The Altar Of Bones Part 10

Her mother looked up from a laptop computer screen, while her right hand went under the black marble desk to where she kept a Glock 22 on a spring-loaded shelf. Anna Larina Dmitroff had not connived and fought and murdered her way to become the boss of a Russian mafiya mafiya family by being careless. family by being careless.

"Zoe," she said, and Zoe was surprised to see real shock and concern flash across her mother's face. "Why are you here? Has something happened?" she said, and Zoe was surprised to see real shock and concern flash across her mother's face. "Why are you here? Has something happened?"

"Why? Would you care if something had?"

"Don't be ridiculous. Of course I would care." Anna Larina, who'd half stood up, settled once more behind the ma.s.sive marble desk. "You're looking a bit harried and damp, but otherwise well. All grownup," she said, a.s.sessing her daughter now with cool, indifferent eyes. "But, since in all these years I haven't received so much as a Christmas card from you, I could only a.s.sume something dire has happened to bring you here now."

Zoe had to set her teeth to keep from screaming. G.o.d, how she'd always hated that light, dry voice that could mock and cut and scar so easily. Thirteen years and nothing had changed. One look at that beautiful but soulless face and all the old bad feelings came rus.h.i.+ng back, mixing in her blood like poison.

She needed to pull herself together, to push her emotions down deep. She knew from bitter experience that you couldn't show so much as a flicker of feeling to Anna Larina, show her anything like love or hate or fear, or even anger, because feelings opened you up and then she would eviscerate you. Quickly and cleanly.

Zoe walked toward the great black marble slab of a desk slowly, to give herself time. The room was beautiful but cold, like the woman who occupied it. Shaped like a triangle, it jutted out into the sky like a s.h.i.+p's prow, overlooking the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Against the one wall not given over to the floor-to-ceiling windows stood expensive Scandinavian bookcases. They held some books, but were mostly filled with the finest pieces of her mother's antique Russian icon collection. When Zoe was a little girl, it had hurt so much to think these icons mattered more to her mother than she did.

She set the crime-scene photo she'd filched from Mackey carefully down onto her mother's desk. "Look at this and tell me what you see."

Anna Larina laid both hands flat on either side of the photograph and looked down. She studied it in silence, while Zoe studied her. Absolutely no hint of recognition, no hint of shock, no hint of anything.

She looked up, met Zoe's eyes full on. "I see some random old woman who looks dead. Did you expect me to know who she is?"

"Oh, please. Are you really going to try to pretend that you don't recognize your own mother?"

It was a deliberate slap, a hard one. Her mother's head jerked as she stared back down at the death photo. Her hands, still lying flat, turned white at the knuckles. But beyond that small reaction it was still impossible to tell what she was thinking, what she was feeling.

Zoe knew her mother could order one of her enforcers, her vors vors, to whack someone as easily as she could order up a pot of tea, but she didn't believe her mother was responsible for this if for no other reason than it was sloppy, and Anna Larina Dmitroff was never sloppy. Zoe had wanted to rattle her, though, and she had.

She picked up the silver-framed picture on the desk-an enlarged version of the one in the gla.s.sine envelope Mackey had shown her-and laid it faceup next to the crime-scene photo. "Do you see the resemblance now? She's got our eyes. Or rather we have hers."

"I don't-" Anna Larina cut herself off. Zoe saw her mother swallow convulsively but she didn't say anything more.

"You don't what-believe it? Because she died in a car accident when you were eleven? Drove off a cliff and into the ocean in bad weather and left you to grow up in an orphanage. Did you actually see her buried, Mother? Or did you just make the whole thing up to keep me away from her?"

Anna Larina seemed not to have heard her. "She is so old here. So old." She lightly touched the face of the woman in the crime-scene photograph with the tips of her fingers. "All these years I've seen her in my mind the way she was then. Young and beautiful, so full of life and laughter. She had the sweetest laugh. I always thought of rose petals when she laughed because of how the sound of it would curl up on the edges. Just like rose petals do."

Her voice trailed off and her mouth softened a little. "Odd how I just remembered that, and now she's dead."

"Not just dead, Mother. Murdered. Or don't you know a crime-scene picture when you see one?"

Anna Larina pushed the photograph away from her. "Yes, of course I do."

She got up from her desk and went to close the door. The click of the latch as it swung shut seemed loud in the taut silence.

She stared at Zoe, letting the silence drag, then she said, "I thought she was dead. I never lied to you to keep you away from her. That's ridiculous. She didn't want me. Why in h.e.l.l would she want you?"

The words were spoken in that cool, emotionless voice, but Zoe had seen a dark emotion flare in her mother's eyes. Hurt, yes, but something more. Guilt? Fury?

