“Perhaps?” someone cried out.
“ — but let us not rush to judgement. That, after all, is the mistake of the West.”
There was a murmur of agreement.
In the end, the vote was postponed two weeks. No one needed to point out that by then the Communist Party Committee would have met and voted. That meeting was in one week. The worker’s committee could then safely take its cue from the Party.
Two weeks. Time was running out for Victor Perov.
Konstantin Tarasov watched the chairman adjourn the meeting. People got to their feet reluctantly; some like angry spectators cheated by the referee who stops the boxing match; others like dazed witnesses of a public execution who have seen a thing that shouldn’t have happened.
Victor Perov was the first to leave. He breezed by Tarasov without looking at him. Several minutes later, as the auditorium cleared, Tarasov got up and went out too.
He found Victor in his office, writing in a notebook. Tarasov leaned against the door frame and said, “You ever get the idea ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’?”
Victor looked up. “Huh?”
“It’s an English expression.Hamlet , if I’m not — ”
“Who are you? How did you get in here?”
“My name is Konstantin Tarasov. Don’t be fooled by thegaishnik disguise. I’m from the KGB.”
“Victor snorted. Just what I need.”
“As a matter of fact, I am.” Tarasov pointed at the chair in front of Victor’s desk. “May I?”
“I don’t have time for games.”
“I know that you think your brother is alive.”
“And you’ve come to try to stop me from searching?” said Victor. “Well, you can’t. Unless you’re here to arrest me. Are you?” Victor held out his wrists. “Put on the cuffs. It would be the perfect end to a perfect day.”
“I’m not here to arrest you,” said Tarasov. “I’m here to help you.”
“I doubt that,” said Victor.
“I think you are right about Anton.”
Victor’s eyes narrowed.
“May I sit down now?”
Victor nodded. “What do you know about Anton?”
“I don’t know where he is, if that’s what you’re asking. But I do know it’s why Katherine Sears came to Moscow. I also know it’s why Pavel Danilov was murdered on the wharf of Rechnoy Vokzal.”
“Murdered?”
Tarasov nodded. “A terrible tragedy. He had a young wife and a four-year-old daughter.”
“Bastards,” Victor breathed. “Who did it?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
Tarasov lit a cigarette and looked hard at Victor. “Does a man with a stub nose mean anything to you?”
“Huh?”
“A man with a stub nose? It means nothing at all?”
“No.”
Tarasov picked a flake of tobacco from his tongue. He flicked it on the floor and said, “Katherine Sears is still in Russia.”
Victor paled.
“You didn’t know that, did you? I wasn’t sure until just now.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Tarasov handed Victor a copy of Grayson Hines’s article on Katherine’s disappearance. “The people who killed Pavel Danilov have tried to kill her — twice. She’s on the run.”
Victor read it and collapsed in his chair. “Is she . . .”
“Dead? She wasn’t four days ago. She may be now. The KGB is after her. Make no mistake, theywill find her. She cannot hide for long.”
“You said you could help?”
“Not with Katherine. I can help you find your brother.”
“How?”
Tarasov pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. He unfolded it and flattened it on the desk in front of Victor. It read:
Koos van der Laan. 332–4771
“What’s this?” asked Victor.
“Call and find out,” said Tarasov, nodding toward the phone. “When the man asks your name, say ‘Fyodor Dostoyevsky.’”
Victor dialed the number. The line rang twice, and a voice answered in a foreign language.
Victor said in Russian, “May I speak to Koos van der Laan?”
“Who is this?” asked the voice in heavily accented Russian. The man’s tone was guarded.
Victor looked at Tarasov and said, “Fyodor Dostoyevsky?”
The man’s voice relaxed. “Koos is not in the embassy at the moment. He should be in tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. Is there a message?”
“No,” said Victor. “I’ll call back.”
Victor hung up and looked at Tarasov. “That was the Dutch embassy, wasn’t it?”
