by James L. May
He continued, “Of course there really could be violence. Golubov’s men wouldn’t be the only casualties, either. Holed up in that cellar, their position is good, and none of them are scared to fight. Guards could flush them out, of course, but it would be bloody, and not just for the urki. They’ll be armed, that’s certain. Knives, axe handles: they’ve got that much down there, at least. Then you’d have to explain to Moscow why you got your men killed massacring a group you ought to have been practicing social closeness with.”
He dropped the snow from his eye. That left ice crystals and blood in his mustache, but he didn’t deign to notice: what I was watching was the laborious reconstruction of his dignity, brick by brick. “S’not an outcome anyone in Administration wants. And Golubov doesn’t either. But he’s a cagey one. Wish I knew his endgame.”
The sweat that had trickled down my neck and soaked my shirt was beginning to chill. “Has he always had the tattoo?” I asked.
“The one on his face? No, no, only after they locked him up. They use a needle or a piece of razor. Make the ink from soot and soap. Some things, even an urka only does when he’s facing a long stint. ‘Indian,’ ha. People say he scalps his enemies, but that’s all made up. Prison’s been good for his reputation.”
Maybe Golubov’s not the only one, I thought. Petrovich had dignity to rebuild, here on Solovetsky. It had never occurred to me to wonder whether that would have been the case back in Odessa as well. So far he had conducted our investigation with such energy and authority that he’d struck me as inexorable — he was a rule of arithmetic or logic, not to be denied. But had it ever been more than a part he needed to enact? Did it have any connection to the person he’d be outside? Golubov had said he’d been living with his daughter. An old man huddled by a fire, wiping the noses of grandchildren.
Petrovich heaved himself away from the wall and we got going again, this time with him holding on to my shoulder with both hands. He muttered, half to me and half to himself as we went.
“Said he didn’t know the name, didn’t I? Got that much out of him, at least. And maybe we find out later he lied…” I turned and looked at him as we negotiated a raised spot in the path. “Only for now, it doesn’t get us any further than we were before. Shot in the dark. Came up with nothing.”
The blood had begun to run from his nostrils again. I could see his mustache was turning pink, but I said nothing.
14
Since his shot in the dark had turned up nothing, Petrovich said we needed to make progress on the Chekist’s list.
After giving his face a more thorough wash back at the cell, he’d sent me downstairs to make him a cup of tea, then sat on his pallet drinking it and looking out the window for a long time. While he ruminated, an impressive shade of purple-red spread over his wounded cheek, the bruise swelling until it nearly forced his eye shut. When he finally put his cup down on the sill and stood, however, he seemed steadier. Evidently he’d been right about not needing a doctor. I still felt concerned about him, but the old man was tough.
The next name on the list belonged to one Zuyev, a former military engineer who worked in the tiny office of canal management, north of Nikolski. We found him in a room whose walls were covered with maps drawn on flimsy paper. Apart from that difference of setting, the interview proved nearly identical to Nail Terekhov’s. Like Terekhov, Zuyev had been an officer in the White Army. Like Terekhov, he swore he could tell us nothing. He didn’t seem to have heard about Terekhov’s fate, and true to the Chekist’s instructions, we didn’t ask him about it. I hoped he wouldn’t be the next to turn up dead.
By the time we left him, the five o’clock whistle had already shrieked. Zeks had begun to trail back from work sites, and the setting sun was dragging northern twilight across the island, early and heavy. Atop their poles, electric lamps flickered on.
I’d thought he might want to return to the cell for more rest, but Petrovich was intent on keeping the appointment he’d made that morning with Stepnova, Veronika Fitneva’s floor mistress.
I hadn’t liked Stepnova, and the feeling had grown to full-blown resentment now that I’d laid eyes on Veronika and heard her voice. For all the queasy, voyeuristic excitement elicited by her becoming a focus of our investigation, I also felt she needed a protector. “Do you really think Fitneva was involved?” I asked. “Even after that business with Terekhov?”
