The Last Secret, page 37
Oblivious, Pat paces the beach like a jungle cat, tracking Kay’s progress out in the bay, swimming as if someone is right behind her, heading for the Secretary Islands, a destination she might reach if the incoming tide doesn’t sweep her away. Pat takes a few steps toward the ocean’s edge and falters, glowering at a dark cloud mass the color of a bruise surging overhead. She seems to remember that she’s a poor swimmer and thinks better of entering these menacing waves as the light fades perceptibly. It might very well be dusk.
As Taras and Ilyin grapple in the sea, Pat suddenly rounds on me. “I’ve been trying to protect you all these years,” she says, her eyes swinging wildly. “I had your best interests at heart. And you fought me every step of the way.” She gestures at the ocean. “The Fire Bride should be out there trying to escape, the woman who immolated herself on her husband’s stupidity. Jeanie Esterhazy, the deluded romantic, a sacrificial victim to love.”
Shaking, I feel myself cycle back unwillingly through the past thirteen years, so many wretched moments flaring and fizzing like dying stars. “All those times I stupidly accepted medicine cups from you,” I cry, vaguely aware that Savka has let go of my hand and stares silently at Belyakov, who’s now wading back to shore. I take a few steps toward Pat. I don’t want her to miss a word. “Medicine cups filled with uppers, downers, antipsychotics,” I stutter in outrage, conscious that Belyakov is now closer to Savka, as Ilyin and Taras wrestle behind them in the deeper water. Pat has poor timing, but I can’t resist this last chance to tell her what I really feel. “You haven’t protected me. You did everything you could to fight me. When I’d spent two years in the hospital. If anyone should know, it was you and Kay—I’d already gone through the fight of my life!”
Pat looks momentarily cowed at my unexpected outburst, then a crazed smile breaks across her face. She flies at me like a deranged bird and grabs my arm, dragging me toward the water. I struggle against her, scratching and fighting with every ounce of my strength.
“You want a fight?” she says through clenched teeth. “I’ll give you one.” Pat outweighs me, and her hands feel impossibly strong on my arm. If she can’t beat me, she’ll kill me. Has it come to this, after thirteen years of unjust treatment? Is she really going to win?
The police sirens set up a piercing wail as they make the turn on Arbutus Road, and Pat falters, letting me go. My old nurse lingers in a moment of indecision, finally breaking with a violent howl and plunging away across the beach.
53
SAVKA
Salt Spring Island
december 12, 1972
as belyakov waded toward savka, the police sirens inexplicably stopped in the near distance. Savka stood rigid as a board, her body frozen with fear. And a chilling certainty: The police didn’t know which long driveway led to Jeanie’s house.
Belyakov lifted his gun and aimed it at Savka, his face strangely animated. Everything else disappeared from her awareness. Finally, it has come, she thought, Belyakov will put a bullet in my head, as he’s longed to do all along. She had dared rise against him and must be dispensed with at once. A scream threatened to burst from her lungs and suddenly Ewa’s voice resounded in her memory:
I would never have believed you were a warrior.
Belyakov gripped his gun with both hands as he struggled through the waves, even as a much larger swell rolled close behind him. Savka felt her throat go dry. The rogue wave knocked Belyakov to his hands and knees, leaving him gasping and spitting sea water. He stared down at his now empty hand, stupefied to have lost his gun. Reluctantly he plunged his hands into the water up to his armpits, frantically feeling for the pistol, but quickly abandoned the search.
Savka tensed as Belyakov emerged from the water like a sea monster. Somehow, she found the courage to stumble forward. “You think you will survive?” she shouted at him. “Like a cockroach?”
Her heart beat staccato against her ribcage as she shoved Belyakov, but her hands slid off his slick leather coat and he squirmed away, leaving her on all fours, soaking wet and gasping in the surf. He bolted toward the headland, and Jeanie rushed to her side, dragging her out of the waves. Savka crouched with her at the water’s edge, trying to get her breath back, aware that in the shallows of the bay, Taras had grabbed Ilyin by the coat, throwing him out and away from him. The Russian went under for a moment—the water too deep for him to get his footing. He flailed his arms as a boy would and Savka watched him struggle. “He doesn’t know how to swim,” she said to Jeanie, in wonderment. Could it really be that simple—Ilyin following her thousands of miles from Ukraine to Canada, only to drown in the Pacific Ocean?
