Skandal

by Lindsay Smith

  Damn it, Papa. Heat surges up from within me, pressurized. This is the same father who took the blame for me when we were playing hide and seek, and I knocked Mama’s figurine off the bookshelf?

  Valentin steps between Papa and me. “Andrei Dmitrievich,” he pleads. “Please don’t make her do this.”

  Papa’s face is perfectly, irritatingly blank. “She thinks she’s mastered her powers. So let her,” he says.

  Cindy and Valentin both look to me for a response. But I shove past all of them and step right up to the body, the toes of my boots pressing into the too-pliant flesh. I bend down into a squat, keeping the weight off my bad ankle, and study Carlos’s face. The darker skin along the cheek that rests on the ground, where his blood has pooled. The splotches of rot.

  “Yulia,” Valya says. “Don’t listen to him. You don’t have to do this.”

  But if I want to follow the trail back to Rostov—and therefore Mama—then I have no choice.

  I spread my fingers wide and press my palm against the corpse’s shoulder.

  Carlos’s skin gives way under his shirt with a sickening, sloshing sensation. For once, I’m grateful when the chattering white fog envelops me. Somewhere, on the other side of the mist, a man is screaming. I walk toward the noise, ignoring the way the mist stings at my bared arms. An invisible wall presses back at me; trying to force my way through is like trying to strain myself through a sieve. But I have to see what’s on the other side. I have to know what these scrubbers want.

  Carlos Fonseca thrashes around his bare apartment, clutching at his throat as blood pours from his ears and eyes. The screams are his—his agonized howls. He didn’t take the cyanide pill. He’s fighting whatever’s killing him to the very last, and it’s making his power go haywire, filling the air with its deadly isotopes—

  I do not need to see this man die. I need to see what happened before.

  The mist weighs against me as I push backward in time. I can only see fragments, tenuous and watery. Carlos entering the Stratford building. Carlos riding a bus through downtown Washington. Carlos at the market, his shoulder pressing too hard against a man’s as their hands meet, just for one second—

  There. Something passes between their hands. I need to see the other man—is this the H-22 he said he made the drop with? Passing information or an object along. Like a relay race. Who is he passing it to? What’s being passed?

  The man’s face is turned away from Carlos. Tan skin, short-cropped blond hair, a few inches taller than Carlos. I cling to the memory, trying to stay locked inside it, but I can feel hot blood tickling at my nostrils again. The whiteness seeps into the image, the scrubber’s static trying to force me away, but I have to resist. I have to see H-22.

  The telephone’s shrill ring pierces the air. I’m thrown out of the memories, my hand uncurling from the corpse’s shoulder, and I sprawl backward on the rug. There’s blood running down my nose again. Valentin rushes to me and cradles my head, but Papa lays his hand on the telephone receiver and looks at me, expectant. For a moment, I can almost imagine he’s putting his trust in me. The phone rings again.

  “How did he identify himself on the phone call?” Papa asks.

  “C-21.”

  Cindy’s face looks stricken. “Andrei, you can’t—”

  Papa offers me a brief smile, quick as a camera flash, and picks up the phone in the middle of the third ring. “C-21.”

  Neither Valentin nor I move; the only thing I feel is blood curling its way around my upper lip. Papa holds the earpiece away from his head. In the held-breath silence of the apartment, the voice on the other end of the line is painfully loud.

  “You are still alive.” There is a pause, though it doesn’t sound like hesitation. “What about H-22? Will he make the trip?”

  Papa glances toward me. I manage a weak nod. “Say that you made the drop,” I whisper.

  “H-22 has the materials he needs for the trip.” Papa’s stance is too relaxed for this terrifying game he’s playing. His free hand hangs motionless at his side.

  “Why are the police at your building?”

  “The old lady next door,” Papa says, without a moment’s pause. “She’s complaining about us again.”

  The silence grows and grows, like a rubber band stretching too tight. Pressure builds up inside of me as I force myself to sit up. I wish I knew something else to tell Papa to say. There has to be something we can fill the silence with. Valentin’s hand tightens around mine, and Cindy leans forward, head drawing down to her chest. But Papa remains stony, unmoved by their stalling tactic. Is he doing this for the same reason I touched the dead man? Is desperation to find Mama fueling his courage and bluster, or is this just another of his careless games?

