I finished the last of the sausages, sucking the savory grease off my fingers. “Rifles from my grandfather. Taught myself the rest.”
He looked dubious. “Your grandfather.”
“My mother’s father. Used to take me hunting up in the hills outside Brzuchowice. He had a cabin on the lake.”
“Rifles, you said.”
“Mosins, Mausers, Winchesters—”
“Ever used automatics?”
“Sure.”
“Ever actually hit anything?”
“Sure,” I said, “I’ve hit things.”
“Show me,” he said. He unholstered his pistol and laid it on the papers between us.
I picked it up, testing the weight. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Marko’s finger curl around the trigger of his pistol. Knowing I came of Ukrainian nationalist royalty apparently wasn’t enough to put his mind at ease.
“What am I hitting? Him?”
“Preferably not,” Strilka said. “Hit the bulb.”
“Which one?” I asked, turning to look and seeing the line of electric bulbs strung down the length of the cellar—unlit, of course, but gleaming dimly in the lamplight.
“The farthest,” Strilka said.
It winked at me in the darkness—twenty meters, maybe. The light was what made it tricky. I opened the magazine and checked the rounds. Then I shoved the housing back in and adjusted my grip, cupping my hands and willing them not to shake. I shut my left eye, sighted, and pulled the trigger.
Or I tried anyway. The trigger was stuck. I tried again impatiently, mashing my finger down. Nothing. I lowered the pistol. My face was burning.
“Safety,” Strilka said softly, trailing pipe smoke from his lips.
I flicked it off without looking at him and lifted the pistol again. This time the trigger yielded smoothly under my finger, the pistol recoiling quickly and sharply in my hand. The spent cartridge clattered at my feet. The echo of the shot rolled away over the brick-faced walls.
“Your technique isn’t bad,” Strilka said, taking out his pipe. “Accuracy takes time and effort. You’re a mathematician—you know that. One miscalculation, one sloppy mistake, and the whole equation goes to hell.” He stuck the pipe back in his mouth and held out his hand for the pistol. “How about a job?” he asked.
I handed him the pistol. “At the Hotel George. Night porter.”
“No,” he said. He brought out a cartridge box from his pocket. “I mean that I’m offering you a job.”
“What kind of job? Hired gun?”
“Let’s call it a chance to continue your father’s work. You’ve met Commander Shukhevych, I’d imagine.”
“Ah,” I said.
I’d met him. He would probably even remember me. Roman Shukhevych had been head of the UPA, the militant arm of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, and mastermind behind the assassination for which my father had been jailed. He’d been in and out of our flat all that spring, 1934. I’d been eleven years old—old enough to know he wasn’t just one of Papa’s army friends, no matter what Mama might say. I had no idea he was working with the Germans now. The last I knew, he’d been with Papa in the Brygidki.
I couldn’t help the bitterness needling at me. How come he was free, and not Papa?
Strilka was still going on about his Nachtigallen.
“You’ll take your oath to Hitler and the Third Reich. You’ll take your orders from me.”
“And you’ll shoot me if I refuse?”
He avoided the question neatly. “Why refuse?”
“My war is right across the street,” I said. “Not with the Wehrmacht.”
He was reloading the pistol, not looking up. “Your father is dead, Aleksey.”
“What—you’ve seen him?”
“I saw enough.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He pushed the cartridges into the magazine with his thumb, one by one. “The Reds pulled out about an hour ago—tried anyway. We finished them in the street. Went in to see if we could find survivors. Found a few in the upper prison—the rats and collaborators, the ones they left for us to deal with. The lower prison…”
He let that hang in the air between us.
“I want to see,” I said.
“No, you don’t.”
“I want to see.”
“These weren’t the first shootings. These were the last. They’d already finished with the cellars. Must have been at it for days. Nobody’s alive down there. Too far gone to identify, most of them. Maybe you could do it if you knew clothes and personal effects, but you’d need a respirator.”
