by James L. May
It was ridiculous, of course. Some zeks reacted to prison this way—transforming themselves into grotesques by adherence to some fixed idea. Better that, maybe, than to remain who you had been before. In one way or another, we were all changed.
Petrovich said something about his scrupulousness requiring him to ask why the requisition had included specific dimensions for the requested icons. How had the dimensions been determined? How had it been known that icons would be available in those sizes?
“Ah, yes,” said Zhenov. “The measurements. We simply passed along what had been requested by the cabinetry workshop, as I recall. It amounted to just a few square yards of board, but of a desirable quality. They’d had last year’s shipment to give them an idea of what was available, I suppose. And they coordinated with Ivan, my foreman.”
“What were they going to build?”
Zhenov seemed to hesitate before he said: “The cabinetry workshop’s production schedule isn’t set here. I only find out what the workshops do with the supplies we’ve sent when they’ve finished their work and are ready to ship it back. You’d have to ask them.”
Petrovich pinched his mustache, considering. At last he said: “Fine. Tell me, Subcommandant Zhenov. Are you acquainted with a man named Gennady Antonov?”
“I can’t say that I am.”
“Antonov worked with the icons at the camp museum. He was the one responsible for deciding which of them they’d give to you, and which they’d keep. He hasn’t visited this warehouse recently?”
“Not to my knowledge. Why do you ask?”
“Last night he was murdered.”
Zhenov pursed his lips at the word. Two fingers rose to his hairline, just brushing the hairs there.
Petrovich went on: “You can see why we’d be interested in his involvement with something as out of the ordinary as your icon requisition.”
You could see Zhenov gathering himself, putting on a military attitude. “In truth, I can’t say that I can. Just why is it you believe our department here is connected to the—the murder?”
“There’s no connection,” said Petrovich. “Not yet. At this point we’re only trying to reconstruct where Antonov went yesterday, what he did last week. Anything unusual interests us.”
Zhenov stammered. “Ah. Well—yes. But if I had met the man, I assure you, I would remember. I keep careful records of all my affairs. Indeed, the main thing in maintaining a Gruenewaldian regimen is to keep a careful journal. Close observation of your own scalp condition is the key to health. Variations among the hairs of the Herr-Professor-Doktor’s nine regions are subtle, but with the help of his guides, and careful record keeping, even someone as inexpert as myself can tell the difference. For instance, under normal circumstances, over fifty percent of the hairs I lose in a day come from the left-anterior and left-supra-auricular zones. However, in a period of sickness this summer, I observed a distinct spike in my crown’s rate of denudation. In fact, the spike began before I’d even begun to feel other symptoms. If I’d been more knowledgeable, perhaps having been forewarned I could have done something to fend off the episode. No man is immortal, of course, as Dr. Gruenewald rightly notes. The loss of a certain number of hairs each day is merely the sign of natural human decay—which, in a situation like ours in this camp, is inevitably accelerated. The important thing is to minimize the loss, and also to ensure that it occurs evenly, at a similar rate across the entire scalp.”
Petrovich was not willing to be distracted by follicular health. “Your men might have met Antonov when they collected the pieces from the museum.”
It had been nervousness, clearly, that launched Zhenov’s new recitation of Gruenewaldian pieties. But you could hear the Subcommandant gaining confidence as he touched his topic’s familiar points, until by the end he’d made himself aware of the affront to his dignity and office that our investigation represented. Now he sounded angry.
“I must say, Petrovich. I consider it distinctly ungentlemanly of you not to have explained the seriousness of your investigation immediately. A fellow feels rather caught out, describing the details of his business without knowing there’s been a murder. I have nothing to hide, of course, but you must know as well as I that even the appearance of involvement in such a case can be, well, quite dangerous!”
Before Petrovich could reply, the block outside gave a squeal that made us all pause. Louder still than it had been before, the sound warped nauseously, a change in pitch drawn out over a period that must only have been several seconds but felt longer. Then a metallic snap, a cry, and the noise of men shouting.
“Dear lord,” said Zhenov. “Excuse me.”
Petrovich motioned for me to follow. He would come along behind.
Out on the stairs, Zhenov fumbled with a cap he’d taken from one of the pegs in his office. Even as he raced ahead of me, I could see him making gingerly adjustments to its band.
The man bled into the snow, still pinned where one end of the container had crushed his leg and hip. He sprawled, moaning, half on the sledge and half off. The crate’s other end, still attached to a set of straps like the ones that had come loose, remained suspended, perhaps two feet in the air. If the crate fell, what was left of the wounded man below the waist would be pulped.
The big overseer we’d seen before struggled to keep it from slipping free. “Don’t let it go, you prick-fingered cunts!” he yelled to the men working the crane above. He’d squatted to get a grip, and the muscles bulged hugely beneath the fabric of his coat as he strained against the weight. Wind strummed at the rope that ran from the pulley, freezing and wild. “No! Fuck, don’t pull. Just hold it there!”
Zhenov and I were the first to reach them, taking up positions on either side. Even with three of us and the support of the straps, the weight was incredible. I could hardly believe the big man had been able to support it by himself.