Zoe looked at this woman who was her mother. The sculpted cheekbones and high forehead, smooth as a polished seash.e.l.l. The gray eyes, wide-s.p.a.ced and tilted at the corners. Anna Larina's age had always been a closely guarded secret, but she had to be almost sixty by now. Yet she seemed not to have aged a day in all these years. I could be looking in a mirror I could be looking in a mirror, Zoe thought, and the horror of it twisted in her like a knife in the guts.

If she'd inherited her mother's face, had she also inherited her black soul?

Anna Larina's full mouth curved into a wry smile. "What are you looking for, Zoe? The mark of Satan on my brow? Proof that we aren't anything alike, after all? That's what you've always been afraid of, isn't it? It's why you ran away, why you're on that battered-women's crusade of yours. You're trying to buy your salvation by atoning for my sins."

Zoe felt a sharp pain in her arm. She looked down and saw her fist was clenched in a tight knot. She uncurled her fingers, made herself breathe. "Don't flatter yourself. Right now all I want to know is how the woman who gave you birth ended up homeless, living with the winos and drug addicts in Golden Gate Park."

"I don't-Golden Gate Park?" Anna Larina waved a hand at the photograph on the desk. "Is that where she ..."

"Was murdered? Yes. It happened in front of the Conservatory of Flowers. She was stabbed with a knife. The cops didn't know who she was at first-"

"And yet they came hotfooting it right to you with their crime-scene photos? So either they're psychic, or you're not telling me everything."

G.o.d, the woman is quick, Zoe thought. She needed to remember that. She'd learned in the martial arts not to let the enemy get inside your moves or inside your head; she needed to remember that Anna Larina was her enemy. Her mother was her enemy, and in her heart of hearts, since she was the smallest child, she'd always known that. She just didn't know why why.

"Before someone rammed a knife up to the hilt in her chest," Zoe said, deliberately making her words blunt, shocking, "your mother managed to swallow a piece of paper. Or half swallow it. It had my name and address on it."

Another cold smile curled Anna Larina's mouth. "Good Lord, how deliciously mysterious of the old woman. She knew where you were, yet she couldn't manage to find the time in between panhandling and urinating in doorways to drop by to see you before she was stabbed? No? Well, what a touching scene we all were spared."

"For G.o.d's sake, Mother."

"'For G.o.d's sake, Mother,' "Anna Larina mimicked. "What do you want from me, Zoe? Tears? I used mine up a long time ago."

Zoe uncurled her fist again, drew in another deep breath. "I thought maybe she'd been here to see you. Because how else would she have known about me?"

Again Zoe saw something flicker deep in Anna Larina's eyes. She knows something She knows something, Zoe thought. She knows what brought her mother here She knows what brought her mother here.

After a moment, Anna Larina shrugged and said, "It's not like either of us has been hiding out in the witness protection program. A three-minute search on Google would've done the trick."

She crossed her arms over her chest and went to look out the wall of gla.s.s, although there was nothing to see today, no bridge or bay, just clouds and rain. "So are we done here now, Zoe?"

"No, we are not done, Mother. Not even close. Let's say for the moment I believe you. That this is all such a big surprise to you. Was any of that sappy orphanage story you fed me over the years the truth?"

"Oh, G.o.d G.o.d," Anna Larina said in a burst of sudden and genuine exasperation. "What a stubborn little b.i.t.c.h you are, and, yes, of course you got that particular attribute from me. Very well. I'll allow you five more minutes to probe away at the festering childhood wounds you imagine I have, if only you will promise to leave me in peace afterward."

Anna Larina took a package of cigarettes and a gold lighter out of the pocket of her black cashmere pants and lit up. She watched the lighter's flame a moment, before she snapped it closed.

"The orphanage," Zoe said. "Was any of that real?"

"Oh, it was real all right. A big, ugly brownstone run by the Sisters of Charity in a run-down part of Columbus, Ohio. There were even bars on the windows, although I suspect they were more to keep the neighborhood riffraff out then us little Orphan Annies in. It wasn't all gruel and daily beatings, but it was still pretty grim. Only my mother was very much alive when she dumped me off there. Me and one small suitcase of clothes and a cardboard box with a few of my treasures."

"But why Ohio, of all places, when you were living in L.A.? And, besides, no woman would just up and abandon her child. She must have had a reason."

"You surprise me, Zoe. Given whose daughter you are and what you do for a living, you still have a remarkably rosy view of human nature."

"But you must have some inkling of why she did it. If not then, then now, looking back on it."

Anna Larina tilted her head back and blew a perfect smoke ring at the ceiling. "Must I?"

