Vera took pains to limit situations that put her in proximity with her brother-in-law. His comment the other day about the length of her skirt had sorely tested her endurance. The nerve! She would have liked to complain to Sofia, but she had kept the incident to herself, until this morning when Sofia had asked if Mendel had done anything to upset her. This time, Sofia hadn’t tried to minimize the incident or explain it away. She had shown the first stirrings of real concern, the first evidence that she might be waking to her own harsh reality.
Judging by her sister’s bloody nose and Kolya’s unceasing complaints, Vera instinctively understood the reality to be even harsher than she had let herself imagine.
Kolya clenched his fists at his sides. “She wouldn’t give him his way. And so he hit her.”
Vera said the only thing she thought would make him feel better, “I’ll talk to your dedushka.”
Kolya idolized his grandfather, who she had to admit had made a better father than Mendel seemed to be. “Good. He’ll know what to do,” Kolya said.
Vera nodded her agreement, but she doubted her father would intervene. Like Sofia, he always sided with Mendel.
When Mendel had proposed they renounce their Soviet citizenship and request to emigrate, her father had followed his lead. Ilya had wooed the family with a tale of how wonderful it would be to live free as Jews in the Land of Israel. Now, they were all stuck with the consequences of that choice, waiting for permission that would likely never be granted, non-citizens excluded from Soviet society, eligible only for odd jobs, with no prospects for making things better, and living in constant fear of the KGB.
Together, her father and Mendel had ruined their lives.
Mendel’s jail time had given them some reprieve. But now he was back, and he demanded more concessions, more changes. She feared Ilya would go right along with him.
Deep down, she believed that only one key thing had changed about Mendel. Before he had gone to prison, her sister’s husband had always had to have his way, always had to be right, and he had badgered anyone who disagreed. After prison, he had learned he could use his fists to get what he wanted. He didn’t have to be right, didn’t have to marshal reason and logic. Now, he only needed to be stronger than his opponent.
Gennady pressed the bell and cleared his throat. “It’s your stop,” he said.
Lost in thought, she would have missed her stop without his prompt, but she couldn’t bring herself to thank him.
She took Kolya by the hand and exited the bus. Gennady followed and trailed a few steps behind. They walked the couple of blocks to Sofia’s apartment.
Vera noticed her father’s KGB agents stood outside, accompanied this time by several others, and she stopped short.
Gennady bumped into her. He caught her arms to keep her from falling and pulled her up against him. She wrenched out of his hold just as he asked the question that was on her mind, too. “Why are there so many KGB agents here?”
Kolya ran ahead into the street without looking. A line of cars sped toward him.
“Kolya!” Vera screamed.
Gennady took off and raced toward him. Fast and light on his feet, he snatched Kolya out of the way of an oncoming car and scooped him up into his arms without missing a step. The car swerved and the driver leaned on the horn, but by then, Gennady had already cleared the far curb.
Vera waited for the light to change and crossed on shaky legs. She covered her heart with her hand, feeling as if it might leap out of her chest. If not for Gennady, Kolya might have been killed.
When she reached them, she threw her arms around her nephew. All of her worry and love—for him and for her sister—poured out of her, and she clung to him. “Don’t scare me like that!”
She knew she should acknowledge Gennady for his bravery, but she buried her head in Kolya’s neck until she felt Gennady move on. Kolya held himself stiffly, but she remembered how not so long ago he used to snuggle against her and fall asleep. The family used to joke that Vera was his second mother. For so many years, she had chafed at the responsibility for him that they had all heaped on her, especially when he wasn’t hers.
But Kolya had become hers. Hadn’t he? And she didn’t know how she would have survived if she had lost him.
“Ugh! Auntie Vera, you’re getting me all wet,” Kolya protested and pulled away. She hadn’t realized she was crying.
She straightened and wiped at her eyes. She glanced self-consciously at the gauntlet of KGB agents. She recognized four of the agents. She had seen them outside her building, waiting for her father. Gennady spoke quietly with one of them, something she had been warned never to do.
Her father would condemn Gennady as one of the enemy. But who was the real enemy?
Gennady had risked himself and saved Kolya’s life.
“Come on, Kolya,” she sniffled. “Let’s go see your mom.”
Kolya darted ahead, still spurred by the urgency that had sent him shooting so incautiously across the street. Inside, he pushed repeatedly at the elevator button, but the noisy gears seemed to have gone silent.
“Do you think it’s working?” he asked. The elevator needed chronic repair and often glitched out of service. He shifted impatiently where he stood and glanced at the door to the stairwell, likely weighing which option would get him home faster.
Gennady joined them. “Your mom’s not here. She left for work,” he said.
“She’s not here,” Kolya repeated as if slow to digest the information.
“See? She’s fine,” Vera said, as much for herself as for him. “She wouldn’t have gone to work otherwise.”
They should have expected Sofia wouldn’t be home. She always left for work before Kolya returned. Inside, Vera shuddered at the direction their thoughts had taken, the fear that had driven them both to worry what state they would find her in, despite Sofia’s assurances to them that the episode had been an accident.
