Last to Fold

by David Duffy

  He nodded. “I know that, of course. Something else I learned—one step at a time.”

  “Any idea why she would have run from the hospital?”

  He shook his head. “Only to avoid being brought home.”

  “Any idea where she would have gone?”

  “None. I’m afraid that for all our concern, we don’t know nearly as much about her as we should. That goes for her mother, too.”

  “You will talk to her? Your wife, I mean,” I said.

  “Yes. I’m on my way home now.”

  “I think you’ll find her under some stress.”

  “About Eva?”

  “In part. How much do you know about her past?”

  He hesitated, surprised by the question. “Not a great deal. She grew up in Queens, Jackson Heights. Went to CCNY. Sold real estate—very successfully. Married once before. Her first husband died. I haven’t pried. Not really my business.”

  “I don’t mean to add to your troubles, but her past is a good deal more complicated than that.”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “Just that I think it’s about to catch up with her.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Trastevere was in the early Eighties. I didn’t know it, the Eighties not being my normal neck of the woods. A simple room, in an elegant kind of way, the kind of simplicity that comes at a price. I arrived hot and sticky and was greeted at the door by an old-world Italian gentleman of about fifty with kind eyes and a warm smile.

  “Ms. Millenuits just called,” he said when I announced myself. He looked around the room as if trying to decide something. “She … she said she is very sorry, but she’s been detained. She doesn’t know how long she’ll be. She suggests that you meet here tomorrow night. She said…” He stopped and looked troubled.

  “You’re being very kind. I’m guessing she isn’t sorry, very or otherwise. You can tell me what she really said.”

  He was clearly uncomfortable. A good host doesn’t attack his guest as soon as he walks in the door.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve already been on the receiving end of Ms. Millenuits’s temper. Would you like to see the bruise?”

  He smiled, but he didn’t relax. He unfolded a piece of paper from his jacket.

  “She said, ‘Tell that bald Bolshevik he can buy me your best bottle of wine tomorrow night if I cool off between now and then. And tell him to bring his body armor. He’s going to need it.’ Those were her words. She wanted me to repeat them exactly.”

  “I’ll attest you did as requested, if given the chance,” I said with a smile. “No hard feelings.” I put out my hand, which he took quickly.

  “I’m sorry to—”

  “Don’t think any more about it. Would it be okay if I had a bite at the bar? Since I’m here, and solo.”

  “Of course. But please, let me give you a table.”

  “The bar’s fine. I’ll have a dry martini with Russian vodka, if you have it, followed by whatever pasta you’re recommending tonight.”

  “Right away.”

  The martini was cold and dry, just like it should be. It went down quickly, so I ordered another. The pasta came coated with a sauce of escargots and mushrooms that was wondrous in its depth and complexity. I found myself looking forward to coming back regardless of whether Victoria showed up.

  The place was busy, as was the bartender. With no one to talk to, other than the owner, who came by three times to make sure I wasn’t angry at him, I spent the meal musing on intersections of past and present.

  I probably shouldn’t have warned Mulholland about Polina. It wasn’t my business, and he’d made his own bed (with her)—but in spite of myself, I felt bad for him. Perhaps because I knew in ways he’d yet to experience what he was in for. Perhaps because he’d surprised me with his concern for Eva, real and heartfelt. Perhaps because a new snake pit was about to open at his feet, one he wasn’t likely to see before he fell in. Bad enough that Polina had been married to me and hadn’t told him, but Lachko was a whole different nest of vipers. I had a mental image of Victoria licking her Cajun chops when she heard the news.

  Nothing I’d learned in the last thirty-six hours caused me to change my initial belief that Polina was hiding from Lachko. I still couldn’t see why. Lachko had expressed less than no interest in her or Eva. I’d half expected him to drag me back to Brighton Beach or at least send Sergei around, but he hadn’t even asked which hospital Eva was in. Maybe he’d found out by other means. Iakov expressed more curiosity in Eva and her mother, and he hated Polina. Always had.

