Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  “Zyuganov,” she whispered, “that was Zyuganov.” She turned and started moving in the direction the little shadowy figure had gone, along the Quai d’Orléans, along the southern side of the island. Nate reached out and grabbed her hand.

  “Stop. I’ll follow him and call in reinforcements,” he said. “Gable will be here in fifteen minutes.” Dominika shook her head and twisted her hand out of his.

  “If he gets away, I’m finished,” said Dominika.

  “Not if you’re back in the hotel,” said Nate.

  “Zabud’ pro eto, forget it,” she said. “He’s trying to kill me, and I will not take a back door. Don’t even think of trying to stop me.”

  “You mean take a backseat,” Nate said.

  Dominika shook her head. “There’s no time,” she said. “Zyuganov is moving. TRITON is on this island. They could slip into a building and we’d never find them.” She started moving, looking back at him. “Come on,” she hissed.

  They walked tight against the wall of the buildings, pausing in doorways to let Zyuganov maintain his distance. His silhouette ghosted along the opposite sidewalk. He was not hurrying—he occasionally looked out over the water—and he certainly wasn’t looking for surveillance. Jesus, thought Nate, we cannot blow this. Zyuganov’s head and shoulders appeared, then faded, and then reappeared, as he passed through light reflected off the river. Halfway down the street, Zyuganov slowed and turned to walk down one of the broad ramps leading to the river-level landing, his head descending out of view. Nate and Dominika quietly crossed the street and peeked over the wall. Zyuganov was standing at the bottom of the ramp, leaning against a lamppost. River water swirled blackly past him.

  “We wait for TRITON to show, or go now?” asked Dominika. Nate pulled her sleeve and dragged her back into a shadow cast by a tree growing out of the sidewalk.

  “Zyuganov’s not going anywhere on that landing. And TRITON has to come right by us to get down to him,” said Nate. “We want them both.” Dominika nodded, and took out two lipsticks. Christ, the lipstick gun again, thought Nate. Russians. They stopped talking and watched the top of the ramp. They were cold waiting two, three, five minutes.

  They suddenly heard voices from the riverside platform. They peeked over the wall again to look down on the tops of Zyuganov’s and Angevine’s heads. Nate pulled up straight. Fucker came around the other way along the lower river-level promenade, thought Nate. Dominika was looking down at them and started tugging at Nate’s sleeve. The two men were arguing, and their voices grew louder. Angevine reached out and collected a fistful of Zyuganov’s jacket lapel. The dwarf pulled away angrily, turned, and started walking up the ramp. Angevine followed him, shouting as he caught up. Nate heard the word “euros” repeated twice. Zyuganov ignored him and continued walking up the ramp.

  “TRITON just told Zyuganov my name,” said Dominika, starting to move. And Zyuganov just told him he had no money, thought Nate, coming up behind her. Maybe they’ll kill each other.

  At the top of the ramp, Angevine spun Zyuganov around—the American towered over the Russian—then both men stopped as they saw the silhouettes of Nate and Dominika standing in front of them. They were five feet apart, looking at one another, frozen in place. Angevine passed his fingers through his hair. Zyuganov’s face was crazed, his chest heaved.

  “Suchka, little bitch,” said Zyuganov, meeting Dominika’s eyes. “I knew it was you,” he said in guttural Russian. “Are you ready to come home to die?”

  “I’m more interested in whether you know you will never set foot in the Rodina again,” said Dominika. “The Paris pauper’s cemetery is called Thiais, zhopa, asshole.” Listening to the Russian, cool and deadly between them, Nate was once again reminded that the only people Russians hated more than foreigners were themselves. Then everything broke loose.

  As if it were a starter’s gun, a river barge sounded its air horn, and Angevine spun and ran back down the ramp, sliding on the uneven cobbles as he descended, and Zyuganov simultaneously darted to his right past Dominika. Spurred perhaps by their respective instincts, Nate and Dominika reacted simultaneously. Nate pounded down the ramp to chase Angevine along the landing. Dominika moved toward Zyuganov and tried a foot sweep, but the poisonous dwarf agilely skipped over it and sprinted down the darkened Quai d’Orléans. Dominika ran after him down the center of the midnight-empty street. She flashed that there were two spans of the Pont de Sully on the eastern corners of the island into either side of the city proper. She could not let him escape. Zyuganov knew she was the mole.

