“Come on, Efremov. You know this case stinks. And one of the reasons it stinks is your distinct effort to keep me away from it. Now you’re going to tell me that the great project cannot be disrupted with days to go before the test. Doesn’t a murderer who kills top scientists constitute a threat to your precious Arzamas? You saw what happened to Petrov’s body. And you told me, ‘Maybe he deserved it.’ ”
Efremov sat motionless, his palms on his thighs. A muscle in his jaw pulsed, but he said nothing for a full minute.
“What gives you the right to place your curiosity above the highest considerations of State Security?”
“You know, Efremov, you’re not the first person in Arzamas to ask me that.”
“You have the arrogance of a fanatic, Comrade Major.”
“I have my orders and I follow them.”
“Vasin, you asked for my help. The best help I can give you is a word of advice. If you persist in your disruptive behavior, there will be negative consequences for you, personally.”
“Negative consequences from whom?”
“From patriotic men.”
“You mean General Zaitsev.”
Efremov’s face had become stone.
“Very well, Efremov. I take careful note of your help.”
Vasin stood abruptly and made for the door.
“Comrade, all we want is for you to get home safely to your wife and child.”
Vasin froze and turned back.
“The work of a KGB officer is not always easy on a marriage. We do hope it works out for the best between you.”
Vasin scanned Efremov’s face for signs that the man knew of the fatal knowledge that was contained in the transcript of his telephone call with Vera. “Katya Orlova”—it was a common enough name. Had Efremov put two and two together and connected her to General Orlov? Vera could not have put him in more jeopardy if she was trying. Was the man needling or stabbing? Judging from the smirk on his face, needling. Or so Vasin fervently hoped.
He composed his face.
“Thanks for your concern, Efremov. I’ll see her when my investigation is finished. And I mean completed.”
Vasin turned to open the door.
“One moment, Comrade. There is something I can do for you.”
“What’s that?”
Efremov had risen.
“You wanted to see Petrov’s apartment?”
Vasin hesitated. Something knowing and menacing had entered Efremov’s tightly wound face.
“Why the sudden change of heart?”
“A gesture of goodwill, Comrade. We’re on the same team, after all. Come. We can go right now.”
VI
Fyodor Petrov’s apartment building was at the edge of town, a kilometer and a half from Lenin Square. It was a modern five-story building identical to Kuznetsov’s, but facing a woodland park. The apartments had balconies, too, and a fenced-off children’s playground, small signifiers of great privilege. Parked in the courtyard were a pair of official cars and two large Kamaz trucks. A policeman standing guard at the stairwell saluted Efremov and rolled his eyes to say: They’re upstairs.
In the lobby the tiny concierge’s lodge, decorated with magazine cuttings of Red Army hockey stars, was empty, and the doors to the ground-floor apartments stood ajar. Vasin glanced inside. Net curtains billowed on a breeze blowing through wide-open windows. A suitcase yawned, half-packed. The residents had left in a hurry.
Voices drifted down the stairwell. Vasin and Efremov ascended to the third floor, where a trio of green-uniformed backs huddled in conference.
“Comrade Officers?”
A narrow face framed in a lieutenant’s collar bars turned irritably, then snapped to attention.
“Sir?”
“This is Major Alexander Vasin from Moscow. He wishes to see the deceased’s apartment.”
The KGB subalterns exchanged glances.
With exaggerated formality, Efremov extended a cardboard box he had brought with him from the car.
“Take this protective gear, Major. The place is covered in…” Efremov searched for a more delicate word and decided against it. “Radioactive puke.”
The box contained a gas mask of Great Patriotic War vintage. Vasin thought of the morgue—the breathing apparatus, the canvas suits, the hosing down.
“Are no other precautions necessary?”
Efremov gave a snort that said, probably.
“Take your time.”
“Thank you, Comrade.”
He pulled on the dusty mask.
