“Like I said, Nate, whose side are you on?”
“Jesus.” He sighs. “You think this is some big political conspiracy all about Kathleen Polinski? You’re wrong. It’s about guys like Cage getting out of control and—”
The ice in her eyes stops him cold. “Because if you’re with the people who killed my family, you’ve picked wrong.”
THIRTY-NINE
Wednesday, 6:30 a.m., BST
A siren blares in the street below. Kat wakes, opening her eyes to a slatted blue light circling on the ceiling above her head.
“Did you manage to sleep?” asks Nancy, placing a steaming mug on the bedside table. Kat blinks, sits up, gets hit by a wall of sleep, and fights it. She remembers bathing, drying her hair, trying to stay awake, talking to Nancy. About what? Sleeping over. Nothing big. Nothing about what she needs to do.
Nate Sayer plans to send her back to the United States today to face homicide charges while Yulya and Max walk free.
Kat pushes back the covers, swings her legs out on the other side of the bed, goes to the window, looks through the blinds. Two police cars are parked at angles at each end of the street.
“What’s going on?” she says.
“They’ve blocked off South Audley Street and Grosvenor Square, where the embassy is,” says Nancy. “President Abbott’s coming for the signing on Saturday, and there’s been a bomb scare.”
Nancy sits on the bed. “Here. Hot, milky coffee. Just the way you like it.”
That was when she was a kid. Kat now takes her coffee strong and black. She says nothing, takes the mug, and wraps her hands around it, as if it were winter. “It’s early, right?”
“Just after six-thirty,” says Nancy. “You didn’t get here until three. You’ve been sleeping deeply.”
Kat sips the coffee, looks up at the window.
“Nate’s doing everything he can, Kat,” Nancy says, her voice lowered. “He’s afraid for you, here in London; you’ll be safer in Washington.”
I won’t, thinks Kat, but she doesn’t argue. “What time’s the flight?” she asks.
“A car’s coming at nine. The flight’s at eleven-thirty.”
Kat checks her watch. She’s got two and a half hours to get out of the apartment. She sits down on the bed next to Nancy.
“Where’s Suzy’s body?”
“The British police are keeping her—”
“I thought Nate said—”
“Things have changed.” Nancy’s eyes are edgy, flickering. “Nate told me what happened Friday night. It’s horrible.”
“I didn’t kill those people in the embassy,” Kat says. “They were dead when I got there.” Kat looks straight at Nancy, making sure her own face gives nothing away.
“I know. We’ll protect you.”
“Is Nate here?” Kat asks, putting the cup on the bedside table.
Nancy shakes her head. “He’ll be back soon. He got called away for the bomb scare.” Then, as if Nancy read Kat’s thoughts, she puts her hand on Kat’s knee and smiles. “And don’t think about running. They’ve put a couple of guys outside. It’s only because of Nate that you’re not under lock and key.”
Kat says nothing. She’s good with computers and material things, not so good with people.
“Nate told me a bit about last night, too,” says Nancy. “You’ve got to stop lashing out. Some things you can’t control.”
Kat squints her eyes and turns to face Nancy full on. “Do you think my mom killed herself?”
Nancy is taken by surprise and laughs nervously. “Why would you ask me that?”
Kat stands up again, leans on the windowsill, her back to the glass, looking into the room. “All this, and being with you.” Inside, the butterflies kick. She knows where’s she’s heading, knows it’ll be merciless.
“Helen was my best friend,” Nancy says. She gets up from the bed, stands next to Kat, and takes her hand. Kat glances outside. A police car turns off its flashing light. A policeman speaks into his cell phone.
“But your mom wasn’t an easy person. She had a dark side. I don’t mean evil or cruel. She had no self-esteem. John never let her step down from that pedestal where he treated her like a goddess. Helen found that difficult, because with a man like that, you never know how he’ll treat you when his worship stops.”
Nancy frowns at her own memories. “Helen tried to become what your father wanted her to be. Not what she really was.”
