A split-second fall, her feet made contact with the rail below. Trying to keep her balance, rocking from side to side, she heard Zoya’s voice. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the men exiting the front entrance, one carrying Zoya. The other had his gun trained on her. Balancing on the narrow rail, she was helpless.
The man fired. She heard glass smash. Raisa was falling toward the snow.
SAME DAY
UNWASHED, STILL STINKING OF THE SEWERS, Leo was driving at the car’s top speed. Cumbersome and slow, incongruous with his urgency, it had been the first vehicle they’d been able to requisition after he and Timur had emerged from a manhole almost a kilometer due south from where they’d originally descended into the sewers. His hands a bloody mess, Leo had refused Timur’s offer to drive, putting on a pair of gloves, taking hold of the steering wheel with his fingertips, eyes watering each time he changed gears. He’d driven to his parents’ apartment, only to discover the area closed down by the militia. Elena, Raisa, and his parents had been taken to the hospital. Elena was being treated for shock. Raisa was in a critical state. Zoya was missing.
Reaching Municipal Emergency Hospital 31, Leo skidded to a stop, leaving the car on the shoulder—door open, keys in the ignition— running inside with Timur just behind. Everyone was staring, appalled by the sight and smell of him. Indifferent to the spectacle of himself, demanding answers, Leo was eventually directed to the surgery where Raisa was fighting for her life.
Outside the operating room a surgeon explained that she’d fallen from a significant height and was suffering from internal bleeding.
—Will she live?
The surgeon couldn’t be sure.
Entering the private ward where Elena was being treated, Leo saw his parents standing by her bed. Anna’s face was bandaged. Stephan seemed unhurt. Elena was sleeping, her tiny body lost in the middle of a white hospital bed. She’d been given a mild sedative, having become hysterical when she’d realized Zoya was gone. Peeling off his bloody gloves, Leo took hold of Elena’s hand, pressing it against his face pitifully, wanting to tell her how sorry he was.
Timur put a hand on his shoulder:
—Frol Panin is here.
Leo followed Timur to the office commandeered by Panin and his armed retinue. The office door was locked. It was impossible to enter without first announcing your name. Inside were two uniformed armed guards. Though Panin appeared unruffled, neat as always, the additional protection was testament to the fact that he was scared. He caught the observation in Leo’s eyes:
—Everyone is scared Leo, at least everyone in power.
—You were not involved in Lazar’s arrest.
—The issue stretches beyond your prime suspect. What if this behavior triggers a pattern of reprisals? What if everyone wronged seeks revenge? Leo, nothing like this has ever happened before: the execution and persecution of members of our State Security services. We simply don’t know what to expect next.
Leo remained silent, noting Panin’s interest was not the welfare of Raisa, Elena, or Zoya, but the wider implications. He was a consummate politician, dealing with nations and armies, borders and regions, never the mere individual. Charming and witty, yet there was something cold about him, revealed in moments like these when any ordinary person would have offered some words of comfort.
There was a knock on the door. The guards moved for their guns. A voice called out:
—I’m looking for Officer Leo Demidov. A letter was delivered to reception.
Panin nodded at the guards, who cautiously opened the door, guns raised. One took the letter while the other searched the man who delivered it, finding nothing. The envelope was handed to Leo.
On the outside was a carefully drawn ink crucifix. Leo tore open the envelope, pulling out a single sheet of paper:
Church of Sancta Sophia
Midnight
Alone
15 MARCH
THIRTY MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT, LEO was waiting at the location where the Church of Sancta Sophia had once stood. The domes and tabernacles were gone. In their place was a vast pit, ten meters deep, twenty meters wide, and seventy long. One of the pit walls had collapsed, forming an uneven slope that led down to a muddy basin of brown snow, black ice, and oozy water. The remaining walls were near collapse, slipping inward, creating the impression of a mouth closing around a monstrous black tongue. No work had taken place since 1950: it was a construction site with no construction, sealed off and closed down. Along the steel perimeter fence were faded signs warning people to keep out. After the initial, botched attempt, when one demolition expert had died and several of the crowd had been injured, the church had been successfully destroyed and cleared away, loaded on the back of trucks, the remains dumped outside the city, a rubble corpse now bound together with weeds. Preliminary work had begun for what was to be the nation’s largest watersports complex, including a fifty-meter pool and a series of banya, one for men, one for women, and one marble chamber for State officials.
Excitement had been manufactured by a saturation media campaign. The design schematics had been reprinted in Pravda, footage had run in the cinemas showing real people superimposed against a matte drawing of the completed baths. While the propaganda geared up, work had shuddered to a halt. The ground beside the river was unstable and susceptible to slippage. The foundations had begun to move and tear, causing the authorities to regret not examining the ancient foundations of the church more carefully before scooping them up and tossing them aside. Some of the best minds in the country had been called in and, after careful consideration, declared it unsuitable for a complex that required deep networks of pipes and drains, dug farther down than the church had ever extended. Those experts had been dismissed and more pliable experts brought in who, after a different kind of careful consideration, declared the problem fixable. They merely needed more time. That was the answer the State had wanted to hear, not wishing to admit to a mistake. These experts had been housed in luxury apartments where they drew diagrams, smoked cigars, and jotted down calculations while the deep pit filled with rain during the autumn, snow during the winter, and mosquitoes during the summer. The propaganda footage was pulled from the cinemas. Shrewd citizens understood that it would be best to forget about the project. Imprudent citizens wryly commented that a watery trench made a poor substitute for a three-hundred-year-old church. In the summer of 1951 Leo had arrested a man for making such a quip.
