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

  Vasily curled his nose up in distaste. The man smelled as though he’d been soaked in a vat of Kossu for several days and then left to dry in a barrel of herring. He shoved at him, certain the smell would be impossible to remove from his greatcoat.

  The man fell to the floor, a stinking heap, mumbling to himself in a polyglot of languages that Vasily could make neither head nor tail of. He was a pitiful creature, and Vasily, a soft-hearted boy at his core stood, and with a grunt of disgust helped the crabbed fisherman to his feet. Oddly, he was a good deal taller than Vasily had originally thought, and somewhat more straight-bodied. Seen up close he appeared younger, the dirt more of a smear than an actual settling into creases.

  The fisherman smiled at him, revealing a set of teeth that were startlingly white and straight. Vasily began to get an uneasy feeling. Just then, a doe-eyed girl walked past him, skin aglow against her white furs like a night-bloomed peach. She glanced at him with a slow, fluid smile that made his knees want to drop in worshipful prayer, though like most good little Soviet boys the only god he was familiar with was Josef Stalin. He got a funny feeling at the nape of his neck, a small prickling that told him somewhere amongst this motley and filthy crew, was his quarry. But where? The girl was his only clue that the package was actually in the vicinity, because certainly she wasn’t here with any of these brutes. Strange, but she was looking back over her shoulder now, as if beckoning him over.

  Later he would blame the vodka, for after all the vodka wasn’t likely to refute the accusation and he couldn’t think of any other reason that he would agree to accompany the filthy fisherman into the sauna, housed in a small building out back of the tavern. That and the fisherman. When asked if he was aware whether a man with golden hair and a reputation for being a bit of a bastard was anywhere in the vicinity, he had assured Vasily that this man was one he knew but who wasn’t likely to appear until the sun had disappeared into the sea.

  “Why to seek him?” the fisherman had asked in extremely mangled Russian. “This is very bad man you are finding, young friend.” He gave Vasily a look of pity that hadn’t done a great deal to shore up Vasily’s shaky spine.

  “Come, we will sweat the poisons out while you wait for this…” the fisherman spat as though ridding his mouth of a vile poison, “…bastard.” His new friend then all but dragged him by the lapels of his coat out back. Vasily felt a small trickle of unease but the alcohol had relieved him of actually paying attention to the feeling. Also, being Russian, he firmly believed in a sauna as a cure for almost all the bodily and mental ills the world could inflict upon a man.

  The low-roofed hut looked as if a good wind would send it scuttling straight out into the frigid embrace of the Barents Sea. He eyed the sun still hovering on the horizon. He would have time to steam and go back into the tavern to await the package.

  Inside, the hut was lathe and plaster, with a low roof and steam so thick that he couldn’t find his own hand once the door was shut behind them. It clogged his lungs and lent a torpor to his head that increased the effect of the Kossu exponentially.

  The fisherman could talk, that much was clear. Not that Vasily, neatly folding his uniform and placing it on a bench in the tiny vestibule, could follow much of what he said. He had a feeling it wasn’t necessary and that the man would chatter glibly no matter whether his audience listened or not.

  Vasily clambered up to the top of the two-tiered bench and settled himself against the wall. The fisherman handed him a bottle, his hand disembodied so that Vasily giggled, for it looked as though the bottle were floating to him out of the fog, a Russian dream come to life. He leaned back after several lusty swallows, allowing the vodka to lubricate his every cell. Later, he would think he must have drifted into a short sleep, for he had no recollection of the fisherman leaving. Yet leave he must have, for when Vasily next noticed, the fisherman was nowhere to be found though streams of dirt were running down to the floor, testifying to his recent occupation of the seat beside Vasily. With senses severely impaired by the litre of Kossu, Vasily felt little cat feet run up his spine and then he sensed a presence in the sauna that felt in no way benign.