“Lift,” he said hoarsely. We heaved. Dizziness came over me, but the crate began to move. The tendons stood out in the overseer’s neck. You could smell him—like an engine, he radiated heat and fumes into the cold air.
The pinned man screamed.
“Shut your fucking mouth, Luka,” the big man roared. “Lift!”
By this time, others had run to join us. Inch by inch, the box rose. At last someone dragged Luka free of the sledge. On a signal from the big man, the crate crashed to the ground.
“A stretcher,” cried Zhenov. “A stretcher, quickly!”
There was a bustle of activity as something suitable was searched for. Strangled sounds of pain came from the wounded man’s white face. His trousers were sodden with blood.
At length someone returned with two wide boards, and they carried him off in the direction of the hospital. Before hurrying after the makeshift litter, Zhenov grabbed his overseer’s sleeve.“That block should have been checked, Ivan. We could hear the sound it made from my office.”
“It was checked,” said the other man sullenly, rubbing one shoulder. “Greased it like I was going to stick my prick in. It always squealed. They give us bad equipment, sometimes bad things happen.”
Petrovich had made his way outside at some point during the commotion. “You all right?” he said to me.
I must have looked shocked. “I’m fine,” I said.
It didn’t look as though we would be able to finish our interview with Zhenov. Before we could depart, the overseer came over, offering his hand.
“Thanks for the help,” he said to me. “Name’s Kologriev. Fuck your mother, ugly business, eh? Maybe Luka’ll be all right.”
“Anatoly Bogomolov,” I said. It was like shaking hands with a brick.
I hadn’t quite met his eye. He looked at me appraisingly. “The pulleys—one of the little bitches must’ve snapped off inside the block.”
“Yes.”
Petrovich barked his laugh that might as well have be
en a cough. “Tolya’s not quite used to the blood, and has had a full day already. You see he’s good in a pinch, though.”
Kologriev nodded. “You found the boss. What’d you want to talk to him for, anyway?”
“Something you can help us with, maybe. You the foreman here?”
“That’s right.”
Kologriev admitted to having been in charge of collecting the icons for the lumber requisition. The pickup had gone smoothly; with five men and two sledges, the only inconvenient part had been going up and down the museum’s stairs. “All of that came from Anzer,” he said when Petrovich asked about the requested dimensions. “Didn’t pay much attention to it, to tell the truth. Just counted up big, small, and medium-sized. Made sure we had the right number of each.”
“Remember meeting a man named Antonov? He might have shown you which lots to take.”
“That the little one with a chip on his shoulder?”
Petrovich’s mouth twisted a little. No, that’s Ivanov, the assistant director. Antonov would have been taller and quieter, with a beard.” He indicated its length on his own chin.
Kologriev shook his head. “No one like that.”
“Anything that struck you about the pickup at all, at the time?”
“Only that fucking museum being there to start with. Monks must have had it good here once, if it was all like that. Can’t believe the pricks in Administration let them keep on that way.” He looked back and forth between us. “’Scuse me. Maybe you two are working for the center.”
“Infosec. Don’t worry, temporary basis only.” The old man tried again: “But Antonov—you don’t remember him? Long beard, quiet voice. About Tolya’s size. His work was restoring the icons. A painter.”
Kologriev shook his head. “Nah. But every son of a bitch looks the same to me in this camp. He might have been there. Why’re you looking for him?”
“He was murdered,” said Petrovich.
At this, finally, the big man looked modestly impressed. “Murdered? Fucking bad luck.” He reached up to massage his shoulder. The fabric of his shirt strained over his chest. “But then, we all have bad luck. Zeks get killed every day. Every son of a bitch looks the same to me, and fuck your mother, they all have different versions of the same bad luck.”
Without the noise of the crane, our walk back was much quieter than the approach had been. For all his foul language, Kologriev had had a point. What had happened to Antonov was sad, but not really so different from what befell others every day. Starved, murdered, or smashed by a box of saws: dead was dead.
7
We’d passed back over the dry dock by the time Petrovich spoke again. The wind was blowing snow into our faces.
“How did they meet?” he said.
The question took me by surprise. I’d just noticed a red stippling of blood on the path in front of us: we were following along the way Luka’s litter had come. Remembering the noises he’d made still brought about a sympathetic clenching in my throat.
“Who?” I said.
Petrovich stopped and looked at me. “Thought you’d be able to handle something like this, after your self-possession with Antonov’s body. You’re not going to be in a cloud all afternoon over an accident, are you?”
“No.” I shook my head. “No. You’re talking about Antonov and the woman who wrote that note, aren’t you? That’s the next clue we need to follow.”
“Ah!” The old man shook his cane at me. “And what makes you think it’s a woman? Why couldn’t V stand for Viktor, or Valery?”
“You said it was a woman before.”
“Maybe I did. I am asking what you think.”
I shrugged. “It would be an odd note for a Valery to have written. And the handwriting looked like a woman’s.”
He started off down the path again. “That’s what I think, too. I want to know who she is, what they were up to. So, how did they meet?”
