Free Requiem For a Glass Heart by David Lindsey Page A

in
art
, for God’s sake! You will see how perfect this is when you read the files.” He sat back in his chair and stretched out his arms, opening his hands to her. “And you’re beautiful!”
    There was silence.
    “Sergei …”
    “What are you talking about, dammit!” he blurted fiercely, slapping the Regency table so hard his spoon leapt off the saucer and hit her hand. His face was tumid with anger.
    It was futile for her to say anything else. She stared at her teacup, her finger lightly touching the thin gold rim, the intricate cobalt pattern.
    Krupatin was silent. The house was silent, and then awall creaked, the way a house will do when one is alone, and Irina clung to that sound as though it were an actual piece of wood, a plank of drifting wreckage to keep her afloat in the deep, ominous sea of her disconsolation.
    “Irina, what are you talking about?” The tension had vanished from his voice, which now conveyed only a cajoling irritation.
    “Nothing,” she said. They both knew she would not bring it up again, and she would not talk about it even if begged to do so.
    “You’re tired,” he said, his voice lilting to sympathetic tones, “and you should be. Of course. I should have waited a few days to bring these to you. But I was so eager—I just didn’t think. Look, why don’t you just sleep tomorrow, then, in another day or so, look at the files. I’m asking too much of you. I’m sorry.”
    He reached across the table and took her hand from the teacup and gently held it in his own.
    God, how she hated his condescension, his door-to-door salesmanship that was so insultingly transparent. She didn’t know whether he was mocking her or he really believed that this pots-and-pans psychology was effective.
    She had known Krupatin a long time, had seen him emerge from the human debris of the Russian criminal world by sheer will and unrelenting cunning, and she had benefited from and suffered with him as his fortunes rose and he had dragged her along by his cruelty. He could buy all the expensive suits that the British tailors could make, he could become more handsome than a film star and accumulate even more wealth to separate him further from his former poverty, but she always would see Satan in those sad eyes. And always she would fear that he would carry out the only threat he had ever made against her, which had served to bind her more closely to him than the acts of sexual intercourse of the past, and which reached further into her being than she ever could have imagined, even into her own death and beyond.
    She thought of this now as he looked at her, and she thought she could see a glimmering of his old desires. She had learned that they were complicated desires, fueled by ambition and power and the erotic aura of what she had come to represent to him. She was afraid that in his mind she hadcome full circle: the Red Angel of Desire and the Black Angel of Death were beating their great wings in the back of Krupatin’s soul. There they were engaged in a tumultuous struggle, like two celestial cocks who in the frenzy of their carnage had become indistinguishable.

“A LMOST TWO WEEKS AGO ,” H AIN BEGAN, SPEAKING DIRECTLY to Cate, “I got a teletype lead in my office in Washington from legat Moscow. He had received pretty good source information that Krupatin’s going to be making a trip to the U.S. and that he’s probably headed here, to Houston. Now, this isn’t the first time he’s been to the States. There’s a sizable Russian émigré community in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and Russian organized crime is well established there. Krupatin’s been to Brighton Beach three times in the last two years—that we know about. We think he’s also been in under false documents on a number of occasions.”
    “The Russian
mafiya
gangs operating there now are not actually organized,” Loder picked up. She was sitting with her purse in her lap as she brushed her hair, pulling it back in a ponytail.