“It’s me,” he yelled. His mouth was full of blood. “Art.”
She stopped screaming and looked at him. She was shaking.
He spat. “It’s me.”
She trembled and stared. Her fists were still tight little bloodless rocks. He said her name. Her face was pale and varnished with sweat. Her roots had grown out. She was thinner than he ever remembered seeing her. “It’s me,” he said. Her fists unclenched and fell and her hands hung limp at her sides. “It’s me,” he said. Her trembling peaked and began to subside. She said his name. He nodded. She said it again. He nodded again and put out a tentative hand. She said his name a third time and then he stepped all the way toward her without fear or hesitation, taking her in his arms and pressing her humming body close to his and kissing her like the California state bar exam, long and hard.
106.
He retrieved the knife. He wiped the plaster from the blade and closed it.
“How many others?” he asked.
“One. He went outside for a cigarette.”
“I saw him. He was just lighting up when I got here.” He spat blood and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. “We’ll have to find another way out.”
She glanced at Savory’s body. “What about him?”
Pfefferkorn knelt and took Savory’s pulse at both wrist and neck. He looked at Carlotta and shook his head.
“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Carlotta said. “He was a hundred.”
Pfefferkorn expected to feel guilt, like he had standing in Dragomir Zhulk’s hut, staring at the prime minister’s waxwork “corpse.” He expected to feel disgust: unlike Zhulk, Savory really was dead, and he had died directly at Pfefferkorn’s hands, not via a middleman. He expected to feel fear. Any minute now the soldier would be coming back to the room, and they had at most a few hours before the manhunt for them began. He did not feel any of these emotions. Nor did he feel satisfaction, empowerment, or righteous fury. He felt nothing, nothing at all. He had become, irrevocably and without fanfare, a hard man hardened to hard truths.
“Closet,” he said.
They dragged the body into the closet and covered it with the spare blanket.
“It’ll do,” he said. His mouth was filling up with blood again. He spat, hard.
“Arthur.”
He looked at her.
“You came for me,” she said.
He set his jaw and took her by the hand. “Let’s move.”
107.
The service elevator let them out in the kitchen. They raced through a dark, steamy labyrinth of prep tables and swinging plastic strips. There were large walk-in coolers full of goat dairy and racks of unbaked pierogi on sheet trays. The whole place stank of garbage and bleach. The first exterior door they found was locked. He kicked it. It held firm.
“What now?” Carlotta asked.
Before he could answer, there was a noise. They turned to see a largish shadow moving toward them across the kitchen tiles. The shadow belonged to a largish person smiling menacingly and swinging a largish chef’s knife in lazy figure eights.
“Hungry,” Yelena said.
“Not in the least,” Pfefferkorn said.
He pulled Carlotta to safety behind him and flicked open his toothbrush.
108.
“Really, Arthur, that was very impressive.”
They were running.
“Brutal,” Carlotta said. “But impressive.”
Somewhere not too far away, a siren began to wail.
“You damn near took her head off,” she said.
“Keep your voice down,” he said.
They had no trouble at all finding the right ship. It dominated the harbor, a weathered twenty-five-thousand-ton handy-size freighter with
They waited. Pfefferkorn’s legs were cramping and it was hard for him to sit still. Carlotta massaged him and used the bucket to wash the blood from his face and hands. He couldn’t be sure whose blood it was, his or Yelena’s. Both, he assumed. He watched it come off impassively. Time ticked by. The sounds of a busy ship trickled down through the ventilation system: forklifts and winches, hydraulics and pistons. The engine began to churn and the whole ship juddered. Home free, he thought. Then he heard barking.
“They’re searching for us,” Carlotta whispered.
He nodded. He uncapped the stun gun and handed it to her. He opened the knife. The barking got louder and nearer and more insistent. There was a shrill metallic squeal as the cargo hold’s doors were hauled open. They could hear Jaromir arguing vociferously with a man in Zlabian. The dogs were going crazy, their barks echoing. Pfefferkorn could sense them straining in his direction. They could smell him. He thought fast and pulled the designer eau de cologne solvent out of his back pocket. It was amber and viscous, just like real designer eau de cologne. He had no idea if it was disguised to smell like anything, but he didn’t think twice. He pulled Carlotta out of the way, held the bottle out at arm’s length, and spritzed the side of a crate. A heady base note of sandalwood and musk, overlaid with ylang-ylang and bergamot, filled the air.
The effect was instantaneous, in more ways than one. The barks turned to whimpers. Pfefferkorn could hear the handler fighting to keep the dogs there, without success. They broke free and ran, and the handler’s voice faded as he chased after them. Right away the doors to the cargo hold slammed shut.
They were safe.
Except they weren’t.
“Arthur,” Carlotta said.
She pointed.
He looked.
The solvent was rapidly eating its way through the crate, the wood dissolving before their eyes. There was a creak and a spray of splinters. Pfefferkorn processed this information just fast enough to throw himself on top of Carlotta and tent his back. The bottom crate collapsed and the seven stacked atop it crashed inward on him, each one loaded with more than fifty-five kilograms of the world’s finest quality root vegetables.
109.
He awoke with his leg bound in a crude splint. His arms and torso were taped up. His head was bandaged tightly. His skin burned with fever. He looked around. He was in a tiny cabin, surrounded by metal canisters and mason jars. He was in the ship’s infirmary.
“My hero.”
An uninjured Carlotta smiled at him from the foot of his cot.
110.
She and Jaromir nursed him as best they could, feeding him soup and expired blister packets of Soviet-era antibiotics and keeping watch as he slipped in and out of delirious dreams. Eventually he awoke lucid enough to ask for a full serving of root vegetable hash and strong enough to get it down.