38. Alexei #2
Taking a last look at the building, he walks us back to the car and gives the driver more directions.
“We had been in Paris for almost a decade by now,” Papa goes on as we drive through the old streets, “and had both married. We were no longer bachelors, able to sleep on the floor above our shop, or fall down drunk in the warehouse on top of whatever woman happened to be nearby at the time.” He casts me a slightly wicked look that makes me smile.
“No,” he goes on. “We were husbands now. Fathers.
“We bought two shops with apartments above them,” he goes on as we take innumerable turns through the streets.
“Proper homes, with enough room for our growing families. Stop here,” he commands, as we turn into a quiet residential street made up of small shops with multilevel apartments above them.
Papa orders the car to park where the line of shops and buildings abruptly stops.
We get out in front of a long, tall construction fence in dull khaki aluminum that blocks any view of what lies beyond.
Barbed wire runs loosely across the top of the fence, and two faded signs nailed to the aluminum warn of hazardous materials and that trespassers will be prosecuted.
Next to the signs are a set of padlocked gates.
Taking a key from his suit pants, Papa pauses in front of the gates.
“This,” he says quietly, “is where those shops and the apartments above them once stood.” Slipping the key into the padlock, he opens the gates, and we step inside.
He locks them behind us, and despite the fact that we are in the heart of the Marais, it feels as if the world beyond the tall fence has simply disappeared, leaving us surrounded by nothing but heavy silence.
The stillness in the air is almost expectant, as if the space itself is silently waiting for something.
Or perhaps it is more like a nightmare that has been frozen in time.
We are standing amid the undisturbed rubble of what must have been a catastrophic fire.
Twisted metal thrusts through the remains of charred, rotten beams. Grass grows between broken brick and crumbled tiles.
A chimney still stands at one end; an old porcelain sink lies cracked and broken on the ground nearby.
My shiver has nothing to do with the dull rain and everything to do with the eerie sense that I am standing amid ghosts.
“You told me your first family, and Aleksander’s, died in a fire.” My voice sounds unnaturally loud in the dead stillness. “Is this the place where they died?”
“It is.” My father lights another cigarette and draws deeply on it.
The plume of smoke wends through the wreckage like it belongs there.
“My wife, Camille; Aleksander’s wife, Caroline; and all five of our children.
Forgive me.” Raising his fist to his mouth, he clears his throat and glances at me.
“I have not spoken these names aloud in many years.”
“Papa.” I shake my head, looking at him with concern. “You don’t need to—”
“Yes, syn moy,” he cuts me off. “I do.”
He continues after a moment. “The night Ilyan Fedorov came for our families, my eldest daughter, Irina, was eight. My sons, Nik and Pyotr, were five years and three, respectively.” He takes a deep breath.
“Aleksander’s eldest son,” he says, “was five, like Nik.” His mouth tightens.
“Eduard, the youngest, was only six months old.”
Ilyan Fedorov.
Of all the names my father has mentioned, that is the one I do not need my imagination to see.
Fedorov’s dead black eyes still haunt my worst nightmares. Not because of the many times he stood silently watching as Vilnus Orlov either cut me with his knife or forced me to cut others.
What sends cold sweat down my spine even now is the recollection of him standing in the door of Ofelia and Masha’s cell. The sound of his silky voice saying coldly to Vilnus, “When this is done, you can do whatever you wish to Roman’s daughters . . .”
“I do not need to tell you of the evil of Ilyan Fedorov.” I realize my father is watching me, sadness heavy in his face. “You lived enough of it to know the man he was.”
“He told Vilnus Orlov that I belonged to him.” I barely realize I’m saying the words until they’re out of my mouth. “He said, ‘Sergei Petrovsky’s devil-spawned son belongs to me.’”
“Da.” My father’s soft Russian is barely a breath. “That sounds like Fedorov.”
“My people are watching your every fucking move, Petrovsky. You so much as twitch in the wrong direction, and I’ll take your other eye.”
“I wasn’t afraid of him.” I meet my father’s eyes. “There was nothing he could do to me, by then, that Orlov had not already done.”
Papa’s mouth twists painfully. “As you recently reminded me, Alexei: It isn’t our own pain that hurts the most. It is being forced to witness the suffering of those we love—and knowing that we caused it—that is the stuff of nightmares.”
I grimace. “I was angry.”
