The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  There was a phone in the hallway. He walked out of his bedroom to the old beige phone, to call the power company. A line was obviously down somewhere. Sometimes a car would hit a pole, knocking down a power line. He picked up the phone. No dial tone.

  Then there was a high-pitched yelp, a sound that wasn’t quite human, and Stone knew it was the dog.

  Someone was down there.

  He turned slowly toward his bedroom to get a pair of shoes, to go downstairs and investigate, and—

  There was someone in the hallway, a large bearded man, and he was coming at him. And something about the man looked terrifyingly familiar… .

  Stone whirled fully around to face the intruder. “What the fuck —” he shouted. Stone leaped at him, grabbed his arm, forced it upward at an angle. The interloper slammed his fist into Stone’s abdomen; Stone, who was taller, threw him to the floor, relying on the element

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  of surprise. But the man was more powerful, and he lunged forward, cracking a fist into Stone’s face as he propelled himself forward. Stone reeled backward, suddenly seeing, as he hit the wall, that the man had a gun, in a holster concealed beneath his windbreaker. Stone threw himself at the attacker again. He was on home turf, protecting himself and his father inside their home, and the adrenaline surge he felt was enormous. With the flat of his hand he cracked into the man’s chin, forcing it upward. Then he shoved him hard, hard enough to throw him into a long mirror that hung in the hallway. It shattered, the shards of glass cascading noisily to the floor. Stone reached again, and now he felt a sharp jab from behind. Something had pierced his skin.

  There was another man behind him now; he was outnumbered. As he turned, he saw what had jabbed into his flesh, his backside: a hypodermic needle.

  A shout came from the end of the hallway. His father had opened his bedroom door and was hoarsely calling out in terror.

  “Get back,” Stone shouted. “Stay back!” He turned to the first man, and as he threw his fist he felt dizzy, uncoordinated, and his fist loosened as he lost his balance. He seemed to be falling headlong, falling incredibly far, and then everything went dark.

  A bell. A steadily penetrating bell was the first thing he would remember hearing. The sound was unbearably sharp. His head was hurt; it felt swollen. There was something coarse and abrasive rubbing his cheek. Carpeting. Stone was lying on the floor of his father’s study, his head on the Oriental rug. Everything was incredibly bright— daylight.

  The ringing was the doorbell, which was buzzing angrily. He tried to lift himself from the floor, but he was dizzy, nauseated, sick. It was painful, but he had to stop the noise.

  He grasped the edge of his father’s oak desk as a brace, and pulled himself up slowly.

  He stared in horror, incredulity. He felt his blood freeze, his heart explode.

  It was his father.

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  It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be. It had to be some horrible delusion. I’m asleep still, Stone told himself, I’m dreaming something unspeakable, this isn’t real.

  The blood was everywhere—on the desk, on the blotter, dark, sticky, congealed puddles of human blood. Blood covering his father’s pajamas, like a spill of crimson dye. The deep gashes crisscrossed the body, bloody lines, cuts, stab marks, extending upward from his chest, his heart, to his throat, which gaped open.

  “No, no, no,” Stone moaned. “Oh, Jesus Christ, no, my God, no.” He stood, paralyzed with horror.

  His father had been stabbed to death. His body was sprawled in the desk chair, his defaced head tilted all the way back. He was covered with deep, violent stab wounds, the mangled victim of a psychotic attacker.

  Protruding from one of the wounds in his father’s side. Stone now saw, was a long, black-handled knife. A Sabatier knife, one of those from his father’s set in the kitchen, one of the ones Stone had sharpened so recently.

  He stumbled crazily toward the body of his father, a low, keening cry escaping his throat. He would bring him to life, he would resuscitate him. It was possible. Surely he wasn’t so far gone. It was possible. He would save his life, he would fix him. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he screamed. He gasped, clawing at the body.

  The doorbell had stopped, and then something hurtled against the door. He heard a tremendously loud crash.

  There was no Hme to see what the noise was. He had to save his father’s life. He would save him.

  Somewhere in the house were voices, men’s voices, people shouting. He could hear someone calling his name, but he would not answer now. No time. There was no time.

  He put his hands on his father’s torn cheeks, held up the lifeless head, screaming with vocal cords that no longer could make a sound. No, no, he tried to say, leave me alone.

  He caught a glimpse of blue through the drapes. Police. They wanted to come in, but there was no time.

  No time. Stone tried to shout out at them. I have to save his life.

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  “Open up,” a loud voice said.

  They had not come to help, some part of Stone’s brain told him. Leave. They are not here to save your father. Leave.

  He would have to escape. For his father’s sake, he would have to escape.

  20

  Moscow

  Finally, it was the visit to the Serbsky Institute that turned Stefan Kramer and his father into terrorists.

  The mental deterioration of his brother, Avram Kramer, was, however, only the last straw. Sometimes Stefan believed that his family had been singled out by fate for a miserable existence. Driving home that night from Serbsky, Stefan’s father told him the full tale of his own private nightmare, his own imprisonment, for the first time.

  He’d been captured by the Germans while fighting in the Great Patriotic War. In another country, in another time, he would have become a war hero; in Russia he was a traitor for having been so valorous and so foolhardy as to be captured.

