“I hope you don’t mind that I …”
“Of course not.” He put an arm around her and kissed her very softly on the ear. “I’m glad you’ve been looking.” She leaned into him, loving his closeness. “How have you been?” he added, smiling. “Not too bored, I hope?”
The image of the dogs flashed into her mind. She said, quickly, “Oh no. I’m fine. Your meeting – how did it go?”
“Waste of time, actually. This guy Lebedev claimed to have important information about that break-in. Turned out he knew nothing. Thought he’d get us to pay him for a bullshit story. Anyway, we sent him packing pretty damn quick once we realized. But then I got a call from the Moscow office. Nothing sinister – just a bureaucratic snarl-up. Took a bit of time to sort out. Sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
Looking down at the photo, he changed the subject abruptly. “I suppose you’ve noticed I look like him. My grandfather, I mean. KGB Major Mikhail Petrovich Makarov.”
She glanced at him. “Mmm,” she said, cautiously, knowing by the tone in his voice that the resemblance didn’t exactly please him.
“Wait a minute.” Getting up, he opened one of the drawers and took out a small black case with metal clasps. Inside was a pistol, with engraved Cyrillic script on the grip. “This was my grandfather’s service pistol – they engraved it for him when he retired. See, it says,” and he translated, “To M.P.M, a true patriot, for services to the USSR.”
“What was he like, I mean, as a grandfather?”
“Can’t say. Never met him. He died of a stroke before I was born.”
“What about your dad, what did he feel about his father?”
“Oh Dad didn’t talk about his relationship with his father. But I knew from what Mama said that he’d been scared of his dad, as a kid. But admired him, too, from a distance. But they were not what you’d call close.” His mouth twisted wryly. “Seems like that too runs in the family. Anyway, he kept this pistol preciously enough.”
“Oh,” said Helen, doubtfully eyeing the weapon. Her French grandfather had a hunting rifle, which had in turn been owned by his father, and which he was very proud of. But the service pistol was different to a gun you took out to shoot ducks and rabbits for the pot; it smelled of a darker and more disturbing history.
Alexey saw her expression. He closed the pistol case and put it away. “Remember I told you Dad wasn’t much of a one for following tradition?” he said. “It was quite a big thing for him to turn his back on the family profession and go into business instead of joining the service. I doubt his father was too happy about that, though by the time Dad was old enough to get a job, the regime was imploding and even the KGB wasn’t much of a sure-bet career. But his background sure didn’t hurt when he started Trinity. Gave him useful connections. And to the people who mattered, it made him trustworthy. The KGB was feared by many people of course, but to many others it was a badge of honor. And that worked in Dad’s favor. Especially when his business partners Galkin and Barsukov also both came from KGB families, though they didn’t meet till they were adults.”
Helen said, “What did your mother think about all that?”
“She kept out of it. She had nothing to do with the business. Her world was family, it was what mattered to her – Dad, and my brother and me, and her parents. The other side of the family – well, she said Dad’s father made her nervous, that he was the coldest man she’d ever met. Very polite, formal even. But with dead eyes. She never knew what he was thinking. And knowing what he did for a living didn’t exactly help. But Dad’s mother was a nice woman, even if pretty meek, and the scary father-in-law died only a year or so after she and Dad were married, so he wasn’t around to cast a shadow on things for long. Her parents had been against her marrying Dad at first – not only because of the KGB connection, but because they were religious, and he was pretty much an atheist – but they came round to quite liking him.” He paused. “Dad could be – could be charming. When he felt like it. And he truly loved my mother, and her parents saw that, so it made a bond between them.”
“Are they still around – your other grandparents, I mean?”
“No. They died a while back. But they were nice, from what I remember of them. And they doted on Mama.” He leafed through the album. “But here she is, aged about sixteen. My mother, I mean. Svetlana Gavrilovna Makarova, née Egorova.”
The picture showed a small, sweet-faced teenaged girl with a cloud of teased fair hair, laughingly posing arm-in-arm with two other girls in front of the statue of the Bronze Horseman in St Petersburg. “She came from Peters originally,” Alexey explained, “she only moved to Moscow in her university years.” Another showed her in a pinafore dress at a summer barbecue party on a riverbank, among a crowd of other young people. “Dad’s university mates,” Alexey said. Another photo in winter, bundled up in fur hat and coat, posing in front of St Basil’s, peeking between her fingers. “She’s so pretty,” said Helen. “And she looks like she’d be fun.”
