In the Red (21 page)

“It's a gun,” he explained when she looked at him questioningly. “I carry it all the time now.”

This must have been why the gun was missing from Andrei's desk drawer. It must have been that he was carrying it all the time now too.

“Are you in danger?” Irina asked.

“Irina, it is best for you not to tangle with the likes of us anymore. Go out there and be good. Go back to university.”

This might have been the strangest moment of this whole strange trip, Dragos giving Irina sound life advice. He laughed at the look she was giving him. Before she could say anything, he got out and pulled her suitcases out of the small, crowded trunk of his speedy roadster. She stepped out of the car slowly, as if moving under water. He was about to open the door to get back in and leave her there alone in the parking lot when she put her hand on his arm.

“Elena,” she said.

“Andrei didn't tell you?”

Irina shook her head.

“Maybe he thought it would make you safer not to know. But she was your friend, so you should know. She left. She stole a truly ludicrous amount of money from Vasilii and left. Vasilii thinks that because you were friends you know where she went. He was going to put you to the question.”

Irina opened her mouth as if to say something, but nothing came out. Elena wasn't dead. Elena had put one over on the butcher scribe himself. The world had taken a funny turn.

Before Dragos drove away, he gave Irina a wet smooch on the cheek and whispered in her ear, “My little philosopher.”

I
n the air, everything felt different. The constant roar of the jet engine, the hot cottony feel of the recycled air, the drowsy proximity of so many bodies, the fluorescent half-light—all these things tamped down the intensity of Irina's feelings. It was like being in a sort of stasis. Perhaps being so far from the ground put her above her troubles. Even the knowledge that she would eventually have to land seemed remote.

The in-flight movie was on. Sometimes she looked at the mute people agitating themselves onscreen and dimly wondered what their fuss was about, but mostly she stared at nothing. Elena is alive, she kept telling herself. Elena is alive, maybe flying through the sky somewhere right now. Elena is rich.

Irina had been ejected from her wayward life by a cataclysm and Elena was right at the center of it. Elena had saved her. She would only think of this years later, when she would be able to think of her departure as being saved.

Andrei had saved her by sending her away. It might have been his one act of true love.

When Irina had told Elena to leave, Elena had said
not yet
. Only later, up in the air, did Irina finally hear this
not yet
. Elena had let Vasilii cut her up because she was biding her time all along in order to execute the most magnificent, wily heist imaginable. She might have been waiting until her family was somewhere safe before striking. Vasilii's wife had put her dainty finger on the lighter side of the world's rigged scale, making it only slightly awry in the smallest possible way. The scale was not tipped visibly. But Irina had felt the weight shift. She hoped that Vasilii had given Elena a false passport with a false name too, and that the false identity he had forced on her had been the tool she used to pluck him like a chicken. Elena had not done what she'd been told. She had been bold, and now she was gone. Not cast out like Irina, but a triumphant gone. Not a victim of the butcher scribe but his undoing.

The flight attendant asked if Irina wanted a drink. Irina looked up at her dumbly for a moment and then asked for a glass of wine. The attendant did not move, looking into Irina's face with visible suspicion.

“I'm going to have to see some identification,” she said pleasantly.

Out here in the big world, a girl of Irina's youth needed a valid piece of identification displaying a legal age in order to get a drink. She had forgotten. She had forgotten the great big world.

“I'll just have a Coke,” Irina said with a sigh.

The attendant plunked the soda in front of her with indifference and moved on. This was what young people drank out here in the big, visible world. The can was coated with a cold dew. It cracked and hissed when she opened it. The bubbly sweetness tickled her tongue. Vasilii would not track Elena, find her, and chop her into pieces left to desiccate in some hole in the desert. Elena would forever be sipping a gaudily colored drink with a paper parasol in it, on some faraway tropical beach. This is the story Irina would keep telling herself.

She took the little golden key out of her pocket. It was an utterly stupid and dangerous thing she had done, but somehow it felt less dangerous than being ejected into the big world by herself with nothing to run to. How far could she be flung if there was no past for ballast? She wasn't like Elena. She hadn't come to steal. She'd come to give herself and they'd turned her away.

After Irina drank down the last dregs of the soda, she did something she did not expect to do. She closed her eyes and fell asleep. In her dream, a man made love to a girl. The light was warm; the colors were saturated. It was as if the dream was on film, had been art-directed. The costuming for the girl was careful and exquisite: the man slowly divested her of the most beautiful designer lingerie money could buy. The first thing he took off was her high heels, with the care of Prince Charming fitting a delicate shoe to Cinderella's dainty foot in reverse. It was clear that the man loved the girl very much. It was also clear that he owned her.

