Declare (63 page)

Elena knew who it was that he must be referring to.
“Her
ring? The Sadovaya?”

“With her… earring stones? anchor stones?… installed around the periphery, at Patriarch’s Pond and Gorky Park and the Kursk Station, to keep her from becoming… disoriented?” The French word was
désoriente
, and he laughed as though he had made a joke.

He had whirled her to an arch on the other side of the high-ceilinged room, and he stepped back and let her last dance step link her arm through his, so that now they were walking down the corridor beyond without having paused.

Another man was holding open an outside door, and Elena found that she had been escorted down a set of cement steps and into the back seat of a black Ford sedan before she could catch her breath. She wondered if she would ever see her overcoat again.

The man who had met her on the dance floor glanced at his wrist-watch as the car accelerated away from the curb, driving in a counter-clockwise loop around the block and then speeding north up the Neglinaya boulevard. “Moroz is probably dead, by now,” he said, still speaking in French. “The NKVD has learned about your Palestinian lover in Paris.” He laughed and shook his head. “A Palestinian radio operator! You would be food for Zat al-Dawahi yourself if we hadn’t been tracking you closely. Moroz planned to send you to Berlin?”

“Who are you?” Elena demanded. “Hiding me from the NKVD—you’re not Russians!”

The driver turned his head around to look at her, and she quailed.
Under a wool cap his hairless face was pure Cossack, with high cheekbones and slanted eyes. “We are the oldest Russians,” he said harshly in barbarous French, before turning back to the street ahead. “Our organization was old before Lenin returned to Petrograd from his Swiss exile in 1917,” he went on, “and Lenin blessed us and committed into our hands the protection of Russia.”

“The secret protection,” agreed her escort. “Stalin and his NKVD hate the measures we take, and so we protect the motherland while hiding in foxes’ earths that are secret even to the secret service, true to the old covenant. Andre Marty noted you, in Spain, and would have killed you as soon as he didn’t need your wireless telegraphy skills any longer, if we hadn’t used the GRU to summon you out of Madrid. Marty wrote a report to the NKVD, in which he said you were particularly dangerous—you were baptized but nevertheless sensitive to the most-secret world, and you were nearly virgin, still, in ’36.” The word he used was
vierge
, a term often used in speaking of unexposed photographic film.

“I
was
a virgin then!” protested Elena; and a moment later she could feel herself blushing.

“A virgin in the sense of not having killed anyone,” her escort explained. “Marty said you had shot a Nationalist soldier, but it was before you had reached puberty, and we think you have probably killed no one else since, and never anyone up close. A soul’s first few bloody murders have a sacramental power that must not be spent promiscuously.”

“We were at war,” said Elena now. “It was not a murder!”

The man shrugged impatiently. “Killing, execution, riposte, establishment of truth. We don’t want you wasting any more of your baptized sanctity until you can spend it effectively.” He looked away from her, out the window at the old women sweeping snow from the sidewalks. “And not in Berlin.”

These
are
Russians, she told herself; and they apparently want me to perform an assassination. She remembered her sleepless night after shooting the Nationalist soldier at the Sierra de Guadalarrama pass, but she took a deep breath and said, “I am at the command of the Party.”

“The Politburo consigns you to us with her left hand,” dryly said the man she had danced with. “Our headquarters is in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs on the Kuznetsky Bridge, where we still operate out of the Spets Otdel, the Special Department, of the NKVD. They don’t quite know who we are, and our very presence in so secret an institution forbids them to inquire.”

Elena never saw her flat on the Izvoznia Ulitza again—she was quartered now in a single-story log cabin in one of the “Alsatias” down at the southwestern bend of the Moskva River, by the Lenin Stadium. The Alsatias were rookeries dating from before the Revolution, tangles of old streets and open sewers that had been slated for leveling and reconstruction before the war had intervened. The Alsatias were a perfect sanctuary for “hooligans”—criminals and deserters—and in fact a fugitive division of Azerbaijan troops had lately taken up residence in Elena’s neighborhood, and frequently could be heard firing their Army-issue rifles at the cavalry patrols who enforced the midnight-to-five curfew. Elena’s roommates were Betsy, an American-Armenian woman who, lured by the promise of a farm of her own in a new Armenia, had moved from New Jersey to Moscow in 1935 and irretrievably surrendered her American passport, and Pavel, a Roman Catholic priest who was generally too drunk to speak. Elena gathered that they were all working for the same unnamed agency, but it was never discussed.

