Potboiler (27 page)

103.

The night was gauzy and moist. At that hour there were few pedestrians other than soldiers. Preparations for the festival were coming along. The sidewalks had been swept. Bright banners rippled and snapped. Aluminum barricades lined the parade route. Pfefferkorn guessed that there would be a good deal more pomp than usual, owing to the momentous nature of the anniversary. To avoid attracting attention, he stuck to side streets and kept a medium pace. He put his head down, his hands in his pockets, and his faith in his moustache.

Typically during the day there was a line of troikas waiting outside the Metropole, but now he found the block deserted except for a lone soldier lighting a cigarette. The solider glanced at Pfefferkorn incuriously before taking his first drag and looking off in another direction. As Pfefferkorn approached the hotel’s glass doors he spied the night clerk engrossed in a magazine. He decided to go for it. He crossed the lobby, making a beeline for the elevator. He was almost there when the clerk called out in Zlabian. “Excuse me.”

Pfefferkorn froze.

The clerk ordered him to turn around.

Pfefferkorn put on an indignant face and marched to the desk.
“Uiy muyiegho lyubvimogo uimzhtvyienno otzhtalyiy zhtarzhyegoh bvrudhu ghlizhtiy,”
he snapped.

The clerk was understandably startled by this outburst. Pfefferkorn would have been startled, too, by a comprehensively moustachioed man in a goatherd’s outfit yelling at him that his beloved and mentally retarded older brother had tapeworms.

“Tapeworms,”
Pfefferkorn repeated, for emphasis. Then he yelled that he had been waiting for an oscillating fan for more than a week. He slammed his fist on the desk as he said this. The clerk jumped. Then, with enormous contempt, as if he couldn’t stand to deal with such an imbecile any longer, Pfefferkorn reached into his left sock and whipped out the roll of cash. He peeled off a fifty-
ruzha
note and dangled it in front of the clerk’s face, as if to say,
I can bribe you right out here in the open and no one can do anything about it. So how important must I be? Very important, that’s right. So don’t mess with me.
That was his intention. It was equally possible that the message was
Take this money and shut up.
In any event, the clerk plucked the bill and gave him a timid smile. “Monsieur,” he said.

104.

Pfefferkorn’s finger hovered over the button for the penthouse. He told himself that he had more than enough on his plate as it was. He chafed, knowing he would have to let Dragomir Zhulk live to plot another day. He punched the button for the fourth floor.

As the car labored upward, he visualized what he was about to do. The Metropole was old and quirky enough for every room to be done up differently. Certain constants would hold, though. There would be an entry hall with a closet on one side and a bathroom door on the other. There would be a bed. There would be a dresser. There would be a television on top of the dresser. There would be a nightstand, a telephone, a clock, a radiator, and a lamp. There would be an oscillating fan, although the likelihood of its functioning would be low.

The elevator ground to a halt. The doors parted. He crept down the hall.

There would be Carlotta. That was important to keep in mind. He couldn’t come storming in like a maniac, striking at everything that moved. He had to be deadly but precise. If the room was anything like the one he’d stayed in, it could fit four comfortably. This being West Zlabia, he had to count on things being less than optimally comfortable. He steeled himself to fight ten men. They would be armed. They would have shoot-to-kill orders. His motions would have to be unified and fluid. He would go for the solar plexus.

He passed his old room. He passed 46, home of the noisy honeymooners. He came to number 48 and stopped. She had been no more than forty feet away the entire time.

He checked that he was alone.

He was alone.

He uncapped the deodorant stun gun and held it in his left hand. Not too tight, not too loose. He snicked open the toothbrush switchblade and held it in his right hand. Not too tight, not too loose. He reviewed Sockdolager’s advice. Let the weapons become an extension of your own body. Don’t pull punches. Commit. He held up the butt end of the toothbrush and tapped the door three times. There was silence, then footsteps, and then the door opened.

105.

The door opened.

