STEPPING OFF THE CURB IN FRONT OF THE CROWDED AIRPORT terminal, Martin raised an index finger belt high to flag down one of the freelancers cruising the area in search of customers who didn’t want to deal with the doctored meters on the licensed cabs. Within seconds an antique Zil pulled to a stop in front of him and the passenger window wound down.
“Kuda,” demanded the driver, an elderly gentleman wearing a thin tie and a checkered jacket with wide lapels, along with a pair of rimmed eyeglasses that were the height of fashion during the Soviet era.
“Do you speak English?” Martin asked.
“Nyet, nyet, nye govoryu po-Angliiski,” the driver insisted, and then began to speak pidgin English with obvious relish. “Which whereabouts are you coming to, comrade visitor?” he asked.
“A village not far from Moscow named Prigorodnaia. Ever hear of it?”
The driver rocked his head from side to side. “Everyone over fifty knows where is Prigorodnaia,” he announced. “You have been there before?”
“No. Never.”
“Well, it’s not stubborn to find. Direction Petersburg, off the Moscow-Petersburg highway. Big shots once owned dachas there but they are all late and lamented. Only little shots still live in Prigorodnaia.”
“That’s me,” Martin said with a tired grin. “A little shot. How much?”
“Around trip, one hundred dollars U.S., half now, half when you resume to Moscow.”
Martin settled onto the seat next to the driver and produced two twenties and a ten—which was what Dante Pippen had paid the Alawite prostitute Djamillah in Beirut several legends back. Then, popping another aspirin from the jar he’d bought at the airport pharmacy to dull the pain from the cracked rib, he watched as the driver piloted the Zil through rush-hour traffic toward Moscow.
After a time Martin said, “You look a little old to be freelancing as a taxi.”
“I am one miserable pensioner,” the driver explained. “The automobile belongs to my first wife’s youngest son, who was my stepson before I divorced his mother. He was one of those smart capitalists who bought up industry privatization coupons distributed to the proletarian public, and then turned around and sold them for an overweight profit to the new Russian mafioso. Which is how he became owner of an old but lovingly restored Zil automobile. He borrows it to me when the ridiculous rent on my privatized apartment needs to get paid at the start of the month.”
“What did you do before you retired?”
The driver looked quickly at his passenger out of the corner of an eye. “Believe it or not, no skin off my elbow if you don’t, I was a famous, even infamous, chess grandmaster—ranked twenty-third in Soviet Union in 1954 when I was a nineteen-year-old Komsomol champion.”
“Why infamous?”
“It was said of me that chess drove me mad as a hatter. The critics who said it did not comprehend that, as a chess-playing psychologist once pointed out, chess cannot drive people mad; chess is what keeps mad people sane. You don’t by any chance play chess?”
“As a matter of fact, I used to. I don’t get much of a chance anymore.”
“You have heard maybe of the Katovsky gambit?”
“Actually, that rings a bell.”
“It’s me, the bell that’s ringing,” the driver said excitedly. “Hippolyte Katovsky in the flesh and blood. My gambit was the talk of tournaments when I played abroad—Belgrade, Paris, London, Milan, once even Miami in the state of Caroline the North, another time Peking when the Chinese Peoples Republic was still a socialist ally and Mao Tse-tung a comrade in arms.”
Martin noticed the old man’s eyes brimming with nostalgia. “What exactly was the Katovsky gambit?” he inquired.
Katovsky leaned angrily on the horn when a taxi edged in ahead of him. “Under Soviets, drivers like that would have been sent to harvest cotton in Central Asia. Russia is not the same since our communists lost power. Ha! We gained the freedom to die of hunger. The Katovsky gambit involved offering a poisoned pawn and positioning both bishops on the queen’s side to control the diagonals while knights penetrate on the king’s side. Swept opponents away for two years until R. Fischer beat me in Reykjavik by ignoring the poisoned pawn and castling on the queen’s side after I positioned my bishops.”
His lips moving as he played out a gambit in his head, Katovsky fell silent and Martin didn’t interrupt the game. The Zil passed an enormous billboard advertising Marlboro cigarettes and metro stations disgorging swarms of workers. Fatigue overcame Martin (he’d been traveling for two days and two nights to get from Hrodna to Moscow) and he closed his eyes for a moment that stretched into twenty minutes. When he opened them again the Zil was on the ring road. Giant cranes filled what Martin could see of the skyline. New buildings with glass facades that reflected the structures across the street were shooting up on both sides of the wide artery. In one of them he could make out automobiles barreling by, but there were so many of them on the road he couldn’t be sure which one was his. Traffic slowed to a crawl where men in yellow hard hats were digging up a section of the roadway with jackhammers, then sped up again as the Zil spilled through the funnel. Up ahead an overhead sign indicated the junction for the Petersburg highway.
“Turnoff for Prigorodnaia very shortly now,” Katovsky said. “I was one of Boris Spassky’s advisors when he lost to Fischer in 1972. If only he would have followed my advice he could have vacuumed the carpet with Fischer, who made blunder after blunder. Ha! They say the winner in any game of chess is the one who makes the next to last blunder. Here—here is the Prigorodnaia turnoff. Oh, how time seeps through your fingers when you are not closing your hand into a fist—I remember this road before it was paved. In 1952 and part of 1953, I was driven by a chauffeur to Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria’s dacha in Prigorodnaia every Sunday to teach chess to his wife. The lessons came to an end when Comrade Stalin died and Beria, who behind Stalin’s back created the gulags and purged the most loyal comrades, became executed.”
As Katovsky headed down the spur, past a sign that read “Prigorodnaia 7 kilometers,” the cracked rib in Martin’s chest began to ache again. Curiously, the pain seemed … familiar.
