Authors: Lindsay Smith
But I’d just seen her holding the thermometer to her bedside lamp. I open my mouth to say as much, but there’s permafrost in her eyes when she looks my way, and I clamp my jaw back shut.
Papa sinks to his knees at her side. “No, Nina, don’t be silly. If you’re ill, then I must stay with you. I’ll make you soup—do you want some tea? Maybe I can fix a nice roast for you. I’ll send Yulia to the Party grocer to pick us out a nice cut of beef.”
“For heaven’s sake, I already have a blanket if I want to smother myself. Take care of our daughter.” She nods at me. “I just need some peace and quiet, and
you
need to get out more. Besides—” She coughs into her hand. “I think I’m contagious.”
After a few more rounds of protests, Papa grudgingly leaves her side, though back then—seven years ago, it must have been—he always wandered about, slightly dazed, when he did so, like an amputee being forced to adjust. He saunters through the soggy leaf-strewn street with me, puffing at his Pyotr I unfiltered cigarette, his eyes as dark gray as the sky. “Do you think your mother’s all right?” He’s speaking more to himself, I assume, because I don’t answer, and the green-uniformed lady who usually follows our every move is missing today. “I hope she didn’t catch anything at work.”
When we reach the playground at the end of the block, he doesn’t offer to push me on the swings or play any of the games we usually play when Mama is with us. I swing back and forth, alone, watching the few other kids that chase each other in the field. Stupid Papa. I scissor my legs, aimless. Why must he be so blinded by Mama that he doesn’t even notice me?
Then I spot the man smoking next to Papa—short, with stocky features and an oddly cut coat unlike all the Russian fashions. A foreigner. I narrow my eyes, and strain to hear them—but they’re only making small talk, griping about the impending weather. The swing’s chains creak as I glide along, listening in. Somehow, the conversation turns scientific, onto Papa’s favorite topic—psychology. They talk the whole afternoon. I keep waiting for our usual green-coated shadow to interrupt them and tell the foreigner to move along, but she’s nowhere to be found.
“Well, nice to meet you, Andrei. I’d better get my little one back home.” The man squashes his cigarette on the ground when I hop off the swing and stroll over. “We should get together for drinks sometime. Let the kids play together.”
I can’t believe the smile on Papa’s face as he puts his arm around my shoulders. “A pleasure to meet you, Frank.”
When we return home, Mama’s up and about, humming to herself as she cooks supper. I catch Zhenya in one of his warmer moods. “What was that all about?” I ask Zhenya.
He shrugs. “As soon as you left, Mama went outside to chat with that lady in the green uniform.” He’s absorbed in his music sheet, not looking up at me. “The lady kept trying to follow you to the park, but Mama wouldn’t shut up. What a weird illness, huh?”
What a strange illness, indeed.
TONY PEERS AT ME
from under a greasy lock of hair. He’s too scrawny for his oversized frame; his joints look incapable of supporting his lanky limbs, and his Adam’s apple bobs freely on a toothpick neck as he fidgets in the break room chair. His pimples stand out like indignant punctuation marks on his tan skin. “Hey,” he says, looking the complete opposite direction from me when I take the chair beside him.
“Hello.” I glance over at Cindy and Al Sterling, heads bowed together in urgent whispers in front of Frank Tuttelbaum’s office door. “Cindy said you can find the scrubber.”
“That’s right.” Bob, bob.
“Are you a remote viewer? Like Marylou?”
Like Sergei,
I think.
He snorts. “I’m way better than that.”
I’m not sure what the correct English response is to such a declaration, so I say nothing.
“You work through touch, right?” He rubs his palms back and forth against his jeans. “Give me your hand and think about the guy. Let me in to the image.”
I clench my teeth and slowly place my right hand in his. His skin is clammy, much colder than I’d expected; some unidentifiable grit rubs between our palms. How easily I’ve forgotten the feel of other people, those whose shape and texture and emotion I don’t know like I know Valentin’s. I peel back the frantic strings of Shostakovich’s symphony, then dribble out the percussion, then the marching bass—only when I’m sure my emotions are firmly reined in do I let it all fade away. The sallow-skinned man with a grungy mustache, white static eating away his features. Scouring blasts of thought. I see his sunken eyes and his jagged eyebrows and the sweat running down his cheek—
“Okay, I think I got it.” Tony lets go of my hand and takes a deep breath. “Carlos Fonseca, born in Havana, Cuba, in 1928, but later became a citizen of Mexico. Last known whereabouts: the border crossing in El Paso, Texas, in July of 1961. No further information.”
