Rasputin's Shadow

8

Little Italy, Manhattan

Without bothering to remove his shoes, Sokolov swung his legs up onto the creaky bed, sat back, and closed his eyes. He tried to master his breathing and slow his still-racing heartbeat, but all he could think was that his life, his second life, the one he’d built up over decades and had grown to love, was now over.

Out in the open, he had very deliberately kept his mind away from the circumstances of his flight and from that debilitating conclusion. Now that he was alone and-he hoped-safe, at least for the time being, his attention slipped back to earlier that day, back at his apartment, back when he merely thought his wife was late, rather than in the hands of those monsters.

They have Daphne.

They have my laposhka.

The thought forced Sokolov to sit up again, bolt upright. His lips were quivering, as were his hands. He looked around his crummy hotel room in abject panic. The sight was as grim and desperate as he felt. The walls were cracked, and two columns of dirty yellow light were leaking into the room through moth-eaten drapes from a streetlamp outside. He could almost hear the mites and roaches scratching and scurrying around beneath him. He shut his eyes again and tried to imagine that he was back at home in Astoria, listening to his beloved music with his even-more-beloved Daphne curled up next to him on the couch, but his mind wouldn’t play along and forced him to confront the reality of his situation: that he was hiding in a thirty-dollar-a-night roach-fest in Little Italy, his wife was being held captive, and he had killed a man.

THE APARTMENT’S ENTRY BUZZER sounded in the hallway, and Sokolov checked his watch. It could only be Daphne, of course-who else would it be that early in the morning? No doubt she was running late and her keys were buried at the bottom of her bag. Not the first time that had happened, nor would it be the last.

“Here you go, laposhka,” he said as he buzzed her in. “I’ll get the tea ready.”

Leaving the front door open, he hummed along to the Rachmaninoff coming from the living room as he padded back to the kitchen, thinking he didn’t have that much time before he’d have to set off to work. He turned the kettle on and slipped a couple of slices of rye bread into the toaster, but as he waited to hear her walk into the apartment, something deep within clawed at him-and the unfamiliar, sharp footfalls he heard coming his way only confirmed his unease.

His body taut with apprehension, he stepped out of the kitchen and into the foyer, only to come face-to-face with a complete stranger. Sokolov immediately knew he was Russian. Not just Russian. An agent of the Russian state. He emitted that unmistakable combination of arrogance, resentment, and thinly suppressed violence, traits Sokolov knew well.

Traits he’d happily left behind many years ago.

They’d found him.

And given the ominous timing, it meant they also had Daphne.

Sokolov’s heart imploded. He’d finally made the mistake of sticking his head above the parapet, just once, after all this time, and almost immediately, his wife had paid the price. Nothing was more Russian than that. Not even the unblinking eyes staring at him.

“Dobroe utro, Comrade Shislenko,” the man greeted him with a sneer of blunt irony as he pulled a handgun from his black leather coat and leveled it at Sokolov’s chest.

Sokolov stared at the gun and backed away from his uninvited guest, as instructed by the sideways flicks of the gun in the man’s hand, until he was standing in his living room.

“Thank you for alerting us to your whereabouts-and, indeed, to your intentions-in so unambiguous a manner,” he told Sokolov in Russian.

Sokolov was standing by the stereo. “Where’s my wife?” he asked as his fingers reached out and hit a button on his CD player, killing the Rachmaninoff.

The man’s face soured. “Why’d you stop it? I thought the concerto added a nice nostalgic ambiance to our little gathering, no?”

“Where’s Daphne?” Sokolov insisted, his voice breaking.

“Oh, she’s fine. And she’ll stay fine as long as you behave,” the man told him as he sat down in an armchair facing the window.

He gestured for Sokolov to sit on the sofa adjacent to him, by the wall of bookshelves that were jammed with books and home to an elaborate hi-fi and a pair of expensive-looking speakers.

The speakers were positioned in such a way that the far armchair was the optimal listening point. Sokolov had spent many hours sitting in that very chair, reading the Times and listening to Scriabin preludes and Tchaikovsky ballets. Right now, it was precisely where he needed his guest to be sitting.

“We should charge you for all the resources we spent looking for you all these years, both here and back home. But no matter. We have you now. Once you’ve given us what we want-what you stole-we’ll let your wife go free. I can’t promise the same for you. That’s out of my hands.” The man scratched one unshaven cheek with the muzzle of his gun. “Does she even know who you are?”

