But the place seethed like a souk. One-armed bandits rumbled and whirred, and garish whores sat about on orange sofas. As one of the security thugs approached her, Katinka pointed at the whores and he shrugged: he’d collect his share later. Sitting on a foam sofa next to two booted, stockinged girls with bare, bruised white thighs, she offered them both a cigarette. Each of them grabbed one: the first put it in her handbag, the other in her stocking top.
Katinka lit up her own, inhaled and then tore open the envelope. Inside were a few trinkets and a wad of photocopied documents. The first was dated May 1953, two months after Stalin’s death:
To all case officers: Palitsyn/Zeitlin Case
For security reasons, relatives enquiring about sentences of abovementioned state criminals are to be informed that the prisoners were resentenced after a ten-year term in Gulags.
Signed: I. V. Serov, Chairman, State Security Committee (KGB)
Anger and confusion coursed through Katinka, followed by a sinking sadness. Everything she had so far learned from Mouche and the KGB archives was a callous lie. She must have paled because one of the prostitutes leaned over and asked gently: “Your test results, love? Bad news?”
“Something like that,” said Katinka, her forehead prickly with sweat.
“Tough, tough, but we survive,” said the prostitute, lighting up and turning back to her friend.
Katinka looked again at the typed pages.
Sitting of Military Tribunal, office of the Narkom L. P. Beria, at Special Object 110, 2:30 a.m. 22 January 1940. Trial of Accused Alexandra “Sashenka” Zeitlin-Palitsyn (Comrade Snowfox).
Chairman of the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court Vasily Ulrikh presiding in person.
Katinka leafed to the end, looking for the sentencing—but there was that maddening note again: Send documents on Palitsyn case to Central Committee.
Then she started to read Sashenka’s trial notes—and what she read shocked her so deeply that she stuffed the papers back in the envelope and ran out of the hotel into the street, turning right and heading down the hill toward the Kremlin, its eight red stars glowing high above her through the hazy rhapsody of a spring night.
“You’ve gone too far this time!” said Mariko, barely raising her voice, which made the implied threat all the more powerful.
Marshal Satinov sat in his high chair in the elegant, breezy sitting room with an oxygen mask held onto his face by elastic and a large oxygen cylinder on wheels beside him. He appeared to have shrunk in just a few days, and his blinking eyes followed Katinka’s every move.
“Please, let me talk to your father for one minute,” said Katinka, breathless and flushed with running. “I’ve so much to tell him and he himself asked me to let him know what I found…”
She fixed her eyes, imploringly, onto Satinov’s sharp orbs with their half-closed lids. At first they showed nothing. But then they seemed to twinkle and the old man wrenched off his oxygen mask. “Oh Mariko, stop fussing.” He spoke with difficulty. “Bring us tea.” Mariko sighed loudly and stomped out. “How did you get in, girl?”
“Someone let me in through the street door and then I found your door ajar.”
Satinov absorbed this. “Fate, that’s what it is. Don’t forget that’s why you’re here.” He gave a skull-like smile.
Katinka sat down on the sofa near him and he opened his wizened hands as if to say Go on then, girl, give it to me.
“I found Snowy.” He nodded appreciatively. “Lala Lewis told me everything. You were a hero. You saved the children. Snowy wants to meet you to say thank you.”
He shook his head and waved his hand. “Too late,” he rasped. “Have you found her brother too?”
“Not yet. I’m still trying to work out what happened to Sashenka.”
“Leave them. Concentrate on Carlo! The children, the future…”
“Sashenka and Vanya were your best friends, weren’t they?”
“Sashenka was…there was no one like her—and the children…” His blue eyes softened and for a moment Katinka thought she saw tears. She made herself go on.
“That was why Stalin summoned you to the Little Corner when he read the transcript of Benya and Sashenka. He was aware you’d known them since Petersburg and that you were Roza’s godfather. He’d seen you all together at the May Day party. Did he want to find out what you knew about them?”
Satinov blinked and said nothing.
“Beria left and you arrived at ten thirty p.m.—I’ve seen Stalin’s appointment book. But then what happened? Sashenka had had an affair. Vanya was jealous and bugged their hotel room. How did that grow into Captain Sagan’s conspiracy and the destruction of an entire family?”
“I don’t know,” whispered Satinov.
“Why did Stalin request all the files on the case?” She glared at him. Cold bloodshot eyes looked back. “You’re not going to answer that either? How can you pretend you don’t know what happened?”
“Just find Carlo,” Satinov wheezed. “You must be so close.”
“And what did Stalin mean when he wrote Bicho to curate?”
There was a long pause during which Satinov breathed painfully. “Read my memoirs carefully,” he said at last.
“Believe it or not, I’ve read every word of your interminable speeches on peaceful coexistence and your heroic role in forging the socialist Motherland and there’s not a word of humanity in it.” His eyes were fixed on her but she didn’t stop. “You’ve lied to me again and again. The KGB has concealed its crimes but today I got hold of the transcript of Sashenka’s trial. You were at the trial of your best friend!”
His breathing creaked.
“Take a look,” she said, pulling out the first page of the trial.
“I haven’t got my glasses.”
“Well, let me help you then. Here, look at this. It’s you, Marshal Satinov! You didn’t just attend the trial,” she was almost yelling at him, “you were a judge.”
“Read my judgment,” he gasped.
“You sat there in judgment on your best friend, the mother of your godchild. Sashenka found you at the trial. What did she think when she saw you? What went through her mind? I thought you were a hero. You saved Snowy and Carlo yet you presided over Sashenka’s destruction! Was she sentenced to death? Or did she die in the Gulags? Tell me, tell me! You owe it to her children!”
Satinov’s face tightened as his breathing constricted and his mouth gaped open.
To her shame, Katinka fought back her own tears. “How could you have done such a thing? How could you?”
“What’s going on in here?” Mariko appeared in the doorway, holding a tea tray. “What is it, Papa?”
As Katinka left the room, she looked back at the old man. The oxygen mask was on his face, his lips were blue, a wiry arm was raised—and a gnarled finger pointed toward the door.
19
Judge Ulrikh: Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn, you have confessed to a remarkable conspiracy to kill our heroic leaders, Comrade Stalin and the Politburo, at your own house. We have read your confession. Do you have anything more to say?
Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I plotted to kill the great Stalin at my house. I rubbed arsenic and cyanide powder onto the curtains of the room where Comrade Stalin would stand.