Sekret (23 page)

Valentin scoops up the cards and shuffles them. In the still, dead night, it sounds like machine gun fire. “It helps me, though, that you kept it all from her. It makes my work easy. When I tell Rostov that there’s nothing, it’s not a lie. I wouldn’t tell him anything regardless, but as you know, he has his … ways.”

“We hid it from her, her mother and I,” Papa said. “For her own safety.”

Valentin sighs. “It would appear you’re not the only ones. There are parts of her mind—I don’t know if it’s something Rostov has done, or…” For a moment, I almost think he looks at me, but it must be the light playing on his glasses. Again, I feel that sore patch inside my head like a fading bruise. Rostov. It has to be. But some of the spots feel older, more battered than the rest.

“You could help her,” Papa says, “but I doubt she’ll let you.” He lays out his hand of cards. “I win again.”

Valentin smirks and digs in his pockets. “At least it’s only dream money.” He drops a wad of rubles on the tabletop.

“And I’m only a collection of her memories of me.” Papa scoops up Valentin’s bills and deals again.

“I do have an idea,” Valentin says. He lays the words out as carefully as he plays his next hand, while Papa takes another drag on his cigarette. “Not just helping her recover whatever memories she’s lost. I—I know she doesn’t trust me enough for that, not yet. But if she wants to escape from Rostov, all this…”

“Best not to say too much right now,” Papa says.

“No, you’re right. But if she can forgive me, if she’s willing, then she should meet me in the vault room tomorrow afternoon. One o’clock. We’ll have a few hours to talk before I have to go on a mission with Kruzenko.”

Papa extinguishes his cigarette in his emptied glass. “Not flesh nor feathers—best of luck to you, young man.”

The train rattles around a corner, and the moonlit fog pours in from the window, flooding my view until I slip back into the prickly warmth of sleep.

CHAPTER 29

THE VAULT IS DARK
as I feel my way through the narrow corridor. Maybe my dream of Valentin and Papa was just that; or maybe it’s all a trap. My fingers scrape flecks of paint from the walls and an image flits through me of others touching this place—servants, liveried and trussed up, seeking refuge from their bygone rulers decades ago.

Something shuffles at the end of the hall. Scraping sound; smell of sulfur; light. Valentin’s face looms out of the darkness as he lowers his match to a large candle, then takes it around the room, lighting further candles from the first.

“Are we performing some sort of ritual?” I ask. “You have Saint George’s finger bone on display in here?”

He shakes his head. “I had to use the light outlet to power the record player.”

I smile despite myself and sink down cross-legged onto the floor. He appears to have made some effort to sweep up the dust and fragments of disintegrating drop sheets. The record player is open before me, built into a square plaid-patterned suitcase. “And what does this have to do with—”

“Shh. A surprise.” He finishes fussing with the candles and sits opposite me. After flipping through his stack of record sleeves, he pulls a black disc out without letting me see the album cover.

“Come on, Valya. I hate surprises.”

“Most psychics do.” He slides the disc onto the turntable. “Close your eyes.”

I wrap my arms around my chest. “I’m really not in the mood for games. What you’ve been doing to me…”

He winces, eyes closing like a searchlight extinguishing. “I know I shouldn’t have kept it from you, Yulia. But at the same time, I had to—as long as Rostov trusted me to do it, then I could monitor what he was doing, protect you from facing him alone…”

“I don’t need your protection,” I say, my face flushing. “Not anyone’s. Why does everyone think I’m so helpless? I can take care of myself.”

“But don’t you see? That’s just it. You can’t stand up to Rostov by yourself—none of us can. We have to work together. But they’ve turned us against each other this way, everyone spying on everyone else…”

“Please. Don’t. You were right before, when you showed me what happened when you tried to run. It’s safest for us in here.” I lean back on my palms.

Valentin nods, fingers circling the rim of the record. “For now, yes. But once we catch the Americans…”

I tremble, squeezing my eyes shut. “No.” His words are making me sick. He’s filling me with the foulest disease I can imagine.

He’s filling me with hope.

“I want to run again. Of course I do. But Rostov—” Buried memories rumble deep in my mind. I cannot let them free. The blistering white heat, the thud in my chest and temple—No. There are thoughts Rostov must not see. But their existence, their hearts beating under the floorboard, remind me what he’s capable of.

