The Ice Curtain

by Robin White

  “Over here,” the hostess said impatiently.

  A man in the uniform of the militia, a colonel, no less, was offering a toast. His arm was outstretched, a glass tumbler in his hand. Seated next to him was a man in a poorly cut business suit, his face already pink and rapt with interest as the militia officer spoke. A foreigner sat next to him. He wore a casual sport coat and no tie. What was it called? A blazer? The skin of his face was deeply tanned.

  Nowek walked over. The colonel sputtered on for a moment after he saw Nowek, then let his arm with its brimming glass of vodka slowly sink to the table.

  Nearer, Nowek could see around the decorative screen and into the partitioned space.

  A plate of pickles, onions, and carrots was on the table, flanked by more plates of cheese, salami, and bread. A silver bowl sparkled with the fat black marbles of expensive caviar. Two bottles of vodka stood guard beside it, along with pitchers of untouched fruit juice. And one more guest, a woman.

  It was Larisa Arkova.

  The world outside his window was pitch dark, but Levin was wide awake. He put the used syringe back on the table in time for the night nurse to find it. He listened as she made her final rounds. His ears were acutely tuned. Approaching feet, the slight rattle of a knob. The tiny squeak his door made just as it was opened.

  He closed his left eye and relaxed. The room light went on with a sharp snap. The night nurse didn’t bother checking Levin’s pulse. Apparently that was secondary. She tugged on the rubber restraints. Left arm, right. Both ankles. Soon the lights snapped off, the door shut. Levin opened his eye.

  The room was lit by a sliver of yellow light coming in beneath his door. He kept listening. There was a narrow window of opportunity between the night nurse’s last check and the arrival of the morning staff. When he heard the nurse shuffle by his room, when he heard her chair squeal as she settled back into it at her station at the end of the hall, he twisted his right arm, exposed the slipknot, threw off one restraint, another, and pushed himself up.

  His head swam. Levin fought it by staring at the bar of light beneath the door. His horizon. At first it tipped, tumbled. But then it steadied and stopped. Blood returned to his head.

  He could reach his ankles. He pulled loose the last two knots that kept him bound, then swung his legs out into space and felt for the floor. A toe. A foot. Both feet. He let his weight accumulate, gram by gram, until he was standing.

  The mirror drew him. It was three steps away. One step steadied by a hand on the bed, another by the sink beneath the mirror. In between, a bottomless black chasm to be crossed unaided, alone. One step. He took a deep breath and crossed it, proud as though he’d run a long race. There was a fluorescent tube above the mirror. He switched it on.

  His first thought wasn’t a thought, but a spasm. Someone else was in the room. Someone with half a face covered in bandage, tape and gauze, and the other half a bruised balloon ready to burst. Purple, red, gentian violet, ghastly white. A monster. But when Levin blinked, so did the monster. He tried to gently peel away the bandage over his right eye, but the gauze was stuck to something deep. When he pulled harder, flashes of jagged light stopped him, as though everything inside his head would come spilling out.

  He turned the light off and went to the window. Snow, glowing under streetlights. The sky the charcoal gray of old, cold ash. What were the chances of getting out dressed in a white sheet and bare feet, with a face like his?

  Levin went to the door and cracked it open.

  The hall was empty. Silent, except for the soft snores of the night nurse. Her head was on a crimson pillow she’d placed on top of the desk. Levin looked closer and saw the telephone.

  With one hand on the wall for balance, he started to walk. He stopped every few steps to listen. Only the hum of lights, the whirring of fans, soft snores. When he drew near, he saw the name tag on her white cap: L. Pavlova. Lydia? Lena? She was more the Ludmilla type, he decided. He could call Sherbakov’s voice mail at the office, and if he checked in, he could be warned. He reached for the telephone and . . .

  “Shto?” It came out in a sleepy slur.

  Levin froze. She swept a lock of hair off her cheek, briefly considered waking, shifted in her chair and pinned the coiled phone cord with her elbow.

  An elevator rumbled up from below. Air whistled out through the crack between the doors. It kept going. He waited until the snores returned. The phone was not going to help. He looked around for another, and saw the computer.

