night your sister vanished, he thought that Camille was dead. He crumbled. And so he confessed the truth."
It made sense. Horrible sense. My mother had learned what my father had done. She would never forgive him for betraying her beloved parents. She would think nothing of making him suffer, of letting him think that his own daughter was dead.
"So," I said, "my mother hid my sister. She waited until she had enough money from the settlement. Then she planned on disappearing with Camille."
"Yes."
"But that begs the central question, doesn't it?"
"What question?"
I spread my hands. "What about me, her only son? How could my mother just leave me behind?" Sosh said nothing. "My whole life," I said. "I spent my whole life thinking my mother didn't care enough about me. That she just ran off and never looked back. How could you let me believe that, Sosh?"
"You think the truth is better?"
I thought of how I spied on my father in those woods. He dug and dug for his daughter. And then one day he stopped. I thought that he stopped because my mother ran off. I remembered the last day he had gone out to those woods, how he told me not to follow him:
"Not today, Paul Today I go alone..." He dug his last hole that day. Not to find my sister. But to bury my mother.
Was it poetic justice, placing her in the ground where my sister supposedly died, or was there also an element of practicality-who would think to look in a place where they had already searched so thoroughly?
"Dad found out she planned to run."
"Yes."
"How?"
"I told him."
Sosh met my eye. I said nothing.
"I learned that your mother had transferred a hundred thousand dollars out of their joint account. It was common KGB protocol to keep an eye on one another. I asked your father about it."
"And he confronted her."
"Yes."
"And my mother..." There was a choke in my voice. I cleared my throat, blinked, tried again. "My mother never planned on abandoning me," I said. "She was going to take me too."
Sosh held my gaze and nodded.
That truth should have offered me some small measure of comfort. It didn't. "Did you know he killed her, Sosh?" "Yes." "Just like that?" Again he went quiet. "And you didn't do anything about it, did you?" "We were still working for the government," Sosh said. "If it came out that he was a murderer, we could all be in danger."
"Your cover would have been blown."
"Not just mine. Your father knew a lot of us."
"So you let him get away with it."
"It was what we did back then. Sacrifice for the higher cause. Your father said she threatened to expose us all." "You believed that?" "Does it matter what I believed? Your father never meant to kill her.
He snapped. Imagine it. Natasha was going to run away and hide. She was going to take his children and disappear forever."
I remembered now my father's last words, on that deathbed...
"Paul, we still need to find her..."
Did he mean Camille's body? Or Camille herself?
"My father found out my sister was still alive," I said.
"Its not that simple."
"What do you mean, it's not that simple? Did he find out or not? Did my mother tell him?"
"Natasha?" Sosh made a noise. "Never. You talk about brave, about being able to withstand hardships. Your mother wouldn't speak. No matter what your father did to her."
"Including strangling her to death?"
Sosh said nothing.
"Then how did he find out?"
"After he killed your mother, your father searched through her papers, through phone records. He put it together-or at least he had his suspicions."
"So he did know?"
"Like I said, it's not that simple."
"You're not making sense, Sosh. Did he search for Camille?"
Sosh closed his eyes. He moved back around his desk. "You asked me before about the siege of Leningrad," he said. "Do you know what it taught me? The dead are nothing. They are gone. You bury them and you move on."
"I'll keep that in mind, Sosh."
"You went on this quest. You wouldn't leave the dead alone. And now where are you? Two more have been killed. You learned that your beloved father murdered your mother. Was it worth it, Pavel? Was it worth stirring up the old ghosts?"
"It depends," I said.
"On what?"
"On what happened to my sister."
I waited.
My father's last words came to me:
"Did you know?"
I'd thought he was accusing me, that he saw guilt on my face. But that wasn't it. Did I know about the real fate of