Winter Palace (9 page)

“To Poland?” Her eyes opened into momentary wounds, but she recovered and hid her disappointment behind a brisk tone. “If Gregor and Alexander both agree, then I suppose you must. With Alexander in the hospital, I'll have to stay here and watch the shop, won't I? Mrs. Grayson won't be
able to handle it for so long on her own.” She folded and refolded her napkin in little nervous gestures. “How long will you be gone?”

“I'm not sure,” he said, and forced it out. “Gregor wants me to travel on to the Ukraine. The young man we met at the market in Cracow, remember? He has set up a series of buys for me.”

“You'll be traveling to the Ukraine by yourself?” Now real alarm colored her voice.

“With Yussef, that's the man's name. There's no other way, Katya. Gregor can't go. And you've said yourself you have to stay here and handle the business.”

“I hear it's like the Wild West over there. Crime is out of control.” Her voice took on a pleading note. “Surely you don't really have to go?”

“Gregor thinks so. Alexander agrees.”

“How will you get there?”

“Gregor says Yussef will just drive us across the border.” Jeffrey tried to make it all sound matter-of-fact. “I don't even need to get a visa anymore. I can arrange it all at the frontier.”

“How long will you stay?”

“Gregor thinks about a week.”

“That's not too long.”

He reached for her hand. “Try not to worry, Katya.”

She pulled backed. “What do you mean? Every Polish woman is born with worry in her genes. It doubles with marriage and triples with children.” She continued to give her napkin a good workout. “You'll have to get all your shots.”

“I'll make an appointment with the doctor tomorrow,” he soothed.

“And you'll have to watch yourself every instant. Keep your suitcase locked at all times. Don't go out at night. Don't ever talk to strangers. Carry your valuables everywhere. Watch out for pickpockets. Count your money carefully every time you pay for something.”

“Yes, dear.”

“I hear there's a terrible drought and heat wave over there right now. You'll need to pack light clothes. And a hat.”

“All right, Katya.”

“And water. Don't you dare drink any water that hasn't been boiled before your very own eyes, do you hear me, Jeffrey Sinclair? And I'll have to pack you some food. There was a horrible article I saw about—”

“Yes, my beloved.”

“Take your own toilet paper. With all the shortages you'll never find any. Don't smile at me, Jeffrey. This is serious.” Her features were creased with worry. “Just look at how Western you are. You might as well have it tattooed on your forehead. Every thief within fifty kilometers is going to take you for an easy target. How are you going to communicate anything? What happens if you need help?”

“Yussef will supply a translator,” he hoped.

“That's his name? Yussef?”

“I've already told you,” he said calmly. “You're not listening, Katya.”

“I'm entrusting my husband to a strange Ukrainian called Yussef?” The napkin was balled into a tight little knot. “How do you know you can trust him?”

“Gregor does.”

But she was off and running. “What if you get over there and the hotel doesn't have your reservation? It happens all the time. You'll have to go sleep in the train station with the gypsies.” Her voice took on a slight wail. “What if there's a coup? What if—”

“The sky falls,” Jeffrey offered.

“Don't be silly. There's a drought. How could the sky—” She took on a stricken look. “Hail! What will you do if it hails?”

“Duck,” he replied. “You forgot nuclear fallout.”

She reached over and took a vice-grip on his arm. “Chernobyl! That's not too far from where you'll be, and it's just the one disaster they've told us about!”

“I think that just about covers it,” Jeffrey said, loving her deeply. “Do you feel better now?”

The little girl appeared in her eyes. “I'll miss you terribly.”

He walked around the table and embraced her. “I've not had anybody worry about me like this in a long time. Twenty-nine years old and I feel like I'm going out to the playground for the first time.”

“This is not a game, Jeffrey.”

“I know,” he said, keeping his anticipation over the adventure well hidden. “I know, Katya.”

