The Last Secret, page 24
She spun to face him. “Don’t forget,” she hissed. “While your wife cavorted with her Polish whore, I waited to catch her alone. It’s Savka’s fault I was arrested by a Nazi patrol. You had it good in Rimini, playing on the beach, getting a suntan, but my prisoner of war camp was not so cushy.”
Natalka had told him how she’d suffered in the German prison brickyard, then the stables, kept alive by stealing oats from the horses and by the thought of slicing his wife’s throat. When her camp was liberated by the Allies, Natalka had struggled to regain her health in displaced persons camps, unable to get back to Kraków until ’47, only to find that Savka had disappeared. Savka Ivanets, who she believed had shared secrets with her Polish lover—also a Soviet spy—and was responsible for sending an NKVD patrol to the location of Kuzak’s bunker. Natalka had been checking her trapline in the summer of ’44 when she heard shouts and then gunfire. She’d rushed back to find a small army of Soviets surrounding the bunker. They’d thrown in tear gas and waited for Kuzak and Bohdan and the others to run out, then machine-gunned them like dogs.
Kuzak and five insurgents had been shot dead, and the encrypted files were taken. Natalka would have fired on them if she’d thought she had a chance, but she wished to remain alive and find the woman she knew had betrayed the location of the bunker so carefully hidden in the mountains.
Natalka fidgeted, taking a deep drag on her cigarette. “Look at her,” she said, “enjoying a visit to caged animals, when she has the blood of hundreds of insurgents on her hands.”
Marko scowled. Surely it had been someone else who betrayed Kuzak. Not Savka. It took time for the Soviets to decipher the encrypted files they’d found in that bunker, and when they did, it was like dominoes. Over the past twelve years, they’d dismantled the entire underground network. But the NKVD hadn’t bargained on the Ukrainian émigrés in the West, who were intent on rebuilding the resistance with help from the CIA and MI-6. It was time to bring it back in full force and fight Russia from the mountains again.
From its enclosure, one of the polar bears set up a pitiful howl and Natalka smiled to herself. “Savka still thinks her handler will kill Taras in the Gulag if she doesn’t find the Rimini list. When Taras has been dead for years.”
Marko flinched. “You will not speak of my son this way,” though even he believed that Taras had perished.
A son for a son.
God continued to punish Marko for what he’d done in Czechoslovakia in ’48, on assignment for MI-6. He and his men had been parachuted near the country’s border with Ukraine and were surprised by Czech police. One of the officers had been particularly vicious, engaging him in hand-to-hand combat, Marko finally drawing his Webley and shooting him point blank, in the heart. Although Marko had killed many partisans during the war, the look on the officer’s face still haunted him—the brutal way he’d had to take him out, and the man’s last words, calling out for his son.
Natalka pulled hard on her cigarette. “If you won’t let me kill Savka,” she said, exhaling, “I’ll expose her as a Soviet spy to the Canadian government.”
Marko shook his head. “I will not see her in a prison cell. Savka would never betray me.”
“She’s betrayed Ukraine, she’s betrayed you for years. Why don’t you believe me?” Natalka pouted, her small, bow mouth turned down. Irresistible.
Marko remained silent. Not for the first time had Natalka made him doubt his wife. She’d recounted in great detail how Kuzak suspected Savka had been turned and insisted that she kill her handler. But Savka had avoided that directive by escaping to Poland.
“You believe the story she told you?” Natalka had cried when Marko initially expressed misgivings. “Her mother surrendering her to a Ukrainian doctor who just happened by? Savka was sent to Kraków by her handler while he hunted you down.” Marko admitted it was strange that his wife had made it to Poland, when her family had disappeared.
“I want to be there when the police arrest her,” Natalka said, blowing smoke out of her nose. “They’ll force her to expose her Soviet handler and we’re free to train our insurgents without worry a Russian will shoot us in the back of the head.”
Marko looked away. Natalka had edges—some that managed to wound him, and others…well, he could only smile quietly to himself and think of her riding him like a she-wolf in bed. Savka had no edges to speak of, yet he would not punish the mother of his son.
