All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

  Polina told me that Rachel had declined her offer of hospitality and said that she would be staying at the priest’s house next to the church instead. And what was the harm in that? It was nice to see young people moving back to the village again. Polina had also confirmed—to the point of irritation at how many times I asked—that no one else had visited Arkhangel immediately before, or since, Rachel had arrived.

  I put one foot after the other, and tried to fathom why, of all the places she could have bolted to—whether she was running from something or toward it—she had come here. Was it me? Or my mother? Or perhaps it was closer to home than that. In my mind’s eye I saw Doc dead in his drawing room, slumped in front of the fire. For better or worse, he linked us all. Our pasts and our presents all spun around him. The thought of what might happen if—when—they collided made me shudder.

  On the way to my mother’s old family house I’d avoided the road and persevered along an old cart track that had taken me to the west of the church, but not past it. The birch trees on the approach were thick enough to give good cover against infrared, though if anyone nearby had thermal imaging, I’d be lit up like a Christmas tree. Despite Polina’s protestations about no one else having come to the village, an entire detachment of Special Forces could have deployed without her suspecting a thing. I was about to find out for certain if the GRU had connected Arkhangel the place to Arkhangel the project. My cheeks burned. There was just enough time for a simple recce. Ideally, I’d have watched the churchyard all night, but without the proper kit, minus fifteen will kill you. I didn’t have the proper kit. I didn’t have any kit—and I was injured.

  I tried to empty my mind of Rachel, of the uncertainty of what meeting her might beget, and filled it instead with the specifics of safely crossing the short distance to the churchyard.

  I looped around the other painted wooden cabins neighboring Polina Yurievna’s. There couldn’t have been more than ten houses in total—smallholdings, mainly, and all separated from one another by fields and trees. At the front of the third plot along stood a snow-covered Lada Niva, tires unworn, snow around it undisturbed: Aleksandr Denisovich’s new car, in which he’d brought Polina the logs for her Christmas fire. I watched the house. The silhouette of a man passed in front of the downstairs window and then vanished behind the woodpile. Five-eleven, maybe, and wrapped up against the cold. I heard a door shut, and then the lights went out. I listened carefully, but the night was silent again, all sound muffled by the snow: no wolves, no planes, no car engines. I crept around the offside of the four-by-four and pulled gently at the door handle. It was unlocked, keys in the ignition.

  I crossed the road at a crouch. The church was a dilapidated nineteenth-century two-story white box topped by a short spire and onion dome supporting a silver Orthodox cross. At the west end there was a lower extension, where the congregation would have entered and bought candles. It had been a long time since I’d been inside an Orthodox church. In Ireland my mother had taken Communion with my father in the Roman Catholic church of Sts. Mary and Peter in Arklow—although there were parts of the service she always refused to say out loud.

  I wished I’d paid more attention.

  Snow worked its way into my pockets, boots. The wind picked up a little and cut through my jeans, stinging my ears. I was chilled and getting colder. Whatever the risks, it was time to get back inside. The church, Polina Yurievna had told me, had been closed for years—another victim of the Soviet era that had never recovered. The St. Michael that hung on her wall had been rescued three days before the doors had been shut for good. More recently, by the looks of it, a large metal grille had been bolted over the north entrance—though who, or what, it was meant to deter out here was anyone’s guess.

  The priest’s house was set in the southwest corner of the churchyard—a ramshackle wood cabin that looked as if it might have been used more recently for livestock than clergy. I slipped through the remains of an old picket fence, the tops of which crested the drifting snow like the masts of a sunken clipper, and threaded my way between the frosted branches of ancient apple trees to the back of the house.

  Smoke leaked from the chimney. A light flickered in the window, but the panes were smeared with grime and impossible to see through. I circled around to the front door and stamped the snow off my boots. I breathed deeply, sending a column of silent white mist into the air. Since I’d fled the burning cottage in Donegal, all roads had led me here. Led me home.

