PART TWO BURNED AND BLINDED
We stopped at a checkpoint where we were issued dustproof jumpsuits and dosimeters. We drove in open cars past the buildings destroyed by the blast, braking to a stop beside an eagle whose wings had been badly singed. It was trying to fly, but it couldn’t get off the ground. One of the officers killed the eagle with a well-aimed kick, putting it out of its misery. I have been told that thousands of birds are destroyed during every test; they take wing at the flash, but then fall to earth, burned and blinded.
CHAPTER FIVE
TUESDAY, 24 OCTOBER 1961, EVENING SIX DAYS BEFORE THE TEST
I
As the Antonov-8 dropped beneath the low cloud cover, Vasin saw that Arzamas had been transformed by the day’s snowfall. The airfield was a white scar across the black of the forest. Beyond, the city was visible as a lonely island of light in an ocean of woodland. The pilot fought crosswinds all the way down, landing in a jolting skid that had Vasin grasping the canvas of his seat. As the rear doors opened, a chill blast of wind sent pain throbbing across his bruised face.
To his relief, Vasin found no reception committee waiting for him. Zaitsev and his boy Efremov would doubtless be scouring the town for him but clearly hadn’t yet checked the airport’s movement orders. Good. He might be able to steal a couple more hours of freedom.
Vasin hitched a ride into town with a group of fellow passengers. After the numbing cold of the aircraft, the fierce heat of the little bus stupefied the group into the companionable silence of bathers in a hot sauna.
Vasin disembarked at Lenin Square. Evening was already closing over the city, and the trams were crammed with citizens hurrying home. The high windows of the Adamovs’ apartment on Marx Street were dark. Vasin waited at the flimsy shelter of a bus stop at the end of the block. She was easy to spot, her stride as upright and self-conscious as that of a schoolgirl stepping up to the podium to collect a prize. She was dressed formally in a smart topcoat and head scarf, and under her arm she carried a fresh loaf wrapped in paper. She walked right past him, her gaze fixed on some point in the middle distance, not on the ground in front of her like the other pedestrians. Vasin caught up with her as she was about to turn in to the apartment building
“You look well, Maria Vladimirovna.”
She seemed unsurprised to see him.
“You look like someone kicked the shit of you.”
“Someone did.”
Maria pursed her mouth and glanced up and down the street.
“Better come inside. You need to clean that up.”
They mounted the steps in silence. The apartment was dark and silent.
“Professor Adamov?”
She answered with an eye roll and pushed the door shut with a backward kick.
“At work.”
Snapping on the lights as she went, she led Vasin through the dining room and into a large, white-tiled bathroom.
“Sit.”
Vasin obediently perched on the edge of the cast-iron tub. Maria opened a large medicine cabinet and began rummaging inside. The shelves were crammed with medicine bottles, some with the plain typed labels Vasin recognized as being from the Kremlin Polyclinic, others in their original American bottles with the bright logos of Bayer and Merck. He peered over her thin shoulder at the labels: phenobarbital, phenothiazine, chlorpromazine. Tranquilizers.
Maria picked out a bottle of iodine. As the cabinet door clicked closed, her face appeared in the mirror, and for a long moment she paused to look at herself. Vasin, out of her eyeline, could not stop himself from staring at her reflection. Fine mousy hair, cropped short like that of a French tomboy film star. Thin, sharp little features. High cheekbones supporting those huge eyes, too big for her head. And her head too big for a thin neck and narrow shoulders, like a child’s. Seeing Vasin watching her, she grimaced briefly. Tipping iodine onto a wad of cotton wool, she set to swabbing Vasin’s temple with brusque, businesslike movements. The spirit burned hot on the bruise.
“You didn’t report me?”
“I did not.”
“And now you’ve come to present the bill. Let me guess.”
“No, there isn’t going to be a bill. I know what the nuthouse is like.”
“Sure, you are a very knowledgeable man. That is obvious to everyone.”
She recorked the iodine bottle with a sharp slap and turned back to replace it in the medicine cabinet. Next, Vasin knew, she would ask him to leave. He felt a sudden, piercing urge to return to the complicity they had shared in Korin’s barrack.
“My sister died in an asylum. They tied her down and electrocuted her.”
Masha froze in mid-movement, her back still to Vasin.
“I haven’t told many people that.”
“So why did you tell me?”
“I don’t know why,” Vasin said. “I wanted you to know I understand.”
Maria nodded. She seemed to be turning his words over in her mind, like a magpie examining a bauble. Vasin felt suddenly stupid, exposed. This is work, fool, he told himself. A wash of pain from his temple mercifully interrupted that train of thought. It had been a mistake to come here straight after Olenya. The conversation with Maria had wriggled suddenly from his grasp, like a stick in a fairy tale that turns into a serpent. He stood.
“Maria Vladimirovna. May we continue our talk later?”
“Wait.”
“Your husband will be home soon.”
Maria’s hand was on his arm, her grip tightening as he tried to pull free.
“Little rat.”
He looked away from her face, suddenly too close to his as she pulled herself toward him, her words hissing in his ear.
“That’s what my schoolmates called me. Little Rat. And Stock Bones, for the packets of bones they sell for soup at the meat shop. Only twelve kopecks a kilo. Around here, my neighbors feed it to their pet dogs and buy chicken hearts for their fucking cats. But that’s what I am, a bag of bones. A little rat.”
Her grip eased, and Vasin sat back down heavily on the edge of the bath.
“I see what you think. The Director’s young, well-dressed wife, she gets whatever she wants. She lives in this huge apartment, spoiled as a butcher’s cat. She’s got no real problems, so she invents some of her own. I saw you eyeing those pill bottles. A hysteric. A junkie.”
“I don’t see why you were on the roof. There is no obvious road from here”—Vasin glanced about the spotless bathroom—“to the Kino. The reason is hidden, to me. As are you.”
Anger kindled in her pinched face.
“You think this is me? Think I want of any of this? I do it for him. I wear these beautiful, foreign clothes from some commission shop on Oktyabrskaya for him. For Adamov. All of these vanities are his way of saying he will protect me from the world. And he tells the world, ‘This woman has power. Respect her.’ You have your uniform with stars on your collar. My husband has his own stars on his chest. I have my French clothes. You have no idea how much the other wives hate me. I can feel their glances on me, flung like spit. But I never show weakness. I learned that a long time ago. The pack always turns on the weakest, and then they die.”
“You’re the weakest?”
“Obviously not. Otherwise I wouldn’t have survived.”
“Survived what? Leningrad?”
Masha stiffened.
“You’ve been spying on me?”
“Your friend Pavel Korin is very concerned about you.”
“Where on earth did you find him?”
“Where you told me I would find him. When we had coffee at Korin’s barrack.”
Masha folded her arms tightly across her chest.
“Christ. You told him that I’d brought a Chekist to his house?”
“Not sure I mentioned that part.”
Masha curled her lip in frank disbelief.
“I’m sure the next time you gentlemen get together to chat about the welfare of crazy Masha, you’ll get around to it.”
“We weren’t chatting about your welfare. We were talking about a death. Which is why I am here in Arzamas. Maybe you forgot. Perhaps you have things on your mind. Perhaps Fyodor was the thing on your mind.”
“Is this an interrogation now? How nice. I should have let you leave.”
“Korin told me how you and Adamov met in Leningrad, Maria. About your childhood. The siege.”
“So you know all there is to know about me then.”
“I’m starting to realize how little I know about you. For instance, I don’t know why you had an affair with Fyodor Petrov.”
Her face became hard.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“On the roof, you called me Fedya.”
“Those pills turn you inside out. I must have been raving.”
Vasin saw steel in her gaze, cold and steady.
“So you and Petrov were never lovers?”
“Believe what you want. You already have your theories.”
Maria’s gaze was defiant. A flash of the ferocity he had seen on the roof of the Kino the previous night played across her face.
“That’s not ‘no.’ ”
“Are you trying to frighten me, Major? If you think you can use what happened at the Kino against me, you can’t. My husband will not be shocked by anything you can tell him. This is none of your business.”
“This is precisely my business. Fyodor Petrov dies under, let’s say, unusual circumstances. The last people to see him alive were you, your husband the Director, and Colonel Korin. He was your lover, and a week later, you swallow a bunch of pills and try to jump off the roof of a cinema.”
“You’re wrong. It’s private and…unconnected.”
“Fine.” Meaning — enough.
Maria had broken off her gaze and was staring down at her own stockinged feet. When she looked up again, she had rearranged her face. She was suddenly calm, absolutely in control of herself, her anxiety wiped away without a trace. They might as well have been discussing the weather.
“Thank you, Major Vasin, for what you did last night. I still believe that you are a good man. It’s good to have someone to talk to. I don’t, you see. All the men in my life have their great deeds to accomplish. No time for the likes of me. Which is fine. But…Do you talk to your wife, Major? I mean really talk. You do have a wife, don’t you?”
He began to answer, but she reached up and covered his mouth with her small hand. It smelled of medicinal spirit.
“Let’s do something normal tomorrow. Not complicated. Not clever. Will you take me for an ice cream in Lenin Park? I can be there at eleven.”
It took a second for it to register. Will you. The familiar form. Something very simple, but also shockingly intimate.
“Yes.”
This time she allowed him to stand and leave. He let himself out.
It would not be normal, Vasin knew. Or uncomplicated.
II
The light in the living room windows, bright and artificial as orange soda, proclaimed that Kuznetsov was at home. As Vasin mounted the stairs, he heard the record player cranked up, filling the stairwell with a plaintive Ukrainian folk melody. He opened the door into a pall of cigarette smoke. Kuznetsov sprang to his feet, spilling the contents of a full ashtray onto the carpet.
“For fuck’s sake, Vasin! Where the hell have you been?”
“Good evening to you too. I hopped on a plane to Olenya.”
“You are joking.”
“I wanted to see Korin.”
Kuznetsov’s hands flew to his temples in a pantomime gesture of incredulity.
“Without permission?”
“I thought Adamov’s authority was all that one needed in Arzamas.”
Kuznetsov made a strangled sound of exasperation.
“Don’t. Don’t even move. Stay there.”
Kuznetsov picked up the telephone and dialed a four-digit number, his eyes fixed on Vasin as though he might disappear once more if he took his eyes off him.
“He just showed up….Olenya…Yes. Olenya…Leave my mother out of this, Efremov. Yes, I will. Of course…Understood.”
He replaced the receiver with an exhausted sigh and flopped back down on the sofa.
“You.”
“I know. I didn’t mean to get you into trouble. What did Efremov say?”
“Nothing repeatable. Zaitsev wants to see you. Tomorrow.”
Vasin leaned on the doorpost to tug off his tall service boots.
“Got any dinner for me, old man?”
“Help yourself.” Kuznetsov sighed. “The kontora won’t let you starve.”
When Vasin emerged from the kitchen holding a deep bowl of steaming solyanka, he found Kuznetsov studiously absorbed in a pile of papers that covered the coffee table. He settled into one of the armchairs and ate hungrily.
“Good soup.”
“General Zaitsev will be so delighted to hear you’re enjoying our hospitality.”
Vasin continued spooning soup and eyed Kuznetsov steadily until he deigned to look up.
“Whatever you think you are up to, Vasin, it’s not going to work. Not the way you’re doing it.”
“What exactly am I doing?”
“You are not in Moscow. You can’t just disappear. This is Arzamas, six days before the biggest nuclear test in history. The kontora is going nuts over security. The Institute is a madhouse. Nobody is sleeping. The whole city’s burning truckloads of fucking lightbulbs, working round the clock. And then there’s you. Barreling around, pulling the top brass away from their jobs. Trying to start some half-assed murder investigation. Hitching rides to Olenya. I mean, what planet are you on, Vasin? How do you think this bull-in-a-china-shop act is going to help you? You’ll just get yourself shut down, and pronto.”
“Zaitsev wants to shut me down anyway. Today was meant to be my last day, as you know.”
Kuznetsov did not reply, but instead scooped his papers aside, revealing a pair of heavy shot glasses. He fished a foreign-looking bottle out from under the table.
“Drink? Rum from Cuba. All the rage since Comrade Castro’s visit.”
He poured two glasses, brimful.
“Our Latin comrades drink it with the juice of limes and coconuts. But until we get a fraternal delivery of those, we’ll have to drink it our way.”
Kuznetsov raised his glass. Vasin, after a moment’s hesitation, followed suit.
“To us.”
Kuznetsov breathed out sharply, made his mouth an O, and knocked back the liquor.
“Good stuff. Sorry, again. If I got you into any trouble.”
“Ah, Vasin. Don’t say things like that. I’ll start to worry you’re doing something you shouldn’t.”
“I should have told you about Olenya.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. Not if you wanted to ever get up there. I would have had to tell the kontora, and they would have stopped you. But you already knew that.”
“I knew that.”
Kuznetsov poured another round. Vasin noticed that half the bottle was already finished.
“Do I feel a serious man-to-man conversation coming on so you can advise me to go home?”
Kuznetsov ignored the question. He pointed at the shiny Melodiya record player.
“Be a good sport and turn it over. It’s the music from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. Great film.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“Excellent adaptation.”
“Are we going to talk about the short stories of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol this evening?” Vasin returned to his chair and picked up his brimming glass. “That would be most pleasant.”
Kuznetsov grinned, gestured silently with his glass, and knocked it back.
“So what did our lugubrious friend in Olenya have to say? I’ve always found Colonel Korin rather mysterious, myself.”
“He told me to go fuck my mother.”
“That may even be true.”
“Hasn’t got much time for the likes of us Chekists, as he puts it.”
“Ah. Of course.”
“Of course what?”
“There’s not much love lost. You can understand. So many of them…you know.”
“So many of them sat?” Vasin didn’t need to finish the phrase. Sat always meant sat in jail.
“Right.”
“You knew about Korin?”
“He has that look, if you know what I mean.”
“Who else from the Citadel was in the Gulag?”
“I don’t think Fyodor Petrov spent much time felling trees in the Arctic.”
“Be serious, Kuznetsov.”
“I don’t know. Honestly. You’d have to visit the library and look it up.”
Kuznestov winked theatrically.
“Good to know you’re keeping abreast of things.”
“Did it happen to any of yours?”
“It?”
Kuznetsov and Vasin both sat forward, facing each other like chess players across the coffee table.
“The repressions. The purges. Was anyone from your family arrested?”
Kuznetsov shook his head.
“No, nobody? Or no, you don’t want to tell me?”
“Both, I suppose. Nobody ever asked, apart from the personnel department when I joined up. How about yours?”
“My wife’s grandparents. Razkulachevenny.” Meaning they had been arrested during the campaign against wealthy peasants. It had happened to so many that it had become a verb.
Kuznetsov grunted indifferently.
“What the devil are we talking about this for?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because nobody ever talks about it. Maybe because it’s still important to some people.”
“Nobody talks about it because it’s ancient history. Five years since we played out that historic blame game. Khrushchev’s big speech.” Kuznetsov slipped into the General Secretary’s distinctive southern peasant drawl: “ ‘Comrades, the Party made a mistake. There was some overzealousness in the elimination of enemies of the people.’ ”
Vasin cracked a smile at the outrageous irreverence, but Kuznetsov’s voice became urgent and confiding.
“He was right. It was understandable. We were fighting for survival. Deadly enemies were all around, determined to sabotage our glorious October Revolution. Some innocents suffered. Regrettable. Investigations were undertaken, thousands of victims rehabilitated. And pardoned, posthumously. Soviet justice has been restored. Our worthy leaders have cleansed the record. That is their gift to us. Our generation is blameless, and the older generation guilty. And the only men who are called upon to atone for their sins lie safely in their graves. Some of them in the same mass graves as their victims. Some of them in the Kremlin wall. Case closed. We are free of guilt, free of the past, free to build the future. Why dig that up?”
“I don’t think Korin is free of the past.”
“I thought he didn’t talk to you.”
“Just got that impression.”
Kuznetsov snorted and flopped back on the sofa. He fumbled for a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“You’re amazing, Vasin. I’m watching with bated breath to see what you do next.”
“Nice to have an appreciative audience.”
“First you make it obvious that you’re planning to turn the Petrov case into a murder inquiry. Then you take an unauthorized jaunt to one of the most sensitive military installations in the Motherland. On the day of a test flight. Like you’re some secret agent sent to spy on the program. Then you start asking questions about who sent who to the Gulag. Where do we take things from here? Start asking around about who’s fucking the General’s wife?”
It took Vasin’s rum-addled wits a second to work out that Kuznetsov must mean Zaitsev’s wife, not Orlov’s. Zaitsev’s wife. There was a terrible thought. Vasin reached out to pour the last of the rum.
“What did you mean, ‘who sent who to the Gulag’?”
“You know what I meant, Vasin. Everyone in that generation denounced each other. Kill or be killed. Wolves’ laws. That’s how it was.”
“And you don’t think that kind of betrayal can echo down the years?”
“Maybe it can. But it’s not our job to listen to echoes.”
“I thought we listened to everything.”
“I can tell you what my job is. To secure the future of our country against our enemies. Or don’t you think that we have enemies?”
“We have enemies.”
“And traitors? There are no traitors? How about saboteurs?”
“Don’t speak to me like I’m a child, Kuznetsov.”
“Okay, you’re not a child. But you’re an idealist. You’re pursuing the truth, as you see it, without regard for the consequences. I call that naïve. And dangerous. I told you what the stakes were. The jeopardies that threaten the work here. Zaitsev and the military goons waiting to tear the cloud dwellers down. So whatever it is you think you are doing, for God’s sake remember that. Don’t do the bastards’ work for them. The past is gone. Let it lie.”
Vasin and Kuznetsov sank back into the soft upholstery, exhausted as an old couple after an argument. Both lit cigarettes and smoked in silence. The only sound was the soft, rhythmic hiss of the record as it turned on its endless inside loop.
“What was the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology?”
“Vasin, go to hell. You’re impossible.”
“We’re on the same side.”
“If you say so.”
“You can help.”
“Help you put someone in jail for Petrov’s murder and put another bar on your collar? Do you mind if I don’t?”
“I understood what you said about the Citadel. I’m not a fanatic. But it’s more complicated than you think.”
“Mate. Can you do me one favor? One? I don’t want to know. Really. Please, keep your fucking complications to yourself.”
I
As the Antonov-8 dropped beneath the low cloud cover, Vasin saw that Arzamas had been transformed by the day’s snowfall. The airfield was a white scar across the black of the forest. Beyond, the city was visible as a lonely island of light in an ocean of woodland. The pilot fought crosswinds all the way down, landing in a jolting skid that had Vasin grasping the canvas of his seat. As the rear doors opened, a chill blast of wind sent pain throbbing across his bruised face.
To his relief, Vasin found no reception committee waiting for him. Zaitsev and his boy Efremov would doubtless be scouring the town for him but clearly hadn’t yet checked the airport’s movement orders. Good. He might be able to steal a couple more hours of freedom.
Vasin hitched a ride into town with a group of fellow passengers. After the numbing cold of the aircraft, the fierce heat of the little bus stupefied the group into the companionable silence of bathers in a hot sauna.
Vasin disembarked at Lenin Square. Evening was already closing over the city, and the trams were crammed with citizens hurrying home. The high windows of the Adamovs’ apartment on Marx Street were dark. Vasin waited at the flimsy shelter of a bus stop at the end of the block. She was easy to spot, her stride as upright and self-conscious as that of a schoolgirl stepping up to the podium to collect a prize. She was dressed formally in a smart topcoat and head scarf, and under her arm she carried a fresh loaf wrapped in paper. She walked right past him, her gaze fixed on some point in the middle distance, not on the ground in front of her like the other pedestrians. Vasin caught up with her as she was about to turn in to the apartment building
“You look well, Maria Vladimirovna.”
She seemed unsurprised to see him.
“You look like someone kicked the shit of you.”
“Someone did.”
Maria pursed her mouth and glanced up and down the street.
“Better come inside. You need to clean that up.”
They mounted the steps in silence. The apartment was dark and silent.
“Professor Adamov?”
She answered with an eye roll and pushed the door shut with a backward kick.
“At work.”
Snapping on the lights as she went, she led Vasin through the dining room and into a large, white-tiled bathroom.
“Sit.”
Vasin obediently perched on the edge of the cast-iron tub. Maria opened a large medicine cabinet and began rummaging inside. The shelves were crammed with medicine bottles, some with the plain typed labels Vasin recognized as being from the Kremlin Polyclinic, others in their original American bottles with the bright logos of Bayer and Merck. He peered over her thin shoulder at the labels: phenobarbital, phenothiazine, chlorpromazine. Tranquilizers.
Maria picked out a bottle of iodine. As the cabinet door clicked closed, her face appeared in the mirror, and for a long moment she paused to look at herself. Vasin, out of her eyeline, could not stop himself from staring at her reflection. Fine mousy hair, cropped short like that of a French tomboy film star. Thin, sharp little features. High cheekbones supporting those huge eyes, too big for her head. And her head too big for a thin neck and narrow shoulders, like a child’s. Seeing Vasin watching her, she grimaced briefly. Tipping iodine onto a wad of cotton wool, she set to swabbing Vasin’s temple with brusque, businesslike movements. The spirit burned hot on the bruise.
“You didn’t report me?”
“I did not.”
“And now you’ve come to present the bill. Let me guess.”
“No, there isn’t going to be a bill. I know what the nuthouse is like.”
“Sure, you are a very knowledgeable man. That is obvious to everyone.”
She recorked the iodine bottle with a sharp slap and turned back to replace it in the medicine cabinet. Next, Vasin knew, she would ask him to leave. He felt a sudden, piercing urge to return to the complicity they had shared in Korin’s barrack.
“My sister died in an asylum. They tied her down and electrocuted her.”
Masha froze in mid-movement, her back still to Vasin.
“I haven’t told many people that.”
“So why did you tell me?”
“I don’t know why,” Vasin said. “I wanted you to know I understand.”
Maria nodded. She seemed to be turning his words over in her mind, like a magpie examining a bauble. Vasin felt suddenly stupid, exposed. This is work, fool, he told himself. A wash of pain from his temple mercifully interrupted that train of thought. It had been a mistake to come here straight after Olenya. The conversation with Maria had wriggled suddenly from his grasp, like a stick in a fairy tale that turns into a serpent. He stood.
“Maria Vladimirovna. May we continue our talk later?”
“Wait.”
“Your husband will be home soon.”
Maria’s hand was on his arm, her grip tightening as he tried to pull free.
“Little rat.”
He looked away from her face, suddenly too close to his as she pulled herself toward him, her words hissing in his ear.
“That’s what my schoolmates called me. Little Rat. And Stock Bones, for the packets of bones they sell for soup at the meat shop. Only twelve kopecks a kilo. Around here, my neighbors feed it to their pet dogs and buy chicken hearts for their fucking cats. But that’s what I am, a bag of bones. A little rat.”
Her grip eased, and Vasin sat back down heavily on the edge of the bath.
“I see what you think. The Director’s young, well-dressed wife, she gets whatever she wants. She lives in this huge apartment, spoiled as a butcher’s cat. She’s got no real problems, so she invents some of her own. I saw you eyeing those pill bottles. A hysteric. A junkie.”
“I don’t see why you were on the roof. There is no obvious road from here”—Vasin glanced about the spotless bathroom—“to the Kino. The reason is hidden, to me. As are you.”
Anger kindled in her pinched face.
“You think this is me? Think I want of any of this? I do it for him. I wear these beautiful, foreign clothes from some commission shop on Oktyabrskaya for him. For Adamov. All of these vanities are his way of saying he will protect me from the world. And he tells the world, ‘This woman has power. Respect her.’ You have your uniform with stars on your collar. My husband has his own stars on his chest. I have my French clothes. You have no idea how much the other wives hate me. I can feel their glances on me, flung like spit. But I never show weakness. I learned that a long time ago. The pack always turns on the weakest, and then they die.”
“You’re the weakest?”
“Obviously not. Otherwise I wouldn’t have survived.”
“Survived what? Leningrad?”
Masha stiffened.
“You’ve been spying on me?”
“Your friend Pavel Korin is very concerned about you.”
“Where on earth did you find him?”
“Where you told me I would find him. When we had coffee at Korin’s barrack.”
Masha folded her arms tightly across her chest.
“Christ. You told him that I’d brought a Chekist to his house?”
“Not sure I mentioned that part.”
Masha curled her lip in frank disbelief.
“I’m sure the next time you gentlemen get together to chat about the welfare of crazy Masha, you’ll get around to it.”
“We weren’t chatting about your welfare. We were talking about a death. Which is why I am here in Arzamas. Maybe you forgot. Perhaps you have things on your mind. Perhaps Fyodor was the thing on your mind.”
“Is this an interrogation now? How nice. I should have let you leave.”
“Korin told me how you and Adamov met in Leningrad, Maria. About your childhood. The siege.”
“So you know all there is to know about me then.”
“I’m starting to realize how little I know about you. For instance, I don’t know why you had an affair with Fyodor Petrov.”
Her face became hard.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“On the roof, you called me Fedya.”
“Those pills turn you inside out. I must have been raving.”
Vasin saw steel in her gaze, cold and steady.
“So you and Petrov were never lovers?”
“Believe what you want. You already have your theories.”
Maria’s gaze was defiant. A flash of the ferocity he had seen on the roof of the Kino the previous night played across her face.
“That’s not ‘no.’ ”
“Are you trying to frighten me, Major? If you think you can use what happened at the Kino against me, you can’t. My husband will not be shocked by anything you can tell him. This is none of your business.”
“This is precisely my business. Fyodor Petrov dies under, let’s say, unusual circumstances. The last people to see him alive were you, your husband the Director, and Colonel Korin. He was your lover, and a week later, you swallow a bunch of pills and try to jump off the roof of a cinema.”
“You’re wrong. It’s private and…unconnected.”
“Fine.” Meaning — enough.
Maria had broken off her gaze and was staring down at her own stockinged feet. When she looked up again, she had rearranged her face. She was suddenly calm, absolutely in control of herself, her anxiety wiped away without a trace. They might as well have been discussing the weather.
“Thank you, Major Vasin, for what you did last night. I still believe that you are a good man. It’s good to have someone to talk to. I don’t, you see. All the men in my life have their great deeds to accomplish. No time for the likes of me. Which is fine. But…Do you talk to your wife, Major? I mean really talk. You do have a wife, don’t you?”
He began to answer, but she reached up and covered his mouth with her small hand. It smelled of medicinal spirit.
“Let’s do something normal tomorrow. Not complicated. Not clever. Will you take me for an ice cream in Lenin Park? I can be there at eleven.”
It took a second for it to register. Will you. The familiar form. Something very simple, but also shockingly intimate.
“Yes.”
This time she allowed him to stand and leave. He let himself out.
It would not be normal, Vasin knew. Or uncomplicated.
II
The light in the living room windows, bright and artificial as orange soda, proclaimed that Kuznetsov was at home. As Vasin mounted the stairs, he heard the record player cranked up, filling the stairwell with a plaintive Ukrainian folk melody. He opened the door into a pall of cigarette smoke. Kuznetsov sprang to his feet, spilling the contents of a full ashtray onto the carpet.
“For fuck’s sake, Vasin! Where the hell have you been?”
“Good evening to you too. I hopped on a plane to Olenya.”
“You are joking.”
“I wanted to see Korin.”
Kuznetsov’s hands flew to his temples in a pantomime gesture of incredulity.
“Without permission?”
“I thought Adamov’s authority was all that one needed in Arzamas.”
Kuznetsov made a strangled sound of exasperation.
“Don’t. Don’t even move. Stay there.”
Kuznetsov picked up the telephone and dialed a four-digit number, his eyes fixed on Vasin as though he might disappear once more if he took his eyes off him.
“He just showed up….Olenya…Yes. Olenya…Leave my mother out of this, Efremov. Yes, I will. Of course…Understood.”
He replaced the receiver with an exhausted sigh and flopped back down on the sofa.
“You.”
“I know. I didn’t mean to get you into trouble. What did Efremov say?”
“Nothing repeatable. Zaitsev wants to see you. Tomorrow.”
Vasin leaned on the doorpost to tug off his tall service boots.
“Got any dinner for me, old man?”
“Help yourself.” Kuznetsov sighed. “The kontora won’t let you starve.”
When Vasin emerged from the kitchen holding a deep bowl of steaming solyanka, he found Kuznetsov studiously absorbed in a pile of papers that covered the coffee table. He settled into one of the armchairs and ate hungrily.
“Good soup.”
“General Zaitsev will be so delighted to hear you’re enjoying our hospitality.”
Vasin continued spooning soup and eyed Kuznetsov steadily until he deigned to look up.
“Whatever you think you are up to, Vasin, it’s not going to work. Not the way you’re doing it.”
“What exactly am I doing?”
“You are not in Moscow. You can’t just disappear. This is Arzamas, six days before the biggest nuclear test in history. The kontora is going nuts over security. The Institute is a madhouse. Nobody is sleeping. The whole city’s burning truckloads of fucking lightbulbs, working round the clock. And then there’s you. Barreling around, pulling the top brass away from their jobs. Trying to start some half-assed murder investigation. Hitching rides to Olenya. I mean, what planet are you on, Vasin? How do you think this bull-in-a-china-shop act is going to help you? You’ll just get yourself shut down, and pronto.”
“Zaitsev wants to shut me down anyway. Today was meant to be my last day, as you know.”
Kuznetsov did not reply, but instead scooped his papers aside, revealing a pair of heavy shot glasses. He fished a foreign-looking bottle out from under the table.
“Drink? Rum from Cuba. All the rage since Comrade Castro’s visit.”
He poured two glasses, brimful.
“Our Latin comrades drink it with the juice of limes and coconuts. But until we get a fraternal delivery of those, we’ll have to drink it our way.”
Kuznetsov raised his glass. Vasin, after a moment’s hesitation, followed suit.
“To us.”
Kuznetsov breathed out sharply, made his mouth an O, and knocked back the liquor.
“Good stuff. Sorry, again. If I got you into any trouble.”
“Ah, Vasin. Don’t say things like that. I’ll start to worry you’re doing something you shouldn’t.”
“I should have told you about Olenya.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. Not if you wanted to ever get up there. I would have had to tell the kontora, and they would have stopped you. But you already knew that.”
“I knew that.”
Kuznetsov poured another round. Vasin noticed that half the bottle was already finished.
“Do I feel a serious man-to-man conversation coming on so you can advise me to go home?”
Kuznetsov ignored the question. He pointed at the shiny Melodiya record player.
“Be a good sport and turn it over. It’s the music from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. Great film.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“Excellent adaptation.”
“Are we going to talk about the short stories of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol this evening?” Vasin returned to his chair and picked up his brimming glass. “That would be most pleasant.”
Kuznetsov grinned, gestured silently with his glass, and knocked it back.
“So what did our lugubrious friend in Olenya have to say? I’ve always found Colonel Korin rather mysterious, myself.”
“He told me to go fuck my mother.”
