by James L. May
“She didn’t respond well to threats from Spagovsky,” I said. “I don’t think it will be any different coming from us. She’s stubborn.” It was true: she was more than stubborn. A beating wouldn’t scare her. Hearing myself say it made me realize that if I didn’t like the prospect of her withering looks, I liked even less the possibility of her allowing herself to be destroyed before submitting.
“Rather you were allowed to work your charms, would you? I’m afraid we don’t have that long to wait. I told you before, it could take you years to catch her up.” The old man chuckled. “Let me worry about the methods, Tolya. You only have to listen and keep your eyes open.”
The next morning was clear again. Freezing winds spun the day past quickly; gray clouds scudded across a pale blue sky overhead. Zhenov and the men at his warehouse would need to be questioned again, obviously, but Petrovich thought we should start our search for the missing gold leaf at the museum.
Ivanov’s eyes widened only slightly at what the bruise was doing to the old man’s face, though it had certainly acquired new shades of purple and yellow since he’d seen it yesterday morning. By this time he seemed to have grown used to helping us, and when we asked for any material he might have related to Vinogradov’s expedition, he produced a file from his desk marked “Kostrihe.” Inside, memos from Vinogradov detailed the plans. There were copies of receipts for supplies, as well as carbons of two letters arranging permission for Vinogradov and five assistants to be away from the kremlin, addressed to Camp Director Nogtev’s office and copied to Deputy Director Eikhmans. The earliest memo was dated September 8. “As you see,” he said, “the director’s expedition had been planned for more than a month.”
“What about this gold leaf?” said Petrovich.
Ivanov knew Antonov had had some, but hadn’t heard about it going missing. It would have been in his desk somewhere, he assumed. If we hadn’t seen it when we searched the other day, then, as the director said, it wasn’t there. He couldn’t say exactly who had known about it; that Antonov had used leaf in his work was common knowledge. When Petrovich asked whether there wasn’t some kind of inventory where the things being issued to Antonov would be recorded, Ivanov looked unhappy but nodded.
He disappeared into the director’s office, then returned from a hallway towards the back of the sanctuary with a slim black ledger, which he laid open before us on his desk. “There.” A stubby finger pointed to a line that read Sept. 3: 1 book (25 sheets) leaf issued Antonov. He flipped back a few pages. “And here.” June 28: 1 pint spirits and 1/3 pint turpentine issued Antonov. Both had been marked Missing Oct. 14 in the rightmost column. “That’s the director’s writing.”
Petrovich turned back and forth between the pages and reread the entries slowly. Without looking up from them at Ivanov, he said: “You think it’s plausible one of the men who came for the icons took these things?”
“They might have,” said Ivanov slowly. “We didn’t think to take precautions. And they had to pass Antonov’s desk to reach the staircase to storage.”
Another search of Antonov’s desk turned up nothing new, and we weren’t able to tell where the leaf or the solvents had been stored. The rest of the morning we spent questioning the other men. As Ivanov had said, most were aware Antonov had worked with gold, but none admitted to knowing it had gone missing.
Petrovich asked a number of them about the day of the icon requisition as well, without producing much of interest. The men from the warehouse had been up and down from the courtyard a good deal, carrying the pieces a few at a time out to the sledges they’d brought, but it hadn’t taken long. No one had noticed any of them take anything from Antonov’s desk. None of them were men that anyone had recognized or seen before. Johan Sewick attempted to reconstruct the morning for us at some length, but in the end he said the same thing as everyone else.
Before we left, Ivanov escorted us down into the museum’s storage area, explaining that the requisitioned icons had been stored here before the men from Anzer Division came to collect them. A set of stairs at the back of the chapel led down to windowless rooms that must have occupied a space in the wall just to the side of the Holy Gates. Here Vinogradov’s collection resided: a wealth of crates stamped with numbers. A few pieces of furniture had been draped with white sheets, and a row of cases with sliding drawers had been lined up against one wall.
The icons were stored vertically in racks constructed for the purpose, each wrapped in a white cloth bag. Covered that way, there was something funereal about them, like shrouded bodies stacked in a crypt. When we took one out and undraped it, the lamp showed a haloed saint busy before the wooden gates of a city, appealing to the Virgin Mary and an infant Christ for a blessing.
As so often with the icons of Antonov’s I’d seen, I felt there was something peculiar about the piece’s composition, something that eluded me. Mother and Son peered down at the scene from an ornate red patch in the panel’s top left corner, as though the ivory sky had peeled away to reveal a crimson heaven behind. Past the city’s walls ran a ribbon of blue hatched with white—a river—and the saint had planted his slippered feet on a brown disc that appeared to float in the middle of the stream. What the disc represented was hard to tell—perhaps a clod of earth or a round stone—but with it and him done in much larger proportions than the river or the city, the bearded figure resembled nothing so much as a gigantic circus bear on its ball. Why the ball? Why the filigree in Christ and Mary’s red ground? Why the strangely regular undulation of the river’s banks?
