“I’ll go tonight,” he lied.
“You promise,” she corrected.
“I promise I’ll go tonight.”
“Better.” She slid off the switchboard, settled lightly on his lap, and leaned into him, lifting his chin with cool fingers so she could lay a row of kisses very slowly and carefully across the base of his throat.
She must have felt his heart lurch, because when she sat back, the corners of her mouth were turned up in a slight, sly grin. She brought his trembling hand to her lips and kissed his callused fingertips, one by one.
“Is that goodbye?” His voice was hoarse. He hadn’t quite caught his breath yet.
“It’s good luck,” she said. “I’ll see you again.”
He didn’t say anything. He had the feeling she knew he was lying. She always knew.
3
In the end it didn’t matter, the lie, because the NKVD came for him at noon mess.
There were three of them, wearing the khaki tunics and the bloused navy trousers and the blue peaked caps with the blood-red bands. Each carried a sleek sidearm very much like the one he’d taken off Zampolit Petrov and given to the Polish Resistance girl. They took him from the mess line, and two of them held him tightly by the arms while the third plucked Tolya’s identification papers from his breast pocket and compared them carefully to another set of papers that Tolya couldn’t see to read. Then he folded both sets of papers into his own pocket and jerked his chin over his shoulder.
They took Tolya out to the station square, the two holding him by the arms, the third walking behind with the mouth of his pistol pressed in the small of Tolya’s back. There was a smooth, low black car idling by the curb. The driver had a DP-27 machine gun loose on his lap. They pushed Tolya’s head down and shoved him into the back seat. One of them sat on either side of him. The third holstered his pistol and went around to sit with the driver, pulling the machine gun across his knees.
The car pulled away from the curb, circled around the square, and went down toward Gródecka. The verdigris spires of Saint Elizabeth’s rose up straight ahead. The car turned left onto Pierackiego Street, following the railroad tracks. They weren’t taking him to the prison. The car sped along the street, away from the city center—very nearly the same way he’d run, last night.
The one with the machine gun, the one who’d held his pistol on Tolya’s back, turned around, cradling the gun in the crook of his arm.
“Don’t be afraid, Tolya,” he said, in Ukrainian.
Tolya spit at him.
They all laughed—except the driver, who hadn’t seen it and who glanced up in the mirror distractedly.
“We’re all friends here,” the one with the machine gun said. “We’re not NKVD.”
He took off the blue peaked cap and smoothed his dark hair with his fingers. He was young—five years or so older than Tolya. He had a smooth, tanned face and cold gray eyes that were much older than his face. There was a tiny sliver of a scar, like the mark of a fingernail, on his right cheekbone, below the eye.
“This is Andriy,” he said, putting his hand on the driver’s shoulder. “That’s Taras”—flicking his fingers—“and that’s Yakiv. I’m sorry about the uniforms, but I think we pulled it off pretty well.”
He slid the gun off his arm and stuck out his hand to Tolya, over the seat.
“Aleksey,” he said, “but you can call me Solovey. This is my squad—well, some of it. We’re with the L’viv group of the UPA.”
Tolya didn’t move. It was a trick. He was sure it was a trick. They would speak in Ukrainian, saying L’viv instead of Lwów, and they would tell him they were UPA—Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia, the Insurgent Army, radical Ukrainian nationalists and anti-Communists—and they would try to trick him into talking.
After a moment, Solovey withdrew his hand.
“It’s all right, Tolya,” he said. “It’s all right.”
Tolya looked out the window. They were crossing the north fork of the railroad tracks. There was a roadblock with a boom gate at the end of the bridge. Solovey put his cap back on. He slipped a paper from inside his jacket, unfolded it, and leaned across Andriy to show it to the sentry. This time, Tolya saw the heading at the top of the paper and the stamp on the corner.
“Comrade Colonel Volkov’s orders,” Solovey said to the sentry, in Russian.
Tolya’s throat closed. He watched the paper circulate hands outside the car window. Fyodor Volkov was the Front’s senior NKVD officer. Tolya had seen him only once, in Kyiv last November, and then only very quickly from a distance: He’d been with General Vatutin, commander of the Front, on an inspection of the ruined city. Five months later General Vatutin was dead, assassinated by UPA partisans, and Volkov had sworn the UPA would pay.
They must think he was UPA. They must think that was why he’d killed Zampolit Petrov. That was the only reason they would take him on Volkov’s personal orders. That was the only reason they would be trying to convince him that they, too, were UPA.
The stamped paper came back in through the window. The sentry raised the gate.
“I almost saluted,” Solovey said, and laughed. He was speaking Ukrainian again.
“Quiet,” Andriy said, glancing up in the mirror.
He didn’t know why they were taking him out of the city to work on him. He knew how the NKVD did their business. If they really needed to get somebody talking, they would do it in public, making everybody else watch. They called that the “conference method,” and that was how they’d gotten his father. His father hadn’t been strong enough—weak enough? hardened enough?—to stand by and watch in silence.
The last of the city was speeding past in a gray, rubbled blur. Now there were bright green poplar trees streaming along the roadside. Tolya’s stomach jumped and twisted. He looked away.
Solovey looked back at him over the seat.
“Have you ever been in a car before, Tolya?”
No. He remembered the first time he’d ever seen a car—in Kyiv, at the train station, after Aunt Olena had come to get him and take him away from Kuz’myn. That was three or four days after his mother had been shot. There’d been some high-ranking Communist Party official getting out of the car, and there’d been NKVD with him, and Tolya had held on tightly to Aunt Olena’s hand because they’d looked so very like the men who’d shot his mother against the garden wall. Of course, they couldn’t have been the same because it was three hundred kilometers from Kuz’myn to Kyiv and there were different jurisdictions, but that wasn’t how a ten-year-old mind worked. You didn’t understand distances and jurisdictions. All you really knew was that your mother was dead, and it wasn’t the famine that had done it, but the men with the blue caps.
“Our source says you come from Kyiv,” Solovey said, as though he’d heard Tolya’s thoughts. But that was another trick—to drop names and dates, to pretend you knew things. Tolya didn’t say anything. Solovey didn’t seem to care. “Turn off here,” he said to Andriy. The car eased off the road, the tires spitting up gravel. Andriy put on the hand brake and cut the engine.