“That may even be true.”
“Hasn’t got much time for the likes of us Chekists, as he puts it.”
“Ah. Of course.”
“Of course what?”
“There’s not much love lost. You can understand. So many of them…you know.”
“So many of them sat?” Vasin didn’t need to finish the phrase. Sat always meant sat in jail.
“Right.”
“You knew about Korin?”
“He has that look, if you know what I mean.”
“Who else from the Citadel was in the Gulag?”
“I don’t think Fyodor Petrov spent much time felling trees in the Arctic.”
“Be serious, Kuznetsov.”
“I don’t know. Honestly. You’d have to visit the library and look it up.”
Kuznestov winked theatrically.
“Good to know you’re keeping abreast of things.”
“Did it happen to any of yours?”
“It?”
Kuznetsov and Vasin both sat forward, facing each other like chess players across the coffee table.
“The repressions. The purges. Was anyone from your family arrested?”
Kuznetsov shook his head.
“No, nobody? Or no, you don’t want to tell me?”
“Both, I suppose. Nobody ever asked, apart from the personnel department when I joined up. How about yours?”
“My wife’s grandparents. Razkulachevenny.” Meaning they had been arrested during the campaign against wealthy peasants. It had happened to so many that it had become a verb.
Kuznetsov grunted indifferently.
“What the devil are we talking about this for?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because nobody ever talks about it. Maybe because it’s still important to some people.”
“Nobody talks about it because it’s ancient history. Five years since we played out that historic blame game. Khrushchev’s big speech.” Kuznetsov slipped into the General Secretary’s distinctive southern peasant drawl: “ ‘Comrades, the Party made a mistake. There was some overzealousness in the elimination of enemies of the people.’ ”
Vasin cracked a smile at the outrageous irreverence, but Kuznetsov’s voice became urgent and confiding.
“He was right. It was understandable. We were fighting for survival. Deadly enemies were all around, determined to sabotage our glorious October Revolution. Some innocents suffered. Regrettable. Investigations were undertaken, thousands of victims rehabilitated. And pardoned, posthumously. Soviet justice has been restored. Our worthy leaders have cleansed the record. That is their gift to us. Our generation is blameless, and the older generation guilty. And the only men who are called upon to atone for their sins lie safely in their graves. Some of them in the same mass graves as their victims. Some of them in the Kremlin wall. Case closed. We are free of guilt, free of the past, free to build the future. Why dig that up?”
“I don’t think Korin is free of the past.”
“I thought he didn’t talk to you.”
“Just got that impression.”
Kuznetsov snorted and flopped back on the sofa. He fumbled for a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“You’re amazing, Vasin. I’m watching with bated breath to see what you do next.”
“Nice to have an appreciative audience.”
“First you make it obvious that you’re planning to turn the Petrov case into a murder inquiry. Then you take an unauthorized jaunt to one of the most sensitive military installations in the Motherland. On the day of a test flight. Like you’re some secret agent sent to spy on the program. Then you start asking questions about who sent who to the Gulag. Where do we take things from here? Start asking around about who’s fucking the General’s wife?”
It took Vasin’s rum-addled wits a second to work out that Kuznetsov must mean Zaitsev’s wife, not Orlov’s. Zaitsev’s wife. There was a terrible thought. Vasin reached out to pour the last of the rum.
“What did you mean, ‘who sent who to the Gulag’?”
“You know what I meant, Vasin. Everyone in that generation denounced each other. Kill or be killed. Wolves’ laws. That’s how it was.”
“And you don’t think that kind of betrayal can echo down the years?”
“Maybe it can. But it’s not our job to listen to echoes.”
“I thought we listened to everything.”
“I can tell you what my job is. To secure the future of our country against our enemies. Or don’t you think that we have enemies?”
“We have enemies.”
“And traitors? There are no traitors? How about saboteurs?”
“Don’t speak to me like I’m a child, Kuznetsov.”
“Okay, you’re not a child. But you’re an idealist. You’re pursuing the truth, as you see it, without regard for the consequences. I call that naïve. And dangerous. I told you what the stakes were. The jeopardies that threaten the work here. Zaitsev and the military goons waiting to tear the cloud dwellers down. So whatever it is you think you are doing, for God’s sake remember that. Don’t do the bastards’ work for them. The past is gone. Let it lie.”
Vasin and Kuznetsov sank back into the soft upholstery, exhausted as an old couple after an argument. Both lit cigarettes and smoked in silence. The only sound was the soft, rhythmic hiss of the record as it turned on its endless inside loop.
“What was the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology?”
“Vasin, go to hell. You’re impossible.”
“We’re on the same side.”
“If you say so.”
“You can help.”
“Help you put someone in jail for Petrov’s murder and put another bar on your collar? Do you mind if I don’t?”
“I understood what you said about the Citadel. I’m not a fanatic. But it’s more complicated than you think.”
“Mate. Can you do me one favor? One? I don’t want to know. Really. Please, keep your fucking complications to yourself.”
CHAPTER SIX
WEDNESDAY, 25 OCTOBER 1961 FIVE DAYS BEFORE THE TEST
I
Vasin rose through layers of sleep like a thrashing diver, struggling upward through water. He awoke tangled in unfamiliar blankets in a strange room to the rising wail of a siren.
“Kutuz…Kuznetsov!”
He skidded into the kitchen, his bare feet sliding on the smooth linoleum. He caught himself on the doorframe.
“Slow down, Young Communist. Don’t break your neck. It’s only an air raid.”
Kuznetsov’s voice came from inside his room, from which he emerged a moment later with unlaced boots and a winter overcoat over flannel pajamas. In his hand he held a sheaf of notes and a dog-eared reference book.
“I mean, only an air-raid drill. Grab the milk from the fridge. And put on an overcoat.” Kuznetsov’s voice receded as he trudged down the stairs. “Bring your passport, and something to read.”
Vasin tugged on his tracksuit and coat and followed Kuznetsov down the stairs at a run. He caught up with him on the ground floor.
Kuznetsov stood holding open a heavy steel door leading to a cellar.
“The patrol should be around within the hour to check that we’re all safe and sound. Come down and meet our lovely neighbors. They’re already downstairs, taking cover from the Imperialist aggressors.”
The shelter was a low basement, equipped with rows of neatly made-up bunk beds around the walls. A dozen men and women, motley in dressing gowns and fur coats, slumped in easy chairs and sat at a pair of tables, slumbering or reading. A few glanced at Vasin without particular curiosity. In one corner a pair of young twins laid out a desultory game of checkers. Kuznetsov, acknowledging nobody, bounced down himself into an easy chair and cracked open his book. Vasin sat alone on a bunk, regretting having given away his copy of Krokodil. The group in the cellar, settled in their various attitudes of study, seemed to him a bizarre parody of a university library reading room on a quiet afternoon.
The banging on the door was curt and officious. Eyes turned to Kuznetsov. With a sigh he rose and unrolled the door bolt.
“Greetings, early-rising Comrades, we have the roll call ready here for you…”
Kuznetsov paused, midsentence. The door opened to a pair of young sergeants with KGB epaulets. The elder one saluted.
“Good morning, sir. Major Kuznetsov?”
“Okay, okay. I know who sent you. Back upstairs, Vasin. We’re getting dressed. There’s somewhere we need to be.”
The uniform suited some men, fitting as though they had grown up in it. Kuznetsov was not such a man, Vasin decided as he clattered down the stairs behind him. In his breeches, tunic, and pistol belt, Kuznetsov looked like an actor in a provincial theater stuffed into a badly fitting costume. Their breath steaming in the morning chill, they scrambled into the back of a UAZ jeep for the short drive into town. The sirens’ wail swelled and ebbed, relentless, as they passed the speakers mounted on each lamppost. Lenin Square was deserted except for a pair of street sweepers’ handcarts, abandoned by their owners. A tram stood by the intersection with Kurchatov Street, empty, except the driver had forgotten to extinguish its single, cyclopean headlight.
Instead of turning in to the kontora’s forecourt, they slewed past, drove on to another square official building that stood on a high bluff overlooking the old monastery.
“Kommandatura,” Kuznetsov mumbled by way of explanation. “Military command headquarters. The lair of General Pavlov. Head soldier around these parts. Runs everything in this city — outside the walls of the Citadel, that is.”
That familiar, masculine smell of military installations: floor polish, new uniform cloth, strong tobacco. Vasin thought of the Army training camps he and his fellow students had been made to attend while he was at university. Cold showers, mud, bawling voices. The Army’s endless hierarchy of petty cruelties, the kingdom of the stupid. They followed a group of infantry officers hurrying up a broad concrete staircase to the top floor.
Around forty men stood in groups in a large, carpeted anteroom, speaking in low voices. Most wore Army green, with a scattering of KGB blue. As Vasin and Kuznetsov joined them, a set of double doors at the opposite end of the room swung open. A heavyset man lumbered in, carrying a teacup. Everyone snapped to attention. General Pavlov ignored their presence. He sat down heavily at a long conference table and took a slow swig of his tea.
Pavlov glared at his wristwatch and then at the clock on the wall as though daring them to contradict each other. Half past six.
“Enough.”
His voice carried effortlessly. A young orderly acknowledged the order meekly and hurried out. Within a minute the wailing sirens ceased, leaving a silence that rang in the ears. Pavlov decided that he needed to drain the last of his tea, and needed the room to watch him do it too.
“At ease.” The words came from deep in Pavlov’s chest; he could have been clearing his throat. “Nu? Well?”
An adjutant stepped forward nervously, neat in a freshly pressed tunic.
“The air-raid test was a success, Comrade General. Antiaircraft crews at their posts in good order. All but one of the new emergency generators started and are running. We have had phone reports from all the shelters. Ninety-four percent of the civilians accounted for and at their muster stations…”
“The civilians. Where’s our Comrade Major General Zaitsev?”
On cue, the sound of boots on the stairs. Major Efremov stepped in smartly, followed by Zaitsev, puffing from the long climb. The crowd parted before him. Vasin sheltered from the General’s roving, furious eye behind a tall Air Force captain.
“General, good of you to join us.”
Zaitsev settled wordlessly into a chair beside Pavlov.
Efremov stepped forward, opening a leather folder and proffering it to the commandant. Pavlov fixed the younger man with an out-from-under stare of disdain, taking in his polished boots, pomaded hair.
“Six percent of our little pigeons unaccounted for, Zaitsev.” Pavlov raised his eyebrows along with the tone of his voice. This, Vasin imagined, indicated sarcasm. “Decided not to get out of their soft beds?”
“The KGB will make inquiries, Comrade,” Efremov began. “But as you are aware, the members of the Institute are not always able to immediately…”
The adjutant’s voice trailed off as Pavlov hauled himself up and walked over to a set of tall windows that filled one end of the room. He looked like nothing so much as a side of beef in a uniform: the skin of his face and hands blotchy red, his neck straining against the collar of his tunic. Gray hair stuck up at the top and was shaved short at the back and sides. On his uniform four rows of medal ribbons were punctuated by the single, unmistakable gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union, on its scarlet ribbon.
“And what is this?” Pavlov pointed curtly.
Obediently, the officers turned to look across the landscape of rooftops that spread below them. One large glass roof was illuminated from below, the glow of the fluorescent tubes fading into the spreading dawn. Even Vasin could see that it belonged, undoubtedly, to one of the workshops of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics.
“Major?”
Pavlov ground a fat finger into the glass of the window in the direction of the illuminated laboratory, then tapped it for emphasis, leaving a greasy mark.
“A shocking breach of regulations, sir.” Efremov’s voice was theatrically shrill with indignation. “It seems to be the new laboratory complex. I assure you the duty security officers were fully briefed on the revised blackout procedures.”
“And the boys in white coats told them to get lost. To them, this is all provided for their amusement! This whole establishment, so that they can live in the clouds! Is this negligence? Or sabotage?”
“We will find those responsible immediately.”
Pavlov tapped the window once more, for emphasis, then stalked out of the room. Zaitsev remained silent, arms crossed over his chest, his face a brewing storm. For a long moment nobody moved.
“Well? What are you all standing around for, like heifers waiting for a bull to fuck them?” Zaitsev bellowed. “Dismissed!”
Vasin and Kuznetsov joined the rush for the door. By the time they had reached the ground floor, most of the Army men had peeled off into their offices, leaving only their KGB colleagues crowding into the cloakroom like disgraced schoolboys.
—
The day was fully born now, a pall of low cloud promising more snow. After the overheated fug of the Kommandatura, the morning air felt cold and clean on Vasin’s face.
“So that was the charming General Pavlov.”
Kuznetsov rolled his eyes as he buttoned his overcoat.
“Zaitsev’s even more evil twin? Hero of the Soviet Union, my ass,” Kuznetsov answered in a low voice. “That Pavlov. Desk jockey. Politburo ass-kisser. Heroically cleared out all the old warhorses who’d actually bled on the front. Pavlov’s war was about filling tank shells and fucking women munitions workers with tits like torpedoes. That’s what they say down at the kontora. But sometimes the meathead in green likes to show everyone that it’s the military that ultimately runs the show around here.”
“Vasin!”
Zaitsev had emerged at the top of the steps, punching his way into his overcoat as though the flapping cloth deserved a good thrashing. Vasin trotted back up and saluted smartly. Efremov, hovering at his boss’s side, wordlessly handed Zaitsev a piece of paper. Vasin recognized the list of movement orders from the previous day. The paper crumpled in the General’s fist as he thrust it forward.
“I never authorized a flight to Olenya.”
Vasin caught a whiff of the General’s hungover breath. As he looked up into Zaitsev’s porcine face, he noted the unshaven chin, a corrugated pattern of corduroy indented on the pale flesh. A night on the sofa? He bowed respectfully before the General’s halitosis.
“I was interviewing an important witness, Colonel Korin. Wanted to get the investigation done as quickly as possible. As per your orders, sir.”
Zaitsev snorted like a bad-tempered bull and took a step down, his face now level with Vasin’s. His voice was low and menacing.
“You were meant to be gone yesterday, but you’re still fucking here. You’re a hemorrhoid I can’t get rid of.”
“I…”
“Your orders do not trump what’s going on here. You’re in Arzamas, not in some Moscow whorehouse. And however big you think you are, Major Vasin of State Security from Special fucking Cases, however big your boss Orlov thinks he is, no one is bigger than what’s being built here in Arzamas. So go, run and bleat to your chief. Get your permissions from on high. But I swear to you. I swear to you, Vasin: Step out of line one more time, disappear one more time, and I will break you. Officially. Unofficially. Whatever it takes, I will do. But you will play by my rules. My. Fucking. Rules.”
Vasin paused to slowly wipe the flecks of Zaitsev’s spittle from his face. He stood to attention and saluted. As he walked down the steps away from the glowering General, Vasin felt his bowels turning to water.
II
Orlov’s private telephone network was one of Special Cases’ more ingenious secrets. Though of course it was not technically private, only a private use of something very public. “We hide in plain sight, Major,” Orlov had told Vasin when he briefed him on the system. “The most private place for a conversation can be in a crowd. The most secret place for a message may be on the front page of Pravda.”
The USSR’s railway network had its own telephone and telegraph system, independent of the All-Union Post and Telegraph, which connected all other calls. The secret was that Orlov had his own patched-in line, accessible from any railway station across the country. The network was antiquated — some of it even pre-Revolutionary — but secure for precisely that reason. No one in the kontora had much interest in listening in to the conversations of stationmasters and junction managers. A parallel phone system that covered the entire Soviet Union.
Vasin parted from Kuznetsov on the corner of Lenin Square and boarded a tram toward home. This time his companion made no protest, which surely meant that Zaitsev had made other arrangements to keep tabs on him. To give Vasin space to make a mistake. Sure enough, Vasin spotted two men in plain coats scramble aboard as the doors closed, studiously avoiding his eye as the tram gathered speed. Giving them the slip should be easy. Shaking them off so they didn’t realize they’d been shaken would be harder. Back at the apartment Vasin changed into his civilian clothes and stuffed a black beret into the pocket. He returned to the kontora on foot, watching his followers out of the corner of his eye. Once inside the building he nonchalantly made his way to the cafeteria and, as he waited in the queue to pay for his sandwiches, scanned the room. His shadows had remained outside.
A back door, a courtyard, a low wall behind a line of rubbish bins. The service gate stood open as a delivery truck backed crookedly out into the street. Vasin slipped past and worked his way back around the building. Through the dripping trees he spotted his watchers waiting docilely for him in a Volga sedan.
Two more trams, boarded and hopped off at the last moment, brought him to Arzamas’s small train station. Vasin found the operations room without difficulty. The duty stationmaster obeyed Vasin’s scarlet KGB identity card and showed him to a chunky iron telephone receiver that hung in a corner.
“We don’t use it much these days.” The stationmaster was a small, anxious hippo of a man, eager to please. “This branch is all electronic now.”
He pointed to a large wall-mounted board showing the Mid-Volga Railway Region dotted with red and green lights. A pretty, silent blond secretary hovered protectively close to her boss. Vasin’s professional eye caught the body language of an affair. Possibly recreational humiliation? He smiled at his own jadedness before nodding both back into their offices. What have you become, Vasin?
He dialed the four-digit number that got him a priority line to the local railhead: the city of Gorky. Another code, and he was connected to the trunk line to Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Station. Four tinny rings and an operator picked up. Raising his voice to be heard above the static, Vasin asked for Moscow Heavy Goods Ring Line Station, Number 262. Orlov’s Lubyanka office.
After a short wait Orlov came on the line, the loudest voice in a whispering cacophony of railway men’s chatter.
“Comrade! Good to hear from our fellow workers in the middle Volga! No problems? Traffic flow in your section good?”
“Nothing unexpected, sir.” Vasin had to almost shout; it was like trying to make himself heard in a crowded cocktail party. “The usual problems. The head of the local organization. Unhelpful. Very unhelpful.”
“Manageable?”
“Yes, sir. So far, manageable.”
A deafening electronic buzz made Vasin hold the receiver away from his ear for several seconds.
“Still with me?”
“Still with you, sir. Requesting a routine information check. Code 111.”
The highest urgency.
“I am listening.”
“Two files. Both 1937. First case, subjects: Comrades Matveyev. Markov. Adamov.”
Orlov’s simple security code to throw off any eavesdroppers, the first two names on any list were always to be nonsense. Then the real name. God loves trinities, Orlov had said.
“Second case: Comrades Ivanov, Sidorov, Petrov.”
“The last again please, Comrade?”
“Petrov. A. V. Petrov.”
“I hear you clearly and understand. And what information do you require?”
“A connection between the two cases. The comrades in Case One suffered a…serious derailment. In ’thirty-seven. I believe that the individuals in Case Two may have been responsible.”
“Responsible for the derailment? We will check our records.”
“My thanks.”
“Your diligence does you credit, Comrade. Call tomorrow. Same time.”
Vasin breathed a sigh of relief as he replaced the heavy steel receiver. Orlov’s voice had been friendly. Vasin’s wife was evidently still holding her tongue. No sign that the General had any idea about him and Katya.
III
Vasin glanced at his watch. He judged that he probably had a couple more hours before his minders began to grow suspicious.
A standard-issue statue of Lenin stood at the entrance to the main city park, his concrete face resolute as he gestured toward the glorious future. Vasin hurried through the concrete archway, past a forlorn row of refreshment stands shuttered for the winter. Their brightly painted fronts were decorated with cartoon animals. The signs said, SODA, DOUGHNUTS, COTTON CANDY. Nikita’s favorite. The Soviet city park, the space allotted to approved leisure activities. Walking. Eating sweet foodstuffs. Enjoying nature, tamed and framed and shorn of its wildness and hostility and laid out in carefully measured blocks, like a green model city. Also the designated space for all human activity not connected with labor. Courtship, for instance. Lovemaking in the spiky, pungent undergrowth. Strolling with infants. Talking to one’s children. A place where Soviet citizens were allowed to be solitary, though never truly alone.
It occurred to Vasin that his walks in Gorky Park were probably the closest he had ever come to spending time in private with Nikita. Had he really ever had a real conversation with his son? Whenever they were together, without the nagging presence of Vera, it had always seemed kinder to allow the boy the luxury of silence. Every time he asked his son a question, even a joking one, the boy’s face would pinch in earnest nervousness as he considered what would be the correct answer. The poor kid seemed always convinced that he was somehow at fault, but without ever knowing why.
An alley of birches gave on to a wide lawn, gray with melting snow and crisscrossed with footprints. By an empty bandstand Vasin caught a flash of electric blue, the only vibrant color in the monochrome landscape. Maria. From a distance, he watched her. On the street, in a crowd, she had walked upright and stiff as a windup doll. Now, when she thought she was alone, she kicked her boots through the snow like a child. Her hands were stuffed deep in her pockets, and her sharp, small face was almost hidden by the hood of her mackintosh. There was something about her fragility that sent a sudden, unexpected stab of protectiveness through him. He thought of her struggling, the strong kick to his face, as she had fought toward her fall the other night. The anger in that small body, the force of it. He walked out across the snowfield.
“Hi.”
“Hi yourself.”
He waited for her to continue, but she was back to the formal form of address. Vasin felt obscurely hurt.
“Aren’t you going to buy the girl an ice cream?”
The cafeteria overlooked a round, concrete-lined pond, black under the white sky. A few grandmothers sat in the coffee-scented warmth, minding babies in prams who were wrapped like parcels. He bought a couple of ice creams, the forty-eight-kopeck variety he had always loved, a square block of vanilla-flavored cream. They walked on, eating in silence. There was something about eating ice cream in the snow that Vasin had always found pleasingly strange. It was like swallowing winter.
“Good. Thanks.”
Maria paused by a rubbish urn to lick the last of the ice cream from its wrapper, then deposited her rubbish like a good citizen.
“I come here quite a lot. Never with company, though.”
“You’re lonely?”
“Always straight to the point. Maybe I always have been. What of it?”
She stopped and turned toward the maze of birches, her face hidden under her hood. Vasin let the silence between them grow.
“They’re all crazy. You know that, right?”
“Who?”
“The people here in this city. The power they command and the secrets they keep twist them. It’s hard to explain so that you might understand.”
Not so different from the rest of the world of the nomenklatura—the Soviet elite — Vasin thought. His year in Special Cases had been an education in the distorting power of privilege. How it can corrode men. And women.
“Was Petrov twisted? Adamov?”
“My husband is a good man.”
“If you say so.”
“Korin told you about Leningrad.”
“He told me some.”
“Where were you during the war?”
“Korin asked me exactly the same question. Does it matter?”
“Oh, yes. It matters.”
“Moscow. I was still at school.”
“So was I, until they closed the schools. No heat, no food, teachers all mobilized; some of my classmates made it out on the boats across the lake. To Ladoga. My father wanted to get me on the transport, but my mother said it was too dangerous. She was right. The Germans dive-bombed one of the ships. The water was full of little kids’ summer hats, floating back to the shore. My friend’s mother saw it. She drowned herself the next day. You didn’t see the war.”
“No. Not the way you did.”
“That siren, this morning. Second time in as many weeks, for fuck’s sake. Last time was on the morning Fedya died. I hate it.”
“Aren’t you used to it by now?”
“No, because one day it won’t be a drill. I think of that day a lot. The sky filled with bombs tumbling from the bellies of airplanes. Detonations like great doors slamming underground. The hard, solid things of the world, melting. Bricks, weightless, flying upward. Landslides of masonry and plaster. Buildings bursting like paper bags. Fire. Hot wind. Every time I hear that siren I think, This is the day we will all be erased from the world along with our death-breeding city. Every time I hear the siren, you know what I do? I put a pillow over my head and I wait. And then no planes come. Only another day to get through. Thinking about how that fucking siren was probably the last thing that Fedya ever heard.”
“You don’t go down to the shelter?”
“I’ll never go into a shelter again in my life. My neighbors hate me for spoiling their quota. Svetlana Ivanovna and her foghorn voice booming in the stairwell, exhorting all comrades to hurry to the basement. She never dares to knock on our door, but I can feel her dirty look as she passes. Her and the old cows muttering at the bread shop. ‘Arrogant little bitch,’ they say. ‘Whatever does the Director see in her?’ Hypocritical, cock-sucking cunts, every one of them.”
Vasin started involuntarily at the obscenity. Maria’s grimace of hatred turned into the beginning of a smile.
“I kept some bad company as a kid. It still comes out sometimes.”
“Sorry. Korin said you met Adamov in Leningrad.”
“He taught me. Pure mathematics. We both loved numbers. They’re hard, beautiful, concrete things that can’t ever be destroyed. All those infinite patterns, fixed until the end of time. Whether there are people to know it or not. We took comfort.”
“In each other?”
“In science. After what we had both been through. But yes. You’re right. We took comfort in one another. I was seventeen when we met. An orphan, by then. Street-smart, but still more kid than woman. Scarecrow, Adamov called me. ‘A pair of big green eyes up top, a pair of tough little fists in the middle, oversize man’s boots down below.’ I nearly punched the old goat when he tried to lay a hand on me.”
Maria smiled at the memory. Vasin suppressed a smile of his own at the thought of Adamov in the improbable role of old goat.
“He said, ‘I will look after you.’ And he has been as good as his word. My savior, I thought at the time. Like I told you. He is a good man.”
“And what happened on the roof of the Kino?”
“You’re bloody relentless, you know that?”
“It was pretty memorable. For me, anyway.”
“What part?”
There was mischief in her glance. Vasin thought of her hands gripping his face, the smell of her skin, and looked away.
“You tried to jump. Why?”
“Maybe I wanted to fly away. Escape.”
“Is that why you had an affair with Petrov? To escape?”
Masha turned to Vasin, defiant.
“You tell me something, then I’ll answer you. Do you think someone killed Fedya?”
“Maybe.”
“You’ve spoken to his colleagues?”
“Of course.”
“To Vladimir Axelrod?”
“Maybe.”
Masha’s face creased in distaste.
“Axelrod’s a pederast.”Pederast, criminal jargon. Masha spat the word. “I mean literally. He is a homosexual.”
“How do you know?”
She stopped walking, her eyes fixed on the snowy ground.
“Because Fedya was sleeping with him before he started sleeping with me. I told you, this place is full of deviants. If you think someone poisoned Fedya, start by asking his jealous lover boy.”
Masha turned abruptly and walked away.
IV
Vasin picked up his watchers once more, striding nonchalantly out the front door of the kontora without a sideways glance. Like dutiful dogs, the pair slipped into position behind him as he walked to the Institute. A mist was thickening, and the sky promised a new snowfall.
Vasin watched Adamov and his acolytes file out of the lecture theater. The Director’s eye slid over Vasin’s shabby civilian raincoat without noticing him. Axelrod trailed the group, walking alone. He and Vasin spotted each other at the same moment. To Vasin’s surprise, Axelrod pushed his way back through the crowd of young scientists. He was agitated.
“Major, I need to talk to you in private. I didn’t know where to find you so I called the State Security headquarters and…”
“They said they’d never heard of me.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m only a visitor here. But, Doctor, I was about to say just the same to you. We need to talk.”
Axelrod’s office was lined with orderly files and dominated by an outsize blackboard, which was covered in calculations. Nervously he swept a pile of papers aside and plumped a large ring binder marked TOP SECRET on the desk. On the cover the date—25 OCTOBER 1961—was stamped in thick black ink.
“Major, this is the latest design of RDS-220. We get a new version every week, updated with all the new parameters. Every department’s work, summarized, so everyone knows what everyone else is doing — the engineers, the metallurgists, the meteorologists.”
Axelrod began to leaf through the pages covered in figures, graphs, and engineering blueprints. “Here, the conventional explosives experts and the fission boys. And of course Adamov’s team, all the new yield projections of the main thermonuclear device…”
“Axelrod, are you crazy? This is classified!”
“So what? You could never understand a word of it.”
Axelrod registered Vasin’s look and paused.
“Oh. Sorry. Was that impolite? I do that sometimes. I’m rude to people, without meaning to be.”
“No, you’re right. There’s nothing here I would understand. Go on.”
Flustered, Axelrod resumed his search and smoothed the file flat on the table.
“Right here, the section on the casing is, was, Petrov’s work. It’s all gone. He rewrote it.”
“Who?”
“Adamov did, just days before the test. He’s reconfigured the whole damn apparatus.”
“Aren’t engineers always changing things? Why do I need to know this?”
Axelrod snatched at his rumpled hair in a gesture of confusion.
“Because the casing is everything Fyodor worked for. We debated its composition for months. Fyodor was passionate, adamant. And now that he’s gone, his work has gone too.”
“And you find this sinister?”
“No, I find it suspicious. You do not?”
“You are accusing Professor Adamov of being somehow complicit in Petrov’s death because of a disagreement over”—Vasin gently closed the folder and pushed it back across the table—“metallurgy?”
Axelrod deflated.
“I accuse nobody.”
Vasin paused. What Axelrod was saying might be important. But first he had to test if Masha was telling the truth about his relationship with Petrov. Gently, though. He didn’t want to spook Axelrod into silence. But if what Masha said was true, it was the moment to put Axelrod on the hook.
“Before we discuss this further there is something I wish to raise with you. As I said, I actually came here to speak to you, Dr. Axelrod. I have some questions about your relationship with Petrov. Your close friendship.”
Some men were hard to read, their countenances stone. Axelrod’s was an open book. Alarm passed across his grief-stricken face. Ask any interrogator — sitting is an eloquent business. Suspects sit according to the guilt they carry, though not always, as Vasin had learned, the guilt that you are looking for. They would sprawl and straddle, fidget, cross and uncross their legs. What they never, almost never, did was sit in a posture that was finite and irreducible, not a muscle stirring. Yet here was Axelrod, frozen to the spot as though posing for a photograph. His long-fingered hands lay immobile on his thighs, his whole body suddenly halted in its small motions. But his was not the stillness of calm, it was the paralysis of fear. When he spoke, Axelrod’s lips barely moved.
“My close friendship?”
“Is that not an accurate description?”
Axelrod went pale. Vasin pressed on, choosing his words delicately.
“Intimate friends.”
“Certainly not.”
“Relax, Comrade. I don’t care about Article 121. We leave locking up people like that to the cops. If you ask me, it’s a pointless task.”
Axelrod found motion, suddenly, like a paused film set once more to run. He sat forward, and his hands leapt at each other like a pair of fighting animals.
“It’s an outrageous insinuation. You have no proof.”
“Forgive me, Doctor, but that is not an answer.”
“The suggestion is disgusting. Offensive. Who told you such a thing?”
“Does it matter?”
“There are many here with grudges. Men become obsessed.”
“Are you saying someone is pursuing a vendetta against you?”
“Fyodor and I are young…were young. We had authority above many who are more senior, but less able. I am speaking of jealousy, Major. Evil tongues. Malicious gossip. Such malicious filth in people’s minds. My God, to accuse us of such revolting deviancy.”
It was not the first time Vasin had seen a man drawing strength from the passion of his denial. Axelrod, a moment ago startled as a rabbit, had found the mettle to raise his voice. He stood, abruptly, tipping his chair onto the floor.
