Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  “I am holding this document in my hands, reading how your president intends to escalate from a few inconvenient advisers in South Vietnam to a full-blown war with the North and with China, and with us Soviets, as well. It was sheer insanity. And that was when I knew the dark side of the altar had truly taken hold of him. That for the sake of my country, for the world, he had to go.”

  An invasion of North Vietnam? Nuking the passes? It seemed unreal to Ry. Truly insane—and wasn’t that a laugh? Yet, when you thought about it, after Kennedy’s death those “advisers” did escalate into an invasion of a sort, although into the southern half of the country, not into the North.

  While Popov was talking, all of Zoe’s attention had been on Ry, letting him take the lead. He held out his hand to her now, and she came to him. He put his arm around her waist and drew her to him. Popov and his two goons didn’t seem to care.

  “So you decided all on your own,” Ry said, “that President Kennedy had to go. And you had my father and Miles Taylor to help you pull it off. The brilliance of the plan, the reason why it worked, was in its very simplicity.”

  Popov looked pleased at the compliment. “If you involve too many people in your conspiracy, someone always ends up talking, either to save his own ass or because he just can’t help himself. Even so, I never anticipated your father would have his woman make that damn film. He outsmarted me there. Miles Taylor was going to be useful to me for many years to come, but your father? From the moment he pulled the trigger, he was dispensable, and he knew it.”

  “Like Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  “Ah, yes. Poor Lee Harvey. Why am I always forgetting about him? But then he was never a real part of it, except as a patsy. You know the type. In Russia we call him the elephant-in-the-parade man—the one who follows the elephant with a shovel and a pail full of shit. I fed him a beautiful story about how Castro wanted revenge for the poisoned cigars, then I sent him off to make history.”

  Popov laughed again, and Ry thought he looked positively entranced with himself now—the star of his own movie. “And what a history it turned out to be,” he said. “Imagine that a single bullet from a clunky Italian-surplus bolt-action rifle could change direction several times in order to kill the president and wound the governor of Texas. A pity our poor Oswald didn’t live long enough to marvel and gloat at what a crack shot he was that day.”

  “And Jack Ruby, the man who in turn gunned Oswald down in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters—I take it we have you to thank for that? Snipping off loose ends, were you?”

  “Of course. Like your father, Lee Harvey Oswald was a dispensable commodity.”

  While Popov talked, Ry had edged himself and Zoe farther from the table and closer to the slaughterhouse door. He could see that it had grown light outside, and it was no longer snowing. Feeble rays of sunshine filtered through gaps in the crumbling walls.

  Ry casually put his hand into his coat pocket, found the lighter, and flipped open its lid. He pushed down on the gas lever and pressed the pad of his thumb on the striker wheel. He said, “I remember reading about the Warren Commission’s ‘magic bullet theory.’ You must’ve gotten a good laugh out of that.”

  Popov was getting a good laugh out of it now. “Magical bullet, indeed. But what turned out to be even more magical was the top-secret document Miles Taylor had given me. It was only later, long after our big kill, that I found out the document was a forgery. An exceedingly well-drawn forgery, but all lies nonetheless. Miles, and some other members of the Kennedy administration, had been pushing for an escalation of the fighting in Vietnam because of the millions to be made in Defense Department contacts, but Kennedy was balking. Vice President Johnson, though, seemed quite amenable to the idea. Miles must have decided that the easiest way to get those defense contracts was to arrange to have the vice president become the president.”

  Popov laughed again and shook his head. “Miles, the devious bastard—he used me to do his dirty work for him. I had made Miles Taylor, I shaped and molded him, and so I thought he was my creature, that I owned him. It was arrogant of me, I know, and in my arrogance I swallowed that phony document of his hook, line, and sinker.”

  “You thought you were so smart,” Zoe said, startling everybody because she’d been quiet for so long. “And yet you were wrong about everything. The document was a fake, but so was the amulet, because the real one, the one with the altar of bones—Katya got that one back. You’re wearing it now, around your neck. The amulet Marilyn Monroe gave to Bobby that day was filled with toilet water, so even if his brother did drink from it, he was never going to lose his mind and push the red button.”