“Oh yes, she so was!” His eyes were very bright. “It sounds corny, but she was like a light – lit up everywhere she went, everyone she met, and you felt warm just being near her.” He turned another page. “Here are my parents on their wedding day.” A stiff portrait, professional this time, the bride in a drop-waisted dress and bouffant hairdo, and her groom, a beaming young man with a bad haircut, wearing a large-lapelled suit. Alexey said, lightly, “Check out the daggy fashions.”
“Daggy?”
“I keep forgetting you don’t speak Australian. Means old-fashioned. Uncool.”
“Oh, right. Well, my mother says the ’80s is the decade style fled howling from,” she said, instinctively matching his light tone. “But she still looks beautiful anyway,” she added, more seriously. “And they look happy.”
“They do,” he said, and smiled. He might look like the scary grandfather, Helen thought, but he had a sweet smile exactly like his mother’s.
He flipped through more pages. “There’s their Moscow apartment – one of those communal ones, totally cramped – oh, and a Black Sea holiday they took before we were born. Wait, here we are. Baby photos. That’s Misha. Their first child. My older brother, Mikhail. He was a funny little thing, wasn’t he?”
“He looks very serious,” said Helen, looking at the unsmiling little boy with gray eyes under a straight fringe of dark hair.
“Scowling as usual,” said Alexey. “That’s why I thought that Dimitri icon looked like him. And that’s me,” he added, pointing out the photo opposite, of a laughing baby with a white-blond quiff sitting up in his pram.
“Oh, you were so cute!” said Helen.
“Not like now, eh,” he said, and she colored and said, “You know I didn’t mean that, you’re just fishing shamelessly for compliments you don’t even need, Alexey Makarov,” and he said, laughing, “Shameless is right, you’ve got me in one, Helen Clement.” And he kissed her, long and lingeringly.
“Check this out,” he said, a little later, taking up the album again. “Here’s Misha and me in our hideous boarding-school uniforms, in Australia. Not so cute there, are we?”
“You sure don’t look happy.”
“We weren’t. We both hated it, but I put up with it.” His face darkened. “Mish couldn’t. Wouldn’t. He was in revolt against everything. Dad, well, he’d never been close to us – but he got totally remote after Mama died. It really got to Misha. He wanted Dad to notice him and he only did that when my brother played up, and then he’d roar at him. Meanwhile I just tried to keep out of the way.”
She said, gently, “It sounds very difficult.”
“Yeah. It was. The worst of it was that – Misha and me – we were brothers, but we didn’t understand each other, even though we were only just over a year apart in age. Maybe that was the trouble. He didn’t cope well when I was born, Mama told me once, he was jealous and they had to watch he didn’t try and poke my eyes out! And then, as we grew up, we just were interested in such different thi
ngs, he thought I was soft, and I was freaked out by that temper of his, which only got worse. He was just so – so angry about everything.”
“I used to wish I had a brother or sister,” said Helen. “I thought it would be so good to have someone to share things with. And who’d look out for you.”
He said, very sadly, “Well, it wasn’t like that, for us. We were like a family out of Dostoyevsky, constantly at odds with each other, and constantly missing the point about each other.” He paused. “Anyway, after school Mish started a law degree, but dropped out before the year was out. So Dad got him a job with a mate of his called Anatoly Tretyakov. He was an expatriate Russian like us, and he had a boat business in Surfer’s Paradise. Anyway it might’ve worked out if Mish hadn’t got matey with Tretyakov’s son Dima, Dimmer I used to call him, bloody idiot he was, though his dad thought the sun shone out of his backside. So did poor Mish, he never was a good judge of character. To cut a long story short this creep got my brother into boosting cars, Anatoly found out but Dimmer made out it was Misha who was the bad influence so he was sacked. He had a massive fight with Dad, walked out and never came back. Wouldn’t answer emails, ditched his old cell phone number and deleted his Facebook account. And that was it, for years. Until – until the day when my father got a call from the Mexican police. Misha had been killed in a car accident near Hermosillo, in the north. They were pretty cagey about it and it was only when we went over there that we realized why. The accident was hardly an accident. His car – it had been blown up, with him in it.”
