Free Good People by Nir Baram Page B

wasn’t disturbed by the change in plan. It was a foolish thought that he or his men might harm her: he wouldn’t allow anything to happen to her. The car slowed, turned into a narrower road, and glided into an unpaved lot where other black vehicles were parked in tight rows. She got out and followed the two men at a distance. They took a sloping path, and when she looked down at the parking lot, perhaps the darkest piece of ground she’d ever seen, she remembered the visions that her mother would conjure up when she wanted to scare her: the black-robed horsemen of the apocalypse, having gathered in their final assembly, would soon storm the world with bows, arrows and swords, but first they would take care of naughty twelve-year-old girls who allowed Maxim Adamovich Podolsky to fondle their breasts.
    She trailed after the agents. Her scalp felt hot and itchy. She poked a finger under the scarf, scratched vigorously, and in her heart she cursed the bastards. An annoying eddy of air hovered across the path and buffeted her. Why did the agents look so tall? Her back and calves hurt, but she hurried after them.
    ‘Comrade Weissberg, almost there,’ the driver called.
    The winds strengthened. Their shriek was piercing. Her panting sounded ugly to her.
    He was standing around a sharp bend, hidden from the climber’s eye. She almost collided with him. A woollen coat rested on his shoulders like a stylish robe. Behind him loomed a broad and silent building, whose illuminated windows cast pentagons of light onto the courtyard, which the night didn’t touch at all.
    His proximity surprised her, and she flinched. He placed a hand on her hips, and she pushed it away, but his other arm was alreadyencircling her body, pulling it close to him.
    Maxim Adamovich Podolsky winked at her. ‘Alexandra Andreyevna,’ he laughed, ‘be careful not to fall and hurt yourself. Hosts of men will take to the streets to avenge you if we lose you.’
    ‘Hello, Comrade Podolsky,’ she said. Here, in the company of his colleagues, she addressed him formally.
    ‘Comrade Weissberg,’ he replied in an official tone and brought his lips to her ear. His breath warmed her earlobe. ‘I apologise for dragging you out here. This weekend there’s going to be an assembly of our people from the whole district. It’s a convenient, quiet place, as you see, and there are enough bedrooms for everyone. I gathered from your message that our meeting couldn’t be postponed.’
    ‘Correct,’ she said.
    ‘Anyway, I’m sorry you had to walk up here. Those weren’t my instructions. I intended to meet you down below.’
    He was lying, she decided. He had been waiting for her around the bend, and those had been precisely his instructions.
    Podolsky reached his hand out to her with the familiar peacock-like gesture that he affected sometimes to amuse himself, copied out of books for foppish noblemen. Had he ever wondered why he chose that particular gesture? Maxim Podolsky was a man whose body was always stiffened with compressed power, confident that his every deed was for the good, rooted in noble motives, in his pure desire to benefit the people around him. He once quoted Mephistopheles from Goethe’s Faust :
    I am part of that force which would
    Do evil evermore, and yet creates the good.
    That was four years earlier, on the first day of their last year of school. Each of the students had been asked to bring a quotation that described who they were. She had chosen lines by Nadyezhda Petrovna:
    We studied death
    Not that which is not our own
    in which we have no interest
    We are not philosophers.
    ‘Your mum is a smart woman,’ said Podolsky. They stepped back down the path, leaving the circle of white light, and Sasha felt as if she had escaped from a trap.
    ‘I’ve already heard that tonight.’
    ‘Very smart,’ Podolsky repeated. ‘To the best of my understanding, she set up the little meeting in your house this evening so that our informer would