“Believes?”
“I have my doubts. How many dead now? And not one success. Not a real success, at least.”
Leonid looked at her. She had already admitted that she knew the truth of the twins, but Leonid still felt as though he should keep the secret. Of course Ignatius knew. There was never a moment when she appeared unprepared, as if the big leather jacket she wore contained not just candy but all the answers, as well. Ignatius glanced at Leonid and caught his stare and held it for a moment.
“Now that Giorgi’s dead,” said Ignatius, “there’s only one trained pilot. The Chief Designer plans for her to finally complete the mission she couldn’t five years ago.”
“She’ll fly?”
“And I think it unlikely that she’ll survive. At least not so likely that I’d bet on it. The Chief Designer is a dreamer, a noble one, but sometimes the dream gets in the way of his better judgment. The whole plan was a mistake. Tsiolkovski’s folly. But it was the Chief Designer who turned Tsiolkovski’s perverse science into outright deception. Twins not as experiments but as expendable.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Nadya’s life can’t be put at risk. If she were to die on this flight, I couldn’t cover it up. It would be a scar on the face of the nation.”
“Stop the Chief Designer.”
“He has Khrushchev behind him, so I’m not in a position to act. My superiors would prefer that I not cross the First Secretary himself.”
“I’ll talk to the Chief Designer.”
Leonid turned toward Giorgi’s family home, but Ignatius grabbed him by the shoulder, a firm grip though not unfriendly. She reached into her pocket, the one on the opposite side of the jacket from where she’d pulled the candy, and retrieved a piece of paper folded over several times into a palm-sized square. She handed the paper to Leonid.
“What is it?” he asked. There was no mark that he could see on the paper to identify it.
“Nadya’s inside the house,” said Ignatius. “You have a car. Buy me the time I need to resolve this issue.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Ignatius crunched through the outer shell of the candy in her mouth and chewed away at the shards. She clapped Leonid on the shoulder and walked away, not toward the house, but toward the street corner she had gestured to earlier, the corner around which she would find only strangers. Leonid unfolded the paper. A stack of rubles, doubled over and bound with twine, fell out. Leonid bent down and picked up the money. All the bills were in denominations of a hundred. He shoved the stack into the inner pocket of his uniform jacket. His knuckles brushed against the piece of paper the Americans had given him. He pulled the note out and read it. He put it back in the pocket. The inside of the paper Ignatius had given him was printed with a map of Ukraine, railways and train stations marked with red pen. He shoved that into his pocket, as well.
WHEN LEONID FOUND HER inside the house, Nadya was standing alone in the corner of an otherwise unoccupied room, humming the same simple melody as always. The room was small, crowded by a dining table too large for the space. No chairs. Nadya held a drink in her hand, but it did not look like she had taken a sip. Several blond strands had slipped free from the bun on her head and draped over one eye. The rest of the guests could be heard in other parts of the house, sharing stories about Giorgi, Leonid assumed. What would the people from Star City say? What lies had been prepared for them to tell Giorgi’s family? The honorable death of a soldier. The facts scrubbed smooth to nothing. Ignatius had briefed them before they came, but Leonid paid no attention. If anyone were to ask, he would tell the truth. Not the whole of it, but much of who Giorgi was had nothing to do with his training. The games and songs and paintings. Leonid felt he owed Giorgi’s family whatever honesty he could manage. Perhaps he should say nothing, silence the only assurance that what he said was true.
“Nadya,” he said. “Have you ever thought about what you would do if you weren’t a part of all this?”
“This? This is an actual home.” Nadya pointed to each corner of the ceiling in turn. “This already feels like it’s far away from everything we know.”
“It’s not our home, though.”
“And that’s always the problem.”
“I know a place we could go. A place where not even Ignatius could follow.”
“I expect Ignatius to crawl out from underneath my bed each morning.”
“She’s not as bad as that.”
Nadya eyed him. “You want to leave?”
“Yes. Right now. Both of us.”
“Where would we go?”
He stepped closer to her. “In London, I met two Americans. Ignatius said they were spies, but I don’t care. They gave me an address. Right here in Ukraine. If we go there I think they’ll find us. They’ll take us to America.”
“America? I don’t remember much from my visit. Yuri said he would have stayed there if he could have, but what do any of us really know about the place?”
“I know that there I would still have a brother and you a sister. I don’t need to know anything more than that.”
Nadya pushed herself from the wall. “Did she ever tell you her real name? My sister.”
“No, none of us ever shared much that was personal. It was easier that way, to forget the past rather than hide it. What was her name?”
“If she didn’t tell you, it’s not my place.” Nadya rounded the table toward the door. “Let’s go, already. I can’t stand any more time spent in this home. I thought I might learn something of Giorgi, but he’s not here. If he once was, then he took all of himself when he left.”
Leonid lingered after Nadya exited. He took in the ceiling, the floor, the strip of wood along the base of the wall, beveled across the top into a quarter-arc with a semicircular lip below that. Leonid had never known a home like this one. He was unsure how such a strip of wood was even crafted. The work of machines or a patient hand? What was its purpose? He tapped the baseboard with the toe of his shoe, leaving a small black smudge, and then followed Nadya outside.
She waited on the narrow sidewalk, a recent addition to the neighborhood, the poured concrete like pure snow compared to the old stone architecture. The line of black cars a streak of midnight. All the drivers waited inside their vehicles, except for Leonid’s, who sat on his hood smoking a cigarette, and another who held Kasha’s leash as the dog poked her snout through an iron fence to sniff at the wilted plants on the other side.
Leonid whistled and Kasha’s head, ears perked to perfect triangles, jerked in his direction. She strained against the leash, hacking as the collar dug into her neck.
“It’s okay,” said Leonid. He crouched, holding out his arms.
The driver released the leash, and in a white flash Kasha was in Leonid’s embrace. The metal fastener on the leash clattered against the sidewalk. Leonid unhooked the leash from the collar and hung it from the fence.
“We’re taking her for a walk,” said Leonid, explaining it to the driver who had been tasked with dog-watching. And then to his own driver, “I think I’m ready to try my hand at driving.”
THE CAR SPUTTERED forward, and then the engine turned over once and fell silent. Leonid had been trying to master the clutch for twenty minutes, but all he had accomplished so far was to grind the gears down near to nothing. The driver, who had proved to be a patient teacher, could no longer hide his grimace at every incorrect sound the car made. Beads of nervous sweat dotted his brow.
In the backseat, Nadya sat with Kasha. The dog scampered back and forth, from window to window, as if the car was moving and the scenery changed with every moment. Her claws tapped the glass each time she jumped up for a better view.