Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (44 page)

Moments later he was in his bed, lying on his back, blood lurching through his veins like a rabbit that had narrowly escaped the wolf’s jaws, and was hiding in the hedgerow trying not to die from the resulting heart attack.

There was something strange in the hut, something unfamiliar. It was the silence, he realized. Nikolai wasn’t snoring or muttering in his sleep.

Jamie found he wasn’t breathing, but anticipating, afraid that if he made the slightest noise the man would not speak, for he was certain he was about to. The very energy in the room testified to it. Nikolai’s voice, when it came, was as deep and dense as the oak tree everyone claimed him to be.

“You have done what needed doing. Don’t look back, don’t regret, no matter the price.”

“I won’t, Nikolai Ivanovich,” Jamie said quietly, as ridiculously grateful for the old man’s few words as he would have been for the blessing of a saint. For with that one sentence, the man had made him feel that he was no longer alone, no matter what terrors the days and months ahead held.

Chapter Thirty
April, 1973
Seanachais

Jamie thought the old saying that a man
could get used to anything, given enough time—including being hanged—had never perhaps been proven truer than in his current situation. A man could get used to having every liberty and right he had ever taken for granted stripped from him. He could get used to constant hunger with no hope of alleviating that terrible gnawing in his belly. He could become accustomed to standing to attention in the frozen dawn while Soviet platitudes and diatribes were broadcast over a squawking PA system. He could get used to the inhuman quotas that had been designed long ago to work a man to death while providing him the minimum requirement of nutrition in order to draw his death out to vulgar limits. He could even get used to being cold all the time, so cold that sleep did not come easily despite an utter and complete exhaustion that sat deep in every cell of his body.

Despite his repeated demands that he be allowed to contact someone at the British embassy in Moscow, that he be allowed to make a phone call, that they in fact acknowledge in any way, shape or form that he existed and had even a snowball’s chance in hell of ever getting out of here, or that they contact someone on the outside to let them know why and how he had disappeared off the face of the earth—he had not been allowed any of these rights, for rights were a rather foreign concept in the Soviet Empire. He might as well have landed on another planet in a far off solar system for all that a gulag resembled the life he had left behind.

Life was brought down to its bones here. What was necessary and what was not became clear very quickly.

Everything had its uses: tin cans became cooking pots, bits of string were used to tie foot wrappings in place, scraps of paper could be used to line boots and mittens. Every item had use as barter as well. Even things not material had their place in the complex trading system of the camp. The item of greatest value Jamie had, it soon became clear, was his ability to tell a story.

Storytellers resided near the top of the prisoner hierarchy, as any sort of distraction from reality was very highly valued. And so he became the camp storyteller through the simple expedient that the previous storyteller had dropped dead in his boots only two weeks before Jamie’s unfortunate incarceration. This new occupation bought him extra rations of bread, small bits of chocolate, and favors when he needed them.

He had long believed that novels had a life of their own, far beyond that of an individual reader. For a good novel lived on in the minds of hundreds, perhaps even thousands or millions of readers and thus became another entity outside and beyond the rough-cut pages and black-type words. This became truer as he told stories each night near the pot-bellied stove. His memory had always been an unreliable sort of fellow when it came to certain events in his life, mercifully perhaps, for there were things it shielded him from that he suspected he did not need nor want to know. Books he remembered, though, with a near photographic clarity that served him well in his role of storyteller.

He pulled from the well of memory other stories, ones he himself had invented during an adolescence that had been both unbearably dark and incandescent to the point of scorching his spirit. These stories he changed, for he was not that boy anymore and did not see things in the same light. But it gave him a feeling of grounding himself here in Russia, as though by saying words he had written down long ago, he had rooted the lodestone of his soul.

