Текст книги "The Romanov Cross"
Автор книги: Robert Masello
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 35 страниц)
Chapter 8
Harley Vane had been telling his story for days, but he was fast running out of new people to tell it to. By now, everyone had heard about how he had been out on deck overseeing the retrieval of the old casket, while Lucas Muller, that college boy, had altered the course of the boat to carry it too close to the rocks off St. Peter’s Island.
“I never should have left him alone at the wheel,” Harley had mused aloud to a reporter for the Barrow Gazette, “but I always liked to give a kid a chance.”
He’d also recounted how, after the boat had hit the rocks, he had single-handedly carted Richter the engineer up from the hold—“the old man was drowning in a sea of crabs”—and tried to get him into the lifeboat, only to find that the crew had already launched it. Shaking his head, he had told the local reporter, “If they’d just waited, I could have gotten them all out of there alive.”
It was only when he had assured himself that no one else was still aboard, and the Neptune IIwas lost, that he had reluctantly plunged into the churning sea and taken his miraculous trip to shore atop the carved coffin lid. “Sometimes, I wish I’d just let myself go down with the ship and my crew,” he’d mused, while the Gazette’s photographer had taken a shot of him gazing soulfully out to sea.
Not that many of the locals believed it, however. Port Orlov was a tiny town, and the Vane boys had lived there their whole lives. Their mother had absconded back when they were kids—“bewitched,” their father had said, “by a local shaman”—and the boys had grown up wild and, as they got older, downright dangerous. Charlie, the older one, had led the way, breaking and entering other folks’ cabins when they were off on hunting trips, fouling another boat’s halibut with gasoline to raise the price of his own, and finally wrecking the first Neptuneby falling asleep, drunk and stoned, at the wheel. The boat had run out of fuel at sea, gotten caught up in some ice, and crumpled like a tin can. After that, nobody would sail with Charlie Vane at the helm. Now, with the Neptune IIat the bottom of the sea, it looked like nobody was likely to join a crew if Harley was in command, either.
“Hail the conquering hero,” Charlie said, dryly, when Harley showed up at the family homestead. It was a rambling old structure with a lighted cross mounted on the roof like an antenna. The whole house was raised a few feet off the ground on cement pylons, and so ill conceived and built that every room felt like it had been an add-on. The floors sloped, the ceilings were either too low or too high, and ramps had been placed anywhere that Charlie’s wheelchair would have trouble going. After sinking the boat, Charlie had tried to operate a nautical sales franchise, but a couple of months in, he’d tried to run the rapids at Heron River Gorge, at the full height of the spring runoff, and when his canoe cratered on the rocks, he’d emerged a paraplegic. The burglary rate around town had dropped precipitously in the immediate aftermath of the accident. “Come on into the meeting room,” he said, turning the chair down a wooden ramp.
What Charlie called the meeting room was a big raw space with a timbered ceiling and a dozen old rugs thrown on the floor to keep the cold from coming through. A stack of folding chairs leaned against one wall, in case he ever got more than a few people to attend one of his Sunday prayer meetings. In the two years since his accident, he’d claimed to have found God, and to spread the word he’d started an online ministry called Vane’s Holy Writ, which was a strange brew of evangelism, antigovernment polemics, and conspiracy theory. Harley, who had glanced at the site once or twice and even attended a couple of the prayer meetings, was never entirely sure if his brother actually believed the crazy shit he was saying or was just pulling another con. Once he’d even asked him, point-blank, if he was serious, and Charlie had indignantly ordered him out of the house.
But that could have been part of the con, too.
“You want some tea?” he asked, and Harley, who was frozen stiff from the long walk to the house, said okay, even though the tea in Charlie’s house was all but undrinkable.
“Tea!” Charlie shouted, propelling his chair over a knotty patch where the rugs overlapped. On the trestle table he used as a desk, he had two computers – one for what he called his research, and the other permanently displaying his website and its logo: a timber wolf, fangs bared, defending a wooden cross.
Harley flopped down on a dilapidated armchair that smelled like a wet dog.
“So,” Charlie said, rubbing his stubbly chin with one hand, “I’ve been reading about your adventures. You’re a hero. What’s it feel like?”