Natalka grabbed him by the elbow. “Someone’s coming. I told you she was meeting her handler.”
Marko ducked lower, parting the bush in front of him with one hand. A man had come down the pathway from the aquarium, his pace quickening when he saw Savka. Marko laughed with relief. “It’s only Lev Podolyan.”
At the sight of Podolyan, Savka stuffed her plastic rain cap in her purse and touched her hair. Marko watched as the two of them awkwardly circled each other. What were they doing? His wife said something, and Marko’s breath caught in his throat when Podolyan took her playfully by the shoulders, Savka smiling up at him in a way Marko did not like. They exchanged a few words, a laugh, then Podolyan leaned in and kissed Savka on the mouth. With a stomach-lurching swoop, Marko took a step forward, his fist clenched, but Natalka threw down her cigarette, dragging him back.
“You’re jealous?” she said in disbelief. “You love me.”
Marko shook her off. He wanted to kill Podolyan for daring to kiss his wife against her will, but now he could see that Savka did not pull away. She leaned in, returning the kiss with ardor.
Marko hardened his heart. Every last doubt, every last vestige of affection or loyalty to Savka evaporated. Natalka was right. Not only was his wife a traitor, she’d been spying on him all these years. She was still getting her Soviet handler’s instructions from Moscow.
“Now do you believe me?” Outraged and vindicated, Natalka kicked grass over their spent cigarette butts—an old habit from her days in the underground. A family came down the path behind them, and Marko took her arm, leading her back to the parking lot, the banderivka gesturing wildly, making threats to kill Savka. Marko felt panicked, exposed. How was Moscow getting orders to his wife in Vancouver?
Then he remembered the short NKVD agent who’d interviewed him at Rimini, threatening him with violence, and hinting at something else.
What of your wife? Your son? That secretive smile. Before he’d come to Italy, the Moskal’ had already turned Savka and taken Taras. And had never stopped searching for the Rimini list, a list that was so important to the Soviets they’d sent the same agent halfway around the world in order to find it. How long had that fucking Russian been in Vancouver?
When Marko and Natalka were back in his car, he turned to her, his heart pounding.
“I think it’s time I put Savka out of her misery.”
29
JEANIE
Salt Spring Island
december 10, 1972
“What in God’s name do you hope to accomplish with this?” Kay touches my braided leather headband as if it’s a snake.
“I don’t know—christen a Viking ship?” I joke, wilting under her fearsome stare. Kay has all but dragged me into the kitchen, out of hearing distance of Danek Rys—who stands in my living room, legs akimbo, fresh from the early afternoon ferry.
It isn’t often I dress up, and I thought I looked kind of groovy. This morning, I’d torn through Aunt Suze’s trunk and all her mod outfits, finally settling on a swingy maxi dress in shocking orange and pink that she might have worn dancing around a fire on the beach. “I wanted to look nice for our guest.” I say, hiding a shiver. Wool socks and clogs do not go with a maxi dress, so I’m wearing my favorite summer Jesus sandals. My feet are freezing.
“Who happens to be a man.” Kay says the word as if it were poison in her mouth. She watches me closely. “And you invited him here?” Her eyes have narrowed. “I don’t trust him.”
Who I invite to my house is my business, but I invited Kay here too, didn’t I? To be my new caregiver, which lends her some authority. “Pat lied to his face,” I tell her. “I can set the record straight without her here to shoot me down.”
“And you think you know the truth.”
I suddenly understand how Kay rose through the ranks to become head nurse in that Congo hospital. She’s more overbearing than I remember. I say, “Dan thinks I was the last person to see Marko Kovacs.”
She makes an exasperated noise and sails to the fridge, removing a freshly chilled bottle of wine. With the focus of a brain surgeon, she sinks a corkscrew and begins turning. Just how much alcohol has she brought with her?
