Jason Overstreet: Beneath the Darkest Sky

Each of us positioned ourselves near the respective bedroom doors and I held the flashlight up to my face. All of the bedroom doors were open. We were to enter the rooms slowly as soon as I dropped the light from my face. So with my heart pounding and our targets presumably sound asleep, I did just that.

Pointing my light straight ahead into the room now, I could see a man and a woman lying in a large bed. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. When I flipped on the light, both of them wrestled about, affected by the sudden brightness. It was as if they hadn’t been sound asleep. They both sat up and squinted.

“Audra!” the woman said.

As soon as she realized I wasn’t Audra, that I was a stranger who had a pistol pointed at them, she let out a single scream, but the man stayed quiet, holding his arm up in front of her, signaling for her to shut up. I could tell this wasn’t the first time he’d stared at a pointed gun. According to Xavier, both were in their late fifties.

“Do not scream again or I will shoot you!” I said in Russian. “Ne krichi! YA budu strelyat’ v vas!”

The woman pressed her back against the headboard and tried to hold back another scream, all the while moaning and beginning to weep. I stayed calm and kept my eyes on him. He knew I was serious.

“Good,” I said. “Just stay quiet like that and no one will get hurt. I am not here to kill you. I am not even here to lay a finger on you. All you have to do to stay alive is stay calm and do exactly what I tell you to do. Do you understand?”

They both nodded.

“Now, I want you to both get out of bed and get dressed. Then I want you to walk down the hallway and sit on the couch in the living room. That is all. I will stand right here and wait.”

Minutes later, the man, woman, and their two twin daughters sat on the living room couch, Luc and Xavier sitting in chairs while I stood. Both girls were crying. I focused my attention on the father.

“Do you love your son?” I said.

“Da,” said the salt-and-pepper-haired man, Zigfrid.

“Very much!” said his wife, Karina, her dingy red hair pulled back in a ponytail, her Russian barely audible.

“And Xavier has reason to believe that your son loves you all, too,” I said. “Is this true?”

They all nodded.

“I read in Xavier’s report that you young women are sixteen,” I said, looking at the plain-looking blond daughters. “And do you love your older brother?”

“Da,” said Audra.

“Da,” said Jana.

“I have a wife, a daughter, and a son,” I said. “And ironically, they are twins just like you. I love them dearly. But they are in Joseph Stalin’s prison camps. I’m sure you can understand how painful this must be for me.”

Again they all nodded.

“I’m sure you can understand that I am willing to do anything to get them out. I would rather be dead than live without them. And I can’t sit idly by while they die a slow death. How old is your son?”

“He is thirty-two,” said Zigfrid.

“And yet your daughters are so much younger,” I said.

“They were a surprise,” said Zigfrid. “My wife got pregnant at forty-two. We had already seen our son grow to be twenty-six years old at that point.”

I walked over to Xavier, unbuttoned his backpack, and removed a pen and file. I took a blank sheet of paper from it.

“Which neighbors are your closest friends?” I said.

“The Krols,” said Zigfrid. “They are downstairs in number three.”

“Good,” I said, setting the paper and pen on the coffee table in front of his wife. “I want you to write a letter to them explaining that your family has been invited to Leningrad to stay at your son’s new big house. Tell them in the letter that your son is very sick. Tell them that because you may be gone for several months, you would like for them to collect your mail for you. Tell them you received a telephone call early this morning and didn’t want to wake them, hence the reason for leaving the letter and mailbox key under their door. That’s all.”

Karina sniffled, nodded, and began to write, her hands shaking in the process.

“When you are finished writing that letter,” I said, “I want you all to go pack a suitcase. We will be taking you to a different location here in Riga. My plan is for you to be there no longer than two months. Don’t worry. You will be fed and taken care of. Meanwhile, I have to return to Berlin. You see… I have to send a briefcase to your son on May 1st. He’s expecting some spy information. But this briefcase will have no such thing inside. It will have letters and photographs and instructions, telling Ivan’s young assistant to meet me in Leningrad on May the 10th. When did your son first fall in love with Stalin?”

“He didn’t fall in love with Stalin,” said Zigfrid, his daughters still lightly crying. “He fell in love with Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution when he was a ten-year-old boy. He swore he would leave as soon as he was sixteen to live in Moscow and join the Red Army. And he did.”

“Well, this son of yours, Colonel Ivan Zorin, has shown himself to be ruthless. I am not going to belittle him any more than that in front of you, but you would not be proud of his actions. He has taken very much after Stalin.”

“Maybe he lost his way,” said Zigfrid, making a cross on his chest and looking upward.

“I first found out about your son while I was in a labor camp on the far northeast side of Russia. A good man named Commander Koskinen said he knew your son, this after he’d just told me where my wife and daughter were. He then proceeded to tell me that they might have gotten pregnant from one of the guards or commanders or zeks . With my head ringing, I asked him to tell me more about your son. Koskinen said he’d met him in 1933 at a Dalstroi training academy in Moscow. He also told me that your son was from Riga, Latvia. And right then and there I began to hatch this plan.”

With all of them having attentively listed to my story, I walked over to the front door and removed the camera from the leather bag. I handed it to Xavier. Then I walked over to the mother and picked up the written letter.

“Thank you, Karina,” I said, reading her Russian words. “When we get to the other location, I am going to need you to write a detailed letter to your son, explaining the terrible situation you four find yourselves in. You will lie and tell him that I almost killed your husband. You will lie and tell him that it is only a matter of time before I do the unthinkable to all of you. You will write about his childhood, telling him only things that you, his mother, could know. And you will mention each of my family member’s names, pleading with your son to do exactly as I say immediately. Understand?”

“Da!” said Karina.

“I need you all to scoot over and make room for me,” I said, waiting for them and then sitting next to Karina. “Luc over there has his pistol loaded and ready, so none of you should try anything stupid.”

I began taking the bullets out of my pistol and setting them on the coffee table.

“I want you to all look,” I said, holding up my empty gun. “This is only a pistol for show now. Xavier is going to take a few photographs of the five of us. Again, let me reiterate, I have no intentions of harming you. But I have to do everything I can to make your son believe I will. So, when we are finished with this group picture, I am going to sit with each one of you individually. I am going to hold this empty pistol next to your head. And Xavier is going to photograph it. I am sorry. But I have to put the fear of God in your son. Now, look at the camera.”