Chapter FORTY-SEVEN
ARTUR
ARTUR LEFT THE reception determined to do his duty, however he felt about the rest. He would get between Sofia’s thighs and into her head, and he would make sure he had the information the KGB needed.
A cab waited to take Artur back to the field. He recognized the two agents in the backseat, Sasha and Leonid. They had been instrumental in abducting him from outside of the Reitmans’ apartment what seemed two lifetimes ago.
He flashed back to that horrible moment of helplessness, to the fear he’d had that he might actually get shot because they had mistaken him for a Jew.
“Where to?” Leonid asked.
“Any sign of Sofia?” Artur asked. He was eager to see her, to talk to her, to see if she was really all right after Mendel’s harsh treatment.
“I want to catch up with her tonight. Alone,” he told the agents with a wolfish smile, calculated to impress them. He dared not reveal any sign of his sympathy for her or of his failure so far to seduce her. They were likely reporting to Semyon or Victor.
But he wasn’t ashamed of his softer feelings, either. Despite what Maya had said, it wasn’t wrong to feel sympathy for Sofia or for the community he had infiltrated. They were people, with their own lives and dreams and worries, with families they loved.
Still, he wouldn’t let his softer emotions, his humane sensibilities, keep him from his purpose.
This was war. A war for his country’s future. A war for his family’s future.
Maybe the Jewish story was more compelling than he had at first credited. He couldn’t ignore the feelings his own experiences had aroused. But their alleged persecution didn’t warrant the standstill on nuclear disarmament, the continued brinksmanship pointing them to Armageddon.
The traitors had to be silenced.
Sasha pressed an earpiece to his ear and relayed Artur’s question. “She left the university a few minutes ago. She’s likely on her way to the metro station. Unless she stops by her parents’ place first.”
“Sooner or later she’ll head for the subway. Let’s head her off there,” Artur decided.
Sasha spoke into his earpiece again. “We don’t have eyes on her at the moment, but it doesn’t seem she’s passed this way yet.”
“Good,” Artur said.
They dropped him at the station, and he went down to the platform to wait for her.
The underground station was clean and brightly lit, but he spared no appreciation for the bright tiles or the artwork. He watched the people entering the platform and kept an eye out for Sofia. A train arrived. He didn’t see her, and he stayed put, while the rest of the platform cleared of people.
Sofia Reitman held the key to this case. Tonight he would lock her in his embrace and seduce her into trusting him with her secrets—about her husband, her uncle, her father, and anyone else who threatened his country. Including herself.
He spied her coming down the stairs to the platform. She moved briskly, her nose still swollen, her unflattering kerchief slightly askew. His heart seemed to beat in time with her rapid steps.
Her obvious misery in her marriage to Mendel made her the perfect weak link. In his head, Artur composed the story of the affair between them, the easy way he lured her into his arms and pretended to help her with her conspiracies. Once Edik left, she would turn to Artur the way she had turned to Edik.
He took a step toward Sofia and called her name. She looked in his direction. “Yosef? What are you doing here?”
“I knew you’d be getting off work about now. I came to check on you. To see if you’re really okay.”
“You mean because of Mendel? Don’t worry about me. I’m fine,” she said with a confidence that crushed his plans.
She didn’t seem to welcome any concern from him. So what was his move? He couldn’t think. Every cell in his body seemed to pulse with acute awareness of her. He fixated on her lips as they moved and lost himself to thoughts of how they would feel under his, how she would taste when he claimed her mouth.
Sofia’s eyes rose questioningly to his. “Do I have something in my teeth?”
Artur jolted back to awareness. Caught up in his fantasies, he was botching his approach. Badly.
What should he say? He reached for words and came up blank. A slight panic built behind his breast bone. He finally had her to himself, without her family to interfere. He couldn’t waste this opportunity.
He had to seduce her. He couldn’t fail.
He reached for Sofia and dragged her up against his chest. He pressed his lips to hers and kissed her for all he was worth. She gasped, and he plunged deeper.
