Black Sun

by Owen Matthews

  A crack of disapproval creased the secretary’s makeup.

  “Ah! And the latest issue of Krokodil! May I?”

  Without waiting for an answer Vasin picked up the Soviet Union’s best-loved satirical magazine from a low table. He shrugged off his wet mackintosh and hung it, dripping, on the General’s coat stand. Then he went in search of coffee.

  The basement cafeteria at the tail end of breakfast was almost deserted. Vasin bought himself a sweet roll and a cup of excellent coffee, Cuban, fresh-ground. He settled at a table and began to leaf through the magazine. The usual nonsense: caricatures of drunken workers, comic poems about nagging mothers-in-law, prose sketches of the charms and absurdities of rural life. From the corner of his eye he saw a tall officer in an immaculately pressed uniform with adjutant’s braids enter the dining room. The man peered about, spotted him, then strutted across the room like a clockwork toy.

  “Comrade Major Vasin.”

  It was not a question. The officer sat down heavily opposite him.

  “I am Major Oleg Efremov, General Zaitsev’s adjutant.”

  The officer’s pointed gaze made a slow tour of Vasin’s face. He took in the glasses, the soft hands, and Vasin’s eyes, steady and insolent as they met his.

  “The General is waiting for you. If you please.”

  * * *

  —

  In his tight-fitting tunic General Zaitsev looked like a pre-Revolutionary farmhand buttoned uncomfortably into his Sunday outfit. His neck was wider than his face, and he sat with huge, scarred fists clenched on the table like an ogre ready to eat an intruder who has strayed into his kingdom. One of the university-trained milksops who’d come into the service since Stalin died, for instance. Vasin recognized Zaitsev’s type. A State Security officer of the old school, who had earned his stars in blood-spattered execution cellars. A man who’d breathed the smell of fresh death.

  “The government inspector has come to check on us.”

  Zaitsev spoke with a thick country accent and addressed Vasin in the familiar form, like a wayward child.

  “No, sir. I have no reason to believe that your work is anything but of the highest quality.”

  “I am told you personally approached Professor Adamov last night. But you had not presented your credentials to the local authorities. To me.”

  Vasin nodded slowly. Zaitsev’s butcher’s face. Those joint-popping hands.

  “My apologies, General. My credentials are all here.”

  Vasin pulled a sheaf of letters from his tunic pocket and held them out. Zaitsev did not take them.

  “Listen to me now. This city is governed by a special regime. There are procedures—”

  “General,” Vasin interrupted. “With all respect, my orders are very clear.”

  Zaitsev’s face flushed a deeper shade of red.

  “My investigators have already reached a conclusion.” The General’s voice was emphatic as a blow from a billy club. “The evidence clearly shows that Fyodor Petrov killed himself. The investigation is over. We are filing the report. You are too late.”

  Vasin composed his face into a mask of humility.

  “Yes, Comrade General.” Vasin had been through this before. By rank, he was a subordinate. But by the authority he represented he was…something else. Something that must be hinted at delicately. At first. “But I have been ordered by the competent authorities to conduct an independent review of the evidence. And you of course would not wish me to disobey my orders. As you are aware, the deceased’s father is personally close to many members of the Politburo.”

  Zaitsev gave a porcine grunt.

  “Review if you have to. We have assembled definitive evidence. But you are not to approach or harass the principal witnesses. They have already been interviewed to my satisfaction. Is that clear?”

  “Definitive evidence, sir?”

  “Definitive. Petrov died of thallium poisoning. A radioactive heavy metal. He used thallium in his laboratory. Signed for every milligram taken. But he did not use every milligram. The records prove it. A substantial quantity of the thallium is missing. Some two thousand milligrams unaccounted for. Is that definitive enough for you, Major?”

  “May I be allowed to see the records, General?”

  Zaitsev’s scowl turned even more venomous. He turned to his adjutant.

  “Efremov? The man from Moscow does not believe me. Bring our transcript of the laboratory files.”