  He went around her desk. The screen was dark. He tried to see where it was connected, but where it was connected was hidden behind two ample thighs. He touched the keyboard.

  The screen snapped, buzzed, filling with bright blue clouds and symbols. Yellow file folders. Unknowable hieroglyphs, runes. Where was Sherbakov when he needed him? Sherbakov was probably saying the same thing of Levin.

  In one corner of the screen was something more recognizable: the time, the date. Wednesday. At least it’s still September. Then, in the opposite corner, another familiar symbol: a blue globe. Levin sent the cursor skittering to it. He placed it over the blue sphere and clicked.

  A cascade of fervent notes rose from somewhere beneath the desk. A connection was made. There was a new icon on the screen. Levin had used it only a few times before, but he knew it. Levin began to type.

  To: wizard-private@russiamail.com

  From: ivl-private@russiamail.com

  Levin knew Sherbakov checked his elektronka hourly. He’d be attached to it by an umbilicus if he could. He only hoped the security program, his KGB “virus,” kept the message he was about to send from being read by the wrong eyes.

  If you are still in Irkutsk, stay there. . . .

  When he was done, he moved the cursor over SEND, but then stopped. He went back to the box that sent a copy of the message to others, and began typing again:

  CC:
  It was more than he’d hoped for, and less than he’d wanted. But it was everything Levin could do. He heard the elevator rumble again. Air whistled through the shut doors, higher, higher, and then stopped.

  The doors opened.

  Two nurses. White uniforms, faces rumpled from rising too early. Hair pinned beneath white paper caps. They were almost to the desk before they saw him.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Call an orderly!”

  They didn’t need one, for when the nurses rushed him, Levin fell into their strong, snowy arms.

  Larisa Arkova whispered something to the foreigner, then stood, gathering her coat, smiling her apologies. “You’re early,” she said to Nowek. “We’re just finishing.”

  “Am I too early?”

  “Not at all,” said the foreigner in excellent Russian. “You’re just in time. By tradition, the second toast is in honor of the women at the table. The third can be for the new Siberian Delegate.” Navy blazer, blue oxford shirt, no tie. You didn’t have to hear his accent to know he wasn’t Russian.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have time for toasts,” Nowek said.

  “Delegate Volsky said almost the same thing.”

  The room seemed to narrow, to taper in on itself like one of those strange geometries with six dimensions, folded, convoluted, focused. Nowek stared. “Excuse me?”

  “I was in Moscow last Saturday. I was visiting a club called Ekipazh. I ran into your predecessor and invited him to join our table but, like you, he was too busy.”

  Nowek felt the chill of that night invade his bones again. The cold, and the fire, too. “Who are you?”

  The foreigner fingered a small business card from the inside pocket of his blazer and handed it to Nowek.

  Eban Hock

  Strategic Resources, Ltd.

  Lynnwood, Pretoria

  South Africa

  There was the silhouette of a horse on it. Or was it a chess piece? “What did you want to speak to him about?”

  “Business. The presidential representative for all of
Siberia is a man I need to know. I’m a konsultant abrazivanye.”

  A business consultant. “What sort of business did you have with Volsky?”

  “We really should be going,” said Larisa.

  “Why? The Delegate’s plane doesn’t leave until tomorrow.”

  Nowek thought that Mirny was like a cobweb. Touch it here, and it vibrated everywhere.

  She said, “We have a busy afternoon scheduled.”

  Hock wagged a finger at her. “I’ll be in Africa seeing your husband next week. He won’t approve, Larisa.”

  “It’s not for him to approve.” But Larisa sat back down.

  “Right.” Hock took a bottle of ice-frosted vodka and splashed a tumbler full. He offered it to Nowek. “It’s decided.”

  “It’s not,” said Nowek. “Miss Arkova is right. I have work to do, Mister Hock.”

  “You’re the first Russian I’ve met who wouldn’t mix drinking and working.”

  “You haven’t answered my question about Volsky.”

