Trinity Icon

"Are you busy?" Father Paul asked me when I opened the door.

  "No, Father, why?"

  "Can you come with me? To the hospital? Boris Nikitin is very bad. He may die."

  I remembered a voice from distant yesterday saying "Nick will live."

  I shuddered.

  "He wants to see you," continued the priest.

  "Me? Why?"

  "He won't say. But he desperately wants to see you. Can you come?"

  I followed him to the hospital in my own car because Father Paul was determined to stay with Boris until he was out of danger. Danger?! When we arrived at the hospital, he told me he would wait outside the room.

  "He's very bad," he said.m"Don't stay too long."

  I stood inside the door for a moment, staring at the thing before me. All my early virtue disappeared in the face of this reality I could not deny. The man I loathed was no longer a man; he was a pulp. The man I loved had never been a man. Only an animal could have done this. I could not pass this off conveniently to the evil Misha; he had been in my sight the whole time. Vasily had done this, was the only one who could have done this. He had done this without apparent effort, certainly without compunction, and then he had kissed me.

  Boris was difficult to pick out in the jungle of tubes and bandages. Every limb was encased in plaster.

  His hands, suspended from a frame above him, were double their normal size with fingers spread by silver splints. His face, a blot of purple and red surrounded by hospital white, was swollen and unrecognizable. His nose was broken, his jaw wired together. He looked at me through one blood-filled eye; the other had been forced shut by the swelling.

  I went to his side. He murmured something.

  I bent closer to hear him.

  "Forgive me," he said.

  I don't know how long I knelt by that bed crying. It was a space of time outside of time. It ended when Father Paul came into the room.

  "They think he will make it," he said gently. "Why don't you go home now, Alex?”

  A mountain of stairs faced me at my apartment building. I climbed it one boulder at a time, watching my feet, and so I did not see Brent Grayson waiting on the landing by my door until it was too late. He grabbed me by my sweater and slammed me against the door, pushing the muzzle of a gun into my face so hard that it cut the inside of my cheek on a tooth.

  "I'm going to die and you're going with me," he said.

  I had no time to answer him. He was sweating, taut, heated by some desperate fear, talking fast and without coherence.

  "You didn't give it to them," he said.

  "I did," I insisted, searching the stairwell for an escape.

  "They're on me. They're dogging me. What did they say?"

  "They laughed," I said with difficulty.

  His color changed; he turned scarlet, convulsed with rage, fierce, and out of control. He hissed, “Laughed? Open your mouth so I can shoot you in your laughing throat."

  I caught sight of a movement to my left, behind Grayson's shoulder. It was Louis. He held a finger to his lips in a gesture of silence. His other hand held a gun. He took aim.

  "Open!" said Grayson.

  "Wait," I said in desperation. "I know where the icon is."

  He paused. There was a sharp pop from Louis' suppressed gun and Grayson was dead, slumping against me, then crumpling to the floor.

  Louis was putting his gun away when Misha came up the stairs, two at a time.

  "What the hell!" he said. "Open the door. Get that inside before someone comes along."

  Louis had the door open before I could find my key. Vasily came upstairs and helped Misha pull the body inside. They put it in the bathtub. Louis escorted me in and bolted the door behind us all. The body did not frighten me as much as did the wild look on Misha's face. It was a fury very much like Grayson's had been, but more controlled and therefore, to me, more surely deadly. He and Louis held a heated discussion in French that I did not understand.

  Louis' temper flared. I was trying to edge away from the two of them when Louis said suddenly, in English, "She knows where the icon is."

  I did not like the attention I received then. Misha's gaze made the bones inside me sizzle. He said, "You know where the icon is?"

  "Yes."

  "Where?"

  I was about to answer when Vasily said something in Polish. Another long and incomprehensible discussion followed. Vasily spoke quietly; Misha was more vehement. I did not speak Polish at the time, so I do not know exactly what was said, but Vasily told me later that it was an argument over my right to a free choice. He said that I was the eventual loser, depending on one's point of view, but he never told me which way he argued.

  Eventually, they decided something, because there came a flurry of questions. What was my dress size? Shoe size? Was there a store open? Where were my car keys? Louis and Vasily left, and I was alone in my apartment with Misha and a dead body.

  Misha bolted the door, then went to the window. The curtains were closed and he stood by the far right side of the window looking out through the narrow space where the curtain did not cover the side. He looked around the room, pulled the sofa away from the wall and slightly toward him. The side of the sofa was low, about two and a half feet high. He rested one foot on it, leaned against the wall, and checked the street behind the curtain again.

  I recognized something. I remembered doing something similar. I remembered an alarm made from pots and pans. "You're afraid," I said to him, amazed.

  He looked at me and I noticed other things. He was unshaven, his hair uncombed, his eyes slightly puffy. He was tired.

  "This place is not safe," he said. "Come here, so I can talk to you."

  I approached warily.

  "Ten days ago," he said, "we arrived to do a job that was supposed to take only two days. Everything was ready, then something went wrong. For ten days we have been living with only the protection Frank can give, and it is not enough. The whole world knows now that we are here; the whole world knows we are exposed; the whole world is ready to exploit it. We are already making too many mistakes."

  "And you're afraid of dying," I said.

  "No. Dying is nothing. Louis did Grayson a great favor by putting a bullet in his head. Much worse awaited him."

  "Then why not quit now?"

  "I don't know. Maybe you will tell me the answer to that tomorrow."

  I wondered what he meant by this.

  "Please describe the icon and tell me where it is," he said.

  I did.

  "Then it can be taken apart? Into sections?"

  "I suppose so, but it is three or four hundred years old. I am not sure it can be done without damage."

  "We will go get it. But first I will explain something to you. Sometimes people make choices for us, but even then, we can, we must accept or reject the choice. That is unavoidable. Even by not choosing, we chose. Do you understand?"

  "No."

  "You will."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN