stripped off by a velleity of the wind or the hand of a curious boy. Blue light shone through the tarp. It was warm under there, but he would just have to survive that. His heart was pounding at something like 180 beats a minute, which meant that his body was generating an enormous amount of heat. He rested his head on his arm and closed his eyes and began making a conscious effort to slow his breathing. He had water in the CamelBak pouch strapped to his back. He rubbed some into his hair so that it would evaporate and cool off his head, then put the end of the tube in his mouth and began taking little sips every ten seconds or so. The cart started and stopped, pivoted and lunged through the throng. He was alive, and he was putting distance between himself and the epicenter.
“MY BAD,” YUXIA kept saying, as the van pulled up the ramp onto the ring road, in hot pursuit of the dust- covered taxi that contained Zula. “My bad, my bad, my bad.”
“There is no bad,” Csongor said. He had to shout to be heard, since, as they accelerated to freeway speed, the wind began howling through the crack in the van’s roof. “You did nothing bad.”
“But I saw her,” Yuxia keened. “She ran right past me! I honked but she did not look back. Aiyaa!”
They seemed to be passing a lot of traffic. Marlon, seated next to Csongor in the second row of seats, directly behind Yuxia, leaned forward and made a sharp remark. Yuxia glanced at the speedometer for the first time since the journey had begun, and the blue boot pulled back from the gas pedal.
And only just in time, since they had nearly shot past a dust-covered taxi in the right lane. Yuxia let it gain some distance on them, then cut back into the right lane, drawing stentorian protests from car and truck horns all around.
“So,” Csongor said. For he really had no idea what was going on. “Zula ran past you. You honked at her. She ignored you. She got into a taxi—?”
“Bottom line, got thrown into one.”
“Who threw her into a taxi? What are you talking about?”
She opened her mouth and shook her head hopelessly.
“The tall black man?” Marlon guessed.
“No, tall white man.”
Marlon and Csongor looked at each other.
“White like paper,” Yuxia went on. She licked a finger, wiped a streak of concrete dust off her cheek, then held it up for them both to see. “Basic color of this.”
Marlon said, “If you had tried to do something, that dude would have killed you.” But this just sent Yuxia into another paroxysm of steering wheel pounding.
“My head was confused,” Csongor said. “I saw nothing clearly. But after Ivanov struck me, someone else came into the cellar—the same man as you are talking about?”
“Yes, the same,” Marlon confirmed. “He shot at the man who hit you and—” Seeing what had happened in his mind’s eye, Marlon shook his head in a combination of disbelief and nausea. Csongor, who spoke no Chinese at all, was impressed, thus far, by Marlon’s fluency in the universal English of action movies and chat rooms.
They were threading a huge interchange where the ring road connected with a colossal, new-looking bridge thrown across a strait to what Csongor conjectured was the mainland: a zone of tidal flats supporting immense high-rise apartment complexes still under construction, and equally tall standards to support power lines hung across the water.
“Anyone who kills Ivanov is my loverboy,” Yuxia remarked.
Csongor had a strong feeling that Ivanov’s killer would make a terrible loverboy. He turned and looked at Marlon.
A human figure, outside the car, caught his eye. He looked out the dust-hazed windshield to see a uniformed PSB officer standing in the median strip, just by the side of the road, facing traffic. Both hands in front of him.
Aiming a gun.
Right at them.
Csongor twitched so hard that he kicked Ivanov’s man-purse under the passenger seat. But as the cop was flashing by, he perceived that it was actually a manikin, planted there on a concrete base, and that the thing in its hands was a mockup of a radar gun. He put his hands to his face and leaned back and tried to compose himself.
First things first. “You have a phone?” Csongor asked.
Marlon hadn’t noticed the manikin. He had been gazing curiously at Csongor’s strange reactions and movements. He nodded, sat up out of his slouch, produced a phone, and yanked its battery. Csongor felt a wave of good feeling pass through him. Not only had Marlon guided him out of hell, but he was the kind of guy who didn’t have to be told how to render his phone silent and untraceable.
“Yuxia?”
“No! Dr. Evil took it.”
“Then it’s probably in Dr. Evil’s bag,” Csongor said. He extricated it from beneath the passenger seat, hauled it up onto his lap, and began zipping it open. The unmistakable lurid pink of Chinese currency gleamed in the gap, and he thought better of opening the thing wide. So he opened it just enough to get his hand inside and began groping around. This went slowly, since he couldn’t see what he was doing. Marlon watched with a mixture of curiosity and nervousness.
“Who was that guy?” Csongor asked, trying to get Marlon thinking of something else. “That black man?”
Marlon’s eyes snapped up from the bag to glare at Csongor. “Who the fuck are
Then Marlon and Yuxia got into an argument. Csongor had the impression that Yuxia had reprimanded Marlon for his bad manners.
“Don’t worry about it,” Csongor said. “It is a reasonable question.” He grinned, trying to convey that he was not offended. Any kind of pronounced facial expression made his head hurt, though.
Perhaps in response to something Marlon had said, Yuxia got an interested look on her face and turned to scrutinize Csongor. Then her eyes dropped to the bag.
Marlon tapped her on the shoulder and nodded toward the windshield, trying to draw her attention to the road, since she had drifted back into the left lane and was passing a lot of cars.
“Marlon is right,” she concluded, turning back around and dropping speed. “Who the fuck are you?”
It was obvious that Csongor’s behavior with the bag had set their nerves on edge. So he dropped it to the floor of the van, in the middle of the space between himself and Yuxia and Marlon. He unzipped it all the way and pulled back its top flap to expose its full contents.
It had some kind of internal stiffeners that held it open in a box shape. Its main central cavity was filled with money: as many as a dozen rubber-banded bricks that, along with the ammunition clips and the electric stun gun, floated around in a stew of loose bills and ten-bill packets. Sewn to the inside walls of the bag were a number of little mesh pockets, filled with clutter. Csongor, recognizing the purplish-red hue of a Hungarian passport, opened one of these and pulled out a clear Ziploc bag containing his passport, his phone, and most of the contents of his wallet. He pulled the battery from the phone and put the other stuff on the seat next to him. Continuing to explore the other pockets, he found two other Ziploc bags, one containing Peter’s stuff and the other containing Zula’s. He made certain that their phones were deactivated.
Yet another phone, a Chinese model, had been thrown into one of the pockets. Csongor pulled it out and held it up. “Is this yours?” he asked, popping out the battery.
No answer came from Yuxia, and he looked up for the first time to discover her and Marlon gazing into the bag in silent astonishment. She, at least, had the presence of mind to glance up at the road from time to time.
“This is Ivanov’s bag,” Csongor said. “Do you guys understand that? It is not mine.”
“It is now,” Marlon said.
“Are those bullets?” Yuxia asked.
Csongor placed Yuxia’s phone and its battery in the cup holder next to her elbow, then reached into the bag and held up one of the ammunition clips. The top couple of cartridges were clearly visible at its top. “Yes.”
“You have a gun?” Her tone of voice was not:
