Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

She tottered back a step and collapsed into a chair. Her miniskirt stretched wide, and he saw, on the soft flank of skin beside her crotch, several dark lines. Rage bubbled up inside him, a familiar ally, there waiting in the shadows. He swept the plates from the table with his forearm and grabbed her throat, forcing her legs apart with his other hand.

“What is this? What did you do to yourself?”

She choked out a few words. “Papa … no…”

He dropped to his knees, peering up her skirt at the inside of her thigh. But the marks were not ink. They were cuts, a neat row of them. The top mark was mostly healed, the middle ones scabbed, the bottom slice still fresh.

He stared in disbelief. Cuts there ? Why? He had forgotten he was still gripping her throat. He released, and she coughed and hacked.

“Who did this to you?”

She wiped her face on the inside of her collar.

“Who did this to you?”

“ I did!” she screamed in a fury, her torso twisting away from him.

He was on his feet, stepping back from her, perplexed and oddly on edge. Coals in the pit of his belly. “You cut yourself? Why?”

“To feel. I just want to feel something. I just want…” She leaned onto the table, burying her face in her bare arms.

The air of the kitchen had grown thicker. He was having trouble inhaling fully. He needed the breadth of the floor upstairs, his perch atop the world. Her sobs trailed him up the stairs. Pacing the perimeter of his vast bedroom, counting his steps, he heard her cries still, rising through the floor.

The sound of her ripped him back to the night itself.

Quiet enough at first. A carved turkey served by a nameless maid who, like the others, spoke no English, the atmosphere in the dining room frigid with Nastya’s mood.

“What’s wrong?” he’d finally asked.

“I’m sick of this,” she said. “Always us. Always alone. And I’m sick of her. ” She glared at the maid. “You can’t even understand what I’m saying, can you? Can you? ” The maid withdrew meekly. “She might as well not even be here.” Nastya skewered a cooked carrot on the tines of her fork and held it before her face.

“You have no idea what you have,” he said softly. “You have everything. ”

“It’s like a mausoleum.” She dropped her fork, which clanged against the fine china, chipping the twenty-four-karat-gold band at the rim. “Cold and empty.”

He folded his hands, straining for patience. “What do you want?”

“I want to belong. ”

“We do belong. Here.”

“No. We float. Above the city. Away from other people.” She took a big gulp of red wine, the crystal throwing slivers of light across her face. Turning sideways in her chair, she stared at the wall. “What was my mama like?” she asked. “Tell me again.”

He set down his silverware. Pushed his plate away. Studied the markings on his knuckles. Prison-ink asterisks in a circle, the symbol of a thief from a broken home. When he looked up again, he saw that Nastya had guzzled the rest of her wine.

He spoke the mantra. “She was simple country girl. Seamstress. She loved you very much.”

Nastya’s body sagged a bit, relaxing into a daze. “And how’d she die?”

“Diphtheria outbreak. She caught.”

Nastya closed her eyes. “And she said…”

“On her deathbed she say, ‘My daughter must always know I carry her in my heart. And she carries me in hers.’”

Nastya mouthed the last sentence with him. She pushed away dreamily from the table and drifted back toward her room.

He sat and stared at his knuckles, the table. Turkey and wine, stuffing and potatoes. A dripping gravy boat. All that American excess. He felt a hole grow inside him that could be filled with neither food nor rage. He thought about the bundle of pink blanket delivered into his arms by the whore. How the sight of those sapphire eyes had delivered him into another life.

His chair screeched when he pushed back from the table. He walked down the hall, the house staff shrinking into the walls as he passed.

Nastya’s room, when he entered, smelled of schnapps and sweet perfume. A Gauloise protruded from an ashtray, sighing a wisp of smoke, and a plastic tumbler sat beside Nastya’s hand on the mouse pad. At his footfall she started, then swiftly began clicking screens closed on the computer.

He’d come to comfort her, but now his steps across her lush carpet were hard, enraged. He brushed her aside, tapping the mouse around on pages with an unskilled hand as file after file repopulated the screen.

“Papa, no,” she slurred. “I was only…”

He stared at the monitor, doing his best to force the words to make sense. Requests made to a genealogy forum online. Subject line: “American girl trying to find her mother.” A response to an e-mail she’d written to the U.S. embassy in Kiev. A database of victims of the diphtheria outbreak that had occurred after perestroika. Weeks, maybe months of searching and requests and secret communications. “Is my mother dead?”

His face glowed with heat, the pulse of an infection. He drew himself erect over the desk, gathering into himself. “You doubt me? Me ? Who gave you everything? Who brought you here to give you this life?”

“I see the guns on the men. I know your tattoos. I’m not stupid. ” She wobbled on her stork legs, emboldened by the alcohol. “I got a letter from the embassy. They said you served time. I don’t know your story. I don’t know my mama’s story. I don’t know my story.”

“I told you your mama’s story.”

“I know it’s fake. I know she wasn’t a seamstress. I’m not a child. I’m seventeen. ” Her eyes were glassy, her breath ninety proof. “What happened to her?”

“It is history. No more.”

“We are our history.”

“No. We are who we are. Now . You and me. We have each other.”

“It’s not enough.”

The hollow in his gut spread, devouring his intestines, flesh and blood, a black hole of pain. “I gave up everything for you. And this is how you show respect?” His mouth was moving, throwing words before thought. It felt like vomiting to say this. She was backing away from him, tripping over the furniture, terrified. “You want to know who your mama was? I do not even remember lying with her. I remember only when she dropped you into my arms like trash. She was a whore who died with a needle in her arm.”

Nastya’s mouth twisted open, emitting a startled moan. Then she was scrambling out, away, clawing across her bed to the door, pulling the sheets in her wake.

Her feet slapped the tile of the hall. Then the door to the garage opened and slammed harder than he believed a door could slam. The Jaguar fired to life in the garage, the roar of 470 horses. There came a scream of grinding metal, car scraping house, as she flew out into the night.

Agent Abara’s smooth, handsome face remained so blank, so noncommittal, that Nate, shivering in the cold box of the interrogation room, wondered if the man was devoid of human emotion. There were no windows here, but Nate knew he was somewhere high up in the Federal Building overlooking Westwood’s National Cemetery. He’d noted as much through the windows earlier, before he’d been deposited in the proverbial chair before the proverbial table. Beside a digital recorder, a bolted metal bar protruded from the table, there to cuff suspects of less gentle demeanor.

Nate had endured the full rotation of the Joint Terrorism Task Force-a gruff supervisor sporting a broad, unironic mustache from an earlier era and a succession of female agents, each smarter than the last. He’d spilled all, directing his responses largely to Abara, praying that their previous rapport, no matter how strained, might accelerate the process. When he’d come clean about going out on the bank ledge to kill himself, he’d watched Abara do a Sixth Sense rewind and play the film over with the missing piece laid in.