Requiem For a Glass Heart (46 page)

U
NBELIEVABLY
, I
RINA’S
SIG-S
AUER DID NOT GO OFF IN
K
RUPATIN’S
mouth. Simultaneously with firing his own gun, he twisted his head back and away, so that Irina’s reflex shot blew past his face, taking away part of his ear and searing his jaw. Leaping to his feet, Krupatin sent the shocked Irina sprawling, which launched the
SIG
-Sauer into the air, end over end toward Cate, past her. It landed on the parquet floor and skittered away from her toward the far curve of the glass wall.

Without even thinking, Cate lunged across the room, scrambled for the gun, and in an instant was dropping down on one knee, both hands gripping it as her arms swung up. Looking down the length of her outstretched arms, she found Krupatin halfway to the front door, whirling around as he raised his wobbling arm to fire.

His gun had no silencer, and the bursts of his gunfire were deafening. They both fired. Cate felt the SIG recoil but didn’t hear her own silenced shots against Krupatin’s cannon blasts. She saw his muzzle flashes, heard the sizzling rounds splitting the air around her, heard the shattering glass.

Krupatin was down but picked himself up and scrambled for the door, turned again, fired again. He was out into the foyer. Cate floundered toward him. She managed to get to the
front door herself and got a glimpse of him fumbling with the elevator button. She fired twice, wildly, her slugs hitting the elevator door above his head. As he whirled she fell back, anticipating the
boom!
that followed, and then she stuck her head around the corner again and heard the stairwell door open and slam.

“JesusChristJesusChrist you people hear me? He’s going down the stairs—the stairwell, going down the stairwell!” she screamed. “We’ve got casualties up here, you hear me—casualties!”

She checked the barrel of the SIG. There was one round in the barrel, but she didn’t think it was the only one left. She counted her rounds, tried to count them, but gave up. There was no way in the excitement.

Standing in the doorway, she turned to look at Irina, who was trying to get up. Jesus God. Her gestures, her expression of shock, dehumanized her. She was not a woman but a gravely wounded animal that did not understand what was happening to it.

Cate grabbed a picture from the wall and a small chair sitting in the entry. She wedged the chair in the apartment door, ran to the stairwell, opened the door, went inside, and put the picture frame in the jamb to keep it from closing and locking behind her. Then she paused and listened. She could hear Krupatin going down.

She started down, stumbling five or six steps and then jumping the last ones to the next landing. She did the same with the next flight, and the next, and the next, before she stopped to listen. Nothing. But she saw blood on the cement stairs. Then she heard him moving. Closer now. Two flights down.

Again she ran, stumbled, jumped. And again. And again she stopped. There was a lot of blood on the stairs, and there were long drags of it smeared along the wall. She must have hit him. Maybe in the side or the stomach. But he was definitely slowing.

Silence.

She waited. She heard him move, just around the corner on the next turn.

“Come on,” he said, his voice weak but amplified in the empty stairwell. “I’ll kill you.”

She moved down one step at a time until she saw him,
sitting in the corner of the next turn, the two walls holding him up. He was aiming at her, but didn’t fire as she darted her head around the corner. He was too weak to risk an uncertain shot at a small target.

“Throw the gun out where I can see it,” she said.

“Go to hell.”

“You’ll die there. I can get you an ambulance.”

“I’m going to kill you,” he said. “Goddamn you.”

Cate thought of Irina upstairs, dying alone. Oh God, she thought, don’t let her die alone. Gate was furious. She remembered a small plastic trash bucket that had been set outside the door on the landing behind her. She took off her shoes.

“I’m going to ask you one more time,” she said and hurried up the steps to the trash bucket. Krupatin shouted something at her, but she couldn’t understand him. The plastic bucket had some twisted wire coat hangers in it, which she dumped out on the floor. Then she retraced her steps. Staying out of Krupatin’s sight, she began unbuttoning her dress. After stepping out of it, she put the bucket in the top and buttoned it up to hold the plastic bucket in. She cinched up the belt to hold it in on the bottom.

“Krupatin,” she said. “Your last chance.”

He did not respond. She leaned slightly forward and saw his knee doubled up on the floor. He hadn’t moved.

