“The records are in Ust-Nera.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Oh, the Leningrad boys swiped the files there, too, all right. But they got unlucky. Part of the file was in Oimyakon at the time. It contains the material our agent there reconstructed after the 1978 fire at Leslog-7. A lot was lost in the blaze, apparently. Oh, and there’s a tape.”
“A tape?”
“An interview with Stepan Bragin in 1978. It was part of the effort to rebuild the files after the fire. Some of the inmates were real mystery people after the fire. Some had no records at all. It was a mess.”
“And this tape is in Ust-Nera?”
“Yes,” said Novikov. “There’s a flight to Ust-Nera tomorrow. Shall I reserve a seat for you?”
“Thanks,” said Tarasov and hung up.
Leo’s call came through a few minutes later.
“His name is Stepan Bragin,” Tarasov said over the crackle of the line. “He was exiled in Oimyakon. Before that, he was in the camps. There would have to be an arrest record in Lubyanka.”
“I’m not working for you anymore,” said Leo. “I told you. Shatalin said — ”
“Just do this,” said Tarasov. “It could be important.”
Leo sighed. “All right.”
“Call me in Ust-Nera tomorrow night, my time,” said Tarasov. “Novikov will have the number. Remember, all communications should come over secure lines. Belov went to a lot of trouble to make sure the name Stepan Bragin never came to light. He wouldn’t want me poking around.”
So now it was another plane, this time a twin-engine turboprop that whined and shook and seemed to fly slightly sideways, like a car whose chassis is mounted unsquarely on its frame. Tarasov was moving deeper into Siberia, and with every icy mile he could sense Stepan Bragin drawing nearer.
Tarasov used the time to perform what he called a “sanity check.” The mind, Tarasov believed, was the body’s laziest organ. Once it found a line of reasoning it liked, it was loath to go bounding off in a new direction, even if truth happened to lie that way. His goal now was to construct a theory that explained the events in Moscow, in Leningrad and on the Norwegian border that didnot lead to Stepan Bragin. He could not. All roads converged on Stepan Bragin. His death was like a pebble dropped in a pool; everything else that followed was a result of that initial disturbance: Anton Perov’s consignment to a psychiatric hospital, the changes to Anton Perov’s file to make it look as if he was killed, Katherine Sears’s trip to Russia and the subsequent attempts on her life, the murder of Pavel Danilov, the automobile “accident” of the captain of the border guards.
The plane rattled eastward impossibly, like a fat-bellied bumblebee. Tarasov looked out his window. A strange fog lay over the land.
“Ice fog,” the man beside him shouted above the scream of the propellers.
“Ice fog?”
“Air freezes at fifty-five below. It makes fog.”
Ice fog.The white earth was now even more desolate.
After two hours, the plane began to descend. White mountains rose in the east. The plane banked and a dirty settlement materialized out of the ice: Ust-Nera. It looked like a splotch of mud on a white carpet. The village was bounded on the east by the outline of a frozen river. From the air, Tarasov made out about fifty buildings, mostly huts, along two main streets. A half-dozen cross streets completed the black-and-white checkerboard. A tall smokestack towered over the western end of town belching tire-black smoke.
The plane landed, and this time it was not a black Volga but a jeep that was waiting for him.
The driver was a big Yakut with bad Russian. They bounced along the frozen roads in silence.
What passed by Tarasov’s window was not a town, not a village, not even a settlement — it was a camp. While Yakutsk had the flavor of a frontier town, Ust-Nerawas a frontier town. Tarasov didn’t see a thing of substance that couldn’t be hauled away on the inhabitants’ backs. Just give them an hour’s notice.
The jeep pulled up to a wood frame structure with a double placard that read:Administrative Offices Oimyakon Region andHeadquarters “Olyen” CollectiveFarm. Tarasov followed the Yakut inside and was met by Fyodor Kagan, whom Novikov had described as a fine administrator and the only ethnic Russian for five hundred miles.
“Welcome to Ust-Nera,” he said.
“You have a file for me?” said Tarasov.
