In For the Kill (McClouds & Friends #11)(50)

Everyone watched as he twisted and snagged the kitchen shears out of the knife block on the kitchen bar behind him.

“Sam!” Sveti leaped up and started around the table. “Stop! That’s mine! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Changing history.” He cut into the photo, angling the shears carefully around Sergei’s head to cut out Zhoglo’s face.

Sveti skidded to a stop next to him, poppy red. “That was not yours to alter,” she said, her voice tight. “You had no right to do that!”

He’d be damned if he’d apologize. He shook the shears. The scrap of photo fell from the blades and fluttered onto the table.

“You can’t change the past.” Sveti’s voice quivered, dangerously.

“No?” Sam stabbed the point of the scissors in the middle of Zhoglo’s face. “You can change how you think about it.”

“And you think it’s so simple? How the f*ck would you know?”

Sean fidgeted uneasily. “Um, guys? This sounds like the kind of argument you two should have in private.”

Sam lifted up the shears, with the offending scrap stuck upon the point. “Burn this ugly motherf*cker,” he said. “Burn him to ash.”

Nick looked around. “I’m with that program,” he said. “Anybody here have a lighter? Nobody smokes in this crowd anymore.”

A box of kitchen matches sailed into the air from the other side of the bar, lobbed by Rachel. The box bounced on the table, sliding open. Wooden matches spilled out.

Sveti stood like a statue, fists clenched. Sam held the shears out to her. An offering.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” she said. “And it won’t work.”

“I’m with Sam,” Becca said, her voice hard. “Burn it, Sveti.”

Tam banged her forehead against the table. “For the love of God, finish it,” she snarled. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

It was Becca, finally, who grabbed a match and scraped it against the box. The puff of sulfur burned Sam’s nose as the flame took hold. Becca held it up to the photographic paper.

They all watched it burn in silence. Flames blackened the edges, curling green and blue, shrinking from the outside in. Ghostly shards of ash drifted onto the table, disintegrating into a puff of gray dust.

“Enough.” Tam sounded unusually subdued. “Let’s move on.”

Sam picked up the picture frame, but Sveti snatched it out of his hands. “Do not touch my stuff again,” she muttered, as she teased the backing out of the frame. The picture of Sonia fell out, along with a square of thin, almost transparent paper.

Sam held up the photograph. “What does that writing say?”

“The Sword of Cain,” Sveti said. “The guy kept asking what it meant to me. I would have told him if it meant anything. It doesn’t.”

“Did the part you trimmed off have anything written on it?” he asked.

“Nothing about a sword,” she said. “On the picture side, there were a few numbers. I figured they were phone numbers, or maybe filing numbers. Sometimes she printed several different versions of a photograph before she was happy with it, and numbered them. The other side had snippets of poetry, the address, and stamp.”

“Did she send any others?”

“Not through the mail,” Sveti said. “She sent me lots of JPEGs, on my e-mail. But they’re just art photography. Pretty pictures of Italy.”

Sam turned it over. On the back was more scribbling. Some in Cyrillic and some that appeared to be in English, but such tiny cursive, he could barely read it. “What’s this stuff written on the back?”

Sveti shook her head. “Mama was cryptic,” she said. “They’re lines from various obscure poems. Some French, some Russian, some English, but she’d translated them all into English here. She taught poetry at the university, before Papa was killed. That first line in Ukrainian Cyrillic says, ‘When you don’t know which way to turn, look to the source.’ Then come the quotes.”

He squinted at the first quote. The writing was so miniscule. “‘Darkness from that ragged hole/pulls like a prisoner’s shackling chain/drawing me into Hell’s blind’ . . . what’s that?”

“Realm,” Sveti said. “Hell’s blind realm. Peter Rodionov. It’s very sad. Don’t read any of them aloud, please. I’ll break out into a cold sweat if I have to listen to them again.”

“Is there a unifying theme?” he persisted.

She shook her head. “Only that they’re all depressing. Lukyenov, Rafael, Lebedev. Poems about death. Whatever point she meant to make with them, I missed it.”

Sam peered at another one. “ ‘Bear witness to this bowl of bones/this yellowed snarl of sticks and twigs.’ Wow. Cheerful.”

“Esther Rafael,” Sveti said, her face stoic. “She survived Auschwitz. She wrote about the Holocaust. Oh, and another thing. The man who questioned me yesterday? He’s the one who killed my mother.”

Tam’s eyes dropped. Val’s gaze slid away. Nick and Becca exchanged worried glances. A nervous silence stretched out.

“Sveti,” Sean said carefully. “Wasn’t your mom’s death a suicide ?”

“That’s what we thought,” Sveti said. “But that man talked about Mama as if he’d known her. He talked about the red dress she wore that night. How would he know if he wasn’t there? Besides, Mama was not a person who would kill herself. She must have been taking pictures that made someone nervous, so they killed her. And The Sword of Cain is the key, if I could figure out what the hell it is.”