That was the first dance of the night, but it wasn’t the last. The Russian pilots seemed to love American Big Band music and chattered among themselves, passing the American aviators from one to another, judging each as worthy of a kiss—or two or three. America may have been the land of the free, but Russia, it seemed, was the land of free kisses, for Jack had never had such an easy time coaxing a girl’s lips to his own. It almost made that crash in the desert worth it.
At midnight, Bovington broke up the party. The squadron was scheduled to ship out by truck back to Eritrea at 6:00 a.m. The major decided it was time to turn in, and the female Russian flight leader seemed to agree. She called out to her pilots, clapped her hands, and hurried the women away, like a mother hen, to their chicken coops. But before she disappeared into the night, she left a tiny envelope with the major.
“What’s that?” Bobby asked him.
“Microfilm.”
“What, like spies use?”
“Yup.” Major Bovington pulled out the film and held it up to the light, trying to read the tiny print.
“So what’s on it? German military secrets? Japanese intelligence?”
Major Bovington scowled and placed the microfilm back in the envelope. “A symphony. Apparently the Russians want us to smuggle out music written by some fellow named Shostakovich.”
CHAPTER 22
THE ORGAN-GRINDER AND THE CELLIST
Petr wished he still had his PTRD rifle. It was too big a gun for deer hunting, but the little Tokarev pistol was too small.
He and Duck had been stalking a deer for hours. The young buck was running them in circles. Before they could get close enough for a pistol shot, the deer would hear them and bound off into the forest, well out of sight. They’d caught back up with it twice, largely thanks to Duck’s keen sense of smell, but once again they’d spooked it before they got close. If he’d had the big PTRD, or better still, a simple Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle, Petr was sure he’d have bagged the buck an hour ago. Instead, he was considering giving up.
Normally, Petr would have thrown in the towel. He’d never been particularly resolute. When something proved too difficult, he would move on to some new, less onerous, task. But for some reason he dreaded returning to the hunting cabin empty-handed. Why? It wasn’t as if he needed the food. They had plenty of macaroni; they wouldn’t starve, not anymore. Meat was purely a luxury. Most of it would go bad, anyway, before he, Karen, and Duck ate it. So why did it matter so much to kill this deer? He wasn’t doing it for the food, he realized. He was doing it to show off.
When Petr realized this, he gave up the hunt immediately. Why should he care about impressing some strange American girl? She wasn’t even particularly pretty. No, that was a lie. She was skinny and filthy, and you couldn’t even see much of her under her thick sweaters and fraying coat. But her eyes were beautiful. He’d never seen such intense eyes. To look into them was to be captivated by them. He couldn’t look away. The dark-brown irises and deep-black pupils were mesmerizing. There was a saying that eyes were the window to the soul. If that were the case, Karen’s had to be the purist soul in existence.
But the saying was a lie, too, because Karen’s soul was dark. Petr had seen what she’d done to the NKVD man. Not that Petr had much love for NKVD men. They were the ones who’d taken away his father, and Petr knew his father had been extraordinarily lucky to escape that arrest with his life. Very few people returned from an NKVD interrogation alive.
Petr’s father had never talked about what he’d been forced to endure during that interrogation. Petr had been afraid to ask. But he could imagine that, if given a chance, his own father, a normally peaceful mathematics professor, would have smashed in the brains of an NKVD man with just as much ferocity as Karen.
Maybe she didn’t have that dark a soul, but neither was she pure. She was certainly no angel. That was part of what he liked about her, Petr had to admit. He couldn’t trust her, not completely, and yet he felt some overwhelming desire to make her trust him. Hunting the deer was more than just showing off to a pretty girl. He wanted to demonstrate to her that he could find food. He wanted to prove to this girl, who he knew had almost starved to death, that he could provide for her, that she could trust him.
Well, he thought to himself, he would just have to find some other way, because the hunt had been a failure.
Petr marched through the snow, too lost in his thoughts to pay much attention to Duck. But when they neared the hunting shack, Duck suddenly halted and dropped to his stomach. Petr instinctively did the same, falling prone beside the big dog and drawing the pistol from his coat pocket.
They both lay there a moment, trying to control their breathing, Petr grasping the pistol with two hands and aiming it in front of him. He tried to ignore the discomfort of the cold seeping from the snow through the front of his uniform. He peered past the pistol’s steel gun sight and focused on the shack. The front door was open.
The front of Petr’s uniform was getting wet, his body heat melting the snow beneath him, but he resisted the urge to climb into a crouch and instead wormed his way forward—an awkward, uncomfortable, and excruciatingly slow way to maneuver. But it made him a small and very difficult target. The ground is the infantryman’s best friend, Petr’s drill instructor had often insisted, and Petr had learned that lesson well.
Eventually, now shivering with snow down his pants, Petr reached the shack. He had angled his approach to veer right of the doorway. Anyone inside peering out wouldn’t have a direct line of sight to him. But neither could Petr see inside. So he wrapped his fingers around the bottom of the doorjamb, tightened his knuckles, and pulled himself forward silently until he could peer inside.
The shack was empty.
Petr immediately saw that he’d been the victim of one clever girl, and he felt the hot shame of gullibility. Karen hadn’t cared about the venison. She’d just acted impressed as a way to encourage him and Duck to leave. She’d wanted to be rid of them so she could steal all the macaroni for herself. Maybe he shouldn’t have given up on that hunt, after all, because Karen had just stolen his food and left him to die.
Despondent, he climbed to his feet and tromped into the shack. Snow fell from his clothes onto the wood-plank floor. He began to disrobe, throwing his uniform in a heap in the corner. Duck trotted into the shack behind him. Petr was down to his underwear when Duck decided to shake, spraying Petr with wet snow. Petr yelled and leaped away in shock. Duck pulled his ears back in apology and nuzzled his snout up to Petr’s hand. Petr scratched the big dog behind his ears. He was cold, but not angry—at least not angry at Duck. It wasn’t Duck’s fault the girl had left them. Petr remembered how Duck had rolled over this morning, letting Karen scratch his belly. “She tricked you, too, didn’t she?” he muttered to the dog.
Then, almost absentmindedly, Petr walked over to the cabinets and pulled them open, hoping Karen had missed some morsel of food. What he saw shocked him: two bags of macaroni, neatly stacked for him, maybe enough to survive the journey to Tikhvin. But that wasn’t all. Slid between the bags was a train ticket. Karen had left him her most valuable possession. She hadn’t left him to die, after all.
Petr wanted to go after Karen immediately. He felt irrationally compelled to get dressed, pocket his gun, and head back out into the woods. They were behind enemy lines, at the mercy of German patrols, and Karen was unarmed. He felt an overwhelming desire to protect her. But his clothes were still wet, and he couldn’t risk building a fire, not until after dark, or the Germans would see the smoke and send a patrol.