by Noel Hynd
He smiled.
“Blue,” he said. “When you came to see me in Geneva last time, you said you liked blue.”
Yes, blue. She now recalled and better understood his question from several weeks earlier.
Blue, like the Nile. Blue like the sky. Blue like sapphires on the most stunning engagement ring she had ever seen in her life.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “I didn’t know there was a woman in your life again. Who is this for?”
Her eyes rose to meet his and her mouth opened to speak, but his words preceded any she could utter.
“It’s for you, Alex. Will you marry me?” he asked.
“What?”
“I’m asking you to marry me,” he said. “It is a serious proposal.”
Almost gasping, almost angry, thoroughly flummoxed, she struggled to answer. “Yuri… I…”
“Please say yes,” he said. He moved a hand to her and settled it on her knee. He touched her with obvious affection. He was too sick for lechery and time was too short for games.
She looked back down to the ring.
It was jewelry more befitting a movie star or a member of European royalty, not a working woman from southern California who had gone through college on scholarships and now worked in law enforcement. Again, she was no expert, but in the past she had had enough experience on a professional basis with jewelry to know that this piece probably clocked in at seventy-five to a hundred thousand dollars.
She sat before him nonplussed. The reality of the moment was sinking in upon her, the realization that he was not kidding and the offer was indeed serious.
“If you say yes,” he added with surprising gentleness, “it would be the most joyous moment of my life.”
“Yuri, I don’t know what to say.”
“Then say yes. I will call a priest whom I know here in Geneva. And we will do fast paperwork and make it official. We could do it here in the hospital as early as tomorrow. I have paperwork that has been prepared. All you would have to do is sign and-”
“My reaction isn’t so much yes or no,” she stammered, “as it is that such a proposal is completely out of the question.”
“Why?”
“For more reasons than I could explain.”
“Give me one reason,” he said.
The words came out almost reflexively. “I’m not in love with you,” she said.
He snorted a little laugh. “At this point,” he said, “what does that matter, hey?”
She groped for more words, more of an explanation, but instead was more at a loss for them than any previous time in her life. “I couldn’t possibly marry you,” she finally expanded.
She abruptly closed the ring box and set it back on the side table.
Federov was, however, neither hurt nor perturbed.
“Be realistic,” he continued. “This is my gift to you. If I am in love with you, what does it matter whether you love me? What would-?”
“Yuri, please. Stop this or I’ll leave.”
“How much time do I have left on this earth?” he pressed. “No one knows. You believe in God? Well, your God is in the process of taking me. So you give me a small gift before I die, and I will give you tremendous gifts that will last your lifetime.”
He paused and moved a hand to the ring box. He fingered it but didn’t open it.
“Let’s be honest,” he continued. “I am a very wealthy man. See that drawer? “ he asked, indicating the same drawer that had held the Tiffany bag. “All my financial information is in there. Bank accounts. Some in Ukraine, some in New York. Most of them safe here in Switzerland. You will also see letters I have on file with lawyers here in Geneva. You would have access to everything I own if you were my wife. I have a will. I have already named you as a beneficiary.”
“I don’t want your money, Yuri,” she said. “When it comes down to it, I can only be honest with you. I am appalled by the way you acquired your wealth. How many people did you betray? How many did you kill?”
“A small number compared with how many tried to harm or kill me,” he answered. “I have taken care of my daughters who live in Canada,” he said, “although they do not know it.”
“They should inherit your wealth, not me,” she said. “They’re your flesh and blood. They suffered because of you. They deserve whatever you can give them.”
“They hate me,” he said matter-of-factly. “Do you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you,” she said.
“There then, you see?” he said, attempting to close an argument around her. “I want to leave my fortune to someone who doesn’t hate me. Do you understand what a wealthy woman you would be, what a wealthy widow you will be in a short period of time?”
“Yuri, I don’t think like that. And it was about a year ago that I had to get myself past the death of my fiance in Kiev. So-”
“I believe I’m worth more than twenty-five million dollars,” he continued. “Most of it in cash.”
She blew out a long breath. “Yuri, that’s not my idea of marriage,” Alex said. “Material wealth is not what motivates me.”
“What motivates you, then?” he asked. “I’m not sure I understand. Wealth is wealth. Wealth is power. Think of all the charities you could finance, if that is your goal. You would never have to work again in your life. You are young. After my passing, which will be soon, you would be free to do as you wish. You-”
“Yuri, I hate to be so brutally frank. But I’m not in love with you! I couldn’t marry a man I didn’t love. It might seem quaint and old-fashioned to you, but that’s how I am. That’s who I am.”
“The man who died in Kiev…? The man you just mentioned…?”
“Robert.”
“Did you love him?”
“Of course I did!”
“And you still miss him?”
