The Last Secret, page 1
Outstanding praise for
THE LAST SECRET
“An extraordinarily powerful novel cinematically weaving one gripping layer into the next. From the frozen hellscape of Eastern Europe during WWII to the lush green of Salt Spring Island in Canada, The Last Secret delivers a thrilling story of survival and love that held me spellbound throughout.”
—Genevieve Graham, #1 bestselling author of The Forgotten Home Child
“A tense and thrilling ride of a story.”
—Janie Chang, bestselling author of The Porcelain Moon and The Library of Legends
“With The Last Secret, Maia Caron firmly establishes herself as one of the most powerful, truthful, and poetic voices in Canadian historical fiction.”
—Natalie Jenner, bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls
“Sweeping from hardship to heartache, The Last Secret is a timely reminder of the bonds forged, broken, and recast on WWII’s Eastern Front. Here, revenge is served tundra-cold, but with a dash of sea salt and fire.”
—Shelley Wood, internationally bestselling author of The Quintland Sisters
“The Last Secret is a masterfully crafted historical thriller, a riveting tale that sweeps across decades and continents. The intertwined stories of a Ukrainian woman ruthlessly pursued by the Russian secret police and a scarred young artist at the mercy of her nurse’s sinister machinations converge in a climactic, heart-stopping showdown on a remote island in the pacific northwest. Maia Caron has irresistibly woven historical drama, mystery, and romance in a gripping tribute to women’s resistance and resilience.”
—Lilian Nattel, author of Only Sisters
“This haunting and exquisitely written story will stay with me for a long time to come.”
—Gwen Tuinman, author of Unrest
“Throughout history, the stories of women have been neglected or erased. But in The Last Secret, Maia Caron places women front and center at historical turning points, where they have always been. She honors their agency and resourcefulness even in the face of extreme betrayal, Solomonic choices, and the darkest secrets. This tightly woven narrative of two resilient, resourceful women kept me on the edge of my reading chair. Brava, Maia!”
—Shelagh Rogers, founding host of The Next Chapter, CBC Radio
ALSO BY MAIA CARON
Song of Batoche
Copyright © 2024 Maia Caron
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The last secret: a novel / Maia Caron.
Names: Caron, Maia, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20240322525 | Canadiana (ebook) 20240322533 | ISBN 9780385688826 (softcover) | ISBN 9780385688833 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS8605.A764 L37 2024 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780385688833
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover and interior design: Kelly Hill, adapted for ebook
Cover images: (coat) Anna Gorin, (trees) OliverLeicher, (braid) Cavan Images, all Getty Images; (frame) pingebat, (coat collar) Galina, both Adobe Stock
Interior image: Bernhard Lang/Getty Images
Typesetting: Sean Tai, adapted for ebook
The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
a_prh_7.0a_148321933_c0_r0
CONTENTS
Also by Maia Caron
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1: Savka
2: Jeanie
3: Savka
4: Jeanie
5: Savka
6: Jeanie
7: Savka
8: Marko
9: Jeanie
10: Savka
11: Jeanie
12: Savka
13: Jeanie
14: Savka
15: Jeanie
16: Savka
17: Danek
18: Savka
19: Jeanie
20: Savka
21: Jeanie
22: Marko
23: Savka
24: Jeanie
25: Savka
26: Jeanie
27: Savka
28: Marko
29: Jeanie
30: Savka
31: Danek
32: Savka
33: Jeanie
34: Savka
35: Danek
36: Marko
37: Jeanie
38: Savka
39: Danek
40: Savka
41: Jeanie
42: Savka
43: Jeanie
44: Savka
45: Jeanie
46: Taras
47: Savka
48: Jeanie
49: Taras
50: Jeanie
51: Savka
52: Jeanie
53: Savka
54: Taras
55: Jeanie
56: Savka
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Questions and Topics for Discussion
About the Author
For the Daughters of Ukraine, past and present…and Shasta, my beautiful girl
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
ralph waldo emerson, “Brahma”
PROLOGUE
Rimini, Italy
june 1946
the cage is narrow and humid as a steam bath, with just enough space for Nikolai Belyakov to execute a slow circle around the prisoner. A single bead of sweat trails down the Ukrainian’s cheek, and Belyakov takes out his handkerchief to tenderly dab it away.
Marko Ivanets leaps to his feet, only to be jerked back by the handcuffs around his wrists, attached by a chain to the table. He turns his head and spits on the floor. “Moskal’.”
“You disappoint me,” Belyakov says, bringing the handkerchief to his nose. He inhales a last, thrilling smell of ocean, sun, and sweat, before tucking it into the pocket of his field tunic for later. “A Ukrainian who fought in Hitler’s Waffen-SS should show respect to his Soviet superior. Do you forget who won the war?”