  He glared blearily through the steam and saw someone with hair slicked to his head in translucent streams of guinea gold and skin that had recently drunk sun in quantities not found in this hemisphere. He peered through the steam, the Kossu settling in sweet pools in all his joints, muscles and senses. A pair of eyes, cutting as viridescent steel, looked back at him. Somewhere far down inside his brain an alarm bell rang, but the tinny sound was quickly submerged in the river of vodka that kept emerging hospitably from the steam.

  “You do know the old Finnish drinking game, don’t you?”

  One part of his mind noted with surprise that he was now addressed in flawless and stone-cracking Russian.

  “Nyet,” he said, the word acquiring the length of several slippery syllables in its traverse over his tongue.

  “It goes like this—three Finns go into a sauna with a half litre of Kossu each, one leaves and the other two have to guess who left. Got it?”

  “Da.” He wiped a trickle of sweat from his cheek and was vaguely worried that he couldn’t feel his fingers on his face until he realized he still had his mittens on. This in itself was worrying because he didn’t remember putting them back on after removing his uniform.

  “The advanced version goes like this—two men enter a sauna with a half litre of vodka each, they drink the vodka and one leaves, and the one left behind has to guess who left. So guess which one of us left,” the voice said, floating disembodied through the steam.

  Vasily scratched his face again, mittens sodden with Kossu and steam… and another scent… peaches or limes or something that he couldn’t quite locate in his memory.

  “I don’t know your name,” he said plaintively, feeling put upon by this game that he didn’t understand. Silence greeted him through the steam.

  “Skazheete pozhluista, (can you tell me please)” he said, with the inbred politeness that came of having far too many superiors in one’s life. Still silence, and he moved over on the bench unsteadily, only to be jerked back unceremoniously by his mittens which appeared to be attached to a long set of threads that wove like an inebriated spider all over the small room. His inebriated state, however, made it imperative to follow each thread singly to its ultimate destination. This endeavor took some time, until finally the last thread led to the door of the sauna. But the door wouldn’t move. It too seemed to be threaded shut in some ingeniously perverse fashion. He thought sinkingly of the messenger from last year and the year’s worth of Siberian potatoes he had peeled.

  Putting a shoulder to the plastered wall, he found it disturbingly solid. A small thrum of panic rose in his stomach though the Kossu was still numbing most of his bits into stoic acceptance. He rushed the door but his slippery flesh slid off with little effect. Still, he had the innate stubbornness of his forebears who had been farmers in the Ukraine for several generations.

  He heard the roar of the UAZ and gave one last frantic rush on the door, which gave suddenly like a hot knife through butter and he shot out, naked as a cherub, into the blue banks of snow in time to see a man turn and wave at him—a man with guinea gold hair and a bastard’s smile on his face. A man who wore the perfectly groomed uniform of a Soviet Red Army soldier, winter greatcoat and all.Vasily noted furiously that it looked better on the bastard than it did on him.

  With a heart already lurking in the region of his appendix, he noted the doe-eyed stunner, furs framing her peachy face, blowing him a kiss from the passenger’s seat before the jeep tore off in a spray of Finnish snow.

  Beside him, the big Swede waved to the jeep, a broad grin on his face.

  “You know him?” Vasily asked in the passable bit of Swedish he had learned during his Army training.

  “Ja, is Jamie—I know him many years—he i
s—how to say—madman.”

  He noted then how cold his feet were and the interest with which several pairs of fishermen’s eyes gazed upon his bare behind. Pulling together what dignity could be found nude and shorn of both his uniform and vehicle, he turned, pulled the threads of his unraveled mittens to him, and carefully bunching them over the area that was taking greatest offense at the cold, he walked back into the tavern, certain that anything was better than telling the Captain he’d failed. There wasn’t, Vasily thought with sudden dark clarity, enough fucking Kossu in a glacier to make that palatable.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Dacha in the Woods

  Several hours later, while Vasily slept curled up in an Astrakhan rug in front of the tavern fire, the chancy bastard who had stolen his jeep and his clothing was pulling up to a long, low-eaved dacha heavy with snow and ice, his lips still tasting sweetly of peaches and vodka. Whether this cabin was on the Soviet or Finnish side of the border was debatable. He was in favor of it being on the Russian side because the stars here were closer to the ground and that seemed to him a Russian state of being. Cold beauty, seemingly within reach, but in truth not anywhere within the grasp of a man at all.

