Black Sun

I

Vasin swallowed the chill air of the street like a draft of cold water. The lamplit faces of Korin and Adamov, hazy in the cigarette smoke — filled dining room, swam before him. The evening’s fog had cleared, leaving the air damp and fresh. He looked up and saw a young moon swimming among wreaths of cloud and moist stars. The plaster caryatids of the building’s facade looked down on him like old gods, trapped in cocoons of peeling paint. Vasin had walked into the building a man of truth, filled with righteous questions. He had emerged two hours later something quite different. A conspirator.

He sensed rather than saw movement, left and right. Car radio receivers were being lifted off their cradles, whispers were traveling in waves through the air around him. Like a magnet trailing iron filings, Vasin’s tails were assembling into formation.

It was just past midnight. The work of the scientists was over and Axelrod didn’t seem the type to celebrate at Café Kino. RDS-220 had, earlier that day, been carefully hauled up from its cellar and into the daylight. The device was now in the hands of the engineers, the pilots, and the firing crew. Somewhere, under this same moon, the railway flatcar bearing the bomb was trundling slowly northward through the snowfields of Central Russia, heading for the railhead at Murmansk. It would then be transferred to a truck for its final terrestrial journey to the Olenya air base. Korin was due to leave by plane to rejoin the precious cargo in eight hours’ time. The test was scheduled for the following morning, Monday, at 11:30.

Only a moment of hesitation remained before Vasin threw his lot in with this pair of madmen. But what was the alternative? To put nine grams of lead in the back of Axelrod’s head, as the likes of Zaitsev, Orlov, and the other old butchers of the kontora would have done, without hesitation? To run to Efremov and tell all? To have Axelrod taken into protective custody? To hand Zaitsev a triumph, standing in the witness box at Adamov and Korin’s trial? To count the weeks and months before another scientist built an RDS-221, mightier and more deadly than its sabotaged predecessor? And so on until somebody finally succeeded in consuming the whole world with fire? Or maybe Adamov’s version of RDS-220 could still go out of control, like Castle Bravo, and incinerate them all.

A chill breath of wind returned Vasin’s thoughts to the present. He found himself shivering. How long had he been standing here, paralyzed by thought, before his large audience of invisible watchers? He shook himself into motion. But rather than heading to Builders’ Street, he turned toward home. For the first time in his career, he needed his gun.

II

The apartment’s windows were dark. Vasin crept up the stairs and gingerly turned his key in the lock. He could see no sign of Kuznetsov’s usual discarded boots and coat in the slice of light that fell from the landing into the hallway. Vasin slipped off his shoes outside the front door and padded down the corridor in stockinged feet. The glow of the streetlamps, eerily orange when filtered through the curtains, gave him just enough light to see the outlines of the furniture. Kuznetsov’s drifts of magazines and books had disappeared. There were no empty teacups, ashtrays, or dirty glasses on the coffee table in the sitting room. The sofa and two easy chairs had been aligned at precise angles. Even Kuznetsov’s record collection was in wholly unaccustomed perfect order on the Czech dresser. The place had evidently been very thoroughly turned over, then equally thoroughly cleaned up, by professional hands.

Vasin remembered that his door handle had always squeaked. A new spring. He began to turn it a fraction of a millimeter at a time, pulling the door gently toward himself to release the friction of the tongue in its housing. At the very first hint of the familiar metallic squeak, he stopped and listened to the silence of the apartment. Was it possible to feel people, in the dark? Could one really sense another human being without seeing or hearing him? Because Vasin certainly sensed an unsleeping presence, somewhere in the shadows. Yet each time Vasin paused, holding his breath and listening with every part of his body, he heard nothing. He continued to turn the handle until he felt it press home against its restraining latch. He swung the door open.

Vasin’s bedroom windows opened on the courtyard, and there was less outside light to illuminate the room. He made out a pile of his dirty shirts at the foot of the bed and the white detachable collar of his uniform tunic picked out on the dark bedspread. On the back of a chair by the window, he could see his leather service belt, hanging taut under the weight of his pistol in its holster. He took a step toward it but stumbled on his tall boots, hiding treacherously in the shadow of the bed. Vasin froze and listened. He took two more steps and fumbled with the fastening of the holster, slipped his hand around the grip of the heavy Makarov, and pulled it out.

The bedroom light snapped on. For a split second Vasin was blinded and paralyzed by the brightness. Recovering his senses, he spun around into a crouch, his pistol pointed at the door.

Kuznetsov stood in the open doorway. He wore his usual shabby civilian slacks and shirt, but his face had none of its usual jollity.

“Greetings, Comrade. Trust you had a pleasant evening. I’ve been waiting up.”

Kuznetsov’s eyes were on the gun, but his voice was artificially cheerful. Vasin put his finger to his lips and motioned Kuznetsov into the corridor with his eyes. He lowered the Makarov and stuffed it into his trouser pocket. Vasin gestured his handler toward the stairwell. Kuznetsov shuffled down the corridor more in protest than obedience.

“You’re a fucking wrecking ball, you know that?” Kuznetsov hissed. “The electricians were here today, installing bugs. They took my goddamned books. My Vozdushniye Puti. My Mandelstam. The Lubyanka library requires them for an audit, my ass. So thanks very much, Comrade Vasin.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, old man.”

“I’ve never had a gun pulled on me. Got to say, didn’t think you’d be the one to take my virginity on that score.”

Kuznetsov folded his arms across his chest and faced Vasin across the stairwell.

“I’ve listened to you a lot, Kuznetsov. Now you have to listen to me.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Your face, when you waved that tool about. Doesn’t look like a late night game of cops and robbers. Now you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t mention that to the duty officer when he calls after you go back out. Which is where I presume you’re heading.”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I want you to do. Just say I took a shit, then left on official business.”

“With your gun.”

Kuznetsov stroked his beard, grimacing doubtfully.

“This is a very long shit you’re taking.”

“Please.”

“You planning to put a hole in anyone tonight with that thing?”

“I beg you, Kuznetsov. I heard everything you’ve told me. What I have to do tonight is not going to hurt your cloud dwellers. Please. Just keep quiet.”

Kuznetsov demonstratively put his hands to his ears and began humming.

“If you discharge that cannon of yours, I’m in for the high jump. I’m under specific instructions to keep an eye on everything, including your sidearm.”

“I won’t. Thanks, friend.”

Vasin, in a gesture of intimacy that did not come naturally to him, clapped Kuznetsov on the shoulder and set off down the stairs.

“Psst.”

Vasin retraced his steps and leaned into Kuznetsov’s whisper.

“You forgot to flush. And, there’s no fucking clip in your pistol. You might find one in the front pocket of your holster. That’s what they told me during basic training, at least.”

With a grateful glance Vasin darted back inside, pulled the chain, retrieved the cartridge clip, and slammed it home into the breech of his Makarov.

“Hope your business does not detain you long, Comrade.” Kuznetsov was back in the corridor now, speaking loudly.

“You know how it is. No rest for the wicked.” Vasin clenched his fist and raised it in solidarity, a gesture he had seen in a newsreel of Cuban revolutionaries, his voice self-consciously loud and cheerful. “They shall not pass, Comrade! No pasarán, compadre!”

