The Last Secret, page 17
Within a few minutes, their car crossed a short bridge. Now they seemed to be on an island in the middle of the city. The car slowed in front of a grand bombed-out relic, the towering limestone walls and columns pitted with shrapnel fragments from artillery fire. Savka imagined it might have once been an impressive museum. “Where is my friend and her son?” she cried.
Her captor opened the back door, and she was yanked out onto the sidewalk. She pounded her fists on the Russian’s chest and looked back at Zoya, her small palm flat against the car window, her face wet with tears. “Let her out!”
“She stays here,” Yeleshev said, his voice a surprisingly rich baritone.
Savka struggled as he led her up a series of wide steps into the building and down a warren of abandoned corridors. The air was thick with dust and the musty scent of ancient history. She tripped over rubble from the collapsed ceiling as they passed through an arched entrance to a massive gallery. Would she be reunited with Ewa and Paweł in a bombed and deserted museum?
Savka’s heart almost stopped at the sight of a figure in the middle of the gallery, his back to her. Belyakov waited next to a huge stone structure of time-worn bricks glazed a vivid lapis blue. Exotic animals stood out from the wall in bas relief—enameled tiles depicting lions, dragons, bulls. Boards lay on the ground, presumably pried away from the installation, the rest of which was covered by other boards and extensive scaffolding. Several NKVD border soldiers stood in the archway, smoking. The Germans had done what they could to protect this antiquity from Allied air raid damage, but there was no protection from the invading Soviets.
“Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon!” he thundered, without turning to look at her. “Isn’t it magnificent, Savka? The Ishtar Gate brought here stone by stone. What I would have given to be on that dig—fifteen years to unearth this beauty.”
She ignored his comment. At another time, she would have studied the gate with fascination, but this was the man she’d hoped never to see again, the same dark eyes under his cap, his immaculate khaki uniform, and burnished black boots, Lilliputian as ever. When he removed his cap, she saw that he’d pomaded his hair, slicking each hair so close, she could make out the disquieting shape of his skull.
He opened his arms and turned to the gallery. “We have all this glory to ourselves, Savka. See where it was walled in during the Allied air raids? If not for the meddling of American troops, we would have disassembled it and taken it to Moscow, like the Pergamon Altar.” A sour look. “Now it must be guarded day and night.” He gestured to the NKVD border soldiers. “They have taken off the cladding so we can see it. What a gift to stand before one of the Seven Wonders of the World—entrance to the ancient city of Babylon.”
Savka glanced up at the spectacle, hardly seeing it for worry over Zoya and barely listening as Belyakov prattled on about how German archaeologists had painstakingly reconstructed the gate in Berlin, any missing tiles replaced to show what the edifice must have looked like in its day, one hundred years before the birth of Christ. It was obvious that he expected her to show some kind of awe, but she refused to give him the satisfaction.
“If you hurt my daughter, I’ll kill you,” she said quietly, fixing Belyakov with a cold, dead stare.
“Did you hear that, Yeleshev?” Belyakov tilted his head back to look at the roof of the gallery, parts of which were open to the sky. “Do you see the destruction Hitler wreaked on Germany’s treasures?”
“They shouldn’t have stolen it in the first place,” she said.
“Savka, I had no idea you shared my love of archaeology.” Belyakov smiled broadly. He took out his pewter flask, slipped a small white pill into his mouth, and gulped it down without taking his eyes off her. “Did you know this gate was built to venerate Ishtar, the goddess of love and war?” He chuckled to himself. “One must appreciate a woman who forced gods and men to their knees.” Belyakov stole another drink from his flask before returning it to his pocket. Then, hands folded behind his back, he stepped closer to examine a golden dragon set within the bright blue tiles, its long tongue lashing as it prowled the netherworld.
Savka was sick of his games. “Where is Ewa?” she demanded.
“Safe.”
“What have you done with my friend?”
