Chapter Twenty-Five – Hunter

 

I hefted the old lockbox onto my bed. They don’t manufacture them like this anymore, with the heavy wooden planks to contain everything, and the oversized metal latches on the front. Everything is plastic or polycarbonate. So light, yet so sturdy, that you almost begin to forget what old world craftsmanship was like.

No, times had changed in the last century. Not better, not worse. Just changed.

I flipped open the metal latch on the front, raised the old wooden lid, and swallowed hard as I looked down and took stock of the contents within. A bundle of letters, an old passport, a scarf Natalya had worn on one sunny May day over a hundred years ago. My old service revolver, which I’d worn at my side when I’d gone back.

I picked it up, the heft in my hand bringing back the time I’d spent in the trenches with my unit. I’d swallowed back my pride on the plane the day before with Kris. It wouldn’t have done to get into an argument about serving in a war that was more than a century old. That argument was just like the service revolver in my hand: its mechanisms rusted, the blue long faded and corroded away, its leather holster eaten by rot. Probably so far gone beyond repair that I couldn’t have even cracked the frame to get at the cylinder.

Just like memories. Given enough time, they all rot. They all fade. Even the good ones.

I placed the revolver back down in its little spot, the metal clinking against the glass of the liquor bottle. Mouth pressed into a line, I picked up the bottle, hefted it in my hand. There was a little more than two shots still at the bottom. Less than I remembered, but, well, what is memory?

Some brand name was on the front, but the label was so far gone I couldn’t read it. To tell the truth, I could barely even remember it, except that it had been expensive at the time.

Of course, back then, everything in Russia had been expensive. Especially with the shortages.

We’d drunk from this bottle on my last night in St. Petersburg, Natalya and I. Now, as I looked down at the glass in my hand, I thought back to her words at the time.

“Save the last two!” she’d said, laughing as she forced my hands away from the bottle.

“What? Let good vodka go to waste? Hardly the Natalya I know!”

“No, no, you fool! Not forever! It will give us something to toast with when you return to me.”

We’d kissed, then, and her lips had been as soft as ever. But behind that kiss, there’d been that feeling I was so familiar with after so many centuries of life. After so many centuries of human lovers.

It was that feeling of her knowing full well I’d never come back, no matter how much I swore I would.

We' never had a chance to drink those last two shots.

Raindrops fell from the ceiling, marring the old label even further as the ink ran down the front. Two, to be precise. One from each leak.

I sniffled a little as I considered how I really needed to get that roof looked at.

Taking the bottle in one hand, I went out to the kitchen, grabbing the file Kris had given me. In my junk drawer, because every kitchen has one, I took out a box of matches and went to go outside through the rear door. I stopped at the entrance to my hothouse, with its previously lush tangle of trees and shrubs and flowers and crawlers, sighing a long, aching sigh of regret.

I should have just paid a service to watch over them. I could have packed up my important belongings, put them under lock and key or some such, and just had someone come care for them.

But I hadn’t.

Because I’d thought it wouldn’t be more than a week.

Oh well. Maybe this somehow made my decision easier. After all, if this really was a suicide mission I was chasing after Kris on, then there still wouldn’t have been anyone to watch over my interior garden of delights. All of its evocative colors and brash details, all the work I’d put into it, would have gone completely unnoticed or remarked upon.

I pushed through the hothouse, the limbs of my dead plants like the hands of fallen friends on my shirtsleeves, as I made for the rear door. I flipped the multiple deadbolts, undid the chains, and let myself out.

The smell of bum sweat, cigarettes, rust, and urine met my nose as I stepped out back. There were some things I’d miss about this city, but not this. I turned down the alley that ran behind the length of my building, and came to a stop next to an old, pitted burn barrel. Blackened bottles, cans, and remnants of old paper and other refuse littered the bottom of it. It hadn’t been used in months, not since the cold nights had left Missouri.

I opened the folder, undid the brads holding in the pages, and began to unceremoniously dump the contents into the barrel. Every couple dozen of pages, I’d stop, light a page on fire with the kitchen matches, then toss the burning sheet in after its compatriots. In no time at all, I had a steady fire going, the heat reaching up to scorch my face as the cool morning air tried in vain to compete.

Soon, all the contents of my blackmail were in the barrel, and the flames were crackling as merrily as the hearth on Christmas Eve. As each page continued to blacken and curl, I stared down into the flames. I brought the bottle of vodka up, lifted it to the heavens for a moment, then took a drink.

I tried to think of a toast to give, but nothing seemed fitting. Nothing seemed to give Natalya the proper send-off she deserved, even if this wasn’t much of a send-off.

“To love,” I said finally, drinking down most of the last shot. The liquor burned all the way down, the age of it having done nothing to mellow the flavor. I raised it again, drank down the last of it. “To old debts.”

Done with the bottle, I tossed it in after the file. What was left of the fading, flaking label began to blacken and crackle beneath the heat of the flames as a smoke façade took root on the glass surface.

“To new beginnings,” I whispered. “And stupid ends.”