Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  When Ry didn’t say anything, she looked up to see that he was back to prowling the room. He stopped in front of the dressing table and leaned over, bracing his fists on it to look into the fanciful gold mirror, but she didn’t really think he was seeing his own reflection.

  “I know it might seem almost obscene to say this,” he said, “but I think we need to look at it from Nikolai Popov’s point of view. If he didn’t know your grandmother got the amulet back, then it wasn’t ‘no reason’ to him.”

  “Yeah. I see your point,” Zoe said.

  Ry straightened and spun around. “So what in hell was in that thing to make the KGB kill a president of the United States just because they believed he drank from it?”

  Zoe couldn’t help shuddering. “I don’t know, but I think we’d better figure it out fast before not knowing gets us killed. And where’s the amulet now? Katya got it back, so you’d think it would have been in the chest with the icon and the film.”

  Ry sighed as he pushed his fingers through his hair. “Maybe the disastrous consequences of her giving it to Marilyn spooked her so badly she threw it away.”

  Zoe shook her head. “She would never do that. She might give it to someone out of love, but she’d never just throw it away. It’s the altar of bones, and she was the Keeper.”

  Ry came and sat down on the chaise next to her. He wasn’t crowding her, yet she could feel the ferocity in him, the barely leashed violence. Had his father been like that? Is that what had attracted her grandmother to Mike O’Malley?

  “Do you think they were really married?” she asked. “Your dad and my grandmother?”

  Ry was quiet a moment, then he said, “Yeah, they were. After Galveston, when I new I had to track down Katya Orlova, to get some answers and see the film, I looked for her in the one place where I knew for sure she had once lived—the L.A. area. I found a record of their marriage in the Holy Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox Church in Hollywood. A Michael O’Malley married Katya Orlova there on June twenty-third of 1962. Anna Larina’s birth certificate and her own marriage license to your dad were there, too. That’s how I was able to track your mother down so easily once I ran out of other leads. I was hoping that somehow Anna Larina would lead me to Katya.”

  “And your plan worked,” Zoe said. “In a crazy sort of way. It seems weird to think of them being married, though. Katya and your dad, I mean. It’s not like that makes us blood relatives or anything, but still, it seems weird. Two strangers with a connection neither of us knew about, and now here we are.”

  “Getting shot at.”

  “There is that,” Zoe said, and they shared the kind of grim smile she imagined soldiers in a foxhole did during a lull in the fighting. “And to top it off, now I gotta come to terms with the idea that this Nikolai Popov monster is my great-grandfather.” She gave a bitter laugh. “But then it’s not like I had a normal family to begin with.”

  Ry said nothing, but he reached over, took her hand, gave it a gentle squeeze, then let it go.

  A silence fell between them then that was almost poignantly intimate, yet fraught with so many conflicting emotions, Zoe didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe it was because of this newly discovered past they now shared, a past full of such dark and ugly secrets, but it felt as if this man understood her, knew her, better than anyone else ever had. She wondered if he felt the same.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  He leaned back, lacing his hands behind his head. “That it’s like a jigsaw puzzle made up of all these pieces. I keep thinking if we can just put the pieces together right, we’ll be able to see the whole picture.”

  Zoe leaned back against the sofa cushions alongside him and stared up at the ceiling. “Well, we know that somewhere there exists, or existed, an amulet filled with this stuff called the altar of bones. Stuff so scary that when the KGB thought the president of the United States drank it, they killed him.”

  “But not right away,” Ry said. “They murdered Marilyn in August of 1962, on the day she gave what they thought was the altar of bones to Bobby to give to the president. Yet Jack wasn’t assassinated until November of the following year, a whole fifteen months later. If Popov and the KGB really believed his drinking from the altar made him a danger to the world, then why did they wait so long?”

  “‘Danger to the world’ …,” Zoe echoed. “That makes the altar sound like something downright evil. Yet Popov and your dad were both willing to betray the women who loved them just to get their hands on it.”

  “A two-bit pimp told me a story once, about taking a knife to one of his whores who’d gotten out of line. He said the power he felt while he was cutting her made him feel like a god. For some people, Zoe, the mere act of doing evil can be a seductive thing.”

