by Robin White
Nowek replayed the night again and again. The car, the struggle, one flash, another. Volsky had been alive after that first shot. Dying, he’d saved Nowek’s life.
Again.
In America, you can call someone you just met your friend. Friendship is harder to earn in Russia, but once kindled it burns for life. Volsky had always lived up to his end of the bargain. And Nowek?
Four years ago Nowek’s wife, Nina, was dead, and he might as well have been. He was numb with grief, sleepwalking, a zombie. He’d just been fired from his job as a petroleum geologist at the Samotlor fields. He’d caught it in the neck for daring to speak the truth about the potential for a catastrophic oil spill that happened just as he said it would. Being right had doomed him. Volsky invited him out to hunt eiders. In truth, he wanted to tempt Nowek back to the world of the living.
A fire crackling in the woods. A cold, still afternoon, the sun draining away low to the west, more glare than heat. The smell of snow in the air. A metal flask placed near the fire to keep the tea inside from freezing. It was silent, as only the northern taiga can be silent in the grip of deep cold. And then, the shot.
The dense air carried the shotgun blast up from the lake. It arrived like a slap. A minute later, Volsky clumped through a stand of frozen reeds, a gorgeous white eider in one hand, the shotgun broken over his shoulder. “This is what we can do to them.” He tossed the bird to the ground. His breath puffed white.
There was very little blood, just a pink fringe to the snowy white neck. The eider had been neatly decapitated. Nowek said, “Not bad.”
“Not bad?” Volsky pulled his own flask from inside his jacket and toed the eider with his boot. “It’s fucking perfect.”
Nowek looked at the bird. The long-tipped feathers were slowly opening like a fan. “That depends on what you were aiming at.”
“What I aim for, I hit.” He handed Nowek the bottle. His eyes had a calmness to them. “Let’s talk about you. The All-Siberian Reform Party is getting organized. We’re looking for candidates.” He leaned over. “Your name has come up for the position of mayor of Markovo. It’s an oil town. You have the necessary experience.”
“My experience was brief. They fired me.”
“People say you’re stubborn, that you don’t care if you make trouble, only whether something is right.”
Nowek unscrewed the top. He tipped it back and drank. Vodka. It was cold, then hot, then good. “Have you considered these might not be compliments?”
“They are to us. To me.”
Nowek drained the flask and turned it upside down. A crystal droplet appeared, hung, and fell. “You think they’ll let me just walk in and win an election?”
“No. We’ll fight and take it from them. I’ll watch your back,” said Volsky. “You watch mine. From now to the end. Wherever it leads. Do we have a deal?”
Volsky had lived up to his word, even as his life was draining away into the gutters. And what had Nowek done? He’d dawdled over a Dvo(breve)rák symphony.
He leaned against the cold prison wall. I’ll watch your back, you watch mine. Volsky had stood by him, even as he whispered something that made no sense: Idi . . . k’gorizontu . . . Idi . . .
A command: Go to the horizon. To take up Volsky’s cause? His life? Or did he mean the horizon that divided life and death? Maybe it was a place where all that was wrong in this world was made right, all that was crazy made sane. He thought of Galena. If he could send her a message now, what would he say? Stay. Become Gail. Live a normal life. Russia is a madhouse, a psychiatric ward run by the inmates.
Forget horizons. Nowek wasn’t going anywhere. He remembered Volsky’s visitka, his business card, the one with President Boris Yeltsin’s phone number. They’d taken it, but he’d memorized it. The code word, too. Use it if you get into trouble. Only, what would he say to Yeltsin tonight? I didn’t kill Volsky?
Nowek leaned back against the cement wall and felt it yield, felt it soften, felt it draw him in. Deeper, falling back through layer on layer. A buran, a blizzard, howled overhead as his arms closed around soft white pillows of new snow.
Chapter 6
. . . and Crime
It was the kind of morning that made Major Izrail Levin wish for a real snow. Not a “walking” snow, but a rushing snow, a rioting snow. A snow that buries things and keeps them safely buried. Instead, the bright morning sun had already melted most of last night’s flurry, and Moscow’s millions of ineptly tuned engines were fast turning what remained a sooty black.
