Neil Olson - The Icon

She was a quiet soul, like him, and she sensed his urgency in his stillness.

“I promise to keep it private. I don’t know when I’ll see Matthew, though.”

“I am confident that he will return here soon. I place my hopes in that, and in you. Bless you.” He turned and moved away before she could say anything in return, but he had made his impression. She was not the kind of woman to shirk the duty he had placed upon her.

The sky above the avenue had grown strange. Still blue to the south, fierce gray clouds to the north. Ioannes could not tell which way the clouds were moving, or what the evening’s weather held. It did not matter greatly. He would walk in the park once more, extract some sweetness while he still might, before the terrible task beckoned again.

There was something both touchingly intimate and maddeningly claustrophobic about her forced captivity with his family. His father was ill, though less so than she had expected, and still quite handsome, in a harsher way than Matthew. He stayed in his study, reading or sleeping, accepting the occasional visit. The mother had left Ana alone at first, when they arrived the night before, but had been at her all this next day. Trying to feed her every ninety minutes. Asking all sorts of questions about Matthew, as if Ana were a wife or girlfriend of long standing, instead of someone who had met her son only a few weeks before, someone who felt that she might already love him without really knowing him at all.

“She likes you,” Matthew said, when they were alone for a while, his mother shopping, his father asleep.

“Is that why she keeps scowling at me?”

“That’s just her normal expression. She likes talking to you.”

“She’s plying me for information about what’s going on.”

“Don’t worry, she doesn’t really want to know.”

“Anyway, what difference does it make if she likes me?”

“None at all, but she does. Trust me.”

“Would I be sitting here in your parents’ kitchen, after everything that’s happened, if I didn’t trust you?”

He put his lips to hers and her body responded immediately, despite their exertions during the last two nights. They barely made it upstairs to the guest room, his old bedroom. There was something vaguely taboo about doing it in the afternoon in his parents’ house, with his father asleep below. She understood very well that there was a good deal of seeking for relief and comfort mixed in with the lust, but it didn’t make the sex any less intense or satisfying.

Matthew fell asleep minutes after they finished, still making up for lost time. Ana waited a little while, watching his chest rise and fall, stroking his arm, and breathing in his scent. Her friend Edith insisted that you could forget about good looks, intelligence, and all the rest; attraction was about scent. Ana wondered if it wasn’t true. Then she crawled from the bed to her travel bag, digging out a box of Marlboros and a lighter. Sitting in the window seat, she pulled up the sash several inches, lit a cigarette, blew smoke into the breezy air and tried to set her mind in order.

What she really needed was a day or two alone, away from everyone, including Matthew, to think all this through. They had promised each other to let the icon go, yet details had nagged at her for days. The name in the diary, del Carros’ hints, his fear of her knowledge, which made him say more then he should. Eight years earlier, during another terrible illness of her grandfather’s, he had raged semiconsciously about being responsible for her father’s death. This was not a new thing, and she had tried to calm him, but he had been inconsolable. It was supposed to be me, he had insisted over and over. As if the death had not been random, but that someone was meant to die. She had chalked it up to guilt and the delusions of fever, but like these later details, it had stayed with her.

What to do about it? She could try to set up another meeting with del Carros, but that would be madness, and he would surely never go for it. She could leave it alone and hope that he would be caught, that the truth would come out some other way. Was she prepared for whatever the truth might be? Would it be better if he just vanished again, if it all remained a mystery?

“What are you doing?” Matthew spoke from the bed. His voice was more alert than she would have expected.

“Oh, just making myself crazy.”

“You’re supposed to leave that to me.”

“I was crazy long before I met you, sweetheart.”

“Why don’t you come back over here?”

Why not, indeed? Yet she sat there several moments longer, finishing the cigarette, wondering now about Matthew and herself, and if whatever was between them could survive beyond the elevated emotions of the current crisis. Would they still care for each other when all the excitement was over, when dull, hum-drum daily life returned? When the icon was well and truly put to rest? Was she really so eager to know? Better to enjoy it while it lasted. She stubbed the butt out on the exterior sill, closed the window, then rose and went to him.

The hospital in Queens was not as impressive as the one in Manhattan. Older, dingier, even less well organized, if that was possible. Andreas rode up to the eighth floor in an elevator that vibrated alarmingly underfoot. The tired Jamaican nurse beside him took no notice of it.

His thinking had become confused once more. Morrison’s news echoed in his mind, testing his will. It was easy to tell himself that nothing had changed, that this visit was simply a last convulsion, a necessary act for purging his conscience and satisfying his curiosity. Easy to tell himself, but hard to believe. The important thing was not to involve Benny and Matthew any further. That much he was determined upon.

The gray-green corridor was suffused with the universal smell of institutional sickness. Stale air, urine, cleaning fluid; the memory-scent of a hundred visits to men now dead. Andreas found the room easily enough. There had been a police guard for the first few days, he’d heard, but since the patient had become well enough to question, that had been dispensed with. It was his information they had been protecting, not this life. Nicholas looked up at him as he entered, face thin and pale, dark eyes wide with concern. Andreas understood that the wounded man might still not know what exactly had happened, and that his visit could hardly be welcome.

“Peace, Nicky,” he said in Russian, taking a chair by the bed. The other man shifted under the white sheets, but the IV in his left arm limited his motion. Thick bandaging on his chest was visible beneath the flimsy blue hospital gown. Someone had placed a vase of yellow tulips on the rolling table beside him. A screen pulled halfway across the room separated his bed from the one by the window, where another patient watched a game show on television. Nicholas nodded, but spoke no reply.

“I’m here on my own.” Andreas reverted to English. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“I’m alive.” His voice barely above a whisper.

“Yes. My grandson had a hand in that.” Nicholas looked at him blankly. “Matthew. He went to see his godfather that morning, and he found you instead, bleeding on the floor. He held a towel against your wound until the ambulance arrived. Has no one told you?”

“The police asked questions. They didn’t tell me much.”

“No one has visited? No one from Fotis’ operation has checked up on you?”

“Phillip, you know, who runs the restaurant. He’s the only one.”

“Did he bring the flowers?”

“No.” Nicholas smiled just a little. “My girlfriend.”

“Good. I’m happy you are not alone.”

“She’s working now. She’ll come by soon.”