Chapter 47: Happiest Place in the World
Rudy could have retraced the route he’d taken to Moscow from Vladimir, turned left at the city monument, left where he had stopped just a week ago, gone through Suzdal, maybe checked in with the Captain, asked if he had a jeep to trade for his old bike. But the E115 to Yaroslavl would cut over 60 kilometers off their trip. They’d need to stop twice for gas, but traffic would be light. Rudy guessed they could make Galich before sunrise.
Not that it looked like they would see sunrise. The rain had stopped in Moscow, but clouds hung around and made nearly a proper night out of the long June twilight.
They both were dressed better now for the wind, with gloves, so Rudy pushed the bike past 110 kph. By the time they got out in the open and up to full highway speed, Rudy felt his own metabolism kicking in and keeping him warm enough that he wouldn’t be distracted by fingers or toes going numb or arms and legs aching from the chill. He hoped Ksenia was as comfortable; at least he couldn’t feel her shivering. They couldn’t talk: she was secluded behind the visor of his helmet, and he would not hear her through the wind and the thick stocking cap he’d pulled down over his ears. That silence was maddening—he wanted to ask her how she was Black Crane’s boss, how any of this was possible. Maybe she would ask for his story, too, although she seemed to know something about his life, while he knew nothing of hers.
Even if they didn’t have a world of impossibilities to discuss, he could have used her voice, questions and answers, to keep him awake. The road, the wind, and adrenaline were keeping him awake, but they were going to ride all night, and he wasn’t sure how long it might take for terror to exhaust him.
And her voice would have assured him he hadn’t already fallen asleep, wasn’t already dreaming. Ksenia, the girl he’d taken to Galich—she couldn’t be the woman who ran Black Crane, the woman he had saved from an FSB raid, the woman who had saved him from Chechen assassins by shooting them dead.
But the assurance of her voice would have to wait. He had to keep his attention on the road and all the hazards that could come at them from any direction. Once again, he simply had to get Ksenia to Galich.
45 minutes out, outside Sergeev Posad, Ksenia tapped his chest twice and pointed at a 24-hour gas station. Rudy saw maybe another hour of fuel on the gauge, but he didn’t know when or if that they would find another station further on before this tank ran out. Besides, Ksenia couldn’t see the gas gauge; maybe she needed a stop for other reasons.
Rudy pulled up to a pump and switched off the engine. Ksenia swung off the back, stretched her legs, flexed her feet in Volodya’s clumsy boots. “Are you doing o.k.?” Rudy asked. “Warm enough?”
“It’s been a while,” she said, “and my feet still hurt. She glanced up and around, finding the surveillance cameras on the canopy and over the store’s door. “Keep your head down. I’ll go in.”
Without removing her helmet, she turned and headed toward the store. Rudy felt an unexpected panic. Across the bike, he reached for her. “Ksenia, wait!”
She stopped and spun, seeming angry. “I’ll be fine. I’m not—” But then she noticed something in Rudy’s look, and her own expression calmed. She stepped close so she could speak softly. “This is not Astrakhan. This is Galich. We are going together.” Then she clumped away. Rudy waited, the pump beeped, and he filled his tank.
Ksenia came back, with two small cups of hot coffee. They downed the bitter, metallic brew quickly, warming their cores. Then Rudy got back in the saddle and kicked the engine to life, and Ksenia got on and wrapped herself around Rudy again to keep that coffee warmth in for as long as possible.
The country rolled by in darkness. The highway was empty, the villages mostly dark. They turned right before Yaroslavl, staying out of the city and south of the Volga. Not until Kostroma did they slow down. South of the city, he saw the sign for Ivanovo and Vladimir. That was the road to Suzdal. The rest of the way was the road they’d ridden before. He remembered the bridge across the Volga into the heart of the city, but that was in August daylight, in Saturday traffic. This crossing in the dark, steady, straight, only one fish truck to dodge, rang few clear memory bells.