“If you wish to be a successful operative, you would do well to follow Ewa’s example.” Belyakov turned to face her, laughing at her obvious confusion. “You ignored the signs, my dear Savka. Did you not question why your friend took you in so readily?”
She blinked rapidly. He was trying to make her doubt Ewa, and she wasn’t going to let it happen. “Why would I question a woman so welcoming and giving of herself? Ewa is a true loving soul, who would give me the shirt off her back.”
Belyakov smiled. “And…did she?” he asked with a wink.
Stunned, Savka backed away from him but Yeleshev, who’d been leaning against the wall behind her, stepped out and pushed her forward. Her thoughts stuttered over Belyakov’s sly suggestion. As she tried to convince herself that he knew nothing of the relationship between her and Ewa, moments with her friend replayed in her mind like one of the war-time romance films they often went to see at the playhouse in Kraków: In bed with Ewa, her lovely fingers tracing a pattern on her naked back, taking her, sobbing, into her arms while Savka wailed Taras’s name into her shoulder. Ewa angry at the treatment of Jews on the day Savka had caught her getting dressed for her SS officer informant, yet warning her for trying to help them. Ewa handing Savka the exit visas, willing to leave her lovely flat and Poland forever. The film ended like so many of them did, with a close-up of the Hollywood starlet wearing a stylish new red hat, fingers trembling as she lighted a cigarette on the train. Savka’s heart turned over and a hot, hard lump formed in her throat. “Ewa…just took my gun to keep Berlin police from arresting me at checkpoints.”
“Dear Ewa,” Belyakov said, his eyes dancing with amusement. “Protecting innocent women from harm.”
Yes, Savka thought, with a low moan, she protected me…didn’t she? “Ewa loves me,” she murmured aloud, shivering as if she had a fever.
“Love?” he scoffed. “Ewa does not love.”
“She does,” Savka insisted. “She loves me. Ask her.”
“I would if she wasn’t leaving tomorrow for New York with her son Paweł and daughter Maja,” he said with a sick smile.
The shock of betrayal rose slowly, forcing Savka to examine the truth in utter devastation. Maja was alive? With shame and humiliation, she thought of every secret she’d told her friend. How had she been so stupid, so trusting? And how could Ewa have lied so easily? Paweł had become another son to Savka, and Ewa loved Zoya to distraction. It can’t be true. But she knew that it was.
“Ewa is one of your agents,” she said, her voice wretchedly toneless.
“Not mine,” Belyakov said conversationally. “A comrade turned her and two other Home Army operatives a few months before I turned you. You’d flown the coop and I’d written you off but imagine my delight to hear from my comrade that you had shown up at his agent’s clinic in Kraków.” He looked at her with hooded eyes, ignoring her tears. “It wasn’t personal, Savka. Ewa kept you safe until I needed you. She did what she had to do to get her daughter back.”
So Ewa had delivered her to Belyakov to save Maja. Savka knew she’d do the same to Ewa if it meant being reunited with Taras. Still, her hands formed into fists, tight against her sides. “You’re a monster,” she spat at the Soviet. “You used Maja the way you use my son.”
Belyakov merely shrugged. “Let Ewa inspire you, Savka. Do a good job and it’s possible to get your son back.”
The scene in their flat seven months prior came hurtling back at Savka: Ewa shouting at the Soviet agent, shoving him to protect Zoya; his hand darting out to slap her. It had all been a charade, a show they’d staged to convince her to trust Ewa completely. She trembled, thinking back to how cooly her friend had seduced her. The sex had been casual, meaningless—simply what she did to ensnare her victims, male or female. And that damned new red hat—undoubtedly purchased with money Ewa had earned double-crossing Savka and Zoya and delivering them to the NKVD.
Belyakov was watching her with a sober expression. “You will never escape me. Show me Marko’s letters from Rimini.”
