She had never been in an airplane before. This, combined with the mere fact of still being alive, made her fascinated and giddy during the first hour of the next day’s journey. Extraordinarily silly of her, given the circumstances: being for all intents and purposes abducted to an unknown destination by the head of Stalin’s secret police and one of his expert torturers.
The other Georgians were left behind in Magnitogorsk to build their blast furnaces. Proton and Elektron were supposed to be going back to Moscow but were apparently deemed unworthy of being given seats on an airplane—even though there was room for them. Their father, of course, still had years left on his sentence and would be going nowhere.
The knock at Aurora’s hotel-room door had come hours before dawn. And normally when Lavrentiy Beria sent someone to knock at such an hour, it signaled the beginning of a very bad day. But in this case it was just a polite notification that she needed to be down in the lobby in half an hour.
Twenty-four hours would not have been long enough for her to get out of bed and feel human. The previous day’s hours of uncontrollable shivering, the straining against her bonds, the gasping for air, had wrecked every muscle in her body. When they’d finally freed her and summoned her to dinner she had felt paradoxically fine, almost like she was back on the morphine. Maybe she was. Maybe they’d slipped a dose into a vein while she was semi-awake. But by morning everything hurt and she moved like a hundred-year-old woman. It was fortunate that all she had to do was put on clothes and crawl down to the lobby. A car was waiting, a nice black Mercedes. She dozed in the backseat and was only vaguely aware when Shpak and finally Beria climbed in, followed by some aide of Beria’s, a younger Georgian man. Twenty minutes’ jouncing and skidding along roads paved with soot-blackened ice took them to the airfield north of Magnitogorsk. And there waiting for them in a pool of light was the plane. It was a beautiful object, much more so than the ungainly contraptions of Italo Balbo’s air armada. Perhaps it had to be beautiful in order to do its job. The wings and so on probably had to be shaped in a particular way for such a thing to work at all. A streamlined fuselage rested atop a pair of broad wings. There was a single engine up in the nose, and it looked like the pilot sat right on top of it in a narrow glass cupola. The better to keep an eye on oil levels and adjust the carburetor in flight, perhaps. Back close to its tail was a little door in the side.
There were young men in uniform all over the place. Nice uniforms, clean and new. One of them opened the car door on Aurora’s side and extended a hand to help her out. Normally she’d have scoffed at the bourgeois courtesy but in this case she took it in a death grip and hauled hard, only to topple into him once her feet were on the ground. He offered his arm and she took it, then walked in small, careful steps across tamped-down snow to the plane’s door. He and another soldier helped her up and in with a firm shove on the backside that probably would have looked like out-and-out kidnapping to anyone watching from a distance.
There were six seats, three on each side. In the front row Beria was already sitting across from his aide. Shpak sat behind the aide in the second row. Aurora opted to sit on the other side, Beria’s side, in the back. She was afraid Shpak would attempt to make conversation with her. But when the pilot started the engine it became clear she needn’t have worried. Conversation was going to be impossible as long as that thing was running. Aurora, strapped into a seat, no longer being asked to get up and move about, no longer under the gaze of these men, could simply look around and take it in. And—strange as it was to think this way—enjoy it. The plane was made of wood, but more like a boat than a house, since everything was curved. Out the window she could see the hinged vanes on the wings’ rear edges, moving up and down as the pilot fiddled with the controls. Those looked to be made of cloth stretched taut over elaborate wooden frames. The engine’s roar became even louder and the plane began to roll forward and swing round, feeling its way over ruts smashed into snow and frozen mud by terrestrial vehicles. Then the ride got smoother and it swung around to a new heading. She could not see forward, but off to one side was a windsock, and people watching. After a ceremonious pause the engine began to roar louder yet and they accelerated forward. Very soon she was going faster than she’d ever gone, even in the getaway car when they’d been speeding away from Fort Sickles. Suddenly the ride became perfectly smooth and the ground began to fall away below them. A spike of orange light hit her in the eye and she looked out the window into the dawn.