It feels good to dissolve. It feels good to put oneself in the hands of another and forget everything. It feels good to be nothing but feeling, to have no boundaries, to be no one. At that moment the girl could be any girl. She could be all girls at once. It did not matter whose face she wore. It did not matter if her face was Irina's face, or Elena's face, or the face of some nameless orphan with a broken life any more than it mattered whether the man's face was Andrei's face, or Vasilii's face, or the face of some nameless father who would never acknowledge any child he mistakenly conceived. None of the things that mattered in the big, visible world mattered here, in this utterly naked place.

She would always remember. Inside Irina, the man would make love to the girl forever. The best Irina could do to attempt to go on with her life was to try not to watch.

T
he image now in question is the portrait of a man made legend. For centuries, historians have looked upon this portrait and speculated on the cruelty in the man's narrow blade face, the distant determination in his shifting eyes, the depraved sensuality in the curve of his lip. Lean closer and ask yourself what the image says. If you put your heated cheek close enough to its cool surface to see the streaks of every brushstroke with your inquiring eye, maybe the image will be kind enough to talk to you. Maybe the image, in its infinite wisdom, will say: Once upon a time something happened. Had it not happened, it would not be told.

Over a besieged land surrounded by three hostile kingdoms reigned a voivode called the Dragon. One day the Dragon gave his allegiance to one of the three kingdoms, the next day to another, the next day to another—all to keep his land from being swallowed by whichever of the three kingdoms was the hungriest. Eventually his dealings caught up with him, and he was betrayed by his boyars to the sultan of the greatest of the three hostile kingdoms. He and his eldest son were put to death, his other son put in prison. His second son moldered in jail, reigning over only his cell, executing the insects who crawled in the straw he slept on by crushing them with his heels and dispensing punishment to the mice who gnawed on his crust of bread by running his dull knife through their small bodies. He passed much time watching them wiggle on his blade, watching the life dim from their beady black eyes.

Eventually his star rose again and he took his father's land under the name Son of the Dragon. He gave his allegiance to none of the three hostile kingdoms. When ambassadors were sent to collect tributes, he refused to pay. When the ambassadors would not take off their hats to salute him, he had the hats nailed to their heads and sent them away. He raised a great army and won many battles. He became known far and wide for how much pain he could inflict on the bodies of those who would not yield to his rule. Thieves seldom dared practice their trade within his domain. In the central square of his capital city, Son of the Dragon displayed a golden cup on an open altar. Such was the fear he inspired that none dared steal or even touch the cup. It was said that whoever drank from the cup would kiss the lips of Justice.

One day Son of the Dragon wished to examine the precise manner of his elder brother's death, having not seen it with his own eyes. He ordered the corpse exhumed from the unmarked grave in the public burial ground. Upon opening the coffin he found his brother lying facedown, his body contorted and his mouth open as if gasping for breath. Deep grooves from the dead prince's fingernails were gouged in the coffin's lid. The voivode said nothing. He closed the lid and called a great celebration for Easter Sunday, inviting all the boyars of the land to his feast.

On Easter morning the boyars came to the royal garden, mounted on fine horses and riding in carriages. Their wives brought fine oriental carpets to rest and converse on. Everyone wore their brightest, most beautiful clothes. The palace provided roasted lambs, sweet cakes, and mulled wines for the feast and Gypsy fiddlers for the music. The voivode did not eat and did not dance, watching silently over the revelry. As the sun sank behind the mountains and the people reeled in their most frenzied joy and forgetfulness, Son of the Dragon signaled the captains of the guard, who sealed the doors to the royal garden. At his command, they seized all the boyars who were old enough to remember the killing of the Dragon and his eldest son. As all the women and young ones were made to watch, stakes were driven through the bodies of the old betrayers, from the fundament up through the mouth, the neck, or the shoulder. The stakes were cut with dull points so as not to pierce the vital organs but move them aside, so that death would not come quickly.

The stakes were raised, and as the writhing bodies of the boyars slowly slid down the shafts, the night was filled with their howls and groans. The voivode looked upon his work and said, Listen to them—what music they make! Send the fiddlers home, for this is all I need.

