by Peter Golden
“Russische Fotze,” he says, and Yuli fires at him until his face is gone.
On Leidsegracht, the wind was rippling the black water of the canal, and Yuli admired the moonlight silvering the ripples. She had almost told Michael about the German when they had hiked to Lake Bereza, but he kissed her, and Yuli told herself that his kiss had distracted her. That was a lie, and she knew it. Yuli said nothing because that story was only one of another eight or nine stories—she resisted a strict accounting—about men Papka had sent her to kill in the service of governments. For America, a North Korean microbiologist in Lviv, who specialized in weaponizing viruses; for Israel, a Syrian arms merchant in Moscow who peddled his wares to radicals in the Middle East and the Chechen-Ingush Republic; for the Kremlin, a Cuban official, a personal friend of the Communist hero Fidel Castro, who tried to bribe a manager to acquire AK-47s directly from the factory in Izhevsk for resale to South American criminals—an average of one a year, give or take, and when Yuli envisaged telling Michael about any of them, she couldn’t bear picturing the horror on his face.
Papka had practiced this trade, and after Yuli’s formal education was done, he had introduced her to the art of stalking prey and escaping pursuers. He had hired Red Army veterans to help guard the compound and warehouses, and these men had tutored Yuli in hand-to-hand combat, knife fighting, marksmanship, booby-trapping doors and windows with plastique, and wiring a bomb to a car’s ignition. It was Papka, though, who had taught her the one indispensable lesson, which permitted Yuli to justify the killing to herself. Your targets are evil men, he said. Like the men who murdered Dovid and the children at the lake. Like the men who murdered your mother. Never forget that. And Yuli never did. Nor did she question why she was expected to do as Papka ordered. He had rescued her from the forest, and Yuli loved him. Then Michael arrived in Otvali, and Yuli started wondering if her debt to Papka would ever be paid. Had Yuli been his daughter—the daughter that Papka, drinking his way to the bottom of an ArArAt brandy bottle, often said that he wished he’d had with his beloved Maria Adaskina—would Yuli’s life have been her own? Wouldn’t she be allowed to marry and move away to raise a family? Sometimes, Yuli thought Papka acted as though the Nazis slaughtering his parents, siblings, and Maria entitled him to hold on to her forever, to never sustain another loss, even one as inevitable as a child growing up and leaving home. Well, Yuli didn’t share his perspective, and traveling to Paris, Nice, and Amsterdam with Michael had brightened her daydreams with the irresistible hues of overlapping rainbows, and she neither wanted to let go of them nor of Michael.
“Yuli, this is you?” a man’s voice called out to her in English.
Her reflex, honed by training and experience, was to grip the switchblade in her coat pocket, but Yuli relaxed as she turned to the blond-haired man in a trench coat, realizing that the voice belonged to Pyotr Ananko. He was sitting on the terrace of a café decorated with cords of white lights entwined around the awning poles.
“Petya!” Yuli said, sounding as if she were pleasantly surprised—instead of being suspicious about his presence.
Despite the wintry evening, the tables were full, the terrace warmed by a big perforated metal brazier. Yuli entered the terrace as Pyotr stood and bent to kiss her lips. Yuli had dodged his lip kiss at the party in the Malt Shop and offered him her cheek, but hoping to determine why he was in Amsterdam, she accepted the kiss and sat at his table.
“Would you like a beer?” Pyotr asked, then took a drink from his mug.
“No, thank you, Petya. I’m out for a walk.”
“You are on a vacation?”
He knew that she wouldn’t be vacationing in the Netherlands, but Yuli had to calibrate her response to inform Pyotr and to mislead him. Soviet foreign correspondents were debriefed by the KGB. The Committee for State Security was obsessed with information about the West, mainly how Europeans and Americans felt about their governments, and whether certain individuals, with access to sensitive materials or with the ability to influence public opinion, might be willing to work for the Soviets. All the correspondents answered their KGB questioners. Otherwise, their credentials would be revoked, and they would trade the comfy perquisites of life in the West for public transportation instead of a car; a decrepit apartment with a communal kitchen; and quoting tiresome party functionaries at home. All the same, some of the correspondents were more dedicated to spycraft than to journalism, and Yuli was unsure which her childhood friend preferred.
