The Secret Speech

and persecution of members of our State Security services. We simply don’t know what to expect next.

Leo remained silent, noting Panin’s interest was not the welfare of Raisa, Elena, or Zoya, but the wider implications. He was a consummate politician, dealing with nations and armies, borders and regions, never the mere individual. Charming and witty, yet there was something cold about him, revealed in moments like these when any ordinary person would have offered some words of comfort.

There was a knock on the door. The guards moved for their guns. A voice called out:

— I’m looking for Officer Leo Demidov. A letter was delivered to reception.

Panin nodded at the guards, who cautiously opened the door, guns raised. One took the letter while the other searched the man who delivered it, finding nothing. The envelope was handed to Leo.

On the outside was a carefully drawn ink crucifix. Leo tore open the envelope, pulling out a single sheet of paper:

Church of Sancta Sophia

Midnight

Alone

15 MARCH

THIRTY MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT, LEO was waiting at the location where the Church of Sancta Sophia had once stood. The domes and tabernacles were gone. In their place was a vast pit, ten meters deep, twenty meters wide, and seventy long. One of the pit walls had collapsed, forming an uneven slope that led down to a muddy basin of brown snow, black ice, and oozy water. The remaining walls were near collapse, slipping inward, creating the impression of a mouth closing around a monstrous black tongue. No work had taken place since 1950: it was a construction site with no construction, sealed off and closed down. Along the steel perimeter fence were faded signs warning people to keep out. After the initial, botched attempt, when one demolition expert had died and several of the crowd had been injured, the church had been successfully destroyed and cleared away, loaded on the back of trucks, the remains dumped outside the city, a rubble corpse now bound together with weeds. Preliminary work had begun for what was to be the nation’s largest watersports complex, including a fifty-meter pool and a series of banya, one for men, one for women, and one marble chamber for State officials.

Excitement had been manufactured by a saturation media campaign. The design schematics had been reprinted in Pravda, footage had run in the cinemas showing real people superimposed against a matte drawing of the completed baths. While the propaganda geared up, work had shuddered to a halt. The ground beside the river was unstable and susceptible to slippage. The foundations had begun to move and tear, causing the authorities to regret not examining the ancient foundations of the church more carefully before scooping them up and tossing them aside. Some of the best minds in the country had been called in and, after careful consideration, declared it unsuitable for a complex that required deep networks of pipes and drains, dug farther down than the church had ever extended. Those experts had been dismissed and more pliable experts brought in who, after a different kind of careful consideration, declared the problem fixable. They merely needed more time. That was the answer the State had wanted to hear, not wishing to admit to a mistake. These experts had been housed in luxury apartments where they drew diagrams, smoked cigars, and jotted down calculations while the deep pit filled with rain during the autumn, snow during the winter, and mosquitoes during the summer. The propaganda footage was pulled from the cinemas. Shrewd citizens understood that it would be best to forget about the project. Imprudent citizens wryly commented that a watery trench made a poor substitute for a three-hundred- year-old church. In the summer of 1951 Leo had arrested a man for making such a quip.

Leo checked his watch. He’d been waiting for over an hour. Shivering and exhausted, he was near mad with impatience. He had no idea if his wife had survived surgery and, cut off from communication, had no means of finding out. There was no question that the decision to leave Raisa’s side and meet Lazar was the correct one. There was nothing he could do in the hospital. No matter how much Zoya hated him, no matter how she behaved, no matter if she wanted him dead, he’d taken responsibility for her, a responsibility he’d promised to uphold whether she loved him or not. In preparation for the meeting he’d gone home, showered, scrubbed the smell of the sewer off him, and changed out of his uniform. His hands had been dressed at the hospital. He’d refused painkillers, fearing that they might dull him. Wearing civilian clothing, he was conscious that the trappings of authority might provoke a vengeful priest.

Hearing a noise, Leo turned, searching the gloom for his adversary. There was residual light from nearby buildings outside the fenced perimeter. Precious machinery — cranes, diggers — stood abandoned, left to rust because no one dared admit defeat and redeploy them where they could be put to use. Leo heard the noise again: the clang of metal against stone. It wasn’t coming from inside the construction site: it was coming from the river.

Cautiously, he approached the stone ledge, tentatively leaning over and peering down toward the water. A hand reached up not far from where he was standing. A man nimbly pulled himself up, squatting on the ledge before jumping down to the construction site. To his side another man climbed up. They were crawling out of the mouth of a sewer tunnel, clambering up the wall, like a disturbed ant colony responding to a threat. Leo recognized the young boy who’d murdered the patriarch clambering out, expertly using finger- and toeholds in the brickwork. Watching the boy move with such agility, it was unsurprising that he’d survived his earlier dive into the torrent.

The gang searched Leo for weapons. There were seven men and the boy, tattoos on all of their necks and hands. Several items of their clothes were well tailored, while others were threadbare, mismatched as if a haphazard selection from the wardrobes of a hundred different people. Their appearance left no question. They were part of a criminal fraternity — the vory—a brotherhood forged during their time in the Gulags. Despite Leo’s profession, he encountered vory rarely. They considered themselves apart from the State.

The gang members spread out: examining the surroundings, making sure it was safe. Finally the boy whistled, giving the all-clear. Two hands appeared on the ledge. Lazar climbed up, towering above his vory, silhouetted by the lights on the other side of the river. Except that this wasn’t Lazar. It was a woman — Anisya, Lazar’s wife.

Anisya’s hair was cropped short. Her features were sharp. All the softness in her face and body had been lost. Despite this, she seemed more intensely alive, more striking and vivid than ever before, as if some great energy emanated from her. She was wearing loose trousers, an open shirt, and a short, thick coat — dressed much like her men. There was a gun on her belt, like a bandit. From her triumphant position she looked down at Leo, proud that her arrival had surprised him. Leo could manage only one word, her name:

— Anisya?

She smiled. Her voice was cracked and deep, no longer melodic, no longer the voice of a woman who used to sing in her husband’s choir:

— That name means nothing to me now. My men call me Fraera.

She jumped down from the ledge not far from where Leo was. Standing up straight, she studied his face intently:

— Maxim…

She addressed him with the alias he’d taken:

— Answer me this, and don’t lie, how often did you think of me? Every day?

— Honestly, no.

— Did you think of me once a week?

— No.

— Once a month…

— I don’t know…

Fraera allowed him to taper off into embarrassed silence before remarking: