Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [30]
“Wake the girl,” Annika said, “we should leave.”
“The police are still outside, smoking cigarettes and ogling female legs.”
“All the better,” she said, putting money on the table, “they can ogle my legs.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call her ‘the girl.’ She has a name.”
Annika gave him a level stare in which he could discern no irony. Nevertheless, she said in a light tone, “So do I, but she feels ‘psycho-bitch’ fits so much better.”
THE COPS, slouched against the wall, did, indeed, ogle Annika’s legs as she, Jack, and Alli walked away from them, and she even turned her face to them, presenting them with a warm smile.
“Was that so smart?” Jack muttered.
“Flirting with the police is not a suspicious action.” Annika kept their pace up in the face of a brisk wind. “In fact, just the opposite.”
Since Jack had no experience in the matter, he made no comment. She took them into a department store, where they all bought a change of clothes, as well as a package of hair dye for Alli. The entire time the women were shopping Jack kept a keen eye out for police officers, but all he saw were glum, overweight shoppers who paid them not the slightest attention.
Twenty minutes on Kiev’s crowded streets brought them to a yellow brick building with a trio of cupolas rising from its copper roof like doffed hats.
Annika rang a bell, one of many in four long ranks next to the locked doors. A moment later, they were buzzed into an antechamber, where she was obliged to repeat the process. The dim, cathedral-like vestibule smelled of wet wool and old shoe leather. Their footsteps set up echoes, like protestations for old inequities perpetrated on the souls the building had once harbored.
The agonized groans of the tiny elevator caused Jack to say, “We’ll walk down on the way out.”
“This way,” Annika said, as they went down the dusty fourth-floor corridor, which in better times or at night would be lit by the bare bulbs screwed into cheap plastic sockets bolted into semicircular niches in the walls.
At the far end, they stopped in front of a door on which she rapped twice, then three times, then twice again. Afterward, nothing. The bellicose sounds of a TV show rolled along the hallway like a damp fog.
At length, Jack heard a scratching on the other side of the door, as of a dog or a cat. The door jerked inward and a pair of eyes magnified by wire-rimmed spectacles peered out at them from a long, sallow, emaciated face.
“Hello, Dyadya Gourdjiev.”
At the sight of Annika, the old man’s face lit up like a neon sign. “My child!” he cried as she flew into his arms. “Too long, my little one, too long!”
“What’s going on?” Alli asked. “Lazarus is too old to be her father.”
“She called him ‘uncle,’ ” Jack said. “Anyway, I think you mean Methuselah. Lazarus was the beggar Christ supposedly raised from the dead.”
“He ought to do it with this guy before he turns to dust,” Alli whispered conspiratorially.
Annika made the introductions and asked Dyadya Gourdjiev to speak English because the girl didn’t understand Russian.
“Who does?” Dyadya Gourdjiev said with a grave laugh as he welcomed them into his apartment.
Jack supposed he was expecting a broken-down musty mess, typical of old people who live on their own and, with eyesight and attention to detail failing, continue to exist in squalor without ever being aware of it. The apartment smelled of lemon oil and applewood. It held none of the sickly-sweet scent caused by the imminence of death.
True, the apartment itself was old, as was the furniture, which had been built in another age. But all the exposed wood shone, the brass and copper lamps glittered, and the floor gleamed with a new coat of wax. Not a mote of dust emerged from the deep pillows of the sofa as they sat while Dyadya Gourdjiev went into the kitchen to brew tea and set out an enormous tin of homemade cookies, “baked by my girlfriend, who happens to live next door.”
He must have been eighty if he was a day, Jack judged, but apart from the peculiar thinness of the old man and a slight stoop to his shoulders, which