Death Is My Comrade (19 page)

“Lucienne,” I said.

Laschenko said: “After Ilya Alluliev fled the Russian Embassy with his letter, I was given orders to stop him, to get it back at all costs.” His heavy-lidded eyes had shut. He was staring sightlessly at the small window, as if he couldn't bear to see my face while he told me what he knew, now, he had to tell me. “Eugenie told my wife where the letter was.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I don't know. If Eugenie confides in anyone at all, it is her mother. At any rate, Lucienne told me. My orders also were to do what must be done without the help of the Embassy staff.”

“Sure. Since there was a chance you'd fail.”

“Ordinarily in such cases there are outside contacts, but reaching them in a country such as yours, where domestic Communism is all but nonexistent, is difficult. In this case it was easy.”

“Lucienne,” I said. “Lucienne belonged to a Red cell. She knew Leo Ring. He was her contact, not yours. That's why the story you told me on Custer Street didn't make sense.”

Laschenko nodded sadly. He had all my attention now. Once you accepted Lucienne's Red involvement, his story had the ring of truth to it. “She contacted Leo Ring for me, and Ring went to work.”

“Kidnaping the Baker twins at your orders.”

“No, Mr. Drum. Perhaps I had buried my head in the sand like an ostrich. My orders, conveyed to Leo Ring by Lucienne, were not specific. The kidnaping was Ring's own idea.”

“He paid two visits to Marianne Baker's apartment,” I said. “The first time with nothing but a hard threat. He got nowhere. The second time with Al Bock. The second time to kidnap the twins.”

“Lucienne told me. She was very pleased with her Leo Ring. We argued. I became furious. I had not bargained for the involvement of innocent children. But Lucienne said that since I had called the tune I must pay the piper. I would succeed in what I had set out to do, she said. That was what mattered.”

“You went to Guster Street anyway?”

“I went to Custer Street, yes. To see that the children were returned safely. You got there before I did. But before I went, I threatened Lucienne. If she didn't call Ring off, I said, I would see to it that the authorities learned of her Party membership. She didn't care. She was returning to Russia with me, wasn't she? That was what she wanted. I went to Custer Street,” he said again. “I knew then I had to.”

“And Eugenie came after you. To kill you.”

“Eugenie is a psychopath.”

“She's a walking gratuitous act. You have some stepdaughter.”

Laschenko showed me a sick smile. He looked like a man writing a check to his own undertaker.

“But that's beside the point,” I said. “Eugenie tried to kill you because you murdered Alluliev. Didn't she?”

“That's ridiculous, Mr. Drum. She said that for your benefit. She had only one reason to kill me. She refused to believe her mother was really serious about coming to Russia to live. And if I carried out my threat to expose Lucienne—”

“No more parties for Eugenie,” I said. “No more being the daughter of the new champ of the Washington hostess set. Okay, I'll buy that. But then who the hell did kill Ilya? Not Eugenie; she'd tried to help him. Lucienne?”

Laschenko showed me the palms of his big hands. “I don't know, Mr. Drum. Whatever else she may be, I can't believe my wife is a murderess.”

“You two all washed up?”

“A foolish middle-aged man,” Laschenko said with a shrug, “marrying a stunning woman in the twilight of life.… I can't answer your question. I just do not know. There are ironies within ironies in this situation. I grew disenchanted with Communism. I married Lucienne, regarding her Party membership with amusement. I married her because she embodied the very opposite of what I'd come to loath. She married me because I could bring her to Moscow. And Eugenie, I suppose Eugenie never took either of us seriously.”

“She came here with you, didn't she?”

“She had to come. She has no money of her own. She has never worked a day in her life. What her mother pays for, she accepts. Where her mother goes, she goes. Which is ironic too: when she tried to kill me it was her mother's position and money she was trying to protect, and her mother's money forced her to come here with us.”

“What about Lucienne?” I said. “Is she taking off with you and Rodzianko, knowing you'll be an enemy of the state the minute you cross the border?”

