The top of the signal gantry was barely half a meter wide, two girders linked by haphazardly welded crossbars with a flimsy-looking handrail along one side. Sailor was clearly on home turf, shimmying sideways along the walkway with a practiced movement, oblivious of the ten-meter fall to the tracks below him.
“Stop or I shoot!” The words sounded ridiculous even as Vasin yelled them. His service Makarov was hanging in its holster on the back of a chair in his bedroom. He could never hope to catch the man on this icy steel. Vasin bowed his head in exhausted defeat, gasping and cursing every Orbita he had ever smoked. A steel box welded into the corner of the gantry caught his eye. Vasin flipped it open and saw that it contained a rusty tangle of rivets. He fished one out. It was twenty centimeters long, heavy in the hand as a half-liter vodka bottle. Sailor was more than halfway across the gantry, some thirty meters from him. More in frustration than from a desire to hurt him, Vasin pitched the rivet after the fleeing man. It ricocheted, with a ringing clang, off the steel cowling of a signal.
Sailor stopped and turned to Vasin, scowling in fear and alarm. He had a brutal, low-browed face, much older than Vasin had expected, at least fifty, he would guess, with a brawler’s physique. Vasin reached down for a second rivet and pointed it at the man like a pistol.
“I said stop! State Security!”
The wind carried away Sailor’s answering insult, and he continued his scramble toward the other side faster than ever. Vasin threw the second rivet, uselessly, then pitched a third, which bounced off the frame of the gantry, and a fourth, which once again dinged against a signal. With each impact the man ducked. He was almost all the way across now. Vasin fished in the box for something weightier, and found a wrench as long as his forearm. With a final, desperate throw, he flung the heavy tool. It pitchpoled through the air with a menacing swish. Damn, thought Vasin as he watched it fly. What if it actually hits the fucker?
The wrench missed. But as it scythed past Sailor’s head, he flinched to avoid it and lost his footing. One boot skidded into space, and he went down on one knee. The man’s hand grabbed for one of the uprights of the handrail and caught it, on his back with half his body over the edge. Kicking against the air, he scrambled to regain the walkway. An absurd thought flashed into Vasin’s mind as he watched the man struggle. He had never seen anyone so absolutely alone, fighting to live, beyond help.
“I’m coming! Hold on!”
Reckless with adrenaline, Vasin stepped onto the steel walkway. Copying Sailor’s shuffle, he edged as fast as he could along the gantry, hugging the signal cowlings for support as he passed them. He could see Sailor’s hand sliding slowly down the handrail. The knuckles were white, and the outstretched arm was covered with the deep blue of prison tattoos. Hooking one elbow around the handrail, Vasin reached down and grabbed the man’s trouser leg. Sailor stopped struggling, gathering strength. On an unspoken signal, they both heaved. Vasin hauled the man’s knee onto the gantry. Sailor rolled onto his back, safe, his legs tangled with Vasin’s.
Neither man spoke. A flight of starlings crowded into the gray sky above Vasin’s head, swirling through each other like live smoke. He felt the thud of blood on his aching muscles, and the panting shudder of the man tumbled with him. He could smell the sour reek of Sailor’s clothes, a tang of engine oil and sweat. Theirs was almost like the intimacy of spent lovers.
With a supreme effort, Vasin pulled himself upright. Sailor did the same. Side by side, facing the snaking steel railway lines and with their legs dangling from the walkway, they sat, sucking down air. Vasin looked sideways at the man whose life he had saved. He took in the vicious face, swollen with drink and rough living and with a smoldering violence in the eyes, like a dog that would bite if it dared.
“Who are you?”
There was no accusation in Vasin’s question. He hadn’t been expecting an answer, and didn’t get one. Still he persisted.
“Who do you work for?”
“For the glory of the fucking Motherland. Same as you.”
Sailor’s voice was a smoker’s, like churning cement.
“What do you want?”
“How about you just fuck off out of town.”
“Who wants me to fuck off?”