  Zyuganov was surprisingly fast, and Dominika could not gain on him, even as she vaulted over the hood of a parked car to try to shorten the distance. Zyuganov sensed she had drawn closer and he veered wildly away from the bridge and instead vaulted the waist-high fence of the little Barye park, tore through hanging willow branches and blindly down the broad steps to the platform on the river. A hoarse call from a watchman sounded from the shadows. This was the eastern tip of Île Saint-Louis, and the Seine endlessly plowed into and flowed around the prow-shaped breakwater. Zyuganov stopped short and turned around. Dominika stood at the top of the stairs, breathing heavily. She was dressed in a dark pleated woolen skirt with tights, a sweater under an oiled jacket, and jogging shoes. Her hair was halfway down from the running, and she absently brushed it behind an ear as she slowly came down the steps toward him. She could still feel Nate on the inside of her thighs. She was immeasurably tired.

  Rounding the corner of the landing, Nate slipped on a slimy cobble and went down hard on his butt, which saved him from the ten-foot pipe—one of several discarded scaffold stanchions that had been stacked against the wall—Angevine swung at his head, but which instead rang like a bell off the stone wall. Angevine swung it again like a broadsword, over and down in a log-splitting stroke, directly at Nate’s head. Still on his back, Nate twisted to avoid the massive skull-caving blow and rolled into the freezing Seine, all sewer-sweet smell and bitter taste. He could immediately feel the scour of the water as it boiled past and he got his fingers and the toe of one shoe into a masonry seam before the current could pluck him off the stone and whirl him downriver—he’d be around the Orsay bend and past the Eiffel Tower in three minutes. That’s if he wasn’t sucked into some vortex or pinned under a dock and drowned. He tried a quick grab at the pistol in his belt but almost lost his grip and had to hang on as the river tugged at him.

  Angevine stood over him, legs apart, seriously winded but lining up a final swing to smash Nate’s face or shatter his clinging hands. “You fucks underestimated who you were dealing with,” he panted, resting the pipe across his shoulder, as if he were waiting his turn in the batting cage.

  “Yeah, you’re right: You’re a bigger traitor than any of us imagined,” said Nate.

  Angevine fumed at the insult, choked up on the pipe for more accuracy, and stepped closer. Nate risked being taken by the river as he reached out with one hand, grabbed Angevine’s pant leg, and pulled. Unbalanced by the big pipe he held over his head, Angevine’s feet shot out on the slimy blocks and he tumbled into the river, the stanchion bouncing off the stones into the water next to him. He came up spluttering beside Nate and reached for a handhold, but was a foot too far and was instantly swept away from the embankment, turning in the water, arms feebly paddling for stability. In three seconds he was in the middle of the channel.

  One of the late-night Bateaux-Mouches boats—long, wide, gaily lit, and glass-topped—thrumming downstream sounded its whistle as the dot that was Angevine’s head bobbed over the bow wave and down into the trough, bouncing along the hull until bobbing again over the stern wake, and with an audible scream was sucked into the foaming prop wash. His body disappeared underwater, then was thrown back up by one of the propeller blades, followed by his severed head. The frantic ship’s horn kept sounding its bass note while Japanese tourists on the upper rear deck turned night into day with flash photography. Angevine’s body continued floating downstre
am in the shimmer of embankment lights, eventually disappearing around the Île de la Cité.

  With considerable effort, Nate scrabbled back up onto the landing, shivering, his clothes streaming river water. As he pounded up to the street, his thoughts raced. Angevine was gone. The prick never got his final payment for betraying his country, and now he was dead. Gable would kick Angevine’s fished-out head back into the river and say, “Our grief can’t bring him back.” Then Nate flashed to Zarubina floating facedown in a fountain. Dominika. He sprinted down Quai d’Orléans, his breath ragged and his shoes squishing, the river stink in his nose. Down at the other end of the island there were lights and sirens.

