by James L. May
“Five nights from now, according to the man he left in charge at the museum. It’s too long to wait. I know you want us to hurry.” He leaned forward, both hands bearing down on the head of his cane. “That’s why we need you to order him to come back here and talk to us. You can do it, can’t you? Send someone. Tell him Infosec requires him to come back to answer some questions.
“I can,” the Chekist said. “But I won’t. Vinogradov’s friends are powerful. And I don’t care to use up my store of goodwill in the service of an investigation being prosecuted in as leisurely and haphazard a manner as yours is.”
Petrovich cleared his throat but didn’t say anything. The Chekist continued: “Interrogate the men on the list I gave you. All of them. Make them talk to you. Only after that are you to proceed with your investigation of anyone at the museum, of this Spagovky or this Fitneva. You will report back here in two days.” He pulled a date book from an inner pocket of his jacket and consulted it. “At 10:30 sharp. I expect to hear of concrete advances in the case. Otherwise you’ll return to me the documents I gave you and resume your normal work at that time. Your investigation will be over. Understand?”
I rose, anxious to be gone, but Petrovich stayed stubbornly in his chair. “That’s your final word?”
“Yes. Get to work.”
We left.
The old man held on to my arm as we went down the path from the shack. “All right,” he said. “All right, I’m surprised. I’d thought he would give us more time. Apparently he’s not so respectful of my approach as he made out.”
I waited for him to say more, but he looked lost in thought. The electric lamps along the road had been turned off, but it was still dark. Only the faintest hint of dawn showed me his face.
“I’m sorry I brought up Terekhov,” I said. “The two of you seemed surprised I mentioned it.”
“No, that was fine,” he said distractedly. “That was good.”
We reached the road.
“What will we do now?” I asked.
Petrovich shook himself, cleared his throat again. Then he said: “Things are getting more and more urgent. He wants two things that are impossible together: for us to go down his list, and for us to produce results. I wasn’t lying to him when I said I thought the list was a waste of time. But whether it helps the case or not, it has to be done. It would be more than our skins are worth to refuse.”
He heaved a wheezing breath, settling down on his cane. He’d been making a good pace so far this morning, but I could tell he ached. “So that’s what I’m going to do. If there’s any time, I’ll follow up with Fitneva. We still have to follow our best leads, or we’ll be sunk all the same.” He looked up at me, his face hard to read in the dark. “That’s why you’re going to go to Kostrihe. If we can’t bring Vinogradov to us, someone has to take our questions to him. I’d never make it there and back in a day. But you can handle the walk, and you performed well with Fitneva last night. You’ll do well enough on your own.”
17
By the time the sun cleared the horizon, I was trudging south. Last night’s clouds had dropped their snow and disappeared; the world was a glass box filled to the brim by the sounds of my steps and breath. Only when I stopped for a moment could I hear axes and the drone of saws, somewhere off in the forest.
Sometime earlier I’d crossed the dark, frozen ray of a canal. Now, following the road to the top of a low bluff, I caught a glimpse of the sea. Here the water was still water. Only a sluggish flickering near the shore suggested crystals forming.
The air was bitter, painful and inert in my lungs. On days like that, you labor in the morning’s grip for each breath. As the last pools of darkness evaporated, sky and ground turned fragile lilac, a spreading facsimile of warmth. Pines cast their pale shadows over the snow, interrupted at intervals by stands of ash and birch. Where the road ran near the water, these were gracefully doubled over, like ballet dancers. They all bowed in one direction, trained as they grew by the force of the wind off the sea.
What was it, that morning, that brought Solovetsky’s beauty to life for me? I hadn’t slept, and after the meeting in the Chekist’s shack, I ought to have been worrying about being sent back to Quarantine. I ought to have made plans for smuggling what remained of Antonov’s ration back into the cathedral, or schemed about how to turn my interlude in Company Ten into something more permanent. And then, of course, the landscape should have bored me, the subarctic vistas worn me down. They had been spread before me every day since my arrival on the island, without a break.
But no. Today—today’s scenes were new. And the visit to Kostrihe would not have to be repeated tomorrow. These trees, this snow, these canals: none of it was freighted with the fear of seeing the same image every day for the rest of my life. I could let my mind wander—had Veronika known what I meant when I mentioned swimming in the Neva the night before? Would Antonov have seen the line of her wrist in the arched birches, the way I did?—and I could experience as a kind of frisson, rather than a handicap, the ambivalent sensations my reflections raised?
I’ve written that it was a labor to breathe in the cold, and that is true. But I was walking a straight line to an unseen location, one outside my normal round. At least I didn’t have to feel I was taking the same breath over and over again. I was an arrow fired from one point to another, and the snow painted white symmetries for me on either side of my path.
It was something like five miles to the cape. No one had made any effort to clear or manage the snow, but as much as possible I walked where sledges and footsteps had packed it down. As the road took me farther from the kremlin, these marks of prior passage made less and less difference. By midmorning I was tired and had to stop to readjust the wrappings in my left boot.