  “You told us you would kill the old woman,” the voice finally says. It’s burnt around the edges now, hot and angry. “Who is this?” Then, lowering almost into a growl, “You cannot stop us.”

  The dial tone pierces the oppressive quiet. Papa slams the phone back onto the cradle.

  “K chortu,” Valentin says, snarling.

  I drop his hand and scrub at my nose with my sleeve. “We have to find more information.” My fingers hover over the rotting man before me, this bag of flesh and bones that should hold all the answers we need. “The man he passed something to. Details about the trip. If we can find this H-22—Or if we can find Anna Montalban—”

  Cindy shakes her head. “There’s nothing more we can do here. Yulia, I won’t have you endanger yourself any further. If you can’t salvage any more memories from him…”

  I look to her, pleading, but I know she’s right. Another drop of blood splashes onto my knee. “We can’t lose the trail.”

  Valentin catches my gaze, his dark eyes hooded. Cindy may not realize what this means to me, but in an instant, I see in his stare and in the wave of his music pouring over me that he understands my need to hunt Mama.

  “Don’t worry,” Cindy says. “I have a feeling I know exactly where they may be headed.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “I UNDERSTAND—now listen to me, I understand, Winnifred, why you’re doing this.”

  I pause midway to the restroom and lower my foot to the ground, silently. My head swivels toward the circle of harsh lemon light radiating from Cindy’s desk lamp, spilling into the darkened hallway ahead of me. I can see Cindy and Winnie more easily than they can see me. I breathe slowly and keep Shostakovich in my head at a dull thrum. Cindy had left me alone this morning to read the items we recovered from the stove in the apartment while the rest of the team hunts for Carlos’s new contacts. It’s nice to know I can melt into the shadows as easily I once did on the streets of Moscow, forgotten. It makes mole hunting easier, whether I’d planned to or not.

  “If you really understood, you’d be out there with me.” Winnie’s voice is harsher than I’ve ever heard it. It brings out her Southern drawl. “This is your fight, too. Just because you snuck by with your daddy’s lighter skin—”

  “What I understand,” Cindy hisses through her teeth, “is that it’s goddamned hard enough for us to prove our worth as it is—be that as a woman, as a member of any given blend of races—that there’s no sense complicating it with rebellion.”

  Winnie snorts. “Is that how you see it? Asking for some basic human decency is an act of rebellion?”

  “The way I see it…” Cindy’s voice lowers. “The McCarthy days aren’t so very far behind us. There are men who will use any excuse they can to claim you’re threatening the nation’s security.”

  “So what? I’m good at my job—the best. I’d have to be, to get my foot in the door here.”

  Cindy clicks one heel against the linoleum. “They overlook it for now because you follow orders and do your job well. If you value that uniform you wear, you’d be wise not to risk that.”

  “Is that a threat?” Winnie asks. “Are you threatening to tell Frank about my Urban League friends?”

  “Sooner or later, you’re going
to have to choose between the military and your ragtag band of overly optimistic dreamers. You may be able to reconcile the two, but people like Frank Tuttelbaum don’t understand the subtleties…”

  Cindy closes the door, muffling their voices into English-shaped thuds I can’t understand. I hurry to the restroom and splash cool water on my face, washing away the grime of secrets and betrayals that I don’t fully understand.

  *

  When I head to the break room for lunch, Winnie is watching a rebroadcast of last night’s news with Walter Cronkite. “The communist forces of North Vietnam’s Viet Cong are nearly fifty thousand strong,” he intones, eyebrows bristling as he stares at us through the screen. “The South Vietnamese are not likely to last long against their guerilla warfare tactics.”

  Winnie drums her nails against the wood-paneled television set that’s as wide as a Cadillac. I settle onto the couch in front of the set and prop my chin in my hands. “Are we going to go to war?” The we slips out before I can catch it, but I let it go. This team, this agency, this city, this country are a part of me now, no matter what that brings.