Memory, however photographic, was like water, in constant flux so that one perceived things differently depending upon the angle one approached it from or, as the case might be, the age. Some things flitted beneath the surface, flickering, a flash of scale and fin, and others tore the surface of that still pool, glittering and arcing, spraying a thousand other droplets of time and remembrance. So it was for him with tales, finding something different with each telling, another layer through which to peer or sink wholly, depending upon the angle from which he viewed the story, or the mood, easily sensed, of his listeners that particular night.

And so he became the camp Seanachai. He thanked God for his fluency in the Russian tongue, for between Yevgena and Andrei, he could speak it as though he were a native. He knew many Russian stories and could recite Eugene Onegin from memory. He was also familiar with many of the other great Russian poets—Blok, Pasternak, Akhmatova and others. He gave them the poets of his own world too—Yeats and Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth, Keats and Rilke, and the stories that sat closest to his soul—
Les Miserables
,
The Idiot
,
The Inferno
,
Ulysses
(that was a challenge and a half in Russian—his brain felt like a pretzel twist during the telling),
Dr. Zhivago
and the whole lovely world of Trollope’s Barchester Tower series. He told Dickens in installments, just as the great man had written his stories, instinctively knowing where to leave off to create the maximum anticipation for the next session.

He knew if they were caught he was likely to be punished severely. Western literature had long been banned in the Soviet Union, and despite Kruschev’s thaw and the phenomena of
samizdat
, it was still a punishable offense. But he knew that to take a people’s stories was to kill something in their soul, to strand them on a far shore where nothing seemed familiar, for people were their stories and the re-telling of them in all their facets had the power to keep a man sane. Stories knew no national borders, nor politics, but rather a truth universal to the human condition, no matter the regime under which the minds had been captured.

His own mind had been molded in the traditions and teachings of the West, whether from the ancient Greeks or the less ancient Jesuits. The teachings of the Jesuits had been many, but if they had left him one gift of lasting power, it was this: he was able, when it was most necessary, to build himself a fortress of the spirit to keep safe that which was most imperative in a man. It was a place within which to seek the eternal and unchangeable, to fix one’s sight far beyond pain and humiliation and to roam unhindered in a place of beauty and peace. It was a sanctuary that he carried everywhere with him, and had for as long as he could remember. For this he was grateful to those men who had the teaching of him in his youth.

He noticed Gregor and his lackeys sometimes hung about the edges of this storytelling circle, close enough to hear, occasionally close enough to menace. If he was unfortunate enough to lock eyes with Gregor, the man would give him a long, slow smile and then run his tongue suggestively across his lower lip. Jamie merely held the look long enough to be sure the man knew he was not afraid, even if his insides felt slippery with the thought of what the man wanted to do to him.

Gregor, however, was happy enough for now merely to play with him. Three days after Jamie’s nighttime visit with the knife, he had come back to his hut to find Vanya sitting on his bed, his meager sack of belongings on the floor by his feet. When he raised an eyebrow in question, the reply was simple.

“I am sent to stay with you. I am told I am now
your
bitch.”

“Pardon me?” In his shock, he had spoken in English, to which Vanya could only respond with a brow wrinkled in confusion.

“I—no, this is not possible. I do not want anyone to be my bitch,” Jamie said in exasperation, thinking to himself that in the revenge department Gregor was far wilier than he had expected.

Vanya raised a perfect eyebrow at him in return. “It is no hardship to be such to you.”

“That is not the point,” Jamie said, not sure if he had a point that was going to make an impression on the beautiful young man.

Vanya lay back on the bed, amethyst eyes alight with mischief. “Well, if you do not want me to be bitch for you, what
am
I to do?”

Jamie contemplated him for a moment. “As it happens, I find myself rather short on friends just at present.”

Vanya’s face lost its mischief. “To be friends in Russia is a serious thing. We do not take such offers lightly. It is an engagement for life, more serious than marriage.”

“I’m in here because of my friendship with a Russian,” Jamie said.

“And he is still your friend?” Vanya asked, perfectly serious in his query.

“Yes,” Jamie said, and knew it for truth.

“Then you are understanding what it means to be friends in Russia.”

