AS THE MOTORCYCLE CRESTED THE HILL, SUNLIGHT WINKED OFF THE goggles of the rider. Against the chill of early spring, he wore a double-breasted leather coat and a leather flying cap which buckled under his chin.
He had been on the road for three days, stopping only to buy fuel along the way. His saddlebags were filled with tins of food he’d brought from home.
At night, he did not stay in any town, but wheeled his motorcycle in among the trees. It was a new machine, a Zundapp K500, with a pressed-steel frame and girder forks. Normally he could never have afforded it, but this trip alone would pay for everything, and more besides. He thought about that as he sat there alone in the woods, eating cold soup from a can.
Before camouflaging the motorcycle with fallen branches, he wiped the dust from its sprung leather seat and the large teardrop-shaped fuel tank. He spat on every scratch he found and rubbed them with his sleeve.
The man slept on the ground, wrapped in an oilcloth sheet, without the comfort of a fire or even a cigarette. The smell of smoke might give away his location, and he could not afford to take the risk.
Sometimes, he was awakened by the rumble of Polish Army trucks passing by on the road. None of them stopped. Once he heard a crashing in among the trees. He drew a revolver from his coat and sat up just as a stag passed a few paces away, barely visible, as if the shadows themselves had come to life. For the rest of the night, the man did not sleep. Tormented by childhood nightmares of human shapes with antlers sprouting from their heads, he wanted only to be gone from this country. Ever since he crossed the German border into Poland, he had been afraid, although no one who saw him would ever have realized it. This was not the first time he had been on such a journey, and he knew from experience that his fear would not leave him until he was back among his own people again.
On the third day, he crossed into the Soviet Union at a lonely border checkpoint manned by one Polish soldier and one Russian soldier, neither of whom could speak the other’s language. Both men came out to admire his motorcycle. “Zundapp,” they crooned softly, as if saying the name of a loved one, and the man gritted his teeth while they ran their hands over the chrome.
A few minutes after leaving the checkpoint, he pulled over to the side of the road and raised the goggles to his forehead, revealing two pale moons of skin where the road dust had not settled on his face. Shielding his eyes with one hand, he looked out over the rolling countryside. The fields were plowed and muddy, seeds of rye and barley still sleeping in the ground. Thin feathers of smoke rose from the chimneys of solitary farmhouses, their slate roofs patched with luminous green moss.
The man wondered what the inhabitants of those houses might do if they knew their way of life would soon end. Even if they did know, he told himself, they would probably just carry on as they had always done, placing their faith in miracles. That, he thought, is precisely why they deserve to be extinct. The task he had come here to accomplish would bring that moment closer. After today, there would be nothing they could do to stop it. Then he wiped the fingerprints of the border guards off his handlebars and continued on his way.
He was close to the rendezvous point, racing along deserted roads, through patches of mist which clung to the hollows like ink diffusing in water. The words of half-remembered songs escaped his lips. Otherwise he did not speak, as if he were alone upon the earth. Driving out across that empty countryside, that was how he felt himself to be.
At last he came to the place he had been looking for. It was an abandoned farmhouse, roof sagging like the back of an old horse. Turning off the road, he drove the Zundapp through an opening in the stone wall which ringed the farmyard. Overgrown trees, sheathed with ivy, ringed the house. A flock of crows scattered from their branches, their ghostly shapes reflected in the puddles.
When he cut the engine, silence descended upon him. Removing his gauntlets, he scratched at the dried mud which had spattered his chin. It flaked away like scabs, revealing a week’s growth of stubble beneath.
Shutters hung loose and rotten on the windows of the farmhouse. The door had been kicked in and lay flat on the floor inside the house. Dandelions grew between cracks in the floorboards.
He set the Zundapp on its kickstand, drew his gun, and stepped cautiously into the house. Holding the revolver down by his side, he trod across the creaking floorboards. Gray light filtered through the slits between the shutters. In the fireplace, a pair of dragon-headed andirons scowled at him as he walked by.
“There you are,” said a voice.
The Zundapp rider flinched, but he did not raise the gun. He stood still, scanning the shadows. Then he spotted a man sitting at a table in the next room, which had once been a kitchen. The stranger smiled, raised one hand and moved it slowly back and forth. “Nice motorcycle,” he said.
The rider put away his gun and stepped into the kitchen.
“Right on time,” said the man. Set on the table in front of him was a Tokarev automatic pistol and two small metal cups, each one no bigger than an eggshell. Beside the cups stood an unopened bottle of Georgian Ustashi vodka, a blue-green color from the steppe grass used to flavor it. The man had placed a second chair on the other side of the table so that the rider would have a place to sit. “How was your trip?” asked the man.
“Do you have it?” said the rider.
“Of course.” The man reached into his coat and pulled out a bundle of documents which had been rolled up like a newspaper. He let them fall with a slap onto the table, raising a tiny cloud of dust from the dirty wooden surface.
“That’s everything?” asked the rider.
The man patted the bundle reassuringly. “Full operational schematics for the entire Konstantin Project.”
The rider put one foot on the chair and rolled up his trouser leg. Taped to his calf was a leather envelope. The man removed the tape, swearing quietly as it tore away the hair on his leg. Then he removed a stack of money from the envelope and laid it on the table. “Count it,” said the Zundapp rider.
Obligingly, the man counted the money, walking the tips of his fingers through the bills.
Somewhere above them, in the rafters of the house, starlings trilled and clicked their beaks.
When the man had finished counting, he filled the two small cups with vodka and lifted one of them. “On behalf of the White Guild, I would like to thank you. A toast to the Guild and to the downfall of Communism!”
The rider did not reach for his cup. “Are we finished here?” he asked.
“Yes!” The man knocked back his vodka, then reached for the second cup, raised it in salute, and drank that, too. “I think we are finished.”
The rider reached across and picked up the documents. As he tucked the bundle into the inside pocket of his coat, he paused to look around the room. He studied the canopies of spiderwebs, the puckered wallpaper, and the cracks which crazed the ceiling like the growth lines on a skull. You will be home soon, he thought. Then you can forget this ever happened.
“Would you care for a smoke?” asked the man. He laid a cigarette case on the table and set a brass lighter on top.
The rider stared at him, almost as if he knew this man from someplace before but could not remember where. “I should be going,” he said.
The man smiled. “Maybe next time.”
The rider turned away and started walking back towards his motorcycle.
He had gone only three paces when the man snatched up his Tokarev pistol, squinted down the line of his outstretched arm, and, without getting up from the table, shot the rider in the back of the head. The bullet tore through the rider’s skull and a piece of his forehead skittered away across the floor. He dropped to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Now the man rose to his feet. He came out from behind the table and rolled the corpse over with his boot.
