by Greg Rucka
In early April, we received a third e-mail, and in it Dan asked if we could perhaps do without Vadim, that he had work for him back in Brooklyn.
“He’s missing him,” Alena confided to me while watching my attempts at dance the following morning. “So he says he has work, because Dan doesn’t want us to think he is weak.”
“He misses his son. How is that weak?”
“He believes admitting such things makes one vulnerable. It can be exploited.”
I thought about what Natalie had said to me six months earlier in the kitchen of the house in Cold Spring, and what I’d said to her in return. Her words had seemed so saccharine and manipulative at the time, an attempt by her to convince me to stay, and I’d resented her like hell for making something that was already difficult all the harder.
At night, when I closed my eyes, I still saw her on her autumnal bed. It didn’t help things that the last words I’d exchanged with her had been bitter and spiteful ones.
“It can,” I said, and left it at that.
At the end of April we moved to a smaller house outside the resort town of Ureki, and the next morning we sent Vadim back to his father. The boy was glad to go, though he tried to hide it. He missed New York, and he had friends there he wanted to see. I could almost remember what that was like.
The following day the weather turned unseasonably ugly, as if reminding us it was still winter, but Alena, Miata, and I went down to the shore for a walk anyway. We did some shopping for the house, bought some fresh-caught sea bass for dinner. In the grocery store, I saw Alena hovering over the selection of wines, and she caught me looking and then moved on to gather fruits and vegetables. Georgians, as a rule, loved to drink, and loved their wine, but Alena was not Georgian, she was Russian, born—she thought—in Magadan, and further, she never touched alcohol. Since I’d begun training with her, I didn’t, either.
We took our walk, getting cold and wet, trying to enjoy the empty beach and the quiet, but it wouldn’t take. When we’d been in Bequia, both of us had known Oxford was coming, that it was only a matter of when, not if. That knowledge had followed us, cast its pall on the mood and the environment. Even at the best of times in Bequia, it had been impossible to truly relax.
So it was here, some six and a half months since the attempts on our respective lives. It didn’t matter that there’d been nothing, no threat, no signs of danger since that murderous night in Cold Spring. Our enemy remained, unnamed and unknown and potentially very powerful, and just because they hadn’t found us yet didn’t mean they had abandoned their search. As it had been with Oxford, we lived with the knowledge that we were hunted, and that the hunter might find us at any time.
Yet we lived with something else now, too, something that we hadn’t truly had in Bequia, even with Alena teaching me. We had been tested, after all, first by Oxford, then more cruelly by Cold Spring, and we had remained true to each other, had defended each other, had supported each other. For Alena, it must have been an extraordinary sensation, bewildering and perhaps even frightening. There had always been someone who had wanted to hurt her, or use her, or kill her, or there had been the promise of the same. That promise remained, but this time it was different.
This time, she had someone with her that she could trust absolutely.
With Vadim in the house, it had been easy to push any thoughts of intimacy aside as inappropriate, even if, as an excuse, it was a feeble one. Vadim didn’t care what we did, and, being nineteen, probably imagined that we were doing far more together than we could’ve possibly done, anyway. With the addition of fabulous lingerie.
But Vadim was gone, the house was ours, and when Alena looked at me, I could see everything she felt for me, and everything she wanted. It was all there, and it was so raw and so sincere that I had to look away, because it scared me. It scared me a lot.
Because Natalie had been right. Every single thing she’d said to me had been right.
The house, like the one in Batumi, was murder to keep warm. A woodstove served as the major source of heat, positioned in the main room. Miata went straight for it as soon as we were inside, dropping to the floor to bathe in its glow, and we knew that meant the house was safe. Each of us trusted his ears and his nose far more than our own, and if he wasn’t reacting to anything, that was because there was nothing to react to.
