Traitor

by Amanda McCrina

  We agreed to take a watch in shifts of three hours. Andriy took the first shift. I went to sleep in the happy anticipation of six uninterrupted hours before my shift, and I was groggy and a little peevish when I woke up to Mykola shaking my shoulder insistently after what seemed like only a couple of minutes.

  “All right,” I said, “all right. You’re not mixing a martini.”

  “Andriy’s gone,” he said.

  He shifted on his heels so I could sit up and see. He’d relit the grease lamp. The tiny flame sputtered and bobbed in the draft down the tunnel. The empty shelf stretched away into yawning darkness. Wherever Andriy had gone, he’d taken the gun.

  “How long?” I asked.

  It was a stupid question. He’d been asleep as I had, and anyway, neither of us had a wristwatch. My head felt thick and heavy. That little bit of sleep was just long enough to remind me how bone-tired I was, not long enough to do anything for it.

  Mykola avoided the question graciously. “He was gone when I woke up just now.”

  “You probably woke up because you heard him leave. He’s gone off to piss.”

  “Without saying anything?”

  “He didn’t want to wake us up.”

  “The point of being on watch is so he can wake us up if he has to,” Mykola said.

  “Rats carried him off,” I said. “He’s skinny enough. Almost as skinny as you are. The question we have to ask is—was it many small rats or one big rat?”

  “That’s not funny,” Mykola said. He was afraid of rats.

  “The possibility we don’t even want to consider is that it was many big rats.”

  “Shut up,” Mykola said.

  “Which would you rather fight—a hundred one-kilogram rats or one hundred-kilogram rat?”

  “Shut up.”

  I yawned and rubbed my face, digging the heels of my hands into my eyes.

  “We’ll give him a couple minutes. Then we’ll panic. Put that light out.”

  We sat in darkness, listening to our breaths and the distant plop of dripping water. There was a faint splash that I hoped for Mykola’s sake was a fish, not a rat. I was almost asleep again when I heard the soft patter of footsteps coming down the shelf from the direction of the drain—quiet enough that I could tell they were trying to move stealthily, whoever they were, loud enough that I could tell there was more than one of them. Electric torchlight jumped over the walls.

  I snatched at Mykola’s arm. We retreated down the shelf, staying just ahead of the torchlight. They were making more noise than we were—they wouldn’t be able to hear us as long as they were moving—but they had the advantage of being able to see where they were going, which meant they were moving a lot faster. Sooner or later, the shelf would start splitting off into smaller side passages and we’d be able to lose them, but we’d have to keep pace with them until then.

  They stumbled across our pack. Somebody flashed a torch up and down the shelf. They knew we couldn’t be far. We pressed flat against the wall, holding our breaths. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to grab the pack, and I consoled myself with the thought that something in it would have clinked or rattled if I had—the lamp or the tins or the vodka bottle filled with drinking water. At least I still had the money, tucked safely in my coat pocket. At least I still had my boots. But I ached at the loss of our icons.

  They were conferring over the pack. I nudged Mykola’s elbow and jerked my chin. He slid quietly along the shelf. I followed him, careful to keep my weight on my toes. We moved stiffly down the shelf, huddled against the wall like rheumatic old peasants.

  Mykola tripped over something in the darkness. I heard the thump and his soft, hissed breath, then the wet smack as he caught himself on his hands.

  There was a moment of absolute silence—nobody moving, nobody talking, nobody breathing.

  Then there was gunfire.

  I hauled Mykola up and shoved him. We ran. Bullets drilled after us, chewing across the shelf and up the walls, spitting clumps of concrete dust. Muzzle flashes lit the tunnel in short, skittering bursts—enough that I could see the gaping black hole in the wall where a side passage veered off, just ahead. We ducked into the passage. My relief at the way it banked and twisted lasted a good ten seconds. Then the passage turned one last corner and slapped up solidly against a brick wall.

  Dead end.

  I spent a frenzied moment groping blindly across the wall and came across a set of iron rungs bolted into the brick—a manhole ladder. We weren’t out of options just yet. I followed Mykola up the rungs. Footsteps pounded after us, echoing down the passage. Torchlight raced across the floor and up the walls.

