Gleb studied Kostya a moment. He’d known Kostya Nikto for years, teaching him as a cadet. He’d considered young Nikto a most promising student then and a most promising officer now, and he’d remarked several times this week that he felt no surprise at Nikto’s promotion to senior lieutenant. The wounded ear and shoulder, the sunken face: Nikto had earned a reward. Besides, Gleb now added to himself, sneaking a nip from his flask and tasting his limp moustache, with NKVD in such flux, the ranks might yet change again, and an experienced and overlooked longtime sergeant like Gleb Kamenev should soon find himself drawing more pay and respect.
Kostya accepted the scrutiny and ignored the flask. Gleb’s dedication, loyalty, and, above all, results meant no one wished to examine his drinking. Besides, it seemed all the old Chekists drank.
Gleb checked his watch as Kostya parked. —Two o’clock. Dead on time.
— We are, yes. Where the hell is the rest of the squad?
Ursula tapped on Temerity’s door. —Margaret? Are you awake?
Temerity flicked on a lamp, relieved to find electricity still flowed. Then she checked her watch, which read two in the morning, and freed herself of the bedsheets. —I am now.
— I can’t sleep. Would you play backgammon with me?
Ursula had extended this same invitation on Temerity’s second night at Hotel Lux, explaining how backgammon calmed her. Many nights I don’t sleep well.
None of the hotel residents slept well. While one could almost smell NKVD paranoia, one could not predict a date for the raids, only the likely time: the hours of deep sleep, between one and four in the morning. Those left behind by the arrest of a loved one, sleep wrecked, might then sit up for the rest of the night or stumble back to bed and doze, fear now shot through with relief and guilt: not me, not me, not me.
Temerity freshened her perfume. Despite the warm and stuffy air, she felt chilled. She recalled a night during her first social season in London when she’d ducked the supervision of her Aunt Min and joined several other debutantes to visit a nightclub. The clock struck two as she sneaked back into the family’s London flat, and Min, still sitting up, provided a thorough tongue-lashing. That night, too, had been warm, and Temerity had shivered in dread, though not, she told herself, of Min’s anger. She shivered the way she had when, as a child, she’d pushed the book of Russian fairy tales from her father’s hands. When the book fell to the floor, pages up, Baba Yaga’s hut, half-hidden by trees, still lurked behind Vasilisa. Something, it seemed, waited for Vasilisa and Temerity.
Ursula called again. —Margaret?
— Give me a minute.
Down the hall, in a room not used by Comintern guests, a telephone rang, rang, rang.
Scowling, Temerity rolled on her stockings and recalled Neville Freeman’s definition of a Londoner: born within the sound of Bow Bells. Temerity, he would add, being born on the Kurseong House estate, could not call herself a Londoner. Moscow, like London, had once kept time by church bells; Moscow’s bells belonged to memory. Shoved from belfries, many bells cracked, even shattered. Some survived their crash. The condition of the bells hardly mattered past the gesture, the theatre of the fall. The rougher pragmatics of fire took over as smiths melted the bells and reforged them into more useful items, like parts for locomotives and strong locks for heavy doors.
Temerity opened her door; the telephone’s jangle fell silent.
Temerity started in German and finished in Russian as she followed Ursula into her room. —I’m sorry. I was thousands of miles away.
Closing the door and pointing to a rickety table where the backgammon game waited, Ursula smiled. —I’m glad you enjoy backgammon. I thought I wouldn’t find another partner.
Ursula’s first backgammon partner had disappeared, arrested by NKVD on the last night of May, the same night Temerity had arrived at Hotel Lux. Ursula spoke of her friend’s arrest in a roundabout way, almost a code, because she feared hidden microphones. How else, she’d argued in fierce whispers, could NKVD know so much?
Temerity wanted to scoff, yet as each day passed, she, too, could believe more in the hidden microphones. Ursula preferred hidden microphones as an idea, as an article of faith, to any acknowledgement of NKVD using torture. Her adherence to communism an exercise in intellect and empathy after the spectacular worldwide failure of capitalism in the early 1930s, Ursula struggled to avoid the gall of truth: revolutions betrayed. The Great Purge, she reasoned, cleansed away only the guilty, the traitors, the filth of society. Those who disappeared must, on some level, deserve such treatment. Otherwise, nothing made sense.
Struggling with these thoughts, Ursula sought distraction. She found it in Temerity’s wafting perfume. —You smell so nice.
Temerity smiled as she dropped dice into the leather-edged cup. Before leaving London, she’d purchased a bottle of Shalimar perfume and a Stratton compact, both luxuries, as potential bribes. Now, she wanted to keep them, wield these expensive pleasures in — what, defiance? No, certainty of self, or at least an attempt at it. She’d worn Shalimar back in England, if against her father’s wishes; she would wear it in Russia. The chip in the stopper, a souvenir of rough seas, hardly mattered.
Ursula tapped a pencil, rhythms random, against the table edge. This action, she’d explained, disrupted sound waves; any eavesdropper must struggle to listen. Temerity doubted the power of a pencil against eavesdroppers and hidden mics. Still, like Ursula, she now kept a pencil in her handbag.
Temerity rattled dice in the cup.
Ursula dropped the pencil.
Temerity shook the dice some more.
On her knees, Ursula retrieved the pencil and used it to point to the east wall, where she suspected microphone placement. Then she stood up and commented in a clear voice on how much she’d enjoyed the sugar in her coffee. Temerity agreed, yes, the sugar had been lovely, too bad it’s been scarce, but surely next week the hotel would have plenty of sugar.
As the dice clattered on the table, Temerity considered how best to ask a cold and cynical question: did NKVD have quotas? Could these arrests and disappearances, supposedly the workings of law and justice, of crime and punishment, truly be nothing more than a tool of terror? Too soon, she told herself. Even if Ursula suspected quotas, she’d dare not say so. Not yet.
Ursula pitched her voice a little too high. —Good roll.
Temerity nodded, smiled a little, then moved her token.
Ears keen, ready for car engines and booted footsteps, for knuckles and fists on doors, they played the round.
And then another.
Kostya lit a cigarette and glanced up at the building, a block of flats, unusually high with its seven floors and only a few years old, much like the one where he now lived. Arkady had bribed, or threatened, the right people. Arkady himself still lived in a two-storey house inherited from his parents, and he’d raised Kostya there from age twelve. Never married, Arkady now lived alone. When first released from hospital, Kostya had stayed with Arkady, sleeping in his old bedroom, these days made over into a study that Arkady never used, and he felt great surprise at how much he wanted to stay. He could not explain it. Not long before leaving for Spain, he’d argued with Arkady, both men shouting, about his need to live on his own, free of Arkady and Vadym’s supervision. Now he wished to return to this house and bask in its familiarity.
Change, Arkady said over and over, things had changed while Kostya was in Spain, deep and drastic change. Arkady’s new anxiety, the way he cautioned Kostya against vague menace and then deflected questions, the way he ordered that poor bastard Dr. Scherba around, all made Kostya worry about the old man’s sanity. Then again, Arkady treated all doctors and intellectuals with a Chekist’s contempt. When Kostya demanded concrete examples of this mysterious change, Arkady changed the subject to Kostya’s new independence and flat, throwing Kostya’s own words back at him. You’re thirty-two years old, Tatar. You should have moved out long ago. You don’t need me breathing down your neck. When Kostya learned that Dr. Scherba, of all people, would also be his flatmate, Scherba no doubt under pressure to report to Arkady, Kostya gave Arkady an exasperated look. Arkady shrugged. It’s a complete coincidence, he’d said. Well, you both need a place to live, don’t you?