“Okay,” she said. “If you want to make this …”

She threw the dress onto the landing, the bucket giving it body for an instant, the skirt flying, a big target—something he could hit. And he did. There were three
booms.
The bucket flew back, slammed against the wall by the slugs fired at point-blank range. Then she heard a sound:
clickclickclick, click.

Cate came around the corner and stepped down onto the landing with Krupatin. He was slumped, bleeding from the stomach, from the mouth, drenched in sweat. They stared at each other, and then he threw the gun at her, startling her, thwacking her in the side.

They stared at each other.

“You had better think about this,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much money I could give you? Untraceable. A Belgian account.”

Cate walked up to him and put the SIG-Sauer to his forehead.
Krupatin said nothing, swallowed, and began involuntarily urinating.

“Goddamn you!” He swung his arm at her, a sloppy, wobbly swing. His gut was hemorrhaging a lot of blood.

She gave it a second thought. She would have to explain the contact wound. She took the gun away from his head. She picked up her dress, unbuttoned it, and dumped out the trash can. Carrying it across her arm, she walked back up five steps, turned, aimed, and fired. One, two, three times.

She had thought she had four shots left.

But three were enough.

A
FTER SLIPPING INTO HER DRESS—
K
RUPATIN’S THREE SHOTS HAD
ripped three tears, one each in the midriff, the left breast, and the skirt—she hurried as fast as she could up the stairwell, stopping at each landing door to try the doorknob, even though she knew all of them would be locked. She was exhausted, out of shape, dizzy. She had come down farther than she had guessed. All the turns looked the same. Had someone removed the picture? Had she passed it already? Then she rounded a corner and saw it.

When she jerked open Krupatin’s door, which was still propped ajar with the chair, the whole place was dark again. They must have knocked out the lamp. She could not find any light switches and finally located another table lamp near the sofas where she had left Irina. Putting down the gun, she fumbled hastily at the lamp switch, and when it came on she was stunned at the amount of blood and how it glistened in the feeble light. The furniture was scattered and knocked over, but Irina was not there.

Then she saw the trail of blood on the carpet leading around the corner to a hallway. Her heart sank as she noted the volume of it. Suddenly the place gave her the creeps.

“Irina!”

She was taut inside, dreading what she would find, sick at what she had done, horrified at what the night had been like.

“Irina!” She was running now, down the corridor, which was wide and curved gently past a kind of office and after that opened into a bedroom. Just as she entered, something fell on a tile floor in the bathroom around the corner.

She ran past large windows that looked onto the city and skirted a round bed—Krupatin’s idea of luxury, a round bed with rumpled sheets—to reach the bathroom. It was an enormous room that was reached through double doors of glass. Deep cobalt tile glittered with cleanliness, and full-length mirrors were placed at angles to expand its size. There was a large vanity, and a large shower without walls in the center of the room, with a shallowly sloped, disk-shaped marble floor to catch the water for the drain.

Close up against the windows was a long bathtub made of tiny brilliant gold tiles, a construction of such richness that it seemed as if it had been made of fine, sheet-thin gold foil. A sludge of blood trailed across the tile floor to the tub. Irina was inside.

“Oh, God … God …” Cate ran over and knelt down.

Irina reclined in the tub, still dressed, her skirt pulled up to her waist and a pile of white towels, dark with grume, jammed between her legs. She held them in place with both hands. She was as pale as a mannequin and was sweating profusely.

“Did you get him?” Her voice was frail.

“I killed him,” Cate said. She jumped up and ran to the vanity and grabbed another towel. Where the fuck was everybody? On her way back to the tub she folded the towel, then she put it under Irina’s head, which was lying back on the sloping gold tile. She knelt beside the tub. She realized she was crying, in frustration and horror and exhaustion.

Irina tensed the corners of her mouth briefly. “It is my fault. We were so close. I should have shot him while he was bending over the sink. It would have been so easy. And it would have been over …We were so close.”

“Jesus, Irina.” Cate was sobbing. Whatever small threads of her emotions had held together up to this point, they were now long past their ability to hold. There was nothing left.

For a while there was only the sound of her weeping.

“I do not think this is going to stop,” Irina said, lifting her head, looking at the pile of towels between her legs. Blood was running from the saturated pile into the drain. Cate could actually hear it trickling into the pipe.

“You’re going to be okay,” Cate said, a stupid, silly statement in the face of what both of them could see. She had put her hands on top of Irina’s. The situation was pitiful. Horrible and pitiful.

