FINDING KATARINA M. Page 14

  She looked uneasy. “It’s not a good time. Bohdan will be back soon.”

  I made an embarrassed face. “Did I do something to make him mad?”

  “Nah. He just gets this way sometimes. Moody, you know. Typical guy.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Tell me about it.” They’d probably argued after I left—him criticizing her for gabbing too much, warning her to keep her mouth shut around the American.

  “It’ll just take a minute,” I insisted in a friendly tone.

  She swayed a bit, grimacing. Her chapped lips were almost as pale as her face. Anemia? Fatigue? Something.

  “All right. Just a minute, though. Come into the kitchen. I’m making dinner.”

  Potatoes were boiling in a pot on the stove, their bland smell wafting through the room. A cutting board was covered with uncooked chicken breasts, which Tanya had apparently been pounding with a heavy meat tenderizer lying nearby. She didn’t offer me tea, a sure sign of her ambivalence.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said, taking a seat at the table while scanning the room for a good place to stash a thin object about one-and-a-half inches square. My sweeping glance took in potted plants on a windowsill trailing dried-out vines, cracked dishes stacked on open plywood shelves, and walls plastered over with posters of rock bands and hostile, craggy landscapes.

  “What are you looking at?” Tanya asked.

  “Oh, the posters…fascinating.” I heard my insincerity, and she looked unconvinced. “It seems Misha was writing an article…” I said, waiting for an answering glimmer in her eyes. It didn’t come. “…about an abandoned prison camp that was discovered by herders—did he ever mention that to you?” Even though Meredith had taken over this line of inquiry, I figured I could still use it. It had the advantage of being true, and I might even learn something I could pass on to Meredith.

  “He liked history,” Tanya said off-handedly. “But I never heard him talk about such a place. We don’t usually talk about those things.”

  By those things, she probably meant the gulag camps and prisons. “Evenki herders? Did he mention having Evenki friends, or taking any trips with them?”

  “Don’t think so.” She turned to the counter and resumed pounding the meat.

  I slipped one of the listening devices out of my pocket, concealing it in the snug palm of my hand. What if I laid it on the inch or two of floor behind the refrigerator, an area people rarely cleaned? I rose quietly from my seat. Tanya was hammering like a madwoman. The metallic clatter of a key turning in the front door reached us, and Tanya whirled around, the blocky tenderizer held aloft.

  “He’s early. You have to go. I can’t explain right now. Just, please, go out this way—”

  She swept across the room, and opened a door beside the refrigerator, waving the tenderizer in a rapid sweeping gesture to encourage speed. I slipped through, found myself on the landing of a dirty stairway that descended one flight. Yellow kitchen light illuminated it, but as soon as Tanya shut the door, I was swamped in dark. I slipped the device back into my pocket, groped for a light switch that I couldn’t find. My hand brushed against a railing. I felt my way down the steps, careful not to make noise, lest Bohdan hear. The smells of dirt and mold rose to meet me as I descended. At the bottom, I put my hands out and inched forward in the dark until I touched a door of clammy, half-rotted wood. I ran my fingers along its edge, felt a deadbolt, which I turned, and a metal chain, which I unleashed. The door groaned open, and I stepped outside into a warm, gloomy twilight, loamy dirt under my feet, the edge of the parking lot ten feet ahead. The sickly aroma of the untended dumpster filled my nose.

  I walked around to the front of the building, almost certain that Tanya wouldn’t welcome me into her home again. I’d have to find another way. As luck would have it, I’d just been introduced to the well-hidden back entrance to their flat. Now if Tanya would just forget to slide the bolt and hook the chain…

  At two a.m., I slipped out of bed and pulled on sweatpants, a T-shirt, and sneakers. I ghosted along the dark hallway past Ilmira’s room, down the poorly lit stairs, and out the front door. There was a nip of cool in the air; a profound silence, broken by the soft crunch of gravel under my rubber soles. The moon was peeking from behind thin clouds, shedding a pale glow on the access road. Parked cars were shadowy hulks.