He heard a roaring in his ears. The wind in the station picked up. For a wild moment, he felt caught up in something bigger than himself, felt the relentless momentum of history.
Then the train screeched into the station. Sofia wrenched herself out of his hold.
She slapped him hard.
The crack across his jaw stunned him. He brought his hand to his face and stood dumbfounded as she turned and raced for the open doors of the train.
She was rejecting him!
Artur’s cheek stung from the wallop she’d delivered, and more than that, his pride stung. He watched, frozen with humiliation, as she ran from him. The train doors slid closed, separating them.
Maybe he’d been a green fool to believe such a complicated woman would swoon in his arms, or maybe he didn’t know the tricks Semyon did.
The train pulled out of the station, taking Sofia away from him. He glimpsed her sitting with her fingers pressed to her lips. She didn’t look his way.
For as long as he could see her, she continued to sit with her fingers pressed to her mouth.
Maybe he had gotten through to her.
He stared after the train until he could no longer see her.
This wasn’t over.
Chapter FORTY-EIGHT
SOFIA
YOSEF HAD KISSED her.
Perhaps Sofia had craved his kiss and unwittingly invited it, but she didn’t think so. She had taken pains all week to distance herself from his attentions, even if she had secretly savored them.
She had been alone for too long, and Mendel’s return hadn’t yet eased her longing for intimacy.
She sat in her seat on the subway train and pressed the pads of the fingers of both her hands to her lips. To erase the kiss? Or to press it deeper?
As the train wheels clacked on the tracks, she replayed the kiss over and over in her mind.
There had been no warning. He had kissed her deeply, with so much passion, the way Mendel used to, like his next breath depended on the flow of desire between them.
The kiss was wrong of Yosef on so many levels. What kind of woman did he think she was?
She supposed the problems in her marriage were obvious to everyone, but she wasn’t in the market for a lover. She had honored her vows to Mendel, and she would see her marriage through.
Years of love, of faithfulness and partnership, didn’t simply burn to ash in the heat of another man’s kiss.
But, oh, that kiss. She had forgotten what passion tasted like.
She ruminated over the kiss, savoring and detesting it all at once, until the train pulled into her station.
She exited at her stop into the brisk night air and turned her thoughts resolutely to Mendel.
Her great love story with Mendel couldn’t end in betrayal and bitterness. It was her deepest wish to have Mendel, her Mendel, her great love, returned to her. She yearned to resurrect what they once had. She dreamed of the day she finally would wake up to the man who’d been stolen from her.
She had waited so long for him to return to her. She would keep waiting, as long as there was hope.
There was hope. Wasn’t there?
He had said he loved her.
> He had said she was his world.
As she trudged the scant blocks to her apartment, doubt crept in. Was she foolish to believe the violently protective stranger in her apartment might yet transform into the man she used to adore?
The lights were off when she entered. The sound of Kolya’s deep steady breath as he slept instantly calmed the turmoil inside her. She wasn’t foolish to hope. Her son deserved to know his father—the real Mendel.
Careful not to disturb Kolya’s slumber, she lightly kissed his forehead and brushed his unruly hair from his face.
She heard a scuffling sound in the kitchen and quietly went to investigate. Coming to stand in the doorway, she saw light spilling into the darkened kitchen from the crawl space. The hatch was slightly open. She heard the sound again, boxes being moved and pushed aside quickly. She suspected Mendel had waited for Kolya to fall asleep, and now he was now frantically searching for more evidence of her spying.
She hoped she was wrong.
She backed out of the kitchen. She moved slowly, soundlessly toward the front door, keeping her eyes on the kitchen. Mendel didn’t emerge.
She opened and closed the front door, hard this time, ensuring it made a sound loud enough to carry to him in the crawl space. Immediately, she heard the creak of the hatch and the muffled thump as Mendel levered out of the crawl space and hopped down in hasty response to the sound of her return.