Kat eases her hand away, reaches to get her cup, sips it, and puts it on the sill. A second flashing light goes off. A police car door closes.
“I’m not saying anything bad about your father,” Nancy says. “He was a strong man. Often, I wish Nate had his backbone. But your mom and dad were two people who didn’t like to know about each other’s weaknesses.”
“So you think she did kill herself?”
“I think she did, Kat. Things get dark if you haven’t been able to be who you really are for twenty years.”
Nancy’s face is soft. Her eyes are damp. She’s wrestling with something. “Helen didn’t understand what her real human spirit wanted. She was living a life not suited to her.”
Kat looks out the window again. The police cars are moving away. “They’re leaving.”
Nancy follows Kat’s line of sight. Traffic is returning to the street. “The bomb scare must be over. Nate’ll be back soon, then. You’d better start getting ready.”
Kat takes Nancy’s elbow. “So what you’re saying is the day my father dies, the day Mom can get her character back, she goes upstairs, ties one end of a curtain cord to the banister, the other around her neck, jumps over, and hangs herself.” Nancy winces, but Kat keeps spelling it out. “And by killing herself, she’s abandoning her children who on that day will need her more than ever.”
She grips Nancy harder than she meant to.
“No one knows what went through your mom’s mind,” says Nancy calmly.
Kat touches the edge of her lip. She opens her arms toward Nancy and buries her head in her godmother’s shoulder.
“Aunt Nance,” says Kat, “you have to help me. Yesterday, I learned that my mom was murdered. The same people who shot Suzy drugged her, then they hung her and tried to make it look like suicide—”
“Stop,” interrupts Nancy, patting Kat’s back. “Don’t start thinking those horrible thoughts.”
“It’s the truth,” counters Kat, keeping her arms around Nancy, speaking softly, her mouth right next to her ear. “And you know it, don’t you, Aunt Nance? You always have.”
Nancy doesn’t reply. She keeps holding Kat.
“If I go back to the United States, those people who killed Suzy, Mom, and Dad are going to get away with it, and they’re going to put me in jail and tell lies about me killing people and try to get me executed with the same drugs that killed Mom.”
Nancy lifts her head. “I love you like a daughter.”
“Then you’ve got to help me.”
“I can’t.”
“Because of me or because of Nate?”
Nancy pulls back. “I can’t go against Nate.”
“Even though Nate’s been cheating on you for years?”
Nancy’s head drops, her eyes wet. Her hand fiddles with a hair clip. She looks so old, suddenly. “That’s just not true.”
“No?”
“Don’t try to come between me and Nate.”
Kat draws back, puts even more space between them, and folds her arms. “You want me to tell you how he cheats on you, Aunt Nance? You want me to tell you what your husband and my mom did together? You want me to tell you what deals he’s cutting with murderers? You want me to tell you what you already know about your husband but think you can keep hidden? How can you live in such a lie? You’re a good person. Is that why Nate and you have no children, because you couldn’t look them in the face and tell the truth about what . . .” Kat’s fired up to go on, but she stops as Nancy’s face turns white and skeletal. She reaches out for Ka
t to catch her balance.
Kat’s broken her. She bites the inside of her cheek to control her own emotions.
It’s done.
Nancy dabs her eyes. “You told me Saturday night about Dix Street and that man you lived with and how frightened you were about running away to a place like that again. I know the place I’ve built for myself is a hell inside my marriage with Nate. But it’s a place I’m too afraid to leave.”
There’s no resentment in Nancy’s tone. Only regret.
“I’m sorry,” says Kat softly.
“I want to help you, Kat. I do. But if you leave Nate’s protection, they’ll kill you.”
Kat’s look hardens. “They won’t know how to start.”
Nancy nods, the decision made. “I’ll show you how to get out of here.”
