Lazlo Horvath Thriller - 01 - Chernobyl Murders

by Michael Beres

  “No,” said Juli. “What kinds of magazines?”

  “Celebrity magazines,” said Natalya. “I can’t bring them to work anymore. The chief technician says they’re distracting. She caught me looking at Bruce Springsteen. The Frank Sinatra of the eighties. Am I right?”

  “Each generation has its idols.”

  “So, who is your idol, dear Juli?”

  “I don’t have an idol.”

  “What about your boyfriend? Couldn’t he be considered your idol?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “No? A pretty girl like you with no boyfriend? It’s shameful we have boys around here instead of men. The real men are married.

  Here, when the boys aren’t drinking vodka, they hover over their books and calculators. I prefer older men. I’m waiting for a widower who needs a helpmate to cook meals and send him off to work so I can relax.” Natalya sighed. “But if I’m home all day watching television and reading magazines, I’ll eat myself into an early grave.

  You’re lucky to have been born thin, Juli. All the women in my family are heavy. None of the diets I’ve tried do any good. So I might as well enjoy it while I can.”

  They ate, silent except for explosive crunches as Natalya munched her cucumber. After she finished that, Natalya polished off the cookies and cake. Then she leaned across the table and whispered.

  “Did you hear the latest joke circulating up here?”

  “Here” meant the main floor, as opposed to the basement or sub-basement. Gossip from the facility entered the building by way of the main floor, where workers had contact with drivers who brought in samples and reactor personnel who sometimes visited.

  Juli leaned close to Natalya, hoping the joke would not be overheard.

  Even Natalya’s whispering was loud.

  “Is it the one,” asked Juli, “about the reactor inspector who wears gloves even in the summer?”

  “This joke is much better,” said Natalya. “The head of the SSNI in Moscow receives an invitation for delegations of Soviet reactor safety engineers to visit U.S. facilities and study reactor safety principles. The U.S. official says they can visit any reactor they like in the United States. The SSNI head makes his selections and, a few days later, hands his list to the U.S. official. ‘Everything looks fine except for one thing,’ says the U.S. official. ‘What?’ asks the SSNI head. ‘You’ve said you wish to send your Chernobyl engineering staff to Three Mile Island. Don’t you realize,’ asks the U.S. official, ‘we had an accident there in the seventies?’ ‘Of course,’ says the SSNI head. ‘But Three Mile Island is more than adequate for Chernobyl engineers, because at Three Mile Island you had only one accident!’”

  Natalya laughed so hard Juli thought she would tip over backward in her chair. Several people at other tables turned and smiled.

  At one table, a man Juli had never seen before took out a notebook, wrote something in it, then put the notebook back in the pocket of his lab coat.

  For a moment Juli considered warning Natalya about the recent memo condemning “malicious gossipmongering.” But Natalya would probably say something worse. Besides, the joke would spread throughout the facility by quitting time. Better to let the matter rest despite the man in the lab coat.

  “Funny, yes?” said Natalya.

  “Yes,” said Juli. “But now I’ve got to get back to work.”

  As she left the cafeteria, Juli noticed the man in the lab coat tug at his earlobe. And while going down the stairs to the basement, she wondered if Natalya might be part of the head office’s underground network. If the joke was a test, it wouldn’t work because, since Aleksandra’s disappearance, Juli never repeated these jokes to anyone, except Mihaly.

  All afternoon, while inserting Geiger tubes of various sizes into the tombs, Juli imagined each symbolized a night she and Mihaly would spend together. By the time she finished work, she had accumulated over fifty nights with Mihaly, fifty nights she wished might come true.

  Juli rushed from the locker room in the basement so she could be first at the bus stop. She stood alone in the sun while others waited in the shade of the building. Being first in line guaranteed entry into the first bus for Pripyat, the bus she and Mihaly always took.

  As the bus approached in a shimmer of heat, she wondered if it was full, if it would pass by like it once had with Mihaly onboard. No.

