Malone caught sight of Lou, standing at the bar. In that second, she seemed to realize for the first time that something was wrong. She pushed herself violently away from the bar, and looked frantically around, her mouth opening to call. Petkoff was a blur next to her; Malone didn’t look at him clearly. Lou took a step....
And two men with broken, lumpy faces came through a door somewhere in the rear of the restaurant, closer to her than Malone. Petkoff suddenly swam into sight; he was standing very still and looking entirely baffled.
Malone pushed through a pair of dancers, ignored their glares and the man’s hissed insult, which he didn’t understand anyhow, and found his view suddenly blocked by a large expanse of dark grey.
It was somebody’s chest, in a uniform. Malone shifted his gaze half an inch and saw a row of gold buttons. He looked upward.
There, towering above him, was a face. It stared down, looking heavy and cruel and stupid. Malone, his legs still carrying him forward, bounced off the chest and staggered back a step or two. He heard a hissed curse behind him, and realized without thinking about it that he had managed to collide with the same pair of dancers again. He didn’t look around to see them. Instead, he looked ahead, at the giant who blocked his path.
The man was about six feet six inches tall, a great Mongol who weighed about a sixth of a ton. But he didn’t look fat; he looked strong instead, and enormously massive. Malone sidestepped, and the Mongol moved slightly to block him. To one side, Malone saw Her Majesty scurrying by. The Mongol was apparently more interested in Malone than in trying to stop sweet little old ladies. Malone saw Her Majesty heading for the bar, and forgot about her for the second.
The Mongol shifted again to block Malone’s forward progress.
“What seems to be such great hurry, _Tovarishch_?” he said in a voice that sounded like an earthquake warning. “Have you no culture? Why you run across floor in such impolite manner?”
The man might have been blocking his way because of Lou, or might simply want to teach an uncultured _Amerikanski_ a lesson. Malone couldn’t tell which, and it didn’t seem to matter. He whirled and reached for a glass of vodka standing momentarily unattended on a nearby table.
He tossed the vodka at the giant’s eyes, and scooted around the mountain of flesh before it erupted with a volcanic succession of Russian curses that shook the room with their volume and sincerity.
But Lou and Her Majesty were nowhere in sight. Major Petkoff was staring, and Malone followed his line of sight.
A door in the rear of the restaurant was just closing. Behind it Malone saw Her Majesty and Lou, disappearing from sight.
Malone knocked over a waiter and headed for Petkoff. “What’s going on here?” he bellowed over the crash of dishes and the rising wave of Russian profanity.
Petkoff shrugged magnificently. “I have no ideas, colleague,” he said. “I have no ideas.”
“But she—”
“Miss Garbitsch was taken suddenly ill,” Petkoff said.
“Damn sudden,” Malone growled.
“Her friend, Miss Thompson, has taken her to the ladies’ room,” Petkoff said. He gestured, narrowly missing a broken, lumpy face Malone had seen before.
“You are under arrest,” the face said. Its partner peered over Petkoff’s shoulder.
“I?” Petkoff said.
“Not you,” the face said. “Him.” He started for Malone and Petkoff threw out both arms.
“Hold!” he said. “My orders are to see that this man is not molested.”
The guests had suddenly and silently melted away. Malone backed off a step, looking for something to stage a fight with.
“On the other hand, Comrade,” one of the lumpy-faced men said, “we have orders also.”
“My orders—” Petkoff began.
“Your orders do not exist,” the other lumpy man said. “We are to arrest this man. Our orders say so.”
“You are fools,” Petkoff said. He spread his arms wider, blocking both of them. Malone edged back against the bar, feeling behind him for a bottle or maybe a bungstarter. Instead, his hand touched a sleeve.
A voice behind him bellowed: “Cease!”
The two lumpy-faced men goggled. Petkoff did not move.
Malone turned, and saw a tall, thin civilian with dark glasses. “Cease,” the civilian repeated. “It is the girl we are to arrest! The girl!”
“This is not a girl,” one of the lumpy men said. “Sir. We are to arrest this man. Our orders say distinctly—”
“Never mind your orders!” Petkoff said. “Go and reduce your orders to shreds and stuff them up your nostrils and die of suffocation! My orders say—”
“The girl!” the civilian said. “Where is the girl?”