It was not until ’27 that the flimsy bast shoes, which caused so much frostbite, became standard issue on Solovki. At the time of Petrovich’s and my investigation, most of us had valenki. The beaten felt boots were warm enough. With a pair of galoshes, they would be waterproof—that was what Genkin, back in Company Thirteen, had been so eager to capitalize on when he asked me to get him rubber. Otherwise, all that kept your feet dry was the snow’s being too cold to melt much.
We’d received ours earlier in the season. Naturally, a nobody like myself had not had his choice of the supply. By the time my work platoon entered the washhouse to claim them, the giant pile had been picked over. I’d found a right boot close to my size and without too many worn-thin places, but there was a small hole in the sole of my left, near the ball of my foot. I’d padded it with rags. For some time I’d felt them loosening with each step.
I brushed off a fallen log and sat. The wind on my socked foot made me shiver. After that I walked along with less of a sense of possibility.
Sometime before midday, I plodded among the sparse trunks of a few final trees, then stepped out onto the cape, a white expanse stippled with stone and brush and framed by saltwater. The trees had petered out, but off to the west a line of them kept me from seeing the whole of the promontory. Stands broke up the view to the south as well.
The wind had died while I walked, the day growing overcast. A fine icy haze drifted inland from the sea. When a seabird’s loud cry pierced the gloom, it was a surprise.
Vinogradov’s camp was nowhere to be seen. Petrovich and I had visited Ivanov briefly at the museum before I set off. The Anti-Religious Bug was not thrilled to see us, but he’d showed me a few places on a map where I might look for Vinogradov. The cape was about a mile wide, and that long again. “These stone arrangements he’s studying are found at several sites,” he said. “Can’t say which one he’ll have decided to camp by. The director’s going to make the arrangements that seem best to him.”
I started by following the western shoreline. Beneath the snow the ground was rocky, with boulders strewn here and there as if carelessly dropped. The clusters of low scrub I step
ped among cast no shadows in that wide gray noon.
I’d circled around the butt of the cape and begun coming up the other side of the trees before I noticed smoke trickling into the sky from a campfire. At some distance, three tents stood at the woods’ edge, sheltered by some birches. They were low affairs, sides heaped with snow. I could see a few figures among them, one standing and moving, the others seated.
Setting off in their direction, I came around a stand of scrub and found a man crouching over the earth. He squatted strangely, tense and ready, like a marionette or an ugly bird. The hem of his belted peasant coat brushed the ground. When I said, “Oh,” he stood and turned.
The face he showed was strange as well. Beneath a furred ushanka, the features might have been pinched or molded into the ball-like head. Half-lidded eyes moved behind the round lenses of a pair of wire glasses. The thin lips turned down at the edges of the mouth, never quite forming a frown.
“Yes,” he said. An acknowledgment, not a question. I might have been the next person in a queue. “What can I do for you?”
“I am—excuse me, I’m looking for Nikolai Vinogradov.”
“Yes.”
“You are—he?”
“Yes.” A tidy rectangle of mustache centered itself beneath his nose, the bubble in a spirit level. He gave the impression of having been distilled, drop by drop.
“Excuse me,” I said again. “I expected to find you at your camp. My name is Bogomolov. Your assistant Ivanov said you could be found here.”
“You’ve come a long way from the museum.”
It seemed abrupt to launch into the interrogation here, out in the wind. But Vinogradov gave no sign of being about to invite me back to the camp. He looked like nothing so much as a man who wanted to conclude this distraction and get back to his work.
“Yes. I—we—have a few questions for you. About an—an important matter.” His features were utterly still. “I am sorry to tell you that Gennady Antonov is dead.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “You’ve come to talk to me because of his work at the museum.”
“That’s right.”
“It is sudden. I spoke to him before I left the kremlin. He was quite well.”
“Yes. He died two days ago.”
“And here you bring news of his passage into the underworld to the mouth of the labyrinth. The ritual of stone age man recapitulated in our modern era.”
I blinked. “I don’t—”
He gestured at the ground. Where he’d been crouching, a rough circle of some twenty feet had been cleared in the snow. Within it, a pattern of stones, also brushed clean. They were uniform, none more than a foot high, packed close together in arcs and curls. They made a spiral.
Or not quite a spiral. The form teased you. At any given point it was simple, but the principle of the whole’s construction never made itself obvious. The path your eye traced seemed always to be turning away from its expected destination. Now inward towards the center, now out to the edge, now nearly back to the point where it had started. On one side the pattern divided into two lobes or leaves, while on the other it looked like a simple series of concentric circles.
At a height of about two feet, thin ropes were strung between four stakes. The ropes met at right angles, dividing the whole into quadrants. They were an addition of Vinogradov’s, obviously, something to do with his work.
“This is a figuration of the city of the dead,” said Vinogradov. “Not merely a depiction, you understand. An image with the power of the thing it represents. Man has always wished to dictate the lower world’s structure. Here on Solovetsky they tried to do it with the arrangement of their labyrinths. They are designed to confuse and trap the souls of the departed, to keep them from returning to torment the living.
