The Ice Curtain

by Robin White

  “Did you have a problem finding our headquarters building?”

  Nowek shook his head. “None.”

  “I’m surprised. It was your driver’s first day on the job.”

  Nowek thought, That breach. “He had a good sense of direction.”

  “He got one of our employees drunk, took his identity credentials, and then stole his van. Did you think it wouldn’t be discovered?”

  Not this quickly. Nowek asked, “Where is Chuchin?”

  “We’re holding him downstairs in case he feels like stealing something else. As for the regular driver, he’s been fired. You have yourself to blame. He’ll be sent out on the first available flight.”

  “Maybe he’ll be able to join his wife now.”

  Kirillin cocked his head. “You collect odd pieces of information.”

  “You never know when something will turn out to be useful.”

  “You’ll find these useful.” He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out two paper vouchers. He waved them at Nowek. “Two passes out of Mirny on a special flight to Moscow. As soon as the snow is cleared from the runway tomorrow, you will leave.”

  “I have no reason to travel to Moscow.”

  “You will. As Siberian Delegate, you had special privileges. . . .”

  “I still have them.”

  “Excuse me. A decree is being prepared by the same Presidential Administration that appointed you. Your nomination will be rescinded tomorrow. When that happens, you will have no official standing and no official immunity. Mirny is a closed city. It requires permission from Kristall to stay. I can promise you that permission will not be forthcoming.” Kirillin held out the vouchers. “Well?”

  Nowek didn’t touch them. “And if I stay?”

  Kirillin tossed them to the desk. “The Moscow militia requested we hold you until they send someone out. If you’re here without immunity, I’ll have no choice but to comply with this request.”

  Nowek eyed the vouchers. Leave tomorrow for Moscow and hope Levin could keep the militia off his back, or end up in a cell here until Kirillin decided to send him to Moscow in chains. Where was Levin? “What about Chuchin?”

  “If you stay, there are additional charges of theft to consider.”

  Nowek reached over and took the vouchers.

  “My opinion of you rises,” said Kirillin. He checked his watch. “Lunch is being served at the hotel. If you hurry, you’ll find a table.”

  “I should probably work on my report first.”

  “Report?”

  “The one Volsky was going to write about conditions in Mirny.”

  “You’ve only been here a few hours. What could it say?”

  Nowek stood. “That a diamond mine that’s supposed to be the source of a quarter of the world’s gems can’t be.”

  Kirillin’s face was a perfect, impassive mask. “How did you come to such a fantastic conclusion?”

  “Like you, I keep things simple. The cartel is buying Mirny diamonds? They didn’t come from your pit.”

  “No gem rough has been sold to the cartel in a year.”

  “No gem rough was sent to Moscow, either.”

  “Then why did our shipping manifests say otherwise?”

  “I was wondering about that, too. I’d like to speak with the person who made out those manifests.”

  “Take it from me. There is no crime in Mirny.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring. Then there’s the ore plant. Fabrika 3. I think Moscow would want to know what happened.”

  “Some drunk miners in a stolen ore truck? Moscow has better things to worry about.” Kirillin reached into his desk drawer. He took out a pack of Marlboros and got one lit.

  “That cigarette reminds me of Kristall’s incentive program. The dollars you stuff into overseas accounts. I believe that’s illegal under currency laws.”

  Kirillin let out a long stream of smoke. “The Finance Ministry does it. The President and his family do it. Why shouldn’t a simple worker have the same opportunities to get ahead?”

  “There’s a difference. The miners can’t spend their dollars.”

  Another cloud of smoke. “It’s a bag of feathers. Not a report.”

  “You’re probably right.” Nowek started to leave.

  “Wait.” Kirillin looked grave, serious, even believable. “Let no one accuse us of hiding from legitimate questions. As you said, today you’re still Delegate.”

  Nowek sat back down. “Four million carats of gem-quality rough is missing. Yevgeny Petrov says you filled boxes with industrial stones and kept the gems.”

  “And who neglected to inspect the shipping containers for the better part of a year? I wonder. Could it be Petrov? Our view is that if Moscow lost them, it’s Moscow’s problem.”