  Ry leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his spread knees. “Anyway, we might not know yet exactly what the altar of bones is, but we got an idea how it fits into the Kennedy assassination—they killed him because they believed he drank from it. So that’s at least one part of the puzzle. And we also know we’ve got two separate bad guys after our asses. Mr. Ponytail, who wants the altar of bones, and Yasmine Poole, who wants the film.”

  “They could both be working for Nikolai Popov, though,” Zoe said. “Katya got his face on the film, remember? He was the guy with the umbrella, which he used to signal your father that the president’s limousine was coming. So he’s got a good reason to keep the film from ever seeing the light of day. At the same time we now know that he was after the altar of bones from as far back as the 1930s, so—” She stopped as a thought suddenly struck her. “Which was what? Eighty years ago? So that means Popov would have to be old as dirt now, and I think I just shot a big hole in my theory, didn’t I?”

  Ry gave her a tired smile. “Actually, he’d be pushing a hundred and ten or so, if he were even still alive. While I was trying to find your grandmother, I did some research on the Nikolai Popov, who was a procurator general for the KGB in the early sixties. As you can imagine, there wasn’t a lot to be found, but as near as I could tell, he was born in St. Petersburg sometime around the turn of the last century. He wielded a lot of power behind the scenes until Leonid Brezhnev’s death in 1982. Apparently, once he found himself out of favor with the new regime, he retired to his dacha to live out his golden years. There was no mention of him anywhere after that.”

  “Not even a death certificate?”

  “Not that I could find, but then a lot of records got lost or were tossed after the Soviet Union collapsed.”

  “Well …,” Zoe sighed, and straightened, stretching out her legs and the kinks in her muscles, “it was a good theory while it lasted.”

  “Actually, you might have been sort of right. At least as far as the ponytailed guy working for a Popov, I mean. Back in the early eighties, when organized crime really got going in Russia, a man calling himself Mikhail Nikolaiovich Popov emerged as the pakhan of a big mafiya outfit in St. Petersburg. He claimed to be the old master spy’s son, even produced an official birth certificate to prove it, and supposedly he’s the spitting image of his dad. Whatever, this guy’s into some real serious shit now—prostitution, extortion, murder for hire, drug trafficking. Especially crystal meth.”

  “How delightful. Yet another pakhan in the family. If Nikolai Popov was my great-grandfather, then that would make his son my … what? Great-uncle or something? You don’t think it could be genetic, do you?” she said, only half-joking.

  Ry cupped the side of her face, turning her head so that she would have to meet his eyes. “You are your own person, Zoe. You’ve already proved that a thousand times over.”

  She nodded, swallowed. “I know. It’s just … I know.”

  He stroked her cheek once with his thumb, then let her go. “So I’m thinking Nikolai Popov could certainly have told his son about the altar of bones, and your ponytailed guy does have the look and feel of a typical vor. But as for Yasmine Poole?” Ry shrugged. “Maybe she works for him, to
o, but I don’t think so. She doesn’t fit the mafiya picture. As far as I can tell, the Popov crime outfit only operates inside of Russia, a country that’s chauvinistic to the max. No insult to your mother, Zoe, but I can’t see a true Russian pakhan trusting a woman to do his enforcement work, especially someone as flamboyantly out there as Yasmine Poole.”

  “Remember there was that other guy in the film?” Zoe said. “The one in the railroad uniform who took the rifle from your dad? Katya made sure to focus in tight on his face for a good ten seconds. With your dad dead and Nikolai Popov most likely dead by now, too, and his son a criminal—that guy in the railroad uniform might be the only one left with everything to lose. He could’ve been another KGB mole, like your dad. Maybe Yasmine Poole really is with the CIA, and they’re doing all this to keep the scandal from getting out.”

  Ry grunted in agreement. “If it turned out the CIA was involved with the Kennedy assassination, even as dupes, and they covered it up, there would be so many spook heads rolling down Capitol Hill, it would dam up the Potomac.”

