“What happened to your parents?”
“My father died when I was very small. I don’t remember. And my mother, three years ago. She was hit by a car.” She relayed the information blankly, as if recounting the plot of a novel.
“I’m sorry to hear that. And you didn’t have any other relatives?”
“My mother’s, er . . . mother and father?”
“Your grandparents?”
“Yes, they were dead. And my other grandparents, from my father, they didn’t want to take me. They’re old.” Again, there was no self-pity, no search for sympathy, just a basic relation of the facts.
“Aren’t you curious, about what will happen to you now, about the man I’m taking you to?”
She smiled. “You said he’s a good man.”
“He is,” said Finn, though he couldn’t tell her much more than that because he didn’t know how Alex would choose to help, whether by placing her with someone back in Russia or sending her to a boarding school. There would be no more orphanages, that was all he knew. “His name is Aleksandr Naumenko.”
She looked wide-eyed for a moment and laughed, saying, “I’ve . . . I know from the TV, from the news.”
“Yes, that’s him.”
“He’s very rich.”
“And very powerful. The man who took you from Russia, he won’t be able to harm you now.”
Finn looked at his watch, calculating how many hours it would be until Karasek was ambushed in Kaliningrad. And yet instinctively, he couldn’t help but imagine that Karasek would walk away from Sparrowhawk, the way he’d so far walked away from every other attempt to bring him down. If that were the case, then Katerina really would need to rely on Alex’s protection, at least for a while.
“May I read to you?” He looked at her, puzzled. “Harry said it’s good for practice my pronunciation.”
“Okay, what are you reading?”
“An English crime story. It’s very good.” She reached into her bag and pulled the book free.
Finn looked at the cover and said, “Murder on the Orient Express.” It was oddly appropriate, but he had to wonder if Harry had picked it up somewhere specifically for Katerina, or if it had been in his own collection. He’d ask him about it when he got back.
“Do you know it?”
“I read it a long time ago, but I’d like to hear you read it.”
She read to him for about an hour, occasionally asking for guidance on how to pronounce some word or other. Occasionally he corrected her, too, but for the most part he just listened, enjoying the lilting delivery, the nostalgia of a story so long-known that it seemed to speak of his own childhood.
When she went to bed, changing in the bathroom into a pair of pajamas Harry had bought for her, he kept on only the light by the desk. And for hours, he kept reading the book from where she’d left off, sinking back into the story, lulled by the rolling of the ship, the occasional strained clanks from down on the vehicle deck.
He stayed in the chair all night, dozing for short periods but never really sleeping. Once or twice, Katerina seemed troubled in her sleep, acting out bad dreams, but she didn’t wake.
Despite the early promise of a rough crossing, the sea settled as the night wore on, and by the time dawn seeped across the horizon, the sea was flat and the sky cloudless. He showered and dressed, and when he came out of the bathroom he saw that she was awake.
She smiled. “The sea made me sleep.”
“Good,” he said, understanding what she meant. “I’ll go and get us some breakfast.”
By the time he came back, she was in the bathroom. She came out dressed but with her hair still damp.
“Do you want to dry your hair?”
“It’s okay.” She looked bedraggled and childlike again.
After breakfast she looked out of the window. The sun was in the sky now, and the first of the islands were appearing in the distance. She looked back at Finn, her eyes full of excitement.
“May we go outside?”
He weighed the very slight risk of Karasek having someone aboard against the fact that they were now on the long approach into Stockholm, within reach of safety.
“Okay, but you need to put more clothes on—it’ll be cold.”
She laughed, even as she went into her bag for another sweater, and said, “I’m from Russia.”
She had a point.
He took her up onto the large open deck on the top of the boat, and despite the sharp wind pummeling it, there were plenty of other passengers who’d been tempted out. Finn scanned their faces, but there was no one to raise his suspicions.