The Last Secret, page 22
“Jeanie, you took her in when she had nowhere to go.”
I nod. “Yep, saved her from the poorhouse.”
“If you hadn’t it would have meant she’d never work as a nurse again—” she breaks off.
My heart stops for a moment, attempting to process this declaration. “Why exactly wouldn’t she work as a nurse again?”
Kay looks around at me, wide-eyed. “I’m jetlagged and spouting rubbish.”
I step toward her. “You’re not getting off that easy.”
She snatches up another stone and pitches it into the waves, taking out her unnamed frustration on the natural world. “You deserve to know the truth, Jeanie,” she admits, watching as the rock dribbles weakly across the surface. She sighs, then turns to me. “There was a little episode on the ward near the end of your stay. Pat made a mistake—”
“A mistake?” I lean closer. “She gave too much of something to someone, didn’t she?” Kay doesn’t answer immediately, and my nerves are suddenly on high alert.
“Perhaps you should ask what you would have done if she hadn’t been available at the right time, the right place.” Kay finally says with a brave smile. “You would have had to hire a stranger as caregiver. Imagine that.”
“I have imagined such a scenario, and my life with a stranger comes out on top.” My heart now thuds alarmingly against my ribs. “What kind of mistake are we talking about?”
“Pat was caught siphoning off some of your morphine—” When I let out a startled squeak, Kay hurries on. “Just incremental amounts, for her bad back. I forgave her—”
I can barely breathe for the dagger in my chest and the swirl of conflicting emotions there—despair, rage, hopelessness, and something else I can’t identify. “My morphine?” I finally manage, staring blankly down at the crushed clam shells beneath my feet. How can the waves go on lapping at them, as though a quake has not just riven the earth? I can’t look at Kay, who abandoned me to a criminal without telling me, because she forgave her transgressions.
But she’s telling you now, a voice intercedes on her behalf, and that means something, doesn’t it?
Kay looks out at the sea, hands on her hips. “I’m going to take another swim—clear my head.”
A steely resolve washes over me. “I’ll need your help,” I say, my reckless plans finally crystallizing. “When Pat returns from Vancouver, I’m going to fire her.”
I turn to go back up to the house, but Kay loops her arm around my neck and hauls me in for a hug. I can smell alcohol on her breath. Not wine but something stronger. Gin or whiskey, it doesn’t matter. This is Kay, that voice again, her strong shoulders beneath your hands, shoulders that have squared off against Pat in the past and will do so again.
“You don’t realize how very much we love you,” she whispers into my hair. “We nursed you back from the dead. Do you know that? Watching you suffer—you have no idea what it did to us.”
Tears spring from my eyes as I return her embrace. Kay is here to save me from Pat.
* * *
I drag myself up to the house, fatigued, my scars aching, but I’m too devastated at Kay’s news to think straight. I peer out the living room windows. She’s stripped off her slacks and sweater and is standing on the beach in her navy one-piece bathing suit. Donning a pair of swim goggles, she wades in a few feet, performing a lovely, shallow dive and surfaces, water dripping from her hair. As she eases into an overhand crawl, my heart swells with so much love for her. Kay knows that Pat’s the real monster. I might not have enjoyed her blunt delivery, but my old nurse had some good points to make.
What journalist doesn’t have a card?
Maybe Dan ran out? I’m not sure, just that I really need to speak to him. Now. Without this obviously traumatized version of Kay listening in. My fatigue forgotten, I head for the hallway, digging out the piece of paper with his number on it and pick up the telephone, fumbling with the rotary dial. I hold my breath when a man answers on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Danek Rys?” I exhale in relief. But his voice is gruffer than I remember.
“You have the wrong number.” He hangs up and I stare at the wall, stunned. I dial the number again. The same man answers and slams down his handset the moment he hears my voice.
I dart into the living room and glance anxiously out of the windows. Kay is still doing laps across the bay like an Olympian. Pat isn’t here to stop me, but I have the sense that Kay, if she knew what I was doing, would disapprove.
