“I mean, only an air-raid drill. Grab the milk from the fridge. And put on an overcoat.” Kuznetsov’s voice receded as he trudged down the stairs. “Bring your passport, and something to read.”
Vasin tugged on his tracksuit and coat and followed Kuznetsov down the stairs at a run. He caught up with him on the ground floor.
Kuznetsov stood holding open a heavy steel door leading to a cellar.
“The patrol should be around within the hour to check that we’re all safe and sound. Come down and meet our lovely neighbors. They’re already downstairs, taking cover from the Imperialist aggressors.”
The shelter was a low basement, equipped with rows of neatly made-up bunk beds around the walls. A dozen men and women, motley in dressing gowns and fur coats, slumped in easy chairs and sat at a pair of tables, slumbering or reading. A few glanced at Vasin without particular curiosity. In one corner a pair of young twins laid out a desultory game of checkers. Kuznetsov, acknowledging nobody, bounced down himself into an easy chair and cracked open his book. Vasin sat alone on a bunk, regretting having given away his copy of Krokodil. The group in the cellar, settled in their various attitudes of study, seemed to him a bizarre parody of a university library reading room on a quiet afternoon.
The banging on the door was curt and officious. Eyes turned to Kuznetsov. With a sigh he rose and unrolled the door bolt.
“Greetings, early-rising Comrades, we have the roll call ready here for you…”
Kuznetsov paused, midsentence. The door opened to a pair of young sergeants with KGB epaulets. The elder one saluted.
“Good morning, sir. Major Kuznetsov?”
“Okay, okay. I know who sent you. Back upstairs, Vasin. We’re getting dressed. There’s somewhere we need to be.”
The uniform suited some men, fitting as though they had grown up in it. Kuznetsov was not such a man, Vasin decided as he clattered down the stairs behind him. In his breeches, tunic, and pistol belt, Kuznetsov looked like an actor in a provincial theater stuffed into a badly fitting costume. Their breath steaming in the morning chill, they scrambled into the back of a UAZ jeep for the short drive into town. The sirens’ wail swelled and ebbed, relentless, as they passed the speakers mounted on each lamppost. Lenin Square was deserted except for a pair of street sweepers’ handcarts, abandoned by their owners. A tram stood by the intersection with Kurchatov Street, empty, except the driver had forgotten to extinguish its single, cyclopean headlight.
Instead of turning in to the kontora’s forecourt, they slewed past, drove on to another square official building that stood on a high bluff overlooking the old monastery.
“Kommandatura,” Kuznetsov mumbled by way of explanation. “Military command headquarters. The lair of General Pavlov. Head soldier around these parts. Runs everything in this city—outside the walls of the Citadel, that is.”
That familiar, masculine smell of military installations: floor polish, new uniform cloth, strong tobacco. Vasin thought of the Army training camps he and his fellow students had been made to attend while he was at university. Cold showers, mud, bawling voices. The Army’s endless hierarchy of petty cruelties, the kingdom of the stupid. They followed a group of infantry officers hurrying up a broad concrete staircase to the top floor.
Around forty men stood in groups in a large, carpeted anteroom, speaking in low voices. Most wore Army green, with a scattering of KGB blue. As Vasin and Kuznetsov joined them, a set of double doors at the opposite end of the room swung open. A heavyset man lumbered in, carrying a teacup. Everyone snapped to attention. General Pavlov ignored their presence. He sat down heavily at a long conference table and took a slow swig of his tea.
Pavlov glared at his wristwatch and then at the clock on the wall as though daring them to contradict each other. Half past six.
“Enough.”
His voice carried effortlessly. A young orderly acknowledged the order meekly and hurried out. Within a minute the wailing sirens ceased, leaving a silence that rang in the ears. Pavlov decided that he needed to drain the last of his tea, and needed the room to watch him do it too.
“At ease.” The words came from deep in Pavlov’s chest; he could have been clearing his throat. “Nu? Well?”
An adjutant stepped forward nervously, neat in a freshly pressed tunic.
