She had been living next door to him the entire time.
He used the toilet and went back out to the antechamber. She held the hazmat suit open. He stepped into it. It was a roomy one-size-fits-all. He pulled his arms through the sleeves.
“Where’s your husband?” he asked.
She smiled sourly. “The penthouse at the Metropole.” She zipped him up and sealed him in with Velcro. “He’s busy with festival planning. He won’t be back until tomorrow morning.” She zipped the hood on. The interior of the suit smelled like her. “That’s your deadline,” she said, pressing the Velcro around his neck. “From this point on, you’re on your own.”
“I understand,” he said. His voice boomed inside the suit. “Thank you.”
She nodded. “Good luck.”
He started for the stairs. He paused and turned back.
“What’s going to happen to you?” he asked.
The same sour smile came across her face. She reached into the apron for the breath mints. She rattled the tin. If she swallowed one, she would be dead in three minutes.
“I’ll be minty fresh,” she said.
100.
He must have been a mile underground. As he rose, so did the ambient temperature. Breathability, he discovered, was not one of a hazmat suit’s selling points. Soon his peasant shirt was sticking to his chest and the viewing panel had fogged up. His thighs quivered with every step. His pockets felt like they were loaded with birdshot. The shaft was claustrophobic and dim. He imagined Zhulk’s wife doing the same climb carrying stacks of books, crates of root vegetables, re-ups of towels. He gritted his teeth and pressed onward.
The stairwell ended unceremoniously at a metal ladder bolted to the wall. Pfefferkorn climbed up and heaved against a trapdoor. It fell open with a clang. He poked his head up into a circular concrete chamber lit by bare yellow bulbs. At the center of the room stood a ten-foot tank that had burst open to resemble an enormous, rust-colored orchid. Oily puddles disclosed an uneven floor. Everything bore the universal three-petaled symbol for radiation. A series of pictorial placards ran along the wall. The first showed a smiling stick figure touching the tank. The next showed the stick figure down on one stick knee, proposing to a female stick figure. The third showed the stick-figure man standing by nervously as his stick-figure wife (her legs in stick-figure stirrups) bayed, a stick-figure midwife urging her on. The fourth placard completed the cautionary tale: the stick-figure couple’s faces contorted in stick-figure horror as they received a stick-figure baby with three eyes and both sets of genitals.
He found the exit. It was unlocked, as he knew it would be. He stepped onto a small concrete apron. The sun was going down. There were no dogs, no razor wire, no watchtowers, no arc lights, no cameras. Instead, extending in every direction for half a mile, was a vast lake of toxic goo. It was thick, sticky, and antifreeze green. It glowed faintly. Anyone wanting to come in or out of the building would have to cross it. He couldn’t smell it but he reckoned that the background smell from the forest multiplied by a billion was a decent approximation. He felt his prostate curling up and trying to hide. The hazmat suit didn’t much reassure him. It was one thing to know and another to do. He sighted the perimeter fence and stepped off the apron, sinking in up to his knees. He was glad he’d ditched the heels.
As he waded along, he glanced back at the ruined reactor. Cylindrical, flared at the top and bottom, the building looked like some overblown dessert sauced with lime coulis. A jagged crack ran up its side. It was identical to other nuclear reactors he had seen pictures of, only far smaller. The smallest in the world, he thought, remembering Zhulk’s obituary.
He reached the fence in thirty minutes. The goo had thinned enough that he could feel solid earth. He walked parallel to the fence for another twenty minutes and came to an abandoned checkpoint, the barrier arm replaced by a chain welded to the bent fencepost. He ducked underneath and was free.
Just off the dirt driveway was a three-sided wooden shower stall, like those at the beach for washing off sand. A sign read . Decontamination station. He looked down at an ordinary garden hose connected to a pipe rising from the ground. He rinsed the goo off, unzipped the suit, and stepped out of it carefully, leaving it puddled in the stall. He hurried down the driveway to the main road. He walked for a while—he wanted to put some distance between him and the reactor—then stopped and scanned in all directions. He saw dewy moonlit fields. All was quiet, not even a bleat. He took out the cell phone. He was getting one bar, barely. He moved around until it fixed. He closed his eyes and pictured the card. He opened his eyes and dialed.
“Tha,” Fyothor said.
“It’s me,” Pfefferkorn said.
There was a scratchy silence.
“Where are you?” Fyothor said.
