“The original model,” Rudi said, pulling out a book that showed a famous picture of Lenin making a speech and Trotsky mounting the platform. Rudi turned the page. “Look closely. Look, Trotsky is gone, but they forgot his elbow. They left Trotsky’s elbow in. We used to tease Lev. ‘Don’t forget the elbow,’ we would say to him. Ivan never forgot.” He looked at me.
“Do you know why the Soviets failed? There was always some nut like me or Sasha who kept the original pictures. Someone who could get the facts out to the West. There were always so many places to publish over there. Then comes Gorbachev and glasnost, and nobody cares if his hat is on or off. Everyone knows the truth. More or less. Ivan lost his job.”
“He was angry? This Ivan?”
“No. He was a sweet guy. He met an American girl. He was crazy about her. He said he would marry her and live in America. He was obsessed. He became a little strange, but it was strange times, you know? He showed us her picture, but she never answered his letters. Then he disappeared. Do you want his telephone number?” Rudi opened a notebook, licked a pencil stub and copied out a phone number on a scrap of paper.
“Shall I try it?”
I nodded.
Rudi dialed, listened, hung up. He made another call and talked some more.
“Lev’s father has moved. He has no telephone. But I have found an address. I’m sure he would be pleased to see a friend of his son’s from America.” He inhaled his cigarette deeply, a look of intense pleasure on his face.
“Thank you.”
Sasha returned, looking pleased. He spoke as formally as if in a classroom. “I am pleased to confirm that I was right. Mr Chaim Brodsky is to buy Novosti Press.” He smiled and we all had a cigarette.
“Nice cigarette. Tasty,” Sasha said.
I felt for these guys. It could have been me.
“What’s your work now?” I asked them.
“We wait around. Maybe somebody will buy us. We try to keep the archive together. Tough times. Do you think things will be OK, Artemy Maximovich?”
“I don’t know.” I put all the cigarettes I had in Rudi’s drawer as discreetly as I could. “And my name is just Artie,” I said, and went to see the father of the man I killed.
7
The man prised open his door with ragged fingernails and a screwdriver.
“I have sold my doorknobs for bread,” he said, when he saw me on the other side. “I am Kowalski, Boris. You are?”
“My name is Cohen,” I said stiffly, as if I’d learned Russian in school. “You are the father of Ivan Borisovich Kowalski, sometimes known as Lev?”
“Yes, we call him Lev sometimes. It was also my father’s name. He sent me this.” He stroked a brown cardigan he wore as if it were a fine cat, and I assumed he was half cracked, the way you do with the old or sick, in Moscow especially. Then I caught myself. His eyes focused and for a moment, there was real intelligence in them.
“I’d like to speak about your son.”
“Lev is dead.” It was a statement.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He stood back to let me in from the fetid hallway. Kowalski had covered the windows with old copies of Pravda and only a weak light showed through the lies.
Like Birdie, he apparently lived alone.
He hobbled on a homemade crutch and a crude prosthesis. As he led me into his room, the man’s skull showed beneath his skin and a section of his head was concave, as if it had been battered in with a mallet. The sweater he wore was cashmere, but his filthy undershirt had food stains on it.
“Good,” he said again. “Then he is released.”
I found myself in a room piled high with papers. The table was covered with paper, news clippings, reports, letters. On the dow, on the floor, there were stacks of papers. I began to feel that old people in Moscow sat imprisoned in their miserable rooms guarding piles of documents as if they were the only thing that attached them to their own memories at all. Above the television was an icon.
“Sit down, please,” he said. “I will some make tea.”
This was a man too weary even for hate. Once, it had been a face made for hate: lean, a jutting jaw, faded blond hair, skin tight around the mouth, a pale Polish face with light hard eyes. But illness had eaten much of the flesh and all the ambition.
“I am glad he is dead. They made him into a monster. You knew him?”
“He tried to kill me,” I said.
“Why have you come, then?”
“I thought you would want to know.”
“You are a policeman?”
“Yes, in America. I need to know who your son was and what he did.” I offered the old man a pack of cigarettes. He took one reluctantly and I lit it for him. He smoked with three fingers. The other two were missing. I wanted to say: I killed your son. I did it.
He poured tea and put four cookies on a saucer. He sat in an armchair covered with tattered rose-printed fabric and removed his leg. He put it aside and started massaging the stump which was covered with a brown sock. Waiting until I finished my tea and ate my share of cookies, he said formally, “I am grateful for the news. What do you want?”
“How did Lev get his samples?”
“Please,” he said and pointed to a plastic curtain. “In the kitchen.”
Behind the curtain was a work table. On it stood a set of vegetable scales. A row of stainless steel disks the size of hockey pucks were neatly stacked to one side. There were metal containers and clean jam jars. On a yellow plate there was a dusty bunch of purple beets, leaves still gray with soil.
The lead soup cans were used to carry cesium or plutonium, the hockey pucks fitted with uranium pellets, he said. All samples.
“What about certificates?”
He opened a drawer and held out a sheaf of official documents verifying the scientific characteristics of the samples.
“Forged?”
“Some. Some real. Not expensive,” he said. “Easy to get from research institutes.”
The samples, Kowalski explained, were the point and he showed me his tools that included a bent potato peeler.
“They made my son into a mule,” Kowalski said. “They made him carry this shit.” He spat it out. “He did not know what he was carrying, not at first.”
“Who made him?”
“Who? Mafia. KGB. Bosses. Godfathers. They said he was escorting girls. Driving trucks. Does it matter what? Or who? Whoever. It is not our fault. It begins with Americans. In Brooklyn.” He showed me a postcard from his son.
“How did he get the samples he took to America? Who gave them to him?”
With no expression at all, Kowalski replied, “I did.” He shifted his weight, grimacing. “I didn’t do this for money, you understand. I am not a money-grubbing Jew addicted to money. Do you understand me, Mr Cohen?”
As he talked he shuffled papers back and forth across his table. “I did this for my son. I had nothing to give him, so I gave him death.”
Currently, Kowalski was employed as a caretaker at a nuclear research institute outside Moscow. He spoke stiff, educated Russian and I could follow easily. It was the formal language of my grandparents’ generation. What he told me, as far as I could understand, was this.
Too old for the draft, he, Kowalski, had been sent to Afghanistan with the Corps of Engineers to look at the possible use of unconventional weapons. He was older and slower than the others, he tripped on a landmine, lost his leg, they shipped him home and demoted him. He was already sick because, earlier in his life, he worked at a facility that made plutonium pits. He worked with his head near a steampipe and his hands in a glove-box that sometimes leaked.
In those years, Kowalski and his wife, who had since divorced him, said nothing. They were good Party members. If the state said that there was no danger from radioactivity, then who was he, Boris Kowalski, to disrespect his betters?
Then came glasnost and he began to read. Around the same time, Lev was fired from his job. No one need
ed pictures fixed any more. Lev fell in with a bad crowd, foreigners, mafia.
They invited Lev to do errands. He drove a fruit truck to Varna for a while. They paid him well. He realized the money wasn’t about fruit, but for what? Drugs? He escorted girls to Croatia, to Germany. Dancers, they told him. He knew the girls were whores. But the money was good, the work easy and Lev liked the girls. A few of the girls got sick and Lev told his father about it.
“I then understood what it was they were carrying,” said Kowalski.
On the road, Lev made a friend who knew how real money could be made. He asked his father for help. “We would retire and live together in a lovely dacha in the country, he said. I agreed. Everyone was doing it. After all, it was our family business, so to speak.”
Minatom, the old Soviet atomic energy agency, had been a country in its own right. It still employed a million people. Everyone was broke. At the lowest level, illegal trade was active: plutonium, uranium, lithium, cesium, even garbage like yellow cake would sell somewhere. Boris Kowalski simply walked out of his institute with whatever he needed on a regular basis.
