Текст книги "The Bourne Deception (Обман Борна)"

Автор книги: Eric Van Lustbader

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

Having ascertained that Lester Burrows, the police commissioner, was gone for the day, Willard had directed them to this block, to this specific brownstone.

―That being the case, the only smart way to play him is with psychology.

Honey is a powerful incentive inside the Beltway, never more so than with the Metro police.‖

―You know Commissioner Burrows?‖

―Know him?‖ Willard said. ―He and I trod the boards in college; we played Othellotogether. He was a helluva Moor, let me tell you, scary-good—I knew his rage was genuine because I knew where he came from.‖ He nodded, as if to himself. ―Lester Burrows is one African American who has transcended the utter poverty of his childhood in every sense of the word. That‘s not to say he‘s forgotten it, not by a long shot, but, unlike his predecessor, who never met a bribe he didn‘t take, Lester Burrows is a good man underneath the mean streak he‘s cultivated to protect himself, his office, and his men.‖

―So he‘ll listen to you,‖ Marks said.

―I don‘t know about that‖—Willard‘s eyes twinkled—‖but he sure as hell won‘t turn me away.‖

There was a brass knocker in the shape of an elephant that Willard used to announce their presence.

―What is this place?‖ Marks asked.

―You‘ll see soon enough. Just follow my lead and you‘ll be okay.‖

The door opened, revealing a young African American woman dressed in a fashionable business suit. She blinked once and said, ―Freddy, is that really you?‖

Willard chuckled. ―It‘s been a while, Reese, hasn‘t it?‖

―Years and years,‖ the young woman said, a smile creasing her face.

–Well, don‘t just stand there, come on in. He‘s going to be tickled beige to see you.‖

―To fleece me, you mean.‖

Now it was the young woman‘s turn to chuckle, a warm, rich sound that seemed to caress the listener‘s ear.

―Reese, this is a friend of mine, Peter Marks.‖

The young woman stuck out her hand in a no-nonsense fashion. She had a rather square face with an aggressive chin and worldly eyes the color of bourbon. ―Any friend of Freddy‘s…‖ Her smile deepened. ―Reese Williams.‖

―The commissioner‘s strong right hand,‖ Willard supplied.

―Oh, yes.‖ She laughed. ―What wouldhe do without me?‖

She led them down a softly lit, wood-paneled hallway, decorated with photos and watercolors of African wildlife, most predominantly elephants, with a smattering of rhinos, zebras, and giraffes thrown in.

They arrived soon after at double pocket doors, which Reese threw open to a blue cloud of aromatic cigar smoke, the discreet clink of glassware, and the fast-paced dealing of cards on a green baize table in the center of the library. Six men—including Commissioner Burrows—and one woman sat around the table, playing poker. All of them were high up in various departments of the district‘s political infrastructure. The ones Marks didn‘t know on sight, Willard identified for him.

As they stood on the threshold, Reese went ahead of them, crossing to the table, where Burrows sat, patiently playing his hand. She waited just behind his right shoulder until he‘d raked in the considerable pot, then leaned over and whispered in his ear.

At once the commissioner glanced up and a wide smile spread over his face. ―Goddammit!‖ he exclaimed, pushing his chair back and rising. ―Well, wash my socks and call me Andy, if it isn‘t Freddy Fucking Willard!‖ He strode over and engulfed Willard in a bear hug. He was a massive man with a bowling-ball head, who looked like an overstuffed sausage. His freckle-dappled cheeks belied the master manipulator‘s eyes and the pensive mouth of a seasoned politician.

Willard introduced Marks and the commissioner pumped his hand with that sinister warmth peculiar to people in public life, which flicks on and off with the quickness of a lightning strike.

―If you‘ve come to play,‖ Burrows said, ―you‘ve come to the right joint.‖

―Actually, we‘ve come to ask you about Detectives Sampson and Montgomery,‖ Marks said impulsively.