“Papka has me doing errands for him.” This was a safe reply. Pyotr knew that Der Schmuggler had connections among the state-security apparatus and in the Kremlin. The men in power tolerated his smuggling because he bribed them, and while a few of them may have suspected that he took on assignments for the CIA and the Mossad, no one had any proof. In addition, as Yuli came to understand, Der Schmuggler was clever enough to work in the little-known corners of the Cold War, where the interests of all his clients were aligned. For instance, the United States had reason to target that North Korean microbiologist, yet Soviet leaders had been distressed by his contacts with Ukrainian nationalists. Israel dispatched Arab arms dealers like picnickers swatting flies, but the Syrian was greedy and had arranged a delivery of rocket-propelled grenades to Chechens hostile to the Kremlin. And the Cuban official was a thief, which annoyed the big-shot party thieves. In these cases, the targets were from countries allied with the Soviet Union. Thus, the KGB couldn’t leave its fingerprints on the corpses, so Papka was protected by his powerful friends in Moscow—for the time being.
Pyotr took out a flip-top box of Marlboros, and when Yuli eyed the pack, he said, “They sell these here.”
She gave him a droll smile. “You are in Amsterdam for the cigarettes?”
“For an article on Ben Webster.”
“That is the saxophone player you like? The man who played with Duke Ellington?”
“And Oscar Peterson and Coleman Hawkins and Art Tatum. Ben is disgusted with how he—and all Negroes—are treated in the United States, and he has come to live here.”
Pyotr might be lying, but his explanation was plausible. To dig for the truth, her best course was to confront him head-on, a reasonable tactic given that she knew things about Pyotr that he would prefer the KGB not to know—that he used to sell German shortwave radios and Beatles albums in Dnipropetrovsk and that he had identified the missile designer Kazimir Zolnerowich for Yuli, so she could photograph him and pass the pictures, through Bashe, to the Americans, who were eager to persuade the young genius to defect.
With an accusatory edge in her voice, Yuli said, “I saw you in Nice, hiding behind the newspaper at the kiosk.”
Pyotr smoked his Marlboro, his expression placid, as if Yuli was making chitchat. “That was you and the Mad Russian going into the Hôtel Ruhl? I thought so.”
“And you would not come to say hello?”
“You were . . . engaged.”
“It was odd seeing you in Nice.”
“I was there for Ben Webster. He had a performance at La Caravelle in Marseille the night before, and one in Nice that night—at the Hôtel Le Negresco.”
This was credible, primarily because Yuli couldn’t figure out how Pyotr could have tracked them to Nice unless the KGB had been watching them when they first landed in Paris—unlikely given that Yuli had seen nothing suspicious. Yuli had more success figuring out how Pyotr could have tailed them to Amsterdam: that chambermaid at the Hôtel Ruhl. The KGB had more chambermaids on its payroll than Conrad Hilton, and the maid struck Yuli as Eastern European. As soon as Yuli spoke to her in Ukrainian and the maid answered, Yuli kicked herself for not checking the phone and the suite for bugs. But that would have alarmed Michael. Yuli wanted to protect him from that part of herself, but now she worried that her reluctance had exposed them to more danger, because in all likelihood the KGB had picked them up on their return to Paris, then shadowed Michael to his lunch with Taft Mifflin and to the train at the Gare du Nord.
&n
bsp; “Petya, what does the KGB want with me?”
“With you?”
“Or does the KGB have a special department to assist jealous former boyfriends?”
Pyotr appeared wounded, frowning and poking out his Marlboro in the ashtray. “We are friends our whole lives. I am telling the truth—I am here to write about Ben Webster.”
Yuli had hurt Pyotr by rejecting him, and she didn’t want to rub salt in the wound, but she didn’t believe him. His story contained too many coincidences, and Papka was fond of saying that every coincidence was a mirage, the result of adding stupidity to ignorance.
She stood. “Good night, Petya.”
“It is late. Let me walk you.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “To keep me safe?”
