Black Wolf, page 29
“Is William a part of this?”
He nodded. “A big part. He determines who will be moved. The Soviets have been cracking down on the exodus. All of the brightest minds are escaping to Israel. So now, the smart ones that Stalin managed not to kill are being held hostage by the State. They know once the Jews leave, all that will be left are the stupid and the cultist apparatchiks, which is the same thing.”
He handed her the canteen, which she gratefully accepted. She drank deeply and handed it back. “William says you’ll be going to Israel.”
“I would have left already, but I stayed to help out our good friend, who is also an Israeli citizen. And by extension you and your colleagues.”
Mel flashed on bumping into Joseph in the hallway, holding a paper bag of garbage. The garbage that a seemingly fastidious William made sure to take out before every party.
“Are you the one smuggling our reports out to the State Department?” she asked.
“Yes.” He looked at her. “As well as to Israeli intelligence.”
“Does the US know you’re sharing the intel with Israel?”
He gave her a tight smile. “If you live, they will.”
Chapter 27
Sunday, August 19, 1990
Once they entered the city limits, Joseph reduced his speed, his eyes restlessly searching for anyone following them. It was after one in the morning; the streets were empty and quiet. But when they passed the KGB headquarters on Ulitsa Nezalezhnastsi, there seemed to be more lights than usual burning in the top-floor windows.
Joseph made a slow pass in front of William’s building. Two large black Chaikas were double-parked on either side of the entrance. Anton’s van was gone.
“This is not good,” Joseph muttered.
“With the van gone,” Mel said, “couldn’t it mean that the others went back to the hotel?” She knew even before she’d finished the sentence that they wouldn’t have left the apartment voluntarily. Not without her and Dan.
He circled the block and approached the building from the rear. Guards were posted outside the exit there too. Joseph told Mel to crouch down so her profile wouldn’t be seen. Once they were out of sight of the guards, he pulled over and parked. He stared straight ahead, his brow furrowed in thought.
“KGB is all over the building,” he said. “We have to assume that your colleagues have been arrested or soon will be.” He exhaled a tortured breath. “And that may include William.”
“What do we do now?”
“I need to find out what’s going on.” He studied Mel crouched on the floor in front of the passenger seat. She could only imagine what he must be seeing. A young, frightened woman with blood on her face and two skinned knees, wearing a faded, malodorous dress and a grandmother’s scarf. How many terrified women had he witnessed in his life?
“I need to go into the building.” He reached under the front seat and brought out a near-empty bottle of vodka. He drank some and dribbled the rest down his shirt. “Wait here. If I’m not back by morning you need to get to a safe house.” He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket. “Give me your hand.”
He wrote an address on her palm. “It’s only a few miles away. Just follow the main street, Nezalezhnastsi, so that William’s building is to your back. You’ll pass the Lenin monument and the Church of Saints Simon and Helena. You will recognize it as the Red Church. Turn right on Ulitsa Sovietskaya and walk two more blocks, and there you’ll find the address. I’ll give you keys to the front door and to the apartment on the third floor. Repeat to me the directions.”
After she had recited the directions, he handed her the two keys.
“Don’t respond to anyone. Keep your head down. Pretend to be deaf. If I can, I’ll come to you. If not, I’ll send someone you can trust.”
Everything was happening too fast. There were too many ways the plan could go wrong.
“Who?” she asked.
“You’ll know him when you see him.”
“Why can’t you tell me?”
Joseph turned and reached for his cap in the backseat. “In case you’re caught before you get there.”
He handed her the water flask, opened the door, and stepped out. “Good luck,” he said.
Staggering as though drunk and stooped as if he were simply a weak old man, he slowly approached the rear entrance to the building. Mel peeked over the seat and watched as he loudly greeted the guards. One of the guards held up his hands as if to block him from entering. Joseph pulled out a large ring of keys from his jacket pocket and gestured to the door. After another few moments of animated discussion, and Joseph showing his identification papers, the door was opened and one of the guards followed Joseph in.