The man who had danced with her at the Metropol told her his name was Utechin, and he led her with cheery confidence through the mazes of the Soviet secret world. As his secretary, she went with him to the offices of various commissars and ministers, always having to pass through two sets of padded-leather doors with brass plates over the keyholes, to discuss everything from weapon shipments to the selection of operas to be performed at the Bolshoi. Once she watched him preside over the disposition of a shipment of American Lend-Lease leather—the Army wanted it all for boots, and the Minister of Health wanted some of it for the construction of artificial limbs, while the Minister of Trade wanted enough to make a lot of industrial belting; Utechin later prepared conflicting reports to make
each of them imagine that he had got what he had wanted, while in fact a full third of the leather was diverted to partisan groups in Astrakhan and Baku on the Caspian Sea coast, for the construction of assault-coracles—boats powered by outboard motors, each with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted at the stern. “The hulls have to be animal-stuff,” Utechin told her merrily, “for our
allies
there to be able to distinguish our boats from the Germans’.”

And he took her on tours of graveyards. In the Vagankov and Danilovskoye cemeteries they shoveled away the drifted snow to note the patterns of little holes punched upward out of fresh graves, and Utechin pointed out that the graves of the affluent dead had more such punctures than those of the poor. “The rich can afford gold teeth and jewelry,” he told Elena once as they made a picnic of vodka and hard-boiled eggs and bloodwurst on a snow-covered grave mound. “It’s only right that they should be called to give them up at the end. There is too much gold anyway, in our country—teeth from the dead, plating from the old church domes. If our angel wants our gold, so be it.”

“Nichevo,”
Elena had agreed bewilderedly, reaching for the vodka bottle.

He nodded. “Drink more,” he told her. “A fledgling agent should live more in drunkenness than in sobriety, in order to achieve distance from the deformity which is bourgeois conscience.”

The preserved body of Lenin had been moved to Kuibyshev when the Nazis had begun their advance toward Moscow, but Utechin took her to the empty mausoleum, right across the broad expanse of Red Square from the palatial GUM department store. Utechin showed a pass to the guards at the tall portal, and he and Elena walked into the mausoleum and followed a counterclockwise route to a set of descending stairs, then turned right several times to get to the crypt room. Net zero, Elena thought.

Though it was empty, the glass coffin in the middle of the floor was brightly lit by electric lights. “If the Politburo has any sense,” whispered Utechin as he ran his hand over the glass, apparently feeling for pits or scratches, “they will leave him in Kuibyshev. Why tease
her
with this?”

Elena was afraid she knew who Utechin referred to—and her suspicion was confirmed only a day or two later, when she received her ideological confirmation at the Spets-Otdel office on the Kuznetsky Bridge.

Utechin fed her six glasses of vodka before sitting her down in a chair across the desk from him. “You are elevated? Out of the twitching, gag-reflexing body? Good. Listen to me, girl—Mother Russia has a guardian angel, a very literal one. She can take a number of physical forms—you met her in one form, on the Sadovaya ring. In her remote youth she was known as Zat al-Dawahi, which is Arabic for Mistress of Misfortunes, but we call her Machikha Nash, Our Stepmother…”

And so, in the uncritical credulity of drunkenness, Elena had learned about the supernatural creature who had been captured on Mount Ararat after the earthquake of 1883 had knocked down the old confining drogue stones; and she learned that the guardian angel demanded deaths in return for her protection of the Soviet empire— such a constant cascade of deaths that Utechin’s agency had been forced to assist and even encourage the NKVD in its insane whole-sale purges. Elena was told that the great famine in the Ukraine during the winter of 1932 and 1933 had not been an accidental consequence of collectivizing agriculture and relocation of the land-owning farmers, the despised
kulaks;
the famine had been deliberately set into motion, and the Ukraine had been cut off from the rest of the world by heavily armed OGPU detachments at the Kiev and Ukrainian–Russian borders. “Machikha Nash demanded sacramental cannibalism,” Utechin said blandly, “and the starving Ukrainians provided it for her, in the interval before they became her food in turn.”

