Grisha blinked. Karpov was a spymaster? They chartered Pravda~ for a debriefing session? It did make sense, after a fashion.
“No!” Karpov’s surprise carried clearly over the tiny earphone.
“Perhaps we should pay them less?”
“At least she provides us with accurate information. She told me there is softening about us in the western republics.”
“Didn’t you just come through California?”
“Yes. But our man in San Francisco spends all of his money on cannabis cigarettes, which makes him useless for days at a time. All he wanted to do was make love and eat.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Make love with him.”
“That is none of your svinia affair.”
“It used to be.”
Something thumped on the table, and Grisha realized Karpov had been drinking vodka throughout the debriefing.
“Not anymore, Nikki. You’re just not my type.”
“You’d sleep with our Creole captain, I saw it in your eyes.”
“He is pretty to look at, but he holds no interest for me beyond the objectives of our voyage. I am weary of men and their strutting and crowing.”
“You prefer women to sleep with, is what you mean?”
Valari stomped up the companionway. Grisha’s heart lurched as he jerked the tiny phone from his ear and hastily stuffed the wires back into their hidden compartment. She stormed past before he could shut the false molding, but she had eyes only for her anger and the passing scenery.
“That bastard is such a svinia, a pig!” she said in a hissing voice.
“Someday I will kill him.”
“I believe he dropped out of finishing school,” Grisha said in a theatrical Californian accent. He quietly pushed the small door shut. The molding blended with the rest of the console. He wondered what she meant by
“the objectives of our voyage.”
When Valari laughed she almost looked pretty. “You’re married, aren’t you?”
The question caught him off guard.
“At the moment.”
“I’ve been out of the country for two years. What does ‘at the moment’ mean? Is it a marriage of convenience to obtain citizenship papers?”
“No. It means that at any moment she is going to leave me for another man.”
“Oh.”
Grisha made a show of checking his charts. He glanced at his watch and immediately powered up the radio.
“…move across the Alexandr Archipelago by nightfall. Thirty-knot winds increasing to forty to fifty knots by morning. Seas two to three meters. For the outside waters, Dixon Entrance to Christian Sound, smallcraft warning. Seas two to four meters. West winds forty knots increasing to fifty-five by morning—”
Grisha snapped off the radio and peered at the horizon. A dark line rapidly moved out of the west, staining the abnormal blue sky back to familiar tones.
“We’re in for some rough weather,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “Are we in any danger?”
He tried to laugh, but even to him it sounded more like a bark.
“One is always in danger in Russian Amerika, one way or another.”
“Is this one of your pithy Native American sayings?”
“It’s truth, like my boat.”
“How can a boat be truth?” she asked with more than a hint of angry sarcasm.
“How can it be a lie?”
Karpov emerged from the cabin, vodka bottle in hand. “I’m hungry.”
A gust of cold wind heeled the boat over to starboard. The temperature dropped ten degrees in as many seconds.
Karpov braced himself and stared out at the rapidly advancing weather.
“Storm?” he said in a small voice.
Grisha started to smile at their discomfort but stopped himself. It would not do to laugh at the wind.
“Da,” he said.
Karpov hastily drank from the bottle. He peered at Valari.
“You will go below with me, now.”
She scowled back. “In the Amerikas they have the perfect expression for someone like you. Would you like to know it?”
Karpov quietly stared at her, eyes hidden in wrinkled folds of skin.
“Go fuck yourself, is what they say. I think you should do that now.”
With surprising speed he lunged forward and slapped her open-handed. Her head smacked against the bulkhead with a solid thunk and she emitted a startled yell.
“Hey!” Grisha shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Karpov turned to face him. His English had gained polish. “This is none of your concern, Captain Grigorievich. You are being well paid. You will drive the boat and mind your own business.”
Grisha clenched his teeth and said nothing. Karpov gathered Valari in one arm and hauled her down the companionway as if she were a sack of oats.
Then the storm caught them and Karpov started his last fight.
3
Pravda danced and jerked on the anchor line. The small cove on Prince of Wales Island sheltered them from the brunt of the storm. Grisha took a firm grasp under Karpov’s shoulders.
“Ready?”
Valari nodded sharply.
“Hup!”
They swung the stiffing body off the deck and up onto the gunwale at the stern, balancing it carefully. The memory of butchering hogs flashed through his mind.
“Okay, I’ll hold him, put the box on his chest.”
She bent over and grabbed the box tied to the corpse with a short line, sat it in the middle of Karpov’s chest.
“Push!” Grisha ordered.
The body splashed into the water and, spinning in a slow circle behind the heavy box of weapons, sank rapidly out of sight.
Numb lassitude spread over him, and he relaxed for the first time in three days. Suddenly Valari pressed against him, her hands moving over his face, chest, groin.
“I need you,” she said. “Right now.”
With a tired smile he pulled her into the cabin.
The bright sky held no wind when he woke. For a long moment he lay in the bunk beside the woman and collected his thoughts. He tried to figure out how he could have changed the outcome.
This charter was set up by the government, even he knew that. Would the Okhana believe their concocted story about the loss of one of their agents?
“What’s the matter, Captain Lover?”
Grisha turned his head and looked at her. The now-familiar mouth smiled, lips parted slightly as if anticipating a kiss. But Valari’s eyes held a hardness unaffected through murder and sex.
He’d seen eyes like hers only a couple of times. They had belonged to desperate men whose only hope lay with the legal benediction of the Troika Guard. Both had finished badly, one shot for cowardice and the other killed in a barroom brawl.
He had let this situation get out of his control. With this woman he had helped murder a man and finally cheated on his wife. Too much, too fast. He knew nothing about her, yet she held his life in her hands. Amazing how an orgasm could clear the mind.
“What are we going to do now?” he asked.
“He got drunk and fell over the side during the storm.” Her eyes searched his. “Isn’t that what you said last night?”
“Yes, but…” Grisha licked his suddenly dry lips, “You must attest to what I say, no matter what. Agreed?”
“ Da.” Valari’s eyes narrowed and her mouth flattened. “But you must be very convincing and not waver.”
“I can do that. But you worked for him, or with him, isn’t there someone you could talk to, and make this be all right?”