  Mihaly would make up an excuse, tell the driver he had business at the low-level laboratory, and get off. But what if Mihaly was not on the first bus?

  When the bus wheezed to a stop, Juli got on, walked slowly down the aisle, but did not see Mihaly. For an instant she imagined what had happened. Mihaly on holiday with his family at his boyhood home near the Czech border, reminders of his duties as father and husband everywhere. Mihaly taking another bus so he would not have to face her. Then a newspaper lowered at the back of the bus, and Mihaly, looking like a boy who has done something deli-ciously evil, grinned at her. She closed her lips tightly to keep from laughing, walked to the back of the bus, and sat next to Mihaly so abruptly he barely had time to remove his briefcase.

  A few seats ahead, Juli saw a woman turn to look at her. The seat next to the woman was empty. Juli took a section of Mihaly’s newspaper, and they both held newspapers up before them. When the bus was through the gate, moving along on the road to Pripyat, the noise of the rear engine allowed them to speak without being overhead. They spoke softly in Hungarian.

  “How are things on the farm?” asked Juli.

  “Fine,” said Mihaly. “How are things here?”

  “The usual. No radiation releases.”

  “Good. How about the weather?”

  “Hot and dry.”

  “Same as the farm, hot and dry except for all the wine my brother and I drank.”

  “Is your family well?”

  “Yes. How about yours?”

  “Don’t be cute. You know I have no family here.”

  “What about the grass, then? Has it taken over?”

  “The other day in the courtyard, it grabbed my ankles and dragged me into the bushes.”

  Mihaly rattled his newspaper section and made an evil smile.

  “And what did the naughty grass do to you in the bushes?”

  “I can’t tell you. There’s a crackdown on gossipmongering.”

  “If you don’t tell, I’ll brood like my bachelor brother.”

  After making sure her newspaper section shielded them, Juli turned and softly bit Mihaly’s ear. They kissed, and her arms grew tired holding up the newspaper.

  Before the bus entered Pripyat, the guard finally made his way to the back. After checking their identity cards, the guard returned to the front of the bus, and Juli and Mihaly left the newspapers in their laps. Beneath the newspapers they touched one another gently. Because Juli had changed into shorts, Mihaly was able to caress her intimately.

  “Will you get off at my stop tonight, Mihaly?”

  “I can’t, not on my first day back. Is your roommate still working at the department store Wednesday evenings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I missed you, Juli. I’m not joking.”

  “It’s hard to tell when you are and when you aren’t.”

  “It’s my protection. I can make up the world as I go along.”

  “Am I in this made-up world?”

  “You and me and the wild grass.”

  “Where is everyone else?”

  “A parallel world. I’ve left a duplicate of myself there.”

  Juli tickled Mihaly on his inner thigh, and he coughed to cover his laughter.

  “Not tonight, then?” she asked. “Not even a walk?”

  “Wednesday. I’ll arrange a late night Wednesday.”

  Before the bus reached her stop, Juli told Mihaly the joke Natalya had screamed in her face at lunch. Mihaly nodded. “I heard it this afternoon, but I didn’t want to ruin it for you. It’s all over the facility.

  The engineers added a new e
nding. After Chernobyl’s engineers leave for the United States, Pravda’s diplomacy page features the story. The headline reads, ‘Chernobyl Engineers Permitted Inside Three Mile Island Containment Building for Firsthand Look.’”

  The bus was at Juli’s stop. When she got off and looked back, Mihaly grinned at her with his eyes crossed and his nose pressed to the bus window.

  4

  Major Grigor Komarov of Branch Office 215 of the Special Department of the Soviet Committee of State Security—the KGB—stood at his office window. He admired Kiev’s greenery, dark and thick beneath the morning sky. Because his window faced west, the window was relatively clear. This afternoon, with the sun in the west, streaks left by inept window washers and the previous evening’s rain would glare like graffiti. He stared at the horizon in the direction of the GDR and East Berlin a thousand kilometers away, where he was stationed before being sent to Kiev. Major Komarov had fond memories of his years in East Berlin, years replete with hard work and hard play. And the women … ah, those fine German women.

