The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  It was a man who came to the door. The first thing Florence noticed about him was his polished black shoes, immaculate despite the slushy weather. Only after she’d followed them into the apartment did Florence take note of the rest of him: an egg-shaped head with side-parted hair presenting a pair of small, precise ears. He looked to be in his thirties, as well groomed as his oxfords, with a set of facial features worked into such a fine alignment that they might have looked effeminate were it not for his stubble and his flat, autocratic mouth.

  He introduced himself unceremoniously as Comrade Subotin. The living room to which Subotin led her was, like him, neat and spare, with a touch of the bourgeois. Old-fashioned lace curtains covered the windows, and a lace runner bisected the oval table, anchored there by a potbellied samovar from which Florence half-expected Subotin to offer her tea. He did not. Instead, he moved to the oblong end of the table, where a portfolio of papers lay, evidently in preparation for their meeting. He told Florence to sit. If she had had the composure to do anything other than oblige Comrade Subotin’s request, Florence might have noticed, as she would on subsequent visits, the absence of slippers or coats, or books on the shelves—indeed, of any signs of actual habitation.

  Hitching the creases of his trousers and taking the seat across from her, Comrade Subotin held up a piece of paper for Florence to examine. It was the visa application she’d filled out at OVIR three years earlier. “Let’s take a look at this.” He spoke politely but not warmly. “It appears that you did not fully complete your application.”

  Subotin’s hand held a silver fountain pen. “Place of employment,” he read aloud. “Here it says the Central State Bank, but in fact you are on staff at the Institute of Philology, History, and Literature.”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t working there at the time I filled out this form.”

  “But you are now, are you not? Then let’s write that down.”

  Florence followed the movement of his pen as it formed neat, slanted words on a clean form.

  “Name of spouse…You wrote nothing, but, if I’m not mistaken, you are married.”

  “We are not registered…I mean, officially.”

  “And yet you’ve been living together with him for more than four years, which constitutes a civil marriage according to Soviet law. Shall we fill that out?” He repeated the question: “Name of spouse.”

  Florence could feel a constriction in her chest, the weight of a lead spade where her lungs were supposed to be. She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the speed of her galloping heartbeat. She cast her eyes to the window, its dark mirror obstructed by colorless lace. Had Leon been right—that, as long as she’d worked as a janitress and kept to herself, nobody would have reason to bother her? Now they had summoned her. And they knew everything. “Leon Brink,” she said.

  “Patronym.”

  “Naumovich.”

  She tried to steady her pulse with shallow breaths. Subotin continued to fill out the form with his careful hand. Without looking up, he said: “I want to remind you where you are. If you provide the NKVD with inaccurate or incomplete information, you are committing treason, punishable by the full force of the law. It is similarly treasonous for a Soviet citizen to attempt to flee her homeland.”

  She was tempted to say that whatever jurisdictional alchemy had magically transformed her into a “Soviet citizen” was itself most certainly illegal. Instead, she said: “Are you suggesting I was trying to flee my homeland? I went to OVIR openly and filled out a visa application to visit my family, whom I have not seen in six years. All of this I did in broad daylight.”

  But Subotin’s immobile face suggested he was neither convinced nor impressed by this. “And yet,” he said, still not looking up, “you neglected to mention that you had a husband.”

  Florence was silent.

  “You claim you intended to visit your family. But that is for us to decide. Maybe you are intending to go to America to divulge confidential state secrets to its imperialist government?”

  “Forgive me, Comrade Subotin. What secrets could I possibly have? I have never been entrusted with any. I am not a Party member.”

  “Let’s not playact, shall we? You worked for the Soviet State Bank for several years, and have knowledge about its methods of obtaining funds, and its other operations. You and I both know that this kind of information has tremendous value to our enemies.”

  Subotin’s smile made a sharp crease around his nose. He obviously did not care about the State Bank and its secrets. Anything could be a state secret. He was simply letting her know that it was not his job to prove her guilt, but hers to demonstrate her innocence. “Economic espionage, no less than fleeing, is a capital offense.”

  It was important, above all else, to maintain the appearance of calm, of composure and imperturbability. “If you believe I intended to give away state secrets, why have you not arrested me yet?”

  “You know where you are, and I have no intention of playing games with you. When we arrest someone we have more than enough evidence. You are here because we would like to give you the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps an opportunity to visit your family in America, after all. Naturally, if we send you, at the state’s expense, you will be obliged to do some work for us. We hope that as a loyal citizen this is something you could do sincerely.”

  As the buzzing of his threats faded from her head, an earlier hope started to beat in Florence’s chest. Could it be possible? They wanted to send her to America! Why not? She’d never hidden anything from the state; the NKVD had nothing to hang over her. If anything, she was valuable to them. Of course it was only logical that if they were going to send her to the United States it would be as part of a secret mission of some sort. If that’s how it was going to go, she would be ready. “I understand,” she said with new solemnity.

  “We need to have the highest level of trust in those we send out of the country. To be sure we’re dealing with reliable people. Naturally, it is up to you to prove your reliability.”

