‘Who are you?’ asked Kamo, though he knew well. They were Cossacks of the Kuban Host.
The men said nothing.
‘Come,’ said Kamo. ‘Are you soldiers?’
He could not judge their mood. Were they disappointed that their trap had sprung on only one poor Bolshevik?
A man from the centre of the group said, ‘Your papers.’
Kamo smiled. There was blood on his chin. He could feel it cooling. His papers, such as they were, had been loaned by a school friend. Perhaps his confidence betrayed him; the officer did not repeat his request. In the silence, a little snow fell from the tree.
‘Who will search me?’ asked Kamo. ‘Will it be you, officer?’ He moved his eyes around the group. ‘You? Or you?’ He waggled the hand behind his jacket. ‘Maybe I have something for you.’
The faces of the men remained blank.
‘If it is a bomb,’ said the officer, ‘show us.’
Kamo spat, ‘If I were a revolutionary, would I give you your evidence so easily? No, friend.’
‘Choose your words carefully,’ said the officer. ‘I have the moral advantage.’
‘What moral advantage can you have when your trap is honeyed by a boy?’
The man raised his rifle to hip height and shot at the snow between Kamo’s knees.
‘That’s for your insolence,’ said the officer. ‘Look behind you.’
Frowning, Kamo turned. Dmitri had made it one third of the way across the lake before the ice had broken. He was floating, quite dead, supported by the air trapped beneath his jacket.
‘That is truly sad,’ said Kamo. ‘We should be ashamed of our times, and what our State has brought us to.’
‘Thank you,’ said the officer. He seemed relieved that their conversation was over. ‘We will hang you for that. Now, give us a statement and my friend Oleg will write it down.’
‘All this for me?’ asked Kamo. ‘You must be disappointed.’
For the first time, the Cossacks looked unsure. There is something in this, thought Kamo. If I were Soso, I could smoke this out.
‘Listen, fine and brave Cossacks of the Kuban Host,’ said Kamo. An unease was growing among them. ‘“Thrust out your chests to the moon / With outstretched arms, and revere / The spreader of light upon the earth!”’
‘That’s it,’ said the officer. ‘String him up for a fucking poet.’
A black shape fell upon the Cossack at the edge of the semicircle and the man collapsed in an explosion of snow. There was an instant of silence. Then, before could Kamo work out what had happened, the Cossacks were turning as one and the black shape, a hard contrast to the snow, seemed to spiral up from the ground like a dervish.
Kamo did not understand how a woman, or even a circus strongman, could survive such a fall without injury. Neither did he understand how she had returned to such conspicuous life after a hanging. But he did understand that death had moved one step away from him. Indeed, death had now taken the form of this creature. She knocked aside the rifle of the next Cossack in the line, struck his ribs with two hard elbow strikes, caught his rifle, and discharged it into his chest. The man was dead before he fell. Likewise the Cossack behind him, whose throat was burst by the same projectile.
The third Cossack swung his rifle towards the woman. It struck her shoulder and she dropped onto her side. The Cossack aimed at her face and tensed to shoot, but now Kamo had picked up his own instrument and played it with the satisfaction of a maestro. The Cossacks had, to a man, turned towards this black apparition, and Kamo would not waste his gift. He shot the next in the head, thumbed the bolt, the next in the chest, thumbed the bolt, missed the third, heard a hasty shot pass over his head, thumbed the bolt, dropped the officer with a gutshot, tossed away his rifle, and emptied his pistols into the final two.
He kept his arms outstretched.
It was over.
The woman stood up. She had the posture of a noblewoman. It made Kamo want to laugh. What was noble in this warm work? But she was beautiful. Her hair had fallen from its pins. Her face had lost its death bloat. Yes, there was beauty. Clear eyes green as the grass. The noose still looked like a fur collar, the rope a bloody pigtail. Kamo thought of Dmitri and the coldness of his death. He wanted to laugh again.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, gesturing to her left hand, which was concealed under her right elbow.
The woman walked over to Kamo, crouched by him, and touched his face.
‘You are hurt,’ she said, in Georgian. Her voice had the ring of a poem by Soso. She might have been a native of Gori, the town where Kamo had grown up. ‘You should see a doctor.’
He laughed.
‘I should see a doctor, says the woman who was hanged!’
He took a knife to the rope cuffs that dangled from her right wrist, and then parted the knot that held her noose. The striations on her neck were bloody, but she could breathe well. This done, he stood. The pellets in his leg stung.
He said, ‘I am at your service.’
‘No. I am at yours.’
Her eyes were empty. Kamo told himself that, given her thin frame, the thickness of the rope, and the absence of a drop, it was not impossible that she could survive the hanging. Not impossible.
He thought about this as he hobbled around the Cossacks, finishing them with his dagger.
‘Are you hungry?’
The woman was standing on the edge of the lake with her back to him. She was looking at the boy. The way she concealed her left hand gave her a forlorn quality that Kamo judged would endear her handsomely to the employees of the State Bank.
‘Call me Kamo,’ he said, moving in front of her to occlude the boy’s death. ‘What shall I call you?’
The empty eyes looked at him. In a man, this would have angered Kamo. In her, it made him curious.
‘I don’t have a name.’
‘Where do you come from?’
When she spoke, she used the words that Kamo would hear again and again, as though her short history was a litany.
‘I became conscious for the first time when I walked west from Lake Baikal. Before that, there is nothing. Sometimes I dream about the time before. The dreams make no sense. If they are true, they are not my truth.’
‘You drop on your prey like a lynx,’ he said. ‘How is that for a name, Lynx?’
‘Lynx.’
‘Will you listen as I tell you how the people will rise up?’
‘You saved my life. I will listen.’
The prison wagon rattled through the streets. It was night. Now he was bound by chain instead of leather. Kamo could feel the spirit of a dead lawyer in the stinking suit they had given him. The lawyer: that beloved tool of the bourgeoisie. The suit reeked of mothballs and shit and the acid tang of fear, an aroma Kamo had smelled on men before, but never himself. He never would.