But how in the name of God could pain be familiar?
A pulse, the harbinger of a splitting headache, began to beat in Martin’s temples and he brought his fingers up to knead his brow. He found himself slipping into and out of roles. He could hear Lincoln Dittmann lazily murmuring a verse of poetry.
… the silent cannons bright as gold rumble
lightly over the stones. Silent cannons, soon
to cease your silence, soon unlimber’d to begin
the red business.
And the voice of the poet wearing the soiled white shirt open at the throat.
Sight at daybreak,—in camp in front of the
hospital tent on a stretcher (three dead men lying,)
each with a blanket spread over him
Other voices, barely audible, played in the lobe of his brain where memory resided. Gradually he began to distinguish fragments of dialogue.
Gentlemen and ladies … overlooked Martin Odum’s original biography.
His mother was—
… was Polish … Immigrated … after the Second …
Maggie’s on to …
… staring us in the face …
The driver of the Zil glanced at his passenger. “Look at those chimneys spewing filthy white smoke,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s a paper factory—built after Beria’s time, unnecessary to say—he never would have permitted it. Now you are knowing why only little shots live here nowadays—the stench of sulfur fills the air every hour of every day of every year. The local peasants swear you get used to it—that in time you only feel discomfortable when you breathe air that is not putrid.”
Even the reek of sulfur stinging Martin’s nostrils seemed familiar.
“Comrade Beria played chess,” the driver remembered. “Badly. So badly that it required all my cleverness to lose to him.”
… Lincoln Dittmann was in Triple … overheard an old lottery vender talking Polish to a hooker… catch the drift …
… his mother used to read him bedtime stories in Polish …
Martin found himself breathing with difficulty—he felt as if he were gagging on memories that needed to be disgorged before he could get on with his life.
Ahead, an abandoned custom’s station with a faded red star painted above the door loomed at the side of the road. Across from it and down a shallow slope, a river rippled through its bed. It must have been in flood because there appeared to be a margin of shallow marshes on either side; grass could be seen undulating in the current.
Martin heard a voice he recognized as his own say aloud, “The river is called the Lesnia, which is the name of the woods it meanders through as it skirts Prigorodnaia.”
Katovsky slowed the Zil. “I thought you said me you never been to Prigorodnaia.”
“Never. No.”
“Explain, then, how you come to know the name of the river?”
Martin, concentrating on the voices in his head, didn’t reply.
He aced Russian at college … speaking it with a Polish accent.
… bringing his Polish up to snuff, they could also work on his Russian.
“Pull over,” Martin ordered.
Katovsky braked the car to a stop, two wheels on the tarmac, two wheels on the soft shoulder. Martin jumped from the car and started walking down the middle of the paved road toward Prigorodnaia. Off to his left, high on the slope near a copse of stunted apple trees, he could see a line of whitewashed beehives. His game leg and broken ribs ached, the migraine lurking behind his brow throbbed as he made his way across a landscape that seemed painfully familiar even though he had never set eyes on it.
Half of Poland is named Jozef.
… precisely the point …
I happen to be rereading Kafka …
… suggest a Polish-sounding variation. Kafkor.
Martin detected an unevenness in the tarmac under his feet and, looking down, saw that a section of roadway, roughly the size of a large tractor tire, had been crudely repaved. It had been smoothed over, but the surface was lumpy and the seam was clearly visible. Gaping at the round section of road, he suddenly felt dizzy—he sank onto his knees and looked over his shoulder at the Zil drawing closer to him. His eyes widened in terror as he felt himself being transported back in time through a mustard-thick haze of memory. He saw things he recognized but his brain, befuddled with chemicals released by fear, could no longer locate the words to describe them: the twin stacks spewing plumes of dirty white smoke, the abandoned custom’s station with a faded red star painted above the door, the line of whitewashed bee-hives on a slope near a copse of stunted apple trees. And then, vanquishing terror only to confront a new enemy, madness, he could have sworn he saw an elephant striding over the brow of the hill.
The old man driving the Zil was standing alongside the car, one hand on the open door, calling plaintively to his passenger. “I could have crushed Beria every time,” he explained, “but I thought I would live longer if I came in second.”
The voices in Martin’s skull grew louder.
… studied Kafka at the Janiellonian University in Kraków.
… worked summers as a guide at Auschwitz.
… job in the Polish tourist bureau in Moscow … contact with the DDO target without too much difficulty.
Question of knowing where this Samat character hangs out …
Martin, his facial muscles contorting, heard himself whisper, “Poshol ty na khuy.” He articulated each of the O’s in “Poshol.” “Go impale yourself on a prick.”
Pushing himself to his feet, feeling as if he were trapped in a terrible dream, Martin stumbled down the paved spur toward Prigorodnaia. Could he have met Samat before? He had a vision of himself leaning on the bar of a posh watering hole on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya called the Commercial Club. In his mind’s eye he could make out the thin figure of a man settling onto the stool next to him. Of medium height with a pinched, mournful face, he wore suspenders that kept his trousers hiked high on his waist, and a midnight blue Italian suit jacket draped cape-like over a starched white shirt, which was tieless and buttoned up to a very prominent Adam’s apple. The initials “S” and “U-Z” were embroidered on the pocket of the shirt. Martin saw himself placing on the burnished mahogany of the bar a Bolshoi ticket that had been torn in half. From a jacket pocket the thin man produced another torn ticket. The two halves matched perfectly.
Moving his lips like a ventriloquist, Samat could be heard mumbling, What took you so long? I was told to expect the cutout to make contact with me here last week.
