Altar of Bones (52 page)

“It’s February, O’Malley. Get a grip,” Zoe said, but he saw she was smiling. “It’s almost two. We need to find Professor Kuzmin’s place. Agim said it was on a hill overlooking the river.”

They found it easily, but Ry drove by without even slowing. He
hung a right, then a left, so that they were on a street parallel and downhill from the villa. He parked alongside a set of steps that led up to what looked like the wall of a cemetery.

They got out of the car, stretched out the kinks, and looked around them.

Zoe said, “I haven’t seen any sign of Yasmine Poole yet. Have you?”

“No. But then we wouldn’t.”

Ry took the Glock out of the glove compartment where he’d stowed it while he was driving, slipped it into the small of his back, then stuffed the side pockets of his cargo pants with extra ammo clips.

“Are we going to be the Carpenters again? Jake the chauvinist pig and clueless Suzie with a
z
?” Zoe asked.

Ry shook his head. “No, the only thing the same is going to be the names. I figure this guy’s spent years looking for your icon, and the minute he lays eyes on it, he’s going to want it. If he thinks we’re a couple of rubes, things could get nasty. They could get nasty anyway.”

Ry took one last look around, then said, “Do you mind waiting by the car for a bit? I want to scout the villa before we go inside. Find the back way out, just in case.”

“A plan B.” Zoe was grinning and kind of rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, and Ry thought,
Damn, in spite of everything, she’s actually loving this
.

And he smiled to himself, because he was loving it, too.

P
ROFESSOR
D
ENIS
K
UZMIN’S
villa—a two-story stucco painted a pale peach—sat behind a stand of cypress trees and a green wrought-iron fence. The gate was open to the gravel drive, and Ry slipped through without being seen. He circled around to the back and found a door that led out from the kitchen into a vegetable garden and a small apple orchard. On the other side of the orchard was a lane that led to the rear of a church.

He walked down the lane, past the church, and came upon a small
cemetery of leaning stone crosses and crumbling monuments. A wall ran along one side of the cemetery, and on the other side of the wall, some stone steps. Ry looked down the steps and saw all but the front end of their rented Beamer, but no Zoe anywhere.

He trotted down the steps, still not seeing Zoe, panic uncurling in his belly. Then he saw the back of her, leaning up against the front bumper. He must’ve have made some noise because she stood up suddenly and whirled, a bottle of water in one hand, and a Glock in the other, pointed at his heart.

“Jesus Christ, O’Malley, what are you doing? I almost shot you.”

“Sorry, I thought you … Sorry.”

Ry drew in a deep breath and tried to get his racing pulse under control. He needed to get a grip here. He’d let Agim get inside his head with all that talk about the One, and now it was distracting him. And when you got distracted, you not only got yourself killed, you got the people who depended on you killed, too.

“Well, give me some warning next time. I’m a little jumpy here.” Zoe slipped the gun back into her satchel. “So what did you find? Have we got us a plan B?”

Ry described the layout of the villa while he got out his Swiss army knife, opened the BMW’s passenger-side door, and pushed the seat back as far as it would go so he could get at the center console.

Zoe peered over his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Disabling the air bags. I should have done it sooner. At some point we might need to haul ass out of here in a hurry, and if we end up colliding with something along the way, I don’t want us to get hit with a faceful of nylon.”

“That’s probably illegal, what you’re doing. But I won’t tell.”

“Hey, if I go down, sister, I’m taking you with me. Shit, I was afraid of this. I’m gonna have to cut the carpet to get at the control box.”

“Fine, but when it comes time to take this sucker back to the rental company, you’re on our own.” She leaned over so she could stick her head in the car for a closer look. “If we do have to haul ass, though, can I drive?”

Ry laughed at the very idea.

T
HE DOOR TO
the villa was opened by a rather attractive, but cold-eyed, blonde in her fifties, who told them she was the housekeeper and the professor was expecting them. As she led them across a spacious black-and-white-tiled foyer, Ry admired her legs and wondered if perhaps she was the reason why Denis Kuzmin had never remarried.

She showed them into what she called “the professor’s library,” a room full of sunlight, rich mahogany paneling, and walls of built-in bookshelves.

“What a lovely garden,” Zoe said, walking up to a pair of French doors that opened onto a sloping green lawn hedged with hawthorn and azalea bushes.

The housekeeper didn’t even crack a smile at the compliment. She said, “The professor will be with you shortly,” and left, pulling the double doors to the foyer firmly shut behind her.

Ry took a turn around the room, but saw no other door. “I don’t like it that the only other way out of here besides the door leading in from the hall is out through the front garden.”

He stopped at the library table that served as the professor’s desk. On the wall behind it hung a framed propaganda poster of Joseph Stalin—the famous one of the Great Leader posing with a little apple-cheeked peasant girl. “I wonder if he knows that Stalin ended up having that little girl’s father shot,” Ry said to Zoe.

“Maybe he doesn’t care. Or, since he was an informer himself, maybe he just figures the guy deserved it.”

Ry leafed through a stack of manuscript pages that sat next to the professor’s computer. “It looks like he’s writing a book. On medieval witchcraft in Siberia.”

“Hey, don’t knock it. For all we know, I might come from a long line of witches.”

Zoe walked along the wall of shelves that held not only books but icons of all sizes, some so old most of the paint had worn off, others richly gilded with silver and gold. “He’s got some good pieces,” she said.