  “If they’re lost, Kristall won’t get paid. Isn’t that your problem?”

  “Our problem. Not yours. So? What else?”

  “I’d like to see Fabrika 3.”

  Kirillin considered it, then said, “The shift changes at three this afternoon. Boyko will take you through.”

  “And also Mirny Deep.”

  “It’s been shut down.”

  “I’d like to see it anyway.”

  “It’s unsafe.”

  “I’ll take the risk.”

  Kirillin was about to speak when the door clicked.

  Larisa Arkova came in, smiling shyly. “Yes?”

  “We’re finished.” Kirillin faced Nowek. “Miss Arkova can answer your questions about Mirny Deep.” Kirillin glanced at his watch. “Boyko will pick you up at the hotel at two-thirty. And don’t miss your flight in the morning. I say that with your own interests in mind.”

  “Please,” Larisa said to Nowek. “Won’t you follow me?”

  Out in the hall, Larisa went to the barred window at the end of the corridor. Gray, north light flooded the corridor. Swirling knots of snow danced across the open, deserted square. “What were you hoping to see in Mirny Deep?”

  He looked down across alleys, onto a vista of dirty rooftops, plumes of steam, wood smoke. “You have a suggestion?”

  She laughed, but then said, “Your daughter. What’s her name?”

  “Galena.”

  “Like the mineral?”

  Nowek looked up with his surprise. Galina was a common girls’ name. Galena was a metallic, blue-gray cubic crystal of lead sulfide. “How did you know?”

  “I think you like things that are unexpected.” Her whole face seemed to take on the cool radiance of the north light. “I’ve planned a surprise for you.”

  “Mirny Deep?”

  “Not that big a surprise.”

  Chapter 20

  The Spear

  Levin rose up out of the darkness, the deeps, like a bubble rising through oil. Slowly, slowly, to the light, the air, to a world that only gradually assumed recognizable shape. He rebuilt it detail by detail. A door. A clock. A small plastic radio. The sharp smell of antiseptic. Half his face felt stretched and hot, dangerously thin, a balloon filled almost to bursting. The other half felt nothing at all.

  They’d moved him off Hospital 31’s busy trauma floor to a recovery area. His new floor was quieter. There were no more screams. Just an annoying American song playing from the bedside radio over and over again. There was a volume knob, but he couldn’t reach it.

  “Raindrops keep falling on my head. . . .”

  He had to think, and think clearly. How had Goloshev known he’d been attacked by two flatheads? Had he told him? No. From a militia report? Unlikely. A witness? Possibly. Because he’d arranged it? Four possibilities, two very different implications. For the investigation. For Levin. Most of all, for Sherbakov and Nowek. Levin kept worrying about it like a tongue unable to stay away from a chipped tooth.

  Stay away from the Closet!

  That had to be a message from Petrov. Yet Goloshev had seemed perfectly willing to pin the loss of all those diamonds on him. If the Toad had sent those two flatheads, didn’t that m
ean he was working for Petrov?

  “Nothin’ seems to fit . . .”

  Either way, he had to get word to Sherbakov, to Nowek, that the man in charge of the entire case might well be working for its principal suspect, that everything about their mission to Mirny might be compromised.

  There had to be a telephone on the floor. He tried to move his arm, but it was fastened to the side rail with rubber surgical tubing. He couldn’t see out of his right eye. He heard the doorknob rattle, then a voice.

  “Wait. This one is due.”

  The sallow-faced doctor walked up to the bed and beamed a bright light into Levin’s eye.

  The room vanished behind blinding sparks, galaxies, rainbows. Levin blinked. His dry lips felt welded shut. His tongue was a swollen sock, a cotton towel rammed into his mouth. Levin recognized the “desert mouth” brought on by the sedative scopolamine. It used to be a common interrogation drug until someone noted that even a willing confessor couldn’t get the truth by a thick, dry tongue and parched throat. Not that they were looking for truth.

  The doctor placed a tray on the table beside Levin’s bed. It contained a syringe and two vials. One filled with scopolamine. The other with Antilurium, its antidote.

