Last Snow, page 17
“I knew it was a possibility, yes.” Dyadya Gourdjiev took his coffee, padded back into the living room, and made himself comfortable in his favorite chair.
After spooning in sugar, Batchuk followed him, stirring the coffee with a tiny silver spoon. He remained standing for some time, as if to remind Dyadya Gourdjiev of his superior status. Apparently he thought better of the stance, because he did not continue the conversation until he had settled on the sofa obliquely across from the older man.
“Do you know why Arsov is interested in your daughter?”
For just an instant Dyadya Gourdjiev looked startled, fearful even. Then he gathered himself. “No, and I’m not interested.”
“You trust her too much.”
Dyadya Gourdjiev did not respond. He wondered whether this statement was an admonition or an admission of envy. It could be either, or both, he decided. Batchuk was impossible to read, he’d proved that many times over. Dyadya Gourdjiev was reminded of a video he’d seen of an elephant safari in Rajasthan, in northwest India. Nothing but a sea of tall grass could be seen in front of the people on the elephant, until, with the quickness of a heartbeat, a tiger appeared. It ran directly toward the elephant and, in an astonishing attack, leapt onto the head of the elephant and severely mauled the mahout. Tigers aren’t supposed to attack elephants, but unlike other big cats tigers are as unpredictable as they are deadly. In Dyadya Gourdjiev’s mind Batchuk was aligned with this tiger.
“Oriel Jovovich, please. Trust is an absolute, either you trust someone or you don’t. There’s no halfway position.”
Batchuk, sipping his coffee, appeared to mull this over. “I don’t trust anyone, why should I? People make an industry out of lying to me. Sometimes I feel as if there’s a cash prize awarded to anyone who can put something over on me.”
Dyadya Gourdjiev knew this was absurd, but he also knew that this was the only place for Batchuk to safely blow off steam while someone listened. This spoke directly to the matter of trust, which, in Russia these days, was uppermost on every silovik’s mind.
“Every day, it seems, there are new people joining the applicant’s pool for the cash prize.” Batchuk made a face. “And, you know, it’s impossible to kill them all, or at the very least, put their balls to the fire.”
“Yet another industry underwritten by the Kremlin.”
At this, Batchuk laughed. Actually he smiled, which, for him, was more or less the same thing. “Time hasn’t dulled the edge of your sword. Your daughter doubtless gets her smart mouth from you.”
“I was happy to give her whatever I could.”
On the face of it, this was a simple, declarative statement, and yet with these two men nothing was simple, everything possessed layers of meaning that struck at the very core of their friendship, if their relationship could be called friendship. It was at once less and much more; there was, perhaps, no word adequate for what they meant to one another, or how entwined their pasts were. Several months ago, Annika had used a word, perhaps it was American slang, or possibly English, that had stuck in Dyadya Gourdjiev’s mind. In speaking about an associate of hers she had said, “what we really are is frenemies.” She’d supplied the explanation when he’d asked for it: The word was a contraction of the phrase “friendly enemies,” though she admitted that the actual relationship was far more complex than that, that this was the norm for frenemies.
Were he and Batchuk frenemies? He shrugged mentally. What did it matter? Why was there always a human desire to put a name to everything, to neatly sort, catalogue, pigeonhole even things like relationships that by their very nature were so complex they defied classification? They liked one other, admired one other, even trusted one another, but there would always be friction between them, always a bitterness and, on Dyadya Gourdjiev’s part, a profound disappointment whose origin could not be erased or forgiven. And yet here they were like two old friends who confided secrets to one another they’d never reveal to anyone else. It was their shared secrets, their shame, envy, and dispassion, that bound them tighter than father and son, than brothers. There was bad blood between them, but there was also love—curious, mystifying, impossible in any creature other than a human being.
“There you can’t be faulted,” Batchuk said with a tone that implied that there were other matters for which he still held Dyadya Gourdjiev liable.
Finishing off his coffee, Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled as if with secret knowledge, an expression that infuriated Batchuk and also put him in his place. “Now you must tell me why you’ve come here. I need some facts to offset the armada of innuendo you’ve been launching.”
Setting aside his cup, Batchuk rose and walked to stand in the entryway. He stood for a moment, hands in his pockets, frowning as he stared down at the smear of blood Arsov had left behind.
“Kaolin Arsov is no one to count as an enemy,” he said, as if speaking to the polished tips of his expensive English shoes. “To have the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka aligned against you is to court disaster.”
“This is Trinadtsat-speak.” Dyadya Gourdjiev shook his woolly head. “To think it comes to this. Warnings of this nature would never have been necessary even two years ago.”
“This is a new world, it’s being remade every day,” Batchuk said. “If you don’t have a spade in your hand then get out of the way.”
Dyadya Gourdjiev turned to confront the younger man. “Trinadtsat is your doing, I warned you that it would be your undoing. Crawling into bed with the grupperovka was a grave mistake—”
“It couldn’t be helped,” Batchuk interjected.
“—and now, as you yourself have discovered, it can’t be undone. You’d have to exterminate the Izmaylovskaya, and even Yukin doesn’t have the stomach for that.”
