“I received no invitation.”
“I tried to convince myself I asked.”
“Still the melancholy Gypsy. Yet you are the fortune-teller who knows when to call. There is a woman who wants to see you.”
“I am sorry, Svetlana, I—”
“Another woman. Inspector Listov from Darnytsya put her in contact with me. Are you aware of a fire at a video store near the airport?”
“I read about it in the newspaper.”
“The woman’s husband died in the fire. Perhaps you should steel plate your ass before returning home to office number two, which is already subject to watchful eyes.”
“Do you know whose eyes?”
“Simply the same vehicle three nights in a row.”
“Is there anything else I should know?”
“Yes. The woman in question has blond hair, and her name is Mariya Nemeth.”
“Will you see her again?”
“This Friday. No phone calls.”
“It is a healthy attitude. They say these phones can cause brain cancer.”
“Rumor,” said Svetlana. “Forget all I have said. These make fine magazine stories.”
“Tell a story about a meeting at Borispol Airport.”
“Why not Zhulyany?”
“I prefer crowds when I listen to a magazine story. It will take at least two days to pull my foot out of my mother. Tell the magazine story lady to meet me at the gate on Monday at flight time for the first Aerosvit outbound to New York after 10 a.m. Do you have it?”
“I have it. No need to repeat. So, what to do with yourself until then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind. Simply think of me when you flip through the magazine.”
“I will, Svetlana. You are like a page from a magazine … glossy.”
After he hung up, Janos got out his GPS and planned his trip back to Kiev.
Later that afternoon, other campers came in and set up. Campfires lit up the campground and everything seemed at peace. Then, as other campers fell asleep, a small five-cylinder camper van started up and cruised slowly through the quiet camp.
CHAPTER
FOUR
In his Khreshchatik Boulevard office, SBU Agent Yuri Smirnov spent the morning scanning the latest telephone system data report on his computer. Although the report was useful in several cases during the past year, Smirnov disliked the task. Automated information processing conflicted with the idealized version of an SBU agent he’d dreamed of while attending the National SBU Academy on Zolotovoritska Street ten years earlier. He was not naïve. He knew investigative work was mostly tedium. But he had envisioned more field work.
The report listed calls placed through Kiev area switching stations the previous week. Not all calls; the report was selective, generated using landline telephone numbers and cellular numbers for search criteria. Smirnov scrolled through the file himself instead of leaving the job to a clerk because information gained could not “officially” be used in court. This “experiment,” being run jointly by the SBU and the Kiev militia to investigate the possibility of detecting certain crimes before they happened, could be considered illegal.
Smirnov’s part of the experiment was to convert the report into a concise summary he would send to SBU officials several floors above his floor. He searched a series of numbers from his active list, put the appropriate name in with the search, and continued to the next series of numbers. He made no changes to the database, nothing left over to cause legal problems. Smirnov paused to sip tea before continuing. Although the office courier did not deliver the computer file with the report upstairs until noon, he usually finished first thing Monday so he would not have to rush to meet his deadline.
Most names from his active file were unfamiliar, simply someone the head office wanted to track. But several names he did recognize. When Smirnov came across Investigator Janos Nagy, a Kiev private investigator nicknamed “Gypsy,” he made a separate note containing information about Nagy’s calls. A few minutes later, Smirnov gave his completed summary report to his secretary for copying. While his secretary was gone, Smirnov made a phone call.
“Chief Investigator Chudin,” said a tired-sounding voice on the other end.
“Boris, this is Yuri from State Security.”
“I thought it would be you,” said Chudin.
“Why?”
“Because it is Monday morning. What do you do on weekends, Yuri?”
Smirnov chuckled. “On weekends I pull out my crystal ball.”
“Is this about the Gypsy again?”
“You are a seer,” said Smirnov. “How could you possibly know?”
“Word association,” said Chudin. “Crystal ball … Gypsies … You called about him last Monday when you created your magic phone report.”
“He is in the Carpathians,” said Smirnov. “Once again, he has phoned your Investigator Svetlana Kovaleva.”
