Victory Square

THREE

It was one by the time Gavra reached the Stop amp; Drop office. The next flight from Richmond to New York wouldn’t leave until late that night, so in the meantime he could at least catch up on his sleep.

Yuri Kolev’s death surprised and disturbed him, but it couldn’t be called a shock. Gavra had long heard Ministry rumors about the Lieutenant General’s cocaine addiction, and so a sudden heart attack wasn’t out of the question. He even began to wonder if this whole job had been some drug-fueled fantasy.

But no. Brano Sev had made such a particular point of trusting the Lieutenant General that Gavra had no choice but to feel the same. That’s how much General Brano Sev’s judgment meant to the younger man, even though he hadn’t spoken to or heard of Brano in the last three years.

Brano Sev’s postretirement vanishing act had only deepened his near-legendary reputation among Ministry agents, as well as those of us in homicide who had worked with him. He’d fought the Germans in the Patriotic War, tracked down ex-Nazis after it, and had quietly, meticulously, made the country safe for socialism. His name evoked both admiration and fear. For me, though, his name provoked feelings of revulsion.

But if the now-absent Brano Sev had said that Lieutenant General Yuri Kolev was to be trusted, that was all Gavra needed to know.

He found Freddy behind the desk, feet propped up, wearing an Orioles cap. Freddy raised the brim with a knuckle. “Well, hey there, Viktor! Decide to take me up on that beer?”

“I need to pay my bill. I’ll be leaving tonight.”

“As you like, man. But as for the beer, I’m insisting.”

“I’m a little tired, Freddy.”

“Trust me. You’ll sleep like a baby.”

Gavra rubbed his eyes for effect. “Okay, but just one.”

Freddy leveled a finger-pistol at him and shot. “You got it, buddy.” He took two cans of Budweiser-not the Czech Budweiser Budvar but something else entirely-out of a tiny refrigerator and passed one over. Gavra tried to appear pleased with the taste-like a half-can of beer topped off with stale water-but it was difficult.

Freddy began their fraternity by complaining. About his old woman. Which Gavra took to mean his wife, Tracey. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. She’s a good woman. Puts out like a goddamned machine and makes a massive pot roast. But that mouth on her… wow! Sometimes I’m like to take a swing at her.”

“You hit her?”

“Not yet, brother. But someday it’s gonna happen. Got yourself a wife?”

Gavra shook his head.

“No problem. How old are you? Fifty?”

“Forty-four.”

“Well, don’t hurry into it. That’s a tip from the top. Might as well track down all the pussy you can before buying the cow. Can’t imagine it’s any different in Russia.”

“It’s the same all over.”

“Who you visiting with?”

Gavra rubbed his eyes. He wished he could get through this terrible can and to bed. “My cousin, Lubov. I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“Lubov Shevchenko?”

Gavra thought he’d heard wrong. Not merely that Freddy knew Lubov Shevchenko but that he’d pronounced the name correctly. “You know him?”

“Course I do! My kid, Jeremy, he’s got Shevchenko for math. He’s a tough bastard, doesn’t stand for no bullshit in his class.” He raised his beer in a kind of salute. “Country needs more teachers like him.”

“He teaches?”

“I kid you not. Didn’t Lubov tell you?”

Gavra was speechless a moment. “You know Lubov. He’s secretive.”

“Tell me about it,” said Freddy. He scratched his beard. “I figured it was all Russians, but meeting you, I see it’s just Lubov. School’s just a little farther up the turnpike. Clover Hill High. Done all right by himself, your cousin.”

“I’m glad he’s happy.”

“Land of the free, and all.”

He didn’t have to do this. No one knew that, at the last minute, he’d been handed Lubov Shevchenko’s location. But opportunity changes how you look at the world. With Shevchenko just “up the turnpike,” Gavra could see that nothing really added up. A defector-turned-schoolteacher who needed to be kept alive. Why? A now-dead lieutenant general who wouldn’t share the man’s real name, who was in fact getting his orders from someone else who wanted to remain anonymous. He was starting to believe that the timing of Kolev’s heart attack was too much of a coincidence.

So he thanked Freddy for the beer and conversation, then stepped out into the bright, cold sunlight. Behind the wheel of the Toyota, he looked around to be sure no one was watching. He reached under his seat, took the P-83 from the paper bag, then filled the clip with eight rounds. He wouldn’t be sleeping anytime soon.

By two, he was on the turnpike again. Thick forests lined the road, and that somehow made the discomfort of all of this more bearable.

Over the next hill he spotted the high school. Clover Hill. It was a low, flat-topped building that spread back into a deep field checkered with a baseball diamond and an American football field and a running track. It was impressive. His own village school had been a small house. All their sports were done in the public park, or for special events they went to the Palace of Physical Culture in nearby Satu Mare.

