Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3) Read online

  John sat alone, watching the fire die to a small glow in the hearth, nursing his drink and allowing himself the luxury of sliding fully into memories of Jamie. It wasn’t something he did often. The pain of it became too easily overwhelming, and he found himself living more in that world than in the one that surrounded him.

  The memories were more real, more than life itself often was. Memory was the one gift love left behind when it took its burning leave of a man. Memory that one held as carefully as an ancient artifact, for to take it out too often and hold it up to the light would cause it to lose some of its wonder and rarity, and so he did not indulge in this sort of behavior very often.

  Talking about it with Pamela had brought up memories both beautiful and awful. In particular the night he had allowed himself to drink until even his judgement had left in disgust. His original intent had been to find oblivion and stay there, wrapped away from the world. But, as had sometimes happened in his past, the whiskey had clarified that which he sought to obliterate and put sharp corners on feelings that he had wanted to dull and misshape. Waiting outside Jamie’s door, he had found himself in a state of divine anger.

  Jamie hadn’t been entirely sober when he found John curled up there, looking and feeling about as dignified as a moldy dormouse on the mat.

  “Oh Christ,” had been the only salutation Jamie offered him, as though he sensed the tempest stirring in John’s thin frame. He had slung him over his shoulder and John’s head had been spinning too hard to protest this outrage to his sensibilities.

  When Jamie dumped him unceremoniously onto the sofa, his head was already pounding and bitterness was flooding his mouth with a terrible bile. Had the drink given him what he wanted, he wouldn’t have said the things that he did, or so he told himself later. And there had been a second, a small flash of an instant, where Jamie’s eyes had looked into his and he’d felt his very soul seared within that look. That a mere look should have such power, a look not even of intimacy, without the tempering of tenderness in its scope, swept away the last vestige of caution he might have possessed.

  “Why are you as you are? It’s as though you were designed to torment me.” Even he had known how foolhardy he was being, that the drink was making his jealousy flow upward and outward like a vile wine long past its drinking time. What had he hoped—that he might, in giving voice to these feelings, poison the friendship and leave himself only the emptiness such a draught will leave behind?

  “John, leave it be.” The patience in Jamie’s voice was noticeably thin. Those words, with just a faint edge of anger to them, had been the straw that snapped what little sense he had left. John had begun to berate Andrei, always a chancy proposition. Even the expression on Jamie’s face, the elongation of the eyes and the tightening of the mouth that always signaled anger, did not cause him to halt.

  He ran down a list of what he felt were Andrei’s most egregious faults, knowing how bitter and pathetic he sounded with every word that dripped from his lips. Jamie said nothing, merely allowing him to vent his spleen, though his eyes grew steadily darker throughout the recitation. This maddened John further, causing him to wind up with a snippy, “He exercises excess to the point of self-destruction.”

  “He’s not the only one guilty of that,” Jamie said tartly.

  He knew Jamie did not mean himself by this, but had been unable to resist the opening, such as he saw it.

  “I don’t like to see you joining him in his debauchery. It’s unseemly.”

  “Unseemly?” Jamie laughed at that and suddenly John felt every minute of the time he had spent on this earth, as though his age had deluged him, pinning him relentlessly with its dark weight.

  “Yes, unseemly. Above we mere mortals as the two of you are, still some rules do apply.”

  “You forgive me the excess, why can’t you forgive it in him?”

  “Because, dear James, quite simply, I am not in love with Andrei.”

  “Oh,” he said, and John felt the sharp sting of an answer that had been too quick to hide the dismay.

  “Oh,” John echoed back with no small bitterness. “Oh—I see. It’s alright, dear boy. I know that your tastes do not run to old, failed, alcoholic professors. Had I been prepared… had I known…” he shook his head, a lock of grey hair falling in his eye. “But no, one cannot prepare for James Kirkpatrick because one cannot quite imagine that such a person, such a beautiful, brilliant bastard exists. So I’m not really to blame then am I, Jamie?”