  As Dominika came down the steps toward Zyuganov, she knew she would kill him. Taking him back to Moscow in chains had been an appealing option—Putin would have been impressed—but not now, not after he had heard her name from TRITON’s lips. She fingered a lipstick tube in her pocket, feeling for the end with the trigger plunger. She would walk to within an outstretched-arm’s distance and aim for center mass. With the explosive bullet even a hit in the hand would vaporize it to the wrist and cause massive blood loss. A torso hit and the subsequent hydrostatic shock would turn the thoracic cavity into an inflated bag of sweetmeats.

  Zyuganov stood watching her, darting glances to the left and right—there were no stairs or ladders, no other way off the platform. The river? He was not a strong swimmer and did not think he could survive a plunge into the water. Egorova had a reputation, had killed men, had gone through hand-to-hand Sistema training, but was she that good? As he waited for her, the diminutive Zyuganov experienced the old familiar sensation of the assassin’s prickling impatience to get up close and stick pointy things into soft places. His instincts told him to wait, get her close, blind her, or cripple her, then finish her. Zyuganov wanted to see Egorova’s face as she died.

  Bat wings of black unlimbered behind Zyuganov’s head—no gargoyle on the cornices of nearby Notre Dame could match these—as Dominika walked up to Zyuganov, slowly sliding her hand with the lipstick out of her pocket.

  Marta and Udranka were on the riverbank, like two Rusalki mermaids, singing. Over the sound of her pounding heart, she heard Hannah behind her.

  Dominika raised the lipstick tube, her arm straight and tense, pointed at his chest, and pushed the plunger. Zyuganov flinched and ducked. Then the world slowed, the stars froze in their orbits, the river stopped flowing. All that came out of the lipstick was a faint musical ping, as if a spring had snapped in a pocket watch. Misfire. Faulty electrical primer. Cracked component.

  There was no time to dig around for the second lipstick tube. In a singular circular motion, Dominika threw the dud lipstick into the river, stepped slightly to Zyuganov’s left, and grabbed his sleeve. He pulled back, and she continued stepping into him, swinging his arm in the direction he wanted to go, then suddenly back in an arc toward her, bringing her other arm up and across his neck. Before she could strike, Zyuganov somehow blocked her arm and stepped away from her. He moved with speed and skill. They stood looking at each other—black fog came out of his eyes and mouth, and he snarled at her. She would trap an arm and deliver another strike to the head, then fish out the second lipstick gun.

  Zyuganov came at her in a strange loping gait, and Dominika stepped into him to use his momentum, but he put one arm around her neck and bared his teeth. Was the little cannibal going to bite her? Dominika pulled her head back and hit him twice, very fast, under his nose, aiming for a spot two inches inside his skull. Zyuganov’s head went back and his eyes blurred, but he kept his claw around Dominika’s neck, and with a jerk drew her to him, mashing her breasts against his chest. He smelled like vinegar and night soil.

  Zyuganov’s free hand brought up the eight-inch Sabatier fillet knife he had taken from his mother’s kitchen and stuck it into Dominika’s side, down low, just above her hip bone. The curved blade was thin and murderously sharp, but it flexed—as boning knives are predisposed to do—as it tore through Dominika’s tough outer jacket and only three inches of the blade penetrated her body. Dominika felt a flash of fire in her side that radiated around her waist and up her stomach. She dug thumbnails into Zyuganov’s eyes—got one but missed the other—as he shook his head in pain.

  Zyuganov knew what flesh felt like and he pulled the blade out and stabbed back in, trying to get inside the coat, and this time felt sweater wool against his knuckles, but Dominika’s hand clamped down on his wrist and he could get only an inch of the blade in. Wrenching the knife away, Zyuganov stabbed again, then again, reaching around to her lower back, trying for kidneys or the lower lobe of her liver. Zyuganov looked up at her face with one good eye—the other was blurred and weeping—and saw the bitch’s mouth was open and she was panting, those blue eyes blinking rapidly, and her body trembled a little as she started sliding down the front of him; he let go of her neck and she sat down with a bump on the stones, leaning a little and holding her side.

