Death Is My Comrade (22 page)

That did it. I was suddenly fed up with the Duhamels, Lucienne with her complex motives and Eugenie without any motives at all. I scooped her up, one arm under her thighs, one around her shoulders, and carried her toward the hatch. Her legs kicked air.

She cried: “I'll fix you, Chester Drum, I'll fix you!”

When I brought her below decks she changed her tune. She singsonged: “Chester is taking me to bed, Chester is taking me to bed.” Lucienne looked scornful, Mike Rodin parentally angry, everyone else surprised. Except Galina. Galina gave me a wry, understanding smile.

I deposited Eugenie near some cabbages and went back on deck for some fresh air. Her voice floated out of the hatch after me.

“I'll fix you!”

She was going to fix one of us, all right.

Chapter Twenty-six

V
ynoslivost.
Lasting a thing out.

After the interlude on the barge, we learned the meaning of that Russian word. We lived it and ate it and slept it. It was burned into us like a brand.

The train of barges reached Pestovo late the next afternoon. We waited three hours in a shed on the river, and then a man I had never seen before and would never see again led us through the night to the railroad marshaling yards north of Pestovo. As we boarded an empty freightcar, a brakeman came rushing along the tracks, shouting and waving his arms. With a lurch and a clank of couplings, the train began to roll.

Vynoslivost.

Would he report us? We were just some Russians bumming a ride. Why should he? Why shouldn't he?

Vynoslivost.

The train sped us through the night north to Babayevo. There the underground railroad hit a snag. We waited three days and three nights in an abandoned church, then were shipped with a consignment of uncured hides in a big semi-trailer on the highway running north from Babayevo to Podporozh'ye and Pytkyaranta. The truck had a blowout, swerved, skidded and blocked the road for two hours because the front wheels had plunged into a ditch. To top it off, a Red Army convoy came south toward the Babayevo base, and the officers in the lead vehicle got out and made the noises officers will make. I heard them arguing with our driver. They browbeat him and threatened him. They did everything but search the truck. In the end one of their half-trucks hauled us out of the ditch.

Vynoslivost.
Hell, you get the idea.

Pytkyaranta was a Lake Ladoga town on the Karelian Peninsula, forty miles from Ozero Yanis. We had reached it without casualties. We were reasonably healthy. By now of course all Russia was alerted, but Russia is a big country. We had only forty miles to go.

We washed in the lake. My black-and-blue bruises had turned various shades of green and yellow and brown. We had five days of grime to scrub clean, and the men shaved their beards.

Forty miles to go. We could all feel it. Forty miles to go. It sang in our blood. Screened by the tall reedy plants that grew there, Galina washed her long blond hair in the lake. She swam and sang and got back into her Russian shift and the graceless peasant clothing, and was still happy—almost as if she had wanted all along to leave as her father did.

We were all like that, all except Lucienne. All convinced the worst was over and here on the Karelian Peninsula we were a stone's throw from freedom.

Until we met the gypsy.

His name was Felo. He was the Baro Sero, or Great Head of a caravan of twenty gypsy wagons making their slow, creaking way from Poland through Russia to no one, not even Felo, knew where. They were a clan of Kelderaris, kettlesmiths. They had identity papers as questionable as their own geographic origins but, Felo explained, even the Russians had long since given up trying to make the wandering Kelderaris gypsies conform to the laws of a totalitarian state.

“A gypsy must have more homes than shoes,” Felo said. “Doesn't a swimming fish taste best?”

He spoke English, Polish, Russian and the Romany tongue. His Kelderaris clan had spent several years in Ireland, which today has more gypsies than any country west of the Iron Curtain. He said, “You have no worries now. The Russian officials have learned not to trouble gypsies. We come and we go. We will take you to Ozero Yanis.”

He was a short, very fat man with immense shoulders and a shapeless body which did not taper to the hips. He had lost an eye and wore a green glass one, though his good eye was brown. His one good eye looked out on the world with greed and cunning, all the more so because the other was bland, sightless glass. His skin was tanned. A livid scar ran from his left ear to his mouth. The mouth had been smashed, too. Felo's lips were swollen with scar tissue. They looked like red sausages. Four front teeth were missing.

