Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“ Dad, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. ”

“You always tell me things I don’t know,” he said.

“ About us, yes. The two of us. That’s why I’m still here. But about everything else, no, I can’t. ”

“The way you say it . . . as if it’s some kind of law.”

“ I suppose you could look at it that way. ”

“A universal law, like physics or quantum mechanics?”

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles just in case he really was sleeping. But when he opened them, whether in fact he was asleep or awake, he found himself alone in the backseat. There was no one to answer his question.

“NOTHING IS inherently good or evil,” Annika was saying to Alli as Jack looked around for his daughter, “it’s just disappointing.”

“Give me an example,” Alli said.

Annika, her eyes on the road, thought for a moment. “All right. In ancient Rome, there was a man, Marcus Manlius, who had masterminded the plan to save the Capitol from destruction when Rome had been overrun by the Gauls. This was in, oh, three ninety, B.C. Anyway, in the aftermath of the war that drove the invaders out, as in all wars, the soldiers who had so bravely defended their homeland were now out of a job, and soon so deep in debt they were thrown in prison, an injustice Marcus Manlius would not tolerate. He used much of his great fortune to buy these heroes their freedom, an act of altruism that pissed off the patricians of the city, so much so that they accused him of building his own private army in order to force his way into power. The plebs, incited by the patricians’ charges, sentenced Marcus Manlius to death. They threw him off the Tarpeian Rock.”

Alli remembered that the Tarpeian Rock had fascinated Emma because it was the spot where criminals were hurled to their death. It was named after the traitor who opened the gates of Rome to the Sabines for the promise of gold bracelets. Instead, when she let them in, they crushed her with their shields, which they wore on the same arm as the bracelets so coveted by Tarpeia—a vestal virgin, no less! How ironic. She was buried at the base of the rock that came to bear her name, which rose from the summit of a steep cliff on the southern face of Capitoline Hill, overlooking the Forum.

Rome had been founded by thieves, outlaws, murderers, and slaves who’d been clever enough to escape their masters. The only trouble was there were no women, which is why these early Romans, as they called themselves, decided to steal females from the neighboring Sabines. It was this infamous rape—the Latin raptio , meaning kidnapping—of the women that led to the Sabines’ revenge, using Tarpeia as their cat’s-paw.

This dark side of Romans—of Rome itself—had caught and held Alli’s attention, because in addition to being responsible for the invention of roads, the aqueduct, and numerous other innovations, it was the Romans who, infamously, had created the homicidal system of election. Those leaders they didn’t like, learned to dislike, feared, found fault with, or about whom they invented transgressions (out of envy or greed) were murdered forthwith. Alli, having been born to and brought up in the incubator of politics, felt the tension, the unspoken fear of assassination that swirled around her father in ever thicker layers the higher on the political ladder he climbed. And when she’d come to Moscow she almost immediately had intuited how similar it was to ancient Rome, how much the modern-day political system had been infected by that of the Romans: institutionalized murder as a means to an end.

“So,” Alli said after her moment’s thought, “what you’re saying is that even the best intentions turn to shit.”

“I’m saying that all of us are doomed to disappointment. I’m saying I embrace that disappointment because it’s the ultimate leveler, it doesn’t care about class or money or power. It’s the great reaper.”

“You mean the grim reaper,” Alli said. “That’s death.”

Annika shrugged. “Take your pick.”

THE CALL came in to Dennis Paull’s cell phone at three thirty in the morning. He was in the middle of a labyrinth of data he’d finally been able to pull off of General Brandt’s cell phone records, as well as a definitive report on his comings and goings over the last year. In fact, Paull was busy reading the item that interested him the most: two unofficial round-trip flights to Moscow, both in the last six months, both over weekends, that were neither recorded or expensed by any government agency. That wouldn’t have necessarily set off an alarm bell in Paull’s mind, but there were a number of oddities. For one thing, General Brandt paid cash for first-class tickets. For another, both flights had been on Aeroflot, not Delta, an American airline, which by all rights he should have taken. Where in the world did the General get ten thousand in cash for two trips to Moscow? He hacked into the General’s bank account at District National. A day before the withdrawal, ten thousand was wired into the account from Alizarin Global, an entity Paull had never heard of.

His cell buzzed. He was plunged so deep in thought he almost didn’t answer it.

A local number not recognized by caller ID. “Hello?”

“Mr. Paull?”

“Yes?”

“This is Nancy Lettiere, we’ve met several times. I run the Alzheimer’s wing at Petworth Manor. I’m sorry to report that Mrs. Paull expired at three eleven this morning.”

For a long time after that Paull sat very still. His eyes still ran over the lines of information on his laptop just as they had during the long hours before the call, but now nothing registered in his brain, which was suddenly filled with a dreadful little refrain repeated over and over—“You weren’t there, you weren’t there, you weren’t there when she died”—as if it were a ridiculous children’s song coming out of a ghostly radio in her room. All at once he was suffocating in the sickly-sweet odor of her, of . . . good God, he couldn’t even say her name, she’d been a vegetable for so long. And yet now he was choking on what was left of her, of Louise, as if he’d inhaled the ashes of her funeral pyre.

He pushed back his chair, rose, and left the room without retrieving his coat. The fire stairs echoed harshly with his hurried footfalls. Outside, he lit a cigarette, but almost immediately the night manager appeared behind the glass door, pointed to the cigarette, and shook his head vigorously. Paull took a deep drag and blew the smoke against the glass.

The night manager frowned, slid his key card into the slot, and opened the door. “I’m sorry, sir, but federal regulations prohibit any smoking within twenty feet of the building.”

Paull said nothing, stood looking at him while he continued to smoke.

“Sir, did you not hear me? If you persist I’m going to have to call the authorities—”

He gave a startled yelp as Paull grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him up against the wall, then struck the man in the stomach. As he doubled over, Paull hit him in the side of the head, then flush on his nose, which immediately gushed blood.

For a moment Paull drew smoke into his lungs and let it out in a luxurious plume. He was dizzy with the onrush of adrenaline. At length, he knelt down and showed the night manager his credentials.

“I am the fucking authority, buddy.” He hauled the man to his feet and pushed him roughly through the door. “So fuck off before I turn you in as a suspected terrorist.”

Alone again, Paull stamped out his ruined cigarette and lit another. He stepped out onto the asphalt lot. Shouldn’t it be raining, he thought, gloomy weather to match his mood? Instead, a brilliant butter-colored moon rode in the sky, and all at once he was thrust back twenty-eight years, when he used to read Claire Goodnight Moon . He read it so often that she had soon memorized it and then she recited it aloud with him as he read.