FINDING KATARINA M.

by Elisabeth Elo

  The rising wail of a siren reached us. We didn’t move until the vehicle had sped past the park entrance and the sound had died away.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” I said, my voice rising in panic.

  She continued to observe the river silently, her face tilted slightly up, like a wolf sniffing the air.

  It occurred to me that she could simply leave me there. Her life would be a lot easier without an American spy in tow. Maybe that was what she was contemplating—whether to abandon me in the park.

  The shrill scream of another siren was fast approaching. Again, we waited wordlessly as the noise expanded into a blare and shrank to a whine. I was convinced that the next patrol would discover us; my imagination teemed with searchlights, megaphones, police cruisers, dogs.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” I repeated in near hysteria.

  Zara turned to me and smiled, one tooth catching a gleam of moonlight. “Cheer up, Natushka. You’re free.”

  The ice wasn’t solid. It was composed of large chunks that bobbed and bumped in the current, and flat sheets that ground against each other like tectonic plates. Zara had led the way to the river’s edge, where we now stood, listening to the quiet lapping of moving water and, further out, a creaking like the straining timbers of a wooden sailing ship.

  An inch of snow blanketed the shoreline. She turned and loped along it with surprising speed. I struggled to keep up, not entirely trusting her, but scared of being left behind. I’d tucked my bare hands under my armpits, but it did little good. I couldn’t feel my fingers, toes, or face.

  She stopped at a paved landing where, in a different season, small pleasure boats were eased into and out of the river. Here, the shallow water was frozen solid. She stepped onto the ice mantle easily, like stepping onto a ramp, and I followed her lead. The edge crumbled a little, but held our weight. The ice was covered by a layer of granulated frost, a good, rough surface that crunched under our rubber-soled shoes. We walked out as fast as we could, staying ahead of the chorus of sharp, percussive cracking that accompanied our steps.

  In the middle of the river, the wind died down mysteriously, and the temperature seemed to rise. I was cold to the core; my thoughts were sluggish. Sensing the slight temperature difference, I greedily imagined more warmth than was really there, and, just like that, my misery eased. I stopped in my tracks, and, with a sense of wonder at where I’d found myself, gazed first at the sweep of night sky, where the lantern moon appeared low enough to swing on, then to the river’s far shore, where a hopeful green light was twinkling. Was it possible that we would make it all the way across? Would we really escape?

  My feet tingled with the sensation of encroaching wetness. I looked down at a puddle of slush deepening around my shoes—the black river was rising quickly through thick but porous ice. I lurched forward, all my terror returned. Up ahead, Zara was a murky running shadow on the verge of disappearing, her ghostly arms outstretched like wings.

  Further on, the ice sheet broke into large moving floes that swayed and dipped precariously under our weight as we jumped heedlessly from one to the other. I hardly knew what I was doing. I had one thought only: to get to the other side.

  We were almost there. Now nothing but a stream of quickly moving liquid water, about seven feet across, lay between us and the beach. Zara didn’t hesitate: she backed up a few paces and took a running leap, splashed into the river, found her footing, and staggered onto dry land. For the first time since our wild dash began, she turned to wait for me, pant legs dripping, hands on hips, long hair whipping across her face.

  I knew better than to think. I made the same gangly leap, plunged into the heart-stopping ice-water. I was beyond shrieking, beyond pain. The water was almost to my waist, the current flowing fast along a rocky bottom. I stepped, teetered, almost fell. Zara waded in, grabbed my hand, and pulled me onto shore.

  WE SCRAMBLED UP a low rise. We were wet from the waist down in ten-degree cold, and I assumed we wouldn’t survive. I couldn’t feel my legs at all, though I must have been moving them, because a dark, looming embankment was coming closer all the time. I huddled momentarily at its base, protected from the wind. I had an urge to stay there, to curl up, conserving whatever warmth my body still retained, but I didn’t dare indulge it. I followed Zara up the steep rise—part ice, part mud—crawling on all fours, slipping and regaining ground. We reached the top at roughly the same time, clambered over a guard rail, found ourselves on a deserted two-lane road. Moonlight illuminated the snow-dusted pavement. We crossed over, hid ourselves in a copse of trees where the underbrush sticking out of the snow was sharp and brittle with ice. I set about trying to strip off a low branch with my chafed, numb hands, thinking to make a rough shelter that might trap our combined warmth after we’d stripped off our frozen pants and shoes.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Zara hissed.

