Emil moved as fast as possible, jumping into each step, ignoring the pain, and saw a short, blue car-a make he wasn’t familiar with-spraying mud as it rocked through the driveway, laboring over lumps and puddles toward the road. Emil dropped his cane and ran after it. The pain ground inside him, but he pushed it down. The car slid sideways, then caught again. He was sprinting now, and the engine whined in his ears. Dark blue, no license. He was close enough for the mud to spit across his face as the tires climbed forward. Then the pain jumped again, into his chest, suffocating him. He opened his mouth, but all that came was mud. He was almost at the fender. Then he wasn’t. There was something on his chest, squeezing the air out of it. The car dwindled in the distance, turning onto the main road, and his vision dimmed. He dropped into the mud, unable to move, gasping, his lungs two useless bags heaving inside his bullet-scarred chest.
Lena helped raise him, her narrow shoulder under his. She didn’t notice the mud smeared all over her coat, or that her shoes-her feet, now that her shoes had become stuck a few paces back- were deep in it. Nor did she mind the tracks they made across the marble, the sitting-room rug, and all over the sofa she dropped him in. She was remarkably strong for her size.
“You’re bleeding!” Lena kneeled beside him and unbuttoned his shirt.
He’d already known it; he could feel the bite where each suture in his belly had ripped loose. She pressed a soft white towel to him, and it came up red. He took the towel from her hands and used it on his face.
“You need a doctor.”
“Irma needs a doctor.”
Irma, on the chair, was wiping her own face with a towel.
“Tell us about it,” said Emil.
“Not yet, Irma.” Lena stood up. She looked lost, touching everything. “First, yes. First, a doctor.” She reminded Emil of shell-shocked soldiers-he’d heard about this from veterans. The bounciness just before their explosions.
But he looked at Irma instead. He had his window-it would soon close. “Now,” he insisted. “If you can.”
Lena’s brief hysteria passed, and she sank, cross-legged, to the floor. She was still in her dirty raincoat, her bare feet thick with mud.
Irma talked out of the side of her mouth, as though the right side were filled with pebbles. The man had come soon after Lena went to meet Emil. He wore sunglasses and knocked at the front door. He had been caught by the rain, he said, and had lost a tire on the main road. “But he didn’t look so wet,” said Irma. “I should have seen that.”
“And you let him in?” Lena asked.
She shook her head. “I remembered what you’d told me. I asked him to wait, but he didn’t wait.” The man shouldered his way inside and began rifling through Lena’s cabinets and drawers. Irma followed him, explaining that he would have to leave, that her mistress would return soon with a policeman. The intruder finished with the drawers and moved on to the bookshelves.
They looked around. Half the books from the shelves covering the wall lay scattered on the floor.
“I put a hand here.” Irma placed her fingers on her own shoulder. “He slapped me then. He had white gloves. Soft. And he asked me where it was.”
“It?” said Lena, “it?”
Irma nodded as vigorously as her blood-puffed face would allow. She didn’t know what it was. She told the man as much, but he began beating her, and as his fists struck he repeated the question: Where is it? Finally, he gave up and returned to the shelves. He took each book and flipped through it very quickly, as though speed- reading, catching any slip of paper that fell out and looking at it before going on to the next title. He shouted sometimes out of frustration: It’s here, isn’t it?
Lena looked at Emil, then at her maid. “And he never said-”
“Never.” Irma s grainy voice had acquired an edge of impatience.
There was little more to the story. When Emil’s Mercedes rolled up the drive, she had tried to make it to the door, but the intruder was on her again. He beat her face and chest until she collapsed on the stairs. Then he ran to the rear of the house, where he had parked his car.
“Can you describe him?” asked Emil.
“Tall,” she said resolutely. “Light hair, old eyes.”
“Old eyes?”
“Wrinkled. Dark.” She closed her own eyes. “His face was thin. He had-I think-a German accent.”
“German?”
She looked at him again with wet, red eyes. “I’m sure. German.”
Emil took out one of the nine photographs still in his pocket. He showed it to her. He pointed at the man who was not Smerdyakov, the one who had said: Comrade Emil Brod?
“Oh God.” Her bruised head nodded with conviction.
“Go,” Emil said. “Both of you pack some clothes.” He felt himself sinking.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In the car, he finally admitted to his gunshot wounds. A few words, nothing more. Lena was beside him, and her face quickly exposed her feelings-it felt good to see the deep concern that she finally controlled by speaking: “Christ, Emil. You almost died.”
He shrugged, but even that movement hurt.
He was given three stitches to reclose his wound, and Irma was given, for a substantial bribe to the Unity Medical head nurse, a private bed. He drove Lena to the Brod apartment. They said nothing the whole way, but the silence was a warm, easy thing. Despite the cane, he was able to carry her small leather suitcase, and he set it down just inside the door.
“She’s staying here, maybe a few days,” he told Grandfather, who was grinning in his chair, wet-mouthing an unlit, frayed cigar.
Lena tried to hide her disappointment as she looked around the meager home. Grandmother was still out.
“A girlfriend?” Grandfather asked when Lena was in the bathroom washing up.
“A widow,” said Emil. “A case.”
“Some widow.” He stuck the cigar back in his mouth. “You look like hell.”
He was leaving stains on everything he touched. “I tried to run down a car.”
“A motor car?”
Emil nodded.
“Youre a goddamn dog, that’s what you are.”
By the time she emerged from the bathroom, Lena’s disappointment had become a buoyancy he could see in her step, in her smile, as if she had decided this was not to be a sacrifice, but an adventure.
“Do you have anything to drink?” she asked the room.
“Girl after my own heart,” said Grandfather as he grunted out of his chair and went for the liquor cabinet.
It took an hour to heat his bathwater, and by the time he emerged, bruised but clean, toweled dry and in fresh clothes, Grandmother had returned and made dinner. She gazed over her plate at Lena. When she spoke, her voice was thick with admiration: “Who else lives out there? Near you.”
Both Lena and Grandfather were tipsy by now. She smiled slyly at her drinking partner before answering. “No one, not really. A lot of bores” She choked down more cabbage soup, which, for an instant, made her easy demeanor stumble: She looked as though she had discovered new teeth. Then she swallowed. “Rich people are as dull as proles, I can promise you that.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Grandfather, and it took a moment before Emil realized he was being sarcastic. “But aren’t they all filled with charm? With poise ^ 7.” He sipped from his spoon daintily and stared at Lena. He was plainly charmed, head over heels.
Lena settled her gaze on him. “Comrade Avram Brod,” she said in a suitable Russian accent, “the wealthy are
