The Bookworm

by Mitch Silver

  “Am I?” She glanced down from his grinning image on her screen to the small picture-in-picture cameo of herself in the lower left corner and back again. It was scary how alike they looked: the same almost jet-black hair; the same big, dark eyes set deep in olive-skinned faces with Asian-influenced features (their mother’s doing). Lev still looked like Omar Sharif, the way he was in Doctor Zhivago.

  “Tell me, Levishka, how’s your week starting off?”

  “Strange.” A worried look crossed that strong face. “When Craig and I ran the test this morning, the crude was crazy … sulfur off the charts. I don’t know what to make of it. Neither does he.”

  “Could your instruments be off kilter?”

  “Two separate meters? No way.”

  She thought for a moment. “How many North Slope fields feed into the pipeline?”

  “I thought of that too, Professor.” There were laugh lines around his mouth for a moment, the roughneck teasing the academic. “With over twenty fields and a thousand separate wellheads, any gas pocket they hit wouldn’t make this kind of difference eight hundred miles downstream.”

  Five seconds of silence traveled back and forth along the 7,000-kilometer connection, much more if you added in the satellites they were bouncing off of. Lev switched the subject. “School start yet?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Really? There’s something I don’t understand … why do they need a full professor to teach Rocks and Clocks to a bunch of komya?”

  “They’re not clods, they’re future historians, I hope. And for the millionth time, it isn’t geology and history, it’s geohistory.”

  He had the exact same grin he’d had that time in Perm when he’d dropped the frog down her dress, the eternal brat of a younger brother. She was trying to think of a way to retake the offensive when a hurricane of noise suddenly slammed through the closed bedroom door.

  Katrina was back, accompanied by most of the male population of Moscow, singing unintelligibly at the top of their voices and bumping into things.

  The door flew open. Katrina’s hair was mussed, and her lipstick looked smeared. Laughingly, she said, “Larashka, sweetie, a few stray dogs followed me home. Can I keep them?” The door was pushed open a little wider and Lara saw there were at least three of them, all soldiers, all drunk, all staring into the bedroom and swaying unsteadily. “Please, Mommy? They won’t be any trouble!”

  Gales of male laughter told Lara her quiet call with her brother was history. To the computer screen she said, “I’ll call you back when I can.”

  “Okay. Sleep tight, Professor, and don’t let the geohistorical bedbugs bite.”

  Lara clicked off, and her grinning brother’s face was gone from the screen.

  Chapter 8

  London, England

  Tuesday

  A little after two in the morning, anyone able to peer over the hoardings just down from the Chancery Lane tube station would have seen men with electric lamps and shovels digging quietly but furiously in the large hole. Within the hour they found what they came for: a small, mostly decomposed leather valise, no longer handcuffed to a human arm bone at the wrist.

  Shining their lights on it together, they could see the damp had rotted away the leather at the bottom. There was nothing inside.

  Chapter 9

  In Brixton, a noise somewhere woke up Davidson Gordon in the middle of the night. The strange find at the site meant there’d be no work today; no work meant no money, curse the luck, and the Gordons needed the money. Still, it would give Davidson—“Davy” to friends and family—the rare chance to sleep in before going through the package he’d found in the hole next to the human bone, the one he’d kept hidden under his coat the whole time the cameras were on him.

  His wife and daughter were still asleep when the noise came again, a discreet knock on the door. Bollocks.

  Three men with muddy shoes stood on the step in the predawn, holding out identification cards that read, ANTIQUITIES DIVISION.

  “Mr. Davidson?” asked the tallest of the three.

  “Gordon. Davidson’s me Christian name.”

  “Mr. Gordon, then. May we come in?”

  “Family’s sleeping.”

  “Oh, this won’t take but a minute,” said the heavily muscled one. “We want to hold up work at the dig as little as possible.”

