Marks thought a minute. “I might be able to help you there.”
How badly does your shoulder hurt?” Devra said.
Arkadin, pressed against her body, his powerful arms around her, said, “I don’t know how to answer that. I have an extremely high tolerance for pain.”
The airplane’s cramped bathroom allowed him to concentrate exclusively on her. It was like being in a coffin together, like being dead, but in a strange afterlife where only they existed.
She smiled up at him as one of his hands traced its way from the small of her back to her neck. His thumb pressed against her jaw, gently tilted her head up while his fingers tightened on the nape of her neck.
He leaned in, his weight arching her torso backward above the sink. He could see the back of her head in the mirror, his face about to eclipse hers. A flame of emotion flickered to life, illuminating the soulless void inside him.
He kissed her.
“Gently,” she whispered. “Relax your lips.”
Her moist lips opened beneath his, her tongue searched for his, tentatively at first, then with an unmistakable hunger. His lips trembled. He had never felt anything when kissing a woman. In fact, he’d always done his best to avoid it, not knowing what it was for, or why women sought it so relentlessly. An exchange of fluids, that’s all it was to him, like a procedure performed in a doctor’s office. The best he could say was that it was painless, that it was over quickly.
The electricity that shot through him when his lips met hers stunned him. The sheer pleasure of it astonished him. It hadn’t been like this with Marlene; it hadn’t been like this with anyone. He did not know what to make of the tremor in his knees. Her sweet, moaning exhalations entered him like silent cries of ecstasy. He swallowed them whole, and wanted more.
Wanting was something Arkadin was unused to. Need was the word that had driven his life up to this moment: He needed to revenge himself on his mother, he needed to escape home, he needed strike out on his own, no matter the course, he needed to bury rivals and enemies, he needed to destroy anyone who got close to his secrets. But want? That was another matter entirely. Devra defined want for him. And it was only when he was certain he no longer needed her that his desire revealed itself. He wanted her.
When he lifted her skirt, probing underneath, her leg drew up. Her fingers nimbly freed him from his clothing. Then he stopped thinking altogether.
Afterward, when they’d returned to their seats, making their way through the line of glaring passengers queued up to use the lavatory, Devra burst into laughter. Arkadin sat watching her. This was another thing unique about her. Anyone else would have asked, Was that your first time? Not her. She wasn’t interested in prying his lid open, peering inside to see what made him tick. She had no need to know. Because he was someone who had always needed something, he couldn’t tolerate that trait in anyone else.
He was aware of her next to him in a way he was unable to understand. It was as if he could feel her heartbeat, the rush of blood through her body, a body that seemed frail to him, even though he knew how tough she could be, after all she’d suffered. How easily her bones could be broken, how easily a knife slipped through her ribs might pierce her heart, how easily a bullet could shatter her skull. These thoughts sent him into a rage, and he shifted closer to her, as if she were in need of protection-which, when it came to her former allies, she most certainly was. He knew then that he’d do everything in his power to kill anyone who sought to do her harm.
Feeling him edge closer, she turned and smiled. “You know something, Leonid, for the first time in my life I feel safe. All that prickly shit I give off is something I learned early on to keep people away.”
“You learned to be tough like your mother.”
She shook her head. “That’s the really shitty part. My mother had this tough shell, yeah, but it was skin-deep. Beneath it, she was a mass of fears.”
Devra put her head against the headrest as she continued, “In fact, the most vivid thing I remember about my mother was her fear. It came off her like a stink. Even after she’d bathed, I smelled it. Of course, for a long time I didn’t know what it was, and maybe I was the only one who smelled it, I don’t know.
“Anyway, she used to tell me an old Ukrainian folktale. It was about the Nine Levels of Hell. What was she thinking? Was she trying to frighten me or lessen her own fear by sharing it with me? I don’t know. In any case, this is what she told me. There is one heaven, but there are nine levels of hell where, depending on the severity of your sins, you’re sent when you die.
“The first, the least bad, is the one familiar to everyone, where you roast in flames. The second is where you’re alone on the summit of a mountain. Every night you freeze solid, slowly and horribly, only to thaw out in the morning, when the process begins all over again. The third is a place of blinding light; the fourth of pitch blackness. The fifth is a place of icy winds that cut you, quite literally, like a knife. In the sixth, you’re pierced by arrows. In the seventh, you’re slowly buried by an army of ants. In the eighth, you’re crucified.
“But it was the ninth level that terrified my mother the most. There, you lived among wild beasts that gorged themselves on human hearts.”
The cruelty of telling this to a child wasn’t lost on Arkadin. He was absolutely certain that if his mother had been Ukrainian she’d have told him the same folktale.
“I used to laugh at her story-or at least I tried to,” Devra said. “I struggled against believing such nonsense. But that was before a number of those levels of hell were visited on us.”
Arkadin felt her presence inside him all the more deeply. The sense of wanting to protect her seemed to bounce around inside him, increasing exponentially as his brain tried to come to terms with what the feeling meant. Had he at last stumbled across something big enough, bright enough, strong enough to put his demons to rest?
After Marlene’s death, Icoupov had seen the writing on the wall. He’d stopped trying to peer into Arkadin’s past. Instead he’d shipped him off to America to be rehabilitated. “Reprogrammed,” Icoupov had called it. Arkadin had spent eighteen months in the Washington, DC, area going through a unique experimental program devised and run by a friend of Icoupov’s. Arkadin had emerged changed in many ways, though his past-his shadows, his demons-remained intact. How he wished the program had erased all memory of it! But that wasn’t the nature of the program. Icoupov no longer cared about Arkadin’s past, what concerned him was his future, and for that the program was ideal.
He fell asleep thinking about the program, but he dreamed he was back in Nizhny Tagil. He never dreamed about the program; in the program he felt safe. His dreams weren’t about safety; they were about being pushed from great heights.
Late at night, a subterranean bar called Crespi was the only option when he wanted to get a drink in Nizhny Tagil. It was a reeking place, filled with tattooed men in tracksuits, gold chains around their necks, short-skirted women so heavily made up they looked like store mannequins. Behind their raccoon eyes were vacant pits where their souls had been.
It was in Crespi where Arkadin at age thirteen was first beaten to a pulp by four burly men with pig eyes and Neanderthal brows. And it was to Crespi that Arkadin, after nursing his wounds, returned three months later and blew the men’s brains all over the walls. When another crim tried to snatch his gun away, Arkadin shot him point-blank in the face. That sight stopped anyone else in the bar from approaching him. It also gained him a reputation, which helped him to amass a mini real estate empire.
But in that city of smelted iron and hissing slag success had its own particular consequences. For Arkadin, it was coming to the attention of Stas Kuzin, one of the local crime bosses. Kuzin found Arkadin one night, four years later, having a bare-knuckle brawl with a giant lout whom Arkadin called out on a bet, for the prize of one beer.