The Last Secret, page 25
“What is it?” Lev asked.
“Nothing.” She was simply feeling guilty. But why when she knew Marko had been committing adultery? Couldn’t his infidelity grant her license to have an affair of her own?
Lev stared silently ahead, immersed in his own thoughts. “I know the feeling,” he said.
Savka had a sudden, chilling premonition. “Has someone been following you?”
Lev blinked a few times, as though weighing whether he should say anything or not. “Last week, I was heading to Olena’s school,” he replied, haltingly. “A black town car was idling at the corner. As I passed, the back window went down. A man spoke to me in Russian.”
Sick rose into Savka’s throat. “What did he say?”
“That if I told anyone you and I were following Marko, I’d never see my daughter again.”
She was stunned into silence. How had she managed to bring Lev and Olena into danger? “I can’t let you take the risk—”
“I’m not telling anyone,” Lev insisted. “There is no risk.” He looked confused, and rightly so. Yet he was too much the gentleman to ask her awkward questions and had already dismissed the strange Russian.
Savka was not convinced. Belyakov had proved himself ruthless and unfeeling. She didn’t trust him to keep his hands off Lev or not use Olena as another bargaining chip. She felt her legs wobble. You deserve this, she told herself. You destroy everything you touch.
But she wouldn’t destroy Lev Podolyan, whose thoughtful, amiable face was now wreathed in a smile. Her stomach fluttered madly. How could she let him go? In the space of a year, Lev had become so important to her, she couldn’t imagine facing life without him.
“We don’t need to follow Marko anymore,” she said. “I know he’s having an affair.” Savka raised a hand, warning Lev away, but he took it, lacing his fingers in hers. The warmth in his hazel eyes melted the edges of her heart, melted the woman she’d become after years in Marko’s increasingly unbearable company.
Lev leaned closer. “Let’s run away tonight,” he said, as if he sensed that he was losing her. “You, me, Zoya, and Olena.”
Savka looked quickly away from Lev’s firm resolve, his bright light. She couldn’t tell him that it was impossible to leave; that Belyakov was the only link left to her son.
She’d read in a Vancouver newspaper that Khrushchev had dismantled the Gulag, and political prisoners incarcerated under Stalin’s regime were being released. The joy she’d felt at this news was quickly crushed when she’d called Belyakov to ask when Taras was coming home.
“When you bring me the Rimini list,” her handler replied. “Taras has been transferred to the Black Eagle correctional colony, where the worst serial killers in Russia are held.” The list was still so important to Belyakov, he’d ensured that his bargaining chip remained in captivity, even after Khrushchev had decided all political prisoners should be free. And perhaps Taras was in even more danger at Black Eagle penitentiary. The sinister name alone made her worry for her son.
“I must be here,” she said to Lev. “When Taras is let out of prison.”
“You’ve already lost him,” Lev said, and when he saw Savka’s sudden tears, “I didn’t mean to upset you.” He frowned, and she knew he was kicking himself. “Do you think Taras is a good man?” he asked her.
Her lip quivered with emotion. “I only knew him as a boy, but yes…good.”
“Then he will come back to you.”
Savka lifted her chin, desperate for courage to bear this aching loss. A shift in the wind brought the sharp, feral smell of captive monkeys who’d been torn from their mothers and sent thousands of miles away to a cold, unfriendly place. When Belyakov had told her nine years ago in the Vancouver Museum that she could communicate with her son, she’d written letter after letter, pouring out her heart to Taras, and her Russian handler had taken them, but she’d received none in return. The silence had been so absolute, Savka feared her son was dead. After the devastating news that he’d not been released, she’d confronted Belyakov at their next meeting. “I have sent many letters to my son,” she said, unable to stop herself from shaking. “Why has he not written me back?”
“I said you could write letters,” her Russian handler intoned. “Not receive them.”
If Ilyin and Yeleshev hadn’t been standing nearby, she would have lunged at Belyakov and strangled him with her bare hands. Instead, she demanded proof that Taras was alive, and another photograph had been provided—of her son bending over a patient’s bed in the Gulag infirmary, some twelve years after the first photo had been taken of him in the mines. Taras had looked up at the very moment the shutter clicked, surprised by the camera, his expression shrouded and his eyes wary. He was then a man of twenty-five, and taller…but still painfully thin and haunted.
