The Last Secret, page 11
Kuzak made a dismissive gesture. “This is what women like you are doing to destroy the underground. A patrol will soon ambush us coming back to our bunker.”
“You made sure I didn’t know the location of your bunker,” she cried, glancing down the barrel of his gun. It was the same kind of Liliput pocket pistol she’d seen on other insurgents before they began snatching Russian-made weapons off the bodies of Soviet partisans.
Kuzak surprised her by turning the handle of the pistol toward her. “In respect to Roman, we’re releasing you. You’ll go back to your mother’s house and wait for this NKVD officer to contact you. Tell him we believed your story.”
Natalka grabbed at Kuzak’s arm. “She can’t be trusted.”
Savka shuddered with relief. They weren’t killing her?
Kuzak threw off Natalka’s hand. “Here’s the gun Roman should have given you before venturing out here. There are two bullets in the chamber.” Savka reluctantly took the weapon, small but deadly. “Your handler will soon come to visit,” he said. “And you will shoot him. When we see his body, we will trust you again.”
With the cold steel of the pistol in her hand, she focused on the stippled bark of a nearby tree to conceal a wave of raw terror. Kill Lieutenant Belyakov? Agreeing to this plan would confirm that she’d been turned. But did she have a choice? If she failed to shoot the Soviet officer, she didn’t want to know what the underground might do to punish her and her family. Savka’s only recourse was to gratefully accept the gun and hope a better scheme presented itself.
Natalka lunged at her and thrust the length of her submachine gun against Savka’s chest. “If you don’t kill your handler,” she said, “I’ll come for you. I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
Savka’s knees buckled, and she staggered to keep herself upright in the snow. She could still feel the impression of that submachine gun across her breasts after it was yanked away, and she stood motionless, watching Natalka and Kuzak turn and hike up the same way they’d come down. Only when they were out of sight, did she scream her anguish into the trees.
The underground had provided a way out of her predicament with the NKVD. But they didn’t know the deal she’d made with the devil—spy on your husband or lose your son. This was a contract impossible to break, yet she feverishly schemed a solution. Lieutenant Belyakov had been right—the underground had saved her. Now he owned Savka Ivanets as surely as he did his own boots. Had he also known they would order her to kill him? If so, he wouldn’t be alone when he came to find her in Deremnytsia.
She stared at the gun, imagining Belyakov and his soldiers coming to her home, as threatened. She’d enlist Mama and Lilia’s help to overpower them, then Savka would hold a butcher’s knife to the officer’s throat and take him hostage until the Soviets agreed to trade his life for her son’s. If the officer refused, she’d eviscerate him and scatter his guts in the forest to be devoured by wolves. But if she killed the only man who could free Taras, she’d lose him forever.
Savka stumbled, falling hard on her wounded shoulder in the packed snow. Moaning, she rolled onto her back and stared up into the trees, struck by a raw and gutting truth: she couldn’t kill the officer, she must betray the underground and her own husband in order to save her son. She’d have to be smart and muster her courage. Somehow, she’d find Marko and he would rescue Taras.
With grim determination sharpened by grief, she pocketed the gun and began to descend through the silent forest.
13
JEANIE
Salt Spring Island
december 5, 1972
i stand under a massive Garry oak tree on the headland near the house. The wind whips Aunt Suze’s ceremonial Japanese kimono around my bare legs and the scars that traverse my back and stomach in whorls and channels. Across the palm of my hand lies a length of rope, one end fashioned into a noose. My nostrils fill with the brine smell of kelp drying on the beach at low tide. My eyes fill with angry tears.
Rain has ebbed, the sky now rinsed clear of cloud. Across the Strait of Georgia, snow dusts the summits of the Coast Mountain range only thirty miles to the east. A short ferry ride to the west, the mountains of Vancouver Island jut skyward. A hundred yards to my left, a long wooden staircase descends from the deck that wraps the house and leads to the beach path. Over thousands of years, ocean waves pounded this coast, creating Southey Bay, and the headland—made of harder rock that resisted erosion—plunges away on all three sides in a sheer cliff drop to the sea. Ghost forms of monolithic rocks shimmer below the surface of the bay, and out in Houston Passage the restless ocean churns.
