a bit of money in their pocket, they’re off like rabbits.”
Ever the pragmatist, Arkadin said, “I’ll take my crew and go find them.”
“A waste of time.” Kuzin’s little head bobbled on his shoulders. “Just find me more.”
“It’s getting difficult,” Arkadin pointed out. “Some of the girls are scared; they don’t
want to come with us.”
“Take them anyway.”
Arkadin frowned. “I don’t follow you.”
“Okay, moron, I’ll lay it out for you. Take your fucking crew in the fucking van and
snatch the bitches off the street.”
“You’re talking about kidnapping.”
Kuzin laughed. “Fuck me, he gets it!”
“What about the cops.”
Kuzin laughed even harder. “The cops are in my pocket. And even if they weren’t,
d’you think they get paid to work? They don’t give a rat’s ass.”
For the next three weeks Arkadin and his crew worked the night shift, delivering girls
to the brothel, whether or not they wanted to come. These girls were sullen, often
belligerent, until Kuzin took them into a back room, where none of them ever wanted to
go a second time. Kuzin didn’t mess with their faces, as that would be bad for business;
only their arms and legs were bruised.
Arkadin watched this controlled violence as if through the wrong end of a telescope.
He knew it was happening, but he pretended it had nothing to do with him. He continued
to count his money, which was now piling up at a more rapid clip. It was his money and
Yelena that kept him warm at night. Each time he was with her, he checked her arms and
legs for bruises. When he made her promise not to take drugs, she laughed, “Leonid
Danilovich, who has money for drugs?”
He smiled at this, knowing what she meant. In fact, she had more money than all the
other girls in the brothel combined. He knew this because he was the one who gave it to
her.
“Get yourself a new dress, a new pair of shoes,” he’d tell her, but frugal girl that she
was, she’d merely smile and kiss him on the cheek with great affection. She was right, he
realized, not to do anything to call attention to herself.
One night, not long after, Kuzin accosted him as he was leaving Yelena’s room.
“I have an urgent problem and I need your help,” the freak said.
Arkadin went with him out of the apartment building. A large van was waiting on the
street, its engine running. Kuzin climbed into the back, and Arkadin followed. Two of the
brothel girls were being guarded by Kuzin’s pair of personal ghouls.
“They tried to escape,” Kuzin said. “We just caught them.”
“They need to be taught a lesson,” Arkadin said, because he assumed that was what his
partner wanted him to say.
“Too fucking late for that.” Kuzin signaled to the driver, and the van took off.
Arkadin settled back on the seat, wondering where they were going. He kept his mouth
shut, knowing that if he asked questions now he’d look like a fool. Thirty minutes later
the van slowed, turned off onto an unpaved road. For the next several minutes they
jounced along a rutted track that must have been very narrow because branches kept
scraping against the sides of the van.
At length, they stopped, the doors opened, and everyone clambered out. The night was
very dark, illuminated only by the headlights of the van, but in the distance the fire of the smelters was like blood in the sky or, rather, on the undersides of the belching miasma
churned out by hundreds of smokestacks. No one saw the sky in Nizhny Tagil, and when
it snowed the flakes turned gray or even sometimes black as they passed through the
industrial murk.
Arkadin followed along with Kuzin as the two ghouls pushed the girls through the
thick, weedy underbrush. The resiny scent of pine perfumed the air so strongly, it almost
masked the appalling stench of decomposition.
A hundred yards in the ghouls pulled back on the collars of the girls’s coats, reining
them in. Kuzin took out his gun and shot one of the girls in the back of the head. She
pitched forward into a bed of dead leaves. The other girl screamed, squirming within the
ghoul’s grasp, desperate to run.
Then Kuzin turned to Arkadin, placed the gun in his hand. “When you pull the
trigger,” he said, “we become equal partners.”
There was something in Kuzin’s eyes that at this close range gave Arkadin the shivers.
It seemed to him that Kuzin’s eyes were smiling in the way the devil smiled, without
warmth, without humanity, because the pleasure that animated the smile was of an evil
and perverted nature. It was at this precise moment that Arkadin thought of the prisons
ringing Nizhny Tagil, because he now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was
locked within his own private prison, with no idea if there was a key, let alone how to use it.
The gun-an old Luger with the Nazi swastika imprinted on it-was greasy with Kuzin’s
excitement. Arkadin raised it to the height of the girl’s head. She was whimpering and
crying. Arkadin had done many things in his young life, some of them unforgivable, but
he’d never shot a girl in cold blood. And yet now, in order to prosper, in order to survive the prison of Nizhny Tagil, this was what he had to do.
He was aware of Kuzin’s avid eyes boring into him, red as the fire of Nizhny Tagil’s
foundries themselves, and then he felt the muzzle of a gun at the nape of his neck and
knew that the driver was standing behind him, no doubt on Kuzin’s orders.
“Do it,” Kuzin said softly, “because one way or another in the next ten seconds
someone’s going to fire his gun.”
Arkadin aimed the Luger. The shout of the report echoed on and on through the deep
and forbidding forest, and the girl slid along the leaves, into the pit with her friend.
Thirty-Five
THE SOUND of the bolt being thrown on the 8mm Mauser K98 rifle echoed through
the Dachau air raid bunker. That was the end of it, however.
“Damn!” Old Pelz groaned. “I forgot to load the thing!”
Petra took out her handgun, pointed it in the air, and squeezed the trigger. Because the
result was the same as what had happened to him, Old Pelz threw down the K98.
“Scheisse!” he said, clearly disgusted.
She approached him then. “Herr Pelz,” she said gently, “as I said, my name is Petra.
Do you remember me?”
The old man stopped muttering, peered at her carefully. “You do look an awful lot like
a Petra-Alexandra I once knew.”
“Petra-Alexandra.” She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. “Yes, yes, that’s me!”
He recoiled a little, put a hand on his cheek where she’d planted her lips. Then,
skeptical to the end, he looked past her at Bourne. “Who’s this Nazi bastard? Did he force
you to come here?” His hands curled into fists. “I’ll box his ears for him!”
“No, Herr Pelz, this is a friend of mine. He’s Russian.” She used the name Bourne had
given her, which was on the passport Boris Karpov had provided.
“Russians’re no better than Nazis in my book,” the old man said sourly.
“Actually, I’m an American traveling under a Russian passport.” Bourne said this first
in English and then in German.
“You speak English very well, for a Russian,” Old Pelz said in excellent English. Then
he laughed, showing teeth yellowed by time and tobacco. At the sight of an American, he
seemed to perk up, as if coming out of a decades-long drowse. This was the way he was,
a rabbit being drawn out of a hat, only to withdraw again into the shadows. He wasn’t
mad, just living both in the drab present and in the vivid past. “I embraced the Americans