Unlucky in Law (22 page)

How many times had Constantin talked about his youth, the incredible last days of Old Russia, the tsarevitch's pony, the padded saddle and stirrups, the excruciating attacks the boy endured whenever he bumped his hand or body, the blood leaking slowly through the capillaries, ballooning into terrifying hematomas. And yet the boy had wanted to play; he wanted to ride, wanted to live.

Constantin had said, “He was brave, but he did cry.” The tsarina weeping in the anteroom outside his bedroom. Rasputin, summoned, murmuring unknown things to the boy, passing his hands over the boy's body, while Constantin stood in a corner, invisible, waiting to be called for any task.

As he recounted these memories of his early life, Constantin would always tear up. He had only escaped the purges by accident, he told them. Then his stories would begin to conflict. Once he said he had fled to Estonia, once to Finland. His parents died in various ways, in labor camps in the thirties, on a farm in Finland, even during the Revolution while still in Russia.

The details never matched, and Father Giorgi had begun to wonder. So many people who had gone through these terrible experiences made up stories to fill the holes in their memories. So many people lived ordinary pasts and embellished them, because who does not enjoy a good story?

What Russian does not have many secrets? What was Constantin's real story? He had tried many times to cajole the truth out of the old man. But the truth had been left for much, much later.

“I never knew what to believe,” Giorgi said. The truth. He hadn't, back then.

“Let me ask you something, Father. You know Constantin Zhukovsky's bones were stolen?”

“Another shameful thing.”

“Any chance somebody wanted to test those bones because they suspected that this man was somehow more closely connected to the Romanov family? A cousin? Maybe even someone who could claim succession?”

Giorgi laughed. “Look, it's hard enough to believe that the old man was a page to the tsar, isn't it? A typical old man's story, elevating himself beyond his station to give himself a bigger position in the eyes of his family and friends. But if he were a Romanov, why not shout it out?”

“Times have changed in Russia. During his lifetime, it might not be something you'd want bandied about. Now, it's a political free-for-all compared to the Communist era. For all I know, there's interest in restoring the monarchy. Is there?”

“There are a thousand factions and every opinion under the sun when it comes to politics there. My only interest is in restoring the Church,” Giorgi said. “I want a government conducive to traditional religion, that's all.”

“We've been doing some research. I know there are a number of people who are Romanovs left in the world, and I know the country is—searching for something.”

Giorgi forced another laugh. “You mean, to install a new tsar in place of the president? Well, America's done worse, I guess.”

Van Wagoner frowned, obviously not liking the political insult. Then he shook it off and even smiled, saying, “Sorry. I've got a lot on my mind today. How about this thought: is it possible someone took the bones hoping to prove Constantin was not the page, or not who he said he was?”

“Why ask me?”

“Okay, then let's go back to Alex Zhukovsky. Why would he lie on the witness stand, invent something that would convict someone else? Unless he murdered his sister?”

“Listen to me. Alex Zhukovsky didn't kill anybody.” Giorgi made a big point out of looking at his watch. What would it take to unstick this disturbing tick?

“I'll let you drink your coffee in peace in just a minute,” van Wagoner said. “Just a couple more quick questions.” The investigator scratched his head and shifted his legs. He seemed to have lost interest. Father Giorgi expelled a silent prayer of thanksgiving.

“You do know Sergey Krilov, don't you?”

How smoothly this was asked, as the man looked idly at a girl standing at the counter ordering coffee. He would never stop asking that question, Father Giorgi realized, and he suddenly felt very tired. “I knew him years ago in St. Petersburg. He doesn't spend that much time in the U.S.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“He's involved in his family businesses. He does whatever they need done.”

“I'll bet. He follows people, he breaks into cars . . .”

“What?”

“Never mind. Is he blond? Short and built like a brick shit house?”

“He is a big man, but not tall. The Krilov I knew came from a well-known family who managed to make a lot of money during the Communist years, money they squirreled away in foreign accounts. Unfortunately, they squandered it on American biotech stocks and lost most of it when the market fell so drastically a couple of years ago. They are reactionaries who are very unhappy with the current government.”

“They miss Communism because it was profitable? That's a twist.”

“These people are not ideologues. They want only two things, power and money. They are looking for a way back in. They would happily kiss the president, but he won't let them near. Therefore they would like to see him gone.”

“Is Krilov involved in some revolutionary activities?”

“I wouldn't know.” He hoped God would forgive him for all these lies. He lied too much; he knew it.

“Christina Zhukovsky went to Russia to be with him, didn't she?”

“Yes.”

“While she was there, did he get her mixed up in his politics and put her in danger?”

Giorgi stared at Paul without speaking. “I wish she was here, and could speak for herself. Christina was a woman with her own agenda, her own dreams. Let's just say Sergey was part of her education. In the end, she broke with him, remember that. I thought he returned to Russia long ago, but you say he's here and he followed Alex last night?”

