The Ice Curtain

by Robin White

  He tried to imagine her stripping pieces of wood from a tree, a member of some primitive, prehistoric tribe, dressed in a slim blue skirt, white silk blouse, high heels. “It sounds”—Nowek paused—“very resourceful.”

  They passed a knot of men standing in the lee of a kiosk. A battered white Lada sedan was parked on the curb. Its bumper rested on the wooden boards of the little shop. Six men dressed in heavy jackets and tall rubber boots. It was a liquor kiosk, open of course, with its name emblazoned over the window in bright red: NADEZHDA. As they approached, the men eased behind the kiosk, as though Nowek’s presence could somehow infect them with an incurable disease.

  “The liquor kiosk accepts veskels?” he asked.

  “They could demand babies and get them. Hock is right. Everyone drinks. In Mirny, especially. Last winter, someone stole a few thousand liters of jet fuel. He mixed it with industrial alcohol and sold it on the street. Six people died, but the ones who survived were back in line the next day. You can say that drinking is one way a person can leave Mirny.”

  “Getting blown up at the ore plant is another.”

  She looked away. “Life is hard. But you can’t just give in and say there are no answers. You have to make a plan and stay with it. If I thought there were no answers, I would have been on that Belaz, too.”

  Larisa seemed to answer serious questions casually, and casual questions seriously. “So what’s your plan, Miss Arkova?”

  “To live a normal life. For Liza, too.”

  “In Mirny?”

  She suddenly reached forward and tapped the driver’s shoulder. “Turn here!”

  The jeep veered off the pavement and went bouncing across a muddy path in the direction of a clump of sad, dispirited trees. The path ended at a rusty steel fence. They came to a stop.

  She pulled out a net bag, known everywhere in Russia as a what if bag. As in, what if the store has something to sell? What if I happen across something that’s been unavailable for months, and will be gone in an hour? She got out and made straight for the fence. The stand of dwarf cypress beyond was scarcely tall enough to block the wind, their crowns at eye level.

  Nowek and Larisa were giants, approaching some secret, miniature forest.

  Larisa walked along the fence, tugging at it, then stopped, knelt, and peeled up a section of chain link.

  Something tickled Nowek’s cheek. He looked up. The windblown Fairy Dust, the opening flurries, were done. This was the beginning of a storm.

  “They’ll all be covered if we don’t hurry.” She held the fence up for Nowek, and he knelt down and scrabbled through.

  A layer of brown sawdust covered the ground. It was already turning white. Larisa moved deliberately, slowly.

  Her long legs reminded Nowek of those elegant birds that stalked fish in shallow water. “What are you looking for?”

  “Keep still and use your eyes.” Larisa walked over to a small mound of wet, half-composted sawdust. “Here.” She knelt beside it and brushed away the wood debris to expose the fleshy cap of a rising mushroom. “Agaricus bitorquis.” The cap was gray, the gills a chocolate brown. She plucked it out of the ground, found two more nearby, and popped them into her bag.

  “You brought me here to pick mushrooms?”

  “The snow will bury them. The first one is hardest. Mushrooms are shy. Watch. Now they’ll appear everywhere.”

  Nowek had never thought of mushrooms as shy, but she was right. Once the first mushroom mound was detected, others seemed to materialize, peeking from beneath fallen limbs, from piles of dead dry leaves, under rising crusts of half-frozen sawdust.

  Spot. Bend, uncover, pluck. Her net bag began to fill.

  Nowek let the snow accumulate on his shoulders. Second by second, the balance of brightness shifted back and forth between the overcast sky and the snowy earth. He enjoyed the mindlessness of the hunt and it surprised him. “I have a question, Miss Arkova.”

  “I’ve brought you to my secret mushroom patch. I think you can call me Larisa.”

  A secret place she shared with both Nowek and the militia driver. “Did Kirillin tell you to keep me busy this afternoon?”

  She let out a derisive puff of breath. “He thinks he has a hand in everything.” Her slender fingers snatched at the mushrooms now with violence. She shredded a brown cap and tossed it away. “It’s best to let him think so.”