* * *
—
Vasin had seen blood before. A schizophrenic electrician who had butchered his family in an apartment on Taganka. A drunk who’d been thrown out of a bar at Kursky Station and had returned with a pair of axes. But this crime scene was like nothing he had ever witnessed. The whole place, sleek bookshelves, modern furniture, shoes standing neat as parading soldiers, was covered in scarlet splashes. Great, extravagant puddles of bloody vomit, more than Vasin had thought one man could ever produce.
In the bedroom was a team of three technicians in the same hazard suits he’d seen at the morgue. They were stripping blood-soaked sheets from the bed with tongs and stuffing them into metal-lined plastic bins. The men acknowledged Vasin’s presence with a brief glance, then continued their work. Vasin began to understand why Efremov wanted him to see it. The official investigation was over, so every scrap of evidence in Petrov’s apartment was being systematically thrown away. On the bedside table a Geiger counter crackled steadily.
Radiation.
When Vasin first heard the word during a childhood X-ray, the nurse had explained that this magic ray was a force of nature that had been tamed by Soviet science. But here in Petrov’s apartment the magic had been turned loose. Odorless, tasteless, and deadly.
Instinctively, Vasin tucked his bare hands under his armpits and looked about the bedroom from the doorway. On one wall hung a framed poster for a foreign film. Vasin squinted through the misted eyepieces of the gas mask. Gérard Philipe in Le Rouge et le Noir. Vasin backed out of the doorway and turned to the sitting room. Framed photographs of family holidays: Fyodor the golden boy, floppy-haired, posing with his parents on beaches and boats. Two Doctors Petrov, father and son, standing side by side, both wearing lab coats. The older man sported a crumpled grin, while his son stared at the camera proud and invincible. Above the television hung a series of framed sketch portraits of Petrov, posing shirtless, executed in charcoal by a talented amateur. Vasin noted the signature: “With all my love, V.” He hoped that Zaitsev’s clowns had photographed the drawing. Within days, he guessed, this and every other object in the place would be buried at the bottom of a mine shaft.
Two of the technicians were starting to maneuver a laden bin into the corridor. One of them waved to Vasin and made a jabbing motion toward his wrist. Vasin stood uncomprehending for a moment then understood: time. Radiation exposure.
Back on the downstairs landing, Vasin tore off the musty gas mask and breathed deep. As he snatched it off he felt a dry rattle in the filter. Snapping off the cover, he found that the mask’s snout contained nothing more than crumbled, useless wadding.
Efremov and his colleagues had gone. He could hear their guffawing banter in the courtyard. Seeing Vasin in the window, they tossed away their cigarettes and mounted their jeep. By the time Vasin had reached the front door, both they and Efremov had driven off, leaving him to find his own way to KGB headquarters. A pair of kontora goons sat in a Volga sedan, watching him pass like bored guard dogs.
Right now, he needed to get away from the poisonous air of Petrov’s apartment. The visit had told him nothing, and in the process he’d inhaled God knows what dose of radiation. Or maybe not quite nothing. “With all my love, V.�
� Vladimir Axelrod? The rain had thickened into a steady drizzle, but nonetheless Vasin struck out into the park in front of Petrov’s building. Like most such green spaces on the edges of Soviet cities, it wasn’t actually a park at all but a patch of primeval forest, abruptly demarcated by a line of asphalt that signified civilization’s furthest advance.
Within a hundred meters, Vasin could have been anywhere in deep Russia. The birches and firs embraced him with the sweet smell of autumnal decay. Rain hissed on the yellowing branches. He followed a lightly trodden path to a natural clearing where traces of ice had formed on the edges of a pond filled with black water. A bristling clump of marsh alders stood, their mongrel-brown trunks tangled fantastically. Vasin pressed on. The forest damp was like a balm against everything man-made and unclean. Behind him he heard the snap of twigs as his tails from the kontora struggled irritably through the wet undergrowth.
Abruptly the woodland ended in what looked like a wide firebreak. But, as he stepped out from the bushes, Vasin saw it marked the city’s border. A tall barbed-wire fence ran along the center of a clear-cut area, perhaps a hundred meters wide, that extended as far as he could see in either direction. A gravel road ran alongside the fence, with guard towers every two hundred meters. Left and right, Vasin saw glinting pairs of glass lenses scanning him from the towers’ walkways, the binoculars held by armed soldiers in rain capes. Opposite, through two lines of fence, the forest continued dark and impenetrable.