Once Mel was certain there was no one on the street, she quickly crawled over the front seat and lay down on the floor in the back. The car was small, so she couldn’t fully stretch out her legs. She made herself as comfortable as possible and checked her watch. It was one thirty; sunrise would be at five thirty, four hours away. Four hours in an airport or in a hospital visitors’ room was not a very long time, if you had a book or could grab something to eat. But her bladder was full, she was cold, and the hard floor made her back ache. At least she had some water and shelter. It could be much, much worse. She could still be lost and wandering around a Byelorussian forest, hunted by the KGB.
But now, besides not knowing the fate of her colleagues, she was alone, with no money and no true Russian-language skills. Her only map was an address scribbled on her palm. She kept her fingers extended so her nervous sweat would not wash away the ink.
Closing her eyes, Mel directed her thoughts away from her bodily discomfort. As she’d been instructed, she searched for an image that would soothe and calm her nerves. Her mind grasped at the memory of Prashar Lake in India, the unplumbed body of water with the floating island. The lake where she’d lain on a raft, staring up at the sky white with stars, the countless pinpricks of light reflected back into the water like phosphorescent algae.
There’d been no wind and no sound, and, for an instant, she’d experienced a dizzying vertigo, not knowing which direction was up. As though she’d been cast into the deep vacuum of space. It was in that moment that she understood that the loneliness she’d felt as a child was little compared to the awesome, potentially crippling reality of infinity, of nothingness. The reality that her presence on the rock she called Earth was less than insignificant.
And yet, she’d also understood—feeling the steady pounding of her heart, the unfailing pumping of her lungs, the furnace of her blood—that she would fight ferociously to continue living.
A little physical discomfort could be endured, overcome, ignored. It would pass. It’s just the drugs, Alice, she repeated over and over.
At last, she drifted off to sleep. When she later opened her eyes, the sky was a pale gray. Morning had come and Joseph had not returned. She unfolded her stiffened limbs and climbed carefully out of the car.
Chapter 28
Sunday, August 19, 1990
Millions of the cheaply killed, have trod the path in darkness…
The line, repeated quietly under his breath, over and over, mirrored the cadence of his fevered thoughts. It was written by the Russian poet Mandelstam, he recalled, although the man in the blue Lada couldn’t remember the rest of it. It put him in mind of the American poet Robert Frost.
But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep…
Both were about impending death. Mandelstam once famously said, “Only in Russia is poetry truly respected—it gets people killed.” But to those burdened with a sentimental bent, Frost’s poem was also a nostalgic ode to a traveler reveling in the rustic beauty of nature.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep…
Certainly his woods were lovely, dark and deep, enough to hide many secrets. It would be only a few weeks before the mushrooms would erupt through the rich soil behind his dacha.
The woman he was following had quickened her stride. He’d seen her face for only an instant as he passed, but he’d known. The woman-child with the wide-set eyes and elfin chin. With skin as pale as moonlight. As pale as the meat of a Veshenka mushroom, and just as delicious.
He could scarcely believe his luck. He’d been headed for an emergency meeting at the State Security headquarters. There’d been quite a lot of excitement the previous night, but as the dust began to settle, no one knew where the youngest American was.
Then, as though he’d conjured her, he’d spotted her walking past the Church of Saints Simon and Helena, right on the main thoroughfare. Alone! She was dressed in a formless housedress, one befitting a much older woman, but there could be no mistaking her luminous eyes.
By his usual criteria, Melvina Donleavy would be too slender for planting. But the idea of keeping this beautiful creature close to him forever gave him immense pleasure. She wouldn’t yield a robust crop, but he could imagine slender rows of Chesnochnik—what the English call fairy ring mushrooms—blooming slowly like shy virgins until late in the fall. The proper Latin name was Mycetinis scorodonius, and the mushrooms mimicked the delicate garlic plant in smell and taste.
