Black Wolf, page 24
It was no wonder she was so receptive to Alexi Yurov’s attentions. Her uncertainty must be cascading off her in waves. It wouldn’t take a genius to see she was vulnerable to seduction.
“You’re an idiot,” she said to her reflection.
She finished dressing and hurried down to the lobby to meet William.
“We’re driving to Khatyn,” William announced after she’d gotten into the car. “Dan knows you’re with me. It’s far enough out of the city for us to speak privately. And public enough for us to be safe.”
Safe from what? Mel wondered uncomfortably. She knew that Khatyn was a national monument, a tribute to a village decimated by the Germans during World War II. Almost 150 people, at least half of them children, had been burned alive in a barn. Retaliation for a German officer killed near the village.
“There were over six hundred villages burned in Byelorussia by the Germans,” William explained. “Thousands of men, women, and children slaughtered. Byelorussia lost more people than any other country during the war.”
Mel tried to imagine what kind of lasting psychic damage would occur following that kind of epic brutality. She believed that the effects of violence could be generational, that the experienced carnage could be metabolized, absorbed at a cellular level, to be passed down from parent to child. How could a country not be left with a populace that was suspicious, slow to smile, pessimistic?
“Alexi’s from Dubrova, by the way, which is not far from Khatyn.” William rolled his window down and inhaled noisily. “What a treat to smell pine trees again instead of motor exhaust. Sveta’s dacha is not far from Dubrova. It’s a lovely place. I’ve gone there often. If I can, I’d love to have you all out for dinner before you leave.”
When Mel didn’t respond, he looked at her over his glasses. “You look tired, Melvina. I know no one can ever be fully prepared for the Soviet Union. You have to experience it. That’s why I recommend to the few Western friends who come here that they drink more vodka, sing more extravagantly, and throw themselves into an ill-advised love affair.” When she looked at him, he smiled and said, “I’m speaking of Sveta, of course.”
“How did you meet Alexi?” she asked.
The smile broadened under William’s mustache. “I think you want to ask how Alexi became my go-between.” He shrugged. “He, like a lot of young people in the Soviet Union, wants to defect. So, until I can help make that happen, he does what he can for me in return.”
This was interesting. Not only might Alexi be a source of information for US intelligence, but might his interest in her be authentic? Perhaps he saw her as another ally in his defection, rather than as a target for Soviet intelligence.
“So, you trust him?”
“He’s given me no reason not to. But trust should never be blind. A seasoned paratrooper would never take a jump without checking his parachute three times.”
William had been glancing in his rearview mirror more and more frequently. “I’m not certain, but it looks like we’ve got a tail.”
Mel craned her neck around and saw sunlight reflecting off a dark car about fifty yards behind them. “Militsiya?” she asked.
William pursed his lips. “More likely one of Martin’s.”
At the name, Mel felt a rush of nervous energy. William had assured her they’d be safe at Khatyn. “Are they still buying the mistress story?”
“We’ll soon find out.”
He slowed the car until they were advancing at a crawl. Instead of passing them, the dark car did the same.
William snorted as he sped up once more. “If I really wanted to irk them, I’d pull over and take a nap.”
William took the turnoff into the memorial park, the entrance fronted by a large concrete block with KHATYN written in large Cyrillic letters.
“A man named Leonid Levin built this park,” William said. “He subsequently won the Lenin Award, which was extremely rare for a Jew.”
They parked in the already crowded lot, and as they walked toward the monument, Mel spotted the dark car parking some distance from William’s.
The pathway ended at an enormous bronze sculpture of a tortured-looking older man holding in his arms the limp body of a young boy. Mel thought it one of the most poignant commemorative statues she’d ever seen. Anguish beyond endurance, made manifest in bronze.
“It’s called The Unconquered Man,” William said. “Twenty feet tall. The man was one of the only survivors of the massacre. His name was Joseph Kaminsky and he’s holding his dead son in his arms, burned to death by the Nazis.”
As they walked through the complex, steering clear of the other visitors, William explained the meaning of the different sculptures.
“The three birch trees and the eternal flame pay tribute to the one in every four Byelorussians killed during the war.”
It meant that every single family would have lost someone: mother, father, sister, brother. Mel was stunned by the genius of the memorial. It was visual, it was tactile, it had weight as well as emotional gravitas. It got into her pores, and she wanted to sit and weep.
She became aware of the frequent ringing of low tonal bells throughout the complex. The sounds vibrated in the hollow of her chest like the final notes of a funeral mass. “What do the bells signify?”
“They ring every thirty seconds to commemorate the rate at which these lives were lost.”
Every thirty seconds, a man, woman, or child had died. Hundreds, thousands, millions dying in agony, side by side, by gunshot or disease or starvation. Most of the faces Mel retained were of the living. What would it be like to scan a battlefield with so many dead? Could she take in all of their distorted, terrified, bloated visages, until she too ceased to exist? Instinctively, she took William’s arm for comfort.
He led her to the Cemetery of Villages, where 185 “tombs” held earth taken from vanquished villages. Each tomb was a squat concrete sculpture, painted black and red, with the name of its village spelled out in blocky letters. Mel could almost smell the acrid tang of burnt wood and flesh; the heavy atmosphere ached with pervasive, unavoidable tragedy.
