Axelrod looked down.
“The kontora says that Petrov signed for and removed two thousand milligrams from the lab himself,” continued Vasin. “He stockpiled it bit by bit, for over a month. Signed for it, but didn’t use it. Then he ingested it.”
“Two thousand milligrams unaccounted for? That’s what they’re saying?”
“It’s in the experimental logs. You seem surprised.”
“That’s not possible.”
“What part? Technically or personally impossible?”
“Both.”
“How do you keep track of the thallium you use?”
“Petrov had been running his own experiments in the calutron for weeks. Using thallium, naturally. They’re all in the results log. He was testing different alloys of unenriched uranium metal. Different casings for RDS-220.”
Axelrod gestured down the row of fume chambers, each with its stack of lead pots.
“We know what comes into the laboratory. The senior technician takes delivery of dozens of capsules of material every shift. Then each laboratory chief records what is used in every experiment. You could compare the two to check if there was a discrepancy. But it would take days.”
“That’s exactly what the kontora must have done. They said it was a huge job.”
“But thallium is very unstable. Half-life of just seventy-three hours. That means that half of it decays into mercury every three days. In six days, only a quarter is left. And so on. Makes it hard to keep track of.”
“You’re saying this stuff just vanishes over time?”
“Something like that.”
“So the lab records…”
“Must be falsified. Those two thousand milligrams you say he supposedly signed for? In three days they’d have decayed to a thousand. In twelve, there’d be one hundred and twenty-five milligrams left. In thirty days, less than two. This story of him signing out thallium over a month? A piece of nonsense concocted for scientific illiterates. Show me that log, and I’ll prove it’s been faked.”
Vasin paused as the implications of what Axelrod had told him sank in.
“And you suggested a moment ago that it was personally impossible for him to have taken it himself? You knew him well. Did Dr. Petrov show any signs of being suicidal? Had anything happened to upset him?”
Axelrod shook his head.
“No.”
“No, he didn’t show any signs? Or no, you don’t want to tell me?”
“He was not suicidal. Tired, perhaps. The project was everything to him. Like all of us, he was nervous about the test. He was looking forward so much to seeing it. But who knows what is really happening in a man’s mind?”
Vasin nodded in understanding.
“And his relationships? Was he involved with anyone?”
“No.”
“Was he close to Maria Adamova?”
Other investigators swore that they could tell in an instant when a witness was lying. Vasin had seen too many honest men scared and flailing for salvation to make such a claim. But he could at least tell when a man was collecting himself. A contraction of the mouth. Shoulders tightening. The mouth drying into a tight smile.
“I don’t know.”
Abruptly the ambient vibration stopped and was replaced by the distant sound of an electric klaxon, hooting.
“What the hell is that?” asked Vasin in alarm.
“Here we go.” Axelrod winced. “Wait for it.”
A powerful thud echoed through the floor, like a train colliding with a concrete wall.
“Dr. Mueller’s shock waves.”
Axelrod led Vasin out of the spectrometer hall. In the corridor they stood aside to allow a pair of technicians to pass, wheeling a large trolley from the neighboring laboratory. Vasin glanced inside and saw a pile of shit-stained fur, goats’ horns, some hooves sticking up at odd angles. The animals had been crushed, as though stamped on by a giant boot. A farmyard reek, utterly incongruous in this sterile place, followed them.
“Ah. And here is our German comrade himself. Good day, Dr. Mueller.”
Mueller, a small man in round glasses, blinked nervously as though expecting to be slapped. He nodded briefly to acknowledge Axelrod’s greeting and scuttled on. With a bang of doors, the German and his trolley were gone.
Axelrod waited before answering Vasin’s unasked question.
“They found him in one of the German camps. He’d set up a whole laboratory for medical experiments. Used the prisoners as his guinea pigs. The Americans wanted him hanged, but we decided to use his bright mind. So here we are. The miracles of Soviet science. In this cellar, we separate streams of atoms. In that cellar, Mueller explodes farm animals.”
“Why?”
“Bombs produce pressure waves, as well as light and heat. Different ones at different altitudes. Beyond a certain distance, the heat dies away and it’s the blast wave that produces the lethality. So Mueller calculates it.”
“Lethality?”
Axelrod made a moue of distaste.
“Kill zone radius. Casualty estimates, that kind of thing. The military men are interested in such matters. Nothing to do with atomic physics, of course. But that barometric sphere needs power, and space. So it was built here, in the basement, next to our calutron. And so we live. Neighbors to our German destroyer of livestock.”
They walked to the lobby in silence. The linoleum gave way to a carpeted corridor that brought them once more to the turnstiles. Vasin spotted Kuznetsov slumped on a bench, his nose in a book. He stopped just out of his handler’s earshot.
“What do you think happened to Petrov, Dr. Axelrod?”
The scientist’s voice, when he spoke, was trembling.
“It was not an accident. Petrov did not commit suicide.”
Axelrod turned to go, and Vasin recalled something Adamov had said about Petrov’s final dinner. About the only guest Vasin had yet to meet, dead or alive. Colonel Pavel Korin.
