He stepped back from the edge and looked to his right. Standing at the chain about twelve feet away was the driver of the Citroën. She was in profile to him and the wind was whipping her hair forward, pressing it tight against the back of her skull, giving the illusion of a blond helmet. She was tall, with a strong, well-conditioned body. Just as Nikolai was thinking she didn’t strike him as a Pulver type, she turned only her head his way and looked him in the eye. He met her stare. She smiled slightly. Not a friendly smile, but one he felt communicated with calm confidence that he would inevitably be killed.
Nikolai returned to the BMW. Vivian wasn’t in it. She’d left the door on her side ajar. He reached to his carryon bag in the rear seat, and from it took out his holster harness. He put on the harness and, to conceal it, the cotton windbreaker he’d brought along. After adjusting the holster he got the Sig automatic from his carryon. Normally it wouldn’t have been important to him whether it was loaded or not, but now he released the magazine, checked it, and shoved it back into position. He pulled back the slide to determine there was a round ready in the chamber. He holstered the pistol and zipped up his jacket. It disturbed him that he really didn’t feel any safer.
Within a few minutes Vivian squeezed in. “I went to the loo and ran cold water through my shorts,” she said. “I thought I’d gotten out most of the stain, but now I see there’s still a bit of pink. There’s even wine on my knickers.”
He apologized again for having caused that.
“Pas grave,” she said. “I just wanted to give you something kinky to think about. Are you seasick?”
“No, why?”
“You look a bit peaked. That air you got must have been terribly polluted. I must say this tub has a very small loo. While I was in there rinsing my shorts an amply upholstered butchy creature came in and stood there practically panting down my back. Quite obviously what she had in mind was a Dutch treat. Have you got that pictured?”
Nikolai nodded.
“Shall I invent some details?”
Nikolai shook his head no.
“Perhaps all you need is an undemanding Vivian kiss and a bit of a hug.” She leaned over and gave him a very light but long one on the mouth. Her hug felt the Sig. She studied him for a long moment before asking: “Why do you have that on?”
It suddenly occurred to Nikolai that he’d wanted her to discover he was wearing the pistol. So he’d have to reveal and share the threat he was feeling. Perhaps she’d convince him he was overreacting. He’d already explained to her who Pulver was and vaguely how the System took all sorts of measures to preserve its control over the diamond market. He’d intentionally not mentioned the drowning of that dealer in Switzerland, but he told her about it now, really opened up and told her how the System had a reputation for meting out its own justice to those who opposed it or violated its rules. He gave her some secondhand examples. That, he said, was the reason they were being followed.
“Swell people you’re in business with,” she remarked.
“Used to be in business with.”
“Whatever.” She thought a bit. “You know, it seems dreadfully melodramatic. Are you sure your remarkable Russian imagination isn’t just getting a little too vivid?”
“I wish you’d stop attributing all these things to my nationality.”
“It wasn’t meant as a criticism.”
“It’s always my Russian this or my Russian that. You sound like a misinformed American.”
“My, aren’t we the touchy one!”
“I have an average, undistinctive imagination,” he claimed.
Vivian disagreed with an almost inaudible scoff. “Are you really pissed?” she asked.
“Do I appear to be?”
“Not entirely. Maybe about forty percent.”
“It feels like about ten.”
“That’s not enough to prohibit a smile.”
He smiled for her, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“So, you’re certain we’re being followed,” she said.
“Definitely.”
“And there’s the possibility that they intend to do us harm.”
“Not us, just me.”
“As far as I’m concerned there’s no such entity as just me.”
“I think what we should do is drive up to Rotterdam. I’ll put you on a flight there—”
“Like a piece of baggage.”
“—then after I’ve dealt with this matter, settled it somehow, I’ll come on to London. In a day or two.”
His words seemed to go right past her. “How many of these blokes are there?” she asked out of one side of her mouth, suddenly a tough.
