Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“I’m the one she calls dyadya .”

“Indeed you are.” Batchuk’s tone made it clear this statement was anything but a concession. “And you’re the ignorant one, the scales have not yet dropped from your eyes. Unlike Saul of Tarsus you haven’t yet had your road to Damascus moment, but then it seems you were untimely born.”

“Untimely born?”

“ ‘Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me,’ ” Batchuk quoted. “Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.”

“For a devout atheist you’re quite the biblical scholar.”

“I like to probe the weaknesses of my enemies,” Batchuk said, with a meaning directed at Gourdjiev. The tenuous cord was broken, they were no longer frenemies. “In any event I came to warn you, or more accurately, to give you the opportunity to warn Annika. I’m coming for her—me, myself, not someone I’ve hired or ordered to do a piece of work. This I do personally, with my own hands.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev fairly trembled in barely suppressed rage. “How can . . . This is monstrous. How can you do this?”

“Given the decisions she has made how can I not?”

“You know what this means.”

Batchuk nodded. “I do.”

“Nothing will ever be the same between us.”

“My dear Dyadya Gourdjiev,” Batchuk said, using Annika’s nickname for him in a mocking manner, “nothing was ever the same between us from the moment I first saw Annika.”

“I DID what I thought was right,” Annika said, “but I know I don’t always make the right choice.”

Jack studied her at some length. They were standing in the entry-way to the Magnussen mansion, just outside the bathroom where Alli had gone. Neither of them wanted to leave her alone at the moment, and as for Jack, the feeling of having been boxed in by both Alli’s impetuosity and her mother’s inability to control her had reasserted itself with a vengeance. And yet he knew quite well that there was no use in railing against this situation; as he had since he’d taken off from Sheremetyevo he resigned himself to the responsibility of keeping her safe, both from others who might want to kidnap her and do her harm, and from herself.

“In that you and Alli are alike,” he said. “She seems to lack the ability to know what’s good for her, or maybe it’s her own self-hatred that pushes her to seek out dangerous situations.”

Annika smiled what might best be described as a secret smile, or at least an ironic one, as if his words had triggered hidden memories.

“You see her in such a clear and perfect light, Jack, I admire that, I really do. I mean, she’s such a complex person, not that most people aren’t complex, but there’s something about her that—”

She stopped abruptly, as if changing her mind, and her eyes seemed to drift away to another time, another place. It wasn’t the first time Jack had observed this phenomenon in her, and he was struck by its similarity to what he sometimes observed in Alli. And now, as this particular Rubik’s Cube shifted perspective in his mind, he began to wonder how many more similarities there were between the two women.

Her carnelian eyes came back to him, in the light of the entryway their mineral quality making them transparent. “Jack, you don’t hate me for what I did, do you?”

“Did? What did you do?”

“What I said to Alli.”

“No, not at all. She needs all the help she can get, even if that help is sometimes difficult for her to hear.”

“I’m relieved then.” She placed a hand on his arm. “After all that’s happened—”

“But that’s just it.” Jack suddenly decided to take the bull by the horns. “I don’t know what happened to you.”

“What? I told you.”

“But you didn’t, not really. When I first saw the scars I decided not to ask you how you got them because I thought it might be an invasion of your privacy, but now I’d like to know.”

“Why? Why is it important now?”

“I’ve already told you, you have a particular affinity for understanding a young woman you met just days ago. I want to know how that works.”

Soft echoes of footfalls, of muffled voices came to them now and again. Since their arrival the mansion had come alive as if it had been waiting for them. A number of cars were parked on the generous expanse of gravel outside and the interior exhibited the air of expectancy, the bustle of hastily arranged preparations.

“It works,” Annika said, “because we’re both broken.”

Her mineral eyes studied him with a frightening intensity. In those eyes it was possible to get lost, moreover, to want to get lost. Jack felt himself losing his sense of time and place, and he enfolded her in his arms, felt the slight tremors of her emotions firing along her bare arms.

“It works,” she said, “because, like her, I was taken. It works because I’m just like her.”

“DARLING, YOU’VE only taken one bite of your stollen,” the widow Tanova admonished. “Did I put in too much cinnamon?”

Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled vaguely. “No, Katya. I was just thinking about the past.”

Katya Tanova came and sat beside him at the dining room table. They were in her apartment, which was smartly furnished in the latest Western style. She was not a person to become stuck in amber like so many of her friends who had not moved on from the things they had liked in their thirties and forties. Their homes were like museums or mausoleums, depending on your level of cynicism. Katya’s public persona—cool, proper, even a bit formal—was in stark contrast with her private demeanor, or at least her behavior with Gourdjiev, which was very private, indeed. With him she was like a young woman, coquettish, bantering. She often threw her head back and laughed, or else she engaged him with an intellectual rigor he found positively erotic.

“For most people that’s not so good, darling, but for you it’s terrible.”

He nodded with gravity. “That may be true, but I can’t help it.”

“She came to see you, didn’t she? You saw Annika.”

He stared out the window at the hideously bare branches of a tree.

Katya wore a sleeveless flowered dress short enough to show off her strong legs, but not so short as to be unseemly. She had kicked off her shoes when she sat down. Her feet, wrapped in sheer stockings, were quite beautiful.

“You always become so melancholy when you see her. And the past—”

“Sometimes I can fool myself into thinking I’m happy, or satisfy myself at being so clever at this game or that. Once in a very great while I can even feel young again, but it always fades, this feeling, and then I realize that I’ve simply deluded myself. I expend so much energy trying to ignore the past, or forget it or—and this would be best of all—erase it, but it comes back to haunt me again and again.” He turned from the window with a bleak smile. “How can it not?”

“But, darling, how can you keep blaming yourself, when—”

“It wasn’t my fault? I should have known, I should have foreseen—”

“How could you, you’re not a sorcerer.”

“If only I were, I could obliterate the past, alter it with a wave of my hand!” he cried in anguish. “Such a terrible ending. No one deserves that.”

“Especially not Nikki. She was your wife but she was my best friend, we both miss her terribly.” Katya put her hand over his. “But we’re not really talking about Nikki now, are we? She’s dead and gone, beyond pain, beyond suffering. But Annika—”

“I cannot quantify Annika’s suffering, because to this day I don’t know what happened to her.”

“And if you did know, of what possible use would it be to you, except to bring you more heartache and self-recrimination? And, darling, you are full up on those things already.” She pushed the plate of stollen closer to him. “Come now, have something to eat, you’ll feel better.”