by Robin White
Gemstones? Bezdomov moved the candle to read it better, when he heard the scream of jet engines growing louder, closer. The big shot, he thought. He waited for it to pass, but it didn’t. Instead, the sound grew to a piercing whine, then fell away to a whisper, right outside the factory wall.
He blew out the candle, stuffed the pouch into his belt, and ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. Eight risers. A landing. Eight more. At the next level, Bezdomov stopped and listened. Around him, the building echoed with the thump of filling steam pipes. Inside, his chest hammered, too.
There was a window up in the director’s old office. The glass hadn’t been washed in a decade, but it was clear enough to see the jet. A short, stubby plane with three engines in back was parked right below. A cargo ramp at the tail descended with the controlled grace of a ballerina flexing a leg, and then a man stomped down to the tarmac. He looked around, then motioned impatiently to someone inside. He had a shotgun over his shoulder.
Bezdomov reached down and touched the handle of the pelt knife he kept in his boot.
A second man emerged from the jet. He guided a large rolling cart down the ramp. Some kind of metal box was strapped down to it like a body going to an autopsy. It didn’t seem heavy, but the man moved it so slowly, so carefully, it might be filled with fresh eggs. Together, they rolled the cart toward Bezdomov’s building and disappeared beneath the canopy over the door.
He rushed to the stairs and heard the rasp of turning locks, the squeal of reluctant hinges, and a loud, booming voice.
“. . . boxes. One pebble and we could live like two pashas.”
“Or die like two idiots.”
“Don’t say you’ve never thought of it.”
“Slava, don’t even make jokes. You never know.”
“Relax. He’s not here.” The door slammed shut.
But Bezdomov was, not that he had a clue what they were talking about. Pebbles?
“It’s fucking cold in this tomb. What time is it?”
“What does it matter? He’s never late.”
Bezdomov eased back from the stairs, not even breathing. He’d wait them out. Whoever they were, whoever was coming, they would leave. There was no reason for them to stay.
Just then, a bleed valve popped open over the trapper’s head with a sharp, loud clack.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Wait here.” The stairs flashed bright with the beam of a powerful lantern. “Who’s up there?”
Bezdomov slipped the pelt knife from his boot. Run or fight? It seemed ridiculous to put a knife up against a shotgun. That left escape. There was another floor above, and a roof. But getting to them meant running in front of whoever it was with the . . .
“Who’s there?” the voice called again, louder now. The light shifted. He was coming up the steps.
Bezdomov retreated into the empty director’s office. There wasn’t even a desk to hide under. Jump out the window? He might be able to smash it with his knife, his fists, and run. The canopy would break his fall and from there it was a short drop to the ground. He thought of all the animals he’d trapped. Simple, tame pets who should have run when they saw the snare, but who let their hunger for fresh meat, their trust in the human race, lure them to their deaths.
Bezdomov had seen the paper pouch. It should have set off an alarm. He should have run back into his tunnel and sealed the blast doors. Instead, the lure of a safe warm haven for the winter had drawn him in. Not to a refuge, but a trap.
He flipped the pelt knife around and smashed it against the window. The entire pane jumped from its rotted molding and fell out. Bezdomov pulled himself into the eyeless opening. It seemed like a bigger drop than he’d imagined. He looked and thought once, again, and then it was too late. A beam of light caught him.
“Don’t turn. Don’t even fucking breathe. Get back down and drop what’s in your hand.”
He swayed, the decision to jump draining away second by second, muscle by muscle.
“Do as I say! Now!”
“Please,” he said, easing down from the open frame. “It’s a mistake. I thought the building was empty. I’ll go.”
“It’s a mistake, all right. Don’t make another. Drop the blade now.”
Bezdomov wasn’t brave. If he had been, he’d be living in a flat with people, not in a bomb shelter with dead dogs. His fist opened. The knife clattered to the floor. He heard the one with the shotgun approach from behind and kick the knife away. “I won’t cause you any trouble. Please. I used to work here.” He thought of the husky he’d trapped. Someone’s pet. Used to humans. Used to being taken care of. With his leg snared in Bezdomov’s wire, he’d looked up and wagged his tail. Didn’t he know? It mystified Bezdomov then. Now he understood.
