“The pathologist expressed doubt that Dr. Petrov could have received such a large dose by accident. Not in the laboratory.”
“I defer to his opinion.”
“But if the doctor’s estimation is correct and it was not an accidental poisoning…”
“Then the poor soul knew what he was doing.”
“Or someone gave it to him,” said Vasin.
Adamov’s face did not flicker.
“You are saying someone in this city could be a murderer?”
“I am saying that someone in your laboratory could be a murderer.”
“The stoker sees other stokers everywhere.” Adamov pronounced the old Russian proverb in an indifferent voice. “An investigator, I imagine, sees murderers everywhere. I pray you are wrong. But the fact is, Comrade Major, that with the work we are undertaking at the laboratory, nobody has time to pursue your theory. Project RDS-220 is too important to be interfered with. Eight days from now the most powerful bomb the world has ever known will be detonated. That is all you need to know. So let me put it more plainly. Objectively, I cannot afford to give a flying motherfuck how Petrov died.”
Adamov pronounced the words precisely. In the Professor’s clipped voice the profanity was as shocking as a bucket of turds tipped onto the white tablecloth. Vasin was stunned into silence.
“I mean you no disrespect, Major,” Adamov continued smoothly. “Indeed it is quite possible that you are an intelligent young man. You show some signs. You are courteous, certainly, which is not the case with many of your colleagues. But please. File your report. Allow us to work in peace.”
“Professor, I care what happened to Petrov.”
Adamov sipped his tea. The four of them sat in silence for a long moment. Vasin could sense Efremov’s pent-up anger radiating down the table like heat from a stove, but refused to catch his colleague’s eye.
“Why?” Maria’s voice cut abruptly across the room, slightly slurred. “Why do you care, Comrade Major?”
Vasin could barely see her shadowed face. Could this girl be the professor’s wife?
“Comrade…Adamova? Because we cannot live by lies.”
“I see,” said Adamov. “You are a believer in General Secretary Khrushchev’s brave new world. The end of Comrade Stalin’s personality cult. A new heaven and a new earth. Very laudable.”
Maria gave a soft snort.
“Can it be that we have lived to see the day?” she drawled. “An officer of State Security who tells us about truth.”
“Masha. Enough.”
She leaned forward once more into the light. Vasin had seen drunken bravado before. But Maria Adamova was different. Her green eyes shone with an almost supernatural intensity. She took a breath, as though to continue, but her husband interrupted.
“We are all tired, I think.”
“A final question, Professor. When was the last time you saw the deceased?”
Adamov drained his teacup before answering.
“You are playing games now, Major. You know the answer already. We saw Petrov the evening before he was taken ill. He came here for dinner with Colonel Korin. We discussed the project, as usual. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Korin left at ten to catch a flight north, to Olenya. Petrov sat with us a little longer. We debated some technical issues. He appeared tired, but resolute. As we all are. Now, you must excuse us. Maria Vladimirovna will see you out.”
Vasin stood and shook Adamov’s papery hand. Masha walked them to the door, moving slowly as though with infinite weariness.
“My thanks for your time, Comrade Adamova.”
Maria’s eyes wandered slowly around Vasin’s face.
“How fortunate to be guarded by honest men.”
The door shut behind him with a heavy thud.
VII
Vasin and Efremov stepped out into the empty street. A shower had passed, and the wet tarmac shone in the streetlights like a policeman’s plastic cape. A wintry smell rose off the bare earth of the municipal flower beds and freshly planted linden trees on the avenues. In the waiting car the driver’s face was illuminated by the pale yellow light of the dashboard.
“Satisfied, Vasin?”
“Satisfied. Thanks for the lift, Efremov.”
The adjutant opened the car door and motioned Vasin inside.
“Think I’ll go home on foot. Clear my head.”
Vasin turned so that the wind would be at his back and began walking before Efremov could stop him. The domestic hour, after dinner and Good Night, Children on the television. The hour of tea and vodka, arguments and lovemaking. The windows of most of the apartments were illuminated with warm yellow light.
