16
New York, January, four months later
There was a coffee shop on the ground floor, modern and spare, chrome and marble fittings, glass walls giving a view to the lobby, the street door, the elevator and stairs. It was a nice place, the smell of the freshly ground coffee teasing the air, the steam-train sounds of it being made, a quiet background chatter.
Quite a few of the other people in there were on their own, some reading books or newspapers, keeping their own company, others like him, clearly waiting for somebody, glancing toward the lobby now and then. They looked like an even split, locals and tourists, a mix of ages.
And as he sat there a couple of the other people were joined by those they’d waited for, one middle-aged woman greeting another, a young guy kissing his girlfriend, joking about the designer shopping bags she’d brought in. The two women talked urgently once they were together. The girl showed her boyfriend the things she’d bought, opening the bags but not removing the garments.
JJ took it all in but kept looking out to the lobby, patiently waiting, and then he saw who he’d been waiting for, saw him come out of the elevator and through the lobby, heading out into the street, the bodyguard they didn’t want killed. He waited till the guy had left and then finished his tea and walked out to the elevator.
Alone, he pressed for eleven and twelve and watched his progress as the numbers lit one by one. When it got to eleven he stepped out, pressing the Open Door button as he left, giving himself an extra twenty seconds to get up the two flights of stairs, heavily carpeted, easy to climb quietly. It was a simple maneuver but effective all the same.
He waited near the top, listening to the elevator’s clunking movement inside the wall, and then it stopped and there was a pause and the door opened, and within that second of confusing emptiness he leaned around the corner and took out the guy who was sitting there. He was built like a bull, the useless bulk of a show bodyguard, but he still made no noise as he fell forward and hit the thick pile of the carpet, blood gathering quickly and stickily into the fibers.
JJ strolled into the corridor then like a regular guest, inadvertently catching the other bodyguard listening at Korchilov’s door. He pulled away quickly and aimed an unfriendly stare at JJ, keeping eye contact in an attempt to brazen out his own embarrassment. It was a mistake, something the guy realized too late, going for his gun only as JJ fired his first shot. It knocked him backward, his body glancing off the wall, his footing lost as his mind struggled to catch up with what had happened.
Moving quickly, JJ finished him off as he opened the door and walked in to see what the guy had been listening to. Korchilov and a girl were on the bed facing him, the girl on all fours, Korchilov pumping her energetically from behind, both of them moaning, the bed rocking.
JJ didn’t even give him a chance to break his rhythm, putting a bullet straight into his forehead. Blood spurted out over the girl’s back before Korchilov fell backward and lay crumpled against the headboard, a look of amazement on his face, like he was too young, too alive and powerful for this to happen to him.
The girl looked like a child, confused, unsure why Korchilov had suddenly withdrawn. JJ glanced over at the coffee table, enough pills and powder on it to have had a full-scale party, and when he looked at the girl he could see she was tripping on cocktails. She clambered off the bed and stared at Korchilov for a second, then at JJ, puzzled but too dulled to work it out. She looked pretty, vulnerable, the kind of girl who’d been unlucky enough to be born with good looks and nothing else.
She stared at him like someone in a hall of mirrors, trying to make sense of what she could see, her pupils dilated. And then she seemed to focus on him, battling through the haze, her mouth moving like she was trying to say something. He shot her in the chest, the impact throwing her backward like a cast-aside toy, and shot her again in the head as soon as she’d hit the floor.
He left straight away then, walking along the corridor, getting the elevator back to the ground floor. He walked through the lobby, no one paying any attention to him, a businessman buttoning up against the cold. He walked out of the hotel, out into the busy city, the gray-skied morning, the upper reaches of some buildings half lost in the mist.
Early the next morning the mist was still there, obscuring the roof of the city, but it was a different kind of mist, snow flurries falling from it like ticker tape, dying dirtily on the street under tires and feet. After an hour on the train though, it was real snow, too much to be trodden away, swaddling bands on the world, enveloping everything.
The mood on the train was excitable, sociable, JJ letting himself get drawn into conversation now and then with other passengers. There were a lot of people heading up for the skiing, the weather keenly discussed, the condition of the snow they were passing through, how it was looking for the days ahead.
The snow was falling as constantly as it had all day but the drive at the other end was still okay, even the road that led to the Copley cleared, the inn and half-hidden village below looking even more picturesque but fresher too somehow, more elemental, reminding him of home a little, the same seasonal transition.
