said, 'I want a lawyer.'
'Fuck you,' Lucas said. He stood up and said to Nadya, 'What happened to you? Let me look.'
She stood up and Lucas took her chin between two fingers, turned her face. 'You have four small cuts, probably from glass. There may still be glass… here. Here's a piece.' He could see a small sliver of glass protruding from one of the cuts. He caught it between the fingernails of his two index fingers, and lifted it out. Blood tricked down her face. 'That's what happens when you don't behave.'
'Bad?' she asked.
'Nah. You might have to have some glass picked out, but nobody'll even see the cuts after they heal up. You'll still be gorgeous.'
He looked back at the kid, and Nadya walked away, back into the garage and behind the car. He turned back in time to see her pick up a long, thin piece of glass from the car's trunk. 'Careful with that…' he called.
She fit it between two fingers and then lightly slapped herself twice on the forehead. Blood trickled from two long new cuts, running across her fair skin into her eyebrows.
'What the fuck are you doing?'
'Politics,' she said.
Chapter 34
The ambulance took a full half hour to get to the shooting scene. Carl had slipped into shock, and while the wounds were serious, they weren't life threatening, an EMT told them-Carl was young, in good shape, and should recover quickly. Before they took off in the ambulance, the EMT looked at Nadya's face, and found one additional small shard of glass, which he removed with a pair of tweezers.
When he'd finished, Nadya asked Lucas to take a picture of her with the blood on her face: 'This I can use,' she said. She posed next to the ambulance, with Carl's feet visible on a gurney, her face smeared with blood.
Two days later, she was gone. Lucas dropped her at Minneapolis-St. Paul International, and said, 'Well: it's been real.'
'What is this 'real'?'
'I mean, it's been interesting.'
'I think I have been a pain in your ass,' she said, smiling at him.
'Ah, well…'
'I'm so sorry about Jerry…' Her smile disappeared. 'This will not go away.'
'Nothing you could do. You did nothing wrong-except run into a crazy kid.'
'Who thought he was working for Mother Russia.' They were coming up to the security screening, and she sighed, stood on her tiptoes, kissed him on the cheek. 'If you ever come to Russia…'
'Right.'
She smiled again. 'I know-you won't. But if you do…' She patted him on the chest. 'Say good-bye to Weather for me. I like her very much. And I think she has a very good husband.'
The day after that, he'd gotten comfortable with his couch again.
He was lying on it, reading GQ, an article about a specially spun wool used by an Italian tailor, for suits that cost six thousand dollars. He would not pay six thousand dollars for a suit under any conditions, he decided. Well. It'd have to be a really good suit.
He was reading about bespoke shoes when heard a car enter the driveway, and then a quick beep on a horn. He'd been waiting for it. He dropped the magazine, rolled off the couch, and headed out the front door. Weather was there, standing back, looking at her new red BMW 330 sedan. 'It's not as good-looking as the Prelude,' she fretted.
'It's better-looking than the Prelude,' Lucas said, walking around the car. 'It's just different.'
'More practical,' she said. 'All-wheel drive and you can carry more stuff.'
'I got your practical right here,' Lucas said. 'You don't buy a forty-thousand-dollar car to haul celery.' He patted the car on the ass. 'You buy it because it's an artwork. Just don't drive it through the fuckin' garage door.'
She looked at the new garage door, then said, 'What about Carl?'
When they'd gotten Carl to the hospital, an examination showed that a piece of the bullet jacket had fragmented off and had ripped into his sphincter muscle. That could have been serious, but a delicate operation had removed the remains of the bullet and had repaired the damage to the muscle.
'I talked to the doc about an hour ago-everything went fine. He won't be running for a while.'
'Thirty years, if you have anything to say about it.'
'The little asshole killed Jerry Reasons,' Lucas said. 'And the Russian. I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for him.'
'Good-looking guy, though,' Weather said. She turned back to her car. 'Would blue have been better?'
A few more days went by. Weather began driving the new BMW into the driveway at fifty miles an hour, and Del got surveillance on the McDonald's truck deliveries.
The St. Louis County attorney announced that the grand jury had indicted Carl Walther on charges of first- degree murder in the killings of both Rodion Oleshev and Jerry Reasons. The feds indicted Anthony Spivak on espionage charges, and the county attorney dropped charges of accessory to murder, saying that they were redundant in light of the federal charges. In fact, he seemed pleased to get out from under the Spivak case.
Lucas heard from Harmon, unofficially, that Janet Walther was willing to talk about the espionage ring if she could make a deal for Carl.
The deal would be a tough one, though: the Duluth cops were convinced that Carl had killed Jerry Reasons, and they wanted him put away. The only problem was that they had little evidence, other than Lucas's story of chasing a man up and down the hills, and some general descriptions from the women behind the hotel desk.
On the other hand, the blood from the switchblade definitely was Carl Walther's, and Carl had definitely gone to the emergency room the night Oleshev was murdered, within a couple of hours of the murder taking place.
Carl claimed that the cut on his arm had come from a broken window in Grandpa's basement. The feds, as it happened, had spotted and processed the window, and confirmed that the blood was in fact Carl's.
Still, if they could get the knife into evidence-not a sure thing-nobody believed that the blood-on-the-window alibi would hold up.
If Duluth couldn't get Carl for killing Reasons, they would be somewhat satisfied with a life sentence on the Oleshev murder.
Yet another complication: Roger Walther was still missing. The feds said that Janet Walther was now blaming everything on him.
'Just between you and me,' Harmon told Lucas, 'I think perhaps the best we can hope for is to identify this entire Soviet ring and debrief all the participants. I don't think there will be much jail time-too many lawyers involved now. The cooperation of Janet Walther is critical to that end.'
He was wheedling.
'That would be the best deal for you spooks,' Lucas agreed. 'For the rest of the world, including both Russia and the United States, the best deal would be to nail Carl Walther for murder. We've got to get him for something…'
Harmon was fifteen hundred miles away in Washington, but Lucas could almost hear the shrug. 'If we can.'
More time passed. Del nailed the McDonald's thefts, and Neil Mitford, the governor's aide, came down to shake his hand. 'Fuck a bunch of Russian agents, this McDonald's thing was important.'
'I oughta get a certificate or something,' Del said, cutting his eyes toward Lucas, who yawned.
'You should,' Mitford agreed. He took a dollar out of his pocket. 'Here. It's even signed by the secretary of the treasury.'
Four weeks after Carl was shot, Lucas got a note from Nadya.
'Thank you very much for your hospitality; I enjoyed my time working with you,' the note said. Blah-blah-blah. She sounded like an exchange student, Lucas thought. The laser-printed portion of the note seemed to have been written with the idea that carbon copies would be filed somewhere. The real meat came at the very end,