In Moscow, Vera would be on the phone to her girlfriends. Vasin could imagine his wife’s gossipy voice, see the thin stream of cigarette smoke curling out of the kitchen window. Nikita would be sleeping, calm, in his narrow bed under the bookshelf. By day the boy’s face was usually anxious. Admonitions, scolding, advice, the poor kid lived his life advancing doggedly into a daily blizzard of instruction. Only when he slept did his features relax. Nikita was an obliging child, eager to please. But there was no pleasing Vera. “Next time you will do even better,” she would tell the boy. “Higher, higher, and ever higher!” Somewhere else in the world, she believed, there was always a child who was better than her own.
Vasin’s thoughts paced in cramped circles. Arguing voices, call and answer, like a ritual song. Guilty, Vasin stood in the center of a wheeling parade of sins summoned by his wife Vera’s rage. Here, the vodka. There, his mistress.
“How could you?” Vera had screamed. “With her?”
From the next room, the thump of piano scales as Nikita desperately hammered arpeggios to drown his parents’ arguing voices.
“You bastard!” Vera had added, perhaps for the neighbors’ benefit.
Out in the world, criminals, hard men, begged for Vasin’s mercy. In his own home, he hung his head like a defendant before a People’s Court, searching the parquet in vain for crumbs of forgiveness.
Vasin, he thought, your life is ridiculous.
He reached the end of a long boulevard. Like all the streets of Arzamas, it seemed to terminate in a park. Beyond, he guessed, was the forbidden perimeter with its guard towers, dogs, and barbed wire that he had crossed by train the previous day.
Vasin was ravenous. At a tiny cafeteria by the train station, he bought himself a plate of sausages and a mug of watery beer. The other customers were workingmen in overalls and greasy caps, but the place exuded none of the underworld squalor of similar establishments in Moscow. Vasin leafed through General Zaitsev’s copy of Krokodil as he stood by his tall, rickety table. A witty dispatch from the Kharkov Tractor Works, whose male-voice choir had just won an all-Union singing competition. By half past ten he was the last customer. The burly waitress began scooping the remaining sausages out of their steaming water and tipping them, wriggling like live things, into a jar. Her own family’s dinner, doubtless.
“We’re closing, Comrades,” she chirped to the empty room.
“Tell me, pretty one,” Vasin called, raising his voice against the clatter of pans and swish of water. “Where does a man go to get a drink at this time of night?”
“The Café Kino, of course.” The woman looked him up and down in frank appraisal and cocked a flirtatious eyebrow. “But you should watch out. There might be pretty girls there.”
Vasin badly wanted to speak to somebody. A stranger would do. A stranger would be better, in fact. And he needed a drink.
“You’ve earned it, you brave boy.” Katya Orlova’s words, as she sloshed out brandy from her husband’s crystal decanter. He thought of her pendulous breasts, her rouged mouth, her desperate sexual hunger.
What the hell were you thinking? The bos
s’s wife?
Vasin faced the spitting wind and retraced his steps toward Lenin Square. In front of the glass facade of the Kino Moskva the tramlines gleamed. A light burned in the vestibule, and from a basement came the faint sound of chatter and music. There would be cognac. And girls. This, thought Vasin, could end badly. He went in.
The Café Kino occupied a large, dimly lit basement. In one corner a dozen young people had pulled chairs into a circle and were talking loudly over the din of swooping, rhythmic music. It sounded like—could it be?—American rock-and-roll. Thrilling. Semilegal. A couple of the customers glanced at Vasin’s uniform as he hung his mackintosh and cap. Vasin saw no fear in their eyes, only distaste. He settled onto a stool at the long bar and ordered Armenian cognac.
“Unusual music.”
The barman was an indigenous Siberian. His flat, Oriental face was expressionless.
“Rei Charlz,” he said. “ ‘Hit road, Dzak.’ The kids bring their records in. Mo-town.”
