First, I checked the map. Cherkeh was a dull pencil dot in a vast blankness traced by a few twisting rivers. For the life of me, I couldn’t see how such a rudimentary drawing could be helpful. Fortunately, he’d written out the directions in detail: I was to board a ferry in Yakutsk, cross the Lena River, and get on a van that stopped at various villages. There might be eight or ten others in the van—as many paying customers as could be crammed inside—with the driver making stops according to each person’s needs. Depending on who else was riding that day, the trip might take anywhere from five to ten hours. Once in Cherkeh, I could ask any passerby for directions to Katarina Melnikova’s house. There was a little message at the bottom: Thank you for everything. I hope we will meet again someday.
Finally, I opened the slip of white paper and read these words, scrawled in pencil:
It’s my fault Saldana died. I sent her the files in case something happened to me. Kosloff’s documents, the pictures from Death Valley—everything. The FSB would have found the email to her on my computer. They broke into her hotel room to steal her laptop and killed her when she came in.
There was no signature.
I refolded the note, thinking, Don’t do this to yourself, Misha. Just don’t. In his grief and rage, he was clearly overreacting, blaming himself, as family members often did. That explained his ashen look and trembling hands when we’d said goodbye. If he’d given me the chance, I would have urgently tried to talk him out of guilt. There was nothing good in it, nothing to be gained. It would only hurt him in the long run, more than he could guess. He’d been very smart to send me on my way before that conversation could take place.
But as my emotions settled, the details of the crime that had bothered me from the beginning came back into focus. The fact that the killer took Saldana’s computer and not her money. And the murder weapon—the wire garrote—had always seemed the tool of a professional killer rather than a common thief. Those details had thrown the NYPD’s hasty burglary-gone-bad thesis into doubt, at least in my mind. But they hadn’t been enough to prove that the Russian government was behind the murder. Now all that was changed. If the FSB knew Saldana was in possession of Leonid Kosloff’s monograph, they had a plausible motive for silencing her that, ironically, had nothing to do with either her plan to defect or her family members’ CIA connections.
So Misha could be right. It was his fault—if he wanted to look at it that way, which I really hoped he wouldn’t. One thing I’d learned as a doctor was how perfectly useless guilt is. There had been countless times in my career when I’d wanted to scream at bereaved family members: Of course the baby wouldn’t have died of SIDS that afternoon if you hadn’t put him in his crib for a nap! Of course grandpa might have lived a little longer if you’d taken him for a check-up sooner than you did! But now the baby’s dead, and so is grandpa, and you’re alive and well—so far—and you have no right to ruin your own god-given health by imagining you’re a worse person than you really are!
Luckily for my patients, I’d learned not to say everything on my mind.
In a few hours, the helicopter touched down in Mirny. Roxana gave me a ride downtown in her Ford Explorer, waving off the extra money she was owed for the extended trip. It was just as well, as I didn’t have much cash left. I copied her address into my phone, promising to write when I was back in the States.
“What about the police and the trouble you’re in?” she asked.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, having no idea. “Just remember that what you might hear about me isn’t true.”
In a busy cafeteria, alive with the smells of coffee and cinnamon and the thrum of conversation, I bought a coffee and potato pastry and a local newspaper at the counter. Taking a seat as far away as I could get from the big window onto the street, I shoved my conspicuous luggage under the table. The paper gave no mention of the murders on ul Barrikad. There was nothing in the online edition either, not even on the day the murders had taken place. I had no idea what to make of that. A cover-up? Business as usual in the Russian Far East? More likely, the investigation had passed into the hands of the security forces, who played by their own rules and thrived on secrecy. In any case, I needed to get out of town right away, avoiding the airport if possible.
There was only one taxi company in town. I called the number, explained to the man who picked up the phone that I wanted a driver to take me to Yakutsk as soon as possible.
“That trip takes eight hours one way,” he barked. “And you have to pay round-trip.”
