Skandal

by Lindsay Smith

  “When you … well, did whatever you did to Donna, she caught a glimpse of him. What you’d seen in the memories.” Valentin keeps stroking my skin, channeling calm toward me, but I can feel him tensing. “They’ve dispatched a whole squadron of FBI agents to hunt for him. You don’t need to worry about anything.”

  My hand clenches under his. How I wish that were true. We still don’t know what Anna and this scrubber want with Senator Saxton—what the strange case was he passed to her, the one she initially refused. And if they’re a part of Rostov’s attempts to build a “psychic army,” then how are they realizing his goal of destroying the United States? Catching Anna or this man is only the beginning; they are the loose thread we need to pull on to find out where it leads.

  But I can’t do anything about it now. I need to clear my head; I need to think of something good. “Valentin.” I turn toward him. “Come here.” My voice sounds thick to my ears. I feel heavy with a sudden need for comfort. I want this boy beside me; I need him in my arms, softening my own sharp edges. The boy who ran away from home with me so we could clear our minds. They hurt him; they filed off whatever lock kept his demons at bay, but he’s still my Valentin, despite his pain. He’s the steady ostinato bass line beneath all my songs.

  His curved lips twitch, smiling, as he lowers his eyes from mine. “I’d love to, but I think…”

  Cindy Conrad’s head pops into my room. She’s a dazzle of pink and blonde and caramel against the dark taupe walls of my bedroom. “Are we awake?” she asks, in a voice that channels a grade school teacher.

  “Did you find Anna? The scrubber?” I ask. Valentin starts to disengage his hand from mine, but I tighten my grip. Stay, I beg him, in Russian as well as through our own silent code of shared songs. I need you.

  Cindy stands at the foot of the bed. Her pressed silk overcoat hangs at perfect angles as she clasps her hands in front of her. “We’re doing our best to search for them, based on the details you … transferred to Miss Willoughsby.” A frown creases her smooth features. “I’m assuming that was the same … technique that you used on me yesterday, as well. What precisely is it?”

  My head sinks through the stack of pillows, and I wish it’d keep on sinking right through all three floors and the finished basement of Papa’s townhouse. That “technique” is the thing I fear doing every time I use my power; the thing I did to the Hound when he tried to stop Valentin and me from escaping Berlin. Emotions and memories and bitterness building up on my palms like a crust, then shooting off of it all at once, punching through another person’s skin, as if I’d shot them with adrenaline, only instead of that jolt, it’s sadness. It’s regret. It’s whatever emotion is overwhelming me at the time, spilling over, too much for me to contain.

  “I’m not sure I have the words for it,” I tell her.

  “I’ll get Winnie, if you like.”

  I shake my head. “In any language, Miss Conrad.”

  She taps something against her lips; it looks like one of the brightly colored cards she’d had with her at the senator’s office. She looks me over, expression shielded by the card, then steps forward. “Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

  She lays the card down in front of me, faceup. It depicts a naked woman kneeling before a pond, stars streaming through the sky and her hair as she pours water into the pond and the earth both. Or is the water flowing up into her hands? I can’t tell for sure.

  “The Star,” Cindy says. “I always visualize it when I think of you. The water is meant to show emotions and memories—you pull them into you and push them onto the world and minds around you.”

  I nod, but something tugs in me. I’m never as calm and confident as this woman. Her cheeks are flushed with happiness and health, whereas when I tried healing Valentin last night, I thought I was going to drown. She looks like a vessel, immutable, as the currents flow into and out of her with frightening ease. I don’t think I could ever harness such peace.

  I glance at Valentin and listen to the quiet melody flowing between us through our joined hands. Back and forth—I couldn’t say which one of us is the music’s source. When I breathe, it’s Valya’s calm trickling into me. When he shudders and jolts at night, it’s my arms that shield him from his tormenting thoughts.

  “But I don’t have that kind of control over it.”

  Cindy’s smile at that moment looks the closest to genuine that I’ve ever seen from her. “You’ll get there, through practice and failure,” she says. “Tell me more about what you saw at the diner.”

