Countdown in Cairo (Russian Trilogy, The)

by Noel Hynd

  A long apologia followed but the words barely made any sense. After a few moments she was not hearing it.

  Disgust. Resentment. Fury.

  It all welled up inside her, those emotions and more. The monstrosity of all this brought her close to despair, a despair modified with rage, and almost a wish that this conversation had never happened, that she had heard none of it, that she might have lived a happier life never knowing the truth, never having heard this rambling deathbed confession.

  And although one wave of angry doubt was in mutiny against another, her heart fought against what she had always known, always somehow suspected, yet found a way to deny until this moment, that Federov had taken Robert from her, that the man now dying before her had shattered her life and left it in small pieces that had been nearly impossible to piece back together.

  “So I ask you now,” Federov finally said. “Where is your faith? What is it to you? What did your Jesus Christ teach you? Do you forgive me?”

  She was angry. Resentful. Fearful. Every foul and vituperative emotion welled inside her.

  Somehow she managed words.

  “Forgiveness is not mine to give you, Yuri. Forgiveness is for God to give you.”

  “Will he?’

  “Ask him.”

  “But will he?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  He took a moment, his strength almost gone. “But do you forgive me?” he asked.

  She stood in silence, tears welling, not knowing whether she wanted to answer, to flee, or—as one horrible instinct urged—to shoot him herself in revenge, except something about that would have seemed both wrong and too good for him at the same time.

  “Please answer me honestly,” he said. “Don’t give me the answer you wish me to hear, but the one that has the truth. I have little patience left for anything except truth.”

  Federov paused. “So, I ask you again. Do you forgive me?”

  Several seconds passed. Somewhere deep in her soul, in something that seemed to her too much like a spiritual abyss, she found an answer that she didn’t know was there.

  “I think in time,” she said, “with the proper strength, I will be able to. Yes. Because I need to. Because everything in my faith tells me to. Because I don’t choose to live a life burning with hatred. So with time,” she said, “with time, maybe, yes. Right now, I do not know why God has put me on this path. I hope that eventually I will understand.”

  He nodded weakly. “That is good,” he said. “That is as good as I could hope for, hey. In its way, it’s a gift. So thank you.”

  Words had departed her.

  “Look,” she finally said, her insides raging, “that’s really all there is here. There’s nothing more to discuss. We’re finished here, right?”

  He nodded and his head eased back.

  “You’re a good person,” he said. “I wasn’t always. I regret.”

  He closed his eyes. He was dozing within seconds, transported to wherever the dreams, illusions, and drugs took him, his memory leaping through the past.

  Alex stood, turned, and went to the door.

  She pulled it open, but then, responding to some inner voice, looked back one final time at the now-quiet man in the hospice bed. Dying was sometimes an eloquent act, she mused. Men and women often died in accordance with their lives: in battle, home with their families, in transit, wracked with disease.

  Federov’s body was very still, and despite her insides being in turmoil, she tried to assess him once more. And almost before her eyes, he shrank to something very small and mean, and something very mortal, flawed, and harmless. She tried to develop a hatred for him, but couldn’t.

  His eyes opened a sliver and his hand came up almost imperceptibly. “Hey,” he said in a near whisper. Then he was quiet again, breathing lightly.

  She stared for another several seconds. In the end, he was just a man. More flawed than most others, but just a man.

  She gently closed the door behind her. It latched in complete silence.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  In the lobby of the hotel, she spotted Gian Antonio Rizzo not far from where she had left him. But she did not go to him, not immediately. She wasn’t ready to talk to anyone.

  She spotted a small chapel in the hospital lobby and slipped into it. Like the doors to the hospital room upstairs, the chapel portals closed quietly. She wanted time to meditate and calm down. The chapel of the hospital was as good a place as any.

  Her emotions were all over the place. Her spirit was exhausted. Taken as a whole, Federov’s confession contained the most monstrous words she had ever heard in her life.

  Robert’s death … I was responsible … Do you forgive me?

  It was too much to bear. For the first time since the dark days after Robert’s death, she put her head in her hands and cried. Long, hard, deep tears, tears she had fought back every lonely day for the past several months.

  Several minutes passed, her mind awash in confusion, her entire soul lost in thoughts and prayer and spiraling images, all the way from the death of her grandmother and her funeral in Mexico, up through Kiev, and into the present. She tried to replay events and determine what she could have done differently, what might have put her in a different place today. But she was unable. She tried to push it all aside and tell herself that what was done was done and that it was God’s path for her, but she was unable to do that either. She wondered if she was on the right path or if she was a miserable failure.

  And once again she felt very alone. Even in the chapel, she felt very alone.

  At length, she realized that she wasn’t.

  It was a sensation at first, a rallying of the spirit, perhaps, as she continued to lean forward, her face in her hands, her eyes closed. Then a small amount of additional time went by and she felt a spiritual presence, and then a physical presence to complement it.

  It wasn’t something she heard or saw. It was something she could sense.

