by Susan Viets
The shrill ring of the phone roused me into action. I picked up the handset and shifted. I sat on the top step of a short staircase that led down into the kitchen area and said hello in English.
“May I speak to Susan?” a man asked in a North American accent.
“Speaking.” The man’s voice did not sound familiar. He introduced himself as a businessman, Mr. Smith, on assignment in Kiev. He spoke for a few minutes and then said, “I have some information that will interest you.” I asked for details, but he would provide none over the telephone.
“I’m staying at the Zhovtnevyi Hotel. Meet me here.” I had no reason to trust this stranger. He established no common link through friends or acquaintances and barely stated his business. I hesitated but did agree to go. Foreigners, still rare enough in Kiev for interest, had never posed a threat. I wondered what this man wanted and who had given him my number.
I lived so centrally that I could reach the hotel quickly on foot. I scratched at frost built up on one window pane in my study. I pressed my hand against the glass and felt the sharp sting of January cold. I decided I would drive.
I took two coats from the cupboard and put them on, layering one on top of the other. I lifted a square hat, the shape of a cake box, from one shelf and placed it on my head. I pulled on wool socks and boots, slid my hands into thick lined gloves and stepped into the corridor. I fished a set of impossibly long keys from my pocket, locked the door and then waited for the arrival of the elevator. A couple fit inside with moderate ease; three was a squeeze. I stared at a jagged hole in the door on the slow ride down and wondered, as I always did, if a bullet had made the hole.
A snowdrift partially blocked the door. I shoved hard, opened it and blinked as I emerged from our windowless lobby into the courtyard. I tramped through snow that reached my knees. Some spilled in over the top of my boots. As I reached the street the warmth that I carried from my well-heated flat dissipated. I felt the first burst of cold sting my thighs. I moved as quickly as I could on the snowy sidewalks to reach a stoyanka – a guarded parking lot – just above October Revolution, no Independence Square. I was still adjusting to new names for streets and other city landmarks.
I had kept my red hatchback Lada in these guarded lots since the morning that I woke and found it stripped of all exterior parts, left wheel-less, propped up on wooden blocks. Street parking was no longer safe. I had ignored warnings not to leave my car out and so could blame no one but myself.
I felt moisture build inside the scarf wrapped tightly around my face. I soon reached the lot and my car, opened the door and started the engine. I took a snow brush from the trunk and cleaned off my nearly buried car. When I had finished, I knocked the brush clean and put it away. I opened the door and sat on the driver’s seat. The heater had warmed the interior quickly. This one part of my Lada worked well. I put my hands in front of the vents to warm them in a blast of hot air and wondered about a faintly salty, fishy smell inside the car.
I looked in the back seat and noticed a package wrapped in newspaper. I picked it up and unfurled the paper. A dried fish dropped out. Evgenyi, I thought. He’d taken to leaving small presents in my car. I turned the ignition off and went to a cabin at the edge of the lot. Evgenyi, the stoyanka attendant, saw me as I approached the booth. He flung the door open.
“Well, look who’s here!” he said. I wished him Happy New Year and thanked him for the fish.
“Come in for a New Year’s toast,” he insisted.
“I’m driving,” I said. “But I’d love a cup of tea,” I added as I scrambled in from the cold. I sat on a tiny stool as Evgenyi made tea for me and poured a shot of vodka for himself. He inquired about my family in Canada and I asked him how he had spent the holidays.
“Alone with my thoughts,” he said. I explained that I was late for a meeting and edged toward the door.
“Sit for a while,” he insisted. “Do you know about Stalin?” I nodded. I had studied Stalin’s regime in university. So many innocent people died. Purges resulted in mass arrests, show trials and sentences in the Gulag. Sometimes guards just shot their prisoners in the back of the head.
“I was a driver back then. I didn’t do any of the dirty work,” he said. I wanted to end this conversation. I could not bear to hear more. I already imagined Evgenyi behind the wheel as agents pushed victims into the car for their trip to the security services headquarters. Interrogation, torture and sentencing would follow.
