Sekret (12 page)

It’s late October—I’ve been here five whole weeks—and the snow is growing, mounting, sudsing up like a washbasin about to overflow. It won’t go away till April—possibly May. I’m surprised it came this late. I’ll have to wait for it to pack down and ice over so I leave no tracks. Now I can’t look out the mansion window without shielding my eyes with my hand; everything glares back with a harsh overtone of gold, as if it’s been washed with too much bleach. Nothing in Russia is so headache-inducing as a sunny, snow-filled day, the kind that makes you hate yourself for wishing for clouds.

After Sergei showed me the vault, I’ve taken to walking the mansion at night, while Larissa is distracted by Ivan. I can’t listen to the radio with him anymore; all I feel is the strain on his face as he tries to show me that this is enough for a life, that everything worth living for can be contained in these four walls. So I excuse myself after dinner and start in the left front corner of the attic, working my way down to the back right of the bottom floor, one room at a time. I sweep my hands along the walls, the floor, everything in the room, calling up memories like I’m trying to exorcise them.

Surface memories—of my comrades, going about their lives—are easy enough to sift through. I push past them quickly. I don’t want to see Larissa’s stolen moments with Ivan, or worst of all, Anastasia’s looping madness. I shove it aside and dive further into history. The worker housing, the thirty-some families who shared the mansion with its bourgeois owners after the Party took control. I go deeper. Beyond forty years, it gets hazy, and I’m not sure I can trust what I see. A man who is dead is alive in the next layer of memories. Lives run out of order, interrupted with more recent static bursts.

But I won’t stop looking. Sergei’s tunnel may be a dead end, but there has to be another. There are walls that don’t add up, there are whispers among the memories. There has to be another way.

Sometimes my feet linger in the ballroom doorway just a little too long, like gravity pulling me toward Valentin’s music as he plays. The mathematical etudes ease the knots out of my mind; I like the way his long fingers dance across the keys, and I like the crease that appears between his eyebrows when he comes to the tricky parts. He watches me, but if he knows what I’m doing, he doesn’t mention it to me. It’s just as well. I’ll never trust a psychic like him—a scrubber, just like Rostov, making lacework of peoples’ thoughts.

Larissa gives me a sad smile when I return from searching. Does she see my future? Me succeeding in my escape, or failing? I’m afraid to ask. But we talk, some, when Ivan’s not around to suck up all her attention. Under night’s blanket, she sits at the foot of my bed and tells me stories from her life at school, a normal life full of blue jumpers and white dandelion barrettes. She passes down tales from her grandmother about life under the tsars, before the Soviet Union. There were no lines to wait in, she said, but often there was no money or food to be had, either.

I’ll take that uncertainty. Uncertainty is my constant companion, the shadow always underfoot. Whether I’m safer in here than on the run. Whether my parents knew what I am all along. It’ll be worth it, I tell myself, as I sweep the mansion’s walls. But there are a few more answers I need first.

*   *   *

“Natalya Petrovna Gruzova.”

Major Kruzenko points to the black-and-white passport photograph streaming onto the wall from the slide projector. It takes me a moment to recognize the woman because her blond hair looks white and is pulled into a stern bun; her face is fuller in the picture, as if the exhausted woman who grabbed my wrist in Red Square was only her withered shadow.

“She is one of the engineers designing the secret
Veter 1
capsule that will give us the first flight around the moon. If the mission is a success, then we will be sure to achieve a moon landing long before the Americans.” Kruzenko’s face tightens; her brows draw down. “Unfortunately, we believe Gruzova has been compromised by an enemy team of American psychics. In addition to stealing
Veter 1
design documents for the Americans, she appears to be assisting them in hunting us.”

Natalya’s eyes in the photograph are glazed with excitement, as if she is staring beyond our world, into the stars. That yearning was gone from the woman I heard in the Square. What happened to her light? Is that what these “scrubbers” can do?

Masha’s hand shoots up. “If we know she is a traitor, why haven’t we arrested her?” If she and Misha had their way, the Siberian gulags would be fuller than the cities.

“If we arrest her now, we can learn everything she knows, but her accomplices, this scrubber who is working her, will burrow into the earth.”