  Popov raised his eyebrows at Ry. “This is true?”

  “Yeah, Popov, it’s true,” Ry said. “It turns out you were played all over the place, every which way there is.”

  The Russian thought about it for a moment, then threw back his head in genuine amusement. “What a joke on me. A joke every which way, no? … And now I really must be going. As you American’s say, have a good life.”

  Ry waited until Popov had turned and was walking away, out of ear-shot, then he pulled Zoe tighter against him, leaned his head close to hers, and spoke softly as if he were giving her comfort, “Do you remember Paris and the Drano bomb?”

  Zoe nodded.

  He gave her a little squeeze. “Straight out the door, babe, and don’t look back.”

  Zoe nodded again.

  Vadim, Ry saw, must suddenly have figured out that the cigarette dangling off his lower lip wasn’t lit, because he was patting the pockets of his jogging suit looking for his lighter. Popov was almost at the trailer house now, nearly abreast of the picnic tables with their lethal brew.

  But suddenly he stopped short and turned back.

  “You think it is so terrible,” he said, “what I have done to possess the altar of bones so that I might save my grandson’s life. But Katya herself would have understood. Did you know, Zoe, my dear, that when your mother, Anna Larina, was four years old, she was stricken with leukemia? She was given only weeks to live, but a year later not only was she still alive, she was as healthy as any child of her age. And in every test they ran on her, they could fine no trace of the cancer. The doctors were at a lost to explain it. They called it a miraculous recovery.”

  Zoe shook her head. “I don’t … What are you saying now?”

  The smile Nikolai Popov gave her was full of spite. “Just that I thought the sacred duty of the Keeper was always passed down from mother to daughter. Yet Katya skipped Anna Larina and gave it to you. Ask yourself why she would do that, Zoe. Ask yourself why your mother didn’t die when she was four like she was supposed to.”

  THIS TIME WHEN Popov left them, he kept on going.

  Ry watched him take one step, then another, purposeful steps, mission accomplished, and Ry waited, waited until the man was walking past the trailer house again, alongside the picnic tables and the mason jars full of cooking meth.

  He waited one more second, two, then yelled, “Now.”

  Zoe ran all out for the door, just as Ry jerked the lighter out of his pocket and hit the striker wheel.

  Nothing happened. He hit it again, then again. Got nothing but puny sparks. He saw Vadim and Grisha scrambling to get out their weapons, saw Popov spin around and pull a gun out of the pocket of his sable coat. Ry prayed as he’d never prayed before in his life and struck the wheel again. And again.

  Suddenly the wick caught, bursting into a bright blue-yellow flame. Ry threw the burning lighter onto the picnic tables, then ran for the door. He heard two shots, rapid-fire, one after another, but nothing hit him. Then he heard a loud whoosh, and a blast of hot air hit the back of his neck. He looked over his shoulder as he ran—the picnic tables had become a giant fireball.

  He saw a curling tongue of fire leap out, like a giant fist, and grab Popov. The man screamed and screamed as the flames enveloped him, shooting up the length of his sable coat, wreathing and billowing ar
ound his face.

  Ry’s last view, as he went through the door, was of the flames spreading from Popov to the trailer house, and to the stacks of propane tanks and bags of ammonia nitrate, and he ran harder, desperate now, because any second that stuff was going to blow and send everyone to hell.

  He was out in the yard, looking frantically for Zoe, not seeing her. Then, oh God, oh God, there she was running about ten yards ahead of him, moving fast, long, hard strides, and he pushed harder to catch up with her. She didn’t know, she couldn’t know—

  He tackled her, slamming her down into the snow-covered ground, covering her with his body as best as he could, his arms over their heads as the world exploded behind them. The air disappeared, sucked out of their lungs, and time seemed to stop. Then bricks and shards of sheet metal and glass rained down, and hot, roaring flames shot up into the sky.

