by Noel Hynd
“There,” Voltaire said calmly. “That’s done. Excellent.”
Alex was silent.
“Which airline again?” Voltaire asked her. “Swiss International? That’s a good choice. Can’t go wrong with Swiss International. I understand the hors d’oeuvres are excellent.”
Several minutes passed before Alex answered.
FIFTY-THREE
On December 24, Alex observed her thirtieth birthday. The event was a bittersweet occasion, considering the events of the year. But she celebrated with a small group of friends in Washington. As was frequently the case with her birthday, falling on the day it did, it was a half-Christmas half-birthday celebration. Friends from work filtered in, as well as friends from the gym. Don Tomas dropped by to speak five languages and keep everyone amused. And once again, Alex missed Robert horribly.
She went to a Christmas Eve service at her church in Washington and then went home alone. On Christmas morning, she did something unusual. She slept.
Over the next two days, she packed. The job in New York had been offered to her, and she had accepted it. The moving men arrived on the twenty-seventh. Her personal bags were packed and stashed in the trunk of her car. The listening devices she had personally disabled. One morning when she was out for a walk, she threw them into the Potomac.
As the moving men worked, she dropped by a few of the establishments that she had patronized in the neighborhood. She said her good-byes.
When she went back to her apartment, it was empty. She stood and looked at it for a long, cold moment. An instinct told her to take a walk through and then another instinct warned her not to. Enough was enough. She closed the door.
She rapped softly on Don Tomas’s door to say good-bye.
He answered. She gave him a shrug and tried to keep her eyes from welling. He did much the same. Then they embraced in a wordless hug. He had been as close to family as anyone in the last days-older brother, uncle, and advisor. She would miss him.
Then she went down to her car.
She turned the key in the ignition, came up out of the garage, and left her block for the final time as a resident. She drove past the monuments again and then watched them recede in her rearview mirror. Thus, on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoon, Alex moved out of Washington and drove north to New York.
By this time, Janet, her protegee, had found her own friends, her own apartment, and a new job. She was happy, living in Brooklyn, and anxious to introduce Alex to her new boyfriend, who-against Alex’s best advice-was one of her former bodyguards.
FIFTY-FOUR
Six weeks later, Alex was at her desk in her new office in Manhattan when her cell phone rang. She glanced at the LED and read the incoming number.
She recognized the country code: 39. Italy. She also recognized the number.
She smiled. She picked up. “ Ciao, Gian Antonio,” she said.
He laughed. “I should be used to the technology by now, but I’m not,” he said in English. “You know who’s calling before you answer.”
“Consider yourself flattered,” she said. “I knew it was you and I picked up.”
“I’m deeply humbled, Signora,” he said with evident amusement.
She glanced at her watch. “What time is it there?”
“Evening,” he said. “So buona sera,”
“Buona sera.”
Within a minute, he moved to the objective of the call. “Your Russian has lost track of you,” Rizzo said.
“Which Russian?”
“There’s more than one? Federov. He’s been quite ill, you know.”
“I knew he was ill,” she said in a more somber tone. “I didn’t know how ill he was. Where is he?”
“Geneva,” Rizzo said. “He’s residing in a place called Le Clinique Perrault.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
There was a heavy pause. Rizzo’s voice assumed a grim tone. “He’s in a-What do you call it in English?” he asked. He switched to Italian to be clear. “Uno ospedale per i malati in fase terminale. Un ospizio.”
“A hospice,” Alex said, her chair moving forward. It took a moment for it to sink in. “Terminale?” she asked, making sure she had heard right.
“Terminale,” he said again.
“Uh-oh,” she said.
“He phoned me. He says there is something enormously important,” Rizzo continued, changing back to English. “And he will only talk to you.”
“Give him my number,” she said gently. “He can phone me anytime that he-”
“No, no. He wishes to speak to you- and only you- in person,” Rizzo advised.
She sighed and felt the weight of the news. “Gian Antonio, I’m beat. I just started a new job in New York. I don’t know whether I have another trip in me right now. Know what I mean?”
“Yes, I know, I know,” he said. He paused. “Advise me what flight you will be on. I’ll meet your flight in Geneva. Would that make it any easier?”
“I didn’t say that I was going.”
“Not yet, you didn’t, no,” Rizzo said. “But I know you very well by now, Signora Alex,” he said. “I doubt if you’d turn down the request of a man who is so gravely ill.”
“I see,” she said.
“Alex?”
“ Si, Gian Antonio?”
“You should come as quickly as you can.”
Two mornings later, the February sky in Geneva was gray and grim, much as it had been almost exactly a year earlier in Kiev on a similarly fateful day. Alex had taken a direct flight from New York. Gian Antonio Rizzo was at the airport in Geneva waiting reliably for her.
Their taxi drove them through the center of the city, past the Hotel de Roubaix from which Alex had been abducted. Then, five minutes later, they arrived at the Clinique Perrault on the rue Joffrin in central Geneva. The cab pulled onto the gray gravel of a wide semicircle driveway that formed the front courtyard of the medical clinic.