FORTY
Wednesday, 7:03 a.m., BST
She’s wearing clothes belonging to Nancy, low-heeled leather shoes, blue jeans hanging too loose on her, a short-sleeved red blouse, and a dark woolen jacket hanging over her arm, under which she’s holding Nancy’s Glock Model 38, registered on diplomatic license to the American embassy.
It might be a .38, but it takes a shortened .45 cartridge, which gives it more power. It seems from the way Max Grachev examines the weapon that he knows that, too.
Kat went straight to his place from the Sayers’, and Grachev let her in. She leveled the Glock at him and asked him what he was doing at the concert hall the night Suzy died.
“As I expected, still picking at those old wounds,” he says, relaxed, wearing a beige silk and cashmere suit and an open-neck red shirt.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Don’t worry. Russia has been doing it for centuries.”
He stands in front of Kat, blocking light from the street-level window of his apartment. He’s left the coffee table in between them, not invading her space.
He brings out three photographs and spreads them on the table.
One she has seen before, of Grachev, his arm around an elegant, older, unsmiling woman with the backdrop of a snow-drenched forest.
The second looks like the Grachev family around a dinner table, with a spread of drinks and food, everyone clinking glasses. The older woman again; a gaunt, thin-faced man with streaks of white in his hair; a younger Max Grachev, with a dark mustache, broad shoulders in an ice white T-shirt, his eyes mournful, almost poetic, staring somewhere far away; a pretty young teenager in a pink tank top, all her concentration on making a sketch on a paper napkin; and a taller girl, in her early twenties perhaps, with blond hair tied back from a high forehead and penetrating eyes taking an inventory of everyone around her.
The third photograph she’s seen many times before. Her father had it. Sayer has it on the wall of his apartment. It is Kat’s dad and Nate Sayer with a group of people in Red Square in Moscow.
“Now,” Grachev says. “Are you beginning to understand what this is about?” He hasn’t threatened, hasn’t mentioned Suzy again. There’s been no menace. Nancy’s pistol hasn’t worried him.
“No,” she says bluntly. “I don’t understand at all.”
Grachev squats down so their faces are at the same level. His finger hovers over the first picture. “This is my mother. Her name is Tiina Alekseevna Gracheva. She did not want this photograph taken. That is why she scowls.”
His finger moves to the second photograph. “This is my family. My stepfather, Vadim Andreevich Grachev, loyal to my mother, but when it comes to brainpower, out of his depth. My younger sister, Lara, totally beautiful. She is now an archeologist, one of the youngest professors at St. Petersburg State University.”
He smiles proudly at Kat. “She’s a little bit crazy, I always say. She’s working on a project on the Luga River, a mysterious burial mound called Shum-gora, outside the old city of Great Novgorod.”
His face darkens. “And Yulya, whom you know. She is a nasty piece of work. I’ll tell you how nasty. She dated a Russian student when she was going to Columbia in New York. Yulya cheated on him, and they split up. Then when he began dating again, she beat the shit out of his new girlfriend. My sister is not someone to cross.”
“Is that how she got RingSet over you?”
“Ruthlessness is a trait we Russians admire, and she is better at it than I.”
His eyes drop down to the photographs again, and he moves onto the third one in Red Square. “Here is your father; there is Nate Sayer, thinner with more hair; and here, slimmer in those days, is my mother. She was an interpreter working for the KGB, as all Soviet interpreters did. Your father was an employment lawyer then. He came over to see if there were any areas in which the two great superpowers could work together.” He laughs, scratching his right temple in bemusement. “Anything to stop us blowing each other to pieces.”
Grachev withdraws his hands from the table, stands up, and steps back. Kat stares stone-faced at the photograph of Tiina, a young woman, firm and elegant face. Blond hair hangs loose to the shoulders, and bangs straggle over her eyes.
“You don’t believe me?” Grachev asks.
“There’s nothing to believe, unless you tell me why it matters.”
“Your father and my mother had an affair,” he says without expression. “I am the result. Your grandmother in Lancaster, Ohio—she’s my grandmother, too.”
