73

He sits on the park bench shifting his weight, pinches the side where he’d been shot to feel the pain again, a way to remind himself that he is alive and there are still things to be done. The rain has started up and he is cold, disgusted. He has called the middleman to let him know the two men have gone into the silver-domed house. He was told to wait, to find out who lived there.

He checks his watch; a half hour since they went in.

He recognized the man with the American as the one he had fought with, tall and definitely strong. Though he looks forward to a rematch. He does not like to lose a fight and rarely does. Where he comes from, losing a fight, losing anything, is inconceivable, even punishable.

An image blooms in his mind: his brother falling, blood spreading, soaking into the earth. Andrei, tall and towheaded at nineteen, older by one year, his best friend, his hero—and the promise they made to never be separated and how they had kept that promise, even as Andrei died in his arms. He sees men dying all around him—not men—boys, unprepared for combat. And for what? A war that even the former Soviet leader had referred to as a “disgraceful, bloody adventure.”

Was it then—when his brother died—that he stopped caring? Or was it seeing the masses of dead children killed by cluster bombs set off by the separatists or his own men? Who could tell? He squeezes his eyes shut, thinks that losing his brother has made it impossible for him to feel, when in fact what he has felt since that moment was that he too wanted to die.

The front door opens, and the image dissolves like a piece of old movie film caught in a projector, bubbling red and blistering.

The two men head down the steps. He tugs the hat lower on his face, but they are so deep in conversation they pass right in front without giving him a look. He hears the American say, “Lacoste,” has no idea what that means but makes a note to find out.

When they are a block away, the Russian checks the tracking device, watches the red dot turn a corner, gets up, stretches, and yawns. He is tired of all the watching and waiting, his patience and restraint exhausted at forty-one, or is it forty-two, his falsified papers changed so often he can’t remember. What he needs is action. Fun. He makes his way to the front door of the silver-domed house and raises the knocker.

74

“The Louvre called,” Smith said as he came back into the room after his cigarette break.

“That was fast. Didn’t you just send the pictures you took of Madame Leblond’s Mona Lisa?”

“Wouldn’t you call the person who sent you photos of another Mona Lisa if you were a curator at the Louvre?” Smith paused. “They’re going to let me have a look at the real painting, I used my INTERPOL clout, but there’s a hitch… I have to go alone.”