He was not prepared for what he saw when Solomon Kaasik opened the door.
Solomon was dying.
T
HE TWO MEN WORDLESSLY
embraced. To Michael, Solomon felt like dry kindling. Michael had been meaning to call, to come by.
Life takes over
, he thought. Now it had taken everything.
He looked at Solomon. What had once been robustness and health was now the pall of the grave. He had lost seventy-five pounds. His face was thin and pallid, gaunt. In the corner of the room, next to an easy chair blanketed in an afghan – an afghan Michael remembered his mother knitting for Solomon when he was sentenced to Attica – sat an oxygen tank.
“Mischa,” Solomon said. “
Minu poeg
.”
My son
.
“This is my daughter Charlotte,” Michael said.
With great effort Solomon got down onto one knee, holding Michael’s arm to steady himself. Charlotte did not shy away from the old man.
“Say hello to Mr Kaasik,” Michael said.
“Hi,” Charlotte said.
Solomon considered the girl for a few moments. He put a knotted finger to her cheek, then stood up again. It took three attempts. Summoning all available strength and dignity, Solomon moved, ghostlike, unaided, across the room to his kitchen. He turned to Charlotte. “Would you like some juice?”
Charlotte looked at her father. Michael nodded.
“Yes, please,” she said.
Solomon opened the fridge, removed some freshly squeezed orange juice. He poured a glass with a trembling hand.
W
HILE
C
HARLOTTE SAT AT
the dining-room table, crayon in hand, a sheaf of blank paper before her, Michael spoke to Solomon. Beginning with the murder of Viktor Harkov, continuing to the horror he had found at his house, and ending with the bloody confrontation on the street.
Solomon looked out the window, at the traffic on 101st Street. He glanced back at Michael. “The man from the motel,” he said softly. “This Omar. Where is he?”
Michael told him.
Solomon rose, walked to the door. Michael heard the old man speaking to someone. A moment later Michael saw one of the men who had been in front of the house get into a step van on the street, take off.
Solomon returned. A long silence passed. Then, “What are you going to do, Mischa?”
Michael did not have an answer.
“I can put a man at your side,” Solomon continued. “A very experienced man.”
Michael had thought about this. Indeed, it was probably one of the reasons he had reached out. He decided against it. He knew that these were hard, violent men, and he could not take the chance of a confrontation.
“No,” Michael said. “But there is something you can do for me.”
Solomon listened.
“I need to know if someone knows this Aleksander Savisaar. I need to know what I’m up against.”
“Savisaar.”
“Yes.”
“He is Estonian?”
“Yes.”
“
Alt eestlane
?”
“I don’t know.” It was true. Michael did not know if Aleks was born in Estonia or not.
Solomon closed his eyes for a moment. Michael looked at him, remembering for a moment how big the man once was, how he had filled a room, his thoughts. He struggled to his feet, this time allowing Michael to help him.
“I will make a call.”
Solomon moved slowly across the room, to one of the spare bedrooms. He closed the door. Michael looked out the window. He saw no police cars. He looked above the buildings, toward the skyline of the city. His wife and daughter could be anywhere. New York had never seemed larger or more forbidding.
Although it was probably only ten minutes, it seemed like an hour before Solomon returned. His face looked even more bloodless, as if he had received some terrible news. Michael was not braced for this.
“Did you find anything out?”
“Yes.” Solomon crossed the room to his bookshelves. “This man is from Kolossova. He was in the army in the first wave in Chechnya.”
“And lived to tell.”
“And lived to tell,” Solomon repeated. “He is well known in eastern Estonia. A
roimar
. My cousin has had dealings with him.” Solomon turned, supported himself against the bookcase. He looked Michael in the eye. “There is no easy way to say this.”
“Then I suggest you just say it.”
Solomon took a long moment. “Charlotte and Emily are his children.”
Michael felt hot and cold at the same time, dizzied. Every slot in which he had tried to fit the events of this day now made perfect, horrifying sense, a wisdom he did not want. Aleksander Savisaar was here to take his daughters back. “Are you sure of this?”
