Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (58 page)

On the cracked countertop there was a bottle of wine—red and breathing out in dark, fragrant notes—pomegranates and deepest crimson grapes, the ones whose juice poured forth like fresh spilled blood. She had already poured a glass for him and left it waiting. He drank as he was meant to, for it was part of the game. It was delicious, tasting of Georgian earth and Saperavi grapes and the deep undernotes of the vessels it was aged in, the ancient clay of the
kvevri
. It was as heady as liquid roses on his tongue. He wondered where she had sourced it, what deeds had been committed to bring it here to this godforsaken hole. He drank it like a Georgian, swiftly to the dregs and then poured himself another glass, taking a slow contemplative swallow, before walking through to the bedroom.

On the bedside table was a bowl of white peaches, a sharp silver knife beside them, waiting to quarter and bleed them. Their delicate flesh was veined with coral and garnet, their perfume heady as opium. He knew well enough their purpose, nestled there in their lacquered bowl, for he had taught her this particular pleasure. An open jar of honey glinted crimson-gold in the firelight. Oh yes, he had schooled her well. Too well, perhaps. He still had a bruise on his face from their last encounter.

She was already on the bed, naked. The sheets were clean, candles blazing in profusion, lighting the entire place with a rubescent glow. She was a study in red: red lips, parted in carnal expectation, lower lips suffused within the claret hair, breasts tipped vermilion with a generous brush, full and aroused in the cherry coal light which spilled from the stove and lent its carnelian flush to her skin. Her hair was loose, fanned across the clean pillows like flames burning the cheap cotton. She was desirable and his body, despite his mind’s aversion, took this in and did with it what it would. He had become a whore, knowing that whether the ends justified the means or not, he was still whoring his body to keep his soul intact. At some point, as he knew from previous experience, his soul would present him with a bill for that fractured wholeness.

In the extremes of blind need, there comes a place where thought is obliterated and all is sense and feeling. But after—when the body loosens its hold and the mind reasserts itself along grey pathways—comes regret, fine as soft falling snow at first, but building until, like the avalanche, it breaks and suffocates. There was, however, no room for such a luxury as regret in the Soviet Union. The obliterating of history had eliminated the need for regret, for without a personal history, how could one have regret? How could one experience such a thing when one was no longer a self, but merely part of a machine, a nameless cog without a voice?

The bill, he knew, would only be sent from his depths when and if he found his way home, and so until then he would keep running up the cost, for he might never survive to pay the debtor.

He allowed nothing of his own world to come here, not even the life of the camp outside these walls. He made of his mind a compartment, and within it there was no one he loved, no places of familiarity, no memories of other bodies touched, nor eyes met, nor thoughts enjoined. He was merely a vessel.

He had been tutored in the arts of lovemaking long ago by women far more sophisticated than this one. He knew how to touch, how to play upon the skin and the nerves until his partner cried with need and want. He knew when to stop and when to begin again, and again, and again. He knew how to ruin her for all other men who would share her bed after him. It was his small revenge and he did it with precision and great skill. He also did it with hatred, the one thing he had allowed into the vessel, into the compartment emptied of self—hatred for her, and for himself. It added an element to the events that she responded to with vigor, and his body, barren in all but sensation, understood and replied.

He watched her now, his own clothing shed, appreciating with the male eye what her female form offered—the narrow waist and full breasts, the hips already tilting upward in expectation of what he had been ordered to bring.

He joined her on the bed and did what he had been contracted to do.

He had committed the cardinal sin
. He had fallen asleep in her bed, something that was not permissible and foolhardy in the extreme. He awoke to confusion and an awareness that the fire must have burned down hours before for it was cold in the hut, frost already forming on the inside of the logs. The light was no longer in hues of red, but those of dawn—blue and violet, ash and mist. His head felt unnaturally heavy and he remembered the wine dimly, tasting of flowers and smoke and dark Georgian earth. It had soured in his mouth through the night and now mixed with the peaches and honey in a rancid brew.

The silence was thick in the small room and he tried to remember how long Isay was meant to be away. He hoped there was enough darkness left to to hide his return to his hut. He tried to raise his head and found it seemed to be filled with molten lead, his arm stuck to the sheet by a substance he could not define, for his vision was swimming with dark spots.

He smelled the blood before he saw it. The rank copper stink was unmistakable, as was the cold, clammy feel of it under his body, on his body, everywhere. He sat up, waiting for the dark swimming in his head to stop.

She was still in the bed, and ‘still’ was the operative term. She was motionless with the sort of cold flaccidity that only came with death. Her throat was a scarlet slash, clotted around the edges to a crusted black, her skin blue and flaccid. Her hair too had been drenched in blood, was stiff and dull with it. He himself was covered in blood—all hers presumably, for he felt no mortal wounds in his own flesh. In fact, other than a headache, he felt as if all his parts were intact.

He stood, legs wobbly and stomach surging. He had to get out of here, wash the blood off, he had to… his thoughts trailed off here… had to do what? There was nowhere to run and certainly no place to hide. The knife was on the bed. He had been lying on it, for he could feel the imprint of the handle in his hip as his senses began to return. He had been drugged—Svetlana too, or she would have fought. There was no other way for him to have slept through this carnage and he had clearly been meant to sleep through it. But who and why? Everyone hated the woman, but she was merely the devil they knew, and no one fretted about that too much. Except for her husband. The bottom of his stomach dropped out. If Isay had done this, he meant for Jamie to hang for it.

