“The downward path quickly became very steep,” Anatoli agreed. “Among my own classmates there was the saying, give the KGB the first knuckle of your little finger, and they will soon take the entire body, the entire mind, and the entire soul. Once the weaker priests were hooked into the KGB machine, the state used its influence to push forward these people’s careers.”
“Through these permits.”
“For a start. No priest or bishop could serve anywhere without first receiving permission to live there. Then, of course, once a person they controlled was in a position of responsibility, the KGB would instruct them as to which priests they should bring in or assign elsewhere.”
“The way you describe it,” Jeffrey said, “it seems amazing that any believers at all were brought into senior positions.”
“It is indeed a miracle,” Anatoli agreed. “A testimony to the power of God that despite these pressures, the majority of priests and bishops remained steadfast in their refusal to compromise their faith and their church.”
“So where does that leave us in regard to the missing treasures?”
His manner turned grim. “Some of those who compromised themselves under the old regime continue to do so today. They have either chosen to do so willingly or have been forced to continue their unholy service. Their masters have simply traded one cloak for another.”
“They told the KGB about the treasure hidden in the Ukrainian church crypt,” Jeffrey said.
“Who in turn sold it elsewhere,” Anatoli finished. “To some group who, in my opinion, has also been responsible for thefts of church treasures and artifacts from museums all over the country.”
“You mean the government is involved in repeated thefts?”
“The government is involved, but not involved. Just as six thousand churches taken from us by the Communists are returned, but not returned. The laws offer the bureaucracy room to abuse us.”
“Which they do.”
“Which they have done, and continue to do at every opportunity. This was a favorite Communist trick. Now it is a favorite trick of Communists turned capitalists. The deal is done, but not done. The church property is returned on paper but not in fact. So there is a vacuum. Museums which supposedly have released church artifacts show us directives to return confiscated treasures and icons, but the church has never received them.” He spread his hands in resignation. “We are forced to grasp a double-edged sword by the blade.”
“You believe treasures from your own church have also been stolen in this way?”
“We know, but we have no proof. When we question others about this, we receive no help. The bureaucrats recall the orders of their former Communist masters and shun us. The police pocket the mafia’s bribes and offer only words, never action. The museum directors stand under leaking roofs and shrug their lack of concern.”
“I have a friend I would like you to meet,” Jeffrey said. “That is, if he’s still in Saint Petersburg. And if you wouldn’t mind meeting someone from outside the Orthodox fold.”
“He is Ukrainian?”
“A bishop,” Jeffrey agreed. “Actually, while we’re discussing this, there’s a Protestant minister here in town whom I’d also like to introduce. Has the Consul General told you about the kidnapping of Miss Stevens?”
Father Anatoli nodded. “A tragedy. I continue to pray for her safety.”
“Reverend Collins is the minister at her church and has spent a lot of time in the search. He probably won’t be able to help with your thefts, but he could possibly assist with some of your other problems. From what he told me, I’m pretty sure he would like to try. Plus, I think you’d enjoy meeting him.”
“Enjoy,” the priest mused. “I can scarcely imagine using such a word when describing such a meeting.” He focused his attention on Jeffrey. “But I agree. It is an opportunity to express my own feelings with more than words.”
“So where does that leave us as far as the thefts in Lvov are concerned?”
“I have alerted my friends throughout this region,” Father Anatoli replied. “They shall speak with our brothers, and they in turn with those they trust. So it shall spread, in ever wider circles, reaching out through the faithful until, I hope, an answer is found. It is by far the safest road for us to take, and one that has brought great results in the past.”
He rose from his chair and extended a broad peasant’s hand as he added, “You must take great care, my brother. There are wolves who hunt under the darkness of our nation’s gathering night. They are without mercy. Do not fall into their clutches, I urge you. Do not relax your vigil for an instant.”