He parked near the front door, between a Subaru and a Ford pickup, and slipped the pistol into the glove compartment. He wouldn’t need it yet. Inside, crowds of teenagers clutched books and shouted at one another, ignoring him. They were on their way to classes, and the corridor soon thinned until only a few were left when the grating bell sounded. He nodded at a brunette. “Excuse me, where is the main office?”

“There,” she said, exasperated.

Directly behind him was a door labeled OFFICE. He let himself inside.

A heavy woman sat at a wide desk, talking into a telephone. Behind her were two doors, PRINCIPAL and VICE-PRINCIPAL. TO Gavra’s right was a line of four chairs, and in two of them sat a boy and a girl, teenagers. The boy was pale with prematurely thinning red hair he’d foolishly chosen to grow long. The girl gripped the boy’s hand, looking like a stunned model, with long blond hair and eager eyes that locked on to him. He smiled.

“Need some help?” It was the woman at the desk. She covered the telephone mouthpiece with her palm.

“Uh, yes. I’m looking for my cousin. Lubov Shevchenko. He teaches math.”

He heard a gasp and turned to see the girl whispering to the boy, who nodded.

“Cousin, huh?” said the clerk. “What’s your name?”

“Viktor Lukacs.”

“Well, Mr. Shevchenko has a class right now.”

“I don’t want to interrupt him,” Gavra said quickly. “When will he be finished?”

The woman thought a moment, wrinkling her nose. “I think Mr. Shevchenko’s running detention today. Is that right, Jennifer?”

The girl nodded. “Last detention of the year.”

“Yes, so he’ll get out around five thirty. Want to leave a message for him?”

“He’s not expecting me until next week. I want to surprise him.”

The boy said, “I don’t think Mr. Shevchenko likes surprises.”

“Yeah,” said Jennifer.

“Mind your own business, you two,” said the clerk. “You’re in enough trouble as it is.”

Gavra picked up Marlboros and a ham-and-cheese sandwich from the Brandermill Plaza and learned from the pimply cashier that the name Brandermill referred to not just the plaza but the whole wooded area that bordered it. “It’s a housing development” she told him between smacks of her chewing gum. “Ain’t no project. Got its own lake, restaurants, sports club, and all these shops here. Ain’t no reason to leave. It’s just like a town.”

On the drive back, Gavra was struck by the similarity-in theory, at least-between the Brandermill development and Tomiak Pankov’s New Towns, those vast concrete estates where reassigned farmers were moved in order to man newly constructed factories. The difference, of course, was that people chose to move to Brandermill.

He parked in the same spot again, ate the sandwich (which was delicious), and waited in the car, smoking. Occasional adults emerged from the front doors, found their cars, and drove away. A woman with horn-rimmed glasses frowned at him when he tossed a butt out the window, but he ignored her. Later, two teenage boys came out, throwing punches at one another and laughing, then raced at full speed through the lot.

His plan was simple: find Shevchenko and then follow him home. There, he could take control of the man in privacy and get the answers Kolev had been unwilling, or unable, to share.

At four thirty, the grating bell sounded again. Students poured out. Older ones tossed bookbags into pickup trucks and small Japanese cars. Teachers patiently shouted at students to slow down, wished them a Merry Christmas, or reminded them to do this or that over the holiday. The Subaru beside Gavra’s window was owned-or at least used-by a tall kid who dribbled a basketball on his way to his car, stopping as he unlocked it to glare at Gavra.

“The fuck you looking at, faggot?”

Gavra considered pulling the gun on him. He could use a laugh. Instead he gave the kid the same cold look he’d once given a pe-dophilic murderer in 1982 just before he plunged the guy’s head into a toilet.

By five, the last of the buses were turning onto the road, and the parking lot had emptied of all but ten cars. In a half hour, Lubov Shevchenko would finish with his detention class.

Gavra slipped the P-83 into his coat pocket.

The corridors were empty but littered with spare pens and flakes from spiral notebooks. Just past the office, he took a left and began walking slowly past doors, each with a tall, narrow window. He paused at one where an old woman helped a black teenager with his writing, then at another where three students sat on a table, looking at notes a fourth was marking on the chalkboard. Whatever he’d written had upset a girl, who was shouting at him.

Gavra followed the corridor to the end, where it turned right, past a woman running a vacuum cleaner, and then up another right until he was back at the corridor where he’d begun. In the center of the floor was a large glassed-in library where a librarian was directing her student-workers as they shelved returned books. On the opposite side of the building, he followed another U-shaped corridor past more empty rooms until, on the last leg, he stopped at room 161.

Looking through the narrow window at an angle, he saw Lubov Shevchenko, a little fatter and older than his picture, with spectacles, seated at a desk, reading a disorderly stack of papers. He’d mark one, then go to the next, read, and write something else. He was grading students’work.