Leo checked his watch. He’d been waiting for over an hour. Shivering and exhausted, he was near mad with impatience. He had no idea if his wife had survived surgery and, cut off from communication, had no means of finding out. There was no question that the decision to leave Raisa’s side and meet Lazar was the correct one. There was nothing he could do in the hospital. No matter how much Zoya hated him, no matter how she behaved, no matter if she wanted him dead, he’d taken responsibility for her, a responsibility he’d promised to uphold whether she loved him or not. In preparation for the meeting he’d gone home, showered, scrubbed the smell of the sewer off him, and changed out of his uniform. His hands had been dressed at the hospital. He’d refused painkillers, fearing that they might dull him. Wearing civilian clothing, he was conscious that the trappings of authority might provoke a vengeful priest.
Hearing a noise, Leo turned, searching the gloom for his adversary. There was residual light from nearby buildings outside the fenced perimeter. Precious machinery—cranes, diggers—stood abandoned, left to rust because no one dared admit defeat and redeploy them where they could be put to use. Leo heard the noise again: the clang of metal against stone. It wasn’t coming from inside the construction site: it was coming from the river.
Cautiously, he approached the stone ledge, tentatively leaning over and peering down toward the water. A hand reached up not far from where he was standing. A man nimbly pulled himself up, squatting on the ledge before jumping down to the construction site. To his side another man climbed up. They were crawling out of the mouth
of a sewer tunnel, clambering up the wall, like a disturbed ant colony responding to a threat. Leo recognized the young boy who’d murdered the patriarch clambering out, expertly using finger- and toeholds in the brickwork. Watching the boy move with such agility, it was unsurprising that he’d survived his earlier dive into the torrent.
The gang searched Leo for weapons. There were seven men and the boy, tattoos on all of their necks and hands. Several items of their clothes were well tailored, while others were threadbare, mismatched as if a haphazard selection from the wardrobes of a hundred different people. Their appearance left no question. They were part of a criminal fraternity—the vory—a brotherhood forged during their time in the Gulags. Despite Leo’s profession, he encountered vory rarely. They considered themselves apart from the State.
The gang members spread out: examining the surroundings, making sure it was safe. Finally the boy whistled, giving the all-clear. Two hands appeared on the ledge. Lazar climbed up, towering above his vory, silhouetted by the lights on the other side of the river. Except that this wasn’t Lazar. It was a woman—Anisya, Lazar’s wife.
Anisya’s hair was cropped short. Her features were sharp. All the softness in her face and body had been lost. Despite this, she seemed more intensely alive, more striking and vivid than ever before, as if some great energy emanated from her. She was wearing loose trousers, an open shirt, and a short, thick coat—dressed much like her men. There was a gun on her belt, like a bandit. From her triumphant position she looked down at Leo, proud that her arrival had surprised him. Leo could manage only one word, her name:
—Anisya?
She smiled. Her voice was cracked and deep, no longer melodic, no longer the voice of a woman who used to sing in her husband’s choir:
—That name means nothing to me now. My men call me Fraera.
She jumped down from the ledge not far from where Leo was. Standing up straight, she studied his face intently:
—Maxim…
She addressed him with the alias he’d taken:
—Answer me this, and don’t lie, how often did you think of me? Every day?
—Honestly, no.
—Did you think of me once a week?
—No.
—Once a month…
—I don’t know…
Fraera allowed him to taper off into embarrassed silence before remarking:
—I can guarantee you that your victims think about you every day, every morning, and every night. They remember your smell and the sound of your voice—they remember you as clearly as I see you now.
Fraera raised her right hand:
—This was the hand you touched when you made me your offer, that I leave my husband. Isn’t that what you said? I should let him die in the Gulags while I slipped into bed with you?
—I was young.
—Yes, you were. Very young and yet you were still given power over me, over my husband. You were a boy with a crush, little more than a teenager. You thought you’d done a decent thing in trying to save me.
This was a conversation she’d practiced a thousand times, words shaped by seven years of hate:
—I had a lucky escape. If fear had taken hold of me, if I had faltered, I would’ve ended up as your wife, the wife of an MGB officer, an accomplice to your crimes, someone to share your guilt with.
—You have every reason to hate me.
—I have more reason than you think.
—Raisa, Zoya, Elena: they have nothing to do with my mistakes.
—You mean that they are innocent? When has that mattered to officers like you? How many innocent people have you arrested?
—You intend to murder every person who wronged you?
—I didn’t murder Suren. I didn’t murder your mentor Nikolai.
—His daughters are dead.