“It’s all right,” Harley said.
“Just all right?” Charlie scoffed. “I’d have thought you’d be on top of the world by now – or at least on top of Angie Dobbs.”
That was just the kind of remark that got Harley so confused. On the one hand, his brother went around claiming to be a man of God, all pure and everything, and on the other he was exactly the same mocking asshole he’d always been – at least when nobody else was around to hear him.
“You make any money off of it yet?” Charlie asked. “I saw that article in the Barrow Gazette, and I bet you gave ’em the interview for free. You did, didn’t you?”
“You don’t chargeto be in the paper.”
“That’s what they tell you, but you think movie stars and singers and baseball players don’t get paid every time they open their mouths?”
“I’m not a movie star.”
“No,” Charlie said, “that’s for damn sure.”
Rebekah, Charlie’s wife, came in with a tray of tea and some muffins that would probably taste just as bad. Harley had never been asked to any wedding, and he strongly doubted there’d been one, but then his brother had probably claimed to have channeled the Holy Spirit directly. Rebekah was a scrawny woman, and his brother had found her on the Internet, when she responded to his online ad for a “helpmeet.” She’d brought her younger sister Bathsheba along, too. She poured out the tea, made from tree bark or anything else that contained no caffeine – all stimulants were against his brother’s religion now – and served up the muffins that were sure to contain no sugar or spice of any kind. Harley figured she made them from sawdust left lying around the wood chipper out back.
Harley said hi, but Rebekah, in her usual long dress with its buttoned-up collar, just nodded. On her way out, she said to Charlie, “We’re almost out of fuel oil.” She had a thick New England accent – she was from some hick town not much bigger than Port Orlov – where she’d been living in a so-called Christian commune that had been broken up by the state. Still, Harley often wondered what had made her, and her sister, do something so stupid as to come all this way to Alaska.
Charlie grunted and, once she was gone, picked up where he’d left off. “Maybe you oughta let me handle the press from now on.”
“There’s not much left of it. Nobody’s called me today, except the Coast Guard. They want to know more about that coffin top that came up in the nets.”
“What’d they say, exactly?”
Harley knew that his brother would be intrigued by that. “They want to be sure that’s all that came up.”
“That’s what you told ’em, right?”
“What do you think?” Harley said, looking steadily into his brother’s dark eyes. “Of course I did.” He sipped the hot tea, which tasted like it was made from boiled leather.
Charlie met his gaze and didn’t blink.
Screw it, Harley thought; it was now or never. “You came to the hospital,” he said, pointedly, “and you left with my anorak.”
“What about it? You want your coat back, it’s in the hall closet.”
Harley put the cup down on a stack of old newspapers, went out into the hall, and came back with his coat. He sat down and began rummaging through the various zipped pockets, and apart from a packet of throat lozenges, came up empty-handed. “Okay,” he said, “where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Charlie answered, but with that malicious glint in his eye that told Harley he knew perfectly well what he was talking about. It was like they were kids again, and Charlie was holding out on him.
“You know what. The cross that was in the inside pocket.”
Charlie’s face slowly creased into a grin, revealing a row of crooked gray teeth. “What cross?”
Harley put out his hand and said, “Give it to me, Charlie.”
“Or what? Are you gonna beat up your own brother – your own crippled brother?”
Nobody ever milked a wheelchair the way his brother did. “If I have to, I’ll turn this whole goddamned house upside down.”
“Oh, I don’t think Rebekah and Bathsheba would let that happen,” Charlie said, and Harley knew he was right. The two sisters might be bony as skeletons, but they were tough and, though he hated to admit it, scary as hell. Their eyes were black as little pebbles, set in dead-white, pockmarked faces, and he’d once seen Rebekah wring a fox’s neck without even looking down at it. Even scarier, he had the impression Bathsheba kind of had a crush on him. It was one more reason he’d had to move out.
Before the stalemate went on much longer, Charlie seemed to have tired of the joke, and gesturing at the gun rack below the window, he said, “It’s in the ammo drawer.”
For a split second, Harley wondered if the ammo drawer was booby-trapped, but then opened it and found the cross, wrapped in a clean rag. It looked like Charlie had shined it up a bit, and the stones– emeralds, for sure—glistened in the light from the computer screens.
