“Where the hell are we?” she said.
“I thought you knew.”
She fished a map out of the glove compartment and studied it. “I’d say we’re around here,” she said, pointing to a blank spot southeast of Krasnoyarsk and west of the Lena River. The only thing nearby was the highway to Irkutsk. To the north there was a huge expanse of nothing, a wilderness the size of Canada, stuck in the middle by the pinprick of Yakutsk.
“How far to Yakutsk?” I asked. The idea of heading to my grandmother’s village on the Tatta River crossed my mind; Misha had told me how to get there, and my relatives, I trusted, would take me in. But if they refused, what then? I’d be stranded in the middle of nowhere. And if they did give me shelter, what would I do there, other than hide? Besides, I doubted Zara would agree to that plan, so I’d have to get rid of her first, and I didn’t want to do that. I needed her to speak for me in un-accented Russian, at least until we got to a place where Westerners were less conspicuous.
I’d been thinking as we drove, and I’d concluded that my best bet was, again, the American Consulate, where I could throw myself on the mercy of my countrymen, and trust that the CIA would care enough about me—their captured fugitive spy—to smuggle me out of Russia. Vladivostok wasn’t the closest city, but it was a better choice than Novosibirsk, as it was smack at the end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, where Zara and I were presently headed in the only mode of relatively safe transportation currently available. If Zara decided she’d rather go with Plan B and hop the border into Mongolia, I was open to that idea, too. Anything, as long as I got out of Russia fast.
“Four thousand kilometers to Yakutsk, roughly. About a fifty-hour drive,” she said, folding the map and putting it away.
That was too far anyway, which happily justified the decision I’d already made.
“Getting cold in here,” Zara prompted.
I turned on the engine, and soon the fan was blowing hot dry air into our faces. I leaned my head against the head rest. The pickled herring was not sitting well, or maybe it was the raw egg. My stomach heaved, and I swallowed down the acid. The ghostly thin-lipped face of the dead Samaritan—eyes wide open in either the shock of being murdered or the shock of death itself—floated on the other side of the windshield. I blinked away the image, but another one quickly appeared—my hand wrapped around a small scalpel, a thin seam of red bubbling on a smooth white neck.
A brutal loneliness washed over me, as vast as Siberia itself, a feeling that I was nothing and nowhere, that I’d somehow ceased to exist. Like a drowning person, I tried to propel myself back to the surface of sanity, back to whatever I used to know that might still make sense. I tried to mentally retrace the events that had gotten me to where I was, but the pieces dangled, unconnected. The steps that had taken me from my bright, busy office in Washington, D.C. to this dark, vacant lot were numerous and bizarre. I couldn’t possibly recall them or link them logically. So many small and large decisions. What should I have done differently, if not everything? Where had I made my mistakes? And how would I ever crawl out of this below-zero place?
“You okay?” Zara’s feet, swimming in the Samaritan’s wool socks, were propped on the dashboard, and the vodka bottle was pressed between her skinny thighs.
“Why would I be okay? Are you?”
A crooked, bashful smile played across her lips. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“A man is lying dead back there.”
Zara said calmly, “Isn’t this what you wanted? To be free?”
I pondered the question. Is this what I wanted? As if watching a grainy time-lapse film, I saw murky images of a woman, Dr. Natalie March, getting old in Female Prison 22, the years ticking by slowly, her hair turning gray and her skin falling into wrinkles, as she mopped floors and changed bedpans and learned to sleep like the dead. Before my eyes, she grew ever more sallow and stooped, until her steps were mere shuffles, and her eyes didn’t leave the floor. Someone had needed to care about that woman, to try to save her from a fate as bad or worse than death. If not me, then who? So if everything had to happen the same way, if the Samaritan had to die to free my future self, would I do it again? It shocked me to realize that I would.
“Did you always want to be a doctor?” Zara asked quietly.
“Always. Ever since I can remember.”
“Why?”
I grimaced in the dark. “I’ve forgotten.”
“You wanted to help people. That’s what most people say.”