Vasin had reached the edge of planet Arzamas.
VII
As Vasin walked home, the sun dropped below the clouds and for a few minutes bathed the snowy streets in harsh, oblique sunshine. The tarmac shone with a lingering scarlet glow. The sight of the post office, its sandstone facade a rich gold in the evening light, held him for a moment. But after counting through the possible outcomes of a phone call home like a pauper auditing pennies, he could think of no good one. Even his final play, the one he promised himself he would never make, the one of total surrender and self-abasement, had not worked. He had thrown himself on Vera’s love and mercy but found that there was none left over for him.
There had been a time, once, when Vasin would confide in Vera. Sharing his indignations, his small triumphs, talking over the mysteries of his police-work cases. Never much of reader, Vera, but she had liked Sherlock Holmes as a girl. Her breathlessly inventive explanations for his homicides reminded him of a younger version of himself. He could never quite bring himself to tell her that Moscow’s murderers were, for the most part, a depressingly predictable bunch. Weeping drunks, beaten wives, the furious human dramas of the communal apartment kitchen where a missing chicken could lead to bloodshed. And then there were the occasional turf wars between such underworld figures hardy enough to exist in a city as saturated with police and vigilant citizenry as Moscow. A gambling club shoot-out. A prostitute with her throat cut. No complex motives, nothing that Holmes and Watson would ever feel the need to light a pipe to ponder, ever appeared in the files that landed on Vasin’s desk. No speckled band snakes, no phosphorescent hounds. Only thieves’ pathetic ideas of honor, profit, and survival. The desperate things human beings with no options left did to each other.
He and Vera had met, in approved fashion, at a Young Communists’ dance. A dusty hall in late summer, the smell of sweet teenage sweat and floor polish. A loud emcee with hair oil running down his temple, a band made up of pimply young men in square suits. From among a crowd of her girlfriends, gripping bottles of soda like protective talismans, Vera looked out into the hostile territory of menfolk with an expression of calm and tolerant appraisal, strangely without ambition. Vasin had of course been too nervous to ask her to dance. She did it instead, accompanied by a girlfriend. She spoke for both of them.
“Will you sit there all evening? The music will finish soon.”
There was annoyance in her voice, an accusation that the boys weren’t doing their bit. As he and Vera danced, awkwardly, hands on hip and shoulder and a chaste arm’s length apart, Vasin felt surprise and relief. So she knows how this all works. Outside, after the dance, they sat side by side on a bench among the long shadows of a small park. Again, Vera had taken him in hand.
“Well?” she asked. Her tone was that of Vasin’s mother, drawing her boy’s attention to some undone chore or broken promise. “Will we kiss?”
She turned her head, eyes closed, mouth half-open, waiting. Her mouth tasted of sugar syrup. When his hand closed on her small breast she slapped it away.
“What are you doing? It is not seemly.”
Vera always knew what was expected. Her life proceeded according to a timetable of convention known to everybody except Vasin. On their third date, to see a comedy film at the Arbat Cinema, she had allowed him to put his hand up her skirt. He felt only hot, taut nylon, and an impenetrable fortress of underclothes. It was understood that a proposal was required to get further. They were both nearly twenty. It was time.
Vera’s eyes were cool and gray, and she had a squat Russian homeliness he found comforting. She was accepting and grave. When he suggested they get registered, after queuing for an hour for a table at the Aragvi restaurant and working their way through a bad Georgian dinner, she did not smile exactly, but her mouth appeared to relax.
“Nu na konets,” she said. “Finally.”
Vasin assumed that meant yes.
Vera had embarked on the arrangements for the wedding stoically, keeping him updated on the process of obtaining champagne coupons and a dressmaker’s appointment as though he had laid a burden upon her. She allowed him to make love to her, on a friend’s sofa. The event was signaled long in advance. Arrangements had been made, keys passed over with a knowing look. Vasin, in his nervousness, had drunk too much. Afterward he remembered only Vera’s sigh when it was over, far too quickly. She had allowed her man to indulge his bestial instincts.