“The air-raid test was a success, Comrade General. Antiaircraft crews at their posts in good order. All but one of the new emergency generators started and are running. We have had phone reports from all the shelters. Ninety-four percent of the civilians accounted for and at their muster stations…”
“The civilians. Where’s our Comrade Major General Zaitsev?”
On cue, the sound of boots on the stairs. Major Efremov stepped in smartly, followed by Zaitsev, puffing from the long climb. The crowd parted before him. Vasin sheltered from the General’s roving, furious eye behind a tall Air Force captain.
“General, good of you to join us.”
Zaitsev settled wordlessly into a chair beside Pavlov.
Efremov stepped forward, opening a leather folder and proffering it to the commandant. Pavlov fixed the younger man with an out-from-under stare of disdain, taking in his polished boots, pomaded hair.
“Six percent of our little pigeons unaccounted for, Zaitsev.” Pavlov raised his eyebrows along with the tone of his voice. This, Vasin imagined, indicated sarcasm. “Decided not to get out of their soft beds?”
“The KGB will make inquiries, Comrade,” Efremov began. “But as you are aware, the members of the Institute are not always able to immediately…”
The adjutant’s voice trailed off as Pavlov hauled himself up and walked over to a set of tall windows that filled one end of the room. He looked like nothing so much as a side of beef in a uniform: the skin of his face and hands blotchy red, his neck straining against the collar of his tunic. Gray hair stuck up at the top and was shaved short at the back and sides. On his uniform four rows of medal ribbons were punctuated by the single, unmistakable gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union, on its scarlet ribbon.
“And what is this?” Pavlov pointed curtly.
Obediently, the officers turned to look across the landscape of rooftops that spread below them. One large glass roof was illuminated from below, the glow of the fluorescent tubes fading into the spreading dawn. Even Vasin could see that it belonged, undoubtedly, to one of the workshops of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics.
“Major?”
Pavlov ground a fat finger into the glass of the window in the direction of the illuminated laboratory, then tapped it for emphasis, leaving a greasy mark.
“A shocking breach of regulations, sir.” Efremov’s voice was theatrically shrill with indignation. “It seems to be the new laboratory complex. I assure you the duty security officers were fully briefed on the revised blackout procedures.”
“And the boys in white coats told them to get lost. To them, this is all provided for their amusement! This whole establishment, so that they can live in the clouds! Is this negligence? Or sabotage?”
“We will find those responsible immediately.”
Pavlov tapped the window once more, for emphasis, then stalked out of the room. Zaitsev remained silent, arms crossed over his chest, his face a brewing storm. For a long moment nobody moved.
“Well? What are you all standing around for, like heifers waiting for a bull to fuck them?” Zaitsev bellowed. “Dismissed!”
Vasin and Kuznetsov joined the rush for the door. By the time they had reached the ground floor, most of the Army men had peeled off into their offices, leaving only their KGB colleagues crowding into the cloakroom like disgraced schoolboys.
* * *
—
The day was fully born now, a pall of low cloud promising more snow. After the overheated fug of t
he Kommandatura, the morning air felt cold and clean on Vasin’s face.
“So that was the charming General Pavlov.”
Kuznetsov rolled his eyes as he buttoned his overcoat.
“Zaitsev’s even more evil twin? Hero of the Soviet Union, my ass,” Kuznetsov answered in a low voice. “That Pavlov. Desk jockey. Politburo ass-kisser. Heroically cleared out all the old warhorses who’d actually bled on the front. Pavlov’s war was about filling tank shells and fucking women munitions workers with tits like torpedoes. That’s what they say down at the kontora. But sometimes the meathead in green likes to show everyone that it’s the military that ultimately runs the show around here.”
“Vasin!”
Zaitsev had emerged at the top of the steps, punching his way into his overcoat as though the flapping cloth deserved a good thrashing. Vasin trotted back up and saluted smartly. Efremov, hovering at his boss’s side, wordlessly handed Zaitsev a piece of paper. Vasin recognized the list of movement orders from the previous day. The paper crumpled in the General’s fist as he thrust it forward.
