Last Snow (4 page)

As he lifted his glass, she said, “You’re not leaving, too, are you?”

He had learned early on not to lie to her; he’d needed to earn her trust. Besides, she was too quick to be gulled. “I’m not going with your father, no.”

A ghost of a smile played around her generous mouth. “Which means you’re going
somewhere
.” Her gaze slid slyly sideways. “What are you doing for him?”

“You know I can’t tell you.”

“Whatever it is it’s got to be more interesting than sitting around this dump.”

“I thought you liked it here.”

“Talking to Dad again? Didn’t your bullshit meter go off? The Russian boys are Neanderthals and the Russian girls are sluts—what’s to like?”

“There’s a lot of history here.”

“Which no one wants to talk about because it’s been entirely rewritten,” she said dryly. “I’m begging you, take me away from all this, Jack.”

“I wish I could, Alli, really.”

“Fuck. Fuck you!”

“Don’t be like that.”

“How would you like me to be?” Her eyes flashed. “Docile, meek, girlish?”

“Now you’re confusing me with your father.”

“How can you be friends with him?”

Then again, Jack thought, she could still be startlingly immature. “He’s a good man, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a good father.”

As quickly as her anger had sparked, it winked out. “Fuck.” But now her voice had softened. “I hate this life, Jack, really, it sucks beyond belief.”

“How can I make it better?”

She kissed him tenderly on the cheek. “If only.” Then she downed the last of her White Russian with such force the ice cubes clacked against her front teeth. “One day it’ll get better, or it won’t, right?”

She began to slide out of the banquette.

Against his better judgment, he said, “So how are you doing?”

Alli paused. “About as well as you.”

It was a smart answer, Jack thought, or else it was a smart-aleck answer. Maybe, knowing Alli, it was both. “That would have made Emma laugh.” Emma, who had been Alli’s roommate, best friend, confidante, and closest ally against Alli’s parents. “Remember the time I came to watch you in a relay race? You were the anchor, remember?”

“I remember.”

“She let me sit next to her and though she didn’t say a word I could see how proud of you she was. She didn’t get to her feet, she didn’t applaud like everyone else when you pulled away and won.”

Alli was quiet for some time as if lost in the past. “That night when I came back from celebrating, the room was dark and I thought she was asleep. I went into the bathroom and undressed as quietly as I could. As I got into bed I saw there was a small box lying on the blanket. I moved it into a bar of light slanting through the window. Inside was a leaping silver cat on a chain.

“As I held it up, she said, ‘It’s a cheetah, the fastest fucking animal
on four legs,’ and turned over and went to sleep.” Alli stood up. “I’ll never stop missing her and neither will you.”

He watched her walk away, but he was seeing Emma. Alli was right, he would never stop missing the daughter who he’d allowed to drift away from him, who’d called him right before she crashed her car into a tree and died on the spot. Although, improbably, there had been times afterward when she’d appeared to him, even talked to him.

Which opened up four possibilities: His extreme guilt had caused him to conjure her up from the depths of his unconscious, as the shrink he’d consulted suggested; he was insane; his dyslexic brain was playing tricks on him; or the incorporeal part of Emma had survived her physical death. Any one of those scenarios filled him with dread, but not for the same reasons. He wanted to believe that there was more to reality than life and death, which were, after all, man-made concepts. He wanted to believe that Emma still existed in some form. To him that was the definition of faith: to believe in something that science was unable to explain. When Emma had been killed he’d lost whatever faith he might have had; when she returned to him he’d regained it.

Alli and her escort had been swallowed up by the lobby, and he was alone in the bar. The hush of a mausoleum wrapped itself about the room. The lamps glimmered like shale in a riverbed. The snow tap-tap-tapped feebly against the windowpane, a starved beggar wanting in. He’d only taken a couple of sips of the cloying White Russian, and he pushed it away now. Catching the waiter between catnaps, he ordered a single-malt whisky with water on the side. Then he pulled out the slip of paper with Lloyd Berns’s itinerary in Ukraine and concentrated on reading it.

