“Do as I say,” Natalia told him. She started undoing the laces of his left
boot, getting the boot free; it felt damp to her. Then she removed the two
socks that covered his foot. The sole of his foot was yellow. “This could
turn to frostbite—very quickly,” she snapped. She opened the front of her
coat, throwing back as well the sleeping bag that covered her. Reaching
under her coat, under the shirt Rourke had given her, to the front of her
black jump suit, she zipped it down, then took Rubenstein’s foot and
placed it against the bare flesh of her abdomen. Hey—you—
“Let me! Tell me when the feeling starts back. How is the other foot?”
“It’s well, it’s okay.”
“Keep your foot here and don’t move it,” she ordered, reaching down to his
other foot and starting to work on the boot laces—her own fingers were
numb, and her ears still felt the cold from the slipstream of the bike as
they’d ridden.
“That bandanna you put over my face against the wind—it smelled like you.
I guess from your hair,” Rubenstein concluded, sounding lame.
“Thank you, Paul,” Natalia whispered, getting the two socks off his right
foot. The sole of his foot was yellow, but not as bad as the left one had
been. Again, she felt the almost icy flesh against her abdomen and she
shivered,
“You love John—I mean really love him, don’t you?” Rubenstein blurted out.
She closed her eyes a moment, felt pressure there
against her eyelids, tt
say:
Natalia swallowed again, this time without the smoke—instead the bottle in
her left hand, the whiskey burning at her throat suddenly. “Yes—I wanted
to say that. Men always jokingly say women are like children, call them
girls—but we are. We all look for our own personal knight—you know, the
kind with a rK-N-I—’ We look for someone we hook our dreams on. That’s
what Ruth saw in you—and she wasn’t wrong.”
“Me—a knight?” Rubenstein laughed.
“A knight doesn’t have to be tall and brave—but you are brave, you just
maybe didn’t know it then. It’s inside. That’s what it is.” She reached
her hand out and felt Rubenstein’s hand touching hers. “That’s what it
is,” she repeated.
Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy thought the idea was, in a way, amusing. He
looked at his gun—a nickel-plated Colt single-action Army . with a
four-and-three-quarter-inch barrel. He was the conqueror, the invader,
and/his sidearm was “The Gun That Won the West’—as American as—he
verbalized it, “Apple pie—ha!”
He cocked the hammer back to the loading notch, opened the loading gate,
and spun the cylinder—five rounds, originally round-nosed lead solids, but
the bullets drilled out three sixty-fourths of an inch with a
one-sixteenth-inch drill bit, then tipped into candle wax after first
having had an infinitesimal amount of powdered glass shavings inserted
into their cavities. His own special load.
After rotating the cylinder, closing the gate, and lowering the hammer
over the empty chamber, he holstered the gun inside his waistband, in a
small holster he’d had custom-made of alligator skin, the gun with -ivory
butt forward and slightly behind his left hip bone. He reached to the
dresser top, picking up the set of military brushes and working his hair
with them. Thirty-four years old and not a speck of gray, he thought.
He set down the brushes and walked across the room to his closet; the
clothes were neatly arranged there by his valet. He took down a tweed
sportcoat—woolen and finely tailored to his exact measurements. He held it
for a moment against the charcoal gra> slacks he wore. The herringbone
pattern had a definite charcoal gray shading and it made for a perfect