The Bookworm

by Mitch Silver

The father laughed. The son just went on making waves in his soup with his spoon. “No one does nothing. He must have written or spoken against the authorities.”

  “No, he was one of the loyal ones. Even afterward. He simply knew too much about the West.”

  Nikki looked up from ladling his okroshka. “You see? It’s what they say … a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

  Grigoriy put a manicured hand on his son’s arm. “Nikki, Larissa Mendelova is our guest. Stop interrogating. And besides, we already know everything about her. It’s all in her file, or we wouldn’t be breaking bread together.” With his free hand he started picking up the breadcrumbs and dropping them on Nikki’s plate. “Use the other spoon, the soup spoon.”

  The younger man, annoyed, moved his arm from under his father’s grip, picked up his unused utensil and wordlessly began slurping up his broth.

  But Lara wasn’t about to let it drop. “You know, Nikolai, I happen to agree with you. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So if my dossier says I spend half my life thumbing through yellowed documents or listening on the Arkhiv’s Dictaphones to a lot of dead guys, it’s because the only antidote to a little knowledge is a lot of knowledge.”

  The boy’s eyes briefly registered something at the word “Dictaphone.” Then it was gone.

  She turned to his father. “This file on me. What’s in it?”

  Her question caught Gerasimov with his spoon almost to his lips. He went ahead and put it in his mouth, looking straight at her as the liquid went down. Then he said, “Your file? Public stuff. Birth date, schooling—”

  “Who I live with or don’t live with?”

  He went right on. “—the chess titles you won as a girl, your work record, marriage, separation decree …”

  Nikki eyed her again, and shared a veiled look with his father.

  She had her dander up. “What I think or don’t think?”

  Gerasimov was still picking up microscopic breadcrumbs and dropping them, one by one, beside his soup bowl. “All I’m interested in is that you do think. And you do that very well, judging by the degrees you earned.”

  Nikki said, “Let’s go back to those tournaments you won. What’s the real reason you stopped playing?”

  She’d been thinking about it ever since the father had asked the same question at lunch. “If you must know, I think it was the injustice of chess.”

  The young man gave out an unbelieving snort. “What could be more just? Equal pieces, level playing field, a fight to the death, just the two of you.”

  She knew she’d never convince him but she tried, anyway. “Exactly. Chess is warfare without the blood. Everything about it gives the stronger, more cunning player the means to grind down the lesser one, turning the screws until there’s no place to run, no place to hide.

  “Oh sure, there are once-in-a-lifetime accidents, like Kasparov thinking about something else, maybe his dinner, and overlooking what I was doing with my knight that time. And don’t get me wrong, I love the intellectual challenge, the problem-solving. But as a system, in and of itself, chess is simply a way for the powerful to prey on the weak.”

  Nikki smiled. “I call that justice.”

  “And I call it tyranny. So, though I didn’t fully understand it at the time, I stopped playing competitive chess because I wasn’t willing to live under those rules.”

  For a long moment, the rain hitting the roof was the only sound in the room. Lara needed to change the subject. “Nikki, what do you do for a living? Or are you still in school?”

  The younger man didn’t make eye contact. “No, I’ve had enough of studying. It’s time for a little doing.”

  For some reason, Gerasimov was staring daggers at his son.

  Lara kept on. “What kind of doing?”

  “All I know is,” he answered, still not making eye contact, “this place needs a complete housecleaning, top to bottom.”

  Lara decided to add fuel to the fire. “It seems to me you’re doing all right. Your father’s got a nice job with the Government; you have this place, Bulganin’s place …”

  Lara knew she’d made a mistake the instant Nikki turned back to her. There was fire in his eyes. “We have a dacha, but we don’t have a country. Whatever happened to Russia for the Russians? When did we ever have a chance to rule ourselves?

  “You teach History, but how much history do you actually know? You think your rivers and lakes make history? Or iron and coal under the ground? People make history. For three hundred years we were a wholly owned subsidiary of Ivan the Terrible’s family. He marries some Circassian woman and we get the Romanovs for centuries.