  51

  RY ROLLED off Zoe and got up onto his knees. She lay facedown in the snow, unmoving, and he felt a split-second’s panic before he saw the back of her parka moving up and down with the force of her breathing.

  He started to reach for her, but she pushed herself up, spitting snow out of her mouth and rubbing it out of her eyes.

  “Are you okay?” he said, although he knew she couldn’t hear him, because his own ears were still deafened from the force of the explosion.

  He looked back at what was left of the slaughterhouse. Flames still shot up from the rubble, and roiling brown smoke billowed into the air. Anyone still inside when it blew, he thought, could never have survived, and he didn’t see anyone else about. He remembered Vadim ordering their driver to take the SUV up to “the farm,” and he wondered how far away that was and how many of Popov’s men were there.

  He touched Zoe’s arm, and she looked up at him, still blinking the snow from her eyes. “Can you run some more?” he shouted at her.

  She nodded, and he wrapped his hand around her arm, helping her to her feet. The lane that led to the main road was too exposed, so he looked around and spotted a small gate in the cemetery wall. The gate was padlocked shut, but it was old and rusted, and one kick with his boot broke it open.

  They wove in and out of snow-draped tombstones and monuments, heading away from the gutted, burning meth lab. They stopped at the top of a small rise and looked back. The fires had gone out, but thick brown smoke still lay over the ruins like a shroud. Ry searched for any movement, for any sign of pursuit, but he saw none.

  Then, as they started down the other side of the rise, Ry noticed the small group of people gathered around a freshly dug grave. And parked next to them, a hearse, the smoke from its exhaust blowing out into the cold morning air.

  “Babe,” he said, “I think I see our ride back to St. Petersburg.”

  RIDING IN THE back of the hearse was weird, but warm.

  They lay side by side, Zoe cradled in the crook of his arm. She turned her head and lightly kissed the cigarette burn on his neck. “I know you said not to give up the amulet too quickly or he might get suspicious, but if I’d known—”

  “Sssh. It’s over now, and he’s dead. Roasted and blown to smithereens. I’m just sorry he took the altar of bones down into hell with him.”

  “He took the amulet with him,” Zoe said. “Not the altar of bones.”

  He pushed himself up on one elbow so that he could look into her face. “But last night … Wasn’t the juice still in the amulet, then? When did you—”

  “Right before Popov’s goons showed up. That’s what I was doing in the bathroom.” She grinned up at Ry. “It was a good plan, if I do say so myself.”

  “Better than good. It was brilliant.” He kissed her on the mouth, then lay back down beside her. “And the best thing about it was that it worked.”

  Back on that mountain road above the Danube, when she’d showed him the little sample perfumes, she’d told him of her idea then—to pawn a fake altar of bones onto Popov by transferring the bone juice into one of the perfume vials and putting mineral oil in the amulet. The consistency of the mineral oil was close enough to the real thing, as long as you didn’t know it was supposed to glow in the dark.

  Zoe stirred in his arms. “Do you think Igor’s real, that Popov really had a grandson who’s dying of cancer?”

  “I don’t know. His pain seemed real enough. But then I know from my years as an undercover narc that sometimes you can play a part so well, you can even talk yourself into believing it.”

  “He wasn’t really going to let us go, was he?”

  “No. We were loose ends that needed snipping.”

  Her breathing slowed and quieted, and he thought she’d fallen asleep, then she said, “Then maybe what he said about my mother was a lie, too. What he implied. That Katya gave her the bone juice when she was a little girl because otherwise she would have died of leukemia.”

  Ry hesitated a moment. “Remember I told you how I researched your whole family last summer, when I was trying to find your grandmother? … Anna Larina’s ‘miraculous’ recovery was such a big deal back in 1957, it made the front page of the L.A. Times.”

  Zoe shuddered. “It kind of creeps me out, thinking about it, but it explains a lot. Why she looks young enough to be my sister. And why she is … what she is.”

  “Don’t think about it, because it doesn’t matter. You broke free of her a long time ago.”