It was the third time he’d been here. When he’d left the first time he hadn’t been certain about going back, and he’d been even less so in the weeks following. But he’d gone back, had taken that leap, and had found himself counting off the days then in the back of his mind till he could make another trip.
It was partly the place—he was developing an attachment to its rhythms—partly the people—Susan Bostridge’s easy hospitality, the constant flow of guests, their kindest sides to the fore, people who were essentially decent, the way most people were in the world, a fact it was easy to forget sometimes in what he did.
It was mainly for Jem, though, that he went back there, a tightly woven friendship developing between them, JJ constantly reminded of her when he wasn’t there, in the details of faces, in the things he saw. Maybe it wasn’t healthy but he didn’t think about it, conscious only that he wanted to be there when he wasn’t, and that he felt more at ease in her company than he had with anyone else for a long time. What was there to think about in it?
Kathryn met him in the lobby when he arrived, fussing over him, asking him questions like she’d known him for years. A moment later Susan came out and pecked him on the cheek, saying casually, “Lovely to see you again, JJ How was Christmas?”
“Fine thanks. With my family, you know, quiet.”
She smiled and said longingly, turning to Kathryn, “Wouldn’t you just love the holidays in Switzerland?”
“Oh yes, how romantic,” said the older woman, and JJ was puzzled about what they thought Switzerland could offer them over and above what they had.
“And speaking of Christmas, we saw Tom over the holidays. He wants to know why you haven’t been in touch.”
JJ smiled, appreciating the way Tom had played along with the idea of them being great friends, and said then, “No excuse really, but I have been busy, a lot of work over here as you know. Then a friend of mind had a baby, so ... And I’ve moved since I last saw you.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, into the mountains.”
Susan smiled at Kathryn again and said with a knowing smile, “Christmas in Switzerland!” Changing tone then she said, “Now, I’ll get your key. Oh, and you’ll have dinner with us tonight?”
“I’d love to.”
“Good. And Jem’s waiting in the lounge to see you.”
“Your lounge?”
“No, the communal one; she didn’t want to miss you when you arrived.” He smiled indulgently, showing the right face.
“In which case,” he said, “I ought to pop in and see her now.” He moved his bags over near the stairs. Susan drifted off and came back with his key, saying as she gave it to him, “By the way, don’t mention Freddie.”
“He broke her heart?” JJ asked, grimacing slightly.
“She broke his, which shows how wrong a mother can be. She feels guilty about it.”
He smiled and walked away to the lounge.
The room was overrun with the white light of the snow outside, a dreamlike haziness on everything it touched, on the furniture, on Jem where she sat reading. For a moment she appeared oblivious, a ghost; then she looked up and saw him, gave him an immediate reactive smile.
“Hey,” she said and jumped up like she was about to throw her arms around him but stopped herself short, suddenly conscious of his physical presence, her own body language falling back awkward and shy.
“It’s good to see you,” he said, smiling as if to acknowledge the difficulty of how to greet each other, finally kissing her on the cheek, the girl blushing slightly as they sat down.
“So, are you here on like, business or pleasure?”
“Business in New York, pleasure here.” He noticed a newspaper on a table nearby, folded open on a page bearing the Korchilov story, reminded of Lenny and Dee Kaplan by the sight of it. “Actually the business in New York wasn’t essential, more of an excuse. I wanted to see what this place looked like in the winter, check out some of the cross-country trails you were talking about.”
“We could go in the morning,” she replied quickly, adding, “I mean, whenever, but like, if you don’t have anything else to do.”
“Like I said, it’s what I came for. What about skis?”
She looked bashful again, saying, “I’ve kind of taken care of that.”
“Thanks,” he said, nodding. “Tomorrow morning it is then.”
He looked at her for a second or two, half smiling, until finally she said, “What!”
“Nothing,” he said innocently. “Only, I heard you broke up with Freddie.”
She whooped with mortified laughter, covering her face, repeating again and again, “I don’t believe it. No, I don’t believe it,” surging into the details then, all the teenage drama in its gory detail, the easiness drifting back between them.
They left about an hour after breakfast the following morning. There were plenty of other people around at first on the marked trails, but they fell away into isolation as Jem took JJ farther into her own territory, routes through the woods that only someone like her would know.
For a lot of the time they said nothing, a silence almost demanded of them by the pillows of snow, hollow woods, earth-hugging sky. And when they spoke their voices carried on the crisp air, an intimate winter acoustic.
