Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  Their driver took them through a dizzying maze of streets lined with decaying palazzi of long-dead merchants and noblemen, mixed in with fitness clubs, espresso bars, and a Porsche dealer. Trying to ditch a possible tail, Ry supposed. Not that they needed to. Sasha’s security men had positioned themselves well back to keep from drawing attention to themselves, counting on the GPS in the heel of Ry’s boot to let them know if he and Zoe were on the move. A brilliant plan, except that Popov had anticipated it, and now the boot was still back at the apartment, while he and Zoe were now headed God knew where.

  Every ten minutes Vadim lit up another foul cigarette, filling the SUV with a greasy yellow cloud of smoke. Eventually the eclectic neighborhood gave way to blocks of crumbling Soviet-era apartment buildings and rusting factories. The snow was coming down hard, stacking up on the windshield faster than the wipers could flick it away.

  About an hour out of St. Petersburg, they crossed a set of railroad tracks and ran out of asphalt. They were deep in the country now, lurching over frozen ruts through a wasteland of pines and rocks.

  Ry was beginning to think he’d fallen into some existentialist hell, then out in the middle of nowhere they came upon an old cemetery. The driver slowed and turned down a narrow lane, lined on both sides by the cemetery’s tall stone walls. They drove for about a mile, and then the lane dead-ended in front of the ruins of a large brick building.

  “Once we get out, take yourself and the car up to the farm,” Vadim said to the driver, as the SUV crunched to a stop on the fresh layer of snow.

  The frigid air felt good after the smoky stuffiness inside the Mercedes. Flakes, soft and thick as down, fell from a black sky overhead, but Ry’s internal clock told him it would soon be dawn.

  He thought the brick ruins were once a slaughterhouse because of the bronze sculpture of a bull that stood guard next to the building’s wide, arched doorway. A lone, bare lightbulb cast just enough light on the yard for him to pick out the remains of what looked like a cattle chute sticking up out of the snow and a rusted-out hay baler.

  There was no sign of the other SUV, nor of any living thing. And, worse, no other fresh tire tracks in the virgin snow.

  Oh, man, O’Malley, this isn’t good. This is not good at all.

  Vadim poked him in the side with a Beretta. “You speak good Russian for an American. Do you know the word grokhnut?”

  Literally it meant “to bang,” but it had another meaning as well. “If you were going to shoot me,” Ry said, “you’d have done it by now.”

  Vadim grunted a laugh. “Does it comfort you to think so?” He pointed with his gun. “Go over there, beneath the light.”

  With Vadim close on his heels, Ry walked toward the wide, arched entrance into what had probably been the slaughterhouse’s bleeding and gutting area. A long time ago fire had destroyed part of the roof and blackened the brick walls, but as he got closer, he could see someone had pulled an old, turquoise trailer house inside and set it up on cinder blocks.

  “That’s far enough,” Vadim said, and Ry felt the burn of cold steel in the side of his neck, the wash of hot breath against his cheek.

  Ry stood unmoving, the gun at his head. A long moment passed, and then another. They seemed to be waiting for something—but what? It was so eerily quiet, you could almost hear the snow falling.

  Here, the stench that permeated the air around the ruins was more pronounced, the old, sour smell of blood and rotting entrails, overlaid by a newer, more pungent stink—like a combination of cat pee and rotten eggs.

  He had a good view of the old trailer house now, and the litter of KFC tubs and pizza boxes around it. But he also saw empty cans of paint thinner, stripped lithium batteries, used coffee filters, and empty cold-tablet blister packs. Propane canisters with blue, corroded valves were stacked up on one side of the trailer’s front door. On the other, a pile of rotting bags full of ammonia nitrate.

  In other words, everything you would need to make methamphetamine.

  A crank lab was usually a hive of activity, but at this one there wasn’t a tweeker in sight. Yet although the place looked deserted, Ry knew it wasn’t abandoned, because under the low aluminum roof of the trailer’s patio extension, he could see two picnic tables loaded with row after row of mason jars filled with cold-medicine tablets soaking in muriatic acid.

