4
THE CAPTAIN
Moscow, January 1942
His footfalls rang against the glossy floors. Uneven. A slight hitch. The wooden heels of his boots went off like gunshots each time they kissed the polished tiles. He didn’t have eyes for the opulence around him, the creamy white walls and their gilded drippings. The soaring domed ceilings. His mother would have given her last heel of bread to see the inside of this place. Nikita had given the life of his closest friend – though not willingly.
His destination was the set of gold inlay doors that loomed a dozen strides ahead. The uniformed guards standing at attention on either side shifted forward as he approached. One – young and pale-faced – opened his mouth as if to speak, and his partner silenced him with a hand gesture. Their eyes skipped over him, but they didn’t move to intercept him. His long black coat, the black boots, the gloves – it marked him for what he was.
The young one caught his lower lip between his teeth, and Nikita knew he’d seen the blood, the shiny splashes down the front of his coat; the trickles that ran down his sleeves and filled the palms of his gloves with tacky pools.
“I want to see him,” he said, without slowing.
They conferred with a glance. And opened the doors.
Major General R was entertaining a guest, a small man in a gray fur coat, bundled up in a chair opposite the expansive wooden desk. The major general glanced up with obvious annoyance, displeased by the interruption, and did a double-take. It was the blood. Plenty of men demanded it, but so few of them ever wanted to see it. Rokossovsky’s nostrils flared as if he could smell it.
Nikita could smell it. Some of it was his, still oozing from the long gash across the tops of his shoulders.
Most of it was Dmitri’s.
The flecks on his boots – those were a different story.
“Captain Baskin,” the major general began. “This is unexpected.”
But it wasn’t. Or, it shouldn’t have been. Maybe in other parts of the world, commanders expected their men to challenge this kind of bloodshed. Here, though, complete, unswerving loyalty was a given. To the major general, Nikita was not a man – capable of independent thought, emotion, resistance – but a weapon. A tool. And tools didn’t question their handlers.
Nikita reached inside his coat and withdrew a small, bloody bundle of cloth. He tossed it onto the desk, and it landed with a wet plop that caused the major general to wince.
“What is this?” he demanded, lip curling back in disgust.
“What we found in the village.”
Rokossovsky glared up at him.
Nikita met his stare.
A muscle twitched in the major general’s cheek. “What is it?”
No response.
“Major General,” the stranger said, his accent light, cultured. Like a Russian who had studied abroad, and who had lost the heaviness of Moscow. “If I may?”
Rokossovsky gave a stiff nod.
The man leaned forward over the desk and gnarled fingers flicked back the cloth. In the center, dark with blood, rested a small bird-shaped pendant on a chain.
Nikita recalled the slender, white throat, the soft gasp, the speckled brown of frightened eyes.
“All of them,” Rokossovsky had said of the families Nikita and his men had been charged with searching. “Anarchists, all. And anarchists aren’t human.”
It was artifacts they’d been charged with looking for – anything of great value. To be retrieved by any means necessary.
The stranger pinched the chain between thumb and forefinger and lifted the necklace, so the bird swung back and forth, a grisly pendulum. “A trinket,” he said, smiling softly. “A pretty bauble for a little girl.”
“Yes.” Nikita’s tongue felt oily; he could taste the blood. “A little girl.”
The major general inspected the necklace without touching it. “This was it? This was all you found?”
“There was nothing to find. There never has been.”
He’d known this moment was coming, had been building for months now. All those villages, all those simple farm folk, factory workers, families with too many mouths to feed. Upended furniture, and startled shrieks, the cries of babies. And the blood. All the blood. Nothing worth taking but a handful of trinkets that were precious to their owners, and worthless to the cause. Threats from Germany, amassing armies, and a mad scramble in the dark for something even darker, something Nikita wasn’t sure he even understood. He’d known it would come to this face-off across a desk, he just hadn’t known how much he’d lose in the process.
“I’m done,” he said, simply, and reached to unfasten the top button of his coat with one bloody-gloved hand.
“Wait,” the stranger said, twisting in his chair. Smooth, unremarkable features, lines around his eyes – eyes that were, as Nikita studied him – brighter than he’d first thought. Full of sparks and mischief. His beard and mustache were neatly trimmed, salt-and-pepper. His hair shone with expensive oils.
“Captain,” he said, smiling, “the major general and I have been talking about you and your men.”
Nikita had always thought that when he finally resigned, he’d do so with his heart in his throat, his pulse beating loudly out of his ears and fingertips, his skin slick with sweat beneath his clothes. He’d thought his jaw would lock and his tongue would freeze, and that he wouldn’t be able to get the words out. Because the words were a death sentence. The day he said “I don’t” was the day he signed the rest of his life away.
Instead, he felt nothing but cold. His insides full-up with the bleak chill of the winter that lay beyond the Kremlin’s decadent walls. He let the few, fragile soft parts of himself soak up the grief, lock it away tight until he had the chance to feel it properly, and everything else was ice.
At the stranger’s words, he felt the first crack in that wall of indifference. The first faint stirrings of something like fear.
“Captain Baskin,” Rokossovsky said, folding his hands together on the desk. “I’d like you to meet Monsieur Philippe.”
Nikita didn’t acknowledge the man, who was now watching him with a smile.
“He comes to us with a great boon,” the major general continued. “A way to stop the Germans.”
Nikita didn’t take the bait.
The stranger – Philippe – turned around fully, tucking his legs up into the chair like a child. “You see, Captain, there is a program, one which I’m quite familiar with. A way to create a powerful weapon.” His smile widened as he spoke. “The kind of weapon that the Führer, even with all his factories and technology, could only dream of obtaining. It will turn the tide of the war.”
Nikita curled his hands into fists, felt the stickiness of drying blood gluing his fingers to his palms. “I don’t see what this has to do with me or my men.”
The major general smiled then, sharp and angry. “Monsieur Philippe’s weapon requires a volunteer.”
“One with certain…gifts,” Philippe said.
“You,” Rokossovsky said, pointing at Nikita, “are going to go and fetch him.”