The Altar Girl (23 page)

CHAPTER 36

I
DROVE BACK
to Rocky Hill and ate another short stack of pancak
es for breakfast. It was Easter Sunday, but my mother wasn’t planning a family meal. She’d stopped doing that after the incident with Marko. Instead, she was having a traditional Easter breakfast with one of her boyfriends. She’d told me his sons were in town, and she was eager to charm them into not minding if their father added her to his will. That’s why I asked the waitress to sprinkle some chocolate chips into the pancake batter. In the absence of familial bliss, we always have chocolate. I washed the pancakes down with a cup of tea and waited another half hour until it was 8:00 a.m. Then I called Mrs. Chimchak and told her I was coming over to give her an update. I analyzed her words, delivery, and comportment. She sounded perfectly normal to me.

Still, I dreaded my arrival even more than the first time. Would she be lucid when I got there? Had she been in control of her faculties when she’d encouraged my delusion that my godfather had been murdered? Did she know she was suffering from dementia? How, in the name of all that was decent, could I even broach the subject with her? If the topic of her dementia didn’t come up, I had no idea how I would explain that we’d been wrong about my godfather. I’d fostered suspicions for my own emotional needs. Evidently she’d done the same.

The first time I’d shown up at her house, she’d been waiting for me as though I were her long-lost daughter. This time was only slightly different. Once again the door opened and her smiling face appeared before I climbed to the top of the stoop. But instead of calling me by my name, she spoke someone else’s.

“Stefan,” she said. “Is it really you, my love? Oh my God. It is you.”

She let me into her home and then reached out with her arms to welcome my embrace. I hugged and held her for a long three count, and then tacked on another three count for good measure. Afterward, I pulled back but kept my hands on her small, narrow shoulders. They were hard as stone.

“It’s not Stefan, Mrs. Chimchak,” I said. “It’s Nadia. It’s your favorite
Plastunka
, Nadia Tesla.”

She stared at me with a vacant expression, her eyes glazed over as though she were looking right through me onto a celluloid screen. I wondered if she actually saw her childhood love in my place, or if she was watching a movie in which they were the stars. And then, the glaze disappeared. Her focus sharpened instantly, as though someone had turned the projector off and the lights back on in her head.

“Nadia,” she said, sharp as the razor blade that she’d earned as a nickname. “Come in, dear. Come in.”

She led me into the sitting room where we’d talked before. I reminded myself to be gentle, and to avoid being the sledgehammer whose image I sometimes invoked. She told me she had hot water and offered me tea. I declined and told her I’d just finished breakfast. We sat down and faced each other. She eyed me curiously.

“There was a note of finality in your voice when you called this morning,” she said. “You have some news for me? You’ve learned something important, yes?”

I told her everything that happened last night and this morning. She listened in her typically inscrutable fashion. She raised her eyelids and shifted in her seat when I recounted the most dangerous moments, in the vineyard and later in the gravedigger’s office. I told her the state police were calling in the FBI, and that they suspected I’d broken up a multimillion-dollar arts and antiquities ring that may have spanned the entire Northeast, and included other middlemen besides my godfather. I told her everything except the bombshell Rus had dropped on me. The one that had shed light on my overly active imagination. That he had not killed his brother, nor had Marko. That I’d invented the story for my own purposes and that she’d encouraged me for her own reasons, whether because of her illness or in a desperate stab to be part of something meaningful as she watched herself deteriorate.

“And what did Rus say about your godfather’s death?” Mrs. Chimchak said.

“He said he didn’t kill him.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’s hard to explain. His delivery, his tone of voice, the circumstances under which he said he didn’t do it. All the ways in which we reveal ourselves when we’re lying. I have some experience with people under pressure as a forensic financial analyst. He showed none of the signs a liar usually does. None.”

“I see. Did Rus have any thoughts on who did kill him?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“No one,” I said. I softened my voice. She appeared so sharp and focused, I had no doubt she’d infer a reference to her illness if I wasn’t careful. “He believes his brother died the way the police said he did. Accidentally.”

“And you agree with him now? Did he change your mind?”

“Yes. He changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“He made me realize I had my own agenda. That I had personal reasons for wanting to be in Hartford, and so I convinced myself my godfather was murdered. I believed what I wanted to believe.”

“So you believe what Rus said. And yet he lied to you when you first met him in his house. He told you he didn’t think his brother—your godfather—could have killed himself. You believed him then, and you believe him now. How can you be sure he hasn’t fooled you this time? How can you be sure he isn’t the murderer?”

I shrugged. “I can’t be one hundred percent sure. But I trust my instincts. I said this was all about my godfather, but I lied. It was all about me. Rus was right about that. He knew me well enough from when he’d been my father-in-law to know I had an ulterior motive for my so-called investigation.”

Mrs. Chimchak nodded for a moment, as though she were considering everything I’d said. “And what about me?” she said. “Why do you think I agreed with you? Why did I buy into your theory of murder so passionately and so thoroughly?”

Above all, she wanted me to be real and true. That much I knew from my first meeting with her in this same room. I could not disappoint her. I chose my words carefully.

“Perhaps it brought you joy to immerse yourself in something.”

“Maybe. Or perhaps I’d lost control of my senses. Is that what you really think, Nadia?”

“No.” The word escaped my lips so quickly it left no doubt that’s exactly what I thought.