  And those babies are cooking all right. He could actually see the fumes rising in waves out of the open mouths of the mason jars. One spark, and this whole place could blow to smithereens.

  “Nice little meth lab you all going on in there,” Ry said.

  Vadim was silent for a couple of beats, and the gun at Ry’s head didn’t waiver. “I am beginning to suspect you are mussor. I think you know that word, as well, huh? How do you say mussor in American?”

  “Garbage.”

  Vadim laughed, because it was also Russian-mafia slang for “cop.”

  “I thought you would know it.”

  At that moment, Ry heard what he’d been hoping, praying for—the steady hum of a powerful car engine turning down the lane from off the main road, the crunch of tires over snow. He felt Vadim stiffen behind him.

  “Now, mussor,” said Vadim, “it is time for you to die.”

  Ry started to spin around, throwing up his arm to knock the gun away, but he was too late. His head exploded in a white, hot flash, and then there was nothing.

  48

  THE MAFIYA thug, Grisha, had told her they would be bringing Ry to the meeting place in a separate car, but she didn’t believe him, even though the alternative was unbearable.

  The litany of a prayer ran through her head over and over. Please God don’t let them kill him. Please God, don’t let them kill him….

  After an eternity of driving aimlessly around the city, and then another eternity through a dark, arctic countryside, they turned down a lane that ran alongside a cemetery. The car’s headlights picked up crumbling brick walls, then Zoe saw a black Mercedes SUV just like theirs pull out and head down a narrow road that led away from the ruins.

  “There, you see,” Grisha said. “Vadim and your lover have made it here ahead of us. I told you not to worry.”

  Zoe said nothing. She was filled with a strange fatalism now, and she pressed her hand against her chest, where beneath her clothes the green skull amulet hung from its silver chain. It would happen now, she thought. Whatever it was.

  As they rolled to a stop, Grisha reached out and grabbed Zoe’s wrist. Instinctively, she tried to pull away, but his fingers were like a vise, and then she realized he was only snapping handcuffs on her, as they had done with Ry.

  He reached across her lap to open the car door. “This is the old Rach’a slaughterhouse,” he said, with a strange, secretive smile that made her skin crawl. “You will wait for the pakhan inside.”

  Icy snow stung her cheeks as she got out of the car. The cold in the city had been bad enough, but this far out in the country it was a biting, living thing.

  Grisha wrapped his meaty hand around her upper arm and half-pushed, half-dragged her toward the ruins, while their car drove off, taking the same side back road as the other SUV.

  Zoe had to look down at her feet to keep from slipping on the rutted, icy snow, so it wasn’t until they were almost at the gaping, arched doorway that she saw the body.

  And the man standing over it with a gun in his hand.

  “No!” ZOE SCREAMED, and tried to run, slipping and flailing over the icy snow. Grisha snagged her around the waist, lifting her off the ground, and still she screamed, “No! No! No!” and her legs thrashed at the air.

  Ry lay on the ground, a pool of blood staining the snow by his head. What she could see of his face looked as cold and white as marble. Already a thin layer of flakes dusted his coat and hair.

  Vadim said, “Get her inside, then help me get rid of this dead dolboy’eb. He’s too big for me to drag off by myself.” And he gave the body a kick in the side to emphasize his point.

&nb
sp; Zoe clawed at the arm that held her and screamed again, and it was as if the scream tore all of her breath out with it. She went limp, and the world around her blurred into a white haze. She was barely aware as Grisha carried her into the ruins.

  He flung her into a straight-back wooden chair that sat in front of a gray metal table. He unlocked one of the handcuffs from around her wrist and refastened it to one of a pair of eyebolts embedded into the tabletop.

  He started to leave, then turned back. “Life is as cheap as the price of a bullet. Remember that when you talk to the pakhan.”

  Zoe barely registered what Grisha said, or that he left her. She couldn’t see Ry’s body from here, but her mind was filled the image of his blood staining the snow, so bright and red and wet.

  She wasn’t sure how long she sat there alone. She didn’t dare let herself think beyond the need to take one breath and then another and not scream.

