Altar of Bones (26 page)

He went back to the blue velvet curtain behind the mirror and pulled it open. “Come.”

Zoe followed him through a narrow door into a small room. It looked, she thought, like a stage set for a séance. A round, cloth-draped table was surrounded by five hard-backed chairs. A tin-shaded lamp hung from the ceiling. The plaster walls were bare of paintings, the old peg wooden floor of any rugs.

The old man pulled out a chair. “Please …”

Zoe sat.

“It will be a moment,” he said, then left to go back into the front of the shop.

Zoe heard the scrape of wood against wood, the creak of a hinge, followed by a sneeze and
“Merde!”

The curtain swirled open, and he came back into the room. “I’m afraid I’ve allowed things to get a bit dusty.”

Zoe felt a jolt of pure excitement when she saw the wooden casket he carried so reverently in his outstretched hands. It was an exact replica of the casket in the tapestry. The one the unicorn lady had used to keep her jewels.

This one was large enough, though, to hold a good-size loaf of bread. It was banded with studded iron strips and had a domed lid. It also had two locks, one at each end.

The old man set the chest on the table in front of her. He whipped a cloth from his coat pocket and wiped away the dust. “We
toapotror
like to
tell a story of how many, many years ago, so long ago the truth has been lost in the mists of time, there lived a people who practiced the ancient arts of sorcery, and whose shaman was possessed of a magic so powerful he could bring the dead back to life. One day this shaman took himself a wife, who was as fair as the first snowfall of winter. Alas, she could bear him only daughters, although each daughter she bore him was as beautiful as their mother.”

“Did he care?” Zoe asked, her feminist hackles on the rise. “That she gave him only daughters?”

The old man laughed softly and shrugged. “If he did, it is one of those truths now lost in the mists. But to go on with the story … On another day some evil men, who were jealous of the shaman’s powers, set upon him in a snowy field. They stabbed a spear into his side so that they might drink his blood. But the taste of it drove them mad. They fell into fighting amongst themselves, killing each other until none was left alive.”

The old man gave the casket a final buff, then took a step back to admire his handiwork. “It was nearly nightfall when the shaman’s wife and daughters came upon him there in the field, his red blood staining the snow. They wailed and tore at their hair, and their hearts broke into pieces. Then they gathered up his shattered body and bore it away to a secret cave behind a waterfall of ice, where they guard it to this day and will for all eternity…. But, my dear, why are you crying? It is only a story. One story among many that are told around the fire during the long and cold Siberian nights.”

“Sorry,” Zoe said, feeling a little silly as she wiped the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I honestly don’t know where that came from. It must be the jet lag.” She also thought, though, that there was something more to this particular story than what the old man was letting on, but she let it go. “So tell me what happened after you met up with Lena in the noodle shop.”

“Why, I offered her my services, of course. As was my duty.”

The old man’s eyes had lit up with a look of wistful memory, and Zoe wondered if he and Lena had been lovers for a time. It was hard to imagine, looking at him now, but he would have been a young man after the war.

After Lena died,” he went on, “I kept in touch with her daughter, Katya, over the years, and in the fall of 1962 Katya came to me here and asked for my help in safeguarding the altar’s secrets for the Keeper who would come after her. She never told me the nature of the danger she was in, out of fear perhaps that with too much knowledge the danger could rub off onto me.”

The old man stuffed the cloth back in his coat, then removed a pocket watch from his vest, and Zoe saw that instead of a fob on the end of the chain, there was a key. With a griffin on the end of it.

“It takes two keys to open the casket,” he said. “Mine and the Keeper’s. Your grandmother Katya designed it. Clever, is it not? But then over the centuries you Keepers have always been clever at devising riddles to keep the altar safe from the world.”

“It’s like a safe-deposit box in a bank,” Zoe said, feeling more than a little intimidated. She couldn’t even solve the old riddles. God help them all if she ever had to come up with any new ones.

The old man pushed his key into the lock on the left end of the casket, then motioned for Zoe to do the same with her key to the lock on the right.

He met her eyes and actually winked at her. “Now we must both turn our keys simultaneously for the mechanism to work.”

“Okay,” Zoe said, feeling both a little silly and so curious she was about to burst.

The old man said, “One, two … now,” and they turned their keys. There was a soft click and the casket lid sprang open a quarter inch.

Zoe reached for it, but the old man stopped her. “Not yet. For this I must not be present. There is only one Keeper, and she is always a she. But then you knew that, of course.”

Zoe nodded, thinking of those names in her grandmother’s letter, Lena, Inna, Svetlana, Larina … And then she remembered something Anna Larina had told her only yesterday in San Francisco. How Lena Orlova liked to sing to her daughter when she was little, about being a blessed girl child from a proud, long line who wouldn’t be the last.

“Thank you, Boris.”

He crossed one arm over his waist and bowed slightly. “I wish you God speed. I fear that you will need it.”

He turned and pulled aside a smaller velvet curtain—purple this time—to reveal a plain oak door. “When you are ready to leave, it is best if you do so through here. You will find yourself in a small courtyard. To your right will be a wine bar, and if you go through it, you will emerge onto the Boulevard St.-Michel. If you’re of a mind to pause for a little libation and without making your wallet squeal too loudly, I can recommend the house Bordeaux.”

Zoe smiled. “May I buy you a glass after I’m done?”

He bowed again. “Thank you for the offer, but, sadly, I find that at my age the grape gives me the heartburn.”