Gavra stepped to the other side and saw from that angle seven students at desks, serving their time. Some were working as well, hunched and scribbling, while the pretty girl he’d seen earlier- Jennifer-was passing a slip of paper to the balding redhead and glancing warily in Shevchenko’s direction.

The scene brought on a pang of empathy. As a boy, Gavra had considered it his patriotic duty to make trouble. He’d succeeded often enough to be very familiar with the experience of staying after school.

His smile disappeared-Jennifer was looking directly at him. She touched her boyfriend’s hand, and then he, too, was staring at Gavra. Jennifer smiled, and Gavra brought a finger to his lips for silence.

But Jennifer, like the young Gavra, was deaf to the pleas of adults. Through the door he could hear what she said: “Mr. Shevchenko, your cousin’s here.”

Gavra stepped back out of view. He almost fled as Lubov Shevchenko’s accented voice said, “Cousin?”

“See for yourself if you think I’m a liar,” said Jennifer.

Gavra only wanted to follow Shevchenko. Confronting him in the middle of a schoolhouse was not what he’d had in mind.

The door opened, and Lubov Shevchenko’s spectacled face peered out. He cocked his head and spoke in their shared accent. “Can I help you?”

All reasonable plans were now figments of Gavra’s imagination. He answered in our language. “Please close the door. I’d like to speak with you a moment.”

Shevchenko’s expression, at first confused, shifted. It was in the edges of his nose and the way his heavy eyes seemed to stretch just slightly. Fear, or repugnance. “How did you find me?”

“I’m not here to bother you.”

“You are.”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To talk. Please come out and close the door.”

Shevchenko looked back into the classroom and said in English, “I’ll be right back. Everyone, quiet.” Then he stepped into the corridor and shut the door. Something occurred to him, and he raised a finger. “Tell them you can’t find me. Tell them I died.”

“Tell who?”

Shevchenko said nothing at first. Then: “What do you want to talk about?”

That was the question for which Gavra had no real answer. So he said, “These kids are in trouble?”

Shevchenko frowned; he nodded.

“American kids, are they any worse than we were?”

“Much, much worse. But you didn’t cross the Atlantic to ask me that.” Behind his glasses, a dew of sweat formed in Shevchenko’s thick eyebrow and rolled down his cheek. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you.”

“I’m not going to kill you. I just want to talk.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Come on,” said Gavra. “We’re going.”

“I have a job here.”

“They can take care of themselves.”

Shevchenko shook his head and tried to speak with conviction. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Gavra looked past the math teacher, down the empty corridor, then behind himself. Control. He had to keep in control. This was something that, more than a decade before, Brano had hammered again and again to into his pupil. Stay in control. Act, but never react. Once you start reacting, you’ve already lost.

He took the P-83 from his pocket and shoved it into Lubov Shevchenko’s stomach, whispering, “Please don’t make me shoot you, comrade. I just want to talk. Walk with me.”

“Comrade.” Shevchenko shook his head, but the fear was evident. “Never thought I’d hear that word again.”

Gavra moved the pistol to the small of Shevchenko’s back and gripped the man’s elbow as they walked ahead, then turned left. Just before the exit stood the heavyset clerk he’d spoken to a couple hours before. She smiled brightly. “So you found him!” She winked at Shevchenko. “Lubov, your cousin wanted it to be a surprise!”

Gavra dug the barrel into Shevchenko’s back, forcing a smile into the teacher’s face. “Yes…”

“My cousin is always flustered by surprises,” Gavra told the woman as they passed. “The bad girl, Jennifer-she was right!”

“Tell me about it,” the clerk said, laughing as she disappeared around the next corner.

On the turnpike, Lubov Shevchenko began to weep. There was nothing gradual about it. One moment a frightened calm held him mute; the next, he covered his face with his hands and moaned, rocking back and forth. It was an unnerving sound.

“Cut that out,” said Gavra, accelerating.

Lubov wouldn’t stop. When he tried to speak, the tears flowed, glistening in the late afternoon sun; he coughed wetly.

“I told you, I’m not here to kill you.”

“I don’t care what you say,” Lubov managed. “You wouldn’t tell me, would you?”

“You live alone?”

The math teacher nodded.

“Where?”

“What?”

“We’re going to your house.”

Lubov, between fits, pointed him around a U-turn and then through a secluded side entrance to the woods of Brandermill. They looped around a flat-faced medical center, then took a left onto a tree-shaded street lined with the kinds of houses one saw in Hollywood films. Thornridge Lane. Each house had a paved driveway leading from the road, and along the curb five-digit numbers had been stenciled in green.

“What’s your number?”

“What?”