AFTER A WHILE THE NOVELTY OF IT WORE OFF AND SHE WENT TO SLEEP. SUDDEN IMPACT OF landing gear on frozen ground awoke her. They had stopped somewhere. Just to refuel, as it turned out. The men got out to smoke. It was recommended she use the toilet, so she got out and did that. Apparently they were in a place called Kazan. She had learned to expect the very worst where Soviet toilets were concerned, but she was beginning to get the picture that some parts of the country made the leap from medieval to modern without passing through any of the intermediate phases. Any facility related to air transport jumped the queue and straightaway got flush toilets in centrally heated bathrooms. She was able to do her business and return to her seat in the airplane without being exposed to the horrors of outdoor privies in the Russian winter. In a few minutes they were airborne again, Aurora gazing out the window at the sun glinting off the frozen Volga and some nice old churches and fortresses. She was thinking about how a few simple items could transform your experience of the world. How rapidly one could come to expect the conveniences of air travel and warm toilets, how desperately one would long to have them back if they were taken away, the lengths one would go to, to preserve one’s access to them. For all that Beria and his ilk had soldiers, police, and torturers at their beck and call, their ability to give or take mere conveniences must, in the aggregate, confer more power by far.
It seemed that Kazan had been the flight’s halfway mark, for a couple of hours later the plane landed outside of Moscow. The center of the capital had been in sight, some miles distant, when the plane descended and the view out the window was cut off by white birch and black pine lining the airstrip. This was not a proper airport but a single-runway field in the countryside. During the final approach she’d glimpsed a few houses in the woods. Big ones, widely spaced, abutting patches of cleared ground where it looked like vegetables or even flowers might be cultivated in the summer. Now of course they were just blank lakes of snow, and even though it was only midafternoon the long shadows of trees were beginning to reach across them. A car awaited. Warm, engine running—another of those little conveniences people would probably kill to keep, once the Berias of the world had seen fit to dole them out. They drove for no more than fifteen minutes before slowing down and turning off onto a driveway flanked by stone pillars supporting massive wrought-iron gates. A short drive through a slot between tall black conifers took them to a compound, anchored by a big house, with a large stable off to one side—by far the biggest of the estate’s several outbuildings. The car stopped before the house’s main entrance just long enough for staff members to unload luggage from the back—even including the tiny valise that now contained all of Aurora’s possessions. Then the car pulled forward and approached the stable, which was large enough that they simply drove into its central aisle and parked. Barn doors were pulled closed behind them. This didn’t make things any warmer but did prevent the wind from whistling through. A few high clerestory windows shed some light into the space but it still took a few moments for Aurora’s eyes to adjust when she climbed stiffly out of the car.
What she had observed in the last few minutes had powerfully drawn her mind back to some of her earliest memories: the years she’d spent in the city that was now called Leningrad but that had been built by the tsars under the name of St. Petersburg. There was a style of building and decoration particular to that era that she’d forgotten about during her adolescence in the States. It was all over the place here, though, and it called to five-year-old Aurora, riding on Papa’s shoulders before the Winter Palace or clinging to the skirts of Veronika’s greatcoat on her way to school. She knew what this compound was, or rather what sort of place it was: a dacha, which meant a cottage outside of town, a second home in the countryside. But the word literally meant a gift. For these properties had been handed out, in the old days, by the tsar to members of the ruling classes who had somehow earned his favor. As such this one—particularly the gates on the carriageway, and the house itself—had the look of the fine old buildings she remembered in St. Petersburg. Though apparently one was expected to cultivate a woodsy and rustic aesthetic at the same time. That was certainly on display in this stable. Whoever had been given this dacha by some grateful tsar must have been a cavalry officer. A general, no doubt. The number of stalls was sufficient to accommodate two polo teams, with room left over for workhorses and riding horses. The open space in the middle was much broader than what would be needed merely to lead horses in and out—it approached the scale of an indoor arena, though the space was interrupted by a double row of columns, consisting of whole tree trunks, necessary to support the roof and bear the weight of winter snows.
Alas, not a single horse was now in the building, and it seemed that work was under way to convert it into a motor pool. To the extent you could smell anything in this cold, it was metal and petroleum, not leather and manure. She was reminded strongly of the former stables at Fort Myer that the army had converted into a depot for the Landesjäger.
But that was mostly in the future here. Perhaps they would get to work on it as the weather warmed. Today the only activity was a fire burning in a steel drum, next to a table covered by a blanket. Standing around the fire were four soldiers, all in their winter greatcoats, carbines slung over their shoulders, pistols holstered at their hips. As the new arrivals approached, they moved away to make room. Three of them took up stations across the width of the stable’s central way. The fourth moved only a little, and yet there were subtle cues in the style of that movement that this person was a woman.
She turned around and met Aurora’s eye.
It was Veronika.