Malone darted forward. Petkoff caught him neatly with one arm as he went by. “Until we decide what to do,” the MVD man said, “you stay here.” Malone bucked against him, but could get nowhere. “Meanwhile,” Petkoff said, “I am for letting you go.”
“I appreciate it,” Malone said through his teeth. “How about proving it?”
“If you let him go,” a lumpy man said, “you will answer to our group head.”
Petkoff tightened his hold protectively. Meanwhile, the civilian was climbing up into a stratospheric rage.
“You are dolts, imbeciles, worms without brains and walking bellies filled with carrion!” he said magnificently. “I have orders which I am sworn to carry out!”
“You are not alone,” Petkoff said.
Malone took another try at a getaway, and failed.
“We take precedence,” a lumpy man said. “We can talk later. Arrest comes first.”
“But who?” the civilian snapped. “I insist—”
“There shall be no arrest!” Petkoff screamed. “No one is to be arrested at all!”
“I swear by the bones of Stalin that my orders state—” the tall man began.
“The bones of Stalin are with us!” a lumpy man said. “Go and die in a kennel filled with fleas and old newspaper! Go and freeze to the likeness of an obscene statue of a bourgeois deity! Go and hang by the ears from a monument four thousand feet high in the center of the great desert!”
Inspired, the other lumpy man screamed “Charge!” and came for Petkoff and the civilian. Petkoff whirled, letting go of Malone in order to beat back this wave of maddened attackers, and Malone took the advantage. He ducked free under Petkoff’s left arm and started around the gesticulating, screaming, fighting group for the door at the back of the restaurant. He took exactly four steps.
Then he stopped. The Mongol, his eyes red with a combination of vodka and bull-roaring rage, was charging toward him, his hands outflung and his fingers grasping at the air. “Warmonger!” he was shouting. “Capitalist slave-owner! Leprous and ancient cannibal without culture! You have begun a war you can not finish!”
“Ha!” Malone said, feeling inadequate to the occasion. As the Mongol charged, he felt a wave of intense pragmatism come over him. He reached back toward the bar, grabbed a bottle of vodka and tossed several glassfuls into the giant’s face. The Mongol, deluged and screaming, clawed wildly at his eyes and spun round several times, cursing Malone and all his kin for the next twenty-seven generations, and grabbing thin air in his attempt to reach the _Amerikanski_.
All of the customers appeared to have discovered urgent engagements elsewhere. There was little for the Mongol to collide with except empty tables and chairs. But he did manage to swipe one of the lumpy-faced men on the side of the head with one flail of his arms. The lumpy-faced man said “Yoop!” and went staggering away into Petkoff, who spun him around and threw him away in the general direction of the bandstand. The diversion provided Malone with just enough time to start moving again.
Four uniformed men were making their way toward the ladies’ room from the opposite side of the restaurant. They were carrying a stretcher, which seemed pitifully inadequate for the carnage Malone had just left.
He blocked their path. “Where are you going?” he said.
“You are American?” one of them said. “I speak English good, no?”
Behind him, Malone heard a yowl and a crunch, as of a body striking wood. It sounded as if somebody had fetched up against the bar. “You speak English fine,” he said, feeling wildly out of place. “Have you been taking lessons?”
“Me?” the man said. “It is no time for talk. We got to get lady for hospital.”
“Lady?” Malone said. “For hospital?”
“Miss Garbitsch her name is,” the stretcher-man said, trying to get past Malone. The FBI agent shifted slightly, blocking the path. “We wait outside one revolution—”
“One what?”
“When hands revolve once,” the man said. “One hour. Now we get call so we take her to hospital.”
It sounded suspicious to Malone. He heard more yells behind him, and they sounded a little closer. The sound of running men came to his ears. “Well,” he said happily, “goodbye all.”
The stretcher-bearer said, “Vot?” Malone shoved him backward into the approaching mob, grabbed the stretcher away from the other three men, who were acting a little dazed, and swung it in a wide arc. He caught an MVD man in the stomach, and the man doubled up with a weird whistling groan, turned slightly in agony, and hit another MVD man with his bowed head. The second man fell; Malone heard more crashes and screaming, but he didn’t find out any details. Instead, he threw the stretcher at the milling mob and turned, already in motion, racing for the ladies’ room.