“It’s working today,” Ilya said. “A few of us arrived at the same time. It was crowded. So I decided to wait.”
“So there’s a large turnout?” Artur asked.
“No,” Ilya said. “The elevator is just very small. And someone smelled like onions and stinky cheese.”
“I’m surprised you’re going to this class at all,” Artur said. “I thought religious teachings weren’t your taste. And now, with stinky cheese…” He tried to joke with Ilya.
“And onions,” Ilya agreed. “You’re quite right. But it’s my daughter’s apartment that’s about to be clogged with zealotry and unpleasant smells, and she might need a little support.”
Artur detected the censure in Ilya’s voice. The man didn’t approve of his son-in-law’s new direction, and, he surmised, neither did Sofia, even if she had started covering her abundant hair.
The battle lines were being drawn, and he planned to exploit the tensions among the players, especially the rift between Mendel and Sofia.
“I understand you brought the KGB,” Artur said and nodded toward the agents standing outside the door.
“Consider it a public service,” Ilya said dryly. “This way we can’t forget we’re being watched.”
Artur chuckled as if Ilya had made an excellent joke.
Chapter FORTY-ONE
SOFIA
WHEN SOFIA AND Mendel returned from the basement, Sofia yearned to go immediately to the crawl space .
But she didn’t dare.
She went into the bathroom. She splashed cold water on her face, washing away her tears and the traces of blood still on her nose and hands.
She had promised Mendel she would stop her spying. She couldn’t risk his discovering she had lied. She couldn’t give him any cause to doubt her. So far as he was concerned, she had made her promise and given up espionage.
She needed him to believe her wholeheartedly if she had any hope of continuing undetected.
When she shut off the water, she heard Mendel’s footsteps. Was he headed back to the crawl space? Would he find the last Tropel before she could save it?
There were other treasures there still, too. Earlier, he hadn’t noticed the English book, banned in the Soviet Union, that Paul had given her for decoding his messages. And he hadn’t found the substantial pile of money.
Mendel must have bypassed the kitchen. She heard the front door open. For a brief, hopeful moment she thought Mendel might leave.
She needed to retrieve those remaining items from the crawl space. Before Mendel destroyed them. Or before the KGB descended on their apartment.
Slowly, she eased open the bathroom door and watched as Mendel greeted four men.
“Welcome. Welcome,” Mendel said. “I’m so glad you could come.”
He had been expecting them, she realized. How long had he been planning this study group? Looking back, she suspected he had made arrangements on Saturday, when he had preached from the steps of the synagogue, perhaps issuing the invitations right after she had left.
Gracious and calm, he shepherded them into the living room and invited them all to sit and make themselves comfortable.
She came out of the bathroom, and his eyes tracked her movements. She didn’t miss the nervous, almost guilty look on his face.
He obviously hadn’t wanted her to know ahead of time. He had never expected her to cooperate or agree. He had known all along he would have to force her into surrender.
“I’ll make tea,” she offered. She noticed some of the tension leave his shoulders.
“Thank you.” His voice cracked with what sounded like relief.
Let him think he had won.
She would smuggle the camera, book, and money from the crawl space with Mendel none the wiser.
He didn’t need to know she planned to continue her espionage. The knowledge would only drive an impenetrable wedge between them. In the inevitable battle of wills, he would do anything to win, and so would she.
But if he didn’t know? Poof! No battle. No conflict. Maybe they could finally start their lives together.
Mendel followed her to the kitchen, where she began to tidy up the mess he had made when he had emptied the cabinets earlier.
He stopped her and took her hand in his. For a moment, he looked at her the way he used to, with love shining so clearly in his eyes. It made her smile, and then he smiled, too. He squeezed her hand and then returned to the living room, a spring in his step.
She brought her hand to her heart and stood quietly for a moment, daring to hope.
He was soon caught up in his role as host and teacher. There was something comforting about seeing him resume the role he had once so loved.
She filled a kettle and set it on the stove. She glanced out at the men in her living room. From where they sat, they wouldn’t be able to see her opening the hatch to the crawl space and climbing in and out. Even if one of them happened into the kitchen and caught her up there, they wouldn’t think it strange. Most apartments had similar storage spaces. There was nothing inherently suspicious about retrieving objects from one.
She only had to worry about Mendel. He would suspect immediately.
He seemed engaged in conversation with his guests. She made some more noise with the teapot, and he didn’t even dart a glance in her direction. Good!
This was her best chance. Maybe her only one.
The chair was still positioned beneath the crawl space door. She climbed up and lifted herself into the small, dark space. She pulled the string to turn on the overhead bulb and searched the shadowy corner behind the boxes where she had stashed the items from Paul. There! The silver of the lipstick tube caught the light.
She scrambled to reach it. She breathed a hefty sigh of relief when she clutched the cool metal in her hand. All wasn’t lost. She had a few more nights of photographing ahead of her, but Paul would have the document on the prototype, all of it.
Assuming she could get back into the laboratory office and the file cabinet.