  Zoe picked up the icon to study it some more, and another thought struck her. “All those icons my mother collected through the years, I bet it was all a front, a way to get her name out there as a serious buyer. This is the only one she’s ever really wanted, Ry. Anna Larina knows about the altar of bones, all right. Maybe not everything, but she knows enough to believe this icon is a clue to finding it.”

  Zoe brushed the tips of her fingers over the embossed silver skull cup that was cradled in the Virgin’s hands. So unlike anything she’d ever seen on an icon before. “I’m the one who’s supposed to guard the altar from the world, to keep it safe from the hunters, including my own mother, it seems, yet I don’t even know where, or even what, it is. All those Keepers who came before me—I don’t want to be the first one to fail, Ry.”

  She hadn’t realized she was crying again until he cupped her neck to wipe a tear off her cheek with his fingers. “No way are you going to fail. We won’t fail, because we’re in this together now. From here on out I’ve got your back, Zoe. Trust me on that.”

  He spanned the back of her neck with his hand, and this time he didn’t let her go. His palm was hard, calloused, yet warm. She saw his eyes darken, and she thought, He’s going to kiss me.

  But then he looked away, and a moment later he let his hand fall away as well, and her neck felt strangely cold and naked now without his touch.

  ZOE DIDN’T REALIZE how hungry she was until she started eating, and then she couldn’t stop. The soup had grown cold, but it still tasted wonderful and she had to restrain herself from licking out the inside of the carton. And she would have arm-wrestled Ry for the last lamb pastry, if he hadn’t snatched it up when she wasn’t watching.

  Out in the nightclub, she could hear the hum and crackle of conversation and laughter, the clink of glasses, a melancholy pianist, and Madame Blotski’s husky alto singing “La Vie en Rose.”

  Zoe said, “You know, Ry, I’ve been thinking …”

  “Jesus. Should I duck?”

  She searched through the take-out cartons for something to heave at his head, but they’d eaten everything except the cardboard. Then she spotted a crust of pumpernickel under a napkin, but instead of throwing it at him, she popped it into her mouth instead.

  She looked up and caught him grinning at her. “What?”

  “Nothing. I just like to see a girl with a healthy appetite. I lived with a ballerina for three years and all I ever saw her eat was lettuce. She’d get so hungry, I swear there were times she looked at me like she wanted to slather me with ketchup and—”

  He cut himself off, but he wasn’t quick enough. Zoe felt a big grin splitting across her face, but before she could open her mouth, Ry covered it with his hand. He was laughing, though, and she thought how much she liked his laugh.

  She also liked his fingers on her mouth, probably too much, but he pulled back and raised his hands, palms out, in an attitude of surrender. “Okay, okay. You probably got a good half dozen smart-ass zingers just bursting to get out, so lay them on me.”

  “Naw,” Zoe said, blushing a little. “I think I’ll pass up on the temptation. This time.”

  Ry laughed again as he poured them more vodka from the bottle that now had a good-size dent in it. “So you were thinking …”

  “Huh? Oh, just in her letter to me, my grandmother said, ‘Look to the Lady, for her heart cherishes the secret, and the pathway to the secret is infinite’…. ‘The Lady’ is what Boris, the griffin shop man, called the icon, and the icon is what Anna Larina seems to be after. So maybe the icon, or rather the composition of the painting itself, is the riddle that’s supposed to lead us to the altar.”

  “Hey, that is a good point. We should find an expert on Russian icons. Get him to take a look at it under the guise of getting it appraised, and see what he’s got to say about it….” His voice trailed off, but she could feel his intensity as he stared at her. “You really are something else, Zoe. You know that, don’t you?”

  Zoe’s cheeks felt hot, and she couldn’t meet his eyes or get her mouth to work. She finished off the last of the vodka in one gulp and stood up slowly, brushing off her jeans. “I, uh … think I’ll take a shower. I’ve got wedding cake in my hair and I smell like I’ve been soaking in diesel fumes for a month.”

  WHEN SHE CAME back out of the bathroom, all clean and deodorized and wearing fresh underwear, the dressing room was empty. The icon and the postcard that she’d left lying on the brass table were gone.

