After Yekaterina

by K. L. Abrahamson

  His foot slipped. He slammed into the building again. This wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to work because his shoulder was too injured and he’d lost too much blood. He was going lose his hold and fall and die just as surely as if Antonov and Alenin had killed him. Already his hands were freezing and the wind stripped all warmth from him.

  He shook himself. That was the kind of thinking that ended empires, it was not the kind of thinking that the original Yekaterina had when she tried for greatness beyond anything ever seen in a woman. It might have resulted in a country dreaming of past splendor, but Russian blood ran in his veins. That was worth something. For Yekaterina, he was a fighter.

  Ignoring the tearing pain in his shoulder, his feet scrabbled again and caught something firmer. He threw himself up just as his foothold broke free, and caught his torso across the roof edge. The roof edge wall cut into his wound.

  The pain pulsed through him and he couldn’t breathe. He kicked and rolled onto the roof to stare up at the heaving clouds. When he could breathe again, he hauled himself to his feet and waved back at the moon that was Adelit’s face and checked for his weapon. Still there.

  He hurried to the trap door on the roof and tugged on the worn wood handle. The door didn’t budge.

  “Derr`mo!”

  He knelt beside the door and tried it again. No movement.

  He knocked softly, then harder, pausing to press his ear to the edge of the opening. Maybe there was a sound but it was hard to tell in the wind and with his teeth chattering in the cold.

  He knocked again, softly. “Khan. It’s Khazakov. Let me in.”

  Then he stepped back, weapon drawn in case he’d been wrong.

  Chapter 15

  The night was cold, the wind off the mountains stiff so that Kazakov’s bloody shirt and trousers blew around him like flags and he was freezing as the stinging snow swirled around him on the flat roof. The distant lights of New Moscow were a glow through the haze of flakes like an imagined world. There were clotheslines here, too, but most were empty. What remained of the wash looked like medical bandages that ran a long, ragged beard through the wind. A small shack leaned on one corner of the roof and the floor seemed to slope underfoot as if the roof had sunk in past rains.

  The slick sound of a well-oiled bolt came through the trap door and Kazakov tensed with the pistol ready. The trap door lifted a few inches exposing only inky blackness beyond. Kazakov lunged forward and caught the edge of the door, yanking it back so it fell into the snow. From within the blackness, he faced the well-oiled steel of another antique rifle.

  “Kazakov?” Khan’s voice was a hoarse whisper.

  “Khan.” He came around the edge of the trapdoor and peered down at his friend. Khan’s normally solemn face was grave and pale as the night was dark around him. Even the darkness couldn’t hide the huge circles bruising Khan’s eyes.

  “They’ve got Anfisa and the children. I won’t give myself up until they release them.”

  “I know, old friend. I know.” Kazakov stuck the gun back in his waistband and climbed down through the trap door into a warm room that smelled of—old wool and spice. In the almost total dark at the base of the ladder he caught Khan’s shoulders and felt the little M.E. shiver. “So now we free them, yes?”

  Khan nodded. He wore a glowing white night shirt shoved into a pair of hastily pulled on trousers. Kazakov’s vision adjusted enough to make out Khan’s usually neat hair standing up wildly around his head. Fear and gratitude warred on his face. Finally, he composed himself and looked Kazakov up and down. “And you? Your wound? How did you get here?”

  Kazakov shrugged. “I ran. I jumped.”

  Khan frowned and pulled Kazakov’s shirt open, then glanced up at him. “You abuse my work.”

  “And you’re in my way if you want to free your family.” Kazakov tugged his shirt closed. “Show me where they are.”

  He buttoned his shirt as he followed Khan out onto a balcony that ran around the house’s interior courtyard. Khan tugged him back against the wall. “They can see movement unless we are in the deepest shadows. I think one keeps watch here and one guards the front of the house. He nearly caught me once, but I shot back and may have caught him.”

  “Then you’ve made my job easier for me.” Kazakov looked down at Khan’s ancient weapon and gained a new respect for the M.E. But then, there was a reason the old weapons were treasured by the tribal families. He’d just never thought of Khan as connected that way.

