Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

Gerasimov refused to give him a second chance, spinning the wheel hard right and sending them careering on a diagonal through three lanes of traffic the way a bishop might cut through a cluster of pieces to end up all the way on the king’s rook file. If a bishop could hydroplane at 150 kilometers an hour.

They were already under the Third Ring. Lara felt her stomach trying to climb out her throat. It was getting harder to see through the windshield. Apparently Alfa engineers don’t care that much about defrosting either. “Wipe it for me,” Gerasimov yelled. “With your sleeve.”

The way the glass was curved, she’d have to use her right arm. It hurt her to lift it but Lara managed to do it. The corridor of vision she revealed showed the southbound exit for the expressway coming up. We’re going too fast, she thought, and closed her eyes.

For the next twenty seconds, the centrifugal force of the turn kept her injured arm pinned to the door. A moaning sound seemed to be coming from the tires, and then she realized it was coming from her.

Gerasimov reached out to touch her good arm and Lara opened her eyes again. They were hurtling south along the Third Ring, the motorcycle still twenty meters behind them.

“Keep your hands on the wheel, damn it!”

He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Okay, hold on. Let’s see if he can stay upright in this rain.” He gunned the car till the needle passed the 9,000-rpm line and then drove onto the roughly paved shoulder, passing a slow-moving van and a camper ahead of it.

Gerasimov was weaving in and out of the two right lanes of traffic. Every now and then, looking behind them in the mirror, Lara could see a smudge of red in the gloom, keeping up. She turned around and tried to see through the plastic back window of the convertible’s top. Impossible.

Now the motorcycle was on the shoulder too, shuddering over the broken tarmac directly behind them. At least it would take both hands on the handlebars to stay upright. The turn for Shmitovskiy proyezd was almost on them. Gerasimov shifted left a lane as if to go on, and then pulled another hard right at speed, fishtailing them onto the ramp, barely. The little Italian car fought to regain its grip. The back end gave a second little waggle and they were through.

Looking back, Lara could see the cyclist had gone for Grisha’s head fake left. Now he had all he could do to duplicate their move. They were hurrying away from him. With the side windows starting to fog up, she couldn’t tell if the guy had made the turn or spun out.

Gerasimov was taking no chances. The car was now heading away from town and the flat, and he took the bridge over the Moskva River at full speed. He was still doing 130 when they turned off onto one of the promenades that sliced a short way through the Moscow Hills. There wasn’t another vehicle to be seen. Or heard.

Finally Grisha let up on the gas and they watched the unrelenting rain as they made their way south along the tree-lined allée. At the end, crossing busy Minskaya at the light, he puttered over to Park Pobedy on the other side, the two of them so drenched in their own sweat they might as well have been driving with the top down. Lara was starting to feel the chill. She put a hand up to her cheek. Her hair was matted against her face.

Gerasimov said, “Your arm took a hell of a whack back there. You okay?”

She wanted to say something like, “I’ll live.” Instead, now that they were safe, the terror came welling up. “You’d better pull over, now.”

Good thing she had almost nothing left in her stomach from the time before. She got back in the car, soaked to the bone. Gerasimov had found a clean rag in the Alfa’s trunk and was trying to dry her off with it. But it was so threadbare, all she could feel was his hand running over her neck and down her arms and through her hair.

They drove slowly on. Up here, above the city on Victory Hill, they were coming to the spot where Napoleon waited in vain in 1812 for someone to deliver the keys to the defeated city of Moscow. Now there was a Victory Arch on Poklannoya Gora, the hill’s formal name, one dedicated to his defeat and the defeat of every other would-be conqueror.

The road to the Arch was blocked off due to the just-completed renovation work on the huge War Museum that lay ahead. Instead of the dark, drafty place where Lara discovered her love of history, they could see lights were ablaze in the remade entrance hall of its fancy successor, three hundred meters away across the vast pedestrian plaza. But there was no place to stop and get out of the rain—the workers had taken down the acres of scaffolding and dumped them on the plaza and here in the car park.

Lara really had to get her feet on solid ground. She pointed across the road to the neighboring building, the ugly box that was the Holocaust Synagogue. Gerasimov nodded and nosed the car into the deserted temple’s parking area.

There was an overhang over the short flight of steps in front. Lara’s legs were rubbery going up. The bile in her throat tasted bitter. She shook with a long, five-second shiver. Grisha took off his windbreaker and wrapped it around her shoulders. He kept his large hands there, warming her. Despite her misgivings about him, the strange man’s hands felt good.

He said, “Do you smoke?”

“No. My brother’s a chimney, and I hate the smell on his clothes.”

“I think you should start.” He pulled a couple of French Gitanes out of a pack. “It’s a good way to warm up, from the inside.” When she was slow to accept, he added, “One won’t make you an addict.”

He lit a cigarette for himself and mimed his intention to light the other. She shrugged and then nodded.

Lara took the cigarette smoke down into her lungs. Almost everyone at the University smoked, which Lara considered a sign of moral weakness. Now she said, with a cough, “It doesn’t warm you up.”

“I know. I just wanted to take your mind off what happened back there.”

They stood smoking in front of the great doors to the holy place, one more Russian palace of the dead. Moscow was a giant mausoleum with people living in it.

Lara asked, “Where did you learn to drive like that?”

“The Army. It’s all I did, drive and shoot.”

Lara looked up at him. “You were in Afghanistan?”

He laughed. “I was defending these very hills from Afghan attack, eight kilometers over that way. There’s a shooting range; my father pulled strings.”

He was still holding her. She said, without really intending to, “I’m glad.”

He kissed her, adding his cigarette smoke to hers. It had been so long since a man had kissed her. Even longer since one had meant it. If he was a bad guy, this was so wrong.

She kissed him back and, without making a conscious decision, moved so their bodies touched.

The noise was almost imperceptible, a buzzing like a far-off mosquito, mixed in with the dull throb of the Minskaya traffic on the other side of the trees beyond the car park. But the mosquito didn’t go away.

Gerasimov broke off the kiss and looked back toward the war museum. A single light was moving slowly, methodically, among the piles of iron scaffolding. Coming slowly this way.

Lara didn’t immediately understand when Grisha said, “I have an idea.” He hurried down the synagogue’s steps to the Alfa Romeo and opened the door. He got in, flicking on the interior light as well as the radio. Lara couldn’t see what he was doing with the car’s windows steamed up, but her ears told her he’d turned on a classical station. Then he was out of the car again, taking the steps two at a time. The Alfa’s light was still on and the radio was going in the closed car.

“Stay here out of sight, whatever happens. You understand?” He took what was left of her cigarette and crushed it with his against the rough concrete wall of the building. “And keep quiet.”