GUSAROVA: He’s no better. Just more clever.
LAZDA: I concur. Nurse, I order a continuation of his insulin shock treatments. Also, start him on sodium Amytal — that might make him more cooperative. Comrade, for you the most important thing is to acquire a realistic understanding of Soviet reality.
PATIENT: I’m getting there.
15
Leo Yakunin called Tarasov at home about the fire.
“It was at a KGB safe house near Lubertsi, an hour-and-a-half east of Moscow,” said Leo. “Two agents from Leningrad died.”
“Leningrad?” Tarasov asked, startled.
“Right. It occurred to me that this may have been where Belov held the American. You want me to check it out?”
“No. You’re going to Leningrad.”
“Bullshit. You’re not my superior officer anymore. You can’t just order me around.”
Tarasov sighed. It was just like old times.
He had spent the morning reading through the KGB reports on the disappearance of the American. What they knew was this: At ten o’clock, three men entered the Intourist Hotel using counterfeit passes. Minute bloodstains were found on the wall in Sears’s room. No other signs of a struggle. Nothing stolen from the room, so far as anyone could tell. Her purse was on the bed with her passport and visa. A cleaning cart was found near the loading dock with some discarded service uniforms. It was pretty clear what had happened. Three men had ambushed Katherine Sears in her hotel room, knocked her unconscious and then concealed her beneath the cart. Disguised as hotel workers, they wheeled her to the service elevator and descended to the basement, where they loaded her into a waiting car.
The conclusion was inescapable.
“It was a KGB job, Leo,” said Tarasov.
“Probably.”
“The three men had to come from somewhere, and it’s a safe bet General Belov wouldn’t have wanted to risk Shatalin finding out through Moscow channels. He would have used freelancers from Leningrad.”
“Shatalin didn’t say anything about me going to Leningrad.”
“He said you should cooperate with me,” said Tarasov. “Cooperate.”
“Devil!”
“You’re looking for any connection between Belov and Perova. Belov was working in Leningrad at the time of their promotions. The link must be there somewhere.”
“Let me get this straight. You expect me to go poke around the Leningrad KGB? It’s not exactly the public library.”
“We’ll invent a cover. I know people up there. It’ll work.” Tarasov grinned into the receiver. “I have confidence in you, Leo. You were never a bad researcher. It was always common sense you lacked.”
“Poshol na khui!” Leo cursed.
Go to your prick.
The next morning, Tarasov stood in an open field in Lubertsi kicking at the charred remains of a two-room cabin. Little was left to kick. The walls and roof had collapsed. Only the chimney stood, rising like an obelisk. A local policeman showed Tarasov around the site.
“It was a typical Russian firetrap,” he said. “All wood, amateur electrical wiring. We believe a space heater was responsible.”
“Where were the bodies found?”
The man pointed to the back of the structure. “It was an intense fire. Nothing left but bones.”
At the opposite end of the wreckage Tarasov spotted some pipes and the remains of a sink lying basin-side down. For no particular reason, he picked up the pipe.
“Hey,” said the policeman. “Are you sure you should be here?”
Tarasov ignored him. Using the pipe, he flipped over the sink. Beneath it were some jars and rags. They were charred, but less so than everything else. He picked up a burned rag and unwadded it. When he got to the center, he found red blotches. Blood. He slipped the rag into his pocket.
He stepped off the porch and looked around. Fields rose to the horizon in all directions.
“Pretty isolated up here,” said Tarasov.
The policeman shrugged.
“Have you had any rain in the last few days?” Tarasov asked.
“No. Listen, maybe you should talk to my captain — ”
“Where does this path go?” asked Tarasov, pointing.
“Into town, through the forest over there,” he said.
Tarasov started along the path.
“Hey, where are you going?” the policeman called after him. Tarasov didn’t answer. His eyes were on the ground. The policeman went back to his car, sat down on the fender and sulked.
After about five minutes, Tarasov reached a low place where a mound of winter snow was melting steadily into a puddle. Tarasov knelt and studied the ground. Footprints. Three sets. Two men — one large, one small. The other set was made by sneakers. A woman’s? He couldn’t be sure.
Tarasov went back to the house and found the policeman. “I want that forest searched,” he said.
“On whose orders?”
“KGB Director Oleg Shatalin.”
The policeman stood up straight. “Are you kidding?”
“What do you think?” snapped Tarasov.
“Okay. Sure. What are we looking for?”
“A body,” said Tarasov. “A woman.”
Tarasov spent the rest of the day in Lubertsi meeting with the police chief and interviewing neighbors. About five kilometers away, he found a cabin that had been broken into. The burglar had entered through a window and apparently taken shelter for several days. Jars of pickled mushrooms and tomatoes had been taken. There was nothing else to steal.
“Happens all the time out here,” the policeman assured him.
Late that night, Leo Yakunin called Tarasov from Leningrad.
“Your friends have set me up as an auditor looking for missing capital equipment,” said Leo.
Tarasov laughed. “That should keep people from asking questions.”
Tarasov told him about the fire.
“You think she’s still alive?”
