by James L. May
“Did you notice the sorts of things he used, restoring them?”
“The things he used?”
“Supplies. Anything of that sort.”
“There was something he cleaned the surface with. I thought it was alcohol. Otherwise—the pigments, his brushes. There was a little knife I saw him cut canvas away with. Is that what you mean?”
“Did you ever see him apply gold leaf?”
“No.” She narrowed her eyes.
“It’s gone missing. We’d like to know what happened to it.”
“I’m sure.”
“You don’t know anything?”
“You think perhaps I took it? You think I would have had anything to do with killing him for that?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think that.”
“Then why do you keep pushing me?”
“Petrovich thinks you’re hiding something. Maybe you are. But I don’t believe that is your reason. You’re scared—but we can protect you, Veronika!”
“Ha! You don’t find it brazen to make that offer twenty-four hours after your partner offered to have me slapped around if I didn’t help? Why, you’re exactly like Spagovsky! ‘Let me protect you, and if you don’t you get a smack.’ You think the offer is different for being a hair more subtle? It is not.” Again her fingers began to ravel up the net. She shook her head. “You may as well go. I don’t think you are going to be satisfied with anything I can tell you. If you would really like to help me, convince your partner not to have Spagovsky beat me. I would appreciate that. Otherwise—well, who cares if you’ve wasted my time?”
I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I had not managed to bring her around. Petrovich would tell Spagovsky, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Before I reached the door, I turned to look back. “Veronika Filipovna,” I said.
In her pool of light and nets she was a sculpture with living eyes.
“I can see why he was ready to sin.”
With that I stepped out quickly, cheeks burning.
That was Tolya: foolish enough to say it, not bold enough to stay and hear her reply. Out on the road, I stepped quickly over the snow, as if I could leave my embarrassment behind if I only walked fast enough. Her voice was in my ears as I made my way back to the kremlin. I begged him to come and find me when he was well, she’d said. I couldn’t live without him. Somewhere in my mind was a picture of myself with Antonov’s beard, raising a hand—was it fatherly? was it desiring?—to Veronika’s cheek.
It can only have been its stillness that made the figure pierce the fog I was in. No one stood still outdoors on Solovetsky. It was a waste of heat, a waste of calories.
I’d come about halfway back from the fishery by then. The man stood off to the side of the road beneath a stand of trees, some hundred yards away. I’d just come around a bend, in a spot where the road ran close to the sea. Now, seeing him, I stopped.
There was a moon, but with the trees crowding the road it was dark, and I couldn’t make out anything about him. Was he facing this way? Was he looking at something? Was he waiting?
Was he waiting for me?
A gust of wind blew, and there was time to shiver. By now I thought he’d noticed my presence and was looking in my direction.
The situation said danger. I hadn’t expected to see anyone out so late. I remembered Petrovich advising me not to confront Spagovsky two nights before.
Something about the situation said danger.
In a moment I’d decided: I would simply turn around, go back the way I’d come. The thought of explaining to Veronika that I’d returned because someone scared me on the road was excruciating, but the zek’s sense of self-preservation already outweighed my tenderer feelings. Perhaps I wanted to see what she would have said to my parting remark as well.
When I turned, a second man had appeared behind me. This one was closer than the other. I could make out an anonymous watch cap, a scarf wrapped around his face.
I was sure no one had been following me. He must have been hidden in the trees alongside the road, only to step out after I’d passed.
I thought the first figure had taken a few steps in my direction, though it wasn’t moving now. The new one was looking back over his shoulder in the direction of the fishery, as though he expected something. When I tried to think of what to do, my mind stalled, produced a blank page. For a long moment the three of us stood there. I could hear the blood pounding in my ears.
Then the man standing between me and the kremlin shouted something that sounded like “This one!” and everything was in motion.
I could hear the one who’d appeared behind me coming as I broke for the cover of the pines. A branch pushed me back as I got among them. Something gave with a crack and I stumbled, then righted myself without slowing down. Fingers of snow shook down my coat.
Beneath the canopy it was far darker. Snow squeaked and crunched under my boots, and my breath roared in my ears, whipping away in flags.
The ground sloped up as I ran away from the water, and the trees were thick enough to slow me. To avoid crashing into a trunk or another errant branch took care, but at least they’d put me out of view of the two men. I thought the second one had followed me into the woods, but when I chanced a glance back I couldn’t see him.
Who were they? Why had they been lying in ambush for me? It had to have something to do with the case, but panic drove any further conclusions from my mind.
After a short time the slope evened out again, with the snowy ground interrupted here and there by depressions that the boughs filled with shadow. By this time I was panting, and beneath my coat I could feel fearful sweat running down my chest. When I looked back again, there was still nothing. I needed to think. When I passed a spot where an overhang of roots and stones created an especially deep patch of darkness, I checked behind me one more time, then crouched down and hid.
My thighs felt made of gruel. Again I wondered who they were. But there was no use wasting time on that question now. For the moment their identities didn’t matter, only what they might do if they caught me. I tried to control my breathing, the trembling of my muscles. I needed to listen.