  I found my way to the apron of packed dirt behind the building, and when the dumpster reek reached me, I followed it through the gloom. Scuttling, scratching sounds rose up suddenly—foraging animals scattering amid the soft rot and trash. There—the back door to the Duboff/Karp apartment was visible in the feeble moonglow. I approached and gently turned the handle, gently pulled. It didn’t budge. Pulled harder, and this time felt its slight motion arrested by the deadbolt. Yanked it fast and sharp, just to be sure, but all it did was creak and strain against the steel.

  Clever Tanya didn’t forget.

  The night murmured outside Misha’s bedroom window. A pale trapezoid of moonlight cut across the floor. I was frustrated, restless, still buzzing with adrenaline from my failed attempt, when it occurred to me that I hadn’t called my mother. What’s more, I’d been too drunk to call her last night, and hadn’t even thought of calling her all day. The challenges I was facing were occupying my mind so completely that the Western world, my real one, had slipped into insignificance.

  My call took a long time to connect. I started to think it wouldn’t, when, suddenly, Nurse O’Donnell’s voice filled my ear with enough volume to startle me.

  “Caitlin. Hi. It’s Dr. March. Is Vera awake?”

  “I should hope so. It’s four thirty in the afternoon. What time is it there?”

  “Oh, let’s see. Past two a.m., I guess.”

  “I hope you have a good reason for being up in the middle of the night,” she said with a tease in her voice.

  “As far as I’m concerned, there aren’t any. But that’s me. How’s Vera?”

  “Steady. Recovering from her fall. She went to the flower arranging demonstration in the common room this morning.”

  “Really? Did she like it?”

  “I’ll let her tell you, Dr. March. I know she’ll be glad to hear from you.”

  Vera was agitated. A terse tone and abbreviated answers were payback for my negligence. She obviously sensed that something beyond simple forgetfulness was going on, that I wasn’t being completely honest with her—a breach of trust that she didn’t state explicitly, but her hurt was evident in her querulous tone. I heard the strain in my own voice when I cheerfully asked about the flower arranging class. Ignoring my question, she demanded to know if I’d heard from Lena. When I said no, she insisted that there had to be a way I could meet Katarina Melnikova without my aunt’s help.

  I reassured her as best I could, and kept the call short. Afterwards, I vowed to myself to finish my work in Mirny as quickly as possible, so the CIA could make good on its promise to deliver me to my aunt and grandmother in their remote village, and I could get home to Vera soon, with lots of photos and happy news to share.

  The next morning, Ilmira’s freshly laundered underwear was draped over a clothesline that stretched across the bathroom. She must have hung it before she went to work. One end was tied to the shower head, the other to a towel rack, with a long spool of unused rope lying underneath it on the floor. The sight was annoying at first, as I would have to take the clothesline down in order to shower, and then hang it again when I was done, but as I was laying Ilmira’s wet things on a towel temporarily, an idea occurred to me.

  I brought the clothesline to Misha’s room, climbed out the window as I’d done the day before, and peered over the railing. One floor below, Tanya and Bohdan’s window was open. I lowered one end of the clothesline, and watched with satisfaction as it plopped onto their balcony. There was plenty to spare, enough for it to be folded into a double strand, which, when looped around one of the bars on the balcony’s floor, would yield four thicknesses of rope, which ought to be enough to hold my
weight for the brief time I would be suspended between balconies. I aligned the lengths, tied a knot one-third of the way down, another two-thirds of the way, and a last one to gather the loose ends, and let my primitive ladder drop through the bars.

  My heart was battering my rib cage, and my palms were leaking sweat. The challenge seemed beyond my physical strength, if not my nerve. It was an impulsive, probably stupid idea, but was actually a little less crazy than ones I’d sleeplessly considered the night before. The fact that it scared me only meant that I needed to do it quickly, before I had time to psych myself out.

  It was just before 10 a.m., so Tanya and Bohdan were probably at work. There were a few cars in the sun-dappled parking lot, but no signs of life. The warm air hung heavy and still.

