Sashenka (56 page)

Perhaps Benya Golden’s confession had been true after all. Could Sashenka really have had an affair with a famous writer in room 403 at the Metropole Hotel? But it would have been such a dangerous thing to seduce the wife of a Chekist, who had all the weapons of the secret police—surveillance, bugging, arrest—at his disposal. Somehow Vanya seemed to have found out about the affair and he himself had set the ball rolling, unleashing the thunderbolt: a personal investigation without official sanction.
Reports only to me, no copies.

Palitsyn
.

Jealousy, Katinka thought. Were they all ruined because of one man’s fear of being cuckolded? Did they all die because of his jealousy?

10

“So Vanya Palitsyn recorded his wife in bed with a writer?” said Maxy that evening, sitting on his motorbike in leathers, outside the nightclub near the British Embassy. “He gets the report: all the oohs and aahs of fucking…”

“…Vanya was outraged,” Katinka continued, “and ordered Benya Golden’s arrest.”

“No, no,” said Maxy. “Benya Golden’s a famous writer and Sashenka was well known, the niece of Mendel Barmakid, ‘Conscience of the Party.’ And if this just concerned adultery, why was Vanya himself arrested?”

“Benya was arrested and then denounced his mistress Sashenka who denounced her husband?”

“No, Katinka, you’re missing the point. They couldn’t have been arrested without Stalin’s approval.” Maxy lit a cigarette. “Besides, the dates don’t tally. You must realize the archives are full of lies and distortions. We have to read them like hieroglyphics.”

Katinka sighed. It was getting cold, and her miniskirt did not keep out the wind. “What shall I do now?”

“Don’t get upset about all this. You’ve done really well—better than I thought possible.”

Maxy looked at his Red Army watch. “Wait—it’s only nine p.m.: why don’t you ring his eminence the marshal? You need his help to get the rest of the KGB files, the stuff they didn’t show you. And now you know more, you can ask more. We need him to confirm that the Palitsyn family are the ones to follow.”

Business concluded, he offered her a cigarette and struck a match. They both sheltered the flame with cupped hands. As their skin touched, his eyes narrowed, and she was conscious of him looking at her carefully.

“Tell me—are you spending all that oligarch’s money? On clothes? Or makeup? No, you’re too sensible, too serious. You’re not spending any of it. You should enjoy life more!” He laughed. “You’re too cute, Katinka, for a historian.” He leaned over and brushed the hair off her face.

“Not so fast,” she said coolly, allowing him to kiss her on the cheek. His stubble burned her skin.

Flicking his cigarette into the air so that it landed on the embankment by the Moskva, he pulled on his helmet, kickstarted the bike and sped away toward the Stone Bridge.

Katinka watched him go then touched her cheek where he had kissed her and repeated his line mockingly to herself:
You’re too cute for a historian
. What a ridiculous gambit, she thought. You may be my teacher, but you’re a bit of a poser. I decide who kisses me and who doesn’t.

Then slowly, thoughtfully, with the eight red stars of the Kremlin sparkling above her, she walked over to the public telephone and dialed a number.

“I’m listening,” answered an old man with a Georgian accent.

“I won’t be dancing this time,” said Hercules Satinov with a wintry smile. He was sitting in his chair at Granovsky, surrounded as usual by the photographs of his family, beneath the portrait of himself as the bemedaled marshal. “I’m getting sicker.”

“No smoking, Father! He was showing off to a pretty girl,” said Mariko, bringing in the tea. “He had to go to bed afterward, you know.” She sounded angry, as if this were Katinka’s fault. “You shouldn’t have come now. It’s much too late. You should go.”

Mariko banged the tray on the table and left the room, tossing a sour glare at the visitor.

“It’s all right, Mariko…” Mariko shut the door, though a creaking suggested she was never far away. “Well,” said Satinov, “I am rather ancient.” When Katinka sat in the same chair as last time and crossed her legs, the old man glanced at her approvingly. “You look as if you’ve been out dancing in nightclubs. Well, why not? Why should a flower as young and fresh as you waste her youth on dusty archives and ancient miseries?” He pulled out his cigarettes again, lighting up and closing his eyes.

“It’s what I do best, Marshal.”

“You might not have as long as you think for your research,” he said, “or are you getting fond of me?” He looked right at her. “Well, girl, what did you find?”