“Then we should find out what she knows,” Ivan says. Larissa nods beside him.

“Very likely, she only knows one piece of the puzzle, and the scrubber has carefully controlled the contents of her head to keep her from discovering more.” Kruzenko folds her arms. “We will observe her, instead, as she plays her little game, then spread our net from there. We must find more information connecting the Americans to Gruzova, whether it’s memories or thoughts in others’ heads.”

“We’re using her as bait,” I mutter. Valentin turns toward me, but I keep looking ahead.

“But do not worry. We also have additional agents monitoring her, in case she tries to flee.” Kruzenko smirks. “So let’s begin.”

She splits us into teams again, so we can play off each other’s strengths. I’m paired with Valentin this time—I’m relieved it’s not Sergei, but terrified nonetheless. I can’t shake the knowledge of what he can do. And in case I was harboring any thoughts of escape during our mission, Pavel, my guard, is joined by the slimmer but no less imposing Lev, who wears a pair of scars across one eye like a medal of honor.

Valentin and I are shuttled to the Metro, Moscow’s underground network of trains. We ride a packed car one stop to the Kievskaya station, surrounded by exposed armpits as their owners clutch at the handles overhead. For once I’m thankful for winter and its smell of salt and radiators instead of sweat. Somehow, Valentin finds us a seat—I can’t help but suspect he’s mentally coaxed this loud man in expensive corduroy out of it—and Pavel and Lev flank us.

We have other guards.
Valentin’s voice flutters against my mental shell.

I flick my gaze down the length of the car.
Can’t they hear our thoughts?
But Valentin taps a finger to his ear without looking at me. It takes me a moment to catch on, then I realize—Shostakovich is still going strong in my mind. A warmth spreads along my spine. He could have dived right in and grabbed the thought from me. Rostov would have. I look casually to my feet, strip away the strings section, and repeat myself, burying my words in the low tympani.
Are the guards psychic?

Lev is, but the rest, definitely not. I caught Kruzenko thinking about it.

My jaw slackens.
You can hear her thoughts? But her gypsy music is so loud—

Hear them, casually? No. But I can take them.
In my peripheral vision, he cocks a smile on his face like a loaded gun.

I flinch and raise Shostakovich around me.

Valentin swallows audibly; the next thought he passes to me carries the warmth and the fragrance of spring.
Yulia … I’d never take your thoughts without permission. Not yours or—or anyone’s, who wasn’t a Party supporter.

I want to believe this. Truly I do. But I can’t find the right words for what I’m feeling. Even if we only steal thoughts from our oppressors—the KGB, the Communist Party, whatever Russian entity feels like taking its turn putting soles to our necks—we’re no better than they. Are we? And there’s Valentin himself, his dangerous skill. Will he savor this power with Rostov’s same hunger, where the more power he acquires, the more he craves? Will he use his abilities just as ruthlessly?

I don’t talk to him for the rest of our Metro ride. Shostakovich pulses to the steady clanking of the rail car.

We reach the Kievskaya station and squeeze out of the car at the last minute, swimming against the rush of people trying to board. I don’t care if our guards make it off the train or not. We can’t be blamed for the morning rush.

“Take my hand.” Valentin’s fingers catch mine. His voice is soft, the command almost a question. “Stay close.”

The station itself is palatial—a palace for all the workers, as Stalin once called the Metro stations, and he spared no expense in their decor. Phony plaster molding, chandeliers, marble floors, elaborate mosaics, and of course hammers and sickles everywhere, as if sprayed there by some terrible explosion. The grimy factory film that hastens to cover up such finery is thinner here than in most stations. I can actually see Lenin’s coy smile on a painted mural, and the shine on a soldier’s boot as he waves to farmers in a field of golden tiles.

We cram onto the escalator. Waves and waves of
nomenklatura
, the Communist Party elite, pass us on their way down. Tailored suits, fur coats, Turkish scarves; the women wear absurd heeled boots under their billowing skirts, the leather already stained with a rind of salt. Unlike the solemn industrial-park station where we boarded, the air crackles with rapid-fire conversation, giggles, grins.

