• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1322 0

this was the really strange part—in the wintertime she had liked to walk around the apartment in an oversized man’s V-neck cashmere sweater. Just the sweater and nothing else, her long, pale legs emerging from the bottom, and when she turned around, a glimpse of the bottom of her lush buttocks. She liked to tease him that way, a behavior that must have been a form of revenge, because one evening when he returned from overseas—Munich or perhaps Istanbul, he couldn’t remember which—she was gone: Sherrie, her suitcase, and her cashmere sweater; the drawers in the bedroom, the shelf in the bathroom, the half of his closet he’d ceded to her empty. The smell of her lingered like a last cigarette, but only for a day or so. By that time he’d called her more than a dozen times, had gone by her apartment at night, like a stalker, looking for lights, for her silhouette against the drawn Roman shades. Nothing moved, nothing remained, and eventually he forgot her.

But he hadn’t forgotten her, because here she was now, or at least the memory of her, as he stared bleakly out into the crowded Kiev street, haunting him as if she had just left him moments before, or yesterday, instead of three years ago. He wished she were here now, though what he’d say to her he had no idea. Not that it mattered; he was alone. There was no Sherrie, or any of the girls before or after her, whose faces folded into each other along with their names. They were all gone, they’d never actually been there, he hadn’t let them.

The waitress took his order, returning almost immediately with a small pitcher of cream and miniature bowls of sugar and honey. She smiled at him but he didn’t return it.

His eyes were red-rimmed with bloodlust, his heart a blackened cinder beyond any hope of repair or remediation. He wanted neither; he wanted only to kill someone, to steep his hands in blood, Annika Dementieva’s blood.

“YUKIN IS going to want tangible concessions,” General Brandt said as he and President Carson landed in Sheremetyevo airport. “That’s how it works here, they’re Russians, talk means nothing—less than nothing. People say things here—Yukin among them—they don’t mean. The air needs to be filled with buzzing, any form of buzzing will do, in fact, the less truthful the better.”

“I know all this,” Edward Carson said. “Lies obfuscate, and as far as the Russians are concerned, the more obfuscation the better.” He wore a neat charcoal suit with a red tie and an enamel pin of the American flag affixed to his lapel. Brandt, on the other hand, had decided to come to Russia in his military uniform, complete with his chestful of medals. Uniforms impressed the Russians, they always had. They were like the worst bullies on the block, lashing out with strained aggression to compensate for their insecurities. They knew better than anyone that the Western powers viewed them as semicivilized, as if they were apes pretending to be human beings.

Having slowed to nominal ground speed, Air Force One turned off the runway and began the long slow taxiing to the VIP terminal.

“We have prioritized the concessions we’ve put into the final draft of the accord,” Carson continued, “chief among them the revision of our missile defense deployments around Russia.”

“The conservatives are going to scream about that one,” the General said.

“They forfeited the right to complain when they fucked things six ways from Sunday when they were in power,” the president said. “Besides, General, you and I both know the technology for the missile defense system is still not in place. If we had to implement it today or next week or even six months from now it would be a joke.”

“It’s real enough to President Yukin.”

“Because it surrounds Russia like a noose.”

The General nodded. “I’ve gone on record on both ABC and CNN that our proposed MDS is the main reason for Yukin’s recent aggression into Georgia.”

Carson lifted a finger. “One thing I need to make clear. Yukin can’t expect unilateral support from us, I’m not coming to him on bended knee.”

“Absolutely not. That would give him an advantage