“Oh my God!” She was white to the lips.
“They told us Mish had been in the States, working in some crap job, when Dimmer turned up and persuaded my brother he had a good thing going in Mexico. Small-scale dealing in marijuana,” he said, “not big-time, but it got them on the wrong side of some very dangerous people who have that trade all sewn up. So then Dimmer dreamed up some bird-brained scheme to sort it out, and sent my brother to a meeting.” He clenched his fists. “The only reason we knew was because Dima wrote to the police, confessing what had happened. He said he was sorry. Sorry! As if that made a difference. You know, there was nothing left of Misha for us to bury but a handful of ash, and the few things he’d left behind in the flophouse he lived in. And that cowardly bastard Dima disappeared. And no, I’m sure he didn’t get whacked,” he went on, “because he always managed to get out of things. Right now he’s probably conning some other loyal sucker into doing his dirty work for him.” His voice carried such a freight of bitterness that Helen felt the weight of it settle heavy on her own heart. There was nothing to say. And he didn’t want her to. He just wanted her to listen, to the very end. She knew that as clearly as if he’d told her. She took his hand and held it, tight, as he went on speaking.
“Dad said he never wanted to hear Misha’s name spoken again, that as far as he was concerned his eldest son had never existed. The weird thing was,” he continued on, bleakly, “that he said that, and I hated him for it, but do you know what? When he died and I saw his will – Helen, he hadn’t changed it. He’d left it just as it was before poor Misha’s death. Everything was still left to me and him – just as if – as if in a part of himself my father couldn’t bear what had happened. Couldn’t bear the loss of his son. That’s when I understood that – well, that I would never understand my father.” He paused, and went on, quietly, “So, there you have it. That’s us. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. You still want to be around me?”
“Of course I do!” she said, hugging him fiercely, tears in her eyes.
He cried, “Oh Helen – the thing that wakes me up at night sometimes is – I just wish I had … Mishka was hurting real bad, and I didn’t understand. I had my music, my books, my dreams. He had so little. He was my brother. I should have helped him. I should have tried harder.”
“You can’t help a person if they won’t let you in,” she said. “They have to want it. If they won’t let you in – then there’s nothing you can do.” And haltingly at first, then with her voice growing surer, she began to tell him about her father. About all of it. Not only the difficult visits, her father’s silences, her growing distance from him, but how it had all ended, too. How, six years before, Sam Byrd had come back from a mission in Afghanistan, resigned from the service, and vanished. Eventually, they found out what had happened. Narrowly escaping a roadside ambush that had killed several of the Afghan soldiers he’d been training, he’d returned home and been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress. He’d been offered help but refused it. Instead he’d taken off, holing up in an isolated cabin deep in the woods of Montana, shunning all contact with the outside world. No phone, no Internet, not even a postbox. Helen had sent a letter anyway, care of the little post office nearby. He’d written a curt note back, saying he thanked her for her concern, but that he was trying to deal with things in his own way. He’d added a PS: You are better off without me. And that was it. There’d been not another word or call from him in the years since, though she knew he was still living in his remote cabin.
Alexey listened in silence, and when she finished, he hugged her and said, “Oh, Helen.” That was all he said; but the expression in his eyes showed her that he understood.
Chapter 11
Maxim had arrived in Uglich the day before, much later than he’d hoped. It had been a particularly slow and frustrating trip, cursed by more than the usual number of delays. He was held up first by the usual traffic snarls in Moscow and then, on the open road, he endured ages in the tailback of a lumbering old truck which his almost equally ancient vehicle was too gutless to overtake, and achieved the hat-trick of a flat tire as well. When at last he drove into the town, it was dark, he was furious, ravenous and dog-tired, and not inclined to be civil to the nervous young hotel receptionist who told him the kitchen had already closed and the cook gone home for the day.