The driver hopped out of the cab and hurried to open the door for Alex. A small flock of startled pigeons fluttered upward from the driveway as she stepped out. The birds took roost within the crevices of the ornate facade of the Clinique, where they lurked and watched her arrival. It was all inconsequential to them.
Alex reached for the wallet in her purse, but Rizzo, ever a gentleman around those he respected, waved her off and paid for the ride from the airport. He tipped the driver generously. They both carried only overnight bags. Then another sense of deja vu was upon her-an unwelcome flashback to Kiev again-as a slight snow had begun to fall.
Always, in her mind, there had been a light snow in Kiev. At Robert’s funeral there had been a light snow. When the RPGs had been incoming at Mihaylavski Place there had been a light snow. What might God be trying to tell her? She didn’t know.
She shivered, not from the temperature. The cold had been much worse elsewhere recently, and so had the sense of doom and foreboding and sadness. A few moments later, they were in a starkly modern but serene lobby. They presented themselves to the visitors’ desk, showing their passports. They registered properly as visitors and were directed toward a bank of elevators that would take them to Federov’s room on the fourth floor.
Rizzo continued to speak Italian. “It might be better if I waited down here,” he said.
“I think it might.” Alex agreed.
She gave Rizzo a nod. He gave her hand a squeeze. Alex continued to the elevators, and Rizzo went toward the sitting area in the lobby.
Moments later, she was on a floor of the Clinique where a middle-aged nurse named Naomi directed her toward Salle 434. The signs on the floor were in four languages. Very Swiss. French, German, Italian, and English, tacked on almost as a conceit. Every letter and word was perfect.
In the back of Alex’s mind a little spark of absurdity danced forth: Naomi had also been the name of one of the girls at the nightclub in Kiev where Alex had knocked back too much vodka and had allowed herself too much time within Federov’s grasp. This was a
day, it was clear, for heavy ironies.
Well, she decided, she had come a long way from there. They both had, and it didn’t seem to matter much anymore, did it? Or did it?
She proceeded down the hall. She was on an expensive wing of the hospice.
Only the best for Federov, she mused. He had earned it, but in some ways he hadn’t. The door to Salle 434 was open. Moments later, her mind teeming, Alex peered in.
She suppressed a gasp. The vision shocked her. The man in the bed was Yuri Federov, but not the Yuri Federov that she remembered. The man she remembered was strong and vibrant. This was an extremely sick man, attached to tubes, wires, and monitors. He lay in the bed with his eyes closed, his mouth open, his head tilted at an angle as he appeared to sleep, his face pallid.
Across his chest was an open book with a Russian title. She couldn’t see it clearly yet. The book was positioned as if it had slipped from his hands when he fell asleep reading.
With a shudder, and a conscious summoning of willpower, she stepped into the room. She moved quietly. Like a giant cat, however, Federov woke instantly-first one eye opened, then the other.
It took a moment for his gaze to register an identity to go with Alex’s presence, but when it did, some of the fear and sadness washed away from his face. Under the circumstances, he looked pleased.
“Ah!” he said in English. “Bless you, Alexandra!”
“Hello, Yuri,” she said.
“Heaven exists for me after all. My angel has arrived.”
“It’s just me,” she said. “Just an overgrown American kid from California.”
His smile widened.
“You’re the person I most wished to see,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”
He motioned to the book that lay open across his chest. “I’m taking your advice, you can see, hey?” he said. “Catching up on the classics.”
She looked at the jacket of the book.
He smiled, as if in a small victory.
“Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,” she said. “Very good, Yuri. I’m proud of you.”
“I’m told it is the greatest of Russian novels,” he said. “And I’m told I should read it before I die.” He laughed. “Well, it might be a close call,” he said. He motioned to all the wires and tubes and monitors.
“It started with lung cancer,” he said dryly, as if announcing a losing football score. “That’s why I was in New York. Then it spread. Rather than being a typically slow and pokey cancer, mine was pure and aggressive. Presurgery Gleason scores of 9 or 10. Do you know what that means?”
“It’s not good,” she said.
“The higher the number on this scale of 10 the worse the news. So I had ten.”
Despite everything, she felt a caving, tumbling feeling within her. She bit a lip as she settled into a chair beside the bed.
His gaze traveled the length of her, up and down, toe to head, taking her in. Then it settled into her eyes.
“I’m very sorry. I’ll pray for you,” she said. “And anything else you’d like.”
Somehow he had the energy and nerve to raise an eyebrow, almost flirtatiously. “Anything?” he asked.
“Within reason,” she said.
He managed a sad smile and a laugh that was so weak that she was appalled. A rasp in his voice made him sound like a much older man. She had been ready for this but not really ready. Then again, what might one expect in a hospice? Not stand-up comedy.
“Well, I don’t necessarily listen to the doctors,” he said. “I know I have more time than they tell me. And as for the book, I’ve already finished it. But I don’t think I understood it, hey? So I’m reading some sections again. Seems to me in the book, everyone is very unlucky with trains and train stations. Even the brat with the toy trains at the beginning. And then there’s the part you’d like. This ‘Lev,’ he’s not a Jew, even with a Jew name, or maybe he is. He ends up accepting the Christian God at the end.”
“That was a recurring theme of Tolstoy,” she said.
