“Really?” Lyudmila huffed, as if reluctant to go on. “Years ago, I brought a nephew of mine to England, to live with another family. To protect him. And protect him I did, until I couldn’t anymore. He was murdered several months ago. He was especially dear to me. I supervised his repatriation to Russia, his burial. I think of him often, and when I do, I picture the place I chose for him to rest in peace. I find solace in the image, in picturing myself there. I speak to him, sometimes. It helps. Well, it helps me.” She ducked her head. “That’s why I thought …” Her voice was lost in the rain. “But, of course, everyone is different.” They were standing by the Opel, but neither made a move to get in. It was as if they had forgotten about the vehicle altogether.
“But you knew him, Lyudmila, your nephew. You watched him grow up. While my parents left me on someone else’s doorstep while they …”
“They did what they were meant to do,” Lyudmila said softly, soft as the drizzle. “What their duty to Russia dictated. Do you imagine it was easy for them—especially your mother—to birth two little girls only to give them up before they even knew you? I have no doubt it was the most difficult thing she did in her life—the most heartbreaking thing any woman would have to do.”
“You’re wrong, Lyudmila, for the third time. What I did—giving birth to two children I was ordered to have, two children I never wanted, was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do.”
Lyudmila seemed struck dumb. Her eyes were the only clue as to the wildness Kobalt’s confession caused inside her. Kobalt sensed she didn’t understand. She wondered whether she possessed the fortitude to explain it. This nighttime sojourn into Romania had exhausted her.
Kobalt closed her eyes. “Have you ever had an itch you couldn’t scratch—or, worse, a pain? Those things kicking at my stomach from the inside, eating away at me, taking a part of me with them when I squeezed them out between my legs. And then the endless howling, the shit and piss, the neediness, the relentless mouths at my breasts, gnawing away at my nipples until they were raw. They were anchors, weighing me down, warping my life out of shape. I did all this for the State, another layer of varnish shining my cover, my false identity, a candy coating like an M&M. But I didn’t love them. I didn’t even like them.”
She took a breath. “Shocked? Am I shocking you? You don’t know what to think of me now, do you? A monster, you think, right? But I’ll tell you something I never told you at my intake interview, something I never would have told you even if you’d pressed a red-hot knife blade to my flesh: those times after the children were born, before I was exfiltrated, I had never felt so helpless in my life. I was a prisoner and they were my jailers. Paul’s depredations were nothing compared to what the children did to me. When Paul struck me it was over in a heartbeat and then life went on. But the darkness my children brought into my life was every second I drew breath—no respite, no surcease. None.”
She stopped, for the moment out of breath. She could feel her blood beating fiercely in her temples, like a gun to her head: boum, boum, boum! For a moment, the shame of what she had admitted threatened to overwhelm her, thinking, What if my mother was like me? What if she didn’t love us, what if she didn’t even like us? What if her time with us was a nightmare? What if she couldn’t wait to give us away? What if she was like the couple who raised me, who I called Mother and Father, who lied, who denied me my birthright? She shuddered inside, her breath hot in her throat. I hate them. I hate them all. But then she pulled herself together for the final volley. But, really, she thought, parents were the least of it.
“You want to know fear, Lyudmila? Well, my children taught me fear.”
The sky was gray, storm clouds being shredded high aloft, though down here among the mortals it was as still as a held breath. The thick clouds had bundled the heavy, suffocating air with them. Kobalt could smell the sea, its freshness, its mineral tang; she could taste its limitless expanse, its freedom.
“I need a drink,” Lyudmila said thickly.
“Vodka,” was all Kobalt could manage.
A gull, large, graceful, gray-and-white, determined in its militancy, swooped low over them, a fresh fish clamped in its pale beak.
42
SCHNELLER PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC,
BERGISCH GLADBACH
“There is your key, Evan: the number five.”
“I don’t … I don’t understand.”
“In time you will,” Reveshvili said. “Have faith.”