The commissioner‘s brow pulled down, darkening into a furry mass. ―Who are Sampson and Montgomery?‖

―With all due respect, sir, you know who they are.‖

―Son, are you some sort of psychic?‖ Burrows turned on Willard. ―Freddy, who the hell is he to tell me what I know?‖

―Ignore him, Lester.‖ Willard inserted himself between Marks and the commissioner. ―Peter‘s been a little on edge since he went off his medication.‖

―Well, get the man back on it, stat,‖ Burrows said. ―That mouth is a fucking menace.‖

―I will certainly do that,‖ Willard said as he grabbed Marks to keep him out of the line of fire. ―In the meantime, do you have room for one more at the table?‖

Noah Perlis, sitting in the lime-scented shade of the lavish rooftop garden at 779 El Gamhuria Avenue, could see all of Khartoum, smoky and indolent, laid out before him to his right, while to his left were the Blue and White Nile rivers that divided the city into thirds. In central Khartoum the hideous Chinese-built Friendship Hall, and the weird futuristic Al-Fateh building, so like the nose cone of an immense rocket, mixed uneasily with the traditional mosques and ancient pyramids of the city, but the unsettling juxtaposition was a sign of the times—hide-bound Muslim religion seeking its way in the alien modern world.

Perlis had his laptop open, the latest iteration of the Bardem program running the last of the scenarios: the incursion by Arkadin and his twenty-man cadre into that section of Iran where, like Palestine, the milk and honey flowed, in the form of oil.

Perlis never did one thing when he could do two or, preferably, three at once. He was a man whose mind was so quick and restless that it needed a kind of internal web of goals, puzzles, and conjectures to keep from imploding into chaos. So while he studied the probabilities of Pinprick‘s end phase the program was spitting out he thought about the devil‘s deal he‘d been forced to make with Dimitri Maslov and, by extension, Leonid Arkadin. First and foremost, it galled him to partner with Russians, whose corruption and dissolute lifestyle he both loathed and envied. How could a bunch of scummy pigs like that be so awash in money? While it was true that life was never fair, he mused, sometimes it could be downright malevolent. But what could he do? He‘d tried many other routes but, in the end, Maslov had been the only way to get to Nikolai Yevsen, who felt about Americans the way he, Perlis, felt about Russians. Accordingly, he‘d been forced to make a deal with too many partners—too many partners for whom double dealing and backstabbing had been ingrained in their nature virtually from birth. Contingencies had to be made against the threat of such treachery, and that meant triple the planning and man-hours. Of course, it also meant he‘d been able to triple the fee he was charging Bud Halliday, not that the price meant anything to the secretary, the way the US Mint was printing up dollars as if they were confetti. In fact, at the last Black River board meeting, members of the steering committee were so concerned with the threat of hyperinflation that they had voted unanimously to convert their dollars into gold bullion for the next six months while they put their clients on notice that starting September 1, the company would accept fees only in gold or diamonds. What bothered him about that meeting was that Oliver Liss, one of the three founding members and the man he reported to, was absent.

Simultaneously, he was thinking of Moira. Like a cinder in his eye, she had become an irritant. She was firmly lodged in a corner of his mind ever since she had abruptly quit Black River and, after a short hiatus, had started her own company in direct competition with him. Because, make no mistake, Perlis had taken her defection and subsequent treachery personally.

It hadn‘t been the first time, but he vowed to himself that it would be the last. The first time… well, there were good reasons not to think about the first time. He hadn‘t for years and he wasn‘t about to start now.

Besides, how else should he take actions that directly drained him of his best personnel? Like a jilted lover, he seethed for revenge, his long-withheld affection for her curdled into outright hatred—not only of her, but of himself. While she was under his control, he‘d played his cards too close to the vest—had, he had to admit bitterly, misplayed them altogether. And now she was gone, out of his control and in complete opposition to him. He took whatever solace he could salvage from the fact that her lover, Jason Bourne, was dead. He wished her only ill now, he wanted to see her not simply defeated but humiliated beyond redemption; nothing less would appease his appetite for vengeance.

