Black Sun

I

The train jerked to a halt, jolting Alexander Vasin out of his crumpled doze. In the opposite corner of the compartment, the dough-faced Party man who had traveled with him from Moscow without a word snored softly on, arms folded across his chest.

Outside, the autumn night was still and moonless. The train had stopped in a no-man’s-land enclosed by two long walls of barbed wire, illuminated by rows of electric lights. A strip of freshly raked sand stretched into the darkness. Somewhere up ahead Vasin could hear the barking of guard dogs.

He breathed in the fragrant silence. This train was like no other he had ever traveled on. The compartment was brand-new soft-class rolling stock. It was redolent of the future: leatherette and Formica and rubber sealant. An automatic ventilator blew warm air gently onto his ankles. Vasin stepped gingerly over the apparatchik’s outstretched legs and pulled open the sliding door.

The trains of his childhood had been like mobile villages, full of chatter, crying, arguments. Lurching theaters of humanity, cluttered with suitcases and leaking bedrolls. But this one was silent, smooth-running, and as hermetic as a spaceship. Only at the vestibule at the end of the carriage did the chilly night air reach in, bringing the familiar train smell of coal smoke and damp grass. Vasin shivered and buttoned his prickly new uniform tunic, retrieving a packet of Orbita cigarettes from the pocket. Orbita: fashionable, hard to find, strong. An apparatchik’s cigarette. Better than he’d been used to.

Vasin straightened his uniform in the glass of the door. He had his father’s high forehead, dark blond hair just starting to recede. He tucked his new spectacles into his top pocket and squinted again, smoothing his hair and flexing his shoulders to fill out the tunic. Bars of rank on his collar, a sword-and-shield emblem on his right breast. Major Vasin, KGB.

From the corridor came a low murmur of voices in another compartment. A muffled dance tune began, midsong, from a radio in the conductress’s cubbyhole. There was a shush of escaping steam and the screech of spinning wheels as the train resumed its motion. It trundled through a floodlit checkpoint into a long barbed-wire cage supported by a timber frame. A pair of barking Alsatians choked on their leads as they stood on their back legs, almost pulling their handlers off their feet.

In the distance the lights of a city appeared, the hard urban crenellations of tower blocks. A single-platform station slid into view.

Vasin hurried back to the compartment, disturbing his companion in the middle of a mighty yawn. He waited in the doorway for the older man to pull on a thick mackintosh and slip a plastic suitcase from the shelf. He gave a curt parting nod as the train slowed to a halt.

Up and down the carriage, compartment doors were sliding open. Vasin wrestled down his large prewar Bakelite case, a prized family possession. He waited for his fellow passengers to pass before he hauled it onto the platform. The young conductress stood by the door smiling, pert and pretty in her uniform coat, her fore-and-aft cap perched on a pile of peroxided hair.

At the stationmaster’s whistle the locomotive reversed away from the platform, the red star emblazoned on the front of its boiler disappearing into the night. The new arrivals were momentarily blanketed in a cloud of hot, oil-scented steam.

The guards saluted every passenger and requested papers, corralling them to a pair of clerks, who sat checking and stamping in a bright pool of lamplight. To Vasin’s surprise they made no attempt to search any luggage.

In the empty waiting room a stocky, bearded man sat hunched on a bench, holding a book close to his face. He wore a creased trilby hat, and his winter boots were half-laced and unpolished. Vasin stood before him in slightly bemused silence.

“Ah! Comrade Major Vasin?” The man stood quickly, snapping the book shut and scooping it into his coat pocket. “Greetings. Vadim Kuznetsov. Major. Arzamas State Security.”

He was a head shorter than Vasin, but nonetheless contrived to look down his long nose at him, squinting through black-rimmed glasses. His shirt was buttoned tightly round a thick neck, and his pointed beard jutted forward.

“Welcome to Arzamas-16. The city that does not exist.”

Outside the station, the last of Vasin’s fellow passengers were boarding a small bus. The only other vehicle standing on the forecourt was a UAZ military jeep.

“This is us.”

Kuznetsov jerked down the stiff door handle and tossed Vasin’s suitcase unceremoniously onto the backseat.

“Jump in.”

“You don’t lock the car?”

“Ha! No thieves in Arzamas! This is the most honest city in the Soviet Union.”

Kuznetsov bounced into the driver’s seat, pumped the accelerator, and held up a finger, demanding reverential silence. The engine shuddered into life.

“Miracles!”

He ground the jeep into first gear.

“She’s not broken in yet. You know, new cars.”

Vasin glanced sharply at his companion for any sign of mockery. But Kuznetsov was oblivious, wrestling the UAZ’s gear stick. His was evidently a world where new cars were an everyday annoyance. They accelerated alarmingly along a broad, freshly tarmaced boulevard.

“Our beautiful town.” Kuznetsov waved a hand airily as he zoomed through a crossroads without slowing down or looking for crossing traffic. “We’ll have the scenic tour tomorrow.”

They saw no other people or cars as the city thinned from stucco pre-Revolutionary facades around the station into uniform rows of the modern five-story concrete blocks known as Khrushchevki.

“Here we are. You’ll be staying with me for your visit.”

The engine shuddered to a halt. The night was still except for the croaking of frogs. A row of young apple trees gave off a strong odor of rotting fruit.

Kuznetsov’s apartment was large and empty. A broad corridor ended in a deep bookshelf, on which a few books were haphazardly stacked. On the right were two spacious rooms; on the left was a sitting room and, beyond it, a kitchen and bathroom.

“I’m in here. You’re next door.”

Kuznetsov gestured casually into the first of the bedrooms, where a mulch of shirts and coat hangers covered the bed and spilled onto the floor and a small desk stood covered in notes and printed papers.

In the sitting room, polished glass-fronted cupboards entirely filled one wall. It looked like the House of the Future exhibition Vasin had visited with his son, Nikita, at the start of the summer holiday: boxy armchairs and a square sofa, upholstered in bright-striped fabric. Not a sofa bed, but a compact two-person sofa which could not be used for sleeping on. Vasin had never seen such a thing. Before his marriage, he and his mother had lived in two adjacent rooms in a rambling, high-ceilinged communal apartment off Metrostroyevskaya Street in Moscow. They shared the kitchen and bathroom with two other families, seven people in all. With his transfer to the KGB, Vasin had moved with Vera and their son into a two-room apartment of their own near Gorky Park, a sign of giddying privilege. Yet here he stood in a room in which no one lived at all. A room just for sitting in. In the corner stood a large radio and record player, the latest model from Rigonda, in an oak case. And on the shelf a meter-long row of records.

“From Czechoslovakia,” Kuznetsov called from the kitchen. “The furniture, I mean. They brought a trainload of it last year. Nice, no?”

Vasin’s agreement was drowned out by a clatter of pans.

“Got some food from the canteen. Borscht. Meatballs. Mashed potatoes.”

In the kitchen a new refrigerator, not a rumbling monster from the Stalin Factory, purred in the corner. Kuznetsov tossed Army-style aluminum mess tins onto the Formica kitchen table.

“We’ll have everything, I guess? I’m hungry too.”

Kuznetsov set enameled pots onto the electric cooker with a clatter and unscrewed the mess tin lids.

“Go wash if you like. I’m an excellent cook. Look!”

He took a mess tin in each hand and splashed their contents into the pots.

By the time Vasin returned from his shower Kuznetsov was hunched over the table, slurping soup. A portion for Vasin steamed in a large Uzbek bowl.

“So. Has someone briefed you on what happened?” Kuznetsov pointed his beard quizzically at his new roommate.

“The case summary says that Fyodor Petrov was poisoned. Accidentally.”

“Right. Bright young physicist. Sad business.”

“It says a lot about what happened. Nothing about why.”

Kuznetsov pushed away his empty bowl, stood to open the window a crack, and lit a cigarette.

“Why, indeed. That is the question, Comrade Vasin.” He spun a steel ashtray onto the table. “We are not very used to outsiders here in Arzamas. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

Vasin slowly dipped his spoon in the soup, tasting it in silence. Then: “Good soup.”

“Wouldn’t want you to starve, Comrade.”

Vasin ate on in silence.

“Is there a reason I shouldn’t have come, Comrade Kuznetsov?”

“Forgive me. Personnel tells us that you have recently joined State Security—”

“From the Moscow Police Criminal Investigation Department. Homicide Department. That is correct.”

“Homicide?”

“Does that bother you, Comrade?”

“Well. You know about Arzamas. Something about the word ‘homicide’ makes us nervous. And the Lubyanka usually lets us take care of our own business.”

“Actually, I don’t know about Arzamas.”

“They didn’t tell you anything in Moscow?”

“Let’s say they didn’t.”

Kuznetsov exhaled smoke.

“Consider Arzamas a separate planet. Some of the greatest minds of the Soviet Union are here, doing vital work for the defense of the Motherland. Social deviants to a man, in the opinion of some of our colleagues.” Kuznetsov leaned forward, his breath strong on Vasin’s face. “But here’s the thing — no one cares about what they do. What they think. What they read. Who they sleep with. Nothing matters, as long as they do the job they’re here to do. So take all the rules you know, and add a new rule at the top: Nothing interferes with the project.”

“What project?”

Kuznetsov snorted and loudly clattered his bowl into the sink.

“Kuznetsov.” Vasin softened his tone. “Really. What project?”

“Nothing interferes with RDS-220.”

Vasin digested this for a moment.

“Which is a kind of bomb?”

Kuznetsov flinched at the word.

“It is a device. A new device.”

“Isn’t that what they do here? Why this is a secret city? Make new devices?”

“Not like this one. It is bigger. Much bigger. And urgent. Top-level Politburo order.”

“Our Soviet way. Always the biggest. Always the best.”

Kuznetsov’s mouth contracted into a thin line. His nostrils flared as though sniffing for a hint of mockery. Vasin sensed that he had bumped into a hard edge in his hitherto amiable companion. Kuznetsov waited a long moment before replying, his eyes traveling over Vasin’s face.

“We’ll find out soon enough.”

“Find out, how?”

“They’re going to test it. And before you ask, by test I mean detonate the thing.”

“Here?”

“Not here, numbnuts.” The tension in Kuznetsov’s mouth eased at the obtuseness of Vasin’s question. “They test the devices up in the Arctic. Don’t they tell you anything in Moscow?”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“For some.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning — let’s hope so. The farther away that thing is from me, the better.”

Kuznetsov fumbled another cigarette into his mouth and testily struck a match.

“And the deceased…?”

“Fyodor Petrov was a key member of the RDS-220 team.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. Ah. An assistant to Professor Adamov, no less.”

“The Director?”

“The Director. The Tsar and God of Arzamas. Father of RDS-220.”

“So what do you think happened to Petrov, exactly?”

“You read the file.”

“I want to hear your version.”

Kuznetsov exhaled smoke through his nostrils like a cartoon demon.

“I don’t have a version, Vasin. The boss, Major General Zaitsev, is going to lay it out for you chapter and verse. A words-of-one-syllable man, our Zaitsev. Tomorrow, 0900 at the kontora.”

Kontora. Literally, the office, and one of the more respectful slang words for the KGB. Vasin had heard plenty of others.

“Very good. And what have you been asked to lay out for me, Kuznetsov?”

“Oh, you know. Bed linen. Towels.”

Kuznetsov cracked a smile, holding Vasin’s eye.

“You’re funny.”

“So they keep telling me.”

“Seriously, though.”

“Seriously? That’s a good word. Shit here is serious, Vasin. Which is why I find myself thinking that it may not be my most natural habitat. What I need to lay out for you is this: We do not wish to see Fyodor Petrov’s colleagues unduly distracted.”

“Because nothing interferes with the project. I understand. Thanks for filling me in.”

“Pleasure. That’s what I’m for. To fill you in.”

“And Petrov’s body?”

“Spot the ex-detective. Central Clinical Hospital, I assume. Ask the General tomorrow.”

“Address of the deceased’s apartment?”

“No idea. Zaitsev’s in charge.”

Probably a lie. But Vasin smiled nonetheless. The address was somewhere in the summary report he had brought from Moscow.

“I’m keeping you up, Kuznetsov. It must be getting late.”

“For Moscow, maybe. Not for the busy bees of Arzamas. We’re going out.”

“Out?”

“To a lecture at the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics. Also known as the Citadel.”

Vasin glanced at his watch.

“A lecture? At eleven at night?”

“Science never sleeps, Comrade. Professor Adamov has something to tell the assembled brains of Arzamas. Which probably does not include us. Sorry. I mean me, at least. But we’re going anyway. Come, or we’ll be late.”

II

It took them less than five minutes to drive through the empty streets of Arzamas and swing into the broad expanse of Kurchatov Square. A freezing mist was rising. The main building of the Citadel loomed like an ocean liner in the thickening fog, its illuminated windows piercing the night. A colonnade of bare concrete pillars supported a jutting roof. It reminded Vasin of a mainline railway terminus.

A row of turnstiles divided the high-ceilinged lobby in half, a more solid version of the entrance of a Moscow metro station. Kuznetsov flashed his red KGB identity card to the sergeant on duty, and Vasin followed suit.

The lecture theater was crowded to overflowing. Whispering apologies, Kuznetsov pushed his way into the darkness. A couple of young uniformed men shifted up to allow him and Vasin to sit on the carpeted stair. A single table lamp on the raised stage provided the only light, illuminating a lectern. Professor Adamov’s gaunt face, lit from below, looked to Vasin like a speaking skull. He wore an old-fashioned black Party member’s tunic, buttoned to the collar, with three Hero of the Soviet Union stars pinned over his heart.

“…First and foremost, of course, we must be careful. I promised the General Secretary that we would not…” Adamov paused, wheezing a little, as he worked up to the punch line. “That we would not crack the earth like an egg!”

The Professor looked up from his notes and squinted through small glasses at the attentive young faces arranged around him like disciples. He stretched his thin mouth into something like a smile, authorizing a ripple of awkward laughter to spread around the hundred men in the overheated hall.

The Professor’s smile widened, even as his mind seemed to turn inward. Silence deepened. It seemed to Vasin as though Adamov was suddenly too busy thinking to acknowledge the outside world. Every other function of his body except breathing appeared suspended while the brain raced at full speed. Vasin glanced left and right, but Adamov’s pause seemed to excite no surprise in his audience. Was the quiet filled with racing calculations? Or was Adamov’s silence within himself — just silence?

And then, just as abruptly as it had left, animation returned to Adamov’s eyes. He peered into the hall at his students and colleagues and examined them, one by one. The faces were eager, open, the eyes shining with intelligence. A few tried to hold his stare, at least for a moment. Some looked brave, some hopeful, most fearful. And then they looked down.

“Every one of you has been chosen.” Adamov’s voice was so quiet as to be almost inaudible, as though he were speaking half to himself. “Chosen for some aspect of your minds that the Motherland has found useful. Or interesting. Or just uselessly unusual. In physics one always has to keep the useless results in mind.”

Another dry joke? If so, this time nobody laughed. Adamov stepped toward a large box that stood at the front of the stage and flicked a switch, illuminating a white square of light on a large screen. An overhead projector, the first Vasin had ever seen.

“Every day newcomers arrive to assist in the final assembly of RDS-220. To them, welcome. And I have an announcement to make to all of you. After receiving the reports of all the laboratory heads, I have concluded that all is in place to finally set a date for the test that we have all been anticipating so eagerly. The date is October thirtieth. We have reached the final stage of preparation. Nine days from now, the world will see the might, the glory, and the genius of peace-loving Soviet science.”

A low murmur ran through the hall. Adamov stabbed the whispering down with an icy glance.

“As I was saying. For the newcomers, and for all of us, a reminder of our fundamental questions. This device has some…new features. The consequences of this test will be hard to predict.”

He began writing formulas with a scarlet marker on a transparent sheet on the projector’s screen, tapping the point on the glass for emphasis. “It. Is. Our. Patriotic. Task. To. Calculate. Them…There are great unknowns we have yet to grasp. Consider the work of Dr. Smirnov on fusing hydrogen nuclei with their heavy brothers tritium and deuterium. The behavior of superheated plasma, gases hotter than the heart of the sun, during the milliseconds after core detonation. The consequences of scaling up the tried-and-tested thermonuclear reactions to a hitherto unknown scale. What happens when we double it? Multiply it by ten? A thousand? At this kind of scale, gentlemen, we encounter new parameters: the solidity of the earth’s crust. The behavior of the atmosphere in different thermoclines. The point at which we may ignite a chain reaction in atmospheric water. And this is the point that we address today. But first, for the benefit of the newcomers, we remind ourselves of some ancient history. Our old friend RDS-100. Back in 1951.”

There was a squeak as the lectern light was dimmed. A film projector clattered into action. A bright white rectangle flung a series of numbers onto the screen, counting down.

“So, colleagues.” When Adamov spoke loudly the pitch of his voice also rose. “We will remind ourselves of the terrible forces that we believe are under our command. We watch. And we are humbled. You will see the film at one-twenty-fourth speed, frame by frame, so that we can visually establish the detonation stages of this device from ten years ago.”

A rumble began in Adamov’s chest that sounded like the start of a phlegmy smoker’s cough. The Professor rooted in the pockets of his tunic, drew out a crumpled packet of cigarettes, and struck a match.

