Centralny Vokzal
Kyiv, Ukraine
They spent the night in a first-class sleeper compartment on the overnight train to Dnipropetrovsk. Two beds narrow as coffins and facing benches so close, if they both sat at the same time, their knees were touching. The curtains were drawn over a window caked with ice as the train rocked across the countryside in the darkness.
Iryna had changed into wool clothes, a synthetic down overcoat, and a woolen hat pulled down over a curly blond wig. When she met him on the freezing platform of the Central Station, he had barely recognized her. She gave him a start because in the blond wig, she looked like Alyona in the pouty photo. She could have been any pretty Ukrainian blonde. Scorpion had changed his image too. Instead of a suit and overcoat, he wore a heavy sweater, jeans, ski jacket, and a wool cap. Designed so no one would give him a second glance.
Back at the apartment over the pub she had asked him: “Who the bloody hell are you?”
“I’m exactly who you think I am,” he’d told her.
“Are you CIA?”
He shook his head.
“How do I know you’re not working for the other side?”
“Anyone who speaks Russian as badly as I do couldn’t possibly be working for the other side.” He paused. “Why didn’t you tell Kozhanovskiy?”
“You know why.”
“To protect the campaign? Is that what this is?” he asked. “Trying to live up to Daddy?”
“Self-preservation,” she replied, shaking her head. “You said it yourself when you first came to see me. The trail leads back to me.”
Now, settled in the compartment, they didn’t talk about what happened on the train platform.
A crowd of about twenty tough-looking men wearing black armbands began grabbing people. They let some alone and shouted at others. Then all at once fighting broke out. A group of the men with armbands surrounded a man with his wife. They manhandled the woman aside and began beating the man with their fists. He fell to the platform. One of the men took out a workman’s hammer, and the man screamed as his hands and knees were smashed with the hammer. The assailant continued to hit him in the face with the hammer, while the other men crowded around and kicked him as he lay on the platform.
Three of the men with armbands had come up to Scorpion and Iryna.
“Cherkesov abo Kozhanovskiy?” one of them asked.
Scorpion grabbed Iryna’s arm.
“My z Kanady,” Scorpion had said—We’re from Canada—meanwhile staring at the men savagely kicking the fallen man on the platform whose face was bleeding and who could no longer protect himself.
The man questioning Scorpion had followed his glance.
“Ne khvylyuy tesya,” he said. “Vin prosto Zhid.” Don’t concern yourself, he’s just a Jew, waving it off. Scorpion felt Iryna start to move forward and tightened his grip on her arm.
“Remember why we’re here,” he whispered to her, turning them away from the beating.
In the train, the female suputnikh brought them tea and biscuits. Iryna lit a Dunhill cigarette, her fingers trembling. For a long time neither of them spoke. It was warm inside the car, and Scorpion took off his heavy sweater.
“Maybe we’re on a fool’s errand. We should let him kill Cherkesov,” Iryna said finally, meaning Pyatov.
“Is war better?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking away. “He hasn’t been elected yet and look what he’s doing. I’m watching my country commit suicide.”
“It isn’t pretty,” he said.
They sipped tea and listened to the rhythm of the wheels on the track.
“What will you do when we get to Dnipropetrovsk?” she asked.
“I assume you have someone undercover with the Cherkesov campaign?”
She nodded. “You won’t tell me anything about yourself?”
“What about you? Are you married?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore. He was older. Like my father.”
“What happened?”
“He wanted a pretty ornament. I outgrew it—him. I’m nobody’s anything,” she said, tossing her hair. “Your father? What was he like?” she asked.
“I hardly knew him,” Scorpion said. “We’d only been together about a week, then he died. I was four.” He was surprised to find himself telling her the truth. She had that effect on him, or perhaps it was the compartment, the intimacy of it: the one overhead light, the darkness outside, the rocking of the train detached from the rest of the world.
“What about your mother?” she asked.
“She was already dead. They’d been separated.”
“So who raised you?”
He thought about Arabia. The hot days and starry nights and Sheikh Zaid, the closest thing to a father he’d ever had. He thought about the Mutayr, the Bedouin tribe that saved him from the Saar and took him in, and his strange Arabian Huck Finn childhood and the paths it had taken had somehow brought him to Ukraine in the dead of winter.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“It’s four hundred kilometers to Dnipropetrovsk,” Iryna replied, folding her arms.
He looked at his watch. It was past one in the morning. The train would be arriving in five hours.
“We should sleep,” he said, pulling off his T-shirt.
Her eyes widened at the sight of his lean, muscled torso. The scars on his arms and ribs.
“How’d you get those?” she asked.
“I tripped,” he said. He got into the narrow bunk and put his forearm over his eyes to block the overhead light. He heard the swish of her clothes as she undressed. He couldn’t help thinking about that. She shut the light and he heard her get into her bunk. All he could see in the darkness was the glowing tip of her cigarette. For a time neither of them spoke.
“Whoever you are, I’m glad you’re on our side,” she said. It sounded like she had rolled on her side toward him. It was strange, talking like this in the darkness. He could almost feel the warmth of her body pulling at him from across the narrow space between them, and more viscerally, the tingle in his groin.
“I’m on no one’s side,” he said. “Our interests coincide, that’s all.”
“Gospadi, you’re cold.”
“No,” he said after a moment.
“What then?”
“Honest. Or as honest as someone who lies for a living can be.”
“What’s going to happen when we get to Dnipropetrovsk?”
“Someone’s going to die.”
A few minutes later, “You’re not what I expected. Michael . . . ?” she whispered.
There was no answer.
Scorpion was asleep.