“What is puzzling to modern archeology, however, is that all of the apparent tortuousness is false. In these structures there is only ever one path, looped back on itself—no chance of a wrong turning, you see? One cannot become lost. But perhaps the dead are easy to fool. Some believe structures like this are modeled on primitive fish traps. The fish swims in, and is only prevented from swimming out again because it lacks the intelligence to realize it must go back the way it came. If the dead are like that …”
He trailed off, and was silent for a moment before he continued. “It seems the island itself was a kind of marginal space for these ancient men. An outpost on the border between our middle world and the lower world of the dead. An image for our own state as prisoners of SLON, perhaps. Gennady Antonov has crossed the boundary on which we all exist.”
His hooded eyes flicked once, from my cap (I’d returned Petrovich’s watch cap to him) to my boots. In his right hand were a little book and a pencil, which he now transferred to the pocket of his coat. “And there is something unusual about his death. Otherwise bringing news of it to me here on the cape would not have been worth the trip. Forgive me. I am dismayed, of course. It is unfortunate. He was a man of rare skills, and he had been with us for some time. My plans for the collection will have to be entirely changed. How did it happen?”
Lulled by his discourse on the labyrinths, I almost said. But that would have been giving too much away. Petrovich had been quite explicit: I wasn’t to tell the museum director anything about the circumstances the body was found in, or about the cause of death.
“That is what we are hoping you can help us discover.”
“An inquiry, then. The matter is very serious. Tell me, on whose behalf is it being made?”
I explained about Petrovich and Infosec. I’d had to leave the investigation authorization back at the kremlin, but Vinogradov didn’t ask for it. The old man hadn’t thought he would.
“And your name is Bogomolov,” he said when I’d finished. The glasses perched on the bridge of his nose as though balanced there. “Perhaps I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
“I knew Antonov. Sometimes I came to the museum to watch him work.” He considered this for a moment, then nodded once.
The night before, I’d had to improvise my list of questions for Veronika, doing my best to ask what Petrovich would have if he’d been there. This time the old man had had me commit an ordered list to memory. I started down it. “Can you think of a reason anyone might have had to hurt him?”
“No. I would have described him as an inoffensive man. He was killed, then? Someone did this?”
I didn’t see any point in equivocating about it, Petrovich’s advice notwithstanding. “So it appears.”
Vinogradov frowned. “I see.”
“You can’t think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt him? Maybe someone at the museum? There might be jealousy or competition about the work.”
“No,” he said. “Nothing of the sort.”
“He never mentioned any danger to you?”
“No.”
“Was there anything out of the ordinary about how he acted recently, or about his work? Did he seem worried?”
“He did not. I would not have said he had been acting any differently than usual.”
“Can you think of anything we should know about him, then? About his life here on Solovki, or before? Anything out of the ordinary might be a clue.”
“Gennady Mikhailovich was a man worth talking to, but not the type to discuss himself when he could be discussing his subject. I know very little about his life apart from his work.”
The next question gave me pause. It would have been a mistake to bring her up, but Veronika was in his background. Anything related to her made me doubt myself. “He would never have mentioned a relationship with a woman to you, then?”
Vinogradov pressed his lips together. He took, then released, a large breath through his nose. “No.”
All of this was as expected. We’d asked the same questions of Ivanov and Sewick, with the same responses. The crucial moments,
which Petrovich hoped would advance the investigation, were still to come. But there was some context to be provided first. “How did Antonov come to work at the museum?”
“Ah. In that he was unusual. Most of those I employ are referred to me—I am known as someone who will find places for members of the intelligentsia—but he presented himself. Once he’d described his training and experience, it was immediately clear he would have to work with the collection. There are few enough men with his expertise in Russia. At SLON he is—was—quite unique.”
“Most of his work was restoring icons, then. Did he do anything else?”
“Basic maintenance work. Ensuring the pieces were stored safely, things like that. Some identification and cataloging. The records of the monks are not always clear about dates of acquisition. The artist responsible for the production of a given piece is not always known. At my direction he undertook a few archival research projects of that sort. But for the most part he simply worked on the damaged or faded pieces.” He looked away. Annoyance flicked across his face, the first emotion I’d seen on it. “The work plan for all of the religious paintings will have to be altered.”
He hadn’t mentioned the requisition order, but that would have been an irregularity, not a normal part of Antonov’s work. I was meant to ask about it at a later stage anyway. The bird I’d heard when I stepped out onto the cape called again. It made a sound like a gull’s kee-kee-kee, but lower, harsher. It sounded predatory. It was time for the first of my difficult questions.
“Can you think of any reason he might have had to be outside the walls three nights ago?”
“He was found outside?”
“Yes.” Leaving out what we’d discovered at Nikolski was purposeful, but it didn’t depend on Vinogradov not knowing about the body. Either way, if he didn’t mention the pass he’d written, we’d have something on him. Petrovich had instructed me to watch him closely, even if he came back with the right answer.