Altar of Bones (50 page)

Miles watched a pigeon fly into view, land on the windowsill, and then crap all over it. “You must be bored shitless.”

Nikolai laughed. “Well, I do still dabble in a few things. On the occasion.”

The pigeon flew off. Miles said, “Is that what you were doing in San Francisco? Dabbling? Because, if so, you’ve lost your touch.”

For a second or two, all Miles heard was static. Hesitation on Popov’s part? Or merely a hiccup with the satellite?

Then, “I am afraid you have lost me, Miles. I haven’t been to your delightful country in years.”

“Cut the crap, Nikki. I might be late to the party, but I know all about O’Malley’s forty-nine-year bluff now. He never had the film. At least not for long. His woman ran off on him and took it with him, lo these many moons ago.”

More static, then, “Here you are, America’s Kingmaker, and I am but the son of a poor Russian peasant, yet I am, as always, one step ahead of you. Indeed, you are right, I knew all along about Katya Orlova, and that she had the film. And now you think that because she is dead, I must have it, and you are calling to see what my price will be.”

“I don’t care what your price is, I’m not paying it.”

“But, my dear Miles, you are such a testimonial to the wonders of capitalism. Whereas I am forced to live off a measly government pension and the dubious charity of a son who is little better than a murderer and a thief. Surely you can spare a billion or two? You have so many.”

“The thing is, I don’t think you have the film, Nikki. I think your guy botched it and killed her before he could get her to say where she’d stashed it. Did you know that she was already dying of cancer?”

Nikolai heaved another mock sigh. “My man lost his temper. The bitch stabbed him with a whiskey bottle—can you believe it? It isn’t like the old days. One simply cannot find competence in the assassination business anymore…. But you are right, of course, I do not have the film. At least not yet. I should have known better than to try to fool you, Miles.”

“You’ve been fooling me from the very beginning, you bastard. Tell me about the altar of bones.”

“The altar of what?” Not a second’s hesitation this time, not even a second’s worth of static.

“O’Malley talked about the big kill with his son the priest the day he died. He said you ordered it done because he drank from the altar of bones, and that made him dangerous to the world.”

“Poor Mr. O’Malley. He must have been delirious, because I’ve never heard of this thing. This altar.”

Miles hadn’t expected to get the truth out of Nikolai. He could fly to St. Petersburg and try to choke it out of the man, and still he would get nothing.

“You’re a lying sack of shit, Nikki.”

“No, you are lying to yourself. You needed to believe it had everything to do with Cold War politics and money, but for you that was the least of it. You
wanted
him dead, Miles, and not for the millions you stood to make out of it. You wanted him dead because you hated him. He was the golden boy. Sun-kissed, rich, handsome, and meant for great things. And you couldn’t bear it.”

“No,” Miles said, but he knew that it was true.

He laid the phone back in its cradle, breaking the connection without a good-bye.

A bare second later the telephone rang beneath his hand, and Miles jumped, his heart pounding.

Yasmine
, he prayed.
Please, God, let it be Yasmine
.

Budapest, Hungary

R
Y PULLED
the rental car to a stop across the entrance to a narrow, cobblestoned street. They were in the heart of the Józsefváros district, a part of Budapest where decaying Hapsburg mansions rubbed shoulders with grim Soviet-era apartment buildings. And whores and struggling musicians shared the sidewalks with plumbers and electricians.

He cut the ignition and waited. The only sound he could hear was the ticking of the car’s engine as it cooled. The empty street dead-ended into the wall of a cemetery. Ry did not like dead ends.

“Are you sure this is the place? I don’t see anyone,” Zoe said, just as the door to a nearby house crashed open and four enormous bruisers with shaved heads and hard, hooded eyes came out. It was the biggest house on the block, and its crumbling stucco had recently been painted a bright marzipan yellow.

As he watched the men come toward them, Ry raised his hands slowly and put them on the steering wheel. “Keep your hands out in the open, where they can see them.”

“Oookay,” Zoe said, and Ry heard the fear rising in her voice.

