Father Night
Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
CONTENTS
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Here, on the level sand
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?
—A. E. H
OUSMAN
,
“Smooth Between Sea and Land”
December 4
M
OONLIGHT, AND
what comes after. The Moskva River shimmered in moonlight. Jack McClure and Annika Dementieva stood on her balcony looking out at snow-covered Red Square. The onion domes gleamed in floodlit splendor. The French doors of Annika’s second-floor apartment were thrown open, despite the icy chill. Somewhere beyond Moscow, the stars were out. A crescent moon rode high overhead.
The night sounds of the city were drowned out by Annika’s laptop, in split-screen mode, tuned in to both CNN and Al Jazeera. Competing talking heads, one in English, the other in Arabic, were proclaiming the continued rise and spread of what had quickly been dubbed the “Arab Spring,” started when the corrupt Mubarak regime in Egypt was ousted by a coalition made up of shopkeepers, teachers, students, doctors, mechanics, bus and taxi drivers, and housewives—everyone, in fact, clamoring, it seemed, for an end to dictatorship and a start to democracy.
“It won’t last. A new beginning, indeed,” Annika scoffed as she went inside to stare at her laptop screen. “It all sounds so rosy now, everyone, Christian and Muslim, getting along, but it won’t last.”
“How cynical you are.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Merely realistic. Every regime in the Middle East is corrupt, it’s simply a matter of degree.”
Jack tried to get her back outside, but she was too wrapped in her feelings.
She pointed. “Look at them. No one knows what they’re talking about. Now that the Muslim Brotherhood has won the election, how long do you think it will take until the army starts muscling in, trying to regain the traditional power it’s lost? The Brotherhood knows what I know. Those other factions could never get along; they’ll continue to fight and tear each other apart. The Brotherhood was quick to move into the power vacuum.”
She turned to look at Jack. “I despised Mubarak, but one thing you could say in his favor, he kept the Brotherhood from insinuating themselves into the fabric of Egypt’s government.”
“The price was high,” Jack said. “Instead of the Brotherhood, the Egyptian military insinuated itself into the fabric of not only Egypt’s government, but its economy as well.”
“There’s no good answer here.” Annika shook her head. “When it comes to the Middle East, there never will be. Mark my words, a feeding frenzy for power is going to erupt not only in Egypt, but throughout the Middle East.”
Jack closed the browser and shut down the computer. “That’s enough of feeling helpless for tonight.”
Annika smiled, first slyly, then more broadly. “Who says I feel helpless?”
As he slid his arms around her waist, she said, “There
is
no good answer, you know.”
He kissed her. “That’s why…” He kissed her again. “We’re tabling this discussion…” And again. “For the rest of the night.”
“There
is
an answer, you know,” she murmured into his mouth, “but it isn’t good.”
A high-low siren wailed like a muezzin, approaching along the embankment, before slowly fading away. They heard the hiss of car tires on the road below, and, once, the sharp, demented shout of a drunk, terrified of the demons in his head.
Jack backed her up against the wall. The prints on both sides of them trembled, then rattled. He kissed her hard, and she responded in kind. One of her legs drew up, her bare calf running up the outside of his leg. He rocked her like the sea.
“You should not even be here.”
When she spoke, her scent wafted over him, cloves and orange and a peculiar spice all her own.
“You should be with your American friends.” Her lips parted and her tongue flicked out. “With your American boss.”
“And yet I’m here with you.”
“Why? Why are you with me?” The tip of her tongue traced the outer whorls of his ear. “I am a Russian, and a murderer.”
“We’re all murderers.” His voice was thick with desire.
Her palms pressed against his shoulders as he pinned her to the wall. “You know that’s not true.”
“But it is. For us, killing is as much a part of life as eating or breathing.”
“Or making love.” Hips insinuating themselves.
“No. Making love is entirely different.”
“How?” Her lips slid down the side of his neck. “How is it different? Tell me.”
“When we’re together, making love, we’re different. We’re better people.”
“Only for a time—the space of a breath.” She took his hands, placed them on her buttocks. “Or a sigh.” She sighed deeply, an ecstatic explosive.
“Even that is enough.” He pulled the fullness of her hips into him. “My fear is that we will become like those before us. Living in the shadows, at the edges of society, gives us certain privileges, privileges that feed our egos, inflate them, until we believe that we are beyond the law.”
She unbuckled his belt. “But, darling, we
are
beyond the law.”
He unbuttoned her Shantung silk blouse. “Humans, unconstrained, are prone to develop criminal tendencies.”
