A Shadow in Moscow, page 31
“I don’t think you need it, Mother, but you have it. I forgive you.”
She inhales so sharply through her nose that her nostrils collapse with the effort. I’ve seen her do that gesture a thousand times, always suspecting she was annoyed with me or with something else, but now I understand. It’s a self-defense mechanism. She is drawing back from a line beyond which she can’t control her emotions or the variables. The cost of exposure was always too high for her—even in the privacy of our little family of three—to risk true vulnerability.
She checks her watch and taps the table between us. She’s all business now. I recognize this pragmatic mother.
“This is for you.” She stretches the bag to me. “You must change your clothes. Every article. Even your underwear. The KGB sprays closets regularly with radioactive dust.”
At my expression she clucks her tongue. “Not enough to harm anyone, just enough to track them. Your job and relationship to Petrov make you a prime candidate. They could have entered your apartment at any time, especially after you caught their attention in the failed brush pass at the Hotel Metropol.”
“You heard about that?”
“I’ve heard a great deal about the impetuous SCOUT.” She quirks a half smile and I’m embarrassed my own mother knows how much I’ve messed up over the years. I’m humiliated that LUMEN—a living legend—knows how much I’ve messed up over the years.
I take the clothes.
She continues. “There is little time. A car will pull into the alley exactly five minutes after I walk out the hotel’s front door. When we stand to leave, go to the powder room and change. Leave your current clothes in the bag in a stall, along with your handbag. Someone else will collect and dispose of them. Take absolutely nothing with you that is not in that bag. I will head straight through the lobby and out. It will take me thirty seconds and then the five-minute timer starts. There is a side door at the end of the hallway. It is unlocked. Walk through it with only fifteen seconds to spare. You mustn’t be seen lingering in the alley.”
“You arranged this? With the CIA?”
She lifts a single finger to gain my attention. “Other than one agent, the CIA is cut out of this. Whatever has happened, it’s in their backyard and there is no one you can trust. Remember that. I called in a favor from an old, dear friend and your security will be flawless.”
“And you?”
She touches my cheek. “‘Soon . . . There’s still work to do.’”
Her voice takes on a strange, soft quality of remembrance. I reach for her and end up clutching the tablecloth between us. “What work? You’re in as much danger as I am.”
“Don’t fret. I have a plan to keep us both safe.” She holds my gaze for a long moment. “Someday you may need to forgive your father too, Anya. He loved us the best he could, and this”—she waves her hand between us—“will be incredibly painful for him.”
In a flash I skip past my father’s pedantic lectures and remember the significant events of my childhood—his pride as I hit each milestone within the Party’s youth organizations; his manic love for marching music, parades, and patriotic festivals; his loyalty; and his fear.
That last is a new revelation. In a flash I see and feel it now—my father has been afraid of something his entire life. Maybe the very ideology he built up and I worked to break down. The ideology my mother never embraced. Nevertheless, I love him. And as complex as their relationship must be, I sense she does too. Maybe love isn’t so complicated after all.
I remember I once argued with a few kids at school over Party ideals—they were spouting nonsense. But when I relayed the incident to my mother, she said, “If you’ve only seen the color red, how could anyone expect you to recognize blue?” It took me years to understand she wasn’t talking about crayons, and only now do I suspect she was talking about my father as well.
She’s about to stand when I ask one last question. “Do you enjoy music?”
It feels like a random question, but it’s important. I love music. Always have. I truly believe it captures the best essence of a culture. It helps you grasp massive ideas in a compressed time frame. Music seeps into your soul and molds you. But my mother always hated Soviet marching records and the music that blares from street speakers. Her eyes tighten and her jaw gets so square I think she’d crack a tooth. Until I was a teenager, I thought it was just Party music, but then she hated all Dmitri’s heavy Soviet rock too. Now I wonder if it was never the music at all.
Her eyes fill with tears. She doesn’t try to stop them. One falls with her small single nod.
My heart shatters. How little I know her. How small I’ve loved her. I pick up my still-full teacup, amazed at how the world can tip on its axis and yet not a drop has spilled. I’m still sitting upright and only the drop of moisture falling from her cheek to her chin, and the soft hum of nothingness surrounding us, tells me life marches on.
“We must go.” My mother stands.
“But?” I set down the cup. It’s too fast. Too final.
“No buts.” She reaches for my hand again. “No looking back. The people picking you up will take care of you. They’ll get you to a plane in Paris. I will take care of you, my beloved.” She smiles. “It’s my job, my life’s mission, and my pleasure.”
I turn my hand underneath hers to grip it tight for a heartbeat. I then feel her slight pull within our grasp.
It’s time.
With no more words, she smooths her cardigan sweater over her shoulders, picks up her handbag, and, leaving a kiss on my cheek, makes a silent goodbye. Then, with her back straight and regal, she walks out the café’s glass door.
I watch her turn and proceed through the Hotel Imperial’s decadent lobby. After The Talks here, I read about this hotel—how Hitler seized it immediately as a sign of power and probably as payback for once having to shovel snow from its front walk. It had been an interesting story for me. It was life for my mother—things she experienced and understood at a far deeper level than I ever will.
