Free City of Thieves by David Benioff Page B

dropped to one knee, ready to unsheathe my knife. He passed by me and climbed the stairs, two at a time. Kolya and I glanced at each other. When Blackbeard was out of sight, I pulled out the German knife and slipped it into my coat pocket. Kolya raised his eyebrows, possibly impressed by the act, possibly mocking me. We headed up the stairs, taking them one by one but still panting by the time we reached the second floor.
    “Where do you get the eggs?” asked Kolya, calling out to the giant who was already a flight above us. The big man was untroubled by the climb. He and the colonel’s daughter were the two fit-test people I’d seen in Piter in months. I wondered again where he got his energy.
    “There’s a peasant I know, he works on a farm near Mga.”
    “I thought the Germans took Mga.”
    “They did. The Germans like their eggs, too. They come every day and grab all they can find, but my friend hides a few. Can’t hide too many or they’ll figure it out.”
    The giant stopped on the fourth floor and rapped on an apartment door.
    “Who is it?”
    “It’s me,” he said. “With a couple of customers.”
    We heard a deadbolt slide back and the door opened. A woman wearing a man’s fur hat and a bloodied butcher’s apron blinked at Kolya and me, wiping her nose with the back of her gloved hand.
    “What I was wondering,” said Kolya, “is how you keep the eggs from freezing. Because frozen eggs won’t do us much good, I’m afraid.”
    The woman stared at Kolya as if he were speaking Japanese.
    “We keep them by the samovar,” said the giant. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”
    He gestured for us to enter the apartment. The silent woman stepped to the side to let us pass and Kolya walked right in, not a care in the world, looking around with a smile as if he’d just been invited into a new girlfriend’s place. I waited by the door until the giant put his hand on my shoulder. He didn’t shove me, exactly, but with a hand that big the effect was the same.
    Wick lamps lit the small apartment and our long shadows crept across the walls, across the frayed rugs on the floor, the brass samovar in the corner, and a white sheet hanging on the far side of the room—partitioning off a sleeping area, I assumed. When the giant closed the door, the sheet billowed like a woman’s dress in the wind. In the moment before it settled down I saw what lay behind it—not a bed, no furniture at all, just slabs of white meat hanging from hooks, suspended from a heating pipe by heavy chains, with plastic sheeting on the floor to collect the drippings. Maybe for half a second I thought it was pig, maybe my brain tried to convince my eyes that they weren’t looking at what they were looking at: a flayed thigh that could only be a woman’s thigh, a child’s rib cage, a severed arm with the hand’s ring finger missing.
    The knife was in my hand before I realized I wanted it—something moved behind me and I wheeled and slashed, crying out, unable to form any words, throat constricted. The giant had pulled a foot-long section of steel pipe from his coat; he danced away from me, far quicker than a man that big should be, easily dodging the German steel.
    The giant’s wife drew a cleaver from her apron pouch. She was quick, too, but Kolya turned out to be quickest of all, pivoting on his back foot and hitting the woman with a right cross to the jaw. She crumpled to the floor.
    “Run,” said Kolya.
    I ran. I thought the door would be locked, but it wasn’t; I thought the giant’s pipe would crush my skull, but it didn’t; and I was out in the hallway, hurtling down the staircase, jumping nearly the entire flight to the landing below. I heard a great shout of pure un-worded fury and the thud of the giant’s hobnailed boots on the floorboards as he charged across the room. I stopped there with my hand on the banister, unable to catch my breath, unwilling to run farther away, unable to climb the dark stairs back to