Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

  “But they knew that,” Travniček said. “Next, they delivered chickens. Cages of chickens. They were left at the doorstep, and I couldn’t leave them to die. There was chicken feed among earlier shipments. Then they sent tropical fish in tanks. Parrots. White lab mice.”

  Kalitin fell back into the past. White mice—so many had died on the Island, dozens, hundreds of thousands, no one kept count, they incinerated the bodies and that was it.

  Travniček’s artless tale induced a strange stupor. His vision became multidimensional, he could see the killers’ gray shadows in the distance, himself surrounded by church walls, and the past affairs of the Island.

  “They kept dying anyway. I couldn’t take care of them all,” Travniček said bitterly. “Dying. I could find homes for the fish, chickens, and parrots. But hundreds of mice? So when they sent me dummies instead of animals, I was pleased. They didn’t need to be fed.”

  “Dummies?” Kalitin echoed.

  “Yes, dummies,” Travniček confirmed. “Plastic. The kind in store windows. Naked. Female.”

  Kalitin thought of what he never thought about, what he had left back on the Island. Dummies.

  If he could, he would have run out of the church. But the killers’ shadows were waiting for him. And here the clever priest was mocking him. Dummies. Zakharyevsky once said: officially there aren’t any here and never were. Aren’t and never were, Kalitin repeated. Aren’t and never were.

  “They were stacked up,” Travniček continued. “Pink. It had started snowing in the morning. They had eyes. Plastic blue eyes with lashes.”

  Kalitin did not remember the eyes. The bodies had not been pink. White, gray, blue. Color sometimes returned afterward. On the morgue table.

  “I should have guessed that it was a warning. I just brought them inside. Ten naked, plastic women in a priest’s house. I was afraid I would be photographed with them, that they had rented the apartment across the way. That would have been a fine photo.”

  Women. They were not given women. Kalitin had asked: gender differences in the organism, he explained, different biochemistry. He needed to test. But the ones at the top did not want to hear it. Their half-hearted determination drove Kalitin crazy.

  “Then it all stopped. That was even worse. Torture by absence. I had gotten used to the madness, began to find some strength in it. I lasted eleven days. On the twelfth I asked for death if God did not want to protect me. I broke. I stopped preaching. For the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit: the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me,” he chanted. “Job 6:4.”

  Kalitin looked at the priest. He derived fierce pleasure from seeing his face.

  “Here’s what I looked like then.” Travniček handed him a photo from the leather pocket in the notebook.

  Kalitin was stunned. He could not have imagined the elegant and spiritual appearance of the former Travniček; thin, aristocratic, with a high forehead. Gentle, aloof, and at the same time willful. Handsome. Very handsome. Focused on a high, unearthly goal.

  Women must have fallen for him in droves, Kalitin thought, trying to demean the image he had seen.

  “I started drinking then,” Travniček said. “At home, naturally. There was always an open bottle in the cupboard. The source of the Word had dried up, and I sought another. I knew what was happening. The recordings, the cassettes, vanished; people stopped listening to them, as if the wind had died down. The storm was over. So I drank more. ‘Their wine is the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of asps.’” He spoke majestically.

  Kalitin looked up again. Looked at the scaly mask. Now he could see the face behind it.

  “Their wine is the poison of dragons,” Travniček said thoughtfully. “I took only one sip from the glass. The usual taste, the usual pinot gris, Grauburgunder. You know the one I mean. Then there was pain. In my whole body at once. It’s not surprising that the people who consider others saboteurs, who care about the purity of the race, come up with the idea of modifying pesticides.” Travniček named the substance.

  Kalitin saw black. He knew it. Not Neophyte, but still an ultimate poison. The man was a living corpse. Nothing could save you from that substance, not pumping the stomach, not blood transfusions. There were no antidotes. Kalitin knew that as firmly as two times two equals four.

  His mind, his solid rational world cracked. Through it was the unknown.

  Apparently unaware of what was happening to Kalitin, he went on. “They told me I was an anomalous occurrence. I was supposed to die. And in fact, I did. My former self was dead. I gave sermons later. Ordinary words. No miracle in them. As for my face, the doctors said it was a hormonal reaction. That may be so. Physically. But it is a mark. God’s mark.”

