Black Sun

by Owen Matthews

Builders’ Street was broad and tree-lined and crossed 8th March Street at an oblique angle. It was halfway to the airstrip, and Vasin watched a transport plane lumber into the sky over the rooftops, waiting on the corner for the Volga to nose into view. The last thing he wanted, for now, was for the kontora men to lose him. Axelrod’s house had been built after the war from red brick. “German buildings,” citizens called them, because so many had been put up by German prisoners of war. Even as slave laborers, the Fascists were known to build well. The facade was a wide expanse of windows pierced by a high archway that led into the courtyard. All the building’s staircases and doorways opened onto the yard, and there was only one way in or out. Good. There was a children’s sandpit in the center, empty of children but populated by a small crowd of oversize cartoon characters rough-hewn from wood and garishly painted. A large timber mushroom that was part of the playground furniture was usefully screened from the archway by a near life-size statue of Karandash the clown. Vasin settled on the mushroom to wait. He could observe all four entranceways from a single spot.

  Vladimir Axelrod. The summary from the personnel files, pinned to the transcripts of Axelrod’s interrogation by Zaitsev, had concealed as much as it revealed. Twenty-nine years old. Jewish family, father a good Bolshevik. Brilliant mathematician, studied theoretical physics under Adamov in Leningrad after the war. A stream of commendations. Worked with Fyodor Petrov here at Arzamas-16 for the last five years. Unmarried. Like Petrov, politically irreproachable, on paper at least. So why had Efremov spoken of him as politically unreliable? Probably because Axelrod had lent his friend banned French philosophical literature. Maybe that had been enough to send the likes of Zaitsev and Efremov into frenzies of suspicion. And Vasin knew that he had wept like a girl when speaking of Petrov’s death. More likely than not, the tears of a lover. And equally probably Axelrod had taken the pornographic photographs and attempted blackmail. But a killer? Vasin went over the grainy photographs in his mind, the fuzzy image that might have been Axelrod. The anger in the punched-through type. HER OR ME?

  From Gogol Boulevard came the sounds of the folding doors of an electric tram opening and closing with a snap. A minute later a tall young man came hurrying through the archway. Vasin recognized the sloping, urgent gait immediately. Axelrod disappeared into the building. Vasin checked his watch and stood stiffly. Just as he was about to step out to follow Axelrod inside, he caught a movement by the archway. He ducked back behind Karandash’s shoulders. A squat, simian figure peered furtively into the courtyard, then retreated. The man wore a padded black jacket, like that of a road worker, and a cheap rabbit fur hat. The man was trying far too hard to be inconspicuous to be a professional.

  Not one of the kontora’s regular watchers. Someone else, with different intent. One of Efremov’s irregulars? Some deniable outsider? An underworld killer drafted in for what the kontora liked to euphemistically call a wet operation? Vasin remembered Efremov’s menacing glance up from the courtyard after he had emerged from Petrov’s poison-filled apartment.

  Keeping his hand to his face as though scratching his temple, Vasin sauntered from his hiding place into Axelrod’s entranceway. Inside the hall he doubled back and peered from the gloom of the stairwell toward the arch. Their watcher had disappeared.

  Apartment 211 was on the fourth floor. Axelrod opened the door immediately and peered down the stairwell to see that Vasin was alone.

  “We don’t have much time before they miss me at the laboratory. Come in.”

  Axelrod’s place was luxurious by any standard, but it was not the kind of sleek nomenklatura apartment in which Petrov had lived. It was filled with the typical clutter of the intelligentsia, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, an upright piano, a spread of sentimental paintings of Russian landscapes across one wall. The sitting room was furnished with solid prewar furniture. Axelrod evidently hadn’t made the distribution list for the trainload of Czech buffet suites that graced Kuznetsov’s apartment.

  Axelrod moved a pile of journals from an easy chair and shifted some pillows and blankets from the sofa. Vasin had counted at least two other rooms leading off the hall, but evidently Axelrod still sometimes slept on his couch rather than in the bedroom. Vasin sometimes did the same himself, though in his own case it had been to escape from Vera into his own thoughts.

  “What did your machine tell you?”