Kagan led Tarasov to his office. Tarasov sat down at a small table beside a window while Kagan went to his desk. Kagan was about fifty years old, of average build. His face was pock-marked from acne, which gave him a rugged appearance. Thick blond hair was blown back permanently over his head, like a sailor facing a head wind. Kagan opened a drawer and withdrew a brown, accordionstyle folder. He plunked it on the table in front of Tarasov.
“Dumb luck,” said Kagan. “The case worker in Oimyakon had these sections, so the file wasn’t here for the two Leningrad agents to remove.”
Tarasov spun the file around to face him and flipped back the cover. A cassette tape lay atop a stack of papers.
“Would you like to hear the tape first?”
Tarasov nodded. Kagan got a tape recorder from his desk.
“The first voice you hear is mine,” he said. “I did about forty of these interviews after the fire in 1978. I wouldn’t have saved the tapes except that I never got around to making a transcript.”
Kagan inserted the tape into the machine, slapped the lid closed and pushed PLAY.
From the little box rose the screech of a chair being pulled forward. And then a voice: Kagan’s.
“What is your name?”
The second voice followed immediately, raspy but quite strong, like an old blues singer. It was a voice from the grave.
“My name is Stepan Bragin.”
KAGAN: I will be asking you a series of questions. Some, I know the answers to. Others I don’t. You won’t know which. If I catch you in a lie, I will have to assume you are serving a twenty-fiver that began the day before the fire. Got it?
BRAGIN: Yes.
KAGAN: By the way, what happened to your nose?
BRAGIN: I lost it in the winter of ’62. Frostbite.
KAGAN: You were here in ’62? They say it was so cold ermine were dying.
BRAGIN: It’s true.
KAGAN: I didn’t realize Leslog-7 had been around that long.
BRAGIN: I was in Worker’s Paradise Camp at that time.
KAGAN: I’ve never heard of that one.
BRAGIN: It was one of the first camps they built up here. It burned on January 4, 1962.
KAGAN: But you rebuilt it.
BRAGIN: Eventually. We lived in tents while we worked. One morning, I woke up and my nose was numb. The feeling never came back. It got red, then kind of gray, then white. Gents took it off.
KAGAN: Igor Gents? The prison doctor at Leslog-11?
BRAGIN: That’s him. He used a kitchen knife. . . . Don’t make that face. I never felt a thing. It was like snipping a fingernail, and I got seventy-two hours in the infirmary, which meant a wood stove and time off work, so it wasn’t so bad.
KAGAN: Nineteen sixty-two? That was fifteen years ago. How long have you been in the zone?
BRAGIN: Since ’56.
KAGAN: That’s a lie. We all know the maximum sentence is a double tenner.
BRAGIN: I got life.
KAGAN: Nobody gets life.
BRAGIN: I did.
KAGAN: What was your crime?
BRAGIN: Subversion. I crossed myself on a square in Tallinn.
KAGAN: That’s awfully stiff.
BRAGIN: You’re telling me?
KAGAN: Well, Stepan. Because of overcrowding we are commuting some sentences to work furlough in the village of Oimyakon. You could work on the reindeer collective farm and even earn wages. Would you like that?
BRAGIN: Yes. Very much.
KAGAN: I’ll see what I can do.
The sound went dead, and Kagan switched off the machine.
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“I need a copy of that tape,” said Tarasov.
“I’ll have it made.”
“I detected an accent.”
“Estonian,” said Kagan. “It’s in the file.”
“So he entered this work program?”
“Yes. I enrolled him. I felt sorry for the guy. He was the hardest of the hard-luck cases.”
“How did he escape?”
Kagan blew a gust of air through his nose. “I’ve spent months thinking about that one. It’s impossible.”
“The impossible happened,” said Tarasov.
“I know. Until those border guards showed up with pictures of Stepan — ”
Tarasov started. “They had pictures?”
“Sure. I had to make the official identification.”
“And it was him?”
“No mistaking that nose. It was Stepan. Quite dead, poor bastard. I wonder what the hell got into him. Anyway, if it hadn’t been for those pictures, I would never have believed the old goatdid escape. We all figured he just wandered off and died on the tundra — fell through some ice or got lost in a white-out, any number of possibilities.”
