She tried another tactic to shut Mendel up. He wasn’t helping matters at all with his tirade. “You’re going to wake Kolya.”
Mendel didn’t heed her warning. His voice rose with anger until he was yelling, this time at her. “You don’t need some depressed man-child hanging on your shoulders. He‘s leaching off of you. Just like your parents. Having you run their errands and hold their hands. Like your mother can’t get her own damn sugar!”
Edik crumpled under the weight of Mendel’s censure. He buried his head in his hands and sobbed wretchedly.
“It’s not true,” she tried to reassure Edik. Her own anger swelled. She had been making allowances for her husband, tried to be understanding, but there was a limit.
The man she had married would have shown compassion. He wouldn’t have gone after Edik like this. Her cousin wasn’t capable of defending himself.
Mendel rounded on Edik’s friend. “And you! What the hell’s the matter with you? Why’d you bring him here?”
“He got it in his head that this was where he needed to be.” Unlike Edik, Yosef wasn’t ruffled by Mendel’s temper. He spoke confidently, as if he were accustomed to having authority and instantly commanding respect. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who would ordinarily befriend her cousin. Edik tended to attract oddballs, who were as awkward as he was.
“There was no stopping him,” Yosef said. Yet Yosef was taller and broader than either Mendel or Edik, and he stood with a straight posture that suggested he might be fit and strong under his coat. He glowed with vitality, the way Mendel once had. Certainly, he should have been able to wrestle Edik into a cab and get him home.
“I came along to make sure he got here safely,” Yosef explained.
“You should have taken him home,” Mendel scolded, voicing her thoughts.
“I don’t have the address.”
Her gaze snagged on Yosef’s thick lashes, on his firm chin, his wide shoulders. She found him attractive and wished she didn’t.
“I thought you said you were ‘dear, dear’ friends,” Sofia quoted Edik’s words back to him.
“Dear friends. The best of friends,” Edik moaned in agreement.
His color was a little green. He liked his liquor, but he usually stuck to a strict limit, and he wasn’t one to deviate from his routine. She had never seen him so sick with drink. Had the news from the OVIR so unsettled him, or was this Yosef’s influence? She regarded Edik’s new best friend with sharpened suspicion. She didn’t want to push Edik while he was in this state, but she needed to ask. “Then why doesn’t he know where you live?”
“I just moved to Moscow. From Leningrad,” Yosef answered before Edik could. “We met last week at a bar.”
His answer was plausible.
Maybe Edik had overstated their relationship, and Yosef had been too polite to contradict him. Maybe Yosef was simply a newcomer, just like he said, who had latched onto the first friendly person he had met.
But what if he wasn’t?
“I’ll write the address down for you.” Mendel was obviously eager to eject both men from the apartment. He scribbled the address using the pen and pad of paper she kept on the counter by the phone. When he was finished, he shoved the slip at Yosef. “Take the fool home.”
“I’m sorry, Sofia. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Edik repeated, over and over again, like a broken record caught in a groove. He started to rock again.
“Hush,” she said. “It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t mean it.”
“I did mean it,” Mendel contradicted her. “Every word. She’s done taking care of you.”
“Don’t talk to him like that.” Her own temper exploded.
“Stop coddling him,” Mendel said. “He needs to grow up. Be a man. All this time, he should have been taking care of you. Not the other way around. You were all alone!”
“I wasn’t alone.”
“You were alone!” he shouted. “And no one—no one!—took care of you. Protected you. I was trapped in hell, and you were alone. And they never let me forget it.”
She wasn’t quite sure who “they” were. She hadn’t asked him about his experiences again after his request their first night, and he had remained completely close-lipped.
“I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” she said, trying to soothe him now, too. “You’re home now, and it will all be okay.”
She wrapped her arms around Mendel and embraced him tightly. His ribs poked against her chest.
He pushed her away as if her touch were unbearable.
“I’m home now.” His voice softened, as if to soften the blow of his physical rejection.
But it hurt. Even if she could understand it, even if she knew she needed to be patient and give him time, it still hurt.
Edik rocked harder in the chair, back and forth, as if he sensed the depth of her own distress, and it fueled his.
“Edik, stop,” she warned, but she was too late.
The chair pitched too far back. Edik tipped over. He windmilled his arms. His feet kicked in the air. And then his head thumped against the linoleum.
The fall knocked him out of his fit. He fell momentarily silent.
She rushed to his side to check him over. He grabbed her hand, and his grip was strong. She helped him to his feet.
His hat had fallen off. He ran his hands through his sweaty hair and gave a shake, the way a wet dog might.
“I’m okay,” he said, but he swayed unsteadily on his feet.
She pushed him into another chair. Mendel muttered under his breath, and she was glad she couldn’t make out his undoubtedly toxic words.
He set the tipped chair back on its feet and scooped up Edik’s hat. Then suddenly, he froze. “What the hell is that?”
On the floor, near where Edik had toppled, there was an all too familiar object.
Black, the size of a kopek.
A listening device, just like the one she’d found in Mendel’s mezuzah.
