Daughters of victory, p.31
Daughters of Victory, page 31
“I would have executed anyone else without a second thought. Not you.” Harsh again as he paced, passing a hand through his hair and over his beard. “What more could I have done to secure your full loyalty?”
“You have been lenient, and I’m grateful.” He had not mentioned Vera or Fanya, so surely that meant he was unaware of their involvement, and if he had known about my plot, he would have prevented it. Someone at the hotel must have uncovered it, someone who had not interfered but had told him after I’d broken out, claiming to have heard I’d gone to the speech; for fleeing imprisonment and defying orders, the baron’s daughter would surely be executed. “Please listen—”
Kazimir caught my chin, looking at me with eyes that saw only the aristocracy, then jerked me into a firm kiss, tasting of ash and betrayal.
“You have proven you won’t stop. Not even if I grant you mercy. So do not expect mercy or anything else from me ever again.”
When I twisted aside, blinding pain coursed through my head. It had no time to pass before a cloth smothered my nose and mouth—damp, with a slightly sweet taste and oddly metallic odor. Though I screamed and hurled muffled curses, everything faded.
* * *
Khimki Forest, 5 September 1918
I lost count of how many days it continued; I spent them unconscious or left in horrific isolation. It was as though Kazimir hated being in the room with me. I knew nothing of his plans for me, nothing of my friends, only that my chance to find Orlova was gone.
The drug-induced haze lifted from my mind as I roused. Kazimir sat at the table with a cigarette, refusing to look at me.
I swallowed against my dry throat. Now that he was here, I had to make him listen.
The door swung open, accompanied by a new voice—clear, distinct, shrill with desperation. Unmistakable. “You were supposed to get there, Kazimir!” As he rose to meet her, she gripped his forearms, shrieking. “You were supposed to get there!” She looked to me as her voice fell to a tremble. “Before she fired.”
No, it was not possible.
I stared into those familiar eyes, bright and hazel.
“Traffic was heavier due to the speech, but I went exactly where you told me to go—and what the hell were you thinking?” he retorted, though something beyond rage tainted his own voice—guilt, fear, perhaps both. “This is your fault, Vera, not mine. You lured me out of the hotel, let her go, and then sent me to stop her, all to prove a fucking point.”
“Because when I told you she mentioned a desire to assassinate Lenin, you said we needed to leave her imprisoned while we worked harder to bring her into the party, so you had to see for yourself that she won’t change. Now do you realize she was never going to stop?”
“You’re both Bolsheviks?” I demanded, prompting them to look at me. Then in an unsteady whisper, “You, too, Vera?”
I wanted her to say no. It was too late for Kazimir; he had already confirmed the truth. And indeed, the truth had shattered us. I had always known it would, though this was a truth I had never anticipated. So much had been taken from me—years in a katorga, precious time with my daughter, the uncle who had cared for me, the man I loved. Now Vera had to assuage my concerns, to assure me we would endure. Ours was a friendship built from perceptions and revolution and mistrust. Fate would not be so cruel as to permit us to overcome so much only to destroy us.
But I knew not to put my faith in such impossible hopes. Fate was the pistol pointed always at my chest, firing one bullet, then another, until all that remained was an empty magazine and an unrecognizable corpse.
The silence was deafening, broken only by my sharp intake of breath when Vera nodded.
“My mother and Kazimir’s were sisters,” she said, moving a chair closer to me and sitting down. “After Bloody Sunday, the Bolshevik Party recruited survivors, so I responded to an advertisement. At first they just laughed—a little girl with nowhere to go, offering to join a political party? But I wanted justice and retribution, as did they, so they took me in.”
“When you lost your families, why didn’t you and Kazimir try to locate one another?”
“By Bloody Sunday, my aunt and uncle were already dead, so I thought the Old Regime had killed my cousin, too, until a mission took me to Moscow. I learned he was alive with a contingent of Socialist Revolutionaries, and my superiors gave me permission to infiltrate to win his loyalty. Until then, he thought I’d been killed alongside my parents.”
