The Reckoning

by Alma Katsu

  After a week, I finally ventured out, mostly because I was out of gin and the front desk refused to send any more, fearing I was drinking myself to death. I made it as far as the hotel lobby and collapsed in a cane chair, fighting back tears as guests and poker-faced staff brushed by, ignoring my misery. Women walked by looking so composed in their fashionable dresses, with men on their arms, and the sight of them brought on fresh tears as I realized for the first time that I was truly alone. Like an animal separated from its pack, I feared I would not survive without Jonathan. I would go mad.

  I soon realized I was being watched by a man I did not know, who had taken a chair opposite me. A guest in formal traveling clothes, he wore a full suit and hat despite the temperature. He was small and beautifully built, like an expensive doll meant for admiration but not play. He smiled uncertainly at me the way one smiles at a growling dog, wary but willing to risk being bitten in the cause of charity.

  “I’m sorry if I’m intruding, miss, but . . .” He gave a little salute with his walking stick. “Have we met?”

  “No, we haven’t,” I said warily.

  “We have a friend in common, I’d wager. You know a man by the name of Adair, if I’m not mistaken.” His expression lit up as I fell silent. “You do. I knew it. I can see his hand on you.”

  “See his hand on me?” I asked, shaken. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “That’s just what I call it. I don’t know what it is, rightly. It’s just an aura, a stillness, you might say. It’s not something anyone would notice; you have to know to look for it. Go on, try it for yourself. Look at me; really concentrate. Don’t let your eye wander. Do you see?” He held his pose, willing me on with his eyes.

  I held my breath and tried to hold absolutely still, and slowly I saw what he meant. It was almost as though he were flattened a bit, made to look like an image of his own self. “I—I think I see it.”

  “There, you see: his hand is on me, too,” he said brightly, as though we were comparing something as benign as birthmarks or childhood scars.

  We went to my suite with a fresh bottle of gin. He insisted on throwing back the shutters to let air and light drive the stink of fear from the room. He sank into a deep chair as I spoke, telling him first about my present predicament before going on to the story of my life. His deep-blue eyes never left my face as he poured thimble-size sips of gin for me until my tale was finished.

  I was exhausted from speaking, but so much calmer: the trembling and tears subsided. We were now sitting next to each other on a fainting couch that had seen better days. With the frame seemingly ready to break apart in the center, there was no way for two people to sit on it without rolling against each other, so there we were, having known each other for barely half a day, and we were already leaning against each other for support, as cozy as twins. It was all I could do not to hug him to my breast, so grateful was I to have someone to stave off the absolute emptiness of being alone. There seemed to be no question that we would remain together for some time.

  Born in 1705, Savva was from St. Petersburg, and though he was there for only the first twenty years of his life, St. Petersburg was burned into his soul. He claimed to owe his sense of style, his fine manners, and his snobbery to his birthplace, for the city was the crown jewel of the Russian empire, and those who lived there believed themselves superior to the rest of their countrymen. St. Petersburg was very cosmopolitan, filled with all the foreign representatives to the Russian court, but with a fierce Russian pride at the same time. There was no better place to come from and no better place to be raised, as far as Savva was concerned. If he loved it so much, why wasn’t he in St. Petersburg at that very moment? I had wanted to know, and at that, my new friend grew wistful and took a slug of gin before replying that, as another of Adair’s companions, I already knew the answer. As one of Adair’s creatures, he, too, was an outcast from humanity. Like me, he could never go home.

  In the closeness of my hotel room, Savva explained that his troubles had started many decades earlier when, as a young man, he confessed to his father, a minor official in the royal court, that he had fallen in love with a young Hussar officer. His father’s response was to throw Savva out on the street, where he wandered for hours in an icy rain as he tried to figure out what to do next. The Hussar officer was quartered with his regiment and would not be able to take Savva in. Besides, Savva suspected his lover wouldn’t help him anyway: affairs such as this, between young men, tended to be fleeting.