  Under a tangle of berry canes, he spotted something different. A mushroom of another variety. He cleared away the bramble and plucked it. “What about that one?”

  “Do you drink?”

  “Not much. Why?”

  “It’s Coprinus atramentarius. Tippler’s Bane. If you eat it and drink alcohol, you could be paralyzed for a day or so.”

  “Kirillin would give you a bonus,” said Nowek. “But it would probably be in veskels.”

  “No thanks,” she said. “I can eat mushrooms.”

  Nowek smiled. Chuchin was fond of saying that under the Soviets there was nothing to buy, but at least you could afford it. Nowek didn’t trust Larisa, but he understood her.

  “It’s enough,” she said. Larisa’s sack was filled almost to capacity. She brushed off the wet sawdust from her bare knees, her skirt. Snow drifted down featherlight, constant, muffling.

  Nowek looked at his watch. Boyko wouldn’t arrive for another hour and a half. “The mushrooms. They’re good?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “Documents.”

  Levin stood in the aisle of an airliner, the way out blocked by two militiamen in heavy winter greatcoats. Their fur hats were tugged low to keep the area of skin exposed to bitter cold to an absolute minimum. Instead of the traditional red star of the militia, Kristall’s blue diamond was pinned to their hats.

  Levin was sweating. It was too hot for the guards to be dressed for a blizzard. His shirt was drenched and still it poured from his skin. He reached into his jacket. The pocket was empty. His wallet was gone. He looked up, confused, but then he remembered. “I already sent them.”

  “Who did you send them to?”

  A jet was taking off nearby. Its thunder made the air tremble as it roared overhead.

  “I sent them to Mirny. I sent them both to Mirny.”

  “Who did you send them to?” the guard demanded again.

  Levin thought, Can’t you hear me?

  “Who did you send them to?”

  Levin started to speak, but the words were drowned by another departing jet.

  “Levin!”

  He opened his eyes. The light was unnaturally bright. Almost bleached, as though a flash had gone off and not quit.

  Goloshev, another man Levin felt he should recognize but didn’t, and a third he had no idea about at all. The stranger’s head was bald as a bullet, his skin fishbelly pale. Loose bags of skin underscored his eyes. All three wore dark coats. All three gazed at him with the solemn, perplexed stare of foreign tourists trying to decipher the Moscow bus schedule.

  The room had changed. Levin looked to where the mirror had been. A blank wall. Where the window had looked down on a snowy parking lot, a closet door. And instead of the surgical rubber tubing, thick leather bands immobilized his wrists.

  They’d moved him.

  “Good. You’re awake.” It was Goloshev. “You gave us all a scare, boychik.” He nodded to the one Levin thought he should recognize. “Maybe you should check him again.”

  Yes. The sallow-faced doctor from Hospital 31.

  Another jet roared low overhead, making the glasses on a bathroom shelf tinkle merrily.

  A hotel room . . . near an airport. There were no airports in the middle of Moscow. All of them were thirty, forty kilometers out of town. Which one was he near? Shermetyevo? Domodedovo? Vnukovo? Bykovo?

  The doctor took his pulse, put a light in his eye, measured the pupil’s contraction, inserted something into his ear that beeped. “His temperature’s coming back down.”

  Sweat pooled under the small of Levin’s back. He wa
s shaking with fever. His bones ached from it. He tried to move, but he couldn’t. The leather restraints had no give in them at all. A specimen mounted to a board, ready for dissection, had more freedom. He squinted against a desert-dry glare that seemed to come from inside his eyes.

  “They say you’d pulled your bandages halfway off,” said Goloshev. “You know what would have happened? They’d be cleaning your brains off the floor with a mop. Everyone said it was impossible. The doctor. The nurse. I told them if there was a way, Levin will find it.”

  Levin found that his throat was no longer stuffed with cotton. They were using something new on him. It made him feel hot and light, so light the leather straps might be all that kept him from floating away. They wanted something. What?

  “Look,” said Goloshev. “You know the situation. You know why there’s no time. The two messages you sent? Something happened to them. Some kind of germ . . .”