Valentin peers over his shoulder, to the base of the escalator far below. We’ve been riding for three minutes, but we’re only halfway up the tunnel.
Can you see them?
I ask, pushing the thought against him gently.

They’re just now boarding.
He looks upward at the glowing circle of daylight ahead.
You need to add another layer of music to your thoughts. In case Lev can hear us. Something we both know, so I can understand you.

I grimace. An arms race of thought. They are trained to penetrate one, so add another. They can penetrate two, so add three more.

This Tchaikovsky song. Do you know it?
Valentin closes his eyes behind his fogged lenses and for a moment, all I hear are girls chattering, the elevator squeaking and churning. Then the low, mournful piano chords start. Thick notes, but somehow soft, patient. I think I may have heard Papa and Zhenya playing it together once. It doesn’t fit the beat of Shostakovich, but somehow, they meld together into a sturdy fortress of sound.

Keep it in your head along with your usual barrier,
he says.
We’ll use it to speak to each other. Safely, without me having to dip into your head.

Like a code.
I nod, the tightness in my chest unclenching as we finally reach the escalator’s crest. The clouds have reappeared to shield us from snow blindness. The street is a soothing gray, tipped in white. Elaborate apartment buildings of plaster, marble, and stone stand in rank on both sides of the street, bolstered with red columns. Unlike the crowded-teeth concrete blocks in most districts, the boulevard is wide and trimmed with well-groomed trees. No streetcar cables forming a web against the sky; no factory slime blackening the walls. I take a deep breath, and I can’t even smell the pickled-fish stink of the Moskva River. “This looks nothing like the Moscow I lived in,” I mutter aloud, as we stride onto the plaza.

Valentin puffs out a phantom of breath and rubs his hands while surveying the street. “That’s because the Party members live here. Rumor has it, there’s even a secret Metro line that runs through here for the top officials.”

“And where did you hear that?” I ask.

Tchaikovsky’s somber chords echo the rest of his thoughts. He slides his thumb up my hand; wriggles it into the hem of my glove so our bare skin makes contact. I flinch at his cold touch, but this is the shortest distance for his thoughts to travel.
I lived here once
.

The winter air doesn’t bother me, but that thought certainly does. It slips through my coat and chaps my skin. I’m not so sure I want his hand on mine, but those words lure me in.
What happened?

My father was Party. We had a private car, a custom apartment, a piano, maids …

Was
, I echo. We squeeze past a pair of hound-faced men, and I catch an unwelcome thought of sex clinging to one of them.

He doesn’t live here anymore.

And then his thoughts tear away from mine. The shine to his deep, dark eyes is gone. He lets go of my hand. Like Colonel Rostov, his thoughts are a negation of thought, a painful noise. They grate against me, brittle and sharp, until he takes a few steps away from me.

I pull off one glove and concentrate on drawing out the memories dormant on the trees, the street signposts, but it’s so crowded and noisy in the recent history of this sidewalk. How will I ever find Natalya Gruzova in this crowd? I try to envision her blond hair bound in a scarf: not with the full, healthy cheeks of her passport photograph, but the worn-away face in Red Square, her thoughts strung together with crimped wire after the scrubber interfered.

There. A trail of her scattershot thoughts; it runs from the apartments the next block down to the station we just left. “This way,” I say to Valentin, and as I usher him to the crosswalk, our four little shadows follow.

It’s Stalinist architecture, same as the rest, a five-story structure that runs flush with the Ukraina skyscraper—one of the Seven Sisters. A quaint grocery store sits in the bottom floor. No rations, no lines. I peer through the glass, and its shelves are actually stocked. They have white toilet paper, real toilet paper, not the standard-issue sandpaper brown.

We pass through the red and gold building’s entrance under a stained-glass blue globe. The foyer is flawless. The gleaming granite floor, columns, and ceiling are all full of shadows; our figures play across them as dark blobs with no distinct edge. The Metro stations may be the palace of the people, but this is truly the palace of the Party. The door latches shut behind us, as satisfying as Gagarin’s space capsule sealing shut.
Kk-ssshhhhsss.
We are as safe from the rest of Moscow here as we would be from the vacuum of space.