CHAPTER 20
Please don’t cut me,” said the trapped man.
“Explain or bleed,” demanded Petrova.
“Look, I’ll show you how cooperative I can be.” He squirmed, and his arm emerged from underneath him and tossed something a few inches away. It was a small automatic pistol. “Loaded and ready. I could have shot you. I give you the gun.”
Holding the knife harder against the pulsing blue line in his throat, she reached for and seized the pistol, some Hungarian miniaturized thing, managed to secure it against her leg and one-handedly pry back the slide just enough to make sure the brass of a shell glinted from the chamber.
“Try it. Shoot it off. You’ll see.”
She backed off, let him up. “Hands on head. Hands come off head, I shoot. Legs crossed. Legs uncross, I shoot.”
“Understood. Now I—”
“Cut the shit, Teacher. Too much of it already. You found me where the Germans couldn’t. You read the imprint of the tracks and concluded correctly that a panzerwagen left them. That’s advanced scouting, unlikely in a schoolteacher. Who are you? Or better, who do you work for?”
“Myself,” he said. “I am no agent. I have no affiliation. That is not to say I don’t have a secret. I have a very deadly secret. It would kill me in days anywhere I was.”
“And what is the secret? Tell me or die now, not in days. I cannot afford to make a mistake. Too much is at stake.”
“In the middle of the biggest pogrom in history, I am a Jew.”
“A Jew?”
“Yes, absolutely. My papers do not say it because they are not mine. My name does not reflect it because it is false. No one alive knows except you. Bak himself did not know.”
“Go on.”
“I am from Lviv, where the Germans did their big killing. My family, my relatives, my mother, my father, all gone. I was able to evade. I knew a man in town, a teacher of the Russian orthodox religion. It happened that we somehow resembled each other, being scrawny types with bad eyesight and no particular physical distinctions or assets and the beard further blurring the issue. While all the slaughter was going on, I made it to his house by scampering like a rat through the sewers, after cutting off my yellow star. He and his family had gone somewhere so as not to hear the gunshots of the action, and so I broke in, rummaged through his bureaus, and found an identity document. With that prize, I escaped. I lived by my wits, gradually moving west to the Carpathians, where I heard of Bak and his army. I managed, after several adventures and several near-misses, to join them, under the name on the document. There was no mechanism for him to check on the authenticity of the document. The war, you know.”
“Yet in safety, you continued with your deception.”
“Nowhere on earth, it seems, are Jews welcomed anymore. These Ukraines, particularly of the rural proletariat who form the bulk of Bak’s group, are no friend of the Jews. Many have joined Nazi legions and become the Jews’ worst persecutors, at Nazi bidding but based on their own brutal nature. I did not care to make myself known to them. Brave men, yes, as you can see in our friend the Peasant, who does not know or even suspect. He has no idea I am circumcised. Not an easy deception to bring off, I might add.”
She considered, then said, “I need more convincing. You still know too much, are too keen, quick, observant, like a trained intelligence operator. I can tell, I’ve been around them.”
“You note that which is my greatest gift and my greatest curse. Yes, it turns out, I am gifted. Because I was smart, weak, not obviously a warrior type, Bak assigned me as his own intelligence officer’s aide. He was NKVD, highly professional, and I learned much from him. At the same time, I had what might be called a ‘feel’ for the work. I come from a fur-trading family. We didn’t trap, we didn’t sell, we were the middlemen playing both ends against each other while keeping both in the dark. Believe me, it’s a business of bluff and feint, fast reactions, quick recognition of the real, timing, timing, and oh yes, timing. Perfect training for intelligence, and I learned quickly. It happened that this officer was killed in a bridge raid, and Bak trusted me in his service, and so I became his new intelligence officer. And that is what you encounter when you see through me, not an NKVD agenda or a GRU loyalty. You’re just seeing a frightened Jew.”
“I suppose I could believe that story,” she said. “It’s crazy enough to sound real. No one would dare make up such nonsense.”
“I’m trying to serve, that’s all. To do my little bit.”
She threw the pistol down, but he did not take it up.
“All right,” she said, “employ this ‘gift’ you claim to possess. Impress me with an insight.”
“I know through late radio reports from Red Army intelligence that the unit that ambushed us was the Police Battalion of Thirteenth SS Mountain, known as Scimitar. Specialists in anti-partisan warfare, especially in forest and mountain climes. Run by a monster named Salid, an Arab, no less, who learned his trade killing naked Jews in pits for an outfit called Einsatzgruppen D. We puzzled over the significance, and now I see it. They weren’t here by coincidence. They were brought in a week ago. Specifically to catch you. What that means is the Germans knew before Bak did that you were coming.”
“They knew before I did.”
“Yes. And how could they know if no one here, including Bak and myself, knew you were coming? They also knew that a specialist unit with advanced skills was appropriate to the ambush. They didn’t trust the local lunks.”
She knew the answer. She just couldn’t say it.
He did. “You were betrayed from Moscow.”
“I understand that.”
“Yes, and it means, very simply, at the highest of levels, one of us works for them. Whoever, this person, or so I infer, knew that the monster Groedl was a favorite of Hitler and that Hitler’s irrationality would demand that Groedl be protected at all costs. Which led to special efforts to ambush not Bak, who is of little consequence, but you.”
“I think I have suspected all of this,” she said.
“Perhaps so. But have you considered that your escape is now a major threat to whomever the traitor is? You are the living proof that he exists, and he is trapped in a very small pond. That means the Germans will make a concentrated, labor-intensive effort to capture you. They need you alive to take you to Berlin and work on you and see what you know and to whom you have communicated your suspicions. You are enemy of the Reich number one. But it gets much worse. You are also the traitor’s enemy number one. He will use his power to destroy from his end, via Russian means, to crush you. He will use NKVD, GRU, and SMERSH.”
“Dear God,” she said.
“You see now, as both sides conspire to kill you, that you have already in your young life managed an impressive accomplishment.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You are the most hunted woman on the face of the earth. You have managed to get the two most violent governments in human history obsessed and totally committed, out of state necessity, to your destruction. That takes talent.”
CHAPTER 21
The leg never bruised. But the next morning it announced that it preferred to take a day off. It ached dully from ankle to knee to steel ball in hip, which might have annoyed the steel ball, so it started hurting, too. Bob took six ibus and felt a little sick. But today was not going to be a day of running up hills. He met Reilly in the lobby with his first, most urgent question.