Taras swung around, wiping salt out of his eyes to search for his old enemy. He thundered out of the sea and hovered for a moment to look Jeanie and Savka over. Convinced they were unhurt, he lifted his head to find Belyakov, who was scrambling up the headland, slipping on the rocks and moss. The cold sea water had revived her son. To Savka’s surprise, he dropped his father’s gun on the beach; the long barrel stuck up menacingly among the broken clam shells, gleaming in the dull light. She watched, astonished, as Taras fumbled in his breast coat pocket and took out the leather sheath containing his small, thin knife—the shiv he’d made to kill Belyakov.
Her Russian handler had climbed to the top of the headland. He looked back once, then turned, heading for the tree line on the other side. Taras sprinted after him, the shiv hard and glinting in his hand.
Savka broke away from Jeanie and stood, her coat sleeves dripping sea water. She couldn’t take her eyes off Ilyin, who was still struggling in the sea. Finally, he seemed to give up and his head sank from view. This was the end, she thought, a fitting demise for the Russian soldier who, on Belyakov’s orders, had shot her, then returned to rape her while she lay unconscious and bleeding in the snow.
Jeanie took a few steps into the frigid water, as if she meant to help the man she had no idea had violated Savka in such a horrific way. “We can’t let him—”
Her words were cut off by a sudden, cascading spout, and Ilyin broke the surface of the ocean like a whale and somehow thrashed his way to shallower water. Savka stared in horror as Ilyin found his feet on the rocks. Why wouldn’t he sink into oblivion? But he waded toward her, now waist-deep in the surf, his eyes searching out Taras who climbed the headland path, racing after Belyakov. Ilyin would never let her son catch the man who’d stolen his life.
Ilyin spotted Marko’s old Webley on the beach at the same time Savka did. As if in a daze, she reached down and picked up her husband’s gun. Then, everything seemed to slow. The wind died suddenly, as though holding its breath. When Ilyin noticed Savka raise the gun and point it directly at his chest, he paused, water lapping at his ankles.
From behind her, Jeanie said, “Wait, the police are coming…”
Savka took another step forward, her finger finding the trigger of Marko’s revolver. Could she wait? The police were obviously up on Arbutus Road, unsure which driveway was Jeanie’s. If Ilyin remained at a distance, she thought she might let the police handle this, but he waded slowly toward her, hand up as if he meant to talk her down. His eyes again flicked to Taras on the headland, and he smiled, his white teeth gleaming. “Savka,” he said. “I could have killed you that day—in ’44. I aimed for your shoulder. I could have aimed for your heart.”
“My heart?” She stood rock still, her arms straight out and the gun foreign in her hand. A jolt of pain traveled down her arm and into her finger, tensed against the trigger, and her rage was there, too, the hopeless anger she’d kept hidden in her body for too long. She tightened her grip on the gun and adjusted her feet under her on the beach. “You wounded a little bird,” she shouted at him, her voice surprisingly assured. “And put her in a cage—so you could play with her.”
Ilyin’s smile broadened, and her anger sharpened to a point. He found this, her, amusing. “We let you live.”
He took several steps closer and Savka swallowed hard. In a moment, he would lunge at her and take the gun, then follow Taras. He’d shoot her son, probably kill him to save Belyakov. “Pretty bird,” she said, lifting her thumb to pull down the hammer on the revolver. “Why don’t you fly away?”
Then Savka squeezed the trigger with chilling determination, recoiling only at the surprisingly innocuous pop and a puff of smoke erupting from the barrel of the gun. Ilyin’s eyes widened and he stared at Savka in disbelief as a blotch of red bloomed like a rose in the middle of his chest.
Savka backed away, watching silently as her rapist fell like a tree into the water, floating only for a moment before half sinking below the waves. Then it grew eerily quiet. She was vaguely aware of Jeanie prying the gun out of her hands as the police sirens suddenly started up again, fracturing the trance she’d been in. The sirens grew louder, they were almost here, and without a word Jeanie took a few running jumps on the beach, then threw the revolver far out into the ocean, where it could never be found.