III

Vasin turned off Gogol Boulevard onto Builders’ Street. The last tram was long gone. Most of the suburb’s residents, too, seemed to be parked for the night in their beds, though light still flickered in a few windows like gray bonfires. Tele-Vision machines, Vasin concluded, though he had never been in a home that boasted one, not even Adamov’s. He walked on the edge of the sidewalk, in full view of the kontora Volgas that ritually passed every two minutes. He could guess their orders. Straddle him, but don’t touch him. And don’t lose him.

To his left were rows of dark trees, and a black mass of undergrowth. The streetlamps hung over him like yellow moons caged in broad steel brackets. Vasin glanced nervously from time to time into the thickets. Was Korin crazy enough to send Sailor and other cutthroats to murder both him and Axelrod under the noses of a full kontora surveillance team? There had been a chilling calm in Korin’s confession to the killing of Petrov, the practical callousness of a military commander. Korin needed Vasin for as long as it took to fetch Axelrod. But afterward?

He hesitated in front of Axelrod’s archway. In the courtyard, a lynch mob of deformed apparitions appeared to have gathered in formation, ready to jump him. Most menacing was Karandash the clown, who cast the moon-shadow of a gorilla, backed up by the big-eared bear Cheburashka. Axelrod’s windows were dark. Vasin found a pay phone, positioned, just like in Moscow buildings, in the shelter of the main archway of the building, and dialed the scientist’s home number. Engaged. He waited two minutes and dialed again. Phone off the hook, most likely. Vasin crept through the shadowed part of the courtyard to Axelrod’s entranceway. The staircase was silent and deserted. Vasin waited three minutes in the first-floor-landing window, watching for signs of life in the courtyard, but saw none. He adjusted the pistol, uncomfortably wedged down the back of his trousers, and went up.

Axlerod’s flat had a mechanical bell operated by twisting a knob in its center. It tinkled feebly in the silence. Eventually Vasin heard stumbling footsteps inside the apartment.

“Who is it?”

“Vasin. We need to talk.”

A silence.

“It’s one in the morning.”

“Let me in and I’ll tell you everything.”

“Are you alone? Was that thug lurking outside?”

“I’m alone.”

Another long pause. Vasin heard the grating of metal on metal, then the click of the lock turning. Axelrod opened the door a crack. But his pale face peered out through a steel door restrictor that prevented it from opening further.

Vasin had installed exactly the same restrictor at his mother’s apartment. It was a solid fucker. By the time he kicked it in, the local cops would be swarming.

“It’s Maria Adamova. She wants to see you.”

“Now? Why on earth?”

The suspicion in Axelrod’s voice had given way to alarm.

“I think you know. We both know. She wants to talk to you about the information she has about you and Petrov.”

Axelrod’s eye disappeared from the door crack. Vasin felt the weight of the scientist’s body slump against the door.

“I don’t care. She can’t save her husband and her fancy life.”

Axelrod’s voice came, muffled, out of the darkness of his own hallway.

“She wants to protect you. That unpleasantness doesn’t have to hang over your life. Your career.”

“Now she wants to blackmail me. Those photographs for her precious Adamov’s freedom. She thinks I care so much about myself that I will forget what that animal did to Fedya?”

The logic of a man in love. Vasin could think of no answer to it.

“Honestly, Axelrod? I don’t know what Masha wants.” Vasin weighed his words carefully. What do you tell a jilted lover? “Perhaps she loved Fedya, too, and she doesn’t want his bright memory besmirched.”

A long pause.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“It was not Adamov who killed Fedya.”

“How? Vasin, you’re lying.”

“Just come with me to see Masha, and you will learn everything. She has all your answers.”

“Bullshit.”

“Masha is desperate. She will not destroy the evidence unless she speaks to you.”

“Why has she confided in you?”

“Because she thought you poisoned Petrov. But today I told her about the lab reports that Korin falsified. She realizes she has made a grave mistake. But she needs to see you. Now. Before the morning.” A final flash of inspiration sparked in Vasin’s tired brain. “She fears that you are too blinded by hatred for her husband. To listen to the real story. If you do not come, you will never know. And you will send the wrong man to perdition.”

Nothing from behind the door. For a desperate moment, Vasin feared that Axelrod had tiptoed away from the door and was now dialing the police. But then he heard a sigh from inside the apartment and felt Axelrod lean into the door once again.

“She swears to keep quiet about me and Fedya?”

“I can’t speak for her. But I am sure that’s what she wants to speak to you about.”

“And you? You will also keep silence?”

“I give you my word.”

“I hardly know you, Vasin. What’s your word to me?”

“Listen. Axelrod. I know more than you think. I know how important Adamov is to the RDS program. I know his value to the defense of the Motherland. How important his genius is to all of us. What you propose to report tomorrow is only part of the truth.”

The silence stretched. Vasin imagined he heard his own heart thumping. With an effort of will, he prevented himself from thinking of what he would have to do if Axelrod refused.

The weight of the scientist’s body lifted from the door. Vasin heard the restrictor grind home, then free. The door opened again, revealing Axelrod in gray pajamas and dressing gown. He looked older, his eyes ringed with exhaustion.

“God knows why I’m trusting you, Vasin.”

“Because I’m on the side of the angels, Axelrod. Always have been.”

IV

They trudged along the deserted boulevards in silence, broken only by the regular soft crunch of cruising kontora Volgas. Axelrod was clearly nervous. Was he afraid of confronting his lover’s mistress? Masha said they had not seen each other since the evening Axelrod had run from Petrov’s apartment. Or was he ashamed of suffering the indignity of having to bargain with Masha, who held Fyodor’s reputation and Axelrod’s future in her hands?

The Citadel was quiet, quieter than Vasin had ever seen it. In the final days of RDS-220’s gestation, every corner of the place had hummed with activity. Now he and Axelrod found the building nearly silent. The building’s baby had been birthed. For the hundreds of men and women who had worked so intently on its creation, there was nothing left to do but wait. It was the turn of others to see their precious device on its last journey into the skies over Novaya Zemlya.

Once through the turnstiles in the entrance hall, deserted apart from a single sleepy sentry, Axelrod turned instinctively to the lifts that would take them to Adamov’s office. Vasin stopped him.

“She is waiting for you at the registry, Doctor.”

Axelrod blinked quickly, and looked imploringly at Vasin, as though begging him to reveal whether he was really some enemy who worked under the cover of friendship, trust, and pity. Finding no answer, Axelrod looked past him into some troubled private territory of his own. He hesitated for a final moment, then turned quickly and began to descend the stairs.

Axelrod was still well ahead of him when they turned in to the corridor that led past the calutron hall and the laboratory that housed Dr. Mueller’s barometric chamber and went on to the registry. Masha stood halfway down the long passageway. Her feet were planted apart, her hands deep in her pockets, her chin sunk into her chest. She looked up as they came into view.

“Hello, Vladimir. You came.”

“Maria Vladimirovna.”

Their voices sounded unnaturally loud in the echoing corridor. She straightened, arrogant and defensive at the same time.

“Let’s go somewhere they can’t hear us.”

Masha flung a contemptuous glance down the corridor toward Vasin. Axelrod also turned, mirroring her look. In the moment of mutual dislike of the kontora man who stood before them, Masha put her hand on Axelrod’s shoulder and forearm.

“Come.”

