Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

Jack went past the bar itself and saw a Secret Service agent nursing a club soda. He turned his eye from an empty banquette at the rear at which he was planning to sit to the one the agent was keeping an eye on, and saw Alli Carson. She was sitting by herself next to a window that looked out onto the snow-covered square, occupied only by architecturally florid buildings, all of which had a history steeped in blood and power. She looked so small, almost lost, vulnerable against the high-back crescent, but he knew better. This part of her physical appearance was caused by Graves’ disease, a form of hyperthyroidism that made her look sixteen rather than twenty-two. Beyond that illusion, she was tough as reinforced concrete and smarter than many people twice her years. Her skin was pale against the bloodred material. Clear green eyes below a thick fall of auburn hair dominated an oval face. A constellation of freckles danced across the bridge of her nose. She wore jeans and a T-shirt that read SEX IS DEAD across the front. She could not have looked more out of place.

“I’ll have whatever she’s having,” he told the somnolent waiter as he slid into the banquette beside her.

Alli’s slim fingers gripped the glass. “It’s not a Shirley Temple,” she said.

He grinned. “Good God, I hope not.”

She laughed, which was the point.

“Where’s your mom?”

“In bed,” Alli said. “She might be asleep, or not. She only took the Xanax ten minutes ago.”

“She still having trouble sleeping?”

“She hates it here. She says the Russian women are too piggy to be impressed with her.”

The waiter came with Jack’s drink, which turned out to be a White Russian, a bit sweet for him, but what the hell, he thought.

As he lifted his glass, she said, “You’re not leaving, too, are you?”

He had learned early on not to lie to her; he’d needed to earn her trust. Besides, she was too quick to be gulled. “I’m not going with your father, no.”

A ghost of a smile played around her generous mouth. “Which means you’re going somewhere .” Her gaze slid slyly sideways. “What are you doing for him?”

“You know I can’t tell you.”

“Whatever it is it’s got to be more interesting than sitting around this dump.”

“I thought you liked it here.”

“Talking to Dad again? Didn’t your bullshit meter go off? The Russian boys are Neanderthals and the Russian girls are sluts—what’s to like?”

“There’s a lot of history here.”

“Which no one wants to talk about because it’s been entirely rewritten,” she said dryly. “I’m begging you, take me away from all this, Jack.”

“I wish I could, Alli, really.”

“Fuck. Fuck you!”

“Don’t be like that.”

“How would you like me to be?” Her eyes flashed. “Docile, meek, girlish?”

“Now you’re confusing me with your father.”

“How can you be friends with him?”

Then again, Jack thought, she could still be startlingly immature. “He’s a good man, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a good father.”

As quickly as her anger had sparked, it winked out. “Fuck.” But now her voice had softened. “I hate this life, Jack, really, it sucks beyond belief.”

“How can I make it better?”

She kissed him tenderly on the cheek. “If only.” Then she downed the last of her White Russian with such force the ice cubes clacked against her front teeth. “One day it’ll get better, or it won’t, right?”

She began to slide out of the banquette.

Against his better judgment, he said, “So how are you doing?”

Alli paused. “About as well as you.”

It was a smart answer, Jack thought, or else it was a smart-aleck answer. Maybe, knowing Alli, it was both. “That would have made Emma laugh.” Emma, who had been Alli’s roommate, best friend, confidante, and closest ally against Alli’s parents. “Remember the time I came to watch you in a relay race? You were the anchor, remember?”

“I remember.”

“She let me sit next to her and though she didn’t say a word I could see how proud of you she was. She didn’t get to her feet, she didn’t applaud like everyone else when you pulled away and won.”

Alli was quiet for some time as if lost in the past. “That night when I came back from celebrating, the room was dark and I thought she was asleep. I went into the bathroom and undressed as quietly as I could. As I got into bed I saw there was a small box lying on the blanket. I moved it into a bar of light slanting through the window. Inside was a leaping silver cat on a chain.

“As I held it up, she said, ‘It’s a cheetah, the fastest fucking animal on four legs,’ and turned over and went to sleep.” Alli stood up. “I’ll never stop missing her and neither will you.”

He watched her walk away, but he was seeing Emma. Alli was right, he would never stop missing the daughter who he’d allowed to drift away from him, who’d called him right before she crashed her car into a tree and died on the spot. Although, improbably, there had been times afterward when she’d appeared to him, even talked to him.

Which opened up four possibilities: His extreme guilt had caused him to conjure her up from the depths of his unconscious, as the shrink he’d consulted suggested; he was insane; his dyslexic brain was playing tricks on him; or the incorporeal part of Emma had survived her physical death. Any one of those scenarios filled him with dread, but not for the same reasons. He wanted to believe that there was more to reality than life and death, which were, after all, man-made concepts. He wanted to believe that Emma still existed in some form. To him that was the definition of faith: to believe in something that science was unable to explain. When Emma had been killed he’d lost whatever faith he might have had; when she returned to him he’d regained it.

Alli and her escort had been swallowed up by the lobby, and he was alone in the bar. The hush of a mausoleum wrapped itself about the room. The lamps glimmered like shale in a riverbed. The snow tap-tap-tapped feebly against the windowpane, a starved beggar wanting in. He’d only taken a couple of sips of the cloying White Russian, and he pushed it away now. Catching the waiter between catnaps, he ordered a single-malt whisky with water on the side. Then he pulled out the slip of paper with Lloyd Berns’s itinerary in Ukraine and concentrated on reading it.

Jack’s dyslexia caused his brain to work thousands of times faster than what was considered normal. He could not understand, at least not easily, anything that wasn’t in three dimensions, which meant that he could solve a Rubik’s Cube in about ninety seconds, but writing, which was two-dimensional, was an arduous task. He had to decipher it as if it were a foreign language or a code. He’d been taught to master his disability by a minister who’d sheltered him after he’d run away from his father, who had constantly beaten him for being unable to learn at school. It was only later, as an adult, that he had discovered that his dyslexia could be a devastating asset in deconstructing crime scenes and crawling inside asocial and psychotic minds.

He was running down the list of unfamiliar city and street names when he heard someone order a vodka in a voice as sharp as it was familiar. Glancing up from his task, he saw a young blonde in a black dress and high heels, perched on one of the bar stools. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail that reached to the hollow between her shoulder blades. Though that hairstyle was most often used by women with thin hair, this was not the case with the blonde, whose hair was as thick as it was lustrous. Her large, slightly uptilted eyes were the mineral color of carnelian. She had wide lips that might have been sensual had they not been down-turned in a distinctly unattractive scowl.