Even answered, such questions would mean nothing for our investigation, of course, and I couldn’t think of any others more productive. After Petrovich had turned the icon over and rapped a knuckle against its wooden back—indeed, it was smooth board—we wrapped it up again. Back in the chapel proper, the old man stopped at Antonov’s desk to run a hand over the surface. “I don’t know. It isn’t in the middle of the room, but it’s out in the open. You’d expect someone to notice a stranger rooting around.”
But the icon had pushed the details of the case from my mind. With the field cleared, there was nothing to keep worries about Petrovich’s intentions for Veronika at bay. She was never far from my thoughts in any case, and shame over what he planned to do to her had been stabbing at me from around corners all morning.
It should not have surprised me to be shown his character in a new light, but it did. I’d known there was a core of something canny in him underlying the bluster and the hectoring, something wry and knowing. Now I saw that it was not only canny, but ruthless.
The fact of the matter is that I never did get to really know the old man. There wasn’t time. Our acquaintance ran its course over just eight days. That was how long it took to conclude Antonov’s case.
Eight days will allow you to begin your mental portrait of someone—I began several of Petrovich, with each of my later efforts painted over an earlier one that had come to seem entirely incorrect—but it isn’t enough to make the face resemble your subject more than superficially. Our glimpses of others’ characters are fleeting. It takes many to build a comprehensive picture. As if you were rendering a face whose features—the curve of a cheek, the bridge of a nose, the left eyelid—appeared only intermittently, out of the dark. Assembling fragments like that into something remotely human is painstaking work. Often enough, even after much careful collection and collation, the image that emerges is monstrous anyway. Why should it have surprised me to learn Petrovich was willing to see Veronika’s ribs broken again, if it meant we got our man?
This conceit is drawn from portraiture, of course. That wasn’t Antonov’s sort of painting. He would have thought of these things differently. The details of the face, he would say—he would have called it “the physiognomy”—are unimportant, merely a gate through which passes a higher, diviner truth. I will never, he says, come to true understanding of Man or God while I persist in this false concep
tion of the Image.
But he is confusing my metaphor. Very well, there is purported to shine through a man’s face a kind of truth, which some call his soul and others his personality, and which makes sense of how the face looks. But it isn’t the face I need sense made of. I am asking the more concrete thing to stand for the more abstract one—the face for the personality.
Petrovich’s actual face is tediously clear to my memory: mustached, floridly bruised, the one open eye flat, sharp, and above all, blue. I don’t require anything shone through these features to be satisfied. It’s the inner man who’s remained fragmentary and vague. So, all right then, Gennady Mikhailovich, if the soul unfractures the physiognomy, what unfractures the soul? If some higher truth is expected to redeem and complete the passing accidents of Petrovich’s character, which are so hard to assemble into one man—well, fuck your mother: what is it?
No, the only images of others available to us are the ones we produce ourselves, from the materials we are given. And I was never able to create anything satisfactory from the gleanings the inspector from Odessa afforded me.
What about Antonov’s voice, the one I carry on the argument with? Why should I retain a confident version of that, when I knew him barely longer than I did Petrovich?
I can’t say.
At the Anzer Division warehouse, the only sign of the accident we’d witnessed three days before was the block and tackle having been removed from the crane in the front. Zhenov looked askance at Petrovich’s face, then blanched and patted his hairline with his fingertips when we told him his men might have taken something from the museum.
He wrote out a list of the warehouse’s fifteen workers readily enough, but couldn’t say which had been assigned to go for the icons that day. “Ivan was in charge,” he said to Petrovich. “He might remember.”
“Fine. Get your men together. We’ll talk to the ones who were with him. The others can help search the warehouse.”
“You don’t suspect these stolen goods are being stored here?”
“Plenty of spots to hide something in a place like this.”
“Well, I doubt—that is—” Zhenov was taken aback. “Forgive me, Inspector, but the disruption of our work a search would entail—”
“I showed you our documents before, didn’t I? I think your operations can be interrupted for an hour on Infosec’s authority.”
We waited downstairs while someone rounded up the workers. Zhenov fidgeted. I’d been sure to take off my cap when we came inside this time, but the subcommandant still managed to vent his anxiety by lecturing me on follicular analysis: “Even if your working schedule won’t permit daily region-by-region sweeps with a comb, there are other methods. For instance, along with my more careful daily examinations, I place a sheet of newsprint over my pillow every evening before I go to bed. I record the hairs I lose during the night, you see? Of course, your data concerning location are less precise with this method, but it requires a minimum of effort.”
Kologriev, the foreman, arrived with the last group, a stub of pencil behind his ear. He’d removed his coat, but the blue shirt was once again buttoned tightly at the neck and wrists. It made him look like an oddly grimy priest. “You two,” he said, noticing us. “Fuck your mother, that was something with the winch the other day, wasn’t it? What’s going on?”
