“Are you all right?” Galina asked me. “Are you all right?”
I didn’t answer her. I went to Mike Rodin. He had taken the shotgun blast full in his face. He was dead.
In the first flush of comprehension, acting on instinct and years of ingrained habit, I’d blurted my accusation at Eugenie. But knowing what she had done meant knowing why she had done it, and that was something I never could have told Mike Rodin.
I wouln’t have to tell him now.
The earth lurched and dipped. Galina kept me from falling.
Chapter Twenty-nine
We dug a grave for Mike Rodin between the gutted wagon and the nearest of the birch trees. The Kelderaris had taken my rifle, but Mike Rodin had fallen on the automatic, and we still had that. We also had the spade I’d been slugged with. I used it to dig the grave. After a while Mikhail helped me. I stood watching him. Galina was comforting her father. He wouldn’t look at Mike Rodin’s body.
At first Lucienne stood near it. “He was too much man,” she said, almost musingly. “Too much man for me, or anyone.” Then Laschenko took her arm and drew her away. He comforted her.
The grave wasn’t very deep. Mikhail and I carried Mike Rodin to it.
Rodzianko suddenly brushed Galina aside and came to the grave. He spoke words over it in Russian, his voice barely audible. I never knew what it was he said. Tears filled his eyes. When he finished, I picked up the spade to cover Mike Rodin with earth. Rodzianko took it from me.
“I wish to do that.”
He filled the grave, and the six of us started walking north through the birch woods.
I looked at Lucienne. I’d expected trouble from her. There wasn’t a chance in the world we could do anything for Eugenie now, but still, wasn’t she Eugenie’s mother? She should have been raving and ranting, shouldn’t she? They’re not far yet, we can follow them, we must follow them—something like that.
She didn’t say a word about it. Numbed by Mike Rodin’s death? Maybe.
She just walked.
After a while Laschenko fell into step with me. “Was it true?” he asked me. “About Eugenie?” He spoke in the past tense, as if he already knew that with all the vast Eurasian land mass to hide them, no one would find the Baro Sero of the Kelderaris and Eugenie. She belonged to the gypsies now.
“It was true.”
“But it makes no sense, Mr. Drum. If Eugenie wanted to help Ilya, why then did she kill him?”
“In the beginning she wanted to help him. A letter. That was all she knew. A letter for her father. What Ilya Alluliev, a clerk at the Russian Embasssy, wanted with her father—that she couldn’t possibly have known. It intrigued her. Mike Rodin had kept his origins secret. No one knew he’d come from Russia as a boy, no one knew he was Vasili Rodzianko’s brother.”
“No one? Ilya knew.”
Lucienne joined us. Laschenko patted her hand. “I assure you, my dear,” he said stiffly, perhaps because he knew it wouldn’t help, “when we reach freedom we will do something to find Eugenie. You have your American citizenship … the American legation in Helsinki … there are ways.…”
“Yes,” Lucienne said. “Of course.” She’d hardly heard him. She told me tonelessly: “Semyon is right. Ilya knew. Last year in France, Ilya was at the Russian Embassy there. I was spending the summer in France. I knew, you see. I have known for years. I and no one else. Not Eugenie, not anyone. Vasili Rodzianko’s book had already been published in the West.”
Her face colored. “At a party, I—I dropped my purse. In it I kept, I have always kept, a picture of Mike.” She shrugged. She wouldn’t look at us. “Energy. He radiated energy. Sometimes he infuriated me, he was so much … the epitome of the profit system. But he was so much man. He—anyway, Ilya was there. He helped me with the purse. He saw the picture. It amazed him. Rodzianko, he said. This man looks so much like Rodzianko. I denied it vehemently. Perhaps too vehemently. I never convinced Ilya.”
“But he wasn’t sure?” Laschenko said.
“How could he be sure?”
“I said: “All right, a year passes. Figure Ilya was ready to defect. Figure you never convinced him, Lucienne. And the names—Rodzianko, Rodin. He had a year to think about it. Figure he also knew how it really was with Rodzianko inside Russia. That Rodzianko wanted out, was under house arrest. He would have known of course that Rodzianko had had a brother, years ago. And he wrote his letter—for Mike Rodin. If he was wrong, if Rodin wasn’t Mikhail Rodzianko, no harm done. The letter wouldn’t have meant much to Rodin then. But Rodin being the kind of guy he was—and if he was Mikhail Rodzianko—Ilya could expect him to do something about it.”
