Encore (38 page)

Now she was more calm. It could be done. She had to make this work. While he crushed her body against the wall, she reached for the holster, found the gun, and pulled it out. With a sudden forceful gesture, she yanked her knee upward and smashed it into his soft testicles. He stepped back, rage and amazement spreading over his face. Now she was free, and the gun was in her hand.

At that moment the train's whistle erupted into a loud wail. In the ensuing din she acted on impulse. She knew how to make a gun work, for Boris had possessed a small pearl-handled revolver he had taught her to use long ago. Now she rapidly cocked the small instrument, aimed it at the roaring Ballhausen—and fired, her eyes wide with fear.

The shot reverberated in the car. The baby started to shriek, but another whistle obliterated all sound, and then the train entered a tunnel, throwing the scene into total darkness. Natalia could not move. She breathed in small gulps, and her hands trembled so much that the gun slipped out of her fingers, bouncing like a toy on the carpet. Light returned, and she saw Ballhausen's ghastly face, his body crumpled on the floor like a manikin. I have killed a man, she thought, with bewilderment.

A knock on the door suddenly glued her in position. A voice said:
“Herr Oberst?
Colonel? I wanted to discuss with you about the—” Natalia did not hear the end of the sentence, knowing only that it was Püder 's voice, that doom had come to her in the tones of Pùder's precise German. He opened the door a crack, then completely. His tall form stood on the threshold of the private car, disbelieving and aghast. She could not speak.

Then, rapidly, Püder entered and shut the door, bolting it behind him. He strode to Natalia and planted his hands squarely on her shoulders, hurting her. “Tell me, Countess Kussova,” he said, his breath rasping. “Explain this if you will. Are you a spy?”

Her teeth began to chatter. Püder shook her once, twice, and the pins fell out of her hair one by one. He stepped back, and only then did he notice her torn bodice. “My God!” he cried.

“Are you going to turn me in?” she asked, her voice a whisper in the large car.

Püder glanced at the dead colonel and turned his back on him. He went to Arkady and picked him up, holding him out to his mother. With infinite bitterness, he sighed.
“Gnädige Frau,
I have already risked too much for that. Sit down, and let me think awhile. Thank heavens the train was making noise when you fired that gun. Who'd have thought a little girl like you could kill a man like Ballhausen? But the point is, what now?”

Natalia swallowed. A strange calm had settled over her. “You're going to have to turn me in,” she said tonelessly. “What else can you do? But you'll still be blamed for getting me on board under a false identity. What will happen to you?”

“I don't know. I dare not think. But this child still needs a mother. I'm going to get you out of here. In fifteen minutes we're due to pull into Mulhouse. At that time you will calmly exit from this train, as though to take a stroll with your son on the platform. You will disappear. I'm sorry about the jewels and your bags. You can't go back now. If the war ends, I shall try to get those jewels back to you, somehow. That's all I can do for you,
Gräfin.”

“But you?”

Tensing his jaw, Heinrich Püder shrugged. “It will be all right. I shall manage. Hopefully, people won't think to remember where you stepped off the train. I'm going to do my best to spring this murder as a suicide. Our company won't have time to think of you—they'll be too preoccupied with Ballhausen's sudden end.”

“Will it work?”

Püder laid his hands palms up in front of him. “Who can tell?” he said.

Natalia was numb with a surfeit of conflicting, overwhelming emotions. She must not look at the dead man, at his grimace of pain. She must not think of what she had done. But Püder! Tears came to her eyes, and all at once she started to sob, with fear, release, and memory. He stood beside her and placed an arm about her, restraining her, calming her. The train was screeching into a station and slowing down.

“It's time,” Püder said, in his stiff but kind voice. “Good luck,
Gräfin.”

Natalia took his hand and pressed it to her lips, tears falling upon it. Without looking back, she quickly picked up Arkady, went to the door and unlocked it. She stepped into the corridor and found an exit door. She pulled it open with effort, her whole body trembling with suppressed hysteria. She climbed down the stepladder onto the platform. Mulhouse. Would she and her son ever survive Mulhouse?

Shivering coatless in the wind, Natalia peered about her. No one else stood nearby. In Russian, she said to her son: “Grown men play at being toy soldiers, but in all this confusion one or two keep a human heart. If there were a God, he would protect Heinrich Püder.”