“I never authorized a flight to Olenya.”
Vasin caught a whiff of the General’s hungover breath. As he looked up into Zaitsev’s porcine face, he noted the unshaven chin, a corrugated pattern of corduroy indented on the pale flesh. A night on the sofa? He bowed respectfully before the General’s halitosis.
“I was interviewing an important witness, Colonel Korin. Wanted to get the investigation done as quickly as possible. As per your orders, sir.”
Zaitsev snorted like a bad-tempered bull and took a step down, his face now level with Vasin’s. His voice was low and menacing.
“You were meant to be gone yesterday, but you’re still fucking here. You’re a hemorrhoid I can’t get rid of.”
“I…”
“Your orders do not trump what’s going on here. You’re in Arzamas, not in some Moscow whorehouse. And however big you think you are, Major Vasin of State Security from Special fucking Cases, however big your boss Orlov thinks he is, no one is bigger than what’s being built here in Arzamas. So go, run and bleat to your chief. Get your permissions from on high. But I swear to you. I swear to you, Vasin: Step out of line one more time, disappear one more time, and I will break you. Officially. Unofficially. Whatever it takes, I will do. But you will play by my rules. My. Fucking. Rules.”
Vasin paused to slowly wipe the flecks of Zaitsev’s spittle from his face. He stood to attention and saluted. As he walked down the steps away from the glowering General, Vasin felt his bowels turning to water.
II
Orlov’s private telephone network was one of Special Cases’ more ingenious secrets. Though of course it was not technically private, only a private use of something very public. “We hide in plain sight, Major,” Orlov had told Vasin when he briefed him on the system. “The most private place for a conversation can be in a crowd. The most secret place for a message may be on the front page of Pravda.”
The USSR’s railway network had its own telephone and telegraph system, independent of the All-Union Post and Telegraph, which connected all other calls. The secret was that Orlov had his own patched-in line, accessible from any railway station across the country. The network was antiquated—some of it even pre-Revolutionary—but secure for precisely that reason. No one in the kontora had much interest in listening in to the conversations of stationmasters and junction managers. A parallel phone system that covered the entire Soviet Union.
Vasin parted from Kuznetsov on the corner of Lenin Square and boarded a tram toward home. This time his companion made no protest, which surely meant that Zaitsev had made other arrangements to keep tabs on him. To give Vasin space to make a mistake. Sure enough, Vasin spotted two men in plain coats scramble aboard as the doors closed, studiously avoiding his eye as the tram gathered speed. Giving them the slip should be easy. Shaking them off so they didn’t realize they’d been shaken would be harder. Back at the apartment Vasin changed into his civilian clothes and stuffed a black beret into the pocket. He returned to the kontora on foot, watching his followers out of the corner of his eye. Once inside the building he nonchalantly made his way to the cafeteria and, as he waited in the queue to pay for his sandwiches, scanned the room. His shadows had remained outside.
A back door, a courtyard, a low wall behind a line of rubbish bins. The service gate stood open as a delivery truck backed crookedly out into the street. Vasin slipped past and worked his way back around the building. Through the dripping trees he spotted his watchers waiting docilely for him in a Volga sedan.
Two more trams, boarded and hopped off at the last moment, brought him to Arzamas’s small train station. Vasin found the operations room without difficulty. The duty stationmaster obeyed Vasin’s scarlet KGB identity card and showed him to a chunky iron telephone receiver that hung in a corner.
“We don’t use it much these days.” The stationmaster was a small, anxious hippo of a man, eager to please. “This branch is all electronic now.”
He pointed to a large wall-mounted board showing the Mid-Volga Railway Region dotted with red and green lights. A pretty, silent blond secretary hovered protectively close to her boss. Vasin’s professional eye caught the body language of an affair. Possibly recreational humiliation? He smiled at his own jadedness before nodding both back into their offices. What have you become, Vasin?