  Whatever happened next, I knew Rachel would at least want to know how her father had really died. In Tel Aviv I’d braced myself to be confronted, hoping all the while to be forgiven. I’d thought I’d been prepared. But as soon as I’d stepped into her office, I’d been swamped with uncertainty. I still was, but with this difference: I no longer knew which of us was guilty, or of what. I thought that I had come to assuage her. But I hadn’t. I’d come to accuse her. What followed might lead to revenge. Or atonement. Either way, I told myself, I’d be ready.

  Midnight in Arkhangel, and all was quiet.

  I raised my fist to strike the door, but as I did so I saw that it was already open. I pushed it gently and stepped through the looking glass.

  32

  Rachel was facing away from me, sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, knees drawn up to her chin, arms locked around her shins. Her hair hung long, falling down the back of her tunic in a jumble of black tresses.

  Three candles—arranged neatly in a line—burned on an old dresser pushed up against the far wall. Wax spilled onto the bare floorboards. The remains of a fire glowed in the stove. I closed the cabin door quietly and stood still, letting my eyes adjust. The ceiling was fouled with lamp soot, the walls covered with crazy patterns scored into them by years of decay.

  Before I could speak, she said: “Ner tamid.”

  She turned and looked hopefully at me over her shoulder. She was both Rachel and a stranger—familiar and yet disarmingly different. Her face was set with worry, a hard journey etched in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Eternal light,” she replied, pointing to the taller candle in the middle. “God’s gift to us who live in darkness.”

  I took a step closer. I looked at her, at the room. Light pooled above the candles. The marks that at first had looked like random patterns in the cracked wooden panels took shape. The whole back wall was covered in an organized explosion of mathematical calculations. Dead center, repeated in dozens of permutations, the serial number of the hundred-dollar bill: 73939133.

  I trod the ten feet between us. I tried to squat down beside her, but my knee gave way. I grunted with pain as I sprawled on the floor, leaning on my right hand with one leg folded beneath me. I could feel fresh blood leaking into Polina’s bandages.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said, “after I saw your photograph in the paper. You want to convince me that you didn’t kill him.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  We were a foot apart. Her accent was harsh and unfamiliar, pulled between Ireland and Israel, edged with fear.

  “But you did, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know where to start,” I said.

  I looked at the candles, at the few personal effects scattered around the room: a sleeping bag by the stove, a half-eaten loaf of bread, a plate and a bowl. But I could find no anchor to steady me, see no compass to navigate by. It felt both unremarkable to see her again and deeply disorienting.

  “Yes, you do, Max. Where all stories start,” she said. “At the beginning. Remember?”

  She looked down and rested her chin on her knees. Her hands were dirty, nails blackened. Then I saw on the floor next to her a burned stub of kindling, sharpened to a point. I studied the wall again. She’d been using firewood to write with, her hands as an eraser.

  “Rachel,” I said, feeling the weight of the syllables fi
ll my mouth, “this time you have to tell me the story.” I opened my left hand and gestured toward her calculations. “I don’t understand what any of this means.”

  “It means,” she said, slowly and deliberately, “the eyes to read every word, the ears to hear every whisper.” She smiled at me. “It means the triumph of light, Max, and the defeat of darkness. At least that’s what I thought it meant.”

  “I see,” I said, looking for some way, any way, back into the mind, the soul, of the person I’d cherished as a teenager.

  “Do you?” She stood up abruptly in one strong, fluid movement and moved away from me. She wrenched the center candle free of its wax fixings and brought the flame to bear on the charcoal scrawl. “Do you see? Do you understand?” I looked up at her and pursed my lips.

  “What do you think death looks like, Max? A skeleton on a horse? The Grim Reaper? A fantasy to scare children with?” She turned around to face me, holding her arms and the candle aloft. “Well?” The sleeves of her tunic fell back, revealing the thick, angry scars that ran from her wrists to her elbows. I bowed my head. “Look at me, Max. Look at me!” she shouted. “Look at them!”

