Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [70]
“I’m talking about long before you rose to that position.” Dyadya Gourdjiev turned to face Batchuk. “I’m talking about the young man I knew, the young man who—”
“Stop! Not another word!” Batchuk raised a hand, a singularly violent gesture that might have been directed as much at himself as at the older man.
Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled, much as a father might at a mischievous child. “It does my heart good to know that all the feelings haven’t been squeezed out of you by Yukin and his murderous kind.”
Batchuk waited until the steaming glass of coffee was in his hand and he had sipped it graciously. “You knew these people were going to come, didn’t you?”
“I knew it was a possibility, yes.” Dyadya Gourdjiev took his coffee, padded back into the living room, and made himself comfortable in his favorite chair.
After spooning in sugar, Batchuk followed him, stirring the coffee with a tiny silver spoon. He remained standing for some time, as if to remind Dyadya Gourdjiev of his superior status. Apparently he thought better of the stance, because he did not continue the conversation until he had settled on the sofa obliquely across from the older man.
“Do you know why Arsov is interested in your daughter?”
For just an instant Dyadya Gourdjiev looked startled, fearful even. Then he gathered himself. “No, and I’m not interested.”
“You trust her too much.”
Dyadya Gourdjiev did not respond. He wondered whether this statement was an admonition or an admission of envy. It could be either, or both, he decided. Batchuk was impossible to read, he’d proved that many times over. Dyadya Gourdjiev was reminded of a video he’d seen of an elephant safari in Rajasthan, in northwest India. Nothing but a sea of tall grass could be seen in front of the people on the elephant, until, with the quickness of a heartbeat, a tiger appeared. It ran directly toward the elephant and, in an astonishing attack, leapt onto the head of the elephant and severely mauled the mahout. Tigers aren’t supposed to attack elephants, but unlike other big cats tigers are as unpredictable as they are deadly. In Dyadya Gourdjiev’s mind Batchuk was aligned with this tiger.
“Oriel Jovovich, please. Trust is an absolute, either you trust someone or you don’t. There’s no halfway position.”
Batchuk, sipping his coffee, appeared to mull this over. “I don’t trust anyone, why should I? People make an industry out of lying to me. Sometimes I feel as if there’s a cash prize awarded to anyone who can put something over on me.”
Dyadya Gourdjiev knew this was absurd, but he also knew that this was the only place for Batchuk to safely blow off steam while someone listened. This spoke directly to the matter of trust, which, in Russia these days, was uppermost on every silovik’s mind.
“Every day, it seems, there are new people joining the applicant’s pool for the cash prize.” Batchuk made a face. “And, you know, it’s impossible to kill them all, or at the very least, put their balls to the fire.”
“Yet another industry underwritten by the Kremlin.”
At this, Batchuk laughed. Actually he smiled, which, for him, was more or less the same thing. “Time hasn’t dulled the edge of your sword. Your daughter doubtless gets her smart mouth from you.”
“I was happy to give her whatever I could.”
On the face of it, this was a simple, declarative statement, and yet with these two men nothing was simple, everything possessed layers of meaning that struck at the very core of their friendship, if their relationship could be called friendship. It was at once less and much more; there was, perhaps, no word adequate for what they meant to one another, or how entwined their pasts were. Several months ago, Annika had used a word, perhaps it was American slang, or possibly English, that had stuck in Dyadya Gourdjiev’s mind. In speaking about an associate of hers she had said, “what we really are is frenemies.” She’d supplied the explanation when he’d asked for it: The word was a contraction of the phrase “friendly enemies,” though she admitted that the actual relationship was