  Reluctantly, Davy led them into the kitchen. The tall one’s first question was, “Did you take anything from the excavation, sir? A package of any kind?” When he hesitated, the man added, “There’s a finder’s fee, of course.”

  With that, he led the men downstairs. Even though the overhead light was on, the massive one with a bull neck shone the flashlight he was holding on the workbench, where the package and its strange contents—the still-damp wrapping around the gunmetal-gray canisters—were lying open to view.

  Davy wished now he’d done a better job of looking through his find. What if there was money in those sealed metal cans? Or jewels? He’d shaken them and hadn’t heard anything. Still, he’d be in a better bargaining position if he knew.

  The tall man continued, “I count six tins. Have you removed any?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’d know, woun’t I?”

  “Have you told anyone about finding this?”

  “Just the wife and daughter.”

  “No one down the pub?”

  “Didn’t go down the pub.”

  “Your wife and daughter, did they tell anyone?”

  “No, nobody. Must be pretty valuable, these things, the way you’re asking all these questions.”

  The tall man was saying, “Questions? No, no more questions,” even as he took the silenced gun out of his coat pocket and shot Davy in the heart and, just to be on the safe side, once more in the head where he fell.

  The beefy man picked up the parcel and led the way back upstairs.

  “Davy, that you?” a sleepy voice called from the bedroom.

  She was sitting up in bed when the bullet went through flesh and bone, the pillow and the headboard.

  The third killer, the young one with his red hair in a buzz cut and a little blue tattoo on his neck, grinned and went looking for the daughter. Beverly never made it to school.

  Chapter 10

  Moscow

  It was 11:57, Lara knew, on the huge clock thirty-six floors above her head, having checked her watch against it on her way in. In exactly 180 seconds it would boom a dozen stunning notes across the Sparrow Hills in southwest Moscow and inform the newcomers who were hopelessly lost in the warren of hallways—there were 33 kilometers of corridors and more than 5,000 rooms in the Moscow State University building—that they were late.

  Once the biggest structure in the world outside New York (if you counted the giant star on top), the building had maps of each floor, sealed in plastic, posted on bulletin boards under the heading IN CASE OF FIRE. The plastic had yellowed with age, so now the floor plans were totally indecipherable. It meant there were always stragglers who barged into the first class at the last moment, or even later.

  For something to do while she waited, Lara walked over to the large map of the fifth floor above the elevator buttons. Pasted to the yellowed and cracking plastic was one of those oversized stars saying, “Vy Nakhodites Zdes.” As if “You Are Here” would help anyone who didn’t already know where “Here” was.

  Around the map, the students had commandeered the remaining space on the corkboard. A thumbtack held in place the picture of a lost Siamese; good luck finding a cat in this place. A printed card glowingly advertised for a nonsmoking roommate, the same sort of card that had brought Katrina to Lara.

  She was fingering a flimsy notice stapled to the board, the kind with a fringe of cut-apart phone numbers at the bottom you tore off if you were interested. In this case, a pretty Swedish student, smiling in the photocopied picture on the flier, wanted work as a nanny after school. Quite a few of the fringes had been t
aken. Could so many of the girl’s fellow students need nannies?

  She found herself reading an older flier under the fringed one: the Moscow City Chess Club was holding its monthly exhibition match and, this month, Garry Kasparov was taking on all comers. Refreshments would be served, “with a short talk beforehand by the Guest of Honor, former world champion and current Secretary of The Other Russia.” His topic: “‘Why the Toothpaste Can’t Go Back in the Tube,’ an appeal for Russia to create closer ties with America and the West.”

  Make that a long talk, Lara thought—Kasparov’s transmit button was permanently on. The event, she noticed, was this Thursday evening at 8:00.

  The tolling of the bell overhead, always a surprise even when you were waiting for it, shook the windows in their frames. Lara let the echoing sound of the final note dissipate completely before briskly striding through the door to her lecture hall for the first time as a full Professor.

