Where has that bitch got to? Where do I look for her?
I turned the wheel and feverishly thought over my plan of action.
I absolutely had to find Magda. Without her I could consider myself a dead man. But if I could locate her in the next two or three hours, then maybe I’d turn a few more somersaults, maybe the sun would shine on me for a few more days.
Damn it! It’s getting dark and there’s no time at all.
Right. Let’s reconstruct the chain of events.
Jurgen, three greenhorns and I went down to the workshop, Magda stayed upstairs. Nobody, obviously, twisted her arms or bound her eyes. Hearing the sounds of battle, the two oddballs left with her ran off to help their own. Stop. I met one of them, which means the second stayed with her. Where is he? I saw no more corpses. So-so-so. Got it. I am currently driving somebody’s Lada 2109. It was standing with a warmed-up engine and the keys in the ignition by the institute gates. I dashed out of the gates, jumped into the only – day off! – motor in the car park, started it and raced off to Mamon’s dacha. But I had arrived at the institute with Jurgen in a different car, and that car was a red Beemer. Where’s the Beemer? Presumably in the same place as Magda. Exactly. The two guards left upstairs heard the explosion. One of the guards rushed off to help his own. The second grabbed Magda and drove to the dacha to warn Mamon. So Magda is at the dacha. It will be hard to smoke her out of there, almost impossible, but it has to be done. Only she can say where Hans is.
She knew his whereabouts.
I was certain: Hans is in Moscow at present, and Magda knows exactly where.
If only I can get to her.
I drove up onto a snow-covered hillock overgrown with trees. Through the bare branches I made out the dacha settlement. Mamon’s dacha rose like a mighty fortress among a couple of dozen far from poor little mansions. I focused my gaze on the guards wandering about the yard, on some sort of incomprehensible domestic staff, and was struck by the absence of any alarm. What’s this? I cast my eyes over the cars standing in the yard and did not find the Beemer that had supposedly brought Magda. Hmm.
What to do?
If I knew Magda was at the dacha, it would all be simple. There are no impregnable fortresses, and therefore a night assault on Mamon’s residence would be arranged and – whizz-whizz-whizz, carry off the finished article. But Magda wasn’t there.
Which meant she had gone straight to Hans.
Why hadn’t she warned the locals? Why were they behaving so calmly? Why… They’re running about! Bustling! They’ve heard about the explosion! Who told them? Magda isn’t here, and the other witnesses are soaring heavenwards. Ah. I forgot about the existence of the telephone. They rang the dacha from the institute. The gatekeepers stayed alive after all, so they raised the alarm. Ai-ai-ai, the blokes with the guns are getting into cars. Now the rotten score-settling will begin.
Time to bail out of here fast.
I turned round somehow on the narrow icy country road and, recalling the road to Moscow with difficulty, raced away from the alarmed dacha, onward to Magda. If only I can reach the little German, I’ll shake the whole soul out of her.
I gave it more gas. The car shot sharply forward. Hmm. Too sharply for black ice. Vovka never drove like that, he was a calm bloke. But this little mare really tears away. A new car, evidently. Pleasant. And studded tyres too, by the look of it, which is doubly pleasant.
I shot out onto the highway and, shoving everyone aside, raced for Moscow. Where to look for Magda there, I had no idea. Then again, if one makes the assumption that she is a completely brainless woman, contrary to Jurgen’s assertions about her exceptional intellect, then in that case one can guess at the existence of a certain known little place. Let’s go there. I’ll be there in an hour. And if I give it more gas, in about forty minutes, if I don’t fly off the road. I glanced at the speedometer – a hundred and thirty. Oh, the traffic police will be watching me go with the eyes of wild beasts and, sure as anything, will fit out a dashing pursuit after me. Another possible problem. All right. While there are no checkpoints, we’ll keep to this speed. All the more so as I’m not the only lively one. There’s a Merc tearing along behind, wanting to overtake.
I glanced in the wing mirror and went cold. Out of the open window of the Merc (twenty degrees of frost!) some bloke was staring at me, vaguely familiar. No, I’d never met that mug anywhere. But the object he stuck out of the window a second later struck me as very, very familiar. A Kalashnikov! Are they planning to do me in?
