Last Snow

ELEVEN

WHY ARE emotions—some of them, the deepest, most important ones—inarticulate or muddy, as if filtered through a fishing net or a sieve? This was the question that Jack asked himself as he sat on the lid of the toilet and, while the shower was running, punched in Sharon’s cell number. Midnight in Kiev, which meant it was five P.M. back home in D.C. No answer, which could mean anything, including her looking at his number coming up on her screen and deciding not to answer. That would be like Sharon, the Sharon that once was, the Sharon who over the past weeks had started to reemerge.

He tried the home number with the same result, didn’t leave a message. What was there to say? Already the sense of her was fading, as if she were made of celluloid exposed to sunlight. Emma, dead for five months, was clearer to him, so clear, in fact, they seemed to be on either side of a thin pane of glass, transparent but unbreakable.

He turned the phone off, put it on the edge of the sink, and stepped into the shower. He almost groaned aloud. The hot water felt so good on his aching muscles, the soap sluicing off the layers of sweat and grime. There was blood, dark as ink, under his fingernails. Prying out each crescent was like reliving each incident that had happened to him since leaving his hotel in Moscow on his crazy, quixotic mission to save Annika. Since then, he’d been nearly killed, had shot two men, come close to being picked up by the police, found a naked girl murdered in a truly bizarre fashion, been saved by a crow, and narrowly escaped from an SBU stakeout.

He put his face up to the spray, feeling the soft battering like a masseuse’s hands. There were a growing number of questions to be answered, such as why were the SBU on stakeout at Karl Rochev’s dacha? Had they already been inside and seen the murdered woman? Probably not, otherwise the house would have been crawling with crime scene investigators. So why were they there? Who were they waiting for? Rochev, a confederate, or, chillingly, Jack and Annika? But, if so, how had they known they’d be coming there—the only other person who knew where they were going was Dyadya Gourdjiev. It seemed absurd to suspect him; nevertheless, Jack filed the possibility away. And then there was the mystery of the SBU sharpshooter who had winged Annika: Why hadn’t he shot at them as they were driving away?

It wasn’t any one of these questions that nagged at him, but all of them, and all the while his unique brain was working on the whole picture as if it were a Rubik’s Cube, moving incidents around in order to see them in three dimensions and thus find their proper place in the puzzle he’d been presented.

He turned off the water. Pulling back the curtain, he reached for a towel and saw Emma sitting in the precise same spot where he had sat moments before, trying to call Sharon. Jack pulled the towel around him as if his daughter were still alive.

“Hi, Dad.” Emma’s voice was soft, almost like the sound the spray of water made shooting out of the showerhead. “Mom’s not home.”

“Emma.” He felt his knees weaken and he lowered himself onto the edge of the tub. “Emma, is it you or are you in my head?” Was this image of Emma merely a manifestation, a more concrete expression of that thought?

Emma, or the image of Emma, crossed one leg over the other. “You’re in a dark place, Dad, so dark I can’t see. I don’t know whether I can help you here.”

“That’s all right, honey.” Tears glittered in Jack’s eyes. “That’s not your job. It’s time for you to rest.”

“I’ll rest,” Emma said, “when I’m dead.”

There was a knock on the door, shifting his attention.

“Jack, I have to pee,” Alli said from the other side of the door.

He stood up. “I’ll be right out.” But when he looked at where his daughter had been sitting a moment before, she was gone like a will-o’-the-wisp.

HE AND Annika hadn’t discussed their sleeping arrangements, but crossing the living room he saw no linens or pillows piled on one end of the sofa, so he pushed open the door to the larger of the two bedrooms, which was already half open like a question or an invitation. The room was roughly a square, with windows on two walls, both covered with old-fashioned Venetian blinds. Street light shone through the slats, painting tiers of parallel bars across one upholstered chair, across a faded hook rug, up one side of the bed and across approximately a third of it. The overhead light was off, but one lamp threw a scimitar of light on the empty side of the bed, which was actually two double beds pushed together.

The bedspread and blanket had been rucked back to the foot of the bed. Annika lay beneath the top sheet, turned away from him. She hadn’t bothered redoing her hair, which as a consequence lay rather wildly along one cheek, snaking down her neck to cover one shoulder and the shallow indentation between her scapulae. Her injured arm lay on her hip outside the sheet. He couldn’t be sure in the dimness but it looked like it was still wrapped with Alli’s shirt.

Jack unwound the towel, found some of his new clothes, put on a T-shirt and underpants. The moment he sat on the bed he was overcome with exhaustion. Every muscle in his body, it seemed, was crying out for rest. He climbed under the covers gingerly so as not to wake Annika and, switching off the lamp, put his head on the pillow. The bars of street light seeping through the blind were thrown into prominence, looking like a staircase or a bridge to Emma’s world, whatever or wherever that might be.

Slowly he stilled his breathing, but as sometimes happens when one is exhausted, sleep did not immediately come. While his body longed for surcease his brain was on fire problem-solving. He knew from experience not to interfere with this fiendish engine when it was on a roll.

Annika stirred. “Jack?”

“Sorry I woke you,” he said softly.

“You sighed.”

“I did?”

“Yes, you did,” she said. “Why did you sigh?”

“I don’t know.”

