"But you love him differently—I know that, too. The kid isn't always
asleep when you think he is." Rubenstein smiled, then winced, his face
evidently hurting when he moved.
"Rest," she told Paul.
"He's a funny guy, isn't he? John, I mean," Paul Rubenstein said, as if to
himself, she thought.
"Yes—he is," she answered, wishing for a cigarette but still needing to
rub his face to restore the circulation. "How are your feet and hands?''
"Left foot's a little stiff—but I don't think it's—"
"Rourke isn't the only one who knows about the damage cold can do to the
body," she said reprovingly. "Lean back."
"Hey, no—I can—"
"Do as I say," Natalia told him. She started undoing the laces of his left
boot, getting the boot free; it felt damp to her. Then she removed the two
socks that covered his foot. The sole of his foot was yellow. "This could
turn to frostbite—very quickly," she snapped. She opened the front of her
coat, throwing back as well the sleeping bag that covered her. Reaching
under her coat, under the shirt Rourke had given her, to the front of her
black jump suit, she zipped it down, then took Rubenstein's foot and
placed it against the bare flesh of her abdomen. Hey—you—
"Let me! Tell me when the feeling starts back. How is the other foot?"
"It's well, it's okay."
"Keep your foot here and don't move it," she ordered, reaching down to his
other foot and starting to work on the boot laces—her own fingers were
numb, and her ears still felt the cold from the slipstream of the bike as
they'd ridden.
"That bandanna you put over my face against the wind—it smelled like you.
I guess from your hair," Rubenstein concluded, sounding lame.
"Thank you, Paul," Natalia whispered, getting the two socks off his right
foot. The sole of his foot was yellow, but not as bad as the left one had
been. Again, she felt the almost icy flesh against her abdomen and she
shivered,
"You love John—I mean really love him, don't you?" Rubenstein blurted out.
She closed her eyes a moment, felt pressure there
against her eyelids, tt<sn opened them. "Yes—you know I do."
"I'm sorry—I mean for both of you. John and Sarah— I mean it's none of my
business—"
"No—talk if you want," she told him.
"He—well, it's because he doesn't know if she's safe, if she's alive
minute by minute—that's—"
"I heard the lines in an American movie once—fI can't fight a ghost'?
No—even a living ghost. And I don't want to fight it. I respect John for
searching for Sarah. For—" She almost said never touching her. But she
couldn't say that because she didn't like to think about it. !
"I mean . . . he's the last of a breed, isn't he? Silent, strong—a man of
honor."
"Yes—he's a man of honor," she repeated. The chills in her body from the
coldness of Rubenstein's feet were starting to subside. . . .
They had built a fire; there had been no other choice. And behind the
windbreak in the glow of the fire, her feet wrapped in the sleeping bag
and blankets around her, even covering her head, her ears were finally
starting to become warmer.
Paul sat a foot or so away from her, the whiskey bottle beside them,
between them. He had taken a long drink from it an hour earlier and then
simply sat, watching the fire, silent, his feet wrapped in blankets
against the cold.
"She used to do that. I always had problems with my feet freezing up,"
Paul said suddenly.
"Your—"
"My girl—I was afraid you were gonna say my mother. But it was my girl."
"Was she—was she pretty?" Natalia asked, not looking at him, but staring
into the fire.
"Yeah—she was pretty. She was," he said with an air of finality.
Natalia felt suddenly awkward, reaching her hand out of the blankets which
swathed her, the cold air something she could feel suddenly against her
skin. She picked up the bottle—the glass of it was cold to her touch and
cold against her lips as she drank from it, then set it down again. She
reached her hand out still farther, found Rubenstein's arm and held it.
"Would you tell me about her?"
"Catharsis?"
"Maybe—and my curiosity. You know that. Women are always curious."
"Ruth was that way," he said quietly.
"Had you—?"
"Known each other a long time? Yeah—went to temple together whenever my
dad was on leave when we were kids. Her folks and my folks knew each
other."
"You were a military brat weren't you?" Natalia smiled, looking at him in
the firelight.
"Yeah—brat period, maybe. But that isn't true. I was always a good
kid—relatives, the other officers, always said, 'Paul is such a
well-behaved little boy.' Wish I hadn't been. Ruth always said we should
wait until we—" He stopped and fell silent.
Natalia didn't know if she should press it, but then decided. "Until you
were married?"
He just looked at her, his glasses, long since back in place, slipping
down the bridge of his nose. "You believe that ... I mean, well you know .
. . but this isn't any kind of thing on my part to try to—"
"To make a pass?" Natalia smiled.
"Yeah—that'd be pretty funny—me making a pass for
you, wouldn't it?" He laughed.