Assuming she could avoid getting caught.
She shoved the precious camera in her pocket and then swiftly grabbed the rubles. The money was still loosely wrapped in its original package from Paul, which may have been why Mendel hadn’t noticed it earlier.
He had tossed tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment into the fire. He had burned up thousands of rubles, even though people in their community depended on that money to make ends meet. She wouldn’t let him find the rest and destroy it.
She had to smuggle it, along with Paul’s book, out of her apartment.
She folded the paper more tightly around the remaining stack of money and refastened the twine. Even without the amount she had already smuggled to her parents, the package was still roughly the size of a book, slightly smaller than the one Paul had given her for decoding his messages.
She tucked the book and the package of rubles under her arm and shimmied out of the crawl space. She needed to keep them temporarily hidden until she could get them out of the apartment. While a KGB agent might find the book itself incriminating, there was nothing about a book or a brown paper package that would immediately raise anyone else’s suspicions. No one who came upon her this moment and saw her holding the items would suspect her of spying—except for Mendel. But it would be even better if no one noticed the items at all.
When she came out of the crawl pace, she couldn’t see the guests from where she stood in the back of the kitchen, which hopefully meant they couldn’t see her either. She heard Mendel, talking to his guests in the living room, making introductions.
She hadn’t been caught.
Where could she hide the book and the money? They were bulky and not easily disguised. She glanced wildly around the kitchen. She found and discarded several potential temporary hiding places.
Her father cal
led. “Sofia?”
She was out of time. She tightened her arm against her side, hugging the rubles and the book close.
Ilya poked his head into the kitchen. “What are you doing in here?”
“Making tea,” she said.
“What happened to you?” Ilya asked. Crossing the small kitchen in a few quick strides, he caught her by the chin and inspected her face.
“An accident. Nothing to worry about,” she said.
“Are you sure?” He gave her arm a gentle shake as if to rattle the truth out of her and dislodged the items she was holding.
She managed to catch the book but fumbled the heavy brick of rubles. The paper and twine package fell to the floor with a dull thud and landed at her father’s feet.
He bent to pick it up. The brown paper had torn in the fall. The corner of a stack of rubles poked through the wrapper.
Her father straightened and seemed to weigh the money in his hand. His gaze locked with hers.
He couldn’t know how she had gotten the money, but he would easily grasp its significance and recognize how much more it was than the already substantial amounts she regularly delivered to his sugar bowl. He had been involved in more than his fair share of underground enterprises.
He opened his mouth, about to speak when they both realized someone else had joined them. Sofia pressed the book close against her side to hide the cover in the folds of her skirt. Then she turned to find Edik and Yosef hovering in the kitchen doorway.
Edik’s gaze dipped to the package of rubles. Her father tried casually to hide it behind his back.
But it was too late. Yosef and Edik had both seen it. Worse, the congregation by the kitchen had drawn Mendel’s attention. He moved quickly toward them.
As Mendel approached, she opened the door to the refrigerator, blocking his view into the kitchen. She grabbed the package from her father and stuffed it and the book into the fridge next to last night’s leftovers, while Edik and Yosef looked on from the doorway.
“What happened to your face?” Edik asked, once she closed the door. She could have kissed him for the distraction.
All three men—Ilya, Edik, and Yosef—crowded into the kitchen to take a closer look. She touched her nose with her hands, as if she had nearly forgotten the trauma that had bruised her. “It’s nothing. I’m sure it looks worse than it is.”
“It looks pretty bad. What happened?” Ilya asked again. Her father now turned to Mendel, eyebrows raised, a hint of a challenge in his question.
“We had a fight,” Mendel admitted. His shoulders stooped, and she believed he was truly ashamed for having struck her.
“It was an accident,” she said.
“Did you accidentally walk into his fist?” Yosef asked. He stood tall and squared off with Mendel.
“Stop it. It wasn’t like that,” she said, stepping between them. She turned to Mendel, eager for him to move off before he might discover her plan. “Go get started. I’ll bring out the tea when it’s ready.”
Mendel gave her a tentative smile. As he headed back toward the other students in the living room, Sofia whispered to her father, “I need you to keep him distracted.”
More loudly, she asked her cousin, “Edik, would you mind helping me with the tea?”
As if on cue, the kettle whistled. She moved to the stove to turn it off. Yosef followed a step behind.
“If he lays a hand on you again, I’ll kill him,” Yosef muttered darkly so that only she could hear. She turned to him with surprise. She wasn’t prepared for the intensity of his gaze, the passion in his eyes, and she stood, spellbound, wondering what it meant.
Had their trials together forged such a strong bond?
“Sofia and Edik have things well in hand.” Her father tugged on Yosef’s sleeve, and the spell between them was broken. “Come on. Let’s go see what the charlatan has to say.”
She turned her back on him and busied herself with preparing tea. She steeped tea leaves in hot water and gathered cups and saucers, buying time until Mendel was fully engaged with his class.