She led Axelrod past the double doors of the calutron hall and on down the corridor, speaking to him in a low, confiding voice that Vasin could not hear. She steered him toward another pair of doors further down the passage, increasing her pace as she went. There was something angular and not quite reconciled about her movements. She’s moving too fast, thought Vasin. He had fallen back a respectful distance, but now he began to lengthen his stride. Masha opened a door and herded Axelrod inside. As he passed before her into the darkened laboratory, she turned and fixed Vasin with a fierce stare of warning.

He broke into a sprint.

“Axelrod! Stop!”

Pushing Masha aside, Vasin burst through the door. An axe came flying within millimeters of Vasin’s face and connected squarely with the nape of Axelrod’s neck, a few paces in front of him. The blow knocked the skinny scientist into a stack of files and buried him in an avalanche of sliding paper. As Vasin lurched back to avoid the blow, he recognized Korin’s broad back and shoulders carried through half a turn by the swing of the axe. Korin was a powerfully built man and recovered quickly. Almost without pausing to size up his next target, he raised the weapon again and swung it with all his force at Vasin’s head. Vasin ducked, by instinct, and the heavy steel sang past his ear.

“Korin! You lying bastard.” Vasin glanced around him. He sensed, rather than saw, a great, dimly lit space, as large as the calutron lab. Behind him, blocking his escape route, was Masha. She had turned to bolt the doors to the lab shut behind them.

Adamov’s voice, coming from somewhere in the gloom, was reedy with alarm.

“Pavel! Have you gone mad?”

Vasin’s hand went to his waistband and fumbled with the unfamiliar Makarov. He turned to face his attacker.

In front of him, Korin went down into a crouch, the heavy fire axe in his left hand and the fingers of his right poised to gouge the eyes. Korin had a feral look that Vasin had seen in some criminals, the look of a man ready to do more hurt than he needed to. And Vasin had seen that fighting pose before. The hovering crouch of the urka, the convict, before a knife fight. Too late, Vasin remembered the next move. A scything kick that knocked his legs from under him and sent the ceiling lights spinning away with a sickening suddenness. As he fell he saw Adamov’s face, pale, aghast, flash through his field of vision. The back of Vasin’s skull connected with the floor, and his head exploded in stars.

V

Vasin came to in a dark world that rang with pain. He lay on a cold concrete floor, alone. His hands had been tied, quite expertly, behind his back with a rough strip of cloth that chafed his wrists. White light burst through his head when he tried to lift his face from the floor, and he could taste blood in his mouth. In his line of vision he saw the bases of steel filing cabinets, the legs of stacked office chairs, and a scattering of small black balls the size of peas. He seemed to be in some kind of side office that was divided from the main laboratory by a row of windows. One leg was bent painfully under him. Mercifully, his legs were not tied, and he was able to roll from his side onto his back. His whole body seemed to be trembling at low frequency, a hideous vibration that grew slowly and made his skull ring with pain. But when, with an effort, he lifted his head from the floor, Vasin realized that the rumble came not from inside his body but from the outside. It was the whine of a large machine, spooling up into motion.

Vasin managed to scrabble along the floor a little way. He felt something squashing under his shoulder blades, releasing the unmistakable smell of animal shit. Vasin recognized the sour, farmyard smell from the day he’d visited Axelrod and his calutron. This must be the laboratory of the little German doctor they’d brought from the concentration camps. Vasin remembered his nervous greeting as he followed his wagonload of crushed goats down the corridor.

Vasin managed to reach a wall of filing cabinets and work his way into a sitting position. The rumbling had grown louder and was now joined by the audible whine of an accelerating flywheel. He rolled over onto all fours and got to his feet, the back of his head a mass of fiery pain. The only light in the vast space beyond the glass-walled office came from a series of lamps that illuminated a kind of raised console bordered by steel-boxed, dial-studded controls. Three figures were huddled under the lights, talking animatedly in hushed voices. Unmistakably, Masha’s blond bob, Adamov’s bald head, and Korin’s shaggy gray locks. He could hear nothing of what they were saying.

Vasin saw the shadowy outlines of an array of machines in the hall. There was a vast steel ball as large as a tramcar that reminded him of a deep-sea diving bell in one of Nikita’s science books. Behind it stood a pair of gigantic steel arms, like bowed-down oil derricks. The increasing whine came from somewhere in the darkness beyond.

His head still ringing, Vasin made his way unsteadily over to a table that stood before the window. Working blind, he began to rub the knots on his aching wrists back and forth against the desk’s corner. His bindings only got tighter. Cursing, he looked back to the conspirators around the console, his face illuminated in the light for a brief moment. Masha glanced over in his direction at the same second.

Vasin ducked back down into the shadow. But the voices in the hall had stopped. He heard quick footsteps approaching across the echoing hall. A key rattled in the lock, and the office door opened. Masha appeared, backlit in the doorframe. She was carrying Vasin’s Makarov.

“You can stand up, Sasha. I see you.”

Vasin straightened up, reeled giddily, found his balance by leaning on the edge of the table.

“Everything’s fine,” Masha called back to Adamov and Korin.

She backed against the open door and placed one foot flat against the wood. She looked girlish, except for the gun she held loosely by her side.

“How’s your head? Korin didn’t mean to…”

“Hurt me? Think he did actually.”

“I mean — you know.”

Masha puffed out her cheeks. She raised her pistol hand to scoop back a lock of stray hair behind her right ear.

“I’m sorry you got hurt. Really. It wasn’t meant to be like this.”

“I told your husband that I would not bring him here like a lamb to the slaughter. He gave his word.”

“Axelrod’s just one man. This is about more than that.”

“Just tell me that Axelrod is alive.”

“Yes. Axelrod is still with us.” Masha’s voice had become suddenly hard.

Their eyes met. Vasin felt suddenly swept by a regret for what could have been, the refuge Masha could have given him. So she really was one of them. The knowledge of her deception ached as much as his throbbing head. Masha’s stare was defiant, as if to appeal for his support in some argument she was conducting within herself.

“None of this was my idea, Vasin.”

“Not your idea, to use me? For information?”

“You came into my life. On the roof of the Kino. You saved me.”

“I can see you’re grateful. What do you do to people who piss you off? Actually, I know. You stick a knife in their ribs. If that was even true.”

Masha’s face pivoted, pinched with anger, toward the light for a moment before she composed herself and leaned forward.

“Poor innocent Vasin.” Her voice was an angry whisper. “When will you stop being a child? Everything I told you was true.”

She wiped her face with her sleeve, the dull gleam of the Makarov’s butt catching the light.

“I did like you, Vasin. I do. I’m not that good a liar. There. Believe me if you like.”

“But you used me. To find out what I knew.”

“Yes. But only because it turned out that you knew things.”

“You’re going to tell me Adamov put you up to it.”

“Some women are actually capable of rational thought independent of their husbands. Might be news to you. I knew that you came here to find out who poisoned Fedya. It was dangerous. To Adamov. To the project.”

“You knew who killed Petrov all along.”

Masha looked away.

“You sat at the table while Petrov drank poison. You must have been within a meter of him. Probably poured his tea yourself. God knows, you had the motive. Petrov betrayed you. You wanted him dead.”

Masha closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the door. She gulped, her long neck reflecting the light.