“How much?” I would have paid any price, but it would seem suspicious if I didn’t barter.
“You have cash?” he asked slyly.
“Sorry. Credit card only.”
“All right. Maybe I have a driver for such a long trip, maybe not. I will have to let you know. I will call you back in one hour.”
“Half an hour.”
“Maybe. I’ll see what I can do.”
I waited thirty minutes, pretending to read the newspaper. I bought another coffee and waited another thirty minutes. What was taking so long? Had my American accent sounded an alarm? Even though I knew it was stupid, and probably not even possible, I imagined the phone call being traced to my precise location and a flock of squad cars with blaring sirens swooping down on the little café.
I rummaged in my duffel for Ilmira’s rain hat and put it on, along with my sunglasses. Then I gathered up my luggage and walked out of the coffee shop into a cool, overcast day. In a park where children were playing, I sat down on a bench and dialed the taxi service again. This time, a woman answered.
“I’m waiting to hear about a driver to take me to Yakutsk.”
“What? We don’t have taxis going there. It’s much too far away.”
“Are you sure? I spoke to someone at your company an hour ago who said he could find someone to take me.”
“Who was it? What was his name?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“It must have been Boris. He is the only one stupid enough to have said such a thing.”
“Does this mean I can’t get a taxi?”
“Of course not. What do you think? The only way to get to Yakutsk from here is by plane.”
I thanked her and hung up.
I’d meant to stay away from the airport. Too many people with badges hanging around; too many gates to get through. But it looked as though I’d have to risk it, as there was no safe place for me in Mirny. Imposing on Tolya and Emmie again was out of the question; I’d already put them in danger by having had contact with them at all. Roxana would probably have sheltered me if I’d asked, but that would have put her in danger, too.
I pulled up the airport on my cell phone. A shuttle to Yakutsk left daily at 2:15 p.m.
I had a passport and credit card in the name of Anne-Marie Phipps. All I had to do was buy a ticket and board the plane. I’d be fine as long as Ilmira hadn’t shared my photo with the authorities, and even if she had, I could still slip through if the airport personnel were uninformed or lax, as they tended to be. The trick, I decided, would be to arrive at the airport close enough to the time of departure that I wouldn’t have to wait around in the terminal, drawing attention to myself. Once I landed in in Yakutsk, I could disappear fairly quickly into the countryside.
A taxi brought me to the airport. There was no sign of police, and the official who remembered my name the last time I was there wasn’t in sight. Ticketing went smoothly. I was one of the last to board a small commercial jet. Seats were not assigned, and the passengers had spaced themselves out so that I couldn’t get a row to myself. I chose an aisle seat towards the back, next to a pleasant-looking woman in her sixties. As I sank gratefully into the worn upholstery, I let out a sigh of relief. The CIA’s fake documents had done their work; with any luck, they’d take me all the way home.
In one of those random coincidences that travelers often experienced, my companion was an American from California, a solo traveler like myself. Hip, green glass
es perched on her snub nose, and her silk scarf combined all the colors of the rainbow. She wrote a blog called “Alice in Wanderland,” full of tips and itineraries for the adventurous empty-nester. Thrilled to meet a fellow American, she regaled me with stories of her adventures in far-flung parts of the world. Though her determination to lead an interesting life was perhaps a bit too strident, she made delightful company. I found myself laughing unguardedly for the first time since I’d been in Russia, pleasantly homesick for my comfortable life in Washington—especially for my deep, downy couch, where I vowed to curl up for as many days as I wanted upon my return, wearing sweatpants and woolly socks, eating chocolate and ice cream, watching old Audrey Hepburn movies while guiltlessly blowing off work. If there was one thing this experience had taught me, it was that the medical center that used to be my entire universe was actually just a tiny microcosm, that I could exist outside its boundaries—and needed to. Vera would be proud.