Nikolai sensed that Vivian had slipped into her obstinate phase and now it would be futile to try to reason with her. He hoped these people of Pulver’s were only supposed to intimidate him. If it would get rid of them he’d act severely frightened. That would be easy. All he’d have to do was turn up what he was feeling half a notch. He told Vivian: “I don’t know exactly how many there are, but they’re not all blokes. At least one is a woman.”
“You didn’t see the others because you were so intensely noticing her, is that it?”
“Not quite.”
“So, what did she look like?”
He told her but chose his words carefully. Instead of saying the woman was blond he said “fair-haired,” instead of tight-bodied he said “solidly built.” “I saw her face only for a minute.”
“But you’d probably recognize her in nice low light. Did she say anything to you?”
“No,” he replied, thinking how much the woman had wordlessly expressed.
Vivian dug into her carryall for her Beretta automatic. She attached the stubby silencer to it and put it on under her sweater. “Do you have your silencer on?”
“No.”
“Better. That piece of yours sounds like a cannon without it. No need to flush all the birds.”
Twenty minutes from then the ferry pulled into its slip on the north shore of the Westerschelde. The vehicles it carried were directed quickly off in double file. As soon as the wheels of the BMW had roadway under them it began showing its impatience, went around the cars and trucks ahead, maneuvered sharply in and out until it was relatively in the clear. Vivian was driving now. She’d convinced Nikolai that it would be a better arrangement if he “rode shotgun.” He’d never used the term but understood it from the American westerns he happened to have seen on British television.
The highway they were now on was designated A58. It was four lanes, divided. Nikolai peered back through the rear window. “I don’t see them,” he said.
“That woman was probably some cheesemaker’s wife and her lover on their way to the seashore,” Vivian remarked with a tinge of disappointment.
Nikolai continued to look back. He sighted a mere black speck on the beige ribbon of highway. It turned into something that had color, which became maroon, which became the Saab coming on fast. “There they are!” he told Vivian.
“I’ll bet I can lose the bastards,” she said as she made the speedometer indicator climb. She remained in the left lane. Nikolai kept looking back. The Saab had steadied its speed, was now just following along about seventy-five yards behind. It must have been delayed by a traffic snarl at the ferry landing, he thought. He could see the silhouetted shapes that were the heads of its occupants. He counted three, including the driver, although a fourth was possible.
A green-and-white overhead sign said the turnoff to Route N18 and the city of Goes was a quarter mile ahead. Vivian was still keeping to the left lane, apparently intending to pass the turnoff. At the last second, however, she swerved across the right lane and took it. The Saab managed the right lane but was unable to make the turn. It went up onto the shoulder, slid to a stop on the grass. Immediately it backed to the turnoff.
“Lost them,” Vivian said.
“No you didn’t,” Nikolai told her, sighting the Saab again.
“Merde.”
“Just drive at a normal speed and see what they do.”
“What would be normal in these parts?”
“I don’t know. Try sixty.”
Vivian let up to sixty. It felt like slow motion. It was particularly irritating to Vivian because the sun was striking her face from the left and she hadn’t thought to bring sunglasses. Even with the visor down and swung over the glare got to her. To make it even more excruciating, when she looked in the rear-view mirror she noticed the two identical dark ovals that were sunglasses being worn by the woman driving the Saab. And several much older cars, including a couple of four-cylinder weaklings, passed easily. Vivian endured it for a mile or two, then sighed a moan. “Maybe they’ll give up on us out of boredom,” she said.
After another six miles she couldn’t resist a turnoff. She still kept the BMW at sixty, but now the road was only a regular black-topped two lanes with bumpy patches, unavoidable rises and dips, and no shoulders, and sixty seemed as though it were a hundred. The Saab, with its excellent suspension, was taking it with ease.
“I still think I can lose them,” Vivian mumbled. A dubious grunt from Nikolai caused a reflex by her foot. It punched the accelerator pedal. The BMW responded like a racer breaking away. Nikolai thought losing them would be unlikely here in the lowlands of Holland, where the terrain was so level. There were no groves of trees or complexes of structures for the BMW to dart into and hide. It could only be straight flat-out, and the Saab had ample power to keep from being outrun.