  I sink back into the pillows. “Anna met with this man two nights ago. He’s one of the powerful scrubbers you’ve been finding—his thoughts were eating away at hers.”

  “And you have a clear image of what he looks like?”

  His dried-up face looms before my eyes, splotchy and out of focus like I’ve stared at the sun for too long. But it’ll have to be enough. “If you have a…” I grope for the English phrase. “A person who draws faces, like for the police—”

  “A sketch artist?” Cindy asks. “We have something much better. But what else happened in the memory?”

  “They were speaking Spanish at first, but switched to English so they wouldn’t get strange looks. He was arguing with her—he was trying to convince her to do something. Because something bad would happen if she didn’t.”

  “Blackmail, extortion—common spy tactics.”

  I commit those ugly words to memory. “Extortion. Yes, that’s the word. Then he gave her some things. When she took a cigarette from him, there was something black and shiny wrapped around it.”

  Cindy presses her lips together. “Microfiche, maybe. It’s used for photographing documents.” Her eyes flick upward. “Wait, you said he gave it to Anna? She didn’t give it to him?”

  “Yes. What does that mean?”

  Valentin leans forward; Cindy jumps as though she’d forgotten he was there. “Usually,” he says carefully, “the spy is the one stealing information.”

  “Right. If she’s a spy, we’d expect her to be stealing secrets from the senator’s office, not bringing them in.” Cindy sighs. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  I crick my neck, trying to work out the needling stiffness in it. “Well, there must be a reason for her to take it from him. What if she’s changing the senator’s files? Giving him false information?”

  Cindy nods rhythmically, like she’s clicking off each piece of information as it snaps together in her mind. “Yes. Yes, could be.” She stands up. “Frank isn’t going to like this,” she says under her breath. I’m not inclined to care what Frank thinks, but I say nothing. “Anything else you remember?”

  “After he gave her the film, he gave her a cigarette case, but I don’t think there were cigarettes inside. He wanted her to use what was inside, but I don’t know how, or why.” The words still ring in my ears in the scrubber’s caustic voice. No one says anything for a few seconds.

  “And you didn’t get a look at it.” Cindy grimaces as I shake my head. “Not even a guess?”

  “There was a liquid of some sort. Like vials, something like that.”

  Cindy’s warm skin turns a shade lighter, but she says nothing. “All right. Okay. Get your rest. First thing tomorrow, you’re going to work with Tony to look for any other records of this—this scrubber. Valentin?” Cindy peers down her nose at him. “Do let the poor girl get some actual rest, won’t you?”

  “Of course, Miss Conrad.” Heat flushes his cheeks.

  After the heavy report of her heels vanishes down the staircase, Valya tucks my hair behind my ear. “You’re certain you’re all right?”

  I want to talk about this monstrous weapon my powers have become. I want to tell him about Sergei’s warning. I want to take away Valya’s suffering … I twist toward him and lose myself in the comforting depths of our songs. How can I tell him these things? How can I add to his barely contained pain for my own needs? I can’t do it—not now. Maybe later, when we aren’t so desperate i
n our hunt.

  A grin plays on my lips—we could both stand to smile more. Just this once, I want to push these problems from my mind, these equations to which I can’t find solutions, and focus on the good in my life. On my Valentin, and his warm heart and warm skin. Sergei and the mole and our secret pains can wait a few hours more. “I’ll be all right.”

  His slow smile makes it so easy to forget.

  “So,” I say, “are you going to let me get some actual rest?”

  “I had no such intentions,” he replies, resting his cool forehead against mine.

  “Hooligan.” I sketch his jawline with my index finger, heat and hunger lurking just below the surface of my skin.

  “Red Menace,” he says, and buries his lips in mine, all the music between us crashing and intersecting in one heavy, glorious symphony.

  *

  I wake up on the edge of my mattress, pinned in only by my sheets, Valya anchoring them on top of me. His glasses are off, and white cotton socks peek from the frayed hems of his slacks. He looks so much younger when he’s asleep. When he isn’t thrashing and screaming with nightmares, at least. I work my way out of the sheets and fold them over to cover him up.

