The Stargazey

To Travis and Kent and Roanoke—stargazers all.

April 25, 1998

Far in the pillared dark

Thrush music went—

Almost like a call to come in

To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:

I would not come in.

I meant not even if asked,

And I hadn't been.

—R
OBERT
F
ROST
,

FROM
“C
OME
I
N
”

St. Petersburg

February

T
he snow looked blue in the dusk, its fresh fall an untrodden path leading into the dense fog that shrouded the Palace Square and the Alexander Column. Ice encased the tall trees on the edge of Nevsky Prospekt, along which cars picked their way, braving the winter gloom. Snow falling on snow muffled the shuddering gunfire sounds of the Neva's ice surface splitting and cracking, as the wide river fought itself free of January's thick ice. From this height, she could see St. Petersburg's snow-topped roofs, the drums and domes of St. Isaac's, the ice-sheathed bridges. She loved St. Petersburg's bridges almost as much as London's. Between the time she had entered and left the museum, it had snowed again. A layer of ice as thin as lace had crackled delicately underfoot as she'd walked across the flat roof of the restaurant.

At least the blade-sharp wind had stopped, thank God. Like pendant smoke, her breath hung before her, as if it were crystallizing in the frigid air. Her hands were frozen in gloves that were as thin as her breath, more like a layer of black ice than leather. Anything heavier would have made it impossible to handle the rifle.

The rifle was fitted with a telescopic lens and a night scope. She had used it many times but hadn't expected to use it this evening. This evening she had to improvise, something she disliked doing, not because she hadn't the wit for it but because planning should always be impeccable, and hers was usually flawless.

But this afternoon there had been a flaw. She had made certain the rest room was empty but had forgotten the janitress, who came in while she was standing at the sink dismantling the walker. It was this woman for whom she was now waiting. She had watched them all, the staff, and the building, for weeks. She had recognized the cleaning woman when she'd come into the rest room with her rags and bucket. But tonight schedules were upset because no one had been allowed to leave until the police had asked their questions.

Since her Russian was bad and her French was excellent, she had presented her French papers. Her fabricated identity—
Cybil Odéon, Paris, 6
^e
Arrond., blvd. St.-Germain
—was one of several. What were the Petersburg police to do but wave off this old, half-deaf French pensioner who couldn't get around without a walker? And who hadn't been clear about what had happened because her glasses were so thick-lensed that her eyes looked drowned behind them, strands of hair trapped in the stems like seaweed.

The staff had been trickling out, one, two at a time. No sign yet of the cleaning lady. She jammed her hands down in her sheepskin-lined pockets, just to warm them for a moment; otherwise she wouldn't be able to hold the gun. Now she picked it up again, sighted down its barrel at the statues on the parapets of the Winter Palace. She moved the rifle a little to the left until she saw the Alexander Column. The angel on its top floated on icy wings. The column itself was perfectly balanced, supported by its own weight. She had read this somewhere and liked it.
Supported by its own weight:
a study in splendid isolation.

That was how she felt now. She would have preferred the isolation not be a freezing one, but personal discomfort bothered her only insofar as it kept her from performing. She had trained herself to withstand any discomfort that could come along, discomforts of either body or mind. The mind was more difficult, being limitless. She raised her eyes for a moment
to look up at the stars. In the course of her studies, she had read that what fueled the stars was the merging of atoms. Fusion science. What fascinated her was the notion that the amount of energy in was the amount of energy out. There was an equation:
Q=1.
And this, she had to imagine, was perfect balance, like that of the Alexander Column. Perfect balance was what she was after; it was all she was after. She wanted to get to that point where nothing resonated, where the past could not pretend to shape itself into the present, where planes had clear, sharp edges to which nothing clung. People didn't come into it; they weren't part of the equation. What relationships she'd had had been brief and in her control, though her partners didn't seem aware of this. It was astonishing how easily people were hoodwinked, how easily—even eagerly—led.

Q=1.
She would have made a good physicist if she hadn't been deflected in her studies and instead become a killer.

People were trickling out, one by one, finally released from being questioned—by museum security, by state security, by city police, probably none of whom had coordinated efforts with the others. There seemed no end to the permutations of police authority sent to plague the Russian citizen. One could scarcely blame police, though, considering what had just gone missing. A few men, a few women, all leaving through the main entrance only to be stopped again by the guards standing outside of the entrance doors.

She sighted the distant doors of the museum through the scope. The cleaning staff came out this way. In the lavatory, the janitress's glance had swept over her—the old French lady with the walker—without seeming to register. It was hard to tell with these Russians, with their decades of training emotions not to reach their faces. She had always admired that trait. If she knew the Russian temperament, the janitress would need to think about what she'd seen. Probably, she would not have rushed into the room where police were questioning people. The woman would leave, go back to the flat she no doubt shared with a dozen others, and start thinking about it.