  Savva wandered through town in shock and indecision until he collapsed by the side of the road. By then he was soaked to the skin; his teeth were chattering violently and his head was swimming. As he lay in the gutter, he prayed unconsciousness would set in and that he’d be dead by morning from pneumonia. He was just tumbling into darkness when a carriage pulled up beside him and the door swung open. . . .

  Savva awoke in an unfamiliar room. He had been tucked into a bed made cozy with layers of blankets and a firm feather pillow. His clothes, brushed and neatly folded, hung over the back of a wooden chair set before the fire. Likewise, his boots stood drying on the hearth. The room and the house were quiet. It was like waking up in a fairy tale after having been scooped up by unseen hands: everything smoothed and righted by fairies while he slept.

  And then Adair appeared “with those amazing eyes.” Savva smiled at me conspiratorially. “One look at him, so dashing and mysterious, and I almost forgot my troubles. He reminded me of the Cossacks who ruled the steppes. You could still see them at the time, roaming the plains on horseback, their families in caravans. . . . Adair had the same coloring, the same rough hair, the same animal ferocity. The same cunning. His wild beauty appealed to my Russian soul.”

  Adair introduced himself as a recent arrival to the city and admitted to being a Hungarian noble but made it clear that he was not there as an emissary of the Hungarian emperor, sent to join the court. “‘No, no . . . I represent only myself,’ he said. ‘I’m here to see the marvels of the Great Peter’s empire, to see for myself his wondrous accomplishments,’” Savva recounted. Adair acted humbly that first night—Savva would later learn how much of an act it was—and charmed his guest with his attentiveness. For the heartbroken, confused boy, warm soup, brandy, and a bright fire were enough to win his affection.

  And there was one aspect of Adair’s behavior that Savva understood clearly. There was no mistaking the glimmer in his eye. By twenty years of age, Savva had already seen the surreptitious inquiry made by one man of another with a glance held a second too long, the silent begging by a man of a certain temperament. And Savva was inclined to respond, despite his feelings for the Hussar officer (whom, as it would turn out, he’d never see again). The two men were alone for the night, the servant sent away, heavy curtains drawn over the windows, stout locks on the door. Savva succumbed to the temptation. “The most serious mistake of my life,” he lamented to me that day, tipping back the last silvery drops of gin.

  I wouldn’t hear the rest of the story of Savva’s short time with Adair until many years later, and what a sad story it was. I thought Savva lucky in one respect, however: Adair didn’t keep him for very long. Adair needed Savva to introduce him to the Russian aristocracy, and once Savva had served his purpose, Adair let him go. He was one of the few chosen whom Adair set free, but Savva took a pessimistic view of even this good fortune, believing that he had simply failed to be of much use.

  CASABLANCA, PRESENT DAY

  By the time the sun had set, the air in Savva’s front room was blue with smoke. He’d brought out gin and cigarettes, a tin box, and a hookah. The water pipe, though prettily ornate, was old and not well maintained, the ivory mouthpiece as stained as an old set of dentures. But Savva was a good host, peeling open a much-worked packet of foil to reveal a half brick of hashish, and he doled out generous dabs throughout the afternoon so we could smoke our inhibitions away.

  In Savva’s company I felt a peace I hadn’t known in a long time, st
rong enough to suppress the last of my jitters after having left Luke. This calm came from being with someone who had been through what I had been through with Adair. No matter how close we might get to a normal person, there was always a barrier, a final veil, that couldn’t be pierced, and that apartness from the rest of humanity took a toll. Ours was a terribly lonely existence. The only time we could lift the weight of a thousand sins off our shoulders was in the company of someone with his own thousand sins on his conscience. Adair used to chide me for being aloof with Dona, Tilde, and Alejandro, explaining that we might not like one another but we would always need one another—because, like any family, no one else would truly understand us. At the time, I didn’t want to be like them, and so I resisted. Now I had come to see what Adair meant. It was the only gift he gave us.

