Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

  No shot.

  The paintball rifle had fewer shells in the magazine than his habitual automatic gun.

  The number one was painted on the player’s helmet. Maxim, thrown onto his back, smeared with fake blood, groaned and tried to crawl away, pushing his feet on the slippery linoleum. The paint had splashed lightly on the plastic visor. Eyes wild with pain and fear stared out at him.

  Shershnev could have made it all right. He could have knelt. Embraced him, held him close. Asked forgiveness. Explained what had happened to him, that it was a bad idea to play paintball with a professional soldier. But the same evil force that directed his finger on the trigger and readily responded to a march—“Only the scarlet soldiers, dear, The soldiers coming”—that force turned Shershnev around and away. His son couldn’t whine like that, couldn’t be so afraid. And most importantly, he could not, did not have the right to look at his father that way.

  Shershnev went into the corridor. There were no opponents left. He won the skirmish he had wanted to lose.

  His phone vibrated silently in the pocket of his overalls.

  “You? Tomorrow, eight o’clock at the Directorate. Got it? Over.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The doctors at the hospital treated Kalitin with extreme respect. It wasn’t because of his expensive insurance. The doctors considered Kalitin a former colleague and at first expected him to be demanding. But he turned out to be an ideal patient: he wasn’t worried, he didn’t ask questions, he didn’t call the duty nurse at night, and he patiently dealt with the procedures.

  They thought that he was not afraid.

  Kalitin was afraid. The way he had been afraid only once in his life, during a long childhood winter. They had just moved to the City, where they were assigned a two-room apartment with kitchen and bath—it had seemed enormous to him after the small room in a communal flat. He went to a new school—where everyone was a newbie like him, and there were no huge second-grade and third-grade bullies, as there had been at the old school. Life seemed radiant and invigorating.

  Suddenly something inexplicable happened to his mother and father. In the evenings, his parents placed a pot over the telephone—they had their own phone now—and shut themselves up in the kitchen. The water poured full-blast into the sink and the radio proclaimed loudly and solemnly: Today the entire country. . . Their voices could barely be heard: strange, aloof. He hid in the hallway behind his grandmother’s ancient, molting fur coat, trying to catch even a word.

  His mother was a surgeon. Just recently she had told them proudly how well equipped her new operating theater was. Now she wanted to leave urgently. His father was trying to convince her to stay.

  “You have my last name,” he said softly.

  “You think they don’t have my personnel file?” she replied.

  “It will be all right,” he said uncertainly. “Look, they made me a senior fellow. They gave me access. First category! Do you think I would have that if they suspected us of anything? Apartment. Salary. Rations. They approved my dissertation topic.”

  “Have you read what they’re writing in the papers?” she asked bitterly. “Killer doctors! I studied with one of them, don’t you understand?”

  His father stopped talking. Then he said: “Igor will help.”

  “As long as Igor doesn’t fall himself,” she replied joylessly, dully. “This is just the beginning.”

  Those nocturnal words destroyed the invisible, warm softness that was his home, leaving gaping holes open to uncertainty and fear. He began to think that some of the teachers regarded him strangely: as if they knew something. Fear became the spice in meals, the shadow of all feelings, the echo of all sounds. Fear took out all the bannisters and supports from the world, stole his usual sense of balance, took away his agility.

  That’s why he fell in the locker room after gym class. He got tangled in his trousers. He clumsily knocked over someone’s canvas bag from the bench. A change of clothing fell out—and a deck of greasy photographs with torn, chewed edges.

  Vovka Sapozhok, the class clown, hurried over and looked over his shoulder; he whistled in astonishment and then gave a salacious, disgusting smack of his lips.

  The cards scattered, mixed up. Naked arms, breasts, buttocks, black-and-white glossy flesh, stockings, ostrich feathers, gauzy curtains, sofas, slippers. Women on their backs, crouching, kneeling. Naked men in black hats. Dark thickets of hair between plump female thighs. Penises in mouths. The nakedness was not of the bodies, but of the secret real life of men and women, covered by clothing, the frightening seriousness of what was taking place in the photos, it was like seeing birth or death. And strange, bizarre apparel, jewelry, belonging to a fairy tale theater, a foreign ritual, an extinct world.

  He looked, frozen in place. Sapozhok grew quiet and bent forward, leaning on his shoulder as if in love.

  Voices burst into the dressing room. Senior students, the volleyball team. Tall, sweaty, angry after the game. Sapozhok was first to sense danger and tried to jump away, but fell on his friend’s back, humping like a street dog, a hurrying runt, and then rolled off and vanished.

  The older boys laughed and guffawed loudly and then suddenly stopped.

  “You little rat.” A heavy blow knocked the boy toward the bench.

  The boy knew that voice. The son of Colonel Izmailov, the City’s military commandant. He had seen him with his father at Uncle Igor’s house. He overheard the adults talking about how after the war the colonel had been sent to Germany to disassemble scientific equipment and came back with “a lot of interesting things for himself personally.”

  Interesting. The boy realized that Izmailov junior had taken those dirty pictures from his father. Secretly of course. And if they were found, if a teacher walked in right . . .