It takes time to establish a cover, to rent an apartment, to make it seem as if we are meeting by chance.
My uncle Tzvetan wants to see you as soon as possible. He has urgent messages he must send to Langley. He wants assurances he will be exfiltrated if things turn bad. He wants to be sure the people you work for lay in the plumbing for the exfiltration before it is needed.
How do I meet him?
He lives in a village not far from Moscow. It’s called Prigorodnaia. I invite you to his dacha for the weekend. We will tell everyone we were roommates at the Forestry Institute. We studied computer science together, in case anyone should ask.
I don’t know anything about computers.
Except for me, neither does anyone else at Prigorodnaia.
Martin caught sight of the low wooden houses on the edge of the village ahead, each with its small fenced vegetable garden, several with a cow or a pig tethered to a tree. A burly peasant splitting logs on a stump looked up and appeared to freeze. The large axe slipped from his fingers as he gaped at the visitor. He backed away from Martin, as he would from a ghost, then turned and scampered along the path that ended at the small church with paint peeling from its onion domes. Nearing the church, Martin noticed a patch of terrain behind the cemetery that had been leveled and cemented over—a great circle had been whitewashed onto the surface blackened by engine exhaust. An Orthodox priest wearing a washed-out black robe so short it left his bare matchstick-thin ankles and Nike running shoes exposed stood before the doors of the church. He held a minuscule wooden cross high over his head as men and women, alerted by the log splitter, drifted through the village lanes toward the church.
“Is it really you, Jozef?” the priest demanded.
As Martin drew nearer many of the women, whispering to each other, crossed themselves feverishly.
Martin approached the priest. “Has Samat come back to Prigorodnaia?” he asked.
“Come and departed in his helicopter. Donated this cross, fabricated from the wood of the True Cross of Zuzovka, to our church here in Prigorodnaia, where his sainted mother prays daily for his soul. For yours, too.”
“Is he in danger?”
“No more, no less than we were after it was discovered that the planks over the crater in the spur had been removed and the man buried alive had gone missing.”
Martin understood that he was supposed to know what the priest was talking about. “Who protected Samat?” he asked.
“His uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, the one we call the Oligarkh, protected Samat.”
“And who protected his uncle?”
The priest shook his head. “Organizations too powerful to have their names spoken aloud.”
“And who protected you when you removed the planks over the crater and freed the man buried alive?”
“Almighty God protected us,” said the priest, and he crossed himself in the Orthodox style with his free hand.
Martin looked up at the onion domes, then back at the priest. “I want to talk to Samat’s mother,” he announced, thinking she might be among the women watching from the path.
“She lives alone in the Oligarkh’s dacha,” the priest said.
“Kristyna is a raving lunatic,” said the peasant who had been splitting logs. Crossing themselves again, the other peasants nodded in agreement.
“And where is the Oligarkh, then?” Martin thought to ask.
“Why, none of us can say where the Oligarkh went to when he quit Prigorodnaia.”
“And when did the Oligarkh leave Prigorodnaia?”
“No one knows for sure. One day he was here, struggling down the path near the river on aluminum crutches, his bodyguards following behind, his Borzois dancing ahead, the next the dacha was stripped of its furnishings and echoed with emptiness, and only a single candle burned in a downstairs window during the long winter night.”
Martin started toward the sprawling dacha with the wooden crow’s-nest rising above the white birches that surrounded the house. The peasants blocking the path gave way to let him through; several reached out to touch an arm and a toothless old woman cackled, “Back from the dead and the buried, then.” Gaunt chickens and a rooster with resplendent plumes scrambled out from under Martin’s feet, stirring up fine dust from the path. Drawn by curiosity, the villagers and the priest, still holding aloft the sliver of a cross, trailed after him, careful to keep a respectful distance.
When Martin reached the wooden fence surrounding the Oligarkh’s dacha, he thought he could make out a woman singing to herself. Unlatching the gate and circling around toward the back of the dacha, he stepped carefully through a neatly tended garden, with alternating furrows of vegetables and sunflowers, until he spotted the source of the singing. An old and frail crone, wearing a threadbare shift and walking barefoot, was filling a plastic can with rainwater from a barrel set under a gutter of the dacha. Long scraggly white hair plunged across her pale skin, which was stretched tightly over her facial bones, and she had to stab it away from her eyes when she caught sight of Martin to get a better look at him. “Tzvetan, as always, was correct,” she said. “You will have been better able to survive the winter once the hole was covered with snow, though I was dead set against their burying you before you had eaten your lunch.”
“You know who I am?” Martin asked.
“You didn’t used to ask me silly questions, Jozef. I know you as well as I know my own son, Samat; as well as I knew his father, who hibernated to Siberia during the time of Stalin and never returned. Curious, isn’t it, how our lives were utterly and eternally defined by Stalin’s whimsical brutality. I knew you would come back, dear Jozef. But what on earth took you so long? I expected you would surely return to Prigorodnaia after the first thaw of the first winter.” The old woman set down her watering can and, taking Martin’s hand in hers, led him across the garden to the back door of the dacha. “You always liked your tea and jam at this hour. You will need a steaming cup to see you through the morning.”
Kristyna pushed through a screen door hanging half off of its hinges and, slipping her soiled feet into a pair of felt slippers, shuffled through a series of deserted rooms to the kitchen, all the while glancing over her shoulder to be sure Martin was still behind her. Using both thin arms, she worked the hand pump until water gushed from the spigot. She filled a blackened kettle and put it to boil on one of the rusting electric plaques set on the gas stove that no longer functioned. “I will fetch your favorite jam from the preserves in the larder of the cellar,” she announced. “Dearest Jozef, don’t disappear again. Promise me?” Almost as if she couldn’t bear to hear him refuse, she pulled up a trap door and, securing it with a dog’s leash, disappeared down a flight of steps.
