Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  Gregor, however, was happy enough for now merely to play with him. Three days after Jamie’s nighttime visit with the knife, he had come back to his hut to find Vanya sitting on his bed, his meager sack of belongings on the floor by his feet. When he raised an eyebrow in question, the reply was simple.

  “I am sent to stay with you. I am told I am now your bitch.”

  “Pardon me?” In his shock, he had spoken in English, to which Vanya could only respond with a brow wrinkled in confusion.

  “I—no, this is not possible. I do not want anyone to be my bitch,” Jamie said in exasperation, thinking to himself that in the revenge department Gregor was far wilier than he had expected.

  Vanya raised a perfect eyebrow at him in return. “It is no hardship to be such to you.”

  “That is not the point,” Jamie said, not sure if he had a point that was going to make an impression on the beautiful young man.

  Vanya lay back on the bed, amethyst eyes alight with mischief. “Well, if you do not want me to be bitch for you, what am I to do?”

  Jamie contemplated him for a moment. “As it happens, I find myself rather short on friends just at present.”

  Vanya’s face lost its mischief. “To be friends in Russia is a serious thing. We do not take such offers lightly. It is an engagement for life, more serious than marriage.”

  “I’m in here because of my friendship with a Russian,” Jamie said.

  “And he is still your friend?” Vanya asked, perfectly serious in his query.

  “Yes,” Jamie said, and knew it for truth.

  “Then you are understanding what it means to be friends in Russia.”

  Jamie considered the head that lay upon his improvised pillow and sighed.

  “I’m beginning to.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  April 1973

  Spy Games

  Spring crept up from the south, across salted seas and the rich soaked soil of the steppes. With it came a gradual thaw, though the air was still raw with winter’s leaving. The evenings were still laden with frost and the occasional fall of snow, but spring was undeniably in the air, though it came with its own problems—mud and voracious mosquitoes as well as a host of other pests that were impossible to control in a camp where so many people lived in close, not terribly clean, quarters.

  Coming through the gates that night, exhausted, and aware of the perpetual guns at his back, Jamie was not in a good frame of mind to receive a summons to the OC’s office. There was not a decent bone in the man’s body and a summons would not mean anything good. Every face that turned to him before departing for the dining hall wore expressions made up equally of pity for him and relief that they had escaped the net this time.

  The administration building shimmered with warmth after the chill of the forest. Jamie thought the sheer pleasure of the heat might well drop him to his knees if it wasn’t for the trickle of fear in his stomach as he wondered what the hell Comrade Isay wanted of him now.

  He had learned quickly here that to be invisible was to survive. But without a physical disguise, James Kirkpatrick was not one of life’s natural chameleons. His beauty had always singled him out for attention both welcome and not, much as the man seated in the office awaiting him had never been invisible either. He felt relief at first, quickly swept away by anger.

  Andrei looked well—rather too well—Jamie thought, with nary a bruise or cut or broken bone in sight to explain his long absence.

  “I see you aren’t dead,” Jamie said dryly.

  Andrei came away from the window and seized Jamie by the shoulders, searching his face as though he would read there how Jamie fared.

  “Yasha, it is the first time they have allowed me to see you. For two weeks I didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”

  “It’s likely they weren’t certain either whether I would be alive or dead at the end of those two weeks,” Jamie said. “I was in Lubyanka—where exactly the hell were you?”

  “Under house arrest. I don’t move, I don’t breathe, I don’t speak a word without them knowing about it. I work, I go home, I work some more. Not that that is new, but they aren’t even trying to hide their presence anymore.”

  “And how exactly do I play into this?” Jamie asked. “You realize I have not been allowed to contact an embassy or anyone outside of this hellhole? It’s as though I’ve ceased to exist in the last month.”

  Andrei’s hands dropped from his shoulders, his blue eyes dark with emotion. “Yasha, you must believe I knew nothing of this. I would have somehow warned you. You cannot think that I…”

  “I don’t know what I think. A couple of weeks in Lubyanka will do that to a man.”

  “Did they hurt you? I had begged for them to show you mercy.”

  “My interrogators were Russian. How much fucking mercy do you think they showed me?”

  “I am sorry, Yasha. I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am.”

  Jamie merely raised an eyebrow.

  “I begged them to allow you to contact someone at the British embassy, or even to allow you to contact someone in Ireland. They refused. I was only allowed here because I refused to do any work on the project unless they let me see you and know that you are alive.”

  “Well, as you can see, I am alive, so you can go back to your comfortable little nook with your adequate food and shelter and rest easy.”

  “You are not supposed to be in the forest. I specifically—”

  Jamie held up a hand. “It was offered. I chose to stay on the cutting crew.” He did not say that much of his reason for that foolhardy decision was the stubborn old ox who was his partner. As long as he could take some of the weight from Nikolai’s shoulders, he would do so.

  “Why are you so stubborn, Yasha?”

  “Half the inmates already think I’m a spy. I start pulling cozy indoor duty and they’re going to be certain I am.”

  “The forest could kill you,” Andrei said.

