Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  This time her scream was swallowed by the shriek of a train’s warning whistle. It bore down on them with a hammering roar that rent the air. The whole world seemed to be shaking.

  They leaped over the last of the tracks, just as the train blew by them in a buffeting gust of wind and another earsplitting shriek of its horn.

  RY TOOK THEM on a twisted route through a warren of narrow one-way streets. Zoe had no idea whether he knew where he was going and she didn’t care. They were climbing now, the cobblestoned streets taking on a bohemian charm, but she barely noticed. She kept twisting around to look for the silver Beamer.

  She heard it before she saw it—the rev of its powerful engine. It came roaring around the corner behind them, and this time the hooded guy wasn’t being careful of innocent bystanders by trying to take aim. Bullets bit into the cobblestones, shattered glass, and ripped into a pile of garbage cans.

  “How is she doing it?” Zoe cried. It seemed impossible—after the shopping arcade, the one-way streets, the railway tracks—that Yasmine Poole could have found them again already.

  Ry opened the throttle as wide as it would go and they shot forward, putting some distance between them and the semiautomatic weapon. Even so, Zoe thought, it was a good thing it was harder than it looked to hit a moving target from another moving target.

  They careened up a winding street, using the buildings as a shield. But the street ran out at a small square studded with leafless trees and the few straggling artists still packing up for the night. They ripped past colorful restaurants and galleries, and then Zoe saw before her the white dome and turrets of an enormous basilica lit up against the night sky.

  The forecourt of the basilica’s great bronze doors was full of tourists and Arabs selling knockoff handbags spread out on blankets over the paving stones. The bike slashed through faux Gucci and Chanel, its headlight pointing right at a low stone balustrade. Beyond the balustrade the city’s rooftops and shimmering lights spread out for miles below them.

  Far below them.

  BULLETS SPRAYED THE stone railing in front of them, kicking up a blizzard of stinging pellets.

  For one terrifying instant, Zoe thought Ry was going to drive them over the balustrade to die, impaled on the point of a gray mansard roof. Then she saw the long flight of terraced steps, lit by a string of globe lampposts.

  They dove down the stairs, hurtling, bouncing, and rattling, and more pieces of the pizza cycle fell off. They reached the end of one flight of stairs, cut hard right, under the framework of a funicular, and started down another, longer flight.

  Ry yelled, “When I say now—jump. I won’t be slowing down, Zoe. You got it?”

  Zoe nodded, unable to shout back she was so scared.

  They bounded past a row of poplar trees, then Ry yelled, “Now!” and they jumped. The bike kept going without them, faster now, careening wildly out of control with no one to steer it.

  Her momentum carried Zoe into some kind of holly bush, whose prickles scraped the side of her face. She landed hard on her left side, jamming an elbow into her chest and winding herself.

  Ry was suddenly there, leaping out of the dark. He grabbed her hand, hauled her back onto her feet, and they ran down the steps, following the path the empty pizza cycle had taken. Zoe could still hear it, clattering and roaring, but far below them now. They didn’t run all the way after it, though, and thank God for that, because after the eternity on that thing with its rotten shock absorbers and padless seat, Zoe could barely feel her legs.

  Ry pulled her down onto a stone bench and reached for her satchel. “Give me your bag.”

  Zoe clutched it to her chest. “Why?”

  “This afternoon, back at the café, Yasmine Poole must have dropped in a tracking device when you weren’t looking. That’s the only way they could be keeping up with us the way they have.”

  Zoe was already dumping out the satchel onto the bench between them. The sealskin bag with its priceless icon first, then the film, which without its can was unspooling into a wiry mess. Then lipstick and compact, hairbrush, eyeliner, a couple of pens, wallet, passport, keys, a petrified PowerBar, sunglasses and sunscreen, a small box of tampons, a handful of old credit-card receipts, cell phone and PDA—both probably dead now … an expired coupon for a free cup of Peet’s coffee, a can of Mace and a whistle …

  “Jesus, the things you women—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  Red lacy bikini panties and matching bra … “Nice,” Ry said.

