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ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA
Gabriel decided it was safer to take the train. There was a station in the town of Okulovka; he could catch the first local of the morning and be in St. Petersburg by early afternoon. Privately, he was relieved when Eli Lavon insisted on coming with him. He needed Lavon’s eyes. And he needed his Russian, too.
It was only forty miles to Okulovka, but the dreadful roads and weather stretched the trip to nearly two hours. They left the Volvo SUV in a small windblown car park and hurried into the station, a newly built redbrick structure that looked oddly like a factory. The train was already boarding by the time Lavon managed to secure a pair of first-class tickets from one of the surly glass-enclosed agents. They shared a compartment with two Russian girls who chattered without pause and a thin elegantly dressed businessman who never once looked up from his phone. Lavon passed the time by reading the morning papers from Moscow, which contained no mention of a missing oil executive. Gabriel stared out the frosted window at the endless fields of snow until the swaying of the carriage lulled him into something like sleep.
He woke with a start as the train rattled into St. Petersburg’s Moskovsky Station. Upstairs the great vaulted hall was in turmoil; it seemed the afternoon bullet train to Moscow had been delayed by a Chechen bomb threat. Trailed by Lavon, Gabriel picked his way through the sobbing children and quarreling couples and headed into Vosstaniya Square. The Hero City Obelisk rose skyward from the center of the swirling traffic circle, its golden star tarnished by the falling snow. Streetlamps burned up and down the length of Nevsky Prospekt. It was only two in the afternoon, but whatever daylight there had been was long gone.
Gabriel set out along the prospekt with Lavon floating watchfully in his wake. He was no longer in Russia, he thought. He was in a tsarist dreamland, imported from the West and built by terrorized peasants. Florence called to him from the facades of the Baroque palaces, and, crossing the Moyka River, he dreamed of Venice. He wondered how many bodies lay beneath the ice. Thousands, he thought. Tens of thousands. No other city in the world concealed the horrors of its past more beautifully than St. Petersburg.
Near the end of the prospekt was its only eyesore—the old Aeroflot building, a hideous flint-gray monstrosity inspired by the Doge’s Palace in Venice, with a dash of Florentine Medici thrown in for good measure. Gabriel turned into Bolshaya Morskaya Street and followed it through the Triumphal Arch, into Palace Square. As he neared the Alexander Column, Lavon drew alongside him to say that he was not being followed. Gabriel glanced at his wristwatch, which seemed frozen to his arm. It was twenty minutes past two. It happens the same time every day, Zhirov had said. They all go a little crazy when they come home after a long time in the cold.
Adjacent to Palace Square was a small park, green in summer, now bone-white with snow. Lavon waited there on an icy bench while Gabriel walked alone to the Palace Embankment. The Neva had been stilled by ice. He glanced at his watch one final time. Then he stood alone at the barrier, as motionless as the mighty river, and waited for a girl he did not know.
He saw her at five minutes to three, coming across the Palace Bridge. She wore a heavy coat and boots that rose nearly to her knees. A wool hat covered her pale hair. A scarf concealed the lower half of her face. Even so, Gabriel knew instantly it was her. The eyes betrayed her—the eyes and the contour of her cheekbones. It was as if Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring had been freed from her canvas prison and was now walking along a riverbank in St. Petersburg.
She passed him as if he were invisible and made her way toward the Hermitage. Gabriel waited to see whether she was under surveillance before following, and by the time he entered the museum she was already gone. It didn’t matter; he knew where she was going. Same painting every time, Zhirov had said. No one can figure out why.
He purchased an admission ticket and walked along the endless corridors and loggias to Room 67, the Monet Room. And there she sat alone, staring at The Pond at Montgeron. When Gabriel sat down next to her, she glanced at him only briefly before resuming her study of the painting. His disguise was better than hers. He meant nothing to her. He supposed he never had.
When another minute passed and he had yet to move, she turned and looked at him a second time. That was when she noticed the copy of A Room with a View balanced upon his knee. “I believe this belongs to you,” he said. Then he placed the book carefully into her trembling hand.
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