Woman Chased By Crows Part 12

When he made a grab for her, she ducked under his arms, spun behind him, shoved the small of his back. He stumbled, fell to one knee. She ran for the fence, heard him cursing and scrambling to gain his footing. The gap was narrow, a ragged slit made with bolt cutters, mended with wire, cut again. Just wide enough for school kids, or for a small woman. Halfway through, her buckle caught on a wire thorn and she got hung up as the man slammed into the chain-link making it rattle in both directions. He reached through the gap to grab her coat and pull her face against the fence. She could smell garlic and sweat. She spat in his eye. He tried to hit her and cut his knuckles on the jagged edges of the gap. She yanked the belt free of the buckle and slipped it through the loops, left it hanging on the wire. He lost his grip on her wet sleeve and she stepped back from the fence. She watched him for a long delicious moment, watched him struggle like a rhinoceros in a cargo net, his sleeve caught, his hand bleeding. He pounded the chain-link in frustration.

"You should put a bandage on that," she said. "But the suit is ruined, you think?"

She was laughing as she picked her way down the slope through the dark trees. Deep delicious breaths. Survival. Nothing like death deferred to amplify the life force, recharge the energy reserves. There was a walkway at the bottom that ran alongside the locks, and further along there was a footbridge she knew, and on the other side of that, a street led to her street. She could still hear the rattle of chain-link fencing above her. The sound elated her. She was triumphant. That is the second time you failed to hold me, she thought. I do not think you are very good a.s.sa.s.sins at all. I do not think you work for Chernenko, or whoever inherited what was under his mattress. I think you are working only for yourselves. Common thieves, that is all. Is that what you have become, Sergei? You and your thug? Just thieves? How pathetic.

She emerged from the dark trees and checked the footpath. Deserted. Sergei must be close by. Waiting for me. Expecting a delivery. He will not be pleased with you, whoever you are. The thought made her quite happy. It was an unfamiliar feeling.

There were open doors along the fourth floor corridor, curious neighbours, a uniformed policeman taking a statement from the slovenly woman down the hall, evidence of a minor earthquake inside her apartment. That goon had started out energetically, she thought, but he quit in a hurry. The bedroom was almost neat. Drawers pulled open, the mattress flipped. Silly.

"Can you tell if anything's missing, ma'am?"

A handsome young uniformed boy was standing inside her doorway. Still a child, his cheeks were pink. "Nothing missing. I do not have anything to steal."

"Ms. Daniel?"

The uniform stood aside to let someone in. It was the big man, the police chief himself, filling her doorway. Behind him was the woman from the afternoon, the detective with the stylish boots and the dark eyes. "You are too late," she said. "They have made off with my three-ply toilet paper."

"Ms. Daniel. My name is Orwell Brennan. I'm . . ."

"I know who you are." She faced him. "It is Zubrovskaya."

"I'm sorry, I don't speak any Russian."

"Zubrovskaya. That is my name. Anya Ivanova Zubrovskaya."

"Very well, Ms. Zubrov . . ."

"Practice it. Zu-brov-ska-ya. Go ahead."

"Zubrovskaya."

"Bravo. You may call me Anya."

He smiled at her. She almost believed his smile. It was wicked, like a little boy who just found matches in his pocket.

"Anya. Do you know who did this?"

"What, this?" A slow pirouette amid the wreckage. "This is nothing."

"It looks like a break-in to me. Your neighbour called the police."

"How neighbourly of her."

"Otherwise they might have still been here when you got home."

"I usually arrive earlier than this, but tonight I decided to drink instead."

"Are you all right to talk?"

"I am Russian. Vodka is fuel for talk."

"Fine. Do you have any idea who did this?"

"Certainly. Chernenko did it. Konstantin Chernenko."

"He's dead, isn't he?"

"Not everyone has been informed of his demise." She turned on the little clock radio atop her refrigerator and located the all-night cla.s.sical station.

"And these people are after you?"

"Not me. They do not really care about me."

"Then what?"

"Bah!" she said. "Schumann. I do not like Schumann." She lowered the volume, leaned against the refrigerator and looked at him. "You want to hear a story? Do you have time for a story?"

"Yes, I have time."

"Good. I am drunk enough to tell you a story. Let me see if they left my vodka alone." There was a small bottle in the freezer compartment. She found two gla.s.ses in the cupboard above the stove. "Okay," she said, "turn the couch back over and we will have a drink and I will tell you some things."

"Actually, I'm working now," Orwell said. "I don't drink when . . ."

"Do not be silly. If you do not drink with me, we cannot have a conversation. It is not sociable."

"All right then."

"Good. Now you are being sociable. Tell the other ones to leave us alone."

He stepped into the hall. The young cop came to attention. Roy Rawluck's influence. "Everything sorted out with the neighbours, Constable?"