I bolt back to the living room, where I find Dan standing at the window, hands deep in his pockets, gazing out at the Secretary Islands. I circle the room, circle him, with a dorky smile on my face. Under his leather jacket, he’s wearing an old-fashioned white shirt with a long, pointed collar, and a patterned sweater vest, the kind I expect my grandfather would own, if I still had one. He’s so quiet and still, which is delightful, but a strong urge overtakes me—make him smile, Jeanie, make him laugh.
Rain clouds have cleared and it’s sunny again; the ocean lies flat and wide before us, the horizon dotted with small islands that rise out of the water like a pod of killer whales. Dan seems hypnotized by a lone bald eagle, who—despite buffeting winds—flaps lower and lower over the water. “Hide dear, darling fishes,” I say, sidling closer to him. “Hide.”
“Eat or be eaten,” Dan says. Instead of making him laugh, or even smile, he appears more melancholic than ever.
You’re traumatizing him, Jeanie. Shut up.
He turns and looks at me properly for the first moment since he’s arrived. The old scars that mark his cheeks make him seem more fiercely handsome than when I first saw him five days ago. His frank, blue-eyed gaze unsettles me in all the good ways.
“How can you be sure,” I stammer, “that the man I remember seeing in my hospital room doorway was Marko Kovacs?”
“I read in the police report that Kovacs was wounded by a Red Army soldier in battle during the war and had a scar on his face—like this scar you described to me on the phone.”
Ah, his voice—the way he holds himself! Dan regards me with expectation, as if I’m about to tell him a whole lot more. But Kay ruins the moment by meandering in and sitting in the big wicker chair. She’s dispensed with the restriction of a dainty, stemmed glass and has poured her wine into a beer stein.
Dan glances at her, seemingly anxious to ask her a few questions of his own. “Pat O’Dwyer said in the police report you both saw a visitor when he came to the nurses’ station.”
“That’s right,” she says, taking a manly swig of her wine.
“What did this visitor look like?”
“I was busy charting and didn’t notice. Pat handled it, told him to leave.” Kay meets my eye and raises her brow, as if to say, I see what you mean—he’s rather compelling.
Dan has taken a few steps closer to her. “And the visitor doesn’t listen to Pat telling him to leave?”
Kay looks up at him, blinking. “Pat saw him press the elevator button, but she told him Marko Kovacs didn’t leave that way. The man bolted for the hallway. He must have followed Kovacs down the back stairs.” Kay huffs an indignant sigh. “What newspaper do you work for, anyway?”
“The Vancouver Sun.”
“That bloody rag?” She narrows her eyes at him. “Listen, Pat and I were at the nursing station, charting, then we had a patient call. What do you hope to write about this case? It’s stone cold for a reason. One bad actor chased another. Both bad actors disappeared. Who knows why.”
Dan regards Kay for a moment, as if he wants to say something else, but instead, turns to me. “If you close your eyes, can you see anything?”
I realize that he wants to know if I saw this man follow Mr. Kovacs into my room, and I do as he asks. Suddenly I’m back in my hospital bed, a form coalescing behind my closed lids, silhouetted in the light from the hall. He steps into my hospital room and the door swings shut behind him. Shadows, dancing along the wall. And a worrisome foreboding. I will my memory to be cooperative, eager to share what I couldn’t when Dan was here last, but it’s no use. I can’t coax anything more out of my broken brain than the frozen image of a man dressed in a black coat and hat standing in a dark corner of my room, staring at me. Is he even real?
My eyes fly open of their own accord. “You’ve read the articles about me. People have a morbid curiosity when it comes to burn survivors.”
“It’s true,” Kay says, crossing her legs. “Newspapers like yours made Jeanie famous. People found her appealing—they still want to touch her in some way.”
I wonder, vaguely, how Kay knows that the odd thrill seeker still stalks me when she hasn’t been here, but I’m transfixed by Dan, who has gravitated to Aunt Suze’s bookshelves, his hand floating across the spines. He jiggles one book halfway out, as though he yearns to touch the velvety pages within, but reshelves it immediately, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets.
“You’re welcome to borrow anything, anything at all,” I blurt. When he turns to examine one of the Buddha heads, I add, “Aunt Suze brought that back from the Orient.” The poor man. He can’t notice anything without me providing baseball commentary.