The view from the hatch of an aircraft flickered onto the screen. In one corner, a tail fin intruded on the shot. Below, a landscape of whiteness. Sea ice, the outline of a sweeping bay with indistinct shapes on the horizon. An ungainly black shape tumbled earthward, neatly deploying a parachute a couple of seconds into its descent, then gaining stability as it drifted gently down. For nearly a minute, there was nothing but the projector’s whir. Then, a sudden flash, making the screen an almost perfect blank for several seconds.

“Now. Slow, please.”

On the screen, as the flash died, smoke rippled centrifugally. A small vertical blast of debris, as from a conventional shell, burst upward. Then a second horizontal ripple, and a third, each raising a ridge of earth and snow as it hurtled out across the landscape. A column of smoke rose and thickened, obscuring the detonation point. Light flashed inside the column as it rose. Then came another detonation, inside the cloud this time and far above ground zero, making the rising smoke suddenly bulge. The frames clicked by. The blast wave reached the aircraft and caused it to lurch crazily for several seconds before recovering. The cloud was level with the aircraft now, and climbing, and spreading. The cameraman pulled the focus back to encompass a vast mushroom of debris spread across the sky.

Vasin found no words for what he was watching. He turned to Kuznetsov, but his companion’s attention was still rooted to the now-static final image on the screen, transfixed as a child’s at a scary movie.

The lights in the hall at the lecture’s conclusion robbed Vasin of the anonymity of darkness. Plenty of the men were in uniform, mostly with the crossed-hammers insignia of military engineers. But Vasin’s KGB sword-and-shield badges immediately marked him out as an intruder.

The crowd on the stairs shuffled aside to allow Adamov to pass. Vasin felt the Professor’s eye catch on the telltale uniform, the officer’s bars on his collar, his face. The old man’s pale face momentarily creased with distaste.

The Professor moved on up the stairs. Vasin slipped into his wake. He heard Kuznetsov call something after him, and ignored it. Pushing forward among the bodies crushing through the doors with a skill learned on the Moscow metro, Vasin squeezed into the corridor and raced after the retreating figure of the Professor and his entourage of assistants.

“Professor Adamov? A moment, please.”

Vasin’s raised voice was enough to stop Adamov in his tracks, if only because it was clearly unheard of for anybody to shout the Professor’s name in the halls of the Institute. Catching up with Adamov, he felt the full weight of the Professor’s outraged glare.

“Major Alexander Vasin. State Security.”

Adamov did not speak, but stood motionless, waiting for one of his acolytes to interpret his silence. A white-coated youngster consulted a clipboard.

“Professor, there was a letter from the Kommandatura this morning. Major Vasin is here to investigate Dr. Petrov’s accident.”

Vasin saluted.

“My apologies for the disturbance, Professor. But I hope you understand….”

Adamov raised a long-fingered hand in front of Vasin’s face, as though stopping traffic. The gesture was imperious.

“A terrible tragedy. But I have spoken to one of you already. Major…Efremov? There we are. Thank you. Goodbye.”

Adamov turned to go, his palm still raised rudely in Vasin’s face.

“Sir?” Vasin flung the word hard enough to stop Adamov in his tracks once more. “I am afraid that there will have to be more questions. I have been sent from Moscow on the personal orders of General Orlov to conduct an independent assessment of the case.”

Slowly, Adamov turned back.

“General Orlov.” Close up, Adamov’s face was gaunt as a corpse’s. He spoke slowly, and there was menace in his voice. “Now if only we had as many hours as we have generals. And what is it that your general needs from me?”

“Thank you, Professor. May I have the honor of speaking to you in private?”

An indecent hiss escaped the Professor’s dry lips.

“What will cost me less? Arguing with your generals, or making time to talk to you?”

“Professor, you answer your own questions so succinctly. Talking to me should take no time at all.”

The Professor’s mouth clamped tight as a trap. His pale blue eyes filled with fury.

My God, thought Vasin, his eyes connecting for a long moment with Adamov’s wrathful stare. This is a man who can hate.

“Perhaps. After the test.”

Adamov turned his back on Vasin and strode onward.

Vasin felt a strong hand gripping his upper arm. Kuznetsov pulled him to the side of the corridor with enough force to make a point. Young scientists and engineers streamed past them, chatting animatedly. Kuznetsov’s voice hissed into his ear.

“What the fuck was that?”

Vasin pulled his arm free and turned to his host. His handler.

“I wanted to make an appointment. Is there a problem?”

“A fucking appointment with Professor Academician Yury Adamov? Yes, there is a problem.”

“Is he not a witness in the Petrov case?”

“Vasin. So you’re a big shot from some top-secret cubbyhole of the kontora’s top floor. Orders from above. I see. But Adamov…”

The crowd spilling out of the lecture theater pushed them apart for a moment before Kuznetsov could continue.

“…Adamov is Arzamas. The program is his. He is…”

“Above the law?”

“He’s off-limits to you. To everyone.”

“To you, Kuznetsov. Maybe he’s off-limits to you.”

Vasin saw a red flush of anger boiling up from Kuznetsov’s tight collar like a rising storm. But the man forced it down, like a child fighting to control a tantrum. Kuznetsov exhaled deeply, twice, and when he spoke again his voice was impressively calm.

“Vasin. Alexander. Or may I — Sasha? Sasha, listen to me. This place is not like other places. It’s not like anyplace you’ve ever been.”

“You don’t know the places I’ve been.”

“Nowhere in our broad, glorious Union is like Arzamas. Different rules.”

“I believe you. But would you be surprised to know I’ve heard that before?”

Kuznetsov raised his eyes to the heavens in a pantomime of exasperation.

“I give up. You really need to speak to Zaitsev.”

“I didn’t think I had a choice in the matter.”

The two men stared at each other. The corridor had finally emptied. The only sound was the distant clatter of a Teletype machine and the fading chatter of the departing crowd.

Vasin broke the tension first.

“That film was…”

Kuznetsov threw him a low glance.

“Terrifying? Yes.”

“You’ve seen it before?”

“It’s Professor Adamov’s favorite. It is why I brought you along.”

“And the bomb he’s building now. It’s…”

“Bigger than that. Hundreds of times bigger. See, I wanted to fill you in on what they do here. They make machines to kill the planet.”

I

Early the next morning Vasin turned up his mackintosh collar against the rain and mist that drifted down the broad boulevard outside Kuznetsov’s apartment building. The sky was heavy with low, dawdling clouds. The slow weather of deep Russia, where seasons follow each other like a procession of steamrollers, trundling and relentless. Autumn was a dripping season of sweet rot and the sound of running water in hidden places.

Kuznetsov’s jeep shuddered reluctantly into life. He gunned the engine to attract Vasin’s attention.

“Come on, old man. Big shots are waiting for you.”

Kuznetsov dropped him off in front of Arzamas’s KGB headquarters, a stubby modern block screened from the street by a row of fir trees. In the forecourt stood a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, his bronze face glistening in the rain.

In the lobby secretaries carrying files clicked on high heels across the marble floor. Even on Sundays and holidays, night and day, the kontora worked on. A boy-sentry entered Vasin’s name in a ledger with painstaking formality. The place had the same thick smell of floor polish and wet overcoats as his office in Moscow. Somewhere two typewriters clicked in busy disunison. A telephone rang, unanswered.

General Zaitsev’s secretary had buttery blond dyed hair and a face that seemed to have been disfigured permanently by constant lying.

“The General has been delayed,” she told him archly. “Wait.”

“Very good. Please tell the Comrade General that I shall take the opportunity to visit the canteen. Downstairs, I imagine?”

A crack of disapproval creased the secretary’s makeup.

“Ah! And the latest issue of Krokodil! May I?”

Without waiting for an answer Vasin picked up the Soviet Union’s best-loved satirical magazine from a low table. He shrugged off his wet mackintosh and hung it, dripping, on the General’s coat stand. Then he went in search of coffee.

The basement cafeteria at the tail end of breakfast was almost deserted. Vasin bought himself a sweet roll and a cup of excellent coffee, Cuban, fresh-ground. He settled at a table and began to leaf through the magazine. The usual nonsense: caricatures of drunken workers, comic poems about nagging mothers-in-law, prose sketches of the charms and absurdities of rural life. From the corner of his eye he saw a tall officer in an immaculately pressed uniform with adjutant’s braids enter the dining room. The man peered about, spotted him, then strutted across the room like a clockwork toy.

“Comrade Major Vasin.”

It was not a question. The officer sat down heavily opposite him.

“I am Major Oleg Efremov, General Zaitsev’s adjutant.”

The officer’s pointed gaze made a slow tour of Vasin’s face. He took in the glasses, the soft hands, and Vasin’s eyes, steady and insolent as they met his.

“The General is waiting for you. If you please.”

In his tight-fitting tunic General Zaitsev looked like a pre-Revolutionary farmhand buttoned uncomfortably into his Sunday outfit. His neck was wider than his face, and he sat with huge, scarred fists clenched on the table like an ogre ready to eat an intruder who has strayed into his kingdom. One of the university-trained milksops who’d come into the service since Stalin died, for instance. Vasin recognized Zaitsev’s type. A State Security officer of the old school, who had earned his stars in blood-spattered execution cellars. A man who’d breathed the smell of fresh death.

“The government inspector has come to check on us.”

Zaitsev spoke with a thick country accent and addressed Vasin in the familiar form, like a wayward child.

“No, sir. I have no reason to believe that your work is anything but of the highest quality.”

“I am told you personally approached Professor Adamov last night. But you had not presented your credentials to the local authorities. To me.”

Vasin nodded slowly. Zaitsev’s butcher’s face. Those joint-popping hands.

“My apologies, General. My credentials are all here.”

Vasin pulled a sheaf of letters from his tunic pocket and held them out. Zaitsev did not take them.

“Listen to me now. This city is governed by a special regime. There are procedures—”

“General,” Vasin interrupted. “With all respect, my orders are very clear.”

Zaitsev’s face flushed a deeper shade of red.

“My investigators have already reached a conclusion.” The General’s voice was emphatic as a blow from a billy club. “The evidence clearly shows that Fyodor Petrov killed himself. The investigation is over. We are filing the report. You are too late.”

Vasin composed his face into a mask of humility.

“Yes, Comrade General.” Vasin had been through this before. By rank, he was a subordinate. But by the authority he represented he was…something else. Something that must be hinted at delicately. At first. “But I have been ordered by the competent authorities to conduct an independent review of the evidence. And you of course would not wish me to disobey my orders. As you are aware, the deceased’s father is personally close to many members of the Politburo.”

Zaitsev gave a porcine grunt.

“Review if you have to. We have assembled definitive evidence. But you are not to approach or harass the principal witnesses. They have already been interviewed to my satisfaction. Is that clear?”

“Definitive evidence, sir?”

“Definitive. Petrov died of thallium poisoning. A radioactive heavy metal. He used thallium in his laboratory. Signed for every milligram taken. But he did not use every milligram. The records prove it. A substantial quantity of the thallium is missing. Some two thousand milligrams unaccounted for. Is that definitive enough for you, Major?”

“May I be allowed to see the records, General?”

Zaitsev’s scowl turned even more venomous. He turned to his adjutant.

“Efremov? The man from Moscow does not believe me. Bring our transcript of the laboratory files.”

Efremov curled his nose as though at a bad smell and obeyed. While he busied himself opening a large steel safe at the back of Zaitsev’s office, the General plucked a sheaf of papers from his in-tray and began to read them, demonstratively ignoring Vasin.

“Comrade General? The report you asked for.”

Zaitsev plucked the gray file from his assistant’s delicate hand. The cardboard cover creased in the grip of the General’s thick fingers.

“Right. Vasin. Here. Look at it. Every sample of thallium Petrov signed out for the last month. There, on the left, every gram he used in his tests. There, in red, the amount unaccounted for. Took a team of five men three days to comb through all the files to get the information. Began immediately after the postmortem report, finished last night.”

Vasin flicked through the columns of numbers, dates, amounts. They meant nothing to him. As Zaitsev knew.

“May I keep this?”

“You may not. As you see, it is marked ‘Top Secret.’ ”

“And the transcripts of the witness interviews?”

“They will be filed in the registry, in due course. The case file is being collated now. As per our procedures. When it’s finished, you will read it. And agree with it.”

“And the body?”

Zaitsev snorted.

“In a secure morgue.”

“When may I be allowed to see it?”

“Never. Too radioactive. The radiation dissolves tissue like a sugar cube in tea. Or so I’m told.”

“And Petrov’s apartment?”

“Same story. Sealed.”

Vasin frowned and looked at the floor.

“So, General, if I have understood correctly, I may not in fact do anything? Except compose a telegram to Moscow informing them that I have been prevented from carrying out the Politburo’s orders. Good day, Comrades. I imagine Moscow will be in touch.”

Vasin placed his sheaf of credentials on Zaitsev’s desk, saluted smartly, and turned on his heel without waiting to be dismissed.

“Wait!”

The boss’s voice had sunk to a low growl.

“Major. Just do your job and get out of here. Efremov, you can take our guest to the morgue. He wants a sniff of our Arzamas radiation. Take him now.”

Efremov saluted in turn and stalked out of the room, throwing a glance of contempt at Vasin as he passed. Vasin and Zaitsev remained alone.

“My thanks, Comrade General. I will do my job.”

“You have two days, Vasin. Two.”

Or what?

Vasin knew better than to ask.

II

Vasin and Efremov walked down Engels Boulevard without speaking. A fine drizzle shrouded the town in a pall of drifting gray. They emerged into the main square, named for Lenin. One side of the square opened onto a high riverbank. Beyond stood a wooded island topped by the tall belfry and onion domes of a former monastery that no one had got round to demolishing. To their left rose the arrogant modern bulk of the Kino-Teatr Moskva, the facade a sloping expanse of plate glass. Inside the cinema’s atrium the chandeliers glowed with dingy light against the morning gloom. The only color in the square came from the windows of the Univermag department store. As they passed Vasin dawdled to examine the goods on display. Czech shoes and German overcoats. A large stack of canned Kamchatka crab. In Moscow, such a cornucopia would draw a crowd. But here, citizens were apparently indifferent to the fantastic luxuries piled high in the shopwindow.

And the people. The way they moved was disconcerting. On this singular planet there were no scrums of grunting housewives, shoving forward toward their objects of desire, a departing tram, a fresh chicken. The people of Arzamas strolled about like extras in a film. They were as well dressed as actors, too, even the manual workers in their striped sailors’ undershirts and boiler suits. A model town, full of model citizens.

On a street corner a traffic policeman stood hopefully, waiting for some traffic to direct. None came. Efremov turned in to Kurchatov Street. They passed a restaurant with red velour curtains, a hairdresser’s shop with its miasma of violet-scented hair spray, food shops with their standard-issue Soviet signs: MEAT. FISH. An electric tram, the new Polish kind that had only just arrived in Moscow, rumbled past on fresh-laid rails. Arzamas’s Central Clinical Hospital stood back from the road, a long gray cube.

At the entrance to the hospital Vasin paused to light an Orbita. Efremov waited, but did not light one of his own. Vasin knew the wisdom of numbing the nostrils, recalling the foul mortuaries that marked the beginnings of most of his cases. A stinking cellar in Tashkent from which some Party bigwig had commandeered the refrigeration unit for his dacha. A charnel house in Rostov on Don where bodies were stacked in promiscuous piles in a grotesque parody of an orgy. But as he and Efremov strode down the stairs to the hospital’s basement, Vasin’s nostrils were filled only with the clean sting of formaldehyde and disinfectant. A doctor in a crisp laboratory coat stepped backward into the corridor. Catching sight of the two officers, he stopped short.

“Good morning…Comrades.”

Their uniforms. Black officer’s boots, blue breeches, belt and shoulder straps, the telltale KGB green piping on their caps and epaulets. Back in the days when Vasin used to work in his old dark blue police uniform, crumpled and scruffy, people would roll their eyes. Most Soviet citizens viewed ordinary cops as bunglers, sacks of shit tied with belts. The most common nickname for the police was musor, “garbage.” Ever since his move to the KGB, people shrank at the sight of him. Did he enjoy it? Vasin looked the doctor up and down. A part of him did. The world bends around an officer of State Security. It was like a law of physics, radio waves curving in a magnetic field. It bends — though not usually in the direction of truth.

“Comrade Doctor Andreyev.”

“Major…?”

“Efremov. I have brought one Major Vasin of State Security, from Special Cases in Moscow. He has come to discuss the tragic accident of Fyodor Petrov.”

“Ah.” Dr. Andreyev’s face eased a little. “Of course.”

Men still feared the uniform. Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime, old KGB bruisers of the Stalin generation used to say. Sure, the country had a different leader now and was heading into a different future. Officially the old days of State terror, of indiscriminate arrest lists and regional quotas for executions, had been jettisoned. Or so Vasin chose to believe. Nonetheless the reflex of fear lingered like the ache of an old scar.

“Would you like your visitor to see the pathology report, Major?”

Vasin spoke up.

“And the body.”

Andreyev hesitated.

“Are you aware of the necessary precautions…and the risk?”