  The doctor picked it up and jabbed the needle into a bottle of straw-colored fluid. He pulled the plunger down, filling it with sleep, with time. He unfastened the surgical tubing that bound Levin’s wrist, the better to allow the free flow of sedative.

  The sharp prick of the needle almost made Levin cry out. He fought the impulse. The needle slid deep into his forearm. Levin felt the familiar burning. The pressure behind the syringe flowed through it and into him. Pushing, pushing him back down to that dark, quiet place.

  A new voice. “We’re ready for you, Doctor.”

  “I said I’ll be right there.” The needle came out. The doctor stood by, watching.

  Levin blinked, fluttered his eye, then closed it.

  The doctor left. The door clicked shut.

  Levin could feel the deadness. A finger drooped. Another. Sherbakov. Nowek. They had to be warned. He opened his eye.

  The rubber tubing had not been refastened. He didn’t have much time. His arm was already numb. His fingers were loosening, untying themselves from his bones, dissolving.

  As the poison raced for his heart, he clumsily grappled the second syringe from the table. It felt like he was wearing mittens. He brought the needle to his mouth, bit off the cap and spat it out. Light glinted from the sharp tip.

  He commanded his thumb to press down on the needle’s plunger. A round, milky drop formed. As the ground began to tilt, as he was about to slide off an invisible cliff, down into deep silence, into darkness, he rammed the needle into his belly.

  He squeezed the plunger until his fingers no longer obeyed. His arm flopped to his side. The needle, still in him, swayed like a metronome to the beat of his heart.

  The pungent aromas of boiling cabbage, frying onions, and meat filled the ground floor of Kristall’s headquarters. It reminded Nowek that he hadn’t eaten since Irkutsk, that Kirillin hadn’t invited him to the company cafeteria.

  “I’ll meet you outside the hotel in a few minutes,” said Larisa. “Your colleague is in there.” She pointed out a small door tucked behind the hanging waterfall of crystals, then left to retrieve her coat.

  Nowek went to free Chuchin. Thousands of diamond-shaped prisms streamed down from the high atrium, like big raindrops frozen in the flash of a strobe. They shifted in currents of air, sending patterns of refracted color across the balconies, the floor, the walls. Nowek touched one. Not crystal. Not even glass. What else would a Russian company that mines a quarter of the world’s diamonds use? Plastic.

  A small camera stared down from above an unmarked door. A red light glowed below the black lens. He pushed inside.

  “It’s about time,” said Chuchin with as much dignity as a man with bound wrists could muster. His face was flushed red. He perched on a bare wooden bench. A braided cord bound his hands together. It was looped through a steel ring set into the wall. The geometry forced his body into what had to be a deeply uncomfortable position. Not that it showed. With his dark sunglasses still on, Chuchin looked like royalty surveying a room of commoners. He even had a smoldering cigarette pinched between his yellowed fingers. A Marlboro at that. “Did I miss lunch?” Chuchin asked.

  “We had to restrain him,” the guard apologized. He sat behind the desk. A row of small televisions was mounted on one wall. The dirty window behind him was filtered by steel bars. “We couldn’t let him wander around the building. There are diamonds here. You understand.”

  “Perfectly,” said Nowek.

  “You’ll sign for him?” The guard spun a thick bound notebook around and offered a pen.

  Nowek hesitated, considering. “If he’s willing to reform.”

  “Pah,” Chuchin snorted. “I’ve been places where sitting in a warm room was something worth slitting a throat for. This is a vacation. Forget lunch. Bring me a bowl of balanda and I’ll stay all night.” It was a prisoner’s soup made with subtle hints of vegetables, distant memories of meat.

  “You’ll have to earn your balanda, zek,” said Nowek as he signed, then tossed the pen to the desk. “Vacation’s over.”

  Outside, a high cloud layer veiled the sun.

  Chuchin looked up and sniffed. “I smell snow.”

  “Kirillin said a storm is due in tonight.”

  “I met him. One look was all it took to know that you can forget about seeing that underground mine. What did he say?”

  “That we’re leaving tomorrow morning for Moscow.”

  Chuchin seemed surprised. “How did you convince him?”

