"I cannot believe you allowed that fortune teller to take your money, Louis," said Misha. "You are usually more careful." He laughed at the thought of Louis parting with so much as a sous on such nonsense.
"You should try it, Misha," said Vasily. "She told me intriguing things."
Vasily would not say what these were, but then he rarely disclosed anything concerning himself.
"I agree," said Louis. "She is an interesting old woman, flattering and insulting at the same time, talking in riddles and contradictions. I am to be well loved despite my despicable nature. How is that for a future?"
The young Frenchman laughed out loud, his black curls waving in the warm breeze of Misha’s perfect wedding day. Puffy white clouds floated over tents and marquis with pinnacle flags fluttering and guests taking their fill of only the best food and drink.
Now twenty, Misha had avenged the car bombing of his parents, sister, and little brother. The sight of the burning car remained in his mind. The scenes of his revenge were there too, but did nothing to dispel the horror of that day. He had bowed to his older relatives and accepted the girl his father had chosen for him before he died, because he was a dutiful son, and because he didn’t know what else to do.
"You will rebuild your family with your beautiful bride," said Louis, always capable of putting his finger on Misha’s mood. "Celebrate the fact that you have lived to see this day. Go. Talk to the old woman. She will tell you what a lucky son of a bitch you are."
Misha allowed his friends to shove him toward one of the many entertainment tents peppered across the extensive lawns of his family’s estate. He entered the fortune teller’s lair chuckling and took the chair before a painted low table without waiting for an invitation.
The woman had stood when he entered. Evidently, she knew who he was but said nothing, her wrinkled face a studied blank, and simply inclined her head in greeting. A few wisps of grey escaped the drab scarf she wore. Despite the heat of this summer day, she wrapped a dirty tasseled shawl closer about her as she stared into Misha’s blue eyes. She shuffled a stack of playing cards and indicated that he should cut.
"This is not a full deck," he said as he broke the pile in half.
"It contains only aces and face cards, my lord. You have no interest in servants."
He did not bother to correct her inaccurate address. This was all in fun, after all.
Gnarled hands turned over the new top card. The ace of diamonds. She placed it before him on the table. The queen of diamonds came next. She set it in front of her on the other side of the little table. Two kings surfaced and found places half-way between the diamonds: clubs on Misha’s left and hearts on his right. He found it difficult to keep a straight face as the crone pretended great solemnity in forming a cross with the last card, the queen of hearts, at the center, but it became easier to fight laughter as he watched her face. She studied the cards, registering puzzlement and dismay, fear and sorrow. He hoped she would not try to flatter him in this charade and glowered at her to make sure.
Her black eyes held his for a long moment before she spoke.
"You are the ace of diamonds, my lord," she rasped, "well practiced at cutting your enemies."
Where had she obtained this information? He lowered his brow.
She did not flinch.
"Your bride is the queen of diamonds. Also cold and sharp but without your violence. Your families think they have arranged the perfect match, but though she will give you an heir, she will cut you."
This was probably the favorite topic of speculation throughout the neighborhood. All the old woman had to do for this intelligence was listen. No matter how sharp and cold his bride might be, he intended to thoroughly enjoy the exquisite young woman he had married that morning.
"They are your friends, your champions. One light, one dark." She pointed a crooked forefinger at first the king of hearts, then the king of clubs.
Misha nearly snorted in derision. Was there anyone who did not know that he, Vasily, and Louis had become a team?
Her bent frame rocked forward on her seat, as the old woman used her chin to indicate the last card, the queen of hearts, in the center.
"There is the woman you seek. She is not well formed in my mind. I cannot tell you much. She is connected in some way to the light king, and the dark king will fight you for her."
Preposterous. He wanted to shout his scorn, but she raised her eyes to his and arrested the words in his throat.
"Time and hardship will erase this interview, until you again draw the ace of diamonds. When you see the card and remember my words, look at the woman before you. She is the queen of hearts. She will save your life. Then, after time and more grievous loss, you will win her."
The witch sat back with a sigh.
"And… she will save your soul."
*****
"I am adamant," said Vasily. "She must live."
The girl trembled as they stood in her tiny efficiency apartment speaking Polish. Now just over thirty, Misha had caught the twenty-year-old lying repeatedly but doubted the chit understood Polish.
"Vasily," he said, "there are too many coincidences with this girl. Both of her parents are connected to us in some way, to you in particular. She may be dirty, no matter how many assurances we have been given."
"Nonetheless, I want her. I want her to live."
Misha knew that blank face carved of stone. Vasily would not budge, but he tried one more argument.
"We must use her as bait, Vasily. The operation comes first. Always. She will give the targets what they need from Grayson so we can find them. They will check her and discover she cannot be his lover because she is a virgin. You know they will realize that she is mere bait and will kill her outright, no matter what we do."
Their discussion, sometimes heated, other times analytical, began sketching out a plan that might, only might, appease Vasily and then finally circled back to the main obstacle, which Louis summed up in English for her benefit.
"She must not be a virgin."
Misha looked at the insignificant young woman. The tangled brown curls that ranged around her face only highlighted her blanched reaction to Louis’s words.
"Choose," he demanded.
Of course, she must choose Vasily, he thought. Her preference for him was as obvious as his for her. Louis had found it amusing; Misha, mystifying. She wasn’t even all that pretty. He waited for her to name her necessary lover.
"No," she said.
This was where she chose to stand firm? Misha marveled as arguing voices filled the little room. She had agreed to help them kill a band of terrorists. She had lied to them repeatedly. The girl had even violently smacked a neighborhood foe in the face with a heavy bag of books. Misha had seen the bruise. But having sex with the man she quite plainly loved in order to give herself a chance of survival was a moral bridge she would not cross? He considered that had she been older and less ignorant, there would be no problem. But then, if she were older and less ignorant, she might not be a virgin.