Vasin nodded grimly. Never admit to ignorance. Andreyev glanced nervously at Efremov, who grimaced his assent.

“Please, go ahead. Our Moscow visitor seems very eager. But if you don’t mind I will wait outside.”

“Very well. I will summon my personnel.”

“Is the risk…unusually high?”

“Yes, Comrade Major. You will see it in the pathology report. Tests show that young Petrov has enough thallium inside him to poison a city.”

The rough cotton of the oversize overalls chafed Vasin’s crotch and made him walk bowlegged. The curved plastic of his face mask was misted with condensation. Andreyev, leading, walked stiffly into a room covered in shining white tiles and illuminated by a powerful surgical lamp. A pair of orderlies, also dressed as spacemen, rolled a dull metal coffin in on a gurney. They struggled to lift off the lid, which came off in weighty sections.

“Lead,” Andreyev called through the rubberized canvas of his mask. “Lead! Absorbs radiation.”

In the coffin lay a drowned man. Or at least that was Vasin’s first impression. The face was bloated, the skin pale and blotched, the eyes and mouth wide open. Petrov’s hair had fallen out in clumps and had continued to shed into his coffin. The young man’s teeth, too, were loose and covered in clotted blood. Around Petrov’s shoulders and chest were scratch marks, as though made by fingernails. Vasin gestured a question with a gloved hand. The doctor mimed tearing off his overalls.

“Self-inflicted. He shredded his clothes.”

The handsome young man in Petrov’s file photograph was unrecognizable. In death the victim looked…Vasin searched for the word to describe it. Exploded. Petrov’s body seemed to have burst like an overboiled sausage.

Unusually, the torso was untouched. Vasin mimed cutting up and sewing together above the stomach. Andreyev wagged a finger.

“No autopsy, Major. Too dangerous” came his muffled words.

The dead were often Vasin’s best informants. Most of his fellow detectives preferred living witnesses that they could browbeat and terrorize. But Vasin knew that dead men most certainly could tell tales. And unlike the living, they rarely lied. Petrov’s corpse, however, would keep its secrets locked inside.

“Close it.” Vasin flapped his hands. “Close it.”

The pathologist eased a black Bakelite device into the space beside the corpse’s head — evidently a Geiger counter for measuring radiation. The needles on the dials leapt to maximum and stayed there. Andreyev turned some buttons, coaxing the needles downward, and took a final reading. Orderlies reappeared, moving quickly, sealing off Petrov’s pale blue eyes from the light for the last time.

Vasin and Andreyev filed out through a door different from the one they had entered. Three moon-men awaited them, armed with powerful spray guns. They buffeted Andreyev and Vasin unceremoniously from every direction with hot water, two spraying and the other brushing vigorously with a long-handled broom. Then the white ghosts stripped off Vasin’s and Andreyev’s protective clothing and pointed them, dripping in their underwear, into a shower room. Even as steam rose around the two men’s bodies, Vasin found himself shivering.

“You find our procedures thorough, I hope?”

“I trust this was not only for my benefit, Doctor.”

“We take radiation very seriously at Arzamas.”

“There is no doubt about the cause of death?”

“None. The symptoms are very clear. Petrov ingested a highly radioactive substance sometime last Monday. A simple analysis of his vomit confirmed the presence of thallium. And tissue samples show that he consumed around two thousand milligrams. Two grams. A fatal dose is only around a quarter of one milligram. Therefore he ingested enough to kill eight thousand people. You see why we are reluctant to open him up.”

“And the source of the thallium? Who has access to it?”

Andreyev turned to the investigator.

“Hundreds of people. This whole city is built on radioactive materials. And their uses.”

The doctor tugged up his braces and slipped on his white lab coat.

“Petrov had access?”

“Of course. He worked in the Institute. But you’d have to ask his lab clerks for details. They keep a log, I imagine, in the laboratory.”

“And you, Doctor, what is your feeling about the cause of death?”

“I have no feelings, Comrade Major. Only observations. And my observation is that men who work with reagents such as thallium are professionals. They are well aware of the dangers.”

Vasin now regretted the uniform. Pathologists often had good hunches, usually shared like postcoital endearments over an after-autopsy cigarette. But here in the bright sterility of this hospital basement, there were no dark corners in which confidences could grow.

“Does it look like a suicide to you?”

Andreyev gave Vasin a long look.

“Comrade. The scientists here live in a cloud. But the cloud is small and very high up. And sometimes the cloud gets very crowded. People fall off.”

“Or jump off?”

“That, Comrade, if you will permit me to say, is your department.”

Andreyev shook Vasin’s hand and left him standing in the changing room. In a glass window in the laboratory door, Efremov’s face appeared, peering in impatiently to see what was keeping Vasin.

III

Outside the hospital Vasin sucked greedily on another cigarette.

“Why didn’t you view the body with us, Efremov? You don’t seem the squeamish type to me.”

The adjutant, his arms deep in the pockets of his raincoat, merely nodded.

“How long are you going to keep up this strong, silent act, Efremov?”

His companion smiled coldly.

“Are you bored already by Arzamas, Major? In need of conversation?”

“I need information.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, how did Petrov die?”

“It’s…”

“In the file. Of course. But my memory is terrible. Remind me.”

“Petrov was found dead in his apartment. Killed by thallium poisoning.”

“And what did he do in the last hours of his life?”

“Petrov was last seen alive at dinner with colleagues.”

“Which colleagues?”

“He dined with Professor Adamov and his wife at their home. They reported that Petrov seemed tired but otherwise normal.”

“Was anyone else at dinner?”

“An engineer colonel. Pavel Korin.”

“And how long did it take the thallium to kill Petrov? Any idea when he ingested it? Or how?”

“A matter of hours. He took it himself.”

“You suppose. Did anybody visit him at his apartment after dinner?”

“No.”

“Does his building have a concierge? A guard?”

“He was asleep. It’s in his witness statement.”

“So we have no way of knowing if anyone came or left during the night?”

Efremov sighed wearily.

“Petrov took his own life, Vasin. People usually do that alone.”

“Did he leave a note? Can we visit his apartment?”

“Your memory really is terrible, Major. General Zaitsev just told you that it was impossible. Too radioactive.”

“He said the same about seeing the body. Yet here we are.”

“You may look at the investigator’s photographs.”

“I will. But did you see the apartment yourself?”

Efremov’s icy face registered a twitch of emotion.

“I did, as it happens.”

“And what did you see?”

“Blood and radioactive…Efremov seemed to search for a more delicate word but decided against it. “Radioactive vomit. Everywhere.”

“And where was Petrov?”

Efremov struggled for a moment, torn between distrust and a desire to talk.

“Come on, old man. We’re on the same side.”

“Petrov was tangled in his sheets. He’d ripped them into shreds. And he’d torn the pillow apart with his teeth. There was even blood up the wall.”

“Sounds like a pretty horrible way to die.”

Efremov shuddered involuntarily but said nothing for a long moment.

“Maybe he deserved it.”

“Deserved it?”

Efremov summoned another glacial smile.

“Right. Enough chitchat.” The adjutant’s voice had become brisk and official. He tugged his tunic straight and looked at his watch. “Registry should be ready for you now. Let’s get you buried in that paperwork.”

“Before you bury me…”

Efremov’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“I need to send a telegram, internal and secure. To my boss.”

Secure naturally meaning — to be immediately shown to Zaitsev.

“Telegram?”

“It’s time to check in with Moscow. Procedure. My chief likes to keep his finger on the pulse. Unless you’d rather I didn’t, of course.”

“Of course.”

Vasin knew that just four words would probably do the trick. REQUEST IMMEDIATE INTERVIEW ADAMOV. If he had learned anything in his year at Special Cases, it was that General Orlov possessed an almost supernatural knack of making some of the most powerful men in the USSR jump to his will. General Zaitsev be damned. Within hours, Vasin guessed, some mighty voice of authority would be on the line instructing the Professor to make time. Now.

IV

Petrov’s file weighed heavily in Vasin’s lap. The dead scientist’s file picture was a professional studio portrait, the face cast in a dramatic half-shadow like that of a star from Mosfilm. Petrov wore his good looks lightly, a half smile on his lips. A face from a magazine: curly light hair, large blue eyes, a chiseled jawline. A face that nobody had smacked, certainly. The eyes ready to crinkle into an expression of earnest devotion. A lover’s face.

Zaitsev and his men had been thorough. The file contained Petrov’s complete personal records: forty pages of references and checks going back with clockwork regularity for each of the six years that he’d been in Arzamas. Party meetings attended and dues paid, formal reports from Party instructors. And before that his Young Communist League records and a pile of letters of recommendation from university supervisors. The letterheads bloomed with red stars and laurel wreaths.

Vasin’s practiced eye caught what wasn’t there. There were no denunciations from colleagues or snide notes from superiors in the file, no phone or mail intercepts. None of the usual fragments of office gossip or petty resentments that usually found their way into the kontora. The KGB, it seemed, had no eyes or ears inside the senior circles of the Citadel. As far as the kontora was concerned, the Institute was smoothly sealed behind a high, closed wall of silence.

It had been Major Efremov who had conducted most of the interviews with Petrov’s colleagues in the days after his death. The language of the transcripts was a familiar high officialese, for the most part a dense wad of meaninglessness. But one witness stood out: Dr. Vladimir Axelrod, Petrov’s laboratory colleague and, by his own admission, personal friend.

Vasin rubbed his eyes and swore quietly. The formality of such records had always infuriated him, squeezing out the words’ life and casting every subject into a predetermined role, the contrite criminal, the helpful citizen.

On the page, fiercely typed out in triplicate, the investigator and his subject spoke like amateur actors declaiming lines from some archaic play. And yet, of all Petrov’s colleagues, only Axelrod had been summoned for a second interrogation, this time with General Zaitsev personally. The tone of the next interview was more brutal. Zaitsev knew precisely what he needed from his subject.

A mistake on Axelrod’s part, Vasin saw immediately, to try to crack a joke with a man like Zaitsev. He could imagine the General’s meaty face flushing at the young man’s insolence.

A spirited riposte. But between the lines Vasin’s interrogator’s eye could read, long before Axelrod saw it, the goal toward which Zaitsev’s questioning was leading, steady as a tractor plowing a furrow.

Vasin turned the page. Zaitsev had set up every part of his theory as carefully as a billiard trickster positioning his balls. Now he sank them, one by one.

Vasin knew he wouldn’t have to read Zaitsev’s final report. The General’s theory had been neatly laid out in the Axelrod interrogation. Petrov, in the official opinion of the KGB, had been driven to take eight thousand times the lethal dose of thallium by a deadly combination of overwork and French existentialism.

V

Vasin stretched wearily at his desk in the kontora’s registry. Outside the windows the light was draining from the gray sky. He closed the files and tapped his notes into a neat stack. He was hungry. But when he caught sight of Efremov bustling through the double doors with thunder in his face, he knew that the cafeteria would have to wait.

“Vasin?”

“That’s me.”

“Listen, I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, or who it was that your people called, but…”

“The Professor is ready for me? That’s what you came to say? You’re kind.”

Vasin stood briskly, folded his papers into his tunic pocket, and smiled at Efremov’s obvious discomfiture. A familiar enough scene: the local officer on the case realizing with ill grace that he’s not master in his own house. He hadn’t been expecting flowers. “Never hurts to give the little jerks a little jerk,” Orlov had advised Vasin. “They need to know who’s in charge.” Orlov had himself in mind.

A kontora Volga sedan awaited them. The driver pulled a blithe U-turn across the central reservation and raced the car across the darkening town toward the Professor’s home.

VI

The Adamovs lived in a handsome pre-Revolutionary building that overlooked the monastery on the far side of the Savva River. The facade was decorated with plaster caryatids and nymphs, their ancien régime voluptuousness rendered saggy by thick coats of Soviet paint. A single angry eye peeked from the concierge’s booth in the hall, but was evidently satisfied by Vasin’s and Efremov’s uniforms. As they ascended the stone stairs, Vasin noticed that this place had none of an apartment building’s usual cacophony: no noisy radios or raised voices, children’s shrieks or slamming doors.

On the second floor, Efremov tugged a brass bellpull. After a long pause the heavy door swung open. At first Vasin thought that a boy had opened it. But it was a young woman with pale, close-cropped hair. She wore a pair of checked trousers, cut fashionably short, and a loose sweater. Her eyes were set wide apart, and her body was long-waisted and thin, like an elegant weasel’s. She exuded an icy glamour.

The young woman leaned her head on the door and gripped the handle with both hands. She said nothing, but her eyes shone with an unnatural brightness.

“Excuse the disturbance. I believe I have an appointment with Professor Adamov?” Vasin stammered a little under the intensity of the young woman’s stare. “Major Alexander Vasin.”

“One second.” She spoke in a whisper. She crossed the wide hallway, swaying unsteadily, leaving the two KGB men standing at the open door. He heard a murmur, and then Adamov’s voice.

“Come.”

Adamov sat at the head of a dining table of dark wood surrounded by high-backed chairs with carved arms. The young woman took her place beside the Professor. An elegant, old-fashioned lamp that hung over the table illuminated empty plates and the two diners’ hands, but left their faces in shadow. Adamov eyed his visitors with unconcealed distaste.

“Comrade Majors. Sit.”

Vasin took the chair to Adamov’s left, leaving Efremov to settle at the far end of the table. Vasin felt that he had wandered into some kind of interrogation scene from a historical film. In the half-light, Adamov’s face looked cadaverous. Next to him the girl sat poised and motionless, as if posing for a portrait.

“Professor Adamov, thank you for seeing me. It has also been explained to me very clearly that your work is of the utmost national importance.”

“I protest this waste of my time, especially at this critical juncture in the fate of our nation. But when I receive a call from a member of the Politburo, I have no choice but to obey. So. Quickly. Fyodor Petrov.”

“Exactly, sir. Was there anything about his behavior in his last days that seemed strange to you? Did you notice any signs of distress?”

“I noticed nothing amiss. I have already spoken of this to your colleague. Him.”

Adamov gestured down the table at Efremov as though indicating an inanimate object.

“I have read your statement. Perhaps you would describe your relationship with Petrov to me?”

“Petrov was one of my most promising assistants. He had a good mind. Our relationship was perfectly correct and professional. He will be missed.”

“So Petrov was generally well liked?”

A pause.

“Everybody loved Fedya.” The young woman uncurled herself and leaned forward into the light. Her voice was low and slurred. “Everyone. Just. Loved. Fedya Petrov. Especially my husband.”

Tension snapped like an electric spark down the table. The woman was young enough to be the Professor’s daughter. Vasin watched her face tighten into a little smile. Mascara was starting to run from one eye. The whine of a boiling kettle rose from the kitchen.

“Maria.” Adamov spoke firmly, as if to a child. “Would you bring us some tea, please?”

She stood, abruptly, and stalked out of the room.

Adamov turned back slowly to Vasin.

“Continue.”

“How long did you know Petrov?”

“Have you spoken to the boy’s father? Our esteemed Comrade Academician Arkady Vasilyevich Petrov?”

“I have, sir. I spoke to the Academician two days ago in Moscow.”

Vasin thought of Petrov senior, slumped and weeping under his dripping dacha eaves a few days before. A plump man, punctured by grief.

“So doubtless Arkady Vasilyevich told you that we have known each other a long time. Since Fyodor was a boy, in fact.” A tremor entered Adamov’s voice. “You see, his father and I were colleagues, once. Back in the thirties. The heroic days.”

His voice was bone-dry, like papers being taken down from dusty shelves.

“Are you still on good terms with Academician Petrov?”

“Very good.”

“And his son Fyodor Arkadiyevich came here to work for you….”

“In 1955. You will surely see that in the files. Please, Major, let us spare each other the pro forma questions.”

Maria returned with a tray laden with clinking china. It seemed to take all her concentration to pour out three cups of weak tea. She passed them to Vasin, Efremov, and Adamov with great formality, then resumed her place in silence.

“Tell me about the safety procedures in your laboratories.”

“Speak to Dr. Vladimir Axelrod, if you must. He is aware of the technical aspects of the work he did with Petrov. He will be at his post tomorrow.”

“The pathologist expressed doubt that Dr. Petrov could have received such a large dose by accident. Not in the laboratory.”

“I defer to his opinion.”

“But if the doctor’s estimation is correct and it was not an accidental poisoning…”

“Then the poor soul knew what he was doing.”

“Or someone gave it to him,” said Vasin.

Adamov’s face did not flicker.

“You are saying someone in this city could be a murderer?”

“I am saying that someone in your laboratory could be a murderer.”

“The stoker sees other stokers everywhere.” Adamov pronounced the old Russian proverb in an indifferent voice. “An investigator, I imagine, sees murderers everywhere. I pray you are wrong. But the fact is, Comrade Major, that with the work we are undertaking at the laboratory, nobody has time to pursue your theory. Project RDS-220 is too important to be interfered with. Eight days from now the most powerful bomb the world has ever known will be detonated. That is all you need to know. So let me put it more plainly. Objectively, I cannot afford to give a flying motherfuck how Petrov died.”

Adamov pronounced the words precisely. In the Professor’s clipped voice the profanity was as shocking as a bucket of turds tipped onto the white tablecloth. Vasin was stunned into silence.