  “I’ve seen them already,” I said, still staring at the floor. “Remember?”

  “Remember? How do you think I could forget? I wanted to disappear, Max, to slip away quietly without bothering anyone. To vanish. I didn’t want to be anymore. And then . . .” Her voice calmed again. “And then you brought me back.”

  I looked up at her.

  “Of course I did. Of course I saved you. What else could I have done? Doc loved you. I loved you. We were kids, Rachel, and you were out of your mind with—”

  “Saved me? Mamash, mamash lo, Max. No. Really no. You condemned me.”

  “Condemned you to what, exactly?”

  She was quiet for a moment, making the space for what she needed to say, making sure I would hear her words. I kept my eyes fixed on hers, glowing green in the half-light.

  “Náire shíoraí,” she said at last, in Irish. Eternal shame. “You brought me back and then you ran. You vanished and left me to burn in the heat of my own humiliation. And do you know why, Max?” I struggled to my feet. Blood ran down my arm. “Because you are a coward. Whoever put those words in my mouth in the paper knows you better than you know yourself. You were too scared to let me die. Too scared to keep me alive. Too craven even to spare the life of an old man who loved you. But I survived, Max. And I survived for a reason. Everyone always does.”

  “Stop!” I blurted out with unexpected force. “Please.”

  I reached for her, but she recoiled, her face flickering in the chaos of shadows thrown up by the candles.

  “I asked you a question, Max Mac Ghill’ean. But I’ll give you the answer. Death is beautiful. They say the angel Azrael is covered with eyes, millions upon millions of eyes—beautiful, piercing eyes whose gaze no one can avoid. That no one has ever avoided. That is what is written.” She jutted her jaw toward me, resolute, her own eyes catching the light again, filled with the certainty of belief. “And that is the truth. Do you know how it happens, Max? Do you know how Azrael takes your soul?”

  “No,” I said, struggling to find anything to help me calm the storm I knew could drown us both.

  “You look into those eyes, those million, million eyes, and you fall in love. That’s how. There’s no escape. There’s nowhere to run. You can’t hide. He sees everything, all the time, from one end of the world to the other. And as you open your mouth to tell this angel, this wonder, that you love him, that your heart has broken, he lets fall a drop of gall between your lips, and then you cease to be, putrefied by your own passion. That is the Helper of Ha’Shem. That is the Destroyer. And I have seen him.” She pivoted abruptly and threw the candle at the wall with all her might. Wax exploded across the giant calculation laid out before her. “And this is what he looks like.”

  Everyone has a breaking point. I had one. Rachel had reached hers. Moshe had been right: she had gone insane. She stood facing the wall, shaking. I peered into the corners of the room, glanced at the ceiling, and then over my shoulder toward the door. She kept her back to me and composed herself.

  “I know who you are, Max Mac Ghill’ean, or McLean, or whatever you call yourself now. I know who you are. And I know what you are.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A murderer.” She turned around. “My father told me everything. About how he helped you to join the army. About how you ran away. And do you know what? He was glad, Max. Glad I got away from you, glad I was free of you. He loved you. But, by God, how he despised what you became. That’s why he drank. Not because of your mother. Because of you.”

  “That’s not true. That’s . . .”

  “There is only one reason you’re here, and that’s because you’ve got the banknote. It’s the only reason you could be here. The only person Arkhangel means anything to, apart from him, is you.”

  “And you? What does it mean to you? Why name your project after it? Why write it on the note? Why send it to him? Why come here at all? Why run? There’s nowhere to go from here. You’re trapped.”

  “I didn’t come here to escape, Max. I came here to do something I should have done a long time ago. I came here for the same reason you did.” She took a step toward me. “To understand.”

  “But I don’t . . . I don’t understand.”

  Yet in my guts I began to feel the truth unfurling like the devil’s banner.

  “You don’t think they sat up all night just talking about Russia, do you? Your mother and my father?”