“Yes,” Valentin says, “but even Rostov cannot catch everything.” He takes a deep breath. “Do you trust me, Yulia?”

“No.” I don’t even pause to think.

Valentin smiles. “Fair enough. But I think we want the same things—a better use for our powers, a better life than ‘good enough.’ Do you want them badly enough to try?”

Yes.
The answer comes from deep in my bones, etched onto my genetic code. I want answers, I want freedom, I want something more than the comfortable but helpless life that Sergei says is ours. I want to know why Mama has changed her mind; I want to see the soft, tender thoughts under my brain’s bruises.

“All right.” I shift my weight and squeeze my eyes shut. “I’m closing my eyes.”

The needle drops. Scratchy sounds creep from the record like melting ice. “I was given this music as a reward for sifting through your dreams. I think you deserve to have it as much as I do,” Valentin says.

Three guitar chords—then they tumble down the scale. Three chords, then back down. The drums kick in, and suddenly two men’s voices sing out in simple English, perfect harmony, not just one line but a thick, lush landscape of sounds.

Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something, I think you’ll understand

When I, say that something, I wanna hold your hand …

We are no longer in the dead of a Russian winter. Instead we skip across a beach, in Georgia perhaps, looking across the Black Sea as sunlight and sand kiss our toes. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It isn’t dark and heavy and crushing like Russian music, nor is it treacly and false like what our comrades put forth as a pretense of pop. It is so real, so unusual, so removed from anything I’ve ever seen or heard.

And when I touch you, I feel happy inside

It’s such a feeling, that my love … I can’t hide

I can’t hide

I can’t hide …

The song rolls into a sour mood, but only long enough to tug my heart from my chest until it turns joyous again. It’s over too fast—only a few minutes in length. I open my eyes and find Valentin staring back at me with the same glassy-eyed hunger for this music that I feel pounding through my veins.

“And this—” I wet my parched lips. “This is American pop music?”

“Actually, they’re English. Call themselves the Beatles. This is their brand new single. Kruzenko had it imported from England just for me.” He smiles, and lies on his side, propped up on his elbow. “I have a few other songs for you, if you want to—”

“Yes!” I tumble onto my back with a laugh, my head angled toward him. “Yes, more. Please!”

“All right.” He leans over me to change the records, blushing furiously as he does. “This is Bob Dylan, and he sings in the American style called ‘blues,’ which is similar to the jazz I love so much…”

A mournful guitar patters along for a while before a man sings, deep-throated but crisp, and Valentin translates in my head the sad story of a house in New Orleans that chews up lives and spits the souls back out.

Valentin nestles onto the floor beside me again, shoulder hovering near mine close enough that I can feel his warmth. His temple radiates a pleasant lack of thought. There is no fear, no overwhelming responsibility in this room; only wonderful music and Valentin and me.

After that song ends, and he has played a few more—Elvis Presley with a dark chocolate voice who “Can’t Help Fallin’ in Love,” and another Beatles song, imploring me to hear their secrets—he tilts his head toward me. “You are happy?” he asks, his words flowing across the floor.

“It’s incredible. Is this what the rest of the world sounds like?”

“Not all of it.” He props one hand on his forehead, and his fingertips touch my hair. “But this is music, music when restraints have been lifted. It’s the difference between plants growing in a fenced-in garden, and the same plants left to conquer an entire field.”

“Music is very important to you,” I say. Stupidly, I know. Music is his soul, and all those afternoons I basked in his piano playing—he shared more of himself with me then than he could ever speak.

He nods. “It’s a language for things we can’t put in words.”

I roll my head toward his and our noses brush together. We have similar dark hair, olive skin; his eyes dark and brooding, mine wide but no less dark. Genetics mark us both as Georgian, he a Sorokhin and I a Chernina. Like most human beings, we share ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of our DNA. Perhaps even closer—we share whatever strange gene gives us this mental prowess, if it can be explained with science at all. And yet there are things about each of us that neither will ever understand. That we can only admire from afar, like a Fabergé egg under glass whose gears will never be exposed.