  “We’ve got to get warm.”

  “Not that way.”

  She lurked at the edge of the forest, quietly observing the empty road, seemingly unaffected by cold, panic, or fear—or even the wound in her side. What choice did I have but to follow her lead? I didn’t know the territory, there wasn’t a soul in a thousand miles who would help me, and the first few words out of my mouth would peg me as a foreigner. Zara’s dash across the icy river had been insanely reckless, to be sure, but somehow, we’d made it, and now, thanks to her, we had a chance—if we could make it to warmth.

  In due course, a car filled with people whizzed by. The next car had two passengers inside.

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked.

  “Someone driving by themselves.”

  “There,” I said a few minutes later. A small pick-up was barreling down from the north, one head behind the wheel and none on the passenger side. Zara stepped into its path, waving her arms. The driver pulled over, popped open the passenger door, yelled out, “You need a ride?”

  “Sure do,” she yelled back.

  We climbed into the cab. There was no backseat, so we crammed together on the passenger seat. “Boy, are we glad to see you,” Zara said, sounding folksy and innocent—an actress playing a part.

  He pulled away. “What happened?”

  “We skidded on a patch of ice back there. Went right into the river. Just a few feet luckily, so we were able to get out. But we’re soaked, need to get warm fast.” She rubbed her hands in the stream of hot air coming from the vent. “God, that feels good.”

  The cab was dim, the Samaritan intent on the road. There was a whiff of alcohol about him, but he didn’t seem drunk. It was unclear whether he’d noticed that his passengers were dressed in the same institutional clothes.

  “You live around here? I can take you home,” he said.

  “It’s kind of far. We need to get out of these clothes right away.”

  “Well, I live just up the way. I could take you there.”

  “Hate to impose on your family.”

  “No problem. I live alone.”

  Zara picked up one of my hands and rubbed it briskly between her own. “Don’t worry, Petra. We’re going to be all right,” she said in a nurturing tone. Then, turning to the driver, “I think my friend here is in shock.”

  Now I didn’t have to speak.

  The Samaritan’s cabin was in the woods, a few hundred feet off the road. There was a light over a side entrance, but the rest of the place was dark. He fumbled a bit with the lock, while Zara and I huddled behind him on the stoop. Once inside, he flicked a switch, revealing a small, homey kitchen with a hand-hewn pine table, cheerful red curtains, a stove with a kettle on top. Iron pans hung from hooks on the wall; a grimy tool box lay open on the counter.

  “I’ll turn up the heat and get a fire going. I’ve got sweatpants and T-shirts you can borrow,” he said, heading toward a front room.

  Zara grabbed a hammer from the tool box, and, following swiftly on his heels, raised it high, and smashed it onto the crown of the man’s head. The crac
k of bone was audible; he collapsed instantly.

  “For god’s sake, what are you doing?” I screamed, sprinting across the room.

  Before I could get there, the hammer slammed down a second time on the back of the man’s skull. It rose once more, but this time I was there to grab it. I yanked it out of Zara’s grasp, shrieking at her to stop.

  She stood back, eyes wild and gleaming, a drop of spittle lodged at the corner of her mouth.

  “Wat the fuck! Are you trying to kill him?” I dropped to my knees beside the face-down, inert form. Two bright seams of blood were bubbling through the crew-cut hair. There was something, some sixth sense I had, that told me the man was dead.

  My right hand was still curled around the warm wood shaft of the hammer. My grip loosened, and the hammer tumbled to the floor. I placed two fingers on the side of the man’s neck, hoping… But no, he was gone. I rolled back on my heels, my hands fallen helplessly to my sides. “Oh my god.”

  I looked up in baffled amazement, into Zara’s mad, glittering eyes. “You killed him.”

  Her mouth curved into the hint of a smile.

  “And you liked it,” I said in horror.

  “I had to do it. He would’ve called the police.”

  “You didn’t know that.”

