Death Is My Comrade

by Stephen Marlowe

  We waited the night out. I sat up with my rifle. In the morning Mike Rodin was feeling better. He could have walked if his life depended on it, but not very far.

  The Kelderaris hitched their horses to the wagons. We had cold hedgehog stew for breakfast. The long caravan train assembled. We pulled out of the campsite early and rolled creakingly north.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  We covered thirty miles of marsh country in two days, passing all the road-junction checkpoints without incident. I almost began to think that Felo had told me the truth. But then why had Lucienne gone to him?

  It was night, our third night with the gypsy caravan and our second on the trail. Ten miles to Ozero Yanis. If Lucienne had told Felo who Vasili Rodzianko was, and if he had told the militia, what were they waiting for? I thought I could answer that one: we were in Felo’s hands for the time being, there was no hurry, the militia had kicked the buck upstairs, all the way up maybe to Lubianka Street in Moscow, and when they moved in on us they’d move in in force. Meanwhile, we were on ice.

  If Lucienne had told Felo. If he had told the militia.

  The waiting, the not knowing, ate at me.

  Each night, despite Lucienne’s objections, Eugenie managed to flirt with Felo. He was an ugly man and immensely flattered. It was safe enough for Eugenie; she always did her flirting in my presence. “I’ll fix you” she had said. This was her way. It was childish, but then in that way Eugenie was just a kid. I almost felt sorry for her.

  I had taken to sleeping on the ground some distance from our wagon. The nights were warm enough, and because I’m a light sleeper that meant we had more than one man for sentry duty all during the night. I slept with the rifle at my side. The other sentry had Leonid’s automatic.

  Now, on the third night, I stayed up late. Some of the gypsies were singing around their dying campfire, a sad song of the wanderlust too long heeded, of the long rootless days and the black lonely nights. Tomorrow, I kept thinking. Tomorrow, Lake Yanis. How long had it been since Zagorsk? We’d been gypsies ourselves. For half a lifetime it seemed. Tomorrow.…

  Sleep sat on my chest like an incubus. We had another sentry, twenty yards away under the wagon. There was no reason I couldn’t doze. The other sentry was Mikhail. The campfire embers had died; I couldn’t see him. Clouds obscured the moon. I drifted off.

  Hands awoke me. Not urgently, the way Mike Rodin’s had three nights ago. These were warm hands, and gentle. Fingertips stroking softly, slowly on my face, like the blind trying to see.

  It was a woman. She was leaning over me. Her hair brushed my face. Not Lucienne. Lucienne had made her move. Lucienne didn’t need me now. Eugenie, I thought. Eugenie. She had tried to evoke jealousy. It hadn’t worked. And now, the last night, she’d decided to try a less subtle approach.

  I thought all that, coming awake. The hands touched my chest. Just fingertips, feather-light, tentative.

  “Eugenie,” I said softly but angrily, “will you for crying out loud get back to the wagon?”

  A finger touched my lips. “Shh.”

  I grabbed a wrist. It was trembling.

  “Look—”

  “Shh, you’ll wake the others.” A throaty whisper, inches from my face.

  Not Eugenie. You know your women, Drum, that you do.

  It was Galina.

  “Please. Please just be quiet.”

  I was quiet.

  She whispered a little speech in that husky voice of hers. Maybe, being Galina Rodzianko, she had to. “You’re a strange man,” she said. “A disturbing man. I should hate you. I should hate you and everything you stand for. You know that, don’t you? But in Zagorsk—that soldier. You could have killed him. Perhaps you should have. You did not. And my uncle, the way you made him go on when he wanted to stop, wanted to surrender himself. And the French woman … and … I have, I want.… Lone wolf,” she said suddenly but barely audibly. “Lone wolf you are … the last of them, almost, in a world going collective so fast, so fast it makes your head spin.” I could barely hear her now. She was talking softly and swiftly, merging the rhythms of two languages. “Lone wolf.” She made a sound: throaty laughter. “Lone wolf, lone wolf … I want you.”

  She moved. We came into contact, more than fingertips on flesh, for the first time. Her lips brushed my face, searching. Found my mouth. It started as a sweet sad kiss, a kiss of farewell because tomorrow this would end, tomorrow night we would be in Finland and the wild journey north and the fear and the uncertainty would be gone. That was the way it started.

