Traitor Page 18

“You’ve got a price on your head.”

  “How would they know?”

  “The Germans have probably got your photograph up. And anybody who looks at you is going to know you’re on the run. You’ve been shot. You’re wearing somebody else’s shirt. Anyway, if they’re Jewish or Polish, they might just kill us themselves.”

  I played my trump card.

  “Third option, then,” I said. “You go.”

  For a second, I thought he was going to kick me in the face. I think the only reason he didn’t was because he was worried about the noise. He hopped off the table.

  “We’re done,” he said.

  “Listen to me.”

  He kicked his mattress instead. He kicked it away from mine and flopped down on it, his back to me.

  “Listen,” I said. “You’ve got enough food to get you to Stryy, maybe to the border—someplace where it’s safe to use the money. There’s no point in both of us staying. There’s no guarantee we’ll make it out even if we wait. This is your best chance.”

  He sat up without a word, reached across me, took my pistol from beside the mattress, and lay back down with both pistols cradled protectively under his arm.

  “Mykola,” I said, “listen to me.”

  “You can keep saying that. It’s not going to work.”

  I couldn’t even get him angry. I tried a less nuanced approach.

  “You’re an idiot,” I said.

  “And you’re sick.”

  “Dying,” I said viciously. “I’ll be dead by morning, so you might as well—”

  “I’m not leaving you,” he said, “so shut up.”

  I tried one last tack.

  “I’d leave you,” I said.

  “Aleks,” he said peacefully, “shut up and go to sleep.”

  * * *

  The knock made both of us jump.

  It was either very late or very early. The room was still pitch-black. Mykola must have been lying there awake as I was; I don’t think the knock would have woken us up if we’d been sleeping. The pattern was right, short-short-short-long, but it wasn’t Mrs. Kijek. She’d tapped lightly with one fingernail. This person was using a knuckle.

  Mykola nudged my arm in the darkness and handed me my pistol. There was a rattle and a soft snick as the tongue of the lock depressed. The door eased open. I had a glimpse of a tall, oddly bulky figure in coat and fedora, silhouetted against the light from the streetlamps. Then the door slid shut again.

  “Don’t shoot,” Mr. Kijek said, in Polish.

  He came over from the door, unbuttoning his coat. I heard the rustle of paper packages and the clink of bottles.

  “Vodka?” I said, also in Polish.

  I couldn’t tell whether he knew that was a joke. He didn’t laugh.

  “Water—four bottles. Sausage, cheese, bread, jam, two bars of chocolate.” He set them out on the floor, one by one. He spoke in a low, level voice. “We’d have come sooner if we could. They’ve been watching us—the Gestapo. Tailing us. Has anybody tried the door?”

  I felt stupid and selfish and ashamed all at once. My face heated up.

  “No,” I said.

  “Two days ago,” Mykola said.

  I rounded on him. “What?”

  He spoke in Ukrainian. He’d always been shy about trying to speak Polish.

  “The first,” he said quietly. “The afternoon of the first. Aleksey was asleep. I think it was just looters.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” I accused.

  I couldn’t see it, but I knew he shrugged.

  “What were you going to do about it?” he said.

  “And since two days ago”—Mr. Kijek, in Polish—“nothing?”

  “Nothing,” Mykola agreed in Ukrainian.

  “My wife has an estate outside Zarudce,” Mr. Kijek said, “too far outside the city to be requisitioned as an officer’s billet, thank God. We’re going to try to move you there.” He hesitated. “The trouble is they’ve impounded our car, so we won’t be able to move you, Aleksey, until you can walk it. Mykola can go sooner, of course.”

  I felt Mykola stiffen. “No.”

  “When is sooner?” I asked.

  “We can move him today.”

  “No,” Mykola said again, more sharply.

  “The longer we wait,” Mr. Kijek said quietly, “the greater the risk—for all of us.”

  He was talking to me, not to Mykola. I knew what he was really saying. Mykola had a chance. I didn’t. He was counting on me to be sensible about it.

