other girl screamed, squirming within the ghoul's grasp, desperate to run.
Then Kuzin turned to Arkadin, placed the gun in his hand. "When you pull the trigger," he said, "we become equal partners."
There was something in Kuzin's eyes that at this close range gave Arkadin the shivers. It seemed to him that Kuzin's eyes were smiling in the way the devil smiled, without warmth, without humanity, because the pleasure that animated the smile was of an evil and perverted nature. It was at this precise moment that Arkadin thought of the prisons ringing Nizhny Tagil, because he now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was locked within his own private prison, with no idea if there was a key, let alone how to use it.
The gun-an old Luger with the Nazi swastika imprinted on it-was greasy with Kuzin's excitement. Arkadin raised it to the height of the girl's head. She was whimpering and crying. Arkadin had done many things in his young life, some of them unforgivable, but he'd never shot a girl in cold blood. And yet now, in order to prosper, in order to survive the prison of Nizhny Tagil, this was what he had to do.
He was aware of Kuzin's avid eyes boring into him, red as the fire of Nizhny Tagil's foundries themselves, and then he felt the muzzle of a gun at the nape of his neck and knew that the driver was standing behind him, no doubt on Kuzin's orders.
"Do it," Kuzin said softly, "because one way or another in the next ten seconds someone's going to fire his gun."
Arkadin aimed the Luger. The shout of the report echoed on and on through the deep and forbidding forest, and the girl slid along the leaves, into the pit with her friend.
Chapter Thirty-Five
THE SOUND of the bolt being thrown on the 8mm Mauser K98 rifle echoed through the Dachau air raid bunker. That was the end of it, however.
"Damn!" Old Pelz groaned. "I forgot to load the thing!"
Petra took out her handgun, pointed it in the air, and squeezed the trigger. Because the result was the same as what had happened to him, Old Pelz threw down the K98.
"Scheisse!" he said, clearly disgusted.
She approached him then. "Herr Pelz," she said gently, "as I said, my name is Petra. Do you remember me?"
The old man stopped muttering, peered at her carefully. "You do look an awful lot like a Petra-Alexandra I once knew."
"Petra-Alexandra." She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. "Yes, yes, that's me!"
He recoiled a little, put a hand on his cheek where she'd planted her lips. Then, skeptical to the end, he looked past her at Bourne. "Who's this Nazi bastard? Did he force you to come here?" His hands curled into fists. "I'll box his ears for him!"
"No, Herr Pelz, this is a friend of mine. He's Russian." She used the name Bourne had given her, which was on the passport Boris Karpov had provided.
"Russians're no better than Nazis in my book," the old man said sourly.
"Actually, I'm an American traveling under a Russian passport." Bourne said this first in English and then in German.
"You speak English very well, for a Russian," Old Pelz said in excellent English. Then he laughed, showing teeth yellowed by time and tobacco. At the sight of an American, he seemed to perk up, as if coming out of a decades-long drowse. This was the way he was, a rabbit being drawn out of a hat, only to withdraw again into the shadows. He wasn't mad, just living both in the drab present and in the vivid past. "I embraced the Americans when they liberated us from tyranny," he continued proudly. "In my time I helped them root out the Nazis and the Nazi sympathizers pretending to be good Germans." He spat out the last words, as if he couldn't stand to have them in his mouth.
"Then what are you doing here?" Bourne said. "Don't you have a home to go to?"
"Sure I do." Old Pelz smacked his lips, as if he could taste the life of his younger self. "In fact, I have a very nice house in Dachau. It's blue and white, with flowers all around a picket fence. A cherry tree stands in back, spreading its wings in summer. The house is rented out to a fine young couple with two strapping children, who send their rent check like clockwork to my nephew in Leipzig. He's a big-shot lawyer, you know."