A bus roared by, sending filthy water across Levin’s windshield. He cranked down his window and wiped the glass clear by hand. His 1986 Zhiguli was over a decade old and looked twice that. The little car lacked windshield wipers, its body was held together with rust, but its engine always sparked to life no matter what the Siberian winds threw at it, and it was completely self-insured; no car in Moscow dared to tangle with it.
Levin’s entire Investigations Directorate was supposed to be driving new Volvos. As government vehicles, they could be imported without the usual tax, which only made them more profitable to steal. It was a matter of market forces. Somewhere between Sweden and Moscow, the cars vanished without leaving so much as a spot of oil behind.
Market forces were in control of Russia now. Not ideology. Not the Kremlin. Not even Levin’s own Federal Security Bureau, successor to the once-feared KGB.
Of middling height and more than middling weight, Major Levin had the stout, pugnacious physique of a wrestler whose glory days had receded faster than his appetite. His dark blond hair was turning prematurely silver at the temples. He kept his mustache nicely trimmed. His eyes were as brown as olives.
Levin joined the FSB during a period of reform. That was one strike against him. He was a Jew, which counted for two more. Yet at thirty-three, he was a young, fast-rising officer. Why?
Market forces. In Russia, investigating corruption was a growth industry and Levin had a talent for it. He’d even earned minor fame, and an odd nickname.
Before the great ruble meltdown of 1998 annihilated them, storefront banks dotted Moscow like mushrooms after an autumn rain. Their lure was simple: you handed over all your money and they paid back enormous rates of interest, so long as ever-greater numbers of depositors agreed to hand over their money.
Friday’s interest payments came out of Thursday’s deposits, with the principal going straight to the bank’s branch office in Cyprus. A classic pyramid scheme, and Levin was assigned to investigate one with a peculiar name: the Eynabejan Bank.
It was the name that intrigued him. Vaguely Armenian, not quite Caucasian. Was it a village? A lake? It was a puzzle, and eventually he figured it out: Eynabejan was Najebanye backward: Russian for “Fuck You.” The baldness of it forced the FSB to act.
One week after Fuck You’s board of directors moved en masse to Cyprus, the bank was raided by troops wearing ski masks and carrying machine guns. The Fuck You Bank had left a few accounts behind and Levin stubbornly tracked them down. A few small depositors actually got some money back, and Levin became “Fuck You Levin,” a populist hero.
Levin passed the Old Arbat. It might be Sunday morning, but the daily coal miners’ rally was getting under way. They’d descended on Moscow from the catastrophically dreary coal cities of the Kuzbass. Their pockets were empty. They vowed to stay put until someone filled them. Levin thought they might as well leave now. The government’s pockets were empty, too.
He turned left and entered a maze of small streets whose general trend was in the direction of the Kremlin.
He checked the time. Almost eleven-twenty. Would the powerful chairman of the State Diamond Committee be punctual? An even more interesting question: Why send Levin out on a Sunday morning to interview him about a murder that should be in the hands of the militia, a murder with a suspect already in a cell?
The Zhiguli rattled by Manezh Plaza, the mayor’s new shopping mall where fat, balding thugs wearing leather by the meter para
ded with tall blondes wearing leather by the scrap. In other words, a New Russian sort of place. Here, just one block from Lenin’s Tomb, were stores with names like Eleganza, Prestige. Even Vendetta. The churches might be half-empty, but the shops were filled with customers anxious to buy something, anything, expensive.
There were times Levin missed the Communists.
Levin turned onto Elyenka Street and entered the heart of Moscow’s governmental district, all but abandoned for the weekend. The five-story buildings were painted in pastels and soot. The Kremlin walls loomed at the end. Snow still hid in their shadowed cornices.
