The Last Secret, page 28
36
MARKO
Vancouver Regional Hospital
october 12, 1959
marko rubbed his forehead, where an iron vise had tightened itself—a headache coming on. He squinted at a sign hanging on the door just down the hallway from Savka’s room.
Do Not Enter
Sterile Environment
The Fire Bride lay within, he’d stake his life on it.
If he weren’t still devastated to hear that Natalka was dead—followed so closely by news that Bandera had been assassinated in Munich—he would open the door and look in, see what all the fuss was about. But he must flee Canada for New York, where Lebed and the CIA would protect him. The nursing desk was hidden from sight around the corner at the end of the hall, and he could hear one nurse complain loudly to the other that she’d been accosted by a visitor. Accosted. He snorted. She would know if Marko Kovacs had accosted her.
Hands thrust in the pockets of his coat, he turned to head for the stairs, when he heard the elevator ding. Who would be coming up this late? Glancing back, his pulse jumped as a man in a dark coat and black hat with a wide brim that hid his face, sidled toward the nursing station. Marko backed himself into the Fire Bride’s doorway, certain the man had not seen him.
A nurse’s grating voice floated down the hall. “Another one? Visiting hours are over—come back tomorrow.”
The stairwell suddenly seemed miles in the distance.
He thought of the short, vicious NKVD agent, who had interrogated him in Rimini, vividly recalling his threat.
Do not mistake it. One day, my hands will find your throat.
Marko had always presumed the Rimini list kept him alive. But they’d killed Natalka, and Bandera, too. He could hear his own breath, coming now like a train, and a jolt of raw fear passed through him. After exterminating the underground in Ukraine, had Moscow sent word that all Ukrainian émigré leaders in the West must be eliminated, the list be damned?
When in fact he didn’t have it. After dropping Natalka off to pack her bags, Marko had returned to his apartment to pack his own things. Seeing Savka kiss Lev Podolyan had filled him with such hatred toward her, he knew he couldn’t leave with Natalka until he’d ensured that his wife no longer drew breath. It had been a risk, coming to the hospital so late; a Nazi hunter might follow him. Driven by revenge and panicked that the list might fall into the hands of Wiesenthal—Marko had torn it out of the lining in his coat and hidden it in a familiar place. But Savka had not been alone in her hospital room, and now a Soviet assassin or Mossad agent hunted him, perhaps the very one who had murdered Natalka in cold blood.
Soundlessly, he opened the Fire Bride’s door. He would wait for the assassin to leave, then scramble to retrieve the list before escaping to New York. Pausing for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dark room, he stepped in, letting the door click shut behind him. The Fire Bride’s room was bigger than he had expected, but it was windowless, stuffy, and he drew a breath against the scent of bleach, and the lingering old-soup smell of a dinner tray that hadn’t been cleared. Light glowed softly from the low recess behind her bed, casting her figure in shadow.
The Fire Bride did not stir.
Something swung ominously over her head, bothered by air displaced at his entrance, and he hesitated by the door, his first, disturbed thought: rope. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light, it transformed into a metal trapeze attached by a chain to the ceiling, a contraption for her to pull on, he understood, to sit up or strengthen her arms. What parts of her had been burned so badly, he wondered, that she was still in hospital two years after her accident?
Marko waited, his back against the wall, finally exhaling a hesitant sigh of relief. He was safe, hidden from the assassin who had obviously become impatient waiting in the parking lot and come up to find him. The nurses had surely sent him on his way by now. Marko still itched for revenge, and he thought of Zoya, in their apartment earlier, standing quietly, hatefully, in the living room as he charged toward the door with his suitcase. Yes, he would return for the Rimini list—and strangle Savka’s bastard daughter while he was at it.
The Fire Bride moaned in her sleep, and he found himself taking several tentative steps toward her, yet when he approached the bed, he noticed that her eyes were open. He stopped dead, but she gazed blankly, possibly too drugged to acknowledge his presence. Her eyelids fluttered as he stared down at her.