  Zoe quickly tucked the underwear inside the half-open zipper of her leather jacket. “Down, dog,” she said, and Ry laughed.

  She got to the bottom and turned the satchel upside down. Crumbs and lint and dust fell out, but no tracking device.

  “Oh, God, maybe it’s stuck on me somewhere….” She jumped up and ran her hands through her hair, over her jacket and jeans, searched her pockets.

  Then Ry spotted it, caught among the bristles of her hairbrush. He held it up—it had the size and shape and creepy look of a wolf spider, and a tiny red light that was blinking like an evil red eye.

  “This is the very latest technology,” he said. “I’ve never even seen it before, just read about it. I wasn’t really buying her tale before, but maybe Yasmine Poole really is CIA. In which case we are seriously …”

  “Screwed,” Zoe said. “I’d use another word, but I don’t speak French.”

  She expected Ry to throw the tracker into the bushes or squash it to smithereens beneath his bootheel, but instead he wrapped it up in his big fist and jumped to his feet. “Let’s go,” he said, and started at a jog back down the steps.

  Zoe shoveled her stuff back into her satchel and ran after him.

  AT THE BOTTOM of the steps, they passed a garbage truck idling at the stoplight. Ry tossed the tracking device onto the mound of trash.

  Zoe watched the truck disappear around the corner. “We didn’t just put that garbage man’s life in danger, did we?”

  Ry shook his head. “Soon as they catch up with the truck, they’ll know they’ve been had.”

  They caught a cab going in the opposite direction. Zoe leaned back against the cracked black leather seat and shut her eyes. A moment ago she’d felt as if she had a half dozen double espressos shooting through her bloodstream; now, suddenly, she didn’t think she’d ever be able to move again. Ry would have to pry her out of the cab with a crowbar when they got to where they were going.

  And where were they going? She’d heard Ry say something in French to the driver, giving him an address presumably, although it had sounded like gibberish to her. If she’d known one day she would be running for her life over and over again through the streets of Paris, she would have studied more French in school instead of Spanish. She would have …

  THE CRACK OF a gunshot startled her awake.

  She jerked upright and looked around wildly for the silver Beamer, but except for a ratty old Citroën idling at the red light in front of them, the street was deserted.

  She felt a hand on her knee, and Ry said, “It was only a car backfiring.”

  She tried to laugh, but it broke coming out. Her heart was still pumping hard. “Sorry. I guess I get kind of jumpy when people are trying to kill me.”

  She thought she caught the flash of a smile, but it was dark in the back of the cab. “You’re doing great, Zoe. Better than great, you’re kicking ass and taking names.”

  She knew he was just being a good leader, rallying the troops, but his words were still nice to hear. His hand on her knee also felt nice.

  She was trying to think what to make of that when he said, “We’re almost there.”

  Zoe looked out the window. The streetlights were few and far between, but she could make out a quaint, old-fashioned tobacco shop complete with a wooden Indian in front, a tailor shop with a nude mannequin in the window, and a ramshackle garage. This was a poorer neighborhood than any she’d yet seen, the buildings lopsided and grimed with the soot of centuri
es.

  “So where is ‘there’?” she asked, just as they turned the corner onto an even narrower side street and rolled to a stop.

  Ry leaned into her, and this time she was sure he smiled. “Come with me,” he said in a really bad Pepé Le Pew imitation, “to the casbah.”

  28

  IT WAS the casbah. Literally, in the sense that THE CASBAH was written in purple neon script above the front door.

  It was a theme nightclub, Zoe supposed, and the theme was glaringly obvious. The building was built like a mosque, decorated with Moorish-like tiles and mosaics. It had no windows, just an iron-banded wooden door framed on each side by a pair of green neon palm trees.

  The door had no handle that Zoe could see, just a grilled spy hole set dead center and at eye level. Ry pressed a buzzer, and a moment later the spy hole shot open, then closed.