“We are all angry. Many of us have not been paid for months. For years. So we make business. I did business for Lev.” He put one hand over the other and cracked the knuckles.
“How?”
“How? I put the materials, the samples, in a saucepan. In my lunch box. What difference does it make how?”
He put his hand over his face. “But once, I took the wrong material, or someone played a trick. I took cesium and it made Lev very sick. I knew because another worker took some and was exposed over his whole body. He was dead in two weeks. But I had already given the samples to my son.”
We sat silently. I didn’t know what to say so I ate the last cookie.
“I wanted Lev to stop. It was too late. He was addicted. To the power, the chance for money. To death. He was a sample merchant. A mule. He was an atomic mule, he said, and he would work until he dropped. He wanted to make one last run. He wanted to run plutonium to America. To be the first. I think he had other plans.”
“What kind?”
“A girl. A girl who betrayed him.”
He shuffled papers around and took out a picture of Lily Hanes, ten years younger, in furry earmuffs that were white against her red hair.
“What else?”
Kowalski shrugged. “Do you know the effects of radiation? Shall I tell you how it was for my son? The blood dies.”
“I know.”
Kowalski lit a stinking Indian cigarette from a pink packet. Outside it had begun to rain again, hail this time. The pellets hit the glass. A police siren wailed into the Moscow dusk. I wanted to tell Kowalski I shot his son.
“Who did he think he was selling to?”
“In Germany, in Bulgaria, these places, he was selling to middlemen. Bankers. Italians who clean the money—you say clean money?”
“Launder.”
“Yes. Terrorists. Libyans, maybe, Iran, sure. Who knows? Who cares? You can buy anything here these days.”
“Anything?”
“Sure.”
“Plutonium?”
“Plenty.”
“Red mercury?”
“Harder. More expensive.”
The rain fell like lead against the window.
“Lev was a good son.” He began to weep. I thought about his son’s passion for knives.
“Who wanted the stuff in America?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you find out?”
“Me, I am nobody. Nothing. Maybe the big bosses at some institute can tell you.”
“Your institute? Will you take me?”
“It will cost.”
“How much?”
“A new leg.”
When he rubbed his stump, I understood. Boris Kowalski, who had cheated the system that betrayed him and destroyed his son in the process, wanted, as compensation, a better leg.
8
“Give me a few roubles,” Kowalski said to me late the next night when we arrived at the institute. I gave him a wad of crumpled money.
An hour out of Moscow, we were outside the gates. An old woman sat in the guardhouse snoring. Kowalski banged on the iron railing and she opened her eyes. “Hello?” She looked up. “It’s you.”
“It’s me, mother.” He gave her the money. “I left something at work. You understand.” The old woman nodded, and raised the gate, and spat out into the night.
“Give her a few cigarettes,” Kowalski said and I passed a pack out the window. The woman bobbed her head with a subservient grin. God, how I wanted to go home. I reached for Svetlana’s hand. She had driven us in her little car. It was getting cold.
The place was deserted. A pale frost covered the muddy yard. A machine like an old tractor chugged lethargically, sending a stream of steam onto the cool night. “Helium.” Kowalski snorted. “We sell it to make cash fast. Wait here.”
Kowalski left us in the car and walked towards a dirty yellow stone building, then gestured us to follow.
“Stay in the car,” I told Svetlana. She shook her head. “What if there’s a radiation leak or something?”
“Are you worried I might have sick babies?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll wait,” she said, and I knew she was going to marry me.
Inside the building, Kowalski led me to a room that looked like a school science lab. It was pretty run down. There were ragged charts of transuranic elements on the walls, outdated microscopes, a gas ring in a corner with a tea kettle on it, a chalky blackboard, a few desks and piles of paper. Kowalski sat down heavily, leaning on his crutch, lighting one of his Indian cigarettes. Silently he watched the windows.
“We’ll wait.”
“What for?”
