But when the driver got close, he only said something to Bobby in a courteous tone, glancing around as if puzzled by the abundance of passengers. Bobby nodded, waved to him, and reversed carefully off the bridge and onto the narrow shoulder against the cliff. Irina and Lenka were placid, in the back seat, as if it was a matter of course to them, by this time, to get stuck above white water in the mountains.
A few minutes later the policeman came over to return Bobby’s papers, without comment, then started the police car and drove past them. He gave a sedate wave; he seemed to be counseling Bobby to forget all about it. The man called the Bear waited for his driver to hold open the door of the BMW. Alexandra saw his strange hair disappear first, his stiff polished boot last. As the luxurious car passed them, driver and passenger were completely hidden by tinted windows. She wondered if he’d turned to look, if she had met his narrow ursine eyes without knowing it, through Bobby’s windshield. Stoycho’s head turned, too, and his gaze seemed to follow the BMW until it was out of sight. Alexandra suddenly felt that she should not have stared so directly into that dark glass.
The first Rhodope villages Alexandra ever saw clung to the sides of ravines above a mountain river, and the first thing that struck her about them was the roofs. They were not fluted red ceramic, like the roofs in the towns they’d already driven through; instead they were made of gray slate, laid in complicated scalloped layers. She remarked to Bobby that the rough stone houses looked as if they’d sprung up there naturally, or been piled up by giants. Bobby said that in a sense they had grown out of the mountains, since they had been created by people with only the natural world from which to build them. “The original environmentalists,” he said.
The road was very steep now and it took them up hillsides of pastureland and then to a plateau, a large village with a flat streambed down the middle and a statue of a man holding a tattered bronze flag. There was a yellow building on the other side of the stream, old trees leaning over it, a tumble of stone houses on the higher slopes. When she rolled down her window, Alexandra could hear running water and smell the sharp, clean cold of mountain air just under the sunlight. She saw several signs for hotels, with three stars and arrows pointing uphill. Then she noticed a couple of men attaching a poster to the side of a store. One man was on a ladder, holding the top of the poster against the wall.
“Look,” she said to Bobby. He slowed and peered across her: it was a huge photograph of a man with hair to his shoulders, smiling out at them.
“Kurilkov,” Bobby muttered. “Again. Bez koruptsiya! It doesn’t say anything specific about his purity campaign, but that will come next.” He shifted gears. “They are choosing the poorer areas to put these in.”
They climbed higher, past more of the ancient houses and into forested mountainsides. Alexandra saw a sign that promised Gorno in four kilometers.
“But there was an earlier sign that said three,” she told Bobby. “How can it be getting farther away?”
Bobby shrugged. “Ask the Minister of Roads.” He had the map on his knee as he drove; Irina’s hand sometimes reached for his shoulder, or pointed the way. The roads were even narrower now, pressed between towering slopes; the villages they passed were very small, the feet of the houses almost on the pavement. Some looked empty, a cross of iron over the windows, glass panes broken in. They passed an old man sitting outside a house with curtains at the open windows, chickens in a small yard, and a tiny church with a surreally bent-over, folded-up woman locking the door. Everyone they saw was old. Alexandra had only imagined such places, but here were people living in them, finishing out their days.
“Do they have television?” she asked Bobby.
“Television?” He seemed to be driving somewhere else, in his head, a million miles away.
“Here, in these villages,” she said.
“Oh, certainly,” he said. “At least most people. A few might be too poor, but almost everyone has television.”
She wished again that they could stop at each village, knock on doors and go in to see. Another woman, her head covered with a flowered scarf, was scraping something out of a pan into her garden. She looked up, so close to the road that Alexandra could see her gold earrings, the stains on her apron; she could have been fifty years old or eighty. Her face was full of a guarded curiosity, no smile. Alexandra hoped the woman had a dog like Stoycho, to protect her in her yard and give her someone to take care of. But no dog was visible and a moment later the woman was behind them and the road was winding through heavy woodland, higher and higher, with steep views opening out to their left.
