Condemned (4 page)

The room began to quiet. The jurors sat back in their seats.

“Who are you?” the Judge said to the first man in the white jacket. He had a black mustache and slick black hair.

I'm Doctor Angelo J. Acquista,” the man responded somewhat stridently.

“And you've been treating Mr. Leppard for a nose bleed? Is that it?”

“This patient has had a massive hemorrhage due to critically high blood pressure. It took more than three hours at the hospital to stop his bleeding.…”

“I'm not asking you for a speech, Doctor.”

“I'm not giving you a speech, Your Honor. I merely want you to know that this man's condition is far more serious than what you consider a mere nosebleed. Your demand that he be brought here was certainly contraindicated, and was certainly severely detrimental to his medical condition.”

“I'll be the judge of that.”

“I hope you're also prepared to be medically responsible for any untoward events in his health. I will not be, nor will Lenox Hill Hospital be, and I want that on the record, if that's what you say around here.…”

“Don't you dare talk to me like that, young man,” the Judge snapped, rising.

“
Doctor
, Your Honor.
Doctor
Angelo J. Acquista. I may be young, but I am a medical doctor. I don't intend to be rude. I am merely stating to you that this patient's medical condition is such that to have brought him down here was a serious and detrimental decision which was due solely to your direct order and over my serious professional objection.”

“Look at his face! Look at his face!” someone shouted from the jury box.

The gauze on Leppard's face was suffused with fresh blood. It began to flow through the gauze, and then down his cheeks. Pandemonium, shouting, screaming, pounding of the bench arose. Everyone was on their feet, staring or shrieking.

Dr. Acquista began to shout defiantly toward the bench, while ministering to his patient. His harangue was lost in the babble of all the other voices. The other medical man was hovering over Leppard, bandaging his face.

Slowly the doctor began to push the gurney into the crowd, toward the back, through the door. When the door closed behind it, half the audience flowed with it.

The Judge was still pounding the bench. Claire Trainor was shouting through cupped hands. The lawyers and defendants, everyone in the well of the courtroom, was standing.

“Sit down! Sit down!” shouted Trainor.

The Judge motioned to the jury, directing them back to the jury room. The jury began to file out reluctantly, lingering with amazement, curiosity. Finally they were all out.

The Judge standing behind the bench, gavel in hand, pounded for order again. Finally, she handed the gavel to Trainor, and slipped silently down the steps toward her robing room. “Three o'clock, three o'clock,” Trainor shouted, as she banged the gavel on her desk.

When the noise had died down sufficiently for some to understand what Trainor was saying, like fluid from a toppled bottle, the crowd in the courtroom began to leak slowly into the corridor.

Leningrad : January 9, 1983 : 4:10 A.M.

Tatiana Marcovich trembled as she huddled against her father, Vasily. From behind Tatiana, her mother, Inga, reached forward to clutch Tatiana's left arm, not to calm or comfort her daughter, but to support herself. Inga's tuberculosis had become debilitating. She declined visibly as they waited for Vasily's contacts to make arrangements at the American Consulate for travel documents to Finland as Jewish refugees—although they were Orthodox Christian. From Finland, they would have passage to Vienna, then Italy. But the threat of arrest by the K.G.B. at any moment had been torturous. Inga's condition so deteriorated that the American medication that Vasily bought through his network of contacts had almost no effect. Despite Tatiana's constant attention and devotion caring for her mother, Inga's condition worsened. The coughing and the vile, yellow-green mucous were a daily harbinger of what lay ahead.

The trio stood just inside the entrance door of the apartment below their own, listening to the heavy footsteps of the K.G.B. above. The Agents sprang their ‘surprise' raid a half hour earlier than Vasily had been expecting. Fortunately, they had been on their way down the stairs to spend a few last moments with Vlada, Inga's sister, and her husband Boris, when the raiding party, equipped with sledge hammers, started up the stairs. They managed to slip inside and shut the door to Vlada's apartment just seconds before the raiding party. Through a K.G.B. official whom he bribed handsomely each week, Vasily was expecting the K.G.B. A few days before, his contact had arranged for them to pass each other casually in the street, for a warning to be conveyed. Unlike the previous raid, which the K.G.B. sprang at Vasily's sister's apartment, this time, the K.G.B. was intent upon raiding the right apartment and arresting Vasily.