What did ring his bell was the feeling of Ksenia in the saddle with him. He’d given a few girls, strangers, rides across town, short hops out and back from the bar or to their apartments. He’d taken Vitaly and Maria’s kids for short rides; they both clutched his ribs like frightened baby monkeys. Maybe Ksenia had a bike of her own and rode all the time in Moscow; he didn’t know (just one more of the myriad things he didn’t know, and plunging farther into the night, he couldn’t conceive of time slowing down to allow him to ask and find those things out). But she felt as natural in the saddle behind him as the bike itself. She sensed the road as well as he did, leaned into curves, absorbed the bumps. Even through her heavy coat and his own jacket and thick sweatshirt, she felt the same there this black Monday midnight as she had that brilliant Saturday summer day.
They stopped for a second fill-up on the north side of Kostroma. The station was locked and dark. The automatic pump dispensed about 70 rubles’ worth of gas for every 100 rubles that Rudy fed it. Rudy thought of the sleazy station boss who had ogled Ksenia 20 years ago. Different station, farther north, but apparently one just couldn’t get an honest fill-up around Kostroma. But he’d rather lose a couple more hundred-ruble notes than gratify that leering slug again or the inheritors of his roadside hovel.
Then again, he thought as he glanced at Ksenia standing watch by the pump, facing the road, hand in her gun pocket, if they found that station, Ksenia might put her gun to the man’s head and demand a refund. She might give the man what he deserved.
Rudy shook that grim image away and topped off the tank. They left without a word.
The clouds were breaking east of Kostroma. A few stars peeked out shyly from the patches of light northern sky to their left. The sun was rolling closer to the horizon. If they had left an hour later, they’d have been riding right into the sunrise.
If they had left an hour later, they would have been dead. A second, larger team would have come to find out why the two Chechens hadn’t reported back in. Police or FSB would have scoured the neighborhood and shot them down before they got on the E115. Rudy found alternatives impossible to imagine. Survival now demanded going, every possible minute, farther and farther from Moscow.
But Galich? Why Galich?
They reached the outskirts of Ksenia’s hometown just a few minutes before 3:00. Clouds lay east and south, but above Galich, the sky was clear, and the north horizon was a milky green, giving enough light that he could see all around, outside the glare of his headlight. Before Ksenia patted Rudy’s chest, he recognized the turn into town, the road toward the town square, and the turn toward Ksenia’s neighborhood, toward her parents’ apartment. But Ksenia leaned even closer and shouted him left, west, na ozero—to the lake.
* * *
They rolled down Ulitsa Ozernaya, Lake Street, unchanged, unpaved, puddly but passable, past the same old jumble of houses and gardens, to the well-packed gravel at the dead end. They parked the bike next to two garden spades leaning inside the wire garden fence of the last house on the left. Ksenia pulled one spade over the fence and hung her helmet on the other one. Heads on pikes, Rudy thought. They hurried down the footpath—the ground was slippery, but the mud was not deep; Ksenia used the shovel as a walking stick to keep her footing in her big borrowed boots.
At the shore, they found the rafts and poles. He couldn’t tell if the raft they’d taken 20 years ago was still here, but the assortment on shore looked like they’d been around for longer than that: weathered and mossy planks, rusty pontoons. Ksenia pointed to a small, sturdy raft, three sheets of heavily lacquered plywood with black traction strips glued to the deck, all bolted to thick plastic floats. With her foot Ksenia nudged a long white plastic pipe free from the sand.
Rudy looked back up the path and around the shore. No one was following. He heard no motors. But… “Ksenia, a raft won’t outrun the FSB.”
“This is important.”
Rudy wasn’t used to arguing with Ksenia. “Staying alive is important. Getting out of here is important.”
“They won’t find us here,” Ksenia insisted. “I need to do this.” Her voice was the only human sound on the lake.
Rudy shook his head and helped Ksenia drag the raft to the water. She grabbed her shovel (well, somebody’s shovel) and climbed aboard. Rudy lay the pole on the deck, gave the raft a shove from the sand, and after a couple wet steps joined her on deck.
