Michael looked at Tommy. “You bought them iPods?”
“What’s wrong with iPods?”
“Jesus, Tommy. They’re four.”
“What are you saying, four year olds don’t listen to music? I listened to music when I was four.”
“Four year olds don’t download music,” Michael said. “Why didn’t you just get them cellphones?”
“That’s next year.” He sipped his wine, winked. “Four is too young for cellphones. What kind of parent are you?”
Michael laughed, but it occurred to him that his daughters weren’t all that far off from cellphones and laptops and cars and dating. He barely survived them going to preschool. How was he going to handle the teen years? He threw a quick glance at Charlotte and Emily, who were tearing into a new pair of presents.
They were still little girls.
Thank God.
By four o’clock the party was winding down. More accurately, the parents were winding down. The kids were still jacked sky-high on cookies, chocolate cake, Kool Aid, and ice cream.
As Tommy prepared to leave, he caught Michael’s eye. The two men gathered at the back of the yard.
“How’s the girl?” Tommy asked, lowering his voice.
Michael thought about Falynn Harris, the quiet girl with the sad angel’s face. She was the star witness – no, the only witness – in his next homicide trial. “She hasn’t spoken a word yet.”
“The trial starts Monday?”
“Monday.”
Tommy nodded, taking it in. “Anything you need.”
“Thanks, Tommy.”
“Don’t forget Rupert White’s party tomorrow. You’re coming, right?”
Michael instinctively glanced at Abby, who was cleaning the frosting off a neighborhood boy’s face, neck, and arms. The kid looked like a chubby pink fresco. “I have to clear it with command and control.”
Tommy shook his head. “Marriage.”
On the way out, Michael saw Tommy stop and talk to Rita Ludlow, a thirtyish divorcee from the end of the block. Tall, auburn-haired, shapely, she had probably populated the daydreams of every man under ninety in Eden Falls at one time or another.
Not surprisingly, after just a few seconds of chatter, she handed Tommy her phone number. Tommy turned, winked at Michael, swaggered off.
Sometimes Michael Roman hated his best friend.
Because the invitations said noon to four, when they heard the car doors slam out front, it could only mean one thing. Abby’s brother Wallace was making his regal entrance. He was not just fashionably late. He was fashionista late. Which was all the more ironic, considering his past.
Angel-hair thin, freckled and balding, Wallace Reed was the kid in high school who ironed his book covers, the kid who would have played triangle in the school band if he hadn’t gotten smoked in the audition and ended up playing second triangle.
Today he was chairman of WBR Aerospace, pulling down something north of eight figures a year, living in a McMansion in Westchester, and summering in one of those sea-foam green Gatsby places in Sagaponack featured in Hamptons Magazine.
Still, despite his card-carrying status in Nerds Anonymous, Wallace had romanced an astonishing array of beautiful women. Amazing what a few million dollars can do for your image.
This day his belle du jour didn’t look a day over twenty-four. She wore a Roberto Cavalli halter dress and a pair of burgundy ballet flats. This according to Abby. Michael wouldn’t know a ballet flat from a flat tire.
“Now here’s a woman who knows how to dress for cake and Kool Aid,” Abby said, sotto voce.
“Be nice.”
“I’m going with Whitney,” Abby whispered.
“I’ll take Madison.” It was a running five-dollar bet they had.
“There’s my favorite sister,” Wallace said. It was the standard line. Abby was his only sister. He kissed her on the cheek.
Wallace wore a bright plum Polo, razor-creased beige chinos and green duck boots. Barney gone LL Bean. He gestured to the girl. “This is Madison.”
Michael could not look at his wife. He just couldn’t. The twins came running over, sensing fresh chum.
“And these must be the girls of the hour,” Madison said, getting down to the twins’ level. The girls did their shy act, fingers to lips. They hadn’t figured out the woman’s gift-potential yet.
“Yes, this is Charlotte and Emily,” Abby said.
Madison smiled, stood, patted the girls on their heads, like they were schnauzers. “How adorable. Just like the Bronte sisters.”