“I mean you no disrespect, Major,” Adamov continued smoothly. “Indeed it is quite possible that you are an intelligent young man. You show some signs. You are courteous, certainly, which is not the case with many of your colleagues. But please. File your report. Allow us to work in peace.”

“Professor, I care what happened to Petrov.”

Adamov sipped his tea. The four of them sat in silence for a long moment. Vasin could sense Efremov’s pent-up anger radiating down the table like heat from a stove, but refused to catch his colleague’s eye.

“Why?” Maria’s voice cut abruptly across the room, slightly slurred. “Why do you care, Comrade Major?”

Vasin could barely see her shadowed face. Could this girl be the professor’s wife?

“Comrade…Adamova? Because we cannot live by lies.”

“I see,” said Adamov. “You are a believer in General Secretary Khrushchev’s brave new world. The end of Comrade Stalin’s personality cult. A new heaven and a new earth. Very laudable.”

Maria gave a soft snort.

“Can it be that we have lived to see the day?” she drawled. “An officer of State Security who tells us about truth.”

“Masha. Enough.”

She leaned forward once more into the light. Vasin had seen drunken bravado before. But Maria Adamova was different. Her green eyes shone with an almost supernatural intensity. She took a breath, as though to continue, but her husband interrupted.

“We are all tired, I think.”

“A final question, Professor. When was the last time you saw the deceased?”

Adamov drained his teacup before answering.

“You are playing games now, Major. You know the answer already. We saw Petrov the evening before he was taken ill. He came here for dinner with Colonel Korin. We discussed the project, as usual. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Korin left at ten to catch a flight north, to Olenya. Petrov sat with us a little longer. We debated some technical issues. He appeared tired, but resolute. As we all are. Now, you must excuse us. Maria Vladimirovna will see you out.”

Vasin stood and shook Adamov’s papery hand. Masha walked them to the door, moving slowly as though with infinite weariness.

“My thanks for your time, Comrade Adamova.”

Maria’s eyes wandered slowly around Vasin’s face.

“How fortunate to be guarded by honest men.”

The door shut behind him with a heavy thud.

VII

Vasin and Efremov stepped out into the empty street. A shower had passed, and the wet tarmac shone in the streetlights like a policeman’s plastic cape. A wintry smell rose off the bare earth of the municipal flower beds and freshly planted linden trees on the avenues. In the waiting car the driver’s face was illuminated by the pale yellow light of the dashboard.

“Satisfied, Vasin?”

“Satisfied. Thanks for the lift, Efremov.”

The adjutant opened the car door and motioned Vasin inside.

“Think I’ll go home on foot. Clear my head.”

Vasin turned so that the wind would be at his back and began walking before Efremov could stop him. The domestic hour, after dinner and Good Night, Children on the television. The hour of tea and vodka, arguments and lovemaking. The windows of most of the apartments were illuminated with warm yellow light.

In Moscow, Vera would be on the phone to her girlfriends. Vasin could imagine his wife’s gossipy voice, see the thin stream of cigarette smoke curling out of the kitchen window. Nikita would be sleeping, calm, in his narrow bed under the bookshelf. By day the boy’s face was usually anxious. Admonitions, scolding, advice, the poor kid lived his life advancing doggedly into a daily blizzard of instruction. Only when he slept did his features relax. Nikita was an obliging child, eager to please. But there was no pleasing Vera. “Next time you will do even better,” she would tell the boy. “Higher, higher, and ever higher!” Somewhere else in the world, she believed, there was always a child who was better than her own.

Vasin’s thoughts paced in cramped circles. Arguing voices, call and answer, like a ritual song. Guilty, Vasin stood in the center of a wheeling parade of sins summoned by his wife Vera’s rage. Here, the vodka. There, his mistress.

“How could you?” Vera had screamed. “With her?”

From the next room, the thump of piano scales as Nikita desperately hammered arpeggios to drown his parents’ arguing voices.

“You bastard!” Vera had added, perhaps for the neighbors’ benefit.

Out in the world, criminals, hard men, begged for Vasin’s mercy. In his own home, he hung his head like a defendant before a People’s Court, searching the parquet in vain for crumbs of forgiveness.

Vasin, he thought, your life is ridiculous.

He reached the end of a long boulevard. Like all the streets of Arzamas, it seemed to terminate in a park. Beyond, he guessed, was the forbidden perimeter with its guard towers, dogs, and barbed wire that he had crossed by train the previous day.

Vasin was ravenous. At a tiny cafeteria by the train station, he bought himself a plate of sausages and a mug of watery beer. The other customers were workingmen in overalls and greasy caps, but the place exuded none of the underworld squalor of similar establishments in Moscow. Vasin leafed through General Zaitsev’s copy of Krokodil as he stood by his tall, rickety table. A witty dispatch from the Kharkov Tractor Works, whose male-voice choir had just won an all-Union singing competition. By half past ten he was the last customer. The burly waitress began scooping the remaining sausages out of their steaming water and tipping them, wriggling like live things, into a jar. Her own family’s dinner, doubtless.

“We’re closing, Comrades,” she chirped to the empty room.

“Tell me, pretty one,” Vasin called, raising his voice against the clatter of pans and swish of water. “Where does a man go to get a drink at this time of night?”

“The Café Kino, of course.” The woman looked him up and down in frank appraisal and cocked a flirtatious eyebrow. “But you should watch out. There might be pretty girls there.”

Vasin badly wanted to speak to somebody. A stranger would do. A stranger would be better, in fact. And he needed a drink.

“You’ve earned it, you brave boy.” Katya Orlova’s words, as she sloshed out brandy from her husband’s crystal decanter. He thought of her pendulous breasts, her rouged mouth, her desperate sexual hunger.

What the hell were you thinking? The boss’s wife?

Vasin faced the spitting wind and retraced his steps toward Lenin Square. In front of the glass facade of the Kino Moskva the tramlines gleamed. A light burned in the vestibule, and from a basement came the faint sound of chatter and music. There would be cognac. And girls. This, thought Vasin, could end badly. He went in.

The Café Kino occupied a large, dimly lit basement. In one corner a dozen young people had pulled chairs into a circle and were talking loudly over the din of swooping, rhythmic music. It sounded like — could it be? — American rock-and-roll. Thrilling. Semilegal. A couple of the customers glanced at Vasin’s uniform as he hung his mackintosh and cap. Vasin saw no fear in their eyes, only distaste. He settled onto a stool at the long bar and ordered Armenian cognac.

“Unusual music.”

The barman was an indigenous Siberian. His flat, Oriental face was expressionless.

“Rei Charlz,” he said. “ ‘Hit road, Dzak.’ The kids bring their records in. Mo-town.”

In Moscow, Vasin had seen bootleg copies of foreign discs cut onto the celluloid of old X-ray sheets. “Bone discs,” the young people called them. Each cost a month’s student stipend. But the records scattered over the far end of the Kino’s bar were originals, in brightly colored sleeves that spoke of America and unattainable luxury.

A couple stood to dance in front of a small, empty stage. The girl’s hair was done up in a beehive and the young man’s was glossy with cream. They performed a kind of half-squatting dance.

“Da Tvist,” explained the barman, unprompted, as a new song came on. “Chabi Cheka.”

He pronounced the last word like “che-ka,” the first Bolshevik secret police, now slang for the KGB. Was the man being sarcastic? But the barman’s face was blank. Vasin took his cognac to a table in an empty corner.

Pizhony, they called these kids in Moscow. The stylish ones. The term mixed contempt and envy. Plain working people would travel specially to gawp at the pizhony preening up and down Gorky Street in their polka-dot dresses and sharp suits on a Saturday night. Vera hated them. “Today he dances jazz,” she quoted from a Pravda editorial. “But tomorrow he will sell his homeland.”

So this was Petrov’s world. French books, American Motown music, pizhony for friends. The handsome only son of Academician Petrov had moved from the bubble world of Politburo compounds around the dacha village of Zhukovka to the still more isolated cloud dwelling of Arzamas. When he died, the young man had left a great future behind him.

Very senior people were taking a close interest in the circumstances of Fyodor’s untimely death. General Orlov had spelled that much out in his cluttered Moscow office.

“We have made a promise to the Comrade Academician to get to the truth of the matter,” Orlov had said, his face cracking into a toadlike grin. “I told him we would put one of our best men on the case. Our very best man.”

Orlov was stating a fact. Vasin was one of the best investigators in the kontora. He knew this because he had been so hated for so long. In his ten years at police headquarters, Vasin had acquired a reputation for maddening tenacity. A towering sense of righteousness inherited from his mother. A faith in science from his father. Put together they had made Vasin a brilliant detective — as well as a giant pain in his colleagues’ backsides. Honesty was an unusual quality in a police officer, and certainly not a career-advancing one. At least until Vasin’s work had caught the watchful eye of the kontora.

General Orlov, in Vasin’s first ever interview at the Lubyanka, had put it bluntly.

“Too many people in this building are skilled in covering their asses, Vasin. Spinning fairy tales they think the bosses want to hear.” Orlov’s jowls bulged over his uniform collar; his small black eyes skewered Vasin like pins in a butterfly. “You’re a man who can actually investigate a crime. And sometimes we need the whole truth.”

Vasin had noted the sometimes.

Special Cases was Orlov’s term for his tiny, secretive department, which occupied a suite of shabby offices on the Lubyanka’s ninth floor.

“Special Cases concern people who must be treated with special sensitivity,” Orlov had explained the first time Vasin brought him a completed case file, ready for the Prosecutor’s Office, and locked all three copies away in his personal safe. The General had turned full face to the indignation kindling in Vasin’s eyes.

“You understand, Comrade Major?”

“Of course, Comrade General.”

Orlov settled back into his chair.

“Agreement that comes too easily is usually not agreement, Comrade.”

Orlov sized Vasin up like a newly caught specimen.

“Ah! You say nothing!” The General pointed his index finger right down his line of sight into Vasin’s face. “Good! You do not rush to assure me that yes, Comrade General, you do most certainly agree with my every word. Because you do not agree. So, good. You learn fast, Vasin.”

“Sir, I…”

“You believe that a criminal’s place is in jail. Am I right? Of course I am right. For every crime committed, a criminal must be punished. That is the simple arithmetic of our police comrades. And you will agree that they are simple men. ‘Vasin?’ your bosses said. ‘Vasin is the cleverest one.’ They were not paying you a compliment. But you are clever. So I invite you to consider a different logic. Here, we have crime.”

Orlov, sliding forward on the black leather of his chair, picked up a glass paperweight that contained an outsize dragonfly and placed it to one side of his blotter. “And here, punishment.” A heavy-lidded malachite inkwell stood in for the Gulag.

“Your old job was simple. Connect our guilty four-winged comrade here”—Orlov’s fingers mimicked a little man wandering in zigzags across the spotted paper—“and place him in here.” He snapped the top of the inkwell shut.

“A crime must be punished. But what do we say about actions that are no longer crimes? Or not yet crimes? What do we say if the criminal is doing important work for our Motherland? Do we follow justice and shut him up — even if it damages the cause of international Socialism? Or let’s say, we leave a criminal at liberty in order to catch a bigger criminal. Or, perhaps there is a higher motive behind the crime? As you surely know, Comrade Stalin was a bank robber once, in the service of the Party. Would you wish him to have been sent to the tsarist gallows? Which part of you wins the debate, the good Communist or the good policeman? I see you catch my drift. Special cases. They need a special kind of investigator.”

Vasin had made his face stone. Orlov’s scrutiny was like a beam of cold light.

“You know, young Sasha, my father was a priest.” Vasin shuddered involuntarily from the double shock of Orlov’s abrupt familiarity and his admission of a background most men would go to great lengths to hide. “His father was before him. Generations of Orlovs. Humble parish priests, dispensing opium to the masses, soothing them with lies and scented smoke. And I, too, was educated at a seminary. Just like Comrade Stalin. Did you know that, about either of us? In my early days in the Cheka my comrades would call me pop, the priest. There were actually quite a few of us in the kontora, back in those days. Priests, I mean. Sons of priests. Also lots of bitter Jews, revenging themselves on the world. Georgians, too, of course. How we underestimated them! Anyway. Here is what every priest learns as he hears men’s confessions. In order to do evil, a man must tell himself he is doing good. When they kneel and whisper and cross themselves they say, ‘I ask forgiveness.’ But in truth they are asking for understanding. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Ever heard that? Of course you haven’t. The Bible. Book of Genesis. Now our respected Comrade Dzerzhinsky also thought all men were evil. Perhaps he was right. But the important thing is that every man I have ever met secretly thinks that he is better than all others. More deserving. He wants the world to recognize his worth. There is no righteousness and no wickedness. Only men, imposing themselves on the world, for reasons they consider good. And Justice exists no more than God does. What we humans — even enlightened Soviet men — call justice is just another name for expediency. The moment you understand that is the moment that you become an investigator worthy of Special Cases.”

There was a pause as Orlov moved the dragonfly and the inkwell carefully back to their places.

“You may rely on me entirely, Comrade General,” Vasin said to Orlov’s face, saluting.

Special fucking criminals, he’d said to himself on the way out.

Vera loved the perks. The new apartment. A private phone line. A place at the best Young Pioneer camp for Nikita. A Moskvich car of their own, one day. Jolly drinks parties at the officers’ clubs that now occupied the palaces of Moscow’s old merchant princes. Crystal glasses, white-coated waiters, generals and colonels in boots that other men had shined for them. Glittering women. General Orlov’s wife like a galleon in full sail, bursting from her evening dress. Her confiding hand on the jacket of Vasin’s new uniform, her eyes wet with lust.

The cognac was sweet. Vasin ordered another. The barman brought over the bottle and left it on the table. He was in a city that existed on no maps and had no address other than a post-box number. A city where Armageddon’s engineers danced to Negro music. Once again trying to discover the misadventures that had led a Party princeling to an early grave.

“Because I care,” Vasin heard himself telling Adamov. “Live not by lies.” You pompous idiot. Vasin could feel the brandy thudding in his temples. You’re just a janitor. Bring me your embarrassments, your peccadilloes, your jealousies, and your addictions. And Vasin will mop them all up into a slim file and take it to Orlov for discreet burial in his steel safe. And in the afternoons he will screw the tits off the General’s needy wife.

Live not by lies.

He ran a hand through his hair and swung a heavy gaze over the bodies of the girls in the corner. Perhaps he could join them? Ask if they knew Petrov? Suggest a dance.

Oh for God’s sake.

From behind Vasin came the scrape of a chair. Kuznetsov, his oiled hair falling over his brow in an untidy lick, settled his sturdy bulk at Vasin’s table.

“Enjoying our Arzamas nightlife? Hear you’ve been busy.”

Vasin, slowed by the drink, focused blearily on his roommate. To his own surprise, Vasin found himself pleased to see him.

“Help me finish the bottle?”

“It’s in my job description, old man. Duty to my Motherland.”

Vasin was back under the kontora’s watchful eye.

I

Vasin awoke late. He found Kuznetsov in the kitchen, immersed in a copy of Science and Life magazine.

“Morning. Coffee’s cold, I’m afraid.”

“It’s nearly nine. Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Thought you needed your beauty sleep, old man. Seemed tired last night.” Kuznetsov looked up from his magazine with an affectionate smile. “We want you to have a restful time in Arzamas.”

“Fuck off, Kuznetsov.”

“You’re welcome.”

Vasin dressed quickly in his civilian clothes, swigged the remains of Kuznetsov’s cold coffee straight from the pan. There was something about last night’s conversation with Adamov that had sent Vasin’s mind running. That catch in the Professor’s voice as he spoke of Petrov’s father. A curious tension as he spoke of his old colleague from the heroic days.

“Drive me to kontora in that crate of yours?”

“Your wish is my command, O master.”

“And while I’m there, I need to speak to Axelrod.”

“Axelwho?”

“Come on. Vladimir Axelrod. Petrov’s colleague from the lab. Adamov said I should speak to him about laboratory security.”

“Adamov said that?” The warmth had vanished from Kuznetsov’s voice.

Vasin paused as he pulled on his mackintosh and shot his roommate a raised-eyebrow glance.

“Want me to send some more telegrams? I thought we were all in a hurry to get this done.”

“Okay, okay. Calm down. I get it, old man. You can summon lightning from the heavens. No need to repeat the trick. I’ll find you your Axelrod. Will have him washed and brought to your tent.”

II

The registry of the KGB headquarters was almost deserted. The duty archivist, a plump brunette with a lopsided hairdo, looked up resentfully from her novel as Vasin leaned into the doorway.

“Registry’s shut till lunch. Sanitary day.”

“Library?”

“Library’s open.”

“Library’s what I need. Great Soviet Encyclopedia?”

Vasin tried a smile, which the girl extinguished with an irritated sneer.

“Over there. General Reference.”

He recognized the familiar dull red volumes massed officiously in the corner.

“Thanks. Here.” Vasin pulled Zaitsev’s copy of Krokodil out of his mackintosh pocket and tossed it onto the girl’s desk. “It’s a good one. Hilarious piece on collecting the sperm of champion bulls.”

Vasin quickly found the encyclopedia entry on Fyodor Petrov’s father.