Solomon nodded gravely.
Michael got up, began to pace. He considered that this news provided one thin ray of light, as discomforting as it may be at its core. If Aleksander Savisaar believed Emily was his daughter, perhaps it meant he would not harm her. On the other hand, it made Abby expendable, but maybe not until he got to where he was going.
“They say he consorted with a girl in Ida-Viru County,” Solomon continued. “An
ennustaja
. She bore him three children, but one was stillborn.”
The facts roared through Michael’s mind like a runaway locomotive. Three place settings. Three candy bars. Three everything.
“An
ennustaja
?” Michael asked. “A fortune-teller?”
Solomon nodded.
Everything began to fall into place, all the explanations of how Charlotte and Emily were far more in tune with each other, far more perceptive than even the brightest twins. Could it be that the girls were prescient, just like their biological mother? Had they inherited this? Was clairvoyance their legacy?
Ta tuleb
, Michael thought.
He is coming
.
They
knew.
“There is more, I’m afraid,” Solomon said. The words chilled Michael’s blood.
Solomon turned, unsteadily, and made his way over to a glass-enclosed bookcase. In it was a collection of leather-bound editions. He opened the case, searched for a few seconds, then removed a small, scuffed book. He leafed through it, then turned to Michael, a thousand miseries in his damp eyes. “Koschei,” he said. “Do you remember the story?”
The name was familiar to Michael. It walked the far horizon of his childhood memories. It had something to do with a boogeyman.
“It is an old tale,” Solomon said. “I used to read it to you when you lived on Ditmars. You got scared, but you never wanted me to stop. The story of Koschei the Deathless was your favorite.”
Bits and pieces of the tale came floating back.
“You used to think Koschei lived in your closet. You used to wake up your parents every night with your nightmares. Then your father and I rewired the closet and put that light fixture inside. You were never afraid again.”
Until now, Michael thought.
“What does this have to do with this Savisaar?” he asked.
Solomon seemed to choose his words carefully. “He is insane, Mischa. He believes himself to be Koschei. He believes he is going to live forever. And it has something to do with the girls.”
Michael tried to process it all. He remained silent. Now that he had an idea what this was all about, he might find a way to fight it.
Solomon nodded. “What can I do for you, Mischa?”
“I want you to watch Charlotte. I can’t think of anywhere in the world where she would be safer at this moment.”
Solomon turned to the window, made a signal to one of the men on the street. The man got on his cell, and within thirty seconds a car pulled up, and two other men got out. They walked toward the backyard. Solomon turned back to Michael, reached into his pants pocket, handed Michael a single key. “You will take this car. It is the silver Honda, parked three doors down.”
Michael took the key, stood, pulled off his oversized raincoat. “I could use some clothes, too.”
Solomon pointed to one of the bedrooms. Michael rose, crossed the room, opened the door. Inside, stacked floor to ceiling, were a hundred sealed cardboard boxes: electronics, small appliances, expensive liquors. Michael found a box of Guess jeans, rummaged through them until he found his size. There were also a dozen boxes of Rocawear hoodies. He found his size, slipped it over his head. In the corner of the room was a flat screen TV, tuned to channel 7, volume low.
The news came when Michael was at the door. It was a breaking story. His heart fell. Beneath the talking head was a headline.
QUEENS PROSECUTOR SOUGHT IN HOMICIDE
Onscreen was his “executive” photo, the one taken by the office, the one that was featured on the DA’s office website. Next to it was a live shot of his house. A pair of Eden Falls sector cars flashed their lights.
Michael walked out of the bedroom, sat on the chair next to Charlotte’s. He looked at the table. On it was the piece of paper she had been working on, practicing writing 0 through 9. The numbers were all drawn in precise rows. The sight of his daughter’s diligent work almost made Michael break down. But there was something else about the drawings that caught his eye, and his attention. Charlotte had used two different crayons drawing the numbers. In all four rows of numbers, all but two of the numerals were drawn in black crayon. The only two numbers drawn in red crayon were the 6 and the 4.
