Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (45 page)

“They believe,” Andrei said tightly, “that you are a spy.”

“A spy?” Jamie said and laughed.

“So they believe, Yasha, and you know in Russia that is not a matter for laughter.”

“It’s not a matter for laughter anywhere that I’m aware of,” Jamie retorted, “but as it’s an accusation completely without foundation, it is a matter for some humor, if of the particularly grim sort.”

“Don’t you understand?” Andrei hissed. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, suspicion alone can land you in Lubyanka, from which there are very few return journeys.”

“I’ve already had my Lubyankan holiday, and even if they take me into prison and torment me with hoses and bamboo slivers—which are about the only two things they didn’t do to me last time—I can’t tell them anything different.”

Andrei stood, putting his hands on the desk between them, his blue eyes dense with some meaning Jamie wasn’t eager to translate.

“We are too long friends to prevaricate.”

“What do you mean by that?” Jamie asked sharply.

“Only, Yasha, that I remember that spring at Oxford too. You were not the only one approached.”

Jamie felt a deathly stillness descend over him, as though he stood suddenly on the broad plains of this country, with snow falling in every direction and no human aid anywhere in sight. Why Andrei would speak of this here was beyond him. It could mean a long and messy death for both of them.

“All I remember of that, Andrei, is that I turned them down. Did you?”

“It wasn’t as simple as a mere refusal. You, of all people know that, Yasha. We both came from countries that had caused Britain no small problems.”

“That’s an understatement in the extreme,” Jamie replied. “But it still doesn’t change what I said. I turned them down. Did you?”

“Sit down, Yasha. I did not come here to interrogate you.”

Jamie sat, for he saw little choice in the matter, and the warmth of the room was too seductive to resist. Andrei had set out a chessboard with the pieces neatly aligned. And there was food, more than he had seen in a very long time.

“This they will allow, and for the time it takes, you are warm and fed, my friend. It is the little I can do for you.”

Part of him wanted to take the chessboard and throw it and all the exquisite pieces out the window, and the other part merely wanted the comfort of the game, the warmth, the company and the food.

There was bread, soft black rye, and thinly sliced beef and boiled eggs and vodka.

“And what of Violet?” Jamie asked, so quietly that he could not be heard even over the soft crackle of the fire from the cast iron stove. “Does she get these dinners, the warmth of a fire and your attention for an hour or two?”

Andrei’s face tightened visibly. “She has refused to see me these last two months. I do not know why. From her end there is only silence. If you—”

“We know of each other. Beyond that we have said little more than hello,” Jamie said. He had been made aware by Shura that the small, copper-haired woman who worked in the infirmary, was named Violet. After that, it had been simple to make the connections. After that, it had been hard not to suspect that there was far more to his capture and incarceration than had originally met the eye.

The food was more plentiful than what his stomach had come to expect over the last several weeks, and slightly more flavorful. He was warm too, so warm that he took his coat and hat off. He could see the changes in himself reflected in the quick flash of Andrei’s eyes as he took him in, weighing and assessing against the last evening in the dacha. He knew the comparison wasn’t good.

Chess provided them with common ground, though, and Jamie felt a visceral relief in the absorption of the game. The warmth had heightened his senses, his hearing so sharp that the
whoosh
of felt against wood was audible.

A drink was placed into his hand at some point and he sipped at it slowly, the warmth alone inebriation enough.

The familiarity of the game allowed their talk to be light, ribboned about with their own special code, coloring the weft of their communication. And so there was what was said and what was meant.

“You will have to forgive my appearance. I am still getting used to life in the gulag.”

Why the hell am I here?

“I am sorry for that, Yasha. You must believe me.”

Me, you are here because of me and my mistakes.

“Work going well?”

What are you involved in?

“Yes, it is interesting as always.”

I can’t tell you, but it’s something more terrible than your worst imaginings.

“Good to hear. I miss my own work, my home, spring in my own country. The Russian spring is not a soft one.”

I want to go home before they kill me.

“It will warm up soon. The summer will be wonderfully hot.”

I will not let them kill you.

“I’m Irish. I burn if the sun is too hot.”

You will not be able to stop them.

A silence and then softly, moving his bishop, Andrei spoke aloud.

“I am doing what I can, Yasha, but it is not easy. Right now they hold all the chips and I am, as you might say, between a rock and a very hard place.”

Jamie merely gave him a hard, green look, for he was painfully aware that there was much more going on here than met his limited view. Things that Andrei could not tell him. He himself was the rock, Violet the hard place. They had Andrei neatly cornered.

“You remember that night on the tower? What we promised?”

“Yes,” Jamie said stiffly.

“I still mean what I said that night. The question is—do you?”

To mention that night here, now, was cutting too close to the bone and Andrei knew it. But that had never stopped him before. He had always known how to make his cuts deep and lasting so that the scar only partially healed. So that with the right touch it might bleed again at his command.

Paris, city of light, city of love
. Paris—le Grand Siecle of Louis XIVth—a city of astrologers and artists, of writers and philosophers, of great minds and grand hearts. A city, too, of riff-raff, pickpockets and prostitutes, peddlers and organ grinders, inspiring in their ability to graft and mold themselves to life and the survival of a poverty that ought to have ground the spirit from their very bodies, yet did not.

The ghosts of all these people wound about amidst the narrow streets and topple-roofed houses, the France that had risen like a red-gold sun over the rest of the western world, whose rule had been absolute, formed as it was under the hand of a wildly ambitious cardinal.