* * *
As before, when Jeffrey left the priest’s office, he walked back through the monastery grounds and entered the main cathedral. Mass was being celebrated, and the cathedral was packed. Jeffrey found a spot near the back and looked out over the throng.
Upon the ceiling, a burnished sun rose above an earthbound cloud, and golden light streamed out from the all-seeing eye of God. From every wall, at every height and angle, flattened two-dimensional figures within ornate frames stared down at him. Their hands held open Bibles, or pointed toward a lamb wounded on one side, or beckoned for the beholder to look up, up, up toward a bejeweled city descending from on high.
Each worshiper in that vast, chairless space appeared intent on his or her own inner world. They converged, yet remained separate, each wholly involved in the individual act of worship. Even the priests, when intoning prayers, turned and faced forward with all the others. There were five priests in all, chanting prayers and moving about in ancient formality. Yet attention did not remain on them. No person held center stage. Attention was elsewhere.
Signs of the cross were grand gestures, often utilizing the entire body. Up to the forehead went the right hand, then below the heart, then shoulder to shoulder before clasping the other hand in an amen. Sometimes they genuflected, bending and touching the floor before repeating the gestures again and again and again.
Aspects of the church still disquieted Jeffrey. The icons remained alien presences to his mind and heart. Yet as he stood and felt the peace of worship pervade him, surrounded by the incense and murmured prayers and beautifully chanted verses, he made a conscious effort to set his judgment aside. For the moment. For this instant of seeing an unknown culture. He shut his eyes and prayed that he be able to see as he should, to understand with compassion, to witness the lives of others who struggled under burdens he could not fathom.
Jeffrey stood and watched, and for the moment was content in the enigma of all that remained unknown. And in that moment when judgment was suspended, there came a gift. A mystery. He stood in this alien world and became somehow united. Not to the others gathered here, not directly. Simply joined. His body no longer seemed to mark the boundaries to his life.
He listened, and for a brief instant he felt his heart to be listening also, hearing a voice not spoken to his ears. He heard the choir intone prayers his mind could not fathom and felt a union with the mystery of the sacrament. A communion.
The prayers rose to a crescendo, the priests’ deep basso drones punctuated by lofty calls thrown heavenward by the choir. Jeffrey stood isolated within the glory of this moment and yet felt less alone than ever before in all his life. He prayed, and felt his words rising as incense to the heavenly throne room above, and truly felt as though his heart soared upward with his words.
Boundaries he had not even known existed suddenly melted to reveal vistas that called to him, challenged him to rise beyond the confines of logic and realize the deeper mysteries of living in faith. Of following the commandment to love.
Chapter 34
The Hotel Moskva was an enormous structure designed to process tourist groups with factory precision. Built in the early seventies, this hotel of a thousand rooms stretched out rather than up. Because the city rested on what formerly had been swampland and marsh islands, buildings were restricted to nine floors or less. The hotel made do with seven, but extended arou
nd a full city block.
Outside the main entrance, Yussef pushed through a crowd representative of Russia’s progress to capitalism. Beggars in rags and crutches skirted the parking lot. Police mingled with illegal money changers. Crowds of hard-faced men gathered and smoked and talked and eyed passersby with the gaze of carnivores. Western tourists huddled in tight clusters and tried to hide their fear.
Directly in front of the entrance doors, dealers had pulled up four full-sized Cadillacs and two Lincolns. They dwarfed the plasticized Ladas and Muscovites parked to either side. The eventual buyers would be after symbols of the American good life as much as transport, an important fact in a land where legal gasoline purchases were limited to four gallons per month.
The crowd shoving good-naturedly about the cars consisted of the traders who filled the hotel’s third and fourth floors. By day they bribed the mafia for market space; by night they filled the city’s Valuta bars, which took only American currency. These traders came mostly from southern lands—Kazakhstan and Georgia and Uzbekistan and the Crimea—and were flush with sudden wealth. All their lives they had dreamed of the day when their fists would close around dollars, and now that day had come. They paid more than a month’s average Russian wage for one night in the hotel, then spent five times that amount each night on food and vodka. They bought the most expensive items they could afford—radios, televisions, suits, jewelry, cars, prostitutes—giving not a thought to the days to come. The barriers had come down. Their years of waiting were finally over.