“When did your family leave Georgia?” I ask. Papa always spoke of visiting his grandparents back in Tbilisi, before Stalin’s days.

“We didn’t leave,” Valentin says. His chest settles and our noses press closer. “Father and I were taken from there.”

“What was it like?” I want his soft, thick hair in my fingers, as though I were sifting through sand. I raise my hand, tentatively; his hair doesn’t disappoint. His eyes half close but he is still watching me, every bit as alert. Yevtushenko’s poem bleeds through my music.
We can do so much, denied our earth—tenderly embrace as lovers in a darkened room.
Never mind that he was talking about corpses in a mass grave.

“We lived in a tiny town in northern Ingush.” He raises a hand and tangles it in my hair, mirroring me. “I woke up every morning to the smell of sea salt from our back porch. I practiced piano while the sun came up, and at night, I walked the beach. Even after my mother passed, we survived, we…” He hesitates. “Her memories were like happy ghosts around us.”

“It sounds like a charmed existence,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I had no idea, at the time, what work my father did to give me such a life. That there were debts we’d have to pay.”

“Debts?”

He looks away. “It was too good to be true. It couldn’t last.” He twitches under my hand. “I don’t deserve such things. This monster that I am…”

“No.” My hand tightens into a fist. “You aren’t a monster. Neither of us is. We have the tools, the power to be monsters … but we don’t have to use them that way.”

“I never wanted to be more. I felt trapped in this fate, until the first day I saw you and knew just who I had hurt by not caring. By helping them hunt you down.”

I flinch. I thought I was prepared for that truth, but hearing it hang in the open air gives it a sharpness it doesn’t deserve. “We have all done unforgivable things. You had no choice,” I tell him.

“We always have a choice, Yul. Some may cost us more, far more than we can pay, but we can choose. After I met you, I swore I’d stop obeying them blindly, but I couldn’t undo what I’d done…” He sighs. The spark of hope and the blackness of regret is in that sigh. “How can you ever forgive me?”

My lips find his, and it’s like kissing the sea. He is salty, cool without chilling me, and fresh as a clean summer breeze. Our mouths snag together, two currents flowing as one, and all the music in his head goes spilling into mine, the thoughts and emotions for which there are no words.

His hands dig deeper into my hair. He is gold-domed Russian Orthodox chapels on the shore and birch forests awash with green. I’m pulling myself onto him, and a new song emerges in the rise and fall of our lungs, in his lips reaching for mine.

“Yulia.” He jerks forward beneath me as if he’s been startled from sleep. “Yulia.”

I kiss the smooth tip of his nose. “Valentin?”

“I don’t deserve your affection—”

I slide off of him, but can’t keep my hand from running the length of his arm as I try to catch my breath. My blouse is tangled up in my sweater, and the pleat of my skirt won’t lay flat. I don’t care. Snow is falling outside, but in here I could melt away, just a puddle of craving for the music inside Valentin.

Valentin crosses his legs funny. “I’m sorry,” he says, and I like him so much I pretend not to know why he’s covering himself the way he is.

“You don’t have to apologize,” I tell him. “I wanted … I mean, I started it—”

“No. You don’t understand.” He takes off his glasses; the lenses have fogged. “I’m letting myself be a tool for Rostov and his monsters, and I don’t know how to break free.”

Free.
The word shatters against me, too painful to contemplate. I tuck flyaway hairs behind my ear. “Valya. Please.” His shortened name is so rich on my tongue. I want to say it again and again. “I understand why you’ve done these things, but I don’t want you in my dreams anymore, all right? I want the thoughts that we share to be given freely.”

His eyes squeeze shut; his thoughts hum like a radiator. “You know what Rostov is capable of. I can’t simply tell him no.”

One, two bullets in my skin. “I know.” I lower my head. “But you said you had an idea.”

He loads the Beatles record onto the plate and starts it over, ratcheting the volume up. “Focus on the music,” he shouts at me. “Try not to think too much about the words I’m saying.”

I nod, and scoot closer to him. I stop myself short of reaching for his hand.

His lips tingle against my ear. “If we work together, I know we can escape. I’ve been testing the guards, getting them to do little things under my command—I’m sure I can distract them. And you can learn the Metro tunnel guards’ patrol route…”