Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [2]
The creaking bus turns a corner and for a moment he can see the ribbon of road behind them, running up the steep, verdant mountainside to the Hotel Caesar Augustus. His heart seems to turn over in his chest like a dropped stone. Mia’s final, brutal, horrifying sentence said it all, wrapping up the last two weeks in the soiled brown paper it deserves.
The bus, gears grinding ominously, staggers the last half kilometer into the open-air depot at Capri village, where he changes for the bus down to Marina Grande. Fifteen minutes later, he arrives. The bus begins to disgorge its load into a street clogged with people and vehicles all, it seems, needing to go to the same place at the same time. Those seven hateful words, the bland look on her face that revealed not a trace of bitterness or remorse, made him want to smash her face with his balled fist. He is filled with rage, a swamp through which he is struggling as he swings off the bus. He hits the pavement, his heart aching, his nerves raw.
Craning his neck, looking around for her, he feels the stir of resentment like a hungry dog’s growl, sharp and craven. He hears Mia’s closing line in his head, perfectly, devastatingly choreographed.
“Don’t worry about me, I’m well fucked.”
This woman, moving like a siren of the sea, circles him still like a hungry beast.
He wishes Cloe had come, because it would mean that she has forgiven him, that she’ll take him back. He imagines what it would be like to catch sight of her through the crowd, to watch her walk toward him. He would find it a jolt to see her here, the open arms that the real world holds out to him in forgiveness. Yes, forgiveness.
He is thinking of what he will say to Cloe when he calls her this evening, the new beginning that might now be his; the betrayal that will be forgotten, because he’s quite certain that Cloe would never hurt him as cruelly as Mia hurt him. He is imagining as if it is a film he is expertly splicing together: the mise-en-scène of betrayal, and he begins to wonder (because all good films are juggling acts of counterbalancing forces) what is the opposite of betrayal. He walks amid the squall of people. His steps quicken, his heart pounds as he takes out his cell phone. He’ll call Cloe now, confess everything, tell her it’s all over and done with, a bad dream consigned to history. She’ll understand, of course she’ll understand.
He sees what will happen reflected in the eyes of a wisp of a girl striding toward him, sees it an instant too late. He is still absorbing her look of horror when the narrow Caprese van strikes him full on and kills him instantly.
PART ONE
Lady Macbeth:
“The sleeping and the dead
are but as pictures.”
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Macbeth
ONE
Moscow | April 5
JACK MCCLURE, cell phone to his ear, stood in his hotel suite, staring out at the arc-lit onion domes of Red Square. It was snowing. The last snow, it was predicted, of a protracted and, even for Russia, frigid winter. Red Square was nearly deserted. The swirling black wind swept the last of the tourists, shoulders hunched, digital cameras stuffed inside their long coats to protect them, back to their hotels where steaming cups of coffee waited, spiked with vodka or slivovitz. Jack had arrived here a week ago with the presidential entourage on a trip that was both politically necessary and culturally important, which was why the First Lady and the First Daughter had been invited along. The trip had been arranged—brokered might be a more accurate term—by General Atcheson Brandt, who had commanded a wing in the Gulf War. He was both a decorated veteran and, now that he’d retired, a revered military analyst for both CNN and ABC. He knew everyone in Washington who mattered. When