I think that was when I knew he wasn’t lying. His hands were shaking as he refitted the magazine, though his voice was steady.
“They left the upper prison burning. Clumsy attempt to cover—”
“All right,” I said, “all right.”
The strange thing was I didn’t feel anything now, not really. I was vaguely angry at Strilka, and I wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe because he’d so very obviously orchestrated all of this—not the shootings, I mean, but this, the food, the job offer, the trump card at the end: Your father is dead, Aleksey. He hadn’t been counting on that, but he sure as hell didn’t mind using it. But I didn’t feel anything for my father. Shock, I guess. Staggered by the irony. I’d have broken into the Brygidki to find him already dead after all.
I fought a sudden, wild urge to laugh.
Strilka holstered his pistol. He looked up.
“Commander Shukhevych is the better speechmaker. If he were here, he could tell you all about the glory of the fight. ‘Ukrainian blood on Ukrainian black earth.’ Very pretty. But instead I’m here telling you that you can have your revenge.” His eyes were sharp and cool on my face. “You tell me. How did it feel bowing and scraping to them—the people who took your father from you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never tried it.”
“No?”
“I don’t bow to Poles. Or to Reds. Or to Germans. Or to you.”
“They made you speak Polish, didn’t they? They wouldn’t want your dirty Ukrainian tongue in a high-class place like the Hotel George. Believe me, they knew exactly what they were doing.” Strilka blew a low, smoky breath. “I know you want revenge, Aleksey.”
“On my own terms. Not on the Germans’.” Not on yours.
He dropped his eyes to my bulging pockets pointedly.
“Not even for thirty Reichsmarks a month?”
“Thirty Reichsmarks?” I said, like an idiot. My face was burning again.
“A month,” he repeated. “That’s base pay. You’d have opportunity for promotion, of course. They want college-educated men for officers.”
Thirty marks—more than sixty rubles. More money at once than I’d seen since Mama died.
“Think about it,” Strilka said. “Revenge against the Poles, freedom, food on the table—all that to gain and nothing to lose.”
“All that and thirty pieces of silver,” I said, but oh, what I could do with sixty rubles. The first thing, of course, would be to pay Father Yosyp back the rent he’d covered these last three months. But after that—
“Think about Mykola,” Strilka said.
I was up so quickly that I think I startled him a little. He leaned back, one hand swinging down to his pistol. Quick as I was, Marko was quicker. He’d been watching and waiting for this moment. He closed the distance between us in one long step, slipping one arm around my chest, the other across my throat, hugging me close and tight, pinning my arms.
Strilka let go of his pistol. He puffed on his pipe—calmly, as though I hadn’t just caught him off his guard. Bastard.
“Where did you get his name?” I snarled, as menacingly as I could with Marko’s arm crushing my throat.
He took my map out of his breast pocket. “This is from an Orthodox Psalter.”
“So?” But I knew where he was going.
“So I went to the church. I wanted to know if you w
ere who you said you were. The priest gave me your name. Father Yosyp.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“He would if he thought you were dead.”
“He wouldn’t give you Mykola’s.”
“Name—no. I’m capable of reading baptismal records. Address and flat number—yes, unintentionally. The good father didn’t realize he was being followed.”
I jerked against Marko’s grip, kicking at his shins, trying to snap my head back into his face. He hooked a foot around my ankles and sent me neatly to my knees.
“I’m trying to get you to think about consequences,” Strilka said. He worked at his pipe unhurriedly, watching my face. “If you want to know your father’s one weakness, I think that was it. He accepted consequences for himself. I don’t think he ever understood what it meant for you.”
“If only he’d had you to explain it to him,” I said by reflex. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how right he was—how much that stung.
“And you, Aleksey Yevhenovych, ready to die in the Brygidki tonight, and never once stopping to think it through.”
“What can I say? I’m my father’s son.”