“Hold on,” Vivian said so calmly Nikolai didn’t prepare for the sharp right turn she took onto a side road. His leg and hip was centrifuged against the divider. He grabbed the hand support above the door, and just in time, as, barely reducing speed, she took another hard right. How had she spotted that side road? Nikolai wondered. He hadn’t. Now, the way she was driving, so confidently taking lefts and rights as they came, one might have thought she’d been over this course any number of times and knew exactly where she was going. The flat land, as it turned out, was a veritable grid, had all sorts of ways running through it, but none better than a dirt road, and some no more than crude double trails, evidently worn into definition by people or cows walking two abreast. A rutted road, heaved every which way, then suddenly, without any apparent reason, pinched down to a mere path. Committed to it, Vivian sped ahead, making buttercups fly. The path led to a narrow drainage ditch. Nikolai, hanging on, saw the flash of a silvery vein of water as the BMW hurtled over it.
All the while the Saab had been hounding and holding its own, losing distance in one place, making it up in another. However, when it came to the ditch it decided not to take it. The Saab stopped several feet short of the ditch, backed up a way, and, hoping to gain decisively on the BMW, chose to cut across a wide pasture. The pasture was close-cropped, appeared solid enough. In support of that impression the gray hips and spines of nearly buried boulders were visible in several places. The Saab was a third of the way across the pasture before it was made to realize how drastically it had ventured out of its element. The front wheels of the Saab were first to feel the pasture’s soft spot, as though they’d come upon a deep-piled carpet. With their responsibility for traction, they were soon confounded. Immediately below the roots of the grass the earth was sog, and the front wheels worked themselves into it. They couldn’t get anywhere, spun in place, whined, dug their own holes, and kept digging them until the Saab was hopelessly mired.
Meanwhile, the BMW was sending up a trail of dust on the dirt road that ran along the far edge of the pasture about a hundred yards away. From that distance Nikolai observed the stuck Saab. He saw two men get out and go forward and examine the buried wheels. He couldn’t make out their features, just got a general impression of them. They had on business suits and hats, seemed even more out of place than the Saab way out there in the pasture. No doubt the muck was ruining their shoes. Vivian brought the BMW to a halt so she could enjoy a look.
“I suppose they’d consider it mockery if I gave them a couple of honks,” she said.
“Don’t,” Nikolai advised.
“Not even a good-hearted adversarial wave?”
“No.”
“All right, you drive now.”
They exchanged places. Nikolai couldn’t get away from there soon enough. He was fooled a couple of times by paths before making it back to the main road. He paused there. Vivian consulted her map. “This area is called Noord Beveland,” she informed him. “Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Well, now you do, and it’s an island.”
“How do we get off?”
“I’m hungry. Hang a right.”
After driving an extremely fast twenty miles, Nikolai felt easier and told himself he could let up. For reassurance he kept picturing the Saab sunk up to its chassis in meadow mud. Neither he nor Vivian was in a talking mood. Her silence was punctuated every four miles or so with an uncomplaining reminder that she was still hungry. The first eating place they came to was in the village of Renesse. They ordered too much and ate too much, and afterward it was almost dark and they didn’t feel like taking on the fifty miles yet to go to Lisse. When Nikolai inquired he was told the only nearby inn was a mile beyond Scharendejke village on the other road to Zonnemaire—mind, not the new road but the other road.
They had no trouble at all following the directions they were given. Nikolai expected Vivian to say she’d called upon her traveling angels, but for some reason she didn’t. The other road was a tertiary road that seemed unfriendly the way it threw gravel up at the underside of the BMW. The inn, named Koopershaven, was situated shyly back from it at the end of a long unlighted drive. It was typically Dutch, a modest two-story brick farmhouse of simple lines with a steep-pitched roof and upper facades on each end to create the impression of greater height. The night prevented Nikolai and Vivian from seeing these features or the surrounding scenery. Thus when they were unloading their baggage from the car and lugging it inside, they experienced the feeling of having lost their bearings and being subjected to the mercy of some strange place.
