Cold Blood (50 page)

“Everyone present and correct?” Again they smiled on me. It was stunning—that we'd come through such an ordeal losing only three of us. Marvelling, I fell back with a shout. That all this should have happened to me by the age of thirty!

Then Mrs. D. was kneeling at my side with her medical bag, asking if I was all right. She took up my wrist. Moaning softly, I feasted my eyes on her bosom.

“Stop pretending,” she said commandingly, at which Lilenka, watching us from above, giggled.

She tapped my chest, got out her stethoscope. In an ominous voice, “Did your father have heart problems?”

“He died of the plague,” I said, looking up into her masterful eyes.

“Be serious.”

“I am.” (By rolling back my eyeballs, I could see Lili still leaning out of the wheelhouse.) “What have you found wrong?”

“It should be lub-dup, lub-dup, the four valves snapping shut in pairs. But with you... Your heart is scored. In normal times I'd send you to a hospital for examination.”

I sat up sharply, knocking her stethoscope away. “Scored? My heart
scored
? It's more than scored, Annushka, it's stencilled. Your people in the hospital, they'd find Elizaveta to begin with and then Xenia—and God knows who's yet to come. Let's work out how much space there is. How big's my heart, the area that'll take a chisel?”

She gave me the steely eye. “Don't be frivolous. For a long time I've wanted to speak to you about your attitude. It's morally pernicious. You'll end up lonely and cynical if you continue down that road. I've seen it a dozen times in my professional life. You'll take to drink. A temperate existence is what everyone should aim for. I'm keeping Lili away from you—”

“Waste of time. She's a goner.”

“—under lock and key if necessary. And you, Charlie—” She broke off in a sudden bunch of smiles and started patting her hair. Looking up, I knew why: padding down the deck towards us was Yuri Shmuleyvich. Thick mud-streaked legs, everything mud-streaked, big furry stomach, swinging arms—it was how he approached, swatting aside the sprays of brown and jaded willow leaves. Love was written in capitals across his black and bristling face as he advanced upon her.

“Be temperate now, Annushka,” I murmured.

She rose twittering, the stethoscope dangling from her neck.

He coiled a massive hand around her waist—bent her backwards—planted his mouth on hers. Her jaws parted. Her hands were up his back in a flash, nails digging into his muddy flesh.

He broke away, gazed adoringly on her, whacked her on the bottom and said to me solemnly, “Every morning I thank God for big women.”

She went up on tiptoe and kissed him. “Men are such brutes.”

“Some are,” he said agreeably, pulling on his pants. Whistling he went into the wheelhouse, turfed Lili out and started the engine.

The barge edged out into the river. And there was another welcome sight—on the far bank, Kobi astride Tornado, motionless, like a Red Indian, their two images fused into one in the water's reflection.

I raised both fists and shook them in triumph. He waved back, slipped his rifle sling and fired a couple of shots into the air.

I said to Lili, “How did the horse get here?”

“He was grazing beside the road. Kobi hopped out and hitched him on at the back of the armoured car. He rode him onto the barge. Tornado just stood in the middle of the deck, looking around as if he owned the boat. When we got into the middle of the river, he was so big he acted like a sail. So Kobi's riding him along the towpath. Isn't he beautiful?”

“And Boltikov?”

“Improving. I'm just going to wash his bandages.”

“Stiffy and Joseph?”

It was Shmuleyvich who replied. “Getting the wireless to work. Got a knock on the way here.”

“The aerial?”

“Safe and sound. Hey, boss, give me the course for Odessa, will you?”

We all laughed. Nothing to come could be more difficult than what we'd just pulled off. “Oh, south and west in a general manner of speaking,” I said cheerily. “Anything for a man who's feeling peckish? Do we have a cook on board?”

“Be patient,” said Mrs. D.

There was no other traffic on the river. The war had made it too dangerous unless a crew could defend themselves. Thinking of which—but Shmuley interrupted me, saying, “We should find ourselves a pilot. This river'll have bad places as well as good, sure to.”

Now I noticed someone had positioned a machine gun on the roof of the wheelhouse, which allayed my worries in that direction.

The right bank had the usual steep bluff with the towpath hacked out at its foot. On the left the countryside was flat for a bit, letting the river spread out and wander among marshes, stew ponds, duck decoys and a few houses on stilts. Then the forest took over again.

I lay back. The sun was at its sweetest. It was a beautiful early-autumn day: yellowing birches, maples just starting to colour, poplars spearing to the sky, which was itself perfectly blue—
perfectly
, from horizon to horizon, as if the day had decided to set an example to all the other days that God intended to follow it.

Russia, O Russia! World without end, world of every emotion known to mankind at twice normal proof. Could I ever leave it?

Lili was draping the washed bandages over the rail to dry. I called to her. She finished her job and sat beside me, touching. I took her hands between my paws and said, “What's the best memory you have of your mother?”

Those eyes, just like Xenia's but bigger. I thought, I'll eat my hat if she's fifteen. Seventeen, more like.

She cleared her throat: the truth was coming. “The best, the very very best? All right—when she said goodbye to me. In the chapel. Then she ran out—remember? She freed me. I loved her for that.”

“She gave you good advice—having my children. They'll be terrific. My father had his faults but I make up for them.”

