Child 44 (43 page)

There was silence. The train was almost at a stop. At any second the doors would slide open, guards would enter, guns at the ready. Who could blame them when faced with the barrel of a gun not to tell the truth? A woman on one of the benches called out:

—I’m from Rostov. I’ve heard of such murders. Children with their stomachs cut out. They are blaming them on a group of Western spies who have infiltrated our country.

Leo replied:

—I believe the murderer lives and works in your city. But I doubt he’s a spy.

Another woman cried out:

—When you find him you’ll kill him?

—Yes.

The train stopped. The guards could be heard approaching. Leo added:

—I have no reason to expect your help. But I ask for it all the same.

Leo and Raisa crouched down among the prisoners. She wrapped her arms around Leo, covering up his bloodstained hands. The doors slid open, sunshine flooded the carriage.

Finding the two bodies, the guards called out for an explanation.

—Who killed them?

They were answered with silence. Leo looked over his wife’s shoulders at these guards. They were young, indifferent. They’d obey orders but they wouldn’t think for themselves. The fact that they hadn’t personally killed Leo and Raisa meant that they hadn’t been given instructions to do so. It had to be done on the sly, through a proxy. Without explicit authorization they wouldn’t act. These guards had no initiative. However, given some slight justification, they might seize the opportunity. Everything depended upon the strangers in this carriage. The guards were shouting, pushing guns into the faces of those nearest them. But the prisoners told them nothing. They selected an elderly couple. They were frail. They’d talk.

—Who killed these men? What happened here? Speak!

One of the guards raised his steel-capped boot above her head. She wept. Her husband pleaded. But neither of them replied to their questions. A second guard moved towards Leo. If he made him stand up he’d see the bloodied shirt.

One of the remaining gang, the man who’d told Leo there was no longer any quarrel between them, got down from his bench approaching the guards. No doubt he’d now claim the reward promised to them. The man called out:

—Leave them alone. I know what happened. I’ll tell you.

The guards stepped away from the elderly couple, stepped away from Leo.

—Tell us.

—They killed each other, because of a card game.

Leo understood that there was a perverse logic to the gang’s refusal to give them up. They were prepared to rape and murder for a small profit. But they were not prepared to snitch, to be a guard’s stool pigeon
.
It was a question of status. If the other
urki
, the members of their criminal fraternity, found out they were selling inmates for perks they would never be forgiven. They would probably be killed.

The guards looked at each other. Unsure of what to do, they decided to do nothing. They were in no rush. The journey to Vtoraya Rechka, on the Pacific coast, would take weeks. There would be plenty of opportunities. They would await further orders. They’d come up with another plan. One of the guards addressed the whole carriage.

—As a punishment we will not offload these bodies. Soon, in this heat, they will begin to rot and stink and you will all become ill. Perhaps then you will talk.

Proud of himself, the guard leapt off the carriage. The other guards followed. The door was shut.

After a while the train began to move again. A young man with broken spectacles, peering at Leo through a cracked lens, whispered:

—How will you escape?

He had a right to know. Their escape now belonged to everyone in the carriage. They were all in it together. In reply Leo raised the bloody steel shard. The guards had forgotten to take it back.

13 July

Leo was lying flat on the floor, his arm squeezed through the small hole used by the prisoners as a toilet. With the steel shard he scratched at the iron nails fastening the plank to the underside of the carriage. None of the nails were accessible from inside: they’d all been hammered in the underside. The only access point was this small hole not much wider than his wrist. Leo had taken the dead man’s shirt and cleaned the area as best he could. It was not more than a token effort. To reach the three iron nails he was forced to bring his face down flat against the stinking piss- and shit-sodden wood, retching while blindly groping, guided by touch alone. Splinters dug into his skin. Raisa had offered to do the work instead since her hands and wrists were smaller. While this was true Leo had a longer reach and at full stretch it was just possible to reach each of the three nails.