“If you came here to threaten me, Major, with some ridiculous inventions for your own purposes, I can only say that I refuse to play your foolish games. I protest in the most adamant terms!”
Axelrod’s passion petered out, battered flat against the rock of Vasin’s silence. Slowly the investigator half-stood, finding a higher perch on the corner of the desk, and crossed his arms over his chest. Axelrod’s eyes traveled across his face, looking to see if his performance had been believed. Involuntarily, the scientist’s hands sought each other once more and clasped tight for comfort. He glanced down at the upturned chair, decided against stooping to pick it up, then faced his accuser once more. God, thought Vasin. So it’s true. He felt an involuntary surge of pity for this evidently brilliant, brittle man, whose weakness had placed him suddenly in Vasin’s power. And yet, Axelrod was clearly a man who held secrets. Perhaps the secret of Petrov’s death.
Vasin made his face benevolent.
“Do you have a girlfriend, Doctor? If you will forgive the personal question.”
“My fiancée is in Moscow.”
“Well then. Malicious rumors. Anyway — like I said, I don’t care. And you are right — I don’t have any proof about your personal inclinations or about your relationship with Petrov. Yet.”
Vasin let the last syllable hang in the air for a moment. He continued, leaning forward, his voice low.
“All I care about is finding out who killed Petrov.”
“As do I.”
“We see eye-to-eye, Comrade Doctor. And I need someone inside the Citadel. Please. Sit down.”
Axelrod fumbled to right his chair.
“You want me to become your informer?”
“My guide. We have the same goal in this, we agree.”
Axelrod nodded bleakly.
“You want to put me on the hook?”
Vasin had always found the colloquialism for being recruited by the KGB imprecise. The kontora liked to land its fish immediately, with a single violent jerk. Then they would leave them to gasp, drowning in the air. Perhaps, then, they might agree to gently release the fish back into the water to swim a little longer, as far as the line would allow. The hook was already set deep in Axelrod’s throat, even if he didn’t yet realize it.
Vasin weighed his sympathy for this floundering, flawed man against his hard investigator’s instinct. The policeman won. He decided to let Axelrod flap around a little more.
“You are not on the hook if you have nothing to hide, Comrade.” Vasin repeated the old secret policeman’s lie too easily for his own liking. “I am only asking you to help find the answers you seek yourself. You came to me voluntarily, remember?” Vasin placed a palm on the classified folder in front of them. “You wanted me to understand something about metallurgy. Start there. Guide me in terms an idiot could understand. Why should I care that Adamov changed Fyodor’s casing? Why did you want to tell me about it?”
A nervous smile flicked across Axelrod’s face. Vasin had seen it before. The face of a man who has been momentarily dangled over the precipice and then hauled back by firm hands into the warm embrace of collaboration. The brief storm of alarm, the terror of discovery, had passed. Now Vasin gently released Axelrod back into his natural element, his deep sea of numbers.
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Start with how the bomb works?”
“It’s basically very simple. You are familiar with the concept of an atom?”
Axelrod evidently found it hard to judge where the limits of a layman’s ignorance could lie. Vasin nodded gravely.
“At the center of every atom is a nucleus made of two kinds of particles, protons and neutrons. A different number of protons makes a different element. Hydrogen, one proton. Helium, two. And so on. And around every nucleus are concentric rings of electrons, like little moons circling around a planet. When the electrons move from atom to atom, that’s called electricity.”
Vasin half-expected Axelrod to ask whether he had heard of electricity.
“Most atoms are stable, meaning the nucleus has an equal number of protons and neutrons. But some elements, especially the heavy ones, have an unbalanced number of neutrons. Nature abhors disequilibrium, so they spit out their spare neutrons, naturally. When neutrons move, that’s called radiation. If you leave a radioactive element alone, it will spit out all its spare neutrons and eventually become inert. We call that radioactive decay, so over time, uranium 235 will eventually turn to lead.”
“Uranium what?”
“Two thirty-five. It’s a kind of uranium. A heavy metal. Most uranium is pretty stable and barely radioactive. But about half of one percent of naturally occurring uranium has a different number of neutrons from the normal sort. That’s called uranium 235. It’s more radioactive. And very unstable, because when you add just one more neutron, it becomes uranium 236. And that atom is too heavy to exist, so its nucleus immediately splits in half, into barium and krypton. When the nucleus splits, that’s called nuclear fission. It releases enormous amounts of energy. Uranium fission, for instance, produces about eighty-three terajoules per kilogram.”
“That is a lot?”
“Compared to oxidizing hydrocarbons, I mean, compared to burning coal? About twenty-five million times more energy, roughly.”
“You measure the power of atomic bombs in coal?”
“No, actually. We measure the power of bombs in tons of high explosive. TNT, to be precise. It’s not really a scientific metric, but it’s a more useful indicator than energy content when you are measuring the impact of the device on the real…um, world. For instance the first American device, Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima in ’forty-five, yielded eighteen kilotons. The same as dropping eighteen thousand tons of high explosives at the same time.”
“My God.”
“Little Boy was tiny by modern standards.” Axelrod straightened with pride. “The detonator alone for RDS-220 is a fission bomb larger than Little Boy.”
“A detonator as powerful as eighteen thousand tons of TNT?”
“We talked about fission, splitting atoms. When you put a certain amount of U-235 in one place, the radiation, the neutrons coming off all those disintegrating atoms start to split each other apart. Like rolling a billiard ball into a cluster of other billiard balls. Free neutrons knock out other neutrons, which knock out others. That reaction also gives off heat, and more neutrons, which in turn split more of the surrounding atoms in a spontaneous chain reaction. That’s what happens in a nuclear reactor. You put enough fuel in, and it starts to generate heat on its own.”
“You mean it starts to destroy itself spontaneously?”
“Right. But you can control the reaction by absorbing those free neutrons with graphite rods. It’s like putting a dishcloth on the billiard table. Some of the balls will roll into it and stop knocking each other around. With graphite, we can control the reaction and stop a nuclear reactor from melting down. We’ve even been putting reactors in submarines. Kit-class attack subs to start off with, in ’fifty-nine. And last year we launched the first nuclear-powered missile sub. There have been some problems, though. Back in July there was a terrible accident on K-19 out in the North Atlantic — the reactor coolant leaked, and the crew have been dying like flies ever since….”
“For God’s sake, Axelrod. Do you even know the meaning of the word secret? One more word about submarines and I’ll have to bury you myself.”
Axelrod’s face tightened anxiously for a second as he weighed whether Vasin was joking, then relaxed into a nervous smile. “An atom bomb uses the same principle as a nuclear reactor. A fission reaction. But instead, it’s designed to melt down on command, explosively. To do that you need to focus the reaction.”
“How?”
“If you just put a pile of blocks of uranium 235 together, they’ll start to react as soon as you have a critical mass. Takes about fifteen kilos of pure 235. It will get hotter and hotter and emit more and more radiation. But it won’t explode. You’d just get a kind of nuclear bonfire that would burn through the floor. And probably though the earth’s crust. Nobody’s tried it….”
Axelrod paused for a moment, as though considering how interesting such an experiment would be.
“And how does it go bang?”
“So, to get it to explode, we need to achieve critical mass very suddenly, and under great pressure. That means we have to enclose the reaction in some kind of vessel. That’s called the tamper. And we need a way to transport the critical mass of uranium in a safe state until you’re ready to detonate it. Actually, the answer is very simple.”
The scientist glanced questioningly at Vasin, as though at a particularly unpromising student. “Obvious, really.”
Vasin spread his hands with a gesture that said, No idea.
“You cast the uranium 235 into a hollow ball.” Axelrod cupped his hands to imitate a sphere. “The critical mass is all there, but there’s not enough of it in one place to trigger a chain reaction. It doesn’t go critical on its own because it’s hollow in the middle, you see? It’s too spaced out.”
“And then?”
“Then you surround this hollow ball with an outer shell of explosives. You detonate those explosives and the blast makes that ball implode.” He squeezed his cupped hands into a tight fist. “Suddenly, it’s a solid ball and therefore goes critical. A chain reaction kicks off and energy is released. Nuclear explosion.”
“That’s what happens inside that?” Vasin pointed to the file on the desk.
“Yes. No. I mean, both. RDS-220 isn’t like an old-fashioned fission bomb. It’s a thermonuclear device. A hydrogen bomb, in common parlance.”
“Which is?”
“Very different. The first atom bombs worked by splitting heavy atoms apart, nuclear fission. Thermonuclear bombs work the opposite way. They make lighter atoms join together. Nuclear fusion. That’s what happens in the heart of the sun, in all stars. They are all giant, continuous thermonuclear explosions. Balls of hydrogen, fusing together to make other elements and giving off light and heat. Every atom in the universe was created inside a star. Every atom in your body, in mine. To reproduce the effect on earth we need to create the same conditions as on the sun. We expose hydrogen to heat and pressure. Something like seventy-three million times the pressure of the atmosphere of earth. And the fusion begins.”
“And how do you make a sun…on earth?”
Axelrod smiled in fond pride, as though Vasin had asked him about the school grades of a particularly brilliant child.
“By using a fission bomb as a detonator, we get the necessary energy. As long as you surround the detonator and the hydrogen in a strong enough casing. The tamper has to be very thick and heavy to withstand the pressure for as long as twenty, maybe thirty milliseconds. Then you get enough energy concentrated inside to start a fusion reaction.”
“Which is explosive?”
“What you call an ‘explosion’ is just rapid combustion. Combustion is something solid turning to gas and expanding. Expose almost anything to enough heat and it will turn into gas. So, when the hydrogen atoms in the bomb fuse together into different elements, they release enormous amounts of heat and light that vaporize everything around them. But that explosion also vaporizes the casing of the bomb itself, releasing the pressure, and the fusion reaction stops. That was the genius of Petrov’s design. The heavier and stronger the tamper, the longer it can contain the fusion.”
“That can happen in twenty thousandths of a second?”
“Certainly. That’s long enough to create a sun. A small sun. And you see, the stronger the tamper you have, the longer the reaction time. Petrov’s idea was to make a casing of twenty tons of pure uranium metal. Very dense. Very strong.”
“Twenty tons of uranium? But you said that fifteen kilos was enough….”
“Fifteen kilos of weapons-grade uranium is enough to make an atomic bomb, yes. That’s uranium 235. But like I said, natural uranium metal contains less than one percent of that stuff. Ninety-nine percent is uranium 238. It is much more stable, but has never been used to make a tamper. We always used lead. But Petrov was a genius, a revolutionary. He wanted to make RDS-220 out of uranium for two reasons. It’s much denser than lead — about twenty tons per cubic meter for uranium, eleven for lead. And uranium’s boiling point is more than twice as high.”
“Stronger tamper, bigger explosion.”
“Correct. Well done.”
“And the other reason?”
“Ah. Here is the pure beauty of Fyodor’s vision.” Axelrod sat forward, his whole body animated. “A new generation of devices, an order of magnitude bigger than anything ever seen before. He wants to open a new chapter.” He caught himself, as though stung. “Wanted.”
“A new chapter of…?”
“Petrov’s idea was a three-stage bomb. The first two stages were a standard hydrogen bomb. A fission device as a detonator, then two chambers of hydrogen as the main explosive force. But the casing itself would act as a third stage. The neutrons thrown off by the fusion would irradiate the uranium tamper. Even the trace amounts of U-235 could become fissile with that much radiation and heat. So you have three stages: fission, then fusion, then once again fission. The uranium tamper was revolutionary. It would have doubled the power of the device. More, perhaps.”
“Might? Using a uranium casing has never been tried?”
Axelrod shook his head.
“So what did Adamov change?”
“The day after Petrov’s death, Adamov ordered the metallurgists who were casting the uranium tamper to stop. And ever since he’s been closeted night and day with his closest comrades recalibrating. And today — this.”
Axelrod traced a finger over the cover of the thick document that lay between them.
“The new tamper is made of lead. Not uranium, but lead. Which is inert. There is no third-stage fission. Professor Adamov’s substitution of lead for uranium will drastically reduce the power of the device. It is the opposite of what we have been trying to achieve. It’s sabotage, Major.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am quite sure the yield will be reduced.” Axelrod’s voice became low and urgent. “By how much, we won’t know until we calculate the projected yield with an inert casing. I want to get some time on our electronic computer to work out how much.”
“How powerful does it have to be?”
“That’s the point. General Secretary Khrushchev has ordered a one-hundred-megaton device. A hundred million tons of TNT equivalent. Yes. Roughly five thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.”
“Fuck.”
It wasn’t often that Vasin was moved to swear. Axelrod glanced up with faint distaste.
“That’s one way to put it. A hundred megatons was meant to put the Americans in their place. Before Adamov began his alterations.”
“Will this device be bigger than the Americans’ bombs?”
“The biggest hydrogen bomb they have ever detonated was about fifteen megatons, but that was by accident. Anyway, the Yankees got scared and started making them smaller.”
“Scared of what?”
Axelrod shrugged.
“I thought it was the kontora’s business to tell us what the Americans are thinking.” He ventured a quick, nervous smile before continuing. “They got scared of the unpredictable effects, I suppose.”
“What unpredictable effects?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Vasin ignored the insult.
“You’re saying that maybe Adamov got scared?”
“Soviet scientists fear nothing, Comrade. We fear only fear itself. As the Yankees’ President said once.”
“But isn’t it dangerous to increase the scale so radically?”
“Thermonuclear bombs are quite dangerous, Major.”
“You don’t think that caution in this matter…”
“Cowardice in this matter is a betrayal of the trust placed in us by the Party, Comrade. And deliberate sabotage would be, of course, treason.”
Axelrod spoke with a bravado that was just short of absolute earnest. Ah, thought Vasin. A weak man, flinging words stronger than himself in the hope that someone will believe him. He’d seen the type.
“And who knows about these changes?”
“Everyone. That’s the way we have always worked here. A basic principle of our craft. At the beginning, the kontora, your chief, Beria, tried to impose compartmentalization of information. The Beard — Igor Kurchatov, the builder of our first Soviet device — refused. He insisted that here inside the program we have complete freedom to exchange information. And so it has remained. Therefore, Adamov handed out the new general design today to the heads of all the laboratories. Every senior academic worker has access to his department’s copy.”
“And who knows about the exact implications of Adamov’s change of design?”
“Protopopov, the chief metallurgical engineer. He’ll be kept busy casting the new lead tamper. The rest of the design is pretty much unchanged.”
“Does anyone share your view that Adamov’s plan is sabotage?”
“Every man here owes his advancement to Adamov. They are all his acolytes. For them the Director is the brain of the Institute. He taught them. He made them. They would never question his wisdom and judgment.”
“Except you.”
“Except me. But that is only because Fedya — Dr. Petrov — took me into his confidence over their dispute. Adamov had been worried about the uranium tamper for months. They argued about it. Constantly.”
“Why didn’t Adamov just overrule Petrov? If he is the law here.”
Axelrod flicked Vasin a helpless, pleading glance, as though he hoped to find an ally.
“Can I trust you, Vasin?”
Only a desperate man would ask such a question of his interrogator. Yet Vasin had heard it often enough. There comes a point when every man needs a confidant, even if his words will damn him.
“You can trust me, Axelrod. I promise.” Vasin even truly meant it.
“Petrov has powerful supporters. Had. His father, for instance. Petrov was the only scientist in Arzamas who could really stand up to contradict Adamov. And now he is dead. Adamov can do as he pleases.”
“Which implies, Adamov eliminated him in order to put his sabotage plan into action? Is that what you are telling me, Axelrod?”
“You answer your own questions so succinctly, Comrade.”
Vasin’s own words to Adamov on their first day, flung back at him. But there was no longer any hint of humor in Axelrod’s pale, agitated face.
—
The street was slick with mushy snow, churned into the consistency of porridge by pedestrians’ feet. Vasin passed a team of street cleaners in padded coats who were scraping the sidewalk clean with broad steel spades. On the corner a snow-clearing machine, the kind they called a capitalist because of its rotating, grasping arms that scooped the snow onto a conveyor, idled waiting for the team to finish throwing the slush into the road. A comforting ritual of Soviet urban life.
Our death-breeding city, Maria had called it. Vasin began to see the menace. The hurrying schoolchildren, the laden shoppers, the comforting clack of closing tram doors, all formed a familiar screen of normality. But sitting on that tram, driving in that car, eating in that restaurant, were men and women who held the death of the world in their minds and hands. Everyone around him had his or her little piece of Armageddon to build. And somewhere beneath his feet, as he walked the corridors of the Institute, the bomb itself was growing in its cellar-womb like a monstrous baby.
Could Adamov have murdered Petrov because he wanted to be free to sabotage the bomb? The project that would crown Adamov’s career with a mushroom cloud of such proportions that the world would stand awed? Why would Adamov wish to reverse a decade’s progress, the research of thousands of his students and colleagues? Sabotage?
Or fear?
Fear of the “unpredictable effects” of a device that was too powerful?
Vasin thought of Professor Adamov’s pale, papery skin, the thin gray bristle that covered his scalp. What was inside that brilliant brain? To hold death, so much death, in that mind of his. And still be calm. How could one carry such knowledge and remain sane?
Vasin could find no obvious impossibility in Axelrod’s story. The timing of the radical new design was certainly suspicious. But why would Axelrod seek him out? Why would a member of the Citadel, that ivory tower so tightly closed to the prying eyes of the kontora, choose a stranger from Moscow to confide in? Unless Axelrod was trying to deflect suspicion from himself?
Could it be, Vasin thought, that it was Axelrod who had slipped a hook into his mouth rather than the other way around?
V
Vasin found Efremov in his office at the kontora, sitting bolt upright at his orderly desk reading a report. Seeing Vasin’s head poking around the door, he set the papers facedown and folded his hands into a steeple.
“Not disturbing you, Efremov?”
“Come in, Major.”
Vasin closed the door behind him. Efremov did not invite him to sit.
“I need a favor from you. An important favor. And I promise it won’t involve distracting the golden minds of Arzamas.”
“You seem to have taken a lesson from the General this morning. I understand he set out some checks to your ambition and carelessness.”
“I took careful note.”
“And what is this harmless favor?”
“I need a copy of the lab report, specifically the thallium records.”
Efremov’s face twitched involuntarily. He unfolded his hands and leaned back in his chair.
“May I ask why?”
“Because I have reason to believe they are inaccurate.”
The adjutant’s voice became icy.
“I assume your informant in the Institute, Dr. Vladimir Axelrod, has been making suppositions?”
“It’s irrelevant who I talked to.”
“Oh, but it is relevant, my dear Vasin. Dr. Axelrod is a known troublemaker. A man of dangerous views, an irregular personal life, and unreliable politics. And based solely on the word of this man, you wish to undo the work of an entire State Security team who combed through the laboratory records for days, cross-checking under supervision. To what end this folly? Are you driven to turn the Petrov tragedy into a detective mystery? Or did Orlov send you to deliberately disrupt the most important show of Soviet might in history?”
“Is that a no?”
Efremov struggled to keep his composure.
“It is a no, Vasin.”
Unbidden, Vasin squared a chair directly in front of Efremov and sat.
“You are covering for somebody. I don’t know why, or for whom, but you’re hiding something.”
Efremov smiled thinly.
“Wild accusations are all you have left. You seem to have me confused with some hapless patsy you have pulled off the streets of Moscow.”
“Come on, Efremov. You know this case stinks. And one of the reasons it stinks is your distinct effort to keep me away from it. Now you’re going to tell me that the great project cannot be disrupted with days to go before the test. Doesn’t a murderer who kills top scientists constitute a threat to your precious Arzamas? You saw what happened to Petrov’s body. And you told me, ‘Maybe he deserved it.’ ”
Efremov sat motionless, his palms on his thighs. A muscle in his jaw pulsed, but he said nothing for a full minute.
“What gives you the right to place your curiosity above the highest considerations of State Security?”
“You know, Efremov, you’re not the first person in Arzamas to ask me that.”
“You have the arrogance of a fanatic, Comrade Major.”
“I have my orders and I follow them.”
“Vasin, you asked for my help. The best help I can give you is a word of advice. If you persist in your disruptive behavior, there will be negative consequences for you, personally.”
“Negative consequences from whom?”
“From patriotic men.”
“You mean General Zaitsev.”
Efremov’s face had become stone.
“Very well, Efremov. I take careful note of your help.”
Vasin stood abruptly and made for the door.
“Comrade, all we want is for you to get home safely to your wife and child.”
Vasin froze and turned back.
“The work of a KGB officer is not always easy on a marriage. We do hope it works out for the best between you.”
Vasin scanned Efremov’s face for signs that the man knew of the fatal knowledge that was contained in the transcript of his telephone call with Vera. “Katya Orlova”—it was a common enough name. Had Efremov put two and two together and connected her to General Orlov? Vera could not have put him in more jeopardy if she was trying. Was the man needling or stabbing? Judging from the smirk on his face, needling. Or so Vasin fervently hoped.
He composed his face.
“Thanks for your concern, Efremov. I’ll see her when my investigation is finished. And I mean completed.”
Vasin turned to open the door.
“One moment, Comrade. There is something I can do for you.”
“What’s that?”
Efremov had risen.
“You wanted to see Petrov’s apartment?”
Vasin hesitated. Something knowing and menacing had entered Efremov’s tightly wound face.
“Why the sudden change of heart?”
“A gesture of goodwill, Comrade. We’re on the same team, after all. Come. We can go right now.”
VI
Fyodor Petrov’s apartment building was at the edge of town, a kilometer and a half from Lenin Square. It was a modern five-story building identical to Kuznetsov’s, but facing a woodland park. The apartments had balconies, too, and a fenced-off children’s playground, small signifiers of great privilege. Parked in the courtyard were a pair of official cars and two large Kamaz trucks. A policeman standing guard at the stairwell saluted Efremov and rolled his eyes to say: They’re upstairs.
In the lobby the tiny concierge’s lodge, decorated with magazine cuttings of Red Army hockey stars, was empty, and the doors to the ground-floor apartments stood ajar. Vasin glanced inside. Net curtains billowed on a breeze blowing through wide-open windows. A suitcase yawned, half-packed. The residents had left in a hurry.
Voices drifted down the stairwell. Vasin and Efremov ascended to the third floor, where a trio of green-uniformed backs huddled in conference.
“Comrade Officers?”
A narrow face framed in a lieutenant’s collar bars turned irritably, then snapped to attention.
“Sir?”
“This is Major Alexander Vasin from Moscow. He wishes to see the deceased’s apartment.”
The KGB subalterns exchanged glances.
With exaggerated formality, Efremov extended a cardboard box he had brought with him from the car.
“Take this protective gear, Major. The place is covered in…” Efremov searched for a more delicate word and decided against it. “Radioactive puke.”
The box contained a gas mask of Great Patriotic War vintage. Vasin thought of the morgue — the breathing apparatus, the canvas suits, the hosing down.
“Are no other precautions necessary?”
Efremov gave a snort that said, probably.
“Take your time.”
“Thank you, Comrade.”
He pulled on the dusty mask.
—
Vasin had seen blood before. A schizophrenic electrician who had butchered his family in an apartment on Taganka. A drunk who’d been thrown out of a bar at Kursky Station and had returned with a pair of axes. But this crime scene was like nothing he had ever witnessed. The whole place, sleek bookshelves, modern furniture, shoes standing neat as parading soldiers, was covered in scarlet splashes. Great, extravagant puddles of bloody vomit, more than Vasin had thought one man could ever produce.
In the bedroom was a team of three technicians in the same hazard suits he’d seen at the morgue. They were stripping blood-soaked sheets from the bed with tongs and stuffing them into metal-lined plastic bins. The men acknowledged Vasin’s presence with a brief glance, then continued their work. Vasin began to understand why Efremov wanted him to see it. The official investigation was over, so every scrap of evidence in Petrov’s apartment was being systematically thrown away. On the bedside table a Geiger counter crackled steadily.
Radiation.
When Vasin first heard the word during a childhood X-ray, the nurse had explained that this magic ray was a force of nature that had been tamed by Soviet science. But here in Petrov’s apartment the magic had been turned loose. Odorless, tasteless, and deadly.
Instinctively, Vasin tucked his bare hands under his armpits and looked about the bedroom from the doorway. On one wall hung a framed poster for a foreign film. Vasin squinted through the misted eyepieces of the gas mask. Gérard Philipe in Le Rouge et le Noir. Vasin backed out of the doorway and turned to the sitting room. Framed photographs of family holidays: Fyodor the golden boy, floppy-haired, posing with his parents on beaches and boats. Two Doctors Petrov, father and son, standing side by side, both wearing lab coats. The older man sported a crumpled grin, while his son stared at the camera proud and invincible. Above the television hung a series of framed sketch portraits of Petrov, posing shirtless, executed in charcoal by a talented amateur. Vasin noted the signature: “With all my love, V.” He hoped that Zaitsev’s clowns had photographed the drawing. Within days, he guessed, this and every other object in the place would be buried at the bottom of a mine shaft.
Two of the technicians were starting to maneuver a laden bin into the corridor. One of them waved to Vasin and made a jabbing motion toward his wrist. Vasin stood uncomprehending for a moment then understood: time. Radiation exposure.
Back on the downstairs landing, Vasin tore off the musty gas mask and breathed deep. As he snatched it off he felt a dry rattle in the filter. Snapping off the cover, he found that the mask’s snout contained nothing more than crumbled, useless wadding.
Efremov and his colleagues had gone. He could hear their guffawing banter in the courtyard. Seeing Vasin in the window, they tossed away their cigarettes and mounted their jeep. By the time Vasin had reached the front door, both they and Efremov had driven off, leaving him to find his own way to KGB headquarters. A pair of kontora goons sat in a Volga sedan, watching him pass like bored guard dogs.
Right now, he needed to get away from the poisonous air of Petrov’s apartment. The visit had told him nothing, and in the process he’d inhaled God knows what dose of radiation. Or maybe not quite nothing. “With all my love, V.” Vladimir Axelrod? The rain had thickened into a steady drizzle, but nonetheless Vasin struck out into the park in front of Petrov’s building. Like most such green spaces on the edges of Soviet cities, it wasn’t actually a park at all but a patch of primeval forest, abruptly demarcated by a line of asphalt that signified civilization’s furthest advance.
Within a hundred meters, Vasin could have been anywhere in deep Russia. The birches and firs embraced him with the sweet smell of autumnal decay. Rain hissed on the yellowing branches. He followed a lightly trodden path to a natural clearing where traces of ice had formed on the edges of a pond filled with black water. A bristling clump of marsh alders stood, their mongrel-brown trunks tangled fantastically. Vasin pressed on. The forest damp was like a balm against everything man-made and unclean. Behind him he heard the snap of twigs as his tails from the kontora struggled irritably through the wet undergrowth.
Abruptly the woodland ended in what looked like a wide firebreak. But, as he stepped out from the bushes, Vasin saw it marked the city’s border. A tall barbed-wire fence ran along the center of a clear-cut area, perhaps a hundred meters wide, that extended as far as he could see in either direction. A gravel road ran alongside the fence, with guard towers every two hundred meters. Left and right, Vasin saw glinting pairs of glass lenses scanning him from the towers’ walkways, the binoculars held by armed soldiers in rain capes. Opposite, through two lines of fence, the forest continued dark and impenetrable.
Vasin had reached the edge of planet Arzamas.
VII
As Vasin walked home, the sun dropped below the clouds and for a few minutes bathed the snowy streets in harsh, oblique sunshine. The tarmac shone with a lingering scarlet glow. The sight of the post office, its sandstone facade a rich gold in the evening light, held him for a moment. But after counting through the possible outcomes of a phone call home like a pauper auditing pennies, he could think of no good one. Even his final play, the one he promised himself he would never make, the one of total surrender and self-abasement, had not worked. He had thrown himself on Vera’s love and mercy but found that there was none left over for him.
There had been a time, once, when Vasin would confide in Vera. Sharing his indignations, his small triumphs, talking over the mysteries of his police-work cases. Never much of reader, Vera, but she had liked Sherlock Holmes as a girl. Her breathlessly inventive explanations for his homicides reminded him of a younger version of himself. He could never quite bring himself to tell her that Moscow’s murderers were, for the most part, a depressingly predictable bunch. Weeping drunks, beaten wives, the furious human dramas of the communal apartment kitchen where a missing chicken could lead to bloodshed. And then there were the occasional turf wars between such underworld figures hardy enough to exist in a city as saturated with police and vigilant citizenry as Moscow. A gambling club shoot-out. A prostitute with her throat cut. No complex motives, nothing that Holmes and Watson would ever feel the need to light a pipe to ponder, ever appeared in the files that landed on Vasin’s desk. No speckled band snakes, no phosphorescent hounds. Only thieves’ pathetic ideas of honor, profit, and survival. The desperate things human beings with no options left did to each other.
He and Vera had met, in approved fashion, at a Young Communists’ dance. A dusty hall in late summer, the smell of sweet teenage sweat and floor polish. A loud emcee with hair oil running down his temple, a band made up of pimply young men in square suits. From among a crowd of her girlfriends, gripping bottles of soda like protective talismans, Vera looked out into the hostile territory of menfolk with an expression of calm and tolerant appraisal, strangely without ambition. Vasin had of course been too nervous to ask her to dance. She did it instead, accompanied by a girlfriend. She spoke for both of them.
“Will you sit there all evening? The music will finish soon.”
There was annoyance in her voice, an accusation that the boys weren’t doing their bit. As he and Vera danced, awkwardly, hands on hip and shoulder and a chaste arm’s length apart, Vasin felt surprise and relief. So she knows how this all works. Outside, after the dance, they sat side by side on a bench among the long shadows of a small park. Again, Vera had taken him in hand.
“Well?” she asked. Her tone was that of Vasin’s mother, drawing her boy’s attention to some undone chore or broken promise. “Will we kiss?”
She turned her head, eyes closed, mouth half-open, waiting. Her mouth tasted of sugar syrup. When his hand closed on her small breast she slapped it away.
“What are you doing? It is not seemly.”
Vera always knew what was expected. Her life proceeded according to a timetable of convention known to everybody except Vasin. On their third date, to see a comedy film at the Arbat Cinema, she had allowed him to put his hand up her skirt. He felt only hot, taut nylon, and an impenetrable fortress of underclothes. It was understood that a proposal was required to get further. They were both nearly twenty. It was time.
Vera’s eyes were cool and gray, and she had a squat Russian homeliness he found comforting. She was accepting and grave. When he suggested they get registered, after queuing for an hour for a table at the Aragvi restaurant and working their way through a bad Georgian dinner, she did not smile exactly, but her mouth appeared to relax.
“Nu na konets,” she said. “Finally.”
Vasin assumed that meant yes.
