Altar of Bones (43 page)

So what Marilyn gave to Bobby the day we murdered her was not the real altar of bones, and, no, I never told Popov that inconvenient truth. I couldn’t think of a way to do it without betraying Katya.

Over the next couple of weeks, while Popov mapped out the detail of the big kill, Katya and I figured out the best way to save both ourselves from Popov. And it all went according to plan.

Until the end.

She filmed the kill from a natural blind and with a zoom lens, so she not only got the killing, she got all our faces in some of the frames. Afterward, we made still prints off it, the shots with their faces in them, and I gave them the prints, so they’d know what I had. I told them as long as both Katya and I stayed fat and sassy and alive, the film would stay buried.

We were home free then, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the altar of bones. I had to have it. I
needed
it. But she wouldn’t give it to me, damn her soul to hell. She’d given it to Marilyn, but she wouldn’t give it to me.

After a while she began to suspect I wanted it bad enough to kill her for it, and God help me, but she was right.

So she ran. And she took the altar of bones with her to protect herself from
me
.

B
UT ALL
of that was still over a year in the future. At the moment I was more worried about talking Popov out of killing me in the here and now.

“If you are lying to me,” Popov said, “I will rip off your balls and make you eat them. Now, think. Is there a friend she could have gone to? A relative?”

“I don’t know.” That was the truth. Her only real friend had been Marilyn.

“I could destroy you.” I knew Popov would, too. Without breaking into a sweat, or without an instant’s regret.

“I still don’t know anything. Hell, I don’t even get what this is all about.”

I edged my way down the hall, back into the living room, Popov with
me every step. Suddenly his gaze sharpened and focused, and I whirled, half-expecting to see Katya standing there.

But there was no one, and then I realized he was looking at the framed photograph on the fireplace mantel, a larger copy of the one Katya always carried in her purse—of her and Anna Larina standing in front of the studio gates. He went to it and picked it up, stood looking at it for a long time.

Then he said what I thought was the strangest thing at the time.

He said, “I thought she’d died in the cave.”

He said, “I thought she died in the cave.”

Z
OE WIPED THE
tears off her cheeks and closed her eyes. She felt a movement beside her: Ry wrapping a throw blanket around her shoulders.

“You’re so cold your teeth are chattering,” he said.

She looked down and saw that she held the pages of Mike O’Malley’s story clenched so tightly in her fist she was wrinkling them.
She smoothed them out on her lap. “They shot Kennedy for no reason, Ry. My grandmother got the amulet back—we know that part is true, because she said so with her dying breath. So they shot him for no reason. And what they did to poor Marilyn. It’s the
way
she was killed that seems so awful, to be violated like that. And now they’ve killed your brother, too.”

When Ry didn’t say anything, she looked up to see that he was back to prowling the room. He stopped in front of the dressing table and leaned over, bracing his fists on it to look into the fanciful gold mirror, but she didn’t really think he was seeing his own reflection.

“I know it might seem almost obscene to say this,” he said, “but I think we need to look at it from Nikolai Popov’s point of view. If he didn’t know your grandmother got the amulet back, then it wasn’t ‘no reason’ to him.”

“Yeah. I see your point,” Zoe said.

Ry straightened and spun around. “So what in hell was in that thing to make the KGB kill a president of the United States just because they believed he drank from it?”

Zoe couldn’t help shuddering. “I don’t know, but I think we’d better figure it out fast before not knowing gets us killed. And where’s the amulet now? Katya got it back, so you’d think it would have been in the chest with the icon and the film.”

Ry sighed as he pushed his fingers through his hair. “Maybe the disastrous consequences of her giving it to Marilyn spooked her so badly she threw it away.”

Zoe shook her head. “She would never do that. She might give it to someone out of love, but she’d never just throw it away. It’s the altar of bones, and she was the Keeper.”

Ry came and sat down on the chaise next to her. He wasn’t crowding her, yet she could feel the ferocity in him, the barely leashed violence. Had his father been like that? Is that what had attracted her grandmother to Mike O’Malley?

“Do you think they were really married?” she asked. “Your dad and my grandmother?”

Ry was quiet a moment, then he said, “Yeah, they were. After Galveston,
when I new I had to track down Katya Orlova, to get some answers and see the film, I looked for her in the one place where I knew for sure she had once lived—the L.A. area. I found a record of their marriage in the Holy Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox Church in Hollywood. A Michael O’Malley married Katya Orlova there on June twenty-third of 1962. Anna Larina’s birth certificate and her own marriage license to your dad were there, too. That’s how I was able to track your mother down so easily once I ran out of other leads. I was hoping that somehow Anna Larina would lead me to Katya.”