“Yeah. I suppose that was it.” The Samaritan’s head bumped softly against the windshield like a beach ball hitting the side of a pool. The eyelids I’d pressed closed flickered up and down. There was nothing behind them but dark water flowing fast.
“You have it good, you know,” she mused. “You put on your white coat and your stethoscope, and you get respect. I bet you believe what you see in people’s eyes, don’t you?”
“Not always,” I muttered.
“Me? I have to fight for respect, always have, since I was a kid. People always told me what was wrong with me. Total strangers, who didn’t know me from crap. Yet they all agreed how fucked up I was. I’ve been hearing what a piece of shit I am all my life.” She paused, put her hand out to touch my sleeve briefly. “Don’t be scared, Natushka. You’re going to get out of this one way or another. You’ll go back to having money, being somebody, living in a nice place. You’ll see. You’re not like me.”
There was nothing I could say to that, so I asked, “What did you want to be when you were a kid?”
“A photographer. I used to take pictures for my friends—weddings, graduations, babies. Happy times. I could have done it, I think. I was pretty good.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She shook her head in bewilderment. “I honestly don’t know.”
“When this is over, Zara, things will be better for you. Just stay off the drugs.”
She gave a sarcastic laugh. “You make it sound so easy. But you don’t know what it’s like. I’ve got a mental problem, Natushka. My head doesn’t work like other people’s. I think I’m god sometimes; no one can hurt me. I play chicken with trains. Then the next day I want to kill myself. I think about hanging, how my body will swing on the rope. By the way, if I ever do it, that will be how.” She turned her tawny eyes to me. There was nothing but calm acceptance in them, resignation to a fate. “I need the drugs. That’s how I survive.”
“No. You need to see a psychiatrist. You’re probably bipolar. It’s nothing to be ashamed of—a lot of people are. There are very good meds these days for people like you.”
“In Russia? Good meds in Russia for people like me?” She gave a bitter laugh. “I can just see it: I walk into a hospital. Say, ‘Oh, excuse me, I’m crazy. May I have some good meds, please? Like they have in the United States?’”
“You have to try, Zara. There are doctors out there who will help you, I’m sure of it. Maybe in some little town. If you really try, you can figure it out.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re as crazy as me.”
Maybe she was right. I put my hand out for the bottle, and she handed it to me. I felt like getting drunk, but that wasn’t going to happen: the bottle was too light. I guzzled the last of it and said, “If I could claw my way through the fucking planet to get out of here right now, I would.”
I felt her smile in the darkness. “My, my. So dramatic.”
“What? Aren’t you scared, Zara? Just a little?”
“Mmm. No, not me. I don’t get scared.”
“Bullshit. Everyone does.”
“Oh, maybe once in a while. But it doesn’t bother me too much because I know I’m going to die soon. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe in five or ten years. Death is not far off for me. I don’t fight it, so I don’t worry. Simple.” She turned to me with a sad half-smile. “Take my advice and don’t worry, Natushka. Every life ends the same way.”
“If you get to Mongolia, if you get away—you have a good chance
, you know. You could make a better life.”
She punched my shoulder playfully. “What are you up to now? Trying to curse me with hope? Don’t you know I’m Zara Chernovskaya? I don’t need hope or dreams. I don’t need anything. If I’m still alive ten years from now, I’ll mail you a postcard. It will say, Dear Dr. Natushka, It’s me. The same fucked-up Zara with the same shitty life. Thank you for believing in me anyway.”
We gassed up when the station opened, and continued our journey east. The sun rose, burning off the haze. Signage appeared, indicating that P-258 to Irkutsk was ahead.
“You ready for civilization?” I said.
We merged onto the highway, stayed within the posted speed limit. The traffic was light. In a few miles, Zara said, “There’s a truck stop coming up. Pull in; we need more money.”
I took the exit, parked at the rear of the lot, facing outward. A couple of big rigs came and went, the drivers getting out to stretch their legs and piss into low, dirty snowbanks. They glanced at the Toyota pick-up with two women inside, but climbed back inside their cabs. Finally, the driver of a cement mixer saw us parked there and headed over, zipping up his fly. He had a bristle of short white hair, and a pink, small-featured face.