Laschenko shook his head. “But Eugenie. First she helped him, then she—”
“She didn’t know at first what was in the letter, don’t forget that.” I turned to Lucienne: “Did Eugenie ask you about her father?”
“Why, yes. Yes, she did.”
“When?”
“Saturday morning. It was Saturday morning, after what had happened at the beach house.”
“Before or after she told you about Ilya’s letter?”
“Told me!” Lucienne gasped.
Gently Laschenko said: “Drum knows, Lucienne.”
“Before or after?” I asked again.
“Right before she told me about the letter.”
“And you told her who Mike Rodin really was?”
“I told her.”
“Where was this? In Chevy Chase?”
“In Chevy Chase, yes.”
“She’d been with you all the time till then?”
“No. Back in Chevy Chase she said she was all tensed up over what happened at the beach house. She couldn’t sleep. She went for a walk.”
“Ilya,” I said. “She saw Ilya. Which was when Ilya told her what the letter said, told her who he thought her father was.”
“But I don’t see—” Laschenko began.
“That changed things for Eugenie. Another question, Lucienne: did you know Mike was dying of cancer?”
“I knew it, yes.”
“He told you?”
“No, I hadn’t seen Mike for years. Eugenie told me.”
“Then she knew?”
“Every time she came to the States she spent some time with Mike.”
I nodded. I had it then. I knew I had all of it. Not the exact details. The exact details no one would ever know—except Eugenie. And Eugenie wasn’t where she could tell anyone. But Mike Rodin, I thought: Mike Rodin wanted to go out with a bang, not with a whimper. I hadn’t told him. He never knew. He’d died trying to save his daughter’s life. As much as you could like anything under the circumstances, I liked that.
“The way Eugenie acted with Mike here in Russia,” I said, “it was pretty obvious she’d known how sick he was.” I asked Laschenko: “How do you think she’d have felt in the States when Ilya told her what was in the letter and told her who he thought her father was—and when Lucienne confirmed it?”
Laschenko’s eyes widened. “Why … why, she immediately told Lucienne about the letter.”
“Sure, because—”
“Because she knew Lucienne was a Communist?”
“Right. At first she was intrigued by Ilya and his letter, but once she found out what it was and what it would mean to her father, she was desperate to stop Ilya at all costs. She knew Mike Rodin as well as anyone knew him. Knew he was sick but also knew he’d move heaven and earth to rescue his brother. She didn’t want that. She was afraid for him. Maybe she even guessed he’d come here. We’ll never know that for sure.”
“And she thought,” Laschenko said, “Lucienne and I could thwart Ilya?”
“Yeah, there’s that; but don’t forget Marianne already had the letter. Saturday morning she told Ilya it was in my office, and Ilya went there. Eugenie followed him.”
“With a gun? To kill him?” Laschenko asked doubtfully.
“With a gun. To scare him, probably. To threaten him, or me, or a
nyone she had to, to get the letter back and destroy it. I wasn’t there. She must have argued with Ilya. He had a gun. She had a gun. He was a fugitive. The Russians were looking for him. You were looking for him, Laschenko. He was desperate. But so was she. She wanted to protect her father, to keep him from grief. They must have fought. In the heat of the moment, and Eugenie being what Eugenie was, she shot him.”
“And you?” Laschenko asked.
“I popped in after that. She slugged me on the way out.”
“She could have killed you too. She still did not have the letter.”
“She had just killed a man. She was scared. It had been done on impulse.”
“On a whim? You said before on a whim. Then she also would have—”
“All right,” I said. “Not on a whim. Call it desperation, call it impulse.” Maybe that was for Mike Rodin in his Russian grave, I thought. Maybe that would help a little. That wasn’t going to get me anywhere; he was dead. “Impulse,” I repeated. “And the first impulse after that—to get the hell out of there.”
