She removed the ring from the box under his careful gaze. Fighting back second thoughts and with a little voice within her screaming that she should know better than to do something as wildly inappropriate as this, she slid the ring onto the third finger of her left hand, where Robert’s ring had once been.
Not surprisingly, Federov had chosen the band size perfectly. The ring felt exquisite and repugnant at the same time.
She looked up and her gaze met his. He was looking back and forth from her hand to her eyes, then back again. He reached forward and took her hand, the one with the ring.
“You’re sure,” he said, “the answer is no?”
“The answer is no,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He pulled her hand to him and brought it to his face. He pressed his lips to the back of her hand, then released it. She withdrew her hand from him.
“Very well,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to accept.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“One never knows.”
With her right hand, she pulled the ring off her finger. Respectfully, she replaced it in the ring box, closed the box, and handed it back to him.
“Be careful with this,” she said. “It has a great monetary value. You don’t want it to disappear.”
He took it and returned it to the drawer. “It barely matters,” he said. “Maybe I’ll give it to the nurse.” Alex wasn’t sure if he was kidding. “She might like to sell it.”
He dropped it in the drawer and stared at the drawer. He looked lost again. Alex noticed a fresh line of sweat across his brow. She waited for him to come back again. In time, he turned to her.
“I wonder then,” he said. “When the time comes, there is another thing that needs to be done. And I have no one else I can ask. No one else that I can trust.”
“Tell me what it is,” she said.
“My instructions are that my body is to be cremated,” he said. “Then, afterward, there is a place nearby here,” he said, “a very pleasant, peaceful place, a section in Geneva, just to the south of the center of the city. It’s called Plainpalais.” His voiced trailed off for a moment. “Do you know it?” he asked.
“I’m familiar with it,” she said.
“I have all that paperwork in the drawer here too,” he said. “I have made all the arrangements. So when the time comes…” With a weak smiled, he added, “Not before.”
She nodded. “Not before,” she said. “I’ll make sure that everything is done properly.”
“And you will be there?”
“If I can be,” she said. “I promise.”
“Thank you. You are more kind to me than I deserve,” he said. “Will you also forgive me? ” he asked.
“For what?”
“For my greatest sin, my greatest malefaction ever.”
“I’m not following,” she said.
“No?” Federov asked.
“No.”
“I thought you might have figured it out by now.”
A deep feeling of unease began to creep over her, as if deep within her she knew what was coming next.
“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alex said. “Figure what out?”
“Robert’s death,” he said. He held a long beat, and then he said very clearly, “I was the person responsible.”
“What?”
“And the attack on Barranco Lajoya, also,” he said. “Completely responsible.”
An extraordinary silence crashed down upon the room.
“I ordered the attack in Kiev,” he continued. “I ordered it, organized it, and financed it. Then I did everything I could to blame it on my opposition, the filoruskies. I wanted to get back at your government for the war they waged against me, for expelling me from America, for siding with that swine Putin, for driving me out of business, for making me into an exile in my own land.”
With wide eyes and a sense of disbelief, Alex listened to him, his familiar voice, now racked with pain that was as severe spiritually as it was physically. He was assuming complete culpability for the carnage in Kiev that had shattered her life as well as so many others, the attack that had rewritten in blood one of the worst atrocities ever aimed at her country.
And then he moved along to Venezuela.
“In Venezuela,” he continued. “I had the local fascist militia come to try to kill you. I felt you were the instrument of the government, the representative of all my enemies. So they came for you; they murdered some other people, but you escaped again. It was only later that I understood that you were only doing a job. That Comrade Cerny was my enemy. And the disgraceful Putin as well.”
A long apologia followed but the words barely made any sense. After a few moments she was not hearing it.
Disgust. Resentment. Fury.
It all welled up inside her, those emotions and more. The monstrosity of all this brought her close to despair, a despair modified with rage, and almost a wish that this conversation had never happened, that she had heard none of it, that she might have lived a happier life never knowing the truth, never having heard this rambling deathbed confession.
And although one wave of angry doubt was in mutiny against another, her heart fought against what she had always known, always somehow suspected, yet found a way to deny until this moment, that Federov had taken Robert from her, that the man now dying before her had shattered her life and left it in small pieces that had been nearly impossible to piece back together.
“So I ask you now,” Federov finally said. “Where is your faith? What is it to you? What did your Jesus Christ teach you? Do you forgive me?”
She was angry. Resentful. Fearful. Every foul and vituperative emotion welled inside her.
Somehow she managed words.
“Forgiveness is not mine to give you, Yuri. Forgiveness is for God to give you.”
“Will he?’
“Ask him.”
“But will he?”
“You’ll find out.”
He took a moment, his strength almost gone. “But do you forgive me?” he asked.
She stood in silence, tears welling, not knowing whether she wanted to answer, to flee, or-as one horrible instinct urged-to shoot him herself in revenge, except something about that would have seemed both wrong and too good for him at the same time.
“Please answer me honestly,” he said. “Don’t give me the answer you wish me to hear, but the one that has the truth. I have little patience left for anything except truth.”
Federov paused. “So, I ask you again. Do you forgive me?”
Several seconds passed. Somewhere deep in her soul, in something that seemed to her too much like a spiritual abyss, she found an answer that she didn’t know was there.