  “When he heard about the escape, he would have had no choice.”

  “We would have thought of something.” I stared at her, hard. “You didn’t have to kill him.”

  She wavered, muttered, “I didn’t think he’d die.”

  “Oh, come on. He was down the first time. You hit him twice.”

  “I’m not going back to prison. Not for anyone.”

  “So you murdered someone?” I shook my head at the enormous stupidity. “Now you go away for life. We both do.”

  “Not if we escape.”

  “That’s a big if,” I said.

  A circle of blood was spreading under the sprawled form. I rolled the man over. He had a high-boned face and a small mouth. His open eyes were glassy, unmoving. I closed them with two fingers, one after the other, wondering what his name was, if he’d had children, what kind of work he’d done.

  “He’s dead,” I said again, still not believing it.

  “What did you think would happen?” she taunted.

  “I don’t know. Not this.”

  “Stupid cunt,” she said with a smirk.

  Wearily, I said, “If you think this makes me afraid of you, you’re wrong. I actually don’t give a shit about you right now.”

  “Be careful what you say. Don’t forget that I got you across the river. You need me.”

  “You need me more. Not just because I got you out of prison, and out of the hospital. But because you’re fucking crazy, Zara. Full-blown insane. You take stupid risks, and you like killing people. You could so easily fuck this up.”

  She stiffened; a haunted look entered her eyes. She knew I was telling the truth. A few silent seconds passed, during which I didn’t take my eyes off her haggard face. Not until she looked away.

  “We make a good team, Natushka. You and me,” she muttered.

  She stepped gingerly over the body, knelt before the fireplace, and started piling logs on the grate. Like a good Girl Scout, she arranged them carefully for maximum draw. She had grown preternaturally calm, as if the killing had already drifted into a murky past. I recalled the rumor: two brutal murders behind the walls attributed to Zara Chernovskaya. How many more had happened outside them? How many were yet to come?

  She could easily kill me, too, I realized.

  Stiff-limbed and shivering, we took off our wet, icy clothes and wrapped ourselves in blankets from the bed. Sitting as close to the fireplace as we could get, we silently watched the new flames lick the bottoms of the logs, cleave to them, begin to rise up their sides, and finally cover them like a shroud. The room filled with the crackling of dry bark and pops of boiling sap. Soon, our cheeks and hands were burning with heat, and when the Samaritan’s pooling blood came too close, we staunched its flow with towels from the bathroom.

  After a while, we dressed in the Samaritan’s clothes, padding the toes of his huge boots with socks and rolling up the bottoms of his jeans. We dragged the body into the bathroom and closed the door. Wiped the floor and tossed the bloody towels in the bathroom, too. I rolled our water-logged prison uniforms into a ball and stuffed them in a garbage bag to take with us in the pick-up and eventually throw away. No point in leaving calling cards.

  We worked together smoothly, wordlessly, with an uncanny mutual understanding of all that had to be done. Zara piled whatever might be useful by the door: the toolbox, a hunting rifle, a box of bullets, a kerosene lamp. I emptied the refrigerator and cupboards of anything edible that would keep. I yanked out a succession of drawers until I found a wad of rubles stuffed in the back of one. In the pocket of the Samaritan’s parka, my fingers curled around a cell phone. I took it out, carefully studied the scratches on the screen and its worn rubber case. Evidence of him, his individual life. Not long from now, it would start ringing. Friends and family—a girlfriend maybe? a son or daughter?—would start calling, wondering where he was. Why hadn’t he shown up at work, or called his brother, or picked up his kid? First, the callers might be angry, then concerned, then…

  I dumped the cell phone back into the parka’s commodious pocket as if to give it refuge from the coming ordeal. I wanted to say I was sorry—it had happened so fast I couldn’t stop it—but who would give a shit about my meager excuse?

  It was after two a.m. by the time we were ready. We took hats and gloves, shut off the lights. On her way out the door, Zara swiped a bottle of vodka off the counter. I grabbed the keys.

  “Give them to me,” she said imperiously, holding out a hand.

  “Forget it. I’m driving. From now on, we’re doing things my way.”