“You had every right to be.” Taking another cigarette from the packet, Papa lights it from the first, then throws the butt into the rubble.
“You said something else that has stayed with me: that you knew how important the Naryshkin treasure was to me, because I had already sacrificed a family for it back in Paris.”
I shake my head. “I should never have said such a thing.”
“Again—you had every right.” He draws on his cigarette.
“I have made many terrible mistakes in my life, Alexei. But there are two I regret the most. The first is the way I spoke to you during our last call.” He blows out smoke in a fierce stream.
“And the other is all the things I have never said to you.” His face is grim and set.
“I did not intend to keep secrets,” he says slowly.
“I am not even certain I kept them on purpose. But as your sister rather bluntly pointed out to me recently, whatever my intent might have been is irrelevant.”
The shade of Darya’s voice coloring his words almost makes me smile.
“I should like to tell you some of those things now,” he says quietly, “if you will allow me to.”
I nod.
“So.” Papa’s cigarette burns between his fingers.
“The night Ilyan Fedorov took our families, he had Aleksander and me arrested.” Not even half a century is enough to take the rough edge from his voice as he begins.
“False charges, of course, but Fedorov owned much of Paris at that time. He offered us a deal: he’d leave our families alone if we handed over the Naryshkin treasure.
” He glances at me. “We agreed. Of course we did. There was nothing we wouldn’t have given for their safety.
We took him to the warehouse and gave him everything we had.
” His face spasms. “We didn’t realize it was already too late. ”
He inhales deeply on his cigarette. The smoke leaches slowly from his mouth like an afterthought, his old eyes staring at the broken ground before us.
“You said earlier that our families died in a fire. That description does not come close to describing what Ilyan Fedorov did to our wives, Alexei. To our children.”
Inhaling sharply, he looks directly at me.
“Fedorov came into our homes. Into the bedrooms of our children. Pulled them from their sleep and forced them to watch as his men raped our wives. Irina, my eldest daughter—” He breaks off, passing a shaking hand over his face.
“I will never know if that was true,” he says grimly.
“But I knew Fedorov.” He holds my eyes. “You knew Fedorov. You know what he was capable of.”
For a horrible moment I hear Fedorov’s flat, cold threats: “I’ll take your cock and feed it to your cunt of a father, while I torture his daughter until she’s mad with it . . .”
“Yes.” My voice is not quite steady. “Yes, I know what he was capable of.”
“Long before Paris,” Papa says grimly, “I knew Fedorov in the gulag. When I beat him in a fight, he forced me to watch as he raped my sister. All those years later, when he told me that he’d done the same to my daughter, not only did I have no reason to doubt him—I could see it.
I could see it, Alexei.” He shakes his head.
“And then he burned them alive,” he says dully.
“Later, our neighbors told us that they heard our children screaming for us. For fathers who never came.”
The sudden, sickening spinning hits me without any warning.
One moment my eye is locked on my father’s, his every word slicing me up inside.
The next, I’m gripping a twisted piece of jagged metal hard enough to cut into my hand, fighting for breath and wondering wildly if I am going to shame my father’s loss by vomiting at his feet.
Then Papa’s hands are on my shoulders, his grip surprisingly strong. “Breathe.” His voice comes down a whirling tunnel, calm and strong. “Breathe, syn moy. I am here. You are safe.”
He keeps saying the same words, until gradually the world steadies and I can breathe once more.
“Come,” he says, leading me to an overturned piece of concrete. “Sit.” Sitting on the concrete beside me, he offers me one of his cigarettes.
“No.” I shake my head. “Thank you.”
“Ha.” He gives me a rueful smile. “I admire your strength, syn moy. Me, I have many weaknesses. Cigarettes are the least of them.”
“I am not strong, Papa.” I put my head down, clasping my hands behind my neck, my stomach still churning.
“I don’t smoke because showing any form of weakness just gave Orlov another way to torture me.
” I’ve never spoken of those years to my father.
Not ever. But somehow, after what he has just said, the words come of their own volition.
“Yes.” Papa nods. “That is the way men like that work, is it not? They seek our vulnerabilities and exploit them. Discover what we care about—and destroy it.”
He rests his elbows on his knees, smoke trailing up into the air. “I am ashamed to admit,” he says slowly, “that after what happened here”—he nods at the wreckage in front of us—“I learned to do that myself. We both did, Aleksander and me.