He steered left onto Ulitsa Razina. The offices of GOKHRAN, the state repository for treasure, were out near the monument commemorating the Battle of Borodino. But beneath this street, buried under ten meters of concrete, reinforced with steel and stiffened with the bones of the men who dug it, was the treasure itself. Here, comfortably close to the Kremlin, safe behind steel doors proof against even a nuclear blast, was the complex of tunnels and vaults known as the Closet.
Built by the Tsars, expanded under the Soviets, the Closet was filled with gold bars, ingots of platinum, carved panels of solid amber, Fabergé eggs, looted art, and heaps of precious stones; a thieves’ cave scaled for an empire. Above it stood an ornate masonry building with walls the color of thin tomato soup, the headquarters to the State Diamond Committee.
The building also dated from Tsarist times. The keystones above the north-facing windows still showed the old double eagle. The tall arched panes on the second floor had been ruthlessly bricked over in the interests of security. Steel bars covered most of the main entrance as well as all the first-floor glass. The effect was an elegant old dowager held hostage, blindfolded and gagged.
The parking area in front was chained off. There was a red-striped kiosk for a guard, and a sign warning that deadly force was authorized. Levin pulled up to the chain, rolled down his window, and flashed his official identity card. It carried the red diagonal slash of the FSB. “Major Levin. Investigations Directorate. I’m here to meet Chairman Petrov. Where should I park?”
The guard palmed the ID and trudged back to his kiosk.
Levin straightened his blue tie in the cracked rearview mirror. With the gray suit and denim shirt, it gave him the raffish, mafiya look so fashionable in Moscow these days.
Levin had arrived in the first class of recruits following the collapse of the Soviet Union; a period known as the Bakatin Interregnum. Bakatin, the first post-Soviet head of the KGB, splintered the all-powerful security agency into five bite-size services, then handed over total authority to the President. He ordered probes into past misdeeds of the KGB, fired thousands of senior officers and even appointed a close friend of the dissident physicist Sakharov to head the Moscow office.
Those were times when anything seemed possible. Levin had seen the great grim statue of Feliks Derzhinsky, Iron Feliks, founder of the KGB, hauled away to a dump as crowds cheered. He’d stayed long enough to see it remounted in Gorky Park.
Bakatin was first absorbed, then expelled. His reforms followed the same ballistic arc. Levin’s Investigations Directorate was abolished, then reestablished. Now only the KGB’s name was new. Everything else about it had become, like the Tsarist double eagle, recycled, more familiar.
The guard returned and pointed. “Pull onto the sidewalk down the street and wait.”
Levin parked the Zhiguli with two wheels up on the curb. He had to slam the sprung door twice to keep it from falling open.
As he turned, a sapphire-blue Mercedes 600 series glided soundlessly up to the chain barrier. The guard all but genuflected to it as he rushed to pull the stanchions aside.
Levin walked over. Petrov’s driver got out. He wore a dark leather coat that came down to his knees. Levin had seen the likes of him in those ceramic figurines on sale in places like Manezh Plaza. They came in collectible sets: the miniskirted moll, the dark-suited biznisman, the leather-jacketed security bull. The vendors would arrange them in realistic tableaux, authentic right down to tiny cell phones glued to the ear.
The back door of the Mercedes swung open. Petrov unfolded his legs and got out. “You’re from Goloshev’s department?”
Levin nodded. “Major Izrail Levin.”
“Petrov. Chairman of the State Diamond Committee.” Petrov was dressed in a long tweed overcoat. Snowy white cuffs peeked from his wrists. A gold watch. Cuff links.
The businessman. The guard. Levin glanced into the glittering blue Mercedes. An incomplete set. Where’s the blonde?
Petrov said, “I assume it’s about Volsky. You know, I was with him moments before he was killed. The thief was caught?”
“What makes you think it was a robbery?”
Petrov gave him a long look, as though measuring Levin’s sanity. “Ekipazh is the best club in Moscow and every thief in the city knows it. Anyone associated with it becomes a natural target.”
“You weren’t.”
“And how would you know?” Petrov didn’t wait for an answer. “What exactly do you want from us, Major?”
“You met with Volsky last night. What was it about?”