Slowly he lifted the blanket, then the sheet. He just wanted to look. He’d bent low enough to feel her hair against his cheek, when a chain rattled above his head, like a guillotine blade descending. The first blow came by surprise, and he was thrown across the bed, the toes of his shoes grazing the floor. He lay there, stunned in the sudden quiet, feeling her legs jerk beneath him.
Deep in his coat pocket, against his hip, he could feel the cold press of his Webley revolver. He twisted to wrench his arm around when the chain clanked again. A relentless force smashed down over his head and back, and out of the shadows came muffled cries, a bitter, repetitive chant. His shoes scrabbled on the tile, but he’d fallen too far over the bed to get back on his feet. Jumbled words fell like shots from a cannon, reverberating with each strike. Willing his other hand to life, he fumbled blindly for the far bed rail. He seized it and the earth swelled and rose beneath him, along with a memory—the deck rolling as his ship crossed the Channel, the sight of England on the horizon, a distant roll of thunder. How vast the sky was, how alive with light.
Another blow came down. He lifted his head and cried out in Russian, pleading with the assailant to stop. But he was silenced by a strike to his face, blood in his mouth and a spray of it across the white blanket beneath him. The blows raged until he lost his grip on the bed rail and slid to the floor.
“The list,” Marko groaned, this time in English, and the assault stopped. He felt quick hands searching through his pockets, patting the lining of his coat, then the door opened and closed; a flicker of light from the hallway sent a lone shadow up the wall—the assassin slipping from the room as soundlessly as he had slipped in.
With a shout of pain, he rolled and thrust himself to standing. Fumbling for his gun, he was overcome by dizziness, and fell like a tree across the bed again. A nurse would come. He had only to wait. As he lay there, half on his side, he felt a light touch on his face, a cautious, tentative contact that made him think of his mother in Ukraine, how she always reached out to him before he would leave for school, as if imprinting his face on her memory.
Ukraine.
A black hole opened before him, the land pulsing beneath his jackboots, and stars wheeling above. Moonlight glinted off the death’s-head insignia on the brigadeführer’s steel helmet—Freitag with his ghost eyes, fresh from the death squads at Babyn Yar. Below them, a dozen soldiers were at work, widening the trench, a raw wind at their backs.
He blinked away the memory, blinked away a sudden slice of light that appeared on the far wall. Cooler air wafted about his exposed ankles as the door closed, pitching the room into shadow. “Help,” he gasped. Was it the short nurse or the tall one with the English accent? He felt rough hands on his shoulder and knew in an instant: it was the assassin, returning to finish the job. With frightening certitude, something was slipped over his head, the cold rubber pinching his neck. He lifted his good hand and groped frantically behind him, but the arms of his assassin were unrelenting and steady, squeezing with brutal efficiency—with the confidence of a killer.
Blood roared in his ears, and behind the lids of his closed eyes, the sparking brightness of a thousand stars.
37
JEANIE
Salt Spring Island
december 10, 1972
“why did you leave me out there?” Kay is standing in the dark hallway when I come in from getting Dan settled in the guest cabin. A sliver of moonlight from the living room windows falls across her lower face, and I can see that her lips are chapped, and she’s completely sloshed. It’s obvious she’s shaken from having to row against a frighteningly robust current as her boat filled with water. Now, after a hot bath, she has a highball firmly in hand, which I suspect is not her first of the evening.
“I could have drowned,” she says, her voice slurred and shaky.
“It was really…dumb to follow us. Didn’t you see the boat was leaking?”
Her eyes look larger than ever behind her glasses. “I imagined him tipping that kayak and both of you in the ocean. Hypothermia—”
“Dan isn’t dangerous.”
Kay gulps some of her drink. “You have no idea, Jeanie.”
“Really? Why don’t you tell me?” I think of Dan’s idea to slip her a sleeping pill. I just can’t do it. This is Kay, my old nurse and confidante.
Suddenly she’s in my face. “He doesn’t work at the Vancouver Sun. So why is he here?” Her breath smells like grain alcohol, with a low note of cheese. “He thought Pat was gone, that you’d be alone—”
“I invited him,” I say, stepping back.
