“Tell me.”
“I—” and she began to sob.
It took a minute or two to quiet her, to get her calm enough to speak, and when she could, she went off like a bomb. “She left him because she thought he was safer. She married the man we all thought was our grandfather to save him—to make the world believe that Matteo was just a fling. She wanted the dogs off his trail. But—”
She lost it again at this point. I had to remind her to breathe, to take in air. Fear reflected in her eyes, in the quiver of bones, but anger warred with uncertainty, lending her some bravery. “Thatman had him killed. Not Lev’s family, like we thought. The man we thought was our grandfather all those years—he had Matteo killed!”
“What?” I barely got out.
She nodded, almost frantic. “He was jealous. He found out about my mother and how she came to be. Dragotin Kumar had him killed. He told Maja just before he died.Revenge at the last breath, she called it in her letter. All those people that could have killed him for—for political reasons, and it ended up being her husband out of brutal jealousy!”
There was a turn I never saw coming.
“It’s all there.” Scarlett pounced up, her fists clenching. “In the letter.”
I took it from the chest, looking it over. I couldn’t understand a word of it. It was all in Slovenian.
Maja had left a twisted history. No wonder she didn’t want Pnina and Charlotte to know—it would confound their straight lines into labyrinths she knew they couldn’t possibly crawl out of.
Scarlett had inherited Maja’s gift. My wife knew the cost and the reward, as her grandmother had. It was more than pride that had made the old ballerina stick by her granddaughter who was so much like herself. It was a sense of duty—she had more than ballet to teach her. I wondered what she had, in regards to survival, that Scarlett never realized. All of this light was bound to make clouded issues clear.
“The monsters in my ballet shoes…do you remember me telling you about those?”
“I do.” I watched her carefully. Champagne had made her unsteady, and her emotions fueled the fire. “Maja told you that another dancer put glass shards in her slippers. You should never forget to shake, shake, shake…”
Scarlett dug in the chest, holding the pointe shoes up. Vintage pink satin things dotted with—
“Blood.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Take a good look at the front of these shoes, Brando.”
I took the shoes from her, examining them. Then I remembered what Lev had her do, the night in the Italian club when he reentered her life after their “moment” in Russia years ago. They were both kids at the time.
“There’s a razor blade in the front. Made to fit the shoe. No one noticed?” The weapon was clear, a slit through the fabric showed through the material. Dull, but its job was still apparent.
I looked up; Scarlett nodded.
“They would, if they would have seen. She cut the fabric away before she went on to perform. No one would notice after, or bother to look. The idea is ingenious, if you think about it. There’s something between the razor and her foot, protecting her, but once the slit is made—there was no stopping her. She had a hidden weapon.”
“Two,” I said, looking at the shoe again. “Her dance hypnotized them before she stunned them. So the monster was actually the strip of razor blade? Not the glass?”
“No, not exactly.”
She paced in front of me, in front of the glass window, roses just beyond. They no longer felt like just roses, they almost felt like ghosts, their histories sharp as the thorns on their stems.
“Another dancerhadput glass in her pointe shoes. But. In her letter she went on to explain that as assessable as we are to other monsters, we could become monsters, if the time called for it.”
I returned the shoes to the chest, taking out the thick journal. I held it up. Scarlett nodded.
“Their beautiful times. All there, she says. There was more to their story than the letters. She said Matteo had given permission to release the letters. Because he wanted the world to know how he felt about her. He was—a-angry at her, for leaving him, forcing his hand.”
“Understandably so,” I said.
“She made their affair seem like it was nothing, afling,to protect him. That journal sings to a different tune. Their love was everything.” She looked me in the eye. “There’s something else.”
I didn’t like the way she said that, as though she was preparing me for something dangerous, like watching as she danced around landmines.
“If he hasn’t died between when Maja wrote the letters—yours had to be finished not long before she died—and when she died, then the man who made her razor shoes is still living. She set up provisions, though, in case he had. There are two others who know how to make the shoes, and who know her secrets. She refused to call them by name. She left other information. A way for me to find them.”