And, finally, in order to “divest her of the Judeo–Christian spiritual gag reflex,” she had been driven to the Lubyanka, only three blocks east of the Metropol Hotel, and taken down many flights of stairs to the basements. After fasting and being kept awake by electric shocks for forty-eight hours, she was shown the ring of huge rectangular stones in one of the remotest chambers, each stone with a loop carved at its top, and inside the ring she saw the crushed,
skinned, and eviscerated bodies that had lately been offered to Machikha Nash; and she was taken to a cell full of Polish and Romanian women, and was allowed to talk to them in pidgin German for a few minutes before being forcibly restrained while they were brutally and deafeningly killed by guards with machetes; and after she was finally allowed to eat, she was told something abominable about the stew she’d eaten. Throughout the three-day ordeal she was prevented from sleeping and was constantly forced to choke down glass after glass of harsh vodka.

At last she was marched into a wide, tiled room that shone a sulfurous yellow in the light of an electric bulb that hung on a cord from the ceiling; two wooden chairs stood facing each other across fifteen feet, with a drain in the floor between them. Elena was tied into one of the chairs and given a hypodermic injection, and then an old man in a white coat came in and talked droningly to her as he swung in front of her eyes a tiny, anatomically perfect gold skull. After some time a young woman was brought into the chamber by a couple of aproned guards; the girl was dressed in a blood-spattered smock that was a precise copy of the one Elena wore, and she had clearly been chosen because of her strong physical resemblance to Elena—auburn hair, thin face, sunken, haunted eyes. She too appeared to have been drugged, and she didn’t struggle when the guards tied her into the other chair, facing Elena.

“This woman is you,” the old doctor told Elena in guttural English as he stood behind the girl, with his hands on her shoulders, “and you are sitting right here, you can feel the ropes that confine you; the chair out there toward which I am looking is empty.” He was staring down at the top of the girl’s head as he spoke, though Elena was finding it difficult to focus her eyes. “You feel my hands on your shoulders, don’t you?”

Elena did—and when the doctor lit a cigarette and leaned down to blow smoke in the girl’s face, Elena smelled the burning tobacco. After some unguessable period of time, punctuated by more injections and electric shocks and many administrations of vodka through a rubber hose, Elena found that she was able to see from the
girl’s eyes, and she could see that the doctor was right—the chair across the room was empty.

At last the old doctor stood away from her, with his back to the empty chair, and Elena saw him draw a revolver from the pocket of his lab coat. “Now you will be killed,” he informed her. He pointed the gun at her face, and she saw his finger whiten inside the trigger guard.

A wall seemed to break in Elena’s mind—and in the instant before the gun’s muzzle exploded in stunning and obliterating white light, she thought,
Santa Maria, Madre de Dios—

And when consciousness, but not light, returned to her, along with the sensation of lying on a cold stone floor, the voice in her head resumed where it had left off, simply because she had no thoughts of her own:
—ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora en esta hora de nuestra muerte.

Pray for us, sinners, now in this hour of our death.
Because there were no thoughts in her head, her concussed memory simply repeated the prayer over and over again.

Another voice was saying similar words in the dark, in insistent Spanish and Russian, and she tried to attend to the other voice’s sentences too.

Then she was alone, lying in darkness for some period she could not estimate, without food or drink. She was able to move, and feel with her palms the texture of the stone floor and walls, and she could remember being hypnotized and told to identify herself with the girl who had been shot, but she was not at all certain that she was not in fact herself dead. And after the lights were turned on at last, and Utechin unlocked a barred door to run to where she lay and tip a glass of cold clear water to her cracked lips, she explained that the string she had tugged from her smock and tied into a series of knots had been her attempt to number the days of her confinement.