“Those guys in the service were my family, my brothers,” he said. I wanted to shout, “Why tell me this?” But I sat silent, uncomfortable. I guessed he felt safe talking to a foreigner who might not judge him. Maybe he would die soon and needed to unburden himself. I edged toward the door again. He put up his hand as if to say wait, so I did. He rummaged in a drawer and pulled a pin out.
“It’s my badge for service,” he said and put it in my hand. “A gift, for the New Year.”
I smiled and thanked him but felt quite horrified by my gift, as if someone from the SS had just handed me Nazi memorabilia.
“I must go now,” I insisted. “I’m very late.” He opened the door. I ran back to my car.
When I reached the hotel, I parked and fumbled in my pocket for the notebook where I had recorded Mr. Smith’s room number. I also pulled out Evgenyi’s badge and shoved it in the bottom of my bag. I sat in the car for a few minutes to reflect on what he had told me, compose myself and switch gears for this next meeting. When I felt ready, I entered the lobby and rode the elevator up. I knocked on Mr. Smith’s door. A man in casual business dress opened it and asked me in. Papers lay strewn across a small desk. I sat on a chair nearby.
“I’m sure you’re wondering why I invited you here,” he said. I did.
“Do you cover business stories?” he asked. I said that under Communism the government had only permitted small-scale experimentation with private business, usually restaurants or cafés.
“Well get ready for some changes. I’ve worked for several months on a big telecommunications deal and I don’t like what I see.” Few people in Ukraine had a phone. There would be a good market for any company that was able to meet this demand. I asked for details.
“I lost the deal. I have no doubt at all those guys that won paid a significant bribe,” Mr. Smith said.
I felt shocked by what Evgenyi had told me but not by what Mr. Smith said. Deals worked that way here, so payment of a bribe seemed a reasonable assumption. I had learned how the market in Ukraine functioned through a gas station attendant not long after I arrived, when Ukraine was still Communist. As a foreigner I received no coupons that would allow me to purchase gasoline at state-run stations. A co-operative station, a semi-private enterprise, opened, and this is where I bought gas. Usually the line stretched several blocks down the street and the wait was several hours. Demand always exceeded supply and at some point gas ran out.
A group of boys – the oldest, about fourteen – learned to work the system. Several joined the line with canisters. When one got gas, he would walk down the line of cars from the back and auction his tin to the highest bidder. Initially I resisted buying from the boys, however, soon I became a loyal customer.
One day I arrived at the station and saw no line. As I drove closer to the pump, I noticed a small handwritten sign posted on it that said No Gas. I had lived in Ukraine long enough to realize that No Gas might mean “gas only under the right circumstances.” I saw a babushka wrapped in a heavy coat inside a kiosk by the pump. I opened the trunk of my car and pulled out a bottle of vodka. I walked over to the kiosk and knocked on the glass. The woman saw me and the bottle. She opened her window.
“Is there any gas?” I asked.
“Is there any vodka?” she countered. We reached a deal. Then I asked the woman how she got her job.
“I bought it, of course. I had to borrow the money.”
“So you pay it back with deals like this?”
“Girl, tell me how else?” Whoever controlled t
he telephone system likely played by the same rules that had existed under Communism. I was not that interested in Mr. Smith’s story, but he still told me more.
Soon documents lay across the table. We stood side by side as he pieced together a complex puzzle of secret meetings, mostly in overseas locations like Switzerland, where Mr. Smith alleged that foreign company representatives gave more than a million dollars in cash to high-ranking Ukrainian officials in exchange for business support.
“How did you obtain this information?”
“I have my contacts,” he said. “You should investigate this.” I felt suspicious about what he had told me and wondered if Mr. Smith wanted revenge and was trying to use me to get it.
“Do you think this is linked to the coup?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “to regime change. You need political guarantees to do business here, to secure the market. Before independence those guarantees came from politicians in Moscow. Now politicians in Kiev have that power.”
