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Detective Thompson’s best guess was suicide. People who dove off buildings of their own free will usually landed with arms tucked in, legs straight. Sometimes they almost looked at peace. People who were thrown, on the other hand, made a mess. Trying to scramble back air, they landed with arms and legs at all sorts of disjointed angles.
This one, though, had dived head first, which meant a hell of a mess, but a quick and almost assured death. So they were either a very brave and determined suicide or drugged before someone dropped them.
Looking at the burst skull and fractured pieces of spine, Thompson had a feeling that the toxicology report would come back clean. When he received it, he’d wonder why they had chosen to die this way, but then he’d put the file away.
Then and there, Thompson said a quiet prayer for the jumper. If the city and his job ever got to be too much, he’d know that whoever this poor soul was, they had shown him the way.
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The statue of Athena was lit by one of the floodlights that dotted the grounds. Celebratory noises issued from the house. Men stood on the steps watching some joker pantomime choking out, going down on his knees, raising a melodramatic hand to the sky as he shriveled in a parody of Sartre’s death.
My headlights painted two figures blocking the drive. Bulky leather jackets marked them as a different kind of blackbird from the rooks. Vory.
I slowed the car to a stop. Both slid their weapons forward to make them visible. I set the MP7 on the passenger’s seat and then pushed down the parking break. I rolled down the window and held out a hand, hoping to signal friendliness, or at least harmlessness. One of them gestured for me to get out of the car.
I looked at the two men in the headlights, both like young recruits reduced to near identical likeness with their pale skin and shaved heads, black leather coats and dark pants. Either of them would be willing to gun me down, and neither of them was important. I thought about Mitnick’s smiling face and what it might take to get close to him.
I had promised Sophie a distraction, though, so I bent over, took out the grenade, pulled the pin, and then pushed it under the parking brake. Jammed between the pedal and the floorboard, the brake would hold the grenade’s safety lever in place until someone released it.
When I came up, both men had their weapons trained on me. I raised empty hands and reached out to open the door from the outside, keeping everything nice and visible. I slowly stepped out of the car, hands in the air.
They were smarter than they looked. They kept their distance until they could see I was alone, not police or overtly French. They asked me something in their Cyrillic tongue. I replied, “I’m here to see Mitnick.” I tried it in both English and French and got nothing. One of them flashed a light on me, lingering on Sartre’s fresh blood. I repeated the one word I knew they’d understand. “Mitnick.”
One stepped forward and I obediently let him slide a hand up and down my sides, finding and extracting the pistol. The other spoke into a handheld. A voice like chocolate covered gravel came back over the radio.
The vory stepped aside. One used the constellation of tattoos along his hand to point me to the house. I started walking.
The laughter and the jokes of the Russians died away as we got closer, all eyes on me. I was grateful to see Pyotr wasn’t in the mix, but the latent hostility in the group made up for his absence. Like walking past a group of angry dogs, I tried not to make eye contact.
In the foyer, I moved toward the stairs, but vory blocked the path. One of myescorts slammed his submachine gun into my back, hard enough that my knees nearly buckled, directing me deeper into the house. I complied and walked past the fountain, towards the door on the right.
Through the parlor and into the interior rooms, I saw none of Mitnick’s men. I kept walking past the hostile eyes of other black-clad vory. I mentally tallied how many I saw. There were a lot of them.
After walking through that long corridor we came to a door I recognized. I entered Mitnick’s library. The roomed smelled of book glue and sea breeze, an odd combination that reminded me of the prison library. Whatever pleasure I might have gotten out of that was robbed by a repetitive wet sound like a broken water pump.
Flanking Mitnick’s big desk with its liquor cabinet globe were two more vory, more grizzled than the others. Their black clothes were nicer, their jewelry bigger and shinier, their hair longer and slick. One was taller, broad-shouldered, going grey, and wore a cross so large it might have been out of penance if it weren’t so flashy. The other was short and narrow shouldered, everything but the diamonds in his ears connected by ropey muscles. He lit a cigarette with a silver lighter.
They both evaluated me with apathetic eyes. This drew my attention enough that I didn’t spot the grey blob behind the desk immediately.
Nearly bald, the pale skin of an older man’s pate barely rose above the desk’s horizon, its owner leaning back in Mitnick’s chair, head tilted towards the ceiling. When I entered he didn’t move other than to open his eyes and glance towards me, his eyes flickering with irritation, followed by a melodramatic sigh.
He raised a lazy hand and gestured towards the seaside of the room’s exits. I waited for more instruction then I realized it wasn’t for me – a young girl, probably not out of her teens, rose up from behind the desk, wiping saliva from her lips with the back of her hand. She looked as a frightened child does at foreign soldiers, a fear of reprisals for breaking undefined rules. She tried to adjust what little clothing she had on but Diamonds grabbed her by the elbow and pushed her towards the door.
The older man behind the desk sat upright, his bulk causing the chair to squeak in protest. His eyes and mouth formed uncaring horizontal lines, only twitching downward as his figure rose up. His skin had the gray flabbiness of age, but his eyes were quick and hard, his open shirt exposing a tattoo of an onion domed palace that could have been Old Town’s own cathedral.
