The Russian

by Saul Herzog

  Tatyana reached out and put her hand on Larissa’s. “The man next to your father,” she said, “that’s my father.”

  Larissa dropped the photograph onto the table.

  “It’s true,” Tatyana said.

  Larissa nodded. “Who are you?” she said again.

  “I already told you. My name is Tatyana.”

  “Tatyana what?”

  “Tatyana Aleksandrova.”

  10

  Tatyana knew how to evade capture. She knew the tricks used by the GRU, and she knew how to counter them.

  There was a clothing kiosk on the platform, and she had Lance go to it for her.

  “I need something to wear,” she told him.

  He returned with a pair of John Lennon sunglasses, a scarf for her hair, and red lipstick that was a little darker than strictly tasteful. It wasn’t exactly her style, but every item was chosen to trick the government’s facial recognition system. That system was tied in to police CCTV cameras across the country, and some of the most closely monitored areas were the train and bus stations. The trains themselves weren’t yet equipped with cameras that could run the software.

  She put on the glasses, and Lance grinned.

  “The sixties called,” he said.

  “What?” she said testily, pretending not to get it.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  She thought of the Prada shoes she’d just left in the locker and wished she could go back for them. What she wore now was a humiliation.

  “Come on, Yoko,” Lance said. “You’re going to miss your train.”

  She glanced one final time at the locker. What she’d done was a risk. It was a decision she knew would have consequences. Maybe for her, certainly for Larissa.

  As well as the shoes, which she was sure Larissa would remember, she left a matchbook from the hotel in Kapotnya. She’d also set up a secure phone line in advance and rerouted it to her cellphone. Before she shut the locker, and against all her own rules and protocols, she wrote the phone number inside the matchbook.

  She couldn’t leave Larissa alone. She wouldn’t. She’d brought her into this world knowing she wasn’t equipped for it. She hadn’t been trained. She wouldn’t know what to do. She’d panic, and then she’d make a mistake. A mistake that would cost her life.

  Better to leave her with something, even if it was only a number.

  Carrying the phone was dangerous, any networked electronic device was susceptible to tracking, but she’d taken what precautions she could. She told herself if she didn’t hear from Larissa in the next week, she’d disconnect the number.

  It went against her instinct for self-preservation, but as far as she knew, Larissa was the only living family she had left. She couldn’t abandon her.

  Lance walked her to the train, and the two of them looked at each other before she boarded. It felt like one of those war movie scenes, except in this case, the soldier wasn’t wearing a handsome uniform, and he wouldn’t be standing on the platform watching the train pull out with tears in his eyes.

  Also, this was the rush hour commuter service to Khimki, and she had to stand in the aisle so that she couldn’t have watched him from the window even if he did stay.

  She stood, pressed against a middle-aged man in a pinstripe suit, breathing into his armpit, and got off fifteen minutes later with the crowds of office workers who swarmed off with her.

  On the platform, she inhaled deeply and looked around. She knew this station to be the last government building the German Wehrmacht ever captured on its march to Moscow. The bridge the train had just crossed marked the spot where the Red Army held the line, and ultimately turned the tide, in the Battle for Moscow. She remembered being taught, as all Russian children were, that it was just nineteen miles from Stalin’s office in the Kremlin. According to German myth, it was from the steel supports of that same bridge that soldiers of the fourth panzer army had been able to read the clock on the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower.

  Tatyana wasn’t so sure of that. The city’s skyline had changed in the intervening decades, but as she crossed the footbridge over Luzhskaya Street, she turned east and removed the ridiculous sunglasses Lance had given her. In the distance, not even the lights of the new skyscrapers in Presnensky could be seen.

  She walked the short distance to a gas station on the main Moscow to Saint Petersburg highway and lit a cigarette. She was glad it was night. If the government cameras hadn’t picked her up yet, they were unlikely to.

  She went to the edge of the road and stood on the filthy snowbank, each passing car spraying freshly melted slush onto her shoes. She held out her hand, and in just a few minutes, one of the enormous westbound tractor-trailers was heaving and down-gearing to a stop.

  She ran to it and climbed the step to the passenger door, holding herself up by the door handle. The driver opened the window.

  He had heavy stubble, a large belly, and a cigarette dangling at the edge of his mouth, an inch and a half of ash still holding on precariously to the butt.

  “Where are you headed?” he said.

  “Tver,” she said, which was a city about a hundred miles northwest.

  He motioned for her to get in, and she did. He offered her a cigarette, and she took it. He asked her a few questions, small talk, weather observations, but mostly they drove in silence.

  He didn’t try anything, which was good for him. If he did, she’d have snapped his wrist.

  At Tver, she got out at another gas station where she left the main highway and caught a ride southwest to Rzhev, a dreary town on the Volga where Russia had lost two million men to the Germans. The series of battles became known as the Meat Grinder offensive.

  Her driver was thinner than the one before, chattier, and smoked the same brand of cigarettes. In the darkness of the cab, it seemed he was a little more confident in his talents as a seducer than the first driver had been.