He remembered the old peasant saying that when fields of mushrooms abound, you’ll find the dead of war around. The Russian countryside always yielded its best crops during deadly conflicts.
Five months after the taking of Berlin, he, along with ten thousand other veterans of the Great Patriotic War, had been sent back east. They traveled through Poland by foot, pushing, pulling, and carrying military matériel along the way. There was little food, and the nights were turning cold. The man couldn’t recall ever not being hungry. But it was then that he’d learned from his comrade Misha how to pick mushrooms. He’d learned which ones were safe to eat, and which would bring a slow, painful death.
Misha was a fanciful fellow. Whenever they’d find a bright surge of mushrooms growing over a hastily dug grave, he’d stop and say, “Here lies so-and-so,” and make up their story, all the while plucking the edible fungi from the spongy ground.
“Here lies Alexander Gregorivich. He had a lovely voice in life, made the best sausages east of Potsdam, but had a very small pecker, which gave his wife no end of sorrow. He was felled by a cannonball, separating his head from his body, which is why he was buried in two graves…”
There were no females in the ranks, so, of course, any village that hadn’t hidden their surviving women—women who had somehow miraculously escaped rape and death at the hands of the advancing, or retreating, Germans—had been made sorry for it. And after women were killed by the Soviet army to stifle their wailing, it wasn’t uncommon for late-arriving, desperate men to avail themselves of their sometimes cold and rigid bodies. They could do no more harm to the lifeless, after all.
The man, remembering his excitement over the tank driver’s warm, writhing body, was not, at first, tempted by these frigid remnants. What good was expending all that energy on leftovers?
One day, outside Grodno, though, the man came across the naked corpse of a girl. She’d been dragged into a small stand of birch trees and left with her poor peasant’s clothing scattered about her like leaves, her dark hair spread out like a halo. She was recently dead, her skin waxy and smooth, the areolae still pink, the thatch of hair between her legs like a small sparrow’s nest. There’d been no noticeable animals or insect disturbance, yet, but on her arms and legs grew the beginnings of a fine spray of oyster mushrooms, sprouting like gills on a mermaid.
Aroused and ravenous in equal measures, the man had plucked and consumed the mushrooms—the most delicious he’d ever eaten—at the same time releasing himself onto her body in mighty spasms. When he’d recovered enough to stand, he looked at her for a long moment, burning her perfect image into his memory.
She was the ideal woman, providing pleasure and sustenance alongside a dignified, unquestioning silence. Such a female would never, ever laugh at him. He hated to leave her behind, but he had no way to transport her back home before the inevitable decay began.
Until he spotted Melvina, he thought he’d never see her like again. The same graceful form, the silvery skin, the beautiful dark hair.
And now she was just steps ahead of him.
It was still early morning, and the street was empty. As she passed the looming shadow of the church, impulsively, knowing he might not have this chance again, he parked his car and began following her on foot. He closed the distance easily and, giddy, overcome, enveloped her in his arms, dragging her into the church’s lush garden.
It wasn’t until his hands had closed over her mouth and he had wrenched her around that he discovered his mistake.
Chapter 29
Sunday, August 19, 1990
The entryway to the apartment building was dark, and, thankfully, there was no one around to challenge her as she climbed the worn, uneven stairs. Behind the closed doors she passed, Mel could hear muffled conversations, radios, hungry children looking to be fed, even a lone woman crying. Another Sunday in Minsk.
She had found the building easily, following Joseph’s orders, keeping her head down and her scarf pulled low over her forehead. To keep herself from panicking on the long walk, she’d recalled Agency protocol: first, run an SDR—surveillance detection route—looking for possible escape options or anything that would allow outpacing, or outwitting, an enemy. But given her situation, her inability to have prepared only made her more nervous, and so instead she’d slipped into a mental state where she simply focused on moving her feet: left, right, left, right. There was no worrisome past, no threatening future, only the movement toward her destination.
