Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  “I’m in possession of a lot of ‘items,’ “Zoe said. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  Yasmine Poole—if that was her real name—pursed her very red lips as if she’d just kissed a lemon. “A film. A reel of eight-millimeter film, to be exact. Don’t waste time denying you have it, Ms. Dmitroff. We both know better.”

  The film again, not the icon. What was it about that damn film?”

  Wow, I’ve got a home movie of a little girl’s birthday party. Our nation is in peril. Arrest me now.”

  Yasmine Poole’s beautiful face turned hard. “Pretending to be stupid isn’t something I would recommend, given the circumstances. Because I can arrest you, and Guantánamo Bay really sucks. Trust me on that.”

  Zoe said nothing, and the woman took her silence for some sort of surrender. “Your country really would be grateful for your cooperation in this, Ms. Dmitroff, because there are others who will stop at nothing to get their hands on that film, and they are not nice people. Not nice at all.”

  Yasmine Poole opened her bag again, removed a photograph, and held it out to Zoe. “Have you ever seen this man before?”

  The photograph was of a man standing next to a wrought-iron lamppost on a snowy, cobblestoned street. He looked to be in his midforties, and he was extraordinarily handsome, with intense, hooded eyes, flaring cheekbones, and an aristocratic nose.

  “His name is Nikolai Popov,” the woman said. “He was a very senior echelon officer in the KGB during the Cold War, a vicious, ruthless man, responsible for too many deaths to count. He’s long retired, of course, enjoying his Crimean dacha. We figure he’s got to be in his nineties now, but his power and influence hasn’t waned.”

  “And you think he’s after the film?”

  “Zoe … Can I call you Zoe? He’s had his agents out trying to track it down for years.”

  “Why? What’s in it for him?”

  Yasmine Poole pursed her lips again. “Oh, dear. See, I knew you would ask me that. Unfortunately the answer is classified. Top secret, and all that.”

  Zoe looked down at the photograph one last time, then handed it back to the woman who called herself Yasmine Poole. Zoe didn’t trust her as far as she cold spit. Somehow, she needed to find a way to look at the film, because it obviously had something more on it than just a little girl’s birthday party.

  She gave Yasmine Poole the earnest look she used on juries. “I just want to do the right thing.”

  The woman patted her hand. “Of course you do.”

  “Only I don’t have it with me anymore.”

  “I know that, Zoe,” Yasmine Poole said, and again Zoe heard that tinge of malice in her voice. “I searched your hotel room and your possessions while you were showering. You’ve obviously put it somewhere you think it’s safe. Just tell me where, and I’ll be out of your life. Then you can enjoy the rest of your vacation in this beautiful city. You don’t look like the club-hopping type, but there’s always an art fair at the Grand Palais this time of year.”

  Laughter, coming from the next table, distracted Zoe. She looked over and saw a couple, dressed in matching hooded sweatshirts, holding hands between two steaming cups of espresso.

  When she looked around again, the butt of a Glock was protruding out of the expensive designer handbag. “You see, I really didn’t want to go to a bad place where there are guns and threats of violence,” Yasmine Poole said. “But you made me. Hand over the film, Zoe, or I’ll be forced to play hardball, and you really don’t want that. Trust me.”

  “I’m not being deliberately obstinate, Ms. Poole. I put the film in a safe-deposit box. So I’m afraid you’ll need my signature in order to get at it.”

  Yasmine Poole stood up. She shut her handbag, slipped its strap over her arm, and tugged at the bottom of her suit jacket. “Then let’s do it.”

  “The bank is by the opera house,” Zoe lied. She hadn’t a clue where the opera house was, but she figured Paris had to have one and she was gambling that it wasn’t right around the corner. “We’ll have to take the metro.”

  “Honey, I’m really not the metro type. And I have a nice expense account. We’ll take a taxi.”

  “Sorry, but the only way I can find it is to retrace my steps from this morning, and this morning I took the metro.”