Zoe picked up the silver-framed photograph and returned it to its place on the desk. Anna Larina had cared enough to keep it where she could see it every day. The woman in front of the studio gates with her arm wrapped around her little girl's shoulders certainly looked happy, full of life. But this had been taken a year before the orphanage, if Anna Larina was to be believed.

"You told me she worked for Fox as a cinematographer-"

"More like a cameraman's gofer, I think. Although ..." Anna Larina trailed off, staring at the end of her cigarette, as if she was really trying to remember now.

"I think the studio was finally putting her to work behind the camera there at the end. I remember she'd already done some actual filming for one picture, and she was all excited because they were about ready to go into production on another. I was worried because it was coming up on my birthday-I was going to be nine-and I was afraid she'd get so wrapped up with her new job that when the big day arrived, she wouldn't remember it. But then we ran off before that could happen, just took off in the middle of the night, or so it seemed to me. She didn't even bother to leave a note for Mike."

"Mike? Who was Mike?"

"Mike O'Malley. My stepfather, or I guess it would be more accurate to call him Mother's husband, since he was hardly much of a father to me. But then they were only married for a couple of months before we took off."

"Husband?" Zoe stared at her mother. "This is the first time you've ever mentioned you had a stepfather." Zoe stared at her mother. "This is the first time you've ever mentioned you had a stepfather."

"Like I said, it was only for a couple of months, and even then he wasn't around the house all that much. He was a location scout for the studio and on the road a lot of the time, and before your mind can leap to any movie-of-the-week scenarios-no, he didn't beat her, and he never touched me inappropriately, as they say. He barely seemed aware of my existence."

"Beatings and child abuse aren't the only reasons women leave their husbands."

Anna Larina shook her head. "If you say so. Only I was there, and on our way out of town that night she pulled over at a stoplight so she could bawl her eyes out and moon over his picture-the whole sad, broken-heart drill. So, no, I don't believe she left him willingly."

"Just because she loved him doesn't mean she didn't have a good reason to be afraid of him."

"Again I bow to your vast experience, Zoe. All I know is she threw me and a few things in the car and we didn't stop driving-I mean, we literally did not stop except for taking naps alongside the road until we hit the Scioto River. And now we're back to where we started this little trip down memory lane, with her dumping me in that orphanage full of kisses and promises that she'd be back in a few weeks and me believing her."

"But she didn't come back. So what happened? No, not that tale you told me about her dying in an automobile accident. The truth."

"I don't know what happened to her. There's no reason for me to lie about it now. I don't know. The weeks went by, then months, then years, and during all that time I still believed she was coming back for me. No phone calls, no letters, not even a card on my birthdays and I still believed, and then one day I just stopped believing. Did I think she was dead? I really don't know. Maybe I hoped so. I just knew I was dead to her."

Zoe didn't know how much of that to believe, except for those last five words. I knew I was dead to her I knew I was dead to her. They sounded as if they had truly come right from the depths of Anna Larina Dmitroff's soul.

"Did she ever tell you anything about her past before she was born? About her family? Where she came from?"

Anna Larina uncrossed her arms, turning away from the window. "She never said so outright, but from what little I know, she was probably illegitimate. Like I am. She used to tell me she was her mother's only child, like I was her only child, and that her mother always crooned to her about how she was born a blessed girl child, from a proud long line, and she couldn't be the last. Like it was supposed to be a special thing, to mean something, although what I haven't a clue."

But she did have a clue, Zoe thought, for again she'd caught that sheen of secret knowledge in her mother's eyes.

"It sounds sweet," Zoe said. It certainly didn't sound like anything else Anna Larina had ever said to her, and Zoe felt a deep ache from the loss of this grandmother she'd never known. "What else? Was she born here or in Russia?"

Anna Larina gave Zoe an impatient look, then she shrugged. "She was born in Shanghai, of all places. On the very day the j.a.panese invaded. She used to tell this crazy story that her mother, whose name was Lena, Lena Orlova, had escaped from a prison camp called Norilsk in Siberia and walked all the way to China, if you can believe that."

Anna Larina paused, shrugged again. "At some point after the war, though, Lena hooked up with a gem dealer from Hong Kong, and he brought her and my mother to live with him there. A few years later Lena went to buy some fish off a sampan, slipped on the gangplank, hit her head, and drowned in the harbor. I think my mother was fifteen, maybe sixteen at the time. Old enough, anyway, to make it on her own."

Zoe had never heard any of this before. It sounded exotic, adventurous. Until you really thought about what life would have been like in a Siberian prison camp and a city ravaged by war.

"Did she ever tell you how she got from Hong Kong to L.A.?"

