The Devil's Garden

Table of Contents

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Published by William Heinemann 2009

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Copyright © Richard Montanari 2009

Richard Montanari has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs

and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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–Estonian proverb

I would like to thank Meg Ruley, Peggy Gordijn, Jane Berkey, Christina Hogrebe, Don Cleary, and everyone on the front line at the Jane Rotrosen Agency; thanks to Kate Elton, Jason Arthur, Susan Sandon, Rob Waddington, Trish Slattery, Oli Malcolm, Jay Cochrane, Louisa Gibbs, Emma Finnigan, Lucy Beaumont, Claire Round, Chrissy Schwartz, and all at Random House UK; thanks to Darin Brannon and Tiina Fischgrund; and a special thanks to Robert Masters, Esq. of the Queens County District Attorney’s Office, and Detective Rick Torelli, NYPD. As always,
grazie mille di cuore
, Pop.

N
ORTH-EASTERN
E
STONIA
– M
ARCH
2005

E
lena Keskküla knew they would come at midnight, bathed in the blood of ancients, just as she had known so many things in her fifteen years. As the
ennustaja
of her village – a fortuneteller and mystic whose readings were sought by believers from as far away as Tallinn and St Petersburg – she had always been able to glimpse the future. At seven she saw her family’s small potato farm overrun by vermin. At ten she saw Jaak Lind lying in a field in Nalchik, the blackened flesh of his palms fused around the face of St Christopher. At twelve she foretold the floods that washed away much of her village, saw the peat bogs choked with dead livestock, the bright parasols adrift on rivers of mud. In her brief time she had seen the patience of evil men, the heartbreak of motherless children, the souls of all around her laid bare with shame, with guilt, with desire. For Elena Keskküla the present had always been past.

What she had not seen, what had been denied the terrible blessing of her second sight, was the torment of bringing lives into this world, the depth to which she loved these children she would never know, the grief of such loss.

And the blood.

H
E CAME TO HER BED
on a warm July evening, nearly nine months earlier, a night when the perfume of rue flowers filled the valley, and the Narva River ran silent. She wanted to fight him, but she had known it would be futile. He was tall and powerful, with large hands and a lean, muscular body marked with the tattoos of the villainous
vennaskond
. Drug lord, usurer, extortionist, thief, he moved like a wraith in the night, ruling the towns and villages of Ida-Viru County with a ruthlessness unknown even during Soviet occupation.

His name was Aleksander Savisaar.

Elena had first seen him when she was a child, standing in the place of the gray wolf. She knew then that he would come to her, enter her, although she was far too young at the time to know what it meant.

At morning he stole away as quietly as he had come. Elena knew he had left his seed in her, and that he would one day return to reap what he had sown.

Over the many months that followed, Elena saw his eyes every waking moment, felt his warm breath on her face, the cruel power of his touch. Some nights, when the air was still, she heard the music. Those who whispered of him said on these nights Aleksander Savisaar would sit on Saber Hill overlooking the village, and play his flute, his long fair hair blown back by the Baltic winds. They said he was quite learned in Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. Elena did not know of these things. What she did know was that many times, when his song soared over the valley, the lives within her stirred.

O
N A LATE WINTER MIDNIGHT
the babies came, two of them perfect girls, one stillborn, each wrapped in a thin veil, the true sign of the second sight.

For Elena, consciousness came and left. In her fever dream she saw a man – a Finn by his dress and manner and accent, a man with fog-white hair – standing at the foot of the bed. She saw her father bargain with this man, take his money. Moments later, the Finn left with the newborns, both children swaddled in a black woolen
tekk
against the cold. On the floor, near the fireplace, he left a third bundle, bloodied rags in a lifeless pile. Her maternal instincts battling her dread, Elena tried to rise from the bed, but found she could not move. She wept until her tears ran dry. She wept for the terrible knowledge that these babies, the progeny of Aleksander Savisaar, were gone. Sold in the night like so much chattel.

And hell would be known.

S
HE SENSED HIM BEFORE
she saw him. At dawn he filled the doorway, his shoulders spanning the jambs, his aura scarlet with rage.

Elena closed her eyes. The future raced through her like a furious river. She saw the severed heads on the gateposts at the road that led to the farm, the charred and battered skulls of her father and brother. She saw their bodies piled in the barn.

A
S MORNING CRESTED THE
hills to the east, Aleksander Savisaar dragged Elena outside, the blood between her legs leaving a ragged red streak in the snow. He placed her against the majestic spruce behind the house, the tree around which Elena and her brother Andres had wrapped ribbons each winter solstice since they were children.

He kissed her once, then drew his knife. The blue steel shimmered in the morning light. He smelled of vodka, venison, and new leather.

“They are mine, soothsayer, and I will find them,” he whispered. “No matter how long it takes.” He brought the edge of his razor-sharp blade to her throat. “They are my
tütred
, and with them I will be immortal.”

In this moment Elena Keskküla had a powerful vision. In it she saw another man, a good man who would raise her precious daughters as his own, a man who had stood in death’s garden and lived, a man who would one day, in a field of blood far away, face the devil himself.