  Russia—the very name was a dark, rich perfume upon his tongue. He had never been able to bring himself to call this country by its official name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. No, she was Russia, indomitable and cruel, much like the nature of her own people. She was mysterious, dark, and unfathomable: from the far west where the city of St. Petersburg still hung like a sugar-spun fairytale of European architecture, European manners and European decay, a city of water, stone and sky, Russia’s own Venice; to the east, Kiev, its outlines laid down in white marble and etched upon the skies in airy domes, so beautifully constructed they seemed like teacups awaiting the discerning tongues of angels on high to drink their exotic depths.

  The Russians themselves were descended from the great horse warlords with their scythe-like cheekbones and ice-blue eyes. To the far north, with its vast, dark forests, tracts of which no man had ever walked within nor touched upon, was the land of fable, of Baba Yaga and the Firebird, the land of the sweeping amber-skinned hordes of Ghengis Khan… Siber, the very name conjuring icy steppes and dark-eyed women in wind-torn furs.

  The armies of Ghengis Khan had numbered in the tens of thousands, men feared from one ocean to the other for their famed indestructibility. Neither hunger, nor cold, nor mighty Russian princes stood against them, the reach of their hooked swords extending from the frozen tundra to the warm-blooded waters of the Black Sea. They had shaped the modern body of Russia.

  Ah, yes, the vast bloody, beautiful, terrible body of Mother Russia. No mother had ever been less nurturing to her children. She had succored her young on blood from the very beginnings of human memory. Never more so than now, with the heartless steel of the Soviet Empire and all its tin soldiers illustrating her might and fury. James Kirkpatrick stood in the cold embrace of her harlot’s heart and knew himself ten kinds of fool for keeping this meeting as he did each year. Each year the risk of something going very badly awry increased, and he often felt his luck running down like a rope of sand, leaving little to which to cling.

  But Russia gave him perspective. She was so huge, so brutal, so layered in history, beauty, terror and blood. So like Ireland, and yet nothing like it at all. For Russia owed nothing to the Western mindset. The Russian mind was inscrutable, owing to neither East nor West for its philosophy and way of viewing the universe. Russia was Russian, and could not be defined by the tenets of the rest of the world. She was a fact, a great dark Mother, whose mind and soul was slippery and often not understood even by her own.

  “Yasha.” A voice, strong, commanding, yet filled with a remembered laughter, came to him out of the snow and the dark.

  There were only two people on the face of the planet who called him Yasha. One had been partly responsible for raising him, the other stood here now, outlined in the dark against the blowing pines. He had met Andrei Alekseyevich Valueve when they were both eighteen years old. They had three years of sublime friendship in which both were lucky to emerge with limbs and spirits intact. Since then this was all they were allowed, one night a year here near the Finnish border in a low log house whose eaves hung heavy with ice and pine boughs that scraped the roof.

  “Andrushya,” he replied, voice carrying quietly through the delicate spirals of snow that danced around the two of them.

  They stood thus for a moment, Andrei Valueve’s guards a dim blur behind him, the six feet of snow separating Jamie and his dearest friend filled with a wealth of memory and regret.

  Then Andrei, always and in all essentials Russian, stepped forward to clasp Jamie in a bear hug which Jamie returned with equal ferocity. Emotion engulfed the men, from the sheer relief of seeing each other alive, and reassuring themselves that all nightmares could be woken from, even if both were very aware that such things were seldom true in the waking world.

  “How is our soldier-boy? Have you left him in a brothel or afloat on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean?”