"No—and it wouldn't even be sweet. But it'd be flattering to me." She
smiled.
Again he fell silent, taking a pull on the bottle, then settling his
forearm under her left hand again. "Here I am—middle of nowhere and I'm a
virgin. Just what you want with death around every corner, isn't it?" He
laughed.
"You would make any woman a fine lover," Natalia said, feeling awkward
saying it.
"Hell! I knew Ruth for six years before I worked up/the nerve to kiss
her." Rubenstein Jaughed. {
But the laughter sounded hollow to her, and Natalia said, "How old were
you then?"
"Nine." He laughed again, this time the laughter sounded genuine she
thought.
(fI me! Vladmir when I was twenty. He was so strong and brave and—I didn't
know any better. He made love to me—a lot in those days. I thought it was
love anyway."
She moved her hand away, finding the black shoulder bag and starting to
search it for her cigarettes. She set her knife down on the ground beside
the bag.
"What'd you call that knife again?" Rubenstein asked, obviously changing
the subject. "What was it?"
"A Bali-Song knife—it's a Philippine design, though it may have originated
with an American sailor who brought it there. Some of the really big ones
were used as cane knives and as weapons, too. It's a martial-arts
fighting knife. I got into martial-arts weapons when I was just—"
She put the knife down, looking at Paul. "Why don't you ask—did I ever
really love Vladmir?"
She lit a cigarette, waiting for him to ask her.
"Did you?' he finally said, his voice sounding suddenly older to her.
"Yes—until I found out what he was. And
I was trying to deal with that and
I saw John again there and—" She swallowed hard, forgetting about the
cigarette a moment, then choking on the smoke and coughing.
"John was everything you'd thought Vladimir was— but really wasn't. I
mean, the grammar or syntax or whatever—well it really sucks, but isn't
that what you want to
Of >
say:
Natalia swallowed again, this time without the smoke—instead the bottle in
her left hand, the whiskey burning at her throat suddenly. "Yes—I wanted
to say that. Men always jokingly say women are like children, call them
girls—but we are. We all look for our own personal knight—you know, the
kind with a rK-N-I—' We look for someone we hook our dreams on. That's
what Ruth saw in you—and she wasn't wrong."
"Me—a knight?" Rubenstein laughed.
"A knight doesn't have to be tall and brave—but you are brave, you just
maybe didn't know it then. It's inside. That's what it is." She reached
her hand out and felt Rubenstein's hand touching hers. "That's what it
is," she repeated.
Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy thought the idea was, in a way, amusing. He
looked at his gun—a nickel-plated Colt single-action Army . with a
four-and-three-quarter-inch barrel. He was the conqueror, the invader,
and/his sidearm was "The Gun That Won the West'—as American as—he
verbalized it, "Apple pie—ha!"
He cocked the hammer back to the loading notch, opened the loading gate,
and spun the cylinder—five rounds, originally round-nosed lead solids, but
the bullets drilled out three sixty-fourths of an inch with a
one-sixteenth-inch drill bit, then tipped into candle wax after first
having had an infinitesimal amount of powdered glass shavings inserted
into their cavities. His own special load.
After rotating the cylinder, closing the gate, and lowering the hammer
over the empty chamber, he holstered the gun inside his waistband, in a
small holster he'd had custom-made of alligator skin, the gun with -ivory
butt forward and slightly behind his left hip bone. He reached to the
dresser top, picking up the set of military brushes and working his hair
with them. Thirty-four years old and not a speck of gray, he thought.
He set down the brushes and walked across the room to his closet; the
clothes were neatly arranged there by his valet. He took down a tweed
sportcoat—woolen and finely tailored to his exact measurements. He held it
for a moment against the charcoal gra> slacks he wore. The herringbone
pattern had a definite charcoal gray shading and it made for a perfect
combination.
He slipped the coat on. It would be cold, dangerous because of the
storm—but it was vital and no choice was left other than to go.
He tried to think if there was some American song about West Virginia—his
destination. He thought for a moment, then decided there doubtless was but
he didn't know it. Instead he whistled "Dixie"—it was close enough for his
purposes.
He stopped whistling as he reached the door of his quarters, laughing.
"Whistling 'Dixie' in a snowstorm—ha!"
He started through the doorway, into the hall. . . .
The wind at the restored Lake Front airport was bit-ingly cold, and he
pulled up on the collar of his coat— wolfs fur—as he started toward the
helicopter for the first leg of his journey toward West Virginia and the
presidential retreat—and the duplicate set of files on the American Eden
Project.
As he crossed under the rotor blades, he could feel it— his hair was
ruined.
