“Look,” he said, putting the car in reverse but holding his
foot on the brake. “You’re the one who figured out the letters were
fake. At Voloshin’s, all you had to do was put your hands on that man’s
face and you knew where the letters were. I’d have had to beat him to a
pulp to get that out of him. So, no, I don’t think you’re crazy. I
couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”
“I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
The smile he gave her was wide and enveloping. It lit
up his eyes and made her feel as if she were perfect. “Feel free to thank
me when we find the password and get rid of Vympel.”
He backed out of the parking lot and steered the Monte Carlo
in the direction of I-280 North and drove into the city. He stopped just
around the corner from the San Francisco Public Library’s Civic Center
branch. “We’ll work on the translations here,” he said. “Then we’ll
figure out what happens next.”
They rounded the corner of Larkin Street and slipped through
the library’s columned entrance. Natalie looked up at the domed skylight,
illuminating the central atrium. Each successive floor spiraled around
the atrium, with silver pendant lights illuminating the dim passageways. She’d
come here many times to pick up books or journal articles for Beth’s
research. It was a peaceful place, one she felt at home in. She
took his hand and led him to the elevator bay.
They rode to the third floor and wound through the stacks
until they found an alcove with a beat-up table and chairs. Natalie sank
into one, pulling the onionskin envelope from her bag. Constantine pulled a pen
from his pocket, stolen from the desk of the nursing home. “I’ll
translate them on paper and pass each one to you as I finish,” he said.
“Does Belial have any last words of advice?”
“He’s quiet. It kind of scares me.”
“Why?”
She tapped her finger over the onionskin envelope.
“These are people I’ve read about my whole life. I’ve obsessed over them,
dreamed about them, helped Beth write a book about them. Now I’m part of
the story, and Belial has
nothing
to say?”
Constantine slipped the envelope out from under her grasp
and pulled out the letters. “Maybe once you read the letters, he’ll have
something to tell us.”
“Wait,” she said, reaching for his hand. “Before we do
this, I just want to say thank you. For believing in me.”
“Anyone in his right mind would believe in you.” He
wrapped her hand in hers and pressed his lips to the tender webbing between her
fingers. The pressure of his lips on her skin made her blood tingle in
her veins. She closed her eyes and her breath came out in a shaky sigh as
she imagined his lips tracing their way from her hand to the soft flesh of her
inner elbow. “Don’t let go,” she whispered.
“Natalie, open your eyes.” She obeyed and found his
crystalline gaze locked onto her face, so bright a blue she blinked under his
scrutiny. His mouth crinkled at the corners in a bemused smile.
“We’re in a library, with some of the world’s best trained killers after
us. If you keep distracting me, they’re going to sneak up and kill us
because I’m too busy staring at you.”
She nodded, unsure whether to feel disappointed or
flattered. Then she put her arms up on the table and buried her head in
them, waiting for the flames in her cheeks to subside.
Get a hold of
yourself
, she thought.
He chuckled, caressed her bent head, and then started the
translation. It took only a few moments to finish. “All right,” he
said. “I’ve got it. But I don’t think it will help.”
He slid it over to her. She snatched it up and read as
quickly as she could.
Dear Ivan,
Thank you for the birthday cake. I’ve never tasted
anything sweeter, nor will I if my sisters are right. Olga believes we will
never leave this house, and Olga is always right. Tatiana believes God will
save her, and Anastasia does not want to be saved. I am the only one who wants
to live! I am the only one who wants to experience something of this life
before it is blotted out like a drop of ink. And I will try…I promised you I
would try. If I succeed, we will run away together and pretend we are American.
Papa so admires the American president and all he did for us in 1905. He told
us that should anything bad happen here, America would shelter us. Some say the
Americans are uncouth, but Mama also says you are uncouth. If America is a
nation of people just like you, I know I can be happy there. There is nothing
to be happy for here. Even my bones ache for missing you. If there were
one magic word I could utter that would bring you to my side, I would speak it,
every day of my life. Sometimes greater riches are to be found in a
single word than in a golden palace.
