There was another shuddering crash, machine gun fire, then something else, just at the edge of my hearing — sirens. Another crash… shouting… then sirens growing louder, what sounded like dozens of them. The gunfire stopped, replaced by the sounds of a chaotic retreat.
“Come on, we’re going!” I said, throwing on my coat. The wooden inner door came away in pieces. The outer steel door was bowed inward and riddled with holes. They cast weak beams of light through the swirling plaster dust. I shouldered into the outer steel door. Jagged bullet holes cut into my heavy suede coat. The door, however, didn’t budge. It was jammed solid in its frame.
Cops were just outside the building. Someone had a megaphone. They were either playing it safe or thought we were cornered. “The police could be working for the same bunch those thugs are.” I said. “At any rate, let’s not stick around to find out.”
The jammed outer door was a problem, but the two footed kick into a car door from flat on my back generated excellent results earlier. Why mess with success? Down I went, kicking hard with both feet. The lower corner gave and started to bend outward. “Unlock it!” I ordered, landing my next two footed kick a little higher, closer to the deadbolt. A surge of pain shot from my left ankle and figured I had only one good kick left.
Over the sirens, more megaphone calls cackled. Car alarms provided a weird counterpoint. Anna’s aerial ice bombardment had at least set off a few of them. Echoing up the stairwell were the excited cries of tenants. The police were evacuating the lower floors. They probably thought we were the shooters.
Anna pulled the bolt back and I wound up with every bit of kick I had left in me. One foot landed on the lock, the other, just below, near the frame. Over my own cry and the grinding of metal screeching out of the frame, I heard a distinctive crack. The pain was way more than I expected.
“Push it!” I got my right leg under me. “We’re going for the roof.”
The door ground open just enough to let us squeeze through. I hopped up on my right foot, tried my left, and was immensely relieved when it held me. The landing was littered with shell casings and shattered building debris. Crashing though it, I grabbed the rail and peered up the stairwell. Five stories straight up to a trapdoor onto the roof. One of the first things I had done before settling in was to explore the building — just in case — so I knew that trapdoor was unlocked.
“Move! Up! Fast!” We power climbed the stairs. Reaching the roof, I jammed a piece of rebar, I’d left there on my initial exploration, into the access door from the outside. No one was coming up through that trapdoor without a fight — or a cutting torch. The temperature had dropped a couple more degrees and howling wind tore at us. We pulled up our hoods and shoved our rapidly stiffening hands into mitts. Catching my breath, I gazed at Kiev spread out like an electric galaxy below us. The sky had cleared and ice-bright stars shone above.
The night was absolutely freezing — stunningly beautiful, but deadly. I didn’t know if I could get another stairwell roof access open, but it was imperative to find out before frostbite set in. From nine stories below, car alarms still wailed, although the sirens and shouts had died away. “I’m impressed, Anna. You really got those car alarms going.”
“Yes, and it was not easy!” She shouted back over the wind. “The icicles were not heavy enough, so I pushed down that cement block and the flower pot.”
“What?” I was floored. “You could have killed someone!”
“What was I to do? The icicles didn’t work. You said we needed a diversion. The flower pot and its base was the only heavy thing.”
“Well shit, we’re criminals now,” I muttered. “Some poor sod, minding his own business when a cement block caves in his skull — or at least his car!”
Anna fumed at my unfair lack of gratitude.
I pulled off a mitt to get my phone. Luda’s eyebrow-pencil scrawled phone number was crumpled in my coat pocket with it. “Luda! I almost forgot about her. She said, ‘in an emergency,’ and this sure feels like an emergency to me.” Punching in her number with frozen fingers was a challenge.
We traversed the roof, skidding over wind polished ice and low drifts. I was limping badly. Eventually a stairwell access door yielded. Sheer luck or we’d have been climbing down our own stairwell, right into the arms of the police. They lingered in front of the Prokuratura and, having no idea who else lurked with them in blacked out sedans, we decided to split up. I sent Anna down the unfamiliar stairwell on her own. It opened onto an entirely different street, but two women skulking off together would be like shouting, “You-hoo, over here…”
Anna had the instructions I had just gotten from Luda on how to find her grandmother’s apartment. From the roof I watched her cross a busy street and disappear. I descended a few minutes later, fighting to ignore what I hoped was only a sprain. It wasn’t easy, less than an hour after kicking our way out of the apartment, my ankle was swollen to the constraints of my boot. Reaching the street, I stopped a taxi and asked the driver to pass by our former building’s entrance. Sure enough, there in the lot, favored for special business deals, was someone’s beloved Lada Samara, roof crushed, alarm still sounding. Turning my head, not wanting to see, I told the cabbie to drive on.
THIRTEEN
The brick building we pulled up to was incongruously attractive. Lacking Soviet, soul crushing architectural ugliness, meant it was built before the revolution. How it survived since then was a mystery. A sharp intake of super cold air and a Russian expletive got me up and kind of standing by the cab’s open door. The driver grunted something sardonic, reached over the passenger seat and snatched the cash I held out. The door slammed as he accelerated into a flawless execution of the change-making-avoidance maneuver. I was left somewhat awestruck in his wake.
“Why do you for so long stay outside? Waiting for snow to fall?” Luda waved me into the lobby.
The heavy, frost veneered entry door slammed. Anna, who had been hiding in a corner, emerged and embraced me. I felt her heart beating though our combined layers of insulation.
Luda interrupted with a briefing on the roles we were to play in front of her grandmother. “You are nothing more than a couple of visiting foreign acquaintances. American girlfriends traveling to see the world. Such a pity that you speak no Russian!”
“Ukrainian?” I asked.
“Nyet, not even Latin! You are not to speak with Grandmother in any language.” Luda was adamant. Inside the apartment, communication was to be strictly in English. Baba was never to learn of her granddaughter’s clandestine activities or pick up even a hint of who we really were.
By the time the glacially slow hydraulic elevator made the third floor, Luda had become her usual lighthearted social self. Her chameleon-like transformation was, to say the least, vaguely disturbing. Reaching the terminus of a convoluted passageway, she swung open one of the mismatched doors. “Welcome, friends of mine, to the flat of my grandmother!” She ushered us inside. “Please, make at home your selves in this, our modest flat.”
Baba, waiting up to meet us, innocently insisted on providing tea for her granddaughter’s weary friends. Luda’s body language told us, in no uncertain terms, that rejecting the offer was not an option.
“What a treat! A nice cup of tea would really hit the spot.” I said in English.
Anna rolled her eyes.
“Especially after that long flight from America. I dare say, the turbulence over Tuscany was more than a mere trifle.” I picked at the dried blood matted into my fake-fur collar. My face had probably bruised up like a prize-fighter’s.