Jack’s dyslexia caused his brain to work thousands of times faster than what was considered normal. He could not understand, at least not easily, anything that wasn’t in three dimensions, which meant that he could solve a Rubik’s Cube in about ninety seconds, but
writing, which was two-dimensional, was an arduous task. He had to decipher it as if it were a foreign language or a code. He’d been taught to master his disability by a minister who’d sheltered him after he’d run away from his father, who had constantly beaten him for being unable to learn at school. It was only later, as an adult, that he had discovered that his dyslexia could be a devastating asset in deconstructing crime scenes and crawling inside asocial and psychotic minds.

He was running down the list of unfamiliar city and street names when he heard someone order a vodka in a voice as sharp as it was familiar. Glancing up from his task, he saw a young blonde in a black dress and high heels, perched on one of the bar stools. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail that reached to the hollow between her shoulder blades. Though that hairstyle was most often used by women with thin hair, this was not the case with the blonde, whose hair was as thick as it was lustrous. Her large, slightly uptilted eyes were the mineral color of carnelian. She had wide lips that might have been sensual had they not been down-turned in a distinctly unattractive scowl.

She was sitting beside another woman of approximately the same age, with dark hair and eyes, dressed in a flashy dress of hunter-green, which was so short most of her thighs were pearled by the light. When the blonde spoke again, Jack racked his brain as to where he’d heard that voice before.

The blonde tossed her head. “So I said, ‘I’ll see you in hell.’ ”

And Jack knew hers was the female voice from the room below him.

“Then I threw the lamp in his face and the bulb burned his cheek.”

The brunette laughed. “Fucker got off easy.”

“You bet,” the blonde with the carnelian eyes said. “If I see him again I swear I’ll kick his balls into the other side of Red Square.”

“Well, honey, here’s your chance,” her companion snickered.

The blonde turned toward the entrance and so did Jack. He saw a large, bearlike man with dark hair, oiled like an American gangster from the thirties. There was a ruddy burn on his cheek, no doubt from the lightbulb. He wore one of those gaudy silk suits that only Russians think are fashionable, a chunky gold watch, and an even chunkier gold pinkie ring. He held himself like Tony Soprano coming in heavy to a Mafia sit-down. Even Jack, who didn’t know him from a hole in the wall, wanted to kick his balls into the other side of Red Square.

The blonde swiveled around to face her lover, or ex-lover, who, as he came toward them, was leering at her. Jack could see, if no one else in the bar could, that there was going to be serious trouble. He wished he’d left with Alli, because he had no desire to get involved in a fight that was none of his business. On the other hand, as the Soprano wannabe moved, Jack glimpsed the butt of a 9mm pistol in a chamois shoulder holster in his left armpit. He edged to the end of the banquette and turned halfway outward, giving him a clear field to get to his feet quickly if the need arose.

The man sauntered up to where the blonde and her girlfriend sat. The blonde was swinging her left leg as if in time to unheard music. Jack could see her smiling, but the smile seemed wicked, deadly even. The man, cocksure and armed to the teeth, appeared oblivious to the bloodlust in her heart, or possibly he felt invulnerable meeting with her in this public space. After all, what would she dare do to him that he—or his 9mm—couldn’t handle?

He was about to say something to her when, with an upswing, she buried the toe of her high-heeled shoe in his groin. He grimaced, making a face not that different from his leer, and bent over almost double. Because he was on the man’s left side, Jack could see what the blonde couldn’t: Her lover reached for the 9mm.

Jack was out of the banquette. He took two long strides to the bar
and brought the edge of one hand down on the man’s hairy wrist. The gun clattered to the floor, the waiter jumped back, and the bartender signaled for security.

