She remembered that her revolver had fallen from the train along with Kamo, and regretted her refusal to accept the replacement offered by the guard.
Am I thinking in Russian?
The handle turned again.
Fear, she thought. Lead me.
Had there been a day without fear since her unhappy arrival in Russia? Not truly. Days of camaraderie, yes. Mountain work. Milk bar stories in the hard lands around Tiflis. Her friends there had risked death for a future they could not imagine. It had been imagined for them by the orators and downright mountebanks of the revolutionary movements.
A voice outside said, quietly, ‘Open in the name of the Tsar.’
Saskia smiled with one side of her mouth. She entered the bathroom. It had a door, identical to the one leading to the corridor, which connected to the bathroom of the neighbouring compartment. She could break through it but the sound would carry and she would only gain the advantage of another compartment, which could be occupied.
She crossed to the window, opened it, and looked forward along the train. Through habit, Kamo had chosen a compartment next to the maintenance foot-hoops, and they were within reach. She saw the dining carriage, the luggage carriage beyond that, the tender, and the locomotive. The darkness of the sky was complete. The train was passing through a wood whose trees rose to twice the height of a carriage.
She remembered a dervish in Yerevan Square. And the bloody, gut-blown horses. When the horses had screamed, she had not heard them over the echo of grenades. Those grenades had been called “apples” in the parlance of the Outfit. She remembered everything.
Saskia closed Kamo’s trunk and stepped onto it. She swung her leg out into the night air. She had climbed from a moving train window twice before, but she had never ascended to the roof. The bunched newspaper in the toes of her boots made the job difficult. She reached one of the maintenance hoops with her heel and swung out to snag the topmost rung with her hand. She caught it, held on, exhaled. For the moment, she was secure against the side of the train with the window below and to her left.
As she looked, a head emerged from it.
Saskia tried to make herself small against the train. She felt the vibration of the carriage through her cheekbone. She could see that the man was holding onto his hat and looking towards the rear of the train. He did not, however, lift his eyes. She hoped he could not hear the flapping of her skirt.
The train blew its whistle. Saskia squinted against the sooty air and saw the locomotive enter the tunnel that the guard had described. If their speed did not change, she had between six and seven seconds before her own carriage passed through.
She looked down. The man in the hat was staring at her. He had the red eyes of an addict and his mouth was open. One hand still pressed his hat against his head. Saskia could see its brim flutter. His other hand held a gun, but she was already moving when it fired.
The roof was arched, slick with rain and dirt, and swaying unpredictably in the gloom. Saskia stood for a moment, then dropped to one knee. She turned to face the tunnel.
It was four seconds away.
A gloved hand gripped the topmost maintenance rail.
Saskia spun again, this time to face the rear of the train. She had half a carriage in which to sprint as fast as her body could take her, against the direction of travel, cutting her absolute speed by a margin that would reduce the chance of injury from her jump.
She raised her skirt and ran.
When she was two thirds of the way along the carriage, she knew that time had run out. She shortened her run and cut to the side. She released her skirt and leapt as a long-jumper, wheeling her arms. A shot rang out.
Then she was in freefall.
She had slipped through a raincloud twisting like a cat. She wore twenty-first century clothes. There was fear; fear like a shrill note, deafening her thoughts. But the reflexes told, with or without her. She settled flat as a leaf. Face down. Her fall described a helix. She arched her back, relaxed her legs, and spread her arms.
Where did I learn that?
Oh, God.
She was thousands of feet above a lake whose waters were the richest blue she had ever seen. Brown-green forest pressed on all its sides.
Where am I?
‘Jem, help me!’
An automated mechanism within her mind captured a diagnostic portion of the shoreline. She heard a single, foreign thought—Siberia—and she understood that the word meant “sleeping land” in a language one thousand years dead.
This is Lake Baikal.
I’m going to—
She dropped her shoulders to bring her crash zone nearer the shore.
Forty seconds remaining.
Baikal. Lake Baikal.
She was screaming.
Russia.
Twenty seconds.
She bit down on the scream, made it her last, and took a huge breath. This relaxed her a little.
Ten seconds.
Oh, God.
She straightened her legs and her body slipped towards the vertical. Her feet were together and her knees were bent. She tried to understand how she could hit this blue-black, indifferent water and live.
Cat.
Remember Ego, the cat? She fell from a balcony in Berlin and lived to chase the birds another day.
How deep?
Seventeen-point-eight-three metres, plus or minus point-three.
When?
She did not know.
Where?
Siberia, no other.
The sleeping land.
Jem, I’m sorry.
More than three years after that fall into Baikal, Saskia landed on the yielding stones of the track foundation. Her momentum gave her two backward rolls, a third during which she wheeled her legs to change direction, and then she was jogging through the wet nettles to a stop. She watched the remaining carriages enter the tunnel. Four. Three. Two. Smoke poured from the floor of the tunnel entrance. She heard the rats call as one. They chirped like sparrows.
She flexed her shoulders and brushed away the worst of the dirt. She gathered her skirts and walked up the slope. The trees thinned. There, the domes of the Church of St Alexander Nevsky and of St Isaac’s Cathedral were visible as brighter stars in the flat constellation of St Petersburg.
Saskia imagined its bridges rising. Then she bit the last of the gravel from her palm and set off towards the light.
Chapter Three
Walking the streets until morning would not do. She had to find somewhere for the night. With no sure friends in the city, and no papers, she would gamble on a safe house associated with her late employer, the revolutionary underground. St Petersburg held more than forty safe houses. They could not all be warned to expect her, not so soon, even if the man—or men—who had attacked her on the train had notified confederates upon arrival.
Saskia walked for three hours without incident and entered the city. She presented herself at a bookshop called Pushkin & Co. The superintendent was a short man. He pencilled the name she offered, “Ms Margaret Happenstance”, into his visitors’ book and, seeing interest where there was none, told her that he would erase the letters later and re-write them in peerless copperplate. He was that kind of man. Her back straightened with annoyance. The record of her name was, he sighed, an unfortunate bureaucratic consequence of the recent troubles. He installed Saskia in a small receiving room at the rear of the bookshop, where he continued to impress upon her the signal difficulties of his professional life. The second floor was occupied by a German baron and his wife, who were wonderful. But the higher the floor, the cheaper the rent, the worse the trouble, the greater the difficulty. The exception, he added, was the basement. It was the cheapest by some margin. Could she believe a tenant would pay for such lodgings? That is to say, basement lodgings in a city such as St Petersburg, where the Baltic rammed its cold storms down the throat of the Neva each winter with a regularity that smacked of malice? He, for his part, could not.