Altar of Bones (31 page)

Zoe hadn’t been able to cry earlier over the old man’s death, but now tears suddenly flooded her eyes and she had to look away. “Do you have to say it like that, like it’s just another day on the job? His name was Boris, and he was sweet, and the ponytailed man cut out his eye.”

Sergei, or Ry, or whatever his name was, said nothing.

“Maybe you were there, too. Maybe you helped him do it.”

“You don’t believe that.”

She leaned back so she could study him again, from head to toe. “You really aren’t a true
vors
, are you? In spite of your gutter Russian and that tattoo you’ve got on your arm.”

“The tat’s real. I earned it in a Tajikistan prison cell, but that story is for another day. What did you do with the film? Put it in a safe-deposit box?”

“Such aptly named things—safe-deposit boxes. As in safe from guys like you and Ms. CIA and Mr. Ponytail. Well, it’s the icon that he seems to want.” She waved a hand. “But details, details.”

“We need to take a look at that film, Zoe.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t like that movie from a while back—the one with Naomi Watts.
The Ring
? Once you look at it you die.”

“You don’t have to look at it to be killed.”

Zoe said nothing. The church was dark and silent and cold, like the proverbial grave, she thought.

“You know what’s on it, don’t you?” she said. “On the film.”

“Yes. But I need to see it.”

Zoe blew out her breath in a sigh. “Oookay. So why don’t we just bop on down to the nearest video store? I’m sure they have one of those old-fashioned projectors we can rent. On the shelf right next to all the Betamaxes.”

His mouth did the twisting thing again. “It so happens I know a guy whose hobby is collecting prints of old, uh, movies.”

“Porn, you mean?”

“Not all of it’s porn. Anyway, he owns the kind of projector we need, and that’s where I went this morning—to his place to pick it up.”

“And left me handcuffed to the bed.”

“Using the best, state-of-the-art handcuffs, by the way. And being stupid enough to leave the film behind, too. Man I waaaay underestimated you there.”

“I’ll choose to take that as a compliment.”

“It was meant as one…. Look, I’ll make you a deal. We go back to the apartment and watch your grandmother’s movie, and afterward if you want to take it and walk out the door, I won’t stop you.”

Zoe sat in silence a moment, then said, “I wouldn’t even make it as far as the airport alive, would I?”

“Probably not.”

Z
OE GOT THE
film and her icon out of the safe-deposit box, and they crossed the river to the Île St.-Louis and the apartment of Sergei’s … of Ry O’Malley’s friend. The projector was there. He’d told the truth about that at least.

They took a couple of hunting prints off the wall to clear a space. Zoe let him handle the film, since he seemed to know what he was doing, threading it through sprockets and around spools. She pulled the shade down over the window, darkening the room.

She felt an odd mixture of excitement and dread. She knew what she was about to see would probably change her life forever. But her life was already changed, her life was already in danger, and at least now she would be getting some answers.

And once she saw what was on the film, maybe she’d know better how to handle Sergei … Ry. And all the rest of the hunters.

The projector was noisy, with a whirring fan, and the film made a clatter as it fed through the sprockets. Black marks danced on the wall and suddenly there was her mother’s face, close-up, a big grin splitting her small mouth. Her eighth birthday party, according to the brightly penned banner across the wall behind her. She pointed to her cake with its flaming eight candles, frosted white, but Zoe knew it was chocolate inside, her mother’s favorite, her own favorite.

And there was her grandmother Katya, so pretty, so happy, almost dancing around the table. It was like seeing herself, dressed up in a play, how much she looked like the two of them.

They watched the girl blow out the candles on her birthday cake and open her presents. Katya was always there, helping to untangle a bow, adjusting a paper hat. Zoe tried to imagine what awful thing had driven this seemingly adoring mother to abandon her child, but she couldn’t. And who was the person behind the camera? The stepfather Anna Larina could barely remember?

The birthday party faded to white, more black sprocket marks danced on the wall.

Then suddenly, a splash of color. Blue …

T
HE CAMERA
pans along a wide boulevard, buildings on one side, a park of sorts on the other, the sun shining beneath the big blue bowl of a sky. And there are people and they’re cheering, although you can’t hear them. Motorcycle cops and cars are driving slowly toward the camera, a cavalcade
.

Suddenly the lens zooms in on a dark blue stretch Lincoln convertible with American flags flapping on its fenders. Two men are sitting in the front seat, a couple in the middle seat, and another couple in the back, and they’re smiling and waving to the crowds lining the sidewalks
.

The camera closes in on one face. His thick hair is shining in the sun, his large white teeth are flashing
.

It is John Fitzgerald Kennedy
.