--Maria Nikolaevna
Constantine frowned. “Does any of this make sense to you?”
With a shaking hand, she pointed to the first line.
“None of the sources say exactly what happened, but on her nineteenth birthday,
Marie was discovered with one of her guards in a position compromising enough
to get the guard dismissed. After that incident, Marie lost her family’s
trust. Alexandra wouldn’t let her carry any of their hidden
jewels.”
“Doesn’t that give her even more of a reason to get the
password to Ivan?”
“It wasn’t about the money. She wanted to be in love
and do everything normal girls do, but her family thought she betrayed
them. They punished her for it.”
The way they punished me
, she thought.
After Treblinka, she came home from the hospital to find her
room decorated with rainbow wallpaper and a yellow bedspread. The terrarium
was gone, Medusa vanished. She knew what they were trying to do, but it
was useless—after the ovens and the shootings and the snowfall made of human
ash, no one could convince her that the world was a safe and happy place.
It only made her parents seem stupid, like the people who lived next door to
the camp and said they didn’t know what happened there.
Suddenly, a hot knife-edge of pain sliced through her
occipital lobe.
Stop
, Belial said.
This has gone far
enough. You’re getting too close to things that could hurt you.
She cried out and grasped her head with both hands.
Belial was pushing against her brain from the inside. “Belial, stop!” she
cried.
No, little one. I care about you far too much to
see you hurt any further.
“Please!”
Not until you agree to let me handle the rest of this.
“No!” Through the pain, she remembered the horror of
the motel room, when Belial had killed the Vympel man using her as the
weapon. “I won’t let you do that again!”
Are you trying to fight me, little one? I don’t
think you’ll win. Here, let me prove it to you.
Suddenly, the
white-hot wall of pain vanished. It turned into a brittle sheet of
glass. Belial flicked one wing and it shattered into thousands of
pieces. She felt each piece slice through her as it fell. There
were pieces of her everywhere, bleeding and broken, reflected thousands of time
in each piece of glass. She felt herself falling, just as broken and
sharp as the glass.
July 2012
San Francisco, California
Ivan Tarasenko rapped on the back door of the ambulance
parked in Elizabeth Brandon’s driveway. The vehicle’s paint job was
barely dry. If anyone looked closely, they’d see the red numbers and
letters had begun to drip. In Moscow, they had fixers paid to stand by
for rush jobs like this; in a strange and crowded city, they’d done it
themselves with supplies stolen from a hardware store and an abortion
clinic.
Ivan knocked again and Sergei flung open the ambulance’s
back doors, sliding a gurney towards him. “Hurry,” Sergei said.
“The police went around the block.” Then his eyes fell on the patch of
red spreading across Ivan’s shoulder. “What happened?”
“Bitch stabbed me.” Ivan wheeled the gurney from the
driveway into the house’s foyer. The professor lay on the floor,
unconscious but breathing. Her throat had already begun to bruise, a
thick band of blue-black wrapped around it like a necktie. He hadn’t
intended to choke her. Her submission was all he wanted, but she’d fought
him until the very moment her eyes closed.
He picked her up and put her on the gurney, strapping her
limbs down in case she woke up before he got her in the vehicle. “You
fought well,
lastochka
,” he said. His hands stroked her legs, feeling
the soft flesh of her inner thigh and the thick band of muscle in her
calves. “I’ll give you your reward later.”
Before he left the house, he used his cell phone to record a
copy of the phone message that had caused her stop dead in her tracks. Then
he wheeled the gurney back to the ambulance, pushed it inside, and pulled the
doors shut behind him. Sergei signaled to Yakov, who punched the gas so
sharply the gurney jerked forward and slammed against the back of the driver’s
seat.
“Easy!” Sergei barked. “Like a grandmother, not a
mafiya wheelman!”
Yakov slowed the van and rounded the corner without
upsetting the gurney.
