Things couldn’t be stupider. Shershnev felt scammed. How had Grebenyuk put it? The adhesion was growing supernaturally. Or maybe the major hadn’t said it, Shershnev had thought it himself? Why was he here? They were being led around the woods by a forest spirit. It was rational to admit it. Impossible to ignore the facts.
But then Shershnev was lost. In his experience there wasn’t a single hint of a possible explanation.
All he could retrieve from his memory was the depressing astonishment with which he watched Charlie Chaplin movies as a child. Especially the one about the boxer. Shershnev had been in a boxing club, one run by the lightweight Sheredega, former army champion, winner of national prizes, and Shershnev was not one of his worst students. Sheredega later wrote a recommendation for admission to the special military school.
So when Shershnev watched the puny Chaplin mock his strong opponent, who should have destroyed him with the first punch, he helplessly made fists and regretted that he was not in the ring, for he would have shown him how it was done!
Shershnev could remember nothing more than this jester’s magic of slipping away, where the clown wins because all the twists and ducks are on his side, because the art of comedy is based on a continuous violation of the everyday, the usual, the correct. It was a parallel, but not an explanation.
The policemen who had shown them the way actually accompanied them to the memorial parking lot. They waved. But instead of leaving, they sat at a cafe table under an umbrella and ordered something from the waitress. They could see the entire parking lot from their seats. There was no place to hide, anyway, nothing but empty fields all around. Grebenyuk took out a pack of cigarettes, and they lit up, hoping that the police would have a cup of coffee and move on. But the waitress returned with a tray: two huge hamburgers and fries; big portions. She set down the plates and joined them at the table, smoking; she said something and they laughed—they could hear it, even though the wind was blowing in the other direction.
“This is going to take a while,” Grebenyuk said grimly.
The cops looked at them. The senior officer waved toward the gates—that’s where to go.
“Let’s go,” Shershnev commanded in a doomed voice. “The sooner we start, the sooner we’ll finish.”
So they wandered within the fortress walls, occasionally encountering other visitors. They wanted to sit in one place, but noticed the video cameras—who knew? Maybe they would send someone to see what was wrong.
Good thing we have no direct contact with the bosses, Shershnev thought. What would they report? How could they explain the delay? A museum visit? If this nonsense were revealed, they’d be thrown out of the department. They’d be lucky to keep their jobs. But that would be later. They’d be able to talk themselves out of it. Make up some story about car trouble, anything at all, the main thing was to break out of here, get back on the trail.
Shershnev was also worried about Grebenyuk. His partner was quiet. Probably planning his report, the bastard. He had to get the major on his side, get him to agree to any story he made up.
Shershnev could ask for help from the embassy resident spies. He could get money, satellite data, weapons. He was used to being a particle of state power. Now that power was being wasted, seeping into sand, and it was pointless calling for help—help against what? Against Charlie Chaplin? Mr. Bean?
He was suffocating. They had agreed to spend a half hour at the museum. Long enough for the cops to leave. It had been nineteen minutes.
Grebenyuk came around a corner, calm, collected. He stopped two steps away and looked at the ceiling, the simple, gray showerheads, high up out of reach. Shershnev realized that he was in a former gas chamber. There was the heavy steel door on wheels. He wanted to leave, but Grebenyuk carefully held him back with his hand on his chest.
“Listen, Lieutenant Colonel.”
Shershnev instinctively looked toward the door. Thank God, the cameras did not record sound. Basically, Grebenyuk was in his hands now. Breaking cover. If he reported that the major called him by rank in a public place, Grebenyuk would be arrested. Was he losing his mind?
But Grebenyuk looked perfectly fine, actually.
“Listen, Lieutenant Colonel,” he repeatedly softly. “This seems a good place for a quiet talk.”
Shershnev was taller, stronger. And he had had different training. He moved close and whispered an order.
“Shut it! Let’s go!”
