Nadia came within ten feet of Adam and stopped. He was the boy from her mother’s photo, although he looked taller and more mature. He looked ready to run on a second’s notice.
“Hi. My name is Nadia. Your father told me to meet you here.”
“Passport,” he said, like a young customs officer in training.
“What?”
“Passport.”
Surprised by his officious manner, Nadia pulled the booklet out of her bag. Adam studied her photo, her personal information, and the entrance stamp, and returned it. She stowed it back in her bag and put her left hand on her hip.
“Passport,” she said.
His sullen expression didn’t change.
She put her hand out. “Passport.”
He removed a sealed plastic bag from the front of his pants. The bag contained his two passports, as though there were a risk they would get wet during his journey. One of the passports was a domestic ID, the other international. Nadia read the inside page of the international one.
“It says you were born in Korosten,” she said. “Your father told me you were born in Chernobyl village.”
“No one lives in Chernobyl, so no one can be born in Chernobyl, even if he was really born in Chernobyl.”
He reached out with an open palm. She leafed through the domestic one quickly and slapped the passports into his hand. He stuffed them back in the plastic bag, sealed it tight, and stowed it in his knapsack.
The boy was very stiff, and she could understand that. She tried to put him at ease. “So you’re the man with the plan,” she said. “What next?”
“We go see the forger.”
“Who?”
“The forger. My father, he knows some people. It’s all arranged.”
“What do we need to see a forger for?”
“You need a visa.”
“I do? Where am I going?”
“Moscow.” He checked a battered watch with a red hammer and sickle on a discolored white dial. “It’s ten after six. The forger’s expecting us at six thirty. The express to Moscow leaves Central Station at eight-oh-nine tonight.”
“Moscow? Why are we going to Moscow?”
He remained very cautious. “I can tell you once we’re on the train but not before.”
“Why not?”
“Because those are the instructions my father gave me. If you get captured by the men chasing you, you won’t know anything more.”
Nadia studied his neck. A sliver of gold protruded along the left collar of his T-shirt.
“Your father told me about a locket. A locket that has some very special information in it. Where is that locket?”
He slid his hand under his shirt and lifted the necklace high enough to reveal a pendant. It was a golden square with a black trident carved on the front.
“I’d like to see inside—”
“No.” Adam took a step back. “I don’t open the locket for anyone.”
“I’m not anyone. I’m your cousin.”
“I don’t care who you are. My father told me. Keep it simple. If you don’t open the locket, you can’t lose the formula inside. So I won’t open the locket. Not for you, not for him if he showed up here right now. Not for anyone.”
“Okay,” Nadia said. “So be it. There are men following me. We should hurry.”
Adam suddenly loped toward the train station across the street. Nadia raced after him. As a teen, she’d run the mile in 5:37. At home, she still worked out religiously. It didn’t matter. The kid had the propulsion of a locomotive and the stride of a deer. The faster Nadia ran, the more ground Adam gained. He disappeared across the street into the Dorohozhychi metro station fifty yards ahead of Nadia.
When she got there, she was out of breath. The station teemed with commuters. Informal queues lined food kiosks. Nadia found Adam waiting for her at one of the yellow vending machines.
“I’ll get this,” she said.
He slipped two hryvnia into the machine and bought his own token before she could open her purse. Nadia did the same. Their tokens rattled to the metallic cup at the bottom, one after the other. As they walked toward the platform, a babushka stepped in their way. Nadia put her hand on Adam’s shoulder to guide him around the old woman.
Adam stopped sharply and pulled back. “Don’t touch me. Don’t ever touch me again.”
This wasn’t exactly a family reunion. The boy was scared, and he obviously didn’t trust her. That was okay, Nadia thought. She was scared, too.
Seven minutes later, a train arrived. They climbed aboard and headed south toward the center of Kyiv without saying another word to each other.
CHAPTER 51
“THE POLICE MAY be onto me,” the forger said after opening the door. She glanced over Nadia’s shoulder. “One of my clients was arrested this morning. Come in. We must hurry.”
The forger lived in the basement of a small coffee shop with a Wi-Fi sign in its window, three blocks away from a hospital near the Pecherska metro station.
At first glance, she appeared to be the prototype for the churchgoing spinster: a middle-aged woman with alabaster skin, meticulously combed short hair, and a smile that could charm a priest into eating anything she baked. On second glance, the tattoo on her forearm that peeked out from beneath the sleeve of her dress suggested she was less devout. It was a picture of the queen of diamonds, an inkwell, and a feathered pen in the shape of a gun.
Her office was a bookkeeper’s dream, with stacks of accounting ledgers and textbooks lining the shelves. A high-powered lamp illuminated a sturdy wooden desk. A computer, a printer, and an array of well-organized office supplies rested on top.
Adam removed his backpack. The forger pointed to a plate of poppy seed rolls and a pitcher of milk. He grabbed a massive hunk of pastry and dug into it like a Cro-Magnon man.
“Let me see your passport,” the forger said. “Do you have two blank pages facing each other? Do you? You must have two blank pages facing each other, or I cannot help you.”
Nadia opened her passport to a pair of blank pages.
“Good. Stand in the corner against the white wall. We need to take a passport photo.”
Nadia backpedaled toward the corner. “Why? Since when do visas have pictures?”
“When you cross the border, a customs agent will check your visa against the computer. If your information isn’t there, you’ll be arrested. My son will download your application into the Russian Federation database. He will also enter your picture.”
A man in his thirties with wire-rimmed glasses and an air of ambivalence shuffled into the room. He held an instant camera and a blue knit sweater the size of a pup tent in his hands.
The forger gave the sweater to Nadia. “Put this on. Quickly.”
“Why?” Nadia said.
“It will look suspicious if you are wearing the same clothes as you are in your photo, no? Put it on.”
Nadia took her coat off and put the sweater on. She stifled her horror at how she must have looked. Yet the photo would be shoulders up, she reminded herself. Who cared?
She stood against the wall and cracked a sympathetic smile. The son snapped three photos in rapid succession and disappeared into a back room with the pictures.
“Now fill out this visa application,” the forger said. “In English, as though you walked into the Russian embassy in New York. Date it February nineteenth. I will fill in the name of your hotel in Moscow. It will also be the entity that’s inviting you.”
“Inviting me?”
“To get a Russian visa, you must be invited by an authorized party. Usually it’s a travel agency or a hotel. You are going to be invited by the Hotel Ekaterina.”
“Does it even exist?”