The Russian put his arms around her, cradling her shoulders and expelling a deep breath into her ear. “I believe in the human spirit, Lily. And if I’m wrong and my rational mind is as limited in its understanding of the universe as I fear it is, then I hope the God I have denied will forgive me.”
Pasha squeezed her closer, and Lily could hardly move.
“You’ve done so much for me, Lily,” he whispered.
Lily nodded, wrapping her arms around his neck. Pasha no longer smelled of healing flesh, and his breath was tinged with the wedges of apple that Matvei had given him that morning. His faint smile wore a soft jumble of raw emotions—the kind she had always hoped to see on a lover’s face.
“I want to do one more thing,” she told him, her eyes tracing the thick line of his jugular vein. “I want to be your lover.”
She had not imagined herself making love with him. Despite Pasha’s lusting eyes and delicate touches. Despite her own emerging desires for him—this killer, spy, diplomat, spiritualist. But it was exactly what she wanted. In fact, Lily had never wanted anyone or anything like she wanted Pasha Tarkhan.
She moved her hands to his face and trickled her fingers over his cheeks and neck, gliding them down over his chest. Lily untied his robe and let it drop to the ground, at last allowing her eyes to drift over his naked body without feeling the least bit ridiculous.
“Right here,” she said, and laid down beneath the fire bushes. They were ferocious in their color, pungent, with hundreds of tiny barbs growing along their stems like hairs. And they were beautiful.
Chapter 26
They had been communicating the way secret sweethearts might have during the Dark Ages. Beryx threw the first rock over the fortress wall, having wrapped it in a piece of crisp stationary he’d taken from Grigori’s desk. He’d used crayon to write the message so that, in the event of rain, the words wouldn’t run together.
The following night he came across the same rock—this time wrapped in cheap school paper—sitting on the outer lawn, waiting to be found. The message had been written in pencil. It had been a remarkably easy and straightforward exchange.
For this, he had to give Grigori credit. In the span of a half-day, his wife’s cousin managed to locate a doctor who had performed an unsuccessful operation on a young man who’d taken a nasty fall some months before. The youth had been attempting to repair the roof tiles of a dilapidated church at the St. Sergius Lavra. He’d fallen nearly four stories before landing in the holly bushes that wrapped like a wreath along the base of the outer wall. It had been the young man’s misfortune that nobody within the compound had seen him tumble. He was discovered only when a local widow took her Schnauzer for a walk and heard him whimpering for help. The young man had kept repeating just one word in his agony: “Derevo.”
Grigori hadn’t wanted to risk breaking into the coroner’s files, but he did it anyway, and the Hungarian rewarded him with ten additional American dollars before he left the man’s home for good. The file had been worth at least fifty, but Grigori had no way of knowing that. To him, all it had revealed was the young man’s name and the contact information for his brother. His personal belongings had seemed more promising and contained a metal card like the one Gulyas had seen during his interrogation.
It was that same card that Beryx revealed to the young monk who crawled out of a hole hidden in the grass around the outer ring of the St. Sergius Lavra. The night was cloudy, with little natural light, but the monk’s teeth—a clumsy row of tablets too large for his mouth—gleamed.
“Murdered,” he murmured. “But how can that be?”
Gulyas shrugged and tried to appear concerned.
“I believe your brother had stumbled onto something and that this was an inside job.”
The monk shook his head violently and stepped back from the Hungarian.
“How else can you explain that no one saw him fall—or found him for hours?” Gulyas pressed. “There’s a rat in your midst. You mark my words.”
The young monk folded his hands and exhaled. His bit down hard on his fleshy bottom lip and thrust his chin forward. Gulyas hadn’t won him over.
“I hope I’m wrong,” Gulyas continued. “But this has been eating at me for months now, and I had to at least do my part—as a God-fearing man and a doctor—and share my suspicions.”
Gulyas turned toward the fortress wall surrounding the Lavra.
“If I’m right, of course, all of you could be in danger.”
It was too dark for the monk to look into the doctor’s eyes, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t like his voice and now regretted meeting with him at all.
