“And he told you I’d asked,” Strilka said lightly. His hands were very still on my shoulders.
Vitalik hesitated.
“Look,” he said, “the point—”
“The point is I’ve got a rash of loose tongues, apparently. An epidemic.”
“I didn’t talk. I didn’t tell them anything.”
“You shared a cell with Yaroslav and Borys. Yaroslav and Borys are dead. You are not.”
“I told you. The Reds came in shooting. I hit the floor and played dead. They were in too much of a hurry to make sure.”
“Hit the floor with a body on top of you. Don’t neglect your details, Vitalik.” Strilka’s voice was bland. “Is there anything else you’d like to say?”
“Not to you. To your pet, there. Aleksey.” Vitalik smiled at me savagely, baring bloodied teeth. “Six months, maybe a year. You do everything he asks. Then he gets a new pet, and this is you.”
Strilka put his pistol in my hand.
I’d been expecting it, but I still flinched a little at the touch of the cold steel. I curled my fingers around the grip—loosely, so my hand wouldn’t shake. Strilka’s left hand was still resting on my shoulder, his thumb braced gently on the back of my neck. I went through the motions unhurriedly. I checked the magazine, just to be sure. I checked the safety—I remembered this time—and snapped the action.
Vitalik leaned his head against the chair back. He licked the blood from his lips and smiled at me. His face was white.
I turned under Strilka’s arm, sidestepping him. I put the mouth of the pistol to Strilka’s breastbone and pulled the trigger.
Just like that—pop, thump, silence—and I’d killed a man.
I waited for the pangs of conscience. It was never as easy as you thought it was going to be. I knew that because I’d failed every time before. I hadn’t even been able to kill that Red sentry, down at the station. I hadn’t been able to kill Andriy, and I hadn’t been able to watch Andriy kill that Pole.
It wasn’t supposed to be this easy.
“They’ll have heard the shot,” Vitalik reminded me in a low voice, after a moment.
“They’ll think it was for you,” I said.
I tucked the pistol in my waistband. It was because I didn’t have time to think about it, I decided. It would be harder later.
I crouched to untie Vitalik’s ankles. Marko’s handiwork—the curtain cord was pulled so tight that Vitalik’s bare feet were purple, the color of borscht. His toenails were gone. That must have happened in the Brygidki. The nail beds had had time to scab over.
I spent a couple of minutes picking ineffectively at the cord.
“There’s a knife in his boot lining,” Vitalik said finally.
His fingernails were gone, too, and the ends of his little fingers, below the knuckle. I stared a little too long, and he twisted to look at me reprovingly over his shoulder.
“Having trouble?”
“No—sorry.”
The cuts weren’t clean. I knew they were hurting him, because he stiffened when I touched his hands. The stumps were weeping pus. His fingers were streaked purple and puffy even after I’d rubbed the circulation back into his wrists. His skin was fever hot under my fingers.
“Can you stand?” I asked.
He didn’t bother to reply to that. He spit blood and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He got up, leaning lightly on the chair.
“Guards?” he said.
“Two at the top of the stairs.”
“What about the street?”
“The alley door’s open.”
“That’s suspicious.” He limped over to Strilka and crouched to tug off Strilka’s boots. He sat there lacing the boots on his own mangled feet slowly and carefully.
“Andriy’s there,” I admitted.
“Thinks you’re a friend of his, doesn’t he?”
When I didn’t answer, Vitalik looked up, smiling that sharp, cold smile.
“Don’t worry about it. He thinks everybody’s his friend. Thinks it’s his fault when he realizes they’re not.”
He got up, sucking a breath.
“Ever killed a man with a knife?” he asked.
“No.”
“Better give it to me, then,” he said.
I handed him the knife. He caught my wrist and jerked me expertly around, pulling me tight against him, sliding an arm across my throat. He twisted my wrist until the knife slipped from my numb fingers. Then he liberated the pistol from my waistband and pressed the muzzle to my temple.
