this is not the style of the Talamasca which I know. This thing, it is so dangerous…No. This does not fit with what I know of my Order, my brethren, not at all.”
“What in the world can you possibly mean?”
“You’re very patient with me. I appreciate it. But our Order is too smooth for all this. The Elders know how to take care of everything without creating suspicion and alarm. There’s something crude about the way it all happened. It would have been a simple thing for the Elders to keep me contented in London. To keep Aaron contented. But this is all clumsy, hasty. Impolite. I don’t know. This is not the Talamasca to me.”
“Yuri, the Order expected your complete obedience. It had a right to expect it.” For the first time, the man displayed a tiny bit of anger. He laid his napkin down on the table, rudely, beside his fork. Dirty napkin on the table. Napkin smeared with sugar and stained with droplets of coffee. Yuri stared at it.
“Yuri,” said Stolov. “Women have died in the last forty-eight hours. This doctor, Samuel Larkin, is probably dead too. Rowan Mayfair will die sometime during the next few weeks. The Elders did not expect that you would cause them trouble at this hour. They did not anticipate that you would add to their burdens, any more than they anticipated Aaron’s disloyalty.”
“Disloyalty?”
“I told you. He won’t leave the family. But he is an old man. There is nothing he can do against Lasher. There never was!” Anger again.
Yuri sat back. He thought for a long moment. He stared at the napkin. The man picked it up, wiped his mouth with it again and laid it back down. Yuri stared at it.
“I want to communicate with the Elders,” said Yuri. “I want to know these things from them.”
“Of course. Take Aaron with you today. Take him to New York. You’re tired. Rest first if you will, but only in a location known to us. Then go. And when you reach New York, you can contact the Elders. You will have time. You can discuss this between you, you and Aaron, and then you must go on back to London. You must go home.”
Yuri stood up. He laid the napkin on the chair. “Are you coming with me to see Aaron?”
“Yes, maybe it is for the best that you are here. Maybe it is for the best, for on my own I don’t know that I could ever have convinced him to leave here. We’ll go now. It’s time I talked to him myself.”
“You mean you have not done that?”
“Yuri, I have my hands full, as they say. And Aaron is not cooperative now.”
There was a car waiting for them, an egregious American Lincoln limousine. It was lined in gray velvet. Its glass was so dim that the outside world fell under an edict of utter night. Impossible to really see a city through such windows, Yuri thought. He sat very still. He was thinking of something that had happened to him years ago.
He was remembering the long train ride with his mother into Serbia. She had given him something. An ice pick, though he did not know what it was at the time. It was a long rounded and pointed instrument, made of metal, with a wooden handle which had once been painted, and from which the paint had been chipped away.
“Here, you keep this,” she’d said. “You use it if you have to. You stick it straight in…between the ribs.”
How fierce she’d looked in those moments. And he had been so startled. “But who’s going to hurt us?” he had asked. He did not know at this moment whatever became of the ice pick. Perhaps it had been left on the train.
He had failed her, hadn’t he? Failed her and himself. And now he realized—as this smooth car went up on the freeway, and gained speed—he had no weapon, no ice pick, no knife. Even the Swiss Army knife he carried he had left at home because he was taking a plane. They don’t want such things on a plane.
“You’ll feel better once you’ve communicated with the Elders, once you’ve reported in and been officially invited to return home.”
Yuri looked at Stolov, who sat there all in priestly black, with only a bit of white collar showing, and his large pale hands opening and closing as they rested on his knees.
Yuri smiled very deliberately. “You’re right,” he said. “A fax