Martin wandered through the ground floor of the dacha, his footfalls echoing from the bare walls of the empty rooms. Through the sulfur-stained panes of the windows he could make out the priest and his flock of faithful gathered at the fence, talking earnestly among themselves. The double living room with an enormous stone chimney on either end gave onto a study filled with wall-to-wall shelves devoid of books, and beyond that a small room with a low metal field-hospital cot set next to a small chimney filled with scraps of paper and dried twigs waiting to be burned. Half a dozen empty perfume bottles were set out on the mantle. A small pile of women’s clothing was folded neatly on an upside down wooden crate with the words “Ugor-Zhilov” and “Prigorodnaia” stenciled on several of its sides. A dozen or so picture postcards were tacked to the door that led to a toilet. Martin drew closer to the door and examined them. They’d been sent from all over the world. One showed the duty-free shop at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, another the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, a third a bridge spanning the Vltava River in Prague, still another Buckingham Palace in London. The topmost postcard on the door was a photograph of a family walking down a paved country road past two identical clapboard farm houses built very close to each other. Across the road, a weathered barn stood on a small rise, an American eagle crafted out of metal sitting atop the ornate weather vane jutting from the mansard roof. The people pictured on the postcard were dressed in clothing farmers might have worn going to church two hundred years before—the men and boys were attired in black trousers and black suit jackets and straw hats, the women and girls were wearing ankle length gingham dresses and laced-up high shoes and bonnets tied under the chin.
Martin pried out the tack with his fingernails and turned over the postcard. There was no date on it; the printed caption identifying the picture on the postcard had been scuffed off with a knife blade, the post office cancellation across the stamp read “fast New York.” “Mama dearest,” someone had written in Russian, “I am alive and well in America the Beautiful do not worry your head for me only keep singing when you weed the vegetable garden which is how I see you in my mind’s eye.” It was signed, “Your devoted S.”
The old woman could be heard calling from the kitchen. “Jozef, my child, where have you gone off to? Come take tea.”
Pocketing the postcard, Martin retraced his steps. In the kitchen the old woman, using a torn apron as a potholder, was filling two cups with an infusion that turned out to have been brewed from carrot peelings because, for her, tea had become too expensive. She settled onto a three-legged milking stool, leaving the only chair in the room for her visitor. Martin pulled it up to the table covered with formica and sat across from her. The woman kept both of her hands clasped around the cracked mug as she summoned memories and gently rocked her head from side to side at the thought of them. Her lidded eyes flitted from one object to another, like a butterfly looking for a leaf on which to settle. “I recall the day Samat brought you back from Moscow, Jozef. It was a Tuesday. Ah, you are surprised. The reason I remember it was a Tuesday is because that was the day the woman from the village came to do laundry—she was too terrified to use the electric washing machine Samat brought from GUM and scrubbed everything in a shallow reach of the river. You and Samat had been roommates in a school somewhere, so he said when he introduced you to his uncle’s entourage. Later, Tzvetan took you aside and asked you question after question about things I did not comprehend—what in the world is an exfiltration? You do remember the Oligarkh, Jozef? He was a very angry man.”
Martin thought he could hear the angry voice of an older man raging against the regime as he lurched back and forth on aluminum crutches before people too cowed to interrupt. My grandfather was executed during the 1929 collectivization, my father was shot to death in a field gone to weed in 1933, both were found guilty by itinerant tribunals of being kulaks. Do you know who kulaks were, Jozef? For the Soviet scum, they were the so-called rich peasants who wanted to sabotage Stalin’s program to collectivize agriculture and drive the peasants onto state farms. Rich my ass. Kulaks were farmers who owned a single pair of leather shoes, which would last a lifetime because they were only worn inside church. My grandfather, my father would walk to and from church wearing peasant shoes made of woven reeds, what we called lapti, and put on their leather shoes when they crossed the threshold. Because they owned a pair of leather shoes, my grandfather and my father were branded enemies of the people and shot. Perhaps now you understand why I wage one-man war against Mother Russia. I will never forgive the Soviets or their heirs …
Martin looked across the table at the old woman sipping her infusion. “I remember him saying something about leather shoes,” he said.
The woman brightened. “He told the story to every newcomer to the dacha—how his grandfather and father had been executed by the Soviets because they owned leather shoes. It could have been true, mind you. Then, again, it could have been imagined. Those who lived through the Stalinist era can never get out of it. Those who were born afterward can never get in. You are too young to know the Soviet state’s greatest secret—why everyone spent their waking hours applauding Stalin. I shall educate you: It is because the walls in the new apartment buildings were insulated with felt, which left the rooms well heated but infested with clothes moths. Our indoor sport was to clap our hands and kill them in mid flight. We kept score—on any given evening the one with the most cadavers was declared to be the winner. Ah,” the woman added with a drawn out sigh, “all that is spilt milk. Samat and Tzvetan, they are both of them gone from here now.”
“And where have they gone to?” Martin asked softly.
The old woman smiled sadly. “They have gone to earth—they have hibernated into holes in the frozen ground.”
“And in what country are these holes in the ground?”
She gazed out a window. “I was studying piano at the conservatory when my husband, Samat’s father, was falsely accused of being an enemy of the people and sent to Siberia.” She held her fingers up and examined them; Martin could see that the palms of her hands were cracking from dryness and her nails were broken and filthy. “My husband—for the moment his name slips my mind; it will surely come back to me—my husband was a medical doctor, you see. He never returned from Siberia, though Tzvetan, who made inquiries after the death of Koba, whom you know as Stalin, heard tales from returning prisoners about his brother running a clinic in a camp for hardened criminals, who paid him with crusts of stale bread.”