She had the terrible premonition that one day she would arrive with Kolya to find her sister dead.
She shook off the dark thoughts, dismissing them as another daydream, this one dark instead of rose-colored, full of violence instead of silly romantic notions. Her gaze flitted to Gennady and then quickly away.
Either way, her daydreams were equally unlikely.
Chapter FORTY-FOUR
GENNADY
VERA WAS CLEARLY upset. She stood on the sidewalk a long moment after Kolya disappeared into his apartment building. Gennady could see how much she was hurting.
He fought to keep his hands at his side, when what he really wanted was to pull her into his arms and offer whatever comfort he could.
“What can I do?” he asked.
She tensed. He understood with no small hurt that she had forgotten about him. She hadn’t let down her guard in front of him. He had merely caught her unguarded, and she didn’t like it.
With a noisy breath, she straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. When she looked at him, her usually expressive eyes were shuttered. She called to mind a soft, vulnerable creature retrenched in its hard shell.
“We should go. Petya’s waiting,” she said.
She didn’t paper over the incident with a tidy white lie that she was fine. Nor did she go so far in the other direction and lash out and push him away with an insult. She merely closed in on herself, shut him out as if he didn’t matter, and moved stubbornly on.
Here he fell deeper and deeper for her with each passing day, but she still wasn’t comfortable with him, still only tolerated—barely—having him around.
When would she finally let him in?
She started walking in the direction of the apartment, first at a fast pace, and then eventually at a more measured one. She didn’t speak, and he didn’t push her.
He worried she would run, for good this time, if he pushed at the boundary she had so clearl
y drawn. Much as it killed him, he had to wait for her to open up.
The silence wasn’t uncomfortable as they walked along, but neither was it companionable. Separate people. Separate worlds. For the next twenty minutes, she didn’t so much as glance in his direction.
Her extended silence made him doubt himself. Maybe he’d read the whole thing wrong. Maybe he was imposing. Maybe he should stop pursuing her and leave her alone the way she had asked.
Maybe he couldn’t win her after all, despite what Uncle Semyon had said.
When they arrived at his building, she preceded him up the stairs. He lagged a little behind to watch her long, graceful legs and torture himself with the same question that had plagued him since their first kiss.
Did she even like him?
He caught up to her before she reached his apartment. She stepped aside while he unlocked and opened the door. As soon as they crossed the threshold, multiple voices talking all at once drifted to them from the living room.
Giggling chatter. Loud jokes and guffaws. It sounded like a party. He couldn’t see from the hallway into the living room, but he surmised his brother’s classmates had come to visit.
He stepped ahead of Vera and stopped her in the hall. He wasn’t ready to relinquish her to her classmates. She stopped and studied him in her quiet, serious way, but he had no idea what she might be thinking. He wanted to break through the wall of silence she’d thrown up between them.
“Let me take your coat,” he said to buy himself time as he wracked his brain for the magic words to unlock her. He noticed the slight tremor in her hand as she undid the first button.
“That’s probably Vera now,” he heard his brother say to his guests in the living room as if delivering the punchline of a joke. Vera stilled.
“This should be good,” someone replied, and Vera’s shoulders jerked with tension.
Someone else, maybe Petya himself, made the next comment, voice too low for Gennady to hear, but the raucous, derisive laughter that followed was unmistakable.
Vera hugged her books to her chest. Gennady stepped toward her just as she whirled on her heel. She bumped into him.
“Sorry,” she said. Her gaze flashed up to his then, and her lovely tilted eyes swirled with powerful emotions. Just for a moment, he read in them the longing that he had halfway convinced himself he had only imagined.
Deep, deep longing. For him? And so much hurt.
She blinked her eyes and turned her head, and he was cut off once again, but that small glimpse had been enough. She ducked her head to hide her face and squeezed past him. She yanked open the door and hurried into the hall. To leave. To run.
“Vera, wait.” He pursued her out the door. The carpet in the hall swallowed the sound of her quick steps. She made it halfway down the hall before he caught up to her. He grabbed her gently by the arm and pulled her to a stop.
A small sob escaped her, and tears started to spill down her cheeks, as if the dam she had tried to construct around her heart had cracked under the strain and sprung a leak.
He walked around her so that she was forced to look at him.
“Let me go.” She swatted at him. He loosened his grip. He didn’t want to seem threatening. But he didn’t let go.
The freshly painted white doors up and down the hallway were all shut, but he could hear the sounds of his neighbors moving about their apartments. He took a step closer to her and kept his voice low as he pleaded with her. “Wait. Please. I don’t want you to go.”
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t do this. Don’t pretend you care.”
“I’m not pretending,” he said.
“I’m not an idiot.” Her shoulders were high and tight. She adjusted her grip on her books and held them in front of her like a shield. “I know how this all works. You pretend to like me and then laugh at me as soon as I start to believe it.”
Her words confirmed the story he’d been telling himself about her. She’d been hurt and rejected so often that she had come to expect it.
“I would never do that.” He needed her to believe he was different.
