Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

But that night Batchuk was nowhere to be found, instead he walked in on a screaming fight between Alexsei and Nikki. At first no one answered the door, but when he became insistent Nikki opened the door a crack.

He was stunned to see her looking disheveled, her face pale, her carnelian eyes fever-bright. There was a snarl on her lips that she was too upset to hide or modify as she stared out at him. She hadn’t wanted to let him in, had begun to close the door on him when he’d planted his foot on the lintel. Then he’d leaned into the door and pushed it open, stepping inside.

At once Alexsei rushed out of the bedroom where, it seemed, their argument had escalated into a full-scale battle of harsh words, hurled invective, insults, and accusations.

“It’s him, isn’t it!” Alexsei shouted. “How dare you let him in?” When he saw that it was Gourdjiev standing in the entryway, he turned away, but he was hardly mollified. “Now you call your father to take your side.”

“I didn’t call anyone, Alexsei.”

“Liar! You call Oriel all the time!” he shouted as he whirled around.

“He calls me,” she said, “it’s not the same thing.”

“It is if you accept the call.” Alexsei’s lips were drawn back from his teeth.

“You’re making something out of nothing,” Nikki said.

“Do you deny you see him during the day?” he snarled. “Go on, deny it, it would be just like you. Deny it and I’ll have my proof of what sort of woman you are, because I’ve seen you two.”

“You’ve been spying on me?”

“I saw the two of you having lunch, bent over the table together, your foreheads were practically touching, I saw it and there were other prosecutors there as well.”

“Alexsei, think for a minute, if I were having an affair with Oriel would either of us be stupid enough to meet in public, let alone at a restaurant frequented by your colleagues?”

“I know him, he wants to throw the affair in my face, he’s out to humiliate me, he wants everyone to know that he’s taken you away from me.”

“You speak of me as if I were a horse or a sack of wheat.”

That was when Gourdjiev turned on his heel and left. No good would come from him inserting himself between them, especially when emotions were running so high. It was only when he emerged from the building and saw the spotlit domes of the Kremlin that he knew there was only one place for him to go.

“Is everything all right?” Magnussen said now, wrenching Gourdjiev back to the present. They stood in the villa’s entryway. “We didn’t expect you.”

“Yes, I know,” Gourdjiev said, “but there was no place else to go.”

BATCHUK WAS inside the perimeter of the manor house before he saw a guard. The brick wall surrounding the property was high but not particularly difficult to scale or to get over. The real difficulty was in keeping his silhouette from being seen in the gloaming of dawn. There were no trees on the cliff top, no foliage to mask his movements, but luck was with him, a light fog was billowing in off the water in ghostly waves.

Dropping down off the top of the wall he heard faraway barking and he crouched down, still as a rock. If there were dogs on the property, particularly hunting dogs, they would present a problem. With the onshore wind they would already have picked up his scent, or would at any moment. Close to the front of the house he saw the Zil. As he watched, a guard emerged from the house and drove the Zil around to where a number of other cars were parked.

As soon as the guard was back inside Batchuk ran as fast as he could, zigzagging, still bent over, heading for the left side of the manor house. He reached it without incident, but now he heard a chorus of barks, close enough for him to identify them as belonging to Russian wolfhounds. Wolfhounds were not in themselves dangerous, they liked people too much, but they would certainly sound the alarm for those inside the house. Any moment now other guards would come pouring out, following the dogs who, he was now certain, had picked up his scent.

He knew the feeling, he’d had a hound coming after him the night Nikki told him that she couldn’t see him anymore, that Alexsei had found out about them and was causing a terrible row. She told him unequivocally to stay away when he said he was coming to make sure she would be safe.

“I don’t need you to feel safe,” she had told him. “I don’t need you at all.”

“You do need me,” he had replied like an idiot, as if he were seventeen, “I know you do, Nikki, no matter what you say you can’t hide it from me.”

“You are so deluded,” she shot back, “I was a fool, weak and sad, and you caught me in that moment, you took advantage of me and climbed all over me.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said, “you loved every minute of it, it was you who climbed all over me, if memory serves, you couldn’t get enough.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she shrieked, clearly terrified.

“I did what you wanted me to do, nothing more.”

“Liar! It was what you wanted.”

“You can’t fight it, Nikki, I don’t understand why you even try.”

“Idiot, because I’m married.”

“You’ll divorce him, I’ll make it easy for you.”

All at once she sounded desperate. “I pledged my heart, my life to Alexsei, don’t you get it? But, no, I don’t suppose you do, why would you? You have no soul, no humanity, you’re heartless, pitiless, you want what you want, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

“Then why did you give in to me? Why did you scream over and over in ecstasy?” He barely got out the last word when she hung up on him.

An hour later Gourdjiev came for him, baying at his door, and he had had no choice but to let him in, no choice because Gourdjiev knew he was home, and if he’d ignored the repeated knocking he’d become a prisoner in his own apartment. He had plenty of power, it was true, but so did Gourdjiev; he had no wish for an all-out war that would bring an end to both their political careers, he had too much on the line to take that risk. And so he opened the door, accepted his medicine, the righteous indignation, the affronted anger, the howl of the animal that feels its off spring threatened.

Visibly chastened, he did not argue, he acquiesced. Whatever Gourdjiev wanted of him he did without argument or protest, let him win this battle, let the war wait in abeyance, all the players frozen in place, until the moment when he himself dictated that the next act would begin.

______

BUT THE dogs would not wait, the wolfhounds came tearing through the carefully manicured foliage—sculpted boxwood and cotoneaster, as close-clipped as a general’s hair—to where Batchuk had crouched under the eaves at the back of the house, but he was no longer there, and they ran in dizzying circles, barking and yelping, their nostrils full of his scent, but with nowhere to go.

“That badger again,” one of the guards said, after he and his companion had had a thorough look around, “or maybe this time an opossum.”

JACK WAS just finishing up his call with Dennis Paull, having at last found the time to answer his urgent voice mail, when he caught sight of Annika. She was in the entryway, talking with Dyadya Gourdjiev, of all people, obviously just arrived, as he stood in his water-beaded overcoat. At this hour, as misty dawn light crept slowly up to the manor house, everyone should have been sleeping, they should have been in bed hours ago, sleeping through the small hours of the morning, when the country was quiet and indolent, dreaming of yesterday or the day after tomorrow, when sorrow’s heartbeat was stilled at last, overcome by hope. But Vlad’s attempt on Jack’s life had turned the world within the manor house upside down; at Kharkishvili’s urging several of the guards had hustled the inhabitants outside while Ivan Gurov and his crew interrogated the kitchen crew, discovered Vlad’s treachery, and slowly, feeling shaken, chilled, and desolate, everyone had filtered back inside, where they puddled in the library, knocking back glasses of slivovitz and watching each other with ambushed eyes.