Page 49 of The Battle of Maddox
“All right, well, where are we heading here?” He glanced up at the map.
We were able to slip out of the metro car with the masses who were going to other stations as well. We flowed along until Maddox and I looked up at the same time.
“Thisis a subway station?” he whispered.
“I forgot… Soviet architecture.”
“This is not a subway station. This is art. It screams the late Sixties in here…”
I pulled him along. “We can’t keep staring. Move along with everyone else.” I glanced around one more time as we passed through an arch that directed us to the line we needed.
Maddox shook his head. “Damn Soviets.”
Laughing, we headed for the next station that would take us to Belorusskaya. But that station also greeted us with insane decoration.
“Those aremuralson the ceiling,” Maddox said, pulling me to the side to look up. “Hand painted murals. What the hell? These people were nuts!”
“What else are you going to do when you’re a talented artist and your boss is the banner psychopath of the first half of the twentieth century who wants nothing but good wholesome communist worker art?”
“True story.”
He pointed to the stairs out and we walked through the sparsely populated terminal. It was just about a quarter to ten at night, and with any luck, the plane was taking off with the girls and the rest of the band on it.
We stepped out of the metro station and pulled up short,again.
“Are you kidding me?” Maddox jerked his thumb at the Belosrusskaya Train Station. “What the hell is this? The Ekaterina Palace or a freakin’ train station?”
“Neoclassical Russians. Tsar money.”
“Ooh, that’s right.” He nodded and we headed across the bridge to the main terminal. “Which one was this? Nicholas? Alexander?”
“I think they were all Nicholas or Alexander, except for the odd Catherine or Ivan.” I led us down into the terminal and followed the delightfully English signs to the luggage storage. After a terribly mangled conversation, the attendant rolled two bags out for us. They were small carry-ons with just the basics in them.
Maddox and I rolled away from the storage, and around a corner. Once there, he unzipped the front pocket and pulled out a colored folder that was marked like a travel agency bureau, in something that wasn’t English and wasn’t Russian. He flipped it open, and there were two tickets inside, our fake passports—of which Maddox handed mine to me—our real passports, and an address in Warsaw.
“James Bond.” He choked on the laugh.
“The train leaves in fifteen minutes.” I pointed to the time on the ticket. “Let’s go.”
Within ten minutes, we were on the train, and an attendant was leading us down the corridor to a door. She pushed it open and smiled. “If you gentlemen need anything, please let us know. We’ll be around for a light snack at twenty-three hundred, and turn down at oh-thirty. Please remember to fill out your breakfast requests and hang them on the door before turning in for the night.”
“Spasivo,”I answered, and she shut the door.
“I hadno ideathey still had private rooms on trains.” Maddox stowed the luggage below his bench.
“I had no idea they sprung for this for us.” I sat down and stared out the window. “Am I now supposed to have an existential crisis while speeding away from a lover I’ve jilted?”
Maddox chuckled, plopped down across from me and put his feet up on my bench. “I thought that we would have like, plush Amtrak chairs.”
“Ah, my dear Ilya, how things could have been different if the world only understood that our love has no boundaries. I shall miss the foggy mornings with you in my arms and the warm scent of tea rising from the cups you’d brought us. We could have had the world.”
Laughing harder, Maddox playfully kicked my leg. “Quit it, Tolstoy.”
“I can do Chekov instead.”
“Uncle Vanyaor ‘torpedoes ready, captain’ Chekov?”
I kicked him this time.
