Beneath the Darkest Sky Read online

  Grabbing the bottle of whiskey, I opened it and poured some all over the table. Closing it now, I reached inside my coat and placed it near my underarm, pressing it there so it wouldn’t fall. I lifted the back of my coat, picked up the clipboard, and shoved it in my pants at the back until it touched my rear. Sticking my finger in my mouth, I forced myself to vomit all over the table, which was easy. I grabbed the bucket, entered the hallway, closed the door, and headed for one of the big sewage holes near the western perimeter of the main camp.

  I arrived there to find no one, luckily, and the only light was emanating from the bright, streaming camp lamps, as the day’s work continued throughout. I sat the barely full bucket down and scanned the area. No one.

  Removing the bottle from under my coat, I opened it and then lifted the sewage lid enough to pour the whiskey out. I could tell the hole was almost full by how quickly the whiskey hit it. I slid the hammer out from my sleeve a bit and rinsed the blood off of the head with the remaining whiskey. Then I pulled Vladimir’s hat from my crotch and threw it in as well, hoping it would float. Closing it and removing the clipboard, I placed both it and the empty bottle near the western part of the lid’s hinge, as zeks would be approaching the hole from the east, and very few at night. I also kicked a little snow on the items to camouflage them a bit. Looking east, I couldn’t detect any guards looking this way, even though they might have been hidden from my view. I picked up the bucket, opened the big lid again, and threw it in.

  Looking east once more at the single light above the door of the punishment isolator, I took a deep breath before turning and making my way back. Entering and returning to James, I found him still sitting there.

  “You okay?” I said, and he nodded while I set my hammer on the floor.

  I approached him and stood him up, steering him to the guard’s office. I sat him in the chair and went to retrieve the dead body. After returning the canteen to Vladimir’s pocket, I pulled his long coat up at the back and wrapped it over his pulpy head so there’d be no blood on the hallway floor as I dragged him to his office. I placed him behind James’s chair and returned to the chamber, taking the three slats we’d removed and returning them to their original position, even hammering the rusty nails back in. I then grabbed the rifle and our hammers and took them to the office. Touching James on the shoulder, I picked up the flashlight from the table and turned it on.

  “I’m going to close this door now, son. And I’m going to turn the light off in here. Don’t turn around or move. He’s lying on the floor right behind you. Just sit right there and wait for me.”

  He nodded and I closed the door behind me, flipping off the exterior switch for the office, then the one for the chamber we’d been working in. Even though the lights in the hallway remained on, all of the chambers were dark, as I could see the exterior switches pointed down. I found the hall light switch and turned it off, leaving me with only the flashlight to see. Approaching the chamber directly next to the one we’d worked in, I fiddled with the keys until I managed to open the door.

  “Zek!” I said, pointing the flashlight at the curled-up prisoner, trying my best to sound like the dead guard.

  “Da!” he slurred, his eyes closed, my light illuminating his filthy face in the dark. “Da!” he continued. “It’s me, Goran! Is that you, Officer Anosov, or is it Officer Divac?”

  “It’s Divac,” I said. “Come, you can get some fresh air!”

  He slowly stood and approached. Taking him by the arm, I led him down the dark hallway, then stopped, just before the front door.”

  “Wait!” I said. “I must vomit. You can get air later.”

  I turned him back around and steered him toward his chamber on the right, except I passed it and led him into the chamber we’d been working in. He couldn’t know the difference. Leaving him inside and closing the door, I grabbed James from the guard’s office before entering Goran’s chamber, the light switch inside now turned on. For the next hour we feverishly proceeded to remove enough slats of wood and joists to create a space large enough for us to dig a hole. It had to be wide and deep enough for us to dump the guard’s body in along with his rifle.

  “The shovels and wheel barrels are out behind the punishment isolator, right?” I said to James, realizing how fortunate we were that Koskinen had suggested we remove the top dirt underneath the slats.

  “Yeah,” said James.

  At some point deep into the night, we had managed to bury him and replace the joists and slats. I then repeated my “fresh air” routine with Goran, this time effectively returning him to his proper chamber, the one with the guard now buried underneath him. If the NKVD ever suspected we’d buried him under our worksite, they’d be sadly mistaken. He’d be in the adjacent chamber, the one where their only plausible witness, Goran, resided. And he’d say he never left his chamber, save for one minute, when the guard walked him outside. He might also mention the guard’s vomit comment.

  James and I returned all of our tools to the original work chamber and finished removing the slats, frantically yanking up the ones stained in Vladimir’s fresh blood. Once finished, we used our filthy, wool rags to wipe away any fresh splatterings of blood from the log walls, but it didn’t actually matter, because old bloodstains were all over the chamber walls. Still, we were now ready for our two coworkers to join us in the morning.

  On our way back to Lagpunkt Seventy-Nine, I dropped the keys inside the sewage hole. Then we returned to our barracks, got into our bunks, and waited for dawn. When the sun rose we’d be ready to return and finish the job as originally planned. I already had my response prepared for when the morning shift’s guard asked me where Officer Divac was. I’d say nothing more than, “He approached us looking sick last night with a bottle of whiskey in his hand and said he was heading for the big hole to empty his bucket.”