  Zoe was quiet again for a while, then said, “The altar of bones is real, Ry. He was a hundred and twelve, yet you saw how he looked. The altar did that to him.”

  “It also made him crazy, and in the end it couldn’t keep him from dying. Whatever the altar did to him, it didn’t make him immortal.”

  “Popov was convinced it was never in the cave,” she said. “But it’s there. He just didn’t know how to find it.”

  “And you think you can?”

  “I’m the Keeper, so I have to try.”

  “It would have to be all the way up in Siberia, though,” Ry said. “And it’s the goddamn middle of February.”

  She laughed and snuggled deeper into him. “That’s why I’m bringing you with me, to keep me warm. At least we’ve run out of bad guys to come after us. Popov was blown to smithereens, Yasmin Poole was skewered, and apparently Miles Taylor is now a turnip. We won’t have to worry about being chased all over the place and shot at every time we turn around.”

  Ry wasn’t so sure about that, but he said nothing.

  The hearse rocked over the ruts in the road. In the distance he heard the wail of a train whistle. “We must be getting close to civilization,” he said. “The first thing I’m going to do when we get back to the apartment is take a long, hot shower. A loooong, hot shower …”

  Ry hoped she would ask him if she could join him, but she said nothing, and then he realized her breathing had slowed and quieted. She had fallen asleep.

  He turned his head and rubbed his mouth over her hair.

  52

  New York City

  MILES TAYLOR couldn’t stop himself from screaming every time someone came near him, even though it didn’t do any good because nobody could hear.

  The screams were all inside his head.

  They thought he was a vegetable. He heard the doctor tell his daughter that, the one and only time she had been to see him since the stroke. “Persistent vegetative state,” the asshole had said, and Miles had done lot of screaming then, oh, yeah. Inside his head. You fucking ignorant bastard, where’d you get your degree, Podunk U? If I understand every fucking word you’re saying, how can I be in a state where there’s no cognitive function? Hunh? Answer me that, asshole. Answer me that.

  Miles slept a lot; there was nothing else to do. Every time he woke, it would take one sweet, exquisite instant for his mind to catch up to the hell he lived in now. And then he would remember and he would scream and scream and scream.

  He wanted to die. He prayed that he would die.

  Lately, when his doctor or one of the nurses would come into his room, that’s what h
e would scream at them. Let me die, please. For the love of God, pull the plug and let me die.

  But they never heard him because he couldn’t open his mouth or move his tongue or work his throat. If a man screams and no one hears him, does it even happen?

  He had round-the-clock care, four nurses who bathed him and did other things too humiliating to even think about. He loved them, and he hated their guts.

  The new girl—her name was Christie—had a whore’s mouth and long, wine-red hair. A few days ago, he began to dream about her. Exhausting, erotic dreams. Doctor, Doctor, can a man still shoot his wad even if he can’t get it up anymore?

  Today, Christie was on the afternoon shift, and he found himself waiting for her with such excitement it almost hurt. His eyeballs—the only part of him that he could still move—were riveted on the open door. He’d heard her voice earlier, out in the corridor, so he knew she was here, but the hours crawled by and she wouldn’t come, wouldn’t even pass by his door so that he could see her. It was as if she sensed in some way how desperate he was, and she wanted him to wait. To suffer.

  He was beginning to wonder if there was more to her than her mouth and that red hair that reminded him of Yasmine Poole.

  A little meanness, maybe?

  He fell asleep waiting for her and awoke with a start. She was leaning over him, her face only inches from his, and he felt a strange tingle on his left cheek. What had she done to him? Pinched him, poked him? Kissed him?

  “Are you in there, Mr. Taylor? I think you are. No one else does, but I do.”

  Yes, yes, he screamed, so ecstatic with joy he was nearly delirious. I’m here, I’m here. Oh, God …

  The girl leaned closer to him, lowered her voice. “You thought you were such hot shit, didn’t you? Mr. Hot Shit Billionaire. I read all about you in Vanity Fair and the stuff you did to other people to make all that money. How people lost everything because of you, and all you could say was ‘Fuck ‘em.’ “