From all of this I wagered a guess. “Oleg Churbinov.”
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Born in prison, Brechek had never known anything but the brutality and darkness of incarceration. His mother, a political prisoner of the despotic regime, died before he was grown, but he still remembered the stories she would tell him of the outside world; the sunlight, brighter than any bulb, the green grass, softer than any carpet, water that fell from the sky. As a child, he would hold her tight and listen, and believe every impossible word she uttered.
He had always believed her, in everything she said, particularly about the outside. But when the dictator died and the prisons were emptied, outside Brechek was blinded by the ball of fire in the sky and his feet felt the warm softness of grass instead of cold concrete.
Brechek realized then, yes, he had always believed his mother’s tales of the sun and the sky and the grass. He just never actually thought the things she spoke of were real.
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I got in the car and drove. The road was only lit by a ghostly moon and impossibly bright stars. It reminded me of a trip we had taken to Australia when Cheryl was still alive.
On cue, Cheryl’s voice drifted up from the backseat. “Going the extra mile, huh?”
“With Sartre dead, Mitnick is going to run this town unless somebody stops him.” I left out what “stopping” would entail – Cheryl had never seen me work and I didn’t feel like having that conversation now.
“I don’t think Sophie cares about that.”
“I think you’re wrong.” Even getting away with Nika was going to be a pretty big swing, so added, “But they’ll get the girl out.”
“So no escape for you then?”
“Doesn’t look that way.”
“You know, you don’t have to be in such a hurry to join me.”
I gripped the wheel in my hands and stared out onto the road, feeling a truth form into words for the first time. “I don’t know what else to do.”
A touch in the head flooded my mind with the past few months, the mind-numbing routine of the casino punctuated by the simple moments of joy with Sophie. I thought of her walking out of the Venice palazzo covered in Verdicchio’s blood, all the way to Capanne to spring me out of prison for my part in that. “Do you think she’d love me if I wasn’t willing to do this?”
“Yes.” That answer came from Cheryl’s ghost without hesitation, but I could feel a conditional sinkhole form around it. Up from that came, “But if you weren’t she’d be doing this alone.”
I thought of all the monsters that had been floating across Sophie’s vision since Verdicchio had thrust her into that world. She lived there now, stalking predators too big and too perpetual for her to ever really harm. But trying anyway. She’d die without help. Or at least she’d die alone and I couldn’t stomach that. I said so.
“Well,” Cheryl said in the exasperated voice she used when she knew I couldn’t be deterred, “I look forward to seeing the two of you.” There was a pause and a happy laugh. “Just, you know, hopefully not tonight.”
Cheryl vanished again as the whiteness of Mitnick’s Greek temple rose up from the cliffs near the sea. I could hear the surf.
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Open all the doors and windows, cover the mirrors, and sit by the dead. Drink your whiskey and tears, your moonshine and grace. Bake bread in the kitchen and take pictures down from the hall. Leave no one alone, especially the deceased. In doing this, we honor the dead and wait for the Salesman.
The Salesman promises everything in death that you couldn’t get in life. So his offers are irresistible to the recently deceased. But every good hill dweller that knows his Bible knows the Salesman offers nothing but lies that steal the soul and harm the living.
Jacob stopped believing in all of that long ago, long before he left the holler, long before Ohio State and Harvard. When his mother calls crying, though, he knows he has to go back home, even before she tells him he’ll need to rent a car. She won’t leave his father’s body. It must be attended at all times.
Jacob makes excuses, remembering his father’s belt and fierce temper rather than any love. But his mother pleads, reminding him of when his father refused to sit by her father. The body of his grandfather had disappeared, or so the story goes, and whatever the Salesman had offered cost him his soul. His family’s price was paltry, nothing unexpected when the bank showed up with papers, evicting everyone from grandfather’s home.
Jacob rents a car and drives up to the holler, remembering the old rituals. He doesn’t get home till after midnight, driving past the house it’s been so long. If the windows weren’t open so he could spot the hearth fire, he might not have found it till morning.
His mother, exhausted and grieved, drapes him in a long hug in which she kisses his cheeks many times. Father is laid out in the living room, but Jacob focuses on his mother, getting her to sit down, to be calm, and, eventually, to rest. He is only able to get her to sleep when he promises to stay awake until his sister gets there in the morning.
It’s nearly dawn by the time ma falls asleep. Jacob decides to keep his word, staring at the sunken face of his father, imagining his hard gray eyes behind the closed lids.
Jacob does this till there’s a knock at the door. Unthinking and exhausted, he answers it to find a suited man who immediately removes the bowler hat he is wearing. Jacob cannot see his face, but only the smile of perfect, white teeth that reflect the fire’s light. “May I come in?” he asks.
Jacob blinks, taking a long moment to look at the stranger, then says, “We don’t want any.” He closes the door over the man’s smiling protests.
Jacob returns to the mantle where his mother has left two silver coins. He takes them and places them on his father, one over each eye.
