Last Snow (50 page)

“I’ll welcome that look in your eyes.”

“That expression haunts you, Alexsei, follows you down into dreams, into the deepest recesses of your mind, lodged there like a lesion or a tumor that can’t be treated, can’t be eradicated no matter what you do.”

Something flickered in Alexsei’s eyes, some disturbance or doubt roiled up by Batchuk’s words. In that instant of doubt or hesitation Batchuk lunged at him, slapping him across the face so
hard that Alexsei, totally unprepared, reeled back against the door frame.

Batchuk ripped the pistol from his hand. “You’re a buffoon, Alexsei, a patsy. I used you to get to Nikki. Do you really think I’d be friends with someone like you, someone who lets his wife be taken away from him?”

Alexsei, enraged at both his rival and himself, came at Batchuk, roaring like a bear. Indolently, almost carelessly, Batchuk swiped the barrel of the Makarov across Alexsei’s face.

“That’s right, she was going to leave you, leave your poor, pathetic life behind to be with me.”

Alexsei would not stop, he continued to grapple with Batchuk until Batchuk had no choice but to take Alexsei’s head in one hand, his neck in the other, and twist in one powerful motion that broke the vertebrae.

D
YADYA
G
OURDJIEV
, glancing briefly down at the handguns he, Annika, and Jack had placed on the carpet of the drawing room, heard Batchuk say, “Now sit down, all of you, and I’ll outline the situation.”

As they sat, Batchuk continued, “The two guards are dead, the others are away with the dogs, so that leaves just us, not that I have much time, but then killing doesn’t take much time.”

“Whatever you do, leave the girl out of it,” Jack said, indicating Alli. “She has nothing to do with this.”

“She’s here, isn’t she, she’s seen my face.” Batchuk shook his head. “No one is exempt.”

“Oriel, your battle is with me, let the others go,” Gourdjiev said sharply.

“I told you I was coming after Annika, I told you she had overstepped even your protection, did you think I didn’t mean it?”

_____

“H
E
’
LL COME
after me, I know it,” Nikki said as she lay in the hospital room.

“Have no fears on that score,” Gourdjiev said soothingly, “I’ll protect you come what may.”

“And the child.”

Gourdjiev took her hand. “Of course the child, she’s the product of your and Alexsei’s love.”

Nikki closed her eyes. “He’s coming soon, Papa, when I’ll be weak and helpless.” Her eyes flew open. “Oriel has an instinct for knowing when people are most vulnerable. Promise me you’ll keep her safe.”

“I swear, Nikki, calm yourself.”

“Her name is Annika, I want to call her Annika.”

She was a perfect baby. Gourdjiev remembered holding her in his arms, so tiny, so pink, so Annika, and the world seemed all right again. But then five years later everything came undone, Nikki had killed herself, Annika was gone, and Gourdjiev knew that he had failed daughter and granddaughter both.

“I
HAVE
an instinct for knowing when people are most vulnerable,” Batchuk said, “and now that I’ve caught up with you both it’s time to end our decades-long game of charades.”

“I prefer to call it a game of cat and mouse,” Gourdjiev said.

“Call it whatever you want,” Batchuk leveled the machine pistol, “it’s over.”

At that moment, Alli moved.

“Keep still, girl!” Batchuk shouted so loudly that Alli jumped and he almost shot her.

Jack took a step forward, Batchuk swung his machine pistol around, and Annika rushed him. She buried her fist in Batchuk’s belly while Jack wrested the Pernach away from him.

“His left arm!” Gourdjiev shouted, leaping to his feet. “He’s got a dart launcher!”

Indeed Batchuk, through eyes streaming with tears, struggled to level his left arm at Gourdjiev. Jack knocked it sideways an instant before the dart was launched, causing it to embed itself harmlessly in the crown molding that joined wall to ceiling.

“Let me go,” Batchuk said. Though he was being restrained by Jack, he addressed Annika, as if they were alone in the room.

“Why would I do that?” she said. “You’re a monster.”

“It’s your grandfather who is the monster. I swore never to talk about it, never to tell you, but what are oaths now, in the end the promises we make all fail, they’re meant to be broken.”

“How evil you are,” Annika said. “You’re rotten with malevolence, nobody knows this better than I do.”

A peculiar light shone in Batchuk’s eyes. “You think you know the meaning of evil, but you don’t, Annika, because it’s your grandfather who’s truly evil.”

Gourdjiev took a step toward them. “Don’t believe a word he says, Annika.”

“Yes, not a word of it, but here is the truth of it: Nikki and I were in love, she was the only woman I cared about, to this day that’s the truth.”

“You wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit you,” Gourdjiev said.

Batchuk kept his gaze firmly on Annika. “It was your grandfather who schemed to keep us apart. He never let me even meet your mother until it was too late, until she was already engaged to Alexsei.”

“No,” Annika said, “my mother and father were in love.”

“Alexsei loved her, of that there can be no doubt.” Batchuk shook his head. “But as for Nikki, no, she thought she loved Alexsei until we met, and then she knew the truth of it. Even though she was married neither of us could help ourselves, we became lost in each other—nothing, no one else existed.”

“What he’s saying is nonsense,” Gourdjiev said. “He’s simply trying to justify his actions.”

“Annika,” Batchuk said, “it was our love, your mother’s for me and mine for her, that caused Alexsei to feel so threatened. If we’d just had a quick tumble, if our connection was purely physical, do you think he would have become so maniacal with her? No, he knew, just as she knew that her love for me meant that their marriage was over.”

“You killed him,” Gourdjiev said. “You broke Alexsei’s neck.”

“He gave me no choice, he was out of control, nothing less would have stopped him from tearing me limb from limb.”