  “It’s Mykola’s decision,” I said. No use pretending otherwise.

  “I don’t go without him,” Mykola said flatly—in Polish, as if to make sure Mr. Kijek heard him this time.

  Mr. Kijek was silent for a moment, probably trying to figure out how to explain tactfully that we were both idiots.

  “There is another option,” he said finally. “We have friends who can get you out in their car—both of you, today.”

  He waited for us to grasp the implication.

  “Resistance,” I said.

  “On my orders,” he agreed.

  I was an idiot, all right.

  He’d backed us into a corner, and he knew it. He’d known Mykola wouldn’t leave me. The infuriating thing was that he didn’t need to do it. We were powerless. He could do whatever he wanted with us, and he could do it without a word. He’d just wanted to hear us admit it.

  If I hadn’t been so angry, I might have conceded it was neatly done. As it was, I put my pistol to his forehead.

  “How about this? We give you to the Germans, and they give us amnesty.”

  “Aleks,” Mykola said.

  “They won’t give you amnesty,” Mr. Kijek said. Except for the fact that he was sitting very still, you’d never have guessed he had a gun against his head. His voice was maddeningly calm. It made you wonder whether he was used to talking down angry Ukrainians brandishing pistols. “You killed a Nachtigall officer. The best you’ll ever get from them is a bullet in your skull, and I wouldn’t count on that. They want you alive. They’ll make an example of you.”

  I wondered how he’d known, and how long he’d known, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d caught me off guard.

  “As if we’d get any better from your people,” I said.

  “Aleks,” Mykola said again.

  “I’m asking you to trust me,” Mr. Kijek said.

  “And I’m answering.”

  “Tell me why we’d betray you now,” he said, “now—after all this. We could have handed over the two sons of Yevhen Kobryn five days ago.”

  I was too truly startled this time to care if he could tell, and too exhausted suddenly to be angry. I lowered the pistol.

  “You told him?” I asked Mykola, in Ukrainian.

  “He didn’t say a word,” Mr. Kijek said, in Ukrainian that was better than mine.

  “Who told you? How’d you know that name?”

  He shook his head. “I remembered your names—Aleksey, Mykola. Your ages were right. Neither of you was carrying identification. I could put it together.”

  “You were there.”

  “I was there,” he agreed. “It was my case—my operation. My arrest.”

  And I remembered him.

  I remembered the way he’d leaned silently against the door after they’d taken Papa out, smoking his cigarette and watching while the police pulled books off shelves and rifled through papers, while they slit mattresses and ripped up floorboards, looking for anything that might so much as hint at treason. I remembered him thumbing idly through the fresh-printed stack of UPA pamphlets that Papa hadn’t had time to stuff into the stove. I remembered him bending his head to speak into an underling’s ear, and the underling coming over with a photograph of Shukhevych and asking whether we remembered seeing that man before—asking Mykola and me, not Mama. They wouldn’t let Mama speak while they questioned us. I’d shaken my head and said no and wondered whether that was a lie I would hav
e to confess or whether God understood when you lied to protect somebody. Mykola hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t said anything the whole time. The underling had prodded him with a booted foot and dragged him up by his hair—“Please,” Mama had said in Polish, “please don’t hurt them.” I had never heard her speak Polish before, but she’d spoken Polish then. The underling had laughed and called Mykola an inbred runt, at which I’d lunged at him and bitten his hand hard enough to draw blood, at which he’d cracked me across the face with his pistol butt.

  I’d had the welt and a swollen-shut eye for three weeks, and Mama had said to tell people at school that I’d tripped on the stairs. I still had the scar—a tiny, silvered divot under the corner of my right eye, on the cheekbone.

  “You weren’t police,” I said. I remembered. He’d worn plain clothes—suit and fedora, his overcoat folded over his arm.

  “No,” Mr. Kijek said.

  “Border guard?”

  “Second Department,” he said.

  Polish counterintelligence. He’d been an undercover agent—an infiltrator into the Ukrainian underground. Papa would have known him before that night. Papa would have trusted him.