  Then the door itself was flung wide, and Zoe expected to see a guy in a fez or maybe a belly dancer in harem pants. But instead a woman of a “certain age” stepped across the threshold and into the green light cast by the neon palms. She looked straight out of the 1930s, a chanteuse with straight, bobbed black hair and dramatic cheekbones, a black pencil skirt, a red silk blouse, and a long ivory cigarette holder pinched delicately between two fingers.

  “Rylushka?” she said, in Russian roughened by too much bad vodka. “I do not see or hear from you in two years, now suddenly you are banging on my door? You must be in big, bad trouble.”

  “BUT THEN WHEN are you not in trouble?” the woman said, switching to English so thick Zoe was afraid she would choke on it. She held up the hand with the cigarette before Ry could answer. “No, better to say nothing, lapushka, tell me nothing. That way I can keep my—what is it you Americans call it? My ‘plausible deniability.’ “

  “We thought we’d drop by for supper,” Ry said, and turned to Zoe. “Madame Blotski makes the best borscht west of the Urals.”

  “He lies.” The woman smiled at Zoe, but the dark eyes narrowed and looked her up and down, as if sizing up a potential rival. “I cannot even boil a potato without burning it. But there is always the takeout, no? So come in, come in.” She stepped aside and waved the cigarette at the open door. “But no Madame Blotski. You must call me Anya.”

  “Ochen priatna. Nice to meet you. I’m Zoe—”

  “Nyet, nyet. Say no more. Plausible deniability, remember? How nice, though, that you speak Russian. And how polite of you to let me know of this accomplishment, before I gave myself the red face by letting slip a little insult here, a little indiscretion there, thinking you were—what is the word you Americans say? Clueless. Rylushka, wherever did you find this girl?”

  “I fished her out of the Seine.”

  “Hunh. You make the little joke. Still, she does have the look of the drowned krysa about her. Never mind, I have bathing facilities, and for that she should be thankful. And for why are we all still out here on the stoop? What if someone is to see you and starts to shoot?”

  Zoe looked nervously up and down the street. She didn’t want to bring trouble down on this woman. “Thank you, Madame Blotski, but maybe we should—”

  “Anya,” Ry cut in, “likes to pretend she is living inside a John Le Carré novel. If you told her we had the KGB hot on our trail, it would make her day.”

  Madame Blotski laughed. “Listen to yourself, Rylushka. It is you who must always be playing at the good guys, bad guys.”

  Zoe looked at Ry. Earlier, when she’d woken up thickheaded and nauseated after he’d shot her with that tranq gun, she’d thought he was one of the bad guys. She didn’t think that anymore, but she knew there were still a lot of things he wasn’t telling her.

  Then again, she hadn’t told him everything either. Remember, trust no one. No one, her grandmother had warned. Zoe had been the Keeper for barely forty-eight hours, and already she was contemplating breaking rule number one.

  Anya Blotski was laughing as she took Ry’s arm and pulled him inside, leaving Zoe to follow. Anya leaned into him and her breast brushed his arm. A clue, Zoe thought, as bright as the neon palms outside the front door, that the two of them had a history, and she smiled to herself at the thought.

  ZOE LOOKED AROUND at the potted palms, art deco stenciling, and the gilt on the cobalt blue walls and thought Humphrey Bogart would have felt right at home.

  They wended their way through wicker chairs and small, round tables with crisp, white cloths, each table with its own little red-shaded lamp and onyx ashtray. Then crossed a small parquet dance floor in front of a slightly raised stage that was already set up for a jazz band, with the instruments out of their cases, the sheet music on the stands. Zoe didn’t see any musicians, though; in fact there wasn’t a soul in the place. But then it was early; things probably didn’t get hopping here until after midnight.

  Anya Blotski led them through a swinging door in the back, down a short hall to another door, which she opened with a key. “This is the singer’s dressing room, but since I am the singer, I say you may use it. Please to make yourselves at home. That chest over there is really a refrigerator—clever, no? And there is vodka inside. Meanwhile, I go send for takeout.” She brushed Zoe’s cheek with a cool, dry hand. “Poor darling. You looked half-starved and blue with the cold.” Then Anya left on a cloud of Opium perfume.