Once she had recovered from her astonishment Aurora’s first impulse was to go to her. To embrace her, even. But Veronika—after holding her gaze just long enough to be sure she’d been recognized—flicked her eyes toward Beria, then back to Aurora just long enough to say, Absolutely not.
Then she turned directly toward him. “Yes,” she said, “it has been a long time, Comrade, but this is unquestionably the same girl.”
“Very well.” Beria was approaching the fire. He drew his hands out of his pockets to warm them. The flames were reflecting in the lenses of his eyeglasses, just as they had in the ice-fishing house on the Ural River. But Aurora could tell nonetheless that he was looking at her. “Only two more tests remain, then, before I can be sure of you.” He nodded at the table. “Take a look at what is there.”
Aurora stepped to the table and peeled the blanket back. Arranged there neatly were the components of a Thompson submachine gun, including a straight magazine.
“It’s getting a bit dark in here,” Beria said, “but if your story is true, you should have no difficulty assembling it.” He turned his head in Veronika’s direction. “Comrade, perhaps you could find a few small items that could be set up for target practice.” He nodded down the length of the arena, which would indeed do service as a shooting range if one didn’t mind a few bullet holes in the barn doors at the far end. The same thought seemed to occur now to Beria. “Shpak,” he said, “do us a favor and get those big doors open.”
Shpak seemed a bit put out by this request, and glanced meaningfully at the three male soldiers, but then seemed to understand, from the intensity with which they were staring at Aurora, that they were here not to open doors but to provide security for Beria. So he and Veronika both stalked off in the same direction, Veronika presently dragging a sawhorse into the middle of the space at a range of perhaps twenty yards, Shpak going all the way down to the far end, where he began to decipher an old wrought-iron latching mechanism.
Conscious of being watched alertly by the soldiers, Aurora began to repeat the procedure she had first only read about in the Library of Congress, then performed for the first time in the barn in Springfield under the gaze of Silent Al, then again in the Kidds’ garage outside of Fort Sickles. It went quickly. She wondered how badly she would have to fumble this for Beria to nod at the soldiers and have her shot out back of the stable. But it didn’t matter. She had it together in short order, no mistakes.
When it was all in one piece, she reached out and picked up the magazine. It was heavy with lead. She cast an inquiring look at Beria.
“But of course,” he said. “How else can you pass the third test?”
She was conscious that one of the soldiers had come up right behind her, and she heard the muffled pop of his holster being unsnapped. If she were to move the wrong way she’d get a bullet in the head. So with great deliberation, facing squarely down the length of the arena, she snapped the magazine into place and drew back the bolt to chamber a round. Veronika had stood up three pieces of cord wood on the sawhorse to serve as targets and gotten out of the way. Shpak had got the barn doors open and was most of the way back to joining the group. Accordingly she kept the weapon aimed at the floor, waiting for everyone to get on the near side of the firing line.
“Kill him,” Beria said in a quiet yet perfectly audible voice.
“I beg your pardon, Comrade?”
“Kill Shpak.”
Her relatives in Montana spoke often about guns and the relative merits of different ammunition. It was boring to her, but she couldn’t help absorbing some of it. Long weapons were usually rifles, the entire point of which was to fire bullets great distances, and so the cartridges were more powerful. These had a propensity for going all the way through soft targets and passing out the other side, like needles. The tommy gun was something of a novelty because it fired what were normally pistol rounds. Fat and slow, these hit hard and often stayed in the body. They weren’t called slugs for nothing. This was more punching than stabbing.
Shpak was only the second person Aurora had ever machine-gunned, but it went the same as it had with Mrs. Kidd. Maybe if you shot someone with a revolver there would be enough of a delay between successive rounds—supposing you even bothered to use more than one bullet on them—that they would feel that first shot, and know its effect, and develop a fear of the next. But taking a dozen rounds in the space of a few seconds must be different. Like being run over by a car. Aurora had learned to fight the climb of the muzzle, and fought it especially hard now, because she wanted to show her prowess. Especially in the eyes of Veronika. But also because she didn’t want to hit Shpak in the head too early. She wanted him to know she was killing him. Before long, though, the sheer impact of all that flying lead had thrown him onto his back and the slugs, if they didn’t go into the ground, were basically entering his groin and traversing the length of his body and hitting his head anyway.
She set the gun down on the table and raised her hands. She spoke loudly, wanting to make herself heard over Beria’s laughter. “Do you believe my story now?”