  Then there was the enigma of Ratko. He knew exactly who Polina was—he was using the information to put the bite on her. How, and why, had he found out in the first place? Why didn’t he tell his boss? Why was he getting ready to disappear as Alexander Goncharov? Greed—not wanting to share the spoils—seemed much too simple an answer.

  Iakov’s Cheka business somehow involved Ratko. How had he put it—laying old ghosts to rest? Why did he need Ratko for that? Why didn’t Lachko know his resident tech genius was working on the side for his old man? There was a lot Lachko didn’t know—a lot that was going on right under those thundercloud eyebrows. Maybe his illness had slowed him down to the point where he was out of touch. Based on our encounter yesterday, I doubted it.

  One piece of good information had come from all this. Aleksei was alive and, according to Lachko, working with the CPS—the Criminal Prosecution Service. I hadn’t wanted to show it, but that was the first hard news I’d had in years. It appeared Polina had abandoned him following Kosokov’s death. Perhaps she’d left him with her sister, or another relative. Had she been in touch since? Did he know about his mother’s new identity? Then there was the question I’d been asking myself for two decades—what, if anything, had she told him about me?

  My head was starting to spin, and other investigations tugged. I’d had enough vodka to numb whatever pain was in Sasha’s envelope. Tonight was as good a time as any to look into my own old ghosts. I asked for the check. Two martinis and pasta—eighty-five dollars by the time I signed the receipt. There are sound Marxist reasons why the East Eighties aren’t my neck of the woods.

  I remembered my disabled cell phone and turned it back on. It buzzed half a minute later.

  “BASTARD! Tell me right now…”

  I’ve never appreciated the opportunity to listen to other people’s phone conversations while I’m eating, even when they’re friendly, so I told Polina to hold on, thanked the owner and reminded him I looked forward to sampling his fare again tomorrow, and walked out into the heat of Second Avenue. Just after nine thirty, the street was still hot and busy.

  “You keep calling me like this, I might think you have ulterior motives,” I said.

  “Ulterior motives? My only motive is to get you out of my life!”

  “You talk to Mulholland?”

  “He’s a stubborn fool, like all men.”

  “He’s trying to help. Eva, I mean.”

  “I can take care of her. I always have.”

  I didn’t point out that Mulholland thought that was part of the problem. Or that I agreed with him. “Why’d you pull that scam?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The kidnap picture. You Photoshopped it, sent it to Mulholland with that bullshit kidnap note. Why didn’t you just tell him you were being blackmailed?”

  “What? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “How do you … Nobody’s blackmailing me!”

  “If you say so, but the only person delusional this time is you.”

  “You … You … You haven’t changed at all, you son of a bitch.”

  “Still the same guy, zek and all, I always was. What are you afraid of? Lachko?”

  Pause. “Yes.”

  “Why’d you run out on him?”

  “Long story.”

  “You want to tell it? I’m not far
away.”

  “Stay away from me!”

  “I’m not the one trying to hurt you, Polya.”

  “I said, stay the fuck away.”

  This was getting nowhere. “Where’s Aleksei? Did you leave him in Russia?”

  “He’s all right. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Lachko says he’s working for the CPS.”

  Another pause, longer this time. “That bastard.”

  “You can’t isolate yourself, Polya. Lachko, me, Mulholland. A couple of us might still be on your side, if you let us.”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “I think you do. I think that’s why you called. What did Rislyakov take from your computer?”

  “This conversation is over.”

  The line went dead. I was at Seventy-first Street. I walked south and tried calling her from Fifty-eighth Street. I tried again at Fifty-second. No answer. I hailed a downtown cab.

  * * *

  The office was dark, but Pig Pen was awake, listening to his radio.

  I retrieved Sasha’s envelope and stopped to say good night.

  “Truck lanes closed. Exit nine. Fuel spill,” he said.

  “Not on my route. Pig Pen, what do you know about serendipity?”

  He gave me his hostile one-eyed stare. He hates words of multiple syllables—he thinks I’m teasing him.

  “No joke, seriously, serendipity.”

  “Pity me?”

  “Not pity. Luck. Good luck.”

  “Lucky Russky.”

  “Exactly.”