  “Describe the layout,” Kazakov asked.

  “The stairs are there,” Khan pointed beyond the bare branches of an apricot tree that grew up from the courtyard. By the low humps in the snow, the courtyard was likely a garden of potted plants in the summer. A low, boxy structure stood in one corner of the courtyard just outside of the balcony cover. “The bedrooms are all up here. The parlor is there.” Khan pointed to one side. “Kitchen is at the rear of the house, of course. The clinic used to be a prayer room.” He pointed at a doorway masked in balcony shadows that would have a clear view of the stairs down from where he stood.

  Kazakov nodded. “Is there any other way down?”

  Khan hesitated. “There is an old stairway that leads to the kitchen, but that brings you out below us, directly into their line of sight.”

  Not a good option, but then neither was going down those courtyard stairs. If he was younger he might chance a leap off the balcony, but he wasn’t younger and he’d already reopened his wound.

  “All right. I want you to give me ten minutes to get down the kitchen stairs and into position below. In the meantime, I want you to go up to the roof and tell Adelit to signal the men out front to start shooting. Then get back here as fast as you can and cover me. We’ll split their attention and just maybe have a chance to take them.”

  Agreeing, Khan told him where to find the stairs to the kitchen and then faded back into the shadows toward the roof ladder. Kazakov followed the balcony and found the door to a small storeroom. He slipped inside into darkness and the smell of cedar and had to feel his way past shelves to a low, servant’s door at the rear. He pushed it open, its hinges creaking, and found himself looking into a pit of more darkness.

  No windows. No lights that he dared flick on. Only velvet darkness ready to swallow him down. He slid one foot forward, feeling like he was stepping into an abyss, until his foot found the stair. He stepped down and kept his hand on the wall, feeling each step and counting. Twenty steps in the dark with the only sound his breathing. He came out into a space that smelled of cooked beef and noodles and, faintly, of turmeric and saffron. It was lighter here, from an open-air cooking area at the rear that in the summer would hold a cooking fire. Gradually his eyes adjusted enough to make out the bulk of a modern stove and fridge. So perhaps the cooking fire was not needed. Neat shelves lined the walls.

  Carefully, he edged between the stove and butcher-block counters to the hallway that led to the courtyard. His feet whispered on tile. His fingers traced the wall—smoother than anything in the dacha—and with his other hand he drew out Chelomeyev’s gun.

  Still in the shadows, he peered across the courtyard. The clinic door was open, the window beside the door closed and curtained so no one could see inside. There was no light in the clinic and he could only assume that, like him, either Antonov or Alenin were in the shadows keeping watch. His money was on Alenin given Antonov’s sharpshooter skills would be put to test fighting off Khan’s friends outside and if, as Khan had suggested, Alenin had been shot, he would be very, very angry and on guard.

  Kazakov edged forward until he was almost to the courtyard. The good thing was that as far as Antonov and Alenin knew, Khan was here alone with an inferior weapon. Kazakov tested the weight of Chelomeyev’s gun once more. For all intents and purposes, they might be right.

  He waited, contenting himself with breathing, with keeping watch for movement inside the clinic doorway. There was no way Antonov or Alenin would let their hostages near an
y escape route. These men were killers, but with police training. That meant they would be careful—and thorough. Maria’s poor battered body proved that at least one of them could also be cruel. Even traitorous Collin Archer had been killed more cleanly. But then Maria had betrayed her mistress by abandoning everything in that life. Archer had simply had pretentions of grandeur—had thought he was good enough to play one power against the other as if he was a game master. A gambler to the end.

  From the balcony above him came the soft fall of footsteps. Khan was back. Kazakov took a deep breath. It was beginning.

  From the street, beyond the stout house walls, came the sound of shooting. The city men were firing at the front door. Answering, muffled shots came from inside the clinic and Kazakov tensed, praying that he wasn’t hearing the deaths of the hostages. More shots came from overhead, blasting plaster off the wall by the clinic’s courtyard door and window.

  Something moved in the inky clinic shadows. A gun barrel appeared, aimed at Khan’s position. Kazakov used the wall to brace himself and aimed at the darkness beyond the shadows. If Alenin was shooting in proper police style, his body would there as he steadied his pistol.

