Tarasov didn’t believe in coincidences. He threw his butt on the floor and went out.
At 7:30 the next morning, Leo Yakunin came to Tarasov’s flat.
“Sorry about the time,” said Leo after Tarasov let him in. “I just got off the night train.”
He grimaced at the tiny space. “Lord, what a shithole.”
“Why are you back from Leningrad, Leo?”
“I got it. The link.”
Tarasov smiled. “Like some coffee?”
“That would be great.”
They went to the kitchen and sat down. Tarasov stood in his bathrobe over the coffeepot. It ticked as the water warmed.
“Go on,” said Tarasov. “You were telling me about a link.”
“Last year, on November 11 at 3:30 A.M., Yevgenia Perova was signed into the Leningrad KGB building by then-colonel Yuri Belov.”
Tarasov thought. “The timing’s about right. Good. How did you get this?”
“The log sheets. It stood to reason that if there was a connection between Yevgenia Perova and General Belov, then at some time she would have come to the building. And if she had, she would be required to sign in. Not even Belov could alter that.”
“How did you get the log sheets?”
“They archive them, same as us. They’re not even classified.”
“So what brought the Iron Perova to Leningrad in the middle of the night?”
“I figured you were going to ask that, so I stuck around until I had the answer. I didn’t want you to send me back up there.”
Tarasov smiled. He poured the coffee into cups and set them on the table. He sat down opposite Leo.
Leo went on. “The time of the meeting suggested an emergency — I mean, 3:30 A.M.! Jesus. So I went through all the case files for two weeks on either side of that day. Nothing. It looked like a dead end. Then, by chance, I was having lunch in the KGB cafeteria and struck up a conversation with a border guard. All border guards for Finland and Norway are run out of Leningrad.”
“Which was Belov’s responsibility.”
“Right. Anyway, this guard remembered a border shooting around that date.”
“Border shooting?”
“Yes. So I went back to the archives for the case file on a border shooting on that date, but there was nothing.”
“So there was no shooting?”
“Oh, there was a shooting all right. I phoned the head of the border guards up there, a fellow by the name of Captain Rodenko — one very bored, very unhappy Ukrainian. He said he had been assigned there about three months ago. He spent a half-hour talking to me about how I could help get him stationed in Kiev.”
“You said he was new to the post?”
“That’s right,” said Leo. “The previous captain died in an auto accident on November 20.”
Tarasov jumped to his feet. Ten days after Yevgenia Perova’s visit to Leningrad.”
“Right. So then I got real interested. Luckily, this Rodenko was anxious to help me, you know, so I could help him get out of Karelia. He put me on the phone with three of the border guards from the sector. One of them was the guy who actually pulled the trigger. He was real upset about it. Said the fellow ignored his warnings. All three of them remembered the incident, which surprised me — until I heard why.”
“Why?”
“The man they shot had no nose.”
“Excuse me?”
“He had no nose,” said Leo. “Just a little stub where a nose should have been, presumably once was.”
“A stub-nose man,” said Tarasov. “Interesting.”
“He was still alive when they got to him,” said Leo. “Guess who did the interrogation.”
“The captain who died in the accident.”
Leo grinned.
“They remember anything else?”
“Siberia. He had escaped from exile in Oimyakon.”
“And he made it all the way to the Norwegian border? A difficult journey.”
Leo nodded. “He was quite resourceful, apparently. They said he had built himself two excellent little ladders. Remember the camp break in Yakutia in the 1970s?”
“Ladders.”
“That must have been where he got the idea. Anyway, he made just one little mistake.”
“What’s that?”
“There are three fences on the border. He thought there were two.”
“So he escaped into the forbidden zone.”
“Right. Which is probably why he didn’t surrender when the border guard called out for him to stop.” Leo laughed. “Poor bugger thought he was in Norway.”
Tarasov went back to his chair and sat down. He lit up a cigarette. It was Russian and tasted like rubber. “You got any foreign cigarettes?” Tarasov asked.
“I preferpapirosy. ”
“You kidding?”
“No. Really.”
“Devil!” said Tarasov. He took a drag and said, “So let me get this right. A stub-nose man escapes from Oimyakon, flees to the border, gets shot — but not killed. He is interrogated. The captain informs Belov, who calls Yevgenia Perova in the middle of the night. She comes running up to Leningrad. They murder the stub-nose man and the captain, remove the file, and within months they both receive big promotions.”
“That about sums it up.”
“Why?”
“Without the file, I can’t say.”
“Oimyakon,” said Tarasov. “That’s in Yakutia, right?”
“The coldest place in the northern hemisphere. I suppose I get to go there next.”
Tarasov grinned. “Don’t forget your long underwear.”
Shatalin called Leo into his office the moment he arrived at Lubyanka. He told Leo about Katherine Sears.
“Tarasov refuses to look for her,” said Shatalin.
“Figures,” said Leo. “The guy’s a loose cannon.”
“I had forgotten what a fanatic he was. I never should have let him back in. Listen, Belov has formed a task force to find Katherine Sears, and I’m appointing you from my office.”
“Yes, comrade director.”