  The neck feathers ruffled. “Luck. Crap shoot.”

  “You’ve been spending too much time with the boss.”

  “Crap shoot.”

  “Okay. Maybe. Boss likes statistics and probabilities, but sometimes you gotta go with what’s working. If I roll seven on this crap shoot, pizza’s on me.”

  That grabbed him. “Seven—pizza!”

  “You got it.”

  “Seven. Lucky Russky. Pizza!”

  One thing about Pig Pen. He doesn’t lack focus.

  I took my time walking home. The streets were still steaming. I was anticipating a painful evening, vodka-numbed or not.

  “Lucky Russky,” Pig Pen had said. If he was right, tomorrow night I wouldn’t dine alone.

  Solovetsky, March 12, 1938

  Dearest Tata,

  My heart breaks. I cannot believe this is happening. I have to try to tell someone, so someone knows and I keep my sanity.

  We were on our way to work in the forests yesterday, Mama and I, in a large group of prisoners. It had snowed overnight. It was cold, below freezing. I remember willing the sun to rise higher in the sky to provide a little warmth.

  Our group slowed when we saw the line of men being led toward Sekirka—the ancient church that has become the killing chamber for the monsters that run this hell on earth. We all knew what the queue meant, and we hung our heads in sorrow and shame—sorrow for our comrades, shame for ourselves and our country.

  When I looked up, I saw the shock of red hair in the middle of the shuffling group. I didn’t want to believe it at first, but then he turned, and despite the distance, there was no doubt. Papa! We had not seen him since the night of our arrest.

  I pointed him out to Mama, who broke into tears. She yelled after him, but he could not hear, she was weak from hunger, and he was too far away. A guard told her to shut up, but she yelled again—“Filya! Filya!”

  The guard hit her with his rifle. The line of condemned men moved up the hill toward the church. I watched my father disappear through the doors without hearing Mama call him for the last time. I have never felt such helplessness and misery.

  The guard poked me with his gun, and I helped poor Mama to her feet. He shoved us back into line with the others.

  There was nothing we could do. Our hearts in pieces, we were led off to work.

  I can’t understand how anyone, Bolsheviks, Stalinists—we’re all Russians!—can do this. My grief is my own, but I’m surrounded by thousands of others with stories just like mine.

  We are in an unimaginable place run by incomprehensible people. I go to sleep each night asking God to take me to the eternal underworld—it can’t be any more sorrowful than this.

  I put down the letter and went to the freezer for the vodka. I hadn’t had enough to numb the pain after all.

  No one can say how many people died in the Gulag. Estimates run into the millions. I now knew for certain one of them was my grandfather. I have the record of his arrest, with his wife and daughter, on November 26, 1937, the first year of Stalin’s Great Terror. I have a record of them at Solovetsky—the cradle of the Gulag, a network of islands in the White Sea and the Soviet’s first forced labor camp— in 1938. I have an old photograph of the sign that welcomed new arrivals—WITH AN IRON FIST, WE WILL LEAD HUMANITY TO HAPPINESS. I know Solovetsky’s inmates worked and died in its forests, timber mills, fisheries, and factories. When the islands had been largely deforested, the camps were incorporated into the larger Belbaltlag network, whose inmates built the White Sea Canal. Those camps were vacated in 1941, ahead of the German advance, and I have documentation of my mother’s transfer to Norillag in Siberia, where she stayed until her release in 1946. My grandparents disappeared from the record. Until now.

  My mother’s name was Anna. She was nineteen, Eva’s age, when she was arrested. Her parents were artists, members of the Russian avant-garde, committed revolutionaries, friends of Malevich, Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, and the rest. She studied music. She was a singer, a soprano, and apparently an accomplished one, even in her teens. There was no legal reason for their arrest, just some trumped-up charge about working to undermine the revolution. Stalin had set quotas, and the NKVD dutifully fulfilled them, just as other agencies produced economic results to meet the five-year plans. The economics were often fiction; the arrests were real—1,575,259 people in 1937 and 1938 alone. The Cheka shot 681,692 of them.

