by David Duffy
Almost ten o’clock. Nosferatu had smoked his cigarette, then two more. He’d made two calls on his cell phone. I didn’t move a muscle the entire time. No one else came down the block, vehicle or pedestrian. The guy in the other car, if there was a guy in the other car, stayed out of sight. After the third smoke, Nosferatu climbed out and went into the building using a key to open the front door. I watched the windows on the third floor. No light came on. Coryell could have drawn curtains or shades. Nosferatu could be doing his work in the dark. He could be visiting someone else altogether. Still no movement at the car down the block. Ever so slowly, I got out my phone and tapped Coryell’s number, not sure what I’d say if anyone answered. No one did. After a handful of rings I got a recording.
Nosferatu was inside exactly twenty-four minutes. When he came out, he walked up and down the block, ten yards in each direction. He stopped about five short of the car where I’d seen movement. Once again, I didn’t move a millimeter. Neither did the guy in the Chevy. If he saw either of us, there was nowhere to run. After two minutes that stretched through half the night, Nosferatu got back in his SUV. He smoked another cigarette, made another call, started his engine and drove off. I waited another fifteen minutes before I started breathing normally.
I took a chance and walked to the other end of the block before turning left and back to Queensboro Plaza. A calculated gamble—I had little to lose. If there was a guy in the car, he’d already spotted me going in and out of Coryell’s building. If he was Nosferatu’s man, I wouldn’t be walking around. If it was Tan Coat, he already knew what I looked like. Sure enough, a man in a Chevy Malibu tried hard to look invisible as I strolled past. Definitely not Tan Coat—this guy wore a suit and had a full head of hair. Lots of people appeared to be interested in YouGoHere and Walter Coryell. Forty minutes later, as I got off my elevator, I was still thinking about that. But my immediate concern was who was in my apartment. Nosferatu hadn’t spotted me, I was almost certain of that. But what was this?
A pause on the CD and a new song started, Loretta singing about a honky-tonk girl crying out her lonely heart. My heart did a back flip and landed in my throat. I got my breathing under control for the second time in an hour, walked down the hall, and pushed open the door.
Victoria sat on my couch, glass in hand, looking drop-dead gorgeous and staring straight at me.
“Goddamned Russians. It’s about time you got home. I’ve been here since seven, and I’m hot and hungry—or I was when I arrived. When the hell are you going to learn to keep some wine in the house?”
CHAPTER 16
We didn’t get any dinner. Not much sleep either. But when I awoke at my usual 6:00 A.M., her head on my chest, my arm around her shoulders, her leg across mine, all was right with the world.
I had a thousand questions, of course. She hadn’t let me ask one. We went straight to bed and rediscovered each other slowly until heat and passion took over, and we thrashed across the sheets like two teenagers who have just figured it all out. When we came up for air, she still wouldn’t let me say a word. The second time was slow, contained passion until the very end, when we both exploded and collapsed in a single mass of sweat and flesh. Just like the first time—even better. Before I fell asleep I told myself this time I’d resort to padlocks and handcuffs before I let her leave again.
She seemed to read my mind.
“Don’t worry. I’m not making the same mistake twice,” were her only other words that night.
* * *
I believed her, but I also thought it would be just my Russian luck to go for my morning run and come back to an empty apartment. I couldn’t move without waking her, which I didn’t want to do—truth be told, I didn’t want to move at all—so I lay there, dozing, thinking about what had brought her back and trying not to let the ghostly image of Nosferatu, smoking his cigarettes, intrude on an otherwise perfect morning.
“Don’t you go running or jumping or pumping at an ungodly hour of the morning?” she said, smiling at me, her eyes as big and green and deep as the Nile.
“Pumping perhaps. And I’m not leaving,” I said.
“Jesus. I’d almost forgotten the humor. You don’t need to worry. I told you that last night.”
“You are a woman of your word.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what it says. You told me you’d leave before, without so much as a kiss good-bye, and that’s exactly what you did. I’m staying put.”
She laughed. “You’re right. I did. But not this time.”
“What changed?”
“Not you, I’m willing to bet.”
“Guilty. But I can try.”
“Uh-huh. We both know how good you are at that. We can discuss it. We can discuss lots of things, which I’m looking forward to, but first, I’m ravenous. I never did get dinner. I couldn’t find anything worth eating in your fridge last night, and believe me, I looked. Get out there and hunt or forage or whatever men do, besides pump. I want a real breakfast. Bacon, eggs with Tabasco, remember? Move it!”
She rolled out of my grasp with a playful slap and skipped to the bathroom. She flicked her beautiful behind for my benefit before she closed the door.
I lay there another minute holding on to the image of a present-day Aphrodite frolicking across my bedroom. Victoria de Millenuits, Victoria of a Thousand Nights, was ten years younger and two inches shorter than I am. She had a figure that would make Sophia Loren take a second look and turn green when she did. Long, thick black hair, those Nile-deep green eyes, a big laugh, and a Bardot pout when she was unhappy. She had brains to match her looks and a temper that trumped both. She also had that highly successful legal career, most recently occupying perhaps the top prosecutorial position in the entire country. And a firearm permit. The first time I met her she threatened to have me deported.