She did not know that at a tiny window above her, Pierre Riazhin sat watching her, in bewilderment and horror. But she had seen the blond Lieutenant framed in the window of the colonel's private car. Heinrich Püder watched, and Pierre Riazhin watched, as Natalia and her small son disappeared into the station house, two small, frail figures in the dusk.

Pierre, who above all found constriction hard to bear, now panicked. All the force of his muscles compressed by his cramped position in the lavatory, shivered from the need for release. He stood up and pushed up at the small square window, which appeared to be jammed from disuse. Frantically, he rammed his hands into the pockets of the brakeman's trousers, and there encountered a small metal object. He pulled it out, and to his infinite joy saw that it was a pocket knife. Standing on the commode, he worked the tip of this knife around the edges of the window, to dislodge whatever debris might have been blocking it. Perhaps dampness had glued the paint on the frames to that of the sill. When he next tried to open it, the window gave way. The pane slid upward.

Pierre looked below him. A guard had entered the station house, leaving the platform empty. He appraised the opening before him, and then, desperate for time, hoisted himself to it and threw his powerful legs onto the other side. How would he manage to pass through such a small space? With a superhuman effort, Pierre pushed hard against the top of the window, which blocked his way. The wooden frame broke, and glass fell about him, on his arms and legs, around his head. Concerned with the tinkling noise of the broken pane, he did not feel the shards pierce his skin. Pierre jumped, landing among the remnants of the shattered window. Dusk lay around him like a protective cloak, and the platform was still empty. There was no sign of Natalia and the baby.

Pierre shook the dust, shards, and splinters of wood from his clothing, and ran as quickly as he could to the side of the station house. He could not enter it from the back without rousing suspicion. German voices resounded from the inside. Two soldiers, bayonets on their left shoulders, came out of the terminal, and Pierre hid in the shadows. When they moved away, he slid along the wall of the terminal, making a right-angled turn to the left and at length a second one, until he stood in front of the small wooden shack. He straightened his collar, adjusted his shirt sleeves, and opened the door.

Still no Natalia. With renewed anxiety, Pierre saw that no one was in the station house, and he wondered if perhaps the two German soldiers had killed her and Arkady. How absurd! He had heard no screams, only normal voices raised in conversation. At that moment a door opened along a back wall, and he saw her, small and frail, Arkady rigid in her arms. She saw him at the same instant. Above the door an old French sign read
Dames.
She had been hiding in the women's lavatory and had heard the two soldiers on their way back to the platform.

They remained there for perhaps thirty seconds, relief sweeping over his features while shock froze hers. All at once the back door swung open, and a burly German guard entered on this bizarre reunion. He looked first at Pierre in his brakeman's uniform, noting the tiny cuts on his face, and then at the coatless young woman with the pale, sickly infant. “What's this?” he began, raising his bayonet immediately. He did not finish. Pierre threw himself on the guard, knocking him to the ground with the full force of his strong limbs and the unexpectedness of his assault.

Pierre did not hesitate. He held the guard pinned down, and reached for the brakeman's pocket knife that had already proved so useful. Savagely, he thrust the sharp blade once, twice, three times, into the guard's chest until the man grunted and went limp beneath him. Pierre jumped up, blood all over his trousers and seeping onto the floor of the station house. His face was contorted with violence.

Natalia had stayed to the side, unmoving, unblinking, horrified. When he approached her, she instinctively stepped back, like a woodland fawn taking flight from a wild boar. But he seized her wrist and propelled her into action, forcing her to run with him out the front of the terminal. Arkady wiggled in her arms and her mind was a jumble of clashing emotions, of chaotic sensations. But for Pierre there was no confusion.

Outside it was oddly quiet. Darkness had rapidly fallen on this cold and bleak October day in occupied France. Across the street Pierre spotted an empty cart hitched to a lone plow horse, itself tied to a post in front of what appeared to be a small tavern. He tightened his grip over Natalia's wrist and began to run toward it.

No one had seen them. “Get in,” he whispered. While he unhitched the reins of the horse, she hoisted herself and her son into the open wagon. She did not try to understand how Pierre had come to be here, in the middle of her own nightmarish adventure, or why his face was caked with blood and why he was wearing a brakeman's uniform. Her mental faculties were paralyzed; she reacted like an automaton. The child whimpered now, a steady noise, but she did not hear him.

