Ry had lied, though. It was really, really far.
THEY CAME OUT of the tunnel through a dummy sewer grate, into a small, triangular square with a bronze statue of the poet Pushkin in its center. A white Lada rolled along the curb and rattled to a stop in front of them, vapor spewing from its exhaust pipe—
Ry opened the back door for Zoe to get in, then climbed into the passenger seat alongside a small figure, so enveloped in a brown fur coat and matching hat that Zoe could barely make out a face.
“Zoe,” Ry said. “This is Dr. Nikitin. Dr. Nikitin, Zoe Dmitroff.”
Their gazes met in the rearview mirror. Behind a pair of thick bifocals, his scientist’s eyes were round and liquid as a basset hound’s.
“It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” Zoe said.
“The honor is all mine.” He put the Lada into gear, and they lurched out into the street. “We will park in front of the Ploshad Vosstania metro station,” he said to Ry. “As if we are waiting there to pick up a friend. That way we can talk here in the car without drawing attention to ourselves.”
As they turned a corner, a blast of cold air blew up Zoe’s pant legs. She looked down and saw the snowy street rushing by through a hole in the floorboard. She turned sideways and drew her legs up onto the seat, tucking her knees up under her chin. The car smelled of boiled cabbage and the pine-scented air freshener that swung from the rear-view mirror.
They drove for about five minutes through dark and mostly deserted streets before pulling up in front of a large, domed-roof building, ringed by a bright necklace of streetlights.
Nikitin lit up a foul-smelling cigarette. “Did you just come from my Sasha’s nightclub? I have heard that you can get ecstasy pills there out of a vending machine.”
Zoe caught the flash of Ry’s smile as he turned to look at the older man. “It’s possible, but I didn’t see any.”
Nikitin shrugged. “He won’t let me come check it out for myself. He says the style is not to my taste.”
“It’s modern,” Ry said. “And loud.”
Nikitin grunted. “So, tell me … where is this thing you wish for me to analyze?”
“I’ve got it back here.” Zoe dug into her parka for the clear glass ampoule with its rubber stopper that Ry had bought in Budapest, along with the eyedropper she’d used to take a tiny drop of the bone juice from the amulet. In the semidark of the hotel bathroom, the juice had been the color of swamp water. But now, as she handed the ampoule to Dr. Nikitin, she was more than a little spooked to see the bone juice was glowing a bright, iridescent red.
Ry was spooked by it, too. She could see it in his face.
“Interesting,” Dr. Nikitin said, peering closely at the ampoule through the thick lenses of his glasses. “Where did it come from?”
“A cave in Siberia,” Ry said. “The people there believe it’s some kind of fountain of youth. That if you drink one drop of it, you will live forever.”
“Interesting.”
“Could it be real?” Zoe asked. “I mean, is it possible? Scientifically?”
“Theoretically, perhaps. But it is highly unlikely given the complexity of the aging process. All the genetic and lifestyle factors, the hundreds, possibly thousands, of individual factors in our cells and organs that affect our longevity.”
Dr. Nikitin gave the ampoule a little shake, and Zoe would have sworn the red iridescent goo glowed brighter.
“Because of its phosphorescent property,” Nikitin went on, “it is understandable that a primitive people would imbue it with special powers. Perhaps one day a witch doctor or a healer mixed it with some herbs and the patient recovered. And a legend grew from there.”
“But you’ll analyze it for us anyway?” Zoe asked.
“I could analyze it, certainly, but my area is in developmental biology. Who you should really have take a look at it is a biochemist. There is a woman I know with the Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology who has done some experiments with the longevity genes in Caenorhabditis elegans—that is, roundworms. Nearly transparent little things, are roundworms. You can see their heart, neurons, and other innards clearly through a microscope. They are a favorite of Olga’s because of their simple anatomy and because they have a minimal number of genes. I would like to include her in our discovery, if I may. Her expertise would be invaluable.”
Ry shook his head. “I don’t know…. How much do you trust her?”