I was aware of Solovetsky’s women as a distant presence. Several hundred lived outside the kremlin, in a separate dormitory behind the main administration building, north of the bay. You would pass them sometimes, walking in groups to their work. Not long after I’d arrived, my platoon had been assigned to remove stones from a field out by the power substation, near the little brick building that housed the telephone system’s switchboards. Every day, the half-dozen girls who operated them would go by in skirts. I remember the sound of their conversations, their voices reaching us over the waving grass. The summer was fading, the sky blue. By then I’d lived for a year and a half without hearing a female voice.
Telephone operator was a plum assignment, of course. Most of the women labored like the rest of us, sawing timber the men had felled, or working the vegetable fields. What it took for a girl to get something better was spoken of in sniggering tones. Often it meant she’d entered into what zeks termed, with their characteristic combination of coarseness and delicacy, “a calculated marriage.” They took pull, these marriages, an amount of pull most could never hope to muster. You had to have something to offer the woman in the first place. Then you had to be able to arrange to live together, or at least provide for regular private visits. But the arrangement was respected, if not quite respectable. Most men would leave a “married” woman alone.
Could that have been what Antonov’s acquaintance with the mysterious V consisted of? It seemed unlikely. But under what other auspices did men and women come together on Solovki?
“Some women work in the kremlin,” I said to Petrovich. “They could have known each other that way.”
“Not likely. What did the note say? ‘I will be inside this Thursday.’ If she had a regular way into the kremlin, she wouldn’t have cared about the day.”
I fished the note out from the interior coat pocket where I was keeping our papers. The slip fluttered in the wind as I read. A package has come from my mother with a few rubles. I will be inside, visiting the commissary store before nightly roll. This Thursday. Please meet me.—V. Beneath that: The thought of your goodness is all that enables me to continue as I have.
“I don’t know,” I said, catching up to Petrovich. “It could be that. But from the way it’s written, it’s possible she’s often inside, only doesn’t have much opportunity to meet.” He grimaced, but didn’t deny it. I went on. “And wherever she works, it doesn’t necessarily tell us how they knew each other, does it? It could have been a simple chance encounter. Those happen anywhere, by definition.”
We’d turned and were heading north on the road along the bay again. Petrovich’s voice creaked irritably. “Grasping after certainties is an amateur’s mistake. Too many Pinkertons: you think you’ll go on from excitement to excitement, without false starts, because that’s the way it works in your stories. No. Investigating crimes is mostly boredom and asking questions whose answers turn out not to matter. If you thought you were guaranteed an adventure when I took you on, you’re wrong.”
“I was only trying to be logical. I don’t want an adventure.”
“Logic! Another fantasy. How many cases do you think have been solved with logic? Not many. Working a murder means looking at things and talking to people. Maybe then you think, a little. After that you look and talk some more, see who has secrets that might be squeezed out of them.”
“All right,” I said. “I only want to help. You must guide me about what sort of thing is useful.”
Petrovich huffed, ruffling his mustache. “What are we going to do if we only follow necessary and logical leads, eh? Sit practicing deduction in our cells? This is like the footprints. You think there will be a thread, and if you can just think along it, it will lead you from the beginning to the end.”
I was learning to take the old man’s badgering in stride, I thought. And what he’d said was interesting. In fact I had had Sherlock Holmes in mind again, with my remarks about what was necessary and true by defi
nition. There was a line that I’d always remembered from The Sign of the Four, to the effect that detection ought to be as dispassionate and unromantic as the fifth postulate of Euclid. What intrigued me was precisely that this postulate, the parallel postulate, was the one Lobachevsky’s imaginary geometry had shown not to be necessary for a coherent account of lines and shapes in the plane. It had occurred to me to wonder whether there wasn’t something romantic, something arbitrary and passionate, about the fifth postulate itself. In that case, why shouldn’t the logic of detection prove to be a fantasy, just as Petrovich had said?
“I have to make reasonable assumptions,” he continued, a little mollified by my acquiescence. “Lucky for us, your average zek, man or woman, can’t move freely around the camp. We saw Antonov needed a pass from Vinogradov to go out through Nikolski. He can’t have been having those written for him all the time. Whereas the girl couldn’t—probably couldn’t—come into the kremlin regularly. So, where does that leave them to bump into each other?”
“It sounds like you have an idea.”
“I do. In July, Antonov was in the hospital for over a week.”
There was a small surgery within the kremlin used for treating emergencies and brief illnesses, or sometimes for isolating the infected during epidemics, but anyone sick enough for long convalescence was transferred to a larger facility outside the walls. That would be where they were taking Luka, in fact. It treated both men and women.
The hospital was something zeks talked about. On the whole, it was not considered a bad place in which to find yourself; the place had served as the monks’ infirmary for decades, and in general the arrangements there were less haphazard and makeshift than in the rest of the camp. If you managed to get yourself admitted, you could lie in bed for days, safe from your work quota and receiving an invalid ration that wasn’t too bad. The trouble was how sick you had to be to get in—almost to the point of death if your bosses were unsympathetic—and the risk you ran of catching something else from your fellow patients once you had.