  Yasmine Poole really didn’t look at all happy about this, but she followed Zoe across the street and down into a subway station next to the big old stone church. It was the tail end of the midday rush hour, so the platform was crowded. But the woman stuck to Zoe like an African river leech.

  The train pulled in and they got on together. Yasmine Poole started to take a seat, but she stopped when she realized Zoe had stayed by the door. “We transfer at the next stop,” Zoe said.

  Yasmine Poole nodded, but Zoe saw that she was checking out the route painted on the wall of the car.

  Zoe counted off the seconds as more passengers squeezed on.

  Yasmine Poole pointed to the map. “If the bank is near the Place de la Bastille, then shouldn’t we be on the Porte d’Orleans train? Or were you talking about the old opera house. Still—”

  Zoe widened her eyes. “Oh, my God, it’s that man again. The man who killed my grandmother.”

  Yasmine Poole’s head whipped around. “Who? Where?”

  “There.” Zoe pointed. Then she jumped off the train just as the door slid shut.

  Yasmine Poole whirled back again, but it was too late. She pounded her fist on the door, tried to pry it open with her fingers, but the train was already moving.

  Zoe waved bye-bye to the woman’s furious face as the train pulled away from the platform, gathering speed and disappearing into the black tunnel.

  SHE TOOK THE steps back up to the street at a run. She figured she had fifteen minutes to disappear in the crowded Parisian streets before Yasmine Poole could double back. Unless the woman had an accomplice she was in touch with by cell phone. In which case Zoe was dead meat.

  She shot out of the metro station at a run and slammed into a man’s chest so hard she nearly knocked herself over. He grabbed her arms to steady her. She didn’t even have to look up; she knew who it was.

  There were over 2 million people in Paris, so how come she was so easy to find?

  “Come on,” said Sergei. He kept hold of her left arm, leading her toward the big stone church. “Let us pray.”

  HE TOOK HER to a pew tucked away in a corner behind a marble column, next to a wooden confessional box.

  They sat down side by side. Zoe said, “Fancy meeting you again so soon, Sergei.”

  He said nothing, just reached in his pocket. She half-expected him to pull out a gun.

  He pulled out a wallet and flipped it open to show a gold shield that glittered even in the dim light. “My name isn’t Sergei. It’s Ry O’Malley. I’m an undercover agent for the DEA.”

  Zoe laughed, although she thought she sounded hysterical even to her own ears. “That woman who called herself Yasmine Poole flashed a CIA badge at me. And now you with the …” She peered closer at the gold shield. “Ryland O’Malley. The Drug Enforcement Administration. For all I know you could both be fakes.”

  “Sometimes you got to go with your instincts on who to trust.”

  “And in what universe would my instincts be telling me to trust you?”

  “I think you know you should at least listen to what I have to say.”

  “Okay, then you can start by telling me how you found me so easily. Do I have a tracking device planted on me somewhere?”

  A corner of his hard mouth actually twitched in a smile. “When a person’s being hunted and that person is an amateur, they run to ground in a place that’s familiar to them. I figured you’d eventually go back to the shop across from the museum where you first picked up the film. And, sure enough, you showed up there just about the time they were carrying out the body.”

  Zoe hadn’t been able to cry earlier over the old man’s death, but now tears suddenly flooded her ey
es and she had to look away. “Do you have to say it like that, like it’s just another day on the job? His name was Boris, and he was sweet, and the ponytailed man cut out his eye.”

  Sergei, or Ry, or whatever his name was, said nothing.

  “Maybe you were there, too. Maybe you helped him do it.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  She leaned back so she could study him again, from head to toe. “You really aren’t a true vors, are you? In spite of your gutter Russian and that tattoo you’ve got on your arm.”

  “The tat’s real. I earned it in a Tajikistan prison cell, but that story is for another day. What did you do with the film? Put it in a safe-deposit box?”

  “Such aptly named things—safe-deposit boxes. As in safe from guys like you and Ms. CIA and Mr. Ponytail. Well, it’s the icon that he seems to want.” She waved a hand. “But details, details.”