  Every segment of Papa’s townhouse is painted in a different rich hue, all the shades you’d find in a Dutch oil painting, but when the house is still and unlit, the colors retreat to a murky gray. My windowpanes are washed in the deep indigo of sunset; it’ll be another stormy spring night. I’m not used to all this wetness, all this air that’s merely cool instead of cold. I miss the sight of my own breath hanging before me, reminding me that I’m alive. I haven’t seen snow since we left Berlin, though everyone bundles up at the first hint of clouds like they might have to dig themselves out of a blizzard at a moment’s notice.

  I peek into Papa’s bedroom, thinking for a moment that I’d heard a voice in there. The room is dark, but his closet is lit, the doorway ajar. As I draw closer, I realize it’s only a radio I’m hearing, though I don’t understand what strange sort of broadcast he has it tuned to. A woman’s voice recites a string of numbers in Russian, while a magnetic tape reel set up next to Papa’s radio records the transmission.

  The woman’s calm voice belies the hairs she’s raising on the back of my neck. I don’t know what the numbers mean, and a question lodges in my throat as I stare at the recording equipment and its slow methodical spin. One word stands out in my mind, offering me an unsettling possibility:

  Mole. Mole. Mole.

  No. Papa couldn’t be a mole. Everything he’s done already, everything he’s working for still—it’s all been to set us free. The Papa who worked so hard to rescue me from the KGB couldn’t possibly do such a thing.

  But I’m not sure I know Papa anymore.

  I back out of his room and tread through the gray house. “Papa?” I whisper. Surely he has an explanation for it. Tree branches whip past the front windows as I head to the main level, leaves scattering. My pulse canters, trying to reconcile the storm outside with the silence in here.

  I lean against the door frame that separates the kitchen from the parlor. Or am I trapped in here with a traitor, and the answers I need are outside?

  “Yulia?”

  I leap half out of my skin, bashing my temple on the door frame. “Bozhe moi!”

  Winnie rushes toward me from the breakfast table, “Oh, lordy, I am so sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you!”

  I hold out my hand to fend her off. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me,” I plead, afraid for what emotions might be crackling with the adrenaline under my skin.

  “It’s okay.” Winnie tilts her head. “It’s just me.”

  “I know—I just didn’t want to—” I suck down fresh air. I’m in control; I’m not going to hurt her like I did Donna and Cindy. “Why are you sitting in our kitchen? In the dark?”

  Winnie settles back into her chair and cups her hands around a mug of coffee, though no steam rises from it. “Good to see you up and about,” she says, tentatively, like this is only one of a dozen phrases she was preparing. She wears her standard blue uniform under a navy rain slicker, but her heels peeking around the kitchen table legs look taller than usual.

  “Why are you here?” I ask again.

  Her lips round on an answer but then Papa clambers in from the conservatory, all brassy music and dark leather jacket and permanent grin. My stomach sinks to look at him. After his outburst last night, he drove us to Langley in the morning, filling Valya’s and my silence with inane chatter about the weather, as if the weight of enough noise could crush whatever ill feelings remained. “There’s my little girl!” He waves his lips over my scalp, dangerously close to actually dropping a kiss there, before swooping away with an arm extended toward the kitchen door. “Are we all ready?”

  “Sure.” Winnie stands and dumps her coffee in the sink, then turns on the faucet to wash it down. Her eyes dart toward me for a brief second. “Sorry, Yul, but I’ve got to borrow your father for the evening. Emergency meeting.”

  I glance at my bare toes. “Should I get ready?”

  Winnie stammers for a second before Papa steps in. “You’re not doing any work until tomorrow. At the earliest! Now, while I’m gone…” His voice is so bright that it takes me a moment to realize I’m being lectured. “I know you were both clothed, but I don’t want you kids in the same bed together anymore. Valya’s a good kid, but neither of you want any … complications, now, do you? Good.” He pats my arm. “Here’s some cash if you kids want to grab a late dinner at Clyde’s.”