“Did you and Samat suffer when your husband was arrested?”
“I was expelled from the Party. Then they cancelled my stipend and expelled me from the conservatory, though it was not because my husband had been arrested—he and Tzvetan were Armenians, you know, and Armenians wore their arrests the way others wear medals on their chests.”
“Why were you expelled, then?”
“Dear boy, because they discovered I was an Israelite, of course. My parents had given me a Christian name, Kristyna, precisely so that the Party would not suspect I had Jewish roots, but in the end the ruse did not work.”
“Did you know that Samat went to live in Israel?”
“It was my idea—he needed to emigrate because of the gang wars raging in the streets of Moscow. I was the one who suggested Israel might accept him if he could prove his mother was Jewish.”
“How did you make ends meet when you lost your conservatory stipend?”
“While he was in the gulag, Tzvetan arranged for us to be taken care of by his business associates. When he returned he personally took us both under his wing. He convinced Samat to enroll in the Forestry Institute, though why my son would want to learn forestry was beyond me. And then he sent him to the State Planning Agency’s Higher Economic School. What Samat did after that he never told me, though it was clearly important because he came and went in a very shiny limousine driven by a chauffeur. Who would have imagined it—my son, driven by chauffeur?”
On a hunch, Martin said, “You don’t seem mad.”
Kristyna looked surprised. “And who told you I was?”
“I heard one of the peasants from the village say you were a raving lunatic.”
Kristyna frowned. “I am a raving lunatic when I need to be,” she murmured. “It is a formula for protecting yourself from life and from fate. I wrap myself in lunacy the way a peasant pulls a sheepskin coat over his shoulders in winter. When people take you for a raving lunatic, you can say anything and nobody, not even the Party, holds it against you.”
“You are not what you seem.”
“And you, my dear, dear Jozef, are you what you seem?”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that …”
“Samat brought you here—he said you were friends from school. I accepted you in place of the son I had lost at childbirth. The Oligarkh received you as a member of his entourage and, after several months, as a member of his family. And you betrayed us all. You betrayed Samat, you betrayed me, you betrayed Tzvetan. Why?”
“I don’t … remember any of this.”
Kristyna looked at Martin intently. “Does your amnesia protect you from life and from fate, Jozef?”
“If only it could … I run as fast as I can, but life and fate are endlessly and always right behind and gaining on me.”
Tears seeped from under Kristyna’s tightly shut lids. “Dear Jozef, that has been my experience also.”
Taking leave of Kristyna, Martin headed back toward Prigorodnaia’s church. The crowd of peasants had long since followed the priest back to the church to offer up special prayers for the soul of Jozef Kafkor. Martin was unlatching the garden gate when he heard Samat’s mother calling from a window.
“It was Zurab,” she shouted.
Martin turned back. “What about Zurab?” he called.
“Zurab was the given name of Samat’s father, my husband. Zurab Ugor-Zhilov.”
Martin smiled and nodded. Kristyna smiled back and waved good-bye.
When he reached the paved spur, Martin found the Zil parked off the roadway in the shade of a grove of birches leaning away from the prevailing winds. Katovsky, his shoes off and trousers rolled up, was down slope from the car soaking his feet in the cool currents of the Lesnia. “You wouldn’t by any chance be familiar with the fourth game A. Alekhine versus J. Capablanca 1927?” the driver called as he scrambled uphill toward Martin. “I was just now playing it in my head—there was a queen sacrifice more dazzling than the thirteen-year-old R. Fischer’s celebrated queen sacrifice on the seventeenth move of his Grünfeld Defense against the grandmaster Byrne, which stunned the chess world.”
“No,” Martin said as Katovsky sat on the ground to pull on his shoes. “Never played that game.”
“On second thought you ought to avoid it, comrade visitor. Queen sacrifices are not for the weak of heart. I tried it once in my life. I was fifteen at the time and I was playing the State Grandmaster Oumansky. When he made his sixteenth move, I studied the board for twenty minutes and then resigned. There was nothing I could do to avoid defeat. The Grandmaster Oumansky accepted the victory gracefully. I later discovered he spent months replaying the game. He couldn’t figure out what I’d seen to make me surrender. To me, it was as conspicuous as the nose on your face. I would have been a pawn down in four moves. My bishop would have been pinned after seven and the rook file would have been open after nine, with his queen and two rooks lined up on it. What I saw was I could not beat the State. If I had it to do over again,” the driver added with a sigh, “I would not play the State.”
A hundred meters in from where the Prigorodnaia spur joined the four-lane Moscow-Petersburg highway, interior ministry troops in camouflage khakis had blocked off circulation, obliging the occasional automobile to slow to a crawl and slalom between strips of leather fitted with razor-sharp spikes. When Katovsky’s Zil came abreast of the parked delivery truck with the DHL logo on its side, baby-faced soldiers armed with submachine guns motioned for the driver to pull off the road. A brawny civilian in a rumpled suit yanked open the passenger door and, grabbing Martin’s wrist, dragged him from the car so roughly his cracked ribs sent an electric current through his chest. A second civilian wagged a finger at the driver, who was cowering behind the wheel. “You know the rules, Lifshitz—you could get six months for operating a taxi without a license. I might forget to arrest you if you can convince me you didn’t take a passenger to Prigorodnaia today.”
“How could I take a passenger to Prigorodnaia? I don’t even know where it is.”
Martin, looking back over his shoulder, asked, “Why are you calling him Lifshitz?”
