by Alex Dryden
As Petrov now approached the hiring office in Krasnoyarsk’s dockland which recruited workers for the Igarka lumber companies downriver, he suddenly found himself thinking about the rootlessness of his now dead father compared to the deeply traditional tribal affinities of his mother’s family. Despite the repeated attempts throughout the history of the Soviet Union to wipe out the Evenk and other tribal groups or, at the very least, assimilate them until there was nothing left of their heritage, there was still a thin culture among them that kept them staggering on, from one generation to another, their language in decline and their way of life slowly eroded by the metals factories and oil pollution of the reindeer feeding grounds in the Arctic, not to mention the nuclear testing on the far northern island of Novaya Zemlya. But Petrov knew that one day – soon perhaps – that thin culture, too, would be wiped out and then the Evenk would have effectively ceased to exist. Gannyka might be the last, not just of his generation, but of a group who knew the old ways by heart and instinct. Part of the landscape that was itself slowly being destroyed.
Perhaps it was the Evenk identity papers he had used the night before at the block, but he suddenly felt a wave of affinity for his tribal past that he hadn’t felt for years.
He studied the concrete box of the hiring office before entering. Though prohibited now from pursuing any direct lines of inquiry into the death of the foreigner, Petrov wore his militsiya uniform and he commanded the authority that came with it. He wasn’t asking anything about the dead foreigner, after all. He told himself that he was simply following up a missing woman who called herself Valentina Asayev.
He approached the hiring office and entered. The officer didn’t bother to look up. Petrov rapped his knuckles on the table and demanded to see the list of the hired employees from the day before.
From an initially reluctant, grunting response from the drunk who was apparently in charge of the hiring process, there followed a string of expletives. But finally here was the list and on it, sure enough, Petrov found the name ‘Valentina Asayev’. She had gone north to Igarka the evening before aboard the Rossiya, a few hours after he’d been in the apartment block with Irina Demidova. But he remembered that she hadn’t returned to the block to pick up her belongings before the ship had left. Why? Who would go north without carefully prepared clothes and provisions, and he had seen and searched her bag at the old woman Zhenya’s before he’d left the apartment.
Petrov ran his eyes down the list, carefully going past her name, then turning the page until he reached the end.
Simply because she hadn’t returned to Zhenya’s apartment, it didn’t mean there was any connection between her and the corpse of the German. But it was strange, nevertheless, the conjunction of events. She’d had the whole day to walk two streets from the docks to Sverdlovsk Street to pick up her things and she hadn’t done so. ‘She was Russian but she smelled of foreign countries’, Petrov suddenly recalled Irina Demidova saying before he’d left. Were they simply the ramblings of an old woman who watched too many Brazilian soap operas? How do you smell of foreign countries anyway, he wondered?
But Petrov knew he had no choice but to follow the young woman, even if it were only to put his mind at rest. If she were connected to Bachman, then she must also be connected to the papers.
‘Found who you want?’ the hiring officer asked him.
‘No,’ Petrov replied. ‘He’s not here.’
‘They used to get sent up there to the Gulag,’ the officer sneered. ‘Now half the low-lifes in Russia go there to escape.’
Petrov left the wooden office building and walked back towards his apartment, steering clear of Sverdlovsk Street.
When he reached home, he carefully hung up his uniform before packing a rucksack with food and water, a few items of clothing and heavy boots. He wrapped his police gun in a pair of trousers and took an old hunting rifle Gannyka had given him when he was seven years old. Called a berdianka, it was more than a hundred and twenty years old but, if you learned to shoot with it as he had, you could bring down a deer at a hundred yards. He strapped his fishing rod in sections to the outside of the pack and added a few traps for small animals. When he thought he was ready and had the pack on his back, he suddenly put it down again. He walked over to the window and looked at the tambour. Then he finally took the old shaman’s drum from the windowsill and tied it on to the top of the pack and stuffed an old pair of reindeer-hide breeches into one of the outer pockets.
But before he left he went to the bathroom and tipped the asbestos panel upwards and retrieved the tin. He took out the documents and wrapped them tightly in a new waterproof bundle. He didn’t imagine that he would need them where he was going, but he couldn’t leave them here. He didn’t trust Robolev and the MVD. If they didn’t find what they wanted to find, it was easily possible that they would raid his apartment, particularly if they found out that he’d returned to Sverdlovsk Street or gone to the hiring office. Now that he recalled it, he hadn’t entirely trusted Robolev’s relatively easy manner, nor the way he’d been allowed to go without further questioning.
Finally, he locked the door of the apartment and headed for the city centre.
He walked away in the opposite direction from Sverdlovsk Street and continued walking for two miles until he reached a thoroughfare that contained a few restaurants and a couple of hotels. It was a commercial district of sorts and he was heading for an Internet café he knew. He dared not use his own computer.
Once inside the café, he saw that it was occupied only by a youth behind the counter and another sallow young man – possibly a friend of the barman – sitting at one of a dozen screens. Petrov ordered a coffee and paid a few roubles for the use of a screen at the far end.