  Kalitin reeled.

  Travniček’s face floated before his eyes. It changed rapidly: human, animal, stone, forest, snake, a multilayered, composite mask. All the dead creatures poisoned by Kalitin were resurrected in it. Horses. Goats. Dogs. Monkeys. Rats. Mice. People.

  The last face to rise out of the vortex, from the depths, to flash and fade, was Vera’s.

  Kalitin imagined that the resurrected souls sought to settle in him: there was no refuge for them except the body of their murderer. He felt his own face turn to stone, while Travniček’s became human again.

  The pastor embraced him. Patted his head.

  Kalitin could tell that the pastor was not lying. Travniček was the miracle that crossed out Kalitin’s destiny, rendered Neophyte meaningless, insignificant. It had aimed for absolute power over matter, and the absolute was destroyed. Kalitin tried to persuade himself that Neophyte would have killed the priest and saw that the irrationality of a miracle was higher than his thinking, plans, calculations.

  He was conquered; he was filled with deathly hatred. Kalitin wanted to kill the priest; he had only one weapon at hand. Kalitin began whispering, telling the pastor the blackest and most evil things that had happened to him—his own life; pouring it into Travniček like poison. Kalitin could not pause, unstoppering all the secrets of the past as if they had been sealed in test tubes and ampoules, shouting without hearing what he was shouting, so that the wonderful pastor would swallow the poisonous revelation and die like the mice and dogs, apes and humans, Kazarnovsky and Vera—the death of creatures. Death without miracles.

  CHAPTER 21

  Only now, on the mountain road, did Shershnev appreciate that Grebenyuk was a real master. Minute by minute, the major was stubbornly regaining the time stolen by the police.

  Cliff-face on the left. On the right, warning stripes, then an abyss. The flat yellow lamps in the tunnel—the car flew without resistance, the wipers flipping once in a while to remove bugs from the windshield, the headlight cutting through the dusk, and the golden disco music of his adolescence played softly, a melody from the eighties, “Modern Talking.”

  Shershnev had never felt so acutely the exchange of space for time, an exchange in their favor, as if Grebenyuk were paying generously from the pocket of his future successes.

  The white arrows in the lanes said forward! Forward! The road rose higher toward the pass, the former border.

  The tunnel. Narrowed to two lanes. Grebenyuk did not slow down, turn, turn. The bright red scattering of stop signals up ahead. The car stopped. They could hear the exhaust fans on the concrete ceilings. They were trapped inside the mountain.

  Other cars drove in behind them and the drivers obediently turned off their engines. Grebenyuk tried the radio: nothing but static on every station.

  They looked at each other—both faces betraying concern. Shershnev got out and knocked on the window of the car in front. Three guys, students probably, were smoking—and not tobacco. He could smell weed.

  “Do you know what happened?” he asked. “Is there a long wait?”

  The driver laughed and said in a blurry, happy voice, “It’s the mountains, man. Something’s always happening here. Want a hit?” he offered the joint.<
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  He went down the row of cars. No one knew anything. Mobile phones didn’t work, GPS systems turned themselves off. Shershnev noticed a phone on the wall, a red box with the emergency sign. He picked up the receiver and pushed the button: beep, beep. Long beeps. No answer.

  People sat in their cars, calm, obedient. Sheep, thought Shershnev. He remembered how their convoy once ran into a herd of thousands of sheep in a ravine. The shepherd gloated as he looked at the military vehicles trapped in the river of sheep, which headed down, paying no attention to the blaring horns, leaving bits of wool on the trucks. Stupid, obedient creatures. Like these people. They wouldn’t let him through, wouldn’t move aside. They would just wait.

  He went back.

  “Too bad we didn’t bring the siren light,” Grebenyuk said. The joke died like a bad match. The cooling hood creaked. They lacked the strength to think, compare, build suppositions.

