“Is it a paperweight?” Everyone turned at the voice. The children’s father had appeared almost out of nowhere and inquired. His camera was around his neck, and he was cleaning his sunglasses with a handkerchief. Dennis McCauley was a big man, not fat and not muscular, but tall and stocky with a stomach that was just starting to grow bulbous. He was handsome, his hair now more white than black, but still lustrous and thick. He parted it in the middle and swept it back, and her sister often teased him about having movie-star hair and said he looked like an actor when he was in one of his uniforms. He wasn’t wearing a uniform today, however, he was wearing khaki cargo shorts. In Cassie’s opinion, that eliminated instantly any chance at all that he might be mistaken for an actor. Sometimes her sister called him absentminded, but Cassie rather doubted that he was ever inattentive at work. He was an engineer and probably just compartmentalized. Everyone knew how bloody brilliant he was. She wished that she had told Buckley that last night. Shown a little more pride in what he did. She’d said Dennis was sweet; she should have said he was smart. The guy, after all, helped dispose of chemical weapons. It was work, Cassie suspected, that was more dangerous than he was ever likely to admit to his family.
“No, it’s a bookend,” Cassie answered. “I bought it at an antique store near the Spanish Steps in Rome.”
“They only had half?”
She nodded.
“I love it. A bookend about twins and half has gone missing,” Dennis said. “That may be the definition of irony. What will you use it for, son?” he asked Tim.
The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. But I like it. It’s cool.”
“I agree,” said Dennis. Then he bent over to look at the earrings that Cassie had brought his daughter, oohing and aahing at their beauty. When he was done, he stood up straight and put back on his sunglasses. “You find the damnedest things in your travels, Cassie.”
“I guess.”
“No, I mean that. You bring back the most creative things. Me? Ask these two: the stuff I bring them back when I travel is way less interesting.”
“That’s because you only go to places like Maryland and Washington, D.C.,” Rosemary tried to reassure him.
“Nah. Cassie has a much better eye,” he said. “Really, they’re perfect gifts.”
“Thank you,” she said. She was touched. He was always so much kinder to her than Rosemary was, Cassie thought, even though he knew just as much as Rosemary did about her peccadilloes great and small. But he was less judgmental. She had a feeling that when her name was attached to the dead body in Dubai, he would be far more surprised than his wife.
17
Against the allegations that his people were brutish, Elena’s father would smile and bring up the Bolshoi. Chekhov. Tchaikovsky. “We can be merciless,” she once heard him remark as he studied the Ararat cognac in his snifter, “but we are no more and no less brutish than anyone else.” It was over dinner with his old comrades from the KGB, most of whom now were more focused on their trophy dachas and trophy wives, and the riches that they had found in the rubble of the once iconic wall. He reminded them how much Lenin loved novels, and how literature was a part of the political world in which Lenin grew up. When Lenin wanted to belittle his rivals, he’d refer to them as particularly stupid or especially loathsome characters from Chernyshevsky, Pushkin, and Goncharov. “The biggest difference between an Oblomov and an oligarch?” he asked that night, the setup for what he viewed as a bon mot. “If an oligarch spends the day in bed, it’s because he has a hooker and he’s getting his money’s worth.” In his heart, of course, he knew that wasn’t the biggest difference. Not at all. The oligarchs now had the wealth of Oblomov, but they weren’t lazy and they hadn’t inherited their vast fortunes. Most of them were self-made. Corrupt, of course. Corrupt on a positively titanic scale. But they worked hard. And perhaps the only man before whom they would bow was the Russian President. They were alpha males who took no prisoners.
Viktor was, in her mind, a perfect example of that balancing act between barbarism and refinement: he was cold-blooded and feral beneath his crisp black suits, but he had constructed a veneer that compelled him to eat in small bites. He spoke multiple languages fluently and appreciated the aesthetic of films by Tarkovsky.
And he wasn’t alone. Supposedly even Stalin, as uncultured as they came and absolutely no fan of art for art’s sake, died in 1953 with Russian pianist Maria Yudina’s recording of Mozart’s Concerto no. 23 playing on the nearby turntable.
* * *
? ?
Elena opened the app on her phone and watched the little blue dot beat like a small, tiny heart. A frog’s heart. It pulsed, in and out, in and out, sending a fainter blue wave away from it in a perfect circle, before the wave would disappear and a new one would follow. The dot was her prey and her prey was at the zoo.
She put her phone down on the wooden bench and folded her arms across her chest. She looked up once at the Flatiron Building a block and a half to the south, and then at the young parents playing with their toddlers on the grass or walking their dogs along the paths that looped throughout Madison Square Park. The simple normalcy of the tableau was affecting: she felt a forlorn tug at her heart and shook her head ever so slightly, willing the melancholy away. This wasn’t her world or her life and it never would be. Not in Moscow and not in Manhattan.
She was wearing nondescript khaki shorts, a sleeveless white blouse, and beige espadrilles. She had a magazine and a bag with a bagel in it, but only so it looked like she had a reason to be sitting on the bench. It was sunny but hot, the air damp and still, and she wished for a breeze.
She really didn’t know much about this neighborhood. The section of New York she knew best was midtown west of Fifth, the great wide blocks of skyscrapers where Unisphere had its Manhattan office, and she’d probably only been there four or five times in her life. The family money. The family business—or part of the family business, anyway. The part that came of age after the final collapse in 1991. She’d been but a toddler then. When she thought of this city, she thought first of lunches in the dark oak dining rooms with her father and the American managers of the fund while she was at college—before he was poisoned—the dining rooms packed with administrators and executives who seemed to eat and drink as if it were another era. (The older adults occasionally still called each other comrade—they even called the Americans comrade—though there was now a trace of irony to the term.) Of dinners alone with her father in nearby restaurants that were largely empty because they timed their meal to begin after the pre-theater crowd had left for their shows. Her father enjoyed coming to America, and he loved it when she was a freshman and a sophomore and would come south from Massachusetts to New York to meet him. He enjoyed these people. He probably would have enjoyed Sokolov—or at least gotten a kick out of him until he showed his true colors—because Alex’s blood was so rich with Russian DNA. But her father was Russian through and through, and his trips to the United States were brief. He took pride in his accent. (She, by design, had worked hard to lose any trace of hers.)
She’d certainly never been to the Empire State Building or the Metropolitan Museum or the Bronx Zoo.
She rolled her eyes as if she weren’t alone. The zoo, she thought. Really? The woman’s life was unraveling, and Cassandra Bowden had gone to the zoo. Based on the homework Elena had done on the flight attendant, she was most likely with her sister’s family. She’d probably be with them all day, since they were in from Kentucky. Tomorrow night she was supposed to fly out to Rome.