Last Snow

TWELVE

“IT’S CALLED a sulitsa or, less commonly, dzheridom,” Bogdan Boyer said. He was the antiques dealer Dr. Sosymenko had recommended. His shop was in Gorodetskogo, near the Maidan Metro stop, though they had driven from the apartment, after dying Alli’s hair dirty blond and wolfing down a hasty breakfast, because it wasn’t conveniently located near the Metro.

Boyer, a small man with the pinched, avid face and busy hands of an inveterate collector, turned the murder weapon over and over under a large magnifying glass with an illuminated fluorescent ring. He sat scrunched on a high stool, much as Bob Cratchit must have sat hunched over his ink-stained desk in his dismal little cell, as Charles Dickens described his tanklike workspace.

“The sulitsa is one of what’s known collectively as splitting weapons, because—see here, how the point is diamond-shaped, beautifully functional—they were forged to pierce armor,” Boyer said, warming to the task Annika had given him.

“This is a missile spear, though it was also used for close-to stabbing, hence it’s nickname, ‘the lunger.’ Weapons like this one and the much larger boar-spear, which had a spade-shaped point, were used by Russian soldiers as far back as 1378 in a fierce battle in Ryazansk along the Vozhe. The Russian Cossacks, the mounted regiments, used these splitting weapons to defeat the invading Tatar army.”

He looked up at Annika. “It’s interesting, but I can’t give you much for it. Apart from a collector here or there and possibly a museum, there’s no market for these things. Besides, it’s incomplete.”

“Incomplete?” Jack said. He was keeping an eye on Alli, who was rummaging through the bowels of the overcrowded, overheated shop. “What do you mean?”

“Typically, sulitsa came in threes, packed in an elaeagnus, a small cured leather quiver that sat against the left hip.” He shook his head. “Without its brothers—or sisters—” He grinned at Annika “—it’s worth next to nothing.”

“I’m not interested in selling it,” Annika said. “I want to know who its owner is.”

Boyer frowned. “That might be difficult.”

He picked up his phone and made several calls. While he did so, Jack went to find Alli, who had disappeared behind a glass case filled with copper teapots and kettles. He found her examining a sheet of paper—no computer printouts here. The sheet was a written list of shipments that had either gone out over the past several days or were about to be packed and shipped. Beside each item was a name. She pointed wordlessly to the name “M. Magnussen,” and his address written just below an item labeled, “Three sulitsa (a set) in original elaeagnus, ca. 1885, prov. J. Lach.” FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY was noted in red.

Seeing that he was having difficulty reading the list, Alli beckoned him to bend down so that she could whisper the notation as well as the name and address of the intended recipient in his ear.

Jack had her put the paper back where she’d found it, then he took her hand and led her back to the front of the store.

Boyer was just putting down the receiver. He smiled insincerely. “I’m afraid I’ve had no luck.”

“No matter,” Jack said. “Thank you for your time.” He took the murder weapon and turned to Annika. “In any event, we’re late for your appointment. Dr. Sosymenko has to change your dressing.”

Annika played along smoothly, though she must have been as taken by surprise as was Boyer. “Oh, yes, I got so engrossed here I forgot all about it. Come along, darling,” she said and, taking Alli’s hand, walked out the door with Jack right behind her.

“What was that all about?” she said when they were out on the street.

“In the car,” Jack said. “Now!”

He flipped Annika the keys and she slid behind the wheel while he got in beside her and Alli climbed into the backseat.

As she started up and pulled out into traffic, she said, “Do we have a destination or should I drive in circles for a while?”

“Drive in circles,” Jack said, staring intently at the off-side mirror.

“That was a joke, Jack.”

“I know, but I want to make sure we’re not being followed.”

“Okay,” she said, turning right at the first stoplight, “I give up.”

“Alli found a bill of lading in the back of the shop for a set of those sulitsa complete in their quiver about to be delivered to a client by the name of M. Magnussen.”

Annika nodded. “Which means Boyer was lying to us.”

“So who the hell was he calling?” Jack said.

“The SBU or the cops?” Annika ventured.

“Or maybe this Magnussen, who asked him to be on the lookout for anyone coming around with a spare lung sticker.”

“You’re thinking he’s the killer,” Alli said, hunched forward, her face between them.

“That’s right, you heard Boyer, a single sulitsa is worthless. Magnussen ordered a new set of sulitsa because he used one from his original set to kill Rochev’s mistress.”

“But why would anyone use one of those things to commit murder?” Alli asked.

“D’you think the police would know what they’re looking at?” Annika made another right. “It would simply confuse them.”

“Except,” Jack said, “if someone else other than the police found the body. Someone smart enough—”

“—or interested enough,” Annika cut in.

“Yes,” Jack continued, “to pursue the investigation.”

“Which is why,” Alli said, “he gave Boyer instructions to call him if anyone came in inquiring about it.”

“By the way,” Jack interrupted, “see that dark sedan two cars back? We are being followed.”

Annika proved herself as adept as Jack at flushing tails and getting rid of them, which was, he thought, one advantage of her being trained by the FSB. On the other hand, he couldn’t bring to mind another.

She spent the next ten minutes lulling them into thinking they hadn’t been made before she tore through a red light, leaving an angry chorus of blaring horns and squealing brakes. She made a right, then an almost immediate left, rolling down an alleyway so narrow the brick walls sheared off their side mirrors. A third of the way along, she turned off the engine, and they sat waiting. Forty seconds later the black sedan sped by the alleyway, and Annika immediately fired up the ignition, and they rolled to the far end of the alley, where she turned left.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Jack gave her the address. “The collector’s named M. Magnussen.”

“Doesn’t sound Ukrainian,” Alli said.

“Or Russian, for that matter,” Annika added, as she navigated through Kiev’s crowded streets.

