I helped Ana to her feet. Her body was shivering and I was desperate to warm it, to comfort her in any way she needed comforting. The room, I knew, reeked of cordite and spent blood and sizzling flesh, but all I smelled were fresh strawberries. I buried my face in her hair as she clung to the back of my neck. We pressed our bodies together.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, breathing heavily. “I think I am getting used to this.”
Carefully, I led her around the broken glass and fallen bodies.
“What did he mean?” Ana said as we passed Viktor and stepped out into the foyer. “What was he going to say about what separates men like you from men like him?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, Ana.”
“Well, it is a very bad habit to interrupt people when they are in the middle of a sentence.”
If she was joking, she didn’t let on.
We moved swiftly through the living room to the front door, intent on not taking a single moment for granted.
Together Ana and I stepped out of the duplex and into the ferocious cold, knowing two things for certain.
The Podrova brothers were dead. And, far more important, little Lindsay Sorkin continued to live.
Part Four
THE CHILDREN OF BELARUS
Chapter 47
Ana and I were just a few kilometers outside of Gomel, the second largest city in Belarus, when our rented Suzuki Grand Vitara struck a large fallen branch, immediately overheated, and seconds later broke down. I’d been dozing off in the passenger seat of the navy SUV when Ana released a scream so loud it made me reach for my Glock. I thought our tires had been shot out. In the pitch black, the SUV rumbled to the side of the deserted road and let out a great sigh of steam from the hood. We sat in complete silence for several moments as we contemplated the repercussions of becoming stranded on a dark, rural road in southeastern Belarus in the dead of winter in the freezing cold.
A light snow dotted our windshield. I lowered my window and gazed out into the woods. More than one-third of the country was forest. Pine, spruce, oak, birch, aspen, alder—all were represented. Here, the trees stood so tall they choked off any light from the moon.
“We are imprisoned in a Grimm fairy tale,” Ana said softly.
Strange how, with everything that had transpired over the past few days—the shootout at Chudzik’s lake house, the standoff with the Podrova brothers—this could feel like our low, our rock bottom. But it did. Maybe because it seemed so completely senseless. This wasn’t an obstacle raised by the Germans or Turks, the Pruszkow mob or corrupt cops, wasn’t a land mine laid by Yuri Bobrovnyk or the Podrova brothers, or even the Russians we were trying to track down. This was just dumb, stupid luck—nothing but shitty fate.
And wasn’t that the worst of all our fears? Something we couldn’t at all control. A tumor in the colon, a drunk driver barreling down the wrong side of the road, striking us head-on because we’d decided to forgo the two-dollar delivery fee and order Chinese takeout instead. It was the ultimate mind-fuck. Those who just happened to be riding the subway in Tokyo on a Monday morning in March 1995, or flying from Boston to Los Angeles on September 11, 2001.
For me, it was Hailey. Over and over, for years, I’d thought, Why her? I’d blamed my career, my being in Bucharest when she was taken. I’d blamed Tasha’s parents for buying us that huge house in Georgetown when all we’d needed was a two-bedroom apartment downtown. Hell, I’d even faulted Tasha herself for being at home with Hailey and not out shopping or at a Nationals game with Tasha’s older brother, Benny, and his wife, Lara. But it was none of their faults. Only the man who took her, and however he came to find her, which was pure rotten luck.
Ana and I both jumped at a loud rap on her window.
Even though I’d been watching for tails fairly steadily since we’d left Kiev, I placed my hand around my Glock before telling her she could lower her window.
The man standing outside our SUV in the scudding snow was large and had a round, red face and a full, gray beard.
“Preevyet,” he grunted, which I knew to be a greeting. He then followed with a few sentences I couldn’t begin to understand.
Ana, not for the first time, surprised me.
“Knee puneemaiyoo,” she said carefully. “Ya plokha guvareyoo pa rooski. Vy guvareetyeh pa angleeski?”
Grimly, the man shook his head.
“What did you say?” I asked her.
“I told him I do not speak Russian. I asked if he spoke English. He doesn’t.”
“Hauno,” I muttered. Russian for “shit.” One of the four or five words I remembered. The others would be useful only in a bar.
Fortunately, the steam billowing from beneath our hood clued the man in as to our troubles. He motioned for Ana to pop the hood and she did. I knew little about engines but felt bad about leaving him out there alone in the cold, so I opened my door and hopped out to join him. By the time I got to him he was already shaking his head and frowning.
“Nyet,” he said.
It was clear that he couldn’t fix it, at least not out here, in the dark, in the blizzard, with no tools and no parts. He stepped around the hood to Ana’s window and pointed behind our SUV to his pickup truck, which must have been twenty years old. We then engaged him in a game of charades. After a few tries, we realized he was mimicking the act of taking us to his home, where we could spend the night.
“What do you think?” Ana said as the man returned to his truck.
“What choice do we have?” I replied. “We’ll be fine. He’s an older man, and besides, I’m carrying my gun.”
We piled into his pickup and, after a few attempts, his engine coughed to life. He waited for the truck to warm up, then we rolled off.