  “We need to take a look at that film, Zoe.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t like that movie from a while back—the one with Naomi Watts. The Ring? Once you look at it you die.”

  “You don’t have to look at it to be killed.”

  Zoe said nothing. The church was dark and silent and cold, like the proverbial grave, she thought.

  “You know what’s on it, don’t you?” she said. “On the film.”

  “Yes. But I need to see it.”

  Zoe blew out her breath in a sigh. “Oookay. So why don’t we just bop on down to the nearest video store? I’m sure they have one of those old-fashioned projectors we can rent. On the shelf right next to all the Betamaxes.”

  His mouth did the twisting thing again. “It so happens I know a guy whose hobby is collecting prints of old, uh, movies.”

  “Porn, you mean?”

  “Not all of it’s porn. Anyway, he owns the kind of projector we need, and that’s where I went this morning—to his place to pick it up.”

  “And left me handcuffed to the bed.”

  “Using the best, state-of-the-art handcuffs, by the way. And being stupid enough to leave the film behind, too. Man I waaaay underestimated you there.”

  “I’ll choose to take that as a compliment.”

  “It was meant as one…. Look, I’ll make you a deal. We go back to the apartment and watch your grandmother’s movie, and afterward if you want to take it and walk out the door, I won’t stop you.”

  Zoe sat in silence a moment, then said, “I wouldn’t even make it as far as the airport alive, would I?”

  “Probably not.”

  ZOE GOT THE film and her icon out of the safe-deposit box, and they crossed the river to the Île St.-Louis and the apartment of Sergei’s … of Ry O’Malley’s friend. The projector was there. He’d told the truth about that at least.

  They took a couple of hunting prints off the wall to clear a space. Zoe let him handle the film, since he seemed to know what he was doing, threading it through sprockets and around spools. She pulled the shade down over the window, darkening the room.

  She felt an odd mixture of excitement and dread. She knew what she was about to see would probably change her life forever. But her life was already changed, her life was already in danger, and at least now she would be getting some answers.

  And once she saw what was on the film, maybe she’d know better how to handle Sergei … Ry. And all the rest of the hunters.

  The projector was noisy, with a whirring fan, and the film made a clatter as it fed through the sprockets. Black marks danced on the wall and suddenly there was her mother’s face, close-up, a big grin splitting her small mouth. Her eighth birthday party, according to the brightly penned banner across the wall behind her. She pointed to her cake with its flaming eight candles, frosted white, but Zoe knew it was chocolate inside, her mother’s favorite, her own favorite.

  And there was her grandmother Katya, so pretty, so happy, almost dancing around the table. It was like seeing herself, dressed up in a play, how much she looked like the two of them.

  They watched the girl blow out the candles on her birthday cake and open her presents. Katya was always there, helping to untangle a bow, adjusting a paper hat. Zoe tried to imagine what awful thing had driven this seemingly adoring mother to abandon her child, but she couldn’t. And who was the person behind the camera? The stepfather Anna Larina could barely remember?

  The birthday party faded to white, more black sprocket marks danced on the wall.

  Then suddenly, a splash of color. Blue …

  23

  THE CAMERA pans along a wide boulevard, buildings on one side, a park of sorts on the other, the sun shining beneath the big blue bowl of a sky. And there are people and they’re cheering, although you can’t hear them. Motorcycle cops and cars are driving slowly toward the camera, a cavalcade.

  Suddenly the lens zooms in on a dark blue stretch Lincoln convertible with American flags flapping on its fenders. Two men are sitting in the front seat, a couple in the middle seat, and another couple in the back, and they’re smiling and waving to the crowds lining the sidewalks.

  The camera closes in on one face. His thick hair is shining in the sun, his large white teeth are flashing.

  It is John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  The camera moves slowly as Kennedy turns his head and looks at the woman beside him. It is the first lady, Jackie, wearing a pink suit and her trademark pillbox hat. They seem to share a moment of what? Intimacy? Triumph? The camera rests on both their faces and they are so alive, so beautiful. They look on top of the world.