The camera moves slowly as Kennedy turns his head and looks at the woman beside him. It is the first lady, Jackie, wearing a pink suit and her trademark pillbox hat. They seem to share a moment of what? Intimacy? Triumph? The camera rests on both their faces and they are so alive, so beautiful. They look on top of the world
.

But the camera is veering away from them now, leaving the motorcade in the distance, panning over a curved, white pergola, its columns looking classically Greek and a bit strange under the bright Texas sun. Then leafless early-winter trees come into sharp focus, and globe streetlights along an open grassy knoll. The crowd is sparser here, almost eerily calm as they wait for the motorcade to pass by
.

The camera lingers awhile on a handsome, bareheaded man, all dapper in a dark suit, standing next to a freeway sign. He carries an umbrella in the crook of his arm, odd for there is not a cloud in the sky, but now the camera is leaving him, moving on to an all-American family who could have walked straight out
of the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. The mother looking Jackie-like in her red, sleeveless shift dress and matching red heels, the father holding his boy on his shoulders, telling him, maybe, how he is going to remember this day forever. The day he saw the president of the United States of America
.

The camera jumps now, over to a wooden picket fence that separates the grassy knoll from what looks to be a parking lot near a railroad yard. Stopping suddenly to focus on a man in a brown suit and a hat who is standing behind the fence, using it as a blind, because he has a rifle in his hands
.

The camera is resting on his profile, studying his thoughtful expression, when the man suddenly turns and stares directly into the lens, and his eyes light up, as if he knows he’s the star in this macabre home movie and he wants everyone else to know it, too. But after a moment his face hardens, turns cruel, and he looks away, back toward the grassy knoll
.

Slowly, he brings the rifle to his shoulder and sights down the barrel
.

Then it’s all a blur—pergola, trees, grass, asphalt, people—nothing but a whirling kaleidoscope of color until the camera freezes again on the dapper man with the umbrella. The man seems tense, waiting for something. Suddenly, he snaps open the umbrella and raises it high above his head. Is it a signal to the man with the rifle? Because the camera is jumping now, down the street, and the president’s car is coming into view, closer and closer. The camera zooms in on that famous, smiling face, locking in so close it fills the apartment wall
.

He looks happy, he’s playing to the crowd, loving the adulation, the cheers. Then his hand stops in midwave, and he half turns to Jackie. Has he heard something? Seen something?

Suddenly, he reaches up and clutches at his throat with both hands. He looks so surprised, and Jackie is reacting now, too, glancing over at her husband, not understanding what has already happened, what else is going to happen soon now. Then she understands and horror twists her face
.

The driver, too, is turning to look over his shoulder and the car is slowing, slowing, stopping …

And the president’s head explodes in a red mist and pieces of something white—is it his skull?—are flying through the air
.

The camera jerks, then quickly moves over the crowd, recording the hysteria, the terror, the screaming mouths making no sound. Then the camera shifts back to the Lincoln as it madly picks up speed, and a Secret Service agent is
running alongside it, jumping onto the trunk, where a piece of the president’s skull has landed, and where Jackie, in her bright pink suit and pillbox hat, is climbing out to get it, as if all she has to do is stick it back on and he will be whole again
.

The camera closes in on the president, slumped over onto the seat, no longer moving. It lingers on him, almost lovingly, almost with a mad flourish, as if to show—
Look, he’s dead, just look, the back of his head is gone.

And then the camera, as if suddenly repelled, jerks away from the carnage, back to the killer just as he is stooping to pick up the spent shell casings. As he straightens, he looks directly into the lens, and he grins really big, like
, Fuck you, I got it done, didn’t I?

Then he spins away and runs toward another man who’s standing, waiting, a man in some kind of uniform. Not a cop, though, for he has on pin-striped overalls and a beaked cap, like a railroad worker in a children’s book. The assassin pitches the gun to him as he passes, then he disappears out of the scene
.

The camera records every movement of the man in the overalls as he breaks down the rifle, smooth and fast, putting it in a toolbox, and then he is walking along the railroad tracks toward some parked boxcars
.

Slowly, the boxcars fade to white
.

Z
OE STARED
at the blank wall, as the tail end of the film flapped around and around on the spinning spool. Her brain refused to work, but her mouth did.

“Holy bejesus.”

She kept looking at the wall, as if expecting it to show her more, to continue with the carnage, to show her Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest and his murder by Jack Ruby, maybe show LBJ getting sworn in as president with Jackie in her bloodstained pink suit standing blank-faced beside him.

But there was nothing more. It was over and she’d witnessed history. The real history, not the cooked-up report of the Warren Commission.

She looked at Ry, who stood motionless, staring just as she had at the now blank wall. Then his hand came up, startling her, and she jerked back. But he was only reaching for the switch on the projector to shut it off.