Chapter 10

Ivona Aristonova walked through the hazy dawn toward early morning Mass. The sky retained the same washed-out blue as every morning for the past four months. The drought was the worst in history, the heat a fierce animal by midday.

Ivona went to church every morning, always for the six o'clock service. Always wearing the black lace head shawl and a coat, even on the warmest of summer dawns. Always clutching a few lilacs from her garden, to be placed before her favorite side altar. And always arriving well before Mass was to begin so as to have time to light a candle and kneel and say the ritual prayers twice through before confession.

The fact that she went to church daily made Ivona Aristonova, in her own eyes, a very religious person. Her neighbors, too, considered her devout because she followed the visible pattern. There was little room in her tightly controlled world for the inner life of faith, but she valued the ritual of the church. Church ritual was understandable. It was definable. It was a visible path to follow. The knowledge that she was walking on the sure path toward eternal rest made the misery of her past bearable.

Ivona Aristonova showed great respect toward all priests, although in her mind not all priests deserved it. She bowed to each one, spoke with reverence, felt keen pleasure when one of God's chosen envoys paid her special attention.

Her prayer time involved a fair amount of breast-beating. She could not aspire to sainthood, so she settled for martyrdom. When she thought of her past, which was seldom and never for very long, she felt the stern satisfaction of knowing that her suffering had earned her God's grace.

She knew, in theory, that God was a God of love. But the reality to her was that the Lord was a wrathful judge. She lived in fear of God's judgment at all times. Forgiveness was
something longed for, penance counted out with her prayer beads, salvation left for the life after this one.

After she had lit her candle and dipped a finger in the basin of holy water and crossed herself and knelt in the same pew she occupied every morning, Ivona lowered her head in prayer. But instead of beginning the chant of words that usually came without thought or realization of what she was saying, today her mind moved to the coming meeting with Yussef and the bishop. For some reason she herself could not understand, the topic of their discussion troubled her enormously.

And from there her mind flitted to the past. It was an act that she seldom permitted. But today she had no choice. The memories rose unbidden and refused to go away. Ivona knelt and fingered her prayer beads and struggled to begin her prayers, fighting the images that welled up inside her.

She remembered a white bow for her hair.

She remembered how her father had fashioned the clip from a strand of metal chipped from his saw blade. The ribbon had come from her mother's last petticoat. It had been her twelfth birthday present, a far better gift than the one from the previous year. For her eleventh birthday, the shifting tides of war and men in power had sent her on her first train ride. In an unheated boxcar. For seventeen days.

Ivona Aristonova had spent her early years in Poland, part of the large population of Ukrainians who lived in northern and eastern Poland before the Second World War. When the Russians had invaded Poland at the end of the war, most of her town had fallen victim to Stalin's program of Russification. The objective was to quash patriotism to anything but the great Soviet empire through massive relocation efforts, shifting populations about and blurring borders. Populations who might have a legitimate claim to seized property, such as the Poles and the Ukrainians and Jews, had been sent to projects in the distant north.

Ivona Aristonova knelt with eyes tightly closed and remembered how her family had been deposited about one hundred
kilometers from a city called Archangelsk. This was west of the Ural Mountains, still in European Russia. But it was at the same latitude as Asiatic Russia, the region known as Siberia, and less than five hundred kilometers below the Arctic Circle.

Their village had stood at the border of a forest. And such a forest. Primeval. Virgin. Limitless. It stretched unbroken from her village all the way to where the ice conquered all. Other than the one road running from their village to distant Archangelsk, there was nothing but trees stretching to the end of the world.

Her father and mother, along with everyone else, had been put to work in the forest. It did not matter that her father had been a schoolteacher and her mother the administrator of a hospital. In that nameless village, the men had cut down trees and the women had chopped off the bark and the smaller limbs. The children had gathered what they could to supplement a meager diet, learning from those who had come earlier to spend every daylight hour searching for food.