Not a chance!
I came off the gas, immediately worked the wheel right, then left. The car went into a skid. I gave it gas again. Describing an intricate trajectory, Vovka clipped the Merc’s nose with his left rear wing. Its driver – evidently no master of road pirouettes – dropped his speed, and very sharply. Just what was needed. I, on the contrary, gave it more gas and pulled a good hundred metres ahead at once, which was very gratifying. I gave it still more gas. A hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. The car began to be noticeably thrown from side to side. Adding more speed would be unsafe. Damn it! Where is my Berta! I’m riding in some old crate, risking my arse, and desperate gunmen are sitting on my tail behind.
I glanced in the mirror again. The Mercedes was tirelessly devouring the distance that was safe for me. Slowly but surely reducing it to killing range.
The bloke got out the rifle again.
I threw the car into a sharp right turn, tucked in behind some greenhorn in a Moskvich and braked. As soon as the Mercedes repeated my manoeuvre, I gave it hard gas and overtook the Moskvich on the right, nearly running into the backside of a truck crawling along in front of me in the process. I was lucky. I got through the gap between the Moskvich and the GAZ in time. That manoeuvre didn’t come off for the Mercedes. While I was giving it gas and racing, racing forward, my pursuers were braking, overtaking the Moskvich on the left in accordance with the traffic regulations, running into another greenhorn, and another, and another… And I was far away. I raced forward with one single thought: «If only I can reach the city, they won’t dare shoot there».
Ha-ha-ha, three times over.
My pursuers let off the first burst at my wheels as I raced past the traffic police post on the ring road and rolled into dusk-shrouded Orekhovo.
The moment I saw the flashes of fire from the rifle barrel, I wrenched sharply right. Nearly turning over, the little 2109 mounted some pedestrian path, ploughed along the kerb with its underside and crawled out onto a normal road, perpendicular to the Kashirskoye highway. I stamped the accelerator into the floor, noting as I did so that the Mercedes had raced past the little appendix I had found. While the lads are stopping and backing up, I need to break away from them by a decent distance. And then I’ll turn into some courtyard and abandon the car. And that will be the last you hear of me…
I raced forward, winding through the little streets. The Mercedes did not fall behind. At its wheel sat a not very experienced but insolent and self-assured driver. Every riddle offered him, this horseman solved. Not always the first time, but nonetheless…
I rolled out onto some bridge, came off the gas and rolled, rolled slowly to the other bank. Why? I don’t know. But I can say definitely that it is not for nothing that I loathe bridges, along which crowds of greenhorns are always strung out. You can’t get round anyone, they all crawl slowly in single file. Rat-a-tat-tat. Dry clicks scattered like a handful of beans along the side of the car, but didn’t touch me. Thanks for that at least. Shoving the sluggishly plodding cars aside with dull thuds, I tore forward. Just as well the dimensions of my small-engined car allowed me to squeeze, with a scraping noise but nonetheless, through the small gaps between vehicles. It was harder for the Merc… No, the pushy driver got through there too, came after me as if driving a tank.
Ah, I broke out into open space after all. Now forward with all your might, brother, show what you’re capable of!
Stop! I saw the accursed Mercedes, which had come up on me like a ghost so close that you could have hit the rifle barrel with a gob of spit frozen in flight. I wrenched the wheel left, putting my side under the insolent thing while keeping my foot on the gas. Boom! A dull blow, a shove. Now hard forward!
Too late!
My car spun round. It flew out onto the oncoming lane, flew across it in an unthinkable skid, miraculously not going under a dump truck in the process. Ba-baamsss! My 2109 flew out onto some snow-covered open ground.
Gas!!!
The engine roared, the car jerked and raced across the untouched virgin snow away from the road on which – I could see in the rear-view mirror – the Mercedes stood with its astonished occupants. Heh, they’d decided to drive after me too, but it isn’t so simple to do. You have to let the oncoming lorries past, and they’re just itching to run over fattened bourgeois in a foreign car.
