Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 34

“Professor Barron, I’m obliged to inform you that the woman who invited you to visit is a dangerous criminal.” Sasha’s pronunciation was mediocre, but he spoke English precisely and literately, without mistakes.

Michael’s eyes popped and his jaw dropped.

“There’s an old joke,” Sasha went on. “A wealthy English family had a little boy who had never spoken and he was nearly five. His parents were very worried. They took the child to various doctors, but all in vain. Then one day at dinner the boy pushed his plate aside and said distinctly, ‘The steak is overcooked.’ ‘Johnny, darling!’ his parents exclaimed when they recovered from their shock. ‘Why didn’t you talk before?’ ‘Before this everything was fine,’ Johnny answered. So you see, Dr. Barron, before this everything was fine and I didn’t talk.”

“But what’s not fine now?” Michael asked, swallowing hard. “We’re not at the dinner table and there’s no steak. I’m trying to make a joke, but joking’s the last thing on my mind. Please explain what’s going on. And you can start with who you are.”

“I’m a first lieutenant in the Federal Security Service, and my name is Volkovets.”

“Sasha, could you explain, specifically, what is going on? Why is a Security Service agent driving me around Siberia?”

“Dr. Barron, do you know your classic Russian literature well?”

“Oh Lord, Sasha, I asked for specifically!” Michael groaned.

“Remember Gogol’s play The Inspector General? Well, you’ve been taken for someone else, too. The local mafia is following you very closely. And it’s getting dangerous. I think you should go back to Moscow today.”

“What do you mean Moscow? I still haven’t been to Khanty-Mansiysk and the surrounding villages. I haven’t done half of what I wanted to do. And Lena?”

“She’ll go, too. Right now we’ll stop by your room together so you can pack. Quickly. Then we’ll head straight to the airport in Tyumen. There’s a night flight and I want you on it.”

“Alone?”

“Why alone? With Lena.”

“And if I don’t agree?”

“You already have.” Sasha grinned. “You’re a sensible man and you don’t want to risk your life.”

“You’re right,” Michael sighed. “I don’t want to risk my life. But I have one condition. I won’t go without Lena.”

Nikolai Ievlev watched Sasha Volkovets’s Moskvich drive away and the dark brown Zhiguli take off after it.

That’s all right, the major mentally addressed the four goons in the Zhiguli. That’s all right, shitheads. We’ll cut you off at the intersection, and good. Unfortunately, not at the roots.

It had been dark for a while. There were only a few lights on in the gloomy five-story Veterans Home. Pale yellow patches of lights flickered randomly, falling on the black wall of the snow-drifted taiga.

The taiga came up very close to this side of the building, but they weren’t watching it from that direction. They should be waiting for Polyanskaya around here, in the tall, dense bushes that grew along the main drive. And they were. When the sound of the dark brown Zhiguli’s engine had died down, Ievlev picked up on a rustle, and the black mass of bushes stirred.

He glanced at his watch dial. In ten minutes, Polyanskaya would come out of the building and walk down this drive flanked by the black bushes. They might let her walk on a little bit, rather than attack right away. But there was another possibility. In their place he would have lost patience long ago.

Ievlev knew that very soon, a hundred meters from here, an army vehicle would stop. He listened to the roar of the infrequent cars going down the highway, trying to pick out the distinctive rumble of its engine. The SWAT team, five men from the local Security Service, were prepared to go into action at a moment’s notice. The faintest noise, let alone a gunshot, would be an automatic signal for them.

His old leather boots were soaked through with melting snow, and the cold had permeated his body. Ievlev was dying for a cigarette or a cup of steaming hot tea. He thought about the fact that the bad guys they caught wouldn’t talk or give up their boss for all the tea in China. Life’s worth more than any tea.

That’s the way it was always going to be. The foot soldiers would keep quiet and sweat it out in prisons all across the country. And the bosses would continue to rule their fiefdoms—large swaths of this enormous country, with its gold and oil, its poppy and flax fields, its crooks and prostitutes, its people’s artists and members of government—with an iron hand. That’s the way it was always going to be. Nothing was going to change just because he, Major Ievlev, was sitting here now, soaked through and shaking, on the outskirts of an ancient Siberian town, waiting—for either a stray bullet or pneumonia to strike him down. Even if he could get the thugs hiding across the way to talk, nothing was going to change.