Ivona knelt and fingered her beads and remembered what it was like to watch her parents wither under the strain of simply surviving. She remembered how each passing day became another blow pounding home the lesson that had shaped her remaining days; the lesson that love was a luxury she could not afford.

To her vast relief, the priest intoned the opening words of the Mass. Ivona rose to her feet and managed to push away the unbidden memories. For a few moments she was able to lose herself in comfortable ritual and forget all that lay both ahead and behind.

Her husband went to Mass with her on Sundays, more to keep Ivona company than as an act of faith. Yet he was glad that she went to daily services, for in God's infinite grace he also would be remembered through his wife's penance. He was an engineer, a steady man, called good by all who knew him. An honest man. Not a drinker. A man who loved her dearly and did as well by her as this chaotic world permitted.
A man who never ceased his yearning to have her return his love.

The women of her circle were certain that Ivona and her husband were bound in a loveless marriage because her husband could not have children. Ivona was called a saint because she bore the martyrdom of childlessness in silence. Ivona did not contradict them. She found it best to wrap her life in layers of secrecy and deny nothing.

After Mass was completed, she hurried back to the church offices to begin her work as the bishop's secretary. Only the bishop and his questions in the confessional threatened to uncover the truth. And she hated the truth most of all.

“There can be no further delay,” Bishop Michael Denisov told the pair. “Every day raises the risk of our treasures' having departed from Russian soil. If that happens, they shall be lost to us forever.”

Ivona shifted uncomfortably. “I still do not like it. An unknown man—”

“To you he is unknown,” Yussef interrupted.

“—being entrusted with the secret of our greatest treasure,” she persisted. “It is too dangerous.”

“Not so dangerous as leaving our treasures in the hands of the Orthodox,” Yussef replied. Yussef was Ivona's nephew, her sister's son, a slender young man of fierce independence. For their extended family, his trading with the West had meant the difference between starvation and a relatively comfortable life. And now he was suggesting they use one of these trading contacts to assist with the church's most recent crisis. An American. A dealer in antiques. A man whom Yussef knew by the name of Jeffrey Sinclair.

“We do not know for certain that the Orthodox are involved,” the bishop cautioned.

“We know,” Yussef stated flatly. “You are too kind when it comes to dealing with our enemies.”

“Not all Orthodox,” the bishop replied, “are such. Not all.”

“Enough,” Yussef retorted. “And with our treasures most of all.”

Bishop Michael waved it aside. “Be that as it may, we need an outsider. Someone who can come and go at will. Who will not be suspected. Who has reason to be asking the questions we ourselves cannot ask. Who can mask your activities as you continue your search.”

“Someone we can trust,” Ivona insisted.

“This man we can,” Yussef replied.

The bishop asked, “And when does he arrive?”

“Nine days,” Yussef replied. “We meet in Cracow.”

“But an American,” Ivona protested. “A Protestant and a stranger to our cause.”

“A friend,” Yussef countered, “who has proven himself to be trustworthy.”

“For the sake of gain,” she scoffed. “He does what he says he will because it pays.”

“He does what he promises because he is an honorable man,” Yussef countered. “I know this. In my heart of hearts I know.”

“But how can we be sure?” Ivona complained. “How can we know that he will do as we ask and not work for his own profit?”

“You must test him,” the bishop replied simply.

“Test him how,” she said, disconsolate. “I know nothing of such things.”

“Nor do any of us,” Bishop Michael agreed. “And so you shall teach him about us and our past and our ways. You are good at that. Teach, and watch his response.”

“I know his response,” she replied sharply. “He will be a Westerner. He will smile and nod and say, how nice. He will be naive beyond belief. He will have the face of an infant and a mind like bubble gum.”

“This is not so,” Yussef replied quietly. “How can you say this when you have never met him?”

“All Westerners are such,” Ivona replied, not sure herself why she felt so cross at the idea. “Americans especially.”

“Jeffrey Sinclair is an honorable man,” Yussef repeated, without heat.