Louis found a pack of playing cards in a utensil drawer next to the tiny stove at one end of the room and handed them to Misha.
"Choose, or we draw cards," Misha said to her as he shuffled.
She refused to cut the deck. Louis drew the jack of clubs and smiled. Misha hoped her shuddering reaction would bring her to her senses and make her name Vasily, but when he turned over the king of hearts, Misha did not know why it bothered him. Surely she would relent now that luck had given her the man she preferred.
As he drew his card and stared down at the ace of diamonds in his own hand, he remembered with a clarity that mimicked the reality of that day in a tent on his lawn more than a decade before. He remembered every word.
He told himself it still amounted to no more than nonsense. How could this obscure nothing of an American girl in Chicago have anything to do with his past or his future? It was true that his wife had given him an heir and then cut him thoroughly, taking not only to a separate bedroom, but an entire suite of rooms in another wing of the house. His current mistress, whom he had installed in the village, might be more willing but only in an equally indifferent way.
"Choose, or we go by the cards," he said to the girl who stood trembling before him.
She shook her head.
He appreciated the irony of having his soul saved by adding yet another crime to his already vicious resume.
*****
She had dressed again before the other two returned, but the free flow of her tears caused Vasily to meet Misha’s eyes with a questioning glance. It was no more than a glance. The two friends understood each other perfectly. No matter how much Vasily might fantasize about American girls, Misha was sure he knew the necessity they were under.
The operation had been fraught with coincidences and a succession of obstacles that had delayed them at every step. They were visibly exhausted and becoming noticeable to possible enemies. The team’s survival depended on a successful outcome. The girl’s survival would not be a factor in any measurement of a satisfactory result. Only the deaths of the targets counted here.
As they approached their task that night, it looked more likely the deaths would be their own. With one bad decision, I will have killed my only friends, thought Misha.
Vasily’s girl swallowed a tiny sensor Louis gave her before her ordeal began. The targets dragged her through the basement of the skyscraper they planned to destroy, threading their way along a labyrinth of girders, packing crates, and ventilation machinery.
Louis carried a small radio and wore headphones as he led the way. He held up a hand on the second turn, pointing to a sensor that had been placed by the enemy. The radio had picked up the sensor as the girl passed it. This was a trap.
I suppose, thought Misha, the old woman would say that in this way she has saved my life. It stretches believability, though.
It took some time to avoid the sensors and achieve the element of surprise. By then, the girl had suffered considerably and could barely walk as the largest of the the tangos dragged her back through the labyrinth. This was the so-called knife expert, Misha knew, and thus his natural target, so he pursued them.
He caught up to them in a cul-de-sac of crates and machinery. He knew better than to try grappling with a man twenty kilos heavier who had a reputation for skill in a knife fight. The logical thing to do would be to shoot him, and Misha was ready, but the man held Vasily’s girl in such a way that he could not get a clear bead on anything lethal in that dim basement light. Without hesitation, he slid sideways instead, kicking the girl into a wall and out of the target’s hands. He lost his gun in the process and had just enough time to pull his knife from its sheath.
There, Crone, thought Misha. It is I who saved her life, and it has cost me mine.
It was the slowed time of disaster that allowed him the luxury of an imaginary conversation with a fortune teller in the past. He and his opponent grappled on the floor. Each man held the other’s right wrist in his left hand.
Death became more certain as Misha’s position worsened with every minuscule advance of the enemy’s knife. He would not bow to inevitability and so strained on, knowing it was futile, watching the glee grow on his opponent’s face, which is why he saw the shadow and then the brown curls.
She had crawled to them, her feet being useless, and lifted something above the enemy’s head. Misha recognized his SIG Sauer semi-auto handgun. The fool held it by its barrel and brought the stock down on the skull of his opponent with all the picayune strength of a mouse. To an observer there would have been no indication that the blow changed anything. But Misha and his foe existed in the slow time before death by disaster, and Misha had seen the blow coming. He was ready for the momentary distraction, the infinitesimal transfer of attention in the man about to kill him from the hand holding Misha’s wrist to the touch on his head.
He twisted his knife hand as the grip on his wrist softened, thrust the blade it held into the enemy’s lower abdomen and pulled. As he rolled the body off of himself, he sat up, panting and stinking of blood and vomit. The girl sat within arm’s length, stricken with nausea. Misha held out his left hand.
"Do not ever touch my gun again," he commanded.
She handed over the weapon, just managing not to shoot him, or herself, accidentally.
With ignorance, incompetence, and wrong-headed interference, the wench had saved his life. He silently cursed the old fortune teller.
When the girl refused to come with them, he did what he could to keep her safe by advising her to stay quiet, using threats to make his point. She glared at him. He dealt with Vasily’s dejection by finding an excuse to return to Chicago six weeks later.
They found her at church, for heaven’s sake. Louis had supplied Vasily with flowery words designed to woo a bride, most of which he forgot in the moment, but it did not matter. She was as infatuated as he, saying yes almost before the last syllable of his halting question, while Louis and Misha stood in supreme awkwardness in a crowd of people who did not mask their disapproval.
The besotted couple married in Capri on their way home.
Before turning in to sleep in his empty bedchamber that night, the night of his best friend’s honeymoon with the queen of hearts, Misha sat in a wingback chair before the fire, a glass of port on the table next to him. He pulled the ace of diamonds from his wallet, meaning to throw it in the flames, and stared at it, remembering the closing words of that cursed old woman.
"I have no soul, old witch," he had sneered.
The woman spat at the ground, disgusted.
"Then she will give you hers."
He returned the card to his wallet and drained his glass.
The End
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