The man with the gun snatched the wire snares from the trapper’s belt. “What the fuck are these?”
“For animals.”
A snort. “How did you get in?”
“I’ll show you. I didn’t mean to make things difficult.”
“Don’t worry. You won’t.”
From below “Anton?”
“It’s a squatter.” To Bezdomov he said, “Hands behind you.”
Bezdomov did as he was told and felt cold metal around his wrists. His snares! Of all the . . . A kick in the small of his back sent him sprawling. The shotgun barrel pressed against his neck.
Anton searched him. He found his old identity card. A piece of plastic with a picture, a job title. “Senior engineer, eh?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Fucking engineers. What’s this?” The paper pouch drew the gunman’s interest. “Where did you get it?”
“I saw it on the floor downstairs. When I first came in. I swear I won’t, I mean, I didn’t think it was . . .”
Anton tapped the back of his skull with the barrel. “You’re giving me a headache, Engineer.”
In the silence that followed, Bezdomov heard a second jet approaching. The sound of its engines swelled, then died. A few minutes later, he heard the door scrape open downstairs, low voices conferring, then someone called up, “What is it?”
Bezdomov listened. A different voice. Impatient and full of authority. And an accent. Who was it? A foreigner?
“A squatter. It’s under control,” Anton replied.
“Stay. I’m coming up.”
No wonder they turned on the airport lights. A foreigner meant that Bezdomov had stepped in really big shit.
“So,” said the foreigner. “Who is it?”
“He says he used to work here. He had a card and this.” His tone was deferential.
“Senior Engineer Bezdomov,” said the new voice. “What were you doing snooping? You left something in your desk drawer?”
“I wasn’t snooping,” said Bezdomov. “I was only looking for a place to sleep.” Whoever this foreign voice belonged to, he was clearly the nachelnik. The boss. His hopes rekindled. A Russian would kill him, but foreigners were different. Softer.
“The building is under new ownership.”
“I swear. If I had known I would never . . .”
“Where did you get the diamond pouch?”
“Diamonds?” said Bezdomov. “I don’t know anything about diamonds. Lenses, ray paths. Skins and snares. Just ask. But diamonds? Nothing. I was just . . .”
“How did you get in? The doors are all bolted and locked.”
“Don’t worry. No one has a key. There’s a tunnel. . . .” Bezdomov explained everything without omitting the smallest detail. When he was done, he said, “I don’t know anything and that’s the way it will stay. You can count on me.”
“He’s lying. Tomorrow everyone will hear,” said Anton.
“No! I’ll take your secret to the grave! Please! Life’s a kopeck here, but you’re not Russian, I can hear it. You’re not . . .”
“We’re all loaded up!” came the call from below.
“Well,” said the foreigner. “Now what?”
The
re was a long silence, then Anton said, “Throw him over the yard wire. Twenty thousand volts. People fry trying to steal copper cable all the time. No one will wonder.”
“Gentlemen, I’m looking for a solution. Not a light show.”
Bezdomov felt a surge of hope. “I knew you’d understand.”
“You’ve made an honest mistake, Senior Engineer Bezdomov,” said Eban Hock. “You were just looking for a warm place to rest? I think we can accommodate you.”
Chapter 12
The Eternal Ice
Like Rome, Irkutsk is a city of hills, though you can live here all your life and hardly notice them. But then Rome was never buried by an ice sheet nine kilometers thick. When the last glacier retreated, it left behind hills barely high enough to contain the swift Angara River. The hills of Irkutsk aren’t dramatic, but like the people who live among them, they’re survivors.
Cemeteries occupied the high ground. One was still called Jewish Hill, though it had been paved over in Soviet times and turned into an amusement park. To this day you can still walk twenty paces away from the big Ferris wheel at the top and be surrounded by old gnarled trees, mushrooms, and mossy headstones capped with pebbles.