The bonds around my wrists and ankles felt tighter with every passing moment. “Why did you keep your familial tie from everyone?”
“So party members would not fear favoritism between us. I joined the contingent a couple years before you returned; then, after the uprising, I told Kazimir my loyalty was with the Bolsheviks, as his should be.” She exchanged a glance with him. “We hoped to show you the same. It was the most direct path to vengeance.”
It was all so outlandish, so impossible; betrayed by the two I had trusted, both Bolsheviks. I succumbed to an uncontrollable burst of laughter. “You thought Lenin was the best path to vengeance?” I leaned forward as far as my bonds allowed. “I shot that bastard three times. If given the opportunity, I would kill him again.” Sitting up taller, I locked eyes with Vera. “Defend your dear comrade’s honor. Make me a martyr.”
Fanya was on her way to Kiev now, surely. She must have realized something had happened to me. My daughter would have an adoptive mother to love and care for her. Someday, Fanya would tell her about her birth mother, a woman who had given her life for her country and cause to give Tatiana the life she deserved.
Vera leaned closer. I waited to relish the click of her revolver.
Silence hovered between us until she spoke with painstaking clarity. “You misaimed.”
It was as if she had struck me.
It was a lie, an effort to unnerve me so I wouldn’t face death proudly. She accepted a collection of newspapers from Kazimir—Delo naroda, Izvestia, and the two Bolshevik papers, Severnaia kommuna and Krasnaia gazeta—then opened them to show me the concurring headlines.
An assassination attempt. Attempt. The man was not dead.
No, it wasn’t true. I never missed. I never failed.
“Comrade Lenin is expected to make a full recovery,” Kazimir said as if the headline hadn’t burned itself into my mind.
Suddenly I was fighting to break free of the ropes again while shouts and curses tore from my throat. I lost all control, numb to everything except you misaimed and a full recovery as they filled every corner of my being, taunting me, torturing me.
A sudden, sharp pain struck my cheek, so hard it knocked out my breath while a loud smack sounded in my ears. I slumped back into my chair, wanting to curse her, unable to do more than stare. My friend had betrayed me, now held me captive; had she just struck me, too?
“When you insist on being irrational, you leave me no choice.” Vera glanced at her palm before letting it fall, and I spat out a mouthful of blood. “I gave you every chance to change your ways, but you were too obsessed with me to see reason.”
Her words were the missing piece, the final clarification.
Me.
My shallow, shuddering breaths disrupted the quiet, piercing as a gunshot. The gravity of the truth contained the fullness of my own incompetence, of how entangled I was in this web of deceit.
“Did I not tell you?” Vera prompted. “Most people know me by my surname.”
The surname I had so diligently sought these past months; the surname that could not belong to my friend.
“Orlova. Vera Fyodorovna Orlova.”
Chapter 44
Khimki Forest, 5 September 1918
Knowledge was the most dangerous weapon of all. I had loaded my enemy’s gun and presented it to her, and there I sat—unarmed, awaiting the death blow. She had everything she needed to bury the bullet in my skull.
Vera knew everything. Kazimir, my daughter, my plans against Orlova. She had led me down an unending labyrinth of deception; now I was lost, never to emerge.
“Did you know it was her?” I asked Kazimir. His cousin was not simply a woman with the same surname, but the Orlova. “Did you know during our discussion about her after I returned from the katorga?”
He shook his head. Lying to me even now. He had made love to me, betrayed me, shot me, all while honesty remained impossible. Now we faced the decaying remnants of what we had been. We confronted one another with more honesty than ever before, and still he shied away from it. From me.
“You forbade me from targeting her.” I wanted to claw the truth from his throat, to hear that he had known, had intended to let her have me all along because I was nothing to him beyond a tsarist whore. Not that I was a woman he’d chosen to love, then chosen to betray. “If you didn’t know who Orlova was, why protect her?”