“Did you invite him?” She comes closer, until I’m backed against the wall. “Or was he too eager to jump on a ferry and question you without Pat to protect you? When you told me you remembered seeing Kovacs in the doorway of your hospital room, I couldn’t help but wonder if you’d asked yourself why he was there. Or what had happened to him. I think Danek Rys is a private investigator, who’s here because he suspects you of having something to do with Marko Kovacs’s disappearance.”
I press a hand to my forehead, sudden doubt clouding my thoughts. But I say nothing; the raw scraping pain in my throat makes it difficult to speak. Kay’s eyes glint in the moonlight. She’s obviously concerned, but I don’t need someone afraid for me right now. I need a friend.
She takes my hand, squashing my fingers. “Forgive me,” she says in my ear. “I can’t seem to stop trying to protect you.”
I pry my hand out of hers. “Why does everyone want to protect me? I’m not seventeen anymore.”
“Mr. Rys refuses to see that Marko Kovacs’s daughter had something to do with her father’s disappearance; the girl was positively venomous. I’ve seen men like Dan before—shattered into a million bits, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. They’re compelling, yes, but you can end up hurt…or dead.”
“Shattered into a million bits?” I say, stepping back. “Is that what you think of me?”
She sobers briefly and fishes around in her pocket, before drawing out a little white cup. “Time for your medications,” she says, the white of her crooked teeth bared in a smile.
I take the cup reluctantly, realizing that it’s just the nurse in her coming out.
Kay finishes her drink and spins drunkenly, before careening into the living room. “He’s dangerous, I tell you,” she calls over her shoulder, before collapsing on the sofa, her head lolling back.
I make a beeline to the kitchen and peer into the medication cup. A full moon shines through the skylight, illuminating an unpleasant surprise. Hidden among my pain and sleep meds, tucked away at the very bottom, is an orange chlorpromazine tablet. The faint, moldy smell of the drain makes me feel like retching. Plucking out the orange pill, I angrily flush it down the sink, thinking of what Dan said earlier.
Kay is sent by Pat to watch you. They are afraid of what you might remember.
I told Dan I trusted Kay with my life. But why would I, when she’s been following us around all day and dared sneak a medication for schizophrenia and severe behavioral problems back into my medication cup? She still thinks of me as a child, a teenager who got herself into the trouble of a lifetime. I’m sick of behaving for everyone. I’m sick of being managed.
The guest cabin is visible from the kitchen window, and I can feel Dan’s presence behind the warm glow through the curtains cast by the kerosene lamp he lit when darkness fell. What’s he doing in there? Bursting with resolve, I extract my sleeping tablet from the white cup. On the counter, it almost glows in the moonlight. I hesitate. It’s a crime to drug someone, to ease them into sleep without them knowing, but I raise a glass and crush the pill, pulverize it into dust. With a shaking hand, I drift the powder into a water glass and stir while my heart flips over like a dying fish.
When I bring the water to Kay, her eyes are open to slits, through which she regards me with something that approaches curiosity. “You’ve always been considerate.” She tosses back the water as if it were whiskey, then slides the empty glass onto the side table. It teeters on the edge, and I lunge forward to catch it before it crashes to the floor. “Now sit down and talk to me,” she laughs, her eyes already closing.
Back in the kitchen, I look out at the cabin again. Danek Rys dangerous? I trace a finger across my upper lip, remembering the feel of his mouth so very briefly on mine this afternoon before he turned away.
Almost as if I’ve conjured him, the front door of the cabin opens, and he steps out on the porch. He closes the door, and I watch a match flare, the glow of yellow that seems to jitter and jump as he lights a cigarette.
I quickly pull on a sweater, then head to the linen closet and gather two bath towels. My heart skipping beats, I follow the boardwalk across the garden. Moonlight shimmers over the shrubs, mist rising from the leaves like steam. These things so familiar to me, and yet I gaze upon them with new eyes. Is it possible I’m falling in love with a man who might very well be a private investigator here to prove I’m guilty of a crime I can’t remember committing?