“She knows something she thought was worth lying about,” he said. “Maybe finding it out will convince the Chekist there’s more to this than he thinks. And there’s the suitor, too, the one who beat her up. To me, that still seems promising. At least it will show we’re doing something.”
Stepnova had asked Petrovich to brief her privately, while Veronika was engaged with Spagovsky, the man Petrovich had called her “suitor.” The timing was tricky. The guards at the gate to the women’s enclosure let us wait in their sentry box while one of them went up to the dormitory to let Stepnova know we’d arrived. Word came back that we should wait: Fitneva hadn’t returned from the fishery yet, but she would soon, and it wouldn’t do if she found us inside. Once Spagovsky had whisked her away, Stepnova would send word. Then we could come up.
With four in the box, our shoulders were pushed up around each other’s ears. The stamps on our permit had been so imposing, however, that neither guard dared make Petrovich or even me stand out in the wind. That may have had something to do with his face as well; they seemed impressed by the damage. Soon the stream of women returning from work grew steady enough that they had to stay down at the gate to deal with them all, and the old man and I had the place to ourselves, with room to unfold.
“All right, I understand the interest in Fitneva,” I said. “But what more are you hoping this Stepnova can tell you? She’s no more than a madam.”
“You don’t think madams have useful information? You do have a lot to learn. At the very least she’ll be able to tell us something about the girl’s circumstances. Probably has a better idea of her movements than anyone, too. Would be good to figure out how she and Antonov arranged their meetings. Anything that puts pressure on Fitneva is progress.”
We were calling her Fitneva, but already I thought of her as nothing but Veronika. Every time a group of women came up the path past the sentry box, I hunched down in my coat and turned my face to the wall, worried she might be among them. If someone had asked, I’d have explained it was because Stepnova had warned us not to be spotted. But it wasn’t that, not really.
She’d told me not to leer. What is a leer, after all? A sidewise glance, a desire that expresses itself by trying to hide its interest. Inevitable, perhaps, to leer at a person first glimpsed through the window of the Cheka’s file on her. Yes, surveillance is the leer of the state: a prurient interest that simultaneously declares and hides itself.
Perhaps it was only more leering, and not, as I thought, desire to prove my usefulness, that made me suggest what I did.
“What if I followed her?”
“What?” said Petrovich.
“When Spagovsky comes. While you talk to Stepnova, I could tail them, find out where he takes her. Maybe I’d be able to overhear something. If they really are mixed up with Antonov’s death, she would at least tell him about our visit, wouldn’t she?”
Petrovich rubbed his mustache with the knuckle. “Putting a tail on someone isn’t so easy,” he said. “Especially not alone. It’s better with a team, in a crowd.”
“We’d learn at least as much as you will taking tea with Stepnova.”
“You’re getting bolder, eh? You stared down a roomful of criminals this afternoon and now you think a paper from Infosec will protect you from anything. No great risk to have a man find you trailing along after him like a bad smell. But what about my face? That paper of ours didn’t protect me then.”
I hadn’t considered that Spagovsky might resort to violence if he noticed me. But it was true: I did feel
bold. Tailing him could hardly be more dangerous than marching into the sauna had been that afternoon.
“I’m not proposing to confront them,” I said.
“No, and you shouldn’t. I want to know more when we question this Spagovsky,” he said. He eyed me, however, eyes glinting in the dark. “In there with Stepnova, there’s nothing for you to do, of course, only get in the way. I won’t need you … All right. Yes, it might work. We’ll do it.”
Only now that he’d agreed did I begin to feel concerned. He seemed well enough, but tailing the others would mean leaving the old man to negotiate stairs and snowy paths on his own. “You’ll be all right?”
