Skandal (26 page)

The shovel fell from Mama’s hands, clattering against the freezing earth. She seized me by the shoulders with startling swiftness. Her nails dug into my arms through her wool gloves; her eyes tightened to two blazing points as she knelt before me, urgency rippling through her. I felt bolted into place by that intense gaze. I didn’t dare so much as breathe, lest I disrupt the moment with a tuft of frozen breath.

“There is always a purpose.” Cold spit flecked across my face as she hissed out the words. “The more senseless a death seems, the greater a purpose it can serve. The less sense it makes, the more we must honor it. Remember it. Vow to never let it happen again. Do you understand me?” She shook my shoulders; my brain rattled in my skull. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I muttered, though of course I did not.

How could I? I had no real perspective on death. The most senseless, most tragic deaths, like those of millions of Russians in the Great Patriotic War or in Stalin’s purges, are like a great weight on a cosmic scale, and the only way to balance them is to heap justice on the other side of the scale—through honoring, through remembrance.

And maybe, just maybe, through revenge.

CHAPTER 23

THE THUDDING SOUND
that’s swallowing up all other noise in the safe house room cannot possibly be coming from me. But I feel it like a drumbeat under my sternum.
Ba-bump. Ba-bump.
I cannot sit still. I cannot watch Cindy and Papa do their crazed multiple-telephone square dance, their words just phantoms under the furious beat of my heart.

My mouth tastes dry and swampy, like I haven’t brushed my teeth in weeks. I look down at my fingernails. I need to trim them. But how can I bring myself to take part in this mundane act, to do this routine thing, when it will forever lock me on the side of After? Enough time cannot have passed since Valentin was attacked (
since you let yourself be forced to attack him
ba-bump), so therefore I can take no further action until it undoes itself.

This is the logic of denial, blundering its way around my head, blind and banging into every raw memory in my perforated brain.

Ba-bump.

“Let’s go.” Cindy’s arm is through mine, though we might as well be swaddled up for a Russian winter for all that I can feel her. No memories, no musical shield, no nothing passing between our skin. “I need your help with her, Yulia. I can give you at least half an hour before Frank Tuttelbaum arrives, but then you’ll have to leave. Come on. It’s time.”

We are going. We are chasing another wild goose. Anna Montalban, who has been sitting in a cell in the safe house for several hours now, a bulky camera lens watching her every move as we wait, on the other side of the camera, for any signs that she is wearing down. Twenty hours. Twenty hours since the man who used to be Al Sterling set himself on fire after Rostov forced me to inject Valentin with whatever poison ravaged him. In twenty hours, I have tried to sleep; I have tried to lodge Valya permanently in my mind, so I might never forget his face, but each time I glance away from him, I find some other crucial detail missing from my mental picture. Already I am forgetting.

No. I have to harness the anger that pulled me from my dreams. I have to unravel whatever’s been done to him, and Anna might be our only way of finding out what it is and how to undo it.

Donna cracks her gum and bows her head toward mine. “Look … I’m sorry about Valentin, okay?” She sighs. “I don’t know if Frank’s right about you, but hopefully you understand that if you want to save Valentin, questioning Anna together is our best shot.”

I think I’m supposed to tell Donna I forgive her or that I understand or that we can put it behind us, but I don’t have the energy for such words. Even if I wanted to forgive her, though, I cannot go into that room to question Anna. I can’t be that near to her, this traitor, this attacker, this woman who has somehow hovered near the poison inside Carlos and Heinrich and Al Sterling and now Valentin and come out unscathed. I’m watching her through the black-and-white closed-circuit television as she smokes in the concrete questioning room; water stains along the wall behind her stand out in crackling relief on the screen, which skews everything into harsh lightness and dark. Her eyes and hair—hollow, dead black; her skin and dress—blinding white. When she opens her mouth it becomes a gaping pit of deep black.

“Fine,” Donna says, when I don’t answer. “Suit yourself. I’ll crack Anna Montalban without you.”

Cindy shakes her head. “We could really use your help questioning Anna, Yul. Let me handle Frank—you let me know if you’re ready.”

Winnie settles into the chair beside me as Cindy and Donna leave, and fixes her gaze on the screen. “I’m so sorry, Yulia. I wish there was more I could do.”

I stare at the angry slash of Anna Montalban’s mouth on the distorted TV screen.