“Circumstances had come to a head, they demanded to be dealt with by the harshest possible measures.”
“And now you have your wish.”
Batchuk sighed and looked back at Dyadya Gourdjiev as he covered the smear of blood with the heel of one shoe. “The truth is I face reality every minute of every day. The truth is the grupperovka—most notably the Izmaylovskaya—have both the power and the access to avenues crucial to the success of Trinadtsat.” He lifted a finger. “And make no mistake, Yukin needs Trinadtsat to succeed. His entire vision for Russia’s future rides on it.”
Dyadya Gourdjiev scrutinized him now because he knew they were coming to the crux of the visit. Oriel Jovovich Batchuk was a long way from the Kremlin; he hadn’t come all this way to simply vent his frustrations, or to seek advice. Not this time, anyway.
Batchuk took a step forward and put his hand on the doorknob. Looking back over his broad shoulder he said, “It’s your daughter.”
“Yes, of course, it always comes back to Annika, doesn’t it? And do you know why? People want to see what’s best for them, not what actually exists. You do nothing but pretend, to yourself as well as to me. You try to reshape events in the past to suit yourself when we both know very well that what happened—the terrible events that must never be mentioned—is immutable, it can’t be changed and, therefore, expunged, no matter how hard or in which ways you try.”
Batchuk’s eyes glittered; no one else on earth would dare speak to him that way. When he was certain Dyadya Gourdjiev was finished, he continued his own thought to prove to the old man how little he thought of what he’d said. “She’s like a spanner in the works. I don’t know what she’s been up to—I suspect you don’t, either, not that it matters, I know you wouldn’t tell me even if you did. But I know she’s not stupid enough to tell you.”
“She’s not stupid at all,” Dyadya Gourdjiev felt compelled to say. “On the contrary.”
“Yes, on the contrary.” Batchuk opened the door, the empty hallway looming in front of him. There was a smear of blood there, too, too large for him to cover with his heel, or even his entire shoe. “And that, essentially, is the problem. She’s too smart for your own good.”
“My own good?” Dyadya Gourdjiev said, reacting to the warning.
“Yes,” Batchuk acknowledged as he stepped into the echoey hallway. “And hers.”
SIXTEEN
JACK AWOKE with the scent of Annika on him, and it was as if he were in another world, as if he’d eaten a bowl of peaches last night and now smelled of them. Nevertheless, opening his eyes, he immediately felt a kind of remorse. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed himself, because he had, immensely; what occurred to him were the consequences, because experience had taught him that there were always consequences from having sex with another human being, no matter what your partner claimed at the time. If you had any emotions they were bound to be stirred by intimacy of any sort. He’d known plenty of guys who hadn’t cared who they’d slept with—to a man they were either in loveless marriages or divorced. In any case, they still inhabited the same bars where, back in the day, they’d always scored. Now, however, they felt old, isolated from the feverish pace of a dating scene they no longer belonged to, or even understood.
Next to him, Annika was still asleep, her cruel scars rising and falling with her slow breathing. She turned, then, her head still burrowed in the pillow, facing him. For a moment, he did nothing but watch her, as if, in her sleep, she would tell him something about herself. But she remained resolutely a mystery, as, in fact, all women were mysteries, and he wondered now whether he knew her any better than he knew Sharon. On the face of it, an absurd notion, equating a woman he’d just met with the woman he had lived with for twenty-three years. But the truth was staring at him with Annika’s quiescent face, which held no expression, or perhaps just the hint of a smile, as if her dream were more real to her than the world around her, than Jack himself. It made him wonder whether it was possible for one person to know another. Weren’t there always surprises, like layers of an onion being peeled away only to reveal another person, one we scarcely knew, or had for years tried our best not to understand, preferring a manufactured reality that reflected the things we required?
This was what he’d done with Sharon, and now that the reality he’d manufactured had cracked and crumbled away he knew Emma was right: they’d never had a chance. And yet, in retrospect it was heartbreaking to see how one misstep had led to another, and another, and so on, small accretions of mistakes that had become a life less lived. It seemed odd to him, even ludicrous that he had once held her in his arms, that they had whispered intimacies to one another, that they could have said “I love you,” in any conceivable setting. That time had collapsed in on itself; it was the opposite of when you walked into a house you used to live in or a room you’d once known like the back of your hand and nothing had changed. Now that house, that room, that woman were all changed, unfamiliar to him, as if observed in another man’s life. He closed his eyes for a moment, wanting to completely uproot all the acrid memories and stark revelations cropping up in his mind like weeds after a soaking rain.
Lifting the covers, he rolled out of bed carefully enough not to wake her. Slipping into clothes, he opened the door and padded into the living room, where Alli, already awake, sat curled on the end of the chocolate velvet sofa directly beneath the mandala. She held a mug half filled with hot tea, which she handed to him as he sat down beside her.
“Have fun?” she said as he took a sip.
Jack tried to assess her tone. Was she disapproving, pissed, being ironic, or trying for casually adult? He came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. Sitting beside her made him realize how foolish his brief stab of fear had been; he’d never be like those former acquaintances of his, not as long as he had Alli. “She’s yours, Jack, for better or for worse,” Annika had said last night.
