by James L. May
My throat felt dry. “Do you know where Spagovsky was when Antonov was killed?” I said.
“No. But I’ve told you, he didn’t know anything about it. He couldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
She waved a hand in the air. “You see what he’s like. If he’d found out, my face would have been first to hear.” Then she shivered and pulled her coat more tightly around her shoulders. “Are you going to ask him—tell him—about it?”
Petrovich had, in fact, mentioned wanting to confront Spagovsky. It was easy to see what would happen to her if he did. “What about Nail Terekhov,” I said instead of answering. “Do you recognize that name?”
It was a question I’d wanted to be sure to ask before this period of forthcomingness ended. Petrovich’s warnings notwithstanding, it couldn’t hurt to mention the second murder to her. The Chekist had said he didn’t want us to interfere, but he wouldn’t be interrogating Veronika unless she proved to know something significant. If she did, it would be good to have asked. If she didn’t, no harm done.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Another dead prisoner,” I said, watching her. “He was once an officer in the White Army. Someone killed him this morning—while we talked to you, perhaps. It was done the same way as Antonov.”
“Awful, but the name means nothing to me,” she said. “It still strikes me as most likely that your bosses murdered Gennady Mikhailovich. Maybe they murdered this Terekhov as well. Are you going to tell Boris about me?”
She was not willing to be brushed aside. That was all right; I had what I wanted. She’d hardly been able to control her face when we mentioned Antonov that afternoon, but discussing Terekhov seemed to have no effect on her. Either she’d become a better liar, or she was telling the truth.
“Yakov Petrovich may want to talk to him,” I said. “To see what he says.”
She laughed again, bitter and low, still musical. “Well, you spared me the worst of one beating. Maybe I can’t complain if you cause me another.” She exhaled hugely. “Are we done? I’ve answered enough of your questions, haven’t I?”
“We can walk,” I said.
We walked. She was favoring her side again, but I hadn’t quite finished. “When did you last see him?”
“Antonov?”
“Yes.”
She shot me a glance, but answered. “It had been some time. Since that note you found—that would have been about two weeks ago, when the package from my mother came. That was unusual. Usually it’s easier for him to leave the kremlin than for me to get in.”
“Did he seem strange, or worried?”
I heard her sad smile as much as saw it. “He was always a little strange. I don’t know whether he seemed worried. I wouldn’t say so. He seemed the same.” She shook her head. “I don’t know anything that will help you.”
As it ran along the lake’s north shore and approached Nikolski Gate, the road became a bright corridor, hemmed in on either side by the height and length of the wooden buildings. We were the only ones out walking, and the ground showed white under the lamps’ electric glare.
Were there further questions I should have been asking? I’d learned things, but they seemed to lead nowhere. Veronika and Spagovsky’s having anything to do with Antonov’s death did not seem more or less likely than before. Knowing more only traded old ignorance for new.
Looking up at Nikolski Tower, I said: “I … overheard what you said about the causeway to Muksalma.”
“You were eavesdropping for quite a while.”
I ignored her tone. “I see what you mean about it. Building a wall to cross the water.”
“That is what interests you?” She sounded surprised.
I couldn’t have said why I’d lit on that, of all the things I’d heard her say to Spagovsky. “Antonov told me once that, properly perceived, the faithful were the living stones of the church. He thought the church itself, the building, is only an image of something spiritual.” It was embarrassing to be so incapable of explaining. If I’d been imitating the Chekist’s restraint, I wasn’t any longer. “A living stone in the wall of a church. It’s beautiful, but horrible, too. I don’t think Antonov understood that. Imagine being alive, stuck like a stone in a wall of bodies.”
She didn’t say anything until we’d come to the barbed-wire fence surrounding the women’s dormitories. Then she said: “Yes. That’s part of what I meant.” She gestured with her chin, a pale angle on which spread a shadow of bruise. “Here’s the gate. Goodbye, Anatoly Bogomolov.”
16
Vasily Feodorovich asks, am I still writing?
It is the first he’s spoken of it openly in some time. It was four months ago that I first told him I was writing a detektiv and refused to let him read it. Lately his eyes have not darted about when I first open the door the way they did. I thought he’d ceased to look. But last night he asked again.
I hedged, said I wasn’t sure it was worth finishing. Let him decide whether that means the story is abandoned or I am still at work.
But the truth is I am still writing. Why? After first describing Veronika, I put it down that I would stop, throw the pages I’d produced in the stove. For a week I did stop. But since then I’ve filed four more chapters with the others in their box, and on the page Veronika and I limp back from Spagovsky’s cabin to the Women’s Quarters.
Every night, I write. My shift ends at ten. I wash in the factory showers, walk home. In the kitchen I am allowed to use on the first floor, I cook myself something to eat. By then it is eleven-thirty. I descend. I write until three, three-thirty, four. Sometimes later. When I wake up the sun is shining brightly in through my ground-level window, and sweat soaks the bed.