  The dressing room reeked of it. In here, Zoe saw, the decor was faux Turkish harem. The wooden floor was laid with overlapping Turkish rugs, the mirror above the dressing table was gilded, and there was a chaise longue loaded with beaded, fringed pillows. A samovar burbled on a nearby table.

  “I should be doing the dance of the seven veils,” Zoe said.

  Ry came up to her and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “You okay? You looked really wiped.”

  She smiled, but she took a step back. She’d felt his touch all the way to her toes, and she didn’t want to go there. She’d be a fool to go there.

  “Apart from my insides feeling scrambled for an omelet, I’m fine. Only next time you go to steal us a getaway vehicle, would you mind staying away from the pizza bikes?”

  His eyes crinkled up at the corners. “I could go for something classy, like a Beamer.”

  “As long as it’s not silver. If I see another silver Beamer, I might just jump back into the Seine.”

  “Isn’t your mother’s Beamer silver?”

  “Thank you for making my point.”

  He laughed as he went to the table with the samovar. She watched him pour tea into a pair of tall, curved Russian glasses, then place two sugar cubes on the little lips meant for that purpose. How did a guy named O’Malley come to speak better Russian than she did? And he’d played the part of a vor so well, he’d even fooled her mother, a pakhan in the Russian mafia. No way could he have picked that up in DEA school. There was simply too much she didn’t know about him—she’d be nuts to trust him. Okay, so he’d saved her butt multiple times today, but still …

  She walked to the chaise and collapsed. The strap of her satchel cut into her shoulder. Her eyes felt gritty, and every bone in her body felt pulverized. Her stomach was now so empty, its growls were echoing.

  She ran her fingers through her hair and they came away sticky. She couldn’t for the life of her … Then she remembered the wedding cake Ry had plowed into on their mad dash through the streets of Paris.

  Ry turned around with the tea glasses in his hand and must have caught her smiling because he said, “What? You’re sitting there grinning like an idiot.”

  She laughed. “I was remembering the looks on those two guys’ faces when you drove through their wedding cake. That was some wild ride you took me on, O’Malley. I thought—”

  She was interrupted by a knock on the door, and Madame Blotski came in bearing a tray with silverware, glasses, and a half dozen white takeout cartons.

  “From Igor’s deli,” the woman said. “We have chicken tabaka and pickled cabbage, and kotleta, which he promised to me is stuffed with lamb, not hor
se, so you need not to worry. The bread is pumpernickel. You like?”

  “We do,” Ry said. “Spasibo.”

  Zoe’s mouth was suddenly so full of water, she was afraid she’d actually start drooling. “It smells wonderful. Spasibo.”

  “You are most welcome. And, please, help yourselves to the vodka.” The woman set the tray on the chest that doubled as a refrigerator, brushed Ry’s cheek this time, and said, “Eat, eat. Meanwhile, I take hint you are too polite to give me and give you kids some privacy.”

  Zoe waited until the door had shut behind her, then she looked at Ry and they shared a smile. “Us ‘kids’? What is this place, anyway?”

  “The Casbah? It’s a nightclub that was started by some White Russian émigrés way back before World War Two, although it’s changed hands several times since then, obviously. Anya was a singer in a Moscow nightclub when the Soviet Union collapsed. She emigrated here and bought this place.”

  Probably with a little mafiya seed money, Zoe thought, but she was too hungry to pursue the subject, even if it were any of her business. As she started to reach for a steaming carton that smelled of potato soup, she caught sight of the condition of her hands and shuddered.

  AS ZOE CAME out of the bathroom, she saw that Ry had his back to her and was talking on his cell phone. She heard him say, “Yes, pakhan. No, pakhan,” before he flipped the phone closed.

  “You were talking to my mother,” she said, suddenly feeling so sick that if she’d had any food in her stomach, she would have vomited.

  Ry turned to face her, tucking the phone into his back pocket. “She thinks I’m working for her, remember? If I don’t check in every day, she’s going to get suspicious.”

  “What—” Zoe’s voice broke, and she had to clear her throat. “What did you tell her?”