  It ended explosively. It started with Galina kissing me, sadly, sweetly like that, and ended with me rolling over and feeling the floodgates of my own tension burst and then taking the kiss and then commanding it until it commanded us, and then drifting, searching with Galina. And Galina’s superb dancer’s body responding and, with mine, seeking and finding a tempo that lifted us up, up, away from the dying campfire and the gypsies and the soil of Russia and the menace to a joined surging freedom.

  Much later she said again, “Lone wolf,” huskily, spent.

  I stopped that with a kiss.

  She stayed with me until the first light of false dawn hung over the caravan wagons.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The scream came from Felo’s wagon.

  That last morning the caravan had made five miles. We’d stopped for lunch. Felo had invited Eugenie to eat in his wagon. Felo’s long hair had been plastered down with stickum. Or maybe with axle grease. Eugenie had given me an arch look and her mother a defiant one, and had accepted. Mike Rodin, still weak, was asleep in our wagon.

  That was an hour ago. Now Eugenie was screaming.

  I picked up the rifle and sprinted to Felo’s wagon. A young gypsy barred my path. I stiff-armed him out of my way like a downfield runner, and went rushing up the stairs. The door was locked, but it was also flimsy. I kicked it in.

  In a way it was like beginning all over again, like seeing Eugenie the first time that Friday night in tidewater Maryland when she’d hollered rape. With one difference: this time it was no act.

  The wagon had wood and leather furniture. It even had a strip of Persian carpet on the floor. This time Eugenie stood in a crouch with her back to the far wall. She had done up her hair in that single glossy auburn braid, like the first night. In her hand she held the jagged neck of a broken vodka bottle. Her eyes were big with fear. Her dark blouse was ripped from shoulder to waist, as the aqua one had been in Maryland. But that night Eugenie had done the ripping herself. Felo’s big hand had also ripped the strap of her brassiere. It was very hot in the wagon. Sweat ran down between Eugenie’s high, tip-tilted breasts.

  Felo pivoted in my direction, panting. “The little one has spirit,” he said. “This Felo loves.”

  As he turned, Eugenie slashed him with the broken bottle. Blood welled from his cheek. He’d have a scar there to match the one on the other side. He made a sound like a growl, deep in his throat, and licked his red sausage lips.

  “Later, little one,” he promised Eugenie.

  He came at me.

  With my left hand on the barrel and my right on the trigger guard, I swung the rifle butt up at Felo’s jaw. His head jerked up. The glass eye popped from his left eye socket, struck the floor, bounced and rolled. His bandy legs buckled under him and he collapsed on the floor.

  Eugenie leaned over him to cut him again. She didn’t know what she was doing. She was wild: I grabbed her wrist. She tried to slash me with the broken bottle. I slapped her face, three times, briskly.

  “Come on. We’re getting out of here.”

  She blinked sanity back into her eyes. “He tried to rape me.” The same words. Friday night in Maryland again.

  I found a shirt hanging on a hook. Eugenie covered herself with it. We went back to our wagon, the gypsies standing silently, watching us.

  “Hide me! Please hide me! You’ve got to hide me! Chester, I’m begging you. Don’t let him take me!”

  T
hat was Eugenie. A few minutes had passed. We were all in the wagon. We had my rifle and the automatic. We also had a crowd of the Kelderaris outside. From the window I could see that two of them held shotguns. Till now I hadn’t known they owned firearms. Several others gripped the handles of long spades. The points and edges had been sharpened. They made vicious weapons; you could decapitate a man with those sharpened spades.

  Felo, his face bloody, his empty eye socket gaping, had joined the crowd outside our wagon. “The little one,” he had bawled. “Felo wants the little one. She comes with me. Everyone outside, quick, quick, quick! This is as far as you go. I want the little one.”

  I had snapped off a shot at his feet with the little automatic. It kicked up dust and earth. Felo danced back. So far they hadn’t returned our fire.

  “Calm down,” Mike Rodin told his daughter. “We’re not going to let him take you.”

  “Calm? How can I be calm? He’s an animal. He’s horribly ugly. The Baro Sero’s mate, he said. He wants to make me the Baro Sero’s mate. I’d kill myself.”

