Last Snow by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

them that it would be open for breakfast at this early hour. Stretching their legs, Jack and Alli had been surprised and pleased to find the weather here far milder, though more humid, than it had been in Moscow. Alli unzipped her coat and already had it off before they entered the restaurant. She lookeddifferent now, with her hair cut short. Not wanting to take chances after the scare with Igor, Jack had insisted she cut her hair before they left the aircraft. In the taxi, he’d told Annika that they needed to find hair dye for her before the day was out.
    In the cheerful interior, amid brightly colored balloons and cartoonlike paintings of
dva gusya
, the two geese of the popular folk song that gave the restaurant its name, they sat on café chairs at a blond-wood table and ordered the first food any of them had had in twelve hours.
    “We must wait several hours for the documents—the passports—that Gustav is preparing for us.”
    “Can I sleep here?” Alli said.
    Outside the plate-glass windows, the sky was clearing, revealing a cerulean sky as the city stretched, yawned, and came to life around them. The rumble of traffic rose and fell like a drowsing giant periodically clearing his throat.
    Annika ordered more coffee, drinking it black this time. It steamed like a stoked engine. “Stop looking at me that way,” she said.
    “What way?” Jack’s voice held the rueful tone of voice of a child caught at the cookie jar.
    “Like I’m an exhibit at the zoo, or the sex museum.”
    “Was I doing that? I’m sorry.”
    “No, you’re not.”
    She was partially right. “I don’t—I don’t know how you could have done it.”
    “It’s not for you to know.”
    “That’s not an answer.”
    “It is, but you don’t want to acknowledge it.” She sipped her coffee as if it weren’t scalding. “In any event, we’re safely here, just as I promised.”
    “But the price—”
    She put down her half-empty cup. “You want me to be justthe  way you imagine, and when I’m not you’re disappointed in me.”
    “In my country women don’t do what you just did with Igor.”
    “Yes, they do, you just don’t know about it.”
    Jack looked down at the smeared remnants of his breakfast. He could hear Alli’s calm, even breaths as she slept, and he thought of what he’d told her about the past, that you only knew what happened to you, not to others around you, and even then wasn’t everything distorted by the unreliable lens of memory?
    “Would you like me to tell you something about this city?” Annika said this in an altogether different tone, as if the last contentious exchange had never happened, or had happened to two other people.
    “Yes,” he said, grateful to be brought out of his thoughts. “I know nothing about Ukraine besides its difficult history with Russia and the secret naval base in Odessa.”
    “War,” Annika observed, “that’s all you men know.” She fished a cigarette out of her purse and lit it with a metal lighter, took a first, long inhalation, and let it out slowly and luxuriously.
    She regarded him for a moment through the veil of smoke. Then she said, “Kiev, the mother of Slavic cities, was founded by nomads, fifteen centuries ago, if you can believe it. The name is derived from a man, Kyi, a
knyaz
, a prince of the Polans, a tribe of eastern Slavs who, along with his two brothers and a sister, felt this place on the western bank of the Dnieper was an ideal point on the transcontinental trade route, and he was right. Now, of course, the city spans both banks, but the left bank only came into being in the twentieth century.” She blew out another languid cloud of smoke. “That this story is shrouded in myth only makes the current inhabitants all the more certain of their beloved city’s origin.”
    Just then, a pair of police officers entered the restaurant. Annika’s hand froze halfway to her mouth, the glowing end of her cigarette releasing its curl of smoke, rising toward