The Ice Curtain

by Robin White

  “Volsky was going to Mirny. I’m going in his place.”

  “Alone?”

  “You want to come?”

  “I’ve seen snow, thank you. Why Mirny?”

  “Volsky was murdered over diamonds. Mirny is where they come from. I know Volsky was in touch with someone there. He called him his colleague. I’m going to find him.”

  “For the glory of the KGB?”

  “No,” said Nowek flatly. “For Volsky.”

  The bulldozer clanked to a stop, blade raised high. The two groundsmen swung the coffin around to line up with the rough hole. The priest began reading from a prayer book, his back to the wind and the water. He finished, then said, “Mir prachu tvayemu.” Peace upon your dust. He looked at Nowek and cleared his throat.

  Nowek walked to the front of the earth-moving machine and gripped one of the cold, rusty chains that held Volsky’s coffin.

  The open grave was lined with giant crystals of ice. Soft, feathery, white as eiderdown. Moisture had risen from the river, settled into the hole, and frozen where it touched the ground.

  Both ice and diamonds grew in response to changes in temperature. The slower the change, the larger the crystal. The process inside Volsky’s open grave had been slow. The crystals were extravagantly big. Nowek thought, Fifty, sixty carats at least. They looked terribly fragile. A warm breath would shatter them.

  “Arkasha,” he said softly, “I wasn’t going to say anything this morning. What for? Maybe it would have made no difference if we had been together. Maybe we’d both be dead. I don’t know. But now they’ve blessed your dust, so your soul is safe enough.”

  The young priest shivered and wrapped his ryasa around his shoulders against the biting chill.

  Nowek ignored him, and continued to speak softly, softly. “You once said we’d look out for each other. You kept your word. You also promised you would help the miners. Whatever it took.” The ground seemed to tilt. He grabbed the chain to steady himself. “I want you to know, I will keep your promise for you. Whatever it takes. And though it’s a little late, I’ll keep mine, too.” He looked up and nodded.

  With a clank of a clutch, the bulldozer blade began to drop.

  Nowek guided Volsky down, down, into the soft bed of crystals, down into the eternal ice. When the coffin bottomed, he unfastened the iron hooks and pulled the chains up hand over hand. They rattled against the coffin. His palms were rust red.

  “There aren’t many people in this world worthy of trust,” Nowek said as the distant voices from the church climbed higher into the air, then, from beneath the trembling alto came a low, powerful bass. The voice of the river.

  “Today there’s one less.”

  The first shower of dirt thundered against the wooden coffin. The next was softer. Nowek couldn’t hear the third at all.

  On the way back to the battered white Land Cruiser, Chuchin said, “So how soon do we have to leave?”

  Nowek took him by the shoulder. “The diamond company will send a plane to meet us tomorrow. Thank you, Chuchin.”

  “I’m not busy. What now?”

  “My apartment. I want to see my father.”

  The trauma surgeons at Moscow’s Municipal Hospital Number 31 were experts when it came to bullet wounds, picking bomb shrapnel, stitching knife slashes. When a businessman ended up on the wrong side of a deal and couldn’t afford the gleamingly expensive American Medical Center, Number 31 was where he would hope the ambulance drivers would go. Sometimes it was a matter of luck. Levin was lucky. Not once, but three times.

  He woke up on the street, covered in blood, cold, his body rigid, his face a shell, a mask. He forced himself to move. First an arm, then a leg. He pushed himself upright and felt cold air on the bare, raw skin of his back. He could see with only one eye. He didn’t know why, and that was luck paying its first call.

  If he’d known his right eye was attached only by a slender, violet thread of optic nerve, he might have given up, sat down, and quietly frozen to death. Instead, Levin found Sasha, carried him to the front door of his apartment building, and collapsed.

  Luck came again. A neighbor’s daughter had a fight with her boyfriend and returned home early. She found Levin clutching the broken body of a dying dog, screamed, ran upstairs, and called 02.

  An ambulance was dispatched. When it arrived, the medics took one look at Levin and decided it didn’t matter where they took him. But Levin was lucky one more time: someone followed the trail of blood back to the street, and there they found his wallet and, inside, his FSB identity card.

