‘What do you say, Lynx? Geno is an ugly man. You are beautiful. What defence can he possibly have?’
If I fail, there will be no heist. Does this mean I can stop it?
Soso caught something of her thoughts. He took her to the edge of the patio. They both looked down onto the heads of pickpockets, the water-carriers and the pimps, thirty feet below.
‘If you are, or intend to be, a traitor, you will regret it. Is that understood?’
Saskia counted to five, slowly. ‘I understand.’
‘Fearless!’ shouted Soso. He smiled at Kamo. ‘Where did you find her? Find more!’
A ghostly, answering smile appeared on Kamo’s face, but he seemed distant from the moment. Was it because he had lost his limited control over Saskia? Or did he hold genuine friendship for her, a friendship that did not sit well with the notion of Soso pimping her services like a common flower seller?
Soso disappeared through the wooden door. Saskia and Kamo lingered for a moment. They did not speak. They had not spoken since she had denied Kamo’s oddly formal request for sex the night before. When Soso returned, he wore a scarlet shirt and black Fedora and carried three glasses of wine, red as roses.
‘From this point,’ he said, ‘I am Soselo the Poet. Where did you find your name?’
‘Kamo gave it to me.’
‘No, not ‘Lynx’. I mean the name you have assumed for your travels.’
‘Penelope?’
‘Yes. On what basis did you choose the name?’
‘It is consistent with some papers I acquired. Additionally, it recalls the Odyssey.’
Soso nodded. ‘Of course. Please, take this.’
‘I don’t drink.’
‘You must,’ said Kamo. ‘It is a tradition.’
‘Please,’ said Soso. He gave a shy smile. ‘You would hurt the feelings of your host.’
Saskia and Kamo each took a glass of wine.
Soso raised his. ‘“One who journeying / Along a way he knows not, having crossed A place of drear extent, before him sees A river rushing swiftly toward the deep, And all its tossing current white with foam, And stops and turns, and measures back his way.”’
From the Iliad, thought Saskia, not the Odyssey.
‘To journeys, Penelope. And, at the close of many adventures, to coming home.’
‘Coming home,’ she said.
Kamo muttered, ‘Home.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Saskia opened her eyes on a pie-crust horizon moving in the heat. Nine months had passed since that meeting with Soso. She and Kamo were sitting on horses. They overlooked Tiflis from a ridge in the slow, loose foothills of the Holy Mountain. Saskia was dressed as a cavalry captain. Her moustaches had been applied with stage glue. Her boots and jodhpurs were fine quality and a Circassian sabre lay against the withers of her horse.
Kamo turned to her. His left eye was swollen shut.
‘Well, do you see them?’
This is the day of the robbery.
She remembered her morning ride into the foothills, where she had reconnoitred the approach to Tiflis. Everything was ready. Her job was to brandish the sabre once the stagecoach was identified. The lookout on the roof of Prince Sumbatov’s house would see the flash and alert the Outfit.
Not again. Will there be all that blood? The screaming?
Her thoughts were interrupted as Kamo pressed his knuckle against her moustache. ‘It will do,’ he said. ‘Is your corset too tight, Penelope? Can you breathe?’
‘Call me Lynx,’ she replied. Her eyes were fixed ahead, straining for the telltale dust.
Kamo’s horse settled its footing. ‘Don’t be afraid. You handle a horse better than anyone but me. Everything will be fine. And they need you.’
She ignored his glance. ‘You exaggerate.’
‘In the morning, you cannot ride a horse. At lunch, you watch me ride. In the afternoon, you can ride. At supper, you see me performing tricks. By nightfall, those tricks are yours.’
‘You exaggerate,’ she repeated. ‘I can’t do your tricks.’
‘No tricks today. Unless you call your eagle eyes a trick.’
‘Your friends suspect me of collusion with the authorities.’
‘When it comes to it, they suspect everyone. Don’t speak of it.’ He added, peevishly, ‘They’re your friends, too.’
Saskia watched the threads of chimney smoke. She could stop this. She could ruin the robbery and destroy the promising career of Joseph Stalin. There would be nothing left for him but exile from the Party—if he was lucky. More likely, someone would come for him. A trusted man like Kamo, for example, could get close enough to carry out the orders, reluctantly signed no doubt, of that man waiting in the north, of Lenin. But whereas her spirit had felt fully shackled to her body in the Amber Room of the Second World War, and during her first meeting with Stalin, she now felt like a ghostly passenger.
‘Do you still have your dreams?’
‘Which dreams?’
‘When we first met, you told me that you could remember a time before you walked out of the east, but that you did not trust those memories. They came to you in dreams: lighter-than-air machines, panaceas, food in abundance.’
Saskia rubbed the shoulder of her horse. Yes, she remembered those dreams. Their edges had cut her and the blood was sanity. She had denied herself as a protective measure. She had untied the knot of 2023 and let it float away. The blank slate of her mind had been set for ideas: Marxism, brigandage, the very drive to change the world.
She saw a distant, turning worm of dust, larger than the others on that busy highway, and outpacing them.
‘It’s time.’
‘How fast?’ Kamo gasped.
‘It’s difficult to tell.’
‘You said you’d be able to tell.’ Kamo leaned forward, but the movement disturbed an unseen wound in his neck. He hissed. ‘Fuck my carelessness.’
‘It’s difficult to see,’ she said, holding her voice low. ‘We have ten minutes. Maybe longer, if they slow.’
‘They won’t slow. How many?’
Saskia concentrated on the black dot. She felt an expansion of the percept, though she saw no magnification. There were two Cossack guards in front of the stagecoach and two behind. Another two galloped alongside. She saw a rifle inside the carriage, and at once she understood that there was a soldier inside, along with the cashier, Kurdyumov, and the accountant, Golovnya.
‘As many as we thought.’
‘Make the signal.’
Saskia withdrew the Circassian sabre and held it high. She caught the sun on the blade once, twice, three times.
‘Well?’ asked Kamo. ‘Did they see it?’
‘There’s nobody on the roof of the palace.’
‘What? Damn him, the traitor. Give me the sabre. I’ll make the signal. Go.’
Saskia spurred her horse down into the switchbacks. Grit and scree loosened beneath the hooves but the steady warmblood had her trust and soon they entered a rhythm where her balance spoke to the animal. Moments came when she almost fell from the saddle, but she relaxed, with a sure concentration, and the rapport was re-established. The heat grew as they descended. Sweat ran into her corset and rubbed her forehead raw beneath her plumed cavalry hat.
As the slopes flattened, she entered the city through washing lines and fields. Then she was into the streets. The crannies and turns were foetid with spice, urine, horse shit and dust. Its people were, too, a Caucasian miscellany of Georgian, Russian, Armenian and Azeri. Saskia still labelling. Still counting like the doomed accountant Golovnya.
Saskia pulled the horse through a corner and trotted down Golovinsky Avenue. There were gendarmes and militiamen on every corner. They knew something was afoot. Saskia kept her back straight. Her jaw twisted a little to the left. She rode with the airs of a captain to suit her stolen clothes and her glued sideburns. Outside the opera house, Patsia Goldava stopped the horse and twirled, girlishly, a parasol. Saskia saw that her parasol was open. It was a signaclass="underline" Nothing yet. Saskia corrected her by touching her cap.