“What are you—NKVD?”
“I thought that was you,” I said.
The muscles in his forearm contracted, and I gagged.
“I’m expendable,” he said, low and tight into my ear. “Strilka wasn’t. You should have known better, you Red bastard.”
I pried frantically at his arm. Hot blood hummed in my ears.
“Wouldn’t have—blown cover—”
“What?”—without loosening his grip.
I got two fingers under his arm finally and gulped a long, sobbing breath.
“If I were NKVD. Wouldn’t have blown cover for you.”
He was silent, considering this.
“I’m not Nachtigall either,” I added after a moment. At this point, it couldn’t hurt to be honest.
His voice was cool. “What are you?”
That was a damn good question. I wasn’t my father, as much as Strilka might have been hoping. In over my head, that’s what I was. Pulled in too many directions by too many obligations. Angry. Desperate. Scared.
An idiot, in sum. P → Q, where P is Aleksey is angry and desperate and scared and Q is Aleksey acts like an idiot.
“Look,” I said, because it couldn’t hurt to be honest, “I don’t care about the glory of Ukraine. I’ve got a sixteen-year-old kid brother, and I’m going to get him out of Lwów or die trying.”
He was silent. I didn’t think he was going to shoot me. The guards at the top of the stairs might have been expecting one gunshot, but they’d be suspicious about two. But his arm was still clamped convincingly tight across my throat. I waited.
Finally, abruptly, he slid his arm from my neck and took the gun away from my head.
“We’ve all got our own little wars,” he said.
He stooped to pick up the knife.
“They don’t know anything’s wrong,” he said, jerking his chin to the stairs, “so you walk out of here like there’s nothing wrong. Send them down. Tell them he wants them to come down and take care of the body. Casual, got it?”
“Casual,” I agreed.
“I’m doing you a favor, so you’re going to do one for me. You’re going to take Andriy with you.”
I looked at him. He didn’t look at me. He was digging through Strilka’s pockets, looking for spare clips.
“Your own little war?” I asked.
“One of them.”
I hesitated. I didn’t like the idea of leaving him.
“You could come,” I offered.
“I’ve got business here.”
“They’ll kill you.”
He opened the magazine of the pistol and pushed a new cartridge in. Then he shoved the magazine home against his palm. He looked up, smiling coolly.
“Why? You’re the one who shot four men.”
“Four?”
“Three killed, one wounded.”
“You want me to shoot you?”
He rolled his eyes. “I want you to get the hell out of here. I’m buying you time.”
“You’re going to shoot yourself?”
“You heard the commander.” He shrugged. “It looks suspicious if I come out unscathed.”
* * *
Andriy was alone on the alley doorstep. He jumped up when I came out. He was holding his rifle.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“Relax,” I said, “it’s me. Where’s Mykola?”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
My stomac
h lurched as though I’d stepped off a ledge.
I hauled him up by his collar and backed him against the wall. I towered over him.
“Where is he?”
His eyes were shut, his teeth chattering. “They’re bringing the b-bodies out. He s-said he’d be ba—”
I was halfway down the alley before I remembered what I’d promised him, what Vitalik had asked of me.
I went back.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ll find him.”
He’d crumpled against the wall like an empty paper bag when I’d let him go, curling up into a miserable, tight ball, clutching his rifle.
“He’ll kill me,” he said to his kneecaps. “He’ll kill me…”
I pulled him up by the elbow, slipping the rifle from his hands. With two fingers, I tugged the blue-and-yellow band from his upper arm and shoved it into my pocket.
“Strilka? He’s got other things to worry about now,” I said.
13
It didn’t take us long to find Mykola. They were bringing out the bodies from the prison courtyard and laying them out for identification on the wide sidewalk along Kazimierzowska Street. He was sitting by one of the bodies—just sitting there, cross-legged, looking at nothing, not hearing when I shouted at him through the crowd.
