“I didn’t,” she whispered. “I didn’t tell. I swear.”
Lily wanted to cry, but her head wouldn’t let her. She stood up and rubbed her eyes, inching cautiously back from Tony’s corpse as she watched the sky and the sea. They mingled together into one black mass that could only be distinguished by sound—a whistle of the wind and whoosh of the waves.
“Oh, God,” she murmured.
She looked down into Tony’s face and swallowed a sickening pool of saliva that had collected under her tongue. It almost made her vomit. “Dear God,” she said fully aloud this time. Tony’s eyelids were half-closed, like he was falling asleep to the sound of a radio show. Lily thought about what it was Tony might like to listen to when he was alone. Maybe one of those detective stories her mother was so fond of.
“God-damn,” she shouted. She’d drank with Tony and made him laugh. She fed him pieces of smoked trout from room service china. He’d been inside her, for Christ sake!
And he’d been one of the good guys. Maybe Lily didn’t know all that much about the dead man at her feet, and maybe she hadn’t loved him, but part of her wished she had. Because if there was one thing that she was one hundred percent sure of, it was that in the big picture Tony was okay. More than okay.
“Bastard—where are you?” she gasped. She squatted down, waiting, watching.
Nothing changed—at least not out there. Inside, though, she could feel the shift, the adjustment from her old life—the one with Etor and Malvasia wine and without a thing to do—to her new one.
The new one she knew nothing about, except that a CIA agent was dead on top of the ruins of Monemvasia and she was hunched there on a cliff with a billowing, white dress on—an easy target for another poison pen cap. Lily took in a sharp breath and started untying her belt and fumbling with her buttons. Her fingers were shaking and wouldn’t cooperate, so she grabbed the top of her dress at the neck and yanked as hard as she could, until half the buttons popped off and it fell to her ankles. Her tanned skin blended well with the night air and she figured at the very least Tony’s killer would have a hard time distinguishing her from a Greek fir. Lily ducked behind the eroded fortress wall and pulled her airline tickets and the metal card from under Tony’s fingers.
Running naked back to her hotel room, Lily did not go un-noticed in the Hotel Malvasia’s lobby. But this was Kástro, after all, and there was little that could have surprised the hedonistic clientele or jaded hotel clerks.
Once inside her room, she locked the door and drank three shots of ouzo—compliments of the house. Out her window, the one she’d left open for fresh air, Lily saw the same panorama she had admired earlier in the evening after she and Etor had returned from the seaside. The little lane, two floors down, had been bustling, a stream of worshipers filing out of the only church on Monemvasia—a small Greek Orthodox temple with a domed roof shaped like a breast. Now, the lane was gloomy and still, with only the click-clack of a pair of high-heeled sandals sounding off of its cobblestones. The footsteps seemed ominous, like they could have, conceivably, belonged to Tony’s killer and Lily shuddered.
After closing the window and locking the latch, Lily crouched down and slithered beneath her bedframe, pulling with her the copper spine of her bedside lamp and the coverlet from her mattress. She balled the soft, cotton spread into her arms like a loved one and hid under her bed in the dark—naked, but with her wits about her—until the sun rose out of the sea and filled her room with its butter and lemon glow. It was there, under her bed, and in a fetal position, that Lily got hold of herself and made some decisions about her life.
STEPPING ON THE THROAT OF HIS OWN SONG
Kosmo Zablov had no grasp of situations in their whole, though he could execute flawlessly against any detail that protected or advanced his own self-interest. He had never questioned his instincts in this regard and certainly never considered any moral implications.
But right at this moment, he would have given anything for the mental agility that could’ve freed him to apply his gifts of self-preservation to the mechanics of his actual job. It seemed like such a small leap and yet somehow he had never mastered it. If only Kosmo could have been more like his brother.
“Lucky Yakov,” the spy bemoaned, as he pulled his overcoat closed and descended into the Prospect Mira metro station.
Yakov was a journalist, and one of some repute, who was always writing stories about exemplary Soviet scientists or engineers. It amazed Kosmo how his older brother never failed to convince himself that he possessed the same dexterity as his subjects and could’ve easily—if he had fancied—become, say, a prize-winning physicist, instead of someone who simply interviewed physicists.
But this was a moot point.
Zablov’s problem was made worse by the fact that he had no insight into his one and only talent, either. It wasn’t a skill he had practiced and perfected, the way Yakov had mastered three-act journalistic structure. As a result, he didn’t know how he had come to the decisions he had made or why things had always worked out for him.
And unlike his good brother Yakov, Kosmo Zablov had no inclination towards self-delusion. He knew very well that he had risen in the ranks of the KGB by manufacturing espionage escapades that allowed him to save the day, and passing off the blame for the very real exploits he had overlooked. Politics and intrigue were where Zablov’s core abilities lay, and it was imperative that he rise out of the KGB and into areas of diplomacy. There, his inadequacies could take years to surface.
For the time being, however, he still had to deliver real results and his terror of getting caught “improvising,” as he liked to call it, was starting to wear on him.
The nightmares, the tremble in his pinky finger, the days of insomnia before any meeting with a superior, and the crushing lower back pain that seemed to start at his arches and shoot up to his buttocks before lodging itself at the base of his spine, had all intensified as expectations of him increased and he began to be considered for the very positions he had been striving for, but never seemed to get offered.
Finally, not two weeks before, Comrade General Pushkin had revealed to him that a diplomatic post was indeed in his future, but not for another two to three years. By then, Pasha Tarkhan would be tendered a seat at the big table in Moscow and Zablov could succeed him on the Lobster and Lafite circuit, as it was called.
“Only the ’45. The remainder of the 40s Bordeaux are dreadful,” he mimicked Tarkhan’s Georgian accent to himself.
Two to three years was an eternity under his present circumstances! Not only could an associate stumble upon his shortfalls, but a foreign agent could exploit them as well. He’d seen it happen before.
“I’d rather compose romances for you—more profit in it and more charm. But I subdued myself, setting my heel on the throat of my own song,” he whispered the Mayakovsky poem, almost laughing, as a fat-faced hag turned at the sound of his voice. Zablov elbowed his way past her on the stairwell.
Poetry—Mayakovsky’s—soothed him; it was the way the words pranced from his tongue and out into the ethos as if he’d composed them. If he was Yakov, he would be certain that he could have, had he not turned his eye towards journalism, of course.
It pleased Zablov to remind himself of his brother’s shortcomings. Particularly as he struggled to shake the curly-headed man with the dented face General Pushkin dispatched to follow him. The Neanderthal had made no effort to hide his intentions and strolled around the metro station—hands in his pockets, admiring the Cathedral ceilings and giant Deco chandeliers –until he hopped onto the same coach Zablov had boarded.