Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

“Tomorrow.”

“Really? There’s something I don’t understand… why do they need a full professor to teach Rocks and Clocks to a bunch of komya ?”

“They’re not clods, they’re future historians, I hope. And for the millionth time, it isn’t geology and history, it’s geohistory.”

He had the exact same grin he’d had that time in Perm when he’d dropped the frog down her dress, the eternal brat of a younger brother. She was trying to think of a way to retake the offensive when a hurricane of noise suddenly slammed through the closed bedroom door.

Katrina was back, accompanied by most of the male population of Moscow, singing unintelligibly at the top of their voices and bumping into things.

The door flew open. Katrina’s hair was mussed, and her lipstick looked smeared. Laughingly, she said, “Larashka, sweetie, a few stray dogs followed me home. Can I keep them?” The door was pushed open a little wider and Lara saw there were at least three of them, all soldiers, all drunk, all staring into the bedroom and swaying unsteadily. “Please, Mommy? They won’t be any trouble!”

Gales of male laughter told Lara her quiet call with her brother was history. To the computer screen she said, “I’ll call you back when I can.”

“Okay. Sleep tight, Professor, and don’t let the geohistorical bedbugs bite.”

Lara clicked off, and her grinning brother’s face was gone from the screen.

Alittle after two in the morning, anyone able to peer over the hoardings just down from the Chancery Lane tube station would have seen men with electric lamps and shovels digging quietly but furiously in the large hole. Within the hour they found what they came for: a small, mostly decomposed leather valise, no longer handcuffed to a human arm bone at the wrist.

Shining their lights on it together, they could see the damp had rotted away the leather at the bottom. There was nothing inside.

In Brixton, a noise somewhere woke up Davidson Gordon in the middle of the night. The strange find at the site meant there’d be no work today; no work meant no money, curse the luck, and the Gordons needed the money. Still, it would give Davidson—“Davy” to friends and family—the rare chance to sleep in before going through the package he’d found in the hole next to the human bone, the one he’d kept hidden under his coat the whole time the cameras were on him.

His wife and daughter were still asleep when the noise came again, a discreet knock on the door. Bollocks.

Three men with muddy shoes stood on the step in the predawn, holding out identification cards that read, ANTIQUITIES DIVISION.

“Mr. Davidson?” asked the tallest of the three.

“Gordon. Davidson’s me Christian name.”

“Mr. Gordon, then. May we come in?”

“Family’s sleeping.”

“Oh, this won’t take but a minute,” said the heavily muscled one. “We want to hold up work at the dig as little as possible.”

Reluctantly, Davy led them into the kitchen. The tall one’s first question was, “Did you take anything from the excavation, sir? A package of any kind?” When he hesitated, the man added, “There’s a finder’s fee, of course.”

With that, he led the men downstairs. Even though the overhead light was on, the massive one with a bull neck shone the flashlight he was holding on the workbench, where the package and its strange contents—the still-damp wrapping around the gunmetal-gray canisters—were lying open to view.

Davy wished now he’d done a better job of looking through his find. What if there was money in those sealed metal cans? Or jewels? He’d shaken them and hadn’t heard anything. Still, he’d be in a better bargaining position if he knew.

The tall man continued, “I count six tins. Have you removed any?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’d know, woun’t I?”

“Have you told anyone about finding this?”

“Just the wife and daughter.”

“No one down the pub?”

“Didn’t go down the pub.”

“Your wife and daughter, did they tell anyone?”

“No, nobody. Must be pretty valuable, these things, the way you’re asking all these questions.”

The tall man was saying, “Questions? No, no more questions,” even as he took the silenced gun out of his coat pocket and shot Davy in the heart and, just to be on the safe side, once more in the head where he fell.

The beefy man picked up the parcel and led the way back upstairs.

“Davy, that you?” a sleepy voice called from the bedroom.

She was sitting up in bed when the bullet went through flesh and bone, the pillow and the headboard.

The third killer, the young one with his red hair in a buzz cut and a little blue tattoo on his neck, grinned and went looking for the daughter. Beverly never made it to school.

It was 11:57, Lara knew, on the huge clock thirty-six floors above her head, having checked her watch against it on her way in. In exactly 180 seconds it would boom a dozen stunning notes across the Sparrow Hills in southwest Moscow and inform the newcomers who were hopelessly lost in the warren of hallways—there were 33 kilometers of corridors and more than 5,000 rooms in the Moscow State University building—that they were late.

Once the biggest structure in the world outside New York (if you counted the giant star on top), the building had maps of each floor, sealed in plastic, posted on bulletin boards under the heading IN CASE OF FIRE. The plastic had yellowed with age, so now the floor plans were totally indecipherable. It meant there were always stragglers who barged into the first class at the last moment, or even later.

For something to do while she waited, Lara walked over to the large map of the fifth floor above the elevator buttons. Pasted to the yellowed and cracking plastic was one of those oversized stars saying, “ Vy Nakhodites Zdes .” As if “You Are Here” would help anyone who didn’t already know where “Here” was.

Around the map, the students had commandeered the remaining space on the corkboard. A thumbtack held in place the picture of a lost Siamese; good luck finding a cat in this place. A printed card glowingly advertised for a nonsmoking roommate, the same sort of card that had brought Katrina to Lara.

She was fingering a flimsy notice stapled to the board, the kind with a fringe of cut-apart phone numbers at the bottom you tore off if you were interested. In this case, a pretty Swedish student, smiling in the photocopied picture on the flier, wanted work as a nanny after school. Quite a few of the fringes had been taken. Could so many of the girl’s fellow students need nannies?

She found herself reading an older flier under the fringed one: the Moscow City Chess Club was holding its monthly exhibition match and, this month, Garry Kasparov was taking on all comers. Refreshments would be served, “with a short talk beforehand by the Guest of Honor, former world champion and current Secretary of The Other Russia.” His topic: “‘Why the Toothpaste Can’t Go Back in the Tube,’ an appeal for Russia to create closer ties with America and the West.”

Make that a long talk, Lara thought—Kasparov’s transmit button was permanently on. The event, she noticed, was this Thursday evening at 8:00.