The Last Paradise

by Antonio Garrido

  “I just blurted it out. It was all I could think of to be able to speak to you alone. I thought that, it being a party, Sergei would pull the guards off and entrust Viktor to watch you. Anyway, the important thing now is to get you out of here as quickly as possible.”

  “My niece told me that they’re planning to lock me up. Is it true?”

  “Yes. Sergei’s going to accuse you of being behind the sabotage. He even blames you for the attempt on my life. He thinks that you’re working for your own benefit, embezzling funds from the factory, or worse still, doing it for the capitalist US government in order to delay Soviet industrialization.”

  “That man’s insane! No one’s keener than I am to avoid any disruption at the factory. It’s my responsibility to—”

  “I know. And that’s precisely why I felt obliged to tell you.”

  “But how did you find out?”

  Jack was silent for a moment. He looked at Hewitt and finally let out a sigh. “Because Sergei’s forcing me to spy on you.”

  Hewitt stopped in his tracks. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?” His face hardened.

  Jack took a deep breath. “I just said it. He’s making me find out whether his suspicions are correct.”

  “So you were already working for him when I asked you for help at the firing range?”

  “Let’s leave the lectures for another day,” said Jack. “What’s really important is to get you and Elizabeth out of here, before Sergei tires of waiting and fabricates evidence.”

  “I warned you! That son of a bitch is intent on laying the blame for his own incompetence on someone else! That’s what happens when you put peasants and goatherds in charge!”

  “Goatherds? Ha! Sergei’s a graduate of the Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology. If you’d warned me, I could have saved myself from a whole lot of trouble.”

  “And who taught him? Probably someone carrying a gun.”

  Jack saw Viktor in the distance searching for them with his eyes, and he led Hewitt to the junk room where they stored potatoes.

  “Did Elizabeth mention the money?”

  “She did. I have ten thousand dollars that I’ve been taking bit by bit from my account.”

  “That’s good. Wait here. I’m going to fetch my friend. I’ll be right back.”

  After looking through the lock to make sure nobody was watching, he opened the door and slipped out of the junk room. Shortly after he returned with Ivan Zarko and his nephew, Yuri, who stood guard on the other side of the door. After the introductions, Jack explained the situation superficially to Zarko. They needed three passports and a safe escape route. He refused to say how much money they had, though the Russian asked him several times.

  “Forget the price for now and tell us whether you can help us escape,” Hewitt said in broken Russian.

  “Who does this sack of shit think he’s negotiating with? A railway station clerk?” growled Zarko.

  Jack didn’t bother to translate. “Please, Mr. Hewitt! Keep quiet,” he said. “This man isn’t one of your employees!” He turned back to Zarko. “Excuse him. He doesn’t speak the language very well,” he said on Hewitt’s behalf. “We’ll pay what you consider fair.”

  “Why?” said Zarko, his expression ill-tempered. “Why should I be fair with him? I respect you because of my long friendship with Konstantin. He gave you blat. I owe your friend nothing.”

  “I’ll vouch for him,” Jack said to settle the matter.

  “Hmm . . . I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you.” He shook his head. “If you want to get out of the country without too many checks, you’ll need a Polish, Romanian, or Bulgarian passport, for instance. But if they arrest you, the first thing they’ll do is interrogate you in the language of your passport.”

  “The girl and her uncle speak German, and I can get by, too.” Jack was glad he’d had lessons for his trips to the machinery fair in Berlin. “Will that do?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s your money. It’ll cost you three thousand dollars, twenty-five hundred for theirs and five hundred for yours.”

  “Including transportation?”

  “No. For transportation expect to pay the same again. It will take me about three weeks to get the documents. Maybe four. But before spring it will be impossible to leave.”

  “Too long. I can wait, but these people need to go right now.”

  “Impossible. The railway’s a ticket straight to the gulag. The checks are constant. Two, even three times between each station. If the fugitives were anonymous citizens, they might be able to slip through, but as Americans reported missing, forget it. They’ll arrest you as soon as you set foot on the train. As for road transportation, it disappears in the winter.”