They poled across the bay to the island. The water was a little lower—they wove around more grassy tufts and slodged across shallow silt more often than he recalled from their previous outing. Rudy imagined the FSB in a roaring fanboat chasing them across the shallows.
They had the bay to themselves, except for one other couple, barefoot figures visible in the twilight, spooned together on a dark blanket at the eastern tip of the island. They did not move. A blue cooler sat near their heads. Ksenia directed Rudy to pole the raft away from the sleeping pair, up the shore farther west.
They beached quietly behind a shrubby point that hid the sleepers from their view. Some creature plunked into the water; frogs and crickets stopped chirping as they landed, then resumed as the humans trudged up the sandy path.
Ksenia led Rudy to the highest point—the mountaintop, she had called it once upon a time. The shrubs thinned here, and the island supported just a couple small, scraggly trees. The mountaintop offered a mostly clear view across the lake to the smoldering horizon.
Ksenia stood in the middle of the clearing, facing east, directly toward town. She studied the trees and the ground around her, and took two careful steps to the left. She started shoveling, taking shallow scoops, dumping the sandy soil into a careful pile close by the new hole. Soon the spade clinked against glass, and Ksenia knelt and freed two bottles from the earth. Across the caps in faded script—Fanta.
Ksenia rubbed the glass clean with her gloves. “Look how well you sealed them. The labels are gone, but the paper—” she peered into one bottle, then the other “—your paper, looks as white as when you pulled it from your pocket.”
Rudy was amazed by the sight of the paper, torn in two, rolled into the Fanta bottles they had drunk on this spot, the mountaintop. But he was also worried. This didn’t feel at all like a plan. “Ksenia, did we come here just—”
“No, of course not,” she said, as if reading his mind. She handed him the shovel. “Dig further, another half-meter.” Ksenia held the two bottles close to her chest, but she knelt next to the hole and watched intently as Rudy dug. The sandy soil gave way easily. He struck metal. “Stop!” Ksenia said, laying the bottles aside in the grass. She reached into the hole and pushed sand away to reveal a metal cash box. She pulled the box out, struggled with the lid, pounded the sides a couple times with her fist, and finally pried it open. Inside was another container, a bright orange plastic camping container, waterproof, meant for cell phones. Ksenia pulled the plastic container out and dropped the cash box. Ksenia snapped off the orange lid and shook free a single silver key clipped to a ring and a small blue carabiner.
Ksenia slumped and resituated herself so she could sit and hug her knees close while facing the northeast. Her eyes went from the key to the lake, to Galich across the water.
“There is a repairman in Petrozavodsk, on Lake Onega. He does a going business in documents, travel papers, other things people like us need. He holds a safe for me. This key opens it. Inside are cash, a clean debit card, and phones and papers that the repairman updates every six weeks and locks away. This key is the way out.”
“Out… Lake Onega… to Finland?”
“To Finland, and then… wherever.”
Rudy looked around, as if trying to spot the road, imagining the route to Lake Onega and Finland. Was there no safe place left in Russia for her, or for him?
Rudy leaned on the shovel. “Ksenia, if you need that key to escape, why not have it in Moscow, in your hand?”
Ksenia curled tighter, nose almost to her knees, then looked out again at the still water. “Rudy, sit next to me. I will explain. But the sun is about to rise. Sit next to me and watch.”
They were running, had much farther to run, run or die. Rudy thought Ksenia must understand this better than he did. Galina Filipovna wouldn’t stop to watch the sunrise. But here was Black Crane’s Galina Filipovna saying that the most important thing for them at this moment was to watch the sun rise together.
And who was Rudy to question any Galina Filipovna?
Rudy sat down on the grass next to her. She leaned on his shoulder, and he leaned on her. The sun pushed its first sharp, pink edge into the thick haze on the horizon. The muted sun bloomed and rolled south, chasing the distant clouds over their shoulders, clouds that continued their retreat as they glowed red and orange.
“We saw here stars and moon. Now we see the sun. Everything… here.”
Ksenia reached for the bottles and gave them to Rudy. “Please, open them. Read me my message.”