The plane touched down in Yakutsk after a mere ninety minutes in the air. Alice and I crossed the tarmac with a couple dozen other passengers, and entered the familiar, dismal terminal building. There were the native faces waiting peaceably behind the rope line; there was the baggage chute and rotating carousel. We planned to continue our conversation over dinner—a luxury I’d decided to afford myself before I set out the next day for Cherkeh—so I waited for Alice to claim her luggage, a large red Samsonite that she needed help pulling off the belt. I had my duffel already, which held nothing decent for me to change into. My clothes smelled of reindeer skin and smoke, and were smudged—as I myself was, I realized—with Verkhoyansk Mountain mud.
As we were leaving the building, two uniformed security officers came upon us suddenly, and asked to see our documents.
Alice gave a loud sigh and rolled her eyes. “They always go for us foreigners.” Seeing my face, she added, “Nothing to worry about. Just a random check. Happens all the time.”
I showed my passport with what I hoped was a friendly smile. Just a random check. The official thumbed through it and came to a page at the back.
“Where are you coming from?”
“Mirny.”
“What was your business there?”
“Tourism.”
“Where do you live?”
“Washington, D.C.”
He flipped to the front of the passport and studied the photo, glanced up and down several times, comparing it to my face. I tried to relax.
Meanwhile, Alice had been cleared. She pointed toward the entrance, indicating that she would wait for me there, and trundled off in her jaunty scarf, trailing her huge, eye-catching suitcase.
“What brings you to Yakutsk?” the officer asked.
I hesitated. Why was I in Yakutsk? “I thought I’d visit the Permafrost Institute.”
“Are you traveling with that American woman?” he said, nodding toward Alice’s retreating figure.
My face grew warm. I wanted to say yes so that he might be inclined to let me follow her toward the terminal’s main door. But if they checked with her, I would be caught in a lie. “No. Alone. We just met on the plane.”
I felt as if I were making mistakes, tiny ones, even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t so far. But the situation could spin out of control very quickly if I wasn’t careful. It felt like the giddy moment when the roller coaster started to drop, and the best you could hope for was to ride it out.
The official was Caucasian, tall, narrow-shouldered—really just a boy with soft fingers and smooth cheeks, dressed up in a smart black uniform with a billy club hanging from his belt. His expression was so perfectly flat and impersonal that he must have practiced it in the mirror at home. He continued thumbing through the passport, even though we both knew the pages hadn’t changed since the first time he looked.
Having traipsed back to me, travel-savvy Alice in Wanderland hovered close at my elbow, peering up at the tall boy. “What’s going on here? What’s this about?” she asked in high umbrage. I sensed that she’d had a lot of practice at performing entitled Western outrage in foreign hotels and restaurants. Her Russian was terrible—the Gde tualet? of the tourist class.
This seemed to give the boy a new idea. He looked at me with a flicker of interest. “You speak Russian very well for an American.”
“My parents are Russian…I mean, Russian immigrants…American citizens, actually. I learned Russian at home.”
“Ah,” he said meaningfully, and I was left to wonder what meaning he’d gleaned. He flipped casually to the last page of the passport.
“Where did you stay in Mirny?”
“The Zarnitsa,” I replied without hesitation, having prepared the answer beforehand. This was the nicest hotel in the city, where a wealthy Westerner would be most likely to stay.
“And when did you check out?”
“This morning.”
“There’s no registration stamp.”
“Oh. That must be a mistake. On the hotel’s part.” How stupid of me to have forgotten about the governmental registration process, whereby a hotel verified a guest’s stay, presenting a date-stamped form for the traveler to show officials if asked. But the situation could be finessed, I thought, as an inexperienced traveler might easily overlook the formality and the hotel must also neglect this duty once in a while.
The young man looked coldly into my eyes.
I added, “A silly mistake. But what can you do? Everyone makes mistakes.”
He snapped the passport closed, and I watched it disappear into his pocket. “Come with me.”
My heart plummeted. The blood rushed out of my head. Alice blinked rapidly behind her owlish glasses. “What’s happening?” she asked, having been unable to follow the conversation in Russian.