“So how did he escape, then?”
Kagan shrugged. “Maybe, just maybe, he stowed away on a helicopter, which would have gotten him from Oimyakon to Ust-Nera. And then maybe, just maybe, he stowed away on an airplane that took him as far as Yakutsk. And from there, maybe, just maybe, he stowed away on another plane, avoiding police and airport security — ”
“I see your point,” said Tarasov.
“Like I said, it’s impossible.”
Tarasov lit a cigarette and turned his attention to the file. It consisted mainly of monthly interviews summarized by Stepan’s case officer. The reports were terribly written, filled with spelling errors and bad grammar. A Yakut with bad Russian, Tarasov surmised. The reports were maddeningly sparse. Six years had been compressed into a few mundane summaries. There was a request for extra hours to earn more money, and a complaint about late wages. He was building a cabin, and he wanted to know how could he order materials. He wanted to know how to go about officially naming a river.What the hell was that about? There were several requests for a doctor to see his wife. Then he began to ask for medicine: His wife had ovarian cancer, and she needed morphine for the pain.
“Bragin had a wife?” Tarasov said.
He looked up, and that’s when he noticed that Kagan was gone. Tarasov went out in search of him. He found him in the next room chatting in front of the desk of a fastidious-looking Yakut woman.
Kagan spotted Tarasov in the doorway and jumped to his feet. He introduced the woman. “Yermali is head of the collective that operates the Oimyakon farm where Stepan Bragin worked,” he said. “She’s also my wife.”
The woman gave him a nod. Tarasov sensed a reserve in her. She didn’t trust him.
Kagan said, “We were just recalling some of the stories about Stepan.”
“He was a legend,” said Yermali.
Something dawned on Tarasov. “Youwrote the reports,” he said.
“Yes,” Yermali replied.
“The file said he had a wife,” said Tarasov.
“Nadia Bragina,” said Yermali. “It wasn’t official, of course. Stepan was a bit old to be standing before a judge. He and Nadia just started living together, calling each other husband and wife. It’s very common out here.”
“They could have performed a traditional Yakut ceremony,” Kagan added.
“She was Yakut?” asked Tarasov.
“Of course,” said Kagan. “At least, I assumed so. Yermali?”
Yermali shrugged.
“What do you know about her?” asked Tarasov.
“She’s another mystery,” said Kagan. “We tried to find out about her after Stepan disappeared. But we came up empty. It’s like she never existed. She died about the time Stepan escaped. I figure that’s what triggered his decision to leave.”
“Surelysomeone knows something about her.”
Yermali flipped her dark hair over her shoulder. “Is this your first trip to a Siberian outpost, comrade?”
“Yes.”
“I figured. You can’t imagine how desolate it is. You can live an entire lifetime and never see another living soul.”
“But you sawhim? ”
“Stepan’s parole required him to work in our reindeer collective, so, yes, I saw him. The rest of the time he lived like a hermit. He built his house up on Suntar Ridge. Very difficult country. It takes eight hours by jeep over winter roads to get up there. In the summer, the roads are impassable.”
“But I thought he worked in the village.”
“Five months a year — September to February — when we do the slaughtering. The rest of the time he lived in his house. He loved that house. I imagine for someone who spent twenty-eight years in the camps to suddenly have his own house and a woman in it to make it a home must have been . . . well, it must have meant a lot.”
Her tone suggested reproach. Tarasov let it pass.
Kagan said, “As long as Stepan kept turning up for work and his parole meetings, nobody cared to go out to his place. If Stepan hadn’t mentioned Nadia in his parole meetings, we wouldn’t have known she existed.”
“Where did she come from?” asked Tarasov. “You must have a record of a Nadia Bragina somewhere.”
Yermali smiled indulgently. “Nadia is a common Russian name among Yakuts. They take it because it means ‘hope.’ Stepan never mentioned her Yakut name.”
“The file said she had ovarian cancer,” said Tarasov.