“So much destruction,” Mel said, struggling to keep her voice steady. She thought of the framed image on William’s bookcase: the young blond boy. “The photograph of the boy and the older couple in your apartment. Are they your parents?”
William took off his glasses and cleaned them slowly on the edge of his jacket. “They are the Polish Catholic couple who took in this Jewish boy after his parents had been sent to the camps. I have no pictures left of my actual family, fourteen of whom perished in the gas chambers.”
Mel was speechless. William Cutler, born Wilhelm Kolwitz in Poland, a fair-haired youth in short pants, had lost more than a dozen of his family members in the Holocaust. And yet, despite all odds he had survived. He’d maintained his dignity, his sanity, and, more astonishingly, his empathy.
It took Mel a few moments to trust her voice. “I saw a book in your apartment by a woman named Svetlana Alexievich. Is she your friend Sveta?”
“No,” he answered, smiling sadly. “Svetlana’s a brilliant author and journalist. A chronicler of women’s experiences during the war. Sadly, what’s usually written about are the exploits of men, the very same who started the conflict. She once wrote, ‘What must be reclaimed is the small, the personal, and the specific.’” He waved a hand across the concrete tombs. “Most men only look. Women are better at seeing.”
But what Mel saw now were two men, dressed in sports coats and patterned shirts, strolling casually in their direction. Even if she hadn’t maintained a heightened awareness of her surroundings, Mel would have known they weren’t merely sightseers. They wore dark glasses and spoke to each other tersely, their lips barely moving.
William took Mel’s arm and they walked slowly around the Cemetery of Villages, the gravel crunching softly under their feet. She studied his face, deeply lined, slightly jowly, lips curled in a Buddha-like smile, and had a burning desire to know how this orphan became a well-respected scientist.
“Dan said you got your doctorate in the States.”
“That’s right,” William said. “After the war, I was the…how shall I say it…guest of the liberating Russians for a year. And then I was sponsored to go to America by a kind, and very rich, Jewish lady. I attended college and later got my PhD from Columbia. I worked for a while at Caltech, which is where I met Richard Feynman. Then I taught briefly at Oxford and then the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.”
Mel was relieved to see that the two men were keeping their distance. “What made you come to Byelorussia?” she asked.
“I was invited by Oleg. Our paths had crossed a few times in Frankfurt and Berlin at conferences. We got to be friends as well as colleagues. As you’ve seen, he can be quite charming when he’s not puffing himself up. I’m an American, but I’m also Byelorussian in spirit. And so Oleg and Martin, and others, amuse themselves by trying to turn me. Make me into a double spy.” He said the last in a dramatic whisper.
Like a splinter in the ear, Mel remembered Julie’s mistrust. Her suspicion that William was playing both sides. As William had said, there was what was looked at, and there was what was seen. She believed that Svetlana Alexievich was right, that women were often more perceptive. But in a world where deception was key to surviving, did you trust people because you perceived them to be trustworthy? Or did you do so because to do otherwise would be to eventually go insane?
William had led Mel to another sculpture—two giant slabs of granite, leaning together to form a massive roof.
“This is the site where the barn was razed to the ground.”
William turned to face the two men, watching them with narrowed eyes as they hovered in the distance. Every trace of humor and goodwill had drained from his expression. “Here’s the dirty little secret that the Soviets don’t commemorate. It was not just the Nazis who burned and killed and tortured. It was the Byelorussian police, the militsiya, who collaborated to extinguish the Jews and the resistance movement. Their fellow Byelorussians.”
He turned his back to the men and stared at the granite sculpture. “I was saved because I didn’t look Jewish. And, because I spoke Russian, German, and Polish, I was made a translator to an SS officer. I was twelve at the time. Terrified that I would be discovered and sent to the camps. You see, by that point we knew what was happening.”
He reached out, laying one palm on the stone edifice. “The officers used to play a game. They’d gather up any male civilians they suspected of being Jewish, sometimes ten at a time, and make them pull down their pants. Anyone who was circumcised was arrested and shipped out on the next transport.”
He turned to Mel, who stood frozen, staring at him. All the granite and bronze at Khatyn had been formed to overwhelm the senses, to transport the visitor to a place of unimaginable suffering. And yet the most powerful and inspiring embodiment of survival and remembrance was standing right next to her.
William gently took her arm and began walking again. “That’s when I learned to be conspicuously invisible. To stand out in a crowd when I needed to be noticed, like making sure my language skills were acknowledged by the Germans. I made myself seamlessly useful to the very entity who could be my destruction. But I also learned to blend into the scenery, to step back when necessary. I fed a lot of information to the partisans this way.”
“Like a magician’s sleight of hand,” Mel said. “Artistry and distraction.”
He gave her a playful smile, tapping his forehead with one finger. “Exactly. That along with shrewdness and cunning.” He took a few gliding steps. “And, of course, being light on one’s feet. It’s no small task to make this bulk slip between the shadows.”
