Black Sun

I

So many secrets, buried in Russia’s earth. Vasin had been down to see them. An underground city of files, arranged in stacks on steel shelves, stretching into darkness. An acid smell of old paper and a faint, moldy tang of decay. The KGB’s Central Registry, in the Lubyanka cellars, was the graveyard of a million sins and betrayals. Except unlike in a graveyard, Vasin could tug these small tombstones off the shelf and, Godlike, learn the dead’s forgotten stories. He could read of their struggles as they fought to stay alive, to walk under the sun, raging against their burial in deep, secret places.

It had been nearly two years ago, Vasin’s first month at the kontora. Armed with a fistful of authorization slips, duly stamped and signed, he had descended in a service lift to the bowels of the Lubyanka. Orlov could have ordered the files up to his office. Instead he had sent Vasin down to find them himself. If it was meant to be a lesson, its meaning was still obscure to Vasin. Behold how much treachery there is in the world to be rooted out? Take a walk in our mausoleum of memory, know that for every corridor there are a thousand more? See how many corpses we have made?

Vasin had stepped out at the third basement level. The passageway was low, its ceiling cluttered with wiring and pipes that twisted against each other like veins. When he swung open the door to the registry, the desk clerk’s eyes flickered in alarm, as though visitors from the upper regions carried some dangerous virus. The woman had the pallor of a cadaver. She took his slips without a word and copied the file numbers, slowly, into a register.

“First time?” she asked in a gravelly voice. Vasin nodded. She blew out air, as if she were smoking, and stood. “Follow me.”

She led him through tunnels of paper, endless as a labyrinth. Every wall was stacked with rows of files, all neatly labeled, interspersed with gray steel cupboards and shelves full of old red-bound books. There was a scent of sweet dust and black tea.

“Nineteen fifty. Category 151 cases. It will be here. Leave the slip on the shelf in place of the file, recover it when you replace the dossier. Reading room is down there.”

Vasin found the documents without difficulty. The boxes’ spines had been stamped with consecutive serial numbers in heavy black ink. When he slipped the correct box from its place, the file was so heavy he had to cradle it like a baby. It sat in his arms, eerily malignant, a swollen tumor of paper. Three kilos of paper that equaled a human life.

The reading room was a long, low hall lit with hanging steel lamps and furnished with standard-issue office desks. A dozen men and women, all in uniform and all pale as stationery, pored over boxes like his own with a concentration so profound that they seemed bewitched. Nobody looked up as he entered. The silence was broken only by the rustling of paper and the scratch of pencils.

It had been Vasin’s first job for Special Cases. Orlov had started him off on something familiar: bribery and extortion. Nikita Olegovich Belov, secretary of the Regional Committee of Ivanovo Province. A midlevel Party apparatchik, no vices beyond the usual, on paper a typical example of the species. His official photo showed a bloated face with a bully’s straight gaze and the resentful pout of a much-commanded man. Like most officials of his level, Belov’s rise had been punctuated by a flurry of official complaints from colleagues and citizens, swirling in his wake like candy wrappers in the backwash of a Party sedan. Complaints, the tiny revenge of the powerless. Everyone wrote them. Tales of drunkenness and domestic cruelty, accounts of the indifference of post office clerks and the slovenliness of meat-counter workers, accusations of petty theft, adultery, and espionage. Encouraged by officialdom as a harmless way for citizens to vent their frustrations, these complaints were the bane of newspaper editors, foremen, and policemen. And useful, too, on occasion. Troublemakers carelessly flagged themselves to the authorities with their scribbled indignations. And denunciations formed a helpful store of petty transgressions that could be produced to cut short the career of an enemy or anyone who had become politically inconvenient.

“Every man goes through life carrying a sack of sins, Vasin,” Orlov had told him. “As Comrade Stalin said, show me the man and I will tell you his number in the Criminal Code.”

And so it came to pass that Special Cases had decided, for reasons Vasin never presumed to know, to send him to examine Comrade Belov’s personal sack of sins. A particularly unattractive bagful, as it turned out. His progress up the greasy pole had been, by the accounts of the hysterical widows and passed-over colleagues, facilitated by blackmail. A serial denouncer, Belov, and one who, according to his accusers, had demanded bribes in return for his silence. Those who refused to pay had been reported. Back in the days when a Party official’s word was more than enough to condemn a man to the Gulag, Belov’s name had cropped up on an unusual share of damning reports and deadly memoranda to the kontora. It hadn’t mattered until suddenly, in Orlov’s judgment, it did. It was Vasin’s job to comb the files and gather the facts.

The first box on the list of Belov’s victims was the dossier of one Slutsky, Foma Petrovich. Party worker from Novgorod, wife and three children. Condemned to die on 15 October 1950, for sabotage and spying. At the time, Slutsky had been Belov’s equal at the local Party branch, and therefore a rival.

When Vasin pulled the black cloth tag that held the box closed and opened its crumbling cardboard cover, the papers inside exuded a slightly acidic musk. Most of the file’s pages were flimsy official onionskin forms, punched through in places by heavy typewriting. Interspersed were a few slips of thicker, raggy scrap paper. Toward the end were several sheets of plain writing paper covered in a thin, blotted handwriting, Slutsky’s confessions to being an enemy of the people. Vasin, exhausted by the enormity of his task even before he had begun, settled down to read.

The file existed on the border between banal bureaucracy and painful poignancy. It was a compilation of the absurdly petty, a receipt for the confiscation of Slutsky’s Party card, the confiscation of his daughter’s Young Pioneer holiday trip voucher, and the starkly shocking. Long confessions, in microscopic, crabbed handwriting, covered with blotches and evidently written under extreme stress. Thick wads of testimony, cross-referenced and typed verbatim, given by Slutsky’s accusers and by his fellow defendants. Belov’s damning indictment of his colleague as a traitor and a spy. Transcripts of the court hearing. The conclusion of the three-judge court, first in longhand and then typed. The verdict of death seen and signed for, with bureaucratic neatness, by Slutsky himself. And finally, at the end of the file, a slip with the stamp of the Novgorod prison and a scribbled signature verifying that the sentence had been carried out.

At the end of that first day, the passing of time marked by no change in the hard electric light but only by the soft whisper of files being closed and chairs shifted backward across the linoleum, Vasin closed the bound stack of papers with an exhausted sigh. Before he shut the box’s lid, he stared at the fussy cursive of the first document, the seed from which the rest had sprouted like a poisonous plant. Belov’s handwritten denunciation, on a small piece of expensive blue notepaper. “I beg to approach you, Comrade guardians of State Security, with some disturbing information that as a loyal Soviet citizen I am bound to report….”

In all, Vasin had spent three weeks in the Lubyanka’s catacombs. Down in these tombs of secrets it began to seem to him that no weather, no sunlight, no open space existed or had ever existed. Emerging into the chilly air of the spring nights, he felt as though he had woken from a deep fever-sleep. Stepping back into the lift in the mornings was like clambering back into his own grave. Every box file he touched and every cup of bitter tea he sipped seemed charged with suffering, like electricity. Sitting in the quiet of the reading room, he began to imagine, like a man hallucinating, that the whispering of the water in the central heating pipes overhead was the murmur of dead human voices. Though in truth the sound of these files, if they could make sounds, would be a scream.

He came to know Belov’s crabbed handwriting well. A lurch, like that of the Ferris wheel in Gorky Park that had so terrified Nikita, would grip him every time he saw the fatal denunciation. This man had written the death sentences of dozens. And, just as Orlov had known, the evidence of his venality was all there for those who chose to look. A desperate victim’s wife, panicking in the interrogation room, protesting that Comrade Belov had demanded a five-hundred-ruble bribe to refrain from his accusation. A daughter, freshly in shock after her expulsion from university following the arrest of her father as an enemy of the people, sobbing a barely coherent story about rejecting Belov’s sexual advances and ignoring his threats to destroy her family.

Inevitably, as he turned the pages of each dossier, Vasin would learn from the terse typed-up referral slips that most of these accusers had themselves been punished in their turn. “Slander of a public official.” “Antisocial tendencies.” And, more than once, “mental instability.” A suspicion of slow-onset schizophrenia, in the investigator’s opinion, “subject to be referred for psychiatric evaluation.” Somewhere, in some other cellar in some other building, Vasin knew the rest of the victim’s story lay carefully recorded by the all-seeing eye of Soviet bureaucracy. Assessments, medication, commitment to psychiatric care. Vasin knew how that ended, an agony of terror on twisted, shit-stained sheets, like his sister, Klara. Or else the story would continue in the files of a labor camp or a prison or an exile settlement somewhere deep in the Kazakh steppes. Illness, suicide, lonely death. A universe of suffering, recorded in a million words dropped one by one into silence.

Vasin remembered how he had climbed into bed beside Vera during those weeks. He had touched her shoulder but she didn’t stir, so he knew she was awake. But he could think of no words for what was going through his mind. When he finally found sleep he was powerless to stop his mind from filling the day’s words on the page with flesh and blood, from giving them voices and tears.

Sentimentality? Not something he had ever suspected in himself, not after years as a Moscow criminal detective. He had spent his career in society’s underbelly, as elbow deep in the shit and the gore as any morgue orderly or sewage man or abattoir worker. He knew the sour stink of prisons, so pervasive that you tasted it in your mouth for days. He knew about the mutilations and the sodomy and the sordid ways men chose to kill and die in the hopelessness of their captivity. A straitjacketed prisoner in Moscow’s Butyrika prison who had bitten his tongue in the hope of choking on his own blood. A suspect who had tried to drown himself in the latrines, kicking at the guards as he desperately fought to inhale sewage. He had seen the netherworld where the greatest horror of all was to remain alive. More, he had condemned perhaps hundreds of men and women to life, and sometimes death, in this underground.

Men had made a hell for the guilty. But what did it mean to send the innocent there, deliberately — or even worse, through simple carelessness? Something in Vasin rebelled. His childhood sense of fairness was offended. It seemed too feeble an instinct to stand against the storming fury of so many unquiet ghosts. But Vasin knew he had discovered anger. He could smell its first kindling and hear the crackle of its brushwood. We must cut down the serf inside ourselves, he remembered some great Russian writer saying. We must set our good hearts free, which is the dream of every decent soul. And even — it must be — of certain serf masters, too.

When Vasin had stood before Orlov, at attention with report in hand, the General had taken in his pallor, his pinched convalescent’s face. What was the lesson that Orlov had wanted him to learn? Did his boss even believe there was a lesson to be learned, down in that world of the dead? Perhaps, thought Vasin, a man who had spent a lifetime inside the system had no knowledge of its enormity, like some blind cave fish who knew nothing of the sun? But Orlov had said nothing. Or nearly nothing.

“Did you find what we were looking for?”

“Yes, sir. Comrade Belov is corrupt, without a doubt.”

Orlov silenced him with a hand, impatiently extended for Vasin’s report. His boss flicked through it, grunting occasionally.

“Good work.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Orlov caught something in Vasin’s tone. His head snapped around, like a listening bird hearing a rustle in the branches.

“Vasin.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Vasin?” This time a rising note of question.

The General paused, perhaps weighing if he had the time to make a speech, and decided against it.

“When you fell trees, the chips fly.”

“Yes. Sir.”

Vasin struggled to choose words, but Orlov has already turned away and was rooting in the pocket of his breeches for his keys. The green steel safe, the first time Vasin had ever seen his superior open it.

“That will be all, Major.”

The next month, Vasin read in Pravda that Nikita Belov had been accepted as a candidate member of the Central Committee. In the kontora canteen they spoke of him as the next Minister for State Security.

So much poison, dug into the ground. So much betrayal and viciousness trapped in those lifeless pages. All those dead, their cries for justice composted into poison that could seep out like marsh gas. Even a tiny waft of it, released into the outside air, could kill. Academician Petrov’s secret, for instance. Had Adamov known all along, as he sat in the courtroom and watched his wife denounce him as a traitor, that his friend and colleague had brought him to this pass? Could Adamov have found out more recently? Had Fedya Petrov, so bright and clever and vital, been murdered by a shade of the past escaped from its deep cellar and now abroad in the world?

Through the thin partition of the Arzamas apartment, Vasin heard Kuznetsov loudly clearing his throat in the bathroom. Then the shower pipes, shuddering into life with an equally throaty gurgle. Outside the drawn curtains and the closed door, the new day stood ready for him.

Arzamas buried its secrets, too. Somewhere deep underground and very close, men like Adamov were moving among their stockpiles of deadly metals, building their infernal machine, patiently constructing Armageddon. But the kontora’s own poison cellars were stocked with a knowledge no less deadly, waiting to burst explosively out into the light.

II

Vasin sat on a hard wooden bench in front of Adamov’s office, waiting for the Professor. Outside the Institute an enlarged detail of Zaitsev’s watchers waited in turn for Vasin. But some unwritten protocol kept them outside the hallowed halls of the Institute itself. This building had become the last place in Arzamas where Vasin could move around without close surveillance.

On the wall outside the Professor’s office was an arrangement of official photographs of the luminaries of the Institute. They all wore the hard glares of men who stared through hardship and into a glorious future. The faces in the upper row were underlined with a constellation of stars, spreading across their tunics. Hero of Socialist Labor. Hero of the Soviet Union. The portraits of the deceased bore black ribbons across one corner. In the fourth row Vasin found Fyodor Petrov, his ribbon not yet added. Fedya, still alive on the wall, had worn thick-rimmed glasses for the shot. Another vanity, guessed Vasin, albeit one of false modesty. He had wanted to render his matinee idol’s face more serious, for the eternal record. His white lab coat bore no medals. And now never would.

Vasin sought out Adamov, in the center of the top row. Stern, like the rest, formidable. Resolute. The photographer had found no trace of humanity or humor in the sharp lines of that countenance. Vasin could stare at the photograph in a way he would never dare at Adamov’s live face.

Did Adamov dream of the Gulag? Vasin wondered. Did the faces of all the men who had ever caused him pain come to him at night, the swine-faces of the camp guards, the pale ratlike faces of the hypocrites’ court that had condemned him? Petrov, the once-beloved colleague who had betrayed him so ruthlessly? His faithless first wife? His daughter, who never wrote, even after his release and rehabilitation? The two women must have renounced Adamov in their righteous indignation at his supposed treachery. Or was it fear, and now they remained far from him out of shame? What lies did they weave in their minds when they thought of him? Could Adamov justify what they had done, even forgive them? What lies did he tell himself about their reasons? Did the man keep a spark of love alive for them, nestled deep in the ashes of the past in the cold grate of his heart?

Vasin tried to imagine Adamov, this brilliant, imperious man, in the hard places of the world. A golden mind, the Russian phrase went. And at the same time, he was also a human skin, a bag of hormones and organs, a sack of desire and digestion. Vasin saw him freezing in a thin prison uniform, starving and pushing forward, crazed for food, breathing the stench of other prisoners, his hungry belly filled only with the stink of their common humanity. Adamov slurping thin soup from a flimsy metal bowl. Fighting for a place to squat in the fetid dark of a prison latrine.

Vasin thought of Butyrika prison, the faces he had seen peering through the hatches in the battered old doors. Most were uncomplaining men, doomed to be abused, men to whom things simply happened. Their grandfathers had been someone’s property, serfs, and so on back for a hundred generations. These men had inherited the bovine resignation of ancient Russia. But there were others, men whose reason rebelled. You could tell them immediately. A snap in the glance. The way they straightened when the handcuffs came off in the interrogation room. A lingering dignity in the spread of their shoulders. The prison guards saw it, too, of course, with their scavengers’ instinct for scents of weakness, or dangerous strength. Proud men always had it hard, at the beginning. Then, in time, their fellow inmates would accord them a grudging space, as a race apart.

How had he become a man who knew such things? wondered Vasin with a sudden flash of revulsion. This knowledge of the degraded subtleties of prison society. How had he become a gatekeeper to this filthy world? Its interpreter?

“Mama, I am going to be a policeman.” Even his mother, this woman for whom the Soviet State could do no wrong, had flinched at the idea. The way she had paused, halfway across the communal kitchen, taken a moment to compose a brave smile.

“It’s not like Uncle Styopa, you know.”

Uncle Styopa, the kind neighborhood cop in the patriotic children’s poems that she had read to him. Tall, blond, and strong, Uncle Styopa had prevented train crashes, helped firemen, punished a school bully. He was a fighter against injustice and a hero to all Young Pioneers. She knew him as only a mother could. Of course Uncle Styopa was exactly what Vasin wanted to be. And even, then, what he thought it would be like.

“It will be an honor for you,” his mother had said, eventually. “Your father would be proud.”

Vasin had no way of knowing how his father would feel. He remembered a warm, ironic smile, the feel of the rough cloth of his father’s uniform tunic on his childish face. A week or so before his father had left for the front for the last time, his mother had taken Vasin to watch the troops parade. She had waved excitedly as his father’s unit passed, and the boy Vasin had waved and cheered too. But the truth was that he had not been able to recognize his dad among the rows of rhythmically high-stepping soldiers. It was as though the man had already been absorbed into the khaki mass, dissolved into the collective. His father had become part of a machine, an unrecognizable dot in a sea of identical faces.