“What the fuck?” Lucian Savory asked, or started to ask. He hadn’t gotten any further than “What the f—” when Pfefferkorn jammed the stun gun into his withered gut and fired. Savory’s knees folded and he went down like a sack of root vegetables, his bulbous head hitting the carpet. In one fluid motion Pfefferkorn sprang over him and rolled into the room, coming to his feet in a defensive crouch, whirling and ducking and weaving and jabbing with the knife and snapping off nasty eighty-thousand-volt crackles. “Hah!” he said. “Heh!” He dashed from end to end, a cyclone of lethality destroying everything in its path, meeting no opposition. He paused to assess the damage. Aside from Savory, who was an inert heap, the room was empty. He had completely subdued the finishings, though. He had mauled the curtains, lamed the lamp, annihilated the radiator, obliterated the fan, and electrocuted the duvet.

Carlotta was nowhere to be seen.

But then he saw that he had missed something. The room was mostly the same as his, but there was one key difference. There was an extra door, the kind that connects two adjacent rooms. It connected room 48 to room 46, home of the honeymooners.

He opened the door. The corresponding handleless door was ajar. He pushed it all the way open with his foot and stepped through the doorway and there she was, tied down to the bed, a moon-shaped scar in the wallpaper corresponding to the top of the headboard that she had been rocking back and forth for weeks, slamming the wood into the wall and producing a rhythmic banging that was not hot water pipes or overzealous lovers but a frightened woman’s desperate bid to attract the attention of whoever it was in room 44, not forty feet away but less than the same number of inches.

He ran forward to free her. She raised her head up off the pillow and stared at him uncomprehendingly as he used the knife to cut the ropes on her wrists. He cut the ropes holding her ankles and then he turned toward her with open arms but instead of kisses and pent-up passion he was met by a stinging right hook to the jaw that knocked him off the bed and onto the floor. He tried to sit up and with a primal scream she came flying off the bed and her knee smashed into his jaw and his teeth snapped shut like a mousetrap and he tasted blood and the knife pinwheeled out of his hand and embedded itself in the wall. He managed to scrabble backward and turn onto all fours and crawl away from her. She let him get as far as the doorway connecting room 46 to room 48 and then she kicked him in the rear, sending him sprawling on his stomach. She fell atop him with her knees in his kidneys and began punching him in the back of the head. She was deceptively strong and unfathomably vicious. He tried to roll over and she began belting him in the side of the head instead. He covered his head with his arms and she gave up punching him and started choking him. A remote part of his brain observed that she had absorbed her training well—much better than he had. Good girl, he thought. He also felt vaguely ashamed and made a note never to pick a fight with her. He grabbed her wrists and wrenched them from his throat and she screamed and started clawing at his eyes. It took both his hands to control one of hers, and with her free hand she grabbed his moustaches and began yanking on them hard enough to start tearing the glue. He realized then what was happening. She didn’t recognize him. He was dressed like a goatherd and he had more facial hair than the East German women’s gymnastic team. “Carlotta,” he cried. “Stop.” She didn’t hear him. She just kept on screaming and pulling at his moustaches and punching him in the mouth. “Stop,” he yelled. But she was berserk, lost in some kind of hateful hypnotic trance. He had no choice. He made a fist and walloped her on the side of the head hard enough to stun her. He wriggled out from under her and scrambled for the shredded curtain and hid behind it like a sorority girl caught in the shower.

“It’s me,” he yelled. His mouth was full of blood.
“Art.”

She stopped screaming and looked at him. She was shaking.

He spat. “It’s me.”

She trembled and stared. Her fists were still tight little bloodless rocks. He said her name. Her face was pale and varnished with sweat. Her roots had grown out. She was thinner than he ever remembered seeing her. “It’s me,” he said. Her fists unclenched and fell and her hands hung limp at her sides. “It’s me,” he said. Her trembling peaked and began to subside. She said his name. He nodded. She said it again. He nodded again and put out a tentative hand. She said his name a third time and then he stepped all the way toward her without fear or hesitation, taking her in his arms and pressing her humming body close to his and kissing her like the California state bar exam, long and hard.

106.

He retrieved the knife. He wiped the plaster from the blade and closed it.

“How many others?” he asked.

“One. He went outside for a cigarette.”

“I saw him. He was just lighting up when I got here.” He spat blood and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. “We’ll have to find another way out.”

She glanced at Savory’s body. “What about him?”

Pfefferkorn knelt and took Savory’s pulse at both wrist and neck. He looked at Carlotta and shook his head.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Carlotta said. “He
was
a hundred.”