Whaa-a-at?!!! The 2109 began shaking and thrashing about like something in a washing machine drum. I let go of the wheel, grabbed it again and drove my head into the roof, nearly breaking my neck in the process. The car heeled over on its side, travelled a way apparently on two wheels, resumed a normal position and described a circle about its own axis one-two-three-four times. My brains nearly ran out of my ears from such a headlong spinning. I blinked myself clear and was dumbfounded. The car had been carried out onto the Moscow river! The ice cracked beneath me. So that’s how it is!!!
I feverishly turned the ignition key – the engine had stalled! – and got nowhere. Again! Aha, it started. Now forward! Forward! The car, pushing off from the sagging ice with its studs, tore away from the dangerous spot. I glanced back. Water welling up through the cracks had stained the site of my intended submersion with dark patches. Lucky so far. One–nil in my favour.
And what’s this? My pursuers in the Mercedes had finally come out at the point where I had driven onto the December ice, apparently solid. Without a second’s hesitation, the fine fellows threw themselves into the chase after me. Perhaps they shouldn’t have. I did say that the driver of the Merc was an insolent and not very clever bloke. He hadn’t taken into account that the weight of his car with its passengers was about twice mine. And so, having rolled about ten metres over the breaking ice, his car went into the water like a submarine off the slipway of a shipyard in newsreel footage. I saw that as a child. The lads’ game with fate ended with the score nil–one in favour of the sly-eyed lady.
But what’s this? Not far from the site of the Mercedes’s submersion, some hunchbacked little car resembling my own shot out onto the ice and raced after me with its headlights blazing. Where did that lot come from? Part two of the chase? Not all the bandits drowned? Heated by the confrontation of «my 2109 versus their Mercedes», had I failed to notice that a second crew was creeping stealthily along behind the Mercedes? No question, I have to bail out from these ones too.
I raced forward, listening warily to the sounds flying into the cabin from outside. Under the wheels there seemed to be no cracking, but I could feel the ice heaving beneath the car. God forbid I should come out onto the main current. The ice is thin there. Get into that and you can send greetings to the ruffe from the motoring divers! Have to give it more gas. The higher the speed, the greater the load the ice can bear. Those daredevils in the Mercedes must have skipped physics at school and never water-skied in their lives. Why did they start braking? Stupid. Then again, the drowned Mercedes worried me least of all. But the lads who had continued the pursuit were starting to get on my nerves.
What to do?
A vital question. A hundred and fifty years the answer has been sought and all to no purpose. What is to be done? What is to be done?
And what’s that little light burning? Aha, fuel running out. Sad news. And up ahead something dark that looks like a patch of open water. Sadder still, if… No, lucky. The open water turned out to be local. I managed to drive round it. I glanced back. The lads behind drove round it too, even contrived to close on me.
How much longer am I to ride about on the ice? It has started bending suspiciously under me again, started heaving. There must be some plant up ahead discharging its effluent into the Moscow river. Effluent that doesn’t freeze, which is why the ice was thinning. I hugged the bank more closely. There the ice bent too, though less. When I had been driving down the middle of the river, the sensations were – a complete trip. As if racing over waves on a jet ski, pulled left, right, nearly made me seasick. And how are those lads doing? Aha, not falling behind. All right. We’ll roll a bit slower, slower still. Closing the distance. What? They’re getting ready to shoot.
Here goes nothing.
I swung out into the middle of the river, flooring the gas, and raced for the opposite bank. Something seemed to crunch behind me.
Got it!
The ice under my wheels cracked, broke, all but crumbled. The car that had followed me, alas, caught with its wheels not a solid surface but a mush over flowing cold water. Their car went to the bottom. Not straight away, of course, but in about ten seconds. Idiots, playing it safe, they kept the doors open so as to jump out more easily. If the doors had been closed, the car might have bubbled about on the surface for a minute.
I hugged the opposite bank and rolled forward at last in calm, well-earned solitude. About a kilometre on I discovered steps leading up from the embankment. Quietly I drove up to them, tried to drive out onto the bank, but without success. Only sank the rear of the car in the water. The ice broke up under the weight of the stationary car. I climbed out of the car through the open window and ran up the steps.
I needed Magda. A stupid, witless German woman. I know the type inside out. What’s in her head? Kirche, kitchen and kinder. The first she doesn’t attend, the last she hasn’t got, so we shall look in the kitchen. I have to go to the flat.