  Hock gave Nowek’s glass to the colonel. “I was in Moscow to meet with the chairman of the State Diamond Committee.”

  “Petrov.”

  “You know him?”

  “We never met. What about Volsky?”

  “He and Petrov had their heads together when I showed up. They were together only a short time when Petrov stormed out and said that Volsky had demanded money.”

  “For the miners.”

  “I wasn’t there. Come to think of it, neither were you. In any event, Petrov left in a big hurry. A few minutes later Volsky came out looking ready to break someone in half. He asked to borrow my cell phone. I invited him to sit down and talk. But like you, he was too busy. And now here you are.”

  “What brought you here, Mister Hock?”

  Hock sipped his vodka. “The same as anyone. Diamonds.”

  “You’re a buyer?”

  “When necessary. Generally, we’re paid with them. When a mine runs into trouble, there’s usually no money for consultants. But diamonds? Plenty of them.”

  “Kristall is in trouble?”

  The militia officer was about to interrupt, but Hock said, “No. He’s asking serious questions. We should give him serious answers.” He took another sip and said, “Some diamonds have gone missing. My client would like them found.”

  Four million carats? “You mean Chairman Petrov.”

  “Petrov?” Hock laughed. “He’s why they’ve gone missing. No. I’m working for Kristall.”

  He’s why they’ve gone missing? It was exactly what Nowek thought. Why did it leave him so uneasy to hear Hock say it? “You think they disappeared from Mirny?”

  “No doubt some did. Every mine in the world leaks. Diamonds are the most condensed form of wealth known to man, and who mines them? The poorest of the poor. Sierra Leone or Siberia. Poverty and wealth make a combustible mix.”

  “And you put out the fires.”

  “That’s a bit overstated. The diamond world is like a country. It has rules. We remind people what they are. Usually, that’s enough.”

  “And so you hunt down diamond smugglers if it isn’t?”

  “We’d rather enlist them.” Hock emptied his glass, then reached for a pickle and took a quick bite. “We buy what they sell at a very fair price. That way, they guard their own turf. They keep the ones you don’t know out of business so we don’t have to, plus the stones end up back in legitimate channels.”

  “Legitimate according to the cartel?”

  “What makes London happy makes everyone happy.”

  “So you’re working for the cartel, too.”

  “Yes and no. Do our interests overlap? Sure. But in a way, the cartel is also our main competition. Who needs us if the machinery is running smoothly?” said Hock. “Take Botswana. The whole bloody country is in the cartel’s pocket. The phones work. There are schools, hospitals. The streets are swept. It’s the Switzerland of Africa and I haven’t had a reason to go there in six, maybe seven, years. Then there’s Angola.” Hock shoveled up a pile of caviar with a toast point.

  “The Catoca Mine ships eight million dollars’ of rough a month only because we guard it. If we left, the rebels would overrun it in a day. The diamonds would go to the black market, prices would fall, and Larisa’s husband would end up with his hands chopped off. Chopping hands is the specialty in Angola. That and a charming custom they call spear sitting.”

  “Spear sitting?”

  “It happened to one of the UN’s boys. His name was Phillipe. The rebels caught him in the bush and tried to sell him back to us. Negotiations broke down while the UN decided what to do. The bandits got impatient. They decided to make an example of him.”

  “Eban . . .” said Larisa.

  “They stripped poor Phillipe naked and tied him to a wooden pole about eight feet high. Tied him to the very top. Did I say that they’d stuck a great long spear up Phillipe’s anus?”

  “Eban!”

  “No doubt he tried to hang on as long as he could, but his weight pulled him down. It took him all night to die. In the morning, the tip of that spear was poking right out his mouth.”

  “Stop it,” Larisa protested. “You’re disgusting.”

  Nowek thought, What’s the specialty in Mirny? Falling into machinery? “You’re here, so Russia must be more like Angola.”

  “Fewer generals. More politicians. They can be expensive, but at least you’re sitting at a table and not staring into a gun.”

  Politicians like Petrov? Or like Volsky? “You say you enlist smugglers. Who have you enlisted here?”