“I'd put fifty bucks on that,” the investigator said. “Now will you tell me why?”

“No.”

Van Wagoner smiled a little and shook his head. “Your call,” he said. “Okay, let's go at it another way. Alex Zhukovsky wanted his father's bones. Did he tell you why?”

“I can't answer that.”

“You know, Father,” the man said. “This guy Krilov, or whoever the man is who followed Alex Zhukovsky up here and left me this note—he might think you were told pertinent things last night. You should be careful. He let Alex go, and he stayed around the church. I don't know where he is now.”

“Don't worry about me.” Giorgi squeezed his paper cup and tossed it toward a trash can, missing. He got up to stuff the cup into an opening. “I'm a man of God.”

But then he remembered that Alex had told him there were still bones remaining that had not been cremated after their recovery. A woman in Sacramento was testing them. Krilov wouldn't like that. He felt cold with fear. He wished he could ask this inquisitive stranger to help him, but the price was so high. He wanted too much. In the end he decided to say nothing. The man finally gave him a quizzical stare, thanked him, and went out the door.

Giorgi left, too. He hadn't eaten a bite of his biscotti, so he wrapped it in a napkin and tucked it into a pocket for later. He looked everywhere for Krilov on the street, but saw no sign of him.

Back in his room, he picked up the phone and called Alex Zhukovsky.

“Don't pretend you can't see the danger. Whether you like it or not, you're linked with Christina, as her brother. My advice is, talk to Krilov. Tell him you're no threat.”

But Alex was not Christina. He didn't want to talk to Krilov or anyone else. He wanted it all to go away, to have it buried forever with Christina. Hadn't he learned from Constantin's bones that you can never bury an unfinished past?

18

Wednesday 9/24

“T
HIS PRIEST IS THE MOTHER LODE,
”
P
AUL TOLD
N
INA THAT AFTERNOON
, calling on the phone from San Francisco, leaning against his newly repaired car, which he had just retrieved from the nearest garage for the princely sum of sixteen hundred fifty dollars. “I've told you what he said, now let me tell you what he didn't say. What he didn't say is that Alex Zhukovsky spilled his guts to him, and both he and Zhukovsky know something Krilov wants to know. I get the impression that Krilov is going to pick one or the other to go after. And he didn't follow Alex.”

“He drove off?” Nina asked.

“Yeah. But maybe only around the block.”

“I'll send Wish over to Alex Zhukovsky's place. He lives in Carmel Highlands on Fern Canyon Road. If Wish sees Krilov hanging around, he can call the police.”

“What are they gonna arrest him for? Loitering? If he sees Krilov he should tail him, and if Krilov tries a break-in or anything, then he can call.”

“I should call Alex Zhukovsky,” Nina said.

“And say what? We don't know diddly-squat. It's a feeling. They're all such liars. The priest—what's he up to? He should be ashamed.”

“Let's subpoena him, just in case,” Nina said. “Do you have a spare subpoena in your car?”

“Sure do. Issued and signed. So what do I do now? Serve his ass and come home? Or stick around?”

“I need you up there. One more night, okay?”

“I'll get a decent hotel room tonight, then. Last night's Travelodge was more like a mosh pit,” Paul said. “Hear the bells? He's conducting some kind of service as we speak, so I can get away for a few minutes. Nina. How long should I stay?” A wind had kicked around the corner and he thought longingly about his leather jacket, which of course he had left at the condo.

“We'll decide in the morning. I'm frustrated, Paul.”

“Of course you are. You miss my warm body.”

Nina let out a laugh, then said, “I mean about the case. Jaime's just as frustrated. He's running this prosecution without two pieces of information that would help it make sense: why bury Christina in her father's grave? And what motive did Stefan Wyatt have to kill her?”

“Alex and his father-confessor know,” Paul said. “Driving up here, following him, I couldn't make up my mind. I made Zhukovsky as the killer of his sister, but it's a deep situation, and Krilov could be a professional.”

“Because he broke your window?”

“Because of
how
he broke it. Quickly and without a second thought. Leaving me a note, for Pete's sake.”

“Be careful, Paul,” Nina said. “I-I'm thinking of you.”

“I'm always careful, honey.” He closed the phone and walked back, thinking, Man, are we ever tiptoeing around our situation. He and Nina seemed to have arrived at an implicit understanding not to deal with their relationship right now, but Paul was damn lonely these days and sick of it. They needed to clear the air somehow soon.

Across the street from the cathedral he spied a bakery with signs in Cyrillic. Inside, he bought himself a roll and coffee and sat at a small table watching the golden doors while babushkas came in and went out with bread in their shopping bags, as if he had just been transported via magic carpet to Novgorod.

