“I suspect,” he said, “that your family and mine were equally unconventional.”
“I’ve never met my mother’s sister, Aunt Cymry, but my father says she’s a dangerous mutant they’ve locked away somewhere.”
The Russian shrugged. “I would nevertheless wager heavily on the equivalency of our families. Should I lead the way or follow you?”
If he contained chaos on some level below wardrobe and face and eyes, it must be in his mind. I wondered what kind of strange order might underlie it.
“Sir, I’ve never driven in snow before. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to tell, under all the drifts, exactly where the driveway runs between here and the abbey. I’d have to plow by intuition—though I usually do all right that way.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Thomas, I believe that experience trumps intuition. Russia is a world of snow, and in fact I was born during a blizzard.”
“During a blizzard, in a mortuary?”
“Actually, in a library.”
“Was your mother a librarian?”
“No,” he said. “She was an assassin.”
“An assassin.”
“That is correct.”
“Do you mean assassin figuratively or literally, sir?”
“Both, Mr. Thomas. When driving behind me, please remain at a safe distance. Even with four-wheel drive and chains, there is some danger of sliding.”
“I feel like I’ve been sliding all day. I’ll be careful, sir.”
“If you do start to slide, turn the wheel into the direction of the slide. Do not try to pull out of it. And use the brakes gently.” He walked to the other SUV and opened the driver’s door.
Before he climbed behind the wheel, I said, “Sir, lock your doors. And if you see anything unusual in the storm, don’t get out of the truck to have a closer look at it. Keep driving.”
“Unusual? Such as?”
“Oh, you know, anything unusual. Say like a snowman with three heads or someone who looks like she might be my Aunt Cymry.”
Romanovich could peel an apple with his stare.
With a little good-luck wave, I got into my truck, and after a moment, he got into his.
After he drove around me to the foot of the ramp, I pulled in behind him.
He used his remote opener, and at the top of the incline, the big door began to roll up.
Beyond the garage lay a chaos of bleak light, shrieking wind, and a perpetual avalanche of falling snow.
CHAPTER 35
IN FRONT OF ME, RODION ROMANOVICH DROVE out of the garage into hammers of wind and shatters of snow, and I switched on my headlamps. The drowned daylight required them in this feathered rain.
Even as those beams brought sparkle to the dull white curtains of snow, Elvis materialized in the passenger seat as though I had switched him on, as well.
He was dressed in his navy-frogman scuba suit from Easy Come, Easy Go, possibly because he thought I needed a laugh.
The black neoprene hood fitted tightly to his head, covering his hair, his ears, and his forehead to the eyebrows. With his face thus isolated, the sensuous quality of his features was weirdly enhanced, but not to good effect. He looked not like a navy frogman but rather like a sweet little bow-lipped Kewpie doll that some pervert had dressed in a bondage costume.
“Oh, man, that movie,” I said. “With that one, you gave new meaning to the word ridiculous.”
He laughed soundlessly, pretended to shoot me with a spear gun, and phased from the scuba suit into the Arabian costume he had worn in Harum Scarum.
“You’re right,” I agreed, “that one was even worse.”
When making his music, he had been the essence of cool, but in his movies he was often a self-parody embarrassing to watch. Colonel Parker, his manager, who had picked movie scripts for him, had served Elvis less well than the monk Rasputin had served Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.
I drove out of the garage, stopped, and thumbed the remote to put down the door behind me.
Using the rearview mirror, I watched until the door had closed entirely, prepared to shift into reverse and run down any fugitive from a nightmare that tried to enter the garage.
Apparently calculating the correct path of the driveway by a logical analysis of the topography, Romanovich plowed without error north-by-northwest, exposing blacktop as he ascended in a gentle curve.
Some of the scooped-away snow spilled back onto the pavement in his wake. I lowered my plow until it barely skimmed the blacktop, and cleaned up after him. I remained at the requested safe distance, both out of respect for his experience and because I didn’t want him to report me to his mother, the assassin.