“Wait. What’s in Olenya?”
The scientist hesitated.
“I’m not sure I’m supposed to…”
“Come on. This isn’t a test of your discretion. You failed that one about fifty times already.”
A look of alarm crossed Axelrod’s pinched face.
“Forgive me, Comrade. What is Olenya?”
“It’s a naval air base up on the Kola Peninsula on the White Sea. It’s where the bombers take off when we conduct atmospheric bomb tests.”
“Do you know someone named Korin?”
“Everyone knows Pavel Korin. He works on weapons delivery. Brilliant nuts-and-bolts man. But why?”
“I believe he’s a personal friend of the Adamovs. How well did he know Petrov?”
Suspicion closed down Axelrod’s face like a rattling shutter.
“Ask him yourself.”
“That’s precisely what I want to do, but he’s in Olenya.”
“Testing dummies of RDS-220, I imagine. I have to go.”
Vasin caught Axelrod’s arm and held it, pulling him close.
“How do I get to Olenya?”
“It’s a busy time. There are transport planes going up there round the clock. Get a travel order from your superiors. Now let me go.”
“My superiors want me to sign off on their suicide theory and go home.” Vasin released Axelrod’s sleeve. “Is that what you want me to do?”
The scientist sagged.
“Keep me out of this.”
“I will try. How do I get myself on one of those planes?”
“They take couriers on practically every flight. Find some documents to deliver to Korin.”
“On whose authority?”
Axelrod thought for a moment.
&
nbsp; “Adamov signed an Institute pass for you, right?”
Vasin nodded.
“In Arzamas, Adamov’s authority is all you need.”
IV
“Interesting chat?”
Vasin looked up from the notebook in which he was writing up his meeting with Axelrod. Kuznetsov lay on the sofa, his book folded on his chest.
“Lots of chemistry. Or maybe it was physics. Didn’t understand much of it, to be honest.”
Kuznetsov sat up on the sofa and began playing with a box of matches on the coffee table, flipping it end over end with his index finger.
“Listen, Vasin. You twisted their tails over at the kontora yesterday. Zaitsev was spitting nails all afternoon after your stunt. Getting some big Moscow pinecone to call Adamov and make him jump like a schoolboy.”
“The General strikes me as a zealous comrade who takes his duties very seriously.”
“Spare me your bullshit, I’ll spare you mine.”
“We agree. Life’s better without bullshit.”
“Zaitsev’s an old-school butcher. You saw those scars on his right hand. He boasts they are burn marks he got from a red-hot pistol.”
Vasin made his face blank.
“Red-hot,” continued Kuznetsov, “from firing hundreds of rounds into the backs of men’s heads. They were evacuating a prison near Minsk. Early in the war, during the Fascist advance. There was no transport, so Zaitsev ordered every prisoner liquidated rather than see them fall into enemy hands. He decided it was his duty to do the job personally. That’s Zaitsev.”
“And why are you telling me this?”
“Because he hates your guts, Vasin. You tell me why. I can guess most of it. He doesn’t want complications. You have some ideas about Petrov’s death. Maybe he’s scared of who you work for. Who do you work for, by the way?”
“The Department of Special Cases of the Second Chief Directorate of the Committee for State Security.”
“Okay, so I don’t need to know. All I’m saying is you got our boss all riled up. You need to walk carefully.”
“I’m just doing my job.”
“Which is to discover the cause of Petrov’s death?”
“Except I’m getting the feeling that pretty much everyone here would rather not know.”
Kuznetsov shrugged.
“There are lots of things in the world it’s better not to know.”
“Is that a message from Zaitsev?”
“Don’t be paranoid, Vasin. It’s a message from me.”
“Okay. Tell me why you don’t want to know.”
Kuznetsov grimaced.
“Because of Zaitsev, yes. But not for the reasons you think. Because of what this place stands for, the people who work here, and what Zaitsev could do to them. All this that we are building in Arzamas? It’s so fragile.”
“I don’t understand.”
Kuznetsov snatched up his copy of Science and Life magazine from the table. On the cover was a picture of a new Sputnik satellite, shiny as a child’s toy.
“Look here: this ball of steel, made by Soviet hands, about to go up into the cosmos and orbit the planet. Don’t you see? After revolution and war and bloodshed, finally we’ve done it. We’ve beaten history. A new world is being born, right here in the Soviet Union. And the capitalists see it, and they hate it. They fear it. The future is being forged in front of their eyes, for every citizen of the world. The capitalists have to destroy us, or see themselves destroyed. That is why we need them. The Golden Brains.” Kuznetsov jabbed a stubby finger in the general direction of Kurchatov Square and Adamov’s Citadel. “In this space age, the bombs they make are our frontline soldiers.”
“What’s that got to do with Petrov and your butcher Zaitsev?”
“You’re not listening. Can we say the death of Fyodor Petrov was an accident?”
Vasin raised an eyebrow.