Vera’s mother, Margarita Ivanovna, lived in a new five-story building on the outskirts of the city. She was not yet forty, but her young face was worn out and framed by hair gone dead. Husband lost in the war, officially. Unofficially, Vera had confided, run off with another woman. Margarita Ivanovna had eyed the flowers that Vasin brought disapprovingly, as though the gift might carry some sort of obligation. The bouquet was evidently too gaudy for her. What was this young man trying to cover up? In time Vasin learned that too modest a gift would also have been wrong for his mother-in-law. But by then he had grown used to his role. As a man among women, he stood for all that was wrong and unjust in the world.
Vasin and Vera received the portion of happiness that they had been raised to expect. As the son of a war hero, Vasin had to wait only three months for a one-room apartment in a concrete high-rise on Lenin Prospekt. Vera had been assiduous in finding correct furniture, buying plastic flowers, hanging Hungarian curtains. She even learned to enjoy their sessions in bed, or at least pretended to. Night after night, she had worked her way through the recipes in 1001 Things a Good Housewife Should Know: borscht, cutlets, beetroot salad, fish soup. The training manual for a good Soviet wife, the points to be ticked off one by one on the road to domestic perfection. In their tiny kitchen, over cups of tea, she had listened to her young husband speak of the trials of the police academy, then the force, then his murder cases, or at least sanitized versions of them. She had found a job in the accounts department at the nearby Dom Tkani, Moscow’s biggest draper’s emporium, and settled into the petty politics and jealousies of the office with enthusiasm. She had smiled, at least once, almost every night.
Nikita had been born two years after their marriage. Vasin had first seen the infant as a swaddled parcel, displayed from behind a sealed third-floor window of the House of Births on Nikitskiye Vorota as though to prove that Vera had not been malingering. No men were allowed into this temple of female suffering, for which the husbands gathered on the sidewalk outside were clearly held respo
nsible. The birth had been a bad one, Vera had told him, and he’d pretended to know what she meant. Never put me through that again, she had said, as though the whole thing had been his idea. He did not protest.
At first Vasin had been grateful that the squalling, red-faced creature occupied so much of Vera’s attention. He had been displaced in her life and affections, and was relieved. He discovered from his cop colleagues that real men were expected to drink. Soon, he began to enjoy the confident glow that booze gave him. At a certain point, his swaying gait could almost pass for macho swagger. At a Women’s Day party organized for the officers of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, Vasin had found himself drunkenly propositioning a pretty blonde, the sister of a colleague’s wife. To his intense surprise the girl had taken him by the hand, as though weighing his wedding ring, then turned and led him out of the dance hall and to his brother officer’s apartment. They had screwed with desperate haste on the sofa, right in front of a toddler who stood and watched them wide-eyed from his crib. As they lay together afterward, breathing each other’s sweat, they had listened for the whir of the lift that would announce the return of the child’s parents. As they made love the girl had moaned and writhed in his arms like a wild thing. That night, Vasin realized, he had discovered lust. Sex was not just an unclean bodily need to be discharged but could be an ungovernable hunger. He had never before felt lost, weightless, outside time. He imagined he could taste the girl’s salty kiss on his lips for weeks afterward. He wrote to her at her women’s dormitory at a textile factory in Ivanovo, but she never wrote back.
In the banter of the detectives’ operations room, they teased Vasin as a babnik, a ladies’ man. The truth was that he didn’t dare. He was handsome, or so the teenage secretaries and shopgirls and waitresses and even, once, a pretty trolleybus conductress who chatted to him with bright, inviting smiles, told him. Neatly dressed, closely shaved, hair brushed. A model Young Communist, a young man going places. But women, for Vasin, remained fundamentally unknowable and dangerous. Every winning female smile seemed to him to conceal a terrifying hinterland of hysteria, pregnancy, and disaster.
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