Red Mercury Blues

by Reggie Nadelson

  “Get some scales,” she ordered Kowalski.

  Valya continued slicing the salami with scientific precision. Kowalski found some rusty scales. She dropped pieces of salami on it.

  “Look. One hundred grams. Quarter of a pound to you. With this much red mercury, you can make a frightfully nice little device.” She put more salami on the rusty scales, then broke off a small piece of bread and added it with a little flourish. A quarter pound of salami sliced. A quarter pounder. Jesus, I thought. She talked about the stuff like it was pig meat.

  “Smuggling is nothing.” She popped the pieces of salami in her mouth and washed them down with vodka. “Like plutonium, red mercury is easy. Undetectable. Put it in a steel can in your handbag, walk through the Green Channel, you’re over the border. Nothing to declare!” She began taking things out of her bag and throwing them on the table. “You can fit scraps, samples, in a tennis ball, a glass rod, a cigarette pack, a jam jar.” She was enjoying her own performance. “If you can’t make a bomb, you can make a time bomb. I know a woman who poisoned her husband by putting uranium pellets behind the toilet. It took some years, but she said, ‘So what?’ I said to her, ‘Didn’t you poison yourself?’ She said, ‘It was worth it.’ ”

  Valya Golitzine finished her vodka. She was drunk. Kowalski sat sullenly in a corner rubbing his stump. He had been a good Party man and he disapproved of her laughter, but she was his superior and he waited for her to finish.

  A night watchman rapped on the door, then opened it, putting his head in. Valya greeted him, took a few notes from her purse and gave them to him. He tipped his cap, she offered him a slug of her vodka, he accepted, then waved and left.

  “With red mercury, finally we have the technology to make bombs the size of that salami that could destroy a whole city.” Sodden, she repeated herself. I let her ramble.

  “It was tested?”

  “A few times. In the north. We misled the outside world. In Minatom, in the Ministry of Defense, we lived in a closed state. We knew we could earn billions by exporting our special nuclear technology. Gorbachev knew. He wanted to use it to finance reforms. The documents were destroyed during the coup. Yeltsin knew. Here.” She threw more paper at me. It spilled out of her bag.

  “What does it sell for?”

  “Two hundred fifty thousand dollars for a kilo, maybe more. There were stories about corruption, about businessmen who stole it. Corruption is everywhere. Rumors. Nobody talks to the scientists. Nobody pays us.”

  I looked at the coffee can. “Who were the buyers?”

  “America, Britain, France, Germany, anyone working on nuclear or stealth technology. Israel, South Africa. Iraq, Saddam paid a million for a kilo of red mercury.”

  “How does it travel?”

  “Diplomatic freight. Zurich airport is a customs-free zone. Mexico has open borders with the US.”

  “Can I buy a sample? For testing?”

  She shook her head. “Too dangerous.”

  “Why should I believe any of this?”

  A few workers had begun to arrive for the early morning shift and Valya closed her coffee can full of tricks and put it in her bag. She snatched one last piece of paper from her bag and snapped it shut. It was a letter of transfer from an American company agreeing to broker red mercury at $290,000 per kilo. There was technical stuff about the use of the substance in aerospace, electrotechnology, its potential for polymers. Techie double talk, I thought. Then I looked at the signature. The letter had been sent by someone at a PO Box in Los Angeles with reference to Cosmos Auto Supply in Brooklyn. I had seen an identical letter in Johnny Farone’s hands.

  “You may believe me, or not, but it is true.” Valya wrapped herself in her shawls. “Please forget you have met with me.” She tossed the vodka bottle in a garbage can, bowed slightly and disappeared through the door, heels clicking on the linoleum floor, leaving me believing the nightmare, but without any proof.

  9

  The next morning, Gavin Crowe took me to buy red mercury samples from a woman named Tania in a flat above Ismailova Park. She wore a feathery pink angora bolero and little spike heels that went tippy tap on the marble floor and she held out her hand to be kissed and a box of Turkish delight. I knew it was risky getting into bed with Crowe, but he was sleazy enough to have the contacts. I took Eduard Skolnik with me. They had met. It was a small circle.