  “Rachel, don’t.”

  “Don’t? Don’t what? They were lovers, Max. For years. And you know they were. While we were fucking in my bed, they were fucking in hers. Oh, don’t look so shocked. You’ve always known, whether you wanted to admit it or not. Your mother changed my father’s life, Max. She changed our lives. She showed him what it meant to love. And she taught me what it meant to serve.”

  “Serve whom? Men like Avilov?”

  “Not who, but what. She loved this place, these people. She thought they were special. She thought I was special. Ty moi volchonok, she called me. Remember? My little wolf. She was obsessed with the idea of Russia. The beauty of it. The promise of it. Her work, her vision, was brilliant. One of the best, brightest scientists of her generation. That’s what they said when she died, wasn’t it? That was what I clung to after she drowned, Max, after you ran away. I escaped to Israel to serve an idea. I clung to faith and to science—just as she had done. My father assimilated. I never could. Your mother thought that one day Russia would be her savior, the savior of us all.”

  “And so you came here to do what? Understand my mother?”

  She shook her head. “No, Max. I came here to understand how she could have been so wrong. So completely and utterly wrong. My work, Max. It’s bigger than Russia. Bigger than anything you can imagine.”

  “But you knew that the money came from the Akvarium, didn’t you? You knew that the GRU was funding you, funding Arkhangel.”

  Now she looked down, hair falling in front of her face. “Of course.”

  “You worked for them, for Avilov.”

  “No. I worked for the beauty of it, the promise of perfection. I imagined a world without shadows, a world without secrets, a perfect future where everyone is equal because nothing can be hidden.” She lifted her head. Tears flowed down her cheeks, matting wild strands of black and silver hair. “No one else would fund me. No one. They thought I was crazy—some wacko who’d tried to kill herself.” She began to cry harder, her body swaying in the flame light. “All anyone ever saw were the scars. No one could ever see past them. But Avilov did. He found me. He saw me. He saw what I could do, what I could create. I know what you think, but I’m not crazy, Max. I saw the Destroyer, the Helper of Ha’Shem, and Leonid Avilov was the only person who b
elieved me, believed in me. And then he betrayed me.”

  I moved closer to her. Only a couple of feet separated us now. “I believed in you, Rachel. And I still do.”

  “No. You betrayed me, too. You ran, and you kept running, and now you’ve come full circle. I thought I would be spared. I thought the angel would pass over me. But he hasn’t, has he? That’s why you’re here.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Rachel. That’s not why I’m here. I didn’t kill Doc. I didn’t kill Amos. Whatever that means”—I pointed at the wall—“that’s what murdered them. Not me. Whoever gunned them down was looking for it, for you.”

  She collapsed to her knees and then sank to the floor, hair spilling about her head in a ragged black halo at my feet.

  I reached down and took her by the bicep, and for the first time we touched. I pulled her to her feet and I tried to think straight, through the pain and exhaustion.

  “Listen. Listen to me. What was on the note? What does it really mean? You have to tell me.”

  She wrested her arm loose and unstuck the hair from her face. She wiped her eyes with her fingers and sucked the tears from her lips.

  “It’s everything,” she said. She was looking directly at me, eyes wet and wide. “All my work. It’s all written there, in the numbers and letters. It’s a key.”

  “What does it unlock?”

  “An algorithm. One simple algorithm.” I thought of Baaz, our conversation in Paris. I hoped that he was safe, that the banknote was safe, that Talia had come through for him.

  “It’s for a quantum computer, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “It’s the ghost in the machine.”

  “And you’ve given this to the Russians? This algorithm?”

  She shook her head. “Moshe hid it from them on the note. It would take a genius to crack it. Amos took it to the only person I could trust.”

  “But you did this for the Russians?”

  “No. It’s not like that. You wouldn’t understand. I did it because . . . because I had to. People dream of revolution, of the Second Coming, of Aharit Hayamim, of . . . whatever.”