She fixed her eyes, imploringly, on to Satinov’s sharp orbs with their half-closed lids. At first they showed nothing. But then they seemed to twinkle and the old man wrenched off his oxygen mask. ‘Oh Mariko, stop fussing.’ He spoke with difficulty. ‘Bring us tea.’ Mariko sighed loudly and stomped out. ‘How did you get in, girl?’
‘Someone let me in through the street door and then I found your door ajar.’
Satinov absorbed this. ‘Fate, that’s what it is. Don’t forget that’s why you’re here.’ He gave a skull-like smile.
Katinka sat down on the divan near him and he opened his wizened hands as if to say – go on then, girl, give it to me.
‘I found Snowy.’ He nodded appreciatively. ‘Lala Lewis told me everything. You were a hero. You saved the children. Snowy wants to meet you to say thank you.’
He shook his head and waved his hand. ‘Too late,’ he rasped. ‘Have you found her brother too?’
‘Not yet. I’m still trying to work out what happened to Sashenka.’
‘Leave them. Concentrate on Carlo! The children, the future …’
‘Sashenka and Vanya were your best friends, weren’t they?’
‘Sashenka was … there was no one like her – and the children …’ His blue eyes softened and for a moment Katinka thought she saw tears. She made herself go on.
‘That was why Stalin summoned you to the Little Corner when he read the transcript of Benya and Sashenka. He was aware you’d known them since Petersburg and that you were Roza’s godfather. He’d seen you all together at the May Day party. Did he want to find out what you knew about them?’
Satinov blinked and said nothing.
‘Beria left and you arrived at 10.30 p.m. – I’ve seen Stalin’s appointments book. But then what happened? Sashenka had had an affair. Vanya was jealous and bugged their hotel room. How did that grow into Captain Sagan’s conspiracy and the destruction of an entire family?’
‘I don’t know,’ whispered Satinov.
‘Why did Stalin request all the files on the case?’ She glared at him. Cold bloodshot eyes looked back. ‘You’re not going to answer that either? How can you pretend you don’t know what happened?’
‘Just find Carlo,’ Satinov wheezed. ‘You must be so close.’
‘And what did Stalin mean when he wrote Bicho to curate?’
There was a long pause during which Satinov breathed painfully. ‘Read my memoirs carefully,’ he said at last.
‘Believe it or not, I’ve read every word of your interminable speeches on peaceful coexistence and your heroic role in forging the socialist motherland and there’s not a word of humanity in it.’ His eyes were fixed on her but she didn’t stop. ‘You’ve lied to me again and again. The KGB has concealed its crimes but today I got hold of the transcript of Sashenka’s trial. You were at the trial of your best friend!’
His breathing creaked.
‘Take a look,’ she said, pulling out the first page of the trial.
‘I haven’t got my spectacles.’
‘Well, let me help you then. Here, look at this. It’s you, Marshal Satinov! You didn’t just attend the trial,’ she was almost yelling at him, ‘you were a judge.’
‘Read my judgement,’ he gasped.
‘You sat there in judgement on your best friend, the mother of your godchild. Sashenka found you at the trial. What did she think when she saw you? What went through her mind? I thought you were a hero. You saved Snowy and Carlo yet you presided over Sashenka’s destruction! Was she sentenced to death? Or did she die in the Gulags? Tell me, tell me! You owe it to her children!’
Satinov’s face tightened as his breathing constricted and his mouth gaped open.
To her shame, Katinka fought back her own tears. ‘How could you have done such a thing? How could you?’
‘What’s going on in here?’ Mariko appeared in the doorway, holding a tea tray. ‘What is it, Papa?’
As Katinka left the room, she looked back at the old man. The oxygen mask was on his face, his lips were blue, a wiry arm was raised – and a gnarled finger pointed towards the door.
19
Judge Ulrikh: Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn, you have confessed to a remarkable conspiracy to kill our heroic leaders, Comrade Stalin and the Politburo, at your own house. We have read your confession. Do you have anything more to say?
Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I plotted to kill the great Stalin at my house. I rubbed arsenic and cyanide powder on to the curtains of the room where Comrade Stalin would stand.