  Snowflakes fell softly in the blackness. It was not as cold outside as it had seemed before. I backed the Samaritan’s pick-up truck to the end of the driveway, stopping when I got to the road. “Which way?”

  “Any way,” Zara said with a shrug.

  “Come on. You’re from this town. You must have friends.”

  “That’s the first place they’ll look. I have to get out of Krasnoyarsk, and stay away, maybe for a long time.”

  “Okay, but where?”

  Zara’s mouth puckered. “Irkutsk? We can get on the Trans-Siberian Railroad there or go over the border into Mongolia.”

  “How far away is that?”

  “Fifteen hours.”

  “That’s too far.”

  She gave a snorting laugh. “Where do you think you are? Ohio?” She named the state with odd glee, as if proud of remembering her grade-school US geography, then screwed the top off the vodka bottle and held it to her lips. Before she took a swig, she said, “Go left, west. Hurry. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  The road curved lazily with the river. Flurries waltzed in the headlights, as the

  wipers waved laconically across the windshield. We pulled over at a steep embankment, and Zara went right to the edge in the darkness, hugging the trash bag stuffed with our uniforms to her chest. She heaved the bag into the current, and the blackness over the river was so thick I didn’t even see it fall.

  The road was taking us closer to the lights of the city. I said, “There’ll be checkpoints, so we should stick to the back roads. They’ll be looking for two people, so if you see headlights, duck out of sight.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Zara said with a hint of sarcasm. She tipped up the bottle again and started guzzling.

  “And put that thing away. I need you sober.”

  She wiped her mouth roughly with the back of her hand, seemed on the verge of making some retort. But she screwed the top on the bottle, and tossed it onto the pile of blankets in the back. The tires slipped on a patch of hard ice under the dusting of snow, and I steered into the skid to keep us from sliding off the road.

  The Samaritan’s odor of p
ine wood and sweat filled the cab, and the heater finally started spewing enough hot air that I could take off his large leather gloves.

  We skirted Krasnoyarsk without incident and drove for hours on narrow forested roads, occasionally speeding through tiny sleeping villages, where the headlights swept over shabby, unpainted houses with dilapidated barns out back and muddy yards for chickens and cows. Close to six o’clock, we came upon a large, gently curved snow mound on the side of the road. It was a car, I realized, craning my neck as we went by. Covered in a thin snow blanket, its front end tipped into a shallow ditch. I stopped and drove in reverse until the abandoned car was in front of us, illuminated by the Toyota’s headlights. Zara hopped out, lifted the tool box out of the back, wiped the snow off the car’s rear license plate, and started to unscrew it. I grabbed a screwdriver and started removing the pick-up’s plates. Ten minutes later, the abandoned car’s plates were on the Toyota, and the Toyota’s plates were buried about a hundred feet in the woods under a layer of snow that would only get deeper as the weeks went by.

  “Come on, hurry up,” I said, glancing up and down the deserted road.

  Ignoring me, Zara strolled back to the abandoned car. She had the hammer in her hand—unwashed, glinting red in the headlights from the Samaritan’s blood. Just the sight of it was enough to set my blood racing. Before I could ask what the hell she was doing, she tried the door and, finding it locked, used the hammer to shatter the passenger side window. Then, reaching through the broken glass, she popped open the door, slid inside, and started rifling through the glove compartment.

  “Fuck,” I muttered. We’d been there much too long; a car was bound to come along at any moment. Still, I was hoping she’d find something—money, a license. I got into the Toyota and cranked the engine so we could make a quick getaway.

  A minute later, she climbed inside the cab. “Nothing,” she said in disgust.

  Just after seven o’clock, we rolled into a small town. Not a town, really, more like a handful of buildings. Grocery, laundromat, post office—all deserted. A sign on the door of the Sibneft station indicated it wouldn’t open for another hour. The Toyota was very low on gas, and there might not be another town for hundreds of miles. I didn’t want to chance it, so we parked behind the station, turned off the engine and lights, and waited. Zara hauled a bag of food from the storage area behind the seats. We smeared raspberry jam on crackers, passed a carton of cold milk back and forth. Zara cracked a raw egg and tipped it down her throat. I hesitated, then followed suit. We finished up with a tin of pickled herring and a couple of radishes.