“Petrov, Arkady Vasilyevich, born St. Petersburg, Russian Empire, 10 July 1901. Nuclear physicist. Member of the All-Union Academy of Sciences. Hero of Socialist Labor. Laureate of the Stalin Prize, 1951.”

Arkady Petrov’s brilliant career occupied half a page. A doctorate at age twenty-one from the Physics Department of Leningrad State University. Work at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, 1930. Then Cambridge in 1934, working with Pyotr Kapitsa. Zurich, 1935. Returned to the USSR 1936, appointed deputy head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkov, Ukraine. Became the department’s director the following year. Then a place at the All-Union Academy of Sciences; prizes; State laurels.

Vasin puzzled over the list of Petrov senior’s discoveries and scientific articles: “The Density Matrix Method in Quantum Mechanics.” “The Quantum Mechanical Theory of Diamagnetism.” “The Theory of Superfluidity.” He understood not a word. Only at the very end of the entry did Petrov’s official life revert to simple human terms: “Spouse: Nina Petrovna Scherbakova, b. Kursk 1913, d. Moscow 1959. Issue: Fyodor Arkadyevich Petrov, b. Moscow 1929.” In the encyclopedia’s next edition, doubtless, the painstaking editors would add the date of Fyodor’s death.

Vasin opened another volume.

“Adamov, Yury Vladimirovich. Born Baku, Russian Empire, 9 December 1900.” Adamov’s path through the Soviet physics world had been no less stellar than Petrov’s. A post at the People’s Commissariat for Education. Work at Göttingen and Leipzig in the twenties. He had, according to the encyclopedia, put his name to the “Adamov pole in quantum electrodynamics,” “Adamov’s equations for S matrix singularities,” “Adamov’s theory of second-order phase transitions.” Whatever those might be.

Then Vasin spotted it. “1932–37: Head of the Department of Theoretical Physics, Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology.” So Adamov had been Petrov senior’s boss in Kharkov, before Petrov took over his post.

But what followed immediately after was stranger. “1944: Senior researcher, All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics.” Nothing between 1937 and 1944. Petrov’s entry for the same period had been a steady stream of publications, academic posts, prizes. But for seven years Adamov’s biography was a perfect blank. Which could mean only one thing.

The Professor had spent those years as a prisoner in the Gulag.

III

By daylight the colonnaded entrance of the Citadel, with its crowds of hurrying people, reminded Vasin more than ever of a grand transport terminus. And like a railway station, the facade on Kurchatov Square concealed a deep hinterland of offices, glass-roofed laboratories, and bunkers that extended back into the far distance, shut off from the surrounding boulevards by high brick walls. Kuznetsov effortfully parked his car almost straight in an official spot under the critical gaze of a traffic policeman.

Vasin recognized Axelrod from the crowd of assistants around Adamov the night of the lecture. He was angular and pale, with the kind of face that was sharp in the flesh but fudged in memory. He stood alone in the echoing lobby, his clothes hanging off his skinny frame.

“Axelrod. Vladimir Moiseyevich.”

The scientist pronounced his name in a murmur, standing almost to attention.

“Vasin. Alexander Ilyich.”

They shook hands. Vasin removed his trilby hat and tried a smile that was not returned. Axelrod peered through rimless spectacles, waiting for his visitor to speak.

“Thank you for seeing me at such short notice. I know how valuable your time is.”

Axelrod’s faced twitched at the irony. Did he have a choice?

Axelrod motioned the KGB men toward the turnstiles. Kuznetsov made to go through, but Vasin stopped him with a hand on the shoulder, leaning close to whisper into his ear.

“Can I handle this one alone? He looks like a nervous customer to me.”

Kuznetsov began to answer, but Vasin cut him off.

“Please. Trust an old detective. It will save time, I promise.”

Kuznetsov frowned, but nodded.

After their passes had been scrutinized, Axelrod moved quickly, disappearing at speed down a corridor that led into the heart of the building.

They reached a stairwell fragrant with tobacco smoke.

“Wait. Vladimir Moiseyevich,” called Vasin. “Shall we?”

Axelrod resignedly retraced his steps. Vasin offered him an Orbita, but the scientist declined in favor of his own, an unfamiliar blue packet with a swirl of stylized blue smoke on the cover. Foreign.

“You know why I am here?”

Axelrod nodded.

“You were friends with the deceased?”

“Yes. Dr. Petrov and I were friendly.”

The man was clearly nervous.

“I saw your late friend yesterday morning.”

Axelrod went pale.

“What do you mean?”

“In the morgue.” Vasin paused a moment to let the thought sink in. “What killed him was terrible.”

“I…I can’t imagine.”

“I think you can imagine it. And I believe it keeps you awake at night.”

Axelrod said nothing, inhaling deeply through his cigarette.

“I’ve read your interview. General Zaitsev is a brute.”

A spark kindled in Axelrod’s eye. A sideways glance that said: Come now, Major, you’re going to have to try harder than that.

Vasin plowed on.

“Understand Zaitsev. To an axe, every problem looks like a log to be split. Zaitsev’s job is to provide solutions that are acceptable to all. So, he looks for a solution to the Petrov problem. Negligence? The Institute will be upset. Madness? Petrov’s father won’t believe it. So Petrov himself cannot be the culprit. So Zaitsev finds other factors that can be blamed. Subversive foreign literature. Pressure of work. Comrades too distracted by their heroic labors to notice a mind under strain. In Zaitsev’s world, he begins with the solution and works back to his suspect.”

The scientist looked Vasin over with a new curiosity.

“Are you always so frank with your interviewees?”

“No. But they’re usually not cultured men such as yourself. I thought we would save time by dispensing with the formalities.”

Axelrod brushed the compliment aside.

“By saying this you wish to tell me that Zaitsev’s world is not your world?”

“I am saying that I wish to get to the truth.”

“Of course you do.”

Axelrod sounded unconvinced. He volunteered nothing else, and they crushed out their cigarettes in unison. The urn had been freshly emptied, Vasin noticed, not the usual filthy mess of week-old butts he found in most offices.

“You wanted to inspect Dr. Petrov’s last workstation, Comrade Major?”

Vasin followed Axelrod’s retreating figure as he clattered down stairs, deep into the basement. The levels were marked with codes. The young scientist finally stopped before a set of heavy double doors marked LABORATORY ZH-4.

They stepped inside a vast concrete hangar lit with rows of industrial lamps. In the center was a machine at least as long as a locomotive, a massive tubular structure sprouting cables. On either side was a row of steel-cased instruments with buttons and dials that reminded Vasin of soda-vending machines. The place had the sacramental atmosphere of the Kremlin cathedrals he had visited with Nikita, cavernous and full of unfathomable mysteries. He sniffed the air. The place had a familiar odor that Vasin couldn’t place.

“The smell? Everyone notices it the first time they come in here. It’s the same as the metro. High-voltage electricity creates charged plasma when it passes through air. Ionizes it, creates ozone. That’s what you’re smelling.”

Axelrod led the way past banks of instruments, some attended by lab-coated young men who cast quick, unfriendly glances at Vasin as he passed. Raised voices came echoing down the hall in a high-pitched argument. Axelrod paused for a moment to tune in to the quarrel, got the gist, then dismissed it with a shake of the head.

“Sorry. Everyone’s on edge around here. Not much sleep. The test, you know. Working the machine day and night.”

They had paused at the foot of the giant cylinder with a clear view along its whole mighty bulk, twice the length of a metro carriage.

“What does it…do?”

Axelrod grinned for the first time. Here he was on home territory.

“It’s a mass spectrometer.” Axelrod registered the investigator’s blank look. “We bombard samples with ions and pass them through a magnetic field. It separates the stream into their different atoms, by weight. The heaviest atoms bend more. This one is based on an American design they called a calutron. It’s mostly used for separating uranium into its different isotopes. On an industrial scale, it’s one of the ways of refining uranium to weapons grade. But this is a baby one. For experiments.”

As a young detective Vasin had wasted hours following up citizens’ paranoid denunciations of neighbors who were taking too close an interest in radio parts. But here Axelrod scattered military secrets like the husks of sunflower seeds.

“Don’t look so alarmed, Major. There’s nothing secret about the principle. While we were having our Great October Revolution, the English were building the first of these machines. In forty years’ time, I promise you, the capitalists will be trying to copy ours.”

A row of large glass-walled rooms lined one wall. In each one stood a laboratory bench topped with powerful ventilator fans. Axelrod led Vasin up to one of the plate-glass windows.

“This is where the samples are prepared for spectrum analysis. They must be turned into gases for the process to work. And — there — you see where the samples are kept.”

Vasin followed his guide’s pointing finger and saw a glass cabinet in the corner of the chamber. It had its own ventilator and contained stacks of dull metal cylinders the size of large coffee mugs. In the corner stood an instrument that Vasin was coming to recognize, a Geiger counter.

“The radioactive samples are kept in those lead cylinders. One or two grams in each.”

They were interrupted by a momentary dimming of the lights in the hall, like the lamps on the metro signaling the arrival of the last train. A bass thrum began to vibrate through the concrete floor.

“Bother,” said Axelrod.

Bother? Vasin looked askance. That’s how they swear round here?

“It’s the next-door laboratory. We share a generator. They’re starting up their pneumatic rams. They’re meant to bloody warn us.”

“Pneumatic rams?”

“For a barometric chamber. Measures sudden changes in pressure. We built it for particle and gas research. But for the last year they’ve been letting Dr. Mueller use it. One of our German guests. Been with us since the war. He uses it for his experiments on shock wave effects.”

The lights flickered slightly as the thrum increased. Vasin turned back to the workstations.

“Petrov worked here?”

“Right here.”

“And he used thallium?”

“Certainly. We use thallium as a control. It’s one of our most predictable alpha emitters.”

“Alpha?”

“There are three general types of radiation. Gamma is the most penetrating. Cosmic rays are gamma radiation. They cross the universe at the speed of light and travel right through the earth. Thousands of them are passing through your body every second. The atmosphere screens us from their most harmful effects. Beta radiation is less penetrating, but more dangerous because it has more energy. Alpha radiation is the opposite of gamma. It has far more energy than beta or gamma. But luckily for us it cannot penetrate human skin. Thallium emits mostly alpha radiation.”

“So why…?”

“Why is it deadly? Because once it gets inside the body it is absorbed by the digestive system. Your bloodstream takes it to every part of the body. The alpha particles destroy everything around them, especially human cells. So every organ disintegrates from inside. The effect is…as you saw.”

Axelrod’s face flushed, like a child’s, and tears abruptly spilled from his eyes.

The scientist turned and walked quickly away, a handkerchief to his face. Vasin tactfully turned his back. The cellar looked like a cave from a futuristic fairy tale. A captive monster squatted obscenely in its center sprouting wires from its head and guts. To dominate and conquer one’s fellow man, that was easy. The stupidest and most brutal of Vasin’s colleagues could do that in minutes. But to enslave nature itself to your purposes, like a genie inside a lamp? That was something akin to black magic.

“Forgive me.” Axelrod returned, his freckled face blotched red.

Vasin nodded in sympathy. The shock wave of bereavement could sometimes be an ally, he knew. He’d seen it burst men’s composure apart at the seams. Made them want to confide in strangers. He was glad of Kuznetsov’s absence.

“Do you have any idea how a man in this laboratory could ingest thallium by accident?”

“No.” Axelrod’s voice had become a bleak whisper. “In theory it might be possible that a few milligrams might escape from the fume chamber. We wear gas masks in there, of course. But we swabbed the one that Fyodor was using the day before he was taken ill and found nothing. He was a first-rate scientist, Major. And the technicians who work here designed the fume chamber. They would know if someone had made a foolish mistake. Not to mention the radiation alarms, those boxes that look like gramophone speakers along the wall. So, no. To answer your question, I do not see how a man could ingest a fatal dose of reagent by accident and not know it. But it’s hard to say without knowing how much was inside him. No one told us. Or me, anyway.”

“The pathologist believes Dr. Petrov ingested a lot.”

“How much?”

“Two thousand milligrams.”

Axelrod blanched.

“God almighty. He said milligrams? Are you sure? He must have said micrograms.”

“No. I know what he said, Doctor.”

“Two grams…” Axelrod barely registered Vasin as his eyes darted to the fume chamber, to his white-coated colleagues huddling over a disemboweled meter. He lowered his voice still further, making Vasin lean in to hear. “Two grams is the weight of an entire sample. We use maybe a thousandth of that as a control in the spectrometer. That is not an amount that could in any way be taken accidentally.”

Axelrod looked down.

“The kontora says that Petrov signed for and removed two thousand milligrams from the lab himself,” continued Vasin. “He stockpiled it bit by bit, for over a month. Signed for it, but didn’t use it. Then he ingested it.”

“Two thousand milligrams unaccounted for? That’s what they’re saying?”

“It’s in the experimental logs. You seem surprised.”

“That’s not possible.”

“What part? Technically or personally impossible?”

“Both.”

“How do you keep track of the thallium you use?”

“Petrov had been running his own experiments in the calutron for weeks. Using thallium, naturally. They’re all in the results log. He was testing different alloys of unenriched uranium metal. Different casings for RDS-220.”

Axelrod gestured down the row of fume chambers, each with its stack of lead pots.

“We know what comes into the laboratory. The senior technician takes delivery of dozens of capsules of material every shift. Then each laboratory chief records what is used in every experiment. You could compare the two to check if there was a discrepancy. But it would take days.”

“That’s exactly what the kontora must have done. They said it was a huge job.”

“But thallium is very unstable. Half-life of just seventy-three hours. That means that half of it decays into mercury every three days. In six days, only a quarter is left. And so on. Makes it hard to keep track of.”

“You’re saying this stuff just vanishes over time?”

“Something like that.”

“So the lab records…”

“Must be falsified. Those two thousand milligrams you say he supposedly signed for? In three days they’d have decayed to a thousand. In twelve, there’d be one hundred and twenty-five milligrams left. In thirty days, less than two. This story of him signing out thallium over a month? A piece of nonsense concocted for scientific illiterates. Show me that log, and I’ll prove it’s been faked.”

Vasin paused as the implications of what Axelrod had told him sank in.

“And you suggested a moment ago that it was personally impossible for him to have taken it himself? You knew him well. Did Dr. Petrov show any signs of being suicidal? Had anything happened to upset him?”

Axelrod shook his head.

“No.”

“No, he didn’t show any signs? Or no, you don’t want to tell me?”

“He was not suicidal. Tired, perhaps. The project was everything to him. Like all of us, he was nervous about the test. He was looking forward so much to seeing it. But who knows what is really happening in a man’s mind?”

Vasin nodded in understanding.

“And his relationships? Was he involved with anyone?”

“No.”

“Was he close to Maria Adamova?”

Other investigators swore that they could tell in an instant when a witness was lying. Vasin had seen too many honest men scared and flailing for salvation to make such a claim. But he could at least tell when a man was collecting himself. A contraction of the mouth. Shoulders tightening. The mouth drying into a tight smile.

“I don’t know.”

Abruptly the ambient vibration stopped and was replaced by the distant sound of an electric klaxon, hooting.

“What the hell is that?” asked Vasin in alarm.

“Here we go.” Axelrod winced. “Wait for it.”

A powerful thud echoed through the floor, like a train colliding with a concrete wall.

“Dr. Mueller’s shock waves.”

Axelrod led Vasin out of the spectrometer hall. In the corridor they stood aside to allow a pair of technicians to pass, wheeling a large trolley from the neighboring laboratory. Vasin glanced inside and saw a pile of shit-stained fur, goats’ horns, some hooves sticking up at odd angles. The animals had been crushed, as though stamped on by a giant boot. A farmyard reek, utterly incongruous in this sterile place, followed them.

“Ah. And here is our German comrade himself. Good day, Dr. Mueller.”

Mueller, a small man in round glasses, blinked nervously as though expecting to be slapped. He nodded briefly to acknowledge Axelrod’s greeting and scuttled on. With a bang of doors, the German and his trolley were gone.

Axelrod waited before answering Vasin’s unasked question.

“They found him in one of the German camps. He’d set up a whole laboratory for medical experiments. Used the prisoners as his guinea pigs. The Americans wanted him hanged, but we decided to use his bright mind. So here we are. The miracles of Soviet science. In this cellar, we separate streams of atoms. In that cellar, Mueller explodes farm animals.”

“Why?”

“Bombs produce pressure waves, as well as light and heat. Different ones at different altitudes. Beyond a certain distance, the heat dies away and it’s the blast wave that produces the lethality. So Mueller calculates it.”

“Lethality?”

Axelrod made a moue of distaste.

“Kill zone radius. Casualty estimates, that kind of thing. The military men are interested in such matters. Nothing to do with atomic physics, of course. But that barometric sphere needs power, and space. So it was built here, in the basement, next to our calutron. And so we live. Neighbors to our German destroyer of livestock.”

They walked to the lobby in silence. The linoleum gave way to a carpeted corridor that brought them once more to the turnstiles. Vasin spotted Kuznetsov slumped on a bench, his nose in a book. He stopped just out of his handler’s earshot.

“What do you think happened to Petrov, Dr. Axelrod?”

The scientist’s voice, when he spoke, was trembling.

“It was not an accident. Petrov did not commit suicide.”

