CHAPTER 49
THE COPS KEPT Kirilo, Victor, Misha, and the bodyguards in the warehouse for another hour. Kirilo fumed at the irritation until the cops finally left at 7:25.
“We have to stop her from leaving the country,” Kirilo said. “If she’s still here. Pavel, call the deputy minister of the interior. Get him on the line for me.”
Pavel pulled out his cell phone and stepped away.
“Who has a picture of her?” Kirilo said.
Misha pointed to Specter, who nodded.
“Good,” Kirilo said. “Get it to Pavel right away. I’ll see that the deputy minister gets it to Passport Control and that she’s held for suspicion of illegally entering the Zone of Exclusion. We don’t even have to make up a phony charge. It’s legitimate. The taxi driver confessed to it.”
“She has a head start,” Misha said. “She could be on a plane before they have her picture.”
“She won’t go to the airport,” Victor said.
Kirilo forced himself to look at his cousin. “Why do you say that?”
“She’ll be expecting us to be expecting her there. It’s how she came in. It’s the easy way out. It’s too big a risk, and she’s too smart to take it.”
“Then she’ll go by boat or by rail,” Misha said.
“It doesn’t matter how she travels,” Kirilo said. “She has to clear Passport Control somewhere, and we will either have that picture in time for her to be stopped or we won’t. Which is why we will pursue our other leads while we wait.”
“What other leads?” Misha said.
“We know from the taxi driver that she met with a zoologist. A man named Karel who conducts experiments in Chernobyl village. The deputy minister will get Pavel his home address, and we’ll go pay him a visit immediately. Meanwhile, the deputy minister will get us emergency clearance to enter the Zone of Exclusion tonight.”
“Chernobyl?” Misha said. “You’re going to Chernobyl? When? Tonight?”
“That’s where she went to see her uncle,” Kirilo said. “Damian Tesla is there, somewhere. He can tell us what we’re chasing after. And he might be able to tell us how she’s leaving the country.”
Misha fidgeted in place. “For real? You would go there? I mean, like, is it safe?”
“Of course it’s not safe,” Kirilo said, amused by the moscal’s obvious fear.
Victor slapped his young protégé on the shoulder. “You don’t have to go, Misha,” he said. “I’ll go with Kirilo, and we’ll fill you in with whatever we find out. You can trust us. You know that.”
Misha blinked several times in rapid succession. He straightened his posture and balled his fists. “Fuck you, old man.”
As soon as he got the words out, Misha whitened. He raised his hand to cover his mouth, turned, and vomited on the warehouse floor.
Kirilo stepped back. Victor hadn’t been kidding, he realized. The Bitch really had poisoned the moscal.
“You okay?” Kirilo said.
“I’m fine,” Misha barked, face flushed. “Don’t you worry about me.”
As Kirilo passed him, Victor whispered under his breath, “Ten million divided by two is greater than ten million divided by three.”
The mere sound of the Bitch’s voice made Kirilo want to bite his ear off and spit it out in his face.
“I’m on hold,” Pavel said, cupping the phone with one hand.
Kirilo edged closer to Pavel, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Victor couldn’t hear him.
“Anything on Isabella’s whereabouts?” Kirilo said.
“No,” Pavel said. “I have calls in to all our contacts. The only thing I’ve learned so far is that the Timkiv twins may be helping him. They run a small crew in Odessa and were seen in Yalta by one of our men. They match the description of the two young men you saw outside your boat when Victor came aboard.”
“Good,” Kirilo said. “How can we squeeze them where it hurts? Are their parents alive? Are they married with children?”
“I don’t know about their family. I know they’re single. And they worship only money.”
“That is a church I’m familiar with. Let’s find their bishop. I’m sure I can threaten to disrobe him to reveal their location.”
CHAPTER 50
NADIA ASKED DETECTIVE Novak to give her a quick tour of the park at Babi Yar so she could orient herself. He dropped her off two kilometers away from the ravine itself. She’d learned her lesson at the Caves Monastery: she wasn’t going to expose herself at the rendezvous point. She would approach the boy only after she saw him.
Nadia hoped the picture of him was recent and that she would recognize him. Of greater concern was her responsibility to help get him out of Ukraine. She could take care of herself under any circumstances. Of that she was certain. A teenage boy she’d never even met, however, was an entirely different matter.
She stepped out of the police cruiser at 5:43. After the car disappeared, she hid behind a tree and waited for a few minutes to make sure Kirilo or Misha hadn’t somehow followed her. When no one appeared, she slipped out of hiding.
Tall lampposts illuminated the tree-lined path that wove its way around the perimeter of the park. The air smelled of dew and worms. A young couple, their fancy backpacks identifying them as tourists, walked solemnly around the Menorah Monument. A family of seven stood at the ravine’s edge.
Nadia was certain she and the family were thinking about the same thing. On September 29, 1941, all Jews in Kyiv were ordered to report for relocation. The Nazis spread the word by nailing bulletins to telephone poles and taping signs to windows. At the time, the Jewish population in Kyiv numbered fifty thousand, with another hundred thousand having fled deeper into the Soviet Union and Central Asia. Non-Jews were told that their Jewish countrymen were going to be deported to Israel. In fact, 33,771 of them were lined up at a ravine called Babi Yar, stripped naked, and slaughtered over a two-day span.
A total of one hundred thousand people were executed at Babi Yar during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, including Ukrainian priests, nationalists, and gypsies. Yet, after the war, the Soviet Union refused to acknowledge the murders. The first Jewish memorial was built only when Ukraine proclaimed independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. A bronze statue dedicated to all the Ukrainians who perished was added in 2009.
The ravine was not what Nadia had expected. Its shockingly small size stood in sharp contrast with the number of bodies the Nazis had buried within it. Nadia snaked along a fence of decorative trees to a rolling meadow. A sports complex loomed in the foreground. She clung to the shadows as she marched two kilometers through the park, eyes swiveling around to the back of her head. The sound of traffic grew louder. A metro station came into view. Cars crisscrossed at a major intersection ahead. When the outline of the new statue appeared, Nadia circled around a maintenance building and hid behind a corner. From her perch, she couldn’t make out the details of the monument.
As if on cue, a boy emerged from behind the statue. He wore an old blue warm-up suit, muddy track shoes from the seventies, and an army knapsack that looked as if it had survived a world war. He carried a duffel bag in his right hand. He was close to six feet tall and lanky, with a knit cap pulled low over his forehead.
Nadia decided to approach. A light shone over the monument. On the granite wall to the left, a series of human silhouettes toppled into a ravine. A mother clung to her baby below. On the right, a bronze child read the announcement on the wall, ordering him to report to Babi Yar.