In Moscow, Vasin had seen bootleg copies of foreign discs cut onto the celluloid of old X-ray sheets. “Bone discs,” the young people called them. Each cost a month’s student stipend. But the records scattered over the far end of the Kino’s bar were originals, in brightly colored sleeves that spoke of America and unattainable luxury.
A couple stood to dance in front of a small, empty stage. The girl’s hair was done up in a beehive and the young man’s was glossy with cream. They performed a kind of half-squatting dance.
“Da Tvist,” explained the barman, unprompted, as a new song came on. “Chabi Cheka.”
He pronounced the last word like “che-ka,” the first Bolshevik secret police, now slang for the KGB. Was the man being sarcastic? But the barman’s face was blank. Vasin took his cognac to a table in an empty corner.
Pizhony, they called these kids in Moscow. The stylish ones. The term mixed contempt and envy. Plain working people would travel specially to gawp at the pizhony preening up and down Gorky Street in their polka-dot dresses and sharp suits on a Saturday night. Vera hated them. “Today he dances jazz,” she quoted from a Pravda editorial. “But tomorrow he will sell his homeland.”
So this was Petrov’s world. French books, American Motown music, pizhony for friends. The handsome only son of Academician Petrov had moved from the bubble world of Politburo compounds around the dacha village of Zhukovka to the still more isolated cloud dwelling of Arzamas. When he died, the young man had left a great future behind him.
Very senior people were taking a close interest in the circumstances of Fyodor’s untimely death. General Orlov had spelled that much out in his cluttered Moscow office.
“We have made a promise to the Comrade Academician to get to the truth of the matter,” Orlov had said, his face cracking into a toadlike grin. “I told him we would put one of our best men on the case. Our very best man.”
Orlov was stating a fact. Vasin was one of the best investigators in the kontora. He knew this because he had been so hated for so long. In his ten years at police headquarters, Vasin had acquired a reputation for maddening tenacity. A towering sense of righteousness inherited from his mother. A faith in science from his father. Put together they had made Vasin a brilliant detective—as well as a giant pain in his colleagues’ backsides. Honesty was an unusual quality in a police officer, and certainly not a career-advancing one. At least until Vasin’s work had caught the watchful eye of the kontora.
General Orlov, in Vasin’s first ever interview at the Lubyanka, had put it bluntly.
“Too many people in this building are skilled in covering their asses, Vasin. Spinning fairy tales they think the bosses want to hear.” Orlov’s jowls bulged over his uniform collar; his small black eyes skewered Vasin like pins in a butterfly. “You’re a man who can actually investigate a crime. And sometimes we need the whole truth.”
Vasin had noted the sometimes.
Special Cases was Orlov’s term for his tiny, secretive department, which occupied a suite of shabby offices on the Lubyanka’s ninth floor.
“Special Cases concern people who must be treated with special sensitivity,” Orlov had explained the first time Vasin brought him a completed case file, ready for the Prosecutor’s Office, and locked all three copies away in his personal safe. The General had turned full face to the indignation kindling in Vasin’s eyes.
“You understand, Comrade Major?”
“Of course, Comrade General.”
Orlov settled back into his chair.
“Agreement that comes too easily is usually not agreement, Comrade.”
Orlov sized Vasin up like a newly caught specimen.
“Ah! You say nothing!” The General pointed his index finger right down his line of sight into Vasin’s face. “Good! You do not rush to assure me that yes, Comrade General, you do most certainly agree with my every word. Because you do not agree. So, good. You learn fast, Vasin.”
“Sir, I…”
“You believe that a criminal’s place is in jail. Am I right? Of course I am right. For every crime committed, a criminal must be punished. That is the simple arithmetic of our police comrades. And you will agree that they are simple men. ‘Vasin?’ your bosses said. ‘Vasin is the cleverest one.’ They were not paying you a compliment. But you are clever. So I invite you to consider a different logic. Here, we have crime.”