She was not meant to love in this life.
Taras had been stolen. Marko had drifted away from her when he left to join the Waffen-SS, and now she knew the reason for Tyrsa Dorochkin’s pained glances at her in England: Marko had started an affair with the nurse, perhaps before he’d visited Savka in Deremnytsia that night in 1944. And Ewa had broken what was left of her heart. Now she must let Lev go to protect him from Belyakov.
It had started to rain, and the other visitors began to peel away, opening umbrellas and running for their cars. But Lev still held her hand, gazing at her with stars in his eyes.
It’s the last time he will touch you like this, she thought, and suddenly she was back in the Carpathian Forest, after Belyakov and his men had taken Taras away, lying alone, the snow fallen almost an inch thick over her, and the surprise image of Natalka grabbing her by the shoulders, yanking her to sitting.
Look at you, your trousers down, smelling like a dirty Russian.
Savka’s body began to tremble, a sad, vibrating hum, and she bent double at a searing pain in her abdomen, one that managed to eclipse the pain in her heart.
“What is it?” Lev went down on one knee, peering up into her face with concern. “Tell me.”
Another jarring pain shot through her. She felt her legs give out, then she collapsed to the ground as she had after being shot that day in the woods.
“Savka!” Lev took her hand and tried unsuccessfully to raise her to her feet, then ran up the path toward the aquarium, shouting back that he would find the nearest pay phone and call an ambulance.
Breath coming in gasps, Savka closed her eyes, willing this torment to end. In Kuzak’s bunker, delirious with fever, the excruciating pain in her shoulder had been all encompassing. She’d lost consciousness after being shot and remembered only fragments. Now she knew why Belyakov had sent Ilyin back. No longer able to ignore the other pain, the secret her body had borne to this moment, Savka curled into a fetal position on the cement path, the sound of a polar bear’s tormented growl in her ears.
Zoya wasn’t Marko’s child; she was the progeny of Ilyin, a man who had returned to her as she lay unconscious in the snow and raped her while she lay bleeding.
31
DANEK
Salt Spring Island
december 10, 1972
dan’s muscles tense as he tries to process what Kay has just told him. “A Russian”—he can barely speak this word without his blood running cold—“came to visit Mrs. Kovacs before her husband did?”
The woman is looking at him from the sofa like a cat who’s caught a mouse. “Pat saw a Russian in Mrs. Kovacs’s room the night her husband disappeared.”
Dan is frozen in place. “How does Pat know this visitor is Soviet?” A black cloud that he left behind over a year ago now seems firmly anchored above his head.
Kay gets up from her chair and strolls to the window. “Pat said she interrupted a heated conversation—foreign. She heard the word nyet…”
“Is that Russian for no?” Jeanie says and Dan turns to where she’s standing near the sofa. She’s more beautiful than he remembers, in that long, colorful dress with bell sleeves, her straight, dark hair brushed out over her shoulders. Emotions wash across her face, desolate as the Lady of Shalott, open as a flower. She’s like the goddess Devana, from ancient times, he thinks in a fluster, daughter of the moon and wild things.
“Why did Pat not tell the police of this Russian visitor?” he asks Kay, getting out his notebook. His breath is shallow; the air feels like fire in his lungs.
Kay shrugs, gazing out at the view. “She clearly thought it had no bearing on the case. But wouldn’t you agree, you’re obviously looking in the wrong place—it’s Mrs. Kovacs you should grill, not us.” She heaves a theatrical sigh. “I see someone has to be Miss Marple. A mysterious Russian appears in Mrs. Kovacs’s hospital room after visiting hours. They engage in a heated discussion. About what, you might ask. Mr. Kovacs shows up soon after, fights with his wife, then he’s chased down the back stairs by another man with a foreign accent—perhaps also Russian? I’m surprised you missed this.” She drains her beer stein. “Or the daughter did something she shouldn’t have.” Kay sends a pointed look his way, sees that’s he’s been madly taking notes. “You’ve got what you came for. You can leave Jeanie and me alone now.”