Tarasov nodded and smoked his cigarette thoughtfully. A cloud of smoke swirled around his head.
“Who is Koos van der Laan?” Victor asked.
“Pavel Danilov’s contact,” said Tarasov.
“The man who died on the wharf?”
Tarasov nodded. “The KGB has had him under surveillance for some time.”
“I don’t get it. Why are you telling me this?”
Tarasov needed time. Things were happening too fast for his liking. Belov was looking for the American. Victor was after his brother. Tarasov needed time to find the man with the stub nose, and he couldn’t let others get to the answer before him. It was a long shot, but if Victor actually found his brother then Tarasov might get to speak to Anton before General Belov. And as for Katherine — she was a wild card. The only person in Russia she trusted was Victor Perov. There was always the chance Victor could lead him to her.
“I have my reasons.”
“Why should I trust you?”
Tarasov snorted. “Don’t trust me. Trust no one. It’s a sorry day when you have to trust your fellow man. Believe me, I’ve been in this business long enough to know that — friends informing on friends for the sake of moving up the queue; colleagues denouncing colleagues in order to land a promotion. Trust is a luxury, and people like us can’t afford it. But that day may yet come for you, comrade, when you will have to decide whom among the untrustworthy you trust more.”
“And Koos van der Laan?”
“Go ahead and meet him,” said Tarasov with a shrug. “I won’t stop you. Others may, so watch your step. I will be away on business for several weeks. I will call you when I get back.”
That evening after Victor put Grisha to bed, after he told Oksana about Ivan Petrovich’s fictitious swastika, after he told her about the committee meeting and about Alexander Kaminsky — after all that, Victor told Oksana about his talk with Konstantin Tarasov. Oksana’s eyes flashed like knives in the dark.
“Stay away from that man,” she said. “Promise me.”
They sat beside each other on the sofa, and Victor turned to face her more squarely. There was an edge of fear in her voice.
“Why?” asked Victor.
“Just promise.”
“It’s possible he can help us find Anton.”
“Anton wouldn’t want that kind of help. Let him go to hell with the rest of them.”
“Oksana!”
“Promise me!”
“My hands are not entirely clean,” said Victor.
“Yours are not bloody,” she said.
“What about Vladimir Ryzhkov?”
“That’s not the same thing, and you know it,” said Oksana angrily. “This man is from the KGB. The KGB! I lived under its shadow for my entire five years with Anton. We watched our friends sent to prison camps and psychiatric hospitals. We would listen to their stories after they got out and . . .” Her voice cracked. “They tried to lure us into informing on our friends. We refused, and so they turned our friends into informers against us. For five years, my stomach jumped every time there was a knock at the door. In the end, they got Anton. And how could they not? We had only our love for each other. What is that against the power of the KGB? So they put my sweet Anton in a psychiatric hospital and then told me he was dead. Thes
e men are not human. Now, I want you to swear to me that you will stay away from him.”
“Even if he could help Anton?”
“I’m his wife!” she cried. Her face flushed, and her eyes were moist with rage. “He is the father of my son! No one wants him back more than me! But not if it means an alliance with this kind of man. Anton wouldn’t want it. Iwill notallow it! ”
She was panting with fury. Victor knew Oksana could be stubborn when she thought she was right. Victor called this side of her “the lioness,” though he had seen it only twice before — once when Grisha had been sick and a pharmacist refused to sell her medicine, and once when Victor had suggested getting Yevgenia involved in the search for Anton. Now the lioness was on the hunt once again, claws exposed, fangs glistening. Victor knew he was no match for her.
“All right,” he said. “I promise.”
Her body relaxed, and she closed her eyes. She began to sob. Victor watched her. He longed to take her into his arms, but he did not. He feared where that touch might lead.
A few minutes later, they got up and went to their separate bedrooms. Victor opened the door to Grisha’s room and stood a moment listening for the sound of his breathing. It came to him reassuringly. He backed out.