Orlov, sliding forward on the black leather of his chair, picked up a glass paperweight that contained an outsize dragonfly and placed it to one side of his blotter. “And here, punishment.” A heavy-lidded malachite inkwell stood in for the Gulag.
“Your old job was simple. Connect our guilty four-winged comrade here”—Orlov’s fingers mimicked a little man wandering in zigzags across the spotted paper—“and place him in here.” He snapped the top of the inkwell shut.
“A crime must be punished. But what do we say about actions that are no longer crimes? Or not yet crimes? What do we say if the criminal is doing important work for our Motherland? Do we follow justice and shut him up—even if it damages the cause of international Socialism? Or let’s say, we leave a criminal at liberty in order to catch a bigger criminal. Or, perhaps there is a higher motive behind the crime? As you surely know, Comrade Stalin was a bank robber once, in the service of the Party. Would you wish him to have been sent to the tsarist gallows? Which part of you wins the debate, the good Communist or the good policeman? I see you catch my drift. Special cases. They need a special kind of investigator.”
Vasin had made his face stone. Orlov’s scrutiny was like a beam of cold light.
“You know, young Sasha, my father was a priest.” Vasin shuddered involuntarily from the double shock of Orlov’s abrupt familiarity and his admission of a background most men would go to great lengths to hide. “His father was before him. Generations of Orlovs. Humble parish priests, dispensing opium to the masses, soothing them with lies and scented smoke. And I, too, was educated at a seminary. Just like Comrade Stalin. Did you know that, about either of us? In my early days in the Cheka my comrades would call me pop, the priest. There were actually quite a few of us in the kontora, back in those days. Priests, I mean. Sons of priests. Also lots of bitter Jews, revenging themselves on the world. Georgians, too, of course. How we underestimated them! Anyway. Here is what every priest learns as he hears men’s confessions. In order to do evil, a man must tell himself he is doing good. When they kneel and whisper and cross themselves they say, ‘I ask forgiveness.’ But in truth they are asking for understanding. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Ever heard that? Of course you haven’t. The Bible. Book of Genesis. Now our respected Comrade Dzerzhinsky also thought all men were evil. Perhaps he was right. But the important thing is that every man I have ever met secretly thinks that he is better th
an all others. More deserving. He wants the world to recognize his worth. There is no righteousness and no wickedness. Only men, imposing themselves on the world, for reasons they consider good. And Justice exists no more than God does. What we humans—even enlightened Soviet men—call justice is just another name for expediency. The moment you understand that is the moment that you become an investigator worthy of Special Cases.”
There was a pause as Orlov moved the dragonfly and the inkwell carefully back to their places.
“You may rely on me entirely, Comrade General,” Vasin said to Orlov’s face, saluting.
Special fucking criminals, he’d said to himself on the way out.
Vera loved the perks. The new apartment. A private phone line. A place at the best Young Pioneer camp for Nikita. A Moskvich car of their own, one day. Jolly drinks parties at the officers’ clubs that now occupied the palaces of Moscow’s old merchant princes. Crystal glasses, white-coated waiters, generals and colonels in boots that other men had shined for them. Glittering women. General Orlov’s wife like a galleon in full sail, bursting from her evening dress. Her confiding hand on the jacket of Vasin’s new uniform, her eyes wet with lust.
The cognac was sweet. Vasin ordered another. The barman brought over the bottle and left it on the table. He was in a city that existed on no maps and had no address other than a post-box number. A city where Armageddon’s engineers danced to Negro music. Once again trying to discover the misadventures that had led a Party princeling to an early grave.
“Because I care,” Vasin heard himself telling Adamov. “Live not by lies.” You pompous idiot. Vasin could feel the brandy thudding in his temples. You’re just a janitor. Bring me your embarrassments, your peccadilloes, your jealousies, and your addictions. And Vasin will mop them all up into a slim file and take it to Orlov for discreet burial in his steel safe. And in the afternoons he will screw the tits off the General’s needy wife.
Live not by lies.
Black Sun Page 5