Sailor looked Vasin up and down dismissively.
“Grown-ups, boy.”
Vasin tried to think of what to do next, but his head was filled with a singing vibration. The noise grew. It took Vasin a moment to realize that the noise was not in his mind but coming from below, a metallic hum rising from the rails. Ahead of them, a plume of white smoke rounded a corner followed by the black silhouette of a speeding train. It was approaching on the track directly under their feet.
“Are you hanging on tight, friend?”
Vasin’s mind scrambled to find the man’s meaning, even as he tightened his arm around the handrail post. The rumble of the approaching locomotive drowned out words. The red star on the front of the engine bore down on them, paralyzing in its power and speed.
“I said, hold on tight.” The man was shouting in his ear now. As he spoke the engine thundered beneath them and they were engulfed in a thick cloud of oily steam and coal smoke.
Vasin felt the man’s sudden movement a split second before the punch landed, square in his groin. A strong hand immediately went to his chest, steadying Vasin as he doubled forward in a wave of pain. He gasped a toxic mouthful of smoke as an agony such as he had never experienced washed through his body. The hand moved to Vasin’s arm, gripping it tightly as he reeled, holding him back from a fall. Then it was gone. When the steam thinned Vasin found himself alone in his throbbing world of pain.
“Ty che?” He heard a voice coming from the end of the gantry by the rail yard. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Vasin was too busy fighting back nausea to answer. He closed his eyes and felt the steps of the railway men ringing though the steel girders on which he sat. He allowed himself to be hauled to his feet and helped slowly back along the gantry, none of his muscles properly obeying him. A small audience had gathered at the base of the scaffolding, a gang of workingmen, a supervisor in clean overalls. Vasin saw frank incomprehension in their eyes, then looked down at himself. A sooty man in a good suit and mac, smeared in machine oil and grease, fooling about on a signal gantry. Brushing himself off once on firm ground, he nodded at them, summoning dignity.
“State Security.” Vasin’s voice had become unnaturally high. He fumbled for his red ID card and flipped it open.
The men’s eyes widened in appropriate awe. Vasin extended his hand to the man in the cleanest overalls, who was momentarily too stunned to take it. When he eventually did, the supervisor clasped Vasin’s hand in both of his, as though greeting Party nobility.
“Thanks, Comrade Foreman.”
Over the foreman’s shoulder Vasin caught sight of two portly men in suits lumbering across the yard, his kontora goons, finally catching up with him.
“My men. Too late, as usual.”
Obedient as an audience of schoolchildren, the railway men all looked round at the new visitors.
“Farewell, Comrades. Remain vigilant. Saboteurs are all around.”
Vasin picked his way unsteadily across the rails toward his approaching colleagues. At least the sons of bitches would be good for a lift home.
The two goons had offered no demur when Vasin followed them to their car and climbed painfully into the backseat. But they drove in the uncomfortable silence of men unused to breaking regulations. Vasin outranked both of them, of course. And he was that most exotic and possibly dangerous creature, an officer from Moscow, mysteriously free to gallivant about their secret city on a mission they would never dare to guess at. Nonetheless Vasin preferred to seed an explanation for his sudden chase rather than leave it to their own provincial imaginations.
&
nbsp; “I saw a suspicious individual lingering by Dr. Axelrod’s apartment.” There was no point in trying to conceal whom he had met at lunchtime. “Looked like an undesirable social element to me. Thought I should follow him. Bastard got away. I’ll be putting it in my confidential report. And file a description with old man Zaitsev.”
The kontora men maintained their silence. Like all Vasin’s comrades at the KGB, they had good ears for the unspoken. Above your heads, Comrades. Ask no questions and you will get told no lies. Sailor’s words echoed in his head. “Grown-ups, boy.” He’d heard that patronizing, old prisoner’s tone somewhere before. Vasin settled back on the Volga’s worn upholstery and concentrated on a hot shower, a change of clothes, and fighting the waves of pain that rose from his balls.