“So did you offer them money?” I asked.
“No. I explained how the deal could help the economy boom and bring more business here,” the man said. “But it was clear they had something of more personal benefit in mind. No one stated this, but they wanted a bribe. Those guys who won the deal must have paid it.”
Mr. Smith had tracked his rivals’ movements throughout the fall. I found this odd, almost obsessive. Inexperienced in business, I wondered if large corporations commonly behaved this way. I left armed with ammunition for an investigative story but felt unnerved. It would be a serious matter to probe allegations of corruption so high up. This encounter reminded me of that sinister undercurrent from my early days in Kiev. Even though Ukraine was independent, the same men remained in power as before.
Days passed. I made a few calls but did little more to substantiate Mr. Smith’s claim. I did not exactly forget what he told me, but focused on other stories instead. This investigation would take time and I wasn’t convinced it was worth the effort or risk.
One morning in mid-February, the telephone rang. The answering machine intercepted the call before I reached the phone. I had just arrived home on a 4 a.m. flight from Crimea and lay tired in bed, still groggy from so little sleep. I heard Mary’s voice over the answering machine. She said something about Vadym Boyko. I managed to grab the phone handset before Mary hung up.
“Have you heard about Vadym?” she said.
“No, what happened?”
“He’s dead.”
Dead? I turned the word over in my mind, stunned by the news but still detached. Sadness had yet to set in. I tried hard to process information that I did not want. Mary told me what she knew. The previous night a journalist friend, Marko, had received a call about a fire in Vadym’s apartment and a dead body. The caller said the body was believed to be Vadym’s and asked Marko to come and identify it. Marko asked a friend, Ilko, to accompany him. In the apartment Marko and Ilko saw Vadym sprawled across the floor, his torso and face were badly burned. The description nearly made me retch. I could not imagine having to view the semi-charred corpse of a friend.
“Who did it?” I asked.
“They say his television set exploded. We’ll get together this morning and see what we can do,” Mary said.
We would meet at New York Marta’s news bureau in the building next door. As I dressed, I thought of Vadym and one of my earliest meetings with him at the Ukrainian State Television and Radio Headquarters. He rushed down the steps, casually elegant: slim, in black jeans and a maroon sweatshirt, with that glossy dark hair. He held a bundle of paper and stopped to show me what it contained.
“There’s more crossed out than left in,” Vadym joked. I did not understand what Vadym meant until I leafed through the bundle. I saw a heavily edited evening newscast script, with large sections of text blacked out.
“At least this guy still has integrity,” Vadym said. “The worst is self-censorship, when a script is handed in and comes back clean.”
I left my building, walked through the courtyard, under the archway, up the street and entered the next building, climbing the stairs in semi-darkness. Dull light filtered in from a window far above.
I entered the news bureau. Some people sat in chairs, others stood, huddled in clusters. Our host, New York Marta, who had recently returned to Kiev, was usually so cheerful and optimistic. She looked sombre now. Mary talked to the friends, Ilko and Marko, who had identified Vadym’s body. Lesyia, sat quietly. She was in shock. She had had the closest relationship with Vadym. Serhyi, one of Vadym and Lesyia’s close friends, who was also an MP, stood near Lesyia.
None of us wanted to be alone. We formed a circle in the main room and exchanged information. No one believed that Vadym had died in an accident caused by an exploding television set. He’d last been seen the day before his death.
Ilko and Marko had arrived at Vadym’s apartment just after firefighters extinguished the blaze. People were already swarming inside his apartment. They touched items that could be evidence and potentially destroyed important clues.
“A crime scene like this should have been sealed off,” Ilko said. But the investigator in charge did not bother to take samples or conduct interviews with friends or neighbours in the building. He stood near the door and told everybody who came in that Vadym, a television reporter and advocate of uncensored, free media, had died in an accident caused when his own television set exploded. Ilko and Marko described the gutted, scorched interior of the apartment. The position of Vadym’s body, the pattern of his burns and the intensity of the fire all suggested a different version of events.