  “It’s a machine. It performs the calculations you give it.”

  “So what did it tell you about the tamper?”

  “I’m trying to explain. You put in variables, and it applies formulae to them and comes up with a result. Boil a liter of water at one hundred degrees, turn it into steam, and what volume does it occupy? Sixteen hundred ninety-four liters. First time you measure it, you have to do a physical experiment. But once you have the data, the second time a computer can do it for you. It’s called a mathematical model. And you can scale it up. For instance, to project the effects of a nuclear explosion.”

  “So why test the bombs at all?”

  Axelrod looked at Vasin as though he were simple.

  “You do the real-world test to show the world you can do it.”

  “So what does it say about RDS-220?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nobody really knows exactly how the hydrogen—actually tritium and deuterium, heavy versions of hydrogen—will react as it undergoes fusion. You just have to go on the previous results and assume the reaction will be similar.”

  “Assume?”

  Axelrod shrugged. “You assume until the experimental data proves you wrong.”

  “RDS-220 is an experiment?”

  “All new devices are experimental, by definition.”

  Vasin saw no trace of self-doubt in Axelrod’s boyish face.

  “I’ve entered new data for Adamov’s lead tamper. The machine ran for four hours performing a hundred thousand operations per second. So far it’s less than halfway through the complete model….”

  Axelrod made a grimace of doubt.

  “Out with it, Axelrod.”

  “It’s just a partial picture. The reduced density of the new tamper means that the reaction is contained for a shorter period. This we knew. And the nonreactiveness of the lead means we have to subtract all our projections for the reaction of the uranium in the old tamper.”

  “Meaning that the power of RDS-220 is reduced. By how much?”

  “So much of this is guesswork until the model is complete, Major.”

  “By how much?”

  Axelrod swallowed nervously.

  “My guess would be perhaps fifty percent.”

  “Exactly as you said before.”

  “As I suggested before, but once the computer modeling is complete we will have the data to prove it. Deliberate sabotage.”

  Axelrod looked at his hands. His voice had become quiet.

  “Dr. Petrov confided in me,” he said. “He often mentioned Professor Adamov’s anti-Soviet attitudes. Adamov makes no secret of his subversive opinions to his intimates.

  “The great Adamov also served time in a correctional facility for counterrevolutionary activity. There is a stain. Petrov told me that a time would come when such irreverent political attitudes would no longer be tolerated. That a project like RDS must be led by ideologically pure cadres.”

  “Perhaps Dr. Petrov considered himself a suitable replacement for Adamov, one day?”

  “Adamov treats the program like his private kingdom. Petrov was passionate. He felt the Director lacked zeal. That he was too cautious. Fedya, Dr. Petrov, said that Adamov was scared of the bombs he was creating.”

  “And yet Adamov built RDS-220.”

  “Yes, but now he is unbuilding it.”

  “You think he poisoned Petrov?”

  Axelrod shrugged.

  “I
think he is capable of murder, yes. But Adamov is undisupted master here. He did not need to kill Petrov to get his way. So I don’t understand.”

  That makes two of us, thought Vasin.

  “Maria Adamova thinks that…”

  “I don’t much care what Masha Adamova thinks,” Axelrod interrupted, his meekness abruptly discarded. “She’s a lying whore.”

  “ ‘Her or me?’ Those words mean anything to you, Axelrod?”

  Axelrod sank back on the sofa, dislodging a sheaf of papers. He sat very still as the pages slid, one by one, onto the floor.

  “She showed you?”

  Vasin let the silence build. He needed Axelrod good and scared. He needed to be sure of the scientist’s silence.

  “Yes. She showed me the photos, Doctor.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I will bear them in mind, Comrade. Nothing more. Which is precisely what you will do with this information about Adamov’s new design for the tamper.”

  Axelrod blinked, as though the thought was crossing his mind for the first time.

  “I…I don’t understand.”

  “You will talk to nobody.”

  Axelrod nodded meekly.

  “Nobody. Only me.”

  The young scientist bit his lip. Vasin felt a sobriety, a clarifying loneliness, in the young man. He seemed to be thinking intensely about his hands. His brown eyes held Vasin’s for a moment, slipped away, and came back to him as though Axelrod had reached some kind of resolution.

