Black Sun

by Owen Matthews

  “Even you?”

  “Yes, even us. They offered Adamov a proper apartment in the old town. He said, not until everyone has one.”

  “Very admirable.”

  The water began rolling in the pot. Vasin stirred in four spoonfuls of coffee and turned down the Primus.

  “It was luxury,” Masha continued, her voice petering out as if she was talking to herself. “Compared to Leningrad, everything seemed luxurious. Adamov found me there, you know. After he came back from the North.”

  The North? Vasin popped a triangular hole into the lip of the condensed milk tin with a can opener and dribbled the white syrup into their coffee mugs.

  “And your anonymous friend who still lives here?”

  “He stayed on in the barracks after everyone else moved out. Took over the whole hut and burned the old partitions in his stove. He preferred honest wooden planks to concrete walls. Wise man. He knows everything that goes on around here.”

  “They didn’t make him move?”

  Masha gave a snort.

  “Haven’t you worked it out yet? The Golden Brains of Arzamas do exactly as they please. They want to live in an old wooden barrack full of cockroaches? Of course, sir. Crazy? Sure. But we are all very, very crazy.”

  Abruptly Masha flipped herself over in bed and rose on her elbows, her face in the light.

  “Crazy-crazy-crazy,” she hissed, widening her eyes in an exaggerated mime, watching Vasin in the blue light of the Primus flame. “Fucking cray-zee.”

  He brought the hot mug to Masha and squatted next to the bed, his face level with hers. The mask of mockery fell away. She accepted the steaming coffee and took a sip.

  “Damn, that’s good.”

  Vasin sipped too. Army-style: strong, milky, and sweet.

  “You were happy here.”

  “Yeah. Happy.”

  “So, how did you end up on the roof of the Kino tonight?”

  Her eyes met Vasin’s, and he saw himself, tiny, in her pupils, suspended like a prehistoric fly in amber.

  “Ask me some other time.” She swigged down the last of the coffee. “You’ll hear the vixen’s tale.”

  Vasin straightened and drained his mug of coffee. Masha lay huddled in the narrow cot, her eyes trembling in apparent sleep. He turned to leave, but habit made him tug the wardrobe door. It opened stiffly to reveal the dress uniform of an Air Force colonel, with an engineer’s crossed hammers on the breast. He slipped a hand inside and turned the lining of the breast pocket out into the light. The owner’s name was written in the military tailor’s square hand. KORIN P. A.

  The freezing night air stung Vasin’s bruised eye, but he was in no hurry to return to Kuznetsov’s. He lit an Orbita and puffed it, enjoying the silence and solitude. He was just about to start for home when he heard it: a thin whine, almost like the buzz of a mosquito. The noise was so faint that he was ready to dismiss it as a ringing in his ears when it changed pitch. Higher, lower, and higher again. It was coming from somewhere inside the hut.

  Ducking out of sight of the windows, Vasin followed the sound to the back of the cabin, near the kitchen area. Through a frosted pane he saw Masha, wrapped in a blanket, squatting by an open cupboard. Her hair was haloed by faint electric light. Abruptly, the whine resolved into a man’s crackling voice. Vasin strained to hear, but caught only one phrase that came directly after a snatch of music.

  “This is the Voice of America….”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TUESDAY, 24 OCTOBER 1961

  SIX DAYS BEFORE THE TEST

  I

  Vasin’s portable alarm clock rang under his pillow at three in the morning. He crept into the bathroom and closed the door carefully before switching on the light. In front of the mirror he prodded a ripe blue bruise that had hatched on his temple where Maria Adamova had kicked him. Nothing to be done about that. Apart from lie.

  Vasin could feel her strong fingers on the side of his head, the urgent gesture with which she had pulled his face to hers. He thought of her and Adamov sitting at their grand dining table, still as waxworks. The slow swing of her walk as she had led him out of the apartment. And later, the fury in her eyes. The damage. His sister’s doomed, defiant spark.

  “Fedya?” she’d called him on the roof of the Kino. “They said you had been poisoned.”

