The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

the shutter fell in his mind.
    Why
him
? Rot it all to pieces, why him—what does he have that I don’t?
    For an instant—for a single short instant, but yes, he did, although he wouldn’t confess it even to save his immortal soul—he hated Stodólya. Everything about him—at once: that grimface of his with its hooked nose that jutted forth like an ax, the Red Army cap pushed down almost over his eyes, and the way he stood there with one foot forward like he owned the place—the rascal, you couldn’t help but admire him: “at ease” as all of them, but still alert, watchful, as they all should be—like a loaded bundook full-cocked, like a wolf on hunt, ready at any moment to leap up and tear into a stranger’s throat—and Adrian felt hot with shame for his impulsive outburst. Dog your bones, brother, this guy carried you under fire on his own back! It was this man’s efforts that dismantled the enemy agents’ network in three districts; this man’s intelligence service worked like a Swiss watch and knew of the Bolsheviks’ plans five minutes before the Bolsheviks themselves did—so what if he could not, did not know how, to let go of his abundantly tight grip without need? Adrian could indulge all he wanted in his nostalgia for the old warfare, in which the enemy came bearing arms, but that warfare was, indeed, over, and the one that was left for them to fight was incomparably harder: the housewife who put GB-supplied poison into the bread meant for the insurgents, and that batyushka who interrogated his flock when they came to confession—they did not bear arms—they
were
the arms, weapons of war in the hands of the enemy who wished to stay invisible. So was it really any wonder that Stodólya, constantly dealing with the darkest sides of human nature, had learned to treat people as tools to be used to achieve his goals?
    Including the woman he loved?
    Because Stodólya did love Geltsia. Adrian saw how he followed her with his eyes, how his face changed when their eyes met. On her name day he presented her with cyanide in a sealed, lightproof blue vial—he didn’t have any himself, such a luxury rarely fell into their hands, wherever did he find it? A few people Adrian knew resorted to arsenic, but it was not reliable—the Soviets could always keep them alive with a simple stomach lavage. Except cyanide, nothing was reliable: the last bullet you kept for yourself couldjam, a grenade could fail to explode. Adrian was happy to know that Geltsia had a vial of certain death, pure as lightning, sewn into her collar. He was grateful to Stodólya for that.
    And still, looking at their group in the photograph—looking at them all from outside for the first time, as though he had been asleep before and just awoke—he clearly felt unease, like the ticking of a bomb.
    TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...
    The unease emanated from Stodólya. The trusty Stodólya, solid as a rock wall. The Stodólya to whom you could yield—or die.
    It could not have been easy for her. It was
his
life she eased,
his
power that she softened with her light. How long could she bear this double burden—the underground’s and the husband’s?
    He felt the same unease again when they were informed that Stodólya’s winter bunker fell. Fell in the middle of October, when it was already too late to build a new one. They were lucky they hadn’t yet stocked it with a winter’s worth of food and hadn’t transferred their typewriter there. There had to have been a traitor, the courier said; around the same time, in the same territory, a Security Service courier girl got turned in by her own boyfriend—the gump believed the GB when they promised they’d leave them in peace as soon as the girl parted with the underground. When the girl said nothing under interrogation, they nailed her tongue to a board—right before the boy’s eyes. He may have been the one who somehow found out about the bunker and spilled it, but there was no way to find out: he lost his mind.
    Stodólya and Dzvinya were left without a bunker. Someone had to share quarters with them. Only no one was in a big rush to winter with Stodólya: four months in a bunker with him was no picnic.
    And, with a sudden sickening feeling in his stomach that usually occurs when you are staring into the black eye of a gun barrel, Adrian realized—he would do it. He asked the courier to wait and wrote a ciphered dépêche to Stodólya. With his secretary and