His eyes, which were grey and weathered beyond his years, shrunk with suspicion. He frowned at her clothes, then at her face.
‘I know Kamo is dead, Comrade,’ he said. ‘You killed him.’
She put the barrel of her rifle to the cleft in his chin.
‘Art thou the last man?’
He shrugged, as though this was obvious. ‘Yes, Comrade. Three times yes.’
As Saskia considered this, she listened once more to the sounds of the mountainside. The volume was building with the dusk. There was not, however, a human note to be heard.
‘Tell me where Lenin lives.’
The Finn stilled the muscles of his face. That told Saskia enough.
‘Who?’
Saskia spoke her next three words as though to a child.
‘Vladimir. Ilyich. Ulyanov.’
The Finn looked away. The movement reminded her of Grisha, who was even now running down the mountainside. That worried her. Grisha was running for his life and Saskia would find overtaking him difficult.
She brought the barrel of her rifle to the Finn’s cheek.
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘or I will put a hole in you.’
He remained looking away. ‘I will die for him.’
‘I don’t doubt it. But not today.’ She paused, then asked, ‘Am I a woman?’
The Finn looked at her, surprised and suspicious. ‘What is this?’
‘Just answer me.’ Saskia put the barrel against his black neckerchief. ‘Am I a woman?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Are you a man?’
He frowned. ‘I think—’
‘Try not to,’ she said, smiling. ‘I won’t hurt you if you cooperate. Now, art thou a man?’
He sighed and said, ‘Yes.’
‘Good. And two and two is five.’
He gave her a confused half-smile. ‘It is four, miss.’
Saskia remembered how Soso had greeted her in the Amber Room: ‘Lynx, mythic beast who sees through falsehood to the truth beyond.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now tell me this one thing: art thou the last man?’
As he replied with one Finnish word, ‘Kyllä,’ Saskia called upon her talents. Automatic, inscrutable processors recalled all his behaviour since the beginning of their conversation. His voice was examined for stress complexes. His breath for micro-hesitation. His eyes for blink rate. She attended to the blood in his lips and the conductivity of his hand, which she had taken in a soft grip. ‘A sorceress,’ he whispered. Those automatic processors parsed his behaviours and plotted them in a non-Euclidean space, within which emerged two attractors: the truth, and falsehood. Saskia could offer his subsequent behaviours to that statistical model and observe which attractor captured them. Scylla the truth. Charybdis falsehood.
Kyllä.
His reactions were aggregated to a data point and fell into that non-Euclidean space, orbited the truth, them tumbled into it unambiguously.
So he is the last man.
‘You have met Lenin.’
‘Who?’
Falsehood; he knows who Lenin is.
‘He is here, in the city. Correct?’
‘Who is?’
Again, the sum of his physiological responses were presented to the model, returning truth.
The Mountain Eagle is here.
She cocked her head. ‘Lenin lives in Colgny.’
‘I have never heard of that place.’
Truth. He has not.
‘In Chambésy, then.’
‘Where?’
False. He knows it. We’re getting closer.
‘Near the train station?’
‘Which?’
Truth. Yes, near there.
‘Lenin lives on Chemin de Valérie?’
He said nothing. There were little data for her model, but his thoughts were plain enough. Lenin did not live on that street.
‘But near there?’
The Finn looked glum.
Truth.
‘He lives on … Chemin de la Pie?’
The Finn looked defeated. Truth. He sighed and said, ‘You will not be able to reach him. He is guarded by better men.’
Saskia nodded. She released his hand. He took it, as her touch had burned him, enclosed it in his other hand against his chest.
‘This place reminds me of the highlands of Georgia. Do you know them?’
The Finn shrugged. Saskia smiled at him and stood. The edge of evening had fallen on the meadow. A quietness had settled. She glanced at the body of Kamo, which filled the doorstep of the hut, and was surprised by a sparkling in her chest and a note of sorrow in her thoughts.
‘I want you to bury him.’
The Finn leaned so that he could see the hut. ‘Kamo, is it? Told me his name was Alexei.’
Saskia clipped his head with the rifle stock. The weapon connected with a louder sound than Saskia had anticipated. Perhaps the temporal plate of his skull was thinner than normal because of a developmental abnormality. She crouched and touched the bone. It was firm; intact. She laid him on his side. She took his rifle, then returned to the hut, where she took Kamo’s pistols from the dirt. She put them in her rucksack. There was a tall pine behind the hut. She climbed it, carrying all the weapons, until she had risen into the last of the sunlight. She jammed the rifles there and returned to the hut. Its snow shovel was hanging at the rear. She unhooked it and dropped it near the body. Finally, she removed Kamo’s dagger and cut ‘Simon’ into a piece of blackened wood. As she cut, she realised that the name echoed that of her boyfriend, an Englishman, for whom she had pined in the night hours following the inception of her first case for the FIB. The boyfriend had been fictional; a picture to hang in the empty room of her identity. What residue of truth remained in his given name, Simon Ter-Petrossian, after the long years of his disguise, Kamo? But if she had ever held affection for Kamo, or loved him to even the smallest degree, it was not this Kamo. Hers was, in some parallel reality, still held in the Amber Room, entombed mid-movement.
Kamo’s trouser leg had ridden up his calf, exposing a dirty sock. She tugged it into place before turning to Lake Geneva. It was wholly dark but for the lights of its shores and boats. There was still time to overtake Grisha. She began to jog.
Chapter Thirty-One
Saskia followed the trail of roughened grass and broken branches and reached Grisha within an hour, on a rocky cowpath not far from a small hermitage. He did not have her night vision advantage or her sense of direction. She retrieved the dark dress and put it on over her clothes. It was ragged but would serve her better once she was around people. Grisha she left naked and lost. She thought of breaking his neck as he scrambled away into the pines, thinking it a kindness, until she told herself that those kindnesses led to the sorrows over which the dictator conducted his monologue, and she would not be kind in that way, even merciful, even thinking of what the Party would do to Grisha.
Two hours passed before she reached the shore of Lake Geneva. She was in time for one of the last ferries to the western side. She sat on deck, in a dark spot behind the paddle, and ate fondue with a group of middle-aged British wool merchants on a walking tour. She explained that she was a nanny from Bradford and allowed one of the younger walkers to tell her about his time as an usher in the Panathinaiko Stadium during the first Olympiad. The man offered her his straw boater because the wind was freshening. Saskia took it.
At the shore, Saskia thanked them for their kindness and took a taxi through Chemin de la Pie, though it was a short walk. The early night was a quiet time in this quarter of Geneva. She inspected the street as she passed. It was tree-lined and spotted with villas whose splendour did not fit well with the conception that Saskia had formed from stories of Lenin in exile. She had heard of his preference for cheap, anonymous and often seedy establishments in which he and his wife Nadezhda mixed with the downtrodden and the passionate. These villas, however, reminded her of the residence of Count Nakhimov on Lake Lucerne. She tried to identify lookouts. She could see none.