I scrape away my tears and tighten the knot on the noose, using my thumb to test the strength of the rope, still damp from the shed where I found it among the boxes of screws and light bulbs. Careless Pat had forgotten how dangerous a length of rope can be in the hands of a heartsick woman.
A sudden gust bothers a few shreds of rabbit fur strewn in a dismal still life upon the moss at my feet. Bunnies are shy, yet extremely talented at evading predators—just the shadows of those wings send them scurrying for cover—but sometimes an eagle catches a rabbit out in the open, on land such as this, and then it’s a fight to the finish. Fur and sometimes feathers or thatches of down are often the only sign such an epic war has taken place. I stare down at the battle scene, wondering if this bunny fought to the bitter end, or ceased to struggle as it lay helpless in the raptor’s talons, admitting defeat to the stronger opponent. Perhaps it got away—slipped from the vise, because that’s what rabbits sometimes did.
After Pat had destroyed my abstract canvas, thoroughly berated me, and finally left for town, I headed back to the house and stood in the hallway, glaring at the telephone. There was no one to call even if I wanted to, and it rarely rang these days. I yearned to speak with Octavius Karbuz, but what would I tell him? That I had no idea I’d been selling paintings all this time? That I had zero clue as to where the money had gone? I’m an artist so dumb I didn’t even know I had an art dealer, or a “new collection.”
I climbed the stairs in a fury, like a wounded animal caught in a trap, willing to bite off my own leg to survive. In my bedroom, I stripped off my clothes and put on Aunt Suze’s Japanese kimono. It seems the right thing to wear to stage a death scene. What a spectacle I’ll make when Pat comes down the drive: my long hair lifting in the wind, the white kimono fluttering around me, like a butterfly that’s landed on a flower, its wings outstretched.
I’m not really going to hang myself. Horrors. I don’t have the nerve, or the real desire. This is an act of desperation, a petulant kind of performance art, a chance to enjoy the expression on Pat’s face when she thinks the disability cheques and cash from art sales that keep her in Cheerios and Irish whiskey are coming to an end.
“Your cash cow is no longer giving milk for free,” I mutter as I squint up at my Garry oak and toss the rope. It falls uncooperatively across my garden clogs, and I bend to throw it again until it finally hooks over a gnarled branch. “Oh man, it’s going to cost you going forward.” If there is a forward with her.
At one time, I considered the world out there hostile and depraved, a world to escape from. The fear of other people’s judgment and their curious stares sent me into hiding, and, in turn, that fear became my prison. Yet when I close my eyes and feel the wind burn my cheeks, hearing waves crash below and spray salt into the air, I’m free. I stretch out my arms and pretend I’m a bird, hovering over the bay and striking out for lands unknown. I’m smiling into the wind like an idiot, when, from behind my eyelids, an image rushes at me like a freight train—a man in a dark coat and fedora hat standing in a doorway, his looming form silhouetted against the light behind him. I sink to my knees, terrified, the image haunting my every nerve synapse and cellular function.
By the time I raise my head, the memory train has thundered around a corner and disappeared from sight. Who was that man? I might not remember the night of my accident, but I have many childhood memories. Not all of them pleasant. My father was a traveling salesman, often away for weeks at a time on the road. When he returned to our little bungalow in Vancouver, he’d go out at night to get himself stinking drunk, as my mother used to say. This intrusive memory can’t be of him. He wasn’t the kind of father who opened his daughter’s room to gaze at her with affection. And not the kind of dad who stuck around to see her grow up, either.
I haul myself up by the rope and onto a moss-covered rock, experimentally slipping the noose around my neck. But I still feel uneasy. If the man in the doorway was a memory, and he’s not my father, then who the hell is he? My clog slips and the rock wobbles. I claw at air, panicking for a moment as my upper body swings away, then laugh darkly at the irony of possibly managing to hang myself while attempting to foil Pat.
She won’t be long now, I think, cocking my ear to the driveway. I picture her spotting me, rope around my neck, and freaking out, terrified her meal ticket is about to swing.