  She turned to me again, her eyes desperate. “You’ve got to save me.”

  I went to the front of the wagon. Past a thick curtain and outside, the reins hung on a hook.

  “What are you going to do?” Mike Rodin asked me.

  I paused at the curtain. “Ride right through them. It’s the only way. Just five miles to Lake Yanis, Mike.”

  “They’ll shoot you off the wagon. They’ve got shotguns.”

  “Maybe,” I said, and parted the curtain.

  But two gypsies had just finished cutting the horse’s harness with their knives. The trace poles thudded to earth. They led the horse away.

  “Ten minutes,” Felo shouted. “You have ten minutes to decide. Then Felo burns you out of there.”

  I went back inside. “They cut the traces,” I said.

  “You,” Lucienne hissed at her daughter. “You had to get us into this. You with your bold eyes and your flirting.”

  Eugenie grasped my right hand with both of hers. Her fingers made scrabbling motions. Her big eyes looked up at me beseechingly. “You’ve got to save me!”

  I didn’t answer her. Mike Rodin had put it into words. We wouldn’t let Felo take her. He’d have to kill us first.

  She misunderstood my silence. Her fingers crawled up my arm, clutching. “Please. Oh please.…”

  I brushed her hand away. Outside I’d heard a sound I didn’t like. A crisp crackling, as of dry twigs burning. I went to the window. Some of the Kelderaris had started a fire a couple of dozen yards from our wagon.

  Eugenie came up behind me. She was hysterical now, as she’d been in Felo’s wagon. She screamed at me: “I could have killed you once! I didn’t. I didn’t! You owe me your life. Do you hear me, I could have.…”

  Her voice trailed off. Her eyes widened when she realized what she had said.

  For another moment it meant nothing to me. I had too much to sweat about right here, right now. And then it socked home, bits and pieces of it like harmless lumps of plutonium until they’re brought together and reach critical mass.

  There was only one time Eugenie could have killed me. “When would that have been?” I said. “In Washington? In my office?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re crazy.… I only want to.…”

  “In my office. You had a gun. You didn’t kill me. All you did was slug me from behind before getting out of there. After you’d shot Ilya.”

  “What is this?” Mike Rodin gasped in astonishment. “What is this?”

  Another thing Eugenie had told me came back now: the A-bomb after it reached critical mass. “On Custer Street you said Ilya’d been shot dead in my office. In my office. But that wasn’t the way the papers ran it, or the radio. It didn’t mean anything to me then. I didn’t know yet that the State Department had given out a false account of the murder. They said outside. They said in the hall. You said inside.

  “Ilya brought the letter to you, Mr. Drum?” That was Laschenko, incredulous. “To you? Not to the Baker woman?”

  “Marianne gave it to me for safekeeping.”

  “And so Lucienne contacted Leo Ring and he did what he did for nothing?” Laschenko gasped. “I even thought that perhaps she had followed Ilya.…”

  I shook my head. I should have felt the elation that comes when you crack a case. I looked at Mike Rodin. I felt empty, drained. “It was little bright eyes here.”

  Mike Rodin said: “I’ll never believe Eugenie killed anyone. Never.”

  “Why should she have, Mr. Drum?” Laschenko asked. “She was trying to help Ilya.”

  “At first she was. But at first she didn’t know the contents of the letter. There wasn’t time. Ilya had just given it to her when we arrived at the beach house. She gave it to Marianne. All Eugenie knew then was that Ilya wanted her to give it to her father.”

  “But to kill—” Laschenko began.

  “Her?” I said. Eugenie was crying. Galina put an arm around her shoulders. “Killing doesn’t mean the same thing to her as it means to you. You’ve got some pretty good firsthand evidence of that. She tried to kill you on Custer Steet.”

  Laschenko looked at his arm. He wasn’t wearing the sling any longer.

  “Why’d she follow you?” I asked him. “Why’d she go gunning for you?”

  “I had threatened Lucienne,” he said tonelessly. “I would reveal her past unless she.…” He couldn’t go on.

  “Unless she called Leo Ring off. But spilling Lucienne’s background would have messed up Eugenie’s gay little social life, so she went after you with a gun. Went after you with a gun the way other people would raise their voices and holler. Right, bright eyes?” I asked Eugenie. “Isn’t that the way it was?”