  Mykola fumbled at the manhole cover.

  “It’s stuck—it’s stuck—Aleks—”

  “Punch it! Pretend it’s a rat.”

  I heard the dull clatter of metal on cobblestone just as the gunmen rounded the corner. Mykola pulled himself up through the opening. He swung his legs up and vanished into sunlight. I scrambled after him. I had one hand on the last rung, one hand on the ledge, when the guns opened up.

  I lost my footing first. A wave of nausea hit me before the bullets did. The anticipation of pain is as bad as the pain itself—as incapacitating anyway. I was already sliding off the rung when the bullets tore across the backs of my legs. No taking it in noble silence—I had no more control over the scream that came out of my mouth than I had over my buckling knees. Holy hell, it hurt. I lost my handholds under the sheer force of the pain, every muscle in my body overwhelmed by my urgent need to curl up into a ball and sob.

  I didn’t fall. That confused me. Even as a quivering mass of pain, I knew I should have fallen when my hands slipped. Instead, I was moving steadily upward, thumping painfully over the rungs. I yelled. Mykola yelled back into my face. He was hauling me bodily up the ladder, yelling and crying and pulling all at once. He dragged me over the ledge and dumped me onto the street. I lay writhing and gasping on the cobblestones while he heaved the cover back over the manhole.

  There were people all around us. It was late afternoon, and we’d come out right in the middle of Saint Theodore Square, just off the boulevard. Somebody who wasn’t me or Mykola was screaming incoherently. I don’t know whether that was because of the blood and shooting or because you just don’t expect people to come popping up out of manholes like that. Nobody stepped up to help—I couldn’t blame them, really—but nobody tried to stop us either. Mykola pulled my arm across his shoulders and half carried, half dragged me away from the manhole and into an alley.

  He zigzagged through alleys and side streets for ten minutes before he put me down against a low brick wall, under the cover of some scraggly trees. We were at the western edge of the old High Castle grounds, and we were alone. He shook my arm off and dropped to his knees beside me, panting with the effort. He wiped the sweat and tears from his face with his sleeve, sniffed, shook his head, and reached for my legs. I hissed when he stretched them straight. I was past the point of being able to scream. He flinched, though he didn’t let go.

  “I’ve got to wrap them,” he said. “Aleks, I’ve got to wrap them. It’s too much blood.”

  I watched him tug my boots off. His hands were shaking.

  I tried to help. “Can’t be the artery,” I croaked. “I’d be d-dead already.”

  He didn’t respond. It was a lot of blood. I hadn’t really had a good look at the damage until now. There was blood bubbling through the holes in my trousers—two holes on the inside of my left thigh, just above the knee, where the bullet had punched in and out again; one hole at the back of my right calf, where the bullet must have gone straight to the bone. Mykola took off my coat and shirt and tore the shirt up into long strips.

  “Twenty m-marks in the pocket,” I reminded him.

  “Lot of good it’s done us,” he said, but he stuffed the bills into his own coat.

  The nausea hit me again when he peeled off my trousers. I focused on my boots. My boots—my fine, twice-stolen Pol
ish cavalry boots. I wouldn’t be able to sell them now, except for scrap. The bullet had gone through the boot on its way to my shinbone. Maybe a museum would want them. The bullet hole and bloodstains would make them an object of interest in a couple of centuries or so, assuming the war was over by then. Maybe we could eat them, if things got bad enough.

  I didn’t realize I’d closed my eyes until Mykola shook me. There was blood slicked all over his hands, and he must have rubbed his face at some point, because there was a long, red smear across his cheek. I knew he was saying something because I could see his mouth moving. I couldn’t hear him. I wasn’t really concerned. I was comfortable—a little cold, but blessedly numb. I’d be asleep if he’d stop shaking me.

  I closed my eyes again. Whatever it was, I could safely assume it would still be a problem when I woke up. It could wait.

  III

  TOLYA

  Saturday, July 29–Sunday, August 6

  1944

  17

  For the first time, Tolya wished he’d paid attention when Comrade Lieutenant Spirin tried teaching him to read a map.

