Babayaga

She watched and waited as he went down to the phone booth and started dialing. One call followed another, and with every coin Oliver dropped into that phone, she felt the weight of her conviction to find Will grow. If he were almost any other man she had known in her past, she would have been long gone by now. She knew that she had probably played the situation entirely wrong from the start. She could have stayed with Oliver. He would have been easy to leave when the time came, and leaving was what a majority of her bones was urging her to do right now. But her heart told her to stay.

A hair-trigger instinct to run had always been strong in her: she had charmed her way onto ducal carriages, hidden in the beds of hay wagons and dairy lorries, tucked herself into the claustrophobic baggage holds of freight trains, stolen countless horses, bicycles, and automobiles. She had even once driven a hotwired BMW R75 motorcycle across the Latvian countryside while a bundled and dour Elga rode sullen in her sidecar. Of all her many skills, knowing when to flee was one of Zoya’s most pronounced; she would be long gone before the empty vault was discovered, the forged checks reached the bank, or the bloated body washed up on the riverbank. She knew she could slip out of the Chevy now, leave Oliver to his phone calls, and vanish backward into the night, holing up in a nearby hotel or rooming house, sleeping until her strength returned in full. Then, in a few days, she could find her way to some other town, perhaps breaking from her old trail, heading south to Madrid, Milan, or Rome, or maybe finding a berth on a steamer to a distant port, Capetown, Hong Kong, or Buenos Aires. Making the journey alone, with no sister beside her, would be alien and dangerous, though perhaps, like Elga, she could find some poor urchin to train in the arts, beginning the cycle all over again. All she needed to do was pull the shiny door handle right beside her, and then she could go, never stopping, never looking back.

The trouble was, she couldn’t. The strange knots binding her to Will kept her rooted in the car seat, waiting impatiently for Oliver to return with whatever scheme he could muster. There was some feeling, some ephemeral spirit working here. She could feel its strange strength clutching at her soul with a grip too strong to resist. It felt like a spell—she knew all the signs of those, but she knew too that this was no bewitching, it was her own choice, born from some kind of affection, which overrode all her old patterns and habits. So instead of bounding off into the briar, she stayed. It was greater than a sense of debt or obligation—Will had shown up in time to save her life, yes, but he had only been her unintentional hero, stumbling in at a lucky moment—the fact was there was more between them, in how their sleeping bodies curled together like a punctuation mark, how his kiss fit against her lips, how their tongues danced along chest and nook and thigh, and how his simple, assured presence calmed her, taking her mind from the constant focus on the hunt, making schemes and stratagems evaporate. It was different than a simple debt. This bond with him made her slightly nauseous, the way all magic did.

Oliver finally came back to the car. “Well, I’m happy to report the cavalry is on its way, though they’ll take a bit to get here.”

She nodded, saying nothing. Oliver took out a cigarette. “I must say, I find your affections for our friend Will quite touching. I’m not sure there’s a soul on earth who would go to such great lengths to rescue me.”

She looked up at him. “You have to want to save someone in order to be saved.”

“Yes, well, now there’s a brain-teaser…” Oliver said, pausing midsentence as he thought it over. He lit his cigarette and smoked it as they sat silently together. For twenty minutes, nothing happened except for the occasional car passing by.

Finally, a little gray Citroën deux chevaux came rattling fast around the corner and pulled to a hard stop in front of them, its beat-up bumper almost kissing the Chevrolet chrome. The doors opened and Zoya watched three large black men draw their sizable bodies out from inside the tiny vehicle’s. Moments later, Oliver was making introductions: “Zoya, may I introduce Red, Flats, and Kelly. Gentlemen, this is Zoya.”

“Bonne nuit, mademoiselle,” said the one named Red, tipping his hat. She smiled politely. She had guessed they were American even before they started speaking English. She was not especially skilled with that tongue, but she had known her share of sailors and could follow them well enough. “Okay, Oliver, how about you tell us a bit more about this job?”

“And this had better be good, friend, not some wild fairy-tale goose chase,” said Kelly. “We had plans to connect with Basie’s crew backstage at the Olympia tonight.”