With Sofiya’s mother muttering behind them, they continued on into the cluttered and chaotic kitchen. A riot of tattered clothes were hanging on makeshift clotheslines; one half of the double sink was filled with laundry, the other with dishes. The minimal heat came from one source — an old oven’s open door.
A potbellied man sat at a 1950s-style kitchen table sipping kvass from a jar. A tiny ancient lady at a samovar — an authentic animated matrushka doll — looked up from stirring strawberry jam into a glass of black tea.
The man, seeing Templar drenched to the skin, let out a low whistle and a gruff laugh.
“Look at the polar bear! Took a dunk in the Moscow River on a bet?”
“Hush, Uncle Fyodor,” admonished Sofiya, “he needs our help.”
The old woman clucked her tongue in sympathy, and offered tea.
“Chai?” she trilled.
To Simon Templar, the entire environment seemed surreal and hallucinatory. The room appeared to alternately expand and contract, distances were inconsistent, and the reality of his own physical existence seemed questionable.
The elderly woman handed him the glass, but his shaking hands and feeble grip made the warm liquid spill out over his fingers. She wagged her head in disapproval, took it back, and began drinking it herself.
Sofiya hurriedly plucked clothes and towels off the line and handed them to Emma. Then, smiling sheepishly, she removed a hundred-thousand ruble note from her bra — the monetary rewards of her unfortunate vocation — and hung it on the line as payment for the items. Her mother looked the other way and crossed herself.
“The bra is a good place to keep valuables,” said Sofiya.
“I know exactly what you mean,” concurred Emma.
“I’ll show you another good place,” added Sofiya. “Follow me.”
They did.
4
Emma urged on the trembling Templar as they passed a maze of rooms, each crowded with three or four sleeping men, women, and children. The diverse ages and genders huddled together under blankets, taking full advantage of their combined body heat.
Led by Sofiya, Emma and Templar sidestepped the sleeping forms and continued on to what appeared to be a dead end.
“Where are we?” Emma asked. She was trying to visualize where they were relative to the rest of the building.
The teen pointed back from where they came.
“Kitchen that way.”
She then pointed to a narrow hallway entrance on the other side of the room.
“That leads to stairs — not the big stairs from the lobby, but short stairs from here to roof.”
Sofiya then moved away an old highboy and slid open a false wall. Behind it was a cramped but clean cubicle.
“You can hide here,” she said. “Built during Stalin Terror. They say five scientists hid for six months.”
Emma thought of Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis. When she heard the squawk of walkie-talkies, she remembered Anne died in captivity.
Sofiya heard it, also, raced to the closest window, pulled back a tattered bit of sheeting, and nervously glanced outside.
The original Range Rover had multiplied to a fleet. Jeeps and other 4X4s formed a heavy-treaded fist around the building.
Ilya was in the street, flanked by footsoldiers, barking orders at Igor.
“Seal every exit. If they’re still in there, there’ll be no way out. We’ll search every apartment!”
He turned abruptly, snapped his fingers, and a cadre of uniformed militia followed him into the building.
Sofiya hurried the wet Templar and the dry-mouthed Emma inside the cubicle.
“They can search all they want,” insisted Sofiya, “they will never find you. You very safe.”
“What about you?” asked Emma.
“I take care of me, you hide.”
Sofiya replaced the false wall and the highboy, and the two sequestered fugitives heard her footsteps as she left the room.
The cramped space was spottily illumined by thin light shafts entering through tiny breathing holes. Emma felt like a boxed hamster.
She looked at the drained and pasty face of the man she knew as Thomas More. She knew his name wasn’t Thomas More. She also knew she was going to undress him.
“This isn’t quite the way I imagined this happening,” admitted Emma with feigned joviality, “but I have to take your clothes off and get you warm before your body shuts down. You have hypothermia, my drowned poet... or drowned rat.”
She tugged, pulled, unbuttoned, unzipped, and removed every soaked item of clothing clinging to Templar’s pale frame. She towel dried him, and held him close to her own warmth.
“Do you feel anything? Talk to me, tell me you feel warm.”
To Simon Templar, the tiny pinpoints of light seemed to sparkle and dance like bright stars in a clear night sky — a night sky in another time, another land, another life.
“Agnes, my love...”
Emma’s eyebrows arched in the dark.
“Your kiss, Agnes...”
Whoever this Agnes was, she must be one hot number.
Emma sighed.
There’s nothing like hypothermia-induced delirium to bring out the naked truth, she thought.
And then she saw something that took her breath away.
His eyes brimmed with tears.
She held him tight, then tighter, rocking him as a mother would a feverish child.
“Tell me,” her voice was soft as cotton, “tell me all about it...”
And he did.
Cradled in her arms, it was as if he were a child of tender years nourished from the breast of mercy. He spoke to her warmth, and if the narrative lacked elements of cohesion, it was unmistakably authentic.
It was all there — St. Ignatius, the boys and girls, nuns and priests, dogs, danger, and death in the moonlight. The long-withheld tears broke through the mesh of cold emotion and poured as a torrent down the mountainside of his cheeks.
He did not sob, nor did he cry. It was rather as if the sadness and pain of a quarter century had risen to the surface of his life and, having reached the deep blue pools of his eyes, overflowed for once and forever.
Emma held him closer, kissing the corners of his beautiful eyes.
“I’ve never felt quite like this before,” admitted Templar.
“What do you mean?” asked Emma hopefully.
“I’m freezing, what do you think I mean?”
She giggled, and the fact that she giggled in this most repressive and traumatic of environments, and under such life-threatening conditions, amused them both.
Emma knew she couldn’t allow Templar to lose consciousness. She had to keep him alert and conversational.
“What’s your name? Who are you, really?”
“My name is Simon, Simon Templar...” His answer was almost unconvincing.
“So, were you really named for a saint?”
He laughed a wet but honest laugh.
“No, I was named after a character in a paperback book — Knight Templar.”
“The hero of a thousand adventures?” Emma knew the book, the character.
Templar’s eyes brightened.
“You’ve heard of Knight Templar?”
She smiled. “Sure. My father had tons of that sort of stuff,” replied Emma, doing her best to sound nonchalant. “If you would’ve spent more time in my apartment, you would have found an entire cardboard box filled with back issues of Thriller — The Paper of a Thousand Thrills.”
“You’re the woman of my dreams.” He said it as if it were a joke, but he meant it.
“In case you haven’t noticed,” said Emma, “I’m not quite as buxom as the women on the covers of those old blood-and-thunder adventures.”