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Page 14.

About one hundred meters away sat a second car, a small white sedan, burning hard, and flat on the road surface as its tires had been shot away and were now on fire. Blacker than black, smoke poured out from its seats, its tires, its oils and benzine, and the three or four bizenis thugs inside. Before dying, Lenka and Mikhail and Anatoly had made an accounting of themselves.

Anatoly and Mikhail lay near the police cruiser, torn by bullets into piles of raw meat, broken bones, and torn clothing. Their faces were caved in and unrecognizable. They lay on their sides, fetally, roughly facing each other.

Lenka’s face looked as though she were asleep, pale and calm-eyed. Her small body likewise had been torn into a mangle of ripped clothing, shattered bones, and opened up ribs. She lay face up, with her arms sprawled over her head, and her legs crossed at the knees. Her pearly little teeth were visible between blue lips, and she still had little pink, plastic flower ties in her blonde hair.

Several burly militia men, unshaven and cynical-faced, leaned over to look into the car—more to ogle the pretty Western woman and the fancy interior driven by an impressive looking bizenis man, than to look for anything suspicious.

Seconds later, the wreckage lay behind them.

Slowly, Marianne took her hands from her face and started to breathe more normally again.

“Sorry you had to see that,” Nayden said. “You got done what you came here to do, that’s the main thing.”

“That girl…Lenka…”

“Don’t grieve over her. Russia is full of them. Back in the 1940s, the whole world was one big mass of Lenkas.”

“You had something to do with this,” Marianne said through gritted teeth.

“I was looking out for my own interests. Those three were crooked cops who tried to knuckle in on big business way beyond their scope.”

“Who ambushed them?” She hit her brother repeated on the arms with her fist, in a futile gesture of rage and revulsion. Yes, she was grieving for Lenka, and her grandparents, and all the millions of people harmed by the Hitlers and Stalins of the world, unto the nth generation, long after their own disgusting animal deaths.

Nayden brushed his sister’s impotent fists away. “Stop it. I am simply an investor.”

“You came here to look after your business, not after me.”

“Not quite. I was contacted by an old uncle of ours, who lived here when we were small. Your father’s assassin, though he threw his guns away and returned to Moscow.”

“Uncle Viktor,” she intoned.

“Yes. I have never met him, but he spoke very passionately and persuasively to me that he is too old to come here himself, but he knew I was coming here on business—apparently not too difficult to track if you have connections around the world—and all but demanded that I look after you. That’s when he told me that you are my half-sister.”

“I wish it were not true.”

“It won’t be for very long. I’m going to do you a big favor and disappear from your life. I have done my job here. I have taken care of you…” He put the gun and the ammo away as he spoke. “…and of my own business as well. You are outraged right now, and emotionally drained, but figure I did you a big favor today. If you had tagged along with those three cops, you might be dead right now. Instead, you get to fly back to Paris and pick up your life where you left off. You have your sons, your houses, your money, and your grandchildren. And, in case you are wondering, I am not jealous. I’ve made my own money, my own way. Nobody came and adopted me. I shot and stabbed my way out of this hell hole. You can hold it against me all you want. But you know how fucking miserable life was. Do you remember that? Do you? Answer me!”

He reached across and squeezed her forearm in his fist so tightly that it hurt. She did not resist, but melted back into crying mode. It was a dry, lippy, hazy-eyed cry at the memory of the drunken sailors, the dancing, the rape of her mother by Vadim Samsonov, the birth of this monster in some back chamber of Auntie Dora’s tavern. Maybe what hurt most was that the woman whose memory she had cherished almost like her mother, the woman who Nayden had fibbed and claimed as his own mother because his real mother had been taken from him, that Aunt Dora had probably been quite a crook in her own right. God knew how many bodies had ended up in the Anadyr on their way to the fishes or the great bay in the Bering Sea. But she’d had to be tough to survive, Auntie Dora. And she’d always been so kind and loving to the little ones.

Beyond all that, Marianne’s heart broke at the thought of her own failure in life…

The airport hove into view, and Nayden pulled up at the edge of the tarmac. An U.S. Alaska Airlines 737 was just then boarding. Nayden handed her a paper book of tickets. “Take these and get on board.”

“My stuff…”

“Everything is packed and on its way to Nome. Don’t go near the hotel. I have enemies around here. You see what happened to your friend Lenka. I don’t want to see you lying in the road too.”

Marianne stepped from the car on rubbery legs. “Oh my god. What do I say to you?”

He looked at her from inside the car with those leaden eyes. “Good bye, sister.”

She stared at him, trying to say the words, but they would not come.

“We’re done,” he said. “There’s nothing more to do or say. We’re finished. I left flowers, you left ashes. Neither of us is perfect, by a long shot, but we’re both survivors. Go on. Good bye.”

She slammed the door and stood there, while he wasted no time driving away. The last she ever saw of him was the receding brake lights of the Mercedes as he paused to let a baggage cart rumble by ahead of him—probably carrying her suitcase, and the copious notes she planned to assemble into a journey, a legacy for her children and grandchildren, once she got safely back to France…which would be tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after. She would miss nothing here. Nothing at all.

She had proven that she was indeed mama’s good and clever little girl child. Like a faint echo of rose petals pressed between important pages in a long-closed book, she could faintly recall the voice and tone as her mother called her Umnitsa.

As she boarded the flight on an exposed, open air ladder, with her hair blowing in the wind, she felt a cold, empty sense of freedom. It was the hollowness of starting life over again. But at least she was privileged to do that. She would go back to the beginning, unearth her notes, and start compiling the story of herself, and before that her father and mother, so that the wheel came full circle and never stopped turning.