“Yuli, wait,” he said, but she had already left the terrace.
38
She had intended to go straight up Prinsengracht, but after bumping into Pyotr, Yuli checked her map and altered her route, veering away from the canal onto Passeerdersstraat, quickening her pace and abruptly slowing down, her head swiveling to check for a tail, and cutting back to Prinsengracht, the streetlights buffing up the night with an amber sheen that fell like flames on the ebony surface of the canal.
That afternoon, when she and Michael had arrived to speak to Joost Ter Horst, Yuli had seen the ramp outside the front door of the house above the basement entrance of the Magic Dragon, and the ramp had inspired her plan. The window of the coffee shop was dark, and Yuli sat on a bench kitty-corner from the house. Several people passed by, hurrying through the cold, and across the canal, the lights of a houseboat were on, and Yuli heard the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” coming from the boat. It wasn’t the plan that made her anxious. Yuli was worried about Michael alone in the hotel. If Pyotr hadn’t followed her in a fit of jealousy, she couldn’t understand why the KGB would be shadowing them: whatever she was doing was being done for Papka, and the KGB didn’t harass him. That left Michael. If KGB agents were watching them, they knew that Michael had met with Taft Mifflin, so maybe this was nothing but intrigue between American and Soviet spies. That would be good news. The bad news would be that Michael, in searching for his grandmother’s killer, was poking around in business that interested the KGB. If that was true, then he and Yuli had a problem, which was why she was in a rush to leave Amsterdam.
Yuli was shivering when Joost, wearing the same ratty cardigan, rolled down the ramp in his wheelchair. He was holding a leash, and the schnauzer scurried beside him. The houseboat was dark and quiet. Joost wheeled over to the leafless trees along the canal. Yuli walked behind Joost and the dog, who had lifted a hind leg to relieve himself against a tree trunk. Seeing that the street was empty, Yuli dashed behind Joost, locking the crook of her left arm around his throat. He fought, rocking in his wheelchair, but because his legs didn’t work, he couldn’t push up to free himself. Removing the syringe from her coat pocket with her right hand, Yuli flipped off the cap with her thumb and, aiming at the jugular, jabbed the needle into Joost and injected him with phenol, the drug used by the Nazis to cleanse the world of Lebensunwertes Leben—life unworthy of life.
Joost stopped rocking. Yuli withdrew the needle from his neck and tossed the syringe into the canal. Keeping her eyes on the street and spotting no one, she knotted the yellow armband with the blue Star of David around his throat and shoved Joost and his wheelchair into the water. The schnauzer was barking and gazing up at her. She recalled a quote from The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most popular novels at school: Providence has punished him. Then Yuli was overwhelmed with revulsion because she had felt nothing about killing Joost yet was concerned about his dog. Joost, she decided, got the fate he deserved, but the schnauzer was innocent. Yuli picked up his leash, intending to tie him to the front door of the house, but when she tried the handle and the door opened, she put the dog inside, a modest gesture that proved to Yuli that her vocation had not fully extinguished her humanity.
* * *
The car was parked thirty meters past the Anne Frank House. Through the rear window, in the faint wash of the streetlights, Yuli saw the outline of a driver in a cap. The shape of the car resembled the Mercedes she had seen outside the hotel, but there wasn’t enough light to say for sure. The difference between paranoia and caution was the ending; if the driver blew her brains out, no one would accuse her of being paranoid. Not much of a prize, was it? Yuli changed her route, heading toward a bridge to cross the canal, and as she did, the car started, the taillights winked on, and she glimpsed the license plate—GZ-89-91—the same plate as the Mercedes sedan. She walked faster, going down a street too narrow for the Mercedes, and then another. Yuli had to call Papka before Joost was fished out of the water. She couldn’t use a phone at the Hotel Americain, not the public ones in the lobby and not the one in the room, because the call would have to be placed through the hotel switchboard, and the KGB paid off switchboard operators as zealously as chambermaids. And Yuli avoided phone booths. She felt too vulnerable, frightened that somebody would attack her from behind.