38
SAVKA
Vancouver
march 19, 1972
when marko had disappeared thirteen years ago, Savka found a job as a cleaner in a nursing home. The work was hard, but on her one day off that week, she made her slow, painful way through the park across from her apartment building juggling three paper bags of groceries in her arms. She was tired and irritable and her back ached. When she got home, she planned to finish making a few dozen varenyky, then go right to bed and recover from six straight days of scrubbing toilets and mopping miles of linoleum floors.
She paused reluctantly in front of a park bench, dark memories swirling in her mind. The place was deserted, not as it was that day in 1959, when she’d stumbled upon Belyakov on her way home from the hospital. The ghost of her Russian handler was still there, flicking away his half-smoked cigarette. Elbows on his knees, he had glanced at Ilyin, who stood nearby at the edge of the small pond, looking adrift without his old sidekick, Yeleshev. Savka had had the sense the two Russians circled her like lions hunting an injured zebra on the plains. Belyakov had looked up at her. “Where is he, Savka?”
She’d waited for her racing heart to slow, remembering his distressing visit to her hospital room only days before. “Where is who?”
“Your husband leaves on another trip and you do not contact me?”
After Marko had threatened her several nights before, she had presumed he’d climbed into his car and driven straight to New York. “He came in after you did,” she said. “A nurse thought he was you. Marko flew into a rage, demanded to know who you were.”
“You didn’t tell him…”
“I didn’t have to tell him,” she said, her womb-less body aching and yearning for her own comfortable bed. She wanted to tell Belyakov that news of Natalka’s death had undone her husband, but knew better than to mention the banderivka’s name and set her Russian handler off. “He remembered you from Rimini. We had words and he left. He’s escaped.”
Belyakov’s eyes narrowed. “I would think the same thing, but why did he leave his car in the parking lot?”
Savka winced as pain snaked its way along her hysterectomy incision. Marko would never leave his prized Pontiac. “A Soviet assassin found him?” she gasped, struggling to take in the fact that Marko’s worst fear had come to pass. “An assassin who worked without your knowledge?”
“No operatives are here without my knowledge,” Belyakov said. “It was Mossad.” He looked up at the gray sky. She flinched when he swore, calling her a “train station whore” in his despicable Russian. If she had the strength—and a gun—she’d shoot him dead. Reaching into his coat pocket, he took out his trusty flask. “I should be in Moscow,” he said, after a long swig, “not in this shit country—rain, rain, rain.” He seemed still grief-stricken at the loss of Yeleshev, and now of Marko. He’d spent years and a great deal of effort tracking her husband across continents, desperate to bring him back to Moscow, this traitor to the motherland, a rebel who had something he dearly wanted. And another predator had snatched his prey without warning.
But Savka wasn’t buying this act. “In the hospital, you threatened to kill Marko. You’ve done it and now wish to make me think he ran afoul of a Nazi hunter. Is this the lie you’re telling the KGB?”
Belyakov seemed so startled by the accusation, Savka had to presume he had nothing to do with Marko’s troubling disappearance. But there was an upside. With her husband gone, and presumably the Rimini list along with him, Belyakov didn’t need her anymore. She was free to turn her Russian handler in to the Canadian police. Without orders from him to the Black Eagle prison, someone would notice that a certain political prisoner had not been granted release when Khrushchev set so many of them free. And Taras would be liberated. Savka felt power thrum in her blood. She was a warrior at last, authority and dominance finally in her hands.
Emboldened by this new burst of confidence, she didn’t notice Belyakov studying her. “You think you can turn me in now?” he said. “Who do you think has kept Taras alive in Black Eagle? If a year goes by and the commandant does not hear from me, he has direct orders: shoot your precious son into a ditch.”
At the time, Savka had hung her head, chastised, but now she clutched her groceries and shook off that memory, leaving the park, and climbing the front steps of her apartment building. Wedging her bags against the door, she juggled her keys. Belyakov had insisted she file a missing person’s report. “The police are useless here,” he’d said, “but they might turn up something. A friend of Marko’s could have waited for him in the parking lot. Left the car behind to throw us off. Until I see a body, I will assume Marko is still out there.”