  “You pull your hook tight, Major.”

  * * *

  —

  In the courtyard the sky had turned dark with low cloud. Light snow was swirling in the wind trap made by the enclosed space. Vasin checked for the mysterious watcher, and for his own familiar kontora team. There was no immediate sign of either. He took up his position behind the wooden clown. There was a clatter on the stairs, and Axelrod hurried out. He had changed into a checked suit and a bulky overcoat against the chill, and under his arm he carried a slim cardboard document folder. Off to an important meeting at the Citadel, Vasin guessed. As his quarry disappeared into the archway, he slipped silently into Axelrod’s wake. Stepping quickly across the pedestrian sidewalk into the shadow of the trees that lined the road, Vasin watched the scientist trotting across Builders’ Street toward the tram stop on Gogol Boulevard. A familiar hunched figure broke cover from the bushes and followed Axelrod.

  To Vasin’s relief, there was a small crowd at the tram stop. Axelrod was anxiously checking his watch, oblivious of his suite of followers. When the tram clanked into view, Vasin muttered another prayer of thanks; it was a double-length car, made of two carriages coupled together. He waited until Axelrod, his tail, and the rest of the crowd had pressed their way on board the first carriage before darting into the closing door of the second car.

  Schultz. Boris Ignatiyevich Schultz had been the name of Vasin’s instructor during his three months’ countersurveillance training at the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB. Little white hands, a survivor’s gravity. The other trainees, all much younger than Vasin, whispered that Schultz had worked in Tokyo and Shanghai among the community of deluded dreamers, the lost rabble of prewar fellow travelers of the Communist International who had later been erased in the Purges. Somehow Schultz had returned alive. Word was he’d given up his ideologically impure comrades in exchange for his life. In person, Schultz had been dry as a closed book on a library shelf. But he was good, very good, at watching.

  When they had reassembled after an afternoon on the streets around Michurinsky Prospekt trying to avoid Schultz’s all-seeing eye, their instructor would greet his pupils with a slow reading from a notebook filled with times and places.

  “Comrade Vasin. At 14:02 you attempted a dry-clean in the toilets of the Warsaw Cinema,” Schultz would recite in his mysteriously accented Russian. “At 15:15 you exited the metro train at Prospekt Marxa, walked to Teatralnaya Station, doubled back through the North Corridor….”

  The man was a limpet. Yet when he set the whole fifteen-strong class on himself, Schultz disappeared like a noonday shadow. Inevitably, they would find him silently waiting for them back in the classroom, swaying in quiet dignity after a few comforting cognacs at the cafeteria.

  A few weeks’ training under Schultz hadn’t made Vasin a professional, at least not by his teacher’s exacting criteria. But one of the details that Vasin had learned was that all Soviet trams were double-ended, with identical rearview mirrors front and back, giving a perfect view of whoever entered and left if you stood by the second leaning post behind the driver’s cab. As expected, Axelrod descended at Kurchatov Square, his shadow ineptly leaping out in his wake. Vasin himself jammed the door open with his weight, ignoring the imprecations of the citizens pushing past him to get on, and stepped off just as the tram gathered speed. Axelrod took the broad steps of the Institute two at a time. The man who was following him watched him go up. Vasin joined a group of men examining the evening papers that were pasted on boards by the tram stop, in full view of the road but hidden from Axelrod’s tail. He watched the kontora Volga spot him and circle round the square. Not Schultz-level training, but at least they weren’t total idiots.

  The man loitered conspicuously by the steps before checking his watch and evidently deciding that Axelrod had settled in for the afternoon. With a rolling step like that of a sailor from a children’s animated film, the man began to walk down Lenin Avenue. The Volga with Vasin’s own tails began to follow him more closely, evidently spooked by his suspiciously last-minute tram hopping. Perhaps they had already radioed for a backup team. The goons’ boring day of surveillance was suddenly getting interesting.

  Vasin had been taught to follow a target, but to do so when he was himself a target—that was a conundrum that would have intrigued even the cold-blooded Schultz. But Vasin’s more immediate problem was that Sailor was heading out of the boulevards of the center into the thinly populated side streets of Arzamas.