54
TARAS
Salt Spring Island
december 12, 1972
shiv in one hand and his wet coat almost hanging off him, Taras stands tall in the cool of the forest. He can see Belyakov running, his head down, gasping with effort as he dodges among the trees. Taras flinches at the crack of a single gunshot from the beach behind him. In the ominous silence that follows, he turns his head. When he left Ilyin in the water, the man had been drowning and weaponless. The shot couldn’t have come from him.
Taras hesitates, worried for his mother and Jeanie. Is it possible that Ilyin recovered and came out of the ocean? He has to believe it’s true, that his mother has picked up Tato’s gun and dispatched the man who violated her in a Ukrainian forest so long ago.
He shakes his head to dispel the last vestiges of the drug, and to catch his breath. Belyakov’s figure is getting smaller, almost disappearing among the trees ahead. Taras hovers in a moment of indecision. If he returns to the beach, the Russian will get away. The sirens are now ear-splittingly close. He decides to go after Belyakov. The police will be here soon to help his mother and Jeanie.
Taras bursts into a run, weaving and jumping over thick undergrowth. He spots Belyakov, resting with his hand on a tree, believing he’s escaped. Taras’s old nemesis looks more like a drowned rat than a dangerous criminal.
With a few long strides, he closes the gap and sends the Russian sprawling, his pant legs peeling up his ridiculous legs to reveal a pair of drenched socks that reach all the way to his knees.
“Fuck your mother,” Belyakov spits, his teeth bared and eyes on Taras’s shiv, as though he has plans to lunge for it.
Taras blinks away the vile Russian curse and shifts the handle of the knife in his palm, its blade sharpened to a razor’s edge. “Not the one my father gave me—not the knife you took from me in Ukraine,” he says in Russian. He wants this man to understand every word. “I made this in the camp infirmary, for one purpose—to kill you.” His voice calm even as his heart beats out of his chest. How many years he has fantasized about this moment, one he thought would never come. Face to face with the man who sent him to hell.
Belyakov crouches low, his dark eyes agleam. “You should never have been released from Black Eagle. A mistake. If I’d been camp commandant, you would die there.”
Grief hits Taras like a hammer. He blinks rapidly to clear his head. “You’re a petty grunt to the KGB. Only good enough for shit jobs.” Taras inches slowly toward him. Since he found Mama in Vancouver, he’s untangled countless mysteries swirling around the disappearance of his father. But there are still too many questions left unanswered. “Why were you following me? Why did you force my mother to spy for you, why follow her and Tato to Canada?”
Belyakov crawls backwards on his hands and feet, looking past Taras toward the headland, as if hoping Ilyin might appear to save him. He glances up at Taras and smiles. “Your mother didn’t tell you about the Rimini list? Ukrainian men who fought against the motherland. Your father stole it.” Belyakov’s dark eyes flit desperately. “When I interrogated him at Rimini, I offered him a deal. Do you know what he said to me? I would not trade my wife and son for eight thousand Ukrainian men. He could have saved you, saved your mother from her fate, if he’d wanted to. But he chose his compatriots over you.”
Taras glances at his hand—holding the shiv—and the tattoos inked on his middle fingers like a desperate prayer. Spasi, Otets, Syna—Save me, father, your son. A life-long obsession with his father had culminated in a fruitless search to find him again. But he’s had it all wrong. Tato chose to save his men, not his own son. It’s his mother who kept him in her heart for twenty-eight years, his mother who has sacrificed so much. “You used me as a bargaining chip to make Mama spy on her husband for this list?” He takes another menacing step toward Belyakov. “I once dreamed of running this knife across your throat, but death is too good for you.”
Belyakov’s escape has been blocked by a large tree. He presses his back against it with a look of shrewd desperation. Like all bullies, he doesn’t enjoy having the tables turned on him.
Taras slips his shiv back into its leather sheath and circles the tree, circles his nemesis. “I’m handing you over to the Canadian police. Moscow will repatriate you. What I wouldn’t do to see you in Black Eagle.”
