The Forbidden Zone

by Michael Hetzer

  “They fulfilled their part of the bargain,” said Tarasov.

  “I can’t let them just walk out of here,” Shatalin said miserably.

  “Let me make it easy for you,” said Tarasov. “You have two choices. You can murder us all here and take the diaries, or you can go ahead with the deal.”

  Shatalin’s gaze moved over Katherine, Oksana, Victor, Anton and Grisha.

  “I am not a murderer,” he said as though he wished he were.

  One of the border guards came running back. He held Podolok’s sable hat in his hand.

  “What happened?” Shatalin asked. “Where’s the Party secretary?”

  “Swamp got him,” said the guard, contemplating the hat. “Quicksand.”

  50

  Katherine was still trembling from the shootings, but she was glad to be left alone momentarily with Tarasov. Something was bothering her.

  “There’s one thing I don’t get,” she said. “Why would Shatalin honor the agreement? Podolok’s dead.”

  Katherine and Tarasov stood on the road not far from Victor’s jeep. The KGB director had gone into the guard tower to phone the Norwegian post to warn them of the coming transfer. Oksana and Victor were in the tower with Anton and the medic. The border guards had Leo and Belov already aboard the helicopter. There was very little time left, and if Katherine was going to be the executor of Tarasov’s devil’s bargain then she wanted to understand everything about it she could. In a few minutes, the time for answers would pass — perhaps forever.

  Tarasov smiled indulgently. “How little you’ve learned, Katherine. Shatalin is a patriot. He’s protecting the motherland from an enormous embarrassment — a vlasovite traitor in the Politburo! Imagine if some historian found out that Thomas Jefferson had secretly conspired with the British during the Revolutionary War. Would you want that to come out, even if it were true?”

  “I see your point,” said Katherine. “But then why did you need us? You could have gone to him from the beginning.”

  “No,” said Tarasov. “I knew about Podolok — that was in the diaries — and I deduced how Belov got involved. Yevgenia’s involvement was a fluke, though I didn’t know that until Victor showed me Anton’s letter. What prevented me from acting was that I didn’t know who my enemy was in the KGB. You helped me with that.”

  “Me?”

  Tarasov nodded. “It was something you said. You told me the Americans disconnected their secured phone line because they figured out it had been tapped by the KGB.”

  “That’s how the KGB knew I was in Ivanovka. And that I was aboard theEstonia. ”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something? Victor called the Americanson the samephone line. Victor told Cameron Abbott he had found Anton in Little Rock. Don’t you see? That means the KGB knew about Anton two months ago. If so, why didn’t Shatalin grab Anton back then?”

  “Why?”

  “Because Leo never told him,” said Tarasov. “Leo had thrown in with Belov and Podolok.”

  Tarasov lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out thoughtfully into the frigid air. “Leo was always a good researcher, but his instincts were bad.”

  Victor strode to where they stood.

  “How is Anton?” Katherine asked.

  “He’ll be okay. But we have to get him to a hospital.”

  He reached out and took Katherine’s hand. Her pulse quickened at his touch. They stood like that a moment, and Tarasov seemed to sense that it was time for him to leave.

  “Well, I have to go talk to Shatalin now,” he said. “But first, Victor, I’ve been thinking — we may not be out of trouble yet.”

  “How so?”

  “We never counted on Yevgenia’s death. With her dead, the evidence on Podolok will be mailed automatically to the Politburo.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Victor. His face was grim, and Katherine realized that, in spite of everything, he was grieving over his mother’s death.

  “Why? I thought she had it set up that way.”

  “She did. Podolok told me all about it. It was set up as a trust. In the event of her death, the file was to be sent to Anatoly Podolok’s most bitter enemy on the Politburo, the man most certain to use the information to destroy him — Oleg Shatalin.”

  Tarasov laughed. “Now that’s justice! Good thing Shatalin didn’t know about it: He wouldn’t have needed us at all. If you’ll both excuse me, there are a couple more conditions I’d like to attach to this deal.”

