There was no thief to stop, but speed in a crowd can often compensate for this particular problem. I barrelled through the shoulders of the people on the train, elbowing them aside with no regard for age or disposition, until, as the train slowed to a halt and the people turned to stare, I raised my head and shouted, “He’s got a gun!” To make my point, I drew my own and fired it once into the wall of the carriage. The doors opened, and the stampede began.
There were certain disadvantages to my technique, not least being that the point of origin of the surge of people was a clear indicator of where I was. However, this was to a degree countered by the chaos that reigned on the platform and by the herd mentality of the people around as they perceived the carriage emptying, heard the cry of “A gun, a gun!” and made their own, potentially unwise, decisions. I like to think I contributed in my own way to the chaos, stumbling into the crowd with my head down and giving an occasional cry of “Oh God, help us” or words to that effect. The finer details of what I said were hardly inspiring, but in that heightened state no one really cared. I was pushed, shoved and stumbled upon, my fellow travellers knocking me aside as thoughtlessly as I had ruined their day, and I went with them, the surge of the crowd sweeping me past the bewildered-looking professor, who pressed himself into the wall for refuge, only to give a surprised whimper as, stumbling through the crowd, I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him after me.
All stations have bottlenecks, and while the crowd wished to run, there wasn’t the space to do it, so as we pressed and piled for the exit I pushed my body close to Gulakov, pushed my gun into his belly and hissed, “I know they’re here. Tell me where I can find Karpenko.”
“I’m sorry,” he whimpered. “I’m sorry!”
“Karpenko!”
“Pietrok-112! He’s in Pietrok-112!”
I let go of his arm and plunged back into the flow of people. There didn’t seem much point saying anything more. The three watchers on the platform were shouting, moving among us, pulling hats from faces, hollering at commuters to stop, to stay calm. I could see the woman had now a gun in her hand, the pram abandoned, and was shouting at everyone to stand still and present their papers. At the top of the stairs to the outside world more voices were being raised, police, some in uniform, some not, pouring down towards the human weight that wished to go up. However good their security services, the transport system hadn’t yet got the message. I heard the rattle of wheels on metal and as the first watcher came near me, a long-faced man in a fur-lined coat, I turned, face an open picture of panic, wailed, “He’s got a gun! Oh my God!” and nutted him as hard as I could in the nose, grabbing the gun in his hand and twisting his wrist hard towards the ceiling. I heard a shot, felt the bite of the metal moving beneath my fingers, and someone next to me screamed, a woman, clutching her leg, before I twisted the pistol free and kicked the watcher squarely between the legs. He fell inelegantly to the floor, and as the crowd parted around us like a flower I turned towards the approaching train, slipped the gun into my pocket and ran for the opening doors.
I had never been a fugitive in Russia before.
The feeling was exhilarating at first, until the discomfort of the settling night and the damp cold eating through my boots reminded me that exhilaration held nothing over reliable hygiene and warm sheets. My Kostya Prekovsky papers were now an even greater liability to me than no papers at all–no papers would at least cause bureaucratic delay, whereas the Prekovsky name was instant, guaranteed incarceration or death. I threw them into the slow black waters of the canal, bought a new hat and coat, and in a second-hand bookshop beneath the glowing lights of a doctor’s surgery flicked through an atlas of the Soviet Union, looking for Pietrok-112. I couldn’t see it. I considered going to the Cronus Club, but the grief that I would bring upon Olga and her ilk seemed uncivilised in light of her hospitality, and I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was the professor’s enquiries alone which had led to the appearance of security forces at Avtovo. Instead, I found Pietrok-111 and Pietrok-113 in the atlas, two tiny markers on an empty stretch of nowhere in the north of the country, and considering this as likely a place to start as anywhere, waited until the last tram had slipped into silence, and headed to Finland Station to recover my escape papers. I had left two sets of documents in an empty signal box by the railway tracks, where a man, hopefully in a fur hat, had once spent his days switching points, and where now mice hid from the worst of the winter’s cold. The first document declared that I was one Mikhail Kamin, party member and industrial adviser, a position high enough to accord me respect without necessarily inviting security checks. The second was a Finnish passport, stamped already with an entry visa, which I attached to the back of my calf with surgical tape and rubber bands. I then spent a chilly night in the signal box, listening to the mice scurrying below, around and, in one particularly adventurous case, over me, and waiting for sunrise and the journey north.
Chapter 37