Razmik sat at the driver's end of the space, leaning up against the grill and talking with the Kokoureks through the grill to the driver's compartment. Homer had sidled up close to them as well and was listening rather than talking. As O'Connor watched his strange ward he could not decipher if Homer was attempting to garner what he could from a conversation that revolved around the coming action or if he simply wanted to be close to these men he did not trust. As he looked at the expression on Homer's cryptic face he came to the conclusion that it was probably a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. Homer was complex, for all the priest knew there might be bits of unknown columns C, D and E factoring into Homer's decision to sit near the other men. O'Connor was happy about his decision to do so because he wanted to have a moment to talk with Ardia.
The beautiful young woman was staring into some distant place that lay beyond the cold steel wall of the van.
'You look worried child,' O'Connor said softly.
Ardia looked at him in the startled way of the suddenly aroused deep sleeper. It took her a heartbeat, it seemed, to decide where she was and who he was.
'Oh, I'm just thinking.'
O'Connor scooted a little closer to her, still well out of her personal space, but close enough to give their conversation a sense of privacy.
'Can I ask what you were thinking about? They didn't look like pleasant thoughts.'
Ardia met his gaze and O'Connor could see tears and deep emotion sitting just behind that strong exterior. She said, 'I'm worried about Abraham.'
'I understand that Abraham is quite the warrior from what Razmik has said.'
Ardia nodded, 'he is. He's one of the best I know. But he's in trouble now and it's my fault really.'
O'Connor's eyebrows went up, 'how so?'
Ardia said, 'he came here looking for information about the Golem because of some faint notion that he might be able to help me find my mother's killer. That he might be somehow connected. There was nothing factual in the notion. It was pure speculation. But he came here to try and help with my problem. Now he's in trouble and there is absolutely no reason to think we can get him out of this alive.'
'You're saying you don't think you can overcome your rival here?'
Ardia shook her head, 'no. I am extremely confident we can hammer the sh... I am very sure we can beat them. I am not very sure we can beat them and get to Abraham before they do something bad to him... if they haven't done something bad already, that is.'
O'Connor said, 'Razmik has mentioned nothing specifically about a ransom...'
Ardia ran her hands over her face and through her hair, 'there hasn't been anything specifically mentioned abut a ransom. It is very possible they don't want money, they might want concessions. It might be as simple as insisting we trade solely with them in a particular market or as complicated as exchanging territory. I don't know these people. Razmik does, but he can be very tight lipped about things when he's thinking. And he's thinking hard right now.'
'He cares about Abraham then?'
'Oh yes. Raz doesn't have a lot of people he's close to. There's me, I guess, and my mother was definitely special to him. After that there's Abraham and a handful of partners and old aquaintances that he mightn't see for years at a time. Abraham is very important to him. I think that's why he's so deep in thought. I don't think he wants to let himself make a bad business decision that's driven by emotion but I don't think he can see the line at the moment.'
O'Connor hesitated a moment before deciding to say, 'and where do you see that line?'
Ardia looked at him, a little taken aback by the question. She said, 'there is no line. Abraham wasn't here on business, he was here helping us with a personal matter. And, that aside, he's our friend. He would give his life for Raz. I really, truly believe that. We have to give them whatever we have to to get him back.'
O'Connor absorbed this and then gave a very small nod of approval.
Ardia turned to the priest again. She looked at him but it was more to his chest than his eyes. She hesitated and let out a faint sigh before saying 'you knew my mother?'
O'Connor nodded, 'yes. I am very sad to hear of her passing.'
'How did you know her?' Ardia asked, her body uncharacteristically stiff with tension.
O'Connor studied her. She was rigid to the point of spasm, not moving in the slightest while she waited for his response. What was the cause of this sudden and inexplicable stress? He noticed that she was watching him very carefully and knew he had to answer quickly. He said, 'I met her many years ago when she was just a girl. When I was really just a stupid boy as well.'
Avrils eyes narrowed, 'when? How long ago?'
O'Connor raised his hand to his face and massaged his crinkled forehead as he thought. He said, 'when? It was before... let me see... It must have been the early 60s.'
Avril asked, 'how old were you? How old was she when you met?'
O'Connor said, 'well, I can remember her. She was little. She was definitely no older than ten years. She might have been younger. I'm no good with guessing kids' ages. She was little though, and all alone. As for me, that was so long ago. I was just a boy trying to be a man at the time which, if I was anything like every other boy who ever decided he was a man, means I must have been in my late teens. But I can't be certain sure about that.'
Avril relaxed then, 'how did you meet?'
O'Connor's eyes glazed in recollection, 'well, I can tell you about that. I was driving down some poor excuse for a road. I can't say for sure if it was Georgia or Armenia, but it was definitely some place on the border because it had the look of both countries without properly having the look of either of them. The weather was terrible, there was a storm brewing terribly. And trust me, with cars in the 60s, especially the rickety old thing I was driving, there was no comfort being out in the wind and the rain that night. I was considering pulling in somewhere.'
'Wait,' said Ardia, 'you can't have this right. You, a teen-aged Irish boy, was driving unescorted through Soviet Georgia in the 1960s? What could you possibly have been doing there? How could you possibly have been there?'