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” I said. The Reds hadn’t bothered sending captured Polish intelligence agents to the camps, the way they’d done with army and police. They’d tortured and shot them right here in Lwów.

  “I left the department,” Mr. Kijek said. “That was the last assignment I took.”

  “Got what you were after?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Good thinking,” I said. “Quit while you’re ahead.” My throat was tight. I was dangerously close to sniffing. I dashed my hand across my nose and hoped he and Mykola didn’t see.

  He put out a hand suddenly, and I jerked back. I thought he was going for my throat. Instead he laid the backs of his fingers on my forehead.

  “You’ve been taking the acetaminophen?” he asked.

  The question was so unexpected that I just blinked at him for a second.

  “The medicine for the fever,” he prompted.

  “Yes.” His fingers were cold against my skin. I resisted the urge to squirm away.

  “The full dose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he telling the truth?” That was to Mykola, the trustworthy one.

  “Four hundred milligrams every four hours,” Mykola recited.

  Mr. Kijek let go of my head. I heard him release a long, low breath.

  “He hasn’t been taking the codeine,” Mykola said. “I didn’t know whether he was supposed to keep taking that when he was taking the—other stuff.”

  Mr. Kijek put a hand on my knee. I flinched reflexively. I tried to swallow the groan and ended up sounding something like an asphyxiating duck.

  He let go of my knee and pushed me down against the mattress.

  “Acetaminophen,” he said. He sounded distracted. “Yes, he can take the codeine.”

  “Is he all right?”

  Mr. Kijek hesitated, long enough that I could guess at what he wasn’t saying.

  “Infected?” I said.

  “The knee doesn’t look too good,” he said quietly. “We can make you comfortable, keep the fever down, keep you hydrated and rested—but you need antibiotics, not painkillers.”

  “Can you get them?” Mykola asked. His voice was level, but he’d stiffened again.

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Kijek said.

  Mykola fumbled in his coat and pulled out the twenty marks. He held the wad out to Mr. Kijek.

  “Please,” he said.

  Mr. Kijek shook his head. He pushed Mykola’s hand away gently.

  “We’ve been trying,” he said. “We’ll keep trying. The problem is that the Soviets cleaned out everything when they retreated. The hospitals, the black market—all the sulfa antibiotics they could get their hands on. If we’re going to get them, we’re going to have to get them from the Germans.”

  28

  They would bring the car at seven, Mr. Kijek said—he and his friends.

  I could tell he wasn’t very happy about it. There was a curfew at sundown, and neither Mykola nor I had identification. My fake passport had been in the pack we’d lost in the tunnels, which meant the Nachtigallen had it now, which meant the Gestapo and the SS had it too. I would be identified straightaway if we were stopped, and we would almost certainly be stopped if we took the car out after dark. But they were making another shipment today—that was the word he used, wysyłka, exactly as if we were packages—and that was the earliest they could make it back with the car.

  At half past seven, Mykola said, “What time is sundown?”

  “About nine thirty,” I said.

  “Maybe they decided to wait until tomorrow,” he said.

  The lock finally rattled at a quarter to nine. I think we’d both accepted by then that the car wasn’t coming tonight. The noise caught us off guard. The door swung open before it occurred to me that there hadn’t been a knock first.

  It shut again before I’d registered anything but the steel Wehrmacht helmet and the bayoneted rifle.

  I snatched up my pistol, snapped the slide, and aimed for the middle of the intruder’s chest. Mykola’s hand shot out to catch my arm. My brain caught up with the rest of me. Somebody would hear a gunshot. His rifle was slung. He was as off guard as we were. Maybe he was alone. Maybe he hadn’t seen us. Maybe he was just looking for a place to sleep, and if we kept very quiet—

  “Aleksey,” Andriy said.

  Maybe not.

  I retrained the pistol. “Who’s there?”

  “Andriy. Please don’t shoot.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember. Andriy of Proskuriv. Didn’t recognize you in the uniform. Almost shot you by accident.”

