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was the courier in Sevastopol? As if of their own accord, his fingertips stroked the velvet flesh of Devra’s neck. The crafty little bitch! Filya was a soldier, a guard. She was the
courier in Sevastopol. She’d handed the document off to the next link. She knew where
he had to go next.
Holding her tightly, Arkadin at last let go of the night, the room, the present. On a tide
of elation, he drifted into sleep, into the blood-soaked clutches of his past.
Arkadin would have killed himself, this was certain, had it not been for the
intervention of Semion Icoupov. Arkadin’s best and only friend, Mischa Tarkanian,
concerned for his life, had appealed to the man he worked for. Arkadin remembered with
an eerie clarity the day Icoupov had come to see him. He had walked in, and Arkadin,
half crazed with a will to die, had put a Makarov PM to his head-the same gun he was
going to use to blow his own brains out.
Icoupov, to his credit, didn’t make a move. He stood in the ruins of Arkadin’s Moscow
apartment, not looking at Arkadin at all. Arkadin, in the grip of his sulfurous past, was
unable to make sense of anything. Much later, he understood. In the same way you didn’t
look a bear in the eye, lest he charge you, Icoupov had kept his gaze focused on other
things-the broken picture frames, the smashed crystal, the overturned chairs, the ashes of
the fetishistic fire Arkadin had lit to burn his clothes.
“Mischa tells me you’re having a difficult time.”
“Mischa should keep his mouth shut.”
Icoupov spread his hands. “Someone has to save your life.”
“What d’you know about it?” Arkadin said harshly.
“Actually, I know nothing about what’s happened to you,” Icoupov said.
Arkadin, digging the muzzle of the Makarov into Icoupov’s temple, stepped closer.
“Then shut the fuck up.”
“What I am concerned about is the here and now.” Icoupov didn’t blink an eye; he
didn’t move a muscle, either. “For fuck’s sake, son, look at you. If you won’t pull back
from the brink for yourself, do it for Mischa, who loves you better than any brother
would.”
Arkadin let out a ragged breath, as if he were expelling a dollop of poison. He took the
Makarov from Icoupov’s head.
Icoupov held out his hand. When Arkadin hesitated, he said with great gentleness,
“This isn’t Nizhny Tagil. There is no one here worth hurting, Leonid Danilovich.”
Arkadin gave a curt nod, let go of the gun. Icoupov called out, handed it to one of two
very large men who came down the hallway from the far end where they had been
stationed, not making a sound. Arkadin tensed, angry at himself for not sensing them.
Clearly, they were bodyguards. In his current condition, they could have taken Arkadin
anytime. He looked at Icoupov, who nodded, and an unspoken co
between them.
“There is only one path for you now,” Icoupov said.
Icoupov moved to sit on the sofa in Arkadin’s trashed apartment, then gestured, and
the bodyguard who had taken possession of Arkadin’s Makarov held it out to him.
“Here, now, you will have witnesses to your last spasm of nihilism. If you wish it.”
Arkadin for once in his life ignored the gun, stared implacably at Icoupov.
“No?” Icoupov shrugged. “Do you know what I think, Leonid Danilovich? I think it
gives you a measure of comfort to believe that your life has no meaning. Most times you
revel in this belief; it’s what fuels you. But there are times, like now, when it takes you by the throat and shakes you till your teeth rattle in your skull.” He was dressed in dark
slacks, an oyster-gray shirt, a long black leather coat that made him look somewhat
sinister, like a German SS-Stьrmba
searching for the meaning of your life.” His dark skin shone like polished bronze. He
gave the appearance of a man who knew what he was doing, someone, above all, not to
be trifled with.
“What path?” Arkadin said dully, taking a seat on the sofa.
Icoupov gestured with both hands, encompassing the self-inflicted whirlwind that had
torn apart the rooms. “The past for you is dead, Leonid Danilovich, do you not agree?”
“God has punished me. God has abandoned me,” Arkadin said, regurgitating by rote a
lament of his mother’s.
Icoupov smiled a perfectly i
misinterpreted. He had an unca
is that?”
Arkadin had no answer because this God he spoke of was his mother’s God, the God
of his childhood, the God that had remained an enigma to him, a shadow, a God of bile,
of rage, of split bone and spilt blood.
“But no,” he said, “God, like heaven, is a word on a page. Hell is the here and now.”
Icoupov shook his head. “You have never known God, Leonid Danilovich. Put
yourself in my hands. With me, you will find God, and learn the future he has pla
you.”
“I ca
“Nor shall you be.”
Icoupov turned to accept a tray from one of the bodyguards. While they had been
talking, he’d made tea. Icoupov poured two glasses full, added sugar, handed one to
Arkadin.
“Drink with me now, Leonid Danilovich,” he said as he lifted his steaming glass. “To
your recovery, to your health, to the future, which will be as bright for you as you wish to make it.”
The two men sipped their tea, which the bodyguard had astutely fortified with a
considerable amount of vodka.
“To never being alone again,” said Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.
That was a long time ago, at a way station on a river that had turned to blood. Was he
much changed from the near-insane man who had put the muzzle of a gun to Semion
Icoupov’s head? Who could say? But on days of heavy rain, ominous thunder, and
twilight at noon, when the world looked as bleak as he knew it to be, thoughts of his past
surfaced like corpses in a river, regurgitated by his memory. And he would be alone
again.
Tarkanian was coming around, but the phenothiazine that had been administered to
him was doing its job, sedating him mildly and impairing his mental functioning enough
so that when Bourne bent over him and said in Russian, “Bourne’s dead, we’re in the
process of extracting you,” Tarkanian dazedly thought he was one of the men at the
reptile house.
“Icoupov sent you.” Tarkanian lifted a hand, felt the bandage the paramedics had used
to keep light out of his eyes. “Why can’t I see?”
“Lie still,” Bourne said softly. “There are civilians around. Paramedics. That’s how
we’re extracting you. You’ll be safe in the hospital for a few hours while we arrange the
rest of your travel.”
Tarkanian nodded.
“Icoupov is on the move,” Bourne whispered. “Do you know where?”
“No.”
“He wants you to be most comfortable during your debriefing. Where should we take
you?”
“Moscow, of course.” Tarkanian licked his lips. “It’s been years since I’ve been home.
I have an apartment on the Frunzenskaya embankment.” More and more he seemed to be
speaking to himself. “From my living room window you can see the pedestrian bridge to
Gorky Park. Such a peaceful setting. I haven’t seen it in so long.”
They arrived at the hospital before Bourne had a chance to continue the interrogation.
Then everything happened very quickly. The doors banged open and the paramedic leapt
into action, getting the gurney down, rushing it through the automatic glass doors into a
corridor leading to the ER. The place was packed with patients. One of the paramedics