‘Cry, Grisha,’ she said. ‘See if your tears run red, as mine did when you tied me like a pig.’
Saskia struck him in the groin with the rifle. He gasped and clamped his legs to his chest.
‘They only want to talk to you,’ he said.
‘What could I possibly tell them? Something of philosophy or mathematics?’
‘I don’t know.’ Grisha collapsed to the floor. He pressed his palms into his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
Saskia could not wait while he composed himself. She dug the barrel of her rifle into the dress and dealt it across Grisha’s shoulder. Sobbing, he removed his tweed jacket.
She watched him.
‘All of it.’
The evening had not yet come to the mountainside, but Saskia could see, through the barricaded window, a dull cloud shadow approaching the hut. Its edges haloed in the moments when the last of the sun shone. Within the hut, Grisha had completed his transformation. He was hunched and pitiful.
‘Don’t make me do it,’ he said.
Saskia made a sympathetic noise in her throat. ‘But they only want to talk to you.’
‘What if they don’t?’
Saskia considered his lanky, angular body and his crooked back. He had not buttoned the dress evenly. His jaw no longer trembled but his eyelids were raw where he had rubbed them dry.
‘Is Kamo out there?’ she asked, softly.
Grisha looked at his bare feet. He said nothing.
‘If,’ she continued, ‘it is indeed Kamo, then he will take a full breath when he sees you. He prefers to shoot on the exhale. Are you listening?’
‘Yes.’
‘That means you might make it if you run fast. He likes to shoot in the back. Don’t look for him ahead of you. He’ll be somewhere behind the hut. My advice is this: Run as fast as you can downhill. If you make it to the town, I suggest you find another method of employment. Your present boss would look upon these two failures—one in St Petersburg and one here—as poor reflections on your abilities.’
Grisha swallowed. He looked from the door to Saskia and back.
‘Don’t do this,’ he said.
Saskia raised the rifle and indicated the door with her chin.
‘I could shoot at your feet, but that would only warn him. Go.’
Grisha offered her a last look of horror before he charged at the door. When it opened, the brightness was sudden. His silhouette stumbled onto the bald earth where the countless travellers had worn away the grass. Then he was sprinting in a zigzag towards the closest thicket of trees.
Saskia closed her eyes. She thought of Kamo and imagined looking out through his eyes at herself, sprinting, making a desperate escape. She pictured the barrel as it swept towards her.
Kamo inhales through his teeth.
He exhales and—
Nothing.
No shot.
She opened her eyes to see Grisha reach the thicket and dive into the undergrowth.
Chapter Thirty
Saskia touched her top lip with her tongue. She had the same feeling that had overcome her during those first steps into the Amber Room: numbness, stage fright, and detached frustration of playing a role in someone else’s plan. Why had Kamo not fired? He was out there. Had to be. Grisha would not have feared for his life otherwise. And Grisha had shown that glimmer of recognition when Saskia mentioned Kamo by name. It could be none other than Simon Ter-Petrossian.
Above her, a beam creaked. She looked up. A drizzle of dust played into her eyes.
Was Kamo on the roof? No, that is a mistake he would not make. He valued stealth too highly. If he was not on the roof, what had made the sound? Second person perhaps. Why the second person? The conclusion of her thought followed before she had truly derived it. Kamo wanted her to think he was on the roof. Why? Because it would preoccupy her while he—
She remembered herself saying to both Kamo and Soso, ‘Where does a lynx store its spoils?’
The tempo of her thoughts doubled, doubled again, and she lived a slow minute in the quarter-second it took for her eyes to saccade on the silhouette, the inevitable silhouette in the doorway, of Kamo. He was dressed as a clerk from bowler to boots. She had time to blink before his pistols flared—left, right—and one bullet roared past her cheek. The echoes washed around the hut as though the space were a church. It was when she had blinked again, and seen that Kamo wore a lopsided smile, that she understood one of those echoes had been the discharge of her own rifle. She had shot it from the hip.
‘Simon,’ she said. She gave the word its English pronunciation, which turned her mind to the English boyfriend, Simon, whose memory had been implanted within her mind those years ago. How trivial a thing to recall now.
‘Lynx.’
His word seemed to lengthen in the failing light, in the tang of cordite.
His smile continued. It might have been a cue from one actor to another. There was a patience and expectation in his eyes. As though they had been playing a game and it was over. As though they were old friends recalling a high time.
Saskia frowned at the rifle in her hands. She removed her finger from the trigger and watched her hand open and close the bolt action. A spent shell was ejected.
Kamo, still smiling, slumped against the doorframe.
Saskia pulled the trigger.
His jaw disappeared in a flare of blood.
She moved towards him, thinking of a fog bank she had once seen at the shore of the Black Sea. Her tuned nerves felt even the cracks of the earth. When she reached him, there was no last moment of confidence. He was dead. Her first shot had passed through his heart, and the second had exploded his jaw. Pieces lay on his shirt and the ground behind him. He sat with his back to the doorframe. His head sagged on his chest. He was no longer Kamo. He was an empty body, spent like his pistols.
She put one hand over his but made sure that she remained fully in the darkness of the hut. The solution to the trap of her surroundings, and the dangers they contained, lay in sound. She heard a distant cow bell, the purr of a woodpecker, the wind in bending branches, and a thousand diminishing signatures of nature. One of them was human: a growl of thoughtfulness.
Hmm.
Saskia thought about the advantages of the hut. They were few. She skipped over the body and sprinted into the meadow, holding her rifle by the stock and the barrel. Before she had taken four strides, a bullet passed her ear. The clap of pain reached her a moment later. She rolled in the grass. The sound was pure enough for her to identify the location of the shooter within a degree. As she completed her roll, she rose in a crouch. Her finger tensed on the trigger, then eased; framed in the ramp site of her rifle, and not twenty metres away, was a young man in a trench coat. He was fussing at the action on his rifle, which had jammed.
Saskia ran towards him. She drove the stock of her Mauser into his thigh. His leg flew out and he landed on his back. Saskia looked left and right to see if the movement had flushed out more men, but the clearing was empty and still. She took the collar of his jacket and heaved him into the longer grasses where the meadow met the first of the pines. He had not released the rifle, so she put a boot on his chest and tugged it from him.
‘Are there any others?’
His expression moved from shock to fear. Not of her, she guessed, but the men for whom he worked. She waited for his attention to return to her. Then she raised her eyebrows.
‘I speak not German,’ he replied in stuttering, thick French.
His accent was muddy patchwork of Finnish, French and Danish. Saskia began to speak in the dialect used in the southern part of Finland. She found the phonemes difficult to articulate at first. ‘Kamo is dead,’ she said. ‘Art thou the last man?’