  She moistened the roof of her mouth. What did “proving” her reliability entail? Did they intend to give her an immediate assignment? Was this why she had been brought here?

  “We need to know, first and foremost, the names of your friends and colleagues, anybody with whom you have regular contact.” Subotin ran a delicate finger down the crease of his notebook and tore out a clean sheet. “On the right side, please list any foreign-born acquaintances you and your husband have. On the left side, list any colleagues or acquaintances at the Institute of Philology, History, and Literature.” He pushed his fountain pen closer to her.

  Rapidly, Florence made a list of everyone she ran into in the course of a day, then wrote a shorter list of those she and Leon knew socially. She had to write quickly because it was important not to think too hard about what she was doing. She took comfort in the idea that the NKVD probably knew with whom she worked and socialized by now anyway. How else had Subotin known when her classes ended? Very well, she’d show them she had nothing to hide. Soon enough they would learn on their own that she had nothing to report, either. In the meantime, she was attesting to her honesty. Still, none of this rationalizing could account for her total absence of shame. And this, she suspected, could only be because some part of her knew why she was doing it. The very sound of the word “America” had gone clean to the tender root of her homesick heart.

  Florence slid the paper back toward Subotin and watched him read it. Briefly, she let herself study his face. It was at once handsome and unpleasant. She had the feeling she had seen it before. He slipped the silver pen into his vest pocket and rose from his seat, giving her license to do the same. “You will report here again in exactly three weeks,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you that you will keep these meetings to yourself.”

  Outside, early evening had descended. Naked tree limbs twisted in the moist, iodine-col
ored air. The tram, overcrowded on the way to her meeting with Subotin, was now peopled only by a few pale and listless passengers with bundles at their feet. The bumping trolley jerked her empty stomach as she tried to tell herself that she’d acquitted herself well with Subotin.

  Still she could not erase the mental picture of his face, those meticulous features and the narrow build all tugging at some unsettling memory. It wasn’t until her trolley crossed the bridge over the Moscow River and was heading toward Manezh Square, beyond which the fortress of the U.S. Embassy stood, as impenetrable as it had been on the fateful day when she’d tried to get past its gates—not until then did Florence’s mind come into focus on the memory of the man in owl-framed glasses who’d stood on the sidewalk in front of the Hotel National, watching her as she crossed Gorky Street with the egregious confidence of an American.

  A tasseled cross swung gently from the cabbie’s mirror as I rode to the detention center where they held my son. Outside, cold summer rain lashed the high-rises that passed us at halting, rush-hour speeds. We were in Kapotnya, in the southeast. Here the building materials were no longer marble and limestone but cinder block and concrete. The naked apartment blocks were anonymous yet familiar; the neighborhood was shorn of all identifying marks save the silos of the local power plant that puffed white sulfur smoke into the rain-darkened sky.

  An hour earlier I’d left the cab to wait while I’d run up to Lenny’s apartment. With her damp ponytail and smudged mascara, Katya had looked like a lost adolescent, though part of this impression was due to the expensive-looking orthodontia in her mouth (another improvement I suspected Lenny was bankrolling). I hadn’t been able to get a complete story out of her, other than that the MVD had spontaneously arrived to detain Lenny over some financial impiety that he’d been only circumstantially connected with two years earlier. Katya, for her part, seemed convinced that Lenny was the victim of a fiendish conspiracy orchestrated by his so-called friends (those suki) to take the fall for some nefarious Ponzi-ish maneuver they themselves had managed to dodge. Between the loud percussion of the rain on the roof and Katya’s sobs, I could not make heads or tails of her story.

  The air inside the jail reception area smelled fermented, suggesting that the place also doubled as a sobering-up station for the local street sludge. I gave my documents to a militzia guard and was led through a narrow corridor to an empty room painted hepatitic green. The militzia man made me wait for half an hour before he brought Lenny in and ceremoniously uncuffed him.

  Lenny’s skin was patched with blotches. He smelled, implausibly, of tobacco. “You’ve been smoking?”

  “They’ve stuffed me in with some skinhead they picked up for harassing Tajik girls on the street. He’s always lighting up. I can’t fucking breathe in there.”

  “You look like mincemeat,” I said. “How long have you been in here?”

  “Four, maybe five hours.” He showed me his naked wrists. “They took my watch and my phone. Have you called Mom already?”

  “Not yet. How the hell did you get yourself in here?”

  “Oh, you think I did this to myself?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “But it’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Just tell me what’s happened.” I tried to speak at a discreet volume.