“Whatever his nationality,” Jack said, “there seems to be a clear line back to my starting point. Senator Berns is killed by a hit-and-run on Capri after having flown from here. The last person he met with was Karl Rochev, whose mistress has been murdered in bizarre fashion with an antique Cossack weapon, and Rochev himself is nowhere to be found. Now it seems clear that the murder weapon belonged to this M. Magnussen.”

“Whoever he is,” Alli said.

WHOEVER MAGNUSSEN was, he was wealthy. He lived outside the city, in one of the areas so high-priced that not a high-rise or even a block of cement was to be seen. Instead, rolling farmland not unlike that of rural Virginia protected his domicile from the ravages of the modern-day city. The driveway to his estate was a half mile long, snaking through dense stands of pine forest that would have completely obscured the house from the road even if it were only a hundred yards from it. The structure, which stood on a shallow knoll, was modeled after an English manor house with two wings attached to either end of a long central section that faced the visitor with both the square shoulders of a soldier and the chilly contempt of a high-court magistrate.

“This place looks like any minute Keira Knightley is going to draw up to it in a gilded horse-drawn carriage,” Alli said.

She wasn’t far off the mark, Jack thought. The place was fit for a nineteenth-century baron or viscount, but a dead one. The place was lightless and, as they soon discovered, locked up tighter than a duck’s behind.

“Not making sense,” Alli said.

Which was also true, Jack thought, unless Magnussen, having gotten the warning call from Boyer, packed up and flew the coop in the hour or so it had taken them to drive out here. It would have taken them far less time if they hadn’t been slowed down by the dark-colored sedan tailing them. And then, of course, he understood.

“Magnussen’s gone,” he said. “The purpose of the tail was not to see where we were going, but to slow us down. Boyer must have gone to the back of his shop the moment we left and seen the bill of lading out of place.”

“Nevertheless,” Annika said, “it couldn’t hurt to take a look around the grounds.”

They set off in a more or less northeasterly direction, making a full circle of the property. The dull, clammy morning had been swept away by a freshening wind out of the west, but high up the remnants of the morning’s clouds drifted across the sun. They came first to an apple orchard, the orderly rows of gnarled trees looking abandoned and forlorn. Next came a fenced-in section that in the summer would be bursting with rows of pole beans, cabbage, cucumbers, and lettuce, but now lay fallow.

By this time they were behind the manor house, approximately at a forty-five degree angle to its right-hand wing, moving in a counterclockwise direction. Coming over a rise they spotted a finger of water that turned out to be a small lake or perhaps a large pond, it was difficult to tell from their present position. But what surprised them was a small family cemetery set in the adjoining lowland planted with mature weeping willows, which so craved water. Here were the headstones of perhaps four or five members, Magnussen’s forebears all, from what Jack could glean as he scanned them. The letters M and S were for some reason the easiest for his brain to interpret immediately.

“Father, mother—and a brother, I think,” Alli said as she came up beside him. “Each stone has the places they died, along with the dates.” She squinted through the watery sunlight. “The father was ten years older, but curiously, though they both died during the same week it wasn’t in the same place.

“Who’s the smart one?” Alli said. “Daddy could have made the money.”

At that moment, they heard Annika calling them. They turned, saw her standing on the opposite rise, waving them on. Jack, wondering what she’d found, strode up the gentle incline, Alli scrambling after him.

“Look.” Annika pointed to their left, as soon they gained the modest crest.

Now Jack could confirm what he’d suspected, that Magnussen, spending like a drunken sailor, had had the pond or lake built, because on a spit of land that perfectly bisected the body of limpid water was a stone pergola, a folly in the classic Roman style. But the pergola, per se, wasn’t what had caught Annika’s attention; rather it was a seated figure drenched in the shadows beneath the pergola’s dome. From their viewpoint they could see that the figure, bent slightly forward, forearms on knees, had the aspect of a person deep in contemplation.

They descended the far side of the rise, walked on the damp, mossy ground around the skeletal willows whose branches arched overhead in a tangle of rheumatic fingers. Skirting the edge of the lake they walked out onto the small peninsula. From this angle it was impossible to tell anything about the figure other than it was male.

“Magnussen?” Jack called out. But if Magnussen had flown the coop as Jack had surmised this man wouldn’t respond to that name. He didn’t, remaining in the same position, plunged deep in thought.

They approached ever more cautiously until Jack, his spine tingling, moved around in front of the figure. He looked hard at the man for a moment, then very quietly said, “Alli, stay where you are, please.”

Her curiosity piqued, she felt the urge to take a step forward, but something in Jack’s voice stayed her. “Why? What’s going on?”

By this time Annika had joined Jack in front of the figure, whose eyes were fixed on the horizon. The man was sitting on a gaily painted wooden Adirondack-style chair. It was difficult to see at first for all the blood and the gaping hole in his chest, but the top of each thigh where it creased with his abdomen was punctured by a sulitsa—seemingly identical to the one that had killed the young woman—which some force, terrible in its rage, had driven all the way through muscle and fat so that the points had buried themselves in the wood beneath, pinning the victim in place.

“It’s the man in the photo at the dacha,”Annika said. “This is Karl Rochev.”

Jack knelt in front of yet another example of man’s barbarity. “Which means that our prime suspect in his mistress’s murder has himself become a murder victim.”

“Not that it matters, we’re at a dead end.” Annika sighed. “This murder tells us very little.”

“On the contrary,” Jack said, rising to his feet. “It’s proof that Senator Berns’s death wasn’t accidental. He was murdered because of something Rochev told him, something the senator was about to tell someone else.” He reached out to touch one of the shafts, then thought better of it, stuffed his hands in his pockets instead. “This leak is being sealed one hole at a time.”