Conspiracy in Kiev

room or an office. She had isolated herself well.

She went to church each Sunday, sitting alone, avoiding the pew she used to share with Robert. Sometimes she would go on Wednesdays. Absently she wrote his name in the prayer books and the hymnals that she found before her. She offered prayers and didn’t hear answers.

Her pastor sought her out. They had discussions. No headway. The minister wanted to talk about God’s love and Christ’s forgiveness and her mission in life.

Her ears were deaf. She wasn’t ready to hear any of it, much less consider it.

She was an emotional basket case and she knew it.

Sometimes Alex would find herself in the parish chapel and not remember how she got there or how long she’d been there. Once she realized that she had left her car running, ran out for the keys, found them gone. The parish assistant minister had taken them for her.

During the second week of March, on a Thursday night, she found the final handwritten note Robert had left. It was in blue ink in bold penmanship, and he had slipped it into a pair of her shoes. Red high heels. The sexiest footwear she owned. She only wore them for him and on special occasions. It said simply, “I love you and I always will.”

FORTY-EIGHT

The phone call from Bernardo Santangelo came into Gian Antonio Rizzo’s office at half past eight in the morning.

“Sorry to have not gotten back to you sooner,” said the jolly keeper of cadavers at the city morgue. Today he didn’t sound so jolly. His voice was quiet and he sounded shaken. “You asked me to alert you if anything unusual transpired with the bodies of those two Americans, the couple I showed you?”

Rizzo answered quickly, his senses on full alert.

“Yes?” he said.

“We’ve been friends for many years, you and I,” he said. “So I’m doing you a favor. But you must never mention it.”

“Go ahead,” Rizzo said.

“Two things,” said Santangelo, who added that he was calling from a cafe around the corner. “A security team from the American embassy came by and picked up the bodies. They had all the paperwork, personal and legal, to remove the bodies. This was two days ago. They seemed to be in a hurry. I believe the corpses have been repatriated to America now.”

“And did you behave like their lap dog and give them all of the information that we have?” he asked.

“I had no other choice,” came the response.

“Wonderful!” Rizzo said. “Bloody Americans! How do they always know these things? Spies, they have spies among us!”

Santangelo allowed his friend to rant, saying nothing.

“And what was the second thing?” insisted Rizzo. “Is it anywhere near as pleasant as the first?”

“Perhaps,” said Santangelo. “I’m not supposed to give you any more information about the case,” he said. “In fact, I’ve been served with papers from a federal court. I’m not even supposed to speak to you.”

With that, he rang off, leaving Rizzo with a dial tone.

FORTY-NINE

Every once in a while, Alex almost felt human again.

Instead of running or going to the gym, she went for long walks, an unusual activity in her neighborhood. On a whim, she booked a trip to Puerto Rico and went for what she thought would be a week. She used the fake passport and driver’s license that Cerny had issued because the government-with their usual bureaucratic diligence-had never asked for them back. She spent too much money and sat each day by a hotel swimming pool in huge dark glasses so she wouldn’t be recognized.

In Puerto Rico she spent time in the bars and in the casinos. She played blackjack one night, lost more than a hundred dollars, then won it back the following night at the roulette wheel. Then she went up by several hundred dollars by playing the thirty-three, the “double trinity,” as she thought of it. She drank way too much. The booze seemed to help even though deep down she knew it wasn’t an answer. The double trinity hit on the thirty-third spin after she sat down to play.

She took three ten-dollar chips from her pile of winnings, placed it on the double zero, gave the dealer a smile and a shrug.

“One more spin and I get up and leave,” she said.

“Good luck,” the dealer said.

Alex smiled back.

The ball clicked around the rim of the wheel, clattered noisily and came to rest.

Double zero. Two hits in a row. The table buzzed.

“That’s it. I’m done,” she said.

She tipped the dealer lavishly and got up and left. She was ahead by six hundred dollars. She put four hundred aside and vowed to not put it back on the tables.

On the next night, she played roulette again, then some keno, then blackjack and broke even. At least it wasn’t a loss. She must have looked much better than she felt because she was asked to dance by an attractive Canadian man. She obliged but declined to have dinner with him in his room, much to his disappointment.

“Something wrong with me?” he asked, teasing gently.

“No. Nothing wrong with you. My fiance was killed in an accident recently.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“I understand,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I’m not much good company for anyone, much less myself,” she said.

“I understand that too,” he answered. “Hey, if things ever change…”

He handed her a business card. He was in film production in Toronto. She threw the card away.

Then she went upstairs and soon, inexplicably, found herself in tears again.

She came home a day early. Her home answering machine was loaded with twenty-six messages. She cleared it without listening to them. She felt as if she were about to hit bottom and fall through. She wasn’t that far wrong.

Two nights later, toward ten in the evening, she took out her Glock 9 and placed it on the coffee table in front of her in her living room. She took out a pen and pad and loosely constructed a suicide note. She put a fresh clip of bullets in the magazine and slapped it into the butt of the weapon. She pulled back the slide. It snapped back on its spring, pulling a round from the magazine, leaving the round in the firing chamber and leaving the hammer cocked. She clicked the safety catch to “off.” All that was needed now was a slight pull on the trigger.

Doggerel tiptoed across the fringes of her consciousness.

The time has come, the walrus said,

to speak of many things,

Of loaded guns and obscene puns

and whether pigs have wings.

Well, the time had come.

She walked her way through a suicide scenario. She set her suicide note aside on the table. She wondered if