“You would be justified for thinking so,” Mrs. Chimchak said. “You’ve heard, no doubt. By now someone’s told you that I’m losing control of my mind.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know how. In a similar situation, a woman in my place might have stood up, walked over to her, and held her. Or at least touched her. If I had done something like that, however, it would have felt disrespectful. It would have felt like an insult. Mrs. Chimchak was, above all else, a warrior. She deserved to maintain her self-respect. Any display of sentimentality on my part might have diminished her pride.

“How is your health?” I said.

“I’m losing my memory, I find myself wandering around, at night and during the daytime. Yesterday I found myself barefoot in the park staring at the ducks, wondering how I’d gotten there. I was feeding them poker chips. And I’m forgetting how to do basic things. Yesterday I woke up and had no idea what I was supposed to do next.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

She waved her hand. “They’ll put me in an institution. If there’s one thing I’m certain, it’s that I’m going to die in this house. Not in some asylum with a bunch of strangers. I will die here, with my memories.” She cleared her throat. “Do me a favor, my love. Go over to my desk and bring me my tin of mints. It’s in the top drawer. When a person doesn’t feel well, a mint will always improve her spirits.”

I walked over to her desk and opened the drawer. A box of Altoids rested atop a journal. It was black with a fleur-de-lis pattern around the edges. When I lifted the Altoids off the top of the notebook, a white square revealed itself. It was a place for the journal owner to print the title of his work, or, if it were a diary, his name. Two initials had been written in cursive in the white space:
PC
.

Mrs. Chimchak’s first name was Roma. The “P” was the Ukrainian “R”. This was probably her diary. It wasn’t this observation that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the way the “P” was written. The writer had made an extra loop after closing the semicircle around the “I” in the letter.

It was identical to the “P” I’d found in my godfather’s calendar.

My mind reeled. I glanced at Mrs. Chimchak. She gave me nothing. I stared at the journal again. I raced through a series of deductions. They led to a preposterous conclusion, an utterly impossible one, which in my heart I knew was true. I planted my eyes on Mrs. Chimchak.

“DP,” I said. “You wrote the letters in my godfather’s calendar.”

She confirmed my conclusion by remaining mute.

“You did so for my benefit. You knew I was coming over to search his home with Roxy, and you wanted me to see those letters. You wanted me to see them because you wanted me to investigate. And you wanted me to investigate because you wanted to be revealed. You wanted to be revealed as my godfather’s killer.”

A look of contentment spread on her face. “May I have my mints please?”

That was as good a confirmation as any. As I walked toward her, tin of Altoids in hand, I stared into her eyes and searched for a motive. Why had she killed him? Was it a function of her illness? Had she pushed him down the stairs accidentally? No, I thought. She wouldn’t have looked so contented when I’d accused her of being the killer. Mrs. Chimchak had sent him flying down those stairs to his death on purpose. It may have been an act of passion, or a premeditated act. More like the latter, I thought. The woman I knew wasn’t prone to acts of passion. But what could a ninety-year-old woman have cared so much about to have killed a lifelong friend?

I handed her the tin of mints, and then I saw it. The picture of her with her childhood love on the shelf beside her chair.

I sat back down and faced her. “Tell me about Stefan,” I said.

She put the tin on her lap and folded her hands atop it. “He was dedicated to a free Ukraine at a time when that was only a dream. He was a leader of men at an impossibly young age. He was fierce and fearless. He was a commander in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.”

“Did you ever see him again once you returned to Europe for the second time? To a different DP camp?”

“No. I never saw him again.”

“What happened to him?”

“He vanished. He was living in the camps under an assumed name. For his own protection. The NKVD’s primary goal was to repatriate and kill all known leaders of Soviet resistance. They were constantly on the lookout for partisans. Once his true identity was revealed, the NKVD took him away. He was seen being hauled into a truck by four Russians. No one ever saw him again.”

“Was Takarov among the men who took him?”

She shook her head. “I doubt it. He was an officer. He would have been the one who gave the order.”

“And how did he know to give the order? Who revealed Stefan’s true identity?”

Mrs. Chimchak’s eyes turned to steel. “Please don’t disappoint me. Not now. Not at this stage of my life. You know the answer already, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, my voice trembling a bit. I didn’t want to hear myself saying it. “My godfather gave up Stefan to the NKVD. To Takarov.”

Mrs. Chimchak looked away from me. Her hands kneaded the box of Altoids.

“Why did he do it? For money? Or was he himself blackmailed?” My mind raced to answer my own question. “If he had been blackmailed, I doubt you would have killed him. There would have been extenuating circumstances.”

“The answer is he did it for money, but not the way you think.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your godfather didn’t accept a bribe in exchange for revealing Stefan’s identity. He accepted a paycheck.”

Her words stunned me. I tried to think of an alternative conclusion but there was only one. “My godfather worked for the NKVD?”

“Your godfather
was
the NKVD. He was SMERSH. He was the NKVD’s ultimate weapon. An infiltrator. A Soviet agent assigned to assimilate in society. Was he Ukrainian? Of course he was. What, you thought there were no Ukrainians working against their own people? We didn’t all know each other when we arrived at the DP camps. We were among strangers from day one. Your godfather, he became one of us. He
was
one of us.”

“When did you find this out?”

“After the Crimean business started, I became suspicious. I pressed him on it over the course of several visits not knowing where it would lead. He became very talkative after a full bottle of wine. And I played him. Told him bygones were bygones, and that I just wanted to know the truth before I died. He knew my health was deteriorating, and bit by bit he told me everything.”

“Did he stay in contact with Takarov all these years?”

“Lord no. Your godfather became an American. He found heaven in Connecticut. In his mind, he became a member of our community. He thought he was safe from his past. Until Takarov found him.”