Judge Ulrikh: And the gramophone?
Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: Yes, on the gramophone too. I had heard from various comrades, including my husband Vanya, that Comrade Stalin liked to listen to music after dinner so I dusted the gramophone with cyanide dust.
Judge Satinov: Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn, we need more details …
Satinov was speaking for the first time at the trial. Katinka could almost hear the voices of these flint-hearted men in the pine-panelled office in the Sukhanovka Prison, lit up in a bright electric glare in the middle of the night. NKVD guards in blue stood armed at the doors. Ulrikh, with his bullet-like bald head, sat behind the desk with Satinov and the other judge, all in their Stalinka tunics and gleaming boots.
As soon as she had left that disastrous meeting with Satinov, Katinka had called Maxy, repeating what had been said word for word, trying to disguise her tears. But Maxy was encouraging. Satinov had told her to read his judgement, so she must read it right away. Satinov had told her to read his memoirs – and that must mean something too. Maxy proposed that they meet at midday the next day at the closed Archive for Special Secret Political-Administrative Documents, through the archway off Mayakovsky Square.
Now it was the middle of the night and Katinka was reading the trial in her seedy room at the Moskva Hotel. She poured herself a shot of vodka – for courage and to overcome her exhaustion. Through her little window, the red stars of the Kremlin glowed.
Judge Satinov: How did you procure this cyanide? Tell the Tribunal!
Katinka imagined Sashenka standing at the end of the T-shaped table, pale, thin, battered but still beautiful. But what must she have thought as she was tried for her life and found Hercules Satinov on the Tribunal right there in front of her? She must have struggled to show no emotion, not even a flicker of recognition – everyone would be watching for her reaction and his. But imagine her surprise, her shock – and her overriding concern: are the children safe? Or does Satinov’s presence mean that the children …
Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I will, Comrade Judge. Vanya procured it from the NKVD Laboratory.
Judge Satinov: How did you know which records to poison?
Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I knew Comrade Stalin enjoys Georgian folk music, the songs from the movies Volga, Volga and Jolly Fellows, and the arias of Glinka and Tchaikovsky. So I poisoned those.
Judge Satinov: You were serving the Japanese Emperor, the Polish landowners and the British lords in conspiracy with Trotsky?
Katinka’s skin crawled as she pictured what was going through Sashenka’s mind: Snowy and Carlo – where are you?
Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: Yes, Trotsky ordered the assassination in diabolical compact with the Japanese Emperor and the British lords.
Judge Satinov: And the network of the White Guard, Captain Sagan, who controlled you on Trotsky’s behalf, forcing you to use the methods he had taught you as a young girl?
Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: You mean the sexual depravity? Yes, and I used that to recruit further agents such as the writer Benya Golden.
Judge Satinov: Did the writer Golden become an agent? Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I tried to recruit him using the wiles taught me by Captain Sagan but – as I must tell the truth before the Party – Golden was a dilettante non-Party philistine who lacked vigilance but he never joined the conspiracy. He regarded it as ‘play-acting’.
Judge Ulrikh: You’re amending your confession? Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I have
to tell the truth before Comrade Stalin and the Party. I am myself guilty; my husband and Captain Sagan are guilty but Golden was a child incapable of conspiracy.
Katinka could not help but smile at this. Now she knew that Sashenka had truly loved Benya Golden too. Wasn’t this insult to Golden more romantic than any love song?
Judge Satinov: Comrade Judges, I’m almost overcome with disgust at the evil and depravity of this serpent woman, this black widow spider. Are we ready to consider the case?
Katinka fought back tears as she read this tragic-comic exchange. Did Satinov mean this? Did Sashenka believe he meant it? Sashenka must have looked at her friend, sending him message after message: are the children settled? Are they safe? Or have you betrayed us? A mother’s questions. Katinka lit a cigarette and read on.
Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I must declare before the court that my greatest regret and shame are the crimes I’ve committed before the Party and that the future … posterity … will remember me as a scoundrel.
Posterity? Was this a message to Satinov?
Judge Ulrikh (presiding): All right, are we Comrade Judges ready? Any comment?
