Last Snow (41 page)

Alli seemed calmer now, or at least better able to listen to what he had to say. She was still in shock, so he understood that it would take her some time to digest their conversation, to allow her thoughts and emotions to find the equilibrium from which she could definitively move on.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, put her head against his chest, leaning heavily against him as if she were exhausted.

Having walked slowly in their direction, Annika apparently decided it was now more or less safe to approach them. “Jack, Alli’s violent reaction was my doing.”

“You’re going to have to explain that.”

And Annika did. She told him about the conversation she’d had with Alli, how it had become more abrasive, more contentious, how she had been trying to force Alli out of her debilitating shell.

“What were you thinking?” He put his arm protectively around Alli’s shoulders, holding her close.

“I forced her to look at herself,” Annika said softly. “She had to get to this place, she had to sink so far down the only way to go was up.”

“And what if she had jumped off the cliff?”

She put her hand tenderly on the back of Alli’s head. “She’s not suicidal, Jack. If she had been she’d have killed herself before this.”

Jack looked at her and knew what she said was true. He looked around then as if suddenly aware of their surroundings and saw Kharkishvili standing at some remove, watching them with a mixture of pity and forbearance. The oligarch called his wolfhounds, who bounded toward him, and he turned with them at his heels, heading back to the estate at a quickened pace.

“We’d better follow him,” Jack said, eyeing the rapidly darkening sky. The wind had picked up, gusting in off the water, and the sudden dampness foretold the coming rain.

D
EPUTY PRIME
minister Oriel Batchuk was waiting outside Dyadya Gourdjiev’s building when Gourdjiev returned home. He lurked in the doorway like a wraith, wrapped in his leather trench coat, which was both sinister and absurd. He had a thirties-style fedora pulled low on his forehead. He looked like he was auditioning for
The Thin Man
or
Five Graves to Cairo
, and in another time and another place the sight might have tickled Gourdjiev’s funny bone. As it was he felt only a deep sense of fate having its way with him.

As he approached, Batchuk stepped out of the doorway, but he brought his own shadows with him.

“I received your burnt offering,” he said, referring to the sacrifice of Boronyov, whose still warm corpse Gourdjiev had laid at his agents’ feet, “but this time I’m afraid it’s insufficient.”

Gourdjiev stood his ground, trying his best to appear unperturbed. “Meaning?”

“This time Annika has gotten in the shit too deep, beyond even my ability to cover for her.”

Gourdjiev let go of a sudden spurt of anger, deep-seated and long-simmering. “Is that what you’ve done? I wasn’t aware that you’ve ever done anything for her—”

“Contrary to your peculiar delusion of omniscience you don’t know everything.”

“Please. You’ve been too busy doing things
to
her.”

The two men stood staring at each other with such malevolent intensity that it was possible to entertain the incredible notion that they were trying to destroy one another with their minds.

“I understand and sympathize with your frustration,” Batchuk said at length. “Only Annika and I know what happened. She won’t tell you and I certainly won’t.”

“She was only five, only a child!”

“She certainly didn’t act like a child.” Batchuk’s smile was both smug and contemptuous. “You see, you never really knew her, you never suspected what she was capable of, you missed the point of her entirely.”

“I’m the one she calls
dyadya
.”

“Indeed you are.” Batchuk’s tone made it clear this statement was anything but a concession. “And you’re the ignorant one, the scales have not yet dropped from your eyes. Unlike Saul of Tarsus you haven’t yet had your road to Damascus moment, but then it seems you were untimely born.”

“Untimely born?”

“ ‘Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me,’ ” Batchuk quoted. “Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.”

“For a devout atheist you’re quite the biblical scholar.”

“I like to probe the weaknesses of my enemies,” Batchuk said, with a meaning directed at Gourdjiev. The tenuous cord was broken, they were no longer frenemies. “In any event I came to warn you, or more accurately, to give you the opportunity to warn Annika. I’m coming for her—me, myself, not someone I’ve hired or ordered to do a piece of work. This I do personally, with my own hands.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev fairly trembled in barely suppressed rage. “How can . . . This is monstrous. How can you do this?”

“Given the decisions she has made how can I not?”

“You know what this means.”

Batchuk nodded. “I do.”

“Nothing will ever be the same between us.”

“My dear Dyadya Gourdjiev,” Batchuk said, using Annika’s nickname for him in a mocking manner, “nothing was ever the same between us from the moment I first saw Annika.”

“I
DID
what I thought was right,” Annika said, “but I know I don’t always make the right choice.”

Jack studied her at some length. They were standing in the entry-way to the Magnussen mansion, just outside the bathroom where Alli had gone. Neither of them wanted to leave her alone at the moment, and as for Jack, the feeling of having been boxed in by both Alli’s impetuosity and her mother’s inability to control her had reasserted itself with a vengeance. And yet he knew quite well that there was no use in railing against this situation; as he had since he’d taken off from Sheremetyevo he resigned himself to the responsibility of keeping her safe, both from others who might want to kidnap her and do her harm, and from herself.

“In that you and Alli are alike,” he said. “She seems to lack the ability to know what’s good for her, or maybe it’s her own self-hatred that pushes her to seek out dangerous situations.”

Annika smiled what might best be described as a secret smile, or at least an ironic one, as if his words had triggered hidden memories.

“You see her in such a clear and perfect light, Jack, I admire that, I really do. I mean, she’s such a complex person, not that most people aren’t complex, but there’s something about her that—”

She stopped abruptly, as if changing her mind, and her eyes seemed to drift away to another time, another place. It wasn’t the first time Jack had observed this phenomenon in her, and he was struck by its similarity to what he sometimes observed in Alli. And now, as this particular Rubik’s Cube shifted perspective in his mind, he began to wonder how many more similarities there were between the two women.

