All she hoped was that the guide whom the agency had arranged to have meet her at Sheremetyevo would actually show up. She had been told to go to the transfer desk and make herself known; in fact she was told by a stewardess just before the plane touched down that someone would be waiting for her when she disembarked and would take her through passport control. So far so good.
“Dr. Flemyng? I’m Irina Lomova. Everybody calls me Ika, I hope you will.”
The woman, whose handshake was warm and welcoming, was around thirty and spoke excellent English with only a trace of an accent. She had thick blond hair swept back from a face that was coarse-featured though attractive and open; it was the sort of face, Susan decided, that would grow on you.
“Susan,” she said. “That’s what everybody calls me. So tell me, Ika, how long a wait are we in for?”
Ika screwed her mouth up to one side and made a wavy gesture with her hand. “The good news is the official time is still three hours. The bad news is that maintenance has lost a fuel truck, probably stolen, which could mean a delay of… who knows?” As she spoke she gave a shrug that seemed to come from deep down in the core of her being: a very Russian response, Susan thought, to a very Russian situation.
The best thing about the delay was that Ika had arranged for them to wait it out in the first-class lounge of the U.S. airline that had flown them in. She advised Susan to eat as many sandwiches and crackers and as much fruit as she could manage, because there wasn’t going to be much on the five—and—a—half—hour flight to Norilsk—whenever it got off the ground.
Ika, Susan discovered, had helped organize John’s trip. There was genuine emotion in her voice when she spoke of her shock and sadness at the accident. The cause had not been properly ascertained and probably never would be: Such things were difficult in Russia. It had been a charter plane, well maintained, and with a good pilot. The inquiry was officially continuing, but offered little hope of a solution. Susan nodded, grateful for the Russian woman’s kindness, but said nothing about the darker suspicions that had brought her here to find out what she could for herself. Time alone would tell her whether Ika was someone she could confide in fully or not.
In the event, the delay was only a little over four hours, though it was followed by a further forty minutes on the ground before takeoff. Ika said they were in luck, as this was slightly better than average. The plane itself came as a shock to Susan. The seats appeared to be made for dwarfs and nearly half of them were broken. The cabin hadn’t been cleaned for some time, and the floor was covered in greasy wrappers and discarded paper cups. Ika’s last advice to Susan before boarding had been to make full use of the first-class lounge toilet facilities, because no human being should ever have to enter an Aeroflot toilet on a domestic flight. Unfortunately, Susan had drunk one cup of coffee too many, and after an hour or so the need was irresistible. She returned to her seat white and sickly, and had to close her eyes and breathe deeply for some minutes.
Norilsk, Susan had read in the guidebook she’d picked up in New York, was a town of roughly 170,000 inhabitants. It had been founded in 1935, and lay in the Rybnaya Valley amid the Putoran Mountains 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It was one of the world’s leading centers for the production of nickel and platinum. Copper was also mined. But perhaps the most distinctive thing about it was its gigantic airport, which provided the only link to Moscow and the rest of civilization within a 1,200-mile radius.
So much for the abstract information. As she felt the plane begin losing altitude she looked out the window to see what the reality looked like. What she saw was a flat, featureless landscape stretching away to the horizon, mostly just bare ground or rock. There were no trees, just scatterings of scrublike gray-brown vegetation, which Ika said was chiefly moss and lichen. It was a picture of the most uninhabitable bleakness that Susan had ever seen, and she found it almost impossible to believe that people actually did live down there. She glimpsed Norilsk only as a cold, gray, and unwelcoming sprawl before they touched down. There must have been almost a hundred planes on the tarmac, from huge intercontinental jets to old crates that would have looked more at home in museums than in the air.
Ika had already warned her that there would probably be another delay on the ground before disembarkation. The usual reason given, she said, was too many planes arriving at the same time and not enough buses to transport passengers to the terminal. Sure enough, they sat there for another fifty minutes after the engines had stopped. Susan was beginning to feel a deep passivity, a withdrawal into the self that inured her against the kind of frustrations and obstacles that would normally have driven her to distraction. Perhaps, she thought, she was picking it up by osmosis from Ika and all the other Russians around her. Time, for them, was not what it was in the West—a commodity with measurable value. Here it was an abstraction, something that ceased to exist when it wasn’t being used to some purpose.
They would be staying overnight in Norilsk, Ika explained, because there was no flight to Ostyakhon till the following day. They took a taxi to the Arktika Hotel, where Ika had made reservations. The taxi stank so strongly of diesel fuel, that Susan tried to wind down the window to get some air, but it jammed after barely an inch. At least the battered vehicle got them to their destination, though shock absorbers would have been a welcome comfort.
Susan’s room was, Ika assured her, the height of luxury, having its own bathroom. There was marble everywhere, and very little else. The taps spat scalding water and gave a trickle of cold. The bed was hard, though not broken. That evening they ate in a gloomy dining room enlivened only by a group of Russians at a neighboring table consuming vodka by the gallon. Ika advised Susan to stick to the cabbage soup and sausage, and avoid the wine. They retired to bed early, and Susan was glad she’d brought some sleeping pills.