  I stopped at the stereo to turn up the volume. I was listening to Mahler, his Ninth Symphony, perhaps his most prayerful piece, which he wrote after discovering his wife was sleeping with Walter Gropius. He was my mother’s favorite composer, or so I’ve been told. I prefer Prokofiev—I like percussion—but tonight it seemed a little prayer couldn’t hurt.

  I’d done my best to bury my past. When Iakov got me out of the Gulag and into the Cheka, he also procured a new passport, one that bore no record of my birthplace or incarceration. Over time, serving in the Cheka enabled me to shed the fear of rearrest that haunts many former prisoners, even those who were now “clean” and led a normal life, or as normal as was possible in Soviet Russia. That was all blown up during the Disintegration when Lachko extracted his revenge by informing Polina about my time in the camps. Horrified that my taint would rub off on her, terrified that I would return her to the shambles of insecurity that was her childhood, she did everything she could to use my shame against me. She succeeded beyond her greatest expectations.

  It took many more years, the dissolution of the Soviet state, and my finally moving away from Russia before I came to realize that I would remain imprisoned by my past, just as sure as I was an inmate of the Gulag, until I confronted it head-on. I also had the vague idea that the one thing I could give Aleksei was the truth about his family. How and when I would pass it on was an open question, but I figured I’d find a way if and when the time came. First I had to unearth the story.

  That’s not easy. The Gulag doesn’t give up its secrets without a fight. You have to know how to dig, and you need help. Even then, many are buried too deep to ever be found. There’s also an emotional price. Working on oneself, the early Bolsheviks had called it—trying to rewire human psychology to adapt to new social goals by altering one’s identity. “The new structure of political life demands from us a new structure of the soul,” the de facto Bolshevik propagandist Maxim Gorky wrote in 1917. Reconstructing the history of my mother’s life was the psychological eq
uivalent of dismantling the soul I structured when Iakov plucked me from the Gulag and I entered the Cheka. Lonely work, but maybe someday I’d be able to tell somebody about it.

  Mahler faded to silence. Most symphonies rise to great final crescendos. Not Mahler’s Ninth. He hints and feints, starts the climb once or twice, but backs off into deeper contemplation. In the end, as Bernstein put it, he simply lets the strands of sound disintegrate. I’ve always felt that fourth movement comes as close as anything to capturing the tragedy of the human experience—in a few bars of music.

  The vodka glass was empty, too. I didn’t need more, but I got a refill anyway, stopping on the way to play Miles Davis and Gil Evans’s Sketches of Spain. I went back to my papers as Miles sounded the first few bars of “Saeta”—literally, “heart pierced by grief.”

  I never knew the man with the funny name who was my father. I know how he met my mother in Norillag, a few months before she was released for the first time in 1946. He was an NKVD officer, on the staff of Lavrenty Beria, head of the secret police and Stalin’s chief executioner. Her beauty was intact. I have a letter he wrote attesting to that fact. He could not approach her there—zeks were nonpersons, untouchables—but as soon as she got out, he found her in Moscow.

  This was a risk on his part. Release did not mean rehabilitation in the eyes of the state, and fear ruled the populace. Former prisoners were shunned, then as now, even by family and old friends. My father took the chance, and they fell in love. He also paid the price. They had two years together, but when she was taken away again in 1948, in a wave of rearrests, he was picked up, too. She got a second ten-year sentence and a trip to Dalstroy, a complex of camps in Kolyma in far northeastern Siberia. He was sent to Steplag in what is now Kazakhstan. The fact that he was an NKVD officer, the son of a prominent Chekist and friend of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, didn’t matter. Or maybe it did. He was released after two years, in 1950. By 1951 he was again wearing an NKVD uniform.

  None of this was as unusual as it sounds. Naftaly Frenkel, a Stalin favorite who oversaw construction of the White Sea Canal, rose from prisoner to camp commander. The deputy director of the Dmitlag camp, a guy named Barabanov, was arrested in 1935 for drunkenness and escaped the Great Terror because he was already in jail. He emerged some years later, went back to work for the NKVD, and rose through the ranks until, in 1954, he was deputy director of the entire Gulag.