  Dominika was aware only of a belt of intense pain around her waist and the feel of the cobblestones as she lay down on her good side and the wet grittiness on her cheek. Zyuganov was close, enveloped in black, and he pushed her on her back—rolling was an agony because something inside her was adrift, hot and liquid. She heard a man’s voice—Nathaniel help me, she thought—but Zyuganov screamed and brandished the knife and the voice—a night watchman’s, not Nathaniel’s—faded away. Zyuganov straddled her and sat heavily, causing more pain. He greatly regretted that he could not spend hours with Egorova, but this would have to do. That meddlesome watchman would call the police—he had a minute or two to spare.

  The night glow of the City of Light filled her vision. The pain in her guts was rising in waves to her jaw, and the hand clamped over the first wound was sticky. She opened her eyes and saw Zyuganov leaning forward, silhouetted against the lights of the city, bat wings extended. She felt cold air on her belly and breasts, and realized Zyuganov had pulled her sweater up to her chin. Not like him, the little asexual bug. She then felt cold, questing fingers running along her rib cage, cold beetle fingers feeling for the space between the fourth and fifth ribs where he could shiver the knife in to fillet her heart and lungs.

  He hadn’t been flirting. His fingers stopped moving—he had found the hollow between her ribs, exactly where he could start the tip of the blade into her. Zyuganov leaned over Dominika—one of his eyes was swollen shut—and breathed into her face. Then he placed one hand behind her neck and lifted her head, as if he were about to spoon soup into a sick relative. He hoarsely spoke in Russian.

  “A person can never know exactly when and where he will die, but you can know this now, Egorova: midnight in Paris, on a stinking embankment, tasting blood on your tongue, and smelling blood in your nose. I will cut off your clothes and roll you into the Seine so your American friends can find you downstream, swollen and splitting, with the river in your mouth, and it will be pizdets, an ending, for you.” Dominika’s eyelids fluttered, and she whispered softly. Zyuganov frowned and put his ear close to her mouth. He relished the dying declarations of people in pain, especially when he had personally administered the pain.

  “Do you know when you will die, svinya, pig?” said Dominika. Zyuganov looked into her blue eyes—they were flat and dull from the shock. He smiled and shook her head side to side a little, chidingly, while whispering.

  “Little Sparrow, you will not be—”

  Dominika put the lipstick tube under Zyuganov’s chin and pushed the plunger. The distinctive click was barely audible, followed by a wet melon-against-the-wall sound. Zyuganov’s undamaged eye was open as he fell to one side, and his head hit the stones with a flat slap. One of his legs was lying across Dominika’s stomach, and his face was pointed away from her. The back of his head—there was no aura around it—was a furry candy dish empty down to the start of his teeth. The night air stirred strands of his hair around the shattered rim of his skull.

  With a shaking backhand toss, Do
minika threw the lipstick tube over Zyuganov and into the river. The motion caused her great pain in her stomach and she tried pushing Zyuganov’s leg off her. Her arms weren’t working very well and her hands were numb. That further movement brought a fresh wave of pain in her chest and a rushing noise in her ears, which blanked out the rumble of the river, so she did not hear the running footsteps and was surprised to see a young face in an orange jacket lean over her. She could smell his aftershave. He was very handsome, not as lovely as her Nate, but he smiled and said, Ne bouge pas, don’t move, and she heard the word “plasma” and she felt him lift her sweater and apply pressure to the stab wounds, and wondered whether they would release her body into the river, because there she could swim and sing with Marta and Udranka, and there was the whiff of alcohol and a pinch in her arm and she took Hannah’s hand as they lifted her onto the gurney and carried her up the stairs away from the river, the night glow fading in her eyes.

  Lights flashed off the façades of the buildings. There was a small crowd of gawkers, those already moving at this early-morning hour, and Nate pushed through them. He ran up to a policeman in boots and a helmet who turned with extended arms to stop him. Nate could think of nothing to say in French except ma femme, my wife, the irony of which almost made him choke with emotion. The policeman nodded and Nate walked a few feet and stopped at the top of the steps. The cobbled terrace looked like an invasion beach: Discarded medical packaging and two clumps of red-soaked gauze were strewn around amid two substantial puddles of black treacle—by lamplight blood appeared quite shiny and black—and Nate could see a knife on the ground, the gore on its blade in lacy streaks. Dominika did not have a knife. It must have been Zyuganov’s. And the blood on the blade must be hers.