“Yes. I did pour the tea. And yes. I did know what Korin was planning to do. I knew it would be the last time I would see Fedya. It wasn’t easy. For what it’s worth. But I didn’t want him dead. Not for myself.”

“Sounds like you were eager enough to help. Was it Adamov who told you about the plan? Korin?”

“Adamov didn’t know. I listened to their conversations around the table. I knew what Petrov was to them, how dangerous his ideas were. So when Korin privately told me that something radical had to be done, I agreed. The method was Korin’s idea. He didn’t want to put me in danger by keeping me in the dark about what he was going to do. As for the rest…as for you…we just made the calculations. Just like Adamov taught me to do.”

“And you calculated that you needed to keep me close.”

Masha puffed out air by way of answer. Her eyes avoided Vasin’s.

“Was I right that you were in love, Sasha? A little bit?”

“Enough to spill secrets. That’s true.”

“Ah.”

“Masha. Listen to me. Your husband promised me that he would persuade Axelrod. That’s why I agreed to go get him. I didn’t agree to bring him to his death.”

“No. No, you wouldn’t.”

“But you knew all along?”

“You think I know everything, don’t you? I thought that Korin would let Adamov at least try to talk to him. But Korin is a man of action. He believes destiny guides his hand.”

Masha stared at him, then with her habitual abruptness of movement stood up straight.

“One last thing. In the bathroom of your apartment. When you kissed me…”

Behind his back, Vasin continued working the knot with quiet determination against the corner of the desk. He could finally feel it getting looser. Just a couple of minutes more.

“Guess you’ll never know, will you, Sasha?”

She sniffed violently, and once more rubbed her face with her gun hand.

“Careful with that thing. It’s loaded.”

“I know it’s fucking loaded. Patronizing asshole. I was top in marksmanship at my institute. Korin used to warn Adamov I’d shoot the cap off his head if he got me angry. I can handle myself.”

The knot finally came free. The cloth that had bound him so painfully had been, he realized as it unraveled, his own woolen tie. Vasin clenched and unclenched his hands to get the blood flowing again.

“If only I had a cap. But I lost it. Off the roof of a cinema.”

Masha grinned, despite herself, with genuine warmth. Vasin smiled back, willing this moment of simple complicity never to end.

Three seconds. Four. His left hand shot forward, seizing her right wrist. With his other hand Vasin cupped the back of her head and forced it forward, twisting her into a sudden headlock. A movement he’d routinely flunked at training school, executed with a wholly unexpected perfection. Her hand, the finger on the trigger, was now closed in his. Muffled in the side of his coat, Masha tried to scream, but her shouts were drowned by the rising din of the engine.

Vasin squeezed the pistol out of her sweating grip. Defeated, she seemed to relax, her hand dropping around his waist in a bizarre parody of an embrace.

Vasin shifted his weight around Masha so that he could step out of the doorway when he released her. He was ready for her to spring at him like a banshee when he loosed his grip on her head. Instead she only slumped backward, rubbing her neck.

“Shit.”

“Did I hurt you?”

Vasin was outside the doorway now, keeping her covered with his pistol.

“Vasin, please. None of this was Adamov’s idea. It was all Korin. And me.”

“Put your hands on your head.”

“Or you’ll shoot me?”

“If I have to.”

She tossed her head contemptuously.

“No. You won’t.”

Both of them knew she was right. Nonetheless she obeyed him, placing each hand on her head with exaggerated formality, like a teacher demonstrating the move to a class.

“Now walk in front of me. Slowly. And keep quiet.”

Masha started briskly across the machine hall, though she kept her hands in place.

In the dim light that came from the control console, Adamov and Korin looked gaunt and pale as figures from a church mural. Their debate had reached some kind of resolution and they stood together in silence, contemplating the controls before them.

“Sorry, Korin,” Masha called out with forced brightness. “He got loose. I think he’s got some questions for you.”

The two men looked up in alarm as Masha and Vasin approached. Coming closer, Vasin saw that Adamov’s already gaunt face had become a pale mask of shock.

“What have you done with Axelrod?”

“First put the gun down,” Korin said. “Then we talk.”

“You must be joking.”

“Lower it, at least. Masha, come here.”

Without looking back to see if Vasin had complied, Masha walked over to join her husband. She did not touch Adamov, or look at him, but merely stood very close. Korin leaned over the controls and turned a dial.

“Stop, Colonel. Whatever you’re doing. Stop it.”

But Vasin could not summon enough power into his voice to command the likes of Korin. The dull noise rose to a deafening thrum as the electric engine revved up to full power.

“Where is Axelrod?”

Korin pulled himself to full height to face Vasin.

“I’m unarmed. See?”

Korin opened the battered sheepskin flier’s jacket that he was wearing over his uniform and slipped it off his shoulders. There was no holster on his belt. He raised his hands and twisted them back and forth, like a magician, demonstrating that they were empty.

“God damn it. Answer the question. What have you done with Axelrod? And switch that noise off. Or I’ll put a round right into those controls.”

“Vasin, be calm.” Adamov’s voice was rasping and dry, but its volume cut through the din. “Your gun will not save Axelrod now. But now there is nothing to be done for him. It is decided.”

“It is decided? You are going to kill him.”

“He was a promising young man. Believe me, if there had been a way…”

“Is that what you meant by persuasion, Professor? A fire axe to the back of the head.”

The two old men exchanged a glance. Adamov’s was cold and judgmental. Korin looked down, either chastened or exasperated.

“I did not authorize the Colonel to raise his hand against Axelrod,” Adamov said. “But he did. And now there are no longer any other possible courses open to us.”

“You think you can batter a prominent scientist to death and there won’t be any questions? You think another murder will help keep your secret safe? And what about me? You plan to make me disappear too?”

“Nobody will batter anybody to death, Major. And do not forget what we are doing here. You seek the truth; today we do the work of the Lord.” Korin spoke firmly, with the emphatic authority of a commander under fire giving orders to a bickering platoon.

“Trying to persuade Axelrod to keep quiet would have been a waste of time,” Korin continued. “And time is exactly what we do not have. Tonight Dr. Vladimir Axelrod will commit suicide. And you, Vasin, the last person to be seen with him, up there at the turnstiles, you will report on his desperate state of mind as you left him here.”

Korin’s face, up-lit by the dials of the console, had an air of demoniacal conviction.

“Why on earth would I testify to such a thing?”

Now Masha answered.

“Because you believe, Vasin. You know why Fedya had to die. It’s all a calculation. That’s why you are here. You know why nobody can ever find out. You became one of us the moment you went to fetch Axelrod.”

“I didn’t bring Axelrod here so that Korin could murder him.”

Masha’s gaze was cool and level.

“Adamov and I didn’t come here to kill him either. And yet here we are. When you live with wolves, you howl like a wolf.”

As Masha spoke, Korin retreated slowly from the console. The bright light released him into the shadows, and his figure moved closer to Adamov.

“Stop moving, Korin. Shut down that bloody din.”

The old man said nothing, but stood stock-still in the half darkness. Vasin saw the whites of all their eyes suddenly focus on something over his shoulder. Keeping his gun trained on Korin, Adamov, and Masha, Vasin glanced behind him.

The four-meter-high steel sphere dominated the hall. Vasin remembered what Axelrod had said: “In this cellar, we separate streams of atoms. In that cellar, Mueller explodes farm animals.” In the front of the chamber was a circular pressure door, like on a submarine. And in the center of the door was a single window. The interior of the giant ball was illuminated in ghostly red light. And in the light a face had appeared.

