58-12

So far every trail had led to a dead end.

Take the newspaper he had saved for eighty years, covered in faded ink and antiquated headlines.  Which was the critical clue—Browder Opens 8th Communist Party Convention, Detroit Auto Men Furious at Betrayal, Workers Urged to Pack Bronx Court This Noon?  Or, just as likely, none of the above?  Tiana felt ready to go for a hike, take a shower, and leave the problem for a future generation.

But wait, it got better.  For instance, there were the only highlighted words in his entire Bible: “An evil man seeketh only rebellion: therefore a cruel messenger shall be sent against him.”  The four digits tattooed on his arm: 58-12.  Or the quote scribbled on his desk: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”  It might be a tangled web somewhere in the middle, but just now all she had was loose ends.

And of course, she had to cope with his own solemn charge, ringing out to her from that bewildering will:

I bequeath and devote to my daughter, Tiana Emily Morton (Smith): justice for Katia Kuznet, or her heirs and relations yet living.  To her I also bequeath all my personal effects. To Katia Kuznet, or her living heirs and relations, I bequeath my personal estate and property (including, but not limited to, all intangibles and all tangible personal property including land, stocks, securities, cash, savings, and other realty).

Tiana thought she was the most long-suffering daughter on the planet.  It was bad enough to be randomly deprived of a fortune, but to be assigned as private detective to boot, and left with a batch of clues as cryptic as a 1934 Daily Worker, a quote from Marmion, and a name she’d never heard before, Katia Kuznet…

“Yeah, I loved you too, Dad,” she muttered, glancing at the picture on her desk.  George with baby Emily in his arms, herself, dad on the right.  Plain old dad, with those ordinary gray eyes and the unremarkable persona you’d expect of a John Smith.  For crying out loud, if he were gonna leave a mystery like this behind, why hadn’t he at least had a name she could look up?

Perhaps worst of all, George was all in.  Whenever George went all in on something, rash decisions would probably be made.  So far, though, he’d only made the questionably helpful discovery that Kuznet was the Russian equivalent of Smith.

Tiana slapped a final post-it note on her evidence board.

58-12. Failure to denounce a counterrevolutionary crime,
reliably known to be in preparation or carried out, shall be punishable by—
deprivation of liberty for a term not less than six months.
[6 June 1927 (SU no 49, art. 330)]

Another tid-bit courtesy of George—and the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

She stepped back, pushing strands of rebellious hair off her forehead in a gesture of profound thought.  The evidence board looked businesslike and professional, satisfactory as far as it went.

The door flew open and George’s messy iron-gray hair flopped excitedly into the room.

“Ready to go to Russia?”

“Russia?”

George glanced appreciatively at the evidence board.  “I just booked our flights.  So far, every trail has led to Russia.”

Tiana looked blankly at the family photo.  George followed her glance, humming softly.

“The spider bid the mouse, sleep, sleep,
Spider in the house, sleep deep
Don’t wake up or you might find a spider in your mouth…”

__________

Russia, 1949

“Ivan Kuznet.”

The thin envelope trembled between John Smith’s unsteady hands as he tore it open.

“You are to forget everything.

“Tomorrow at dawn, meet Lansing at Yakoslo 8491.  He will have a new passport and papers for you and your daughter.  You are to come directly home.  Your services have earned your country’s gratitude.  Forget everything you have done and everyone you have seen.”

He crushed the letter in his palm before burning it.

Lansing was on time to the second.  Smith exchanged the password with him before accepting the forged papers, flipping through them as the two men walked casually down the street.  “There are two missing,” he whispered.  “My wife, my eldest daughter.”

Lansing glanced up sharply.  “Go home,” he said.  “That’s an order, Smith.”

“I won’t leave them behind.”

“Then you won’t ever leave.  You can take your pick, Smith.  Home or gulag?”

“The Agency is supposed to help!”

