The Bourne Sanction

From that day forward he was on his guard with Marlene. She was attracted to him, of this he was quite certain. She’d slipped from her objective pedestal, from the job Icoupov had given her. He didn’t blame Icoupov. He wanted to tell Icoupov again that he wouldn’t harm him, but he knew Icoupov wouldn’t believe him. Why should he? He had enough evidence to the contrary to make him suitably nervous. And yet, Arkadin sensed that Icoupov would never turn his back on him. Icoupov would never renege on his pledge to take Arkadin in.

Nevertheless, something had to be done about Marlene. It wasn’t simply that she’d seen his left foot; Icoupov had seen it as well. Arkadin knew she suspected the maimed foot was co

The problem was that she couldn’t help Arkadin. No one could. No one was allowed to know what he’d experienced. It was unthinkable.

“Tell me about your mother and father,” Marlene said. “And don’t repeat the pabulum you fed the shrink who was here before me.”

They were out on Lake Lugano. It was a mild summer’s day, Marlene was in a two-piece bathing suit, red with large pink polka dots. She wore pink rubber slippers; a visor shaded her face from the sun. Their small motorboat lay to, its anchor dropped. Small swells rocked them now and again as pleasure boats went to and fro across the crystal blue water. The small village of Campione d’Italia rose up the hillside like the frosted tiers of a wedding cake.

Arkadin looked hard at her. It a

“What, you don’t think my mother died badly?”

“I’m interested in your mother before she died,” Marlene said airily. “What was she like?”

“Actually, she was just like you.”

Marlene gave him a basilisk stare.

“Seriously,” he said. “My mother was tough as a fistful of nails. She knew how to stand up to my father.”

Marlene seized on this opening. “Why did she have to do that? Was your father abusive?”

Arkadin shrugged. “No more than any other father, I suppose. When he was frustrated at work he took it out on her.”

“And you find that normal.”

“I don’t know what the word normal means.”

“But you’re used to abuse, aren’t you?”

“Isn’t that called leading the witness, Counselor?”

“What did your father do?”

“He was consiglieri-the counselor-to the Kazanskaya, the family of the Moscow grupperovka that controls drug trafficking and the sale of foreign cars in the city and surrounding areas.” He’d been nothing of the sort. Arkadin’s father had been an ironworker, dirt-poor, desperate, and drunk as shit twenty hours a day, just like everyone else in Nizhny Tagil.

“So abuse and violence came naturally to him.”

“He wasn’t on the streets,” Arkadin said, continuing his lie.

She gave him a thin smile. “All right, where do you think your bouts of violence come from?”

“If I told you I’d have to kill you.”

Marlene laughed. “Come on, Leonid Danilovich. Don’t you want to be of use to Mr. Icoupov?”

“Of course I do. I want him to trust me.”

“Then tell me.”

Arkadin sat for a time. The sun felt good on his forearms. The heat seemed to draw his skin tight over his muscles, making them bulge. He felt the beating of his heart as if it were music. For just a moment, he felt free of his burden, as if it belonged to someone else, a tormented character in a Russian novel, perhaps. Then his past came rushing back like a fist in his gut and he almost vomited.

Very slowly, very deliberately he unlaced his sneakers, took them off. He peeled off his white athletic socks, and there was his left foot with its two toes and three miniature stumps, knotty, as pink as the polka dots on Marlene’s bathing suit.

“Here’s what happened,” he said. “When I was fourteen years old, my mother took a frying pan to the back of my father’s head. He’d just come home stone drunk, reeking of another woman. He was sprawled facedown on their bed, snoring peacefully, when whack!, she took a heavy cast-iron skillet from its peg on the kitchen wall and, without a word, hit him ten times in the same spot. You can imagine what his skull looked like when she was done.”

Marlene sat back. She seemed to have trouble breathing. At length, she said, “This isn’t another one of your bullshit stories, is it?”

“No,” Arkadin said, “it’s not.”

“And where were you?”

“Where d’you think I was? Home. I saw the whole thing.”

Marlene put a hand to her mouth. “My God.”

Having expelled this ball of poison, Arkadin felt an exhilarating sense of freedom, but he knew what had to come next.

“Then what happened?” she said when she had recovered her equilibrium.

Arkadin let out a long breath. “I gagged her, tied her hands behind her, and threw her into the closet in my room.”

“And?”

“I walked out of the apartment and never went back.”

“How?” There was a look of genuine horror on her face. “How could you do such a thing?”

“I disgust you now, don’t I?” He said this not with anger, but with a certain resignation. Why wouldn’t she be disgusted by him? If only she knew the whole truth.

“Tell me in more detail about the accident in prison.”

Arkadin knew at once that she was trying to find inconsistencies in his story. This was a classic interrogator’s technique. She would never know the truth.

“Let’s go swimming,” he said abruptly. He shed his shorts and T-shirt.

Marlene shook her head. “I’m not in the mood. You go if-”

“Oh, come on.”

He pushed her overboard, stood up, dived in after her. He found her under the water, kicking her legs to bring herself to the surface. He wrapped his thighs around her neck, locked his ankles, tightening his grip on her. He rose to the surface, held on to the boat, swung water out of his eyes as she struggled below him. Boats thrummed past. He waved to two young girls, their long hair flying behind them like horses’ manes. He wanted to hum a love song, but all he could think of was the theme to Bridge on the River Kwai.

After a time, Marlene stopped struggling. He felt her weight below him, swaying gently in the swells. He didn’t want to, really he didn’t, but unbidden the image of his old apartment resurrected itself in his mind’s eye. It was a slum, the filthy crumbling Soviet-era piece of shit building teeming with vermin.

Their poverty didn’t stop the older man from banging other women. When one of them became pregnant, she decided to have the baby. He was all for it, he told her. He’d help her in any way he could. But what he really wanted was the child his barren wife could never give him. When Leonid was born, he ripped the baby from the girl’s arms, brought Leonid to his wife to raise.

“This is the child I always wanted, but you couldn’t give me,” he told her.

She raised Arkadin dutifully, without complaint, because where could a barren woman go in Nizhny Tagil? But when her husband wasn’t home, she locked the boy in the closet of his room for hours at a time. A blind rage gripped her and wouldn’t let her go. She despised this result of her husband’s seed, and she felt compelled to punish Leonid because she couldn’t punish his father.

It was during one of these long punishments that Arkadin woke to awful pain in his left foot. He wasn’t alone in the closet. Half a dozen rats, large as his father’s shoe, scuttled back and forth, squealing, teeth gnashing. He managed to kill them, but not before they finished what they’d started. They ate three of his toes.