“Must I repeat myself about their relationship?” asked Chudin.
“Please simply ask about the call.”
“What kind of details do you desire?”
Smirnov stood from his desk and raised his voice. “Boris, the top offices want information on the Podil abortion bombings. Nagy opened a crack in the dam but it closed. We live in Ukraine, not America! We want to know what he is doing in this matter!”
“I understand,” said Chudin, obviously trying to remain calm. “I will ask. On another matter … and I assume the reason he is not in Kiev … Can you tell me anything about the bombing of his office?”
“No,” said Smirnov. “My agents are working with your militia. Together, perhaps we can solve something in this ancient city before it becomes even more ancient.”
“And before we become ancient and are forced into retirement,” said Chudin.
After Smirnov hung up, his secretary returned with a hard copy of the report and Smirnov put this and a copy of the computer disk in the envelope marked Secret. Perhaps this afternoon someone upstairs would be on the job and be kind enough to open the envelope.
The Gypsy named Nagy would be traveling up the elevator where Smirnov could only assume his file was getting thicker and thicker each week.
That afternoon Smirnov received a scrambled call from Sergei Izrael, his old roommate at the National SBU Academy. Izrael had been head of the Odessa field office but was recently transferred to Slavutich, the town built for Chernobyl workers. Izrael called Smirnov at least once a week. During their conversation, the Gypsy came up again.
“Why are you interested in Nagy?” asked Smirnov.
“A private investigator implicates a Moscow Patriarchate priest, and following this he is bombed,” said Izrael. “We had many female clinics in Odessa, and I preferred observing non-pregnant nymphs on the beach.”
“You have a way with words, Sergei.”
“I owe it to our beloved days at the academy. I wish I was still in Odessa. But it was a promotion. Yuri, do you recall after graduation you and Brekhov and myself vowed to keep one another informed, no matter who moves up the ladder?”
“Yes, so what is new?” asked Smirnov.
“Something Brekhov said might relate to female clinics being bombed and adult video stores burning down. But the information must stop with you.”
“I understand,” said Smirnov.
“A deathbed letter from another Moscow Patriarchate priest was sent to Brekhov. He reported it to headquarters in your building and was told to send it in and close the file. No copies, no report, by order of SBU Deputy Anatoly Lyashko, head of the Directorate for Combating Corruption and Organized Crime.”
“Now I understand why you called on a scrambled line.”
“You are alone?” asked Izrael.
“Yes,” said Smirnov.
“The deathbed letter implied teenagers are being recruited and kidnapped to be trafficked and used in pornography and members of the church are involved. To cover themselves, they bomb female clinics, burn down ad
ult video stores, and implicate rival churches. Murders of the Moldavian Ivan Babii, the Ukrainian pornographer Belak, and the American pornographer Donner also may be part of a plan to cover a trail leading back to Kiev.”
“The upper floors of this building?” asked Smirnov.
“I cannot say for sure,” said Izrael.
“I wonder,” said Smirnov. “I’ve always wondered about the agenda of our Anatoly Lyashko, especially being head of Combating Corruption and Organized Crime.”
“Yes,” said Izrael. “NGOs like La Strada have also wondered about him. Perhaps this is why no information has been released concerning the murders of the pornographers in the Carpathians and the fate of the teenagers taken from them.”
“We tread on sensitive ground,” said Smirnov.
“I agree,” said Izrael. “One last thing before we end this unpleasantness: the reason your superior, Anatoly Lyashko, keeps quiet. Pornographers kidnap teenagers, use them in videos, and then sell them on the trafficking market. Mostly girls, but there have been some boys. Either Lyashko does not want to upset every parent in Ukraine who has a child missing—”
“Or he has other reasons,” said Smirnov.
“Reasons related to his expensive SBU Bentley and an apartment in Kiev while his wife lives far away near the Russian border.”
“He claims to work at his apartment more often than one would expect,” said Smirnov.
“I have heard rumors of visits from women,” said Izrael. “Do you think they are true?”
