The White City (4 page)

When he tugged the interior door ajar, his eyes provided the answer: rather a few more than expected. Sight lines in the space were disrupted by a maze of two-thirds height display walls and only three or four people were immediately obvious, but warm, moist air and the murmur of voices spoke of a significant number of people just out of sight. A glance at the canvases hanging on those walls and the sculptures studding plinths told him that not all of them were there for Irina Stephanova, unless she managed an unlikely juxtaposition of art styles and media.

A coat check girl hurried to relieve Jack of his cold-weather armor, which he shed gratefully. The layers that proved so necessary outside were stifling within. It seemed that he’d scarcely handed over his coat when a glass of vodka replaced it in his hand, and a moment later a tray of blini laden with chopped egg and sour cream drifted past. No caviar, but that might have been a bit much to hope for. He folded a tender buckwheat crepe into his mouth with no complaints.

Irina Stephanova appeared at his left side. Her complexion concealed any flush, but by the brightness of her eyes the glass of vodka in her fingers was not her first. He bowed over her unburdened hand and kissed the air above it, so as not to leave behind lingering egg crumbs.

Nevertheless, she giggled. “Gospodin Priest, is good of you to come.”

“Miss—Belot…Belotserk…” An Englishman would have stumbled, and so Jack did too, though he was Czech by birth and had spent two years of his childhood in the most cosmopolitan of possible surroundings: the wampyr crèche from which Sebastien had purchased him.

She laughed. “Irina Stephanova,” she said. “Are we not friends now?”

“Then you must call me Jack,” he replied. “Surely these are not all yours?”

She collected and dismissed someone’s life’s work with a scoop and flip of her hand. “This crap?” She lingered over the English word as if it pleased her, childlike, delighted by her own temerity. Rolling the R as if letting it breathe out its essence across her tongue. “This is Ilya’s.”

Jack winced. It wasn’t bad, honestly—certainly not such
crap
as she characterized it. Still lifes, figure studies, a Moscow street scene with gray rain slanting across unpaved highways and one lone figure in a red coat just about to vanish around a building in the distance. “I wonder where he’s going.”

Irina sipped her vodka. “Probably to loo,” she said, and when Jack laughed, half-unwilling, “I know. I am mean woman.”

“Mean, funny woman,” he agreed.

She flashed her eyes at him over the lip of her glass.

“Who else is here?”

She took his arm, guiding him through the small white rooms. Filtered electric light—still rare in Moscow—cast shadowless illumination. He stopped to examine a bronze of a starved horse, its prickery mane thinning and bones staring through its scratched-dull coat. “Svetlana,” she said.

Jack smiled. “This is all your friends?”

She hesitated, releasing his elbow, and he wondered if perhaps he should not have used the word
friends
. But after a moment, she nodded crisply. —Yes. All. Grigor, darling.

Grigor turned, startled. He was drinking white wine, which Jack thought a strange choice for the bleak midwinter, and it splashed high in the glass. He didn’t spill it, though, and once he identified Irina, a broad grin broke across his face, revealing teeth stained with tea and streaked from the Russian habit of drinking it with sugar cubes clenched between them. —Sweetheart!

He reached out to her, a hand showing the pale band of a missing ring taking her shoulder and drawing her into a one-armed embrace while the other hand lifted his wine glass aside. Irina secured against his hip like a docked ship, he turned his attention to Jack. —And…Excuse me please, how are you called?

“Jack,” Jack said. “Jack Priest.” He extended a hand, amused to watch Grigor shuffle drink and girl until he could clasp it. —Congratulations on your show.

Grigor beamed. —A friend made it possible. A patron. He arranged the show.

He seemed to be watching Jack carefully when he said it, and Jack was not imagining the glare with which Irina favored Grigor.
The missing ring
. Grigor was a courtesan of the blood, or (given his naked hand) he had been, and Irina—disapproved? It bore watching.

—Your pieces are very good,— Jack said, latching on to the excuse not to stare Grigor in the face any longer.

Grigor’s style had something of an impressionist air, deeply saturated colors and great senses of place and air, billowing crags upon billowing skies. —Where is this? This is not near Moscow,— Jack asked, pointing to one long landscape that showed a gray cliff stark above blue water, scaling to an azure sky.

