The Last Secret, page 23
Lev squinted through the windshield. “Who is she?”
Savka watched Marko and the woman—now clutching his arm as if it were a life preserver—stroll companionably about the parking lot for a few minutes, talking and laughing. Savka could only see the woman’s mouth beneath the brim of her hat, and she wished she had binoculars. “I know her from somewhere,” she said, her ears humming with irrational panic, and a nagging memory. She’d seen that defiant smirk before.
Savka sat back in her seat, stewing in anger and frustration. So it was true, Marko was having an affair. She felt diminished somehow, but jealous? She paused to consider. No. The truth was, her husband had become a stranger to her, and she felt more like his cook and laundress than his loving wife. Still, even though he’d been returning home late the past few weeks, she never would have suspected him of cheating.
Lev turned to her. “What will you do now?”
Savka studied him. Was it her imagination, or did he appear almost pleased? When Lev had been released from the Gulag and come back to his daughter and wife in Kyiv, he found she’d left him for another man, nine years too long for her to wait. Perhaps there really was something more to Lev’s feelings for Savka. The thought made her feel surprisingly giddy and guilty at the same time.
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” she admitted, her pulse jumping. Savka looked away and gazed unseeing at the old rail tracks and run down warehouses. False Creek lay flat and gray in the near distance. More fog had rolled in, and it started to rain. Perfect weather for a dying marriage.
Her early years with Marko had been exhilarating—the strong and handsome commander of the underground fighting for Ukraine’s independence, and the studious but passionate village girl falling in love at first sight. Perhaps she should have run the other way. She might have chosen a less manly man, one who would not let his head be turned by other women. She glimpsed her own image in the side mirror of Lev’s car. A new hairdo could not mask her harried look and the weight of fifteen years of servitude. Savka usually didn’t care about her chestnut hair, leaving it in an untidy shoulder length style, if only to win one small battle with Marko, who still begged her to grow it long. But she’d visited the salon last week, and now she wondered if it was vanity, shamelessly preening under Lev’s admiring gaze. Why would he find her attractive, a married woman who’d been beaten down by fate and bad luck?
A pain in her lower abdomen made her wince. “It’s nothing,” she said, when Lev looked at her with concern. She’d been having increasingly difficult monthlies and was only comfortable in bed cradling a hot water bottle to her stomach.
“What’s this?” Lev said, and Savka jerked her head up to see where he was pointing. Marko and the woman were getting back into their car. “They came here to walk around an abandoned parking lot?”
Savka held her breath, and her hand inched toward Lev’s passenger door. Her fingers curled around the handle but then she paused. What did she intend to do if Marko crawled into the back seat with his lover? Stalk over and scream at him? She slipped her hand off the door handle and folded it in her lap. Not when she was also harboring conflicted feelings for another man, blood stirring in her veins again.
The strange woman started her engine, and the car quickly swung out of the parking lot. Lev gave them a head start before he pulled out into Cooperage Way, then onto Smithe Street. A truck had somehow come between them, but Savka kept her eyes glued on the Dodge. When it turned right, they did too.
The three vehicles stopped at a traffic light. When it changed, they waited. Savka jumped when the truck just ahead of them honked. “What is it?”
Lev’s face had taken on an odd, tense expression. “The Dodge isn’t moving.”
Savka craned her neck, trying to see the dusty blue car, but the truck now blocked her view. It honked again and when the Coronet refused to budge, the truck pulled out into the next lane, passing the Dodge with an angry rev of engines. Was this one of the “evasive maneuvers” Belyakov had complained to her about on the phone? If so, Marko and his friend had noticed Lev’s car. He didn’t advance to fill the empty spot between them. Savka glanced at her friend. He was sweating, and it looked as though he were holding his breath. “What should I do?” he asked Savka. “Pass Marko and we lose him—or, worse, he’ll see you. If we stay here and wait—he’ll confirm we’re following him.”
