Джанет Фитч - Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

I didn’t want to disappoint him by saying that the smuggler wouldn’t have to look far to find boys who would do more for less. “As far as he’s concerned, you’re just in it for the ride, understand? Don’t tell him about the money.”

“How dumb do you think I am? Wait’ll I get one of those little stvoli. ” A pistol. “Nobody’ll push me around then. I’ll be Nat Pinkerton .”

I couldn’t say I was a good influence on him. I worked my fingers through the sheepskin’s fatty curls. The stories this coat could tell, my old friend. How many nights had it sheltered me? I’d tucked Iskra up into its warmth. I’d wrapped it around my father. A gun once again in its pocket. I’d always thought of faith as a positive thing, but faith was a blindfold—you walked along the edge of a cliff at all times. The crickets thrummed in the bushes, knowing their time was growing short. Overhead, the sound of flying geese heading south filled the twilight. A sea wind rinsed the stones. I was as anxious to be gone as the boy. At last, the stars emerged—first in the east, then scattered throughout the sky. With no lights to outshine them, no clouds to blur them, they seemed more populous than the city itself. How lonely we were by comparison.

Finally, the sound of a motor. Not sails after all. Coming not from the sea but up the Little Nevka. I lit the lantern. The motorboat pulled up to the dock. The Wolf, in knitted cap and leather coat, manned the tiller, while another man hunched over on some crates, smoking a pipe. The Finn brought it up neatly to the old dock, jumped off, tied it loosely to the post.

“Got the babki ?” he said. Little cakes. The money, the dough.

“Who’s that?” I wanted to know.

“None of your business is who,” said the Wolf.

“I don’t know him. Maybe he’s Cheka,” I said.

“Maybe he’s Joulupukki, the Yule Goat,” said the Wolf. “It’s my boat. Give me the babki. ” He held out his hand, snapped his fingers.

I took out an envelope, that brick of paper notes, and counted out half, put it back in my bag. The rest of my money was neatly secreted in a pocket under my dress, money he didn’t need to know about. “That’s half. You get the rest when we land.”

“I thought you had more people,” said the smuggler.

“No, it’s just us,” I said.

“Just you,” he said. “Not the kid.”

Makar protested, rising to his knees. “We had a deal—”

“I changed my mind.”

“But you promised!” I could hear the tears in his voice. He might be a streetwise orphan, but he was still a child.

“I promised nothing. Now beat it. Get back to work.”

“But you promised!”

“Did I tell you to beat it? Maybe you’re hard of hearing.” He pulled out a nasty-looking knife, a blade about six inches long. “Can I help clean out your ears?”

Suddenly I felt the boy’s hand plunge into my pocket and before I could stop him he’d pulled out the stvol. He was up, pointing it at the Wolf. “Want to clean out my ears, asshole? Go ahead. Try me.”

Oh God, was he going to ruin this? “Give it to me, Makar. It’s mine. Don’t do this. It’s fine. We’ll take you, I promise.”

But he wasn’t listening to me, he had eyes only for the Wolf, who’d wounded his pride. “Come on, fucker,” he said, laughing. “My ears, I’m not hearing very well.”

“You’re dead, Makar,” spat the smuggler. “Nobody pulls a stvol on me.”

I was going to lose my captain, my ship, my chance to get away. All of it because of this newly sprouted little man. “Just put it down,” I urged the orphan. “Everybody calm down. It’s going to be okay.”

Makar clearly didn’t know what he was going to do next, hopping from one foot to another, giggling. And neither did the Wolf, standing with his hands half up. He obviously could not believe one of his own street boys would produce a firearm and train it on him. It still all might have sorted itself out, except that the man on the crates lurched for shore, or maybe just for cover, and the movement startled Makar. He fired, striking the Wolf in the shoulder. The tall ginger-haired thug came at him with the knife, and the boy kept firing until both men lay dying, and the woods were full of sound.

The noise radiated out and out, rolling across the water. The faces of the men, pale in the dark. Startled, eyes open. I blew out the lantern.

I wanted to vomit. I only hoped the strange man was one of the Wolf’s colleagues and not another citizen hoping for escape. I waited in the dark for my senses to return to me. I waited for shouts, for running footsteps, arrest. I wanted to run, but where? Back to Petrograd? No.

Makar sat next to me in the darkness. “He was going to cut me out.”

Was that an apology? “You didn’t have to shoot him.”

“I didn’t know what the other one was going to do.”

“Give me the gun.”

It was hot and I could smell the sulfur. By touch, I reloaded it from the box of ammunition in my other pocket, the cylinder almost too hot to handle, then I returned it to its home. Luck has not been your friend. So what were we going to do now?

Makar was crying. “We were going to be partners.” This poor crazy kid. His big chance just a fantasy. Nobody likes having to look at themselves in the spotlight and see the gull, the fool. What the Wolf didn’t know about the human heart. I felt like crying myself, but I patted his leg. We had to pull ourselves together. We had to think.

“What’s in the crates?” I asked. Trying to sound practical. “Go look.”

He stumbled over to the boat, shook a crate. “Vodka, I think,” he sniffled. “He shouldn’t have tried to cut me out. He shouldn’t have done that.”

I couldn’t begin to count the ways this thing was going wrong. All of my hopes had been pinned on the ginger-haired man now dead or dying on the dock. After a while, I relit the lantern, gazed down at the victims. The Wolf on his back, his pale eyes staring. The blood-soaked shirtfront black in the faint light. The other man lay draped, half in, half out of the boat. He didn’t seem like a smuggler, but how did a smuggler look? He wore city clothes, a black coat, shirt, dark pants. Dark hair. His cap had come off along with the top of his head. No satchel, no luggage.

Makar was already searching the dead men. From the smuggler he produced a lighter, some cigarettes, gold coins that flashed like fire between his fingers and disappeared. He held out my bills, which I took and replaced in my bag. He wrestled and rolled the Wolf out of his jacket, put it on. He took off his mismatched boots and slid the man’s sturdy ones over his bare feet. They were enormous. He took his belt and cap and grinned, as if he hadn’t just killed two men. “Pretty nice, eh? I never had a leather jacket before.” The Wolf’s knife he also kept.

“The other one. Who is he? Does he have a labor book?”

He checked the man’s pockets. A few rubles, a lighter, a bag of cheap tobacco. No labor book. No papers. Nothing to indicate whether he’d been an innocent man whose life we just ended, or a smuggler, or both. All of my volition had drained from me. I felt as weak as an invalid. Nevertheless, we had to get rid of the bodies. Two splashes, we didn’t even bother to weigh them down. “Sorry,” I said as the passenger sank into the little Nevka.

Breathe. Breathe in calm, breathe out chaos. Breathe out wanting to throw that kid into the Nevka.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or grab him by the throat. “Do you know how to drive a boat?”

“How hard could it be?”

We examined the vessel. One bullet had gone through just below the oarlock on the starboard side, but the bottom seemed untouched. The motor? I lifted the lantern but it was hard to tell. Well, I couldn’t go back to Petrograd and I couldn’t stay here. I’d said my goodbyes, I’d sat on my luggage, so to speak. I climbed into the boat and the boy followed me. Now I was grateful Anton hadn’t come. Panic was a disease that spread faster than cholera. He would be accusatory by now— This is what leaving gets you —on his way to venomous hysteria. Makar was still a child, he would follow my lead. He held the lantern, peering over my shoulder as I explored the boat’s mechanisms.