When his satellite phone rang, he assumed it was Bud Halliday, giving him the signal to launch the final phase of Pinprick, but instead he discovered Humphry Bamber on the line.

―Bamber,‖ he shouted, ―where the hell are you?‖

―Back at my office, thank God.‖ Bamber‘s voice sounded thin and metallic.

–I finally managed to escape because the woman Moira Something was too badly hurt in the explosion to hold on to me for long.‖

―I heard about the explosion,‖ Noah said truthfully, though of course he didn‘t add that he‘d ordered it to keep Veronica Hart and Moira from finding out about Bardem from Bamber. ―Are you all right?‖

―Nothing a few days‘ rest won‘t cure,‖ Bamber said, ―but listen, Noah, there‘s a glitch in the version of Bardem you‘re running.‖

Noah stared out at the rivers, the beginning and the end of life in North Africa. ―What kind of a glitch? If the program needs another security patch, forget it, I‘m almost finished using it.‖

―No, nothing like that. There‘s a calculation error; the program isn‘t producing accurate data.‖

Now Noah was alarmed. ―How the hell did that happen, Bamber? I paid through the nose for this software and now you tell me that—‖

―Calm down, Noah, I‘ve already solved the internal error and corrected it. All I need to do now is to upload it to you, but you‘ll have to shut down all your programs.‖

―I know, I know, and Jesus, I ought to know the protocol by now considering how many versions of Bardem we‘ve been through.‖

―Noah, you have no idea how complex this program is—I mean, come on, literally millions of factors had to be incorporated into the software‘s architecture, and per your orders at the speed of light, too.‖

―Can it, Bamber. The last thing I need now is a lecture from you. Just get the fucking thing done.‖ Perlis‘s fingers were running over his laptop‘s keyboard, shutting down programs. ―Now, you‘re sure the latest parameters I‘ve loaded into the program will be there when I bring up the new version?‖

―Absolutely, Noah. That‘s why Bardem has one monster-size cache.‖

―Nothing better be missing,‖ Noah said, and silently he added, Not at this late date. We’re almost at the finish line.

―Just let me know when you‘re ready,‖ Bamber prompted.

All the programs were closed, but it took several minutes of going through one deliberately convoluted protocol after another until he exited the proprietary Black River security software. While this was happening, he muted his line with Bamber and dialed a number on a second satellite phone.

―Someone needs to be put to sleep,‖ he said. ―Yes, right away. Hold on and I‘ll transfer the particulars in a minute.‖

He unmuted the line with Bamber. ―All set,‖ he said.

―Then here we go!‖

26

KHARTOUM HAD about it the air of a disreputable mortuary. The sweet rot of death was everywhere, mingled with the sharp odor of gun barrels. Baleful shadows hid men smoking as they observed the night-lit street with the inscrutable look of a hunter searching for prey. Bourne and Tracy, in a jangling three-wheeled raksha,going at a hellish speed against traffic, rushed down avenues filled with donkey-pulled carts, wheezing minibuses, men in both traditional and Western dress, and vehicles belching blue smoke.

They were both tired and on edge—Bourne had had no luck contacting either Moira or Boris, and, despite what she‘d claimed, Tracy‘s experience in Seville seemed to have made her anxious about meeting Noah.

―I don‘t want to be caught napping when I walk in the door,‖ she‘d said as they checked into a hotel in the main section of the city. ―That‘s why I told Noah I wasn‘t coming over until tomorrow morning. Tonight I need a good night‘s sleep more than I need his money.‖

―What did he say?‖

They rode up in the mirrored elevator, heading for the top floor, which Tracy had requested.

―He wasn‘t happy, but what could he say?‖

―He didn‘t offer to come here?‖

Tracy‘s nose wrinkled. ―No, he didn‘t.‖

Bourne thought that odd. If Noah was so anxious to take possession of the Goya, why wouldn‘t he offer to complete the transaction at the hotel?

