She shook her head.
“We’d better search it,” Dinara said.
She crouched beside the safe and started sifting through the contents.
“What will happen to the money?” Agafiya asked.
“This is your house,” I replied. “How you handle this discovery is up to you.”
Agafiya brightened. “For the first time in many years, fate gives me pleasure.”
I was only half listening. Dinara’s shoulder had brushed against something that had been stuck to the inside of the door, and dislodged it. As it floated to the floor, I realized it was a Polaroid photograph. It landed face down, and when I picked it up and turned it over, I almost recoiled in shock.
The faded old image was of Ernie Fisher, Elizabeth Connor and Karl Parker as smiling teenagers, arms around each other’s shoulders, the familiar pose of close friends caught in a moment of pure joy.
CHAPTER 68
“I TOOK THAT picture,” Agafiya said wistfully. “I didn’t know he had kept it.”
I studied the picture, my mind in freefall as I tried to come up with a logical explanation for its existence. Two things shocked me about the image. The first was the Spartak Moscow top sported by Karl Parker, and the second was the Russian imagery and signs that surrounded them.
“That was the bar where I met Ernst,” Agafiya continued, “where I used to work.”
She took the photograph from me and stroked Fisher’s likeness tenderly.
“I loved him very much,” she said. “I was younger then. Not too much older than him, but enough. He told me I was his first.”
Dinara had halted her search and looked at the photo in disbelief. “Ernest Fisher, Karl Parker and Elizabeth Conner knew each other,” she remarked in astonishment. “In Russia?”
“I didn’t know the others. Just Ernst,” Agafiya said. “He was a fine young man. It’s very sad what has happened to him.” Tears welled in her eyes.
“Where was this?” I asked.
“Volkovo, north of Rybinsk,” Agafiya replied.
“Do you know what they were doing there?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Ernst always said he could never talk about it. But he told me it was the biggest mistake of his life. Not then, but now. He said he regretted it every day.”
Dinara and I shared a knowing look. Her theory about guilt being behind his drinking was starting to sound plausible. It seemed clear Ernie Fisher had been living a lie.
“But back then he was full of himself. He would come to the bar often and try to win me with his words,” Agafiya said. “His friends only came once. When I took that picture. They were greedy for drink. Vodka. Like it was their last day alive.”
“Were they talking Russian?” I asked.
“I don’t remember about the other two, but Ernst definitely spoke to me in Russian,” she replied. “How else could he hope to win my heart? I didn’t learn English until I came to Moscow many years later.”
“Were you still …?” Dinara trailed off, but Agafiya got her meaning immediately.
“No, no,” she replied. “Our love is a memory. When he found me again, we were only friends. Not even that. I think he just wanted someone to listen to him while he drank. Or maybe he just wanted this basement.”
I looked at the photograph she held in her pale hand, and struggled to make sense of what she’d just told us. My friend, the man I’d crossed half the world to seek justice for, wasn’t the man I thought he was. The younger version of Karl Parker, who grinned up at me from the old picture, was a stranger who wasn’t supposed to exist. Karl Parker had been raised in Clarion, Iowa, and according to all the information Mo-bot had been able to find, he had never once been to Russia.
“You said Ernie Fisher spoke Russian to you in the past. What about now?” I asked.
“Of course,” Agafiya said. “What else would he speak? He was an office administrator for a trading company in Moscow.”
“Didn’t you read the article?” I asked.