  “Please, I’ve got to talk—”

  “Which would have been ironic,” I said, “because when I shoot you it’s definitely going to be on purpose.”

  “Please,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “Hands up, bastard. Come over here.”

  He came over quickly and wordlessly, holding his arms out like a scarecrow. The bulky wool coat looked ridiculously big on him. The deep brim of the helmet hung down low over his eyes. You could see a mouth and a chin and the tip of a nose, that was about it.

  “Enjoying your two thousand marks?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything. He dropped to his knees beside my mattress. He darted a glance over my legs. I yanked the rifle off his shoulder and gave it to Mykola.

  “Alone?” I asked him.

  “Yes. Aleksey, they—”

  “Who else knows?”

  “What?”

  I shoved him down to the floor and pinned him, digging the muzzle of the pistol between his eyes.

  “Who else knows we’re here? Marko? The Gestapo? Who else?”

  “V-Vitalik. Just Vitalik, I swear.”

  That gave me pause.

  “Vitalik sent you?”

  “And these. Anti-b-biotics.” He dug a small paper packet from somewhere inside his coat and held it out, hand trembling. “G-good faith.”

  I snatched the packet away from him. “How’d you find us? Lucky guess?”

  He shook his head doggedly. “I followed them—the Kijeks.”

  Realization dawned.

  “You were the tail.”

  “You’ve got to listen—”

  “That was you trying the door the other day.”

  “Please,” he said, “you’ve got to listen to me.”

  “They thought you were Gestapo. I could have told them you were just a sneaky, cowardly, greedy little rat.”

  “Aleksey—”

  “Stop saying my name.” I dug the muzzle harder against his forehead. “Give me a reason not to, rat. Go on. Nobody’s going to hear this in time to do you any good.”

  “I’m sor—”

  “Not going to cut it. Try again.”

  “Please, just listen to me. They shot him
—Kijek.”

  My stomach jumped as though I’d been kicked.

  “What?”

  “They shot him. They went to the house. T-took him out to the Wulka Hills and shot him.”

  “Who? Gestapo? SS?” From everything I’d heard, the Germans’ secret police were just as bad as the NKVD—and the SS, the devils responsible for keeping us subjects of the Reich properly in line, were much, much worse.

  “SS and Nachtigallen.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry, Al—I mean, I—”

  “You gave them the address?”

  He blinked at me, his mouth open. Clearly he hadn’t anticipated the question.

  “You gave them the address,” I hissed. “You told them they were with the Resistance.”

  “No, I sw—”

  I shook him so hard that his teeth snapped together. “You told them they were with the Resistance, didn’t you?”

  “N-no, I didn’t t-tell them anything, I swear. It’s not b-because of the Resistance. It’s because of the university.”

  “What?”

  “They’ve got a list—the SS. Vitalik showed me. Names and addresses of university faculty, academics. Like the Reds. They took him because he lectures at the university.”

  Mykola lifted his head. He hadn’t said a word this whole time—just sat hunched with the rifle across his lap, deliberately avoiding looking at Andriy. “If they’d known he was with the Resistance,” he said quietly, “they’d have kept him for interrogation, not shot him.” I was pretty sure he was crying, but his voice was steady.

  “Please,” Andriy said. “I didn’t tell them anything.”

  “Weren’t they paying well enough this time?”

  “It wasn’t for the mon—”

  “Shut up.” I nudged him sharply with the pistol for emphasis. “You said they took Mr. Kijek. What about Mrs. Kijek? She wasn’t on the list?”

  “N-no—I mean, yes, she’s on it. That’s what I c-came to—”

  “Where is she?”

  “At the hospital. N-night shift.” He gulped a breath and rushed to get the words out before I could clobber him again. “That’s what I came to t-tell you. Mr. Kijek t-told them she was up in Zarudce. Bought some ti—”

  I took the pistol away from his forehead. “Give me your uniform. Now.”

  Mykola looked up again. “What are you doing?”