  He wet himself.

  Izmailov picked him up by the scruff of his neck. The pictures were no longer on the floor.

  Dark, round-headed, the commandant’s son looked at him but was also looking around furtively—apparently he didn’t trust everyone on the team. And the smaller kids were nearby as well.

  “You spill this to anyone, I’ll kill you, you little shit!” Izmailov shoved him into the corner of the room.

  Even before, when there was peace in the family, the boy would not have told his parents anything. How could he prove that he had not wanted them and had not intended to steal those cards? How could he admit that he had seen them at all?

  Now the boy felt that even if he did confess—his parents would not listen to him, wouldn’t condescend to that.

  They had no time for him.

  During the following week, Izmailov “accidentally” ran into the boy three times at the classroom door. He just stood there and looked at him. His gaze was beginning to show his father’s stern nature; he could sit calmly at the table, looking around courteously at his fellow diners, and people would clam up, lay down their forks, and start rubbing the stems of their vodka glasses for some reason. The boy recalled the black-and-white bodies, submissively bent, the men in black top hats, Izmailov’s hand, his angry hot whisper, and felt that he did not have the strength to rid himself of that memory.

  Then the day came when once again gym class coincided with volleyball practice. Earlier he would have managed to get out of it, for example, by eating snow to catch cold and staying home. But he couldn’t manage it. It required a little bit of strength on hand, you couldn’t borrow it, for that sort of ploy. The boy was tormented by fear and guilt: if he had not knocked over Izmailov’s bag, nothing would have happened.

  He sat through the class. Put on skis that were too long and poorly waxed and had loose mounts for his gym period.

  Cross-country.

  He did the first lap with enjoyment, surprised by his body’s indifference, its dumb and uncomplaining skill despite the splintery skis and the horror ahead. The wind came up and the light frost grew even lighter, and the snow on the course, even though it was rolled and compacted, started sticking t
o the badly waxed skis.

  A raw blizzard started. The whirling whiteness hid the figures of his classmates and the school building. Snow formed a tight hump on his right ski; the boy jerked his foot and the screws pulled out of the loose holes, with a spray of rusty wood particles.

  He stood there, one foot with a ski, one without. He realized that there was no goodness in life that would save him from Izmailov waiting in the locker room; the knowledge was as obvious and final as a sentence; very adult. The boy prayed wordlessly, begging the blizzard, the sky, anyone—save me!

  The world, it seemed, did not respond.

  He took off the second ski and meekly headed for the gym.

  There was no one on the stoop. The volleyball net was still swaying gently. A whistle lay on the referee’s stool. The ball had rolled into a corner.

  It felt as if he had walked through some dangerous hole in the blizzard and ended up in an alternative world, without people. If a war had started, there would have been air raid sirens wailing throughout the City. Had the enemy attacked suddenly?

  He peeked into the cafeteria. Glasses of tea and unfinished pieces of bread on the tables. He could smell scorched buckwheat porridge. The old cat, Duska, sat by the trash can for bones and peels.

  The door to the auditorium was slightly open. He could hear stifled sobs.

  It was dark in the auditorium, just a few lights were on. It was filled with teachers, students, guards, and cooks. The director was on the stage. He raised his only hand, as if trying to catch someone flying away, and in the same voice he used when he had sent his tank battalion into attack, shouted:

  “The moment of silence is over! On your knees! On your knees!” He knelt first, and everyone followed.

  “Let us remember,” the director’s voice broke. “Let us remember . . . Our dear—” The old crooked scar that went across his temple and cheek turned white and his face was suffused with bad blood. An old concussion, a German shell striking the tank turret, deafened him once again, he sank to the floor, while a simple-hearted cook cried out:

  “They killed him!”

  Everyone started to cry, the words released the cries.

  Someone put a hand on his shoulder. Izmailov. His mouth was twisted and there were tears in his empty, wild eyes. The boy felt that he was crying, too. Izmailov got up and wandered off. People stood up, holding on to one another, stunned.

  A portrait of a man with a mustache hung in the middle of the stage. The boy knew the City had been founded on his direct orders. The portrait had a black ribbon draped across one corner.

  Believing in this man’s immortality, in his name’s immortality, the boy could not accept that he was actually dead, that he was reduced to a body emptied of its spirit. He thought that he had not really died, but had merely sacrificed himself for an hour, a day, in order to stop Izmailov’s revenge, to save him, the most insignificant of the insignificant. He was engulfed by an uncontrollable wave of happiness and pain, the desire to sacrifice himself in return, to give his entire life, present and future, to the benevolent power embodied in that familiar, comforting portrait. He sobbed passionately, discharging the fear, and the ceiling flipped upside down and the lamps flew in a tight arc.

  Darkness. Serenity.

  The sharpness of smelling salts.

  Izmailov no longer approached him. At the end of the summer, he disappeared from the City. Along with the commandant father.

  His parents no longer locked themselves in the kitchen in the evening or covered the telephone with a pot. His mother started praising her new operating theater again.