Wind skirled as though a dozen Scottish funerals were under way. Concussive blasts rocked the SUV, and I was grateful that it was an extended model with a lower point of gravity, further anchored by the heavy plow.
The snow was so dry and the blow so relentlessly scolding that nothing stuck to the windshield. I didn’t turn on the wipers.
Scanning the slope ahead, left and right, checking the mirrors, I expected to see one or more of the bone beasts out for a lark in the blizzard. The white torrents foiled vision almost as effectively as a sandstorm in the Mojave, but the stark geometric lines of the creatures, by contrast, ought to draw the eye in this comparatively soft sweep of stormscape.
Except for the SUVs, nothing moved other than what the wind harried. Even a few big trees along the route, pines and firs, were so heavily weighed down by the snow already plastered on them that their boughs barely shivered in deference to the gale.
In the passenger seat, Elvis, having gone blond, had also phased into the work boots, peg-legged jeans, and plaid shirt he had worn in Kissin’ Cousins. He played two roles in that one: a dark-haired air-force officer and a yellow-haired hillbilly.
“You don’t see many blond hillbillies in real life,” I said, “especially not with perfect teeth, black eyebrows, and teased hair.”
He pretended to have a buck-toothed overbite and crossed his eyes to try to give the role more of a Deliverance edge.
I laughed. “Son, you’ve been going through some changes lately. You were never able to laugh this easily about your bad choices.”
For a moment he seemed to consider what I had said, and then he pointed at me.
“What?”
He grinned and nodded.
“You think I’m funny?”
He nodded again, then shook his head no, as if to say he thought I was funny but that wasn’t what he had meant. He pulled on a serious expression and pointed at me again, then at himself.
If he meant what I thought he did, I was flattered. “The one who taught me how to laugh at my foolishness was Stormy.”
He looked at his blond hair in the rearview mirror, shook his head, laughed silently again.
“When you laugh at yourself, you gain perspective. Then you realize that the mistakes you made, as long as they didn’t hurt anyone but yourself—well, you can forgive yourself for those.”
After thinking about that for a moment, he gave me one thumb up as a sign of agreement.
“You know what? Everyone who crosses over to the Other Side, if he didn’t know it before he went, suddenly understands the thousand ways he was a fool in this world. So everyone over there understands everyone over here better than we understand ourselves—and forgives us our foolishness.”
He knew that I meant his beloved mother would greet him with delighted laughter, not with disappointment and certainly not with shame. Tears welled in his eyes.
“Just think about it,” I said.
He bit his lower lip and nodded.
Peripherally, I glimpsed a swift presence in the storm. My heart jumped, and I turned toward the movement, but it was only Boo.
With canine exuberance, he appeared almost to skate up the hill, glorying in the winter spectacle, neither troubled by nor troubling the hostile landscape, a white dog racing through a white world.
After roundi
ng the back of the church, we drove toward the entrance to the guesthouse, where the brothers would meet us.
Elvis had phased from carefully coiffed hillbilly to physician. He wore a white lab coat, and a stethoscope hung around his neck.
“Hey, that’s right. You were in a movie with nuns. You played a doctor. Change of Habit. Mary Tyler Moore was a nun. Not immortal cinema, maybe not up there with the Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez oeuvre, but not egregiously silly.”
He put his right hand over his heart and made a patting motion to suggest a rapid beat.
“You loved Mary Tyler Moore?” When he nodded, I said, “Everybody loved Mary Tyler Moore. But you were just friends with her in real life, right?”
He nodded. Just friends. He made the patting motion again. Just friends, but he loved her.
Rodion Romanovich braked to a stop in front of the guesthouse entrance.
As I pulled up slowly behind the Russian, Elvis put the ear tips of the stethoscope in his ears and pressed the diaphragm to my chest, as though listening to my heart. His stare was meaningful and colored with sorrow.
I shifted into park, tramped the emergency brake, and said, “Son, don’t you worry about me. You hear? No matter what happens, I’ll be all right. When my day comes, I’ll be even better, but in the meantime, I’ll be all right. You do what you need to do, and don’t you worry about me.”