Darkness had fallen deeply—he glanced at the black luminous face of the
Rolex Submariner he wore—more than an hour ago. Rourke exhaled, watching
the steam $n his breath. The Harley's engine rumbled between his legs,
running a little roughly with the cold.
A smile crossed his lips; he had been right. He was heading into the heart
of the storm, Natalia and Paul away from it. He looked behind him once,
into the white swirling darkness, then gunned the Hariey, slowly starting
ahead, the snow making the road almost impassable. . . .
Rourke had stopped a little while earlier to pull up the neck of his
crew-neck sweater so that it covered most of his face, and his ears and
head. There had been a sudden coldness near the small of his back where
his sweater no longer protected him, and his ears had been stiffening with
the cold. Now as he pressed the bike along a mountain curve, the
visibility was bad, worse than it had been before. The storm only seemed
to intensify as he moved along, and the cold increased. He wore his
dark-lensed aviator-style sunglasses, to protect his eyes from the driving
ice spicules; the backs of his gloved hands were
i
encrusted with the ice where his fists locked over the handlebars.
Brushing the ice away from the cuff of his sweater where it extended past
his brown leather jacket's cuff, he moved his right hand to roll back the
the temperature would still drop for another nine or ten hours or so until
just before dawn. As he shifted his right hand back to the handlebars, his
weight shifted— stiffness from the cold—and the bike started into a skid.
He was doing barely twenty by the speedometer, the headlight of the Harley
dancing wildly across the snow and ice as he took the curve, the Harley
almost out of control. His hands wrestled the controls, trying to steer
'the bike out of the skid. His feet dragged to stop it, to balance it.
He let the bike skid out, jumping clear of it, the machine sliding across
the road surface as he rolled. The Harley stopped in a snowbank to the far
right of the road; Rourke landed flat on his stomach on the ice and snow.
He looked up, shaking his head to clear it.
He pushed himself up with his hands, slowly rising to his feet, pulling
off his right glove, clutching the wrist hole tight in his left fist to
retain the warmth inside. Then, with his right hand, he took off the
glasses that had protected his eyes. He realized also that he was tired,
fast approaching exhaustion; and with the cold, that could be fatal. He
moved slowly, carefully toward his bike. It was in a snowbank, the snow
having cushioned its impact. It appeared totally undamaged.
"Lucky," he murmured. He reached down and shut off the key, putting the
glasses into an inside pocket of the jacket first. Squinting against the
ice, he looked around him; he needed shelter. To his left—to the east—the
clouds had a strange glow. Radiation? He shook his head, dismissing the
thought. He could be dying at this very instant, he realized, if the snow
that fell on him was irradiated. He would worry about that later.
But there was a subtle glow and trails of fire were visible; and as the
cloud patterns shifted in the wind, the glow remained, as if it emanated
from the ground.
If things had been normal, he would have labeled the glow as the lights
from—he verbalized it—"A town—a town. A town." It looked to be about two
or three miles away, but he realized that with the darkness and the snow
and the cloud layers the distance judgment he made could have been
self-deceptive. ,
He gloved his right hand again, working his fingerfs which were already
stiffening.
There were two possibilities: to fabricate a shelter which would give
marginal protection from the wind and no protection from the cold, or to
go to the source of the lights. He had passed a side road turnoff a
half-mile back; it likely led toward the source of the lights. The general
direction seemed the same, although mountain roads, winding like Christmas
ribbons across the landscape and really leading nowhere, could be
deceptive as to direction. But along such a road there would be farms,
homes—he decided.
His best chance for shelter was along the side road, though the snow would
be heavier there.
He wrest/ed the Harley up, straddling it, starting it, the engine
rumbling; his gas gauge was low, very low. Rourke fought the machine back
out of the snowdrift and arced it around. If he kept the speed low enough
. . .
When more Brigands had started arriving—some sort of conclave she
wondered?—she had awakened the children; then as silently as possible,
she led them and the horses down on the far side of the rise—away from the
Brigand camp, into the mounting storm. As Sarah rode Tildie now, the
horse's body white-coated with the snow and ice, she wondered if it had
been a wise decision—the right one? What would John have done? Would he
have—?
"Mommie?"
She shook her head, smiling as she turned around. "What is it, Annie? Are
you cold?"
"No—I'm letting her hug me—she isn't—"
"I am cold," Annie interrupted Michael. "I'm cold. I'm cold."
"Slow up, Michael," Sarah told her son, wanting him to rein in Sam.
Michael didn't argue; she guessed he was cold, too. "Here." She reined
Tildie around, then came up beside her children. She took the blanket
which she had wrapped around her and put it around Annie's shoulders,