Fraera shook her head:
—Maxim, I have no heart. I have no tears to shed. Nikolai was weak and vain. I should’ve guessed he would die in the most pathetic of fashions. However, as a message to the State, it was certainly more powerful than him merely hanging himself.
Just as the Church of Sancta Sophia had been destroyed and replaced with a dark, deep pit, Leo wondered if the same was true of her. Her moral foundations had been ripped up and replaced with a dark abyss.
Fraera asked:
—I take it you have made the connection between Suren, the man who ran the printing press, Nikolai, the patriarch, and yourself? You knew Nikolai: he was your boss. The patriarch was the man who enabled you to infiltrate our church.
—Suren worked for the MGB but I didn’t know him personally.
—He was a guard when I was interrogated. I remember him standing on tiptoe, looking into the cell. I remember the top of his head, his curious eyes, watching as if he’d snuck into a movie theater.
Leo asked:
—What is the point of this?
—When the police are criminals, the criminals must become the police. The innocent must live underground, in the shit of the city, while the villains live in warm apartments. The world is upside down: I’m merely turning it the right way up.
Leo spoke out:
—What about Zoya? You’ll kill her, a young girl who doesn’t even like me? A girl who only chose to live with me to save her sister from an orphanage?
—You are mistaken in your attempts at appealing to my humanity. Anisya is dead. She died when her child was taken from her by the State.
Leo didn’t understand. Answering his evident confusion, Fraera added:
—Maxim, I was pregnant when you arrested me.
With the precision of a surgeon Fraera probed this newly inflicted cut, prising it open, watching him bleed:
—You never even took the time to find out what had happened to Lazar. You never took the time to find out what had happened to me. Had you looked through the records you would’ve discovered that I gave birth eight months into my sentence. I was allowed to nurse my son for three months before he was taken from me. I was told to forget about him. I was told I would never see him again. When I was released, granted an early reprieve after Stalin’s death, I searched for my child. He’d been placed in an orphanage but his name had been changed and all record of my motherhood erased. This is standard, I was told. It is one thing to lose a child: it is another to know that they’re alive, somewhere, ignorant of your existence.
—Fraera, I can’t defend the State. I followed orders. And I was wrong. The orders were wrong. The State was wrong. But I have changed.
—I know about the changes you’ve made. You’re no longer KGB, you’re militia. You deal only with real crimes, not political ones. You’ve adopted two beautiful young girls. This is your idea of redemption, yes? What does any of it mean to me? What of the debt you owe me? What of the debt you owe to men and women you arrested? How is that to be paid? Are you planning to build a modest stone statue to commemorate the dead? Will you put up a brass plaque with our names written in tiny letters so they all fit in? Will that suffice?
—You want to take my life?
—I have thought about it many times.
—Then kill me and let Zoya live. Let my wife live.
—You would gladly die to save them. It would make you noble; it would scrub you clean of your crimes. You still believe that you can lead your life as a hero?
Fraera pointed to his clothes:
—Take off your clothes.
Leo remained silent, unsure if he’d heard correctly. She repeated her instructions:
—Maxim, take off your clothes.
Leo took off his hat, his gloves, his coat, dropping them to the ground. He unbuttoned his shirt, shuddering in the cold, placing it on the heap in front of him. Fraera raised her hand:
—That’s enough.
He stood, shivering, his arms by his side.
—You find the night cold, Maxim? It is nothing compared to the winters in Kolyma, the frozen corner of this country where you sent my husband.
To his surpris
e, Fraera also began to undress, taking off her coat, her shirt, revealing her naked torso. Tattoos covered her skin: one under her right breast, one on her stomach, tattoos on her arms, her hands, fingers. She stepped closer to Leo.
—You want to know what has happened to me these past few years? You want to know how a woman, the wife of a priest, came to be in charge of a vory gang? The answers are written on my skin.
She took hold of her breast, lifting it up, drawing Leo’s attention to the tattoo. There was a lion:
—It means I will avenge all who wronged me, from the lawyers, to the judges, to the prison guards and the police officers.
In the center of her chest, rising up between her breasts, was a crucifix:
—This has nothing to do with my husband, Maxim—it represents my authority, as the Thief-in-Law. Perhaps this one you’ll understand.
She touched the tattoo on her stomach. It showed a heavily pregnant woman—a cross section revealing the inside of her extended belly. Instead of an unborn child, the pregnant stomach was filled with barbed wire, coiled round and round like one long, jagged umbilical cord.
—Maxim, you have the blank skin of a child. To me, and to my men, it appears dishonest. Where are your crimes? Where are the things you have done? I see no trace of them. I see no marks on you. I see none of your guilt written on you.
Fraera took another step closer, her body almost touching his:
—I can touch you, Maxim. Yet if you lay a finger on me, you will be killed. My skin is the same as my authority. For you to touch me would be a violation, an insult.
She pressed against him, whispering:
—Seven years later, it is my turn to make you an offer. Lazar is still in Kolyma, working in a gold mine. They refuse to release him. He’s a priest. Priests are hated again, now that there are no wars the State needs them to promote. He’s been told that he’ll have to serve his full sentence—twenty-five years. I want you to get him out. I want you to put right that wrong.
LD02 - The Secret Speech Page 11