Chapter 27

The village was not far removed from what it had been when Erene Skujans lived there as a little girl. Stone buildings and houses sat too close together to allow more than a single line of cars. Few visitors came through. Mostly they were black marketers who wanted to increase their earnings or off-load items they hadn't been able to sell in Riga.

Dressed for the freezing wind that whipped through the village, Erene walked down the hill to the center of the village. Her grandmother had always lived away from the villagers. Outside of the village, she had more room for her gardens, and it was cleaner.

No one cared about the village. It was an eyesore. Frozen horse and dog dung littered the narrow, snow-covered streets that wound around the small stone houses.

The downtown area consisted of five two-story buildings. A hundred years earlier, merchants had conducted business there. Now they were just squats for those too poor or too lazy to seek out better shelter.

However, there was a bar in the bottom of one of them. Fermented goat's milk was the drink of choice, but there was also black market vodka for those who could afford it. The owner maintained a kitchen there, as well, but the cook was his wife and her efforts weren't much appreciated until the men had started drinking.

Women didn't go there except to sell themselves or steal husbands. When they did and they were found out, the other women of the village ran them out of town. The only thing those who sold themselves hoped for was to get enough money before being ostracized to get a start in Riga.

Erene's grandmother had never gone there. Erene had never gone there, either, until Mario took her there. They'd shared his rented cottage or her grandmother's house.

Thinking about Mario upset Erene again. She felt the ball of pain in her stomach like a heavy stone. She knew it would never leave. She hoped that killing Wolfram Schluter would help. She believed it would.

Despite the man's departure from the area, Erene knew he would return. The lure of treasure was too irresistible. After all, it had kept her there all this time.

She had visited her grandmother on occasion, but those times usually ended in arguments and guilt. The strained silence between them, the annual birthday card, those things had seemed more comfortable.

Of course, that meant she hadn't known of her grandmother's death until eight months after the fact. Erene had stood at the overgrown grave where the villagers had interred the remains of Misha Skujans. Erene, who thought she'd known everything there was to know about her grandmother, hadn't even known her age until she'd read it on the crudely carved headstone.

A group of squatters had taken over her grandmother's house. Erene had come back and let them know the house would remain as it was until she decided what to do with it.

Then she'd found Mario in town. For a week she'd watched him as he'd talked to the villagers and went trekking around through the ruins outside the village. She'd heard about what he'd been looking for, but all of her life she'd never believed it existed.

The tavern was a rectangular room with a low ceiling. Timbers covered the bare stone walls, holding a mix of mud and straw that served as insulation. In many places, scars from bullets – from Russians, as well as Nazis – showed on the timbers.

A hodgepodge of chairs and tables occupied the room. Only three lanterns, one of them on the bar, lit the space. The others had been dimmed and the surviving lanterns had pulled the final few men together near the wood-burning stove against the back wall.

"The witch!" someone growled.

"What's she doing here?"

The bartender, an old man with gray hair and gold-capped teeth, leaned toward Erene. "Can I help you?"

"No," Erene replied.

The six men seated at the two back tables looked away from her.

Erene walked toward the tables and stopped a few feet away. "Viktor Ivanov," she said.

Five men got up from the tables to join the bartender at the bar.

The remaining man looked at her and grinned insolently. He was at least eight inches taller than Erene. At one time his body had been lean and muscular; his wife had a picture of them together in those happier times. But now he'd gone soft and paunchy. He outweighed Erene by at least one hundred pounds. His brown beard and hair were long and shaggy. He wore tattered clothing and a large parka.

Calmly, he took a drag off his cigarette. "I am Viktor Ivanov," he said.

"Your daughter's arm was broken," Erene said.

Ivanov shrugged. "She is careless." He smiled a little. "Like her mother. Both of them are careless."

"I had to rebreak your daughter's arm tonight to reset it," Erene said. It was cold enough in the room that she could see her breath. "I've never had to do it to a child before."

Ivanov grinned. "Breaking a child's arm is very easy. Now, a man? That is much more difficult." He sneered. "Perhaps you're better at curses. They say your grandmother was."

Without a word, Erene planted one of her boots in his face. The impact jarred along her leg. His head snapped back and rebounded from the wall behind him. Before he could move, Erene grabbed a fistful of his hair, turned and slid a hip into him, then yanked him from the chair and flipped him to the ground.

Ivanov landed hard on the floor. The wind whooshed out of him. He flailed at her weakly, still stunned. He tried to catch his breath. His nose, flattened across his face, bled profusely.

Shoving her hand into her pocket, Erene slid out the switchblade knife she carried there and flicked the blade out. Avoiding his attempted blows, she sank to one knee beside his head. When she laid the keen knife edge against his neck, he ceased his struggles.