“About five or six kilometers outside the city, I think.”
“Has anyone seen you?”
“No.”
“You are alone?”
“Yes.”
Pfefferkorn heard the phone’s mouthpiece muffled. Fyothor spoke to someone. The reply was inaudible. Fyothor came back on. He recited an address.
“It is near the waterfront district.”
“I’ll find it.”
“Come quickly,” Fyothor said and hung up.
Pfefferkorn took a good look at the stars. He might never see them again. In a world where nobody could be trusted, he had just committed a fatal error. He refused to live in that world. He put the phone back in his pocket and walked on.
101.
Fyothor lived on the eleventh floor of a hideous concrete-block tower. The elevator was out of service. The stairwell was slick with urine and sown with condom wrappers. Pfefferkorn’s legs were still sore from climbing out of the reactor and the long hike back to town. He relied heavily on the handrail.
Fyothor had told him to head straight to the end of the corridor. It was a sensible instruction, because most of the apartments were missing numbers. The prevailing hush amplified his knock. The door opened a crack. A hairy arm beckoned him in.
Pfefferkorn stepped into the entry hall. A sack-eyed Fyothor stood re-cinching his bathrobe. Through a doorless frame was the kitchen: a closet with a hotplate and a hand sink. A wooden drying rack nailed to the wall held four plastic plates. There was no refrigerator. It didn’t look like enough for a family to get by on. Down the hall was a darkened room.
“After you,” Fyothor said.
Pfefferkorn groped his way forward. His nose picked up a briny, masculine smell. He could hardly see. The room’s shades were drawn against the moonlight. He stopped short. Fyothor bumped into him from behind. He reached past Pfefferkorn and switched on the light.
Pfefferkorn cringed at the bright blast. Then his eyes opened and he was disappointed to learn that he indeed lived in a world where nobody could be trusted. The person waiting for them was not Fyothor’s wife. If Fyothor even had a wife. And if Fyothor was even his real name. The person waiting for them was six-foot-five. He—for it was a he, very much so—was muscular and mean-looking, with a jet-black goatee and tattoos on his hands and neck. He wore a leather motorcycle jacket and black leather boots, and he was making a growly noise not unlike a garbage disposal. Pfefferkorn sank to his knees, gasping for breath. Nobody had hit him yet, but his mind seemed to know what was coming, and it was determined not to be awake when it came.
102.
“Ahn dbhiguyietzha.”
“Dyiuzhtbhithelnyuio?”
“P’myemyiu.”
“Friend. Friend. Are you all right? Can you hear me?”
Pfefferkorn opened his eyes. Fyothor and the man in the motorcycle jacket were standing over him, fretting. Contrary to expectation, he was not back in his cell, but the selfsame living room, laid out on a mushy sofa. He tried to sit up. They restrained him gently.
&n
bsp; “Please, friend, rest. You had a bad fall. You went down like a sack of root vegetables. We thought you had a heart attack.”
Down the hall a kettle whistled. The man in the motorcycle jacket growled and left.
Pfefferkorn palpated himself. He was not tied up, and aside from a sore head, he did not seem to be injured.
“Akha,” Fyothor said. He grunted as he sat down in a plastic chair. “I apologize. It was not my intention to disturb you. I assumed that you, as a foreigner, would be more accustomed to such things. But perhaps I am wrong.” He sighed and rubbed his face, then smiled tiredly. “Well, friend. My secret is now yours.”
Pfefferkorn, coming around, pointed to his ear and then to the wall.
Fyothor shook his head. “Not here. Besides, it is not them I worry about. It is my neighbors, friends, family. Jaromir’s mother is old. It would kill her to find out.”
Jaromir brought three steaming mugs of tea. He handed them out and sat on the floor near Fyothor. Fyothor laid his hand comfortably on Jaromir’s brawny shoulder. Jaromir’s hand went up to meet it. Their fingers laced and stayed that way as Pfefferkorn told them what he needed to do. He finished talking and fell silent and then he waited for a response. Fyothor’s eyes were focused on an imaginary point in the distance. Jaromir was likewise expressionless. Pfefferkorn feared that he had asked too much. He was betting the chance to save his life and Carlotta’s life against all of their lives, and he was getting poor odds. Action heroism was not a rational undertaking. He was far too preoccupied to wonder if that might make an interesting premise for a novel.