I raise one eyebrow. “How do you know all that?”
He punches those knobby shoulders up into the air in a shrug. “Please. The border crossing records are way too easy. I memorize them in, like, seconds. Photos take a little longer, but not much. Wanna check the photo bank with me?”
I glance over at Cindy; she’s pounding one fist into her open hand while Al makes “mmhmm” noises. I turn back to Tony. “Do they need to come with us?”
“Oh, we don’t have to go anywhere. It’s all right up here.” He raps his fingertip against his temple.
I place my hand in his again, nervous energy running through me. I try to draw on a reserve of calm like Cindy admonished me to yesterday. Control these emotions instead of merely being a conduit for them. I want to be like the Star Cindy showed me; if any emotions spill out of me, they should be safe ones. I try to think calming, watery thoughts, like the images in the card. Waves lapping rhythmically against a shoreline. The sun melting into the horizon, red spilling against the waves. Valentin’s screams ripping through the salty air and his mother’s fiery embrace searing into my waist—
I jerk back from Tony with a yelp. The terror drips out of me slowly. But Tony just watches me, head cocked to one side like a curious sparrow. I clench my hand into a fist, waiting for my heart rate to return to normal.
“That’s the western shore of the Black Sea,” he says, though it sounds like there’s a question behind it. “By the town of Sukhumi. I can give you the coordinates for it, if you want.”
“Is it?” I’d guessed as much, since it was from Valentin’s memories as a boy. Before his father was promoted to a senior Party official. He rarely speaks of those days, not that he talks about his past much anyway. Walks on the beach. Violin and piano duets with his mother, late into the night.
“What happened to you there?” Tony winces. “It looked … awful.”
I shake my head. “It’s—it’s not my story to share.”
“Okay.” He looks at his knee, bobbing up and down with nervous energy, then takes a deep breath. His knee goes still. “Okay. If you can keep your, uh, your thoughts to yourself…”
“I’ll be fine,” I snap.
“—Then let’s look through the photo bank.”
He takes my hand again. I’m rattled from letting Valentin’s nightmare seep out. I can feel new fears buzzing beneath the surface of my thoughts like a shorting circuit, but I try to make my mind empty. After a few seconds, black-and-white photographs start to flicker across it, as if projected onto a screen. Faster and faster—hundreds of photographs whiz past, of all different faces and buildings and objects. It’s dizzying. They turn into a blur of grainy surveillance photos. I only just manage to get a grip on one image before it’s torn away, that split-second shot of trees dissolving into a woman’s laughing face, which tears into a smoky nightclub—
“Got it.” The images halt. “That’s him, right?”
My head is still spinning from the parade of pictures, but as the image before me takes shape, the unmistakable profile of the scrubber manifests, glancing over his shoulder as he ducks into a doorway. The awning over the door reads 1301. “That’s him.”
“1301,” Tony says. “I know I’ve seen that somewhere before.” Tony taps his temple. “Ever heard of a photographic memory? Well, mine’s like that, cranked to supersonic. Hmm, 1301, must be something the FBI has under surveillance. Where are you, 1301…”
Another dizzying zoetrope of images marches past, all of building façades now—I’m pretty sure they’re all in DC, though it’s too fast for me to be certain—and slowly, the array converges on a single building. An apartment complex. It must have been gorgeous once, but the carved stone accents are weathered and cracked, and the air-conditioning units in the windows sag like tired babushkas. The awning out front reads 1301.
“There we go. Now, why did the FBI have surveillance on it?” Tony’s voice has taken on a smug lilt as he asks these rhetorical questions—I can only gather it’s because the answer is already awaiting him inside his head, or wherever he’s drawing all these pictures and records from. Sure enough, the pictures in his thoughts have now been replaced by typed documents, all of them formatted similarly, with a big seal stamped across the top.
“Bingo.” Tony lets go of my hand, and the images shimmer and vanish. “Mister Sterling? Can you pull a file for us?”
Al looks up from his conversation with Cindy. “Sure thing, kiddo. What’s the serial?”
Within minutes, a busty file clerk arrives with a folder for us. “Just like you requested, Mister Sterling!” Her voice sounds squeaky, like it’s been squeezed through a tube. “You need anything else, just ring on down the records office. Of course, you can ring us even if you don’t need anything.”