Sokolov shook his head.

“Good. We suspected that would be the case. So her safety depends entirely on your actions,” the man said-then an odd, confused look flooded his face, and a thin film of sweat broke out across his forehead.

Sokolov watched nervously as the man switched the handgun to his left hand and back again as he shrugged himself out of his coat.

“Why do you keep the place so hot?” he asked. “And what’s that noise?” The man rubbed his ear irritably. “Sounds like you have cockroaches in the walls.”

Sokolov leaned forward and, concentrating as hard as he could to stay in control, stared directly into the man’s eyes.

“Don’t worry about the tarakanchiki. They don’t care about you. Tell me, Comrade. What is your name?”

The man furrowed his brow and winced, as if he had just stepped on a tack. He seemed to wonder about the question for a moment, then, his expression vacant, he said, “Fyodor Yakovlev. Third secretary to the Russian Consulate of New York.” He looked lost, as if he wasn’t quite sure that this was the case.

Sokolov kept his eyes lasered on his captor, his concentration absolute. He knew his whole existence from here on depended on this moment, and with each sentence, he slowed and deepened his voice, accentuating seemingly random syllables.

“If they see the gun, they will be angry. You should place the gun on the table,” he told the man.

“Who? Who will be angry?”

“You know who will be angry,” Sokolov told him. “They will be very angry. Now, why don’t you show them you mean well and put your gun down on the table.” He tapped the coffee table with his fingers. “This table right here.”

Yakovlev stared at him for a moment, then slowly placed his gun on the glass table between them. Sokolov made no attempt to pick it up.

After a moment, Yakovlev shifted in his chair, then made to retrieve his gun, as though he knew he’d just made a grave mistake.

“No,” snapped Sokolov.

Yakovlev withdrew his hand as though an electrical charge had just run through it. He looked like a child who’d just had his knuckles rapped.

Sokolov immediately reverted to the deep and arrhythmic intonation. “They’ll think you mean them harm. Go over to the window and see if they are still watching you.”

The man’s entire face was now covered in perspiration. He stood, leaving the gun on the glass table, and wandered silently over to the window. He peered outside, taking several seconds to scan every element of the window’s aspect.

Sokolov remained in the armchair, motionless. “Do you see them?”

“Yes.”

“So now, you can understand why I need to talk to my wife. She will be worried. About both of us.”

Yakovlev nodded, then took out his cell phone and pushed a speed-dial button.

And then it happened.

At that exact moment, a fire truck’s siren pierced the air outside. A blaring wail ripped through their ears and kept coming. Yakovlev blinked twice, looked down at his empty right hand, then swiftly located the gun on the glass table. But before he managed his first step away from the window, Sokolov had launched himself out of his chair.

He threw himself across the room and crashed his entire body weight into the off-balance target, sending the man smashing through the glass, then shoving him over the windowsill and out through six stories of New York air and onto the sidewalk below.

Sokolov heard the splat and the screams, but he didn’t dare look out the window. His heart was kicking and screaming its way out of his chest. He looked around in desperation, then acted. He picked up the cell phone from the carpet where Yakovlev had dropped it, and slipped it into a pocket. He also picked up the handgun that had fallen from the Russian. Then he crossed to the shelves and hit the Eject button on the multi-CD player. While he waited impatiently, the tray slid out. He fished out the disc that was in the front-most position and slipped it into another pocket.

Then he rushed out of the apartment, wondering if he would make it out of the building alive and unseen.

SOKOLOV’S MIND SNAPPED BACK to the present as his eyes settled on the ’80s-style LED clock on the side table.

It read 10:5-. He assumed that meant ten fifty-something. He wished he had some of his sleeping pills. He wished he could lie down and just fall asleep. He wanted to burn away as much of the night as he could, to let the nightmare dissipate and allow a new day to rise and wash away this insanity and let his real life resume its normal course. He needed to delay, as far into the future as possible, the moment when he would have to make a decision.

But that wasn’t the solution.

That wasn’t going to get his wife back.

A siren-another damn siren-broke through the hubbub outside the hotel. And although Sokolov had a passion for sounds and what some would mistakenly call noise, he hated pointless, random cacophony, which is what was assaulting his senses through the hotel’s loose-fitting window. When he had first come to America, it had taken him a long time to get used to the constant noise of the big metropolis. Moscow had been deathly quiet when he left, way back then. He knew everything had suddenly changed. For better, first-and then, for worse.