Vladimir Axelrod.

Blood was running down one of his temples, and he stared through the thick glass as though from the other side of life. He began to batter the steel, but no sound escaped the hermetically sealed ball. On either side of the apparatus a pair of enormous pistons, each the size of a car, were slowly rising into the air.

“Korin! What the hell are you thinking? Adamov! Masha! This is madness.”

“Not madness, Vasin. You know this has to be done.”

“It’s murder. Stop.”

Korin and Adamov did not move, but continued to stare as though mesmerized at the pleading face. Masha had put her hands over her eyes and turned away.

Vasin ran over to the steel sphere, stuffing his pistol into his pocket as he sprinted. Nobody made any move to stop him. The circular wheel sealing the door spun with surprising ease. Vasin rolled the bolts all the way open and pushed at the hatch. It did not budge, but a tiny squealing hiss from inside the door mechanism told him that air was escaping the infernal machine. Some kind of pressure differential was sealing the door shut from inside. He straightened from his efforts to open the hatch to face the window. The terror that Vasin saw in Axelrod’s eyes was naked and desperate. Again he shouted and banged with the palms of his hands on the glass, transported by panic. But nothing could be heard. Vasin noticed that the young man was now bleeding from both ears.

He pulled out the pistol once more and ran back to the control console, banging past trolleys and stumbling over rubber pipes that snaked across the floor in the darkness.

“How do you stop it?” Vasin waved his Makarov wildly at Korin.

Korin folded his arms tightly across his chest.

“Leave it, boy. Adamov, don’t watch. Masha! Turn him away.”

Maria took her husband by the arm, and he allowed himself to be steered away from the sight of the desperate struggle in the tiny window.

“Stop it, Korin!”

“I can’t. The poor doctor already set the mechanism in motion. He left the door to the chamber open while he switched on the machine. Then got in himself. He knew that the plug door would seal itself as soon as the pumps began working. No way to change his mind, once he was in. A nasty way to go. But at least the choice was out of his hands. Brave, if you think about it. He knew he would never summon the will to pull a trigger or jump off a building. This way, it would be certain. The boy knew himself. Knew his own weakness. That’s what you’re going to conclude, Major.”

“He’s alive.”

“Not for long.”

“You’re lying. There’s a way to stop it.”

Vasin stepped up to the console. An incomprehensible array of dials, levers, and gauges spread before him. He began desperately toggling every lever within his reach.

Korin stepped into his path, blocking his progress down the control panel. The old man stood before him, craggy and immovable as an ancient tree.

“Steady.”

“It’s murder, Korin. It’s my duty to stop you.”

“It is sacrifice. ‘God called to Abraham. He said, “Take your son, your only son, and sacrifice him there as a burnt offering.” ’ ”

“The fucking Bible? Have you taken leave of your senses, Korin? Adamov, you must stop this.”

Framed in shadow, the Professor found his voice.

“One more life. To end war, Vasin.”

The pistons rose to their zenith, and a loud klaxon sounded. Vasin, alarmed, looked for the source of the sound. Korin lunged forward and grabbed Vasin’s wrist, slamming it down on the hard edge of the console. The pistol skittered across the floor, and Vasin scrambled to recover it in the black pool of shadow under the table. Korin remained where he was, guarding the console. Vasin found the cold metal of the Makarov and trained it on Korin.

“Switch it off. I’m warning you.”

Vasin snapped a round into the chamber and flicked off the safety catch. The bearded colonel loomed over the control panel, covering it with his body. Ignoring Vasin, he began to chant in the powerful, singsong voice of an Orthodox priest reading the lesson.

“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,” Korin chanted in his deep baritone. “But whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it. Glory to you, Lord. Glory to you. Glory to you.”

The klaxon continued, deafening as an air-raid warning. Red lights went on all over the control panel. At the same moment Vasin pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession. One round hit Korin in the shoulder. The other two caught him square in the chest as he fell.

With a titanic thud the pistons released, slamming thousands of atmospheres of pressure into the steel chamber. Vasin turned to see Axelrod’s body burst like a popped balloon, his head collapsing and disappearing from sight.

Masha screamed and ran to catch Korin’s heavy body as it fell. As the cordite smoke cleared, the only sound was the compressor’s engines spinning slowly to a standstill, and Masha’s thin keening.

VI

Vasin’s brain scrabbled for comprehension like a dog slipping on ice, but he could find no purchase. The scene in front of him was unreal, as though he were watching his own life unfold frame by frame in one of Adamov’s slow-motion films. The gun in his hand was impossibly gravity-laden. His hand fell to his side from the weight of it. Masha had gathered Korin’s body into her thin arms. His lifeblood was spreading in a monstrous black stain across his tunic. Korin coughed, spitting blood messily on Masha’s face, shuddered mightily, and then slumped back. His handsome gray-bearded head lolled, the mouth falling open. Adamov remained utterly still, his face blank with shock.

Masha pressed her face into Korin’s, and she tried to lift his lifeless head from the floor in both hands. A stream of soft, unintelligible words came from her mouth, addressed privately to the dead man. Masha’s muttering stopped, as though she was waiting for an answer. She shook Korin’s head, first gently and then with increasing anger, like a child trying to shake a broken mechanical toy into life.

Once, Vasin had been a man afraid of chaos. Now chaos had embraced him. He had killed a man. Vasin turned the words over in his mind, unable to fit them into any meaning or feeling that he could comprehend. Korin, so deep-rooted and indestructible, so thickset and permanent, lay lifeless before them. Korin, the man who saw into the heart of things, the man who always had the answers, was gone. Vasin felt a stab of absurd anger. Look what you made me do, you stubborn old fucker. Are you happy now?

Vasin knew, with the violence of a physical blow, that his own life was now over. In a mad moment he had abandoned all reason to follow a pair of old lunatics into their insane plan. And now it was he who was left holding the smoking gun. The bomb, the end of the world, the uranium tamper, all the awesome, terrifying things that Adamov and Korin had told him seemed just a fantastical web of shadows, banished from his consciousness by the gunshots like shades before the light. He felt a stinging sensation between his thumb and forefinger from the pistol’s kick. He saw the dead man before him, the young woman cradling the corpse like a scene from an old Italian painting in the Pushkin Museum. He tried to wrench his mind beyond the scene before his eyes. But Vasin’s brain refused to obey him.

Crouching by the body, Masha released her burden. Korin’s head hit the floor with a hollow thud. The sound of skull hitting concrete, so human and so physical, broke Vasin’s paralysis. The outside world that surrounded them came crowding suddenly into his mind. He turned his head, listening for footsteps in the corridor, but heard nothing except the ringing of the gunshots in his ears. The engines had stopped spinning, and the pistons were subsiding with a soft, oily sigh. From the barometric chamber came a hiss of escaping air.

Vasin crossed the hall to the steel sphere. He pushed on the hatch, hard, until it finally yielded with a rubbery slurp. A single caged lamp on the inside turned from red to green as the pressure equalized, illuminating the contents of the sphere in a ghastly, theatrical light.

