Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [78]
“It goes without saying that if I knew anything about a rival faction in the field I’d let you know,” the General said, filling the awful void that had sprung up between them. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’ll tell you one thing: I sure as hell am going to find out.”
While staring at the cashmere sweater with its V-neck, double stitching, and magnificent silky texture, he discovered that he didn’t believe the General, not for a minute. On the contrary, he knew in his bones, in their very venom-riddled marrow, that the General was lying through his teeth. Of course he knew about “another faction,” he’d known from the beginning of this wretched assignment. And at that precise moment Martin suspected this mission would be the death of him. Worse—far worse, as far as he was concerned—he finally understood, with a godforsaken clarity, the underlying reason why he loathed his job with a seething, poisonous intent. The General was like Harry Martin’s father, so much so, in fact, that he now couldn’t for the life of him understand why he hadn’t seen it before.
“In that regard,” the General carried on, “your instructions visà-vis Annika Dementieva are hereby changed. Finding her and taking her into custody will no longer suffice. I want her terminated ASAP.”
Leaning with his forehead against the cool plate-glass window, he closed the phone and at the same time thought, It’s that damn cashmere sweater. It reminded him so much of the one his father used to wear around the house, swapping his suit jacket for the sweater, but never taking off his tie, not at dinner, not afterward. Martin remembered wondering whether his father slept in his tie, except the next morning he’d emerge from the marital bedroom in a crisp white or blue shirt with a different tie knotted perfectly at his Adam’s apple.
I want that cashmere sweater because it was my father’s, Martin thought now. He turned away from the shop window display, lurched over to the gutter and, bending over the gap between two parked cars, vomited up his breakfast. He hadn’t done that since he was fifteen and, sneaking home after curfew, had encountered his father in the lightless foyer, who had struck him so hard across the face his outsized knuckles had drawn blood from his son’s nose and cheek. Turning on his heel, the old man had climbed the stairs and closed the door to his bedroom without uttering a single word.
Martin had raised himself to his knees and, without thinking, spent the next twenty minutes wiping his blood and vomit off the wooden floor, scrubbing and polishing the boards until they shined even through the darkness. With each tread he climbed, his dread at encountering his father again mounted until, as he reached the second-floor landing, his hands were shaking and his knees refused to carry him any further. He collapsed there, rolling onto his side, curled up like an injured caterpillar, and eventually fell into a sleep made fitful by images of himself running from a pack of grinning dog-faced boys in military uniforms.
Standing abruptly erect Martin staggered away from the scene of his unspeakable humiliation and sought refuge in a tea shop down the block, where he slid onto a chair by the window and stared bleakly at the hurrying masses of bundled, red-faced Ukrainians. What his mind saw, though, was the General, or rather his father—now they were murderously interchangeable. He thought when he’d buried his father that would be the end of his misery, his suffering, his neediness, but no, he had chosen a job, or perhaps it had chosen him, that mimicked the relationship he had found both intolerable and indispensable. What was he now in middle age, he asked himself, but the same adolescent whom he’d despised for so desperately needing the approval of a man he loathed. How does the human mind do it? he wondered. How can it thrive on antithetical, antagonistic, diametrically opposed absolutes?
And then, his mind still unable to let go of that cashmere sweater, he began to think of Sherrie because—and