“Don’t be patronizing. It’s not the first beating I’ve taken. Now be quiet and listen. There’s more to shadowing a subject than you’ve read in your silly Pinkertons. It’s not just walking along with a quiet step. I couldn’t teach you all you ought to know in a year, much less ten minutes.”
The old man’s advice amounted to behaving always as though you were on the way to some destination of your own, and giving the subject of your pursuit plenty of space. In fact, this was precisely what I had gleaned from reading about Pinkerton’s tracking of the devious Hairy-Man William through a German cathedral cloister and market-fair stalls in “Tiger of the Hamburg Dom,” but I thought it better not to mention it. “I’ll be back at Company Ten before you are,” he concluded. “And I’ll leave your name with them at Nikolski so they know to expect you. We can only hope you won’t have trouble getting in.”
With his one good eye, he scowled down at the white cap in my hand. “You look like a lit candle in that thing. But it’ll be conspicuous if you don’t have a hat. Give it here.” He pulled off his own and handed it to me. It was a sailor’s knit cap, unraveling in places but still better than mine in every respect. “We’ll trade. Thank God I won’t have to wear yours long.”
He jammed it onto his head, rendering himself ridiculous enough that the guards exchanged a glance when they brought their lamp back to the sentry box. The old man only stared straight ahead, frowning and extravagantly bruised beneath the brim.
At last the figure of a tall, thin man appeared at the gate. The guard spent longer than usual examining his credentials, then waved him through. Back at the box, he confirmed that it was Spagovsky.
The old man nodded to me. “Once he’s collected Fitneva, Stepnova will send for me. You go back and wait back up the road. You’ll see when they come out.”
“All right,” I whispered.
Some way up the path, the lamplight cast a shadow from the corner of the main administration building. I took cover there and waited. Five minutes, then ten. The pounding of my heart went on and on. I’d just started to think something had gone wrong, when finally they came out.
Night was closing down Solovetsky’s horizons as they passed my hiding spot. Back above the kremlin’s wall with its squat towers, the cathedrals’ burnt spires dwindled and disappeared into the blackening sky. From the trees to the north and east, the buildings to the south, and the wide sea to the west, the limits of vision shrank down to a series of bright hemispheres centered on lampposts. I trailed them along the path that circled the kremlin, fifty paces behind, following their silhouettes from light to dark, light to dark.
Following proved surprisingly easy. The pair was too far away for me to make out their features, but I could identify them as a couple walking together. They curved around to the north side of the kremlin, then took the road that led north among the larger outbuildings. As we emerged from among the buildings and the lampposts began to come at longer intervals, I’d occasionally lose track of them in the dark, but they would always reappear again a little further down the road. Veronika strode in front, with the shape that was Spagovsky never quite catching up. Neither looked back.
After half a mile they turned off the road onto a path that led to the machinists’ shop, a low building that had been a smithy under the monks. Many of the more specialized and privileged work groups lived outside the kremlin, nearer the sites where they worked. Evidently that was Spagovsky’s arrangement. Snow-covered lumps of machinery were strewn around the yard. A long building with a few windows looked like a barracks to me, but Spagovsky and Veronika headed towards a little cabin at some remove from it.
Stepnova had only said Spagovsky was a machinist. I knew next to nothing about the actual techniques of machining, but you could not help noticing that the parts of Solovki’s many mechanisms broke down continually, whether from hard use on the one hand or neglect on the other. With the closest industrial centers days of travel away, it was obvious how crucial the work of manufacturing replacements was to the camp’s operation. Men with even minimal experience in the trade could expect to be snapped out of Quarantine the moment their term was up. If this Spagovsky had a cabin of his own, it meant he was a particular expert, someone Solovetsky couldn’t do without and therefore had to take special care of—perhaps a die maker or even an engineer. That would be consistent with his having been able to come to an arrangement with Stepnova about Veronika, I reflected.