  Efremov curled his nose as though at a bad smell and obeyed. While he busied himself opening a large steel safe at the back of Zaitsev’s office, the General plucked a sheaf of papers from his in-tray and began to read them, demonstratively ignoring Vasin.

  “Comrade General? The report you asked for.”

  Zaitsev plucked the gray file from his assistant’s delicate hand. The cardboard cover creased in the grip of the General’s thick fingers.

  “Right. Vasin. Here. Look at it. Every sample of thallium Petrov signed out for the last month. There, on the left, every gram he used in his tests. There, in red, the amount unaccounted for. Took a team of five men three days to comb through all the files to get the information. Began immediately after the postmortem report, finished last night.”

  Vasin flicked through the columns of numbers, dates, amounts. They meant nothing to him. As Zaitsev knew.

  “May I keep this?”

  “You may not. As you see, it is marked ‘Top Secret.’ ”

  “And the transcripts of the witness interviews?”

  “They will be filed in the registry, in due course. The case file is being collated now. As per our procedures. When it’s finished, you will read it. And agree with it.”

  “And the body?”

  Zaitsev snorted.

  “In a secure morgue.”

  “When may I be allowed to see it?”

  “Never. Too radioactive. The radiation dissolves tissue like a sugar cube in tea. Or so I’m told.”

  “And Petrov’s apartment?”

  “Same story. Sealed.”

  Vasin frowned and looked at the floor.

  “So, General, if I have understood correctly, I may not in fact do anything? Except compose a telegram to Moscow informing them that I have been prevented from carrying out the Politburo’s orders. Good day, Comrades. I imagine Moscow will be in touch.”

  Vasin placed his sheaf of credentials on Zaitsev’s desk, saluted smartly, and turned on his heel without waiting to be dismissed.

  “Wait!”

  The boss’s voice had sunk to a low growl.

  “Major. Just do your job and get out of here. Efremov, you can take our guest to the morgue. He wants a sniff of our Arzamas radiation. Take him now.”

  Efremov saluted in turn and stalked out of the room, throwing a glance of contempt at Vasin as he passed. Vasin and Zaitsev remained alone.

  “My thanks, Comrade General. I will do my job.”

  “You have two days, Vasin. Two.”

  Or what?

  Vasin knew better than to ask.

  II

  Vasin and Efremov walked down Engels Boulevard without speaking. A fine drizzle shrouded the town in a pall of drifting gray. They emerged into the main square, named for Lenin. One side of the square opened onto a high riverbank. Beyond stood a wooded island topped by the tall belfry and onion domes of a former monastery that no one had got round to demolishing. To their left rose the arrogant modern bulk of the Kino-Teatr Moskva, the facade a sloping expanse of plate glass. Inside the cinema’s atrium the chandeliers glowed with dingy light against the morning gloom. The only color in the square came from the windows of the Univermag department store. As they passed Vasin dawdled to examine the goods on display. Czech shoes and German overcoats. A large stack of canned Kamchatka
crab. In Moscow, such a cornucopia would draw a crowd. But here, citizens were apparently indifferent to the fantastic luxuries piled high in the shopwindow.

  And the people. The way they moved was disconcerting. On this singular planet there were no scrums of grunting housewives, shoving forward toward their objects of desire, a departing tram, a fresh chicken. The people of Arzamas strolled about like extras in a film. They were as well dressed as actors, too, even the manual workers in their striped sailors’ undershirts and boiler suits. A model town, full of model citizens.

  On a street corner a traffic policeman stood hopefully, waiting for some traffic to direct. None came. Efremov turned in to Kurchatov Street. They passed a restaurant with red velour curtains, a hairdresser’s shop with its miasma of violet-scented hair spray, food shops with their standard-issue Soviet signs: MEAT. FISH. An electric tram, the new Polish kind that had only just arrived in Moscow, rumbled past on fresh-laid rails. Arzamas’s Central Clinical Hospital stood back from the road, a long gray cube.