Pfefferkorn expected to feel guilt, like he had standing in Dragomir Zhulk’s hut, staring at the prime minister’s waxwork “corpse.” He expected to feel disgust: unlike Zhulk, Savory really was dead, and he had died directly at Pfefferkorn’s hands, not via a middleman. He expected to feel fear. Any minute now the soldier would be coming back to the room, and they had at most a few hours before the manhunt for them began. He did not feel any of these emotions. Nor did he feel satisfaction, empowerment, or righteous fury. He felt nothing, nothing at all. He had become, irrevocably and without fanfare, a hard man hardened to hard truths.

“Closet,” he said.

They dragged the body into the closet and covered it with the spare blanket.

“It’ll do,” he said. His mouth was filling up with blood again. He spat, hard.

“Arthur.”

He looked at her.

“You came for me,” she said.

He set his jaw and took her by the hand. “Let’s move.”

107.

The service elevator let them out in the kitchen. They raced through a dark, steamy labyrinth of prep tables and swinging plastic strips. There were large walk-in coolers full of goat dairy and racks of unbaked pierogi on sheet trays. The whole place stank of garbage and bleach. The first exterior door they found was locked. He kicked it. It held firm.

“What now?” Carlotta asked.

Before he could answer, there was a noise. They turned to see a largish shadow moving toward them across the kitchen tiles. The shadow belonged to a largish person smiling menacingly and swinging a largish chef’s knife in lazy figure eights.

“Hungry,” Yelena said.

“Not in the least,” Pfefferkorn said.

He pulled Carlotta to safety behind him and flicked open his toothbrush.

108.

“Really, Arthur, that was very impressive.”

They were running.

“Brutal,” Carlotta said. “But impressive.”

Somewhere not too far away, a siren began to wail.

“You damn near took her head off,” she said.

“Keep your voice down,” he said.

They had no trouble at all finding the right ship. It dominated the harbor, a weathered twenty-five-thousand-ton handy-size freighter with
in red letters along the starboard side. Jaromir was waiting for them by the gangplank. He blinked at their bloody clothes, then ushered them down into the cargo hold. There were hundreds of wooden crates, stacked eight high atop wooden pallets. They squeezed their way to the back of the hold, where Jaromir had cleared out a space and laid down a blanket. There was a bucket of water. He told them to keep quiet. He would let them know when they had reached the safety of international waters.

They waited. Pfefferkorn’s legs were cramping and it was hard for him to sit still. Carlotta massaged him and used the bucket to wash the blood from his face and hands. He couldn’t be sure whose blood it was, his or Yelena’s. Both, he assumed. He watched it come off impassively. Time ticked by. The sounds of a busy ship trickled down through the ventilation system: forklifts and winches, hydraulics and pistons. The engine began to churn and the whole ship juddered. Home free, he thought. Then he heard barking.

“They’re searching for us,” Carlotta whispered.

He nodded. He uncapped the stun gun and handed it to her. He opened the knife. The barking got louder and nearer and more insistent. There was a shrill metallic squeal as the cargo hold’s doors were hauled open. They could hear Jaromir arguing vociferously with a man in Zlabian. The dogs were going crazy, their barks echoing. Pfefferkorn could sense them straining in his direction. They could smell him. He thought fast and pulled the designer eau de cologne solvent out of his back pocket. It was amber and viscous, just like real designer eau de cologne. He had no idea if it was disguised to smell like anything, but he didn’t think twice. He pulled Carlotta out of the way, held the bottle out at arm’s length, and spritzed the side of a crate. A heady base note of sandalwood and musk, overlaid with ylang-ylang and bergamot, filled the air.

The effect was instantaneous, in more ways than one. The barks turned to whimpers. Pfefferkorn could hear the handler fighting to keep the dogs there, without success. They broke free and ran, and the handler’s voice faded as he chased after them. Right away the doors to the cargo hold slammed shut.

They were safe.

Except they weren’t.

“Arthur,” Carlotta said.

She pointed.

He looked.

The solvent was rapidly eating its way through the crate, the wood dissolving before their eyes. There was a creak and a spray of splinters. Pfefferkorn processed this information just fast enough to throw himself on top of Carlotta and tent his back. The bottom crate collapsed and the seven stacked atop it crashed inward on him, each one loaded with more than fifty-five kilograms of the world’s finest quality root vegetables.