The workers’ store at the factory has cheap pads for sale, and these are what I write on. The paper is lined, gray, bound with a coil of wire at the top. Each pad has a thin, pale blue cover. When I complete a chapter, I tear the pages out and put them in the box. When I am done with a pad, only a fur of paper is left within the spiral, and the cover flaps on the empty coil. There are five pads empty now, all saved in the drawer along with the manuscript and my shirts. Soon there will be six.
Even in the din of the factory, my pen’s scratching seems always to be in the back of my mind. Filling these pages, tearing them out … This story is inside me. I have never felt the desire, the need, to write it before. But it comes over me now, a compulsion.
What does it mean? I once saw a film set during the construction of the Belomor Canal. In it, two Komsomol members, a boy and a girl, left Moscow and traveled to the canal so they could inspire the zeks to work hard. They were in love with each other. A strong man with a beard, a criminal who’d killed his own son, was so moved by their example that he stormed through his labor assignment. In the end, he worked so hard he died. Everyone sang a song about him, and finally the Mosfilm logo appeared onscreen.
I was an accountant at Belomor. From a window of the office where I had my desk, I watched the Canal’s real workers march down the road to their labor sites. They went to dig, to pour concrete, to dynamite. I saw them, their coats and beards, their prisoners’ boots. I could see their faces from the window, almost as clear as the ones I’d see projected before me years later.
I knew how the film would end—with a song, with triumphant death. I know how the real story ends as well. I was there. I saw the food expenses remain constant as the number of prisoners assigned to the work companies increased, increased, increased. They say 12,000 died before the canal was finished.
And the end of this story, the one I cannot stop writing: I know that too. My pen drags me towards it by the hand.
Back at the cell, I told Petrovich what had happened. He listened closely, only interrupting to ask the occasional question. By now his face was lurid, a pool of ugly color behind his mustache. It occurred to me to wonder who would l
ook worse in the end, him or Veronika.
“I know you didn’t want me to confront Spagovsky, but I didn’t ask questions. All I did was stop him. I didn’t give anything away.”
“That’s fine.”
While we talked, I spooned up tepid soup. Arriving after the stoves had been put out, I’d had no chance to cook, but the old man had saved me a portion from the pot he’d made earlier. It tasted watery, the same as the day before.
“They give you any trouble at the gate?” he asked.
“No, no. They said they’d been waiting for me and let me right through.”
“That’s good. Maybe our friend gave them a talking to after all.” He watched me eat. His blue eyes seemed less sharp than usual, filmed over by something. “You did well. You’ve been doing well. Better than I expected.”
“Thank you.”
“I was lucky to have you there at the sauna today.”
“I’m not sure I did much.”
“Better to have someone with you when you’re knocked out than no one,” he said. Then, after a pause: “I’ve been teasing you about your Pinkertons.”
“I know I have a lot to learn.”
“It’s not that.” He resituated himself on his cot, favoring his back. “Back in Odessa, in the department, we were out on the street all the time. You go everywhere, talk to people. In my day you were expected to cultivate a network of useful types, the sort you could send out to learn something for you. Usually for pay, yes, but you had to know them. Well, the point is I spent time in all sorts of places. The boy who sold me my newspaper—sometimes I’d see him in one of the grog houses I frequented, with a beer before him, following the lines of a magazine with his finger and moving his lips. No more than ten, eleven. After a year I lost track of him. Heard later he’d been picked up with a gang of kids. They’d hit a man they were robbing over the head. Killed the fellow.”
His voice was thick. I hadn’t heard him so sentimental before. “That is how I know about your Pinkertons. He read them, always. So did all the others on the street with him. And there are more than ever of these street children, besprizorniki, these days. They belong to no one, and in the end there’s no choice for them but crime.”
The remark was out of place—the sort of thing people said all the time outside, but rarely on Solovki. It hung in the air. “You’d think the stories would have been a positive influence,” I came out with at last, for lack of anything better to say. “Usually the wrongdoer is punished. The whole point is to see Pinkerton chase down the criminal.”
He shook his head vehemently. “No. It’s the opposite. They see a detective catch a murderer in the pages of your pulps and they think, ‘It isn’t me!’ The one who reads it gets a chance to enjoy the body, all the gore. Then he gets off scot-free. A made-up person punished, and your own crimes ignored. That is what your street hoodlum sees in a Pinkerton.”
“But hoodlums aren’t the only ones who read them. I liked them when I was eleven, too, but I hadn’t committed any crimes.”
“Not even the most innocent cherub is without a crime or two to his name. A policeman knows. Everyone hides something guilty somewhere.”
I’d finished my soup, and I put the bowl aside. When I suggested we turn in, the old man leaned over and blew out the candle that burned on the sill.
“You’ll learn,” said his voice in the darkness before I fell asleep. “You’re a fast learner. You’re doing well.”
That night Petrovich snored like an engine. I suppose something about his injuries brought it on. A swelling of the nasal passages? He would growl and rattle endlessly, then stop and, after a moment, emit an alarming gasp. During the periods of silence that followed, I found myself contemplating Veronika and the difference in our ages. According to her file she was twenty-eight—not a huge difference from twenty, surely? But she seemed so much more experienced, more confident than I. And so on, until the rattling and growling resumed. By the time the steam whistle blew to rouse us, I’d barely managed to snatch an hour of sleep altogether.
