turned back to Michael, reached into his pants pocket, handed Michael a single key. “You will take this car. It is the silver Honda, parked three doors down.”
Michael took the key, stood, pulled off his oversized raincoat. “I could use some clothes, too.”
Solomon pointed to one of the bedrooms. Michael rose, crossed the room, opened the door. Inside, stacked floor to ceiling, were a hundred sealed cardboard boxes: electronics, small appliances, expensive liquors. Michael found a box of Guess jeans, rummaged through them until he found his size. There were also a dozen boxes of Rocawear hoodies. He found his size, slipped it over his head. In the corner of the room was a flat screen TV, tuned to channel 7, volume low.
The news came when Michael was at the door. It was a breaking story. His heart fell. Beneath the talking head was a headline.
Queens prosecutor sought in Homicide
Onscreen was his “executive” photo, the one taken by the office, the one that was featured on the DA’s office website. Next to it was a live shot of his house. A pair of Eden Falls sector cars flashed their lights.
Michael walked out of the bedroom, sat on the chair next to Charlotte’s. He looked at the table. On it was the piece of paper she had been working on, practicing writing 0 through 9. The numbers were all drawn in precise rows. The sight of his daughter’s diligent work almost made Michael break down. But there was something else about the drawings that caught his eye, and his attention. Charlotte had used two different crayons drawing the numbers. In all four rows of numbers, all but two of the numerals were drawn in black crayon. The only two numbers drawn in red crayon were the 6 and the 4.
Michael sat on the chair next to Charlotte’s. “That’s very good,” Michael said. He turned Charlotte’s chair to face his. “Honey, I need to go out for awhile. Onu Solomon is going to watch you.”
Although Charlotte had never met Solomon, Michael’s use of the Estonian word for uncle, and its affection, was known to her.
“Is that okay?” Michael said.
“It’s okay.”
Michael held his daughter close. “My big girl.” He sat back, looked her in the eye. “I’m going to go pick up Mommy and Em, and then we’ll all go out to dinner. I won’t be long at all. Okay?”
Charlotte nodded. She then reached over, picked up the page with the numbers, handed it to Michael. Michael looked back into her eyes. She seemed to drift, to be in some sort of trance. He had seen this before, usually at a time when she and Emily were separated.
“What is it honey?”
Charlotte said nothing. Instead, she began to hum a song. Michael didn’t recognize it. It sounded like a classical theme.
“Charlotte,” Michael said. “Tell Daddy.”
His daughter continued to stare off into the distance, a void into which Michael could not see. She stopped humming.
“Anna is sad,” she said.
Anna, Michael thought. The nightmare fable of his youth came flooding back. The girl in the story.
Michael scanned the piece of paper in his hand, the numbers. It was the same two numbers on the refrigerator door at home. Familiar numbers.
That’s what Emily meant when she pretended to be cold, he thought. She wanted him to look at the refrigerator. She was trying to tell him something, and Michael now knew what it was.
FORTY-EIGHT
He moved through the farmhouse, the kinzbal on point. He had taken the dagger off a dead Chechen, a young soldier no more than eighteen. The smell of decomposing flesh filled his head, his remembrance.
The house had many rooms, each filled with a different light.
For the past few years he had slipped in and out of time, a place unfettered by memory, a place that had, at first, both frightened and unnerved him, but one that had now become his world. He saw the walls of the stone house rise and fall, in one moment constructed of raw timber and mortar, at other moments open to the elements, the trees and sky, the rolling hills that sloped gently to the river. He felt the floor beneath his feet transform from hard-packed dirt to fine quarry tile, back to soft grass. All around him he heard hundreds scream as they fled the heat and blood and insanity of war, the madness soon giving way to the serenity of the graveyard, all of it subsumed in time present, time past, time yet to unfold.
He looked at the old woman dying on the kitchen floor, the taste of her blood fresh and metallic on his tongue. All at once he felt the earth tremble beneath his feet, saw the shadow of enormous things move in the gray miasma, then clear, revealing a pastoral scene of rich and painful splendor.
He saw a young woman sitting by the river. She had a long, slender neck, delicate arms. Even from behind he knew so many things about her. He knew that she, like himself, was ageless. Next to her were two other rocks, unoccupied.
As he approached he realized he could no longer smell the stench of the dead and dying. The air was now suffused with the scent of honeysuckle and grape hyacinth. The young woman turned and looked at him. She was a heart-stopping beauty.
“Mis su nimi on?” Aleks asked. He wasn’t sure if she spoke Estonian.
She answered his question. “Anna.”
“What’s wrong?”
Anna looked at the river, then back. “Marya is sad.”
Nearby, Aleks heard the rumble of a vehicle, the sound of a blaring horn. When he looked at the woman he discovered that she was now a little girl, no more than four. She looked up at him with pride, with longing, her blue eyes shining, her soul an unpainted canvas.
He smelled flour and sugar and blood, the hunger within him rising. He sensed someone near.
An intruder.
They were no longer alone.
Aleks raised his knife, and stepped into the shadows.
FORTY-NINE
Michael stood in the alley behind the building at 64 Ditmars Boulevard. In his mind he saw the numbers on the drawing Charlotte made, the numbers on the refrigerator.
The last time he stood in this place, a time when his heart had been whole and he felt safe in this world, he was nine years old. That day he had played stickball with four of his friends from the neighborhood. Later that night, the night two men walked in the front door and murdered his parents, his whole world fell apart. He had been piecing it back together ever since.
Michael put his ear to the door, listened. Nothing.
Since Abby had bought the building, they’d had all the locks changed and upgraded, putting deadbolts on every door, bars on all the basement and first-story windows.
Michael turned the knob, bumped the door with his shoulder. Solid. He would not be breaking down the door, nor would he be defeating the new lock. He scanned the area for something with which he could break the window pane, saw a broken umbrella sticking out a trashcan. He took it out, fed it through the narrow bars on the door, tapped the pane twice. On three he hit the glass. It smashed. Michael listened to the interior of the space. He was met with a thick brown silence. After a few moments he reached in, scraping his hand on the too-narrow opening, cutting his palm on the broken glass. He turned the lock.
Michael looked both ways and, seeing he was alone, pushed open the door. He stepped into the abandoned bakery, into the dark dominion of his past.