  Fedya. The diminutive of Fyodor. Fyodor…Petrov?

  Vasin examined his own face, bruised and puffy with sleep, in the mirror. Who was there to feel sorry for him, now that Vera had unleashed her hatred? Only his son, Nikita. Once a week they would escape for a few hours into the city. Gorky Park was a favorite, watching their fellow Muscovites stroll along the wide promenades. Ever since the boy had conquered his fear of the squeaking Ferris wheel many summers before, they rode it ritually on every visit. Now that he was thirteen, the ritual seemed defunct, but when Vasin suggested doing something different, Nikita just shrugged, and they ended up on the wheel anyway. What had he done this past Sunday instead? Something miserable, doubtless. Piano practice. Visiting his grandmother.

  Vasin could be back in Moscow in time for next Sunday’s jaunt with Nikita if he just did what General Zaitsev demanded.

  In his mind’s eye, Vasin scrolled through his colleagues, old and new, putting each one opposite him. What would you do in my shoes, Comrade? And you? The lumbering old alcoholics of the Moscow homicide squad, the smooth-faced new KGB men in their apparatchik suits and smelling of Troinoi eau de cologne. They all had the same answer. All of them would do exactly what they did every day. Sigh. Shrug. And sign. Of course, they would all sign the report.

  Perhaps a year ago, new in the State Security job, Vasin would have done the same. His natural curiosity, a compulsion to follow the evidence to its logical conclusion combined with his urge to look around the next corner, was one thing. But until this moment that hunter’s instinct had always been rooted in good sense. His family needed to be looked after. His precious career needed nurturing. Vasin had watched the brown folders disappear inside General Orlov’s safe in complicit silence. “The higher morality of the Party,” Orlov had called it. The Air Force General’s young wife allegedly murdered at her dacha by armed intruders, although the nine grams of lead in her brain had come from her husband’s service weapon. The Politburo member’s heroin-addicted daughter found comatose in the studio of a well-known subversive artist, the heroin supplied by the nephew of a Party bigwig in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. The sins of the Soviet Union’s officially nonexistent ruling class that Vasin had uncovered, consigned to Orlov’s steel-lined chamber of secrets, as explosive as any bomb ever made at Arzamas.

  But now the anchors of Vasin’s world had been abruptly tugged loose. Vera had threatened divorce. She probably meant it. She would get to keep the apartment, and Nikita. And how long could it be before General Orlov found out about Vasin’s affair with his terrifying Valkyrie of a wife?

  Vasin’s life had become a barge drifting into a quickening current of chaos. After Orlov discovered he had been cuckolded, Vasin could be sure that his next posting would be as director of a penal labor colony up in Magadan. Or no—Orlov, with his priestly theories of justice and retribution, would take some time to consider Vasin’s punishment and make sure it was appropriately biblical. Back it up with a trumped-up corruption charge that would give him no choice but to accept. Something resonant with Arzamas, perhaps? Commandant of a uranium mine on the upper reaches of the Kolyma River. He’d be a bald, poisoned wreck in five years.

  A pulse surged through Vasin’s bruised temple, sending a bloom of pain through his face. Perhaps he would be able to unearth something in Arzamas. Something to trade with Orlov. With the kontora. With anyone powerful enough to save his doomed carcass from Siberia.

  Vasin had one more day in Arzamas.

  It was ti
me to get up to Olenya and talk to Pavel Korin.

  He left Kuznetsov a scribbled note:

  Gone sightseeing. Back tonight. Don’t wait up.

  II

  The airstrip at Arzamas was a simple affair. A runway and a row of hangars, a prefabricated concrete terminal and control tower. A pair of Antonov-8 transports stood with their rear ramps down on the apron, spilling bright light onto a team of loaders manhandling cargo.

  The spotty-faced duty sergeant scanned Vasin’s KGB identity card, his Institute pass signed by Adamov, and his travel order to Arzamas without curiosity.

  “Got a billeting order, Comrade Major? It’s jam-packed in Olenya these days.”

  “I’m not staying. In and out. Classified documents from the Lubyanka for Colonel Korin.”

