One gendarme offered his truncheon to Kamo’s mouth. Kamo grinned and bit. Then his legs were raised and a second truncheon was whipped across the soles of his feet. His neck twisted and his head snapped back and he gasped. The image of the unlit ceiling lamp fluttered with his eyelids. His tears mixed with his snot, and he wondered if there was some poetry in the strange contrast between this quiet office and the chatter, the telephone buzzers and the tapped typewriters that carried through the cracks in the old walls of this old police station. He fainted.
The Turtle Lake wet a thin slice of the northern slope of Mtatsminda. It was shallow enough to have frozen already. The surrounding woods were colourless with snow. Kamo and the boy found the woman hanging in a tree close to the shore. The boy cried out at the sight. Kamo assessed her death: arms tied back; hatless; unusually good boots. He removed his rifle, which hung across his back, and cocked it. He looked into the trees for the telltale clouds of exhalation.
The boy should not have cried out.
But there was no sign of movement in the trees. They were alone.
He looked at the snow beneath the hanged woman, and saw the traces of her executioners: cigarettes; matches; piss. The tracks led south.
He watched the boy tug at the rope where it had been made fast to an exposed root. Kamo saw something to admire in the ferocity and the desperation. Though the woman was dead, Kamo took a dagger from his belt and passed it to the boy, blade first.
The boy sawed at the rope. He used both hands and all his strength. The rope thrummed.
Kamo turned in a slow circle. He held his rifle in a casual grip. He took a bullet from the lapel of his chokha and pushed it into the corner of his mouth like a cigar.
He did not see the woman fall. The sound was muffled by the deeper snow close to the trunk of the tree. He turned to see her roll lifelessly through the powder until she was face down.
‘Does her heart beat?’ he asked. ‘Quickly, now.’
The boy pushed onto her back. He put his cheek to her chest for a few seconds. When he looked at Kamo, there were no tears. He shook his head.
Brave lad, Kamo thought. Maybe I can use him.
‘Say a prayer for her, if you wish. We will bury her. Then, Dmitri, I will take you to my sisters. They will help you.’
‘I want her to take care of me,’ said Dmitri. His tears were coming now. ‘Not your poxy sisters.’
Kamo sighed. ‘A poet wrote, “Know for certain that once / struck down to the ground, an oppressed man strives again to reach the pure mountain when exalted by hope”. If you don’t understand now, you will soon enough.’
The boy said nothing. They both looked at the woman. Her face was fat and red with death. The rope around her neck was thick, like a fur collar. Her death would have been prolonged. There had been no first drop to her execution. They had hauled her up like a black flag.
The gendarmes inserted a needle beneath the nail of his big toe. That woke him. They were experts, after all. These gendarmes, careful as nurses, put his socks back on and helped him stand on the chair. The case officer asked for the door to be opened once more. The superintendents filed in. Kamo watched them sleepily.
‘Remember,’ called the officer, ‘if you recognise him, there is no need to tell us this instant. Have no fear. Begin.’
Kamo barked. ‘I will dance for a penny, gentleman. Only a penny!’
He danced, though the flesh of his feet was crushed and lumpy. The gendarmes steadied him and the case officer, shaking his head, returned to his book.
Kamo turned towards the south, where the trees were thickest. He saw a sleek movement flicker between two trunks. It appeared again further up the slope. Kamo did not need another glance to tell him that this was a lynx. Unusual to see one so close to the city. Unusual to see one break cover.
Slowly, Kamo worked the bullet from one side of his mouth to another.
‘Dmitri, do you remember the boat shed to the east of the lake?’
‘Why?’
Kamo gave him a serious look. To his credit, the boy straightened his back. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘The bicycle is there.’
‘It’s yours.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘When I tell you, run as fast as you can across the lake. Keep to the edges. Don’t cross the middle. Run to the shed, get on the bicycle and ride back to the city. Go to the church of the Metekh near the old Royal Palace and ask for Papa Chiladze.’
‘But the bicycle is too big for me.’
Kamo smiled. His heart slowed as it always did on the cusp of a fight. The worst angels of his nature quietened and the dragging, sapping burden of his anxiety lightened. He looked at the sunlight on the mountain behind them and understood the privilege of the moment.
He tried to think through the nature of this trap. If a Tsarist group had hanged the woman and let the boy escape to return with help, how could they be sure that their net would snare revolutionaries? And why rig the trap so clumsily that their haul was so meagre? Kamo was, perhaps, a prize, but the Tsarists had no way of knowing that.
How important was this woman, whom he had never seen before? Why did the Tsarists believe her peril would draw out revolutionaries, and in number?
He put a second bullet in his mouth.
‘Dmitri, you run now.’
They called from the trees, a dozen men or more, ‘In the name of the Tsar!’ and fell upon them both.
Kamo counted six hours before they let him step down from the chair. By that time, his legs were bloated. He could not unlock his knees. His bladder was a tight, painful ball. The gendarmes helped him down through the building in a reinforced lift that—Kamo noted, one eye open—was unlocked by a key carried by each of them.
His cell was a concrete cubicle no wider than a horse trough. Its floor sloped towards a drain with a fist-sized hole that had no echo and stank of the worst human smells. Eight feet above him, an electric light flickered. Its mesh was bunged with dead flies. Kamo smiled. He’d seen worse.
They had taken his clothes. He moved to the rear of the cell and lay on his back. His feet, which he did not bother to inspect, throbbed somewhat less now, but the pain was growing. Even his cheeks ached where he had lost some of his beard to the thorough inspection of the sergeant, looking for razors or files or keys. He raised his legs so that they rested against the wall.
Kamo, inverted, sang a Siberian fishing shanty in a strong Armenian accent. That would confuse them. And, at last, he held his penis and let the urine out, steering it towards the drain. It was the colour of rosé. This did not worry him. The police in Georgia had played the same trick on his feet years before, and the blood was a temporary symptom. He sung the chorus of the shanty even more lustily.
Having relieved himself, he paused his singing for the answer of fellow revolutionaries. None came. Perhaps he had the wing to himself.
He acquiesced to sleep and the last of the shanty became a quiet slur. He did not relive the story of his defeat in his dreams, but parts of the episode flickered through him, as though on the pages of that book the case officer had been reading: Saskia, that spider, wearing that battle frown of hers; the boy with his fists raised like a proper gentleman; the smartly-dressed old man who had died with such surprise. Such surprise! Asleep, Kamo licked his lips. His hands twitched. Another image: the door to the Amber Room, opening.