Requiem For a Glass Heart (3 page)

“W
ERE YOU SLEEPING
?”

“I was, yes,” she said, looking at the clock beside the bed. She didn’t know the voice and didn’t wonder about it. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

“Sorry.” There was a pause. “I’ve got your things for you.”

“Oh. Well, then, I guess you should bring them around.”

“Now?”

“No. Give me some time … quarter to three. Can you make that?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you. Goodbye.”

She lay on the sheets in her underwear, the afternoon light shattered on the foot of the bed, broken by the trees in the garden outside the window. This was a very nice place, she remembered. Large. Clean. Well furnished. He had all kinds of places, shitholes and country homes. She never knew where he would put her, and she lived in all of them with equanimity. She had been here only once before, passing through. She had arrived in darkness, slept, and departed in darkness.

The sunlight on her legs was faintly warm, and she
moved them on the sheets to enjoy the crisp cleanliness of British cotton.

Through the leaded windows she could hear London, the city sounds dampened by the lush vegetation of the park across the road. She hoped her layover here was for several days; she needed the rest, though he didn’t care anything about that. But there might be a chance of it. The documents were supposed to arrive in the afternoon. She had business in the evening, and then tomorrow—maybe—there would be the briefing. The tight schedule was unusual, but she had done it before. It was inescapable, and like any horrendous effort, you did it and then wondered later how you ever got through it.

Actually, she had no complaints about this part of the work, being whisked from country to country without knowing where she was going until just before she got her briefing, and he let her go again. At least she was able to spend most of her time alone.

Feeling a slight cramp tug at her lower abdomen, she rolled over on her side and looked out at the sunny street. She reached up to her throat with her left hand and felt the locket around her neck. She never took it off. She couldn’t. To remove it, even in those terrible moments that threatened to taint it, would cut her loose entirely. She wanted in the worst way to open it now and look inside, but she wouldn’t yet. Too little time had passed since Bolshoy. She was still too near the darkness and could not risk having this special bit of weak, hopeful light extinguished.

Wearily she tried to calculate how much time had passed. The train from St. Petersburg had arrived in Helsinki in the gray Baltic dawn, and she had gone straight to a musty little hotel near the harbor. She had removed her clothes and showered, then washed her underwear and dress in the sink and hung them to dry in the window. Then she spent the whole day on the bed in the puggy, cramped room, waiting for her clothes to dry. Late in the afternoon a man knocked on her door. Without introducing himself, he gave her a ferry ticket to Stockholm, a passport, an identity card, a KLM ticket to London, and a key. He told her the key was to the rooms in South Kensington. Again she spent the night traveling and spent the next day staring out the windows, this time in a sparsely furnished flat in a bleak modern apartment building
in Stockholm. In the evening she took the last KLM flight to London, arriving at Heathrow very late and taking a taxi to the South Kensington address.

The monotonous, calliope-like notes of a siren swelled and receded, probably on Cromwell Road. She rolled over on her stomach, stretched out her arms to either side of the bed, and spread her legs, stretching as far as they would go, her face pressed into the fresh sheets. She imagined her limbs stretching, stretching, slowly separating at the sockets, wrist, elbow, and shoulder, them ankle, knee, and groin, her limbs floating, slightly away from her, slightly separated, her torso limbless on the English cotton sheets, the rest of her suspended in the air around her, all in order like the exploded drawings in medical book diagrams, her blond hair flaring out around the top of her limbless trunk as though it were electrically charged.

In this disjointed state she began to think of an icon she had seen in a monastery in St. Petersburg when she was a child. It was an image of an angel dressed in flowing robes of cinnabar trimmed in gold. The angel’s great, unfurled wings were black.

The man who brought her things was not Russian but German, and though he did not say, she knew he was from Berlin, where a Russian émigré community of more than 300,000 provided the staging ground for the Russian Mafia’s operations all over Europe.

“Passport,” he said, pulling the documents from his satchel one at a time and laying them on the dining table between them. “‘Olya Serova.’” He was big and husky, with a leisurely demeanor and a soft voice. He wore rimless eyeglasses.

Irina gathered her dressing gown and cinched it tighter. Again she had washed her dress and was letting it dry in the bathroom. She picked up the document and looked at her photograph on the first page. Olya lived in St. Petersburg. From the stamps on the following pages it seemed that she had traveled extensively throughout Europe.

“Why have I traveled so much?”

He shrugged. “They just tell me what they want.” He laid a second passport on the table. “‘Vera Mendel.’ Czech Republic. Prague.” He looked at her. “You speak Czech, huh?”

She didn’t answer him. Vera had traveled in Europe as well. But also in England and the United States.

The quiet German laid a visa on the table. “Everything is in order here. Olya leaves St. Petersburg for London. From London to Paris. From Paris to the U.S.”

“From Paris?”

He nodded.

Picking up the visa, she saw that her occupation was trade representative promoting manufacturing opportunities in the Russian Republic. She was always a trade representative.

There were backup papers for each woman, whatever was required to prove her legal attachment to each country. If Olya Serova was going to Paris, it was a safe bet that Vera Mendel eventually would be returning to Prague. She checked all the documents. All of the particulars were correct—age, height, coloring, everything.

“These are personal items,” the German said, placing two photographs on the table. “Olya has a husband and a daughter, it seems.”