  Jamie had sat down opposite him, rubbing his face with his hands. More in an effort, John suspected, to give him a moment to compose himself than anything else.

  “John, please—you’re a very dear friend, and that is all I can ever offer you—friendship. That will have to be enough.”

  But the burden of admission had only stirred the poison in John’s chest and once the spill had started, he found he had neither will nor want to stop it. So he turned, as he often had, to poetry to tell his anguish.

  “TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,

  Before I knew thy face or name ;

  So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame

  Angels affect us oft, and worshipp’d be.”

  “Oh Lord,” Jamie said with some exasperation, “not Donne already. You usually wait a few hours into your agony to quote him. I am not an angel, John, merely a man.”

  “Oh no, dear boy, you are an angel and placed amongst us mere humans to torment us. You and Andrei both, fiery angels burning everything and everyone in your vicinity. But Andrei’s flame burns far colder than yours, dear Jamie. Go wary there, my dear boy, go wary.”

  “I think I can exercise enough judgement to choose my friends. Which is, perhaps, more than we can say for you tonight.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Jamie sighed in the manner of a man sorely tried. “John, what if someone else had come upon you in this condition? This is utter madness. You could lose your position. I don’t want to be the reason for this behavior, for these feelings.”

  “And yet, you are,” John said, wishing his voice would fail him, that the words would stop up and stay buried where they could not do the damage he saw forming in Jamie’s eyes.

  “John, you can’t make me responsible for your loneliness.”

  “Loneliness?” He laughed, but it was laughter that held no humor. “I’ve been more alone since I met you than I ever was before.”

  And then Jamie had done the thing that made John love him forever. Instead of reviling him as he had expected and had half desired, Jamie walked over, bent down, and kissed him gently on the forehead as one would a beloved friend, and then had taken his leave. Only the scent of angels lingered behind—that particular scent of love and heartbreak, the one John could smell even in sleep, half waking from pained dreams of things that were never meant to be. The scent that made him curse God for making him love a man who could never return his love in the one way he wished.

  They had gone on after that as though nothing had changed, but of course it had. In an odd way, it had strengthened their friendship, as though the admission had been a film between them before and now that it had been spoken, the glass had been wiped clean and there was no longer anything to avoid. The love had not gone away despite the confession, and over the years it had become a banked fire that warmed him and that he no longer resented. It had become his friend, for despite the pain this love had often caused him, despite the sleepless nights and the partners who were never quite what he wanted, despite all this… the thought of Jamie no longer being in this world left him breathless with an agony he knew he would take to his grave should it prove to be fact.

  He was not a fool though, and he knew enough of Soviet Russia to understand the risk Jamie took by crossing that border each year. He also envied the love that took Jamie there, despite the danger.

  He
had been entirely honest with Pamela. He did not trust Andrei, not back then, not now. And so, that it should be Andrei who had drawn Jamie far across the world to a place where neither mercy nor love had a home, where there was no sanctuary in the heart of man… well, it made him breathless with fury. He had always worried that Jamie’s friendship with Andrei would end up costing him his life. At present, he was worried it had done exactly that.

  And yet—wouldn’t he know if Jamie were dead? Wouldn’t the clocks have stopped, the world have tilted on its axis and the dogs, in the words of that old bugger Auden, have ceased to bark? And if he were dead, how was it that the stars still twinkled mercilessly in the sky? Did they not know they were not wanted any longer? And if Jamie was gone, why did his heart still beat on, dumbly, like a beast that did not know to lay its yoke aside and crumble into the soil where at least it would find respite?

  It was irresponsible to love an angel. They were bound to break one’s soul in their passing. It was simply in the nature of angels to do so and they could not be held to blame for the results.

