The explosion was an outrage, an insult so egregious that he hadn’t quite found a way to react to it. His handpicked, highly trained, well-paid squad of bodyguards and operators had failed utterly against one man on foreign soil, arriving on foot, to take back his wife.
The word wifeset off a new set of concerns. His wife, Irena, and his children had been in Moscow, visiting her parents, and he felt relieved knowing that. But in a few days she would be coming home. And this—this ugly, horribly damaged building—was home.
His stupid men had formed into squads now and had begun fighting the fire with garden hoses. He watched them imitating well-trained troops, and felt affronted by their tardy and useless discipline and their lack of professionalism.
Next, faintly at first, and then louder and louder, he heard the wails of sirens. His men looked at one another, grinning at the realization that help was coming, and kept spraying water. Poliakoff ran across the yard and clutched the arm of Kotzov, the head of his bodyguards. “Hear those sirens?”
“Yes. They’ll have these fires out in a few minutes.”
“No, you donkey. Don’t you remember what’s stored in the basement? Get your men to stop spraying water. Get them to soak what’s left of the ground floor with gasoline. Block the road from the highway to delay the fire trucks. We’ve got to give the house time to burn before the firemen and police get a look at those drugs.”
Poliakoff stood in isolation as his men stopped fighting the fire and ran to siphon gasoline from the cars and trucks to add to it. This too was part of the outrage. These Fargo people had forced him to burn down his own house. What an indignity. He should have killed the wife as soon as he’d seen her.
* * *
MILES AWAY on the steppe, Sam and Remi saw train tracks across the road from them, the rails gleaming in the moonlight. “Sasha was right,” Remi said. “Here are the tracks.”
“Yes,” said Sam. “But which way is the station?”
“Both ways, silly. That’s how railways work.”
“I meant the nearest station. But I guess it doesn’t matter. Nizhny Novgorod is that way, so we’ve got to go the other way.”
As they started to lead the horses across the road, they saw the first headlights they’d seen in hours. The car originally appeared far away and then came closer and closer. They could tell immediately it was like no car they’d ever seen. It had three headlights—the usual pair, and then another one right between the two on the nose of the car. As the car came around the bend and pulled to the side to pass, the center headlight moved, pointing in the direction it was going.
The car slowed and stopped in front of Sam and Remi. It was a dark bronze color, long and low, with a body that tapered and narrowed at the back, streamlined like a fantasy spaceship. It was brand-new-looking, but somehow the eye knew it was antique. It was a futuristic design from the past.
At the wheel of the car was a man who had white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard. He was wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt that was illuminated by the light from the dashboard in the dark Russian night. He got out of the car and walked up to Sam and Remi. They could see he was very tall and straight. “Can we help you?” he asked quietly in Russian.
“We’re Americans,” Sam replied hesitantly in English.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you look as though you could use a hand,” the driver answered in English. Sam and Remi were reminded that their clothes and faces were covered with flour and soot and dust, stuck to them with sweat.
The passenger door opened and a tall, beautiful woman with hair that was a platinum blond as light as her companion’s hair stepped out of the car. “What gorgeous horses,” she said. “Where did you get them?”
“We stole them,” said Remi. “We’re running away from a Russian gangster and his men. They kidnapped me.”
“You poor things,” she said. “We’ll get you two out of here. But we’ll need to do something about the horses first.”
“Janet likes animals,” the man explained. “That pasture over there is fenced, and I see water reflecting the moon. We could set them loose inside.”
The man helped them remove the top two rails. They led their tired horses inside and put up the rails again. They removed the saddles and bridles, then left the gear on the fence. Sam and Remi gave the horses a pat and a hug, and then Remi whispered to them for a moment.
Sam and Remi came back to the road, and the man opened the door for them to get into the backseat. He got in front and drove off down the road.
Remi said, “What kind of car is this?”
“It’s a Tucker,” the man said happily.
The woman said, “He likes cars.”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “And we both like to travel. So when I learned this one was for sale, we decided to come pick it up ourselves. It’ll make a nice addition to my collection.”
“How did a 1948 Tucker get to the middle of Russia?” Sam asked.
“So, you know about them.”
“I know they just had a year in production,” said Sam. “I’ve never seen one before.”
“Tucker made fifty-one of them. Up until now, there were only forty-four left. This is going to be the forty-fifth. An astute Russian official in 1948 realized the Tucker was something special and had somebody buy one for him in the United States. I think he wanted to take it apart and copy it, but by the time the car got here he had gotten into trouble and was sent off to Siberia. The car has been in storage all these years.”
“How are you getting it home?”
“By rail from here to Vladivostok, by ship to Los Angeles, and we’ll drive from there,” the man said. “You’re welcome to ride along with us for as far as you’d like to go.”
Remi said, “We’d be honored and delighted. We’re headed for the eastern end of Kazakhstan.”
“I know this is going to sound odd,” said Sam, “but do we look familiar to you? I think we met you once before in Africa.”
The man looked at them both in the rearview mirror. “Not that I recall. Lots of people think they remember me from someplace, but I think it’s probably just my beard. Anybody can grow a beard.”
“Just sit back and enjoy the ride,” said the woman. “If you’d like a snack or something to drink, just speak up.”
“Thank you very much, but I think I’ll just try to doze off a little,” said Remi. “Dawn is my bedtime.”
As the sun came up, the 1948 Tucker drove on toward it, cruising smoothly, pushed along by its converted aircraft engine. Sam sat in the backseat, quietly marveling at the feeling of having Remi back again, leaning her head against his chest as she slept. Before too long, he would fall asleep too, but not yet. A moment like this was too good to cut short.
THE RUSSIAN STEPPES
IN THE MORNING, THEY REACHED A SMALL STATION EAST of the Volga, far enough from Nizhny Novgorod so that the stir the Tucker caused was not likely to reach the wrong ears. The tall man in the Hawaiian shirt opened the trunk in the front of the car and showed them two leather suitcases. “They won’t let you get on a train like that. You’d better take some clothes to the restroom and get cleaned up and changed.” He opened the suitcase monogrammed CC, and Sam chose some men’s clothes. The one marked JC contained women’s clothes for Remi. Mr. C. closed the suitcases and the trunk while Sam and Remi went into the station to change. The clothes were long on both of them, but they rolled the pant legs up a bit and came out looking nearly normal in time to see C.C. supervising the loading of his car.