“Hang on,” Grebenyuk said, raising his hands in a conciliatory manner. “We both feel that something’s wrong. I’m a technical man. We have strict rules. If things aren’t working, we have to find the reason.”
“That’s the point, you’re a techie,” Shershnev stressed the word. “But you’re talking nonsense.”
“Technology teaches you a lot of things,” Grebenyuk said. “Has it ever happened to you that the car won’t start, even though everything is fine? And then, it just starts? As if it had been waiting for something?”
Shershnev nodded reluctantly.
“That’s what I’m talking about.” Grebenyuk locked his fingers and then massaged them. “We like to say that if something that’s supposed to work doesn’t work, the reason is either at the entrance or the exit. I had this happen once. Came in to give advice. Two attempts, two failures. Detonators wouldn’t work. They had checked everything of course, and not like the usual slapdash. Well, I was sent in to check for sabotage. It was very strange. I checked—couldn’t have done it better myself. At the test site, it works. On location, it doesn’t. I thought and said: send in another team. The technology is fine. Something’s wrong with the man. They said: Is this official? I said: officially I will write that the technology is in order and the reason for failure is not clear. But you better send in new people. They did, and what do you think? It blew up perfectly. But the guy was still alive. His bodyguards covered him. He was alive. His bearded god was powerful.”
Grebenyuk looked away and chuckled.
“Six months later a conscript shot him. Eighteen years old. Wet behind the ears, just out of training. Couldn’t tell a rifle from his ass. The sergeants sent him into the woods for walnuts. The smarter privates buy them at the market and say they picked them. This brainless goof went into the woods. You know how these expeditions usually end.”
Shershnev knew. He’d seen videos that soldiers passed around on cassettes. Later they appeared on the Internet. He didn’t know that Grebenyuk had also been there, in the mountains, and now he felt a closeness to him, as if they had pledged friendship over drinks.
“So this guy should have been bumped off in front of a camera. Or sold into slavery. Who would pay the ransom for the conscript?” Grebenyuk stopped. “Instead, he killed three men with a single round. I don’t know how it happened, he said. He didn’t know who they were. He just shot because he was scared.”
“So you think it’s because of us?” Shershnev asked directly.
“Or him.” Grebenyuk pointed beyond the mountains. “Or us and him. Tell me,” Grebenyuk asked, “is there any special trail leading to you? You know what I mean?”
“There isn’t, major,” Shershnev responded firmly. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll take care of him.”
They went past the blocks and casemates, past the execution wall to the gates. Children in colorful jackets were coming in, a school excursion. Some gathered around their teacher, others talked, giggled, took selfies in front of the cells.
Shershnev remembered what he had read quickly. Trains from the West and trains to the East. Starvation. Crematoriums. The remains of thousands of prisoners thrown into the river.
He felt the double irrationality of what was happening, the way you sometimes see a double halo around the sun.
What was done here had been committed by villains he had dreamed of fighting when he was a kid.
But now, looking at the renovated wooden towers, the faded black-and-white faces in the photos—he couldn’t help remembering what he had seen him
self: the same watchtowers, crowded cells stuffed with prisoners, the same black-and-white, filthy, overgrown faces.
Shershnev knew that they had been doing something else there. Unpleasant but necessary. There the people behind the barbed wire were enemies, not victims.
But still, the visual resemblance was so painfully obvious that it pushed Shershnev up against the wall.
The children posting on Instagram merely doubled the degree of absurdity. They behaved as if the past could never touch them: not the distant past of this place, not Shershnev’s recent past. He wanted desperately to show them that their insouciance was in vain; to stun them, overwhelm them with a random, painful confession. Smear them in real dirt. But suddenly the teacher finished her explanation and noticed the two men. She regarded them calmly, and Shershnev sensed she was like a mother hen; everyone in the field of her vague vision was a child. She was tied to them. She loved them and knew something about them, carefree and laughing indecently in a place of death, that Shershnev would never know. Knew and would protect them. Marina used to look like that.