  Moments after that, she felt the weight of another person settling onto the pew next to her. For a mad hallucinatory moment, she thought that it was Robert back beside her and that she had imagined all the horrid events of the last year. Then she thought it was Federov, that he had somehow managed to resurrect his energies, came down here, and found her. And then with an equally surreal jolt images came back to her, and she remembered how she and Robert had shared pews together in DC, back when she was several decades younger than she was now, just a year and a half ago. All of that seemed like a previous lifetime—and in a way it was, and in a way it wasn’t.

  An arm wrapped itself around her shoulders. She didn’t resist. She knew who it was. She lifted her head and turned.

  “You must have had quite a conversation,” Gian Antonio Rizzo said. “Quite a confession.”

  “It was,” she said.

  “Deathbeds will have that effect.”

  She nodded.

  “Life’s funny,” he said. “No matter where you are, there you are. So here you are.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for being here with me,” she said.

  Rizzo kept his arm wrapped around her. It was warm, comforting, and supportive. So were his eyes. She leaned to him and allowed herself to luxuriate in his embrace.

  “You were wrong,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “I did manage to turn down the request of a dying man.”

  “Oh. I see,” he said. At length, he asked, “Would it be vulgar of me to ask what the request was?”

  “Marriage.”

  “Marriage!” He seemed as stunned as she had been. “You and him?”

  Alex nodded.

  “You’ll excuse me, but, ha! ” he said. “The man was more of a deluded dreamer than I thought.”

  “And that wasn’t even the worst of it,” she said.

  “What was the worst of it?”

  She told him. All of it. From Kiev through to the jungle of Venezuela, to Paris, back through recent days in Geneva, New York, and Cai
ro.

  “Wow,” he said, blowing out a long breath.

  “I’m wondering,” she said after a long, heavy silence, “if I had known along the way, if I had known for a fact what he just confessed to, that he was responsible for Robert’s death, for the slayings in Barranco Lajoya, for every single venal, hateful thing he’s done, I wonder if at some moment I might have just killed him myself.”

  “But you didn’t,” Rizzo said. “You didn’t know and you didn’t kill him.”

  “But should I have?”

  “Killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Probably not.” He paused. “Did you ever suspect?” he asked.

  There was a long silence.

  “And would you have?” she finally asked. “If you knew that he’d taken the person you most loved away from you? Would you have just shot him?”

  Rizzo’s gaze went far away and came back, much as Federov’s had several minutes earlier.

  “I’m a religious man,” he said, “and maybe a little bit superstitious as well. So I’d prefer not to answer that in a place of worship.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said.

  “Take it instead as a maybe,” he said. “A definite maybe.”

  She nodded. He took his arm away.

  “And you?” he asked.

  “What about me?”

  “If you’d known, would you have killed him?”

  She looked away from him and maintained another silence. When he looked back again, her eyes were moist, but something in them had changed—the compassion had changed to anger, or maybe something deeper.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said.

  He stood. He offered a hand.

  “Come along,” he said. “I think it’s my duty right now to get you out of here.”

  “Thank you,” she said, accepting his hand and standing.

  By then, they had both had enough, so Alex and Rizzo slipped out of the Clinique Perrault without a further word to anyone.

  They went for dinner at a small French place on the Place St. François. Alex was still in a mode of deep decompression after the visit with Federov, but Rizzo knew how to guide the events.

  They split a bottle of wine and talked about life. Gian Antonio rose to the occasion as a gentleman par excellence and talked her out of her anger and depression and fury. The staff of the restaurant sensed that the two needed space and time and, for that matter, a second bottle of wine, so they provided one, a good Swiss one from the Rhône Valley.

  She got back to the hotel shortly after midnight, moderately drunk, which was probably a good thing this evening. She crashed into bed and slept fitfully, unable to come down completely, unwilling to pop an Ambien or any other sleeping aide on top of the wine. She was victimized not by nightmares but by bad feelings about all the events of the last year and a half.

  The stint in Madrid, the pursuit of the Pietà of Malta, was a small vacation in terms of the larger picture. But looking back on it, she could see the hand of Federov once again making the first moves toward forgiveness and contrition.

  She wondered again: If she had known earlier, might she have killed him? Out of pure whim one day, might she have just drawn a weapon and shot him? She pictured herself doing it, probably when she was one-on-one with him in his magnificent study in Geneva.

  But in truth, she would never know. It was the road not taken.

  She fell into what passed for sleep around 5:00 a.m.

  The phone woke her less than three hours later, exploding rudely at her bedside like a fire bell in the night. In a fog, she answered.

  It was Rizzo. He asked if she had heard, and if not, he had news.

  “Heard what?” she asked.

  Federov, Rizzo explained, had slipped into a coma late the previous evening about the time that Alex had tipsily lurched from the restaurant while hanging on Rizzo’s strong arm. In the early morning hours, Federov’s heart had fluttered and then failed. Efforts by the Clinique to move him onto life support had also failed.

