Perri O'Shaughnessy - Unlucky in Law

Paul examined the pile of junk on the bed and said, “You’re leaving?”

“Yes,” Sergey said, looking at the ticket Paul had spotted. “Tomorrow.”

“Going to Vancouver on the train, I see.”

“Unless stopped at the border. I guess you could arrange that. I suppose I’ll have to change the ticket now.” He blew smoke thoughtfully.

“Where are the bones?” Paul said.

“Bones?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

Sergey dragged so deeply that Paul could picture the black tar adhering to his lungs. “You mean Constantin’s? That’s what you’re here for?”

“Right. You stole them in Sacramento. I want to know what you did with them.”

Like a kid searching for goblins, very tentatively, he reached underneath his bed. “You want them?” He held the two long, dusty bleached bones in his hands. “Well, enjoy.”

Paul took them from him. “Won’t your pals get mad if you don’t come back with them?”

“I was supposed to destroy them. Then I thought they might continue to offer some financial possibilities and considered keeping them myself. But I’ve grown tired of these games.” He held out a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”

“No, thanks.” Paul looked around, found a towel on the radiator, and wrapped the bones in it. Krilov watched impassively.

“Sit down. I’ve got no one to talk to in this frenzied country since Christina died.”

Paul remained standing, but did let himself rest against the door frame.

“We don’t want any more pretenders to Russia’s throne creeping out of Monterey,” Krilov went on. “If there is any hint of that, the rest of them will probably be murdered. I myself was instructed to phone in the bomb threat to stop Alex Zhukovsky from testifying. I was supposed to kill him, but I just picked him up when the people came running out and rode around with him for a while. You might say he convinced me he had no interest in bringing up old histories.”

“I might say that you just didn’t feel like killing him,” Paul said.

Krilov laughed and coughed. “True. I thought, after him, there’s the next brother, and then the kid who just spent months in prison. It just seemed like needless butchering, like the Bolsheviks shooting and stabbing the little daughters. The rest of them are harmless. I think Christina was-unique. What a shame she defected over to Father Giorgi’s faction, a bunch of radical religionists. We wanted to make her a tsar, or at the very least, give her a beautiful power. Make her famous. Get her picture in magazines around the world.”

“You wanted a masthead for a phony monarchy you would run from behind the scenes. When Christina figured that out, she dropped you. At least Giorgi might have helped her do some social good.”

“She was an experiment that failed.”

“That sounds damn cold, from what I know of your relationship. You were lovers, weren’t you?”

Krilov shrugged. He didn’t seem to care about anything anymore.

“What happens when you go back to Russia?” Paul asked him.

“Oh, I won’t go there again. My death would be slow. I think maybe Cuba.”

Paul nodded.

“What will they do with the bones?”

“Cremate them.” Paul would have a little talk with Gabe, convince him.

“Fine.” Sergey dropped his cigarette butt into a cup, where it sizzled. “We’re all victims of tradition, even in America,” he said. “Bury the dead, all that kind of thing. Death.”

“Closure,” Paul said.

“Do we have any other business?”

“I’m afraid so.” Paul pointed his weapon through his pants pocket at Krilov. “It’s a Glock,” he said. “My beautiful power.”

“You’re going to turn me in? They’ll never prove anything. Giorgi won’t talk.”

“They’ll deport you back to Russia,” Paul said. Krilov jumped up and ran at him, low, dangerous because he was willing to take a shot, but Paul’s big hand with the gun came down hard on his neck.

“Kto kovo,” Paul said. He opened the door and invited the cops in.

Thursday 10/2

STEFAN COULDN’T BELIEVE, COULD NOT BELIEVE, THAT HE HAD agreed to return to the cemetery, but here he was, going, dressing in one of the suits he had worn daily to court, which seemed appropriate, given the occasion.

At the door, he said good-bye to Erin, but she wouldn’t let him go right away. She took him by the shoulder, forcing him to admire the ring on her finger, the chip of a diamond, really, no more than another promise, but one that he would keep.

The weekend after they let him out of jail, on a windy Saturday, he had invited her to a picnic at Carmel River beach. They walked down toward the ocean and found a place on the sandy slope where they could watch the clouds fly over the water. They talked for hours. He apologized. He begged her to forgive him; then, when the sun had gone down, and Erin was shivering, he had bent down on one knee and proposed. She cried, and then she took the ring. “I’ll be able to get a bigger one eventually,” he had told her. But she swore she loved it, and she loved him. He didn’t deserve her, he knew that.

“One more kiss,” Erin said, holding onto him. “I never knew one heart could hold so much happiness,” she whispered in his ear.

What luck! He drove back to El Cementerio Encinal, music up loud, this time in blazing sunlight, same scrungy Honda Civic, but without a broken taillight, and nothing in the back seat to make a bored beat cop say what the hell.

When Alex had called to ask him to come, Stefan spent most of the conversation thinking about how guilty Gabe must feel, and how mad he was at his brother, and how sorry he was about the whole damn mess. If it wasn’t for Gabe’s consult with that lawyer, Christina might not be dead.

But Alex had told him Gabe wasn’t responsible. “Christina and Alan Turk were infected by the same sickness. They placed an inflated importance on anachronisms, nobility, royalty, divine destiny. Alan killed to claim his personal piece of royal history, and Christina died because she wanted to claim hers. You know what’s sad? The newspapers won’t let this story drop. She got the fame she craved so much, but she had to die to get it.”

Today, taking in the salty wind, Stefan would say hello to a brother he had never known and good-bye to a sister and a father he had never known. Erin accused him of being too sentimental lately, but in jail he had squeezed back so many feelings, he now welcomed tears when they came. Singing to himself, feeling alive, smelling the sea air and loving the warm sun on his left arm, he turned into the narrow gate of the cemetery, open this time, and went straight for the Russian headstones.

Alex Zhukovsky and Gabe had already arrived. They stood talking quietly beside a small, fresh mound of earth below the double cross with its slanty wooden stake planted awkwardly below. Stefan parked behind another car, trying to get off the pavement a little in case someone wanted to get by him, but unwilling to intrude too much on those unfortunate dead with positions too near the edge.

“Hey, Stefan,” Gabe said. “Meet your big brother, Alex.”

Alex held out a hand. “Hey, Stefan,” he also said, smiling, getting the accent wrong on Stef’s name, saying it like a foreigner.

Stefan took his hand, thinking about how Alex had looked in court, so hunted, and how today, he looked relaxed, maybe even a little happy. “I brought bouquets,” Stefan said, showing them. “Erin made them.”

His brothers nodded. Even though Alex was shorter, older, with much less hair than Gabe, the two men looked remarkably similar.

Stefan looked down at their father’s grave, the full force of their history bearing down on him. He and Erin had been reading about the last tsar. “We’ll never know, will we?”