Suddenly Fyothor pushed himself out of the chair and went into the next room. A moment later he could be heard talking on the phone. Pfefferkorn offered Jaromir an apologetic smile.
“Sorry to disturb you like this,” Pfefferkorn said.
Jaromir growled and waved him off.
“Have you been together a long time?” Pfefferkorn asked.
Jaromir held up all ten fingers, then one more.
“Wow,” Pfefferkorn said. “That’s just great. Mazel tov.”
Jaromir smiled.
“And, eh. What is it you do?”
Jaromir growled as he searched for the word. He smiled and snapped his fingers. “Semen,” he said.
Fyothor came back with a slip of paper. “She is here.”
Pfefferkorn looked at the address.
“This is the Metropole,” he said.
Fyothor nodded.
Pfefferkorn looked at the room number. It was four higher than his old room number.
“Be at the harbor no later than three,” Fyothor said. “Jaromir sails at dawn.”
Pfefferkorn looked at Jaromir. “Ah,” he said. “Right. Seaman.”
“He told you this?” Fyothor chided Jaromir in Zlabian. “He is the captain.”
Jaromir shrugged modestly.
Pfefferkorn shook Jaromir’s hand and thanked them both. Fyothor embraced him and walked him to the door. Before he let him out, he said, “Tell me, friend. Is it true that in America men can walk down the street together, free of shame?”
Pfefferkorn looked him in the eye. “I’m not American,” he said. “But that’s what I’ve heard.”
103.
The night was gauzy and moist. At that hour there were few pedestrians other than soldiers. Preparations for the festival were coming along. The sidewalks had been swept. Bright banners rippled and snapped. Aluminum barricades lined the parade route. Pfefferkorn guessed that there would be a good deal more pomp than usual, owing to the momentous nature of the anniversary. To avoid attracting attention, he stuck to side streets and kept a medium pace. He put his head down, his hands in his pockets, and his faith in his moustache.
Typically during the day there was a line of troikas waiting outside the Metropole, but now he found the block deserted except for a lone soldier lighting a cigarette. The solider glanced at Pfefferkorn incuriously before taking his first drag and looking off in another direction. As Pfefferkorn approached the hotel’s glass doors he spied the night clerk engrossed in a magazine. He decided to go for it. He crossed the lobby, making a beeline for the elevator. He was almost there when the clerk called out in Zlabian. “Excuse me.”
Pfefferkorn froze.
The clerk ordered him to turn around.
Pfefferkorn put on an indignant face and marched to the desk. “Uiy muyiegho lyubvimogo uimzhtvyienno otzhtalyiy zhtarzhyegoh bvrudhu ghlizhtiy,” he snapped.
The clerk was understandably startled by this outburst. Pfefferkorn would have been startled, too, by a comprehensively moustachioed man in a goatherd’s outfit yelling at him that his beloved and mentally retarded older brother had tapeworms.
“Tapeworms,” Pfefferkorn repeated, for emphasis. Then he yelled that he had been waiting for an oscillating fan for more than a week. He slammed his fist on the desk as he said this. The clerk jumped. Then, with enormous contempt, as if he couldn’t stand to deal with such an imbecile any longer, Pfefferkorn reached into his left sock and whipped out the roll of cash. He peeled off a fifty-ruzha note and dangled it in front of the clerk’s face, as if to say, I can bribe you right out here in the open and no one can do anything about it. So how important must I be? Very important, that’s right. So don’t mess with me. That was his intention. It was equally possible that the message was Take this money and shut up. In any event, the clerk plucked the bill and gave him a timid smile. “Monsieur,” he said.
104.
Pfefferkorn’s finger hovered over the button for the penthouse. He told himself that he had more than enough on his plate as it was. He chafed, knowing he would have to let Dragomir Zhulk live to plot another day. He punched the button for the fourth floor.
As the car labored upward, he visualized what he was about to do. The Metropole was old and quirky enough for every room to be done up differently. Certain constants would hold, though. There would be an entry hall with a closet on one side and a bathroom door on the other. There would be a bed. There would be a dresser. There would be a television on top of the dresser. There would be a nightstand, a telephone, a clock, a radiator, and a lamp. There would be an oscillating fan, although the likelihood of its functioning would be low.
The elevator ground to a halt. The doors parted. He crept down the hall.
