Altar of Bones (61 page)

Zoe caught the flash of Ry’s smile as he turned to look at the older man. “It’s possible, but I didn’t see any.”

Nikitin shrugged. “He won’t let me come check it out for myself. He says the style is not to my taste.”

“It’s modern,” Ry said. “And loud.”

Nikitin grunted. “So, tell me … where is this thing you wish for me to analyze?”

“I’ve got it back here.” Zoe dug into her parka for the clear glass ampoule with its rubber stopper that Ry had bought in Budapest, along with the eyedropper she’d used to take a tiny drop of the bone juice from the amulet. In the semidark of the hotel bathroom, the juice had been the color of swamp water. But now, as she handed the ampoule to Dr. Nikitin, she was more than a little spooked to see the bone juice was glowing a bright, iridescent red.

Ry was spooked by it, too. She could see it in his face.

“Interesting,” Dr. Nikitin said, peering closely at the ampoule through the thick lenses of his glasses. “Where did it come from?”

“A cave in Siberia,” Ry said. “The people there believe it’s some kind of fountain of youth. That if you drink one drop of it, you will live forever.”

“Interesting.”

“Could it be real?” Zoe asked. “I mean, is it possible? Scientifically?”

“Theoretically, perhaps. But it is highly unlikely given the complexity of the aging process. All the genetic and lifestyle factors, the hundreds, possibly thousands, of individual factors in our cells and organs that affect our longevity.”

Dr. Nikitin gave the ampoule a little shake, and Zoe would have sworn the red iridescent goo glowed brighter.

“Because of its phosphorescent property,” Nikitin went on, “it is understandable that a primitive people would imbue it with special powers. Perhaps one day a witch doctor or a healer mixed it with some herbs and the patient recovered. And a legend grew from there.”

“But you’ll analyze it for us anyway?” Zoe asked.

“I could analyze it, certainly, but my area is in developmental biology. Who you should really have take a look at it is a biochemist. There is a woman I know with the Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology who has done some experiments with the longevity genes in
Caenorhabditis
elegans
—that is, roundworms. Nearly transparent little things, are roundworms. You can see their heart, neurons, and other innards clearly through a microscope. They are a favorite of Olga’s because of their simple anatomy and because they have a minimal number of genes. I would like to include her in our discovery, if I may. Her expertise would be invaluable.”

Ry shook his head. “I don’t know…. How much do you trust her?”

Nikitin looked surprised by the question. “We have been lovers on occasion. Why would—Ah,” he said, interrupting himself to answer his own question. “You need her to be discreet because there is danger involved. Because if a man truly believed there was such a thing as a fountain of youth, he might kill to get his hands on it.”

“He has killed,” Ry said.

Nikitin stared at Ry for another long moment, then nodded slowly. “I can take the subway home. You might have use for a car while you are here.”

Nikitin slipped the ampoule into the pocket of his fur coat, but he made no move to get out of the Lada. “It has just occurred to me,” he said after a moment, “that if such a thing as a true fountain of youth existed, it could be a terrible thing to let loose upon the earth. Overpopulation, wars, famine …” He shuddered. “How often has mankind seen our salvation in something which turns out later to be the means of our destruction?”

He turned to look at Ry, and Zoe saw a sadness come over Nikitin’s face. “When you were in the nightclub, did you see my son?”

“Only for a few minutes. There was no chance for us to talk.”

“But he looked well?”

“Yes, he did. Very well.”

“His music—it, too, must not be to my tastes, for I admit it makes my ears cry out in pain. Yet he’s made himself rich and famous with it. Anything he wants he can have….”

Nikitin looked away, through the windshield at the dark and cold Russian night. “But that place where you found him, the place you saved him from—he had fear etched into his soul there, etched like acid into stone. Will he ever recover from it? That is the question I ask myself, and cannot answer.”

T
HE OPEN
cast-iron railings of the Pevchesky Bridge were throwing spiky shadows onto the river ice when Ry pulled over to the curb and killed the ignition. The Lada’s engine sputtered on out of spite for a few seconds more, then finally died.

“You’ve stayed here before?” Zoe said, as she got out of the car. She tilted her head to look up at the tall, elegant cream-stone building. “With Sasha?”

Ry shook his head. “Sasha’s lover lives here. She inherited it from her grandfather, who was quite the Communist Party apparatchik in his day.”

He slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her against him. She looked up into his face, and soft, feathery snowflakes fell from the night sky into her eyes and open, smiling mouth.

“I’ve been told,” Ry said, “that the bed in the master bedroom came from one of the Tsar Nicholas’s palaces.”

