The searchlight probed the screen and the corners of the porch.
“If you come out, I’ll tell you what happened to your sister. You’re a journalist, don’t you want the details?”
The wind batted his words away. He jockeyed the boat back and forth, letting the inboard engine cough and rumble.
“Renko, don’t you want to know what happened to your boy, Zhenya? Don’t you care?”
“What boy?” she whispered. “You have a son?”
“In a way.”
Alexi called, “Doesn’t either one of you care about anyone?”
The spotlight found Tatiana as she opened the porch door and moved down the stairs to the sand. Alexi motioned her closer. The sky cracked open and in the white glare of lightning, Alexi raised a gun and fired.
The shot went wide. Alexi was a good sailor, but the work he was doing demanded hands on the wheel and the gun while the deck under his feet moved in all directions. One shot went into the water, the next into the air.
She didn’t duck. To her, the shots seemed irrelevant, contemptible, no worse than rain. Arkady caught up to her and felt a hot pluck on his ear. Waves rushed up, fanned and slid away. Alexi fired until he was left squeezing the trigger of an empty gun, like the last strike of a serpent.
Then the boat backed up, seesawing through waves, and retreated to the dark.
• • •
“Hold still.” Tatiana patted Arkady’s earlobe dry. “We’re lucky. My father overstocked everything. We have bandages and antiseptics until the next millennium. Hold still, please. For a detective, you’re very squeamish.”
“How did Alexi know we were here?”
“I don’t know, but it will be a while before he returns. There’s no place on the spit to tie up a big motorboat. He’d have to go to Zelenogradsk. Then he’d have to get a car and return. That will take hours.”
“It makes no sense. Why did he even come here in a boat like that?”
“He was in a rush. People who are in a rush make bad decisions.”
“Now we can’t wait. We have to leave right away.”
“Right away,” she said.
She brushed his hair away from his ear. The Band-Aid would do. He felt her breath on his neck. That and the pain made a strange combination. Her hand stayed longer than need be. He felt her body lean against him. Then her mouth was against his and his hands were inside her shirt, against the curve of her back, against the heat and coolness of her body. Standing with her on the beach, he had been invulnerable despite being nicked. How could she impart so much power and, at the same time, hold on to him as if she might drown without him?
Her depth was astonishing. Endless. And in her eyes he saw a better man than he had been before.
• • •
“Afterward” was an overused word, Arkady thought. It meant so much. A shifting of the planets. A million years. A new sea.
“Alexi will be back,” Tatiana said, although without urgency. “Tell me about Zhenya.”
“There’s not much to say.”
“Tell me anything.”
“He’s seventeen, quiet, scrawny, very bright, unbeatable at chess, brave, honest, deceitful, an excellent shot, and right now he wants to join the army. Both of his parents are dead.”
“Did you know them?”
“I never met his mother. His father shot me.”
“The father was a criminal?”
“Yes.”
“Does Zhenya feel guilty about that?”
“Not that I’ve noticed. Anyway, he shouldn’t. We have, I suppose you could say, a complicated relationship.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid it hasn’t done him much good. Every time we’re together, we clash. We just rub each other the wrong way. On the other hand, if I had a son, I would want him to be like Zhenya. As I said, it’s complicated.”
“I think you’re being hard on yourself. Let’s enjoy the moment.”
“Is that allowed?”
Tatiana found a mattress, luxury itself. She rolled toward him and said, “Definitely not allowed.”
“You think we’re going to pay for this?”
“A thousand times.”
“Why?” Arkady asked.
“Because God is such a bastard, He will take you away from me.”
29
Arkady and Tatiana dressed in the dark and carried their bikes to the road.
There was only one way to go. It might take Alexi three hours to rid himself of the motorboat and return by car from the south. The northern half of the spit was Lithuania and from what Arkady remembered of his earlier trip with Maxim, the Frontier Guards at the border station were probably snug in their beds. A person could practically walk through.
Which was a fantasy, he knew. Alexi had chased them from the cabin. They were mice on the run. The batteries for their headlights were running low and the light they cast was growing feeble. The sound of the ocean rolled on one side and trees murmured on the other. Arkady had no idea how far they had gone. He thought if they could just keep riding, they would be swallowed up by the dark like Jonah and the whale and never be seen again.
Tatiana’s headlight died first and she drew almost even with him to stay in contact.
How did the heart measure distance? How many revolutions of the pedals? How many revolutions of the wheels? He more imagined than saw waves lap the beach and trees sway above the dunes.
As his headlight faded, Arkady halted Tatiana and they came to a standstill in the dark, going nowhere as sand swirled at their feet. He heard breathing dead ahead. Tentative. Waiting.
A blinding light filled the road. The beam was white tinged with blue and emanated from the border station’s ancient searchlight, searching not for high-altitude bombers but targets approaching on foot. Even shielding his eyes, Arkady couldn’t see more than the fire flash of automatic weapons and he couldn’t tell if they were Frontier Guards or Alexi’s men. Between Arkady and the station, figures poured over the road, a carousel of shadows in midair. Silhouettes with antlers milled in confusion, took cover in trees and ran again, while over and around them, branches snapped and bullets ripped the air.
Carrying their bikes, Arkady and Tatiana retreated along the edge of the searchlight’s beam. It seemed to stretch forever, finally faded to a glow and then grew stronger again as the headlights of a car approached.
Arkady knocked Tatiana to the ground. “Stay down.”
The car passed them and stopped. The station searchlight shut down, replaced by flashlight beams that swung back and forth.
Arkady heard the opening of car doors and recognized Alexi’s voice.
“Did you get them?”
“Not yet, but we know they’re here.”
“Then let the dogs out.”
“We let them out, but there’s all these fucking deer.”
“Elk, you idiot.”
“Whatever. The dogs are going crazy.”