As soon as they had disappeared on the far side of the granite slabs, blocking them momentarily from view, William said, “It’s going to be almost impossible to get you close to the thermophysics lab. But I’ve found out where the visiting scientists are being housed. It’s a Soviet-owned facility for VIPs—a compound, really, with a large dacha and several sleeping cabins—not far from here.”
“How do you know about this place?” Mel asked.
“I’ve stayed there in the past with Sveta.”
Mel blinked in surprise. “Sveta Ulanova?”
William nodded. “The very same. Widows who were married to very important politburo members can be extremely useful.” He put his mouth close to Mel’s ear. “Listen, a contact close to Shevchenko told me that the institute is in talks with rogue agents in Almaty. With uranium from Kazakhstan, and the nuclear expertise from Belarus, hostile countries like Iran or Pakistan could have the bomb within a few years. Things are ‘hotting up,’ as my English friends say.”
The two KGB agents had closed the distance and were walking rapidly in their direction, the sun flaring off their glasses.
“I don’t have an exact plan yet,” William said quietly, taking Mel’s arm and moving away from the granite slabs, “and the institute has restricted Sveta’s access to the dacha right now, but I’ll figure something out.”
One of the men called out sharply in Russian for them to stop. William turned in their direction, a pleasant, guileless smile on his face. They exchanged a few more words and William stopped smiling.
The vague anxiety Mel had felt turned to dread. She understood enough Russian to know that they were talking about her. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re to follow them back to Minsk,” he said. “Martin Kavalchuk would like another word with you.”
Chapter 23
Sunday, August 12, 1990
At KGB headquarters, Mel was taken to the same room as before. The same young Alpha officer led her in and left her seated alone, the lone chair once again positioned close to the drain. She had no doubt that it was intentional, as were the lack of windows and the harsh, artificial lighting. The entire space gave her the claustrophobic feeling of being buried somewhere deep below a mountain. The walls sloped inward, the diameter slightly narrower at the ceiling than at the floor, giving the sensation of the space literally closing in. Mel struggled to keep her thoughts calm, her muscles relaxed.
William had again protested Mel’s being taken in without his presence. But, as before, he was not allowed to leave the waiting room. He assured her that he would inform Dan and that he wouldn’t leave until she was returned safely.
Now it seemed as if she’d been waiting a long time. She shut her eyes and concentrated on her breathing, running through all William had said on their drive back to Minsk, as he’d recounted Kavalchuk’s personal history.
Martin Kavalchuk had been a young army officer in the war, and an enthusiastic devotee of Joseph Stalin. His talent for extracting information caught the attention of Yuri Andropov, newly named Soviet ambassador to Hungary. Because of his Hungarian mother, Kavalchuk spoke the language fluently and so accompanied Andropov to Budapest in 1954. He’d then helped to crush the first serious threat to Soviet rule, the Hungarian uprising. It was hard for Mel to comprehend the intentional cruelty; two thousand Hungarians had been massacred, and over two hundred thousand citizens made refugees. How had he not seen his mother’s countrymen as his people?
When Andropov was named chairman of the KGB in Moscow in 1967, Kavalchuk was firmly his right-hand man, overseeing a tidal wave of crackdowns on dissidents. Mass arrests, involuntary psychiatric commitments, and executions were made by the tens of thousands. In 1986, two years after Andropov’s death, Kavalchuk was named head of the KGB of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
At the sound of quiet footsteps, she opened her eyes. He’d arrived. Kavalchuk was walking toward her, carrying a file folder under one arm. She hadn’t heard the door open and realized that the soundlessness of the mechanism was also intentional.
He sat at the desk once again, placing his hands over the folder. “Good afternoon, Miss Donleavy.”
She nodded tersely in greeting and waited. He looked at her, unblinking, for a count of ten and then said, “When we last spoke, you mentioned the Svisloch Dushitel. The Svisloch Strangler. Where did you hear these words?”
She remembered first hearing the phrase in the Planeta Mir, from Larysa. The woman who’d lost her husband, and probably would lose her son. The woman did not also need a midnight visit from the KGB.
Mel shrugged. “I don’t recall.”
He sighed and opened the file. “Your father is a sheriff in Wisconsin, is this true?”
Again, he’d taken a direction that she’d not anticipated. “Yes, he is.”
“How long has he been in law enforcement?” He cocked his head to the side, as though immensely interested in what she had to say.
“Over thirty years.”
“So, he’s a very experienced policeman. And he’s been witness to a lot of crime, some of it violent.”
“Yes.”
“A pernicious ailment afflicting the United States.”
She wondered if she would be getting the “Decadent West” sermon as a preamble to whatever point Kavalchuk wanted to hammer home.
“I think violent crime is a universal affliction,” she said.
“Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy. Do these names mean anything to you?”
The familiar names sounded foreign, almost exotic, spoken with such a heavy Russian accent. “Yes, they’re all what law enforcement now calls serial killers.”
Kavalchuk stood and began slowly pacing behind the desk. “Please define for me what ‘serial killer’ means.”
His tone seemed offhand, relaxed. He could have been any professor in any university calling on a pupil.
“Well,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “most commonly it means someone, usually a man, who has killed multiple people at different locations, often at different times.”