Abby shot a desperate glance at Michael.
“Right,” Michael said. “The Bronte sisters.”
Here was a party-pause longer than the one where Rock Hudson came out of the closet.
“The authors?” Madison said, blinking, incredulous. “The British authors?”
“Of course,” Abby said. “They wrote…”
The second longest pause.
“Wuthering Heights? Jane Eyre?”
“Yes,” Abby said. “I simply adored those books growing up. So did Michael.”
Michael nodded. And nodded. He felt like a bobble-head doll in the back window of a car with busted shocks.
The girls circled the four adults. Michael could almost hear the theme from Jaws. Presents from Uncle Wallace were like the Oscars. Best picture was always last.
“You ready for your gifts?” Wallace asked.
“Yes!” the girls chanted. “Yes we are!”
“They’re out front.”
The girls made a move to rocket across the yard, but instead waited for Wallace, taking him by the hand. They were no dummies. They knew how to work their quarry. Even though Charlotte once said Uncle Wallace smelled like pickles.
“He said they’re out front,” Michael said, once they had disappeared around the corner. “They’re. As in they.”
“I know.”
“He did not buy them bikes. Please tell me he did not buy them bikes. We talked about this.”
“He promised me, Michael. No bikes.”
Getting your daughters their first grown up bicycles was an important thing, a father-daughter thing to which Michael Roman was greatly looking forward. He was not going to let a millionaire who wore eau de gherkin take that away from him.
When Michael heard the yay come flying over the house, his heart sank. Moments later he saw his daughters come racing around the corner in their matching pink motorized Barbie Jeeps.
Oh, Jesus, Michael thought.
They’re driving already.
Twenty minutes later the final few guests gathered in the driveway. Thanks were proffered, cheeks were kissed, promises were made, and teary little ones were bundled into SUVs – the party was over.
On the back patio, Charlotte and Emily shared a piece of chalk. They drew a hopscotch pattern on the concrete. Emily found a suitable stone in the flower garden, and the girls played a full game. As usual, they did not keep score, neither wanting to best the other in anything.
When they tired of the game, they began to draw something else on the concrete, an intricate figure of a big blue lion with a long curling tail. They worked in silence.
At six o’clock, as deep violet clouds gathered over Crane County, New York, their mother called them inside. The little girls rose, looked at their drawing. They each whispered something to the other. Then, in their private way, they hugged, and went inside.
Twenty minutes later it began to rain; huge gobbets of water falling to earth, soaking the grass, giving life to the spring garden. Before long, small ponds pooled on the patio, and the symbol was washed away.
TWO
SOUTH-EASTERN ESTONIA
The valley was silent the morning he left, as if in its stilled branches, its songless robins, its hushed streams and posing wildflowers, it knew there would soon be change.
The tall man in the black leather coat stood at the split rail fence that surrounded the main section of his property. He had al
ready shuttered the structure, armed its systems, and programmed its photosensitive lighting grid. From the outside the dwelling – although not a large house by any means, not by the standards of the young “minigarch” Russians who had begun to buy property throughout Estonia – appeared to be a sturdy but humble building. Inside, in its heart, in the heart of its builder and owner, it was a fortress.
The tall man picked up his two leather bags, shouldered them.
It was time.
As he began to make his way down the two-mile gravel lane that wound through the hills, Rocco, the Italian mastiff, found him at the first turn. Rocco had been rooting in a log, it seemed, and smelled of rot and compost and feces. The aroma filled the tall man with an instant and indefinable melancholy. Soon the other five dogs emerged from the forest and fell into a rhythm next to him. The dogs were nervous, excited, sad, leaping on each other, onto him. They sensed he was leaving, and like all dogs, felt he was never going to return. The wolfhound, Tumnus, already over a hundred pounds, was getting too large for such antics, but on this day – this day for which the tall man had so long waited – it was permitted.