He surveyed all of us with the indifference of a Baro Sero, except for the women. His single good eye studied each of them in turn, as a good trader will study horses. You almost expected him to pinch their flesh for firmness, to study their feet for calluses. Galina's response was contemptuous, Lucienne's speculative, Eugenie's flirtatious.

Eugenie smiled at Felo. “Are you really king of the gypsies?”

“Baro Sero of the Kelderaris, little one. King enough for you, eh?”

Eugenie looked at me, her wide eyes narrowing, then back at Felo. “You must lead a terribly exciting life. Don't you? I'll bet you ride roughshod over anyone who gets in your way.”

Felo's fat chest expanded. He smiled his toothless smile at her. “Felo is very gentle with pretty little girls.” He had come close to Eugenie. The swollen red lips were six inches from her chin. Eugenie wasn't a tall girl, but Felo had to look up at her.

An expression of disgust flickered briefly on Eugenie's face, but she looked at me again and gave Felo her French-Swiss finishing-school smile. “I'll bet you're awfully strong.”

Felo was impressed with her being impressed. He was bare to the waist. He flexed a big biceps for her, grinning hugely. She poked a finger at it delicately and winced. “Like iron.”

“Gypsies do not strike gypsies with iron,” Felo confided. “It is a mortal sin to do so. I use my fists. They are the same.” He winked his good eye. “And so I am Baro Sero.”

Toward nightfall the gypsy camp began to fill. It had been almost deserted when we arrived just after sunrise. But now men and women, and even children, came in from the surrounding fields and marshes. They drove horses before them, big draft animals not in harness. The horses were tethered in the center of the encampment.

Felo had given us a wagon. It had rubber tires, gaily painted wooden sides, and a bowed roof. “In morning, your wagon, like all wagons, will have horse,” Felo said. “We take Russian horse from here, bring it there—” he gestured toward the horizon—“and it is not the same as stealing. No private property in Russia, yes?”

The caravan would take us to Ozero Yanis. It would start in the morning and cover the forty miles in three days. We had a whole day and a night to kill. During the daylight hours we were all too keyed up to sleep, and just before twilight we were busy watching the horses come in.

We ate that night at a small campfire near the gypsies' bigger one. It was typical gypsy fare: nettle soup and a stew of hedgehog, turnips and beets.

Lucienne told Eugenie coldly: “I don't want you playing up to that man, you understand?”

“But
maman
, why not?” Eugenie said, looking not at her mother but at me.

After dinner we all went back to our wagon, fifty yards distant from the rest of the encampment by gypsy custom. The women would sleep in it, the men under it. I took my rifle and started my watch about a dozen yards off, on a hummock of earth. The campfire settled to embers. I was bone weary. For days I hadn't had enough sleep. I was glad to be off by myself, even if only a few yards. I'd had my bellyful of living in close contact with seven fugitives whose desperation brought out the worst in them. No, I thought sleepily, not all of them. Not Rodzianko and hot Mike Rodin. Not Galina.…

A hand shook me awake. It was Mike Rodin.

“Lucienne,” he said tensely. “She just came back.”

“Back?” I was instantly alert. “Back from where?”

“The Baro Sero's wagon.”

“She admitted that?”

“Yeah. Said she told him to keep away from Eugenie.”

“You believe it?”

“It's what she said. But this is her last chance to mess things up, and she knows it. Lucienne's a Red, Chet. It's one of the reasons we broke up.”

“I know. Laschenko told me.”

“Well, it's about time for my watch,” Mike Rodin said. “If she tries anything now I—I'll kill that woman. You might as well turn in.”

“I don't think so. I want to see what kind of bug Lucienne put in Felo's ear.”

Mike Rodin nodded. I got up. The moon was bright, the night warm. I heard the tethered horses stomping nervously. They were silhouetted in the moonlight. One of them whinnied. I made my way silently to Felo's wagon with the rifle.

A light glowed behind the wagon's two neatly curtained windows. The Baro Sero was still awake. I heard him moving about in there. I waited.