  The militia officer said, “That’s an outrageous . . .”

  “Simplification,” Hock finished. “Do we look for ways to cooperate? Of course we do.”

  “What happens if you find someone you can’t buy?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” said Hock.

  “Because it’s a secret?”

  “Because it’s never happened.”

  Chapter 21

  The Cleaner

  Outside the Hotel Zarnitsa the flurries had stopped, but the clouds had lowered. The horizon was soft and indistinct, with no division left between earth and sky. The air was heavy, windless, silent.

  Nowek saw a militia jeep parked on the sidewalk. On its roof, two orange lights flanked the customary blue. “I didn’t expect to be arrested until tomorrow,” he said.

  “Don’t worry.” She seemed to think Nowek was joking. “We’re just borrowing the jeep. In Mirny, everyone has two or three jobs. We maintain the militia’s vehicles. When we need transport, we call on them.”

  “Do you also have other jobs?”

  The driver leaned on the horn button.

  “We’ll talk on our way.”

  To where? Nowek looked inside the jeep and recognized the guard from the hotel lobby. He had both elbows propped on the steering wheel. His black jacket was unzipped. It fell open enough to see the leather straps of a holster sling.

  She opened the rear door for Nowek to get in.

  Nowek eased into the backseat of the jeep. He reached to close the thin door, expecting her to climb in front with the driver. But she didn’t.

  Instead she carefully stepped onto the running board, slightly unsteady in her heels, then, with knees together, swung herself in. She patted her skirt back down as she settled in next to Nowek. Her perfume was sweet, but there was another, deeper note to it, a richness Nowek couldn’t identify.

  Her face was bright with expectation. She said to the driver, “Okay.”

  The jeep lurched over the curb, out onto the empty street.

  “You asked about my other jobs,” she said. “Besides doing technical translations for the company, I teach English in the school. I take the children on ski outings in winter. Our slope is called Diamond Hill. You have a daughter but you don’t wear a wedding ring. You’re divorced?”

  “No. My wife died three . . . no, four years ago.”

  “From an illness?”<
br />
  “An airplane crash. They said it was because of bad weather, but it wasn’t. The pilot had his teenage son in the cockpit. The son wanted to fly. The father let him.” Nowek paused. “One hundred and sixty-four people were on board. Nina was one of them.”

  Larisa’s face seemed to deepen, become more serious. “How did you find out the truth?”

  “I looked for it. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”

  They turned off Bulvar Varvara onto Ulitsa Popugayeva, named for the woman who found that first Siberian diamond. The street was lined with almost identical eight-story apartment buildings, each precisely angled away from the street like a phalanx of concrete chevrons. They were decorated in an alternating color scheme of white and blue. The clumsy attempt to relieve the monotony only accentuated it.

  “There’s my building,” she said, pointing. “The first blue one. It’s not much but we’re comfortable.”

  “I thought your husband was in Angola.”

  “I live with my daughter. She’s six and hasn’t seen her father in years. Her name is Liza. She wants me to call her Britney. Can you imagine such a thing?”

  “My Galena wants me to call her Gail.” Bringing up Galena made Nowek feel anxious. It was too easy to open up to Larisa, but then, that’s probably why she had this job. “Does Hock come to Mirny often?”

  “Not often. He was here just nine days ago. We were all surprised to see him so soon.”

  “What is he doing here now?”

  “You’d have to ask. . . .”

  “Kirillin?”

  “Well, what should I say?”

  Nowek was leaving in the morning. She would stay behind. The answer was clear.

  They came to an intersection. They turned right, and soon the buildings stopped and a tall fence made of welded steel bars began. Behind it ranks of Belaz ore trucks moldered in various stages of decay. Graders, bulldozers, cement mixers parked in rows. Kristall’s motor pool, a gulag for dangerous machinery.

  “Technical information. Translation. Classes. Ski instructor. Mother,” said Nowek. “Your day sounds very full.”

  “In summer there’s berry picking. There’s a small garden plot that demands all my time. In spring, I strip birch bark for the vitamins. The bark makes a nutritional tea.”