Irina smiled. It was a dry, parched smile, her lips stiff with the dehydration of shock.

“I had no idea you were with the FBI,” she said. “You were very … very good, Catherine.” She paused. “Your name is Catherine.”

“Yes,” Cate said. The admission almost stuck in her throat.

“You were very good, yes, but … Tell me, I believed you had real … affection for me. You did, didn’t you? It wasn’t all just an act. We were friends, real friends.”

“I … Of course. More than that. I learned to love you,” Cate said, not knowing whether she was lying or telling the truth or what it meant exactly. She could feel the tears actually falling out of her eyes.

“Yes, we had that.” Irina nodded. Her chignon was coming loose, and buttery blond hair was falling down her neck.

Oh, God, dear God. Cate could hardly stand it.

“There is a little time,” Irina said, “I would like to talk.” She swallowed, tried to find some moisture in her mouth.

Cate jumped up and got a glass of water and helped her drink it. Irina kept both her hands on the scarlet towels.

“I have killed eight people, Catherine,” Irina said. “I want you to know that because … because …” She sighed and swallowed. “You know … when I could, when I was able to do it, I would go to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, to the Trinity Cathedral there, and pray. I wouldn’t pray for my soul, for my sins. No, not for that. I would pray that I would be able to kill the people I was supposed to kill. I prayed to God: please take the man in Prague. Please take the man in Rome, the man in Milan, the woman in Bern. Take them, please, God, and spare my Félia from this devil Krupatin. That sounds horrible, I know.” She swallowed. “And it was horrible. But it was not as horrible to me as what would have happened if I had failed. Every prayer
for death was also a prayer for life.” She paused. “So what am I to think? Could God answer such prayers with a yes?” She looked down at her legs. “Ah, well, it is confusing if he did, isn’t it? But it seems to me that that is what he has done, and for that I am grateful.”

She studied the blood rolling out between her knees. Cate couldn’t look down. Her attention was on Irina; her eyes were fixed on her face. She was fearful of turning them anywhere else.

“Blood from my veins,” Irina mused, still looking at her legs. “Red against gold. In an icon that is one of the most beautiful combinations of colors.” She was thoughtful, the expression on her face serene. “There is an icon in Venice, a fifteenth-century one from Crete, I think, and it is the most beautiful use of scarlet and gold I have ever seen. Mary Magdalene is kneeling before the risen Christ. Christ’s robes are dark, highlighted with golden folds, and Mary …is wearing a scarlet cape.
Noli me tangere
, he is saying-—‘Touch me not.’”

She raised her head, then once again looked down between her legs. Her expression was grim. “Dear God—this is very bad, I think.” She laid her head back on the towel and closed her eyes. After a moment she opened her eyes again and went on.

“Do you believe in God, Catherine?”

Cate supposed she did. She nodded.

“He gave me a glass heart,” Irina said matter-of-factly. “Do you remember I told this to you before? I did not ask for it, the glass heart. It was a gift.” She waited as if to let something subside—a pain, perhaps; a dizziness. “Hard is the glass heart. Nothing moves through it. It has no fragrance or softness. Cold to the touch. It hears no music, sees no light …”

She stopped again. Phlegm was accumulating in her throat, and she had to cough. Her eyes were growing heavy. Her breath jerked in her chest, and then she went on.

“And yet it is fragile too, so very fragile. When Félia smiled … my heart crazed. When she laughed, it shivered almost to breaking. When she kissed my cheek, it shattered into powder.” She paused. “A glass heart. Hard … and fragile. I needed both—to survive. And, in the end, to be redeemed. God is grace, even to the damned. One of his endless paradoxes.”

Cate was heaving with sobs. In her mind she could hear the blood trickling over each tiny gold tile, like the sound of tongues moving just below a whisper.

In a little while Irina opened her eyes one last time, just barely, so that Cate saw only a thin gleam of green.

“After I die,” she said, her tongue searching for moisture, “take the locket.”

In the silence that followed, Irina grew paler against the gold. As the night moved steadily into the thinness of its time, her beautiful face grew still and slack. And then, just moments before the eastern sky pulled away from the weakening grasp of darkness, Cate felt a sudden stillness in the room, and she knew that she was very much alone.