Lom had never driven anything like a ZorKi Zavod limousine before. He liked it. Eight cylinders, automatic transmission, the flat empty road at night. He pressed his foot down and watched the needle climb smoothly to fifty. The car must have weighed a couple of tons, but the engine scarcely rose above a quiet purr. The bonnet stretched ahead of him like the boiler of a locomotive, pennant flickering. All he had to do was keep his foot on the throttle and his hand on the wheel and follow the patch of lamplit road that skimmed ahead of him, always just beyond arrival. Except for the interior of the car, smelling of leather and polish, and the splash of lamplight on the road, there was nothing anywhere but blackness under a vast black sky. Forward motion without visible result. He kept the window open an inch to let the wind touch his face. When small snowflakes began to speckle the windscreen he found the switch for the wipers and set them sweeping back and forth: a quiet click at the end of each cycle, clearing twin arcs in the sparse accumulating snow.
Lom put his hand to his forehead and felt for the lozenge-shaped wound socket. It was just the right size to accommodate the tip of his forefinger. He touched the smooth newness of young skin covering the uneven rim of cut skullbone, soft-edged and painless. It was a blind third eye, pulsing faintly with the restful rhythms of his beating heart, a life sign, part of him now, absorbed, healed, no longer conspicuous. A mark of freedom. A badge of honour. A legacy of ancient hurt. When he took his finger away he could feel the coolness of the wind pressing against the place with gentle insistence. A nudge of conscience. A memory just beyond the frontier of recollection.
Hours passed. The road stretched on ahead, drifting slightly to right and left. The ZorKi swept along at a steady fifty miles an hour. Villages rose ahead and fell behind. Mostly they were too small for names: just clusters of buildings glimpsed and gone, straggling settlements barely registering against the emptiness. No lights showed: they might as well have been deserted. The needle on the fuel gauge had been creeping round to the left all night, and now it was ominously close to empty. Lom pulled up and got out to relieve himself. Legs and back stiff from the long drive, he walked self-consciously a few yards off the road to a scrubby stand of brush at the foot of a telegraph pole. When he got back to the car, Florian was awake, easing himself upright and rubbing his face
‘Where are we?’ he said.
‘We came through Zharovsk a while back,’ said Lom. He looked at his watch. It was coming up towards three in the morning. ‘We’re running short of fuel.’
‘There’s more in the back.’
Florian went round to the boot of the car, opened it and dragged out a couple of jerrycans. He found a funnel and began to fill the tank. When he’d done, he stowed the empty cans. Then he brought out a suitcase and changed his uniform for a neat and sober suit, produced his astrakhan hat and chucked the officer’s cap on the back seat.
‘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 headlamps. ‘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.