In death, Vasin’s father had been doubly taken from him, no longer a private man but transformed into an archetypal war hero. One of the glorious dead who were everybody’s common property. His father’s apotheosis had automatically made him a patriot, a mute statue onto which the world would hang its placards.

“He defended our Motherland,” his mother concluded, finding a trite label for her feelings as usual. “Now it is your turn.”

Vasin had known he made a mistake the moment he walked into the Police Training Academy. Not an escape from school but a nightmarish replay of it. The shaven-headed, low-browed faces of his classmates, scowling at him with an instinctive knowledge that the new boy was not one of them. A smart one, this. Thinks a lot. Even his instructors had mocked him. Cadet Vasin, you know all the answers. Vasin will know this, he has spent the vacation reading the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The plodding sarcasm of a mediocre world. Only the women instructors who taught forensics and fingerprinting had admired him. Always so smartly turned out. An example to you all, boys. The others had sniggered and picked their noses.

Vasin struggled to wrench his thoughts back to the present. He concentrated on the dust dancing in a beam of morning sunlight that pierced the blinds. Particles rising and falling in space, in eternal random motion. God’s feeble way of entertaining bored physics students.

Adamov and his entourage appeared at the end of the corridor, the great man himself striding in front and his coterie of white-coated assistants following behind, moving with great urgency. Vasin stood. Adamov’s plain brown suit was stained with chalk, and his knotted tie was askew. His face wore its usual mask of stony seriousness, but the eyes were exhausted. The Professor fixed Vasin with a beady stare. As Vasin stepped forward into the Professor’s path, the white-coated assistants moved to surround him like white blood cells attacking a germ. A burly lieutenant colonel in an engineer’s uniform body-blocked Vasin.

“Not now.” The officer’s voice was hoarse and his eyes rimmed with red from lack of sleep. “Get lost.”

“Professor,” Vasin called over the man’s shoulder. “A word in private. It’s important.”

Adamov stopped and blinked in the neon glare of the Institute corridor, a bright white against the dull early morning’s effort beyond the windows. The nervous energy of the group focused into a jittery hostility at Vasin’s insolence. An older scientist in a stained lab coat spoke up.

“The Professor has no time. We have important work to do.”

“Two minutes, Comrade Professor. What I have to say is most urgent and concerns you, personally.”

Adamov did not accord Vasin the courtesy of going into his office. He merely swung open the nearest door and with a scowl sent the occupants scurrying for the exit like cockroaches in the light. As the room emptied, Adamov scanned some documents on a clipboard he held, as if bothering to look Vasin’s way would be a waste of a precious second.

“Speak. The device must be ready for transportation by the end of tomorrow.”

The Professor whipped a pencil from his breast pocket and made a note on his clipboard. Some men had a gift of quiet. In their presence, intimacy grew, and tendrils of doubt and confession like softly climbing plants. Adamov was the opposite. His silence was violent, a storm of tension building like a charge in a machine that would soon emit a devastating snapping arc of static electricity.

“I know Academician Arkady Petrov denounced you in 1937, Professor.”

Gradually Adamov’s stillness became awesome. He turned his head away, and the light fell on the square cage of his temples and jaws and the trapped and furious eyes within it. The terrible power of secrets. It had given Vasin power over Masha and now, over this great man. He felt shame. It was like knifing a man in an honest fistfight. Dirty dealing. He was not equal to the weight of the weapon he held in his hands.

The Professor’s answer, when it eventually came, seemed to echo from far away.

“Arkady Petrov.” Nothing in Adamov’s flat repetition gave any clue as to whether this was a confirmation of what he knew or a revelation. “With whom have you shared this information?”

“Maria Vladimirovna. Would you like to know what she said?”

Masha’s shadow fell between them like a sword. Vasin remembered the flutter of her eyelashes, the knowledge thudding into her chest like a blow from a club, the weight of her body against his.

Adamov exhaled. He looked at Vasin as though truly seeing him for the first time. In the crowded world of Adamov’s mind, Vasin imagined that he had finally broken through the screen of the insignificant to become real in the Professor’s eyes.

“Why?”

There was genuine pain in Adamov’s voice. So Masha was the key to him. Far adrift in his ocean of abstractions, Adamov still had love in him. He had not yet reached the freezing point of absolute loneliness. Only the man with love in him carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. Vasin saw it, and hated himself for seeing it.

“To ask her if you could kill Fyodor Petrov, the son of the man who denounced you. If you were capable of poisoning the man during dinner at your own house.”

Adamov deflated, a man worn thin as paper.

“And what did my wife say to you, Major Vasin?”

“She said that you were incapable of such violence. But…” Vasin forced himself to press on. “I also know that immediately after the death of Petrov, you changed a specific part of the design of RDS-220. The tamper, designed by your dead colleague. Why?”

A quiet thickened between them. But this was not a silence of hostility. Now their time, the measure of their silences, belonged for a moment to Vasin. The Professor took a long moment to reassemble himself, to recover his authority. Their eyes locked once more. Adamov had donned a poker face a corpse would envy. But his moment of vulnerability had made Adamov’s voice softer, his adamantine carapace temporarily set aside. Though Vasin remained in no doubt that, at his core, his adversary was as hard as flint.

“You are not a fool. I’ll grant you that.”

“Your answer, Professor.”

“You cannot see what we see. There are matters here which you may not comprehend.”

Indignation erupted inside Vasin. These were also Orlov’s words.

“ ‘We know better than you’?” Vasin’s voice had chilled. “ ‘We sit higher, we see further’? Professor, you sit high and see far. But from where I sit and from what I see, you had the motive and the opportunity to kill Fyodor Petrov.”

Before Vasin could continue, Adamov, still looking away, began to speak.

“Young man. In the middle years of my life, after the camps and before I was allowed to return to Leningrad, I lived on half a hectare of land in Tambov Province. A peasant’s wooden cottage with a vegetable patch fertilized with my predecessors’ shit, which I dug out from the latrine. There was a meadow, completely enclosed by forest. It teemed with creatures: deer, squirrels, songbirds, crows, mice, a hawk. Except for the crows and the hawk, the carrion bird and the predator, every one of those animals constantly and fearfully watched over its shoulder lest it be caught, torn, and eaten alive. From the animals’ point of view, my little paradise was a space of violence and death. Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.”

Adamov had let his arm dangle free, the file held so loose in his fingers that Vasin thought he might let it drop to the floor.

“What do you mean, sir?”

The Professor continued talking as though Vasin had not spoken.

“In nature every creature lives its life in a permanent state of terror. Terror, and vigilance. To live to the end of every day he must fight to find sustenance, and to avoid death. Even the predators must kill or themselves die. The carrion birds depend on the murders of others. Why do we assume that the human world must be different?”

“I don’t understand.”

The Professor suddenly seemed to become aware once more of Vasin’s presence and turned his head to speak to him with a terrifying directness.

“What do we mean by ‘understanding’ something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes ‘the world’ is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by ‘fundamental physics.’ But even if we know every rule, what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited. Because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the rules. Much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we ‘understand’ the world. And do you know the rules? Any rules? I doubt it. So I may say two things to you now with certainty: You do not comprehend what happened then and you do not comprehend what is happening here, now.”

“Then enlighten me.”

“You have dug up a single piece of ancient history from the files and you are spinning tales. That is all. What is your evidence for the rest of what you suggest? There is none.”

Vasin hesitated for a moment too long. The evidence that could convict or exonerate Adamov lay below them, deep in the vaults of the Institute, among the laboratory records of Petrov’s experiments, which Axelrod insisted had been faked. But Vasin could not put his hand on them. And to ask Adamov for permission to view them would be to invite their immediate destruction, if the Professor was indeed guilty.

“You’re wrong, Professor Adamov. Your colleagues…”

“Have denounced me? Again? Is this your evidence? Major, this folly must go no further. You must stop. Now. But perhaps there are some things that you need to know. So, Comrade Not-fool, I offer you this. I have no more time now. By tomorrow night we will have completed the final assembly. Come to my apartment. We will have tea and I will tell you some things that you will find illuminating. But in the meantime you will not mention these accusations of yours to anybody. Especially none of your damn bunglers in the kontora. To nobody at the Institute. You will keep your silence for a day. Your word?”

The image of Adamov, Maria, Korin, and Petrov sitting under the pooled light of the Adamovs’ dining table on the final night of Petrov’s life jumped into his mind. They had all been drinking tea.

“My word, Professor.”

III

From the corridor, the computer room sounded more like an industrial laundry than a temple of high technology. When he swung open the double doors, Vasin was assaulted by a wave of heat and noise. A long hall was filled with banks of steel-cased machines, each composed of decks of glowing electrical valves. Banks of lights flickered on the displays, and the place was hot as a sauna. Overhead, giant air-conditioning ducts poured in cool air, the pumps thrumming like a ship’s diesels.

Along one side of the room were a row of glass-walled offices. Vasin spotted Axelrod gathering up a printout many meters long. He tapped on the thick glass, wasn’t heard, and then banged on it with the palm of his hand. Axelrod, turning, went white at the sight of him. Like a cartoon character he turned left and right, but there was nowhere to hide in the glass cubicle. Axelrod dropped the spooling roll of paper and made a desperate gesture, flapping his hands to shoo Vasin away. Shaking his head frantically, he mouthed the word no.

Looking about him, Vasin spotted a group of white-coated men huddling over one of the machines. One of them was pulling out a tray from the computer with heat-proof gloves. The section trailed wires like the arteries of an extracted organ. Nobody was paying them any attention. Vasin turned back to Axelrod and dropped his hands to his fly, mimicking pissing. With a swing of his head he summoned Axelrod to follow him.

In the men’s lavatory the two of them stood in awkward silence, side by side by the washbasins, as they waited for someone to finish noisily defecating. Eventually an elderly engineer lumbered out of the cubicle, smiling in comradely greeting as he took his time washing his hands. Vasin waited for the man’s footsteps to recede down the corridor before turning the taps on full.

“Why did you come here?” Axelrod said, his eyes flitting around the empty lavatory.

“You told me you were running some tests. What have you found?”

“I’m being followed.”

“Calm down.” Vasin tried to keep the impatience from his tone. Everyone in Arzamas was being watched by someone. “What’s happened, Axelrod?”

“Last night, someone followed me all the way home. He was sloppy and kept ducking behind trees whenever I turned around. I don’t think he was…one of yours. From the kontora.”

“It could have just been a thief.”

“A mugger in Arzamas? Are you insane?” Axelrod struggled to catch his breath. “Who did you tell about the tamper?”

“Nobody. I have told nobody, Axelrod.” Only Korin, and Adamov.

They both froze into silence as the door swung open. The young man, seeing them locked in intense conversation, hesitated before entering.

“Get lost.” Vasin flicked his red ID card from his pocket and flashed it at the boy like a talisman.

The door slammed shut on its powerful spring.

“Vasin, I can’t be seen talking to you.”

“Nonetheless, I need to know what you have discovered.”

Axelrod puffed in exasperation.

“My computer simulation will be done in forty minutes. The first set of results will prove how seriously Adamov has sabotaged the device. Come to my apartment on Builders’ Street in one hour.”

When Vasin stepped out onto Kurchatov Square, a single Volga was parked by the curb, the driver reading a newspaper while the passenger kept lookout. Another car would probably be circling the square. Vasin loitered for a moment to make sure that the kontora men had spotted him, then strolled to the corner of Marx Boulevard. The traffic policeman, pleased to have someone to talk to, gave him overcomplicated directions. The Volga idled by the curb, then kept pace with him, trailing at a distance.

Vasin passed women in head scarves hurrying to do some lunchtime shopping. A pair of young men in new suits greeted each other with a bear hug. On the boulevards young mothers gossiped as they rocked prams. At the window of a shoe shop, Vasin stopped to check the display, watching for someone to double back or pause to tie a shoelace. Nobody did. No followers on foot, then. A steam whistle sounded from the railway, and from a courtyard came the whoop of boys playing football. Vasin walked mercifully incognito in his civilian clothes through an ordinary Friday afternoon in a city that was anything but ordinary.

Builders’ Street was broad and tree-lined and crossed 8th March Street at an oblique angle. It was halfway to the airstrip, and Vasin watched a transport plane lumber into the sky over the rooftops, waiting on the corner for the Volga to nose into view. The last thing he wanted, for now, was for the kontora men to lose him. Axelrod’s house had been built after the war from red brick. “German buildings,” citizens called them, because so many had been put up by German prisoners of war. Even as slave laborers, the Fascists were known to build well. The facade was a wide expanse of windows pierced by a high archway that led into the courtyard. All the building’s staircases and doorways opened onto the yard, and there was only one way in or out. Good. There was a children’s sandpit in the center, empty of children but populated by a small crowd of oversize cartoon characters rough-hewn from wood and garishly painted. A large timber mushroom that was part of the playground furniture was usefully screened from the archway by a near life-size statue of Karandash the clown. Vasin settled on the mushroom to wait. He could observe all four entranceways from a single spot.

Vladimir Axelrod. The summary from the personnel files, pinned to the transcripts of Axelrod’s interrogation by Zaitsev, had concealed as much as it revealed. Twenty-nine years old. Jewish family, father a good Bolshevik. Brilliant mathematician, studied theoretical physics under Adamov in Leningrad after the war. A stream of commendations. Worked with Fyodor Petrov here at Arzamas-16 for the last five years. Unmarried. Like Petrov, politically irreproachable, on paper at least. So why had Efremov spoken of him as politically unreliable? Probably because Axelrod had lent his friend banned French philosophical literature. Maybe that had been enough to send the likes of Zaitsev and Efremov into frenzies of suspicion. And Vasin knew that he had wept like a girl when speaking of Petrov’s death. More likely than not, the tears of a lover. And equally probably Axelrod had taken the pornographic photographs and attempted blackmail. But a killer? Vasin went over the grainy photographs in his mind, the fuzzy image that might have been Axelrod. The anger in the punched-through type. HER OR ME?

From Gogol Boulevard came the sounds of the folding doors of an electric tram opening and closing with a snap. A minute later a tall young man came hurrying through the archway. Vasin recognized the sloping, urgent gait immediately. Axelrod disappeared into the building. Vasin checked his watch and stood stiffly. Just as he was about to step out to follow Axelrod inside, he caught a movement by the archway. He ducked back behind Karandash’s shoulders. A squat, simian figure peered furtively into the courtyard, then retreated. The man wore a padded black jacket, like that of a road worker, and a cheap rabbit fur hat. The man was trying far too hard to be inconspicuous to be a professional.

Not one of the kontora’s regular watchers. Someone else, with different intent. One of Efremov’s irregulars? Some deniable outsider? An underworld killer drafted in for what the kontora liked to euphemistically call a wet operation? Vasin remembered Efremov’s menacing glance up from the courtyard after he had emerged from Petrov’s poison-filled apartment.

Keeping his hand to his face as though scratching his temple, Vasin sauntered from his hiding place into Axelrod’s entranceway. Inside the hall he doubled back and peered from the gloom of the stairwell toward the arch. Their watcher had disappeared.

Apartment 211 was on the fourth floor. Axelrod opened the door immediately and peered down the stairwell to see that Vasin was alone.

“We don’t have much time before they miss me at the laboratory. Come in.”

Axelrod’s place was luxurious by any standard, but it was not the kind of sleek nomenklatura apartment in which Petrov had lived. It was filled with the typical clutter of the intelligentsia, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, an upright piano, a spread of sentimental paintings of Russian landscapes across one wall. The sitting room was furnished with solid prewar furniture. Axelrod evidently hadn’t made the distribution list for the trainload of Czech buffet suites that graced Kuznetsov’s apartment.

Axelrod moved a pile of journals from an easy chair and shifted some pillows and blankets from the sofa. Vasin had counted at least two other rooms leading off the hall, but evidently Axelrod still sometimes slept on his couch rather than in the bedroom. Vasin sometimes did the same himself, though in his own case it had been to escape from Vera into his own thoughts.

“What did your machine tell you?”

“It’s a machine. It performs the calculations you give it.”

“So what did it tell you about the tamper?”

“I’m trying to explain. You put in variables, and it applies formulae to them and comes up with a result. Boil a liter of water at one hundred degrees, turn it into steam, and what volume does it occupy? Sixteen hundred ninety-four liters. First time you measure it, you have to do a physical experiment. But once you have the data, the second time a computer can do it for you. It’s called a mathematical model. And you can scale it up. For instance, to project the effects of a nuclear explosion.”

“So why test the bombs at all?”

Axelrod looked at Vasin as though he were simple.

“You do the real-world test to show the world you can do it.”

“So what does it say about RDS-220?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nobody really knows exactly how the hydrogen — actually tritium and deuterium, heavy versions of hydrogen — will react as it undergoes fusion. You just have to go on the previous results and assume the reaction will be similar.”

“Assume?”

Axelrod shrugged. “You assume until the experimental data proves you wrong.”

“RDS-220 is an experiment?”