She opened her handbag and blindly handed them over. As the Russian scanned each one, she glanced up at a figure of a striding lion on the Ishtar Gate, its savage eyes wide and fangs bared in the pursuit of ancient prey. How she yearned to become that lion, leap upon the Soviet agent, bite into his bony neck and bleed him to the ground.
Belyakov swore and threw the letters. They fluttered around her like lost doves. “He has said nothing of MI-6. You must ask him direct questions.”
It was Savka’s turn to scoff at him. “He would suspect me.”
The Russian practically pulsed with rage, his dark eyes resolute. “Do not waste my time,” he shouted. “Ewa’s forged exit visas got you here. Now you will go to Marko.” He suddenly stepped back and clapped with mock joy. “What a reunion it will be!”
“Why did you bother with this deception?” she asked, startled at how easily his moods shifted. “You could have given me the visas instead of making Ewa forge them.”
“Marko knows the Soviets would never issue you an exit visa. But if you tell him your good friend who’d once been in the Polish resistance helped you get papers, he will suspect nothing.”
Savka still didn’t understand. The Soviets had hunted Marko’s Waffen-SS division since its inception in 1943 and had been one step behind them as the division marched across eastern Europe, fighting partisans. But that didn’t explain the trouble Belyakov was taking with this case. “Why do you still want him so badly?”
His mouth twitched, as if he were suppressing a smile. “There was a camp muster list—a roll call. The British commander would not let me have it. But it was stolen by your husband before he left the POW camp. He somehow took the Rimini List from under Brigadier Block’s nose,” he added with reluctant admiration.
She stared numbly at him. “Why would Marko steal this list?”
Belyakov’s eyes danced. “To safeguard his men. Think of what that list means. The names and places of birth of every man in the Fourteenth Waffen-SS Division. Over eight thousand Soviet citizens—traitors who must answer for their collaboration with Germany.”
She allowed herself a merciless smile. It gave her joy that Marko had unwittingly made her Russian handler’s job difficult. “And he’s escaped your clutches yet again.” But there was an aura of smug satisfaction about Belyakov—as though he’d expected Marko to steal this list—that unsettled her.
Belyakov’s face was now an expressionless mask. “You will go to your husband in England. You will find the list.”
“Marko has surely burned it by now,” she said, staring him down.
“Your husband is an arrogant man. I wager he has kept it.”
“He’ll never just give me this list,” she said, but the thought of spying on her husband, of living a lie of that magnitude made her break into a cold sweat.
“Did you suspect Ewa of being a spy?” Belyakov smiled when she shook her head. “You will do it seamlessly, as effortlessly as she did with you. You’re Marko’s wife. You have your methods of persuasion—pillow talk can be illuminating.”
“I want news of my son.”
Belyakov reached into the breast pocket of his coat and held out a photograph, which Savka took, breathless with fear, and expecting to see Taras standing in a Russian field, perhaps embracing a horse that loved him. A scream died in her throat at the sight of a now sixteen-year-old Taras emaciated and drawn, his head shaved and wearing rough, felted clothes, the barren, snow-covered Siberian taiga behind him. Her son was not looking at the camera. He seemed lost, staring out somewhere she could not see, the whites of his eyes stark against the smudges on his face.
Savka wanted to lunge at Belyakov. “He’s in the Gulag?” she choked. “You said you would protect him. I thought—”
“I snapped this photograph myself,” he said proudly, reaching for it. She held it tight against her heart and he grinned, his gold tooth gleaming, dropping his hand as though he realized it was better for her to keep the photo, if only to remind her what was at stake. “The gold mines are infamously torturous.” He raised an eyebrow in affected concern. “Taras looks near to death, wouldn’t you say?”
“You agreed to keep him safe…,” she trailed off, her voice hoarse with emotion.
“Your memory, Savka! I agreed that you’d see him again if you did what we ordered. Your son was charged with counterrevolutionary activities, which carries a twenty-five-year term. Once in Siberia, it’s either the mining or the logging crews for political prisoners. Your husband writes of mobilizing bandits to find Taras. Impossible when he’s in a gulag. But now you’re in a position to help him.”