Laschenko said nothing. Lucienne said nothing. I said: “A spoiled, selfish brat. A psychopath.” I remembered my words in Moscow: a walking gratuitous act. “But there was one person she loved,” I said. “She loved her father. But more than anything else, Mike Rodin was his own man and proud of it. How do you think he’d have felt if he knew his daughter had murdered a man to keep him from learning about his brother?”
Laschenko’s eyes narrowed. “So that’s why you let him hit you? That’s why you wouldn’t talk?”
“I’d talked too damn much already, in the wagon. A detective, when the facts suddenly fall into place, a detective running off at the mouth.…”
“You could not help that,” Laschenko told me, and repeated the word I’d used for Eugenie: “Impulse.”
Mike Rodin didn’t know. Mike Rodin didn’t have to be told. He had come to Russia to save his brother and had almost seen that through; had died trying to save his daughter. Mike Rodin would rest.
Chapter Thirty
The fisherman came out of the birch woods a mile from Ozero Yanis. He was a tall, cadaverously thin man. He wore a loden-cloth jacket and a soft cap with a stiff leather visor. He had a white, soup-strainer moustache.
He came right up to Vasili Rodzianko. He let loose with a torrent of words in Russian.
“He wishes to know where the gypsies are,” Galina told me. “He is here to intercept us.” Her eyes were big with fear.
“Why?”
“The gypsies. The caravan noise. At the lake, Chet. The Secret Police have come.”
The tall old man was still talking. “The police?” Laschenko cried.
I glanced at Lucienne. She was calm. “Neat,” I said. “All nice and neat.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Felo. You told Felo who Vasili Rodzianko was. Didn’t you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. If I had, wouldn’t the police have come right away?”
“I followed him to the police station in Pytkyaranta. You told him.”
“That is too ridiculous to deny.”
But of course she would deny it. She was still with us, wasn’t she? Until the Secret Police came? Which of course explained why she hadn’t been concerned about what she would do at the American Legation in Helsinki. A State Department note wouldn’t get Eugenie out of the hands of the Kelderaris. Only the Russians could’ do that, if they wanted to. And they’d want to, if Lucienne delivered Vasili Rodzianko to them on a platter.
The Russians had played it cool. Why shouldn’t they? They could have stopped us any time after Pytkyaranta, but they’d had us and they knew they had us. They’d probably paid off the Baro Sero that night at the police station. The carrot and the stick, I thought. To stop Rodzianko at Pytkyaranta was one thing, to stop him on the beach at Ozero Yanis, across the water from Finland and freedom, was another. Brain-washing technique. Dangle hope before his eyes, withdraw it irrevocably at the last moment. The carrot and the stick.
Five hundred miles for nothing. Mike Rodin’s death for nothing. Leonid and Father Alexi and the nameless Russians who had helped us through a hostile land—all for nothing.
The man with the soup-strainer moustache was talking again, and so was Galina. She was saying: “.… two dozen police, this man says. They are armed. They are waiting. Since last night they have been camping on the lake shore.”
“They have boats?” Tasked.
Galina translated the question. The fisherman answered it, and Galina said: “On Ozero Yanis are many boats. They are camped on the lake shore, where the gypsy was supposed to deliver us. A trap. The gypsy has betrayed us. We would have walked right into it. They—”
“You! You did this?” Laschenko’s face was contorted with rage. He was shaking Lucienne by the shoulders.
“It’s a lie. I never—”
“Please,” Galina said. “We have no time for that now. They will hide us in the woods on the edge of the lake, until nightfall. We will cross at night in a skiff. A mile down the lake. There is hope.”
I looked at her father’s face. If the expression on it meant anything, he didn’t agree with her.
We went with the fisherman.
A dark night. Low clouds had scudded over the gray surface of Lake Yanis in the late afternoon. It was cold, and a strong wind blew in off the lake. Far across the angry gray water we could see a smudge on the horizon. Finland. Visibility was poor. Ten miles, I kept thinking. At the outside, twelve.
