“Ooh, the pretty lady is a rich one too. Smells a bit bourgeois to me. On the run from the Cheka, are we pretty lady? My tongue’s going to wag and the nosy ones will start asking questions about your fancy foreign friend.”
Jones punched him on the jaw, then in the gut, twice, and slowly the drunk crumpled to the cobbles. Evgenia picked up the fold of rouble notes and they were about to run for it when the drunk said in a voice quite different from the one he’d been using before, “You won’t last five minutes on the street. There’s Cheka snouts every hundred yards between the station and the ferry terminal. I can show you a way to the docks… but it will cost you.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred roubles.”
“That’s a fortune.”
“Not to you, lady.”
Her eyes questioned Jones. He nodded.
“OK,” she said.
“Money now please,” said the tramp.
“No.”
“Now.”
“One hundred now, one hundred when we’re at the docks.”
The tramp got to his feet, clutched the hundred rouble note she offered and hid it in his coat, then gestured for them to follow. Hurrying away from the street into the yard of the old, run-down mansion, he jogged down some stone steps into a gloomy basement, Jones and Evgenia following close behind. He turned right, then left, then came to a passageway down which a small boy in a sailor suit stared at them, frozen in terror.
“Not a word about this son, ever, or I will come to you in your dreams and you will never sleep soundly again.”
The boy stood stock-still for what seemed an eternity, then nodded and stepped aside, so that they could walk past him in silence.
Two turns further on, they came to a mouldy wooden trapdoor in the floor.
Reaching into his coat, the vagrant found the stubs of three candles, lit each with a match and shared them with his two customers. Then he lifted the trap and guided them down, down into the old catacombs of Odessa.
The light from their candles flickered in the darkness, illuminating a length of tunnel with a curved roof and dull yellow limestone underfoot. Down here, the air was sweet and clear, the temperature coolish, the labyrinth never ending. Every hundred yards, passages veered off to left and right. Sometimes they sloshed through stagnant pools of clear water, but for most of their journey the ground was dry and the going easy. The most troubling thing about the tunnels was, apart from the scuffling of their own boots, the lack of sound. There was something about the texture of the stone that absorbed noise. Occasionally they had to stoop low to pass from one set of underground chambers to the next; at one point, Jones bumped his head and, rubbing it, slightly dazed, was in danger of getting left behind. The tramp said, “You keep up, Mr Foreigner. If you wander off, you’ll go stark staring mad in half an hour. There’s too many tunnels down here. You get lost, you die.”
At length they came to a stop in a chamber, the floor lined with soiled blankets, the walls decorated with chalk drawings of sailing ships, dolphins, naked women. Though they couldn’t hear the sea, the tunnel air smelt differently down here; it carried a slight but unmistakeable salty tang.
“We’ll wait a while,” said the tramp. “When the day is done, that’s the best time to see if we can find a ship that will take you. I’ll go with the pretty lady. The foreign gent best stay. Otherwise, someone might sniff out his peculiar origins.”
Opening his knapsack, he produced some bread and hard cheese, cut the latter into wafer-thin slices with a curved blade and passed the food around.
Evgenia asked about the origin of the labyrinth. The city had been a boom town under the Tsars, the tramp explained, the fourth biggest in the whole of the Russian Empire after Moscow, St Petersburg, and Warsaw. But wood was scarce and manufacturing brick in kilns ruinously expensive. The solution was to dig down and hew out the local yellow limestone, made of out sea shells millions of years old. They call it coquina.
“The result?” he said. “Odessa sits on top of the biggest labyrinth in the world. That makes it a very special place for smugglers, ne’er-do-wells like me – and the kind of people who have their own reasons to avoid the nosey parkers, eh?”
“What did you do, before?” asked Jones.
He sighed and said: “I was a professor,” then fell silent. Jones’ candle spluttered out.
“Have you another candle?”
“One hundred roubles.”
“Come on.”
The tramp leaned forward and blew out Evgenia’s candle, then his own. Suddenly they were locked inside a darkness, absolute and entire. Not a word was spoken, not a movement made. The only sound was the three of them breathing.
“Two hundred rou…”
The tramp didn’t get to finish the new price, because at that moment, Jones lunged for him – or the place where he thought he’d be. But the man wasn’t there and Jones ended up flailing into the stone.
Something shifted and then, from the darkness, came the sound of triumphant mocking.
“Three hundred roubles for a candle,” the tramp said. “And a lot more if you ever want to see the sun again.”
Jones felt Evgenia’s hand on his leg. In the darkness, he leant forward. Their hands met and she passed him something squarish, metal…
Crowley’s lighter.
It fired at the very first attempt.
Jones was onto the tramp in a flash, tossing the lighter back towards Evgenia. It went out in mid-air but, despite the blackness, Jones had his target, pummelling him with his fists, finding his gut, his jaw, his temple, left and right, right and left. The tramp kneed Jones in the groin, then punched him on the cheek and tried to skip away – but Jones caught an arm and piled punch after punch in where his neck and head ought to be.
Once again, the tramp lunged at Jones, clobbering him with a punch to the side of his neck. Jones rolled to one side, recovered, grabbed the tramp by his hair and bashed his head against the rock wall, again and again and again…
The tramp was by the far the bigger man, but Jones was fired by a blind fury. Behind them, Evgenia scrabbled around on the rock floor, searching for the lighter. Her fingers came across a knapsack, the tramp’s. Frantically she delved into it, before coming across a box of matches. She opened the box, caught one – but it didn’t light. The second failed too. Then a blind kick from the tramp knocked her sideways and she dropped the box, the matches scattering across the ground. Scooping a bunch up, she scraped them against the side of the matchbox and, suddenly, there was a flare of brilliant light.
Jones cried out, “Oh God, no!”
Evgenia lit another match and, with that, the stub of her candle.
“I never meant to,” said Jones, the words from his bloodied lips trickling to a halt.
Evgenia stared at the mess of blood and bone that had been the tramp’s face. He was quite dead.
“I couldn’t see,” said Jones. “I couldn’t see how he was. I… I… I…”
They sat in the candlelight, their heads down, alone and afraid. After a time, Evgenia’s hand reached out to Jones’s and gripped it firmly. “I’m sorry.”
“It is done.”
Evgenia shushed him and, holding a candle with one hand, went through the tramp’s knapsack. She found two more candles, long and thin, two more boxes of matches, two bottles – one of water, one of vodka – a ball of string, a piece of chalk, a wallet bulging with rouble notes and, folded neatly, a piece of paper. She unfolded the paper and on it was scribbled, in tiny print, a map of an extraordinarily complicated labyrinth. She stared at it hopelessly.