"Yes, sir. No eyewitnesses. Some noise. Woman at the far end saw a man going out the fire exit, didn't get a look. Said he was big."

"Okay, see if you can get everyone back in their apartments."

"Yes, sir."

"I can go back to the doctor's office," Stacy said quietly. "Have another look around."

"And keep checking with the hospital," Orwell said. "I want to know the minute she wakes up."

"Yes, sir. I'll stay in touch."

"You do that," he said. "You'll have to drive me home. She intends to ply me with alcohol."

"Watch yourself, Chief. She looks frisky."

Orwell sighed and closed the door on Stacy's smirk.

"Turn out that overhead light," Anya said. "I found a lamp that works. I hate overhead lights. Do you?"

"It's a bit glaring," he said.

"It is punishment," she said. "Like in jail. Come over here. Take off that big coat and sit by me. Here." She handed him a small gla.s.s half filled with clear liquid. "Nazdrovya!" She clinked his gla.s.s with her own.

"L'Chaim," Orwell said.

"Yes, that is a nice one. 'To life.' Drink now, do not try to fool with me."

Orwell had a sizable bite. Raw Polish vodka, straight. He felt it all the way down to his stomach.

"There now," she said. "Now we are sociable."

"How did you come to change your name to Daniel?" he said.

"Do not get ahead," she said. "I am telling the story. Ah . . . good," she said, as the music changed. "Borodin. Much better for a Russian story." She had another drink, and so did Orwell.

"Anya Ivanova Zubrovskaya," she began, "came from a family of staunch Party members. She was raised to believe without question in the n.o.bility of the Soviet system. She learned to dance from teachers and ch.o.r.eographers who are legends." She refilled their gla.s.ses. "In 1977 she was a princ.i.p.al dancer with the Mariinsky. You know of the Mariinsky? On tour, it was called the Kirov."

"Yes, of course," he said. "Well, let's say I've heard of it."

"Believe me when I say it was the best. The finest ballet company in the world. Nureyev came from there. Baryshnikov, other ones you never heard of who were just as great, believe me, maybe greater. Sergeiev, Dudinskaya, Yuri Soloviev, he was maybe the greatest of them all."

"I've heard of Nureyev, of course," Orwell offered.

"Of course you have. But trust me, the Kirov had more than one Rudi."

"I believe you."

She drank again. Orwell pretended to.

"Anyway, I must not bore you with ancient history."

"It's your history I'm interested in," he said.

"Of course. My history with the Kirov. It ended in 1978. An a.s.shole named Gregor dropped me during the Swan Lake pas de deux. Dropped me like a sack, in front of an opening night audience. The Supreme Soviet was there with all their medals. f.u.c.king Brezhnev was there, may he rot forever in the hottest corner of h.e.l.l. It was supposed to be a big night for me. And he dropped me. I ruptured my Achilles tendon. I made it worse of course. I finished the performance. Artists are so vain, so stupid."

She drank for a while in silence. Orwell sipped his drink and watched her. A commercial for a package tour to the Bahamas came on, and then one for a funeral insurance plan. Finally, music again. Orwell recognized Mozart. The string quartet seemed to pull her back from some sad place.

"I took a year and a half to recover. But I was not the same. I was good. Do not kid yourself. I was very good. Just not quite Kirov-good. Not yet. So they let me go."

"That must have been devastating."

"It happens," she said. "I would have made it back. I was almost there." She filled her gla.s.s again, topped his up. "You are pacing yourself. That is okay. Keep your wits. This is where it gets interesting."

She rose and began to move around the room as in a stately dream, no trace of intoxication, light, measured steps instinctively keeping time with Mozart's lacy figures, her head held high, her eyes almost closed.

"It was in 1981," she began, "late in the year. Brezhnev was going to die soon." At that she smiled. "And all the s.h.i.+theads were trying to decide where their loyalties lay. Andropov, the king of the KGB, was moving to the head of the table. He held too many secrets to be ignored. And the one with the most to lose was Chernenko, Brezhnev's b.u.m boy from the beginning. He was going to have to watch his back."

Anya crossed the room and picked up her coat where she had dropped it on the floor. She patted her pockets and took out a bent package of Players and a Bic lighter.

"Have a smoke with me," she said.

"I quit some years back," he said.

"Do not be unsociable," she said. "I'm giving you a great story here."

"Okay," he said. He let her light it for him and was deeply dismayed at how good it tasted. There will be h.e.l.l to pay when I get home, he thought.

She looked at the glowing tip of her cigarette. Waved it in a tiny figure eight. "You see this pretty red light?" she said. "Imagine this red light as big as a pullet's egg."

Orwell, with his newfound interest in fancy chickens, had a good idea how big that would be. "Okay," he said.

"It was called the Ember," she said. "Some called it the 'Sacred Ember' but that was back when Russians believed in G.o.d."

