Where was Basil Krulov?
He had been erased, that was clear. Will French of The Washington Post knew that it happened in the Russian records all the time, often for the most banal of reasons. Lots of people to keep track of, budget cuts playing hob with the staffing of the archives, the haphazard nature of the Soviet and later Russian federation bureaucracy, the terrible chaos of both the purges and the war and finally the postwar Stalinist era, the struggles for power. So it was quite possible that Basil Krulov was an innocent disappearance, one of many thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands.
But Will couldn’t let it go. Like his wife, Reilly, he was driven not by vanity or agenda or hope of a talking-head spot on D.C. TV but by curiosity. Who, what, when, where, why? Those five W’s were the key questions of his business, if now mostly forgotten: What does it mean? Or: Who does it help? Call him old-school or whatever, but his plodding earnestness had earned him a superb reputation and a Pulitzer Prize for documenting the hideous conditions under which ships were “broken” on a certain shore of the Indian Ocean, by hundreds of men, most of whom died in their late twenties for all the asbestos they breathed while hacking the giant beached vessels to pieces for the salvage money.
Now, not for the Post but for a force more implacable than any in journalism — that is, his wife (also a legend, but that’s for another time) — he was determined to get the who, what, when, where, and why on Comrade Krulov, who was featured in many war histories, always heroic but never in hard focus, was glimpsed occasionally in the postwar histories, and then seemed to fade out, as if broken down like a ship to tiny untraceable parts by sweaty men in loincloths.
He’d tried the archives, he’d called all the older folks — both old American correspondents and retired Soviet-era politicians — and had gotten nothing, or nothing real.
“Oh, that one. He was a force to be reckoned with. Whatever happened to him? Do you know?”
He’d worked the Internet, finding his way into certain largely unknown databases. He’d tried American, British, French, and Australian intelligence services, all of whom had distinguished themselves with penetrations during the Cold War. But no, it was too long ago, it had faded, so much other stuff had happened.
And so he was down to his last play.
It would cost.
He needed a chunk of dough.
Will, he told himself. You’ve done enough. Don’t go there. You don’t even know what you’re going to find out. How will you tell her if it doesn’t work out?
He couldn’t face that reality. The music of the five W’s, those Circes of a journalist’s honor, kept sliding through his brain, rapturous, seductive, alluring, undeniable.
He went to his laptop, keyed in “Bank of America,” and transferred ten thousand dollars from his — their — savings account to his Moscow bank.
In for a penny, in for his youngest daughter’s college education.
Who knew, maybe she’d like community college.
CHAPTER 28
The patrols came closer and closer. Sometimes they went high, sometimes low. Sometimes they were very aggressive, moving loudly, making a big important-mission show; sometimes they were secretive, employing great woods skill, moving and hunting quietly. Sometimes they traveled circularly, sometimes vertically. Suppose they left trailers, listeners in the night? Suppose they left silent ambush teams? Suppose they left their own sly traps that could drive a stake through you or drop a boulder on you? Worst of all, suppose they left snipers?
With the fear of constant discovery, they could not get out to hunt for mushrooms without great anxiety, which had its psychological and nutritional effects. They were surviving at subsistence level. Days had passed.
“The Peasant will return,” she insisted. “He will have a rifle. You and he will escape deeper into the mountains, where it’s safe for now. The Red Army will liberate Ukraine. You will survive.”
“What happens to Petrova?”
“If he gets a rifle, then I will head down the mountain and into Ivano and find a place to shoot. If I can’t kill Groedl, I’ll just kill Germans until they kill me. I’ll die a sniper’s death, as so many have before me.”
“You are delusional, Sergeant Petrova. The Peasant is dead, obviously. We are lucky he didn’t rat us out under torture. He won’t be back. There is no rifle. The Serbs will find us, and that Arab will torture us, you more than me.”
“The Peasant is too sly.”
“I only wish. Here’s the reality. He’s gone.”
It was true. Where was he? Had he been caught in Yarmeche on his rifle-hunting expedition? No sign of him. Maybe he had simply lit out, used his skills to survive and evade, and abandoned them. But he would not do that. The Peasant was a strong man and would never yield to craven temptation. She could not believe he was gone.
Which wine went with which dish was far from Captain Salid’s mind. He yearned to return, if not to that very interesting wine cellar and whatever treasures it might still contain, then to a treasured volume in the original French, Varietals of the Loire River Valley, compiled in 1833. To know the present and expect the future, you had to know the past. But there was other business to attend to.
“Look, friend,” he said in good Russian to the man on the table, “this is getting us nowhere. We both know how it must end. It’s only a question of the journey to that spot. You would do the same to me were our positions reversed, so there’s no morality here, really. It’s war, that’s all, and duty. So why not make it easy on yourself?”
And me, he thought.
He finished his cigarette and stubbed it. The cellar of the inn made a rather poor torture chamber, but one did what one must. One adapted. It was the soldier’s way. As he saw it, he was not cruel, he was practical. Certain goals had to be achieved.
“Don’t bore me with the lost-peasant routine. Peasants don’t wander about, not in time of war. They understand the danger. You’d only be out and about on a mission, a job, and I think I know what that is. So please, tell me, and it’ll go so much easier on you.”
The man was spread-eagled, secured by ropes. He was largely naked, except for a crude wrap that provided modesty. How much longer would it last? His nose was crushed, his teeth smashed in, both eyes swamped in puffed-out, blood-filled tissue and crusted scab. Blood ran from a dozen or so slashes and contusions randomly placed on his limbs. His body was a festival of bruising, hemorrhaging, cuts and, worst of all, the angry red blossoms where they’d laid the torch against him. Fire was man’s most primitive fear, his most painful prosecutor, his cruelest adversary, and Salid had no compunctions about using it against his enemies.
“Let’s go over this one more time. We picked you up scurrying uphill, into the mountains, with three loaves of bread, a bunch of carrots, three potatoes, and a large piece of salted beef. Someone here in the village gave you the food. That we know. I’ll tell you what, I don’t even care. That’s fine. Petty heroism by some other peasant fool, no need to get all indignant about it. I don’t care, Himmler doesn’t care, nobody cares. That’s your victory, all right? You protected your allies, you gave no one to the hated Police Battalion torturer in the silly red hat, you are heroic and a tribute to the ideal of the new Stalinist Man. I’d kiss you for your bravery if I had the time.
“But you’re a bandit. Of course, what else can you be? You were getting food for other bandits hidden in the mountains, survivors of the gun battle some days ago. Possibly one of these survivors is a woman bandit known to be a sharpshooter. One of your missions surely was to abscond with a rifle so she can complete her mission. Now you mean to return, which means you know where they are. So this is all I ask. Tell us. Lead us. Turn them over to us. Do that, and I’ll let you survive. We’ll cut you free, get you medical aid, your people will be here in a few weeks, days maybe, you’ll go into a refugee center hospital and all the villagers will say, He did not give us up. He was a hero, that one. You’ll get some kind of red banner and, when all this is over, go back to your village with a chestful of medals and scars, a hero in the Great Patriotic War. Every June twenty-second, you’ll wear your medals to remind people of your bravery in the partisan war against Hitler.”