Ry was about to ask her how the professor’s collection compared
with her mother’s when the double doors opened beneath the hand of a small, thin man who looked like central casting’s idea of a retired college professor, complete with a red polka-dot bow tie, tweed trousers, and a sweater with elbow patches.

He held out his hand to Ry as he came into the room. “I am Professor Kuzmin. And you are Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter, I take it?” His English was almost accent-free, but he spoke slowly and carefully, as if he dreaded making a single mistake. “Forgive me, but I did not hear your car pull into the drive.”

“We came on the HEV,” Ry said.

“You climbed all the way up here from the train station?” Pale gray eyes, the color of cement, assessed them from behind thick tortoise-shell glasses, and Ry got the sense Denis Kuzmin sized people up at first meeting, then stood back and waited smugly to be proven right.

He smiled, showing teeth that were small and yellow, like kernels of corn. “Ah, but you are both so young and fit, and it’s not too chilly a day for February. So what did you think of Szentendre’s town square? Charming, yes?”

“A little too froufrou for my tastes,” Ry said, “but my wife was charmed. She wants me to take her for a moonlit ride in one of those horse-drawn carriages.”

Kuzmin chuckled. “A romantic sentiment, indeed, Mrs. Carpenter, but you might want to wait for more clement weather.” He gestured at a sofa and a pair of flanking armchairs unfortunately upholstered in lurid green velvet. “Shall we sit by the fire?”

Ry paused on the way to study the large, framed print that hung over the mantel.
Kind of a weird thing to put up on the wall in your library
, he thought. But then the Stalin poster wasn’t exactly conducive to happy thoughts either.

“I’ve seen the original of this print hanging in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow,” Ry said.

Kuzmin sighed almost happily and rocked back and forth on his heels. The professor was about to launch into one of his favorite lectures.

“Ah, yes. Oil on canvas by Ilya Repin,
Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581
. It captures the moment after the Tsar Ivan,
in a fit of uncontrollable rage, has just bludgeoned his son and heir over the head with an iron staff. The father kneels on the floor, cradling the bloodied body of his son. You see the lunacy in his bloodshot eyes, but also the horrible realization of what he has done. By contrast the face of the dead boy is calm, almost Christ-like in death. Fascinating, is it not?”

“And sad,” Zoe said.

Ry didn’t answer, for he was lost in that terrible moment captured by the artist. The tsar in priestly black, his son dressed in a robe of the purest white. The murder weapon, the iron staff, lying nearby, on the bloodred Oriental carpet.

“You seem particularly interested, Professor, in the more mentally deranged figures from Russian history,” Zoe said, picking up from the mantel a silver-framed, black-and-white photograph of a gaunt, bearded man in a long black robe, seated at a desk before an open Bible.

An odd smile pulled at Denis Kuzmin’s thin slit of a mouth. “So you recognize the Mad Monk, do you? Grigori Rasputin. Some argue that his influence over the Tsar Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, led to the Bolshevik revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty. He variously has been called a saintly mystic, visionary, healer, and prophet on the one hand. And on the other, a debauched religious charlatan. Perhaps he was all those things, or perhaps—”

He cut himself off as the double doors opened and the housekeeper came in, carrying a tray loaded with three tall glasses, a cut-crystal carafe of water, and a squat, round bottle full of a dark brown, herbal-looking liquid.

“Ah, here is Mrs. Danko with some refreshment. Have you ever tasted Unicum? Some call it our national treasure, although the first-time imbiber might find it a tad bitter.”

Bitter, hell
. Ry had tried that stuff the last time he was in Budapest. It smelled like a hospital room, tasted like cough medicine, and the hangover he got after only two glasses had been truly spectacular.

“Maybe I’ll have some water later, but I’m fine for now,” Ry said.

The professor’s face fell in disappointment. “Mrs. Carpenter?” he asked, picking up the liquor bottle and a glass.

Zoe flashed her brightest smile. “I’d love to try some, Professor, but I get a headache if I drink in the middle of the day.”

He shrugged. “I hope you don’t mind if I indulge myself without you.”

The professor poured his drink, and they sat down, Ry and Zoe beside each other on the couch and the professor in an armchair. Ry noticed Denis Kuzmin couldn’t seem to look at Zoe directly, as if he were afraid of meeting her eyes, of having her see too much in his. He could just be a chauvinist, Ry supposed, but he wondered if something more was going on.

“In your telephone call,” Kuzmin said, “you told me you have acquired an icon that you wish for me to study.”

“My grandmother gave it to us as a wedding present,” Zoe said. “We were told there are often myths and fables attached to particular icons, and we wondered, since ours is so unusual, if maybe there’s a story to go along with it, you know? And since this is your area of expertise …”

The professor’s long, thin nose rose an inch or so into the air. “I have acquired something of a reputation in that regard. And, yes, indeed, some icons in times past had various mystical, even magical, properties attached to them.”

Zoe took the sealskin pouch out of her satchel, deliberately letting Kuzmin get a look at her Glock while she did so, and Ry thought,
Smart girl
. But whatever the professor thought about her having a gun, he didn’t let it show on his face, and Ry relished the cool, solid feel of his own Glock in the small of his back. He wasn’t getting good vibes off this guy.

Zoe propped the icon up on her lap. The professor didn’t gasp aloud the way Anthony Lovely had done, but Ry saw the corners of his mouth go white, and the hand that held his glass started to shake.