"What was?"

"Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna's ruby. Ninety-seven carats, mounted like a heart in the centre of a crucifix, surrounded by sapphires and diamonds and pearls. On their own, the stones around it were worth a great fortune, the four sapphires alone were worth a million. But the ruby, the ruby itself was priceless. Maybe the largest in the world. Flawless. Burmese. Blood red. And deep in its blood-red heart it had the magic thing they call a 'feather.' A star. It was very special. But a stolen treasure requires careful marketing."

She put her gla.s.s beside the sink and found a saucer for an ashtray. The radio on top of the refrigerator now gave her something that made her swoon. Tchaikovsky. "Ahhh," she sighed. "Now you are talking. I have danced to this."

She lifted her arms above her head and there, in the small disordered apartment, Orwell saw for a fleeting moment how she might have looked on a stage. The music curved her back and extended her neck. She rose on her toes, bent forward at the waist, and lifted one leg behind her, impossibly high, held the position for a full measure of the melody. And then she looked at him and raised her eyebrows. "Yes?"

"Lovely," he said. And meant it.

She returned to the couch and settled in, with gla.s.s, ashtray and freshly lit cigarette, tucked her legs under her and wiggled herself into the corner.

Orwell had another sip of vodka, another illicit puff of tobacco. "What happened to the ruby?" he said.

"Okay," she said. "Back to business." She emptied the bottle into their two gla.s.ses, in equal measures. "How Chernenko got his hands on it no one will ever know," she said. "All the big ones robbed when they could. They were looting from before the Revolution. They never stopped. But Chernenko knew if he had to run, maybe he shouldn't show up in the West with a state treasure in his pants pocket. So he called up one of his old friends, Yuli Vystovsky, who ran the Moscow black market the way De Beers runs the diamond business. Vystovsky delegated the actual smuggling and fencing to a man named Piotr Romanenko. Do not try to remember these names. They are all dead now anyway." She smiled at him as she watched him take a deep delicious drag on the cigarette. "I knew you were a sinner in your heart," she said.

"True," he said. "All too true."

"So," she went on, "this Romanenko had made many profitable trips to the West selling sable skins, caviar, even heavy artillery, but Vystovsky didn't know of Comrade Romanenko's recently acquired addiction to cocaine. It was an unfortunate craving that obliged him, from time to time, to visit a man named Fyodor Kapitsa.

"Anyway, Romanenko was about to leave for the West with certain goods in his possession, and he stopped at Kapitsa's place of business for travelling supplies. Romanenko didn't like to fly, so Kapitsa gave him something that was supposed to make his journey more bearable. Instead, it knocked him unconscious." She laughed, shook her head at the ridiculousness of the situation. "Kapista got worried. He had to carry Romanenko to bed. And while that was going on, an opportunistic little addict named Andrei Kolmogorov made off with Romanenko's suitcase."

"With the ruby inside." Orwell b.u.t.ted the cigarette. He had smoked it down to the end.

"Of course, Kolmogorov did not know that. He was in a hurry to convert the suitcase into cash. All he saw inside were silk s.h.i.+rts and high-cla.s.s toiletries, and he knew someone who liked silk s.h.i.+rts and was willing to receive stolen goods. Viktor Nimchuk." She drank some vodka. Her eyes were drifting away from Orwell, looking into the past. She was about to go on tour. "Viktor was to leave the Soviet Union, too, the next morning, along with the Volga ballet company." She bobbed her head as if accepting a prison sentence. "And that is where I come into the story."

The Volga company. Castoffs, also-rans, close-but-no-cigars, the nearly great and the merely good. But they had one thing in common: they were all trustworthy, loyal and untainted by 'decadent influence.' Which meant that they were allowed to travel outside the country. There were no Nureyevs, no Baryshnikovs, no incandescent stars who would fly into the welcoming arms of the West. Good solid performers capable of dancing on any stage, under the baton of any conductor. Adaptable, presentable and cheap. They toured places the Kirov did not deign to visit, tolerated marginal accommodations, second-rate orchestras, erratic tempi, borderline lighting and bad floors. And to supplement their negligible remuneration, some of them did a little smuggling on the side.

"We were already in the U.S. when Viktor found the secret compartment. By then it was too late. He had something too big to sell, too big to give back. And who could he give it back to? By then, the others were probably all dead. By then, they would know where the thing had gone. By then, they would already be after Viktor." She got off the couch. Her gla.s.s was empty. She was out of cigarettes.

They went out to buy cigarettes. The liquor store was closed, it was after one in the morning. Orwell could see Stacy's unmarked car following a discreet distance behind as they walked to the 7-Eleven on Vankleek Street. It had stopped raining. The streets glistened and the stars were out. Anya went into the store, Orwell went around the car to Stacy's window.

"How you holding up, Chief?" she asked.