Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

  Suddenly he imagined that the girl was sensing his hidden thoughts. In the ether. She sensed Shershnev, not Ivanov. The real Shershnev. Unusual, nervous children can do that. He knew. When Shershnev returned from his second tour in the Chechen war, Maxim, an infant, cried hysterically whenever he picked him up. He grew rigid, lost his breath, screamed until he was hoarse—and calmed down easily in Marina’s arms. A few weeks later, Shershnev felt that he was getting over his wartime experiences—and his son allowed his father to hold him.

  The girl could see right through him. And she was protecting herself as best she could.

  Shershnev turned and peered into the space between seats. The girl looked back at him: with incomprehension and anxious curiosity. Shershnev wanted to crush her with his stare. But then he remembered a game he used to play with Maxim long ago. He got his pen and drew a funny face on the fleshy pillow between thumb and forefinger, bending his fingers to make it look like the little person wanted to talk.

  The girl smiled and relaxed, she fell asleep before his eyes, as if she had just needed a small dose of fun to relieve her tension. Shershnev wiped off the ink and also relaxed. The late passengers finally arrived, and the plane pulled back from the gate. The crew started the safety instructions, a cork popped softly in business class and champagne fizzed.

  Shershnev liked being in the sky, in a plane. His thoughts were especially clear in flight. Naturally, the lieutenant colonel could not bring along even a line of documentation about the subject. He was a completely different person now, the businessman Ivanov, traveling with his friend to drink beer and eat sausages, pick up pretty girls, buy gifts. But Shershnev had memorized the most important things, and now he intended to think things through and pull it all together. He didn’t have to do it, analysis was not required of him. However, the subject was no longer an abstract, theoretical target, as he should have been, but a phantom, a shadow looming in the distance. He had taken on a strange, illusory freedom of behavior, and Shershnev wanted to subordinate him again, reassert his own power over him, the power that Shershnev had had over the doomed field commander.

  But his mind wandered, as if the subject tried to defend himself from being understood and enslaved, tried to slip away. Then Shershnev started thinking about another person capable—that was the operative system in finding approaches to the subject—of leading him to the right conclusions.

  Igor Yuryevich Zakharyevsky. He died as an academician, lieutenant general in the medical service. Laureate and so on. Zakharyevsky was too significant to be hidden entirely, so he had a public, overt identity.

  An academician. Distant relative. Luminary.

  Naturally his emblem, the bowl and snake, was a cover. He didn’t do medicine. What he did do Shershnev was not supposed to know. But no one could stop him from guessing.

  Zakharyevsky. He remembered that name.

  When Shershnev began working, there was almost no one left in the ranks with prewar experience. Those who had served during the period of “violations of socialist legality,” as they called it in the political training classes. The father of one of Shershnev’s colleagues was a retired colonel, in scientific counterintelligence.

  Winter. Yes, winter. A departmental house of light brick in the middle of Moscow. A birthday party. Cognac sent for the guest of honor from somewhere in the Caucasus; his old colleagues supplied the gift. Smoking breaks in the kitchen. Their youthful drunken argument about what “one of us” meant and can you recognize a future traitor by intuition, by sixth sense.

  The retired officer listened in silence. Then he chopped his hand through the air, as if chopping off someone’s head. With unexpected force, seemingly trying to convince himself as well as them, he told them about Zakharyevsky. Zakharyevsky’s cousin, also a scientist and specialist in cattle breeding, had been accused of falsifying results of experiments in order to sabotage the upturn in agriculture. He was executed on the sentence handed down by a troika, a military tribunal, in 1937. And rehabilitated in 1959.

  “Zakharyevsky, however,” he said firmly, albeit with a heavy asthmatic wheeze, “became an academician. Even though he could have nursed a deep anger against the Soviet regime because of his cousin. But he understood that a mistake had been made. The Party trusted him. And he merited that trust. One of us,” the former counterintelligence agent summarized, stretching out the word “us,” to confirm his commonality with Zakharyevsky and declare publicly the state’s and service’s claim upon the academician, in which he played a small personal part.