“They’re not going to hurt us. They’re just checking us out.”

The men circled the car like dogs around a fire hydrant. They all carried guns in shoulder holsters under their coats, but they weren’t acting as if they intended to take them out. Yet.

“The man we’re meeting here,” Ry said, “his name is Agim Latifi, and he’s one of Eastern Europe’s biggest arms smugglers. He’s also one
of the ugliest guys you’ll ever see in your life. You ever seen a picture of a blobfish? Well, he’s like that, only uglier.”

Ry was joking around to put her at ease, but he was worried. It had been four years since he’d last seen Agim, and the French government was offering a reward of ten thousand euros for a tip leading to their arrest.

The goons finished circling the car. One motioned at them to get out.

They followed the men up the street. Ry heard a dog bark, then, from the open window of a house farther down the street, the incessant base beat of the Hungarian rap group Belga, singing “Az a Baj.”

They went through the door of the yellow house, into a hall whose best days had been three centuries ago. Paint was peeling off the walls in strips, and the parquet floors were warped and stained. Ry could see no furniture anywhere.

With two men in front and two behind, they walked up worn marble stairs, through a pair of wood-paneled double doors, and into a dazzling, sun-filled room. Ry blew out a low whistle.

“Wow,” Zoe said. “I feel like I should be wearing a ball gown and dancing the waltz.”

Ry did a slow turn, taking in the deeply coffered ceilings and the garlanded friezes of carved and gilded fruit. “It was a ballroom once. He’s restored it to all its former glory.”

Before one of the floor-to-ceiling windows was a round table set with white linen, flower-patterned china, and a silver coffee service. A man sat at the table, reading the newspaper.

“Agim, you bastard,” Ry yelled across the room. “Where are the violins? How do you expect Zoe and me to dance if you don’t give us violins?”

Agim Latifi tossed the newspaper onto the floor and was out of his chair and onto Ry in three strides.

“My brother!” he shouted, wrapping Ry up in a bone-crushing hug. “It is fucking good to see you.”

Ry could feel his face cracking into a big smile. His friend hadn’t changed; he was still Agim.

Behind him, Ry heard Zoe mutter, “Yeah, he’s ugly as sin all right,”
and Ry grinned to himself, because Agim Latifi looked as if he’d just stepped off the page of a perfume ad, with his head of thick, black curls, the dark, liquid eyes fringed with thick lashes, and a full-lipped mouth parted open to show off dazzling white teeth. He had on a white, silky shirt with flowing sleeves that seemed to go with the ballroom and was open at the throat to show off a lot of smooth skin tanned a golden brown.

“And this is your new woman,” he said, turning to Zoe and hitting her with a smile that rocked her back on her heels. “I thought, Ry, my brother, from the way you described her to me over the telephone that she just may be your One. And now that I see her, I know it is so.”

Ry felt his ears burn. He made a mental note to never again talk about love with a Kosovo Albanian over a bottle of ouzo at three in the morning.

“Miss Zoe Dmitroff, I am pleased to meet you.” Agim leaned over, brought her hand up to his mouth, and kissed it. “I am Agim Latifi, and I would steal you away if you were not Ry O’Malley’s woman. But I will behave, because although he is not my brother by blood, he is my blood brother. Do you understand what I mean by this?”

Zoe, still looking a bit dazed, said, “You’ve shed blood for each other. Your own and your enemies’.”

Agim slapped Ry hard on the shoulder with the flat of his hand, and Ry felt it clear to the bone. “What did I tell you, brother? She is the One.”

Ry opened his mouth to set his friend straight, then shut it. Some things were better off just left alone.

“This is a beautiful room,” Zoe said.

“Thank you. I am restoring the house little bit by little bit. I think, though, that it will take me a lifetime and cost me several fortunes.” He waved a hand toward the view out the window, of a garden choked with ivy and fig trees. “Perhaps I will tackle the courtyard next. They say that during the Soviet siege at the end of World War Two, many hundreds of Hungarian soldiers were buried in the courtyards throughout the city.”