  But the camera is veering away from them now, leaving the motorcade in the distance, panning over a curved, white pergola, its columns looking classically Greek and a bit strange under the bright Texas sun. Then leafless early-winter trees come into sharp focus, and globe streetlights along an open grassy knoll. The crowd is sparser here, almost eerily calm as they wait for the motorcade to pass by.

  The camera lingers awhile on a handsome, bareheaded man, all dapper in a dark suit, standing next to a freeway sign. He carries an umbrella in the crook of his arm, odd for there is not a cloud in the sky, but now the camera is leaving him, moving on to an all-American family who could have walked straight out of the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. The mother looking Jackie-like in her red, sleeveless shift dress and matching red heels, the father holding his boy on his shoulders, telling him, maybe, how he is going to remember this day forever. The day he saw the president of the United States of America.

  The camera jumps now, over to a wooden picket fence that separates the grassy knoll from what looks to be a parking lot near a railroad yard. Stopping suddenly to focus on a man in a brown suit and a hat who is standing behind the fence, using it as a blind, because he has a rifle in his hands.

  The camera is resting on his profile, studying his thoughtful expression, when the man suddenly turns and stares directly into the lens, and his eyes light up, as if he knows he’s the star in this macabre home movie and he wants everyone else to know it, too. But after a moment his face hardens, turns cruel, and he looks away, back toward the grassy knoll.

  Slowly, he brings the rifle to his shoulder and sights down the barrel.

  Then it’s all a blur—pergola, trees, grass, asphalt, people—nothing but a whirling kaleidoscope of color until the camera freezes again on the dapper man with the umbrella. The man seems tense, waiting for something. Suddenly, he snaps open the umbrella and raises it high above his head. Is it a signal to the man with the rifle? Because the camera is jumping now, down the street, and the president’s car is coming into view, closer and closer. The camera zooms in on that famous, smiling face, locking in so close it fills the apartment wall.

  He looks happy, he’s playing to the crowd, loving the adulation, the cheers. Then his hand stops in midwave, and he half turns to Jackie. Has he heard something? Seen something?

  Suddenly, he reaches up and clutches at his throat with both hands. He looks so surprised, and Jackie is reacting now, too, glancing over at her h
usband, not understanding what has already happened, what else is going to happen soon now. Then she understands and horror twists her face.

  The driver, too, is turning to look over his shoulder and the car is slowing, slowing, stopping …

  And the president’s head explodes in a red mist and pieces of something white—is it his skull?—are flying through the air.

  The camera jerks, then quickly moves over the crowd, recording the hysteria, the terror, the screaming mouths making no sound. Then the camera shifts back to the Lincoln as it madly picks up speed, and a Secret Service agent is running alongside it, jumping onto the trunk, where a piece of the president’s skull has landed, and where Jackie, in her bright pink suit and pillbox hat, is climbing out to get it, as if all she has to do is stick it back on and he will be whole again.

  The camera closes in on the president, slumped over onto the seat, no longer moving. It lingers on him, almost lovingly, almost with a mad flourish, as if to show— Look, he’s dead, just look, the back of his head is gone.

  And then the camera, as if suddenly repelled, jerks away from the carnage, back to the killer just as he is stooping to pick up the spent shell casings. As he straightens, he looks directly into the lens, and he grins really big, like, Fuck you, I got it done, didn’t I?

  Then he spins away and runs toward another man who’s standing, waiting, a man in some kind of uniform. Not a cop, though, for he has on pin-striped overalls and a beaked cap, like a railroad worker in a children’s book. The assassin pitches the gun to him as he passes, then he disappears out of the scene.

  The camera records every movement of the man in the overalls as he breaks down the rifle, smooth and fast, putting it in a toolbox, and then he is walking along the railroad tracks toward some parked boxcars.

  Slowly, the boxcars fade to white.

  24