She had faith; she had to have faith. And yet …
“No, no, no. It can’t be.” Evan on her knees, staring from the photo taken in the Black Hills of South Dakota to Frau Doktor Rebecca Reveshvili’s tearstained face. As she took in the photo, at herself at five years old, Bobbi at three, she thought of the dream shadows, moving across the walls, the floor. Not a dream then? Were they memories?
Rebecca placed her hand on the crown of Evan’s head. A benediction or a welcome home? Both, perhaps. But try as she might, Evan could not get her head around what seemed to be happening. It was too much, too fast. So many revelations unfurling in her mind, one on top of the other, until an unsupportable weight fell upon her shoulders, and her head bowed.
No, no, no, she chanted to herself. You can’t be my mother. I know my mother, I know my father. They raised us. Isn’t that proof enough? But it wasn’t proof of anything; deep down, she knew that. Raising a child was not the same as birthing her. Not at all. But, but, but …
“I cried when it came time to go home, back to Russia.” Rebecca’s fingers ran through Evan’s hair, slowly, gently. “That surprised me. I thought I had steeled myself because my path was set from the moment Kostya and I set foot in America. This was our mission. Our duty, which we had accepted willingly. We knew. We thought we knew.”
“There is your key, Evan: the number five.”
She was five in this photo, five when Rebecca and Konstantin Reveshvili had left America to return to Russia, the place of their birth, having done what the Motherland had asked of them. And there was something else, something just as telling: she could see herself in Rebecca, not simply in her body type, the shape of her face, some of her features, maybe, but in smaller things—the way she used her hands, the set of her shoulders, her freckled forearms. Like Evan, like Evan, all of them. Only in retrospect, with this knowledge front and center did she wonder why she never noticed that neither she nor Bobbi looked anything like their mother and father—the couple who raised them. Why would a child even consider such a thing? You took it for granted that the woman who took care of you, who you called Mom was your mother. The man who set you on his knee, played ball with you, read to you at night before bed, who you called Dad was your father. And they were Mom and Dad—but now, only in a sense. Here was the woman who had borne her for nine months, who had pushed her out of her womb, whose blood she shared. Here was the man who had colluded in her birth, whose blood she also shared.
And then, all at once, it hit her head-on like a Mack truck: she wasn’t American; she was Russian. Bobbi wasn’t American; she was Russian. This was the truth that Bobbi had known about their parents, their real parents, the secret she wouldn’t share that night in the caves of South Dakota. This was why Bobbi became a spy for Russia.
Rebecca’s soft voice filled Evan’s senses. “From the moment I first held you—beautiful pink baby, close to my chest, feeling your heartbeat against mine, your tiny fingers curl around my forefinger—all the defenses I had built against loving you crumbled to dust. That dust tried to choke me, bring me back to where I had begun, but that place was gone, dead and buried. I was no longer the woman I had been passing through immigration in New York, to begin this mission in America.
“You … you changed everything for me. Giving you up ripped out a part of my heart. Now it beats more softly, more erratically. There have been times I thought it would stop altogether. Ask your father; he will tell you. Or perhaps he won’t. Kostya is more secretive than I ever was. He holds his se
crets close, hoards them like a Tolkien dragon its gold. But, make no mistake, he loves you fully as much as I do.”
Evan could not stop the tears rolling down her cheeks. Reaching up, she took her mother’s hand in hers, rose to face her. She placed a hand on her mother’s cheek, wet also with tears.
“Tell me this isn’t a dream.”
Rebecca smiled wanly. “This isn’t a dream, Evan.”
They embraced. Her mother felt as frail as a bird. Her heartbeat came clearly to Evan, fast and fluttery.
Alarmed, she stepped back. For the first time, she took in what Rebecca was wearing—the nightgown, her bare feet. She frowned. “Are you all right? Why are you dressed like that?”
That wan smile, tinged now with sorrow. “I live here. I have for some years now.”
“Live here?” Evan shook her head. “You mean … ?”
