The Last Hiccup (7 page)

Alexander stood over an ailing Asenka. He thought not about her welfare, nor the ultimate disgrace of his rival. Beside him, tracked across the marble floor, were the birdlike paw prints of the world's smallest dog. Alexander knew he would be charged with retrieving the animal from whatever fat lady's gown it had sought sanctuary under. Only he couldn't manage to organize his thoughts well enough to begin the search. Inevitably, he kept returning to the same thought over and over again. It loitered in his mind, slowly pressing against the forefront of his skull.

Vladimir. The boy with the tragic case of the hiccups. Sergei had said the child wasn't insane. It was something much worse. What could it be? What was it, Alexander wondered, that made Sergei storm in here like a madman? What was this evil that lurked beneath the surface of the young boy?

Alexander Afiniganov had long been a man of action. Alternately stern and callous, he had a reputation for lapses into ill-temperament. Quick was his rise to ire when he had the occasion to contend with fools and slow was his patience when confronted by those not matching his superior intellect. Unlike Sergei, Alexander wasn't tortured by personal demons. From the moment he lay his head on his pillow at night until the moment he woke in the morning, he slept the peaceful sleep of a man content with his role in this world. To those who hardly knew him, Alexander was an acerbic character, obsessed with his own brilliance and incapable of regard for the feelings of others. To those who knew him well, he was not only short-tempered and inconsiderate but also conceited and utterly humorless.

Above all things, Alexander was self-aware. He knew others were afraid to socialize with him in the hospital cafeteria and reluctant to seek his professional advice for fear of being disparaged were they even slightly mistaken in their diagnosis. Rather than dissuade his peers of this notion, Alexander did everything in his power to encourage his reputation as a difficult, gifted intellectual. In his heart he knew that when stripped of all the social baggage and cleansed of his brusque demeanor, Alexander Afiniganov was a compassionate man who did what needed to be done.

No more obvious was his empathy than when his rival was dragged by his heels out of the Isirk Ballroom. Alexander felt for Sergei Namestikov in spite of everything Sergei had put him through. Ever since grade school, Sergei had been a thorn in Alexander's side, always competing with him and keeping every manner of tally in an imaginary contest of which Alexander wanted no part. Alexander understood why he did it. Sergei needed an antagonist whose success he could use as a benchmark for his own accomplishments. It was this adversarial relationship that drove Sergei to great heights both academically and professionally. Alexander, on the other hand, needed no external motivation and considered his rivalry with Sergei to exist mostly in Sergei's own head. When he finished first in his class at Tomsk, he did so based on an inherent desire to push his intellectual capacity to new levels. He didn't care that Sergei finished second (a distant second, Alexander might add). When his award-winning paper on phobias was published, Alexander dismissed Sergei's moaning over the timing of its release. He wrote that paper for a personal sense of pride, not the satisfaction of besting someone else. Even when he bedded Asenka, it wasn't to hurt Sergei. Alexander did so because fornicating with a beautiful, alluring woman was what a great man would do.

Now, despite his sympathy for Sergei, Alexander had to do what was right in the case of young Vladimir. Though loath to admit it, Alexander had never been so mystified by an illness as he was by Vladimir's incurable hiccups. Initially, he applied thoughtful analysis and deliberate consideration in his quest to find their root cause. Then days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. For the first time in his career, Alexander began grasping at straws. He unintentionally allowed a randomness to enter into his ever-changing assessment of the boy's condition. Poor Vladimir was made to endure uncomfortable, often excruciating examinations, all in the hope they might inadvertently stumble upon a cure.

One afternoon while sitting down on the toilet to rid himself of a bothersome batch of
zharkoye
, Alexander had an epiphany. Vladimir's case was untreatable through modern medical procedures. In fact, the hiccups were not the primary point of contention in this patient. Something was wrong deep within the child — not in his body, but in his soul. There was nothing he or Sergei could do. Shortly thereafter, Alexander approached Sergei on the cobblestone path and made his best effort to explain his sudden realization. He remembered a disinterested Sergei staring absently at the snow. Sergei wouldn't listen to him no matter what he said. Incensed by his colleague's demeanor, Alexander worked behind Sergei's back and set a plan in motion. Vladimir would be cured if it was the last thing Alexander did.

