CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The next day, the stitches came out in a painful but satisfactory job. Ben had put stitches in more than once, often on himself, but he’d never taken them out. He didn’t want to hurt Nikolas, but couldn’t help finding it funny when the stoic Special Forces Russian fussed and whined and swore throughout the whole operation. He took it as a sign of return to health and Nikolas-ness and tuned him out.
When it was over, the patient lay back exhausted, but after half an hour, he was flexing his knee, testing the wounds, and then he was up and taking careful steps. He seemed satisfied. “Good. A few more days and then we leave.”
“Where?”
“Well, I have come up with another option, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Uh huh.”
“You were right. I do want a future, and I want it with you. I don’t believe we can have that on the run. Neither do I believe that Gregory will accept a pay off for long. He would be greedy. He is Russian, after all. But what if I resurrected the idea of our agency—and I asked him to join us.”
Ben was silent for a moment then said as calmly as he could, “Well, you’re right about one thing—I don’t like it.” Then he let rip. “What the fuck! He’s trying to kill you!”
Nikolas did his irritating European gesture of dismissal. “In a way, yes. But he’s angry and bitter, and that is mostly because I did what we all dream of, I escaped. No one escapes from Zaslon, Ben. It wouldn’t be permitted. But I did it. What if I offered him the same opportunity? With my—our—help, he becomes a wealthy British citizen with a job. A new start. He couldn’t do this without my money and my help, but I believe he would go for it. After all, despite the fact he’s currently trying to kill me, we were friends once. Good friends. Close friends…in some ways.”
“How close?”
“Close enough for me to know how he thinks and he me. There’s a saying in Russia: keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”
“Yeah, yeah, everyone has that expression.”
“Well, there you go. It must be true.”
“What’s he like?”
Nikolas studied Ben for a long while. Then he began to laugh. He couldn’t stop. Eventually he coughed out, “You will hate him, but he will not…hate you. Not at all.” And that was all he would say, until the laughter made one of the cuts on his chest bleed again, and he had to allow Ben to stick it together with some tape. Even then, every time he looked at Ben’s increasingly stony expression, he clenched his jaw to keep his face straight.
Ben decided to go for a run. He needed the exercise, but mostly he wanted to get away from Nikolas for a while so he could think about the latest option without the distracting presence of the man he just wanted to lose himself to every time he was near. He felt that disquieting slipping away of his own identity with this new Aleksey even more forcibly than he’d felt it with the old, more aloof Nikolas. He put on his boots and some old lightweights, called for the dog, and set off up the tor, and then headed off into the open moorland. He’d only been gone an hour when the mist came down, and what had been a hot summer day turned into a cold, wet world of uneven ground and unreliable footholds. After falling for a second time, he reckoned he was only persevering to prove some point that no one but he was bothered about anyway, so he turned around and headed back, slightly more careful and making sure Radulf stayed close to his side. The mist lessened as he descended from the tor, but by then a steady drizzle had begun, which turned into heavy rain by the time he’d splashed over the stream-covered bridge and made it back to the house. He was very cold, wet, and muddy, and for the first time began to see some disadvantages to his plan of camping out in an unfurnished house.
He was bending in the doorway to the kitchen, removing his boots, when he sensed Nikolas in the room watching him. Nikolas held out a towel, and when Ben came closer began to rub his hair with it. He undressed Ben, peeling off his wet clothes and then pulled him closer to the fireplace, where he’d lit a fire and hung one of the sleeping bags to warm. Ben let him wrap it around him wordlessly. It was the first time Nikolas had ever really looked after him the way he constantly and naturally looked after Nikolas, and it left him bemused and off balance. When he had Ben sitting by the fire, Nikolas slipped in behind him, stretching his injured leg out carefully. He sighed, sliding his warm hands in under the sleeping bag and across Ben’s cold stomach. He kissed into his neck and seemed quite content just sitting there watching the flames with the sound of the rain beating down outside.
Gradually, Ben grew warm and stopped shivering. He relaxed back into Nikolas’s arms, which tightened almost automatically around him. As the minutes passed, the atmosphere of the old house began to work its strange magic on Ben. He felt compelled to think about his mother. Perhaps being wet and cold from a moorland run was reminiscent of his time as a boy in Yorkshire. He almost felt as if she were in the room with him. He could picture her there, sure enough, humming something tuneful as she rolled pastry. Had she ever rolled pastry? He couldn’t remember. He felt Nikolas shift position a little behind him. He wondered how many times he had sat with this man, or lain with him after sex, when Nikolas had been thinking about his past, his mother perhaps, stirred to sad memories by something he, Ben, had said or done unconscious of the effect this would have on the other. How had Nikolas stayed silent about his mother during their trip to Saddleworth? “It is your mother’s grave, Benjamin. Even you are allowed to cry here.” It saddened and infuriated Ben in equal measure that Nikolas was so unable or unwilling to unburden himself. He hadn’t even had a body to morn. Ten years old, swimming out in a frozen ocean, seeking her…It made him shiver to think about it.
“Are you still cold?”
Ben bit his lip and shook his head slightly. “Tell me about your mother. What do you remember about her?”
Nikolas sighed. “More questions. You should have been employed by the Inquisition, Benjamin.”
“I want to know.” I want you to talk about it.
“That’s something I don’t like to talk about.”
Ben shook his head despairingly but amused by the exact repetition of his internal dialogue. “You don’t like talking about anything.”
“The other things I don’t like because they don’t paint me in a good light, and as you know, I like to be the perfect, shining hero of all your imaginings. Stop laughing, you are hurting my leg. This I do not like to talk about because it’s painful.”
“You do remember her then?”