Axelrod lay sprawled in a pool of blood, his body akimbo like a loose sack of laundry. He looked as though he been stamped on by a furious titan. Axelrod’s head had partially caved in, and his chest was hollow. His life had been extinguished so violently that lines of black blood had spattered across the chamber’s walls, trickling downward like flung paint. Vasin turned away and walked slowly back to the console, wading through the thick darkness as though it were water running against him.

Masha had straightened up, though she still crouched on her haunches. Her breath came in shuddering sobs, and her face glistened wet in the yellow lights of the console. She swayed a little, balling her fists into her eyes for a long moment. Then she pulled herself together and stood. Adamov, his own spell of immobility suddenly broken by his wife’s movement, stepped toward Masha. He gathered her into his chest in a gesture that was so simple and intimate that the Professor suddenly seemed to have sloughed off his stern former self and become a vulnerable old man.

On the floor between them, Korin’s body jerked in a violent spasm that lifted his hands in a momentary, shocking convulsion before they fell back down with a lifeless slap. All three started in alarm. Adamov and Masha broke their embrace as they all stared at the corpse, waiting for more movement. The Lazarus reflex, the final paroxysm of a dying body. Vasin had heard of it but never seen it for himself. Korin’s skin had turned papery and deathly pale.

Masha was the first to break the silence. Her voice was parched.

“Korin sacrificed himself. He’s the lamb. The sacrificial lamb.”

Vasin looked at Masha dumbly.

“Don’t you see? He offered himself. He was a believer in God. Don’t look so shocked.”

“Sacrificed himself, for what?”

“For us. For you. You heard what he said. ‘Take your son, your only son, and sacrifice him.’ ”

Vasin shook his head, but no coherent thoughts came into his brain.

“What are you saying?”

“We have to do what he said. He sacrificed his life, now we have to sacrifice his name.”

“How?”

Masha cleared her throat. Her voice became steadier as she spoke.

“We tell the truth. Korin poisoned Fedya. Korin forged the lab reports to make Petrov’s death look like suicide. And it was Korin who killed Axelrod. All that is true. Korin took his guilt upon himself. We can explain everything now.”

Abruptly, Adamov moved across the dais and sat down heavily on one of the operator’s chairs. It was if he had been folded up by some large invisible hand.

“Masha. We can explain everything, except why. Why did Korin kill Petrov? Or Axelrod?” Adamov reached into his tunic pocket and produced a papiros cigarette, lighting it with a slightly shaking hand. He spoke across the semidarkness to his wife as though they were alone. “Child — how can we possibly explain Korin’s motive? Without revealing the truth about why we made the changes to the device? And how do we explain how poor Korin ended up dead on the floor, shot through the heart with a kontora bullet? No, it ends here. Korin’s whole scheme? A desperate gamble. He thought he could protect the world from my bomb. To protect me. But he lost his gamble. We spilled the blood of young men in vain. There is no story to explain this.” Adamov gestured to the body on the floor. His voice had become a bleak whisper. “No. My love. We are lost. I am lost, at least. If Vasin agrees to protect you, Masha, you can still run. Save yourself. Tell them that you knew nothing….”

“Wait.”

Clarity came to Vasin like the shivering flush that follows the breaking of a fever. A recent memory had come looping vividly into his head with the force of a revelation. A cold night, creeping along the outside of Korin’s barrack. A glimpse of Masha through the papered-over window, huddled by a kitchen cupboard. The light of an electronic apparatus illuminating her face. And the thin, metallic voice carrying across the radio waves from distant capitalist lands, “This is the Voice of America….”

Finally Vasin’s reason had begun to make connections. His investigator’s mind began to fit the pieces together as he spoke.

“Korin was a spy.”

Adamov exhaled smoke contemptuously.

“Have you lost your mind, Chekist?”

“We have evidence. Material evidence. Korin had a hidden private shortwave radio set up in his hut. He listened to transmissions from America. ‘This is the Voice of America.’ Didn’t he, Masha?”

After a pause Maria nodded slowly.

“Masha? Have you gone mad?” Adamov flung his cigarette away in disgust. “Whatever this man has promised you, it’s all lies. Don’t repeat his fantasies. I know what these people will do.”

“No, husband. Vasin is right. Korin did have a radio. Here in Arzamas. He put it together himself. He used to listen to American programs. Sometimes he caught a Christian radio station run by some Russian émigrés from somewhere in Canada. Lots of different voices. All clamoring for his soul. Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Voice of Israel. Maybe he heard the voice of God there too. He taught me how to use it. I would listen to news programs. Sometimes. When he was away. But mostly because it was like listening to him.”

For the first time Vasin saw Adamov at a loss. The Professor rubbed a hand across his stubbly scalp.

“That fool,” the Professor said, almost to himself. “Saints and angels. Bloody fool.”

Vasin could see it now, the loose threads of the story tightening into stitches.

“Korin told me he worked with Americans, during the war. There was a pilot he was friendly with. Dan…Bilewsky. Bilewsky is the man who recruited him. Back in ’forty-two. He nursed his hatred for Soviet power through his years in the Gulag. And after he was pardoned for his crimes against the Party, he insinuated himself into the Motherland’s weapons program in order to betray it.”

A ragged sigh of disgust came from Adamov.

“Chekist, you know your job too well.”

“No, Comrade Professor. I know their minds well. It’s not about finding the truth, it’s about telling a story the people in power will believe. You will be questioned. You will say that you guessed at Korin’s secret religious sympathies. You will say that he often expressed anti-Soviet attitudes.”

“You want me to denounce him.”

“Yes. You will denounce a dead man. As he would have wanted you to. And the bomb, your version of the bomb, will drop on Monday morning without setting the whole damn world on fire.”

Adamov had recovered some of his icy spirit.

“And how does Korin’s holy radio explain…what we have here?”

“Korin knew Petrov liked foreign films, foreign literature. Decided that he would be susceptible to treachery. Korin tried to recruit Petrov. But he went too far. Every attempted recruitment is a calculated risk. Korin had to expose himself, reveal what he was. And when Petrov refused, he had to be dealt with.”

“So you will say that Korin the traitor murdered his young, brilliant colleague just to protect his own hide?”

“Exactly. Then he forged the record to make it look like Petrov committed suicide.”

“Quite the snake, this Korin of yours. And Axelrod?”

“Axelrod knew Petrov well. Very well.” Vasin shot a glance at Masha. “They were lovers, in fact. Axelrod suspected that his friend’s death was not suicide and came to me with his suspicions. But it was only when he and I checked the laboratory records together that we found Korin’s name on them.”

“And where does Sherlock Holmes come into this? I mean you, Major.”

Vasin ignored Adamov’s sarcasm.

“Korin was present at the dinner where Petrov was poisoned. I heard him listening to American radio. When I interviewed him in Olenya and here in Arzamas, he was defensive and told me many subversive stories against Soviet power.”

“Richard Jordan Gatling?” Masha piped up. “Marshal Zhukov’s nuclear test on our troops?”

“All that. Yes. I tell the kontora I had strong reasons to believe that Korin was a dangerous element. And then, when Axelrod and I found out about the forged records, I decided to bring this information to you, Professor. Privately. You were shocked. Korin was your old friend and colleague. You wished to hear this story from the mouth of his accuser. Axelrod. So you asked me to bring Axelrod here, to the Institute, tonight. And then you made a fatal mistake.”

“I told Korin?”