A faint whistle came from the bushes opposite. In the distance, on the highway, the army vehicle’s motor quietly came to life. A long shadow dashed across the pale light of the streetlamp. The butt of a gun smashed into the major’s head from behind, sending him sprawling onto the crumbly snow. Ievlev managed to grab his adversary’s left wrist in a reflexive motion, and his right hand was fumbling at the safety of his pistol when there was a deafening explosion. A hundred meters away on the highway, something blazed up, for a long second lighting up the low sky over the pines and a corner of the five-story brick building.

For that brief instant Major Ievlev hesitated, and a blade struck his heart. The last thing he saw was a whitish, blurry patch of moon through a layer of night clouds and the black, gnarled branches of shrubbery.

“Thank you, Valentina Yurievna. It’s time for me to go,” Lena said, standing up and putting on her jacket.

“How can you go alone so late, child? I thought someone was picking you up.”

“I’ll be fine.” Lena smiled. “The bus runs until twelve. It’s only ten thirty now.”

There was a boom in the distance. For a second, the blackness out the window was lit by a pale light. The windows tinkled.

“Did you hear that, Lena dear? What is it?” the old woman asked, frightened.

“It sounded like an explosion.” Lena stopped by the door. “Yes, it sounded very much like an explosion.”

“It must be an accident on the highway. Do you want me to call someone to walk you to the bus?”

“Thank you. Please don’t bother anyone. I’ll get there myself.”

After saying good-bye to Valentina Yurievna, Lena went out into the empty hall. Now it all fits, she thought as she walked down the runner. For some reason what’s hardest to believe isn’t that Volkov raped and murdered those girls or that Regina Gradskaya unleashed this entire operation to erase any traces just for his sake. What’s hardest of all to believe is that Regina is Valentina Yurievna’s daughter. Her only daughter.

The floorboards under the thick runner creaked ever so slightly behind Lena. Before she could look around, something hard was resting between her shoulder blades. Even through her sweater and leather jacket, Lena could feel the distinct chill of a gun barrel.

“Don’t struggle or yell,” a man’s voice whispered in her ear. “Keep walking forward, calmly and slowly. Don’t do what I say, and I’ll shoot. That’s it. Good job. Now take your hands out of your pockets. Smart girl. Now down the stairs. Don’t look around.”

She went down, step by step. Her head was spinning, her mouth had dried up, and her legs were like cotton wool. One flight and then another. The guard should be there, by the entrance. But she wouldn’t be able to cry out. No, they were taking her to another exit, the service door most likely.

“Now to the right,” the man with the gun gave her a little push with the barrel into a blind, dark opening.

A second later, someone deftly twisted her arms behind her back, and Lena felt something cold and metal on her wrists. The handcuffs clicked.

A car was parked right by the service entrance. They shoved Lena into an enormous SUV, and she found herself in the back seat between two goons she couldn’t get a good look at in the dark. What she could tell was that there were five of them in all. When the car started up, one of the ones sitting next to her, with the deft movement of a magician, took a rag out of his pocket and blindfolded Lena, pulling a few strands of hair so it hurt.

“Could you be a little more careful?” Lena said. She didn’t recognize her own voice.

“Pardon me,” a goon apologized politely.

“You pulled my hair into the knot and it hurts,” she told him calmly. “What can I see in this darkness anyway?”

“If you’re going to run your mouth, we’ll knock you out!” one of her neighbors snapped.

But something came over Lena. For some reason, in this situation it was scarier not to talk than to talk. The sound of her own voice was soothing. Each time she heard it, it was like a confirmation that she was still alive.

“If you planned to knock me out, you’d have done it a long time ago,” she reasoned out loud. “But so far you’ve treated me politely. And I would be grateful if you would both tie that knot more carefully and let me smoke.”

“I like this one!” someone sitting up front said. “Listen, Turnip, retie that knot for her and give her a cigarette.”

The one they called Turnip fussed with the knot. A minute later she heard the click of a lighter. They brought a cigarette to Lena’s lips.

“Are we going far?” Lena asked.

“The more you know, the sooner you die,” came the answer from the front seat.

They drove for an hour and a half. That whole long way, not another word was spoken. They popped in a cassette, and a singer from a famous pop group started singing a sad song about prison and love.