Vera had embarked on the arrangements for the wedding stoically, keeping him updated on the process of obtaining champagne coupons and a dressmaker’s appointment as though he had laid a burden upon her. She allowed him to make love to her, on a friend’s sofa. The event was signaled long in advance. Arrangements had been made, keys passed over with a knowing look. Vasin, in his nervousness, had drunk too much. Afterward he remembered only Vera’s sigh when it was over, far too quickly. She had allowed her man to indulge his bestial instincts.
Vera’s mother, Margarita Ivanovna, lived in a new five-story building on the outskirts of the city. She was not yet forty, but her young face was worn out and framed by hair gone dead. Husband lost in the war, officially. Unofficially, Vera had confided, run off with another woman. Margarita Ivanovna had eyed the flowers that Vasin brought disapprovingly, as though the gift might carry some sort of obligation. The bouquet was evidently too gaudy for her. What was this young man trying to cover up? In time Vasin learned that too modest a gift would also have been wrong for his mother-in-law. But by then he had grown used to his role. As a man among women, he stood for all that was wrong and unjust in the world.
Vasin and Vera received the portion of happiness that they had been raised to expect. As the son of a war hero, Vasin had to wait only three months for a one-room apartment in a concrete high-rise on Lenin Prospekt. Vera had been assiduous in finding correct furniture, buying plastic flowers, hanging Hungarian curtains. She even learned to enjoy their sessions in bed, or at least pretended to. Night after night, she had worked her way through the recipes in 1001 Things a Good Housewife Should Know: borscht, cutlets, beetroot salad, fish soup. The training manual for a good Soviet wife, the points to be ticked off one by one on the road to domestic perfection. In their tiny kitchen, over cups of tea, she had listened to her young husband speak of the trials of the police academy, then the force, then his murder cases, or at least sanitized versions of them. She had found a job in the accounts department at the nearby Dom Tkani, Moscow’s biggest draper’s emporium, and settled into the petty politics and jealousies of the office with enthusiasm. She had smiled, at least once, almost every night.
Nikita had been born two years after their marriage. Vasin had first seen the infant as a swaddled parcel, displayed from behind a sealed third-floor window of the House of Births on Nikitskiye Vorota as though to prove that Vera had not been malingering. No men were allowed into this temple of female suffering, for which the husbands gathered on the sidewalk outside were clearly held responsible. The birth had been a bad one, Vera had told him, and he’d pretended to know what she meant. Never put me through that again, she had said, as though the whole thing had been his idea. He did not protest.
At first Vasin had been grateful that the squalling, red-faced creature occupied so much of Vera’s attention. He had been displaced in her life and affections, and was relieved. He discovered from his cop colleagues that real men were expected to drink. Soon, he began to enjoy the confident glow that booze gave him. At a certain point, his swaying gait could almost pass for macho swagger. At a Women’s Day party organized for the officers of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, Vasin had found himself drunkenly propositioning a pretty blonde, the sister of a colleague’s wife. To his intense surprise the girl had taken him by the hand, as though weighing his wedding ring, then turned and led him out of the dance hall and to his brother officer’s apartment. They had screwed with desperate haste on the sofa, right in front of a toddler who stood and watched them wide-eyed from his crib. As they lay together afterward, breathing each other’s sweat, they had listened for the whir of the lift that would announce the return of the child’s parents. As they made love the girl had moaned and writhed in his arms like a wild thing. That night, Vasin realized, he had discovered lust. Sex was not just an unclean bodily need to be discharged but could be an ungovernable hunger. He had never before felt lost, weightless, outside time. He imagined he could taste the girl’s salty kiss on his lips for weeks afterward. He wrote to her at her women’s dormitory at a textile factory in Ivanovo, but she never wrote back.
In the banter of the detectives’ operations room, they teased Vasin as a babnik, a ladies’ man. The truth was that he didn’t dare. He was handsome, or so the teenage secretaries and shopgirls and waitresses and even, once, a pretty trolleybus conductress who chatted to him with bright, inviting smiles, told him. Neatly dressed, closely shaved, hair brushed. A model Young Communist, a young man going places. But women, for Vasin, remained fundamentally unknowable and dangerous. Every winning female smile seemed to him to conceal a terrifying hinterland of hysteria, pregnancy, and disaster.
When had he and Vera stopped talking? Parenthood had tipped over the rhythm of their lives in all the usual superficial ways. But in fundamental ways too. And it had never righted itself. Vasin remembered a line from a Mayakovsky poem: the boat of love smashed on the shore of daily life.
It was not as though Vera was unhappy, or at least, no more discontented than she had a right to be, than anyone else seemed to be. Vasin had concluded early on that unhappiness was inevitable in any human relationship — unhappiness suffered and unhappiness inflicted. He had never taken it personally. It was, evidently, a law of nature. The sadistic inclinations of Vera’s supervisor at work, the lack of emulsion paint in the hardware shops, the crowds on the rush-hour trolleybuses, all these blended with her discontent with his own personal slovenliness, the child’s laziness and sleeplessness, the neighbors’ noisy radio. All these were simply the rhythms of life. Vera’s slow-burning eyes, nightly censuring male insufficiency across the dining table, were things simply to be borne. Just as his colleagues’ philistine disdain for culture was a thing to be borne, his boss’s contempt for rules and procedures, some suspects’ stubborn refusal to accept that fate had ordained them to be victims. Lives were imperfect; wives were imperfect. How foolish his unmarried colleagues were to be afraid of loneliness.
But there was something deeper. Vera had no interest in changing what was around her. Worse, she had no concept that the world could be changed.
Vasin did.
That stubborn streak of righteousness he had inherited from his mother. Not rebelliousness, but rather its opposite, a dogged insistence at taking the system at its word. “Citizen, we have the right!” had always been his mother’s favorite phrase. Vera had no such faith. She trudged irritably through a bleak world where hardship could be overcome only by moments of luck and acts of low cunning.
Yes, Vasin realized with devastating clarity that his wife was cynical, and that she was stupid. He had felt a nerve in his head tighten. His usual misery had uncoiled with its inevitable routine. “You are naïve,” she would sneer. “You would rather be right than get ahead.” Vasin longed to retaliate, to fling back his own contempt. But he knew that this would mark a defeat for him, that any reconciliation would be only on her terms. And this he would not allow. Because he knew that he was right. Or at least, that right existed, somewhere, if he could only find it.
Naïve? Perhaps. Vera’s words had stung because they were true. Every day of his career as a policeman he saw his colleagues framing witnesses, pinning spare crimes that had been bouncing around the books onto hapless suspects, driving practiced fists into soft bellies, scrambling at the end of every quarter to round up some likely patsies to fill the crime-statistics quotas. He knew all this, and knew it to be wrong, a travesty of Soviet justice.
But a weasel thought had sneaked into his mind.
What if crookedness was the way the system was meant to work? They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work, his colleagues were always joking. What if his job were to pretend to protect the people, to act a bit part in a giant parody of police work?
Vasin had never thought to call such thoughts political until his friend Arvo did. Arvo Janovich Laar was an Estonian, but the son of a Bolshevik hero, so it was all right. Laar was the uncomplaining butt of constant joshing about his countrymen’s supposed timidity and phlegm. He had a singsong Baltic accent that their fellow detectives never tired of imitating.
“Hey, Laar! Heard the latest one? Russian gets on a bus in Estonia. Asks if it’s far to Tallinn. Driver says, ‘No-sir. Not-far at-all.’ They drive for an hour. The Russian guy asks again, ‘Is it far to Tallinn?’ Pig-fucker driver answers, ‘It is-now.’ ” Uproarious, locker-room laughter. Even Arvo would join in. But he knew, and they all knew, that what the laughter really said was that Balts were sneaky, defeated, Russia-hating little assholes.
The bullying drew them together, though Vasin knew it and didn’t like it. Their outcasts’ friendship had been assigned to them by the group, like the roster of a detective team. Vasin and Laar, the weirdos. But Arvo was easy to like, counter-stereotypically cheerful and essentially optimistic. Vasin recognized something of Arvo in himself. His refusal to bend before the crowd. A core of pride.
They found themselves alone together one afternoon in an office that smelled of stale tobacco smoke and disinfectant, spilled booze and vomit, the after-murmurs of a recent party that they had missed. Gingerly, as though unwrapping contraband, Arvo ventured a joke of his own.
“An Estonian goes to the polling place, prepared to vote. He is handed an envelope and told to put it in the ballot box. But instead of following instructions, he starts to open the envelope. ‘What are you doing?’ yells the woman. ‘I just wanted to see who I was voting for,’ replies the Estonian. ‘You imbecile! Don’t you know this is a secret ballot?’ ”
Vasin had quickly hoisted a smile, but Laar spotted it for a false flag.
“What? Not funny?”
“It’s funny, Arvo.”
Laar had looked at him for a long moment, opening his mouth just wide enough to let the point of his tongue caress his upper lip. Then he closed it and allowed a further pause for uncomfortable thoughts.
“You’re a believer, Vasin.”
“In God?”
“No! For heaven’s sake. I mean…a believer in…the order of things. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad someone is. I admire you for it. You believe that things should be as they should be, not as they are. That things can be done properly. Will be done properly, one day. You can’t laugh at the system because you believe in it.”
Vasin set down his paper coffee cup and thought, Yes, I do.
It had never properly occurred to him that there were people, respectable people, who did not believe.
“You think our bosses believe in anything apart from collecting kickbacks from the Chechens and the Armenians and the Tambov boys?”
Vasin was shocked. Not that he hadn’t heard the rumors about their boss. Of course he had. But to hear his friend discuss them so casually seemed a sacrilege against the gravity of the accusations.
“You’re saying that it’s true? Have you reported it?”
Laar sat back with a sigh.
“And what would be the point of that? To do my duty as a citizen, and get myself reassigned to Syktyvkar?”
Laar drained his cup of thin police coffee before continuing.
“You know what I can never understand about you Russians? You love anarchy, each one of you. I know you fuckers. You all have rebel souls. Every one of you wants to screw the system. But together, you have a terror of chaos. You’ll go to any lengths to prevent it. I always wondered why. Perhaps because you know yourselves too well. You know what you’ll do if suddenly nobody is watching over you with a stick. That’s my profound thought for the day.”
Vasin thought about that term, rebel souls, for days, in the queue at the bread store, in the line at the cafeteria, in the scrum of commuters as they positioned themselves to fight their way onto the Number 31 trolleybus home. Rebels? These?
But at the same time, what were these cancerous secret doubts that were eating away at Vasin’s righteous heart? He searched inside himself for a cool-headed voice that would explain the gap between the sordid daily necessity and the far, shining vision. But as the days went by Vasin began to feel the vision slipping too far away to be grasped, into the realm of myth. He remained convinced that belief was the only gravity that could hold his contradictory world of duty and lies together. But he was no longer sure he had preserved enough of it to make the center hold.
Two years after his conversation with Arvo and newly recruited to the KGB, he’d met Katya Orlova. It felt like justice. “Frustrated salaryman seeks his nemesis, sex-starved Juno preferred. Gods’ wives only.” Vasin had embarked on the affair in the certain knowledge that there was no possible universe in which it could have a good ending. He felt like an alcoholic reaching for the bottle he knew would kill him. As Katya’s monumental breasts smothered him in bed, Vasin experienced for the first time the abandon of self-destruction. It was like a coming of age: After this, there could be no redemption. Because he had finally become a faithless man, and deserved none.
Exactly how Vera had found out, he didn’t know. The bitches’ coven of the kontora wives had woven a sticky web of rumor that had spun quickly across the Moscow phone system to reach Vera’s ears. As he knew it would be, this was Vasin’s grand debacle. The moment of weakness that he sensed Vera had been waiting for all her life. The moment that she and her mother had secretly known would come: all that was rotten and duplicitous about Vasin had finally been confirmed. At last! We knew all along what you were. Finally, his behavior had met their low expectations. And of course, what Vasin hated most was that they were right. His own weakness, his pathetic lust and lack of self-control, had given this crowing chorus of frustrated women the justification they needed to pull his life apart. A just fate had come for him, even if it never seemed to come for anybody else. And it came in the form of his wife, transformed by his own folly from a lonely, silly woman into a righteous avenger.
How ironic that Vera’s revenge should break over his head while he was here, in Arzamas, the assignment that was testing his faith in himself as an agent of justice to the breaking point. Efremov was right. Vasin did think that he knew better, that his precious right to get to the truth trumped everything else. And Maria was right. He’d spared her from the asylum, then come to her to present the bill. And Vasin knew that he was not a righteous man. Thanks to Vera, all Arzamas might soon know it too.
I
Vasin rose through layers of sleep like a thrashing diver, struggling upward through water. He awoke tangled in unfamiliar blankets in a strange room to the rising wail of a siren.
“Kutuz…Kuznetsov!”
He skidded into the kitchen, his bare feet sliding on the smooth linoleum. He caught himself on the doorframe.
“Slow down, Young Communist. Don’t break your neck. It’s only an air raid.”
Kuznetsov’s voice came from inside his room, from which he emerged a moment later with unlaced boots and a winter overcoat over flannel pajamas. In his hand he held a sheaf of notes and a dog-eared reference book.
“I mean, only an air-raid drill. Grab the milk from the fridge. And put on an overcoat.” Kuznetsov’s voice receded as he trudged down the stairs. “Bring your passport, and something to read.”
Vasin tugged on his tracksuit and coat and followed Kuznetsov down the stairs at a run. He caught up with him on the ground floor.
Kuznetsov stood holding open a heavy steel door leading to a cellar.
“The patrol should be around within the hour to check that we’re all safe and sound. Come down and meet our lovely neighbors. They’re already downstairs, taking cover from the Imperialist aggressors.”
The shelter was a low basement, equipped with rows of neatly made-up bunk beds around the walls. A dozen men and women, motley in dressing gowns and fur coats, slumped in easy chairs and sat at a pair of tables, slumbering or reading. A few glanced at Vasin without particular curiosity. In one corner a pair of young twins laid out a desultory game of checkers. Kuznetsov, acknowledging nobody, bounced down himself into an easy chair and cracked open his book. Vasin sat alone on a bunk, regretting having given away his copy of Krokodil. The group in the cellar, settled in their various attitudes of study, seemed to him a bizarre parody of a university library reading room on a quiet afternoon.
The banging on the door was curt and officious. Eyes turned to Kuznetsov. With a sigh he rose and unrolled the door bolt.
“Greetings, early-rising Comrades, we have the roll call ready here for you…”
Kuznetsov paused, midsentence. The door opened to a pair of young sergeants with KGB epaulets. The elder one saluted.
“Good morning, sir. Major Kuznetsov?”
“Okay, okay. I know who sent you. Back upstairs, Vasin. We’re getting dressed. There’s somewhere we need to be.”
The uniform suited some men, fitting as though they had grown up in it. Kuznetsov was not such a man, Vasin decided as he clattered down the stairs behind him. In his breeches, tunic, and pistol belt, Kuznetsov looked like an actor in a provincial theater stuffed into a badly fitting costume. Their breath steaming in the morning chill, they scrambled into the back of a UAZ jeep for the short drive into town. The sirens’ wail swelled and ebbed, relentless, as they passed the speakers mounted on each lamppost. Lenin Square was deserted except for a pair of street sweepers’ handcarts, abandoned by their owners. A tram stood by the intersection with Kurchatov Street, empty, except the driver had forgotten to extinguish its single, cyclopean headlight.
Instead of turning in to the kontora’s forecourt, they slewed past, drove on to another square official building that stood on a high bluff overlooking the old monastery.
“Kommandatura,” Kuznetsov mumbled by way of explanation. “Military command headquarters. The lair of General Pavlov. Head soldier around these parts. Runs everything in this city — outside the walls of the Citadel, that is.”
That familiar, masculine smell of military installations: floor polish, new uniform cloth, strong tobacco. Vasin thought of the Army training camps he and his fellow students had been made to attend while he was at university. Cold showers, mud, bawling voices. The Army’s endless hierarchy of petty cruelties, the kingdom of the stupid. They followed a group of infantry officers hurrying up a broad concrete staircase to the top floor.
Around forty men stood in groups in a large, carpeted anteroom, speaking in low voices. Most wore Army green, with a scattering of KGB blue. As Vasin and Kuznetsov joined them, a set of double doors at the opposite end of the room swung open. A heavyset man lumbered in, carrying a teacup. Everyone snapped to attention. General Pavlov ignored their presence. He sat down heavily at a long conference table and took a slow swig of his tea.
Pavlov glared at his wristwatch and then at the clock on the wall as though daring them to contradict each other. Half past six.
“Enough.”
His voice carried effortlessly. A young orderly acknowledged the order meekly and hurried out. Within a minute the wailing sirens ceased, leaving a silence that rang in the ears. Pavlov decided that he needed to drain the last of his tea, and needed the room to watch him do it too.
“At ease.” The words came from deep in Pavlov’s chest; he could have been clearing his throat. “Nu? Well?”
An adjutant stepped forward nervously, neat in a freshly pressed tunic.
“The air-raid test was a success, Comrade General. Antiaircraft crews at their posts in good order. All but one of the new emergency generators started and are running. We have had phone reports from all the shelters. Ninety-four percent of the civilians accounted for and at their muster stations…”
“The civilians. Where’s our Comrade Major General Zaitsev?”
On cue, the sound of boots on the stairs. Major Efremov stepped in smartly, followed by Zaitsev, puffing from the long climb. The crowd parted before him. Vasin sheltered from the General’s roving, furious eye behind a tall Air Force captain.
“General, good of you to join us.”
Zaitsev settled wordlessly into a chair beside Pavlov.
Efremov stepped forward, opening a leather folder and proffering it to the commandant. Pavlov fixed the younger man with an out-from-under stare of disdain, taking in his polished boots, pomaded hair.
“Six percent of our little pigeons unaccounted for, Zaitsev.” Pavlov raised his eyebrows along with the tone of his voice. This, Vasin imagined, indicated sarcasm. “Decided not to get out of their soft beds?”
“The KGB will make inquiries, Comrade,” Efremov began. “But as you are aware, the members of the Institute are not always able to immediately…”
The adjutant’s voice trailed off as Pavlov hauled himself up and walked over to a set of tall windows that filled one end of the room. He looked like nothing so much as a side of beef in a uniform: the skin of his face and hands blotchy red, his neck straining against the collar of his tunic. Gray hair stuck up at the top and was shaved short at the back and sides. On his uniform four rows of medal ribbons were punctuated by the single, unmistakable gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union, on its scarlet ribbon.
“And what is this?” Pavlov pointed curtly.
Obediently, the officers turned to look across the landscape of rooftops that spread below them. One large glass roof was illuminated from below, the glow of the fluorescent tubes fading into the spreading dawn. Even Vasin could see that it belonged, undoubtedly, to one of the workshops of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics.
“Major?”
Pavlov ground a fat finger into the glass of the window in the direction of the illuminated laboratory, then tapped it for emphasis, leaving a greasy mark.
“A shocking breach of regulations, sir.” Efremov’s voice was theatrically shrill with indignation. “It seems to be the new laboratory complex. I assure you the duty security officers were fully briefed on the revised blackout procedures.”
“And the boys in white coats told them to get lost. To them, this is all provided for their amusement! This whole establishment, so that they can live in the clouds! Is this negligence? Or sabotage?”
“We will find those responsible immediately.”
Pavlov tapped the window once more, for emphasis, then stalked out of the room. Zaitsev remained silent, arms crossed over his chest, his face a brewing storm. For a long moment nobody moved.
“Well? What are you all standing around for, like heifers waiting for a bull to fuck them?” Zaitsev bellowed. “Dismissed!”
Vasin and Kuznetsov joined the rush for the door. By the time they had reached the ground floor, most of the Army men had peeled off into their offices, leaving only their KGB colleagues crowding into the cloakroom like disgraced schoolboys.
The day was fully born now, a pall of low cloud promising more snow. After the overheated fug of the Kommandatura, the morning air felt cold and clean on Vasin’s face.
“So that was the charming General Pavlov.”
Kuznetsov rolled his eyes as he buttoned his overcoat.
“Zaitsev’s even more evil twin? Hero of the Soviet Union, my ass,” Kuznetsov answered in a low voice. “That Pavlov. Desk jockey. Politburo ass-kisser. Heroically cleared out all the old warhorses who’d actually bled on the front. Pavlov’s war was about filling tank shells and fucking women munitions workers with tits like torpedoes. That’s what they say down at the kontora. But sometimes the meathead in green likes to show everyone that it’s the military that ultimately runs the show around here.”
“Vasin!”
Zaitsev had emerged at the top of the steps, punching his way into his overcoat as though the flapping cloth deserved a good thrashing. Vasin trotted back up and saluted smartly. Efremov, hovering at his boss’s side, wordlessly handed Zaitsev a piece of paper. Vasin recognized the list of movement orders from the previous day. The paper crumpled in the General’s fist as he thrust it forward.
“I never authorized a flight to Olenya.”
Vasin caught a whiff of the General’s hungover breath. As he looked up into Zaitsev’s porcine face, he noted the unshaven chin, a corrugated pattern of corduroy indented on the pale flesh. A night on the sofa? He bowed respectfully before the General’s halitosis.
“I was interviewing an important witness, Colonel Korin. Wanted to get the investigation done as quickly as possible. As per your orders, sir.”
Zaitsev snorted like a bad-tempered bull and took a step down, his face now level with Vasin’s. His voice was low and menacing.
“You were meant to be gone yesterday, but you’re still fucking here. You’re a hemorrhoid I can’t get rid of.”
“I…”
“Your orders do not trump what’s going on here. You’re in Arzamas, not in some Moscow whorehouse. And however big you think you are, Major Vasin of State Security from Special fucking Cases, however big your boss Orlov thinks he is, no one is bigger than what’s being built here in Arzamas. So go, run and bleat to your chief. Get your permissions from on high. But I swear to you. I swear to you, Vasin: Step out of line one more time, disappear one more time, and I will break you. Officially. Unofficially. Whatever it takes, I will do. But you will play by my rules. My. Fucking. Rules.”
Vasin paused to slowly wipe the flecks of Zaitsev’s spittle from his face. He stood to attention and saluted. As he walked down the steps away from the glowering General, Vasin felt his bowels turning to water.
II
Orlov’s private telephone network was one of Special Cases’ more ingenious secrets. Though of course it was not technically private, only a private use of something very public. “We hide in plain sight, Major,” Orlov had told Vasin when he briefed him on the system. “The most private place for a conversation can be in a crowd. The most secret place for a message may be on the front page of Pravda.”
The USSR’s railway network had its own telephone and telegraph system, independent of the All-Union Post and Telegraph, which connected all other calls. The secret was that Orlov had his own patched-in line, accessible from any railway station across the country. The network was antiquated — some of it even pre-Revolutionary — but secure for precisely that reason. No one in the kontora had much interest in listening in to the conversations of stationmasters and junction managers. A parallel phone system that covered the entire Soviet Union.
Vasin parted from Kuznetsov on the corner of Lenin Square and boarded a tram toward home. This time his companion made no protest, which surely meant that Zaitsev had made other arrangements to keep tabs on him. To give Vasin space to make a mistake. Sure enough, Vasin spotted two men in plain coats scramble aboard as the doors closed, studiously avoiding his eye as the tram gathered speed. Giving them the slip should be easy. Shaking them off so they didn’t realize they’d been shaken would be harder. Back at the apartment Vasin changed into his civilian clothes and stuffed a black beret into the pocket. He returned to the kontora on foot, watching his followers out of the corner of his eye. Once inside the building he nonchalantly made his way to the cafeteria and, as he waited in the queue to pay for his sandwiches, scanned the room. His shadows had remained outside.
A back door, a courtyard, a low wall behind a line of rubbish bins. The service gate stood open as a delivery truck backed crookedly out into the street. Vasin slipped past and worked his way back around the building. Through the dripping trees he spotted his watchers waiting docilely for him in a Volga sedan.
Two more trams, boarded and hopped off at the last moment, brought him to Arzamas’s small train station. Vasin found the operations room without difficulty. The duty stationmaster obeyed Vasin’s scarlet KGB identity card and showed him to a chunky iron telephone receiver that hung in a corner.
“We don’t use it much these days.” The stationmaster was a small, anxious hippo of a man, eager to please. “This branch is all electronic now.”
He pointed to a large wall-mounted board showing the Mid-Volga Railway Region dotted with red and green lights. A pretty, silent blond secretary hovered protectively close to her boss. Vasin’s professional eye caught the body language of an affair. Possibly recreational humiliation? He smiled at his own jadedness before nodding both back into their offices. What have you become, Vasin?
He dialed the four-digit number that got him a priority line to the local railhead: the city of Gorky. Another code, and he was connected to the trunk line to Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Station. Four tinny rings and an operator picked up. Raising his voice to be heard above the static, Vasin asked for Moscow Heavy Goods Ring Line Station, Number 262. Orlov’s Lubyanka office.
After a short wait Orlov came on the line, the loudest voice in a whispering cacophony of railway men’s chatter.
“Comrade! Good to hear from our fellow workers in the middle Volga! No problems? Traffic flow in your section good?”
“Nothing unexpected, sir.” Vasin had to almost shout; it was like trying to make himself heard in a crowded cocktail party. “The usual problems. The head of the local organization. Unhelpful. Very unhelpful.”
“Manageable?”
“Yes, sir. So far, manageable.”
A deafening electronic buzz made Vasin hold the receiver away from his ear for several seconds.
“Still with me?”
“Still with you, sir. Requesting a routine information check. Code 111.”
The highest urgency.
“I am listening.”
“Two files. Both 1937. First case, subjects: Comrades Matveyev. Markov. Adamov.”
Orlov’s simple security code to throw off any eavesdroppers, the first two names on any list were always to be nonsense. Then the real name. God loves trinities, Orlov had said.
“Second case: Comrades Ivanov, Sidorov, Petrov.”
“The last again please, Comrade?”
“Petrov. A. V. Petrov.”
“I hear you clearly and understand. And what information do you require?”
“A connection between the two cases. The comrades in Case One suffered a…serious derailment. In ’thirty-seven. I believe that the individuals in Case Two may have been responsible.”
“Responsible for the derailment? We will check our records.”
“My thanks.”
“Your diligence does you credit, Comrade. Call tomorrow. Same time.”
Vasin breathed a sigh of relief as he replaced the heavy steel receiver. Orlov’s voice had been friendly. Vasin’s wife was evidently still holding her tongue. No sign that the General had any idea about him and Katya.
III
Vasin glanced at his watch. He judged that he probably had a couple more hours before his minders began to grow suspicious.
A standard-issue statue of Lenin stood at the entrance to the main city park, his concrete face resolute as he gestured toward the glorious future. Vasin hurried through the concrete archway, past a forlorn row of refreshment stands shuttered for the winter. Their brightly painted fronts were decorated with cartoon animals. The signs said, SODA, DOUGHNUTS, COTTON CANDY. Nikita’s favorite. The Soviet city park, the space allotted to approved leisure activities. Walking. Eating sweet foodstuffs. Enjoying nature, tamed and framed and shorn of its wildness and hostility and laid out in carefully measured blocks, like a green model city. Also the designated space for all human activity not connected with labor. Courtship, for instance. Lovemaking in the spiky, pungent undergrowth. Strolling with infants. Talking to one’s children. A place where Soviet citizens were allowed to be solitary, though never truly alone.
It occurred to Vasin that his walks in Gorky Park were probably the closest he had ever come to spending time in private with Nikita. Had he really ever had a real conversation with his son? Whenever they were together, without the nagging presence of Vera, it had always seemed kinder to allow the boy the luxury of silence. Every time he asked his son a question, even a joking one, the boy’s face would pinch in earnest nervousness as he considered what would be the correct answer. The poor kid seemed always convinced that he was somehow at fault, but without ever knowing why.
An alley of birches gave on to a wide lawn, gray with melting snow and crisscrossed with footprints. By an empty bandstand Vasin caught a flash of electric blue, the only vibrant color in the monochrome landscape. Maria. From a distance, he watched her. On the street, in a crowd, she had walked upright and stiff as a windup doll. Now, when she thought she was alone, she kicked her boots through the snow like a child. Her hands were stuffed deep in her pockets, and her sharp, small face was almost hidden by the hood of her mackintosh. There was something about her fragility that sent a sudden, unexpected stab of protectiveness through him. He thought of her struggling, the strong kick to his face, as she had fought toward her fall the other night. The anger in that small body, the force of it. He walked out across the snowfield.
“Hi.”
“Hi yourself.”
He waited for her to continue, but she was back to the formal form of address. Vasin felt obscurely hurt.
“Aren’t you going to buy the girl an ice cream?”
The cafeteria overlooked a round, concrete-lined pond, black under the white sky. A few grandmothers sat in the coffee-scented warmth, minding babies in prams who were wrapped like parcels. He bought a couple of ice creams, the forty-eight-kopeck variety he had always loved, a square block of vanilla-flavored cream. They walked on, eating in silence. There was something about eating ice cream in the snow that Vasin had always found pleasingly strange. It was like swallowing winter.
“Good. Thanks.”
Maria paused by a rubbish urn to lick the last of the ice cream from its wrapper, then deposited her rubbish like a good citizen.
“I come here quite a lot. Never with company, though.”
“You’re lonely?”
“Always straight to the point. Maybe I always have been. What of it?”
She stopped and turned toward the maze of birches, her face hidden under her hood. Vasin let the silence between them grow.
“They’re all crazy. You know that, right?”
“Who?”
“The people here in this city. The power they command and the secrets they keep twist them. It’s hard to explain so that you might understand.”
Not so different from the rest of the world of the nomenklatura—the Soviet elite — Vasin thought. His year in Special Cases had been an education in the distorting power of privilege. How it can corrode men. And women.
“Was Petrov twisted? Adamov?”
“My husband is a good man.”
“If you say so.”
“Korin told you about Leningrad.”
“He told me some.”
“Where were you during the war?”
“Korin asked me exactly the same question. Does it matter?”
“Oh, yes. It matters.”
“Moscow. I was still at school.”
“So was I, until they closed the schools. No heat, no food, teachers all mobilized; some of my classmates made it out on the boats across the lake. To Ladoga. My father wanted to get me on the transport, but my mother said it was too dangerous. She was right. The Germans dive-bombed one of the ships. The water was full of little kids’ summer hats, floating back to the shore. My friend’s mother saw it. She drowned herself the next day. You didn’t see the war.”
“No. Not the way you did.”
“That siren, this morning. Second time in as many weeks, for fuck’s sake. Last time was on the morning Fedya died. I hate it.”
“Aren’t you used to it by now?”
“No, because one day it won’t be a drill. I think of that day a lot. The sky filled with bombs tumbling from the bellies of airplanes. Detonations like great doors slamming underground. The hard, solid things of the world, melting. Bricks, weightless, flying upward. Landslides of masonry and plaster. Buildings bursting like paper bags. Fire. Hot wind. Every time I hear that siren I think, This is the day we will all be erased from the world along with our death-breeding city. Every time I hear the siren, you know what I do? I put a pillow over my head and I wait. And then no planes come. Only another day to get through. Thinking about how that fucking siren was probably the last thing that Fedya ever heard.”