“Lucky you didn’t shoot your mouth off about that,” Charlie said.
Harley turned it over in his hands, marveling at the weight of it, wondering if the silver sheen was real, wondering what the gems would be worth, wondering what the Russian words inscribed on the back meant. There was a fence named Gus Voynovich in Nome – he and Charlie had used him now and then in the past – and if anybody knew what it was really worth, he’d be the one. The guy was a crook, of course, but he knew his business.
“So I figure it’s a fifty-fifty deal,” Charlie said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re going to fence it at the Gold Mine, right?” The Gold Mine was Voynovich’s pawnshop in Nome. “Well, you owe me half of whatever Voynovich gives us for it.”
“That’s bullshit. I found it. I nearly diedgetting it.”
“And if I hadn’t picked up your coat, the Coast Guard, or some fucking orderly, would have it by now. And then how much of a share do you think you’d have gotten?”
“I’ll give you ten percent.”
“I’m not arguing about this with you, Harley. I could just as soon have taken a gun out of that rack and told you to get the hell off of church property.” Vane’s Holy Writ was headquartered in the old house, and as a result, Charlie paid no property taxes. He also drew a tidy disability benefits check every month. “Now, there’s really only one question left for us to discuss.”
“What the hell is that?”
“How much else is there?”
“How much of what else? The coffin’s gone, it sank, same as the boat. Don’t you read the papers?”
“The coffin came from somewhere. And that somewhere would be St. Peter’s Island. It’s one of those old Russians who lived there. Who knows what else is buried in the other graves?”
Harley sat very still, the cross growing heavier in his hand by the second. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, we’ve got to go back out there, before somebody else does, and do some digging.”
“You want me to dig up graves?” Harley said, feeling exactly the same way he did when Charlie had told him to climb through the skylight of the liquor store on Front Street.
“Listen to me,” Charlie said, leaning forward in his wheelchair. “Don’t you remember the stories?”
“Sure I do. The damn place is haunted.” He didn’t add anything about the black wolves … or that yellow light he thought he’d seen on the cliffs.
“Now you don’t really believe that stuff, do you? If you ask me, the Russians made up all that crap years ago, just to keep everybody off the island.”
“There was never any reason to go onthe island.”
“No, there wasn’t,” Charlie agreed. “Back then.” Everyone knew there was nothing on St. Peter’s but the remains of the old Russian village, its wooden cabins no doubt fallen to pieces by now, and guarded, supposedly, by an old lady with a lantern, who walked the cliffs at night, luring mariners to their death. “But there is a reason now.”
Harley didn’t know what to say, or how to counter what his brother was saying. That’s how it had always been. Charlie had always won the arguments – sometimes all at once, and sometimes just by waiting Harley out.
“What other options have you got?” Charlie taunted him. “You think you’re ever gonna get another boat? Or a crew? Your fishing days are over, bro, in case you didn’t know it already.” He smiled broadly and smoothed his hands on the front of his flannel shirt. “This cross is what I’d call heaven-sent … and one thing I do know is that God doesn’t knock twice.”
Harley wasn’t so sure it was God knocking at the door at all.
But nodding at the Russian artifact, Charlie added, “And you might want to leave that here for safekeeping. That tin-can trailer you live in isn’t exactly burglarproof, now is it?”
Chapter 9
Slater wasn’t proud of what he was doing – sitting in his car, in the dark, parked outside his ex-wife’s house – but he hadn’t really intended to find himself here.
At most, he’d intended to cruise slowly past the house and take a look on his way home from the AFIP, but then a wave of exhaustion suddenly overcame him, and he’d had to pull over under the umbrella of a big elm tree. In preparation for the exhumation work in Alaska, he’d put himself on an antiviral regimen that he knew could have some debilitating effects, and the coffee he’d picked up at Starbucks apparently wasn’t doing much to counteract it.
Once he’d parked, he’d turned off his lights, reclined his seat, and looked out his window at the stately Tudor house, with its white walls and its neat brown trim, its gabled roof and trim hedges. Even the driveway didn’t have a leaf on it. It was like a picture from a magazine. The first floor was dark, except for the porch light, but the windows upstairs were lighted, and once in a while he could see someone moving behind the mullioned glass. Martha and her husband had two kids, a boy and a girl.