—Kjerag. Norway.— Grigor smiled. —Doesn’t it make you wish that you could fly?

Jack nodded, dry-mouthed—Grigor had captured some sense of the grandeur of the place, and when he looked up the artist was smiling.

—Is your brother here?— Jack asked, because it seemed polite, and he didn’t catch Irina’s wince and shake of her head until a moment too late.

But Grigor only winced too. —I am afraid Sacha prefers not to attend such things. But I will pass along that you thought of him.

There is something about this that Sacha does not approve of
, Jack translated. He kept his expression mild.

“Thank you,” Jack said, as Irina extricated herself from Grigor’s embrace and came around to take his arm again. “Have a good evening.”

Grigor seemed all smiles again as they left, but Jack was shaking his head. “I guess I put my foot in it that time.”

Irina stared at him blankly. “Put your…foot?”

“Was rude,” Jack clarified. She backed away, frowning. He didn’t think he knew how to express it in Russian, but the expression suddenly flashed to mind. “Nye kulturni.”

“Is family fight,” she said, with a shrug. “Nothing for you to know.”

Another gesture swept him up into her train. Jack smiled and followed through scattered men and women, singles and duos and small conversational knots. Irina Stephanova led him past the bar, where she refilled her own glass and procured one for him.

“Hey,” Jack said. When he had Irina Stephanova’s attention, he indicated a taller man with his eyes. “Is that Dmitri the waiter?”

She waved him away. —He paints. Not very well. He has nothing in this show.— Then she paused, and said grudgingly, “No passion, but technically proficient, I suppose. I did not tell you this, but—for lousy painter, he is very good forger.”

Jack made a face of surprise, and she grinned at him. “Forger?”

She shrugged. “Man must eat. He has elderly mother. Café does not pay very well, truly or no?”

Svetlana and Tania stood alongside them there—a brief relief, given Svetlana’s excellent English, but after a moment they turned away, summoned by a photographer to stand in front of one of Svetlana’s sculptures—a weary-looking woman, this time, her skirts rent about the hem. Jack watched, a bit bedazzled, as Svetlana bent Tania’s head back and kissed her for the camera, long and with apparent sincerity.

He raised his eyebrows at Irina.

Her expression as she handed him a glass of vodka could not have been more bland. “You are offended?”

“Not at all,” he said. A childhood spent in a wampyr crèche did not leave one easily open to shock. “Only a little surprised by their openness.”

Irina smiled. “They are surprising, yes.”

Jack gestured to Svetlana’s sculpture—wonderful, evocative, broken-spirited. “Does she make anything happy?”

Irina’s laugh was all in her eyes. “She is Russian.” She lifted her glass against his and intoned, — Na zdrovyeh.

—Na zdrovyeh.— Jack held the glass cupped left-handed, fumes stinging his eyes, and touched it to his lips just enough to let the unfamiliar sweet fire shimmer across his palate. Irina Stephanova seemed to be watching for his reaction, so he showed one—arched eyebrows and a gasp.

“Your first time?”

He nodded. He’d more sniffed than tasted the brandy the previous day. Nobody on the continent thought much of a young man taking beer or wine once in a while, and Sebastien less so than most. But Jack was ill-experienced with harsher spirits…or, to consider the subtext of Irina Stephanova’s question, with women. Sebastien protected his ward fiercely. Perhaps a little too fiercely, Jack thought, now that he was full sixteen years and—by most standards—a man.

Old enough to die in a war. Old enough to walk abroad in Europe’s war-weary cities unchaperoned. Not old enough for Sebastien to accept as a full-on member of his court, however.

If I bring home a lover
, Jack thought
, he’ll pretty much have to admit I’m grown.
His own ulterior motive shamed him and the lingering tingle of Irina’s remembered touch still warmed his palm; surely there were better reasons to want to know a pretty girl than using her to get into the bed of a thousand-year-old living dead man.