“House number!”

“Three five two-oh-six.”

The house was barely visible through its wooded front yard. Gavra turned down the steep driveway and stopped in front of a bark-colored bi-level.

“Teaching pays well?” said Gavra.

“In Brandermill, this is part of the slums.”

“Let’s not start our relationship with lies.”

The math teacher swallowed. “It’s the truth.”

Gavra opened the car door for him, the pistol always in sight, and took him to the front door, where Lubov fumbled with keys.

Holding him by the elbow, Gavra walked through the house, trying to hide his amazement. From the landing they went upstairs into a high-ceilinged living room that opened onto a terrace with a view of the pine forest Lubov humbly called a backyard. The kitchen, too, was large, the tall, full refrigerator humming. A master bedroom, sparsely furnished, was four times the size of the bedroom Gavra shared with his roommate, Karel, and a smaller bedroom had been converted into an office.

They returned to the landing and continued to the half-underground lower floor, with two more bedrooms, a long den, and an empty utility room with a door leading into the jungle of backyard.

Convinced of their solitude, Gavra placed Lubov on the den sofa across from a massive television. “Don’t tell me you live alone in this place.”

He shrugged, the fear apparently waning. “It’s what they gave me.”

“Who?”

Lubov stiffened, then mumbled something.

“What?”

“I said, you know who gave it to me.”

“Pretend I don’t.”

This seemed to confuse the man. He opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “Who are you?”

Gavra showed him the pistol again. “Right now, you talk. Afterward, I’ll speak. Okay?”

“The Americans,” said Lubov. “CIA.”

“They gave you this house?”

“And the name.”

“Why?”

“It was part of the deal. I answer their questions; they give me a new life. How did you find me?”

“From the beginning,” said Gavra, pulling up a chair. “Your real name.”

“Lebed Putonski.”

“That’s a good start. Where did you make the deal with the Americans?

“Stockholm.”

“Why were you in Stockholm?”

“You really don’t know, do you?”

“I want your version of the story. Why were you in Stockholm?”

Lebed Putonski pressed his fingertips together, as if praying. “This was almost a decade ago. I was there to oversee things.”

“You were the Stockholm resident?”

Putonski shrugged. “Of course. There’s a reason the Ministry keeps watch on its own residents. We start to enjoy life. We start thinking maybe we’d have a better time somewhere else. And then we do.”

“Why not just stay in Stockholm?”

“I was recalled. I guess the Ministry wasn’t happy with my work, or maybe they suspected what I was thinking. Fair enough.” He shrugged again. “I was a desk man, been one all my life. Can’t say I really understood half of what I was doing. So…” He squinted at the pistol. “So I contacted the Americans, spent some weeks at Lang-ley, and then I moved here. Now, eight years later, you’re pointing a gun at me. Why?”

Gavra didn’t understand it either. This was just another old man who’d gotten tired of the intrigues and breadlines. He wasn’t an ideological turncoat, and the information he, after prodding, admitted to giving the Americans was hardly explosive: the Central Committee’s position on its fraternal relations with Sweden, in-country troop sizes and distribution, and some real gross domestic product numbers. All Putonski had wanted was an easier life, and here he’d gotten it.

The telephone rang.

“You expecting someone?”

Putonski shook his head. “Maybe it’s my girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Maureen.” He paused. “Everyone gets lonely.”

“She’ll expect you at home, yes?”

Another shrug, then a nod. “Detention was almost finished.”

“Okay. Come on.”

He walked Putonski back up the stairs to the kitchen and took the telephone on the seventh ring, holding it to Putonski’s ear and keeping his head close so he could hear as well.

“Mr. Shevchenko?” said a man’s voice. American.

“Yes?” said Putonski.

“Mr. Shevchenko, there’s a matter I’d like to discuss with you. Your friends from the west need some information.”

Putonski’s eyes went wide, and Gavra nodded at him to continue. “What’s this about?”

“Let’s talk in person. You’ll stay at home?”

Putonski interpreted Gavra’s second nod. “Yes.”

“I’ll be there in an hour,” said the man. “We should be alone, understand?”

“Of course,” said Putonski, then the line went dead. “I’ll bet it’s about you,” he told Gavra. “You better get out of here.”

“Who was it?”

“Who do you think? CIA. I haven’t heard from them in five years, then you show up, and suddenly they want to discuss something.”

“You don’t know this man?”

“Five years is a long time. They change personnel.”

Gavra stared at Putonski a moment, thinking this through. His real purpose here, as he understood it, was to protect this math teacher. Yuri Kolev wouldn’t have spent the money and effort to send him to the other side of the world if the threat to Putonski weren’t real. Now an unidentified voice wanted to meet Putonski alone.

“Come on,” said Gavra. “We’re leaving.”