She held up her hand. “Far be it from me to lay on the jinx. Being an old flier’s wife, I know how to sit back and keep my fingers crossed until you’re ready. Just don’t forget that I’m waiting for the dish.”
They were silent for a bit, eating their breakfasts, Jack and Jill watching Gordian’s fork with undeviating involvement. On the stereo, Fats Waller belted out a line about someone’s pedaling extremities being obnoxious. Gordian smiled almost imperceptibly and ate with increasing relish.
All at once, Ashley wanted to reach over and hold him tightly in her arms. But she refrained, just as she had chosen not to ask him any questions about what had occurred in Brazil. She would not do that, not yet, though what little she already knew made her suspect it represented an impending threat to her husband’s safety that, like others he’d had to face in the past, would keep her tossing restlessly in bed tonight and for many nights to come, fearing it might take him from her forever.
Their breakfasts finished now, they sat listening to the stereo in the fresh grass-scented air and sunshine pouring through the veranda’s open louvers. His plate cleaned off except for a single wedge of toast, Gordian glanced down at each of the dogs and then gave Ashley a questioning glance.
“I don’t think you should,” she said. “But if you go ahead and do it, there’d better be no complaints about the rotten, hungry hounds to me or Julia afterward.”
He lifted the toast from his plate and portioned it out between the dogs — Jack consuming his half with what appeared to be a single inhalation, Jill accepting hers somewhat more demurely, and then licking Gordian’s fingers as if to make up to him for having bashed the table.
“Such salivating adoration,” Ashley said.
He wiped his hand on his pants and looked at her.
“Mind if I ask
“Sure.”
“I was wondering why you put on the stereo.”
Their eyes met.
“Easy,” she said with a shrug. “I suddenly remembered that Fats Waller’s always been one of your favorites.”
He kept looking at her.
“Well, that explains your choice of music,” he said. “Not your uncharacteristic timing. Since you always say you enjoy your morning peace and quiet.”
She smiled.
“Surely you’ve guessed,” she said.
“No,” he said honestly. “I don’t have a clue.”
She moved closer beside him.
“It’s a female thing,” she said, leaning her head against his shoulder. “Now be still, dear husband, and maybe I’ll explain it to you later.”
EIGHT
As the groaning, rust-spotted Citroen neared the rendezvous point on the high Balkan pass some thirty miles outside Tirana, Sergei Ilkanovitch considered his two fellow Russians in the car, and suddenly and unexpectedly remembered his father’s oft-repeated maxim that one could always judge a man by the shoes he wore. Rich or poor, it made no difference, he had insisted. A vagrant in rags would take pains to keep his shoes in the best possible condition if he had any character at all, while the most elevated member of the Presidium would be oblivious to their scuff and wear if he were of an inferior caliber.
The person he’d frequently pointed to as an example of the latter had been Khrushchev, someone he’d held in the lowest esteem, calling him a simpleton who was overly impressed with American capitalism, a coward for yielding to Kennedy’s bluff during the Cuban missile standoff, and an economic and political bungler responsible for the Black Sea uprising of 1963 and America’s early lead in the arms race. When he’d theatrically banged his shoe on the desk before the United Nations General Assembly, it was clearly seen to be shabby and run-down at the heel, providing a repellent insight into his character, and demeaning his country before the eyes of the entire world. In his boyhood, Sergei had heard his father complain endlessly about the Premier’s supposed
But Sergei had soon given up trying to extract any wisdom from his father’s observations, and remembered him now as a gruff, strident little man who might have been comical for his endless diatribes had he not been so full of anger and sulky frustration. An inspector in a state-operated automotive plant on the Volga, he had been incapable of relaxing after a day’s work without his vodka. Consequently, Sergei’s lasting image of the elder Ilkanovitch was one of him lying passed out drunk on the couch in their austere one-bedroom worker’s flat.
Sergei had been twelve when his father died of a heart attack in 1969, the youngest of four boys left to be supported by their mother’s earnings as a seamstress and woefully inadequate government maintenance. Six months later, he had been sent to live with an uncle who was a mathematician with the government think tank in Akademgorodoc, the Western Siberian township for the intelligentsia that had been presumptuously known as Science City back in the days when the Communists still held romantic notions about leading the world into some futuristic paradise.
When he’d asked his mother why he had been chosen to go rather than one of his siblings, she had explained it was because he’d always excelled in school and had the greatest chance of benefitting from his uncle’s tutelage. But despite her stated reasons Sergei had felt discarded, cast off like an undesirable sentenced to the Gulag, and suspected she had been more concerned with the wages his working-age brothers could bring into the household than his academic prospects. In the end, however, he had come to be grateful for her decision. Whatever he knew about life and living he had learned on his own, but to his uncle he credited the scientific curiosity that had led to his becoming a physicist.
Now the Citroen took a sharp curve in the road, flinging Sergei sideways so that he was bumped against the right passenger door. He peered out his window, where the switchback skirted the very edge of the mountain-side, a dizzying sight that knotted his stomach with tension. Yet his driver had only accelerated as he took the turn, as if never pausing to consider that a single lapse would plunge them over the dropoff into some nameless chasm. How odd, then, for Sergei to still find himself thinking about an absurd paternal injunction to always take notice of men’s shoes — but perhaps it was just a distraction to keep his panic at bay.
What, he wondered, would his father make of the pair of men who had been his guards and traveling companions for the past several days? Both had on Western-style boots of finely tooled leather, yet both were also adorned with tattoos that literally stamped them as hardened career criminals. The burly, thick-featured one on his left, Molkov, had a cross on each knuckle of his right hand, indicating the number of times he had been imprisoned. The “seal” of the ring tattoo on his middle finger, a dagger entwined in a fanged serpent, denoted a murder conviction. The signet on his index finger resembling an inverted spade on a playing card labeled him as a gangster who had been jailed for a violent offense such as assault or armed robbery. The larger gladiator tattoo on his right arm — its bottom half discernible below the rolled-up sleeve of his khaki shirt — was perhaps the most malign of all, identifying him as an executioner with a passion for inflicting sadistic deaths upon his victims.
Alexandre, the thin, bony Georgian seated in front of Sergei, wore a similar resume of offenses on his flesh — the knuckle crosses, the symbols boasting of myriad felonies. But there was another that Sergei found of particular interest, a signet-ring tattoo rendered in careful detail, depicting the sun rising above a horizon that was patterned like a checkerboard. This, he knew, was a testament to Alexandre’s criminal ancestry, a proud declaration that he was upholding a familial tradition of lawlessness.
Sergei could not help but linger another moment on droll thoughts of his father, who presumably would have considered Molkov and Alexandre exemplary human beings from a glance at their feet, overlooking everything else about them. He, Sergei, appreciated irony the way some men did fine wine, caviar, or Cuban cigars, and there was one of most exquisite flavor to be found in these reflections — for he was also wearing shoes that were