  Eugenie just glared at me through her tears.

  Mike Rodin said: “That’s enough, Drum. I don’t know what you’re talking about, this Custer Street business, but I know my daughter couldn’t have killed Alluliev. She was trying to help him. She wanted to deliver his letter to me. Didn’t she? Didn’t she?” He waited for my answer. Rage and uncertainty had made his voice hoarse.

  I looked at him. At Mike Rodin, standing there and seemingly strong and healthy now in his anger, but dying a little, dying a day at a time. I thought I knew the answer now, I thought I knew all of it. But I wasn’t going to tell Mike Rodin. I couldn’t.

  “Well? Well, Drum?”

  “Don’t make me answer you, Mike. Forget it.”

  “You bastard!” he cried. “You made an accusation. Now back it up.”

  I shook my head.

  Mike Rodin hit me, hard enough to drive me back against the wall. I tasted blood in my mouth.

  “Back it up,” he said. He came after me, his big fists ready. “Go ahead and back up your accusation.”

  “No, Mike.”

  “Then take it back, damn you.”

  I said nothing.

  He struck again, blind with rage, savage. My head smashed against the wall. I didn’t raise my hands. He hit me a third time, at the point of the jaw, driving me to my knees.

  He stood over me. “A dick,” he sobbed. “A cheap lousy no-good bastard of a private dick, in the end. Get up and fight. Get up and.…”

  Something thumped against the roof of the wagon. Something else moved the hanging at its front, and fire flickered there. The curtain began to smolder. It burst into flames. Vasili Rodzianko looked at his brother, looked at me and then rushed to the curtain. He tried to beat out the flames with his hands, couldn’t. They spread, licked along the walls. Another torch thumped on the roof. The wagon filled with smoke.

  I got up. Flames danced at my elbow. The smoke choked us, made us gasp for air that suddenly wasn’t there. Water streamed from my eyes. I couldn’t see.

  The wagon was dry as tinder. It was tinder. In seconds it would come crashing and flaming down on us.

  “Outside!” Laschenko cried. “Got to get outside!”

>   I waited, aware of the others stumbling through smoke toward the door. When Mike Rodin hit me, I’d dropped the automatic. Vaguely I saw him crouch for it now, groping, then stagger outside. I got the rifle and followed him, reeling from his blows and the smoke in my lungs.

  I didn’t see the blue of the sky and the white and green of the birch woods, not right away. Smoke had seared my eyes. I saw a red haze and shifting, moving shapes. I went down two steps. Something struck the side of my neck. I plunged off the steps, lay on the ground, saw a gypsy’s legs near me, and the haft of a spade. At least there was that. I could see again.

  Eugenie screamed. I got to hands and knees and scrambled toward the rifle. Felo was carrying Eugenie toward one of the wagons. She clawed and kicked and screamed her hope away.

  Mike Rodin ran after them with the little automatic. A gypsy with a shotgun cut diagonally across the clearing to intercept him. “Mike,” I shouted. “Mike, look out!”

  He fired the automatic once, hitting nobody. The gypsy’s shotgun roared.

  Mike Rodin leaped back three feet as if he’d been jerked by wires. Then slowly and with a great deal of care he spread himself out on the ground.

  Only a second or two had passed since Eugenie’s first scream. I reached the rifle. A shadow hovered over it. The haft of the spade struck again. The shadow grew, enveloping me. I lay for a time in darkness, but there were the smells of the earth, and sounds: the creak of the Kelderaris’ caravan wagons, the whinnying of horses, the shouts of men.

  And something more: Eugenie’s voice, high and thin over the creak of the wagonwheels. “Chester! Save me, please, please.… It’s true, everything you said is true! I admit it, I killed him … save.…” Then just the creak of the wagonwheels and faintly over them, “Save me.…” once more.

  I ran toward the sound, stood in choking dust. The Kelderaris’ caravan was leaving. On foot we’d never overtake it, not that we could have done anything for Eugenie if we had.

  Time passed. I don’t know how much. I was out on my feet. I staggered back toward the others. They had gathered around Mike Rodin’s body. Beyond them, our wagon burned like a bonfire.