  I dressed quickly, stuffed the three devices, masking tape, my mobile, and the key to Ilmira’s apartment into my pockets, swung one leg over the railing, shifted my weight to the other side. Relying on nothing but the strength of my arms, I lowered myself just enough to wrap the dangling rope around one leg the way I’d been taught in summer camp. By pressing the sole of my free foot against the rope where it rubbed against my ankle, I could stop myself from slipping, and a good portion of my weight was transferred to the clothesline. In this way, I was able to lower myself gradually, until my feet touched the railing below and I could balance on it with help from the rope. I dropped onto Tanya and Bohdan’s balcony, landing in a crouch.

  I squeezed through their open window, and found myself in their bedroom. An unmade bed, clothes strewn about, jewelry and make-up on the dresser. I listened—nothing. The closet was gaping open, stuffed with clothes on hangers and piles of shoes. I slid a chair over to the closet door and climbed onto it. Feeling for the edge of the inside doorframe, I taped one of the devices to the wall above the narrow ledge, then slid the chair back to its usual place.

  I headed quietly down the corridor, past the kitchen on my right, into the living room. The parrot erupted into a shrieking diatribe, flapping aggressively against the bars of its cage. I murmured sweet nothings to it, as Tanya had done, and stroked its crabbed talons gently until it settled down. The room was just as I remembered it—every available space taken up by sundry items such as CD towers, snowshoes, dusty vases, and stacking dolls.

  “I am a very fine parrot,” the parrot informed me in perfect Russian.

  I whirled to stare at it, so surprised that I almost didn’t hear a key turn noisily in the front lock, sliding one deadbolt open. I glanced around frantically, but there was no place to hide. A second key turned in the second lock. I darted into the hallway, raced back to the bedroom. A few seconds later, I was hovering behind the bedroom door, listening to slow, shuffling footsteps—a woman’s—enter the apartment. It wasn’t Tanya because Tanya’s steps were quick and light. The woman turned into the kitchen.

  Water splashed in the sink; the refrigerator opened and closed. A low humming commenced and slowly rose into a melancholy song: “Katusha,” a famous folk song about a girl pining for her soldier at the front. The old woman—Tanya’s mother?—had the kind of rough, ancient voice that did justice to mournful ballads.

  The apple and the pear tree bloom,

  Fog lay above the river.

  There went Katusha onto the shore,

  Onto the tall, steep shore.

  As the song unfurled, I retreated to the balcony, where the true seriousness of my position dawned on me. Getting back up to Misha’s balcony would be a lot harder than getting down had been. I could probably shimmy high enough to grip one of the floor bars, but wrapping my hands around the top rail would require strength I didn’t have, and hoisting my body over that rail would be all but impossible.

  Since the old woman was busy in the kitchen—doing dishes, it sounded like—I figured I could sneak past that room and slip out the front door. But as I was tiptoeing down the hall, she bustled out of the kitchen, still singing, and disappeared into the living room. The parrot produced a civilized Privyet, babulya. I slunk back to the bedroom and let out my breath. Tanya’s mother—it had to be—hadn’t seen me, and I’d seen her only from the back—fat and very short, in a sack-like brown dress. Thinning gray hair with some scalp showing through. Edema in her ankles where they disappeared into heavy black shoes.

  I crossed to the window with a new idea. If I could untie the knots, pull the clothesline down through the bars of Misha’s balcony, make it a double strand instead of a quadruple, and reattach it to Tanya and Bohdan’s second-floor balcony, I might be able to lower myself to the ground.

  The mournful ballad stopped abruptly. The sudden silence rang out like a warning bell.

  I froze, fully expecting the old woman to storm into the bedroom and confront me. Instead, she shuffled mercifully out the front door and closed it behind her. The clicking that accompanied the relocking of each noisy bolt was audible in the bedroom.

  I counted to sixty slowly. And did it again, in case she was coming back. Then I slipped down the hall and into the kitchen and glanced out the window. She was trundling down the sidewalk, headed back toward town. I breathed a few times deeply, until my pounding heart slowed.

  The kitchen had been nicely tidied up. Dishes and pans were drying on a rack, and the vinyl tablecloth was wiped clean. It looked like Tanya’s mother truly was doing her part to bring order to her daughter’s messy abode. She’d even arranged some sorry-looking apples in a bowl.

