“I was right behind them,” Roger told me calmly. “They must have known that Graham and I would see to any trouble you’ve had.”
I sniffed with righteous indignation. “They could have at least stopped. Maybe had a sandwich.”
“You wouldn’t, by any chance, have wished for their company just so they wouldn’t get ahead of you?” Roger asked with a blithe awareness that irritated me like a nettle on my flesh.
“Look, we all know they’re cheating like mad by getting rid of everyone else, so I don’t see anything wrong with wanting to keep them near us. Keep your friends close and enemies closer, and all that business.”
Roger sighed. “I have no proof that the Essex team has done anything untoward except for the unfortunate accident involving Rupert and Samuel, and that was most definitely an accident. However!” He held up a hand to forestall my objection. “In the interests of safety and general concern for the well-being of everyone in the race, and since we haven’t ascertained how Melody’s water—assuming it was her water—was tainted, I have decided to pay closer attention to the Essex team, and will be spending the bulk of my time with them, rather than cycling between you and them.”
“Thank god for that. It’s like we’re in an Agatha Christie movie,” I said, waving an arm in a dramatic arc. A passing car honked, and several people stuck themselves out the windows to wave at us. I waved back. “One by one we’re picked off, until the only one to remain is the murderer.”
With a little roll of his eyes, Roger said, “No one has been killed, Paulie.”
“Not yet! Who knows what would have happened to poor Melody if her folks hadn’t gotten her to the doctor when they did? Just you wait. I bet the Evil Esses will try their respective hands at a little lethal elimination next.”
“Bah,” Roger said, and for good measure added, “Humbug.”
“Is the car low on water?” Dixon asked Graham, who had been poking around in the Flyer’s innards.
“No. Try starting her now.”
Dixon did so, and the car roared to life.
“Just a bit temperamental,” Graham said, giving the hood a pat once he’d closed it up. “She was feeling a bit needy, is all, and now she’s calmed down.”
“He doesn’t get to be temperamental,” I said, putting a definite emphasis on the pronoun. “He is a car, and he can bloody well keep his emo moods to himself, because we have murderers to catch up to. Thanks for the lunch, Tabby. Can I pay you for our sandwiches—that’s very sweet of you, thank you.” I climbed in beside Dixon and pointed in the direction the Essex team had taken. “Home, Jeeves, and don’t spare the horses.”
JOURNAL OF DIXON AINSLEY
2 August
5:55 a.m.
Yekaterinburg, Russia
We are exhausted. I’m waiting for my turn at a communal bath. Paulie is asleep. She snores. Just a little, and it’s kind of cute, but I can’t help but think I shouldn’t point that out to her.
It’s been a hellishly long day, and we have the Essex team to thank for much, if not all, of that.
It began at the border crossing from Kazakhstan into Russia.
“It should be fairly quick,” Roger told us before dashing off with Sam and Tabby to check on the other camera team, who evidently had been in a minor accident. “There’s an official agreement with Kazakhstan to pass people through quickly. Just show them your visas and passports and this note from the government tourist agency, and you should be fine.”
“So long as they don’t go all Soviet on us,” Paulie said darkly, but tucked the government document away in the logbook.
We were at the crossing a short time later and lined up behind a car filled with ducks going to market.
“How do you feel about blood sports?” Paulie asked out of nowhere.
I gave her a curious look. “I don’t care for them. How do you feel about them?”
“I’m with you.”
“What brought that up?”
She pointed to the ducks. “I feel bad for them. I mean, I know people eat them, and they were raised to be eaten, but still, they’re cute little duckies.”
“You ate chicken last night,” I pointed out.
“Chickens are not quite as high on the cute meter as ducks, although I will admit that they have their points.”
“Lamb, I suppose, is right off your diet?” I inquired.
“Oh, absolutely. No way I’d ever eat one. Or a deer. Or any of those cute things that are trendy to eat now, like emu and buffalo.”
“Alligator?” I asked.
She made a face. “Not cute, but still wouldn’t eat. I used to be a vegetarian, but kind of slacked off into eating chicken and fish.”
“That seems fairly healthy. Ah. We’re moving at last.”
We jerked forward when an official lowered a barricade and gestured for us to stop on a black-striped line on the ground.
“Don’t look now,” Paulie said out of the side of her mouth, staring straight ahead in a manner that could be viewed only as uncomfortable and highly suspicious. “But there is a man with an Uzi standing on the other side of you.”
I looked.
She smacked me on the arm. “I said, don’t look!”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because they’ll see you looking, and that’s suspicious. You don’t want to be suspicious at these border places. They pull you aside and do full-body cavity searches on you, and, thank you very much, I don’t need anyone rifling around my girlie bits or butt.”
“You let me rifle around,” I said, smiling when an official marched over to me and spoke in Russian. I handed him our passports, visas, and Kazakhstan documents.
“That was not a full-body search, and besides, you didn’t stray into no-man’s-land. No one goes there but my doctor, and then she’d better have a pretty good reason before I allow that!” Paulie declared.