Gripping the nape of Martin’s neck in one huge hand and his elbow in the other, the brawny civilian steered the prisoner toward the back of the DHL truck. “We call him Lifshitz because that’s his name.”
“He told me it was Katovsky.”
The civilian snorted. “Katovsky, the chess grandmaster! He died a decade ago. Lifshitz the unlicensed taxi driver was a finalist in the Moscow district Chinese checkers tournament five, six years ago. Chess grandmaster—that’s a new one in Lifshitz’s repertoire.”
Moments later Martin found himself sitting on the dirty floor in the back of the DHL truck, his legs stretched in front of him, his wrists manacled behind his back. The two civilians sat on a makeshift bench across from him, sucking on Camels as they gazed impassively at their prisoner through the smoke. “Where are you taking me?” Martin demanded, but neither of his captors showed the slightest inclination to respond.
At some point the truck must have turned off the ring road onto a main artery because Martin could sense that it was caught in bumper to bumper traffic. Horns shrieked around them. When the truck swerved sharply, Martin could hear the screech of brakes and drivers shouting curses. The two jailers, their eyes fixed on the prisoner, seemed unfazed. After twenty or so minutes the truck descended a ramp—Martin could tell by the way the motor sounded that they were indoors—and then backed up before coming to a stop. The civilians threw open the rear doors and, gripping Martin under his armpits, hauled him onto a loading ramp and through swinging doors down a long corridor to a waiting freight elevator. The two grilled gates slid closed and the elevator started grinding noisily upward. The doors on the first five floors were sealed shut with metal bars welded across them. On the sixth floor the elevator jerked to a halt. Other civilians waiting outside tugged open the double gates and Martin, surrounded now by six men in civilian suits, was escorted to a holding room painted glossy white and saturated in bright light. The handcuffs were removed from his wrists, after which he was stripped to the skin and his clothing and his body were meticulously inspected by two male nurses wearing white overalls and latex gloves. An overripe doctor in a stained white smock with a cigarette bobbing on her lower lip and a stethoscope dangling from her neck came in to examine Martin’s eyes and ears and throat, then listened to his heart and took his blood pressure and probed his cracked ribs with the tips of her fingers, causing him to wince. As she went through the motions of checking his health, Martin was more distressed by his nakedness than his plight. He concentrated on her fingernails, which were painted a garish phosphorescent green. He caught the gist of a question she posed in Polish; she wanted to know if he had ever been hospitalized. Once, he replied in English, for a shrapnel wound in my lower back and a pinched nerve in my left leg, which still aches when I spend too much time on my feet. The doctor must have understood his response because she ran her fingers down the length of the back wound, then asked if he took any medication. From time to time an aspirin, he said. What do you do between aspirins? she asked. I live with the pain, he said. Nodding, the doctor noted his response and checked off items on a clipboard and signed and dated the form before handing it to one of the civilians. As she turned to leave, Martin asked if she was a generalist or a specialist. The woman smiled slightly. When I am not freelancing for the Service, I am a gynecologist, she said.
Martin was ordered to dress. One of the civilians led the prisoner to a door at the far end of the room and, opening it, stood aside. Martin shuffled into a larger room (once again the laces had been removed from his shoes, making it difficult to walk normally) filled with sturdy furniture, hand-me-downs, so he surmised, from the days when Stalin’s KGB ruled the roost in what was then called the Soviet Union. A short, husky middle-aged man wearing tinted eyeglasses presided from behind a monster of a desk. The man nodded toward the wooden chair facing the desk.
Martin gingerly lowered himself onto the seat. “Thirsty,” he said in Russian.
The interrogator snapped his fingers. A moment later a glass of water was set on the desk within reach of the prisoner. Holding it in both hands, he drank it off in several long gulps.
“I am a Canadian citizen,” Martin announced in English. “I insist on seeing someone from the Canadian embassy.”
Behind the desk, the civilian angled a very bright light into Martin’s eyes, forcing him to squint. A husky voice that was perfectly harmonious with the huskiness of the civilian drifted out of the blinding light. “You are voyaging under a passport that identifies you as Kafkor, Jozef,” the interrogator said in excellent English. “The passport purports to be Canadian, though it is, as you are no doubt aware, a forgery. The name on it is Polish. The Russian Federal Security Service has been eager to get its hands on you since your name first came to our attention. You are the Kafkor, Jozef, who was associated with Samat Ugor-Zhilov and his uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, better known as the Oligarkh.”
“Is that a question?” Martin asked.
“It is a statement of fact,” the interrogator replied evenly. “According to our register, you met Samat Ugor-Zhilov shortly after arriving in Moscow to work for the Polish tourist bureau. You were taken by this same Samat Ugor-Zhilov to meet his uncle, who was living in the former Beria dacha in Prigorodnaia. In the four months that followed your initial visit to Prigorodnaia, you spent a great deal of time as a guest at the dacha, sometimes remaining there the entire week, other times going out for four-day weekends. The ostensible reason for the visits was that you were going to teach conversational Polish to Samat’s mother, who lived in the dacha. Your superiors at the Polish tourist bureau did not complain about your prolonged absences, which led us to conclude that the tourist bureau was a cover. You were obviously a Polish national, though we suspected you had spent part of your life abroad because our Polish speakers who listened to tapes of you talking with your coworkers in Moscow identified occasional lapses in grammar and antiquated vocabulary. You spoke Russian—I assume you still do—with a pronounced Polish accent, which suggested you had studied the Russian language from Polish teachers in Poland or abroad. So, gospodin Kafkor, were you working for Polish intelligence or were you employed, with or without the collaboration of the Poles, by a Western intelligence service?”