She leaned close to his ear and whispered, "I curse you, Viktor Ivanov. With your own blood." She nicked the flesh of his neck, and crimson mixed with his beard. "If you are not gone by tomorrow morning, if I find you here, I will bury you and cover your body in lye so that your bones will burn forever."

There, that sounds positively witchy, doesn't it? she asked herself.

He shuddered. Part of her gloried in Ivanov's fear. That was the part of her that was savage, the part that always lurked just below the surface and that her grandmother had never understood. She couldn't bring Mario back, but striking out – even against someone else's monster – made her feel better.

Ivanov said nothing.

"Do you understand?" she asked quietly.

"Yes," he said quietly.

"Good." Erene stood and closed the knife.

Ivanov tried to get up.

Erene placed a boot on his head. "Don't get up," she said. "Not until after I'm gone."

He nodded and snuffled blood.

Erene went to the bar and reached into her pocket for money. "A bottle of vodka."

The bartender reached behind the bar and brought up a stoppered bottle. There was no label.

"It's black market vodka. Locally made. I've nothing better at the moment," he said.

"How much?"

"For you? Nothing. On the house."

Erene left too much money on the bar. If this had been another town, she would have taken the bottle for nothing. But she didn't want to owe anyone in the village.

She took the bottle and left, hoping the vodka was strong enough to kill the pain she felt over knowing Mario was dead somewhere in New York City.

Outside, she unstoppered the bottle and took a deep swig. The liquid burned the back of her throat and brought tears to her eyes that trickled down her face and felt like icicles. After another drink, she turned and headed back to her grandmother's house.

****

The grave was in a small cemetery behind the house. Erene's grandmother was the last to have her bones laid there. Few spaces remained. Moonlight shone through the wispy clouds. A crooked picket fence missing a few slats surrounded the graveyard and set it apart from the forest that threatened to encroach and devour it.

Numb from the cold, the adrenaline and the vodka, Erene walked to her grandmother's grave and knelt there. She wiped tears from her cheeks with the back of her arm, but it was wasted effort because the nylon material slid smoothly across her face.

Lifting the bottle to her lips, she tried to take another drink but discovered it was empty. She'd consumed all of it on her way up the hill. It was the most she'd drunk in years. Angrily, she flung the bottle away.

She was confused. She didn't know if she was crying for Mario, her grandmother, the little girl whose arm she'd had to rebreak –

Or herself.

The last thought was the most upsetting. Erene couldn't remember a time when she'd cried for herself. And she'd rarely cried for others.

"Oh, Misha," she whispered, reaching out to touch the carved headstone, "I wish you were here."

Only silence answered her at first.

Then a deep voice said, "I've always been told that it's all right to talk to the dead, but when you start waiting for them to answer, you've gone too far."

Erene spun around, reaching for the pistol that she'd habitually carried for the past few years before realizing it was still packed away with the other personal belongings she'd kept from Mario's sight.

A tall, thick man stood at the graveyard's entrance. He had a broad face and his skin was ruddy.

"Dalton," Erene whispered.

"Erene," the big man greeted. His name was Dalton Hyde. For years they'd been sometime business associates and lovers, dropping into and out of deals that had benefited both of them.

"Where did you come from?" Erene asked.

Hyde hooked a thumb over his shoulder. "I was down to the tavern when you went in there looking for trouble." His big face split wide in a white grin. His accent was Hungarian, but he'd lived all over Eastern Europe while he plied his trade.

He was one of the most gifted artists Erene had ever seen, but he didn't have an honest bone in his body and had an attraction to easy money. Usually someone else's. Normally he was a confidence man, arranging for investors to buy fake art or antiquities he'd crafted himself or had others create.

But he was also a thief. He knew electronics, hardware and systems, and he was a sophisticated hacker. He'd taught Erene everything she knew about breaking and entering.

"I wasn't looking for trouble," Erene said. She knew she slurred her words but didn't care.

"I guess not," Hyde said. "From where I sat, you delivered more than you got."

"He broke his daughter's arm."

"I gathered that."

Erene frowned. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to see you."

"You're not exactly the type for a casual hello."

Hyde shrugged. "I came to talk to you about a possible job – "

"I'm not interested."

"I don't think this is the appropriate time to talk about it," Hyde said.

"Why?"

"Because, dear girl, you're plotzed."

"I won't be interested later, either."

"You won't be drunk later," Hyde said.

"Go away." Erene walked toward the house.

"Is that how you're going to treat an old friend?"

"I've got an excuse. I'm drunk."

"You're not that drunk."

Erene slipped and nearly fell. Head spinning and feeling sick, she grabbed hold of the picket fence and threw up. She purged so hard and so long she had a headache. She was barely aware of Hyde picking her up in his massive arms and carrying her into the house. Sleep came almost the moment he placed her on the bed.