IV
Two hours later, showered and dosed with all the aspirin he could find in Kuznetsov’s medicine cabinet, Vasin found the Arzamas-16 Univermag busy with late afternoon shoppers. Again, he was struck by the strange calm of the place. Unlike their Moscow counterparts, the customers strolled casually by well-lit and fully stocked storefronts, unimpressed by the bounty of the place. Vasin had always dreaded his occasional family visits to Children’s World, to GUM or TsUM, the multistory emporia of the capital, where his fellow Soviet citizens approached shopping as a kind of viciously competitive blood sport. The chief prize, in Vera’s view, was to obtain the very thing that everyone else wanted, even if they had entered the shop with no intention of buying Czech shoes, Cuban rum, Volga butter, or the new kind of Mikoyan sausages. The three of them would wander the wide corridors, desultorily browsing displays of fountain pens, withered apples, and galoshes until Vera, with a herd animal’s instinct, would catch the first tremors of mass movement. Bananas! Sneakers! Tracksuits! She would question the waddling housewives as they passed and receive vital intelligence, flung backward in haste. “They say they’re putting out sprats on the ground floor!”
Sometimes, the rumors were baseless, though the crowd stubbornly refused to believe the assistants’ denials. Vasin and Nikita had once spent two hours waiting in the women’s lingerie department, in a silent agony of mutual embarrassment, for a phantom shipment of brassieres, while Vera herself went in search of tins of orange juice. Nikita was to run and get her if the goods arrived while his father joined the queue. On another occasion they had been luckier. Vasin, mortified, had ridden the trolleybus home festooned in dozens of rolls of toilet paper, strung together in bandoliers with twine. It had been the envious looks of his fellow passengers that discomfited him, not the paper’s intimate purpose. But here, he found himself in a land of effortless plenty. It was as though socialism had finally arrived in a single secret city in the Middle Volga.
Today, though, Vasin ignored the artfully stacked tinned goods and scanned the place with a professional’s eye. A three-story maze, perfect for slipping away from watchers. Two public staircases and a service one. A customers’ lift and a goods lift. In the basement Vasin found a popular buffet crowded with customers. And around the corner, a door marked STAFF CANTEEN. He doubled back, watching for the slurred step, the eye that ducked his glance. None of his tails were visible. He paused.
To the kontora, this confidential communications system that Masha had proposed would look like clandestine and personal communications with a key witness. Vasin would think the same if he were in their shoes. If he contacted her secretly, he would be in her power. So—why do something so foolish? To get to the bottom of the Petrov murder by any means necessary. That was Vasin’s official explanation to himself. It was a self-delusion that he clung to all the more stubbornly because he knew that was exactly what it was. How could Masha really help him? She had no access to the laboratory records of Petrov’s thallium experiments, which Axelrod insisted had been faked. Zaitsev was sitting on those. Was he hoping for some dramatic confession from her? Would he ever learn what really happened at the fateful dinner with Petrov? Not a chance. She had pointed the finger squarely at Axelrod.
What did Vasin really want from her?
He felt the tang of the iodine that Masha had applied to his bruised forehead the night he found her on the roof of the Kino. God knew, he needed her healing touch now. He’d run out of leads. Axelrod had been squeezed as dry as Vasin dared. Korin hardly seemed in the mood to deliver another of his curt lectures. Adamov would only speak to him the following day, after the bomb was on its way north. Masha was the only part of the mystery he had left to explore. Vasin stooped to tie a shoelace and shuffled through the door to the staff canteen at a crouch.
Maria’s man Guri was the immediately recognizable king of the sandwich bar, lord of all the sausages. The man was big and swarthy, with waved dark hair parted like a razor slash. He was broad and thick-faced and violent, with pressed-together lips and a patriarch’s paunch. The Georgian wore a stained cook’s apron and barked orders to the waitresses as though to junior members of his extended family. He slipped the apron over his head, wiped his hands on it, and tossed it toward the cashier’s lap without looking where it landed. From a drawer he produced a sheaf of forms, bumped it shut with a swing of his haunch, and crossed the room to intercept Vasin.