Papa offers me a hasty, too-broad grin, though his teeth clench hard on his cigarette. After he puffs the cherry to life, he leans back in the seat and pats me chastely on the shoulder. “Why the horse face, kiddo? You tryin’ out for
Mister Ed
? We’ll get whatever we need from her. Don’t you worry your pretty little head.” He sends a thin ribbon of smoke spiraling skyward, then stubs out his cigarette and heads down the hall after Donna and Cindy.

Winnie smiles sadly. “See? Your pops’ll take care of it.”

I twist around in a flash. “My father doesn’t take care of anyone but himself.”

Winnie leans toward me, matching my stance, but her voice stays eerily cold. “And what makes you think that?”

“He barely acts like he knows me. I’m his roommate, not his daughter. And what has he done to help Mama? To save her before she goes too far? Why is he off drinking and flirting every goddamned night instead of trying to bring Mama here safely?” Rage swells on my fingertips like blisters, like it’s scalding me from within. I should call upon my mantra, but deep down, I want to feel this rage.

Winnie’s face softens; she puts her hand on my knee. “You mean he hasn’t told you.”

I’m boiling over. Everything is steam, and I’m ready to unleash a teakettle scream. Bad enough that Papa should keep secrets at all, but that he should tell them to someone besides me? It takes every ounce of self-control I’ve ever had, every trick in Cindy’s meditative bag, to keep from screaming. When I do manage to speak, my voice is a sharpened blade. “Hasn’t told me what?”

Winnie’s no-nonsense varnish is peeling. Is it sympathy that’s pushing her toward telling me the truth? I can almost smell it on her, like fresh-baked sugared apples. I can hear it in her rippling Ella Fitzgerald shield. “Well,” she says slowly, “I suppose that’s for him to say.”

My pulse quickens as a dark thought takes hold of me. I clench my hand around Winnie’s. It’s too much effort to fear my power; why shouldn’t I embrace it, like Papa so cheerfully does? If I can ply Winnie’s sympathy, pour it into her like I did to Donna that day, give her that little push toward telling me the truth—

No. I can’t be like Papa, manipulating others on a whim. The rage dulls; the boil slows. My mind is mine alone.

My hands sink into my lap as Donna appears on the television screen.

The dark wells of Anna’s eyes lighten a degree as her lashes raise, her eyes tracking Donna’s movement around the table. Anna isn’t restrained, but she leans forward, like a leering fighter; she’s primed for a bout.

“Really? They’re giving me to you, stupid little girl?” Anna snorts, loud and grating, in Donna’s face. “You don’t know shit. You don’t understand
anything
!”

We can only see a sliver of Donna’s face in the screen, but her shoulders are trembling. Donna grips her own ponytail and twists it around one finger, again and again. “Then I guess you’d better explain it to me.”

Anna leans back into the chair. Her eyes are lidded again—dark horizontal bars as she squints at Donna. She sucks at her cigarette, dark gray patches appearing in her sucked-in cheeks, then exhales right into Donna’s face. “You are toast, little girl. Your whole little world is toast. This … system of yours? Your little happy capitalist smiley bubblegum face?” Anna draws a circle in the air with the cigarette. “Toast.”

“You weren’t so sure about that two weeks ago, when you met with your handler. Carlos Fonseca.” Donna opens the folder in front of her, but her bravado is fading, making her hands shake as she shoves a photograph at Anna. “You told him you never agreed to go as far with the plot as he wanted you to go.”

Anna’s smirk slackens. She uncrosses her arms and legs, slumping forward now without the rigidity to her spine. “How do you know I said that?”

Donna smiles, sitting up straighter. “We have our ways.”

“How the
hell
did you know I said that? Don’t play games with me, little girl!”

Anna lunges forward. Donna leaps back with a yelp, chair squealing against the concrete floor. I jump to my feet, forgetting I’m in a separate room from them.

“She’ll be fine,” Winnie says, though I notice she’s already lit a fresh cigarette from the dying old one. “Your father’ll help her out if he has to.”

Though Donna hasn’t said anything, Anna looks like she’s realized this, too. She sits back down, though she’s at the edge of her chair now, like she can’t get comfortable. “Careful,” Donna says. “I’d hate for them to take your cigarettes away.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Anna purrs.

Donna squares her shoulders. “Fonseca gave you two things at the diner. A roll of microfiche, and a bunch of vials. You’re going to tell me why.”

I exchange a glance with Winnie. “She’s not going to tell her anything.”

