– What’s this? – I asked, examining a cheque for fifty thousand marks.
– The advance.
– I understand that. Why in such a castrated form? Hans pays in cash.
– And how do you picture that? Me carrying fifty thousand marks on a train and burning up with impatience and joy: «When at last shall I hand them over to dear Arbalet?»
– Logical.
I studied Hans’s sweeping signature, grimaced with displeasure once more, but by now only for form’s sake, and hid the cheque in my pocket.
– What else? – I asked.
– The car is by the entrance.
I got up from the table, went over to the window and, pressing my forehead to the glass, picked out a bright red BMW 3 Series.
«Nice little machine. The assignment will be carried out with pleasure,» I thought.
Magda came and stood beside me, wriggled her little forehead against the glass for a couple of seconds and said: «You can’t see it from here. Let’s go down.»
We went down.
My joyful mood evaporated without a trace. I kicked the flat tyre of the peeling Lada 2108 that the delighted Magda had pointed out to me, and barked:
– What are you grinning at?
– It’s a good car, and only five thousand marks.
«They’ll drive me into my grave with their economising,» I ground out through my teeth, and climbed into the boot of the beige wreck.
Having pumped up the tyres, I got behind the wheel and sat for a minute in the frozen cabin, shuddering with premonitions: the battery’s dead, the starter won’t pull, there’s no spark, the fuel pump is playing up… Full of bad thoughts, I turned the key in the ignition. Reluctantly, on the third attempt, howling and shuddering, the car started. Phew.
I pushed the choke lever in a little and tried to fit my body into what is frankly a small-engine cabin. With difficulty, but it worked. I looked around, waited a couple of minutes and rolled slowly across the yard in the direction of the nearby avenue. In passing I sniffed at the exhaust fumes seeping through and listened to the loud drone of either the engine or the gearbox… Hell knows which, but the thing droned like the Wright brothers’ aeroplane, enough to deafen you. Mm, yes, my old jalopy, my American girl, how far will I get in you? As they say, the criterion of truth is practice. The rattletrap needs testing in action.
Contrary to my gloomy expectations, the car turned out to be all right. The performance of the engine and running gear compared favourably with the appearance of the body, and any competent driver knows what matters in a motor. I wound about the streets a little, getting used to my new means of transport. Then I came out onto the ring road, which turned out to be right there. If you’re going to test it, then test it. I took the left-hand lane, switched on the headlights and shot forward. At a hundred and fifty I calmed down, eased off the gas and pulled right. The car behaved with dignity, and it seems to me the two of us became friends. I even thought up a name for it – Vova. It’s a quirk of mine, thinking up names for cars and striking up a lads’ friendship with them. If you’re a friend to a car, it won’t let you down. In Hamburg, for instance, Berta was waiting for me like a faithful dog – a wilful three-year-old girl of the Opel Calibra family. As I recall, my four-wheeled girlfriend threw a fair few tantrums in the first three days after I bought her.
Vovka, though, turned out to be a workhorse, simple as a stool and, I think, a reliable lad. With Berta, of course, there was no comparison. But even so. Vovan picked up speed not briskly but confidently, and held the road tenaciously. At high revs he behaved decently, didn’t squeal, didn’t complain, only took the potholes a bit hard – over the bumps you were shaken about like a sack of potatoes in a tractor. But what can you expect when Vovik is going on four years old, and on the open spaces of Russia any suspension can go west in that time? We’ll survive. Vibration in the cabin is not the greatest misfortune in life.
Having described a test circuit a hundred and twenty kilometres long, I drove up to the house, said a friendly goodbye to Vovchik and went upstairs to the flat to sort out the ammunition.
Magda handed over four far-from-simple jerrycans. On their bottoms I unscrewed eight treasured little nuts and obtained forty litres of free space in total, capable of concealing:
– ten two-hundred-gram packs of explosive (jerrycan with a white stripe on the neck);
– six briquettes of sulphurous plastic, plus six remote-controlled detonators and the remote itself (jerrycan with a red stripe);
– a Kalashnikov Special Shortened, 1974 model. A remarkable item for close street fighting, but about as much use to me as an accordion to a sheep (jerrycan with a yellow stripe);
– a pistol named for Colonel Colt with five clips, plus two loaded magazines for the Kalashnikov (jerrycan with a black stripe).
I distributed the arsenal among the jerrycans, admired the work done and praised myself: «Handy and brainy, you rogue!» Then I thought hard for two, three, four, five minutes and came to a conclusion: I must tip the contents of the black-topped jerrycan back out and call through the open door to Magda:
– Hey, mother, who’s going to wipe the fingerprints off the piece? There are no footmen here.
That’s what I did. Magda’s answer was predictable:
– Wipe it yourself, it won’t kill you.
– Then I shall simply be obliged to screw you, that won’t kill you either. We’ll do it on your bed. The position is this: you get into a low sprinter’s start, I settle in behind…
The enraged Magda flew into the room like a fury, flashed her great burning eyes and… observe the sequence of actions:
– put the pistol on safe;
– removed the clip;
– extracted the round from the chamber;
– took the pistol by the barrel and wiped the grip;
– in a fraction of a second shifted the pistol to her left hand, wrapped in a rag, and wiped the barrel;
– wiped the clip and instantly slotted it back in;
– flung the pistol onto the bed.
A professional.
– Satisfied? – hissed Magda.
– Yes, more than from sex. Maybe you could wash the floor as well? There are hoofprints of yours all over…
Magda cracked me on the head with her fist and shot out of the room. I rubbed the bruised spot and thought: «Contact number two is not a contact at all. A girl with that professional an approach to weapons can only be a liquidator. That sets one thinking… Still, it’s late. We’ll work it out in the morning.»
Not troubling in the slightest about my own fingerprints, I turned the pistol over in my hand, then chucked it into the jerrycan, made up the bed and collapsed under the blanket.
After a night of untroubled sleep, a hot day lay ahead of me.