“All new devices are experimental, by definition.”

Vasin saw no trace of self-doubt in Axelrod’s boyish face.

“I’ve entered new data for Adamov’s lead tamper. The machine ran for four hours performing a hundred thousand operations per second. So far it’s less than halfway through the complete model….”

Axelrod made a grimace of doubt.

“Out with it, Axelrod.”

“It’s just a partial picture. The reduced density of the new tamper means that the reaction is contained for a shorter period. This we knew. And the nonreactiveness of the lead means we have to subtract all our projections for the reaction of the uranium in the old tamper.”

“Meaning that the power of RDS-220 is reduced. By how much?”

“So much of this is guesswork until the model is complete, Major.”

“By how much?”

Axelrod swallowed nervously.

“My guess would be perhaps fifty percent.”

“Exactly as you said before.”

“As I suggested before, but once the computer modeling is complete we will have the data to prove it. Deliberate sabotage.”

Axelrod looked at his hands. His voice had become quiet.

“Dr. Petrov confided in me,” he said. “He often mentioned Professor Adamov’s anti-Soviet attitudes. Adamov makes no secret of his subversive opinions to his intimates.

“The great Adamov also served time in a correctional facility for counterrevolutionary activity. There is a stain. Petrov told me that a time would come when such irreverent political attitudes would no longer be tolerated. That a project like RDS must be led by ideologically pure cadres.”

“Perhaps Dr. Petrov considered himself a suitable replacement for Adamov, one day?”

“Adamov treats the program like his private kingdom. Petrov was passionate. He felt the Director lacked zeal. That he was too cautious. Fedya, Dr. Petrov, said that Adamov was scared of the bombs he was creating.”

“And yet Adamov built RDS-220.”

“Yes, but now he is unbuilding it.”

“You think he poisoned Petrov?”

Axelrod shrugged.

“I think he is capable of murder, yes. But Adamov is undisupted master here. He did not need to kill Petrov to get his way. So I don’t understand.”

That makes two of us, thought Vasin.

“Maria Adamova thinks that…”

“I don’t much care what Masha Adamova thinks,” Axelrod interrupted, his meekness abruptly discarded. “She’s a lying whore.”

“ ‘Her or me?’ Those words mean anything to you, Axelrod?”

Axelrod sank back on the sofa, dislodging a sheaf of papers. He sat very still as the pages slid, one by one, onto the floor.

“She showed you?”

Vasin let the silence build. He needed Axelrod good and scared. He needed to be sure of the scientist’s silence.

“Yes. She showed me the photos, Doctor.”

“What will you do?”

“I will bear them in mind, Comrade. Nothing more. Which is precisely what you will do with this information about Adamov’s new design for the tamper.”

Axelrod blinked, as though the thought was crossing his mind for the first time.

“I…I don’t understand.”

“You will talk to nobody.”

Axelrod nodded meekly.

“Nobody. Only me.”

The young scientist bit his lip. Vasin felt a sobriety, a clarifying loneliness, in the young man. He seemed to be thinking intensely about his hands. His brown eyes held Vasin’s for a moment, slipped away, and came back to him as though Axelrod had reached some kind of resolution.

“You pull your hook tight, Major.”

In the courtyard the sky had turned dark with low cloud. Light snow was swirling in the wind trap made by the enclosed space. Vasin checked for the mysterious watcher, and for his own familiar kontora team. There was no immediate sign of either. He took up his position behind the wooden clown. There was a clatter on the stairs, and Axelrod hurried out. He had changed into a checked suit and a bulky overcoat against the chill, and under his arm he carried a slim cardboard document folder. Off to an important meeting at the Citadel, Vasin guessed. As his quarry disappeared into the archway, he slipped silently into Axelrod’s wake. Stepping quickly across the pedestrian sidewalk into the shadow of the trees that lined the road, Vasin watched the scientist trotting across Builders’ Street toward the tram stop on Gogol Boulevard. A familiar hunched figure broke cover from the bushes and followed Axelrod.

To Vasin’s relief, there was a small crowd at the tram stop. Axelrod was anxiously checking his watch, oblivious of his suite of followers. When the tram clanked into view, Vasin muttered another prayer of thanks; it was a double-length car, made of two carriages coupled together. He waited until Axelrod, his tail, and the rest of the crowd had pressed their way on board the first carriage before darting into the closing door of the second car.

Schultz. Boris Ignatiyevich Schultz had been the name of Vasin’s instructor during his three months’ countersurveillance training at the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB. Little white hands, a survivor’s gravity. The other trainees, all much younger than Vasin, whispered that Schultz had worked in Tokyo and Shanghai among the community of deluded dreamers, the lost rabble of prewar fellow travelers of the Communist International who had later been erased in the Purges. Somehow Schultz had returned alive. Word was he’d given up his ideologically impure comrades in exchange for his life. In person, Schultz had been dry as a closed book on a library shelf. But he was good, very good, at watching.

When they had reassembled after an afternoon on the streets around Michurinsky Prospekt trying to avoid Schultz’s all-seeing eye, their instructor would greet his pupils with a slow reading from a notebook filled with times and places.

“Comrade Vasin. At 14:02 you attempted a dry-clean in the toilets of the Warsaw Cinema,” Schultz would recite in his mysteriously accented Russian. “At 15:15 you exited the metro train at Prospekt Marxa, walked to Teatralnaya Station, doubled back through the North Corridor….”

The man was a limpet. Yet when he set the whole fifteen-strong class on himself, Schultz disappeared like a noonday shadow. Inevitably, they would find him silently waiting for them back in the classroom, swaying in quiet dignity after a few comforting cognacs at the cafeteria.

A few weeks’ training under Schultz hadn’t made Vasin a professional, at least not by his teacher’s exacting criteria. But one of the details that Vasin had learned was that all Soviet trams were double-ended, with identical rearview mirrors front and back, giving a perfect view of whoever entered and left if you stood by the second leaning post behind the driver’s cab. As expected, Axelrod descended at Kurchatov Square, his shadow ineptly leaping out in his wake. Vasin himself jammed the door open with his weight, ignoring the imprecations of the citizens pushing past him to get on, and stepped off just as the tram gathered speed. Axelrod took the broad steps of the Institute two at a time. The man who was following him watched him go up. Vasin joined a group of men examining the evening papers that were pasted on boards by the tram stop, in full view of the road but hidden from Axelrod’s tail. He watched the kontora Volga spot him and circle round the square. Not Schultz-level training, but at least they weren’t total idiots.

The man loitered conspicuously by the steps before checking his watch and evidently deciding that Axelrod had settled in for the afternoon. With a rolling step like that of a sailor from a children’s animated film, the man began to walk down Lenin Avenue. The Volga with Vasin’s own tails began to follow him more closely, evidently spooked by his suspiciously last-minute tram hopping. Perhaps they had already radioed for a backup team. The goons’ boring day of surveillance was suddenly getting interesting.

Vasin had been taught to follow a target, but to do so when he was himself a target — that was a conundrum that would have intrigued even the cold-blooded Schultz. But Vasin’s more immediate problem was that Sailor was heading out of the boulevards of the center into the thinly populated side streets of Arzamas.

There’s only a certain number of times a subject can notice you and not realize he’s being tracked. Sometimes it’s just once. Best bet is on the third time. To hope for more grace is, as Schultz had put it, “sheer optimism,” pronouncing the phrase as though optimism was a foolish weakness. Vasin was pretty sure that Sailor had clocked him after he turned off Peace Prospekt into a street of low, single-story wooden dwellings not even dignified by a nameplate. The street was wide, with sidewalks of beaten earth and grassy ditches on either side of the paved surface. These were the humble places of the town, the places where the high, proud facades that would see in the future of socialism melted away to reveal the higgledy architecture of peasant Russia, not quite yet consigned to the dustbin of history. The only cover was telegraph poles. Sailor deliberately slowed his pace, giving Vasin no option but to do the same. He sauntered to the entrance of a junkyard and turned the corner. Half a second too soon to be completely out of sight, he broke into a run. Sailor was bolting.

Vasin sprinted into a yard filled with old trucks in various states of dismemberment. The place was enclosed on two sides by a high, crooked fence, and on the other by a series of barnlike garages. A door banged, and as Vasin ran to follow he saw the kontora Volga lumber gingerly into the yard behind him.

The service door of the garage opened into a narrow alley that snaked between the backs of wooden houses. Sailor’s black figure was disappearing at speed into a small grove of birches.

“Stop!” shouted Vasin, already breathless. “Stop!”

His only answer was the scream of a steam whistle and a cloud of drifting smoke from a passing locomotive. So they were by the railway lines. Vasin ran on, through the damp darkness of the little wood, and emerged into the shadow of a vast, hangar-like building that walled off the end of the path. Nobody to the left or right. But in the back of the hangar, an open steel door. Vasin darted into a space of darkness. He fumbled for the bolt and found it. For a second, he hesitated before shooting it home. Did he want to do this alone? He could hardly rely on the kontora goons to rush to his aid. The less company the better. The steel slid clumsily into place, shutting out his own pursuers.

The afternoon light, already fading, barely filtered through grime-stained windows in the roof. Vasin made out giant, dark forms around him, and smelled soot, oil, and rust. He reached forward and touched a wall of cold metal. His eyes, adjusting to the gloom, made out the giant shape of a locomotive, then another. Underfoot, his shoes crunched on gravel. An engine shed. The sounds of distant traffic echoed in the vast hall.

To his left, a pigeon fluttered up to the roof, the noise explosive over the thrumming of blood in his ears. There had been no sound of footsteps running across gravel. Sailor must still be close by, hiding. Vasin crouched by the locomotive’s driving wheel, reaching up to the driving rod to steady himself. His hand closed on cold grease. He peered underneath the engine and saw only a forest of wheels and spokes, the dull steely glow of parallel rails, immobile shadows. Treading carefully, he crept to the front of the engine. The buffers thrust out like a pair of bowed human heads. From the rail yard came the sound of a steam whistle, and the voices of a work gang guffawing and swearing as they approached. Four men, dressed in drab gray overalls, carrying lunch pails in their hands and tools over their shoulders. As they entered the shed, their voices reverberated around in the cavernous space.

Somewhere ahead, from the darkest shadows behind a coal tender, Sailor made a break. He ran in a loping crouch, low to the ground like a chimpanzee, ducking under one locomotive and then another. Vasin, stumbling on the oil-soaked gravel of the railbed, scrambled to follow. The man straightened as he ran into the light and began sprinting across the weed-covered yard, handily hopping over the rails. The surprised voices of the work crew called after them.

Sailor reached the rail yard’s concrete wall. A stab of cramp in his side doubled Vasin over, but he ran on. Sailor was trapped. But no, he reached a steel gantry that supported a row of signals over the main line on the far side of the wall. A set of rungs ran up the side. With an animal’s athleticism, the man swung himself up the narrow ladder and began to climb. Vasin stopped, breathless, at the base of the gantry, watching the rough pigskin boots disappear over the top. Swearing under his panting breath, Vasin followed.

The top of the signal gantry was barely half a meter wide, two girders linked by haphazardly welded crossbars with a flimsy-looking handrail along one side. Sailor was clearly on home turf, shimmying sideways along the walkway with a practiced movement, oblivious of the ten-meter fall to the tracks below him.

“Stop or I shoot!” The words sounded ridiculous even as Vasin yelled them. His service Makarov was hanging in its holster on the back of a chair in his bedroom. He could never hope to catch the man on this icy steel. Vasin bowed his head in exhausted defeat, gasping and cursing every Orbita he had ever smoked. A steel box welded into the corner of the gantry caught his eye. Vasin flipped it open and saw that it contained a rusty tangle of rivets. He fished one out. It was twenty centimeters long, heavy in the hand as a half-liter vodka bottle. Sailor was more than halfway across the gantry, some thirty meters from him. More in frustration than from a desire to hurt him, Vasin pitched the rivet after the fleeing man. It ricocheted, with a ringing clang, off the steel cowling of a signal.

Sailor stopped and turned to Vasin, scowling in fear and alarm. He had a brutal, low-browed face, much older than Vasin had expected, at least fifty, he would guess, with a brawler’s physique. Vasin reached down for a second rivet and pointed it at the man like a pistol.

“I said stop! State Security!”

The wind carried away Sailor’s answering insult, and he continued his scramble toward the other side faster than ever. Vasin threw the second rivet, uselessly, then pitched a third, which bounced off the frame of the gantry, and a fourth, which once again dinged against a signal. With each impact the man ducked. He was almost all the way across now. Vasin fished in the box for something weightier, and found a wrench as long as his forearm. With a final, desperate throw, he flung the heavy tool. It pitchpoled through the air with a menacing swish. Damn, thought Vasin as he watched it fly. What if it actually hits the fucker?

The wrench missed. But as it scythed past Sailor’s head, he flinched to avoid it and lost his footing. One boot skidded into space, and he went down on one knee. The man’s hand grabbed for one of the uprights of the handrail and caught it, on his back with half his body over the edge. Kicking against the air, he scrambled to regain the walkway. An absurd thought flashed into Vasin’s mind as he watched the man struggle. He had never seen anyone so absolutely alone, fighting to live, beyond help.

“I’m coming! Hold on!”

Reckless with adrenaline, Vasin stepped onto the steel walkway. Copying Sailor’s shuffle, he edged as fast as he could along the gantry, hugging the signal cowlings for support as he passed them. He could see Sailor’s hand sliding slowly down the handrail. The knuckles were white, and the outstretched arm was covered with the deep blue of prison tattoos. Hooking one elbow around the handrail, Vasin reached down and grabbed the man’s trouser leg. Sailor stopped struggling, gathering strength. On an unspoken signal, they both heaved. Vasin hauled the man’s knee onto the gantry. Sailor rolled onto his back, safe, his legs tangled with Vasin’s.

Neither man spoke. A flight of starlings crowded into the gray sky above Vasin’s head, swirling through each other like live smoke. He felt the thud of blood on his aching muscles, and the panting shudder of the man tumbled with him. He could smell the sour reek of Sailor’s clothes, a tang of engine oil and sweat. Theirs was almost like the intimacy of spent lovers.

With a supreme effort, Vasin pulled himself upright. Sailor did the same. Side by side, facing the snaking steel railway lines and with their legs dangling from the walkway, they sat, sucking down air. Vasin looked sideways at the man whose life he had saved. He took in the vicious face, swollen with drink and rough living and with a smoldering violence in the eyes, like a dog that would bite if it dared.

“Who are you?”

There was no accusation in Vasin’s question. He hadn’t been expecting an answer, and didn’t get one. Still he persisted.

“Who do you work for?”

“For the glory of the fucking Motherland. Same as you.”

Sailor’s voice was a smoker’s, like churning cement.

“What do you want?”

“How about you just fuck off out of town.”

“Who wants me to fuck off?”

Sailor looked Vasin up and down dismissively.

“Grown-ups, boy.”

Vasin tried to think of what to do next, but his head was filled with a singing vibration. The noise grew. It took Vasin a moment to realize that the noise was not in his mind but coming from below, a metallic hum rising from the rails. Ahead of them, a plume of white smoke rounded a corner followed by the black silhouette of a speeding train. It was approaching on the track directly under their feet.

“Are you hanging on tight, friend?”

Vasin’s mind scrambled to find the man’s meaning, even as he tightened his arm around the handrail post. The rumble of the approaching locomotive drowned out words. The red star on the front of the engine bore down on them, paralyzing in its power and speed.

“I said, hold on tight.” The man was shouting in his ear now. As he spoke the engine thundered beneath them and they were engulfed in a thick cloud of oily steam and coal smoke.

Vasin felt the man’s sudden movement a split second before the punch landed, square in his groin. A strong hand immediately went to his chest, steadying Vasin as he doubled forward in a wave of pain. He gasped a toxic mouthful of smoke as an agony such as he had never experienced washed through his body. The hand moved to Vasin’s arm, gripping it tightly as he reeled, holding him back from a fall. Then it was gone. When the steam thinned Vasin found himself alone in his throbbing world of pain.

“Ty che?” He heard a voice coming from the end of the gantry by the rail yard. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Vasin was too busy fighting back nausea to answer. He closed his eyes and felt the steps of the railway men ringing though the steel girders on which he sat. He allowed himself to be hauled to his feet and helped slowly back along the gantry, none of his muscles properly obeying him. A small audience had gathered at the base of the scaffolding, a gang of workingmen, a supervisor in clean overalls. Vasin saw frank incomprehension in their eyes, then looked down at himself. A sooty man in a good suit and mac, smeared in machine oil and grease, fooling about on a signal gantry. Brushing himself off once on firm ground, he nodded at them, summoning dignity.

“State Security.” Vasin’s voice had become unnaturally high. He fumbled for his red ID card and flipped it open.

The men’s eyes widened in appropriate awe. Vasin extended his hand to the man in the cleanest overalls, who was momentarily too stunned to take it. When he eventually did, the supervisor clasped Vasin’s hand in both of his, as though greeting Party nobility.

“Thanks, Comrade Foreman.”