Katinka took a deep breath. “In 1956 you visited the Lubianka and examined the files of Sashenka and Vanya Palitsyn. They were old friends of yours from before the Revolution.

They were the link with the past you wanted me to find.”

“You seem keener on the subject than you were before,” he observed.

“I am. These people—they seem so real somehow.”

“Ah. So the historian of Catherine the Great is getting involved in our own times. You smell the happy flowers and the bitter ashes? That shows you’re a real historian.”

“Thank you, Marshal.”

“Tell me again,” he said, leaning forward suddenly. “Your name’s Vinsky. Why did
you
get this job?”

“I was recommended by Academician Beliakov. I was his top student.”

“Of course,” Satinov said, sucking on his cigarette, eyelids sliding down. “I can see you’re a clever girl, a special person. Academician Beliakov was right to choose you out of all his hundreds of students over his many decades of teaching…Think of that.”

“I think he wanted to help me.” Katinka felt annoyed. She could see that he was toying with her, as he had with so many other inferior beings in his lifetime. This was another Satinov, sly and reptilian. The chilliness shocked her, poisoning her liking for him.

“Marshal, please could you answer my question. Sashenka and Vanya Palitsyn are the people I was meant to find, aren’t they? What became of them?”

Satinov shook his head, and Katinka noticed a muscle twitching in his cheek.

“There’s no record of their trial or sentencing. Could they have survived?”

“Unlikely but possible. Last year a woman found her husband, who had been arrested in 1938—he was living in Norilsk.” He gave her a brief, bitter smile. “You’re on a quest for the philosopher’s stone, which so many have sought and none has found.”

Katinka gritted her teeth and started again. “I really need your help. I need to see their files—the ones the KGB are still holding.”

He inhaled, taking his time, as always. “All right,” he said, “I’ll call some old friends in the Organs—they’re all geriatrics like me, waiting to die at their dachas, fishing, playing chess, cursing the new rich. But I’ll do my best.”

“Thank you.” She sat forward in her chair. “The files mentioned that the Palitsyns had two children, Volya and Karlmarx. What happened to them?”

“I have no idea. Like so many children of those times, they too perhaps just disappeared.”

“But how?”

“That’s your job to find out,” he said coldly, shifting in his chair. “Where did you say you came from? The northern Caucasus, wasn’t it?”

Katinka took a quick breath of excitement. He’d changed the subject, a petty diversion. She scented her prey. “May I just ask—you knew the Palitsyns. What were they like?”

He sighed. “They were dedicated Bolsheviks.”

“I saw her photograph in the file. She was so beautiful and unusual…”

“Once you saw her, you never forgot her,” he said quietly.

“But such sad eyes,” said Katinka.

Satinov’s face hardened, the angles of his Persian nose and cheekbones sharpened, became more triangular. His eyes slid closed. “She was hardly alone. There are millions of such photographs. Millions of repressed people just like her.”

Katinka could feel Satinov closing down, so she pressed him again.

“Marshal, I know you’re tired, and I’m going now…but was Roza Getman one of their children?”

“That’s enough, girl!” Mariko, draped in a black shawl like a Spanish mantilla, had come into the room. She placed herself between Katinka and Satinov. “You shouldn’t have come here in the first place. What kind of questions are you asking? My father’s tired now. You must go.”

Satinov sat back in the chair, wheezing a little.

“We’ll talk again,” he said heavily. “God willing.”

“Sorry, I’ve asked too much. I stayed too long…”

He did not smile at her again but he offered his hand, looking away.

“I’m tired now.” There was a piece of paper in his hand. “Someone you must meet. Don’t wait. You may already be too late. Say hello from me.”

11

Two days later, Katinka was awakened by the green plastic phone in her tiny, fusty room deep inside the square colossus of the Moskva Hotel. Her bed, bedside table, light and desk were all one piece of wooden furniture. The bedspread, carpet and the curtains the color of brimstone. She was dreaming about Sashenka: the woman in the photograph was talking to her.

“Don’t give up! Persevere with Satinov…” But why was Satinov so obstructive? Would he refuse to meet her again? She was still half asleep when she grabbed the phone.

“Hello,” she said. She expected it to be her parents—or maybe Roza Getman, who was phoning regularly for updates on her progress. “Hello, Katinka, any jewels in the dust?”

was how Roza always started her calls.