She steps through the hotel’s outer door and onto the red carpet running to the curb. I glance at my watch. Five minutes. I pick up my napkin from where it has fallen onto the floor and fold it. I open the leather billfold lying on the table as if to confirm we’ve paid the bill, which Mother did in the middle of our tea. I stand, straighten my skirt, pick up my handbag and the shopping bag, and walk with slow, leisurely steps out the cafe’s door.
Rather than turn right and circle back into the lobby, I turn left into the ladies’ room. It’s empty. I stop at the mirror. How can I look no different than an hour earlier? I wonder what’s ahead for me. I wonder what I’ll tell Skip. He’ll demand LUMEN’s identity. They all will. I almost laugh at the irony. The spy I feared only slightly less than the KGB turned out to be not only the one who saves me, again, but my own mother.
I change and fold my clothes into the shopping bag. I leave the toilet stall and check my watch again. Forty-five seconds left. Upon entering I’d noticed the exit sign at the end of the short hallway. I’d also noticed the red alarm panel with wires attached to the door. She said it was unlocked.
With a deep breath I roll my shoulders back and walk out the door. This time I am not alone. A group of ladies stand chatting in the hallway, directly between me and my exit. There’s no way I’m getting past them without calling attention to myself.
I count down the seconds as I slowly make my way toward them. With three meters to go, one points down a side hall and her four friends follow her away. My approach is clear and I pick up my pace. I suspect I’m about five seconds late now.
I brace my hands against the door’s metal bar to push it open and whisper a quick prayer, “Do not be afraid.” I’m instantly back with Dmitri on his last night and with Tracy at Georgetown for every Sunday service she dragged me to, and I feel their faith has now become my own. As the door gives way, I realize my time at church with Tracy is another memory, commonality, and understanding I withheld from Dmitri. So much lost. So much wasted.
I close my eyes. No alarm sounds and I step, eyes still shut, into the alley. Opening them, I watch as a black Mercedes sedan rolls toward me from the alley’s north entrance. It stops and the trunk pops open as a man, close to my mom’s age, emerges from the driver’s seat.
“Quick. When you’re safe inside take off your sweater and stockings. You’ll be too hot otherwise. There’s a water bottle in the corner and another empty one if you need to reliev—”
I hold up my hand to stop him, feeling too vulnerable and too human. “I’ll be fine.”
He gestures hurry with his free hand. The other is holding the lid of the trunk, ready to shut it.
Movement catches my eye—nothing more than a shadow. My mother rounds the corner at the alley’s entrance. Our eyes catch and I lift my hand in a small wave of goodbye. She presses her fingers to her lips in a silent kiss.
I climb into the car’s trunk, then glance back as the lid closes over me. I need to see her one more time.
She is gone.
Twenty-Seven
Ingrid
Vienna
June 15, 1985
6:05 p.m.
“Soon . . . There’s still work to do.”
Ingrid had never forgotten Martin’s last words. She had purposely used them in answer to Anya’s question about her own plans. They created a link to her parents, to Martin, to Adam, to all those she believed in and to all she was now willing to sacrifice for. They played through her mind as she walked from the hotel toward the University of Vienna. For forty-one years they had plagued her. Every time they entered her dreams, she had resisted. Now she understood and had made them her own.
She took a wide circle, passing by the address where she had lived with Adam and Martin. A new building stood there. It held no memories. She walked on. She walked to her childhood home. It stood unchanged and still had the power to drop her to her knees. She gripped a nearby light post as waves of memories assaulted her. Her mother, father, all those families; the smell of cooking; laughter; love; literature; the night she met Adam; that last afternoon; seeing her parents broken and bleeding, pushed, pulled, and beaten as they were thrown from their home. She could feel Adam’s strong hand clamped over her mouth and his other arm locked around her waist, dragging her away.
She closed her eyes and said goodbye to all of it. She then walked toward Universitätsring to catch a cab to the airport. She had only a few minutes before the evening’s last flight to Moscow. And she needed a plane—traveling again by train, delaying her arrival further, and getting arrested at the station could ruin everything.
She inhaled long and slow, willing the scent of her daughter, which she’d captured in that last kiss on her cheek, to remain with her—that unique scent each human carried. Anya’s permeated her hair, her clothes, her very essence, and was only discernible if you knew and loved her well. Ingrid tried to press the memory of it deep into her being.
“You were right,” she whispered to her parents, to Martin, and even to Adam. “You did know what you were doing. And now so do I.”
She stopped at a pay phone on the corner of Rathausplatz and Universitätsring. She dialed the British embassy in Moscow. “Please connect me to Ambassador Campbell.”
One night, deep into drink, Comrade Bartsov had remarked how they had finally secured a listening device within the British embassy. Ingrid had warned Reginald and they’d worked around it, but they had purposely left the device in the ambassador’s office active and always manned. It had come in handy over the years and would do just what she needed it to do now.
“Ambassador Campbell’s office. How may I help you?” a young voice asked.
“Please tell him that Inga Kadinova—” She stopped and swallowed. She had to make it so simple, so basic, so obvious, that it didn’t fail. “Code name LUMEN, wishes to come in.”