  “Gavin tells me you are looking for something? Sure, I can help,” she said. “Of course. No problem.”

  The sweet, powdery, pastel smell of the Turkish delight drenched the apartment and the particles of sugar seemed fixed in a suspension of sunlight. There was a wet bar in the middle of the apartment and a wall of ficus trees against a mural of minarets and belly dancers. Turkish music played from a stereo.

  A pudgy woman with bright eyes and a mole on her nose, Tania sat with the candy in her lap and her feet on a pink silk footstool. Tania smiled and put her arms around Crowe who snuggled up next to her, like a lapdog, on a pile of silk cushions. Tania was nice. Very relaxed, very pleasant. A servant brought a tray with arak and coffee and she poured it for all of us, then handed around a bowl of pistachios. In a corner sat a small man eating radishes, his semi-automatic on the table. He did not look at us.

  Crowe barely spoke to Skolnik who amused himself tossing pistachio shells into an old brass spittoon.

  “So, you would like to purchase red mercury. It is quite popular these days,” said Tania. There was no melodrama; I could have been buying toilet paper.

  “Purely theoretically. Purely from a journalistic viewpoint.”

  “Of course. Of course. How much would you like to have?”

  “What else can you get? If I wanted it. Say that I wanted something else, theoretically.”

  “Anything,” she said.

  “Plutonium?”

  “Sure.”

  “Cesium?”

  “Naturally.”

  “What else?”

  “Beryllium, lithium, uranium, enriched uranium, yellow cake, californium. Anything. Any compound. Whatever you like.”

  “It’s that easy?”

  “Sure. Sure.”

  “Hardware?”

  “Not my line, but I have good friends.”

  “For red mercury, how much?”

  She giggled. “For you, two fifty a kilo, or do you want a sample only?”

  “A sample.”

  Suddenly, Eduard smiled boyishly at Tania as if he had been through all this before. “Make us a deal, Tania darling. We’re the good guys.”

  She shrugged and ate candy. “OK, a hundred grams, ten thousand. Less is not worth it.”

  “You could make it travel?”

  “Of course, anywhere. Same as Federal Express. Perhaps we should use Federal Express. Or DHL.” She giggled impishly some more.

  “When can I have it?”

  “When you like.”

  “We’ll call,” Skolnik said.

  “I’ll have to get the money. I assume you want cash.”

  “Naturally. Come Monday,” she said.

  “We’ll call you,” Skolnik said to her.

  “Come Monday.” I knew we were small potatoes and Tania didn’t waste time.

  “I have to go. Svetlana is waiting for me.” I meant it as a taunt. For a second, Crowe’s face was crippled with hate.

  Tania offered her plump hand. Skolnik kissed it. She shook my hand. “I like Americans.”

  Crowe stayed behind. He didn’t like Skolnik and he barely looked up when we left.

  “Where will you get the money to buy this red mercury?” Svetlana asked when I met her at Gastronome No. 1.

  “It’s Yelisayev’s now, like it was before,” she said, waving at the shop and kissing me. Her arms were full of cheese and chocolates and coffee to take to Birdie in the evening. I followed her out of the store.

  “Maybe I can fake it.”

  “Please, Artyom, not with these people.”

  “Then I’ll find the mo
ney. I’ll get the money. Somehow.”

  “Should I get it for you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Shall I show you where I work? You asked me about Mr Brodsky, about Chaim Arnoldovich. Maybe I can show you something.” She stashed her purchases in her car.

  “Yes. Show me. I want to know.”

  She had on white jeans and a plain white T-shirt; a blue sweater tied around her shoulders. Her hair was slicked back behind her ears; it was like black gold, and her brown-green eyes like cat’s eyes. She was lightly tanned and the freckles on her arms were gold in the sunlight. A rich scent came off her skin as she reached across me and shut the door. I sniffed like a dog in heat.

  “What is it?”

  “What?”

  “The perfume.”

  “Joy. From Tolya.” She handed me an object wrapped in a little pink cotton kerchief. “A present.” It was a dark red pear.

  Inside the palatial old building on the outskirts of Moscow where she worked, Svetlana led me through the stacks of film cans, neatly arranged in row after row, thousands of silver rolls of film, some well known, some secret, some forgotten. It was going to crumble, Svetlana said as we wandered through the avenues of metal cans. “Film dies.”