  Winnie’s mouth is curled down like a comma. “Depends who you ask, I suppose. Some people think war is never the answer; others think it always is. Senator Goldwater thinks we’re letting the dark forces of communism run roughshod over a free and peaceful democracy.”

  “But what do you think?” I ask.

  “I think if we try to help, we’re just going to send a bunch of poor and probably colored boys to die in the jungle.” She shrugs. “But it’s not my job to think. Come on, let’s work on your medical journal translations. You were having trouble with the article on viral genetics?”

  “Yes. I did not understand ‘tautomeric forms’…”

  I dig the well-worn journal out of my bag and we work through the article for a few more minutes. I want to soak up every scrap of knowledge I can so I can contribute to the lab at Georgetown, but something Winnie said nags at me. Guerilla warfare. Cindy had been teaching me basic tradecraft earlier in the week, but she hadn’t mentioned any such thing. After Winnie helps me stumble through a dense paragraph on viral phenotypes, I lean back in the chair and pinch the bridge of my nose. “What does it mean, the … ‘guerilla warfare tactics?’ Is this something—” That we did. “That the Soviets do?”

  “Well, we haven’t fought the Soviets in direct combat, but I can imagine they would. Guerilla tactics are sneaky—lots of subterfuge and disguise, with small forces picking off large ones,” Winnie says. “It’s not like World War II—the enemy doesn’t paint a bullseye on themselves with a swastika.”

  The enemy could be anyone. I certainly know the feeling.

  We’ve wrung out a few leads, at least—the fragments of paper we fished out of Carlos’s stovetop match an area in northwestern Paris, though I wasn’t able to dig any further memories out of them. Still, we are no closer to finding our scrubbers, or their access agent, Anna Montalban. I know I should be thanking Sergei for the tip—if he’d reach out to me again. Instead, I feel a tension in my gut like a loaded mousetrap. I keep thinking of Cindy and her competing hypotheses, comparing scenarios both likely and unlikely against the known facts. What if this, too, is just a distraction?

  *

  It’s Saturday morning, and Papa is nowhere to be found around the townhouse. I check the street; no sign of the Austin Healey. Stomach rumbling, I throw open the door to the baby blue refrigerator and paw around the mess of produce and brown paper–wrapped meats in search of something to fix for breakfast. Wilted lettuce, three bottles of milk in various states of emptiness, a massive jug of orange juice that looks best suited to performing dialysis … It’s more food than the three of us could eat in a month, and yet most if it has gone bad; we’re hardly ever home to cook. Papa is always dragging us to greasy burger joints and swanky steakhouses and everything in between.

  Finally I unearth a carton of eggs and pre-sliced bacon. While they fry on the range, I fiddle with Papa’s electric coffee percolator, the coffee jingle from the radio springing into my mind, uninvited. Good to the last drop.

  Valentin stumbles into the kitchen, hair sticking every which way, and slips his arms around my shoulders from behind. “Mm! Smells like capitalism. Delicious!”

  “Might as well use it up before it goes bad.” I turn in his arms and kiss him. “Go ahead, don’t let me interrupt your morning etudes. I’ll bring you breakfast in the conservatory.”

  “How dreadfully bourgeois.” He grins. I swat him with my dishtowel until he runs off to practice his piano scales. Open mic night at Bohemian Caverns is fast approaching, and he thinks it’s his best chance to catch the ear of a record label scout. I flip the eggs, my smile growing with every hiss of the stove and every perfect glissande of his chords. We make quite the pair, the musician and the scientist.

  If only our lives were so easy—science labs and jazz halls. A drop of bacon grease leaps up to sear my arm, and I mutter a curse under my breath. We’re still miles from reaching Anna Montalban and the next scrubber in the relay. From understanding how this relates to Rostov, and what he means to do. From saving Mama. From uncovering the mole, if there is one.

  I can’t find the mole on my own, and I don’t trust anyone else to help. I twist the dishtowel around in my hands, frustration seeping out of me in fits and starts. When I peered into Valya’s memories that night, I didn’t see those signs of Rostov, his scrubbing powers frizzly and sharp and impossible to miss. Valentin can’t be an unwitting mole. Paranoia binds me like a rusty chain, but I will not let it claim this victory over me. If I can’t trust Valentin to help me, what more do I have left?