“I’m not sure. Probably just a routine check,” I said, eager to have her gone, as she seemed a liability now, with her clumsy self-importance.
“I’ll wait for you,” she said steadfastly.
“There’s no telling how long it will take. You might as well go to your hotel, and I’ll call when I’m done here.”
The uniformed boy led me to the far end of the terminal, through a door, down a corridor, into a blue-painted room with a table and some plastic chairs scattered randomly about. The lighting was poor. There was a scrim of grime everywhere and the smell of mold.
I’d read somewhere that innocent people reacted with anger when they were unjustly accused. I hotly demanded to know why I was being detained. “You have no right to hold me against my will,” I said with righteous outrage, not knowing if that were true.
“Wait here.” The boy left the room.
A few minutes later, a short, heavy woman entered, and asked me to place my luggage on the table. She had blue-shadowed, droopy eyes, thick lips, and a lazy demeanor that the black police uniform, straining across her buxom chest, did nothing to offset. She pulled out my clothes, all dirty, ran her fingers through the duffel’s interior pockets. She found Misha’s map, and stared at it curiously without requesting an explanation. Then she extended a hand, palm up, and asked for my phone. I refused to give it on the grounds that it was an invasion of privacy. This response elicited no visible reaction, and she left the room.
There were no surveillance cameras in the room, one of the few benefits of Siberian poverty.
I opened Anne-Marie Phipps’s phone and started deleting all the photos I’d taken of Tolya and Emmie, and all the ones from Death Valley. Also Roxana’s name and address. There was practically nothing left on the phone after that—no contacts, texts, or emails; no apps or photos of family and friends. Only the calls to the taxi service and the airport search remained. Anyone who examined the phone would know it was a fake.
Don’t panic, I told myself. Think. Had news of the double murder in Mirny trickled down to Yakutsk? Did the fact that the crime wasn’t mentioned in the Mirny paper mean that it was unknown here? If so, I could still slip through this net if my cover held. But if it didn’t?
Fi
rst off, I needed to contact someone, anyone, who could help an American tourist who’d been unlawfully detained. That meant the American Consulate. The nearest was over a thousand miles away in Vladivostok. I attempted to bring up their website, but there was no wi-fi and the cellular connection was unbearably slow. The blue line crawled a quarter-inch across the screen and died.
I went to the door of the stuffy room. It was locked. I shook the handle. “Hello! Is anyone there? Hello?” When no one answered, I banged on the door with my fists. “I demand that this door be unlocked!”
The heavily made-up woman returned. “I will wait with you,” she said, as if doing a favor for a friend. “There’s no trouble. They are just checking something. It won’t be long.”
My things were still scattered on the table, the duffel yawning open. I folded and repacked my clothes like someone who fully expected her journey to resume, while all the while my brain was racing to concoct my story.
I was Anne-Marie Phipps. The passport gave me an age of thirty-nine and an address in Georgetown. Fine. But what about the rest? Where did I work? Was I married? Did I have kids? Anything I told them could easily be checked. What had made me decide to tour northeastern Siberia? Why Mirny, of all places? I didn’t have diamond jewelry to show from my excursion, and the hotel Zarnitsa had no record of my stay. I couldn’t talk convincingly about anything I’d done there. Mentioning Roxana
Amasova and Death Valley would lead my questioners to Tolya and the Evenki Museum, and thus to Mikhail Tarasov, who had lived in the apartment on ul Barrikad where the murders took place.
My mind raced in circles, looking for a narrative that would hold up. I soon realized there was no way out of the mess, no thread I could find the end of and pull into a clean, innocent story that would withstand even the most casual scrutiny. The Anne-Marie Phipps identity was destined to dissolve within minutes, and if and when it was discovered that I was actually Dr. Natalie March, I’d be in the kind of trouble you couldn’t talk your way out of.
FINDING KATARINA M. Page 21