“You don’t go down to the shelter?”
“I’ll never go into a shelter again in my life. My neighbors hate me for spoiling their quota. Svetlana Ivanovna and her foghorn voice booming in the stairwell, exhorting all comrades to hurry to the basement. She never dares to knock on our door, but I can feel her dirty look as she passes. Her and the old cows muttering at the bread shop. ‘Arrogant little bitch,’ they say. ‘Whatever does the Director see in her?’ Hypocritical, cock-sucking cunts, every one of them.”
Vasin started involuntarily at the obscenity. Maria’s grimace of hatred turned into the beginning of a smile.
“I kept some bad company as a kid. It still comes out sometimes.”
“Sorry. Korin said you met Adamov in Leningrad.”
“He taught me. Pure mathematics. We both loved numbers. They’re hard, beautiful, concrete things that can’t ever be destroyed. All those infinite patterns, fixed until the end of time. Whether there are people to know it or not. We took comfort.”
“In each other?”
“In science. After what we had both been through. But yes. You’re right. We took comfort in one another. I was seventeen when we met. An orphan, by then. Street-smart, but still more kid than woman. Scarecrow, Adamov called me. ‘A pair of big green eyes up top, a pair of tough little fists in the middle, oversize man’s boots down below.’ I nearly punched the old goat when he tried to lay a hand on me.”
Maria smiled at the memory. Vasin suppressed a smile of his own at the thought of Adamov in the improbable role of old goat.
“He said, ‘I will look after you.’ And he has been as good as his word. My savior, I thought at the time. Like I told you. He is a good man.”
“And what happened on the roof of the Kino?”
“You’re bloody relentless, you know that?”
“It was pretty memorable. For me, anyway.”
“What part?”
There was mischief in her glance. Vasin thought of her hands gripping his face, the smell of her skin, and looked away.
“You tried to jump. Why?”
“Maybe I wanted to fly away. Escape.”
“Is that why you had an affair with Petrov? To escape?”
Masha turned to Vasin, defiant.
“You tell me something, then I’ll answer you. Do you think someone killed Fedya?”
“Maybe.”
“You’ve spoken to his colleagues?”
“Of course.”
“To Vladimir Axelrod?”
“Maybe.”
Masha’s face creased in distaste.
“Axelrod’s a pederast.”Pederast, criminal jargon. Masha spat the word. “I mean literally. He is a homosexual.”
“How do you know?”
She stopped walking, her eyes fixed on the snowy ground.
“Because Fedya was sleeping with him before he started sleeping with me. I told you, this place is full of deviants. If you think someone poisoned Fedya, start by asking his jealous lover boy.”
Masha turned abruptly and walked away.
IV
Vasin picked up his watchers once more, striding nonchalantly out the front door of the kontora without a sideways glance. Like dutiful dogs, the pair slipped into position behind him as he walked to the Institute. A mist was thickening, and the sky promised a new snowfall.
Vasin watched Adamov and his acolytes file out of the lecture theater. The Director’s eye slid over Vasin’s shabby civilian raincoat without noticing him. Axelrod trailed the group, walking alone. He and Vasin spotted each other at the same moment. To Vasin’s surprise, Axelrod pushed his way back through the crowd of young scientists. He was agitated.
“Major, I need to talk to you in private. I didn’t know where to find you so I called the State Security headquarters and…”
“They said they’d never heard of me.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m only a visitor here. But, Doctor, I was about to say just the same to you. We need to talk.”
Axelrod’s office was lined with orderly files and dominated by an outsize blackboard, which was covered in calculations. Nervously he swept a pile of papers aside and plumped a large ring binder marked TOP SECRET on the desk. On the cover the date—25 OCTOBER 1961—was stamped in thick black ink.
“Major, this is the latest design of RDS-220. We get a new version every week, updated with all the new parameters. Every department’s work, summarized, so everyone knows what everyone else is doing — the engineers, the metallurgists, the meteorologists.”
Axelrod began to leaf through the pages covered in figures, graphs, and engineering blueprints. “Here, the conventional explosives experts and the fission boys. And of course Adamov’s team, all the new yield projections of the main thermonuclear device…”
“Axelrod, are you crazy? This is classified!”
“So what? You could never understand a word of it.”
Axelrod registered Vasin’s look and paused.
“Oh. Sorry. Was that impolite? I do that sometimes. I’m rude to people, without meaning to be.”
“No, you’re right. There’s nothing here I would understand. Go on.”
Flustered, Axelrod resumed his search and smoothed the file flat on the table.
“Right here, the section on the casing is, was, Petrov’s work. It’s all gone. He rewrote it.”
“Who?”
“Adamov did, just days before the test. He’s reconfigured the whole damn apparatus.”
“Aren’t engineers always changing things? Why do I need to know this?”
Axelrod snatched at his rumpled hair in a gesture of confusion.
“Because the casing is everything Fyodor worked for. We debated its composition for months. Fyodor was passionate, adamant. And now that he’s gone, his work has gone too.”
“And you find this sinister?”
“No, I find it suspicious. You do not?”
“You are accusing Professor Adamov of being somehow complicit in Petrov’s death because of a disagreement over”—Vasin gently closed the folder and pushed it back across the table—“metallurgy?”
Axelrod deflated.
“I accuse nobody.”
Vasin paused. What Axelrod was saying might be important. But first he had to test if Masha was telling the truth about his relationship with Petrov. Gently, though. He didn’t want to spook Axelrod into silence. But if what Masha said was true, it was the moment to put Axelrod on the hook.
“Before we discuss this further there is something I wish to raise with you. As I said, I actually came here to speak to you, Dr. Axelrod. I have some questions about your relationship with Petrov. Your close friendship.”
Some men were hard to read, their countenances stone. Axelrod’s was an open book. Alarm passed across his grief-stricken face. Ask any interrogator — sitting is an eloquent business. Suspects sit according to the guilt they carry, though not always, as Vasin had learned, the guilt that you are looking for. They would sprawl and straddle, fidget, cross and uncross their legs. What they never, almost never, did was sit in a posture that was finite and irreducible, not a muscle stirring. Yet here was Axelrod, frozen to the spot as though posing for a photograph. His long-fingered hands lay immobile on his thighs, his whole body suddenly halted in its small motions. But his was not the stillness of calm, it was the paralysis of fear. When he spoke, Axelrod’s lips barely moved.
“My close friendship?”
“Is that not an accurate description?”
Axelrod went pale. Vasin pressed on, choosing his words delicately.
“Intimate friends.”
“Certainly not.”
“Relax, Comrade. I don’t care about Article 121. We leave locking up people like that to the cops. If you ask me, it’s a pointless task.”
Axelrod found motion, suddenly, like a paused film set once more to run. He sat forward, and his hands leapt at each other like a pair of fighting animals.
“It’s an outrageous insinuation. You have no proof.”
“Forgive me, Doctor, but that is not an answer.”
“The suggestion is disgusting. Offensive. Who told you such a thing?”
“Does it matter?”
“There are many here with grudges. Men become obsessed.”
“Are you saying someone is pursuing a vendetta against you?”
“Fyodor and I are young…were young. We had authority above many who are more senior, but less able. I am speaking of jealousy, Major. Evil tongues. Malicious gossip. Such malicious filth in people’s minds. My God, to accuse us of such revolting deviancy.”
It was not the first time Vasin had seen a man drawing strength from the passion of his denial. Axelrod, a moment ago startled as a rabbit, had found the mettle to raise his voice. He stood, abruptly, tipping his chair onto the floor.
“If you came here to threaten me, Major, with some ridiculous inventions for your own purposes, I can only say that I refuse to play your foolish games. I protest in the most adamant terms!”
Axelrod’s passion petered out, battered flat against the rock of Vasin’s silence. Slowly the investigator half-stood, finding a higher perch on the corner of the desk, and crossed his arms over his chest. Axelrod’s eyes traveled across his face, looking to see if his performance had been believed. Involuntarily, the scientist’s hands sought each other once more and clasped tight for comfort. He glanced down at the upturned chair, decided against stooping to pick it up, then faced his accuser once more. God, thought Vasin. So it’s true. He felt an involuntary surge of pity for this evidently brilliant, brittle man, whose weakness had placed him suddenly in Vasin’s power. And yet, Axelrod was clearly a man who held secrets. Perhaps the secret of Petrov’s death.
Vasin made his face benevolent.
“Do you have a girlfriend, Doctor? If you will forgive the personal question.”
“My fiancée is in Moscow.”
“Well then. Malicious rumors. Anyway — like I said, I don’t care. And you are right — I don’t have any proof about your personal inclinations or about your relationship with Petrov. Yet.”
Vasin let the last syllable hang in the air for a moment. He continued, leaning forward, his voice low.
“All I care about is finding out who killed Petrov.”
“As do I.”
“We see eye-to-eye, Comrade Doctor. And I need someone inside the Citadel. Please. Sit down.”
Axelrod fumbled to right his chair.
“You want me to become your informer?”
“My guide. We have the same goal in this, we agree.”
Axelrod nodded bleakly.
“You want to put me on the hook?”
Vasin had always found the colloquialism for being recruited by the KGB imprecise. The kontora liked to land its fish immediately, with a single violent jerk. Then they would leave them to gasp, drowning in the air. Perhaps, then, they might agree to gently release the fish back into the water to swim a little longer, as far as the line would allow. The hook was already set deep in Axelrod’s throat, even if he didn’t yet realize it.
Vasin weighed his sympathy for this floundering, flawed man against his hard investigator’s instinct. The policeman won. He decided to let Axelrod flap around a little more.
“You are not on the hook if you have nothing to hide, Comrade.” Vasin repeated the old secret policeman’s lie too easily for his own liking. “I am only asking you to help find the answers you seek yourself. You came to me voluntarily, remember?” Vasin placed a palm on the classified folder in front of them. “You wanted me to understand something about metallurgy. Start there. Guide me in terms an idiot could understand. Why should I care that Adamov changed Fyodor’s casing? Why did you want to tell me about it?”
A nervous smile flicked across Axelrod’s face. Vasin had seen it before. The face of a man who has been momentarily dangled over the precipice and then hauled back by firm hands into the warm embrace of collaboration. The brief storm of alarm, the terror of discovery, had passed. Now Vasin gently released Axelrod back into his natural element, his deep sea of numbers.
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Start with how the bomb works?”
“It’s basically very simple. You are familiar with the concept of an atom?”
Axelrod evidently found it hard to judge where the limits of a layman’s ignorance could lie. Vasin nodded gravely.
“At the center of every atom is a nucleus made of two kinds of particles, protons and neutrons. A different number of protons makes a different element. Hydrogen, one proton. Helium, two. And so on. And around every nucleus are concentric rings of electrons, like little moons circling around a planet. When the electrons move from atom to atom, that’s called electricity.”
Vasin half-expected Axelrod to ask whether he had heard of electricity.
“Most atoms are stable, meaning the nucleus has an equal number of protons and neutrons. But some elements, especially the heavy ones, have an unbalanced number of neutrons. Nature abhors disequilibrium, so they spit out their spare neutrons, naturally. When neutrons move, that’s called radiation. If you leave a radioactive element alone, it will spit out all its spare neutrons and eventually become inert. We call that radioactive decay, so over time, uranium 235 will eventually turn to lead.”
“Uranium what?”
“Two thirty-five. It’s a kind of uranium. A heavy metal. Most uranium is pretty stable and barely radioactive. But about half of one percent of naturally occurring uranium has a different number of neutrons from the normal sort. That’s called uranium 235. It’s more radioactive. And very unstable, because when you add just one more neutron, it becomes uranium 236. And that atom is too heavy to exist, so its nucleus immediately splits in half, into barium and krypton. When the nucleus splits, that’s called nuclear fission. It releases enormous amounts of energy. Uranium fission, for instance, produces about eighty-three terajoules per kilogram.”
“That is a lot?”
“Compared to oxidizing hydrocarbons, I mean, compared to burning coal? About twenty-five million times more energy, roughly.”
“You measure the power of atomic bombs in coal?”
“No, actually. We measure the power of bombs in tons of high explosive. TNT, to be precise. It’s not really a scientific metric, but it’s a more useful indicator than energy content when you are measuring the impact of the device on the real…um, world. For instance the first American device, Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima in ’forty-five, yielded eighteen kilotons. The same as dropping eighteen thousand tons of high explosives at the same time.”
“My God.”
“Little Boy was tiny by modern standards.” Axelrod straightened with pride. “The detonator alone for RDS-220 is a fission bomb larger than Little Boy.”
“A detonator as powerful as eighteen thousand tons of TNT?”
“We talked about fission, splitting atoms. When you put a certain amount of U-235 in one place, the radiation, the neutrons coming off all those disintegrating atoms start to split each other apart. Like rolling a billiard ball into a cluster of other billiard balls. Free neutrons knock out other neutrons, which knock out others. That reaction also gives off heat, and more neutrons, which in turn split more of the surrounding atoms in a spontaneous chain reaction. That’s what happens in a nuclear reactor. You put enough fuel in, and it starts to generate heat on its own.”
“You mean it starts to destroy itself spontaneously?”
“Right. But you can control the reaction by absorbing those free neutrons with graphite rods. It’s like putting a dishcloth on the billiard table. Some of the balls will roll into it and stop knocking each other around. With graphite, we can control the reaction and stop a nuclear reactor from melting down. We’ve even been putting reactors in submarines. Kit-class attack subs to start off with, in ’fifty-nine. And last year we launched the first nuclear-powered missile sub. There have been some problems, though. Back in July there was a terrible accident on K-19 out in the North Atlantic — the reactor coolant leaked, and the crew have been dying like flies ever since….”
“For God’s sake, Axelrod. Do you even know the meaning of the word secret? One more word about submarines and I’ll have to bury you myself.”
Axelrod’s face tightened anxiously for a second as he weighed whether Vasin was joking, then relaxed into a nervous smile. “An atom bomb uses the same principle as a nuclear reactor. A fission reaction. But instead, it’s designed to melt down on command, explosively. To do that you need to focus the reaction.”
“How?”
“If you just put a pile of blocks of uranium 235 together, they’ll start to react as soon as you have a critical mass. Takes about fifteen kilos of pure 235. It will get hotter and hotter and emit more and more radiation. But it won’t explode. You’d just get a kind of nuclear bonfire that would burn through the floor. And probably though the earth’s crust. Nobody’s tried it….”
Axelrod paused for a moment, as though considering how interesting such an experiment would be.
“And how does it go bang?”
“So, to get it to explode, we need to achieve critical mass very suddenly, and under great pressure. That means we have to enclose the reaction in some kind of vessel. That’s called the tamper. And we need a way to transport the critical mass of uranium in a safe state until you’re ready to detonate it. Actually, the answer is very simple.”
The scientist glanced questioningly at Vasin, as though at a particularly unpromising student. “Obvious, really.”
Vasin spread his hands with a gesture that said, No idea.
“You cast the uranium 235 into a hollow ball.” Axelrod cupped his hands to imitate a sphere. “The critical mass is all there, but there’s not enough of it in one place to trigger a chain reaction. It doesn’t go critical on its own because it’s hollow in the middle, you see? It’s too spaced out.”
“And then?”
“Then you surround this hollow ball with an outer shell of explosives. You detonate those explosives and the blast makes that ball implode.” He squeezed his cupped hands into a tight fist. “Suddenly, it’s a solid ball and therefore goes critical. A chain reaction kicks off and energy is released. Nuclear explosion.”
“That’s what happens inside that?” Vasin pointed to the file on the desk.
“Yes. No. I mean, both. RDS-220 isn’t like an old-fashioned fission bomb. It’s a thermonuclear device. A hydrogen bomb, in common parlance.”
“Which is?”
“Very different. The first atom bombs worked by splitting heavy atoms apart, nuclear fission. Thermonuclear bombs work the opposite way. They make lighter atoms join together. Nuclear fusion. That’s what happens in the heart of the sun, in all stars. They are all giant, continuous thermonuclear explosions. Balls of hydrogen, fusing together to make other elements and giving off light and heat. Every atom in the universe was created inside a star. Every atom in your body, in mine. To reproduce the effect on earth we need to create the same conditions as on the sun. We expose hydrogen to heat and pressure. Something like seventy-three million times the pressure of the atmosphere of earth. And the fusion begins.”
“And how do you make a sun…on earth?”
Axelrod smiled in fond pride, as though Vasin had asked him about the school grades of a particularly brilliant child.
“By using a fission bomb as a detonator, we get the necessary energy. As long as you surround the detonator and the hydrogen in a strong enough casing. The tamper has to be very thick and heavy to withstand the pressure for as long as twenty, maybe thirty milliseconds. Then you get enough energy concentrated inside to start a fusion reaction.”
“Which is explosive?”
“What you call an ‘explosion’ is just rapid combustion. Combustion is something solid turning to gas and expanding. Expose almost anything to enough heat and it will turn into gas. So, when the hydrogen atoms in the bomb fuse together into different elements, they release enormous amounts of heat and light that vaporize everything around them. But that explosion also vaporizes the casing of the bomb itself, releasing the pressure, and the fusion reaction stops. That was the genius of Petrov’s design. The heavier and stronger the tamper, the longer it can contain the fusion.”
“That can happen in twenty thousandths of a second?”
“Certainly. That’s long enough to create a sun. A small sun. And you see, the stronger the tamper you have, the longer the reaction time. Petrov’s idea was to make a casing of twenty tons of pure uranium metal. Very dense. Very strong.”
“Twenty tons of uranium? But you said that fifteen kilos was enough….”
“Fifteen kilos of weapons-grade uranium is enough to make an atomic bomb, yes. That’s uranium 235. But like I said, natural uranium metal contains less than one percent of that stuff. Ninety-nine percent is uranium 238. It is much more stable, but has never been used to make a tamper. We always used lead. But Petrov was a genius, a revolutionary. He wanted to make RDS-220 out of uranium for two reasons. It’s much denser than lead — about twenty tons per cubic meter for uranium, eleven for lead. And uranium’s boiling point is more than twice as high.”
“Stronger tamper, bigger explosion.”
“Correct. Well done.”
“And the other reason?”
“Ah. Here is the pure beauty of Fyodor’s vision.” Axelrod sat forward, his whole body animated. “A new generation of devices, an order of magnitude bigger than anything ever seen before. He wants to open a new chapter.” He caught himself, as though stung. “Wanted.”
“A new chapter of…?”
“Petrov’s idea was a three-stage bomb. The first two stages were a standard hydrogen bomb. A fission device as a detonator, then two chambers of hydrogen as the main explosive force. But the casing itself would act as a third stage. The neutrons thrown off by the fusion would irradiate the uranium tamper. Even the trace amounts of U-235 could become fissile with that much radiation and heat. So you have three stages: fission, then fusion, then once again fission. The uranium tamper was revolutionary. It would have doubled the power of the device. More, perhaps.”
“Might? Using a uranium casing has never been tried?”
Axelrod shook his head.
“So what did Adamov change?”
“The day after Petrov’s death, Adamov ordered the metallurgists who were casting the uranium tamper to stop. And ever since he’s been closeted night and day with his closest comrades recalibrating. And today — this.”
Axelrod traced a finger over the cover of the thick document that lay between them.
“The new tamper is made of lead. Not uranium, but lead. Which is inert. There is no third-stage fission. Professor Adamov’s substitution of lead for uranium will drastically reduce the power of the device. It is the opposite of what we have been trying to achieve. It’s sabotage, Major.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am quite sure the yield will be reduced.” Axelrod’s voice became low and urgent. “By how much, we won’t know until we calculate the projected yield with an inert casing. I want to get some time on our electronic computer to work out how much.”
“How powerful does it have to be?”
“That’s the point. General Secretary Khrushchev has ordered a one-hundred-megaton device. A hundred million tons of TNT equivalent. Yes. Roughly five thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.”
“Fuck.”
It wasn’t often that Vasin was moved to swear. Axelrod glanced up with faint distaste.
“That’s one way to put it. A hundred megatons was meant to put the Americans in their place. Before Adamov began his alterations.”
“Will this device be bigger than the Americans’ bombs?”
“The biggest hydrogen bomb they have ever detonated was about fifteen megatons, but that was by accident. Anyway, the Yankees got scared and started making them smaller.”
“Scared of what?”
Axelrod shrugged.
“I thought it was the kontora’s business to tell us what the Americans are thinking.” He ventured a quick, nervous smile before continuing. “They got scared of the unpredictable effects, I suppose.”
“What unpredictable effects?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Vasin ignored the insult.
“You’re saying that maybe Adamov got scared?”
“Soviet scientists fear nothing, Comrade. We fear only fear itself. As the Yankees’ President said once.”
“But isn’t it dangerous to increase the scale so radically?”
“Thermonuclear bombs are quite dangerous, Major.”
“You don’t think that caution in this matter…”
“Cowardice in this matter is a betrayal of the trust placed in us by the Party, Comrade. And deliberate sabotage would be, of course, treason.”
Axelrod spoke with a bravado that was just short of absolute earnest. Ah, thought Vasin. A weak man, flinging words stronger than himself in the hope that someone will believe him. He’d seen the type.
“And who knows about these changes?”
“Everyone. That’s the way we have always worked here. A basic principle of our craft. At the beginning, the kontora, your chief, Beria, tried to impose compartmentalization of information. The Beard — Igor Kurchatov, the builder of our first Soviet device — refused. He insisted that here inside the program we have complete freedom to exchange information. And so it has remained. Therefore, Adamov handed out the new general design today to the heads of all the laboratories. Every senior academic worker has access to his department’s copy.”
“And who knows about the exact implications of Adamov’s change of design?”
“Protopopov, the chief metallurgical engineer. He’ll be kept busy casting the new lead tamper. The rest of the design is pretty much unchanged.”
“Does anyone share your view that Adamov’s plan is sabotage?”
“Every man here owes his advancement to Adamov. They are all his acolytes. For them the Director is the brain of the Institute. He taught them. He made them. They would never question his wisdom and judgment.”
“Except you.”
“Except me. But that is only because Fedya — Dr. Petrov — took me into his confidence over their dispute. Adamov had been worried about the uranium tamper for months. They argued about it. Constantly.”
“Why didn’t Adamov just overrule Petrov? If he is the law here.”
Axelrod flicked Vasin a helpless, pleading glance, as though he hoped to find an ally.
“Can I trust you, Vasin?”
Only a desperate man would ask such a question of his interrogator. Yet Vasin had heard it often enough. There comes a point when every man needs a confidant, even if his words will damn him.
“You can trust me, Axelrod. I promise.” Vasin even truly meant it.
“Petrov has powerful supporters. Had. His father, for instance. Petrov was the only scientist in Arzamas who could really stand up to contradict Adamov. And now he is dead. Adamov can do as he pleases.”
“Which implies, Adamov eliminated him in order to put his sabotage plan into action? Is that what you are telling me, Axelrod?”
“You answer your own questions so succinctly, Comrade.”
Vasin’s own words to Adamov on their first day, flung back at him. But there was no longer any hint of humor in Axelrod’s pale, agitated face.
The street was slick with mushy snow, churned into the consistency of porridge by pedestrians’ feet. Vasin passed a team of street cleaners in padded coats who were scraping the sidewalk clean with broad steel spades. On the corner a snow-clearing machine, the kind they called a capitalist because of its rotating, grasping arms that scooped the snow onto a conveyor, idled waiting for the team to finish throwing the slush into the road. A comforting ritual of Soviet urban life.
Our death-breeding city, Maria had called it. Vasin began to see the menace. The hurrying schoolchildren, the laden shoppers, the comforting clack of closing tram doors, all formed a familiar screen of normality. But sitting on that tram, driving in that car, eating in that restaurant, were men and women who held the death of the world in their minds and hands. Everyone around him had his or her little piece of Armageddon to build. And somewhere beneath his feet, as he walked the corridors of the Institute, the bomb itself was growing in its cellar-womb like a monstrous baby.
Could Adamov have murdered Petrov because he wanted to be free to sabotage the bomb? The project that would crown Adamov’s career with a mushroom cloud of such proportions that the world would stand awed? Why would Adamov wish to reverse a decade’s progress, the research of thousands of his students and colleagues? Sabotage?
Or fear?
Fear of the “unpredictable effects” of a device that was too powerful?
Vasin thought of Professor Adamov’s pale, papery skin, the thin gray bristle that covered his scalp. What was inside that brilliant brain? To hold death, so much death, in that mind of his. And still be calm. How could one carry such knowledge and remain sane?
Vasin could find no obvious impossibility in Axelrod’s story. The timing of the radical new design was certainly suspicious. But why would Axelrod seek him out? Why would a member of the Citadel, that ivory tower so tightly closed to the prying eyes of the kontora, choose a stranger from Moscow to confide in? Unless Axelrod was trying to deflect suspicion from himself?
Could it be, Vasin thought, that it was Axelrod who had slipped a hook into his mouth rather than the other way around?
V
Vasin found Efremov in his office at the kontora, sitting bolt upright at his orderly desk reading a report. Seeing Vasin’s head poking around the door, he set the papers facedown and folded his hands into a steeple.
“Not disturbing you, Efremov?”
“Come in, Major.”
Vasin closed the door behind him. Efremov did not invite him to sit.
“I need a favor from you. An important favor. And I promise it won’t involve distracting the golden minds of Arzamas.”
“You seem to have taken a lesson from the General this morning. I understand he set out some checks to your ambition and carelessness.”
“I took careful note.”
“And what is this harmless favor?”
“I need a copy of the lab report, specifically the thallium records.”
Efremov’s face twitched involuntarily. He unfolded his hands and leaned back in his chair.
“May I ask why?”
“Because I have reason to believe they are inaccurate.”
The adjutant’s voice became icy.
“I assume your informant in the Institute, Dr. Vladimir Axelrod, has been making suppositions?”
“It’s irrelevant who I talked to.”
“Oh, but it is relevant, my dear Vasin. Dr. Axelrod is a known troublemaker. A man of dangerous views, an irregular personal life, and unreliable politics. And based solely on the word of this man, you wish to undo the work of an entire State Security team who combed through the laboratory records for days, cross-checking under supervision. To what end this folly? Are you driven to turn the Petrov tragedy into a detective mystery? Or did Orlov send you to deliberately disrupt the most important show of Soviet might in history?”
“Is that a no?”
Efremov struggled to keep his composure.
“It is a no, Vasin.”
Unbidden, Vasin squared a chair directly in front of Efremov and sat.
“You are covering for somebody. I don’t know why, or for whom, but you’re hiding something.”
Efremov smiled thinly.
“Wild accusations are all you have left. You seem to have me confused with some hapless patsy you have pulled off the streets of Moscow.”
“Come on, Efremov. You know this case stinks. And one of the reasons it stinks is your distinct effort to keep me away from it. Now you’re going to tell me that the great project cannot be disrupted with days to go before the test. Doesn’t a murderer who kills top scientists constitute a threat to your precious Arzamas? You saw what happened to Petrov’s body. And you told me, ‘Maybe he deserved it.’ ”
Efremov sat motionless, his palms on his thighs. A muscle in his jaw pulsed, but he said nothing for a full minute.
“What gives you the right to place your curiosity above the highest considerations of State Security?”
“You know, Efremov, you’re not the first person in Arzamas to ask me that.”
“You have the arrogance of a fanatic, Comrade Major.”
“I have my orders and I follow them.”
“Vasin, you asked for my help. The best help I can give you is a word of advice. If you persist in your disruptive behavior, there will be negative consequences for you, personally.”
“Negative consequences from whom?”
“From patriotic men.”
“You mean General Zaitsev.”
Efremov’s face had become stone.
“Very well, Efremov. I take careful note of your help.”
Vasin stood abruptly and made for the door.
“Comrade, all we want is for you to get home safely to your wife and child.”
Vasin froze and turned back.
“The work of a KGB officer is not always easy on a marriage. We do hope it works out for the best between you.”
Vasin scanned Efremov’s face for signs that the man knew of the fatal knowledge that was contained in the transcript of his telephone call with Vera. “Katya Orlova”—it was a common enough name. Had Efremov put two and two together and connected her to General Orlov? Vera could not have put him in more jeopardy if she was trying. Was the man needling or stabbing? Judging from the smirk on his face, needling. Or so Vasin fervently hoped.
He composed his face.
“Thanks for your concern, Efremov. I’ll see her when my investigation is finished. And I mean completed.”
Vasin turned to open the door.
“One moment, Comrade. There is something I can do for you.”
“What’s that?”
Efremov had risen.
“You wanted to see Petrov’s apartment?”
Vasin hesitated. Something knowing and menacing had entered Efremov’s tightly wound face.
“Why the sudden change of heart?”
“A gesture of goodwill, Comrade. We’re on the same team, after all. Come. We can go right now.”
VI
Fyodor Petrov’s apartment building was at the edge of town, a kilometer and a half from Lenin Square. It was a modern five-story building identical to Kuznetsov’s, but facing a woodland park. The apartments had balconies, too, and a fenced-off children’s playground, small signifiers of great privilege. Parked in the courtyard were a pair of official cars and two large Kamaz trucks. A policeman standing guard at the stairwell saluted Efremov and rolled his eyes to say: They’re upstairs.
In the lobby the tiny concierge’s lodge, decorated with magazine cuttings of Red Army hockey stars, was empty, and the doors to the ground-floor apartments stood ajar. Vasin glanced inside. Net curtains billowed on a breeze blowing through wide-open windows. A suitcase yawned, half-packed. The residents had left in a hurry.
Voices drifted down the stairwell. Vasin and Efremov ascended to the third floor, where a trio of green-uniformed backs huddled in conference.
“Comrade Officers?”
A narrow face framed in a lieutenant’s collar bars turned irritably, then snapped to attention.
“Sir?”
“This is Major Alexander Vasin from Moscow. He wishes to see the deceased’s apartment.”
The KGB subalterns exchanged glances.
With exaggerated formality, Efremov extended a cardboard box he had brought with him from the car.
“Take this protective gear, Major. The place is covered in…” Efremov searched for a more delicate word and decided against it. “Radioactive puke.”
The box contained a gas mask of Great Patriotic War vintage. Vasin thought of the morgue — the breathing apparatus, the canvas suits, the hosing down.
“Are no other precautions necessary?”
Efremov gave a snort that said, probably.
“Take your time.”
“Thank you, Comrade.”
He pulled on the dusty mask.
Vasin had seen blood before. A schizophrenic electrician who had butchered his family in an apartment on Taganka. A drunk who’d been thrown out of a bar at Kursky Station and had returned with a pair of axes. But this crime scene was like nothing he had ever witnessed. The whole place, sleek bookshelves, modern furniture, shoes standing neat as parading soldiers, was covered in scarlet splashes. Great, extravagant puddles of bloody vomit, more than Vasin had thought one man could ever produce.