Judge Lansky (second judge): What wickedness. No other comment.
Judge Ulrikh: Comrade Satinov?
Judge Satinov (third judge): Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn confesses to shocking crimes in a lifetime of deception and mask-wearing. I must ask the court to forgive me for saying that, due to the vigilance of the NKVD investigation, we the Soviet people are grateful that our brilliant Leader of the Peoples, Comrade Stalin, is safe, that his loyal comrades Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Andreyev and other Politburo members are now safe finally from spies, traitors and Trotskyites, safe in their offices and homes from this poisoning viper in their midst. They are now safe, quite safe. There is only one possible punishment, the way we treat mad, rabid dogs, the justice of the people … Thank you, Comrade Ulrikh.
Katinka could scarcely breathe. She read it again, and then again, and it was unmistakable: the sign. Satinov said ‘safe’, and then repeated it four times in all. Two ‘safe’s for Snowy, two ‘safe’s for Carlo. So Satinov had not betrayed Sashenka. Instead he was really saying, ‘Dear friend, die easy if you can, the children are safe! I repeat, the children are safe!’
What relief for Sashenka. Yet the judgement was missing: did she survive after all? There it was, just the same note – papers sent to Central Committee.
Dawn was coming up over Moscow, as Katinka’s head fell forward on to the transcripts that still rested on her knee.
Judge Ulrikh: Thank you, Comrade Satinov, let us retire to make our judgement.
Judges retire.
20
An upstart sun in an eggshell-blue sky threw golden beams on to Mayakovsky’s statue. Katinka walked up Tverskaya, first passing the statue of Prince Dolgoruky on one side and then Pushkin on the other, towards the new archive. She had woken up too early and with a cricked neck when Maxy had phoned, then gone back to sleep. But she still ached as if she had been pummelled and only a bracing double espresso at the Coffee Bean café on Tverskaya – good coffee was one of the benefits of democracy, she thought – had restored some of her spirits.
Carrying a bulky package under her arm, she passed Mayakovsky Metro and took a left through one of those red granite archways that help give Moscow its sombre and hostile grandeur. She found herself on a tiny road that seemed to be a cul-de-sac, but just when she could go no further it turned sharply once and then again, becoming narrower. Katinka relished this unlikely, meandering lane in the midst of the unforgiving metropolis, as if she was discovering a jumbled village behind the granite walls and ramparts of those roaring boulevards. After the second twist, she came upon an ochre wall with a white top and then a black steel gate, which was open and leading to some steps. Maxy’s bike was parked next to a plaque engraved with Lenin’s domed profile.
‘You look tired – did you get any sleep? You procured what I suggested?’ he asked.
Katinka nodded at her package. ‘It was the most expensive stuff I’ve ever bought and I had to ask Pasha Getman for permission.’
‘Three hundred dollars is nothing to him. Did you tell him what it was?’
‘I thought it better not to.’
‘Well, it’s our only hope. This woman will do anything for that.’ Then Maxy took her hand. ‘I fear you’re becoming even more obsessional than me about the secret lives of fifty years ago. Are you ready?’
‘Yes, but how are you getting us in? I thought you said—’
‘Don’t worry, I’ve organized it all. Now remember,’ he continued, straight-faced, ‘I booked you an appointment to apply to make an application to apply to peruse the list of documents held in this archive, and I can now inform you that our application to make an application will of course be refused. Go on in, Katinka. Good luck.’
‘I feel uneasy about this. Will it work or will I get arrested?’
‘One or the other.’ He laughed. ‘Just think, two weeks ago you’d never have tried such a stunt. But be confident. Look as if you know where you’re going and you’re entitled to get what you want. I’ll see you later.’
She watched him kickstart the bike and saw the horned helmet disappear into the hidden lanes before she turned to enter the high gothic slab with pillars and balconies embellished by heroes carved in stone and bronze.