  “And if it does?” Jamie said.

  The words hung there between them, the accusation implicit.

  “You think I want you dead? Why on earth would you think such a thing?”

  “To be honest, Andrei, I’m not sure I know what you would or wouldn’t do. Nothing makes a hell of lot of sense after you’re tortured for two weeks and then wake up in the middle of goddamn nowhere in a gulag.”

  “They believe,” Andrei said tightly, “that you are a spy.”

  “A spy?” Jamie said and laughed.

  “So they believe, Yasha, and you know in Russia that is not a matter for laughter.”

  “It’s not a matter for laughter anywhere that I’m aware of,” Jamie retorted, “but as it’s an accusation completely without foundation, it is a matter for some humor, if of the particularly grim sort.”

  “Don’t you understand?” Andrei hissed. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, suspicion alone can land you in Lubyanka, from which there are very few return journeys.”

  “I’ve already had my Lubyankan holiday, and even if they take me into prison and torment me with hoses and bamboo slivers—which are about the only two things they didn’t do to me last time—I can’t tell them anything different.”

  Andrei stood, putting his hands on the desk between them, his blue eyes dense with some meaning Jamie wasn’t eager to translate.

  “We are too long friends to prevaricate.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Jamie asked sharply.

  “Only, Yasha, that I remember that spring at Oxford too. You were not the only one approached.”

  Jamie felt a deathly stillness descend over him, as though he stood suddenly on the broad plains of this country, with snow falling in every direction and no human aid anywhere in sight. Why Andrei would speak of this here was beyond him. It
could mean a long and messy death for both of them.

  “All I remember of that, Andrei, is that I turned them down. Did you?”

  “It wasn’t as simple as a mere refusal. You, of all people know that, Yasha. We both came from countries that had caused Britain no small problems.”

  “That’s an understatement in the extreme,” Jamie replied. “But it still doesn’t change what I said. I turned them down. Did you?”

  “Sit down, Yasha. I did not come here to interrogate you.”

  Jamie sat, for he saw little choice in the matter, and the warmth of the room was too seductive to resist. Andrei had set out a chessboard with the pieces neatly aligned. And there was food, more than he had seen in a very long time.

  “This they will allow, and for the time it takes, you are warm and fed, my friend. It is the little I can do for you.”

  Part of him wanted to take the chessboard and throw it and all the exquisite pieces out the window, and the other part merely wanted the comfort of the game, the warmth, the company and the food.

  There was bread, soft black rye, and thinly sliced beef and boiled eggs and vodka.

  “And what of Violet?” Jamie asked, so quietly that he could not be heard even over the soft crackle of the fire from the cast iron stove. “Does she get these dinners, the warmth of a fire and your attention for an hour or two?”

  Andrei’s face tightened visibly. “She has refused to see me these last two months. I do not know why. From her end there is only silence. If you—”

  “We know of each other. Beyond that we have said little more than hello,” Jamie said. He had been made aware by Shura that the small, copper-haired woman who worked in the infirmary, was named Violet. After that, it had been simple to make the connections. After that, it had been hard not to suspect that there was far more to his capture and incarceration than had originally met the eye.

  The food was more plentiful than what his stomach had come to expect over the last several weeks, and slightly more flavorful. He was warm too, so warm that he took his coat and hat off. He could see the changes in himself reflected in the quick flash of Andrei’s eyes as he took him in, weighing and assessing against the last evening in the dacha. He knew the comparison wasn’t good.

  Chess provided them with common ground, though, and Jamie felt a visceral relief in the absorption of the game. The warmth had heightened his senses, his hearing so sharp that the whoosh of felt against wood was audible.

  A drink was placed into his hand at some point and he sipped at it slowly, the warmth alone inebriation enough.

  The familiarity of the game allowed their talk to be light, ribboned about with their own special code, coloring the weft of their communication. And so there was what was said and what was meant.

  “You will have to forgive my appearance. I am still getting used to life in the gulag.”

  Why the hell am I here?

  “I am sorry for that, Yasha. You must believe me.”

  Me, you are here because of me and my mistakes.

  “Work going well?”

  What are you involved in?

  “Yes, it is interesting as always.”

  I can’t tell you, but it’s something more terrible than your worst imaginings.

  “Good to hear. I miss my own work, my home, spring in my own country. The Russian spring is not a soft one.”

  I want to go home before they kill me.

  “It will warm up soon. The summer will be wonderfully hot.”

  I will not let them kill you.

  “I’m Irish. I burn if the sun is too hot.”

  You will not be able to stop them.

  A silence and then softly, moving his bishop, Andrei spoke aloud.

  “I am doing what I can, Yasha, but it is not easy. Right now they hold all the chips and I am, as you might say, between a rock and a very hard place.”

  Jamie merely gave him a hard, green look, for he was painfully aware that there was much more going on here than met his limited view. Things that Andrei could not tell him. He himself was the rock, Violet the hard place. They had Andrei neatly cornered.

  “You remember that night on the tower? What we promised?”