Fortunately, very few people were out this early and no one had looked twice at her hunched form. She’d only had one close call. A man, very drunk, waving an unlit cigarette, demanding a light. She’d deftly skirted him, even as he made a grab for her sweater. He swore at her but continued weaving his way down the street.
The apartment key fit into the lock easily and she slipped through the door, closing and securing it behind her. She stood for a moment listening for any sounds in the apartment, but the air was thick with dust and silent. She pressed herself against the door, momentarily immobilized, as if all the adrenaline in her body had vanished at once.
Finally, she drew herself up and moved through the space, desperately searching for the bathroom. Happily she found a modern toilet, and, with shaking legs, she lowered herself onto it. She nearly wept with relief at the release. Looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, she saw a purple bruise at her hairline, a streak of blood down one cheek, her eyes glinting with fatigue and prolonged fear. She washed her face and hands with cool water, drying herself with a bath towel that she hoped was clean.
Mel searched the rest of the apartment in stockinged feet. There were only one bedroom, a small sitting room, and a dining area within the kitchen. It didn’t appear to have housed anyone in a long time. She checked the tiny refrigerator, but it was empty. Turning on the faucet over the sink, she drank deeply, hoping the water was potable.
She removed her scarf and sweater and sat on the narrow couch in the sitting room. Her stomach had been growling, and even though the water had tempered her cravings, she felt dizzy with hunger. She resigned herself to waiting in the apartment until she had formulated a plan. Joseph hadn’t returned, which probably meant he’d been arrested as well. She couldn’t imagine that he would have willingly abandoned her. Her options were limited: waiting for the unknown contact; turning herself in to the KGB to be held for forty-eight hours and then, best-case scenario, sent back to the States; or attempting to board a train to Moscow and somehow make her way to the US Embassy.
The third option seemed impossible, and the second, based on Joseph’s warning, made the spit in her mouth dry up. Imagining Martin Kavalchuk’s cold, relentless gaze through two days of interrogations, and without her nightly processing, she wasn’t sure how she’d hold up. She’d last been able to complete the ritual early on Saturday night. Twenty-four hours from now she’d begin to feel the negative effects. What if she became unglued alone with the head of the KGB? She could be shot, beaten, or committed to a psychiatric hospital, “for her own good.”
The best option was the first. She’d continue waiting in the apartment until hunger drove her to seek help. The walls and ceilings were thin. She could hear somebody walking with heavy steps above her. A man coughed uncontrollably in the hallway as he passed her door. Somewhere in the building someone practiced their scales on an out-of-tune piano. She closed her eyes, telling herself that she had the strength and the fortitude to wait a bit longer.
There was a gentle knock at the door, followed by three more. Alarmed, she stood abruptly, the muscles in her legs tense. The knocking pattern was repeated. She tiptoed to the door and held her ear against the wood.
“Melvina,” a voice whispered.
She opened the door to Alexi. He was wearing his militsiya uniform and carrying a backpack. Mel couldn’t remember a time when she’d felt such relief seeing a friendly face. In a few steps he’d entered the apartment and secured the lock once more. He listened for any sounds in the hallway and then, taking Mel’s arm, led her back into the sitting room. He sat on the couch facing her.
“Joseph told me where you were,” he said, looking tired. He gently pressed his fingers next to the bruise on her forehead. “You’re hurt.”
Seeing him, feeling his reassuring presence, his warm hand on her skin, threatened to unravel the thin veneer of calm she’d managed to maintain. “I’m okay. Just some cuts and bruises.”
There was blood at the hem of her dress. He pulled the fabric away from her bare knees and gently examined the scrapes. On her abraded skin, his fingers were almost unbearably pleasurable. He unzipped the backpack and pulled out two thermoses and a paper sack. “I brought you some tea and soup. In the bag are sandwiches. First you eat and then we take care of your injuries. I brought some bandages and disinfectant.”