“Of course, foolish child. I was ten. Two years older than you when your mother died.”
“Was she—? I mean, did you suspect she would ever…?”
“What? Just say it. Did we think she would kill herself? Of course not. We were ten. We had never known another mother, so we thought she was quite normal.”
“She was very beautiful.”
“How do—? Ah, Kate again. Yes, she was. Very.”
“You look like her.”
“So they said.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“God, Ben, you test my patience.” It was said in an annoyed voice, but the arms around him and the way Nikolas breathed in the scent of him as he spoke told Ben a different story. Eventually, by saying nothing, he made Nikolas fill the void. “She had been on the telephone all morning. For some reason I remember that. I had cut myself and wanted her to look at the wound, but she was on the telephone. She tucked the receiver under her ear—to hold it? Do you even remember telephones that could be tucked under the ear? I forget that you’re only a baby sometimes. Anyway, she held my finger as she was listening, to stop the blood.” He stopped and Ben felt he could have actually reached out and plucked these memories as real and tangible things from the air so vivid was this little scene. “She was…” When Nikolas didn’t continue, Ben twisted around in his arms to look at him. Nikolas was staring up at the ceiling, biting his lip. He swallowed. “She was crying. Someone was shouting on the other end of the line, but I didn’t understand what he was saying. I think it was something to do with school. With me. I had forgot to go that week. I was busy, you know, with other more interesting things. I was making weapons for my invasion plans, but I had cut myself…So, I think it was the school telling her I hadn’t gone and she was crying. She said she was going for a walk on the beach. It was the middle of winter and even the edge of the sea was frozen. Her clothes were there, neatly folded, but her body was never found.”
Ben was utterly silenced by the weight of unspoken guilt in Nikolas’s recitation, but he pushed past his intense desire not to speak. “You didn’t understand what the voice was saying? Could it have been maybe not Danish?”
There was silence for a while then Nikolas replied hesitantly, “Maybe. She didn’t speak in Danish when she hung up.”
“So, maybe it wasn’t anything to do with school? Anything to do with you?” Or everything to do with you. “Nik, can I say something without you biting my head off?”
“Oh, like you’re repressed and not allowed to ask questions. That would be the day.”
“I don’t want you to sulk and be angry with me. Promise?”
“Are you ten? Okay, okay, ask your questions. I am skinned to the bone and eviscerated by you already.”
“Had your father made any moves to get you both to Russia before she died? Moves that she was maybe resisting? Could she have been talking to him? In Russian?”
Nikolas’s hold tightened unconsciously around Ben as if even thinking this made him anxious. “It could’ve been Russian. Why?”
“The timing of her death was very convenient…”
There was a long silence. Ben could almost hear the wheels turning. “No. That’s not possible. She killed herself because I…” He didn’t sound all that certain now, however.
Ben didn’t say anymore, and Nikolas was silent for the rest of the day. Whatever complex reassessment of thirty-year-old events he was making, Ben felt he should have time and space to make without further contribution from him.
That night, for the first time, Ben moved his mat over to Nikolas’s and arranged it so both sleeping bags were open and spread above them creating a double bed; albeit not a luxury one they usually enjoyed.
Ben spooned Nikolas to him, Nikolas’s cold back against his chest, both soon warming to the naked bodily contact. After a long time, when Ben felt sure Nikolas must be asleep, he heard Nikolas’s uncharacteristically tentative voice. “How likely is it that we both had fathers who murdered our mothers? That’s ridiculous.”
“Yeah. I guess. But neither of us knew it.”
“I don’t see your logic in that.” There was another long pause, and then Nikolas added, “I hated her. After what she did. Within a week, we were taken from our house and the life we knew, the freedom, and from our language, and to…well, I blamed her for it all. I thought she was weak. That all women were weak. I have never liked women very much because of her. I saw some of this anger in you and wanted you to know that your mother didn’t abandon you, but I never thought…”
“Now you know maybe.”
“Yes. But it doesn’t help. Now I know that all the things my father told me, to encourage this view I had of her weakness and her lack of love for me, were lies. That he was only telling me this to enable—” He stopped and Ben could not help but feel the tenseness creep into the body pressed tightly against him. “He said what we did together was true love and that it proved he loved me when she had not.”
“Jesus, Nik. I’m so sorry.”
“I wish now it had been me to pull the trigger.”
After a while, Ben said lightly, “At least look on the bright side; you may start liking women now. You know, get into the whole girlfriend scene: dating, flowers, and chocolates, having to be nice, gentle, do the romance thing, all that puss—”
“Stop!” Nikolas was laughing, which is what Ben had wanted, so he didn’t complete his suggestions for Nikolas’s new sex life. With some care, Nikolas turned so he was facing Ben in the dark. They couldn’t see each other, even this close up, but Ben could feel warm breath on his face and honed in on it to kiss. They kissed for a long time, lazily enjoying tongue and taste, and knowing that they were hard but not desperately so and quite enjoying the feeling without the great desire or need to do anything about it. When Nikolas eased his mouth away, he said simply, “I hated myself, Ben. I thought I’d killed her by not being a good son. I let Sergei do what he did because I didn’t care about anything.” He put a finger to Ben’s lips to avoid any response for he did not seem to need one and added, “Have you thought about my suggestion for the Gregory problem?”
Ben allowed him the reprieve from his sad past and replied, “The Gregory problem. Yeah, I have. I guess we can try it your way. I was thinking that if he agrees and does come to work with us, it would be easier to kill him, one of those advantages of keeping your enemies close.”
Nikolas made a small choked noise in the back of his throat then rolled onto his back. “We think too much alike, Benjamin. That thought had occurred to me as well. The trouble is—”
“He’ll have thought of it, too.”