Knowing they had to get off the road soon before Aleksei sounded a quiet alarm, Kiril had pushed the automobile so hard it overheated twice and their petrol was almost gone.
He pointed out other factors in their favor. Aleksei would have to concoct some story about why he was looking for them—something that would take him off the hook for losing them in the first place. Which meant a large-scale search—lots of people in lots of places—was unlikely.
As the sun rose, they spotted a farmhouse deep off the road. “We have to chance it,” Kiril told them.
He drove down the road and parked behind a barn. The farmhouse was two stories of gray fieldstone with the top floor boarded up. The place looked abandoned. No farm animals. No outbuildings apart from the barn and a dilapidated shed.
But a plot of rich black soil in the back was plowed. Kiril smiled.
“We’re in luck,” he whispered as he moved to a window and looked inside. “A man and a woman. Retired farmers, probably. Too old to be put into a collectivization program.”
He took out his handkerchief. “Put your dollars and jewelry in this.”
“All of it?” Brenner asked. “Shouldn’t we save something for your pals in Potsdam?”
“If they help us it won’t be for money.”
Brenner looked skeptical but he emptied his pockets.
Adrienne unwrapped her scarf and handed Kiril a wad of greenbacks and a handful of jewelry.
Her gold-and-diamond wedding band included, Brenner noticed.
“Do we all go in?” he asked.
Kiril shook his head. “I’ll come back for you.”
In a few minutes he returned with food, water, and no jewelry.
“They were farmers. Owned a lot of land here. After the war, the East Germans seized most of it while the Russians took off with whatever animals and equipment they had left. ‘Reparations’ they called it,” Kiril said with disgust. “They’ve managed to eke out a living by cultivating the small plot in back and husbanding a few animals. We’re to hide the car in their barn. We’re leaving it for them, along with our money and jewelry. Their hope is to bribe their way out of East Germany. As soon as it’s dark, we’ll walk up to the house so they can help us get out of here safely.”
“Can we trust them?” Brenner asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I can tell you this much. They detest communists.”
As soon as the three of them settled down in the barn, fatigue began to overtake Kiril. He started to doze on the hay-covered floor.
Adrienne shivered. The draft from under the barn door made her long for the cape she’d left behind in East Berlin.
“Cold?” Brenner whispered.
Without waiting for an answer, he covered her body with his.
“Kurt, don’t.”
“He’s asleep.”
“How do you know?”
“Listen to his breathing. Then listen to mine…”
“What if he wakes up?”
“What if we’re all dead tomorrow or the day after? I want you, Adrienne.”
But I don’t want you. Not now. Not ever again.
“Damn it, Kurt,” she hissed, trying to edge him off her body without making noise.
“You’re my wife. Ever heard of conjugal rights?”
As he bent to kiss her, she turned her head abruptly in the opposite direction—and saw that Kiril Andreyev was no longer lying flat on the floor of the barn. Were his eyes open?
… Did it matter even if they were? She knew Kiril wouldn’t feel free to intervene. Not when he had yet to call her “Adrienne” instead of “Mrs. Brenner.”
She struggled to free herself.
But her resistance had become a challenge. The more she fought each wordless demand on her flesh, the more she was convinced that Kiril’s eyes were wide open.
She jammed hers shut and concentrated on her first glimpse of him at an airport terminal. The look on his face as he crossed a banquet room to meet her. She pictured the morning his shadow had fallen across her body and blotted out the sun. His tortured expression as he kissed her passionately in the privacy of an airport lounge in Zurich—
Despite the hay, the floor was cold against her back, the night air colder. Neither were cold enough to bank the liquid heat that rushed into her limbs.
Oh no, she thought, realizing too late that the images of Kiril had betrayed her senses. Wanting him, not the man who was forcibly entering her body. Her fingers dug into the hay, her body arching, pushing past her protesting mind, greedily reaching for the unreachable and, with a shudder, finding it.
Afterward she lay on the cold ground, eyes open to the sky.
Kiril, she whispered, but only in her mind.
She wept as silently as she had fought.
It was dawn when the farmer rapped his knuckles on the barn door.
“You can change clothes in the house while I’m getting the bicycles,” he told them.
The room they entered was all wood—floor, ceiling, walls, furniture. But no firewood to spare, Adrienne realized. The stone fireplace was pristine. The place smelled of raw potatoes. An old woman, indifferent to their presence, was slicing the potatoes at a pitted sink. Adrienne turned her back and slipped into the clothes Kiril handed her. The hem of the long dress—a faded yellow—stopped just below her knees, the fabric straining under her arms and over her breasts. “I have my own scarf,” she told Kiril, turning around—then smiled mirthlessly even as Kiril shook his head.
A designer scarf from Bloomingdale’s? Yes indeed, Adrienne.
She folded a square of rough yellow cotton and tied it, babushka-style, on her head.
“Good fit, even if they’re slightly threadbare,” Brenner remarked as he examined the trousers he’d just pulled on.
Kiril wore a similar pair—coarse serge, wide and gathered at the waist.
Both he and Brenner put on formless grey caps.
“Ready?” he asked, holding the back door open.
A tall dignified man with thick steel-gray hair waited outside. He looked more like a businessman than a farmer, Kiril thought.Three bicycles leaned against the back of the house, their scrawny tires and tinny-looking bodies giving them the look of pre-war relics. The old man rattled off a few sentences in German and went back into the house.
“He wished us good luck,” he told Adrienne. “He said this is a good hour to enter the town because people will be leaving work.”
“Let’s hope he meant it,” Brenner said drily.
“They need the money. The jewelry’s worth a lot on the black market. They won’t turn us in,” Kiril reassured him.
But will you? Adrienne wondered silently as a man on a motorbike with slicked-back hair and no helmet fixed them with a curious stare as he passed.
Will you turn us in? she asked a shabbily clothed family who examined them closely before pedaling off in the opposite direction.
Will you be the ones? she wondered, her question aimed at a couple of Vopos who stood just inside the Potsdam city limits while she tried to ignore a sign too prominent to miss:
UNDYING FRIENDSHIP AND ALLIANCE
WITH THE SOVIET UNION!
Don’t turn us in, she pleaded whenever Kurt or Kiril paused to ask directions, leaving her to envy them their flawless German.
They walked their bicycles down narrow cobblestone streets, every face, every frown, looming as a potential threat. Even the unbroken gray stucco on both sides of the street seemed less like rows of connecting houses than solid impregnable walls.
Only when gray stucco gave way to red brick did Adrienne’s fear give way to hope. She saw signs of a cheerful Dutch influence in the high rounded tops of the attached houses. In the black shutters with their white trim.