“Donna doesn’t need her to say anything—just think it.”

I shake my head. “I doubt she knows enough to help us.”

Anna is silent, waiting Donna out. Donna tries a few other approaches—the grandmother she’d overheard Anna mention when we first met her, her friends here in America—but nothing sticks.
Ba-bump.
Valentin needs answers.
I
need answers—whatever else the team wants out of Anna, I need some hint as to what’s happening to Valya, and if there’s any way to stop it.

I shove out of my chair and storm from the monitoring room and into the hallway of the nondescript suburban house. “Yulia?” Winnie shouts, chasing after me. “Yulia, are you okay?”

Cindy catches me by the shoulders just outside the interrogation room, where she and Papa watch Anna through a smoky two-way mirror. “Yulia.” She tilts her head at me. “I thought you didn’t want to take part in this.”

“Well, Donna’s not making any progress.”

“Then let the grown-ups handle this,” she says. “I wanted to give Donna a chance to soften her up, but we can send in your father—”

The grown-ups. I snort, whirling on Cindy, tearing my arm from her grip. “You think my father’s a grown-up? That hateful old fish Tuttelbaum? Phony fortune-tellers like you?”

“Phonies?” Cindy snaps.

“I’ve seen quite enough of how our missions play out when we let you ‘grown-ups’ call the shots. I’m not letting you ruin our only chance at saving Valentin.”

“There’s nothing to ruin. She’s an errand girl at best—I doubt they let her in on anything.”

“Which makes any attempt from me useless.” Papa mashes his fingers into the corners of his eyes, like he’s trying to squash out a headache. “I know you want to cure Valya, but I don’t think this bird has any song to sing, even if she wanted to.”

“We’ll see about that.” I yank open the door to the interrogation room.

Donna and Anna look up at me as one, both a little frightened, both a little angry at my intrusion. Donna recovers first, eyelashes flashing like a quick shutter speed. “Why, Yulia!” She grips her ponytail like it’s a ripcord. “So good of you to join us.”

“The hell you want.” Anna spits onto the floor. “The
hell
you want.”

“Don’t pay me any attention at all.” Breathe in. My mind is mine alone. “I’m not even here.”

I position myself behind Anna, palm pressing down into her shoulder. She twists around to look at me with a scowl, but then slumps back down. She’s wearing a sleeveless top; there’s plenty of space for our skin to connect. Perfect. Slowly, she turns back to Donna. I nod at Donna, who’s considering me with a raised eyebrow. “Please. Continue.”

Donna nods slowly. “Right. Where were we—yes. The microfiche. The vials. What were they for, Anna?” Donna asks, her voice gaining an edge.

I close my eyes. On the inhale, I summon up my memory of what I’d uncovered in the diner, the way Anna’s fear and apprehension felt when I viewed it then. She felt—
wrong
, then, about what she was doing. The guilt weighed on her. Hadn’t Carlos scolded her then, hadn’t he had to threaten her? How had she felt, that moment right before Carlos called her bluff? What was pushing her away from Carlos’s goals?

On the exhale. Weariness—the mental toll of keeping a secret like hers, of working against her boss, Senator Saxton. The warm promise of absolution. If she can spill what she knows, she can be unburdened. She can be free of all this weight and fear.

Anna’s thoughts flicker; exhaustion eats at her stony façade. Donna’s eyes meet mine with the faintest smile tweaking her lips.

“It’s a … serum. Some kind of crazy medical experiment they’re doing.” Anna shudders. “I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, okay? They threatened me. I had to either inject Saxton, or—or myself.”

Fear. Breathe in. Find Anna’s fears—getting caught, having Carlos make good on his blackmail threats. Hurting her grandmother in the Bronx. Deporting her back to Havana.
Compromise is another important tool in espionage
, Cindy told me
. It’s like blackmail, but … grayer.
Breathe out. The fear bubbles like soap, enveloping Anna in its oily skin.

Donna’s smile broadens as Anna’s shield crumbles further. “But you didn’t. You didn’t inject him, or yourself—you ran from us and the KGB both, didn’t you? Why?”

“It needed time to take control, all right?” She tries to wriggle out of my grasp, but I tighten my hold. “They wanted me to inject it five days before the NATO convention was set to vote on North Vietnam. I figured I’d wait until five days before, then I could run. They wouldn’t know I hadn’t done it until it was too late. But
you
idiots ruined that for me, didn’t you?”