  At the entrance to the hospital Vasin paused to light an Orbita. Efremov waited, but did not light one of his own. Vasin knew the wisdom of numbing the nostrils, recalling the foul mortuaries that marked the beginnings of most of his cases. A stinking cellar in Tashkent from which some Party bigwig had commandeered the refrigeration unit for his dacha. A charnel house in Rostov on Don where bodies were stacked in promiscuous piles in a grotesque parody of an orgy. But as he and Efremov strode down the stairs to the hospital’s basement, Vasin’s nostrils were filled only with the clean sting of formaldehyde and disinfectant. A doctor in a crisp laboratory coat stepped backward into the corridor. Catching sight of the two officers, he stopped short.

  “Good morning…Comrades.”

  Their uniforms. Black officer’s boots, blue breeches, belt and shoulder straps, the telltale KGB green piping on their caps and epaulets. Back in the days when Vasin used to work in his old dark blue police uniform, crumpled and scruffy, people would roll their eyes. Most Soviet citizens viewed ordinary cops as bunglers, sacks of shit tied with belts. The most common nickname for the police was musor, “garbage.” Ever since his move to the KGB, people shrank at the sight of him. Did he enjoy it? Vasin looked the doctor up and down. A part of him did. The world bends around an officer of State Security. It was like a law of physics, radio waves curving in a magnetic field. It bends—though not usually in the direction of truth.

  “Comrade Doctor Andreyev.”

  “Major…?”

  “Efremov. I have brought one Major Vasin of State Security, from Special Cases in Moscow. He has come to discuss the tragic accident of Fyodor Petrov.”

  “Ah.” Dr. Andreyev’s face eased a little. “Of course.”

  Men still feared the uniform. Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime, old KGB bruisers of the Stalin generation used to say. Sure, the country had a different leader now and was heading into a different future. Officially the old days of State terror, of indiscriminate arrest lists and regional quotas for executions, had been jettisoned. Or so Vasin chose to believe. Nonetheless the reflex of fear lingered like the ache of an old scar.

  “Would you like your visitor to see the pathology report, Major?”

  Vasin spoke up.

  “And the body.”

  Andreyev hesitated.

  “Are you aware of the necessary precautions…and the risk?”

  Vasin nodded grimly. Never admit to ignorance. Andreyev glanced nervously at Efremov, who grimaced his assent.

  “Please, go ahead. Our Moscow visitor seems very eager. But if you don’t mind I will wait outside.”

  “Very well. I will summon my personnel.”

  “Is the risk…unusually high?”

  “Yes, Comrade Major. You will see it in the pathology report. Tests show that young Petrov has enough thallium inside him to poison a city.”

  * * *

  —

  The rough cotton of the oversize overalls chafed Vasin’s crotch and made him walk bowlegged. The curved plastic of his face mask was misted with condensation. Andreyev, leading, walked stiffly into a room covered in shining white tiles and illuminated by a powerful surgical lamp. A pair of orderlies, also dressed as spacemen, rolled a dull metal coffin in on a gurney. They struggled to lift off the lid, which came off in weighty sections.

  “Lead,” Andreyev called through the rubberized canvas of his mask. “Lead! Absorbs radiation.”

  In the coffin lay a drowned man. Or at least that was Vasin’s first impression. The face was bloated, the skin pale and blotched, the eyes and mouth wide open. Petrov’s hair had fallen out in clumps and had continued to shed into his coffin. The young man’s teeth, too, were loose and covered in clotted blood. Around Petrov’s shoulders and chest were scratch marks, as though made by fingernails. Vasin gestured a question with a gloved hand. The doctor mimed tearing off his overalls.

  “Self-inflicted. He shredded his clothes.”

  The handsome young man in Petrov’s file photograph was unrecognizable. In death the victim looked…Vasin searched for the word to describe it. Exploded. Petrov’s body seemed to have burst like an overboiled sausage.

  Unusually, the torso was untouched. Vasin mimed cutting up and sewing together above the stomach. Andreyev wagged a finger.

