The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Kapkán—the word stuck in his mind and lay there like a rock in the middle of a stream, cracked into its two syllables, two blows with a Tatar cudgel,
kap-kán
—but man, do you have luck! Thank You, Almighty Lord—three and a half floors below the trap, two minutes before the fatal knock on the door, three-one-three, “Do you have Brits to sell?” He’d have dropped like a ham hock into stew. God bless that major—whatever’d come over him? With girls, it’s been known to happen—sometimes moskali saved them by warning them like this, but a man? Must get a message to our people at the police, let them find out what kind of a major they got themselves here.... “They arrested everyone last night”—whom, how many? Was the one he’d come to see among them? Had he had the time to shoot himself, or was he taken alive? Waited for friend Kyi, but got another kind of visitor altogether, the uninvited kind—if only the courier had come the day before, a day, just a day earlier!
    Adrian all but moaned through his teeth, his old wound aching in his chest: as if it were he who was being dragged, unconscious, and tossed like a sack into the “black raven,” as they called policevans...“You, black raven, why’d you circle ov-er the hum-ble heaad of mine” went the doleful ballad, drawn out like your own guts slowly pulled by a well crank, when friend Lisovyi sang it around their campfire, the former Red Army captain, Andriy Zlobin, who perished in the Carpathians and to whom Adrian owed his papers (they only changed Andriy to Anton, but that was nothing in comparison to what it would’ve taken them to manufacture good legal papers otherwise). And now it came, the “black raven”—not for nothing did the stupid black bird haunt him But no, you bastards, the day has not yet come when you could take Kyi alive! But who, who was it? He didn’t know even their aliases. A wounded man, dying—that’s all the courier communicated. And what if they’d taken him alive?—they’ll nurse him, to be sure, patch him up in their hospital and then torture him until he tells them what he was supposed to tell Adrian.... And right from under his nose, rot it!—the MGB snatched away the secret that couldn’t be confided to a single other person on the territory, the secret he’d walked eighteen kilometers (and now had to walk as many back!) to hear, and now could only pray to God that they wouldn’t get to it, that it would perish, vanish forever, go into the ground together with whoever was its keeper...
    “Beg pardon!” he blurted in Russian when he shoved past another man. Closer to the market there were more people; he couldn’t keep the same pace without drawing attention to himself, and he spotted behind him—this time beyond any doubt because it was much closer—the gray Mackintosh and the navy-banded hat.... Whoa, brother, you’re a slob to shame all slobs, who tails like that? His mouth was still dry, but his heart had returned to his chest, and his reason worked coolly and clearly as though placed outside of his body. Under different circumstances, he’d have had good fun losing that tail, would make a sport of vanishing without a trace, but now he felt unavenged wrath choking him, high in his throat where it had risen, by the law of communicating vessels. As soon as the first, dark wave of fear ebbed—he was still in that state where the body, like awell-oiled machine, acts of its own accord as it does in dreams, in love, and in moments of mortal danger—and before he knew what he was doing and could rein himself in, in blatant denial of all logic of safety that demanded he remove himself, now, at once, far from the city, he was making a show of turning onto another street, almost tripping into the arms—Beg pardon!—of another fur-wrapped missus who instantly ogled him with a purely feminine hunger—some other time, lady; I’ve no cash on me today!—a quiet and usually empty street where he knew a very good doorway, with narrow latticework like in a confessional—and he was feeling an urge to confess to someone, a powerful urge indeed! He didn’t care if it was broad daylight, as long as the dolt didn’t lose him again.
    He was right: after just a few moments, he could hear hurried steps clattering from the same direction he’d come from—
clickety-clack
, check it out, the comrades make a fine racket when they walk, and we, when “the red broom” swept its hardest, were compelled