Nearly nine days after Sergei's fall from grace, Alexander's plan led him to be sitting in a horse-drawn carriage, traveling up a bumpy dirt road on the side of a mountain in Northern Mongolia with Vladimir asleep in the coach beside him. Across from Alexander was a nurse's aide and riding beside their driver in the icy air atop the carriage was Tarkov, an orderly Alexander had selected specifically for his oxen-like strength and dull wit. Were they to encounter any trouble that Alexander could not talk or buy his way out of, Tarkov would be relied upon to give their assailants a stern thrashing. A month earlier, when the initial arrangements of his plan were put into place, the strapping Siberian was the first piece in Alexander's puzzle. Not only was Tarkov brave and strong, he was also foolhardy enough to demand no more than a single extra day's wage as payment for the dangerous journey. Yes, cheap and stupid — that is how Alexander liked his henchmen.

The nurse's aide, on the other hand, had proved to be quite a more difficult bargain. When Alexander left the Isirk Ballroom, he was so concerned about what Sergei might do with young Vladimir that he moved his plan forward by two weeks. It wasn't good enough to wait until the morning. He had to act immediately. Alexander assisted Asenka home, placed her in bed and then took a car to the hospital and telephoned Tarkov. He woke the muscular oaf from his sleep and demanded Tarkov meet him at the hospital immediately, then set about finding a nurse. At 11 p.m. on a Friday evening it would be difficult to find a nurse willing to accompany them on their journey, let alone one who could maintain a clandestine air about her assignment. Alexander demanded complete secrecy. He would not have Sergei discovering what he'd done and beginning an ill-advised pilgrimage to find the boy. Alexander stormed about the hospital, moving from room to room until he eventually discovered Ilvana Strekov asleep on a chair outside the critical care unit.

“Are you a nurse?” he said.

Ilvana sat up in a fright, startled by the bellowing voice of a senior hospital official.

“No,” she said.

“What is your profession?”

“I'm a nurse's aide,” she said in her timid voice.

“Good enough.” Alexander cleared his throat. “The hospital requires that you accompany me on a trip to a faraway land. The trip should take no more than a few weeks' time and we must leave immediately. It is a matter of some secrecy.”

“Why is it a secret?”

“If I told you, my dear, then it wouldn't be a secret.”

“And you'll pay me for my time?”

“Yes. But we must leave right away.”

Ilvana Strekov scrunched her nose. “I will require more than my regular pay,” she said.

Alexander gave her a surprised look. He hadn't expected anything other than complete obedience. This woman must have known he was disregarding hospital procedures and was taking advantage of the situation. She was completely unscrupulous. Alexander respected her already.

“Name your price,” he said. “Time is of the essence and I have none to spend bartering with you. What will it be? Rubles? A promotion?”

“I want to be your assistant.”

“On the trip?”

“No, here at the hospital,” she said.

“That's out of the question. You wouldn't like me. I'm ill-tempered and demanding. Moreover, I already have an assistant.”

“Then she can travel with you.” Ilvana sat back in her chair.

An image of Alexander's current assistant floated about his brain. A thick-wristed, middle-aged woman of Latvian descent, she was the only assistant who could tolerate his petulant demeanor. The Latvian woman was a perfect aide — competent, intelligent, never tardy and wise enough to know when to leave Alexander alone. This Ilvana Strekov had none of these qualities. Alexander could tell just by looking at her. She was lethargic and had the voice of a retarded child. He would be forced to fire her in a week's time.

“Fine,” he said. “Henceforth, you are my assistant. Now quickly, we must go.”

Ilvana stood up and followed the doctor. Together with Tarkov, they set about stealing the boy away in the middle of the night.

It took less than an hour for Alexander to regret recruiting Ilvana for their journey. She fell asleep twice before they left the hospital, once in a chair at the side of Vladimir's bed and a second time while standing on her feet waiting for Tarkov to pull around in his automobile. The muscular orderly drove the group to the Yaroslavsky Rail Terminal, where they boarded a train traveling east on the Trans-Siberian line. Ilvana, taxed with the responsibility of keeping Vladimir sedated, proved unpredictable during their four days on the train. She was quite competent during her waking hours. She checked Vladimir's heart rate, monitored his temperature and administered the exact amount of drugs to keep the boy in a hazy, semiconscious state. The problem was keeping Ilvana awake. She fell asleep at the most inopportune times — in the middle of meals, while stepping off the train and often in mid-sentence. During a stop in Tyumen, when they entered a delicatessen to purchase food and water, to Alexander's astonishment the woman pocketed a glass figurine from a shelf near the back of the store and snuck outside with the item, an exhilarated expression on her face. Alexander had half a mind to throw her from the moving railroad car and leave her stranded on the outskirts of Mongolia. He would have too, if he hadn't been so focused on getting Vladimir to their destination.