At his cabin the next morning, the Chekist was in a sour mood. “What was it you were telling me the other day, Yakov Petrovich? My method works when I know in advance the result I’m looking for? To me yours seems woefully diffuse and undirected. Without a sense of the political and class forces at work in a situation, you barely know where to begin. A classic liberal fallacy. You believe staring at facts will simply yield up the truth. Not so. You require a proper theory to orient you towards productive avenues of inquiry and labor. It’s precisely this that’s the proper dialectical relationship between theory and factual knowledge, and precisely for this reason that the masses must be educated in the tenets of dialectical materialism.”
Here, reproduced extemporaneously in response to the old man’s report of yesterday’s activities, was the language of a hundred speeches and newspaper articles: the empty (or inspiring, depending on your perspective) discourse of revolutionary authority. It was hard to know what he meant by it. He couldn’t really have been saying our investigation had the wrong political outlook, could he? Petrovich had given no hint so far that our authorization rested on the conviction that we would reach some predetermined end. If that was what the Chekist wanted, why choose Petrovich for the job? But it would never be wise to treat official discourse ironically in front of a member of the secret police—even if the secret policeman himself seemed to be deploying it for ironic effect.
“All right,” said Petrovich. “You wish we’d made more progress on the list you gave me.”
“What I was not expecting,” said the other man, “was for you to spend the time since I last saw you having your face pounded by those antisocial prisoners who burned their clothes. You look horrible.”
“Could be worse.”
“Fine. But you received clear instructions yesterday, none of which included these urki.”
Outside, it was still dark. To arrive at the time the Chekist had appointed, we’d had to get up earlier than the rest of Company Ten. Quarantine Company had still been calling its roll off between the churches as we made our way to Nikolski.
“Golubov is an old contact of mine,” said Petrovich. “I thought he might provide background. You never know where a clue will turn up.”
“And now you’ve sparked the attack on an agent of official business that the Administration Section has been worrying about for a month. You’ll have made things very awkward for me if word gets out.”
“I got my drubbing before he knew I was working for you. Involved our bad blood outside, nothing to do with Infosec. In fact, he got helpful, a bit, once I mentioned your agency. You don’t need to do anything to Golubov.”
“I don’t intend to. Not before the time is right, anyway. And you, Bogomolov. You’ve been off chasing girls. You find that stimulating, do you?”
A bell of warm alarm rang below my throat. In this room, it did not feel safe to become the person of whom questions were asked. “Fitneva did have a relationship with Antonov. And she denied it at first. That’s worth looking into.”
“Impressive. You have discovered that Antonov was not in fact a holy fool, but was motivated by the same instincts and appetites that drive the rest of the species. For me,” the Chekist continued, turning back to Petrovich, “it is an axiom that the religious are hypocrites. Do you really believe this is a good use of the time granted you?”
“I’m not ignoring the men you’re interested in. We talked to one of them last night. Zuyev. I only want to keep all avenues open.”
“And what do you believe Fitneva’s avenue to be?”
Petrovich didn’t flinch. “The only thing more common than a dispute over a woman in the murders I’ve investigated has been vodka. And vodka is like air when it comes to murders. Not everything is a conspiracy or a plot. Sometimes a man gets hit over the head because someone found him under the wrong
blanket.”
“That is your theory? That this—” The Chekist broke off. “What is his name?”
“Boris Spagovsky.”
“This Spagovsky broke Antonov’s skull out of jealousy?”
“I don’t have a theory yet. I’d like to know more about him. According to Fitneva’s floor mistress he’s a lamb, too innocent for the world. Once I explained we were investigating a murder she was at pains to make it clear that no one in her little circle could possibly be involved. She even about-faced and doubted that her Veruchka would ever have taken up with anyone like our Antonov.” He chuckled and ran his hand over his mustache, showing the spots and veins on the back of his hand. “Listen, I told you yesterday. Your list of these officers isn’t promising. The signs we thought might have appeared haven’t turned up. It’s possible you had bad information.”
“Yakov Petrovich,” I said. “Are you forgetting Nail Terekhov? He was on the list as well. His murder counts as a sign, surely.”
The two men stared at me for a long moment. Coal hissed in the Chekist’s stove.
“Of course it does,” Petrovich said roughly at last. “But that side of things is being investigated via Infosec’s methods, not mine. I can’t say what anyone might turn up about Terekhov. But I think there’s good reason to believe we can break this thing open just by figuring out what happened to Antonov. To do that, Fitneva needs to have the screws put to her. Spagovsky needs to be questioned. There’s also the matter of Vinogradov, the museum director. His being away on Kostrihe has delayed us. We ought to know why he wrote Antonov that pass the other night. That would help us start tracking his movements the night of the murder.”
The Chekist frowned. “I believe I recall you saying he would return to the kremlin in a week.”