Nikitin looked surprised by the question. “We have been lovers on occasion. Why would—Ah,” he said, interrupting himself to answer his own question. “You need her to be discreet because there is danger involved. Because if a man truly believed there was such a thing as a fountain of youth, he might kill to get his hands on it.”
“He has killed,” Ry said.
Nikitin stared at Ry for another long moment, then nodded slowly. “I can take the subway home. You might have use for a car while you are here.”
Nikitin slipped the ampoule into the pocket of his fur coat, but he made no move to get out of the Lada. “It has just occurred to me,” he said after a moment, “that if such a thing as a true fountain of youth existed, it could be a terrible thing to let loose upon the earth. Overpopulation, wars, famine …” He shuddered. “How often has mankind seen our salvation in something which turns out later to be the means of our destruction?”
He turned to look at Ry, and Zoe saw a sadness come over Nikitin’s face. “When you were in the nightclub, did you see my son?”
“Only for a few minutes. There was no chance for us to talk.”
“But he looked well?”
“Yes, he did. Very well.”
“His music—it, too, must not be to my tastes, for I admit it makes my ears cry out in pain. Yet he’s made himself rich and famous with it. Anything he wants he can have….”
Nikitin looked away, through the windshield at the dark and cold Russian night. “But that place where you found him, the place you saved him from—he had fear etched into his soul there, etched like acid into stone. Will he ever recover from it? That is the question I ask myself, and cannot answer.”
46
THE OPEN cast-iron railings of the Pevchesky Bridge were throwing spiky shadows onto the river ice when Ry pulled over to the curb and killed the ignition. The Lada’s engine sputtered on out of spite for a few seconds more, then finally died.
“You’ve stayed here before?” Zoe said, as she got out of the car. She tilted her head to look up at the tall, elegant cream-stone building. “With Sasha?”
Ry shook his head. “Sasha’s lover lives here. She inherited it from her grandfather, who was quite the Communist Party apparatchik in his day.”
He slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her against him. She looked up into his face, and soft, feathery snowflakes fell from the night sky into her eyes and open, smiling mouth.
“I’ve been told,” Ry said, “that the bed in the master bedroom came from one of the Tsar Nicholas’s palaces.”
THEY FELL ONTO the postered bed with its rose silk canopy, mouths together, trying to tear off all their clothes at once. It was like it had been on the hood of the car, coming at them, coming over them, hard and fast. He nearly strangled her with her bra, funny really, but their need was so urgent, so vital to what they were and what they were becoming to each other, that there was no laughter, no attempt at anything other than coming together as quickly as possible, joining into one.
When, at last, they were quiet, lying beside each other, replete and at peace, she said, “You almost yelled down the ceiling.”
He tried to laugh, but it came out as an exhausted sigh. “Maybe, but you were louder, the loudest scream I’ve ever heard. I hope we don’t get arrested.”
She snuggled against him. “Thank you, Ry.”
“For what?”
“Being you and finding me.”
He felt the need for her build again, and this time they took it slowly, touches easy and unhurried. He kissed her mouth, her
breasts, her belly, kissed all of her, lingering, and she screamed again.
LATER, THE ROOM dark, lying within the crook of his arm, she said, “What did you save Sasha Nikitin from?”
Ry ‘s hand was idly caressing her breasts, then toying with the green-skull amulet she’d worn on a chain around her neck since Budapest.
“A prison in Tajikistan,” he said after a moment. “I was on a mission there, Operation Containment we called it. Trying to put some kind of dent, no matter how pathetic, in the flow of Afghan heroin into Russia. One night things went all to hell, and we ended up having to bust one of the smuggling rings on the fly. But the wrong guy got killed, and I got hauled in by the local cops and thrown into a jail cell that was already packed like sardines in a can with forty other men. Sasha was the youngest, just a kid, and he … He had this heart tattooed on his forehead.”
“I’ve seen vors with teardrops and daggers on their faces, but never a heart. Why that?” she asked, because prison tattoos always had a meaning.
“Because of what they’d done to him. They’d turned him into a sex toy for any man who wanted him.”
