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“There’s a lot to love,” agreed Shaw.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said.
He remained silent but stared at her expectantly.
“You mentioned back in the cemetery at Harrowsfield that you stare at graves too. What did you mean by that?”
“Not graves, grave, singular.”
“Whose?”
“It’s in Germany, an hour’s ride outside of Frankfurt, a small village.”
“That’s where, but whose grave do you look at there?”
“A woman’s.” The strain on Shaw’s face was perceptible.
“I take it you two were close?”
“Close enough.”
“Can you tell me her name?”
“Anna. And now I think the pretending to be normal period is over.”
CHAPTER
71
FEDIR KUCHIN was impatient, which meant he was irritable, which meant he was once more pacing in his precise ninety-degree grids. A leased jet had just touched down forty kilometers from here. He envisioned Alan Rice climbing in an SUV and setting off to come and meet with him. In his possession was information that Kuchin now craved more than he had anything in his life.
But he had to wait. Forty kilometers over mediocre roads. An hour, perhaps more if the weather continued to deteriorate as it had threatened to do all day.
“Everything okay, Mr. Waller?”
He stopped pacing and looked up to find Pascal standing in the doorway. He wore jeans, boots, flannel shirt, and a leather jacket. Always a jacket and always a gun underneath the jacket, Kuchin knew. His mother had been small, spare, and Pascal had taken after her instead of his tall father. The facial features too were hers. Greek had trumped Ukrainian in this genetic instance. Those features were now marred by yellow and purplish bruises, thanks to the tall man who’d beaten them both in the catacombs of Gordes.
“Just thinking, Pascal. The others will be here in about an hour.”
“Yes sir.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Not bad.”
The little man was tough, Kuchin could not deny that. His arm could be dangling by a sliver of skin and he would probably only ask for aspirin or more likely nothing at all.
He is tough, like his father.
The affair had been brief but memorable. Kuchin had taken a holiday in Greece as reward for his good work in Ukraine. Under brilliant sunlight that did not seem to exist in the Soviet Union, at least that he’d experienced, Fedir Kuchin had bedded a woman and together they’d made a baby. Kuchin had not been there for the birth but he had named his son. Pascal was a Francophone given name for a male. In Latin it meant relating to Easter and in Hebrew to be born or associated with Passover. Kuchin had named the boy in honor of his French mother, who was also a Jew, though she’d converted to Catholicism when still a young girl. He’d never told anyone about her ethnicity, nor of her and his religious beliefs. In the power circles of the Soviet Union, that would not have been looked on in a positive way.
“You do good work, Pascal,” said Kuchin. Searching the other man’s features, as he sometimes did, Kuchin would imagine he saw a glimmer of himself there. He had sent his son off to various skirmishes across the world as a mercenary. Pascal had been trained by some of the best military minds around. He’d fought in places like Kosovo and Slovakia, Bosnia and Honduras, Colombia and Somalia. He’d always returned to his father with a smile on his face and more experience grafted into his DNA. Kuchin had taught him some old tricks of the trade as well, taking some fatherly pride in doing so, but not too much. He was a bastard child after all. But he was also all Kuchin had in the way of descendants. Not smart enough to run the business, but smart enough to protect those who did.
“Thank you, sir, you need anything, you just let me know.”
Pascal moved off and Kuchin rubbed the scars on his wrist. They’d been caused by ten-pound fishing line that had cut into his skin so deeply as a child that the marks had become permanent. This was his father’s way of teaching his son to obey. These lessons were usually accompanied by drunken screams and thundering fists. He would be strung up like one of his father’s catches, his toes barely touching the icy floor. This would go on for hours until Kuchin thought his hamstrings would collapse, his Achilles tendons dissolve.
His back too held the marks of violent intrusion. A belt, a strap, a fishing reel whose metal guides had bitten into his prepubescent skin and stung like the blitzkrieg of a thousand-wasp army. These were his father’s choices, his father’s life lessons to his only child.