“So now you claim the murder was self-defense,” Annika said.

“Yes.” Batchuk nodded. “Absolutely.”

Gourdjiev took another step toward him and at last his antagonistic intent was unmistakable. “And that same night was it self-defense when you raped my daughter the moment she came home while her poor dead husband was bundled in a closet?”

Batchuk’s face filled with blood. “I did no such thing!”

Annika’s eyes were full of shock and rage. “Did you? Did you rape my mother the night you killed my father?”

“I never raped her,” Batchuk said. “There wasn’t a time I touched her when she didn’t want it, didn’t beg for the release only I could give her.”

Annika slapped his face, very hard, the energy rising in her from her lower belly through her arm into the tips of her fingers, the imprints of which could be seen on his cheek white on red, and then an instant afterward, red on pink.

Gourdjiev kept moving in, as if for the kill. “And what do you call it, also self-defense, when you stole Annika away from her mother?”

“You mean from you, Annika was never Nikki’s child, she was yours, you tried with all your power to make sure of that,” Batchuk
said. “But yet it most certainly was self-defense. I took her from you, from your clutches, because she’s mine.” He turned to Annika. “You were conceived the night I killed Alexsei Dementiev in self-defense, you were conceived after he died, in the frenzy of passion your mother and I shared.”

“I
S THIS
true?” Annika said to Gourdjiev, breaking the stunned silence. “You knew?”

“Not right away, of course not.”

Jack could see that the old man was on the defensive now, which was just where Batchuk wanted him. He risked a glance at Alli, who had come off her chair and was standing very near Gourdjiev as if to stop him if he leapt to throttle Batchuk. He could tell that she was totally absorbed in the psychological fireworks.

“But gradually, as your mother’s mental condition began to decline, I got some inkling. At first I thought her depression was a result of Alexsei’s death, but then, as the months turned into years I grew convinced that something else was eating her alive. Finally, five years from the day of Alexsei’s murder, I got it out of her, how she had come home that night to find not Alexsei waiting for her, but him, Oriel Batchuk.

“I was out of my mind with rage and anguish, all I could think of
was how to revenge myself on him, so much so that I lost sight of her, I failed to realize just how deeply in the grip of her depression she had sunk. That night I stayed with her and with you, and that night she slit her wrists, silently, on the bathroom tiles, while you slept and I plotted revenge.”

“There you have it,” Batchuk said, triumph creeping into his voice, “the anatomy of true evil.”

Annika put the machine pistol to the side of his head. “Move away, Jack,” she said.

“Annika.” Alli had moved from Gourdjiev’s side to Annika’s. “Don’t, he’s your father.”

“You don’t know what he did to me, the years I was with him.”

“I did what you wanted me to do, nothing more.”

“Liar! It was what
you
wanted.”

“You’re wrong, I kept you safe,” Batchuk said, “safe from
him
.” He glanced at Gourdjiev.

“I didn’t need you to keep me safe.”

“Annika, no matter what he did in the past, no matter what he is now, he helped bring you into the world,” Alli said. “Without him you wouldn’t exist.”

“At this moment,” Annika said, “I wish I didn’t exist.”

“You don’t mean that,” Alli said.

There were tears in Annika’s eyes. “I’m going to blast his goddamned skull open.”

“Don’t, Annika, don’t. You’ll never be able to live with yourself.”

“It doesn’t matter, I want to die, but before I do I will see his blood spattered all over this room.”

“I hate my father, too.” Alli was pleading with her. “But I couldn’t bear the thought of him dying.”

“Whatever he did, it couldn’t be anything like what this man—”

“Your father.”

“—did to me.”

“Crimes are crimes,” Alli said. “Whether they’re of cruelty or of neglect what matter does it make, they’ve changed us, and they can’t be taken back or absolved or forgotten, but the cycle has to end somewhere, so why not here, why not now, with you?”

“You’re right.” Annika smiled at her, a slow, sad, rueful smile. “It has to end.” Then she pulled the trigger. Batchuk’s blood, brains, and bits of bone flew outward in a hail of red and pink, an explosion so violent its human shrapnel covered them all, so massive it seemed as if he had detonated from the inside out.

B
ENEATH A
gauzy and indistinct sky Dennis Paull stood with his daughter and grandson at Louise’s grave site just across the Chesapeake in Virginia. He and Claire had each dropped a shovelful of dirt onto the lowered coffin.

“Mom, why did you and Grandpa put earth in the hole with Grandma?”

Tears glittered in Claire’s eyes. “So part of us can stay with her and love her always.”

To Paull’s surprise and immense pleasure Aaron stepped forward, stooped down to grab a handful of earth, and dropped it on top of theirs.

Even though they had come here to bury his wife his thoughts weren’t diminished by her death and loss, rather they were filled with the return of his family. How, he wondered now, had he deserved this miracle? Had he been a good man, righteous, strong in his convictions, repentant for his sins? And what did the answers matter, the universe didn’t care, every event was random, chaos ruled, there was no answer for any question, large or small, only compromises and, perhaps, if one was as lucky as he was, sacrifices.

His arm was around Claire’s shoulders, his eyes were on Aaron, who was perhaps dreaming of the promised celebration later this afternoon, but for Dennis Paull the celebration had already begun.

_____

A
DEAFENING
silence now engulfed them all, made their legs numb, their hearts thud in their chests, numbed their minds. What remained of Oriel Jovovich Batchuk lay half in, half out of the drawing room, his blood was all over, but not a single drop of Vasily Andreyev’s had been spilled.

“So, it’s over at last,” Gourdjiev said, breaking the awkward silence. “Annika, I’m so terribly sorry you had to hear that.” He went to her, tried to put his arm around her, but she shrugged it off.