  John had traversed around the study in his agitation and found himself halted in front of a picture of Jamie and Andrei, young, golden and immortal, daring the world to challenge them. Oh, the fragile and fleeting glory of youth. It was enough to break a man’s heart many times over. Further along the wall there was a picture of himself from his first visit here to Jamie’s home, a happy fortnight in a beautiful Irish autumn, the cares lifted from his face, if not the lines.

  He took a swallow of his whiskey, the fire of it welcome as it burned all the way down his gullet. Above, the night was dark and heartless, and a great stillness had enveloped the house. Even the fire had gone cold, leaving only a phantom wisp of peat smoke in its wake.

  He looked back at the picture of Jamie—that beautiful, bright flame could not be doused, for surely he would know, for surely he would die had such light been stolen. He touched the cool glass over that laughing face and found himself quoting Donne again. Bloody John Donne who had understood far, far too much about love’s dark underbelly.

  The day breaks not, it is my heart.

  “Only my heart,” John said and saluted Jamie’s picture with the night’s last swallow of whiskey.

  Part Three

  Down the Rabbithole

  Russia – February 1973

  Chapter Twenty-two

  February 1973

  The Package

  On the rim of the world’s edge, a messenger stood, weary and caked in snow like a shroud. He had been sent to fetch a man, and the description of his target made him less than enthusiastic about entering the premises where he was meant to find him.

  “You won’t be able to miss him. Hair like guinea gold, a bastard’s grin on his face. He’s likely to be the center of a circle of admirers he’s leading merrily toward a night of debauchery such as they won’t recover from soon, if ever. Oh,” the man instructing him had paused and grinned, revealing a scar in the pocket of his right cheek and a gold tooth, “he’s likely to have a girl on his knee as well. A beautiful one.”

  The messenger had voiced his doubts on the likelihood of a beautiful girl being found under the fur wraps and knee high boots of the natives in this godforsaken country. The other man, the Captain, gold tooth winking obscenely, said, “If there’s one within a thousand square miles, she’ll be on his knee, trust me.”

  “You know him yourself?” he had asked the man, a notorious sea dog with a reputation for ruthlessness and a peerless record for smuggling black market goods past the Iron Curtain.

  “Yes,” the Captain said with a bit of a wince. “He left me with these souvenirs last time we met,” his tobacco-stained fingers split into a ‘v’, pointing to both scar and golden tooth.

  The messenger quailed a little inside at the thought of the man who had the nerve, or idiocy, to knock the Captain’s teeth out and leave him with a scar the length of a Cuban cigar, and wondered, not for the first time, what he had done to deserve this task? It was rumored that the man who had been assigned to fetch ‘the package’ last year woke up on a fur rug, naked, in the home of a toothless Laplander widow, with no memory of the previous three days. Such things did not go down well with the Soviet command to whom he was indentured. Even if he was already assigned to the ass-end of the Empire’s postings, he was painfully aware of how much worse his own situation could get should he fail in his assignment.

  Nevertheless, however monstrous ‘the package’ was, it was preferable to facing the wrath of Comrade Andrei Alexseyovich Valueve—a more icy, controlled and nasty bastard may he never meet.

  He sighed, breathed in a small dancing vortex of snow and strode with as much courage and Russian stiff-spinedness as he could muster, buried as he was inside a wool greatcoat and stiff Army issue boots that came to his knees. He was aware of looking rather Yeti-like, though the fashion demands of a tavern located in one of the outer circles of a frozen hell weren’t terribly high.

  Vasily, which was the soldier’s name, stamped his feet, shook snow from his fine dark hair and looked around the tavern. A more disreputable gang of thieves, pirates, and scoundrels it would have been hard to find, even given unlimited travel and time. A frozen hole at the end of the world, the wee village had one thing going in its favor, a narrow glut of water feeling with stoney fingers into the land. Due to the Atlantic current that washed across the headlands, this did not freeze in the winters. Hence, this collection of shacks, a church and a tavern was the way station for a group of international travelers of a very distinct class.