Zoe closed her eyes, not sure she wanted to hear any more now, but he went on, “In a Tajikistan jail they make the ink for the tat by burning the heel of a shoe and mixing it with urine. They’d made Sasha use his own shoe and piss. They even made him pay off the tattoo artist by … well, you can guess.”
Zoe nodded, swallowing around the thick lump in her throat. “But how did he end up in such a place? His father’s a scientist, a professor at the university here.”
“Drugs. He got himself hooked bad on the poppy juice, and then he got it into his head that he could finance his habit by doing his own smuggling. He got caught trying to drive a vegetable truck full of two hundred kilos of heroin across the border.”
She felt Ry shrug in the dark. “I don’t know. I guess I felt sorry for the kid, so when I escaped, I brought him with me.”
Zoe thought it was probably a lot more than that, but she let it go.
“He wasn’t in very good shape, so I had to bring him all the way back home here to St. Petersburg. Soon as he could, the first thing he did was get that heart taken off his forehead. They had to dissolve his skin with magnesium powder to do it. It must’ve hurt like hell.”
She turned her head into Ry’s chest and kissed him, relishing the rise and fall of his breathing beneath her lips. “Ry? Are we going to get out of this alive?”
Every other man in the world would have lied to her then, but not him. “Either we take Popov’s son out tomorrow, or he takes us out.”
“If I have to, I’ll give him the bone juice. But only if I have to.”
The arm he had wrapped around her back tightened its grip. He kissed the top of her head. “Do you think you can find the nightclub again?”
“Yes. But why—”
“Sssh.” He put his finger against her mouth. “If you make it through this and I don’t, I want you to promise me that you’ll go to Sasha. He’ll take care of you. He’ll see that you get back home.”
She shook her head. “If you don’t make it, then I don’t want to either.”
“Yeah, you do. Nobody wants to die.”
She thought suddenly that she could feel a heat coming off the amulet where it lay between her breasts. She sat up, pulled off the chain, and held it out to him on her open palm.
“If this really is a fountain of youth, then maybe if we drink from it, Popov can’t hurt us. Can’t kill us, at least. One drop and we could live forever—”
“No.” He curled her fingers around the amulet and pushed it away from him. “No.”
“Okay, then.” She shrugged, pretending not to care, but she was shaking inside. From temptation, and a terrible fear. Nobody wants to die.
She looked down into his hard face. “I don’t know how you do it. How you’ve lived this kind of life for so long.”
His face didn’t soften then either, but he said, “I don’t know if I can do it anymore. If there is a tomorrow after tomorrow, and another tomorrow after that, then I want all those days and nights to be full of moments like this.” He reached up and cupped her cheek, his fingers wiping away tears she hadn’t known were there. “I want you.”
She leaned over and kissed him, softly at first, and then the kiss turned hard, and this time as they made love, she tried to make herself remember every moment of it.
They fell asleep in each other’s arms.
RY CAME AWAKE suddenly and sat up. The moon had risen, filling the room with a silvery light. He reached for her, but she was gone.
Then he saw her standing in the bathroom doorway, wearing one of his T-shirts. A man in a black jogging suit stood close behind her.
He had the blade of a knife pressed to her throat.
47
LIGHT FLOODED the bedroom with the flip of a switch, and a second man came through the door. He, too, was dressed in a black jogging suit and Adidas athletic shoes—the uniform of a vors in the Russian mafia. Only this guy had jazzed his up a notch. Three gold chains and an enormous gold baptism cross hung around his neck.
“I like your look, dolboy’eb,” Ry said to him in street Russian. “Real classy. Do you plan on being buried in it?”
“You’re the dickhead, dickhead. I’m the one with the gun, so shut up and get dressed.” The vor tossed a duffel bag onto the floor. “In these clothes, not your own, and be quick about it. The pakhan does not like to be kept waiting.”
Ry shook his head slowly back and forth. “I’m not doing a thing until you tell that rutting goat over there to take his knife off my woman’s throat.”
“Grisha, take your knife off her throat.”