Dan hesitates. He’s been dismissed, but his thoughts surge in a Prokofiev symphony of discord and chaos. A Russian visited Savka Kovacs just before her husband disappeared. Why hadn’t she mentioned this when he first spoke to her? He must get back to Vancouver and question her and Zoya Kovacs. Nurse Kay lingers at the window, staring out at the sea as if she owns it.
Jeanie is trying to get his attention, mouthing something his way. He frowns, attempting to understand, and her pale cheeks flush with sudden opposition. “Dan is staying,” she announces to Kay. “Pat won’t be back for another two days.”
“Pat wouldn’t allow it,” Kay says without pause.
Every particle of air has been sucked out of the room. Perhaps Kay is just as wounded as I am, Dan thinks, but he doesn’t pity her. He’s wary of what she might be capable of.
“He’ll stay in the guest cabin.” Jeanie crosses the room, her long dress swirling around her leather sandals. She takes out the paperback he touched earlier, placing it firmly in his hands. A conspiratorial whisper. “You’re gonna love it.”
To Kill a Mockingbird. He almost drops the novel, then studies the cover with wild longing. “Tell me—this Harper Lee, why does he—”
“He’s a she—a famous American writer.”
Dan nods appreciatively. “Mockingbirds do not have much meat on them. Why does she wish to kill one?”
Jeanie breaks into a smile that illuminates her face. “It’s about…oh, it’s about good and evil and fighting—yes, fighting—especially when you’re not allowed to fight.”
“ ‘Not allowed to fight,’ ” Kay repeats. “You always were melodramatic, Jeanie.”
He slips the paperback into his coat pocket, fearing this too might be stolen from him, along with the life he should have had, a life filled with books and art and poetry.
Jeanie takes his arm. “I’ll show you the guesthouse.”
Kay watches with disapproval as Jeanie bundles him out the front door, the dog rising stiffly from his bed in the kitchen to follow them. For the first time since Dan has arrived, he and Jeanie are alone. On the boardwalk, he slows to rummage in his pocket for the plastic baggie filled with his hand-rolled cigarettes. He needs the nicotine but will not strike a match in her presence. Simply holding the cigarette calms his blood enough to think. Clouds have obliterated the sun and the sky has turned the same steel gray as the ocean. Jeanie’s dog catches up to them, heading straight for Dan, nudging his hand and hoping for a scratch. Dan obliges him, if only to stop his hands from shaking.
Kay’s shocking pronouncements have set off bombs, the shrapnel flying about in his mind. Marko Kovacs wasn’t murdered by a thief in the parking lot; he could have been killed either by his daughter or an assassin, someone sent by the Russian who Pat had seen earlier, in Mrs. Kovacs’s hospital room. Marko Ivanets had been a high-ranking officer in the Fourteenth Waffen-SS Division during the war and obviously changed his surname to Kovacs in order to elude the KGB. Was the Russian visitor a KGB agent who had singled him out for assassination? If so, it had taken him long enough to find Kovacs in Canada, a Ukrainian traitor to the motherland.
Pat should have mentioned this KGB officer to the police, but it was Marko’s wife’s failure to admit that the Soviet had visited her, obviously demanding she hand over her husband, that bothers him the most. Somehow, the agent was no stranger to Savka Kovacs.
Dan has an uneasy feeling. He thinks of a black town car that he recently thought was following him, but when he sped up and quickly turned down an alley to test his theory, the car drove straight ahead, and Dan had shaken off his fear as mere paranoia.
But now he knows: Someone has been following him. Had the Russian who visited Mrs. Kovacs at the hospital discovered that a journalist had been poking around, resurrecting the cold case?
He turns to Jeanie. “When I first came here, I asked if you remembered seeing a man in the hall. You couldn’t. What has changed since then, to make you remember?”
Jeanie stares back at him for a long moment before answering. “I stopped taking this orange pill Pat’s been giving me for a while. And some memories…they’re starting to come back.”
