So Uno’s success was built on a platform designed and built by many others, although Uno knew only what he needed to know.
“Do not lecture me,” Oleg warned him. “And do not launch the second missile.”
“I will wait,” Uno replied.
Of course you will.
Oleg wished he could be as sure of Galina’s moves. The monastery intrigued him because she’d been brought up in the faith. Like so many others, though, she’d abandoned it. But Oleg had heard that people often found it again when they had a child with a terminal disease. They might not ever think of praying for themselves, but for a sunken-cheeked cancer kid? And Alexandra was Galina’s whole life.
There it is. He’d finally picked out a cross and building that had been carved out of a mountain a couple miles away. They’d been revealed in stone the way a sculptor will uncover a face with his chisel and hammer.
Why not take a closer look? There wasn’t much else between Voronezh and Sochi. Just small burgs. And Sochi itself had turned into a $50 billion ghost town since the Olympics.
He walked back down a short trail to his Maserati.
After watching Oleg on-screen, and finding her own files missing, Galina couldn’t rouse Alexandra and leave the monastery fast enough.
“We’ve got to keep moving,” she told her daughter. She couldn’t be as terse with the nun who had checked them in and wanted to know why a mother with an obviously ill child would be hurrying out the door in the middle of the day.
“I need to get home. My mother is not feeling well. Maybe dying.”
“What about your daughter? She looks like she needs rest. And you look like you need to pray.”
“She will sleep in the car,” Galina responded.
“And will you pray when you drive?”
“I’ll try.”
The nun appeared unimpressed with Galina’s sincerity. Galina felt the woman’s eyes on her back all the way out to the Macan.
Galina drove down the narrow streets of old Voronezh, eyes on the rearview mirror as much as the road ahead.
The bright sun, high in the sky, filled the narrow streets with harsh light that felt brutal and made her fear they had no place to hide.
But he doesn’t know you have PP’s new car.
No, she corrected herself immediately. You don’t know what he knows — or where he is.
But he felt as present as the sun, and as threatening as the shadows that darkened with every passing minute.
Oleg pulled up to the monastery and strode to the door. He knocked as if he owned the place, reminding himself that he probably could if he wanted to.
A nun greeted him with a curious glance, but no words. Beside her, head bowed, stood a younger woman not in a habit. A novitiate, Oleg presumed. An apprentice in the discipline of denial — of self, sex, and all the keen excesses that made life worth living.
The information center for Voronezh had noted that the nuns were “self-sufficient.” This one looked at him as if she not only owned the monastery, but his soul, too. Oleg loathed that kind of arrogance. Who does she think she is?
“How may I help you?” the nun asked in the manner of one who wishes to provide no help at all.
“I understand you have rooms for ‘sincere visitors.’ Is that true?”
She nodded. He thought he might have detected the slightest softening in her demeanor. Once again, he prided himself on knowing how to instinctively strike the right note with these bitches.
“And you are ‘sincere’?” she asked.
“Very much so.” Oleg managed not to smirk or offer even a hint of a smile. “May I stay here?” The monastery had three rooms for visitors, according to the city’s website.
The nun appeared obliging, but showed him only two of the rooms. The novitiate trailed silently behind them.
“Isn’t there a third room?” he asked.
“It is not clean. It was just used.”
He shrugged as though it didn’t matter to him, but then said, “I’d like to see it anyway. If I like it, I’ll be patient while you clean it for me.”
The nun peered at him. He thought about what he’d just said. What could possibly be off-putting about saying you’d be patient?
She shook her head. “It’s not ready.”
“Is that it?” He nodded at a door across the hall, the only one in the small cloister that he had not entered.
She did not respond, at least not quickly enough to suit Oleg. He walked across and opened it, finding Galina. Not her person, but her scent. The lavender he loved so much on her skin, which rose so seductively to his nose when she began to sweat. Unmistakable amid the old wood and stone and tiles.
“Dark hair. This tall.” He held out his hand. “With a little girl, right?” He spoke with none of the patience he had just professed to have.
The nun glanced at him, saying nothing. But the novitiate raised her face to Oleg for the first time. Such a sweet-looking creature, perhaps seventeen, eighteen, just coming into bloom, which even her shapeless black frock couldn’t hide. Neither could her face, frozen with alarm, deny the truth of what he’d just stated.
Oleg knew, and the novitiate knew he knew. He thought to calm her. “Do not worry. She is a dear friend. Which way did she go?”
The novitiate looked at the nun, who replied for her: “We don’t know who you are talking about.”
“You are lying,” he said as he approached the old woman. “Have you had a bad experience with a man?” She was ugly, with big pores on her nose. How he loathed them. But the novitiate looked sweet, pure, unadorned and untouched. But not for long. Any guy worth his manhood could see that immediately. Oleg made a point of letting his eyes settle on the nun’s charge, who averted her beautiful green gaze.
“You must leave. Call the police,” the nun said to the younger woman.
“No need,” Oleg replied, smiling and grabbing the novitiate’s wrist. “I am the police. So, I ask you again: Which way?”
“I don’t know,” the nun said. She had the audacity to even offer a shrug. And she, a religious woman. What kind of example was she setting for the novitiate?
Liar.
“It’s too bad that you don’t know.” Oleg still held the young woman’s wrist. “What car was she driving?”
“Car? I didn’t look,” the nun said. “Now let go of her.”
Oleg shook his head. Then he pushed them both into the room with the lavender scent that he’d always found so arousing, and closed the door behind him. It had an old lock that he snapped into place. He turned back to them, smiling.
Where is everybody? It’s empty. What was I thinking?
There had been so few cars on the road to Sochi. Galina had seen five to be exact; two were police SUVs. How was that possible? Billions had watched the Olympics, and now nothing? Millions had visited Sochi, and now nothing?
Worse than nothing. There were potholes; curbs breaking away from traffic circles; and apartment buildings that looked empty, eerie with the same two chairs and table on every balcony.
How could they ever get lost among the faces of tourists if no one was even there?
Galina realized she’d been living in her own world, such an insular life in Moscow, so focused on Alexandra and AAC and fighting global warming that she’d become oblivious to other events in her own country.