ass. Two words, starting with
“
“It fits. See, that wasn’t so bad. Now you can ask me one.”
“Ask you?”
“Fair is fair.”
Zhenya wondered what the man on the other side of the door looked like. Tall or short? Thin or fat? In between murdering people did he bounce a baby on his knee? Zhenya and Lotte waited with one shot from Arkady’s gun and ski poles under the table.
“It’s a different kind of puzzle,” Zhenya said.
“You have a very superior air. I’m only trying to help.”
“Do you have children?” Lotte asked.
“No, no. Nothing personal. Personal is verboten. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”
“Then don’t,” Zhenya said.
“Suit yourself. You’ve got about an hour, according to my watch. Look, I’ll just talk to the girl. She doesn’t even have to say anything. Write it on a piece of paper, slide it under the door.”
“This is a total waste of time,” Zhenya said. “The man is a killer. He’s just torturing us.”
“I’m only talking to her.”
Lotte took a piece of stationery from the desk and wrote the letter
“That’s it?” the man asked.
“This should be beautiful,” Zhenya said. “He wouldn’t know an Afghan dog if it bit him.”
The page came back. The man on the other side of the door said, “The Roman numeral for fifty. It’s only in every fucking crossword puzzle ever written.”
Lotte went down the list of interpretations for the letter
“It could be fifty thousand, fifty million, fifty percent.”
“For what? And what about the face with an X-or is it a wasp?”
Zhenya found himself looking at her breasts. “The wasp,” he said. “If it’s a wasp caught in amber, then amber is the clue, not the wasp.”
A cell phone rang in the hall. The puzzle man took it and sounded unhappy.
Zhenya asked, “Everything okay?”
There was silence on the other side of the door.
“Is Alexi coming back? We still have half an hour,” Zhenya said.
Again, nothing.
“You just told us we had almost an hour,” Lotte said.
Nothing.
“You can’t kill somebody ahead of time,” Zhenya said, even as he knew how ridiculous he sounded. “Is he still on the phone? Let me talk to him.” He opened the door a chain’s length and the puzzle man held the phone up to the crack. “Alexi, we’re making progress.”
“What have you got?”
“It’s not like the usual notebook or minutes of a meeting. There’s no date. I just know that a submarine will be repaired and that considerable Russian rubles will change hands.”
Alexi said nothing, but the silence was significant. This was the point in a chess match when a player had no choice but to bring his king out from the protection of the back row and plunge it into the center of the board.
“There is going to be another meeting,” Zhenya said.
“On board the
“Yes.” What else could he say?
“Thank you, that’s all I needed to hear. Give the phone back to my man.”
Zhenya returned the phone and closed the door.
Lotte asked, “Did it work?”
“I don’t know.”
All he got from the other side of the door was silence. No “You did it, kid!” Only a clammy feeling and a dry mouth.
He and Lotte no longer looked at each other. It wasn’t fair. If anyone should hew to a schedule, it should be an executioner. They took in the sounds of the street, the emptiness of the building, the sound of a silencer being screwed onto the muzzle of a gun. He was only seventeen. Chess, he found, was no longer that important to him. He had fantasized about having a chess opening named for him. Now all games seemed trivial. He had other ambitions. This was unjust. Oddly enough, he thought it wouldn’t be so bad to be an investigator like Arkady.
Lotte decided to give up chess for music. Her family had always been artistic. She heard a bow drawn across the strings of a double bass. Something grim from Wagner.
Zhenya brought out the gun from the back of his belt but Lotte was in his way, trying to hold the door shut. He reached for her hand and they leaned together against the door.
The puzzle man heaved into it at full force. The chain snapped and Zhenya glimpsed a thin man with a vein- lined beak of a nose trying to insert a gun. The door slammed shut and was opened by an elderly man in a bathrobe and slippers.
“Lotte! I found you!” Lotte’s grandfather, the coward, struggled for the gun. “You must run!” The puzzle man swiped him away.
The door shut. Zhenya heard a head being cracked against the doorjamb. The door opened again like a reshuffled deck of cards as Victor Orlov rammed the puzzle man two more times against the doorjamb and threw him down the stairs.
26
White lights in front, red in back, a line of bikers wound through the early evening chasing streetlights, swerving in and out of streets and parks.
Arkady and Tatiana had signed on for one of the bike shop’s overnight excursions and left Polo in a neighbor’s care.
Joining the group had been Tatiana’s idea. She had batted down every means of escape he suggested. He merely mentioned the bike shop excursion and she seized on it. She rented a bike and gear. Arkady’s pea jacket counted as unusual attire and Karl, the shop owner, asked him when he last rode.
“It’s been a while. I suppose I could use a pants clip.”
Karl looked him up and down. “As long as you have money for a taxi.”
The bikers were not a political crowd. Half were female. Most carried a bedroll and tent and although the route was only fifty kilometers, hardly a tour at all, there was an air of anticipation, especially once the bikers cleared the city.
Arkady wobbled at first, but traffic was light and he regained his sense of balance. Tatiana bit into the wind and plainly enjoyed herself. Military trucks went by, but that was to be expected so close to the home port of the Baltic Fleet.
Karl was in the lead. At a signal from him, the bikes peeled onto a nearly invisible path between spindly birches and pushed through waist-high ferns to a black palisade of firs. Finally the group came to a stop at a charred circle of stones. At once women gathered wood and men set up tents. Arkady was given a flimsy two- person affair of nylon and plastic hoops. By the time a campfire was flaming, a feast of vodka, wine, sausages, fatback and bread was spread out on newspapers.
All the other bikers seemed to know each other. Karl leaned across the campfire to tell Arkady, “Your friend should take her helmet off. We’re all friends here.”
Tatiana removed her helmet. No one gave a hint of recognizing the famous journalist from Moscow.