“A doctor went up there just about a year ago,” said Kagan. “The cancer was already pretty far advanced. She couldn’t have lived much longer. He wanted her to go to the hospital, but she refused.”
“I’ll need to speak to the doctor,” said Tarasov.
“I’ll see to it,” said Kagan.
Yermali said, “The two Leningrad agents said they found a fresh grave up by Stepan’s place. They figure it was hers.”
“They went to his cabin?” Tarasov asked, surprised.
“Oh, yes,” said Yermali. “One of my assistants drove them up there. He said they tore the place upside-down searching for something. Then they found a fresh grave a few hundred feet from the house and that seemed to settle things for them. They must have thought Nadia would have it.”
“Have what?”
Yermali shrugged. “Whatever they were looking for. They didn’t say.”
“So they didn’t find it?”
“Not there.”
Tarasov thanked Kagan and Yermali, and left. He took the file, cassette tape and tape recorder with him. His driver navigated the jeep through town and then came to a stop in front of a wooden barracks with a sagging roof.
“What’s this?” asked Tarasov.
“O-tel,” the driver grunted.
It was indeed the hotel, a dim barn with ten doors like horse stalls along a single corridor. Tarasov walked up to the reception desk and watched his breath congeal before him as he called out for the manager. A middle-aged Yakut woman with a deep scowl signed him in. She handed him an electric space heater and a key attached to six inches of reindeer horn. He walked down the unlit corridor to his room, unlocked the door and stepped inside. Six beds lined the cracked and peeling walls. The room reeked of garlic and cigarette smoke. There was no bathroom, just a rust-stained basin on one wall. A roach popped out of the drain hole, probed the surface a moment with its antennae and then disappeared back down the hole. Tarasov dropped his bag onto a bed and peeled off his parka and boots. He plugged in the space heater and placed it beside a bed. He lay down on his stomach and began to comb Stepan Bragin’s file.
At eight o’clock, there was a knock at the door. “Telephone!”
Tarasov followed the Yakut woman up the hall. On the reception desk, a telephone receiver lay beside the phone. Tarasov picked it up.
“Lord!” said Leo. “You would be easier to find if you were on
the moon.”
Tarasov eyed the Yakut woman. She grunted and turned her broad back to him.
“What have you got for me?”
“Nil,” said Leo. “There’s no record of anyone named Stepan Bragin being sent to the camps.”
“Why am I not surprised?” groaned Tarasov. “Could they have gotten to this file too?”
“No way,” said Leo. “Not files in Moscowand Leningrad. Chernenko himself doesn’t have that kind of access.”
“Then they were lost.”
“The KGB doesn’tlose files,” said Leo.
“So there never was a file,” said Tarasov.
“Also impossible. Nobody goes to the gulag without an arrest order. There would be records of interrogations, confessions, sentencing. It’s like he never existed.”
“Then Stepan Bragin is lying,” said Tarasov.
“Why would he do that?”
Tarasov grimaced and asked Leo about the Sears investigation.
“Belov’s got us interviewing every taxi driver in Moscow. He’s turning the whole city upside down. Apparently Katherine’s father is giving up and going back to the States. Shatalin will be glad to see him go, I can tell you that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a foreigner bring so much pressure to bear on the KGB.”
“But he gave up?”
“He wants to get Washington involved directly. So far, the Politburo has stayed out of it — not a peep from Chernenko. But if Jack Sears gets the American president involved, it could be another matter.”
“So Belov knows his time is running out,” said Tarasov. “He must be getting desperate.”
“He’s obsessed with finding her. He knows that if Chernenko turns the investigation over to someone else, then his involvement will come out.”
“It’ll never get that far,” said Tarasov. “Belov will find her first. She can’t hold out for much longer; I can’t believe she’s made it this long.” Something occurred to Tarasov. “Shatalin must have you working on the investigation.”
Leo ignored this. “I think we’ve covered everything. I really got to go.”
Leo’s haste gave Tarasov his answer. “There’s one more thing I want you to do,” said Tarasov. “Do you have a tape recorder on your phone?”
The Forbidden Zone Page 25