“I think this is it,” Bobby said suddenly, and Irina waved him into a turn. There was no village in sight, only a worn wooden sign, which Bobby read aloud: GORNO, 2KM.
“Is that what your village is called?” Alexandra asked Irina, turning around.
The old lady was peering forward, as if for landmarks. “It has several names—one from the deep past, perhaps Turkish. Now it is just called Gorno, which means ‘high.’ Or maybe, in English, ‘upper.’ ”
“Upper what?” Bobby asked. The road was dirt now, but steeper than ever, and he had to steer around large holes and ruts, going slowly. Stoycho sat up on Alexandra’s lap and gazed out the window, then at Alexandra.
“Only Gorno,” Irina said. “You can invent the other part if you would like.”
Bobby smiled at Alexandra and she thought about squeezing his hand.
—
A FEW MINUTES LATER they drove in among the first houses, which were all stone, growing out of the earth. The road had become so slippery and crusted with big rocks that Bobby slowed the car to walking pace. They passed a tiny chapel with a spray of briars over one side, an empty store with peeling yellow letters on the window. A middle-aged woman dressed in black was walking past it; she turned to stare at them, apparently astonished to see anyone new. The road leveled out into what could have been a main square except that it was made of packed mud and was only a little wider than the road itself. The next stretch, between the houses, looked very steep; Bobby shook his head.
“I must stop here,” he said. “I don’t think that I can drive farther.”
“Yes, this is a good place,” Irina said. She gripped the back of his seat and Alexandra saw that her face was white with fatigue. “Here we are. Our house is in the second street, a very easy walk.”
But when they got her out, she had to lean against the side of the car to steady her legs.
“Shall I carry you there?” Bobby asked her. She said something to him in Bulgarian and smiled for a moment. He chuckled, but she only took his arm.
Alexandra stood gripping Stoycho’s rope and smelling the wind with him—wood smoke nearby, and a sharp freshness beyond. It had been a long time since she’d felt this slight breathlessness, the pressure in her ears. The air was extraordinary, like sips of a thin white wine. Alexandra drew it in: hikes with her parents and Jack, in the old days, before the bad one. From here, in the middle of the road, in the middle of the village, the world spread beneath them. Some of the roofs on the lower streets, a few yards away, were level with her feet. A rusted turquoise truck sat wedged among the trees in one yard, its tires collapsing into the earth and smaller trees growing up out of the dirt in its bed. She wondered why anyone would build on this steepness, in the path of winter weather, even with sheltering higher peaks around it. At home, in the Blue Ridge, the old farms huddled in their coves and hollows; these Rhodope houses strode defiantly up to an alpine meadow. Far below, she saw the villages through which they’d come, and still farther away a long plain and even a city the size of her thumbnail, tiny white and red tombstones. Beyond that, mountains again.
She thought, A whole country—I am seeing a country whole. Now the meadows and roads smelled like grass, a clean warm scent blown toward her on rising wind; just around her there was the smell of mud baking in afternoon sun, and of animal dung. Looking up, she saw that the sky was enormous, laced at the edges wit
h light clouds. A single green cone symmetrical as an extinct volcano sat in front of the darker ridges. Looking down, Alexandra found she was standing next to a trough full of muddy water, a long stone hollowed out and ancient as the village itself.
“Come,” said Irina, leaning on Bobby’s arm, and they all turned and picked their way into a street where the houses sat well back in gardens. One house had a pen of hay in the front yard, another some cages of giant fierce-looking rabbits. At the third, which was joined to a small stone barn, Irina made Bobby stop. She tried the door, found it locked, and then rapped with her carved stick instead of her hand. They waited. While they were waiting, Alexandra tied Stoycho carefully to a tree in the front yard, in case he wasn’t supposed to come into the house with them. Any minute, she thought, they might see Vera or Neven.
When there was still no answer, Bobby knocked gently at one window, where the curtains were drawn. “Perhaps they are asleep?” he said.