  There had been no relatives listed with the Clinique. No friends, either. Aside from a solicitor, Rizzo was his only contact. So it had been Rizzo’s cell phone that the Clinique had called at six minutes past seven that morning when Yuri Federov had been pronounced dead at age forty-nine.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Over the course of the fifteenth century, terrible epidemics of plague, the black death, ravaged Europe. Switzerland was swept by the pestilence as much as any country, and in Geneva, the leaders of the city—in an attempt to quarantine the dying—built a hospital away from the city center. The building sat on a stretch of pasture land called Plainpalais, between the rivers Rhône and Arve.

  The surrounding land took the name of the hospital—the plain palace—that stood on the site. And since death from the plague was almost inescapable for the afflicted, it was only a matter of time that the vast fields surrounding the building became burial grounds.

  Plainpalais Cemetery, also known as La Cimetière des Rois, was located on rue des Rois in the center of Geneva. Over the centuries, it had also become the largest cemetery in Geneva. As Federov had indicated, and as Alex had already known, Plainpalais was a peaceful, quiet place, filled with a small settlement of old burial vaults and tomb markers. The pathways within the cemetery were lined with large, aging trees, and there was a bittersweet air to the place, somewhat like the famous Cimetière Père Lachaise in Paris.

  Some of the gravestones dated back to the late fifteenth century, and notables of Genevois history had been laid to rest here. Here lay John Calvin, the Protestant reformer; Augustin de Candolle, the botanist; Guillaume-Henri Dufour, the engineer and general; James Fazy, jurist and statesman; Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, composer; Charles Pictet de Rochemont, diplomat; as well as many others who, in the course of five centuries, had played a major role in Geneva’s history.

  More recently joining them were Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine author of fantastical short stories, and Sergio Vieira de Mello, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who was murdered by a terrorist bomb in Iraq in 2002.

  It was bitterly cold on the day that Federov’s ashes were to be interred. True to her promise, Alex had made certain that the cremation had taken place and that the urn containing Federov’s ashes was transferred to the funeral parlor that Federov had designated. The establishment seemed to have an Eastern clientele, as she dealt in Russian with a crafty funeral director named Rodzianko. In keeping with Federov’s wishes, she also ordered a headstone in black granite with Cyrillic letters and, in Russian style, an engraving bearing his likeness.

  “That,” she mused with ironic detachment as she signed the papers, “should scare passers-by for another century or two.”

  Alex attended the funeral ceremony with Rizzo. They walked a long, cold pathway and arrived punctually at the designated gravesite where a small knot of other attendees also stood. Alex didn’t recognize any of them. Unlike many such ceremonies that Alex had attended in her lifetime, there was no family and there were no tears. There was again a light snow falling, just as there had been for Robert’s interment.

  She was in a somber mood, but it was more associations than a sense of loss for the man being buried. As the ceremony began, she wondered if Federov had willed himself into dying, or tinkered with his drugs, while she was still in Switzerland. That way he would make certain that Alex would be in attendance. She was convinced that he had followed one of those courses. Similarly, when she declined to marry him, she was convinced he had released his tenuous grip on life.

  The pastor was a young man named LeClerc. He was tall, reed-thin in a heavy coat, and absurdly Harry Potterish with round glasses and an owlish gaze. He conducted the ceremony in French and Russian. His words were brief. A bronze urn rested above an open grave.

  It was minus 4 degrees Centigrade. It felt that cold in Fahrenheit.

  LeClerc spoke softly, rapidly muttering a prayer that no one could hear. Words on the
icy air, brief and appropriate, but impersonal. The knot of people shuffled uncomfortably. Alex counted them. There were eleven—a strange number, but an even dozen including the pastor.

  The snow thickened. Then the service was over.

  Alex had ordered a bouquet of roses for Federov’s send-off. She took one and laid it on the urn. The flower was frozen but it didn’t matter. Out of decency, Rizzo added a second. Other attendees pitched in, also. No one spoke to anyone else.

  Alex and Rizzo turned and started to retrace their path through the cemetery to the exit. They had gone several meters when Alex heard a voice from behind her, a man chasing after her and calling out.

  “Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle?”

  Alex turned and saw LeClerc hastily pursuing her.

  She stopped. So did Rizzo, who remained close. LeClerc arrived slightly breathless and reached to an inside jacket pocket.

  “Vous parlez français, madame?” he asked. “On peut parler français?” he asked.

  She answered, yes, of course. Bien sûr, she spoke French.

  LeClerc was a little breathless and a little befuddled. He searched several pockets and then found what he was looking for.

  “There were some special arrangements today,” the pastor explained in French. “I was asked, or I should say, the deceased requested before his death, that if you arrived here on this day, I should give you something.”

  “How did you know who I was?” Alex asked.

  “He described you.”

  “And what if I hadn’t been here?” she asked.

  “Well, I asked that too,” the minister said. “But the deceased was insistent. He said he knew you would come.”

  “Then what is it that you have for me?” Alex asked.

  “I was asked to give you this.”

  He handed her an envelope. It was addressed simply, in Federov’s shaky handwriting from his final days, perhaps even the final one.

  On the front of it was simply written ALEX LADUCA.

  She felt the envelope. It was too thin to be the ring again; she could tell even with a gloved hand. “My condolences in any event,” said the young priest.