The Ice Curtain

by Robin White

  The Third Horizon. Would Slava’s ID get him out of here alive? Or had Kirillin placed Slava’s name on a watch list? He decided no. They’d already found him, dead. Kirillin had already solved the problem that was Boyko. He’d thought he’d solved the problem that was Nowek, too. He’d been wrong twice. With a little more luck, he might be proven wrong again.

  The Second Horizon. The next would be the ore chute level, the tunnel that would lead to Fabrika 3. He thought about the ventilator shafts. About walking back to town. He thought about the cold and the snow and the burned Belaz and Boyko’s son, his bones too hot to touch. He thought too long, because the hoist was already starting to slow as it neared the top.

  The richest fucking diamond mine on earth.

  The pistol. He already stood accused of murdering Volsky. There was no reason to be found with the weapon that had killed Boyko, too. He opened the door of the circuit breaker box, stuffed the pistol in, and closed it as the elevator came to a stop. He remembered where Boyko wore his ID card, and shoved it into a pocket.

  The door slid open.

  Four men in black smoke hoods, clear face masks and ear protectors. They were breathing oxygen from tanks strapped to their backs. A rescue team. Two of them rushed into the hoist and grabbed Nowek. His lips were moving. Nowek couldn’t hear. He tapped his ears.

  The man in the mask shouted in his ear, “What Horizon?”

  “Nine,” he said weakly, then his knees buckled.

  Someone thrust a clear rubber mask over his mouth and nose. He drew in a lungful of sweet, pure air. He realized why the others were wearing hoods and breathing from tanks. The air was thick with dust and smoke.

  “He’s bleeding.”

  “Check him through.”

  Nowek sagged against them as they dragged him into a brightly lit corridor that was ribbed with girders, throbbing pipes, rust-riveted ducts large enough to vacuum up a small car. Nowek spotted the topmaster’s booth. It was surrounded with thick, soundproof glass. There were two men inside. One was the topmaster, charged with logging in miners heading up or down.

  The other was Kirillin.

  Steel bars herded the miners through a scanner station. Nowek recognized an X-ray machine. It was the same model he’d seen in Sib-Auto’s repair yard.

  Diamonds glow blue under X-rays.

  With all those diamonds in his pocket, he’d light up like a neon sign. If not, the scanner would read his identity and someone would know that Slava had been on the diamond line, was dead, and had not been down at the bottom of Mirny Deep. One way or another, in the next few moments, the alarm was going to sound. It was only a matter of seconds before he would become that wounded soldier in Stravinsky’s tale, rising up from the earth with precious knowledge, a ghost.

  “That’s the third,” said the topmaster. “He must have been near the blast. You want to stop him for a body search?”

  Kirillin looked at the whole-body scan on the X-ray monitor. The injured man glowed from head to toe. The finely powdered residue from the Dynagel blast reacted to X-rays even more than diamonds. “The health of our miners comes before matters of security,” he said gravely. “Let him pass.”

  The topmaster punched a button and the outer gates opened just as one of the rescuers slid the ID card into the reader. A name flashed on the topmaster’s screen, but by then the injured man was already on his way out to the ambulance waiting in the Dead Zone.

  Lakes in the desert. A warm cabin in a blizzard. Dollars in an overseas bank. Boyko had been right about hallucinations. When you run out of hope, they looked pretty good. Nowek was sure this had to be one. He’d been carried right under Kirillin’s nose with a pocket full of diamonds. No alarm had sounded. If that was possible, what was not?

  Now he was looking up at a dense cloud of steam billowing out from the top of the headworks tower. The snow had stopped. Clouds raced across the sky. The stars burned with an unreal intensity. Half a meter of drifted snow was on the ground. A path had been cleared from the tower all the way to the Dead Zone. They carried him to the back of the militia ambulance. It was painted the usual dull, army green, distinct from all the other dull, army-green vehicles by a red stripe painted on its side. It was small; two stretchers left only a narrow aisle for the nurse to stand and work.

  There was already a miner inside having his wrist bound. He had an open bottle of vodka clasped to his chest. They installed Nowek on the other stretcher, slammed the doors, and the ambulance began to roll.