They waited again. Alexandra could hear the wind coming softly up the valley, riffling through the hay next door, turning the leaves of old poplars in the yards. Everything looked so somnolent, so green, that she felt she might fall asleep herself, despite her anxiety. Lenka had gone to the other window and was peering in, standing on her toes. A curtain was drawn there, too.
“I don’t think that they are here,” Irina said flatly.
“Maybe they went out,” Bobby proposed.
“No—my sister would be resting, at this time of day. She would leave the door open and sit in the kitchen, or lie down in her bedroom.”
Bobby turned to look up the street. “Shall I ask your neighbor?”
“Yes, dear. On that side. He keeps the keys for us.” Irina let him go and Lenka came at once to prop her up. Alexandra noted again how tall Irina was and how straight she stood even when she was clearly exhausted. Her hair had come unbound around her face in a white cloud, and her brooch glowed in the shade of the house. Alexandra thought they should get her inside to rest as soon as possible.
Next door, Bobby was conversing on the front step with a man in a plaid shirt and worn pants. When the man saw Irina he hurried over and shook hands with them all, speaking rapidly. Irina’s rectangular face grew even longer: apparently, the house had been locked for almost a week. Yes, Vera and Milen Radev had been living here for many months, with occasional visits from Neven—but then they had left with him, maybe six days before, to do something in Sofia. No, they hadn’t given him any details of their plans. He and his wife had been away themselves the past few days, and had just returned.
At last the man went to fetch a large iron key, then left them to return to his work while they opened Vera’s house. Bobby squeezed the latch and the door swung inward, revealing a step down onto a flagstone floor; the house breathed out at them, cold and dank.
“Come, children,” Irina said wearily, and they went ahead, to help her.
In that first moment, Alexandra could see nothing of the inside of the house, partly because she was still turned toward Irina and the sunlit doorway, and partly because Irina suddenly lost her footing. Alexandra’s heart constricted; for a weird second she was back in Sofia, watching Vera Lazarova stumble forward next to the taxi. She caught the old lady’s upper arm and felt a bone so thin she was afraid it might snap. But the strength of her hand kept Irina upright. The old woman gripped Alexandra’s shoulder and then stood there a moment, panting. Lenka had darted forward and was holding Irina’s other arm.
“Oh, my dear.” Irina looked around at Alexandra in wonder; her watery eyes reflected the bright day in the doorway. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Alexandra said humbly. “I just didn’t want you to—” She thought of the graceful old woman writhing on the floor with a shattered hip, and found she couldn’t finish her sentence.
They led Irina to a chair beside the door and helped her sit down. The room was dark and surprisingly cold, as if it bore no relation to the spring afternoon outside. In the yard behind them, Stoycho had begun to whine, and then to bark.
“Where can my sister be? I cannot understand this.” Irina sounded as if she might cry with frustration, or worry, or sheer fatigue. “She should have returned days before now, or called me.”
“Let’s bring some light in,” Bobby said stoutly. He drew aside the curtains at one window and Alexandra went to open the others. Now she could see enough to make out a lamp in the corner; she turned it on. They stood staring, and Irina sat without moving, Lenka’s hand on her shoulder.
The room was wrecked. The other chairs, upholstered in faded blue fabric, had been turned upside down, splintered. On the far side of the floor lay books, rocks, and broken shells, as if someone had swept a shelf clean with a powerful arm. One of the little tables had been smashed against the flagstones. It was amazing, thought Alexandra numbly, that the lamp on the other had survived. A small oil painting—Irina’s work?—lay in the middle of the mess, its landscape rent across, perhaps by a knife, its frame asunder. There was a fireplace of smooth river stones; broken glass sparkled on the hearth. Alexandra was thankful that Stoycho was still outside, where she had tied him up. Through an open door on the other side of the room, she could see what looked like a kitchen. The wall beside the doorway was white, and it bore sprawling hieroglyphs of reddish-brown—a word. They all stared at it.