With a strip of shirt tied around his mouth and nose as limited protection from the stench, he picked at the third and last nail, scraping, cutting at the wood, gouging the timber and giving himself just enough space to wedge the tip under the nail-head and lever it out. It had taken many hours to remove two nails since the work had to be interrupted by any prisoner needing the toilet.

This final nail was proving the hardest. Partly that was due to tiredness–it was late, maybe one or two in the morning–but something else was wrong. Leo could get his fingertip under the nail’s head but it wasn’t coming loose. It felt crooked, as if it had been banged in at an angle, the body of the nail bent by the blows. It wouldn’t pull out. He’d have to dig further into the wood, perhaps all the way through. At this realization, that it would take maybe another hour, a wave of exhaustion came over him. His fingers were bloody and raw, his arm ached–he couldn’t get the stink of shit out of his nose. Suddenly the train jolted to the side, he lost concentration, and the steel shard slipped from his fingers, clattering onto the tracks below.

Leo pulled his hand out of the hole. Raisa was beside him.

—Is it done?

—I dropped it. I dropped the shard.

Furious with his own stupidity at discarding the other nails he no longer had any tools.

Seeing her husband’s bloody fingers, Raisa grabbed hold of the plank and tried to lift it. One side of it rose up, fractionally, but not enough to grip underneath it, not enough to pull it free. Leo wiped his hands, looking around for something he might use.

—I have to scratch through the wood and get to the base of that last nail.

Raisa had seen every prisoner comprehensively searched before being allowed on the train. She doubted if anyone had metal implements of any kind. Contemplating the problem, her eyes drifted towards the nearest of the dead bodies. The man was lying on his back, his mouth open. She turned to her husband.

—How long or sharp does it need to be?

—I’ve done most of it. I need anything harder than my fingertip.

Raisa stood up, walking to the body of the man who had tried to rape and murder her. With no sense of justice or satisfaction, only a feeling of disgust, she positioned the dead man’s jaw so that it faced upwards. She raised her shoe directly above his jaw, hesitating, looking around. Everyone was watching. She closed her eyes, bringing her heel down against his front teeth.

Leo crawled over, feeling the inside of the man’s mouth and pulling out a tooth still affixed to a stump of bloody gum, an incisor, not ideal but sharp enough and hard enough to continue the scraping already done. He returned to the hole, lying on his front. Holding the tooth, he squeezed his arm through, finding the remaining nail and continuing to pick away at the wood, pulling off the splinters as they came loose.

The nail was completely exposed. Holding the tooth in the palm of his hand, in case further excavation was necessary, Leo gripped the head of the nail but his fingertips were raw and he was unable to get a fix on it. He pulled his arm out, wiping the sweat and blood off his fingers, wrapping them in a shredded strip of shirt before trying again. Struggling to remain patient, he tugged at the nail, incrementally pulling it free from the plank. That was it: it was done. The third nail had been removed. He checked the wood, feeling for other nails, but there were no more, at least that he could find. He sat up, pulling his arm out of the hole.

Raisa sunk both her hands through the hole, gripping the plank. Leo added his hands. This was the test. They both pulled. The top side of the plank lifted up while the bottom of the plank remained secured. Leo moved over, grabbing the end and lifting it as high as he could. Looking down, he could see the train tracks below the carriage. The plan had worked. Where the plank had lain there was now a gap of about thirty centimetres in width and over a metre in length, barely enough for a person to lower through, but enough all the same.

It would’ve been possible with the help of the other prisoners to snap the plank. But worried that the sound would alert the guards they decided against this. Leo turned to his audience.

—I need people to hold this plank up while we drop through the gap, down onto the tracks.

Several volunteers stood up immediately, coming forward and taking hold of the plank. Leo assessed the space. After they’d squeezed through, they’d fall straight down, directly underneath the train. The distance from the underside of the carriage down to the tracks was perhaps a little over a metre, maybe a metre and a half. The train was travelling slowly but still fast enough for the fall to be dangerous. However, they couldn’t wait. They had to go now, whilst the train was moving, during the night. When the train stopped at daybreak, they’d be seen by the guards.