  Greeting the seventy or so students who’d made their way to their seats with a curt “Good afternoon,” she dropped the dog-eared copy of her second published book, An Introduction to Geohistory, on her desk with a thud, the better to emphasize the gravity of the subject.

  “What makes history … history? Do great men make history? Gandhi … Napoleon … Peter the Great … Julius Caesar? That’s what all the textbooks used to say for hundreds of years.

  “Or is it the Big Idea? ‘All men are created equal.’ ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ Even, ‘the will of Allah is the law of the land,’ as the Sharia would have it. Do ideas determine history?

  “Maybe you are an economic determinist. Without onerous royal taxes, there would have been no Magna Carta, no Boston Tea Party, no summoning of the Estates General. Some say, absent a ruinous postwar inflation that had people trundling their currency around in wheelbarrows, there would have been no Hitler or Mussolini. That, without a generation of unemployed Third World youth, ‘Islamic Fascism’ would have no foot soldiers.”

  Lara withdrew a laser pointer from her bag and switched it on. “I suggest to you that all those beautiful theories are, well, theories.” She turned and ran the red laser dot over the giant map of the world on the wall behind her from east to west.

  “This is what causes history. All this … stuff … that’s called the planet Earth. Question: why would an insignificant body of water, barely thirty kilometers long and three and a half wide, with no fishing to speak of, be fought over at least nineteen times in recorded history and another, ten times as large and teaming with aquatic life, be so unremarkable that two warring navies have never faced off in its waves?” After years of practice, she used her pointer expertly.

  “Why is the Bosphorus the belle of the ball and”—she swung the laser way to the west—“why is Long Island Sound history’s wallflower? Why are the nomadic tribes of one mostly uninhabitable desert in Arabia incomparably rich and another group living in the equally inhospitable Gobi unspeakably poor?

  “Why were the political histories of the island empires of Great Britain and Japan, so similar in size, such polar opposites?

  “By the end of the term—once we’ve had our field trip to the State Archives and you’ve learned the kind of material that exists to answer those questions and to prove or disprove all those beautiful theories—you will have mastered all this. As you will prove to me when you hand in your term papers.”

  It was a typical first lecture. Afterward, as she was packing up, Lara said, “For those of you who will be otherwise engaged this Friday, I leave you a question to ponder: if there had been no Great Wall, would the Chinese be more—or less—dominant in world affairs than they are today?”

  She closed the cap on her laser pen and stuck it in the outer pocket of her handbag. Turning to go, she noticed a hand was raised. “Yes, the young man in the back?”

  A student with red hair cropped close to his head got to his feet; was that a smirk? “Does ‘otherwise engaged’ have anything to do with Conception Day, Dr. Klimt? Will you be otherwise engaged?”

  The room broke out in laughter, and Lara went with the flow. “If it does and if I am, I’ll conceive of a way to keep that fact to myself. Have a good day.”

  She watched them file out the door, the usual mix of eager beavers and slackers, trying to guess by their looks which ones were which. Turning back to the room, she was startled to see the young man who’d asked the question still sitting in the last row. Then he began to clap.

  “Bravo, Dr. Klimt, excellent lecture.”

  “Spasibo. Are you a student of mine or are you auditing this class, Mr… . ?”

  “Call me Alexei. And no, I’m not a student; more of a messenger. I have something to give you.”

  He got up, and Lara could see he carried a shopping bag under his arm as he worked his way down the aisle and over to where she was. She noted the dried mud on his shoes and the tattoos covering his neck. No, not a student.

  “Something for me? An apple for the teacher?”

  “A whole orchard.”

  He was standing in front of her now, holding the bag open so she could look inside. It held a standard shipping box, with a torn label addressed to someone with a name ending in “—simov.” Nestled within some sort of old cellophane wrapping, brittle and disintegrating, were tins that looked a little like cans of tennis balls. The whole thing had a musty, dead smell.

  A water-stained cardboard shipping tag, the writing on it lost in places, had worked free from the cellophane and lay loosely across the top. The remnants of a red wax seal still adhered to the tag.