“What? Tricky Jews?”
“No, the acceptance of Christianity,” Alex said. “Tolstoy was greatly influenced by the Sermon on the Mount. Much of his philosophy of peace followed from it.”
“And you know this from your study of literature or from your knowledge of your faith?”
“Both,” she said.
He tapped the book. “You’ve read this?” he asked.
“Nine or ten years ago. When I was in college.”
“And you remember it?”
“I remember it. It’s a book everyone should read. Whoever told you to read it was correct.”
“You told me. Several months ago.”
She thought back. “So I did,” she said.
“Did you like it?”
“I did when I read it. I’d like to reread it.”
“Why would you read it again if you’ve already read it? It will turn out the same way.”
She smiled. “Books can mean different things to you at different stages of your life, Yuri,” she said. “Read things at different times and you may come away with different understandings.”
“So if I read it on Monday I might think differently than on Wednesday?”
“Maybe,” she answered, aware that he was playing with her, “but I suspect the time frame there is too close.”
“But this is the end of my life,” he said. “So I hope I get the good and true meaning.”
She searched for words and didn’t have the right ones.
“Yuri,” she said. “Don’t do this to me.”
He laughed. He reached to the book, closed it, and set it on the bedside table.
“You’re quite extraordinary, Miss Alex LaDucova,” he said, playing again with her name. “I wish I had your memory. And your breadth of knowledge.”
Federov managed a laugh, which made them both feel better.
“That’s good,” he said. “Within reason. And again, very kind of you to come all the way to Geneva. Where were you when my message arrived to you?”
“New York,” she said. “That’s where my job is now.”
“Ah, New York. It was a long trip.”
“As it worked out, it wasn’t that difficult,” she said.
“You’re very kind,” he said. “I find that quaint. And ironic maybe. You’re one of the few people I’ve met in my life who I’ve had to thank for their kindness.”
“Maybe if you had thanked more people your life would have turned out differently,” she said.
“And maybe if kindness had been shown to me more often I would have turned out a different person,” he mused. With a free hand, he used a paper towel to mop his brow. “But we’ll never know, will we? Two theories maybe, hey? One is I was born a mongoose. So I would always be a mongoose. And you can’t blame a mongoose for killing a cobra, because a mongoose is a mongoose.”
She was aware that he was heavily sedated, sailing along on some synthetic morphine, she supposed, which probably had his central nervous system in chaos. The drugs made him ramble, but she found it not difficult to travel along with it.
“The other, of course, is that events made me what I am,” he said. “My father used to beat me without mercy when I was a boy, hey. So did my uncle. You know when it stopped? When I was big enough to hurt them back. Hurt. That’s the only real law in life, isn’t it? Don’t hurt me or I will hurt you. Nations, people. It all works the same.”
In another time and place, she might have taken exception. She might have found the right words to say about love and the search for it, about God, about the spirit, about human kindness instead of violence, and a system of morals based on one’s faith, or any faith, or respect for other people or the sanctity of truth and life. But that was not a discussion for here and now.
“Are we on fire?” he asked next.
“What?”
“It’s very hot,” he said. “I wonder if the building is on fire.”
“The building is fine, Yuri,” she said,
realizing that the sedatives were gaining some ground. “But I can call a nurse if you’re feeling-”
“No, no!” he said, raising a clumsy hand and halting her. “Enough of nurses and enough of doctors.” She sat still and his hand went to the sheets again. He closed his eyes, and Alex wasn’t sure whether he was about to drift off. But the nano-nap helped because the eyes opened again in a flash. He seemed to have regained some lucidity.
“Hey,” he said. “Time is short. We have things to talk about.”
“Go ahead,” she said.
He motioned to the second drawer of the bedside stand. “There’s a small package in there,” he said. “Would you please take it out?”
She reached to the drawer. There was a small blue bag in it. It bore the name of Tiffany amp; Company, the jeweler. She frowned slightly, not knowing where this was going.
Federov nodded. She closed the drawer and opened the bag. She reached in.
“I bought this in New York,” he said as she turned over in her hand a small blue box tied with white ribbon. “It’s for you.”
“Yuri, you didn’t have to buy me a present,” she said. “And you shouldn’t have.”
“It’s something very special,” he said, watching intently now. “Please open it.”
She thought for a moment, but was in no position to decline a kindness. She pulled the ribbon open and set it aside. She opened the box and glanced up at him as she dug through the tissue paper. His eyes were suddenly very happy and almost very young, like a boy on Christmas morning.
Her hand settled then on a smaller box within the larger one. It was in dark blue velvet and was unmistakably a ring box. With reservations, she pulled it from the paper and paused for a moment.
“Yuri?” she questioned.
“Please…,” he said, “see this day through to the end.”
“As you wish,” she said gently.
She opened the box and almost lost her breath. The box contained a diamond engagement ring. It was exquisite and dazzling, a sturdy, bold, brilliant diamond set in a platinum gold band. The center stone was the largest diamond she had ever held in her hands. She was no expert, but she guessed it was eight karats set in a traditional clasp, surrounded by two rows of smaller melee diamonds, alternating with sapphires.