Ivan rotated his shoulder and grimaced. The woman had
stabbed him just outside his body armor; an inch to his left and he would be
unharmed. “Sergei, listen to this,” he said, reaching for his
phone. He played his superior the recording of the answering machine
message.
Sergei’s scarred face twitched with concentration as he
deciphered the English words. “Voloshin,” he muttered.
Ivan nodded. “The same name as the man we killed this
morning. It cannot be a coincidence. I think we should kill him,
too.”
Sergei shook his head. “We have no orders to do so.”
“What if he knows about the letters, too?”
“The message says he is in a nursing home. Old men
talk and no one believes them.”
“What if he makes them listen? The younger sister has
obviously visited him. We should silence him before he helps anyone
else.”
“It is too dangerous,” Sergei protested. “We cannot
risk being caught now.”
Ivan let his eyes flicker toward the front seat. “Send
Yakov,” he said softly.
“And if he is caught?”
“You and I go back to Moscow with the woman.”
“The American police will interrogate Yakov.”
“Not if the cleaner gets to him first.”
Sergei shook his head. “I don’t like it.”
“Do you want Starinov to hear this message? What will
you tell him when he asks if we have taken care of it? He will hear it,
Sergei. I will make sure of it.”
“
Bliad
,” Sergei swore. He pulled out his phone
and began re-charting their course. “Yakov, we have another target.”
Ivan shuffled through the bags they’d stolen from the
abortion clinic until he found something useful. He pulled out a crumpled
white coat and a stethoscope and tossed them up onto the van’s empty passenger
seat, next to Yakov.
“Here,” he said. “You’re going to need these.”
July 2012
San Francisco, California
Constantine watched Natalie’s eyes roll back in their
sockets as she slumped in her chair. He caught her before she slid to the
floor. “Christ, not now,” he said, feeling her twitch in his arms.
Balancing Natalie’s weight on one hip, he reached out for the letters and his
translation and shoved them into his pocket. He swung her up into his
arms and crept through the stacks, anxious to avoid being seen.
On his left, between a break in the stacks, he saw an
unmarked gray door. He swung it open and hurried inside, fumbling for the
light switch. It was a janitor’s closet; the walls were lined with metal
racks stacked high with cleaning supplies. He set Natalie down on the
floor as gently as he could and put his hand to her forehead. There was
no fever.
He opened the miniature whiskey bottle in his pocket and
waved it beneath her nose, with no response. He swore out loud and
reached for a folded towel lying on a nearby shelf. Dipping it into the
whiskey, he patted her forehead and wrists. Her pulse beat like a
child’s, fast and faint. He tilted the bottle to her mouth, but she
twisted in his arms and the liquid dribbled down her chin.
His parents, he realized, had gone through this agony every
single day with Lana while he’d remained oblivious, off playing war games in
Chechnya. For the first time, he understood how much harder it was to be
the one who stayed behind. Guilt ripped into him like an animal’s
claws.
Mamulya, I’m sorry
, he thought.
The doctors had told him that Lana survived the kidnapping
by becoming someone else inside her head. But afterward, instead of
putting them back together, she tried to kill the girl to whom it had all
happened in order to remove any permanent reminders. He put his hand on
Natalie’s forehead. “That’s how it is, isn’t it? It’s like walking
into a trap every day.”
He decided to try the whiskey again. He propped her up
in his arms, squeezed her cheeks, and poured a quarter of the bottle into her
mouth. Then he pinched her nostrils shut and waited for her to
swallow. A moment later, her throat convulsed and she sputtered and
choked. She twitched, swallowed, and drew in a huge breath of air.
Her eyes flew open, racing from corner to corner.
“You’re safe,” he said. “Natalie, you’re safe.”
He poured a few more drops onto her tongue and she lapped them up. “Can
you hear me?”
She nodded, panting as if she’d run a race. Her hand
latched onto his arm and held on tightly. “He wanted to fight me.”
“Belial?”
Her eyes filled with tears, the clear liquid diluting their
color until she looked like a transparent ghost. “I’ve never fought him
like that before.”