Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
Kirilenko continued his study of the man. He had golden hair and the ruddy cheeks of an athlete. Unconsciously, Kirilenko rubbed the backs of his hands, reddened and stiff with a rheumy ache. “It wasn’t one of the Ukrainians,” he said. “They know not to make a move without checking with me first.”
“They despise you,” the thin man said.
“But they fear me more.”
“And whom do you fear, Kirilenko?”
Kirilenko took his time drawing on his cigarette, holding the smoke deep so his lungs could absorb the nicotine. Releasing the smoke, he said, just before he turned away, “Not you, American, if that’s what you think. Certainly not you.”
“
M
AGNUSSEN OR
one of his people was at it a long time,” Jack said after some deliberation. “Rochev must have had something or known something Magnussen wanted very badly.”
“What did they do to him?” Alli said.
“It’s bad enough to give you nightmares.” Jack rose, and Annika was left to inspect the corpse on her own.
“The people who did this,” she said, “are professionals—experts, I must say, in torture and the application of pain.”
“Spoken like a professional yourself,” he said.
She looked up at him. “What an odd thing to say. Do you take me for a torturer?”
He deliberately ignored her comment. “Whoever they are, they must have a strong international connection to plan and execute a hit-and-run murder on Capri. It’s a small island with extremely limited vehicular traffic.”
Alli was staring out at the flat expanse of the water. “But Annika’s right. We’ve hit a dead end. There’s nothing left for us here and we have no way of finding out where Magnussen went.”
“Not necessarily.”
Jack led them back over the shallow crest and into the lowland of the cemetery. The afternoon was waning; the sun, exhausted from its misty journey, was sinking as if weighted down by the earth or by sorrow. The lengthening shadows seemed to thrust the headstones across the grass like accusing fingers.
“Alli, didn’t you say that Magnussen’s parents died on the same day?”
She nodded. “But in different places.”
Jack examined the headstones, one by one. Using his fingertips to trace the outlines of the chiseled letters allowed him to read what had been written more easily and quickly. “They died on August first, seventeen years ago. Magnussen’s father passed away here, on these grounds, but his mother died in Alushta.”
“Alushta is on the east coast of the Crimea,” Annika said. “It’s filled with expensive villas that overlook the Black Sea.”
“Bingo! That’s where Magnussen’s gone,” Jack said.
Annika frowned. “What? How could you possibly know that?”
“His mother was buried there.”
“I don’t see the connection.” Annika shook her head. “Maybe she was on vacation, maybe she was visiting friends.”
“In that event she would have been brought back here to be buried,” Jack said with such perfect logic that Annika was unable to contradict him.
“But a villa—”
Jack’s mind was working faster than the others could match or even imagine. “Look at this spread here. This family was wedded to money and prestige, they wouldn’t have remained here all year long. The summers are hot and unpleasant, aren’t they?”
Annika nodded, still dubious.
“Where would the Magnussens go in the summer? I’m willing to bet they own a villa in Alushta.”
“This is ridiculous, you’re not the Delphic oracle.”
“In a way he is,” Alli interjected. “Jack’s mind works differently than yours or mine, he can see things we can’t, make connections we can’t until much, much later.”
Annika stared at Alli as if she’d grown wings or had been struck by lightning. “Is this a vaudeville act between the two of you, or some idiotic sleight of hand trick?”
“Why would it be a trick?” Alli said so fiercely that Annika seemed stopped in her tracks.
“If you’ve got a better idea,” Jack said to Annika, “now would be the time to tell me.”
Annika looked away for a moment, her gaze roaming over the back of the manor house in the distance. “Seriously?” she said as she turned back to him. “You think Magnussen has gone to ground in Alushta?”
“
S
O WHO
was he then,” the golden-haired American said, “the marksman who took a shot in the woods?”
He was not a tall man, nevertheless he was imposing, like all the American agents Kirilenko had met or had seen in surveillance photos. He was possessed of a confidence that bordered on arrogance. Kirilenko envied him or, at least, was jealous of his sense of entitlement. The world was his oyster, he moved about in it as he pleased, with an ease Kirilenko imagined only in his dreams. Kirilenko, the good
silovik
, who was tied to Russia as if by a chain-link leash. And he thought:
I am faithful, like a dog, and the American is my master. He holds my fate in his hands—hands that do not ache in the cold, are not reddened and chapped, aged before their time. He has not seen what I’ve seen
. And then with the briefest flash of contempt like heat lightning that comes and goes in one breath:
What does he know of life, anyway? What can he know, he’s American
.
Was it contempt Kirilenko felt for the golden-haired American or was it pity? His name was Martin, like the bird. Harry Martin. But what was his real name? Likely Kirilenko would never know.
“Harry Martin,” the American had introduced himself when they first met, “from Latrobe, Pennsylvania.” And when Kirilenko had looked at him blankly, he’d added, “You know, the home of Arnold Palmer, surely you’ve heard of the legendary golfer.”
Kirilenko just barely stopped himself from laughing in Harry Martin’s face. God in heaven! While Russians were struggling to survive, Americans were playing golf.
The two men sat side by side now in the backseat of Kirilenko’s car, drinking hot coffee from a thermos one of Kirilenko’s men had fetched.
“So who was he then?” Harry Martin repeated. “Any theories?”
They appeared to be two old friends chatting about something inconsequential, a sports match, perhaps, or the prospects of a favorite soccer team.
