She walked around to the driver’s side, looked over the roof at me. “You can follow or just meet me back at the house. I’m not running anywhere.”
“I’ve noticed.”
I turned to walk toward Dre’s Saab.
“Where’s Dre?”
I turned back to her, met her eyes. “He didn’t make it.”
“He…” She cocked her head slightly. “The Russians?”
I said nothing. I held her gaze. I looked for something in her eyes that would tell me, one way or another, which side she was playing in this. Or was it all sides?
“Patrick?” she said.
“I’ll see you back at the house.”
In the kitchen, she made green tea for herself and brought the cup and small pot out to the dining room with her. Claire sat in her car seat in the center of the dining-room table. She’d fallen into a deep sleep in the car and Amanda told me she’d learned no good came from pulling her out of the car seat and moving her to the bassinet once they were inside. It was just as easy and just as safe to leave her where she slept.
“Angie get back all right?”
“Yeah. She arrived in Savannah at midnight. Got to her mother’s by half-past.”
“She doesn’t strike me as someone from the South.”
“She’s not. Her mother remarried in her sixties. Her husband lived in Savannah. He passed about ten years ago. By then, her mother was in love with the place.”
She placed her teapot on a coaster and sat at the table. “So what happened at the train station?”
I sat across from her. “First tell me how we ended up at the train station.”
“What? I got a call and they said the meeting site was changed.”
“Who called you?”
“It could have been Pavel, could have been this other one they call Spartak. Actually, now that I think of it, it did sound more like him. He’s got a higher voice than the others. But then what do I know for sure?” She shrugged. “They all sound pretty much the same.”
“And Spartak or whoever said…”
“He said something like, ‘We no like Comcast Center. Tell them meet at Dodgeville Station, half hour.’ ”
“But why call you?”
She sipped her tea. “I don’t know. Maybe Yefim lost your-”
I shook my head. “Yefim never made that call.”
“He had Spartak make it.”
“No, he didn’t. Yefim was waiting at the Comcast Center when Dre got himself vaporized by an Acela.”
The teacup froze halfway to her mouth. “You want to repeat that one?”
“Dre got hit by a train going so fast that it liquefied him. There’s probably a forensics team out there right now, bagging up the Dre scraps. But they’re little scraps, I assure you.”
“Why would he step in front of a…?”
“Because he was chasing this.” I placed the Belarus Cross on the table.
It sat between us for about twenty seconds before either of us spoke.
“Chasing it?” Amanda said. “That makes no sense. He had it with him when he left the house, didn’t he?”
“And I assume he handed it over to someone, and then that someone threw it back over the tracks.”
“So you think…?” She closed her eyes tight and shook her head. “I don’t even know what you think.”
“I don’t either. Here’s what I know-Dre crossed the tracks into the woods and then someone threw this cross out of the woods and over the tracks. Dre came running out after it and ran into a really fast train. Yefim, meanwhile, claims he was never at the train station and that he never changed the original meeting place. Whether he’s lying or not, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance either way, that’s his claim. We don’t have Sophie, they don’t have the Belarus Cross, and it’s Christmas Eve. Friday. Dre was the last chance Yefim had of scoring another baby to give to Kirill and Violeta. So now Yefim wants the original deal back in place-that cross”-I looked down the table-“and that baby for Sophie’s life, my life, the life of my family, and your life.”
She fingered the cross a couple of times, pushing it up the table a few inches.
“What do the inscriptions mean, do you know? I can’t read Russian.”
“Even if you could,” I said, “they’re not in Russian. That’s Latin.”
“Fair enough. You know any Latin?”
“I took four years of it in high school but all I retained is about enough to read a building foundation.”
“So, no idea?”
I held it in my hand. “A little. The one up top reads
She frowned.
I shrugged and racked my brain a bit. “No, wait. Not
“What about the bottom one?”
“Something about a skull and paradise.”
“That’s the best you can do?”
“I took my last Latin class ten years before you were born, kid. My best ain’t bad.”
She poured herself more tea. She held the cup in both hands and blew on it. She took a tentative sip and then placed the cup back down on the table. She sat back in her chair, her eyes on me, as calm as ever, this serious child, this marvel of self-possession.
“It doesn’t look like much, does it?”
“It’s the history that gives it its worth. Or maybe just someone deciding it’s worth something, like gold.”
“I never understood that mentality,” she said.
“Me, either.”
“I can tell you, though, that Kirill’s already lost too much face over this to let any of us live. Certainly not me.”
“You been reading the papers lately?”
She looked over the teacup at me and shook her head.
“Kirill’s hitting his own product too much. Or he’s just having a full-on mental breakdown. He might wrap one of his cars around a pole at a hundred miles an hour before he ever gets around to you.”
“So, I’ll just wait for that day.” She grimaced at me. “And even if, let’s say, everything goes according to this fairy-tale scenario that Yefim-Yefim, yes?-outlined for you?”
“Yefim, yeah.”
“So, okay. We live, Sophie lives, your family lives. What about her?” She pointed down the table where Claire sat, strapped in her car seat, wearing a tiny pink knit hoodie and matching pink sweatpants, her eyes closed to slits. “They take her into their home, Kirill and Violeta, and pretty soon she’s not just the