  No, goddammit, no. And God damn you to hell and back, Ry O’Malley.

  He couldn’t have done this to her, he just couldn’t. Not after all they’d been through together. She’d trusted him, spewed her guts out to him, told him everything. He wouldn’t do this to her because she knew him, knew he was honorable—

  Yeah, right, Dmitroff. Who are you kidding? You didn’t know jackshit, except that he’s gone.

  She crumbled slowly back on the chaise. She wasn’t going to cry, dammit. She would not cry. The smell of the empty food cartons was making her sick. She gathered them up to throw them away and saw the note he’d left her, scrawled on a napkin.

  She lay back on the chaise, grinning like a fool. Then out of nowhere, she burst into tears.

  She snatched up one of the gaudy, fringed pillows and buried her face in it so no one could hear her. Ry had said she was something else, but she didn’t feel like something else right now. What she felt was scared, and she wanted to go home.

  SHE CAME AWAKE with a start. It felt late, deep into the night. The room, the whole nightclub, was quiet, still. The small lamp on the dressing table was lit, but its soft pink light barely penetrated the shadows. Everything was so quiet, but she knew she wasn’t alone.

  She half sat up. “Ry?”

  Something huge and heavy slammed her back down onto the chaise, a hand clamped down hard over her mouth. She saw the tip of a knife, pointing at her left eye.

  33

  YOU’RE GONNA give me the altar of bones, bitch,” said the ponytailed man as he straddled her, his hand clamped tight over her mouth. “But to save us both time and trouble, I’m taking one of your eyes out first. That way you’ll believe me when I tell you just what you gotta do to save the other one.”

  The dim light glinted off steel as the knife touched her eyelid. She grabbed his wrist with both hands and twisted her head aside, felt a sting on her forehead, a splash of blood. He’d cut her, but not her eye yet. Not her eye.

  The knife was coming back at her face again, and he was so strong. She pushed against his wrist with all her might, and still the knife tip came closer, closer.

  She tried to ram her knee into his balls, but she couldn’t get any leverage. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and she could feel the strength melting out her, all her muscles turning to mush, and the knife was so close now.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, felt the tip prick her lid.

  Something
wet and hot splashed her face. He let go of her mouth, and she screamed and screamed.

  SHE COULDN’T SEE. Oh, God, what had he done? Was she completely blinded? Why couldn’t she see?

  Suddenly the weight lifted and she stopped screaming to gasp and suck in air. She felt something soft wipe at her eyes, and then she was looking up into Ry’s face. She was seeing his face.

  “Hey, hey, you’re okay,” he said. “You’re gonna be okay.”

  “He was going to …” She shuddered, closing her eyes, then she opened them again right away. She didn’t like the world being dark.

  Her forehead burned. She touched it, looked at her fingers, and saw blood.

  “It’s not yours,” Ry said. “Mostly not yours. I guess we did kind of let things get a little too close for comfort there.”

  His voice sounded tough, matter-of-fact, but as he leaned closer to her, she thought his eyes were dark with violence and something else she couldn’t read. His mouth was white.

  She was afraid that if she blurted out all the things she wanted to say to him, she’d sound all emotional and embarrassing, so she said, “Hey, O’Malley, don’t get too full of yourself. I had things perfectly under control in here. Couldn’t you tell?”

  He laughed. “Yeah? What I heard, Dmitroff, was you screaming like a girl.”

  “Well, if the shoe fits …” She was laughing herself as she sat up on the chaise. She felt weak and dizzy, but at the same time she had so much adrenaline shooting through her veins she felt as if she’d burst into a million pieces.

  She tried to stand up and her foot knocked against something thick and heavy. She looked down and saw the ponytailed man sprawled on his back on the floor, half his head blown away.

  She stared at the body, at the big, ugly-looking knife in his hand. It looked just like the knife he’d left in her grandmother’s chest. A Siberian knife. This was her grandmother’s killer and he was dead. Good, she thought. Good. She was glad he was dead, he deserved to be dead.