  “Then the Tsars are overthrown by the Jews. Oh, excuse me, the Communists: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky—true believers, not in Russia, but in something they call the workers’ paradise. When they pulled us out of the first Great War, suddenly the Americans and the British were our friends. But only so we’d go back to fighting the Germans, which never happened.”

  Lara tried to get a word in edgewise. “But after the war—”

  Nikki’s laugh was bitter. “After came the civil war, the Reds against the Whites. American, British, French troops started fighting one half of Russia in the name of the other. Churchill dropped chemical weapons from planes; I’ll bet you didn’t know that. Fifty thousand bombs!

  “Then, when their Russians were losing and falling back, the West abandoned them to their fate and went home in 1920, back to their nice warm beds in London and New York. While the firing squads went to work over here.”

  He leaned across the table until he was inches from Lara’s face. “Instead of a national anthem, you know what we got? When the Reds were done, we got “The Internationale,” thanks to the riffraff they brought into our revolution: Finns … Poles … Georgians … Armenians … Tajiks—

  “That’s enough, Nikki! Apologize to Dr. Klimt this minute!” Gerasimov’s raised voice startled them both.

  Lara murmured, “No, it’s okay. I asked, he answered.” She returned to the boy. “You’re right. My father was a Jew, my mother Tajik. And they were both Bolsheviks. But I’m one hundred percent Russian.”

  Nikki was back to playing with his soup. He didn’t look at Lara when he spoke. “You say ‘I’m one hundred percent Russian’ with an American accent. You just live here. You aren’t of here.”

  At that moment, Cook came in and whispered something in Gerasimov’s ear. He turned to Lara. “I was afraid of this. The creek at the bottom of our hill has risen over the bridge. You’ll have to stay over with us tonight. Prostitye, Larissa Mendelova, I’m terribly sorry. I’ll drive you back in the morning.”

  Chapter 35

  Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

  Lev picked up his phone to call Lara in Moscow. No bars. He must be out of cell phone range. Looking out the windows on both sides of the bus, there were no cell towers to be seen. Strange … communications were the first priority at any new drilling site.

  Lev had the pack of Winstons out and the lighter ready even before signaling the driver he’d be getting off at the first “1002 Area” gate. From what he understood, the tourists, naturalists and photographers usually stayed on the bus till it came to the second gate, the one closer to the uplands where the wildlife stayed when they weren’t migrating. The drilling company people, the early risers from the first trip, would use this one.

  Standing by the side of the road, he drew the smoke down into his lungs as the bus started up again. When it pulled away, he shoved the cigarettes into his pocket, reaching down for a handful of dirt to rub on the hard, shiny leather of the new camera case. Then he stood there and smoked the entire cigarette before crossing the road and going up to the small “Information” kiosk just ahead.

  The information obtained at the wooden shed ran in only one direction: from the visitors to the sentry. Lev knew the state worker was stationed there to ID people entering the Refuge; if any caribou were killed and their antlers taken, they’d know whom
to blame.

  The guy behind the counter was flipping through an old People magazine. Only when he handed the clerk his Len Klimt driver’s license did the man finally look up from his reading. He said, smiling, “Do Not Enter means do not enter. Okay?”

  Sure enough, there was a picket line of DO NOT ENTER/ACTIVE DRILLING AREA signs that ringed a rise in the ground three hundred yards ahead; they ran toward the nearby coastline. The land open to the public lay due south, across the flat grasses of the Marsh Creek anticline that lay on this side of the Sadlerochit Mountains, twenty miles away.

  Lev nodded to the man that he understood, picked up his license and now-dusty camera case and started off in that direction.

  Over his shoulder the man called, “Hey, what magazine you with?”

  Lev looked back and said the first thing that came to mind. “People.”

  The guy seemed surprised. “Really? That’s funny.”

  Lev was on his guard. “How so?”

