Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [51]
“Yes, that’s it exactly.” She moved even closer to him, her smooth, aromatic skin brushing against his. “This is how we survive. The terror dissolves like dreams when we wake up and go about our daily routine.”
“I wish Alli felt that way, but I know she doesn’t.”
Another silence consumed them. Apart from the hiss of an occasional vehicle passing by outside, there were no street sounds, not even a dog’s querulous bark.
After a time, she sighed. “I’m tired.”
“Go to sleep, Annika.”
“Put your hand on me. I want to feel you, I want to be connected . . .”
Reaching out, he cupped his hand over the tender ridge of her hip, soft as silk. She stirred languorously, and his hand slid to the top of her thigh, hard-muscled and powerful. He could feel his heart beating slowly. It felt good to be near her, their warmth mingling. The soughing of her breath came to him like wind in the trees or distant birds calling to one another.
“There’s no time for us now,” she whispered, but she might already have been asleep.
TWELVE
“IT’S CALLED a sulitsa or, less commonly, dzheridom,” Bogdan Boyer said. He was the antiques dealer Dr. Sosymenko had recommended. His shop was in Gorodetskogo, near the Maidan Metro stop, though they had driven from the apartment, after dying Alli’s hair dirty blond and wolfing down a hasty breakfast, because it wasn’t conveniently located near the Metro.
Boyer, a small man with the pinched, avid face and busy hands of an inveterate collector, turned the murder weapon over and over under a large magnifying glass with an illuminated fluorescent ring. He sat scrunched on a high stool, much as Bob Cratchit must have sat hunched over his ink-stained desk in his dismal little cell, as Charles Dickens described his tanklike workspace.
“The sulitsa is one of what’s known collectively as splitting weapons, because—see here, how the point is diamond-shaped, beautifully functional—they were forged to pierce armor,” Boyer said, warming to the task Annika had given him.
“This is a missile spear, though it was also used for close-to stabbing, hence it’s nickname, ‘the lunger.’ Weapons like this one and the much larger boar-spear, which had a spade-shaped point, were used by Russian soldiers as far back as 1378 in a fierce battle in Ryazansk along the Vozhe. The Russian Cossacks, the mounted regiments, used these splitting weapons to defeat the invading Tatar army.”
He looked up at Annika. “It’s interesting, but I can’t give you much for it. Apart from a collector here or there and possibly a museum, there’s no market for these things. Besides, it’s incomplete.”
“Incomplete?” Jack said. He was keeping an eye on Alli, who was rummaging through the bowels of the overcrowded, overheated shop. “What do you mean?”
“Typically, sulitsa came in threes, packed in an elaeagnus, a small cured leather quiver that sat against the left hip.” He shook his head. “Without its brothers—or sisters—” He grinned at Annika “—it’s worth next to nothing.”
“I’m not interested in selling it,” Annika said. “I want to know who its owner is.”
Boyer frowned. “That might be difficult.”
He picked up his phone and made several calls. While he did so, Jack went to find Alli, who had disappeared behind a glass case filled with copper teapots and kettles. He found her examining a sheet of paper—no computer printouts here. The sheet was a written list of shipments that had either gone out over the past several days or were about to be packed and shipped. Beside each item was a name. She pointed wordlessly to the name “M. Magnussen,” and his address written just below an item labeled, “Three sulitsa (a set) in original elaeagnus, ca. 1885, prov. J. Lach.” FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY was noted in red.
Seeing that he was having difficulty reading the list, Alli beckoned him to bend down so that she could whisper the notation as well as the name and address of the intended recipient in his ear.
Jack had her put the paper back where she’d found it, then he took her hand and led her back to the front of the store.
Boyer was just