The Last Secret, page 21
Savka raked her eyes over Belyakov, assured that at least the guard was on her side. “How did you find me?”
Belyakov regarded her with solemn gravity. He’d always taken great care with his grooming, and now wore his hair in a severe side part, combed over and slightly puffed at the front, not a strand out of place. She saw that his eyes were bloodshot. Was he drunk? His cheekbones were like razors. He’d lost weight and seemed to disappear in the trench coat that was too big for his frame. Yet there was something still whip-fierce about him, the suggestion of a coiled serpent waiting to strike.
“You came here just for the Rimini list?” she ventured, wishing she had the courage to add, Or are you still infatuated with my husband?
“How kind the West has been,” Belyakov said, with a quick glance at the security guard. “Taking in war criminals like your husband and making nuclear weapons to hurt Mother Russia.”
Not just the list, then. She wondered how many other NKVD agents like him were in North America, hiding in plain sight, running intelligence networks, recruiting those who might trade military secrets and atom bomb technology with the Russians. Deception. Savka hadn’t known it would define her life. It had been three long years since she’d seen Belyakov. And yet, in a matter of minutes, her dreams of a safe, quiet existence had vanished like the sun slipping behind a bank of cloud.
“You’re the war criminal—here illegally,” she finally said. “You think three Russians can walk freely among westerners?” The guard entered her field of vision as he circumnavigated the room, his hand on a bully stick attached to his belt, marking his territory. It was obvious he had an ear cocked to their conversation and was suspicious of Belyakov’s men, who watched him with dispassionate expressions. She was sure the guard didn’t understand Russian, but perhaps he suspected the lot of them were Cold War spies.
“I haven’t found the list,” she said to Belyakov. “And you will not treat me like one of your throwaway spies.”
His bleary eyes sharpened. “Our former allies are now our enemies. We are fighting a new kind of war, Savka. One in which you will prove invaluable.”
Savka felt faint. A mist of perspiration began to form on her upper lip. Did he expect her to spy on others besides Marko? Report him to the police, she thought, but immediately dismissed the idea. If Belyakov went down, he would take her with him. A hot tear and then another rolled down her cheek, and she fumbled in her purse for a handkerchief, summoning her courage. “I refuse to work for you.”
Belyakov inched closer, then smiled broadly at the security guard. “A lover’s quarrel,” he said with a surprisingly authentic Canadian accent, complete with the flat vowels and rhythms of speech she had yet to master. With a hand to the small of her back, he guided her toward another display case. The Russian might have had a gun to her head, so easily she went, like a marionette leaping to life at the touch of a puppeteer.
Through eyes blurred with frantic tears, she realized she stood before Penechates’s case again, the Egyptian boy mummy—her boy. She did not notice Belyakov reach his arm across her shoulders—as a husband would, comforting his wife—until his thumb found her puckered scar, clawing at the place she was most vulnerable. Savka went limp in his hand, a frightened rabbit whose neck he might twist at any moment. His coat was damp with rain; he smelled of unwashed hair and some other sour odor she couldn’t place. Her arm went numb to the tips of her fingers, and she was transported back to cold snow against her cheek and the unbearable pain coursing through her after she’d been shot, the last terrified look from her son before he disappeared over the rise.
Belyakov leaned to her ear. “Resume spying on your husband, and I will allow you letters to Taras.”
Her heart, long frozen over with grief, roused with a flutter of joy and she almost cried out. The thought of writing even one simple letter to her son! “I’ll do what you say—I will find the list,” she whimpered, and he let her go. She glanced at him warily. Now was the time to negotiate, when he’d already made concessions. “I want you to find out what happened to my family.”
“Your family?” Belyakov’s eyes flickered ominously, and suddenly she knew.
“Mama, Lilia…tell me you didn’t hurt them.” When he wouldn’t reply, she pictured, with sudden devastation, his interrogation of her mother and sister, in the brutal manner known only to the NKVD. An interrogation so ruthless, all mail going to their house had been returned. Savka felt her world tip and spin, her entire existence crashing in on itself. “You slaughtered them,” she whispered, an exhale of grief.