There wasn’t much to say anyway, all their memories of skiing cross-country already familiar to each other, a whole evening spent talking about it on his previous trip to the inn. It was almost as if they’d skied together before.
After a couple of hours they began skiing steadily upward, long zigzags up a deep wooded slope. At one point she turned, her breath short, and said, “This is a tough climb, but it’s like so worth it when we get to the top.”
He nodded, not saying anything, leaving the fading trace of her voice to linger there.
He spoke when they got to the top though, a simple “Wow” as he looked over the expanse of the untouched snowfield stretching out flat below them, more wooded hills on the far side, nothing between them but an untouched white bedsheet of snow, an inviting emptiness.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Stunning,” he agreed.
They stood there for a couple of minutes, just staring at it, a whiteness that seemed to swallow up vision and sound. Finally she said slowly, “I used to ski a lot with my dad when I was a kid. A little kid. A few years ago I found this place on my own, like, nearly the end of the season, and I just found it. So I told my dad about it, and he said we’d come here together sometime, so I could show it to him.”
He looked at her, her face still, the only time she’d spoken about her father since that first day, apparent now that it had been something she’d wanted to talk about sooner or later. And though his nerves were bristling it was something he’d wanted too, despite the discomfort it would carry within it.
“He never came,” said JJ, sensing it in her voice, knowing it from the time scale.
She shook her head in response but added, “Not just because of that. Maybe if he’d lived, like, another ten years, we’d have come here together. We were kind of growing apart, you know; I wasn’t his little girl anymore.”
The thought of the girl in Moscow hemorrhaged into his mind, and JJ said in reflex, “That’s the worst thing about death, it has a way of catching you just as life’s overtaken you.
She looked at him like she was thinking about it, possibly not understanding, then looked ahead and said, “You’d lost someone close when you first came here.”
“Close,” he said, thinking of his already distant memory of Aurianne, “but I don’t think I lost ...” He ground to a halt, suddenly realizing what she’d just said, what she’d meant by lost. “You know about Aurianne?”
“Not just Aurianne ...” She turned again and met his gaze, her eyes searching, something building up behind them. Finally she produced a weak smile and said, “I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”
He stared at her, numb, ambushed, the fact only slowly sinking in. He was confused too by the way she looked, compassion where there should have been anger, hostility. JJ managed to say only, “How?”
“Ed,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Ed and me have always been kind of close. He trusts me, thinks I can deal with the truth and stuff, whatever. He told me about Dad a few weeks after it happened, even like, about him knowing and everything, about asking for the right guy to do it if it had to be done.” She looked away from him, staring out over the snowfield, JJ’s mind stalled by her composure, by the fact that a girl of her age had carried this around with her, shocked too that Holden had burdened her with it, a weight of knowledge that was an act of cruelty in itself. “Then last September, he told me that guy was coming to the inn, that he was coming to help him with a problem. He didn’t tell me until like, Christmas, you know, what the problem was. But you were the guy.”
She turned briefly, long enough to offer him another fleeting half smile, a nod to the strangeness of things. And as he stood there looking back at her he thought of the way she’d looked at him on the stairs that first time, and of her taking him to her father’s grave. It all seemed to add up now, the way she’d been with him.
“What about the others?”
She shook her head without looking at him. “They don’t know. Ed might seem flaky but he has people pretty well figured.”
They stood in silence until JJ said, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t ...”
She turned again, saying quietly, “Don’t. It had to happen. It happens. Maybe one day we can talk about it some more.” She paused, her eyes fixing him, her face ruddy with the cold air, her lips full and red. “I’m glad it was you, that’s all. I’m glad it was you.”
He offered her the same smile she’d given him, inadequate but the only response he could manage, his heart overfull with blood, his thoughts flooded, sodden with knowledge for which he could never have readied himself, not that she knew, but that she understood, that she forgave him or didn’t even see a need to forgive him. Without being aware of doing it then, he took his glove off, watching his own hand as it lifted and wiped from her cheek the single tear that had traced its path there, her face cold against his fingers, Jem smiling a little as his hand fell away again.
“Shall we move on?” she asked a few seconds later, as if they were done with it, or possibly as if she still didn’t want to dwell on it; the difficulty of the journey her own mind had taken to that point was something he couldn’t even guess at. He nodded but then, catching up with himself, felt like he had to say something else, at least something, to stop feeling the fraud he was by accepting her vision of him.