Ostyakhon was a mere ninety-five miles south of Norilsk, which prompted Susan to ask why they didn’t rent a car and drive down rather than fly; she’d already had more than enough experience of domestic air travel in Russia to last a lifetime. Ika explained that it was autumn, which meant that the roads, which were muddy and almost impassable in summer and swarming with giant mosquitoes, had not yet frozen into the hard tracks that were slightly more negotiable in winter. It would be a horribly uncomfortable two-day drive at least. This way they could get down there in relative comfort (all comforts in Russia, she reminded Susan, were relative), check into the only establishment that could loosely be described as a hotel, which was where John and his group had stayed, then make trips out in an old jeep she had managed to rent from one of the local apparatchiks.
The plane they boarded in one corner of the giant airport did not fill Susan with confidence. It was a single-engined biplane, an Antonov 2, Ika explained, built in the 1940s and still in use as a reliable flying bus and freight carrier. There were four passengers in addition to Susan and Ika, all men, and all apparently suffering from gigantic hangovers. Whether or not they had got into this condition together or separately was un-clear, since none of them was in the mood for conversation either among themselves or with Ika and Susan, a fact for which Susan considered herself fortunate.
Despite an alarmingly noisy and bone-jolting takeoff, the plane took on a more dependable and solid feel in the air. There was actually something strangely reassuring in its age and much-used appearance, as though the act of flying over this bleak landscape was as casual and risk-free as hopping on municipal transport to travel a few blocks in the city. Indeed, the experience was not all that different, allowing for the difference in topography. The plane touched down four times to let passengers off and take on new ones; also to unload and replace various crates and packing cases. The landing strip was never more than a stretch of cleared, hard earth, sometimes incorporating cracked asphalt or large cement-and-steel slabs left behind, Ika explained, by the Americans after World War II. They were never on the ground more than fifteen minutes, and each time Susan peered from the window at a remoteness
so extreme that she could hardly understand how human beings could inhabit it.
About a half hour before they were due to land at Ostyakhon, and by prior arrangement with the pilot, they made a detour over the site where John’s-plane had crashed. The other passengers either didn’t notice the change of course, or had been forewarned, or were merely indifferent to such things, another example of that strange and rather touching Russian fatalism where matters not in their own hands were concerned.
There was little to see. All the wreckage had long since been retrieved. But for the fact that Ika said this was the place, there was nothing to indicate what had happened there. Susan tried to imagine the scene, as she had often, both awake and in her nightmares, but the reality of John’s death still remained curiously remote—a lingering effect of shock, perhaps. She still had to come fully to terms with her loss.
“We can drive out tomorrow or the day after, if you would like,” Ika said softly beside her, as though knowing what was going through her mind.
“Yes, perhaps, I think I would,” Susan murmured. She saw the pilot give a discreet glance in Ika’s direction, wondering if he should circle the spot again. “Tell him to go on,” she said, “and thank him, please. This was very kind.”
Chapter 14
THE LANDING AT Ostyakhon was along the northern bank of Lake Khantayskoye, a stretch of water about a hundred fifty miles long and varying between two and eight miles in width. From the air, Ika had pointed out the fish cannery on the lakeshore, which had been the cause of John’s coming to this place at all. The town itself, just a haphazard scattering of buildings from the air, was a mile or so away.
Ika explained that the long, derelict-looking shed that was the first thing they saw when they got off the plane was the local school. The jeep that Ika had arranged was waiting for them. The driver gave her the keys, then hopped on the back of a friend’s waiting motorbike. The jeep was a two-seater, and they threw their bags in the back.
Architecturally, Ika explained as they drove into it, Ostyakhon was a good example of state model E3. Susan wasn’t sure whether this was meant ironically or literally. Almost every building was a near-identical three-story concrete block. They were linked by a network of pipes that Ika said were “utilidors”—conduits for water, electricity, and gas, which could not be buried underground because of the permafrost. Even at the warmest times of year, she said, when the surface became pure mud, the earth remained rock hard just beneath.
Here and there an old wooden isba, a traditional wood-built cabin with ornate doors and windows, broke the visual monotony. Most of them were oddly tilted or askew—a consequence, Ika explained, of movement in the permafrost beneath them. The only remotely distinguished piece of architecture was the People’s Palace, a whitish Greek-temple structure, in which a couple of broken windows had been boarded up with pieces from an old Coca-Cola crate.
The hotel, Susan had already been warned, would make the one in which they’d spent the previous night look like a czar’s palace. John, when he stayed there, had told her about it on the phone, so she was prepared for the worst. What she wasn’t prepared for was the immediate and unsettling sense of deja vu that she experienced the moment she stepped through the door. It took her a moment to realize that she was in the place where the Polaroid of John with Dan Samples had been taken. She didn’t even have to take it out to recognize specific details—a lamp with a faded blue shade, a hideous still life on the wall (which she could now see was an original), and beneath it a long sofa covered in some sort of coffee-brown artificial leather.
