The youth didn’t give the passport back to me. He held it in his hand and walked around to the front of the Volkswagen. I thought he was staring suspiciously at the front number plate and my throat turned hollow but then his partner reached in past Pudovkin to pull the release and the youth opened the trunk.
He removed my suitcase and set it down on the wet pavement, and pried up corners of the trunk lining. He took out the spare tire and shook it, weighed it in his hands and put it back. Then he opened my suitcase. I tried not to stare. He pawed through the single shirt and pair of wet socks I had replaced last night; he riffled two stacks of notes and then put one finger on the floor of the suitcase while he reached around under it with his other palm—testing the thickness for a false bottom. Finally he closed the suitcase and politely laid it back in the trunk. I breathed.
His partner was down on one knee on the far side of the car looking at the understructure, his rump showing past the front-sloping fender.
Pudovkin, yawning, patted his lips and turned to glance at the clock mounted on the side of the checkpoint shack. The truck beside me growled through, the gate came down again and another truck pulled in.
They gave us back our papers. Pudovkin had to sign something and then we got back in the car and drove through the raised gate. Sixty yards beyond it was a café-bar and Pudovkin pulled in there. “Hungry?”
“My God, I never want to go through that again.”
He grinned at me. “You get used to it.”
“I’d rather not have to.”
The place was obviously a popular pit-stop for those who had had to wait on the queue at the checkpoint; we had to wait again but finally we bought wine and cheese and bread and went outside to get in the car.
A sentry at the checkpoint shack was talking into a telephone, looking up and down the road. I began to freeze up. Pudovkin went around the front of the car to the driver’s door. I saw the sentry’s arm come up, pointing our way; he took the phone away from his ear and shouted something.
Pudovkin said under his breath, “You didn’t hear him. Get in—quickly.”
I jackknifed into the car and Pudovkin had it rolling before I had the door shut. We swung out into the road and his foot was on the floor. We were nearly through the bend before the first bullet starred the glass of the rear window.
We had a jump on them because they had to get to a car to chase us but the road ahead ran right into the town of Poti; they would telephone ahead to put us in a vise. We had to get off the coast highway and I unfolded the map with badly shaking fingers while Pudovkin wheeled recklessly past slow lorries on blind bends.
“Not the first left,” I said. “It loops back. Take the second turning.”
He pulled out to overtake a bus and there was a van coming toward us but Pudovkin kept the throttle down and the van nosed down under pressure of panic brakes; we squeezed through ahead of the bus and when I threw a wide-eyed glance at him Pudovkin’s lips were peeled back in a fierce glowing rictus. I clung to the strap with one hand and tried to keep the map in focus with the other. “It ought to be soon.”
The old car had a top of not more than a hundred kph—about sixty miles per hour—and Pudovkin was getting every ounce of that out of it. Once we hit the hills we wouldn’t be able to make even that much speed.
I kept glancing to the rear but the starred window made it hard to see. Pudovkin had an outside mirror on the door and he was using that. He said, “No sign yet. Those trucks are holding them on the bends back there.”
We had a straightaway now and at the end of it was the fork; I pointed wildly and he said, “I see it,” but he hadn’t even lifted his foot off the gas. He wanted every inch of space he could get between us. At the last instant he jabbed the brake and we swung up the hill violently, weaving on the springs, the tires wailing.
On the map there were choices and I said, “We could take the first right—it runs parallel to the highway. But they might look for us there.”
“What else is there?”
“If we stay on this road it bends south. There’s a turning about—” I measured the map’s scale indicator with my eye and transferred it to the road’s black line—“about fifteen kilometers. It goes back in the mountains but the map shows a river there—it may be a valley. It cuts back across toward Batumi beyond that.”
“Batumi’s what we want.”
“Have we got any chance at all in this thing?”
“We have with me driving.” He grinned like a lunatic.
The tires snickered on the curves and Pudovkin drove at breakneck pace, using his horn on the blind turnings. We were climbing steadily into the foothills of the Caucasus range above the widening coastal plain of Poti and looking off to the right I could see the patchwork of farms on the flatlands—and a spume of spray on a wet road arrowing up toward a bisecting point somewhere ahead of us. It was quite distant; I looked away and looked again and it was still there, the wake of a fast-moving car. I pointed and shouted. Pudovkin nodded.
It couldn’t be accident. That one was coming up to block our route; he’d been signaled from the checkpoint. They’d have other cars on the other roads by now as well.
Pudovkin said, “We’ll just have to beat him to the crossing.”
The transmission was whining in third. Pudovkin cut across the insides of all the bends without taking his foot off and we were on two wheels more than once. The rain had quit but the surfaces were still wet and there were patches of mist; we burst through them like a projectile.
At intervals the road lipped out and we had glimpses of the flood plain from ever higher points. The car was out of sight in the lower hills somewhere. I tried to judge his course by the map but there were too many roads out of Poti. Most of them crossed the one we were on.
I saw the first intersection coming at us and I jammed feet and hands forward to brace but Pudovkin roared straight through it and the lorry to our left hit his brakes with an indignant yelp of horn. We rammed through a stand of timber and crossed a ridge and I saw the pursuit off to our right angling toward us from below. It was a big Skoda, black with four doors, a heavy Czech saloon climbing the steep rises with the arrogant power of its two-and-a-half liter engine.
The roads met at the head of an open meadow and we were watching each other as we squealed toward it. I saw one of the windows roll down and a weapon appear—something squat and ugly, a submachine gun.
We were into the crossing ahead of them and then the road made a painful turn: Pudovkin down-shifted for it and we almost rolled over but the wheels came down on the high crown and he accelerated us out of it.
We had a third of a kilometer’s straight run and Pudovkin disengaged his seat adjustment lever and pushed the seat all the way back; slid down until he was sitting on the back of his neck, eyes just high enough to see over the wipers through the crescent of the steering wheel. “You’d better get down.”
I followed his example and my knuckles went white gripping the hand strap. He had his driving: I had nothing but hopeless panic.
The big saloon closed rapidly on the straightaways but we had quicker brakes and better turning balance and Pudovkin regained the lead every time we hit bends. He had the engine full-out and I was waiting for a piston to burst through the engine block. In the end it wasn’t the Volkswagen which kept us out of their range—it was Pudovkin’s skill. A better driver at the wheel of the Skoda would have made better miles out of the big car’s horsepower. As it was, we’d hit the intersection nearly a quarter of a kilometer ahead of them and they’d lost a little ground making the turn but since then we’d lost a little bit of our lead with every hill.