She opened the closet and fussed with the hangers, clinking the empty metal ones together. She picked up and dropped her shoes noisily on the closet floor.
He didn’t come out of the kitchen or call out to her in greeting.
With growing dread, she returned to the kitchen. He sat at the kitchen table in the dark. The light in the crawl space was off, she noticed. He lifted a mug to his lips and went through the motions of sipping tea. There was no kettle on the stove. She was willing to bet his cup was empty.
“Why are you sitting here in the dark?” The scene was all too familiar, this time with their roles reversed. She didn’t ask about the crawl space. She waited to see what he would say.
There were myriad reasons he might have been up in the crawl space. He could tell her he had been reminiscing, going through Max and Irena’s things. He could say he had been searching for a specific item that he needed. Maybe he would even admit that he had doubted her.
He said none of those things. He didn’t mention the crawl space. He took another imaginary sip of tea and said, “I was praying.”
“Praying,” she repeated. She didn’t let her doubt show. Didn’t he usually pray at the synagogue? With a prayer book? There was nothing on the table but the salt and pepper shakers. And the mug he plunked down beside them.
“Yes, praying,” he insisted. “For your safety.” Perhaps he had been praying, but he had also been searching the apartment. To thwart her.
He didn’t trust her.
And she couldn’t trust him.
She felt suddenly exhausted. She braced her hand against the door frame for support. Mendel got up from the table and approached her. She breathed deeply. Fighting the urge to take a step back, she dug her fingernails into her palm. He stopped just short of where she stood.
Tentatively, he lifted his hands to her face. His calloused fingers were rough against her skin. He untied the kerchief she’d worn for him, and her hair spilled free. The touch lasted only a moment, and then he dropped his hand, as if she were a flame and the contact had singed him. This time, she was glad when he pulled away.
“I can’t lose you,” he said. “I don’t know how I would live without you.”
What she heard him say beneath his words was, “I will do anything in my power to stop you.” He wasn’t her partner any longer. Her cause was no longer his.
“You’re not going to lose me. I love you,” she said, adding another lie to the mountain growing between them.
He was a traitor. But she wouldn’t let him know that she knew.
***
Thanks so much for reading. Ready for more? The saga continues with To Hunt a Spy. Or check out the Kings of Brighton Beach series, which picks up the saga in present-day Brooklyn, New York. Keep reading for a preview. Or pop over to dbshuster.com to get FREE books and other offers.
KINGS OF BRIGHTON BEACH EXCERPT
VLAD
“I TOLD YOU, I didn’t kill him,” Vlad said. He tried to stay calm, but he was getting impatient with Detective Sharp’s endless repetition of the same question: “Why’d you kill him?” Either this was some kind of advanced interrogation technique, akin to water boarding, or Sharp was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Vlad wondered what time it was. He felt as if he had been in the interrogation room for days. He couldn’t waste time here. He needed to get out, regroup with Artur. Brighton Beach was on the brink of a mafia war, and Inna was in imminent danger.
“Zviad was already dead when I came in,” Vlad said.
“Don’t lie to me.” Sharp threw his pen on the table and jumped to his feet as if ready to smash in Vlad’s nose. The cop smelled like stale coffee and really needed a breath mint. His eyes were bloodshot with thick, dark bags underneath. “It’ll go worse for you.”
Vlad didn’t expect a friendly chat over coffee and donuts tonight, not when he had been two-fisting guns in a room where a man had taken a bullet to the brain, but his handler was a little too intense, a hungry shark that had caught the scent of chum.
Vlad’s nerves stretched taut. He remembered other visits to the station, other lengthy interrogations. Then he had been defiant, maybe even unrepentant. Vlad hadn’t done anything arrest-worthy tonight, hadn’t even fired his gun, but he still felt like a no-good kid with guilt itching to be confessed and threatening to show on his skin like an angry rash. If he wasn’t careful, he would give himself away.