  “Damn it! Then find a private vehicle.”

  “Ha! And how will you refuel? Vodka and piss? You won’t find a gas station open for at least another six hundred miles. Trying it would be suicide.”

  Jack remembered the American couple he saw being arrested and shook his head. There had to be a way.

  “All right. You get the passports. We’ll take care of the rest ourselves.”

  Zarko agreed. He said good-bye to Jack with a squeeze of the hands, and gave Hewitt a disparaging look. Then he left the room and disappeared with his nephew. The industrialist waited to be filled in. “He’ll get us the passports. It’ll cost you six thousand dollars.”

  “Six thousand? That’s daylight robbery!”

  “Three thousand is for Zarko. In advance. The rest is what I’ve estimated we’ll need for bribes, lodging, transportation, and unforeseen expenses.”

  Hewitt looked at Jack with a tinge of distrust. Nonetheless, he put his hand in his pocket. “Six thousand!” He handed the money to the young man. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Jack wandered around the warehouse, feeling six thousand dollars more obligated and six thousand dollars less safe. He wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing. He knew he had to escape, but the image of Natasha in his mind was holding him back. As he served himself a shot of vodka, he felt as if all the guests had suddenly stopped dancing and fixed their eyes on him. Flustered, he made his way through the crowd to the corner where Viktor and Elizabeth were standing near the phonograph to better hear the music. He was surprised not to find Hewitt with them. Viktor seemed to have drunk too much and was struggling to remain steady. Jack filled his glass and drank a toast with the couple to hide his nerves. “To the American party!”

  “The American party!” they replied in unison.

  Viktor chinked his glass so hard that he splashed vodka on his uniform. When he moved away, he backed into the phonograph and made it fall on the floor.

  Jack picked up the contraption and put it back in its place, but when he tried to make it work again, he found that it was broken.

  “I’m sorry, I . . . ,” Viktor sputtered.

  “Don’t worry. Let’s hear the fiddle!” Jack yelled at the musicians.

  “You’ve got it all over you, too,” Elizabeth noted.

  “Huh? Oh yeah.” Jack gave his lapels a shake. “What a mess! I’ll go home to change, and while I’m there, I’ll try to fix the phonograph.”

  Viktor agreed without caring much where the device ended up, and he turned toward Elizabeth to kiss her. Her lips were unresponsive.

  “Have fun. I’ll be right back,” said Jack.

  Jack told Harry Daniels to take care of the guests and remind them that, in the new store, as well as potatoes and pork ribs, they would have a shoe repair service, and offer credit. He asked Jim to help him transport the phonograph. When they reached his house, Jack thanked the youngster for his help.

  “Leave the gadget there and get back to the party. I can manage on my own.” He closed the door and went to look for a clean suit.

  In his bedroom, he took the six thousand dollars from his jacket pocket and separated the wet bills. While they dried in the heat from the stove, he went to the wardrobe to change
his suit. However, when he opened the door, he remembered that Yuri had stored his evening jacket in McMillan’s trunk.

  He looked up at the top of the wardrobe. The trunk was still there, too high to reach with his hand. He dragged a chair over and positioned it beside the wardrobe. Then he put his left foot on the seat and lifted himself until he could reach the trunk’s handle. However, as he tried to pull it, he wobbled, and the trunk crashed to the floor.

  Jack swore to himself. As much as he tried to ignore it, he was infuriated by his hip injury. He got down from the chair and opened the lock, but as he did so, he saw that, with the impact, a panel inside the trunk had become detached, revealing what looked like a false bottom. Amazed, he used a coat hanger as a lever to tear out the panel, and saw that, sure enough, the trunk contained a hidden compartment. He quickly emptied it and tipped it over. The items concealed there included a notebook full of jottings, accounting documents, and plans of the Avtozavod. However, they were not the finds that made his heart stop.

  Almost reluctantly, he set aside the plans and picked up the red booklet marked with the gold letterhead of the United States.

