Temerity waited another moment. Then turned onto her side, facing away from him, and flicked off the lamp.
He stared at where the ceiling should be. —Nadia? If I could protect you here…
— You can’t.
— If I could.
— Kostya, please.
— If I could protect you, if you were in no danger here, would you stay with me? Run that language school with me?
— Duty, Kostya.
— If duty didn’t matter.
— If, if, if.
— What if there’s no if and you are meant to be here? We should never have met at all.
— If everything is meant to happen, then why did you choose to take me from that party?
He said nothing.
After a moment, she rolled onto her back. —The nightingales are loud.
— The what?
— The nightingales, my gentle thief. The birdsong.
He frowned. —Are you saying I should have just left you at that party?
— You stole me.
— I saved you.
Temerity turned over on her side again, her back to him.
Kostya wept.
A RADIANT FUTURE
Tuesday 27 July
Wrapped in a towel, Kostya answered the telephone next to the bathroom door and just kept himself from sighing as the operator told him to stand by for a call from Lubyanka. Expecting Evgenia Ismailovna to inform him of an extra shift, he smiled as instead he recognized Vadym’s voice.
— Kostya, can you come see me in my office?
— I have the day off.
Static on the line, for it must be static, made Vadym’s voice tremble. —Kostya, please.
Riding the metro to Dzerzhinskaya, Kostya knew he must face certain things, perhaps even the moral need to tell Vadym about Misha in Spain. Kostya’s final report, while initially delayed by his convalescence, was long since approved and filed away. It was also incomplete. He’d said little of Misha and nothing of the British nurse. Any discovery of such omissions could get him arrested. If he told Vadym about Misha, he’d implicate Vadym in his faulty report. If he continued to refuse to tell Vadym about Misha, then he’d gall a man he loved with the torment of uncertainty.
Kostya did not see the two young women on the bench opposite him, wondering at the tears on the face of this uniformed NKVD officer.
Dima, I am sorry…
He thought of the story ‘The Maiden Tsar,’ of the moment when Baba Yaga complains of the hero’s Russian smell and then asks him: Are you here of your own free will, or by compulsion?
He muttered the hero’s response. —Mostly of my own free will, yet twice as much by compulsion.
Then he noticed his tears and hurried to wipe them away. As he glanced up, the young women watching him looked down.
At his desk in Lubyanka, Vadym felt confused by how little, yet how much time sagged between his hanging up the phone and hearing a knock on the door. —Come in, Kostya.
— Vadym Pavlovich.
He looked up. Not that he needed to look up to confirm the rich voice of Boris Kuznets.
Uninvited, Boris sat down and spoke in a quiet manner, almost an enemy’s mutter, almost a lover’s croon: a difficult task, comrade, a heavy need in these troubled days of widespread corruption when we must investigate comrades we thought we could trust, your closeness to the man in question and your simultaneous loyalty forged in the fires of revolution…
Vadym looked out his window.
— Vadym Pavlovich, please understand. I must pass on orders for you to assist in the investigation of Arkady Dmitrievich Balakirev and Konstantin Arkadievich Nikto for cronyism.
Vadym shut his eyes. Cronyism meant nothing. Yet it could mean everything.
Boris continued. —I’m compelled to point out that if you refuse or even hesitate to assist, then the investigation would widen to include you. If it hasn’t already.
— My nephew.
— What?
Vadym opened his eyes again and met Boris’s gaze. —Misha. Mikhail Petrovich Minenkov to you. You promised to find out what happened to him.
Boris leaned on the desk as he got out of the chair. —I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, or why you think I’d barter information.
— Is he coming back?
— Speak with care, Vadym Pavlovich. To an outside observer, this conversation might sound close to cronyism. We could both be charged.
— Tell me if he’s ever coming back!
— Ask Nikto. He was the last to see him.
Vadym stared at Boris and refused to look away.
After a moment’s silence, Boris drew his index finger across Vadym’s desk. —Dust. And a messy pile of dossiers. I’ve never seen your desk in such a state.
As Boris left, Vadym shoved himself away from his desk and strode to his office window.
I shot other men’s sons for the good of this country.
Any moment his desk telephone would ring: his brother, asking for news of Misha. Despite Vadym’s pleas, Pyotr would call again and again. Any moment he would call, and the cacophony of the wretched telephone bell would slice into Vadym’s ears.
He leaned his forehead on the glass.
Any moment.
Wishing, as ever, that Dzerzhinskaya felt less grim, less grey, Kostya hurried to emerge. Back to heaven, Odessa bezprizornik.
As he strode toward Lubyanka, the racket of cracking glass made him look up.
A wooden chair fell from a third-floor Lubyanka office, and it shattered into sharp pieces on the ground: legs, arms, slats.
Then a uniformed officer leapt through the broken window and ran through the air.
No one cried out.
The officer fell atop the broken chair.
Kostya ran to him as others stared. Then he saw the shock of white hair.
Vadym had fallen onto his chest, face turned to the left. His jaw worked, and his right fist clenched and twitched. Blood flowed towards it.
Kostya hurried to kneel besides him. —Dima? Uncle?
— Misha?
— Kostya. I’m Kostya. Hush, don’t move.
Vadym spat up blood.
— Dima!
The gathering crowd, so quiet, threw shadows.
Boris Kuznets touched Kostya on the upper arm. —Come away.
Other men pried Vadym’s body from the asphalt, revealing wood, blood, bone.
Boris kept his hand on Kostya’s good shoulder as Kostya gave his statement to other officers, described what he’d seen. Then Boris guided Kostya inside Lubyanka, up to the department.
Evgenia gasped when she saw Kostya’s face.
Boris eased his office door shut. —Sit down.
Kostya obeyed. He studied the large rocking blotter on Boris’s desk as the older man poured two stiff measures. The blotter reminded him of the one on the clerk’s desk in 1918, when Arkady took him for identity papers.
Here you are: Nikto, Konstantin Arkadievich.
Boris offered a glass.
Kostya kept staring at the blotter.
Boris took Kostya’s right hand and placed it around the glass. —Drink.
— Yes.
Kostya knew he sounded young, impossibly young. Then he drank.
— Finish it.
Kostya obeyed that order, too.
— More?
Kostya nodded, drank the second dose.
— You knew him well?
— I call him uncle.
— You’re his nephew by blood?
— No. Vadym is an old friend of Arkady Dmitrievich.
— And neither are you Arkady Dmitreivich’s son. Yet you’re so much alike.
Shock and vodka stifling his fear, Kostya told the story of his name.