Axelrod turned to go, and Vasin recalled something Adamov had said about Petrov’s final dinner. About the only guest Vasin had yet to meet, dead or alive. Colonel Pavel Korin.

“Wait. What’s in Olenya?”

The scientist hesitated.

“I’m not sure I’m supposed to…”

“Come on. This isn’t a test of your discretion. You failed that one about fifty times already.”

A look of alarm crossed Axelrod’s pinched face.

“Forgive me, Comrade. What is Olenya?”

“It’s a naval air base up on the Kola Peninsula on the White Sea. It’s where the bombers take off when we conduct atmospheric bomb tests.”

“Do you know someone named Korin?”

“Everyone knows Pavel Korin. He works on weapons delivery. Brilliant nuts-and-bolts man. But why?”

“I believe he’s a personal friend of the Adamovs. How well did he know Petrov?”

Suspicion closed down Axelrod’s face like a rattling shutter.

“Ask him yourself.”

“That’s precisely what I want to do, but he’s in Olenya.”

“Testing dummies of RDS-220, I imagine. I have to go.”

Vasin caught Axelrod’s arm and held it, pulling him close.

“How do I get to Olenya?”

“It’s a busy time. There are transport planes going up there round the clock. Get a travel order from your superiors. Now let me go.”

“My superiors want me to sign off on their suicide theory and go home.” Vasin released Axelrod’s sleeve. “Is that what you want me to do?”

The scientist sagged.

“Keep me out of this.”

“I will try. How do I get myself on one of those planes?”

“They take couriers on practically every flight. Find some documents to deliver to Korin.”

“On whose authority?”

Axelrod thought for a moment.

“Adamov signed an Institute pass for you, right?”

Vasin nodded.

“In Arzamas, Adamov’s authority is all you need.”

IV

“Interesting chat?”

Vasin looked up from the notebook in which he was writing up his meeting with Axelrod. Kuznetsov lay on the sofa, his book folded on his chest.

“Lots of chemistry. Or maybe it was physics. Didn’t understand much of it, to be honest.”

Kuznetsov sat up on the sofa and began playing with a box of matches on the coffee table, flipping it end over end with his index finger.

“Listen, Vasin. You twisted their tails over at the kontora yesterday. Zaitsev was spitting nails all afternoon after your stunt. Getting some big Moscow pinecone to call Adamov and make him jump like a schoolboy.”

“The General strikes me as a zealous comrade who takes his duties very seriously.”

“Spare me your bullshit, I’ll spare you mine.”

“We agree. Life’s better without bullshit.”

“Zaitsev’s an old-school butcher. You saw those scars on his right hand. He boasts they are burn marks he got from a red-hot pistol.”

Vasin made his face blank.

“Red-hot,” continued Kuznetsov, “from firing hundreds of rounds into the backs of men’s heads. They were evacuating a prison near Minsk. Early in the war, during the Fascist advance. There was no transport, so Zaitsev ordered every prisoner liquidated rather than see them fall into enemy hands. He decided it was his duty to do the job personally. That’s Zaitsev.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

“Because he hates your guts, Vasin. You tell me why. I can guess most of it. He doesn’t want complications. You have some ideas about Petrov’s death. Maybe he’s scared of who you work for. Who do you work for, by the way?”

“The Department of Special Cases of the Second Chief Directorate of the Committee for State Security.”

“Okay, so I don’t need to know. All I’m saying is you got our boss all riled up. You need to walk carefully.”

“I’m just doing my job.”

“Which is to discover the cause of Petrov’s death?”

“Except I’m getting the feeling that pretty much everyone here would rather not know.”

Kuznetsov shrugged.

“There are lots of things in the world it’s better not to know.”

“Is that a message from Zaitsev?”

“Don’t be paranoid, Vasin. It’s a message from me.”

“Okay. Tell me why you don’t want to know.”

Kuznetsov grimaced.

“Because of Zaitsev, yes. But not for the reasons you think. Because of what this place stands for, the people who work here, and what Zaitsev could do to them. All this that we are building in Arzamas? It’s so fragile.”

“I don’t understand.”

Kuznetsov snatched up his copy of Science and Life magazine from the table. On the cover was a picture of a new Sputnik satellite, shiny as a child’s toy.

“Look here: this ball of steel, made by Soviet hands, about to go up into the cosmos and orbit the planet. Don’t you see? After revolution and war and bloodshed, finally we’ve done it. We’ve beaten history. A new world is being born, right here in the Soviet Union. And the capitalists see it, and they hate it. They fear it. The future is being forged in front of their eyes, for every citizen of the world. The capitalists have to destroy us, or see themselves destroyed. That is why we need them. The Golden Brains.” Kuznetsov jabbed a stubby finger in the general direction of Kurchatov Square and Adamov’s Citadel. “In this space age, the bombs they make are our frontline soldiers.”

“What’s that got to do with Petrov and your butcher Zaitsev?”

“You’re not listening. Can we say the death of Fyodor Petrov was an accident?”

Vasin raised an eyebrow.

“You think it was no accident. A suicide, perhaps? Maybe. You think, maybe not. If not suicide, then it must be murder. And who are your suspects? Petrov’s colleagues. His comrades. His fellow scientists. He wasn’t hit over the head with a vodka bottle behind a bus stop, was he? Let’s say it was someone who had access to some of the most radioactive material in the USSR, and knew exactly how to use it. Now we report all of this to Zaitsev and tell him to get cracking. If this is now a murder investigation, what kind of a culprit does a man like our Minsk jailhouse butcher look for?”

Vasin sat down heavily opposite Kuznetsov. He could see where this was heading.

“Zaitsev reverts to what he knows. He looks for enemies of the people. Ideological impurity. Antisocial habits. Unsanctioned reading of ideologically unsound books. Pederasty. Anti-Soviet literature.”

“And he would find them.”

“This is Arzamas. Of course he would. Look, here’s a subversive book, right here.”

Kuznetsov picked up the paperback he had been reading and ruffled its pages in front of Vasin’s face.

“This was printed by Russian exiles in New York last year. Vozdushnie Puti, Air Routes. Look who’s in it. Osip Mandelstam, the greatest poet you’ve never heard of. Letters by Isaac Babel. Poem Without a Hero by Anna Akhmatova. Marina Tsvetaeva, not the lyrical Silver Age stuff you’ve read, but her late stuff. Bitter as quinine. Brilliant. Powerful. It’s all brilliant. But every word of this book is counterrevolutionary propaganda according to Zaitsev and our own kontora.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I got it from the kontora, naturally. Haven’t you ever been to the library in the Lubyanka? It’s well stocked. Newsweek magazine. Paris Match. All the Soviet émigré publications. We have to know our enemy, you see? Or you could take a look on Dr. Adamov’s own bookshelves, next time you pay him a social call. I’m sure you’ll find they’re packed with banned literature.”

“Okay, so Arzamas is a greenhouse. Free spirits and eccentrics. But what makes it fragile?”

“I’ve lived among these people for three years now. And let me tell you, pretty much every one of them is a social deviant in one way or another. Allow Zaitsev to run amok in the Citadel, and he’d have confessions of anti-Soviet activity out of half the staff before you can say ‘purge.’ ”

“The kontora doesn’t do purges anymore.”

“And where did you read that, friend? Does the fact that something is on the front page of Pravda make it true? You’re so sure that times have changed?”

“You told me yourself that the work they do is so valuable they can do whatever they like. They’re untouchable.”

“As long as they succeed. What happens when they fail? What happens if RDS-220 turns out to be a dud? Do you have any idea how many millions of rubles go into this program? No — nor do I. But it’s vast. Eats up the military budget. Eats up the security budget. You think old butchers like Zaitsev like to see all of this power in the hands of these degenerates and cloud dwellers? You think they like to hear General Secretary Khrushchev tearing down the great Stalin? There are plenty who think this entire show would be better run by some square-headed military engineers.”

“If Zaitsev hates all these misfits so much, why is he protecting them?”

“He’s following orders. But imagine the Golden Brains mess up this test of Adamov’s device. We lose the nuclear race to the Americans. Then, let’s say word gets out that there’s a murderer on the loose here in Arzamas. Then the muzzle comes off the hound.”

“Your boss is the hound.”

Kuznetsov dropped his voice and leaned forward.

“Give him an excuse and he’ll rip the guts out of this place. There will be no more of this.” Kuznetsov flourished the book once again. “No more of the likes of them. Or me. They brought me in from a cushy posting in the kontora station in Berlin. In those days you could still pop over to the American sector for an afternoon. It gave me a taste for all this dangerous literature, I suppose. Subversive tastes, Zaitsev would call them. Do me a favor and back off. Petrov was a tragic suicide.”

“And if it was murder?”

“You think there’s just one unpunished murderer loose in this country?” Kuznetsov reached to his shoulder and tapped it with a pair of fingers, signaling invisible epaulets, the universal vernacular gesture for secret police. “In the kontora?”

Vasin leaned back in his easy chair and ran a hand through his thinning hair.

“Thank you for your confidence, Kuznetsov.”

“You just seemed like a man who might understand. Clever face on you. Could be misleading, of course.”

They both grinned.

“I need to make a personal long-distance call. Not from a kontora phone.”

“Ah.”

“No, really. To my wife.”

“Try the post office, just off Lenin Square.”

“Is it open?”

“This city never sleeps, old man. I’ll drive you if you like.”

“Mind if I walk?”

“And if I said I did?”

“I’d call in the big pinecones.”

V

An oppressive evening quiet had settled on Arzamas. Two empty trams rumbled toward each other from opposite sides of Lenin Square and stopped side by side. They stood, humming, with their doors open, as though gathering strength to continue their pointless journeys. Eventually the doors clacked shut and they moved off, their women drivers blank-faced as shop dummies. The entire town seemed to have gone to bed with a book.

Hard, cold loneliness welled up inside Vasin as he walked toward the town center. In Moscow, Nikita would be getting ready for bed. Vera would be on the phone, gossiping with her girlfriends. Or watching television. He pictured his home, his life, without him in it. Vasin urgently wanted to hear his son’s voice, to impress himself on his mind. I still am your father. Don’t forget me, my darling boy.

Arzamas’s Central Post Office loomed into view. Rows of chandeliers glowed in the deserted hall. Two service windows were still open for telegrams and long-distance calls. Vasin felt in his pocket for a coin and tapped the metal counter with it. The telephone operator bustled out of a back room, a bundle of floral print and peroxide hair.

“Long-distance call. Moscow. Urgent.”

“Personal or service?”

“Personal.”

The operator slapped a long form in front of him.

“Fill this out.”

Vasin had seen foreign travel applications that were shorter. Dipping an old-fashioned steel pen into an inkwell provided by the State for citizens’ convenience, he filled out his passport details. The name and address of the party he wished to call, the purpose of the call, his rank and address and his superior’s name, the number of minutes he wanted — six — to be paid in advance. He blotted the form and handed it back. The operator’s fingers danced on a large abacus.

“Eight rubles thirty kopecks. It’ll be booth three.”

“How long will it take?”

“As long as it takes. Authorization.”

Vasin settled wearily onto a long oak bench polished smooth by citizens’ backsides.

What had gone wrong? He did not blame Vera. She had just become what he always knew she was, if he was honest with himself. She wanted what every Soviet housewife wanted: an apartment, a family, a new television, friends, acceptance. He’d wanted all that, too, at the beginning. They had both been twenty. Marriage had seemed a preordained stage of unfolding adulthood, like receiving one’s first passport or Communist Youth League ticket. 1947: The old world had been broken, the new one not yet born. Everyone who had called themselves young during the war had been transformed by the horror and hardship. The old-young soldiers seemed to envy Sasha’s and Vera’s youth, their innocence. And inexplicably resent them for it. At the wedding, a rowdy affair that involved dispensing free booze to their neighbors, the drunk snaggle-toothed old women toasted happiness, love, and peace in the world. Vasin wondered if they had actually known any of those things.

For Vasin and his young wife, marriage was an escape to a room of their own. But in this room they had to learn to live with each other, as well as learn who they were themselves. In the subsequent years Vasin had changed. Something deeper than just marital boredom and the strains of the job.

“This one wants to rearrange the world to suit him,” Vera’s mother had said one afternoon at Vasin’s in-laws’ tiny dacha as he sat drunk on homemade moonshine. “Our dreamer.”

He’d been having some kind of political argument with Vera’s father. Anyone cowardly enough to allow himself to be taken prisoner by the Germans was an enemy of the people, had been the old brawler’s point. Screw ’em. Spies. The old man refused to believe Vasin that the world was moving on. That there were new rules. Now the nation’s battle was no longer for survival but for progress, for plenty. Apartments. Moon rockets. Washing machines. Shorter working hours. Cheaper vodka. At least they’d agreed on that.

The ringing phone sounded like a fire alarm in the echoing marble hall. Vasin hurried to the wooden booth and closed the glass doors behind him. He picked up the receiver and heard several female voices on the line. The call had already been connected.

“Go ahead, caller,” said the loudest of the voices. There was no click to signify that the operator had disconnected.

“Vera?”

“So how are you, my darling?”

He recognized the sliding intonation at once. She’d been drinking.

“It’s him,” she said to someone beside her.

“Send him to sit on a dick,” said a shrill woman’s voice from the background.

“Vera. I hope you are well. How is Nikita?”

“Normal. And you, dearest? How’s the trip? They put you up in a nice hotel? Soft bed? Clean sheets?”

“It’s fine.”

“And have you found yourself a nice little tart there, Sasha?”

“Come on, Vera. Stop it. This is a trunk line.”

“I see. Staying faithful to your tart in Moscow? Katya? Katya fucking Orlova…”

Vasin slammed the receiver down, wincing.

“For God’s sake, Vera,” he said, as though she could still hear him. “What are you doing?”

He picked up the phone again, but the line had gone dead.

Vasin stalked out of the hall into the moonlight. The woman at the counter watched him go with a smirk.

Would the silent listeners on the line bother filing a report? Had they heard? Vasin imagined fingers clattering out a transcript on a typewriter, the carriage jolting as it bounced into uppercase to capitalize the proper names per standard procedure. Zaitsev’s beefy fingers holding the paper. His thick chuckle. And when he reached the last words, KATYA ORLOVA, a ripe curse. The name that could cut off Vasin’s life as abruptly as a finger pressed onto the cradle of a telephone.

Vasin forced himself to breathe and start again at the beginning. A tired operator in the bowels of some KGB listening station, eager to get back to her tea and gossip. The last of the day’s hundred domestic disputes cracking over the wires. Most likely she’d log the call and forget it. Add a sheet to the kontora’s ever-growing Himalaya of useless information.

The windy expanse of Lenin Square opened up before him, lit by weak municipal lamps and a yellow wash of light spilling from the sheer glass facade of the Kino-Teatr Moskva. He looked up at the new moon, half-hidden in drifting cloud.

On the roof of the cinema, something caught his eye. A face, illuminated by the streetlights. A young woman was standing on the high parapet, looking down. He recognized the fashionably cropped hair immediately.

VI

Vasin’s boots clanged on the steps of the fire escape, the leather soles slipping on wet steel. By the time he had reached the top he was doubled over, panting. The roof was dark and flat. In the center, at the front, stood Maria Adamova, framed in a halo of light like a tiny diva on a vast stage.

She stood motionless, hands deep in the pockets of a vinyl raincoat. Her head hung down, as though she was asleep on her feet. When Vasin stumbled she made no sign of hearing.

He reached the edge, about five meters away from her, and peered down onto the square. The drop was sheer.

“Maria Vladimirovna?” He spoke softly. “We met, with your husband. My name is Vasin.” Her eyes flicked open as though a switch had been thrown. She turned her face to him, then the rest of her body. She swayed forward drunkenly before abruptly righting herself.

“Go screw yourself, Chekist.”

Her voice was thick as mud.

Vasin advanced a step.

“Get lost or I’ll jump.”

She stepped up onto the narrow wall that surrounded the roof. Balancing herself with her arms like a child, she lurched forward toward the void. With her arms out and coat flapping in the breeze, she looked like a ballet dancer about to take a bow. She stared out onto the square, mesmerized by the drop before her.

Vasin darted forward three, four, five paces, then seized the smooth plastic of her coat. Maria tumbled sideways, arms still outstretched. She fell with her back squarely on the parapet and attempted to wriggle her body over, into the empty air. Vasin held her coat tightly. She landed a single, despairing kick on the side of his head, then rolled, defeated, into his grasp.

Sparks sprayed across Vasin’s vision as he watched his hat spin like a coin and tumble into space. He sank to his knees and slumped his full weight onto Maria Adamova’s slight body. Panting together, they gulped down cold air.

“Maria Vladimirovna, you’ve been drinking.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Vasin took Maria by the lapels of her coat and swung her into a sitting position. Her head rolled as though it was too heavy for her neck.

“You need an ambulance.”

“I said…” Masha shook her head as though willing blood and consciousness to flow into it. “No bloody ambulance.”

“You need help.”

Masha’s small hands closed around Vasin’s wrists and unpeeled his grip on her lapels.

“Like hell I do. They’ll send me to the nuthouse. You want me to spend the rest of my life as a vegetable?”