Oh God, no. He’d found Papa’s body.
But it wasn’t Papa’s body. It was Father Yosyp’s.
He hadn’t been dead very long. There was a single bullet hole between his eyes, and the blood was still wet. Execution style, with a pistol. I thought of the shots I’d heard earlier. I thought of the pistol in Marko’s hand.
It was stupid, but I bent to check his pulse. I don’t know why I did it. I wouldn’t have felt it anyway. My fingers were numb.
He was wearing his cassock, I noticed. Why not? The Reds were gone. There was nothing to fear.
I tugged at Mykola’s sleeve. He shoved my hand away.
“Mykola,” I said.
“No.”
“Come on.”
“No.”
I tugged harder, and he jerked away, folding limply across Father Yosyp’s body, burying his face in the black folds of the cassock.
“Why did they do it?” he said, his voice muffled in the heavy fabric. “Why did they do it?”
I slung the rifle. I sat on my knees and pulled him up and slipped my arms around him, tight.
“Listen,” I said into his ear, “we’ve got to go.”
He shook his head against my shoulder. He didn’t speak. He was crying the way he’d cried for Papa—shaking but silent. I rubbed his back in slow circles, feeling his rib cage rise and fall in long, racking sobs under my palm.
“It’ll be all right,” I said. “It’s going to be all right.”
Andriy was standing on the edge of the sidewalk, watching and saying nothing. His eyes fell on mine, just for a second. Then he blinked and looked away. I wondered if he thought I was lying. I wondered if he thought I’d lied to him.
Somebody touched my elbow gently.
“Let me take a look.”
It was a Polish voice.
One of the institute nurses knelt beside me in a faint gust of lavender perfume. She was tall: Our faces were level when I looked up. She was about the age my mother would have been. She looked like a film star even in the drab nurse’s uniform: slim but broad-shouldered, cool blond hair done up in an elegant chignon, tiny pearls in her earlobes. She was the kind of woman who’d make you look up from your newspaper on the tram, the kind of woman whose eight hatboxes I’d have to juggle in one go from her chauffeured Daimler sedan to her suite—the kind of woman to whom I’d have to be very careful to say only Yes, madam or No, madam, so she wouldn’t hear the Ukrainian under my Polish.
Her manicured fingers slid over my forearm.
“Let me take a look,” she said again.
“He’s all right, ma’am.”
“Mm.” She pried at my arms as if she hadn’t heard.
“He doesn’t need your help,” I said, through my teeth. My accent was unmistakable when I was angry, but I didn’t care. I wanted her to go away.
She ignored me. She pulled Mykola’s hands across her lap and uncurled his battered fingers one by one, pressing gauze across his bloody knuckles. He let her do it, lifting his head a little to watch. He was still crying—I could feel him trembling—but his shoulders had stopped heaving.
She was trying to calm him down.
I was too ashamed to protest when another nurse pulled me away. I sat beside Andriy on the curb, craning my neck to look for Nachtigallen in the crowd, while the second nurse tried to hold my chin in two fingers and wipe the blood off my face. I’d forgotten about taking that slug to the jaw.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said.
I didn’t know what she was apologizing for—the slug or the sting of the iodine or the way she was holding my chin or the bullet in Father Yosyp’s head or all of it or none of it. I shrugged indifferently, teeth clenched, before I realized she’d said it in Ukrainian.
I looked up at her, caught off guard.
“I saw the fight,” she said. “Fascist bastards. You did the right thing—standing up to them.”
She was younger than the Polish nurse. She was my age, with dark hair plaited neatly in a bun at the nape of her neck and laughing eyes the color of linden honey.
I shut my eyes and opened them, trying to clear my head.
“Why are you here? Little late, aren’t you?”
It was a sour, shitty thing to say, and stupid anyway. There’d be wounded among the survivors. There’d be others like Vitalik. What did I know? Maybe her father was rotting with mine down there in the lower prison.