  “No autopsy, Major. Too dangerous” came his muffled words.

  The dead were often Vasin’s best informants. Most of his fellow detectives preferred living witnesses that they could browbeat and terrorize. But Vasin knew that dead men most certainly could tell tales. And unlike the living, they rarely lied. Petrov’s corpse, however, would keep its secrets locked inside.

  “Close it.” Vasin flapped his hands. “Close it.”

  The pathologist eased a black Bakelite device into the space beside the corpse’s head—evidently a Geiger counter for measuring radiation. The needles on the dials leapt to maximum and stayed there. Andreyev turned some buttons, coaxing the needles downward, and took a final reading. Orderlies reappeared, moving quickly, sealing off Petrov’s pale blue eyes from the light for the last time.

  Vasin and Andreyev filed out through a door different from the one they had entered. Three moon-men awaited them, armed with powerful spray guns. They buffeted Andreyev and Vasin unceremoniously from every direction with hot water, two spraying and the other brushing vigorously with a long-handled broom. Then the white ghosts stripped off Vasin’s and Andreyev’s protective clothing and pointed them, dripping in their underwear, into a shower room. Even as steam rose around the two men’s bodies, Vasin found himself shivering.

  “You find our procedures thorough, I hope?”

  “I trust this was not only for my benefit, Doctor.”

  “We take radiation very seriously at Arzamas.”

  “There is no doubt about the cause of death?”

  “None. The symptoms are very clear. Petrov ingested a highly radioactive substance sometime last Monday. A simple analysis of his vomit confirmed the presence of thallium. And tissue samples show that he consumed around two thousand milligrams. Two grams. A fatal dose is only around a quarter of one milligram. Therefore he ingested enough to kill eight thousand people. You see why we are reluctant to open him up.”

  “And the source of the thallium? Who has access to it?”

  Andreyev turned to the investigator.

  “Hundreds of people. This whole city is built on radioactive materials. And their uses.”

  The doctor tugged up his braces and slipped on his white lab coat.

  “Petrov had access?”

  “Of course. He worked in the Institute. But you’d have to ask his lab clerks for details. They keep a log, I imagine, in the laboratory.”

  “And you, Doctor, what is your feeling about the cause of death?”

 
“I have no feelings, Comrade Major. Only observations. And my observation is that men who work with reagents such as thallium are professionals. They are well aware of the dangers.”

  Vasin now regretted the uniform. Pathologists often had good hunches, usually shared like postcoital endearments over an after-autopsy cigarette. But here in the bright sterility of this hospital basement, there were no dark corners in which confidences could grow.

  “Does it look like a suicide to you?”

  Andreyev gave Vasin a long look.

  “Comrade. The scientists here live in a cloud. But the cloud is small and very high up. And sometimes the cloud gets very crowded. People fall off.”

  “Or jump off?”

  “That, Comrade, if you will permit me to say, is your department.”

  Andreyev shook Vasin’s hand and left him standing in the changing room. In a glass window in the laboratory door, Efremov’s face appeared, peering in impatiently to see what was keeping Vasin.

  III

  Outside the hospital Vasin sucked greedily on another cigarette.

  “Why didn’t you view the body with us, Efremov? You don’t seem the squeamish type to me.”

  The adjutant, his arms deep in the pockets of his raincoat, merely nodded.

  “How long are you going to keep up this strong, silent act, Efremov?”

  His companion smiled coldly.

  “Are you bored already by Arzamas, Major? In need of conversation?”

  “I need information.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, how did Petrov die?”

  “It’s…”

  “In the file. Of course. But my memory is terrible. Remind me.”

  “Petrov was found dead in his apartment. Killed by thallium poisoning.”

  “And what did he do in the last hours of his life?”

  “Petrov was last seen alive at dinner with colleagues.”

  “Which colleagues?”

  “He dined with Professor Adamov and his wife at their home. They reported that Petrov seemed tired but otherwise normal.”