The policemen were gone from the parking lot. Grebenyuk pulled out onto the road. The clouds were thinning, and a pale light glowed above the hills, revealing the way.
CHAPTER 20
This was their third hour together.
The pastor spoke, Kalitin half listened, uttering banalities as needed. Travniček was blathering about some theological nonsense. He never did answer the question about what happened to his face. But Kalitin no longer cared.
The desire to mock the pastor was long gone. The acute fear, the euphoria of possible salvation, were replaced by a dreary, enervating, conscious horror.
That horror used to appear sometimes in the early years of his defection. Kalitin could not fall asleep, worried that there was no place on earth to hide. He would get in the car, drive down twisting forest roads, imagining a pack of hounds on his tracks. The horror weakened with time and then vanished. Kalitin thought he had been cured, had deceived his curse. He couldn’t understand why it had returned now, when he was so vulnerable. Where did that fateful precision come from?
“As a youth, I could not understand why God allows help for the unrighteous,” Travniček was saying, and Kalitin listened, hoping to lose himself in the flow of words. It was getting dark. In five hours or so he could go back to the house. Kalitin hoped they had not shown up yet. But as soon as he imagined the path, they appeared: hiding behind bushes and trees, waiting beyond the turn in the road. Gray, faceless.
“My father was a Nazi,” Travniček continued, and Kalitin nodded wearily. “Not a fellow traveler. A real Nazi. He was arrested after the war and quickly released. His friends helped. So he held on to his convictions until his death. When I told him I was going to be a priest, he replied: at least, you won’t marry a Jewess. The dean of this church,” Travniček gestured at the vaults, “also helped criminals.”
Kalitin was waiting for Travniček to say something about the house on the hill. He was ready to say he knew nothing about it.
Travniček sighed.
“You asked about my face,” he said, and Kalitin knew he was in for a piteous story of how God failed to heal his faithful servant yet also helps villains. The story was transparent and petty, and Kalitin felt a sense of relief.
“It’s a long story,” Travniček said. “I’ll just tell you the end, otherwise even the whole night wouldn’t be enough. As I told you, they watched me for a very long time.” Kalitin felt shivers from the way the priest said “they.”
“It all began because I let young people meet at the church, to talk. That’s when they started a case against me. They were in no hurry, they tried various methods. Essentially, over the years I got used to them. But then it all changed.”
Travniček took a long pause. Kalitin found himself listening attentively.
“A parishioner started recording my sermons,” he continued. “He didn’t tell me about it. He let his friends make copies. They passed them on to others. Suddenly those cassettes multiplied, distributed on their own. Like an epidemic. Like a fire. Both believers and nonbelievers listened to them. At home. In church groups. In clubs. The police found them in searches, customs officers—in packages and luggage. The recordings were sent over the Wall. They were broadcast on Western radio. Day after day. It was very strange hearing my voice on the radio. I didn’t understand. I was never a good orator. I just preached as usual. But apparently people heard something in them that I could not. The true Word of God.”
Travniček stroked his lips with his fingers.
“I was frightened,” he said softly and firmly. “Newspapers in the West began writing about me. Calling me a martyr. Even a ‘true saint.’” Travniček spoke the last words in a half whisper. “Blasphemy!”
Kalitin found he understood the pastor. He had been called the “hope of science” at a party meeting, appointed to honorable presidiums. He just waited for them to end so that he could get back to his lab. The horror was easing, as if the eccentric pastor’s story had chased away the killers’ wandering shadows.
“They, of course, got really worried. Decided that I was making the recordings. They called me in for a chat. I tried to explain that I had nothing to do with it. Of course, they didn’t believe me. Who would? It was essentially a miracle. A real miracle.”
Weakling, Kalitin thought with pleasure. A little pressure, and he gave in. Kalitin liked the idea that his own fear was much more justified.