Her fingertips traced a line from just below his navel down to his groin. “Those tendencies were there all the time.”
He smiled into the hollow of her throat, dizzy with her scent. “A fundamental illness in the human spirit, a cruelty, a capacity for killing without remorse.”
She moved against him, slithering her thighs open farther, pressing the center of herself against him with little grunts of lust. “This isn’t the time.”
“It’s the
only
time.” Cupping the back of her head, Jack tilted her up, pressing his lips against hers, feeling them soft beneath his, opening, their tongues twining. He drew back, slowly, reluctantly, because what he had to tell her was an urgency in the pit of his stomach, and needed to be said before their combined desire overwhelmed it and everything else.
“These moments together, no matter how brief, have to be enough to prove to us that we can go on with this life we’ve chosen.” He stared at her bare breasts, his hands seeking them out. “Without them, there’s only a descent into a perpetual dark from which we’ll never return.”
She looked up at him. “Do you think we kill without remorse?”
“I hope not.”
“But you don’t know.” She put her fingers across his lips. “We do what we have to do. There is no choice.”
“There’s always a choice.”
She started to run her hand up and down the length of him. “What? Walking away?” Her voice held an unmistakable mocking note.
“No,” he said. “That’s not an option.”
“Then let’s make the most of these moments.”
“Let’s make the world around us melt away. Let’s protect each other.”
He rammed her against the wall so hard her body shivered and shook all over. Her legs came off the floor, wound around him, heels drumming against his bare flesh. The wall was their bed; they did not notice how hard it was—they were only aware of each other’s bodies as more and more skin appeared. Shadows played over them as they moved in ragged rhythm, their breath mingling, sweat springing out on their flesh, warmed by their mutual heat. Desire and need commingled, fueling their mutual lust. Every moment was breathless, each one another ecstasy, until the frenzy of the end.
The rapturous cries died slowly, the well-oiled bodies sliding against each other in long, languid caresses. Breathing slowed, along with heart rates. Jack watched the endless curves of her body, the mounds, the dells hidden in soft-edged shadow. He thought he had never seen anything more exquisite. His love for her rose like the sun, heating him, the entire room, filling him with a sure sense of iron purpose. Into the silence, he murmured her name.
And that was when he heard it.
He turned his head, saw the knob on the front door turning minutely. Annika’s eyes were closed. He kissed her eyelids, each in turn. She murmured, rising up out of the fluttering drowse into which she had descended. When her eyes opened, she smiled. Then, at Jack’s silent urging, her gaze followed the direction in which he was pointing.
Then she heard it, too, the slight sound of metal on metal, as someone just outside attempted to pick the lock.
They rolled away from each other, their sticky love now all but forgotten. Jack grabbed a shoe just as the door flew open. He threw the shoe, heel-first. It hit the intruder square in the face. The man’s handgun went off, the bullet just missing Annika’s bare shoulder. Where it impacted in the corner of the wood dresser, needle-sharp shards sprayed outward. Annika cried out, one hand up to protect her eyes.
The intruder’s gun swung around, the muzzle aimed straight at Jack. He leapt directly at the figure, the barrel of the gun slamming into the side of his head as his momentum took them both down across the apartment’s threshold. The intruder struck Jack another blow, and Jack reeled. The figure grabbed Jack’s throat in a death grip, seeking to crush his larynx, while he brought the gun to bear on Jack’s face.
Before the man could pull the trigger, Jack jabbed him in the kidneys, repeatedly smashed his gun hand against the doorframe until the weapon fell to the floor. With the intruder’s hand constricting his throat, Jack was losing oxygen at an appalling rate. He jabbed out, his knuckles connecting with the intruder’s throat. The man choked, his grip relaxing enough for Jack to sweep his hand away. Then he bore down with both hands in a stranglehold the intruder tried to break. Increasingly desperate, the man’s fingers tried to pry Jack’s hands away, then scrabbled on the floor for the handgun. But Annika, stepping over them both, picked up the weapon before he could find it.
“Jack,” she said. “Jack, stop. That’s enough.”
But it wasn’t, not for Jack. This man had violated their private space at the most intimate of moments. He had fired on Annika and almost hit her. No, it wasn’t nearly enough. He pressed in and down, putting his entire body into it, until the intruder’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and his breathing stopped.
It was long moments before Annika got through to him, could pull him to his feet. He stood panting over the body.
“Where did our better natures go, Jack?” she said softly. “They were imprisoned and starved to death by our overdeveloped sense of purpose.” She looked at him. “Do you understand me?”
He nodded. His chest was still heaving.