Another official approached, this one with a dog on a leash. Two more men came up to the rear of the car, one with a long device that I realized was a mirror to see under the car.
The first official said something and opened my door, gesturing for me to get out.
“You see!” Paulie hissed. “You looked at the Uzi dude, and now you’re going to have your butt searched for contraband.”
“You come,” the man with the dog told Paulie, and opened her door.
“What? I didn’t look at him, honest. Why do I have to go be searched? Dixon!”
“It’s all right,” I said calmly. None of the guards showed signs of suspicion, so I gathered we were being pulled aside as a mere formality. “No one is going to probe your depths but me, and only then wherever you allow it.”
“I was going to say!” She marched along with me, twitching her long skirt in an irritated manner. We entered a low-ceilinged room filled with cubicles and were ushered into an office. Behind the desk sat a woman in uniform. She received the documents from the first border inspector, consulted them, then finally looked up at us. “American and British UK, yes?”
“Yes,” I answered, relieved that someone spoke English. “We are part of a transcontinental race, as you can see by our documents.”
“Race, yes. We have heard of you.”
“Really?” Paulie was all smiles now that she knew her ass was safe. “I didn’t think the local press had heard of us, because we hadn’t so much as a reporter stopping by to see what we were doing. Roger—he’s our producer—said that he tried to interest the press, but he didn’t think they understood him because no one responded. Would you like a picture with us? We’d be happy to pose with you if you’d like.”
The woman pursed her lips. “We have heard that you are carrying concealed weapons. How do you answer this charge?”
“Concealed weapons?” I was both outraged and startled. “What the hell gave you that idea—
Oh. Don’t tell me—it was the Essex team, wasn’t it?”
Paulie had frozen at the woman’s words, no doubt envisioning the body cavity searches, but she twitched at the word “Essex” and clutched my arm.
“The nerve of them, trying to sabotage us this way. You can take it from me, madam, that whatever they told you about us carrying anything contraband is utterly ridiculous. They are simply attempting to hold us back so as to increase their lead.”
“Your car is being searched even now.” She lifted a hand, and a man rose from his cubicle and darted over to us. “Now you will be searched. If we find weapons, it will be very bad.”
Paulie’s fingers tightened on my arm.
“You won’t find weapons. We are part of a reality television show, not arms smugglers,” I said, patting Paulie’s hand to let her know she was hurting me.
“Um,” she said, and gave my arm a tug. “Can I speak to you a minute, Dixon?”
I turned to reassure her that her body cavities were safe when I caught sight of the fear in her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Um,” she said, glancing at the woman.
“You aren’t going to tell me . . .” I closed my eyes for a moment. “Where is it?”
“In one of the spare tires,” she said softly, her eyes pleading with me for something. Comfort? Reassurance? I was damned if I knew, and I couldn’t spend the time figuring it out. Not when I had a border guard to mislead. Or bribe. Whichever was effective.
“Just out of curiosity,” I asked the woman, “what is the penalty for bringing a firearm into Russia?”
She just looked at me and snapped out an order to her minion. “You will go for search now. Man to the left, woman to the right.”
“Oh god,” Paulie said, looking as miserable as she could get.
“Stiff upper lip, sweetheart,” I told her, following the man to a side room. A woman with a severe black suit had appeared to escort Paulie. “We’ll get through this. Just stay calm, and don’t borrow trouble.”
“I didn’t borrow it—it was forced on me by my father. Oh, I’m going to have a few things to say to him when I’m out of the gulag . . .”
To my surprise (and profound relief) the search of my person consisted only of a request to remove my clothing behind a screen, at which point they were examined thoroughly, then returned.
I was told to sit at a row of chairs against the wall opposite the offices and waited impatiently for Paulie to reappear. She did so about twenty minutes later, bustling out of the room breathless and with a sense of excitement, and followed by three female officers.
“Thanks for all the info, Katya. And, Anna, be sure to e-mail me the pictures you took trying to get me back into the corset. Tatiana, I hope your mom feels better. If you e-mail me her mailing address, I’ll send her a postcard from California, OK?”
The ladies giggled and waved as they left her.
Paulie bustled up to me. “There you are! Did your guys go where no man has gone before?” She took my hands in hers when I rose to greet her.
“No. You?”
“Unplumbed, thank god.” She squeezed my hands and leaned in to give me a quick kiss. “They told me to strip, which didn’t work very well because, as you know, I can’t reach most of the hooks in the back, and of course there’s the corset. Katya had to call in reinforcements, and Tatiana took the corset away to X-ray it for signs of bombs or something—I don’t know—and when she came back, Katya told me all about the fact that the Englishmen who came through here a little before us told them that they’d heard we had guns. Anyway, I see now why Dad left Russia. It took Katya, Anna, and Tatiana together to figure out how to lace the corset properly. And then, of course, we had to take some pictures of them with the corset, and me with the corset, and them putting me in the corset, and lots of selfies, which I wanted because I’ll need them to remember the last friendly people I see before I’m taken away to some distant camp.”
