Firebird (21 page)

Angrily, she waved the sharp paring knife in the air.  “I bargain for wilted flowers every morning, from a florist on Benning Road.  I fight for every limp stick of celery, sing Hallelujah if someone donates fresh chickens!  I’ll do whatever it takes.  It’s a damned tough world out there, with no money to make the problems disappear.” 

She stared at the girl arranging the flowers so carefully, and dropped her voice.  “Some die,” she said starkly.  “But some live.  And the ones who live – well, they need to know that there is still beauty and kindness on this earth.  And hope.  That’s why we sing.  That’s why I insist on flowers, and clean linen.  Even if it
is
threadbare!”

Alexandra picked up a long knife and began to slice celery. 

“Just don’t waste any of my hard-won veggies,” said Billie brusquely.

For several minutes the women worked together silently, side by side.

Finally Billie Jordan spoke.  “So what can I do for you, Ms. Alexandra?”

Alexandra kept slicing.  “There’s no easy way to say this, Ms. Jordan.  I’m here because of Charles Fraser’s death.  Was he your half-brother?”

Billie’s knife clattered to the chopping board.  “Damn!  Are you from the Press?”

“No, but -”

“No buts!  I’m not talking about Charlie.  There’s the door!”

“Please.  I’ve come because my sister was - a friend to Charles Fraser.”

“Your
sister
?”

“My sister was Evangeline Rhodes...”

“Evie?  Get outta town!  That was
you
, at her funeral?”

Alexandra’s brows flew up.  “Yes, I thought I saw you there.  I’m Alexandra Marik.  You and my sister were friends?”

“Blood sisters,” Billie murmured.  “I knew Evie had a baby sister, but...”

“She told you about me?”

Billie Jordan leaned down and, for the first time, looked deeply into Alexandra’s eyes. 

“Only indirectly.  I never knew your name.  Here, Eve was just…  Evie Rhodes.”  Billie shook her head as she turned to stir the cut vegetables into the stew.  “I miss her.  I miss them both.”   Her head came up with distrust in her gaze.  “How did you find me here?”

“Eve left a message for me,” Alexandra said quietly, “just before she died.  A recording that included the name of your brother, Charles Fraser.  I found a photo of you at his funeral.  You weren’t easy to track down.”

“I like it that way.  Tell me what you want with me.”

“I’m trying to understand what happened to my sister.”

Billie Jordan eyed her warily and remained silent.

“Please.  I need to talk with someone who knew her.”

The dark eyes flickered, then softened infinitesimally.  “Do I look as if I ran in her circles?”  Billie Jordan held out her stained apron.  “Charlie introduced us at a homeless benefit for the shelter.  Lordy!”  Her face lit up.  “You should have seen Evie that night.  Off the shoulder sequined red dress, slit up to here!  Poor Charlie never had a chance!”

For the first time, Alexandra laughed.  “That was Eve, all right!”

“Didn’t find out until much later that she was a married woman.  By then... well, Charlie already was crazy about her, like every guy - and woman - who fell into her orbit.  Including me.  We just couldn’t help it, I guess.  Two days after I met Eve, I found her at dawn on the church doorstep.”

Alexandra froze.  “My sister needed shelter?”

Billie Jordan gave a low rumble of laughter.  “Oh, Lordy, no.  Your sister was strong.  And sober.  She volunteered here for almost a year.”

“
My
sister?  Here?”

Another Matroyoska doll opens
, thought Alexandra suddenly, picturing the bright Russian nesting dolls, revealing their secrets one doll at a time.  One moment she was horrified by her sister’s behavior, and the next...  She shook her head with grudging respect.  What other secrets were hidden beneath the surface of her sister’s life?

“You really didn’t know she worked here?”

“What work did Eve do?”

“Do?  Just look around you, Baby Sister.  What
don’t
we need?  Your sister taught writing skills, washed tablecloths, made beds, cooked dinner - oh, now, you should
really
see your face, girl!  Don’t tell me you never tasted Elegant Evie’s Five Star Chili?”

“But - Eve didn’t cook.”

Billie stared at her.  Voices drifted from the hallway, a brief burst of laughter.  Women began to filter slowly into the dining room.

“Come over here.” 