O'Connor fixed his eyes on some particular point on the opposite wall of the interior of the van and said, his eyes never moving, 'I won't talk about what exactly I was doing there, it was a different time in my life. Let's just say I was there, that I had my means.'
Ardia nodded her acquiescence.
O'Connor mirrored the nod and went on, 'as I was saying, I was driving down this God awful excuse for a road, leaning over the steering wheel as though that was going to help me see through the rain. Then my headlights licked over something. Now, the lights weren't great and rain made them a lot worse, so I couldn't be sure what I saw. What I thought I had seen was a child, huddled at the side of the road, miles and miles from the nearest village.'
O'Connor relinquished his visual stranglehold on the spot on the wall of the van and turned to look at Ardia. 'I wasn't supposed to stop. Don't ask me who had not-supposed me. But I wasn't. But then I had to. What else was I going to do? A child on the side of the road in those conditions was almost certain to die if I didn't intervene.'
Ardia didn't say a word. She hardly breathed.
'So I put on the breaks and went surfing along the water that coated the muddy track. Then I went reversing on back and stopped alongside the huddled little mess. I thought it was just a rug when I saw it close up. I thought I had been mistaken. But when I opened the door of the car I could see the shivering little face peering out from the folds of the rug and, I don't know why, but I told her to get in. She didn't oblige all that fast either. She gave it a good hard thought. But then, quick as anything, she and her pile were sitting on the passenger seat, dripping all over everything.'
Ardia had an Inspector Columbo look on her face, turning her head and twisting her eyebrows in a kind of forced realisation. She said, 'a rug? What did the rug look like?'
O'Connor smiled in surprise and then laughed sof
tly, 'the rug? You're asking me about the rug some fifty years after the fact? I don't know that there's much I can tell you. Maybe if you'd asked me forty years after I'd seen it I might have been able to help you.' He laughed.
Ardia scowled and O'Connor sighed. He said, 'era, it was fine. I can remember that because I couldn't figure out what she was doing with something so fine. But it was dirty and rolled all around her. It might have been red, there might have been a little white or black showing here and there.'
Ardia sucked in her breath sharply. He looked at her curiously, 'what's the significance?'
She shook her head and gestured for him to continue his story.
He shook his head in response and said, 'why don't you tell me to give you a little something back, eh?'
'What do you mean?' she asked.
'Well, I might be able to tell you a few things you didn't know about your mother. But you might be able to tell us both a whole lot of things we don't know. I think you'll be able to make use of this a lot faster than I can.'
With that he reached into his coat pocket and produced the diary.
Chapter 34
Ardia's breath stuck in her throat. For a moment she couldn't believe what she was looking at. Hadn't the point of this whole expedition been to retrieve the diary from the priest. In all of the excitement it had slipped from her mind, blown away by the winds of change.
She reached out tentatively, almost reverently, and wordlessly took the book from the priest. She could feel her mouth hanging stupidly open and closed it. She couldn't take her eyes from the book in her hands. It felt like an artefact. In many ways it was. Her mother's past had long been a mystery to her. In this book, a book that had been secreted and guarded from her by her mother for her entire life, may lie the answers to her mother's origin, Ardia's own parentage and, perhaps most important of all, some indication as to who was behind her mother's murder.
'I can't believe it,' she said, hating how stupid and breathless she sounded.
O'Connor smiled patiently, 'I have translated some segments but it has been a painfully slow process. I... I hope you don't mind the intrusion...'
Ardia shook her head, 'no. My mother wanted you to have this. I have to admit though, if I had know what that package had contained I don't think I could have sent it to you.'
Ardia pried her gaze away from the book in her hand to look O'Connor in the face. He could see tears welling in the corners of her eyes. She said, 'my mother was incredibly secretive with me. I know almost nothing about her past. I think she was protecting me from something. I can barely believe I might have a chance to learn... about my past.' She resisted the urge to tell him how much she wanted to find out who her father might have been.
O'Connor did not flinch from the emotion on her face. He smiled placidly and said, 'well then, let's begin shall we?'
'Where should I start?'
O'Connor opened the book at a random page and said, 'here is as good as any place.'
Ardia took a deep breath and started to read, he voice trembling slightly.
'Um... The twenty-something of June, 1963. I can't read the handwriting very well. Sorry, I'll go on. Ah... I am bored and since nothing seems to happen to me, while I sit in my box and wait for the evening so Razmik will visit, I have decided to write about things that have already happened to me. I have been thinking a lot about the boy recently. The boy from the night in the rain. I don't remember it as well as I used to and I am afraid that if I don't write it down soon then I won't remember it at all.'
'It was the second night since my escape, I think. It might have been the third. What I do remember for sure was the rain. It was raining more heavily that I had ever seen in my life. When I lived in the other place we didn't see the outside much. We were taken outside for exercises sometimes and we had windows in some of the rooms so I had seen rain before. But it was never anything like what I saw that night. That night the rain was so heavy that being outside was like jumping in water. We had a swimming pool in the place before and I fell in once, still wearing my clothes. I remember how wet I had been when one of the men pulled me out just seconds later. How quickly I had been soaked all the way through my clothes. Being outside that night was almost as bad as that. It was hard to keep your eyes open and, when you could, the rain was so heavy you couldn't see through it.'