  The kid nodded reverently and copied Vasin’s details into a flight manifest. Vasin took the stamped piece of cardboard labeled “Movement Order” and tried to make himself comfortable on a hard bench in the waiting room. In the pocket of his uniform greatcoat a paper bag of boiled sausages jammed into bread rolls from the station café warmed his thigh.

  “Passengers for Olenya!”

  Vasin woke abruptly and looked about the waiting room. As he had dozed, a dozen fellow travelers had gathered about him. They were a motley group of civilians and military engineers, some clutching document cases and blueprint rolls, others nursing Army kit bags. Nobody spoke. Vasin’s breakfast had gone cold in his pocket. They filed out onto the tarmac into a swirl of fine, wet snow, guided by the yellow glow of the Antonov’s lights. There was still no hint of dawn in the blackness of the eastern sky.

  The steel-ribbed interior of the aircraft resembled a ship’s hull. It was stacked to the ceiling with wooden crates secured by webbing and straps. Canvas seats folded down from the walls. Vasin squeezed in beside an older man who wore Arctic gear of padded breeches, full-length sheepskin coat, and Army-issue fur hat. Vasin’s neighbor looked him over wordlessly as he stuffed grimy wax plugs into his ears. The ramp creaked shut with a squeal of hydraulics, and the cabin lights went off without warning. The transport’s engines rose to a roar, and Vasin could see the snow streaming into a roiling tunnel behind the propellers.

  It was Vasin’s first time in an airplane. He felt anxiety tighten his bladder as the Antonov lurched into the air, climbing steeply into the gathering snowstorm. He had left the earth and was now in the vertiginous, mechanical world of the cloud dwellers. The high places from which shiny planes dropped deadly bombs on mere earth dwellers below. Involuntarily Vasin grabbed his neighbor’s arm. The man smiled, steel teeth gleaming in the cabin’s red emergency light. The plane steadied as they rose above the cloud canopy. The moonlight illuminated a vast prairie of cloud. It was pale silver, thought Vasin, like the landscape of a dream.

  III

  The Arctic sun dawned over the lake at Olenya, a pale streak in the southern sky. The men who looked up from their work saw it as an elongated, almost rectangular patch of light shimmering above the horizon. The meteorologists called it a “polar mirage.” Not the sun but a mere reflection of it rising on some distant, slightly less frigid corner of the Soviet Union far to the south. A false dawn, then.

  Nature mocks mankind, thought Vasin as he crunched across the snow toward a line of refueling trucks by Olenya’s runway. It mocks man with visions of what he craves the most. In the desert, mirages of pools of cool water. Here, in the Arctic, men see visions of the life-giving sun peeping impossibly around the curve of the earth.

  In a parked bus a row of pale, youthful faces pressed up against the windows like anxious young mothers seeing their babies off to school on the first of September. Engineers, Vasin guessed. He pulled open the door.

  “Colonel Korin?”

  “He’s out on the apron.” A slight kid, swaddled in Army-issue sheepskin, finished stuffing papers into a leather document case. “I’m going over there now.”

  They walked side by side across hard-packed ice. On the runway, floodlit by a circle of arc lamps creating a steaming halo in the night’s gloom, stood the pencil-like form of a Tupolev-95 bomber. The aircraft had been painted a brilliant metallic white all over. But the bomb bay doors and part of the fuselage of the once-sleek aircraft had been cut away. The payload she carried stuck out underneath like a pregnant belly: it was unmistakably a bomb, almost cartoonishly so, with a fat belly, snub nose, and fins. The steel casing was at least eight meters long and two wide.

  “Lord,” said Vasin.

  The young engineer grinned.

  “Big, isn’t she? We spent all night loading her. Twenty-seven tons of cement inside that baby. Nearly two and a half times the bomber’s normal weapon load. More than triple the size of any device we’ve ever loaded.”

  Cement? Of course. Dummy bombs, in preparation for the test.

  “That’s Korin.” The kid pointed to a powerfully-built man with a thick gray beard who stood framed in a blaze of arc light. He wore uniform breeches under a heavy sheepskin aviator’s coat. His angular face had once been handsome but was now hard and dented as an old cast-iron stove.

