Requiem For a Glass Heart Read Free

side of the door Vera laughed a giddy, silly laugh and Maikov’s deep voice mumbled a few indistinguishable words. Gripping the pistol in her right hand, Irina clicked off the safety with her thumb and let her hand hang naturally at her side, hiding the gun in the drape of her dress.
    Then she opened the door and stepped into the room.
    Maikov and Vera were on the bed facing each other, embracing, and at the sound of the bathroom door Maikov took his face away from Vera’s breast and the two of them looked at her. Their heads were close together like those of two lovers in a photograph, cheek to cheek.
    Without speaking, Irina swiftly raised both arms, brought them together to grip the CZ, and fired quickly four times. Each of the four bullets found its mark within the eighteen-inch square that contained the two faces.
    She didn’t know precisely where the bullets hit—an eye, a mouth, a forehead—only that the imaginary square had exploded in successive scarlet plumes punctuated by discrete gassy bursts from the silencer. It was done.
    She promptly stepped to the foot of the bed, the gun hanging at the end of her limp arm, and looked at the man and the woman. They continued to die, soft liquid sounds sighing from their flesh as the two lives slipped loose of their tenuous moorings: a subtle drawing of an extended muscle, a shallow movement in the sternum. The volume of blood andthe way it continued to surge from the bodies always surprised her. She stood rapt, holding her breath.
    On her way out she shot the young bodyguard in the throat, then bent over and put the silencer in his mouth and shot him again. When she got to the front door and started down the steps, she saw that Krupatin’s faces had disappeared, leaving death behind in the dark Lincoln at the curb.
    Outside in the rosy, timeless twilight, she hurried around the corner, past the Cathedral of St. Andrew, past the white Church of the Three Holy Men, through the tunnel of locust trees, to the metro station on Sredny Prospekt.
    She rode the escalators down, down into the immaculate and brightly lighted subterrane, deep below the Russian spring, and within fourteen minutes she had boarded the line to the Finland Station. There she caught the last army-green train for Helsinki. It was a six-and-a-half-hour trip, and it would take the remainder of the night.
    She leaned her head against the window, and as the lights of St. Petersburg receded in the everlasting dusk, she wept, wept without ceasing, until she slept.

C ATE SAT ACROSS THE TABLE FROM AN OLD FRIEND IN A SOFTLY lighted corner of an Italian restaurant and watched him sink deeper and deeper into gin-induced regret. Complaining was a given in his business. It came as a birthright, born of the responsibilities they accepted, of the risks they took, and of the disillusion that eventually ate away the core of far too many of them.
    She hadn’t seen him in nearly eighteen months, since before Tavio’s death. He had been out of the country, and as soon as he was back he called her, wanting to get together. She was wary, but there was nothing she could do about it. It was inevitable that he would get emotional, and she would have preferred to avoid that. Her own road back to life without Tavio had been hard, and she didn’t want to see Griffin’s version of it too. She had heard that he was drinking too much again and that he had been shunted from Rome to Trieste and then eventually back to Washington and now Houston. That had taken most of a year, but Naples was still in his head as if it were yesterday.
    They had finished eating an hour ago and had caught up on all the news, had covered everyone and everything except Tavio, whose absence stood between them like a pillar theykept talking around. And Griffin had settled into the point of his evening anyway, which was drinking.
    “You know,” he said, gesturing toward her with a fresh drink, clear gin in a clear glass with clear ice, “I never told you