Over the foreman’s shoulder Vasin caught sight of two portly men in suits lumbering across the yard, his kontora goons, finally catching up with him.

“My men. Too late, as usual.”

Obedient as an audience of schoolchildren, the railway men all looked round at the new visitors.

“Farewell, Comrades. Remain vigilant. Saboteurs are all around.”

Vasin picked his way unsteadily across the rails toward his approaching colleagues. At least the sons of bitches would be good for a lift home.

The two goons had offered no demur when Vasin followed them to their car and climbed painfully into the backseat. But they drove in the uncomfortable silence of men unused to breaking regulations. Vasin outranked both of them, of course. And he was that most exotic and possibly dangerous creature, an officer from Moscow, mysteriously free to gallivant about their secret city on a mission they would never dare to guess at. Nonetheless Vasin preferred to seed an explanation for his sudden chase rather than leave it to their own provincial imaginations.

“I saw a suspicious individual lingering by Dr. Axelrod’s apartment.” There was no point in trying to conceal whom he had met at lunchtime. “Looked like an undesirable social element to me. Thought I should follow him. Bastard got away. I’ll be putting it in my confidential report. And file a description with old man Zaitsev.”

The kontora men maintained their silence. Like all Vasin’s comrades at the KGB, they had good ears for the unspoken. Above your heads, Comrades. Ask no questions and you will get told no lies. Sailor’s words echoed in his head. “Grown-ups, boy.” He’d heard that patronizing, old prisoner’s tone somewhere before. Vasin settled back on the Volga’s worn upholstery and concentrated on a hot shower, a change of clothes, and fighting the waves of pain that rose from his balls.

IV

Two hours later, showered and dosed with all the aspirin he could find in Kuznetsov’s medicine cabinet, Vasin found the Arzamas-16 Univermag busy with late afternoon shoppers. Again, he was struck by the strange calm of the place. Unlike their Moscow counterparts, the customers strolled casually by well-lit and fully stocked storefronts, unimpressed by the bounty of the place. Vasin had always dreaded his occasional family visits to Children’s World, to GUM or TsUM, the multistory emporia of the capital, where his fellow Soviet citizens approached shopping as a kind of viciously competitive blood sport. The chief prize, in Vera’s view, was to obtain the very thing that everyone else wanted, even if they had entered the shop with no intention of buying Czech shoes, Cuban rum, Volga butter, or the new kind of Mikoyan sausages. The three of them would wander the wide corridors, desultorily browsing displays of fountain pens, withered apples, and galoshes until Vera, with a herd animal’s instinct, would catch the first tremors of mass movement. Bananas! Sneakers! Tracksuits! She would question the waddling housewives as they passed and receive vital intelligence, flung backward in haste. “They say they’re putting out sprats on the ground floor!”

Sometimes, the rumors were baseless, though the crowd stubbornly refused to believe the assistants’ denials. Vasin and Nikita had once spent two hours waiting in the women’s lingerie department, in a silent agony of mutual embarrassment, for a phantom shipment of brassieres, while Vera herself went in search of tins of orange juice. Nikita was to run and get her if the goods arrived while his father joined the queue. On another occasion they had been luckier. Vasin, mortified, had ridden the trolleybus home festooned in dozens of rolls of toilet paper, strung together in bandoliers with twine. It had been the envious looks of his fellow passengers that discomfited him, not the paper’s intimate purpose. But here, he found himself in a land of effortless plenty. It was as though socialism had finally arrived in a single secret city in the Middle Volga.

Today, though, Vasin ignored the artfully stacked tinned goods and scanned the place with a professional’s eye. A three-story maze, perfect for slipping away from watchers. Two public staircases and a service one. A customers’ lift and a goods lift. In the basement Vasin found a popular buffet crowded with customers. And around the corner, a door marked STAFF CANTEEN. He doubled back, watching for the slurred step, the eye that ducked his glance. None of his tails were visible. He paused.

To the kontora, this confidential communications system that Masha had proposed would look like clandestine and personal communications with a key witness. Vasin would think the same if he were in their shoes. If he contacted her secretly, he would be in her power. So — why do something so foolish? To get to the bottom of the Petrov murder by any means necessary. That was Vasin’s official explanation to himself. It was a self-delusion that he clung to all the more stubbornly because he knew that was exactly what it was. How could Masha really help him? She had no access to the laboratory records of Petrov’s thallium experiments, which Axelrod insisted had been faked. Zaitsev was sitting on those. Was he hoping for some dramatic confession from her? Would he ever learn what really happened at the fateful dinner with Petrov? Not a chance. She had pointed the finger squarely at Axelrod.

What did Vasin really want from her?

He felt the tang of the iodine that Masha had applied to his bruised forehead the night he found her on the roof of the Kino. God knew, he needed her healing touch now. He’d run out of leads. Axelrod had been squeezed as dry as Vasin dared. Korin hardly seemed in the mood to deliver another of his curt lectures. Adamov would only speak to him the following day, after the bomb was on its way north. Masha was the only part of the mystery he had left to explore. Vasin stooped to tie a shoelace and shuffled through the door to the staff canteen at a crouch.

Maria’s man Guri was the immediately recognizable king of the sandwich bar, lord of all the sausages. The man was big and swarthy, with waved dark hair parted like a razor slash. He was broad and thick-faced and violent, with pressed-together lips and a patriarch’s paunch. The Georgian wore a stained cook’s apron and barked orders to the waitresses as though to junior members of his extended family. He slipped the apron over his head, wiped his hands on it, and tossed it toward the cashier’s lap without looking where it landed. From a drawer he produced a sheaf of forms, bumped it shut with a swing of his haunch, and crossed the room to intercept Vasin.

“Greetings, Comrade. How is business at the Gorky Meat Processing Plant?” The Georgian had donned the fastidious grammar and ingratiating manners of a Soviet middle manager in the presence of a superior, though Vasin sensed that both were returnable without notice anytime Guri damn well felt like it. “Your meat products are the finest in the Soviet Union! Good to see you again.”

With exaggerated politeness, he gestured Vasin to an empty table. Guri spread the order forms before his guest as though he were dealing cards before sitting down himself and leaning forward confidentially.

“Masha’s friend?” he muttered.

Vasin nodded and repeated the lines as Masha instructed.

“I’m looking for Seraphim.”

“You found him. What can I do for you?”

“She mentioned you might offer a communications service.”

“Yes, esteemed Comrade,” Guri said, after a slightly eerie delay. “For friends.”

“And how may I become your friend?”

“All of Masha’s friends are friends of mine.”

“You make friends easily.”

A wide, gold-toothed smile spread across Guri’s face like an opening theater curtain. His conjurer’s hands spread wide, as though a white dove had just fluttered out of his order book.

“There are no strangers in this world, only friends you have not met yet. My mother taught me this, sir. We men of Gori are famous for our friendliness. We are always ready to help our fellow beings though this vale of tears, however we can. Even if it is only with the tiny trifles of life.”

Some people transmit, Vasin thought. They bring you their whole past as a natural gift, open their heart before you like a book. Some people are intimacy itself. Vasin had met plenty of the sons of bitches.

“Delighted to hear it, Comrade.”

“Will it just be communications services you are requiring today, sir? Nothing else?” Guri raised his brows suggestively.

“Communications.”

“In these disordered times, people have need of all sorts of things. Things only Guri can provide.”

“Disordered?”

“The whole town running because of that infernal machine the Golden Brains are building over there on Kurchatov Square. They say it will kill all the capitalists. It’s making everyone crazy. Actually ran out of condoms this week. Had to send a man to Moscow to fetch an emergency shipment. Don’t ask me why the sudden demand. When I have had a hard day’s work, my dear lady wife can be sure of an undisturbed night. But these brilliant young kids. So energetic! Spend all day screwing in their nuts and bolts, and then all night…”

Vasin tried to banish the image of Guri, the mountainous bedroom athlete, in bed with his wife from his mind.

“Nothing easier, Comrade. But might I trouble you to complete a few formalities? You understand, of course.”

This man should be an actor, thought Vasin. His face was a cinema-screen of false emotions.

Vasin followed Guri as he waddled across the cafeteria, through a kitchen foggy with cabbage-scented steam, and into a storeroom. In the corner was a flight of old stone steps, obviously part of an ancient building that had stood on the site before the Univermag was constructed.

“Here, please. A journey into history!”

The steps led down to a vaulted stone cellar. The walls had been plastered haphazardly, as if by drunks in a hurry. An office desk was crammed into one corner, and around the walls boxes of produce were stacked. A heavy wooden door, locked with three solid padlocks, was partially concealed by a tacked-up curtain. The place had the faint, rotten tang of a pond.

“How old is this place?”

“Who knows? You must ask someone with an education, like yourself, not poor Guri. As old as the monastery just across the river.”

Grinning, Guri hauled out a large, unlabeled bottle that could only have contained home brew. Another rummage produced a pair of cafeteria glasses.

“Chacha.” The grape schnapps of Georgia. “We drink to brotherhood of peoples!”

Vasin had known Georgians, usually shortly before putting them in jail. Resistance was useless.

“A drop.”

His host made a growling noise in the back of his throat that meant: Nonsense, man. He splashed the yellowish chacha into the two glasses. They both drank, Vasin wincing from the fire of the home brew. Then the companionable entwining of the eyes, the tiny nod that always follows a toast. A small ritual, shared.

“Now. Business.”

Guri settled himself onto a stool and nodded Vasin to do the same. He slipped out a large green ledger and, tongue stuck out in concentration, opened it at the last page.

“Your identification please, Comrade? A necessary formality.”

Vasin hesitated for a moment before producing his scarlet KGB ID card. He kept his eyes away from Guri’s. A gesture of tact, allowing the man time to find a suitable face. But when he looked back Guri was carefully copying the details, utterly unimpressed by the sword-and-shield emblem on the little scarlet folder. He returned the card to Vasin with both hands, as if to emphasize its preciousness.

“Get many of my colleagues coming to see you?”

“All my friends appreciate my discretion, friend. But Guri says, we all walk under the same sun. What matter the uniform we wear?”

The Georgian smiled broadly once more and closed the ledger. With the back of his hand he wiped his mouth each way as if he had a mustache, which he did not.

“Please forgive me, but payment here is required in advance. For friends of Masha, a small cash deposit is sufficient. At your discretion.”

Vasin rummaged in his wallet and produced a three-ruble note. The Georgian made no move to take it. Vasin replaced the bill and fished out a twenty-five in its place. As he took the banknote from his new client, Guri rubbed it, instinctively, between thumb and forefinger as though it was a piece of fine cloth. A familiar gesture, to Vasin, from his cop days. The unmistakably crisp smoothness of the government paper: No forger could ever quite match it.

“One final thing please. I think I do not need to explain, as you are obviously a man who knows the world.”

The Georgian lumbered to a corner and picked up a large cardboard box printed with garish Western lettering.

“What’s that?”

“Kotex, for ladies.” They both blushed. “From America. Arzamas is the land of plenty, but some things, only Guri can provide.”

He handed the box to Vasin.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Simply hold the goods please, Comrade.”

Guri took a leather-cased camera from a hook and popped open the cover. An expensive Zenit thirty-five-millimeter, Vasin noted, military-grade. Such a camera would cost him a month’s salary.

“With your permission?”

Vasin indeed understood without having to be told. These photos of customers clutching contraband were Guri’s insurance policy. He stood, trying to compose his face into a suitable mask of disapproval in case the photograph ever found its way into the hands of his colleagues at the kontora. Guri snapped off three frames in quick succession and closed up the camera.

“It is amazing how grateful ladies can be when made a present of such a product. I can sell you a box for…”

“I just want to send a message.”

“Of course. Please, write down where you can be reached. And take note of our line here in the kitchen. It is always staffed. Any special words you might like to use, understandable only to yourselves. Then we do the rest. Discretion is assured. Do you have a message you wish to send now?”

“Yes. For Maria Vladimirovna Adamova.”

Guri bowed to write on a scrap of paper, his pencil poised.

“I need to see her. Tell me what time and where.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

“Two rubles. Including delivery of reply, of course. I may deduct it from your deposit if that is sir’s wish?”

Vasin was growing weary of the man’s parodic obsequiousness. Guri was a parasite, a capitalist, a speculator. He hated the complicity that the Georgian impudently presumed had grown between them.

“Yes.”

“Very good. Expect a call from the children’s toys department. Or maybe electrical goods. We run a very well-stocked shop.”

As he mounted the steep stone stairs, Vasin felt Guri’s appraising eyes on his back.

V

The Univermag porters fidgeted impatiently by the entrance, waiting for the final lingering shoppers to leave. Vasin spotted his pair of watchers, exposed by the draining-out of the crowd. They did not bother to conceal their relief when he reappeared. One wore brown, the other tweed. The brown was a swarthy forty-year-old bantamweight with scars on his left cheek. The tweed was heavier, a slab-faced man with the complexion of an overboiled dumpling. Both glared openly at Vasin as he passed. His twenty-minute disappearance had been noticed. Worse, Vasin guessed that he had forced the men to overstay their shift. In the police, he had known men to break a suspect’s fingers in their impatience for a confession before dinnertime.

How long did he have before the kontora began to intensify its surveillance? He’d already outstayed Zaitsev’s deadline. Vasin was somewhat protected from the official KGB men by the dangerous mystique of Special Cases. Masha and Axelrod were cloud dwellers, ordinarily beyond the reach of the likes of Zaitsev. But who would protect them all from the irregulars, brutes like Sailor? He felt the realm of the possible tightening around him. The goons of the local kontora would not dare to stop him in his duties. But soon their oppressive presence would grow so confining that he would no longer be able to move, to work.

The test was in three days. If he hadn’t found out who killed Petrov by then, he probably never would — or rather, it would no longer matter. If RDS-220 was successful, Adamov, Axelrod, and Korin would all be heroes, whisked off to Moscow to be loaded with medals and then on to some luxurious Party sanatorium for a well-earned holiday. If not, they’d all end up in some extended kontora purgatory where Petrov would be the least of their problems. Or Arzamas and the rest of the USSR would be reduced to a prairie of radioactive dust. With a wince, Vasin quickened his step. But he could not outpace the familiar Volga that followed him down Engels Prospekt at a slow, menacing crawl.

He thought of another solitary supper at the station buffet, but felt too exhausted. As he mounted the stairs to the apartment, he prayed that Kuznetsov would not be at home. He opened the door softly, noticed his handler’s overcoat lying crumpled on the floor below the coat hook, and cursed silently. He crept down the corridor without switching on the light. But within a step of his bedroom door Kuznetsov tugged open his own, throwing his stocky shadow over Vasin like a net.

“Got you!”

Vasin turned wearily.

“Busy day, actually. Didn’t want to wake you.”

“It’s seven thirty. It’s the provinces, but even our bedtime is later than that. You need to get ready!”

Kuznetsov stood in service breeches and stockinged feet, his unruly hair plastered into place with oil.

“Earth calling Sputnik.” As if to demonstrate what he meant, Kuznetsov pulled his braces up over his shoulders with a snap of elastic.

“Ready for what?”

“Don’t you have Chekists’ Day in Moscow?”

Of course. The anniversary of the founding of the Soviet secret police. The red-letter day when every KGB man in the country got good and drunk. No wonder the goons at the Univermag had been impatient to get to the celebrations.

“Fuck.”

“I’m excited, too.” Kuznetsov struggled to button the top button of his collarless uniform undershirt. “My feelings, exactly. An evening in the refined company of our comrades and brothers-in-arms. Come on. We have twenty minutes to get to the Officers’ Club for the big banquet.”

Vasin sank back against his bedroom door and gently banged his head twice on the flimsy wood. Kuznetsov’s big laugh was more sympathetic than mocking.

“Before you ask, yes, you have to go. The brass want to keep you close. Especially with most of the kontora busy filling their bellies. What would Vasin get up to if we let him out from under our eye? they’re thinking. Nothing good. Just explaining, Comrade. Full dress uniform. Decorations, for those who have them. Two minutes and I’m out the door.”

The KGB Officers’ Club was a neoclassical barn, a Stalinist parody of a porticoed manor house. Kuznetsov parked his jeep diagonally across a curb and jumped out, gesturing at Vasin to follow. Every window was brightly lit, and the sound of a brass band spilled onto the street. The main reception room was a sea of dark uniform green, interspersed with the candy-colored evening dresses of the kontora wives.

Vasin and Kuznetsov paused at the door.

“Christ.”

“We don’t mention Him around here, friend.” Kuznetsov intercepted a white-jacketed waiter and grabbed two vodkas from a silver tray. They knocked the drinks back simultaneously and exchanged a grin of mutual sympathy. Vasin was glad of his companion’s humor. He exhaled loudly, like a swimmer about to take a plunge.

“Is there a Mrs. Zaitsev?”

“Oh, my word, yes. Just you wait.”

They both laughed indecorously loudly, drawing glances.

At that moment all conversation was interrupted by a majordomo flinging open the double doors to the ballroom, where a buffet would be waiting.

“Comrade Officers, dinner is served!”