  I barely feel myself taking the stiff, glossy twenty-dollar bill from him (enough for three dinners, even on Georgetown’s main drag). Sure, Papa. Whatever you say, Papa. We wouldn’t want any “complications.”

  Does he sees Zhenya and Mama and I as complications, imposing on the charmed bachelor’s life he’s made for himself stateside? Are we the gnawed-off foot left behind in the trap when he made his escape?

  The convertible’s tires wail down the twilit street as I shuffle through the kitchen and unlock the back door. Wind tears through the trees overhead as I step onto the patio, outside the circuit of the psychic disturbers. The usual sounds of laughter and animated chatter that reach us from Georgetown are silent tonight. The coming rain presses heavy against my skin.

  “Sergei?” I whisper. I feel like an idiot. Like I’m calling for a dead cat, or praying to a god I don’t believe in. “Sergei? Are you here?”

  The insects flatline around me, ready for the impending rain.

  I glance up at the green, heavy sky. I have to know who Sergei claims is the mole—I have to stop jumping at shadows and strange radios. Even if he’s lying to me—I have to slow this frantic whirring in my head. And if the CIA won’t share information about my mother with me, then maybe, just maybe, Sergei can.

  “Sergei, whenever you’re ready to talk … I’ll be here.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I DREAM OF MAMA again that night—the Mama who bound our family together, sturdy as glue. She is lying in bed, in our house in the wealthy Party neighborhood of Rublovka, a quilt tucked tight around her. Zhenya lies beside her, humming to himself, while I button up my lightweight autumn coat. “I’m sorry, Andrei,” she says, holding out a thermometer. “You’ll have to take Yulia to the park by yourself today. I’ve got a fever.”

  But I’d just seen her holding the thermometer to her bedside lamp. I open my mouth to say as much, but there’s permafrost in her eyes when she looks my way, and I clamp my jaw back shut.

  Papa sinks to his knees at her side. “No, Nina, don’t be silly. If you’re ill, then I must stay with you. I’ll make you soup—do you want some tea? Maybe I can fix a nice roast for you. I’ll send Yulia to the Party grocer to pick us out a nice cut of beef.”

  “For heaven’s sake, I already have a blanket if I want to smother myself. Take care of our daughter.” She nods at me. “I just need some peace and quiet, and you need to get out more. Besides—” She coughs into her han
d. “I think I’m contagious.”

  After a few more rounds of protests, Papa grudgingly leaves her side, though back then—seven years ago, it must have been—he always wandered about, slightly dazed, when he did so, like an amputee being forced to adjust. He saunters through the soggy leaf-strewn street with me, puffing at his Pyotr I unfiltered cigarette, his eyes as dark gray as the sky. “Do you think your mother’s all right?” He’s speaking more to himself, I assume, because I don’t answer, and the green-uniformed lady who usually follows our every move is missing today. “I hope she didn’t catch anything at work.”

  When we reach the playground at the end of the block, he doesn’t offer to push me on the swings or play any of the games we usually play when Mama is with us. I swing back and forth, alone, watching the few other kids that chase each other in the field. Stupid Papa. I scissor my legs, aimless. Why must he be so blinded by Mama that he doesn’t even notice me?

  Then I spot the man smoking next to Papa—short, with stocky features and an oddly cut coat unlike all the Russian fashions. A foreigner. I narrow my eyes, and strain to hear them—but they’re only making small talk, griping about the impending weather. The swing’s chains creak as I glide along, listening in. Somehow, the conversation turns scientific, onto Papa’s favorite topic—psychology. They talk the whole afternoon. I keep waiting for our usual green-coated shadow to interrupt them and tell the foreigner to move along, but she’s nowhere to be found.

  “Well, nice to meet you, Andrei. I’d better get my little one back home.” The man squashes his cigarette on the ground when I hop off the swing and stroll over. “We should get together for drinks sometime. Let the kids play together.”

  I can’t believe the smile on Papa’s face as he puts his arm around my shoulders. “A pleasure to meet you, Frank.”

  When we return home, Mama’s up and about, humming to herself as she cooks supper. I catch Zhenya in one of his warmer moods. “What was that all about?” I ask Zhenya.