“Yes. You called Korin. No point in denying it. The kontora would have listened in to the call; it went through the central exchange. You could not credit what I told you. Your impulse was one of loyalty to an old comrade. You regret it now, of course. But you could not believe in the Colonel’s treachery. And Korin was such a very good liar, to survive all these years in the heart of our most secret city. Such a good liar that Korin persuaded you he would meet Axelrod down in the registry and ask to see the evidence in the files for himself. Korin promised to show the boy he was mistaken, then bring him up to your office. Where you were waiting. Where you are waiting still, right now.”

Vasin glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes had passed since he had shot Korin. In an hour the body would start to stiffen. They had to work fast. Adamov began to answer, but Vasin spoke over him.

“I went to Axelrod’s apartment, told him you wanted to speak to him. He was nervous. Axelrod and I arrived here in the basement, at the registry, as you requested. We found Korin waiting for us. Then what happened, happened. He enticed us into this laboratory. Knocked me out. Dragged Axelrod into the chamber. I recovered, and tried to switch off the machine. After a struggle, I shot him. Then I called my colleagues in the kontora. They informed you of the tragedy. You were the unwitting cause of Axelrod’s death. But no blame will attach to you.”

The light of another papiros illuminated Adamov’s drawn face as he dragged on it.

“No. I will not spin such lies about Korin. He did not live by lies, nor will I.”

The solidity of the story that Vasin had spun seemed to dissipate like Adamov’s cigarette smoke in the vastness of the hall. He saw only Adamov’s exhausted face, proud and resigned to its own destruction.

“Professor, you told me yourself. If we do not do this, you will be condemned. Removed. Your work will be undone. Petrov will have died in vain. Korin too. Without you, we are all doomed.”

Adamov sighed deeply and shook his head.

“RDS-220 is not an invention, it is a discovery. This is not a creation of any human mind, it is physical truth made real. I did not create it, I revealed it. We have discovered how to create a sun, right here on earth. It cannot be undiscovered. It will be taken to its conclusion. Not by me, but by others. I can change this one device. But I can no more stop the nuclear age than I can end fire, earthquakes, or the wind. Korin was wrong. There will always be a new Petrov, a man who sees the bomb as a path to worldly power. What they call the arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves. And they will very soon outrun us.”

A quiet followed Adamov’s words. It seemed that the whole dark world inside the Professor had collapsed into a silence so deep that all future words would die in it. Vasin could think of no argument to set against the Professor’s despair. To mention his own survival, Masha’s, seemed trivial compared to the void that Adamov had conjured.

Masha moved toward her husband.

“Yura.” She threaded her arm into his. “Free yourself from your cruel logic for a second. There is another logic.”

Adamov tried to push her away, but Masha only entwined herself more tightly.

“Remember what you said to me in Leningrad. When I was just a young scarecrow, and you an old goat? The goal of science is not universal truth. Instead, you said that the goal of science is the gradual removal of prejudices. A modest but relentless goal. You said that bit by bit, generation by generation, science frees men from their susperstitions. And as they lose their prejudices, men see that the human world is not the center of the cosmos. Remember?”

“I remember.” Adamov’s voice had softened. “I remember, Masha.”

“You said, the discovery that the earth revolves around the sun convinced men that the earth was not the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes showed them that disease was not a punishment from God. Evolution, which showed humans that they are not some separate and unique creation of God but an animal like the rest. Remember? You said that a lot. ‘We are all animals, like the rest.’ Not gods but walking apes.”

“Apes that are bent on killing each other, child. That’s the point. That is our nature. As we have discovered in this bloody century.”

“No. No, Yura. Our nature is to learn. To change. And you have spent your life creating a machine, your device, which shows men that they have finally the means in their hands to destroy themselves. Killing may be in our nature. Killing ourselves is not. It’s the opposite of nature. Remember what Korin used to say — about that American who invented the first bomb? Oppenheimer? His new promised land where weapons would become too terrible to use? So. You reached it. You brought us all to the border of this land. After your bomb, there will be no others. But only you can bring this story to an end. Don’t you see? Korin was right. Nothing can be allowed to stand in your way. Nobody. Not Petrov, not Axelrod. And Korin gave his own life for it. For you. The last blood to be spilled. Listen to Vasin. We must save ourselves. Save you. So that your precious bomb is finally tested. And then your work will be done.”

Masha ran her hand over her husband’s bowed head. Adamov said nothing.

“Maybe you will come to love me as much as you loved your bombs.”

Adamov looked slowly up at his wife.

“A clever one you are, Masha. Korin always said so.”

Adamov’s eyes moved from his wife’s face across the carnage around him. Korin’s powerful body crumpled beside the control panel. The barometric chamber with its empty window. The three spent cartridge cases glinting dully on the floor. Then he nodded, not meeting Vasin’s eye, and stood.

“Perhaps I will do as you say.”

Vasin ran through the plan that he had formulated in his mind, trying to find fault with it. He knew how the kontora functioned: the excitement over finding an apparently real American spy with an operating secret radio would eclipse any minor inconsistencies. He faced Adamov squarely, putting all hesitation from his mind.

“Go. Now. Professor, get to your office. Don’t let anyone see you going there. Take a back staircase. Call Axelrod’s home number. The call will be logged. You are anxious. Don’t leave until someone comes up and tells you what happened here. And when they talk to you, the men from the kontora, don’t play dumb. You are racked by guilt that you did not see Korin for what he was. Talk to them as you talked to me. Arrogantly. You are a cloud dweller. You are a man who holds the defense of the Motherland in his hands. You are above these sordid stories. Got it?”

Adamov nodded, straightening up. He smoothed his tunic, keeping his eyes on Vasin as he worked through the story in his head, like a long equation. After a few moments, he grunted, and continued with his train of thought. Eventually he nodded once again, more to himself than to Vasin.

“A fantastical story from a paranoid mind. But it will serve. For their paranoid little minds.”

Adamov’s old, imperturbable grandeur had begun to flow back into him. There was a plan to be followed. Steps to be taken. Order would be imposed once again on a world that had momentarily flown apart into a blizzard of disconnected fragments.

“Come, Maria.”

“Maria Vladimirovna will join you. You will wait together in your office. But go separately. Make sure nobody sees you on your way.”

Somewhere deep in the building a door slammed.

The three of them froze, brought abruptly back into the present danger. There was no further noise, only a suddenly oppressive sense of urgency.

“Professor, go. Masha, stay here for a moment.”

Adamov’s mouth gave the faintest twitch to hear Vasin address his wife so familiarly. He looked from her to Vasin and back again, but his proud face betrayed nothing. Adamov nodded formally to both of them and stalked out of the laboratory.

VII

Maria and Vasin listened to Adamov’s footsteps as they receded down the hallway. When the silence had closed about them once more, she turned to Vasin. Her face was spattered with Korin’s blood. Vasin fished for a handkerchief and passed it to her. It was warm from the heat of the gun in his pocket.

Masha leaned on the console, examined her reflection in the glass of the dials, and slowly wiped off the gore.

“Better?”

“Better.”

He put out his hand and covered hers. Masha’s knuckles lay under his palm like a small, trembling animal.

“You love him.”

Her face tightened into a small smile. She pulled her hand away.

“These scientists are hard to love. Every day they see perfection. And I was very imperfect.”