I rolled down my window.
“What are you girls doing here?” he said in a tone both sour and amiable.
Zara leaned over. “Looking for work.”
“Oh, yeah. Just one of you, or the both at once?”
“Whatever you like.”
“How ’bout…” His glance slid from me to Zara and back. “How ’bout you?”
I shook my head. “Sick, very sick. Venereal disease.”
“Fuck you,” Zara whispered.
Looking confused, the driver said to Zara, “Okay. So…so how ’bout you?”
“You got enough? I’m not cheap.”
He looked her over. “You’re nothing to write home about.”
“Just for that, you’re gonna have to pay more.”
“Come on. Didn’t mean nothing by it.”
She followed him to his truck, which was parked about fifty feet away. I could see his head in the cab, but not hers. I averted my eyes, settled in to wait.
It didn’t take long. A few minutes later, Zara pulled open the passenger door and hopped into the pick-up. “Hurry up. Drive!”
I shifted into gear, accelerated, merged onto the highway. She peered through the back windshield until the truck stop was out of sight. “Good,” she said, flopping back around.
“What happened back there?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“You didn’t do anything, did you?”
“I didn’t suck him off, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, I mean…you didn’t hurt him, did you?”
“No more than he deserved.”
“Jesus. What’d you do?”
“Don’t act so surprised.”
“I’m not. Just…just tell me what you did.”
“I got us a whole load of cash, that’s what.”
“But what’d you do to him?”
“Don’t worry. He’ll be fine.” She thumbed a colorful stack of rubles under my nose, and I shut my mouth.
The idea of boarding the Trans-Siberian Railroad wasn’t sitting well with me. Word of our escape would be all over the place by now, and train authorities were likely to be on alert. Zara might be able to slip by, but for me, with my American accent and no passport, it was a bad idea.
Attempting to sneak into Mongolia didn’t seem like such a good idea either, on second thought. There would be a checkpoint at the border crossing, and, even if we got through, what would we do in Mongolia with winter setting in, other than encounter a whole new set of problems while trying like hell to get out of there to someplace that was bound to be just as sketchy?
The more I thought about it, the clearer it seemed that driving to Vladivostok was still the best plan for me. Travel by car felt relatively safe now that the Toyota had different plates and we had a wad of cash for gas and food. And one thing I was willing to trust about the roughly 2,500 miles of sparse, untraveled roads between here and that far-eastern city was that they were probably not rife with local cops lying in wait to issue speeding tickets or to pull over Toyota pick-ups matching a certain description. There was always the chance, much too slim to be relied upon but an active hope of mine nonetheless, that neither the Samaritan’s body nor the stolen truck had been discovered yet. I pictured myself walking in to the American Consulate in Vladivostok—in my imagination, it was warm and plushly carpeted, with an urn of fresh coffee and a silver tray of cookies set out for visitors—and being greeted by friendly Americans who gave me food, sympathy, nice clothes, and a place to rest before I was spirited off, secretly, to a small plane bound for the US.
I told Zara what I was thinking, and she admitted it made sense, but she was still bent on Mongolia. She thought she could make it from there to Turkey, where she had friends. So it was time for us to split up. We ought to do that anyway, she said, as we would each have a better chance alone.
“We can split the cash, but who gets the car?” I asked.
She didn’t answer right away, and the silence took on an ominous quality. I had the same thought I’d had in the park. What was to stop her from getting rid of me? Maybe a hammer blow to the head, or a push out the door in a remote area. Then she’d have the car and all the money, and could probably get herself across the border in a day.
“Zara. You have to talk to me. We can work this out.”
A few more moments passed before she said, “You take it, Natushka. I can get through without it. But you, you stick out like…I don’t know…like an iceberg in the desert.”
“You sure?” I asked in concern. Oh, just shut up and take the fucking car, another part of me was saying.