Ilko and Marko questioned neighbours. One had heard a blast from Vadym’s apartment and investigated. He pushed the door open with a ruler because he was afraid that there might be another explosion. This detail troubled Serhyi; he said that Vadym always locked his apartment door. Serhyi felt even more disturbed when firefighters told him they had to break into Vadym’s apartment. This meant that two eyewitness accounts – one from the neighbour and one from the firefighters – were contradictory. The neighbour also said that he saw an athletic blond young man enter Vadym’s apartment. He opened the door with a key. We had half a dozen fragments of information but none fit together in a pattern that made sense.
One of our acquaintances received a phone call from a contact, a lab technician with access to forensic evidence. The contact insisted Vadym did not have smoke in his lungs. This suggested that he died before fire broke out in his apartment. We speculated that someone might have killed him and then drenched his body in gasoline and set it alight.
As the days passed, we all searched for clues but did not learn much more. Lesyia and I went to Vadym’s apartment. It was a painful visit, especially for her. Lesyia knew the way well. I had never been before.
Vadym lived in a modern concrete block high-rise, so ordinary, not a place for murder. We climbed the stairs to his apartment, the red stencilled “2B” still visible in a patch of white beneath the scorched door. Paint peeled away, melted by intense heat from the fire. A note lay on the threshold with some red carnations, a candle and a red sash. Others had come before us to say their goodbyes as we did now. Lesyia and I stood in silence for some time.
Then we left the building and looked at Vadym’s apartment from outside. A long trail of soot stretched four floors up from his windows, a black marker of death. Plywood replaced shattered glass in one window frame. His apartment was boarded up and abandoned; all life was gone from this place.
We noticed a large rubbish container outside the building. Lesyia recognized some of Vadym’s belongings, half-burned pages from his copy of The Maltese Falcon. I clambered up the container and leaned in. I pulled out a page, hopeful for anything that might, however unlikely, one day provide evidence to unravel this mystery. I could not believe a faulty TV had caused such an intense fire and a horrible death.
I called my parents. I wanted a connection to home, a place where I felt safe. M
y father answered the phone. I could not explain what I needed but felt soothed by his voice. We discussed those small events, mundane for others but not for us, that made up daily life at home. He spoke about the latest antics of our family dog. I told my father the story of Vadym’s death and heard from this intelligent, grounded man, a lawyer who thought rationally, how unlikely it would be for someone to die through a malfunctioning TV.
In Kiev, rumours swirled. Because he was handsome, Vadym had always attracted a lot of male and female attention. I heard speculation about a crime of passion – a romantic entanglement that prompted jealous rage and a brutal attack. Others traced his death to the coup. They remembered Vadym’s investigation into who in Ukraine had supported the Moscow coup plotters and thought someone afraid of exposure had arranged his murder.
In a press conference with Leonid Kravchuk soon after Vadym’s death, one journalist put the question bluntly: “Boyko’s death, was this an accident or a political murder?” Kravchuk replied, “All the information that I have had so far points to a tragic accident.” He said that the forensic evidence and injuries were consistent with those that could be inflicted by a television set that exploded.
“If that is true, we’ll have to come out with a number of measures that would rule out the possibility of such accidents in the future,” Kravchuk added. I left the news conference full of doubt.
In the days that followed, I juggled my usual reporting duties but still thought about Vadym. I could not accept that so many questions remained unanswered. I bumped into Mary in Parliament. I wanted to talk about Vadym’s case with her, but she had no updates and seemed very excited, her mind clearly on something else.
“I think I just got permission to go to a nuclear bomber base,” she said. “Are you interested in coming?”
“Where is it and what do you mean you think you have permission, don’t you need a permit?” I asked.
“Uzyn.” Then she named a military man whom I did not know and said “He telephoned my name through to the base. How about giving it a try before he changes his mind? He could add your name to the list.”