“You think it was no accident. A suicide, perhaps? Maybe. You think, maybe not. If not suicide, then it must be murder. And who are your suspects? Petrov’s colleagues. His comrades. His fellow scientists. He wasn’t hit over the head with a vodka bottle behind a bus stop, was he? Let’s say it was someone who had access to some of the most radioactive material in the USSR, and knew exactly how to use it. Now we report all of this to Zaitsev and tell him to get cracking. If this is now a murder investigation, what kind of a culprit does a man like our Minsk jailhouse butcher look for?”
Vasin sat down heavily opposite Kuznetsov. He could see where this was heading.
“Zaitsev reverts to what he knows. He looks for enemies of the people. Ideological impurity. Antisocial habits. Unsanctioned reading of ideologically unsound books. Pederasty. Anti-Soviet literature.”
“And he would find them.”
“This is Arzamas. Of course he would. Look, here’s a subversive book, right here.”
Kuznetsov picked up the paperback he had been reading and ruffled its pages in front of Vasin’s face.
“This was printed by Russian exiles in New York last year. Vozdushnie Puti, Air Routes. Look who’s in it. Osip Mandelstam, the greatest poet you’ve never heard of. Letters by Isaac Babel. Poem Without a Hero by Anna Akhmatova. Marina Tsvetaeva, not the lyrical Silver Age stuff you’ve read, but her late stuff. Bitter as quinine. Brilliant. Powerful. It’s all brilliant. But every word of this book is counterrevolutionary propaganda according to Zaitsev and our own kontora.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I got it from the kontora, naturally. Haven’t you ever been to the library in the Lubyanka? It’s well stocked. Newsweek magazine. Paris Match. All the Soviet émigré publications. We have to know our enemy, you see? Or you could take a look on Dr. Adamov’s own bookshelves, next time you pay him a social call. I’m sure you’ll find they’re packed with banned literature.”
“Okay, so Arzamas is a greenhouse. Free spirits and eccentrics. But what makes it fragile?”
“I’ve lived among these people for three years now. And let me tell you, pretty much every one of them is a social deviant in one way or another. Allow Zaitsev to run amok in the Citadel, and he’d have confessions of anti-Soviet activity out of half the staff before you can say ‘purge.’ ”
“The kontora doesn’t do purges anymore.”
“And where did you read that, friend? Does the fact that something is on the front page of Pravda make it true? You’re so sure that times have changed?”
“You told me yourself that the work they do is so valuable they can do whatever they like. They’re untouchable.”
“As long as they succeed. What happens when they fail? What happens if RDS-220 turns out to be a dud? Do you have any idea how many millions of rubles go into this program? No—nor do I. But it’s vast. Eats up the military budget. Eats up the security budget. You think old butchers like Zaitsev like to see all of this power in the hands of these degenerates and cloud dwellers? You think they like to hear General Secretary Khrushchev tearing down the great Stalin? There are plenty who think this entire show would be better run by some square-headed military engineers.”
“If Zaitsev hates all these misfits so much, why is he protecting them?”
“He’s following orders. But imagine the Golden Brains mess up this test of Adamov’s device. We lose the nuclear race to the Americans. Then, let’s say word gets out that there’s a murderer on the loose here in Arzamas. Then the muzzle comes off the hound.”
“Your boss is the hound.”
Kuznetsov dropped his voice and leaned forward.
“Give him an excuse and he’ll rip the guts out of this place. There will be no more of this.” Kuznetsov flourished the book once again. “No more of the likes of them. Or me. They brought me in from a cushy posting in the kontora station in Berlin. In those days
you could still pop over to the American sector for an afternoon. It gave me a taste for all this dangerous literature, I suppose. Subversive tastes, Zaitsev would call them. Do me a favor and back off. Petrov was a tragic suicide.”
“And if it was murder?”
“You think there’s just one unpunished murderer loose in this country?” Kuznetsov reached to his shoulder and tapped it with a pair of fingers, signaling invisible epaulets, the universal vernacular gesture for secret police. “In the kontora?”
Vasin leaned back in his easy chair and ran a hand through his thinning hair.
“Thank you for your confidence, Kuznetsov.”
“You just seemed like a man who might understand. Clever face on you. Could be misleading, of course.”
They both grinned.
“I need to make a personal long-distance call. Not from a kontora phone.”
“Ah.”
“No, really. To my wife.”
“Try the post office, just off Lenin Square.”
“Is it open?”
“This city never sleeps, old man. I’ll drive you if you like.”
“Mind if I walk?”
“And if I said I did?”
“I’d call in the big pinecones.”
V
An oppressive evening quiet had settled on Arzamas. Two empty trams rumbled toward each other from opposite sides of Lenin Square and stopped side by side. They stood, humming, with their doors open, as though gathering strength to continue their pointless journeys. Eventually the doors clacked shut and they moved off, their women drivers blank-faced as shop dummies. The entire town seemed to have gone to bed with a book.
Hard, cold loneliness welled up inside Vasin as he walked toward the town center. In Moscow, Nikita would be getting ready for bed. Vera would be on the phone, gossiping with her girlfriends. Or watching television. He pictured his home, his life, without him in it. Vasin urgently wanted to hear his son’s voice, to impress himself on his mind. I still am your father. Don’t forget me, my darling boy.
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