Then signaling Edik to join her, she opened the refrigerator. He immediately spied the package with rubles. He pulled it from the shelf and weighed it in his hands. “At least thirty thousand, but possibly more depending on the weight of the wrapper,” he breathed in hushed awe.
He had a knack for money that way, intuiting amounts by feel and effortlessly summing complex calculations. “Where did the money come from?”
She pressed her finger to her lips, signaling him to hush. “It’s a secret,” she said. “And people might be listening.”
His nod showed he understood she wouldn’t or couldn’t discuss the matter with him now, and she knew she could trust him to keep quiet. Like her, he had been raised with a healthy respect for surveillance.
“Can you hide all of this for me?” she whispered, indicating the money as well as the book.
She hated to ask him. In only a few days he would be on his way to America or Israel and free to let the world know of his achievements. Carting around this much money was a risky proposition. If he was caught, he would lose his opportunity to leave.
“Anything for you,” he said.
Without further discussion, he untucked his shirt, loosened his belt, and inserted the package along with the book into the back of his pants.
The package stuck up just a little past his belt, and he covered it with his shirt.
“Good?” he asked her, turning his back to her for inspection.
“It will be invisible once you have your coat on,” she said.
“I’ll take it out to the dacha,” he said. Their families owned a cottage seventeen kilometers outside of Moscow.
“That’s perfect,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Is there anything else I can do?”
Spontanteously, she threw her arms around her cousin. “Just be careful, and be safe.”
He murmured something at the top of her head. It sounded suspiciously like, “I love you, too.”
Chapter FORTY-TWO
ARTUR
THE MONEY! ARTUR had seen the huge stack of money Sofia had hidden in the fridge, and he had the heady sense that his case was about to burst wide open. Soon, so soon, he’d be able to hand the traitors to Semyon and come home a hero.
Ilya plunked himself down on the threadbare velveteen sofa and patted the seat beside him. At the invitation, Artur sank deep into the misshapen cushions, although he would have preferred to sit on one of the hard chairs set up in a semicircle around the sofa, a position that might have allowed him to keep an eye on the doorway into the kitchen.
“Good,” Ilya said once Artur was sitting beside him. “I didn’t want to get stuck next to Misha.” He gestured to a bearded man deep in conversation with Ruben and Mendel.
“Cheese and onions?” Artur ventured.
“Tak.” Ilya folded his hands over his mound of a belly and sat back in his seat, as if ready to nap, but Artur noted how he seemed to watch everyone through the slits of his half-closed eyes.
Artur shifted uncomfortably on the too-soft sofa. The springs were worn. Maya wouldn’t have allowed such a shabby piece to remain in their apartment.
He looked forward to putting this case and Yosef Koslovsky successfully behind him and returning full-time to his life as Artur Gregorovich.
The Reitmans’ apartment boasted none of the luxuries of his own—no Turkish rugs or oil paintings or fine knickknacks. Judging by what he’d seen, his conspirators had access to enough money to furnish several apartments decadently and still have money to burn. Why wouldn’t they use some of it to fix up Sofia’s apartment? Perhaps they were being careful not to draw suspicion. But at the very least, they could have splurged on a pile of toys for her young son.
He supposed Sofia was so dedicated to the cause that it neve
r occurred to her use the money for her own family. She would never conscience skimming from the top like her cousin, who showed no compunction about his fast spending on food and drink.
Artur and Ilya sat side by side, their legs touching, in an uncomfortable silence, while the room filled with men. A dozen in total crammed into the living room.
From his position, he could see Sofia and Edik whispering urgently in the kitchen. Then she opened the refrigerator, and the two were shielded from view.
Sofia had her back to him. A few errant curls peeked out from the kerchief she had taken to wearing.
The curls tantalized him. Artur anticipated the moment when he would bury his fingers in her waves of hair, lock his lips to hers, and deliberately claim all of her secrets.
Sofia was keeping secrets, many, many secrets.
Normal people with secrets suffered with them. The bigger the secret, the greater the pressure, the more they yearned to relieve the tension and reveal themselves. He merely had to seem like a sympathetic ear at that perfect moment of ripeness, and all of those juicy secrets would pour right into his hands.
Ilya jabbed him in the ribs, dispelling his daydreams of making his daughter come undone.
“I see the way you look at her. Don’t get any ideas,” Ilya said in a low voice so that only Artur could hear. “Just because they’re fighting, don’t think you have a chance. She stayed faithful the whole five years he was in prison. She loves that man.”
Artur was struck once again by Ilya’s shrewdness. “I meant no disrespect.”
“No harm done,” Ilya said. “I’m just letting you know how things are.”
How things were, Artur thought. She’d stayed faithful while Mendel was gone. Now that he was here making her life hell, she might very well choose to seek comfort elsewhere.
“So, Mendel, Yosef and I are curious,” Ilya said, pinching Artur’s arm. “If God cares so much about what we do, then why do bad things happen to good people?”
He recognized Ilya’s question as an attempt to divert his too-obvious attention from Sofia and perhaps Mendel’s as well.
To Catch a Traitor Page 23