“My mother never loved me. I was a nuisance, I interrupted her life. She paid for me to be away, with her sister. Every month she sent Anna Marevna rouble notes folded in carbon paper so the post office clerks couldn't see it was money. Once in a blue moon she came down to visit me. I just wasn't part of her life.”

“Sounds like an honest arrangement.”

“I think Anna Marevna took all the guilt upon herself... I'm not old enough to understand about guilt. All I know is you have to have done something really horrible. You've done something, haven't you? Tetka Anna used to mutter about it when she got to know whom Mamasha had gone off with. You shot someone? She wouldn't tell me more.”

She prattled on. I wasn't taken in by her innocence, no matter that her eyes were fantastic and made me tremble. She was leafing through my history, maybe fantasising about the children we were to have. A light gusting wind had sprung up. Poplar cotton was blowing across the river in drifts, like snowflakes. On it came the smell of my country—the fields of rye and oats, the rivers, the woods, the small black cattle, the bathhouses on a Friday evening. I lay back on the quilt, gazing at the sky.

I'd done it! Got the gold, turned the corner, recaptured luck— grabbed it by its horny ankles as it passed, as one would a chicken.

It was then that he came, while I was thinking about luck and the gold and Lili's breasts and the way her buttocks had shifted against each other as we ran from the monastery; while I was thinking that everything comes right in the end so long as one has a calm attitude towards life.

W
E STOOD
, we listened, heads cocked. Below, Stiffy and Joseph were having an argument in Anglo-Russian. The noise was so faint that we couldn't hear it when they suddenly started shouting at each other.

Lili said, “Are you sure you're not imagining it?”

Shmuley said, “If it's one of those destroyers from the Romanov Bridge we're as good as sliced and dried.”

“Not worth the effort for one small barge,” said Mrs. D. “They've got bigger fish to fry. Anyway, it's gone now.”

But I knew what had been making that insistent humming noise, having heard it the previous dawn at close quarters. Glebov would have been too cowardly to dabble iodine down below, but he'd swabbed himself clean, had a few hours' sleep— and come after me. No need to search upstream, towards the bridge. One way only that a gold barge would go. And it would be Glebov himself. No hired assassin this time. He'd want to get me in his sights and pump bullets into me until I was mince.

I said to Shmuley, “It's him. He may have got bandaged bollocks but he has hatred in his heart.”

“Women on board, doesn't matter to him?”

“Not a bit. He's without mercy.”

He said nothing, spun the wheel to take us back under the willows on the flat side of the river.

Kobi had heard the plane too. He'd urged the piebald to the top of the bluff. Warriorlike he sat on the horse, hand shading his eyes, gazing upstream.

I said to Shmuley, “What did Kobi take with him?”

“Two rifles and half the ammunition.”

I tried to send the women below, down there with Stiffy and Joseph. Lili would have gone but Mrs. D. refused point-blank. She was going to stay with her man in case he was wounded. Moreover, if the barge were holed, it'd sink like a stone from that weight of gold and if she were below decks, she'd never get out.

She didn't care for that idea, “Strong swimmer though I am, as you know very well and should be more grateful for than you are.”

That put me in my place.

“Yuri can't swim well. He told you he could in order to stay with me and protect me—you know, when we swam into the godown. Now it's my turn to look after him... Lili, do what you want, girl.”

Lili glanced mischievously at Shmuley and Mrs. D.—plucked at my sleeve. “This morning Yuri asked her to marry him.”

I said to Mrs. D., “Is that so? Hope you said yes. Then you can use him as a shield. He's beefy enough to soak up a whole belt of ammo.”

“Don't say that,” Mrs. D. said, ready to have another go at me.

I told her I'd say what I wanted and the barge was mine and she could swim for it if she wanted but since Glebov hadn't been blown up in the monastery, here he was again and was she going to help me or wasn't she.

But still she wouldn't go below, nor would Lili. I had to resign myself to that. Next I collared Joseph and Stiffy, one in each hand, and kicked them onto the deck, sparing no part of the boot. I wasn't going to be beaten at this point. I didn't know how. But it wasn't going to happen and they were going to be part of it not happening.

We set about collecting mattresses, planks, loose partition boards and any old stuff we could lay our hands on to make the wheelhouse safe.

Joseph began bleating, “Excellency, Excellency, how can we put the mattresses up there if a
mashinka
is already there?”

“So get it down,” I roared.

The old squaddie surfaced in Stiffy. He shoved Joseph out of the way. Shirt off, he walked the machine gun on its tripod to the
edge of the wheelhouse roof. I took it from him, some weight in it. Twenty yards forward was a winch bolted to the deck, a big old iron thing with double handles. I dragged the gun into its shelter and set it up. Stiffy ran over dragging a belt of ammo in each hand.

Hearing the sound of the Fokker getting louder, I glanced up and there it was, only quarter of a mile away, wheels almost touching the water, dancing in the sunny shimmer like a giant fucking hairy black spider.

Shmuley cut the engines. We were eighty yards from the willows and a good thick patch of osiers. But it'd be a neat piece of helmsmanship to get the barge under cover without grounding her.

Even neater would be to get there before Glebov got us.

His distance, four hundred yards. His speed, one hundred miles per hour. We had eight seconds to live the rest of our lives.