Looking at the paper again, the numbers jump off the page, raffish and impertinent: 735-2390. When I scribbled them down from memory, chlorpromazine—a drug meant for the mentally ill—was still smoking its way out of my system. Tears prick my eyelids. In the few moments between looking at the number Dan wrote out so carefully, having Pat take it from me, and getting to the kitchen to write it down, my brain messed things up. I might as well accept it. Now I’ll never talk to him again. Why am I so eager to speak to him anyway? What do I really know about Danek Rys?
He stood up to Pat for you.
Then it occurs to me. Perhaps I transposed the numbers. Surely I can figure out the true combination. Dashing back to the hallway, I yank open the side table drawer and find a small pad of paper. I sit cross-legged on the floor and jot down different variations of the number, the musty smell of carpet that hasn’t been vacuumed regularly wrinkling my nose. Dragging the phone down onto my lap, I dial now with purpose, crossing out each combination as I get a wrong number. One woman mistakes me for her husband’s mistress and calls me a hussy. Another man tries to keep me on the phone, claiming he’s lonely and needs someone to talk to after his wife died.
When I check on Kay again, she’s heading to shore with dedicated strokes. There’s time for one more try, I think, and fly back to the phone. I quickly dial another combination of numbers and a man answers.
“Hi,” I say, waiting for whomever is on the other side to tell me I can take a long walk on a short dock.
“Hello.” A slightly foreign accent.
“It’s Jeanie!” I can hardly keep the excitement out of my voice.
“The artist,” he replies. Is it my imagination, or does he sound happy to hear from me?
I close my eyes in relief. An awkward silence ensues, and I rush to fill it. “It was lovely meeting you last week. I hope you don’t think I’m crazy?” The line hisses. “Because I’m not.”
“Pat—she is suspicious, guilty,” Dan says finally. “But of what?”
“Maybe from years of telling me I’m an average artist?” I say, gripping the handset. “My other nurse just told me Pat was stealing my morphine—she’s probably still siphoning it off. If that’s not a burden of guilt, I don’t know what is. Pat should never have worked as a nurse again, not taken a job as my caregiver.” I hear him take a deep, careful breath.
“What does she sacrifice for you?”
Good question. “Pat thinks me an idiot to throw myself on my husband’s funeral pyre. She said if it had happened to her, she would have watched him burn, maybe run for the fire extinguisher, but not attempt to put out the flames.” I pause, thinking Dan might ask for details, but he remains silent after my little rant. “That’s the story of my life. I don’t think things through.”
“But you remember something?”
“You asked me if I saw anyone the night Marko Kovacs disappeared, if I saw anyone in the hospital. I thought I was hallucinating, but I think I did see him standing in the doorway of my room. He was tall—he wore a dark coat and a hat.”
I can almost hear his disappointment. A tall stranger in a dark coat and hat is hardly enough to go on. Then another memory imprints itself on my retinas and I speak without thinking. “I can see his face, Dan. There was a scar—a jagged line that went from his mouth to just below his eye.”
There’s a pause on the line, static and another deep breath. I brace myself for a sudden click and the dreaded dial tone, or an admonition—don’t waste my time—but he sounds excited.
“Jeanie.”
“Yes?”
“I need to see you.”
27
SAVKA
Vancouver
october 10, 1959
“There he is,” Savka said to Lev Podolyan, ducked low in his front seat. She looked out the windshield and squinted to bring her husband into focus.
Marko had parked his ’52 Pontiac in an abandoned lot not half a mile in the distance, and Savka watched him as he jogged toward an old blue car—what looked like a Dodge Coronet that had been waiting nearby, its engine still running.
Lev turned to look at her, a puzzled expression on his face. “You really think,” he said, “that Marko might be fooling around on you?”