“Did you?” he said at length.
She took back the mug of tea he offered her. “I didn’t even have to put my ear to the wall.” When he looked over at her, she added mischievously, “I heard everything.”
His face drained of blood. “I’m sorry you heard anything.”
“I didn’t.” She laughed. “But now I know what the two of you did.” Leaning over, she sniffed him. “Besides, you smell like a rutting animal.”
“Charming.”
She shrugged, utterly unconcerned. “Hey, we’re all animals when you come right down to it.”
“So you don’t disapprove?”
“Would you care?”
He considered for only an instant. “Yes, I think I would.”
She looked surprised, or perhaps a better word would be amused. “Thank you.”
Jack took the tea back from her. He was feeling both the warmth and the caffeine.
Watching him sip what was left of the tea, she said, “Now I want to hear all about the visit from Emma.”
Alli was the only one who believed that Emma had returned, or hadn’t actually gone away, he’d given up trying to figure out which. It was a relief being able to confide this aspect of his life, which was both eerie and joyous.
“And then you’ll tell me everything, right?”
Her face screwed up in a quizzical look. “About what?”
“You know about what, about what happened to you when you were with Morgan Herr.”
With the mention of her abductor’s name her expression changed subtly. Perhaps he was the only one who would have noticed, and a wave of regret washed over him, because the last thing he wanted was to alienate her. But he was trusting Annika now, trusting what she had said to him last night: “She wants to tell you.”
Alli cocked her head to one side, a bad sign, he knew. “Are you proposing a quid pro quo?”
“I’m asking—”
“Like a politician? Is that what you are now?”
“Forget it.” He closed his eyes. “I don’t want to know.”
“Why not?” Her voice changed suddenly, grown deeper and darker, as if with an adult’s disappointments and loss. “Why wouldn’t you?”
“It’s too late, it’s over, there’s nothing in the past except tears.”
The little sound she made caused him to look over, to see that she was crying, the tears overflowing her lids and rolling down her cheeks.
“Don’t take her away from me, I already miss her too much.”
“I’m not taking anything away from you,” he said as he gathered her into his arms, “least of all Emma.”
But it wasn’t just Emma she meant, he was certain of that, she was also saying, Don’t take away my chance to tell you. And now he knew for a certainty that Annika had been right. So he recounted word for word—a quirk of his dyslexic brain—his conversation with Emma last night, and when he was finished, she said: “Is it true what she said about you and Sharon?”
He nodded. “We were just fooling ourselves. There’s nothing left, because there was nothing to begin with, nothing but sex.”
“ ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,’ ” Alli said, quoting Yeats, one of the poets she’d learned to love from Emma. “Emma always said everything that’s born holds the seeds of its own destruction.”
And Jack thought again of dissolution, of how being an Outsider, of hiding in the shadows, observing without yourself being observed, was its own form of dissolution long before the advent of death.
“Did Emma say that or did Morgan Herr?”
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Alli said, pulling away, “but they both did.”
Jack felt a shiver run through him, as if Herr had somehow managed to walk over his grave. “Did Emma get her philosophy from him?”
Alli shook her head. “No, but on some level they were both nihilists. I don’t think Emma ever saw the point in life, and I know he didn’t.”
“He said that to you?”
“Not in so many words.” Her eyes could not meet his. “He didn’t have to.”
“I’ll make us more tea,” he said gently.
“No. Stay here, don’t leave me.”
He settled back into the sofa cushions. It was getting toward nine; he knew they needed to get moving because the longer they stayed in Kiev the colder Magnussen’s trail would become. On the other hand, he was reluctant to make a move that would break the tenuous strand to Alli’s past she had begun to spin. Besides, with her wounded arm, Annika could use all the sleep she could get.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, as much to himself as to her.
She smiled at him, but it was thin and brittle enough to put him on edge. What could be coming? he wondered. What had she been bottling up inside her since her abduction?
“Emma knew him way before I did.”
Jack knew this, just as he knew she was speaking of Morgan Herr, whose name she couldn’t bear to say.
“Emma saw something in him—she never told me what—but I imagine they sat around and talked about how things were falling apart, how the center couldn’t hold, how chaos ruled everyone and everything.”
Jack wanted to interject a comment, but he bit his lip instead, trying to warm his abruptly chilled extremities.
“He was charismatic, girls especially were drawn to him—as you know. But with Emma it was different. She wasn’t sucked into his orbit, she never adored him or was fooled by his charming exterior. She knew what he was; in fact, I’m convinced now that was why she spent time with him. He was an Outsider on a level it would never occur to her to go. Emma would never harm another human being, but I think she wanted to know why he would.”
Jack was listening very carefully, even though Alli was talking about his daughter and not about herself. Or was she? He knew that whatever had happened to her during the week she had been under Morgan Herr’s control had had a profound effect on her, possibly even changed her, perhaps forever. Whatever this thing was she had been struggling with it for months, trying to understand it, or to see it for what it really was.
“I . . . I never told you the truth, during that time before the inauguration.” Alli stared at her hands. “He told me not to.”
Jack couldn’t help himself now. “Of course he told you not to, that was part of the brainwashing.”