If they’d wanted to kill me, Lena thought, they’d have done it right away. It’s probably a good thing they blindfolded me. That means I may still get out of this alive. They don’t blindfold dead men. Why bother, it’s not like he’s going to tell anyone if he sees something. No, these can’t be Gradskaya’s men. They would have killed me straightaway. She had one goal: to kill me, Lena reasoned. I wonder what blew up on the highway? And what became of Ievlev?

Finally the SUV stopped. Without removing the blindfold, they led Lena out of the car. The snow crunched under their boots.

“Don’t forget my purse, please,” she asked.

“Go on, go on,” they told her and gave her a light shove in the back, with a hand, not a gun barrel.

A weak light leaked through the blindfold. They led Lena out from the cold and into someplace warm, guiding her by the elbow. Only now did she feel how tired her arms were from being handcuffed behind her back. Her shoulders ached miserably. Even though the handcuffs were loose, the cold steel weight of them was repulsive.

“Take the handcuffs off,” she asked softly. “I won’t run away, and I’m not going to fight you.”

“You’ll manage,” they told her, and they stopped and pushed her roughly into an armchair. “Sit quietly.”

A minute later, the door slammed. Lena was left alone, God knows where, handcuffed and blindfolded. She tried to get more comfortable in the chair, but it was impossible. Her shoulders ached more and more, and her hands were numb.

She remembered how once, during the summer semester, she’d studied all night for an exam sitting by an open window in the kitchen that looked out on the Garden Ring Road. That night, right before dawn, was strangely tense and quiet. Suddenly, in that quiet, she heard a distinct tapping. Looking out, Lena saw a man walking down the deserted sidewalk right under her window.

He was walking very slowly, holding a slender cane and cautiously tapping the asphalt in front of him. It was a blind man, but he had clearly only gone blind recently. He was learning how to walk down the deserted streets in the night. Back then she suddenly felt vividly, to the point of horror, the black, desperate loneliness of blindness.

Many years had passed since then, but that lonely blind man on the nighttime Garden Ring was firmly etched in her memory. Now, as she sat blindfolded, her entire being felt the danger emanating from the world around her.

She didn’t know how much time had elapsed. She was hungry and her mouth had dried up. It was quiet. She’d thought there wasn’t anyone else in the building, but then she heard the click of a door lock. Then quick light steps. Someone was silently untying the knot at the nape of her neck. Carefully, trying not to pull her hair.

At first, Lena thought she really had gone blind. The light in the room wasn’t bright, but it killed her eyes. The pain lasted several minutes. Lena squinted and wished she could wipe her eyes, but her hands were still shackled behind her back.

When she was finally able to see she saw a tall, round-faced young woman dressed almost exactly like her, in jeans and a long, loose sweater. She was wearing woolen socks and men’s house slippers.

“Please, give me something to drink and take the handcuffs off,” Lena asked. “It’s not like I’m going to run away.”

The girl shook her head and pointed expressively to her ears.

Great, a deaf-mute, Lena thought sadly, and she finally looked around the room in which she’d probably spent a few hours.

The room was tiny and nearly empty. Besides the armchair Lena was sitting in, there was only an iron cot with a striped mattress and not a single window. A bare lightbulb in the low ceiling gave the room its only light.

Lena swallowed hard and jerked her shoulders. The young woman looked at her calmly and thoughtfully. She had clear blue eyes. She went out, locking the door behind her. Five minutes later, though, she returned with a glass of water, which she brought to Lena’s lips. It was slightly sour mineral water. Lena gulped it down. Putting the empty glass on the floor, the young woman took a small, flat key out of her jeans pocket, unlocked the handcuffs, removed them, and left. The lock clicked behind her. Lena was left all alone.

She stood up, kneading her numb hands, and walked around the room. The walls were covered in beige oil paint. Up near the ceiling, Lena noticed a tiny round window, more like an air vent. And there turned out to be one more door in the corner. Pushing it cautiously, Lena discovered a tiny toilet and sink. There was hot as well as cold running water.

That means I’m somewhere in town, she thought. But we left Tobolsk, and we couldn’t have gotten to Tyumen in an hour and a half. Actually, I could be anywhere at all. Mafiosi can put in plumbing and hot water anywhere they want if it suits their needs, even the desert or the remote taiga.

All she could do was wait and see what happened. Lena washed her face and hands with warm water, removed her jacket and boots, and lay down on the striped mattress. She looked at the yellowish ceiling, trying not to cry.