Of course not, but Savka had asked Lev to follow her husband today on just that pretext. In England, there had been a nurse attached to the Fourteenth Division, a woman named Tyrsa Dorochkin, who had often gazed at Marko adoringly, much to Savka’s annoyance—but she knew he would never cheat on her. Yet when she craned her neck over the dashboard, she noticed, even at this distance, that her husband’s head was held high, a playful grin on his face. As he slipped into the front passenger seat of the car, she thought, I have not seen him smile in years.
The day was gray and overcast, the sun swallowed up by an impenetrable fog. The side street Lev had parked on in Yaletown’s warehouse district was quiet this morning, but she urged him to drive closer.
“Too dangerous,” he said, peering through the windshield. “Do you want Marko to see you?” A few moments later, the Dodge pulled out onto Smithe Street and began making its way east. Lev put the car into drive and followed at a distance.
Savka glanced back at her husband’s prized Pontiac. “He’s reluctant to leave his car in the apartment parking lot, much less in this run-down area,” she said as they drove past abandoned warehouses lined up like haunted houses behind the sea wall.
Haunted. She sobered at the irony of the word. It was how she’d describe the woman she’d become over the last fifteen years—robbed of her son, dying in a loveless marriage, and forced into servitude by a cruel master. Grief and desperation tore at her heart, where it remained caged in a frozen wasteland, the deep caverns of her chest. Savka had done everything she could to find the list—checking Marko’s drawers each time he returned from a trip, even going through their apartment’s basement storage unit. She’d hidden behind doors to listen in on his hushed phone calls; she’d watched and waited for some kind of hint that would direct her to the location of this damned list that Belyakov demanded. And found nothing.
Lev frowned as they slowly followed the Dodge along Smithe Street. “If your husband has another woman, what a good time he is showing her—a tour of deserted warehouses,” he said. “Marko Ivanets, the romantic.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Savka’s mouth, tempered by a twinge of guilt. She did not enjoy lying to Lev, but it had been necessary. She gazed at her friend’s thin, aristocratic face and eyes that were kind even though the NKVD—or the KGB, as it was now called—had not been kind to him.
After Ewa’s betrayal over a decade ago, Savka had sworn she would never trust anyone again. Then last year, when she had arrived to pick up Zoya from dance practice at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre, Lev Podolyan had been there, waiting for his own daughter. Another mother had whispered to her that the new arrival had attended the National Economic University in Kyiv and was arrested by the NKVD in ’44. Savka had sidled over to him, and they’d struck up a conversation. After learning that he’d been sent to a gulag, she peppered him with questions, hoping he had run across Taras. By the time they’d established that Lev was released in ’53 and had neither seen nor heard of a teenage boy of her son’s description in his camp, Savka found herself charmed by Lev’s gentle demeanour and shy, sincere smile.
When Belyakov and his two thugs had appeared in Vancouver in 1950, she’d thought she could simply watch Marko at home, waiting for him to grow careless and leave the list somewhere she might find it. But of course, years had passed and that still hadn’t happened. Then, yesterday, she had received a call from Belyakov.
“Your husband has spotted our car,” he’d said, slurring his words. “And is performing some…evasive maneuvers. You will follow him tomorrow. We are out of town.” Belyakov paused, and she heard him take several lusty swallows from his flask.
She mulled this over, wondering what three Soviet spies did in Vancouver under the cover of a furniture and restaurant supply business. “You forget I don’t have a car, or a license,” she said, anxious to put him off. “Do you want me to follow my husband on the bus?”
“Ask your friend Lev Podolyan to drive you,” her Russian handler had said breezily, as if he was prepared for her protests. “Tell him you suspect your husband is having an affair.”
Savka was stunned. How did he know about Lev? She tried to find the right words to respond. “Where are you going?” she finally sputtered.
Between swigs from his flask, Belyakov ranted several phrases she struggled to understand—fucking imperialists…Princeton University chemist, and…radioactive heavy water. He took another swig from his flask, before shouting, “The vodka here is shit,” and hanging up the phone. Savka stared at the receiver in her hand. Was Belyakov finally falling apart after years of being kept like a dog on a long leash by Moscow?