  He was smiling that I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile all Russian men are endowed with at birth. “Before you teach another bunch of innocents your theory about the causes of war and peace and history,” he said, “I thought you might actually want to know the truth.”

  Now she smiled. “The ‘truth’? It’s in there?”

  “You bet your sweet ass. And it is sweet, by the way.”

  “I think you’d better go, Alexei.”

  “You’re right, I was out of line. What can I say … I’m uncouth. But as a messenger, I’m first-rate. Here.”

  He put the paper handles of the bag firmly in her hand and closed her fingers around it. “You know what these tins are, don’t you?”

  She peered in once more. “They look like the Dictaphone cylinders I listen to in the archives.”

  “Once again, bravo, Dr. Klimt. Or is it brava, I can never remember. You’re looking at six Dictaphone recordings that just came to light. They’re full of testimony by one of the men who started the Great Patriotic War.”

  “How did you get them?”

  He grinned. “The word ‘commandeered’ comes to mind.”

  “Have you listened to them?”

  “No one has, not in almost seventy years.”

  “Then, how do you know what—?”

  “Trust me, Dr. Klimt, we have ways.”

  “This is madness.” She turned and put the shopping bag down on the lectern behind her, reaching for her geohistory text to put it back in her shoulder bag.

  The young man quickly shifted the shopping bag on top of her textbook, keeping it there. “Your whole beautiful theory … all that Romanian oil and Ukrainian wheat and lebensraum the Germans needed: bullshit, Larissa Mendelova. I dare you to go to your hideout in the Arkhiv, listen to the recordings, and see if your precious geohistory still holds any water.”

  Her professional pride at stake, Lara reached into the bag for one of the tins. He stopped her and rummaged in his pocket for a white cotton glove, which he put on before reaching into the bag. He saw the quizzical look on her face and said, simply, “Fingerprints,” as he held out one of the cans to her.

  Lara could see a label on top that read, “Coward interview, 04-10-44, Cylinder Three.” In English. She looked back at him, questioningly. “1944? From the war? Who was the coward?”

  The man smiled. “Not the coward. Noël Cowa
rd, actor and playwright. He was one of the conspirators.”

  She threw up her hands. “No, it’s all too crazy. You’re telling me an English writer started the war that killed twenty-five million of our people? I don’t believe it.”

  “Painful, isn’t it, to find out you’ve been wrong all these years? Or would you rather go on believing in your own theory and unwilling to face the facts, like all those other historians you discredit?”

  She took a breath and faced him. “All right, why are you really giving these … things … to me?”

  “If you must know, I, we, think they’re a road map to something, a treasure map if you will. And that you’re the only person in all of Moscow with access to the Dictaphone machines who has the brains and the determination—and who knows the Arkhiv like the back of her hand—the only one who can listen to them and lead us to the treasure.”

  “Who’s ‘we’? And what kind of treasure?”

  “Russians … patriots … people who don’t buy the conventional fiction about the war. As for the treasure, it’s a book; one that Adolf Hitler was given. Rumor has it he wrote something down in it, a confession, a message for posterity maybe, or a last will and testament. Whatever it is, it’s valuable.”

  “I don’t see how—”

  He held up a finger. “You’re going to say you don’t see how a full professor can waste her valuable time on a ‘wild-goose chase’ looking for some musty old tome. We understand. That’s why we’re prepared to pay you a million rubles.”

  “A mil—I don’t understand.”

  The tough who called himself a messenger pushed the bag of tins toward her one more time and said, “It’s a valuable book, if it still exists. Listen to the recordings, my beautiful Dr. Klimt; follow the clues. Find what we’re looking for, and there’s a million-ruble … uh … finder’s fee.”

  He was already on his way to the door. Lara picked up the shopping bag and hurried over to him, putting the handles firmly in his hand. “I’m sorry, I can’t possibly.”