*
As we drove deeper into the forest I saw that Ana, seated in front between me and the Belarusian, was growing more on edge. As was I. The only lights were those of the truck we rode in; it was clear that no one else was around for miles. We’d already accomplished enough twists and turns that we’d never find our way back to the Grand Vitara if need be. Not that getting back to the broken-down SUV would do us much good anyway.
More than twenty minutes later we arrived at our apparent destination, a single-story home that somewhat resembled an old barn. The Belarusian parked the pickup haphazardly on what I suspected was the front lawn. I couldn’t know for sure as it was buried under a thick layer of snow. He extinguished the headlights and opened his door, providing no hint that we should follow.
“Maybe he is just going in to get his tools,” Ana said quietly.
As she said it, the large man looked back and motioned for us to exit the truck.
Heads down against the blowing snow, we followed the man to the entrance of the home.
He stepped inside, while we were stopped at the threshold by a young woman, presumably the man’s daughter. We waited in the cold as he explained our presence to her in his language. The young woman appeared more skeptical the more he talked, and for a minute I was certain we were going to be turned away, left to freeze to death in the forest.
Finally, the man brushed past her into the house, while the young woman remained in front of us, arms folded over an ample chest.
“I am Darja Kovalev,” she said with no warmth whatsoever. An older woman materialized at her side. “And this is my mother, Olga.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, offering my hand to the mother.
From their reaction I thought I’d accidentally pulled out my Glock. The old woman took several steps backward while her daughter swatted my hand away.
“Never offer your hand over the threshold of someone’s home,” Darja scolded me. “It is very bad luck. You should not even say hello.”
As if to avoid an utter calamity, Darja quickly ushered us inside.
The home was humble, to say the least. Small, the furniture no doubt dating back to the Soviet era, maybe even back to Stalin.
It was late; indeed, both women appeared ready to turn in. Yet, before we could stop them, they were in the process of setting a table and starting the burners. Salami suddenly appeared, and what I was told were pickled mushrooms. Ana and I sat at the table as Olga reheated some beetroot soup—what I knew as barszcz—the fantasy food Ana had introduced me to back in Krakow. Not until the food began hitting the table did I realize I was famished.
I reached for a pickled mushroom and Ana immediately slapped my wrist. I looked up. The man had disappeared into the rear of the house and the women were busy with their backs turned to us.
“Not the mushrooms,” Ana whispered.
For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about. Then it hit me: contamination from Chernobyl. During the ill-fated train ride from Odessa to Kiev, I’d read in the guidebook that more than 80 percent of human radioactive contamination was caused by eating contaminated food. The primary hazard was in the soil rather than the air. Radiation was transferred from the soil to the plants, and the Gomel region suffered the worst contamination of all.
We were only 120 kilometers from the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, where the Chernobyl nuclear plant was located. Levels of radiation in this region continued to be alarming and would remain so well into the twenty-second century. The guidebook I’d read made it sound as though eating berries or mushrooms cultivated in the Gomel region were tantamount to swallowing a liter of drain cleaner while playing a heated game of Russian roulette.
I quietly thanked Ana and helped myself to a slice of salami instead.
The large man returned and set a fifth of vodka down hard on the table between us. He motioned to Darja, who promptly produced two tall shot glasses.
“My father, Vladislav, wishes you to drink with him,” Darja said directly to me.
I was about to demur when Ana poked me in the ribs and whispered, “It would be very bad manners to refuse. Drinking with someone is an act of friendship.”
“Of course,” I said, recalling a long-ago trip to Moscow to track down a fugitive from Brighton Beach. It took sharing a bottle of vodka with his cousin for me to capture him and return him to the Eastern District of New York, where he would later be convicted of twelve counts, including murder and racketeering. Before I left for Moscow, I’d read everything there was to read about Russian culture and customs, drinking being an important part of both.
So now, as Vladislav filled the shot glasses, I searched my mind for the unwritten rules. When he was through with the pour, I raised my glass and clinked it against his as he said, “Za vstretchu!”
“To our get-together,” Ana explained, holding a glass of ice water to her lips.
I maintained eye contact with him and downed most of the shot in a single gulp. It was important not to allow your glass to touch the table again until it was empty. I finished off the last bit, then finally set it down. Before I could remove my hand from around the glass, Vladislav was already refilling it. Once a bottle was opened, I suddenly recalled, the bottle had to be drained dry. No exceptions.
“Za milyh dam!” he said, clinking his glass against mine just as Darja took a seat at the table.
“To lovely ladies,” Ana explained.
I swallowed the vodka, fought the burn in the back of my throat.
As I chased the vodka with a few more slices of salami I listened to Ana make small talk with Darja.
“Your country is so beautiful,” Ana told her.
For the first time, Darja smiled. “Thank you. It is a difficult time in Belarus, but then, I think it is a difficult time everywhere.”
Vladislav shot his daughter a look.
Darja said, “He cannot speak English, my father. But he heard me say ‘Belarus’ and he feared I was talking politics.”
Talk of politics was generally avoided in the former Soviet Union, especially around strangers.
“Vashe zdorovie!” Vladislav said, lifting his glass again.
“To your health,” Ana translated.
That’s ironic, I thought as I fired another direct shot at my liver.