  He hadn’t really seen the point then. He’d already learned how to use the sun and the stars, and anyway, the only other map he’d ever seen was the big framed one of Kyiv that had hung in Ivan’s apartment. He’d made the mistake of assuming Comrade Lieutenant Spirin could just read the map for him if they needed to read a map. He’d made the mistake of assuming Comrade Lieutenant Spirin would be there to read the map for him.

  They’d been going over maps of Lwów all afternoon—street maps, building maps, sewer maps, more kinds of maps than Tolya even knew existed—so he was about three hours too late to admit he didn’t really have any idea what he was looking at.

  Most of the squad was here, gathered in a tight circle on the open ground below the gun mounts: Andriy, and Yakiv, back from wherever he’d been that morning, and a Crimean Tatar called Ruslan, and Valentyn, who’d been one of the German auxiliary police in Lwów. He still wore his German uniform jacket, though he’d ripped off the insignia. The Red Cross girls would be going back to Toporiv as soon as it was dark. They would be walking all night and tomorrow, so they were resting now under the tarpaulin.

  “Windows,” Solovey said, marking right angles with the side of his hand, “here, here, and here.”

  They all leaned in to look—except Ruslan, who’d made the map in the first place. He sat smoking his cigarette, patiently waiting. He wasn’t much older than Tolya, and he hadn’t been here much longer. Two months ago, Stalin had ordered all the Crimean Tatars deported east, deep into the steppe, but Ruslan had escaped by making his way to the port at Sevastopol and stowing away on a ship for Odessa. He didn’t speak much, but that could be just because he didn’t speak much Ukrainian—Tolya wasn’t sure. When he did speak, it was only to Solovey.

  “As many windows as you could want,” Solovey said, “all with clear lines of sight into the headquarters building. We don’t know precisely which office is Volkov’s, but we know he uses the staircase, here”—scribbling with his pencil—“which can be seen from these windows across Pełczyńska Street. How far, Ruslan?”

  Ruslan took out his cigarette and rubbed his lean jaw with his thumb. “Fifty meters.”

  “So. Distance isn’t our problem. Tolya made that distance ten times over, this morning.” Solovey tossed his pencil down. “Our problem—one problem—is that this whole stretch of Pełczyńska south of the Citadel is crawling with reconstruction crews. We go in with one of the crews and smuggle the rifle in by pieces—not impossible by any stretch—but here’s the other thing: It’s heavy security anyway, but they know they’ve got this problem with windows, and they’re anticipating some idiot will try what we’re trying. Nobody makes a move on Pełczyńska Street without Volkov knowing.”

  “That was all one problem?” Andriy said.

  “The first problem. The second problem is that they’ve put in new window glass since the barrage—both buildings. Stationary panes. How does glass affect the shot?”

  There was a long stretch of silence before Tolya realized Solovey was directing the question to him. He was still staring at the map, trying to figure out how the floors of the office building fit together.

  He peeled his tongue off the roof of his mouth. “I’d have to take out the near pane.”

  “What about the staircase window?”

  “Won’t deflect it much—not a straight shot.”

  “That’s no good,” Valentyn said. “The game’s up as soon as the pane comes out. They’ll spot an open window a kilometer away. You might be able to get the shot off, but you sure as hell won’t be making it out.”

  “An eventuality to be considered,” Solovey said blandly.

  There was another stretch of silence.

  “Look,” Andriy said, “this doesn’t have to be a suicide mission. What if we blow the windows first?”

  “No good,” Valentyn said. “Every Red in the city will be watching the building after that.”

  “Do it a couple of days before—time enough for things to quiet down, but not time enough to replace the windows.”

  “Or we forget Pełczy´nska,” Valentyn said. “We get Volkov in his car between headquarters and the hotel. Take the shot from the empty apartment block on the corner of Byka and Kazimierzowska.”

  “It’s too tight,” Andriy said. “You couldn’t make the shot eastward. There’s trees lining the street all along the facade. And you wouldn’t have enough time westward. Look at the angle of the street. You’d only have from here—where the car clears the southeast corner of the Brygidki—to here, at which point it passes out of the line of sight—”

  “Twenty-five meters,” Ruslan murmured to Solovey.