He took the cup to the far end of the bank of screens and sipped from it as he brought up Rustler, the Russian Google. Then he put the name Professor Gunther Bachman into the system and waited an age for a link to appear.
Petrov blindly pored over the German’s biography when it finally came. It was in English and German and he spoke neither language. And so he focused on some of the initials attached to the professor’s name and which had links to a Russian translation. From these it seemed Bachman was a member of something called the IAEA. Petrov tapped the link and found the Russian initials of the organisation and noted that they signified the International Atomic Energy Association. Then he was back to the German professor again. He repeated the process several times, with several sets of initials for international organisations. Bachman, it turned out, was a member of the Nuclear Science Committee, among others. He was also the Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Munich University. It seemed Bachman had written numerous papers on aspects of nuclear technology.
Petrov was able to use the server’s translation to discover the list of prizes and honours the great Bachman had won in his lifetime, and the names of the universities where he’d apparently enjoyed visiting professorships abroad, particularly in America. His learned articles in specialist, academic publications from Sweden to South Africa, Israel to America – the names of these publications Petrov also noted – marked him out clearly as a leader in his field. One press article with Bachman’s photograph caught Petrov’s eye, but it was also only in English and German, with no translation, and he couldn’t understand it. The picture emerging of the man Petrov had seen the previous morning, dead in a pile of trash, was of a highly thought-of individual in a highly sensitive field. And he had visited Norilsk two days earlier, dying within hours of returning.
Petrov sought a translation into Russian of other papers by Bachman. One finally came up. It was a limited overview – a precis – of the foreign language text and in an atrocious form of Russian that was only barely easier to understand. But Petrov was able to join the dots some more. He jotted down the main features of Bachman’s research, his academic achievements and major papers on the subject of nuclear energy. ‘Professor Bachman’, the atrocious translation read, ‘has worked for more tha
n a decade of ten years on a highly top-secret confidential nuclear project, but has, as things stand today, not made the breakthrough he hoped for.’
Finally, Petrov noted that Bachman had been invited to attend a meeting of the Bilderberg Committee. Petrov looked up the link to Bilderberg and read the story of the committee. It was a secret composition of world leaders and industrialists, it seemed. Its Byzantine structure – or more accurately its lack of any formal structure – was essential to its secret meetings. The committee’s invitation-only, annual get-togethers in obscure parts of the world were, according to some, where the world’s affairs were hashed out. Deals made at the Bilderberg Committee affected billions of people, so it seemed.
It seemed to Petrov that Bachman had been merely a guest at this meeting of the Bilderberg, invited in order to explain his – so far failed – research project which he had been working on for so long. Decade of ten years…
Petrov folded the notes he’d made. He didn’t want the record of a printed copy. Then he erased his search just for good measure. He shut down the computer and left the café.
It was a clear day, cold with a blue sky that stretched too far for the eye to properly comprehend. The kind of far-off, wide landscape only a wide camera lens can capture. He felt a great wave of freedom wash over him after the months of winter, the tiny apartment and the relentless duties of his job. He hardly cared why he was leaving the city. Even the documents – his unspoken reason for taking time off – and his brief look at Bachman’s identity seemed suddenly boring compared to the vastness and the light that spread out to the north and east of Krasnoyarsk. He was elated to be leaving, to be going north towards his roots and to be saying his goodbyes to his dying grandfather Gannyka.
At the port, the tourist ferry was preparing to leave in just over an hour. Petrov flashed his militsiya identification and found a place on deck, the cheapest ticket. The ferry would be carrying mostly, if not entirely, Russians this early in the season.
As the ferry left the quay, something about returning towards his mother’s family and the north brought out in him the complete normality of what he was doing. The journey itself, perhaps, contained a clue. In his heart, he guessed he was still a nomad, even one on a modern well-appointed ferry. It was at times like this – so rare he could hardly remember the last one – that he realised how much he had forced himself into the job and into the Slavic culture, just as he had forced himself into the uniform that went with it. His father had made it so. Certainly, he was proud of his achievements – he was a good cop, the best – but it was the pride of merely superseding his ancestry, not of adapting to a culture that he’d ever thought, for a single moment, was superior to his own. It was really the pride of cunning, he thought, of concealing himself, of being able to operate in the alien Russian world. His heart, as he was always aware on the few occasions he allowed himself to think about it, lay in the north, the so-called wilderness, and in the ancient spirit of his people.
He went below the viewing deck and found the bar open. There was a motley collection of travellers mostly bringing supplies northward to their families and friends – fruit and vegetables and alcohol, mainly – packed in boxes or sacks. He ordered a Stary Melnik beer and walked over to the panoramic window of the boat as it slipped away from the quay. He gazed at each tree of the thousands they passed, noted the teal and garganey, a high buzzard and some circling kestrels. He watched them describing their perfect circles until suddenly one would close its wings and dive like an arrow, skimming the grass as it rose again, successful or not. Curlews, plovers, some geese and mallards, all heading south or east. He began to think of their names in the Evenk language.