  In the camp he saw horrors that hardened him for the rest of his life.

  One of his campmates, who’d been arrested for unspecified “anti-Soviet agitation,” refused to sign a confession, and so the authorities had inflicted on him one of the most famous cruelties. They had removed his pants and undershorts and seated him on the floor, while two sergeants sat on his legs, and the interrogator had placed the toe of his boot atop the poor man’s penis and testicles and had begun to press, slowly.

  The man confessed within five seconds, just before he would have passed out.

  Another prisoner had been wounded as seriously when an iron ramrod had been heated red-hot and placed against his anus, and had he not shouted out his guilt they would have plunged it in as far as it

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  w ould go; even so, his anal membrane hemorrhaged and bled for days.

  But Yakov Kramer had been spared—until the two zeks, political prisoners, had splashed acid in his face.

  Yet not until later did his loathing for the Soviet system harden. It was the day when he’d first learned, some weeks after the fact, that Stalin had died. All the prisoners had been roused, as usual, at four o’clock, trundled off to the mess hall for “black cabbage soup,” which was made of nettles and was utterly unpalatable, and then sent off to the clay pit, where they dug clay to be made into bricks. On this shift thev had more or less been left alone: the supervising guard stood idly by some distance awa.

  As he dug, Kramer looked at his fellow inmates. Their shaven heads were gray, and their miserable darting eyes had sunk into their heads, surrounded b}- a brownish discoloration. They looked like walking cadavers, and Kramer knew that he was so ugly no one could even bear to look at him.

  Kramer struck up a conversation with a man who had recently come in from Moscow. What was it like there now? Yakov wanted to know. Was it worse, even, than before the war?

  And the Muscovite had told him a story that had made the rounds in Moscow. It seemed that a Moscow district Part}’ co
nference had taken place, at the end of which the secretar' of the Part}’ had called for a tribute to the late great man, Comrade Stalin, and of course everyone had stood and applauded. They beamed and stretched out their hands in the Russian manner and clapped loudly. And the ovation went on, and on. Five minutes, then ten minutes had gone by, and the members of the audience were so weakened they feared they would drop. Yet they could not stop clapping. The KGB was in attendance, and they were watching the audience carefully for signs of slackening enthusiasm. The audience continued to clap, weak and in pain, desperately. Finally, a local factory manager, who was standing at the front of the room with the Part}’ leaders, took it upon himself to sit down, and with tremendous relief the rest of the room followed. And that night the factor}’ manager was arrested. Well, this story was so widely told in Moscow, the man said, that it had to be true.

  Kramer, listening aghast, threw his shovel deep into the earth and

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  waited for a moment while the guard passed. “StaHn’s dead,” he muttered, “but his wardens Hve.”

  That day, he vowed that, if ever he got out of there alive, he would never forget what had been done to him and to his brethren who had died in the prisons and the camps, and he would see to it that Russia never forgot, either… .

  hi 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous “secret speech” to the Twentieth Part)’ Congress denouncing Stalin, millions of zeks were suddenly released, Yakov among them. He later became friendly with a small group of zeks who had also survived what he’d been through. They helped one another adjust to life outside the camps, watching one another grow and raise children and still sustain within themselves a deep hatred for the system that had done to them what it had done.

  The others seemed to get more and more embittered. They talked, increasingly, of terrorism—of stirring things up, venting their hostility, blowing something up.

  One day in the early 1960s, a member of his group—Kramer wanted no part of it—decided to set off a bomb. Through a friend at the scientific-instruments factory where he worked, the man was able to get the components for a crude TNT bomb, and left it in a valise on Gorky Street. The bomb was even more powerful than they’d expected, and several innocent bystanders were badly hurt. He had slipped a letter to an American wire-service reporter, who published the barely literate broadside against the Soviet government.

  This had happened decades ago. The amazing thing was that the man had never gotten caught.

  “But sometimes,” Yakov said, concluding his story, “things can go right.”

  “Yes,” his son replied. His eyes seemed vacant. “Sometimes they can.”

  That night, Stefan decided to become a terrorist, and, late into the evening, father and son devised a campaign of terror designed to free Avram.

  Stefan came over to his father’s apartment and sat at the kitchen

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  table. Sonya was out for the evening, visiting a friend, which was fortunate: Yako' insisted that she not be involved.

  “Nothing else will free Avram,” Stefan said. He was tall and lanky and wore a sweatshirt whose frayed sleeves were too short. He pulled at them nervously.

  “But we can’t demand Avram’s release,” his father objected. “The authorities will know immediately who’s behind the terror. They’ll connect it right away to us—”

  “No. That’s the beaut}’ of my plan. We’ll demand the release of all political prisoners held in the Serbsky Institute. There are dozens of them—no one will suspect us.”

  “Yes,” Yakov said, thinking aloud. “And we make the appeal private —a letter direcdy addressed to Gorbachev only. Yes. Release these people, and the violence stops. If you don’t, we threaten to go public with our demands. And the Kremlin will have to give in to protect themselves—it’s a matter of pure self-interest.”

  “But why should the letter be private?”