Michael sat on the chair next to Charlotte’s. “That’s very good,” Michael said. He turned Charlotte’s chair to face his. “Honey, I need to go out for awhile.
Onu
Solomon is going to watch you.”
Although Charlotte had never met Solomon, Michael’s use of the Estonian word for uncle, and its affection, was known to her.
“Is that okay?” Michael said.
“It’s okay.”
Michael held his daughter close. “My big girl.” He sat back, looked her in the eye. “I’m going to go pick up Mommy and Em, and then we’ll all go out to dinner. I won’t be long at all. Okay?”
Charlotte nodded. She then reached over, picked up the page with the numbers, handed it to Michael. Michael looked back into her eyes. She seemed to drift, to be in some sort of trance. He had seen this before, usually at a time when she and Emily were separated.
“What is it honey?”
Charlotte said nothing. Instead, she began to hum a song. Michael didn’t recognize it. It sounded like a classical theme.
“Charlotte,” Michael said. “Tell Daddy.”
His daughter continued to stare off into the distance, a void into which Michael could not see. She stopped humming.
“Anna is sad,” she said.
Anna
, Michael thought. The nightmare fable of his youth came flooding back.
The girl in the story.
Michael scanned the piece of paper in his hand, the numbers. It was the same two numbers on the refrigerator door at home.
Familiar
numbers.
That’s what Emily meant when she pretended to be cold, he thought. She wanted him to look at the refrigerator. She was trying to tell him something, and Michael now knew what it was.
FORTY-EIGHT
H
e moved through the farmhouse, the
kinzbal
on point. He had taken the dagger off a dead Chechen, a young soldier no more than eighteen. The smell of decomposing flesh filled his head, his remembrance.
The house had many rooms, each filled with a different light.
For the past few years he had slipped in and out of time, a place unfettered by memory, a place that had, at first, both frightened and unnerved him, but one that had now become his world. He saw the walls of the stone house rise and fall, in one moment constructed of raw timber and mortar, at other moments open to the elements, the trees and sky, the rolling hills that sloped gently to the river. He felt the floor beneath his feet transform from hard-packed dirt to fine quarry tile, back to soft grass. All around him he heard hundreds scream as they fled the heat and blood and insanity of war, the madness soon giving way to the serenity of the graveyard, all of it subsumed in time present, time past, time yet to unfold.
He looked at the old woman dying on the kitchen floor, the taste of her blood fresh and metallic on his tongue. All at once he felt the earth tremble beneath his feet, saw the shadow of enormous things move in the gray miasma, then clear, revealing a pastoral scene of rich and painful splendor.
He saw a young woman sitting by the river. She had a long, slender neck, delicate arms. Even from behind he knew so many things about her. He knew that she, like himself, was ageless. Next to her were two other rocks, unoccupied.
As he approached he realized he could no longer smell the stench of the dead and dying. The air was now suffused with the scent of honeysuckle and grape hyacinth. The young woman turned and looked at him. She was a heart-stopping beauty.
“Mis su nimi on?”
Aleks asked. He wasn’t sure if she spoke Estonian.
She answered his question. “Anna.”
“What’s wrong?”
Anna looked at the river, then back. “Marya is sad.”
Nearby, Aleks heard the rumble of a vehicle, the sound of a blaring horn. When he looked at the woman he discovered that she was now a little girl, no more than four. She looked up at him with pride, with longing, her blue eyes shining, her soul an unpainted canvas.
He smelled flour and sugar and blood, the hunger within him rising. He sensed someone near.
An intruder.
They were no longer alone.
Aleks raised his knife, and stepped into the shadows.
FORTY-NINE
M
ichael stood in the alley behind the building at 64 Ditmars Boulevard. In his mind he saw the numbers on the drawing Charlotte made, the numbers on the refrigerator.
The last time he stood in this place, a time when his heart had been whole and he felt safe in this world, he was nine years old. That day he had played stickball with four of his friends from the neighborhood. Later that night, the night two men walked in the front door and murdered his parents, his whole world fell apart. He had been piecing it back together ever since.