Dan glances at Kay, then out the window, his expression suddenly shrouded. “I do not stop thinking of this place.”
“My aunt came to visit a friend on Salt Spring in the early fifties,” I babble. “Fell in love with the island, and, well—this is weird for some people, but not me of course—she fancied herself a Viking shield maiden in a past life. So, she called this place Gladsheim. Odin’s hall of the gods—”
“You know, there was something strange that night Marko Kovacs disappeared,” Kay says, cutting across my bow. “A girl not more than fourteen showed up. She just stood there outside Mrs. Kovacs’s door.”
Dan turns abruptly and stares at Kay. “What did she look like?”
“Pretty, I suppose,” Kay says after another gulp of wine. “Long dark hair—curly, I remember. I surprised her in the hallway. I asked if she was family, if she was going in. She admitted that she was Mrs. Kovacs’s daughter but ran back down the hall. We didn’t see her after that.”
Dan frowns. “What time was this?”
“9:30, I believe—past visiting hours.” Kay doesn’t notice that Dan seems flummoxed by this new piece of information.
“Do you see anyone else in the hall?”
“Did I see anyone else in the hall…” Kay smiles as she corrects his English, and I cringe. “It’s all starting to fall into place,” she declares. “Pat and I blundered into quite the fight between Mr. and Mrs. Kovacs. And then he disappears. Can’t you see he obviously left her? Bloody selfish of him not to just tell her directly instead of dragging us all into a missing person’s investigation.”
Dan’s expression has hardened, and I really can’t blame him. “If Kovacs left his wife, why did he not take his car?” he asks Kay. “It was in the parking lot.”
“I think that Russian is the key to this little mystery,” she says casually. “The one who visited Savka Kovacs just before her husband arrived.” Kay looks at her watch, ignoring Dan’s stunned look. “You should keep your eye on the time. The last ferry leaves at 5:15.”
30
SAVKA
Vancouver, British Columbia
october 11, 1959
has a man ever looked at me like that? Savka thought. She’d just broken off Lev’s kiss and opened her eyes to find him gazing back at her with a devotion she didn’t deserve. Perhaps Marko had, in the early years of their marriage. She and Lev were standing so close together, she could see the gold ring circling his pupils. Even his smell was intoxicating, a clean, spicy scent with a hint of tobacco and aftershave. She felt feverish and aroused for the first time in years.
A shout issued from the path to the back parking lot, and she quickly stepped out of his arms, anxiety clutching at her stomach. But it was only a group of visitors, laughing and eating the hot dogs and cotton candy they’d bought from a concession stand. Savka blushed furiously, suddenly dismayed that she’d returned Lev’s kiss with equal passion. She was forty-six years old, and Lev closer to fifty—they were a bit long in the tooth to be gawping at each other like teenagers. But her body still pulsed with the beat of her own heart. The kiss had scalded her with its erotically charged heat, like nothing she’d ever felt before. She raised a finger to her mouth, where the memory of his lips still lingered, forbidden and sublime.
All around them, pigeons strutted, waiting to swoop down on a discarded bit of food. A polar bear had raised himself on hind legs to sniff at the new arrivals. Why had she asked Lev to meet her in a place where captive bears paced within their enclosure, waiting for visitors to toss in scraps of bread? The sight of them managed to break the spell of Lev’s kiss and Savka’s heart. How dare she try to steal a moment of happiness when Taras rotted in Siberia?
She brushed away a tear as Lev took her hand and led her toward the monkey enclosure. There were too many of them in the pen; they fought like criminals over food in a metal bowl. A lone monkey hung from an iron pole by its tail, repeatedly slapping its paws against the cement wall. Savka turned away.
“Taras does not fight to eat,” Lev said, reading her thoughts.
One of the polar bears set up a miserable howl, triggering a sharp pain in her womb that made her gasp. Savka shifted from foot to foot, cold wind blowing through her nylons. The back of her neck prickled, and she turned to scan the surrounding trees.