“I don’t know,” said Smirnov. “My worry would be that rumors of visits from women emerge to cover something else.”
“Is it true he has a special SBU security unit assigned to him?” asked Izrael.
“Yes,” admitted Smirnov. “He can come and go as he wishes, travel abroad, and is secure in his office as well as in his apartment.”
“Such contrast,” said Izrael. “Here I am reassigned to Slavutich with Chernobyl refugees and workers. No one smiles here. And now, with the economy going to shit, companies are pulling out and Natashas walk the streets eager to be trafficked because families starve. Meanwhile, our superiors live high on the hog. There is a rumor here of a Chernobyl Trail taking girls away to so-called jobs, but I believe it is simply a rumor started to cover the old Balkan Trail. Soon the traffickers will be waiting at the orphanage gates the day the girl reaches puberty. Oilmen in the Middle East still think they are all Russian Natashas, no matter if they come from Ukraine or Romania or wherever. So there is my speech for today.”
After hanging up the phone, Smirnov went to his window and looked down at Khreshchatik Boulevard. As he did so, he realized he often went to his window when information piled up, coming at him from many directions. He wondered if it was psychological—the connections, the firing of neurons in a certain sequence—that made him stand and go to his window. Perhaps it was a kind of enlightenment, his subconscious knowing these facts are related in some way while his conscious mind slithers along the ground like a slug.
Below his window the afternoon rush home had begun. The street and sidewalks on both sides were jammed, and sidewalk movement was faster than street movement. One man down there reminded him of Izrael because of his black, bushy hair as thick as the hair on a black bear.
As he stared down at the rush, Smirnov thought how easily the masses were controlled. The lighting of a simple DO NOT WALK sign like an electric fence. But soon the WALK sign lit and pedestrians oozed out onto the crosswalk, slugs like him. Unlike Kiev, the village in which Sofya Adamivna Kulinich lived was very quiet. This was because only a few old women lived in the village. Sofya’s neighbor, Tatiana, had come for lunch and stayed at least an hour afterwards. Sofya stood in the doorway watching the entire time Tatiana made her way back to her own cottage. Tatiana had brought over an herb to put in their tea during lunch, something to give them more energy and help them forget they were widows. Of course, they both agreed no one could forget a thing like this and spent an hour after finishing their borsht, bread, and tea speaking sadly of the days when husbands walked the streets of the village, or rode their horses, or went on errands to restock the vodka supply using the collective’s truck driven by Albert Nikolaevich Bobrova, the party boss.
Without men, the village was simply not the same. The only men they saw came from outside the village—a militiaman visit, a postal worker visit, a food delivery, or a medical team. Of course, the doctor was a woman, but she sometimes had assistants who were men. And this would give the women of the village enough gossip for a week.
“You should have seen how low he bent when she checked my varicose veins.”
“That’s nothing. When she did the female examination, he didn’t even leave the cottage. He stood there looking out the window and … I swear on my Bible this is true … sniffing.”
In previous summers they would at least have some activity, like a bus now and then full of young workers going to the guardhouse at the fence west of the village. This was not the large guardhouse to the south on the paved road into the Zone, but a smaller guardhouse next to a swinging gate in the fence. In the past a lot of young women workers looked out the bus windows, and there was hope for a time some of the young men might want to board in the village. Of course, this fell through when they asked a guard at the swinging, padlocked gate about it.
And this summer, for whatever reason, the buses stopped and the dirt road to the guardhouse became two ruts in the grass. Whether in her cottage or tending her garden, Sofya felt closer to joining her husband in death. Beyond the fence the shouts or voices of young workers were rare. And now, at summer’s end, Sofya dreaded winter more than ever. Even Tatiana, normally cheerful at lunchtime, was completely heartbroken this day as they spoke of husbands, and of the past before the accident.
