JJ shook his head, showing that he didn’t believe it but knowing that his opinion counted for nothing, frustrated again that it all came down to the provenance of the information.
He looked then at Naumenko who smiled and said to him, “You have no more cards to play.” And as if he’d read his mind continued, “Not your fault; you’re a killer, not an information broker.” Turning to Berg, he said casually, “Why didn’t you tell me who killed David?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You knew how I felt about David Bostridge. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because telling you wouldn’t have solved anything,” Berg said, suddenly earnest, “and frankly, it was a complication I could do without.”
Naumenko nodded wistfully and said, “But life is complicated.” He made a barely visible gesture and the guy who’d gone to fetch Berg came back over, putting his hand on Berg’s shoulder. Berg stayed calm but his eyes began to play games.
“Alex,” he said, his tone attempting to regain the momentum, but Naumenko looked apologetic, as if there was nothing he could do about it, and answered the point before it was made, “Please, Philip, let’s not make this difficult.” Another guy had appeared at Berg’s other side, easing him off the edge of the sofa and pushing him toward a door at the side of the room, Berg looking like he couldn’t catch up mentally with what was going on.
JJ glanced over, struggling just as much to see how they’d gotten to that point, getting a glimpse of the bathroom they were leading Berg into, the door closing behind them. He turned back to Naumenko who paused for a second and then said like nothing had happened, “You’ve met David’s family?” JJ nodded. “And?” It took him a moment or two to bring himself back, trying to catch up with how Naumenko had come down on his side of the fence, focusing finally on what he’d been asked about: David Bostridge’s family.
“They’re great people,” he said, smiling at the thought. “A beautiful wife, attractive kids, smart. His son looks very much like him.”
“Really?”
He thought about it for a while, the silence broken by the sound of muffled cries and soft blows from beyond the bathroom door. It brought back the memory of Aurianne again, JJ comforted slightly that Naumenko too had decided Berg should suffer on his way to the grave. As if he couldn’t hear the disturbance himself Naumenko continued, “I think he’d grown apart from them somewhat. A source of regret for him, even of self-recrimination now and then, but he was lost, you know, in his own way, quite lost.”
“Aren’t we all?” asked JJ. “We’re all lost somewhere between freedom and security, trying to find a balance; some people deal with it better than others, that’s all.”
Naumenko nodded in response, thinking carefully before snapping out of it and saying, “You know, if you’d been anyone else, even after what you’ve told me, I’d still have killed you for killing David, whether you were just the messenger or not.”
JJ nodded and said, “So what marks me out?”
Naumenko paused again, the same muffled sounds from the bathroom, sounding strangely like some quietly forced sex act. He smiled, eyes flicking toward the bathroom door like he’d just heard it for the first time, relishing the irony as he said, “An allowance for dignity, in a very undignified business. That’s what it is, why Ed picked you, why I forgive you. And now,” he added, moving smoothly on, “what intrigues me just a little bit is that you were the last person to see David alive.”
“And why is that intriguing?” He already had an idea why, guessing Naumenko probably knew more about the death than the Moscow police.
“It’s a delicate matter. David, as you said, has a beautiful family.” He was staring intently at JJ now, reading his expression to catch anything that shifted across it. Carefully then he said, “I received information to suggest he wasn’t alone when he was killed.”
JJ smiled, because it was clear now that Naumenko had been the one who’d suppressed the existence of the condom, a final act of friendship, just as Holden had performed his in requesting JJ or Lo Bello for the job. If a man’s friends were the mark of him, perhaps Bostridge had been more than JJ ever could have guessed from that night.
“He was with a girl, a beautiful girl. I assumed she was a prostitute but Holden thinks it unlikely.”
“In this Ed is undoubtedly correct,” said Naumenko, who was perhaps best placed to know.
A muted high-pitched cry broke from the bathroom, JJ registering the claustrophobic feel of it as he said, “And she took the icon too.”
As with Holden, nothing else he’d said had caused a visible response like the mention of that package. Naumenko looked dumbstruck, spellbound by whatever implications he saw in the information he’d been given. “So it’s true,” he said, nodding to himself. “Do you know about the icon?”
“Holden told me about it, that it was from Pechorsk, very rare.
“And very beautiful. The Annunciation by Theophanes.”