38. Alexei
Alexei
“To Paris?” I frown at the pilot. “I can’t stop in Paris. There are people looking for me there.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Petrovsky.” Mak’s pilot is apologetic but firm.
“But you have no need to concern yourself with the French authorities. Mr. Tereschenko has cleared your arrival in advance. We’ll be landing at a private airfield.
After that, you’ll change planes. We’ll head back to Sicily, supposedly with you on board, and you will head to Madrid, change again, then on to Cuba. ”
There seems little point in arguing, so I put the seat back and stare out the window as the plane leaves.
I’ve had barely four hours of sleep. Lars is in an induced coma from which he won’t wake for some time—if he wakes at all.
I don’t need anyone to tell me the chances of him emerging from this alive, let alone functional, are slim.
I haven’t seen Ofelia. I can’t. I’m about to become the Swamp Surgeon again, at least for a while. I can’t do that with her face in my mind, her scent on my body. I can’t be the predator the swamp requires if I’m thinking of the woman who lifted me out of it.
I don’t want to carry the life I hoped for into the one I’m doomed to inhabit.
Ofelia and I shared a dream on the Quantum Drift. A sybaritic fantasy that I thought, for a time, could be real.
But the swamp is my reality. More corpses than any man should ever have to account for. Corpses that mean there will always be a Silas Thorne waiting in the shadows, planning revenge.
The Phantom project means I don’t always have to be Alexei Petrovsky. It means I can disappear, wear another name for a while, or as many names as I wish.
But not even a thousand new identities can give back the lives I’ve taken.
They can’t change what those deaths made me.
What I am.
Or the fact that men like Thorne will never stop hunting me.
It’s raining as the plane descends into Paris, dawn hidden behind a dreary early-morning sky which utterly matches my mood. The plane rolls to a halt. A black sedan car is waiting on the tarmac.
“Your car is waiting, sir,” the steward says as the door opens.
I tense. “I’m not expecting a car. Or a visitor. I thought I was here to change planes?”
“Oh.” The steward looks confused and goes to the phone on the wall.
As I watch, the chauffeur opens the car door, holding up an umbrella.
He leans in to assist the passenger, and I catch a glimpse of a gnarled hand waving him away with an impatient gesture so familiar it makes my breath seize in my chest. A second later my father stands stiffly on the tarmac, immaculately dressed as ever in an elegant gray suit, matching hat, and cashmere scarf.
Looking directly at my window, he raises a single hand in salute.
Papa doesn’t gesture for me to join him, and by the steward’s uncertain expression, has given no order.
I can almost hear his voice in my mind: It is your choice, syn moy . . .
But when it comes to my father, there has never been a choice. Not for me.
At different times I have fought him, resented him, and even, sometimes, thought I hated him.
But I have never not loved him.
“It’s fine,” I tell the steward as I stand. “How long have I got in Paris?”
He looks even more confused. “As long as you wish, Mr. Petrovsky. Mr. Tereschenko thought it wouldn’t be more than a few hours.”
“Did he, now.” I almost smile. Fucking Mak.
“This is for you.” The steward hands me one of the high-tech phones Mak always uses. “Our number is programmed in. If you need anything while you are out, don’t hesitate to call. The plane remains here until you return, then we hand you on to another flight.”
“And passport control?” I ask dryly, although I already know the answer.
The steward waves me away. “Quite unnecessary.”
Of course it is.
I step out into the rain and cross the tarmac to the tall figure standing with his hands folded by the car.
“Otets.” I put my hand out.
“Syn moy.” Ignoring my hand, my father opens his arms, and I step into his brief embrace. “Come,” he says in Russian, gesturing to the leather interior of the car. “There is somewhere I wish to take you.”
We leave the airport behind and join the early-morning traffic into Paris. Taking a thermos from the side pocket in the car, Papa pours us both small cups of thick black coffee.
Real china, I notice with amusement. My father and Mak are cut from the same cloth, I think, as he adds a decent shot of vodka to both cups and hands me one.
“Za zdorov’ye, Alexei.” He touches my cup with his own.