  The miner took a long look at Nowek, then said, “You know what happened?”

  Nowek pointed to his ears and shook his head.

  “Who set off that fucking charge without clearing the mine?”

  “That’s enough,” said the nurse as she tied off the last strip and pinned the arm and wrist to the miner’s jacket. She shifted around to face Nowek. “Now what’s wrong with you?”

  She looked at Nowek’s forehead, poured some raw alcohol on a cloth, and wiped away the dust.

  Nowek felt the alcohol bite. He turned to look at the other miner. He was asleep. The bottle on his chest was empty.

  She examined his left ear. “Blood. The eardrum is damaged.” She stepped back. “Let’s get you out of your parka.”

  A commotion from the mine hoist caught Kirillin’s attention.

  The rescue team hurried through the ore skip door carrying a miner slung in a heavy canvas tarp. They were soaking wet, as though they’d pulled a shipwrecked man from angry surf.

  The topmaster had a microphone on his desk. He leaned over and keyed it. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Boyko!” said a voice muffled by an oxygen mask. “He’s dead! He was shot!”

  “Boyko?” said the topmaster. “What was he doing down there?”

  “A good question,” said Kirillin. “That makes three dead with Anton and Slava. It seems we have a killer on our hands.”

  “But Slava’s not dead.”

  Kirillin turned to the topmaster. “What?”

  “He’s alive. He came up from Horizon Nine. You cleared him through yourself not five minutes ago.”

  Kirillin swung. He couldn’t see outside the headworks tower. Nowek? He hesitated for less than a second, then mashed his hand down on the red button that sounded the alarm. He swung on the topmaster. “Notify the militia now. Have them stop that ambulance wherever they find it. Now! Is there a radio in it?”

  The topmaster already had the handheld radio out, tuned to the militia frequency. He gave it to Kirillin, thankful to all the gods and devils that the mine director had been the one to allow the other Slava through.

  “It’s all right. I’m fine,” said Nowek, holding on to the sleeve of his parka. The nurse was trying to pull it off.

  “What’s wrong with you? You think I’d steal your coat? It’s ruined with blood already. Stop acting like a baby.”

  Just then Nowek felt the ambulance veer to one side. The nurse grabbed a strap and hung on as the brakes locked and the van skidded sideways. The van was gliding silently across fresh snow. It struck something and came to a stop.

  “Don’t move. I’m not done,” she said to Nowek, then walked up the narrow aisle to the front. A partition separated the rear from the cab. There was a window, and it slid open.

  A face peered back, then away. “Yes. We have him.”

  The nurse was about to ask what he meant, when a thump made her turn.

  The rear doors were open, swinging in the biting wind. One of her patients was sound asleep. The other was gone.

  The ambulance had come to rest against a decorative fence made from welded steel circles. A four-story building lay beyond, with some rusted playground equipment in front. A school.

  Nowek jumped the fence and ran. The snowdrifts came up to his shins. He left a perfect trail.

  The school was elevated on concrete pilings to keep it from melting the permafrost. He dodged under the cracked concrete stairs, then down a dim corridor of pilings. There were only a few
windblown drifts under the school, with plenty of bare earth. He might not be getting anywhere, but at least he wasn’t leaving a trail.

  A flashlight swept across the snowy school yard behind him. Nowek hid behind a pillar as the light probed for him. A second light flared white. He waited while the beams were looking elsewhere, then ran farther under the school.

  On the far side was a large open plaza facing a wall of apartment buildings. Their walls alternated in a pattern of light and dark. Nowek was breathing heavily. He stopped. No. Not light and dark. They were white and blue.

  Liza . . . eats her lunch at school. It’s nearby. . . .

  It was the row of apartment buildings that lined Ulitsa Popugayeva, Larisa’s street. The first blue building on the left was hers. He looked back. The flashlights were under the school.

  He took off across the snowy plaza. Not for her building, but for the end of the row. He ran into a drift and fell. When he got up, he saw a car slowly making its way down Ulitsa Popugayeva. A militia jeep. Its searchlight was swiveling, hunting the entrances to each apartment building.