  A huddle of soldiers and sergeants squatted by a radio truck muffled in their winter coats. Vasin joined them. Voices came crackling over the radio.

  “Final request for visual confirmation from ground crew.”

  Korin strode over and leaned into the truck, taking the radio receiver in a gloved hand.

  “Colonel Korin confirming all normal. Nasha detka krepko pristegnuta. Our kid is tightly strapped in.” The pilot’s voice came loud and steady over the radio’s hiss.

  “Load trim checks complete. Starting engines.”

  One by one, the pilot fired up the four turboprop engines, each of them powering two oppositional propellers. Korin pointed both his thumbs up to the sky and the pilot did the same. Vasin had no idea what the gesture meant, other than it was something Yankee. The overloaded aircraft began its slow taxi toward the runway.

  Something like a real dawn had come by now. The rising sun illuminated the steaming breath of men and the exhaust boiling from the aircraft’s engines in a weak golden light. The men around Vasin watched the Tupolev trundle down the extended runway with professional eyes.

  “Shas’ yebnit,” grunted one of the old hands through missing front teeth. “She’ll fucking crash. It’s too damn big.”

  “Molchat’! Yazyk t’e vyrvu, pizdyuk yebuchy. Shut up or I’ll rip your tongue out, cunt!” called Korin. Vasin recognized the argot of the Gulag immediately.

  The pilot lined his aircraft up on the runway and braked for the final preflight check. Korin raised his field glasses and watched the engines winding up to full power for takeoff. Maybe she is too damn big, Vasin thought, watching the belly of the bomb accelerating barely two meters clear of the tarmac. But no. The Tupolev lifted off late, but gracefully. In a slow arc of black exhaust she turned north, following the receding night.

  “Colonel Pavel Korin?”

  “Who are you?” The voice was deep and imperious.

  “Major Alexander Vasin.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you about Maria Adamova.”

  Korin made no perceptible movement, but Vasin saw concern pass across his face. The Colonel’s eyes flicked to the green KGB flashes on Vasin’s uniform greatcoat.

  “Has something happened to her?”

  “No. She’s okay. But it almost did.”

  “Who are you, Major Alexander Vasin?”

  “State Security.”

  The Colonel made no attempt to disguise the distaste that pulled at the side of his mouth like a fishhook.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Major. What’s wrong?”

  “Do you want to talk about it here?”

  Korin looked around. Black exhaust smoke was drifting
across the airfield. Fuel trucks were revving up one by one to return to base. He checked his large aviator’s watch.

  “The kukla—the dummy—drops in thirty-one minutes. We can talk after that. Come to my quarters after breakfast.”

  IV

  Korin’s billet in Olenya was an anonymous wooden building just like his digs in Arzamas, knocked together and painted a dull military green. A trickle of smoke came from the stovepipe and frost had spread in fantastic patterns over the window glass. Vasin knocked loudly on the door. Silence. After her brilliant dawn entrance, the sun had ascended into a bank of unbroken cloud, leaving Olenya to make do with a pale wash of gray light.

  A polished black limousine turned in to the yard. The car was ungainly as a truck, but its chunky lines had an old-fashioned elegance. The ZiS—the largest sedan ever produced by the Stalin Factory—was the preferred conveyance of people’s commissars of the prewar generation. The car rolled to a halt in front of the hut, and Korin climbed out of the backseat. He gestured to Vasin to come inside and stamped up the steps after him. Small puffs of sawdust floated down from the ceiling as the front door slammed behind them. Korin shrugged out of his heavy coat, hauled off his boots, and turned to Vasin, fists on his hips, formidable even in his stockinged feet.

  “Okay. Now tell me.”

  “Maria tried to kill herself,” Vasin said. “Last night.”

  Korin remained impassive.

  “How do you know?”

  “I was there on the roof of the Kino Moskva. I talked to her and brought her down. She asked me to bring her to your place, and not to report it.”

  “And you didn’t?”