Martin said, “You are mistaking me for someone else. I swear to you I don’t remember any of the details you describe.”
The interrogator opened a dossier with a diagonal red stripe across the cover and began leafing through a thick stack of papers. After a moment he raised his eyes. “At some point your relationship with Samat and his uncle deteriorated. You disappeared from view for a period of six weeks. When you reappeared, you were unrecognizable. You had obviously been tortured and starved. Early one morning, while road workers were paving the seven kilometer spur that led from the main Moscow-Petersburg highway to the village of Prigorodnaia, two of the Oligarkh’s bodyguards escorted you across the Lesnia in a rowboat and prodded you up the incline to a crater that had been gouged in the spur by a steam shovel the previous day. You were stark naked. A large safety pin attached to a fragment of cardboard bearing the words The spy Kafkor had been passed through the flesh between your shoulder blades. And then, before the eyes of forty or so workers, you were buried alive in the crater—you were forced to lie in fetal position in the hole, which was roughly the size of a large tractor tire. Thick planks were wedged into place above you, after which the road workers were obliged to pave over the spot.”
Martin had the unnerving sensation that a motion picture he had seen and forgotten was being described to him. “More water,” he murmured.
Another glass of water was placed within reach and he drank it off. In a hoarse whisper Martin asked, “How can you know these things?”
The interrogator twisted the arm of the lamp so that the light played on the top of the desk. As the interrogator set out five blown-up photographs, Martin caught a glimpse of Kafkor’s Canadian passport, a wad of American dollars and British pounds, the picture postcard that he’d swiped from the door of the dacha in Prigorodnaia, along with his shoelaces. He scraped his chair closer to the desk and leaned over the photographs. They were all taken from a distance and enlarged, rendering them grainy and slightly out of focus. In the first photograph, an emaciated man, completely naked, with a matted beard and what looked like a crown of thorns on his head, could be seen stepping gingerly through the shallow slime onto dry land. Two guards in striped shirts followed behind him. In the next photograph, the naked man could be seen kneeling at the edge of a crater, looking over his shoulder, his eyes hollow with terror. The third photograph in the series showed a thin figure of a man with a long pinched face, a suit jacket draped cape-like over his shoulders, offering a cigarette to the condemned man. The fourth photograph caught a heavy set man with a shock of silver hair and dark glasses in the back of a limousine, staring over the tinted window open the width of a fist. In the last photograph, a steamroller was backing across the glistening tarmac, raising a soft fume. Workers leaning on rakes or shovels could be seen staring in horror at the scene of the execution.
“One of the workman on the road crew, the ironmonger in point of fact, was employed by our security services,” the interrogator said. “He had a camera hidden in the thermos in his lunch box. Do you recognize yourself in these photographs, gospodin Kafkor?”
A single word worked its way up from Martin’s parched throat. “Nyet.”
The interrogator switched off the light. Martin felt the world spinning giddily under his feet. His lids drifted closed over his eyes as his forehead sank onto one of the photos. The interrogator didn’t break the silence until the prisoner sat up again.
Martin heard himself ask, “When did all this happen?”
“A long time ago.”
Martin sagged back into his seat. “For me,” he remarked tiredly, “yesterday is a long time ago, the day before yesterday is a previous incarnation.”
“The photographs were taken in 1994,” the interrogator said.
Martin breathed the words “Three years ago!” Kneading his forehead, he tried to work the pieces of this strange puzzle into place, but no matter which way he turned and twisted them, no coherent picture emerged. “What happened after this individual was buried alive?” he asked.
“When the photographs were developed and circulated, we decided to mount an operation to free him—to free you—in the hope that you were still alive. When we reached the site of the execution, in the dead of night, we discovered the peasants, led by the village priest, had already scraped away the tarmac and pried up the planks and rescued the man buried in the crater. Before first light, our people helped the peasants replace the planks and tar over the spot.”
“And what happened to … this person?”
“The village’s tractor repairman drove you to Moscow in Prigorodnaia’s tow truck. His intention was to take you to a hospital. At a red light on the ring road, not far from the American Embassy, you leaped from the cab of the truck and disappeared in the darkness. Neither the municipal police nor our service was able to find any trace of you after that. As far as we were concerned, you disappeared from the surface of the earth—until today, until a custom’s officer at the airport signaled the arrival of a Canadian bearing a passport issued to Kafkor, Jozef. We assumed you would be returning to Prigorodnaia, which is the reason the interior ministry troops closed the road—we knew we could pick you up on the way out.”
A secretary appeared behind the desk and, bending close, whispered in the interrogator’s ear. Clearly annoyed, the interrogator demanded, “How long ago?” Then: “How in the world did he find out?” Shaking his head in disgust, the interrogator turned back to Martin. “The CIA station chief in Moscow has learned that you are in our hands. He is sending a formal request through channels asking us to turn you over to his agency for interrogation when we’ve finished with you.”
“Why would the CIA want to question Jozef Kafkor?”
“They will want to discover if you were able to tell us what we want to know.”
“And what is it that you want to know?”
“Whose side were they on—Samat Ugor-Zhilov and the Oligarkh, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov? And where are they now?”
“Samat took refuge in a West Bank Jewish settlement in Israel.”
The interrogator carefully unhooked his eyeglasses from one ear and then the other and began to clean the lenses with the tip of his silk tie. “Bring tea,” he instructed the secretary. “Also those brioche cakes stuffed with fig confiture.” He fitted the glasses back on and, collecting the five photographs, slipped them back into the folder. “Gospodin Kafkor, the Russian Federal Security Service is underfunded and understaffed and underappreciated, but we are not dimwits. That Samat took refuge in Israel we have known for a long time. We were negotiating with the Israeli Mossad to have access to him when word reached him that Chechen hit men had tracked him to Israel, causing him to flee the country. But where did he go when he disappeared from Israel?”
