Лесли Чартерис - The Saint

Sofiya heard it, also, raced to the closest window, pulled back a tattered bit of sheeting, and nervously glanced outside.

The original Range Rover had multiplied to a fleet. Jeeps and other 4X4s formed a heavy-treaded fist around the building.

Ilya was in the street, flanked by footsoldiers, barking orders at Igor.

“Seal every exit. If they’re still in there, there’ll be no way out. We’ll search every apartment!”

He turned abruptly, snapped his fingers, and a cadre of uniformed militia followed him into the building.

Sofiya hurried the wet Templar and the dry-mouthed Emma inside the cubicle.

“They can search all they want,” insisted Sofiya, “they will never find you. You very safe.”

“What about you?” asked Emma.

“I take care of me, you hide.”

Sofiya replaced the false wall and the highboy, and the two sequestered fugitives heard her footsteps as she left the room.

The cramped space was spottily illumined by thin light shafts entering through tiny breathing holes. Emma felt like a boxed hamster.

She looked at the drained and pasty face of the man she knew as Thomas More. She knew his name wasn’t Thomas More. She also knew she was going to undress him.

“This isn’t quite the way I imagined this happening,” admitted Emma with feigned joviality, “but I have to take your clothes off and get you warm before your body shuts down. You have hypothermia, my drowned poet... or drowned rat.”

She tugged, pulled, unbuttoned, unzipped, and removed every soaked item of clothing clinging to Templar’s pale frame. She towel dried him, and held him close to her own warmth.

“Do you feel anything? Talk to me, tell me you feel warm.”

To Simon Templar, the tiny pinpoints of light seemed to sparkle and dance like bright stars in a clear night sky — a night sky in another time, another land, another life.

“Agnes, my love...”

Emma’s eyebrows arched in the dark.

“Your kiss, Agnes...”

Whoever this Agnes was, she must be one hot number.

Emma sighed.

There’s nothing like hypothermia-induced delirium to bring out the naked truth, she thought.

And then she saw something that took her breath away.

His eyes brimmed with tears.

She held him tight, then tighter, rocking him as a mother would a feverish child.

“Tell me,” her voice was soft as cotton, “tell me all about it...”

And he did.

Cradled in her arms, it was as if he were a child of tender years nourished from the breast of mercy. He spoke to her warmth, and if the narrative lacked elements of cohesion, it was unmistakably authentic.

It was all there — St. Ignatius, the boys and girls, nuns and priests, dogs, danger, and death in the moonlight. The long-withheld tears broke through the mesh of cold emotion and poured as a torrent down the mountainside of his cheeks.

He did not sob, nor did he cry. It was rather as if the sadness and pain of a quarter century had risen to the surface of his life and, having reached the deep blue pools of his eyes, overflowed for once and forever.

Emma held him closer, kissing the corners of his beautiful eyes.

“I’ve never felt quite like this before,” admitted Templar.

“What do you mean?” asked Emma hopefully.

“I’m freezing, what do you think I mean?”

She giggled, and the fact that she giggled in this most repressive and traumatic of environments, and under such life-threatening conditions, amused them both.

Emma knew she couldn’t allow Templar to lose consciousness. She had to keep him alert and conversational.

“What’s your name? Who are you, really?”

“My name is Simon, Simon Templar...” His answer was almost unconvincing.

“So, were you really named for a saint?”

He laughed a wet but honest laugh.

“No, I was named after a character in a paperback book — Knight Templar.”

“The hero of a thousand adventures?” Emma knew the book, the character.

Templar’s eyes brightened.

“You’ve heard of Knight Templar? ”

She smiled. “Sure. My father had tons of that sort of stuff,” replied Emma, doing her best to sound nonchalant. “If you would’ve spent more time in my apartment, you would have found an entire cardboard box filled with back issues of Thriller — The Paper of a Thousand Thrills.”

“You’re the woman of my dreams.” He said it as if it were a joke, but he meant it.

“In case you haven’t noticed,” said Emma, “I’m not quite as buxom as the women on the covers of those old blood-and-thunder adventures.”

Templar eyed her bosom as best he could.

“Yeah, but you’ve had things in your brassiere they could never dream of.”

She kissed him, held him to her as if they were one, and they both became conscious of his nakedness.

“There’s nothing wrong with you now, that’s for sure. As long as you’re up,” quipped Emma, “you might as well get dressed.”

She handed him the oddball selection of Russian fashion from the kitchen clothesline and pressed her ear against the false wall to listen for sounds of danger. She heard nothing.

“Maybe we won’t be in here long,” she said hopefully. “Sofiya said we were safe. If the coast is clear...”

The coast was far from clear.

Ilya and his men worked their way through the building, sniffing out the trail of the teenage trollop named Sofiya. The welcome afforded him by the lower floors’ residents was cold and unconcerned. They suggested he try one floor up.

He did. And the next floor above that as well. Each successive floor held more people, and more contradictory advice as to Sofiya’s whereabouts.

Between the fifth and sixth floor, Ilya made an astonishing discovery — a small puddle of water similar to other puddles of water he’d encountered on the stairs. Without giving it serious consideration, he assumed the roof leaked.

He now gave it serious consideration, and a sly grin crept across his face.

“Oh, we’ve got you now,” he said, and they followed the wet trail to the ninth floor. Within minutes Ilya was holding court in the communal apartment’s crowded kitchen. In one hand was his Smith & Wesson, in the other, a large wad of American bills.

“Five hundred bucks reward, all in American currency, to whoever hands over the two foreigners. I don’t care about the little slut who brought ’em here,” declared Ilya offensively, “I just want the damn foreigners.”

He turned to the potbellied man who held a mop in one hand and his bottle of kvass in the other.

“How ’bout you. Tubby, seen any Americans or Brits?”

“No, but I did see one polar bear. Do I get two-fifty?”

The foot soldiers snickered.

Ilya smiled. Then he calmly shot the old man through the heart. The foot soldiers stopped snickering. Sofiya’s mother sobbed uncontrollably.

The gunshot echoed through the ninth floor, awaking the huddled residents and penetrating the false wall. Emma and Templar pulled each other tight in silence.

Ilya crossed over to the old woman, took her hand, and kissed it. She looked as if she wanted to vomit. She abruptly turned and ran out of the room.

“Was it something I said?” called out Ilya mockingly.

Templar and Emma pressed their ears against the wall. They heard one person’s rapidly approaching footsteps.

“Maybe it’s Sofiya,” whispered Emma hopefully.

“Don’t count on it,” said Templar. He stood with determination, bracing himself for whatever came next.

“Here! Here! The foreigners are here! Help! Help!”

It was the old crone turned traitor, cawing out a summons to Ilya and his militia. Her nostrils flared and her lips twitched as she cried out.