The Story
Dr. Jonas Bazis is a defector, an escaped prisoner, and a failed husband. His wife’s brutal murder by the Soviets haunts him, corrupting any desire to return to science. Yet although guilt-ridden, and a stone’s throw from madness, the infamous Professor Bazis is also a little bored. But this will soon change.
What he believes is a chance meeting with the Russian mentalist Kamile Damski propels him into danger as an opportunity for redemption emerges. Madam Damski tricks Bazis into attending a demonstration of her psychic abilities at a London theater, planting the suggestion that she might connect him with his dead wife. Instead, she exposes him to a hostile crowd as a defector who allows the talented Isadore to die rather than bend his principles. But the performance is only the beginning of what Madam Damski plans for the handsome Professor Bazis. His time in a Soviet prison makes him easy prey as she revives his paranoia, plays on his regrets, and threatens his uneasy relationship with the British. But what is her purpose? And who smuggles him home to Lithuania—even when it is likely he will be shot on his arrival as a traitor?
When a brilliant young man begs him to facilitate an escape to the West, Bazis must choose between securing his own freedom and helping the adolescent Moze. But to help the prodigy, he must submit to Madam Damski’s manipulation. She hopes, or so she says, to increase favor with the Soviets by impressing Stalin with her mentalist abilities, enticing a defector home to willingly face Stalin’s justice. Yet others have an interest in Bazis, and he faces more danger from shadowy adversaries.
As Bazis plays Madam Damski’s dangerous game to save Moze, two companions—not of his choosing and both in marked for execution—join him in a chilling journey to Moscow. The implausible trio have no reason to trust each other. Ausra Kulbak’s troubled past often cripples her better angels, and she lies on impulse. The man they call ‘the bear,’ once a member of the notorious NKVD, has secrets, he’s not sharing. As everyone’s motives become clear, nothing has been what it seems. The only constant is the reluctant heroes’ struggle to do the right thing—while staying alive in a regime rewarding only deception, degradation, and violence.
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The Unspent Tears of Jonas Bazis
Description & Excerpt
Excerpt
NKVD officers move through the crowd checking papers, the distinctive raspberry piping of their uniforms an unspoken threat traveling with them, attaching to simple hearts, making a home there for the fear it symbolizes.
I resist hurrying to Ausra’s side, knowing I will draw attention to her. As I scan the crowd, I find Gregori’s shaggy head in line near the ticket booth. With a glance at the guards, I see they have spotted him and recognize who he is. No other person is quite like him. His presence announces itself before you take note of his powerful demeanor. The police will not have forgotten his prison escape. The broken bones left to remember him by assure it. I risk a glance at Ausra. She has noticed the guards’ interest in Gregori and shoots me a questioning look, asking, I think, how we will protect him.
But how to divert the guards’ attention. Yet, if I do not, chances are Ausra will do something foolish. So, I sing loud and off-key. I cannot carry a tune, not like Josef Stalin who they say has a fine voice. Even to my ears, I sound drunk and if I sound this way, I may as well act it. So, I weave, alarming people in their solitude by pumping their hands or slapping their backs and singing louder. What happens is not what I expect—that the guards will forget Gregori Sala and march over to silence me (I do not wish to imagine how) before I cause a riot. Instead, an elderly woman takes one hand and then someone else takes the other and soon we are all dancing like fools, singing as if we are not in purgatory but rather in other times when such spontaneity went unpunished. To sneak a glance at Ausra, I cock my head as I waltz, as if it is heavy from Vodka. She is in the firm grasp of an aging farmer who spins her across the debris littering the rail yard. He has made her laugh.
The Thaw of Torin Burns
Description & Excerpt
The Story
If he could remember his youth, Torin Burns might know why his children are troubled, his family disintegrating. An orphan rescued from a blizzard during the Great Depression, he exists in the ghost-ridden tension between an absent past and an uncertain future. Burns will remain a distant and self-absorbed father in the years in takes him to recognize his worth. The murder of his youngest son in a distant city and his older children’s callous response finally force him to act. Widowed, Torin will abandon the isolation of his Idaho farm, his longing stirred by the after scent of a mysterious woman, he believes loves him. Yet as danger mounts on the road, what keeps him from turning back, accepting the harsh judgments of his controlling eldest son, is the growing sense that he must locate his youngest daughter. Fallon, whom the siblings reject for following her dreams, has disappeared, searching for her brother’s grave. But by defying the gravitational pull of the farm, Burns unleashes a maelstrom he and his children may not survive. But the turbulence of long overdue course corrections may also lead Torin to the identity buried in a frozen past.
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Excerpt
The oppressive heat made the sudden image of Sean fishing in the cool foothills of the Tetons unbearable. In the months since learning of his son’s death, Torin looked for him in the eyes of young men at the hardware store and Pat’s diner, inflaming a pain his other children could not soothe.
Fathers with their sons provoked a complex mix of regret, sorrow, envy, resentment, and tenderness. Each emotion a parasite of the others, so the singular, bloated outcome of their fusion weighed on his heart like a tumor. An unsolvable chemical enigma that left him embarrassed at how Sean’s death had crippled him, wondering if others noticed when he could not look away from another man’s child. Did they feel his despair, his longing for what he had lost.
A Mexican farmworker buying a hammer and nails at the feed store caught him gazing at his son with moist eyes. He knew Torin liked him, but they never talked about family. He placed his purchases on the counter and paid. “I was sorry to hear about your son. It doesn’t matter how they die… the hurt is the same. When someone dear passes, we say estoy de luto. ‘I am grieving all that was and all that could be.’”
Torin nodded. He had no words in the face of kindness, accustomed to defending his emotions, or hiding what he felt-an animal disguising illness or injury, afraid of prey who might sense vulnerability.