A pile of hastily cut ham sandwiches and a couple of glasses of beer later, he was feeling more benign, and not a little ashamed of himself. He went down again to excuse himself to the girl, but was told by the impassive night watchman that she had gone off duty but would be back in the morning. Cursing his bad temper, Maxim went back upstairs and, after a shower, fell into bed and into a heavy sleep from which he woke a mere couple of hours later, jumpy and tense.
He tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t, so instead he got up and went for a drive. It was very late and the town was utterly quiet as he drove aimlessly around, ending up at last in a quiet little street which backed onto some woods. The look of it brought back poignant memories of staying as a child at his grandmother’s in just such a little provincial town as this, and, sharply, an image of a night-time walk he’d gone on, once, when everyone was asleep. It had felt brilliant, like the whole world belonged to him. So on impulse, he parked the car, and set off into the woods. He didn’t walk long or go far, but it had done the trick and cleared his head, so that by the time he got back into his car and drove back to the hotel, he was feeling much calmer. This time, his sleep was a good deal better and he woke late, refreshed, and determined to make amends to that poor girl in reception.
It was already ten o’clock, so he did not even try to get any breakfast at the hotel. On his way out to find some in town, he called in at the reception desk, where he awkwardly apologized to the girl, who stammered that it was all quite all right. Maxim hadn’t told her that he was a policeman, but it was clear from her manner that she’d guessed. He asked her gently for a map of the town, and when she hastily handed him one, he asked if she happened to know on which street the Makarov house was. He knew already, but wanted to see her reaction to the mention of Makarov.
Her face lit up at once with curiosity. She pointed out the street on the map. He said, “Have you been to the house—” He looked for a non-existent nametag, “what is your name?”
The girl’s eyes widened. “Norova. Anastasia Kirillovna Norova. Oh no, I’ve never been there.”
Well, Anastasia Kiril
lovna, perhaps you’ve met the young man …” He pretended to hesitate. “What’s his name –”
“Alexey Ivanovich Makarov,” said the girl, promptly. “No. I haven’t. Never spoken to him, that is. But I’ve seen him about. And my friend – he works at one of the other hotels – he saw him yesterday, in the hotel restaurant, having lunch with a girl. Not a local person,” she added. “A foreigner.”
“I see. What’s your friend’s name, and the hotel’s?” Not that it was important, but she looked as if she thought it was. She told him, and he made a show of writing it down. Then he said, “What do people say about him, hereabouts?”
She looked at him, suddenly cautious again. “I – I don’t know.”
“People must have an opinion,” he said. “It’s the biggest story to hit your town in years.”
She hesitated. “Well, I’ve heard that – that he does not seem much grieved by his father’s death.”
“I see. Tell me, were people surprised when he moved here?”
“Why yes, especially as he’d never come before. Not when his father was alive, I mean.”
“Why do you think he came here?”
“Me? I – I don’t know.”
He sighed. “Very well. Have you heard what other people think about it?”
“Some say he is hiding.”
“From who?”
She shrugged, but didn’t answer.
He said, quietly, “Gangsters, you mean?”
She looked at him. “Perhaps. Or perhaps – something else.”
“What?” And then, suddenly, he understood the expression in her eyes. “You mean the curse.” He sighed.
The girl was blushing but determined. “I read it in one of the Moscow papers – an ekstrasens – said it must be a curse made by a powerful sorcerer. She said the police would never be able to solve it on their own.”
“Oh, that one,” said Maxim, knowing the psychic the girl was referring to. “She came to see us. But it was no good. She knew nothing.” He’d forgotten about that, it had been after the Barsukov death, and before Makarov’s. The psychic had come to see him and had gone on about sinister forces and bad karma; she’d placed her hands on the photographs of the Trinity founders and claimed that the sinister forces were particularly concentrated around Ivan Makarov. It was at a time when Maxim was leaning toward the theory that Makarov had engineered his partners’ deaths, so he asked her what she meant. But when she told him that there was a sorcerer at work, he lost his temper, accusing her of wasting his time, and threw her out. She’d sold her story to a trashy newspaper, which the receptionist must have read. Now he looked at the expectant face of the young girl, and said, “I’m afraid she was just a charlatan, thought she could make some easy money. That’s all.”
Trinity: The Koldun Code (Book 1) Page 10