  “It wasn’t hard. He was talking to someone at the Kremlin when I walked in. They’re issuing a decree tomorrow to strip me of my title. If I’m still here, he’ll arrest me. Us.”

  “You think Kirillin scared Levin away?”

  Nowek thought about young Sherbakov. “I hope so.”

  Chuchin reached into his jacket and took out his cigarette lighter. It was made from a machine gun cartridge. Chuchin smoked enough to let the dying embers of one cigarette light the next, so it was rarely needed. “Take it.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “You don’t drink, either. Sometimes I wonder if you’re even Russian. I’ve had it ever since I was na narakh.” Behind the wires. The gulag. “And I’m still breathing. It’s for luck.”

  Once, Nowek thought he might learn enough to clear Volsky’s name, maybe enough to find out who had taken those diamonds and though it was a very long shot, return them in time. Now his aims were simpler: to leave Mirny alive, to somehow evade the Moscow militia long enough to find Levin. And if he couldn’t? How long would he stay alive before he was found dead? What was the current word for it? Suicided?

  He took the butane lighter, pulled the nose cap off and thumbed the wheel. A spark, a tiny blue flame. Fragile like a man. Temporary, easily blown out. He snapped it shut and slipped it into his parka. “Thank you, Chuchin.”

  “Don’t lose it.”

  They continued across the open square, heading for the dingy hotel. A stand of slim birches huddled together at the base of Lenin’s black marble bust. Their trunks were secured with wire and stakes to keep them upright. They looked like shackled prisoners caught out on a forced march, swaying, an instant away from collapse, too stubborn to die.

  The Hotel Zarnitsa appeared to have struck some invisible reef and foundered, sinking slowly into the eternal frost that lived a few meters under the earth. The front facade was cracked, grimy concrete. Entire panels had come loose and remained attached only by habit. The stairs leading up to a pair of glass doors tilted wildly.

  The double doors made an air-lock entry. The inner door was also made from glass. It was attached to a weight and a pulley. You pushed it open, the weight rose. You let go and the weight fell, slamming the glass panel shut with enough force to make you wonder wh
y it hadn’t shattered long ago.

  Inside, the lobby was dim. Two women sat at the reception desk behind thick glass panels, watching a small television. There wasn’t enough work for one. Why two?

  There was a guard, of course. Usually, their main function was to protect the exclusive franchise of the house prostitutes. This one was cut from the common pattern of square shoulders, heavy torso, leather jacket. His hair was trimmed very short, his temples shaved. He sat at a low table, legs apart.

  The dining room was brightly lit and booming with loud, excited voices, punctuated by laughter. Nowek listened. A foreign voice. He walked to the doorway and was immediately blocked by a middle-aged woman with a clipboard in one hand and a soiled napkin in the other. The hostess.

  “You can’t come in unless you’re on the list.”

  “I am. My name is Nowek.” Her minor rudeness made him feel better. Almost at home. In Russia, keeping people out is the primary task of a “hostess.” Her black hair was alloyed in silver, her bosom the prow of an icebreaker. She wore a red vest and a red skirt, a snowy-white blouse. The toes of her shoes were so sharply pointed they looked dangerous.

  “I will check. Wait.” She went to her table and called the front desk. A glass bowl half filled with red-and-white striped candies was on her desk. Chuchin reached for them but she shot him a fierce look that stopped him cold.

  Nowek scanned the dining room. Several men were eating and drinking together. A large table in the center was threatened by a lurid chandelier made from the same plastic crystals he’d seen at the headquarters building. To one side a stuffed bear reared up, claws extended, slightly more welcoming than the hostess. Waitresses in short black skirts and spotless white blouses floated by the tables with full pitchers of water, impervious to eye contact, deaf to all requests.

  The hostess opened her notebook and used a stub of a pencil to write in a name. She snapped it shut. “One of you is Nowek.” It wasn’t a question. More of an accusation.

  “I am.”

  “Come with me.” She turned without wondering whether Nowek might follow.

  He didn’t.

  On the far side of the room, walled off on three sides by ornamental screens, a smaller, private party was eating. Or drinking. Nowek couldn’t see everyone at the table. The view was blocked.