“For God’s sake, shush, you’ll wake up the dead!” cried Evgenia.
Jones surfaced from the nightmare, his chest constricted, drenched in sweat despite the intense cold.
“You were mumbling to yourself, louder and louder. Then you started to scream…”
“I am most terribly sorry, Evgenia.” There was something so utterly formal about Jones’ apology that she burst out laughing and hugged him. “Ffwl!” she said.
To the east, the darkness was softening, turning from obsidian to darkest blue. Across the frozen river, three miles away, they made out a goods train rattling along the far bank, its wagons defined only by their noise, the guard’s van shining a solitary red light at the rear.
Jones studied the train for a time, then said, “If Pyotr talks, they’ll find out we’re heading for Odessa. All they have to do so is search the westerly bank and, hey presto, they’ve got us. If we move inland, it’s still easy for them. In the snow, underfed and exhausted as we are, we can only move at a snail’s pace.”
“So?”
“Evgenia, we’re on the wrong side of the river. We cross the river, we hitch a ride on a goods train, hide in a wagon, then we have a chance.”
“The bridges,” breathed Evgenia. “They’ll be guarded. Passports checked, everything. It’s impossible.”
“Who said anything about crossing by bridge?”
“We can walk across the frozen part. But for the channel, we’d have to have a boat…”
“We can punt a floe.”
“What is punt?”
“You stick a pole into the water, wiggle it along and you move. It’s the only thing that they taught me at Cambridge.”
She did that trick she had, of drawing back, her head turned away, as if she was repelled by his presence. “You’re not serious?”
He was, very.
After a time they found a long, thin log, a fallen silver birch. Snapping off the branches as best he could, he looked at her like a caveman. “Pole,” he grunted.
“Idiot,” she said.
“The word does not rhyme with yacht,” he said, matter-of-factly.
Foolish as it seemed, she accepted his invitation to go punting on the frozen river. So, long before sunrise, they started back out across the river, Evgenia carrying both their bags, Jones shouldering the pole. By the time they had got to the channel, sunrise was already approaching. Their dilemma was simple. Too small an ice-floe and they could be upended in the river; too big a floe and the pole would not be effective, and, when the sun came up, they would be drifting in the middle of the channel for all the world to see.
Chance made the decision for them. They were tip-toeing at the edge of the channel, studying the floes, when with a jolt the ice they were standing on was suddenly torn clean away. Startled, Evgenia almost fell in, recovered and jumped back onto the solid river ice. Jones, using his pole as a trapeze artist on a high wire, recovered too. The floe, a lozenge about ten feet long, stabilised. Jones walked to the rear and put the pole in, gave it a wiggle and, to Evgenia’s astonishment, it began to move back under Jones’s direction. It took him a little time to find his rhythm, but soon he was poling with grace and efficiency – and Evgenia had to jog along to keep pace.
“Now, do you believe me?” said Jones.
By way of answer, she jumped back onto the floe, steadied herself and squatted down towards the front, clinging on to the precious bag with the film reel in it.
Sunrise found them midstream, Jones wrestling with the force of the current. Ahead the river curved to the east, offering an end to their struggle. As the sun climbed, swathes of early morning mist came and went, sometimes hiding both sides of the channel from them, sometimes clearing entirely away. Jones was wrestling with the current but somehow winning his battle when the bullets started to fly, zzzing past them, hissing as they hit the ice.
The mist cleared for a spell and, on the western bank, they saw three lorries etched against the skyline, troops on the bank below. Evgenia flattened herself against the ice, while Jones went down onto his knees. The moment they hit the mass of the river ice on the eastern bank, Evgenia jumped to safety, quickly followed by Jones. Bullets whistled overhead, in front and behind them. Then the mist came down again, blanketing them, and they hurried towards the memory of the sun.
The mist was so thick that the coal train had dawdled to a slow walk, so it was the easiest thing in the world for Jones and Evgenia to hop aboard the plate of a wagon, climb the short ladder and then untie the tarpaulin covering the coal so that they could slide underneath it. The coal was caked in soot, sharp-edged, almost fiendishly uncomfortable. Yet, compared to hiding under the marble, it was heaven.
After a time, the mist cleared and the train picked up speed. Jones peeked under the edge of the tarpaulin and looked across the river but could not see the three GPU lorries. Their luck was still holding.
Sinking back, he tried to make himself comfortable on their bed of coal. Exhilarated by their escape, it took a moment for him to realise that Evgenia was crying.
“Why are we doing that? We managed to escape, no?”
“The GPU tried to kill us.”
“But they missed.”
“That means Pyotr talked. He told them about us. It means the Old Believers… all of them….” She was crying so hard she could not get the words out.
Jones’ face hardened as he struggled to come to terms with the evil that was hunting them. In the Hollywood movies the hero would say, “They’ll never get away with it”, but something held his tongue and instead he simply held onto her as the coal train jolted its way through the mist.
This was not Hollywood, he knew – and, here and now, the Cheka had every chance of getting away with all of it.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The big man had slobber on his beard and dust and straw in his wild hair. He was foully drunk and not a little mad, but there was nothing wrong with his animal instinct. He could smell their fear.
Stopping them on the broad, tree-lined avenue a hundred yards from Odessa train station, the vagabond barked at the top of his voice, “This one’s a foreigner. You can tell from his fancy spectacles. What’s a foreigner doing all dressed up up in tramp clothes, eh? There’s a few kopecks for someone who asks that question, eh?”
Doing a little dance in front of them, he sucked noisily on the teat of his vodka bottle.
“Pretty lady’s got herself a foreign tramp, eh? Come on, give us a few kopecks, your secret’s safe with me.”
It was five o’clock in the morning by the station clock, and not that many people were about – but still the drunk’s attention was the worst possible thing for them. They hurried on through the slush – the season was beginning to turn, the snow starting to melt, here in the most southwesterly corner of the Soviet Union – doing their best to ignore him. But he just skipped along after them, barking more loudly.
“Running from a jealous husband, eh, are you my pretty lady? Taking ship to Constantinople, eh? I’ll show you the way. Running from somebody, that’s for sure.”
“Listen, brother, sssh, I’ll give you some kopecks,” said Evgenia, struggling to suppress the desperation in her voice, “but not here in the street.”
They ducked into a dark alley leading to a dilapidated nineteenth century villa, pools of slush on the cobbles. Opening her purse, Evgehnua scrabbled around for two twenty kopeck coins – “that’s all I’ve got” – but in her haste to shut him up a thick fold of one hundred rouble notes fell to the ground. As bad luck would have it, they landed in a cone of light thrown by a streetlamp.