The escaping scavengers stumbled across two guards playing backgammon in an ante chamber with razor-stropped one-edged Cossack sabers stacked in four old umbrella stands. Both of the guards lunged for their rifles but were clubbed to death before they could reach them. Snatching the two rifles, stuffing their pockets with bullets, Martin and Almagul led the scavengers, armed now with sabers, up a back staircase that led to the lobby. The single guard on duty there backed against a wall and raised his hands in surrender when he saw the scavengers; one of them walked up to him and split his skull open with a single stroke of his sword. On a gesture from Martin, the men spread out and burst through the several double doors into the auditorium. The fight was short and lethal. Furiously working the bolt of his rifle, hardly bothering to take aim, Martin—a pulse pounding in his temple, his trigger finger trembling—provided covering fire from the back of the auditorium as the escaping prisoners, brandishing the sabers over their heads and screaming savagely, charged down the aisles. The warlord, who had been holding court from the throne, cowered behind it as his guards, caught by surprise, desperately tried to fight off the attackers. Two of the prisoners were killed before they reached the stage; a third was shot in the face as he climbed onto it. When Martin’s bolt-action rifle jammed, he caught Lincoln’s voice roaring in his ear: Grab it by the barrel, for Christsake, use it as a club. Gripping the hot barrel with both hands, Martin joined the battle on the stage, clubbing wildly at the guards as they tried to fend off the blows with their rifles or their arms. When one of the guards stumbled, Martin pounced on him and pinned him down while a prisoner hacked off the guard’s hand holding the rifle. Breathing heavily, Martin stood up as another prisoner planted one foot on the neck of the fallen man and slit open his back, exposing his spine down to the coccyx. Gradually the prisoners, pushed by a ferocity that came from having nothing to lose and their lives to win, overpowered the guards who were still alive. The wounded guards, with blood gushing from ugly gashes, and the three who surrendered were hauled into the orchestra pit and decapitated with saber strokes to the napes of their necks. One headless man took several short steps before collapsing to the floor. Martin, sick to his stomach, watched the scavengers circle around the throne almost as if they were playing a harmless child’s game. Hamlet had pulled the square of thick theater curtain that had been used as a carpet over his head. The scavengers tore it away from his clutching hands and prodded the warlord to his feet with the points of their sabers. Wiping snot from his nose, Hamlet begged for mercy as the prisoners stripped away his canvas leggings and boots and gloves and goggles and marched him through the auditorium and lobby and out into the street.
Picking his way barefoot through the gutter to avoid the fleas, Hamlet kept babbling in the strange language of the scavengers, but nobody paid the slightest attention to what he was saying. As the sun edged above the horizon, the group retraced the route Martin had taken into Kantubek, passing the ornate building with the mosaic in the lobby depicting the weight of the state. When they reached the motor pool hangar, aswirl in sand and dust, the scavengers found a roll of electric wire and lashed the warlord of Vozrozhdeniye Island to one of the gutted green trucks, his wrists bound over his head to the rusted frame of a window, his bare feet just reaching the drift of sand when he stood on his toes. The warlord whimpered something and Almagul, watching from the street, called out a translation for Martin.
“He pleads with them not to leave him here where the rodents and fleas can get to him. He appeals to be shot.”
“Ask him where Samat went when he left here,” Martin shouted.
“I do not understand his answer,” Almagul called back. “He says something about the bones of a saint being returned to a church in Lithuania.”
“Ask him if the church is in the village of Zuzovka near the frontier with Belarus.”
“I think he has become mad. He tells only that Samat is a saint—he says this over and over.”
Hamlet Achba could be heard ranting incoherently as the four surviving prisoners and Martin and Almagul made their way along the track that ran through the dunes to the beached boat. At one point Martin stopped to look back at Hamlet. He was about to start up the dunes toward the warlord when he heard Dante’s wild Irish cackle in his ear. Don’t you know the bible instructs victims how to survive emotionally? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a burning for a burning, laddie. When Martin hesitated, Dante sighed in despair. Aye, you’re a weak-kneed excuse for a man. Martin had to agree. Nodding grimly, he turned and stumbled down the hill to join the others on the beach. The men rinsed the blood off their bodies in the sea and tugged the boat off the sand and climbed aboard. Almagul started the outboard, sending the white flamingoes scattering into the air. She backed the boat until the water was deep enough to swing it around and head at full throttle toward the mainland. While Almagul distributed watermelon and goat cheese from the hamper, Martin gazed back at the ghost town of Kantubek, growing smaller and smaller until it finally vanished into the tulle-like haze that thickened as the sun stepped higher in the east.
The solemn timeserver behind the counter at the central post office in Nukus had never before placed a call out of the country and needed to read the appropriate chapter in a manual before she could figure out the various codes and how to charge for the communication. On the third attempt she finally got through to a place she had never heard of—the borough of Brooklyn—and punched the chess timer that she used to measure the duration of calls.
“Stella, that you?” Martin called into the phone in the open booth while the half dozen people queuing for pension checks looked on in wonderment at someone dispatching his voice across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to the United States of America and receiving an answer within a fraction of a second.
“Did you catch up with Samat?”
“I missed him but it couldn’t have been by much. The basketball court was blackened by exhaust.”
“You okay, Martin?”
“I am now. It was touch and go for a while.”
“What does a basketball court have to do with Samat?”