  That changed the equation slightly, but enough. Whether they were calling themselves KGB, FSB, or the Monks of the Holy Name, the organs of state security could make your life miserable. This FSB officer might die, but nobody was going to say they didn’t take him to the best trauma center in Moscow. And so the ambulance screamed off into the night, siren wailing, lights flashing, heading for Number 31.

  The duty surgeon was accustomed to Moscow’s nightly harvest of murder and mayhem. He coiled the optic nerve back into the bruised socket, casually pushed the eye in and stitched the torn flaps of muscle and skin closed.

  The nerve would either work or not. The eye would either stay put or not. And if the damage extended into the brain itself? Levin would never regain consciousness.

  But he did, and when he did, Levin found himself floating on a flat sea of white sheets. His face was hot and swollen. His left eye saw through a narrow slit. When he closed it the world went black. A steady drip of anesthetic left him feeling nothing, which just added to the confusion. He tried to reach up and touch his face, but his arm would only go so far.

  The memory of the attack was beyond recollection. All Levin knew was what he could see: a light fixture, a clock, a radio without a dial that played just one station, a green wall.

  Then a face.

  “He’s awake,” said General Goloshev. “He moved.”

  “He’s not really awake,” said a gaunt, sad-looking doctor.

  “I’m looking at his eye. It’s open. I say he’s awake.”

  “And I’m on the faculty of medicine at the Lomonosov Institute at Moscow State University. How about you?”

  General Goloshev loomed in Levin’s monocular view. “Levin?” The general leaned over close enough for Levin to smell his breath. It was sweet and minty. “He’ll remember nothing of this?”

  “If he does he won’t know what it means.”

  Levin blinked. Adding Goloshev to the scene didn’t help him identify it. He looked around the room, to see some clue, something, anything, familiar.

  “How long will he have to stay here?”

  “We should be able to move him to a recovery area tomorrow. Of course, hidden damage is a possibility. The eye is not far from the brain.”

  “He’s one of our top boys. We want him taken care of. Let him have all the rest he needs. What are you using?”

  “Scopolamine and opiates.”

  “It’s safe?”

  “There can be reactions.” The doctor placed a tray on the table beside Levin’s bed. It contained two syringes. “That’s why we keep Antilurium close by. It counteracts the sedatives.” He pointed to the other syringe. “We’ll know by Wednesday if he’ll recover.”

  “Whatever is required. Just take good care of him.”

  Levin thought, What day is it? He tried to move, to speak. It came out as a moan. But it brought the Toad back into view.

  “You see? They said you could be out for days. I said, Levin? Not a chance. You’re at Hospital Number 31. You have a concussion, some nasty cuts. Frankly speaking, your face has looked better. Scars give a man character. You’ll have to beat the girls off with a stick.”

  A stick! “My eye . . .”

  “You were robbed and beaten.”

  Stick. Beaten, yes. But robbed? Was that right? Levin fought to clear the mist, to see, to remember. An indistinct shape materialized, just out of reach.

  “Remember next
time to keep your pistol handy when you go out for an evening walk . . .”

  Sasha! The memory sharpened, slowly, emerging from the murk and the shock like a developing photograph.

  Hock . . . Kristall . . . Petrov . . . Images began to come at him faster, clearer, piercing the shock, the drugs. A face, no, two faces. The flow of memory rushed ahead, a river surging between narrowing cliffs.

  Stay away from the Closet!

  They didn’t want his money. They wanted him to stop his investigation. Petrov? Who else could it be? “What day . . . is today?”

  “Tuesday.”

  He took in a sharp breath. He was supposed to meet Sherbakov in Mirny . . . tomorrow? How was he going to do that?

  “The hooligans who attacked you. Can you describe them?”

  “Sherbakov . . .”

  “He’s already flown east.”

  “A man . . . South African . . . Hock . . .”

  “Relax, boychik. You’re the lucky one. If you knew what it was like where Sherbakov is going, you wouldn’t be anxious to follow. For now, rest. Everything is taken care of. You can sleep like a gopher.”