“Yes. I’m an inmate.”
“But why?”
“Oh, Evan, what shall I say? Such a simple question, such a complicated answer—an answer, unfortunately, without end.”
Evan half turned, aware now that Reveshvili—Kostya—had come into the office. He had brought a third wicker chair, which he placed alongside the others at the small table.
“Perhaps we should all sit down.” His smile was pained when he looked at both Evan and his wife. “Such grand food should not go to waste.”
Evan walked arm in arm with her mother to the table, seating her first, before she sat. Kostya was the last to be seated. He poured them Earl Grey out of the teapot. It was still hot.
He sipped his tea, then set the cup down precisely in the center of its saucer. “Your mother has a hole in her heart. It causes her weakness in times of stress.”
Absurdly, Evan thought of Rebecca saying that giving her up had taken a piece of her heart. But, of course, that couldn’t be right. “How … how bad?” she stumbled.
“It’s not only the physical,” Kostya went on. “Your mother’s problems are emotional.”
“Oh, Kostya, why beat around the bush? Evan’s our daughter, she deserves to know.” Rebecca turned to Evan. “I’m bipolar. I’m under constant medication to … well, to keep me on more or less an even keel.”
“Sometimes the meds work,” Kostya added. “Sometimes they don’t.”
Rebecca smiled wanly. “I’m here for my own safety.”
Any appetite Evan might have originally had at the sight of the sumptuous tea service had flown to a high branch of a tree whose top she couldn’t see. She began to weep again.
“Oh, no, Evan.” Her mother reached across the table. “No, please don’t. I’m fine here. Your father takes excellent care of me.”
“I warned you, Becca.”
But Evan spoke over him. “But you’re not free.”
“Who among us is free, Evan?” Her mother squeezed her hand. “Are you? If you think so, you’re fooling yourself. Think of your obligations.”
Evan opened her mouth to refute her, but she knew her mother was right. She was on a specific path—she had an obligation to find and rescue Wendy and Michael, she had an obligation to find Omega and, as with Nemesis before it, shut it down. She wasn’t free, not at all.
She squeezed her mother’s hand in return. “Will … will you be okay?”
“I have my … difficult moments. I get overwhelmed by dark thoughts, fears, night terrors”—she laughed without humor—“like you had when you were two. But, yes, overall I’m as okay as I’ll ever be.” The smile she gave Kostya glowed with love. “As I said, your father takes good care of me.”
“May I ask you—?”
“Anything, Evan. We’re through keeping secrets, isn’t that right, Kostya.”
Dr. Reveshvili nodded reluctantly.
Evan’s heart was pounding as she tried to keep her emotions in check. “Are you …” Her mouth dried up, necessitating her to start again. Deep breath, let it out all the way. “Are you two still FSB?”
“We were never FSB,” Rebecca said.
“Your mother is correct.” Kostya smiled. “We were only ever freelancers, cutouts. From the moment we left Russia we ceased to have a case officer. Our monthly stipend came from an entirely benign entity in Germany.”
“No case officer.” Evan shook her head. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Nor will you ever again. That element was part of the experiment. It didn’t work, which was why the program was shut down quickly and completely.”
“All right, you were freelancers,” Evan said, “but you still had knowledge of the program, so …”
Kostya’s smile broadened. “Great minds think alike, Evan. It happened that I came into possession of a piece of material—never mind how—the Sovereign would dearly love to get his hands on. It is something that, were it to get out, would cause him great humiliation. It is not here with me, and naturally it is not in Russia. It is in a secure location where no one but I can get to it.”
“What about you, Mama?” She used the Russian word.
Rebecca reacted with a brief, grateful smile. “I know nothing of this material, nor its hiding place,” Rebecca said. “Kostya was adamant about that.”
Reveshvili’s mouth formed a firm line. “I won’t have FSB thugs trying to get to me through her.”
“You see how he is, Evan,” Rebecca said.