“Close your mouth or you’re a dead man,” Lansing said coolly, one hand inside his coat.  “I’m sorry for you, Smith,” he added, more softly.  “You’ve done your job well…”

“I betrayed my family!”

“I’m not here to argue,” Lansing said, dangerously enough to remind Smith of the gun under his coat.  “You made your choices long ago.  Don’t let all that you’ve sacrificed go to waste.  Go home and forget…”

“The spider bid the mouse, sleep, sleep,” Smith said, bitterly.

“What’s that?”

“—An old nursery rhyme.”

“Don’t try to untangle cobwebs, Smith.  You’ll just get caught.”

In the cold light of late dawn a foreigner boarded the Moscow train with his baby daughter, softly humming.

“Spider in the house, sleep deep
Don’t wake up or you might find a spider in your mouth…”

__________

George pulled some strings and he and Tiana dined with the U.S. Ambassador to Russia their first night in Moscow.  Jetlag kept them from coming out brilliantly, but George held the ambassador’s attention long enough to explain their predicament.

“Now what you want is Lansing,” Tefft said.  “His dad was an American spy just about that time.  Your father-in-law might have been a colleague of his—though all that, you understand, would be classified even now.  Russian relations are fragile and we don’t admit anything.”

He scribbled half a dozen illegible words on a piece of paper and told George that would get him in to see Lansing tomorrow at the Embassy.

Tiana thought it was just as likely to get them in to see anyone else whose name started with L.

The embassy was crowded with folks on every kind of business, and at first no one recognized Tefft’s squiggles.  When someone finally did, George and Tiana were shunted from room to room.  Every department was the wrong department and didn’t know what to do with them.

“We don’t get many personal guests,” a security agent said apologetically.  “I’ll take you to Lansing’s daughter, she’ll know how to find him.”

Sofia worked in immigration and had her hands full just then, figuratively, interviewing refugee claimants.  Literally, she had them full of a chubby baby.

“Sure, I can get you to dad,” Sofia said, then looked helplessly from the toddler to her keyboard.  George bent across the desk and relieved her of the baby.

“Oh!  Thank you, kiddy is grumpy today.  She apparently likes you.  I’ve hardly gotten to take a note all session.  Poor thing, her mom died less than a week ago.  If there’s one thing I despise, it’s a lazy babysitter.  I’ve fired as many sitters in a week as most folks hire in a month.  Taking care of refugees is my job, so I figure watching her counts.  Excuse me a moment.”

The baby fingered George’s buttons and eyed him judgmentally.

“Doesn’t she look like Emily?” George whispered.

“Maybe, if Emily had looked Russian,” Tiana retorted.  Every two-year-old looked like Emily to George.

Sofia was ready in a moment, finishing her notes and telling the room, in Russian, that she’d be right back.  The patient refugees settled themselves again in their seats.

“They’re all kinds, every reason you can think of,” she explained as they walked.  Her opinion on lazy babysitters notwithstanding, she let George keep the baby.  “I only get the ones with a good story.  Some would break your heart, but those stories generally turn out to be false.  This baby’s story wasn’t special until her mom died.  Just a 58’s daughter having trouble getting work.  Some American connection, so she imagined she qualified for refugee status.  I dragged it out until she died.  I don’t mean that—she was dying anyways, you understand!  For my good deeds I now have a baby on my hands who doesn’t really qualify for a refugee.  I’m dragging her through the paperwork, but without adoptive parents she hasn’t got a valid claim.  Can’t make up my mind to hand her to the Russian system.  Here’s dad’s office.”

Sofia introduced them, with the help of Tafft’s by now well-worn memorandum.

“Katia Kuznet,” Lancing said meditatively, once his daughter had taken the baby and left.  “And your dad’s name was John Smith?”

“Yes,” Tiana nodded.

“Yes, I knew Katia.  Tough woman.  Looked a lot like you.  Were you full sisters?”

“What?”

“Did you have the same mom?”