T
HEY FELL ONTO
the postered bed with its rose silk canopy, mouths together, trying to tear off all their clothes at once. It was like it had been on the hood of the car, coming at them, coming over them, hard and fast. He nearly strangled her with her bra, funny really, but their need was so urgent, so vital to what they were and what they were becoming to each other, that there was no laughter, no attempt at anything other than coming together as quickly as possible, joining into one.

When, at last, they were quiet, lying beside each other, replete and at peace, she said, “You almost yelled down the ceiling.”

He tried to laugh, but it came out as an exhausted sigh. “Maybe, but you were louder, the loudest scream I’ve ever heard. I hope we don’t get arrested.”

She snuggled against him. “Thank you, Ry.”

“For what?”

“Being you and finding me.”

He felt the need for her build again, and this time they took it slowly, touches easy and unhurried. He kissed her mouth, her breasts, her belly, kissed all of her, lingering, and she screamed again.

L
ATER, THE ROOM
dark, lying within the crook of his arm, she said, “What did you save Sasha Nikitin from?”

Ry ‘s hand was idly caressing her breasts, then toying with the green-skull amulet she’d worn on a chain around her neck since Budapest.

“A prison in Tajikistan,” he said after a moment. “I was on a mission there, Operation Containment we called it. Trying to put some kind of dent, no matter how pathetic, in the flow of Afghan heroin into Russia. One night things went all to hell, and we ended up having to bust one of the smuggling rings on the fly. But the wrong guy got killed, and I got hauled in by the local cops and thrown into a jail cell that was already packed like sardines in a can with forty other men. Sasha was the youngest, just a kid, and he … He had this heart tattooed on his forehead.”

“I’ve seen
vors
with teardrops and daggers on their faces, but never a heart. Why that?” she asked, because prison tattoos always had a meaning.

“Because of what they’d done to him. They’d turned him into a sex toy for any man who wanted him.”

Zoe closed her eyes, not sure she wanted to hear any more now, but he went on, “In a Tajikistan jail they make the ink for the tat by burning the heel of a shoe and mixing it with urine. They’d made Sasha use his own shoe and piss. They even made him pay off the tattoo artist by … well, you can guess.”

Zoe nodded, swallowing around the thick lump in her throat. “But
how did he end up in such a place? His father’s a scientist, a professor at the university here.”

“Drugs. He got himself hooked bad on the poppy juice, and then he got it into his head that he could finance his habit by doing his own smuggling. He got caught trying to drive a vegetable truck full of two hundred kilos of heroin across the border.”

She felt Ry shrug in the dark. “I don’t know. I guess I felt sorry for the kid, so when I escaped, I brought him with me.”

Zoe thought it was probably a lot more than that, but she let it go.

“He wasn’t in very good shape, so I had to bring him all the way back home here to St. Petersburg. Soon as he could, the first thing he did was get that heart taken off his forehead. They had to dissolve his skin with magnesium powder to do it. It must’ve hurt like hell.”

She turned her head into Ry’s chest and kissed him, relishing the rise and fall of his breathing beneath her lips. “Ry? Are we going to get out of this alive?”

Every other man in the world would have lied to her then, but not him. “Either we take Popov’s son out tomorrow, or he takes us out.”

“If I have to, I’ll give him the bone juice. But only if I have to.”

The arm he had wrapped around her back tightened its grip. He kissed the top of her head. “Do you think you can find the nightclub again?”

“Yes. But why—”

“Sssh.” He put his finger against her mouth. “If you make it through this and I don’t, I want you to promise me that you’ll go to Sasha. He’ll take care of you. He’ll see that you get back home.”

She shook her head. “If you don’t make it, then I don’t want to either.”

“Yeah, you do. Nobody wants to die.”

She thought suddenly that she could feel a heat coming off the amulet where it lay between her breasts. She sat up, pulled off the chain, and held it out to him on her open palm.

“If this really is a fountain of youth, then maybe if we drink from it, Popov can’t hurt us. Can’t kill us, at least. One drop and we could live forever—”

“No.” He curled her fingers around the amulet and pushed it away from him. “No.”

“Okay, then.” She shrugged, pretending not to care, but she was shaking inside. From temptation, and a terrible fear.
Nobody wants to die
.

She looked down into his hard face. “I don’t know how you do it. How you’ve lived this kind of life for so long.”

His face didn’t soften then either, but he said, “I don’t know if I can do it anymore. If there is a tomorrow after tomorrow, and another tomorrow after that, then I want all those days and nights to be full of moments like this.” He reached up and cupped her cheek, his fingers wiping away tears she hadn’t known were there. “I want you.”

She leaned over and kissed him, softly at first, and then the kiss turned hard, and this time as they made love, she tried to make herself remember every moment of it.

They fell asleep in each other’s arms.