Reamde

Sokolov ascended to the second floor, shouldered his way into a vacant office, strode to the front, and kicked broken glass out of a window, giving him a clear exit to the scaffold. He swung the garbage bag out onto the platform, then clambered out onto the planking. A blue tarp, much the worse for wear, was dangling there. He was richly supplied with knives and used one of those to cut a tarp loose with a few quick strokes. Rather than take the time to fold, or even wad, it up, he just threw it over his shoulders like a cape. He picked up the garbage bag and began striding toward the corner where he had seen the carter.

When he reached the end of the scaffolding, he set the garbage bag down, grabbed the bamboo rail, vaulted over it, and found purchase for his feet. Leaning out and looking down, he was just able to see the edge of the carter’s conical straw hat, a few feet below him. Sokolov grabbed the garbage bag, dragged it off the end of the platform, and let it drop into the side street, just a meter or so out of the carter’s reach.

The carter stepped into the street to investigate. Sokolov could only see the top of his hat.

When the carter looked up to see where the mystery bag had come from, Sokolov nailed him in the forehead with a stack of currency two inches thick. It tumbled down his nose, bounced off his chin, and ended up trapped between his hands and his gaunt belly.

It took the carter a few moments to believe his eyes. Sokolov had no idea how much money a carter made, and only a vague notion of the value of that brick of bills, but he assumed that the disparity between those two figures was noteworthy.

When the carter looked up again, he found himself staring into the barrel of Sokolov’s pistol.

Sokolov pointed to the cart, then made a gesture indicating that the carter should pull it into the side street.

The carter made a move somewhere between a nod and a bow, scurried back under the platform for a moment, then pulled his cart out so that it was directly beneath Sokolov. Sokolov dropped into it. In the same movement, he swept the blue tarp over him. He reached out for the garbage bag, but the carter, understanding his intent, had already picked this up. Sokolov pulled it in under the blue tarp. He and the carter were now staring at each other through a tunnel that Sokolov had made in the tarp, about the size of his hand. Sokolov jerked his head down the side street, indicating the direction he wanted the carter to travel.

The cart began to move. Sokolov unzipped another pocket, pulled out his phone, brought up the photo gallery app, and flipped through pictures until he had found an image of one of the big Western-style business hotels along the waterfront: one of those places where it was possible to be a white person without attracting one’s own personal Stonehenge of cataleptic, openmouthed gapers. He got the carter’s attention with a loud psst, then showed him the image. The carter took a moment to focus on it—his eyes weren’t so good, perhaps—but then he seemed to understand. He changed his course and pulled Sokolov onto a larger street that was even more hysterically crowded than usual. Police and aid vehicles were coming toward them in echelons. Sokolov pulled the edges of the tarp inward and got his weight on them so that his shelter could not be stripped off by a velleity of the wind or the hand of a curious boy. Blue light shone through the tarp. It was warm under there, but he would just have to survive that. His heart was pounding at something like 180 beats a minute, which meant that his body was generating an enormous amount of heat. He rested his head on his arm and closed his eyes and began making a conscious effort to slow his breathing. He had water in the CamelBak pouch strapped to his back. He rubbed some into his hair so that it would evaporate and cool off his head, then put the end of the tube in his mouth and began taking little sips every ten seconds or so. The cart started and stopped, pivoted and lunged through the throng. He was alive, and he was putting distance between himself and the epicenter.

“MY BAD,” YUXIA kept saying, as the van pulled up the ramp onto the ring road, in hot pursuit of the dust-covered taxi that contained Zula. “My bad, my bad, my bad.”

“There is no bad,” Csongor said. He had to shout to be heard, since, as they accelerated to freeway speed, the wind began howling through the crack in the van’s roof. “You did nothing bad.”

“But I saw her,” Yuxia keened. “She ran right past me! I honked but she did not look back. Aiyaa!”

They seemed to be passing a lot of traffic. Marlon, seated next to Csongor in the second row of seats, directly behind Yuxia, leaned forward and made a sharp remark. Yuxia glanced at the speedometer for the first time since the journey had begun, and the blue boot pulled back from the gas pedal.