Michael shuddered at the first gunshots. Sasha pushed the car to its top speed. Behind them, at the intersection, a police car cut off the dark brown Zhiguli. Michael pulled a muscle in his neck turning to look out the back window into the darkness of the night highway. He saw gunfire, and bullets flashed in the gloom like trailing falling stars.

“Maybe we shouldn’t bother to stop by the hotel for our things,” he suggested. “I can see something very bad is going on.”

“There’s another car waiting at the hotel,” Sasha replied. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be okay.”

“Why did you leave Lena there? Why didn’t she come with us?”

“That was her decision.”

“But you knew everything. You should have insisted, taken her by force!” Michael wouldn’t calm down.

“It was her decision. She’s a grown woman.”

Somewhere in the distance, on the highway, there was an explosion.

“What is it?” Michael exhaled. “I think war’s broken out! You, Federal Security lieutenant, can you explain to me what’s going on?”

“No,” Sasha honestly admitted.

“Your calm astonishes me!”

“That’s part of the job.” Sasha shrugged and lit a cigarette in the closed car.

Three agents were waiting for them at the hotel. Sasha handed Michael over to them, and they escorted him to his room. It took him three minutes to pack his things. Their Mercedes rushed Michael to the Tyumen airport in two and a half hours. They encountered no pursuit or gunfire along the way.

The plane flew to Moscow through a starry, velvety night, above heavy March clouds, the immense, snow-drifted taiga, and icy Siberian rivers. Michael looked out the black porthole and saw his own blurred reflection. He was thinking about Lena and was worried. He’d realized long ago that asking questions was useless.

On the outskirts of Tobolsk, a hundred meters from the Veterans Home, the SWAT team was working under a searchlight and trying to figure out why, out of the blue, an old empty Volga had blown up on the shoulder of the highway, right in front of five Federal Security agents sitting in a vehicle very nearby. The explosion was powerful, deafening, but they still hadn’t found any victims.

Twenty meters from the Veterans Home front door, in the dense, high bushes by the main drive, they discovered the body of Major Ievlev.

Sasha Volkovets woke up the old woman, Gradskaya, and heard her report that Lena had left at about ten thirty, saying she’d take the bus back to the hotel.

Naturally, the guard at the door hadn’t seen a woman in black jeans and a brown leather jacket leave the building.

She’s got herself in a real mess, the first lieutenant said to himself, and he spat through his teeth at the hard, trampled snow.

When Curly got the call from Moscow and was told the “curious news,” he tensed more than he should have.

“For what it’s worth,” his old friend Regina Gradskaya told him after she’d laid out the story of the American psychology consultant from the CIA and the journalist accompanying him as his interpreter.

“Thanks, Regina.” Curly smiled into the phone. “I’ll definitely look into it. Valuable news. What’s it worth to you?”

As a sober man, Curly didn’t believe in altruism. His old friend had to have some personal interest.

“You take everything so literally!” Regina laughed. “What I meant was that the information is uncorroborated and possibly just hearsay.”

“Well, we’ll check that out. Anyway, what kinds of problems are you having?”

“Well, you see,” Regina said listlessly, “that female, Polyanskaya, is pretty darn curious. She sticks her nose in other people’s business. Like lots of journalists, she’s got a loose tongue and a raging imagination.”

“You mean you know her?”

“Not exactly, no. So far we haven’t been any serious problems with her. But I don’t like her. And traveling with a CIA consultant, I like her even less. So I thought I should warn you because we’re old friends.”

Curly had very serious organized crime connections in America, which is why he decided the CIA psychologist’s visit probably wasn’t hearsay. He’d come very close to getting nicked in Boston once, where he’d been stupid enough to show up in person for the opening of a small pharmaceutical company. He’d wanted to take a look at his latest acquisition—purchased through proxies, naturally. He’d managed to slip away, but he’d still gone into the CIA and FBI databases.

Curly tensed up. The first thing the curious journalist did was head to Malaya Proletarskaya to see Blindboy’s mother and aunt.

In and of itself, the fact that that punk had become one of Russia’s best and most expensive hitmen was insulting to Curly. A punk couldn’t, shouldn’t become anyone, let alone a killer. That broke the rules. But worst of all was the fact that Curly himself had paid twice for his services.

