She could see floodlights and a monument in nearby Khreschatyk Park. She walked toward it, stepping carefully through the ice and encrusted snow. There was little traffic; compared to an American city, Kiev was eerily quiet.
Before her, growing larger as she approached, was a rainbow-shaped arch, reminiscent of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, but smaller. She arrived there and put her knowledge of Ukrainian language to good use. More pre-glasnost propaganda in granite and steel. The sculptures had gone up in 1982.
The Friendship Arch, read the sign.
Underneath the Friendship Arch there were two statues, both illuminated. One to her right was in granite and showed a huddled mass of peasants. It commemorated the great treaty of 1664, the one that sold the soul of Ukraine to Russia. The one to her left was the statue Friedman had pointed out on the ride in from the airport. It was made of bronze and depicted two workers, one Russian and one Ukrainian, as they held aloft the Soviet Order of Friendship of Peoples.
A harsh wind kicked up and bit through her coat. It must have been fifteen degrees but the wind chill made it feel even colder. Her face stung from the icy air. She wrapped a scarf around her throat and the lower part of her face.
She gazed at the monuments, feeling very alone as she looked at them. They were creepy in their oppressiveness combined with the deep silence. She was happy that she could leave this place in a few days and return to an America where she could vote as she wished, think as she wished, and worship as she wished. Some people would have called her an old fashioned flag-waver, and she was as aware of her own country’s faults and shortcomings as anyone. But no one was putting up official statues trying to tell her what to think, and even if someone did, she was under no obligation to look at it.
The extreme cold continued to penetrate her overcoat. She remained tired from the travel. She turned to walk back to the hotel.
She smacked into a huge man in a great sheepskin coat and a massive fur cap pulled low above his eyes, a heavy woolen scarf wrapped around his face. Her heart jumped into her throat. She would have fallen, except he reached an arm out and held her. She could only see his eyes and the bridge of his nose. She knew immediately that she had been incredibly careless to let a stranger get so close to her in a place like this.
His eyes bored into her. He looked like he had stepped out of the Czar’s army of a century earlier. He had arrived quietly beside her, coming up out of the ground or the shadows or God knew where.
Then she realized he was not releasing her.
“Zakordónna?” he asked. Foreign?
Crunch time for her knowledge of Ukrainian. Sink or swim. No backups here and no interpreter either.
“Mozhlývo,” she answered. Maybe.
“Frantsúz’ka? Anhlíys’ka? Amerykánka?” he pressed. French? English? American?
She reached for a phrase from Mistress Olga.
“Ne váshe dílo!” she said. Mind your own business. Always a useful phrase to have ready. She pulled away, but he held her coat, his grip tight as a vice, an iron fist in a leather glove.
A moment passed. She was a heartbeat away from attempting to kick free and reaching for her weapon at the same time.
Then his grip eased. He laughed. She steadied herself. He released her.
“A monument to ‘friendship,’ yes?” he said, now switching into Russian, indicating the monument: “Äðóæáà.”
She couldn’t help herself in replying. “Friendship enforced by the tanks of the Soviet Red Army,” she said, throwing the same language back at him.
His dark eyes took on a deep burn. Her remark had touched something.
He nodded toward the statue of the workers. “Soviet Order of Friendship,” he said. “In Ukraine, we call that the ‘Yoke of Oppression.’ ”
Another moment passed. He looked both ways, dropped his hands into his pocket, and laughed. Then he slowly turned and walked away into the night. Despite the bright lights illuminating the monuments, her visitor knew where the shadows were. He did not look back as he walked away. Then he was gone, as quietly as he had arrived.
TWENTY-NINE
Rome. Quarter to seven in the morning under a cold gray drizzle. A police car bearing Lt. Gian Antonio Rizzo and his assistant, Stephano DiPetri, drew up outside an inauspicious steel door on the via LoBrutti. The building was set among two warehouses and a closed factory.
The two policemen jumped out. Rizzo walked at a quick pace. He knew this place too well. DiPetri followed close behind, pulling his coat close against the elements.
Miserable weather. A miserable place. There was a sign beside the door. It read, “L’Obitorio Municipale-Città di Roma.”
Rizzo pulled the door open. He barged purposefully into the municipal morgue. For the next half hour, he and his assistant stood in a basement chamber that was barely warmer than the outside air. Noxious fumes assaulted their nostrils, the scent of death and chemicals everywhere. They eventually stood over two marble slabs where a pair of decomposing bodies in yellow canvas bags were set forth for their examination.
An emissary of the mortuary’s office presided. He was a chubby bearded man named Bernardo Santangelo, pleasant and jovial, considering his line of work, well known for his unending courtesy and attention to detail. A meticulous well-groomed man, he looked more like a jolly chef than a technician of mortality. In his handsome pudginess, he moved like a big pampered cat.
Nearby, with her arms folded behind her back, stood a young assistant, Neomie, a woman with dark hair, thick glasses, and a complexion as pale as the resident cadavers. Rizzo gave her a quick glance and a nod. Neomie couldn’t hold a candle to Sophie, so Rizzo’s attention bounced back to the business at hand.
Like the corpses, Neomie remained silent.
Lt. Rizzo had worked with Bernardo Santangelo previously and knew him to be an intelligent man who did his wretched job with an air of earnestness. Santangelo adjusted the thermostat in the room to below freezing before he began to talk.
“We may now proceed,” Santangelo said. “Please open the bags.” Neomie unzipped first one bag and then the other.
Rizzo winced. DiPetri retched. Neomie ignored them and the dead folks.
Rizzo had seen many corpses in his career, including those of people he had known personally. But these were particularly horrendous. There had been just enough time since death-perhaps a couple of weeks, he assessed-for advanced discoloration and decomposition to set in. Death had been caused by gunshot, and the gunshots had raked the heads, necks, and upper chests, and caused particularly horrific effects.
The bodies were those of a man and a woman. Half of the woman’s face had been hammered away by bullets and the remaining eye socket was filled with brains and blood. The man’s face had been smashed in by gunfire so brutally that the features almost looked as if they had been turned inside out.
Gravely, his voice muted to low tones, Santangelo explained how the man and woman came to lie in his place of business.
A band of children had been playing near some old Roman ruins in the campground at Villa di Plinio. Rizzo knew the area. It was a sandy swampy region twenty kilometers east of Rome and two kilometers south of the massive airport at Fiumicino. It was a place where unusual things were known to surface.
The bambini piccoli had been kicking a soccer ball when it bounced into the marshes. The ball rolled to rest against qualcosa non comune -something unusual-sticking up out of the ground, something that looked like a broken branch of a tree or a strange piece of driftwood that had washed up from the Mediterranean.