“I—never met mom… Sonia, her name was Sonia…”

“No wonder you look like Katia.  Younger some, but you have the same eyes.  When the gulag went down I hunted her out.  Dad worked with John Smith—your dad—back in the day.  I understood (nothing’s official in these stories) that Smith was a bit of a rogue blade.  Assassinations, even.  Now, whether that comes from higher up than dad’s clearance, or from Smith’s other underground associations…”

Tiana interrupted.  “I’m sorry… assassinations?”

“Your mother was deep underground.  I know almost nothing about it, but I do know that’s how they met.  How much did he tell you?”

“Nothing!  I didn’t know he’d ever been in Russia, much less underground…”

“Officially, let’s keep it that way.  Unofficially, he was in very deep.”

“Metaphorically, Tiana,” George whispered.  “He was really in Russia, but only metaphorically underground.”

Lansing nodded.  “Wildly successful as a double agent.  You’ll still see him celebrated as a communist in some circles.  You see, he went the length of denouncing his wife.  Oh,” he waved his hand apologetically at Tiana’s shocked face, “she had it coming.  He just earned brownie points by doing what he knew would be done.  Likely enough, she had him do it.  But they took Katia too.  That was when the assassinations started.”

George, feeling like a movie extra, said wildly, “Revenge?”

Lansing didn’t seem to think the question odd.  “Likely enough.  Anyways, the U.S. decided to get him out of there.  All-expenses-paid trip for you and him, that kind of thing.  It was dangerous enough here, so he likely figured it would be better for you.  If he planned on coming back for the others, he didn’t realize that the U.S. wasn’t offering a return ticket.”

“What happened to—my sister?”

“Katia?  She died almost a decade ago.  She was stuck with a 58-12 herself, but she lived to see the system crumble.  She spent a few years hunting down a daughter, but never found her.  They’d been separated in gulag years ago; the children of 58’s were often raised in separate camps.  Those that didn’t die rarely remembered enough to know their parents if they heard of them.  So Katia may have a daughter out there, but if she couldn’t trace her, no one else can.  I’m afraid that’s not much help, but I don’t know that I can get you any further.  As Katia’s sister, you’re almost certainly the closest heir.  You can justifiably leave it at that.  The rest is all ancient history now.”

In the corridor George started whistling, to Tiana’s disgust.

“What gives?” she asked, crossly.  “I thought you wanted to find the heirs.”

“Life has changed,” George observed.

“Since yesterday?”

“Well you see, I was thinking it might be handy to have your dad’s fortune if…”  George held the door open for her as he dragged out his sentence.

“George, this isn’t the way out.”

George grinned at the refugees waiting in Sofia’s office.  Behind his hand he whispered hurriedly to Tiana.  “You see, the fortune would be handy if we decided to adopt.”

Tiana hurried to catch up to him as he stepped up to the desk.  “This is not the way decisions are supposed to be made!” she fluttered.

“Adoption?” Sofia was saying.  “You’re a godsend.  I’ll just need you to fill out these papers to start off with,” she added, pointing to a file cabinet and handing Tiana a pen.

Tiana stared glumly at the first form as George crooned the old rhyme that had been Emily’s cradle song and Tiana’s before her.

“The spider bid the mouse, sleep, sleep,
Spider in the house, sleep deep
Don’t wake up or… you might find…”

“…a ‘pider in your mouf…”

Behind them Sofia laughed.  “Funny, the things babies pick up, isn’t it?  I’ll be blessed if she knows a single other English word…”

__________

If you enjoyed this series, you might also have fun with some of my other stories:

• Cutting Grass and Class
• Lampstands: A Short Story
• Wayland Terraformers, INC: Rogue Planet
• Wayland Terraformers, INC: A Little Bit of Everything
• A Ghost, a Graveyard, and a Girlfriend – Part 1
• An Adventure of the Olden Days

Love what I write? Buy me a lemonade, it’ll keep me going: paypal.me/genevadurand/3