  The third man said something.

  Goloshev waved at him impatiently. “Germ. Virus. Whatever. They were scrambled like eggs,” said the Toad. “So you’ve got to tell us what was in them and who you sent them to. You must do it now.”

  Another jet, even louder, lower than the others, thundered overhead.

  “Levin, we don’t have forever. In ten days it will be all over. Ten days and the whole fucking country will . . .”

  “He knows that,” said the third man.

  Goloshev stopped, then said, “I’m doing my best to shield you. But you have to help me. There have been developments.”

  Developments? Levin thought, Sherbakov.

  “I went into your office safe. Materials were needed for the investigation.” Goloshev leaned close. “I found the letter. I had to give it to them, Levin. I had no choice.”

  Letter? Levin glanced at the third man.

  “He’s no friend. He had the doctor give you something to clear your mind. A lot of it. If you don’t start—”

  The bald man touched Goloshev’s shoulder. The Toad immediately stopped talking.

  He outranks Goloshev, thought Levin.

  The stranger reached into his jacket. “We have a lot to talk about, Major Levin. Shall we begin?”

  Levin’s heart jumped. But the stranger held out his identity card, not a pistol. Levin’s ID carried the single red stripe of state security. This card had three stripes: the white, blue, and red of the flag of the Russian Federation.

  He leaned close, his voice a hoarse, smoker’s rasp. “I’m Chernukhin. I’m with the Presidential Security Service. Your commander found a document in your safe.” He reached into his other pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “I won’t waste time reading every word. I think you’ll understand the situation quickly enough.” With that, Chernukhin began to read.

  The Office of Internal Audit and Inspection wishes to express its gratitude for your assistance in our efforts to assess the current Russian situation. As suggested, we will brief bank officers in charge of Russian accounts to make certain your information is considered in their deliberations and decisions. We recognize your help could not have come without risks, both personal and professional. It is our belief and our hope that these risks will prove small in comparison to the ultimate goal of a Russia free from the yoke of official corruption.

  “Enough?” Chernukhin let the letter flutter down onto Levin’s chest. He peered down, his pale blue eyes bright as polished steel. “In ten days, President Yeltsin will hold talks with representatives of the IMF. It seems you’ve been talking with them already. You are going to tell us all what you said.”

  Who wrote that letter? Levin’s eyes darted between Chernukhin and Goloshev for an answer. His thinking was like a leaf caught in a gale.

  The crescents under Chernukhin’s eyes were shadowed, almost purple. “Now I have several questions, and I want you to answer them all in the greatest detail. Is this understood?”

  Levin felt something inside his brain pry open his mouth and spit out the word, “Yes.” What had they given him?

  “Let’s begin with your two elektronka. These messages were encrypted. The code is nothing we’ve ever seen. It’s better than the nuclear codes the President carries around. I know because the person who created them told me. It’s impossible to break. Who gave it to you? The Americans?”

  His tongue was being pulled by strings in someone else’s hands. He took a breath and said, “Sherbakov.”

  Chernukhin looked at the Toad.

  “His assistant. A lieutenant. He’s a kid.”

  Chernukhin took Levin by the shoulder and shook him. “Do you want to see your country go through another 1998? If it happens, who will get it in the neck first? Bankers. The media. Academics. In short, Jews. How much do the Americans know about the Closet? Where did that encryption program come from?”

  “Sherbakov.”

  “Fuck.” Chernukhin slapped the side of Levin’s bed with his open palm, then looked up at the doctor and said, “This isn’t working. Give him more.”

  The doctor stood at Levin’s side. He was frowning.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Chernukhin.

  “I have enough scopolamine, Sodium amytal, and Pentothal to make a horse recite Pushkin. But you can’t just use one after the next. They’re like colors. Throw them all together and you don’t get a rainbow, you get mud. His system must be flushed.”

  “How long will it take?” asked Chernukhin.

  “Tomorrow morning should be enough.”

  Levin felt a tear form in the corner of his good eye. He wanted to tell them something, anything, but the truth they refused to accept.