“I’m chairman of the State Diamond Committee. We talked about diamonds. Is that why Goloshev sent you? Or do you have a personal interest?”
“Personal?”
“With a name like Levin you must have a relative in the jewelry trade.”
Levin’s family had been Russian for centuries, yet in his passport, under race, the word Jewish appeared. “My father worked at a submarine shipyard. My mother was a surveyor. My personal interest is in the murder of Delegate Volsky. You were one of the last people to see him alive. I have been assigned the case.”
“Another mystery. Why should the FSB investigate street crime?”
“The assassination of a high-ranking official is a matter for state security. Sometimes, things work as they should.”
Petrov caught the use of the word sometimes, and reevaluated Levin accordingly. “You know, I invited him to stay for dinner. It’s a tragedy he didn’t accept. Who knows what would have happened if he had?”
He would have died with an expensive stomach. “You set up this meeting at your club. Why not here at your office?”
“For Volsky’s sake. A person from the regions has no opportunity to experience a place like Ekipazh.”
“But is it as safe?”
“Ekipazh is like a diamond vault. No one enters without close screening. So far, the club has kept crime outside the gate. But for how long? It makes you think.”
“Which thoughts, Mister Chairman?”
“The usual ones. I left only moments before our dear Siberian friend. You say I wasn’t a target? Allow me to disagree. These days we’re all targets. How do you guard yourself from random violence? A bulletproof vest? They’ll poison you. An armored car? They’ll use rockets. You see what I mean?”
“The driver you assigned to the Siberian Delegate was ambushed and murdered. The killer took the car back through the gate and waited for Volsky. These are not random acts.”
“And Gavril was one of our best drivers, too.”
Petrov was odd, Ekipazh was a crime magnet, but also safe. Volsky’s murder was to be expected, but also random. Levin thought of him as an image seen through a pair of binoculars, coming in, then slipping out of, focus. “Who else knew of your meeting with Volsky?”
“We received notification of his arrival from the Presidential Administration, so naturally, they knew. My secretary assigned Volsky a car and driver and booked an appropriate room.”
At the Rossiya? “What was the purpose of the meeting?”
“I expected Volsky to make a report on conditions in the diamond zone,” said Petrov. “I was wrong. He was after money.”
“For the miners?”
“At first I thought so. But when he said money had to appear right then and there, I knew I was facing a more familiar problem.”
“Extortion.”
/> Petrov pointed his finger at Levin. “The exact word. Unless I paid him off, he threatened to sell Siberian rough diamonds without bothering to send any to Moscow.”
Could he do that? “And you refused.”
“Naturally. Volsky became quite crude. In his own words, he would tell Moscow to go fuck itself and he would keep the stones.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That Siberian diamonds are owned by Russia, not by Siberia and surely not by him. That their sale is a matter of interest in the very highest ranks of power. He became irrational. He grabbed my arm so hard I’m still wearing a bruise. I was an instant away from calling the guards, but I decided to simply leave him with a bottle of vodka. With Siberians, it usually works.”
“Could Volsky have carried out his threat to sell the diamonds?”
Now Petrov looked troubled. “We’ve worked shoulder to shoulder with Kristall ever since they took over the mines from the state. Not one pebble has ever gone astray. But I don’t need to tell you that times have changed. Volsky hinted at a ‘black’ connection in Mirny. Such a person could have had access to diamonds, so I had no choice but to take his threats seriously. My committee has authority over the diamond reserves. If there are problems, they’re my responsibility. That’s why I ordered an audit of our diamond stocks. The killer. You said he’s in custody?”
“The militia arrested Volsky’s assistant.” But Levin thought, Amazing. It usually took an act of God to force a bureaucrat into taking responsibility for anything. Petrov was volunteering.
“So.” Petrov’s cuff links glittered.
“Are you aware that Volsky made a phone call to the Kremlin a few moments before he was killed?”
Petrov’s expression shifted to something like interest. “What about?”
“He asked to have the diamond stockpile sealed and audited. He also asked for the files of a company licensed to import Russian diamonds. A company named Golden Autumn.”