“Not as perfect as an equation?”

“Right.”

“Is anyone?”

She shrugged and raised her green eyes to Vasin’s, steady and appraising.

“And Fyodor? He didn’t compare you to the perfection of the universe?”

“Fyodor. He was a mistake.”

“Your imperfection.”

“My animal nature, Adamov would have said. But for a while I thought I loved him. Very much.”

“Adamov never knew?”

“I would have told him if I thought he would care.”

“Why wouldn’t he care?”

“That was a worldly matter. And he doesn’t like the world much. He loves his bombs more than any human being alive.”

“More than you?”

Masha gave a snort of impatience.

“You don’t understand him. Or me. He is the greatest man I have ever met. Or you have ever met, of that I’m certain. His mind — his mind is occupied with higher things. Beautiful things. Changeless things. That’s why I love him, if that’s what you’re asking. Adamov is a great man. He is my great man. You know the thieves’ code. Don’t be afraid. Don’t ask for anything. Don’t trust anyone. And don’t give up your own.”

“Bombs are higher things than people?”

“Vasin, spare me your philosophizing. Adamov might need higher motives for whatever he does. Korin too. All that endless talk about the end of war, forever. Those speeches he gave you, and me. I understand, they needed that philosophy in order not to have to murder the humanity in themselves every day. To justify their work to themselves. I just want Adamov alive. And myself alive. And you gave us that, tonight. Now. You almost took it away from us when you shot Korin. But then you gave it back. Nobody will ever know. But I will know.”

“Are you trying to thank me?”

“Yes. Yes, I am, Vasin. You’re brave. You make your own choices. Not many men I know can say that about themselves. Not even him.” Masha gestured to Korin’s corpse with a flick of her head. “Korin was a prisoner all his adult life. The knowledge in his head. In his hands. He never had a chance to choose another path. The State would never have let him.”

“So he served.”

“He served, and he’s serving still. Korin will take all the lies, all the murder onto himself from the grave. He’ll even serve you.”

“Me?”

“The great investigator uncovers a spy in Arzamas. Don’t say that won’t bring you glory, over at your kontora.”

“If you think…”

“No. I don’t think anything. You didn’t bring Axelrod here for glory. You did it because Korin asked you to. Because he and Adamov took you into their confidence. They spoke to you like an intelligent man. And you chose to hear them. And believe them. And act. That’s freedom, no?”

Vasin thought of the crushed heap of clothes in the chamber that had once been Axelrod, and said nothing.

“Listen to me, Vasin. All the rest…the glory? That’s just the world. The mad world. Korin always used to say that rewards and punishment are the same. A test of vanity. Or of strength. Sent by God. Crazy old bastard. So let’s say that Korin sent you a test. Luckily for you, God chose vanity.”

“If the kontora believes us.”

“If they believe you. You’re the one who’s going to be doing most of the talking, Comrade Major.”

Masha put her hand on Vasin’s arm. Slight and fragile as she was, she was now the strong one. The moment when he had cradled her limp body in his arms on the roof of the Kino seemed unimaginably distant.

“It’ll be okay, Vasin. I believe in you.”

Maria was about to walk out of his life. Their time was up. Mechanically, he raised his watch but could make no sense of the dial.

Vasin looked back at Masha’s face. Her gaze had sharpened, and he saw that her thoughts were already striding away from him into her own private future.

“I’m glad. Glad that we are guarded by honest men.”

Masha turned and walked out of the laboratory without looking back.

VIII

In the dim silence, Vasin listened to a dull magnetic buzz that hummed through the building. The gunsmoke had dispersed, leaving a sharp smell of cordite that mingled with the hall’s faint aroma of animal feces and engine oil. The pain in the back of his head, forgotten in the heat of the moment, returned with almost paralyzing force. He touched the rising swelling, sticky with blood. Good, he thought. Evidence. His blood would be on the fire axe too, and the floor. Nobody can hit himself on the back of the head.

Vasin settled himself on a stool beside Korin’s cooling body and tried to concentrate on the performance that lay ahead. A landscape of deceit spooled out before him like a film that he would have to edit, carefully splicing in his fictions to arrive at this final scene of destruction. The endless patterns of intrigue joined and re-formed in his mind’s eye until he lost the thread and pressed his fingers against his eyes. Absurdly, he thought of Kuznetsov, who had trusted Vasin’s word that he would not discharge his weapon. Another promise broken — not that it would matter if his story held together. But would Kuznetsov himself believe his fantastical story? Of all the kontora men in Arzamas, it was his handler’s ironic, skeptical glance that he could not quite imagine facing down as he spun his tale. But neither could Vasin imagine Kuznetsov suddenly discovering righteous indignation. He’d purse his lips, nod his beard in acknowledgment of the incomprehensible loops that life spun about him.

He thought of Masha, her physical presence, trotting up flights of stairs and peering around corners as she made her way through the deserted building to join her husband. And he thought of her words. You make your own choices, she had said. But Vasin could think of no point where he had been offered any real choice. Since he came to Arzamas he had been like a wanderer in a dream, pulling aside one curtain only to reveal another two steps behind it. And for all the secrets that he had uncovered, about Korin and Adamov in the Gulag, about Petrov and the bomb, about the forbidden loves of Masha and Axelrod, he nonetheless sensed endless acres of veiled, forbidden knowledge still surrounding him, stretching into darkness.

Vasin felt loneliness seating itself beside him like a companion who doesn’t need to speak. He would never see Masha again. The only person who had ever called him brave, or probably ever would. What had he wanted from her? To make her his mistress? To escape with her into a different future from the one that the world had prescribed for both of them? Now that she was gone, Vasin realized with a sharp pang that, yes, that was the secret his own heart had kept veiled, even from himself.

There had been a clarity to Masha, an animal single-mindedness that Vasin found obscurely shaming. Her childhood suffering, the violence that she had inflicted on others to survive, the ruthlessness with which she had used and deceived him in defense of her Adamov. Even the addled moment when she decided to destroy herself: all these were impulses of absolute, fearless resolution. Masha had been a mirror upon which Vasin’s life had been violently dissected. And he could find no absolutes to put opposite her own. His own life had been a series of useless efforts, each driven by the material dictates of the little world that surrounded him, or the pathetic impulses of his body. But Masha was the one who truly did not live by lies.

In a few minutes, from the moment that he picked up the telephone and invited the world to burst in on his silence, Vasin would be irretrievably plunged back into the tangled unhappiness of his own life. And he realized that perhaps unhappiness was the one state he truly deserved. He was not a cloud dweller, but a swamp dweller. There were no pure universes of numbers in his life, no eternal truths to discover. Just existence, with its daily compromises. But at least, here in Masha’s death-dealing city, he had touched a different world. A world from which Vasin had brought away a lie of his own, the falsehood of Korin’s espionage, to add to all the rest of the lies in the basements of the kontora. But this would be his lie. A good lie. And Vasin would share this secret with Masha, and with Adamov, and it would bind them together forever. A secret that he would know, and Masha would know, but that the kontora would never know. Which felt almost like a victory. And that gave him strength.

In front of Vasin was a telephone, its wire linked to other wires that spread across the secret city and out across the great Soviet empire like an infinite web. Vasin waited for another minute, feeling time run around him like a stream.

Then he picked up the receiver, and dialed.