A memory, sharp as a flint, chipped across Vasin’s mind. A girl, blond and frail, with a leer of pain smeared across her face. Klara. His younger sister, born two years after him, used to follow him about like a puppy. Her first seizure struck soon after their mother announced that their father would never come home from the war. His mother’s flat adult voice, clinging to dignity, speaking hollow words of sacrifice and glory. It was to Vasin, not their mother, that Klara had run to soak up her tears. And then, a few days later, the fit came with terrifying violence, twisting her body and face into a grotesque, trembling arc. We must trust the doctors, Vasin’s mother had said. Soviet science is the best in the world. They’d recommended electric shock therapy.

Vasin never saw Klara smile again. After a few months at the hands of Soviet psychiatrists all she could do was moan incoherently, like an overgrown infant. He turned her thin hand in his and saw marks on her wrists where they’d tied her to the bed frame. In his narrow bed at night, Vasin fantasized about rescuing her. He was sixteen — old enough perhaps to pass for a doctor if he wore a white coat and stethoscope. Also old enough to wonder where they would hide, how he would look after this wreck of a girl in her urine-stained nightgown. Then she stopped eating. Her fine blond hair fell out, and they put her in an isolation ward and wouldn’t let Vasin visit anymore. “The body has already been cremated,” Vasin’s mother told him. Not “Klara,” but “the body.” It was easier for them both to believe that Klara was no longer present in her tortured body while it underwent its final indignities.

Spend the rest of my life as a vegetable.

“Okay, Maria. I’ll take you home.”

“How the fuck did you even get here? You been following me? You’re not taking me anywhere.”

Maria made a defiant attempt to shiver some life into her leaden limbs. But her strength was spent and she slumped slowly to the ground. Scrabbling his heels along the wet roof, Vasin wriggled into a position by her side, his back braced on the parapet. She subsided into his lap with a shiver, balling her fists and tucking them under her chin like a toddler. In a moment, she was fast asleep. Vasin felt the wetness from her hair soaking into his trousers. He tugged one side of his mackintosh out from under her body and covered her as best he could.

Vasin lit a cigarette and smoked it with his left hand. He laid his right on her skinny, gently heaving shoulder. On the cushion of his lap, Maria began to snore.

Vasin chuckled to himself. Oh, Vera, he thought. Oh, Orlov. Oh, bloody Zaitsev and Adamov and all the rest of you. What, exactly, would you make of this?

The minutes passed. Young voices emerged from the Café Kino, their comradely goodbyes echoing around the empty square. Somewhere far away, thunder rolled over the forest. Maria’s weight was pressed awkwardly on his right leg, which began to lose sensation. The breeze freshened. There were droplets of rain on the gusting wind, and from the darkness came the hiss of rain on rooftops.

“Okay, girl. Time to get you home.”

Stiffly, he untangled himself from the unconscious Masha and laid her on her side, her face on an outstretched arm. Kneeling beside her, he cradled her head in the palm of his hand and slid another under her armpit.

“Fedya?” Masha’s eyes remained closed, her voice but a whisper. “Fedyechka? Is that you?”

Vasin tried to pick her up, but her body was a dead weight.

“Ya.” Vasin murmured the monosyllable softly. “It’s me.”

“They said you had been poisoned. But here you are, thank God.”

“Ya zdes,” Vasin answered. “I am here.”

Maria’s face softened into a smile as she sank back into unconsciousness.

The drizzle pattered on her plastic coat and the cold rain rolled down her face like tears. Vasin shook her, but she did not stir.

He managed to drag her most of the way across the roof to the fire escape. Exhausted, he peered at the steel staircase, winding down six stories to the ground. He thought of heaving her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, but the stairs were too steep and slippery. Vasin propped her upright against the steelwork of the staircase.

“Maria, I’m going to get help. I need help to get you home.”

Her eyes fluttered open.

“You!” she breathed.

“I’m going to call the police. I can’t carry you.”

“Wait. Wait.”

Masha closed her eyes and rolled slowly onto her front with a curse. With a superhuman effort she struggled like a newly hatched butterfly to make each one of her limbs work in turn, first arms, then legs. She rose on her hands and knees and stayed in that position for a minute, head down, panting like a wet dog.

“Okay.”

Masha stood, very deliberately, and scraped the wet hair from her face.

“What are you waiting for?”

She turned unsteadily toward the stairs. By the time they had reached the bottom, her gait was rolling a little, but she stayed upright. She leaned against a wall, gasping.

Lenin Square was deserted. Vasin checked his watch. Half past twelve. A ten-minute walk to the Adamovs’ apartment, and he would be rid of her.

A car rumbled into view. “Shit,” Masha said and gripped Vasin’s arm with two small, strong hands.

An old-model Volga police car entered the square from Engels Avenue, waddling on soft tires across the tram tracks.

“Here. Quick.”

Maria’s hands darted to the sides of Vasin’s face, closing behind his ears. She pulled his head down to hers. Vasin felt the heat of her lips on his as the yellow headlights illuminated them. Her face had a feral smell of sweat, as well as something sour and chemical. After a kiss that lasted seconds he pushed her away, staggering backward. The squad car had already swung past them and was cruising away down Lenin Prospekt.

“What was that?”

Masha had also recoiled and leaned against a young plane tree.

“Insurance, Chekist,” she said eventually.

“Excuse me?”

“The musor—the cops — saw us. Together. What are you gonna tell them when you turn me in?”

Vasin was speechless. He had been checkmated, perfectly, by an addled girl in a single move.

“So you can fuck off and leave me alone, Comrade Major.” Maria Adamova turned, gripping the narrow tree trunk, and vomited almost delicately into the flower bed.

“You can’t keep me from following you, wherever you’re going.”

Masha wiped her mouth on her plastic sleeve and looked Vasin up and down with undisguised distaste.

“So you’re going to stick to me.”

“Like a tail to a vixen.”

Masha cracked a smile, despite herself.

“Come on, then. I know where we can get some coffee.”

Vasin took Maria’s arm and steered her out across the buffeting wind that swept Lenin Square. His lost hat was scampering in the wind like a puppy.

VII

The long rows of wooden huts were unlit, and the gravel courtyard in which they stood was infused with the stink of engine oil. On the porch of the largest hut Masha fumbled for a light switch that illuminated a single, flyblown bulb.

“Keys are in the pot.”

She pointed to a flowerpot with old paintbrushes sticking out of it wedged on a windowsill. Vasin took hold of the brush handles and found that paint and brushes had long ago dried into a single plug. He picked it out and found the key below. The padlock snapped open with a well-oiled click.

Masha found a table lamp and switched it on. The wooden barrack was surprisingly spacious. The room was entirely lined with bookshelves, desks, and filing cabinets. To one side stood a draftsman’s sloped sketching table, with a ruler and set-square attached to its surface with wires. In the far corner stood an Army-type truckle bed with the gray blanket neatly tucked in. A row of tall military boots stood in front of an old oak wardrobe.

“Who lives here?”

“A good man. He lets me use it when I need to.”

“Where has he gone?”

“Olenya. It’s in the Arctic somewhere.”

“What’s his name?”

Vasin immediately regretted the question. A fragile understanding had grown between them as they had walked though the nighttime streets. Now she snatched it away.

“Ask your colleagues, Comrade Chekist.”

She tossed her wet, ripped macintosh onto the floor and collapsed on the bed, the fight drained out of her.

“Well,” she said. “Coffee?”

The tiny kitchen area was as neat as a ship’s galley. Vasin found a pair of tin mugs, a steel jar of Cuban coffee, condensed milk, a paraffin Primus stove. He shook it to check it was full and pumped up the stove’s pressure with the little plug pump. Then he tipped a little alcohol from a corked bottle onto the burning cup and lit it to produce a fine blue streak of flame. A satisfying knack, remembered in Vasin’s fingers from childhood. He opened up the vents of the main burner gently and blew them all into life, then filled a dented pot from the tap and set it on the roaring stove.

“We all used to live like this, you know.”

Maria’s voice sounded unnaturally loud in the dark hut.

“Adamov. All the old scientists. The engineers. When they first started working here after the war, everyone lived in barracks like this one while they were putting up all those new buildings. There used to be partitions in them, all the way down. Tiny, little rooms. One bathroom, down there at the end. One kitchen.”

“Even you?”

“Yes, even us. They offered Adamov a proper apartment in the old town. He said, not until everyone has one.”

“Very admirable.”

The water began rolling in the pot. Vasin stirred in four spoonfuls of coffee and turned down the Primus.

“It was luxury,” Masha continued, her voice petering out as if she was talking to herself. “Compared to Leningrad, everything seemed luxurious. Adamov found me there, you know. After he came back from the North.”

The North? Vasin popped a triangular hole into the lip of the condensed milk tin with a can opener and dribbled the white syrup into their coffee mugs.

“And your anonymous friend who still lives here?”

“He stayed on in the barracks after everyone else moved out. Took over the whole hut and burned the old partitions in his stove. He preferred honest wooden planks to concrete walls. Wise man. He knows everything that goes on around here.”

“They didn’t make him move?”

Masha gave a snort.

“Haven’t you worked it out yet? The Golden Brains of Arzamas do exactly as they please. They want to live in an old wooden barrack full of cockroaches? Of course, sir. Crazy? Sure. But we are all very, very crazy.”

Abruptly Masha flipped herself over in bed and rose on her elbows, her face in the light.

“Crazy-crazy-crazy,” she hissed, widening her eyes in an exaggerated mime, watching Vasin in the blue light of the Primus flame. “Fucking cray-zee.”

He brought the hot mug to Masha and squatted next to the bed, his face level with hers. The mask of mockery fell away. She accepted the steaming coffee and took a sip.

“Damn, that’s good.”

Vasin sipped too. Army-style: strong, milky, and sweet.

“You were happy here.”

“Yeah. Happy.”

“So, how did you end up on the roof of the Kino tonight?”

Her eyes met Vasin’s, and he saw himself, tiny, in her pupils, suspended like a prehistoric fly in amber.

“Ask me some other time.” She swigged down the last of the coffee. “You’ll hear the vixen’s tale.”

Vasin straightened and drained his mug of coffee. Masha lay huddled in the narrow cot, her eyes trembling in apparent sleep. He turned to leave, but habit made him tug the wardrobe door. It opened stiffly to reveal the dress uniform of an Air Force colonel, with an engineer’s crossed hammers on the breast. He slipped a hand inside and turned the lining of the breast pocket out into the light. The owner’s name was written in the military tailor’s square hand. KORIN P. A.

The freezing night air stung Vasin’s bruised eye, but he was in no hurry to return to Kuznetsov’s. He lit an Orbita and puffed it, enjoying the silence and solitude. He was just about to start for home when he heard it: a thin whine, almost like the buzz of a mosquito. The noise was so faint that he was ready to dismiss it as a ringing in his ears when it changed pitch. Higher, lower, and higher again. It was coming from somewhere inside the hut.

Ducking out of sight of the windows, Vasin followed the sound to the back of the cabin, near the kitchen area. Through a frosted pane he saw Masha, wrapped in a blanket, squatting by an open cupboard. Her hair was haloed by faint electric light. Abruptly, the whine resolved into a man’s crackling voice. Vasin strained to hear, but caught only one phrase that came directly after a snatch of music.

“This is the Voice of America….”

I

Vasin’s portable alarm clock rang under his pillow at three in the morning. He crept into the bathroom and closed the door carefully before switching on the light. In front of the mirror he prodded a ripe blue bruise that had hatched on his temple where Maria Adamova had kicked him. Nothing to be done about that. Apart from lie.

Vasin could feel her strong fingers on the side of his head, the urgent gesture with which she had pulled his face to hers. He thought of her and Adamov sitting at their grand dining table, still as waxworks. The slow swing of her walk as she had led him out of the apartment. And later, the fury in her eyes. The damage. His sister’s doomed, defiant spark.

“Fedya?” she’d called him on the roof of the Kino. “They said you had been poisoned.”

Fedya. The diminutive of Fyodor. Fyodor…Petrov?

Vasin examined his own face, bruised and puffy with sleep, in the mirror. Who was there to feel sorry for him, now that Vera had unleashed her hatred? Only his son, Nikita. Once a week they would escape for a few hours into the city. Gorky Park was a favorite, watching their fellow Muscovites stroll along the wide promenades. Ever since the boy had conquered his fear of the squeaking Ferris wheel many summers before, they rode it ritually on every visit. Now that he was thirteen, the ritual seemed defunct, but when Vasin suggested doing something different, Nikita just shrugged, and they ended up on the wheel anyway. What had he done this past Sunday instead? Something miserable, doubtless. Piano practice. Visiting his grandmother.

Vasin could be back in Moscow in time for next Sunday’s jaunt with Nikita if he just did what General Zaitsev demanded.

In his mind’s eye, Vasin scrolled through his colleagues, old and new, putting each one opposite him. What would you do in my shoes, Comrade? And you? The lumbering old alcoholics of the Moscow homicide squad, the smooth-faced new KGB men in their apparatchik suits and smelling of Troinoi eau de cologne. They all had the same answer. All of them would do exactly what they did every day. Sigh. Shrug. And sign. Of course, they would all sign the report.

Perhaps a year ago, new in the State Security job, Vasin would have done the same. His natural curiosity, a compulsion to follow the evidence to its logical conclusion combined with his urge to look around the next corner, was one thing. But until this moment that hunter’s instinct had always been rooted in good sense. His family needed to be looked after. His precious career needed nurturing. Vasin had watched the brown folders disappear inside General Orlov’s safe in complicit silence. “The higher morality of the Party,” Orlov had called it. The Air Force General’s young wife allegedly murdered at her dacha by armed intruders, although the nine grams of lead in her brain had come from her husband’s service weapon. The Politburo member’s heroin-addicted daughter found comatose in the studio of a well-known subversive artist, the heroin supplied by the nephew of a Party bigwig in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. The sins of the Soviet Union’s officially nonexistent ruling class that Vasin had uncovered, consigned to Orlov’s steel-lined chamber of secrets, as explosive as any bomb ever made at Arzamas.

But now the anchors of Vasin’s world had been abruptly tugged loose. Vera had threatened divorce. She probably meant it. She would get to keep the apartment, and Nikita. And how long could it be before General Orlov found out about Vasin’s affair with his terrifying Valkyrie of a wife?

Vasin’s life had become a barge drifting into a quickening current of chaos. After Orlov discovered he had been cuckolded, Vasin could be sure that his next posting would be as director of a penal labor colony up in Magadan. Or no — Orlov, with his priestly theories of justice and retribution, would take some time to consider Vasin’s punishment and make sure it was appropriately biblical. Back it up with a trumped-up corruption charge that would give him no choice but to accept. Something resonant with Arzamas, perhaps? Commandant of a uranium mine on the upper reaches of the Kolyma River. He’d be a bald, poisoned wreck in five years.

A pulse surged through Vasin’s bruised temple, sending a bloom of pain through his face. Perhaps he would be able to unearth something in Arzamas. Something to trade with Orlov. With the kontora. With anyone powerful enough to save his doomed carcass from Siberia.

Vasin had one more day in Arzamas.

It was time to get up to Olenya and talk to Pavel Korin.

He left Kuznetsov a scribbled note:

Gone sightseeing. Back tonight. Don’t wait up.

II

The airstrip at Arzamas was a simple affair. A runway and a row of hangars, a prefabricated concrete terminal and control tower. A pair of Antonov-8 transports stood with their rear ramps down on the apron, spilling bright light onto a team of loaders manhandling cargo.

The spotty-faced duty sergeant scanned Vasin’s KGB identity card, his Institute pass signed by Adamov, and his travel order to Arzamas without curiosity.

“Got a billeting order, Comrade Major? It’s jam-packed in Olenya these days.”

“I’m not staying. In and out. Classified documents from the Lubyanka for Colonel Korin.”

The kid nodded reverently and copied Vasin’s details into a flight manifest. Vasin took the stamped piece of cardboard labeled “Movement Order” and tried to make himself comfortable on a hard bench in the waiting room. In the pocket of his uniform greatcoat a paper bag of boiled sausages jammed into bread rolls from the station café warmed his thigh.

“Passengers for Olenya!”

Vasin woke abruptly and looked about the waiting room. As he had dozed, a dozen fellow travelers had gathered about him. They were a motley group of civilians and military engineers, some clutching document cases and blueprint rolls, others nursing Army kit bags. Nobody spoke. Vasin’s breakfast had gone cold in his pocket. They filed out onto the tarmac into a swirl of fine, wet snow, guided by the yellow glow of the Antonov’s lights. There was still no hint of dawn in the blackness of the eastern sky.

The steel-ribbed interior of the aircraft resembled a ship’s hull. It was stacked to the ceiling with wooden crates secured by webbing and straps. Canvas seats folded down from the walls. Vasin squeezed in beside an older man who wore Arctic gear of padded breeches, full-length sheepskin coat, and Army-issue fur hat. Vasin’s neighbor looked him over wordlessly as he stuffed grimy wax plugs into his ears. The ramp creaked shut with a squeal of hydraulics, and the cabin lights went off without warning. The transport’s engines rose to a roar, and Vasin could see the snow streaming into a roiling tunnel behind the propellers.