  “A couple?” said Victor. “We agreed to just one.”

  Tarasov grinned and left.

  “I wonder what he’s up to,” said Victor, watching him go.

  But Katherine was looking at Victor, her face serious. “Why don’t you come with us?”

  “To America?” he asked. “I can’t. Shatalin needs his hostage. Having me in the U.S.S.R. is the only way he knows none of you will ever talk. If you do, I’m a dead man.”

  “And if anything happens to you,” said Katherine, “I will release the diaries. Yes, I know the deal. It’s a stalemate. But that’s not why you’re staying.”

  Victor grimaced.

  “You don’t want to come,” she said.

  “It would be wrong for me to go.”

  “How can you say that? After all they’ve done to you.”

  “They?” he said sharply. He sighed and shook his head. “You know, Yevgenia wasn’t always like she was at the end. I wish you could have seen her before. She really stood for something.”

  “The wrong thing.”

  “No,” said Victor. “It started out right. She just got in over her head. I know it sounds kind of silly, but that was her biggest problem. She was a peasant, the daughter of a milkmaid-turned-seamstress. She had no education but Soviet propaganda. She built the myth of the Iron Perova, and then she was forced to live inside that suit of armor as though it were her natural skin.”

  The searchlight from the guard tower swept past them, and, slowly, Katherine’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. She raised her head to the sky. The stars shone with such clarity they didn’t seem real, like the dome of a planetarium. Victor followed her gaze.

  “Quite a sky, yes?” he said.

  Katherine nodded.

  “This would be a great place for an observatory,” Victor said.

  “I see the Large Magellanic Cloud,” said Katherine, pointing.

  Victor nodded.

  Katherine asked, “Will we ever finish our survey?”

  “I’m afraid my star-gazing days are over, Yekatarina. My work is nearer to earth now.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes. She didn’t know what to say. Victor kept his eyes on the stars as though he were trying to penetrate the mysteries he would now never get to confront.

  That reminded Katherine of something. “You know what Vladimir Ryzhkov said to me the day he died?”

  A shadow crossed Victor’s face at the mention of his old friend. “What?”

  “He said he hoped you never got angry at the Soviet government. He said you were perhaps the only person in the world who could bring down the Soviet state with his bare hands.”

  Victor didn’t smile. “That’s not what I want.”

  “Whatdoyou want?”

  “What I want I can’t have.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You.”

  Katherine began to cry. He took her in his arms, and they held each other without speaking.

  Shatalin came beside them and cleared his throat. “Well, it’s all arranged. The

  Norwegians have a helicopter and a doctor standing by.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  Victor looked at Katherine and said, “It’s time.”

  Victor left Katherine and went to the guard tower to get Anton, Oksana and Grisha. He found them with the medic, who had just finished bandaging the wound.

  A few minutes later, they were all gathered at the gate: Katherine, Oksana, Anton, Grisha and Victor. Tarasov and Sh
atalin stood a few feet away. They were engrossed in the final terms of the arrangement. Shatalin had a look of disbelief on his face. Victor would have loved to have known what they were talking about. Victor wheeled Anton to the gate and said, “This is where we say good-bye, brother.”

  Anton looked up from his wheelchair. Anton’s left arm was in a sling, and there was blood on his clothing, but there was no arguing that his twin brother had come back from the dark pit into which he had been thrown. Their eyes met. In that instant, Victor felt their childhood bond reforged. In his brother’s eyes, Victor could see all the moments, large and small, happy and sad, they had spent together. Yes, even the summer of the puppies. Especially that summer, for in a strange, unlikely way it had propelled them like bullets toward this moment. That summer had encapsulated all the good and all the bad in their lives to reveal a timeless, subterranean nature of people and times, the way smoke reveals invisible air currents in a room.

  “You could still walk me to the second gate, if you like,” said Anton.

  Victor shook his head and motioned toward Katherine. “I’m saving that for someone else.” He grinned. “You understand.”