  I squatted down next to the refrigerator, reached into the narrow space behind it, and tucked one of the bugs in the half-inch of space underneath it.

  On to the living room. The parrot shrieked when it saw me again. I hissed at it in English to shut the fuck up, as I was too jacked on adrenaline to go through the business of soothing it. It fell silent right away, having apparently taken my meaning. Then I stood in the middle of the chaotic room, searching for a good hiding spot for the last device. The crammed bookcases looked promising, until I realized that any book could be opened at some point. If I slipped the device into the hem of the curtain, the sound would be muffled. If I taped it to the underside of the coffee table, it could be dislodged. My eye fell on nesting Matryoshka dolls on an end table. I eagerly opened the rosy-cheeked grandmother at her waist, and removed her four progressively smaller daughters, but the device was too wide to fit inside the newly hollow space. My frustration mounted. There were probably a hundred places in that room to conceal a small plastic square, but for the life of me I couldn’t find one. Every spot I laid eyes on was subject to being handled at some point.

  The only truly unmoving object was the couch. I knelt and felt under the upholstered skirt for the squat wooden leg. It wasn’t big enough to accommodate and conceal the device, assuming I could have taped it to the back somehow. I was running out of patience. It occurred to me that I should just slide the device a couple of feet under the couch and be done with it. The vacuum couldn’t reach that far, and I doubted that Tanya or her mother was in the habit of picking up heavy pieces of furniture to clean underneath. I laid down on my stomach and proceeded to stretch my arm under the skirt into the roughly six inches of space between the bottom of the couch and the floor. A metal object was in the way, so I shimmied a few inches further along and tried again. My hand encountered another metal object, which rolled into a third with a dull clang. I picked up the skirt and peered into the under-couch darkness, but couldn’t make out what was there. So I pulled one out.

  It was a steel canister, about eighteen inches high and five inches wide. With a dull red-painted stripe around the base and a faded hammer and sickle.

  My head suddenly seemed to be floating above me.

  I pulled out the others. There were eight altogether—identical but for letters near the tapered tops that looked like they’d been etched with a small knife. OPA on four of the bottles. DF on the other four.

  Abbreviations, obviously. They seemed familiar, but I couldn’t recall where I might have seen them before.

  A gun at
my head couldn’t have forced me to open one of those bottle-shaped containers. I didn’t even want to touch them. I sat stupidly on my ass on the floor and tried not to hyperventilate. Finally, sense dawned. I pulled out my phone and snapped some pictures of the eight canisters huddled together in front of the couch like a little battalion of dwarf soldiers. From every angle, top and bottom as well. Then I slid them all very gently back under the couch.

  My hands were trembling, and my breath was shallow. I feared I might pass out. To hell with planting the third device. I needed to get out of there fast. I stumbled past the beady-eyed, blessedly quiet parrot to the front door, terrified that a tenant would see me leaving the apartment, but the corridor was clear. I didn’t have keys to lock the door behind me, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a tip-off, as the old woman had been there and could take the heat for forgetting to do it.

  Back on Misha’s balcony, I reeled the dangling clothesline up through the bars, quickly untied the knots, and began coiling it around my arm. A car drove into the parking lot as I finished. The driver peered up at me through her windshield. Did she think it odd to see a person standing on a balcony with loops of rope around her arm? I didn’t know. But what difference did it make? I’d done my job—most of it—and I’d be leaving Mirny soon.

  I remembered, from chemistry class: OPA stood for isopropyl alcohol, the rubbing alcohol commonly used for disinfecting cuts. DF had me stumped, so I grabbed my laptop and looked it up on Wikipedia. It was methylphosphonyl diflouride—a kind of insecticide, only orders of magnitude more toxic than anything farmers used. The Germans developed it for chemical warfare in 1938. They mass-produced up to ten tons of the stuff before the war ended, but for reasons no one knows didn’t use it on Allied targets. DF didn’t do much by itself, but mixing it with OPA incited a chemical reaction that transformed it into GB, better known as sarin.