“I already talked to security. I told them the Cart Tart Killer is staying here and newspaper and TV people might try to sneak upstairs. They are going to be extra watchful in the lobby.”
She sat back and appraised him. “Wow. You’re good.”
“You’re impressed?”
“I am.”
He picked up the gun and held it by the grip. “And we have this. If we stay together and watch TV and play games? There’s no one in the world who can hurt us tonight.”
She took the gun from him. She worried that he might accidentally discharge it. “I wish that were true. But it’s not.” Then she stood and with her free hand led him to his feet. She walked him to the door.
“The chocolate box will be downstairs in the morning with your uncle’s Beretta,” she told him.
“Text me,” he said.
“I will.”
“And I will see you next week?”
“Yes, absolutely,” she said, though she didn’t believe it. She had a feeling she’d never see him again. Then she kissed him chastely on the cheek, thanked him once more, and said good night. When he was gone, she thought of what her lawyer had suggested and dead-bolted the door.
* * *
? ?
After he had left, she sat in the chair and turned so she was facing the door and practiced holding the Beretta with two hands. She closed one eye and stared through the sight, aiming at the peephole in the door one moment and at the handle the next. She flipped the safety on and off.
It was late here in Rome but nearing dinnertime in Manhattan. She texted Ani to see if there was news. Ani texted back that there wasn’t. She texted her sister that she was sorry she had caused her so much worry—not just now, but over the years—and she told her she loved her. She texted her friend Gillian to thank her for all of the times she had brought her home and held back her hair while she vomited into the toilet. No, toilets. Plural. There had been toilets in bars, toilets in clubs, toilets in other people’s homes. She texted Paula to keep her shirt on, a joke they shared about how impatiently they drank when they were together and how one or the other would often wind up with her shirt off those nights. Cassie recalled holding back Paula’s hair exactly the way Gillian had held back hers. She texted Megan to please wave to the Brandenburg Gate for her. She added how much she had always enjoyed flying with her. She put the words “filet mignon” with a hashtag after the text, a reference to the time that Megan was serving a particularly despicable, angry bore in first class. He had knocked his entrée, the filet mignon, onto the cabin floor, and complained bitterly as if it were Megan’s fault. She had told him with a sincere smile, “Good thing we have extras.” Then she had brought the piece of meat to the lav, rinsed it off with the undrinkable water there, reheated it, and returned it to him on his plate.
And she texted Buckley the answer to his most recent question:
What’s the difference between a Pop Tart and a Cart Tart? They’re both sweet and they both get toasted, but a Cart Tart’s not nearly as good for you.
She hoped her small joke would make him smile, but the truth of it made her cringe. It wasn’t merely the acknowledgment of her drinking; it was the reality that she was poisonous; she always risked diminishing the people she loved or might someday love. Too often she forced them to make the same bad choices she did or she forced them from her life. Best case, she forced them to care for her. Today, though sober, she had gotten a kind young man to steal a gun from his uncle for her. She had needed Makayla to bring her to the hotel after she was pepper-sprayed. And she had attacked a strange woman at an international airport.
She wrote Buckley a second text.
When I sent you that text (above), I meant it as a joke. But you need to know, Buckley, that it’s true, too. It’s the truest thing I have ever said. I’m not good for you. I’m not good for anyone. It’s not just the lies or the fact I’m a drunk, it’s who I am. It’s what I am. So…don’t ever wait for me. Don’t expect anything of me. I will only disappoint you and I know you deserve better. And that, also, is true.
Would he understand this was good-bye? Perhaps not.
But he would when she ignored his next text and the text after that, either because she was doing what was right or because she was dead.
Finally she turned on the television and found the stations from America. She sat against the headboard with the handgun beside her and watched an old sitcom about brilliant young physicists who were socially awkward. She was going to watch anything but the news.
She was just starting to doze off when she was awakened by the deafening, shrill, high-pitched wail of the hotel fire alarm.
31
Who really burned most of Moscow to the ground in 1812? Tolstoy seemed to believe it was the occupying French army and it was an accident: too many soldiers starting too many fires. Myriad small blazes igniting one massive one that drove Napoleon from the Kremlin—though only briefly. He would return and reside there a month before the long French retreat would commence. But Elena knew that her father and her father’s friends thought otherwise: the Russians themselves, the few that remained in the city, set torch to the wooden buildings. Hadn’t the Russian commander himself demobilized the firefighting corps? Hadn’t he ordered that the firefighting wagons be wrecked? No one would ever know for sure where on the spectrum the inferno fell between suicide and sabotage, but Elena had grown up confident that it was the Muscovites themselves—citizens and soldiers alike—who had destroyed the great city.
Which, in her mind, fit the Russian character to a tee. She saw herself in the light from those flames. She knew her people, and she knew the way the West looked down on them: certainly the West had in 1812 and certainly the West did today. Hadn’t she felt that when she had been a student in Switzerland and Massachusetts, hadn’t she heard that in the derogatory comments in political science classes about serfs and gulags and oligarchs? Well, North Americans had their crimes, too: genocide and slavery and, yes, oligarchs of their own. So be it. She and her ancestors lived with a chip on their shoulders that made them at once defiant and fatalistic—and conquerable only by themselves. Always it had been Russians themselves who, in the end, vanquished or annihilated or finally broke Russians.
She was considerably more frightened of Viktor than she was of any man or woman she had ever met in the West.
* * *
? ?
Her mind, as it did often now, meandered to Sochi and her father’s dacha there. Her home there. Mostly it had been spared the madness of the Olympic construction, but the view of the mountains to the southwest had changed: you could see roads that had been cut through the forest in the distance, and in the winter you could spot the alpine trails that had been added when there was snow. Her father would have been appalled had he lived to see it. But the vista to the east was unchanged, as rustic and primeval as when Stalin had summered nearby, and she had a sense that despite his disappointment, her father would have adapted: perhaps he would have grown accustomed to sitting on the porch on the eastern side of the house instead of the one on the west, and arranged his days so he could bask in the sunrises instead of the sunsets. You didn’t survive in the Soviet Union if you didn’t adapt. You didn’t thrive in the post-Soviet world if you weren’t a chameleon. Certainly her father was. But he was also a realist and he was disciplined. It was one more reason why she had both respected and loved him.
And he was Russian: unconquerable by forces from beyond the border. The only person who had ever defeated him was his equally Russian wife.
* * *
? ?
She read the message from Washington twice to be sure. Then a third time.