  There’s only a certain number of times a subject can notice you and not realize he’s being tracked. Sometimes it’s just once. Best bet is on the third time. To hope for more grace is, as Schultz had put it, “sheer optimism,” pronouncing the phrase as though optimism was a foolish weakness. Vasin was pretty sure that Sailor had clocked him after he turned off Peace Prospekt into a street of low, single-story wooden dwellings not even dignified by a nameplate. The street was wide, with sidewalks of beaten earth and grassy ditches on either side of the paved surface. These were the humble places of the town, the places where the high, proud facades that would see in the future of socialism melted away to reveal the higgledy architecture of peasant Russia, not quite yet consigned to the dustbin of history. The only cover was telegraph poles. Sailor deliberately slowed his pace, giving Vasin no option but to do the same. He sauntered to the entrance of a junkyard and turned the corner. Half a second too soon to be completely out of sight, he broke into a run. Sailor was bolting.

  Vasin sprinted into a yard filled with old trucks in various states of dismemberment. The place was enclosed on two sides by a high, crooked fence, and on the other by a series of barnlike garages. A door banged, and as Vasin ran to follow he saw the kontora Volga lumber gingerly into the yard behind him.

  The service door of the garage opened into a narrow alley that snaked between the backs of wooden houses. Sailor’s black figure was disappearing at speed into a small grove of birches.

  “Stop!” shouted Vasin, already breathless. “Stop!”

  His only answer was the scream of a steam whistle and a cloud of drifting smoke from a passing locomotive. So they were by the railway lines. Vasin ran on, through the damp darkness of the little wood, and emerged into the shadow of a vast, hangar-like building that walled off the end of the path. Nobody to the left or right. But in the back of the hang
ar, an open steel door. Vasin darted into a space of darkness. He fumbled for the bolt and found it. For a second, he hesitated before shooting it home. Did he want to do this alone? He could hardly rely on the kontora goons to rush to his aid. The less company the better. The steel slid clumsily into place, shutting out his own pursuers.

  The afternoon light, already fading, barely filtered through grime-stained windows in the roof. Vasin made out giant, dark forms around him, and smelled soot, oil, and rust. He reached forward and touched a wall of cold metal. His eyes, adjusting to the gloom, made out the giant shape of a locomotive, then another. Underfoot, his shoes crunched on gravel. An engine shed. The sounds of distant traffic echoed in the vast hall.

  To his left, a pigeon fluttered up to the roof, the noise explosive over the thrumming of blood in his ears. There had been no sound of footsteps running across gravel. Sailor must still be close by, hiding. Vasin crouched by the locomotive’s driving wheel, reaching up to the driving rod to steady himself. His hand closed on cold grease. He peered underneath the engine and saw only a forest of wheels and spokes, the dull steely glow of parallel rails, immobile shadows. Treading carefully, he crept to the front of the engine. The buffers thrust out like a pair of bowed human heads. From the rail yard came the sound of a steam whistle, and the voices of a work gang guffawing and swearing as they approached. Four men, dressed in drab gray overalls, carrying lunch pails in their hands and tools over their shoulders. As they entered the shed, their voices reverberated around in the cavernous space.

  Somewhere ahead, from the darkest shadows behind a coal tender, Sailor made a break. He ran in a loping crouch, low to the ground like a chimpanzee, ducking under one locomotive and then another. Vasin, stumbling on the oil-soaked gravel of the railbed, scrambled to follow. The man straightened as he ran into the light and began sprinting across the weed-covered yard, handily hopping over the rails. The surprised voices of the work crew called after them.

  Sailor reached the rail yard’s concrete wall. A stab of cramp in his side doubled Vasin over, but he ran on. Sailor was trapped. But no, he reached a steel gantry that supported a row of signals over the main line on the far side of the wall. A set of rungs ran up the side. With an animal’s athleticism, the man swung himself up the narrow ladder and began to climb. Vasin stopped, breathless, at the base of the gantry, watching the rough pigskin boots disappear over the top. Swearing under his panting breath, Vasin followed.