Hot Siberian (48 page)

After another six miles she couldn't resist a turnoff. She still kept the BMW at sixty, but now the road was only a regular black-topped two lanes with bumpy patches, unavoidable rises and dips, and no shoulders, and sixty seemed as though it were a hundred. The Saab, with its excellent suspension, was taking it with ease.

“I still think I can lose them,” Vivian mumbled. A dubious grunt from Nikolai caused a reflex by her foot. It punched the accelerator pedal. The BMW responded like a racer breaking away. Nikolai thought losing them would be unlikely here in the lowlands of Holland, where the terrain was so level. There were no groves of trees or complexes of structures for the BMW to dart into and hide. It could only be straight flat-out, and the Saab had ample power to keep from being outrun.

“Hold on,” Vivian said so calmly Nikolai didn't prepare for the sharp right turn she took onto a side road. His leg and hip was centrifuged against the divider. He grabbed the hand support above the door, and just in time, as, barely reducing speed, she took another hard right. How had she spotted that side road? Nikolai wondered. He hadn't. Now, the way she was driving, so confidently taking lefts and rights as they came, one might have thought she'd been over this course any number of times and knew exactly where she was going. The flat land, as it turned out, was a veritable grid, had all sorts of ways running through it, but none better than a dirt road, and some no more than crude double trails, evidently worn into definition by people or cows walking two abreast. A rutted road, heaved every which way, then suddenly, without any apparent reason, pinched down to a mere path. Committed to it, Vivian sped ahead, making buttercups fly. The path led to a narrow drainage ditch. Nikolai, hanging on, saw the flash of a silvery vein of water as the BMW hurtled over it.

All the while the Saab had been hounding and holding its own, losing distance in one place, making it up in another. However, when it came to the ditch it decided not to take it. The Saab stopped several feet short of the ditch, backed up a way, and, hoping to gain decisively on the BMW, chose to cut across a wide pasture. The pasture was close-cropped, appeared solid enough. In support of that impression the gray hips and spines of nearly buried boulders were visible in several places. The Saab was a third of the way across the pasture before it was made to realize how drastically it had ventured out of its element. The front wheels of the Saab were first to feel the pasture's soft spot, as though they'd come upon a deep-piled carpet. With their responsibility for traction, they were soon confounded. Immediately below the roots of the grass the earth was sog, and the front wheels worked themselves into it. They couldn't get anywhere, spun in place, whined, dug their own holes, and kept digging them until the Saab was hopelessly mired.

Meanwhile, the BMW was sending up a trail of dust on the dirt road that ran along the far edge of the pasture about a hundred yards away. From that distance Nikolai observed the stuck Saab. He saw two men get out and go forward and examine the buried wheels. He couldn't make out their features, just got a general impression of them. They had on business suits and hats, seemed even more out of place than the Saab way out there in the pasture. No doubt the muck was ruining their shoes. Vivian brought the BMW to a halt so she could enjoy a look.

“I suppose they'd consider it mockery if I gave them a couple of honks,” she said.

“Don't,” Nikolai advised.

“Not even a good-hearted adversarial wave?”

“No.”

“All right, you drive now.”

They exchanged places. Nikolai couldn't get away from there soon enough. He was fooled a couple of times by paths before making it back to the main road. He paused there. Vivian consulted her map. “This area is called Noord Beveland,” she informed him. “Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Well, now you do, and it's an island.”

“How do we get off?”

“I'm hungry. Hang a right.”

After driving an extremely fast twenty miles, Nikolai felt easier and told himself he could let up. For reassurance he kept picturing the Saab sunk up to its chassis in meadow mud. Neither he nor Vivian was in a talking mood. Her silence was punctuated every four miles or so with an uncomplaining reminder that she was still hungry. The first eating place they came to was in the village of Renesse. They ordered too much and ate too much, and afterward it was almost dark and they didn't feel like taking on the fifty miles yet to go to Lisse. When Nikolai inquired he was told the only nearby inn was a mile beyond Scharendejke village on the other road to Zonnemaire—mind, not the
new
road but the
other
road.