  “People’s the one thing we got hardly any of.”

  Chapter 36

  When he was well out of sight of the man in the shed, Lev turned sharply left and entered DO NOT ENTER. Then he bent down and got his test station hardhat out of his backpack and put it on, tightening the strap under his chin. Between the empty case around his neck, the hat, and his test station ID, he thought he could pass as a working photographer, if no one got too close.

  Nobody saw him or stopped him. After another half hour he came to the crest of a small hill. A little out of breath, he looked down into a valley, a sort of natural bowl, drained by the Canning River just before it emptied into the Beaufort.

  The visual was striking: at least a dozen structures large and small, with all manner of drilling apparatus everywhere, constituted a twenty-first-century boomtown. But the sound was puzzling. In the middle of a workday, it was oddly silent.

  Lev used his phone’s camera to squeeze off several shots before hurrying down the far side of the hill. No cranes were working, no trucks were moving, nobody was loading or unloading anything.

  In another ten minutes, Lev knew why. The buildings weren’t buildings at all, just tents painted on top to look like buildings from the air. And from space.

  He walked under a “drilling shed” and listened as the wind whistled through the tent flaps. Holding it up in the middle was a telephone pole, plain and simple. The edges of the vast tent were held down, like a circus big top, with stakes.

  The oil rigs themselves were either rusty iron surplus parked on unbroken ground, or else wooden constructions painted to look like rigs. He remembered reading about General Patton’s mythical First Army, stationed before D-Day in southeast England. This was how they fooled the Luftwaffe.

  He hadn’t wanted to add the weight of a real camera with a real telephoto lens to his backpack, but now Lev wished he had one in the case around his neck. Instead, he held up his phone and took more shots of everything at ground level, moving slowly in a 180º arc and snapping away.

  On the far side, stacked against the hill, were piled dozens of huge four-foot-diameter pipeline segments. Instead of anodized steel, they were merely so much concrete drainage pipe, probably hauled in from some municipal sewer project to play their role as props. Lev made sure to get a couple of close-ups before he clambered up the first pipe. He used them in turn as giant rounded steps to start up the hill opposite the one he’d stood on earlier.

  At the top, ready for another cigarette, he knocked one out of the pack and groped for the lighter in his pants pocket. You couldn’t smoke on a real drilling site, but that sure wasn’t what he was looking at down there. A couple more pictures from this side, then he’d get to some place with cell phone bars and call Lara with the news. Maybe she’d know what to make of it.

  The bullet arrived before the flame could reach the tobacco, even before the sharp crack of the firing pin that set off the charge. By the time the noise echoed off the phony derricks and wellheads, Lev’s boots had lost their grip and he was tumbling down the chalky hill.

  A quarter-mile away, the man from the information booth put down the rifle and spoke into his satellite phone. “Got ’im.”

  Chapter 37

  The security guard put down the bulky satellite phone, took the rifle, and worked his way up and around the incline toward the guy he’d shot: always the double tap. One to the chest, then one to the head.

  At the top of the ridge there was a lighter and an unsmoked cigarette where it had been dropped, but no victim. Looking down, he could see the trail the guy’s boots had made on the way up and, right next to them, where the body had tumbled down the dusty slope toward the big pipes. Couldn’t see it from here; must have bounced off and rolled under an outcropping.

  The guard worked his way down, making sure to wipe out the evidence of the dead guy’s boot prints as he went.

  At the bottom he looked around for the corpse, but couldn’t find it; maybe it took a freakish bounce off the concrete ducting. He stood where he could see all the openings of the huge pipes. With the morning sun coming from behind the hill, the interiors were in shadow.

  Then he spotted a dark brown or black something wedged between two of the pipes. He picked it up. The thick, stiff leather camera case had a bullet hole torn into one side, and it rattled. Popping open the case, he found the spent round from his .22.

  Okay, the shot didn’t kill him, but the forty-foot fall must have. Or at least, injured him bad. Must have crawled into one of the pipes to die.