Yussef took one of only four elevators to the third floor. Narrow hallways extended the length of a football field. Carpets bunched and threw out nylon tentacles. The walls were falling apart, with panels simply propped up against their frames. Lights were dim and intermittent. The sound of drunken revelry floated from nearby rooms.
Like all Russian hotels, the front desk did not issue keys, only a hotel ID card. This was taken to the appropriate floor, where a hefty woman known as a key lady inspected all arrivals. In the past, all comings and goings had been carefully noted in a multitude of books—part of the continual surveillance of all foreigners. Now, she sat alone and bored behind her desk, her power lost with the gradual dismemberment of the KGB.
Beyond the key lady’s desk was a small, poorly lit lobby with a “dollar bar.” Its prices were slightly lower than those of the main downstairs bar, and it attracted a crowd of hard-drinking guests.
Kiril was there waiting for him, along with a trio of his associates. To Yussef they seemed so young. Barely escaped from their teens. Wiry with the unfinished lightness of youth. Yet their eyes bore scars of seeing too much too soon.
“I bring greetings from your father,” Yussef began.
Kiril was clearly their leader. When he showed no reaction to Yussef’s greeting, the others remained mute. All four smoked their cigarettes to nubs. No paper-tube papyrosi cigarettes for them. They pulled Dunhills from a communal pack in never-ending turns.
Yussef drew up a chair, seated himself beside Kiril. He reached over and fingered the young man’s shirt. Silk. “Very nice,” Yussef said. “And is that a gold Rolex? Business must be booming.”
Kiril puffed a series of casual smoke rings toward the ceiling and asked in bored tones, “What do you want?”
“Information.”
“I sell cars. You want information, the KGB has opened their files. Go talk to them.”
Yussef made no complaint over Kiril’s attitude. Anyone who had survived what he had survived deserved the right to choose whatever attitude would see him through.
Changing borders and conquering armies had struggled over Kiril’s birthplace for centuries. Lithuania, Russia, Poland, and Prussia had all at one time or another dominated his home region. And through it all, Kiril’s family had declared allegiance to only one country, one that had rarely existed save in the hearts and memories of its citizens—the Ukraine.
When Stalin’s army drove through what before had been a border village of East Prussia, the entire population had been collected—Poles, Ukrainians, and all the Prussians who had not fled westward—and sent off to a city on Russia’s south-eastern border. Semipalatinsk, the largest city in Kazakhstan, had earned its first notoriety in the last century, when Fyodor Dostoyevsky had been exiled there. Then, as Stalin had continued his Russification program, Semipalatinsk had become a favorite dumping ground for Poles and Ukrainians taken from the newly Sovietized western lands.
Kiril’s parents had been shipped to Semipalatinsk in the late fifties. By the time Kiril was born ten years later, Stalin had selected the area as the testing site for the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons. As a result, that city became the only place on earth where the majority of its living population witnessed a nuclear explosion with their naked eyes. Not just once, but as many as one hundred and twenty-four times.
Semipalatinsk pharmacists had experienced the same trouble stocking up-to-date medicines as the rest of the Soviet Union, but they had always managed to keep Geiger counters in stock. Families had used them daily to test their bodies and their food. By the late seventies, when even more acute shortages had hit the nation’s medical system, Semipalatinsk hospitals had begun turning away all terminally ill radiation patients because of a lack of essential medicines, including anesthetics.
In the eighties, the biggest killer had been a wasting disease that locals called Semipalatinsk AIDS. It was a radiation sickness with all the symptoms of sexually transmitted AIDS. Around that same period, the region had earned the highest suicide rate in the world; the victims had mostly been young men rendered impotent through radiation. A large number of local babies had simply disappeared at birth.