The Orthodox Church fared better under the Soviets, and so the graveyard beside the Church of Our Savior remained sacred ground. It was here Nowek brought Volsky home.
It was a clear, bitter morning, the last Saturday of September. Last night’s snow dusted the hard ground. The winter sun was dazzling. A glittering “white frost” was in the air. The tiny crystals flashed with prismatic fire.
The Angara swept north through the city from nearby Lake Baikal. This morning it was covered in “water smoke”; thin fog spawned when cold water met even colder air. It made the gray river look like it was boiling.
The Church of Our Savior had three bell towers painted in bright green, fiery red, and rich gold. The nineteenth-century French aristocrat who proclaimed Irkutsk the Paris of Siberia described them as embroidered cantaloupes. To Nowek, they were colorless as a faded photograph, gray as the river.
He listened to sweet, resonant music rising from within the church. It was the “Canon for Repentance.” Nowek’s mother had insisted he attend the Polish Catholic church on Kirov Square. But then she found his father and a young voice student together, superimposed, on a couch. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the last. She left Irkutsk for Leningrad, and a few years later, Leningrad for a cancer ward.
Nowek stopped attending masses, but he still was drawn to the church by those deep, rich voices. If heaven existed, Nowek hoped his mother would be listening to music exactly like this.
“You’ll never find out who did it,” said Chuchin. He had Nowek’s suitcase resting against his leg. A fresh Prima dangled from his lips.
“Maybe.” Nowek was still wearing the clothes he’d changed into at the Lubyanka, though in deference to the cold Chuchin had come up with a proper winter hat of dark wool karakul.
“Even if they do you’ll never learn who ordered it.”
“Probably.”
“What’s amazing is that they let you leave Moscow.”
“Definitely.”
“Pah.” The Prima flared, glowed. The raw, unfiltered cigarette smelled even more toxic than usual.
Chuchin’s leather jacket was new, but the rest of his outfit was so old it seemed more like skin than clothes. An ancient gray wool hat, heavy felt welder’s pants, scuffed work boots. His face was weathered and lined, his fingers cured yellow with nicotine. He turned sixty this year and looked older. He wore cheap plastic sunglasses tinted absolute black. Chuchin had been a citizen of the gulag for twenty years, and two decades of felling trees and trekking across fields of blinding white snow had seared his eyes.
When he did take them off, a surprise: his eyes bore a distinct, Mongolian fold. Chuchin was Slav enough to let you know he was up to something, and Asian enough to keep you guessing what it was. He’d been Nowek’s official driver in Markovo. When Nowek lost his job as mayor, he’d followed him to Arkady Volsky, and to Irkutsk.
Chuchin said, “The militia came to your office yesterday.”
“What for?”
“What else? You. I said I was just a pensioner. I go where they tell me, I raise flags and sweep floors. What could I know?”
A lot. When it came to knowing things, Chuchin was an acknowledged master. He carried a map of the world in his head, remarkably wrong at the rim, dead right at the center. Still, Nowek doubted the local police had been convinced any more than he believed the Moscow militia had given up on rearresting him.
But the flags, thought Nowek. Volsky had insisted on flying two in front of his office. One, the white, blue, and red of Russia. The other, the Siberian flag, green below for the endless taiga, white above for the snow. “They took you at your word?”
“They’re militia,” said Chuchin, as though that should explain everything. “If they were smarter they’d be mafiya. Though they’re good enough at avoiding trouble when it bites them on the ass.”
“You’re worried about something, Chuchin?”
“You haven’t said why they let you go.”
“I’m innocent. How could they hold me?”
Chuchin peered at him from behind his dark lenses.
Nowek glanced back at the church and saw a young priest hurrying from the monastery. The black wings of the priest’s ryasa flapped in the wind. His beard was full and long.
The priest bustled up, waving impatiently to the driver sitting on his rusty bulldozer. It chuffed sooty exhaust, the dented blade rose. Lengths of chain dangled from it. They drew taut, and Volsky’s plain wood coffin, suspended on iron hooks, floated up from the back of an open truck, into the air.