The bells rang again and the people came out of the cathedral, older people mostly, Father Giorgi doing his thing with the bowing and the chatting and the hand holding. The big doors closed. Traffic roared up and down Geary, and the wind blew litter down the wide avenue.

“Got a paper?” Paul asked the bored woman at the counter. She produced one that said “Npabga,” or so it seemed to Paul.
“Pravda,”
she said. “Truth. You read Russian?”

He passed on the news, although a little truth wouldn't have gone amiss. It was going to be a long afternoon.

At five, another church service inspired what appeared to be the same people going in and out, and a different priest. Paul entered, inhaling the incense, standing with them for a few minutes as the prayers went on. He saw no sign of Father Giorgi. He felt jumpy. You needed two to stake out a tango for more than a few hours. He needed exercise, a chase, something.

Otherwise, left with only a heavily thumbed real-estate throwaway and his own thoughts to amuse himself, he would brood about Nina, which he didn't want to do. She would never believe he could give her the room she needed to be herself, and in truth, he wondered himself sometimes. He did fight a wolf urge to gobble her up. He wanted to protect her, which she hated. He had done awful things for her, which he did not regret, but which had left permanent, unfortunate stains on his soul. How many times had he asked her to marry him now, three? More?

She had the ring. He had worked the script. But Nina didn't answer. Time barreled along, and still she did not answer.

And maybe he didn't have the heart to hear her excuses anymore.

Man, he was tired of being a good boy all the time. He had tried and tried with this woman, and all he got was yanked, mostly not in a good way. In his younger days, he might have stopped into a bar looking for a healthy, all-out brawl, just to remind himself who he really was. He was in that frame of mind.

Disgusted at his lack of progress on every front, he went back outside, crossed the street again, walked down to Anza to check on his car, and found a ticket.

Now he needed a bathroom. The street grates didn't look too inviting. He walked rapidly back to Geary and down the block found a sushi place where he ordered
ebi
to go and took care of his human needs. Bearing his white paper sack of sushi, he headed back toward his observation post.

The bakery closed and the bar next door opened, and Paul found a place by the street window. Traffic increased, then died away as dusk came and the streetlights came on. By now Paul could have drawn the cathedral by heart. It was inordinately beautiful, sublime, and a saint had lived there. How comforting to have all the rules divinely received, so you didn't have to question and test and doubt ever again.

He began to ponder his own upbringing as he drank his Coors. His parents still lived nearby, and so did his sister. He should give them a call, go see them while he was in town, but he knew he wouldn't. No time, on a job, all the old reasons. Excuses.

He had been raised in the Mission District, just down Geary and a few miles south. His parents had insisted he attend Sunday school. The dusty room reserved for children of the faith contained a blackboard, some frayed books and missionary magazines, a stack of Bibles, and a map of missionary activities, which Paul studied with the obsessive interest of one confined in a place one does not want to be. Sunday after Sunday he puzzled out the names: Celebes, shaped like an octopus; Sumatra; Burma; Cebu; fabulous jungly places he would go to someday.

It had been a long time since he had thought about those youthful stirrings of travel fever, and longer still since he had been a believer. He considered the stops along the way, and thought on the whole he could never go back.

A black Infiniti cruised by. Krilov! Paul ducked, then took a cautious look out the door. Nothing new; parked cars, the restaurants spilling out customers, the cathedral domes gleaming in the streetlights.

He gave Krilov a couple of minutes, which he was later to regret, before venturing across the street and up the stairs to the main door, which was locked again. Hastening his steps, he went around the corner on the right, but the subsidiary doors looked locked, too.

Again Paul gave it time. He didn't want to be standing in the open if Krilov was still parking half a mile away.

From far away, Celebes maybe, he thought he heard a shout. No, it was from inside the church. He made a sudden decision and started trying the side doors, but they were all locked.

Then he saw a floor-level window, the rusty grillwork pulled aside, glass shattered along the asphalt beneath. Krilov was unbelievably decisive and fast. Paul pulled off his sweater and wrapped his hand and probed around the dark hole, decided it felt big enough and safe enough, and snaked his way in.

Blackness, some sort of small room. He smelled the pungent church incense, bumped into a hard cot, and found the light by the door.

He was in a tiny cell-like space containing a cot, a plastic-topped desk, and a wooden chair. On the wall above the bed he saw a double silver cross with the same curious slanting line at the bottom, the cross of the eastern orthodox churches. Some black robes hung on a hook. On the table two lit candles illuminated tin cans full of flowers. Incense burned. Propped on the table was a large photograph of a heavily bearded man wearing thick glasses, and a gold-rimmed black ikon of the Virgin Mary.

“Sorry,” he muttered to the dead saint in the picture. He pulled on the sweater—the room was deathly cold—patted his shoulder holster, and listened.

