‘I’ve told them everything. Everything. I’m sorry, boss.’ Losha raised his eyes, and Satinov looked into them searchingly. Had Losha really betrayed their friendship? He wouldn’t blame him if he had, but he had to consider what his former bodyguard knew. Could Losha know his only secret: Dashka?
‘You see?’ said Colonel Osipov. ‘So save yourself much pain, Comrade Satinov, and tell us what Losha has already confirmed. Losha?’
A lull. One of the guards tapped Losha’s arm, pointing at a typed paper before him. He seemed to awaken.
‘I heard you say often that our planes were flying coffins for our pilots and that this was Stalin’s fault.’
‘Not true. I never said that. Not once.’
Losha seemed to doze off and was again tapped. This time he had difficulty finding his place on the paper so Colonel Osipov whispered to him. He nodded.
‘You were recruited as a spy for the Americans and Zionists.’
‘Never,’ retorted Satinov. ‘I’ve been a devoted Leninist since I was sixteen.’
‘One more thing, Losha,’ said Colonel Osipov.
‘Yes,’ said Losha, ‘you corruptly…’
Satinov held his breath.
‘…at the front, when you were at Rokossovsky’s headquarters and Berlin, you corruptly sold medical supplies from the Ministry of Health for personal profit.’
Satinov gazed into Losha’s soul, aware suddenly that they were close to dismantling his entire life. Just a step from Dashka herself. Prussia. Berlin.
‘I know everything,’ said Losha, tears running down his face. ‘You didn’t think I knew of your immoral actions. But I’ve told them – kerboosh – everything!’
Afterwards, Satinov had been taken straight to the station and put in a reserved compartment with two Chekist guards. Now, two weeks later, he had not yet fallen off the precipice, but he was teetering on the edge of an abyss into which he would inevitably draw Tamriko and the children, and perhaps Dashka and hers. The children of Trotsky had all been liquidated; the lovely daughter of Tukhachevsky sent to the Arctic Circle. So far, he was in limbo, neither alive, nor in heaven, nor hell. He was still so enchanted by Dashka that he was utterly numb.
Satinov’s absorption of his own downfall, Genrikh’s role in it and Losha’s betrayals, was constantly interrupted by a replay of his last meeting with Dashka in the Aragvi private room, a memory so vivid that he could smell, feel, taste her pleasure in a rainstorm of images and sensations. Even now, he could see the flash of her white teeth as they came together, panting and laughing, their kisses that tasted of white wine, the smile on her gorgeously crooked mouth, the satin of her bare amber-skinned thighs, and her sitting on him, over him, in the vain hope that a waiter barging into the alcove would never guess that he was deep inside her, demurely covered by her pleated white skirt.
‘You know this just can’t go on,’ she had said afterwards, seemingly as amazed by their behaviour as he was, her pupils dilated with excitement. ‘But don’t look so solemn. Kiss me one more time.’
Now, as these memories fragmented and spun away, he realized that if he didn’t extricate himself from his current predicament, he was well on his way to receiving the nine grams in the back of the neck, and sooner rather than later.
‘THIS IS FROM me to wish you a long and happy married life,’ said Senka, handing over a book entitled
‘Darling Senka,’ cried Serafima. ‘I’ll treasure this forever.’
She was standing on the platform of the Belorussian Station in a flowery summer dress holding a little cream leather case as jets of steam blew white and feathery out of the train. All along the grimy platform, people were saying goodbyes in a myriad of permutations. Anyone seeing Serafima and her party would have presumed that they were schoolfriends and family despatching her on a holiday – but she feared that she would never see them or Russia again. And however much she was in love with Frank (who was waiting for her at his new posting in Paris) and looking forward to a new life in the West, she realized that the cliché was true: her soul was Russian and that meant she already missed Moscow, the diamond crystals of ice on her windows, the verses on the poet’s plinth in Pushkin Square, the silver birches in the forests, the hidden rushing of water beneath the snows as the thaw came, the ochre and duck-egg blue of old palaces – and that was before she had even looked into the eyes of her friends. The Dorov and Satinov children were all there to see her go. They had shared not just school but the Children’s Case too and so far she had only started to say goodbye to Senka. She was so moved that she could scarcely speak.
‘No offence, but your make-up’s all running,’ said Senka, but he too had started to cry and she took him in her arms, tiny in his Little Professor’s suit, and hugged him.
‘I know, darling Little Professor,’ she said. ‘Do I look awful?’
