Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [150]
Nikki was not the kind of woman to fuck a friend while her husband lay insensate in the next room so Batchuk didn’t try, though he had to summon up all his willpower not to take her forcibly and relieve the demonic itch that afflicted him like an allergy or a response to poison. When it came to Nikki’s effect on him poison was not too extreme a word. When he was in her presence—and, eventually, even when he wasn’t—he felt ill, disoriented, dizzy as he lost track of who and where he was. It was only when he was alone with her, so drunk he could taste, or thought he tasted, his heart in his mouth, that he was comfortably numb. But then the gray morning would come and his mind would be beset by the thought of what Alexsei Dementiev had, what he didn’t have, and it was all he could do not to tear his hair out.
Patience, he counseled the raging part of him. Patience.
And then one day his patience was rewarded.
Batchuk’s mind snapped back into focus as he saw Gourdjiev’s Zil turn off the secondary road, down a gravel driveway that led to a high wall into which was set an electronic gate that opened for the car, then immediately closed behind it.
Beyond the wall, set on a rocky promontory, he spied a large and imposing manor house that he knew he must penetrate. He pulled over his car, doused the lights, and began to formulate a plan.
TWENTY-EIGHT
JACK, BENT over a toilet, was retching, his eyes watering, his guts still spasming.
“It’s all right,” he heard a voice say from behind him, “it’s all out of his system.”
A pair of strong hands pulled him upright, led him over to the sink where he washed out his mouth and put his head under the cold, gushing water. Then he was being dried off with a towel. He heard the toilet flush and had a sense that that sound had been going on for some time. There was a terrible taste in his mouth, part supersweet, part salty, that made him shudder. He heard the toilet seat being lowered and then he was seated on it, the damp towel over his face, another one, rolled and soothingly cool, at the back of his neck.
“Tell them he’s all right,” the voice said. “I’ll bring him out in a minute, just be patient.”
He felt ill and exhausted, as if he’d just returned from a fifteen-round boxing match where his midsection had been systematically pummeled by Lennox Lewis. Pulling the towel off his face he looked up and saw Kharkishvili grinning down at him. Kharkishvili handed him a glass of water.
“Drink, my friend. After puking up your guts for twenty minutes, you’re seriously dehydrated.”
Jack drank the water, feeling better with each swallow; however, his head thundered and his throat ached. He handed back the glass, which Kharkishvili refilled from a nearly full pitcher.
“What happened?” His voice was a thin, ugly rasp, as if his throat and vocal cords had been seared.
“Poison,” Kharkishvili said. “You were poisoned.” He refilled the glass, handed it back. “Good thing I was in the kitchen when it happened, I’ve had some experience with poisons.” He chucked darkly. “You know, in my line of work—which, I assure you, the less you know about the better for both of us—you need to know many ways to skin a cat.” He waved a sausagelike hand. “The important thing is I got you to swallow water with sugar and salt, which caused you to expel everything in your system.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You wouldn’t, you were raving but not, fortunately, unconscious.” Kharkishvili nodded. “Now drink up and return fully to the land of the living.”
A sudden fear pierced the slowly dissipating fog in his mind. “Alli was eating the same food I was, is she all right?”
“Perfectly. She’s outside, everyone was evacuated while we interrogated the kitchen staff. Please keep drinking.” Kharkishvili refilled his glass. “It wasn’t the food that was tainted, it was your fork.”
“How?”
“Arsenic, an old but reliable methodology.”
“Who, the sous-chef?”
Kharkishvili shook