Ivanets lunges at him, like a mad dog testing the length of its chain, and the Soviet agent itches to sink his fingers into the prisoner’s short blonde hair, force his head back and expose his jugular. But it’s necessary to handle this affair delicately. Marko Ivanets is Belyakov’s only ticket back to Moscow, a return to what he does best.
“I expected to find you sickly and overworked,” he adds with a smile, “but look at you—tanned and fit. Is it true you sing in the Rimini prison choir?” The former Ukrainian underground commander says nothing, only eases his bulk back into the chair and fixes a blue-eyed glare on his interrogator, who can’t help but admire his profile, noble as any Cossack hetman. Unsettled, the Soviet removes his cap, running a hand over his dark brilliantined hair and wishing he could drown himself in a bathtub of vodka. Or something stronger. But none can be found in this blyadskiy POW camp on the Adriatic, still recovering from the war.
Belyakov had expected a proper interrogation room, not this cage with its thick steel wire walls, cramped as an isolation cell in the Gulag, assembled in haste at the back of a flimsy prefab hut on a disused airport runway. A single bare light bulb hanging from its cord stirs in a breath of humid air from the open window high above them, too far from the ocean here for a trifling breeze that might cool the room. How he would like to have the former Waffen-Sturmbannführer in the basement execution chamber of Lubyanka prison in Moscow, in the room he designed for interrogations such as this, with a sloped cement floor and the black hose hung neatly on its hook. In that room he always won a confession; he always knew how to make them cry.
And beg for him to stop.
Until the day five years ago when NKVD guards knocked down the door of that interrogation room and discovered him at the point of no return. Nikolai Belyakov, star NKVD interrogator, as he was rushed, his arms pinned back. Then the indignation of arrest and the burn of his own brutal interrogator’s final words.
“Do you understand how far you have fallen? I’m disgusted to look a
He blinks away the memory and considers the prisoner. “State your rank and birthplace.”
“Rank: corporal,” Ivanets says in Ukrainian. “Birthplace: Ukraine.”
Belyakov flinches at the sound of Ukrainian, a language forbidden in Soviet Ukraine since 1764 by Catherine the Great. He glances at the British private, his back rigid with attention on the other side of the cage, a lowly soldier the camp commander has sent to ensure this remains an interview, not an interrogation. The private cannot possibly understand Ukrainian or Russian. This conversation will remain confidential. Still, he longs to use other tactics. “You are not a corporal but a major,” he tells the prisoner in precise Russian. “A fascist Waffen-Sturmbannführer, no less. If you return with me, you will be treated like royalty.” How unnatural it is for him, this polite exchange.
“Some of my men were manipulated into leaving with your earlier delegations,” Marko says, beads of sweat gathering on his forehead. “They were shot in the back of the head before the train left Italy.”
Belyakov inwardly curses the sloppy work of the operatives who preceded him, too eager to shoot these traitors and fling their dead bodies out of train cars, where the emotionally overwrought Italians had found them. “We will provide you and your wife and son a luxury apartment in Moscow,” he lies, dangling the ultimate reward.
“You will not speak of my wife and son!” Marko shouts, a scar on his cheek turning livid red.
“And you will adopt a tone of respect—” Belyakov is cut off by sudden shouts that drift through the window, a ball game of some sort going on outside. He closes his eyes to breathe in the delicious sweat of so many muscled bodies cramped together in this shamefully hedonistic prisoner of war camp. After being denounced and demoted by the NKVD, given only two men when he once commanded hundreds, Belyakov had traveled a long, hard road during the last two years of the war, a pariah relegated to hunting Ukrainian underground bandits behind Nazi front lines. He had remained in Soviet Ukraine, secretly building a small network of his own spies. But in the end an NKVD operative had found him and his two men camped on the bitter slopes of the Carpathians and handed him direct orders from the Kremlin.
Stalin needs you! You must do what your comrades could not—persuade the British imperialists to hand over 8,000 Soviet Ukrainians of the Fourteenth Waffen-SS in reparation for crimes against the Motherland!
Belyakov and his men had scrambled their way to Italy—a three-day train journey to Rome, then dusty motorcycles up and across the boot, anticipating success and a way back to decent Moscow apartments, drinkable vodka, and respect. Yesterday, under a relentless sun, Belyakov had stalked into the Rimini camp, hoping to find a wilted pansy in command, one who would quail in terror at the real man Moscow had sent to finally get the job done, the closer. To his outrage, Brigadier Block was decidedly not a wilted pansy, but a British war hero who cunningly installed the three-man Soviet delegation in a foul army tent beside the camp mess hall. Belyakov’s wool uniform stank of fish and cabbage. Simmering with resentment, he stands over Ivanets unable to stop thinking of Block’s horse face as he sat behind his desk, war medals gleaming.