  Vasily swallowed nervously. As accustomed as he was to vagabonds and crooks and all the other riff-raff that tried consistently to cross borders without papers, this crew looked more alarming than most.

  The tavern reeked of wet herring-scaled wool and he saw in a blur the red-furred jaws of Norwegians, always among the world’s toughest and most practical of seamen, the high flat-planed faces of the Laplander, the milk-skin of the Finn, and heard the dipping vowels and harsh-cut consonants of Slavic speakers. They eyed him with open hostility, but this did not concern him, for outside the borders of his own country he was aware the image of the Soviet soldier was not a flattering one.

  He went to the bar and asked politely for vodka. He needed the warmth of it, and also the clarity it induced for anyone with Russian blood. When the taciturn barman, a squat specimen who looked at him as though he were measuring him for a rug, put a bottle of Kossu on the bar, Vasily took it and sat on a rickety chair as far away from the main body of drinkers as he could manage.

  He looked over each man in the tavern in turn, no easy task, for the lighting was one bare bulb hanging fly-caked from the ceiling and supplemented only by a fire in the hearth and a couple of oil lamps flickering behind the bar. Still, there was no man answering to the description the Captain had given him. He sighed and took the cap off the Kossu.

  His eye was drawn to a group off in the far corner, tucked away behind a filthy creosote post. It was a small group, but one man had a flamboyantly green and red parrot on one shoulder that kept repeating something over and over in what Vasily thought was Spanish. The shoulder the parrot sat upon was broad with muscle and covered in well worn oilskin, a fisherman from the set of him, and hair a pale gold above the ratty collar. Vasily perked up. Could this be the man?

  With him sat three other men: a Laplander with his furs puddled around his hips and a look of furrowed confusion on his big face that said he had been drinking for some time; a short grizzled Finn with the callused hands of a long-liner; and a dark, greasy looking man with a wool cap squashed down over his head and a winter’s worth of dirt worked into every line and crevice of him. Some sort of disagreement was brewing at the table, a dispute over the cards they each held. The man in the wool cap had tipped over the bottle of vodka that stood in the middle of the table in a brutish gesture of hostility toward the b
ig blond man, and then slapped his cards out of his hand. The blond giant stood and slapped the table so hard the sound reported like a gunshot. It was a mark of the toughness of the tavern’s clientele that they barely flicked an eye in the direction of imminent violence.

  The woolen cap of the fisherman bobbed, his words delivered with force and apparent insult, for the big Swede backed up, fists balling in fury. Vasily was certain the big man was Swedish, for from the side he looked like a snow-cloaked Viking with that fastidious air so many of his countrymen seemed to be born with.

  The fisherman was a Finn. Vasily recognized a few words even through the slurring. A drunken Finn—well, they never had been able to hold their drink like a Russian could—drunk and losing money like a cod sieve, if he understood the insults that were flying thick and furious. The lack of dignity was what appalled him. Even the louts in this place were watching the grubby creature with distaste. The Swede slapped the filthy Finn, knocking him off his chair.

  Curled up on the floor like a wool-clogged shrimp, the fisherman spat at the Swede and said something in Swedish that to Vasily’s ear sounded like a very discourteous statement about the man’s mother. However, his Swedish was limited so it was just as likely that he had said something about a moose and a goat. Still, from the great roar that was now issuing from the Swede, Vasily thought perhaps he’d been right in his first assumption.

  The big Swede grabbed the other man by the tatty collar of his navy peacoat and shook him to his feet before batting him away with a hand the size of a dinner plate. The fisherman’s legs windmilled backwards, and in a vain effort to keep his balance, he upset the table and the parrot, knocked burning wood into the room, and lifted the fur hat off the Laplander before landing, with no small impact, in Vasily’s lap.

  The parrot was shrieking obscenities that were somehow translatable from any language, without necessarily needing to know the exact organs to which the person, or parrot, as it were, was referring. The fisherman patted Vasily’s face, eyes bleared with drink and muzzy confusion.