Her carnelian eyes came back to him, in the light of the entryway their mineral quality making them transparent. “Jack, you don’t hate me for what I did, do you?”

“Did? What did you do?”

“What I said to Alli.”

“No, not at all. She needs all the help she can get, even if that help is sometimes difficult for her to hear.”

“I’m relieved then.” She placed a hand on his arm. “After all that’s happened—”

“But that’s just it.” Jack suddenly decided to take the bull by the horns. “I don’t know what happened to you.”

“What? I told you.”

“But you didn’t, not really. When I first saw the scars I decided not to ask you how you got them because I thought it might be an invasion of your privacy, but now I’d like to know.”

“Why? Why is it important now?”

“I’ve already told you, you have a particular affinity for understanding
a young woman you met just days ago. I want to know how that works.”

Soft echoes of footfalls, of muffled voices came to them now and again. Since their arrival the mansion had come alive as if it had been waiting for them. A number of cars were parked on the generous expanse of gravel outside and the interior exhibited the air of expectancy, the bustle of hastily arranged preparations.

“It works,” Annika said, “because we’re both broken.”

Her mineral eyes studied him with a frightening intensity. In those eyes it was possible to get lost, moreover, to want to get lost. Jack felt himself losing his sense of time and place, and he enfolded her in his arms, felt the slight tremors of her emotions firing along her bare arms.

“It works,” she said, “because, like her, I was taken. It works because I’m just like her.”

“D
ARLING, YOU’VE
only taken one bite of your stollen,” the widow Tanova admonished. “Did I put in too much cinnamon?”

Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled vaguely. “No, Katya. I was just thinking about the past.”

Katya Tanova came and sat beside him at the dining room table. They were in her apartment, which was smartly furnished in the latest Western style. She was not a person to become stuck in amber like so many of her friends who had not moved on from the things they had liked in their thirties and forties. Their homes were like museums or mausoleums, depending on your level of cynicism. Katya’s public persona—cool, proper, even a bit formal—was in stark contrast with her private demeanor, or at least her behavior with Gourdjiev, which was very private, indeed. With him she was like a young woman, coquettish, bantering. She often threw her head back and laughed, or else she engaged him with an intellectual rigor he found positively erotic.

“For most people that’s not so good, darling, but for you it’s terrible.”

He nodded with gravity. “That may be true, but I can’t help it.”

“She came to see you, didn’t she? You saw Annika.”

He stared out the window at the hideously bare branches of a tree.

Katya wore a sleeveless flowered dress short enough to show off her strong legs, but not so short as to be unseemly. She had kicked off her shoes when she sat down. Her feet, wrapped in sheer stockings, were quite beautiful.

“You always become so melancholy when you see her. And the past—”

“Sometimes I can fool myself into thinking I’m happy, or satisfy myself at being so clever at this game or that. Once in a very great while I can even feel young again, but it always fades, this feeling, and then I realize that I’ve simply deluded myself. I expend so much energy trying to ignore the past, or forget it or—and this would be best of all—erase it, but it comes back to haunt me again and again.” He turned from the window with a bleak smile. “How can it not?”

“But, darling, how can you keep blaming yourself, when—”

“It wasn’t my fault? I should have known, I should have foreseen—”

“How could you, you’re not a sorcerer.”

“If only I were, I could obliterate the past, alter it with a wave of my hand!” he cried in anguish. “Such a terrible ending. No one deserves that.”

“Especially not Nikki. She was your wife but she was my best friend, we both miss her terribly.” Katya put her hand over his. “But we’re not really talking about Nikki now, are we? She’s dead and gone, beyond pain, beyond suffering. But Annika—”

“I cannot quantify Annika’s suffering, because to this day I don’t know what happened to her.”

“And if you did know, of what possible use would it be to you, except to bring you more heartache and self-recrimination? And, darling, you are full up on those things already.” She pushed the plate of stollen closer to him. “Come now, have something to eat, you’ll feel better.”

“Dammit! Nothing’s going to make me feel better!” He pulled away from her, in almost the same movement rose, and in rising, swept the plate off the table. It crashed to the highly polished floor, where it burst into a hundred pieces. Crumbs of stollen went everywhere.

He stood against the wall, biting his knuckle, while Katya’s Siamese crept out from under the sofa, where she had slunk at the instance of commotion, and with her head down and shoulders working, began to methodically eat the pastry.

Katya said nothing. She went into the kitchen, returned with a broom and dustpan, and knelt down.

“Don’t,” he said. “I’ll do it.” Stooping, he very gently took the implements from her hand and spent the next several minutes cleaning up. The cat came up to him and, arching her back, rubbed herself against his leg. When he was finished there wasn’t a shard of china, a crumb of stollen left on the floor. The Siamese, licking her lips, didn’t seem to mind; she’d eaten her fill. Katya had trained her to be dainty in her eating habits. A genuine little lady.

“I’ll wax the floor tomorrow,” Katya said, gesturing for him to sit down opposite her after he had returned from emptying the dustpan.

He did as she bade, sat silently with his hands clasped between his legs like a schoolboy caught making mischief.

“Darling, listen to me, there are some things in this life we aren’t meant to know, some questions, though asked over and over, that have no answer. You must try to accept this, though I know better than most this cuts across the grain of your personality. You’re a man born to find the answers to the thorniest questions, and when this
becomes the norm, it isn’t easy to look at a blank wall and say, Is this all there is? Because, yes, that’s all there is, darling. When it comes to Annika there are essential secrets in her heart you cannot know. The darkness behind that wall is hers, not yours, no matter what you may believe. I know you’ve taken this as a failure—‘I should have known, I should have foreseen’—these are the words of the seeker. As Apollo brought light to the world each day you find answers—but because you don’t have the answer to what happened to Annika—”