Within minutes, Yuli was lost, but there was no shortage of Mercedes sedans in Amsterdam, and she didn’t dare stop to check her map. Her salvation, she hoped, lay up ahead, where pinkish-red lights shone over windows on both sides of a canal, and people were ogling the prostitutes in negligees behind the glass. Yuli blended into the clusters of tourists, many of them couples holding hands, satisfying their curiosity, and single men appraising the wares. Off the main drag, Yuli darted down an alleyway lined with red-lit windows and serious shoppers, and as she reached the end, a hand clamped on her shoulder, pulling her backward.
A man in a sheepskin jacket with a shearling collar loomed over her and, breathing beer in her face, asked, “How much, honey?”
Yuli smiled helplessly, as if she didn’t comprehend his request, and attempted to move out from under his grip. He held on to her, grabbing a lapel of her coat with his other hand, tugging her toward him. “You speak English, don’tcha?”
Yuli encouraged him to let her go with a knee to his groin, which doubled him over, and striking him under his chin with the heel of her right hand, and then she bolted out of the alley and down another street until she came to a corner with a weathered brick two-story house that had a red neon sign above the door that said OPEN, and at the bottom of the front window, decals of credit-card logos, American Express and Diners Club.
Stuffing her knit hat in a coat pocket, Yuli rang the buzzer. A tidy woman with short silver-blue hair, impeccable eyeliner and lipstick, and a black ruffle dress answered the door.
“You looking for the job?” she asked.
“No.”
“We are for men here.”
“What does a half hour cost?”
“This varies. Thirty dollars American will make a man grin.”
“I’ll give you sixty if you let me use your phone.”
The woman eyed Yuli with more than a little suspicion.
“Please. Someone is chasing me, and I have to get off the street.”
The woman let her in. Straight ahead, Yuli saw men and women sitting on couches and heard the simmer of conversation. An office with a metal desk was off to the right, and on the desk was a Tensor lamp, an adding machine, a ledger, and a telephone. Yuli gave the woman three twenties, and she went out, shutting the door.
In Otvali, Yuli had written Papka’s schedule and contact numbers on the back of her map in her private code, a jumble of English and Cyrillic letters. He was in Bucharest, Romania, in an apartment building next to the Israeli embassy, and she got the international operator on the line, gave her the number and one of the phony Polish names she used when calling Papka and, in English, requested that the operator reverse the charges.
“Allo,” Der Schmuggler said after telling the operator he would accept the call.
“Allo, Papka. How are you?”
“Fine, fine. When are you coming home?”
Yuli knew that discussio
n would be unpleasant, so, for the moment, she stuck to business. “The letter should be mailed. The subject is Joost Ter Horst.”
Yuli had drafted the letter in English before leaving Otvali. It was short and to the point: If the Bundestag votes to let the statute of limitations expire, then war criminals like —— will receive justice from those of us who have not lost our minds or our memories.
Yuli had omitted the name, because neither she nor Papka knew if she would find anyone. Papka had translated the letter into German, and Yuli assumed that linguists at the Israeli embassy would translate it into Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and the letter would be sent to newspapers throughout Germany, the Netherlands, France, and South America. They would skip the United States. With the reliance of Israel on America, the Mossad wouldn’t embarrass the White House by assassinating war criminals there.
“Papka, I need an address.”
“Yes, dear girl, which address?”
“Bashe.”
Yuli heard the sharp disapproval in his voice. “No. Too risky. You should come home.”
“Misha will keep looking until he finds her.”
“Let him look. He will find nothing.”
“Do not be so sure, Papka. Misha does not know our world, but he learns fast. And I . . .”
“And you?”
“And I will help him.”
Papka was silent.
“I promise you, Papka. I will stay with Misha until he finds her.”
They both knew it would take a long time to locate Bashe unless Papka provided the address; Bashe was a courier for intelligence agencies, and you couldn’t run those errands without a flair for covering your tracks. Therefore, Yuli’s promising that she wouldn’t return until Bashe was located was a threat to be away from Otvali for maybe a year or more. Yuli felt sick to her stomach threatening Papka, but she wouldn’t change her mind. She had a right to a life of her own.