Vasily turned to embrace his brave twelve—no, thirteen year old, Tatiana. How ironic, he thought, the day of their escape, January 9, was Tatiana's thirteenth birthday. Instead of having a birthday celebration, however, they were having a different, very real, very dangerous goingaway ceremony. “We will have your birthday party in Vienna, Kotyonok (kitten),” Vasily whispered in Tatiana's ear. She nodded. Her dark eyes were wide with resolve and determination as well as fear. In one hand, Tatiana held Bim, her tattered, tired but faithful, velveteen, floppy eared stuffed toy dog.

Deeper inside the downstairs apartment, Vlada Miraslovskaya, sat at a table in the kitchen, comforting her own three children. Vlada's husband, Boris Miraslov, heavy set, balding, stood in the hallway, just behind Inga, gazing up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of K.G.B. footfalls overhead. There was more noise as the K.G.B. shouted, pounding their hammers violently against the cinder-block walls. Vasily saw his wife, trembling, her eyes wet and bulging, a handkerchief pressed hard against her mouth. He put a finger to his lips. Inga nodded.

Vasily looked again toward the ceiling, shrugged an apology toward Boris. Suddenly, there was a crash, followed by jubilant shouting from above. The K.G.B. had found the twenty thousand rubles Vasily purposely left for them to find. Then there was quiet upstairs. There were rubles enough to keep the raiders occupied for several minutes as they counted. Vasily turned to Inga and Tatiana, glanced at Boris, then tugged Tatiana toward the outside hallway. He put a finger to his lips as she passed in front of him. Tatiana, pulling her mother's sleeve, started down the steps.

Vasily took a packet of rubles from his pocket. He had prepared several to take with him on the journey, in case anyone on the way needed practical persuasion. He offered the packet to Miraslov. Boris refused the packet with a shake of his large head. The two men looked in each other's moist eyes and hugged forcefully, kissing each other's cheeks, patting each other's back. They looked once more at each other, then Vasily turned and moved quickly to the stairwell. As he eased down the stairs as silently as he could, Vasily had a dread thought. What if the car and driver the American Vice-Consul promised wasn't waiting by the back entrance? His little daughter and wife would be standing alone in the street; to be discovered by K.G.B. Agents that had stayed downstairs. In that case, they, and he, would be as good as dead.

The car would be there!
he forced himself to think positively. He felt inside his greatcoat to feel the thick, sealed envelope he promised to leave with the driver
after
he had in hand the travel papers that were to be in the glove compartment of the car. There were enough Rubles in that envelope for that greedy Vice Consul to retire to a Dacha, and then some.
The car would be there!
he repeated. Vasily mumbled a litany of remembered prayers that the car and driver would be downstairs.

Tatiana had guided her mother into the basement of the building. Vasily caught up to them, took the lead through a stone passage, opened the rear door of the building that led to an alley. It was cold outside—Russian cold—and totally dark. Snow hung in the air. Vasily looked at his watch. It was 4:25 AM. Leningrad's darkness would cover them for a good five hours more.

Half way back on cobble-stoned Prokophyeva Ulitza (street), the amber turn signal of a parked car lit once in the darkness. He could see the shadow of a driver behind the steering wheel. The shadow of another man opened the door on the passenger side and quickly bounded up two steps into the darkness of an adjacent doorway.

Who was that?
Vasily wondered as he turned quickly to his family. He had no time to worry. He and Tatiana half carried Inga in the direction of the darkened car which—with no lights on—was now moving toward them.

When the car was abreast of them, Vasily peered into the windshield, but did not recognize the driver. “You are?” he demanded.

“Robert Leighton sent me,” the driver said in American accented Russian.

Tatiana could only see that the driver was young and had a long, thin nose.

“Quick,” Vasily said, pulling open the rear door of the Lada, pushing Inga and Tatiana into the rear seat. He ran around the car, opened the front passenger door, and threw himself inward. The car began moving even before Vasily secured the door. At the corner, the car turned right onto Viborgskoe Shosse, a wide avenue that led to the outskirts of the city. After a block on Viborgskoe, the driver turned on the headlights.