  “Yes,” Jamie said stiffly.

  “I still mean what I said that night. The question is—do you?”

  To mention that night here, now, was cutting too close to the bone and Andrei knew it. But that had never stopped him before. He had always known how to make his cuts deep and lasting so that the scar only partially healed. So that with the right touch it might bleed again at his command.

  Paris, city of light, city of love. Paris—le Grand Siecle of Louis XIVth—a city of astrologers and artists, of writers and philosophers, of great minds and grand hearts. A city, too, of riff-raff, pickpockets and prostitutes, peddlers and organ grinders, inspiring in their ability to graft and mold themselves to life and the survival of a poverty that ought to have ground the spirit from their very bodies, yet did not.

  The ghosts of all these people wound about amidst the narrow streets and topple-roofed houses, the France that had risen like a red-gold sun over the rest of the western world, whose rule had been absolute, formed as it was under the hand of a wildly ambitious cardinal.

  France had been the finishing school for the entire continent, where one must come to acquire the graces and discipline to fit one for the life of the diplomat, merchant prince, grand philosopher, prophet or priest. Until you had boiled yourself in the cauldron of her learning, you were not fit for the higher life.

  Jamie had acquired some of his own finish in France—though it had been of a less academic sort. He looked toward the Arc de Triomphe, to the western limits of the city. There in the privileged Chaillot Quarter lived the woman who had provided learning of another sort in his life, and his body still bore the traces of her teaching. It was strange indeed to be in Paris and not under the tutelage of Clothilde in one manner or another, for she had been a friend of his mind before they were lovers. For no man, she had stated in her straightforward manner, should have his mind entirely formed by Jesuit priests.

  Together they had read books, ones with fragrances that still lingered with him, scenting his vision of the world. The Jesuits—Father Lawrence and Monseigneur Brandisi—had given his mind the soil, but Clothilde had planted the flowers in it that grew up in a profusion of brilliant color. Had he been in Paris alone, he would not have hesitated to visit her but he knew instinctively that she would not approve of Andrei and that Andrei wasn’t likely to warm to her, beyond the obvious qualities of grace and beauty.

  Jamie and Andrei visited Paris at least twice a year. It was one of their great shared loves. Since that fateful polo match, their friendship had grown by leaps and bounds as it will when two minds are well matched. Jamie understood that they were cut of the same cloth, that they possessed in equal measure that fire in the brain that could both ignite and incinerate. Such a thing made their friendship dangerous in and of itself, for they had established early on their shared penchant for reckless endeavors. In Andrei Alekseyevich Valueve, Jamie Kirkpatrick had found a man who was both friend and competitor, whose blood stirred to the music of the spheres as wildly as his own. And someone who was willing to partner him in outrageous and dangerous games. Jamie could smell a kindred spirit and had known Andrei for one from the first time he’d seen him skimming a church spire to hang a professor’s robes from it.

  “How does it come to you?” Andrei had asked as they walked in the misty air of a Paris evening. They’d had coffee and so many Sobranies earlier at a grotty little hole in the wall in the Latin Quarter that Jamie had insisted they walk off the resulting caffeine and nicotine haze.

  “How does what come to me?” Jamie asked, waving away Andrei’s offer of yet another cigarette.

  “You know, the fi
re in your head.”

  Jamie shrugged, noting the droplets of mist coalescing on the sleeves of his coat like impossibly fine silver mail. “Like a tidal wave at times, so much that I can’t process it. It overwhelms me. At others, it’s like I’m fogged in and separate from the rest of the world. It’s a bit like being underwater. You can hear things and see shadows passing overhead, but it’s distorted and you feel as though that world is another realm that you can’t enter. What about you?”

  Andrei laughed, a black sound as only Russian laughter could be. “I just get somewhat suicidal, think about ending it all. When I think about it during those times, it seems like it would be a relief. To be set free of my mind.”

  “I wonder why—when at times the mind is a thing of such beauty and wonder. Then at others, it sinks into such cesspits of despair.”

  Andrei shrugged. “Some say it’s chemistry, biology or fate. I think if you are going to be granted the gift of wonders in your mind, you’re going to pay for it equally with the darkness.”

  “How very Russian of you,” Jamie rejoined. He understood what it was Andrei meant, though. There was always a price to be paid for gifts. He was about to add his thoughts on the line between genius and madness when he noticed Andrei looking up, an expression of excitement on his face that didn’t bode well for the health of either of them.

  Jamie’s eyes traveled the same path as Andrei’s—up the shimmering length of pure structural iron that was the Eiffel Tower. He had an uneasy feeling he knew what Andrei had in mind.

  “Let’s climb it,” Andrei said, the electric glow he gave off when in the grip of one of his less intelligent ideas, lighting the pewter-toned air around him.

  Jamie did not ask why, even though it was insanity to consider it. It had rained that day and cleared only toward evening. The puddle iron structure was gleaming with a thin sheath of ice now in the clear, cold evening air. Even if he did ask, Andrei would only answer, “because it’s there.”