We did a sweep anyway, confirming what we already knew, then unpacked the groceries in the kitchen. Alena went off to change out of her soaked clothes, and I went to the stove and fed it a couple more logs, annoying Miata as I did so, because it forced him to move out of my way. The fire came back strong, and I used a stick to close the door on it, then cleaned the rain from my glasses. A few droplets fell from my hair, spat and sizzled when they hit the cast iron. From the back of the house, I heard the little stereo in Alena’s bedroom switch on, the strings and harmonies of “Eleanor Rigby” coasting softly down the hall. Her music tastes were eclectic, almost exclusively confined to the Beatles and their catalogue, with the occasional opera or string concerto thrown in for variety. After another moment, I could make out the sound of running water, the shower in the bathroom starting.
I removed my coat and boots, put them nearby, so they could dry out, then moved the pistol I’d been carrying at the front of my pants and set it within reach on the wobbly wooden coffee table that had come with the house. I pulled a chair of my own closer to the stove, and proceeded to let it do the same thing for me that it was doing for Miata. It was warm and it was comfortable, and the stiffness that had been rising in my right hip was abating. I felt drowsy, realized that it would be very easy to nod off right here, and realized also that there was really no reason that I shouldn’t.
When I heard Alena’s voice, I had no idea that she was back in the room.
“Atticus?”
I sat up and turned, and she was standing on the edge of the rug, her bath towel wrapped around her body, and that was all she was wearing. With her hair wet, it looked closer to black than to red. She shivered.
“I told you,” Alena said. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“You’ve got to be freezing,” I said.
Her brow creased with her frown. “It’s not my first time. I don’t want you to think that.”
The only response I could think to that was to get up and go to where she was standing. I knew what she was trying to say, but she had also told me enough about her youth that I knew what she wasn’t telling me, as well. When the girl is eight and in a prison cell, the “first time” is the last thing you can call it.
She had crossed her arms around her middle, and as I approached she wouldn’t meet my eyes, instead focusing on my chest. Her expression had shifted, turned to something between determined and sullen.
I kissed her, the way I had wanted to kiss her back in the house in Cold Spring.
“It’s all right,” I told her. “It’s mine.”
We moved to Kobuleti the following winter. It was another resort town, roughly midway between Batumi and Poti, and the town wasn’t meant for great things, but great things had been thrust upon it. When Abkhazia, in the north, had seceded, it had taken Georgia’s best beaches with it, the ones of soft sand and alluring landscapes. Kobuleti’s beach was rocky, flat, and utterly uninspiring. But it was Kobuleti’s beach, and it was safe, and wealthy Muscovites and young Georgians came every summer to soak up the heat and wade the water. Kobuleti had responded, and now there was a resort that took advantage of the nearby mineral springs, two new hotels with all the amenities, and several flourishing boutiques and restaurants. During the high season, from the beginning of July until mid-September, the town was packed. Walking down the main street on a summer’s night, music poured from every other café and bar as each venue pulled double duty as a nightclub.
During the off-season, though, Kobuleti shut down, turning into one of those quiet seaside communities that made me remember my Northern Californian youth. The tourists left, as did most of the a
ttendant service workers, and everything grew quiet, and the world around the town contracted. Walking the rocky beach on a cold November morning, the sky and the Black Sea sharing the same battleship shade of gray, the only noise that of the water and the gulls, it could seem like the whole planet was nothing but a small town surrounded by pines and water.
We’d bought a house two and a half miles from the sea, on the north side of town, the right size for the three of us. Secluded, far enough back in the woods that you couldn’t trip over it by accident, but not so far away that we couldn’t see someone coming if a visitor wanted to drop by unannounced. The house had been a summer cottage for some minor Party official once upon a time, then sold as a rental property, and subsequently had seen more than its share of abuse.
The first thing we did when we moved in was to make it secure. We installed an alarm system with motion detectors and two cameras, covering the immediate approaches from the front and the back. We hooked up external lights to complement the cameras, and to give us visibility if anyone wanted to pay us a visit during the night. We replaced all of the locks, and a couple of the doors.