He rubbed his face and glanced at the side table again.

His wallet was there, with what was left from the thousand dollars he’d taken from an ATM not long after he’d slipped out of his building’s service entrance. That was his daily limit, and he knew he needed to make it last, thinking it would probably be unwise to use the card again. The gun and the cell phone that he had taken from his unannounced Russian visitor were also there, beside the broken clock. He needed to hide them-he half expected that they’d be stolen during the night. He saw the TV remote and picked it up, stuck the single battery back inside the remote with the final few molecules of glue left on the frayed black tape, and switched on the pawn-shop TV that was pointlessly anchored to the wall.

He flicked through the channels until he found the local news.

An update soon appeared, about a Russian diplomat falling to his death in Astoria. The reporter said there were no witnesses and no suspect-but then Sokolov’s face appeared, right there on the screen for the world to see. His face, and Daphne’s, side by side. Not as suspects, but as the occupants of the apartment the man had fallen from.

The nerve endings throughout his body flared with alarm.

He knew the bastards were only telling the Americans what suited them. Which meant the siloviki henchmen were in charge of the playbook, and New York’s finest were watching from the sidelines.

He threw the remote at the screen in disgust, but missed. It split into pieces and fell to the floor.

What do I do?

I can’t go to the police, he thought. A Russian agent just went through my window, for God’s sake. What would I tell them, anyway? “The KGB”-no, the FSB, that’s what these gangsters call themselves today, even though they were the same people, the same sadistic thugs, just a shiny, new, supposedly democratized version of the same old murderous machine-“the FSB took my wife?”

“Why would they do that, Mr. Sokolov?” the cops would ask. What answer could he give to that, what answer could he possibly give that wouldn’t trigger an entirely different brand of pain from an entirely different brand of murderous machine, pain not just for him but for God only knew how many others… all because of a futile, misguided attempt to save her. More than misguided. Pathetically naïve, really, because he knew that calling for help would end in dismal failure. He knew the Americans would never let him go either. They’d never leave him the freedom to carry on with his harmless little life and live happily ever after with his beloved Daphne. Not once they knew who he was. And certainly not after they got what they wanted from him.

Then another realization hit him.

If they don’t know who I really am, then they must think I’m a murderer.

A wanted man. A fugitive, on the run-even if they’re not saying it yet.

Were they just trying to lull him into handing himself in?

Maybe they know.

His quivering increased.

No, he couldn’t go to the cops.

Which didn’t leave him many other options. None at all, in fact. He was on his own, cast out of his home in the darkening city, on a citywide alert, the Costa Rica holiday picture they took from his apartment popping up on computer screens in police cruisers all over town, a man wanted for questioning in the suspicious death of a Russian government official.

He was on his own.

The thought tightened around him, and the city felt darker and meaner than it ever had before.

He had to make things right. For Daphne’s sake. He had to do everything he could to save her. Nothing else mattered. She was the one beacon in his life, the one good thing to have ever happened to him. An outlier in a life that had been plagued by bad choices.

He wondered what shape she was in right then. His imagination veered into horrific territory and he tried to rein it in. His throat tightened at the thought that Daphne would have no idea why she was being held. She would be scared, terrified even-though she wouldn’t give her captors the gratification of showing it. Thirty-eight years as a nurse-the last eleven at Mount Sinai in Queens-had given his wife the toughened exterior of a Marine, even though Sokolov knew that inside she was still the delicate, sweet-hearted girl that he’d first met thirty years ago.

He needed to toughen up too.

He’d done it before. He needed to draw on those instincts again and make the impossible happen.

He’d brought this calamity upon himself. All of it. Right from the start. Right from the day when, as a curious fourteen-year-old, he’d made that fateful discovery in the cellar of his ancestral home.

The day that set everything else in motion.

IT WASN’T A GRAND HOME. There was no such thing in Soviet Russia, not unless you were part of the ruling Politburo. Sokolov’s family wasn’t anything like that. He had grown up in a farming lodge on a small plot of land in Karovo, eight miles away from the nearest village and a hundred miles south of Moscow.

His grandfather had lived and died in that same cottage. Sokolov knew all about their family history. At least, he thought he did, until that day.