It was too cold to keep to one position; she had to put the gun down, to blow on her hands, to stomp her feet, to pivot her head on her neck, and, in doing so, to look again at the darkened sky. Night fell, weighted
with stars. She felt a great affinity with the stars, with their detachment, their distant, icy indifference.

Again she retrieved the rifle, sighted through the scope. The door opened; the old janitress appeared, carrying a bag and wound about in a black scarf as close as a shroud. She got the woman in her crosshairs and squeezed the trigger and felt the rush. It was her reward, the rush. Like a black bird, the woman fell into the powdery snow, sending up puffs like white exhaust. She stood up, looking off towards the scene. It was snowing again. Through it, she watched the tiny crowd collect, the guards at the museum doors, the few people within the grounds. She imagined them distraught, imagined them with arms flung up and out, the tiny black figures rushing through snowflakes falling slowly, dreamily, rushing toward the fallen woman as if drawn there by enchantment. Death woke in her long-slumbering scenes of a childhood she could not place—snow, fields, mountains—which sank again as quickly as they'd arisen.

She dismantled the rifle, as she had the walker, and put the stock in her backpack, the barrel in the long case. She retraced her steps across the crackling ice, left the roof, and descended the several flights back to the restaurant.

She returned to the table she had left twenty minutes before. The room had grown noisy, filling up in this early dinner hour. Her vodka glass had been refilled; she had asked the waiter to do this before she'd left the table. He had smiled hugely, nodded.

When he returned to her table, he nodded towards the case across the other chair and asked her if she played the flute in the Philharmonic. No, she smiled and said, the oboe. Then she ordered bream stuffed with kasha and, for dessert,
blinicki
with jam.

When he'd gone off, she looked at the oboe case a little sadly and wished she were more musically inclined.

London

November

S
aturday night. It was not a night to be spending alone, riding a bus. When he was a teenager at the comprehensive, Saturday night without a girl, without a date, without at least your mates to raise hell with, Saturday night alone would have been shameful. One wouldn't want to be seen alone on a Saturday night. . . .
Who are you kidding? That was never your life, Jury, not yours.

There had been an errand to run in South Kensington, and he had taken the underground from Islington. Once out of the South Ken station, he had boarded a Fulham Road bus. It had been a long time since he'd seen this part of London, though it was where he'd lived for part of his childhood, that part he could still call “childhood.” It had been a long time since he'd been on any bus at all. The conductor gave him one of those vaguely suspicious looks that conductors are trained up on, and Jury took the short flight of steps to the upper deck more quickly than was advisable for even agile youth, and he was a long way from that now. Up there the only other passengers were a boy and girl who couldn't keep their hands off each other; an old lady sleeping, chin on chest; and
a dark-haired man in a tuxedo. Strange way for him to travel. Jury wondered where the party was. He was almost glad for his circumscribed life—no black-tie dinners, no champagne picnics at Ascot. No, for him it was work, home, the local.

Little shops lined both sides of the Fulham Road, expensive little shops, like the swank kitchen outfitters, Smallbone. Who, he wondered, had a Smallbone kitchen? He had never seen one. Fusty little electrical shops, an Oddbins, then the inevitable espresso bar that appeared to be replacing the caffs. Sad, that. High-priced grocers, high-windowed dress shops, windows blank but for one or two oddly angled and headless mannequins in mushroom-colored, loose-waisted clothes. A brace of antique shops, small and elegant, their facades looking as if they'd been stamped on Roman coins.

Jury had wanted to sit right in the front row where the wide window gave an unobstructed view of the street, as if one were hanging over it in midair. But those seats had been commandeered by a couple of teenagers with fade haircuts and a boom box, mercifully turned down. He had taken a seat near the back, wanting to distance himself.

He had always liked the street at night. When he was a uniform, he'd always chosen late duty. He had liked walking past shut-up shops, peering down dimly lit alleys. Perhaps night was just a good place to hide—any alley, any doorway.

For several years now, he'd been thinking of leaving London or transferring to one of the provincial police forces, such as Exeter. Macalvie would love to have him in Exeter. Or Yorkshire, up there in the snowy North Yorkshire moors. Or Stratford-upon-Avon. Sam Lasko would like nothing better. As it was, Jury worked often enough on Lasko's cases. Stratford. That made him wonder where Jenny Kennington was. She had left months ago, after her trial. He was still trying to understand what had gone wrong between him and Jenny, why there had been that mutual lack of trust. He had been so certain, at one time, they'd stick. He wondered, as he had before, about his problems with women. Well, one could hardly refer to death as a “problem.” Jane Holdsworth . . . Helen Minton . . . Molly Singer . . . Nell Healey. He should have been able to rescue Nell, at least. . . .
Rescue.
That was an odd way of thinking about it. Not
only odd but arrogant. Hadn't Jenny described him as a man who wanted “to pull women from burning buildings”?