  Shershnev had no problem in enclosed spaces. Reverse claustrophobia, their doctor called it. He went down into tight forest caches, underground irrigation canals turned into secret pathways, he wandered for days through the damp tunnels of a former missile base that the enemy had turned into a lair. Stone did not scare him, tightness and dark did not scare him, nor did stale air low on oxygen.

  But here, in the dry, well-lit tunnel with evacuation hatches, he felt uncomfortable underground for the first time. The smell of gasoline and exhaust pushed into his nose, and the cliff seemed to push down on him from above, like a press.

  Duplicitous stone, its unreliable solidity! So many times he had seen huge boulders fallen on the road, smoldering cars buried beneath them, round spots of soot from wheels, burned and tossed aside by the explosion, human heads . . . or that tunnel in 2008. The mountains there were much higher. Narrow tunnel without light, filled with diesel exhaust, the dull headlights of tanks, and it felt like the ceiling would collapse from the roar of the engines, the fear of the armored bodies the drivers were urging into the narrow funnel, too narrow for two vehicles, in the mountain.

  The air was so wonderful on the other side—neither the fires nor the smell of death spoiled its purity, divine purity! They got through, they did, Shershnev told himself.

  Red lights flashed ahead. The head of the bottleneck slowly began to move.

  It was dark outside. The cars stopped again. Shershnev got out, swallowed the icy, raw air, redolent of mountain wildness. Along the distant spurs, red stars blinked on electric wind turbines, and clumps of thick fog crawled along the road. The headlights dissolved in the vapor, creating an unnatural, otherworldly reflection.

  Shershnev shook his head. Had he breathed in some weed?

  The cars moved. Beyond the turn lay the former border between Czech territory and Germany. Abandoned control posts. Empty duty-free stores. A police helicopter blocked the road. Traffic officers directed the cars to the former border parking lot.

  This is for us, Shershnev first thought.

  But he quickly changed his mind: they would have done this differently. They would have stopped only their car, brought in the special forces. These were ordinary policemen, not even equipped with bulletproof vests.

  Grebenyuk pulled up by a policeman and opened the window.

  “Avalanche,” the overwhelmed traffic cop shouted. “It’s the rain. They’ll open the road by morning. They’re working on it now. Wait in the parking lot. If you need fuel, there’s a gas station twenty kilometers below, you’ll have time.” He waved his lit baton.

  The truck drivers settled down in their cabs. Car drivers folded down their rear seats. Grebenyuk parked at the very exit of the lot. Right, thought Shershnev. The whole herd will head for the exit in the morning, and we have to be first.

  He suddenly realized how tired and hungry he was.

  “Let’s go look around,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t hurt to get some food,” Grebenyuk replied. “We’ve worked up an appetite.”

  They walked past empty kiosks with faded posters inside. Plump dark-red lips and golden lipstick. Tropical palms, a beauty in a bikini, a bottle of whisky on a bar. Pearl earrings on black velvet. A light blue bottle, resembling a sail, of men’s cologne, discontinued long ago.

  Shershnev looked over at Grebenyuk, who gently touched his inside pocket: the container is here, I took it as per orders, don’t worry.

  Empty flagpoles jangling in the wind. The hum of a transformer hut. And there was a hot dog stand, dusty metal blinds, rain-blurred menu in a currency that no longer existed. A grocery store. A pile of ice-cream freezers. An umbrella with protruding ribs. A dog ran out of the dark, a skinny, mangy mutt, with a beseeching look; it wagged its stumpy tail, inviting them to follow. A light flickered in the far end of the lot.

  None of the drivers headed in that direction, as if they knew there was a very good reason not to do so. Or they were just used to flying past at high speed and had no memories of the area.

  There was a huge sign for a hotel; once the sign had burned with hundreds of bulbs, now there was only one left in a bottom corner. They shrugged and headed into the darkness. There was a weak smell of habitation, food.

  Beyond the trees and the living hedge once trimmed and now wild, stood a building. A hotel at the border—so many benches in the garden, enough for a hundred people. The place was dying now, the benches covered in leaves. But there was still light in the first-floor windows.

  Shershnev opened the door.