When they pass his gray car parked in the drive, Dan turns to eye the front door of the house. “It is strange that Kay comes the day Pat leaves.”
“Kay said she and Pat suffered watching me suffer. They just want to protect me from further harm.” As if to punctuate this statement, Kay’s face appears at the kitchen window.
“Harm from what?”
“You? Kay said she thought you could be a murderer.”
He stares out over the ocean. Perhaps he was a murderer, for he’d thought of killing so many times. When they arrive at the guest cabin, he lingers on the porch. “You are sure the man you saw in your hospital room has a scar near his mouth?”
“Positive.”
He frowns. If Jeanie saw Marko Kovacs in the doorway of her room, she knows—somewhere in her drug-and trauma-addled brain—what might have happened to him. Dan must coax the memories out of her somehow. They’ve arrived at a two-story guest house. “This is where you work?”
“Would you like to see?” Lifting the hem of her long dress, she opens a side door and is already heading up the stairs. Dan follows her through an almost tangible wall of paint fumes. Her studio is large, filled with light and he feels intimidated by the tools of her mysterious art. Jeanie—suddenly shy—removes the dust cover from a painting and he walks slowly toward it. “Normally, I only do landscapes,” she says, “but with Pat gone, I can fool around a little. This one is…personal.”
Dan is dimly aware of Jeanie turning on a radio and fiddling with the channels. He doesn’t like to admit it, but Kay is right—he’s been looking in the wrong place and wasting his time with the police report, when the KGB could have killed Marko Kovacs. He might still wonder why Pat didn’t tell the police about Savka Kovacs’s Russian visitor, but Jeanie’s old nurses are innocent of any wrongdoing.
A guttural wail bursts forth from the radio, and the room fills with the rich twang of guitar and harmonica. Dan turns in astonishment. “What is this music?”
“John Lee Hooker,” Jeanie says with a laugh. “I think my aunt might have worshipped him.”
He stands completely still, listening. The raw melody reminds him of every day, every moment he was denied music. Swallowing past the burn of grief in his throat, Dan notices the figure on the canvas for the first time. He finds himself drawn closer, as if in a dream, or hypnotized, until he stares straight into the face of a spectral figure.
Its eyes are a void. He peers closer and there’s something about the figure that’s so familiar to him—perhaps its vague, disjointed reality, that Jeanie has rendered in cubes, which drift away, never to return. He steps back, stunned. The cubes aren’t drifting away. They represent long-lost fragments the figure is calling back to itself. Jeanie has painted him. Not a monster or a ghost, incapable of love, but a survivor, standing on the earth. How can she know his heart, his grief, his loss? “He leaves nothing, not a shadow on the earth,” Dan says, his voice hushed, his shield lowered for only a moment—long enough for his grief to rise like a falcon in the wind.
“I didn’t mean to remind you of…anything,” Jeanie ventures.
He almost doesn’t hear her, he’s so riveted by the figure. A strange sensation within him—a warming of something long gone cold. But a part of him has been touched by evil. He fears this part of him is essential to life. “What do you wish these eyes to see?”
Jeanie tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and stares up at her work, as if comprehending it for the first time. “Perhaps he sees everything in existence.”
Although neither of them has moved, he’s left with the impression that Jeanie’s come closer, and he feels the heat of her skin, the faint thrum of energy that floats, somehow, between them. This feeling, this attraction frightens him, and he turns from the painting. He’s standing so near Jeanie, he feels himself attuned to the rhythm of her breath. Afraid of what else might break open within him if he looks at her again, Dan backs away. When she takes a step after him, he turns and lifts his hand to point at her painting. “How do you do this?”
“Do what?”
“Shine light into the dark corner and see…it’s more than a corner.”
“It’s an ode to freedom,” she says with a tentative smile, perhaps a little puzzled at his reaction.
Freedom. A dirty word. He glances at the artist, not quite trusting himself with her. There’s something here she’s ignited, and he’s afraid for the first time in years. Dan pretends to examine her paint collection, the colors so rich they make him feel like a blind man whose sight has been restored after a lifetime in darkness, before he finally speaks. “When does Pat return?”