“And your plan worked,” Zoe said. “In a crazy sort of way. It seems weird to think of them being married, though. Katya and your dad, I mean. It’s not like that makes us blood relatives or anything, but still, it seems weird. Two strangers with a connection neither of us knew about, and now here we are.”

“Getting shot at.”

“There is that,” Zoe said, and they shared the kind of grim smile she imagined soldiers in a foxhole did during a lull in the fighting. “And to top it off, now I gotta come to terms with the idea that this Nikolai Popov monster is my great-grandfather.” She gave a bitter laugh. “But then it’s not like I had a normal family to begin with.”

Ry said nothing, but he reached over, took her hand, gave it a gentle squeeze, then let it go.

A silence fell between them then that was almost poignantly intimate, yet fraught with so many conflicting emotions, Zoe didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe it was because of this newly discovered past they now shared, a past full of such dark and ugly secrets, but it felt as if this man understood her, knew her, better than anyone else ever had. She wondered if he felt the same.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

He leaned back, lacing his hands behind his head. “That it’s like a jigsaw puzzle made up of all these pieces. I keep thinking if we can just put the pieces together right, we’ll be able to see the whole picture.”

Zoe leaned back against the sofa cushions alongside him and stared up at the ceiling. “Well, we know that somewhere there exists, or existed, an amulet filled with this stuff called the altar of bones. Stuff so
scary that when the KGB thought the president of the United States drank it, they killed him.”

“But not right away,” Ry said. “They murdered Marilyn in August of 1962, on the day she gave what they thought was the altar of bones to Bobby to give to the president. Yet Jack wasn’t assassinated until November of the following year, a whole fifteen months later. If Popov and the KGB really believed his drinking from the altar made him a danger to the world, then why did they wait so long?”

“‘Danger to the world’ …,” Zoe echoed. “That makes the altar sound like something downright evil. Yet Popov and your dad were both willing to betray the women who loved them just to get their hands on it.”

“A two-bit pimp told me a story once, about taking a knife to one of his whores who’d gotten out of line. He said the power he felt while he was cutting her made him feel like a god. For some people, Zoe, the mere act of doing evil can be a seductive thing.”

Ry leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his spread knees. “Anyway, we might not know yet exactly what the altar of bones is, but we got an idea how it fits into the Kennedy assassination—they killed him because they believed he drank from it. So that’s at least one part of the puzzle. And we also know we’ve got two separate bad guys after our asses. Mr. Ponytail, who wants the altar of bones, and Yasmine Poole, who wants the film.”

“They could both be working for Nikolai Popov, though,” Zoe said. “Katya got his face on the film, remember? He was the guy with the umbrella, which he used to signal your father that the president’s limousine was coming. So he’s got a good reason to keep the film from ever seeing the light of day. At the same time we now know that he was after the altar of bones from as far back as the 1930s, so—” She stopped as a thought suddenly struck her. “Which was what? Eighty years ago? So that means Popov would have to be old as dirt now, and I think I just shot a big hole in my theory, didn’t I?”

Ry gave her a tired smile. “Actually, he’d be pushing a hundred and ten or so, if he were even still alive. While I was trying to find your grandmother, I did some research on the Nikolai Popov, who was a
procurator general for the KGB in the early sixties. As you can imagine, there wasn’t a lot to be found, but as near as I could tell, he was born in St. Petersburg sometime around the turn of the last century. He wielded a lot of power behind the scenes until Leonid Brezhnev’s death in 1982. Apparently, once he found himself out of favor with the new regime, he retired to his dacha to live out his golden years. There was no mention of him anywhere after that.”

“Not even a death certificate?”

“Not that I could find, but then a lot of records got lost or were tossed after the Soviet Union collapsed.”

“Well …,” Zoe sighed, and straightened, stretching out her legs and the kinks in her muscles, “it was a good theory while it lasted.”

“Actually, you might have been sort of right. At least as far as the ponytailed guy working for a Popov, I mean. Back in the early eighties, when organized crime really got going in Russia, a man calling himself Mikhail Nikolaiovich Popov emerged as the
pakhan
of a big
mafiya
outfit in St. Petersburg. He claimed to be the old master spy’s son, even produced an official birth certificate to prove it, and supposedly he’s the spitting image of his dad. Whatever, this guy’s into some real serious shit now—prostitution, extortion, murder for hire, drug trafficking. Especially crystal meth.”