Years ago, when the two of us first moved to the island and into Gladsheim, Pat told me there were rumors we were a couple of lesbians who’d bought Aunt Suze’s isolated property to avoid the judgement and live in domestic contentment. “Nothing could possibly be further from the truth,” I shout to the wind. Pat is nothing more than a freeloader and a glorified jailer.
A stiff breeze buffets me, and my kimono flaps open, to the dismay of a fat gull that’s drifting along the shoreline, hunting for sea stars. It screeches, lifting away on a current of air and Tuna sets up a furious bark from somewhere near the compost bin out back, startling me. The rock seesaws beneath my feet. Pat must be home. I frown. How has she managed to sneak down the drive without me hearing? I turn, prepared to savor the look of shock on her face, but it isn’t her at all. A man stands near the garden walkway. He stares up at me, astonished, then takes a few tentative steps before breaking into a run. I watch, unnerved, as he scrambles up the path to the headland, his face contorted with effort and distress at the spectacle of me trying to off myself.
He barrels right at me, grabbing me around the waist without hesitation and lifting me, his hand slipping the noose off my neck in one quick movement. I push off his lean chest and struggle away, falling onto the thick moss. The kimono flies up to my knees, and I pull the hem tightly around my ankles to hide my scars.
But he’s already seen them, this man who has somehow showed up just in time to save me. I expect him to flinch where he’s standing, but he’s got a strange light in his haunted, cerulean eyes, almost as if he anticipated finding me like this, trying to hang myself. I study his face. He’s marvelous, the kind of man you see in old films, striking in the Humphrey Bogart manner—expressive nose, his eyes aloof and brooding. I notice his light hair, trimmed close to his head in a no-nonsense army buzz cut, and the scars on his blighted cheeks. The skin’s surface has been irreparably damaged. He looks away, and I wonder what other injury lies hidden beneath his brown leather coat and worn gray corduroy pants, his scuffed boots.
“What were you thinking?” he says, still out of breath.
Tuna chooses this moment to emerge, stiff-legged and sleepy, from behind the house. The man and I watch my old dog meander up the path. This stranger seems otherworldly, someone who went into the forest a long time ago to remove himself from humanity and, after many years in the haunted wood, has emerged a kind of mythical figure, fraught with secrets and slightly stunned at what he’s found in the world.
But what he doesn’t do—to his credit—is fidget and stare at me, like others who’ve come across my kind of awkward. He stands perfectly still, mountainously still. It’s unsettling. I catch him glancing with concern at my cadmium red paint-splattered hands. Does he think it’s blood? He leans forward, his hand out, and I catch his scent—a heady blend of rain, cigarette smoke, and leather. I feel myself blush. His gaze is disarming; its cool, distant quality makes me feel vulnerable and seen. I turn my head, struck mute and aware of how ridiculous I must appear, cowering on the ground, legs tucked under my kimono.
Tuna has arrived and sniffs at the stranger’s hand companionably. He absently scratches behind my dog’s ears. His jacket and pants seem to float on his frame, as if they’re an afterthought, or were chosen only for the warmth they might provide. “I would speak with Pat O’Dwyer,” he says formally, clearing his throat. He has a slight accent that I can’t place.
I scramble to my feet with as much dignity as I can muster. “Has she done something wrong?” I ask, curiosity trumping my fear of strangers. “Is she going to be arrested?” I try not to sound too hopeful.
He takes a step back, almost tripping over an exposed tree root. “I’m investigating a man’s disappearance from your hospital ward in 1959.” He removes a small plastic bag from his coat pocket and opens it to reveal a battered collection of hand-rolled cigarettes. When he selects one, every muscle in my body primes to bolt. Cigarettes mean matches and matches mean fire. Pat usually smokes huddled by the compost bin and even that’s not far enough from the house for me. I squeeze my eyes shut, bracing myself for the distinctive sound of a match strike. But it doesn’t come, and I open one eye to find him simply holding the cigarette, as if it’s somehow dear to him. Does he know? It’s then I notice that the tips of his fingers are missing. “Your fingertips,” I gasp.