It had been decided by the Lavra elders, after the rock and the note had been found on the path to the bell tower, that the message was a lure or a hoax. Fedot, in particular, had been adamant about not initiating any contact with outsiders—especially while the diplomat and the American woman were still there. But Maxim had been the monk’s twin brother. They had formed from a single egg and been nurtured side by side in one womb. They had come to the Lavra together, and the monk figured they would die together. How could he ignore a message that read: MAXIM FEODOROV WAS MURDERED. DO YOU KNOW WHO KILLED HIM?
“I have to go back,” the monk said.
“I want to come with you.”
The monk put up his palm and backed toward the trapdoor.
“That’s not possible. You have to go, please. Don’t come back here.”
“But, what about the woman?” Gulyas blurted.
The young monk flinched but recovered quickly, straightening his shoulders and shaking his head.
“You know, the American woman. Long, dark hair and a pretty face. Surely you’ve noticed her.”
The monk heard the man’s clothes rustle in the moment before he was knocked to ground. His left side stung, but it was his hand that made him shriek. The bullet had torn off both his index and middle finger before burrowing beneath his rib cage.
“Why?” the young monk begged.
“Why not?” Gulyas answered as he placed the mouth of the silencer between the monk’s eyebrows and fired.
Chapter 27
Was Tony your lover?” Pasha asked. They were sitting naked in the tattered rectory as Pasha scraped the new shaving blade Fedot had acquired for him up the curve of Lily’s calf. He rinsed the blade in the tin tub—still full from their bath.
“No. Sort of. We got drunk and did it once, but I don’t even think he finished.” Lily leaned over and kissed Pasha’s lips as he ran the blade up her thigh. “I know I didn’t. He told me he was a salesman.” She laughed as Pasha finished erasing the last line of soap and stubble from Lily’s leg.
“Tony was a salesman,” Pasha reminded her.
“Then he told me my father was an arms dealer and that I was working for him now if I didn’t want Daddy to go to prison.”
Pasha appraised the work he’d done on her legs.
“Ah, yes, your father. Was this before or after you got drunk with him?”
Lily dried her calves and thighs, scooting closer to Pasha. She wrapped herself around him and put her lips to his ear.
“It was when I tried to sneak out of his hotel room without saying good-bye. Maybe he took offense.”
“Tony took offense to nothing,” Pasha said, kissing her earlobe. “And Tony couldn’t have had your father arrested even if he wanted to. I’m not sure anyone could.”
Pasha chuckled in a baritone hum that had grown on Lily. It was the laugh of an old soldier and reminded her of an uncle she hadn’t seen since adolescence. Pasha was too young to laugh like an old soldier, but then, he’d seen a lot in his thirty-six years. By the time he was sixteen, the full weight of manhood rested on his shoulders, and by his mid-twenties, it was the full-on burden of the world. Lily had been remarkably free of burden until she’d met Tony. Since then, it had been like she was cramming for finals every day, trying to figure out how to get a passing mark in what Tony called simply “the re
al world.”
“Matvei’s late again,” she whispered as her stomach growled.
The monk had taken to leaving their stew just outside the door, as he knew what had been going on in there over the past few days. He would put the tray down, knock twice and scamper away without uttering a word. Lily could swear it had been two hours since his usual time, but Pasha didn’t seem concerned, so she wasn’t about to get worked up again.
“Did you hear that?” Lily sat up straight. Pasha hunched closer to the ground, becoming very quiet.
The cries came first. They were shouts of disbelief, then panic. Almost as quickly came cracks from a firearm. Lily could hear the heels of the simple loafers worn by the monks of the St. Sergius Lavra as they dug into the stone pathways—and the occasional thud of a body hitting the ground.
“Throw me my trousers,” Pasha ordered. He’d eschewed his comfortable monk’s robe for his original clothes—laundered by Matvei only two days before. Lily had barely managed three buttons on her blouse before Fedot darted into the rectory.
“Intruder!” he barked.