He fiddled with the belt on his trench coat, as if he meant to take it off and strangle her with it. “They refused to tell me where you had gone, and our army was advancing on the village—your family already marked for death as collaborators.”
Belyakov handed her a business card, and she looked down at it, her eyes blurred with tears.
Jaska Hanninen
Furniture and Restaurant Supply
And a phone number where he could be reached. She was aware that Belyakov regarded her with a smug smile. “You see, I am a respectable Finnish businessman eager to start a new life in Canada.”
Out of her shock and grief, she blinked with sudden, lightless understanding. Belyakov and his men had taken on Finnish identities, most likely stolen when Russia occupied Finland during the war.
Belyakov sent an almost imperceptible nod to his two men and stepped back. “Don’t forget, Savka, I know where you live.” He let the threat hang between them, then strolled past the security guard with a smile, as though he were out for a walk and had not just reestablished control over Savka Kovacs, his most valuable asset.
The Russian’s men followed obediently. Ilyin took off his hat and ran a hand through his dark hair. When he turned his handsome face to glance back, the breath went out of her. There was something about the set of his shoulders that took her back to that Carpathian forest. Ilyin loping toward her as she lay alone on the snow. Where was Taras in this memory? Already taken over the rise, by Belyakov and Yeleshev.
Her blood turned to ice. Why had Ilyin returned?
She could still see the wavering image of him kneeling before her as she lay bleeding on the snow, could still feel his hands on her, rummaging in her pockets and leaning so close, she could smell his musk scent. Had Belyakov ordered him back to check that they hadn’t missed another shtafeta? Or to ensure that she was still alive?
26
JEANIE
Salt Spring Island
december 10, 1972
“you don’t seem very happy,” Kay says, skipping a stone across the flat water of Southey Bay.
“I can’t stop thinking about that letter Pat wrote to you.”
“Don’t waste your time.” Kay’s hair is still wet and gleaming in the morning light. She’s become one of those hardy souls who, even in December, enjoy getting up with the birds for an early swim in frigid water.
We’ve just followed Tuna’s dear, wagging bottom down the path to my crushed-clamshell beach. Rafts of seaweed, a few crab carapaces, and waterlogged driftwood form an ever-changing still life artfully designed by the tide. A mid-winter sun climbs the sky, casting shadows across the shores of the Secretary Islands, less than a kilometer north of us in Houston Passage; the air is liquid and golden, like it might have looked at the beginning of time.
“I remember you and Pat coming into my hospital room right before I was discharged, trading insults. Didn’t she call you a Cornish Sow? That’s why I wonder why she wrote you that letter.” I regard Kay thoughtfully. “You two hated each other.”
She runs her fingers over a large boulder, its dark gray surface etched with divots and circles and channels carved by the waves of many storms. “Pat has always been deluded. And that letter proves it—writing to the ghost of a nurse she once worked with?” Kay snorts. “Terribly sad when you think about it.”
“She does enjoy the sound of her own voice,” I agree, looking back up at the house. But there was something off about the tone of Pat’s letter. “Had she written you before?”
Kay turns with a smile. “Pat wrote me letters over the years, but I always threw them in the bin. I moved halfway around the world to get away from her.” She shields her eyes and watches Tuna with a grin. “Crikey, if she really did succeed at jumping off this headland, I’d join you in dancing over her bloated drowned corpse.”
We cackle joyfully at the image, horrible I know, but it feels so good to finally be part of a team—me and Kay against evil Pat. No one else in the world seems to know or understand how awful she really is. I still think of braving my way back into her room again, but Kay insists that Pat’s obsessive letter writing is an exercise in futility, so I let it go. I wind up and throw an old tennis ball into the ocean. Tuna splashes in, furiously paddling out, droplets beading on his dark head. If you live by the water, you must own a Labrador. It’s almost a rule. The dear old soul is thirteen years old and crippled with arthritis, but I can’t bear the thought of life without him. Despite his age, it’s impossible to keep him out of the sea. I still get a thrill seeing him retrieve the ball and turn on the swim, with that profoundly resolute look on his face. Besides Kay, he’s my only friend.