They had adjoining rooms with nearly identical views of al Mogran—the junction of the Blue and White Nile rivers—and a connecting door that locked from either side. The White Nile flowed north from Lake Victoria, while the Blue Nile flowed west from Ethiopia. The Nile itself, the main river, continued north into Egypt.

The decor in the room was shabby. Judging by both the style and the wear, it certainly hadn‘t been updated since the early 1970s. The carpets stank of cheap cigarettes and even cheaper perfume. Putting the Goya on the bed, Tracy crossed directly to the window, unlocked it, and pushed it up as far as it would go. The rush of the city was like a vacuum, sucking all the hums out of the room.

She sighed as she returned to sit beside her prize. ―I‘ve been traveling too much, I miss home.‖

―Where is that?‖ Bourne asked. ―I know it‘s not Seville.‖

―No, not Seville.‖ She pushed her hair back off the side of her face. ―I live in London, Belgravia.‖

―Very posh.‖

She laughed wearily. ―If you saw my flat—it‘s a tiny thing, but it‘s mine and I love it. There‘s a mews out back with a flowering pear tree that a pair of house martins nest in come spring. And a nightjar serenades me most evenings.‖

―Why would you ever leave?‖

She laughed again, a bright, silvery sound that was easy on the ears. ―I have to earn my way in the world, Adam, just like everyone else.‖ Lacing her fingers together, she said more soberly, ―Why did Don Hererra lie to you?‖

―There are many possible answers.‖ Bourne stared out the window. The bright lights illuminated the bend in the Nile, reflections of the city dancing across the dark, crocodile-infested water. ―But the most logical one is that he‘s somehow allied with the man I‘m trying to find, the one who shot me.‖

―Isn‘t that too much of a coincidence?‖

―It would be,‖ he said, ―if I wasn‘t being set up for a trap.‖

She seemed to digest this news for a moment. ―Then the man who tried to kill you wants you to come to Seven Seventy-nine El Gamhuria Avenue.‖

―I believe so.‖ He turned to her. ―Which is why I‘m not going to be with you when you knock on the front door tomorrow morning.‖

Now she appeared alarmed. ―I don‘t know whether I want to face Noah alone. Where are you going to be?‖

―My presence will only make things dangerous for you, believe me.‖ He smiled. ―Besides, I‘ll be there, I just won‘t go in through the front door.‖

―You mean you‘ll use me as a distraction.‖

She was not only uncommonly smart, Bourne thought, but quick as well. ―I hope you don‘t mind.‖

―Not at all. And you‘re right, I will be safer if I go in alone.‖ She frowned. ―Why is it, I wonder, that people feel the need to lie altogether?‖

Her eyes found his. She seemed to be comparing him with someone else, or perhaps only with herself. ―Would it be so terrible if everyone just told each other the truth?‖

―People prefer to remain hidden,‖ he said, ―so they won‘t get hurt.‖

―But they get hurt just the same, don‘t they?‖ She shook her head. ―I think people lie to themselves as easily as—if not more easily than—they do to others. Sometimes they don‘t even know they‘re doing it.‖ She cocked her head to one side. ―It‘s a matter of identity, isn‘t it? I mean, in your mind you can be anyone, do anything. Everything is malleable, whereas in the real world, effecting change—any change—is so bloody difficult, the effort is wearying, you get beaten down by all the outside forces you can‘t control.‖

―You could adopt an entirely new identity,‖ Bourne said, ―one where effecting change is less difficult because now you re-create your own history.‖

She nodded. ―Yes, but that has it own pitfalls. No family, no friends—

unless, of course, you don‘t mind being absolutely isolated.‖

―Some people don‘t.‖ Bourne looked beyond her, as if the wall with its cheap print of an Islamic scene was a window into his thoughts. Once again, he wondered who he was—David Webb, Jason Bourne, or Adam Stone. His life was a fiction, no matter in which direction he looked. He‘d already determined that he couldn‘t live as David Webb, and as for Jason Bourne, there was always someone, somewhere in the world, hidden in the shadows of his forgotten former life, who wished him ill or wanted him dead. And Adam Stone?

