Revolver (13 page)

Authors: Marcus Sedgwick

BOOK: Revolver

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Moon Day, morning

A
nyone would have thought it was the Devil himself who came flying out of the cabin after Sig, as he bolted down from the porch.

He saw Anna ahead, transfixed by the two gun shots.

“Run!” he shouted.

She didn't need telling twice.

Behind Sig, Wolff staggered like a drunk, as rage and pain fought for control of his mind and his body. Blood was pouring from his right hand; the thumb and at least his first two fingers were gone, and he clutched uselessly at it with his thumbless left.

“Run!”

Sig waved Anna on, but soon caught her up.

He risked a look backward, and to his horror he saw Wolff was gaining on them.

He seemed oblivious to his injury, just wanting one thing now. He had forgotten about gold, about revenge,
about lust. All he wanted to do was kill them both, and Sig did not doubt that even in his wounded state, he could still do that.

Anna turned for the shore, but Sig called her back.

“No! This way. Up here. To the trees.”

They put on a burst of speed that took them to the line of little trees that lay at the edge of the forest, and then Anna saw what Sig saw.

The snow.

“Wait!” Sig cried. “Anna. Wait. We need to walk.”

“What?” Anna cried. “Are you mad?”

“No! Anna, remember! We need to walk!”

And now Anna nodded and stopped.

Wolff was only yards away.

“Have faith,” she said to herself, and walked across the snow.

Sig followed, trying to stop himself from breaking into a run.

Slowly, they set out across the snow field between the trees.

They were maybe twenty feet in when Wolff hurtled after them. It was enough. Within two paces he sank into the snow up to his chest, breaking through the ice crust which Sig and Anna had walked clean over.

He floundered, waving his arms around him, blood staining the snow in a vivid red scar all around him.

At one moment it seemed he might break free, but his
rage and his strength were draining away with his blood.

Sig and Anna walked on a few more paces, then stopped and turned.

It was true.

Wolff was trapped.

“Help me!” he cried. “Help me. I'm hurt.”

Sig remembered. He remembered saying the same thing to Wolff, only hours before. What was it Wolff had said in reply?

Sig took a tentative step closer to him.

“Well, Mr. Wolff,” he whispered. “Is that my problem?”

1967

The Warwick Hotel New York City

Postscript

S
igfried Andersson sat in the small but elegant bar of the hotel and recalled the last of the story. He was chatting to a young soldier who had just come back from a war in a jungle in a country Sig had never heard of. The young soldier had seen some sights, and had heard some stories, but he'd never heard a story like the one the old Swedish man was telling him.

Some of the details were crystal clear, some were hazy; it had been a long time. He'd forgotten some of it, but then, there were times when he forgot for a moment the name of the woman he'd married, though she'd only been dead five years.

He was an old man, and old men have a right to forget certain things.

But there were other things he would never forget.

He would never forget dragging Wolff from the snow, with Anna's help, and then Nadya's, too. Mr. Bergman
and men from town arrived soon afterward, and took Wolff away. He wasn't quite dead, and even to this day Sig couldn't work out exactly how he felt about that. He'd heard that Wolff had died in prison a few years later, in a fight with another prisoner. The dumb man had never learned to control his anger, and it had cost him his life in the end. A man with no thumbs was never going to win a fight with a cell mate holding an iron table leg.

And then there was something else that he would never forget. Anna and Nadya and he had gone back into the cabin, to try and set things right. The men from town had taken Einar's body away, in preparation for the funeral, and the three Anderssons had gone with them, staying at Per Bergman's house till it was done.

There was time for grief then, at last, and some kind words were spoken that settled the anger between Anna and Nadya for good. Then the time came to return to the cabin, and Sig, for one, went with great dread. The cabin looked just the same as ever from outside, but inside the signs of the struggle were still evident.

They'd cleaned up the mess, lit the stove, put on some food to cook. Anna had set the chairs on their feet, and Sig saw their mother's Bible lying on the floor.

As he picked it up, his father's words came into his head.

“Even the dead tell stories,” Einar had said, “and this book is full of them.”

Finally something clicked in Sig's head. He pictured the day Einar had repaired Maria's Bible. Opening the front cover, he saw what no one had seen before. A slight bulge, flat and square, under the endpaper. He understood that Einar had not meant to burn the Bible at all but, knowing he was already dead, had tried to draw their attention to it.

He took the knife from Nadya's hand as she chopped a potato, and she and Anna crowded wordlessly around Sig as he slit open the binding at the front of the Bible.

Two neatly folded squares of paper fell out from inside.

One was a short note.

I have something for all of you, but I have hidden it until I know it is safe for you to have it. One day, a man will come. And only when he has gone again, will it be safe for you to have it. When he has gone, take this map and start a new life. I know you can do this, for you are all wonderful and clever people. My Nadya, my Anna, my Sig.

I love you all, E.

The other square of paper was a hand-drawn map.

It led them through a path into the forest behind the
cabin, to the bole of a huge birch tree, under whose spreading roots they found a steel box.

Inside the box was a small fortune in gold.