He dialed the four-digit number that got him a priority line to the local railhead: the city of Gorky. Another code, and he was connected to the trunk line to Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Station. Four tinny rings and an operator picked up. Raising his voice to be heard above the static, Vasin asked for Moscow Heavy Goods Ring Line Station, Number 262. Orlov’s Lubyanka office.
After a short wait Orlov came on the line, the loudest voice in a whispering cacophony of railway men’s chatter.
“Comrade! Good to hear from our fellow workers in the middle Volga! No problems? Traffic flow in your section good?”
“Nothing unexpected, sir.” Vasin had to almost shout; it was like trying to make himself heard in a crowded cocktail party. “The usual problems. The head of the local organization. Unhelpful. Very unhelpful.”
“Manageable?”
“Yes, sir. So far, manageable.”
A deafening electronic buzz made Vasin hold the receiver away from his ear for several seconds.
“Still with me?”
“Still with you, sir. Requesting a routine information check. Code 111.”
The highest urgency.
“I am listening.”
“Two files. Both 1937. First case, subjects: Comrades Matveyev. Markov. Adamov.”
Orlov’s simple security code to throw off any eavesdroppers, the first two names on any list were always to be nonsense. Then the real name. God loves trinities, Orlov had said.
“Second case: Comrades Ivanov, Sidorov, Petrov.”
“The last again please, Comrade?”
“Petrov. A. V. Petrov.”
“I hear you clearly and understand. And what information do you require?”
“A connection between the two cases. The comrades in Case One suffered a…serious derailment. In ’thirty-seven. I believe that the individuals in Case Two may have been responsible.”
“Responsible for the derailment? We will check our records.”
“My thanks.”
“Your diligence does you credit, Comrade. Call tomorrow. Same time.”
Vasin breathed a sigh of relief as he replaced the heavy steel receiver. Orlov’s voice had been friendly. Vasin’s wife was evidently still holding her tongue. No sign that the General had any idea about him and Katya.
III
Vasin glanced at his watch. He judged that he probably had a couple more hours before his minders began to grow suspicious.
A standard-issue statue of Lenin stood at the entrance to the main city park, his concrete face resolute as he gestured toward the glorious future. Vasin hurried through the concrete archway, past a forlorn row of refreshment stands shuttered for the winter. Their brightly painted fronts were decorated with cartoon animals. The signs said, SODA, DOUGHNUTS, COTTON CANDY. Nikita’s favorite. The Soviet city park, the space allotted to approved leisure activities. Walking. Eating sweet foodstuffs. Enjoying nature, tamed and framed and shorn of its wildness and hostility and laid out in carefully measured blocks, like a green model city. Also the designated space for all human activity not connected with labor. Courtship, for instance. Lovemaking in the spiky, pungent undergrowth. Strolling with infants. Talking to one’s children. A place where Soviet citizens were allowed to be solitary, though never truly alone.
It occurred to Vasin that his walks in Gorky Park were probably the closest he had ever come to spending time in private with Nikita. Had he really ever had a real conversation with his son? Whenever they were together, without the nagging presence of Vera, it had always seemed kinder to allow the boy the luxury of silence. Every time he asked his son a question, even a joking one, the boy’s face would pinch in earnest nervousness as he considered what would be the correct answer. The poor kid seemed always convinced that he was somehow at fault, but without ever knowing why.
An alley of birches gave on to a wide lawn, gray with melting snow and crisscrossed with footprints. By an empty bandstand Vasin caught a flash of electric blue, the only vibrant color in the monochrome landscape. Maria. From a distance, he watched her. On the street, in a crowd, she had walked upright and stiff as a windup doll. Now, when she thought she was alone, she kicked her boots through the snow like a child. Her hands were stuffed deep in her pockets, and her sharp, small face was almost hidden by the hood of her mackintosh. There was something about her fragility that sent a sudden, unexpected stab of protectiveness through him. He thought of her struggling, the strong kick to his face, as she had fought toward her fall the other night. The anger in that small body, the force of it. He walked out across the snowfield.
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