“I—” The young woman stalled.
Ingrid hung up, trusting the KGB had heard enough.
Twenty-Eight
Anya
En route to Paris
June 15, 1985
Sometime around 11:00 p.m.
The man was right.
Even after I remove my sweater and my pantyhose, the trunk is stiflingly hot. He was right about the extra bottle too—I can’t hold my bladder. How long is this drive?
At first I thought I would hyperventilate. Fear and panic set my heart and breath racing. I had to keep telling myself for that first dark time—I have no idea if it was one hour or three—to breathe slow and easy, to believe I would be fine, and to trust my mother would be as well.
I thought they would pull me from the car once we left Vienna. After all, Austria is a neutral nation. But the car drives on. We stop for petrol several times, but I don’t dare move.
The car grows smelly too. One gets used to smells, I’ve noticed over the years. I could walk into Dmitri’s home and be repulsed by the scent of cabbage or onions for the first five minutes, then forget all about it within ten. This scent is my own, however, and I do not grow used to it. It smells of the lily perfume my father gave me for my twenty-first birthday; it smells of my mother’s jasmine perfume that caught in my hair while we talked; it smells of wool, warm pantyhose, sweat, fear, and finally urine. That’s what catches me.
In its totality, it’s the stench of desperation.
Through all I’ve done—last year’s brush pass fiasco when I came close to getting captured and even when I photographed the nuclear missile—I’ve never experienced this. And I’ve certainly never smelled it.
The car drives on and time slips away and I am a child again. With my mama. That’s what I called her then, and that’s how I think of her now. I remember her chastisements and gentle lectures. I always thought she was the model Soviet woman, dedicated to the Party, the Politburo, the ideals. How little I understood. Her greatest cover was in her compliance, but even that wasn’t complete. My mind plays through memories I’ve never allowed myself to dwell upon. They almost feel like dreams, but they are not. There are cracks in her facade, if only I’d looked hard enough.
I recall she was the one who told Dmitri and me to stop teasing the kids with the bast shoes, telling us it wasn’t their fault they wore those ugly bark shoes and that their parents weren’t Party members, leaving them excluded from coupons, clubs, and approved school trips.
I also remember the moment Dmitri mentioned at the bar before he died. The one I’d forgotten, or perhaps put away on purpose. She’d sat us both down, trembling with fury or fear—I couldn’t tell which—and told us what really happened during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution—Hungarian Uprising as I’d been raised to call it. We’d been so proud, parroting our teacher’s propaganda. But Mama told a different, and chilling, story. She told us how the students were murdered, how Soviet troops rolled into their country, how two hundred thousand Hungarians fled. And only now do I remember how she finished that lesson. “You two need the truth, but we will never speak of this again and you must never repeat it, not to either of your fathers nor to anyone.”
I did ask about it again, though. I remember that too. She put me off, saying, “I was upset about work yesterday. I was just telling tales. Don’t think on it again. I never should have spoken like that.” I remember feeling confused, like reality and fantasy merged. I suspect that was her point.
She was also the one who fought for the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute and must have been the one who wrangled the invite to the Foreign Studies Initiative program. She was certainly the one who enticed me to accept by suggesting all the art and culture I could absorb. “A glimpse into a world so few are able to see.” And she was the one who held Dmitri’s hand all those years and connected with him, took him to church, and tried to guide him in ways I couldn’t see he needed.
I even wonder what would have happened if I’d come to her after Dmitri died. Or if—before or after I dropped that Pepsi can into the car—I’d confided in her, gone for a long walk in the park, and poured out my heart. Would she have steered me back to center as she had so many times before when I was searching? Would she have made something up that placated my fears and frustrations? Or would she have respected that I was an adult and opened up? Would she have let me in?
Soon questions about my mother become eclipsed by facts about LUMEN.
He is highly placed.
He is the greatest intelligence service secret in the history of any organization, with information parsed so fine and so thoroughly scrubbed, no one has ever pinned down the source. He probably drives Philby crazy.
He advised nations on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Prague Spring, the Summits, the Treaties, Reagan’s softening after ABLEARCHER in ’83, Thatcher’s words and behavior at Andropov’s funeral, and the recent and immensely successful Thatcher/Gorbachev meeting.
His instincts are impeccable. His intelligence high-grade. He is a legend, a shadow, a mystery, a spymaster, a demigod.
She is my mother.
Twenty-Nine
Ingrid
Moscow
June 16, 1985
Midnight
The plane touched down as Ingrid’s watch struck midnight. Tired and worn, she made her way home—in full view of every camera, purposefully stepping into every light.
At the corner closest to her apartment, she stopped to gather her thoughts and her courage. She entered the building and chose to take the stairs rather than the elevator. Though exhausted, she wanted to feel each step, take each by the choice of her own free will, and recognize their cost. She did not want to be whisked to her destination.
She was there soon enough regardless. She unlocked the front door and was not surprised to find the apartment lit and Leo awake. They heard her message to Ambassador Campbell, and—even with bureaucracy and security protocols—the KGB would already be tasked to hunt down all twenty-five names on the list.