“For instance,” he said, ignoring me, “you didn’t think about what would have happened if they’d taken you alive—and they would have, almost certainly. You didn’t think about how much you’d spill under torture. You didn’t think about how much your father would spill when they brought him in to watch. Otherwise you’d have made a priority of getting Mykola out of the city first. Yes?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You were careless,” Strilka said quietly. “You can’t afford to be careless—not if you’re going to last this war.”
“All right,” I said, “all right. What do you want me to do? Kiss your feet?”
“Get up,” he said. “I want you to see something.”
9
They brought down the prisoner first, dragging him by the arms. His broken legs trailed limply and uselessly behind. Polish Resistance, Strilka said, one of the ones they’d found alive in the upper cells—one of the very few, which meant most likely he’d collaborated, which meant he was no good for ransom. Evidently, he hadn’t proven much good for information either.
By then I knew why they were here, Strilka and his Nachtigallen. They’d come to pick over the Reds’ leavings and take prisoners—and vengeance—of their own.
He didn’t really look like my idea of Polish Resistance. Stupidly but inevitably, my idea of Polish Resistance was something like the grim, hard-faced men in long navy coats and peaked caps who’d burst into our flat, torn the place apart, and taken Papa away into the night in a terrifying blur of efficiency. Their efficiency had struck me very clearly. The plainclothes officer who’d been in charge of the whole thing hadn’t really even needed to give any orders—just stood watching from the doorway, pulling lazily on a cigarette. Most of my memory of that night was a vague shambles, but that had stayed with me.
But he was about my age, this prisoner, tall and bony and barefoot, wearing the thin, fluttering gray tatters of what had once been a fine, store-bought suit. Maybe he’d been a student. Who knows? Maybe I’d even seen him on campus. He slumped silently against the wall when they let him go, folding up over his ruined knees, looking at nothing—but when Strilka said “collaborator,” his chin jerked up.
“I’m not a collaborator.” He said it in Ukrainian, sounding it out very slowly and stiffly, as though his tongue were out of practice. “Ya … ne … ye … kolaboratsionist”—then again, more confidently. “Ya ne ye kolaboratsionist.”
Marko came down the stairs with Andriy. At that moment, I understood what they were going to do. I don’t think Andriy did. He cast one darting, shamed glance over the Pole, another over me. When Strilka held out the pistol, he just looked at it for a second, blankly.
Then his face went white.
“Ya ne ye kolaboratsionist,” the Pole said.
“Andriy,” Strilka said.
“Ya na ye kolaboratsionist,” the Pole said. Then he switched suddenly to rapid Polish, shutting his eyes. “Ojcze nasz, którys jest w niebie, swiec sie imie twoje…”
Our Father, who art in heaven …
Andriy looked at the pistol in Strilka’s hand. The lump in his throat was going up and down, up and down. He was blinking very quickly. He shook his head once, just perceptibly.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Marko, leaning against the wall, slip his own pistol quietly from its holster.
“Andriy,” Strilka said, “take the gun.”
“… odpusc nam nasze winy,” the Pole said, “jako i my odpuszczamy naszym winowajcom…”
Andriy took the pistol. He cradled it against his stomach, fumbling blindly at the magazine housing. His hands were shaking.
“It’s loaded,” Strilka said blandly.
Andriy snapped the action and cupped his trembling hands around the grip. He lifted the pistol and trained it. Then he lowered it again. He looked back pleadingly at Strilka.
“… ale nas zbaw ode zlego,” the Pole finished.
Deliver us from evil.
“Go on,” Strilka said. “Deliver him.”
I looked away at the moment of the shot. I heard the bullet casing clatter and the body slump to the floor. When I looked back, Strilka had pulled Andriy in close, slipping his arms around Andriy’s thin, shaking shoulders. He pressed Andriy’s face to his shoulder and stroked Andriy’s close-cropped hair gently with his fingers, murmuring into Andriy’s ear: “You did well … you did well.”
But he was looking at me over Andriy’s head.