The Coronet’s brake lights were red as a Soviet star, the eyes of a beast. “Can we back up and—” Savka stopped on a gasp. Lev had pulled out to pass the car, and took her by the shoulder, drawing her down on the passenger seat. Would Marko look to see who’d been following him and recognize Lev Podolyan? Her husband went to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre as much as any other émigré.
Lying flat across the seat, her head was close to Lev’s leg, and she felt the heat of him, so near. She held her breath and closed her eyes when his trembling hand moved from her shoulder to her head, stroking hair back from her face. No one has touched me like this in so long, she thought, with an unbearable ache in her chest. Perhaps she could remain forever curled up beside him. Perhaps she could tell Lev to keep driving, out of the city, and away from the sinking wreck that was her marriage.
28
MARKO
Vancouver, British Columbia
october 11, 1959
The rain had tapered off to a mist and the chill lay close around Marko, the kind that bled through whatever warm coat you might put on against it. He crouched behind a dense row of yew bushes near the monkey pen at the Stanley Park Zoo, watching Savka at the polar bear enclosure, 150 meters away.
He flicked ash from his cigarette and looked over at his companion. “She looks sad and alone,” he said.
No one else was about in this area of Stanley Park. It was ten in the morning and cold for October, but the grass and towering old-growth cedars were alive, green. Marko yearned for the mountains of Ukraine, where, at this time of year, snow would lie several inches deep on the ground. But he would never return to his beloved homeland.
He parted the branches of a yew and glanced at Savka again, who was leaning over a chain link fence to watch the menacingly large white bears. Three of them paced the jagged cement walkways, while the fourth bear swam about in the pathetically small pool. His wife wore an old, threadbare coat, wool tweed skirt, sensible brown walking shoes worn down at the heel, and a plastic rain cap over her new hairstyle. The first time he’d seen her in a cafe in Lviv, she’d been the most beautiful girl in the room. When had she become a drudge?
Natalka stood close beside him, also staring down at his wife. “There was no sadness on Savka’s face when I finally tracked her down in the summer of ’44.” Natalka cursed under her breath. “That Polish bitch and your wife, setting up house and sleeping together. It’s a wonder she walks around freely, never fearing I’ll turn up, when I told her that day in the forest, I’d hunt her down if she didn’t kill her Soviet handler.”
Marko kept Natalka on a short leash, worried that she might slip away and make good on her threat. He still couldn’t believe the story she’d shared after turning up at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre a month ago, newly arrived from Eastern Europe. She’d been surprised to see him, believing him dead in battle with the Fourteenth Division, and he hadn’t recognized her at first, for she’d suffered privations during the war. She fidgeted beside him, her thrift store coat and high-waisted slacks miles too big for her frame. When he’d met the banderivka in the Carpathian Mountains in the early days of the war, her dark hair had been long and unbound beneath her fur cap. But it had been shaved in a German prisoner of war camp, and instead of coming back thicker, like Savka’s hair did in Kraków, Natalka’s had grown in sparse and lackluster, hanging in cheerless waves around her beautiful face.
She felt his gaze and smiled, leaning close to whisper a dirty something in his ear, then pulling away with a throaty laugh. He felt the heat of those dark eyes, remembering them on him last night…and berated himself for falling for a woman other than his wife.
Natalka turned to check on Savka, who’d removed the plastic rain cap and swung it in her hand. “Your wife the traitor,” Natalka said, with a wicked smile. “She’s meeting her handler here. I’ll prove it to you.”
“I don’t believe it,” he said, as they watched Savka stroll aimlessly toward the penguin pen, which was attached to the polar bear enclosure, a set of long, iron spikes the only barrier separating predator from prey. Savka shrank back when a penguin waddled down its cement pathway and a polar bear lunged at it, almost impaling itself on the spikes, before falling back into its pool with a tremendous splash.
“Then why did your wife and her lover follow us?” Natalka sulked.