She turned onto her back and he saw her face, freshly washed without a scrap of makeup, illuminated only by the bars of light, and it struck him how utterly desirable she was. She was also beautiful, but that he had seen the first time they’d met at the hotel bar. But what was beauty? Large eyes, full, half-parted lips to be ensnared by, deep cleavage and powerful thighs to catch the breath, but all of these were surface considerations, delicate and ephemeral enough to be invalidated by a nasty comment, a violent temper, or a lack of understanding. Desirability took into account all those things, and more.

“Did you take your antibiotic?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How’s your arm?”

“It hurts.”

“Time for one of Dr. Sosymenko’s magic pills.”

She tossed her head. “I don’t want a painkiller.”

Jack reached for the twist of paper that held the pills. “Stop being a stoic.”

“That’s not it. I don’t want my mind impaired.” She stared up at the ceiling.

They lay side by side for some time steeped in a silence that seemed to crackle with silent electricity or a confused magnetism to which he was both attracted and repelled. But perhaps repelled was the wrong word. What was it called when you wanted something you knew or at least suspected was forbidden? It wasn’t just Sharon he was thinking of, because even without Emma’s doom-laden pronouncement the ship that had been carrying them back to land had hit a violent squall where all hands were in the process of becoming lost. It was also that Annika was a member of an undercover unit of the Russian Federal Police—or had been, at any rate. You could call her a spy without fear of contradiction. Not for the first time since Emma’s death, since his marriage had fallen apart, since, especially, Emma had appeared to him, he wondered whether he’d become unhinged, whether he was in the grip of some long-form mental illness in which he was slowly spiraling down toward insanity. How else to explain the situation he now found himself—and Alli!—in? But deep down he also knew that his inability to help his daughter when she needed him the most would color everything he did for the rest of his life. Saving Alli from Morgan Herr had been an attempt to atone for his mortal sin; so, too, his compulsion to save Annika from Ivan and Milan.

“What are you thinking?”

Annika had drawn closer while he’d been plunged into his black thoughts. Her scent was like the beach, slightly salty, redolent of freshly washed dark places. Her heat made the hair on his arms stand on end.

He hesitated only moments. “To be honest, I was thinking about my daughter.”

“Emma, yes, Alli told me. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Those words, so often repeated by cops all over the world in whatever language, including himself, took on an altogether different aspect when Annika spoke them because there was genuine emotion behind them.

“Thanks.”

“Alli seems to miss her almost as much as you do.”

“They were very close,” Jack said. “In fact, at school they were everything to one another.”

“What a tragedy.” It was unclear from her tone whether she was talking about the two friends or about herself. Possibly it was both, coming together at the junction of present life and memory. “Jack, let me ask you a question. What if you see a truth no one around you sees? What if everyone, including teachers, friends—former friends!—think you’re a liar and a freak?”

“I think that’s what happened to Emma,” Jack said. “I know it happened to me.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I’m ashamed to say that was another thing about her I don’t know.”

“Don’t be ashamed. You loved your daughter, there’s nothing more important, is there?”

“No, I don’t believe there is.”

He heard a rustle of the bedsheets, then felt her hand take his. It was cool and slim and dry, and yet it created an electric shock that ran all the way through him.

“Did you feel that?” she whispered. “I felt it.”

He turned his head to find that she was looking at him.

“I can’t see the color of your eyes,” he said. “It’s an amber that glows as if with a light inside it.”

She moved her head off her pillow and onto his. “Better?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me more about Emma.”

Jack thought a moment, considered whether he should answer such an intimate question. “She loved music,” he said at length, “blues and rock. And she loved the philosopher-poets like Blake.”

Annika looked at him questioningly. “And?”

“My knowledge of her only goes so far.”

“All this is in your memory.” Annika said this with a curious intensity. “You remember her.”

“Yes, but more as a dream, really, the way you dream when you’re at war, to take yourself away from painful reality.”

“Yes, a war,” she said, as if she understood him completely. “In war you do what you have to do.” But her voice carried a note of insincerity or self-delusion, as if this were a sentence she told herself over and over until, for her, it became the truth. Then, unaccountably, her voice softened. “Nothing is ever what it was, do you recognize this? Every moment immediately dissolves into the next one, seconds and minutes are diluted until your past becomes what you want it to be, as if memory and dreams become so intertwined you can’t tell them apart.”

“The terrible moments become less so as the present dissolves the past into memory.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly.” She moved even closer to him, her smooth, aromatic skin brushing against his. “This is how we survive. The terror dissolves like dreams when we wake up and go about our daily routine.”

“I wish Alli felt that way, but I know she doesn’t.”

Another silence consumed them. Apart from the hiss of an occasional vehicle passing by outside, there were no street sounds, not even a dog’s querulous bark.

After a time, she sighed. “I’m tired.”

“Go to sleep, Annika.”

“Put your hand on me. I want to feel you, I want to be connected . . .”

Reaching out, he cupped his hand over the tender ridge of her hip, soft as silk. She stirred languorously, and his hand slid to the top of her thigh, hard-muscled and powerful. He could feel his heart beating slowly. It felt good to be near her, their warmth mingling. The soughing of her breath came to him like wind in the trees or distant birds calling to one another.

“There’s no time for us now,” she whispered, but she might already have been asleep.