“Maybe. But we can’t count on it. Even if she is, Belov will have half of Counterintelligence looking for her. We couldn’t get near her. Forget about her. The key is in Leningrad. Remember, two years ago, Belov was powerless to stop his own transfer to Leningrad. Whatever information he acquired on Podolok, he got itwhile in Leningrad , and he got it with the Iron Perova’s help. There’s a link. Call me when you find it.”
16
If Katherine Sears had looked carefully from the window of her train as she sped through a railroad crossing on her way to Moscow, she might have seen the black Volga sedan that was carrying Major Konstantin Tarasov to the burned-out cabin. As it happened, she did not.
Katherine had spent the four days since her abduction in an empty cabin three hours’ walk from the KGB safe house. She found it near a cluster of houses outside the village of Lubertsi. The sun was just coming up as she drove the butt of the shotgun through the window, felt for the latch and lifted the frame. She might have marveled at her audacity, at her improbable survival after her abduction and attempted rape. But she wasn’t marveling at much of anything. She moved as though in a strange dream. It might have been shock, or even the lingering effect of the truth serum. Whatever the reason, Katherine climbed into the cabin that morning feeling as though she were outside her body, watching herself lift one leg, then the other over the window sill.
The cabin had two stories, with two rooms on the first floor and one room on the second — much like the cabin she had burned down. She found some blankets in a closet and climbed into bed fully clothed. She no sooner pulled up the blankets than a strange darkness descended around her bed, as though she had donned dark sunglasses. The horror of the previous night swept over her like a wave. She drew herself into a fetal position and began to shake. She lay like that a long time, slipping in and out of consciousness. Dream and reality became indistinguishable. She awoke with her thumb in her mouth. That was Day One.
On Day Two, she got up and began to explore the cabin. In a kitchen cupboar
d she found a cache of pickled mushrooms and tomatoes. She ate cautiously at first, and then ravenously. She never left the cabin.
At first, she thought no further ahead than the next minute. Food, warmth, sleep and her own recovery were all her mind could handle. But gradually, lucidity returned. It came from deep within her, the untested strength, a determination to survive.
Night fell on Day Two, and she lay down on the cot knowing that the next day she would have to do something; she couldn’t live on tomatoes and mushrooms forever. She didn’t want to think about that now, though. Her eye wandered the dim room, eventually falling on the amber ring she wore on her left hand. She stared at it awhile and then slipped it off. She read the Russian inscription.
S lyubovyu.
She smiled.
Katherine and Victor worked together three years before their relationship took its unexpected romantic turn. Their passion crept up on them like a cat, and when it finally pounced they were both breathless and stunned. And exhilarated.
The affair was nothing if not unconventional. They had never kissed, much less made love. They had never seen a movie together or sat down to dinner. Nearly all of their communications were monitored by the KGB, which Katherine had come to think of as an organization of professional chaperones.
In the romance department, Katherine Sears was not what people would call “experienced.” A bad complexion and a late-blooming figure had left her pretty much out of the hunt for boys during her teens. She buried her head in her books and pretended it didn’t matter that she was asked to neither her junior prom nor her senior ball. College was only a little better. Her complexion cleared and her body matured, but by now she was distrustful of men. They were such shallow creatures — intriguing, but shallow. Wasn’t she the same person she had been before she had hips and breasts? In her thirty-two years, Katherine had relationships with exactly three different men, and had never once felt even a fraction of the longing she felt when she thought of Victor Perov.
It was all so complicated. She used to shake her head at colleagues who would complain of their “long-distance” relationships. They had no idea. Of course, there was no way theycould know. It was a secret.
It began with their notes. After the international survey was approved by both governments, Katherine and Victor began to exchange letters daily through their respective embassies.
At first, their correspondence consisted only of work — data on x-ray emmissions, sectors surveyed in the Large Magellanic Cloud, sectors unsurveyed, conclusions and thoughts on how to improve techniques. But as the project wore on, elements of their personal lives slipped in. That first Christmas, when Katherine wrote that she would be spending the holidays alone, Victor asked why. She told him about the death of her mother a few years earlier, her father’s quick remarriage, and Katherine’s life-long troubled relationship with her brilliant, exacting father. Victor wrote back that he knew about exacting parents, his own mother was known as the Iron Perova. “People express their love in different ways,” he wrote. “It may not be the kind of love you would want, but that doesn’t make their love any less. Go home for Christmas, Yekatarina.” She did.
In the spring, Katherine noticed a lapse in Victor’s work and asked about it. He wrote back about the death of his “Baba Raya,” who had essentially raised him. Yevgenia was too busy as a rising star in the Communist party to give much thought to rearing her twin sons. “Motherhood is just not in Yevgenia,” he wrote. Victor had made peace with this in a way Katherine could not imagine. He went on to describe the hardships Baba Raya had endured, travails typical for a Russian of her generation. Her father, husband and two sons were all killed by the Nazis. She had survived the siege of Leningrad by eating rats snared by her clever eight-year-old daughter — Yevgenia.
Victor said nothing about his father, and Katherine wondered about that.
