United Nations Headquarters - 1st Avenue & East 44th Street

15 November 1981

Leo stood on 1st Avenue, outside the main gates of the United Nations Headquarters, at the spot where Jesse Austin had been shot sixteen years ago. Having researched the photographs and newspaper articles, spending many hours in the New York Public Library with access to evidence he’d coveted after Raisa’s death, Leo had ascertained the exact location where the crate had been set up, carried by Austin all the way from Harlem – the stage for his assassination. There was no plaque to mark the place, no sign and no statue. It was an unremarkable sidewalk, giving pedestrians no reason to reflect upon what happened here, the lives lost that night.

Leo came here often, standing with his hands behind his back, as if there were a tombstone before him instead of a kerb. He would ponder the many aspects of the case that he still failed to comprehend. Fundamentally he could not grasp why Austin had been killed, no could he understand why it appeared that the Soviet and American governments had collaborated in covering up the murder. Why had the perpetrators planted the gun on his daughter, slipping it into her jacket pocket only to frame Raisa for the murder? The discrepancy suggested a change of plan and subsequent improvisation. Above all, one question remained unanswered:

Who murdered my wife?

The answers in the history books were lies, undetectable to a casual reader caught up in a narrative of adultery and illicit passion, a fanciful story masquerading as a series of bullet-point facts.

When Leo closed his eyes he was transported back to that night, feeling the heat of the crowd and the humid summer air. He could kneel beside Austin’s body on the street and stare down at the white shirt turning red with blood. He could see the expression on Anna Austin’s face: her mouth open, crying out. He could hear the desperation in her voice, a prescient fear that no help would come. He could picture the crowd panicking, knocking down the barricades – the metal clang ringing out. Leo could see his wife and he’d move closer to her, so close he could hear her heartbeat as she cradled Elena, so close he could hear his daughter’s shallow, rapid breathing as her dreams of a better world smashed around her feet.