His eyes dawdled over the wet canvas roof, down to the gendarme opposite. Their heads rocked in synchrony. The gendarme faced the direction of travel while Kamo faced backward. The gendarme smiled as though he knew Kamo’s secret. Because he did not, Kamo smiled too. His eyes continued to drift. He looked at the iron rods that covered the small, high windows. Counted them. He noticed the tough, canvas layer that protected the floor. His bench was wooden. In it, two circular holes admitted his hands, and these found heavy manacles whose weight threatened to pop his shoulders and collapse his knuckles with every pothole and bump.
Kamo had long ceased his routine of playful comment. His mind had moved to the next challenge. How would he get word to Soso of this incarceration? Doubtless there would be comrades in the remand prison, but many would be stool pigeons. Time would pass before he met someone he recognised. Then, he would make his connection to the informal postal system that webbed the incarcerated political underground, on the condition that he was fortunate enough to be placed among the politicals.
Into his mind’s eye came the cold, narrow stare of Soso, for whom the money was everything. It meant retaining his head. Expropriations had been voted down by the Party and it was a great difficulty for Lenin that Soso had continued his banditry. But there were other problems. Marked notes had been uncovered in Paris and Berlin, cities that suffered under active and enthusiastic foreign bureaus of the Protection. These sums were paltry, yes. They represented slivers of the cuts of middle men. But their leakage put Soso under pressure. Times were already difficult thanks to the stalled revolution three years earlier. For the gradualists, the new parliament was a path to power, and such criminal activities as those advocated by Soso had to be minimised. For the high-blooded revolutionaries, the failure to locate the bulk of the cash spoke to incompetence. The Party was suffocating without the sweet trade. It had to stage its grand meetings, like the one in London the previous year that so titillated the international Press, and maintain the irrigating work of propaganda. It had its underworld of couriers and agitators, none of whom could be expected to earn an honest living when Party business took them all over the Empire, made it impossible to acquire the legal paperwork for paid employment, and, most often, sent them on a slow train to Siberia and their ruin.
These thoughts settled on Kamo with a true weight.
The wagon turned a corner and halted. A rotten egg struck the window bars and a whoop of joy rose up from a gang of urchins. The sound made Kamo nostalgic for Tiflis. His mood was buoyed even more by the manner in which the gendarme picked eggshell from a magnificent side-whisker.
But before the wagon could set off, something heavy landed on the roof. Kamo watched it warp.
It was not likely to be a bomb. One threw a bomb beneath a carriage, not onto it, and such a bomb would come second to the first bomb, which should rip the life from the horses to prevent their flight. The weight of the object was spreading. Could it be person on all fours?
‘A wolf!’ said Kamo. ‘There’s nature for you, comrade. Red in tooth and claw.’
‘No, it’s the chicken who laid the eggs,’ said the gendarme nervously, referring to an old Caucasian nursery rhyme. But two more, softer sounds came from the roof. The gendarme moved from window to window. Red blotches stood out on his cheeks.
Kamo was certain that the two sounds were footfalls of a person moving forward
The gendarme fell into Kamo’s lap as the wagon juddered forward. Kamo watched him scramble back to a window once more. Above the street sounds, Kamo heard someone shout, ‘Yah! Yah!’ The carriage accelerated.
‘What do you suppose can be happening?’ he asked the gendarme. ‘A rescue? That must make me rather important. Do you regret being left with me in this carriage?’
The gendarme said, ‘Be quiet. Let’s see what happens.’
‘Do you wonder why a good fellow such as yourself should be killed so a person like me can go free? After all, you’re a good citizen. But there can be no good citizens in a corrupt society, comrade.’
‘I told you to shut up.’
‘I’ll ask my friends for leniency, assuming you’ll cooperate. What will you say if you are later presented with my face? Let’s practise.’
With a sudden jerk, the wagon’s speed increased. The gendarme collapsed into his seat and let his head fall into his grey-gloved hands. Whether this was a childish mime in answer to Kamo’s question, or simple despair, Kamo could not be sure.
Kamo strained to look through the window but the angle was too oblique. Street lamps passed in haste. He pictured the horses. He had a bad feeling. All of St Petersburg was being treated to a display of his botched escape. But, before that, the carriage would strike an errant bump, or attempt a corner, and a spill would be the result.
Then, in the next moment, the wagon flipped forward.
Kamo wondered if he were already dead. Perhaps the carriage had crashed minutes (centuries?) before and this experience was only an echo of his last moment, sounding again and again. But the gendarme was gripping his seat and asking for his mother to save him, and it became known to Kamo with a troubling certainty that the wagon had been ridden into the River Neva. Kamo had an image of the horses going over the bank; their drop would explain the sharp leverage needed to make the wagon flip.
The carriage struck the water with a tremendous crash. Kamo, facing backwards, was in a good position to meet the impact, but the gendarme was thrown forward. He managed to twist before striking the partition behind Kamo, however, and this saved his neck. As the carriage righted, he fell into the well between the seats, dazed.
Kamo felt water close on his hands. It was rising fast through the suspension holes. Soon it rushed across the floor, biting his wounded feet with cold. Then silver dribbles came through the cracks in the doorframe. The carriage tipped sideways and Kamo roared as his wrists accepted the weight of his body. Barrels of white, icy water burst upwards through the window. Kamo watched it swallow the gendarme. Then the water passed his head, blocking his eyes and pressing the air from his lungs as the carriage drifted down.
A hand gripped his ankle. The gendarme, then, was thrashing his last. Kamo kicked him. But a unexpected sensation spread from his wrists: release. The gendarme had freed him.
With a thump, the carriage settled on the river bed.
Kamo floated upwards. His face emerged into a pocket of air that shrank to nothing as he took a breath. He twisted left and right. He felt certain that his rescue had failed, that he would die here with the gendarme. However, he would not panic at the foot of the tower of Death. He would kick open the door of the carriage. Make the lazy tyrant come down to Kamo.
An elbow hooked his neck and he was drawn away from the bench. There was a perceptible change in the water around him. He was, now, outside the shell of the coach. He was in the river proper. The arm released him and Kamo kicked. He kicked at the darkness and rose through the black skins of filth until he roared onto the surface. Out of the silence, sounds returned: moving water, distant shouts, cheers, and clip-clop of traffic. The wild eye of a horse bore down, and Kamo had time to cover his head as its flank spun him aside. Only when the thrashing animal had passed did he think of riding it from the river.
The horse had deadened his shoulder. He moaned, went under, and when he emerged a second time, he saw a lantern blinking in the darkness as its cowl was raised and lowered. Kamo swallowed water. His shoes gave little to his flailing legs and his arms were loaded with iron manacles. Yet he thrashed towards the blinking lodestone and swore at the river and damned his burning muscles.
The lantern was extinguished moments before Kamo could reach for it. Arms took him from the darkness and hauled him across the stern of a small launch. Kamo collapsed with his head against the gunwale. Next him was a figure so wrapped in a blanket that only his red nose was visible. It was the gendarme. A second, red-haired man unshipped the oars of the launch and dug them into the black river. A third figure put a blanket around Kamo’s shoulders, who was too exhausted to raise his head. Instead, he lay looking at his manacles. How had he swum with these things? The calls and heckles of the shore grew dim as the launch pushed into the open estuary. The oarsman’s breaths grew fuller.