Tatiana's right hand, her mother's left were intertwined, trembling. With her free hand, Tatiana hugged her toy dog Bim tightly.

“Shouldn't we drive faster?” Vasily asked in Russian.

“If we want to bring attention to ourselves,” the driver answered, also in Russian, staring straight ahead. Tatiana could see his eyes glance in the little rear-view mirror as he studied the streets behind them.

The car moved past occasional workers headed to very early shifts, or coming home from very late ones. Some shadows stood in doorways, drunk, others bent over, scavenging in garbage cans. Tatiana recognized the streets through which they now traveled. The family had lived near here two years ago, before Vasily had begun to bring home rubles by the bagful to bribe housing officials for better quarters. They drove past a hospital. It was here, Tatiana holding onto her mother's skirt with one hand, Bim with the other, that hunger and poverty had forced them to sift through the spoiled and rotting vegetables discarded by the hospital commissary. They were not alone. Others competed for the half rotten potatoes and wilted greens, manna to those who had nothing. Scraped and trimmed of their blackened edges, Inga made tasty soup, enough to last for three to eat for days after each foray to the hospital. Like cats in the dark, Tatiana and Inga looked into each other's eyes as they passed behind the dark hulk of the hospital.

Rubles could always find accepting hands in Leningrad, especially at K.G.B. headquarters. For a price, Vasily could learn where and when to expect danger. Many months back, the K.G.B. had mistakenly raided Vasily's sister's apartment and arrested her, thinking she was Vasily's wife. They also found seven hundred fifty thousand rubles in the walls—of which, only five hundred thousand were turned over to the Government. After that, Vasily made sure to put enough rubles, weekly, into the hands of those who could tell him if and when another such raid would happen. He also paid a Deputy Commissar substantially to have the report of the investigation of his sister conclude that the money found in his sister's apartment had been secreted there by the person who had been assigned the apartment before her. The prior occupant, conveniently for the scenario, was in political exile.

The driver silently pointed to the glove compartment in the dashboard. Vasily opened it. A clear plastic folder held travel documents for three Jewish refugees. The Vice-Consul, whose drug habit, spawned in the lonely, long, dark winter nights of Leningrad, had indeed been greedy enough to supply the papers.

“Everything there?” the driver asked.

“Yes,” said Vasily as he sifted through the papers. He reached into his jacket pocket and passed the promised envelope to the driver.

The car picked up a little speed as they reached the edge of the city, and turned onto the nearly deserted open road that led toward Vuoksenniska, Finland, toward the border and then the train that would carry them first north into Finland, then south, to Western Europe, to Vienna, then to Italy. No one in the car spoke. The steady high revving whine of the Lada's motor was broken occasionally by Inga's spasmodic coughing.

Vasily turned anxiously. “Alright?”

Inga, when the coughing subsided, nodded, although he knew she was not.

Vasily took out a package of cigarettes, rolled down his window an inch, He offered a cigarette toward the driver.

“Nyet.”

The match that lit the tip of Vasily's cigarette glowed within the dark car a moment. Tatiana caught a glimpse of the driver reddish, very short American crew cut hair. Vasily's thoughts were as dark as the night into which the cigarette smoke escaped through the small opening at the top of the window. He thought about his nights stalking through the streets of the city they had just left, desperately looking for someone, something, from whom he could steal enough to support his pitiful family, his patient wife, his adoring
melinki kotyonok
, his little kitten, Tatiana.

When Vasily discovered the way to make money, pocketsful, boxes and walls full of it, Inga was already coughing furiously. When he found a way to make all the rubles needed to pay for a good life here, the doctor told him that Inga had tuberculosis, that she needed a dry climate. And then there was the K.G.B.! Vasily cursed silently. But perhaps the K.G.B. finding out about he and his activities, forcing him to flee, was Providence's way of guiding him to move his family to America, to Arizona, where American doctors could cure Inga. He was sure the American doctors could cure her. If only this driver would go faster.