Angel Eyes (79 page)

''Good God.'' Tori could see her father shaking. In a moment he said, "We must make a pact. We will never under any circumstances tell your mother this."

"But Greg told me you knew what he looked like."

"Either he was mistaken or he was misinformed."

"Then she won't be able to see him. His skin is silvery and slick like a dolphin's; he's hairless. And there may be other changes by the time you get to see him."

Ellis Nunn sat abruptly on the Roman-style stone bench in the center of the pergola. He stared at nothing. "Ah," he said softly. "What a world."

They remained like that for some time, father and daughter, near one another yet in other, more important ways, apart.

Tori knew that her heart should go out to her father, yet she felt nothing. He was still as closed off to her as he had ever been. She wondered what went on in his mind. Other than his quite obvious love for Greg, she could discover nothing.

Into her mind crept memories of Koi. The essence of that last afternoon with Koi glowed like a pearl in the viscera of her memory. Intense splashes of color, the flash of the blade, the first splash of blood, so shocking. The lights in the mountains glowing. Opening the door, letting the light in. Wasn't that something that Greg had said? Tori wondered how one person's death could open the door, let the light in.

And, yet, it was so. Koi's last moments had somehow changed Tori in the same way they had changed Koi herself. I was also wearing white that afternoon, Tori thought. Her blood seeped onto me, into me. She was obsessed the way I was. But being with her allowed me to look into the mirror of my own soul, to see what for so long I had not wanted to see.

I was addicted to violence, to the power wielding it gave me in a man's world. But in her I saw how utterly corrupting violence is. In the end Koi understood that about herself. So sad that she had to die; so sad that she could not change as I will make myself change.

Ellis Nunn shook himself. He became aware of Tori, watched for a time the look on her face. He opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it.

Silence seeped in around them like the twining vines of the wisteria.

Laura Nunn arrived back in Diana's Garden just before midnight. She always seemed to have a knack of knowing where Tori was in the vast house, and so she swept into the library where Tori sat curled in a chair, reading Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History.

"Darling! It's so wonderful to have you home again!"

"Hello, Mother." Tori closed her book.

Laura Nunn frowned, arranged herself in the lotus position at the foot of Tori's chair. "Yoga keeps the body young and supple.'' She laughed a little at the stilted phrase, learned from her instructor.

Tori knew she was nervous. She sat up. She had never known her mother to be nervous.

Laura Nunn said, "I understand you saw Greg."

"Why didn't you tell me he was alive? Why did you let me go on grieving for him?"

"Oh, my darling, don't you think your father and I weren't grieving for the torture he was undergoing?''

"You're avoiding answering me.''

"I've never been very good at handling inquisitions."

Tori moaned. "One question is not an inquisition, Mother."

"It's the tone I'm talking about, not the number."

"All right, I'm sorry." Tori knew she'd never get anywhere unless she acquiesced.

Laura Nunn nodded. "I was told not to."

"By whom?"

"Why, your father, of course."

Tori regarded her mother for some time before she said, "Was not telling me his idea?"

"Well, no," Laura Nunn said. "As I remember it, Bernard Godwin might have mentioned it."

"Do you know why?" One had to be patient, like dealing with a recalcitrant six-year-old.

"Of course I do," Laura Nunn said, angry. "He wanted to spare you." She nodded. "Yes, those were his words exactly. 'I want to spare Tori any unnecessary anxiety.' ''

"I think I'm going to need a better explanation than that."

"You must ask your father, then."

Tori leaned forward. "I'm asking you."

"Don't do this to me, Tori. It's not my place-"

"You're my mother," Tori said heatedly. "It is your place."

Laura Nunn put her head in her hands, began to sob. Tori watched her, uncertain whether this scene was real, planned, or was simply another of her mother's ad-libbed "actor's exercises."

"I suppose you think I'm a foolish woman," Laura Nunn said when her sobbing subsided sufficiently. "Always involved in the latest fashions, always throwing lavish parties. No, don't bother to deny it. There's no point anymore." She wiped her eyes, sighed. "The truth is, I detest all that. The truth is, I'm a simple country girl who is, at heart, far too insecure to risk being herself."