“Your home is beautiful,” Ana told Darja. “You live here with your parents?”
Affordable housing in the former Soviet Union was in short supply, forcing many young people to live with their parents well into their thirties. Even if they were married. Even if the couple had children. Which, as it turned out, was the case with Darja. Her husband was sleeping one off in their bedroom, their two children asleep in the small room opposite.
“Vipiem za lubov!” Vladislav said with a roll of his eyes as Darja told Ana about her husband.
Ana turned to me as I downed another shot. “He said, ‘Let’s drink to love.’ But I think he was being sarcastic.”
“Yes, I caught the sarcasm,” I said. “Any way you can help us out with this bottle, Ana?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I do not like straight vodka.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Well, that makes two of us.”
Dizzy, I scanned the room for something to talk about, anything that would forestall the next toast. Through the walkway into the living room, I saw a square piece of black velvet hanging from the wall.
“Is there a Monet hiding behind that curtain?” I said.
Darja and Ana turned to look at it.
“It is a mirror behind that wall hanging,” Darja said.
“Is it broken?”
Darja shook her head. “We have suffered a death in the family,” she said calmly. “When a family member dies, it is necessary to cover all the mirrors in the house. The dead, their spirits linger for forty days. They cannot be seen by the naked eye, of course. But they may be sighted in any reflective surface. When it occurs, it can be very unsettling.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
“I am so sorry you lost someone,” Ana said, glancing at Olga, who was still at the burners, cooking something. “Was it someone very close to you?”
Darja nodded her head slowly, dropping her eyes to the table.
“It was my daughter,” she said.
The air immediately seemed to be sucked through the windows, leaving us without oxygen. I inhaled deeply, suddenly on the verge of inexplicable panic.
Chapter 48
Elena was nine years old when she died at the end of the preceding month. She’d succumbed to complications from thyroid cancer, an unbelievably common disease in Belarus, particularly in the Gomel region, which had suffered the worst fallout from the Chernobyl disaster in the entire country. Levels of contamination continued to be dangerously high, even right here, in the air circulating in the room in which we sat. Thinking about it gave me the shivers, and I hoped we wouldn’t be here long enough to suffer any ill effects.
“I have had four children,” Darja said stoically. “Elena was my first. She was born healthy, which is very rare in our region. Only one out of ten infants born here are so lucky.”
“Because of Chernobyl,” Ana said.
Darja’s expression didn’t change. “Of course, Chernobyl.”
The world’s worst nuclear disaster occurred on a night in late April 1986, when reactor number 4 at the nuclear power plant was scheduled to be shut down for regular maintenance. Workers decided to use the opportunity to conduct an entirely unnecessary safety test. There were purportedly a number of contributing factors to the accident—design flaws, operator errors, flouted safety procedures—but whatever the cause, the result was unthinkable: nearly nine tons of radioactive material (the equivalent of more than ninety Hiroshimas) burst into the sky in a massive ball of fire, ultimately blowing north over all of Belarus and Ukraine. The fallout likely culminated in tens of thousands of deaths in the years and decades to follow, and caused an area the size of the state of New York to become unsafe for human habitation for the next five hundred years.
Because of Soviet silence, the fifty-three thousand residents of the nearby city of Pripyat were not evacuated for two full days following the disaster. Located within the deadly thirty-kilo
meter Exclusion Zone, Pripyat remains a ghost town even today.
But the most horrifying effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe were undoubtedly absorbed by the children of Belarus and northern Ukraine. Currently, only 15 to 20 percent of infants in the affected regions were born healthy, and even those children generally developed weaker immune systems and later contracted radiation-related diseases such as thyroid cancer.
The infant-mortality rate in Belarus was 300 percent higher than it was in all of Europe. Infants who survived birth were frequently afflicted with Down syndrome, chromosomal aberrations, and neural-tube defects. Indeed, congenital birth defects were incredibly common; in fact, such defects had increased 250 percent following Chernobyl. Congenital defects often affected the kidneys, lungs, and heart, and frequently required surgery, even organ transplants.
Presently, there were more than seven thousand children on the list for cardiac surgery. Doctors in Minsk had the know-how to treat most conditions, but not the money. Often not the organs.
“Since Elena was born healthy, my mother said we were blessed and we needed to have more children. The population of our country has steadily declined since the disaster. Soon, my mother warned, there would be no Belarusians left. We were obligated, she told us. So we got pregnant again. The second baby was a boy. He was stillborn, like so many other infants in Belarus.”
Ana held a hand to her chest. “I am so sorry,” she said.
“We had two more children, as you know. Polina and Margerita, both who are asleep in back.”
“And they’re healthy,” Ana said hopefully.
Darja shook her head. “No. The older girl, Margerita, was born with Down syndrome and a cleft palate. She, too, has recently been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. The other, Polina, she was born with a hole in her heart. So many children here are born with the condition that the doctors, they have a name for it—Chernobyl Heart.”
All of us fell silent.
Olga, who stood leaning against the kitchen counter, appeared to be crying, though other than her grandchildren’s names, I was certain she hadn’t understood a word her daughter said.
Good As Gone (Simon Fisk Novels) Page 21