“I can’t officially interfere with General Belov’s investigation, but you can keep me informed. Perhaps an opportunity will present itself.”
“What about Tarasov? He wants me to go to Yakutia.”
“Yakutia! Jesus, what next?” Shatalin shook his head. “Let him go to Siberia himself. Tarasov’s on his own from here on out. I promised him a month. He’s got three weeks left. Then it’s back to traffic tickets for him.”
19
The idea came to Katherine on Friday night as she walked back to Galina Tushchina’s house from White Dacha. She went straight back to the farm’s headquarters and called Sergei. “I want you to get some things for me.”
He took down the list and promised to bring the items the following evening. “We’ll talk about this idea of yours then,” he said.
It began to rain sometime during the night. When Katherine awoke Saturday morning and looked out the window, a new world greeted her.
Under the flat glow of the gray-black sky, a shadowless landscape had come to life. Everything was sharper, as though God had turned up the world’s contrast knob. The last of the snow had been washed away. The brown dirt was stained muddy black. The weeds that grew in clumps in the fields had absorbed the night’s moisture and now glowed phosphorescent. The bark of the birch trees shimmered white, as though someone had scrubbed them clean. And over everything lay the suggestion of fog. It was a morning from a fairy tale. It seemed to Katherine that mother nature herself was on alert, waiting for something to happen.
Katherine dressed quickly, washed and went out to help Baba Krista with breakfast. Katherine had a mission today, and as they sipped acid coffee at the kitchen table, she made her dramatic announcement.
“I go buying bread.”
Baba Krista’s wrinkled face curled into an expression of relief, as though she had been fretting over this strange young woman who lived like a p
risoner in her home. Baba Krista found an umbrella, rubber boots only two sizes too big, and a clear plastic parka like those sold for a dollar at an American football game. Katherine looked like a genuine Russian peasant, circa mid-1980s, as she started off that morning for Bolshevichka.
The fragrance of this new, rain-washed world rose like menthol off the black earth. The air was so supersaturated with oxygen it made her dizzy to breathe.
The rain pattered gently on her umbrella as she made the half-hour march to Bolshevichka.
Bolshevichka, “Little She-Bolshevik,” was not the Gomorrah that Sergei’s sinister history of the fall of Ivanovka had suggested. It was a modest settlement of some two hundred wooden cottages and one five-story brick apartment block of the type Katherine had seen all over Moscow. A stream divided the town. There was a bridge for cars at one end; at the other, a high, swinging foot bridge. Beside the auto bridge stood a two-story stone building that looked out of place. Missing from the pastoral setting were golden onion domes. There was no church in Bolshevichka.
Katherine found the shopping district and began to browse. The shops — a produce store, a butcher, a dry foods store, a department store and a bakery — were clustered on the central “square,” a spot where four cracked asphalt paths converged. The produce store sold two kinds of potatoes: dirty and clean. The butcher was closed, though the sign in the window read “open.” The dry foods store offered three bins filled with unmarked cans reminding Katherine of donation barrels at a canned-goods drive. The department store sold a variety of things made of plastic: toilet bowl brushes, car fenders, plates and cups. The only things that weren’t plastic were the washboards, about two hundred of them, all neatly faced so as to fill the shelves. An ordinary convenience store in the States would have offered Katherine a larger assortment than the entire “shopping district” of Bolshevichka.
Katherine went into the bakery. The sweet smell of the ovens hung in the air, but the room was empty — of people and bread. Crumbs in wooden racks on the wall attested to the presence of bread at some time in the not-too-distant past. She went outside and looked again at the sign.Bulochnaya. Yes, that was right. She went back inside.
“Allo?” she called out.
A middle-aged, bulbous woman in a white smock appeared behind the counter. She wiped her hands on her smock, blinked at Katherine and barked, “Who are you?”
“I want to buying bread.”
“Foreigner. Humph.”
“Can I buy bread?”
Katherine felt like a child who had been sent to the store for milk.
“Where are you from?”
“Latvia. I am from Latvia. Can I buy bread?”
The woman glared at her a moment. “No bread,” she said and turned away.
“This is a bakery?” asked Katherine, but the woman was gone.
Katherine went outside and raised her umbrella. She stood miserably wondering what to do.
A middle-aged woman came toward her along the path. The first thing Katherine noticed was the woman’s hair. It was precisely the shade of purple one finds in grape-flavored hard candy. She was built like a pear, big end down, and was supported by tree-trunk legs. Fat feet joined the tree trunks, but no ankle marked the juncture. The woman drew nearer. She had a young face, which made Katherine wonder if she were correct to assume the woman was middle-aged. She had a mole the size of a dime on the left side of her chin. Hair grew out of it. Her eyes were brown and shone hopefully.
“Yekatarina!” she said. “I thought that was you!”
It was Galina Tushchina, from whom Katherine got the key to White Dacha for her phone calls.
“Good day, Galina Alexandrovna,” said Katherine, using the patronymic as a respectful form of address.
Galina frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“No bread,” said Katherine.
“Ach!” said Galina and spun Katherine around as though she were a child. She pushed her back into the bakery.
“Natasha!” Galina called out.
The plump woman came back from her ovens wiping her hands.