Chapter TWENTY
ARTUR
“IT LOOKS LIKE a listening device, but how did it get in Edik’s hat?” Artur pretended to be as stunned as the rest of them.
“Are you sure that’s what it is? Have you ever seen one before?” Sofia asked.
There was a testing quality to her question. He could tell from the way she had earlier interrogated Edik about their friendship that she didn’t wholly buy his cover. He needed to assuage her suspicion.
“Yes,” he said. “My friend Boris once found one in his pocket after riding the subway. He put it in a glass of water to disable it.”
“Does that work?” Sofia asked. “What if it’s waterproof?”
“Good question,” Artur said.
Mendel rolled the device between his fingers thoughtfully. “Better I think to flush it down the toilet. That way, even if it’s waterproof, it will be far from here.”
Before anyone could protest, Mendel marched out of the kitchen. A moment later the toilet flushed.
“I knew it,” Edik said to Yosef. “I told you there was a conspiracy.”
Sofia went to the sink and ran the water, but she didn’t wash anything. To muffle their conversation? The tactic would have thwarted the bug in Edik’s hat, even at this close proximity. Smart.
“What conspiracy?” she asked over the noisy spray of water.
“Edik thought there was something suspicious about OVIR granting his request now when your husband’s just been released,” Artur said.
Sofia glanced sharply at Edik and pressed her lips together. Some silent communication passed between the cousins, and Artur suspected Sofia wasn’t so quick to dismiss Edik’s concerns.
He really couldn’t understand her seeming soft spot for Edik. Her husband’s account of the man’s shortcomings had been right on the money.
Artur shrugged. “It sounded crazy to me. The only reason I’m crediting it now is that someone put that thing on him.”
“Do you think they planted the bug on you while you were at OVIR?” Sofia asked Edik.
“Maybe,” Edik said.
“Maybe they planted others then, too,” she surmised. “Take off your coat.”
Edik obediently shed his coat. Mendel came back into the room and berated him, “What the hell are you doing? You’re not staying. Don’t get comfortable.”
“We’re searching him for other bugs,” Sofia said. To Artur, she said, “You were with him at OVIR. It’s possible they placed one on you, too.”
“Yes, you’re right. I didn’t think of that,” he said. She wouldn’t find anything on him. He had planted the bug on Edik, but he played along. He took off his coat and turned the pockets inside out.
Sofia took the coat from him and took over the inspection, a sign of her lingering mistrust.
When she didn’t find anything of interest, she stepped up to him and, without asking, reached for his hat.
The move brought her into close proximity. He looked down into her face as she looked up into his. He felt an unaccustomed sense of connection, of longing, a desire to sink deep into her gaze and look and look.
Her large, almond-shaped eyes widened. Did she feel the same draw toward him that he felt toward her?
She looked abruptly away and inspected his hat. She pressed the material between her fingers.
“You have one, too,” she said.
“I do?” He didn’t believe her, but then she ripped the seam and pulled a listening device out of the lining.
Victor was spying on him. The nerve of that guy!
Artur hadn’t known. He hadn’t even suspected. And he wasn’t sure what rankled more—that Victor was spying on him or that he’d been caught unaware.
Artur should have expected that his fellow agents would ply the tools of their trade for their own personal benefit and not only, or even primarily, for the Soviet Union. After all, human nature was greedy, lustful, and selfish, which was what made handling informants so easy.
But Artur had believed what he’d been taught, namely that he and his fellow agents held to a higher standard. They harnessed their base urges and rose above them for the cause.
Hoarding and stealing information from him, Victor had shattered that belief, that trust. They’re not all patriots, like you.
Mendel took the bug from her and headed once more to the bathroom. Artur dropped heavily into the kitchen chair beside Edik and removed his shoes.
“What are you doing?” Edik asked.
“Checking the soles of my shoes,” Artur said. “That’s another well-known hiding place. Isn’t it?”
He was suddenly as motivated as his targets to ferret out any other bugs. He didn’t like the idea of Victor monitoring him without his knowledge. Of the unfair advantage it gave his new rival.
He heard the toilet flush, and he was glad. He wasn’t about to let Victor sabotage him.
“Do you have a knife?” he asked.
Sofia handed him a sharp paring knife, and he dug the tip into the edge of the shoe’s heel. She hovered by his shoulder. She smelled faintly of lemons.
“It looks solid,” she observed. There was nothing in his shoe.
“Why’s the KGB so interested in you?” Mendel asked Artur. His words brimmed with blame and accusation. Mendel’s earlier fury at Edik seemed to have reignited and now extended to Artur, as well.
“How should I know?” Artur shot back.
He was disgruntled that he’d been under surveillance and hadn’t realized. He could imagine the way Victor would laugh at him for being so clueless, when he himself had done the same thing to Edik.
Artur picked up his second shoe and inspected it, finding nothing inside the heel of that one either.
“Take off your shoes,” Sofia instructed Edik. He moved slowly, laboriously, as if removing his shoes was a complex and highly difficult process. She knelt down and sped the process along, pulling his shoes from his feet as if he were a child.
