Typically,
sulitsa
came in threes, packed in an
elaeagnus
, a small cured leather quiver that sat against the left hip.” He shook his head. “Without its brothers—or sisters—” He grinned at Annika “—it’s worth next to nothing.”
“I’m not interested in selling it,” Annika said. “I want to know who its owner is.”
Boyer frowned. “That might be difficult.”
He picked up his phone and made several calls. While he did so, Jack went to find Alli, who had disappeared behind a glass case filled with copper teapots and kettles. He found her examining a sheet of paper—no computer printouts here. The sheet was a written list of shipments that had either gone out over the past several days or were about to be packed and shipped. Beside each item was a name. She pointed wordlessly to the name “M. Magnussen,” and his address written just below an item labeled, “Three
sulitsa
(a set) in original
elaeagnus
, ca. 1885, prov. J. Lach.”
FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY
was noted in red.
Seeing that he was having difficulty reading the list, Alli beckoned him to bend down so that she could whisper the notation as well as the name and address of the intended recipient in his ear.
Jack had her put the paper back where she’d found it, then he took her hand and led her back to the front of the store.
Boyer was just putting down the receiver. He smiled insincerely. “I’m afraid I’ve had no luck.”
“No matter,” Jack said. “Thank you for your time.” He took the murder weapon and turned to Annika. “In any event, we’re late for your appointment. Dr. Sosymenko has to change your dressing.”
Annika played along smoothly, though she must have been as taken by surprise as was Boyer. “Oh, yes, I got so engrossed here I forgot all about it. Come along, darling,” she said and, taking Alli’s hand, walked out the door with Jack right behind her.
“What was that all about?” she said when they were out on the street.
“In the car,” Jack said. “Now!”
He flipped Annika the keys and she slid behind the wheel while he got in beside her and Alli climbed into the backseat.
As she started up and pulled out into traffic, she said, “Do we have a destination or should I drive in circles for a while?”
“Drive in circles,” Jack said, staring intently at the off-side mirror.
“That was a joke, Jack.”
“I know, but I want to make sure we’re not being followed.”
“Okay,” she said, turning right at the first stoplight, “I give up.”
“Alli found a bill of lading in the back of the shop for a set of those
sulitsa
complete in their quiver about to be delivered to a client by the name of M. Magnussen.”
Annika nodded. “Which means Boyer was lying to us.”
“So who the hell was he calling?” Jack said.
“The SBU or the cops?” Annika ventured.
“Or maybe this Magnussen, who asked him to be on the lookout for anyone coming around with a spare lung sticker.”
“You’re thinking he’s the killer,” Alli said, hunched forward, her face between them.
“That’s right, you heard Boyer, a single
sulitsa
is worthless. Magnussen ordered a new set of
sulitsa
because he used one from his original set to kill Rochev’s mistress.”
“But why would anyone use one of those things to commit murder?” Alli asked.
“D’you think the police would know what they’re looking at?” Annika made another right. “It would simply confuse them.”
“Except,” Jack said, “if someone else other than the police found the body. Someone smart enough—”
“—or interested enough,” Annika cut in.
“Yes,” Jack continued, “to pursue the investigation.”
“Which is why,” Alli said, “he gave Boyer instructions to call him if anyone came in inquiring about it.”
“By the way,” Jack interrupted, “see that dark sedan two cars back? We
are
being followed.”
Annika proved herself as adept as Jack at flushing tails and getting rid of them, which was, he thought, one advantage of her being trained by the FSB. On the other hand, he couldn’t bring to mind another.
She spent the next ten minutes lulling them into thinking they hadn’t been made before she tore through a red light, leaving an angry chorus of blaring horns and squealing brakes. She made a right, then an almost immediate left, rolling down an alleyway so narrow the brick walls sheared off their side mirrors. A third of the way along, she turned off the engine, and they sat waiting. Forty seconds later the black sedan sped by the alleyway, and Annika immediately fired up the ignition, and they rolled to the far end of the alley, where she turned left.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Jack gave her the address. “The collector’s named M. Magnussen.”
“Doesn’t sound Ukrainian,” Alli said.
“Or Russian, for that matter,” Annika added, as she navigated through Kiev’s crowded streets.
“Whatever his nationality,” Jack said, “there seems to be a clear line back to my starting point. Senator Berns is killed by a hit-and-run on Capri after having flown from here. The last person he met with was Karl Rochev, whose mistress has been murdered in bizarre fashion with an antique Cossack weapon, and Rochev himself is nowhere to be found. Now it seems clear that the murder weapon belonged to this M. Magnussen.”
“Whoever he is,” Alli said.
W
HOEVER
M
AGNUSSEN
was, he was wealthy. He lived outside the city, in one of the areas so high-priced that not a high-rise or even a block of cement was to be seen. Instead, rolling farmland not unlike that of rural Virginia protected his domicile from the ravages of the modern-day city. The driveway to his estate was a half mile long, snaking through dense stands of pine forest that would have completely obscured the house from the road even if it were only a hundred yards from it. The structure, which stood on a shallow knoll, was modeled after an English manor house with two wings attached to either end of a long central section that faced the visitor with both the square shoulders of a soldier and the chilly contempt of a high-court magistrate.
“This place looks like any minute Keira Knightley is going to draw up to it in a gilded horse-drawn carriage,” Alli said.
She wasn’t far off the mark, Jack thought. The place was fit for a nineteenth-century baron or viscount, but a dead one. The place was lightless and, as they soon discovered, locked up tighter than a duck’s behind.
“Not making sense,” Alli said.
Which was also true, Jack thought, unless Magnussen, having gotten the warning call from Boyer, packed up and flew the coop in
the hour or so it had taken them to drive out here. It would have taken them far less time if they hadn’t been slowed down by the dark-colored sedan tailing them. And then, of course, he understood.
“Magnussen’s gone,” he said. “The purpose of the tail was not to see where we were going, but to slow us down. Boyer must have gone to the back of his shop the moment we left and seen the bill of lading out of place.”