Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [144]
Vasily Andreyev, with skin the color of putty or suet, and the black button eyes of an evil doll that, having been shunted aside for newer playthings, harbored the need for revenge.
“Don’t give me that look, I can take care of myself.” She tossed her head. “I tuned him out by thinking about what you said before, and I know you’re right. I’ve been so intent looking over my shoulder for death to steal up behind me, I was already half dead. When I was taken . . . that week might have been a month or a year, I didn’t know, I became unmoored from the present, or maybe from time itself. Nothing felt right, there were periods when time passed at a glacial pace and at other times it seemed as if hours were compressed into seconds.”
Jack put his elbows on the table, leaning forward, listening to every word she said. With the crackle of the frying eggs no one could overhear what she was saying.
“When I went to Milla Tamirova’s apartment, when I went into her dungeon, sat in the restraint chair, I began to realize that the feeling of being unmoored, of being outside time never left me during the months after you rescued me. Now I think it has, now I want to look ahead, to experience the new, and even the old, which will feel like new to me, just like I’ve been doing since we got here.”
The eggs arrived, sided by thick slices of the dense Ukranian brown bread. The sous-chef placed the plates in front of them, along with silverware, and went to pour tea out of a large, ornate samovar standing on a corner of the work counter.
Alli took up her fork and dug into the glistening eggs. “In the middle of hearing about what flawless skin I had,” she continued, “it dawned on me that the only time I’ve been happy—really happy—since Emma’s death is when I’ve been with you and Annika. The adrenaline rush of the present annihilated the past, at least for a short time, but it also began to resurrect my sense of time and place.”
Jack chewed on a slice of bread, which was intensely flavorful, slightly sour, and slathered with salted butter. “You feel more yourself now.”
“I don’t know about that, because I was only beginning to learn about myself when Emma died.” Alli looked thoughtful. “What I feel is different, as if I’ve just thrown all the sandbags off an air balloon and now I’m rising up toward. . . .”
“Toward what?”
“I don’t know, exactly, but I think now that I have a kind of gift. When I listen to you talking to other people, or when I listen to them talking among themselves, if the conversation goes on long enough, I have a sense of what they mean, not what they’re saying necessarily, but what they’re trying to get across or, more often, what they’re trying to hide. And, it seems to me, that the longer the conversation goes on the clearer their real purpose becomes, or maybe I mean how important their lies are to them.” She cocked her head. “Do you see what I mean?”
“I think so.” Jack was wolfing down the omelet. “But give me an example, anyway.”
“All right, let’s see . . .” She screwed up her face in thought. “Okay, here’s one, that Russian sitting next to me—”
“Andreyev, the lecher.”
She laughed softly. “That’s right. Well, when I mentioned that we had met Dyadya Gourdjiev he started talking about him, and though there was nothing negative in what he said—quite the opposite, in fact—I began to sense that he was lying, that he didn’t like him at all, and when he mentioned Kharkishvili—and only in passing—I just knew that Andreyev had aligned himself with him.”
Jack was thinking of his recent conversation with Kharkishvili, who had denied any kind of rivalry between him and Gourdjiev. If Alli was right in her observations then Kharkishvili deliberately lied to him and the situation within AURA was more complex than he had been led to believe, which in all likelihood might lead to difficulties in his dealing with these people even if he did come up with a solution to the problem of how to defuse Yukin’s plan. He resolved to test her belief at the earliest opportunity.
At that moment Kharkishvili came into the kitchen, opened the