There would be Carlotta. That was important to keep in mind. He couldn’t come storming in like a maniac, striking at everything that moved. He had to be deadly but precise. If the room was anything like the one he’d stayed in, it could fit four comfortably. This being West Zlabia, he had to count on things being less than optimally comfortable. He steeled himself to fight ten men. They would be armed. They would have shoot-to-kill orders. His motions would have to be unified and fluid. He would go for the solar plexus.
He passed his old room. He passed 46, home of the noisy honeymooners. He came to number 48 and stopped. She had been no more than forty feet away the entire time.
He checked that he was alone.
He was alone.
He uncapped the deodorant stun gun and held it in his left hand. Not too tight, not too loose. He snicked open the toothbrush switchblade and held it in his right hand. Not too tight, not too loose. He reviewed Sockdolager’s advice. Let the weapons become an extension of your own body. Don’t pull punches. Commit. He held up the butt end of the toothbrush and tapped the door three times. There was silence, then footsteps, and then the door opened.
105.
The door opened.
“What the fuck?” Lucian Savory asked, or started to ask. He hadn’t gotten any further than “What the f—” when Pfefferkorn jammed the stun gun into his withered gut and fired. Savory’s knees folded and he went down like a sack of root vegetables, his bulbous head hitting the carpet. In one fluid motion Pfefferkorn sprang over him and rolled into t
he room, coming to his feet in a defensive crouch, whirling and ducking and weaving and jabbing with the knife and snapping off nasty eighty-thousand-volt crackles. “Hah!” he said. “Heh!” He dashed from end to end, a cyclone of lethality destroying everything in its path, meeting no opposition. He paused to assess the damage. Aside from Savory, who was an inert heap, the room was empty. He had completely subdued the finishings, though. He had mauled the curtains, lamed the lamp, annihilated the radiator, obliterated the fan, and electrocuted the duvet.
Carlotta was nowhere to be seen.
But then he saw that he had missed something. The room was mostly the same as his, but there was one key difference. There was an extra door, the kind that connects two adjacent rooms. It connected room 48 to room 46, home of the honeymooners.
He opened the door. The corresponding handleless door was ajar. He pushed it all the way open with his foot and stepped through the doorway and there she was, tied down to the bed, a moon-shaped scar in the wallpaper corresponding to the top of the headboard that she had been rocking back and forth for weeks, slamming the wood into the wall and producing a rhythmic banging that was not hot water pipes or overzealous lovers but a frightened woman’s desperate bid to attract the attention of whoever it was in room 44, not forty feet away but less than the same number of inches.
He ran forward to free her. She raised her head up off the pillow and stared at him uncomprehendingly as he used the knife to cut the ropes on her wrists. He cut the ropes holding her ankles and then he turned toward her with open arms but instead of kisses and pent-up passion he was met by a stinging right hook to the jaw that knocked him off the bed and onto the floor. He tried to sit up and with a primal scream she came flying off the bed and her knee smashed into his jaw and his teeth snapped shut like a mousetrap and he tasted blood and the knife pinwheeled out of his hand and embedded itself in the wall. He managed to scrabble backward and turn onto all fours and crawl away from her. She let him get as far as the doorway connecting room 46 to room 48 and then she kicked him in the rear, sending him sprawling on his stomach. She fell atop him with her knees in his kidneys and began punching him in the back of the head. She was deceptively strong and unfathomably vicious. He tried to roll over and she began belting him in the side of the head instead. He covered his head with his arms and she gave up punching him and started choking him. A remote part of his brain observed that she had absorbed her training well—much better than he had. Good girl, he thought. He also felt vaguely ashamed and made a note never to pick a fight with her. He grabbed her wrists and wrenched them from his throat and she screamed and started clawing at his eyes. It took both his hands to control one of hers, and with her free hand she grabbed his moustaches and began yanking on them hard enough to start tearing the glue. He realized then what was happening. She didn’t recognize him. He was dressed like a goatherd and he had more facial hair than the East German women’s gymnastic team. “Carlotta,” he cried. “Stop.” She didn’t hear him. She just kept on screaming and pulling at his moustaches and punching him in the mouth. “Stop,” he yelled. But she was berserk, lost in some kind of hateful hypnotic trance. He had no choice. He made a fist and walloped her on the side of the head hard enough to stun her. He wriggled out from under her and scrambled for the shredded curtain and hid behind it like a sorority girl caught in the shower.
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