  Jack looked at it openmouthed, unable to believe what he was reading. It was George McMillan’s passport. According to Wilbur Hewitt, McMillan, the engineer, had remained in New York due to a sudden attack of appendicitis. So why would his passport be in his trunk, ahead of his arrival in the Soviet Union? Incredulous, Jack carefully flicked through the booklet. When he read the last page, he let it drop as if he’d been shot. His heart pounded.

  On the last page, stamped in black ink, was an entry visa for the Soviet Union dated December 26, 1932, a week before the SS Cliffwood disembarked in Helsinki. And if George McMillan had entered the Soviet Union, Wilbur Hewitt had been lying to Jack since day one.

  30

  Though the evidence implicated Hewitt, Jack wanted to believe that there was a simple, innocent explanation.

  Certainly, the date stamped on the passport proved irrefutably that McMillan had entered the Soviet Union. However, he couldn’t understand why, after crossing the border, McMillan had hidden his passport. And even more of a mystery, where was the engineer now?

  Jack examined the face in the passport photograph: scholarly spectacles, wide-set eyes, a curly mustache—a distinguished countenance that, given the uniqueness of its features, he was certain he’d never seen before.

  Then he remembered Sergei’s suspicions. The OGPU boss claimed that the nature of the sabotage proved beyond a doubt that the perpetrator must have experience working with complex machinery, a description McMillan fit to a tee. Perhaps he was the man whom Sergei was looking for, and Wilbur Hewitt was the person hiding him.

  One fact was clear: Hewitt had lied to Jack when he told him that McMillan hadn’t left New York. However, there was one piece that didn’t fit. If Hewitt knew that McMillan had entered the Soviet Union, why would he have allowed Jack to keep his trunk and belongings? It made no sense, unless Hewitt was certain that McMillan would never reclaim it.

  He couldn’t find a logical explanation for Hewitt’s lies. He held the papers under a lamp and examined them minutely. His hands trembled as he leafed through each page of notes and read each transaction, unable to make any sense of it. He set them aside, angry with himself. Had his vanity and ambition blinded him? Could he really have been so stupid as to think that someone like Hewitt could hire and pay outrageous sums of money to a complete stranger? Unless, as it seemed, Hewitt needed a total imbecile for his plans.

  He couldn’t think straight. However, he still had enough wit to understand that the reason Hewitt was so afraid and so keen to escape was his guilt. The dilemma was that Jack couldn’t blow the whistle on him without implicating himself. He had just revealed his contacts to Hewitt, he was going to provide him with false documents, and he’d taken payment for it. If Hewitt went down, he would bring Jack down with him. And then there was Elizabeth; it wasn’t her fault if her uncle was corrupt.

  The only solution Jack could find was to leave things as they were and wait. He would persuade Hewitt that their escape would be impossible until spring, and in the meantime he would try to find his own way out. Until then, he’d look after himself. He’d work in the store, recover from his injury, earn money, and plan his escape. Now that he knew he was completely surrounded by vermin, it was all that mattered.

  December brought as much snow as it did bad news. The famine, fueled by shortages in Ukraine, the granary of the Soviet Union, was spreading its tentacles over the Avtozavod in the form of severe rationing. Fortunately, Jack’s store provided some relief for the Americans, not so much because of the meager provisions of the official store as because of the food that Miquel was able to procure on the black market.

  With Sergei’s acquiescence, Jack had managed to turn a cockroach-ridden warehouse into a grocery store that offered not just potatoes, beans, and pork belly, but also the tasty marinades that Miquel prepared, and the dishes that Harry Daniels’s wife cooked for those who preferred to work overtime. Harry and Jim washed and prepared the food rations from the general store to make them more appealing, and offering credit had attracted customers from the first day. With Joe Brown acting as bookkeeper and recording every last ruble, Jack soon became a seasoned and successful businessman.

  But the only person Jack wanted to impress with his acumen was Natasha.