“Liar.” She shoved at his chest with the books. She was too slight to budge him, but he took a step back, a small concession. “Let me go. You’re not going to reel me in again.”
“Again?” Her accusation surprised him. “What do you mean ‘again’?”
She tried to glare at him, but her wall wouldn’t hold. The tears came faster now, and he felt he could see all the way into her heart, her breaking heart.
“That first night. When you kissed me. And then you laughed,” she accused.
“I didn’t—”
Crying in earnest now, she continued, “You and the KGB agents. You all laughed at me.”
And then he remembered. He had laughed, but not the way she thought.
“That’s why you ran? Why you’ve been giving me the cold shoulder?” Not because she was slow to trust, but because she thought he had betrayed her.
“Am I supposed to trail after you and beg for more?” she sniffled.
“I wasn’t laughing at you,” he said. “I was just embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed to be seen with me.” She tried again to pull away.
“No,” he said and stepped closer to her. “To be so caught up in you that I didn’t even notice our audience.”
She cut her gaze away, retreating from him in the only way she could. “You’re lying.”
“It’s the truth, Vera.” He let her go then. She started to walk past him, head held high. “Why would I lie about this? Do I look like some stupid, immature schoolboy?”
She paused, and he asked, “Do I seem like the kind of person who needs to hurt someone to feel confident? You think I have nothing better to do than kiss you so I can laugh at you? Than chase your nephew into traffic just so I can mock you? Is that the man you think I am?”
She dragged her gaze back to his. She didn’t answer, but she had stopped. She was listening.
“I see you, Vera. I see who you are,” he said.
He risked touching her then. He placed his hands gently on her shoulders, and she didn’t reject him and jerk away. “Tell me you see me, too. Tell me you want me, too,” he pleaded with her.
The longing was there in the way her body leaned toward his. But so too was the fear in the way she held herself back, poised to run.
She stared at him with those wide, exotic eyes for what seemed an eternity. He waited in unbearable suspense for her answer.
See me. Please, see me.
The books slid from her hands and hit the floor with a thunk, and then, finally, she fell into his arms. She twined her arms around his neck and kissed him as if she’d been waiting for him her whole life.
He tasted her salty tears and lost himself to the soft warmth of her mouth and the heady revelation that she wanted him, truly wanted him, as much as he wanted her.
He heard surprised gasps. They both startled and angled their heads to see the shocked faces of Petya and his classmates, all of whom had congregated in the hall, several doors down, outside their apartment.
“What are you doing?” Petya demanded.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Gennady asked. He stroked his thumb over Vera’s swollen lips. “I was kissing Vera.”
“Vera?” one of the girls spluttered. “But don’t you know who she is? Who her family is?”
“Traitors.”
“Criminals.”
“Zionists.”
He felt Vera stiffen and tense as her classmates offered up as condemnation the things Petya had already told him about her family. They expected this information would make him repudiate her.
This time, Vera didn’t run or retreat into herself. She stood by his side and trained her steady gaze on him.
She’d honored him with her trust. Her faith in him g
ave him a confidence he hadn’t realized he’d been missing.
He treated Petya’s mob to the look their father, the general, had perfected for dealing with unruly subordinates, the one that made them squirm like ants burning under a magnifying glass.
“Of course I know who she is,” his voice boomed in the narrow hall. “A better question is, do you?”
To his own ear, he sounded like a military commander, a formidable man. Even Petya, always quick when they disagreed to remind him that he was a sham of a father substitute, lowered his eyes and submitted to Gennady’s newfound air of authority.
Gennady looked into Vera’s shining eyes, and he liked the man he saw reflected there very, very much.
Chapter FORTY-FIVE
ARTUR
“SO, HOW’S YOUR case coming along?” Semyon cornered Artur at the reception and handed him a glass of champagne. “There’s nothing like fucking a woman for the good of your country, is there?”
“Shh!” Artur warned. He felt a little sick. “Maya will hear you.”
Maya stood among a cluster of men, not far from where Artur conversed with her father. She threw back her head, laughing at something one of the men said, and touched her hand to her throat. Her choker, a luminescent strand of pearls that Artur had saved for months to acquire, emphasized the elegant curve of her neck. She was exceedingly beautiful with her refined features and statuesque figure, and he knew the other men in the room envied him. She flirted and flattered and paved the way for him to step in and claim their admiration himself.
She glanced his way and flashed him a bright, cold smile, dazzling with its warnings about how much she was doing for him, about how he had better use tonight’s opportunities to his best advantage, about how he best not forget she held his future in her hands.
Artur raised his glass to his wife, and then took a long sip, trying to ease his own growing sense of agitation.
“No worries, my boy. Maya’s a good KGB wife,” Semyon said. “She understands the rules. You belong to us before you belong to her.”
Artur drank a little more champagne. He knew for a fact that Maya had no such understanding. When he had arrived home this evening, Maya had been less than pleased to see him. Her anger over his siding with his mother about Aleksei’s behavior hadn’t dissipated in the day he’d been gone. If anything, it had grown, finding other sources of sustenance.
To Catch a Traitor Page 25