Just preparations. If it helps, I haven’t seen any indications that they’re planning to try to assassinate you again.
Not for the next two days, at least. Thanks, November. Let me know if anything changes.
Of course.
I broke the connection and sat back. Around me, the Hollow was peaceful and quiet. I thought back over what I’d learned this morning. My mind jumped from detail to detail, searching for connections.
I kept coming back to two things. Richard’s lie about the ritual, and the isolation ward. I held the two ideas up in my thoughts. I had the feeling they fit together somehow.
I still had a few hours left, and I’d spoken to most of the people I needed. The obvious missing piece was Richard, but my instincts told me that right now, going to talk to him would be a mistake. I didn’t know the right questions to ask, and I was starting to learn that letting Richard set the agenda was a very bad idea. He’d give away less than I would.
But it was Richard who was the key. It wouldn’t be enough this time to just react. I needed to understand him.
I sat there in the Hollow for a few minutes, listening to the birds sing in the trees. Gradually an idea began to take form. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant one, and at first I pushed it away, but each time I did, it would circle around and come back. At last, reluctantly, I rose to my feet and began making a gate.
*
The apartment block was red, with sand-coloured edgings and pale blue drainpipes running from the roof to the ground. Wrought iron balconies jutted from the flats; the balconies on each level had a different design, from half-moons to rectangles to boxes topped with spikes, as though the building had grown layer by layer over the decades with a different architect each time. The street felt too wide and the air too cold, and I watched the cars pass by for a couple of minutes before entering.
The inside of the apartment building was gloomy, with the odour of cleaning fluid trying to drown out an underlying scent of mould and beer. The lift had a notice posted on it in Cyrillic, and didn’t work. I took the stairs.
The third-floor corridor ran the length of the building, with light streaming in from the window at the far end. Muffled sounds of traffic drifted in from the outside. Sitting in a chair beside the window was a woman with a lined craggy face who looked older than the building. At the sight of me, she glared and fired off a challenge in rapid-fire Russian.
I gave her a nod and walked down the corridor. When I reached the right door, I knocked.
The woman hauled herself to her feet and said something angry-sounding. She had white hair peeking from under a red shawl, and carried a thick walking stick. She stomped down the hallway, brandishing the stick.
‘Relax,’ I told her. ‘I’m just visiting.’
Suspicious eyes glared up at me from under deep-set brows. She shook the stick under my nose.
There was a soft footstep from behind the door, and I turned away from the woman to face the spyhole. There was a moment’s silence, then the sound of a key turning in a lock and a chain rattling. The door opened to reveal another woman, taller and straighter-backed than the old lady. She stared at me.
I looked back at her.
‘Well,’ she said after a pause. ‘You might as well come in.’ She said something in Russian to the old lady, then disappeared into the flat. The old lady gave me a look of deep suspicion before stomping off down the corridor.
I walked into the flat, the door closing behind me with a soft snick. The rooms inside were quiet with a sense of age, beams of light filtering through the windows to catch motes of dust floating in the air. It smelt of old wood and cigarettes. I walked through the entry hall into the living room.
My mother was sitting in a chair near the window, her legs crossed. The chair was positioned so that the rays from the window caught her legs but left her body in shadow, and she was holding a cigarette between two fingers from which a trail of smoke drifted lazily toward the ceiling. It was a while since we’d seen each other, and I looked at her face, studying her. Not much change. Deep hooded eyes, aquiline nose, wide mouth, strong jaw. A few more lines at the eyes and cheeks. The hair was still jet-black, though it was starting to look out of place. How old would she be now? Twenty-three plus thirty-four . . . fifty-seven.
I nodded back toward the corridor. ‘I see you’ve got a dragon guarding your door.’
‘Olya,’ my mother said with a faint smile. Her accent was more pronounced than I remembered. ‘She was floor manager in our building when I was a girl. Now she keeps away the Uzbekistanis. They steal things.’ She nodded at a chair. ‘Sit down.’
The chair was by the table, directly in the path of the window. I moved it into the shade and sat. The light from the window streamed into the room between us.
‘You look starved,’ my mother said. ‘Isn’t anyone feeding you?’
‘I’ve had a busy few weeks.’
‘And you haven’t had time to eat?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Family visit.’
‘You don’t visit. You didn’t even come to the wedding.’
‘You mean your second wedding?’ I asked. ‘Or have you had a third one I don’t know about?’
My mother frowned at me. ‘Don’t be uncultured.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But you can’t expect your son to be especially excited about you divorcing his father and marrying someone else.’
My mother had been tapping her cigarette into a glass ashtray; now she shot a look at me. ‘What happened to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said sorry,’ my mother said. ‘And you didn’t start a fight.’
I gave her an annoyed look. ‘So?’
‘Oh.’ My mother’s eyes opened wide. ‘Who’s the girl?’
‘What do you mean, who’s the girl?’
‘You’ve fallen in love,’ my mother said. ‘Who’s the girl?’
‘This hasn’t got anything to do with a girl.’
My mother laughed. ‘I know men, and I know you.’
I tried to shake off the annoyance. It didn’t work. How do parents always manage to get under your skin? ‘Given how your relationship with Dad turned out, I’m not sure you know men all that well.’
‘Your father’s an idiot.’
‘He’s a university professor.’
‘He made professor? Hm.’ My mother shrugged. ‘Very smart idiot is still an idiot. He could have been part of the English camarilla. He knew the right people. I told him, all you have to do is not rock the boat. I would have helped. I could have been at his side, done what he couldn’t. But he wouldn’t listen.’ My mother shook her head. ‘When he came home that day and told me he was resigning from the party . . . good God, I was angry! You probably don’t remember, you were too small. I was furious. A few more years and they would have been in power; all he had to do was keep his mouth shut. He said it was a point of principle. Tchah!’ It was a disgusted noise. ‘So he shuffled off to teach in a dusty classroom.’
‘I don’t much agree with my dad’s principles either,’ I said. ‘But he is sincere about them. And looking back on it, he did try to make the marriage work.’
‘Principles,’ my mother said, loading the word with contempt. ‘Things for rich men in rich countries. A man should put his family first.’
I didn’t have an answer to that. I looked away, out the window. Unbidden, a cold, uncomfortable thought came to my mind. The things I cared about, the person I was . . . how much of that was just the imprint of my parents? How many of my problems had been me trying to reconcile two incompatible ways of looking at the world?