  “So the Kremlin can agree to our demands without losing face. Without appearing to be weak. Without fearing they’d be encouraging other acts of terrorism.”

  “I see,” Stefan said, pulling again at his sleeves.

  “But do you know anything about making bombs?”

  After a moment’s pause, Stefan replied, “Yes. I do. I mean, not a tremendous amount—but I learned a bit in prison—”

  Yakov gave a short, bitter laugh. “Your time there wasn’t altogether wasted. But without the equipment—”

  “I can get it.”

  Yakov shook his head.

  “The question is,” Stefan said, “where do we do it?”

  “We’ve got to attract maximum attention,” his father said. “Our government is skilled at covering things up, making them disappear, denying they ever happened. It’s got to be in public. A symbolic target.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as Red Square, or the metro, or Central Telegraph.” he replied. “Such as one particular Kremlin leader with a particularly odious reputation.”

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  “Borisov,” Stefan suddenly exclaimed.

  Borisov, the Central Committee’s head of the Administrative Agencies Department, was known as one of the most notorious apparatchiks in the immense Soviet nomenklatura, the privileged class. More than anyone else in the Soviet power structure, he had urged the widespread use of psychiatric hospitals to quell dissent. And now, after most of the psychiatric prisoners had been released, Borisov was agitating to restore this insidious form of punishment. People believed he was as close to a fiend as anyone alive, now that Stalin was dead.

  “Borisov,” his father agreed. “Takoi khui!” he added. The prick.

  “We’ll find out where he lives,” Stefan said. “That shouldn’t be hard to do.”

  “Stefan,” Yakov said, involuntarily placing a hand up to the striated mass of scar tissue that disfigured his nose, his lips, and part of his eye. “What are we doing? I’m too old for this.”

  Stefan compressed his lips. He suddenly went cold; he felt goose-flesh on the back of his neck. “It’s my job,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  Suddenly the door to the apartment opened, startling the two men.

  It was Sonya. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m interrupting you two.”

  “No, my dear,” Kramer said genfly. “We were just finishing up.”

  21

  The militiaman in the narrow booth at 26 Kutuzov Prospekt was instructed to report any suspicious loiterers—he was, after all, protecting a building that housed members of the Central Committee— but rarely if eer did he have to pick up the phone. He sat in his booth, checking the identity of the drivers of cars entering the lot, nodding brusquely, and doing ery little else. It wasn’t a ver)’ interesting job; in the winters it was cold, and he would wear two pairs of military-issue gloves.

  The guard didn’t much like to read, but the loneliness of the post provided little other escape. So he read the newspapers— Pravda and Izvestiya and Evening Moscow and so on—and nodded officiously at the cars that passed the booth. In the middle of the night, not too many cars passed into the lot.

  At three o’clock, he was relieved by the guard on the second night shift. The two guards chatted for ten minutes or so, scarcely watching the parking lot. Which was virtually silent, anyway.

  But at that moment, a man entered the parking lot.

  Dressed in the gray-quilted work coat of a laborer, Stefan Kramer walked by with the bored, lagging stride of a worker who would much rather be home asleep.

  If the guards happened to see him slipping in, they would undoubtedly queshon him. Stefan would say that one of the damned elevators was broken, and he’d been rudely summoned from bed by the building’s superintendent. There was some sort of problem, either

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  with the hoist cables or the shng or the landing-zone detector—the guy didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Hadn’t the guards gotten phoned
orders from the superintendent to admit him? And the guards, whose primary instincts were to preserve their own jobs, would admit the guy who knew so much about elevators rather than suffer the wrath of a Central Committee pansy who had to, God forbid, walk down three flights of stairs.

  But no one stopped Stefan.

  The black Volga was at the far end of the large parking lot, just as he expected it to be. A few days earlier, Stefan had once again contacted his old cellmate from Lefortovo, Fyodorov, and asked him to find someone who knew something about the residents of this particular Central Committee apartment building. Fyodorov managed to turn up a car mechanic who’d done some work here, and who knew where Sergei Borisov parked his car.

  Good; the car was out of sight of the sentry booth. No one could see him.

  He set to work immediately, sliding himself underneath the car. The asphalt pavement was cold.

  As he worked, his breath rose in clouds around him.

  He’d molded the white plastic explosive, which Fyodorov had provided, into two sausages, then put them into plastic bags. Connected to each of these sausages was a blasting cap connected in turn to an electrically operated detonator, and both of these detonators were connected to a radio receiver—a pocket pager of the sort that Western physicians use on call. The pager’s speaker, which normally emits the beeping noise, had been removed and replaced with an electrical relay. When the unit received a signal from the transmitter—which would transmit up to several kilometers away—the relay would close a switch, completing a circuit, and the car would blow up.

  Stefan placed one of the sausages under the gas tank and another at the front of the car, checked to make sure there were no wires showing; the first part of the job was done.

  He inched his way, on his back, under Borisov’s car, then under another car, until he could get up without being seen from either the

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  building or the guard booth. Leaving was a problem: better not to risk being questioned. So he spent what remained of the night in a janitor’s closet underneath a stairwell, as his old cellmate had suggested.