  Now things came together for Shershnev. Zakharyevsky. So he must have used his position to help his cousin’s relatives get work in a closed city. Work they should not have been given: it didn’t matter that the executed zoologist had been rehabilitated later, children of enemies were trusted very selectively. Thanks to Zakharyevsky, they cunningly gained access to the storehouse of secrets, where everything was special, even the police and prosecutors. No surprise that the subject had become his student and successor.

  At the briefing they told Shershnev there was a great probability that the subject wanted to return to the homeland. He was unconsciously waiting to be punished and was unlikely to resist. On the contrary, he would accept vengeance as his due.

  But his guess about Zakharyevsky’s cunning, having accepted the loss of his cousin—and had he?—while managing to obtain cover for relatives, told Shershnev: no. The subject would not surrender just like that. He would try to save himself—at any cost.

  Strangely, that pleased Shershnev.

  CHAPTER 9

  Kalitin shut the door behind him, turned on the entry light, and glanced around at the corners. He had lived alone for too long, he had almost no interaction with others, and he was interested solely in himself. Deprived of research, of real work, he scrupulously observed his own habits, registered the preferences or antipathies that explained them, mere stubs, wax casts of the bigger emotions that had once ruled him.

  Even now, as he brought into his house the terrible news of the disease that would relentlessly destroy his daily rituals, acquired over years, take him away from his desk, chair, and book shelves, whose existence would outlast his and were no longer absolutely in his possession—Kalitin had to check the corners: Were there any rats?

  As a child, he was not afraid of animals that usually scare children, dogs for example; the closed city was too new, it arose in the idyll of the woods, people moved there hurriedly without knowing what to expect and left their pets with relatives. There were no stray dogs, because there was nowhere from which they might come.

  As an adolescent, he did not seek pleasure in torturing creatures. Later, during his studies and work, he treated animals indifferently. An entire host of them, thousands of mice, hundreds of dogs, rabbits, monkeys, dozens of horses, goats, and sheep died in torment—but that had been necessary, they served a greater good. If he could have managed without test subjects, he would not have used them. But nature did not want to give up its secrets without force, without sacrificial death, without dull foam in the mouth.

  When tests were performed on dummies, he did not see the process and only read the results. Age. Weight. Disease. Reaction to the substance. The dummies excited him intensely—he wanted to delve deeper into the mystery of human death. Kalitin saw that there were no two identical deaths. Similar complexion, identical age, but the final moments passed in different ways, the symptoms of the final agony were expressed in different ways. Physiology? Psychology? Character? Fate? He did not perceive the test dummies as people. They were an infinitely complex collection of parameters, animated brainteasers. He did not need explanations that these were state criminals sentenced to death, corpses in waiting. Those legalistic details stayed outside the testing chamber. Inside, there was only the body and the substance in it, injected by the lab technician skilled at assuaging any sense of deceit, pretending to be a kindly doctor.

  Of all living creatures that had been in his power, populating th
e laboratory ark, Kalitin prioritized only the rats.

  On the Island, in the ancient monastery building, they had hundreds of artificially bred rats, identical, docile fools. But from somewhere in the monastery cellars, deep down in the limestone, abandoned, sealed off, in the auxiliary and working rooms of the laboratory, which only the most select, tested, and retested personnel could enter, real, feral rats came and went unhindered.

  The first to be defeated were the construction laborers, armed with cement, plaster, iron, brick, and ground glass. There were only a few with the level of security clearance required to work in the lab. They worked assiduously to fill and seal all the holes they found. But the rats kept coming from somewhere, devouring sandwiches left in briefcases, ruining paper and cardboard. The old-timers said you couldn’t get rid of the rats because they swam over from the numerous grain barges that traveled the river. But the rats continued their outrageous behavior in the winter, when the river iced over and the barges had to wait in backwaters.

  Then they sent a rat catcher with an express security clearance; they had all kinds of specialists in their system! The rat catcher with all his powders didn’t succeed, either.