She opened her mouth to answer yes, but her voice broke before she could find the words. “Of course I do!” she said again, almost indignantly. “Why do you even ask me that?”
Several seconds ticked by. Finally, he spoke again.
“You know, my precious Alexandra,” he said, “my whole life, whenever I have tried to show my best innermost desires, to be generous, to be a morally good man, I have faced contempt, scorn, and disbelief. And whenever I gave in to my most base desires I was praised, respected, and encouraged. It is no different now.”
“I will not marry you,” she said. “I will not even consider it. The discussion is over.”
“All right,” he said after a pause. A flicker of a smile and, “But then, please allow a grievously ill man a final fantasy. If you would.”
“What would that be?” Alex asked.
“Put my ring on your finger. Let me see you wear it, if even for a moment before you say a final no to my offer and hand it back. Before the darkness arrives and the long night claims me, let me hold in my head the image of you wearing my ring, even if the reality of a marriage will never come to be. Let me die with that vision.”
“Yuri, I don’t know-”
“Please,” he said softly, from dry lips below beseeching eyes. “What does it cost you to give me this small amount of comfort?”
To his question, she had no immediate answer. So, “All right,” she said softly.
She removed the ring from the box under his careful gaze. Fighting back second thoughts and with a little voice within her screaming that she should know better than to do something as wildly inappropriate as this, she slid the ring onto the third finger of her left hand, where Robert’s ring had once been.
Not surprisingly, Federov had chosen the band size perfectly. The ring felt exquisite and repugnant at the same time.
She looked up and her gaze met his. He was looking back and forth from her hand to her eyes, then back again. He reached forward and took her hand, the one with the ring.
“You’re sure,” he said, “the answer is no?”
“The answer is no,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He pulled her hand to him and brought it to his face. He pressed his lips to the back of her hand, then released it. She withdrew her hand from him.
“Very well,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to accept.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“One never knows.”
With her right hand, she pulled the ring off her finger. Respectfully, she replaced it in the ring box, closed the box, and handed it back to him.
“Be careful with this,” she said. “It has a great monetary value. You don’t want it to disappear.”
He took it and returned it to the drawer. “It barely matters,” he said. “Maybe I’ll give it to the nurse.” Alex wasn’t sure if he was kidding. “She might like to sell it.”
He dropped it in the drawer and stared at the drawer. He looked lost again. Alex noticed a fresh line of sweat across his brow. She waited for him to come back again. In time, he turned to her.
“I wonder then,” he said. “When the time comes, there is another thing that needs to be done. And I have no one else I can ask. No one else that I can trust.”
“Tell me what it is,” she said.
“My instructions are that my body is to be cremated,” he said. “Then, afterward, there is a place nearby here,” he said, “a very pleasant, peaceful place, a section in Geneva, just to the south of the center of the city. It’s called Plainpalais.” His voiced trailed off for a moment. “Do you know it?” he asked.
“I’m familiar with it,” she said.
“I have all that paperwork in the drawer here too,” he said. “I have made all the arrangements. So when the time comes…” With a weak smiled, he added, “Not before.”
She nodded. “Not before,” she said. “I’ll make sure that everything is done properly.”
“And you will be there?”
“If I can be,” she said. “I promise.”
“Thank you. You are more kind to me than I deserve,” he said. “Will you also forgive me? ” he asked.
“For what?”
“For my greatest sin, my greatest malefaction ever.”
“I’m not following,” she said.
“No?” Federov asked.
“No.”
“I thought you might have figured it out by now.”
A deep feeling of unease began to creep over her, as if deep within her she knew what was coming next.
“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alex said. “Figure what out?”
“Robert’s death,” he said. He held a long beat, and then he said very clearly, “I was the person responsible.”
“What?”
“And the attack on Barranco Lajoya, also,” he said. “Completely responsible.”
An extraordinary silence crashed down upon the room.
“I ordered the attack in Kiev,” he continued. “I ordered it, organized it, and financed it. Then I did everything I could to blame it on my opposition, the filoruskies. I wanted to get back at your government for the war they waged against me, for expelling me from America, for siding with that swine Putin, for driving me out of business, for making me into an exile in my own land.”
With wide eyes and a sense of disbelief, Alex listened to him, his familiar voice, now racked with pain that was as severe spiritually as it was physically. He was assuming complete culpability for the carnage in Kiev that had shattered her life as well as so many others, the attack that had rewritten in blood one of the worst atrocities ever aimed at her country.
And then he moved along to Venezuela.
“In Venezuela,” he continued. “I had the local fascist militia come to try to kill you. I felt you were the instrument of the government, the representative of all my enemies. So they came for you; they murdered some other people, but you escaped again. It was only later that I understood that you were only doing a job. That Comrade Cerny was my enemy. And the disgraceful Putin as well.”
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.