Raisa took hold of Leo’s hands.

—I’ll go first.

Leo shook his head. He’d seen the blueprints to these prisoner transports. They faced one more obstacle: a final trap for prisoners about to attempt exactly this kind of escape.

—On the underneath of this train, at the very end, the last carriage, there are a series of hooks which hang down. If we fell onto the tracks right now and waited, as the last carriage passed overhead the hooks would snag us, dragging us with the train.

—Can’t we avoid them? Roll out of the way?

—There are hundreds of them, hanging on wires. There’s no way we’d slip through. We’d get tangled up in them.

—What are supposed to do? We can’t wait till the train stops.

Leo examined the two dead bodies. Raisa stood beside him, evidently unsure of his intentions. He explained:

—When you drop down to the tracks, I’ll throw one of these bodies after you. Hopefully it will land somewhere near you. Wherever it lands, you’ll have to crawl to it. Then, once you reach it, lie under it. Position it exactly on top of you. As the last carriage passes overhead the body will get hooked and snagged. But you’ll be free.

He dragged the bodies close to the loose plank, adding.

—Do you want me to go first? If it doesn’t work then you should stay here. Any other death would be better than being dragged along by this train.

Raisa shook her head.

—It’s a good plan. It will work. I’ll go first.

As she was ready to climb down, Leo reiterated his instructions:

—The train isn’t moving fast. The fall will be painful but not too dangerous, make sure you roll with the impact. I’ll throw down one of the bodies. You won’t have much time—

—I understand.

—You must collect the body. When you get it, put yourself underneath it. Make sure no part of you is exposed. If even one hook gets into you, you could be dragged along.

—Leo, I understand.

Raisa kissed him. She was shaking.

She squeezed through the gap between the planks. Her feet were dangling above the tracks. She let go of the plank and fell, disappearing from view. Leo grabbed the first body and lowered it through the gap, squeezing it through. The body dropped onto the tracks, out of sight.

Raisa had landed awkwardly, bruising her side and tumbling. Disorientated, dazed, she lay still for a moment. Too long, she was wasting time. Leo’s carriage was already far away. She could see the body which Leo had thrown down and began to crawl towards it, in the same direction as the train. She glanced behind her. There were only three carriages until the end of the train. But she couldn’t see any hooks. Perhaps Leo had been wrong. There were now only two carriages left. Raisa still hadn’t reached the body. She stumbled. There was now only one carriage separating her from the end of the train. With only metres before the final carriage passed over her, she saw the hooks–hundreds of them, all attached to fine wires, at different heights. They covered the entire width of the carriage, impossible to avoid.

Raisa got up, crawling again, as fast as she could, reaching the body. It was laying face down, head nearest her. She didn’t have time to turn it around so she turned herself around, lifting up the body and crawling under this man, positioning her head under his head. Face to face with her attacker, staring into his dead eyes, she made herself as small as possible.

Suddenly the dead body was wrenched off her. She saw wires all around her, like fishing lines, each one barbed with many jagged hooks. The body lifted up, as though alive, a puppet, tangled up, no longer even touching the tracks. Raisa remained flat on the tracks, perfectly still. She could see the stars above her. Slowly she stood up. No hook had caught her. She watched the train move away. She’d done it. But there was no sign of Leo.

As he was larger than Raisa, Leo had figured that he needed the bigger of the two dead men, he’d need more body mass to protect him from the hooks. However, this dead man was so large he didn’t fit through the gap in the planks. They’d stripped him in an effort to reduce his width but he was too broad. There was no way to get him through the hole. By this point Raisa had been on the tracks for several minutes.

Desperate, Leo lowered his head though the gap. He could see a body caught at the end of the train. Was it Raisa or the dead man? It was impossible to tell from this distance. He had to hope it was the dead man. Adjusting his plan, he supposed that if he positioned himself correctly he could escape underneath this tangled body. That body would have caught all the hooks in that section. He’d be free to pass underneath it. He said goodbye to the other prisoners, thanked them, and dropped onto the tracks.