He went to his room, undressed, crawled into bed and turned out the light. He lay there a long time thinking about all that had happened to him that day — the argument with Ivan Petrovich, the committee meeting, Konstantin Tarasov, Oksana the Lioness. His mind went over it all for hours until he could think about it no more. He felt adrift. All his life he had things to hold on to — Anton, his work, Yevgenia, his comrades at SAPO, Oksana, Grisha, even his faith in the rightness of the Communist Way. Now, one by one, they were slipping away. The most frightening part was that they weren’t just slipping away, he was pushing them away as he reached for someone who was probably forever out of his grasp— Katherine Sears.
Poor Katherine. Her predicament was all his fault. He had to help her. But how?
He fell asleep without having found an answer.
Once again, the nightmare came to him. This time it was clearer, moredetailed than ever before. He was underwater, his lungs straining for air. He was climbing to the surface when he saw the shadow below him.
Should he rise or dive?
He went deeper. The shadow sharpened into an image. A boy. He was at the bottom of the river. He was clutching something.
A burlap sack.
Victor sat up in bed and screamed. He took a deep breath and then screamed again. Oksana came running from her room. She switched on the lights and sat down beside him.
“It’s okay, Victor. It was just another dream.”
Victor panted. “Oh god, Oksana. It’s not a dream.”
“Of course it is — ”
“No, I remember now,” Victor gasped. “It really happened, a long time ago.”
21
It was the summer of 1960, the summer of the puppies.
Emma, the Perovs’ collie, crawled under the gazebo floor minutes after the family arrived at their dacha for vacation. An hour later, out came four puppies — at least they wereassumed to be puppies, those slimy, eyeless, oversized earthworms that wriggled atop the brown Russian clay. What else might Emma have squeezed into the world?
Emma’s timing was a victory for the jinxed collie. She had disproved Mama’s prediction that the puppies would be born (“hatched,” as she put it) in the car on the way. Mama was not often wrong.
The puppies were mutts, the result of an unsanctioned union with a neighbor’s boxer. The unfortunate beasts got the worst of each parent: The short hair of a boxer and a collie’s long snout and tail.
“Good lord!” mama said when she saw them. “Emma had a litter of rats.”
To Victor and Anton, the puppies were beautiful, a genuine miracle. They could scarcely believe their good fortune. One moment good old Emma, who couldn’t even fetch a stick properly, disappeared under the gazebo floor, and the next,presto! she was surrounded by four newborn puppies. Emma lay beside them, her first litter, with the majesty of a queen who has produced an heir. To the boys, she was the Dog Goddess Emma, Bringer of the Puppies. The twins were eight.
Like most middle-class Muscovites, the Perovs went to their dacha every summer to escape the sticky heat of the Russian capital. The dacha, a two-story house with an outdoor toilet, was located about fifty miles from Moscow in the village of Petrovka. It was part of a community of dachas being built by the Communist party for middle-level officials in the Agricultural Ministry, located on land that was once part of the apple orchard of the boyar Ivan Kerensky. The rusty cable of Kerensky’s raft ferry still looped across the river. The cables were embedded in the center of the poplars standing at either end. The previous summer, the boys had learned to go hand-over-hand out the cable and then, at the midway point, drop with aplunk into the swift Moscow River. They were looking forward to repeating the feat this year (and perhaps adding a flip?). Birch forests, rolling fields, clean air and the cool river made Petrovka an ideal spot for any family to spend its vacation, and especially for an upwardly mobile Communist party family like the Perovs.
What a glorious time to be a boy in the Soviet Union! The newspapers were filled with predictions of another record harvest. The war was nearly two decades in the past. Stalin was seven years in his grave. Sputnik had orbited the earth. Corn was growing in Siberia, thanks to the Komsomol, young communists not much older than the twins, who were helping to open up Siberia with hydroelectric dams and new railroad routes. Nuclear power plants were bringing safe, clean energy for the future. Communism was just around the bend. Soon, all the world would be communist. Just think, the West wouldn’t have to suffer anymore from hunger and homelessness!
