She turns to the wall briefly as if to fuss with her hair and adjusts a part of her dress which is doing something she would generally expect only from a confident and somewhat risquée lover. These outfits have no shame.
When she looks back across the lounge, she can see the man she is meeting. Stocky to the point of tubby, he has a wide face with watery eyes which reminds her—as it did in his file—of a poached egg.
“Good evening, Lady,” he booms. “It is very fine to have such a rose of England on our wessel!”
Edie simpers, broadly, so that the room can see. And the room is watching, no question about that, two lads by the bar in sharp suits who aren’t visiting academicians for all they claim to be, but Hungarian AVH. The left one has a bulge in his pocket too small to be a gun, so she suspects it’s a billy cosh. The other, leaner and fastidious, plucks an olive from his martini and affords her a glimpse of a narrow case she identifies as holding a syringe. So.
“Oh, why, how very flattering! And who are you, sir?” she says aloud, letting it fall into a gap in everyone else’s conversation. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.” A mild chastisement there, and some of the other men, the ones who have already tried their luck, wince a little in sympathy. The Lady Edith has proven elusive, and the beaus are growing frantic. Contests of strength are becoming something of a daily matter—shuffleboard, chess, even shooting from the top deck—they all mysteriously come to a fever when Edie chances to walk by.
“I am Dmitri. To you always I am Dima! I am from Soviet Embassy the cultural attaché,” which is true, though he doesn’t mention he’s about the eighth assistant attaché, which is naughty, or that he’s a spy, which is an open secret everyone is too polite to mention. Anyway, Lady Edith is a pinhead aristocratic wife-in-waiting, and not the sort of person to know that sort of thing at all.
“Oh, how terribly thrilling! You’re a Bolshevik! You must think me absolutely awful!”
“No! But why?”
“I’m a Lady! A terrible oppressor.”
“Is accident of birth, Lady. Also, the wretched enemy from glorious socialism bourgeois capitalism. You are feudal. A necessary part of the ascent to perfected mode. And very pretty! I am a man who does not fail to notice this, even if you must be put up against the wall sooner or later!”
The entire assembled company of kibitzing young men gapes briefly at this last suggestion, but it seems to go right over Lady Edith’s head.
“Oh, my, must I? Am I in frightful danger from you, then?”
“Of the gravest sort,” replies the tubby Soviet, with a twinkle, and Lady Edith actually flushes slightly and makes a gesture of insincere shock.
“You are incorrigible, Dima,” she flusters, “and entirely too forward!”
“I am a peasant, Lady,” Dima says quite untruthfully, “but you should not fear my rough hands. With you they will be gentle. And as for the revolution—if you have the right sort of friends anything is possible!”
“Goodness,” simpers Edie. “Then I do hope we shall be friends. I shall no doubt find use for your rough hands. And in any case,” she adds, placing a lingering index finger on his round shoulder, “I do enjoy the company of a man of substance.”
Dima goggles at her a little, obviously hoping this is the simple truth, and the thwarted suitors groan to one another. All that time practicing the exercises of Joseph Pilates when they should have been eating eggs and sitting still. A disaster. And an unfair one at that.
The boys at the bar give each other a regulation sneer. Cheap theatre!
And it is. Edie knows fine well that this charade will not persuade them, and that is not her intention. Her employer wishes devoutly, however, that they believe that is her plan, so that they will look no further, and certainly not at Dima, who is very brave and very endangered.
“I believe,” Lady Edith smoulders, “that I should like a walk on deck. Perhaps you could lend me your arm, so that I do not slip and fall on my back?” Dima swallows again, but nods. They walk out together.
Six minutes later they are in his cabin, and Edie has ditched the dress for a more practical outfit. Dima resolutely turned to the wall while she did this, which would have been very gentlemanly if Edie hadn’t caught him peeping at the vanity mirror. Gone, thank God, is the ridiculously constrictive frock, and in its place a set of trousers and a light jacket in a new fabric whose name she has forgotten. Warm, light, and above all close fitting.
“Give me the file,” she says, and when he does she slips it quickly into a waterproof wallet and into the long pocket along her thigh. “Thank you, Dima,” she says, and when he smiles shyly she belts him in the eye with everything she has. He staggers, and she follows up hard with an elbow and a knee. He falls, and she wraps a rope around his arms but does not tie it. “Okay?”
“Good,” Dima says, and once again she finds herself impressed by him. She shouldn’t be surprised. Dima’s father was sent to one of Barikad’s towns ten years ago, and the boy trekked up there and saw it for himself, fourteen and alone, using a dog sledge. He camped in the ice and cold for months, hunted and stayed alive, and came to understand what the place actually was. And when he knew his father was dead, had died before he left of cold and hunger, he went back and joined the Party and became a British agent as soon as he possibly could. The crown’s man in the Barikad con. In the wallet at her hip, proof positive, as solid as it comes, the Barikad is and has always been a fiction.
She’s still thinking this when he roars to his feet and his head takes her in the chest—not the stomach, which would have winded her and made the next bit impossible, but just a little higher. All the same, they crash through his door with a convincing bang and out onto the deck, almost at the feet of the lads from the AVH. Edie chops at him, and they separate, Dima coming up in between his supposed allies and their target, fumbles in his coat pocket and roars again. Edie takes flight. When she reaches the rail, Dima gets his gun out and fires.
Bullets whizz past, plucking at her hair. Very close indeed. Bloody hell! She waits a beat, then hurls herself back in time with his final shot, wrenches her shoulder round as if struck and falls head first from the rear of the boat into the sea. Before she hits the water, she can hear Dima demanding that they kill her, kill the blasted British witch, shoot her fucking dead, but no more shots sound and she realises he is yelling all this while still getting in the way. Good lad.
And then she’s in the body of the wave, and down, and down. She twists her bracelet hard and it lights, a gloomy greenish glow made from chemical muck. Down she goes, and pray to God the timing is right and this will work, because her ears are hurting and this water is much, much colder than the water over Fender’s Hollow. Cold and dark. Edie Banister, a falling doll in black water.
Ba-boom.
She can hear the sound of the ship, but it’s fading, no longer a roar but a sort of rattle, drawing away.
Ba-boom.
She imagines, up on deck, Dima proclaiming that he was attacked by the British agent and manfully fought his way free, and the AVH men will be trying to look suspicious, but Dima will be bellowing that they were supposed to protect him, yes, keep him safe, and they somehow allow him to leave a public space with a British spy, poor Dima all unknowing! Or were the Hungarians playing a fucking game here? Had they used him as bait? He would have them shot as traitors! And so the facts would begin to blur, an agreed version would emerge in which they were all heroes. The documents are gone, yes, and that is bad, but the main thing is that they are not in the hands of the enemy.
Ba-boom.
It’s too cold. Too dark. This was not a good plan.