It was not quite a stampede, but came close. Vasin was nearly knocked off his feet by a refrigerator-size woman who had actually hitched up her long skirts in the race for dinner. A colonel hurried in her wake, clutching their two glasses. The room emptied faster than if someone had shouted “Fire!” By the time Vasin and Kuznetsov succeeded in squeezing their way through to the devastated buffet, most of the platters of delicacies had been picked clean. Only a tangle of severed pink claws testified to vanished Volga river crabs. The black caviar sandwiches had gone, leaving only red. Pineapple heads lolled, bodyless.

“Khan Mamai and the Golden Horde have been through,” Kuznetsov laughed. Nonetheless they loaded their plates with mushroom pies, chicken vol au vents, salami sandwiches, and piles of pink sliced ham. The drinks they had downed as they waited for the scrum to thin had warmed Vasin and sharpened his appetite. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

“You don’t do too badly,” Vasin replied, smiling through a mouthful of pie. “For provincials.”

The band, reassembled in the corner of the ballroom, struck up a ragged fanfare. Quiet spread through the company. A group of loudly chatting subalterns, the last to notice that the official part of the evening was beginning, were shushed into silence. A line of waiters, each bearing a tray of shot glasses, filed into the room as neatly choreographed as a corps of ballet dancers. The bulky figure of General Zaitsev, drink in hand, lumbered into view on a podium at the end of the room.

“Comrades!” There was no microphone, but Zaitsev had the impressive parade-ground bellow of the Revolutionary generation, for whom such fripperies had been unnecessary to rouse the masses. “On this day of glorious memory, we gather to honor those who have preceded us.”

Vasin felt the familiar sensation of swooning backward into himself. A conditioned reflex of every Soviet citizen, to switch off one’s eyes and ears during moments of orchestrated boredom, to turn inward. A way to be alone, even in a crowd. The booze helped him think of nothing. He swam weightless in the swelling warmth of vodka and the rising and falling burble of Zaitsev’s words. Only a pause in the General’s monologue broke his reverie.

“But today is also a day to look forward. Those in this city who work in peace and security thanks to our efforts will soon demonstrate a device that will once and for all establish our superiority over the Imperialist enemies beyond our borders. That battle will be over. But on that day another battle will begin. A battle with the enemies within our nation.”

A tremor ran though the audience. Glances were exchanged, nodding listeners nudged into attention.

“Yes, Comrades. There are some in this nation who say that there are no more enemies. There are those who hold our work in the Committee for State Security in contempt. Say that we are butchers. Mock us not just in their kitchens, but even in the highest councils of the land. To those saboteurs, to those traitors, I say: The time will come when we, the guardians of State Security, will turn to restoring ideological discipline in our own nation. And it will come soon.”

The silence was electric. Vasin struggled to believe what he had just heard. Had Zaitsev just publicly called the leaders of the nation traitors?

“To our heroic Soviet Motherland!”

Everyone drank a sip, by a tradition known to every man and woman in the room, ready for the customary second toast.

“And to our Service, ever vigilant in the defense of her borders and in the hunt for her enemies!”

This time the glasses were tipped all the way. Vasin felt his toes curling up inside his boots as he rocked backward, on the verge of losing balance. Steady, man.

An excited buzz of conversation broke out as Zaitsev stepped down from the podium. The band struck up an incongruously frivolous up-tempo polka, shattering the tension, and his fellow Chekists began to steer their wives onto the dance floor. With Zaitsev making his backslapping progress across the room in his direction, Vasin turned to find Kuznetsov gone. He’d missed the speech.

He found his handler near the bar huddled at a table with three fellow officers, cognac and vodka bottles arrayed in front of them.

“Ah! Our Government inspector. Vasin, come join us. Our colleagues have been dying to meet you.”

Kuznetsov clapped a strong arm around Vasin’s shoulders, as though his quarry might make a break to escape, while another man whipped a chair away from a neighboring table.

“Vasin, meet Kesoyan. Oskolkov. Shubin.”

To Vasin’s embarrassment, Kuznetsov’s companions stood for the introductions.

“Kesoyan.”

The slight Armenian major with a fastidiously trimmed mustache gave him a comradely handshake of quite vicious respectability.

“And I’m Oskolkov, sir,” a young lieutenant privately explained, just as respectfully, peering over Kesoyan’s shoulder. But Oskolkov was evidently not in the handshaking class: Kesoyan had done it for both of them.

“Shubin!”

A ruddy farmboy’s face incongruous over his major’s bars. Shubin shook his welcome across the table and grinned with drunken bonhomie. Amid a hospitable reshuffling of chairs, a round of drinks was poured and knocked back.

“We’ve been discussing the news,” said Shubin.

“Front page of the Red Star,” chipped in Kesoyan.

Vasin spread his hands.

“Oh, you know what Moscow is like. We’re the last to hear everything. I come here to get up to speed.”

His feeble joke earned him a round of smiles.

“We launched a nuclear-armed ballistic missile from a submarine,” Shubin said proudly. “It was fired from a Project 629 boat from underwater. Detonated perfectly over Novaya Zemlya. Imagine, launching a missile from underwater!”

Vasin’s blank response prompted Shubin to lean forward to explain further.

“It’s a new era, Major. Sea-launched ballistic missiles mean we can attack the enemy from beneath any ocean. Completely undetectable. The Yankees have never managed it. This will have them shitting in their cowboy hats.”

“That’ll teach Kennedy to meddle in Berlin,” Kesoyan chipped in. “Or Cuba. Confusion to the capitalists!”

They drank once more.

“Comrade Shubin is a great seaman,” added Kuznetsov. “Takes great pride in the achievements of our glorious Soviet Navy.”

“Major Kuznetsov is teasing me, Vasin. Next thing he’s going to say is that I was assigned to submarines because of seasickness. Not true. Like most things Kuznetsov says.”

“Nonsense. I have the greatest admiration for your nerves, Shubin. Couldn’t do it myself. Cooped up in a steel tube with a hundred men, deep under the ocean. And a nuclear reactor just a couple of bulkheads away. And nuclear warheads too. Like being locked in a bunker, but with the radiation on the inside instead of out. You heard about that accident on that sub, K-19, where the reactor sprang a leak? The sailors nicknamed the boat Hiroshima.”

Kuznetsov, carried away with his own speech, failed to notice his companions straightening their backs at the arrival of an outsider.

“Me, I’d be out of the first hatch, take my chance swimming with the sharks.”

Behind Kuznetsov’s chair, Major Efremov gently cleared his throat.

“May I join you, Comrades?”

Oskolkov was the first to jump to his feet.

“Sit, please.” Efremov placed his hands on both of Kuznetsov’s shoulders, as if to hold him down, though he had shown no sign of stirring. “Glad to see you have been making our esteemed colleague from Moscow welcome.”

Vasin looked up at Efremov’s narrow inquisitor’s face. He was sober; conspicuously so. Somewhere on his prudent little journey to power, Efremov had taught himself to smile. It was an underhand weapon to use on people, rather like silence on the telephone, but effective. Efremov smiled now, a thin smirk. Though he outranked nobody still seated at the table, his presence caused every man to stiffen and compose his face. Theirs was the quiet not of insolence, but of fear.

Efremov sat in the lieutenant’s vacated chair, and with a sideways glance indicated that Oskolkov could get lost. The adjutant’s yellowed gaze settled on Vasin with an air of informed suspicion. Vasin could still see the smirk he wore as he’d emerged from Petrov’s radioactive apartment.

“Damn glad you joined us, Efremov. Drink?” Kuznetsov picked out a half-full cognac bottle from the collection that had gathered on the table.

“You know that I do not, Major. But don’t let me stop you. We all know how much you enjoy your drink.”

With a sigh, Kuznetsov looked upward, as though seeking divine help to control his irritation. Evidently he didn’t find it.

“We were just talking about Comrade Khrushchev’s speech last week,” interrupted Vasin. He felt all eyes upon him. His desire to bait Efremov was uncontrollable. It was as if they had recognized each other as heirs to some ancient feud. Flushed with drink, Vasin plunged on.

“His address to the Twenty-Second Party Congress was brilliant. Don’t know about you, Efremov, but I was inspired.”

“All the General Secretary’s speeches are inspiring. Naturally.”

Vasin shifted on his plush chair, positioning himself for a better thrust. There was no mistaking the menace in Efremov’s tone.

“You read the speech in full in Pravda, of course. I’m sure you have been following the reports on the Congress every day as closely as I have, Comrade Major. The Comrade General Secretary’s attack on the Cult of Personality. We know he has confided such thoughts to the Party before, privately. But now he says it in public. Brilliant. In a word.”

Efremov did not reply. His stillness had become chilling.

“Cult of Personality” was Khrushchev’s code for Stalinism. I am a fool, Vasin thought fleetingly, to make this fight public. But Zaitsev’s words about traitors at the top of the Party had stung him. And the sight of Efremov’s smug face made him reckless. He craved the bright colors that came with passion, the glorious release of it. And he wanted to humiliate the man, rub his nose in the fact that he and his thuggish boss were on the wrong side of history.

“The Comrade General Secretary personally condemned all the facilitators of the excesses of those days. He named them all: Voroshilov. Molotov. Malenkov. Bulganin. Kaganovich. All those who allowed the senseless slaughter of so many innocent comrades during the years of repression. Of course he did not need to mention our own Yezhov. Yagoda. Beria. They have already been justly executed for their crimes. The honor of the Party could not be clean, he said, without admitting the mistakes of the past. You surely agree with Comrade Khrushchev, Major?”

Vasin had named the closest allies of Stalin, and three heads of the kontora who had masterminded the worst of the Purges, and themselves been consumed by them. Men who had once been Zaitsev’s chiefs.

Efremov took a long moment before replying.

“It seems, Comrade Vasin, that you are a man with progressive views on these matters,” he said. “I find myself wondering if you truly belong in our service. Some among us have come to believe that maybe you aren’t really one of us at all.”

Vasin looked around the table for support, or at least understanding. Kuznetsov’s face was flushed, his mouth pursed as though he were about to explode. His wide eyes were silently begging Vasin to shut up. Shubin stared in simple fascination, as though Vasin had produced a frog from his mouth. Kesoyan’s smile had become tight as a dog’s bottom.

“My views are as progressive as the Party’s. And the kontora’s, therefore. Naturally.”

Efremov abruptly stood. For an irrational second Vasin thought the man might be about to come round the table and strike him, but then he saw Zaitsev plowing through the crowd toward them with the unstoppable purpose of a tractor. Beside him was a figure swathed in violent pink chiffon. A woman, as squat and square-faced as the General himself, with her hair piled into the shape of a motorcycle helmet.

They all stood to attention. A memory of the lined face of the old mess sergeant who had shown him the ropes before his first drinks party at the KGB Officers’ Club in Moscow flashed into Vasin’s mind. “Brother officers don’t salute each other in the mess, sir. You’re fucking brothers.” Vasin kept his hands by his sides.

Zaitsev’s fleshy mouth worked as though he were chewing on something unpleasant as his disapproving eye flicked from one man to another before settling back on Vasin. Mrs. Zaitsev’s face mirrored her husband’s sour disappointment with humanity in general, and these specimens in particular. Her lip curled as she took in Vasin’s bruised eye, his crumpled uniform and grubby collar, eyeing him like a delinquent son dragged home from the drunk tank.

“S prazdnikom,” the General grunted. “Congratulations on the holiday.”

They returned the greeting in absurd unison.

Zaitsev swayed a little as he stood squarely before them, his powerful arms loose by his sides like a boxer’s. Belatedly, Vasin realized that the man was drunk. As some men may be seen to be in love, so Zaitsev seemed to be possessed by a deep and awesome hatred. For him.

“Vasin.”

He spat the word to rhyme with “fuck you.”

“Sir?”

“Find somewhere else to chase around rail yards and jump on signal gantries,” Zaitsev growled. Rudely, he had used the familiar form of address. “What the devil were you doing?”

“Following my Socialist duty, sir. At speed.”

Zaitsev was an enemy to jokes, feeling an energy in them beyond his control. Fury rose on his mottled cheeks like spreading ink. Vasin hastily continued.

“I was pursuing a suspicious character who threatened one of your witnesses, sir.”

Drink had rolled Zaitsev’s syntax back into the South Russian farmyards of his youth.

“My office has complied with all your idiot demands. Stop wasting our time.”

Vasin made his drink-addled brain focus. Perhaps Zaitsev wanted him gone so desperately that he would give up some evidence. The kontora’s painstaking digest of Petrov’s laboratory reports — the ones Axelrod insisted had been doctored.

“As soon as I have all I require, General. The laboratory report, specifically. From our deceased comrade’s workstation. That is the evidence I am missing.”

Zaitsev’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“Report to my office. Tomorrow.”

The General turned unsteadily, and his wife shot a parting glance of outrage, as though Vasin had somehow insulted them.

Kuznetsov was furiously silent as they wove unsteadily across the empty city. He sat hunched forward over the wheel, wrestling it like an enemy. His face lit and went out again under the sodium street lamps.

“Don’t be angry with me, friend.”

Kuznetsov sighed demonstratively. The elation of the drink and the unaccustomed liberation that Vasin had felt while provoking Efremov remained like a glow inside him.

“So why are you snorting like a bull? Did I say the wrong thing?”

“Where do I start?”

“That’s a start. Human words, better than farmyard noises.”

Kuznetsov turned the wheel violently, throwing Vasin against the door. He accelerated to dangerous speed down the final stretch of boulevard to his apartment and braked wildly to a halt, almost demolishing an innocent apple tree. Vasin wished someone had thought of installing some kind of restraining belts in cars, like on airplanes.

“Do you think nobody else has a mind of their own except for you? You come in here, jerk the kontora around, pull Efremov’s tail, mock every damn thing you like. Telling him about Yezhov and Beria? That’s the new Party line, so I say what I like to whomever I like?”

Kuznetsov’s face was livid in the lights of the dashboard.

Vasin, to his shock, saw a tear spill down his handler’s face. He was no longer angry, but distraught.

“Old man, I’m so sorry if I…”

“You realize that your freedom comes at a price? Every word you say means a word someone else cannot say. For you, it’s just some kind of fucking game. You screw with Zaitsev, with Efremov, he’s going to screw with someone, anyone but you. It’s time for you to go home, Vasin. You don’t fucking live here.”

Kuznetsov flung open the door, then slammed it behind him so hard that it sprang back from its latch.

Vasin followed him inside in shamed silence. He caught up with his roommate as he struggled with the door lock. Inside the apartment, the phone was ringing. Kuznetsov dived inside and snatched up the receiver at the seventh ring.

He turned to Vasin accusingly.

“It’s for you.”

Vasin took the telephone and turned his back on Kuznetsov. Who knew his number here?

“Hello?”

A chirpy female voice with a strong Central Asian accent announced that the comrade’s order of an electric train set had arrived and could be picked up at the toy counter of the Univermag at ten tomorrow morning.

I

Over breakfast Kuznetsov was torpid and hungover, his usual bonhomie strained. He gestured wordlessly to a pot of oats he was stirring on the stove when Vasin staggered into view in the kitchen door, spooned the porridge into two bowls on his guest’s nod, then busied himself with making tea.

“I’ll take the tram to the kontora if you’ve got somewhere to be.”

Kuzentsov stood, straightening with difficulty as though he bore the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“No, Comrade. You’re no trouble at all.”

After a courteous pantomime in front of the shower, Kuznetsov finally agreed to go in first. As he listened to the water gushing, Vasin realized how badly he needed a friend, even if no friend in this strange place could ever be a confidant.

Tugging their crumpled and cigarette-scented uniforms into place, side by side in front of the hall mirror, Vasin and Kuznetsov exchanged an involuntary frown that restored some of the previous evening’s complicity. They both looked like they had been dragged through a hedge.

“To the dragon’s den, Comrade?”

“If I must.”

“Oh ho-ho. You fucking must.”

As Vasin made his way upward through the levels of the kontora’s headquarters, he sensed heads turning in his wake. His notoriety in this little world was spreading. So that’s the guy from Moscow. Vasin walked as tall as the lingering pain in his groin allowed and presented himself to Zaitsev’s bleary-eyed secretary. He had a vague memory of the woman whirling in a drunken dance in the arms of some broad-shouldered ape the night before. All the resentment the woman felt for the rigors of the coming workday was distilled in her voice.

“Yes?”

“General Zaitsev asked for me.”

The secretary nodded him into a chair and frowned, evidently considering whether this disheveled man was of a rank to be offered tea. She probably needed one herself, so didn’t bother asking. Returning from the kitchen with two cups, she put one in front of Vasin and sipped her own noisily. Around them, the headquarters ground into reluctant life. Trolleys of documents rumbled past the door. Gossiping voices reached them from the smoking area of the stairwell. In an unbidden impulse of solidarity, the secretary slid open a desk drawer, fished out a plastic bag of sugared orange slices, and held it out to Vasin, drawing his attention with a brief shake. They sat on, wrapped in their separate silences.