“But, Vadim—”
“Do it.”
Grisha gave the other man a sour look, but he lowered the knife and took a step back. His black eyes focused on Ry, a sneer curdling his mouth. “Move, bitch,” Grisha said, and slammed the flat of his hand into Zoe’s back so hard he sent her sprawling.
Ry came off the bed, hard and fast, but he was stopped cold by the poke of a gun barrel in his belly.
Vadim brought his face right up to Ry’s, so close Ry could see the blackheads on his nose and smell the boiled cabbage on his breath. “One more inch and you die. One more fucking word out of your mouth and you die.”
“Ry, don’t.”
Zoe scrambled to her feet and held up her hands, palms out. He could see the fear in her eyes and knew it was for him. To get his hands on the altar of bones, Nikolai Popov would need Zoe alive and cooperating, but if Ry started looking as if he was more trouble than he was worth, he’d get a bullet in his head.
“I’m all right, Ry, really. He didn’t hurt me.” She bent over to pick her bra and panties from off the floor, but Grisha grabbed her arm. “Put on what we brought you, and nothing else.”
For a split second longer, Ry thought about trying to take the other man down, gun or no gun, but that was the testosterone talking—he could feel it, pumping along with the hot blood through the veins in his neck.
He raised his spread hands and backed up a step. “Okay, okay. I’ll shut up and get dressed. But I want her left alone.”
Vadim smiled, showing off the diamond chips embedded American-rapper-style in his two front teeth. “We won’t kill her unless the pakhan says kill her. Then? We kill her.”
THE CLOTHES IN the duffel bag were more black jogging suits and Adidas shoes, along with a couple of cheap parkas and some wool hats and gloves.
“Don’t we get any bling to go with our new outfits?” Ry said, once they were dressed.
Vadim dangled a pair of handcuffs from his left pointer finger. “This is the only ‘bling’ you’re gonna get, except maybe for a bullet in the head. So shut up and put them on.”
Ry snapped the metal bracelets around his wrists. Either they only had the one pair of handcuffs, he thought, or they didn’t consider Zoe much of a threat.
It was snowing, the dark
streets deserted, but a chauffeured black Mercedes SUV waited for them at the curb, engine running. Grisha opened the back door, shoved Zoe inside, and climbed in after her. Then the Mercedes suddenly shot forward before he’d finished shutting the door.
“Hey!’
Ry started to run after the car—not so easy to do on a street packed with snow and with your hands in cuffs. It was pointless anyway. All he could do was watch as the red taillights grew slowly smaller until they turned onto the Pevchesky Bridge and disappeared into the darkness.
Vadim came up beside him, wheezing from that little bit of a run. He had his gun out again and this time he looked as if he really might use it. “What are you doing, asking to be shot? The pakhan said come in separate cars.”
“Then where’s ours?”
“It will be here when it gets here. Now get out of the fucking street before you get run over by a snowplow.”
They waited, then waited some more. This wasn’t good. Why separate cars?
Vadin fished a Bic lighter and a pack of cheap Russian cigarettes out of the jacket pocket of his jogging suit. He lit up, took a deep drag, then coughed up half a lung.
“Those things’ll kill you,” Ry said.
“Fuck you.”
A snowplow crunched by, and lights came on in the apartments across the street. Vadim began to jiggle up and down on his toes. His lips and nose, even the tips of his ears, Ry noticed, had turned blue with the cold.
“What?” Ry said. “The pakhan doesn’t pay enough for you to buy a coat, not even a cheap-ass parka like this one you gave me?”
“I’m from Siberia. In Siberia this is not cold. In Siberia this is spring.”
Ry’s nerves were on the screaming edge by the time the second Mercedes SUV showed up.
Their driver made a U-turn and drove off in the opposite direction from the one Zoe’s car had taken, and for the first time in his life Ry felt literally sick with fear. Not so much because he knew he could be riding to his death—although that was not a pleasant prospect. But what would happen to Zoe now if she had to handle what was coming on her own?
Altar of Bones Page 38