  “They removed Izmailov,” Uncle Igor said with marked indifference, when they came to visit. “He turned out to be an accomplice of Beria, that enemy of the people.”

  The boy thought that this was all orchestrated by the benevolent power that he had managed to reach. He now knew that the man with the face in the portrait had in fact died; died forever. However, he divined the presence of the same power in Uncle Igor; in his simple, radiant word “removed,” which obscured his triumph; the covert, great knowledge of causes and effects.

  At the hospital, the same childish fear of inferiority and abandonment gnawed at him.

  But now there was no more saving strength. All its mirages had vanished, like the banners and heraldry of the country where he had been born.

  What was left was a patient’s obedience. And thoughts in which he tried to rationalize his fear and find the path to and support for an unconditional hope, and not an illusory one.

  Kalitin set aside the newspaper. He did not like reading on a screen, his eyes tired too quickly, and he had made reading newspapers part of his self-image: the conservative scientist, an émigré who could not reach previously attained heights in his historical homeland and retired.

  He also had an instinctive fear of computers and smart-phones that collected and saved metadata; he tried not to use search engines that remembered your questions; he did not trust VPN protocols or encryption.

  Just an anonymous print paper; a fresh edition, bought at a kiosk.

  Now the newspapers were brought to him by hospital staff, who joked respectfully about the lonely old man: Who else could leaf so calmly through the hysterical pages of news while he knew there was a suspicion of inoperable cancer and that at any moment the test results and final diagnosis would be revealed?

  A chemist by education, Kalitin knew a lot about the human body, but only from a narrow and specific point of view: how to kill the body. He had a fairly good idea of modern methods of treating cancer, some of which were distantly related to his research; after all, on some level he had studied the directed destruction of specific cells.

  But he remained ignorant in medicine. His academic, theoretical thoughts about death and his routine closeness to it in the laboratory gave Kalitin the perverted arrogance of a technocrat who believes that destruction and creation, killing and healing were equally possible; anything that could be broken could be fixed—thing, body, spirit—it was the job of other specialists who would be at hand when needed: repairmen, doctors, psychologists.

  He who developed substances from which there was no salvation, who knew the effect of their virulent molecules, still believed childishly that salvation was always possible in the case of an ordinary illness, it was just a question of timely intervention, a question of means, effort, and price; Kalitin was prepared to pay the highest price.

  He could afford a good hospital. Good doctors. But that was not enough for firm hope. It would be stupid to expect help. They let him know that more than once. The invitation to consult the investigative group was a farewell gesture, a perfunctory administrative kindness. They knew or guessed that most likely he would be gone in a year. National frugality: squeeze the last of the toothpaste from the tube. He had to work off the hospital bills, balance the debit-credit, for his insurance would not cover everything. And then there was the funeral.

  They didn’t tell him over the phone which crime the group was investigating. Secrecy. Not over the phone. What do they know about secrecy? In his ancient past, an armed messenger would come to Kalitin with a sealed envelope in a sealed pouch. Secrecy. . . As if he couldn’t guess since it was all over the newspapers. Anaphylactic shock or its simulation. It was probably a substance of natural origins. Not his lab, not his work. In a restaurant, at close distance. Before witnesses. Risky. He didn’t die right away, he held on, whispered. Distance? Dose? Method? Weather? Specific information on the organism? Food? Incidentally, it wasn’t clear whether he had time to eat or not, what he had eaten didn’t interest the press at all, and there wasn’t a word about alcohol, the stupid fools. Interesting, interesting ... He had to read about it some more.

  In the first few years after his defection, Kalitin had not read any newspapers. The news did not interest him. The laboratory, his baby, was back there in his homeland that betrayed him. Research was frozen and the staff given unpaid vacation.

  He had hoped that th
ey would believe him here and give him resources and colleagues. He would restore his arsenal and continue his interrupted research. Special services, Kalitin told himself, were the same everywhere. Certainly former enemies from the other side of the Iron Curtain, who had to collect information on his laboratory grain by grain and who had seen his creations at work—they would understand what goods he was bringing: excellent, with prospects, invaluable.

  Interrogations, checks. His fate was decided slowly, with difficulty, but he waited and hoped. They scraped him clean, got everything out of him—except for Neophyte, his last secret; a substance that was not yet fully documented. Kalitin also did not tell them about what they called testing on dummies in his laboratory.

  In the end, they gave him the chance to stay. They hid him from the bloodhounds. But they gave him an insignificant, albeit very well-paid, job as an outside consultant in investigations dealing with chemical weapons.

  It was like rubbing his nose in it: you made the mess, you clean it up.

  Kalitin tried hinting again that he could resume his work.

  They promised to try him in that case.

  It was only then that he realized they were handling him carefully, like a chemically dangerous substance, like a contaminated site. They put him in isolation so that no one could find and use him. In the end, it was much cheaper to pay him a salary and keep him under control than to fight the monsters he could create all over the world.

  So he had received the desired recognition from his former enemies: they knew his value and that was why they put him under lock and key. They seemed to understand—and there had been psychologists among the interviewers—that he had been capable of making a break only once in his life, and he used it up, would never try again.