Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled, much as a father might at a mischievous child. “It does my heart good to know that all the feelings haven’t been squeezed out of you by Yukin and his murderous kind.”

Batchuk waited until the steaming glass of coffee was in his hand and he had sipped it graciously. “You knew these people were going to come, didn’t you?”

“I knew it was a possibility, yes.” Dyadya Gourdjiev took his coffee, padded back into the living room, and made himself comfortable in his favorite chair.

After spooning in sugar, Batchuk followed him, stirring the coffee with a tiny silver spoon. He remained standing for some time, as if to remind Dyadya Gourdjiev of his superior status. Apparently he thought better of the stance, because he did not continue the conversation until he had settled on the sofa obliquely across from the older man.

“Do you know why Arsov is interested in your daughter?”

For just an instant Dyadya Gourdjiev looked startled, fearful even. Then he gathered himself. “No, and I’m not interested.”

“You trust her too much.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev did not respond. He wondered whether this statement was an admonition or an admission of envy. It could be either, or both, he decided. Batchuk was impossible to read, he’d proved that many times over. Dyadya Gourdjiev was reminded of a video he’d seen of an elephant safari in Rajasthan, in northwest India. Nothing but a sea of tall grass could be seen in front of the people on the elephant, until, with the quickness of a heartbeat, a tiger appeared. It ran directly toward the elephant and, in an astonishing attack, leapt onto the head of the elephant and severely mauled the mahout. Tigers aren’t supposed to attack elephants, but unlike other big cats tigers are as unpredictable as they are deadly. In Dyadya Gourdjiev’s mind Batchuk was aligned with this tiger.

“Oriel Jovovich, please. Trust is an absolute, either you trust someone or you don’t. There’s no halfway position.”

Batchuk, sipping his coffee, appeared to mull this over. “I don’t trust anyone, why should I? People make an industry out of lying to me. Sometimes I feel as if there’s a cash prize awarded to anyone who can put something over on me.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev knew this was absurd, but he also knew that this was the only place for Batchuk to safely blow off steam while someone listened. This spoke directly to the matter of trust, which, in Russia these days, was uppermost on every silovik ’s mind.

“Every day, it seems, there are new people joining the applicant’s pool for the cash prize.” Batchuk made a face. “And, you know, it’s impossible to kill them all, or at the very least, put their balls to the fire.”

“Yet another industry underwritten by the Kremlin.”

At this, Batchuk laughed. Actually he smiled, which, for him, was more or less the same thing. “Time hasn’t dulled the edge of your sword. Your daughter doubtless gets her smart mouth from you.”

“I was happy to give her whatever I could.”

On the face of it, this was a simple, declarative statement, and yet with these two men nothing was simple, everything possessed layers of meaning that struck at the very core of their friendship, if their relationship could be called friendship. It was at once less and much more; there was, perhaps, no word adequate for what they meant to one another, or how entwined their pasts were. Several months ago, Annika had used a word, perhaps it was American slang, or possibly English, that had stuck in Dyadya Gourdjiev’s mind. In speaking about an associate of hers she had said, “what we really are is frenemies.” She’d supplied the explanation when he’d asked for it: The word was a contraction of the phrase “friendly enemies,” though she admitted that the actual relationship was far more complex than that, that this was the norm for frenemies.

Were he and Batchuk frenemies? He shrugged mentally. What did it matter? Why was there always a human desire to put a name to everything, to neatly sort, catalogue, pigeonhole even things like relationships that by their very nature were so complex they defied classification? They liked one other, admired one other, even trusted one another, but there would always be friction between them, always a bitterness and, on Dyadya Gourdjiev’s part, a profound disappointment whose origin could not be erased or forgiven. And yet here they were like two old friends who confided secrets to one another they’d never reveal to anyone else. It was their shared secrets, their shame, envy, and dispassion, that bound them tighter than father and son, than brothers. There was bad blood between them, but there was also love—curious, mystifying, impossible in any creature other than a human being.

“There you can’t be faulted,” Batchuk said with a tone that implied that there were other matters for which he still held Dyadya Gourdjiev liable.

Finishing off his coffee, Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled as if with secret knowledge, an expression that infuriated Batchuk and also put him in his place. “Now you must tell me why you’ve come here. I need some facts to offset the armada of innuendo you’ve been launching.”

Setting aside his cup, Batchuk rose and walked to stand in the entryway. He stood for a moment, hands in his pockets, frowning as he stared down at the smear of blood Arsov had left behind.

“Kaolin Arsov is no one to count as an enemy,” he said, as if speaking to the polished tips of his expensive English shoes. “To have the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka aligned against you is to court disaster.”

“This is Trinadtsat -speak.” Dyadya Gourdjiev shook his woolly head. “To think it comes to this. Warnings of this nature would never have been necessary even two years ago.”

“This is a new world, it’s being remade every day,” Batchuk said. “If you don’t have a spade in your hand then get out of the way.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev turned to confront the younger man. “ Trinadtsat is your doing, I warned you that it would be your undoing. Crawling into bed with the grupperovka was a grave mistake—”

“It couldn’t be helped,” Batchuk interjected.

“—and now, as you yourself have discovered, it can’t be undone. You’d have to exterminate the Izmaylovskaya, and even Yukin doesn’t have the stomach for that.”

“Circumstances had come to a head, they demanded to be dealt with by the harshest possible measures.”

“And now you have your wish.”

Batchuk sighed and looked back at Dyadya Gourdjiev as he covered the smear of blood with the heel of one shoe. “The truth is I face reality every minute of every day. The truth is the grupperovka —most notably the Izmaylovskaya—have both the power and the access to avenues crucial to the success of Trinadtsat .” He lifted a finger. “And make no mistake, Yukin needs Trinadtsat to succeed. His entire vision for Russia’s future rides on it.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev scrutinized him now because he knew they were coming to the crux of the visit. Oriel Jovovich Batchuk was a long way from the Kremlin; he hadn’t come all this way to simply vent his frustrations, or to seek advice. Not this time, anyway.

Batchuk took a step forward and put his hand on the doorknob. Looking back over his broad shoulder he said, “It’s your daughter.”

“Yes, of course, it always comes back to Annika, doesn’t it? And do you know why? People want to see what’s best for them, not what actually exists. You do nothing but pretend, to yourself as well as to me. You try to reshape events in the past to suit yourself when we both know very well that what happened—the terrible events that must never be mentioned—is immutable, it can’t be changed and, therefore, expunged, no matter how hard or in which ways you try.”