Fedot corralled Lily and Pasha into the chapel, brushing aside Ivanov’s bed. He stood on his tiptoes and removed a crowbar from a tiny ledge that ran above three bullet-shaped windows studded with broken stained glass. He used the crowbar to dislodge a flat chunk of stone that, in part, made up the chapel floor. Beneath the stone was a passageway, lit by the same crisscrossed torches Lily had seen in the tunnel that led into the compound.
“The microfilm!” Lily demanded.
“I’ll retrieve it and meet you at Alyona’s.” Fedot had moved the microfilm into the tabernacle in the Holy Trinity Cathedral. The chapel had been too exposed to the weather, and the Russians feared that all it would take was a good summer storm to corrode the film and render it useless. The printed documents had been left in the collection box, but buried beneath an assembly of rubble that formed a loosely contrived pyramid near the entrance to the rectory. Fedot ran to the pile of refuse and began digging through it.
“Forget the papers,” Pasha said, urging Lily down the ladder and into the tunnel. “It’s the film we want.”
Fedot threw an eroded brick aside and went to the tunnel entrance. With Pasha’s help, he guided the stone back over the descending stairway and remade Ivanov’s bed—patting and arranging it until it looked lived-in again. A heavy heel thudded on the stone sidewalk outside the chapel and then sprinted into a run. Fedot knew the hard step couldn’t belong to one of the monks at the St. Sergius Lavra and listened as the intruder headed toward the Holy Trinity Cathedral.
Fedot walked to the fresco of Rublev’s Trinity, kissed it, and removed an old Cossack’s Shashka sword from a hidden panel behind the Angel of the Holy Spirit. He pulled it from its black sheath and ran his finger along the edge of the curved blade before dashing out of the chapel in pursuit of the stranger.
Chapter 28
Fedot trampled into the field of white tulips swaying across the front lawn of the Trinity Monastery. The intruder had disappeared, his hard step no longer heard on the pathways that snaked in and out of the various chapels. He could’ve entered any one of the surrounding buildings, yet there were no screams coming from their interiors. The wails of the wounded still echoed from the Pilgrim Tower, as did the tapping feet of the monks who were trying desperately to care for their fallen brothers, but the intruder’s rampage had seemed to end as suddenly as it had begun.
Fedot lowered the Shashka sword to his side and strode into the Eastern entrance of the Holy Trinity Cathedral. Mass was in session, the cantor reading from the Epistle—a letter to St. Paul. Fedot locked eyes with one of the altar boys and beckoned him. The boy turned from the altar, gliding over the oriental runner that led to the sacristy. There wasn’t so much as a stir amongst the congregation—a small gathering of monks who peopled the first ten rows and a few lone stragglers that dotted the other pews. Hitching his sword to his trousers, Fedot donned the boy’s robe and took his place at the altar as the Gospel reading came to a close.
From the altar, Fedot could get a good look at the monks who had come to hear Mass. Immersed in prayer, they hadn’t heard the cries that would’ve just barely pierced through the thick walls during the early stages of the massacre. Fedot, himself, could hear nothing of the outside world, and for a moment he envied the monks their ignorance—even if their peace of mind was to be shattered the moment they filed out of the cathedral doors.
But one of these men wasn’t ignorant. Fedot had always had a fine nose for the presence of evil, and that nose had drawn him to the Holy Trinity. He studied each of the kneeling monks, evaluating their posture and the rhythm of their collective breath. It was a phenomenon he’d first noticed in the Lavra several years ago, when he was still living here. As the holy men prayed in any communal venue, they began to breathe as one—their intake of air as well as their exhale coming together in a single motion as if they had only a pair of lungs between them.
Two of the monks rose, retrieving the wine and Eucharist and carrying them to the altar. Fedot stepped down as if he were going to intercept them. Instead, he strode past the cloaked men, gripping the Shashka sword hidden beneath his robes. He walked beyond the pew where a lone monk sat—his hands folded in his lap and his head bowed. He was the one monk whose breath was not in synchronicity with the other praying men. Fedot turned suddenly, and as he leaped over the pew, drew his sword.
“Pōcs!”
