“So what’s the deal with the girl?”
Naumenko smiled in response, seeing afresh the solution he’d just stumbled upon.
“I heard a rumor,” he said theatrically, “that the icon was back in Pechorsk, that it was taken back by the very people we took it from in the first place. Of course”—he leaned back, stretching his arms across the back of the sofa—“it’s just a rumor but it’s the only rumor I’ve heard. And if this girl had been a prostitute or if a rival organization had taken it, don’t you think I’d have heard a rumor about that too, or an offer to sell at the very least?” JJ didn’t respond, thinking it over himself, remembering the way the girl had been as she’d looked for it. “You say this girl was beautiful?”
“Very,” replied JJ, trying to picture her but suddenly unable to remember her face.
“Well if you like beautiful Russian girls, this one I think you’ll find in Pechorsk. I’m convinced of it. And their icon. And they deserve it, don’t you think, if it’s true?”
JJ nodded, the fact sinking in that, far from being a prostitute, the girl had been there for a reason beyond the parameters of the world they operated in. And perhaps that explained the way she’d stared at him too, not reaching out but looking at him with pity or contempt or simply with confusion, that he could do what he did so coldly. But, as it had turned out, he hadn’t been all he’d seemed that night either, chosen in some parallel universe to perform something akin to a mercy killing. Neither of them had been what they’d seemed.
“Now,” said Naumenko brusquely, “perhaps we could discuss business.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Well I take it you no longer feel quite so obliged to London.”
“I never did. I have worked exclusively for them, but I intend to change that.”
“Good. So you’d consider the occasional job for me?” JJ smiled; an offer of work had been the last thing he’d expected from the meeting.
“On a job-by-job basis, yes, of course. I’m puzzled though.” He glanced around the room, listened but could no longer hear anything from the bathroom, an eerily efficient silence. “Why would you need me?”
Naumenko nodded, taking the point but saying, “It would only be occasional. Some jobs are sensitive. It’s expedient to have an outsider in these cases. In addition, as Ed knew, people like you are few and far between.” He responded quickly to JJ’s smile. “You’re too modest. You see, I have men in this building who would carry out unspeakable acts, men who have no feelings. Some of them trained, special forces, some of them simply, I suspect, psychopaths. You too have done some unspeakable things, I know this, but what makes you different is that you have a heart—damaged perhaps, I really couldn’t say, but still a heart. That,” he said emphatically, “gives you an edge these men will never have; it’s a very rare thing.”
JJ stared at him, no longer smiling, thinking over the double-edged curse Naumenko had just described, something which had been meant to flatter but had left him feeling confused and vaguely wounded instead, and perhaps that in itself proved half the argument, that the edge he had was an understanding of what it was to be hurt.
The bathroom door opened and the first guy stepped out, closing it behind him again. He looked unruffled, still smart and composed, offered a curt nod which Naumenko acknowledged in kind. The guy left the room then.
Naumenko turned back to JJ. “Berg’s dead,” he said, no trace of emotion, like he was describing someone he’d never met, someone whose death he’d merely read about in the papers. And that was it. Everything that had started a week before, two years before, all of Berg’s machinations, finished without fireworks or confrontation in those two simple words.
For all of Naumenko’s flowery speaking, there was a bigger truth there too: that hearts were nothing more than machines for pumping blood, and there were countless easy ways of stopping them. Perhaps Berg more than anybody should have known that, and should have been ready, aware that each passing moment was potentially his last.
16
New York, January, four months later
There was a coffee shop on the ground floor, modern and spare, chrome and marble fittings, glass walls giving a view to the lobby, the street door, the elevator and stairs. It was a nice place, the smell of the freshly ground coffee teasing the air, the steam-train sounds of it being made, a quiet background chatter.