“They came to the church,” Travniček said. “They wanted to find where I had the machinery. Which parishioners were helping. They couldn’t find a thing. Yet the recordings kept appearing. New ones. People were converting. Going to churches. Many people. Hundreds. Thousands.”
Kalitin sensed that this story would have a double bottom, that it was leading where he didn’t want to go—but the words had him in their power.
“They brought in experts,” Travniček said. “Scientists. The town had an institute where they developed audio equipment. Eavesdropping devices among them. They studied the tapes. Their suggestion was to get some agents in civilian clothes inside the church during the sermon. The agents had special whistles, almost beyond human hearing, that the tape would record. Their orders were to blow the whistles every thirty seconds. They intended to get the cassette with the sermon. By comparing the times and volume of the whistles, which would also be recorded, they would be able to determine who had a tape recorder and where. Their photographer took pictures from the choir balcony. I saw the photographs later. In them, the church was divided up by marker lines like a chessboard. The agents were numbered. An invisible net.”
Travniček looked around the church vault. Kalitin thought: that must be what the pastor meant when he spoke of creativity in the name of evil. Kalitin was amused once again: such big words for a banal case of acoustic surveillance, and not of the highest quality, incidentally! He automatically took the story as yet another puzzle and began thinking if there could be a chemical solution to the problem: radioactive markers, for example, or a marking spray. His normal thinking process reinvigorated him somewhat; he felt even more clearly that Travniček was playing a game with him.
“The scientists were sure they would succeed,” said the pastor. “However, it turned out that the whistles were not recorded on the cassette. The sermon was easy to hear. ‘The effect of church acoustics.’ That was the conclusion of the report.”
He must think that God had helped him, thought Kalitin. He liked his own skepticism; but he sensed that he was protecting himself, guarding against hearing faith through the words. For a moment he thought that the pastor and the killers were part of an absurd dream, a series of damned dreams that flowed into one another.
“So they changed tactics,” Travniček continued sadly. “I was living in the parish house. One morning someone was at the door. I thought it would be them. But it was a messenger from the bakery. He had brought twenty cakes. I thought it was a joke. I
had several friends quite capable of that. It was my address, my name, and the purchase was paid for. I gave the cakes to poor families. Happy that they would have a celebration. But then . . . ”
Travniček stopped talking.
Kalitin waited.
“The next morning they delivered rakes. Ten packs. I grew suspicious. I wanted to send them back, but the deliveryman was gone.” Travniček reached into his cassock and pulled out an old, worn notebook. “I always carry it with me. As a reminder.”
He leafed through the pages, pointing:
“Dog cages. Fish food. Bicycles. Pumps. Three loads of coal. Sneakers. Hair dye. Mattresses. Axes. Suspenders. Shoe polish. Tape recorders. Televisions. Washing machines. Basins. Hats. Picture frames. Needles. Nails. Tables. Umbrellas. Potted seedlings. Couches. Gas lawn mowers. Milking equipment. Ship models in bottles. Hay. Pots and pans.”
Kalitin felt the heavy weight of the listed objects.
Travniček continued. “No one would take the things back. The house turned into a warehouse. I couldn’t give it all away—what if someone demanded it be returned? The rumor was that I had lost my mind. Become a hoarder. But I continued giving my sermons. They made a radiant path through the madness.”
“Torture by abundance,” Kalitin said. He had never heard of it, but he believed it unequivocally.
“Yes,” Travniček said. “Then they started answering advertisements in my name. If something very large was for sale, for instance, a motorboat or grand piano. People would deliver the goods. Have arguments. One beat me up. I knew that they were doing it all. But it still seemed inexplicable, supernatural; who was I for them to expend so much effort, so much money?”
Kalitin imagined the fat, clumsy priest trying to explain things to the boat seller. It wasn’t funny.
“Thank you for listening so kindly,” Travniček said. “I think they had calculated very carefully. Anyone would break, think it was God’s will. God’s damnation. I wanted to run away. Drop everything and run.”
Kalitin shuddered.
Untraceable Page 17