Beryx Gulyas screamed a Hungarian expletive and threw himself over the next pew, as Fedot’s sword ripped through his robe, carving a slice of flesh out of his left arm. Gulyas ignored the gush of blood that streamed over his elbow and grabbed a small monk by the hair, dragging him into the aisle for cover. He drew his gun.
Shouts and bawls from the sparse congregation echoed throughout the cathedral, but only a couple of the monks scrambled out of the church. The rest of them—confused and frightened—stayed behind with their endangered brother, who Gulyas held close to his chest. A hush fell over the church again as the Hungarian stared down the monks, pressing the mouth of his gun behind his hostage’s ear. The monk with the Shashka sword had disappeared, and the Hungarian could only guess that he was either hiding behind one of the pews or had taken a place amongst the other monks, who from his point of view seemed nearly indistinguishable from one another.
The Hungarian pointed his gun and shot off his hostage’s toe. He muffled the man’s scream with the late Matvei Feodorov’s robe sleeve and watched the other monks gasp and beg for their friend’s life. All of them except one—a small man with thin lips and round glasses. The Hungarian raised his gun again, but Fedot was too fast for him. He’d seen through the attempt to smoke him out and dove behind a marble holy water fount, calling for the rest of the monks to take cover.
“Monk . . . monk . . . dead monk!” The Hungarian sneered, picking off three of the scurrying holy men with an even hand. Fedot watched his childhood friend, Artur, fall dead to the stone floor.
“You can’t escape from here,” Fedot called to the Hungarian intruder.
“Is the hand of God going to stop me?” he hissed. “Because it’s not going to be you with your Shashka against my gun, is it?”
The Hungarian backed up, pulling his whimpering hostage with him until he could lean against a statue of St. Anna of Kashin. His arm stung, and a gush of tepid blood soaked down to his wrist and dripped to the floor, mixing with the blood of his hostage’s foot.
“I don’t have a quarrel with you or with your brothers,” he continued. “I only want Tarkhan and the American girl. I can shoot them quickly and easily—ending all of this bloodshed. Or I can shoot my way to them and you can bury a dozen or more of your friends. It makes little difference to me.”
Fedot held the Shashka sword up to the light. Its beams filtered through the panes of stained glass, and its rainbow colors reflected off the Shashka’s steel blade, striping the Russian’s face with green, indigo and violet.<
br />
“You ran right by them,” he said. “They were last in the old rectory.”
“You better be sure of that,” the Hungarian warned. “Or you’ll all go down.”
Both Fedot and the Hungarian were men of their word.
“Oh, I’m sure.”
Fedot never carried a gun, but at times like this he acknowledged that a gun would’ve been a far more expedient way to handle the Hungarian assassin than a Shashka sword. Still, he believed creativity to be a far more powerful weapon than firepower and was confident at being an immensely creative individual. He waited for the side door to thunder closed before standing up and addressing the monks.
“Whatever you do, don’t leave here,” he said. The men were crowded around their wounded friend, whom Beryx Gulyas had tossed to the floor as he made his exit. “Not even to get a doctor.”
Fedot marched to the tabernacle, removed the microfilm, and left from the same door as the Hungarian.
Chapter 29
Beryx Gulyas tore into the old rectory with his gun squeezed into his hand. He wasn’t surprised to see it empty, but had a gut feeling that the answer to where the girl and the Russian had gone lay somewhere within its decaying walls and broken windows. A crude bed had been assembled in the middle of the floor and looked well-used, while off to the side, in an adjacent room, stood a tin tub filled with ice water. He could smell a faint perfume of sex in the air.
He had expected to hear a soft-shoed scuttle of monks by now, circling the rectory, but the Lavra had returned to its previous state of pensiveness—the same state he’d found it in before he’d stirred things up. It was odd and he didn’t like it.
“Little man—you’re not a monk, are you?” he called out.
He sensed the man with the Shashka sword was close by, even if there was no sound of him. There was simply a prevailing aura of danger. The man was no gangster or Soviet agent, but neither was he an Etor. It was refreshing, Gulyas thought, to have found a type of man he’d never encountered before.
[2017] The Hungarian Page 14