“We never expected to see you again.” Reveshvili’s voice was raspy with emotion.
“But I found you.” Evan, dizzied from one startling revelation after another, felt as if she had been set adrift on a storm-tossed sea, with no sight of land anywhere. “And you recognized me, even after all these years.”
“Not immediately, but as we spoke, I began to see Becca in you—then, in a rush, more and more, and I knew it had to be you. And then I started thinking about how to tell you who I was—and about Becca, of course—and, being a medical man I decided to take a certain course.”
“You drugged me.”
“Very lightly and very safely, I assure you,” he said. “Just enough for your subconscious to be accessible, to create a pathway for me to try and lead you back to your early childhood, the truth about your origins.”
“And what you told me about yourself—the black lake, your lack of family.”
“The haunted black lake is all too real, I’m afraid, as is the cabin beside it.” Kostya kept turning his cup around and around on its saucer. “In fact, everything I told you … the entire session was based on truth. If I had lied, you would have known—your subconscious would have picked it up.” He shook his head. “I withheld certain knowledge—about Ana and her twin—but I judged you weren’t ready to hear about them back at the inn.”
He was right again; she hadn’t been ready then—not by a long shot. This was an immensely difficult situation, fraught with wrong turns that could have blown up in both their faces. “You handled everything well,” she said sincerely. And in the end, he had allowed her mother to tell her what she needed to know. “Very well.”
“I appreciate that.” Kostya looked and sounded like he meant it.
Evan chewed all this over for some time, then, “I need to ask you another question.”
Kostya spread his hands.
“About Bobbi …”
“Ah, Robin.”
“Robin?” Evan’s brows knit together. And she thought, I don’t even know my own sister’s real name. “We only called her Bobbi.”
“Her American nickname,” Kostya said, clearly showing his distaste.
“She was unlike you,” Rebecca said. “She was a blue baby, premature. She came out of me cold as ice. I thought she was dead. I wept over her, until the nurse took her away from me.”
“Robin was in an incubator for the first ten days of her life,” Kostya informed her in his even, professional voice. He might have been speaking of a patient, someone else’s child. She was also acutely aware that he had not come close to her, had not acknowledged she knew he was her father. What was wrong with him?<
br />
“The differences didn’t end when she was brought back to me. She was an unholy terror,” Rebecca said.
“It doesn’t change what she was.” Kostya took a pastry, delivered it to his wife’s plate. “Here, eat something, Becca. You’re looking pale.”
“It’s not from lack of food.” She closed her eyes. “Talking about Robin always does this to me.” Her voice held a tremor. She gathered herself and when she spoke again her voice was steady. “Terror or not, I could not have loved her more. I doted on her, spent more time with her than I did with you.”
“Robin fed off that,” Kostya said, refilling his cup.
“She needed me more,” Rebecca retorted. She didn’t appear angry; she was giving Evan her side.
Reveshvili turned to Evan. “And how did you get along with her, Evan?”
She wished he would call her daughter, or dear. Something other than her name, as if she were an acquaintance of her mother’s asked to tea. But then, why should he? she thought. He scarcely knew her.
“Not well,” Evan said softly. “We never really meshed, never got each other. And then she defected to the FSB.”
Silence at the table, in the office, in the connecting corridors.
“Anyway the good news is she has two children, Wendy, eleven, and Michael, nine, both of whom I love.” That Bobbi had become a Russian agent did not seem to surprise them, but they seemed not to know of the children, nor about Bobbi’s death. She almost told them but then considered that there were enough earthshaking changes in all their lives for the moment. She made a mental note to warn Ben to keep Bobbi’s murder to himself.
“Our grandchildren,” Rebecca said, in the reverential tone reserved for the progeny of their offspring. “Kostya, we have grandchildren. Evan, tell us. What are they like?”
For the next ten minutes, Evan spoke about Wendy and Michael, winding up telling them about the kids’ love of Snickers bars and Butter Brickle ice cream.
The Kobalt Dossier Page 29