Al winks at her before turning back to Cindy, who groans and yanks the file from his hands. “FBI surveillance request, approved by a federal judge.” She slaps it down in front of us. Tony flips through the typed pages and we read it together, though I’m not understanding nearly as much as I’d like.
“The Stratford Apartments in Shaw.” Cindy scans the folder. “Looks like this old widow in the building complained to police about the constant noise from one of her neighbors—said people were coming and going at all hours, I quote, ‘speaking Spanish and Russian and all manner of heathen, godless communist tongues.’” Cindy grins at that. “After the Bureau’s counterintelligence grunts did an initial stakeout, they saw a few ‘persons of interest’ acting suspicious around the building—making chalk marks on the sidewalk in front of it, standard tradecraft—so it’s been under infrequent surveillance ever since.”
Tony nods. “I recognize some of the other individuals photographed outside the building. Chin Xu, a Chinese embassy employee with an unspecified position. Borsca Szabo, a Hungarian national who’s turned up in surveillance photos of other suspected foreign agents—”
“Thank you, Encyclopedia Brown, we’ll pull those files later. For now…” Cindy props one hand on her hip, looking me over like she’s assessing fruit at the market. “Yulia? Feel like a drive through Rock Creek Park?”
I take a deep breath—what feels like the first I’ve taken in days. It feels like we’re finally surfacing for air, finally untangling the first knots on this case.
“What’s at Rock Creek Park?” Papa calls, as he storms into the room, Valentin and Judd trailing behind him. “The Stratford Apartments?”
Cindy lowers the file folder. “How did you know about that?”
“FBI called, alerting us to an interesting complaint they’d received,” Papa says.
“Is it about ‘heathen, godless communists’?” I ask with a smile.
But Papa doesn’t smile. I don’t know if he’s capable of being rattled, but he’s as close to it as I’ve seen him. No whistle on his lips; his hands are jammed awkwardly in his pockets like he’s trying to contain them. “Same old woman as that complaint, yes,” he says carefully. “But she has a new problem this time. An awful smell coming from next door, like when a rat’s died in the walls.”
Dread sinks in my stomach like a weight.
“Should we let Frank know?” Cindy asks.
“No time. He’s in a meeting all day, anyway. We’ve got a full squadron of DC’s finest guarding the entrance, so let’s hurry. No way the bastards can scrub the place before we search it, this time.” Papa holds out his hand for me. “Yulia. It’s your show now.”
* * *
“I told you,” the old woman says, peering out of her cracked door. Her hair is set in pink rollers; she’s sipping Ovaltine from a glass. “I told you them atheists were up to no good. It’s not right, that they should be peddlin’ their un-American lies right here in this great nation’s heart.”
“Don’t worry, ma’am. They won’t be troubling you any longer.” Even Cindy’s smile looks ragged. “Now, if you’ll just answer a few questions for us, I promise we’ll be out of your hair in no time.”
The woman’s rheumy gaze drifts from Cindy to me. “My, what’s this world coming to? We’ve got lady cops now? Little girl cops?”
“Something like that,” Cindy says through clenched teeth.
“Is that Ovaltine you’re drinking?” Donna asks. “Gosh, my grandma used to drink that all the time.” Her voice starts to quaver. “Oh, I miss her so…”
The woman winces, then slowly pulls the chain out of her door. “Why don’t you come inside? I’d be happy to make you a glass.”
“Gee, would you really? That’d be just swell! And then we can have a nice little chat…” Donna twists around to throw us a thumbs-up—and the door clicks shut behind them.
“Yes, better lock your doors. This isn’t going to be pretty,” Cindy mutters under her breath.
Papa props one arm on the door frame. “Would’ve been cleaner if Valya or me just took care of the old lady.”
Valya’s face goes white, but Cindy claps her hands, too loudly, before Valya or I can protest. “Well, then! Donna should be able to gather whatever the old lady knows about the goings-on here.” Her smile strains at the seams. “Now let’s see what
you
can find out for us, Yulia.”
Yulia. Quickly! There you are!
I stagger back, my pulse so loud in my ears I can barely hear anything else over it—Papa and Valentin talking, the security guards, the creaking floors—my pulse and Sergei’s voice swallow them all up. I try to fight down the rising tide of panic before I answer.