  “We don’t have to whisper, damn it, since I didn’t do anything.” Lenny tossed a challenging look at the guard standing inside the door, who stayed as stoic as a eunuch. As he recited the accusations against him to me in his sour breath, I was unnerved by his supercilious calm, as if he were rolling his eyes at each one of them. It seemed that two years earlier he’d served as one of the brokers on a business deal between an obscure European growth fund and a nickel plant in the southern Urals. After the growth fund had completed its purchase of the factory, it had issued a series of specious bonds backed by the nickel plant but without, it later emerged, the knowledge of the plant’s board members. By then most of the bonds had been cashed, bankrupting the plant. A criminal investigation was opened. Old news, said Lenny. The growth fund’s managers—Russians with foreign passports—were charged with fraud. Lenny’s firm, being only a second-string agent in the dark about their clients’ criminal intent, was let off without charge. “It was an ordinary buyout,” he said. “All we did was standard analysis. Nobody at Abacus Group had any connection to anything that happened later. Now someone’s decided to dig it up again.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Did someone at your firm get stingy, forget to pay off the right people?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  Listening to him, I felt sick with despair. It was the second time today I was at, or near, a prison. The street signs changed in this city, but apparently little else. “Have you been charged with anything?” No sooner had I spoken these words than it struck me how hopelessly stupid I sounded to myself.

  “No, just ‘detained.’ ”

  “What does that mean? How long can they keep you here?”

  “A prosecutor is supposed to come in the morning to question me.”

  “They’re planning to keep you here overnight?” The thought of Lenny having to spend the night in a grim tubercular cell made me so light-headed with anxiety that I had to shut my eyes.

  “Trust me, I’m not looking forward to it. I’ve just spent the past four hours avoiding a guy who’s got a manhole cover tattooed on his shaved head, like maybe he wants someone to open it and be impressed by the elaborate sewer system inside.”

  “You need a lawyer,” I said, a bit too frantically. “You can’t talk to some apparatchik prosecutor without a lawyer.” But Lenny was two steps ahead of me. “I’ve already told Katya to call Austin. He’s getting me a lawyer in the morning.”

  “You trust those guys? Katya says they’re the reason you’re in this mess.”

  “Who else am I supposed to call?” Lenny almost shouted, awakening our eunuch guard.

  “I have to call your mother,” I said, checking my watch. “It’s not even past one at home; there’s still time to call around the firms and find you someone good, an American who focuses on this sort of thing.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “This is serious stuff, Lenny.”

  “Don’t call her. Call around yourself if you must, but don’t get Mom involved or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  I said nothing.

  His eyes surveyed me with grinning suspicion. “I can see what you’re thinking—that I got myself into this fucking mess.”

  “I think no such thing.”

  “You do. Like maybe I didn’t do it intentionally, but by trying to take some shortcut. Isn’t that what you tell Mom—that I’m a ‘corner cutter’?” His voice swelled with something almost like satisfaction at forcing me into an acknowledgment of this exquisitely miserable view of him.

  But he was wrong about me in one respect: I did believe him when he said he’d landed here through no misconduct of his own. What I faulted him for—though I could hardly admit this to Lenny—was the same thing I faulted Mama for: neither of them seemed to have the foggiest idea of how to protect themselves in this country.

  “We’ll come up with something,” I said, though I had no idea what this might be. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told him. “Please, don’t open your mouth until then.”

  Our hooligan-faced young warden was at the gate again, telling us visiting time was over.

  Lenny nodded distantly, without commitment, at what I’d just said.

  “Please,” I pleaded a final time before I was led out.

  —

  I SPENT MOST OF THE NIGHT calling various law firms in New York and Washington, writing down names of attorneys who weren’t able to take a phone appointment with me until the following day, abandoning myself to this pointless task even as I knew that the “law” had nothing to do with the predicament Lenny was in. What we were dealing with was a simple hostage situation, for which a suitable ransom would have to be wo
rked out sooner or later, perhaps with the intervention of a local negotiator. But where to find a negotiator with enough pull? The answer came the next morning at L-Pet’s offices, where, with my eyes desiccated and my head pulsing, I entered in a sleepwalking state and, approaching the conference table, almost spilled coffee on Kablukov, seated in the chair beside mine. “Ivan Matveyevich? You’re back so soon,” I said.

  “Forty-eight hours is quite enough time in Tallin.” He spoke in his usual hoarse, semi-bored voice. “And it sounds like there’s pressing business to be done here. I hear you’ve been keeping my lieutenants on their toes.”

  I painted a grin on my tired face and said we were all trying to choose the best contractor we could.

  “I hope all this nonsense hasn’t so tied you up that you’ve neglected to spend time with your son,” Kablukov said.

  At the mention of Lenny I felt my coffee turn into indigestible sludge in my gut. I could see the desolation on my face reflected in Kablukov’s Ray-Bans, and then in the concerned knit of his brows. “You don’t look well.”

  “I could be better,” I said, trying to prepare a proper introduction of my request.

  “These tedious meetings can give anyone an ulcer. That’s why I steer clear.”

  “The meetings don’t bother me, Ivan Matveyevich. It’s my son. He’s presently sitting in a police station in Kapotnya. There’ve been some reckless complaints against a firm he worked for—an unfortunate mix-up—some financial delinquency Lenny really has no connection to.”

  Kablukov removed his sunglasses and rubbed the wide bridge of his nose. “That does sound quite serious.” He frowned in sympathy. “Our judiciary system can be…careless sometimes.”

  “You understand. I don’t know if Lenny quite understands what he was mixed up in. I’m looking for an advokat who can clear this up.” My suggestion to find a good lawyer provoked a not unexpected smirk on the old recidivist’s face.