“I was serving the Socialist Revolutionary Party and chose to protect my contingent from the reprisal such an effort would have brought upon us. It was for the party’s safety. And yours. Not hers.” He toyed with the pack of cigarettes in his hands. “Vera joined the contingent under the name Volkova and told me she had been briefly married to a revolutionary named Volkov who had been killed. When Orlova’s attacks started, I knew it had once been Vera’s surname, of course, but I had no reason to believe my little cousin was the same woman. I didn’t know Vera was Orlova until after the Bolshevik uprising.”
I gripped the arms of my chair to suppress a scream of frustration.
He had indeed truly cared for me. He had betrayed me. And he had let Vera kill Socialist Revolutionaries whose views he had once shared, men and women who admired him, trusted him, believed in him. Perhaps he had helped her do it as he was helping her now. Even if he had fought for none of those he now opposed, a part of me clung to the belief that he would fight for me.
But a larger part of me knew he would not. His mouth pressed into a thin line; his dark eyes never meeting mine; the deep lines across his forehead; above all, his silence; each another bullet slicing into me.
“Uncle Misha,” I managed at last, looking at Kazimir. “She killed him, and you’re working for her? After all he did for you?”
Something crossed his face—guilt, perhaps regret. “I didn’t know Vera was responsible until she told me she had never been married, and that she was a Bolshevik working under her real surname. I wish it hadn’t been necessary.”
Necessary. The ache in my head spread to my chest.
Vera circled the room slowly. “Not quite the Petrov family estate, is it?” she asked with obvious contempt. “This is where I grew up. Where my mother cooked, sewed, and foraged and my father hunted and traded.” She trailed a finger across the table. “I have learned much over these last few years, but it has never been difficult to bring people here. Perhaps Misha brought me good fortune; he was easiest of all. All I said was I had information pertinent to the revolution and requiring utmost caution, and he followed me here.”
My breaths sharpened, though I swallowed the fury threatening to spill over. Vera took her seat across from me.
“Kazimir deserved a leadership role, and I needed his help to eliminate the contingent after I won him to Bolshevism. Misha was an obstacle.”
“So you killed him.” I paused to banish a tremor. “You of all people should know what it’s like to lose your family.”
She visibly flinched before glowering. “Do people respond to anything but violence? I tried peacefully protesting once; did it do any good?” she asked bitterly. “Look at what these endless party disagreements have caused. Even after the revolution, if countless parties remain active in the government, it won’t end. With one party in control, there’s no cause for dissent, no need to suppress it with violence. That’s all I want—for everyone to see reason and understand.”
“Is that what you want? For me to see reason?” Blood rushed in my ears as I dug my fingernails into the bloodstained wood beneath my hands. “Was invading my family’s home a reasonable way to win me over to your cause?”
“I told you, that was not meant to upset you.” The hardened edge in her eyes softened as she placed a hand over mine—a grasp I tried to break, though my bonds prevented it. “Kazimir and I hoped that, if we could reason with you regarding the estate, then you would be open to discussion regarding political allegiances when we offered you a chance to work with us.”
Nothing we had experienced together had been under honest circumstances—not Kiev, not Petrograd, not my family’s estate, not our days at Hotel Petrov, not a single moment. All along, she had stayed hidden from me. I had wanted a friend and had found a liar. An assassin. A Bolshevik.
I leaned closer, holding her gaze. “Are we going to finish this? An evenly matched fight to the death? Or are you going to kill me while I’m as defenseless as those who sat here before me? Take me to the Cheka, perhaps? Whatever you choose, I expect you to look me in the eyes until I draw my final breath, you cowardly bitch.”
Kazimir straightened in his seat, as though interested in this answer himself.
Vera was on her feet again, facing him with sudden fury. “Sveta is Comrade Lenin’s attempted assassin now that you didn’t stop her, but I volunteered to infiltrate the Meshchansky District contingent, and because my superior believes I failed to uncover the plot, this is all my fault.”
Kazimir’s jaw clenched, as if he knew exactly what those words meant. She was already pacing, addressing no one in particular.