The interrogator leafed through more reports. “He was sighted in the Golders Green section of London. He was seen again in the vicinity of the Vys
hrad Train Station in Prague. He was said to have visited the town of Kantubek on the island of Vozrozhdeniye in the Aral Sea. There were reports, too, that he may have gone to the Lithuanian town of Zuzovka not far from the frontier with Belarus. There is even a rumor that he was the mysterious person who turned up in the helicopter that touched down for half an hour behind the cemetery in Prigorodnaia.”
The secretary turned up at the door carrying a tray. The interrogator motioned for him to set it on the small round table between two high-backed chairs and leave. When he was alone with the prisoner, he waved him over to one of the chairs. Settling into the other chair, he filled two mugs with steaming tea. “You must try one of the cakes,” he advised, sliding the straw basket toward Martin. “They are so delicious it must surely count as a sin to eat them. So, gospodin Kafkor, let us sin together,” he added, biting into one of the cakes, cupping a hand under it to catch the crumbs.
“My name is Cheklachvili,” the interrogator said, speaking as he took another bite out of his cake. “Arkhip Cheklachvili.”
“That’s a Georgian name,” Martin noted.
“My roots are Georgian, though I have long since offered my allegiance to Mother Russia. It was me,” he added with a distinct twinkle in his eyes, “the ironmonger on the slope who was employed by our security services. It was me who took the photographs of you with a camera hidden in my lunch box.”
“You’ve come up in the world,” Martin commented.
“Photographing your execution was my first great triumph. It caught the attention of my superiors and started me up the career ladder. After you jumped from the tow truck and disappeared in Moscow, we heard rumors that you had found your way to the American Embassy on the ring road. The CIA station chief himself was said to have taken you in charge. There was a flurry of coded radio traffic for forty-eight hours, after which you were spirited out of Moscow in an embassy car heading for Finland. There were five men in the car—all of them had diplomatic passports and were able to pass the frontier without scrutiny. What happened to you after that we simply do not know. To tell you the truth, I suspect you don’t know either.”
Martin stared at his interrogator. “What makes you suppose that?”
The interrogator collected his thoughts. “My father was arrested by the KGB in 1953. He was accused of being an American agent and sentenced by a summary tribunal to be shot. The guards took him from his cell in the vast Lubyanka headquarters of the KGB one night in March and brought him to the elevator that carried prisoners down to the vaulted basements for execution. When they discovered that the elevator was not working, they returned him to his cell. Technicians worked through the night to repair the elevator. In the morning the guards came for my father again. They were waiting for the elevator to climb to their floor when word reached them that Stalin was dead. All executions were cancelled. Several months later the new leadership killed Beria and issued a general amnesty, and my father was set free.”
“What does his story have to do with me?”
“I remember my father returning to our communal apartment—I was six years old at the time. It had been raining and he was drenched to the skin. My mother asked him where he had been. He shook his head in confusion. There was a vacant look in his eyes, as if he had glimpsed some horrible thing, some monster or some ghost. He didn’t remember his arrest, he didn’t remember the summary tribunal, he didn’t remember the guards leading him to the elevator for execution. It was all erased from his consciousness. When I went to work for the security apparatus, I looked up his dossier and found out what had happened to him. By then my father had been put out to pasture. One day, years later, I worked up the nerve to tell him what I had discovered. He listened the way one does to the story of someone else’s life, and smiled politely as if the life I had dredged up had nothing to do with him, and went on with the life he remembered. Which was the life he lived until the day he died.”
Drinking off the last of his tea, the interrogator produced a small key from the pocket of his vest and offered it to Martin. “If you go through that door, you will find a narrow staircase spiraling down six floors to the street level. The key opens the door at the bottom of the staircase leading to a side street. When you are outside, lock the door behind you and throw the key down a sewer.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I believe you when you say you don’t remember being brought across the river and buried alive. I believe you when you say you don’t know Samat Ugor-Zhilov or his uncle, the Oligarkh. I have concluded that you are unable to help us with our inquiries. If you are intelligent, you will quit Russia as rapidly as you can. Whatever you do, don’t go to the American Embassy—the CIA station chief has been making discreet inquiries for the past several weeks about someone named Martin Odum. From his description, we suspect that Martin Odum and Jozef Kafkor are the same person.”
Martin started to mutter his thanks but the interrogator cut him off. “The skeletal man in the third photograph, the one offering the condemned man a last cigarette, is Samat Ugor-Zhilov. The man with silver hair watching the execution from the partly open window of the automobile is the Oligarkh, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov. Keep in mind that they attempted to execute you once. They would surely try again if they discover your whereabouts. Ah, I must not forget to return to you your belongings.” He retrieved the Canadian passport, the wad of bills, the picture postcard showing a family strolling down a country road somewhere in north America and the shoelaces, and handed everything to the prisoner.
The interrogator watched as the prisoner threaded the laces through his shoes. When Martin looked up, the interrogator shrugged his heavy shoulders, a gesture that conveyed his presumption there was nothing more to say.
Martin nodded in agreement. “How can I repay you?” he asked.
“You cannot.” The lines around the interrogator’s eyes stretched into a controlled smile. “By the way, Arkhip Cheklachvili is a legend. I assume that Jozef Kafkor and Martin Odum are also legends. The cold war is over, still we live our legends. You may well be its last victim, lost in a labyrinth of legends. Perhaps with the aid of the postcard, you will be able to find a way out.”