He stumbled to the bureau, cracked the ice on the basin of water and splashed it on his face. He needed to clear his head, to think, though it wouldn’t matter if he had a map to the labyrinth he was currently in, he could not see his way out. He was naked, covered in Svetlana’s blood and the knife would have his fingerprints all over it. Not that it mattered because there wouldn’t be any testing, or even a pretense at charges or a trial. He was already dead if that was Isay’s desire.

He looked at her, mouth slack, death’s blue mottling her skin and suffusing her face. He wanted to feel pity for her, for the fact that she had once been human, but inside he only felt terribly hollow.

There was a noise at the door, a sound of footsteps in the kitchen and Jamie froze, the drug still carrying him in its clutch but starting to ebb with the effects of cold and adrenaline.

Gregor’s head came through the doorway of the bedroom a second later. “Volodya sent me to find you. I was certain this was where… fuck.”

“Agreed,” Jamie said, putting a hand to his head and wishing the spinning would stop. Of all the people who might have found him, he was somehow relieved that it had been Gregor. Dangerous he might be, but he would not be afraid.

“Yasha?”

Jamie answered the unspoken question in the dark eyes. “No, I did not kill her, though I am fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds given the circumstances.”

“If you say you did not do it, I then believe you. Whoever did that…” Gregor nodded toward the blood-soaked bed and the terrible gaping throat, “hated her very much.”

The name was there between them, the thought as clear as the knife that still lay upon the bed. Who, other than her husband, could hate this woman this much?

“Wash the blood off your body,” Gregor said. “I am going to find you some clothes.”

Jamie looked in consternation at his own clothes. They lay stiff and maroon with dried blood where he had dropped them by the bed. His head whirled, trying to find the thread that would unravel the horrific tapestry of the previous night. He remembered drinking the wine, getting into the bed with her, and he would swear neither of them had been drugged at that point. So the wine was not the culprit. Which left only the peaches and the honey. They had spilled at some point and mixed with the blood when it was still hot and pulsing with life. The blood was gelling now, fixed incarnadine tributaries that branched from the river of her throat.

They had both partaken of the peaches and honey, and considering just
how
they had partaken of them, the drug would have hit Svetlana first and doubly hard. Another roil of nausea twisted in his guts and he bit back hard on it.

Gregor returned posthaste with a set of clean prison garb.

Jamie attempted to put the pants on and would have toppled over had Gregor not caught him by the elbow. Gregor merely took the pants, steadied Jamie and dressed him as though he were a particularly hapless three-year-old—admittedly, a fair summation of his current state.

“Who told you to come to her last night?”

“She did… I think. Or… it was understood.” His memory seemed to be a slippery thing, like a frog sliding over ice unable to find any traction to force a direction. “I—I don’t remember things very well right now.”

Gregor fixed him with a dark, hard look that bade him pay attention.

“You see,” Gregor said slowly and Jamie, through the torpor of the drug, understood there were two levels of conversation going on, “it snowed last night, but there are no tracks in the snow. It is pure out there, though melting now. So, you see, Yasha, things do not look very good for you.”

Jamie squinted at him, trying to clear his vision. And suddenly he understood. If he didn’t kill Svetlana, and there were no tracks outside the hut, then whoever had killed her had been here when he arrived, and was still here in the cabin. What exactly they were to do about it was another matter altogether.

“I have muddied the snow outside so that they cannot tell how many came or went. But now, Yasha, I think you should go. Take this and drink it.” Gregor thrust his daily flask of vodka-laced
chifir
at Jamie. “It will clear your head. You cut your quota and keep your silence. I will see you tonight.”

“But…” Jamie protested. Gregor cut him off immediately, the hard
vor
showing clearly in his face and tone.

“Do as I say, Yasha. If you want to keep breathing, just do as I say for fuck sake.”

When Jamie walked out into the cold still of the camp, nothing moved. The entire world appeared lifeless, suspended. The guards and the crew were leaving and he fell into their ranks as though it were a normal morning, under a normal grey Soviet sky. The cold not as severe today but enough to help cut into the fog of his drug-addled wits.

The day in the forest was exceptionally long. Later, Jamie could not remember it. He simply cut and cut, and obeyed Nikolai’s every grunted command. His head slowly cleared as the drug, whatever it had been, wore off. The bleary memory and pounding head pointed to barbiturates of some sort. No one commented on Gregor’s absence and Jamie was certain more than one surreptitious glance was directed his way that day, though it may have been his imagination, for he felt as though there was blood in every line of his skin, stinking, declaiming a guilt he could not remember.

When they returned to the camp in the thick twilight, snow was falling again, and the camp was deathly quiet. Jamie had tensed in expectation of lights and military police, barking dogs, and a swift answer to just what the consequences of Svetlana’s death were going to be.

Gregor met him outside his own hut, where Jamie was surprised to find himself having made it so far unmolested.

“It is fixed,” Gregor said, offering him a cigarette as though they were talking about a dog race, not the murder of a woman whose bed he had been sharing on a regular basis. Jamie took the cigarette, in need of any sort of calming device.

“How the hell can it be fixed?” he hissed at Gregor’s dark, stoic expression.

Gregor took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out before answering. “Both you and I know, Yasha, who really killed her. He was hiding in the closet the whole time. He admitted that he drugged the honey and watched the two of you until you passed out.”

Jamie felt a chill of another variety pass through him, as he remembered snapshots of the night before. He had hated the woman but physically they had not held back with one another. He felt sick.

This tiny corner of the universe was lawless. He knew that in most camps he would be dead already, without any sort of charge or trial or even a pretense of wondering at his guilt. And there was guilt, for if he had not gone to her bed repeatedly, this would not have happened. It didn’t seem to matter that he had not had a choice in the original decision, for he had understood what the consequences would have to be. There had been something dark hanging there in the air between them before she had ever laid a hand on him.