Alexandra felt herself pulled toward the wall.  Then she was staring at a bulletin board filled with photographs of the shelter’s women at a birthday party.  She looked closer.  And there, amid the balloons and plastic banners, was Eve, her elegant face devoid of make-up, smiling but barely recognizable in an oversized sweatshirt, stained apron, and a cheap cotton scarf that hid the bright gold of her pony-tailed hair.

Look for the truth in the photographs
, Eve always said.  Surely this couldn’t be the same woman who stood, so beautiful but unsmiling in another photograph, passing envelopes in a Russian square?

Something was very wrong, Alexandra told herself.  Subtly off-center, like the colors in the forged Picasso they’d discovered last month at the Baranski.

“Take the picture,” said Billie.  “It’s yours.”

Alexandra slipped the photograph into her pocket.  “Thank you.” 

As if she’d read her thoughts, Billie Jordan spoke in her ear.  “Black women don’t trust easily, Ms. Marik.  The impact of racism is in our marrow.  It hurts.  It disfigures.”  She looked past Alexandra at the women clustering by the tables, and her voice softened.  “But somehow your sister won them over.”  She hesitated, then said, “Especially the young battered ones like Lavonda.”

Alexandra’s eyes flew to Billie’s face.

Billie Jordan touched her shoulder gently.  “Yes, I know.”

“But how?”

“Only man I ever loved broke my arm on our honeymoon,” said Billie.  “Looking into your eyes is like looking into my own mirror every morning.”

“But Eve didn’t know about – what happened to me.  I never told her...”

“Honey, if you think that, you didn’t know your sister at all.  Eve knew, girl.  When she died, she’d just begun working on a photo documentary about Lavonda and some of our other women, here at the shelter.  Said she wanted to give voice to their fears, a face to their pain.  She said it was personal.”

Oh, God.  She was doing it for me?

“I have a whole folder of her photographs in my desk,” said Billie.  “Eve always gave me her treasures for safe-keeping.”

“Will you show me her photographs?”

“She’d surely haunt me if I didn’t!”

“I think you were a good friend to Eve, Billie Jordan.  Can you tell me who her other friends were?”

“Others?  Your sister spent most of her free time here, far as I know.  Her friends were her husband’s friends.  Men.  As for women…  I don’t think they trusted her, you know?   She seemed lonely.” 

Alexandra felt her chest tighten at the words.  Before she could answer, the luncheon bell chimed in the corner of the room.  “My flock is flocking,” said the black woman under her breath, “and I’m short a hand today.”

Alexandra reached for an apron.  “Okay, Billie Jordan, you’ve got yourself a waitress.  But when we’re done flocking, we’re going to talk.”

The two women locked eyes.

“The last time Eve came to the shelter,” said Billie finally, “she asked me to help plan a big reception at her place in Virginia - for the 28th, tomorrow night.  Her daughter was coming to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, and she was counting the hours.  No
way
Evie was going to commit suicide before her girl’s party.”

“Welcome to the club, Billie.  Now won’t you tell me what you know?”

Fire flashed in Billie Jordan’s eyes.  “I’ll think on it, Baby Sister.  You’ll have to be content with that.”  She glanced around the now crowded room.   “My lay-dees need me now.  I’ll call you, Ms. Marik.”

“It’s Alexandra, please.  I’ll be waiting for your call.  And I may have some more information when we talk.  Later today I’m going to talk with the detectives who investigated Eve’s - ”  She stopped, unable to say the word.  “I need to know what happened.”

“Ask them why they closed her case so quickly, Baby Sister!”

“Your lips to their ears, Billie.”  Alexandra smiled as she reached for an oversized spoon.  Billie Jordan, she was sure, knew more than she was telling.  The next piece of the puzzle of Eve’s death was within reach.

And with every piece, another Matroyoska doll twisted open, exposing another secret, bringing her closer to finding the mysterious Ivan.  Every instinct she had told her that Ivan held the key to her sister’s death.  I’m coming, Ivan, she told him.

I am going to find you
.

CHAPTER 23

“For every man who lives without freedom

the rest of us must face the guilt.”

Lillian Hellman

BRIGHTON BEACH, NEW YORK

The windswept beach was deserted, the amusement rides on the down-at-the-heels boardwalk shuttered.

Ivan sat on a bench in a thin, worn overcoat, breathing in the sights and sounds of a nostalgic past.  In the distance, he could see the steel mushroom-like tower of Coney Island’s Parachute Jump and the 1920’s Wonder Wheel against the bright autumn sky.