He might be called a blank slate, but that would be, in practice, untrue because the people who encountered this identity reacted to him—reacted to whoever the real Bourne was. The more he was with people like Tracy, the more he learned about himself.

―What about you?‖ she said now as she joined him at the window. ―Do you mind being alone?‖

―I‘m not alone,‖ he replied. ―I‘m with you.‖

She laughed softly and shook her head. ―Listen to you, you‘ve perfected the art of answering personal questions without revealing one iota of yourself.‖

―That‘s because I never know who I‘m talking with.‖

She watched him for a moment out of the corner of her eyes as if trying to figure out the real meaning of what he‘d just said, then she stared out the window at the two Niles winding their way through North Africa, like a story you read while falling asleep.

―At night, everything becomes transparent, or insubstantial.‖ Reaching out, she touched their reflections in the window. ―And yet our thoughts—and why is it especially our fears?—are somehow magnified, taking on the proportions of titans, or gods.‖ She stood very close to him, her voice lowered almost to a whisper. ―Are we good or evil? What‘s really in our hearts? It‘s dispiriting when we don‘t know, or can‘t decide.‖

―Perhaps we‘re both good and evil,‖ Bourne said, wondering about himself, about all his identities, and where the truth lay, ―depending on the time and the circumstance.‖

Arkadin was lost in the star-dazzled Azerbaijani night. Starting promptly at five in the morning, he and his one-hundred-strong cadre of hardened soldiers had hiked into the mountains. Their mission, he‘d told them, was to find the snipers hiding along their route and shoot them with the long-range paintball guns that looked and felt exactly like AK-47s that had been shipped at his request to Nagorno-Karabakh. Twenty members of the indigenous tribe, equipped with paintball sniper rifles, had secreted themselves along the route. When Arkadin had handed them out, he‘d had to explain their use to men who thought them both amusing and idiotic. Still, within half an hour the tribesmen had become proficient with the pseudo-weapons.

His men had missed the first two snipers completely, so two of the hundred had been ―killed‖ before they hunkered down and learned from their inattention and lapses in judgment.

This exercise had lasted all day and into the swiftly falling dusk, but Arkadin drove them on, deeper and deeper into the mountains. They stopped once for fifteen minutes, to eat their rations, then it was on again, climbing ever upward toward the clear, shining vault of heaven.

Toward midnight, he called a completion to the exercise, graded each man as to performance, stamina, and ability to adapt to a changing situation, then allowed them to make camp. As usual, he ate little and slept not at all.

He could feel his body‘s aches and strains, but they were small and, it seemed to him, very far away, as if they belonged to someone else, or to a different Arkadin he knew only in passing.

Dawn had arrived before he stilled his feverishly working mind and, marshaling his energies, pulled out his satellite phone and punched in a specific set of numbers, connecting him to an automated ―zombie‖ line that switched his call several times. With each switch, he was required to punch in a different code, which allowed him to continue the call. At length, after the last code was digested by the closed system at the other end of the line, he heard a human voice.

―I didn‘t expect to hear from you.‖ There was no rebuke in Nikolai Yevsen‘s voice, only a faint curiosity.

―Frankly,‖ Arkadin said, ―I didn‘t expect to call.‖ His head tilted up, he was staring at the last stars as they were banished by the pink and blue light. ―Something has come to my attention I thought you should know.‖

―As always, I appreciate your thoughtfulness.‖ Yevsen‘s voice was as harsh as a saw cutting through metal. There was about it something feral, a fearsome kind of power that was his alone.

―It has come to my attention that the woman, Tracy Atherton, is not alone.‖

―How is this information of interest to me?‖

Only Yevsen, Arkadin thought, could convey a lethal stillness with the mere tone of his voice. In the course of his freelance career with the Moscow grupperovkahe had gotten to know the arms dealer well enough to be exceedingly wary of him.