Then we discovered that the roof leaked, and instead of paying for someone to come up from Batumi to fix it, we decided we would do it ourselves. Then we found mold in the walls and carpet, and set about tearing out the old and installing the new. When we pulled up the carpet, we found there were hardwood floors in almost every room, and we decided we liked those better, so we had to finish them. Everything needed a fresh coat of paint. Cracked windowpanes had to be replaced. The pipes were lead in many places, and had to go.
The house became our project, how we spent our hours when we weren’t training in the woods or the makeshift gym we’d built in the garage. We read books on home repair and carpentry and renovation. We bought tools. We drove all over the country in search of building supplies and fixtures. Partly, we did it as a way to keep busy, but partly we did it because, without our ever saying so to the other, we’d both decided that this house outside of Kobuleti was going to be our home.
It wasn’t that we’d forgotten. I could still conjure the memory of Natalie effortlessly, the picture of her as she lay in death as clear as today in my mind. But after two years of lurking apprehension and no sign of Illya Tyagachev, with word from Dan coming less and less often, it had become impossible to simply mark time. Since it was impossible for me to do what I truly wanted to do—what I had come to feel I needed to do—it became necessary to do something else.
A little over seven months after we’d bought the house, Rezo Raminisshvilli, who ran one of the two cafés in town where we went for Internet access, mentioned to Alena that another of the summer cottages about a mile and a half from ours was going to be demolished. Whoever now owned the property wanted to put up a more modern abode, and felt that starting from square one was the best way to do it. We headed out the same afternoon to see if there was anything we could salvage, and were delighted to find that not only were most of the windows intact, but they were the original fixtures, and in reasonably good condition.
We salvaged five of them, brought them back home, and set to work repairing and installing them. They’d been painted multiple times, and the paints used had been lead-based, so I had them out on sawhorses in the back, and was working on stripping the third of the five. It was hot—it could get quite hot in the summer, even along the coast—and I stopped to drink some water and catch my breath. Miata was lying on the threshold of the open back door, in the shade, half asleep, and Alena was fitting one of the finished boxes into place, alternately shimming and hammering. She was wearing a white tank and blue bootleg Levi’s she’d bought the last time we’d been in Batumi. I could see the scar, thin and white, that curled along the inside of her left bicep, from a man in Afghanistan who hadn’t liked her politics, or lack thereof. She hadn’t cut her hair since we’d left the States, and it was down to her shoulders now when she wore it loose, but at the moment she’d tied it up and back in a hasty ponytail.
I drank my water and I looked at Miata, and I looked at her, and I looked at myself, and then I burst out laughing.
“What?” Alena asked. She spoke in Georgian. Mostly, we spoke in Georgian or Russian, as a habit. “What is it?”
I kept laughing. Miata had raised his head, sleepy and perhaps annoyed at my interrupting his nap. That made me laugh harder. I wasn’t hysterical, and Alena could tell that, and that probably helped to keep her from thinking that I’d lost my mind. She scowled at me just the same, folding her arms across her chest, waiting for me to share the joke. She had to wait a while, because when she did that, I laughed even harder.
Then, finally, I was able to get it under control.
“What’s so fucking funny?” she asked.
I managed to stop laughing long enough to gesture vaguely at the house, her, and the dog with my hammer, and to say, “Bonnie and Clyde play house.”
It took her a few seconds, staring first at me as if trying to determine if I truly had lost my mind or not, then finally looking at those things I’d indicated. She frowned at Miata. She frowned at the house, with its missing windows and half-finished floors. Then she looked down at herself, at the handful of nails in one hand and the hammer in the other, and the penny dropped, and she, too, started laughing.
Laughing at our domestic fucking bliss, and the irony of it all.
Twice a week we’d check for a message from Dan.
