Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘I’ll drive from here,’ he said.

An hour or so later Florian slowed the car at a crossroads and turned off the highway onto a rough track between trees. There was no sign: nothing to mark the turning. The woods closed in around them and the ZorKi was suddenly bouncing and slithering through soft rutted mud. Florian handled the car effortlessly.

Eventually, the track emerged abruptly onto the edge of a lake and turned left to follow it. The road, if you could call it that, was almost too narrow for the car. On the driver’s side trees pressed in close and overhanging branches clattered and scraped against the windows. To the right the crazily jolting headlamps showed glimpses of a narrow strip of muddy shore: scraps of low mist and the carbon glitter of black water.

They swung round the end of a narrow headland and climbed a slight rise. As they crested the rise, a low wooden building appeared in front of them. It looked halfway between a cabin and a barn. There was a jetty, and a small seaplane moored on the water.

Florian pulled the car in close to the edge of a low stone wharf and killed the engine. On Lom’s side there was a three-foot drop to the water. He could hear the quiet lapping of water against stone, the wind in the trees, the breathy wheezing of disturbed waterfowl.

‘Wait here,’ said Florian. He left the door open and walked towards the building, taking care to stay clearly visible in the glare of the head-lamps. ‘Lyuba!’ he called into the darkness. ‘Lyuba! It’s Florian!’

A woman’s voice answered from the darkness, ‘You’re late. You said yesterday.’

The voice didn’t come from the building, but from somewhere away to the left under the trees. Lom realised that Florian had been facing that way before she spoke. He’d known where she was, out there in the dark.

‘There was some delay leaving Mirgorod,’ Florian said. ‘But I am here now. Is everything ready?’

‘There’s someone else in the car.’

‘A friend. He’s travelling with me.’

‘You didn’t say anything about passengers.’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘Passengers are extra. The deal didn’t include passengers.’

‘Of course. Can we discuss this inside? We’ve come a long way.’

The woman stepped out into the headlamps’ glare. She was short and solidly built: not fat, but heavy, and wearing a bulky dark knitted sweater, the kind seamen favoured. Thick curly hair spilled out from under a peaked seaman’s cap.

She was carrying a shotgun loosely in the crook of her arm.

Lom got out of the car.

‘This is Vissarion,’ said Florian. ‘Vissarion Lom. Lyuba Gretskaya.’

Gretskaya looked him up and down.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘If you say so.’

Florian took a satchel from the boot of the ZorKi.

‘Anything of yours in the car?’ he said to Lom.

Lom leaned into the back, picked up his woollen cap and crammed it down on his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’

Florian reached in and released the handbrake, leaned his right shoulder against the car and, with his hand on the steering wheel, turned it slowly to the right and pushed it off the edge of the wharf. When the front wheels went over, the fenders crashed and scraped on the stonework. The headlamps dipped below the surface and spilled murky subaqueous yellow-green light. Florian flicked them off and gave a heave with his shoulder that levered the whole massive car, all two tons of it, up and forward. The limousine plunged off the edge of the wharf into the lake, leaving oily swirls of disturbance.

Lyuba Gretskaya lived in a single room that did her as a workshop and a kitchen. It smelled of pine and tobacco and engine oil. There was a single bed along one wall. A metal cot piled with blankets. Maps and charts. Racks of hand tools. A lathe.

‘Breakfast, gentlemen?’

Lom realised he hadn’t eaten for almost twenty-four hours.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Please. That would be great.’

He watched Gretskaya cut thick slices off a piece of bacon and fry them on an oil stove in the corner. Her face, lit by a single lamp hung above the stove, was broad and round and weathered to a dark polished brown, with a small stub of a nose. Her bright small eyes were a pale, pale grey, almost lost in the creases of her face.

‘Is that your own plane?’ he said for something to say.

‘Yup,’ said Gretskaya, not looking round.

‘Where did you learn to fly?’

‘Where did you learn to ask questions?’

Lom caught Florian’s eye. He was trying not to smile.

‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘Sorry. Just making conversation.’

The bacon was nearly done. Gretskaya threw some chunks of black bread into the pan to fry in the bacon fat and made a pot of coffee. They ate in silence, rapidly, and when they’d finished she cleared the plates, spread out a chart out on the yellow deal table and lit a cigarette. Her fingers were stubby and brown and stained with oil.

‘The Kotik will do eight hundred miles on a single tank,’ she said. ‘We cover more ground if the wind’s with us, less if it’s not. Maximum speed is one three five, but for efficient cruising I don’t go much over a hundred. With a safety margin, that gives us, say, five or six hours airtime before we need to refuel.’ She jabbed at the chart with her cigarette, spilling ash. Brushed it away. ‘The first leg is straightforward. North-east to Slensk. Refill at the pier head. From Slensk, we have a choice.’ She sketched out the options on the chart. ‘We can follow the coast to Garshal–see that island there? There’s a whaling station, I’ve used it before–or we follow the river inland’–she traced the course of the Northern Kholomora with her finger–‘and stop at the portage head at Terrimarkh. We’ll decide which course to take when we get to Slensk. It’ll depend on the weather, mainly: maybe we’ll be able to get a forecast at Slensk. Either way, from Garshal or Terrimarkh it’s a five-hundred-mile hop to Novaya Zima. I’ll have you there tomorrow afternoon.’

Florian lifted the satchel onto the table, undid the buckles and pulled out thumbed and grubby bundles of ten-rouble notes.

‘A thousand,’ he said. ‘I think that’s what we agreed.’

‘Plus a passenger.’

‘So? How much?’

Gretskaya glanced at Lom. ‘Has he got travel papers?’

‘No—’ Lom began.

‘Sure,’ said Florian. He threw a passport across the table towards him. ‘Here. Name of Vexhav. Stanil Vexhav, age thirty-three. You’re a former policeman interested in setting up as a timber merchant. But only if anyone asks. Don’t volunteer information about yourself. People with nothing to hide don’t do that.’

Lom picked up the passport and turned the pages. It looked convincing. The green cover was creased and stained with use, and its pages were spattered with the internal visas and crossing marks of a man who’d been travelling the rivers and ports of the north for the last couple of years. His own face looked out at him, the version of two or three years ago, stern and monochrome, eyes hooded with fatigue. Hair flopped across his forehead to obscure the angel seal.

‘You got a photograph of me?’

‘It’s not you. It’s me.’

Lom glanced across at Gretskaya.

‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘He pays. I fly. Another two fifty for the passenger,’ she said to Florian. ‘And you pay to fill the tanks. Also other expenses.’

‘Expenses?’

‘We’ll need to eat. Maybe sleep. Maybe bribe a harbour clerk here and there.’

Florian made a sour face but nodded and counted out the money without protest.

‘When do we start?’ said Lom.

Gretskaya ignored him. She gathered up the roubles, disappeared with them into a back room and came back with an armful of leather jackets, sheepskin gloves, fur hats, scarves.