They began to argue. They spoke to each other at the same time in high falsetto voices, seemingly without pausing for air. Spit flew. It went on for a while.
At last, Natasha disappeared into the back room and returned with four loaves of black bread. She put them on the counter. She flipped the beads on her wood abacus and said, “Sixteen kopecks.”
Katherine handed over the money and scooped up her loaves. She hugged them to her body. They were still warm. She dropped them carefully into her string bag.
Katherine felt as though she had won the lottery. Is this what she would have to go through every day to buy bread? She tried not to think about the effort required for something a little more luxurious, like a car, or tomatoes.
Natasha smiled and flashed two gold teeth. “Welcome to Bolshevichka. Bread is baked fresh every odd hour starting at seven.”
She addressed Katherine as though she were talking to a dog. “You . . . un . . . der . . . stand. . . me?”
Katherine nodded and thanked her. Then Katherine and Galina went outside.
“What did you say to her?” asked Katherine.
Galina shrugged. “We were just chatting.”
“I thought you were arguing,” said Katherine.
Galina frowned. “What made you think that?”
“Never mind.”
Then Galina seemed to remember something. “We have a Latvian in Bolshevichka. I was just telling her about you.”
“Is that so?” Katherine replied sickly.
“I will have to invite you both over for tea and cookies and I’m sure it would be nice to speak a little Latvian though you really should work on your Russian and how is it possible that you went through our schools without learning better Russian it is the language of our country after all but I have heard that you Baltic people like to think of yourselves as independent and I hope you don’t take offense to that because it’s just something I read because I’ve never actually been to the Baltics and did you know that our institute has Russian courses and several foreign language courses as well which might be able to help you improve your Russian while you are here and perhaps I could help you to get enrolled and you’re such a sweet dear of a girl a little helpless but with a face just like an angel and such a girlish figure . . .”
The words streamed out of Galina just like that, without punctuation. Their meaning took Katherine a while to work out. Understanding came later, after Katherine had said good-bye, after she crossed the swinging foot bridge and started across the big field toward Ivanovka, after she began to play back the words in the tape recorder of her photographic memory. And that’s how it happened that, alone on a path in the middle of a field, Katherine Sears came to hear about the Institute for the Improvement of the Qualifications of Farmers.
There is an institute in Bolshevichka?” Katherine asked Baba Krista when she got back to the house. It sounded preposterous: a little village like Bolshevichka with an institute.
Baba Krista nodded. Now Katherine knew what that out-of-place stone building near the overpass was.
It rained the rest of the day, and was still raining that evening when Sergei’s taxi pulled up in front of the house. Three days had passed since his last visit.
Katherine watched Sergei from the window. He tucked two bags under his arm, and then raced through the rain.
He bounded through the front door, and Katherine was there to greet him. It was great to see him, and she said so. He grinned and shook the water from his clothes. He gave her three kisses on the cheek. Next came Baba Krista, who shuffled up the hall exactly as she had that first day when Katherine arrived. He gave her three pecks as well.
They went into the kitchen, and Sergei unloaded a plastic bag. Sausage, a head of cabbage, bread and several potatoes spilled out onto the counter.
Baba Krista went to work immediately on a cabbage soup she calledshchi.
Ka
therine and Sergei went into the living room.
“I have the books you asked for,” he said. He spread them out on the table. There was a two-volume Russian-English/English-Russian dictionary, maps of the Soviet Union, Moscow and the Moscow region (which included a dot for Bolshevichka, but not Ivanovka). There was a textbook in English calledRussianin Exercises , and another calledRussian As We Speak It. Finally, there was a book on Latvia, in Russian, entitledSoviet Latvia.
Katherine examined each item. She ran her hands over the dictionary as though it were a gold-embossed, leather-bound special edition.
She thanked Sergei and said, “It occurred to me today, I don’t know your last name.”
Sergei smiled. “Gusin. My name is Sergei Sergeyevich Gusin.”
Now he wanted to hear about Katherine’s phone call the previous night. He listened with interest, and when she finished he said, “It looks as though you may be with us for a while.”
“I’m afraid so,” she said. “I have to learn to be more . . .” She stopped and reached for her dictionary. She found the word “independent.” “Samo-sto-ya-tel-na-ya,” she read. Sergei corrected her pronunciation, and she put a check mark in red pen beside the word.
The dictionary was open the rest of the evening. Red marks began to scar the pages.
Katherine told him about her adventure in Bolshevichka. When she got to the part about the bakery, she said, “Galina Alexandrovna said that — ”
Sergei winced. “Don’t use the patronymic with her like she’s an old woman,” he said. “Galina, just Galina, is proper.”
“I already called her Galina Alexandrovna.”
“Then you offended her,” he said, irritated. “She’s only thirty-two years old.”
Katherine gasped at that.
“If you want to live here,” said Sergei, “you’re going to have to learn some manners.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She’s a friend of mine.”
“I’msorry.”
They were quiet a minute, then Katherine said, “There is an institute in Bolshevichka.”
“Yes.”
“Galina said she could get me enrolled for some Russian courses.”
“Probably.”
The Forbidden Zone Page 20