She tossed her head, sniffled. "Anyway, I'm in the wrong city, the wrong profession for that. No one seems interested in finding out what's below the careful facade. In this town, when anyone bothers to scratch the surface, they do it to draw blood, not to discover what's underneath."

"Sort of like my profession,'' Tori said, seeing it for the first time.

Laura Nunn cocked her head thoughtfully. "Yes, now that you mention it, perhaps that's true. But only in a way." She reached out, put her hand gently, almost shyly, on her daughter's knee. "But you're so much more, Tori. I mean, you're the Zen Policeman, aren't you?"

Tori, her heart thudding heavily, could hear Greg saying, Remember the Zen Policeman, and his small smile that had stayed with her all the way home.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I shouldn't tell you this, I suppose, but ... Well, that's how your father thinks of you, as the Zen Policeman." She took Tori's hand in hers, squeezed it. "Oh, I know you think he's hard and uncaring. I know it hurts you to think that he loves Greg and not you. But that's so far from the truth it's laughable.

"The truth is that Greg was always the difficult one. He drove your father to distraction. He was a weak child, and always afraid, of the dark, of being alone, and especially of being in the water. I took to protecting him which, I'm afraid, angered your father farther. 'A boy should look up to his father,' Ellis once told me sternly. 'Not his mother.'

"Anyway, Ellis fell madly in love with you from the moment I gave birth to you. You were such a happy baby. And you were strong and so very smart when he played with you. You so delighted him! You were going to fulfill his every dream.

''And then, inexplicably, you left him. You ran away-all the way to Japan, the other side of the world. You abandoned him, and he was utterly devastated."

Once again Tori heard Bernard Godwin's voice, saying. Well, if life has taught me anything it's this: truth is a complex animal. Every time you think you've caught it by the tail, it turns around and bites you on the ass.

"But my leaving wasn't inexplicable," Tori said.

"Oh, I know that, my dear. But your father couldn't-or wouldn't-understand. You were his universe, and you left him flat. That's all he could see."

"And he's been punishing me ever since?"

"No, no." Laura's eyes widened. "Oh, how could you ever think such a thing? Who do you think roused Maria out of bed this morning to make sure everything you liked to eat was ready for you when you awoke? He'd never admit it, of course.

"No, Ellis has been punishing himself. He's convinced he failed you in some way. Otherwise, he reasons, why would you have left so suddenly, so utterly."

She rose up, kissed Tori warmly on the lips. "We're so proud of what you do." She smiled a little. "Do you see now why he became involved with Bernard? It was only partially for Greg's sake, and for the sake of his own Soviet heritage.

"Bernard gave us no guarantees that what we would do would help Greg in any way. But your father saw a way to become, if only peripherally, a part of your life again. He never admitted that to me, but I can assure you, darling, that this was his main reason for accepting Bernard's offer."

Laura Nunn stroked Tori's hair, wiped away her daughter's tears, and smiled. "You know, in the beginning Bernard said he could give us no assurances that Greg would be protected. He said he had no agents whom he could trust enough, and do you know what your father said? 'Bernard, you're wrong. You have the Zen Policeman.' "

Tori found her father taking his laps in the pool. He had come home early from work, but had not sought her out. It was late in the afternoon of the following day. The light slanted in through the palms and the cropped Norfolk pines, illuminating the surface of the water, Ellis Nunn's powerful shoulder muscles as he worked up and down the length of the pool.

Tori, in a one-piece bathing suit, slipped silently into the water. She was immediately reminded of Greg, and felt a pang of mingled joy and sadness.

For a while she did nothing but parallel her father, and he, intent on his exercise, did not let up his pace, though surely he was aware of her presence.

When, finally, he broke off, he said, "It's nice having you in the pool with me again."

They hung in the water with the California sun burnishing their faces. The leaves rustled briefly as the ghost of a breeze came up.

"Dad," Tori began, "I'm sorry I left you."