A rowboat had been drawn up into the reeds. It seemed barely big enough for all of us. Cold and wet, we waited in the reeds. Behind us on a ridge was barbed wire. We had come through it, and through the last of the birch trees beyond it. Three times, as the afternoon advanced toward night, armed men had prowled past on the other side of the barbed wire. Even as it grew dark we could see them silhouetted against the birches. Fifty yards off and perhaps forty feet above us they prowled the ridge. If they parted the strands of barbed wire, if they came down the steep slope at the foot of the ridge, if they walked across the gravel beach to where the reeds grew.…
Once settled in the reeds, we’d hardly been able to move. They were tall and stiff and offered us good cover, but they rustled in the wind. If we moved, they crackled. The wind drove the shore line higher. For most of the long northern dusk we were hunkered down in six inches of water, waiting, miserable and wet, for nightfall.
I was nearest Lucienne. Each time the armed men went by on the ridge I almost expected her to call out, and I had my hand ready to clamp on her mouth. Her eyes were narrow slits, reflecting the lake. She watched me watch her. She remained silent.
So did the rest of us. The minutes crawled by, spawning other minutes, building the long tormenting hours with them, as darkness grew out across the lake.
Finally the fisherman said something. Galina told us in a breathless whisper: “It is dark enough. He says it is dark enough.” I heard the fisherman’s footsteps crunch away on gravel.
There was a faint silver glow on the lake, absolute darkness on the shore. Mikhail squatted behind the hidden skiff, began pushing it out through the reeds. It snagged on something. Mikhail was knee-deep in water, struggling. The skiff did not budge.
“Watch your wife,” I told Laschenko, and went over to help Mikhail, sticking the automatic in my belt.
We heaved together. The skiff came clear suddenly. We splashed after it through the last of the reeds, trampling them.
A light winked on above us on the ridge. A voice called something in Russian. Galina and her father were already climbing into the skiff;
Lucienne shouted: “We’re here, down here—Rodzianko!”
I heard her and Laschenko struggling. I floundered back toward them through knee-deep water.
“Mike was too much man,” Lucienne was panting. “You are not—man enough. Your career, for this? For this man and his book? This scribbler? There is still time, we can betray him, we were prison
ers.…”
The light on the ridge was swinging back and forth, shooting its beam across the beach and into the reeds, trying to locate us. Lucienne broke free just as I reached them. Laschenko stumbled back against me heavily. He was sobbing.
“Get in the boat. Hurry.”
The automatic was in my hand. Lucienne ran through the reeds, then broke clear of them. I could just make her out, running across the narrow strand of beach.
“Rodzianko!” she shouted. “Rodzianko is here! Rodzianko is here!”
She reached the steep slope that led up to the ridge. She started to climb it.
That was when the light impaled her.
“Rodzianko.…” she said once more, and then I heard the stuttering roar of a machine pistol. Lucienne’s arms flew up. She reached out toward the light. Except for the splashing behind me, there was a moment of absolute silence. And then Lucienne’s voice, bewildered: “You don’t understand … my daughter.…”
She crumpled there. She rolled down the slope and into darkness, and the light lost her.
I heard footsteps crunching on gravel, men shouting. The light moved toward me. I shot at it and a man groaned and it went out. I rushed back through the rustling, crackling reeds. They were holding the skiff offshore, waiting for me. I could see it, dark against the silver sheen of the lake. In a moment the police would see it too.
The water was hip-deep, then waist-deep, then up to my shoulders. I held the automatic above its surface. Another ten or fifteen yards to the boat. Galina called: “We’re over here. Hurry, please hurry, Chet.” Then her voice changed—anxious at first, terrified now. “Look out behind!”
I whirled. There were two of them. One in the water as deep as I was, only his head and shoulders above the surface and his hands high, holding a machine pistol over his head. I shot that one. He never made a sound. His head just sank below the surface. The machine pistol splashed, was gone.
The other one was a mountain of a man. The water barely reached his chest. I blinked water out of my eyes. He splashed toward me. I fired three times and then the gun clicked emptily. I hurled it at him and missed. He came on, splashing. Either I had missed all three times, which seemed incredible, or else he wasn’t particular as to what—up to and including bullets—hit his body. He came closer. The water was very cold. There was a light from shore and it caught the two of us, and the water lapping at my armpits was the cold obscene caress of fear, because I saw his face then.
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