She cocked a plucked eyebrow at me. “Surprised?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought you…” I faltered.
“You thought the evil side of Zara would fly out of her cave to kill you, too.”
“Well, yeah. It crossed my mind.”
“If I wanted to do that, it would have happened a long time ago, Natushka. At the river, maybe. I could have left you there.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because you went after Svetlana like a baby tiger. Claws out—grrrrr.” She curled her fingers at me, enjoying the tease. “And you got me out of that shithole, where those stinking bitches would have killed me eventually. Now they won’t have that satisfaction, and I have the satisfaction of remaining the great Zara Chernovskaya who escaped from prison. My legend is even bigger now.” She paused with a satisfied smile, then went on more thoughtfully. “If you are ever in trouble, Natushka, you come straight back to Russia and talk to me, okay? If you can find me. Or maybe I should visit you in Washington, D.C., huh? I’d like to see the tomb of Abraham Lincoln. Did you know he was a famous khomus player?”
“Funny. My mother told me that.”
“Your mother is a very wise woman whom I would like to meet. But tell me, seriously, if Zara Chernovskaya showed up at your fancy house in Washington, D.C. one day, would you take her to see the tomb of your greatest president?” She cocked an eyebrow at me in a challenging way.
“I would. Definitely. We’d go there and a lot of other places, too. And we’d eat and drink like queens.”
A glorious smile spread across her face. “Yes, that is just what we’ll do, Natushka. We’ll visit the Lincoln tomb, the zoo, the congress, and at the end of the day, we’ll sit in a bubbling hot tub sipping the very best champagne. With Russian caviar and Cuban cigars.” Her tawny eyes sparkled at me wickedly in the pick-up’s gloomy interior. “Do you believe it?”
“I do,” I said, not really lying.
“Good. You must always believe that, my friend, even on the very last day of your life.”
We split the cash, and I dropped her off at the next rest stop. Our conversation was brief, as she s
eemed eager to be gone. I figured her mind was already working on the challenges ahead, as mine was. But before she strolled off toward the line of parked trucks, she tossed this at me: “See you in Washington.”
“I’ll be waiting,” I said, playing along.
As I watched her walk away, I had to remind myself several times that she could take care of herself.
I got out the map and unfolded it. Irkutsk, not far ahead, was the only major metropolitan area on the way to Vladivostok. After that, it was open road. If I stopped only for gas and food and a few hours’ sleep when I needed it, I’d be smelling the salt breeze off the Pacific Ocean in two and a half days.
Traffic thickened as I approached the Irkutsk city limits. I ought to cut over onto back roads, but I didn’t need to do it yet. Right now, it was good to hear the tires humming over smooth highway pavement as the Toyota ate up the miles.
An exit ramp appeared and disappeared. There would be another one soon. I switched on the radio and played with the dial until a local news show came through clearly. I listened for a while, hearing nothing about escaped prisoners. Maybe what happened in Krasnoyarsk wasn’t news in Irkutsk. It might be okay to stay on the highway that went straight through the city after all—a faster route—instead of taking the back roads.
Another exit ramp went by. Then, just like that, the traffic slowed to a crawl. Up ahead, flashing lights; a blockade had been erected, narrowing the highway to one lane. Police officers were stopping cars, asking for licenses, opening trunks, waving drivers through one-by-one. My heart thudded and nearly stopped. Already, three or four cars were queued behind me; there was no way out. The line of vehicles inched forward. Not far ahead, a huge rig was stopped on the shoulder. I swerved out of the lane and pulled behind it, letting the other cars pass. The Toyota was now hidden from view, at least until the truck resumed its journey. My palms were damp on the steering wheel, and I could barely breathe. I was ready to bolt out the passenger door, dash across an apron of field into the woods, but I would certainly be seen, and even if I wasn’t, the Toyota would eventually be searched or towed; it would become clear soon enough that the Krasnoyarsk escapee was in the vicinity on foot. Searchers would go out. How long could I expect to last?
FINDING KATARINA M. Page 28