  A blonde walking below on the boulevard triggered Komarov’s memory of an especially fine woman, a blonde named Gretchen he had used several times to compromise Western diplomats. Beautiful Gretchen, the most productive KGB operative in Berlin. But this was long ago when he was younger. Long ago when using Romeo agents for sexual blackmail was still effective. In the modern liber-ated world of Western decadence, the blackmailed chap simply asks for extra copies of the photographs for his friends.

  In the old days, male Romeo agents seduced secretaries of em-bassy officials, while female Romeo agents seduced the officials themselves. Agents like Gretchen who could turn a penis into a Siberian fencepost. Of course some Romeo agents, Komarov wished he could forget. Not only the men. He hated men who became Romeos. But there was a woman named Barbara, half-Russian half-Hungarian. If only he could forget the humiliation suffered because of the dark-haired witch during his first week of field training. If only the new recruit had been intelligent enough to realize Barbara’s seduction was a traditional “safe” house hazing in which veteran agents bust through the door when the newcomer’s trousers are down around his ankles.

  To help him forget the hazing incident, Komarov took out his wallet, carefully opened the “secret” compartment behind the bills, and removed a tattered photograph. This was Gretchen. Nothing else remained of Gretchen because, back in the GDR, after he’d gotten beyond being a fresh recruit, he’d used Gretchen as a stepping-stone. He had not wanted to do it. He had agonized over it.

  But it was necessary. Whereas he wished he could have killed Barbara the Hungarian, he had instead killed Gretchen.

  All plans consist of logical steps. In order to create a trail of evidence leading to Captain Sherbitsky, who had been in a high position in the GDR for a decade, two comrades needed to be eliminated. First, a fellow agent named Pudkov; next, Gretchen. Finally, by hunting down and killing Sherbitsky, Komarov gained admira-tion from his superiors. The fabrication of a double homicide fueled by jealousy, and the successful capital punishment of the pseudo murderer, created the atmosphere leading to Komarov’s captaincy a year later.

  Komarov kissed Gretchen’s photograph, feeling the warmth of it and smelling the leather from his wallet. After returning the photograph to his wallet and the wallet to his pocket, he looked out the window again. He leaned forward, facing north instead of west. Here, a hundred kilometers away, beyond the widening of the Dnieper River, lay the Chernobyl Nuclear Facility operated by the Ministry of Energy. Since his transfer to Kiev ten years earlier, counterintelligence at Chernobyl had been his assignment. Instead of recruiting Westerners, instead of the hard work and hard play of his Berlin years, his work now consisted of monitoring hundreds of workers and thousands of relatives and friends of workers at Chernobyl. Each month he reported his findings to Deputy Chairman Dumenko, head of KGB operations in the Ukraine. Dumenko was Komarov’s link to Moscow. Dumenko’s position was one Komarov felt he deserved after his years of loyal service—a position of authority instead of playing nursemaid to a bunch of technical types at the Chernobyl facility.

  Although his position in Kiev was a reward for years of GDR

  service, although even he at first valued the position, at age forty-five he felt stagnant. Was it time for the ruthless Komarov, who had created and solved the Sherbitsky crime so efficiently, to come out of hiding?

  The phone rang and Komarov left the window to answer it.

  Captain Azef from two floors below said his weekly report from Chernobyl was ready. He told Azef to bring the report to his office in five minutes.

  Back at the window, Komarov lit a cigarette. When Captain Azef arrived, he would, as usual, comment on the view. Komarov’s window faced the length of Boulevard Shevchenko as it exited the city and continued northwest over the hills. Up and down went Boulevard Shevchenko, up and down like life. In Berlin, after becoming captain, Komarov had played hard, meeting many women without his wife’s knowledge. Now he only drank hard, the vodka bottle dominating yet giving him solace. It helped him forget his son, recently ejected from university, was a lover of men disguised as a would-be artist. It helped him forget his wife, who catered to their son, was interested only in social position and fashions of the West.