What she hadn’t had was luck with men, a run I perpetuated when I came close to breaking her heart—after promising twice that I wouldn’t put myself, or her, in that position. Compounding matters, I couldn’t even provide a good explanation of what had happened without putting Aleksei’s life at risk, and I couldn’t explain that either. That’s when she left.
Something had brought her back, she’d tell me the story in her own time, but it sure looked like love. I was going to keep my promise this time, I told myself again, knowing as I did so, I was being untrue to her and to me. Fate has a way of letting you know when you’re making commitments you can’t keep.
The hell with fate. Love was stronger than that. I’d fucked up once. I wasn’t going to do it again.
She’d just come out of the shower—Aphrodite, like Sophia, would have been green too—when I joined her in the bathroom.
“Yikes,” she said when she saw my bruises. “I didn’t notice those last night. You look worse than last summer. What happened this time?”
“Someone wanted to send a message, and he selected me as the messenger. They look worse than they feel—now.”
“You go looking for trouble or does it just find you?”
“I wasn’t looking to get beat up.”
“But I’ll bet you did something that attracted the beater’s attention.”
“Indirectly.”
“See what I mean? What was it this time?”
“It’s Foos’s fault. He asked me to help out a friend.” I reached for her towel, but she slapped away my hand.
“And the friend beat you up?”
“Nosferatu beat me up. He’s a six-foot-seven Belarusian with buckteeth, named after a German vampire. The friend tried to crush my legs under his granite conference table.”
“You’re teasing me, and you’d better stop.” Her temper was still in place—the Bayou twang, I’d learned, was its early warning system. I held up my hands, palms facing her.
“All true. I swear.”
“Christ. You need someone to take care of you.”
“I’m taking applications.” I made another try f
or the towel. She slapped me away, with a smile.
“Breakfast, remember?”
“There are all kinds of hunger.”
I pulled at the towel once more. This time she let it fall away as she came into my arms. She was damp and warm all over and hot and wet where it counted. She gave a little cry and sank teeth into my shoulder as I lifted her behind and planted her against the wall to find my way inside. The cry melted to moan.
“Make me one promise,” she said.
Uh-oh. “I won’t lie to you again,” I said.
“You don’t have to lie. Just tell me you won’t let me leave, like you did last time.”
I laughed and said, “That’s the easiest promise I can make.”
“You’ve got me right where you want me—in every possible way. Take me like you mean it.”
* * *
We ate a long, large, leisurely meal, desire sated for the moment, each of us unsure how to start the conversation we both wanted to have. The departure—breakup—six months before had been abrupt. She’d walked out of my apartment, willing me to do something, anything to try to stop her—and I hadn’t moved a muscle. I’d wanted to, I’d been desperate, every part of my body was trying. I do learn from my mistakes. Some wise person once said you get to make three or four big decisions in life—try to get more than half of them right. I’d fucked up my first couple, paid the price for decades, and was still digging myself out of that hole with Aleksei. So as much as I’d wanted to stop her, I’d let her walk. To do otherwise was to send my son to his execution.
Now we were back at the very same kitchen counter, each of us wanting to explain our actions, tell the other how we felt, why we did what we did. We both knew there was no question of incrimination—bygones were already bygones. Forgiveness, to the extent any was necessary, had been granted in an instant last night. The need to explain is one of the most basic human desires. We all want to be loved—we also need to be understood. So the question at the moment, as we chewed bacon, scrambled eggs (with Tabasco), and English muffins, was how to get started.
I said, “Where did you go?”
“Several places. Home to Louisiana. Not much left there for me now, since my mom died. Then my sister in Miami. She’s got breast cancer. Double mastectomy. That’ll give you some perspective.”
“How is she?”
“They think they got it all. She’s doing okay, except her husband, who’s some kind of oceanic consultant, ran off with a hot Cuban babe from his firm. Apparently she’s something in a wet suit. Seems he’s been banging her for the last year, including the whole time my sister’s been sick. Men can be real bastards.”
I didn’t disagree. There was no point. Besides, she was right.
“Once Louisa went back to work, I went out to West Texas. Town called Marathon. Spent the last month there, thinking things over. I wanted solitude, and it’s pretty damned lonely.”
“Beautiful, though,” I said. “Gage Hotel?”
“Goddammit! How in the hell do you know everything I do? He told you, didn’t he? He and that computer serpent-thing…”
“Nobody told me anything. The Gage is the only hotel in Marathon. About the only thing in Marathon, period. You can cut the atmosphere with a knife. Great restaurant.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Shit. Momma taught me lots of things. But she never said, ‘Don’t date a spy.’”
I told her the story of trying to outrun the Basilisk. I’d spent a week at the Gage, where they put a package of earplugs by your bed, as if they’re going to be any help against the mile-long freight trains that rumble through town at 3:00 A.M.—fifty yards from your room.