Pierre climbed into the cart, and now the horse started on its way, its uneven canter resounding in Natalia's ears like a kettledrum on the hard cobbles of the street. It was a charming little town, but she did not watch the houses go by. Pierre had removed his jacket and was laying it over her shoulders. Her teeth were chattering and Arkady had gone completely still, his small face tinged with blue from the cold.

A wooden sign loomed up, indicating directions and distances from Dijon and Baucourt. Pierre pointed to the placard pointing due south:
Frontiere suisse, 40 kilometres.
“That would be Basel if I'm not mistaken,” he said tersely. “That's where we've got to go. Rub his hands and feet, Natalia. Breathe on his fingers. And move your own toes to keep the blood flowing.”

She started to cry, small sobs erupting from her uncontrollably. “It's all right,” he said, more gently. “I had to kill the bastard, there was no alternative.” They had proceeded well away from the station, and the buildings became fewer and fewer. “We're reaching open countryside,” he said.

“I shot a man,” she intoned dully. “On the train. A German officer. He was going to rape me—”

Pierre turned to look at her, his black eyes alive with mahogany reflections. A spasm contorted his face. She continued, in the same monotone: “Püder will have to pay for what I've done. No one will think it was a suicide—no one.”

Pierre did not understand, but he cried out, passionately: “Any man crazy enough to rape a woman could just as easily shoot himself! Stop torturing yourself, Natalia.” Giving way to surprise, he said:
“You
killed a man?”

She started to laugh, breathlessly, the sound high and unstrung. “To save my virtue!” she said, giggling, her eyes bright with tears. “Can you imagine? My virtue? Aren't you going to laugh with me, Pierre?” She stopped and bit her lip, her face mirroring her amazement. “Pierre,” she said, and it was almost a question.
“Pierre.
Good God, what are you doing here? Why are you dressed like this and what's the matter with your face? It's full of blood!”

Her fingers reached out to touch his cheek, and in his fevered state, their cold tips made him shiver. “It doesn't matter,” he answered, looking away, suddenly ill at ease. “I had to come with you on the train. You're still too much a part of my life, Natalia.”

“Don't say that. Already a virtual stranger, an enemy officer has risked his career, his honor, and maybe even his life because of me. Not you, too. You mustn't do that, I can't handle it. Think of yourself, Pierre.”

“But I am. This is something I needed to do. I don't know about this other fellow, the German lieutenant. Once I fell in love with you at a ballet performance—why couldn't he have experienced the same sudden emotion? Was there anything between you, Natalia?”

“Not at all. I hardly knew him. But he was a man of honor. I suppose war does that to people—it brings out the heroic in them, or the most abject baseness—like the colonel's. When reason steps in, Heinrich Püder will be very sorry indeed that he ever asked me into the Exerzierplatz.” She stared ahead of her without expression. Suddenly she burst out: “I can't stand it! I never wanted to owe anybody anything, and now there's Püder, and you. Why couldn't all of you have let us alone, Arkady and me? We would have managed somehow!”

“You don't owe a debt to someone who is repaid by his own desire to give,” Pierre replied. Anger suffused his face. “Damn it, Natalia! You always were selfish, weren't you? Nothing ever changes your smugness. We've both killed people and escaped from certain slaughter ourselves. Don't you think this has made us partners of sorts? Püder can take care of himself. He's probably like Boris, a golden boy who can get himself out of any scrape. These men don't deserve your compassion. Reserve it for us in this miserable cart, with this plodding farm horse! We're made of flesh and bone, they aren't! Mercury runs through their veins, not human blood.”

She turned to him then, and her resolve started to shake, to come apart. The breath came out of her in small gulps, and the child shook against her in her arms. It was so unreal—a situation of
déjá-vu
because Pierre was here, but otherwise it was wrong, all wrong: the time of day, the clothes, the countryside. “Why have you done this for me?” she cried, suddenly very small and frail. “You know I can do nothing for you in return. I can't even promise you love—that's part of the past for both of us, Pierre.” She was too exhausted to reason it out, and besides, they had ridden this merry-go-round countless times before.