Ry looked around the room again, wondering where the money had come from. He thought he’d been exaggerating when he’d told Zoe that
Agim Latifi was the biggest arms smuggler in Eastern Europe, but now he wasn’t so sure.

“Come,” Agim said, linking his arm through Zoe’s and leading her toward the table. “Let us have breakfast. There are small scones baked with cheese and potatoes, called
pogácsa
. And these,” he said, as he pulled out her chair, “are sweet sponge cakes filled with cottage cheese and raisins. I suggest you take one now, Miss Dmitroff, before Ry eats them all.”

Agim poured coffee in a thick black stream from the silver pot into their dainty china cups. Ry bit into a sponge cake and nearly swooned, it tasted so good.

“Now, to business,” Agim said, “for I know you are short of time.”

He bent over and took a wooden box from beneath the table. “First guns. You said you want trustworthy, not fancy, so I have for you two Model 19 Glocks. With two dozen ammo clips for each.”

Ry took one of the pistols out of the box, already liking the feel of it in his hand, the way it slid right in and became a part of him, hard and cold and deadly. “The one thing about jet-setting around in this day and age is how much of a pain in the ass it is to get a new gun every time you hit a new place.”

Agim grinned. “That is why it helps to know an arms smuggler.”

Ry nodded with his chin at the box. “That’s a lot of ammo. Were you expecting us to have to fight a war?”

Agim shrugged. “You are Americans. It is what you do.”

Ry laughed. “Fair enough.”

Zoe was checking out the other Glock, snapping back the slide, looking down the sights, getting a feel for the grip, testing the weight of the trigger pull. Agim watched her, smiling like a parent whose kid just aced her piano recital.

“As for this little trouble you are having with the French Sûreté Nationale, these accusations of terrorism …” Agim waved his hand through the air as if they were mere bagatelles. “My man inside Hungarian security tells me they have indeed received an official communiqué from Paris last evening warning them of your possible entry into this country. At the moment it is wending its way through channels, stopping
at every desk to be read and initialed. You could live out your years and die an old man here in Budapest before they get around to looking for you.”

“I don’t need years, just a day,” Ry said. But the trouble was, if the antiques dealer Anthony Lovely had talked to the French cops, and if Yasmine Poole had an in with them—and Ry would bet that she did—then she would know where they were headed. And she wouldn’t have to wade through any bureaucratic red tape to be hot on their trail.

“Our meeting with Denis Kuzmin is set for this afternoon,” he said. “What were you able to find out about him?”

“He is the son of a Budapest woman and a Soviet soldier who was part of the occupying army after the war. The father deserted the family and went back to his homeland when the boy was eleven. His mother was a gymnastics trainer for the Hungarian women’s Olympics team throughout the Cold War years, so they didn’t want for much.

“Kuzmin is in his sixties now, and a man of some wealth. Up until last year he was a professor of Russian folklore and mythology at our Eötvos Loránd University. Now he is retired and living in a small villa about twenty kilometers from here, on a hill overlooking the Danube and a little town called Szentendre. He was married once, years ago, and they had a son, but the marriage fell apart when the baby died of crib death.”

“And he collects icons,” Ry said.

Agim flashed a brilliant smile. “Indeed he does, my brother. He is famous for it.”

Agim slathered clotted cream on a sponge cake and handed it to Zoe with a smile that made her blink. “There is one other thing you should know about Denis Kuzmin. There are rumors that before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was an informant for the AVO. The Hungarian secret police.”

Agim paused and looked off into the distance, thinking, then shrugged. “Perhaps his spying is the real source of his wealth, who knows? He would have been well paid surely for rooting out dissidents among the students and his fellow professors, listening for subversive remarks, since the seeds of revolution most often germinate within the
universities. These people he informed on, they would have been sent to a ‘psychological hospital’ to be reeducated, but no matter what they chose to call it, it was only a sweeter word for prison. If the chance comes your way, my brother, you might want to kill him.”