  That’s when Kalitin announced the competition, as if for fun. He was affronted that some pathetic rodents had the run of his place while they, the poison masters, the researchers and creators of the most toxic substances in the world, could not destroy them.

  It turned out that everyone was sick of the rats. His staff, especially the young people, were zealous in developing recipes and inventing traps. It seemed the end had come for the rats, and Kalitin joked: see what science can do! But he soon discovered that not all of the rats were dying. They destroyed most of them, but some, at the cost of their companions’ deaths, learned to recognize bait and avoid traps. There weren’t many of them, just a few. But they couldn’t kill them, and all human tricks had limited effect.

  Kalitin learned their traces and habits. He could tell which rat had visited. One, a huge rat with a bitten tail, seemed to tease him, flashing by in the dim corridor and then vanishing. Kalitin could have gotten rid of them, but only by poisoning everything, endangering himself and the staff, paying a price that was not worth a rat’s life.

  Ever since, he had had a watchful, uneasy respect for rats, as if nature was showing him an important exception that had to be taken into account. Later, in his new life, when he felt like a cornered rat, Kalitin discovered to his surprise that this association reassured him, as if he had become that exception to the laws of hunt and capture, manifested in only one breed of creatures.

  He received a sign that his sensations were correct. A sign that came from the long bygone past of his new house. With an unpredictable rhyme it merged the two halves of his biography, separated by defection, border, death sentence.

  Cars never came to his house, except for the yellow postal van and the taxis he ordered. It was on a dead-end road. No landmarks nearby, so tourists wouldn’t wander in by mistake. Hunting was banned, leaving the boar population to expand, but the old hunting towers still stood on the slopes and along the brook.

  However eleven, yes, eleven years ago he saw a car beneath his windows, a shabby gray sedan, an unobtrusive vehicle used for surveillance and hired killers. Even though Kalitin realized that people sent to kill him would not reveal themselves that openly, he quickly went down to the cellar, trying not to be visible through the windows, opened the gun cupboard, and returned upstairs with a loaded rifle.

  The doorbell rang; long, demanding: in the manner of the police or courier delivery. Kalitin decided not to open the door, even though his own car parked under the overhang showed that he was probably in. He was afraid to approach the peephole. And he was afraid, completely irrationally, that if this were say an insurance agent, or surveyor, or an official from the nature preserve—they would spread talk that the professor did not open the door even though he was home and someone, a someone he made up in his own head, would suspect that the inhabitant of the lonely house on the hill had something to fear and something to hide.

  He had not yet equipped the house with the soundproof steel door, made to look like wood. The surveillance cameras that he could monitor from the computer. Kalitin could not see who was at the door without giving away his presence.

  The visitor stepped down from the porch and started walking around the house. Through a space between the curtains, Kalitin saw a face—a typical Englishman, curly reddish hair, glasses, the only Englishman for dozens of kilometers around—certainly not sent by the homeland, they sent their own people, Slavs—and it wasn’t a visitor from his new masters, they would have warned him. A journalist? Had he sniffed something out? A leak? Someone turned him in?

  Kalitin realized that fear had made him forget his secret companion, the joker, Neophyte. The preparation slept in its reliable flask behind the door of a special safe for active substances. Kalitin suddenly imagined what could happen if Neophyte woke on its own and found even a micron-sized opening in the hermetic flask, got free, bypassing the dosimeter, and escaped completely, dissolving instantaneously in the air. He would fall asleep without knowing that he was dead. The curious Englishman would be dead. The swallows that made a nest under the eaves and their babies. Butterflies and mosquitoes. Tree beetles, worms, woodlice, even moles. In the morning the mailman would see a corpse by the house, he would call the police, they would break down the door but find and smell nothing except the heavy, particular smell of yesterday’s death. Neophyte would be gone, lost amid the atoms and molecules of the astral plane. Only an experienced and sensitive senior officer, an old bloodhound, would say, sniffing in irritated surprise, “A luxurious house, and clean, but it smells of bedbugs!”