He opened the blue curtain, said, “Good-bye, Katya Orlova’s granddaughter,” and disappeared behind it.

Z
OE WAS SO
excited now she was humming with it as she pushed open the casket’s domed lid and looked inside.

She saw something square, about the size and thickness of a hardback novel, wrapped tightly in a sealskin pouch. She lifted it out slowly, unwinding the thick, oily skin, and she gasped.

Inside the pouch was a Russian icon, and although her knowledge didn’t run nearly as deep as her mother’s, even she knew this one was exquisite and rare. And very old.

It was painted on a thick piece of wood, the image unlike anything she’d ever before seen. It filled her with both wonder and a supernatural fear. The Virgin Mary sat on a gilded throne with her hands folded around a silver cup fashioned in the shape of a human skull. But the Virgin’s face … Zoe couldn’t stop staring at her face. It had been painted centuries ago, but it was the same face Zoe saw looking back at her in the mirror every day of her life.

She could see now how the old man knew Lena Orlova was a Keeper the moment he saw her in that noodle shop.
She was the very image of the Lady. As are you
. The thought gave Zoe chills.

Could this icon be the altar of bones? Certainly in centuries past,
from superstitious peasants to the powerful czars, it was believed some icons could heal and work miracles. But surely no one would buy into such a thing today—at least not enough to kill for it. The icon was priceless, though, like a buried treasure, and if a clerk in a convenience store could be shot over twenty bucks, Zoe supposed an old lady could die trying to protect the secret of an icon worth millions.

Suddenly the shop seemed quiet, too quiet. Except for the ticking of the clocks. Zoe opened her mouth to call out to the old man, then shut it. She
felt
alone.

And she didn’t like it.

She looked at the icon again. It was starting to creep her out now, how the Virgin had her face. The skull cup was creepy, too. The Virgin and her throne seemed to be floating on a lake. On one side of her was a waterfall, on the other something that looked like a jumble of rocks. And the painting had been studded with jewels, but it was odd the way they were laid out, as if the artist had stuck them on with no plan of either symmetry or logic. Except for the ruby, which he’d put right in the middle of the skull’s forehead.

Ruby, sapphire, aquamarine, diamond, fire opal, iolite, onyx. Seven jewels, and no two of them the same. She didn’t know enough to assess their quality, but the ruby was as big as her pinkie. The other stones were smaller, though.

She stared at the Virgin’s face a moment longer, then wrapped the icon back up into its waterproof sealskin pouch and slipped it in her satchel. She was about to close the casket’s lid when she saw something else inside. It must have been lying underneath the icon.

Not until she took it out, though, did she make sense of what it was—a round, gray tin can of the type that was used for storing reels of 8 mm film. And sure enough, that’s what was inside it.

She unspooled the film a little and held it up to the light. She thought she could make out a little girl blowing out the candles of a birthday cake. She would need a projector to be sure, but she thought the little girl was her mother.

Zoe closed her eyes against the burn of sudden tears. To think this could be all Katya Orlova had left of the daughter she’d been forced to
abandon when she’d gone on the run for her life. Why hadn’t she just given up the icon? Zoe wondered. Surely no material thing, no matter how old and rare and valuable, was worth such a sacrifice.

Zoe put the reel of film in her satchel and stood up to go. Then she sat back down to check the casket one more time, to be sure it was empty. She ran her fingers over the bottom and sides and was only a little surprised when she exposed the corner of a photograph peeking out from a slit in the black satin lining.

She pulled the photograph out carefully, for it felt brittle to the touch. Oddly enough, though, it wasn’t all that old.

It was of a man and two women, both blondes, sitting in the booth of a restaurant somewhere. Zoe recognized the woman on the left as her grandmother, and it looked as if it had been taken a year or so after the one in front of the studio gate, for in this one her hair was longer, worn in a soft bob just past her shoulders. Zoe was also sure she knew the woman sitting next to her grandmother, but she couldn’t place her. The man in the photograph was extraordinarily handsome, with dark hair and a charming, bad-boy grin. He, too, looked familiar to Zoe, although much less so than the second blonde.

She turned the photograph over and saw writing on the back.
Mike and Marilyn and me at the Brown Derby, July ‘62
.

Marilyn … Zoe turned the photograph over, looked at it closer. The other woman in the booth had most of her platinum blond hair wrapped up in a scarf and she had little makeup on, but she looked like …

My God, it is. It’s Marilyn Monroe
.

Had her grandmother actually known Marilyn Monroe? Known her well enough to sit in a restaurant with her? But then she
had
worked for a movie studio, after all…. Still, it just seemed so amazing.

Zoe put the photograph into the sealskin pouch with the icon and the reel of film and stuffed it all back into her bulging satchel, then scraped back her chair and stood up.

“Au revoir, monsieur,”
she called out. She got no answer.

But as she pulled back the purple curtain and opened the door to the courtyard, the front of the shop exploded into a symphony of gongs and chimes and tinkles and bells.

Z
OE WOULDN’T
have known she was being followed if it hadn’t been for the fire-eater.

She came out of the wine bar back onto the Boulevard St.-Michel, as the old man had promised. A juggler and a man with a burning torch stood in front of a sidewalk café on the corner. The juggler tossed a balloon, a billiard ball, and a bowling ball from hand to hand, and he’d drawn quite a crowd. Zoe watched the street performance without really seeing it, while she tried to think what to do. She needed a hotel and some food. She needed sleep.