The boy came to his senses only once while en route through the Circum-Baikal tunnel west of Kultuk. Other than that, he remained sedated all the way to their destination stop at the Siberian city of Irkutsk. There, Alexander met a contact who, for a fee, granted them passage over the Mongolian border without the requisite state-issued documentation. This step eliminated days from their journey, as it normally would have been exceedingly difficult to leave the country with an unconscious, hiccupping child who had no papers.

Once they entered Mongolia, the group boarded a boat and sailed to the south side of the Egiyn River where they were met by a horse-drawn carriage. Its driver — a short, grim, deceitful man with a long mustache and enormous fur coat — was of course crooked. Even though Alexander had paid for his services in advance, the driver demanded an extra fifty percent for the inconvenience of moving the schedule forward two weeks. Alexander had planned for just such a contingency and paid the man without complaint. When they arrived at the base of the Burkhan Khaldun mountain, the driver stopped the horses and demanded additional compensation lest he leave them stranded a hundred kilometers from civilization. Alexander lost his temper and engaged the man in a ferocious argument in broken Khalkha, with sprinklings of Russian and Buryat interspersed throughout. Finally, after uttering disparaging remarks about the man's ancestors and threatening to have Tarkov strangle him, Alexander relented. With only a rough hand-drawn map of their destination, he needed this man not only to steer the carriage along the treacherous mountainside, but also to act as a guide. He handed over more money, climbed back inside, and they were on their way up the mountain. Before reaching the summit, the carriage took a fork in the road and began traveling down toward a valley on the other side.

About twenty minutes before they reached the valley, Vladimir awoke. He had been lying with his head in Ilvana's lap for the last three hours and had been jostled from his sleep when the carriage rumbled through a patch of potholes. Nurse's aide Strekov was too busy resting her eyes to notice. Vladimir's morphine-induced torpor, languid and dense from start to finish, was difficult to emerge from. He sat up, startled but dozy, his eyes wide.

“Relax, child,” Alexander said. “I assure you — you're quite safe.”

“Where am I?” Vladimir said between hiccups.

“You're in Northern Mongolia. We're on our way down the great Burkhan Khaldun mountain, heading toward the valley on the other side.”

Vladimir pointed at the sleeping nurse's aide. He'd left behind a messy puddle of drool in her lap. “Who's she?”

“Her name is Ilvana. You needn't worry. She's harmless. The poor dear sleeps most of the time.”

“Where's Doctor Namestikov?”

“I didn't tell Sergei about our journey.”

Vladimir's mouth tightened. His penetrating eyes shifted. “Doctor Namestikov is going to be angry,” he said.

Up until now, Alexander had given his rival consideration only in abstract terms. For the first time he pictured Sergei storming through the hospital in a frenzy, desperate to find his prized patient. The idea that at this very moment Sergei could be scouring the streets of Moscow, his enraged eyes red as the lining of an admiral's coat, brought a smile to Alexander's face.

“Sergei has done all he can. You're in my care now.”

Vladimir cast a glance at the woman and then back at Alexander. He climbed up on his knees and looked out the window into the sea of lush, green foliage and then sat back down and gave Alexander his ever-present vacuous glare.

“Aren't you going to ask me where we're going?” Alexander said.

“I already know where you're taking me.”

Alexander leaned forward, his interest piqued. “And where's that?”

“You're taking me to sever my phrenic nerve.”

“What would give you that idea?” Alexander said.

“I heard you talking about it with a nurse when you thought I was sleeping.”

Alexander responded in perhaps the most gentle tone he'd affected in his entire life. “That was merely one suggestion out of many. We discarded that initiative months ago. You must understand, I'm not trying to cure your hiccups. Suppose I did sever your nerve and by some good fortune you lived through the procedure and were miraculously cured. Would everything be right in your world? Would you be able to go out into society and function like a normal person? Would you grow up into a teenager and then as a man, find employment and start a family?”