Irina shuddered. A daughter. She picked up the photograph. A complete stranger, a child. The husband, of course, was a nobody too, and was even shown with a little girl, though it was a candid snapshot and the girl could not be identified as the girl in the first picture.

“Vera has an elderly mother and an aunt,” the German said, placing two more pictures on the table with the precise movements of a man assembling the pieces of a puzzle.

“Letters to leave lying around. One from Olya’s husband,” he muttered, placing them beside the photographs, “one from Vera’s mother, who is ill and needs the aunt to do the writing.” He sat back a little. “The contents are very detailed,” he added with low-key satisfaction.

She flipped through the pages and put them aside.

“I think they will want you to know the details.”

She looked at him. He was a man who enjoyed being exact. Neat. At this time of the afternoon his white shirt was still crisp, his tie tightly knotted. She had noticed that his hands were as clean as a freshly scrubbed surgeon’s and that the nails of his surprisingly slim fingers were manicured. She could not remember when she last had seen a man with manicured
nails. He did not exactly smile, but his expression was pleasant.

“One more thing,” he said after a pause. He leaned forward to his satchel again and took out a small book. “An address book.” He handed it to her rather than putting it on the table as he had done with the other documents.

It was of a good quality, leather-covered, roughly thirteen by eighteen centimeters, well worn. It belonged to Olya Serova. She roamed through its pages, which were filled; names and numbers were often crossed out and new ones written above or below. Some pages were more used than others, having a patina of much handling. There were doodles at the corners of some of the pages, numbers jotted beside initials, none of them identified. Since her passport reflected that she had traveled widely in both Eastern and Western Europe, so did her address book. She could tell that some considerable time had been spent on this bogus document. They had never gone to this much trouble before, and this realization gave her a sense of uneasiness.

“This is a very important item,” he said with an odd sort of kindness in his voice. “More important than the others. Until you are briefed, I should be very careful with it.” He paused. “It’s quite important.”

She looked up from the address book. “Did you prepare these documents yourself?” she asked.

He hesitated. “I simply follow instructions,” he said with circumspection.

“And these”—she tilted her head at the variety of documents on the table between them—“were your instructions?”

He considered the packets of papers as though he were regarding the sale of antiques that he had some regret over letting go.

“Yes.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

“Did he instruct you about me?”

He looked up, frowning, but only slightly. “What do you mean?” And before she could answer he added, “I received no instructions whatsoever about you. No.”

She knew, of course, that that was true. She carefully laid the address book on the table and studied him. He was older than she, but by only a few years. Perhaps he was thirty-five, she guessed. He wore a thick ring with carving on it. She
would like to talk with him, visit really, ask him about his work, his family, learn a little bit about his life, but she knew that was impossible. She only wanted a normal conversation, but she hadn’t had a normal conversation in years, and she seriously doubted whether she ever would again.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked.

For the first time he showed hesitancy, a mild uncertainty.

She stood and walked a few steps into the adjacent parlor to a liquor cabinet. Opening it, she surveyed the contents.

“There is a bottle of scotch here, that’s all,” she said, turning to him. He was standing, but hadn’t moved. “Scotch?”

He tilted his head tentatively, shrugging one shoulder. She took glasses out of the cabinet, poured a dollop of scotch into each of them, and turned around to find that he had taken his satchel and joined her just inside the parlor. She stepped over to him and handed him one of the glasses. Lifting hers to him, she said, “Prosit.”

They drank, standing facing each other. He was taller than she by a few inches, even though she was tall for a woman. They looked at each other. He held the satchel in one hand and his drink in the other. She crossed her left arm beneath her breasts and rested her hand in the crook of the arm holding the glass. She knew that the top of her dressing gown had worked loose as they had sat at the table and that he was able to see a good part of her breasts. In fact, he had looked at them as he had taken his drink away from his mouth.

“Do you have a happy life?” she asked. She did not adjust the loose drape of her gown.

“Compared to what?” he asked. The response surprised her.

“I’m not asking you to compare it to anything,” she said. “Simply, are you happy?”

“I could use more money.”

She sipped her drink and saw his eyes fall to her breasts again as he lifted his own glass.

“How long have you done this kind of work?” she asked.

“Since university. A long time.”

“For these people?”

“People like these people.”

“Do you travel a great deal?”

“Not more than I want. I don’t mind it.”

“Are you away for long periods of time?”

He shook his head. “Well, perhaps occasionally.”

With this response she sensed a modest concern in his voice. She had gone too far. What had been intended to be an effort at common human communication had become, in his mind, an inquiry. Another question would drive him out the door. It was a fact that simultaneously angered and pained her. And made her feel foolish. In this dark charade that she had played for the past three years there was no room for anything but suspicion and fear and depravity. She had learned to assume that everything she saw and heard and felt was deception, trickeries fabricated by unknown others, delusions that were intended to destroy her and that she had to ferret out if she wanted to survive.

On rare occasions, and always with strangers, she might experience a moment or two of guileless kindness that she could trust. But she never accepted it, even momentarily, without walking away feeling as though she had just escaped a snare by the skin of her teeth.

She had no idea what had made her think she could talk to this man in a normal way. She had long ago forgotten what normal meant or what it would feel like if she experienced it.

“Thank you for coming,” she said abruptly, reaching for his unfinished drink. Taken aback, he frowned in puzzlement, but he gave her the glass.

She put the glasses on the cabinet and opened the front door for him.

“Goodbye,” she said.