'I had been walking on the road and I was going to walk all night. But when the rain came and I couldn't even see where I was going I decided I had to stop. I sat at the side of the road. My bottom was so wet already that it didn't seem to matter if I sat on the wet ground or not. I tried holding the blanket I had taken from the wall in the Doctor's office over my head but it was no good. The rain was so heavy it just poured through the blanket. In the end I kind of wrapped it around me. It wasn't any good for the rain but at least it kept the wind off me a little bit.'
'And I sat there. I just sat there in the rain for hours. There weren't any cars out in the storm so I had nothing to distract me from the hole in my stomach. I hadn't eaten since I left the other place. I was so so hungry. And so cold and wet. I was getting dizzy and couldn't feel my feet. I think I was going to die. I think I would have died if the boy hadn't come along.'
'When I saw the light coming through the rain I hid under the blanket even more. I was afraid it might be the men come to take me back to the place from before. I couldn't help peaking out at the car as it went past. That was when I knew it wasn't anyone from the place before. It was only a little car. In the place before they only had big Jeeps and vans and trucks and the all had the picture with the tree on them. I had never seen a car like this one before except in pictures.'
'The car went right past me and then I was sorry I had hidden. I was so miserable I was probably going to die from the misery if the cold and the hunger didn't do it first. I should have stood up and waved. I could have begged for food or help. That's why I couldn't believe what happened next. The car stopped. Well, it didn't really stop. It kind of floated along on the water on the road until it wasn't going any more. Then it came backwards to me.'
The car stopped alongside me. Then the door opened and I saw the boy. He wasn't really a boy. He was a man-boy. He was big like a man but he looked like a boy. I had never seen anyone like that before. In the place before there were only children and big men.'
'He spoke to me. I think it was Russian he was speaking but he wasn't very good at it. I couldn't figure out what he was saying to me. Then he said something in English. He said it to himself. He said something like “dammit, how do you say...”. My English is really good. It was one of the things that the doctor got me to learn. I think he did it to see how quickly I could learn English. When I learned it really fast it was one of the only times I think he was happy with me. Learning things quickly was one of the only things I could do that seemed to make him happy.'
'The boy was surprised when I started talking English to him. He took me into the car with him and we started driving again.'
Ardia stopped reading and looked at O'Connor with questioning eyes. He nodded and said, 'it seems to me you are going to find out the end of the story I was telling.'
Ardia said, 'this is you? She's talking about meeting you that night?'
O'Connor nodded and said, 'it sounds like it. Go on, go on now. I want to hear more. I have been waiting quite a while to get some mileage out of that journal.'
Ardia opened her mouth to say something else and then she seemed to realise there was nothing else she could think to say. She turned her face back to the book in her lap and started to read again.
'He gave me some bread and cheese and I think that was one of the ways he saved my life that night. I was so hungry I ate all of it. I don't think he meant me to eat all of it. I don't think he expected me to. When I saw he had wanted some of the food I said I was sorry and he said he would stop at a farm somewhere and buy food.'
'We drove. I don't how long we drove for. And we talked for a while. He was very n
ice. I was so grateful to him. Then I fell asleep. I don't know how long I was asleep either. When I woke up it was still night time so I can't have slept longer than a few hours. I don't sleep much. That was another thing the doctor was interested in. I felt a lot better after eating and sleeping. We talked some more. Then we saw lights up ahead of us. They weren't the lights of a car. It was a house. It was a farm house and it looked like the people in the house might be getting up to go to work on the farm. The boy stopped the car. He told me he was going to ask the people in the house if they had any food or milk that they would sell him. He told me he was going to try and get some cream for me. I remember the way he smiled when he said this. He was so good. I was so happy he had found me.'
'He wasn't inside very long when the vans came. Two of them. The vans would have made me nervous anyway. I hid low in the car. When one of the vans stopped by the car I could see the drawing on the side. It was the same drawing that was on all the cars at the place from before. The tree in the circle, standing on a hand. They were men from the place before. They never looked at the car, they just went inside.'
'I knew they were looking for me. I knew it. I knew they would be back out in a little while to look in the car. And if they found me they would take me back. I knew I was sad and wet and cold and scared and hungry in the new place. Outside. But I also knew it was better than going back to the place before. So I opened the door to run away. Then I stopped. I thought about the boy. I thought about how nice he had been and I wanted to remember him. On the floor between the seats was a small book with a cross on it. I took it. I feel bad about it now but then I was just so scared and so in a hurry that I just took it. Then I ran away, back into the horrible night. At least the rain had stopped.'
'I still have the book. It's a book of stories about a man named Jesus. And there is a name on the front page with some writing. I think it's the boy's name. And I think the other words are where he is from. I know Ireland is a place. That was in our books. And his name is Connor. Connor O'Connor.'
Episode 4: The Golem (The New Breed Chronicles) Page 2