“Another irony,” Laschenko said. He thought of everything in terms of irony—now. Maybe in a way that was symptomatic, because Russian humor is too heavy-handed for irony. “Lucienne and her ex-husband. Lucienne and Mike Rodin. She left him because he was the big financier, because he stood for everything she detested. And now she is in his hands again. She'd like nothing better than to report our plans to the authorities. Or at least Mike Rodin's plans, keeping me out of them, thinking—what is the American idiom?—I'll get back in the groove when Mike Rodin and Vasili Rodzianko are taken by the police. But there is the irony: her ex-husband is watching her like a hawk.”

Laschenko stood up. His suit was rumpled. All at once it seemed two sizes too big for him. “You still think the Secret Police need an
agent provocateur?”
he asked. There was irony in his deep voice. He was like a man trying on a new personality.

“They need an
agent provocateur
about as much as I need a ventilated skull,” I admitted.

“The final irony. If giving you the facts as I have given them is the price of your co-operation, it is a price I have willingly paid. But I still hope that Lucienne … she is my wife, after all … together we could have.…”

His voice broke. Disappointment and regret had finally surrendered to self-pity. In a man as proud as Laschenko, they usually do.

“Why me?” I said. “Why am I so important?”

“Mike Rodin. Rodin has faith in you. Rodin wants you.”

I took a deep breath. Laschenko's story was going around and around in my brain like a flywheel. He was a chimera, he was like the old man of the sea, twisting, changing. Every time you thought you had hold of him he changed his shape. Irony and self-pity, themselves conflicting emotions, had replaced his booming, extroverted confidence, were shaping a new man out of the defeated clay that had been Semyon Laschenko. I didn't know if I could trust him; probably, he didn't know if he could trust himself. But still, Rodzianko wouldn't budge except under his own conditions, unless Father Alexi had fed me a line—a Party line. I doubted that, but could find out for sure only when I saw Rodzianko.

“What's your plan?” I said.

Laschenko surfaced from his funk. “Good! Good! Then you will help us?”

“Let's hear the plan.”

Opening his jacket, he removed a map from the inside pocket and spread it on the table. We both leaned over it. The place names were printed in Russian. Laschenko index-fingered one of them. “Zagorsk, Mr. Drum.” Then he traced a line north and slightly east with his finger. “Zagorsk to Kashin to Babayevo to Podporozh'ye to Ozero Yanis. Ozero Yanis is a lake on the Finnish border. We can cross there.”

“How far is it?”

“The distance from Zagorsk to Ozero Yanis is slightly more than eight hundred kilometers. Five hundred miles.”

“That's great. Five hundred miles through the Soviet heartland. What do we use to make ourselves invisible?”

Laschenko managed a smile. “In your American Civil War a hundred years ago, how did fugitive slaves reach the northern states and Canada?”

“Underground railroad, they called it. Hidden in towns along the way, sometimes by sympathetic farmers, traveling at night—”

“Precisely. There are less than seven and a half million Communist Party members in the Soviet Union, Mr. Drum, out of over two hundred million people. While no revolution is imminent, all our population is not loyal to the government. There is now in the twentieth century a Russian underground railroad. Disenchanted intellectuals, farmers still embittered by the kolkhoz, gypsies. The way stations along an underground railroad. It can be done.”

I looked at the map. What it didn't show were the Red Army checkpoints along the way; or the fast motorized columns of the Secret Police, armed to the teeth, that could be sent anywhere in Russia in a matter of hours at a word from an unseen man in the fortress on Lubianka Street. What it didn't show was Galina Rodzianko, who would leave a brilliant career behind her, and all that that career meant in the Soviet Union, if she went with us docilely. What it didn't show was Lucienne Duhamel Rodzianko, who hadn't flown to Russia with her brand-new husband to see him make a fugitive of himself.

Then I looked at Laschenko. I still couldn't figure him out, but I had five hundred miles in which to try, on our way to Lake Yanis and Finland.

Folding his map and handing it to him, I went to the door. Mike Rodin wanted me. It was Mike Rodin's money I had put in trust for the twins.

“What are we waiting for?” I said.

Hadn't Laschenko told me I was a man of action?

Chapter Twenty-three

W
hen twilight hung over the white walls of St. Sergius, Semyon Laschenko and I left the monastery with Father Alexi.