  Sunlight gilds the conservatory, pouring in the high windows and spilling across the plush chairs, the wooden floor, the sleek piano. After playing his newest experimental theme for me—jazzy and punchy and full of fire—Valentin and I nestle on the couch and stuff ourselves with as much bacon and eggs as we can bear. I flop back into his arms, belly up, and bask for a few moments before taking a deep breath.

  “There’s something I need to tell you about,” I say. His arms tense around me and I hear him swallow. “Something I need your help with.”

  He nuzzles his nose into the back of my head. “Anything you need to say. Don’t be afraid of me.”

  I laugh, bitter. Back in Russia, the mere sight of Valentin was enough to send tremors of panic through me. The sound of his power set my teeth on edge. But now I fear myself far more than I ever feared Valentin. “It’s Sergei.” I cringe, closing my eyes for a moment to avoid Valya’s reaction. “He’s been talking to me in my head.”

  Valentin jerks forward. “How? Is he here right now?”

  “No—no, Papa has those … current-boxes in the walls. The psychic disruptors. When we were escaping Berlin, Sergei—he was able to project himself into my head, like Marylou does. I hadn’t heard from him since then, but then he did it again the other day. He says there’s something important he needs to tell us.”

  Valentin pinches the bridge of his nose with a sharp exhale. “All right. Something important. About Rostov or your mother? Do you think he’s warning us, or is he trying to manipulate us?”

  Fear spreads its wings inside my chest, filling up all my empty space. “He said there’s a traitor on our team.”

  Valya is silent for a long time. Though he’s not sharing his thoughts with me, I know exactly what must be running through his mind; it’s running through mine, too. The question of who to tell and how to tell them, if anyone at all. Of the futility of our efforts to stop Rostov—whether they will be our undoing.

  “It could be a lie, like you said.” I glance away. “He might want us paranoid. He could be trying to make us feel vulnerable. I can’t imagine Sergei has come around to our way of thinking, but I suppose it’s possible. He’s the one who told me to check the stove at Carlos Fonseca’s apartment.”

  I feel the moment it hits him when he slumps back into the couch. “How long ago
did Sergei contact you?” He asks it slowly. Too steadily.

  “A few days ago.” I’m motionless. For all that I’d dreaded sharing this knowledge, I feel hollowed out, lightened. It’s a relief not to bottle it up any longer. “I had to be sure that Rostov—I was afraid that the troubles you’ve had—”

  His laugh scrapes like sandpaper. “My troubles are purely my own, Yul. Can you trust me on that?”

  I bite my lower lip. “Of course I trust you. But you’ve had so much else on your mind, and I didn’t want to be—”

  “A burden? A nuisance? Don’t you understand, Yulia? You’re my reason to fight.” His limbs are stiff. “And we said—no more secrets.”

  Shame flushes through me. Of course he’s right. A thousand protests rush to my lips, all my half-baked fears, but I squash them down. “I’m sorry, Valentin.”

  “I’m sorry you had to carry this weight.” Valya’s arms are still around me; he rocks back and forth, considering. “It could be a lie, you’re right. But that’s a costly risk to take. If there were a mole, it might explain why we’re always a few steps behind. Why we can’t find Anna Montalban, or why everywhere we look is scrubbed clean of memories.” He tilts his head. Under my cheek, I feel the hitch in his breath. “But it doesn’t answer our questions about your mother? What’s her plan?”

  The tremor starts in my toes, a live wire coming loose from its moorings, working its way up my legs and through my spine into my brain. I’m shaking, the seed of fear growing into an entire forest within me, my emotional attunement acting like a positive feedback loop.

  Hypothesis A: Mama has surrendered to Rostov’s plan fully and will do whatever he asks of her. She will push them onward toward whatever devious end he demands. She is no longer the mother who took Zhenya and me into hiding just to keep her integrity.

  Hypothesis B: Mama is conducting a psychological warfare campaign of her own. She appears to be cooperating with Rostov, but is really working toward a different goal. But what? Does she need my help? Does she need us to protect her from our own teammates?