My back was to the door when it opened suddenly. I turned. A middle-aged woman had arrived. She was wrapped in scarves like a dancer. Slowly, she peeled off the garments, then sat on a desk.
Kowalski introduced her as Valya Golitzine. She was a scientist, he said. Top rank.
“How much?” She spoke to Kowalski who looked at me.
Opening my wallet, I showed her cash.
“Not enough. You speak Russian?”
I nodded and showed her more money.
“OK.” She stuffed the notes in her jacket pocket, glanced around the room, picked up a shopping bag and removed from it a large can of Nescafé, a bottle of vodka, a glass, a salami and a small loaf of bread. She put them out on the desk in a row, surveyed her work and smiled. “We have half an hour.” Her fingers fidgeted with the booze.
Like a pupil, I sat in a chair facing her. She had a thin handsome face, a Roman nose, dark eyes, a dancer’s graceful arms. She pulled the lid off the Nescafe, paused to light a cigarette, took out a jar about six inches high. It was lead. She put on rubber gloves then extracted a glass vial filled with a glutinous mass. It had a pinkish color. It looked like nail polish. But this was red mercury. This was what I’d traveled the road for, this bottle of what? Of death?
“Red mercury,” she pronounced. “This is red mercury.”
“Can you make a bomb with it?”
“Of course.”
“How much do you need?” I asked.
Valya pointed to the water glass. “Half this.”
“How does it work?”
“Do you know science?”
“No.”
“OK. Red mercury does not exist in nature at all. Like plutonium, it is entirely man-made. It is used in a nuclear trigger. Put it around the plutonium heart—Americans say pit—at the center of a nuclear device, it compresses. It allows you to use less plutonium. Much less. With it, you can make a bomb much smaller than any others. You can use it in grenade launchers. Even single grenades. Personal nuclear bombs. More?”
“Yes.”
“The first batch of red mercury was made many years ago in a remote region. It is unique. Sometimes it is bonded with strontium. It is hig
hly radioactive. The rare radioactive elements give it a distinctive signature unlike any of the other radiologicals. It is very easy to smuggle.”
“How is it transported?”
“It exists as powder. As liquid. The liquid can be implanted with certain isotopes to make red mercury 20 20. You need a particle accelerator. We have one. We rent it out by the hour, now. Like a whore.” She was drinking steadily and had begun slicing her salami.
For a few more minutes she lectured me. Red mercury 20 20 was real killer stuff.
I had heard some of this from Andrei Federov; I had to be sure: “You use it for stealth technology?”
“As paint, yes,” she said. “Or you might make tiny bombs with it. Easy to carry. Easy to hide. It was the one great Soviet secret, mercury and antimony oxide. In the West, few knew. A paper was written for Dupont in 1968, then nothing. Even your Los Alamos labs dismissed red mercury,” she said, and I recalled that Federov had been at Los Alamos.
“Then, twenty years later, Dupont applies for a patent. Twenty years’ secret research? Who knows?” Glancing more frequently out the window, Valya kept at the salami. “The designs needed high-powered computers. We don’t have high-powered computers here.” She snorted contemptuously at the crumbling lab. “We haven’t got anything here.”
I asked why officialdom denied its existence.
“Corruption. The moral illness of secrecy. One academician who knew perfectly well it existed said it could not exist because it was “outside nature”, even after the KGB confirmed to Yeltsin that it did exist. We have suffered from too much secrecy.” She plucked a crumpled copy of a letter from one of her pockets and threw it at me. “Read!”
It was a letter from Dubna to Yekaterinberg concerning a supply of red mercury. Laughing bitterly, she pulled out more paper.
“Red mercury is wonderful because it is so easy to carry.” She fumbled in her purse. Triumphantly, she showed me what looked like an ordinary lipstick. She pulled the cap off. “Like ordinary mercury, red mercury is very soft, very ductile, very susceptible to heat. Under the right conditions, I can make it into a lipstick. Like this.” She waved it under my nose, laughing as I recoiled from it, then she took a mirror from her bag and made up her mouth with it.
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