  Levin felt the bite of a needle.

  Stay away from the Closet!

  Goloshev leaned over and patted Levin’s arm. “We’ll get these two bastards. You rest. We need you back at work as soon as possible.” He winked, turned, and left.

  Levin’s tongue tasted swollen and metallic. The drug was rising, and he was falling. How could Goloshev get them if he didn’t know what they looked like? Levin had their faces memorized. He could picture them in detail. Their heights, weights, their nationalities . . . Nationalities?

  We don’t want your fucking kike money.

  They’d known he was Jewish. It was on his passport, but they never saw it. They might infer it from his name, but he was just a man out walking a dog. How could they know?

  Levin struggled to think clearly, precisely. Either they’d seen his personnel file at the FSB or were hired by someone who had. Who sent those two flatheads his way?

  “We’ll get these two bastards. . . .”

  Levin felt his face throb with each beat of his heart.

  And who told Goloshev there’d been two?

  Chapter 13

  The Violinist

  The militia jeep followed them onto BOUlevard Yuri Gagarin. Sherbakov’s ailing Volga struggled to keep station at the rear, its sick engine spewing blue smoke.

  Chuchin glanced into the rearview mirror. “Your FSB friend is having troubles.”

  “Slow down. I can’t afford to lose him,” said Nowek. “He’s the only thing keeping the militia away.”

  Chuchin slowed. All three vehicles rolled at a more majestic pace down the frost-heaved boulevard.

  They followed the river from the center of Irkutsk to the university district known as Akademgorodok, Academics’ City. The wide avenue named for the first cosmonaut to orbit the earth looked more like a relic from the eighteenth century than something from the age of space. The street had been abandoned to the elements. Now it was an obstacle course of potholes.

  The deepest had been filled with straw and water, then allowed to freeze over. It worked until the temperature really dropped, and then, when the ice expanded, so did the hole.

  Chuchin carefully steered the white Toyota Land Cruiser around the worst of them. He was a master when it came to scrounging for parts. He’d grafted Russian headlights, wipers, and wheels onto the sturdy Japanese car, but replacing something major? Out of the question.

  Nowek had received the car as a gift back when he was still mayor of Markovo. A group of Japanese businessmen wanted his permission to log the taiga around the city. They’d done business in Russia before. They knew a facilitating payment was expected. What happened was not.

  Nowek accepted the car and denied their request. Back then only the mafiya drove nicer vehicles. Now, after two years of Siberian roads and Chuchin’s surgeries, Nowek’s Land Cruiser looked like the survivor of a great tank battle fought in mud.

  They passed streets named for Lenin, for Marx, even for Derzhinsky, the founder of the KGB. In Moscow, the old names had been erased. They persisted in Irkutsk, though whether out of nostalgia or indifference was difficult to say.

  The ten-story apartment towers of Academics’ City rose in orderly chevrons from the river embankment to the top of a hill. The old steam ferry Baikal was moored where the buildings met the river. The ship, built in Britain, disassembled and hauled across two continents by rail, was wreathed in river smoke. The mist swirled around its single black smokestack as though ghostly stokers were shoveling soft coal into its great, silent boiler.

  Chuchin pulled into the drive that led to Nowek’s building. “When do you want me to come back?”

  “An hour will be more than enough,” said Nowek as he opened the door and grabbed his bag. He walked up the cracked concrete stairs, through the glass door and into the cold lobby.

  What was the old joke about the drunk who fell asleep on a train? He woke up in a different Siberian city, but emerged onto the same Square of the Soviets, walked down the same Lenin Street, up to an identical building on Marx Prospekt, climbed a matching set of filthy stairs to a floor he knew by heart, and only discovered something amiss when his key didn’t fit?

  Nowek paused and turned. The militia jeep was parked on the street. As Nowek watched, the Volga appeared.

  All was right in the universe.

  The flat was on the sixth floor. He ignored the elevator. The stairs might be reliably grim, but they were also grimly reliable. It was cold enough for Nowek to see his warm breath rising in a thick cloud. Soon long daggers of ice would hang from the walls, the ceilings, like dripstone in some underground cavern.