The entourage made the final turn toward the gate. Rounding the bend, the man considered the boy who lived at the edge of the village, the boy who would let himself onto the grounds each morning to feed and water and groom the animals in his absence. The tall man trusted the boy. He trusted few people.
When he reached the gate he unlocked it, stepped through, rearmed it. The dogs all sat on the other side, shivering in the moment, softly keening their sorrow. The smallest of them, the alpha male pug named Zeus, put a paw to the chain-link fence.
The rented Lada Niva was parked on the side of the road, keys in the ignition, as promised and paid for. Except for automobiles belonging to the tall man, no vehicle had ever driven the two miles up to the house. No other vehicle ever would. The silent weight alarms deployed just beneath the surface of the gravel lane, along with the gossamer thin trip wires strung throughout the property – all at forty-eight inches from the ground, lest the dogs trip them – were sufficient warning. The perimeter had yet to be breached. Perhaps it was more the man’s reputation that spoke to any would-be interlopers than anything electronic.
If the alarms were triggered in his absence, the boy next door, Villem Aavik, a growing and muscular fourteen, knew what to do. The boy, whose father was killed in the war in Bosnia, was strong and smart. Aleks had trained him to shoot, which had come to the boy with difficulty, having lost a finger in a foundry accident. He also taught the boy how to read the hearts of men. He would one day be a master thief, or a politician. As if there were a difference. Perhaps the boy, like the tall man, would be vennaskond.
The tall man placed his shoulder bags in the trunk, slipped inside the car.
He looked down the road, and began to feel the exhilaration one feels at the onset of a journey, a journey that had long been in the planning, a journey that would find for him his very soul.
In the silence and darkness of the womb there were three.
Anna, Marya, and Olga.
Four, the tall man thought. His girls were four years old now. He had not slept fully or soundly since the night of their birth, had not drawn one breath of God’s air, had not stopped looking.
Until now.
He had finally located the man who had been there that morning, the white-haired Finn who walked the shadows of his dreams, the man who had stolen his daughters. He would meet the man in Tallinn, find out what he needed, and a reckoning would be known.
The tall man turned to look one last time at the intricate wrought iron gate – a gate bearing the complex metalwork of a blue lion surrounded by oak branches, the national symbol of Estonia – and his house on the hill, the structure now obscured by trees ripe with leaf and blossom. He believed the next time he saw this place his life would be different. The sky would be clearer, the air twice as warm. There would be sweet voices singing in the forest, children’s voices.
He touched the crystal vial hanging from a silver chain around his neck, the small glass bottle filled with Olga’s blood. There it gently clinked against the two empty vials.
With his daughters, his beloved tutred, the tall man believed he would live the prophecy of Koschei the Deathless, he believed he would live forever.
No. It was more than a belief. Much more.
Aleksander Savisaar knew.
THREE
Two hours after the party ended, after the crowd had departed and the mess had been cleared, Michael and Abby sat their daughters down for a solemn talk about the ground rules regarding their new little cars: no driving anywhere near the street, helmets always and, most importantly, no driving after more than two glasses of grape juice.
Michael thought his line was funny; Abby was not amused. She was not all that happy with her brother.
Michael pushed the cars to the double garage. The evening was quiet. The evenings were always quiet here. Through the trees he could just make out the lights from the Meisner house a quarter-mile north.
He tried to find parking spots for the little pink Jeeps in their already cramped garage. When he moved a pair of old bi-fold doors, he saw it. It was the sign from the window of the bakery. As always, it dragged his heart and mind down a long corridor of remembrance.
When Michael’s parents Peeter and Johanna Romanov immigrated to the United States from Estonia in 1971 the world was a very different place. The Soviet Union was still twenty years from collapse, and the process of escaping an Eastern Bloc country was both dangerous and expensive.
They settled in Astoria, Queens, in a small apartment over a shuttered retail store on Ditmars Boulevard near Crescent Street.
In July 1973 Mikhail Romanov was born at Queens Hospital. The next day Peeter applied to have the family’s last name changed to Roman, figuring that, as the Cold War still raged, his son would not be served well by such a Russian-sounding name, especially one so patrician.