10
I had two hours, Strilka said.
A bullet-riddled NKVD car straddled the sidewalk below the Brygidki wall. It had smashed nose first into the wall and hung now at a gentle tilt across the curb, three wheels on the sidewalk and one in the street. A couple of Nachtigallen with blue-and-yellow armbands and submachine guns were standing guard at the Brygidki gate. The upper prison was still burning. The gate doors stood open, and I could see into the yard—just a glimpse in the smoke and firelight, just enough to see the row of limp, lumpy bodies piled waist-high against the far wall.
That was enough. I didn’t try to go in.
I ditched the NKVD uniform down a drain—everything except the boots, which were far better than my own shoes and could be sold later for a good price if need be. I could probably have sold the rest of the uniform too, but I didn’t want to be shot by some trigger-happy patriot before I got the chance.
The clock atop City Hall was tolling six when I went up the street stairs to our flat. I’d already used up a precious thirty minutes. The sun was up over the rooftops. The stairwell was dark even in daylight, stinking of grease and fried onions and cat piss. I fumbled for a second in the half-light, trying to fit my key into the lock. There was a trick to the door that involved pulling the door slightly toward you as you turned the key, then nudging it in very quickly with your foot as you slipped the key out. It would be less effort just to kick the door down if anybody really wanted to break in, so I guess the joke of it was that any place with a door like that wasn’t likely to be a place worth breaking in to. Anyway, nobody had ever tried.
And really it wasn’t much of a place. It was a single bare, square room, with a cracked linoleum floor and peeling, yellow-papered walls thin enough that you could hear the cockroaches scuttling in them at night. There was a woodstove and a washbasin with a tap on the western wall—left, as you came in the door. There was a corner cabinet with four chipped china plates and three mismatched glasses. There was a sagging wooden shelf on the far wall, the northern wall, that held our books, the ones we couldn’t bring ourselves to sell or burn: Papa’s carefully slipcased literary journals; Mama’s beloved natural histories; yellowed paperbacks of all the traditional nationalist writers; Mykola’s well-worn copy of Solovey the Robber, his favorite adventure story. There was one narrow, single-paned window on the eastern wall,
looking down on the street five floors below, and there were our icons: Christ and the interceding Theotokos, above, then each of our name saints—Yevhen of Trebizond and Larysa of Crimea, Aleksey the Man of God, Mykola the Wonder-Worker.
Most everything else had gone for fuel.
I kicked the door shut. Mykola was asleep in his corner, curled up knees to chest in his bed of tattered blankets—fully dressed, to his shoes. He’d pulled one blanket over his head, as always. I could just see the tip of his nose between the folds. He didn’t stir when the door swung to, and I didn’t wake him.
I went to the icons and made my prayers in silence—to Christ first, with the sign of the cross, then to the Theotokos, then to the saints in turn, Saint Yevhen last of all.
Only then, bending to kiss his icon in that holy silence, did I let the tears come—and only for a moment because I’d promised myself six years ago, on the day we buried Mama, that Mykola would never see me cry.
He must have felt me block the sunlight when I crouched to tug the blanket from his head. He woke up with a jerk before I’d even touched him. He thrashed his legs, flinging out an arm.
An empty vodka bottle rolled out from somewhere among the blankets, rattling away across the floor.
I snatched it back. “Where the hell did you get this?”
He fell back against the blankets with a groan, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. I could smell it on him now—straight alcohol and the stink of vomit. I stripped the soiled blankets away roughly, jerking them from under him.
“What—the—hell”—punctuating each word with a jerk of a blanket—“were—you—thinking?”
He didn’t speak. He curled against the wall, drawing up his knees. He looped his arms around his shins and buried his face between his kneecaps. I kicked the bottle away and went to fill a glass with water from the tap. I brought it over, knocking it sharply against his bowed head.
“Drink.”
His voice came up muffled from between his knees. “Leave me alone.”
“Drink it or you get it in the face.”
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