  Nowek got to his feet when it passed. He didn’t have much energy. He was running on will, on stubbornness. But the snow seemed so warm, so inviting. It would be easy to simply sit down in a drift, to fall, to rest.

  His run was more of a lopsided walk. His feet felt wooden, his knees rubbery. Who knew how much blood he’d left at the bottom of Mirny Deep? One hundred meters to go. Fifty. The last twenty steps. He couldn’t think about diamonds, about Volsky or Boyko. Not Hock. Not even about himself. Just the next step.

  The Hotel Zarnitsa, Chuchin, his home in Irkutsk, they all might as well be on Mars. He stopped, and when he did he could hardly muster the energy to look up at the stars. He could see the future clearly now. Nowek would become a “Snow Flower,” a body that emerged from the ice after the first thaw of spring.

  One more step. Then another.

  And then he was at the sidewalk. It was a jumble of footprints, and the walking was easier. He turned right and made his way to the first blue apartment building. Somehow, he climbed the four stairs to the front door. He tried to open it, but it was so well locked it didn’t even rattle. He turned around, reached up, and pushed the buzzer next to the name Arkov.

  He sat with his back to the door, looking out across the same snowy street he’d seen when Boyko had picked him up. The same, and completely different. Nowek felt the cold reaching for him. The stars were very bright. A bag of loose diamonds in his pocket. The giant crystal from the bottom of the Ninth Horizon. Boyko’s body, the Makarov in the elevator panel. He’d done a good job of establishing his guilt. Even Levin would have to believe he was helping Volsky deal in dirty—

  The door clicked, then pulled open.

  “You can’t drink here! Get moving or I’ll call the militia!”

  Larisa was wearing a long coat and slippers on her feet. He looked up into her face.

  She looked down at Nowek, then up the street. The militia jeep was working its way back in their direction. Her expression was that of a chess player weighing moves. Nowek and the militia. Threats and opportunities.

  The patrol’s searchlight swept a bright white path over snow.

  “Hurry,” she said, and reached down to help Nowek stand.

  Chuchin had felt the hotel room floor shake, the windows rattle. He didn’t need a phone call from that woman to know that a blast had been set off someplace, and that, as usual, Nowek had been in the middle of it. What did he expect? That Kristall would pin a medal on him for taking over Volsky’s job of twisting their pricks? Did he think they’d give him the key to the fucking city?

  He pushed a heavy dresser in front of the door. It wouldn’t keep someone out of the room forever, but they’d make noise when they came for him. Chuchin knew they would come. They had to. The boy, Sherbakov. Now Nowek. He was the last detail.

  He rummaged in his cardboard suitcase and pulled out a paper bag stained by fish oil. The smell of ripe omul was overpowering in the enclosed hotel room, which, after all, was the point. He shook the rotted fish into the toilet, then pulled out a small, plastic bag. He ripped it open with his teeth and poured seven Nagant 7.62mm cartridges into his palm. Their unique recessed tips gave them the appearance of turtles pulling their head into a shell.

  Chuchin took them back to the bed and loaded them into the reassembled revolver. You weren’t supposed to be able to break down this model Nagant into such small, easily hidden pieces, but Chuchin was a master at hiding things. After twenty years behind the gulag wire, they could blame themselves for that.

  His old Nagant was an officer’s model, a double-action gun. When cocked, the cylinder moved forward against the rear of the barrel, forming a tight seal, making optimum use of the exploding gunpowder. It gave the pistol the punch of a much larger weapon.

  He slid the last bullet into place, then spun the cylinder, and sat back against two propped-up pillows. He’d been Nowek’s driver, his confidant, his friend, since the election for mayor of Markovo. A long time, too long to slink away even if there was a way to do it. Chuchin hadn’t begged those bastards in the camps for his life. Not once. He wasn’t about to start now. And when they came for him? He placed the cocked pistol on his lap.

  They’d learn what friendship was all about.

  She opened the door, turned on another light, and helped Nowek inside.

  The apartment still smelled of cooked mushrooms. The kitchen table was still set, though now there was a child’s plate and a plastic Mickey Mouse cup that had tipped over and spilled red juice onto the cloth. The normalcy of it gave Nowek strength.