“Hours of beatings and blame, but I accepted responsibility for failing to uncover the scheme, because if he had known the truth, he would have killed me. It still ended with a gun to my head—empty, though I was unaware until after he had pulled the trigger.”
I shuddered, fury dissipating as my heart twisted. “Why not hand me over?”
“No need.” Vera paused with an unsteady breath, as if pushing away the burst of rage. “The perpetrator was in custody moments after the shooting. If I hadn’t already extracted her confession prior to my own interrogation, I’m certain the pistol against my head would have been loaded.”
She had not extracted my confession. I had been here with Kazimir. Yet the look Vera directed at me was solemn, expectant, perhaps waiting for me to speak.
When understanding came over me, my breath caught as I looked to Kazimir. He did not look back.
“Where is Fanya?” My voice rose, bonds biting into my lacerated flesh. “Where is she?”
He set different editions of the SR and Bolshevik newspapers and various copies of Izvestia into my lap.
A gasping sob clawed my throat. She had been caught with her Browning and accused of shooting Lenin, and she had taken full responsibility, even after a few days of interrogation. She had been executed with a gunshot to the back of the head.
“Why didn’t you stop this?” I shrieked. “She was innocent, nearly blind! You knew I had shot him, you had me moments later, and still you let her die.”
And then words failed me. I was left with nothing but the aching knot in my chest, though I knew exactly what she had been thinking: Let me take the blame for a change, Sveta. Go to Kiev. Be with Tatiana. She had given her life for our cause, for everything we had endured together, for me and my daughter. Unaware I, too, had been caught.
Kazimir presented me with a final copy of Izvestia, then stepped outside. After the attempt on Lenin’s life and Fanya’s execution, Sovnarkom established a new decree. Its title was splashed across the headline: “On Red Terror.”
“This decree grants sweeping power to the Cheka so we can suppress future dissent. The Socialist Revolutionaries at Hotel Petrov have already been executed. All due to your actions and Fanya admitting guilt.” Vera gave my hand a little pat. “We owe a great debt to you both.”
Red Terror. Everything I’d fought to prevent, I’d set into motion. And now Fanya and the members of my contingent were dead.
“You let me assassinate your party members in my efforts to find you,” I said as Vera took her seat. “Why not face me outright?”
“Kazimir and I had agreed not to approach you about joining the party until it was safe to do so. When you told me about your assassinations, I thought I could discourage you; instead, you grew more persistent until you settled on Lenin.” Her eyes darkened, as though frustrated with herself, then she drew a steadying breath. “Fortunately, you failed to kill him.”
I recoiled as if the bullet had gone into my own chest.
I had no time to reply before Kazimir entered with another man—Sergei, who refused to meet my glare as he shuffled inside. Another traitor, it seemed.
When Vera nodded toward me, Sergei passed a hand over his beard and lifted his eyes to mine. “After my arrest,” he explained, “Orlova came to me in my cell. That’s when I discovered she was Vera. She offered me the chance to work for her in exchange for my life.”
Filthy coward. No wonder he had suggested we stop fighting the Bolsheviks; his fear of execution had driven him into her service. Sergei swallowed hard and looked to the floor.
Vera stood and glanced from me to him, a look that made me press my back against my chair. “A local Cheka has been established in the Vitebsk Region. Through them, I’ve taken the liberty of seizing control of a farm outside Obol.”
Seizing control likely meant killing the farm’s former inhabitants.
“From this day forward, you and Sergei will reside upon the property, tending the farm and living as husband and wife. A formality, nothing more,” she added quickly. “No need to share his bed unless you wish it.”
Banishment and a forced marriage? Pure insanity.
“No.” I shook my head in vehement refusal. “No, I won’t do it.”
“We have no choice, Svetlana,” Sergei mumbled, focusing intently on the bonds surrounding my ankles.
“No choice?” I repeated with an incredulous laugh. “I will die as a patriot before I live as a coward.”
Though he winced, his mouth remained shut.
“Kill me and let me give my life for my country.” I turned back to Vera as I struggled. “If you don’t, I’ll tell the Cheka I shot Lenin and—”
