“Stupid,” said the first well-dressed man to Yuri.
“Engels is stupid,” said the woman, turning to others in the small group of stragglers.
“You are stupid,” said the second well-dressed man.
The woman, at that point, had swung a mesh shopping bag filled with oranges in a wondrous, almost slow-motion arc, striking the second well-dressed man directly in his face and seriously disrupting his confidence. The man staggered back against Yuri, who pushed him upright to face the advancing, squinting, relentless woman.
“Stupid,” she hissed, and Yuri had turned away, though he would dearly have loved to see the outcome. In turning away, he ran into a man and with irritation looked up to tell the man that he should watch where he was standing, but the warning froze on Yuri’s lips. He found himself facing a tall, gaunt, unsmiling man whose hands plunged into the deep pockets of his dark coat. His eyes met Yuri’s and the young man felt that this pale stranger knew his every thought.
Yuri had moved around the man, may even have mumbled a prastee’t’e, excuse me, and dashed across the square, behind a bus on Suvorov Boulevard, and then in front of the car on the Arbat.
He hurried down the Arbat. He knew, from his history in school, that the street was first mentioned in writings of the fifteenth century, but he was not interested in history now. He ignored the ancient houses, the little shops, and the large mansions on either side of the narrow, winding street. He paused for a moment in front of number 53, where Pushkin lived in 1831. Yuri neither knew nor cared about that part of the history of the street. He glanced at the newspaper in his hand and was momentarily surprised to see a cartoon of Lenin waking from a long sleep and looking around in confusion.
Yuri smiled at the sacrilege, folded the newspaper, hurried on, and entered a small church a block away. It wasn’t crowded, but there were about fifty people gathered, listening to a priest who was in the middle of some mumbled ritual that Yuri neither understood nor cared to understand. There were no benches, no seats, and there was no way of simply characterizing the worshipers. Some were young-a couple with a baby-some old, men, and in the corner, looking toward him and the door, stood Jalna.
She smiled, a warm, somewhat pained smile that filled Yuri with love and longing. He moved forward, opened his mouth to apologize for being late, but she stopped him with a warm finger to his lips as the voice of the priest rose. The priest’s eyes found Yuri for an instant and then moved on to someone else who had entered the small church. Yuri took Jalna’s hand and stood silently, respectfully, but not listening.
Jalna’s eyes were bright in the dim light of the church. She clutched his hand warmly and beamed. Yuri, infected, smiled with her and turned his head in the direction in which the priest had looked. In the darkened corner near the entrance stood a figure, a dark figure, a familiar figure. Yuri’s grip tightened and Jalna looked at him, saw his turned head, and followed his gaze into the corner, where a man stood apart from the worshipers.
Coincidence, Yuri told himself. The gaunt man had been on his way here. He was no ghost. He was a coincidence, if, indeed, it was even the same man he had run into in the square.
Yuri fixed his eyes on the dark corner, unable to make out the face. He stared, determined to cause the man to back down. But the man did not move. The priest’s voice rose and then dropped, indicating an end to the service or at least this part of it. The man in the corner did not appear to breathe. Yuri shuddered, and Jalna, sensing, feeling his fear, gripped his arm tightly.
Yuri turned toward her reassuringly as the crowd muttered a gruff, unfamiliar “amen.” When he turned back to the ghost in the corner only seconds later, the man was gone.
“Yuri, are you all right?” Jalna said softly.
The couple with the child hurried to the door of the church and out into the cool air, neither looking to either side nor speaking to others. Worship was still a guilty pleasure. Anyone could be a KGB agent noting faces, taking names, gathering information for the moment when all this new freedom suddenly disappeared.
“I’m fine,” Yuri said, leading her out the door. The ghost was nowhere in sight. “Are you hungry?”
Jalna nodded and they moved down the street to a stolovya, a small self-service luncheonette where they got in line behind a man in a workman’s cap and scarf who hummed to himself.
Neither Yuri nor Jalna spoke till they had selected kvass and a bread pudding to share and sat in a corner away from the door, the other customers, and the humming workman.
“I heard him on the phone,” Jalna said softly. She broke off a small piece of the crisp pudding and put it in her mouth. Yuri adored the way she ate, talked. “He’ll be sending me away in two weeks. He’s told me nothing of it, nothing. He talks as if nothing is happening.”
She would certainly cry now. Yuri was sure. He couldn’t stand that.
“You won’t go,” he said.
“I can’t do it,” she said, looking around at the faces in the luncheonette, not seeing them. “I can’t let you.”
“If you go, I will never see you again. We will never see each other,” he whispered, reaching for his kvass, knowing he couldn’t drink it.
“You could join me,” she said without expression, without hope or expectation. “We could defect. I don’t care if I embarrass him.”
“Jalna, there is no way I can get out of the country, get to Switzerland,” he said with a sigh.
“We know what must be done, and it must be done soon, tonight, tomorrow,” she said.
Yuri shuddered, remaining motionless for eternity, then shook his head yes. They had been through this before. There was nothing else to do if he and Jalna were to remain together, nothing to do but kill Andrei Morchov. He put his hand into his jacket pocket, came out with a small box, and handed it to Jalna, who slipped it into her purse.
Emil Karpo had not gone into the luncheonette. He was sure, as he had planned, that Yuri Vostoyavek had seen and noticed him. The young man had reacted with guilt, apprehension. True, there were many things one could feel guilty about in the Soviet Union or anywhere else, but Yuri Vostoyavek had, upon seeing Karpo in the church, reached for his pocket as if to check that something was there or would be safe. Karpo, when he had been assigned early in his career to watching the large tourist hotels, had seen the same gesture by visiting businessmen who wanted to protect their wallets. It was a giveaway for the pickpockets, who would often bump into a mark in the lobby not to grab a wallet but to step away and see which pocket the mark would check. Emil Karpo had spent almost a year watching pickpockets, thieves, robbers, and their victims, and he had learned that almost anyone but a complete professional would react in giveaway patterns.
Yuri had given himself away, and Karpo had no doubt now that he had seen the young man with this girl that he was planning something and that whatever he was planning would involve something the young man was going to carry in his pocket. It wasn’t there now, whatever it was, because Yuri had not actually touched the pocket and there was no bulge in the pocket beyond a few coins that Karpo had heard jangling as the young man walked.
He could see them clearly, thought they could not see him. He stood across the street behind the window of a furniture shop. The woman who ran the shop had risen to take care of him when he walked in, but Karpo had simply looked at her unsmilingly and turned to watch the couple through the window. The woman who ran the shop had smiled falsely as if she did not care and had returned to her seat behind a counter to hope for the early departure of this less than welcome intruder.
Karpo watched the unheard conversation of the two young people. If they were conspirators, they were not happy ones. Their faces were pale with dread, resignation. At least that was clear in the face of the young man. The girl’s face, beautiful, bright, unmarked, and clean, was more difficult to read. It was also clear that they had come to a decision. The young man said something, looked around to be sure no one was listening, watching, and men leaned back in his chair as if something had ended. The girl had stopped eating, turned to look at the young man with concern, and touched his cheek reassuringly.