She handed the shoes to Artur, trusting him with the operation, although she kept glancing over his shoulder to check his progress, while she emptied Edik’s pockets.
Neither of their searches turned up any additional surveillance. But Artur realized that from now on, so long as he was working with Victor, he should always expect there was a spider watching him as it spun its web and contemplated how to catch him in a messy tangle.
He didn’t like the feeling.
Mendel leaned against the kitchen doorway, arms crossed over his chest, and glared at Artur and Edik as if his eyes were shooting death rays.
Finally, he said, “I want you both out.”
Chapter TWENTY-ONE
SOFIA
“YOU’RE BEING INEXCUSABLY rude,” Sofia told Mendel. She pressed the heel of her palm to her forehead to push back the headache ready to explode behind her eyes.
The last fine thread of her patience threatened to snap. In her head, she recited the litany of reasons for cutting Mendel some slack.
“These two show up in the middle of the night, bringing all kinds of trouble with them, and you’re going to tell me I’m being rude,” Mendel said.
“So, it’s their fault?” she said. “Are you serious? Do you even hear yourself?” She threw her hands up in the air and stalked from the kitchen and into the hallway.
Having no safe outlet for her own mounting rage, she threw open the hall closet, stepped inside. Mouth opening wide, fists clenching, nails digging into her palms, she unleashed a silent scream.
Then she yanked their coats from the hangers. She snatched up hats and shoes. She shut the closet door with a vicious kick and marched back to face her problems.
The bug in Edik’s hat changed everything.
She hadn’t guarded her words with Paul. So long as no one was nearby and they spoke softly, she’d thought they had safety in the open air. But what if there were listening devices in her own hat or her coat? What if the KGB had been riding along for her conversation, not even several paces back, but right there?
She dumped her haul in front of Yosef.
“What are you doing?” Mendel asked.
“What does it look like?” She was so frustrated with him for the way he’d attacked Edik. For the doubts he wouldn’t dispel about whose side he was on.
“We have an infestation,” she said. “What if Edik’s right, and there’s a KGB conspiracy? It stands to reason we might all be targets.”
“Why would they be interested in me?” Mendel asked. “I’ve been in prison for five years.” Was her husband being deliberately obtuse?
“Seriously? You’re the one with two KGB agents following you everywhere,” she said.
“You served four years five months and fifteen days,” Edik corrected with his usual precision.
“No one asked you,” Mendel sniped.
“But he has a point.” She was done tiptoeing around Mendel. “You were released more than six months early. Why?”
She handed the shoes to Yosef to pry the heels open as he had done for his and Edik’s shoes. She emptied out her coat pockets, laying the odds an ends on the table—a few crumpled tissues, her gloves, her bottle of pepper spray that she carried for protection, a few stray kopeks—and then inspected the coat pockets and lining. Then she moved onto Mendel’s coat.
“You think I made a deal with the KGB?”
“How should I know what to think? You haven’t told me a single thing.”
Mendel blanched. “How could you ever think I’d cooperate with them? Ever?”
“I don’t know you anymore!” she cried out, giving voice to all of her frustration with him.
“You see?” Edik asked Yosef.
S
he became aware of them in a way she hadn’t been before, another audience for what should have been a private moment. They both had pity in their eyes.
She had let them see too much.
“Mama?” Kolya poked his head into the kitchen. He pushed past Mendel and scampered to her. He threw his arms around her and burrowed into her side.
She seldom raised her voice, seldom lost control of herself the way she just had. By the way Kolya clung to her, she knew their argument had frightened him.
She wrapped an arm around him and locked down her raging emotions. “Were we making too much noise? I’m sorry,” she said. “Let me put you back to bed.”
She steered him out of the kitchen, across the living room, to his bed nook.
“Why were you and Papa screaming?”
She stroked his hair and worried what he might have overheard, even with the water running. They couldn’t trust Kolya not to repeat their words to his friends or his teachers.
“Edik came by for some advice about a problem, and your papa got angry because it’s so late,” she said.
“A bug problem?” Kolya asked.
“Yes,” she said. “A little bug rode in on his hat.”
“A cockroach?” Kolya climbed back into his bed. She pulled the covers up to his chin.
“Maybe. I’m not sure,” she lied. “But it was big and black and ugly.”
“Dangerous?”
“No. Not dangerous,” she said, not wanting to scare him. “Just disgusting. I don’t like bugs.”
“Me neither,” he agreed.
He seemed satisfied, and she was pleased to have an innocuous cover for their argument, one a little boy could understand, one that didn’t involve her suspecting his father of being a KGB informant and planting listening devices in their home.
She could scarcely imagine what it would be like to live her life without having to censor every word that came out of her mouth. To be able to rage or cry or love without an uninvited audience.
She had once shared this musing with Paul. He had told her he lived that way all the time in America.
“It’s not Edik’s fault that the bug picked his hat,” Kolya said.
To Catch a Traitor Page 11