Where was Basil Krulov?
He had been erased, that was clear. Will French of The Washington Post knew that it happened in the Russian records all the time, often for the most banal of reasons. Lots of people to keep track of, budget cuts playing hob with the staffing of the archives, the haphazard nature of the Soviet and later Russian federation bureaucracy, the terrible chaos of both the purges and the war and finally the postwar Stalinist era, the struggles for power. So it was quite possible that Basil Krulov was an innocent disappearance, one of many thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands.
But Will couldn’t let it go. Like his wife, Reilly, he was driven not by vanity or agenda or hope of a talking-head spot on D.C. TV but by curiosity. Who, what, when, where, why? Those five W’s were the key questions of his business, if now mostly forgotten: What does it mean? Or: Who does it help? Call him old-school or whatever, but his plodding earnestness had earned him a superb reputation and a Pulitzer Prize for documenting the hideous conditions under which ships were “broken” on a certain shore of the Indian Ocean, by hundreds of men, most of whom died in their late twenties for all the asbestos they breathed while hacking the giant beached vessels to pieces for the salvage money.
Now, not for the Post but for a force more implacable than any in journalism—that is, his wife (also a legend, but that’s for another time)—he was determined to get the who, what, when, where, and why on Comrade Krulov, who was featured in many war histories, always heroic but never in hard focus, was glimpsed occasionally in the postwar histories, and then seemed to fade out, as if broken down like a ship to tiny untraceable parts by sweaty men in loincloths.
He’d tried the archives, he’d called all the older folks—both old American correspondents and retired Soviet-era politicians—and had gotten nothing, or nothing real.
“Oh, that one. He was a force to be reckoned with. Whatever happened to him? Do you know?”
He’d worked the Internet, finding his way into certain largely unknown databases. He’d tried American, British, French, and Australian intelligence services, all of whom had distinguished themselves with penetrations during the Cold War. But no, it was too long ago, it had faded, so much other stuff had happened.
And so he was down to his last play.
It would cost.
He needed a chunk of dough.
Will, he told himself. You’ve done enough. Don’t go there. You don’t even know what you’re going to find out. How will you tell her if it doesn’t work out?
He couldn’t face that reality. The music of the five W’s, those Circes of a journalist’s honor, kept sliding through his brain, rapturous, seductive, alluring, undeniable.
He went to his laptop, keyed in “Bank of America,” and transferred ten thousand dollars from his—their—savings account to his Moscow bank.
In for a penny, in for his youngest daughter’s college education.
Who knew, maybe she’d like community college.
CHAPTER 28
The Carpathians
Above Yaremche
MID-JULY 1944
The patrols came closer and closer. Sometimes they went high, sometimes low. Sometimes they were very aggressive, moving loudly, making a big important-mission show; sometimes they were secretive, employing great woods skill, moving and hunting quietly. Sometimes they traveled circularly, sometimes vertically. Suppose they left trailers, listeners in the night? Suppose they left silent ambush teams? Suppose they left their own sly traps that could drive a stake through you or drop a boulder on you? Worst of all, suppose they left snipers?
With the fear of constant discovery, they could not get out to hunt for mushrooms without great anxiety, which had its psychological and nutritional effects. They were surviving at subsistence level. Days had passed.
“The Peasant will return,” she insisted. “He will have a rifle. You and he will escape deeper into the mountains, where it’s safe for now. The Red Army will liberate Ukraine. You will survive.”
“What happens to Petrova?”
“If he gets a rifle, then I will head down the mountain and into Ivano and find a place to shoot. If I can’t kill Groedl, I’ll just kill Germans until they kill me. I’ll die a sniper’s death, as so many have before me.”
“You are delusional, Sergeant Petrova. The Peasant is dead, obviously. We are lucky he didn’t rat us out under torture. He won’t be back. There is no rifle. The Serbs will find us, and that Arab will torture us, you more than me.”
“The Peasant is too sly.”
“I only wish. Here’s the reality. He’s gone.”
It was true. Where was he? Had he been caught in Yarmeche on his rifle-hunting expedition? No sign of him. Maybe he had simply lit out, used his skills to survive and evade, and abandoned them. But he would not do that. The Peasant was a strong man and would never yield to craven temptation. She could not believe he was gone.