My turn. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She pretended not to hear. She wadded the bloody gauze and stuffed it into her ragbag.
“You were close?”
“What?”
“To the priest.”
He’d been more a father than Papa had ever been. I couldn’t explain that because I couldn’t explain about Papa, who was—had been—one of her fascist bastards.
“I owe him my life,” I said, which was vague but true enough. I skirted back to safer ground. I waved a hand toward his body. “Did you see it?”
Her mouth was tight. “I saw it.”
“What did they say? He was a collaborator?”
She shook her head. “They ordered the Jews out—those nationalist goons. One girl wouldn’t go. The officer shot her. The priest tried to go for the gun, so he shot him too.”
The Polish nurse came over. She’d left Mykola sitting with a cold compress beside Father Yosyp’s body. She murmured something to the dark-haired nurse and knelt beside me on the sidewalk.
“May I talk to you for a minute, Aleksey?”
I was so startled by her effortless Ukrainian that for a second I didn’t even notice that she’d somehow managed to pull my name out of Mykola.
“I’m Renata Kijek,” she said, ignoring my gaping. “I’m the director of the Department of Pediatrics at the Medical Institute.” She paused, as though to make sure I appreciated that. “I’d like to take Mykola in for some testing.”
“He’s not hurt,” I said automatically—not hurt that she could help with anyway.
“He’s malnourished to the point of starvation. He has all the signs of rickets. We’ll do the testing to be sure, but I can tell you right now that both of you could use vitamin supplements.” She glanced at Andriy, who was sitting very still beside me, studying his boots. “All of you,” she said.
“What kind of vitamin supplements?”
“Calcium. Vitamin D. I’ll be able to tell you more once I’ve done the blood work.”
“And they’ll cure it? The vitamins?”
“In combination with a good diet—a much better diet than he’s been getting.” She was looking at me in a way that made me think she could see right through me. “The longer it goes untreated, the more likely the damage will be permanent.”
“Damage,” I repeated, like an idiot.
“To his bones.” She explained it patiently, as if to a child. “He’s still growing. His bones are still developing. In order for them to develop properly…”
I looked away. There was bewildered panic fluttering in the pit of my stomach, and underneath it a sick, tight ball of despair. I couldn’t think—couldn’t focus. I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that I’d failed.
She laid a hand on my arm.
“Aleksey, he’ll be all right. He needs good food and time, that’s it.”
I had neither of those things to give him. I had thirty German marks with which to get us out of Lwów and keep us alive for the foreseeable future—three of us, which had not been the plan—and I had a target on my back, or I would have any minute now, as soon as Marko and the Nachtigallen sorted out who’d killed Strilka.
“Let me help you,” Director Kijek said, her hand still on my arm.
There’d be a target on her back, too, if she helped me.
I weighed the lies in my head. She would believe me if I told her I couldn’t pay for the medicine. She thought we were starving. The problem would be if she were the kind of saintly person who didn’t care that I couldn’t pay.
Alternatively, I could show her the blue-and-yellow Nachtigall armband in my trouser pocket and the Reichsmarks under my coat and tell her I’d go to hell before I accepted help from a Pole.
I didn’t even have to lie. I could tell her who I was, who my father had been, and she would spit in my face and tell me she’d go to hell before she helped me.
Damn it, I didn’t want her hatred. I couldn’t take her help, but I didn’t want her hatred.
“We’re going to Kraków,” I told her.
She looked skeptical. “Do you have family there?”
“An uncle.”
She was silent.
I waited. I resisted the urge to embellish the lie. The trick to lying was to say the least possible at any given point. You played details like pieces on a chess board—never without careful consideration.
She let go of my arm. She slipped her hand into the pocket of her apron, then laid it over mine, squeezing my fingers gently, pushing something into my palm.
“If you change your mind,” she said.
Traitor Page 9