“Frostbite,” he says, as if this covers it.
Frostbite. How in God’s name? “Were you lost in the Arctic or stranded on a Himalayan peak in a snowstorm?”
“An assignment in Antarctica,” he says cryptically. He seems to suddenly notice the view from the headland and turns his head, in awe at the ocean, and a long serrated cloud that’s flung itself across the sky.
“I was still in the hospital in 1959,” I venture. “But I didn’t hear of a man disappearing.”
“His name is Marko Kovacs—he changed his last name from Ivanets when he came to Canada.”
“I don’t recognize the name, but maybe Pat will. She’ll be back soon.” I try to pay attention when he tells me the police made a mess of Marko Kovacs’s missing person’s investigation. As he speaks, something odd happens in my chest, a gloriously painful efflorescence, of which I’m unable to pinpoint an exact cause.
“I am Danek Rys,” he says. “Researching cold cases for the Vancouver Sun.”
“Did you come from Europe?” I ask, shyly.
“Czechoslovakia,” he says, and I get the impression he was there during the war and doesn’t wish to dwell on that time in his life. He holds the unlit cigarette between two ravaged fingers and pulls out a well-thumbed notebook from his jacket pocket, flipping a few pages. When he looks back at me, his expression is maddeningly ambiguous. “The police report says Pat O’Dwyer was the last person to see Mr. Kovacs. But she tells me on the phone she never heard of him. I’ve come to face her in this lie—”
“You’ll find she does a lot of that.”
“—and interview you.”
“Me? You were the one who called last night. Pat never told me that a man disappeared off the face of the earth from my hospital ward.” The very idea of it weirds me out. You’d think she would have mentioned it at some point in the past thirteen years. The wind sweeps hair across my face and as I lift my hand to brush it away, the sleeve of my kimono falls to my elbow, revealing the shiny twisted scars on my arm.
“Why do you do this?” the newspaperman asks, indicating the rope, still swinging from the tree.
Why exactly did I come up here with a rope? To upset Pat? I can do that with a word. No, it’s something more. Much more. I stare at Mr. Rys for a moment. There must be some way to articulate how very isolated and desperate I am out here with a caregiver who’s forcing me to paint and stealing the proceeds of my art sales. I clear my throat and try on a tentative smile. “Don’t you think you should have to fight?”
14
SAVKA
Kraków, German General Government, Poland
april 23, 1944
“we took bets on what color your eyes were,” a woman said to Savka. “I was right—they’re brown!” A thermometer was stuck rudely into her mouth. “I’m Ewa.”
Savka opened her eyes in the strange room. Warily, she turned her head on the pillow and eyed the Red Cross nurse. Ewa wore a crisp blue dress and sat on a chair beside her bed, gazing at Savka expectantly, arms folded over the bright red cross sewn over her heart. She was beautiful. Short blonde hair framed fine features arranged in an expression of veiled curiosity. Her flaxen eyebrows and lashes only made her pale blue eyes more arresting. Savka knew some Polish, but her first instinct was to not trust this nurse. The conflict between their neighboring countries was epic—fighting over what constituted the borders of Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland. Although Nazis were still in control of that disputed territory, the Red Army would soon push them out.
The moment that Ewa took the thermometer out of her mouth, Savka said, “Where am I?”
Ewa frowned as she held the thermometer to the light. “Finally, your fever has broken.” She smiled at her. “You’re in a Red Cross clinic in Podgórze Kraków, and we’ve dosed you up to here with penicillin.” The nurse eyed the bandage on her patient’s chest. “You were brought in by a Ukrainian doctor.”
A Ukrainian doctor? Savka lifted a tentative hand to her scalp, thunderstruck to feel rough stubble beneath her fingertips.
“You got lice on the road,” Ewa said, noticing her distress. “It had to be shaved.”
Savka glanced around the ward, eyes wild. Without her long hair, she felt like a chick newly emerged from its egg. A wave of nausea overwhelmed her, and she tried to settle her stomach by studying the ceiling high above, intricately carved with cherubs and angels.