  Anton smiled and nodded. “Sorry I got you into this, brother. I guess you had to save me again.”

  “No, Anton. This time you saved me.”

  The solenoid in A-1’s lock clicked, and Katherine Sears nearly jumped: She thought someone was shooting again. One of the border guards slid back the gate and ahead of her stretched a fifty-foot-long path to a second gate in a second fence. Beyond that lay the long walk to the third and final fence on the border with Norway. Two border guards with all of Oksana’s bags went through the gate first, followed by Oksana, who was pushing Anton in the wheelchair. Grisha walked alongside his father chattering. Anton listened with a small smile on his lips. Katherine held back with Victor: They were waiting for a signal from Tarasov, who was still with Shatalin.

  At last, Shatalin nodded, and Tarasov came over. Tarasov pulled two leather-bound books from his pocket and pressed them into Katherine’s hand.

  “You know what to do,” he said.

  Katherine slipped the diaries into her coat pocket, and then offered Tarasov her hand. Tarasov smiled at it, and then raised it to his lips. Then he turned and left.

  Katherine watched him go. “He’s full of surprises, that one. I can’t quite figure him out.”

  Victor turned to the border guard. “I’m going to walk her to the next gate.”

  “Okay, but no further. You’re in the forbidden zone now.”

  Victor took Katherine’s hand and they went side by side along the path. Their route was bathed in the white glare of the tower’s searchlight. Crisp shadows etched the asphalt before them. Outside the boundaries of the light, darkness closed around them like water rushing in behind a passing boat.

  Katherine peered south into the darkness. Only a year earlier, Stepan Bragin had been gunned down at a point not far away. She shivered.

  “What are you thinking about?” Victor asked.

  “Stepan. How he must have felt in those last moments. What about you — what are you thinking?”

  “I was remembering that line by Anna Akhmatova you quoted in the bell tower — ‘Why does nothing work out for us?’”

  “It’s not been a normal relationship.”

  Victor didn’t smile. “Do you know how the poem begins?”

  She shook her head. He recited:

  We’re no good at saying good-bye

  We wander around, shoulders touching.

  It’s begun to get dark already,

  You look vacant, I say nothing.

  “We’ll still get to write,” said Katherine.

  Victor nodded. That was part of the arrangement. If the letters ever stopped, that was the signal that Shatalin had reneged. Katherine would then pass the diaries to the Politburo member Victor had selected as their best ally against Shatalin. He was part of a new generation of Soviet leaders. His name was Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Victor was quiet. “I’ll never see you again,” he said finally.

  “You don’t know that,” said Katherine.

  “Oh, come now, Yekatarina. I’ll never get an exit visa, and none of you can ever come back.”

  “Things might change,” said Katherine.

  “Not in Russia.”

  “They could.”

  They reached the second gate and halted. Victor shot Katherine a sideways grin.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Things could change. But you know, we Russians are not exactly known for our optimism.”

  Katherine raised her head and laughed. The border guard looked at her as though she had lost her mind. In that grim place, with the floodlights, the machine guns and the barbed wire, her laughter was like an effrontery. It seemed to surprise Victor, too, but he joined in. Perhaps he hadn’t expected her to get his little joke, delivered as Russian humor must be delivered: wry, dark and self-critical. But she had gotten it. She was thinking about Sergei Gusin and Maya Timofeyeva and Maxim Izmailov and Vladimir Ryzhkov and every Russian she had ever met who saw nothing in the future but bad, and worse. And so she laughed.

  A few minutes later, when Katherine stood in Norway and looked back toward the Soviet Union, it occurred to her that she and Victor hadn’t kissed farewell. With the rush to get Anton to a doctor, they had simply forgotten. Or had they? The laugh, she decided, was what they would always have. It was better than a kiss. For those few seconds, she and Victor had stood in a place that was neither East nor West, a place not unlike that band of forbidden zone across which she now looked, and they had shared a laugh.