France had been the finishing school for the entire continent, where one must come to acquire the graces and discipline to fit one for the life of the diplomat, merchant prince, grand philosopher, prophet or priest. Until you had boiled yourself in the cauldron of her learning, you were not fit for the higher life.

Jamie had acquired some of his own finish in France—though it had been of a less academic sort. He looked toward the Arc de Triomphe, to the western limits of the city. There in the privileged Chaillot Quarter lived the woman who had provided learning of another sort in his life, and his body still bore the traces of her teaching. It was strange indeed to be in Paris and not under the tutelage of Clothilde in one manner or another, for she had been a friend of his mind before they were lovers. For no man, she had stated in her straightforward manner, should have his mind entirely formed by Jesuit priests.

Together they had read books, ones with fragrances that still lingered with him, scenting his vision of the world. The Jesuits—Father Lawrence and Monseigneur Brandisi—had given his mind the soil, but Clothilde had planted the flowers in it that grew up in a profusion of brilliant color. Had he been in Paris alone, he would not have hesitated to visit her but he knew instinctively that she would not approve of Andrei and that Andrei wasn’t likely to warm to her, beyond the obvious qualities of grace and beauty.

Jamie and Andrei visited Paris at least twice a year. It was one of their great shared loves. Since that fateful polo match, their friendship had grown by leaps and bounds as it will when two minds are well matched. Jamie understood that they were cut of the same cloth, that they possessed in equal measure that fire in the brain that could both ignite and incinerate. Such a thing made their friendship dangerous in and of itself, for they had established early on their shared penchant for reckless endeavors. In Andrei Alekseyevich Valueve, Jamie Kirkpatrick had found a man who was both friend and competitor, whose blood stirred to the music of the spheres as wildly as his own. And someone who was willing to partner him in outrageous and dangerous games. Jamie could smell a kindred spirit and had known Andrei for one from the first time he’d seen him skimming a church spire to hang a professor’s robes from it.

“How does it come to you?” Andrei had asked as they walked in the misty air of a Paris evening. They’d had coffee and so many Sobranies earlier at a grotty little hole in the wall in the Latin Quarter that Jamie had insisted they walk off the resulting caffeine and nicotine haze.

“How does what come to me?” Jamie asked, waving away Andrei’s offer of yet another cigarette.

“You know, the fire in your head.”

Jamie shrugged, noting the droplets of mist coalescing on the sleeves of his coat like impossibly fine silver mail. “Like a tidal wave at times, so much that I can’t process it. It overwhelms me. At others, it’s like I’m fogged in and separate from the rest of the world. It’s a bit like being underwater. You can hear things and see shadows passing overhead, but it’s distorted and you feel as though that world is another realm that you can’t enter. What about you?”

Andrei laughed, a black sound as only Russian laughter could be. “I just get somewhat suicidal, think about ending it all. When I think about it during those times, it seems like it would be a relief. To be set free of my mind.”

“I wonder why—when at times the mind is a thing of such beauty and wonder. Then at others, it sinks into such cesspits of despair.”

Andrei shrugged. “Some say it’s chemistry, biology or fate. I think if you are going to be granted the gift of wonders in your mind, you’re going to pay for it equally with the darkness.”

“How very Russian of you,” Jamie rejoined. He understood what it was Andrei meant, though. There was always a price to be paid for gifts. He was about to add his thoughts on the line between genius and madness when he noticed Andrei looking up, an expression of excitement on his face that didn’t bode well for the health of either of them.

Jamie’s eyes traveled the same path as Andrei’s—up the shimmering length of pure structural iron that was the Eiffel Tower. He had an uneasy feeling he knew what Andrei had in mind.

“Let’s climb it,” Andrei said, the electric glow he gave off when in the grip of one of his less intelligent ideas, lighting the pewter-toned air around him.

Jamie did not ask why, even though it was insanity to consider it. It had rained that day and cleared only toward evening. The puddle iron structure was gleaming with a thin sheath of ice now in the clear, cold evening air. Even if he did ask, Andrei would only answer, “because it’s there.”

And that was reason enough when Jamie was in a mood to match Andrei’s.

The iron was brutally cold and Jamie knew if they didn’t move fast it would rip the skin right off their hands. It also hardened the flesh, making it slide against the ice in a manner that didn’t assure their safety. But both he and Andrei had the grace and bearing of natural athletes and had someone viewed them from a distance they would have seemed merely to skim the surface of the imposing structure.

Jamie hugged tight to the inner arch of the base, leaning into the thick strut and feeling his shoulder start to cramp immediately from the searing cold. Hand over hand, one slippery foot after another, they managed with straining muscles and numbed flesh to make it to the second balcony, where they tumbled laughing and out of breath onto the cold, dirty floor. It was deserted, for even the tourists had abandoned the tower for the warmth of restaurants and hearths. They leaned out, arms wide to the city, the illusion of flight sending both spirits soaring.

Over a blue void they hung, the city stretching itself endlessly in every direction. Below was a carpet of stars in which one could fall into infinity and be young forever. The wind was stinging like ice in their faces, but they merely laughed with the joy of it, the sheer beautiful pain of having little control over their lives, yet here for a moment believing that one could alter destiny, conquer fate, and the expectation of one’s family, friends and country.

“Do you ever want to just let go?” Andrei asked suddenly, blue eyes electric with a fevered glow and his expression deadly serious.

“Sometimes,” Jamie said slowly, “sometimes. Yes.”

Andrei nodded. “I thought so. I recognized it in you. I have seconds where I truly think I will fly and the temptation to let go is almost more than I can bear. Like I’m an angel and would soar upward into the stars instead of smashing onto the pavement.

Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.”