We traded notes about West Texas. Solitude and loneliness don’t begin to describe it. Neither do awe-inspiring or beauty. Her favorite spot was the McDonald Observatory outside Fort Davis, where from an altitude of almost seven thousand feet, you can see the stars and planets through high-powered telescopes with virtually no interference from ambient light on the ground. Mine is Donald Judd’s Mecca of minimalist art in Marfa, which he built on an old army base he’d bought from the government—where he’d been stationed as a teenager. Not unlike Muhammad’s epicenter, visiting requires a pilgrimage—the closest airport is El Paso, three and a half hours away. In a way I think Judd understood, it makes getting there half the fun.
Victoria had visited Chinati, as Judd called his desert creation, and not to my surprise, didn’t think much of it. “Art my ass. Concrete rectangles. Steel boxes. Neon lights. That’s not art.”
Minimalism is like my shaved head, people like it or they don’t. Victoria was forcefully in the latter camp on the art question. There’d be time enough to argue that later.
“I listened to a lot of Tom Russell while I was out there.”
“Now you’re talking. Bet he doesn’t have any more use for those antelope shacks than I do.”
Antelope shacks are what the locals, most of whom agree with Victoria, call the concrete structures Judd placed in a field alongside Route 67.
“What did you do, while I was away?” she said.
“Nothing much. Series of one-night stands.”
“What?! You son of a…!”
The right hand came flying across the counter. I resolved to take my punishment like a man and waited for the sting of the slap. She stopped before she got there.
“You really are a bastard.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist. Hard for a virile Russian male in the prime of virile Russian maleness to admit he’s been rendered feeble and helpless by a capitalist vixen.”
“Spare the socialist horseshit. Did you miss me?”
“I spent most of the time moping, you want to know the truth. Didn’t do much of anything. Foos can confirm that. He wouldn’t let me use the Basilisk to find you, which made it worse because I knew how easy it would be. I drank too much. That just made me think more about you. Tried to break out of it by going to Moscow. Saw Aleksei. First time I’ve spent with him since he was a baby.”
“How’d that go?”
“Not great, about as well as can be expected, I suppose. Not easy, starting again after almost thirty years. Worse than starting from scratch, really, because there’s the baggage. Why’d I leave? Why didn’t I let him know where I was? Why did I lie to his mother? Underlying all those questions, of course, is the unspoken premise—why were you only thinking of yourself? And why should I believe you’re any different now? Then there’s my career with the Cheka, not to mention the family connections, which are a huge issue for him. He’s borderline irrational on the subject, not that I blame him. Hard to get past how much damage we did—and the number of people we did it to. Also hard to explain when it all happened in another time, another place, another world really.”
“Even harder when you’re too scared to tell him the truth, right?”
I looked across, stunned. How the hell could she know about Beria?
“Hey, what’s wrong? What did I say?”
I could hear Lavrenty Pavlovich chuckling in the background. I waited for him to appear, but he stayed away. Then I realized she was talking about the story I’d told her of my upbringing—my birthplace, my mother’s death, the orphanage, being sent back to the Gulag. She was the first person I’d ever told—she had no reason to judge and condemn a zek, she barely knew what one was. She was assuming I’d be scared to tell Aleksei, terrified of what his reaction would be, as indeed I had been. Before a bigger terror reared his head. Beria chuckled again.
“Nothing’s wrong, I’m fine, but who’s the real bastard now?” I said.
“Hey! I didn’t mean it that way. I meant to say, I understand.”
“I know that,” I said gently. “Truth hurts, as someone once pointed out.”
It hurt even more if it involved Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. I wasn’t ready to tell Victoria—or anyone—about that.
“Does he blame you—for his mother?”
“He says he doesn’t and I believe him. But he needs time to process everything that happened. I’m glad I went but it was probably too soon to start rebuilding.”
“You going back?”
“Maybe in a month or two.” Or sooner, if I could figure a way to reestablish Sasha’s access to the Cheka archives.
The green eyes stared straight at me. Almost anyone would have asked again what happened that night at JFK. Aleksei had saved my life, but in the process, he’d dispatched Iakov Barsukov and his murdering henchman to reunite with Lenin, Stalin, and, certainly, Beria, south of the last terrestrial border. Since Iakov was second only to Putin in assuring the Cheka’s continuing ascension in post-Soviet Russia, Aleksei’s life expectancy would be measured in minutes the day the organization found out he was anywhere near the airport that night. I will never breathe a word, not even to her. She recognized that, and the fact that she didn’t ask made me think we really did have a chance.
She said, “Did you really spend all that time moping? Over me?”
“Like I said, ask Foos. He got me the job I’m working on because he was tired of my hanging around bothering him.”
“I believe you. Mostly, I believed you last night and in the bathroom this morning. But don’t think I won’t ask. Just to be sure.”
“Good to be trusted. They teach you this in law school?”
“I learned trust in reform school, remember?”
I did. She’d done time in a juvenile detention center as a teenager when she stole her stepfather’s car—her escape after he tried to rape her.
“Speaking of law school, you going back to work?”
“Never fully left. Telecommuted part time.”
“How’d you explain so much time away?” It can’t have been that simple telecommuting to a U.S. attorney position.
“Told them I had some female medical issues to deal with. You work mainly with men, nobody wants to ask too many questions. Then my sister had them for real, so I was covered. I’m looking forward to the office. We’ve got a big case building, that’s the other reason I’m back.”