Last night, in the tiny attic room two blocks away, with the window open to the shushing sound of the waves, he had slept the sleep of the innocent.  For once, no nightmares.  Just deep, dreamless sleep.  Here, in the heart of the old Russian neighborhood, he felt at home.

He sighed as he inhaled the heady scents of blini, borscht, stuffed cabbage and hot zakuski that drifted across the weathered boards.  Just like his old Babushka’s kitchen...

He looked down at his copy of Izvestia, still warm off ancient presses, bought in a boardwalk kiosk.  “Bomb kills St. Petersburg oil tycoon!” screamed the headline.  And below the fold, “Mayhem in Moscow!”  He shook his head.  Ten thousand of his countrymen were taking to the streets, enraged by the rigging of millions of votes in the recent presidential election.  What was happening to his beloved country?

Dostoyevsky, he remembered, had called St. Petersburg a city for the half-mad.  Would I want to return to St. Petersburg now? he wondered.    He imagined himself stepping off the Tupolev 134 that would bring him into his beloved city of twisting canals and poets and arched bridges. 

Knee-deep snow and first love.  He and Tatyana had kissed by the stone lions of Lion Bridge, skated on the icy steps of the Hermitage.  They’d crossed the footbridge over the canal where Raskolnikov used to walk, stood outside the rooms of his favorite Russian muse, Anna Akhmatova, paid homage to Dostoyevsky by his snow-covered grave.

But, he reminded himself with brutal honesty, Dostoyevsky had been exiled to Siberia.  Akhmatova suffered through Stalin’s purges, her son arrested, husband murdered.  The only country in the world, Ivan thought bitterly, where a poem could get you killed.

And now, according to the newspapers, St. Petersburg was an epicenter of crime and corruption, a dying city of tin-roofs and porn videos, rock bands and discotheques with names like Cafe Idiot.  Where had he read that St. Petersburg was like a woman with diamonds in her ears and a noose around her neck? 

Ivan shook his head in sorrow.  Just the useless, half-mad thoughts of an old Russian man on a cold and lonely afternoon.  No, he had made his choice - and his new bed - years before.

From under the dark cap, Ivan’s eyes searched the faces of the men and women walking toward the bright lights of Primorski’s restaurant.  More than once, in the old days, he’d used the men’s rest room behind the bar as a dead-drop for sensitive information.  But no more.  Not when the walls were closing in on him...

Ivan looked down at the cheap watch on his wrist.  It was getting late, and he was to meet his Control uptown at midnight.  Tonight, he would demand answers from Panov.  He needed to know who had re-discovered his existence and who had activated him.  And
why
, after all these years.

A shout across the boardwalk caught his attention.  Raising his eyes to the Fellini-esque parade before him, he saw a huge Russian wedding party heading toward the Imperator Restaurant.  Slipping away from the crowd, a dark-haired boy, no more than eight or nine, leaped and spun across the weathered boards in front of an old arcade mirror.  It was like looking at a silent movie of himself, so many years before.

The distant roar of the waves crashing onto the beach became a flood in his head, and Ivan waded into the memories.

The only constant is sweat
.

He heard the voice of his ballet master, Pushkin, in the cold rehearsal hall.  He’d been eight years old, had just taken leave of his mother to stay at the Vaganova ballet school in Leningrad.  Only one child in 30 had been accepted - a great honor, his mother had assured him.  He could see himself, lost and frightened in the dark rehearsal hall - his thin body reflected in mirror after mirror, hands gripping the wilted bouquet of flowers that was the traditional gift for the house mother...

There is to be no ice-skating.  It develops the wrong muscles
.

But there had been no time off for skating, or anything else.  He’d spent the first year at the barre, learning the classical positions and simple steps that taught discipline to his young body.  And when the school day finished, he’d hidden in the hallways to watch the advanced classes, his body aching for the great leaps and cabrioles taught only to the older boys.

Put resin on your shoes to keep from slipping.  Don’t fall.  Get up.  Do it again.  And again.

A sharp wind sliced across Ivan’s cheeks, and he opened his eyes.  The wedding party was long gone.  But the feeling that he was back in the Vaganova school was so strong that for a moment he thought he saw, in the old boardwalk mirror, the little boy he had been, alone and lost in an endless hall of mirrors.