Jamie considered the head that lay upon his improvised pillow and sighed.

“I’m beginning to.”

Chapter Thirty-one
April 1973
Spy Games

Spring crept up from the south, across salted seas
and the rich soaked soil of the steppes. With it came a gradual thaw, though the air was still raw with winter’s leaving. The evenings were still laden with frost and the occasional fall of snow, but spring was undeniably in the air, though it came with its own problems—mud and voracious mosquitoes as well as a host of other pests that were impossible to control in a camp where so many people lived in close, not terribly clean, quarters.

Coming through the gates that night, exhausted, and aware of the perpetual guns at his back, Jamie was not in a good frame of mind to receive a summons to the OC’s office. There was not a decent bone in the man’s body and a summons would not mean anything good. Every face that turned to him before departing for the dining hall wore expressions made up equally of pity for him and relief that they had escaped the net this time.

The administration building shimmered with warmth after the chill of the forest. Jamie thought the sheer pleasure of the heat might well drop him to his knees if it wasn’t for the trickle of fear in his stomach as he wondered what the hell Comrade Isay wanted of him now.

He had learned quickly here that to be invisible was to survive. But without a physical disguise, James Kirkpatrick was not one of life’s natural chameleons. His beauty had always singled him out for attention both welcome and not, much as the man seated in the office awaiting him had never been invisible either. He felt relief at first, quickly swept away by anger.

Andrei looked well—rather too well—Jamie thought, with nary a bruise or cut or broken bone in sight to explain his long absence.

“I see you aren’t dead,” Jamie said dryly.

Andrei came away from the window and seized Jamie by the shoulders, searching his face as though he would read there how Jamie fared.

“Yasha, it is the first time they have allowed me to see you. For two weeks I didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”

“It’s likely they weren’t certain either whether I would be alive or dead at the end of those two weeks,” Jamie said. “I was in Lubyanka—where exactly the hell were you?”

“Under house arrest. I don’t move, I don’t breathe, I don’t speak a word without them knowing about it. I work, I go home, I work some more. Not that that is new, but they aren’t even trying to hide their presence anymore.”

“And how exactly do I play into this?” Jamie asked. “You realize I have not been allowed to contact an embassy or anyone outside of this hellhole? It’s as though I’ve ceased to exist in the last month.”

Andrei’s hands dropped from his shoulders, his blue eyes dark with emotion. “Yasha, you must believe I knew nothing of this. I would have somehow warned you. You cannot think that I…”

“I don’t know what I think. A couple of weeks in Lubyanka will do that to a man.”

“Did they hurt you? I had begged for them to show you mercy.”

“My interrogators were Russian. How much fucking mercy do you think they showed me?”

“I am sorry, Yasha. I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am.”

Jamie merely raised an eyebrow.

“I begged them to allow you to contact someone at the British embassy, or even to allow you to contact someone in Ireland. They refused. I was only allowed here because I refused to do any work on the project unless they let me see you and know that you are alive.”

“Well, as you can see, I am alive, so you can go back to your comfortable little nook with your adequate food and shelter and rest easy.”

“You are not supposed to be in the forest. I specifically—”

Jamie held up a hand. “It was offered. I chose to stay on the cutting crew.” He did not say that much of his reason for that foolhardy decision was the stubborn old ox who was his partner. As long as he could take some of the weight from Nikolai’s shoulders, he would do so.

“Why are you so stubborn, Yasha?”

“Half the inmates already think I’m a spy. I start pulling cozy indoor duty and they’re going to be certain I am.”

“The forest could kill you,” Andrei said.

“And if it does?” Jamie said.

The words hung there between them, the accusation implicit.

“You think I want you dead? Why on earth would you think such a thing?”

“To be honest, Andrei, I’m not sure I know what you would or wouldn’t do. Nothing makes a hell of lot of sense after you’re tortured for two weeks and then wake up in the middle of goddamn nowhere in a gulag.”