In the bedroom was a team of three technicians in the same hazard suits he’d seen at the morgue. They were stripping blood-soaked sheets from the bed with tongs and stuffing them into metal-lined plastic bins. The men acknowledged Vasin’s presence with a brief glance, then continued their work. Vasin began to understand why Efremov wanted him to see it. The official investigation was over, so every scrap of evidence in Petrov’s apartment was being systematically thrown away. On the bedside table a Geiger counter crackled steadily.
Radiation.
When Vasin first heard the word during a childhood X-ray, the nurse had explained that this magic ray was a force of nature that had been tamed by Soviet science. But here in Petrov’s apartment the magic had been turned loose. Odorless, tasteless, and deadly.
Instinctively, Vasin tucked his bare hands under his armpits and looked about the bedroom from the doorway. On one wall hung a framed poster for a foreign film. Vasin squinted through the misted eyepieces of the gas mask. Gérard Philipe in Le Rouge et le Noir. Vasin backed out of the doorway and turned to the sitting room. Framed photographs of family holidays: Fyodor the golden boy, floppy-haired, posing with his parents on beaches and boats. Two Doctors Petrov, father and son, standing side by side, both wearing lab coats. The older man sported a crumpled grin, while his son stared at the camera proud and invincible. Above the television hung a series of framed sketch portraits of Petrov, posing shirtless, executed in charcoal by a talented amateur. Vasin noted the signature: “With all my love, V.” He hoped that Zaitsev’s clowns had photographed the drawing. Within days, he guessed, this and every other object in the place would be buried at the bottom of a mine shaft.
Two of the technicians were starting to maneuver a laden bin into the corridor. One of them waved to Vasin and made a jabbing motion toward his wrist. Vasin stood uncomprehending for a moment then understood: time. Radiation exposure.
Back on the downstairs landing, Vasin tore off the musty gas mask and breathed deep. As he snatched it off he felt a dry rattle in the filter. Snapping off the cover, he found that the mask’s snout contained nothing more than crumbled, useless wadding.
Efremov and his colleagues had gone. He could hear their guffawing banter in the courtyard. Seeing Vasin in the window, they tossed away their cigarettes and mounted their jeep. By the time Vasin had reached the front door, both they and Efremov had driven off, leaving him to find his own way to KGB headquarters. A pair of kontora goons sat in a Volga sedan, watching him pass like bored guard dogs.
Right now, he needed to get away from the poisonous air of Petrov’s apartment. The visit had told him nothing, and in the process he’d inhaled God knows what dose of radiation. Or maybe not quite nothing. “With all my love, V.” Vladimir Axelrod? The rain had thickened into a steady drizzle, but nonetheless Vasin struck out into the park in front of Petrov’s building. Like most such green spaces on the edges of Soviet cities, it wasn’t actually a park at all but a patch of primeval forest, abruptly demarcated by a line of asphalt that signified civilization’s furthest advance.
Within a hundred meters, Vasin could have been anywhere in deep Russia. The birches and firs embraced him with the sweet smell of autumnal decay. Rain hissed on the yellowing branches. He followed a lightly trodden path to a natural clearing where traces of ice had formed on the edges of a pond filled with black water. A bristling clump of marsh alders stood, their mongrel-brown trunks tangled fantastically. Vasin pressed on. The forest damp was like a balm against everything man-made and unclean. Behind him he heard the snap of twigs as his tails from the kontora struggled irritably through the wet undergrowth.
Abruptly the woodland ended in what looked like a wide firebreak. But, as he stepped out from the bushes, Vasin saw it marked the city’s border. A tall barbed-wire fence ran along the center of a clear-cut area, perhaps a hundred meters wide, that extended as far as he could see in either direction. A gravel road ran alongside the fence, with guard towers every two hundred meters. Left and right, Vasin saw glinting pairs of glass lenses scanning him from the towers’ walkways, the binoculars held by armed soldiers in rain capes. Opposite, through two lines of fence, the forest continued dark and impenetrable.
Vasin had reached the edge of planet Arzamas.
VII
As Vasin walked home, the sun dropped below the clouds and for a few minutes bathed the snowy streets in harsh, oblique sunshine. The tarmac shone with a lingering scarlet glow. The sight of the post office, its sandstone facade a rich gold in the evening light, held him for a moment. But after counting through the possible outcomes of a phone call home like a pauper auditing pennies, he could think of no good one. Even his final play, the one he promised himself he would never make, the one of total surrender and self-abasement, had not worked. He had thrown himself on Vera’s love and mercy but found that there was none left over for him.
There had been a time, once, when Vasin would confide in Vera. Sharing his indignations, his small triumphs, talking over the mysteries of his police-work cases. Never much of reader, Vera, but she had liked Sherlock Holmes as a girl. Her breathlessly inventive explanations for his homicides reminded him of a younger version of himself. He could never quite bring himself to tell her that Moscow’s murderers were, for the most part, a depressingly predictable bunch. Weeping drunks, beaten wives, the furious human dramas of the communal apartment kitchen where a missing chicken could lead to bloodshed. And then there were the occasional turf wars between such underworld figures hardy enough to exist in a city as saturated with police and vigilant citizenry as Moscow. A gambling club shoot-out. A prostitute with her throat cut. No complex motives, nothing that Holmes and Watson would ever feel the need to light a pipe to ponder, ever appeared in the files that landed on Vasin’s desk. No speckled band snakes, no phosphorescent hounds. Only thieves’ pathetic ideas of honor, profit, and survival. The desperate things human beings with no options left did to each other.
He and Vera had met, in approved fashion, at a Young Communists’ dance. A dusty hall in late summer, the smell of sweet teenage sweat and floor polish. A loud emcee with hair oil running down his temple, a band made up of pimply young men in square suits. From among a crowd of her girlfriends, gripping bottles of soda like protective talismans, Vera looked out into the hostile territory of menfolk with an expression of calm and tolerant appraisal, strangely without ambition. Vasin had of course been too nervous to ask her to dance. She did it instead, accompanied by a girlfriend. She spoke for both of them.
“Will you sit there all evening? The music will finish soon.”
There was annoyance in her voice, an accusation that the boys weren’t doing their bit. As he and Vera danced, awkwardly, hands on hip and shoulder and a chaste arm’s length apart, Vasin felt surprise and relief. So she knows how this all works. Outside, after the dance, they sat side by side on a bench among the long shadows of a small park. Again, Vera had taken him in hand.
“Well?” she asked. Her tone was that of Vasin’s mother, drawing her boy’s attention to some undone chore or broken promise. “Will we kiss?”
She turned her head, eyes closed, mouth half-open, waiting. Her mouth tasted of sugar syrup. When his hand closed on her small breast she slapped it away.
“What are you doing? It is not seemly.”
Vera always knew what was expected. Her life proceeded according to a timetable of convention known to everybody except Vasin. On their third date, to see a comedy film at the Arbat Cinema, she had allowed him to put his hand up her skirt. He felt only hot, taut nylon, and an impenetrable fortress of underclothes. It was understood that a proposal was required to get further. They were both nearly twenty. It was time.
Vera’s eyes were cool and gray, and she had a squat Russian homeliness he found comforting. She was accepting and grave. When he suggested they get registered, after queuing for an hour for a table at the Aragvi restaurant and working their way through a bad Georgian dinner, she did not smile exactly, but her mouth appeared to relax.
“Nu na konets,” she said. “Finally.”
Vasin assumed that meant yes.
Vera had embarked on the arrangements for the wedding stoically, keeping him updated on the process of obtaining champagne coupons and a dressmaker’s appointment as though he had laid a burden upon her. She allowed him to make love to her, on a friend’s sofa. The event was signaled long in advance. Arrangements had been made, keys passed over with a knowing look. Vasin, in his nervousness, had drunk too much. Afterward he remembered only Vera’s sigh when it was over, far too quickly. She had allowed her man to indulge his bestial instincts.
Vera’s mother, Margarita Ivanovna, lived in a new five-story building on the outskirts of the city. She was not yet forty, but her young face was worn out and framed by hair gone dead. Husband lost in the war, officially. Unofficially, Vera had confided, run off with another woman. Margarita Ivanovna had eyed the flowers that Vasin brought disapprovingly, as though the gift might carry some sort of obligation. The bouquet was evidently too gaudy for her. What was this young man trying to cover up? In time Vasin learned that too modest a gift would also have been wrong for his mother-in-law. But by then he had grown used to his role. As a man among women, he stood for all that was wrong and unjust in the world.
Vasin and Vera received the portion of happiness that they had been raised to expect. As the son of a war hero, Vasin had to wait only three months for a one-room apartment in a concrete high-rise on Lenin Prospekt. Vera had been assiduous in finding correct furniture, buying plastic flowers, hanging Hungarian curtains. She even learned to enjoy their sessions in bed, or at least pretended to. Night after night, she had worked her way through the recipes in 1001 Things a Good Housewife Should Know: borscht, cutlets, beetroot salad, fish soup. The training manual for a good Soviet wife, the points to be ticked off one by one on the road to domestic perfection. In their tiny kitchen, over cups of tea, she had listened to her young husband speak of the trials of the police academy, then the force, then his murder cases, or at least sanitized versions of them. She had found a job in the accounts department at the nearby Dom Tkani, Moscow’s biggest draper’s emporium, and settled into the petty politics and jealousies of the office with enthusiasm. She had smiled, at least once, almost every night.
Nikita had been born two years after their marriage. Vasin had first seen the infant as a swaddled parcel, displayed from behind a sealed third-floor window of the House of Births on Nikitskiye Vorota as though to prove that Vera had not been malingering. No men were allowed into this temple of female suffering, for which the husbands gathered on the sidewalk outside were clearly held responsible. The birth had been a bad one, Vera had told him, and he’d pretended to know what she meant. Never put me through that again, she had said, as though the whole thing had been his idea. He did not protest.
At first Vasin had been grateful that the squalling, red-faced creature occupied so much of Vera’s attention. He had been displaced in her life and affections, and was relieved. He discovered from his cop colleagues that real men were expected to drink. Soon, he began to enjoy the confident glow that booze gave him. At a certain point, his swaying gait could almost pass for macho swagger. At a Women’s Day party organized for the officers of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, Vasin had found himself drunkenly propositioning a pretty blonde, the sister of a colleague’s wife. To his intense surprise the girl had taken him by the hand, as though weighing his wedding ring, then turned and led him out of the dance hall and to his brother officer’s apartment. They had screwed with desperate haste on the sofa, right in front of a toddler who stood and watched them wide-eyed from his crib. As they lay together afterward, breathing each other’s sweat, they had listened for the whir of the lift that would announce the return of the child’s parents. As they made love the girl had moaned and writhed in his arms like a wild thing. That night, Vasin realized, he had discovered lust. Sex was not just an unclean bodily need to be discharged but could be an ungovernable hunger. He had never before felt lost, weightless, outside time. He imagined he could taste the girl’s salty kiss on his lips for weeks afterward. He wrote to her at her women’s dormitory at a textile factory in Ivanovo, but she never wrote back.
In the banter of the detectives’ operations room, they teased Vasin as a babnik, a ladies’ man. The truth was that he didn’t dare. He was handsome, or so the teenage secretaries and shopgirls and waitresses and even, once, a pretty trolleybus conductress who chatted to him with bright, inviting smiles, told him. Neatly dressed, closely shaved, hair brushed. A model Young Communist, a young man going places. But women, for Vasin, remained fundamentally unknowable and dangerous. Every winning female smile seemed to him to conceal a terrifying hinterland of hysteria, pregnancy, and disaster.
When had he and Vera stopped talking? Parenthood had tipped over the rhythm of their lives in all the usual superficial ways. But in fundamental ways too. And it had never righted itself. Vasin remembered a line from a Mayakovsky poem: the boat of love smashed on the shore of daily life.
It was not as though Vera was unhappy, or at least, no more discontented than she had a right to be, than anyone else seemed to be. Vasin had concluded early on that unhappiness was inevitable in any human relationship — unhappiness suffered and unhappiness inflicted. He had never taken it personally. It was, evidently, a law of nature. The sadistic inclinations of Vera’s supervisor at work, the lack of emulsion paint in the hardware shops, the crowds on the rush-hour trolleybuses, all these blended with her discontent with his own personal slovenliness, the child’s laziness and sleeplessness, the neighbors’ noisy radio. All these were simply the rhythms of life. Vera’s slow-burning eyes, nightly censuring male insufficiency across the dining table, were things simply to be borne. Just as his colleagues’ philistine disdain for culture was a thing to be borne, his boss’s contempt for rules and procedures, some suspects’ stubborn refusal to accept that fate had ordained them to be victims. Lives were imperfect; wives were imperfect. How foolish his unmarried colleagues were to be afraid of loneliness.
But there was something deeper. Vera had no interest in changing what was around her. Worse, she had no concept that the world could be changed.
Vasin did.
That stubborn streak of righteousness he had inherited from his mother. Not rebelliousness, but rather its opposite, a dogged insistence at taking the system at its word. “Citizen, we have the right!” had always been his mother’s favorite phrase. Vera had no such faith. She trudged irritably through a bleak world where hardship could be overcome only by moments of luck and acts of low cunning.
Yes, Vasin realized with devastating clarity that his wife was cynical, and that she was stupid. He had felt a nerve in his head tighten. His usual misery had uncoiled with its inevitable routine. “You are naïve,” she would sneer. “You would rather be right than get ahead.” Vasin longed to retaliate, to fling back his own contempt. But he knew that this would mark a defeat for him, that any reconciliation would be only on her terms. And this he would not allow. Because he knew that he was right. Or at least, that right existed, somewhere, if he could only find it.
Naïve? Perhaps. Vera’s words had stung because they were true. Every day of his career as a policeman he saw his colleagues framing witnesses, pinning spare crimes that had been bouncing around the books onto hapless suspects, driving practiced fists into soft bellies, scrambling at the end of every quarter to round up some likely patsies to fill the crime-statistics quotas. He knew all this, and knew it to be wrong, a travesty of Soviet justice.
But a weasel thought had sneaked into his mind.
What if crookedness was the way the system was meant to work? They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work, his colleagues were always joking. What if his job were to pretend to protect the people, to act a bit part in a giant parody of police work?
Vasin had never thought to call such thoughts political until his friend Arvo did. Arvo Janovich Laar was an Estonian, but the son of a Bolshevik hero, so it was all right. Laar was the uncomplaining butt of constant joshing about his countrymen’s supposed timidity and phlegm. He had a singsong Baltic accent that their fellow detectives never tired of imitating.
“Hey, Laar! Heard the latest one? Russian gets on a bus in Estonia. Asks if it’s far to Tallinn. Driver says, ‘No-sir. Not-far at-all.’ They drive for an hour. The Russian guy asks again, ‘Is it far to Tallinn?’ Pig-fucker driver answers, ‘It is-now.’ ” Uproarious, locker-room laughter. Even Arvo would join in. But he knew, and they all knew, that what the laughter really said was that Balts were sneaky, defeated, Russia-hating little assholes.
The bullying drew them together, though Vasin knew it and didn’t like it. Their outcasts’ friendship had been assigned to them by the group, like the roster of a detective team. Vasin and Laar, the weirdos. But Arvo was easy to like, counter-stereotypically cheerful and essentially optimistic. Vasin recognized something of Arvo in himself. His refusal to bend before the crowd. A core of pride.
They found themselves alone together one afternoon in an office that smelled of stale tobacco smoke and disinfectant, spilled booze and vomit, the after-murmurs of a recent party that they had missed. Gingerly, as though unwrapping contraband, Arvo ventured a joke of his own.
“An Estonian goes to the polling place, prepared to vote. He is handed an envelope and told to put it in the ballot box. But instead of following instructions, he starts to open the envelope. ‘What are you doing?’ yells the woman. ‘I just wanted to see who I was voting for,’ replies the Estonian. ‘You imbecile! Don’t you know this is a secret ballot?’ ”
Vasin had quickly hoisted a smile, but Laar spotted it for a false flag.
“What? Not funny?”
“It’s funny, Arvo.”
Laar had looked at him for a long moment, opening his mouth just wide enough to let the point of his tongue caress his upper lip. Then he closed it and allowed a further pause for uncomfortable thoughts.
“You’re a believer, Vasin.”
“In God?”
“No! For heaven’s sake. I mean…a believer in…the order of things. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad someone is. I admire you for it. You believe that things should be as they should be, not as they are. That things can be done properly. Will be done properly, one day. You can’t laugh at the system because you believe in it.”
Vasin set down his paper coffee cup and thought, Yes, I do.
It had never properly occurred to him that there were people, respectable people, who did not believe.
“You think our bosses believe in anything apart from collecting kickbacks from the Chechens and the Armenians and the Tambov boys?”
Vasin was shocked. Not that he hadn’t heard the rumors about their boss. Of course he had. But to hear his friend discuss them so casually seemed a sacrilege against the gravity of the accusations.
“You’re saying that it’s true? Have you reported it?”
Laar sat back with a sigh.
“And what would be the point of that? To do my duty as a citizen, and get myself reassigned to Syktyvkar?”
Laar drained his cup of thin police coffee before continuing.
“You know what I can never understand about you Russians? You love anarchy, each one of you. I know you fuckers. You all have rebel souls. Every one of you wants to screw the system. But together, you have a terror of chaos. You’ll go to any lengths to prevent it. I always wondered why. Perhaps because you know yourselves too well. You know what you’ll do if suddenly nobody is watching over you with a stick. That’s my profound thought for the day.”
Vasin thought about that term, rebel souls, for days, in the queue at the bread store, in the line at the cafeteria, in the scrum of commuters as they positioned themselves to fight their way onto the Number 31 trolleybus home. Rebels? These?
But at the same time, what were these cancerous secret doubts that were eating away at Vasin’s righteous heart? He searched inside himself for a cool-headed voice that would explain the gap between the sordid daily necessity and the far, shining vision. But as the days went by Vasin began to feel the vision slipping too far away to be grasped, into the realm of myth. He remained convinced that belief was the only gravity that could hold his contradictory world of duty and lies together. But he was no longer sure he had preserved enough of it to make the center hold.
Two years after his conversation with Arvo and newly recruited to the KGB, he’d met Katya Orlova. It felt like justice. “Frustrated salaryman seeks his nemesis, sex-starved Juno preferred. Gods’ wives only.” Vasin had embarked on the affair in the certain knowledge that there was no possible universe in which it could have a good ending. He felt like an alcoholic reaching for the bottle he knew would kill him. As Katya’s monumental breasts smothered him in bed, Vasin experienced for the first time the abandon of self-destruction. It was like a coming of age: After this, there could be no redemption. Because he had finally become a faithless man, and deserved none.
Exactly how Vera had found out, he didn’t know. The bitches’ coven of the kontora wives had woven a sticky web of rumor that had spun quickly across the Moscow phone system to reach Vera’s ears. As he knew it would be, this was Vasin’s grand debacle. The moment of weakness that he sensed Vera had been waiting for all her life. The moment that she and her mother had secretly known would come: all that was rotten and duplicitous about Vasin had finally been confirmed. At last! We knew all along what you were. Finally, his behavior had met their low expectations. And of course, what Vasin hated most was that they were right. His own weakness, his pathetic lust and lack of self-control, had given this crowing chorus of frustrated women the justification they needed to pull his life apart. A just fate had come for him, even if it never seemed to come for anybody else. And it came in the form of his wife, transformed by his own folly from a lonely, silly woman into a righteous avenger.
How ironic that Vera’s revenge should break over his head while he was here, in Arzamas, the assignment that was testing his faith in himself as an agent of justice to the breaking point. Efremov was right. Vasin did think that he knew better, that his precious right to get to the truth trumped everything else. And Maria was right. He’d spared her from the asylum, then come to her to present the bill. And Vasin knew that he was not a righteous man. Thanks to Vera, all Arzamas might soon know it too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THURSDAY, 26 OCTOBER 1961 FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE TEST
I
When Vasin woke, the morning light was already streaming through the orange nylon curtains. Yesterday’s sleet and snow showers were a memory. A bold autumn sun glittered on rows of brand-new apartment windows, shiny as mirrors. From somewhere down the street came the babble of a radio. Vasin was alone in the apartment. Kuznetsov had left some buckwheat porridge on the stove, fruit compote in the refrigerator.
In the bathroom the freshly painted pipes shivered slightly when he turned the tap. The showerhead dangled a tantalizing thread of scalding hot water, then abruptly burst into full steaming force. Arzamas water had a peaty aroma to it. Vasin scrubbed himself, for the fourth or fifth time since he had returned home the previous evening, praying that the invisible contagion of Petrov’s apartment had not entered him. Once again he cursed Efremov. The dud gas mask had been a terrifying warning about how his life could be effortlessly destroyed by the secret poisons of Arzamas. And again he replayed Efremov’s words about Vera in his head, their tone, the cast of Efremov’s narrow face, his contempt for Orlov and his ignorance of the hidden power that Special Cases wielded. Even if the local kontora forbore to take his life, did they possess the knowledge that could destroy his career?
Vasin was scared. Frankly, scared.
In any other circumstances, he would have taken Zaitsev’s advice and cleared out of town. Not even his own curiosity about what the hell they were covering up would have held him here. Efremov might well guess the truth about Katya Orlova. In any case Vera herself would blurt it to someone else soon enough. Vasin was trapped in this accursed city. A bomb of his own making was ticking under his life. Staying on was a risk. But cracking the Petrov case was also his only lifeline. Orlov, it was clear, had sent him to Arzamas because the old man’s instinct had smelled the possibility of netting a golden fish. And finding that fish was Vasin’s only chance to ever protect himself from the wrath of Orlov that he felt brewing on the future’s horizon like a gathering storm.
—
Vasin repeated the dry-cleaning routine he’d used the previous day to shake off his watchers. Once again he was lucky, a bread truck this time, beeping its horn impatiently outside the service gate of the kontora headquarters as he slipped out of the back door. Not a circumstance to be relied upon, and a violation of the basic rule of countersurveillance. People notice patterns. A stranger wandering through the courtyard will be ignored. See him twice, and you remember you’ve seen him before. Same went for the stationmaster, wide-eyed with nervousness when Vasin appeared in his office a second morning in a row. Vasin mouthed a silent prayer to the God he didn’t believe in that Orlov would have something for him.
But the line to Gorky didn’t connect.
Vasin dialed the four-digit code again and again, only to hear a continuing dial tone. He tried the time-honored Soviet technological fix of first resort, banging the receiver on the side of the heavy steel box. For good measure he tried the second resort, too, which was swearing in an angry whisper.
By the time the line finally connected it was a quarter past ten. Fifteen minutes late.
“The Comrade Chief Engineer is in a meeting.” Orlov’s secretary delivered the bad news with the usual tart satisfaction. “You’ll have to wait till the next train.”
So funny.
“I am afraid there will be no next train. Can you tell the Comrade Engineer that there is an emergency? Eight locomotives are about to collide.”
“Wait.”
Vasin could imagine the secretary’s sour moue as she took her time sauntering over to the conference room.
At length Orlov came on the line.
“Eight locomotives?”
“Sir.”
“Well. We must take steps to avoid such an eventuality. Interesting news. On your request.”
The background cacophony on the line suddenly broke into their conversation. Two husky male voices began speaking over Orlov.
“…and I said to that cow, I’m sick of the fucking sight of you. Every day I come home and there you are, sitting on the sofa like a sack of potatoes. And she says, If you’d stop drinking that crap you might appreciate me more. And I said, I drink crap for economy’s sake, woman! Save money for your extravagances….”
“Fuck off the service line now!” Orlov’s voice was at its most commanding. “Bosses are talking.”
“Okay, okay! Calm down, bitches!”
The interrupting voices went silent with a click, leaving only the usual background of low chatter.
“Your sharp nose has not failed you. I have had some responses from the archives. About the derailment back in ’thirty-seven.”
A pause as Orlov spoke aside. Clearing the room, Vasin guessed.
“It seems that Party A, repeat, Party A, was punished for his role in the accident after an anonymous denunciation. From a colleague at the same depot. The Kharkov depot. This source appears in the files under the name Kukushka. The Cuckoo. Yes. And further inquiries have established that the true identity of this source was indeed Party P. Repeat, Party A.V.P. Who was at the time Party A’s immediate subordinate at the depot. Repeat back to me what I have told you.”
Orlov’s words came over the antique phone line like an old gramophone record, a voice from the past.
“Party A was punished as a result of a denunciation from Party P, senior.”
“Exactly. There is more. After Party A’s imprisonment, his wife divorced him.” Orlov was now evidently reading from a document. His voice droned matter-of-factly. “She wrote a letter to the court accusing her husband of anti-Soviet activity. She saved herself. Spoke against him at the trial. Later married a…yes. An Army officer.”
“This is remarkable information, sir.”
“Indeed. Indeed. Though not an entirely unusual situation. Given the, er, state of the railways during that period. But. It is clear that Party P has much forgiveness to ask of his old comrade.”
“How do you wish me to proceed, Comrade Chief Engineer?”
Abruptly, the other faint voices on the line went dead. A loud series of fast clicks replaced the hubbub, ominous in the sudden electronic quiet. Orlov, his voice almost drowned by the clatter, spoke loudly and emphatically.
“Proceed with your usual discretion. Be careful that nobody knows the target of your inquiries. You will take no action and you will report your findings only to me. Only to me. You will take steps to ensure that the local branch remains in ignorance. But find out everything. We must avoid any further derailments.”
“Yes, sir. But, General. May I ask, why am I really here?”
A sigh on the line like wind singing in the wires.
“Comrade, are you scared?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That means you have knowledge. Only a fool would not be, if what we suspect is true.”
In his sudden anguish Vasin abandoned all pretense of coded speech.
“They have threatened me, sir.”
“Who?”
“The local kontora. They’re very serious. Sent me into a radiation zone.”
“No, you allowed yourself to be sent.”
“As you say, sir. But I just want to ask — is there anything you have not told me? About Arzamas? That I should know?”
Orlov’s tone hardened.
“Take care that your fear does not make you foolish.”
“Sir, if an accident should occur, I want you to know that Major Efremov of State Security…”
“Major Efremov will doubtless be in charge of the investigation into your death. I will be in charge of recommending you for a posthumous decoration. And it will be one that does honor to your many talents. Your wife and child will be well taken care of by the State. You have my word on that.”
On the crackling line Orlov’s chuckle sounded like the rustling of leaves.
II
From a phone box on Lenin Square, Vasin dialed the Adamovs’ home number. He heard a telltale hiss on the line, even as the ringing continued. Someone was listening in.
Maria picked up on the fifth ring.
“Maria Vladimirovna Adamova? This is Major Alexander Vasin of State Security. My apologies for disturbing you at home.” At the other end of the line he heard Masha’s small sigh. She had understood the meaning of his exaggeratedly formal tone at once.
“It’s no trouble, Comrade Major.”
“I am afraid that I have some further questions. May we meet at the same place we conducted our last interview in half an hour?”
“I will be there.”
Vasin listened for the clicks as both Masha and their silent listener replaced their receivers, then swore softly.
No point in hiding. In fact the opposite, to try to shake his shadows now would only alert them. They would be following Maria too. The only choice was to hide, as Orlov had advised, in plain sight. He caught a tram to Lenin Park.
Fat, freezing raindrops cut through the dirty snow. Vasin watched Masha’s blue raincoat approach down the boulevard, trailing a nondescript gray figure in her wake. The park’s café was crowded with grandmothers and young children sheltering from the rain, so they walked instead to the empty bandstand. No one, to Vasin’s knowledge, had so far succeeded in bugging a park.
“Hello, you.” Maria seemed unnaturally cheerful. She had made herself up, and under her mac she was wearing a smart woolen twinset. He saluted her, for the benefit of the watchers in the trees.
“Maria.”
“I can’t talk like this.” Maria scanned the strollers who dawdled on the edges of the wide lawn. “It’s like being on a microscope slide, some great eye watching us from above.”
“Act naturally. There’s nothing wrong with you and I meeting.”
“Meeting in a park? In the freezing rain? Are you in trouble?”
“Not yet.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No. Neither of us is in trouble. They’re curious about why I am talking to Axelrod in these dangerous times.”
“If you spoke to him, then you know. There’s no way that man is a good liar,” she said. “What I said about Axelrod and Petrov is true.”
“Perhaps. But Axelrod told me some things of his own. About Petrov and your husband. Explained that they might have had reasons to disagree. Serious reasons.” Vasin made sure to hold her gaze.
Maria took a step away from him, pulling her mackintosh tighter around herself and scanning the passersby.
“The little shit. What kinds of disagreements?”
“Believe me when I tell you that it’s complicated.”
“You can’t…” A note of fear sounded in Maria’s voice. “You can’t really believe that Adamov had anything to do with Fyodor’s death? You met him. You saw him. He couldn’t hurt anybody.”
Vasin thought of the film he had watched his first night in Arzamas and the apocalypse soon to be unleashed by Adamov, tossing the plane miles up in the sky, a firestorm racing across the land below. Was this the creation of a man who would never hurt anybody?
“Whatever Axelrod told you about Adamov’s supposed argument with Petrov is a lie. All his colleagues will confirm it.”
“Has Adamov ever spoken about his experience in the camps?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Did he ever speak about who denounced him in ’thirty-seven?”
Maria set her jaw defiantly.
“What is this? What could you possibly know about the affairs of great men, a little pawn like you?”
Anger sparked in her eyes. Perhaps desperation, too, a desperate desire not to know. Despite himself, Vasin felt the sting of her words, followed by a sudden, vicious impulse to hit back.
“Fyodor’s father denounced your husband. The great Academician Petrov sent your husband to the Gulag.”
Vasin closed his eyes for a moment, shocked by his own words. He had just blurted out the very thing that he should have kept most secret. The professional in him knew that information should be hoarded like dry gunpowder, then carefully laid at the weakest point of your opponent’s defenses for detonation at the most devastating moment. Instead he had ignited it in a single, useless whoosh. For a moment he had the unsettling feeling of not recognizing himself, as though he had been momentarily possessed. But by what? Why the sudden desire to lash out at Masha?
She stood very still, her eyes on the ground. Vasin could not unsay what he had said. What was the phrase that Orlov had used, once, of the momentum of a confession, showing off his wartime German? Yes — the desperate man makes a flucht nach vorn, a flight forward. An act of desperation, compelled by a previous false move. Except now it was Vasin who was the foolish talker. He had no choice but to plunge on.
“It’s in the files. Fyodor’s father destroyed Adamov’s freedom, and his family.”
When she finally spoke, Maria’s voice came from a distant place.
“Adamov’s first wife divorced him.”
“She repudiated him. Testified against him in court and denounced him as a traitor to the Motherland. Then she divorced him.”
“He never told me.”
Tears abruptly ran down her cheeks. Maria wiped them away, angrily, as though they had betrayed her.
Vasin felt a shameful glow. The sordid power this secret knowledge gave him. With a few scything words, her pride had been slashed down like grass. But after the glow came another urge, rising from an entirely unfamiliar place inside himself, to step forward and comfort her.