They had no trouble at all following the directions they were given. Nikolai expected Vivian to say she'd called upon her traveling angels, but for some reason she didn't. The
other
road was a tertiary road that seemed unfriendly the way it threw gravel up at the underside of the BMW. The inn, named Koopershaven, was situated shyly back from it at the end of a long unlighted drive. It was typically Dutch, a modest two-story brick farmhouse of simple lines with a steep-pitched roof and upper facades on each end to create the impression of greater height. The night prevented Nikolai and Vivian from seeing these features or the surrounding scenery. Thus when they were unloading their baggage from the car and lugging it inside, they experienced the feeling of having lost their bearings and being subjected to the mercy of some strange place.

They were welcomed by Erika Kooper, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the proprietor. With her straight, heavy flaxen hair and cheeks that looked as though they'd just been pinched, she couldn't have been more Dutch. While Nikolai was registering he called Vivian's attention to an enlarged color photograph hung prominently behind the counter. Erika and six youngsters in two rows. They so resembled one another that it could not be doubted they were all Koopers. “Breakfast comes with the bedding,” Erika informed him with her thick accent, and choosing a certain key, she led the way up the stairs and down the hall to a rear corner room. She opened both windows a generous crack, filled a Delft blue pitcher with fresh water for bedside. Nikolai extended a two-florin tip. Erika declined it and wished a smiling good night.

The bed was a high one, and hard. Vivian tested it. “I'll wager anything that most of those Kooper babies were conceived right here,” she remarked. She climbed to the middle and bounced vigorously. The mattress didn't bounce back, but whatever was beneath it gave off strident squeaks. “Well,” she said, “if we do anything it will have to be quiet and passive. Are you for a quiet or a passive—or neither?”

Nikolai had removed his windbreaker. He was standing there caught on thoughts about beds: those that had been, those that might be. He told himself there were familiar ones waiting in London and in Devon and that this one would not be the last. He had taken so long to reply that he assumed now she didn't expect him to.

Vivian observed him wearing the weapon, the harness and the holster and the hard protruding butt of the pistol contrasting with the whiteness of his shirt. She wondered about the facet of her that was erotically stirred by the sight. Not an overwhelming stir but definitely that kind of stir. Marvelously perverse, she whispered to herself, and pictured him about to come to bed wearing nothing but that pistol and his new hat. He'd do it, for her, but she hoped she wouldn't have to ask. She rolled over and looked at the headboard. It was intricately marquetried, various light and dark woods arranged into a fine flower design. All the room's furnishings were of that type, she noticed, solid and sensible, aging but not yet valuable old. She got off the bed, balanced on one leg and then the other as she pulled off her canvas sneakers without bothering to untie their laces. “You sleepy? I'm not. We still have that other bottle of Pétrus. Quite a day deserves quite a night, wouldn't you say? What's out there?”

Nikolai had opened one of the windows more and was gazing out. It was a black night, clear but moonless. “Nothing,” he replied absently, and then again with even less conviction: “Nothing.”

CHAPTER

25

THE SAAB WAS NOW PARKED ON THE OTHER ROAD TO ZONNEMAIRE
.

The heavyset killer had the rear seat all to himself, so he'd been able to get some sleep. His suit jacket turned inside out and doubled up was better than nothing for a pillow, although no matter how he folded it the buttons were hard little lumps that troubled his cheek. The backrest of the seat felt good to his lower spine. He couldn't sleep well unless his spine was against something protective. His regular bed in his apartment in Pskov was pushed into a corner. The women who stayed overnight always assumed the wall side of the bed was theirs, and he let them be there until he was ready to sleep. There were times when a woman would go unconscious from too much
chacha
or
sivukha
and too many comings and he'd have to lift her dead weight to the outside of the bed and the next day when she awoke she'd wonder how she got there and be disturbed that things had happened to her that she couldn't recall and he would tell her nothing, just reach over her roughly to get his cigarettes and after lighting up he would make sure he crushed her a bit as he climbed over her to go to piss. The fat ones complained less, if at all, about that. Many of the fat ones laughed from their bellies and parted their legs, thinking that was what he had in mind. The thin ones, he supposed, were worried about their bones. They usually made an ugly, painful sound as if letting out their last breath. He often imagined himself dropping all his two hundred and forty-five pounds upon a thin one and hearing her ribs snap. He was glad there was such a thing as women. What would he do without them?

