Paul Vidich - The Mercenary

The chalk marks were where he’d been told to look. White chalk on the side of a red postal box. There was a note with the details of a meeting waiting for him in the lobby of a building.

Garin entered the metro station. He stopped to light a cigarette, failing until he turned his back to the wind, and then he casually looked for the single surveillance officer who had sporadically followed him during his first weeks in Moscow, but he was gone.

GARIN STOOD OUTSIDE THE CEMETERY’S iron gate, having stopped to purchase a red rose from a peddler whose only business was to sell twenty-kopek plastic flowers to the occasional visitor. Garin, feeling generous, had placed a fifty-kopek coin in the old woman’s hand and received a startled reaction.

He entered the cemetery holding the artificial rose in his right hand and the day’s paper under his arm. He moved along the narrow stone path that lay under a canopy of frost-stiffened branches. Even at noon, the winter sun was low on the sky and cast long shadows on the rows of untended graves.

Garin looked for the man who, like him, would be carrying a red rose. The cemetery was an old, neglected place with a few mausoleums built for dignitaries who had died before the October Revolution, and newer crypts of simpler socialist design. He glanced at the names on the graves and saw pithy inscriptions on several that had meant something to the dead or to the one who had paid for the crypt. Everywhere there was a light dusting of snow. On the path ahead, footsteps of another visitor were being filled with gently falling powder, which also covered the graves’ names, and when he thought he was at the right spot, he wiped away the snow.

But a young woman in a black shearling coat, who stood a few meters away, had no doubt about the deceased’s identity. She was tall, with raven hair, a leather handbag, dark glasses, a scarf wrapped around her head, and a cigarette in her mouth, which she threw to the ground before saying, without turning her head, “General Zyuganov.”

Garin saw a rose in her hand, but it was white not red. He’d assumed he was meeting a man, but he couldn’t recall whether he had been told to expect a man or had simply assumed that GAMBIT was a man. And the rose was wrong. He waited for her to ask the time, and in the moment that followed, he recognized her rudeness and the annoying Russian insistence on one-word answers, and then too, when she added, “The traitor,” he heard in her voice the casual sarcasm that passed for polite conversation in Moscow.

She stood at the neighboring crypt. “Maria Yudina,” she said, seeing Garin’s interest. “The pianist.”

It was not until the winter sun had sunk a few degrees, touching the treetops, and the cold had begun to numb his fingers, that Garin knew that the woman wasn’t there to meet him—and she wasn’t going to leave. She had lit another cigarette, and taken one long, nervous draw, releasing smoke from the corner of her mouth, when she glanced at Garin. Their eyes met, but she quickly looked away. Silence lingered between them.

“The gate closes shortly,” he said. “You might want to be gone before you’re locked in. The guard sleeps off his vodka lunch. It will be hours before he comes back. You’ll freeze to death.”

She nodded and smiled.

“Muggers know the guards leave at noon,” Garin said. “They prey on visitors like you.”

She shot a sideways glance. “This is Moscow. There is no crime here.”

“That’s a nice leather handbag you’ve got. It would fetch a good price.”

She clutched her bag protectively.

“People are the same everywhere,” Garin said. “The same appetites, the same diseases cured by the same medicines, attracted to the same fine leather bags. There was crime before the Party, and there will be crime when it’s gone.”

She gasped. “Only a foreigner would speak like that.”

“Or a thief,” he said. “Don’t worry, I have no interest in your bag, as nice as it is, and I can see that it is well made.” He looked again at his watch, cursing the meeting time that had already passed. “It’s a three-minute walk to the gate. If you leave now, you’ll still get there before the guard locks up. You’re not dressed like a person who wants to climb the fence.”

“The gate,” she said, bristling, “closes for me at the same time that it closes for you.” She nodded at him. “You keep looking at your watch. Perhaps you are the one who is worried about the gate.” She suddenly turned. “Izvinitye.” Excuse me. She stepped forward so she was beside him. “If you don’t mind.”

He stepped back. She brushed away twigs that had fallen on General Zyuganov’s crypt, tidying the grave of debris fallen from trees in the last storm. She placed her white rose on the top of the crypt, aligning it respectfully.

“Even traitors need to be remembered,” she said.

Her voice was brusque but polite, a soft, stern voice. She contemplated the general’s framed photograph fixed to the stone. A memory. She removed her mitten and ran her fingers over the name cut into the marble. Her eyes closed, and her lips moved soundlessly.

Then she stepped back and used her knuckle to wipe a tear. Abruptly, she pulled her mitten onto her hand and whispered, “A traitor to the Party.” Her expression was once again cold and remorseless.

She nodded at the adjacent grave. “Like her.” Faded flowers and a field of spent candles had turned Maria Yudina’s grave into a shrine. “We honor our heroes and our artists, but not our traitors.”

“You knew him?” Garin asked, nodding at Zyuganov’s portrait.

“What do you think?” she snapped. “I’m standing here.” She looked at Garin. “And what brings you to this spot?”

Garin used the moment to put his mind around an answer that wouldn’t seem obviously false. He stepped forward to Maria Yudina’s grave and laid his plastic rose among the others along the foot of the vault. “I’ve heard the stories. I came to see for myself.”

Garin had placed his plastic flower when he heard the sharp crack of a twig breaking nearby and a cough, and he saw that the woman beside him was suddenly agitated. She looked nervously toward a gap between two ponderous mausoleums, but when he followed her eyes, he saw nothing.

“A man,” she whispered in an urgent voice. “I must leave. It is not good to be seen here. It is better that you let me go ahead, and better still that we not be seen together. And the best thing is to forget that we met. It would be the kindest thing, if you have any respect for the man in this grave. Good day.”

She didn’t wait for his response and began to walk quickly down the path. She was gone in a moment, having turned a corner and disappeared between two mausoleums. Garin saw only her long striding footprints in the snow and heard, farther off, the sounds of her footsteps.

How quickly one becomes aware of silence even in so silent a place as a cemetery.

Another cough. The man who had driven her off emerged from his hiding place. He was a big man who walked lightly and gave the impression of bulk without weight. He looked at Garin with an intense agitation, and his hand was shoved in his pocket as if holding a weapon. He didn’t look like a KGB officer. He looked like a professor, or somebody’s father, a well-dressed, well-fed man graying at the temples who had an air of uncertainty about him and a look of trepidation.

Garin hesitated. Was this a KGB officer sent to chat him up and then “ Amerikanets! Ostanovis! ”? The hand on the shoulder, the other motioning for backup to make the arrest? Garin took in the man all at once, judging the threat and wondering if the woman had been part of an elaborate ruse. But then the stranger revealed a red rose under his right arm. He approached slowly, and when he stood beside Garin, he placed the flower at the base of General Zyuganov’s crypt.