Belyakov cowers, raising his hands in front of his face, as if to ward off a blow. “Why don’t you kill me?” He jumps to his feet, but Taras clamps a hand around his neck before he can bolt away. The Russian fights like a fish on a line, slashing and scratching at him with long nails that seem sharpened to a point. Taras yanks Belyakov’s hands behind his back and he cries out in pain.
“These hands will soon beg your fellow prisoners—the worst serial murderers in the Soviet Union—not to kill you,” Taras says in his ear. He kicks him in the back of the knees, and Belyakov sprawls forward, whimpering, his face pressed against the moss. Taras pulls out his blade again and drags him by his coat collar. The Russian twists, still fighting, his booted heels leaving wild drag marks in the moss and pine needles as he moans and roars in protest. The house and headland come into view and Taras flips Belyakov like a turtle, then pauses in the trees, his shiv drawing a prick of blood at the Russian’s throat.
His eyes travel past the headland, where he can just see a sliver of beach, and a police officer wading out into the ocean to a body that’s floating face up in the waves offshore.
Belyakov struggles to stand. “Ilyin,” he cries, snot running down over his lip. He’s spotted the body in the water, and Jeanie leading Mama up the path to the house. “She killed him.” Belyakov cried. Taras’s pulse leaps. After Mama exacted revenge on her rapist, did she have the sense to throw the gun into the ocean before the police arrived?
There’s a burst of frantic activity at the far end of the beach, near the rowboat and kayak, where two police officers are dragging Pat out of a thicket of dense and thorny bushes. Another officer comes up over the headland path and spots Taras and Belyakov. He pulls his service revolver when Taras shoves the Russian forward. “KGB—high up,” he tells the officer. “A prize.”
Belyakov is snatched by the officer and pushed toward the waiting squad cars. He glances back at Taras, his eyes wild and uncomprehending, as if he can’t believe he’s been caught by Marko Ivanets’s son, the one he sent to purgatory so long ago.
Bedraggled and dazed, Taras trails down the path from the headland. He’s still soaking wet and bone tired, but he won’t rest until he sees Belyakov in the back of a police car.
Jeanie leaves his mother and runs up the path toward him. She lifts Taras’s hand. “No,” she stammers, inspecting his bloody knuckles. “You could have been killed.” She stops short of yanking up his sodden shirt to check for hidden injuries, then peers up into his face. “I could get used to that ecstatic look of victory.”
He pulls Jeanie into his arms. Victory. Yes, that’s what this is. Taras finds himself fighting tears, then he feels a warm flush of euphoria. The pressure in his chest eases, as if a shaft of light has burst out of the clouds and cracked him wide open. His hand in Jeanie’s, they make their way down the path toward his mother, who draws him into a ferocious hug.
“My son,” she says into his coat, still trembling after her confrontation with Ilyin.
Taras knows the Russian was her brutal rapist, a thug who made it possible for Belyakov to operate with ease, but killing a man, even an enemy, was not so easy. “I want to know every part of your story now, Mama,” he says past a lump in his throat at the thought of the injustices and betrayals she has suffered, what she’s sacrificed to keep him safe. “Don’t leave anything out.”
She releases him with a tentative smile and slides an arm around Jeanie’s waist. “I will tell both of you.” As the three of them make their way up the path toward the driveway, they don’t look back, where two officers have pulled Ilyin’s body out of the ocean. His mother’s eyes are on the house and several officers who are struggling to handcuff a reluctant Belyakov. “I will never see him again,” she says, her voice breaking.
At this moment, the clouds open up, and rain begins to pelt down, plastering Belyakov’s hair to his forehead. “Don’t touch me,” he shouts, fighting the police officers’ attempt to handcuff him. “I am important person—Stalin himself would tell you—”
He’s cut off when an officer pushes him roughly into the back of one of the three police cruisers parked in the drive. “Stalin?” the officer says, slamming the door. “Stalin is dead.”
A tall, rumpled plainclothes officer has come out of the house, a notebook in hand. He glances between Mama, Taras, and Jeanie. “Staff Sergeant Rumboli,” he says, scratching his head. “Care to tell me what the hell happened here?”