“This is Colonel Lentin.” Katinka was amazed: it was the Marmoset of the KGB archives.

“You wish to see more documents?”

“Yes,” she said, heart surging. “That would be wonderful.”

“Wonderful? Wonderful indeed. You’re such an enthusiast. Meet us at the CaféBar Piano at the Patriarchy Ponds at two.”

Katinka pulled on her boots and the denim miniskirt with the spangles. She was earning money for the first time in her life but still it did not feel like her own. She was using it to pay for her room, food and transportation but nothing else. She was only doing this for Roza, she told herself, so that she, like Katinka, would have a family.

She took the elevator down to the grey marble lobby, damp as wet rat fur, and walked through to another hall, where she climbed the steps, followed a corridor left then right and finally opened a red curtain to reveal a little cubbyhole with three tables and an old woman in a minuscule kitchen. The tempting tang of cooking fat and the music of sizzling eggs welcomed her. A young English journalist and an ancient Armenian man were at their usual tables, sipping espresso coffees.

“Morning, senorita,” said the old woman in a blue apron, speaking bad Russian. Her brown face, with its large jaw, was deeply wrinkled. “Spanish omelette?”

“The usual,” said Katinka. The cook was an old Spaniard who claimed to have been cooking in this cubbyhole since the Spanish Civil War.

“The best cook in Moscow!” murmured the Armenian, kissing his hand and blowing it toward the old woman.

An hour later, Katinka walked slowly up Tverskaya—the new name for Gorky Street—

and then took a left through an archway that led down to the Patriarchy Ponds, a square with a park in the middle containing two lakes surrounded by trees. Bulgakov, she knew, had lived around here, when he was writing
The Master and Margarita
. She bought an ice cream at the openair café and sat watching the couples, the children promenading, the old folk watching her watching them. Why did the Marmoset want to meet her here and not at the Lubianka? Could he be bringing the documents? No, that was impossible. So why? She did not trust these people.

At 2:00 p.m. she walked out of the square and looked around the far end of the street.

There it was—a black and white sign,
BARCAFÉ PIANO
. She went in. Rod Stewart was singing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” on the stereo. The small café was empty except for a specterthin greyhaired man behind the bar, smoking a cigarette as he poured out three thimbles of vodka, and two men at a chrome table. One of them was the Marmoset, Colonel Lentin, wearing a green sports coat and a Wimbledon tennis tie. He stood up and offered his hand.

“Come and sit down, girl.” He guided her to a chair. “Let me introduce you to my comrade here, Oleg Sergeievich Trofimsky.”

“Delighted, Katinka, delighted. Yes, sit!” Trofimsky’s head was wide and misshapen and looked as if it had been fired out of a medieval cannon, and his pitchfork beard gave him the air of an aging magician. The barman brought the vodkas and slammed them down on the table.

“No, no,” the Magician remonstrated coarsely. “Dima, bring us your oldest Scotch whiskey. This young lady’s much too cultured for mere Russian vodka.”

The barman shrugged and returned to the bar.

“Dima’s a retired comrade,” explained the Magician to Katinka, “so we—shall we say—

patronize his establishment. He’s used to my tastes, aren’t you, Dima?”

The barman rolled his eyes and brought the amber liquid.

The Magician turned back to Katinka. “Now, drink carefully. This is fifty years old, aged in oaken barrels in the Scottish isles. Its name? Laphroaig. Taste it: you see? You can taste the peat; that is the soil there. When I was in the London Embassy—my work was, shall we say, clandestine—I toured the Caledonian isles. The British royal family drink only this when they are hunting in the Scottish region. Go on, drink!”

Katinka drank, but only a sip.

“You’re a historian, are you not?” asked the Magician, stroking his pitchfork beard.

“Yes, I specialize in the eighteenth century.”

“I’ve studied history myself and I know the Velvet Book intimately, the Romanovs, Saxe

Coburgs, even the collateral lines,” he said. “It’s a hobby, shall we say. But now I’ve taught you something about civilized living, let me get straight to the point. You are researching something very different? The period of the Cult of Personality?”

“Yes, one family,” answered Katinka, cautiously.

“I know, I know, Colonel Lentin has told me. And you weren’t satisfied with the documents you were shown?”

“I would like to see others,” she said.