Sobbing, coming from deeper within.

He turned the doorknob and found himself in a long dark hall with shabby carpeting, some sort of light at the end where another door came in. The sobbing sounds came from there.

Paul edged down the hall, thanking whomever for the carpeting that muffled his footsteps. At the edge of the open door at the end he hesitated briefly, then stooped and very swiftly looked in and back out again.

Father Giorgi was doing the sobbing, a quiet, resigned kind of crying. Kneeling, he faced the door, eyes closed, beard sticking out, head pulled way back by Krilov, who held a long wicked knife to his throat. Krilov spoke in a low insistent voice, the voice of one who is extorting information, but the language was Russian and Paul had to stop that knife. He pulled out his Glock, stepped in, and said, “Drop it!,” holding the gun in both hands, in position, ready to blow Krilov away if the knife moved.

Krilov's lips parted and his eyes widened. Father Giorgi's eyes popped open and he flung himself back convulsively, knocking Krilov off balance. The priest leaped up and flung open a small door on the other side of the room and ran for his life, Krilov only steps behind him, and Paul tearing along behind Krilov.

They ended up in an alley between the school yard and the church, but by the time Paul found the two other men again, Krilov had slammed Giorgi against a wall. Without pausing he leaned down and reached a muscular arm around the priest's neck and pulled him tightly to him. The knife was back in place before Giorgi could let out more than a surprised grunt and before Paul could get a clear shot.

Krilov dragged the priest to his feet, Giorgi's bulky body covering all but four inches of his round head, white-blond hair, one eye, a glimpse of a once-broken nose. He began edging the priest toward Paul. Paul didn't move, but Giorgi jerked again, resisting, and the knife sliced smoothly across the priest's throat.

The priest's eyes widened. Then they closed and he sagged. Blood flowed from the long slice, down the neck and onto the black cassock. That was good, it wasn't spurting, maybe he hadn't hit an artery. “Back off!” Krilov yelled from behind the priest. The light was bad and Paul couldn't take the chance. He lowered the gun. Krilov pushed Giorgi at Paul. Paul caught him, and Krilov ran for the street, disappearing around a corner, fast and low.

Where the hell was help? Paul let out an enraged yell, realizing he couldn't follow. He let Giorgi down gently and took off his sweater. He pushed the two flaps of neck skin together first, then wrapped the sweater around Giorgi's wound. Pushing against it with what he hoped was enough pressure to keep Giorgi alive, but not enough to strangle him accidentally, he called for an ambulance on his cell phone.

Giorgi was coming around. “Hang on, Father,” Paul said. Paul got him up, propping his head against the wall, thinking a better position, gravity, hell, what did he know about all this blood except that neck wounds could bleed profusely, and he had an idea that Sergey might not have nicked the priest if he hadn't startled him. As the sirens got loud, Giorgi opened dry lips and said, “Am I going to die?”

“Relax. The ambulance is here.” From somewhere in the cassock the priest's hands produced some beads and he began mumbling prayers. Finally, another priest came rushing out of the church. Wailing at what he saw, he pushed Paul away to attend to Giorgi. Giorgi was now fully conscious and Paul saw to his relief that the bloody sweater didn't seem to be getting any more catastrophically soaked.

Paul and the other priest stayed at Giorgi's side as the paramedics slid him into the ambulance, the one thing that whole day that Paul did absolutely right, because just before they shut the doors, Giorgi pulled off his oxygen mask. “Warn her,” he said, voice gurgling on his own blood.

“Who?”

“The woman with the bones.”

“Who? What do you mean?”

“She kept samples, Alex told me. I had to tell . . .”

“I'll take care of it, buddy.”

But Giorgi didn't hear. His eyes closed and the doors closed, too.

Dr. Ginger Hirabayashi returned from her eight
P.M.
appointment two hundred dollars poorer, with her newly rhubarb-red waif hair a quarter inch shorter than it had been, soft around the face, with stiff spikes that radiated like sunbursts from her skull. She admired it in the reflective glass doors leading into the boring building in North Sacramento where she ran her forensics lab.

“Hey, Doc,” the security guard at the desk said, checking her out. “I like it, although my wife might feel moved to give you a word of motherly advice about that color.” A retired cop, he still had the brush mustache he had worn in younger days, only the originally firm brown jaw had a fleshier edge, and the once-dark hair was a spongy white. He pushed a clipboard toward her to sign.

“Hi, Phil. Tell her my mother does that for her.” She signed, then kissed her palm and flipped it toward the video camera screwed into a high corner near the elevators that faced the doors. “You awake up there, Dick?”

A long pause. The image of a young man with tousled black hair and whisker-bruised cheeks appeared on the monitor on Phil's desk. “Of course I'm awake,” said the tinny speaker. His slow words echoed off the marble walls in the darkened atrium.