“And I crunched it between my teeth,” Mikhail breathed, “and I swallowed it.”
Neither man said anything for awhile. Then Valentine Vivian stood up from the floor, more carefully than he’d planned, and he said, “But she forgives you.”
“I don’t forgive myself,” said the young man. “I hurt her. I will never forgive myself.”
“Then show me something,” Vivian told him, nearly begging. “Show me! If you show me, we can walk out of here together, and you can work to make sure many, many people in this world are not hurt, and that those who are hurt find justice. Show me.”
Moving slowly and deliberately, Mikhail pulled the rags over his face and he was gone from sight.
Vivian sighed. What a waste of time this had been! A certain journalist was going to get his ass scorched over a bed of charcoals. Damn, and now back to the jingle bells!
He needed to get out of this stinking hole. Out of this ruin. Out of this village. Out of this country.
At the archway, Vivian looked back at the motionless bundle.
He said, “Goodbye…” And decided to use the English name: “Michael.”
He walked out through the blue light and ascended the stairs, and halfway up he heard the engines.
He could see them coming across the snowscape. He knew who they were coming for.
There were three of them. Three white-painted aerosans with red stars on the sides. They were wooden, box-shaped contraptions meant to carry three or four men in each enclosed cockpit. They travelled on four large, pontoon-like skis. On the rear of the vehicles were aircraft engines and a single pusher propeller shoving the aerosans forward at about seventy kilometers an hour. Behind them spun banners of snow. Atop each aerosan a soldier sat in a hatch manning a bolted-down machine gun on a swivel. The vehicles were almost to the village, and already the sleigh horses were panicked and running and all the driver could do was hang on. The aerosans came on with a noise like hornets from Hell.
Oh my God, Vivian thought. Obviously all the loose ends had not been tied up after all. But still…he might be able to talk his way out of this. His charm knew no limits. He straightened his overcoat and walked down through the village to meet the aerosans as if taking a Sunday stroll in Piccadilly. But as the machines slid to a halt, the engines wound down and the exit doors were unbolted from within, Vivian suddenly found himself looking at the barrel of a Nagant revolver aimed at his stomach.
“Valentine, my good friend!” said Varga Raznakov. He was wearing a black overcoat and a gray fur cap. He smiled, but it was an ugly smile. He had a long horse-like face with a thin nose and a small trim mustache that almost looked pencilled on. “What ever are you doing in this little piece of shit?” He fired a quick dark and mocking glance at the bull-man, who stood among a knot of other villagers. “Huh?” he asked Vivian, and he walked up to the major and pressed the barrel of his gun against the man’s throat. “Talk to me!”
At the same time, two soldiers from one of the aerosans began to frisk the major.
They found the single-shot pistol and removed it, giving it to Raznakov.
“This is a beautiful thing!” Raznakov said. His left eye had begun to twitch just a fraction, a sign of his agitation. A dangerous sign, Vivian thought. He had known this old and respected enemy long enough to recognize the sign of impending murder. “Is this what you used at the Hotel Fortitude? Really, Valentine! Are you slipping? Drinking too much? Pursuing too much of the lady’s kitty? Did you not know you were being followed all the time you were in Minsk? Did you think I’d not know you were there? Not that we care about the wretch you killed—he was worthless—but if it meant getting you, my fine English asshole, then that is a golden trophy!” He pushed the revolver’s barrel hard enough into Vivian’s left cheek to leave a ring. “Okay, then! Let’s go!”
“I think I’d rather stay here, if you don’t mind,” said Vivian. “I don’t think you’ll kill me in front of all these—”
Varga Raznakov turned smoothly and fired a bullet into the bull-man’s bald skull. The village chief toppled into the red-spattered snow. The wizened old woman screamed and fell to her knees at the man’s side.
“Witnesses?” Raznakov asked. “You know I won’t kill you here, Valentine. We have much to talk about first. But all these peasants in this little shit of a town…who are they to me? Now come along like a good boy, or I’ll have to waste another bullet on a feeble brain.”
When Vivivan hesitated, Raznakov turned his pistol on the young blonde girl with the bandaged hand. She shrank back and her mother shrieked, but a soldier stepped forward to grasp the girl’s shoulders.
“Don’t,” the major said. He held his hands palm out. “I’ll come with you.”
“Yes, you will!” Raznakov agreed, and motioned toward the aerosans with his gun.
The soldiers returned to their vehicles. The machine guns were manned and the safeties clicked off. The drivers took their places. Raznakov sat behind Vivian with the gun ready. The engines were started with a burst of noise and black smoke, the propellers began to turn faster and faster and then one by one the aerosans shot forward, gaining speed as they were guided again on their pontoon skis to the east.
The noise was terrific. Wind whipped through the compartments from the open hatches. Vivian tried to close his eyes and think, but he knew he was done for. No way to even get a message out. Back in London they wouldn’t know how he died. Missing In Action would be on his dossier. But maybe they wouldn’t kill him. After he was beaten for the information they wanted, maybe he would go to a jail cell. Oh, a filthy vermin-infested Russian jail cell would be a fine end to a man like himself! He thought he would prefer to be—
The soldier up in the hatch began firing his machine gun, two short bursts.
“What the hell are you shooting at?” Raznakov shouted.
The soldier looked down. He had a fleshy, thick-cheeked face and cruel blue eyes.
“There’s a black wolf coming up fast on the right side!” he shouted back.
Valentine Vivian sat up straighter. He leaned over toward a viewslit, and there he saw the beast approaching.
It was not a large animal. It was a little on the thin side, a little shaggy, but the damned thing could move.
The soldier began firing again. Vivian saw the wolf veer to one side and leap across the snow as bullets marched along its previous path. Then it righted itself and came on faster, and now Vivian could see that it had luminous green eyes.
He couldn’t help himself.
He shouted it: “Oh, Jesus!”
The gunner in one of the other aerosans started firing. It was all great sport. Bullets zigzagged along the snow, but the wolf had already zagzigged. The third aerosan’s machine gunner began shooting, squeezing off long and deadly bursts. Vivian saw snow spray fly into the wolf’s face. God, that had been close! The animal put its head down, veered away, and headed straight for the aerosan that carried the eager gunner. Then…the amazing thing happened.
As Vivian watched, his heart hammering, the black wolf streaked across the snow on a diagonal to intersect the third aerosan. It bounded toward one of the pontoon skis, and when it clambered against the vehicle’s wooden side and gripped hold of a viewslit it had fingers instead of claws.
Within seconds, the black animal shape had become the white naked body of a seventeen-year-old boy. “Oh my Christ! My Christ!” the gunner in Vivian’s aerosan shouted raggedly, proving that a Communist who saw a lycanthrope—because that was the proper word—immediately regained his castaway religion.