  “Better?” Savva asked as he playfully blew gray-blue smoke rings in my direction. He used to do that when we overnighted with tribesmen—whether we were with Tuareg in the Sahara or Kurds in the Taurus Mountains—to amuse their children.

  “Yes, better. Thank you,” I replied, though it bothered me to encourage his drug use. Still, I imagined he would imbibe whether I was there or not. I continued cautiously, “Perhaps tomorrow, when we’re more clearheaded, I can tell you why I’ve come here. You see, I’ve come for your help, Savva.”

  He took another long draw on the mouthpiece, and the sound of gurgling water filled the emptiness between us for a moment. Then, after holding the smoke in his lungs for a good while, he exhaled with deep satisfaction. “All right,” he said hoarsely as he passed the mouthpiece to me. His gaze was coquettish. “Is it possible to persuade you to indulge me for a moment? I can’t help but wonder, though, if the reason you’re here has something to do with Adair’s presence. I felt it return yesterday for the first time, after being dormant for two hundred years. That wouldn’t be a coincidence, would it?”

  EIGHT

  BOSTON

  Adair spent the next few days getting further reacquainted with the contents of his two treasured books, and specifically with the recipe for the elixir of life. For such a specific potion, it didn’t call for exotic ingredients, or even that many. The challenge seemed to be in its preparation. Certain elements needed to be purified to an exacting degree, and that called for equipment not found in an average household, let alone that of a bachelor. He gave Jude a list of the things he needed—cauldrons and beakers and pipettes, a scale—to do the refinements necessary to complete the elixir.

  Jude glanced over the list before handing it back. “Adair, honestly, where do you expect me to find this stuff? Half of it is arcane. You should’ve picked it up while you were at the museum.”

  “And a furnace,” Adair said, ignoring Jude’s obstinacy. “I need a fire capable of producing a very hot flame.”

  “I don’t have that kind of furnace—not something that makes actual fire. We use electricity to heat this house.”

  Adair pointed to the fireplace. “What about that?”

  “It’s a gas insert. You can’t cook anything with that.”

  “How can you live like this?” Adair said in disgust. The wish to return to the past shot through him like an arrow, and he knew to let it pass. “You act as though you live in a castle, but it’s a hovel. It’s not properly outfitted at all.”

  “Take it easy,” Jude said soothingly. “In this day and age, there’s got to be some piece of equipment that runs on electricity that can do this kind of work. I’ll look into it. . . . Oh—and I’ve got a lead on someone we can sell the elixir to. He’s one of these high-tech gazillionaires and he’s on death’s door. He’s always been a real ruthless bastard, but now that his cancer’s metastasized, he’s not so tough. The only problem is that it’s hard to get an appointment to see him. I’m trying to get him on the phone but not having much luck. . . . Anyway, I’ll let you know in a few days.”

  Adair heard the crackle of greed beneath Jude’s words, a reminder of their shared past. Jude’s love of wealth had been his downfall. It had fooled him into believing he could break the Dutch guild’s hold on the gold market, but Adair found him hanging from a rope in a warehouse and left to die by an assassin hired by the merchants’ guild. Adair heard this same rasp of greed as Jude told him about the man he’d selected as a candidate. He must want very badly to get his hands on the man’s fortune, and Adair had to remember not to let Jude’s greed put him in a bad position. He’d go ahead and prepare the elixir for sale, but he’d judge this man’s suitability for himself.

  Adair hadn’t realized how much he would enjoy making the elixir, deriving no small amount of pleasure from practicing an old skill at which he’d once been expert. So much of alchemical practice was done by feel and experience: knowing how hot to cook the ingredients without scorching or altering the composition too quickly, finding the right consistency of a compound, or measuring components without conventional volume or weight (how to measure an ounce of sighs, for instance, or a quintuple of broken dreams?). He was delighted to see it come back to him as though he’d never stopped practicing at all. The elixir came out perfectly: the liquid was so clear you could barely see the meniscus in the glass jar, and it had eddies in it like air currents swirling and colliding, and flecks of gold dancing within like snow caught up on the wind. It was beautiful in this state, though with time it would age gracelessly, turning an ugly brown while the gold flakes would darken until they appeared to be specks of dirt.