“Savka does not have a lover,” he said with certainty, although yesterday, after Savka had shown up with Lev Podolyan, whom Marko recognized from the Ukrainian Cultural Centre he couldn’t be quite so sure. He and Natalka led them on a wild goose chase, but Marko knew his wife was on to him. “She doesn’t drive, so she dragged Podolyan out to seek confirmation I’m having an affair before kicking me out.” He thought of Podolyan’s face when his car passed them. Amateur. He didn’t know what he’d gotten himself into. And Savka, suddenly disappearing behind the dashboard, believing she could hide by cowering like a thief beside him.
“She doesn’t care if you love another woman,” Natalka mused, not taking her eyes off his wife. “The black town car that tailed us last week—I’d wager it was Savka’s KGB handler. He knew we clocked him, so he tasked her to follow us.”
Marko laughed. “Savka isn’t a spy. You’ve met her. She’s incapable of lying.” He turned his head and coughed into his sleeve. His cigarette had burned down, and he ground it out beneath the heel of his shoe, the base of the bushes they hid behind already littered with several butts. He wanted to light another, but his cough was getting worse.
It was unthinkable that Savka had been with a woman in Kraków when, on the rare occasion they still had sex, she lay rigid beneath him, no longer capable of the passion they once knew. In England, he’d harboured doubts about his wife, but believed her story that a Polish friend helped her escape Soviet Poland—unaware that that friend had been her lover. When Savka assumed her wifely role and worked diligently alongside other Ukrainians in the fields, he’d scolded himself for suspecting her of subterfuge. Then after coming back from a mission to Ukraine for MI-6 he’d caught her going through his pockets. But he’d been too distracted with guilt over something terrible he’d had to do in Czechoslovakia to think much of it.
If Natalka was right, and an NKVD officer had turned Savka the day she was shot, he’d surely ordered her to question her Waffen-Sturmbannführer husband about Freitag’s battle plans, hunting Soviet partisans. He thought back to Savka’s letters to him in Rimini, how he’d dismissed the awkward questions about what the British might be planning for the Fourteenth Division as concern for their future together. But that was fourteen years ago.
As though she knew what he was thinking, Natalka said, “Savka has been spying on you all along, hoping you’ll lead her to the Rimini list.”
Marko shook his head. “The KGB couldn’t possibly know I stole the list. Moscow presumes it’s locked away in London, classified by MI-6.”
“Really?” She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “You don’t know the KGB.”
If anyone knew the KGB, it was him, he thought with annoyance. Over the past year, Moscow had escalated its fight against the Ukrainian émigrés in the West, sending operatives to assassinate Bandera in Munich and Lebed in New York, but the attempts had failed. Those men were heavily protected, and no Soviet agent had managed to penetrate their inner circles. Last week, Marko had received an urgent call from Lebed, with intelligence from the CIA. The émigrés who Lebed’s people were training in New York had been parachuted into Romania and were killed when they tried to cross the border into Ukraine, confirmation that the KGB had infiltrated the CIA’s training program. Lebed had wired CIA funds for Marko to start a similar program for émigrés in Vancouver, but the black town car had made that impossible, following him and Natalka out every day.
Natalka was staring down at Savka with daggers for eyes. “I will soon let her know who has stolen her husband,” she glowered.
He almost felt sorry for his grief-stricken wife. Savka would never find the Rimini list. It was the one thing that kept him alive—the KGB knew better than to capture and torture him. For Marko would go to his grave rather than give up eight thousand Ukrainian soldiers.
Unless…
Paranoia crawled like a spider up his back as he recalled an evening last week when he was followed home. He’d parked in the apartment lot, noticing the same black town car that Natalka and he had shaken earlier in the day. Somehow it had picked him up again and he’d been careless, not checking his rearview mirror, and now they—whoever they were—knew where he lived.
He’d hurried up the stairs to the apartment he shared with Savka and Zoya, pausing to listen for steps behind him. But there was only silence. Lebed had told him stories of Simon Wiesenthal, and operatives belonging to Israel’s spy agency hunting ex-Nazis complacent in their new lives in the West. And in the eyes of Mossad, former Waffen-Sturmbannführer Marko Ivanets of the Fourteenth Waffen-SS Division, was an ex-Nazi. For years now, he’d managed to operate in secrecy in Vancouver, helping Lebed in New York, employed by the CIA to resurrect the underground and protect the Rimini list. But now he felt hunted. He’d entered the apartment with a splitting headache, only to find Savka in bed clutching a hot water bottle. She’d scrambled to her feet, claiming she hadn’t expected him so early, and ran into the kitchen, taking up a cleaver to split cabbage for soup.