Her gaze, when it met his, seemed at first to signal a desperate vulnerability. Then like molten glass her eyes slowly hardened till they were brittle and unyielding.
“Why tell me such things? What is it that you want from me, Chekist?”
Her voice was bleak. Vasin had wanted to hurt her. Instead, it seemed, he had shattered her, and their fragile trust.
“If Adamov knew who betrayed him, it would provide every reason to kill Fyodor. Petrov took away his family, so he destroyed Petrov’s son. You can see what it looks like to the kontora. I thought you needed to know.”
“You want to protect me?”
Vasin could find no words to answer her. But he knew why, and the sudden realization chilled him.
“Protect me from Adamov, or from your own kontora?”
“I need to find out the…”
“You’re about to say ‘truth.’ Your favorite word. No need. Spare me your truth.”
Vasin began to reply, but she shook her head firmly.
“Vasin. Alexander. I will tell you this: In all our years of married life I have never known more of Adamov than the part he chooses to show me. It’s as though his soul is wrapped in tightly wadded layers of silence. But I know this, if he was angry once, it was long ago. The past is the past. For both of us. Yes, he carries death inside himself every day, but he is not an evil man. He is not a violent man. He could not kill Petrov. And over some ancient grudge? Never.”
“Did he know about you and Fyodor?”
“Can you spare me your fucking detective story plots? Adamov is not some jealous French lover boy.”
“Maria, I believe you.”
“You believe me, but?”
“Axelrod. I need proof.”
She took Vasin’s hand and squeezed it. After a long moment she seemed to come to some private decision.
—
The tram was packed with lunchtime shoppers. Maria’s thin body pressed against Vasin’s in the crowd. Two kontora Volgas followed them, overtaking the tram in relays. Doubtless another car would be waiting outside the Adamovs’ apartment. Quite an entourage.
As she fumbled with the keys, Maria kept her eyes down, avoiding Vasin’s. Once inside, she double-locked the door and tossed her coat on the floor. Vasin made a quacking gesture with his hand. Keep talking.
“Thank you for your good citizenship, Maria Vladimirovna,” he said loudly. “Your remarks have been most helpful. Would that all our countrymen were so zealous in assisting the organs of law enforcement.”
He walked over to a telephone receiver that stood on a table in the hall. Silently he pointed at the apparatus and tugged his ear. Maria nodded in understanding and beckoned him to follow. She opened the door to Adamov’s study, an austere room filled with neatly labeled files and stacks of journals, and pointed out the other receiver. Then she led him to the kitchen, where a third telephone hung on the wall.
“May I offer you some tea, Comrade Major? I feel a chill from our walk.”
“I felt a chill too. But only if I am not keeping you from your busy day?”
“It is I who fear that I may be keeping you from your important duties.”
“Not at all. Tea. Yes, please.”
The presence of invisible listeners made their conversation easier. Maria filled a kettle, struck a match, lit the gas.
“Excuse me for a moment, Comrade?”
She returned with a large brown envelope and placed it silently on the kitchen table in front of Vasin.
“Would you like some jam with your tea?”
Vasin slid out a smooth wad of black-and-white photographs. On the top was a typewritten card with a single line of text, the letters punched in angry capitals. It said:
HER OR ME?
The images had been developed and printed by an amateur in a home lab. The lighting of the photographs was pale and spectral, and from the little Vasin knew of such matters he concluded that the negative was made on fast film, for the print was also grainy. The first was a portrait of Petrov, shirtless, lying languidly on a divan. A half-smile on his handsome face, he seemed to be humoring some joke made by the photographer. In the next shot Petrov mugged for the camera, pouting. In the next he lay back, stately, remote, floppy-haired. A man who knows he is beautiful. The photographer had taken a step backward, revealing that Petrov wore no trousers.
“I made this jam myself. You must try some. I am not very domestic, really, but I do know how to make jam. The only thing I can cook.”
Masha’s face was tight with tension. She stood opposite Vasin, fighting to keep her gaze off the photographs.
“Thank you, I would love to try some.”
Stiffly, she walked over to the cupboard to retrieve a jar, a saucer, and a spoon.
The next photograph was blurred, Petrov swinging his bare legs onto the floor, his genitals a smudge of black in the badly lit photo. Two more images of his naked torso, arms and legs in movement, as if he was dancing. In these photographs Petrov seemed completely self-absorbed, eyes closed, as though bathing in the loving regard of another.
“I found a splendid bush of sea buckthorn, hidden in a stand of birches. Somehow none of my neighbors have found it. I keep it secret from them. You see, everyone in this town has a secret. I can’t tell you where it is or you might report it. Please, taste.”
Maria placed a saucer of the bright orange jam in front of Vasin, keeping her eyes averted from the table.
“It’s most excellent, Maria Vladimirovna.” His voice felt unnaturally loud. “Better than my mother’s.”
Vasin turned over a second set of photographs, these smaller and printed on more sensitive photographic paper. They were harder to make out, more grainy, a confusion of blobs and rounded surfaces. Close-up shots of flesh. Intimate photographs of Petrov, wantonly lying in his bed, legs akimbo. Vasin recognized a corner of the Rouge et le Noir film poster he had seen on the bedroom wall in Petrov’s apartment.
The final couple of photographs were badly aligned, apparently taken using a timer by a camera balanced at the foot of the bed. Two naked men lay twisted in each other’s arms, their faces invisible as they shared a deep kiss. One was Petrov, his muscular shoulders and gelled hair clearly recognizable. The other figure had a skinnier frame, long hairless legs. Axelrod?
“Good God.” Vasin couldn’t help himself. He looked up inquiringly at Maria, but she had turned away from him. The silent listeners sat among them like invisible guests at the table. “I seem to have spilled some tea.”
She said nothing.
“Maria Vladimirovna.” Vasin stood. “You said there was a household task you wished me to help with. Allow me to assist you and then I’ll be getting along.”
“Thank you, Comrade Major. That would be most kind of you.” Maria’s face was taut with held-back emotion. Vasin gestured toward the bathroom. She swallowed and composed herself. Before she spoke she scooped hair from her eyes and arranged her face as though for a film take. “Could you please help me move the clothes-washing machine? The drainage pipe has fallen down the back.”
“I’m happy to assist you, especially when the master of the house is engaged in such heroic work for the Motherland. Such domestic details must not be allowed to distract him.”
Vasin closed the bathroom door. Behind it stood a large steel tub covered in cream-colored enamel. An electric wringer was attached to one side of it, and an electric cable connected it to a socket. A stylized chrome decal on the front read WESTINGHOUSE in Latin letters.
“Like the appliances?” Masha’s voice was bleak.
“We don’t have much time.” Vasin turned on a tap and lowered his voice. “Where did you find them?”
“Fedya had been avoiding me for days. I went around to his apartment and found them there. They’d been having a row and Axelrod was actually crying. When I showed up, he ran out of the apartment like some hysterical woman.
“I asked what had upset Axelrod so much, and Fedya said his friend had girlfriend problems. But the look Axelrod gave me as he left, it was pure hatred. And Fedya was in a state too. He put on a coat and ran down the stairs after him, and I’m left there wondering what the hell is going on. Fyodor, he was always so cool. So aloof. You know. Those steady eyes, his easy smile. Fyodor’s voice, that elegant Moscow drawl, so full of confidence. His life had always been so carefree. There was no core of pain to him. Sometimes I thought Fyodor was like a visitor from some hot foreign place that had never known war or hunger. And suddenly, there he was in the middle of some hysterical scandal. Running out into the night. Made no sense.”
“You had no suspicions? How could you not have known?”
Maria shrugged with her whole body.
“Who cares, now? But no. It was good to be with him. He was a boy with the sun in him, my grandmother would have said. But then I found the photos.”
“How?”
“He must have stuffed the envelope down the back of the sofa cushions when I arrived. I wasn’t searching. Okay, you don’t believe me. I don’t care. But I just noticed the package. Pulled it out. Read the note. And saw what you just saw.”
“And did you confront him?”
“I never saw him again. Not until the night he died, at our house. It would have made awkward dinner conversation.”
“ ‘Her or me.’ Axelrod wanted him to leave you and be with him. Who did he choose?”
Maria looked up, puzzled.
“Meaning?”
“Who did Petrov choose, you or Axelrod?”
“What kind of a question is that? I’m not a can of fish on the shelf.”
“You say you never saw Fyodor after the apartment. Did he call you?”
“We had a private system to get messages to each other. What public phone box, what time. We spoke, one time.”
“And he apologized?”
Maria shuddered and shook her head.
“Fedya knew I had found the photos. He vowed he’d been seduced, he was a victim. The devil had gone inside of him. Fedya was brilliant and ambitious. He wanted to be an academician. A minister. He couldn’t have someone like Axelrod around, blackmailing him. He told me he was planning to get Axelrod sent somewhere far away where he couldn’t hurt us. Fedya had the connections to send him to a uranium-enriching plant in Siberia. He wanted to break him. Shut him up.”
“Did he tell Axelrod this?”
“I only know what he told me. I’m untouchable, he said. Axelrod is nothing. Fyodor had powerful friends who could bury any scandal. Along with Axelrod. All I know is a few days later Fedya was dead.”
Masha began to shake, gently, slurping back tears like hiccups. Abruptly she stood and embraced Vasin. The gesture was impulsive, and he did not resist. Her arms held him in a tight, desperate grip, and she rested her head on his chest. He put a hand on her fine, pale hair. She smelled of scented soap.
“Save me from all this. These men.”
She looked up into Vasin’s face, her breath on his lips. The warmth of her slender body against his triggered an unstoppable tide of arousal. She stretched up and kissed him. Vasin felt momentarily weightless, the world spinning under him. After a moment he pushed her away, more roughly than he had meant to. He backed toward the door, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
“I disgust you.” Masha hugged herself, shrinking.
“No, you don’t. But I can’t.”
He fumbled with the door handle and almost fell into the corridor in his haste to escape. Staggering like a drunk, he crossed the dining room and stood in front of the window, seeing nothing. Behind him he heard Masha slowly crossing the room. Instinctively he turned his face away, as if by his not seeing her she would disappear.
She paused by the window, pulled aside the net curtain, and glanced out at the street.
“Eyes and ears all around,” she whispered.
He took a step forward and followed her line of sight. Two watchers loitered on the opposite side of the boulevard, not bothering to conceal themselves. Vasin swore, quietly.
“Come back to the bathroom. I have something to say to you.”
Vasin shook his head. Masha moved closer to him, her voice low and sibilant in his ear.
“I know a safe place we can meet. Not even your friends out there know all the secrets of Arzamas.”
Vasin tried to form the word no, but his mouth, still trembling with the taste of her kiss, would not say it.
“Where?” he whispered.
“The Univermag.”
The central department store — the most public place in the city. For a moment Vasin thought that she was making a desperate joke.
“There’s a cafeteria in the basement for the shop workers. A Georgian called Guri runs it. Tell him you’re a friend of Seraphim’s. Say I sent you. He can call me at any time.”
“Masha, we cannot.”
“You don’t want to see me again?”
He ran a hand through his thinning hair. Yes, I do.
“No. I don’t. Not this way.”
Masha nodded, slowly.
“Adamov used to say, ‘There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.’ Typical of him. The physical world as something knowable, the human one a mystery. But I never agreed. There is nothing secret about men. It’s all about lust, ambition, fear. Mostly, fear. Like yours, now. You don’t want to lose what you have. Your place in the world. Your kontora.”
“It’s not that. Not fear.”
“I see.”
“Not fear for me, I mean.”
“For me, then?”
Vasin could find no answer.
“Can it be that you are really an honest man, Sasha?”
Her low tone was half-mocking. But only half.
Vasin thought of Katya Orlova. Of the dossiers buried in Orlov’s safe. Of the soulless, numberless universe of brutalized functionaries that he served, a nebula so vast that it had created its own moral gravity.
“Honest? I don’t know what that means.”
They parted in the hallway, Masha thanking him formally and loudly for his help and his strong back for the benefit of the microphones, with expressions of mutual esteem. The stairs, as Vasin descended them, seemed made of jelly, the street a sea of pearly autumn light.
—
I am a thief of the spirit, he thought. Faithless. I seduce people into confidences and betray them. What does it mean, then, if I myself have been seduced?
Vasin felt the disconnection that usually came with drunkenness, though without drink’s sweet numbness. He remembered a childhood summer holiday at Gagra, on the Black Sea coast, with his mother. Striking out from a beach larded with pale bodies, Vasin had swum far into the swell. Beyond the reach of his mother’s admonishing yells, far out at sea and as far from his fellow human beings as he had ever been or ever would be in his life, Vasin’s schoolboy backstroke failed him. Cramping in a cold current, his body refused to obey. He remembered the calmness and clarity of that moment. The intense blue of the sky, the refractions of sunlight in water as he bobbed below its surface. And far away, the horizon of the world to which he was suddenly sure he would never return. Above all, his sense of childish indignation. He was in the wrong element. Looking downward, he saw the dark blue place where he would presently drown. It was inexplicable. It was unfair. He should not be here. He was in the wrong place. And death was coming to punish him for his trespass.
Then the strong arm of his rescuer enfolded him, hauling him back into air.
Vasin felt a similar helplessness now. With Masha he had plunged into the wrong element. His faculties of reason and calculation had deserted him. He felt himself transfixed in a private maze of signs and portents, unreadable to him. Most disturbing of all, this maze had appeared inside himself.
Vasin walked to Kuznetsov’s apartment, trailing silence. He tried to wrestle his thoughts back to the case. This puzzle, as firm in his hands as a knot, had become the only substantial thing in his suddenly inexplicable life.
III
By daylight the corral of barracks where Korin lived looked even grimmer than at night. The gravel road had largely dissolved into the underlying mud, and the frozen ruts tripped Vasin as he walked. The knocked-together houses seemed to have given up on straight angles and stooped and tottered like drunks. He glanced at a wooden pole to which an ancient electrical junction box was haphazardly attached. Cables sagged toward the houses. The only light shone from the windows of Korin’s block.
There was no answer when Vasin knocked gingerly on the door. Peering in through the window, he saw a figure curled on the bed, still fully dressed. Vasin fished in his pocket for a kopeck and tapped it on the window.
“Come!”
Inside, the barrack was nearly as chilly as the outside air. His breath steamed. Korin remained recumbent.
“Major Vasin, sir.”
“Hell you want?” Korin propped himself up on an elbow. His face was gray with exhaustion. “Masha? Again?” Korin’s voice was anxious as a father’s.
“No, sir. Maria Vladimirovna is fine. But I wanted to talk to you. Urgently.”
Wearily, the old man swung his legs off his couch and rubbed his face. He glanced at the cold stove.
Korin turned his heavy, bearded head toward Vasin. “Coffee is in the kitchen.” Korin addressed him in the familiar form, but his tone was more paternal than patronizing.
As Vasin heated the pot, Korin pushed past him into the primitive bathroom and urinated unceremoniously, not bothering to close the door. On his way back through the kitchen the old man snatched up a paper bag, grabbed a handful of biscuits, and stuffed them into his mouth, unselfconscious as a child.
He shuffled across the room and sank into the decrepit sofa in front of the unlit stove. Vasin brought two steaming mugs and sank into an equally knackered armchair opposite him.
“This better be good, son.”
“Wanted to talk to you about Adamov.”
Korin grunted dismissively.
“My job, sir. A man is dead, Colonel Korin.”
“A man is dead! A man is dead!” Korin squeaked the words in a mocking falsetto. “What’s one man, Vasin? What’s one academician’s son compared to what we are achieving here?”
Vasin couldn’t think of any answer that didn’t sound unbearably naïve.
“I have come across some information. I understand there may be certain dangers associated with the latest design. I heard that Adamov is concerned about the power of RDS-220. He’s worried about the ‘unpredictable effects.’ ”
Korin sat forward abruptly, like a machine that had been switched on. His eyes were intense.
“Who do you have on the hook, Chekist?”
“Apparently there was a new type of…‘tamper’? Made of solid uranium? That could have the effect of—”
“Stop right there, boy. Your little canary has been singing you a fine song, but you have no idea what you are talking about.”
“I believe it is relevant to the death of Fyodor Petrov, sir.”
Korin stared from under his bushy eyebrows with a ferocity that could have stopped a truck.
“Have you mentioned these fairy stories to anyone else?”
“No, sir. I have not.”
“That true?”
“Yes, sir.” Vasin felt himself involuntarily quaking like a scolded schoolboy.
“Why not?”
“Because…it is unconfirmed. Just a story. As you say. But I wanted to ask you…”
“Vasin — that your name? Vasin. Listen to me. Forget everything you think you know about RDS-220. There’s nothing for you there. You are crashing about in something that’s more dangerous than you know.”
“That sounds like a warning.”
“It is a warning. It is a fucking warning. And before you say, ‘What have you got to hide?’ I tell you this. That half-baked information you are blabbing about? It touches on the most closely guarded secrets of our Motherland. I promise you, whoever it is you work for, that your boss’s boss isn’t authorized to know this information. You understand? Just forget you ever heard it. Take it to your grave.”
“Does Adamov fear that the bomb could be too powerful?”
“Are you fucking deaf, boy?”
“Help me understand. You don’t have to tell me any more secrets. But why am I being told that this is connected to the Petrov case?”
“Someone told you that?” Korin’s voice suddenly cracked with urgency. “Who? Who the hell told you that?”
“Just tell me why they’re wrong.”
Korin subsided into his sofa, chewing his lip. “Not your own theory, then? Someone in the Institute going about saying this shit?”
“Correct.”
“They told anyone else but you?”
“No, sir. Not as far as I know.”
“Just the two of you. You and your little stool pigeon.”
Vasin shrugged an affirmative. Korin breathed a silent oath.
“Very well. Let me ask you some questions, to help you understand. What is a nuclear bomb?”
“A weapon of war.”
“Just a very big bomb, a weapon of war, you say. Wrong. They were once. But now there are too many of them. They are too powerful. Nuclear weapons are the end of human history in all places, for all time.”
Vasin was silent. Outside the windows the afternoon light faded.
“And you know who wields that power? Men like General Pavlov. Come across him?”
Vasin nodded.
“Ever heard of Totskoye? Don’t bother answering. You haven’t. A godforsaken place out in the Orenburg steppes. Back in September ’fifty-four they tested a bomb there. RDS-4. Except it wasn’t the bomb they were testing. It was the effect on men. Whose men? Our men. Yes. Forty-five thousand Soviet troops marched out into battle positions on the steppe. The 270th Rifle Division, plus about twelve hundred tanks and armored personnel carriers. They were told that it would be a regular military exercise, but with a mock nuclear explosion that would be filmed. No protective gear was given. They dropped the bomb about thirteen kilometers away. Close enough. A forty-kiloton yield, detonating at an altitude of 350 meters. About twice as powerful as the Hiroshima device. About five minutes after the blast they sent in aircraft. Three hundred of them, to drop conventional bombs on the area. Then, three hours later, they sent in the tanks, to practice taking a hostile area after a nuclear attack. And in the meantime the general who planned the whole exercise was sitting in an underground nuclear bunker. Know who it was? Marshal Georgy Zhukov, that’s who. The most decorated soldier in Soviet history. The Victor of Berlin. The Victor of Kursk. He sat in a bunker while his men advanced into the hot zone.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Political games, boy. They wanted to test the effects of nuclear fallout on men. And to make a point. Play some politics. Stalin always believed that nuclear weapons could never be used on a battlefield, only deep behind enemy lines. His deputy Malenkov agreed. And after Stalin’s death, Malenkov was in line to take over. He hated Zhukov, feared his reputation and his ambitions. So the honored Marshal and war hero decided to stage a nuclear test, with human subjects, at Totskoye, to prove something about a battlefield nuclear war. But mostly to prove that Stalin had been wrong, and that Malenkov was still wrong.”
“What happened to the men?”
“The men? Fucked, to a greater or lesser extent. Cancers. Leukemia. Radiation poisoning. You saw what happened to your precious Petrov. It was worse for the tank men who drove right to ground zero, and inhaled the heavy-metal fallout.”
“They never knew?”
“The nuclear detonation would have been hard to fucking miss. I’ve seen a few myself. They’d been told it was safe, and who are we to question the wisdom of the Party and government? The Party is the intellect, honor, and conscience of our country. Oh, I can tell what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Korin is a subversive element. This traitorous jailbird. How can he be trusted with a responsible position in the defense of our Motherland?”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir. Not what I’m thinking at all, sir.” Again the mocking falsetto. “Keep talking, sir, and I’ll write it all in my little report that I’ll submit to my superiors in due course and they’ll praise me for my diligence and move me up the queue for a new car.”
Korin stilled Vasin’s attempt to answer with a raised hand.
“No. Just listen, once more, and I will spell it out for you in simple words. Ever heard of Richard Jordan Gatling and Cyrus McCormick?”
“Never, sir.”
“They’re Americans, boy. Engineers. These days they tell the kids that Russians invented everything under the sun. Ridiculous. McCormick invented a reaping machine, boy. Back in the 1830s, when Pushkin was alive and we were serfs. It could do the work of a thousand men with sickles, and never tire. And Gatling invented a gun. Based it on a seed drill he’d designed. He discovered that feeding seeds into a pipe or bullets into a chamber is the same principle. Gatling designed the first machine gun. Ten barrels, hopper-fed, hand-cranked. It fired two hundred rounds a minute, more than an entire battalion of soldiers with muzzle-loading muskets. Mowed men down like standing corn when the Americans had their civil war. McCormick invented a reaper of corn, Gatling a reaper of lives. I read Gatling’s memoirs back when I was at the Kharkov Institute. He said his machine gun bore the same relation to a rifle as Mr. McCormick’s reaper did to a scythe or Herr Singer’s sewing machine to a plain needle. And he was right. Automation could multiply the work a human hand can do a thousandfold. Gatling’s genius was to bring automation to war. And he did it because if men had such terrible weapons, they would see the futility of fighting war. If a four-man machine-gun crew could kill a thousand infantrymen in five minutes, what would be the point of ever fighting? That’s what our Gatling thought. And was he right?”
Vasin shook his head obediently.
“Automated war just meant bigger slaughter. And Robert Oppenheimer. Another American. He built the first ever atom bomb. Called it Trinity, like the heathen Jew he was. He said, ‘The atomic bomb has made the prospect of future war unendurable.’ Sound familiar? He said, ‘It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.’ That was just after they dropped two devices on Japan. Oppenheimer thought using atom bombs on cities would make war unthinkable.”
“Last time we spoke, you said RDS-220 is about stopping war forever.”
“My friend remembers. The difference is that Oppenheimer never reached his ‘different country.’ The largest bomb he made was only twenty kilotons. That’s as much conventional explosives as a thousand heavy bombers can carry these days, more or less. He multiplied the killing work a single bomber could do by a thousand. See what I’m getting at? Oppenheimer was just another Gatling. He made war more deadly, but didn’t make it unthinkable. Human minds — or at least the minds of generals — don’t work like that. I told you about Totskoye. As soon as we had our own atom bombs, we immediately began thinking about how to use them on the battlefield. No. For war to be truly unthinkable, it must be truly unwinnable. We need a weapon so powerful its use is suicidal for everyone. ‘A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means. It would be a means of universal suicide.’ At least you know the man who said that. It was Adamov. And it’s Adamov who has brought us to that new land of Oppenheimer’s at last. We’ve reached the final thousand-times multiplication. Adamov has discovered the means of mankind’s extinction as a species. That postwar place that Gatling and Oppenheimer dreamt about? RDS-220 will put us there. Science is on the verge of vanquishing war. The intellectuals will have beaten the soldiers at their own game. Finally, we will have a weapon so deadly that even the most pigheaded general would never use it.”
“Only if RDS-220 is a success.”
“Fucking right.”
“But why would Adamov alter the design of the tamper?”
Korin cut him off, suddenly furious.
“Who are you to ask why? Tampers and uranium. You are an ape poking about in a laboratory. You are as lost as the soldiers and politicians in charge of this whole place. None of you have any idea of what you are dealing with. Science will forge a different country. Adamov will, do you hear?”
Korin leaned forward and grabbed Vasin’s upper arm with a grip that could have burst a bottle. The older man shook Vasin’s whole body, twice, hard. Then he released his grip. For a while the only sound was Korin’s labored breathing.
“You are saying, Colonel, that this is bigger than me. That I am not authorized to continue doing my investigation, nor am I authorized to know why.”
“If you haven’t understood the stakes by now, friend, you never will.”
“Let’s say I do not fuck off out of your affairs. What will happen, Colonel?”
Vasin was speaking in a low, controlled voice, but he knew that it was his stung pride talking. He had expected his insolence to spark another flash of anger from the old man. But instead Korin only swung his legs back onto the couch and sank deeper into his stained pillows, as though the fight had gone out of him. Or perhaps he had lost interest in arguing.
“Then there is nothing I can do for you.”
Korin passed a hand over his weathered face and closed his eyes.
The old’s man’s tongue flicked over his lips, like a lizard’s. After a long moment he opened his eyes again. Korin’s former passion, his storyteller’s animation, had disappeared. His stare had become hard and cold.
“The tongue hath the power of life and death.”
“What did you say?”
Korin had spoken the phrase in Church Slavonic, the ancient language of the Russian Bible. He turned his face away from Vasin. His voice came as a muffled growl from within the pillows.
“You heard me, boy. The tongue hath the power of life and death. And you have spoken.”
I
When Vasin woke, the morning light was already streaming through the orange nylon curtains. Yesterday’s sleet and snow showers were a memory. A bold autumn sun glittered on rows of brand-new apartment windows, shiny as mirrors. From somewhere down the street came the babble of a radio. Vasin was alone in the apartment. Kuznetsov had left some buckwheat porridge on the stove, fruit compote in the refrigerator.
In the bathroom the freshly painted pipes shivered slightly when he turned the tap. The showerhead dangled a tantalizing thread of scalding hot water, then abruptly burst into full steaming force. Arzamas water had a peaty aroma to it. Vasin scrubbed himself, for the fourth or fifth time since he had returned home the previous evening, praying that the invisible contagion of Petrov’s apartment had not entered him. Once again he cursed Efremov. The dud gas mask had been a terrifying warning about how his life could be effortlessly destroyed by the secret poisons of Arzamas. And again he replayed Efremov’s words about Vera in his head, their tone, the cast of Efremov’s narrow face, his contempt for Orlov and his ignorance of the hidden power that Special Cases wielded. Even if the local kontora forbore to take his life, did they possess the knowledge that could destroy his career?
Vasin was scared. Frankly, scared.
In any other circumstances, he would have taken Zaitsev’s advice and cleared out of town. Not even his own curiosity about what the hell they were covering up would have held him here. Efremov might well guess the truth about Katya Orlova. In any case Vera herself would blurt it to someone else soon enough. Vasin was trapped in this accursed city. A bomb of his own making was ticking under his life. Staying on was a risk. But cracking the Petrov case was also his only lifeline. Orlov, it was clear, had sent him to Arzamas because the old man’s instinct had smelled the possibility of netting a golden fish. And finding that fish was Vasin’s only chance to ever protect himself from the wrath of Orlov that he felt brewing on the future’s horizon like a gathering storm.
Vasin repeated the dry-cleaning routine he’d used the previous day to shake off his watchers. Once again he was lucky, a bread truck this time, beeping its horn impatiently outside the service gate of the kontora headquarters as he slipped out of the back door. Not a circumstance to be relied upon, and a violation of the basic rule of countersurveillance. People notice patterns. A stranger wandering through the courtyard will be ignored. See him twice, and you remember you’ve seen him before. Same went for the stationmaster, wide-eyed with nervousness when Vasin appeared in his office a second morning in a row. Vasin mouthed a silent prayer to the God he didn’t believe in that Orlov would have something for him.
But the line to Gorky didn’t connect.
Vasin dialed the four-digit code again and again, only to hear a continuing dial tone. He tried the time-honored Soviet technological fix of first resort, banging the receiver on the side of the heavy steel box. For good measure he tried the second resort, too, which was swearing in an angry whisper.
By the time the line finally connected it was a quarter past ten. Fifteen minutes late.
“The Comrade Chief Engineer is in a meeting.” Orlov’s secretary delivered the bad news with the usual tart satisfaction. “You’ll have to wait till the next train.”
So funny.
“I am afraid there will be no next train. Can you tell the Comrade Engineer that there is an emergency? Eight locomotives are about to collide.”
“Wait.”
Vasin could imagine the secretary’s sour moue as she took her time sauntering over to the conference room.
At length Orlov came on the line.
“Eight locomotives?”
“Sir.”
“Well. We must take steps to avoid such an eventuality. Interesting news. On your request.”
The background cacophony on the line suddenly broke into their conversation. Two husky male voices began speaking over Orlov.
“…and I said to that cow, I’m sick of the fucking sight of you. Every day I come home and there you are, sitting on the sofa like a sack of potatoes. And she says, If you’d stop drinking that crap you might appreciate me more. And I said, I drink crap for economy’s sake, woman! Save money for your extravagances….”
“Fuck off the service line now!” Orlov’s voice was at its most commanding. “Bosses are talking.”
“Okay, okay! Calm down, bitches!”
The interrupting voices went silent with a click, leaving only the usual background of low chatter.
“Your sharp nose has not failed you. I have had some responses from the archives. About the derailment back in ’thirty-seven.”
A pause as Orlov spoke aside. Clearing the room, Vasin guessed.
“It seems that Party A, repeat, Party A, was punished for his role in the accident after an anonymous denunciation. From a colleague at the same depot. The Kharkov depot. This source appears in the files under the name Kukushka. The Cuckoo. Yes. And further inquiries have established that the true identity of this source was indeed Party P. Repeat, Party A.V.P. Who was at the time Party A’s immediate subordinate at the depot. Repeat back to me what I have told you.”
Orlov’s words came over the antique phone line like an old gramophone record, a voice from the past.
“Party A was punished as a result of a denunciation from Party P, senior.”
“Exactly. There is more. After Party A’s imprisonment, his wife divorced him.” Orlov was now evidently reading from a document. His voice droned matter-of-factly. “She wrote a letter to the court accusing her husband of anti-Soviet activity. She saved herself. Spoke against him at the trial. Later married a…yes. An Army officer.”
“This is remarkable information, sir.”
“Indeed. Indeed. Though not an entirely unusual situation. Given the, er, state of the railways during that period. But. It is clear that Party P has much forgiveness to ask of his old comrade.”
“How do you wish me to proceed, Comrade Chief Engineer?”
Abruptly, the other faint voices on the line went dead. A loud series of fast clicks replaced the hubbub, ominous in the sudden electronic quiet. Orlov, his voice almost drowned by the clatter, spoke loudly and emphatically.
“Proceed with your usual discretion. Be careful that nobody knows the target of your inquiries. You will take no action and you will report your findings only to me. Only to me. You will take steps to ensure that the local branch remains in ignorance. But find out everything. We must avoid any further derailments.”
“Yes, sir. But, General. May I ask, why am I really here?”