  He came to the sixth-floor landing. The metal door that opened onto the hallway was streaked with ribbons of dark rust. As he pulled the handle, he heard a shout, punctuated by the bang of a door slammed hard.

  Nowek opened the door and came face-to-face with a young woman, a girl, hardly older than Galena. Jeans, boots with fashionably thick heels, a tight red turtleneck that was nothing if not an invitation to admire. She had short, wheat-yellow hair. The sweater’s neck gaped to one side, pulled out of shape.

  “Paulina?”

  “He’s an animal! Look what he did!” She grabbed the neck of her sweater. “It’s ruined! Who will pay for another? Him? You?”

  “What happened?” Though he could guess.

  “He said it was time to take his medicine. I knew it’s really just vodka, but I played along. I was pouring him a glass and he grabbed me like a snake. You said he was blind!”

  It wouldn’t help to tell her he was only nearly blind. “I’m sorry about the sweater. He’s old and he doesn’t know what he’s—”

  “Oh, he knows what he’s doing. At least, he knows what he’d like to be doing. Go to the Intourist Hotel and hire a professional.”

  “Paulina, let’s—”

  “You don’t even have to pay me. I wouldn’t touch the money.” With that she pushed by him.

  Nowek listened to the angry stomp of her boots as she fled downstairs. Paulina had been the fourth girl Nowek had hired to care for his father. She’d lasted longer than the first, shorter than the last. He walked to his apartment and stopped, listening.

  Sweet violin music came from inside, the notes soft and rich as old wine. He recognized a Khachaturian “Nocturne,” a duet for violin and piano. The playing was so full, so devastatingly elegant you’d never know the piano was missing.

  A mystery. How could those stiff, arthritic fingers summon a universe from just a faint constellation of notes? Two mysteries: What would the crippled seventy-six-year-old have done if he’d actually caught Paulina?

  He went in.

  Tadeus was a commanding figure with a violin tucked under his cheek and a bow flowing gracefully back and forth across bright strings. Music charged the air like ozone. The instrument fell lightly into perfect position,
his head just so. His expression was one of complete confidence and control. The tiny room vanished, and Nowek’s father was in front of an orchestra in a hall packed with people holding their breath, waiting for the final note.

  The “Nocturne” was short. The final note rose to a musical question, then fell away to answer it with silence.

  When he stopped and turned his thick lenses in Nowek’s direction, Tadeus underwent a second transformation: to a tired old man in an overheated room.

  “Welcome home, Gregori.” He put the old violin down. He felt along the tabletop for a brimming glass. Medicinal herbs tinted the liquid a dubious green.

  “Hello, father,” said Nowek. He carefully closed the door behind him. It wouldn’t latch. “I didn’t realize you heard me.”

  “Your disapproval was deafening.”

  “You’re wrong. I was admiring the piece.”

  Tadeus had a full head of snow-white hair. His face was bright pink, especially after a drink. His eyes were magnified behind thick, useless glasses. He wore a white shirt buttoned all the way to his neck, a woolen vest, and old black pants faded to eggplant. He wore slippers. “That’s all you can say?”

  “I just came from a funeral. It’s the best I can do.”

  “You’ll get used to them.” Then “Whose?”

  “Arkady Volsky died.”

  “Your boss?”

  “My friend.” Nowek tossed his suitcase to the couch. What would he need for Mirny? Coat. Sweater. Boots. Everything.

  “Dead friends,” said Tadeus. “It’s nothing new. There was a time when you didn’t dare to make a friend. You never knew who would be around one day to the next.”

  “The war?”

  “Stalin. That student you hired. What was her name?”

  “Paulina.”

  “She has a very sweet voice.”

  “Not when I heard it.”

  “Well.” He turned to face Nowek in that disquieting, upturned way of the blind. “And how was Moscow?”

  “I didn’t bring the Dvo(breve)rák.”

  “Didn’t, or couldn’t?”

  “Both.” He cracked open the suitcase, pulled the bloodstained clothes out and tossed them into the sink. He ran cold water on them. The colors began to swirl in maroons and reds.