  The cold penetrated the horror first, then the stink—like cat urine, only worse. The single dim light over the doorway didn’t penetrate far into the shrouded, cavernous ruins. She saw old graffiti spray-painted on the crumbling walls and a lot of trash scattered about, but no cats. Someone had pulled a ratty old trailer inside the crumbling walls, and the worst of the smell seemed to be coming from it.

  A patiolike extension ran out from the trailer’s aluminum roof, sheltering a pair of picnic tables that sagged beneath the weight of dozens of old-fashioned mason jars. Around the tables were piles of rusting cans and hundreds of what, oddly, looked like old coffeemaker filters. Obviously, Zoe thought, the trailer was being used for something, but at the moment all of its windows were dark.

  She was alone, handcuffed to a table in the dark and foul-smelling ruins of a slaughterhouse, while Popov’s men went off to get rid—

  Zoe forced herself to breathe, one single breath and then another.

  She heard a man curse out in the yard. Grisha? Then the clank of metal slapping against metal. An instant later a bank of electric stadium lights flared on, nearly blinding her.

  When the bright spots that danced before her eyes finally faded, she saw Ry standing in the arched doorway.

  “What?” came a rich baritone voice from out of the darkness behind her. “You don’t believe in miracles?”

  A TALL, SILVER-HAIRED man in a long sable coat emerged from the shadows, picking his way through the rubble that littered the floor, but Zoe was barely aware of him. Ry was alive, alive, alive…. Blood, too much blood, covered one side of his face, and he swayed on his feet, but he was here, she could see him with her own two eyes.

  She stared, stiff and unmoving, not daring to believe, not even daring to breathe. If I could touch him, she thought, I would know he was real, and she started to stand up, but the handcuff stopped her, jerking her back down into the chair.

  She wondered why he wasn’t coming to her, then she realized Vadim was behind him, with his Beretta pointed at the back of Ry’s head.

  “Ry,” she said, her voice breaking over his name. “I thought …”

  “She thought we had killed you,” the pakhan said in English made thick by his accent. “It was a little charade we played, so she would fully grasp, deep in her gut, that you are about as useful to me as a hangnail. And just as easily disposed of.”

  Grisha came back through the archway just then, and the pakhan said to him in Russian, “Good. You’re still here, as well.” He waved his hand at Ry. “Help Vadim handcuff him to the table across from the girl. No need to be gentle if he doesn’t cooperate.”

  Vadim grabbed Ry by his coat and hauled him to the table. Grisha kicked out a chair for him to sit in, and he sat. Vadim unfastened the cuff that was on his right wrist and refastened it to one of the bolts. Then Grisha backed up a couple of steps, folding his arms across his chest, while Vadim stepped to the side and lit up a cigarette.

  Blood was all over Ry’s face from a deep gash high on his forehead, his coat dark with it. “You okay?” he asked her softly.

  Zoe tried to answer but a sob caught in her throat, so she nodded instead.

  “What a touching little reunion this is,” the pakhan said, as he stepped between them. “And how tedious for the rest of us. It hurt, though, didn’t it, my dear, when you thought him dead? I want you to remember that feeling. Remember it well.”

  He let that sink in while his eyes, sharp and hooded, studied Zoe intently. She stared back, trying not to show her fear of him. He was a Popov all right, for he was the spitting image of the man in the film, who had almost fifty years ago used an umbrella to signal to Ry’s father that President Kennedy’s limousine was coming into rifle range. He had the same handsome face, with its wide mouth and Slavic cheekbones, the proud nose. The same startling blue eyes beneath thick, rakish eyebrows.

  “This moment does have a feel of the inevitable about it, does it not?” he said. “A fate that cannot be denied.” He raised a long, fine-boned hand and brushed the back of it once, lightly, across her cheek. “How like my Lena you are. I would know you anywhere.”

  “You touch me again,” Zoe said through clenched teeth, “and I’ll bite your hand off.”

  He cocked an eyebrow, as if he were shocked, shocked that she would say such a thing, but he did take a step back, out of reach of her teeth.

