Katinka could barely stand this filthy place where those dear to her employer had suffered grievous sorrow. She wanted to weep, but not under the eyes of the Marmoset. She turned to Sashenka’s file, which contained a single sheet of paper that “read Please find enclosed the confession of Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn. But it was not in there. Just a note: Send files of Zeitlin-Palitsyn case to Central Committee.
She cursed herself for her rudeness to the Marmoset. “Sashenka’s confession is missing: please may I have it?”
“You insult me and through me the Soviet Union and the Competent Organs!” He pointed at the white bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky. “You insult Iron Felix!”
“Please! I apologize!”
“I’ll report all this to my superior, General Fursenko, but it is unlikely to be permitted.”
“In that case,” said Katinka, emboldened by the courage of those who had been in far greater peril than she, “I doubt very much Mr. Getman will be interested in helping you sell your spy secrets to the newspapers abroad.”
The Marmoset stared at her, sucked in his cheeks, then crossly got up and opened the door. “Fuck off, you little bitch! Your sort have had their day! You blame everything on us, but America’s done more damage to Russia in a few years than Stalin did in decades! And your oligarch can go fuck his mother. You’re finished in here—get out!”
Katinka stood up, gathered her notebook and handbag and, trying to maintain some dignity, walked out slowly right past Kuzma, who stood outside collating some files on his cart. She was crying: she had spoiled everything with her own foolish temper.
Now she would never discover what happened to Sashenka, never find Carlo. She felt faint. It was hopeless.
17
“You again?” said Mariko sourly. “What did I tell you? Don’t call.”
“But Mariko, please! Just listen one second,” beseeched Katinka, the desperation audible in her voice. “I’m calling from the public phone outside the Lubianka! I’ve been to see Lala in Tbilisi. Just listen one second. I want to thank Marshal Satinov. I’ve learned how your father saved those children, Snowy and Carlo, how he risked his life. They want to thank him.”
A silence. She could hear Mariko breathing.
“My father’s very sick. I’ll tell him. Don’t call again!”
“But please…”
The line was dead. Groaning in frustration, she called Maxy at the Redemption office.
“There you are!” he greeted her affably. “Our sort of research isn’t easy—this happens to me all the time. Don’t lose heart. I’ve got an idea. Meet me at the feet of the poet—Pushkin Square.”
Katinka waved down a Lada car, handing the driver two dollars. She reached the Pushkin statue first. It was a dazzling spring day, the sky metallic blue, the breeze biting, the sunlight raw. In the gasoline fumes and lilac scent, girls were waiting for their lovers beneath the poet, bespectacled students read their notes on the benches, guides in polyester suits lectured American tourists, limousines for German bankers and Russian wheeler-dealers drew up at the Pushkin Restaurant. My verses will be sung throughout all Russia’s vastness, Katinka read on the monument. My ashes will outlive and know no pale decay. Pushkin consoled her, calmed her.
A motorbike scooted up onto the pavement. Maxy pulled off his Viking helmet, holding it by the horns, and kissed her in his over-familiar way.
“You look flustered,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s sit in the sun and you can tell me everything.”
Once seated, Katinka told him about her visit to Tbilisi, her night with Lala, her discovery that Roza Getman was Sashenka’s daughter—and her more recent encounter with the KGB.
“You’ve done so well,” Maxy told her. “I’m impressed! But let me interpret some of this for you. Mouche Zeitlin says the KGB told her Sashenka was sentenced to ‘ten years without rights of correspondence.’ Usually that was a euphemism for execution.”
Katinka caught her breath. “But what about the ex-prisoner who’d seen Sashenka in the camps in the fifties?”
“The KGB liked to trick people that way. The KGB files say Mendel died of ‘cardiac arrest.’ That was another euphemism. It means he died under interrogation: he was beaten to death.”
“So these files have their own language?” she said.
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “There was a terrible randomness in the Terror, but at the same time there were no coincidences in that world: everything was linked by invisible threads. We just need to find them. Send files of Palitsyn case to Central Committee,” he repeated. “I know what that means. Come with me. Climb on.”
Katinka joined him on the back of his bike, pulling her denim skirt down over her thighs. The engine revved raucously and Maxy weaved in and out of the unruly Moscow traffic, down Tverskaya until he took a sharp left at the statue of Prince Dolgoruky, founder of Moscow, and went down a steep hill. The wind blew in Katinka’s hair and she closed her eyes, allowing the rich spring air to refresh her.
They stopped alongside a Brezhnevite concrete box with a shabby glass front, a dark frieze of Marx, Engels and Lenin over the revolving door.
Maxy scissored off the bike in his leathers and tugged off his helmet, pushing back his hair. She thought him more seventies heavy-metal singer than historian. He strode ahead into a marble hall and Katinka followed him, almost running. In the grey foyer, women behind tables sold Bon Jovi CDs, hats and gloves, like a flea market, but at the back, where the entrance to the elevators was guarded by two pimply teenage soldiers, stood a white Lenin bust. Maxy showed his card and they checked Katinka’s passport, kept it and gave her a chit.
Maxy led her up the steps, past a canteen with its moldy cabbage-soup fug and into an elevator, which chugged to the top of the building. Before she could take in her surroundings, he was leading her into the glass-walled reading room with its circular panorama of the roofs of Moscow.
“No time to admire the view,” he whispered as disapproving old Communists looked up crossly from their studies. Maxy’s leathers creaked loudly in the hushed room. “I’ve got a little place for us here.” They sat in a cul-de-sac formed by towering bookshelves. “Wait here,” he said. She listened to the rasp of his biking gear with a smile. Moments later, he returned with a pile of brown papki files and sat very close to her. He radiated a blend of leathers, coffee, bike oil and lemon cologne.
“This place,” he whispered, “is the Party archive. You see these papki, numbered five hundred fifty-eight? Stalin’s own archive. It’s still officially closed and I don’t think it’ll ever open.” He flipped the first files toward him. “I was looking at these earlier and I noticed Satinov’s name. When it said your files were sent to the Central Committee, that meant to Stalin himself. This is Stalin’s miscellaneous correspondence. Go ahead, Katinka, look under S for Satinov.”
She opened the file and found a cover note, stamped by Poskrebyshev at 9:00 p.m. on May 6, 1939:
To J. V. Stalin
Top Secret. It has come to my notice that Ivan “Vanya” Palitsyn ordered surveillance of his wife, Party member Alexandra “Sashenka” Zeitlin-Palitsyn, without the knowledge of Narkom NKVD or Politburo.
“You see,” explained Maxy, “Beria had discovered that Palitsyn was bugging his wife.”
“How did he find out?”
“Probably by a tiny bureaucratic mistake. Wiretaps were always copied to Beria, who decided which to send on to Stalin. Palitsyn, foolish with jealousy, had ordered that the transcripts of his wiretap be shown only to him. Remember how he wrote no copies? Probably his secretary forgot this, as secretaries do—and sent it by mistake to Beria, who, by the rules of the time, had to report this abuse of government resources to Stalin himself. Beria had no malice toward the Palitsyns and he knew that, after the May Day party, Stalin took a paternal interest in Sashenka. That’s why his note”—Maxy tapped the cover note—“is neutral. Stalin was often tolerant or even amused by steamy private gossip—unless he felt he had somehow been misled.”