Last Snow

Dyadya Gourdjiev turned to confront the younger man. “Trinadtsat is your doing, I warned you that it would be your undoing. Crawling into bed with the grupperovka was a grave mistake—”

“It couldn’t be helped,” Batchuk interjected.

“—and now, as you yourself have discovered, it can’t be undone. You’d have to exterminate the Izmaylovskaya, and even Yukin doesn’t have the stomach for that.”

“Circumstances had come to a head, they demanded to be dealt with by the harshest possible measures.”

“And now you have your wish.”

Batchuk sighed and looked back at Dyadya Gourdjiev as he covered the smear of blood with the heel of one shoe. “The truth is I face reality every minute of every day. The truth is the grupperovka—most notably the Izmaylovskaya—have both the power and the access to avenues crucial to the success of Trinadtsat.” He lifted a finger. “And make no mistake, Yukin needs Trinadtsat to succeed. His entire vision for Russia’s future rides on it.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev scrutinized him now because he knew they were coming to the crux of the visit. Oriel Jovovich Batchuk was a long way from the Kremlin; he hadn’t come all this way to simply vent his frustrations, or to seek advice. Not this time, anyway.

Batchuk took a step forward and put his hand on the doorknob. Looking back over his broad shoulder he said, “It’s your daughter.”

“Yes, of course, it always comes back to Annika, doesn’t it? And do you know why? People want to see what’s best for them, not what actually exists. You do nothing but pretend, to yourself as well as to me. You try to reshape events in the past to suit yourself when we both know very well that what happened—the terrible events that must never be mentioned—is immutable, it can’t be changed and, therefore, expunged, no matter how hard or in which ways you try.”

Batchuk’s eyes glittered; no one else on earth would dare speak to him that way. When he was certain Dyadya Gourdjiev was finished, he continued his own thought to prove to the old man how little he thought of what he’d said. “She’s like a spanner in the works. I don’t know what she’s been up to—I suspect you don’t, either, not that it matters, I know you wouldn’t tell me even if you did. But I know she’s not stupid enough to tell you.”

“She’s not stupid at all,” Dyadya Gourdjiev felt compelled to say. “On the contrary.”

“Yes, on the contrary.” Batchuk opened the door, the empty hallway looming in front of him. There was a smear of blood there, too, too large for him to cover with his heel, or even his entire shoe. “And that, essentially, is the problem. She’s too smart for your own good.”

“My own good?” Dyadya Gourdjiev said, reacting to the warning.

“Yes,” Batchuk acknowledged as he stepped into the echoey hallway. “And hers.”

SIXTEEN

JACK AWOKE with the scent of Annika on him, and it was as if he were in another world, as if he’d eaten a bowl of peaches last night and now smelled of them. Nevertheless, opening his eyes, he immediately felt a kind of remorse. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed himself, because he had, immensely; what occurred to him were the consequences, because experience had taught him that there were always consequences from having sex with another human being, no matter what your partner claimed at the time. If you had any emotions they were bound to be stirred by intimacy of any sort. He’d known plenty of guys who hadn’t cared who they’d slept with—to a man they were either in loveless marriages or divorced. In any case, they still inhabited the same bars where, back in the day, they’d always scored. Now, however, they felt old, isolated from the feverish pace of a dating scene they no longer belonged to, or even understood.

Next to him, Annika was still asleep, her cruel scars rising and falling with her slow breathing. She turned, then, her head still burrowed in the pillow, facing him. For a moment, he did nothing but watch her, as if, in her sleep, she would tell him something about herself. But she remained resolutely a mystery, as, in fact, all women were mysteries, and he wondered now whether he knew her any better than he knew Sharon. On the face of it, an absurd notion, equating a woman he’d just met with the woman he had lived with for twenty-three years. But the truth was staring at him with Annika’s quiescent face, which held no expression, or perhaps just the hint of a smile, as if her dream were more real to her than the world around her, than Jack himself. It made him wonder whether it was possible for one person to know another. Weren’t there always surprises, like layers of an onion being peeled away only to reveal another person, one we scarcely knew, or had for years tried our best not to understand, preferring a manufactured reality that reflected the things we required?

This was what he’d done with Sharon, and now that the reality he’d manufactured had cracked and crumbled away he knew Emma was right: they’d never had a chance. And yet, in retrospect it was heartbreaking to see how one misstep had led to another, and another, and so on, small accretions of mistakes that had become a life less lived. It seemed odd to him, even ludicrous that he had once held her in his arms, that they had whispered intimacies to one another, that they could have said “I love you,” in any conceivable setting. That time had collapsed in on itself; it was the opposite of when you walked into a house you used to live in or a room you’d once known like the back of your hand and nothing had changed. Now that house, that room, that woman were all changed, unfamiliar to him, as if observed in another man’s life. He closed his eyes for a moment, wanting to completely uproot all the acrid memories and stark revelations cropping up in his mind like weeds after a soaking rain.

Lifting the covers, he rolled out of bed carefully enough not to wake her. Slipping into clothes, he opened the door and padded into the living room, where Alli, already awake, sat curled on the end of the chocolate velvet sofa directly beneath the mandala. She held a mug half filled with hot tea, which she handed to him as he sat down beside her.

“Have fun?” she said as he took a sip.

Jack tried to assess her tone. Was she disapproving, pissed, being ironic, or trying for casually adult? He came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. Sitting beside her made him realize how foolish his brief stab of fear had been; he’d never be like those former acquaintances of his, not as long as he had Alli. “She’s yours, Jack, for better or for worse,” Annika had said last night.

“Did you?” he said at length.

She took back the mug of tea he offered her. “I didn’t even have to put my ear to the wall.” When he looked over at her, she added mischievously, “I heard everything.”

His face drained of blood. “I’m sorry you heard anything.”

“I didn’t.” She laughed. “But now I know what the two of you did.” Leaning over, she sniffed him. “Besides, you smell like a rutting animal.”

“Charming.”

She shrugged, utterly unconcerned. “Hey, we’re all animals when you come right down to it.”

“So you don’t disapprove?”

“Would you care?”

He considered for only an instant. “Yes, I think I would.”

She looked surprised, or perhaps a better word would be amused. “Thank you.”

Jack took the tea back from her. He was feeling both the warmth and the caffeine.

Watching him sip what was left of the tea, she said, “Now I want to hear all about the visit from Emma.”

Alli was the only one who believed that Emma had returned, or hadn’t actually gone away, he’d given up trying to figure out which. It was a relief being able to confide this aspect of his life, which was both eerie and joyous.

“And then you’ll tell me everything, right?”

Her face screwed up in a quizzical look. “About what?”

“You know about what, about what happened to you when you were with Morgan Herr.”

With the mention of her abductor’s name her expression changed subtly. Perhaps he was the only one who would have noticed, and a wave of regret washed over him, because the last thing he wanted was to alienate her.