“Za zdorov’ye, Papa.” We drink, and I turn a quizzical eye to him. “Should I ask where we are going?”
“Nyet.” Papa’s lined face is gentle, but solemn. “Let it be a story that unfolds.”
“Very well.” I settle back in against the seat and look out the window as Paris passes us by, the streets still gleaming dully under the nighttime lamps overhead.
The city feels both cozy and strange, like a dream faintly recalled.
We travel in silence for a while and are past Saint-Denis, heading into the city, before Papa finally speaks.
“When Aleksander and I first came to Paris,” he says quietly in Russian, “we did not wish to be noticed, even by our own people. Especially by our own people. White Russian émigrés, as the French called those who fled Romanov Russia in the wake of the revolution, flooded Paris during the 1920s. By the time we arrived, however, the Second World War was a decade past, and Paris was awash with refugees from all over Europe. It was easier for us to lose ourselves among them, despite our Russian roots. We opened our jewelry and art dealership in a back street in Le Marais, close to the Seine. It was not so far from the 8th arrondissement, where the Russians lived, but far enough to enable us to keep a low profile.” Papa leans forward.
“Take a left here,” he tells the driver in perfect French.
“Then, two blocks down, a right. After that . . .”
I lose track of the small streets and many turns Papa takes us down, surprised at how clear the directions remain in his mind.
When the car finally comes to a halt, we are in a small cobblestoned street set among medieval buildings, crisscrossed by old timbers reminiscent of their wattle-and-daub origins.
“Come.” Papa opens the car door and steps outside with remarkable agility, given his age.
“We will be some time,” he tells the driver.
“Please wait here.” I follow him halfway down the deserted lane, until he stops opposite a shop with oriel windows extending into the street and a blue door set back into an alcove.
Leaning back against a stone wall, Papa pulls a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “Don’t tell Rosa,” he says, flashing me a smile as he lights one, cupping his hand around the flame. “But in Paris, one must smoke, no?”
There is something about his stance, the way one of his feet reaches for stone wainscoting on the wall behind him, that makes me think he has stood smoking in this same place many times, just as he is now.
“This was our first shop,” he says, confirming my thoughts.
“We lived above it.” He points to the upper level.
“Aleksander had a workshop at the rear, where he made safes and repaired jewelry. I made the front into a shop for his pieces and also dealt art. We began with no more than a few small pieces. But, you know, we had come from the gulag, which meant we had certain skills.”
His mouth slants in a smile, his eyes cutting sideways to me.
“It was not long before people began bringing pieces to us to trade for them. Some were legitimate, of course; in those days, selling what small treasures might have survived the war and its aftermath was often how people survived. But other pieces were . . . less honorably acquired. Aleksander and I began to earn a reputation for being men who could find buyers for such pieces, or offer a good price for them.”
He lifts a shoulder, his mouth quirking at the edges.
“We’d intended to go straight, as the Americans might say.
That had certainly been what our fathers wanted for us.
But our fathers were also the same men who instructed us on how to break into the Naryshkin vault, which Aleksander’s father had built for my family—the vault containing the combined treasures of a hundred fleeing Russian noble families.
” He nods, remembering. “A replica of that vault stands still in our Miami compound,” he says quietly.
“Because sometimes, despite our best intentions, the past remains with us. Come,” he says again, flicking his cigarette into the gutter and pushing off the wall. “Walk with me.”
Gesturing to the driver to follow us, he takes another series of small turns with the certainty of familiarity, and we walk through the light drizzle until we find ourselves outside an apartment block a few streets from the river.
It looks like a conversion, modern apartments set behind an old stone industrial facade.
“After we became established, we began to import Graf vodka into France. It was, of course, the vehicle by which we smuggled the Naryshkin treasures into the country, but nobody knew that back then. Even so, we needed to be careful. We couldn’t risk bringing such treasures into our business, so we bought a warehouse.
” He stares up at the dark windows set into stone.
“Two floors of this building belonged to us.” He half smiles.
“There was a food importer below us and a wine importer above. We used to joke that a man could live his entire life in our building and die a happy man.”