Her Taras, a political prisoner? She’d heard stories of the many camps within the Gulag, of the mines—long workdays in minus fifty-degree weather. Savka was suddenly furious at Marko, who’d escaped to safety while his son was being worked to death in Siberia. And now she must keep that terrible fact from her husband. Her chest was weighted with so many secrets, she feared she could no longer carry them. “You cannot punish the son for his father’s crimes,” she said finally.
“You will go to your husband and bring us the list.”
“No.”
“Do you want Zoya to grow up in your dark shadow? Do you want her to grow up knowing her mother was a traitor?”
Savka ground her teeth to stop herself from shouting. “You will move Taras to safe work, out of the cold.”
Belyakov blinked and nodded at Yeleshev, who strong-armed Savka back down the long hallways of the ruined museum. When they got to the car, she came to an abrupt stop. “My daughter,” she said, throwing off his hand, “will be in the back with me.”
The Russian reluctantly obliged her and opened the front passenger door.
Zoya leapt into Savka’s arms. “Mama?” the little girl whispered in her ear. “I thought you were gone forever.”
Savka clung to her daughter, devastated that she’d made her fear such a thing. “I’m here, my love,” she said before steering Zoya into the backseat.
As Ilyin silently navigated the car through the ruined streets of Berlin, Savka contemplated her situation. She held tight to Zoya, who buried her face in her mother’s dress collar. Only hours ago, she’d exulted in the certainty that she’d finally escaped Belyakov; now she felt his hands around her throat. Worse, she had learned that Taras was suffering in a gulag.
She thought of Ewa with Paweł and Maja, soon on their way to America, a place she’d always dreamed of going—to a clean, bright apartment supplied by Belyakov for a job well done. Does she feel guilty for her betrayal? What did Savka know for certain, except that she could trust no one? She hugged her daughter close, stifling a sob. Her beloved friend had delivered her like a hog to the butcher, and Savka would never forgive her.
But she was now bound for England, and soon she and Zoya would be reunited with Marko. For now, she was a bird set free from her cage—even if the master kept the door open in anticipation of her return—and she would spread her wings and fly. She would turn the tables on this ruthless Soviet and tell Marko everything.
21
JEANIE
Salt Spring Island
december 9, 1972
what’s she hiding in here? Vibrating with excitement and dread, I kneel in front of Pat’s bedroom door, frantically jiggling a hairpin in her lock. I’ve seen this technique in a detective movie, but it’s harder than it looks.
Ten minutes later, I’m sweating, ready to give up when there’s a click and the lock gives, almost like magic. I open the door and stare wide-eyed at Pat’s inner sanctum. It’s immaculate, of course—the sheets snugged tight with hospital corners, the quilt on top smoothed of wrinkles. The trinkets on her dresser are neatly lined up, the books on her nightstand perfectly stacked. Every surface clear of dust.
Tiptoeing across the wood floor, I hover in the doorway of Pat’s bathroom; the distinct funk of her Irish Spring soap makes me want to retch. Aunt Suze had the house built in the early 1950s and the entire bathroom is stuck in that decade—pink tile up the walls edged in black, with matching soap dishes above the sink. When I step onto the cold pink-and-black tiled floor and approach the mirrored medicine cabinet, I can’t help but pause. It’s one thing jimmying her lock, another to be snooping through her things.
There are no mirrors in my own room—to avoid unexpected glimpses of my naked, marred flesh. I glance up at Pat’s before remembering not to. And gasp. Dark hair hangs listlessly around my face, not having been cut in at least a decade. It’s almost to my waist. I’m only thirty-one and yet I look thin and drawn and old. My scars mark the places where my wedding dress ended and began. Nothing on my face or neck, my upper arms, my lower legs, but lurking just beneath the neckline of my sweatshirt, there lies puckered and webbed skin worthy of a character out of Grimm’s fairytales.