Zaitsev’s arrival was heralded by a heavy stamping and puffing, like the appearance of a troll in a kindergarten play. But when the General strode in, Vasin saw that his usually ruddy face was grayish, creased with worry lines and the assorted tooth marks of age and booze. A monstrous hangover had not mellowed his habitual fury with the world. Efremov followed, irritatingly crisp and energetic. The secretary, casting a pitying glance at Vasin, scooped up the day’s files and followed her boss into his office.

The electric clock on the wall ticked past 0900. Masha would be waiting for him at the Univermag in an hour. When he thought of Masha, Vasin recognized the same vertiginous feeling he had once had with Katya Orlova, a sense of inexorability, of being drawn into something disastrous by a force stronger than his reason. Except that with Katya the force had been black and nihilistic. With Masha, Vasin felt a deep and genuine impulse of protection. She needed someone to save her — or so she had said. But save her from what? Her lover, Petrov? He was dead. From her trapped life of privilege? From Adamov, the loveless old man to whom she was bound in ways he struggled to understand? Just what he could do to save her, Vasin could not say. But he also knew that he needed her. Masha was hiding something crucial from him. Vasin felt it. She knows something. She fucking knows.

“Comrade Major?” The secretary replaced the handset on her desk. “The General will see you now.”

Zaitsev’s office was bigger than Vasin remembered it, large enough for a regimental dance. The General himself hunched at one end of the long conference table like a plump rat on a raft, watching his visitor cross the acre of parquet with bloodshot eyes. Gesturing Vasin to sit, Zaitsev crammed back the sleeve of his tunic and twisted his wrist around as if it were someone else’s. The dial of an old steel watch returned his stare.

“We have reached an end to your antics, Major Vasin. Efremov?”

The adjutant, with the mocking formality of a waiter, handed Vasin a fat gray file.

“The summary of the laboratory records,” said Efremov flatly. He paused to amplify his disapproval of the hours wasted at the visitor’s caprice. “Now you have everything.”

Vasin eyed his two colleagues warily, unwilling to believe that they had decided to grant his request. Though of course they had not spoken to Axelrod. The kontora men had no idea that the thallium Petrov had supposedly signed out and used to kill himself would have disappeared of its own accord through the black magic of radioactive decay.

Vasin struggled to keep the triumph out of his face.

He began leafing through the thick stack of papers he had glimpsed on the first day. Each contained a long list of dates, names, chemicals, and quantities. The cover noted that this was the fourth copy of four.

“You will note that all the reagents Comrade Petrov signed for are underlined in lead pencil,” continued Efremov. “The thallium is in red. Each notation is cross-referenced with the experiments undertaken, including how much thallium was actually used. Over three weeks, the Comrade Doctor signed for some two thousand milligrams more than appear to have been used in the tests undertaken by his laboratory. The evidence is clear, Comrade Major. Petrov signed for and stole a classified element, and poisoned himself.”

Vasin’s mind raced.

“Thanks. But why…”

“Why have we decided to give you the file?” Efremov exchanged a private glance with his boss before continuing. “Because of your unique talent for disruption. Your breathtaking insubordination. You are a loose cannon, Vasin, and your activities will no longer be tolerated. Therefore — you win. You have everything. And now, you must go.”

A rumble escaped from Zaitsev, like a rockfall inside his capacious chest.

“Before we waste any more time on you, these findings clearly confirm that Petrov’s death was suicide. Very clearly. My final report will be ready this afternoon. I expect you to endorse it. There’s a train to Gorky leaving at 1800. And you will be on it.”

Vasin leafed on to the end of the kontora’s summary of the laboratory data, considering his next move.

“I can sign your report right now, General.”

“Good.”

Zaitsev pushed back his chair and stood. A thought crossed his mind.

“And what of your report, Major Vasin?”

“I am afraid that my investigation still has some unanswered questions. Suicide comes in many forms, General. But you have my word. I will file my final report via the proper channels—”

“Fuck your mother in her channels, Vasin.” Zaitsev’s fist thudded on the table. Not for the first time, Vasin was grateful that he was not facing this man in a soundproof interrogation cell.

Vasin got to his feet and stood to attention.

“Do I have permission to leave, Comrade General?”

Efremov smoothly approached Vasin and stood uncomfortably close, his lanky height towering over him.

“You haven’t understood, Comrade. If you agree to leave tonight, we give you the report at the station. The moment your boots are off the platform, I’ll hand it to you. You have our word.”

Vasin looked from Efremov to the General and back again. Both had smirks smeared across their faces.

“Understood.”

“Good.” Zaitsev’s mouth was curled in a wet smile of satisfaction at having outplayed his adversary.

“But I cannot be on tonight’s train.”

“Why the fuck not?” The General’s smile had abruptly withered into a flabby scowl.

“Because Professor Adamov himself has requested an interview with me at ten this evening, after the device has been readied for transportation. But I need the report now.”

Vasin knew that without the kontora’s painstaking cross-referencing he would have no chance of checking it against the Institute’s original records. He prayed that Axelrod was right. If the records had been doctored, Vasin would have the proof he needed that Petrov was indeed murdered. And that could buy him some more time to find out who really had done it. If Axelrod was wrong, he would be out of time, and out of town.

“Categorically denied.”

“General Zaitsev, I plan to show Professor Adamov your findings this evening so that he can confirm your assessment. And then the case will be closed.”

“Efremov can bring it to your rendezvous with the Professor.”

“No. We will meet alone. The Professor insists. I will take the file with me now.”

Zaitsev opened and closed his giant, pistol-burned fists as though warming up for a fight. His pinkish eyes became a little redder and more fixed, those of a man sighting a natural enemy. Vasin met his gaze. I know you too.

“You’re weak and subversive, Vasin,” snapped Zaitsev. “Hid from the war. Got yourself a fancy education in Moscow. Had privileges. You may impress Adamov. You may even impress your man Orlov. I see you for what you are. You’re anti-Soviet. I can smell it on you.”

Vasin stiffened at the mention of Orlov’s name, but swallowed the insult. Did Zaitsev know about Katya? Vasin guessed not. The General would have blurted it out long before if he’d known. No, Zaitsev wasn’t a man to play a long game. He would grab every weapon available and swing them wildly. But right now he was standing his ground, immovable as a bull. Perhaps the stubborn old bruiser could be coaxed. With a supreme effort, Vasin willed down his anger and desperation and answered calmly.

“You have accorded me much courtesy here in Arzamas, General.” Vasin kept his eyes firmly on Zaitsev; he knew that if he looked at Efremov his voice would crack. “I will report truthfully that your investigation has been admirable and thorough and that you have cooperated fully. This will be recognized in Moscow at the highest levels. Why spoil all of this now, at the eleventh hour? You have agreed to give me the report. So do it, now. That is my final request. You have my word that I will leave for Moscow in the morning, and you will have the gratitude of all those who sent me.”

The General looked at Vasin more narrowly, as though weighing up his recognition in Moscow, his promotion, his decorations. Efremov cleared his throat, about to object, but his boss spoke over him.

“If you’re lying to me, Vasin, God help you.”

Vasin saluted smartly. As he turned to leave, he cradled the papers to his chest. And once he reached the corridor Vasin broke into a run.

II

The smooth soles of his little-worn uniform boots slipped on the slushy sidewalk as he hurried along Peace Prospekt. A board in the Univermag’s lobby announced that the toy department was on the fourth floor. He stopped a closing lift door with his boot and pushed his way into the crowded car, catching sight of his kontora tails panting in his wake. Good. Children’s toys would be the last department they would think to check.

Masha had ditched her electric blue mackintosh. He saw her dressed in a dark head scarf, crouching above a baby carriage and cooing over an infant. Vasin joined a scattering of men in the crowd of browsing young women and placed himself in Masha’s line of vision, pretending to admire some tin soldiers. She waved to the baby and walked briskly in the direction of the lifts. He followed. Vasin passed Masha in the lift vestibule, grabbed her arm, and swung her through the double doors that led to the stairwell.

“Through here. My fat boys won’t be taking the stairs.” He retreated to the top of the staircase, where he could observe the lift lobby through glass panels in the doors. He placed Masha in front of him as a barrier. “Stand there. I’m keeping watch over your shoulder. Tell me where we’re going.”

If Masha was alarmed by his evasion tactics, she made no sign.

“The basement.”

Vasin made a quick calculation. A uniformed man and a pretty girl would turn too many heads on the stairs. They’d take the elevator.

“Wait until one of them comes out.”

On cue, the lift doors opened and a heavyset man elbowed his way ahead of a gaggle of Arzamas matrons and headed toward the men’s clothes department. What was it about some kontora goons that made them as conspicuous as clowns in makeup? Pulling Masha behind him, Vasin darted into the downward-bound elevator car. They stood in opposite corners, avoiding each other’s eyes like cats, as the shoppers filed in and out on each floor.

In the basement corridor Masha took charge. Instead of turning toward the cafeteria, she banged through a pair of service doors marked NO ENTRY. She led him past a bank of industrial freezers and through a storeroom. No store clerks were in evidence. Presumably Guri’s doing.

Producing a key, Masha opened a steel door in the far corner and flicked a light switch. An iron staircase led down into another catacomb. There was a reek of damp, and of coal. Vasin closed and bolted the door before following her disappearing back down the steps. They reached an old stone vault, similar to Guri’s subterranean private office, and also stacked to the ceiling with more boxes of contraband. In one corner was an electric heater and a cot made up neatly, Army style.

Without speaking, Masha folded Vasin in a tight embrace. Vasin allowed himself to enjoy the feel of her in his arms before breaking off.

“Wait. I need to talk to you.”

Masha stepped away from him. Her eyes were green-gray and lucid and seemed, to him, dangerously innocent. A militant simplicity gazed out from them upon a complicated world. What it is to be untamed, he thought. She feels, therefore she is.

“More secrets, Sasha?”

“No. No more secrets.”

“Quite sure?”

Vasin hesitated. The lab report was stuffed conspicuously into his mackintosh pocket. Masha followed his involuntary downward glance, then met his eyes again. She smiled tightly, a twist in the center of her face.

“Fine. You have no more secrets. Thank God.”

“Masha, I…”

“Please, keep them to yourself. So you wanted to see me about electric train sets, apparently.”

They both smiled at the same time, in the same way.

“I like the casual look.” Her voice was teasing. “You took time out of your busy day to meet. You’ve been missing me.”

Vasin looked down at his unpolished leather pistol holder, creased tunic, mud-splashed boots.

Masha turned and bounced a couple of times on the bed, testing the springs.

“You said you trusted Guri. How do you know he doesn’t have this place bugged?”

“No wires.”

She nodded toward the iron staircase and the bare vault. A single, antique electrical cord snaked down the unplastered stone wall to a metal lamp. Masha was right — not a modern, plastic wire in sight, and nowhere to hide one.

“Smart girl.”

“Heard it said.”

“About your last dinner with Petrov. I want to know what his mood was. Tell me what happened.”

The teasing tone of Masha’s voice had become strained.

“Korin arrived first, grim, as ever. Then Adamov and Fyodor came together. They were exhausted too. Everyone’s always exhausted around here. We had made potato soup, and the men talked bombs. Like always.”

“Do you remember if they mentioned the design of the tamper?”

Something behind Masha’s face closed like a trap, but she kept her voice deliberately light.

“They talk of nothing else but uranium and tampers and deuterium and lithium-hexa-something. If I understood what they were talking about, I would make the best spy in the world.”

“So they didn’t talk about a uranium tamper?”

“You’re starting to be insufferable. They talked about what they always talk about, including tampers.”

“They didn’t argue?”

“They always argued.”

“Angrily?”

“Korin’s always angry about something. Adamov never is. Nor was Petrov. Too cool to lose his temper about anything, him.”

“Did you speak to Petrov, privately? About Axelrod, the photos you showed me?”

Finally Masha’s composure broke.

“What would I have said to him? ‘You’re a foul pervert who has no right to breathe God’s good air’?”

Masha’s sudden anger stopped Vasin’s questions. Masha, too, seemed discomfited by her own loss of control. She stood and began to examine the boxes on the shelves with apparent fascination.

“Oooh look. This is good. I’ve just run out. Guri’s got a new shipment of Kot—”

“I know that type. Your Guri. Wouldn’t trust him.”

“Know the type, do you?” An edge of mockery had crept into her voice.

“Put plenty of them behind bars. Jolly Georgians. Be careful.”

“You live with wolves, you learn to howl like a wolf.”

“You lived with wolves?”

“Sure. Maybe I’ll tell you about it one day. And I know how to deal with men like Guri. He’s a kitten, not a wolf.”

“Until he needs to save his own skin. Then you see the fangs.”

“You talk to me like I’m a kid.”

“Listen, Masha, when you’ve seen what I’ve seen…”

Masha silenced him with a hard little fist that smacked into his arm with surprising force.

“Don’t know me very well, do you, buster? I’ve seen some things too, Vasin.”

She was standing very close. He took hold of her upper arms. Through the thick material of her winter coat Vasin could feel how skinny she was, her limbs fragile as a sparrow’s.

“Sorry. I know you have.”

Masha twisted away from his grip. Her eyes lit with a spark of defiance that he had seen before.

“You keep asking me about that damn dinner, but you want to know a real secret? My secret? I killed a man once. Yes. I fucking did. It was in Leningrad. During the siege. We lived by wolves’ laws. Hunting for food wherever we could find it. Running with a gang. Orphans like me ran in packs. I was a kid, fourteen, and I got caught by an air-raid warning in alien territory while scavenging. Early morning. I’d scrambled into a shelter in a cellar on Pushkin Street. People would take everything with them during the air raids, and some of them croaked down there. They were good places to look for grub. Then, just my luck, it was an actual air raid. There was nobody left fit in the city to crank a hand siren by that time. But some Kommandatura had an electric one, and it started singing out like a bitch.”

Masha’s tone and vocabulary had unconsciously slipped into the rhythms of the Leningrad streets. She sat back down on the bed to continue the story.

“The shelter starts filling up. People stagger in, looking like corpses. Unlucky for me. I would have preferred to find real corpses with ration books in their fucking pockets. We sit there in the piss-stinking dark, listening to some poor idiots catching some heavy shit over my way, toward Moscow Station. I start to think of my crew, our food stash. Then a man comes down into the shelter, fast. The ring of good boots on the steps. Ogo, I think. Someone’s doing well for themselves. He lights a candle stub, sniffs, looks around. A well-fed mug, padded cotton coat. Not an officer, then. A criminal. Looked around like he was some kind of underworld king. Maybe he was, but I never saw one without a pack of mongrels looking out for his back. He was alone. He takes one look at me and steps right over. Puts the candle down on the floor. Kicks my feet out from under me and lays me down. Starts rifling my clothes for food, I think at first. No one in the shelter says anything. They are in this shitty place, but their minds are elsewhere. He straddles me and starts yanking off my boots. Son of a bitch wants my boots, I think. Then his hands are pulling down my trousers. He gets one leg of my britches off. Now I know what he wants. The knife I carry in my boot clatters on the floor. While he’s busy getting his dick out, I find the steel in the shadows. I wait for him to slump down on top of me, then slip it under his ribs. Before he manages to slip anything into me, in case you’re wondering. Blade goes in beautiful smooth. I hold it fast while he thrashes about. His hot blood spills onto my bare belly. Man, that guy could swear…When I finally get out from under him, I find three watches and half a kilo of sugar in his pockets. A good bayonet. A handful of manual workers’ ration books, with ID cards. They were worth two hundred and fifty grams of bread a day, each. The man was a treasure trove. Course, the other vultures in the cellar choose that moment to pay attention, start closing in. I had to threaten to cut them to keep ’em away and got the hell out of there. We lived on that haul pretty much to the end of the siege. Maybe I should be grateful to that rapist piece of shit.”

Masha had become a person Vasin did not recognize. Her voice was shrill and flinty, her face hard. When she looked up at him he saw steel in her, an open ferocity.

“Don’t you dare tell me I can’t look after myself.”

“I saw that on the roof of the Kino.”

Masha flushed with anger. Vasin backtracked.

“I mean — of course you can look after yourself. But I wanted to say that I’ve seen…madness. My sister, like I told you. It’s more powerful than any person’s will. You mustn’t be ashamed. You have it in you. And you know it. God knows, it’s understandable after what you’ve—”

“I’m not crazy.”

“If you say so.”

A tense, silent space opened between them. Masha stood, shaking her whole body like a wet dog and reassembling her image as a Party housewife. The coiffed hair, the nicely pronounced vowels. But Vasin could not shake the image of the young Masha, a wet rat in a cellar, sliding her knife into a man’s chest. The blade going in “beautiful smooth.”

Masha put her arms around him. One hand closed over the report in his pocket.

“Time to trade,” she whispered in his ear. “I told you my secret. Ready to tell me yours?”

Vasin’s hand clasped over hers, preventing Masha from pulling out the roll of paper. Her smile spread unnaturally wide as she refused to relinquish her hold on the document.

“Fair’s fair. You can tell me. You can.”