  “Levin, this is serious,” said Goloshev. “Maybe you can clear it up with a few words. I know if you were yourself, this would be a joke. Try hard and tell them the truth. You have to.”

  Chernukhin leaned close to Levin. “We have something in common. Like you, I have a nickname. I’m known as the Cleaner. I make sure there’s no dirt for the President to step in. Right now, that’s you. You’re a traitor. I don’t need to give you chances, but I will. How much do the Americans know? What did you tell them? Is it Israel that you’re working for? They’re clever with computers. They have a big diamond industry. Is that it, Levin? Have you sold your country to the kikes?”

  We don’t want kike money!

  Levin had no answer, truthful or otherwise. He shivered. The sweat poured out of his brow and trickled down his neck.

  “Where did you send those two messages!”

  Now he did have an answer. “Sherbakov.”

  The Cleaner turned his back to him and said to the doctor, “Eight o’clock. We’ll open his head like a chestnut.”

  The militia jeep parked at Larisa’s apartment building. He followed her in. There was enough snow to leave footprints and it was falling more heavily by the minute.

  “You won’t meet Liza. She eats her lunch at school. It’s nearby.” She led him up the broken steps to the front door. The building was elevated above the ground to keep it from melting the underlying permafrost. Nowek saw that the buzzer was by the name ARKOV. Her husband. “How did you meet Hock?”

  She inserted one key, turned the lock, then another key, a second lock, and the heavy wooden door opened. “Kristall sent some representatives to South Africa to negotiate an assistance package. I went along as translator.”

  “His Russian seems good enough.”

  “We didn’t know.”

  “Besides, it was a chance to travel?”

  “Of course.”

  The lobby was marred with graffiti on the walls. The floors were filthy with ancient grime, glittering with shards of broken vodka bottles. The elevator door opened onto black space. “Vandals. Does Kirillin know?”

  “There is no crime in Mirny.” She said it with Kirillin’s Yakut accent. She started climbing the stairs. The dim light of the impending storm filtered down from a skylight. All the fixtures had been stripped of bulbs. The third-floor corridor was floored in chipped vinyl.
She unlocked her door.

  Even before he walked into her flat, Nowek knew what it would be like. Outside, Russia can seem like an old silent movie, a bleak world where the skies, the buildings, even the people are gray. But inside is another world, another universe exploding with warmth, with life.

  Larisa’s flat burst with unexpected color: the bright spines of books, German magazines, gorgeous Oriental scarves draped over battered furniture, posters from an exhibition of French Impressionists, photographs of children at play in snow.

  Nowek felt instantly at home. He’d grown up in this room, or one so much like it the differences didn’t matter. The kitchen table served as living room, dining room, recreation area. There would be a toilet behind one door. A small bedroom behind another. An oversize closet where the babies would sleep.

  Nowek could close his eyes, reach for anything and find it. His father’s enormous black piano would have gone over there on that wall, far from both window and radiator, where Larisa had a couch and a coffee table with an arrangement of silk flowers faded to delicate ivory. The only jarring note was the computer and monitor on Larisa’s desk. That was something Nowek’s father would have thrown out the window.

  She put a kettle on to boil for tea while he settled himself on her couch. There was a picture of her daughter, Liza, standing against a stand of deep green pines, a dark blue sky, a few white clouds. A cool day in late spring. She had a halo of golden-blond hair, tousled by wind. She was wearing a thick red jacket and holding a long pencil. Her face was illuminated by light, confident of a future that would be wonderful. Looking at her, Nowek could see why Larisa would do anything to make it so. He’d felt the same way about Galena. He still did.

  Larisa melted some butter in a pan and began to chop some mushrooms for sautéing. From the tiny white refrigerator came a jar of cream cheese. From a cabinet, a tin of Kamchakta crab and a sack of kasha. The kasha went into a pot to cook. The crab was mashed into the cheese, then she tossed the mushroom caps into the sizzling butter.

  A woody, nutty smell filled the apartment. When the pan turned dark, when the first smoky wisps began to rise, she removed it from the heat and began stuffing the caps with cheese and crab.