With these words, he sat down to feast, and ordered the boyars' wives and young ones to eat with him. Stupefied with terror, they did as he said, looking down at the victuals they could not get themselves to swallow. One young man closed his eyes so that he would not have to look at the agonies of his father, putting his hand over his nose and mouth to stop the terrible stench of clotting blood and emptied bowels. The voivode saw and told the two guards at his side, Skewer him on a stake taller than all the others, so that the disagreeableness will not reach his delicate nostrils. And bid my steward to go to the central square and bring me my golden cup.

As his orders were followed, soldiers rounded up everyone they had not impaled by the garden gates and manacled them together. Once they were all in chains, the voivode took the golden cup that the steward had handed him and stood at the feet of the dying lad on the tallest stake. He held up the chalice and in it gathered some of the thick, pouring blood. He raised it to the company and wished them Godspeed on their journey, and then explained to them that they would walk fifty miles to the mountain, where they would build him a castle. They would work until all their Easter finery had rotted off their bodies. And then they would work some more, until the castle was finished. All those who were left alive then could go home to their estates. Was he not clement?

He stood holding his cup, listening to the groans of the boyars up on their stakes harmonize with the clamor of the weeping women and young ones as they were being pushed by the soldiers out of the garden and onward to their toils. Once the gates were shut after them, he turned to the forest of dying bodies, looked into the eyes of the father crying out for death as he twisted on his stake, drank the son's blood from the chalice, and fainted.

In his dream, Son of the Dragon was kissed awake by the warm, plush lips of a beautiful woman. She had eyes as clear as a mountain stream and a gleaming abundance of fiery hair.

Then it is true what they say, whispered the voivode. You must be Justice.

That is one of my names, answered the beautiful woman. I am here to give myself to you.

The voivode, heartened by her words, put his hand on her to unlace her girdle. She slapped his grasp away as if he were a brazen child, and said merrily, That is not the way Justice gives herself—not to you, anyway.

The voivode wanted to crush her white throat with his smarting hand for her insolence, but found that he could not move. A glowing heat, not entirely unpleasant, bewitched him into stillness. Justice laughed melodiously. Voivode, she said, there are so many wonders in store for you in the next life. When you shed the shell of your body you will not drift into merciful sleep like all those you have staked. You will remain awake to haunt the nightmares of peasant children. You will remain awake to witness your name rolling down through the centuries.

As it should be, said the voivode.

As it should be, answered Justice, the touch of her hand making the heat grow inside the man's body until it hovered at the edge of pain, making his back arch slightly. As it should be, you will remain alive in the stories they will tell about you. As it should be, illustrious conqueror, the people of the world will dream you sleepless forever. From one mind to the next you will grow new limbs and have old limbs cut; your shape will never be at rest. One day in a country far away, a storyteller will slip his kingdom's pent-up sex into your ecstatic violence and your name will roar across the world, voivode; you will take whatever shape they give you, voivode; you will be forced to incarnate the stickiest of forbidden longings, the dankest of all fears. You will be an image to make matrons shrivel in horror in the dryness of their old age, to make virgin girls swoon for the embrace of inoffensive lovers never bold enough to penetrate them, to make the diseased squirm in pleasure at the thought of all that blood—all that blood, voivode. You will dissolve in all their blood and all their blood will thrum through you, as it should be, great and mighty warrior, as it should be. You will never be granted peace, you will never sleep—

As Justice spoke these words, the heat in the man's body gathered at his center, a great blazing shaft of agony burning inside him from his loins to his mouth. He wanted to thrash and claw the earth but he was pinned where he lay, the only movement allowed him a rising tremor as the future ripped its way through all his flesh—the future, the future, the great inexorable restless terrifying future. He tried to open his mouth to scream but could not. Instead Justice held him tightly and planted a hard kiss on his frozen lips, sending a blast of lightning so powerful into him that everything went black.

Never sleep again, her voice said, in the sighing tones of a woman well pleased.

Son of the Dragon awakened with a great start, his body covered with blood and mire. The huge smothering gray sky teased his hot tingling skin with a few cool droplets. His body was in a state of tight, unbearable arousal. He sat up and looked around at the forest of torn, dying bodies, his mind swirling with confusion, his heart racing with unaccountable speed. There had been a dream. What dream? Whose dream?

Did it matter? The voivode stood up and strode toward the castle, his flesh humming with animal heat, calling for his servants, calling for his sword, calling for a woman, calling for everything in this life that pleased him best.