  An old woman hurried towards us between the stacks, felt slippers sliding on the parquet floors. She opened her handbag and took out some veal sandwiches and handed them to Svetlana. Svetlana gave me one. We sat on the floor, our backs against the films, and ate. The sandwich tasted great because I was eating it with her.

  “The old woman says she is afraid for her job. The archive is being sold.”

  “Has anyone ever looked at all this stuff?”

  “I don’t think so. I want to show you something.” Leaning on my shoulder, she pulled herself up and took a large gray ledger from a shelf. “This is the log. You asked me to look for certain things and I checked the files, this log. People write down which films they have borrowed in it. Sometimes it is interesting to know who has looked at certain films.”

  “What did you find? You found something, didn’t you?”

  Svetlana crouched next to me. “Look at these entries.”

  During the last few months, Birdie Golden had been to the archive twice.

  “What did she want? What did she see?”

  “Come on. I’ll show you. I made a little compilation just for you.”

  In a small wood-paneled room, Svetlana threaded film into an old-fashioned editing machine. She turned off the lights and we sat together on a pair of hard chairs and watched the clips. I felt groggy. The film seemed to be from a string of dull documentaries made for Soviet television, about industry, the media, technology. There was ass-achingly dull narration in commie speak. There was nothing special. I yawned.

  Svetlana laughed. “You’re an impatient man. There. Look.”

  The film clips Svet had strung together had one thing that would interest Birdie: shots of Chaim Brodsky. Brodsky the visiting dignitary. Brodsky receiving flowers. Brodsky with Andropov, Gorbachev, Yeltsin. Brodsky in laboratories. Inspecting printing presses, shaking hands with workers and scientists.

  I thought of Birdie sitting alone in this musty archive, in the dark, watching him on the screen. “What do you think?”

  Svetlana said, “You tell me.”

  “She was in love with him once. I wish I thought this was an old lady’s obsession. I wish. She saw him a few months ago.”

  “Perhaps then she wanted to bone up, you know, be respectful of his work.”

  “Respectful? You don’t know my Aunt Birdie.”

  “Let’s go. Let’s go to Birdie’s now,” I said. We were in Svetlana’s tiny apartment and she was getting ready; for an hour I had sat looking at her in the bath. I felt married.

  I put on my jacket, took an old .45 automatic Tolya kept from his army days, inserted the clip loaded with hollow points into the magazine, and dropped the automatic into my raincoat pocket. I had been uneasy since we left the archive. Birdie’s phone was constantly busy when I tried it.

  Svetlana saw the gun. “So many guns. We have become like Americans,” she said. “It is a suit that does not entirely fit us well,” she added, smiling to take the edge off what she said.

  “Am I an American?”

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “Let’s go. You have everything?”

  When we got to Birdie’s building, it was almost dark. I could just make out her entrance. We went in.

  “I think the elevator’s broken,” she said.

  “We’ll walk up. OK?”

  In the hall, the lights were out. I had a penlight and we followed its beam as we climbed the stairs. I took Birdie’s presents from Svetlana; the bag was heavy.

  Going up, I saw the walls were covered in graffiti; the stink of piss was harsh.

  On Birdie’s floor, there were the usual sounds of a TV, of people shouting, fighting, babies yelling, a piano lesson. A metronome went tick tock tick tock. Water dripped.

  “I’m looking forward,” said Svetlana, smoothing her hair. “Do I look all right?”

  “Wonderful.” I kissed her and knocked on Birdie’s door. There was no answer. I rattled the knob. Still no sound.

  “Birdie?” I called.

  “Stay back,” I said to Svetlana as I slid a credit card in Birdie’s door and worked it back and forth; the door gave way. The doorknob came off in my hand. In the dark, someone ran down the stairs. My hands were sweating, I clutched the grips of the .45, my pulse raced in my ears.

  I reached for the light switch. Nothing happened. The fuse was blown. I flicked my penlight around. The place had been destroyed in a fury, crockery pulled off the shelf and smashed to pieces, glass panes in the bookcase smashed, shards of glass scattered on the floor, the books pulled out and ripped apart methodically, paper like snow on every surface. The shelves had been torn out, broken, slashed. I knew the notebooks were missing.