The blonde’s lover lunged clumsily past Jack, the fingers of his right hand grabbing the woman’s throat, throttling her. She gave a soft gurgle, like an infant at the breast. Jack punched the man in the throat, and that was the end of him or, more accurately, the fight in him. By that time, two of the hotel’s security team had arrived. One of them dragged the ex-lover away while the other picked up the 9mm with his bare hand. He seemed unconcerned with leaving his fingerprints. Obviously, they did things differently in Moscow, Jack thought, wondering fleetingly what the Russian crime scene unit was called. This thought took his mind off the murderous look the blonde’s ex-lover shot him as he was dragged away.

“Are you all right?” Jack said to the blonde, whose hands tentatively fingered her throat.

“Yes, thank you.”

He nodded, about to move away, when she added: “My name is Annika, and this is Jelena. We were about to go clubbing. Why don’t you join us?”

“It’s been a long day and I was just on my way up to my room.”

“Please. I’d like to repay your kindness.” She gestured at the empty stool beside her. “The least I can offer is a drink.”

Jack really wanted to get back to his room and prepare for the assignment he’d been given, but it would be rude to refuse. “One drink.”

She nodded. “One drink only. Then, if you like, I myself will escort you to the elevators. I’m staying here, too.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t help hearing the shouting match earlier this evening.”

She made a face. “Jelena said that everyone in the hotel must’ve heard Ivan and me.”

He sat on the indicated stool and nodded after the departing figures. “I guess we’ll need to give statements to the police.”

At this, both women laughed. “I see you haven’t been in Moscow long,” Jelena said. “The police are too busy shaking down businesses and taking American dollars from people like Annika’s boyfriend—”

“Ex-boyfriend,” Annika interjected. “
Very
ex.”

“Whatever.” Jelena shrugged. She spoke English with no foreign intonation at all, unlike Annika, whose English was freighted with a heavy Russian accent.

“I see you have no trouble talking to strangers.”

“If I did, I’d be out of a job,” Jelena said. “I handle the hotel’s overseas bookings.”

Annika signaled the bartender. “What will you have . . .”

“Jack,” he said. “Jack McClure.”

Annika nodded. “What’s your poison, Jack McClure?”

“Single malt,” Jack said to the bartender. “Oban, please.”

“Right away, sir.” The bartender went to retrieve the bottle of scotch.

“I hope you have a strong constitution, Mr. McClure.”

“Shut up, Jelena.” Annika shot her friend a daggered look before turning back to Jack. “Ignore her. She’s developed a lurid imagination from reading too many American thrillers.”

“I have no idea what the two of you are talking about.”

The bartender set his drink in front of him, then backed away as if they were all radiating plutonium.

“You might as well tell him, Annika.”

“That seems like a good idea,” he said, taking a sip of his Oban.

Annika sighed. “My ex—his name is Ivan Gurov—is a minor—and I stress
minor
—member of a Russian
grupperovka
.” Her eyes locked on his. “You know this word?”

Jack did. “He’s part of the Moscow mafia.”

“He’s a fucking criminal,” Jelena said with more emotion than she’d shown up until now.

“As you can see, Jack, Jelena didn’t approve of my involvement with Ivan.”

“He’s a bloodsucker,” Jelena said, clearly warming to the topic. “He’s trash washed up in the gutter, who’d as soon slit your throat as look twice at you. He gets more pleasure out of blood than vodka, that’s for sure.”

“My friend needs to learn to have an opinion,” Annika said with a good-natured laugh.

“And you need to watch out behind you,” Jelena said soberly. “You, too, Mr. McClure. I saw the look Ivan gave you.”

“I take it that means he won’t be thrown in jail.”

“His friends would see he got out in a heartbeat,” Annika said, “which is why the police won’t bother pursuing the matter.”

“More likely they don’t want to wind up in an alley with a bullet in the back of the head,” Jelena said. “They have a serious aversion to being taken out with the garbage.”

Jack took another sip of his scotch. “Count me in on that group.”