They were welcomed by Erika Kooper, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the proprietor. With her straight, heavy flaxen hair and cheeks that looked as though they’d just been pinched, she couldn’t have been more Dutch. While Nikolai was registering he called Vivian’s attention to an enlarged color photograph hung prominently behind the counter. Erika and six youngsters in two rows. They so resembled one another that it could not be doubted they were all Koopers. “Breakfast comes with the bedding,” Erika informed him with her thick accent, and choosing a certain key, she led the way up the stairs and down the hall to a rear corner room. She opened both windows a generous crack, filled a Delft blue pitcher with fresh water for bedside. Nikolai extended a two-florin tip. Erika declined it and wished a smiling good night.
The bed was a high one, and hard. Vivian tested it. “I’ll wager anything that most of those Kooper babies were conceived right here,” she remarked. She climbed to the middle and bounced vigorously. The mattress didn’t bounce back, but whatever was beneath it gave off strident squeaks. “Well,” she said, “if we do anything it will have to be quiet and passive. Are you for a quiet or a passive—or neither?”
Nikolai had removed his windbreaker. He was standing there caught on thoughts about beds: those that had been, those that might be. He told himself there were familiar ones waiting in London and in Devon and that this one would not be the last. He had taken so long to reply that he assumed now she didn’t expect him to.
Vivian observed him wearing the weapon, the harness and the holster and the hard protruding butt of the pistol contrasting with the whiteness of his shirt. She wondered about the facet of her that was erotically stirred by the sight. Not an overwhelming stir but definitely that kind of stir. Marvelously perverse, she whispered to herself, and pictured him about to come to bed wearing nothing but that pistol and his new hat. He’d do it, for her, but she hoped she wouldn’t have to ask
. She rolled over and looked at the headboard. It was intricately marquetried, various light and dark woods arranged into a fine flower design. All the room’s furnishings were of that type, she noticed, solid and sensible, aging but not yet valuable old. She got off the bed, balanced on one leg and then the other as she pulled off her canvas sneakers without bothering to untie their laces. “You sleepy? I’m not. We still have that other bottle of Pétrus. Quite a day deserves quite a night, wouldn’t you say? What’s out there?”
Nikolai had opened one of the windows more and was gazing out. It was a black night, clear but moonless. “Nothing,” he replied absently, and then again with even less conviction: “Nothing.”
CHAPTER
25
THE SAAB WAS NOW PARKED ON THE OTHER ROAD TO ZONNEMAIRE.
The heavyset killer had the rear seat all to himself, so he’d been able to get some sleep. His suit jacket turned inside out and doubled up was better than nothing for a pillow, although no matter how he folded it the buttons were hard little lumps that troubled his cheek. The backrest of the seat felt good to his lower spine. He couldn’t sleep well unless his spine was against something protective. His regular bed in his apartment in Pskov was pushed into a corner. The women who stayed overnight always assumed the wall side of the bed was theirs, and he let them be there until he was ready to sleep. There were times when a woman would go unconscious from too much chacha or sivukha and too many comings and he’d have to lift her dead weight to the outside of the bed and the next day when she awoke she’d wonder how she got there and be disturbed that things had happened to her that she couldn’t recall and he would tell her nothing, just reach over her roughly to get his cigarettes and after lighting up he would make sure he crushed her a bit as he climbed over her to go to piss. The fat ones complained less, if at all, about that. Many of the fat ones laughed from their bellies and parted their legs, thinking that was what he had in mind. The thin ones, he supposed, were worried about their bones. They usually made an ugly, painful sound as if letting out their last breath. He often imagined himself dropping all his two hundred and forty-five pounds upon a thin one and hearing her ribs snap. He was glad there was such a thing as women. What would he do without them?
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