She had begun the sentence in a tone of girlish cajoling — but by the time she reached the last syllable her voice had become hard.

“No.”

Vasin untangled her arms from around him.

“I have to go. My entourage will be looking for me.”

He turned toward the staircase.

“Vasin. Sasha. Wait.”

He found himself incapable of resisting the pleading in her voice. The vicious, foulmouthed version of Masha had disappeared, leaving a vulnerable young woman.

“Sasha. Tell me. Am I really crazy?”

“We’ll talk it over later.”

Vasin tried to make his voice consoling. But he was thinking of the earlier flash of fire in Masha’s eyes, the hard grip of her hand on the document.

She stepped forward to embrace him once more, but he was already moving toward the stairs and out of the door. He closed it behind him without looking back. He took the stairs two at a time and strode out onto the street without bothering to check if his tails were behind him.

Vasin had learned to be wary of opponents of good instinct. Now he found himself wary of Masha.

Even outside in the chilly air, he could feel the warmth of her body under his coat.

III

Vasin was a plague carrier. The realization came as he walked down the gray, chilly boulevard. His presence contaminated everyone around him. Everything he had ever touched, everything that he had ever tried to do, turned to shit. Right now he needed someone to tell him just that. He needed to speak to Vera.

The Arzamas Central Post Office, deserted at night, was by day a teeming circus of human life. Harassed housewives cradled bundles of parcels. Elderly men, their jackets sagging with medals, took their time explaining themselves to the desk clerks. Pretty young secretaries, pleased to be released from their offices on an errand for the boss, gossiped with their girlfriends. Above all, the place was a showcase of queues. The various windows answered various needs: parcel dispatch, regular post, telegrams, general delivery, bills and collections. The line for long-distance phone calls had the most restless and unsettled look. Vasin joined it behind a woman who clutched her address book open at the page where her number was written, ready for the moment twenty minutes hence when the clerk would ask for it. When the line moved, she sighed and wearily shuffled forward a single step.

The wait would be worth it, Vasin told himself. He needed to speak to Vera when she was sober. Maybe he could even head off her vengeance. Nonetheless he found his index finger jiggling involuntarily, as through practicing to cut off the call as soon as talk turned to Katya Orlova.

His forms duly submitted, corrected, and submitted again, Vasin settled down to wait for his call to be put through on a bench beside a pair of sleeping twin schoolgirls. In front of him stood the row of handsomely polished oak phone booths, ominous as a line of dentist’s chairs. In one of them, soon, some small but agonizing part of his self-esteem would be unceremoniously ripped out.

“Comrade Major Vasin! Booth three!”

Again. This booth had something against him. He listened to the usual cascade of clicks and voices as his call was connected.

“Who is this?”

He had reached her at work; he could hear the shrill voices of her workmates in the background.

“It’s Sasha. How is Nikita?”

“Normal. Everything is normal.”

“And how are you?”

“I’m also normal.”

“Listen, I’ve only got three minutes. I wanted to say…”

“I’ve packed your things. When you get back we will file for divorce. I’m not interested in your apologies anymore.”

“Please, Vera, I am sorry. But it’s more complicated than you think.”

Vera interrupted him, her voice beginning to break.

“Self-righteous to the bitter end. I know you, Sasha. You use the people around you to prove to yourself how superior you are, but you’re a liar. A hypocrite. I’ve sent a complaint to my Party committee about your affair. You’re finished, my dearest. It’s time you face the consequences.”

The line clicked dead. Vasin’s finger had come down hard on the cradle. He held it down as though squashing the life out of a tiny enemy. He continued to hold it until his knuckle went white, as though the pressure would hold his secret back from the dangerous world listening in.

He emerged from the booth like a boxer staggering from the ring. Now it was only a matter of time before the matter worked its way through the sluggish bureaucracy of Vera’s pathetic Party committee to the ears of the kontora. And to Orlov himself. The fatal blow was coming. He was finished.

“That bitch,” he hissed to himself.

He staggered out of the portals of the post office. Self-loathing replaced his fury, piercing his thin mackintosh like a cold hand. If he were honest with himself, part of Vasin would have welcomed punishment. Vera’s contempt was nothing more than he deserved. The contempt of her mother and her idiot friends, too, would have been fitting. The female sex, turning their collective backs on him. As they should. But to have his betrayal, his weakness exposed to Orlov — receive his deserts from him. That was too much to bear. To find himself guilty before men whose own guilt was so much more profound, and infinitely more vicious. That offended his sense…of what? Of fairness?

“Justice is mine, sayeth the Lord,” Orlov had once told Vasin in the sarcastic, mincing tone he reserved for biblical quotations. “None of us may choose the manner in which we meet justice, Vasin.”

Screwing the boss’s wife. Not that Orlov screwed her himself, by Katya’s own account. But this would be a matter altogether more serious than screwing. It would be about property and propriety, hierarchy and respect. Vasin had violated them all. He shuddered to think of how Orlov would choose to repay him.

With a violent effort of will, Vasin tore his thoughts away from Vera, Nikita, and the catastrophe that was unfolding back at the place that until this moment he had called home.

The death of Fyodor Petrov. Vasin guessed that the only thing Orlov cared about more than his own pride was his power over other men. Powerful men.

And finding a murderer in the Petrov case, serving up a guilty name for Orlov to lock away in his safe could, possibly, give Vasin a glimmer of hope.

IV

From a phone box on Lenin Square, Vasin dialed a list of numbers he had copied out from the Institute’s phone directory. He eventually tracked down Axelrod at the calutron lab.

“It’s your friend from Moscow. We need to meet. At your place of work, perhaps?”

The Citadel, Vasin’s only almost-safe haven. A pause.

“Come to the accounts department on the ground floor. Room 109. Quarter past six.”

That gave him the whole afternoon to lull his tails into boredom, then perhaps try to lose them. And to change. As evening fell Vasin, glad to be back in anonymously civilian clothes again, lingered by the street display of newspapers, glancing around him to assess how much manpower Zaitsev had assigned to him. He saw nobody obvious. Which meant a truly enormous team.

Vasin waited for three trams of commuters to come and go, looking out for fellow loiterers. There was no sign of Sailor from the yards, at least, or anyone like him. Only a handful of grim-suited labor heroes and war veterans, their breastplates of medals jingling in the twilight, scanned the papers for want of something better to do. At six o’clock a crowd of women, chirruping like a flock of starlings as they adjusted head scarves and exchanged weekend plans, poured from the doors of the Institute. Vasin waited until the steps had cleared and hurried inside.

Axelrod had chosen wisely. The rest of the Citadel hummed with busy activity, but the accounts department was empty. Vasin found room 109, but no light showed through the window above the door. He tested the handle and found a desk-filled space darkening in the twilight. There was a strong smell of mixed women’s perfumes, overlaid with the sticky odors of glue and ink. During the few seconds it took Vasin’s eyes to adjust to the gloom, he thought he was alone. But then he made out the solid shadow of Axelrod’s back, perched stock-still against a desk and watching the light drain from black trees outside the window.

Vasin crossed the room. He pushed aside a slide rule and an electric calculating machine the size of a shoe box to make space for himself on the desk alongside the scientist. Axelrod had hardened his face like someone preparing to take a lashing.

“What now?”

“I have the summary of the audit that the kontora made of the reagent records detailing every milligram of thallium Petrov removed from the lab.”

“Quick. Let me see it!”

Vasin’s eyes flickered from Axelrod’s face to his hands, then back to his face, checking the telltale places. Either Axelrod was a brilliant liar, or he was truly excited. He seemed to truly believe that the records would prove his lover had not taken his own life.

Vasin pulled the transcripts from the lab inventory out of his coat pocket and flourished them in front of Axelrod’s face.

“You have the experiment file reference numbers? If you don’t, it’ll take the two of us weeks to track them all down.”

Axelrod opened the document to a random page and ran his finger down the left-hand column.

“Thank God.”

Vasin could barely keep up as Axelrod flew down the stairs into the basement. By the time they reached Laboratory Zh-4, home of the calutron, both were panting. But Axelrod hurried past the double doors of his own lab and continued down the twisting underground corridor before swinging left into a door marked REGISTRY. A young clerk, pimply and bespectacled, looked up in surprise from a thick textbook. Axelrod fumbled for a purple-striped identity card, which evidently indicated sufficient seniority to bring the clerk to his feet.

“I need file request forms. Lots.”

Axelrod’s demeanor had become almost commanding. He snatched the sheaf of blank forms from the startled boy and led Vasin to a library table.

“Read out every entry for thallium under Petrov’s name. Date, then experiment reference number, then reagent batch.”

Vasin began obediently reading off the ledger numbers on Zaitsev’s inventory as Axelrod filled in the forms, his pencil scurrying impatiently across the paper. When they were finished he called for the clerk, who scurried over at a run.

“We need to see these inventories. Now.”

“All of them, sir? Could take a while.”

“All of them.”

Vasin and Axelrod walked to the smoking area at the bottom of the stairwell. Axelrod’s fingers fumbled to strike a match, so Vasin lit his French cigarette for him. Neither spoke as they smoked. When he was done Axelrod crushed his cigarette out viciously, holding it down long after it had ceased to struggle. The reagent inventory for a single month of Laboratory Zh-4’s work occupied nearly forty volumes, which the clerk wheeled out from the stacks on a trolley. Without Zaitsev’s painstaking report, finding the discrepancies would have been like looking for a lost coin on a stony beach. But now Axelrod had the exact references and quickly found the relevant entries. Experiment by experiment, he and Vasin compared the quantities taken out with the amount used, recorded in the lab technician’s careful hand — how much thallium was used, how much lost, how much returned.

They both saw it at the same moment. A crude enough forgery, an entry for 300 milligrams turned into 800. Vasin carried the volume to a desk lamp and raked light obliquely onto the page. There was no doubt. The page had been written over. They found another in an entry two days later, where 100 became 400. And again and again. In total, two thousand supposedly missing milligrams of thallium, falsely logged and transcribed by Zaitsev’s team.

“Your colleagues have doctored the record,” breathed Axelrod. “We need to get a citizen to witness this. Comrade!”

The registry clerk approached them, thoroughly alarmed by Axelrod’s urgency.

“Wait,” hissed Vasin. Then to the clerk, “Can we see who else signed out these records? Over the last two weeks?”

The cards were soon found in the index. Axelrod scanned the list. His own name, the ink barely dry, was the most recent. Before that, for four days in succession just before Vasin’s arrival in Arzamas, a KGB Lieutenant Girkin, evidently Zaitsev’s man. And before that, just a day after Petrov’s death, another person accessed the Zh-4 records.

Korin, P. A.

“Pavel Korin,” Axelrod said. “Professor Adamov’s oldest comrade and fellow jailbird.”

“You’re very well informed.”

“Korin’s a bomb engineer. Payloads, detonators, altimeters are his area of expertise. There’s no legitimate reason for him to be rooting around the experimental records of the calutron. Korin must have forged the thallium records.”

To Vasin’s discomfort, Axelrod’s logic was racing ahead as fast as his own.

“Korin and Adamov, they killed my…they killed Petrov, and now they are covering it up. I told you before, they are saboteurs. They had to get rid of Petrov because they would not be able to change the design of the bomb with him alive. This proves it. This is treachery.”

Axelrod’s voice was becoming high and hysterical.

“Wait. Pull yourself together, man. Think. What exactly do you plan to do with this theory of yours?”

“I’m going to lodge my concerns with the appropriate authorities. And denounce Yury Adamov as a saboteur and murderer at tomorrow’s daily briefing.”

“There are…considerations, Dr. Axelrod.”

“You sound like you do not wish me to proceed, Major.”

Vasin thought of Kuznetsov’s arguments. The city of cloud dwellers, the jeopardy that stalked them from the vicious careerists of the Party and the kontora. And he thought of Korin’s words. The generals who itched to use every weapon ever made for them, who could not contemplate the end of war, forever. Axelrod was a scientist blinded by straight lines. He had spent his life negotiating the world of the concrete. His affair with Petrov was the single evidence that he had ever plunged into the tides of madness and human emotion. And he had been rejected. Then betrayed. Then bereaved. Axelrod’s fury was cold, and its logic was unstoppable.

“You are right, Comrade Axelrod. You have your duty as a Soviet citizen.”

V

Nightfall brought a freezing fog, rising from the Sarovka River and creeping along the sidewalks like a ghost. Frost had settled on the trees that lined the boulevards. If clear cold is action, Vasin told himself, fog is thought. It was nearly time for his appointment with Adamov.

What he and Axelrod had found in the records clearly implicated Korin. And probably the Professor too. Even if Axelrod was wrong that his feud with Fyodor over the tamper had led to murder, Vasin knew that Adamov had another, far stronger motive for revenge against Petrov’s father. And if both of them were involved, it was almost inconceivable that Masha wasn’t also involved.

If it was Korin and Adamov, their fate would be out of his hands soon enough. At the very least, as soon as Axelrod made his report, the fact that Petrov had been murdered would be released from its vault and out in the world, and even Orlov himself would be powerless to lock it back in his green safe. Only Adamov could save himself now. He could somehow explain away the revelation of Korin’s meddling in the files. Or he would be condemned.

The streets were nearly empty as Vasin strode toward Adamov’s apartment. A couple of cars passed, but no tails were in evidence. A bad sign. The kontora had thrown its circle invisibly wide and almost inescapable.

In the foyer of Adamov’s house an unfamiliar man sat in the concierge’s lodge reading a copy of Sports News, or at least holding it. As he passed up the stairs, Vasin heard the soft purr as the watcher picked a telephone receiver up off its cradle.

Vasin found Adamov alone in his cavernous apartment. He wore his formal Party tunic, unbuttoned at the collar, and his decorations. He had evidently just come from a meeting with the top brass. His deeply lined face was gray with exhaustion. Without a word, Adamov led his visitor through to the dining room. Like actors in a drama, they took their old places at the table.

“Did you get your bomb built, Professor?”

Adamov’s answer came as a low rumble in his throat, barely audible.

“It is done.”

The expression on the Professor’s face was of an almost menacing firmness of intention. The mask that Vasin had seen slip the previous day was back in place.

“Comrade Professor, you asked me here because you have something to tell me.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me that I have nothing to fear if I have nothing to hide? That used to be the most terrifying statement in the Russian language. When my interrogator said that to me, I would experience all the terrors of the abyss. And here you are, come to convict me again.”

Vasin shifted uncomfortably in the hard chair. The moment of denial came and went. He glanced toward the telephone that sat on a side table.

“Worried about your kontora’s little ears? Don’t be. A man from the radio laboratory disconnected your pathetic bugs. He checks this place every week. I will be filing a complaint with the Committee for State Security. The things discussed around this table are not for the ears of your blundering-fool colleagues.”

Vasin absorbed the insult without comment.

“Comrade Investigator, I am not the one who harmed Fyodor Petrov. That is the truth.”

“Petrov’s father’s betrayal cost you your wife and daughter. They both repudiated you. No one would blame you for your revenge, Professor. A child for a child.”

“Not all things that are logical are true. With limited data, it is logical to conclude that the sun revolves around the earth. No. Arkady Petrov and I have had our own reckoning. I knew he denounced me, but to refuse to do so would have been his own condemnation. In truth, he also saved me. After my conviction, Academician Petrov officially declared that I was a vital worker with specialist skills. As a result I was transferred from the mines to a sharashka, a scientific workshop staffed by Gulag inmates. Some of the best work on the Soviet nuclear program was done by men like me, sitting in our padded prison uniforms. The great Sergei Korolev, who just put Major Gagarin into space? He spent the war in a sharashka, too. It was still the Gulag, but without Petrov I’d have died, like Korin nearly did in his hellhole in Vorkuta. So you are mistaken. I have no ancient scores to settle with Petrov, or even his son.”

“Did you ask me here to tell me that Fyodor Petrov’s father saved your life?” Vasin thought of his own interview with Fyodor’s father, a great man broken by grief. Indeed, he had mentioned nothing about Adamov or their shared history.

“I wanted to explain.”

“Professor, what happened to Fyodor?”

Adamov leaned back slowly into the darkness.

“You have had my answer. I did not harm him.”

“Who did?”

“He harmed himself.”

“He committed suicide? Or he brought about his own death?”

“You have a good brain, Major. And no, I am not avoiding an answer. I would say those things were synonymous.”

“No more word games, Professor. Vladimir Axelrod says that you changed the design of the tamper of RDS-220 right after Petrov’s death. He believes that you have deliberately and maliciously sabotaged the bomb and wants to denounce you for anti-Soviet inclinations.”

A grim smile spread like a surgeon’s incision across the Professor’s face.

“Fyodor’s boy. Of course.”

“He has evidence against Colonel Korin. And some compelling evidence against you, Professor.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Dr. Axelrod has made a computer model of the projected yield of your new design. You have deliberately cut the power of RDS-220 by at least half.”

For the first time, Vasin saw emotion on Adamov’s face.

