Looking For A Legend (Book 1)

Looking For A Legend Chapter 52 - Valentina

            The fourth floor was almost completely empty as Valentina walked the hall to Dr. Utkin’s office.  It was still early.  She hadn’t even woken Eli before she left.  She was sure Eli would have objected to her going to see Dr. Utkin, even if it wasn’t about Eli’s academic career.  She had woken with a dull headache – still yet to subside, and didn’t want to deal with the fight or the lecture that was sure to follow if he knew where she was going.

The click of her heels echoed down the hall.  Valentina tried to quiet her footsteps, but there was nothing for it.  She hesitated before knocking on Dr. Utkin’s door.  Valentina reminded herself that she was doing this for her father.  Dr. Utkin might be her last opportunity to know him.  She summoned her courage and rapped on the door.

“Come een.” Utkin called from inside.  Valentina had only met him once before – when Utkin had interrupted their party, and he made her nervous.  His eyes studied her, judged her, and it felt like he could see into her soul.  Utkin looked far older than his age, perhaps he was worn down by the trials and stress of his life.  “Please, Mees Leeton, have seat.”

Valentina’s stomach had gone sour with nerves and for a moment she saw a ghost image of Eli sitting in the offered chair.  He looked younger, not yet needing his glasses, or marred with the fine scar near the hair line on his left temple that only she could notice.  He balanced his books on his knees, dressed in his usual Victorian Era finery.  Valentina cleared her vision with a long blink, and sunk into the chair. “Thank you for seeing me, Dr. Utkin.  I know you are very busy preparing for next year’s class.”

“So many appleecants, so few quality candideets.”  Utkin smiled at her.  “I sense you are not here to talk about class.  Your mind is heavy.”

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about my father – my biological father.” She told him. “There’s so much talk about him recently, and I know so little about him.  I wanted to know… I mean, I was hoping that you could tell me about him.”

“Ah, yes.  Captain Sima is a popular topic right now.  He was a great man.  Sima was brave, cunning, cautious, everything you would want to see in an officer.” Utkin told her, always referring to her father in the past tense.

Valentina nodded.  She started to feel pressure behind her eyes.  Mentally, she cursed Eli for talking her into opening that bottle of wine the night before.  She was jealous of him, getting to sleep off his hangover in bed while she was awake and in a meeting.

“As proud as I was to serve your father, he was too curious.  You have heard the expression, ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’ Da?”  Utkin joked.  Her ears acclimated to his accent, and Valentina no longer heard the oddities in his words. “Captain Sima was the cat.  Colonel Lytton and I tried to stop him many times, but he was stubborn.”

Valentina nodded.  She tried to push through her headache and focus on Dr. Utkin’s stories.  There was much to learn from him.  From everything she had been told, Anton Utkin had been her father’s right hand in the years before his death.  She could not afford to miss a detail.

“For all his tactics, his research and his stratagem, Mischa was caught.  He was killed.  He got my brother killed.  He got our friends, Petyr, Ivan and Alexei killed.  I tried to warn the others.  Reopening this research will get you killed, but I was ignored.  More innocents will die.” His hands waved as he spoke, as if he were conjuring his words from the air.  Perhaps it was a distraction so that she wouldn’t see his pain.  He still mourned his brother.

“Was he really that careless?” She spoke barely above a whisper, afraid of tarnishing her father’s name.

“Careless? No.  Unprepared, is more like.  He made a move before he knew better.  Too quick to attack.” Utkin explained.

“It seems like all of this should just be buried away.  He wouldn’t want anyone else to die over this.” Valentina shook her head.

Dr. Utkin nodded. “He wouldn’t want that.  He was a good man, but he should be laid to rest.”

“Why didn’t my mother ever tell me about him?  Why didn’t his family ever come to see me? Why am I only just meeting them now?” Valentina asked.  Maybe it was the idea that her father was dead, or maybe it was her headache, but she could feel the tears burning in her eyes.

“Your mother was a sweet woman, but she was young.  The Sima family liked her well enough, but thought she dragged him to his fate.  They had only just got him back when he ran off to join the Prizrak Rytsarya to protect her from the phantoms he saw everywhere.  What he needed was psychological help, and what she did was push him into another stressful martial law position.  That’s how they met.  That was the only way they could work.  Of course, this is all according to the Sima clan, a collection of penniless, alcoholic, opportunistic farmers.” Dr. Utkin’s words were confusing.  She’d never heard this about her parents before, but of course, she’d never heard anything about her parents before.

“Is that why they were never part of my life?  They wrote off my mother and me too?” Valentina produced a handkerchief from her bag and dabbed at her eyes.  She sniffed back tears as she managed to speak.

“Your father was the best hope they had, and they were bitter they had lost him to a Western European woman – one that spoke German, no less, and with him went their money.  If he had not joined the Prizrak Rytsarya, he would have worked his father’s farm.  Or at the least, if he had joined, but not gotten married to your mother, he’d send his money home to them, not to her.  The Sima family, all they saw in your father was the potential to line their pockets.  That’s all they see in anyone.  How much money can this person make me?  That’s why I told that miserable whore, Viktoriya to stay away from you.  I wish I could have kept her from Elijah.  She will lure him to his death like a siren.” Utkin warned.

Valentina closed her eyes.  She saw Elijah in his hospital bed, straddling the line between life and death.  Her heart ached.  She wouldn’t allow that to happen again. “What can we do?  It all needs to stop.  No one else needs to die.”

“You just have to make him see that he’s on the wrong path.  Mischa should be left to rest.  The sooner he accepts that, the safer he will be.” Utkin nodded.

“Thank you for your time, Dr. Utkin.  I’ll be in contact with you again over the semester.”  Valentina rose to her feet.  She stopped to dry her eyes again before heading out the door.

Her mind was still heavy.  The more she learned about her extended family, the less she wanted to know.  Her mother had always been so loving, so gentle.  She was no mastermind with designs on luring a husband to death.  Murroh said that her parents loved each other dearly, that they lived for one another.  How could her father’s family be so ignorant?  How did they not see what everyone else saw?

Her poor mother.  Her poor father.  Dead five and ten years respectively, but not yet laid to rest.  Not properly, at least.  The best way to honor them would be to leave them in memory and stop turning over rock and bringing up the painful past.  She could see the pain of losing his brother was still weighing heavily on Dr. Utkin.  Murroh still carried the guilt and sorrow from Mischa’s death.  Valentina still missed her mother sharply.

It was wrong to let Eli talk her into this silly hunt.  What a ridiculous idea to think that her father was alive.  That all would take was a few books, a road trip and a few questions and that her father would just return to her?  If it was that simple, why hadn’t Murroh done it? Or her mother? Or Dr. Utkin?  No, Mischa was dead. Valentina was a fool for letting Eli convince her otherwise.  She was foolish for getting roped in to helping with his research.

How blind could she have been?  How much was she wrong about?  Valentina had seen lies for truths, and now that her vision was cleared, she felt sick.  How twisted and ugly the world had always been around her, but all she saw was the illusion he wanted her to see.  The romantic ideals, the heroic adventure, he was a troubled man with a vision of himself he couldn’t live up to, at least not in reality.  How deep did his lies go?  How easily would he give them up?  When the lies were gone, what would they even have left?