―She‘s with a man named Jason Bourne,‖ he said now, ―who is out for revenge.‖

―We all are, in one way or another. Why would he seek it here?‖

―Bourne thinks you hired the Torturer to kill him.‖

―Where would he get that idea?‖

―A rival, possibly. I could find out for you,‖ Arkadin said helpfully.

―It doesn‘t matter,‖ Yevsen said. ―This Jason Bourne is already a dead man.‖

Exactly what I wanted to hear,Arkadin thought as he could not stop his mind from turning toward the past.

Approximately five hundred miles from Nizhny Tagil, when daylight had bled into dusk and dusk fell victim to night, Tarkanian drove toward the village of Yaransk to look for a doctor. He had stopped three times on the way, so everyone could relieve themselves and get a bite to eat. At those times, he checked on Oserov. The third stop, near sunset, he‘d found that Oserov had peed himself. He was feverish and looked like death.

During the long drive at high speed over incomplete highways, rough detours, and suspect roads, the children had been remarkably quiet, listening with rapt attention to their mother spin tales—fabulous adventures and magnificent exploits of the god of fire, the god of wind, and especially the warrior-god, Chumbulat.

Arkadin had never heard of these gods and wondered whether Joškar had made them up for her daughters‘ benefit. In any event, it wasn‘t just the three girls who were held rapt by the stories. Arkadin listened to them as if they were news reports from a distant country to which he longed to travel.

In this way, for him, if not for Tarkanian, the long day‘s journey into night passed with the swiftness of sleep.

They arrived in Yaransk too late to find a doctor‘s office open, so Tarkanian, asking several pedestrians, followed their directions to the local hospital. Arkadin was left with Joškar in the car. They both climbed out to stretch their legs, leaving the girls in the backseat, playing with the sets of painted wooden nesting dolls Arkadin had bought them during one of the rest stops.

Her head was partly turned away from him as she glanced back at her children. Shadows hid most of the damage done to her face, while the sodium lights drew out the exoticism of her features, which seemed to him a curious mixture of Asian and Finnish. Her eyes were large and slightly uptilted, her mouth was generous and full-lipped. Unlike her nose, which seemed formed to protect her face from life‘s tougher blows, her mouth exuded a sensuality bordering on the erotic. That she seemed quite unaware of this quality in herself made it all the more magnetic.

―Did you make up the stories you were telling your children?‖ he asked.

Joškar shook her head. ―I was told them when I was a little girl, looking out at the Volga. My mother was told them by her mother, and so on back in time.‖ She turned to him. ―They‘re tales of our religion. I‘m Mari, you see.‖

―Mari? I don‘t know it.‖

―My people are what researchers call Finno-Ugrik. We‘re what you Christians call pagans. We believe in many gods, the gods of the stories I tell, and the demi-gods who walk among us, disguised as humans.‖ When she turned her gaze on her girls something inexplicable happened to her face, as if she had become one of them, one of her own daughters. ―Once upon a time, we were eastern Finns, who over the years intermarried with wanderers from the south and east. Gradually, this mixture of Germanic and Asian cultures moved to the Volga, where our land was eventually incorporated into Russia.

But we were never accepted by the Russians, who hate learning new languages and fear customs and traditions other than their own. We Mari have a saying:

‗The worst your enemies can do is kill you. The worst your friends can do is betray you. Fear only the indifferent, because at their silent consent, treachery and death flourish!‘‖

―That‘s a bleak credo, even for this country.‖

―Not if you know our history here.‖

―I never knew you weren‘t ethnic Russian.‖

―No one did. My husband was deeply ashamed of my ethnic background, just as he was ashamed of himself for marrying me. Of course, he told no one.‖

Looking at her, he could see why Lev Antonin had fallen in love with her.

–Why did you marry him?‖ he said.