The whole thing, he thought, couldn’t be more perfect. And it could have been his … if he’d wanted it.
He’d met Martha when they were both in medical school at Johns Hopkins. She was paying her own way, while his was being bankrolled by the Army. When he went off to Georgetown to pursue his studies in epidemiology, she had followed him there, working on her specialty in dermatology. After they got married, he knew what she was hoping for – she wanted him to hold down a nice safe Army post on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center while she built up her private practice in the Washington suburbs. And for a time, he tried. He did the whole office and administrative thing, shuffling paper, attending meetings, giving lectures, but over time he felt more and more restless. It got especially bad when he received reports from the field, detailed accounts of what was being done on the front lines to save lives and eradicate disease. That was what he had trained for, that was what he wanted to be doing – not sitting in an air-conditioned office, evaluating programs and rubber-stamping reports. He had put in for overseas duty, and Martha had reluctantly agreed to let him try it.
But if she hoped he would get it out of his system, she was wrong. The more he did it, the more he wanted to do. After a year or two, he no longer felt out of place in some godforsaken jungle; he felt out of place at a cocktail party in Chevy Chase. And much as he and Martha loved each other, they both recognized that they were going in separate directions. The night she dropped him off at the base for his morning flight to an Army camp in the Dominican Republic, where there’d been an outbreak of dengue fever, she said good-bye and take good care of yourself, but they’d both known it was more than that. When he came back nine weeks later, he opened the door to their condo with a sense of foreboding in his heart; the letter he found waiting for him on the kitchen counter said everything he’d expected, but he’d still had to read it several times just to absorb every word. To this day, if he’d had to, he could recite it line for line.
Slater took a sip of his coffee, cold now, and watched as an upstairs window was cranked open a few inches and a curtain drawn. He thought he caught a snatch of conversation on the wind, a boy’s voice saying something about homework, and a woman’s laugh. Martha’s laugh. A few seconds later, the light went out.
Slater put his seat back even farther and closed his eyes. God, he was tired. It was cold out, but he still had his coat on, and it wasn’t bad inside the car. And it had been such a long day. Long, but productive. At least the mission was chugging along, and his dream team was coming together nicely. Dr. Eva Lantos had jumped at the chance to get out of her lab in Boston—“I will be so glad to give the mole-rat genome a rest!”—and Vassily Kozak had been tracked down to an industrial waste dump on the outskirts of Irkutsk, where he was completing a study of the chemical pollutants in the soil.
“I have recommended,” he said in his heavily accented English, “they should shut the city of Irkutsk, but they do not like this idea.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Not me either.”
Slater had told him, in strictest confidence, what he wanted him for in Alaska. Vassily had listened carefully as Slater continued to outline the task ahead, finally interrupting only to ask, “This Spanish flu – it killed many Russians?”
“Ten or twelve million, by the best estimates,” Slater replied.
“Do you think that it is still infectious?”
Slater knew that Vassily was asking him an honest question, and all he could do was give him the straightest answer he could. “No, I don’t believe it is,” he said, “but I can’t guarantee anything.”
Russians, even now, knew something about death – the twentieth-century toll, from warfare and disease, had been extraordinary by any measure. Other nationalities sometimes forgot their own past disasters, but for Russians a dreadful knowledge was bred in their bones, and Slater respected the caution it inspired to this day. “If you come, I’ll want you to start on an antiviral regimen right now, the same one everyone else on the team will be on – myself included.”
“And you will send me the names of these drugs?”
“I’ll do better. I’ll have them hand-delivered to you in Irkutsk.”
Vassily grunted, still thinking things over, as Slater explained some of the clearances that Vassily would have to get both from the Academy of Sciences on the Russian end, and the National Security Council, the AFIP, and maybe even the FBI on the other. And when he was done, he said, “I rest my case,” and waited for the verdict.
“I think maybe,” the professor said, “I have done enough in Irkutsk.”
Slater smiled and clenched his fist in triumph.
“And it would be a good thing, yes, to work with you again. Maybe we can make some history.”