  Leave him there, or go looking? The guard briefly considered firing a round into each of the darkened pipes, just to be sure, but he didn’t have his extra ammo with him. Sighing, he stuck his head in the closest one.

  Chapter 38

  Lev was in pain, but the fear was overwhelming it for the moment. His ankle must be broken; his fingers were starting to swell. The crazy thing was, it was the hardhat, crushed in several places and digging into his skull—the thing that saved his life in the fall—that hurt the worst.

  The shooter was out there, and he saw it was the guy who checked him in at the gate. No time for the why of it. Lev watched him raise the rifle and aim it at the opening of the bottom pipe closest to the slope of the hill, next to the one he’d crawled into. The tubes were stacked like so many cells in a beehive; if his idea was to shoot into every one in turn, Lev was a goner. Crawling back deeper wouldn’t save him from the bullet. So Lev inched up closer to the opening, worked the hardhat off his head, and waited.

  Instead of shooting, the man walked up to the first dark opening and put his head in, the gun barrel resting on its concrete bottom, prepared to fire. Then he raised himself up and did the same with the pipe that rested above it on the hill. He bellowed, “C’mon out, Klimt. I got the gun and you don’t!”

  Then he shifted to his left and peered into the one next to it, the one that lay halfway on Lev’s. One of his legs was visible just inches from Lev’s face.

  The man was yelling, “Hey, what kind of Commie name is Lev?” his voice echoing down the pipes, when a metal hardhat swung out and rammed itself into the side of the guy’s exposed knee. The satisfying snapping of his anterior cruciate ligament also echoed down the pipes, as did the clatter of the dropped rifle into the pipe above.

  The man, yowling in shock and pain, fell to his left as his leg was taken away from him. It put his face right in line with Lev’s hiding place, and the wide-eyed surprise was evident just as Lev brought the hardhat down on it with as much force as he could muster. By the third blow, the look, and the face, were pretty much history.

  For the longest time Lev just lay there, eyeing the gruesome mess he’d made of the man’s face. His ankle was throbbing. The ring finger and pinkie on his left hand were broken too, or at least dislocated. Even so, he couldn’t help falling into a deep black pit.

  Chapter 39

  Uspenskoye

  Lying in bed in the guest room, Lara found sleep impossible. Too many images were flashing t
hrough her mind, like a slide show whizzing by at a hundred miles an hour. Father and Mother chopping wood in the camp; Lev, her brother, in his Young Pioneers uniform, explaining some experiment at a school science fair that used two spinning cans to generate electricity; which morphed into a spinning Dictaphone cylinder.

  Gerasimov made an appearance, leaning toward her and uttering over and over the word “krasivyi”; which became an old movie poster for Love Story she’d seen in the lobby of a revival movie house on the Upper West Side; which magically turned into Lara and Viktor the way they’d been in the beginning—but, again and again, the leering face of the cocky young man saying, “You just live here. You aren’t of here.” And then, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

  Enough! It was exhausting, the rods and cones behind her eyes firing off in crazy bursts. Then some part of an idea came to her, something for later when her mind was functioning normally. Reaching for her phone on the bedside table, Lara turned it on and pressed the Memo button. She spoke as quietly as she could, not wishing to wake up the others in the dacha. “Who’d want to show the world proof that America and Britain got Hitler to attack us? And who in present-day Russia would do whatever they could to stop it?”

  Before turning it off again, she saw all the messages from faculty members. There must be a dozen! She clicked on the Superintendant’s. “An outpouring of support for our colleague, Larissa Mendelova Klimt, convinces me the waiver should be granted so she may appear on television.”

  Finally, some good news. Lara turned off her phone and closed her eyes, hopeful of getting at least a few hours of sleep before facing the new day.

  Chapter 40

  Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

  The sun had circled the hills and was lighting up the inside of the big concrete duct when Lev opened his eyes again. He roused himself enough to sit up, sideways, with his back against the curve so he wouldn’t have to face the body.