  “Let’s get this off you,” she said, tugging at his bloody parka.

  Nowek saw that her face was different, paler, slightly puffy, and red around the eyes. She’d been crying.

  “Kirillin called,” she said. “He said there’d been an explosion in Mirny Deep, that you and Boyko had disappeared. I said, disappeared? In Mirny? How is that even possible? He said that you might have been down that mine with him.”

  “I was.” He let her pull off the coat, then his shirt. His chest was scraped from slithering through the rock slot at the bottom of the mine.

  “I called your associate right away and told him. He said—”

  “I’m not surprised?”

  Larisa nodded. “What were you doing with Boyko?”

  “Going to the horizon.” What would she say if she knew what was inside the parka’s inner pocket? Ten perfect diamonds, and the giant crystal from the Ninth Horizon.

  “You’re delirious.” Her long blond hair was pulled back. She tossed his bloody shirt to the floor and clucked her tongue when she saw his arm.

  Nowek got a look at it for the first time. Three hard, painful mounds painted in dried blood and a black bruise.

  Larisa took her long coat off. She was wearing a dark green robe, hooded, made of plush, velvety fabric beneath it. It gave her an almost medieval air, a princess in disguise. It had a zipper that went from waist to throat. She looked at his arm, then at him. “Who shot you? Was it Kirillin?”

  “Anton.”

  “Then it might as well have been Kirillin. And Boyko?”

  “He’s dead. We tried to get out, but the mine hoist took us down . . . to the bottom. Kirillin came for us. He killed him, Larisa. I saw it.”

  “But he let you live?”

  “No. He thought I was dead. Listen to me. This is dangerous for you. You and your daughter. I just need a place to stop for a moment and rest. . . .”

  “Liza’s asleep. You’d prefer to go to the clinic and have them look at you? What about the explosion?”

  “Kirillin. He thought I was trapped.”

  “How did you ever get out of the mine?” When she could see that Nowek wasn’t sure himself, she said, “It doesn’t matter. We’ll use the bathroom. I’m sorry, but this is going to be messy.”

  The small bathroom was sandwiched between her bedroom and the large cl
oset that was Liza’s room. In it, a tub sat on a sea of cracked tiles.

  “There was a militia patrol on the street,” she said. “What were they looking for?”

  “Me.”

  “You said Kirillin thinks you’re dead.”

  “He knows I’m alive.”

  The tub was stained from the hard minerals. She opened the tap and let it run until the hot water came and the small room filled with steam. She let the tub fill while she hunted for the appropriate tools: a razor, a tweezer, towels, tape and bandages, a bottle filled with pale green liquid.

  “What’s that?”

  “For the pain. It’s medicine. Take it.” She unscrewed the cap and handed it to Nowek. “Can you sit with your arm over the tub?”

  He took a sip. Vodka, but with something else. He thought of the bottle his father kept by the chair. It was fiery and herbal at the same time. He sat on the floor as she took a washcloth and delicately began to clean his wounds. When she dabbed at the swelling, a shot of electricity sizzled up his arm, his neck, and discharged into his brain. He sucked in his breath.

  “It’s going to be worse. Drink.”

  He did, deeper, letting the liquid fire run down his throat. Thick as molten glass. “Boyko told me about his son. About the strike. I know why Hock is here. He’s got to—”

  “Quiet. I have to dig.”

  He closed his eyes and felt the tweezers probe for the lead pellet. They’d felt like staples going into his arm. They felt like boulders coming out. He drank, and drank again. Larisa was right. It was medicine. The liquid poured life into him.

  The first pellet emerged. She let the wound bleed until Nowek’s arm ran bright red, plunged it into the hot water, sponged raw alcohol on, let it dry. She bandaged it tight.

  “Done?” Nowek asked.

  “The first. There’s two more. Drink.”

  He did. The second pellet fell to the tiled floor with a clink.

  “Larisa, I have to see Chuchin. . . .”

  “You might as well go to Kirillin’s office. You can’t go to the hotel. They’ll be watching. We’ll think of something.”