Kay squints out at the water. “You never swim?” she says, in the same tone someone might ask why you didn’t breathe or eat. “I would think the ocean would be your friend. Are you afraid of drowning?”
Now I’m positive that she’s here to recover from something terrible. What had Pat said in the letter? I can’t imagine any other reason why you might leave that damn place you liked so much. I slip an arm around Kay’s waist. “You can trust me with whatever happened in that jungle.”
Her eyes take on a hooded quality. “What?”
“I don’t know, but it was something. I mean, those rebel soldiers—I’ve heard they harbor little mercy for Western peacekeepers in the Congo. You weren’t a victim of…a victim of violence—”
“You always had a wild imagination,” she says dismissively.
Tuna emerges from the ocean, more sea lion than dog at this point. Kay breaks away from me and reaches to take the ball out of his mouth, but he shakes himself vigorously and walks right past her. She laughs, yet her eyes harden in a flash of emotion.
“Rudeness doesn’t suit you, Tuna,” I say, throwing the ball farther this time.
A double kayak that Pat uses to take me out on sketching trips lies at the far end of the beach, near the tree line and an impressive thicket of blackberry bushes. An old aluminum rowboat reclines beside it, a relic of Aunt Suze’s time. Kay glances up at the headland to our right, which rises in a sheer, moss-covered cliff face, stunted arbutus and fir trees growing from any foothold of earth they can find. A great blue heron stands like a sentinel in the shallow water below. I think of him as my heron, for he’s been there every morning for years, the bay his exclusive fishing territory. “It’s so beautiful here,” Kay sighs. “You’re lucky.”
“My French penal colony?” I say, glumly. “I’ll never escape.”
“Why would you want to? If I owned this place, I’d never leave.” Kay shades her eyes and stares up at the house, surveying the surrounding garden and trees with the proprietary eyes of a real estate agent. “It would fetch a good price in today’s market.”
I hesitate before speaking again. Kay read Pat’s letter; she deserves to know why I drew up a last will and testament. “You understand why I’m leaving Gladsheim to the Salt Spring Historical Society, don’t you, Kay?”
“Of course.”
“I thought of leaving it to you, but Pat would be furious. It’s best left to the island that embraced Aunt Suze with such love.” When Kay nods sympathetically, I decide to finally tell her more about Dan Rys. “He asked Pat about a missing person he’s investigating. She freaked out.”
Tuna returns, shaking his coat and thoroughly soaking us, and Kay laughs, saying, “What missing person?”
“A man named Marko Kovacs.” I clasp my hands under my chin like a smitten teenager, seized by a wonderful idea. “I’ve got Dan’s number, I can call and invite him out, Kay. Maybe you’ll remember the man who disappeared off our ward.”
Kay’s eyes go cloudy. “Tell me more about this journalist.”
I smile, remembering his stern, immovable face. “He’s…inhabited by a great stillness, as though he’s purposefully withdrawn from life.”
“Sounds rather like an enigma.”
“Pat said he was a foreign hulk of a man who loped out of the woods like a stray dog.” I roll my eyes. “Just because he’s got tattoos.”
There was a droll little smile at the corner of Kay’s mouth. “And you happen to like stray dogs…”
I blush furiously. “I only saw him once.”
“He could be a murderer for all you know!” she says, almost gaily. Her last few words are drowned out by the distinctive shuddering cry of a bald eagle. I look up into the treetops, the word murderer dropping like a lead weight on my heart. How disappointing that Kay doesn’t get how very special Dan has become to me.
Her head is down as she bends to examine the beach, searching for the odd skipping stone among the crushed shells. “Can I see his business card?”