When finally he turned an hour or more after the vessel had left the city altogether, he saw three people sitting at the table. You could tell instantly they were foreign. They were youngsters, students probably, Petrov thought. They stood out as being obviously not Russian. They were Americans, he guessed, two men and a woman. They were looking at two or three brand new guidebooks and one of them had a map opened fully on the table.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IN THE MIDDLE of the afternoon on the first full day out from Krasnoyarsk, Anna sat alone, cross-legged on the deck. The Siberian taiga – its dark forest – was now massed thick against the banks on either side like a green infantry army cut in two by the cavalry of the great river.
She considered her vulnerability and she knew now that this vulnerability on board the Rossiya was increased by her solitariness. Aside from the false papers and the mission itself, there was Ivan to think about, a constantly looming presence she could never get away from in the prison of the ship. He lurked, never far away, and now he had made it amply clear to her that her isolation was not only suspicious but also a card in his hand that he was determined to play.
She saw that the others on board all seemed to know each other. Presumably they worked the mills in Igarka every year. But by trying to make herself inconspicuous, she realised, she had cut herself off from the other workers. And so she began to look at the faces around her, deciding who she would approach in case of a crisis with the foreman. It was an automatic action, as well as a sudden desire to be part of the work gang in order to give herself better cover. Here on the ship, it was apparent that to be inconspicuous meant being part of the group.
She had learned to tell a lot from the study of a human face. The Russians had a section in foreign intelligence which had made the study of the face – and the deduction of the psychological nature of a person from this study – into what they called a science. The method, which was not recognised internationally as an actual science, had been invented in America in the 1930s, then dropped and taken up later by the French. It had a name – morphopsychology – and a literature that had grown up around it. The Russian intelligence services, particularly the KGB’s foreign service, had seized on this – some said – pseudo-science in the 1950s. Anna recalled how she had been assigned to the section for nearly three months, nearly twenty years before, in the KGB’s training section at Balashiha when she was a new recruit to foreign intelligence.
Morphopsychology wasn’t described as a pseudo-science by her SVR teachers, however, but simply as an ‘alternative’ science. In Russia, the intelligence services made use of anything, no matter what the rest of the world thought. Some of what took place in the spy laboratories were, to be sure, just cranky, pseudo-studies but, in her experience, the study of morphopsychology could be a highly reliable method of gauging a person’s character at speed. It might make a difference in a situation where only a few seconds counted between life and death. Was a person capable of killing? Would they fight, even? Could they be trusted or should they be distrusted? A person’s reliability or otherwise, likewise their discretion, bravery, recklessness and all manner of things, could be told from a face. Her studies at Balashiha had taught that there was a correspondence between the shape and configuration of the human face, and its component parts, and the individual personality – and most importantly, its capabilities – the person’s potential. And Anna knew from experience it could be extremely accurate.
So on this bright Siberian morning on the Rossiya – partly as an exercise and partly to try to get to know her fellow workers and their potential usefulness to her – she began to take in their faces.
First, she looked at the three men sitting nearest her. They were playing cards ten yards along the deck from where she sat, concentrating on the game, the only sounds a low muttering which was occasionally disturbed by a curse of failure or a cry of triumph.
The man nearest to her had a round face, dilated like a baby’s. He was jovial, with a tight, closed mouth when he wasn’t laughing. His lower lip was large – he was a man with an appetite, then, a baby’s insatiable appetite – and his upper lip came over the lower one. Anna watched him and mentally assessed him in the way she’d been taught twenty years before. He was someone who wanted all the attention – a man baby. He was, most
likely, a grasping, greedy person. His face told her that he was a man with needy, childlike desires – and someone who couldn’t hold his tongue. Unreliable, indiscreet. He was someone who undoubtedly needed to be supported, but who wasn’t much good at supporting others.
The man next to him in the circle of card-players had a strong jawline, a big square forehead and a taut face with no excess skin. This was a very ‘masculine’ man, then, with a force about him and the ability to go for what he wanted and, mostly, to get it. And next to him was a third man whose face she noted when it turned towards her from his profile. This card-player had a big nose, a wide face and straight, protected nostrils. His nose rose smoothly to the head. That signified he was cerebral – in the language of morphopsychology anyway. He was a man who could feel what was going on around him but who didn’t show his feelings, a reflective character, someone who took a distance and thought before he spoke or expressed his thoughts.
As an exercise it was something that had a soothing effect on Anna, like a quiet mental game. But it was also potentially useful as she looked around the deck at those closest to her – useful, if she needed to approach someone and required a quick assessment of their natural discretion, for example, or their willingness to take another’s side. Sometime, she might need somebody’s help on the Rossiya, someone she could trust.
None of the men she studied thus saw her as she studied them. They were too absorbed in the game, or others were focused on eating and drinking, laughing or just half-asleep in the sun. Her gaze travelled further around to a group of women, apparently gossiping incessantly. It didn’t seem to matter about what. Every subject they seemed to be talking about held the same resonant urgency, the same tense flow of words, the same tone of voice. They would have talked in the same way, she thought, if they had been discussing anything from the price of bread to an imminent nuclear attack. Theirs was a steady flow of exchange, a calmness – or acceptance of their lot – that most of the men lacked. But she assessed them in the way she had the men.