  Kazakov fired. Chelomeyev’s pistol bucked sideways in his hand.

  A shout came from the clinic and the pistol disappeared. Kazakov leapt out of the shadows, zigzagging across the courtyard, leaping the heaps of snow that he was pretty sure were summer flower pots as Khan’s gunfire hopefully kept Alenin pinned down.

  He made it up the one step to the roofed porch that encircled the courtyard and shaded the ground floor rooms and the clinic door from the summer sun.

  A gun barrel flash sent him leaping sideways, but the bullet slammed him into the snow five feet sideways from the door. Pain seared through his chest and beat consciousness away in white-hot waves. He fought for breath and clung to awareness.

  Maria. Khan. The cold. The gun.

  Somehow, he still held it. He opened his eyes and looked into the door’s shadows—right into the barrel of Alenin’s gun. The crew-cut blond towered above him, his finger already tightening on the trigger.

  “You have a bad habit of living,” Alenin said, but time distorted his voice as if a tape had been slowed.

  It was over. He was done.

  Kazakov blinked up at him trying to understand. Had Alenin taken out Khan? Had Antonov killed off the attacking men?

  Taking aim, Alenin stepped out of the doorway’s shelter, but he was still hidden from Khan’s view from the balcony above. He used his boot on Kazakov’s bloody side. White heat exploded in his brain and then turned to blackness. Kazakov fell through the pain, fighting for consciousness, the gun lost from his hand.

  “Hey!” The shout echoed in the courtyard.

  Alenin’s head snapped up as someone tackled him. Kazakov rolled away, fighting nausea, and stumbled up as Alenin whirled and took a shot. A double report echoed forever in the courtyard.

  Alenin sagged. He looked at Kazakov in surprise, a Hindu third eye blooming in his forehead before his knees gave. He crashed to the snow.

  Kazakov staggered to Alenin’s gun and dug Chelomeyev’s from the snow. His chest was on fire. His gasps came with a red mist that froze in the air. Someone called his name.

  In the snow beside Alenin lay the Kygyz youth, Adelit, his blood blooming in the snow from the hole in his throat. His hands flopped as he tried to stop the bleeding. His lower body didn’t move. Then Khan was there, kneeling in the snow, fighting to staunch the wound.

  Kazakov went to help him, but the sounds of gunfire from the clinic turned him around.

  He stepped through the clinic door.

  The dark space echoed with the violence of the battle taking place at the front of the clinic and the stink of cordite. Antonov apparently hadn’t noticed the silence from the rear of the place.

  Kazakov picked his way through a storeroom and office, past doors marked as exam rooms. Through one of the doors came the sound of sobbing. Life. But not in front of him. From the front of the clinic came the raining sound of death. Bullets slamming into the walls. The report of Antonov’s weapon. How many rounds had he and his partner brought? They had apparently come prepared, if not expecting their own deaths.

  “Alenin! What’s happening! Did you get him?” Antonov called in a pause in the barrage.

  Kazakov came to the end of the hallway. Beyond was a single room with a desk—now thrown on its side to barricade the door—and a tangle of chairs meant for waiting clients. On the walls, tattered bits of paper fluttered in the cold wind—all that remained of health message posters. Silhouetted at the edge of the now open door crouched the squat form of Antonov.

  “Afraid not,” Kazakov said, leaning against the wall because his legs were shaking. “Put the gun down, Antonov. Give yourself up.”

  Antonov didn’t move. His hand flexed over his gun. “Or what, Kazakov? You shoot me? An honorable man like you? I don’t think so.”

  He turned slowly, his gun still gripped in his hand and he smiled when he caught sight of Kazakov. “You don’t look so good, old friend. If this is a stand off, I think I can out-stand you.”

  Kazakov nodded. “Probably. One last chance, Antonov. Put the gun down. You were a good cop once. I don’t want to kill you.”

  Antonov’s hand swept up. Kazakov pulled the trigger.

  The bullet found Antonov dead center. He slammed back against the desk in the doorway, looking down at the hot bloom on his chest. A blast of bullets caught him from the street. He danced back into the clinic on already dead feet and collapsed to the floor in front of Kazakov.