The last time there had been any hope in the village had been years earlier when an official from a state office paid them a visit and gave a speech in the main street. Cameramen filmed the speech, and the next day the widows in the village gathered to watch the news on Tatiana’s large-screen television. The official spoke of buildings to house geneticists and botanical experts. He spoke of tourist business and perhaps a hotel in the village. He spoke of the Przewalski horses released and thriving in the region, and even of a national park visitor center.
Of course, none of this happened, and the women of the village, gaining ground on death as each year passed, had long ago lost hope. Sofya realized she was fingering the string of garlic around her neck as if it were a rosary. And as she did so, she came to a conclusion. All that remained for the women of her village was church. Nothing anyone said outside of church, especially when an official said it on television, could be trusted. And nothing told to them by the guards at the small guardhouse down the dirt road was even remotely close to the truth. Nothing had changed since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Everything in Ukraine was corrupt, and fences were put up to hide the corruption.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Although Nadia had been drugged, she was able to recall some of it. The older boys dressed as priests had rescued them from the Carpathian Mountains in springtime. She, Lyudmilla the skeleton, and another, whose name eluded her, were the three girls. Guri was the boy. The four of them packed into the back of the van with several boy soldiers on the long journey to what the boy soldiers called a camp for teens. Nadia recalled the boy soldiers giving them jeans and sweatshirts to wear, and also sedatives to take because of what had been taking place when they were rescued. Nadia was not an idiot. She knew she and the others had been grabbed off the streets for videos because of how young they looked.
This was weeks earlier in cooler weather. Now, in summer, it was difficult calling this place an orphanage or a camp—especially a summer camp like the ones she’d heard of in Odessa. Everyone here simply called it “the peninsula” because geographically, that is exactly what it was—a wooded peninsula with water on three sides, and a fence
on the fourth side. Life here was totally unlike life on Kiev’s streets, blending in like a tourist in brightly colored clothing, searching for unbuttoned pockets and unclasped purses. Discipline here was not created from within. Here they were told discipline had roots in fertile Ukrainian soil and in orthodoxy.
Everyone on the peninsula wore the same jeans and blue sweatshirts. Not really the same ones, but that was the way Nadia said it to anyone who would listen in order to get a laugh here and there. There weren’t many laughs because of the daytime pill given to calm nerves and keep the buzz alive, and the so-called knockout pill given at night. The newcomers, called “happy campers,” performed chores much of the time and, when not drugged to the depths of sleep, they either studied the Russian Orthodox Bible on computers or cared for crippled young men and women who could not eat or wash or dress without help. Caring for cripples was not shocking to Nadia. After Chernobyl, survivors were shipped to various parts of Ukraine, and she assumed this place was simply one of many so-called Chernobyl orphanages.
More shocking to Nadia than the cripples was sitting at a computer going through Bible lessons. Even though everyone here spoke Ukrainian, someone had written Russian language game-like computer programs. At first the lessons were addictive, because as street urchins they had never been welcome in Kiev’s computer cafés. But soon the games grew boring, and when Guri asked about Internet access, several older boys laughed at him and slapped him about.
As time went on, Nadia had to admit that caring for the cripples gave purpose to her existence, making it easier to sit through so-called lectures given by Pyotr, their leader, who was old and tall and silver-haired, or by his counselors—Vasily or Tomas or Semyon, who were young and strong and full of energy.
All four newcomers had individual mentors to remind them of the horrors of the mountain, the difficulties living on the streets of Kiev, and the suffering of the cripples. Lena, Nadia’s mentor, explained the rules. Do not make waves; do not fuck with the counselors, which was not meant as metaphor but dire warning; do not touch any of the cats or their kittens; and do not attempt escape. The only way out was through good works. Lena insisted she was living proof of this, marrying good works with pleasurable trips far and wide, including some hot sex. At times Lena seemed confused, saying things had changed recently at the compound, especially the addition of Bible computer programs in Russian. When Nadia tried to correct Lena, saying the place was called “the peninsula,” Lena became angry with her for the first time. “Peninsula! Compound! Orphanage! Training camp for boy soldiers! Call it what you want, little shit!”
Traffyck: The Thrilling Sequel to Chernobyl Murders Page 5