  What the hell, it was a start.

  51

  Rain fell lightly over the manicured grass and solemn headstones of Arlington National Cemetery. A collective hiss rose from the field like whispers of the dead.

  In the southern corner of the cemetery, among the mature gravesites of veterans of World War II, one grave stood apart. It was freshly filled and growing muddy under the rainfall. Its plaque was shiny-new and read:

  Donald Mortimer Turnhill

  February 12, 1923–September 19, 1944

  Katherine Sears stood beside the grave. She wore a black dress, a black trench coat and black pumps already soaked through from the long hike across the cemetery. Over her shoulder, she carried a backpack. She looked much as she had that day seven years earlier when she boarded the Aeroflot flight bound for Moscow, though a hint of crow’s feet had begun to appear around her eyes, and her hair was cut short, in the style of the day.

  Katherine would have liked to have attended the funeral the previous day, the Fourth of July. It was a star-spangled affair with a twenty-one-gun salute and a speech by a congressman. But how could she have explained her presence to the widow and their son, David? Katherine’s role in the burial of Donald Turnhill would remain forever a secret.

  She had read about the funeral in that morning’s newspaper — “Missing WW II Flyer Comes Home.” It gave an account of how the remains of a Rochester native had been found six months earlier by a farmer in a Belorussian cabbage field. In the spirit of good relations between friendly nations, the remains were returned to the Americans, over fifty years after his death in the Second World War. Katherine had checked the article’s byline — Grayson Hines.

  She stood a long time over the grave listening to the rain patter pleasantly on her umbrella. Then a voice came from behind her. It spoke in Russian.

  “He’s with Nadia now.”

  Katherine turned. Anton Perov came beside her. Oksana was a step back.

  “He’s buried in the land of his birth,” said Oksana.

  Katherine looked down at the grave and nodded. The deal with Shatalin had held up, though no one could have anticipated the way in which the final condition would ultimately be fulfilled. Gorbachev, glasnost, Victor Perov’s election to the Supreme Soviet, the end of the Cold War — everything had changed, and so quickly! All Victor had to do to f
ulfill Stepan Bragin’s final vow to Nadia was to compel Shatalin to place the remains in the cabbage field, and then make sure they were found. No one had to know how old Turnhill had been when he died. Why would anyone ask that question? Shatalin, also in the Soviet legislature, had no choice but to agree; he couldn’t risk the diaries becoming public. For all his faults, he loved his country too much for that. Once Stepan’s remains were found, the new spirit of friendly relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. did the rest.

  “Shall we get on with it?” asked Anton.

  Katherine set down her backpack and took out a copper bowl and two leather-bound books, the diaries of Stepan Bragin. She put them in the bowl and then doused the books with lighter fluid until they were soaked through. The smell of kerosene stung Katherine’s nose in the damp air.

  They all stood over the bowl a moment looking down. Katherine was suddenly reluctant to go ahead.

  She turned to Anton. “You’re the only one who met him. You should do it.”

  Anton struck a match and dropped it in the bowl. The diaries burst into flame. They watched silently as the memoirs of Donald Mortimer Turnhill were reduced to ashes. It took several minutes, then Katherine dumped the ashes over the grave and put the bowl in her backpack.

  It was done.

  Oksana asked, “Are you heading straight back to Ithaca?”

  “Actually, I thought I might come to New York City with you guys. I’d love to see Sergei — I hear he’s in town on business.”

  “Was,” said Anton. “He’s gone back to Moscow.”

  Katherine shook her head in wonder. “He sure gets around.”

  Anton smiled. “He’s a jet-set businessman now. No more black deals in the seat of his taxi.”

  Oksana said, “He told us he expects to be a dollar-millionaire by the end of August. Apparently, being a ruble-millionaire is nothing to aspire to anymore.”

  “Why August?” Katherine asked.

  “He says there’s going to be a coup.”

  “That’s better than any newspaper report to me,” said Katherine. “So, what’s his latest scam?”