Arkady had still not decided precisely what to do about the British woman.
Then Yury complained that the car he’d signed out for the evening, and its key, had gone missing.
Arkady checked with the other officers in each car, asking if anyone had Stepanov’s key and vehicle by mistake. Doing so, he discovered two things. Not only had NKVD car number forty-two disappeared, but so had Kostya and the British woman with the injured knees.
Devout in his desire to not understand this development, Arkady quizzed Yury once more about his memory of the car.
Yury stamped his foot. —Yes, I’m certain! Car number forty-two, and it’s gone! How shall I get Comrade Captain Kuznets home now?
Arkady drove both men home himself, in his own signed-out vehicle, as Boris assured Yury this business of the missing car would not affect him. —Someone took it by mistake. We’ll get it straightened out at the office, once I see the Garage Number One records.
Free of Yury and Boris, Arkady knew he should drive by Kostya’s block of flats. Just to see.
Then he’d reminded himself of construction in that area, of random signs rearing up in the dark, and declined.
After signing his car back in, and after thanking a young sergeant called Katelnikov for then driving him home, Arkady returned to the study and sifted the detritus of women. Many pairs of stockings, one set destroyed at the knees. Drawers and step-ins. A necklace with a hammer and sickle pendant. Several handkerchiefs. Some bloodied rags. A brassiere, this last garment very strange to Arkady, and one which refused to give up its secrets even as he dangled it in the air, high above his face. And that handbag, black leather, well made, almost as conspicuous to his eyes as the wristwatch with the English brand name.
Arkady dumped the contents of the handbag onto Kostya’s old desk: a mirrored compact; a lipstick; a beautiful glass bottle of perfume with a tassel and a chipped stopper; a leather case about half the size of Arkady’s hand, and, inside that case, a rubber dome, intimate and strange; a small amount of cash; travel papers and the British passport in the name of Margaret Bush.
He’d almost said it aloud. Kostya, we get shot for less.
Now, in the garden, Arkady did say it aloud, and the sound of his own voice, and then the soft and quiet impact of his dropped trowel adjacent the turned soil, made him feel sick.
I’ve saved him before; I can save him again.
Somewhere behind him, a car braked. Arkady finished patting the earth over the buried stockings as booted footsteps approached.
— Beautiful afternoon, Arkady Dmitrievich.
— Boris Aleksandrovich, how are you?
Boris, looking younger somehow in his uniform, extended a hand. —Sore in the head, but I’m in better shape than young Stepanov. I suppose Nikto’s sleeping it off, too? Sometimes I despair of the next generation. Young people today.
Arkady accepted Boris’s offer of a hand up and lumbered to his feet. —No Chekist like an old Chekist.
— Forged in the fire of revolution.
They laughed at the slogans, at themselves.
— Arkady Dmitrievich, you’ll never guess how I got here.
— Troika? I admit, I heard no sleigh bells.
Boris grinned, acknowledging Arkady’s wit. —NKVD car number forty-two.
— Found it, then? Poor old Stepanov. Had he ever signed it out?
— He had. Someone else signed it back in. Not too long ago, in fact. Still, overdue.
The sunlight seemed to burn Arkady’s face; the rest of him felt quite cold. —Come inside for a drink.
At his desk in Laboratory of Special Purpose Number Two, beneath a huge red poster showing two joined rings and the text Only Those Who Work Deserve to Eat, Efim wrote a letter.
My dearest Olga, my Olyushka.
The pen spit ink in blobs, and Efim scowled at the paper. How to say it, how to consider one’s audience: not just Olga, of course, but any of the NKVD agents who might, could, would, intercept and read this letter? How to say it, and yet make the letter sound innocent?
Every year on their wedding anniversary, he would ask, You still love me, Olyushka? You still want to spend your life with me?
Yes, she’d answer, looking out a window, I suppose so. I don’t see anyone better.
He’d brush her fair hair aside and press his lips to her forehead in mock concern. Are you feverish?
You’re stuck with me, Fima.
As years passed, she’d sometimes pat her abdomen as she said You’re stuck with me. No matter what Efim said about biology and the unknowable workings of life, she blamed herself for the miscarriages.
He imagined another such anniversary conversation. You still love me, Olyushka, even after I inject poisons into political prisoners, call it phage therapy, and study the results? You still want to spend your life with me, or do you want spit in my face?
He heard Major Balakirev’s voice, his casual threat. What did you say your wife is called?
Efim covered his mouth with his hand and moaned. The compelled doctor: he’d played this role before. A sensation of movement, of travel, overtook him, as the floor of his office seemed to become the floor of that armoured train. Forced away at gunpoint, he’d left wounded men to die in misery. Cold. Months on end of bone-deep cold, and one war and one calendar wore into another.
One dull morning, grasses exposed, snow receded to puddles, the train maybe half a kilometre on its way, slow, slow, a woman alongside the tracks dropped the handles of the cart she hauled, a grown man and a child lying there, ran to keep up, then stopped, her arms outstretched. That dull morning, Efim leapt from the train.
Sunday 6 June 1937. My dearest Olga, Olyushka, my love, I think of you every night.
The new radio sitting on a chair in the corridor outside the main lab, volume cranked high, spewed static and Tchaikovsky’s ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.’
As I sit here and think on you, I also think on my great privilege to serve our country as I do. I have here, in Moscow, a chance to leave a legacy in medicine. Such…
He tapped his pen against his thumb, oblivious to the spatter of ink. Such what? Detailed work? Meaningful work?
Intimate work?
My research progresses well, and we approach a breakthrough, one that may reverberate around the world.
A woman cried out, her voice ragged. —Mercy!
A door slammed.
A colleague’s shadow darkened the frosted glass panel in Efim’s office door, remained there a moment, then disappeared. Women’s shoes tapped on the hard floors.
Efim sighed. Even with an office and a closing door, he could expect little privacy. His thoughts slipped on oily fear. So many people. Which of them eavesdropped? Which of them informed? Which of them sympathized with his reluctance to harm people? The prisoner who’d just screamed for mercy and now made no sound: had she even existed?
One day soon, would someone ask the same question about Olga?
Olyushka, my miracle, my love. As I sit here and think on you, I also think on my great privilege to serve our country as I do. I have here, in Moscow, a chance to leave a legacy in medicine. Such work is a journey in honour. I look forward to a new letter from you. I enclose a little money. Buy a nice blouse, if you need one, or a new pair of shoes. All my love, Fima.
Garbage, he told himself, complete garbage, the letter so stiff and formal even as he used the diminutives Olyushka and Fima. No NKVD agent would believe Efim had written the letter with no expectation of interference. Even this tacit acknowledgement of interference with the post could get him arrested.