Joškar gave an ironic laugh. ―Why do you think? He‘s ethnic Russian; moreover, he‘s a powerful man. He protects me and my children.‖

Arkadin took her chin, moving her face fully into the light. ―But who protects you from him?‖

She snatched her face away as if his fingers had burned her. ―I made certain he never touched my children. That was all that mattered.‖

―Doesn‘t it matter that they should have a father who, unlike Antonin, genuinely loves them?‖ Arkadin was thinking of his own father, either falling-down drunk or absent altogether.

Joškar sighed. ―Life is full of compromises, Leonid, especially for the Mari. I was alive, he‘d given me children whom I adore, and he swore to keep them from harm. That was my life, how could I complain when my parents were murdered by the Russians, when my sister disappeared when I was thirteen, probably abducted and tortured because my father was a journalist who repeatedly spoke out against the repression of the Mari? That was when my aunt sent me away from the Volga, to ensure I stayed alive.‖

Arkadin watched one of the girls playing in the backseat of the car. Her two sisters had fallen asleep, one against the door, the other with her head on her sleeping sister‘s shoulder. In the pale, ethereal light slanting in they looked like the fairies in their mother‘s stories.

―We must find a place soon to immolate my son.‖

―What?‖

―He was born on the solstice of the fire-god,‖ she explained, ―so the fire-god must take him across into the death-lands, otherwise he will wander the world forever alone.‖

―All right,‖ Arkadin said. He was impatient to get to Moscow, but considering his complicity in Yasha‘s death he felt he was in no position to refuse her. Besides, she and her family were his responsibility now. If he refused to take care of them, no one else would. ―As soon as Tarkanian and Oserov return we‘ll head out into the woods so you can find a suitable spot.‖

―I will need you to help me. Mari custom dictates a male‘s participation.

Will you do this for Yasha, and for me?‖

Arkadin watched the play of light and dark chasing themselves across the flat planes of her face as vehicles swept by, their headlights pushing back the oncoming night. He didn‘t know what to say, so he nodded mutely.

In the near distance, the spire of the Orthodox church rose up like a reproachful finger, in admonition to the world‘s sinners. Arkadin wondered why so much money was spent in the service of something that couldn‘t be seen, heard, or felt. Of what use was religion? he wondered. Any religion?

As if reading his thoughts, Joškar said, ―Do you believe in something, Leonid—god or gods—something greater than yourself?‖

―There‘s us and there‘s the universe,‖ he said. ―Everything else is like those stories you tell your children.‖

―I saw you listening to those stories, Leonid. They caught and held something inside you even you might not know about.‖

―It was like watching movies. They‘re entertainment, that‘s all.‖

―No, Leonid, they are history. They speak of hardship, migration, sacrifice. They speak of deprivation and subjugation, of prejudice and of our unique identity and our will to survive, no matter the cost.‖ She studied him closely. ―But you‘re Russian, you are the victor, and history belongs to the victor, doesn‘t it?‖

Funny, he didn‘t feel like a victor, and he never had. Who had ever stood up and spoken for him? Weren‘t your parents supposed to be your advocates, weren‘t they supposed to protect you, not imprison you and abandon you? There was something about Joškar that touched a place inside him that, as she‘d said, he hadn‘t known existed.

―I‘m a Russian in name only,‖ he said. ―There is nothing inside me, Joškar. I‘m a hollow man. In fact, when we place Yasha on the funeral pyre and light the wood I‘ll envy him the pure and honorable method of his dissolution.‖

She looked at him with her bourbon eyes and he thought, If I see pity in her face I’ll have to strike her. But no pity was evident to him, just a singular curiosity. He glanced down and saw that she was holding out her hand to him. Without knowing why, he took it, felt her warmth, almost as if he could hear the blood singing in her veins. Then she turned, went back to the car, and gently drew out one of her daughters, whom she deposited in his arms.

―Hold her like this,‖ she directed. ―That‘s right, shape your arms into a cradle.‖

She turned and stared up into the night sky where the first saltings of stars were becoming visible.