A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [169]
“Marina!” a man’s voice called.
She turned to see Shalom Katz coming toward her. She smiled and greeted him warmly, covering up her apprehension. He took her arm and pointed at a park bench in Washington Square.
“It’s been years,” she said. “Are you still running emigrants?”
“I’ve retired from Alyiah Bet,” he said, referring to the central underground organization. “I’m an Israeli diplomat at the United Nations. Second secretary, or something like that, in the mission.”
Marina smiled. Shalom was a cop. Cops looked like cops and acted like cops. The Israeli underground cops were a tough bunch.
“What to do?” Marina wondered. Tell him about her new life, as if he didn’t already know? Surely he was bringing her the news of Yuri’s demise. At the same time she wept for Yuri, she would scream out her new freedom.
“Why am I so honored by your visit?” she asked.
“With a real government, we are able to accomplish things impossible in the old days. I can speak to you, of course, completely confidentially?”
She nodded.
“We captured a high-ranking Soviet KGB station chief in Jerusalem. He was disguised as a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russians wanted him back. I was a negotiator. I gave him a list of Zionists they had imprisoned to exchange. Yuri Sokolov is alive.”
She leaned against Shalom and shook. “How long have you known this?”
“I wasn’t going to inform you until we got an absolute confirmation. We are going to bring out Yuri and two others in exchange for the KGB spy.”
“How is he?” she asked shakily.
“The gulag neither killed him nor broke his spirit, but he is a badly damaged man. He has been brutalized. It is a question of your being in Israel to meet him.”
“Meet me here tomorrow, same time,” she said, and moved away quickly.
Damnable Russian tragedy, the mournful music, the endless dull winters, the bleakness, the walls of cold stone, weeping women in babushkas, the drunk on the street, the listless eyes of a thousand men and women on the escalator coming out of the Metro underground.
Oh, David, what have I done to you? You are my love, greater than anyone. Yuri brought us together, and now he is taking us apart.
Yuri! I have been an unfaithful wife. I have betrayed you. When I had David’s child, I wanted to hear news of your death. What the hell, David and Alexander and Ben were nothing more than a dream. Russia is real. No matter what, she had to keep her rendezvous with Yuri in Israel. This great man could not be further broken with a scandal. Secrets had to be kept.
The safety of the child was a need greater than Marina and David’s agony. Alexander had to be put up for adoption, and she would return to Israel. But how? Through the Jewish agencies her name would surely be discovered.
Father Gallico was now Monsignor Gallico, a strong servant for Cardinal Watts. His relationship with David Horowitz remained.
“My dear friend, my dear, dear friend,” Gallico comforted him. “So, here we are. I will see how I can get it done.”
Alexander was a year old when Marina handed him over to Mario Gallico. The child would disappear inside the Catholic bureaucracy.
From that moment on it seemed that death played a hand in silencing those people who had knowledge of the plot.
First to die was Marina Sokolov. She and Yuri knew a moment of peace. They were given respite on a beautiful kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee.
But Yuri was a wreckage of a man, blind in one eye, one leg amputated, violent headaches from his beatings. Marina poured her life into him, but as she did, her own life ebbed from her. She continued to live the big lie, frightened every day that her secret would be discovered. Always wracking her, the terrible longing for Alexander and her beautiful lover, David.
Marina went silently, they said of congestive heart failure. It was a broken heart. Unable to go on without her, Yuri followed her to his grave a year later.
The little convent of St. Catherine held many secrets. One of their unspoken duties was to care for certain “nameless” orphans. Sometimes, these