  “—and you’ve got the car moving at, say, thirty-five kilometers an hour, which means—”

  “About two and a half seconds,” Solovey said.

  Andriy shook his head. “Too tight.”

  “Could you do it?” Solovey asked Tolya.

  Four more faces turned to Tolya expectantly.

  He swallowed. “One shot, maybe.”

  “No insurance shot, you mean.”

  “Not in two and a half seconds—not a moving target. First shot would have to be the kill shot.”

  “First shot is the driver, then,” Valentyn said. “Solves the moving-target problem.”

  “And gives Volkov time to duck,” Solovey pointed out, “and we’re stuck in a firefight with every gun in the Brygidki. So really it’s one shot only, moving target or no.”

  “All right,” Valentyn said, “but think about this. We miss the shot from Byka, we make it away and try again. We miss from Pełczyńska, we don’t get another chance—whether we blow the windows or not. Nobody gets out of that building.”

  Solovey and Andriy exchanged a glance.

  “It’s Tolya’s call,” Solovey said.

  “When did we start taking tactical advice from collaborators?”

  That was Yakiv. He was looking at Tolya across the map. His eyes bored into Tolya’s face, and Tolya looked away. He didn’t dare look in any of their faces. He looked at the pile of ammunition boxes, which was safely outside the circle.

  “We were shooting collaborators, last I knew,” Yakiv said.

  There was silence, like a held breath.

  Tolya studied the ammunition boxes. He could see some of the stamps through the camouflage net. He knew the Soviet ones, and he knew the German ones by the Reich eagle, though he couldn’t read the lettering. There were others he didn’t recognize, but they had Latin lettering like the German boxes, so he knew they were Polish.

  Solovey leaned back on his heels. He took his cigarette out of his mouth and flicked away the ash with his fingers—slowly, deliberately. His face was blank.

  “Only one of us here has bagged a zampolit,” he said, “and it wasn’t you.”

  “Only one of us here put on a Red uniform. We all had the choice.”

 
; “Most of us were wearing Wehrmacht uniforms three years ago,” Andriy said quietly.

  “In good faith. The Reich stabbed us in the back. The Reds have had knives at our throats for twenty years.”

  “German knives, Russian knives. What difference does it make?”

  “I’m not trusting the judgment of a collaborator.”

  “You’re taking orders from me,” Solovey said, “or I’m shooting you.”

  Yakiv was silent.

  “Tolya’s shot,” Solovey said. “Tolya’s call.” He put his cigarette back in his mouth.

  “When were you thinking?” Andriy asked him. “The longer we wait, the trickier it’s going to be, no matter where we do it.”

  “It can’t be tonight,” Yakiv said.

  “Got other plans?” Solovey said. His voice was cool. Andriy tensed.

  “Volkov isn’t in the office today,” Yakiv said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Up in Zhovkva.”

  “Why wasn’t I told?”

  “I didn’t know until this morning, all right? The girl at the hotel said they went up to Zhovkva. If I’d known you were planning an assassination, I’d have asked him politely to stay.”

  “Did she say how long—the girl at the hotel?”

  “No, and they didn’t leave a forwarding address for me either. Look—all I know is they cleared out of their rooms, and the girl said they went to Zhovkva.”

  Solovey was playing with his cigarette with two fingers, breathing smoke softly—thinking.

  “Well,” he said finally, “good news for Tolya’s shoulder.” He stubbed out the cigarette in the dirt. “All right. Watch headquarters and the hotel—four-hour shifts, no breaks. I want to know when he’s back.”

  * * *

  Tolya tried to approach Solovey alone, later. He wasn’t even sure why, except the shame pushed him—to explain? To make excuses? To apologize? It hadn’t seemed like collaboration two years ago, only hunger. He wasn’t sure how to explain that. He didn’t think Solovey would understand, even if he could find the words to explain. Yakiv wouldn’t. We all had the choice. He wasn’t sure how to explain that hunger made the choices for you. He wasn’t sure he believed it himself anymore.