Kiril’s father had been one of the fortunate ones, an engineer whose skills had required resettlement in Lvov when Kiril was fourteen years old. Kiril’s father and mother had returned with the faith that had sustained them through all their difficulties. But the years Kiril had spent in Semipalatinsk had left him unable to believe in anything save the cruelty of man toward man.
“I need your help,” Yussef replied quietly. “Not the government’s. I talk to you.”
“Then we talk cars. You like a nice Audi? How about a Renault?”
“I saw the Cadillacs parked out front. Are they yours?”
Kiril cast a lazy eye down Yussef’s scruffy form. “You’re not the Cadillac type. Too expensive. Maybe a Lada.”
“Thanks. I have one.” Yussef leaned forward. “Have you—”
“Cars,” the young man stated flatly. “That is all I know. How about a Skoda? You like a souvenir from Prague?”
“I come with a request from your family,” Yussef persisted.
Kiril stood, lifted the trio with his eyes. “My family is a thousand kilometers and a thousand years from here.”
Yussef willed himself to nod acceptance. “You were good to see me. For this I offer thanks. I will tell your family I found you well.”
A flicker of something else passed in the flat depths of the boy-man’s gaze. Kiril slowly drained his glass as the other young men moved a few steps away. Then he shrugged on his doeskin jacket, allowing the cigarettes to slip from his grasp and fall to the floor. He reached to the floor beside Yussef’s chair and asked with the motion, “What?”
“Treasure,” Yussef murmured. “Are the big men moving any? Your bosses, or anyone else’s clan?”
“I am my own boss,” the young man said loudly, slipping the cigarettes inside his jacket. As he turned, he quickly whispered, “Kazan Cathedral. Midnight.”
Chapter 35
It was late afternoon when Jeffrey arrived at the United States Consulate, and the long day was taking its toll. Jouncing taxi rides from the airport to the guesthouse to the Lavra to the consulate had left his neck and back complaining loudly. Casey arrived to find him rotating his head, trying to work out the kinks.
Casey stuck out his hand, asked, “Hope you’re not still suffering from our run-in with the wall.”
“Sorry to hear that. Well, the Consul General’s got a free minute or two, so let’s go on up.”
In the elevator Jeffrey asked what he had been wondering since their first meeting, “Are you with the CIA?”
“My brief says I’m assigned to the cultural attaché,” Casey replied with a perfectly straight face. “And there are some questions you just don’t ask. Not ever.”
Allbright tossed his reading glasses onto the pile of papers scattered across his desk as the pair appeared in his doorway. “Good to see you again, Jeffrey. Come on in.”
“I tried to call you from the guesthouse when I arrived,” Jeffrey apologized, accepting the man’s firm handshake. “But all I got was the sound of a war zone.”
“Yeah, this city has a phone system that would do Beirut proud. Have a seat in the comfortable chair there by the window.” He motioned Casey into the seat alongside his desk. “When did you get back?”
“This morning.” Jeffrey related what he had learned from Father Anatoli. “Have you had any word about the missing girl?”
“No, afraid not. But I may have picked up a little something for your Ukrainian friends. Have you seen them yet?”
“They weren’t at the guesthouse when I went by, so I left a message.”
“Casey’s buddies over at the KGB,” Allbright began, permitting himself a small smile. “Boy, I can hardly believe I’d ever say such a thing. Anyway, they’ve been scouring the earth. Came up with a lot of evidence—nothing solid, mind you, but enough to convince them that something big is going down.”
“Like what?”
“Like an organized effort to make a fair-sized killing in one fell swoop,” Casey replied. “Appears they’ve been skimming bits and pieces from a lot of different museums. Probably churches as well. Small pieces, mostly. No centerpiece, no pride of the collection, nothing that would attract too much attention, except in your case. The anti-crime squad say the thieves probably figured your Ukrainian treasure wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place, so they’d be fairly safe just taking it all.”
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