“You will not be taken anywhere,” I told her, allowing my lips to linger on hers. “If they find the object you mentioned—why on earth do you have it in the first place?—then I’ll simply say it’s mine.”
“That just means you’ll get sent away to break rocks in a chain gang,” she protested. “I don’t want that any more than I want to do it.”
“You’re mixing up your imprisonment scenarios.” I was about to continue, but the two men who’d gone over the car with a dog and undercarriage mirror entered the room.
Paulie stiffened. I put my arm around her, swinging her around to face them, my expression calm even if my heart was racing with fight-or-flight adrenaline.
Perhaps the gulag wouldn’t be so awful. Perhaps Paulie would visit me.
“Would you marry me for real if I was sent away to a Siberian camp?” I asked her quietly when the men consulted with the woman.
She unfroze long enough to blink at me. “I beg your pardon? Did you just propose?”
“Conditionally. I am conditionally proposing. Would you?”
“Why conditionally?”
I sighed. “If I am sent to a Siberian prison camp for the gun that you stashed in the tires, the only way we could have connubial visits is if we were married. So, will you?”
She thought for a minute. “If I was the type of person to allow another person to go to prison for something I did, then yes, I would marry you so we could get it on while you were serving out a sentence that should have been mine.”
“That sounds like a conditional acceptance,” I said suspiciously. “One that has far too many ifs connected with it.”
“And that would be because your conditional proposal is entirely ridiculous. Dixon, I’m not going to let you take the fall for—”
She stopped when we were summoned outside by the two officers. Paulie took my hand in a firm grip, and when I held the door open for her, she murmured, “I’m sorry, Dixon. I really am sorry about this . . .”
The man with the dog strolled off while the other one handed us our visas, passports, and other papers, including a pass bearing the stamp of Siberia.
“What?” I asked, feeling stupid. “Are we supposed to take this with us? To the camp? Both of us?”
“Yes, yes, you go. You take papers,” the man said, and, turning his back on us, gestured at the car behind us to pull forward into the next bay over.
I stared at Paulie. She stared back at me.
“They didn’t find it,” she said.
“It must have been in one of the tires that the Essex team stole.”
A beatific smile blossomed on her face, filling me with joy. “Serves the bastards right!”
“I will admit I was thinking something of the sort. Shall I drive?”
“Go ahead. At least get us a few miles across the border; then I’ll take over. Holy bovines, Dixon! They didn’t find it! We don’t have to go to the gulags! We don’t have to get conditionally married just to have wild, sweaty, naked-bunny sex!”
“A fact I’m profoundly grateful for, because at this point the naked bunny sex is uppermost in my mind.”
“Really?” She shot me a coy look. “Because you can’t stand to be parted from me for more than a few minutes?”
“Yes,” I said, waiting for the count of four before adding, “And the fact that they didn’t get you tucked into your corset properly.”
She looked down and gave a little shriek when she realized her breast had breached the confines of the corset. She stuffed it back down inside with a little giggle.
As we drove deeper into Russia, I was possessed with a sense of well-being, of the fates, for once, casting a benign look my way and turning the wheels that allowed me to face the future with a song on my lips and a throb in my loins that was wholly due to Paulie.
“But not in an STD manner,” I said, and then laughed.
“Huh?”
<
br /> “I was laughing at myself because you aren’t the only one who is having symptoms in your genitals that could be grossly misinterpreted.”
“Are you burning, too?” she asked with raised eyebrows.
“No, but I am throbbing.”
“That sounds bad. Then again, so does burning. Is it a good throb?”
“Very good.”
“Excellent.” She patted me on the knee and then turned her attention to the scenery we were passing, no doubt making mental notes to add to her journal.
I smiled at nothing, feeling that, at last, life was good.
Paulina Rostakova’s Adventures
AUGUST 2
9:34 p.m.
Small town in middle of Russia, hotel room, lying exhaustedly on bed, waiting for Dixon to return with food
We had a lovely night in Yekaterinburg, even though Dixon didn’t want to do anything but stay in the hotel room and do naked-bunny-sex things to each other.
“This is a very historic city,” I pointed out to him from the comfort of a small bed-and-breakfast on the fringe of the city. The place came with a small barn in the back, which we used to lock away the Thomas Flyer, allowing us to spend the night with each other rather than watching the car, figuring the likelihood of the Essex team finding us at a B&B would be much smaller than had we stayed at one of the mainstream hotels. “Czar Nicholas and his family were killed here. You can go look at the spot where their bodies were found. That sounds like . . . well, not fun, exactly. But interesting.”
“Interesting to someone fascinated with government assassinations, perhaps,” Dixon said, frowning at his phone. “Roger says they should be in Yekaterina shortly. They were delayed because the Essex car had a breakdown. A radiator hose, evidently.”
“Rats. I would have liked for them to be held up as long as they held us up.”
“I suppose we shouldn’t be grateful that they had any sort of a breakdown, but I admit I’m petty enough to consider it an act of karma.” He looked up. “You weren’t serious about seeing the place the czar was killed, were you?”
The Perils of Paulie (A Matchmaker in Wonderland) Page 20