Boris. The hulking acromegalic from Lubianka Street.
I turned and surface-dived. Boris? I thought a little wildly. Sure, why not, there’d been plenty of time. Lucienne had betrayed us to Felo and Felo to the police in Pytkyaranta four nights ago. The case belonged to Plekhanov as Plekhanov belonged both to the Ministry of Culture and Lubianka Street. And Plekhanov and his acromegalic henchman had come here to wrap it up.
Something caught my leg as I dived. I shook it off, swam a few strokes under water, surfaced again. I couldn’t touch bottom.
Boris’ head bobbed up two feet from mine. The light had lost us. I treaded water. If Boris could stand here.…
He couldn’t stand. He closed with me. His left fist, moving through water and then through air, cuffed the side of my head. The water cushioned the blow, drew out its strength. Still, my head rang. Boris swung again, his arm wrapping around my neck. I butted his chin with my head. His arm moved away. I filled my lungs with air and dove.
Below the surface, I caught Boris’ belt. I tugged him down with me. One of his knees floated toward my face and exploded there. I held on. Only just held on. Sank with Boris, slowly through the cold and dark, fighting the same fear he was fighting as his legs thrashed and his arms pummeled me. Then my feet landed in the ooze of the lake bottom. I crouched there, holding on. Boris squirmed, kicked, clawed. My lungs began to ache for air. Up, I thought, go up, you’ve got to go up. I waited in the cold wet darkness. Held on.
Then what I held was dead weight. It floated there. A knee struck my face, gently. I let go and kicked, heading for the surface. Compulsively I opened my mouth and breathed.
Not water. Air.
I came up ten feet on the other side of the skiff. Boris didn’t come up at all.
Hands helped me aboard. I just lay there. Mikhail Rodzianko and his father began to row. I think there was light for a time. I know there were shots, rifle fire and the chattering stutter of the machine pistols. The skiff rocked gently.
We moved out across Lake Yanis.
After a while I took Vasili Rodzianko’s place at the oars, and Laschenko took Mikhail’s. We thought we were rowing north. Occasionally one of us thought he could see the eastern shore of the lake. It began to rain, slowly at first and then very hard. Galina and her father bailed with their cupped hands.
All night there were power boats on the lake, looking for us. We could hear the rasping roar of their motors, see their spotlights bouncing off the water. Once they approached so close we could hear them hailing us with a megaphone. They hadn’t spotted us, though. The light went by a hundred yards to our left, the rasp of their boat faded. We bobbed in its wake.
I rowed until my hands blistered, until the blisters broke and new ones formed, until the oar was slippery with my blood. Mikhail replaced Laschenko. Vasili Rodzianko was exhausted. I kept rowing. A motorboat, I thought. The fisherman could have given us a motorboat. He hadn’t. He knew what he was doing. The sound would have guided them to us. They knew we would head north to Finland. That was all they knew. It was dark. They had a lot of lake to cover.
So did we.
“Shore,” Galina said. “I can see the shore.”
It had stopped raining. The first bleak gray light of a new dawn squatted on Lake Yanis. I bent my back and pulled my oar through water and bent my back again.
We heard a power boat. It didn’t have a light. It didn’t need one now.
It pulled alongside. We had no weapons. We waited. A figure in a gray uniform stood on the aft deck. It was a large cabin cruiser. The man called something to us.
Finland or Russia?
The cabin cruiser drifted toward us. Galina watched it. She licked her lips. She didn’t say anything. Another man appeared on the aft deck. This one had a rifle.
I stood up with my oar. I lurched against the gunwale and went down to one knee.
“Who are you?” I shouted.
The man with the rifle looked surprised. In English he said: “Welcome to Suomi.”
Suomi, in one of the two Finnish languages, means Finland.
They took us by plane from a town called Tohmajarvi to Helsinki. Finnish Foreign Office officials met us at the airport. We were closeted with them for five hours, and then a man from the American Legation came to talk with me and I had to tell our story all over again.
“Five hundred miles?” he gasped. “You mean you came five hundred miles through Russia?” I nodded. He was still talking. “With Vasili Rodzianko?” I nodded. He went on talking. What else he said I never knew. I’d fallen asleep.
Some of the rest of it made the papers. Laschenko will stay in Finland, at least for the present. He has no plans beyond that. He had made his break; he was still like a man searching for a new personality. The American Legation in Finland wired the State Department in Washington and they sent a stiff note to the Russian Ambassador saying that Eugenie Duhamel Rodin, an American citizen, had been kidnaped by a band of roving Kelderaris gypsies in Russia. But Russia is vast, and doesn’t a swimming fish taste best? I have a hunch no one will find Eugenie.
Someone from the Swedish Academy flew to Helsinki to see Vasili Rodzianko. He will receive his Nobel Prize at next year’s ceremony. There is much he can tell the West. I hope we’ll listen.
I put through a transatlantic call to Marianne. “Finland?” she gasped. “What on earth are you doing in Finland?” I said I’d tell her when I got home.
The shared violence and tension over, Galina and I were almost like strangers. She came out to the airport with me.
“Mikhail is making contacts,” she said. “The ballet in the West … France or Denmark … I will get work.”
Her hand touched mine. My plane already had been announced. Her fingers squeezed once, and were gone. I turned her toward me, and her blond hair brushed my face.
“Good luck, Galina.”
Her dark eyes narrowed, and for a moment we both remembered. “Lone wolf,” she said huskily. “I’ll never forget you—lone wolf.”
I boarded the plane. Lone wolf?
Lone wolf, hell.
I’d remember Galina, but I was going back to Marianne.
THE END
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1960 by Stephen Marlowe
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Death Is My Comrade Page 20