Rudy took one bottle and wrestled with the rusty cap. It would not budge. He needed his knife to pry the caps off both bottles. He put the caps in his jacket pocket. The papers had unfurled inside; he used a small stick to coax a corner of each paper to the bottle opening and tugged each paper out.
Ksenia had torn the sheet in half from top to bottom. He smoothed out the rolls side by side on the cashbox. His old scratchings on the reverse, flight numbers and times and other little notes in his blocky capital letters, were faintly visible, backwards, like comedy pidgin Russian, beneath Ksenia’s quick penmanship, not florid, firm but friendly. He read:
Greetings from the past! We congratulate you—you have found a message from the two happiest people in the world right now, in the happiest place in the world. We pass this glorious happiness on to you. Live happily and healthily, and help others do the same. All the best! Tsarina Ksenia and Her Knight Errant Rudy.
Rudy laughed first, but only by a single ha. When Ksenia joined him, they doubled over, laughing quietly to tears. He couldn’t laugh, Rudy thought. He shouldn’t… but here, he could do nothing else.
“I was such a child,” Russia’s second-biggest Mafia boss finally said, collapsed against Rudy’s shoulder.
The sun now fully crested the horizon, distinctly more orange than when it peeked out.
Ksenia pivoted so she could face Rudy. The deep orange light caught her profile. She took his right hand in both of hers. “I never told you,” she said, her eyes flitting from his eyes to their hands to the ground, back and forth. “When you brought me here, the first time, it wasn’t to see Mama and Papa. Not just them. Andrei—” she winced, not with the angry resistance she showed limping on her sore feet, but with agony she could not defeat “—my friend, Andrei, had this plan. He wanted me to help. He would have botched it if I hadn’t come. He never would have gotten the backers or the money, I never would have gotten involved….”
Ksenia’s shoulders sagged. “It was just to save the factory. But it grew, into Black Crane. I didn’t expect—” for a moment, Ksenia met Rudy’s eyes, and even as his own thoughts reeled, he saw more prominently the shift in Ksenia’s eyes, from her vision of the broad sweep of her secret history to what she saw in him. “I never expect you. You just keep showing up, once every ten years, when I need you, when you need me, when we need each other.”
Those last words dissolved. Ksenia shook and sobbed. Rudy put his free hand on her shoulder, pulled himself closer, and held on.
Ksenia wasn’t just Black Crane. She was Black Crane because he’d made it possible. His mind went blank before the enormity of where he was, who she was, what they’d done. Too big, too much… focus on the moment, on what we can do….
When Ksenia stopped shaking, Rudy leaned back to look in her eyes. “What do we need now?” Rudy asked.
Ksenia wiped her eyes. “I put the key here as a failsafe. If things went this badly, I wanted to force myself to come here, to see the mountaintop, to look Galich, the town, the lake, straight in the eye and ask, Really? Run away? Are things that bad that I can’t stay and fight and make things right?”
Ksenia turned away from Rudy and faced the sun. “Rudy, is it that bad? Do we have to run away?”
Her face was golden. Her eyes shone. Her dark hair, still held back by the red bandana, lay still in the breezeless morning, flat but shimmering like the lake. Both of their worlds were being taken from them and torn apart. People they loved, like themselves, were running for their lives, dodging bullets, or already dead. Rudy could see all that, but more than anything else, he saw Ksenia’s face, and the split note on the ground between them, and her royal signature, in the happiest place in the world.
He looked down at their hands, then up at the sun, northeast, like the world he saw from the bashnya in Suzdal, now his world.
“We can’t fix this,” he said. “We have to run.”
They both looked at the sun for a few more moments. Ksenia sighed and sagged but finally recovered herself. She released Rudy’s hands and stood. “Are you ready?”
Rudy scrambled to his feet. “Of course.”
A smile grappled with the last of Ksenia’s tears. She picked up her note, folded it around the silver key, and handed it to Rudy. “Petrozavodsk. You’ll take me, good knight?” The question mark was barely audible.
Rudy tucked the note and key inside his jacket pocket. “Yes, tsarina.”