From a distance, I watched them enter. Soon light appeared under the door. I waited what I thought was five minutes; Petrovich had recommended letting them settle in. Then, skirting the edge of the yard, I crept around to the side of the house and crouched down uncomfortably beneath a windowsill. There I waited, hearing nothing—only my own breathing, the blood pounding in my ears, the noises my boots made every time they shifted. Would I be able to hear them through the wall and the windowpane? Maybe the cabin had more than one room. Had I picked the wrong window?
No—a light spilled out onto the snow, to prove they were inside. And as I had the thought, I heard a man’s voice, only a little muffled on the other side of the glass.
“Have some pickled apple.”
That was Spagovsky, then. It was hard to tell much about him, just listening to him offer pickled apple. He clipped his words off at their ends, his voice neither low nor high.
“That’s what you have to say?” It was Veronika, of course. Every thrilling note I’d heard in her voice that afternoon was still there, but she sounded disturbed, unmoored, almost wild, in a way she would never have allowed herself to be with us. “Have some apple?”
“What should I say? You are babbling at me.”
“Nothing.” Having seen her so passionately before—it was a passion of seeing, I felt hungry to look at her again—it was thwarting now to be only able to listen. I thought I could picture what exasperation would do to her expression.
Another period of silence. Flurries of snow were falling past the window; I was aware of them coming to rest on my shoulders. I inhaled through my mouth, trying to control the sound of my breath. Something was passing between them inside, but without being able to see it—their bodies, their faces, their attitudes to each other—there was no way to tell what it was.
“You liked that apple before,” said Spagovsky.
“Did I? I don’t remember.”
“You liked it. I got a jar on purpose from the specialist’s commissary. Not cheap, I’ll tell you.”
The cabin’s shingles smelled of pine tar, even in the cold. I realized I was staring at a particular point on one shingle, as though my looking hard enough would make the scene inside show through.
“You worry too much,” said Spagovsky. “Stop thinking about so many things at once.”
Veronika laughed, a little breathlessly, as though it squeezed her in a way she liked. “I realize you only want me to sit down and be quiet, but I think you’re right. Do you know, I have always thought that of myself? I can never look at only what’s in front of me—I’m always seeing something else as well. When I was a little girl I was always seeing soldiers or foxes in the sums I was assigned. That’s why I am a better translator than I am a poet. I’m always thinking about something else, not the page before me. I can’t
finish the poem I’m working on. Another one emerges out of it before I get done. Sometimes I think it’s a problem of concentration, but at other times I think it’s because I concentrate too hard. Because I can’t relax. You see what I mean, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what nonsense you’re on about,” said Spagovsky. “You’re lucky your voice is pretty.”
This time she didn’t laugh. “That’s both flattering and not,” she said evenly.
My left thigh had begun to cramp, but I didn’t dare move into a more comfortable position.
“Tell me about your day,” said Veronika.
“Same as every other day here.”
“How can you say that? Every day has something about it different than others. Even in our frozen island prison.”
“Nothing worth talking about,” said Spagovsky.
I heard footsteps cross the room. When Veronika spoke again, she was close to the window. “What did you have to give Alexandra Stepnova so she’d allow you to drag me off this evening?”
Her voice had changed, hardened. She must have been standing just on the other side of the wall, looking out into the dark.
For the first time, Spagovsky raised his voice. “All you do is mock. Don’t you see how things are hard for me?” It was the first sentence of his that had had any emotion in it. One of our good Russian lamenters, Spagovsky. The best of us all have that confidence behind our groans.
There was more silence I couldn’t interpret. Once again, my gaze bored fruitlessly into the shingle I’d chosen. “Oh, don’t look like that,” Veronika finally said. There was the faint sound of glass clinking on the other side of the wall. “Here. Drink some vodka and I’ll sit on your knee. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
There was the scrape of a chair moving, and more footsteps. Spagovsky said something I didn’t catch about the vodka, and they exchanged a few more remarks about pickled apple. Was she sitting on his knee? I preferred not to picture it.