His father had told him how Sokolov’s grandfather Misha had arrived there shortly after the 1917 revolution. He’d settled there after a harrowing journey from St. Petersburg across a country ravaged by civil war. He’d found a haven in its idyllic landscape of birch forests, bluffs, and lush flood meadows that hugged the meandering Oka River. In better days, Karovo had been an estate comprised of a manor house, six villages, and good land. There was a gravity pump to bring water up from the spring; a steam mill where rye, barley, and buckwheat were ground; and a distillery where spirits were produced from potatoes. Then the Bolsheviks had taken over. The landowner was kicked out and his estate was turned into a kolkhoz-a collective farm. The manor house was turned into a teachers’ training institute and, after World War II, it became an orphanage for the hordes of children who had been left homeless by the war. By the time Sokolov was a young boy, it had become a run-down weekend rest house for the workers of the giant turbine plant at Kaluga, some forty kilometers to the west, a far cry from its former glory.

Misha had worked the fields. He’d married a laundress, a former employee of the estate’s owner. They’d had seven children, more able bodies to toil the land and feed the masses. Two of them had died during the hardships of Stalin’s Great Purge, and the second world war almost finished off the rest. Four of Sokolov’s uncles had died in various battles. His father, though, had survived, and he’d managed to return safely to Karovo, where he resumed working the fields, like his father. Men were in short supply after the war, and he’d had his pick of the town’s prettiest girls. He’d ended up marrying the daughter of a schoolteacher, Alina, who had given him four children, all boys. The youngest of them was Sokolov, who was born in 1951.

As in the rest of Soviet Russia, life in Karovo was hard. Sokolov’s parents worked long hours for little pay. He and his brothers had to work hard too, from a young age. Life under Soviet rule offered few treats, and there was little comfort to be had. The soil was tough and difficult to work. The huge wood-burning stoves were hard to keep alive. Drinking water needed to be brought over in buckets from a distant well. And at the cottage, the outhouse was mired in ankle-deep mud for most of the year. Food was scarce, the collective farm inefficient and badly run. The village shop was almost always bare. Frost-bitten potatoes, beets, cabbage, and onions were often the only nourishment available to stave off starvation.

Stuck in this harsh reality, Sokolov escaped into a fantasy life whenever he could. His mother, in particular, had been a wonderful storyteller. She was a font of knowledge, and while his father would drink himself to sleep every night, she would regale Sokolov and his brothers with all kinds of stories and folktales. In the centralized Marxist-Leninist education system Sokolov grew up in, the collective took precedence over the interests of the individual, and creativity and imagination were frowned upon. Sokolov’s mother quietly disagreed and encouraged his whimsy and his ravenous curiosity. Sokolov’s imagination was his escape from the dire conditions of his daily life, especially after the untimely death of his mother from tuberculosis when he was twelve.

One of the stories his mother had told them was about a grisly discovery at the Yusupov Palace, the former home of one of Russia’s wealthiest families and once the home of Felix Yusupov, one of the self-confessed murderers of Grigory Rasputin. The discovery had taken place after the revolution, when the Bolsheviks had taken power and sent the Yusupovs, along with the rest of the aristocracy, off to rot in prison or face the firing squads. A secret room had been discovered in the apartment of Felix’s great-grandmother, who had been reputed to be one of the most beautiful women in Europe. In the room, they found a coffin containing the rotting bones of a man who turned out to be a lover of hers, a revolutionary she had helped escape from prison. She’d kept him hidden in her palace for years, even after his death. Sokolov had heard stories about how secret chambers filled with chests of jewelry and all kinds of valuables were discovered in the homes and palaces of the aristocracy after the revolution, chambers they had hastily covered up with plaster and paint before fleeing the uprising. He would often sneak into the old manor house and look for such secret rooms, imagining what it would be like to find a hidden treasure of his own.

As it happened, what he found wasn’t a treasure, and neither was it in the manor house.

It was in a small, hidden alcove buried deep in the cellar of his family’s cottage. An alcove that looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in decades. He’d stumbled upon it by accident while hiding from his brothers, and at first it didn’t seem like much: not gold, silver, or anything like that. Just three rotting old journals, each bound in soft leather, the bundle wrapped tightly with a piece of string.

Sokolov had no idea that what he’d found would be far more valuable-and far-reaching-than any treasure.

He didn’t share his discovery with anyone. Had his mother still been alive, he would have told her about it, without a doubt. But she was long gone, and his drunkard, cynical father wasn’t worthy of it. He didn’t tell his brothers about it either. Not until he knew what it was. It was his secret, and Sokolov knew he had something very special when, on the second page, a notorious name jumped out at him:

Rasputin.

He couldn’t read it fast enough.