“I don’t want to leave,” he told her, but even as he said the words, his eyes opened and he found himself back in the cafe.
AT FIRST, PEKKALA DID NOT UNDERSTAND.
It was as if his memories of Ilya had all been thrown into the air like confetti and were flickering down around him. So often he had returned to these images, retreating from the world around him, their vividness erasing all the years between that world and this. But now time began to accelerate. All he could do was watch things going by, too fast to comprehend, until at last the strands of memory in which he had cocooned himself began to snap. Finally, when the last strand had broken free, he realized that there could be no going back.
Kropotkin returned. “My cargo is ready,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t stay any longer.”
“I’ll walk you out,” replied Pekkala, rising, his back stooped against the staircase which loomed over their heads.
Outside the cafe, the two men shook hands.
The lunchtime crowd was leaving the cafe. People stood on the sidewalk, buttoning up their coats or lighting cigarettes to keep them company on the walk back to their jobs.
“Good-bye, old friend,” said Kropotkin.
Bruno, the owner, came out with a wet rag and a stub of chalk. “Out of soup!” he announced to them as he passed. He crouched down in front of the menu board and began to erase the word BORSCHT.
As he let go of Kropotkin’s hand, Pekkala thought about the people who had drifted through his life. Their faces shuffling past behind his eyes. Now, to that long line, as if fixing a photo into an album, he added Kropotkin.
“Good-bye,” said Pekkala, but his voice was drowned out by the thudding rumble of a large motorcycle coming up the road.
“Hey!” shouted Bruno.
Pekkala turned to see Bruno waving the wet rag at the motorcycle driver, who was riding his machine almost in the gutter as he swooped past. The rider wore a leather helmet and goggles. To Pekkala, he looked like the head of a giant insect with the body of a man. His arm reached out, as if to snatch the rag from Bruno’s hand.
That’s a stupid prank, thought Pekkala.
But then he realized that the rider was holding out a gun.
What happened next took only seconds, but it seemed to Pekkala that everything had slowed down to the point where he could almost see the bullets leaving the barrel.
The rider began to fire, steadily pulling the trigger as round after round left the gun. His arm swiveled as he aimed, but the sidewalk was so crowded with people leaving the restaurant that Pekkala had no idea who the man was aiming at.
He heard the crash of glass behind him as the window of the Cafe Tilsit shattered. Kropotkin sprang to the side. As Bruno lunged away from the motorcycle, he caught his leg on the menu board. The heavy board flew into the air, spreading like a pair of wings.
Pekkala saw it coming towards him.
That was the last thing he remembered.
THE NEXT THING HE KNEW, A MAN WAS BENDING DOWN OVER HIM.
Pekkala grabbed him by the throat.
The man’s face turned red. His eyes bulged.
“Stop!” shouted a woman’s voice.
Now someone had hold of Pekkala’s hand, trying to prize it off the man’s throat.
Completely disoriented, Pekkala squinted at this pair of hands and followed them to the body of the woman. She was wearing the uniform of an ambulance nurse—gray skirt, white tunic, and white cap with a red cross on the forehead.
“Let go of him!” shouted the woman. “He’s only trying to help you!”
Pekkala released his grip.
The man tipped over backwards and lay gasping on the sidewalk.
Pekkala struggled upright. He realized he was outside the Cafe Tilsit. The sidewalk glittered with broken glass. A body lay under a black sheet, only an arm’s length away. Farther along the pavement, there were two more bodies. Those had been covered, too. Blood had seeped out from under one of the sheets, following the cracks in the pavement like a red lightning bolt.
The man Pekkala had been choking climbed unsteadily to his feet, still holding his throat. He too wore the uniform of an ambulance worker.
Now Pekkala remembered the gun. “Have I been shot?” he asked.
“No,” replied the man hoarsely. “That’s what hit you.”
Pekkala looked at where the man was pointing. He saw Bruno’s menu board.
“You’re lucky,” said the man. “You won’t even need stitches.”
Pekkala put his hand to his face. He felt a ragged tear of skin just below the hairline. When he pulled his hand away, his fingertips were flecked with blood.
Uniformed men from the Moscow Police Department were milling about on the pavement. Their boots crunched on the broken glass. “Can I talk to him now?” one of the officers asked the nurse as he pointed at Pekkala.
“In a minute,” she replied sharply. “Let me bandage him first.”
“How long have I been lying here?” he asked.
“About an hour,” the nurse replied, kneeling beside him and unraveling a roll of gauze to place upon the wound. “We dealt with the most serious cases first. They have already been taken to hospital. You were lucky …”
She was still talking when Pekkala got up and went over to the black sheet lying beside him. He pulled it back. Bruno’s eyes were glazed and open. Then he went over to the other two sheets and pulled them back as well. One was a man and the other was a woman. He recognized neither. He felt a moment of relief that Kropotkin was not among the dead. “I was standing with another man,” he said, as he turned to the nurse.
“Those not injured were sent away by the police,” she replied. “Your friend probably just went home. Only the dead were covered up, so your friend must know you’re still alive.”
Pekkala remembered that Kropotkin had been on his way to pick up cargo for his truck. It didn’t surprise him that he had not waited. When they’d said their good-byes, there had been a finality in Kropotkin’s voice which told Pekkala that the two of them would never meet again. Kropotkin was probably on the road by now, driving to Mongolia for all Pekkala knew.
“Do you have a description of the gunman?” he asked.
The officer shook his head. “All we know is that it was a man on a motorcycle. He drove by so quickly that nobody got a good look at him.”
While the nurse was bandaging his head, Pekkala gave a statement to the policeman. He sat on the curb, the soles of his shoes two islands in a puddle of Bruno’s blood. There was not much he could tell them. It had all happened so quickly. He recalled the rider’s face hidden behind the goggles and the leather helmet.
“What about the motorcycle?” asked the policeman.
“It was black,” he told the officer, “and bigger than most I have seen on the streets of this city. There was some writing on the side of the fuel tank. It was silver. I couldn’t tell what it said.”
The policeman scribbled down a few words on a notepad.
“Do you know who he was shooting at?” Pekkala asked.
“Hard to say,” replied the policeman. “A lot of people were standing here when he rode by. He might not have been aiming for anyone in particular.”
The nurse helped Pekkala to his feet. “You should come with us to the hospital,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “There’s someplace else I need to be.”
She rested her thumb against the skin just under his right eyebrow. Then she opened his eye and shone a small penlight against his pupil. “All right,” she told him reluctantly, “but if you have headaches, if you get dizzy, if your eyesight becomes blurred, you should get to a doctor immediately. Understand?”
Pekkala nodded. He turned to the ambulance man. “I’m sorry,” he said.