But for the Perov twins, the summer of 1960 was foremost the summer of the puppies, and they spent much of their time under that gazebo, covered with a layer of clay that soon became resistant to soap and water. They slept with dirt under their fingernails and the smell of the puppies in their noses. Though Victor loved the puppies, it was Anton who assumed the role of Puppy Master. He gave them their names: Yegor, Lena, Sergei and Dina, the runt of the litter. While Victor would come into the house at night to watch television, Anton would stay outside with the puppies, letting them crawl over him and lick his face. Emma must have thought she had a fifth pup.
If Mama was aware of any of this, she gave no sign. She was busy with her meetings, commuting nearly every day to Moscow on one of the suburban trains, the “Little Electrics.” There were meetings of the Community Committee, the Dairy Products Committee, the Agricultural Worker’s Union, the Communist party soviet, the Komsomol, the local soviet and even the neighborhoodzhek. Everyone was in awe of mama’s brilliance in these meetings. While most came merely to get their attendance book stamped, Yevgenia Perova took an interest in every detail. Inevitably, she was appointed chairman of any committee she joined. “If everyone worked like your mother, we would be living in communism already,” Papa used to say when he wasn’t too drunk to speak. Apartments had to be assigned, vacations awarded, dachas leased, quotas set, new policies defined. There was, as Mama always said, “much work to building the world’s first socialist state.” Sometimes the boys wished that being a mother was a greater part of that work.
Then one day near the end of the summer, the whole family — Mama, Papa, Baba Raya and the twins — sat around the picnic table on the dacha’s front lawn. Mama used the moment to announce that the boys could keep only one of the puppies.
“Anton will choose the one,” she said.
“Yevgenia!” said Papa.
“Let the boy learn how things are,” said Mama. “There is no place for every living thing that wriggles into the world.”
“He’s eight!”
The sight of their father standing up to their mother left the boys wide-eyed.
Yevgenia said, “He’s too sensitive.”
“What will happen to the other thr
ee puppies, Mama?” Anton asked.
She didn’t answer.
And then Victor knew. He didn’t know how, but he knew. The idea grew in his head like a tumor.
He leaped to his feet. “She’s going to drown them!”
“They’re only mutts,” said Yevgenia. “Nobody will want them. It’s for the best.”
Victor started to cry.
Anton just sat there. His eyes moved around the table — Mama, Papa, Victor, Baba . . . Victor knew the look. For Anton, the idea was so unbelievable that he might have heard that Mama wanted to killhim. His lower lip went out an inch.
“Anton will give us his decision on Sunday,” said Mama. And then she got up and began to clear the table. Everyone else remained in their seats.
Anton never told me this story,” said Oksana. She sat on the edge of Victor’s bed as he paced the room.
“He probably didn’t remember it,” said Victor. “I had forgotten it completely, blocked it out, I think. The nightmares brought it back.”
Victor was electrified by the resurrection of the long-repressed memory.
“Was it so terrible?”
“Listen.”
Mama had made her announcement on Tuesday, which gave eight-year-old Anton four days to make his choice.
“I hate Mama,” he said the next day when he and Victor were alone throwing stones into the river from the cable-raft dock.
“Don’t say that!” said Victor.
“Well I do!”
Anton threw a stone, and they both watched it splash and sink below the surface. The current carried its wake downstream.
“What are you going to do?” asked Victor.
“If I pick one puppy, I sentence the other three to death,” he said and began to cry.
Anton cried most of the rest of Wednesday and kept right on crying all day Thursday. On Friday, he refused to come into the house. He slept under the gazebo with the puppies. Mama decreed that no food be brought out to him. “We’ll starve him out,” she said. But Baba Raya snuck him some cheese and bread while Mama was working. On Saturday, they managed to get Anton into his bed, but then he wouldn’t get up.
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