  His deputies would assure him that it did not smell of bedbugs.

  Kalitin chuckled. He had such a clear vision of the dead Englishman, so incongruous and comic in his plaid wool jacket among the fresh molehills, that he stopped being afraid of him. It was as if Neophyte had sighed in its sleep, and that breath was enough to chase always the fears of its imperfect creator.

  Kalitin hid the rifle in the closet. Open? Not open? If it’s a journalist, it’s better to find out what he knows. Better to have a chance to give his own version.

  Deceive.

  Justify.

  He opened the door.

  The Englishman turned toward the sound. A thin ocher sweater under his jacket. Light classic jeans. Suede moccasins. Camera on a strap over his shoulder. A big, expensive camera, clearly often used, since some paint had worn off the lens rim. Thin. Not an athlete, but agile and energetic. Externally a polite friendliness, embarrassment at disturbing the owner. Inside, a masterful self-confidence, a trained ability to play along with whatever the owner said and in five or six phrases bring the conversation to the point. A journalist. Excited, following a trail, and for all that, like a loud shot missing the mark, missing Kalitin’s particular destiny.

  He wasn’t there for him, but for some other mission that was inciting him, prodding, filling him with the joy of discovery. The Englishman was staring with the sharp, visionary greed of an archaeologist, the madman Schliemann—but at the house, not the owner.

  Kalitin knew who the previous owners were: descendants of salt traders. The house had been their country villa. Allegedly one member of the family made a career under the Nazis in occupied Poland, and Kalitin assumed the journalist was writing a book and had come to learn about that official of the general governorship. Unexpectedly, Kalitin realized this made him uncomfortable; as if he were tied to the former owners by the shackles of inherited family secrets, and the obnoxious visitor was trying to learn about his life, too.

  He would have kept it to a quick chat on the porch. But he did not want the journalist to notice his taciturn reluctance to talk and keep it in his professionally long and tenacious memory, so he played the part of a friendly and bored simpleton and invited him in.

  If only the journalist could have known tha
t there were two related stories associated with the house, that the shell had landed a second time in the same crater, he would have noticed how unexpectedly deep and animated was the new owner’s surprise when he was told why the journalist was there.

  Beyond the nearby mountains, divided by an angry, restless river, beyond the dark crests covered in old forests that had borrowed the long life of stone, there was a fortress that had known prisoners of several centuries and realms. During the war, it had been a concentration camp.

  In spring of 1945 the roar of war had quieted over the eastern plains, the artillery fire had dimmed. That was when they came to the house—along the old grass-covered road across the mountains, along the path of woodcutters who made the supports for the salt mines, where neither motorcycle nor car could travel. Several SS officers serving as guards and a scientist who experimented on the camp prisoners. One of the SS knew about this remote villa. He had been a guest there.

  Germany had lost the war. Below, in the valleys, in larger towns Allies set up garrisons. But here, closer to the peaks, in the mountain forests and meadows, there was no regime yet. The former owners had already abandoned the villa property and fled. The accidental residents could relax there.

  In fact, the journalist was trying to find out if this was the house. Turned out it was. He had a description given during interrogation by an officer of the camp guards, arrested in the British occupation zone. The rest had vanished, gone along the ratlines, the secret escape routes from Europe across the ocean to the other continent.

  He said ratlines, in his flawless English. And then with his student intonation he repeated it in German: Rattenlinien.

  “Escaping rats always use the same paths,” the journalist had said then.

  He meant the underground network of secret aid for fugitives: officials who would issue false documents and trusted people like priests and policemen; seamen who would take illegal passengers. He was writing a book about medics in camps, and it was easy to talk to Kalitin, an émigré from the land of the victors. He was enthralled by his hunt for ghosts of the past and therefore blind in the present. He asked permission to photograph the house and look at all of it. He peeked into the cellar, passing within a yard of Neophyte in the safe. He asked about the old furniture. No, nothing was left, Kalitin told him sincerely.