  “He was alive when I left him,” Jamie said, his grin a flash of impudent white in the sea-darkened visage. “He’s more scared of you than anything, so be a nice boy, Andrei, and take care of him.”

  “I will, just as I always do.” He grinned back at Jamie, their shared history all around them suddenly thick with the memories of adventures that had often bordered on madness. “Now come inside before we freeze our yaeechkas off.”

  The dacha belonged to a friend of Andrei’s but was never used except for this one night each year. Some mysterious person readied it for them so there was no creeping damp or ice-coated windows, rather a warm, snug interior filled with rugs and heavy furniture, food and drink for the night and the following morning and of course, a chessboard.

  Inside, they shed their heavy coats, boots and hats, and turned to assess one another.

  “Still the prettiest bastard on the face of the planet, excepting myself,” Andrei said and flashed the white grin that had charmed any number of women out of their clothes and senses.

  “I do my best,” Jamie replied and grinned in return, the tension starting to leak out of him.

  Jamie pulled two bottles of Connemara Mist from Vasily’s great coat and handed one to Andrei. The other he gave to Andrei’s guards, old soldiers who would welcome the whiskey’s fire in their bellies and joints, especially on a frigid night such as this one. He always brought a few bottles because it bought them privacy for at least part of the night.

  Andrei disappeared into the kitchen, giving Jamie a minute to look around and catch his breath.

  Andrei returned with a tray that held caviar and thinly-sliced black bread, two glasses and a bottle of vodka.

  “Let us sit and eat and drink—but most importantly, let us play.” He put the tray down beside the chessboard and rubbed his hands in anticipation of the night ahead.

  The chessboard was Andrei’s, a beautiful confection of Baltic amber squares interspersed with onyx. The entire thing shone like a mirror and weighed close to forty pounds, heavy enough that no one thought to notice a few extra ounces.

  Jamie sat and leaned back in the chair, stretching his legs while Andrei poured them each a generous measure of vodka. He took the glass from Andrei and sighed in anticipation. It did not disappoint. The vodka was smooth, near frozen, gelled to perfection, creamy with the silk of silver birch coal in its under notes. Andrei always brought him a bottle of this, the only alcohol he drank these days.

  There was at first a mellow quality to the evening, the light from the fire flickering drowsily, and the old camaraderie between the two of them present enough to form a third entity in the room, a troika of memory and affection.

  “Do you hear from Colleen these days?” Andrei asked lightly. Too lightly.

  “No, but sh
e is well and, I think, happy now.”

  “And what of you my friend, are you happy now too?”

  “Near enough,” Jamie said, “and you?”

  “Near enough,” Andrei replied, with only the slightest undertone of mockery. He took a swallow of his vodka after moving his bishop into a confrontation with Jamie’s knight and eyed Jamie speculatively. “So, what is her name?”

  Jamie looked up sharply. “Was I talking about a woman?”

  Andrei nodded, blue eyes remarkably sober. “Yes, I think you were.”

  Jamie looked down at the board with his hand tight around the glass of vodka. “Her name,” he replied after a strung silence, “is Pamela.” He noted with annoyance that Andrei’s face was alight with interest. It meant that he was about to ask uncomfortable questions. Questions Jamie had no desire to answer.

  “I am going to just say this, and then I don’t want to talk about her anymore. She’s married to another man. She loves him and anything beyond friendship is impossible between us, and even friendship has become insupportable.”

  “Does she love you?”

  “Obviously not,” Jamie said. “She’s married.”

  It was Andrei’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Where the heart is concerned there is nothing obvious at all, and so I’ll ask again, does she love you?”

  “Yes, I suppose she does, but it’s irrelevant, isn’t it?”

  “Love is never irrelevant,” Andrei said, and his tone alerted Jamie to the fact that they weren’t really talking about his own love life, or rather, the lack of it.

  “You sound like a romantic, Andrei, not a state you’ve been bothered by before, so now tell me—what is her name?”

  Andrei laughed. “Her name is Violet.”

  “And what of your Ilena and the girls?”