  16

  Moscow, Russia

  April 1935

  AMBASSADOR BULLITT HAD BEEN OUT OF THE COUNTRY FOR SIX months but had finally returned in time for the enormous party to be held at Spaso House. It would be called the Spring Festival, and every important person in Moscow had been invited.

  With the party still nearly two weeks away, as it was to be held on April 24, I was waiting in the office that I shared with Bobby at the chancery. For some reason he was running late. We were due to meet a very important man at the Kremlin, one Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov. He held the title of Premier. I was to attend the meeting only to interpret for Bobby, of course. But I was excited to see the Kremlin.

  I was still spending half of my days at Spaso House, but that would soon be ending, as the ballroom construction was finished and ready to host guests. Yet, Bullitt wanted me around until the very last Russian worker finished doing touch-up work. I still hadn’t had my meeting with him, so I hadn’t told him what I’d seen nearly four months earlier in Sergei, the caretaker’s, basement apartment. It had shocked the living hell out of me.

  After I’d secured the ring of ten keys from a passed-out Sergei, his wife knocked out on his lap, I’d headed straight for his apartment, past the still-packed house of guests and down the stairway toward the basement. His door had three separate locks on it. It took me a while to find the correct ones for each, but I’d managed.

  I opened the heavy door and flipped the light switch on, only to find what looked like a normal, small living room—a couch, table and chairs, a lamp, bookshelves, etcetera. It was very clean and appeared to have wooden floors throughout. Closing the door behind me, I made my way through and entered a short hallway, the end of which was part of the underground back wall of the mansion. Flipping on its lights, I noticed a bedroom on the left and a large toilet room on the right.

  Continuing down the hallway, I found a small closet on the left, a kitchen on the right. That was all there was to the place—a living room, kitchen, bedroom, closet, and toilet room. I began to fear my quest to find something mysterious would be met with nothing but grave disappointment.
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br />   I flipped all of the light switches on and entered the bedroom first. Searching every inch of it, including under and behind the bed and dresser, I found nothing—same with the hallway closet and toilet room. I even tried to move the tub, but it was mounted. I walked to the kitchen and began opening cabinets and trying to move the stove, which was mounted, too. The back wall of the mansion was behind it. I opened its four doors to find nothing. Then I fiddled with the burners and panel on top. No luck. I opened the refrigerator and tilted it to see if a small hatch might be under. Only wooden floor.

  Reentering the living room, I began moving furniture around, lifting rugs, and looking behind framed art and pictures on the wall, including a large one of Stalin. I looked up at the low ceiling for grooves that might suggest a hatch of some sort, as the ceiling was made of square black tiles with braille-looking shamrock designs on them. I walked the entire place again, looking up this time to see if one of the tile’s borders might appear different. No such luck.

  I sat on Sergei’s bed, thinking. I was blank. Then I thought of an oddity. Why is the green stove so large? It was big enough for a family of eight.

  I reentered the kitchen and began examining the big green thing. It had two front oven doors and two smaller ones for grilling below. I opened them all and looked inside, pressing my hand at the back walls. A normal stove.

  I headed back toward the toilet room and actually decided to relieve myself of all the champagne I’d had. As I stood there listening to water hit water, I heard a tinkering sound coming from the back hallway. Cutting off my stream, I headed down and stopped at the kitchen entry. The tinkering was louder. I approached the stove and realized the sound was emanating from it. As if it were a door, the entire appliance began to move, its back right side pushing away from the wall. The back left side was on a hinge.

  I turned and headed for the bedroom. God forbid this was where the intruder was heading, but I slid under the bed and waited. I could hear footsteps passing, heading toward the living room. The footsteps continued back toward the end of the hallway. The sound of something sliding could be heard, then the sound of feet stepping up.

  I slid out from under the bed and crawled to the doorway. Peeking left, I could see a small boy standing beside one of the dining chairs at the end of the hallway. Next to it, a wooden ladder extended up through the open ceiling where they’d removed two tiles. The boy picked up what looked like a toaster. Two arms reached down and the boy stepped up a few rungs, handing over the device. He turned toward me, still looking down at the floor, however, and I suddenly realized he wasn’t a boy. He was a grown man, but a dwarf, beard and all. Picking up a few tools, he climbed up and disappeared, too.

  I stayed there listening for what must have been twenty minutes. I wasn’t about to move yet. Time stood still. Finally I heard movement and saw legs climbing back down the ladder. Again I slid under the bed and listened to the commotion.

  A few minutes later I heard the stove close and silence returned. I waited a good five minutes before sliding out and heading for the stove. I positioned myself on the right side of it near the back and tried to see how the entire appliance was mounted. It hadn’t been connected to the floor but rather the wall. Running my hand along the space at the back, I felt a lever. Playing ever so slightly with it, I realized it was designed to be pushed down.

  I decided to wait a few more minutes. I contemplated waiting for another day to explore the secret passageway, but I realized this would likely be my only opportunity. I couldn’t help myself. I realized at this moment, some eleven years removed from my having escaped Harlem, how much I got a rush from these types of dangerous situations.