“It’s good,” said Chuchin. “Just a simple machine made for work. He’d like that.” He saw Nowek looking back to the street. “You’re expecting someone?”
Nowek saw just the militia jeep and a dark Volga sedan. The governor of Irkutsk, the mayor, the head of the All-Siberian Reform Party, they all should be here. Volsky hadn’t just fought for them. He’d died for them. Where were they now? “They’ve forgotten him already.”
Chuchin shrugged. “They didn’t want to get close and risk catching the same disease.”
“He was murdered for speaking the truth. It’s not catching.”
Chuchin replied with a cloud of smoke.
The wind carried it to Nowek’s face. He waved it away. “There was a fire in the Lubyanka that smelled better than that.”
“Go back and breathe the KGB’s air then.”
“It’s the FSB now.”
“Different name,” Chuchin said with a snort. “Same smell.” He sucked it down to ash and ember, then flicked it away.
The young priest hurried over to them. He wasn’t dressed for the cold. Clearly, a very quick service was in the works. “The Metropolit sends his—”
“Choirboy,” Chuchin interrupted. “What’s the matter? He’s too busy praying with his mafiya friends this morning?”
Nowek glared Chuchin silent, then said to the priest, “Forgive my driver. He’s not himself. There’s no reason to wait.”
The priest waved to the bulldozer driver. The engine chugged. The treads slipped, then dug into the half-frozen earth. The bulldozer began to move.
Chuchin picked up Nowek’s bag. “So much for speaking the truth.”
“You have something against priests now?”
“I’m Russian,” said Chuchin. “I have something against everybody.”
They walked slowly behind the bulldozer, across a low shoulder of open ground dusted with gray snow. The ground was still bare beneath the trees. Ahead, the view opened to the Angara River. The river smoke was barely ten meters deep. The wind ripped holes in it, revealing plates of thin, new ice spinning north.
The bulldozer headed for a cluster of white birches and a mound of fresh, dark earth.
Chuchin said, “What will you do about Galena?”
>
“I told her to stay.”
“For once she’ll be happy to obey.” Chuchin took another drag, let it out, then said, “You know, just because they let you leave Moscow doesn’t mean they won’t throw you to the wolves later on. What did the militia want from you, anyway?”
“To send me back to Moscow.” He felt the cold of the frozen earth coming through the soles of his shoes. Siberia on the cusp of winter. He should be in boots, not shoes. “But they won’t. Not while I’m still needed.”
“For what? You don’t work for Volsky. Neither do I.”
“You can work for his replacement.”
“Never. I’d rather hang for being loyal than be rewarded as a weasel.” Then “Who will it be?”
“Why should you care? You’ll be hanging.”
“I still have standards.”
Nowek waved away the foul smoke. “Not many.”
“Smoking is cheaper than eating. So? Who is it?”
Nowek drew in a long breath, and let it out slowly. It was snatched from his lips by the brisk wind. “Me.”
Chuchin looked at Nowek long, hoping it was a joke, afraid it might not be. “You agreed?”
“I made a deal.”
“With the devil. Which one, Mister Mayor?”
“You saw the car parked behind the militia jeep?”
“Black Volga, killer plates from the Interior Ministry.” Killer plates put the occupants above local law. The term was quite literally true: a car with killer plates could run over a squad of grandmothers and drive away. “The engine is leaking oil badly.” Chuchin screwed up his face. He looked like he’d bitten into something sour. “I can’t believe you’re working for the KGB.”
“It’s FSB. He’s a lieutenant who works for a major named Levin. Levin is keeping the militia off me. I think I can trust him.”
Chuchin raised an eyebrow. “They say Siberian tigers are rare. You could put this Levin behind glass and charge admission.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s simple. Volsky is dead. You’re still breathing. Take his job and you take on his enemies.” Chuchin looked back at the Volga. “What does the KGB want?”
