“Sir,” said someone.
“Please don’t interrupt,” said the director. “I’m trying to—”
“Sir, please. Look at the monitor.”
All eyes went to the silent newsfeed on the screen of the television mounted in the corner.
“Mystery blast in Moscow,” ran the crawl under the image, which depicted the common sight of first responders working a site of excessive destruction while red lights flashed.
Someone turned the sound up.
“—have confirmed that the limousine contained the controversial Vassily Strelnikov, on his way to the Kremlin to be sworn in as the new minister of trade. He is among the four dead on the scene outside the Strelnikov mansion in this fashionable section of Moscow. Just who is responsible—terrorists or Russian Mafia figures or other actors—is unknown at this point but—”
“Nice work, Gershon,” said the director.
“I had no idea I was on such good terms with the Almighty,” said Gershon.
“He doesn’t even go to synagogue,” said Cohen.
CHAPTER 57
Idaho
Outside Cascade
THE PRESENT
MILI GOT HER MAN: NEW evidence suggests discredited Russian sniper may have killed Nazi war criminal, by Kathy Reilly and Will French, Washington Post Moscow Correspondents, ran as a three-part series, debuting on a Sunday on Page 1 under digitally enhanced photos of both Mili and Obergruppenführer Groedl across six of the newspaper’s eight columns. It got more Web hits than anything in Post history for a single day; it sold fifty thousand extra paywall subscriptions; and it is a front-runner for the upcoming Pulitzer Prize in Feature writing.
For Kathy, it meant a munificent book contract to develop the series into a book. She took a six-month book leave, right after she and Will wound up their coverage of the assassination of Vassily Strelnikov on the way to his swearing-in as trade minister, while Will alone went to Astrakhan to cover the mysterious “abandoned freighter loaded with poison gas” story.
For Swagger, there were numerous pleasures. When he returned home, Miko was back from her riding camp in the East, and father and daughter and mother had a good three weeks of family. Nikki flew in from Washington for a weekend, and the next, Ray and Molly, who was pregnant. It was a good time.
Still: they went home. Then fall arrived. October turned out to be the cruelest month. Swagger’s children went back to their lives, his wife back to her office and the business, he theoretically to his rifles, his 6.5 Creedmoor project, his long rides, the things he did that he enjoyed. But he was alone again, not with ghosts, not with regrets, but with—what?
“You’re in love with her, too, you crazy old coot.” Reilly had yelled that at him, and though he never would have put it in such naked words, he supposed it was true. He couldn’t stop imagining Mili, whose face he’d never seen except in the 1943 magazine blow-up, in the circumstances she’d deserved: Mili with her kids. Mili goes out to dinner. Mili on the job. Mili in her life, a good life, a life both loved and loving. As if Swagger were some kind of screwball angel in some screwball ’40s movie. Yet the images gave him such comfort. Even if they’d never happened, they should have happened, not because she was beautiful, brave, a warrior, but because she was one of the lost millions who got in the way of madmen and, all these years later, had been largely forgotten.
He thought: The least I can do is help the world remember her. And maybe we did that. It’s not much, but it’s something.
He was an old man in a dry month. He was hard, stoic, isolate, unmelted. He rocked on the porch, closing hard on sixty-eight, and watched as frost came and took the land. The green grass turned colorless and stiff, the trees went threadbare, the piles of clouds seemed to gray with age as they sped over the landscape trailing shadow, and a chill came into the air. Dead leaves rode spurts of breeze this way and that, and migratory fowl beat wings southward, trailing a forlorn racket.
“You need a mission,” Jen said.
“I am out of the mission business,” he said. “Here I sit. Call the crematorium when I stop rocking, and that’ll be that.”
“It’s the girl, isn’t it? Bob, what did you expect? It was a war. You know war better than any man alive. When you can’t fight in someone else’s war, you invent your own, because you need to feel alive in the strange way your head is wired. But ever since your first tour, you’ve known the terrible part of it: good people die all the time. So it goes in the cruel, cruel world.”
“I know. Get over it. Wish I could. Jen, it ain’t just ‘Okay, now I’m all better.’ It’s not like that.”