“I will have the list,” Belyakov had quietly demanded in stilted English. Without invitation he had settled himself in the single chair across from the brigadier and lit a cigarette, ignoring an ancient fan that wheezed in a corner, churning dank air across the room. He took a different approach than that of earlier Soviet delegations. Why bother attempting to persuade the British commander to hand over traitors when Belyakov could simply hunt them down individually? Arduous and time consuming, yes, but perhaps the only way forward.
“The Rimini camp list?” the brigadier asked, rubbing an awkward finger over his chin, as if wiping the egg off his face. When earlier Soviet delegations had persuaded him to hand over some of the Fourteenth Division prisoners, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Pope had intervened on their behalf. Now the British considered the Ukrainians surrendered enemy personnel and not the traitors they really were. “I’m afraid that is quite impossible,” Block said. “Moscow would then have the names and birthplaces of every one of the men in this camp.” He looked up, pointedly. “Which is why the list is classified.”
“Classified?” Belyakov wavered on the knife edge of fury and imagined Brigadier Block in the Lubyanka interrogation room, begging for his mother. “The international military tribunal found the Waffen-SS a criminal organization,” he reminded the man, who’d become suddenly fascinated by a paper clip on his desk.
“As I understand it, ancestors of these Ukrainians resisted Soviet oppression for centuries,” the commander said, his voice wavering under the strain of imperialist propaganda. “Does it not stand to reason that their sons and grandsons joined SS divisions to fight communism when Germany gave them the chance?”
“You do not understand ungrateful peasants.” Belyakov sat back in his chair, blowing smoke at the ceiling before placing his right hand, palm down, on the brigadier’s desk. “These traitors join fascist pigs to bite the hand that feeds them for centuries.”
Block raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t Stalin starve millions of Ukrainians to death in the 1930s?”
Not enough of them, Belyakov thought, but he said nothing. His fingers clenched and unclenched on the desk, attracting the Brigadier’s anxious eyes. “Stalin himself sends me. As a Soviet ally you are obligated by the Yalta agreement. Turn these men over to me.” He knew this effort was futile, but there was one other prize he might secure. Belyakov let his pause lengthen, until the blood had drained out of the brigadier’s face. Then, forcing a reluctant tone of respect for the commander he said, “What of Marko Ivanets, underground codename: Roman? Only Ukrainian man promoted to Waffen-Sturmbannführer.”
“I will afford you the same opportunity as other Moscow delegations,” the brigadier said, fidgeting in his seat, “and let you speak to the major. But you cannot have him.”
Now, in the cage, Marko Ivanets is proving to be stubborn and uncooperative, even lying about his rank. Corporal. What luck to find him here, the underground commander Belyakov had hunted three years ago, in Ukraine, and thought lost to the war. He makes another slow circuit of the interrogation room, pausing at the cage door where the British guard stands, close enough to smell the musk scent of youth, close enough to unnerve him.
When he turns slowly toward his prisoner, the man does not pale or falter, as he should. “On the night of May 8, 1945, as the Red Army approached Graz,” the Soviet agent begins, “you were Brigadeführer Fritz Freitag’s highest ranking Ukrainian officer. Freitag had the right idea—shoot himself to avoid capture by the Red Army. Did you and your men think we wouldn’t notice when you changed the name of the Fourteenth Waffen-SS Division to Ukrainian National Army and surrendered to the British? You believed they would protect you.” He leans toward the prisoner. “How did you think you would escape me?”
He waits for a response, for an admission of guilt, but the prisoner remains silent. The heat in this room is suddenly too painful to bear and Belyakov toys with the top gold buttons of his wool tunic, longing to tear it off. The prisoner appears maddeningly oblivious despite the sheen of sweat visible on his chest and the thudding pulse at his throat. Belyakov admires, with a short man’s envy, the elemental force of Marko Ivanets in his hand-me-down version of the British army’s summer prison uniform of khaki shirt and short pants.
From behind, he lowers his hands to the prisoner’s shoulders, electrified by the feel of hard muscle beneath the shirt before Ivanets jerks away. “What happened to your SS uniform, hmm?” Belyakov smiles. “And the Nazi weapons you carried. You were commander of an artillery division, an officer who gave orders.”
“Only German officers issued orders.”
Belyakov itches to slap this lie off the prisoner’s face. He refuses to let Marko Ivanets slip away under an umbrella of protection from the British. He closes his eyes briefly to compose himself, feeling raw and exposed, his self-control drifting away like smoke. Slipping a hand into his pocket, he runs trembling fingers over the case that contains his little white pills and over the stark comfort of his sterling silver flask. “If you cooperate, Moscow will welcome you as a hero of the motherland,” he says, suddenly weary, his aching head reflecting what this lie has cost him.