The kremlin was to the north, which I thought was on my left. That would be the only safe place. My earlier idea had obviously been wrong. Why would men willing to chase me through the forest balk at following me into the fishery?
But what was the fastest way to reach the kremlin? And how far had I run already? Even if I was right about which way was north, simply blundering off through the trees might bring me up on the wrong side of the Holy Lake. That would mean more time in the woods to be found and caught.
I’d been listening, or thought I had. Now I heard the crack of a branch, shockingly close. When I peered around a stone, the man was there. He was coming slowly, following the tracks I’d left in the snow.
My tracks! Hadn’t Petrovich and I been discussing footprints all this time? Hadn’t I been pondering Sherlock Holmes’s forensic expertise? I should have known all along that I left behind my own trail of signs, leading to me as surely as my detektivy’s clues led to their villains.
I held my breath, but again thought failed me. I could hear his boots crunching in the snow now. He would be on me in a moment.
Finally consciousness snapped back into place. Before he could come around the mound and see me, I broke from cover.
“Here!” I heard him shout behind me. “Here!”
I thought I heard an answer from somewhere past him, towards the kremlin, but by then I could do nothing but run. I couldn’t look back, but from the sound of it he was right behind me. As we wove through the trees the ground began to rise again, until it became clear we were climbing a significant hill. Breath came raggedly, and the terrain was treacherous beneath its layer of white. He was gaining on me. Every time I felt myself stu
mble I expected to feel his hands around my neck.
As I came over the crest of the hill, the ground fell away in a much steeper grade on the other side. For a moment I slowed to look for another way, wary of tumbling down the slope.
That was all he needed. I heard him grunt as his hard body slammed into me from behind, felt myself trip and pitch forward. Then the world turned end over end and I fell, the skin of my face raw against the snow. Stones slammed past, whirling about me as I rolled.
It can only have been luck that kept me from dashing my brains out on a rock. I came to a stop when I struck a tree at the bottom of the hill. Aching all over, I had bruised ribs and a sharp pain in my shoulder, but did not seem to have suffered any worse hurt than that. Miraculously, even my hat had stayed on my head. I can hardly have noticed it at the time, but I still had it later, so I know that it must have.
I shook my head to clear it.. Back at the top of the hill, some forty feet above, I thought I saw movement. My pursuer hadn’t registered the drop that yawned in front of us when he tackled me; instead of catching me and finishing me off, he’d given me a lead. Before he could figure out a way down, I scrambled to my feet and set off running again.
My understanding of the game of flight and pursuit was growing by palpable leaps. Though I’d gained some ground, I was still far from safe. Now that it had entered my consciousness, I felt my track erupting out of the ground beneath me with every step. The man who’d been closer to me on the road had followed my path directly, while, judging from what I had heard when they called to each other, the other must have moved off into the woods to keep between me and the kremlin. I was disoriented, but thought they would both be behind me now. If I were somehow to double back and make it past the one, the other would still be waiting to sweep me up.
All I could think to do was keep running.
When a break in the trees appeared, I thought at first I might have reached the road again. Plunging through the last layer of branches, I instead found myself teetering at the top of a stone-lined embankment.
Twenty feet below lay a frozen canal. A system of waterways connected the island’s lakes and ponds, I knew. Once dug by monks for travel to outlying hermitages, now it was one more way to move lumber from place to place. A rough channel had been hacked in the ice, just wide enough for a floating log to be dragged by a hook.
I slid down the embankment in a frantic crouch, nearly sitting. Here the moon was bright again, among sparse clouds. Looking up and down the length of the canal, I saw that muddled boot-prints had packed the snow into ice and the earth into frozen mud at its edges. To the right, the canal gave into a small lake, while to the left it continued straight for some distance before disappearing around a curve. Prisoners’ boots had churned the ice and frozen mud along its edges into a landscape of craters and ridges. If I hurried, my tracks might be lost in the muddle.
I leapt the channel easily. On the other side of the water, between the curve and where I stood, sat a few piles of boards, heaped around a series of rickety, trestle-like constructions whose function I didn’t know.
I looked back over my shoulder, expecting the man to appear at the top of the embankment at any moment. The boards weren’t a much better hiding place than the overhang back among the trees had been, but I’d never make it back around the bend before he saw me. If I lay down, I could at least put them between me and anyone who ran down the middle of the canal. This time I hoped he wouldn’t be able to follow my footprints.
I lowered myself to the snow just in time. Through a crack between two stacks I saw him emerge from the trees. He followed the furrow I’d made sliding down the embankment easily, but drew up short when he came to the canal. For a moment he looked at the bank on the opposite side, searching for signs that I’d climbed back up and continued on into the woods. Seeing nothing, he turned and began jogging in the direction I had taken.
There was time now to look at him. The man coming towards my hiding place over the ice was thin, his height more or less the same as mine. He wore his scarf up over his nose, hiding his face. What I could see of his eyes I didn’t recognize. He wore a standard zek’s coat, felt valenki like mine. In his right hand he held a wicked-looking curved knife with a naked blade.
