“Yes, I’m fine.”
Alessandro nibbled at his cone. “What do you—”
“Or go out, if you want to. Out to a club, I mean.” Nicholas raised his hand to his lover’s back, aware (with the slim fraction of his mind that he allowed to think about it) that Alessandro would be secretly relieved by this sanction but would have to pretend not to have had the thought. A thin grimalkin disappeared beneath a fat black car. To hasten the process, Nicholas turned to face Alessandro and found his most conciliatory tone. “I’m serious. I’m no good tonight. Go. Phone your friends and have fun. I don’t mind. Really.”
Alessandro was now at a loss. His earlier reading of the evening was melting with the last of his ice cream. Yet still he was beset by the urgent need to achieve his goal while everything remained possible. He bent his head childishly toward Nicholas’s chest, a gesture executed for no better reason than to buy time in which to decide whether or not now was the moment to ask. Oh God. No. No—discretion was the better part of, he thought, best to leave it. Best not to risk it. And so why not? Why not go out? After all, maybe Nicholas actually wanted to be alone. A bonus evening! But best not to get back too late and better make sure nothing happened. God, the old general might even cry in the night, and he’d really better be there for that.
Nicholas fed him what was left of his own ice cream, wanting the whole charade over quickly, wanting to save Alessandro even the necessity of saying anything else, wanting desperately to be alone. “There’s a cab coming. I’ll stop it for you. Here, take…” He reached for his wallet.
Alessandro would have liked to have changed but realized that the delay would seriously annoy Nicholas. He patted his pocket, seeking the reassurance of his mobile phone. “Are you sure, Nicholas? I mean, I am happy—I had no plans to—”
“I’m probably going to walk… down to Notre Dame or something.”
“That will be nice. Clear your head.”
“Yes.”
Alessandro accepted the money with studied casualness.
The cab pulled up and wallowed by the curb.
“I won’t be late.” Alessandro kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them on Nicholas’s cheek.
And Nicholas turned back to the river.
The Seine was as dark as history itself, and only the faint sound of its lapping at the embankment below gave the lie to its seeming stillness. Nicholas leaned forward onto the stone wall so that he could see down to the narrow bank-side path. The trees had been pollarded that afternoon and the night air was scented still with sap. He raised his eyes. The severed branches like great misshapen agonized limbs. And above them, the brightest of the stars—names he had learned and forgotten, learned and forgotten—needling their pinpoint antiquity through the city sky. Paris would be cooler tonight. But he knew he would not be able to sleep, and he knew that neither whisky nor coupling would help. For the first time in more than thirty years, Nicholas wanted the company of his blood—not the amicable converse of friendship, not the parley of a lover, but the marrow-talk of kin and consanguinity.
But there was no kin anymore. No kin save for Gabriel and Isabella, and neither, he knew well, could be persuaded to say so much as a single word to him, even were he to pay them in sweat or tears—not in letter, not by telephone, and never again in person. And he could not blame them. He had never once tried to talk to them.
Though wasn’t it true that he had not been allowed to talk to them? Not about anything that really counted. Masha had strictly forbidden it. And she was their great protectress. (In some way, he thought, her Russian pride actually measured its strength by keeping secrets.) Then again, he could never quite be trusted. Whatever the cause—fatally distracted, indifferent, drunk, indolent, dissipated, dissolute, or preoccupied, he knew not what—the fact was that he had surrendered all familial sway to her in return for his savage freedom. Ah, grandest of all ironies: that she had been the one to care for them—their minds, their health, their hearts, the well-being of their twin susceptible souls. And thank God, for that was perhaps the only noble act in his entire life that he had managed to stand by. But still, perhaps a call… No. It was too late, and there was no way to begin. Profoundly, Gabriel and Isabella did not understand him, did not know him—neither as a man nor as a human being. Did not even know who he really was. After all these years… Christ, the bloody madness of it all. The bloody mess.
He stood up straight and walked another few yards, eyes tracking from one lighted window to the next. He suspected himself of maudlin self-indulgence. But the truth was, he had not thought it would affect him. Or not like this. His own tedious egotism, he knew, was causing the forefront of his mind to think about her death as a prelude to his own. But deeper than that, behind the facile and the obvious, there was something else, something intangible but real and hitherto unperceived: a hollowness he had not known the shape of before; a hollowness where his conscience should have been, perhaps. And somehow this emptiness, though composed of nothing, had prickled and tremored through the day like some forgotten disease. Slight but certain. Hardly anything. Nothing.
He turned back to the river and now—as a nameless night barge came stealing by, floodlights fore, freight unknown—now her face came back to him, not as he had last seen her but young: black, black hair, those wide turquoise eyes full of tenacity and temerity, the easy disparagement of her cheekbones, the thin cracked lips, the high-bridged nose, the proportions of her frame, taut, wiry, flat-chested (the better to wear her impenetrable breastplate in battle, he had realized)—she struck him in this moment’s vision as if she were some princess of the tundra come south for obscure reprisals.
He looked up. Two lovers were walking toward him, the young man with his arm strong around the woman, seeking the Seine’s blessing and a quiet place to kiss. They stopped a little way along, his hand on the contour of her body. Ah… now this he did understand. The sweet mercy of lust. The day’s anxiety was but a passing mood after all. And what was conscience but mood wearing a uniform?
10
The Chernobyl Mongeese
Barbara was busy amid the flurry and congestion of the ticket desk but she waved him through over the heads of the people in the queue. He was a regular at Fish, though less and less these days, and she had once been his student. He passed inside, inching like a stick insect along the bare wall of the congested corridor, excusing himself in Russian as he entered the cavernous main room, treading gingerly around stretched-out legs and vulnerable hands spread on the floor, squeezing between chairs, picking his way toward the miniature wooden table that was reserved (as promised by Sergei, the manager) in the center of the second row, directly beneath the low vertex of the brickwork arch above his head. Here the acoustics were as good as the room allowed.
He sat down, shut his eyes a moment, then opened the complimentary mineral water provided, which of course was neither complimentary nor mineral—Sergei’s “table tax” and the back-room tap giving the lie to both claims. But there was no chance of attaining the body-soaked bar, all the way at the far end of the room. So he took a deep gulp.
Now that he was alone, his mind scrambled to reach a clear understanding of what the news meant—for Arkady, but also for himself. The source was depressingly reliable: Grisha, messenger (dealer) for and associate (henchman) of the even more indeterminately extracted Leary—full name Learichenko—the syndicate-sanctioned regional controller of all matters poppy in Petersburg and the man who usually knew most things most often most quickly. Yes, Maria Glover was definitely dead. No doubt about it. Presumably, therefore, Grisha (and so Leary) thought that he, Henry, was also living off Maria Glover and that her death was the blow that would send him into their arms.