“Greetings, Comrade. How is business at the Gorky Meat Processing Plant?” The Georgian had donned the fastidious grammar and ingratiating manners of a Soviet middle manager in the presence of a superior, though Vasin sensed that both were returnable without notice anytime Guri damn well felt like it. “Your meat products are the finest in the Soviet Union! Good to see you again.”
With exaggerated politeness, he gestured Vasin to an empty table. Guri spread the order forms before his guest as though he were dealing cards before sitting down himself and leaning forward confidentially.
“Masha’s friend?” he muttered.
Vasin nodded and repeated the lines as Masha instructed.
“I’m looking for Seraphim.”
“You found him. What can I do for you?”
“She mentioned you might offer a communications service.”
“Yes, esteemed Comrade,” Guri said, after a slightly eerie delay. “For friends.”
“And how may I become your friend?”
“All of Masha’s friends are friends of mine.”
“You make friends easily.”
A wide, gold-toothed smile spread across Guri’s face like an opening theater curtain. His conjurer’s hands spread wide, as though a white dove had just fluttered out of his order book.
“There are no strangers in this world, only friends you have not met yet. My mother taught me this, sir. We men of Gori are famous for our friendliness. We are always ready to help our fellow beings though this vale of tears, however we can. Even if it is only with the tiny trifles of life.”
Some people transmit, Vasin thought. They bring you their whole past as a natural gift, open their heart before you like a book. Some people are intimacy itself. Vasin had met plenty of the sons of bitches.
“Delighted to hear it, Comrade.”
“Will it just be communications services you are requiring today, sir? Nothing else?” Guri raised his brows suggestively.
“Communications.”
“In these disordered times, people have need of all sorts of things. Things only Guri can provide.”
“Disordered?”
“The whole town running because of that infernal machine the Golden Brains are building over there on Kurchatov Square. They say it will kill all the capitalists. It’s making everyone crazy. Actually ran out of condoms this week. Had to send a man to Moscow to fetch an emergency shipment. Don’t ask me why the sudden demand. When I have had a hard day’s work, my dear lady wife can be sure of an undisturbed night. But these brilliant young kids. So energetic! Spend all day screwing in their nuts and bolts, and then all night…”
Vasin tried to banish the image of Guri, the mountainous
bedroom athlete, in bed with his wife from his mind.
“Nothing easier, Comrade. But might I trouble you to complete a few formalities? You understand, of course.”
This man should be an actor, thought Vasin. His face was a cinema-screen of false emotions.
Vasin followed Guri as he waddled across the cafeteria, through a kitchen foggy with cabbage-scented steam, and into a storeroom. In the corner was a flight of old stone steps, obviously part of an ancient building that had stood on the site before the Univermag was constructed.
“Here, please. A journey into history!”
The steps led down to a vaulted stone cellar. The walls had been plastered haphazardly, as if by drunks in a hurry. An office desk was crammed into one corner, and around the walls boxes of produce were stacked. A heavy wooden door, locked with three solid padlocks, was partially concealed by a tacked-up curtain. The place had the faint, rotten tang of a pond.
“How old is this place?”
“Who knows? You must ask someone with an education, like yourself, not poor Guri. As old as the monastery just across the river.”
Grinning, Guri hauled out a large, unlabeled bottle that could only have contained home brew. Another rummage produced a pair of cafeteria glasses.
“Chacha.” The grape schnapps of Georgia. “We drink to brotherhood of peoples!”
Vasin had known Georgians, usually shortly before putting them in jail. Resistance was useless.
“A drop.”
His host made a growling noise in the back of his throat that meant: Nonsense, man. He splashed the yellowish chacha into the two glasses. They both drank, Vasin wincing from the fire of the home brew. Then the companionable entwining of the eyes, the tiny nod that always follows a toast. A small ritual, shared.
Black Sun Page 22