  The slot machine rang and shook, red hearts and green apples jumping. A fat barmaid smoked at the bar, the smoke rising to the ceiling, stained as yellow as wax paper. Her pendulous breasts were enormous, as if she breastfed the children of mountain giants. Drinking beer across from her was an old rocker with straggly gray hair, thin, dried out, wrapped in black leather; his legs and arms were unnaturally straight, as if he were a puppet and the maker had forgotten the joints. Someone in the corner was hidden by a newspaper, only the top of his head visible.

  An old, fuzzy television set played above the counter. Little figures ran wanly in a field; even from a distance you could see that they were second-rate teams, a second division, the last chance, bowlegged failures who no longer expected anything from the game or themselves.

  Shershnev grimaced fastidiously and turned to leave. But he sensed that the place suited the day; here, in the forgotten hotel, nothing more could happen to them. Everything here had happened once and for all twenty years ago.

  The waitress came out from the counter. She had thin legs that didn’t seem strong enough to hold her heavy body. She doesn’t know about the landslide, the closed road, the overfilled parking lot, the hundreds of people nearby who could bring her a year’s salary, thought Shershnev.

  “Two beers,” Grebenyuk said.

  She went behind the bar. The tap handle shuddered in death throes. Thick, sticky foam came out of the spout, splashing the glasses and the counter. She turned the handle hastily, but the tap hissed and spat and then shut up with a thin moan.

  A newspaper fell down, revealing a full-page crossword all filled in. The man, apparently the son of the barmaid and the old man, a strange hybrid of bloods living near the border, big belly and rickety arms and legs, walked past them slowly, opened the hatch, stuffed his body into the cellar, made some noise there, and pushed out a cold barrel.

  “Freak show,” Grebenyuk said quietly. “Should we risk eating here?”

  Shershnev looked at the menu and chose safe-looking sausages and fried potatoes.

  She brought the beer. Shershnev pointed at the picture of the sausages, but she shook her head and pointed at what they had. Steak.

  Shershnev nodded.

  The beer was icy cold, moderately bitter, amazingly fresh, as if they had a mountain beer spring under the floor. They gulped down half a mug each, lit up.

  Beer on an empty stomach softened his thinking, and everything seemed blurry and habitual: the long ribbons of flypaper with flies from years ago, the dilatory game between two losing
teams, the gurgling trills of the slot machine. The subject was very close, on the other side of the mountains, and Shershnev stopped thinking about him; let him sleep. The meeting would come soon enough.

  The waitress went through the faded, hole-ridden curtain, and started banging pans. The old man gave them a questioning look, bent over the bar, and poured two more glasses.

  “I remember similar weirdness,” Grebenyuk said, taking a sip. “It was in an old kebab place. The kind from our childhood. We were eating shashlik. We had thrown a sheep into our trunk along the road. Even the bar with its glasses and trays was intact. With aluminum forks that bend when you try to pierce the meat.”

  Shershnev had a sip. He had eaten with forks like that in the garrison dining hall, when his father took him there.

  “The most important thing was not to look out the window. We were in the city after the second storming. Ruins. For some reason only the little place survived. Even the sign was intact.”

  Shershnev nodded. He also remembered that town, sooty, scorched, shelled—but with the same signs, stores, lampposts, bus stops, buses, like home. That was the strangest thing: trying to find the familiar in the ruins. He remembered that cafe, too—they had passed it several times. So that means, their paths had crossed, he thought. They had a connection.

  They clinked glasses.

  His stomach rumbled. Shershnev looked around, found the right door. In the hallway a machine dispensing cigarettes and condoms, long-empty, hung on the wall. There was a chlorinated toilet smell, the smell of solitude. At the military school the only place you could be alone was on the john. And only after classes. He lowered his trousers, sat, and happily emptied the contents of his churning gut. Even the tank was ancient, attached to the wall with a porcelain handle on a chain.

  Shershnev pulled on it. No water.

  “My shit,” he said, looking into the toilet. He realized he was drunk, intoxicated by a glass and a half, like a kid. He slammed down the lid and went back—let the owners deal with it. He rinsed his hands and wiped them on his trousers. There were no towels here.