A sigh on the line like wind singing in the wires.
“Comrade, are you scared?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That means you have knowledge. Only a fool would not be, if what we suspect is true.”
In his sudden anguish Vasin abandoned all pretense of coded speech.
“They have threatened me, sir.”
“Who?”
“The local kontora. They’re very serious. Sent me into a radiation zone.”
“No, you allowed yourself to be sent.”
“As you say, sir. But I just want to ask — is there anything you have not told me? About Arzamas? That I should know?”
Orlov’s tone hardened.
“Take care that your fear does not make you foolish.”
“Sir, if an accident should occur, I want you to know that Major Efremov of State Security…”
“Major Efremov will doubtless be in charge of the investigation into your death. I will be in charge of recommending you for a posthumous decoration. And it will be one that does honor to your many talents. Your wife and child will be well taken care of by the State. You have my word on that.”
On the crackling line Orlov’s chuckle sounded like the rustling of leaves.
II
From a phone box on Lenin Square, Vasin dialed the Adamovs’ home number. He heard a telltale hiss on the line, even as the ringing continued. Someone was listening in.
Maria picked up on the fifth ring.
“Maria Vladimirovna Adamova? This is Major Alexander Vasin of State Security. My apologies for disturbing you at home.” At the other end of the line he heard Masha’s small sigh. She had understood the meaning of his exaggeratedly formal tone at once.
“It’s no trouble, Comrade Major.”
“I am afraid that I have some further questions. May we meet at the same place we conducted our last interview in half an hour?”
“I will be there.”
Vasin listened for the clicks as both Masha and their silent listener replaced their receivers, then swore softly.
No point in hiding. In fact the opposite, to try to shake his shadows now would only alert them. They would be following Maria too. The only choice was to hide, as Orlov had advised, in plain sight. He caught a tram to Lenin Park.
Fat, freezing raindrops cut through the dirty snow. Vasin watched Masha’s blue raincoat approach down the boulevard, trailing a nondescript gray figure in her wake. The park’s café was crowded with grandmothers and young children sheltering from the rain, so they walked instead to the empty bandstand. No one, to Vasin’s knowledge, had so far succeeded in bugging a park.
“Hello, you.” Maria seemed unnaturally cheerful. She had made herself up, and under her mac she was wearing a smart woolen twinset. He saluted her, for the benefit of the watchers in the trees.
“Maria.”
“I can’t talk like this.” Maria scanned the strollers who dawdled on the edges of the wide lawn. “It’s like being on a microscope slide, some great eye watching us from above.”
“Act naturally. There’s nothing wrong with you and I meeting.”
“Meeting in a park? In the freezing rain? Are you in trouble?”
“Not yet.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No. Neither of us is in trouble. They’re curious about why I am talking to Axelrod in these dangerous times.”
“If you spoke to him, then you know. There’s no way that man is a good liar,” she said. “What I said about Axelrod and Petrov is true.”
“Perhaps. But Axelrod told me some things of his own. About Petrov and your husband. Explained that they might have had reasons to disagree. Serious reasons.” Vasin made sure to hold her gaze.
Maria took a step away from him, pulling her mackintosh tighter around herself and scanning the passersby.
“The little shit. What kinds of disagreements?”
“Believe me when I tell you that it’s complicated.”
“You can’t…” A note of fear sounded in Maria’s voice. “You can’t really believe that Adamov had anything to do with Fyodor’s death? You met him. You saw him. He couldn’t hurt anybody.”
Vasin thought of the film he had watched his first night in Arzamas and the apocalypse soon to be unleashed by Adamov, tossing the plane miles up in the sky, a firestorm racing across the land below. Was this the creation of a man who would never hurt anybody?
“Whatever Axelrod told you about Adamov’s supposed argument with Petrov is a lie. All his colleagues will confirm it.”
“Has Adamov ever spoken about his experience in the camps?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Did he ever speak about who denounced him in ’thirty-seven?”
Maria set her jaw defiantly.
“What is this? What could you possibly know about the affairs of great men, a little pawn like you?”
Anger sparked in her eyes. Perhaps desperation, too, a desperate desire not to know. Despite himself, Vasin felt the sting of her words, followed by a sudden, vicious impulse to hit back.
“Fyodor’s father denounced your husband. The great Academician Petrov sent your husband to the Gulag.”
Vasin closed his eyes for a moment, shocked by his own words. He had just blurted out the very thing that he should have kept most secret. The professional in him knew that information should be hoarded like dry gunpowder, then carefully laid at the weakest point of your opponent’s defenses for detonation at the most devastating moment. Instead he had ignited it in a single, useless whoosh. For a moment he had the unsettling feeling of not recognizing himself, as though he had been momentarily possessed. But by what? Why the sudden desire to lash out at Masha?
She stood very still, her eyes on the ground. Vasin could not unsay what he had said. What was the phrase that Orlov had used, once, of the momentum of a confession, showing off his wartime German? Yes — the desperate man makes a flucht nach vorn, a flight forward. An act of desperation, compelled by a previous false move. Except now it was Vasin who was the foolish talker. He had no choice but to plunge on.
“It’s in the files. Fyodor’s father destroyed Adamov’s freedom, and his family.”
When she finally spoke, Maria’s voice came from a distant place.
“Adamov’s first wife divorced him.”
“She repudiated him. Testified against him in court and denounced him as a traitor to the Motherland. Then she divorced him.”
“He never told me.”
Tears abruptly ran down her cheeks. Maria wiped them away, angrily, as though they had betrayed her.
Vasin felt a shameful glow. The sordid power this secret knowledge gave him. With a few scything words, her pride had been slashed down like grass. But after the glow came another urge, rising from an entirely unfamiliar place inside himself, to step forward and comfort her.
Her gaze, when it met his, seemed at first to signal a desperate vulnerability. Then like molten glass her eyes slowly hardened till they were brittle and unyielding.
“Why tell me such things? What is it that you want from me, Chekist?”
Her voice was bleak. Vasin had wanted to hurt her. Instead, it seemed, he had shattered her, and their fragile trust.
“If Adamov knew who betrayed him, it would provide every reason to kill Fyodor. Petrov took away his family, so he destroyed Petrov’s son. You can see what it looks like to the kontora. I thought you needed to know.”
“You want to protect me?”
Vasin could find no words to answer her. But he knew why, and the sudden realization chilled him.
“Protect me from Adamov, or from your own kontora?”
“I need to find out the…”
“You’re about to say ‘truth.’ Your favorite word. No need. Spare me your truth.”
Vasin began to reply, but she shook her head firmly.
“Vasin. Alexander. I will tell you this: In all our years of married life I have never known more of Adamov than the part he chooses to show me. It’s as though his soul is wrapped in tightly wadded layers of silence. But I know this, if he was angry once, it was long ago. The past is the past. For both of us. Yes, he carries death inside himself every day, but he is not an evil man. He is not a violent man. He could not kill Petrov. And over some ancient grudge? Never.”
“Did he know about you and Fyodor?”
“Can you spare me your fucking detective story plots? Adamov is not some jealous French lover boy.”
“Maria, I believe you.”
“You believe me, but?”
“Axelrod. I need proof.”
She took Vasin’s hand and squeezed it. After a long moment she seemed to come to some private decision.
The tram was packed with lunchtime shoppers. Maria’s thin body pressed against Vasin’s in the crowd. Two kontora Volgas followed them, overtaking the tram in relays. Doubtless another car would be waiting outside the Adamovs’ apartment. Quite an entourage.
As she fumbled with the keys, Maria kept her eyes down, avoiding Vasin’s. Once inside, she double-locked the door and tossed her coat on the floor. Vasin made a quacking gesture with his hand. Keep talking.
“Thank you for your good citizenship, Maria Vladimirovna,” he said loudly. “Your remarks have been most helpful. Would that all our countrymen were so zealous in assisting the organs of law enforcement.”
He walked over to a telephone receiver that stood on a table in the hall. Silently he pointed at the apparatus and tugged his ear. Maria nodded in understanding and beckoned him to follow. She opened the door to Adamov’s study, an austere room filled with neatly labeled files and stacks of journals, and pointed out the other receiver. Then she led him to the kitchen, where a third telephone hung on the wall.
“May I offer you some tea, Comrade Major? I feel a chill from our walk.”
“I felt a chill too. But only if I am not keeping you from your busy day?”
“It is I who fear that I may be keeping you from your important duties.”
“Not at all. Tea. Yes, please.”
The presence of invisible listeners made their conversation easier. Maria filled a kettle, struck a match, lit the gas.
“Excuse me for a moment, Comrade?”
She returned with a large brown envelope and placed it silently on the kitchen table in front of Vasin.
“Would you like some jam with your tea?”
Vasin slid out a smooth wad of black-and-white photographs. On the top was a typewritten card with a single line of text, the letters punched in angry capitals. It said:
HER OR ME?
The images had been developed and printed by an amateur in a home lab. The lighting of the photographs was pale and spectral, and from the little Vasin knew of such matters he concluded that the negative was made on fast film, for the print was also grainy. The first was a portrait of Petrov, shirtless, lying languidly on a divan. A half-smile on his handsome face, he seemed to be humoring some joke made by the photographer. In the next shot Petrov mugged for the camera, pouting. In the next he lay back, stately, remote, floppy-haired. A man who knows he is beautiful. The photographer had taken a step backward, revealing that Petrov wore no trousers.
“I made this jam myself. You must try some. I am not very domestic, really, but I do know how to make jam. The only thing I can cook.”
Masha’s face was tight with tension. She stood opposite Vasin, fighting to keep her gaze off the photographs.
“Thank you, I would love to try some.”
Stiffly, she walked over to the cupboard to retrieve a jar, a saucer, and a spoon.
The next photograph was blurred, Petrov swinging his bare legs onto the floor, his genitals a smudge of black in the badly lit photo. Two more images of his naked torso, arms and legs in movement, as if he was dancing. In these photographs Petrov seemed completely self-absorbed, eyes closed, as though bathing in the loving regard of another.
“I found a splendid bush of sea buckthorn, hidden in a stand of birches. Somehow none of my neighbors have found it. I keep it secret from them. You see, everyone in this town has a secret. I can’t tell you where it is or you might report it. Please, taste.”
Maria placed a saucer of the bright orange jam in front of Vasin, keeping her eyes averted from the table.
“It’s most excellent, Maria Vladimirovna.” His voice felt unnaturally loud. “Better than my mother’s.”
Vasin turned over a second set of photographs, these smaller and printed on more sensitive photographic paper. They were harder to make out, more grainy, a confusion of blobs and rounded surfaces. Close-up shots of flesh. Intimate photographs of Petrov, wantonly lying in his bed, legs akimbo. Vasin recognized a corner of the Rouge et le Noir film poster he had seen on the bedroom wall in Petrov’s apartment.
The final couple of photographs were badly aligned, apparently taken using a timer by a camera balanced at the foot of the bed. Two naked men lay twisted in each other’s arms, their faces invisible as they shared a deep kiss. One was Petrov, his muscular shoulders and gelled hair clearly recognizable. The other figure had a skinnier frame, long hairless legs. Axelrod?
“Good God.” Vasin couldn’t help himself. He looked up inquiringly at Maria, but she had turned away from him. The silent listeners sat among them like invisible guests at the table. “I seem to have spilled some tea.”
She said nothing.
“Maria Vladimirovna.” Vasin stood. “You said there was a household task you wished me to help with. Allow me to assist you and then I’ll be getting along.”
“Thank you, Comrade Major. That would be most kind of you.” Maria’s face was taut with held-back emotion. Vasin gestured toward the bathroom. She swallowed and composed herself. Before she spoke she scooped hair from her eyes and arranged her face as though for a film take. “Could you please help me move the clothes-washing machine? The drainage pipe has fallen down the back.”
“I’m happy to assist you, especially when the master of the house is engaged in such heroic work for the Motherland. Such domestic details must not be allowed to distract him.”
Vasin closed the bathroom door. Behind it stood a large steel tub covered in cream-colored enamel. An electric wringer was attached to one side of it, and an electric cable connected it to a socket. A stylized chrome decal on the front read WESTINGHOUSE in Latin letters.
“Like the appliances?” Masha’s voice was bleak.
“We don’t have much time.” Vasin turned on a tap and lowered his voice. “Where did you find them?”
“Fedya had been avoiding me for days. I went around to his apartment and found them there. They’d been having a row and Axelrod was actually crying. When I showed up, he ran out of the apartment like some hysterical woman.
“I asked what had upset Axelrod so much, and Fedya said his friend had girlfriend problems. But the look Axelrod gave me as he left, it was pure hatred. And Fedya was in a state too. He put on a coat and ran down the stairs after him, and I’m left there wondering what the hell is going on. Fyodor, he was always so cool. So aloof. You know. Those steady eyes, his easy smile. Fyodor’s voice, that elegant Moscow drawl, so full of confidence. His life had always been so carefree. There was no core of pain to him. Sometimes I thought Fyodor was like a visitor from some hot foreign place that had never known war or hunger. And suddenly, there he was in the middle of some hysterical scandal. Running out into the night. Made no sense.”
“You had no suspicions? How could you not have known?”
Maria shrugged with her whole body.
“Who cares, now? But no. It was good to be with him. He was a boy with the sun in him, my grandmother would have said. But then I found the photos.”
“How?”
“He must have stuffed the envelope down the back of the sofa cushions when I arrived. I wasn’t searching. Okay, you don’t believe me. I don’t care. But I just noticed the package. Pulled it out. Read the note. And saw what you just saw.”
“And did you confront him?”
“I never saw him again. Not until the night he died, at our house. It would have made awkward dinner conversation.”
“ ‘Her or me.’ Axelrod wanted him to leave you and be with him. Who did he choose?”
Maria looked up, puzzled.
“Meaning?”
“Who did Petrov choose, you or Axelrod?”
“What kind of a question is that? I’m not a can of fish on the shelf.”
“You say you never saw Fyodor after the apartment. Did he call you?”
“We had a private system to get messages to each other. What public phone box, what time. We spoke, one time.”
“And he apologized?”
Maria shuddered and shook her head.
“Fedya knew I had found the photos. He vowed he’d been seduced, he was a victim. The devil had gone inside of him. Fedya was brilliant and ambitious. He wanted to be an academician. A minister. He couldn’t have someone like Axelrod around, blackmailing him. He told me he was planning to get Axelrod sent somewhere far away where he couldn’t hurt us. Fedya had the connections to send him to a uranium-enriching plant in Siberia. He wanted to break him. Shut him up.”
“Did he tell Axelrod this?”
“I only know what he told me. I’m untouchable, he said. Axelrod is nothing. Fyodor had powerful friends who could bury any scandal. Along with Axelrod. All I know is a few days later Fedya was dead.”
Masha began to shake, gently, slurping back tears like hiccups. Abruptly she stood and embraced Vasin. The gesture was impulsive, and he did not resist. Her arms held him in a tight, desperate grip, and she rested her head on his chest. He put a hand on her fine, pale hair. She smelled of scented soap.
“Save me from all this. These men.”
She looked up into Vasin’s face, her breath on his lips. The warmth of her slender body against his triggered an unstoppable tide of arousal. She stretched up and kissed him. Vasin felt momentarily weightless, the world spinning under him. After a moment he pushed her away, more roughly than he had meant to. He backed toward the door, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
“I disgust you.” Masha hugged herself, shrinking.
“No, you don’t. But I can’t.”
He fumbled with the door handle and almost fell into the corridor in his haste to escape. Staggering like a drunk, he crossed the dining room and stood in front of the window, seeing nothing. Behind him he heard Masha slowly crossing the room. Instinctively he turned his face away, as if by his not seeing her she would disappear.
She paused by the window, pulled aside the net curtain, and glanced out at the street.
“Eyes and ears all around,” she whispered.
He took a step forward and followed her line of sight. Two watchers loitered on the opposite side of the boulevard, not bothering to conceal themselves. Vasin swore, quietly.
“Come back to the bathroom. I have something to say to you.”
Vasin shook his head. Masha moved closer to him, her voice low and sibilant in his ear.
“I know a safe place we can meet. Not even your friends out there know all the secrets of Arzamas.”
Vasin tried to form the word no, but his mouth, still trembling with the taste of her kiss, would not say it.
“Where?” he whispered.
“The Univermag.”
The central department store — the most public place in the city. For a moment Vasin thought that she was making a desperate joke.
“There’s a cafeteria in the basement for the shop workers. A Georgian called Guri runs it. Tell him you’re a friend of Seraphim’s. Say I sent you. He can call me at any time.”
“Masha, we cannot.”
“You don’t want to see me again?”
He ran a hand through his thinning hair. Yes, I do.
“No. I don’t. Not this way.”
Masha nodded, slowly.
“Adamov used to say, ‘There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.’ Typical of him. The physical world as something knowable, the human one a mystery. But I never agreed. There is nothing secret about men. It’s all about lust, ambition, fear. Mostly, fear. Like yours, now. You don’t want to lose what you have. Your place in the world. Your kontora.”
“It’s not that. Not fear.”
“I see.”
“Not fear for me, I mean.”
“For me, then?”
Vasin could find no answer.
“Can it be that you are really an honest man, Sasha?”
Her low tone was half-mocking. But only half.
Vasin thought of Katya Orlova. Of the dossiers buried in Orlov’s safe. Of the soulless, numberless universe of brutalized functionaries that he served, a nebula so vast that it had created its own moral gravity.
“Honest? I don’t know what that means.”
They parted in the hallway, Masha thanking him formally and loudly for his help and his strong back for the benefit of the microphones, with expressions of mutual esteem. The stairs, as Vasin descended them, seemed made of jelly, the street a sea of pearly autumn light.
I am a thief of the spirit, he thought. Faithless. I seduce people into confidences and betray them. What does it mean, then, if I myself have been seduced?
Vasin felt the disconnection that usually came with drunkenness, though without drink’s sweet numbness. He remembered a childhood summer holiday at Gagra, on the Black Sea coast, with his mother. Striking out from a beach larded with pale bodies, Vasin had swum far into the swell. Beyond the reach of his mother’s admonishing yells, far out at sea and as far from his fellow human beings as he had ever been or ever would be in his life, Vasin’s schoolboy backstroke failed him. Cramping in a cold current, his body refused to obey. He remembered the calmness and clarity of that moment. The intense blue of the sky, the refractions of sunlight in water as he bobbed below its surface. And far away, the horizon of the world to which he was suddenly sure he would never return. Above all, his sense of childish indignation. He was in the wrong element. Looking downward, he saw the dark blue place where he would presently drown. It was inexplicable. It was unfair. He should not be here. He was in the wrong place. And death was coming to punish him for his trespass.
Then the strong arm of his rescuer enfolded him, hauling him back into air.
Vasin felt a similar helplessness now. With Masha he had plunged into the wrong element. His faculties of reason and calculation had deserted him. He felt himself transfixed in a private maze of signs and portents, unreadable to him. Most disturbing of all, this maze had appeared inside himself.
Vasin walked to Kuznetsov’s apartment, trailing silence. He tried to wrestle his thoughts back to the case. This puzzle, as firm in his hands as a knot, had become the only substantial thing in his suddenly inexplicable life.
III
By daylight the corral of barracks where Korin lived looked even grimmer than at night. The gravel road had largely dissolved into the underlying mud, and the frozen ruts tripped Vasin as he walked. The knocked-together houses seemed to have given up on straight angles and stooped and tottered like drunks. He glanced at a wooden pole to which an ancient electrical junction box was haphazardly attached. Cables sagged toward the houses. The only light shone from the windows of Korin’s block.
There was no answer when Vasin knocked gingerly on the door. Peering in through the window, he saw a figure curled on the bed, still fully dressed. Vasin fished in his pocket for a kopeck and tapped it on the window.
“Come!”
Inside, the barrack was nearly as chilly as the outside air. His breath steamed. Korin remained recumbent.
“Major Vasin, sir.”
“Hell you want?” Korin propped himself up on an elbow. His face was gray with exhaustion. “Masha? Again?” Korin’s voice was anxious as a father’s.
“No, sir. Maria Vladimirovna is fine. But I wanted to talk to you. Urgently.”
Wearily, the old man swung his legs off his couch and rubbed his face. He glanced at the cold stove.
Korin turned his heavy, bearded head toward Vasin. “Coffee is in the kitchen.” Korin addressed him in the familiar form, but his tone was more paternal than patronizing.
As Vasin heated the pot, Korin pushed past him into the primitive bathroom and urinated unceremoniously, not bothering to close the door. On his way back through the kitchen the old man snatched up a paper bag, grabbed a handful of biscuits, and stuffed them into his mouth, unselfconscious as a child.
He shuffled across the room and sank into the decrepit sofa in front of the unlit stove. Vasin brought two steaming mugs and sank into an equally knackered armchair opposite him.
“This better be good, son.”
“Wanted to talk to you about Adamov.”
Korin grunted dismissively.
“My job, sir. A man is dead, Colonel Korin.”
“A man is dead! A man is dead!” Korin squeaked the words in a mocking falsetto. “What’s one man, Vasin? What’s one academician’s son compared to what we are achieving here?”
Vasin couldn’t think of any answer that didn’t sound unbearably naïve.
“I have come across some information. I understand there may be certain dangers associated with the latest design. I heard that Adamov is concerned about the power of RDS-220. He’s worried about the ‘unpredictable effects.’ ”
Korin sat forward abruptly, like a machine that had been switched on. His eyes were intense.
“Who do you have on the hook, Chekist?”
“Apparently there was a new type of…‘tamper’? Made of solid uranium? That could have the effect of—”
“Stop right there, boy. Your little canary has been singing you a fine song, but you have no idea what you are talking about.”
“I believe it is relevant to the death of Fyodor Petrov, sir.”
Korin stared from under his bushy eyebrows with a ferocity that could have stopped a truck.
“Have you mentioned these fairy stories to anyone else?”
“No, sir. I have not.”
“That true?”
“Yes, sir.” Vasin felt himself involuntarily quaking like a scolded schoolboy.
“Why not?”
“Because…it is unconfirmed. Just a story. As you say. But I wanted to ask you…”
“Vasin — that your name? Vasin. Listen to me. Forget everything you think you know about RDS-220. There’s nothing for you there. You are crashing about in something that’s more dangerous than you know.”
“That sounds like a warning.”
“It is a warning. It is a fucking warning. And before you say, ‘What have you got to hide?’ I tell you this. That half-baked information you are blabbing about? It touches on the most closely guarded secrets of our Motherland. I promise you, whoever it is you work for, that your boss’s boss isn’t authorized to know this information. You understand? Just forget you ever heard it. Take it to your grave.”
“Does Adamov fear that the bomb could be too powerful?”
“Are you fucking deaf, boy?”
“Help me understand. You don’t have to tell me any more secrets. But why am I being told that this is connected to the Petrov case?”
“Someone told you that?” Korin’s voice suddenly cracked with urgency. “Who? Who the hell told you that?”
“Just tell me why they’re wrong.”
Korin subsided into his sofa, chewing his lip. “Not your own theory, then? Someone in the Institute going about saying this shit?”
“Correct.”
“They told anyone else but you?”
“No, sir. Not as far as I know.”
“Just the two of you. You and your little stool pigeon.”
Vasin shrugged an affirmative. Korin breathed a silent oath.
“Very well. Let me ask you some questions, to help you understand. What is a nuclear bomb?”
“A weapon of war.”
“Just a very big bomb, a weapon of war, you say. Wrong. They were once. But now there are too many of them. They are too powerful. Nuclear weapons are the end of human history in all places, for all time.”
Vasin was silent. Outside the windows the afternoon light faded.
“And you know who wields that power? Men like General Pavlov. Come across him?”
Vasin nodded.
“Ever heard of Totskoye? Don’t bother answering. You haven’t. A godforsaken place out in the Orenburg steppes. Back in September ’fifty-four they tested a bomb there. RDS-4. Except it wasn’t the bomb they were testing. It was the effect on men. Whose men? Our men. Yes. Forty-five thousand Soviet troops marched out into battle positions on the steppe. The 270th Rifle Division, plus about twelve hundred tanks and armored personnel carriers. They were told that it would be a regular military exercise, but with a mock nuclear explosion that would be filmed. No protective gear was given. They dropped the bomb about thirteen kilometers away. Close enough. A forty-kiloton yield, detonating at an altitude of 350 meters. About twice as powerful as the Hiroshima device. About five minutes after the blast they sent in aircraft. Three hundred of them, to drop conventional bombs on the area. Then, three hours later, they sent in the tanks, to practice taking a hostile area after a nuclear attack. And in the meantime the general who planned the whole exercise was sitting in an underground nuclear bunker. Know who it was? Marshal Georgy Zhukov, that’s who. The most decorated soldier in Soviet history. The Victor of Berlin. The Victor of Kursk. He sat in a bunker while his men advanced into the hot zone.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Political games, boy. They wanted to test the effects of nuclear fallout on men. And to make a point. Play some politics. Stalin always believed that nuclear weapons could never be used on a battlefield, only deep behind enemy lines. His deputy Malenkov agreed. And after Stalin’s death, Malenkov was in line to take over. He hated Zhukov, feared his reputation and his ambitions. So the honored Marshal and war hero decided to stage a nuclear test, with human subjects, at Totskoye, to prove something about a battlefield nuclear war. But mostly to prove that Stalin had been wrong, and that Malenkov was still wrong.”
“What happened to the men?”
“The men? Fucked, to a greater or lesser extent. Cancers. Leukemia. Radiation poisoning. You saw what happened to your precious Petrov. It was worse for the tank men who drove right to ground zero, and inhaled the heavy-metal fallout.”
“They never knew?”
“The nuclear detonation would have been hard to fucking miss. I’ve seen a few myself. They’d been told it was safe, and who are we to question the wisdom of the Party and government? The Party is the intellect, honor, and conscience of our country. Oh, I can tell what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Korin is a subversive element. This traitorous jailbird. How can he be trusted with a responsible position in the defense of our Motherland?”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir. Not what I’m thinking at all, sir.” Again the mocking falsetto. “Keep talking, sir, and I’ll write it all in my little report that I’ll submit to my superiors in due course and they’ll praise me for my diligence and move me up the queue for a new car.”
Korin stilled Vasin’s attempt to answer with a raised hand.
“No. Just listen, once more, and I will spell it out for you in simple words. Ever heard of Richard Jordan Gatling and Cyrus McCormick?”
“Never, sir.”
“They’re Americans, boy. Engineers. These days they tell the kids that Russians invented everything under the sun. Ridiculous. McCormick invented a reaping machine, boy. Back in the 1830s, when Pushkin was alive and we were serfs. It could do the work of a thousand men with sickles, and never tire. And Gatling invented a gun. Based it on a seed drill he’d designed. He discovered that feeding seeds into a pipe or bullets into a chamber is the same principle. Gatling designed the first machine gun. Ten barrels, hopper-fed, hand-cranked. It fired two hundred rounds a minute, more than an entire battalion of soldiers with muzzle-loading muskets. Mowed men down like standing corn when the Americans had their civil war. McCormick invented a reaper of corn, Gatling a reaper of lives. I read Gatling’s memoirs back when I was at the Kharkov Institute. He said his machine gun bore the same relation to a rifle as Mr. McCormick’s reaper did to a scythe or Herr Singer’s sewing machine to a plain needle. And he was right. Automation could multiply the work a human hand can do a thousandfold. Gatling’s genius was to bring automation to war. And he did it because if men had such terrible weapons, they would see the futility of fighting war. If a four-man machine-gun crew could kill a thousand infantrymen in five minutes, what would be the point of ever fighting? That’s what our Gatling thought. And was he right?”
Vasin shook his head obediently.
“Automated war just meant bigger slaughter. And Robert Oppenheimer. Another American. He built the first ever atom bomb. Called it Trinity, like the heathen Jew he was. He said, ‘The atomic bomb has made the prospect of future war unendurable.’ Sound familiar? He said, ‘It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.’ That was just after they dropped two devices on Japan. Oppenheimer thought using atom bombs on cities would make war unthinkable.”
“Last time we spoke, you said RDS-220 is about stopping war forever.”
“My friend remembers. The difference is that Oppenheimer never reached his ‘different country.’ The largest bomb he made was only twenty kilotons. That’s as much conventional explosives as a thousand heavy bombers can carry these days, more or less. He multiplied the killing work a single bomber could do by a thousand. See what I’m getting at? Oppenheimer was just another Gatling. He made war more deadly, but didn’t make it unthinkable. Human minds — or at least the minds of generals — don’t work like that. I told you about Totskoye. As soon as we had our own atom bombs, we immediately began thinking about how to use them on the battlefield. No. For war to be truly unthinkable, it must be truly unwinnable. We need a weapon so powerful its use is suicidal for everyone. ‘A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means. It would be a means of universal suicide.’ At least you know the man who said that. It was Adamov. And it’s Adamov who has brought us to that new land of Oppenheimer’s at last. We’ve reached the final thousand-times multiplication. Adamov has discovered the means of mankind’s extinction as a species. That postwar place that Gatling and Oppenheimer dreamt about? RDS-220 will put us there. Science is on the verge of vanquishing war. The intellectuals will have beaten the soldiers at their own game. Finally, we will have a weapon so deadly that even the most pigheaded general would never use it.”
“Only if RDS-220 is a success.”
“Fucking right.”
“But why would Adamov alter the design of the tamper?”
Korin cut him off, suddenly furious.
“Who are you to ask why? Tampers and uranium. You are an ape poking about in a laboratory. You are as lost as the soldiers and politicians in charge of this whole place. None of you have any idea of what you are dealing with. Science will forge a different country. Adamov will, do you hear?”
Korin leaned forward and grabbed Vasin’s upper arm with a grip that could have burst a bottle. The older man shook Vasin’s whole body, twice, hard. Then he released his grip. For a while the only sound was Korin’s labored breathing.
“You are saying, Colonel, that this is bigger than me. That I am not authorized to continue doing my investigation, nor am I authorized to know why.”
“If you haven’t understood the stakes by now, friend, you never will.”
“Let’s say I do not fuck off out of your affairs. What will happen, Colonel?”
Vasin was speaking in a low, controlled voice, but he knew that it was his stung pride talking. He had expected his insolence to spark another flash of anger from the old man. But instead Korin only swung his legs back onto the couch and sank deeper into his stained pillows, as though the fight had gone out of him. Or perhaps he had lost interest in arguing.
“Then there is nothing I can do for you.”
Korin passed a hand over his weathered face and closed his eyes.
The old’s man’s tongue flicked over his lips, like a lizard’s. After a long moment he opened his eyes again. Korin’s former passion, his storyteller’s animation, had disappeared. His stare had become hard and cold.
“The tongue hath the power of life and death.”
“What did you say?”
Korin had spoken the phrase in Church Slavonic, the ancient language of the Russian Bible. He turned his face away from Vasin. His voice came as a muffled growl from within the pillows.
“You heard me, boy. The tongue hath the power of life and death. And you have spoken.”
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