She read it carefully twice, noted down its details and the new name: I. N. Palitsyn. She looked round the reading room: it was emptier than it had been. Half the table lights were off. The youngsters were all gone, only the old still there, those old men with so little time, like Roza with her terrifying sense of loss. Was this the name she was looking for? “There were friendships even then…”
Katinka slammed the book shut with a muffled boom that made one of the older readers jump and twitch as if he were waking from a long sleep. It was time to go. She had an appointment.
7
The motorcyclist in the leather trousers, pale brown bomber jacket and horned, Viking-style helmet skidded to a halt outside the Black Dog nightclub. It was on the Moskva Embankment a few hundred yards from the British Embassy and just across from the Kremlin. An occasional chunk of ice still floated down the Moskva River and the dark earth was edged with snow like a frill of lace, but the air held the spring tang of moist earth. It was already dusk, but the night was warm and grainy.
Katinka could hear a heavy-metal band playing the Scorpions’ song “Winds of Change” inside the nightclub. She wondered if she had come to the wrong place: she was no Muscovite and she barely knew the city center. It seemed a strange spot for a meeting of historians.
Then the biker dismounted and walked toward her, pulling off his horned helmet and extending a leather paw. “Katinka? Is it you? I’m Maxy Shubin.”
“Oh, hi…” Katinka felt the flush rise up her face—much to her embarrassment—because he was so much younger than she had expected. Maxy’s dark hair was a long, tousled mane, his caramel eyes were wide, and his light beard looked as if it had been grown over a weekend, by accident rather than design. When she saw he wore tight leather trousers punctuated with silver zippers, she tried not to smile. “You don’t look like a researcher,” she told him.
Maxy smiled. “And you don’t look like an academic. Would you like a drink?”
The doorman, a punk rocker with too many piercings in his lips and nose, waved them into the club. Upstairs there was a sitting area with smoke hanging in the air, used glasses, plastic cups and decaying sandwiches on every surface. The band playing downstairs made the floor shake but at least they could talk.
Maxy found a seat on a sofa, hailed a waif-like waitress in vinyl boots, stockings and leather shorts, and ordered them two cold Ochakov beers. “You’re new in Moscow, aren’t you?”
“I studied here and I do research here but—”
“Let me guess from your accent: you’re from the north Caucasus somewhere? Mineralnye Vody or Vladikavkaz?”
“Not bad,” said Katinka, her confidence returning as she sipped the icy beer, unaware that she had left the foam on her nose and that her clothes made it obvious she was from somewhere far away. “You’re a Muscovite?”
“Originally from Piter.”
“The window on Europe. How romantic!”
“Do you really think so?” said Maxy. “I’m someone who still believes that. Actually it’s a backwater, an elegant poetical backwater, a city of empty palaces. But it has a tradition of freedom so perhaps it played some part in my working at the Redemption Foundation.” He pulled off his leather jacket. “How did you find me? And what’s this project of yours?”
“I read your article on the NKVD during the Terror in
Maxy looked somewhat sheepish—and it occurred to Katinka that he had agreed to meet her only because she was a girl—but she dismissed such base motives in this genial crusader for truth. “I’m studying Catherine the Great for my doctorate…”
Maxy leaned toward her, brown eyes on hers. “So why are you leaving the graceful, noble, romantic court of the Empress for the sordid psychopathic killers of Stalin?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I didn’t want this job. And I refused it at first.”
“But you took it anyway?”
“Have you ever met someone who’s so beautiful and intriguing that you can’t resist her?”
Maxy put his head on one side and looked at her suggestively. “Only very occasionally,” he said.
“I mean in your research,” she said coldly, sitting back.
Maxy’s face fell. “Yes, in my work I often meet people who’ve been so damaged by the crimes of the past that I want to do all I can to put them back together again—that’s my vocation.” He looked young and earnest now, and she liked him better.
“Well, I met someone just like that. Her name’s Roza Getman and she’s so wounded by the past that I had to help her…” Maxy listened carefully as Katinka recounted her trip to London, the oligarch and his palace, the walks in Regent’s Park—and how she had phoned Roza’s one link to the past, a powerful old Communist, and had been to see him on a quest that she had made her own…
“It sounds like a million stories, a thousand cases I’m working on right now,” said Maxy at last. “I can’t help you in detail—I’m so overstretched—but I can give you some rough guidelines. Look, call me again next week and I’ll put you in touch with a coworker who might be more use.” He took a sip of beer and Katinka realized he was ending the conversation. She had slapped down his flirtation and, because her case was like so many others, there was no real reason for him to help her. The sooner she got back to the eighteenth century, the better. “By the way, who was the old Communist?” he asked as he got up.
“Oh, he was called Satinov,” Katinka said, wondering how she was going to tell Roza that no one would help them.
Maxy sat down again abruptly. “Hercules Satinov?”
“Yes.”
“He saw you?”
She nodded.
Maxy lit a cigarette, offered her one and lit it for her. “He never sees anyone, Katinka,” he said, talking fast, his face animated. “I’ve tried to meet Satinov for fifteen years and not one of my colleagues at the foundation, no liberal historian, has ever gotten to see him. All the other old dinosaurs are dead and Satinov’s the very last of them, the keeper of the secrets, the great survivor of the twentieth century. He knows where the elephants lie buried. If he’s seen you, it’s because he’s interested in you. It means he can help you.”
Katinka looked at him witheringly.
Maxy spread his hands. “If you share the results of your research with me, I’ll help you all I can. Don’t look at me like that, Katinka—believe me, you’re really going to need me to find your way through this vanished world. You’d find it easier charting the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt than the labyrinth of Stalin’s Kremlin. What do you say? Do we have a deal?”
Katinka thought of Roza again, and sighed. “Yes,” she said, “but remember, I’m a serious historian—not some girl to be chatted up.”
He laughed and called for two more bottles of Ochakov beer. They raised them.
“To our unlikely partnership.” They drank and clinked their bottles. “Now,” Maxy said, “tell me about your
