“You ready for your gifts?” Wallace asked.
“Yes!” the girls chanted. “Yes we are!”
“They’re out front.”
The girls made a move to rocket across the yard, but instead waited for Wallace, taking him by the hand. They were no dummies. They knew how to work their quarry. Even though Charlotte once said Uncle Wallace smelled like pickles.
“He said they’re out front,” Michael said, once they had disappeared around the corner. “They’re. As in they.”
“I know.”
“He did not buy them bikes. Please tell me he did not buy them bikes. We talked about this.”
“He promised me, Michael. No bikes.”
Getting your daughters their first grown up bicycles was an important thing, a father-daughter thing to which Michael Roman was greatly looking forward. He was not going to let a millionaire who wore eau de gherkin take that away from him.
When Michael heard the yay come flying over the house, his heart sank. Moments later he saw his daughters come racing around the corner in their matching pink motorized Barbie Jeeps.
Oh, Jesus, Michael thought.
They’re driving already.
Twenty minutes later the final few guests gathered in the driveway. Thanks were proffered, cheeks were kissed, promises were made, and teary little ones were bundled into SUVs – the party was over.
On the back patio, Charlotte and Emily shared a piece of chalk. They drew a hopscotch pattern on the concrete. Emily found a suitable stone in the flower garden, and the girls played a full game. As usual, they did not keep score, neither wanting to best the other in anything.
When they tired of the game, they began to draw something else on the concrete, an intricate figure of a big blue lion with a long curling tail. They worked in silence.
At six o’clock, as deep violet clouds gathered over Crane County, New York, their mother called them inside. The little girls rose, looked at their drawing. They each whispered something to the other. Then, in their private way, they hugged, and went inside.
Twenty minutes later it began to rain; huge gobbets of water falling to earth, soaking the grass, giving life to the spring garden. Before long, small ponds pooled on the patio, and the symbol was washed away.
TWO
SOUTH-EASTERN ESTONIA
The valley was silent the morning he left, as if in its stilled branches, its songless robins, its hushed streams and posing wildflowers, it knew there would soon be change.
The tall man in the black leather coat stood at the split rail fence that surrounded the main section of his property. He had already shuttered the structure, armed its systems, and programmed its photosensitive lighting grid. From the outside the dwelling – although not a large house by any means, not by the standards of the young “minigarch” Russians who had begun to buy property throughout Estonia – appeared to be a sturdy but humble building. Inside, in its heart, in the heart of its builder and owner, it was a fortress.
The tall man picked up his two leather bags, shouldered them.
It was time.
As he began to make his way down the two-mile gravel lane that wound through the hills, Rocco, the Italian mastiff, found him at the first turn. Rocco had been rooting in a log, it seemed, and smelled of rot and compost and feces. The aroma filled the tall man with an instant and indefinable melancholy. Soon the other five dogs emerged from the forest and fell into a rhythm next to him. The dogs were nervous, excited, sad, leaping on each other, onto him. They sensed he was leaving, and like all dogs, felt he was never going to return. The wolfhound, Tumnus, already over a hundred pounds, was getting too large for such antics, but on this day – this day for which the tall man had so long waited – it was permitted.
The entourage made the final turn toward the gate. Rounding the bend, the man considered the boy who lived at the edge of the village, the boy who would let himself onto the grounds each morning to feed and water and groom the animals in his absence. The tall man trusted the boy. He trusted few people.
When he reached the gate he unlocked it, stepped through, rearmed it. The dogs all sat on the other side, shivering in the moment, softly keening their sorrow. The smallest of them, the alpha male pug named Zeus, put a paw to the chain-link fence.
The rented Lada Niva was parked on the side of the road, keys in the ignition, as promised and paid for. Except for automobiles belonging to the tall man, no vehicle had ever driven the two miles up to the house. No other vehicle ever would. The silent weight alarms deployed just beneath the surface of the gravel lane, along with the gossamer thin trip wires strung throughout the property – all at forty-eight inches from the ground, lest the dogs trip them – were sufficient warning. The perimeter had yet to be breached. Perhaps it was more the man’s reputation that spoke to any would-be interlopers than anything electronic.
If the alarms were triggered in his absence, the boy next door, Villem Aavik, a growing and muscular fourteen, knew what to do. The boy, whose father was killed in the war in Bosnia, was strong and smart. Aleks had trained him to shoot, which had come to the boy with difficulty, having lost a finger in a foundry accident. He also taught the boy how to read the hearts of men. He would one day be a master thief, or a politician. As if there were a difference. Perhaps the boy, like the tall man, would be vennaskond.
The tall man placed his shoulder bags in the trunk, slipped inside the car.
He looked down the road, and began to feel the exhilaration one feels at the onset of a journey, a journey that had long been in the planning, a journey that would find for him his very soul.
In the silence and darkness of the womb there were three.
Anna, Marya, and Olga.
Four, the tall man thought. His girls were four years old now. He had not slept fully or soundly since the night of their birth, had not drawn one breath of God’s air, had not stopped looking.
Until now.
He had finally located the man who had been there that morning, the white-haired Finn who walked the shadows of his dreams, the man who had stolen his daughters. He would meet the man in Tallinn, find out what he needed, and a reckoning would be known.
The tall man turned to look one last time at the intricate wrought iron gate – a gate bearing the complex metalwork of a blue lion surrounded by oak branches, the national symbol of Estonia – and his house on the hill, the structure now obscured by trees ripe with leaf and blossom. He believed the next time he saw this place his life would be different. The sky would be clearer, the air twice as warm. There would be sweet voices singing in the forest, children’s voices.
He touched the crystal vial hanging from a silver chain around his neck, the small glass bottle filled with Olga’s blood. There it gently clinked against the two empty vials.
With his daughters, his beloved tutred, the tall man believed he would live the prophecy of Koschei the Deathless, he believed he would live forever.
No. It was more than a belief. Much more.
Aleksander Savisaar knew.
THREE
Two hours after the party ended, after the crowd had departed and the mess had been cleared, Michael and Abby sat their daughters down for a solemn talk about the ground rules regarding their new little cars: no driving
