‘Then I’ll have to walk right past you, won’t I?’
Kirov shook his head. He had the gun aimed at the girl’s throat, knowing that if he was forced to pull the trigger at this range, the round would pass through her neck and strike the man standing behind her.
‘You don’t look like a killer to me,’ Serge taunted him.
‘I’m not‚’ agreed Kirov‚ ‘but for you, I would make an exception.’
‘And for her?’ He tilted back the girl’s head until the tendons stood out on her neck.
This time, Kirov did not reply.
‘I didn’t think so,’ said Serge. ‘It’s me or nothing, and I don’t think you have the kind of luck to make that shot. You would need luck like mine‚ and you don’t have that kind of luck.’
‘You’re right,’ said Kirov. ‘I don’t have luck like yours.’
‘I knew you would come to your senses.’ Serge took one step towards the door, still holding the girl in front of him.
As Serge’s right leg moved forward, Kirov lowered the Tokarev and shot him through the knee cap. Serge cried out, releasing his grip upon the girl. He tumbled to the floor, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Before Serge had even hit the ground, Kirov sent another bullet through the bridge of his nose, killing him instantly.
The sound of the shots was deafening in the confined space of the room.
Bakhturin lay on his back, one leg twisted under him. Smoke slithered from his wounds, rising to the ceiling where they mushroomed out across the stuccoed paint.
The girl hadn’t moved.
For a moment, she and Kirov just stared at each other.
Then, with trembling fingers, she began to fasten the buttons on her blood-spattered night dress.
Under the jaundiced eye
Under the jaundiced eye of a harvest moon, Pekkala, Stefanov and Churikova made their way through fields of uncut wheat and orchards where the fruit lay rotting on the ground.
Stefanov took the lead, retracing his route as well as he could remember. One path, in particular, which was nothing more than a cart track running between the fields, he remembered as having been empty when he walked it. He kept them on this trail, which proved to be just as deserted now as it had been before.
Although they heard the rumble of vehicles in the distance, they encountered neither trucks nor soldiers. The fighting had moved like a tornado across the countryside, leaving some places in ruins and the rest of the landscape untouched.
In the middle of the night‚ they arrived at the burnt remains of a house. Smoke slithered through the maze of fallen beams and clumps of charred thatch wheezed and crackled. Behind the house, they found the bodies of an old man and an old woman, hanging from the branches of a tree, their feet almost touching the ground.
Churikova reached out and set her hand against the dead man’s chest, as if to feel the beating of his heart. When she drew her hand away, the corpse rocked gently on the hemp rope noose, like a pendulum spent of its energy.
From a scabbard tucked into his boot, Stefanov pulled a knife and slashed through the ropes with one cut. The bodies fell heavily, one on top of the other, broken necks lolling grotesquely.
Pekkala and the others returned to the road and kept on marching. Not a word had passed between them since they came upon the house.
At dawn, they reached the point where their trail intersected with the main road leading into Tsarskoye Selo. Here, they discovered why the enemy had left them in peace during the night. An old wooden bridge, no more than ten paces long, had been built above a stream that crossed the trail. A German Army truck had tried to cross it, but the supports had collapsed under the weight, sending the truck crashing into the ditch and barring the way for other vehicles.
‘Raise your hands,’ Pekkala told Churikova. ‘You need to start looking like a prisoner. From now on, you must walk in front. Keep your hands above your head and your eyes on the ground. Don’t make eye contact with anyone. Don’t speak, no matter what they say to you.’
Without a word, Churikova raised her arms, pale fingers uncurling, and clutched her hands together at the back of her neck.
They crossed by wading through the shallow stream, whose muddy banks glowed with yellow dandelions, purple vetch and black-eyed Susans. As they set out towards Tsarskoye Selo, they soon found themselves among convoys of trucks, armoured cars, motorcycles, which filled the air with diesel fumes and dust. The occasional group of soldiers passed them, travelling on foot, but always in the opposite direction. There were also a number of captured Red Army gun carriages, all of them weighed down with troops and equipment, pulled along by stocky little Russian Kabardin horses.
Pekkala felt a knot in his throat as he watched the carriages go by, knowing that those Kabardins would go on until they collapsed and died in their traces. From the way the drivers whipped the backs of the horses, this seemed to be exactly their intention.
Pekkala lost count of the number of trucks driving past them. Several cigarette butts were flicked in their direction from soldiers in the backs of these vehicles, but most seemed aimed at Pekkala and Stefanov, in their military police uniforms, rather than at their prisoner. Once the trucks had passed, Stefanov snatched up the cigarettes and puffed greedily at the last shreds of tobacco they contained.
A convoy of Mark IV Panzer tanks rolled by, shaking the ground as it passed and filling the air with the monstrous clattering of tracks. At the head of the column rode a small staff car of the type known as a Kubelwagen.
With a squeal of brakes, it pulled to the side of the road.
Pekkala and the others came to an abrupt halt.
Meanwhile, the tanks continued to roll past, spewing black clouds of diesel fumes from their vertical exhaust pipes.
Very slowly, Stefanov adjusted his grip on the sub-machine gun strap, ready to swing it off his shoulder if needed.
A man in the wide-lapelled black tunic of a panzer officer leaned out of the Kubelwagen. Silver braid glinted above the pink piping on his shoulder boards. He shouted something at Pekkala, who was walking at the front of the line, but his voice was drowned out by the thunder of the tanks’ engines.
The officer tried again, smiling and gesturing at Churikova.
Pekkala pointed at the half-moon-shaped military police gorget which hung around his neck, then pointed back at Churikova.
The officer spoke again, struggling to make himself heard.
Pekkala shrugged and shook his head.
At last, the officer gave up, flipping the air with his hand in a gesture of frustration. A moment later, the Kubelwagen was gone. It raced along beside the tanks, bumper swishing through the tall grass at the side of the road, until it reached the head of the line, then swerved in front of the first Panzer to resume its place in the lead.
After that, while their small procession continued to draw a few stares, nobody stopped to question them. As Pekkala stared at this seemingly endless procession of men and machines, he was struck by an overwhelming sense of momentum. He had the impression that nothing could stop it, not even the architects of this war, who had set everything in motion.
By the time they reached the Orlov gates at the entrance to Tsarskoye Selo, the three of them were so coated with faded yellow dust that they looked as if they had been rolled in turmeric.
The gates themselves had been torn off their hinges and cast aside, as if by an angry giant. Beside the bullet-spattered stonework, into which the gates had once been anchored, lay a heap of empty brass cartridges where a machine gun had run through a box of ammunition. The brass cartridges were spattered with congealed arterial blood, still bright as carnival paint, and nearby lay the grey cotton wrappers of Russian army bandages.
Entering the grounds of the estate, they walked along the deserted Rampovaya Road. Sidestepping blast craters from the fighting, they came across the shattered body of a Russian soldier, dead for several days, lying face down in the undergrowth, his bloated hands white-gloved with maggots.