  His climb into the bottle had unearthed past dreams of success. The Sherbitsky affair had served him well. But how could he create a modern plan with national implications? A plan to garner the prestige needed to take over Dumenko’s chairmanship? He was forty-five years old, his wife and son were foreign to him, he drank too much, and time was running out.

  He coughed several times, turned from the window, and coughed repeatedly into his handkerchief. He put his cigarette out angrily amid dozens of others in the ashtray. There was a knock at the door.

  “Come in!” he shouted and coughed again after he sat at his desk.

  The stack of folders Captain Azef placed on Komarov’s desk was formidable, and Azef was short, only his smiling face and bald head visible above the documents after he sat down.

  “How are you this fine morning, Major?”

  “As well as can be expected, Captain.”

  “I heard your cough.” Azef glanced at the ashtray. “The cigarettes do not help?”

  “A difficult habit to overcome,” said Komarov, glaring at Azef.

  “Sorry, Major. You said to remind you from time to time about the need to reduce the number of cigarettes.”

  “I don’t smoke when we’re in the car anymore.”

  “But you seem to make up for it here. I’m simply trying to be helpful.”

  “Helpful,” said Komarov. “Get on with the report.”

  Because the summer holiday season was ending, there was an extensive summary of where personnel had traveled. Many visited Black Sea resorts to turn their skin to leather. Some returned to villages where they had grown up. A handful crossed the frontier, but these were officials of the Ministry of Energy whose whereabouts were monitored by the committee office.

  Another summary listed unusual absences from work. In the fall this list would lengthen with illnesses, but now, in warm weather, there were few unplanned absences. The list included two pregnancies, an appendectomy, a gall-bladder operation, a death due to an automobile accident, and a hospitalization for lung cancer. The mention of lung cancer made Komarov think of the cigarette pack in his shirt pocket. He fought the urge to light up and concentrated on Azef’s report.

  The last unplanned absence was for an engineer who suddenly went mad, telling everyone reactor unit one, to which he was assigned, was going to blow up. The engineer referred to a 1982

  accident during his outburst, a minor accident that was supposed to be secret. The engineer stayed home and refused to return to work.

  Eventually, the Institute for Mental Health took him away. Komarov knew this meant confinement for several years. There was nothing for the KGB to do in the matter except to continue monitoring the man’s co-workers. />
  The report from agents at post offices and telephone exchanges was routine. No questionable letters or telephone calls. Of course, during the holiday season, with staff being shorthanded, less than five percent of calls and letters had been examined.

  “We should increase our monitoring here,” said Komarov.

  Azef nodded. “I contacted Captain Putna at the PK.”

  “I want the next report back up to ten percent.”

  “Yes, Major. I told Putna ten percent.”

  “Good,” said Komarov, somewhat angrily.

  The summary of rumor and gossip was more interesting. An electrician at the facility told co-workers, ever since he began working near the reactors, his hair had begun to quickly turn gray. Because the man’s hair was indeed turning gray, news spread quickly. But finally, the man’s superior determined the man had been coloring his hair for years and suddenly stopped.

  The engineer going mad and claiming unit one was going to explode caused several spin-off rumors. One claimed the Ministry of Energy in Moscow had, for some reason, decided to experiment with safety limits at Chernobyl. Chief engineers met this rumor with denial and disciplinary action. Next was a rumor claiming chief engineers were technically unqualified. This rumor died out on its own after a time because it was viewed as reactionary.

  Each week the report contained new jokes circulating. Last week’s big joke had been about eating the food in the cafeteria. It was okay to eat there, the joke went, as long as you shit in a lead box. This week’s joke dealt with nuclear engineers being sent on a fact-finding tour of U.S. reactors. Engineers were going to Three Mile Island in order to model safety at their own facility after the safety procedures at a reactor with a stellar record. Only one accident!

  “Our internal agents overheard several persons exchanging the joke firsthand,” said Azef, handing Komarov a list of names.