It was Vasin’s first time in an airplane. He felt anxiety tighten his bladder as the Antonov lurched into the air, climbing steeply into the gathering snowstorm. He had left the earth and was now in the vertiginous, mechanical world of the cloud dwellers. The high places from which shiny planes dropped deadly bombs on mere earth dwellers below. Involuntarily Vasin grabbed his neighbor’s arm. The man smiled, steel teeth gleaming in the cabin’s red emergency light. The plane steadied as they rose above the cloud canopy. The moonlight illuminated a vast prairie of cloud. It was pale silver, thought Vasin, like the landscape of a dream.

III

The Arctic sun dawned over the lake at Olenya, a pale streak in the southern sky. The men who looked up from their work saw it as an elongated, almost rectangular patch of light shimmering above the horizon. The meteorologists called it a “polar mirage.” Not the sun but a mere reflection of it rising on some distant, slightly less frigid corner of the Soviet Union far to the south. A false dawn, then.

Nature mocks mankind, thought Vasin as he crunched across the snow toward a line of refueling trucks by Olenya’s runway. It mocks man with visions of what he craves the most. In the desert, mirages of pools of cool water. Here, in the Arctic, men see visions of the life-giving sun peeping impossibly around the curve of the earth.

In a parked bus a row of pale, youthful faces pressed up against the windows like anxious young mothers seeing their babies off to school on the first of September. Engineers, Vasin guessed. He pulled open the door.

“Colonel Korin?”

“He’s out on the apron.” A slight kid, swaddled in Army-issue sheepskin, finished stuffing papers into a leather document case. “I’m going over there now.”

They walked side by side across hard-packed ice. On the runway, floodlit by a circle of arc lamps creating a steaming halo in the night’s gloom, stood the pencil-like form of a Tupolev-95 bomber. The aircraft had been painted a brilliant metallic white all over. But the bomb bay doors and part of the fuselage of the once-sleek aircraft had been cut away. The payload she carried stuck out underneath like a pregnant belly: it was unmistakably a bomb, almost cartoonishly so, with a fat belly, snub nose, and fins. The steel casing was at least eight meters long and two wide.

“Lord,” said Vasin.

The young engineer grinned.

“Big, isn’t she? We spent all night loading her. Twenty-seven tons of cement inside that baby. Nearly two and a half times the bomber’s normal weapon load. More than triple the size of any device we’ve ever loaded.”

Cement? Of course. Dummy bombs, in preparation for the test.

“That’s Korin.” The kid pointed to a powerfully-built man with a thick gray beard who stood framed in a blaze of arc light. He wore uniform breeches under a heavy sheepskin aviator’s coat. His angular face had once been handsome but was now hard and dented as an old cast-iron stove.

A huddle of soldiers and sergeants squatted by a radio truck muffled in their winter coats. Vasin joined them. Voices came crackling over the radio.

“Final request for visual confirmation from ground crew.”

Korin strode over and leaned into the truck, taking the radio receiver in a gloved hand.

“Colonel Korin confirming all normal. Nasha detka krepko pristegnuta. Our kid is tightly strapped in.” The pilot’s voice came loud and steady over the radio’s hiss.

“Load trim checks complete. Starting engines.”

One by one, the pilot fired up the four turboprop engines, each of them powering two oppositional propellers. Korin pointed both his thumbs up to the sky and the pilot did the same. Vasin had no idea what the gesture meant, other than it was something Yankee. The overloaded aircraft began its slow taxi toward the runway.

Something like a real dawn had come by now. The rising sun illuminated the steaming breath of men and the exhaust boiling from the aircraft’s engines in a weak golden light. The men around Vasin watched the Tupolev trundle down the extended runway with professional eyes.

“Shas’ yebnit,” grunted one of the old hands through missing front teeth. “She’ll fucking crash. It’s too damn big.”

“Molchat’! Yazyk t’e vyrvu, pizdyuk yebuchy. Shut up or I’ll rip your tongue out, cunt!” called Korin. Vasin recognized the argot of the Gulag immediately.

The pilot lined his aircraft up on the runway and braked for the final preflight check. Korin raised his field glasses and watched the engines winding up to full power for takeoff. Maybe she is too damn big, Vasin thought, watching the belly of the bomb accelerating barely two meters clear of the tarmac. But no. The Tupolev lifted off late, but gracefully. In a slow arc of black exhaust she turned north, following the receding night.

“Colonel Pavel Korin?”

“Who are you?” The voice was deep and imperious.

“Major Alexander Vasin.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you about Maria Adamova.”

Korin made no perceptible movement, but Vasin saw concern pass across his face. The Colonel’s eyes flicked to the green KGB flashes on Vasin’s uniform greatcoat.

“Has something happened to her?”

“No. She’s okay. But it almost did.”

“Who are you, Major Alexander Vasin?”

“State Security.”

The Colonel made no attempt to disguise the distaste that pulled at the side of his mouth like a fishhook.

“Don’t fuck with me, Major. What’s wrong?”

“Do you want to talk about it here?”

Korin looked around. Black exhaust smoke was drifting across the airfield. Fuel trucks were revving up one by one to return to base. He checked his large aviator’s watch.

“The kukla—the dummy — drops in thirty-one minutes. We can talk after that. Come to my quarters after breakfast.”

IV

Korin’s billet in Olenya was an anonymous wooden building just like his digs in Arzamas, knocked together and painted a dull military green. A trickle of smoke came from the stovepipe and frost had spread in fantastic patterns over the window glass. Vasin knocked loudly on the door. Silence. After her brilliant dawn entrance, the sun had ascended into a bank of unbroken cloud, leaving Olenya to make do with a pale wash of gray light.

A polished black limousine turned in to the yard. The car was ungainly as a truck, but its chunky lines had an old-fashioned elegance. The ZiS — the largest sedan ever produced by the Stalin Factory — was the preferred conveyance of people’s commissars of the prewar generation. The car rolled to a halt in front of the hut, and Korin climbed out of the backseat. He gestured to Vasin to come inside and stamped up the steps after him. Small puffs of sawdust floated down from the ceiling as the front door slammed behind them. Korin shrugged out of his heavy coat, hauled off his boots, and turned to Vasin, fists on his hips, formidable even in his stockinged feet.

“Okay. Now tell me.”

“Maria tried to kill herself,” Vasin said. “Last night.”

Korin remained impassive.

“How do you know?”

“I was there on the roof of the Kino Moskva. I talked to her and brought her down. She asked me to bring her to your place, and not to report it.”

“And you didn’t?”

“No.”

“Wasn’t it your duty?”

“Yes. But I felt sorry for her.”

“Sorry.” Korin’s voice was flat with disbelief. “I’m sure you will put this experience you had with Comrade Adamova to its proper use.”

Vasin knew better than to bother protesting his good intentions to a hard old bastard like Korin.

“Spit it out, man. Why are you really here?”

“You saw Fyodor Petrov at the Adamovs’ the night he died.”

“I did.” Korin’s voice betrayed nothing.

“Just before he went home and committed suicide.”

“If you say so.” Korin gave a contemptuous grunt. “Major, are you planning to take me in for questioning?”

“No.”

“Then that will be all. I have to be back at the workshop.”

Vasin turned his cap in his hands. He’d encountered men of Korin’s type before. A survivor of the NKVD’s torture cellars, if he had to guess. Unbending as an old oak.

“You were in the camps, Colonel.”

“What’s it to you?”

“Kolyma? Magadan?”

“Does it make any difference?”

“Would you believe me if I said that those times are past? I was a cop until a couple of years ago. A police detective, not KGB.”

Korin remained silent.

“I don’t think Fyodor Petrov killed himself.”

Again, silence.

“Was he close to Adamova?”

“Leave Maria alone.”

“I believe that you and she are good friends. She told me she admires you. So I’m asking you if she was involved with Petrov.”

Korin ran a stubby hand through his beard.

“If I tell you, will you promise to stay away from her?”

“I’m not here to lie to you, Colonel. I can’t in conscience promise that.”

To Vasin’s surprise, Korin grinned, and slipped into the familiar form of address.

“Conscience, eh? You wouldn’t have lasted long in ’thirty-seven, little pigeon. You ‘can’t in conscience’! Ha! That isn’t the way you Chekists used to talk.”

“Times change. Even the kontora changes.”

“Listen to me then, Major, if times are so different. I’ll tell you why you should stay away from Masha, and we’ll leave it to your conscience to decide. Okay?”

Korin made his way stiffly to the kitchen area at the back of the hut and rummaged for a tin of tea. He pointed to a Primus stove, even more battered than the one in Arzamas. Vasin noticed that three fingers of his left hand were missing their tips.

“Light that.”

He tossed Vasin a box of matches and held up his damaged hand.

“Frostbite. Fiddly thing, that stove.”

Korin brewed his tea strong and black. Vasin noticed that he held his mug on the insides of his cupped hands. An old convict habit born in freezing places where every gram of heat is precious.

They sat on a pair of sagging armchairs in front of an incongruously splendid new radio.

“Masha lost her family in the war. I lost my family in the war. But she was a smart one. Just after the war I agreed to teach an evening class for an old professor of mine who was sick. Foundation course in applied mathematics at the Engineering Institute in Leningrad. Masha was the bright button of the class. Good heart too. About the same time, Adamov was looking for people to come to Arzamas to build the first generation of…devices. I agreed to come and introduced the two of them after a lecture. She caught his eye. Long story short, they got married. We all ended up in Arzamas. So now we’re family, Masha and me. Did you know that she survived in Leningrad through the German blockade?”

Vasin briefly considered trying to bluff, but instead shook his head.

“During the heroic siege, the whole city was cut off by the Fascists for nine hundred days. Millions of people were trapped without food. Masha’s parents starved to death. Left her alone to fend for herself. Do you know how people survived? You don’t, because it’s not in any history you would have read. They ate corpses, boy. By the time the authorities rounded up all the children at the end of the blockade, they were wild as rats, and twice as hungry. When I first met Masha, she looked like a scarecrow. Pair of green eyes on a sack of bones. Her stammer was so bad she could barely speak. I’d give her chocolates and she’d turn away and wolf them down. In the classroom she was quiet and attentive. But outside she would get into fights. When Adamov brought her to Arzamas, she didn’t trust anyone. Tough as you like, in many ways. But her mind is…broken. Even after all these years, she’s still on the verge of a collapse. That’s why you need to leave her alone.”

Korin continued before Vasin had a chance to speak.

“If what you say is true, Major, you did a good thing when you brought her to my place instead of handing her over. I’m telling you this so that you understand. Because if those headshrinkers and trick cyclists ever get hold of her, they’ll lock her up and electrocute her brain. Make her one of the living dead. The old man wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

“The old man?”

“Adamov needs Masha. And we need Adamov. The whole world needs Adamov.”

Korin’s words hung in the air.

“The world?”

“Young man, either you’re stupid or you’re playing a game that’s too clever for me. Why? Because of RDS-220. The Big Bomb, the kids call it.”

“How is it different from all the other bombs?”

The old man wiped a hand across his face.

“Where did you say you’d come from?”

“I didn’t. Moscow sent me. Special Cases.”

“I have a special case for you. Stoke up that stove. The wood’s outside, under the porch.”

The split pine logs were full of sap, and left white stains on the wool of Vasin’s greatcoat. A group of soldiers slouched past, smirking, as Vasin stumbled up the steps, dropping logs as he went.

“Where did you spend the war, little pigeon?”

“At school in Moscow. My father was a military engineer.”

“One of us! Where did he study?”

“Moscow Higher School of Aviation Construction. On Leningradsky Prospekt.”

“Ha. In the thirties? I might well have taught him.”

Korin took out a papiros, the worker’s cigarette that consisted of a long cardboard tube with five centimeters of powerful dark tobacco at the end. The brand, Belomorkanal, was named for Stalin’s great canal from the White Sea to the Baltic, built by convict labor. Punishment put to the good of the Motherland. Vasin had met some old convicts who’d worked on it. Korin puffed the papiros into life, moving it from one side of his mouth to the other as though he were chewing a straw.

“I was sent to Murmansk in ’forty-two. Assembling American Douglas bombers after they arrived from Scotland on the Arctic convoys. Getting them into the air. Training our pilots to fly them, our mechanics to arm them, adapting them to carry our heavy munitions. Not a bad job, while it lasted. But one day I flew a mission running air support for a British convoy. The pilot was an American kid, younger than me. He was teaching us to use the bomb-sighting apparatus to spot U-boats and drop depth charges. You’ve got to fly in low, surprise ’em and catch ’em before they dive. But we found a German destroyer instead, and it raked us with antiaircraft fire. Dan Bilewsky was the Yankee pilot’s name. His people were Poles, I suppose. Anyway, we were a few miles south of Tromsø with the starboard engine on fire. Bilewsky managed to gain enough height to get us back to the coast. Best piece of flying I’ve ever seen. Corkscrewed up on one engine. As soon as we were over land, he ordered us all to bail out. We were low — only about two hundred meters — but we jumped. I was the last out before the engine detached and put the crate into a left-hand spin. Uncontrollable. Threw me upward on the roll. I thought, Well, that’s your luck, Korin. You jump out of a fucking plane and fly up instead of down. Anyway, my parachute just had enough time to open, and I landed in a snowdrift. Walked away with bruises.”

“And the pilot?”

“Killed, of course. Don’t interrupt, listen. My point is from that day onward, I saw war. The Norwegians took us prisoner. Me, the two bombardiers, gunner, navigator. Handed us over to the Germans. Our navigator had broken his collarbone, so an SS sergeant shot him in the face. Casual-like, as if he had other things on his mind. Then they put us on a stinking freighter to Riga, where they needed slave labor. We were with a hundred other Soviet prisoners. None of us had any food for a week. When we arrived, they put us to work digging mass graves. Burying the corpses of partisans and Jews. Cold. Hunger. You don’t know what those words mean. But I do.

“Anyway. By the next fall our armies were pushing down from Leningrad. Our aviation blasted the shit out of the port of Riga for three weeks straight. You could get warm just by standing in the cindery wind that blew from the city. The Fascists were panicking, scrambling to save their backsides. One morning we woke up in the cattle shed where we’d been billeted and discovered our guards had gone. Just like that. They couldn’t even spare the bullets to shoot us.

“Our guys were exhausted and starving, ready to die where they lay. I took up with a group of Yakuts. Tough bastards, these Siberian hunters. They robbed our sick of whatever food they could find hidden in their filthy clothes and we struck out to find our lines. I tell you, when I saw that first red star on a Soviet fur cap I cried like a baby. Malyshev’s boys, the Fourth Shock Army. The officer was from Odessa, and he gave us some pork fat they’d captured and propped us in a row by a fire. We leaned against each other like frozen laundry. I ate like a wolf, then puked it all up again. It was the happiest hour of my life. Until you sons of bitches came. The Chekists arrested us for desertion. But that’s a different story. The point is: I know what war is.”

“And now you make bombs.”

Korin spat out a piece of tobacco and leaned forward so that his face was centimeters from Vasin’s.

“We make bombs so that there won’t be another war.”

The words came with such vehemence that Vasin felt Korin’s spittle landing warm on his face.

“RDS-220 will be the biggest thermonuclear bomb ever built. Three thousand times more powerful than the Yankees’ Hiroshima bomb. At least. Maybe five thousand. A hundred megaton yield. That’s what Khrushchev ordered up. That means it has the explosive force of a hundred million tons of high explosive. Twenty times bigger than any atom bomb that’s ever been detonated before. A bomb that can kill every living thing in a two-hundred-kilometer radius.”

Vasin struggled to take in the numbers.

“And why are we making this infernal machine? Because it will be the end of war. You only fight if you think you can win. RDS-220 transforms war into suicide. There can be no victory, only total annihilation. Do you see? We are nearly there. Peace, forever. This is why the world needs Adamov.”

The old man swigged the dregs of his tea.

“What has this to do with Maria Adamova and Fyodor Petrov, Colonel?”

“Maria is a good and faithful wife. That’s all you need to know. It’s also the truth.”

Korin put his empty mug down on the table with an emphatic clunk. The conversation was over. Obediently, Vasin stood.

“Just one thing more, Colonel. Was Adamov in the camps as well?”

“Of course he fucking was.”

“What for?”

Korin jerked to his feet, looming over Vasin and sending his tin mug rolling across the floor.

“Same reason any of us was in the camps. Some ambitious little fucker denounced him. Some Chekist had a quota to fill. That’s what for.”

The old man’s eyes were blazing.

Vasin bowed his head. “Thank you, Colonel.”

“You leave Masha alone.”

“There may be a killer in Arzamas. You don’t think it’s important to find him?”

“Did nothing I told you sink in, boy? The only thing that matters in Arzamas is the bomb.The bomb that will end war. Forever. Can you think of anything more important that that?”

“I got it, Colonel.”

“He got it.”

Korin muttered the last words to himself. Exhausted, the old man subsided back into his chair, closed his eyes, and in a second was asleep. A snore rumbled inside his chest like a growl. Vasin loaded the stove with more logs, pushed the damper half-closed with his toe, and left the Colonel snoring in the warming room.

Outside, the pale Arctic sun appeared for a moment high above the surrounding buildings. But it gave no warmth.