“Jem, I don’t know how Ed painted me; he’s a good guy, he means well. But I kill people, that’s all I do, your dad just one more job, and it doesn’t matter what light you put on it, I didn’t do anything good there in Moscow. All I did was kill someone; there’s no goodness in it, none.”
She smiled once more, this time like it was JJ who didn’t understand, and said, “I think you’re wrong. I think sometimes there’s a goodness where you’d least expect it.” She paused then and added, “Let’s not talk about it. I just wanted you to know, to know that I understand, and, well, you know, that it doesn’t change anything. I’m glad it was you. That’s all.”
He nodded thoughtfully at the repeated phrase, an understanding taking root between them, that it was enough for now, that it was at least in the open where they’d needed it, no longer the obstacle it would have been whether she’d known about it or not.
They stood in silence then as he put his glove back on, glancing at each other once more before pushing forward, down the gentle slope ahead of them, pushing on into the open spaces of the snowfield, heading into the elusive peace of being lost on the winter landscape.
He still wanted to speak at first, to tell her again that she was wrong, or to ask her to explain how she could feel that way, how she could find it within herself not to hate him for who he was. But he said nothing, humbled by her, knowing that he wouldn’t have been able to find the words.
It was hard for him to accept, this belief of hers that there was good in him where he could see none himself, but it didn’t mean she was wrong, perhaps only that she was looking in a different way, seeing more clearly. Because he had killed Bostridge cleanly, the thing he’d been chosen for, and maybe the goodness of this friendship had arisen out of that, and the goodness of everything that had come to him with it, a sense that there was something to head for, a reason to keep going.
So he kept silent, wondering how they could ever speak about anything else again, how they’d move on to another carefree subject. Once they were lost on the flat of the snowfield though, she let herself glide to a stop, and as he slowed and turned to see if she was okay he saw her smiling, almost laughing with exhilaration, like she’d already shed it, something she’d carried from the day they’d met.
“Isn’t this great?” she said, holding her arms out at the landscape, her words steaming skyward in vapor trails.
He nodded, easing back toward her, and said, “It’s what downhillers don’t understand.”
“I know.” She looked around, shaking her head as if in disbelief at the hazy expanse of snow surrounding them. “I’ve wanted to show someone this place for so long. I mean, it’s like a miracle, you know, that it’s so beautiful, but like, so transitory. I mean, I don’t think I believe in God or anything, but this makes you kind of realize, I guess, that ...”
Her words fell away, like she couldn’t pin down what she wanted to say, and JJ said, “That we’re part of something bigger, that there’s a reason for things.”
She smiled, staring at him. “That’s it,” she said, adding with a note of curiosity, “Do you believe in God? I don’t know why I didn’t ask before.”
“No, I don’t, but I see this, and I understand why people do.”
She nodded in agreement, looking around, awestruck by its beauty, JJ doubly awestruck that he was there with her. She pointed then and said, “Do you wanna go all the way across?” He nodded and turned and they moved off in silence again, talking only sparingly.
And as they headed into the white escape, he became lulled by the feel of the snow, the sound of their skis as they sheared its surface, the cold air as it streamed against his face. His thoughts began to die away, lost in each passing winter moment, until his mind was stripped bare, and then in that vacuum a simple truth arose, from something he’d said to her just a few minutes before, that some people saw all of this and explained it with a belief in God.
It made him realize something he’d almost lost sight of, that maybe some other good too had come of that killing in Moscow. Because he had to believe now, as Naumenko did, that hidden in another winter landscape, a continent away, already sunk in darkness, was an icon, beautiful perhaps, valuable, an Annunciation. It meant more to those people than it ever could have elsewhere, representing to them what it did, representing everything.
They’d kept it through centuries of history’s ebb and flow before its theft, refusing to let it go even then, their faith making them determined to retrieve it from people whose motives were alien to them. And at the last, perhaps only a day away from losing it forever, it had been found and taken back.
That was where JJ had played his part, because it had been returned to the place it belonged by a girl who’d seen him kill a man, a witness, someone who by rights should never have survived herself. She’d seen inside him though, had seen something which in her own silent way she’d tried to communicate.
And at the time he hadn’t understood, but he’d been moved by her all the same, a girl he’d had no reason to spare but who, in a moment of weakness, he’d chosen not to kill. It was a scant gift but all he’d had to offer, and on that night perhaps, few could have offered much more.