He couldn’t think straight. However, he still had enough wit to understand that the reason Hewitt was so afraid and so keen to escape was his guilt. The dilemma was that Jack couldn’t blow the whistle on him without implicating himself. He had just revealed his contacts to Hewitt, he was going to provide him with false documents, and he’d taken payment for it. If Hewitt went down, he would bring Jack down with him. And then there was Elizabeth; it wasn’t her fault if her uncle was corrupt.
The only solution Jack could find was to leave things as they were and wait. He would persuade Hewitt that their escape would be impossible until spring, and in the meantime he would try to find his own way out. Until then, he’d look after himself. He’d work in the store, recover from his injury, earn money, and plan his escape. Now that he knew he was completely surrounded by vermin, it was all that mattered.
December brought as much snow as it did bad news. The famine, fueled by shortages in Ukraine, the granary of the Soviet Union, was spreading its tentacles over the Avtozavod in the form of severe rationing. Fortunately, Jack’s store provided some relief for the Americans, not so much because of the meager provisions of the official store as because of the food that Miquel was able to procure on the black market.
With Sergei’s acquiescence, Jack had managed to turn a cockroach-ridden warehouse into a grocery store that offered not just potatoes, beans, and pork belly, but also the tasty marinades that Miquel prepared, and the dishes that Harry Daniels’s wife cooked for those who preferred to work overtime. Harry and Jim washed and prepared the food rations from the general store to make them more appealing, and offering credit had attracted customers from the first day. With Joe Brown acting as bookkeeper and recording every last ruble, Jack soon became a seasoned and successful businessman.
But the only person Jack wanted to impress with his acumen was Natasha.
When his duties allowed it, he would go to see her. Most of the time, their meetings were limited to a short walk on the hospital grounds, but, work permitting, they would climb into the Ford Model A and escape to Gorky to enjoy its monuments and avenues. By her side, Jack found that his difficulties seemed to vanish. The problem was that, as soon as he returned home and closed the door, they all returned.
His main cause for worry was his relationship with Hewitt, even though he had tried to think about him as little as possible since he discovered the industrialist’s deception.
Another problem that he had to solve in December was moving to his new home. Though Walter had kept his distance, and the distrust of his fellow Americans had waned, Jack still felt it wise to move. Ivan Zarko had found him a house in the city, and he didn’t want to delay.
He was trying to decide what furniture to keep when an insistent rap on the door tore him from his thoughts. When he opened it, he found Ivan Zarko’s nephew, whom he’d sent for the previous day to help him with the move. He let him in and showed him the belongings that had to be taken out to the horse-drawn cart that they were going to use for the move. While Yuri got to work, Jack put his final possessions in McMillan’s trunk and prayed that the palace that Zarko had promised him would live up to the description.
However, when he found the colony of bats that flew in through the holes in the roof of his new home, he wondered whether Zarko knew the difference between a palace and a dunghill. Yuri had assured him that he’d see it differently once it had been given a good cleaning, but Jack doubted it. When the Russian had finished unloading, Jack limped up to the little balcony on the second floor that looked onto Alekseevskaya Street, near Gorky’s kremlin. From his viewpoint, he could see the towers of the old fortress built by the tsars, its majestic appearance a clear sign of the power that they once held.
He turned to look at the adjoining homes, on two floors like his own and of similar appearance. According to Yuri, most of them had belonged to members of the bourgeoisie before they were turned into warehouses and workshops after the revolution. He closed the balcony door and went back inside to say good-bye to Yuri. Once alone, he sat on a chair and uncorked a bottle of vodka. He drank, the heat reviving him. On the third draft, he began to see the house in a different way. Perhaps, to avoid arousing suspicion if he was visited, he should give the walls a lick of paint. It would make the house look more like a proper home, where escape was the last thing on the mind of its tenant.
What unfortunately he could not change was the steep staircase that had made him groan with pain as he climbed it.
He applied the lanolin cream that Natasha had given him to the scar and flexed his leg. Then he tried to lift the knee to the height of his navel, but before he reached it, he felt as if a blade were piercing his belly.
He breathed hard before swallowing another draft of vodka. Hewitt, a traitor; Sergei, a fanatic; McMillan, missing; Anatoly Orlov, dead . . . It all swirled around in his head. He decided to sleep and wait for dawn.
He was woken by an unbearable pain in his hip, which he attributed in part to the terrible cold of mid-December. However, the air felt strangely warm. When he sat up, he found Yuri wandering around the room. Apparently, the young man had a key and had risen early to clean the house. Jack put on a dressing gown, washed his face with the water he found in a basin, and looked around. Now that it had been washed down, the place looked better, though it could still easily be confused with a pigsty. Yuri, who was devouring something, greeted him with his mouth full and offered him some kind of roasted sausage sandwiched between two pieces of black bread. Jack took it and wolfed it down without complaint. He was so hungry, he could have eaten the bats that still flitted in the roof.
“Bath?” asked Yuri, and without looking away from his sausage, he gestured at a wooden tub full of steaming water.
“You Russians know how to survive the winter.” Jack’s smile lasted as long as it took for the effects of his hangover to set in.
He looked at the bathtub and hesitated. He felt like submerging himself in hot water and forgetting about his problems for a while, but he wasn’t sure his wound would welcome it. Since the attack, he had kept the area dry.
He saw that Yuri was about to go downstairs. “Are you going?”
“I left some of your things in my uncle’s warehouse. I’ll fetch them. He needs the space.”
“All right. But don’t be long. You’ll have to help me get down the stairs. Yesterday it hurt like crazy.” Jack regretted deciding to spend the night on the upper floor.