Then his heart sank. He looked back up into the paratrooper’s eyes, and followed the intent gaze. Off to the left. The paratrooper was not looking at him at all.
Clay looked across the field of snow and saw his tracks leading backward, toward the prison, toward the figure of a man standing in the doorway. The man stepped into the light underneath the overhang and then was followed by another, and another, and Clay followed the paratrooper’s eyes to see Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei walking towards them.
He saw the paratrooper raise the gun and he wondered if the soldier was going to shoot the three unarmed young men right there in the snow.
The man shouted to the trio approaching on foot, but—and this fact took time to penetrate Clay’s mind—the soldier spoke in Russian.
He spoke in Russian?
Clay saw his life flash before his eyes. He saw the tree swing and the cabin, and the inside of his brownstone, and Veronica. And Cheryl. Lovely Cheryl. He swallowed and looked up into the nighttime sky.
Clay heard the shouts in Russian and saw the waving angry menace of the bulldog Mikail. The gun moved slowly, lazily towards Clay and then Clay…
…heard its bark and felt its bite.
He saw the flash at the muzzle and thought how beautiful it was, how much it looked like fireworks. He felt bullets ripping into him and sensed a jerking in his body. The breath ran through him and then out of him and he noticed the beautiful fog it made against the clear night air, rising up like a spirit.
He collapsed on the snow.
The last thing Clay Richter saw was his own blood in sharp contrast with the whiteness of the pristine snow. It ran in little rivulets along the fresh packed snow where his body had fallen and then sank into the white and beyond that into the ground he loved so dearly and from whence he’d come. The last thought he ever formed, which slowly gripped his fading mind, circling in and around his consciousness like a vise until it held in him for an instant like a thin point of light or like a star in relief against the midnight sky, was a sentence that never had its own chance to find its period.
Always leave yourself a way o
Vasily Romanovich Kashporov heard the gunfire, and then he heard it again, and then once again. Looking over his shoulder and up the hill he saw the outline in the dark sky of the silent paratroopers gliding down in and around the prison walls and its fence and its fields.
A half-dozen came down in the street, drifting past the grocery between the Church and the shops and the houses. Some others looked as though they might have landed on top of the gymnasium.
He shivered just a bit in the cold wind and ducked his head as he pulled the shoulder straps up on the backpack and tightened them slightly across his chest.
He set his square face towards Pushkin Street and the light brown house on the end which even at that very moment had a candle showing through the window.
He knew the house well. He’d often passed it on his errands in and around the village and many times he had stopped to admire its many raised gardens and unique landscaping.
That was where he knew he’d find Pyotr Alexandrovitch Bolkonsky.
From The Poems of C.L. Richter:
Lullaby for My Daughter
KNOT TWO - THE CHARM SCHOOL
CHAPTER 10
Warwick was a nice enough town, if one were merciful enough to forget, even for a moment, its purpose in the world. Nestled deep in a thick forest, in a sleepy little hollow shielded on all sides by ancient mountains cut through by dissecting rivers and grinding glacial ice, the town was beautiful in its way, like many New England towns.
In the spring and summer, its verdant plateau was adorned with the delicate purple blooms of the deadly nightshade and the brief yellows of lady slipper orchids. In the fall, the leaves of its towering canopy of yellow birch, black cherry, red oak, and white pine trees drifted lazily through the crisp mountain air and piled along the streets and in the forest bed in heaps of luscious reds and golds. It was a quaint place, shrouded in antiquity, despite its relative youth.
One might easily have found resting in those piles of leaves, for example, on a normal autumnal evening, a man who by dress and mannerisms resembled (if one didn’t know better) the image of a colonial Rip Van Winkle. Or a man looking like that mad monk Rasputin might have been found raking those leaves, gathering them into neat little piles to be composted as he nodded to the women passers-by, or watched the children playing Cossacks and Robbers in the street.
All in all, Warwick (often called Novgorod, as a nickname, by the locals) had the quality of a foreign town in a foreign land, as if the inhabitants had come from some other country and brought the bricks and stone and wood of their ancestral homes with them, along with their clothes and language and customs. It was the kind of place one rarely sees in the landscape of American modernity. This, in the particular case of Warwick, was especially convenient, since almost no one had ever seen it.
There was only one road leading into and out of Warwick and, in the recent twin natural disasters—the raging superstorm called Sandy and the even more powerful blizzard that followed in its wake—even that route had been cut off.
Where the town had drawn its sustenance, beyond the ample and well-worked vegetable gardens and the livestock that dotted its streets and lay hidden in its valley, had always been something of a mystery, even to those who lived there.
There had been no convoys of trucks along its lone corridor, no planes flying low and touching down on a secluded runway. Somehow the town had simply, since its inception in the late 1950’s, in a time when two superpowers were engaged in a cold war, been re-supplied through capillary action from some unknown source or sources. The Spar grocery and the smaller specialty markets—the butchers, the bakers, and the candlestick makers—seemed to remain perpetually well stocked, though the selection was probably more limited than one might find in a land where competition thrived.
Most American towns, villages, and even tiny hamlets either grew or they died. Warwick, by contrast, just maintained. The same forces that multiplied or diminished growth in small town America were not at work in Warwick. Competition for labor from nearby cities, children escaping small town life for college or for excitement in the Metropolis, young adults fleeing the staid and boring village for… well… for anything else, even for war, these were not defining factors in Warwick.