II
It was morning in the Kremlin, and Svetlana was wide awake, and thinking about Lev Shapiro. Waking up early was a symptom of being in love, she decided, but love is the only illness everyone wants to catch.
In a few days, she had gone from the ideal Soviet schoolgirl, the diligent student, to a lover, a dreamer, and now she did not care about her homework at all. She kept looking at the phone. She had given Shapiro the number of her private line to her apartment, the one used by herself, Klimov and the housekeeper. She waited, then waited some more; then it started to ring. She was about to answer on the first ring but would that seem desperate, too keen. She held her breath, counting four rings, five, six, and then she picked it up.
‘Ya sluzhoo,’ she said. ‘I’m listening.’
The phone line echoed and pranged, a sonar echo fathoms away, and she imagined telegraph poles and wires across steppes, rivers, farms stretching away, a fragile line of communication between herself and her lover.
‘It’s me, Sveta,’ he said at last. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes, yes. Wait a moment.’ She jumped up and closed the door so the housekeeper and her nanny would not hear. ‘Now I’m here. The flowers are blossoming in the Alexandrovsky Gardens! How are you?’
‘I’m at the front in the headquarters bunker.’
‘And where is that?’
The throatiness of his virile voice echoed down the rough, reverberating line. ‘My location is top secret except I can tell you it’s a town with your name.’
She laughed too. ‘You’re talking in such deep code that no one could possibly break it.’
‘I know.’ There was a pause. ‘Are you on your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘I just have to tell you, darling Sveta, that I want to kiss you again, passionately, deeply.’
‘Oh my God,’ she answered, her heart syncopating, almost melting into the mouthpiece.
‘No, really, I can still smell your skin. Taste your lips.’
Svetlana took a deep breath. ‘I want to kiss you too. I wish you were here. I can’t work. I am bored by my studies.’
Shapiro groaned. ‘If we’d only been alone…’
‘If we had been?’
‘If your detective hadn’t been waiting for you.’
‘Oh, he was listening to everything, but we managed to kiss,’ she crowed. ‘And what a kiss!’
‘Was it your first kiss?’
She nodded. ‘Is it bad if it was my first? Am I too much of a novice for you? Will you be bored of me?’
‘No, it’s charming, it’s delightful. It makes it so special for me. And we had so much to talk about as well. I want to know what you’re reading, what you’re thinking – but we don’t have time now. Now I must tell you the essential things, which are that I am thinking of you in the bunker in the city with the famous name on the Volga, and that I want to kiss you again now. Immediately.’
‘I burn for you too,’ she whispered.
There was a gap in the conversation. She heard voices like ghosts ricocheting down the line. And then Shapiro was back again, his voice sounding more urgent. ‘I have to go. All the correspondents have to use this phone. Grossman is waiting and he’s getting impatient. He wants to know who my girlfriend is…’
‘Will you tell him?’
‘God no. You’re a secret. For so many reasons.’
‘Will you be safe?’
‘For you, sweetheart, yes. The fighting is desperate here. But this city won’t fall. Sveta, we will win.’
‘Kisses, Lev, darling Lion. Call me again. Soon.’
‘I’ll call you every spare hour I have, I promise, darling Lioness. I’m sending you a kiss down the phone. Here! Can you feel it? It’s travelling from this bunker on the Volga all the way to you. It’s a sacred vibration. Love sends it. Can you feel it?’
‘Yes, I can feel it. Here’s one from the Kremlin. Across great rivers and steppes and bridges.’
A pause: ‘I’ve got it. Till tomorrow. I kiss you, darling.’
Svetlana put the phone down. The blush ran up her body, emanating from her middle, her thighs, to her feet and up to her neck and lips, to every spot of her body. She closed her eyes. In a few days she had changed completely. She was no longer merely Stalin’s daughter. A beautiful brave man in a bunker faraway in Stalingrad was thinking of her, and she – she was someone’s darling, someone’s secret.
III
Consul Malamore was furious: Fabiana was gone, and the village was in utter chaos. Accompanied by his adjutant and some of his scouts, he had ridden into Radzillovo at dawn, looking forward to calling on her in the Red Cross tent.
He felt he was making progress. She was shocked by the death of the milksop husband – a terrible soldier and not much better as a man – but war always sorted the strong from the weak; and so it had been with Ippolito Bacigalupe, removed so easily in his first skirmish. That was war and Fabiana would soon recover. She was tough and self-reliant, the sort of beautiful Italian woman he wanted to retire with; he would sire her children and those children would rule a new Aryan empire in the sun. He had been at war for a long time and he was weary; this would be his last fight. He was not short of girls. He had an apple-cheeked Russian girl back in Kharkov. But Fabiana of course was different. Hitler’s victory was now so close, just weeks away. If we secure the Don and Stalingrad, he told himself, the Russians will collapse and retreat behind the Urals, and then I can hang up my boots.
As he rode into the village, he was dreaming of buying a vast farm in the rich black earth of southern Russia, like a soldier-settler of the Roman Empire. The Russian peasants would work like slaves on the soil; and he would ride across the golden acres of corn on his black stallion with Fabiana on her palomino, and sometimes he would rest his hand on the amber-coloured skin of her arm…
Instead, as he and his men came to a halt, horsemen were galloping in with reports from east and west and God knew where, and Italian soldiers were running back and forth, some were even weeping, shots were being fired out into the steppe, horses were being saddled, Kalmyks were unpacking ammo boxes from their camels – and when they saw Malamore, they all froze. And here was Major di Montefalcone with his flabby oval face sobbing like a girl – yes, like a girl, for Christ’s sake!
‘She’s gone, consul, she’s gone. The prisoner took her!’ Montefalcone patted his eyes with his handkerchief.
‘I see that,’ said Malamore, dismounting. ‘But who is he?’
‘A Russian. We thought he was Schuma but he wasn’t. He must have been one of the partisans.’
A flash of murderous fury electrified Malamore but he ground it between his teeth. ‘Get on the phone to the Schuma and find out. Then we hunt them and we catch them. And when we do, she belongs to me.’
‘Si, si, signore.’
Malamore scowled at him. These aristocrats lacked Fascist passion; the day would come when he and his fellow Fascists would have to line them up against a wall – but there was more to it than that. He did not like the way Montefalcone was looking at him and he knew why the major was doing it. If the person who’d been kidnapped had not been a girl, if it had not been Fabiana, would they be going to all this trouble, taking this risk?
‘Just obey your orders, Montefalcone. Are you riding out with us?’
‘Me? If you wish it,’ said Montefalcone.
‘The prisoner’s escape was on your watch, major. It’s your responsibility.’