“He didn’t have one, but he wrote down his telephone number,” I say, watching a sailboat that’s appeared farther out in Houston Passage, tacking south toward the long, low profile of nearby Wallace Island, the sun glancing off the limestone cliffs along its shore, shading them a dusky orange.
She licks her lips and smiles. “What journalist doesn’t have a card?”
I decide to ignore Kay’s contentious tone. It’s so not like her. “I’ve had a memory since then—I think this missing man appeared in the doorway of my hospital room.”
“You were drugged up to here,” she says, shaking her head. “And wheeled into surgery for skin grafts almost every week.” Kay stoops lower to study the tide line, as if she’s searching for buried treasure. “You can’t have remembered anything.”
I’m silent for a moment. The sun’s rays on the beach have released a distinct ocean smell of seaweed left behind at high tide, and it’s like ambrosia to me. “I do remember seeing…this man, in my doorway. Why was he there?”
Finally, Kay palms a suitable rock and straightens. Maybe it’s the blood flow to her face, but she looks decidedly bothered. I chide myself for pushing. This conversation about men lurking in doorways has obviously brought back awful memories for her.
“You’re remembering a visitor,” Kay says, distractedly, then winks. “And you had so many of those.”
I’m hurt by her insensitive joke—I had no visitors besides Aunt Suze and, on occasion, mother—but decide to dismiss it as a little gentle sarcasm between friends and watch as she leans to skip the rock she’s found. It dances only briefly across the surface before plummeting straight to the bottom. She glares after it with a stormy expression, as though the rock has somehow failed her. “If this so-called journalist was disrespectful to Pat,” she says at last, “never speak to him again. You can’t live out here without her.”
I’m dumbstruck. “Didn’t we just agree how awful Pat can be?”
Kay looks around at me, eyes bright, like she’s trying to prove she isn’t sad or gloomy, that maybe her years in Africa didn’t break her. “I’d never defend that woman. What does she do in Vancouver, anyway?”
“I always thought it was just to buy my art supplies and deliver paintings that sold occasionally to a gallery. But now I know she couriers them to my dealer in Brussels and goes to see Dr. Reisman.”
Kay raises an eyebrow. “Reisman? Did he leave New Westminster General?”
“He’s now a GP,” I tell her, “in private practice.” He trusts Pat’s knowledge of my medications, which means I don’t have to face real people. She never fails to remind me that, over time, full thickness burn pain becomes increasingly complex to control. Dr. Reisman started me on hydrocodone last year, but it gave me insomnia, which meant I needed stronger sleep medication. “I imagine she’s telling him that I lunged at her, my craft scissors becoming a Bowie knife. She’ll probably show him the stitches she gave herself.”
“Pat was always one to exaggerate.” Kay’s face is a mask, like someone who’s recently come out of a war zone. The bright light dims, wind off the water suddenly colder, and the two of us look up at the same time. A small cloud—the only one in the sky—has obliterated the sun.
“She’s hidden everything from fondue skewers to garden shears. I had to steal a screwdriver from the shed in case I need to protect myself.” Kay might be different than the beloved nurse I once knew, but it’s such a relief to share all of my Pat secrets. “She’s started locking me in my room at night.”
Kay looks shocked. “Why on earth would she do that?”
“The other day she told me I’d stay locked in until I could prove to her I hadn’t gone insane.”
“That’s rather dodgy. I’ll have a little chat.”
“Would you?” I look gratefully into Kay’s eyes and without warning, a vision descends—her leaning over my hospital bed. As the image comes into focus, I see Pat standing next to her. They’re whispering in hushed tones, complaining bitterly about a stint they’d been forced to do while in nurses training at the only mental hospital in Vancouver. Riverview. Disturbing words drop out of my memory: padded rooms…lashed out in rage…lay in their own filth.
The image fades, and I shudder, uncertain if my brain can be trusted. Wind ruffles the water, and I can taste salt at the back of my throat. “She drives me too hard,” I say, determined that Kay hear the truth.