Ten minutes later, the light was snuffed out. The wagon steps creaked. Felo's short, squat bulk appeared at their base. He scuttled toward and past the embers of the camp-fire. A gypsy on the ground asked him something in Russian, sleepily. Felo's answer was a grunt. I skirted the campfire swiftly and followed Felo.

He walked to the dirt road that led from the campsite to the town of Pytkyaranta, three-quarters of a mile away. I stayed a hundred yards behind him on the road.

After fifteen minutes I saw the lights of Pytkyaranta. Felo was silhouetted against them. He began to walk faster. I closed the gap to fifty yards.

He entered town on a cobbled street. It was deserted. A small dog yipped somewhere nearby. Felo never faltered. He knew just where he was going. He also knew why. I didn't. I kept him in sight.

He made straight for the largest building in town. In front of it stood a sentry box like those in Moscow. A militiaman challenged Felo, who answered him in a soft, wheedling voice. The building was three stories, wood; it had a false front of either marble or stone, with a wide flight of stairs. Felo went up the stairs.

Two uniformed figures came down and past him. The moonlight gleamed on their leather accouterments, on their machine pistols. The building must have been Pytkyaranta Headquarters for the Karelian S.S.R. Militia. That's nice, I thought. That's just ducky. Lucienne pays Felo a middle-of-the-night visit and he goes straight to the cops.

Felo remained inside the building for over an hour. I posted myself in the dark shadow of a building across the street. Once a car stopped in front of militia headquarters, and four uniformed figures got out. The two militiamen who had marched off down the street, or two others just like them, came back. I waited. I wished I had a cigarette.

The big door at the top of the stairs opened. Felo came out. He turned and said something over his shoulder. He came down the stairs and past the sentry box. He went scuttling back along the cobbled street. Giving him a hundred yards again, I followed. For now at least I didn't have to keep him in sight. This time I knew where he was going.

A quarter of a mile back along the dirt road, I overtook him. He was whistling. He made a lot of noise. I made almost none. He never knew I was behind him until I poked the rifle into the small of his back and said:

“Hold it, Felo.”

He whirled. His hand flashed to his belt. I struck it with the muzzle of the rifle. Felo raised his hands—empty. At his belt he had a knife in a scabbard. I withdrew it, tossed it into the bushes alongside the road.

“To defile the Baro Sero with iron,” he said, looking at the rifle, “is a deadly insult.”

“Save it. I'm no gypsy.”

“Even then. What do you want? All we Kelderaris are going to do is save your lives.”

“Maybe. Is going to the cops your idea of saving our lives?”

“The cops? Ah, I see. The militia.” Felo laughed. It was an unclean sound. Dirty water gurgling in a rusty pipe.

“The militia. Start talking, Felo.”

His hands came down several inches. I poked the rifle into his gut. They went up again.

Felo laughed once more. “You think perhaps we Kelderaris can slip through the militia road patrols like hedgehogs? Or fly over them like storks?”

“That was the impression you gave this morning. Talk, Felo. Make sense. Don't make a mistake. I'm desperate enough to kill you. I've got seven people to take out of Russia.”

“A swimming fish,” he began. “The net of police intrigue—”

“Save it. The cops. Tell me about the cops, Felo.”

“A bribe,” he said blandly.

“Keep talking. That's not enough.”

“They turn away. They let us pass.” He licked his fat red lips. “But first a bribe. One thousand rubles. It is the same whenever we Kelderaris break camp. That is all. No more. No less. You are being a fool.”

“Lucienne Duhamel,” I asked suddenly. “What did she want?”

He rolled his one good eye. “Felo … the women.…”

“You're a liar.”

“Iron and insults. I am trying to save your lives, don't you understand that?”

It was only forty miles to Ozero Yanis. Felo's story didn't match Lucienne's, and right after her visit he'd gone to the militia. I said: “We're pulling out of camp. Alone.”

“That is impossible. The man of the truck, he paid us to take you to Ozero Yanis. We will take you.”

“Then he bought a wagon. We'll take our wagon and clear out.”

“Impossible.”

“All right. Without the wagon.”

“No.”

I poked the rifle into his gut again, but not hard. “This says we can.”

Felo looked at the rifle, then at me. He sighed. “Very well. Though you are a fool, we Kelderaris won't stop you.”