Katherine called the American embassy in Moscow and asked them to send flowers to Baba Raya’s funeral. A few days later, Katherine received a thank-you note from Victor along with a description of the ceremony. She felt as though she had been there.
And so their letters became more personal. She knew the KGB was reading them, but there was nothing she could do about that. Nothing was ever censored. She assumed this was due once again to Victor’s connections in the Communist party. Gradually, she came to feel she knew something of her Russian partner. Katherine was hungry to know more, but how could she penetrate the mysteries shrouded by the Iron Curtain? Victor was a communist, a believer, and she sensed whole, dark parts of himself that he kept hidden — questions in her letters that were left unanswered, words carefully chosen on issues of politics and economics.
In the cabin, Katherine thought about Titus. By now, he would know that she had not returned from London. He would be frantic.
What would he do?
She slipped the ring back on her finger and admired it. Her mind went to the moment she had received the gift.
It was a year earlier, during the long-planned summit in Ithaca between the Russian and the American sides. By then, the survey was already two years old and everyone was maneuvering to take credit for its success. Katherine didn’t care about any of that. She was going to get to see Victor, and she was a coiled spring of nervous energy.
Victor arrived in New York City with a delegation of seven Russians, including a Russian television correspondent, a writer for a Russian magazine and an oafish man named Boris Orlov. Boris never took his eyes off Victor. When Boris looked at Katherine, he wore a knowing smirk, as though they shared a great secret. In a way, they did; Boris had read their letters.
The summit progressed in a businesslike way through the three days. On the last night a banquet was held with fifty people, including the president of the university, key alumni and a congressman. Victor and Katherine sat at opposite ends of a long table. Katherine was depressed. Victor was leaving the next morning, and they had barely spoken.
Near the end of the meal a middle-aged Russian passed by Katherine and whispered, “Victor requests to meet you at midnight in the science library.” The previous day, Victor had asked for — and received — a key to the library. He had explained that he suffered from insomnia and might want to wander the stacks.
Katherine didn’t know it then, but the man who had given her the message was Vladimir Ryzhkov, the man whose suicide in Helsinki had sent her on her long journey to Moscow.
The library was quiet and nearly dark when she arrived. Victor was seated at a long reading table.
He went to her and kissed her three times, in Russian fashion.
“Is this safe?” Katherine asked. “Us meeting, I mean?”
“For a while.”
He told her to sit down and then sat beside her. “It’s good to get you alone, away from the craziness.”
Katherine nodded. There was so much she wanted to say.
“I’m afraid we haven’t much time,” said Victor. “There’s something I want to give you.”
He handed her a small package wrapped in simple brown paper tied with a string. She envisioned a lens or a Russian trinket.
“Your letters have meant a lot to me,” he said.
Katherine swallowed. “Me too.”
Victor’s blue eyes glowed with a light of their own in the dark library. The eyes smiled, but they were anxious too, nervous.
About what?
She tried to memorize him. Victor Perov wasn’t handsome in an obvious way; his face was soft, almost pudgy and lacked those stone-carved features women were supposed to love. He had a face like a priest — kind and solemn, a little sad. Victor’s shoulders were broad and he had powerful arms, which Katherine had admired the previous day while he hoisted some heavy equipment into a van. She was amazed and a little embarrassed by how much she desired him.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” he laughed.
“Oh yeah,” said Katherine. She tore off the paper and lifted the lid on a small felt box. She gasped.
Inside lay an amber ring.
“It was Baba Raya’s,” he said. “I want you to have it.”
“Oh, Victor . . . it’s . . . so beautiful.”
“I hope you can accept it,” he said. “I had it inscribed.”
She read the inscription,S lyubovyu.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
He was nervous again. “You might not accept it if I told you.”
Their eyes met, and he spoke. “It means, ‘With love.’”
She slipped the ring on her finger. And then she was crying.
“My darling,” he said and opened his arms. She was about to fall against his chest when the front door to the library rattled. They froze.
They were still hidden by the book stacks, but if anyone came in he would find them at once.
“What do I do?” Katherine whispered.
“Stay here.”
Victor went around the stacks toward the door. Katherine sat in her chair trying to quiet her own breathing. She heard Boris’s raspy voice.
“Victor! There you are!”
The two men talked for a minute and went out. She was alone again.
Katherine hated Boris Orlov for destroying her moment. It was so unfair. But after creeping from the library, every time she looked down at the ring she would think: “There will be other moments.” She began studying Russian and fantasizing about helping him to defect.
Victor’s inexplicable silence came that fall. After his bizarre behavior in Helsinki, it began to seem that there would be no other moments. She would never see him again. It was unbearable. Titus Waal suggested that she try to forget about Victor, that she “get on with her life,” and she slapped his cheek, which only made Katherine more miserable.
When Titus got word from his old friend at Soviet Psychiatry Watch that Anton was alive, it was all the inducement Katherine needed to try to reach Victor on her own. How could she allow him to go on mourning a brother who wasn’t really dead? But her mission to Moscow wasn’t 100 percent altruistic; she was honest enough with herself to recognize that she was using it as an excuse — shehad to see Victor, at least one more time.
The Forbidden Zone Page 15