The way led along the high white wall and then north through an apple orchard and then beyond that across a turfy pasture where the monks with their dogs were calling the monastery sheep to the fold. Laschenko and I were wearing black cassocks like St. Sergius' patriarch. Father Alexi had warned us that the guards watching Vasili Rodzianko's dacha had already searched the monastery once because the writer had been gone since last night. Some of them might still be prowling the grounds, searching.

We came to a stand of white birches, and skirted it. Pretty soon I could see a cluster of farm buildings silhouetted darkly against the deep green northern dusk, and when we reached the farmyard I could hear voices. A crowd stood before the main house, a dilapidated two-story structure of rough timber. The women wore kerchiefs on their heads, the men had cloth caps and dark shirts and trousers. Most of them held small, newspaper-wrapped packages in their hands.

“Gifts for Vasili,” Father Alexi explained. “They know he is leaving. He was loved here.”

I wasn't wild about that, and said so. “Won't the dacha guards know something's going on?”

Father Alexi smiled. “They come from the kolkhoz on the other side of the birch woods. They have slipped through two or three at a time all day. They are cunning, these Zagorsk peasants. We have nothing to fear.”

Just then a big man came out of the house. At first the peasants thought he was Vasili Rodzianko. They became silent. But then I saw the bald head. It was Mike Rodin, wearing a dark shirt and dark bell-bottom trousers. He saw us right away and came jogging over. He looked worried.

He said just two words. “She's gone.”

“Who?” I asked him. “Lucienne?”

He shook his head. “Galina.”

“When?” Semyon Laschenko asked.

“A couple of minutes ago. I couldn't be everywhere at once.” He scowled. “She'll head for the dacha. She'll bring the guards.”

The door opened again, and Mikhail Rodzianko came out. He blinked in bewilderment, then saw and joined us. He spoke Russian to Mike Rodin, who nodded.

“The boy's going after his sister. She's got to be stopped.”

“When are we pulling out?” I asked.

“As soon as it's fully dark. Long twilight here,” Mike Rodin said. “A couple of hours—if Galina doesn't bring the soldiers. Damn her. Damn that girl.”

I jerked my head toward Mikhail. “Tell him I'm going with him.”

A minute later we started out, Mikhail leading the way across the farmyard and into the birch woods. It was dark in there, and silent except for our footfalls, but the trunks of the birches stood boldly white against the lingering green dusk. Mikhail was walking fast. I touched his shoulder and broke into a trot. He ran hard alongside me. He was out of shape. I had set a stiff pace and I could keep it, but every stride I took hammered a nail of pain into my stomach. It was cool in the birch woods, and damp, but before long Mikhail began to sweat. He was snorting like an overworked truck horse. Sweat flew from his face as it swung from side to side in the awkward cadence of his running.

When the green sky brightened ahead of us, I broke away from Mikhail. He was slowing me down. His sister, a ballerina, was in shape. She could probably run all night. I had to overtake her.

Suddenly I left the woods behind me. I ran across spongy turf again. A flock of unshorn sheep scattered.

Then I saw Galina, silhouetted briefly against the horizon. She ran easily, in long loping strides. I increased my pace. To my left, a sheep dog barked. The sound drew Galina's head around. She still had a couple of hundred yards on me. She called out something in Russian and kept going. I expected her to sprint. She didn't. Then I realized it was the black cassock. She had nothing special to fear from me. I was one of the monks from St. Sergius.

A hundred yards separated us when she reached a farmyard much bigger than the one where I had started out with Mikhail. Geese fled her path, honking raucously, spreading and flapping their wings ineffectually. I sprinted, cutting the distance between us in half. She looked back and called out again. Her dark skirt whipped about her dancer's legs as she ran.

I overtook her in front of a barn. She turned a third time, her eyes narrowing in recognition.

“You!” she gasped in English. “The American!”

Turning had been a mistake. She stumbled and went sprawling. The skirt rode up her thighs. She rolled over and didn't get up. She was barefoot.

“You're coming back with me,” I panted. “Am I going to have to carry you again?”

Her face twisted in pain. “My leg. I hurt my leg.” She even smiled a little. “It looks like you'll have to.”