  On the same day the elixir was ready, Jude told Adair he’d finally managed to speak to the investor he’d mentioned and persuade him to allow them to come to his house. “He made his fortune with a dot-com start-up about fifteen years ago,” Jude told Adair, to put him at ease with his choice. He didn’t bother to explain to Adair what a dot-com start-up was: he had fallen back into using strange shorthand for modern things, and Adair had grown so accustomed to his arrogance that he no longer bothered to ask Jude to explain. Not that Jude’s arrogance was accepted: Adair just figured he would deal with it one day, when he could abide it no more.

  Jude continued, “He sold his shares at the peak of the internet boom, but instead of spending it on yachts and blow, like everyone else, he started some new companies, all business-to-business. Nobody cared about this stuff at the time, so he managed to corner the market on some key services, like data forensics and security. So now he’s the guy who knows where all the secrets are buried on the web. If his code monkeys can’t find it, it can’t be found. All those Fortune 500 companies—banks, insurance agencies, health care providers—line up to hire him. That’s one reason I chose him: he’ll be useful to you in other ways. Finding Lanore, for instance.” Jude paused and studied Adair for a reaction to her name—but there was no outburst, and Adair allowed only a wrinkle to pass over his brow—and so Jude continued.

  “He and I both invested in a new tech start-up once upon a time; that’s how I got to know him. To set up this meeting, I told him you had a really good investment for him. . . .” Then he paused, concern quieting his normally irksome face. “You know, it was sad. . . . He asked me what good are investments to him now. They stopped the chemo; there’s nothing more they can do for him except try to manage his pain. The doctor told him he has weeks to live. He looks like an old man, but he just turned thirty-eight last summer. You’ll be shocked when you see him.”

  Jude’s subdued air didn’t escape Adair’s notice. “This dying man—he is your friend?”

  “No, not really,” Jude replied.

  “Good. For what we are about to do, there is no room for sentiment.”

  Adair had spent the hours before the meeting deciding how exactly to put this proposition to the dying man. He’d never offered this gift to anyone before: he’d always chosen his recipients and given it to them only as they were dying, like last rites. And his choices had always been instinctual, as though he followed a voice that guided him to his next companion, the chosen individual preordained. He was uncomfortable with the prospect
of selling what should be beyond price, but Lanore had forced his hand, and the sooner he got this transaction out of the way, the sooner he could pursue her and make her pay for her betrayal.

  According to Jude, the ailing businessman he’d selected was worth an unimaginable sum, in the hundreds of millions. He was a very sick man who wasn’t used to losing and wouldn’t give up on his life without a fight. And although Adair recognized the necessity of acquiring the resources, financial and investigative, to rebuild his life from scratch, he still had reservations. He was particularly conflicted about granting immortality to a stranger who’d then have to become part of his inner circle. Adair wasn’t optimistic that it would work out; after all, few of the people he’d transformed had been worth the trouble. Many had been too weak to endure eternity. The stress could shatter one’s mind and leave one as vulnerable as a newborn—or as dangerous as a psychotic.

  Then there was the question of loyalty: he’d been looking for people he could depend on as though they were family, but the result had been disappointing. His minions lacked the fanatical devotion he’d hoped for, as evidenced by the fact that they managed to go on with their lives—quite happily, in Jude’s case—after he’d disappeared. It seemed especially risky to transform someone he hadn’t chosen himself, though it seemed he had no alternative and he could only hope Jude had used his not-inconsiderable cunning well.

  Adair and Jude drove to a stony mansion in the Boston suburbs. Nearly every window was dark in the large house, and it was cloaked in such complete stillness that it seemed as though the owner was already dead. An old man in a dark jacket answered the door. “Mr. Kingsley is expecting you,” he said almost too softly to be heard, and he shuffled down a hall with a sad air, as though he half expected they wouldn’t follow.