It had been years until they'd found out how he'd done it; how he'd smuggled all that gold from right under everyone's noses, grain by grain all through that season. One day Sig had bumped into an old miner from the Alaskan gold rush, who'd told him about all the dodges under the sun, including the one about how gold dust will stick to damp fingers, which can then be transferred unseen to hair that's been slicked carefully through with hair oil, to be washed out every evening into a bowl, strained with a muslin cloth. Just the thought of it had brought the smell of his father's hair back to him, so many years later.

It hadn't been so very much money really, but they'd spent it wisely, after convincing Nadya that there was not really anything else they could do with it. They'd bought a stake in Per Bergman's mine, and in the end the iron business had made them very rich.

Just then, Anna came down the stairs and into the hotel bar. She smiled when she saw her brother, still so very much her little brother, even though he was seventy-two.

She laughed as she joined Sig and the young soldier.

“Still telling that old story,” she said.

Sig nodded.

“Time to go,” Anna said. “The concert won't wait for us, and I don't want to miss it.”

They bade the soldier good-bye.

As they walked arm in arm to the concert hall a couple of streets away, Anna turned to Sig.

“You know,” she said. “It took me years to work out why you did it.”

“What's that?” Sig said, though he could guess.

“Why you let Wolff have the gun. When you knew he had more bullets.”

“Ah, that,” said Sig. “Well, it was what you said to me, as you left the cabin. I suddenly saw what I had to do. I wanted to be true to our mother, but I didn't want to let our father down either. And I saw a way to do both, to make them both happy.”

“But you risked your life to do it.”

“Maybe,” said Sig.

“Or were you trusting in God's intervention?”

Sig stopped for a moment. He shrugged.

“I was trusting in what our parents taught us, in their own different ways. Luckily for me, it worked.”

Anna smiled.

“You know, I understand it now. There's always a third choice in life. Even if you think you're stuck between two impossible choices, there's always a third way. You just have to look for it.”

Sig said nothing, but nodded and walked on, and Anna with him.

That night, as Sig went to sleep with the music of Mahler still drifting around his head, two thoughts came to him.

The first thought was this: that he was a foolish old man, because all his life he'd been looking for something, and it was only when Anna joined him in the bar that evening that he realized that home is not something you find outside yourself; home is something you carry inside you, and it's made from the memories of the people you love, and the people who have loved you.

As this thought left his head, it took with it a small burden that he'd carried for almost sixty years; as he connected to the child he'd been before Wolff stalked into his life, and in the space of little more than thirty-six hours, had stopped being a boy and started being a man. Was it Wolff who'd killed that boy? Or had Sig just been waiting for the right moment to start the rest of his life? It didn't matter anymore.

The second thing he thought of was something the young soldier had said to him. He'd said that a story like theirs was too good to be forgotten, and that what Sig ought to do was to write it down. Sig had replied that he couldn't do it. Or rather, not that he couldn't, but that it wouldn't feel right, writing about himself.

So the young soldier, who was himself hoping to be a writer, explained that Sig could write the story as if he was writing it about someone else, about some other family.

Sig understood.

So one day, I picked up a pen, and a small black notebook, and that's just what I did.

And now it's finished, I hope you liked my story.

Sigfried Andersson
New York City

Author's Note

W
hen I decided to make a revolver and the Arctic Circle the central themes of my novel I thought I had better know what I was writing about, and once again I must thank my wonderful publisher for her belief in and support for the book I hoped to write.

It was in sub-zero temperatures in Northern Sweden that I got a sense of the cold and the landscape and walked on frozen lakes. It was there, in Swedish Lapland, that I came across the story of a revivalist preacher, the model for Nadya's preacher, and though this thread in the book has been greatly reduced in the writing, I'd like to thank Lina Moet for her history of the Swedish-Finnish border at the turn of the last century.

For a technical discussion on the revolver, I am greatly indebted to Peter Smithurst of the Royal Armouries, the UK's leading expert on Colts. He carefully explained the history and workings of the Colt, took a 44-40 to
pieces for me to show how it works, and did it all with great enthusiasm.

Thanks too to Gunilla Carlsson for checking my Swedish. I will, in turn, try harder to be a better student!

Finally, I decided I should know what it's actually like to fire a live weapon. Since this is not something easily done in the UK, I traveled to Estonia, where retired policeman Tonu Adrik showed me the ropes one January day in sub-zero conditions.

If I had expected firing a gun to be frightening or difficult, I was wrong. The only scary thing about firing a gun is just how easy it is. Too, too easy. I was also struck by the strong desire I had to do it again, which is also a chilling thing to realize.

I think it's up to each of us to decide whether guns are good or bad, just as it is for Sig in the book. Many people argue that a gun does nothing without someone deciding to pull the trigger, but the arguments are too involved to discuss here properly. All I would like to say is that I believe there's always a third option in life, it's just that sometimes it takes a little while to find it.

Marcus Sedgwick
Christmas Day, 2008
Stockholm

Published by Roaring Brook Press

Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings

Limited Partnership

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

First published in 2009 by Orion Children's Books, London

eISBN 9781429987004

First eBook Edition : February 2011

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress

First American Edition April 2010