Eli was just in there. Only yards away. I touched the little pouch that hung around my neck.
In a sheer crazy moment, I decided I’d go back to the hotel. I’d get my guns from the safe. I’d return to this spot and walk through that archway and shoot everyone I saw. Take the keys from the corpse of the jailer. Free Eli from his cell. We would leave, leave this city.
I struggled against this impulse with all the strength I could muster.
“Keep off the sidewalk if you ain’t walking,” a stumpy man growled at me as he shoved me aside.
I nearly drew my knife. That proved to me that I wasn’t thinking clear. The man didn’t deserve to die for shoving me. Probably.
I lingered for five more minutes. I wished with all my heart that Eli could know I was close.
Then I made myself leave before someone in a police uniform noticed me.
I went by Felicia’s school, but the woman on duty in the reception room said Felicia was in class and couldn’t be disturbed. I asked the grigori to tell Felicia I’d been there, and she said she would. I believed her. She was nicer than that Tom O’Day.
At loose ends, fighting the urge to return to Folsom Street and yearn across the pavement some more, I walked through the botanical gardens. I didn’t have anything else to do. It was pretty, if you liked plants. The climate of San Diego was so moderate that flowers were showing now, in January.
My mother would have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.
I was standing outside my hotel at four when Felix pulled up to the curb.
“You look like death warmed over,” he said as I climbed in. He pulled right back out into traffic, which was heavy. And noisy.
“Yeah?” I said. I realized I hadn’t eaten lunch. I thought I’d eaten breakfast? Maybe. And I hadn’t slept well, despite all the walking I’d done the previous day. I’d been thinking of Eli in a cell.
“This has to end soon,” I said.
Felix gave me a quick sour look. “You haven’t twitched when people died in front of you. But Eli’s arrest has wiped you out?”
“Yes.”
“You’re so strange. Pull your socks up, gunnie.”
“Pot’s calling the kettle black.” I could hear my grandmother’s voice in my head as I repeated her favorite saying.
“Fair.” Felix nodded.
“Do you really want to marry Lucy?” I said. This was not an unrelated thought.
Felix gave it some thought. “I respect her,” he said at last. “She’s young, and she’s been brought up an aristocrat, but she’s strong. Lucy would be career suicide for most men, after her father was branded a traitor. For me, it won’t make a difference. And that would leave only one sister’s future for Eli to worry about.”
I figured it was possible Veronika Savarov wanted a future, too. She couldn’t be much more than forty. Maybe Felix thought Veronika had had her chance.
There were some words I hadn’t heard that I’d hoped to hear. “Love” and “affection,” mainly. Even knowing what I knew of Felix, those were possible. “So you’ve decided to marry Lucy to help out Eli,” I said. It sounded unbelievable even as I said it.
“No one cares what grigoris do.” Felix shrugged.
“Somebody sure seems to care what Eli does.”
“Oh, of course, maybe princes like Eli. But I’m nobody, in a social sense,” Felix said. He didn’t sound particularly bitter. “I have no pedigree to live up to. Lucy will be lowering herself if she accepts my proposal. But I think marriage to me is preferable to staying home with her mother and sister for the rest of her life.”
“Romantic,” I said. “That’ll sweep her off her feet.”
Felix shrugged again. “It’s the truth. And it’s also the truth that I think we would suit each other. Lucy’s young, yes, ten years younger than me. But I don’t care. Maybe she won’t.”
I understood Felix’s reasons for marrying Lucy, and they were all practical. I wondered if such a marriage would live up to Lucy’s expectations. Only if she were very unworldly or very … hell, who cared about my opinion, anyway?
“Do you think Peter can carry out a plan?” I said, changing course. “He doesn’t think before he acts.”
“Peter almost got you killed, Eli told me.”
“Hadn’t been for Peter’s interference, I wouldn’t have gotten shot. Or at least, not shot so bad.” I had worked out my plan so carefully. Peter’s sudden appearance had set off the chain of events that had put me in the hospital.
“I think if he has clear directions and we drum it in that he has to stick to them, Peter will be fine. He loves Eli, and he’s talented. He may be as good as Eli, someday, if he lives that long.”
“Also, no one else is going to volunteer to help,” I said.
“That is absolutely the truth.” Felix looked grim.
“I have a plan,” I said.
“You too? All right, we’ll hear yours first. Now, we’re going to go to my house, and I’m going to watch you eat something and drink a lot of water or lemonade. Then we’ll plot.”
So that was what we did.
“Plot” sounded like we were doing something wrong, and getting Eli out of jail was absolutely right, so I preferred to call it “plan.”
Felix fried sausages and potatoes at his house.
I watched him moving around the little kitchen. Maybe I didn’t dislike Felix as much as I had. He was not friendly, and he was a killer, and he loved secrets, but he’d done a few decent things.
I couldn’t sit idle while he worked, so I began to straighten the living room. Felix didn’t seem to mind. It wasn’t like I mopped. It was a matter of refolding newspapers, stacking magazines, dumping the wastebasket. I found what might be a dustrag and used it to wipe surfaces.
“How long have you known the Savarov family? Did you come over on the boat with them?” I called, so he’d hear over the pop of the grease and the scrape of the pans.
The fleet following the ship on which Nicholas Romanov and his family had fled had been ragtag and varied, all sizes of boats crowded with all sorts of people. The refugees were united by one thing: the fact that they would have been killed if they had stayed in Russia.
A bullet had actually whizzed past Nicholas’s head as he’d boarded. He’d insisted on being the last to get on the ship, so he would be the last to leave Russian soil. Romantic. Dumb.
Felix stood still, spatula in hand, and looked down at the potatoes like they were a crystal ball. “My sister and I were on one of the smaller vessels, hardly better than a fishing boat,” he said finally. One corner of his mouth turned down. “Our father just qualified to be on the boat, since he was one of the tsar’s favorite attendants. Our mother was dead by then. The quarters were crowded. That’s putting it mildly. But that didn’t last long.”
I waited, because I was sure he was going to tell me more. I was right.
“We didn’t have enough food or water. We were as hungry as we’d been in Russia. My sister died on the boat. We had to push her body into the ocean.” Felix turned the sausages over again, but he was doing it without thought.
I was sorry I’d asked, but now I felt obliged to hear the rest of his story.