  “You want to earn your way?” he said to her when they’d been sitting together about fifteen minutes.

  “Why don’t you keep your eyes on the road,” Tatyana said to him. “It’ll be safer for both of us.”

  He did return his eyes to the road, but his hand, acting independently, crept across the center console separating them and found its way onto Tatyana’s lap.

  Tatyana sat motionless, looking at his hand as if it was a small, harmless animal. Then she turned and looked at the driver.

  “You’re lucky you remind me of someone,” she said.

  “Oh yeah?” he said, his hand moving up her thigh. “Who’s that?”

  “An American. I was just with him before I began this trip.”

  “Did you let him slip you a quickie before you left?”

  Tatyana thought for a second, then said, “I didn’t.”

  “Well,” the driver said, “we could fix that now. Pretend I’m him. I don’t mind.”

  “That’s a very generous offer,” Tatyana said, reaching into her coat.

  The driver began pulling the truck over to the side of the road as Tatyana drew the Browning pistol Lance had given her.

  “How about you keep driving, and I don’t have to shoot your nuts off,” she said, cocking the gun.

  The driver took one look at it and pulled his hand back as if she’d suddenly turned into a snake. They didn’t speak again, and Tatyana forced him off his route so that he could drop her at the train station in Rzhev.

  The train line at Rzhev connected directly with Riga, but Tatyana knew it would be easier to cross the border into Belarus than try to get into the European Union directly. Security along the EU border had been upgraded multiple times. The Belarusian crossings had been completely neglected.

  She bought a ticket as far as Pustoshka, about twenty miles shy of both the Latvian and Belarusian borders. Any closer and she would have had to show the conductor her passport.

  She spent the hour before her train arrived, sitting on a bench sipping watery coffee from a machine. She kept her gaze away from a ca
mera over the platform, never looking in its direction. She was the only person on the platform for most of the hour, and she went back to the machine for another cup of coffee three times.

  By the time the train arrived, there was a pile of cigarettes on the ground beneath the bench.

  The train arrived from the east, and behind it, a thin sliver of dawn had reached the sky.

  She got on board, and her carriage was empty. She stretched her legs across several seats and watched the countryside drift by. By the time they pulled into the station at Pustoshka, it was late afternoon.

  In Pustoshka, she walked from the station into the center of the town and checked into a small inn. The town was provincial, a frontier outpost so far from the center of power that it didn’t even have traffic lights at the intersections. She passed a police station and post office and avoided both. Her picture could have been faxed to either of them from Moscow, and in a town like this, new arrivals stood out.

  She paid cash at the inn and ate in the dining room. It was a grand, stone house with as many fireplaces as rooms, and after her time on the road, she was glad to be there. There were a few other guests, travelers on the Moscow-Riga highway, and they were different from travelers in less out of the way places. These people weren’t anonymous. They seemed to carry their stories with them. There was an old man in a handmade, old-style fur coat with a hunting rifle propped against the side of his chair.

  There was a woman, wrapped in layers of cloth that somewhere around her bosom also covered the body of a small baby. She rocked and cooed as she spooned soup into the child’s mouth.

  Another man came in and sat close to Tatyana by the fire.

  “Beautiful country,” he said.

  He was about fifty and wore wire-rimmed glasses that gave him a severe look.

  Tatyana nodded but kept her eyes on the chicken cutlets and gravy on the plate in front of her. “It is,” she said.

  “Heart of the Motherland,” the man said.

  She nodded.

  “Although the Germans had a garrison here for three years,” he said.

  “The Germans had a lot of garrisons,” she said.

  He nodded.

  She wanted to eat in peace, she was hungry and tired, but he was eager to keep talking.

  “What brings you all the way out here?”

  “All the way?”

  “I assume you’re from Moscow.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m going to Riga tomorrow for a job interview.”

  “What sort of job?”

  “Director of an art gallery.”

  “Strange place to get off the train,” he said.

  “Hotels are cheaper before the crossing,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “What about you?” she said, wanting to move the conversation along. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a teacher. Literature. I specialize in Pushkin. He spent a lot of time in this area, you know.”

  “I did not know.”

  “Yes, he did. I was at the Orekhovno Manor today, reading about him. Have you visited it?”

  “No,” Tatyana said, spreading butter on her bread roll.

  “Very nice museum there.”

  Tatyana nodded.

  “Have you read his Ode to Liberty?” the man said.

  “In school,” Tatyana said. “Not recently.”

  “Tremble, O Tyrants of the Earth!”

  “Ah yes,” Tatyana said as if that jogged her memory. “I like that he died fighting a duel for his wife,” she said.

  “As a woman, I can see how that would attract you.”

  Tatyana looked up for the first time. “As a woman?” she said.

  “With your romantic notions,” he said.

  Tatyana nodded. “Ah yes,” she said, getting up from her seat.

  She left some money on the table, and her server asked if she would like a nightcap.

  “What have you got?” Tatyana said, sitting back down.

  “Warm rum with honey.”

  Tatyana shrugged. “Why not,” she said.