It was over dinner in the hotel that evening that Susan first showed Ika the picture of the two men together and asked her if she’d ever met Dan Samples. Neither the face nor the name meant anything to her. She asked who he was. Susan sidestepped the question, saying she wasn’t sure. She said her husband had sent her the photograph along with several others in a letter that he’d posted just before the fatal flight, and she would be curious to know, just for sentimental reasons, who the man was.
With Susan’s permission, Ika showed the picture to their waiter, the barman, and the hotel manager, but drew a blank. Susan shrugged, said it was of no real importance, and put the picture back in her purse.
It was not long after nine when she went up to her room. She had just undressed and was about to take a sleeping pill when there was a knock at her door. It was Ika.
“I’m sorry, I hope you hadn’t gone to bed.”
“No, I was just going to.”
“Only I just talked to the night manager, and he says he might know the man you were asking about. He says that there is something here that the man left, and he wants to know what he should do with it.”
“Left? What did he leave?”
“A package of some kind. Papers.”
Five minutes later, fully dressed again, Susan was standing with Ika in the windowless cupboard-sized office behind the reception desk. The night manager was a pale, overweight individual whose face and shortness of breath betrayed a wear and tear beyond his years—something Susan had observed in just about all the men in this place. When shown the Polaroid, he confirmed that he had met Dan Samples. Not only that: It was he who, at Samples’s request, had taken the picture of the two men.
He went on to recount how, on that same night that the photograph was taken, Samples had spent an hour using the ancient and very slow photocopier in the night manager’s office—the one that Ika was leaning against at this moment. He had no idea what the document was or how many copies Samples had made. All he knew was that Samples had left one copy, or possibly the original, in an envelope in the night manager’s safe, promising to phone or fax in a few days and give instructions about what should be done with it. By now several weeks had passed and nothing had been heard. Perhaps, as Dr. Flemyng knew the gentleman, she might care to return his property to him, because the safe was very small and they didn’t have room to store things indefinitely.
That night Susan did not take a sleeping pill. She didn’t sleep at all, even though the forty or so pages Samples had left were quickly read, then reread. Sleep, after she had absorbed what was contained in them, was impossible.
Chapter 15
IKA LOMOVA WOULD tell her friends later that something had obviously happened to Susan Flemyng overnight. Clearly it must have been connected with the papers that had been left in the hotel safe, but Susan volunteered no explanation, and Ika sensed that questions would be unwelcome.
When Ika came down for breakfast at 7:30 the next morning, she found Susan already in the lobby and barely able to contain her impatience while Ika swallowed a quick cup of coffee and a stale bread roll.
“Do you know how to find this?” she asked, producing a scrap of paper on which she’d scribbled down a name.
“The Igatrov Marshes? It’s about an hour away.”
“I want to go there.”
Ika looked puzzled. “It’s the opposite direction from the crash site. There’s nothing to see, just an old agricultural research station.”
“I’d like to go. Can we, please? Right away?”
“Of course, if you wish.”
They didn’t talk much on the journey. Any effort Ika made to start up a conversation was met by a polite but monosyllabic response. Susan did not want to talk. She was preoccupied with her thoughts and preferred to keep them to herself. Only as they grew closer to their destination did she start asking questions.
“This agricultural research station? What do you know about it?”
Ika shrugged. “Not much. I think it was set up in the fifties. I’ve driven by it. The people who work there live on the premises. You don’t see much of them outside.”
“And what exactly do they do?”
Again Ika shrugged. “Whatever they do in all these places anywhere, I suppose. Try to develop a new strain of wheat or a higher-yielding milk cow.”
“And is it guarded?”
Ika’s smile was vaguely sardonic
. “In Russia, everything official is guarded. It used to be the army, now it’s some private organization, but I think it’s the same men in a different uniform.”
The place itself when they arrived still had a military air about it. The buildings that were visible some distance beyond the wire fence had an ugly, functional appearance. Some were constructed of light concrete blocks, some of creosoted wood. Few were more than one story high. Occasionally a lone figure would be seen walking from one building to another. Sometimes a vehicle moved between them. Ika said it was rumored that there were sizable underground installations, but nobody knew for sure.
Susan asked her to drive by a couple of times and then to stop while she got out and took some photographs. This activity aroused the interest of the guards at the gate; Ika saw one of them start to watch them through binoculars, then another began talking on a portable phone. Ika never knew whether there was any connection between this and what happened next, but a large unmarked helicopter clattered over the horizon and landed at some point inside the compound, where it was hidden from view by a cluster of buildings.
The incident had distracted Ika just long enough for her not to observe the unmarked though military-style jeep that had swung out of the compound’s gates. She didn’t see it until it swerved to park smartly across the nose of their own vehicle, blocking any attempt they might make to get away. Two men got out, both with revolvers in waist-holsters. One held back, ready to cover his partner in case of any trouble; the other stepped forward and spoke to them in Russian.
The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk Page 7