Blindboy was a true artist. He worked without a guard or armored car. He could kill anyone anywhere. But he only killed big shots, and only those he thought deserved to be killed. He never took a kopek in advance. He always took one shot, and only one, but it was accurate, deadly. No innocent bystander had ever died by his hand. After doing the job, he would disappear, vanish in a puff of smoke. It was as if a bullet had simply materialized out of thin air to shatter the skull of whoever he’d been ordered to kill.

Now Curly had to worry about a wily and uncatchable punk who knew too much, respected no one, and was capable of God knows what. That’s why the journalist who’d arrived with the CIA consultant and had talked with Blindboy’s mother for three hours had puzzled Curly in a bad way. Regina Gradskaya was right. The woman was too curious for her own good.

After that visit to Malaya Proletarskaya, the odd team consisting of a Federal Security agent, a CIA consultant, and the journalist had gone to Zagorinskaya, deep in the taiga, where just fifty kilometers from an Old Believers settlement was Curly’s personal oil field. And what, one asks, had taken them to Zagorinskaya specifically? No, his oil was perfectly legit. Well, almost perfectly. Even if Curly owned the well, the drilling was done by a state company that belonged to Curly, naturally, so they shouldn’t have gone there. There was no reason to.

In Tobolsk, for some reason, the journalist had visited the family of a cop who was killed a long time ago. Nothing connected that cop to Curly personally, but the visit wasn’t what it seemed. When it turned out that this unholy trinity was planning to go to the Veterans Home, the same one where an entire floor had been set aside for Curly’s senile father, the boss’s patience snapped. He had to stop them, and fast.

The old man detested his son, didn’t want to see him, and would always holler at Curly in his rattling little voice: “Thief! Murderer!” Curly hadn’t had any feelings for his father in a long time. He was just doing his duty. He’d placed his father in a good home, close by, in Tobolsk, and ensured his comfort and excellent care. Before, it wouldn’t have occurred to Curly to put a special guard on the Veterans Home. No one would ever dare stick his nose in there. What good was the old man to anyone?

But Curly had no doubt that the trio had gone to the Veterans Home specifically to see his father. Why they had done so, well, he no longer worried about that. Nothing in the world irritated him more than the unknown. Of course, it was too much trouble to nab them both, the journalist and the American. And better not to get mixed up with a foreigner anyway. He decided the journalist was more than enough. Let her explain it all!

He was able beforehand, through his people in Moscow, to get some information about this woman. The fact that she was also the wife of an Interior Ministry colonel didn’t dismay Curly one bit. On the contrary, that fact made taking her all the more appealing to him.

The gunmen sent to the Veterans Home kept in constant contact with him. At nine thirty they reported that the Federal Security agent had left with the American. He ordered them to put a small tail on him, but not to touch him, just to follow him. At first, all went well. He even regretted having employed so many people to deal with one woman. But it turned out he’d acted quite correctly.

Almost simultaneously, the group watching the highway discovered a Federal Security vehicle, and those waiting in the bushes by the building entrance noticed a stranger sitting in the bushes opposite them. He wasn’t answering nature’s call, that’s for sure. Later he turned out to be a Federal Security major. The gunman who offed him made sure to rifle through his pockets.

The situation was more complicated now. He had to think of something, and fast. And Curly did. He had an old Volga at the Veteran’s Home. It was hidden behind the trees, right by the shoulder—just in case. There were two guys sitting in it. They were the ones who’d noticed that damned military car. Curly ordered the boys to pull the Volga a little closer to the shoulder and blow it up right in front of the military car. At that moment, in the confusion, they’d be able to get the journalist out without extra fuss—assuming everything happened at the same time.

And it did. The boys played it out to a T, note for note. True, there was a little gunfire. A police patrol car cut off his tail on the American at an intersection.

“How many of our boys did they lay out on the highway?” Curly asked in alarm when he heard about the shooting, not directly but from one of his people, a former marine major who was acting as his private secretary—or else as his gray cardinal.

“None,” the former major replied cheerfully. “That Zhiguli has a good engine. The boys veered away when they were cut off and disappeared into the taiga. The cops were scared to even get close. They turned their lights on it, saw it was empty, and drove off.”

“And the injured man?”

“It’s all good. Khottabych’s already digging out the bullet.”

“Well, that’s great.” Curly nodded. “What about Moscow?”

“There’ll be a cassette tomorrow morning.”