“And they were not easy to access, but the records of the calutron lab we looked at a few hours ago also proved to be quite surprising,” continued Vasin. “The log tracking Petrov’s experiments with thallium and supposedly showing that two thousand milligrams are missing? They have been doctored. Your trusted colleague Pavel Korin checked out the records the day after Petrov’s death. Axelrod has found his patriotism and demands you both be punished. He is taking his information to the authorities tomorrow.”

Adamov, usually so still, jumped up and began to pace the room.

“Am I to be arrested?” His voice had become dry and bleak. “Is this some kind of Chekist’s courtesy call?”

“No, sir.” Vasin paused.

Ever since he’d arrived in Arzamas, everybody he met had told him to back off. Zaitsev, Kuznetsov, Efremov, Korin — they’d all had their various reasons for telling him to leave it alone. But what if they all had been ultimately right? The idealist in Vasin wanted the truth. The coward in him wanted salvation from the consequences of his own betrayal. Both those paths led to Korin’s certain ruin, maybe Masha’s too. And Adamov’s. But what if Korin was right, that Vasin was just an ape in the laboratory? What if there was some great, overarching truth that he had been missing? He remembered Orlov’s words. What if a crime is committed to prevent a greater crime? What if the stakes were higher than his own survival?

“No, sir. Not courtesy. But Korin told me some things. About you. About the device. The importance of your work. I need to know if there has been any…mistake. Before it is too late for you.”

Adamov’s hands closed slowly on the high back of the chair opposite Vasin’s. The Professor’s hard, clever eyes roamed over him, as though searching for the answer to a question that Vasin had not posed. The last color had drained from Adamov’s face, leaving only ash beneath his skin.

Adamov picked up the telephone and dialed.

“Pavel. Thank God I reached you. We have a serious problem. It’s Axelrod. Yes. Fifteen minutes? Good. Vasin is here with me. Yes, him. Vasin the Chekist.”

VI

Side by side, Korin and Adamov looked like characters from a Russian folktale. Adamov was the pale wizard Koshchey the Deathless, Korin the thickset knight of old Rus. But despite the difference in their appearance — Korin shaggy but lithe with the craggy brows and faraway eyes of an explorer, Adamov desiccated and angular as a skeleton — the two men seemed to have been hewn from the same block of ancient stone. Age has made them twins, thought Vasin. The past was their common womb. Their four hands lay on the table, as lined as maps.

“You got the story, Comrade.” Korin’s voice had the arrogance of a man who can no longer be bothered to lie. “Good work.”

Korin and Adamov faced him like poker players. Vasin’s cards were on the table. Now he waited to see what the old men were holding.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Vasin said. “You’re going to tell me that my talents are wasted at the kontora. My mother does, all the time. She would have preferred me to be Yury Gagarin.”

Each of them, in his different way, smiled, though Adamov’s was more a grimace of suppressed pain.

“Korin.” Adamov addressed his companion. “We need to tell him.”

“He wouldn’t listen. Stubborn little terrier.” Korin pointed an accusing finger at Vasin. “Hand it to him. Even flew up to see me in Olenya. Got to the bottom of things fucking quickly. So what’s the clever Chekist been saying to you? Confess everything and things will go easier for you? Haven’t we heard that one before?”

Adamov shrugged.

“Vasin has discovered your work with the registry. His little bird Vladimir Axelrod in the Citadel believes I have sabotaged the tamper and am a traitor. Even ran a simulation of the new yield on the computer. He plans to present his case and denounce me to the authorities tomorrow.”

“That bastard. We should have acted.”

Korin stared straight at Vasin.

“We should have acted,” he repeated.

Vasin met Korin’s eye and leaned forward.

“You mean, you should have had your thug smack Axelrod over the head with a wrench? And maybe me too? So that was your guy? The ape you had hanging around Axelrod? He nearly pushed me under a train. Said his bosses were ‘grown-ups.’ That would be you.”

Korin grunted and folded his arms.

“He saved you from falling under a train, I heard.”

“It’s too late for all that now, old friend.” Adamov had turned to Korin, his voice hissing and urgent. “But perhaps if Vasin understands what is going on, he will help us. Or else it’s all over.”

The two old men exchanged a long, meaningful glance.

Adamov sighed, leaned forward into the light, and began to speak.

“Vasin, I commit the sin of science every day. I turn plowshares into swords. And yes, I mislead our masters because it is necessary to mislead them. Because they do not understand what we are dealing with. Look at the language they have invented. ‘Deceptive basing modes.’ ‘Baseline terminal defense.’ ‘Dense pack groupings.’ Our military planners make up words in order to pretend that we are in command of the forces we unleash. We used to have whole workshops full of people estimating explosive yields with slide rules. Now they are tabulated on our new computers, and we make neat graphs to report to our superiors in the Kremlin. These men understand quotas, but our numbers conceal a terrible truth. We are not in control of these forces. With every major bomb test, we please the Politburo by increasing our yields. Our bombs are bigger than the capitalist enemy’s, therefore the Motherland is greater. Then, this spring, the order came down from the top of the Party. They wanted a hundred-megaton bomb. A good, round number. One hundred. Thunderous applause at the Party Plenum. Five thousand times bigger than the bomb that Oppenheimer made. These are just numbers to the apparatchiks. But it was insanity.”

The authority of Adamov’s clear, measured voice was awesome. Korin and Vasin had become mere listeners and smokers.

“You must understand that the energy yielded by our discovery of atomic physics exceeds the energy yielded by that of the terrestrial, or planetary, physics of the nineteenth century as the cosmos exceeds the earth. When our grandfathers discovered steam, then dynamite, they considered themselves masters of awesome power. Now we have cracked atoms. We have forced atoms to fuse, as in the heart of the sun. Yet it is within the earth’s comparatively tiny, frail ecosphere that mankind is proposing to release this newly tapped cosmic energy. So far, we have been lucky. The Americans, less so. Did Korin mention Castle Bravo?”

Vasin shook his head.

“Colonel Korin told me about Gatling. And he told me what happened at Totskoye. Forty-five thousand Soviet soldiers sent into a radiation zone. But he didn’t mention any castles.”

“Seven years ago, the Americans planned to test a series of new thermonuclear devices on an island called Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. The aim was to try out a new combination of nuclear fuels. More important, for the generals at least, was that this was the first time they were able to build a payload of deliverable size. The device weighed about ten tons.

“The Bikini tests of ’fifty-four were code-named Operation Castle. The first bomb was named Castle Bravo. There was no Castle Alpha. Our colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory, our enemies as we are supposed to call them, did all the calculations they could. They already had a fast electronic computer, back when we were just experimenting with our first. They estimated that the yield would be six megatons. The designers placed their cameras, their ships, their monitors, and the bunker that sheltered the detonating party accordingly. A distance of about five kilometers from ground zero.”

Adamov had a good teacher’s flair for narrative. He paused now, measuring the effect of his words on Vasin.

“The device detonated perfectly. The fireball spread over seven kilometers wide in less than a single second. But according to their precise calculations, they had only expected the blast to maximize at two point five kilometers. Your spies tell us that the explosion was visible four hundred kilometers away. In less than ten minutes the mushroom cloud had reached an altitude of forty thousand meters and a width of over one hundred kilometers. The fallout was spreading at around one hundred meters per second. The firing party had to evacuate their bunker to avoid being fatally irradiated, which meant running across open ground to a helicopter and flying to a nearby battleship. They barely escaped with their lives. God knows what shape those men are in now. They say the fallout fell like gray ash, and the Pacific islanders ate it thinking it was the snow they had seen on television sets the Americans had bribed them with. Perhaps it is true. When the Yankees flew over the site a few days later, they saw that Castle Bravo had blown a crater two hundred fifty meters deep and two kilometers across. And the yield? Fifteen megatons, not six.”

“How did the Americans get their numbers so wrong?” Vasin’s mind was reeling from the incredible scale of the destruction that Adamov was describing.

“No, Major. Their calculations were as accurate as our own. Their mistake was making assumptions. And their assumptions were wrong. They used lithium, the lightest of all metals, as their source of tritium, a kind of heavy hydrogen. They assumed the lithium 7 isotope they used in the second-stage bomb would be inert, that it would react harmlessly and turn into bromine. It didn’t. Their new lithium-deuteride fuel produced much more tritium than they expected. The point is that despite all the previous real-world tests they had done, all the calculations they had run on their new computers, all the efforts of those Golden Brains in the New Mexico desert, Castle Bravo was three times more powerful than intended. Three times, all because of a single wrong assumption. What happens if a device is one hundred times more powerful than expected? Fifteen years after Hiroshima, and we have already achieved a five-thousandfold increase in the power of our bombs. Why not fifty thousand? Five million?”

Adamov looked at Vasin as though he were expecting an answer. Vasin had none.

“How could our calculations be one hundred times off? Or one thousand? Here we come to the most terrible secret of all. Most of the nuclear material in any device does not detonate. This has been the case since the very earliest tests. Dr. Oppenheimer’s first gadget, Trinity, was the world’s first nuclear explosion, back in ’forty-five. They used more than six kilograms of plutonium-gallium alloy as the bomb core. Oppenheimer himself predicted it would yield less than half a kiloton of explosive force. Enrico Fermi offered to take bets among the top physicists and military present on whether the atmosphere would ignite, if it would destroy the state, or if it would incinerate the entire planet. Trinity surprised them all and generated twenty kilotons of explosive force.

“But that’s not my point. Out of six kilograms of plutonium, only around one gram — one single gram — actually reacted during the explosion. The weight of a kopeck. Almost six kilograms of plutonium, puff, blown to smithereens, wasted, expelled into the atmosphere. Most of what we call nuclear fallout is merely unexploded bomb fuel. And so it has been ever since. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the plutonium and uranium we put into our devices is not detonated. The energy released by the nuclear reaction destroys the metal tamper that is built to contain it within milliseconds, and therefore destroys the conditions under which the reaction can continue. So we tried to build a tamper than contains the reaction for twice as long. Longer. What happens if not one six-thousandth of the fuel explodes, but one sixth? Can we contain the explosion long enough for all of it to detonate?”

“You’re talking about Petrov’s solid uranium tamper.” Vasin could not hide the tremor in his voice.

Adamov pursed his lips.

“Petrov designed the strongest tamper ever made. And one that was itself made of potentially fissile material. RDS-220 was meant to be a hundred megatons, seven times more powerful than Castle Bravo. At that level, the chain reaction may not stop with the hydrogen inside the device. What if it continues to the hydrogen in the air? There is a chance that this thermonuclear chain reaction could ignite the hydrogen in earth’s atmosphere. Set the world on fire, Vasin, just like Fermi joked. And that, I repeat, is a danger we have been considering even without any unpredictable effects from the uranium tamper. Even without more of the fuel reacting than in previous tests.”

Korin took over the narrative, looming into the circle of light on the table as he began to speak.

“Petrov’s uranium casing would become a bomb in itself. The ambitious little cunt. He wanted to ride RDS-220 all the way to the Academy to join his father. Then on to the Politburo. Wouldn’t listen to our objections. ‘In this game you never know until you try. Old man Oppenheimer, when he detonated the first atom bomb in America back in ’forty-five, wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to blow up the world.’ That’s what Petrov said. Then he laughed.”

“Professor — why did you not just overrule Petrov?”

“Petrov threatened to take it to his father and the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences.” Adamov’s voice rose in indignation. “Useless bunch of careerists. He saw the calutron readings and he knew the danger. But ‘the risk is acceptable if we are to show our capitalist enemies that the USSR commands the heights of nuclear supremacy.’ Fool. If RDS-220 sets off an uncontrollable chain reaction, the only heights he would be commanding would be a smoking pile of ash where the Kremlin used to stand. Petrov threatened to denounce me for subverting the project. Said that I was no longer suitable to lead the nation’s weapons program. That I was an enemy of the people. That when he was in charge, there would be two- and three-hundred megaton devices! He said that I could choose to read about his triumphs in a retirement dacha outside Moscow or…or from a newspaper in a shitter in the Gulag. He said…he dared to say…that I was used to prison life, so I had nothing to fear.”

Adamov went silent. His thin hands had found each other on the table and seemed to be strangling the life out of each other, though his face remained expressionless.

“So you decided to kill Petrov.”

“I killed him.” Korin’s voice was as heavy as a cudgel. “Adamov came to me wringing his hands. Just like he is now. Petrov had to be stopped and I promised Adamov that I’d stop him.”

“And save the world?” Vasin had meant the words flippantly. But as he spoke them it occurred to him that they might literally be true. “You invited him to tea to discuss the tamper. Maybe you even promised to see his vision through. And then you poisoned him.”

“Adamov knew nothing. I got the thallium through my own channels.”

“I saw Petrov’s body. How did you handle it and not get poisoned yourself?”

“Thallium emits a radiation that is too weak to penetrate human skin. It’s harmless, unless it is ingested. Two grams is just dust in a piece of paper. I slipped the cup Petrov had used into my pocket so Masha wouldn’t accidentally poison herself.”

“Then you altered the laboratory records to make it look like Petrov had signed for the thallium himself.”

Korin merely raised a shaggy eyebrow in answer. Adamov’s face had tightened into a grimace of pain.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Adamov and Korin exchanged a glance. The Professor, as the senior man, replied for both of them.

“We need to talk to Axelrod, tonight, and tell him the same things we’ve just told you. He’s a man of science. He must see reason.”

“So order him to come over.”

“He won’t come for me. He loved Petrov, we all knew. But he’s your stool pigeon. You can make him come. Tomorrow Axelrod will be at the Party headquarters dictating a complaint to the Ministry. The next stop will be your kontora. It’s only in our hands for a few hours more. They will halt the test and rebuild the tamper with uranium. And we cannot predict what will happen then. As for us, who knows what the Party will decide.”

“That’s obvious enough. The Party will decide that you’re murderers, gentlemen. The altered lab inventory, with your signature on it, Colonel, is your death sentence.”

The two old men held Vasin with their stares, waiting on his word. Vasin had heard a lot of lies in his time. But told in Adamov’s measured whisper, this story sounded very true. For a delirious moment, Vasin thought, I have witnessed the beginning of the world’s end. If I do nothing, the bomb will pass to other hands. And it will be uncontrollable. Armageddon will have started here, with these men, at this table, with my inaction. Images from the film of RDS-100 played in his head. The furious tidal wave of wind, the blinding light, the titanic pulse of the cosmos’s energy unleashed on the fragile earth. Destroying everything. And everything he hated. Vera, turned into a pillar of ash. The kontora and Orlov and Zaitsev, the whole rotten edifice of lies that he served incinerated, burned clean away. And his own worthless self, of course. Annihilated. It would be a kind of answer. An end to everything, forever. Except maybe the kontora’s files, in their deep bunkers.

But then he thought of Nikita at school, with the windows exploding and the air turning to fire. The split second of alarm in his childish face. A bubble of nausea like an air pocket filled Vasin’s lower chest. It seemed that something had gone wrong with time. The past and the future huddled in the present, their impossible weight pressing in around the three men at the table.

Adamov was convinced that he could talk Axelrod into silence, that he was a rational man. But Korin had murdered the love of the young scientist’s life. Fedya, the boy with the sun in him, Axelrod’s sin, his soul. Axelrod had been willing to risk everything with his desperate act of blackmail to keep Petrov by his side. Vasin knew from his old cases just how terrible the cold fury of a bereaved lover could be. What could Adamov possibly say to Axelrod that would make up for the violation they had inflicted on his life? Petrov had believed that his uranium tamper design was safe. Therefore Axelrod did. With Petrov dead, that belief might become a way of keeping faith with his murdered lover. Perhaps Axelrod had become convinced that Petrov’s idea should live, now that he did not. Vasin had seen flashes of a fanatic light in Axelrod’s eyes. Would Adamov’s authority be able to extinguish it? Was Adamov capable of understanding love and loss in another after he had cauterized feeling so thoroughly in himself? And if Adamov failed to persuade Axelrod into silence, then, clearly, Korin would have to take action.

They were asking Vasin to lead Axelrod to his death. Somewhere in this sleeping city, Korin’s sailor was slumbering on some stinking cot, ready to answer the call of a ringing telephone. If Vasin refused, or failed, to bring Axelrod to their agreed rendezvous at the registry of the Institute, Korin’s man would come for him. The only way that Axelrod would live to see another day was if he spoke to Adamov, and agreed with him. According to the new logical web that Adamov and Korin had suddenly thrown over his life, the path was clear. Vasin was fetching Axelrod not to his death but perhaps to his only chance of life.

Perhaps it was not too late.

Vasin made his decision. A plan that might save Axelrod began to hatch in his mind. And Masha was the key to it. He stood.

“I know how to get Axelrod. But we do it my way.”

Korin lumbered to his feet to face Vasin, both their faces in the darkness cast by the lampshade.

“Bring him to the Institute. We meet at the registry.”

Vasin could find no obvious flaw in Korin’s logic. And the Citadel, even at night, was at least a semipublic place, safer for Axelrod.

“Very well. The registry. But you must bring Masha. I insist that she be there. No arguments.”

Reluctantly, Adamov and Korin nodded.

“One final condition. No one dies tonight. No one.”