Grachev’s looking for a reaction. Inside, she compartmentalizes. Kat’s outward expression registers nothing.
“Doesn’t interest me, Max,” she says casually. “There’s no replacing Suzy with a half brother.”
He points to the sofa. “This isn’t easy. May I sit down?”
“No,” says Kat. “Let’s deal with this factually. First, you’re not an English cop. You’re on some sort of personal mission.”
“Right. I’m a Russian cop, but I was also keeping track of you and Suzy—”
“How did you know Charlotte Thomas was Suzy?” interrupts Kat.
“My mother found out. She told me. I checked it out through our London embassy. Once confirmed, I worked on getting loaned out to the Metropolitan Police.”
“Why?”
“To get to know her. To find out more about my real father.”
“But you thought he was dead.”
“Of course. I read everything in the newspaper. It was—devastating.”
“How old are you? And what date was that photograph taken?”
“I am nineteen months older than Suzy, if that’s what you’re thinking. Our father—”
“Don’t.”
“I’ll call him John, if it makes you feel better. In Moscow, that winter, John had just asked your mother, Helen Mitchell, to marry him, but she turned him down. When John and Tiina slept together, he wasn’t cheating on your mother. John’s love was still alive, but the relationship had broken up. A few months later, he asked your mother again, and she accepted.”
Kat doesn’t respond.
“Why did John fall for Tiina?” continues Grachev. “For sanctuary? For lost love? To relieve sexual frustration? Who knows, particularly as it was my mother’s job in those days to seduce foreign visitors. How did she get pregnant? Why did she not abort me? These are not questions for a son to ask his mother.”
Kat stays quiet. But she’s examining Grachev. His long, handsome face and his contagious enthusiasm are like her dad’s.
He sits on the sofa, eyes toward the floor, hands clasped between his knees.
“I want to tell you about your dad,” he says.
“No.” Kat, still on her feet, stares straight at the marble fireplace with fake coals in the grate. “You will tell me what you know about the last moments of my sister’s life.”
They’re both caught by surprise as their eyes meet in the mantelpiece mirror. Kat detects a flash of fear in him.
“You want to peel the world like a fruit. But the world doesn’t work like that.”
“Why were you with her at the concert?”
“Kat, stop this.”
“Why did you sit through the second half without her,” she asks calmly, “when you knew she was missing?”
“Not like this.”
“Yes, Max, like this.”
“You asked about Yulya. You asked how she stole RingSet from me. Yulya is a new breed of Russian patriot; she has no morality except—”
“No, Max,” interrupts Kat. “Don’t change the subject. You, not Yulya, were at the same concert as Suzy. You were in row G. Suzy was in row C. You could see her. In the second half, you knew she wasn’t there. But you sat through it.”
“I stayed because I knew Suzy had been shot. If I had moved, I would have destroyed my cover.”
“You’re a policeman, Max,” says Kat contemptuously, her back still against him. “It’s your job to—”
He’s on his feet, his expression hard. “I will spell it out for you,” he says, his eyes flaring with anger. “And you will listen. My sister, Yulya, doesn’t choose violence. She was born with it. She takes what she wants when she wants. She doesn’t reflect. She studies people only for what she can extract from them. She uses killing, torture, and sexual promiscuity. She has her eye on one goal, and that is to control RingSet, because it is the creation of my mother, who protects her. Do you understand the complexity of the person I am talking about?”
“Sounds like your average serial killer to me.”
“Kat, you’ve got to understand.”
“No. I have to deal with her, not understand her.”
Grachev’s expression is raw; she sees pleading in his eyes.
“No one takes on our family company and wins,” he says softly. “That’s why Suzy died—because she had the power to destroy RingSet.”
At that moment, Grachev’s cell phone rings from the mantel.
“Excuse me,” he says, walking over. He picks it up, checks the caller ID, and frowns as if he knows who it is. He presses the answer button.
The History Book Page 17