Ellis Nunn turned away, but Tori swam in front of him. "You know, sooner or later, I had to leave." She searched his face. "Dad?" She took a deep breath. "It wasn't anything you did."

"Your mother's been talking to you," he said tightly.

''Don't be angry with her. It was time for me to know. I think she understood that."

"You shouldn't know these things."

She moved closer to him. "Why not?"

"You'll think I'm weak." He lifted his head up. The sunlight struck him. "I'm not weak, you know."

"I know. Dad." She watched him. "Don't you think it's important I understand who you are?"

He looked at her finally. "Why did you do it? Why did you run away?''

Tori was still for some time. "I left because I was stifling here. Everything was so unreal, the parties, the money, the people. It got so I was lost in it all-lost in the glitter of the forest. Don't you see, Dad, I had to go far enough away to find a space for myself that wasn't cluttered by all of this.''

"You hated it here, didn't you?"

"No." Tori shook her head. "Don't think that. I was so lost, I couldn't possibly have known what it was I felt. Try to understand, Dad. Only time could allow me to do that."

Ellis Nunn looked into his daughter's angel eyes. "I'll never forget. You were such a beautiful baby. You used to love to crawl across me and, laughing, pound your tiny fists against my chest." So it was true, there were other things beside his childhood in Russia that he remembered with fondness. He sniffed, rubbed his nose. "We never let each other inside, did we? Why was that, do you think?"

"Maybe we were always too much alike. We each had expectations, and they were unfulfilled because they were unrealistic."

Ellis Nunn thought about that for some time, then he nodded. "You were always a smart girl," he said.

"That was your doing. Dad," Tori said.

Ellis Nunn reached out for his daughter, crushed her against him.

"Dobro pcjalovatz, Papa," Tori said. Welcome home.

Gregory Nunn was sleeping on Arbat's back. Irina floated beside him. The worst was over. Valeri and his White Star Moscow contingent had managed to keep a semblance of order as they rounded up the conspirators.

One of Valeri's men had been killed by a KGB colonel in Lefortovo before control had been effected by the firing of a MAND. That had gotten everyone's attention. Another had been wounded in the course of subduing a Red Army general. Valeri was now locked away with the premier, trying to hammer out the preliminary guidelines to a compromise.

Irina watched the play of light as it softly touched the Hero's face. She wanted very much to be with him, but he had been so exhausted, and he seemed so close to a state of grace that she did not want to wake him. But perhaps her thoughts betrayed her, because at that moment his eyes opened.

Irina felt the opalescent light from his gaze caress her like gentle sunlight.

"Did you sleep as well?" he asked.

"A little. Mostly, I was watching you sleep." She was so aware of him, it almost hurt. "Do you miss your sister?"

"Yes," he said. "But I miss other things more."

Irina nodded. "I understand."

"I know you do."

"I wonder," she said, "whether they will let me go with you."

"If I ask it, how can they refuse?"

"But I have no training."

"I will train you myself." He laughed. "I hope you aren't claustrophobic.''

Irina said seriously, "How can you be so sure they will expend the time and money to send us back there?"

Gregory Nunn shrugged. "Human nature. It isn't a matter of speculation, you know. They can't help themselves. Once they assimilate what it was I encountered up there in space between the stars, they will have no other choice. Man's innate curiosity is well-documented.''

In the pool, beside them, Arbat stirred. She rolled, gazing up at them with an eye like black ice. She gave a little call, which Greg echoed. She rolled back over.

Irina said, "What will we find up there?"

''Do you really want to know before we get there?''

"Yes."

There was silence for a time, and Irina, able now to differentiate the natures of silence, felt this one accumulating like golden weights upon a scale. She could discern in Greg's face a light like the sun rising in the desert: clear and radiant, an illumination from which nothing could be hidden. She felt her love for him and for the enigma he had discovered enfolding them both like the eternal cloak of the cosmos. A joy filled her, his joy as well as hers, and she knew what he would say before he said it.

"We will find time." Greg gave her his slow, enigmatic smile. "Time enough for the patience of angels."

-------------------------------

Qvadis

Express Reader Edition

www.qvadis.com

-------------------------------