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Page 11.

“Guides,” Marianne said with lawyerlike precision. “A guide.”

Lenka was brusque and self-assured. “We have bizenis elsewhere. We will go together.”

The two men argued with her briefly, saying there was not time, but she overruled them. A dollar was a dollar. A hundred dollars was a hundred more than they had in their pockets right now. She gestured, and they hurried back outside to load suitcases of something into the back of the patrol cruiser, which looked like a Land Rover knockoff.

Marianne sat on a bench by a window, and looked idly outside while cradling her satchel and the urn in it.

Mikhail hollered something from the driveway.

“We go now to see the grave,” Lenka said, grabbing her hat. “Come.” She extended a hand, as if Marianne were a child. “Must be very sad for you. Will be over soon.”

Her day was proving strangely convoluted, but Marianne was prepared to go along with anything. This was not her day—it belonged to god, the universe, to reality, whatever. She was a passenger, not the driver. So it was with the police car. Sergeant Varov had made the arrangements, including having Marianne meet them in Anadyr rather than Ugolny, which would have been much easier for Marianne.

They changed vehicles on a shadowy side street, which looked as though sunlight never penetrated here. Big piles of plowed snow rose on either side of the frigid street, covered with black dust. The air smelled of coal smoke. Smoke-colored clouds were ripe with more snow.

Now in a new Land Rover knockoff, they rode to the harbor. Mikhail drove, while Lenka rode shotgun in front. Anatoly sat in the rear bucket seats with Marianne, looking none too happy. Or maybe he was stressed about something. He kept chewing his lip and acting nervous. His eyes flickered from one thing to another. The holstered automatic dangling from his belt looked none too reassuring. Marianne noticed machine pistols under the seats, along with boxes and belts of ammo, polishing rags, cleaning rods, and related weapons paraphernalia. They were sitting on a veritable armory, and yet she did not feel entirely safe.

At the harbor, they barely slowed down for stop signs and red lights. Mikhail drove rapidly and nervously. The rover bounced on its tight chassis as it headed to the open, gaping mouth of the estuary ferry, a large white motor vessel with black hull and red Plimsoll line at the water level. Rust streaks bled down her hull. Bilge water spurted from pump holes in her sides. But she was a big, brawny ship with a powerful engine and robust beam or width, prepared for any sort of sea storm.

The passage was calm. Marianne was lulled by the mix of basso profundo engine noise and the shrieks of large, wheeling gulls. The steel deck throbbed under her boots. She and Lenka stood silently on the deck, letting the cold wind blow through their hair. The two policemen smoked cigarettes some distance down the railing.

In Ugolny, they drove up the ramp onto dry land. Not far away, Marianne could see the rolling fin of a large jet readying for takeoff.

“We have no real roads here,” said Lenka. “I have seen films of streets in Moscow and Europe. It’s amazing! Here, we have no main road along the south shore. On the north side, where we are going, is frozen gravel road as far as sand bar on coast, where your mother’s dear grave lies. We will take you there.”

The men understood enough English to argue some more.

Lenka barked back at them, but seemed to be wavering.

“Okay,” Lenka said, turning to Marianne as if Marianne had been part of the conversation. “How long you want to stay?”

Marianne sighed. “I don’t know. I have not seen my mother’s grave before, and I probably never will see it again. A while, I think.”

“An hour?” Lenka prodded. “Two hours?”

“I’d like to get some coffee and a sandwich, and stay about two hours.”

“Okay,” Lenka said. She explained to her boys, who grew more tense. Mikhail slammed the car into low gear with a curse as they turned into a parking lot. Lenka climbed out and went into a restaurant. Fifteen minutes later, she emerged, laden with plastic bags of food and drink. For another fifteen minutes, the car filled with the smells of black coffee, chilled marinated fish, cabbage, potatoes, and onions. Outside, huge gulls paraded around looking for scraps. A Yupik family eating at a picnic area shooed off a stray dog that had cautiously slunk close for a look at their scraps.

Soon enough, the car was en route again.

They drove at a rapid clip through a barren landscape of rolling hills and short, bitten-off grass and brush. Snow capped the distant hills. Off on their right, the sea lay like a leaden blanket. Wan sunlight shimmered over the rippling water from sullen clouds.

As Lenka had promised, a frozen gravel road made a winding ribbon above the sand line, following the shore inside the estuary. Ahead, a long spit grew on the horizon and then resolved into a shapeless sand bar.

At a crossroads, one path ran north and the other south on the sand bar. There, on a low hill, among boulders, were a number of mingled rocks and broken grave stones. In the center, just thirty feet or so above sea level, stood a weathered shrine of concrete blocks with a faded blue dome the size of a diving helmet, and an Orthodox cross atop that. The cross, with its characteristic two beams—one straight, the smaller one oblique under it—had been painted white, perhaps annually in some ceremony, but was reduced almost entirely to its natural gray stone color. The elements out here, Marianne thought, must be unimaginable, between winds and floods and storms.

“We go now,” Lenka said. She spoke to the two men, who alternated between fits and sullen silence. They were clearly all wired up about something.

There was a long walk across a low tidal flat. Lenka walked beside Marianne. Both women had their hands in their pockets. It could have been a leisurely stroll, except for the anxious, impatient noises made by the two men.

Marianne glanced back, to see Mikhail and Anatoly leaning against the police cruiser. They were smoking cigarettes as they waited, hopping from foot to foot. They looked repeatedly at their wristwatches, and glared after their female relative. “What is with them?” Marianne asked with a touch of annoyance.

Lenka made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “Think nothing of them, Gospoja.” The Russian word for Mistress rolled on her tongue, sounding like gaspajah to Marianne’s ears. “They are boys who never grew up.”

“Tell me about your parents,” Lenka said.

Marianne was too overcome with emotion, lugging her satchel, to speak coherently. She saw ahead the rise of gravel, the boulders, the cross, the graves. The embassy man had told her over the phone in Paris that her mother’s grave was marked with a freshly hewn marker, to make it easy for Tim Nordhall to find it should he ever come after the fact. At least, so the embassy man had been told by his sources in Novossibirsk, who had never been to Anadyr but checked with Lenka Varov’s office in the Western Hemisphere, thousands of miles for Novossibirsk. And Lenka Varov had only been to the cemetery a few times in her own life.

The men started shouting.

Lenka stopped, causing Marianne to reluctantly cease plowing her boots through a mix of sand, snow, and gravel.

Nearby, wind rustled over the sea and rattled in Marianne’s ears. She could barely hear the men shouting.

Lenka waved to them, saying in Russian that she would be right there.

Mikhail was on a portable phone, walking up and down nodding and gesticulating, as if someone were yelling at him.

Anatoly kept waving, jumping, shouting urgently to his sister.

“Listen, Gospoja Didier,” Lenka said. “I got to go now.”

“It’s okay,” Marianne said. “I think I can find the grave. Will you come back in two hours?”

“Da, da. Two hours. I come back. We come back.” Lenka backed away, making gestures of relax, relax with both hands. She kept making reassurances and then turned to run back along the beach.