  Birdie was tossed on the bed. Ricky, I thought. Ricky all over again. I touched her neck; there was a pulse. The phone had been pulled out of the wall.

  “Get help. Get an ambulance,” I shouted to Svetlana.

  In the hall I could hear Svet pounding on doors, shouting, begging for help. No one came. From every side, there were faint noises, a whispering gallery of frightened people crouched behind locked doors, like rats or mice, waiting for the trouble, whatever kind it was, to go away.

  We wrapped Birdie in a blanket and carried her down the stairs, my legs aching. The Trabant was too small and I ran into the street and found a cab; the driver, head thrown back on the seat, snored peacefully.

  I grabbed his shoulder and pushed two twenties under his nose. He helped us get Birdie in. “Where to?” he said.

  “Do you know the Borodenko?” said Svetlana. The man nodded.

  To me she said, “Go. Take Birdie. Meet me at the Borodenko. I have a friend there.”

  Svetlana climbed in her car. In the back seat of the cab, I held Birdie and the driver put his foot flat on the pedal. He was a decent man. If you ever believed in the perfectibility of man in this fucked-up country, this was the kind of guy you had in mind: squat, solid, decent, quiet. An OKnik, Birdie used to call them. There weren’t a lot of them; that night we got lucky.

  Svetlana got to the hospital first. Her yellow car was parked outside the Borodenko, a green stucco building with creamy plaster, most of it eaten by acid and time and disrepair, decayed as if the architectural cake had gone stale and cracked up. Before the revolution, it had been a hostel for aristocratic young ladies.

  In the lobby, I stood helpless, holding Birdie, waiting for Svetlana. In the half-dark room the bulbs were all out. A couple of rows of patients sat smoking, drinking tea if they could hold a cup steady. Stray cats and dogs ran around on the marble floor that was awash with spilled tea, blood, mud.

  “Come.” Svetlana reappeared with a young doctor. “This is Viktor,” she said. “Come.”

  Viktor took Birdie
from me, and holding her, ran. We followed down corridors where rusting stretchers were strewn like the aftermath of a train wreck.

  Viktor disappeared. A few minutes later he was back. “I got her admitted. We’ll wait in my office. We will have to wait. She has had a stroke,” he said.

  The office was a desk in a large room where about a dozen doctors worked at shabby tables. There was one phone. Everywhere, drawers were dislodged and tossed on the floor, some crammed with tattered paper, some with bags of lunch. Smoking, Viktor perused an X-ray on a primitive lightbox. He had a desperate case, he said. He had to make a choice. There wasn’t enough medicine for everyone. “If you were in a burning building and you had only time to save one, would you take the cat or the Gauguin?” He said it with an expression of desperate irony.

  I could no longer slip back into this Russian way of talk. There was always talk. After a couple bottles of brandy, even that big oaf of an egomaniac who spoke five languages, a natural skeptic who had traveled, even bloody Tolya told me he considered writers more important than doctors.

  “You’re pretty cheerful about it,” I said, angry about Birdie, taking it all out on this young doctor.

  “What should I be?” He grinned ruefully. “If we only thought about the problems, we’d drop our arms to our sides and cry. Let me show you our work.”

  He led us to a ward with a dozen beds in it. In all of them were children.

  This girl had been operated on five times, Viktor said. That one, from Kazakhstan, was seven, with a tumor half the size of her head. A baby lay on her side, her young mother beside her, a pair of tiny red shoes under the crib. Viktor described their condition: one was going blind; another had a tumor that weighed a pound. The nurse flirted with Viktor who smiled back.

  “Viktor takes care of some children who were at Chernobyl,” Svetlana said.

  He said, “We do what we can, but the government does nothing. Nothing. Malformations, mutations, disease. It hit the children hardest.”

  For years, since Chernobyl, he said, he had lobbied the government for help. “I talk, I argue, it’s like gymnastics for the brain,” he said. He wrote to the Ministry of Health; nothing happened. Eventually, he and his colleagues went directly to the site to make their own study—how many malformations and mutations, how much disease.