Although history was the one thing Slater hoped they would notbe making – his most fervent wish was that the mission would prove in the end to have been utterly unnecessary – he would take his victories any way he got them.
Now, only one big piece of the team was still lacking, and that afternoon Slater had driven over to the base at Fort McNair. The adjutant told him where to find Sergeant Groves, and he’d entered the gym as inconspicuously as possible. He hung out by the back, watching the bout, and even though Groves and his opponent were wearing padded gloves and helmets, every blow echoed with a thud.
The other soldiers had abruptly curtailed their workouts, dropping their jump ropes, giving the punching bags a rest, holding the dumbbells down by their sides. This was simply too good a match to ignore.
For somebody built like a bulldog, Groves was surprisingly nimble on his feet, bobbing and weaving his way around the ring. The other fighter was a white guy with a longer reach, though, and a couple of inches on him. A few times he let loose with a long, looping punch that caught the sergeant on his shoulder or the side of his head. Once, Groves was even rocked back on his heels by a powerful shot to the ribs.
But each time he was hit, he put his head down lower and came in again, like Mike Tyson minus the Maori tattoos.
A bell went off, and the two fighters immediately let their arms fall and retired to their respective stools. Groves had his head down, and was sipping water through a straw.
“The sergeant can really kick ass,” a soldier in a West Point T-shirt observed.
“You better believe it,” Slater replied.
“I hear he’s done three tours over there.”
“Four.”
The soldier glanced at Slater, who was unfamiliar and looked out of place in his civilian clothes – jeans and a white shirt, under an overcoat – and no doubt wondered how he knew. There was the staccato rattle of a punching bag being put back to use.
The bell rang again, and the two fighters got up and started circling the center of the ring. Groves was gleaming with sweat, but otherwise looked like he was raring to go. The other guy, however, was holding his hands a little lower, his shoulders were sagging, and halfway through the round he was throwing wild punches that failed to connect with anything.
“Oh yeah, Groves is gonna take him out,” the West Pointer said.
And true to the prediction, Groves waited no more than thirty seconds before moving in like a locomotive and unleashing a sudden volley of blows that sent his opponent not only against the ropes, but unexpectedly through them. The guy landed on the mat, spitting out his mouth guard and huffing for breath, while a pal helped him off with his helmet.
“Jesus, Groves,” the guy said, “take it easy.” He took another breath. “It’s not like there’s a purse.”
Groves spat out his own mouthpiece, and said, “Gotta fight like there is, Lieutenant. You always gotta fight like there is.”
Groves separated the ropes and stepped down from the ring. He was sitting on the bench, putting his gear back in his bag, when Slater left the corner of the gym and said, “So, is this your idea of downtime?”
The sergeant didn’t have to look up. “Hey, Frank – I’ve been expecting you.”
“That was a nice fight.”
Groves snorted and vigorously rubbed a towel over the top of his sweaty, shaved head.
Slater sat down on the bench. “When are you supposed to deploy?”
“Next Friday, with the Eighth Battalion.”
“Where?”
“Does it matter?” Groves said. “It’ll be 110 in the shade, with all the sand you can eat.”
Slater nodded as a couple of other guys clambered into the ring. “I don’t see how I can compete with that,” he joked. “Sounds like a regular resort.”
Groves zipped up his bag, then turned toward Slater, who saw now that his lip was split.
“I got your messages,” Groves said, “but I still don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“Why you’re going out on another job – and in Alaska, of all places – when you’ve just been busted from the corps.”
“I’m going strictly as an epidemiologist. No Army this time, just civilian AFIP.”
“And do they know that you still get the shakes from the malaria? Since you’re the one who brought up the idea of taking time off, don’t you think you need to take a nice long furlough yourself?”
“I never know what to do with it,” Slater said, in what even he considered the understatement of the year. “And at least it won’t be the Middle East this time. Nobody’s shooting at anybody. It’s strictly medical research.”
“Then why do you need me?” the sergeant asked.
“Because I need someone I can trust to help me run the operation. In one week, we’re going to be off-loading roughly three tons of equipment on an island that I’m told is nearly inaccessible. There’s no place for a plane to land, no safe harbor for a ship of any size. We’re going to have to bring in the supplies by chopper, a lot like we did in Afghanistan, and we’ve got to hit the ground running.”