  When his duties allowed it, he would go to see her. Most of the time, their meetings were limited to a short walk on the hospital grounds, but, work permitting, they would climb into the Ford Model A and escape to Gorky to enjoy its monuments and avenues. By her side, Jack found that his difficulties seemed to vanish. The problem was that, as soon as he returned home and closed the door, they all returned.

  His main cause for worry was his relationship with Hewitt, even though he had tried to think about him as little as possible since he discovered the industrialist’s deception.

  Another problem that he had to solve in December was moving to his new home. Though Walter had kept his distance, and the distrust of his fellow Americans had waned, Jack still felt it wise to move. Ivan Zarko had found him a house in the city, and he didn’t want to delay.

  He was trying to decide what furniture to keep when an insistent rap on the door tore him from his thoughts. When he opened it, he found Ivan Zarko’s nephew, whom he’d sent for the previous day to help him with the move. He let him in and showed him the belongings that had to be taken out to the horse-drawn cart that they were going to use for the move. While Yuri got to work, Jack put his final possessions in McMillan’s trunk and prayed that the palace that Zarko had promised him would live up to the description.

  However, when he found the colony of bats that flew in through the holes in the roof of his new home, he wondered whether Zarko knew the difference between a palace and a dunghill. Yuri had assured him that he’d see it differently once it had been given a good cleaning, but Jack doubted it. When the Russian had finished unloading, Jack limped up to the little balcony on the second floor that looked onto Alekseevskaya Street, near Gorky’s kremlin. From his viewpoint, he could see the towers of the old fortress built by the tsars, its majestic appearance a clear sign of the power that they once held.

  He turned to look at the adjoining homes, on two floors like his own and of similar appearance. According to Yuri, most of them had belonged to members of the bourgeoisie before they were turned into warehouses and workshops after the revolution. He closed the balcony door and went back inside to say good-bye to Yuri. Once alone, he sat on a chair and uncorked a bottle of vodka. He drank, the heat reviving him. On the third draft, he began to see the house in a different way. Perhaps, to avoid arousing suspicion if he was visited, he should give the walls a lick of paint. It would make the house look more like a proper home, where escape was the last thing on the mind of its tenant.

  What unfortunately he could not change was the steep staircase that had made him groan with pain as he cli
mbed it.

  He applied the lanolin cream that Natasha had given him to the scar and flexed his leg. Then he tried to lift the knee to the height of his navel, but before he reached it, he felt as if a blade were piercing his belly.

  He breathed hard before swallowing another draft of vodka. Hewitt, a traitor; Sergei, a fanatic; McMillan, missing; Anatoly Orlov, dead . . . It all swirled around in his head. He decided to sleep and wait for dawn.

  He was woken by an unbearable pain in his hip, which he attributed in part to the terrible cold of mid-December. However, the air felt strangely warm. When he sat up, he found Yuri wandering around the room. Apparently, the young man had a key and had risen early to clean the house. Jack put on a dressing gown, washed his face with the water he found in a basin, and looked around. Now that it had been washed down, the place looked better, though it could still easily be confused with a pigsty. Yuri, who was devouring something, greeted him with his mouth full and offered him some kind of roasted sausage sandwiched between two pieces of black bread. Jack took it and wolfed it down without complaint. He was so hungry, he could have eaten the bats that still flitted in the roof.

  “Bath?” asked Yuri, and without looking away from his sausage, he gestured at a wooden tub full of steaming water.

  “You Russians know how to survive the winter.” Jack’s smile lasted as long as it took for the effects of his hangover to set in.

  He looked at the bathtub and hesitated. He felt like submerging himself in hot water and forgetting about his problems for a while, but he wasn’t sure his wound would welcome it. Since the attack, he had kept the area dry.

  He saw that Yuri was about to go downstairs. “Are you going?”

  “I left some of your things in my uncle’s warehouse. I’ll fetch them. He needs the space.”

  “All right. But don’t be long. You’ll have to help me get down the stairs. Yesterday it hurt like crazy.” Jack regretted deciding to spend the night on the upper floor.