A pretty girl with skill
, Jack amended, as they came around another set of baffles and Irina Stephanova stopped, eyes bright, obviously waiting for his reaction. The walls on the left and the right sides held canvases of moderate size, but Jack did not register the subject matter beyond a riot of color and texture. He could not pull his eyes away from the wall before him, where one great square unframed canvas hung with three smaller but similarly propor-
tioned stacked each above another to its right. The image spread across all four seemed at first glance abstract, streaks and thicknesses of China reds and cobalt blues and the livid twilight purple they became when combined—
poison
, Jack thought, with the fragment of his mind that was doing anything except perceiving—but then he saw that it was a sunset, the silhouette of a wrecked ship canted on rocks before it dominating the lowest of the small canvases, its twisted masts and spars tilting to punctuate the lower right-hand corner of the great one.

Jack felt as if something in the painting reached out and closed fiery fingers around his heart.

—You painted these?

She could have taken offense, but instead she nodded, eyes dancing with silent laughter.

—You are a prodigy.— He wondered what she would think of Sebastien de Ulloa—wampyr, hobbyist detective, peculiar old soul.

Irina Stephanova sipped her vodka. “It will take one to know one. That is the English idiom, yes?”

—Yes.— Jack smiled. He could not have said which of her comments he was answering. He tasted the vodka again, instead: it went down smoother this time. He stole a glance at her soft, cold-cracked lower lip and wondered if he had the courage to kiss it, as Svetlana had kissed Tania. The image brought a fresh flush of heat through him, a tightening and prickling of private skin.

Kissing Irina—Not here, of course, in front of her admirers. But maybe a little later, over coffee and pastries in some café that did not cater to nihilists and revolutionaries.

He wondered what she would taste like. Girl, of course, but how did girls taste?

Okay, maybe he was interested in some things in addition to proving his adulthood to Sebastien.

He was still wondering about that when she raised her gaze to glance over his shoulder and stiffened. Jack had seen that expression often enough on courtiers—never those of Sebastien’s court, but those of the courts of other brothers and sisters of the blood—to know before he turned that whoever approached behind him, it was somebody who played predator to Irina Stephanova’s prey. He stepped away from her and turned, to meet the enemy face to face.

Or face to lapel, rather. To say that Jack was not tall would be a kind understatement; Irina Stephanova had inches as well as years on him, and she was no giantess. So the man who had come up behind Jack didn’t need to be tall to tower over him.

But it helped.

—Sergei Nikolaevich,— Irina Stephanova said, squaring her shoulders. —I did not invite you.

Whatever Sergei Nikolaevich answered it was in Russian too fast and blurred for Jack to follow, but Jack took the opportunity of his speech to examine the man’s face. He was young, not too much older than Irina, with the colorless hair and gray complexion that Jack had thought of as iconically Russian until he came here and saw what the people actually looked like.

He wore a black felted wool suitcoat with a Mandarin collar, Milan fashion from three years previous and so all the rage in Moscow now. Pocked slabs of cheek hung over it, ending in a stern jaw that was currently elevated in belligerence. His eyes were filmed and dull. He looked ill or impassioned or perhaps very drunk—waxy, sweating, fine locks of hair adhered to his forehead, with all the blood fallen out of his face. He weaved a little on his feet, but public drunkenness was no surprise in a Moscow winter.

Jack understood what Irina said, however—perhaps because she spoke so slowly and clearly: —His canvases are at the other end of the building. Someone can direct you. What a pity
you
didn’t have anything selected this time. Was Starkad tired of you?

She began to turn away until Sergei Nikolaevich dropped a neatly manicured hand on her sleeve. He swayed, but Jack couldn’t detect the reek of alcohol on him. Possibly the vodka Jack had drunk had destroyed his own sense of smell.

Irina glared at the hand and Jack stepped forward.

“Pardon me,” he said in English, trusting his tone to carry the intention. “I don’t think the lady likes that.”

Sergei Nikolaevich puffed up like a mastiff, but before he could do or say whatever he was working himself up to Irina pushed his hand off her arm and stepped back. Now what she said was low and snaky, and Jack couldn’t follow it. But either Irina’s words, Jack’s glare, or the fact that they were drawing a crowd was enough to make Sergei withdraw, headshaking, back the way he had come. Irina watched him go, puffed up like a cat that has just stared down a big dog, breathing high and tight through her nose.

—Boyfriend?— Jack asked, when he was out of earshot.

Irina shook herself out of her half-trance. Ruefully, she looked at the glass of vodka in her hand. It had mostly spilled over her fingers, but she knocked back what was left. With his own glass, Jack imitated her. Head spinning, he regretted it.