  She stretched her legs in front of the fire and thought, this might be her last night in Russia for a very long time.

  She was tired when she got back to her room. She locked the door and sat down on the bed. She’d intended to get changed but fell asleep before getting to it.

  She was woken soon later by a knock on the door. Instinctively, she drew her gun and pointed it at the door.

  “Who is it?” she said.

  “Your friend from the dining room.”

  “My friend?”

  “The Pushkin scholar.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I wondered if you wanted some company.”

  She got out of the bed quietly and crept to the wall next to the door. She listened for any sound he wasn’t alone. She looked at the crack at the bottom of the door. The sliver of light was broken by only two feet.

  “I’m a married woman,” she said.

  “Oh,” the man said.

  “Goodnight,” she said.

  11

  Larissa crossed a large intersection and threw her cigarette on the ground.

  It was the photo that had done it. Without that, without seeing her father’s face, she didn’t think she would have joined Tatyana’s cause. Politics was one thing, and Larissa had as much reason as anyone to hate the Russian government, but family, that was the real force that moved her. That was the thing that made her willing to risk her life.

  She’d thought for a very long time that she was alone, that all her family was dead. Tatyana made her believe that wasn’t true.

  She remembered the moment that realization had washed over her. She was sitting in the kitchen next to Tatyana, both of them looking at the photograph of the two sailors.

  “They look like they were friends,” Larissa said.

  “This was taken the day they set out on their final voyage,” Tatyana said.

  “What is this?” Larissa said quietly. “What is this really about? Why are you here in my apartment?”

  “I work for the GRU,” Tatyana said.

  “I hope you’re not here to bring me into the fold,” Larissa said.

  “I’m here to recruit you.”

  “Your bosses can all rot in hell, as far as I’m concerned,” Larissa said.

  “I agree with you,” Tatyana said.

  Larissa looked at her.

  “I already told you, Larissa. We’re on the same side, you and I.”

  Larissa shook her head. She looked more closely at Tatyana. It was true what she’d said earlier. They really could be mistaken for sisters.

  “What age are you?” Larissa said.

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “I’m twenty-nine,” Larissa said.

  “I know. Our mothers were both pregnant when the sub went down.”

  Larissa felt a knot of emotion build in her chest.

  “Do you remember what your life was like as a child?” Tatyana said.

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “There were problems with the authorities?”

  Larissa looked at her and then down at the table. It was difficult for her to speak of this. She’d spent her life building a wall around it. She’d learned it was dangerous. “The police came around sometimes,” she said. “Especially in Saint Petersburg.”

  “That’s why your mother brought you to Moscow, isn’t it? To get away from the authorities.”

  Larissa nodded.

  “Your mother had rocked the boat, hadn’t she?” Tatyana said.

  “She’d done something they weren’t happy about.”

  Tatyana nodded. “Mine did too,” she said.

  Larissa shook her head at the memory, the police coming by the house when she was a child, scaring her, upsetting her mother. Her entire childhood, she’d lived under that cloud of fear.

  “I found some files,” Tatyana said. “Saint Petersburg police reports from the time of the submarine acciden
t. Your mother and my mother were mixed up in something together.”

  “In what?”

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of it yet. The records were suppressed.”

  “You know something,” Larissa said.

  “I know the reports were sent to Moscow.”

  “But you haven’t found them?”

  Not yet, but I will,” Tatyana said. “And one thing’s for sure. They weren’t just fighting over their widow’s pensions. This was something the authorities in Moscow took notice of.”

  Larissa sighed. She’d always known something was going on under her mother’s calm exterior. She remembered the way she would grow tense every time she heard a police siren. Even after they moved to Moscow, it followed them.

  “The authorities always made such a big deal about how they took care of military widows,” Larissa said. “But from what I saw, they only ever treated my mother as an enemy of the state.”

  “They knew how to hit where it hurt,” Tatyana said.

  Larissa looked at her. “What does that mean?”

  “Ever wonder why your offer to attend Vaganova was withdrawn?”

  Larissa looked up. The Vaganova Academy was the most famous dance school in Russia. Since the seventeen hundreds, it had trained the most renowned dancers in the world. Larissa attended her first lessons there when she was four years old. Every summer, her mother signed her up for intensive workshops and recitals. Never once did she complain about the enormous cost. After they moved to Moscow, Larissa begged her mother to take her back in the summer. At age ten, she began the formal application process, and when she was fourteen, she was accepted to the most prestigious program in the entire academy, the elite ballet workshop.

  It was the happiest day of her life, the culmination of years of blood, sweat, and tears. All the work she’d put in, all the sacrifices her mother had made, were validated in a single sweep of the admission officer’s pen. It was the first step in her journey to the stage of the Bolshoi.

  And then, without a word of explanation, the offer was withdrawn.

  Larissa spent the next ten years of her life trying to understand why that happened. She knew she’d done everything right. She’d played by all the rules. At school, on the dance floor, in the local youth organization. She’d stared at the letter a thousand times, trying to read between the lines, to decipher meanings that weren’t there.