“I’m telling the truth.” About this, anyway. “The door was locked. I kicked it in. She was trapped under him, and he was dead.”
“You said they were having sex.”
“I said he raped her,” Vlad said.
His handler cast a frustrated look at the mirrored wall, where his fellow officers were likely monitoring the questioning, as if Vlad were obstructing justice. “You said you weren’t in the room. How do you know what the hell happened?”
Vlad reminded himself that the cops hadn’t seen what he had seen: Inna half-naked, trapped under Zviad, and screaming her lungs out.
“He was lying on top of her. His leg was over hers like he was holding her down. His pants were pulled down around his ankles, and her dress was torn,” Vlad said. “What the fuck do you think happened?”
“Maybe she liked it rough. Maybe she wanted it,” Sharp said.
Vlad’s temper threatened to explode like a grenade, and he tightened his fists under the table to hold it in check.
“Maybe you got jealous and shot him. Did you know him? Were you friends? We can easily find that one out, so just tell us.”
“I told you, I didn’t kill him.” He squeezed his fists tighter, but his hold was slipping. “And, no. I didn’t know him personally. We’ve met a couple of times on business.”
“What is it you do for the Koslovskys?” his handler asked in an obvious attempt to try a new tack.
“I’m in charge of surveillance and security for Koslovsky Industries,” Vlad said. “And before you ask, yes, I’m licensed to carry guns in New York.” There was nothing illegal in the job he did, part of the brilliance of Artur’s scheme. Problem was, the scheme was almost too brilliant.
Vlad still had so much to learn from Artur about his business enterprise. The buyers and suppliers. The “products.” The relationships with the other small businesses in Brighton Beach and in the New York metropolitan area, never mind the connections overseas. He still didn’t know how it all worked, where all the money came from. Artur provided onl
y crumbs of information, a faint trail that hinted at the larger enterprise. Sometimes Vlad felt certain Artur knew his angle and was baiting and teasing him: I have everything you want. Come and get it.
The door slammed open and Detective Saul Hersh stalked in. “I don’t fucking believe it,” Vlad blurted as one of the few men who could blow all of his plans to hell strutted into the room.
“Believe it,” Saul said. He was short and on the slight side for a cop, but his threat wasn’t in his physical strength. The man was clever, sneaky. He used to have a reputation as a hardcore interrogator, the kind who always got his answers. Sharp was only the warm up. The real deal had just arrived.
Another test, Vlad thought, as dangerous as the others. Artur had eyes and ears on the police force.
Saul placed scarred hands on his narrow hips, and the circular marks drew Vlad’s eyes, just as they had the first time he had met Saul. Ivan’s abuse hadn’t left visible scars on Vlad, other than the cleft in his eyebrow from where his head had hit the corner of a coffee table. Saul had told him his own father used to burn cigarettes on his hands. “I had a choice,” Saul had said, “to be like him, or go another way. You have that choice too. What will you choose?”
“Never thought I’d see you here again. On that side of the table,” Saul said now. “Thought I’d scared some religion into you. Guess I was wrong ’cause here you are. Playing your father’s favorite role—gangster with guns.”
“Stuff it, Hershey. We both know you’re the one who tried to play my father’s role,” Vlad said. “You thought if you saved Nadia from Ivan she’d shower you with … gratitude.”
“Does your mother know you’re here? That you’re gunslinging for Koslovsky—just like your old man?”
“I don’t talk to Nadia. The worthless whore,” Vlad said. He made a spitting sound for extra effect.
Saul got up in his face, grabbed him by the collar. “Don’t talk about your mother that way.”
“You’re defending her?” Vlad couldn’t hold back a mirthless laugh. The poor fucking sap, sucker punched by love for a woman who would never love him back, who would never love anyone save Ivan, even her own son. Ivan had beaten Nadia so hard she couldn’t stand and then turned his rage on Vlad, who had been too small to defend himself or his mother, and still she had professed her love. Sickening.
To Catch a Traitor Page 27