The gap I’d been peering through didn’t cover his whole approach. After he’d passed out of view, I could only hear the sound of his footsteps coming closer and closer. Now they were a few feet away.
Now they were here.
I began to breathe again once I’d heard them pass and begin to fade. And yet it is there, waiting to emerge and cross the water again to lose myself in the forest, that the memory of terror returns to squirm in my throat. I had to wait long enough, but not too long. If I thought he would continue on around the bend, I should wait until he had. But if I thought he would reconsider before that and come back to check my hiding place … There was no way to choose. How could I know what he would do? Yet the alternative was to stare helplessly at the boards around me until the knife arrived.
Shaking, I raised my head. He was not around the bend yet, but he was close to it, and still looking the other way. Immediately I darted out from my hiding spot, leapt the canal a second time, and scrambled up the north bank. In a moment I was in the trees again.
Had he seen me? I hadn’t been able to tell, and it would have been foolish to stop to check. Again I ran.
Noise would be important now. If I’d lost him, he would be searching for me soon, and the other man was presumably still somewhere in the woods. The worst thing to do would be to broadcast my position. I tried to slip between the trees quietly.
That was a longer run than the others. At one point, I thought I heard the sound of a voice somewhere off to my right, but I couldn’t be sure. If I did, it was one of them talking at a normal volume to the other, not shouting like before. Afterward I passed over a fresh trail of footprints in the snow. That was a good sign—it meant I’d gotten behind the other man, didn’t it?—but if it occurred to him to double back, he’d find where I’d crossed him. The thought made me willing to risk more noise for speed. Shadows barred the snow in blue and black.
At long last I came to a break in the trees again: the edge of the Holy Lake. The moon shone in the sky on the other side of the water, lighting up the monastery’s towers and walls, the power lines that ran along the road.
I breathed a sigh of relief; disoriented as I’d become, I’d managed to head mostly north, towards the kremlin and safety. I did, however, seem to have veered to the east significantly. I could make out Nikolski Tower, but the gate was well out of sight. To reach it, I’d need to circle around the lake in one direction or the other. The way around the north shore looked longer, but I thought it would be safer as well, since my pursuers would be coming up from the south.
After another period of running, the trees around me gradually gave way to stumps, until I found myself about to emerge onto the road east of Nikolski. Through what remained of the treeline I could see the outbuildings and a few lamps.
The prospect of exposure made me stop to think again. If my pursuers were smart, they’d have made directly for Nikolski as soon as they realized they’d lost me. I’d been telling myself that I’d been eluding them. Had I really only been giving them time to set up another ambush?
The nearest outbuilding was more than a hundred yards away. If one of them was lying in wait and watching for me, there would be no way for him to miss me dashing for it.
The chase had wound its pattern through the trees and around the lake, until now all the turnings looped on each other fell away. From here there were only straight lines.
I took a breath. I dashed.
The snow was treacherous as ever, but I barely had time to notice myself stumbling before I’d picked myself up again. I did not look back when I reached the road, but I felt sure that I heard the sound of pursuit behind me. The dark windows o
f the first outbuilding passed me, then the second. I came to the turning for Nikolski and took it without slowing.
There was no one in the guards’ hut. When I reached the gate, it was shut.
The sounds of my shouting and pounding shattered the night’s stillness. I expected at any moment to feel hands grabbing me.
There were sounds within, and a crack opened. I pushed through. The light of a stove flickered on the arched walls of the tunnel that passed through the wall.
“What’s this all about?” asked the guard I’d shouldered aside. “Don’t shout like that.”
“Behind me—” I gasped. “Shut the door. They’re coming.”
His gray, exhausted face looked at me, baffled. He wore the normal guard’s uniform—belted gray tunic under his coat, high boots, cap with a gleaming black brim—but wrapped around his neck as a scarf was a filthy scrap that had once been a red-and-white-checked dish towel. He glanced outside, then reached up to rub one gaunt and hungry cheek reflectively. Here was a guard, but with the embarrassment of the camp prisoner, who grasps so humiliatingly little about the world that entraps him. Who knows not to seek out any more understanding than he has. He avoided meeting my eyes.
“I don’t know about any of that,” he said. “Need to put an entry in the book about you coming in after curfew, though.”
I was lucky, perhaps, that he was so meek. It hadn’t occurred to me to worry that I might be met with hostility by the Nikolski guards. They hadn’t given us trouble for the past few days. But it could easily have gone differently.
After I had showed Petrovich’s and my pass, I went back to the gate to look out. The snow-covered roofs, the lake, the trees in the distance: the moon shone on all of them, motionless and white.
20
The first thing Petrovich said was that it was a good sign. If it had been worth someone’s trouble to chase me through the nighttime forest, he reasoned, it meant we were closing in on something, making people nervous. Veronika had known we were coming, hadn’t she? It would certainly be a development in our investigation if she’d tried to set someone on us. Perhaps Spagovsky. There were many possibilities. It was a pity I hadn’t gotten a closer look at the two men.