We would go to one of the Internet cafés in town, get a cup of tea and surf the Web and check up on the news of the world. While we were at it, we’d check the LiveJournal of a man named Billy Kork. Billy Kork was sixteen, lived in Newark, and posted every few days or so about all the kinds of things you’d expect a sixteen-year-old from Newark to post about. He posted about music, and school, and movies, and television, and girls. He posted a lot about girls. Sometimes, he shared his poetry. His poetry was very, very bad.
When we saw that another of the very, very bad poems had been posted, we’d log in with the user name and password Alena had chosen, and access the private-message portion of the blog. Once there, we’d find a message from Dan, forwarded to us by Billy Kork. If a response was required, we would post one, and thus carry on an albeit truncated and stilted conversation.
It was a good system, simple, and difficult to crack. To have intercepted the communication would have required the intercepting party to know, first, that Billy Kork was Vadim; second, that “mountainclimber998” was Alena and myself; and third, at least one of the account passwords. The odds of discovering the first were very, very low, but within the realm of possibility. The odds of discovering the second were even lower, because the only way to learn that we were mountainclimber998 would’ve been from either Dan or Vadim. Learning the third, especially the password for mountainclimber998, was impossible.
Which is not to say that it was a foolproof system, because it wasn’t. On our end, if someone knew what they were doing and hit the computer after we’d finished with it, they could have recovered enough information to know what was going on, despite the fact that I made a point of clearing the browser’s cache after each session. On their end, it was possible that someone could bring a federal warrant to bear on LiveJournal and its servers, forcing them to open the accounts, and thus gain access to our communication that way. But if the federal government knew enough to know that it was Dan and Vadim communicating with us, then surely they would know a lot more, and the Men in the Black Balaclavas would have come calling.
As that had not yet happened, we could reasonably assume we were safe.
In the beginning, the messages had been status reports. They mostly apprised us of Dan’s search for Illya, and the frustration he was having in locating the man who had betrayed us. Sometimes he’d give us an update on what was happening in New York, what was going on with the few people I’d asked him to keep tabs on. But these days, the very, very bad poems, and thus Dan’s messages, were fewer and further between
. Even the blog itself was beginning to suffer from a lack of attention, with Billy offering his opinion less and less often as Vadim himself lost interest in the façade. I couldn’t blame him; he’d kept Billy Kork alive for over two years. That’s a long time to tell the same joke.
Still, twice a week, we found ourselves an Internet café, and we checked Billy Kork’s blog.
Two months after our third New Year together, on a rainy and cold Monday morning, the message came.
I’d settled at the computer in the little café, a place called Khval Dghes, which translated to “Tomorrow Today,” Miata flopping at my feet. He was getting old, and both Alena and I suspected arthritis was beginning to affect his joints; on the days when it rained, days like today, he was slower, though as attentive as ever. Alena was at the counter, ordering our tea and chatting with Rezo’s wife, Irema.
We’d been around long enough that we were known in Kobuleti, that we were locals, and we were reasonably sociable as a result. Better that the community know us and like us, better that we be good neighbors than bad; that way, should anyone come calling asking questions, we stood a chance of hearing about it. Being antisocial would have only drawn unwanted attention, and the wrong kind of speculation. As it was, we were the nice-but-strange couple renovating that house outside of town. It was assumed that we were married, that we had American money, and if they wondered why we’d chosen to live in Kobuleti, their imaginations were happy to supply plenty of theories. With Alena’s limp and the silent Doberman, they would have talked about us anyway.
I surfed for a few minutes, checking the news, then running the same searches I always did, plugging in the names that still mattered to me to see if the people they belonged to showed up on the Web. I found a few articles and stories, skimmed them. A girl I had known and cared for apparently had sold her first novel for a six-figure advance. I was mildly surprised to find a story about an ex-girlfriend dating a reasonably famous computer guru. When I typed in “Natalie Trent” I got multiple hits, but none of them for the one I cared about. As far as I knew, there’d never been so much as an obituary for her.