Tolya slung his rifle and ran, keeping low along the empty shop fronts. They saw him in the half-light and shouted after him. They must have seen Zampolit Petrov’s body because there was a split second’s silence—weapons being unslung and aimed—then a spray of submachine-gun fire. Plaster shattered above Tolya’s head and rained down in a fine, white dust. Bullets kicked up dirt at his feet. He ducked into a side street. Footsteps pounded after him. Shouts echoed along the shop fronts. Tolya cut over on a cross street and turned quickly up another side street—then again, over and up, over and up, north and west through the tangled web of little streets above Gródecka, moving away from the city center. He came out onto a broad, quiet, cobbled street running east-west beneath a low brick wall. There were the railroad tracks ahead of him, open countryside beyond—black-earth grainland billowing gently up to the wooded foothills above the city.
He crossed the tracks and crouched for a little while on the embankment, catching his breath and waiting and watching. It was full dark now. The city center was blazing. The streets were empty and silent. He didn’t think they’d seen his face. It was possible they hadn’t even seen his uniform in the darkness and smoke and dust. Most likely, they would think he’d been Polish Resistance—that it had been a targeted killing, retaliation for the six prisoners Zampolit Petrov had shot that morning in the station square.
He walked back along the tracks. The moon had set by the time he got back to the station. There was a lone sentry in the ruined train shed, sitting on the edge of the platform, swinging his legs and smoking makhorka.
Tolya said softly, “Vasya.”
The muzzle of Vasya’s rifle came up smoothly. “Who’s there?”
“It’s Tolya.”
The muzzle dipped. “Where the hell were you? They were looking for you.”
“Who?”
“Rudenko. He ordered a search when you weren’t back at curfew. He said they’d better find you dead or not at all.”
“I got lost.”
“Was she pretty?”
“I got lost,” Tolya said.
“Sure.” Vasya pulled on his cigarette and flicked away the ash with his fingers. “Rudenko’s the one you’ve got to convince. I don’t care.”
* * *
Comrade Lieutenant Rudenko’s office had once been the stationmaster’s office. There were old, yellowed timetables on the walls, and a dusty clock, with tall black Roman numerals and thin, scrolled black metal hands, that had run out one morning at 8:17. There was an upright pine desk with a matching letter box and cash drawer, and faded travel posters for Poznań and Kraków, Warsaw and Sopot.
And there was Comrade Lieutenant Maksym Rudenko, disgruntled battalion commander, the newest addition.
He was a meat slab of a man, very nearly two meters tall, bald and red faced and perpetually scowling, with hands the size of dinner plates and fingers like boiled sausages. There was a long, ridged scar across the bridge of his nose—from shrapnel or a bayonet, Tolya didn’t know. What he did know was that Comrade Lieutenant Rudenko could pick him up, twirl him around, and break him over a knee like a twig.
“I ought to give you to Zampolit Petrov,” Comrade Lieutenant Rudenko said. He was holding his pipe in one hand, pouring vodka into a tumbler on the desktop. “Teach you a lesson—all you farm boys, all you unread Cossack shit. Beat it into your thick heads. You all think you’re the exception.”
He raised the glass. “To hell with that Russian bastard Sokolov,” he said, meaning Comrade Colonel Sokolov, commander of their division. “He’d have my head if I sent you to a firing squad.” He tipped his head and tossed the vodka back. He set the glass on the desktop, stuck his pipe in his mouth, and scowled at Tolya. “Well? Are you going to say something?”
“No, Comrade Lieutenant.”
“Good. Get the hell out of my office.”
“Yes, Comrade Lieutenant.”
“Korolenko.”
Tolya paused at the door. “Yes, Comrade Lieutenant?”
“If you miss curfew again, I’ll shoot you myself, and to hell with the zampolit. I’ll tell Comrade Colonel Sokolov it was an accidental discharge.”
“Yes, Comrade Lieutenant,” Tolya said.
* * *
He felt his way in the clammy dark over bodies and boots and helmets and packs. He slipped in between Yura and Petya, unslung his rifle, and kicked off his boots. He took off his jacket and rolled it up for a pillow. He lay on his stomach, his hands folded under his chest, so he could pull out the rosary between the buttons of his tunic and hold the crucifix in his fingers while he prayed.
Beside him, Yura lifted an arm from his face. “Where were you?” he asked. He spoke in a low, sleepy whisper, in Ukrainian.
“Around. I don’t know. I got lost.”
“They were looking for you.”
“I know.”
“Koval was looking for you.”
Tolya didn’t say anything. He bent his head, touched the crucifix to his lips, and pushed the rosary back into his tunic.
“What was so important?” Yura asked.
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
“Because if you’re not interested in her anymore—”
“Shut up,” Tolya said.
Yura buried his face in his arms again. “Well, you ought to be careful—going around. Gives people the wrong idea.”
2
Koval found him in the switch tower.
He didn’t ask how. It was the system they’d worked out between them over the year and a half since they’d first met, back in Kharkiv: He didn’t ask how, and she didn’t ask why.
There were no trains coming to the terminal now, and there’d been no trains for three months. Polish Resistance saboteurs had cut the main lines back in April, when Lwów was still in German hands, and somebody—Germans, Poles, or Soviets, Tolya didn’t know—had since collapsed the train shed and made off with the rails for scrap metal. Sparse, knee-high yellow grass had sprung up between the ties. The gutted ruins of freight cars were piled up under the wall at the end of the yard.
From where he sat—in the signalman’s chair, his feet propped up comfortably on the switchboard—he could see clear out of the city, past the empty yard and across Białohorska Street to the low, heather-laced slope where the tanks of the Third Guards were practicing their gunnery. That was westward. Eastward, he could see down the station street all the way to Saint Elizabeth’s, and across the smoke-wreathed rooftops all the way to the opera house, at the city center.
He could see the station just below, and he could see Koval coming across the yard from the platform.
He’d cleaned his rifle and was reassembling it now, watching the puffs of white smoke drift over the hillside. She came over from the doorway and sat on the edge of the switchboard, facing him.
“Listen,” she said, “we’ve got to talk.”
“All right.”
“They’re saying somebody shot Petrov.”
Tolya held his rifle on his lap and slid the magazine housing into the port. The barrel followed, then the bands, then the nose cap, then the bolt. His fingers moved on their own, from memory.