Two years later, with a credit union loan, Michael’s parents bought the retail space beneath their apartment, and opened a bakery. Word quickly spread among the local Estonian, Russian, and eastern European residents of the neighborhood. On a block that boasted both Greek and Italian bakeries there was now a place where one could purchase fresh brown breads, gingerbreads, piroshkis, rugalah and, every Easter, their beloved kulich. Patrons no longer had to travel to Rego Park for their kartoshka.
But what made the Pikk Street Bakery special – the shop was named after the street in Tallinn on which Peeter had proposed to Johanna – was its old-fashioned wooden shelves, its linen tablecloths, is luminous display of candy bins stuffed with an unbounded selection of gaily wrapped confections, which turned the place into every child’s fantasy.
Perhaps what made it even more special, especially for the young mothers in the neighborhood, was Johanna Roman’s exquisite Estonian lace. Michael’s fondest memory of his mother was her sitting on the fire escape in spring and summer, her steel needles blazing, chatting with neighbors, her tapestry bag at her feet, the tote with an Estonian cottage embroidered on its side. Booties, blankets, hats, sweaters, especially her delicate Haapsalu shawls – Johanna always gave away whatever she knitted.
Her nickname for Michael – a private nickname, one Johanna never uttered in front of Michael’s friends on the block – was nupp. A nupp was a particularly difficult maneuver in knitting, one that required the left-hand needle to penetrate five stitches. Some women in Johanna’s circle called it “Satan’s contribution to knitting,” but Johanna Roman always meant it as a term of endearment.
Good night my little nupp, she would say to her handful of a son.
Michael always slept well.
In 1980, on a blustery winter day, Michael arrived home from school to find a stranger in their small kitchen above the shop, a large rockpile of a man, with a wide forehead, zinc-colored eyes, and a deeply cleft chin. He wore a pilled woolen coat and boots gone round at the heel.
He ate sardines from a can. With his fingers.
The man was Solomon Kaasik, his father’s childhood friend from Tartu. Peeter Roman had sponsored the man’s voyage to America.
Every Sunday, for many months, Solomon would come for Sunday dinner, often with a small present for Michael, never without something to add to the stew. He would drink Turi vodka and smoke cigars with Michael’s father well into the night. Some evenings he would play chess with Michael, sometimes letting the boy win.
In the spring of Michael’s eighth year, Solomon ceased visiting. Michael missed his loud laughter, the way he would throw him on his broad shoulders with ease. Finally Michael asked. His father did not answer him, but eventually Johanna took Michael aside one day and told him that Solomon had fallen in with some bad people, the local vory. Michael was not sure what the vory were exactly, but he knew to be afraid of them. After much nagging, Peeter told Michael that Solomon had gotten involved in the robbery of a bank in Brooklyn, a robbery where people had died. He said Solomon was now in a place called Attica and he was not coming back for a long time.
Although deeply saddened by these events, Peeter Roman visited Solomon often. When Michael turned nine, his father talked the guards into letting Michael see Solomon. To Michael, Solomon looked thinner, but harder. He had new markings on his arms. He no longer smiled.
On July 4, 1983, just a few weeks before Michael’s tenth birthday, he sat in the window overlooking Ditmars Boulevard. Below him, neighborhood kids threw cherry bombs, M80s, fired bottle rockets. Michael was forbidden to leave the house unaccompanied by his parents – there was always a story of a child losing a finger, an eye, something worse – so Michael leaned as far as he could out the window, the smells of spent gunpowder filling his head. The shop closed at seven PM. Every few seconds Michael would glance at the clock. At seven sharp he ran down the stairs.
At first he thought he had mistakenly taken the back stairs, for he heard none of the familiar sounds – the pans being washed and put away, the sound of the Hoover being run, doors locked, register closed out. But he was on the front stairs, and the shop was quiet.
The Devil_s Garden Page 2