“I don’t deal in speculation, only facts,” Kirilenko said with a good deal less irritation than he felt. It wouldn’t do to rub the American
the wrong way, he had too many powerful friends who, with one phone call, could seriously impact Kirilenko’s career, not to say his life. Just knowing this caused him a level of stress he found intolerable. Harry Martin was like an itch he couldn’t scratch, and it was driving him to distraction.
All at once he threw open the car door and stepped out into the waning day. The air smelled of smoke, charred fabric, and burnt plastic. While he was facing away from Martin he took out the cell phone and sent the photo of Annika Dementieva emerging from Rochev’s dacha to his assistant with specific instructions. A moment later Martin clambered out and without a glance at Kirilenko strode into the woods beyond what had once been the front porch of the house.
“All your men out of here?” he asked.
Kirilenko pocketed the phone as he followed the American into the woods. “The SBU also. It’s just us here now.”
“I need theories,” Martin said as they wound through the thick stand of hemlocks. He switched on the flashlight Kirilenko had given him. “I need
something
.”
Swallowing his emotions, Kirilenko said in his best fatalistic tone, “Someone has taken Karl Rochev, by force I would guess, judging by the corpse impaled to the mattress back there. It wasn’t us and I guarantee it wasn’t the SBU. Which means that there’s another faction in this mysterious, unnamed pursuit of yours.”
“Another faction.” Martin turned this phrase over as if it were alien to him or an idea to which he needed to adjust. He trained the flashlight’s beam on the forest floor as they picked their way across the soft earth. “Then we’ll have to find them, whoever they are. And we’ll have to eliminate them.”
Kirilenko made a noise deep in his throat. It was a kind of warning, as primitive as it was inarticulate, not that Harry Martin would notice, or even care. “And how do you propose we do that?”
Dying light, red and yellow, seeped through the evergreen boughs.
Martin knelt, running his fingertips lightly over the nest of evergreen needles, pointing out to Kirilenko a muddle of fresh footprints, none of them made by the boots of his men. “A man, a woman—and these.” One set was significantly smaller than the other two. He stood. They were very close to the road. “We pick up the perpetrators’ trail and follow them back to the source.”
He seems so sure of himself
, Kirilenko thought bitterly,
even though he’s in a land foreign to him, among people who don’t even speak his language. Such an American trait.
They walked to the edge of the trees.
“This road goes in only two directions,” Kirilenko said. “Several miles away is a turning that takes you back to Kiev, otherwise it goes straight to the city of Brovary.”
“What’s there?” Martin asked.
Kirilenko shrugged. “It’s the shoe-making capital of Ukraine.”
“We split up. You go on to Brovary, see if you pick up their trail. I’ll take my man and two of yours and head back to Kiev and try to do the same. At least it’s a city I know.”
Kirilenko felt a wave of relief flood him. It was a minor miracle to have this gorilla off his back.
Martin nodded at the twilit road that unspooled before them, a tar-black ribbon, vanishing into the darkness of the evening. “Wherever Rochev is you can be sure of one thing: These three people will take us there.”
“
DAD
—”
There were people, Jack knew, who confused the word “haunt” with memory. Since Emma had appeared to him, spoken to him, answered his questions and asked some herself, there were people—Sharon among them—who were absolutely certain that he had confused haunted with memory, that what he had mistaken for an encounter with his dead child was nothing more than his memories of her resurfacing, asserting themselves in order to ensure that she wouldn’t be completely lost to him, that she would remain with him until his own dissolution, whenever that might come, years from now, or tomorrow.
“
Dad
—”
Jack knew they were wrong. Emma remained, some essential part of her that death could not touch or even alter. She remained because their relationship was, in some essential way, incomplete, their time together, though cut short, had not ended. Her will survived the car
crash that had stolen her life away in brutal fashion, before she could feel the joy and pain of adulthood.
“
Dad
—”
Jack heard Emma as they returned to Igor Kissin’s apartment.
“
Dad, I’m here
.”
The door swung open and he stepped into the apartment. While the others went about their business, he looked for his daughter—his dead daughter.
“
No, Dad, over here
.”
At that moment, his cell phone rang. It was Sharon, and he took the call.
“Hello, Jack,” she said in a cool, preternaturally calm voice, “do you know yet when you’re coming home?”
He closed his eyes. “I don’t, Sharon, I told you—”
“Then I’ll leave the key under the doormat.”
His eyes flew open. “What?”
“I’m leaving, Jack. I’ve had enough of you not being here.”
And all at once he understood that they had returned to square one, to the point they’d been at immediately following Emma’s death, when she’d blamed him for not taking Emma’s call, for not somehow intuiting that their daughter was in mortal peril, that her car was about to veer off the road into a tree. Months later, Sharon had sworn to him that she’d put her anger and bitterness behind her, but he saw now that she hadn’t. Perhaps she’d been telling him the truth, or the truth as she understood it at the moment, but then she’d been fooling herself or, more accurately, hiding from herself, which every human being did from time to time.
He didn’t blame her for that failing, how could he? But he blamed her for not telling him the truth now, because she knew the truth. It wasn’t his job or the fact that he was overseas, far from her at the moment, it wasn’t that he couldn’t tell her when he’d be home again. What she meant was, I can’t forgive you for not being
there when Emma needed you, I can’t forgive you for not preventing her death.
He said nothing into the phone because there was nothing to say. She’d had a revelation or maybe her mother had forced the revelation on her. But for the first time he realized that it didn’t matter. The truth was the truth; it did no good to fight it.
“Good-bye, Jack.”
He said nothing, not even then, he merely folded the phone away, and looked around the apartment as if trying to find his bearings, or an answer for what had just happened, though he knew perfectly well where he was and that he was now alone.