Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

This girl, this fantasy needs to be belted down neat like a triple scotch. She is there to make him forget, to help ease the pain inside him that has become an illness. This moment in time, this present, is for him little more than a dream. He is still living in the moment that occurred three hours ago but that continues like a whipping, devastating in its excoriation.

The creaking bus turns a corner and for a moment he can see the ribbon of road behind them, running up the steep, verdant mountainside to the Hotel Caesar Augustus. His heart seems to turn over in his chest like a dropped stone. Mia’s final, brutal, horrifying sentence said it all, wrapping up the last two weeks in the soiled brown paper it deserves.

The bus, gears grinding ominously, staggers the last half kilometer into the open-air depot at Capri village, where he changes for the bus down to Marina Grande. Fifteen minutes later, he arrives. The bus begins to disgorge its load into a street clogged with people and vehicles all, it seems, needing to go to the same place at the same time. Those seven hateful words, the bland look on her face that revealed not a trace of bitterness or remorse, made him want to smash her face with his balled fist. He is filled with rage, a swamp through which he is struggling as he swings off the bus. He hits the pavement, his heart aching, his nerves raw.

Craning his neck, looking around for her, he feels the stir of resentment like a hungry dog’s growl, sharp and craven. He hears Mia’s closing line in his head, perfectly, devastatingly choreographed.

“ Don’t worry about me, I’m well fucked. ”

This woman, moving like a siren of the sea, circles him still like a hungry beast.

He wishes Cloe had come, because it would mean that she has forgiven him, that she’ll take him back. He imagines what it would be like to catch sight of her through the crowd, to watch her walk toward him. He would find it a jolt to see her here, the open arms that the real world holds out to him in forgiveness. Yes, forgiveness.

He is thinking of what he will say to Cloe when he calls her this evening, the new beginning that might now be his; the betrayal that will be forgotten, because he’s quite certain that Cloe would never hurt him as cruelly as Mia hurt him. He is imagining as if it is a film he is expertly splicing together: the mise-en-scène of betrayal, and he begins to wonder (because all good films are juggling acts of counterbalancing forces) what is the opposite of betrayal. He walks amid the squall of people. His steps quicken, his heart pounds as he takes out his cell phone. He’ll call Cloe now, confess everything, tell her it’s all over and done with, a bad dream consigned to history. She’ll understand, of course she’ll understand.

He sees what will happen reflected in the eyes of a wisp of a girl striding toward him, sees it an instant too late. He is still absorbing her look of horror when the narrow Caprese van strikes him full on and kills him instantly.

PART ONE

Lady Macbeth:

“The sleeping and the dead

are but as pictures.”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

Macbeth

ONE

Moscow | April 5

JACK MCCLURE, cell phone to his ear, stood in his hotel suite, staring out at the arc-lit onion domes of Red Square. It was snowing. The last snow, it was predicted, of a protracted and, even for Russia, frigid winter. Red Square was nearly deserted. The swirling black wind swept the last of the tourists, shoulders hunched, digital cameras stuffed inside their long coats to protect them, back to their hotels where steaming cups of coffee waited, spiked with vodka or slivovitz. Jack had arrived here a week ago with the presidential entourage on a trip that was both politically necessary and culturally important, which was why the First Lady and the First Daughter had been invited along. The trip had been arranged—brokered might be a more accurate term—by General Atcheson Brandt, who had commanded a wing in the Gulf War. He was both a decorated veteran and, now that he’d retired, a revered military analyst for both CNN and ABC. He knew everyone in Washington who mattered. When he spoke, senior politicians of both parties listened. Though the former administration’s mini cold war with Russia, and President Yukin in particular, had raged for eight years, General Brandt had made it his business to keep the private lines of communication with Yukin open. His public criticism of the former administration’s hard line against Russia had led to a brief summit between Yukin and the former president. Though nothing of substance had come of it, General Brandt had been praised on both sides of the Senate aisles for his efforts.

However, at the moment General Brandt was far from Jack’s mind. Jack hadn’t said a word for the past three minutes and neither had Sharon. Rather, they were listening to each other breathe, as they often did when they lay in bed together in Jack’s house in D.C. While Jack listened through the phone, he thought of her coming home after work, shedding her clothes layer by layer, until she was in her bra and the bikini underpants she always wore. He imagined her sliding into bed, pushing backward, feeling with her buttocks for that shallow indentation his absent body had left behind like a memory. He imagined her eyes closing as she drifted off to sleep. And then imagined she descended further. What did she dream of when all the artifice and layers demanded by civilization melted away, when she reverted to who she had been as a child, when she was certain no one was watching or, at least, able to pierce the veil of her sleep? He liked to imagine that she dreamed of him, but he had no way of knowing, just as he had no way of knowing who she really was, even though he knew her body almost as well as he knew his own, even though he’d observed over and over her every tiny motion, day and night.

He knew these questions assailed him because he was so far from home—traveling with the newly elected president of the United States, his longtime friend, Edward Harrison Carson, as Carson’s strategic advisor.

“What does that title mean exactly?” he’d asked Carson, when the two had met the week following the inauguration.

The president had laughed. “Just like you, Jack, cutting to the quick of everything. I pulled you out of the ATF to find my daughter. You brought Alli back to me when no one else could. I and my family feel safest with you close.”

“With all due respect, Edward, you have a platoon of perfectly competent Secret Service operatives better suited than I am to guard you and your family.”

“You misunderstand me, Jack. I have far too much respect for you to offer you a babysitting job, even though nothing would please Alli more. Besides, on a practical level, your special abilities would be wasted in that capacity. I have no illusions about how difficult and perilous the next four years are going to be. As you can imagine, there are already no end of people who are clamoring to whisper advice in my ear. Part of my job is to allow them this access, but you’re one person I’m inclined to listen to, because you’re the one I trust absolutely.

“That’s what ‘strategic advisor’ means.”

SHARON HAD begun whispering, which meant, according to the routine their calls had fallen into over the week Jack had been in Moscow, it was time for them to talk. Jack turned and padded in bare feet past the table with the photos of her and Emma he took everywhere he went, across the carpet to the bathroom. He was about to turn on the water, in order to defeat the listening devices planted in every room. No fewer than four representatives of the Russian government swore there were no such listening devices. But ever since the first night when Secret Service personnel had discovered one, he and everyone in the president’s service were warned to take precautions when speaking to anyone while in the rooms, even if the conversation seemed innocuous.