"No, she never did. Although she had plenty of stories, full of the most amazing details, about her own mother, Lena. And that miraculous escape out of Siberia."

Her mother's words dripped with their usual sarcasm, but Zoe got the feeling that some small corner of Anna Larina's shriveled heart was as fascinated with this family history as she was.

"Like what sort of details?"

"Oh, how Lena walked only at night, so that her fur-wrapped silhouette wouldn't stand out against the snow-shrouded tundra, and how she built snow huts for shelter and made fires with moss sc.r.a.ped from rocks and tree trunks. And how she fed herself by milking reindeer and fis.h.i.+ng from holes cut in the ice.

"Finally, after months of walking she ended up on a gra.s.sy hill overlooking the river that separated Russia from Mongolia, eating wild potatoes she'd dug up from a field and staring at the red poles that marked the border. The poles, topped by round metal signs painted with a hammer and sickle, were s.p.a.ced every quarter mile or so, and she watched for two days and two nights, but she never saw any patrols. So in the end she simply walked from one side of the poles to the other, just one more step in a life of thousands that she'd taken since escaping from Norilsk."

It seemed impossible to Zoe to even imagine the courage and the strength of will that must have taken, and she felt small in comparison to this great-grandmother that she'd never heard about until now.

"So then what happened?"

"She kept on walking. Until one day she came across a shriveled old man with a rotting sampan, who took her downriver with him as far as he could, then turned her over to a great-nephew who gave her a ride on his vegetable cart. The great-nephew had a friend who worked as a brakeman on the railroad, and the brakeman had a brother, and so on, and she was pa.s.sed from one person to another down the length of China. Until she found herself floating into Shanghai on a garbage scow and going into labor with my mother."

"Katya."

"Yes." Anna Larina stubbed her cigarette out in a crystal ashtray on the desk. "And G.o.d alone knows who the father was.... Is this really all that important, Zoe? Who cares? Lena's long dead, and now her daughter is, too, and from the looks of her, she was homeless, pathetic. Old. Someone probably knifed her for the pint of cheap whiskey she had in her pocket."

"G.o.d, what is wrong with you? She was your mother mother. All those years missing, cut out, a mystery-and now, suddenly, she's here and someone kills her, and you act like you couldn't care less. It's obvious she's been running from something all this time."

"Is it?"

"You know it is. So what scared her so badly that summer and then kept her scared for so long? Who would want her dead, and why?"

"I don't know know," Anna Larina shouted, slamming her fist down on the desk so hard the lamp rocked. But it wasn't anger. Zoe had seen her mother angry before and this wasn't it.

Zoe picked up the crime-scene photograph and tucked it back into her satchel. "I'm going to the morgue to see her. Do you want to come?"

Her mother didn't bother to answer, just gave her a look.

"Then I take it you won't mind if I make the funeral arrangements."

Her mother laughed at that. "Really, Zoe. You can't shame the shameless-you should know that by now." Anna Larina waved a hand. "Do whatever you like with her. Although if it matters, she was Russian Orthodox. You may send me an announcement after you decide."

The room fell into a heavy silence. Zoe stood in the middle of the ivory silk rug. She felt suddenly lost, drained. She could think of nothing more to say to this woman.

But then, on her way to the door, she did think of something else. "Have you ever heard of the altar of bones?"

Anna Larina was back in her designer chair behind the black marble desk, closing up her laptop. She looked up and said just a shade too casually, "No. Why?"

"Never mind. It's not important."

Zoe started to turn away again, but her mother's voice stopped her. "It was your father's choice to put that gun to his head, Zoe. His choice to pull the trigger. He left left you, deliberately took himself out of your life forever, but you couldn't accept that. You had to blame someone, and so you blamed me." you, deliberately took himself out of your life forever, but you couldn't accept that. You had to blame someone, and so you blamed me."

Zoe fought back the pain. Even after all these years, it was still an unutterable pain. "Daddy loved me."

"Oh, I have no doubt he believed he loved you. He simply loved himself more. He was a vain man, and he was weak. He turned the family business over to me, and then he hated me for doing the very things he wanted done but didn't have the guts to do himself."

"He loved me," Zoe said, shaking inside. "And that's always been your problem, hasn't it, Mother? You're jealous. Jealous of your own daugh-"

A sudden, sharp knock on the door cut her off. Her mother stared at her a moment longer, the color for once high on her pale cheeks. Then she dismissed her with a turn of her back. "Come in."

The door opened and a big man walked through it. Black, black hair, violent blue eyes, cruel mouth. He didn't look much older than Zoe, only in his midthirties. But the brutality in him was two lifetimes older.

He looked from her to her mother, than said in Russian, "Two cops are at the front door."