  Alenin’s gun slipped from Kazakov’s hand. The white-hot pain of his chest was spreading again. This time the bullet hadn’t gone right through. This time it had hit something and the damn wall shifted away from him, leaving him without support.

  Leaving him falling.

  Chapter 16

  The wind was cold and dry out of the eastern mountain ranges. It swirled flakes around Kazakov’s shoulders. This late in December there was always more snow blowing in, smothering the earth, the city, and Fergana’s hopes and dreams, but this year the snows had come earlier. At least that was how it seemed, standing in the graveyard above the cleared plot that marked the spot where Maria di Maria was buried.

  It was on a hillside that faced west, toward Yekaterina’s Mountain, not that the sullen clouds allowed any sense of direction. There was only swirling snow, but his hope was that in the spring the distances to the west might be revealed and Maria’s spirit might see her way across the far-flung Ottoman deserts, past the crumbling might of Constantinople, and on to the remains of her small village in the Anglo-German province of Italia. It was the least he could do for her. She had been good-hearted and trusting and kind and he had allowed her to die. Another lost soul just like the Russian remains who dwelt in Fergana these days. He realized that now. They were all ghosts, figments of a past that was gone and that clung too closely to a fairy tale.

  Kazakov shook his head, the nap of his latest lynx fur hat caressing his cheek in the wind. “We’re all trapped, Maria. But you have gotten free. Perhaps I envy you that.”

  “Talking to the dead? I thought that was my job.” The slight figure of Khalil Khan appeared out of the snow behind him. The small M.E. was swathed in a heavy wool coat that reached below his knees to tall black boots and a hat much like Kazakov’s except black with golden tips. Mink, perhaps, or ermine. He came up beside Kazakov.

  Kazakov sighed. “I suppose I was. Since I got out of the hospital, coming here has become a habit. Perhaps it’s one I’ll continue.”

  Khan shook his head. “I didn’t save your life to let you spend it with the dead. You need to laugh. You need to find joy again.”

  Kazakov remembered a fleeting touch of soft skin, the warmth of Maria’s mouth and body. Perhaps he’d almost found it.

  And lost it again.

  “I suppose I can’t find that sort of thing standing in a graveyard
, can I? It’s just—I feel that I owe her. Not only did she trust me enough to come to me with evidence, she died to keep the evidence from falling into Chinese hands. And the Ottomans.”

  “And our American friends thank you—and her—for it. The evidence on that computer has changed the dynamics of Central Asian politics I think. At least Eric thinks so. The deals the Ottomans were brokering with Fergana seem to have fallen aside and we’re officially back to neutrality. Again.”

  Kazakov gave Khan a sideways glance. “You know a lot more of politics than I ever heard you speak before. It’s an interest you’ve hidden.”

  Khan looked at his hands and shrugged. Perhaps he hadn’t meant to let that fact slip, or perhaps he was putting Kazakov on notice. Khan had secrets just like all of them.

  The M.E. looked out into the snow toward Yekaterina Mountain. “Did you know that we call it Suleiman’s Throne?” He lifted his chin at the five peaks almost masked in the snowfall. “It is said that Mohammed prayed there. Babur, too. It is not well known, but of vast importance as a symbol of my people.”

  Kazakov hadn’t known. “And we renamed it for you.”

  Khan shook his head. “For yourselves, perhaps. For us it is still the same.”

  That was the thing. Fergana was built on memories and stories layered over top of reality. Perhaps that was where his people had gone wrong.

  At the base of the hill, the snow appeared to lessen and the abstract puzzle of New Moscow’s towers and the domes of Saint Basil were momentarily visible, like a dream.

  “I did that DNA testing you suggested. I got the results today. I thought you’d want to know,” Khan said.

  Kazakov nodded as he watched the forms of New Moscow blow away in the wind and snow. More flakes caught in the lettering on Maria’s new headstone. Maria di Maria. Daughter of Italia. Gone but not forgotten. He didn’t know her birth date and could only guess at her age, but in the end that didn’t matter.