Groves blew out a breath and looked up as two new fighters feinted and jabbed.
“Why now? Why this time of year?”
“Why not?” Slater said, “It’s the holiday season – where would you rather be than the Arctic?”
“It’s dark there. Almost all the time. Anybody think of that?”
“Yes, of course we have,” Slater replied. Indeed, artificial illumination was one of the first things he had entered into the budget proposal – klieg lamps, ramp lights, and backup generators to make sure they never went down. When dealing with viral material, inert or not, a lighting malfunction could be as dangerous as a refrigeration failure. “But the job can’t wait.”
One of the fighters in the ring landed a low blow, and the other one complained loudly.
“Walk it off!” Groves shouted.
The match resumed, and Slater waited. In spite of all the sergeant’s objections, Slater knew his man. The call to duty in Afghanistan would be strong, but the plea from his old major would be stronger. Groves’s sense of loyalty wouldn’t allow him to let Slater go off on his own, much less after such a personal appeal.
“I’ve already got my orders,” Groves finally said without taking his eyes from the ring. The two fighters were in a clinch, heads butting like rams. “Who’s gonna get my deployment changed?”
“Don’t sweat it. Everything will be taken care of.” Slater put out his hand and said, “Don’t forget to pack warm.”
“Yeah,” the sergeant replied, taking his hand resignedly, “I’ll do that.”
All in all, Slater thought, it had been a successful day. What he needed now was a good, solid night’s rest. Looking down the suburban street, he saw a door open, a dog come out and lift its leg on a tree, then scamper back inside. Still feeling drowsy from the drugs, he heated up the car, then closed his eyes, for what he planned would be a ten-minute nap before driving the rest of the way home. But when he awoke, stiff and sore in his seat, he heard a light tapping on his window. When he opened his eyes, Martha was standing there in a jogging suit, a key in her hand.
Slater, suitably mortified, touched the button and the window rolled down.
“Please don’t tell me you’ve been here all night,” she said.
Slater glanced at his watch. It was five thirty in the morning. A gray dawn was breaking. Christ, he wondered, was he becoming narcoleptic from all the drug interactions?
“Don’t tell me you jog at this hour,” he said, hoping to strike a tone that would mask his embarrassment.
Martha shook her head ruefully. “You want to come in and warm up?”
“I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”
“No,” she said, “it wouldn’t.”
There was an awkward moment before Martha said, “I’m glad the court-martial went as well as it did.”
“All things considered,” he said, “I got lucky.”
“So, are you posted here in the States again?”
“Not for long.”
“Where are you going next?”
“It’s classified,” he said, and they both smiled. They had had almost this identical conversation so many times in the past that to be having it again now – on a chilly suburban street, with Martha in her jogging suit and Slater slumped in his car – struck them both as absurd.
For a moment, they held each other’s gaze, with a thousand things to say but all of them said before. For Slater, it was like looking at a vision of what might have been, the life he could have led – and right now, with his back feeling like a plank and his legs half-asleep and his brain in a muddle – it didn’t look so bad. He had to keep himself from lifting one cold hand through the window simply to caress her cheek for a moment. As part of the annual exam for field epidemiologists deployed on high-stress missions, an Army psychiatrist had recently told him there was a notable lack of intimacy in his life. “You can’t run from it forever,” he’d said. “Given what you face on the job, you’re going to need some human anchor, some safe harbor, in your life.” After a pause, the shrink had added, “Or else you can find yourself drifting off the emotional map and into uncharted waters.”
Slater knew he was right, because look where he had just washed up. “Well, okay then,” he said, as if he and his ex had just concluded the most casual confab. Turning the key in the ignition, he said, “It’s been great catching up.”
“Yeah,” she said, playfully batting at his window as he raised it, “don’t be a stranger.” She had a bittersweet smile on her face, and for a second or two he wondered if she, too, had been running through that same little might-have-been scenario.
He lifted a hand in farewell as he pulled the car away from the curb, and then he slowed down to watch in his rearview mirror as she set off down the street, an ever-diminishing figure in a blue jogging suit. She turned the corner without looking back and, like so much in his life, was gone.