At the wooden desk, the two teenaged Interior Ministry soldiers half dozed in their battered chairs but sat up at the sight of Katinka. The spottier of the two conscripts slid the signing-in book along the desk, examined her passport with a sneer intended to project the power invested in him by the Russian state, checked a collage of yellow chits on his desk and found one bearing her name, wrote out another chit on a further badly printed scrap and then with the hint of a virile smirk handed back the paper, keeping the passport, and gestured grandly towards the lifts in the white marble hall behind him. ‘Application for archives, fourth floor.’
She scarcely dared look back but sensed a presence. A skinny young man with a bald head, yellow plastic shoes and a grey anorak was hanging up his coat in the cloakroom and watching her intently. A strange crew, these archive rats, Katinka thought, as she hurried on and entered the lift. As its doors were about to close, a hand held them back and the archive rat came in, nodding at her nervously but saying nothing. He was pulling on his archivist’s stained yellow coat, like a laboratory assistant, his red-rimmed eyes magnified and eager through his smeared spectacles.
The lift was small and they stood so awkwardly close that the archive rat kept trying to apologize but never quite managed it, as each of his attempts at conversation ended in him starting to hum. Katinka flattened herself against the wall, horribly close to the pasty dome of his head with its rare colourless hairs, livid blotches and beads of sweat. She pressed the bell for the fifth floor but he pressed the fourth and when the quivering lift jolted to a halt, the doors opened and he got out, holding them open.
‘Your floor.’ He wasn’t asking, he was telling her. ‘Applications.’
But Katinka shook her head twice. The rat looked surprised and remained standing there quizzically as the doors closed. Katinka cringed, knowing she’d been caught out because, as Maxy had explained, ‘outside applicants are not permitted to visit the fifth floor’.
The lift opened on a landing with misted glass doors, some tatty plastic palms and a grand portrait frame – with no picture inside it. Directorate of the Study of Dialectical Materialism and Leninist Economic-Political Historical Questions of the Soviet Union read the plaque, to which someone had taped a note: The Russian State Archive of Special Secret Political-Administrative Documents.
‘It would be best if you didn’t meet anyone up there,’ Maxy had told her – so she expected the archive rat to jump out at her with the poxy teenaged guards at any moment.
The long parquet corridors with lines of closed pine doors were hushed. The passages were much too hot – the winter heating was still
on. Katinka checked the engraved plaques that announced a name and title on each door. She turned right and then right again until she heard the blare of opera – Glinka’s famous aria from A Life for the Tsar. When she turned again, the music got louder and louder as she approached the last door.
Agrippina Constantinovna Begbulatov, Director of Manuscripts, read the plaque. Quite a name. Katinka listened at the door: the music was reaching a climax. Should she have made an appointment? No, Maxy had said that was too dangerous.
She knocked. No answer. She knocked again. Nothing. Katinka cursed obstructive dinosaurs like Satinov, the maddeningly rigid bureaucrats, the frustrations of this project, and just opened the door.
A very large, white-skinned woman of advanced years lay sleeping on a divan in her underwear, her eyes covered by a mask that read American Airways.
The room was hot, the music rippled out of a modern CD player, and the perfumes within were heady. Katinka had only a moment to register two fans whirring, piles of yellowed manuscripts and two mountainous thighs flowing over lacy stocking tops before the woman was pulling off her mask and coming towards her.
‘How dare you barge in here! Who are you? Have you no manners? Are you some sort of cultureless philistine?’ The whale-sized woman looked Katinka up and down as if she had never seen a young girl in denim and boots in the sacred archive. ‘Who gave you permission to burst in on me?’
‘Umm, no one.’ Katinka was lost momentarily.
‘Then please leave and never return!’ cried the woman, whose capacious milky bosoms strained even her rigidly structured brassiere.
‘No, no.’ Katinka was struggling now, blushing and stammering. ‘I was just asked to deliver something to you. It’s here … for you.’ She raised the package.
The woman angrily yanked off a mauve hairnet. ‘I’m not expecting anything,’ she said, peering craftily at the package. Katinka had little left to lose. She tried not to look at the suspender belt, the generous flesh-coloured pants or any of the other eye-catching parts of the vision before her. ‘It’s a gift from …’ she checked up and down the corridor, to suggest that the lady might not like her colleagues to witness the delivery of the package, ‘well, I’d prefer to tell you in private.’