“Bobby!” Alexandra said. His hand closed over hers for a moment.
“What is that?” Irina asked, her voice a quaver. Even with her sharp eye for details, she apparently couldn’t see the word well enough in this half light to read it.
Bobby’s voice was controlled. “It says Znaem. ‘We know.’ ”
“Know what?” Alexandra said.
“Who would do this?” There was rage in Irina’s tone, and a sob.
Bobby suddenly left the room and hurried into the kitchen, where they saw him turn on an electric light. They heard him running up wooden stairs and then above them on the upper floor. He was back just as quickly, going out to the yard again.
When he returned, he stood breathing hard, looking at the word on the wall. “There is no one in the house or outside,” he said.
“Our house,” Irina said softly. “Is it—all like this?”
“No,” Bobby said. “They smashed up only this room.”
Irina gasped, a long intake, rattling. “And my sister! Could they have hurt Vera?”
Bobby turned to reassure her. “No, I don’t think so. There is no sign of a struggle with people, and everything else looks as if your sister left it normally, for her trip. I think that this happened after they departed. Please, everybody—” He held up one hand. “Please, don’t touch anything. I’ve got only my torch, but—”
He took a small flashlight from inside his denim jacket, and Alexandra was reminded of the tool he had produced to let them out of Velin Monastery. Oh, God, she thought. They had been locked in there, from the outside. Then the writing on the taxi and the holes in the windshield.
Bobby was examining the paint, the upended furniture, the broken glass underfoot. Alexandra saw him shove something farther into a corner with his foot, behind the divan. He took out his phone and photographed the smeared word and the damaged room. Irina gave a sudden groan. Lenka stretched an arm around her shoulders.
“Bobby,” Alexandra said.
“Not now,” he told her in a low voice, and she knew he meant they should not talk about whatever was in the corner, or the words on the taxi, or anything else, until they had taken care of Irina. But Irina herself spoke up, as if she had regained her voice.
“Here, my dear—” She beckoned Alexandra close. “Could you and Lenka help me to lie down in the little bedroom? Behind the stairs. Bobby, it is so cold in here. Would you build a fire in the stove? There is no other kind of heat here, you know. The wood is inside the barn. As you say, we can clean up later.”
“Do you want me to call the police?” Bobby asked her.
“No,” said Irina. “
No, I do not think so. The police are a long way from here, down in the big town, and they will only question all the neighbors and then everyone will talk. I have known our neighbors for—generations, and I am certain that none of them would do this to us.”
Alexandra wanted to point out that if outsiders had done this damage, perhaps the police would be the ones to find them. Then she thought of the word on the wall—maybe neither Irina nor Bobby wanted the police looking at that word?
Alexandra and Lenka got the old lady into a chamber under the stairwell and took a dusty sheet off the bed. They helped Irina lie down and covered her with blankets from the wardrobe; the blankets were made of tufted wool, warm and dry to touch even in the chilled air. Lenka sat down beside the bed to take the old woman’s hand. Irina thanked them and closed her eyes as if content, but Alexandra thought she looked half dead.
Then Alexandra went back to Bobby. He was standing in the rubble of the sitting room.
“Bobby,” she ventured. “What is it?” She pointed to the corner behind the divan.
“I don’t know if you want to see,” Bobby said irritably. “But go ahead.”
She hesitated. “The word on the wall—that’s blood?”
“Yes.” He stood with his hands in his pockets and his head bowed.
She stared at him. “Not—”
He shook his head. “Not human. But it is awful.”
She went slowly to the corner and looked behind the divan.
“Oh, God,” she said. There was a gory, disheveled object on the floor and the first thing she recognized about it was teeth, three sharp yellowish ones snaggled over a lower lip. A head. Then a wild yellow eye, half-closed in the middle of ragged fur. Beside it lay a paintbrush, also smeared with blood. She thought for a split second that she might vomit.
“It’s—isn’t it a wolf?” she said.