  Pushing down on the lever until it clicked, I pulled the stove and it glided open as smoothly as a car door. A square opening in the wall was maybe thirty by thirty inches, and it was dark inside. Pushing it shut again, I began searching the kitchen drawers and cabinets for a flashlight, finding several in the one next to the sink. I pulled the stove open and entered. Before closing it, I made note of the other lever on the tunnel side.

  Pointing the light straight ahead, I began walking. There was nothing complicated about the dirt tunnel. It was seven feet high and three feet wide, but it seemed to go on forever, ramping slightly downward.

  After at least a hundred yards of walking, I came to the tunnel’s end where a ladder was positioned. I pointed the flashlight up through a vertical tunnel that extended some ten feet higher. The base of the seventeen-foot ladder touched the ground at my feet and reached all the way up to a hatch.

  I was intrigued but realized it was likely just an entry to the tunnel. Maybe it opened onto the street, or maybe it opened into someone’s house. Whatever the case, I couldn’t risk what might be on the other side. What I wanted to see was above the tile ceiling in Sergei’s apartment.

  I headed back and reentered the kitchen, closing the stove behind me. Grabbing a chair from the dining table in the living room, I carried it down the hall and positioned it below the secret tiles. I stepped up and pushed at one of the black squares, sliding it to the side before doing the same to the adjacent one. Feeling around for the tip of a ladder, I grabbed it and pulled. Made of very light wood, it easily slid down to the floor.

  I climbed up and pointed my flashlight. What I saw was an oddity in terms of how structures are built. The top of my ladder touched the bottom of a wide, metal one that was mounted to the wooden wall of a shaft that ran all the way to the roof. It was very narrow, just wide enough for a person to fit through. Studying my surroundings, I realized that this portion of the back wall behind me had been recently added to create this shaft, the outside façade appearing the same.

  Many of the windows around the house were inlet, allowing such an add-on like this not to disrupt the aesthetic. None of the exterior walls of Spaso was flat from corner to corner, as there were sections that extended out from the main frame similar to the way a fireplace shaft extends out from the exterior.

  I climbed the ladder with my rear to the new wall, my face to the original. When I reached the crawl space that separated the first and second floors, the wall discontinued, allowing me to point my flashlight inside the fourteen-inch-high opening. The joist bay directly in front of me ran all the way to the front of the house, which meant they all did. These weren’t your typical joists, either. They were open web wood trusses, the type I’d only seen on bridges back in America. But, of course, Europe and the Soviets were far ahead of us architecturally. The trusses had triangle patterns, like lattice. From a physics standpoint, using them made sense, as they had much more capability for loads, based on span and depth.

  I reached inside the bay and picked up a folded piece of paper. I opened it to find an entire floor plan of the crawl space. Each joist bay was numbered and first-floor rooms were labeled. There were measurements and markers that showed exact drilling points. What I was reading told me that the drilling points through the crawl space would allow microphones to be dropped behind the walls of the ambassador’s library and office. There were also access holes to the walls behind the oval dining room, music room, state dining room, and even Bullitt’s brand-new ballroom.

  I looked again at the open web trusses. The triangles were large enough for a small person to squeeze through. The dwarf I’d seen could weave his way all along the crawl space. I was sure he’d been tasked to do just that, probably placing microphones above and below various rooms, as the second-story floor was essentially the top of this crawl space. I placed the paper back where it had been and contemplated entering the joist bay. Unfortunately, I was too big to make my way inside.

  Pointing my flashlight up, I began to climb again. Visions of the NKVD dwarf and his partner ran through my head. They had me a bit spooked. In fact, Spaso House as a whole did. I’d learned of its history.

  Perhaps parts of the mansion had been reconstructed after the revolution. That’s when it began housing the government’s Central Statistical Office. It was then
used as the reception house for the Central Executive Committee. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, had only stopped living here in 1930. Maybe all of those years since the revolution had brought with them several “secret” house makeovers.

  And as for the tunnel that began behind Sergei’s stove, it was probably an original escape route, much older than this corner shaft, which was likely built to spy on the Americans. I was guessing the escape tunnel hadn’t worked for Nikolay Vtorov, the original owner, who was a wealthy merchant and had lived in Spaso House from 1913, when it was built, to 1917, when he mysteriously died during the Bolshevik Revolution.

  I continued climbing, finally reaching the attic above the sleeping quarters, the one I’d been in many times before. I crawled inside and sat. Pointing my flashlight around, I realized it wasn’t the same space. The original attic had been partitioned into two horizontal spaces, one for guests like the Americans to enter from the regular inside door, and this one below it that could only be reached from where I’d come. I pointed my flashlight up and could tell the wood used to divide the attic was much newer. No wonder the attics are so shallow.

  Still pointing my light, I could see large recorders everywhere. I began crawling but had to stop because of a four-inch-wide crevasse in the floor. Running my flashlight along the opening, it was the exact size of the ambassador’s bedroom, a large, rectangular crevasse. It was the typical space that separated one room’s wall from another, except the ceiling portions had been carved open. I pointed my flashlight straight ahead into the distance and could see similar crevasses outlining other rooms along the attic floor.