  “What do you mean by ‘my Lena’?” Ry said, and Zoe was relieved to hear the strength in his voice. Then the sense of his question penetrated her brain. How like my Lena you are, Popov’s son had said. My Lena.

  But Lena Orlova had been his father’s lover, and that was over seventy years ago. Long before this man could possibly have been born.

  Zoe shook her head. Something was wrong here. She looked up into the lean, handsome face. Some wrinkles were around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth, and the skin along his jawline sagged a little. His hair was gray but was still thick and full, not even thinning a little at the temples. This man couldn’t be older than in his midfifties. But he had called her great-grandmother “my Lena.”

  And then she remembered what Katya had told Ry’s father: She gave it to him to drink, and so he thought he knew all its secrets. He thought he would be able to find it again, but he was wrong, and he’s been searching for the altar ever since. Hungering for its power.

  No, it couldn’t be true, Zoe thought, yet it also explained so much.

  “There never was a son,” Ry said. “We’re looking at the man himself. Nikolai Popov.”

  49

  THE PAKAHN lifted his shoulders in an elegant shrug. “Ah, yes, another charade, I’m afraid. But one that became necessary after a time, when all my contemporaries began losing their hair and their teeth and their memories, while I barely seemed to change at all. I was going to start looking younger than their children before long, so I retired from the world for a while, and when I reemerged, it was as the son I never had. For, sadly, although I’ve had many women in my long, long life, I didn’t marry until 1964, when I was well into my sixties. And then, when my wife and I had a child, it was only a daughter.”

  “My God,” Zoe said, “just how old are you?”

  A sly, triumphant look came over Popov’s face. “In a little over a month I will celebrate my one hundred and twelfth birthday. But then I drank from the altar of bones, so I have many, many more years yet. An eternity perhaps?”

  His voice trailed off for a moment, and to Zoe, his eyes seemed to glow as if a fire raged inside him. “The altar is real,” he said. “A true fountain of youth, and I am living proof of it.”

  Ry slouched back in his chair. “Yeah, we can see the bone juice worked on you just fine. You’re a hundred and twelve years old and crazy as a loon.”

  Popov’s face hardened, and a killing fury came into his eyes. They’d been speaking all this time in English, but now he said in Russian, “You will hit him, Vadim. Once. Make him feel it.”

  Vadim took the cigarette out of his mouth, tossed it on the floor, and slammed his fist hard into Ry’s face.


  Ry’s head snapped back, and a film of fresh blood misted the air. He breathed hard for a moment, then shook the hair out of his eyes. He spat out a glob of blood and grinned. “Is that the best you can do?”

  Vadim rubbed off the sting on his bunched knuckles. “I know you said only once, Pakhan. But I beg permission now to disobey you.”

  Popov made a tsking noise, shaking his head. “You remind me of your father, Agent O’Malley. He, too, had that tough swagger and the smart mouth. Although now that I remember it better, Mike was not so full of the swagger that night we killed poor Miss Monroe.”

  “Must’ve really felt good to be you that night,” Ry said. “Killing a woman half your size, and a drugged one at that.”

  Popov merely smiled. “Did your father ever tell you that we saw her naked tits? They were all you could ever imagine.”

  A laugh, half-hysterical, spurted out of Zoe’s mouth. “This is insane. You are insane. There, I’ve said it—so what are you going to do now, have your pet goon give me a smack in the jaw? You killed a president of the United States, you killed Marilyn Monroe. You even killed your own daughter, and, yeah, Katya Orlova was your daughter, and you know it. And why? So you could drink from the altar of bones? But you’ve already been there, done that. So why would you need more?”

  “Because he’s still aging,” Ry said. “Much more slowly than the rest of us, maybe, but he’s still getting old. He looks in the mirror and sees the crow’s-feet coming on little by little, the sagging skin, the fading hair, and if he’s still getting old, then that means he’s dying. And he wants it to stop.”

  “Ah, God,” Popov said on an explosion of breath. He tilted back his head and shut his eyes, then breathed out a hollow laugh. “You couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t want it for myself. I want it for my grandson. For my Igor, who is dying….”