This woman who had done the driving, however, was not a woman he would want to touch with any part of him, not even a finger. When they'd met yesterday morning at the airport in Antwerp she'd said her name was Silvie. That was, of course, the name she was using, just as he was using Lotario. His choice of a name was more believable than hers. She wasn't fragile or helpless enough to be a Silvie. She looked more like a Martine or a Florence. He was curious about her, but he'd never know who she was or what she was. She'd never tell him, and even a look at the passport she was traveling with would be meaningless, just as the Italian passport he was using this time meant nothing. Beneath it all, though, he suspected she was some kind of German, most likely East. They were obsessed with physical fitness, the East Germans, especially the females. This one would have a belly and a rump like stone. He'd noticed her hands. They weren't the hands of a woman who'd rely on mere clawing. He remembered a masseuse in Leipzig who had a similar pair of hands. A good-looking woman, like this one, but she'd oiled him and pummeled him and as a finale had tried to shove three fingers up him.

Right away this Silvie had tried to establish herself as being in charge. No one told her to do the driving, she just got behind the wheel and told them to get in. No one was in charge. If she was supposed to be in charge the dispatcher would have mentioned it. When they were under way he'd let her know he didn't consider her in charge, and in response to that she'd handed him her two automatic pistols, ordering him to see if they were ejecting smoothly. She knew they were, had probably checked them out a half-dozen times. She'd just wanted him to see those two Mauser lugers, make it known that she wasn't going to be depending on some little purse pistol. He'd handled that by sarcastically asking her if one of the lugers was for her right and the other for her left, and, as though it were a serious, legitimate question, she'd replied, yes, one for each hand. Not to be outdone, he'd told her to take a look at his Galesi revolver, and he'd waved the blue-black .44 magnum with its ten-inch barrel around in front of her face, unintentionally clipping her nose with it. She'd jerked her head away and called him a
zhopa
, asshole. It disturbed him that she, an East German, had used Russian. It meant she'd figured out his nationality. He didn't want her knowing even that little about him. To even things he'd sat back and called her a
Votze
, a cunt, just loud enough for her to get it and realize he knew she was German.

By now he'd been in one position too long. His body wanted him to roll over, but if he did he'd be facing the backrest and his spine would be vulnerable. He sat up and lighted a Marlboro.

“I said before not to smoke in the car,” Silvie told him. “If you must smoke do it outside.”

Lotario dragged so deep on the cigarette its tobacco crackled. He didn't inhale. He blew out at the back of her head. The smoke wrapped around her hair and got to her face. He did it again.

Silvie got out of the car but didn't let her anger slam the door. It was the kind of place and kind of night that would carry sounds. She contained her fists with her armpits, pressed her crossed arms tight to her. She leaned against the fender of the car. It was wet, although the air didn't seem that damp. According to the map she'd looked at, this spot was only two or three miles from the North Sea coast. She listened. For a moment she believed she could hear the North Sea breaking, but then too many night bugs were making their noises. From what she understood, bugs did that by rubbing their rear legs together. It was their way of calling out for like company. She had fairly close acquaintances who did as much, she thought.

She'd never done this work with anyone before, and the arrangement wasn't comfortable. She much preferred having to be concerned only with the possibility of her own mistakes. Despite the larger amount that for some reason was being paid for this job, despite how easy it was apparently going to be, she kept being poked by the portent that it was going to turn out badly. These two did nothing to alleviate that feeling. One of them, the one who was going by the name Charlie but was obviously Russian, just sat there in the passenger seat like a mute. Not a word from him since that first minute when he'd said his name. Nor had he moved much. It was as though earlier, before Antwerp, he'd set himself on automatic, aimed irrevocably at the kills. At first sight she'd thought Charlie no older than twenty, with his slight build and clean, even features and light brown hair combed to the side. That impression was his stock in trade, of course, and when she'd gotten a better look at him and realized the hard corners of his mouth and eyes she revised her image of him from unlikely youth to lethal professional. No doubt if the job went as it was supposed to he'd get it done, she concluded, but how might things go if he had to improvise?