“What happened to your hair?” Marko had asked, incensed.
She raised a tentative hand to the nape of her neck. “I had it…done.”
Her hair had been a bone of contention between them in England. In Canada, he’d pleaded for Savka to grow it long again. Now, in willful rebellion, she’d gone to a hair salon, where it had been cut short and curled close to her head in a style he found reminded him too much of Doris fucking Day.
But there’d been more important things to worry about. Marko had paced, agitated, then sat down heavily at the kitchen table. “Someone’s following me.”
“You’re too distrustful,” his wife said absently, chopping the cabbage into pieces.
He shook his head. “It’s one of Wiesenthal’s Mossad.”
“Do they think you committed crimes for the SS?” she asked absentmindedly, throwing chopped cabbage into a pot of water. The words were hardly out of her mouth before Marko leapt from his chair and grabbed her by the arm.
“I did not commit crimes,” he shouted. “Do you not understand we were fighting the Soviets—”
The apartment door suddenly opened, and he cut himself off mid-sentence. He and Savka listened to Zoya kick off her shoes in the living room and throw her school bag into a corner. She appeared at the kitchen door, her pretty face flushed, and long black curls flying out of her braid.
“Guess what happened at school—” she said in Polish but saw Marko and stopped short.
His rage was like grit in his mouth. He could never forgive her for speaking Polish. And now he had proof the girl was not his, believing Natalka’s story, that she’d found Savka in the forest, in ’44, trousers down around her knees, neck abraded, and the smell of Russians on her. Sure signs of rape. “What did I say about that language in this house?”
Zoya studied her hands, eyes slanted downward, like a cat’s. Already she’d learned to avoid his wrath by acting the ingénue. “That you’d punish me if you caught me speaking it.”
Marko pointed his finger. “To your room.”
“But I’m hungry,” Zoya said, staring at him angrily.
“As long as you’re under my roof, you listen to me!”
When Zoya had slunk off to her bedroom, Marko was already on his way to the door. At least he’d be welcome in Natalka’s arms. But Savka flew into the hallway and blocked his path, shouting, “Do you believe I was screwing another man as the Soviets advanced?”
Marko opened his mouth to finally tell Savka he had proof that her daughter was a dirty Soviet’s bastard, when Zoya yelled to him from her bedroom, something that, days later, still made Marko sick with fury.
“I hate you so much, I wish you would die.”
He’d stepped into her doorway to find she’d crawled under the covers, still wearing her school clothes—and he thought of pulling her off the bed and beating her, but decided it wasn’t worth the energy and he stalked to the front door, slamming it behind him.
Breaking into his memory, Natalka slipped into Marko’s arms; her heady fragrance and the feel of her breasts against his chest stirred his desire. “Do you have it?” she asked.
In England, he’d kept the list sewn into his coat lining, and in Vancouver, in a safe deposit box, but he’d obsessed over its security, even in a bank, and moved it to a locker at the airport. Now it was with him again. With a surge of anxiety, he ran a hand over his coat, reassured when he felt the distinct edge of the ten-page document that he’d kept hidden since he stole it from Brigadier Block’s office in Rimini. He would soon stash it somewhere else. If Nazi hunters were here, it was too dangerous a thing to keep with him.
Natalka pulled away to stare down at Savka, who kept looking at her watch and glancing up at the opposite pathway that led to the aquarium. “She and her handler have no idea the list they’ve searched for is within smelling distance,” she chuckled, taking out her pack of cigarettes.
Marko fumbled for a book of matches and lighted one for her. He didn’t like the eager expression on Natalka’s face. Could he trust her? Of course he could. She’d been Kuzak’s insurgent. “You’re enjoying this too much,” he said, shaking out the match before it burned his fingers.