As Lev steered the car slowly down the street, Savka tried to calm the worry growing in her chest. She knew that the Soviet and his men tracked every move she and Marko made, but it troubled her that her only trusted friend was being watched by them too.
She twisted in the seat to ask Lev, “What’s radioactive heavy water?”
He gave her a confused smile, as though wondering how she knew the term. “A material they use for making nuclear bombs. I’ve heard that Canada is building nuclear arms processing plants for the Americans.”
The pieces finally fit together. If Canada was hosting a U.S. chemist and radioactive heavy water had been on Belyakov’s mind, he was obviously sending intelligence back to Moscow.
The Dodge had just made a right turn onto another street, and Lev followed. “If only they would bomb Russia into oblivion.”
He looked almost hopeful. When Savka had asked for his help, he’d jumped at the chance. Lev was a loyal friend, but he knew Marko was not often around. Savka wondered if Lev had feelings for her that were greater than fond friendship.
Would that be so terrible? Lev was the kindest man she’d ever met, a stark difference from her tortured husband.
Over the past few years, Marko had become increasingly volatile, perhaps because of his work with the CIA. Belyakov had long ago confirmed that her husband had been recruited by the intelligence agency when Ilyin and Yeleshev followed Marko to the airport, where he got on the first of many flights to New York City. And Mykola Lebed. Belyakov grudgingly shared that a power struggle had erupted between the two former leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists: Stepan Bandera in Munich and Mykola Lebed in New York, over who had the most influence among their émigrés in the West. “The émigrés have not given up the fight,” Belyakov said. “Bandera and Lebed are thorns in Khrushchev’s side. He wants Lebed eliminated. But that svoloch is slippery—hides behind the skirts of CIA and won’t let anyone near him but trusted advisors and friends.”
The danger of assassination was very real for top Ukrainian émigrés working against the Soviets from the West, and that looming threat made Marko unstable. At times, he lashed out at Savka and Zoya for the smallest mistakes or perceived infractions. He still rejected Zoya and could care less that she was now an integral part of the Ukrainian dance troupe. But then there was Lev, who praised Zoya and his own daughter, Olena, who was also fifteen and often came for pajama parties, the two girls staying up all night gossiping and giggling. Lev would appear at Savka’s door the next morning to pick up his daughter, and she would invite him in for tea, the two of them sharing old, pleasant memories of Ukraine. Each time she was with Lev it felt as if the sun came out from behind the clouds. Unlike Marko, Lev was funny, sweet, caring.
And she needed those things like she needed air.
Savka bent her head to hide her face, which now burned with an emotion impossible to name. Her heart was racing. She’d grown to care for Lev, but she hadn’t realized how much. Yet she was married. What would Marko do if he found out? And what would Lev say if he learned the truth—that she was a spy forced by her KGB handler to watch her own husband? He’d want nothing to do with her. The ever-present rage toward Belyakov boiled inside her. That monster had forever ruined her for love.
The Dodge Coronet finally pulled up in front of an old brick warehouse on Cooperage Way. Judging by a faded sign above the door, the place had once been a processing plant. Lev parked behind a neighboring warehouse—not so close that Marko would notice them.
“Why aren’t they getting out?” Savka watched the back window of the Dodge and saw the silhouette of her husband’s head and shoulder leaning toward the driver. Were they whispering secrets?
Marko had so many of those.
“Maybe it’s not a woman,” Lev offered. “Maybe it’s just an old friend of Marko’s and they’re catching up.” Savka glanced at him with gratitude. Thank God Lev was here. Of course it’s not a woman, she thought. Her husband had little time for those of the female persuasion.
Marko suddenly emerged from the car and Savka and Lev slouched low, their eyes on the driver, who was finally climbing out, a hat shadowing his face. The driver was shorter than Marko, slighter too—strangely petite and narrow. Savka’s heart lurched. “It’s a woman,” she whispered, aghast. “Marko is meeting a woman.”