Zhenov cleared his throat. “These gentlemen have a few more questions about the requisition, Ivan. I will need you to come up to my office.” He raised his voice. “Those of you who went along to the museum last week to collect the icons—that is, the lumber order—will come and wait upstairs as well. The rest of you are to stay here. The warehouse must be searched. There may be an object hidden somewhere, a booklet of gold leaf. It is either to be located, or confirmed to be absent. You will work in pairs. Any suspicious behavior or attempt to keep this object hidden is to be reported directly to me.”
The men grumbled, and a dubious look passed over Kologriev’s face. He glanced at me, conveying skepticism eloquently, even with his beady eyes. But he followed Zhenov without complaint, identifying five others who had helped him with the collection.
“You stay here and help look,” Petrovich said to me in a low voice. “Keep an eye out—see whether any of them try to leave. No need to stop them, just note who it is. I’ll handle the interrogations.”
“What are you going to ask them?”
“What they noticed on the day of the pickup, and whether they know of anyone coming into vodka or money. Don’t worry, if there’s anything to get out of them, I’ll get it. You just keep your eyes open.”
Searching was slow. Snow covered the warehouse’s small, high windows, turning the morning light into blue shadows as we searched. And the place was too large to comb systematically: too many barrels might have been knocked open and resealed, too many crevices might have had a small book of gold leaf slipped into them.
It would have helped if the other men had been less wary. Zhenov’s order was carried out with little enthusiasm and many sidelong looks in my direction. Things improved a little when Kologriev came down and set the others moving, making a show of friendliness by partnering with me. We’d covered most of the obvious places by the time Petrovich and Zhenov came down from the office, but I couldn’t have sworn the booklet wasn’t squirreled away in some spot we’d missed.
The subcommandant was clearly getting impatient after sitting through six rounds of Petrovich’s questioning. “I can assure you, Inspector, my men and I will be on the lookout for any sign of your missing objects. But I fear there is little else we can do. I see no evidence that anyone here was responsible for their going missing.”
“We’re almost finished. Explain to me again what happened to the icons after your men retrieved them.”
Hurriedly, Zhenov ran through it the way he had the other day: the train, the ferry, the coordination by wireless. The icons had been transported directly to Anzer, not stored in the warehouse.
“And you visit Anzer regularly,” said Petrovich. “You’ve seen that the icons arrived at the cabinetry workshop as expected, then?”
The other man made a pained face. “Well, no. It was the wrong time in the cycle; I have not made an inspection since they shipped. In fact, my next trip to Anzer is scheduled for tomorrow.”
“So you’ll check on them then.”
“Just so. And the calendar says the workshop is to ship the finished product back here in four days’ time. I will have returned by then, to ensure personally that nothing has gone wrong on this end either. You can be sure, Inspector, that I have taken a special interest in this matter. There will be no more irregularities.”
“That’s fine,” said Petrovich. “Next place we need to look is your men’s quarters.”
Zhenov coughed. “Now, really, Inspector. I have many demands on my attention today. I regard this matter with utmost seriousness, of course, but …”
“Want me to take them, boss?” said Kologriev. “You could get back to work.”
Petrovich didn’t object. With Zhenov anxious to get rid of us, it was quickly arranged. The big zek led us out of the warehouse and into the cold. It was past noon, the sun high in the sky.
“Anyone try to leave?” Petrovich asked me.
“No, no one.”
Petrovich had emerged from his interrogations with a better picture of how the collection of the icons had gone, but little else. Each of the men told a similar story: two sledges, difficulty negotiating the stairs with the paintings, and no way to be sure whether anyone had been rummaging in one of the desks.
I listened with half an ear. I was still worrying about Veronika.
“We’re still going to the women’s dormitory this evening, then?” I said when he’d finished.
“No, not the dormitory,” he said. Kologriev glanced back over his shoulder, his interest apparently piqued by the mention of
women. The old man waved a hand “She said she’d be working late at the fishery with the monks. Something about a rush to finish the nets so they can be tanned. So, another hike. I don’t expect to find anything out to change that.”
Zhenov’s men had their quarters north of the kremlin, above what had been the monastery’s kvass brewery. The first floor, still full of tuns and barrels, went unoccupied; the men stayed on the second, in two large rooms intended for storage. The windows were few and small, the ceilings slanted. It had been a long time since kvass was brewed there, but a yeasty, sour smell lingered.
Their beds were worse than ours, but better than the ones in Quarantine. I spent a quarter of an hour down on my hands and knees, checking underneath them. Kologriev indicated which beds belonged to the men who’d helped him collect the icons, but I found nothing to distinguish any of them from the others.
While I crawled, Petrovich went through the men’s belongings. The old man unfolded the few articles of clothing stored on them, looked into a pair of shoes someone had managed to hold on to, and generally made a mess.
Kologriev leaned easily against the doorframe, watching the search. “The old man really knows what he’s doing, eh?” he said to me as I rose after examining a loose floorboard Petrovich had pointed out. “The two of you Infosec?”
“Not exactly,” said Petrovich, shaking out a shirt. “We’ve been deputized.”
“I’m only the assistant,” I said. “Yakov Petrovich used to be a detective.”
The two rooms were very similar, but one had two improvements the other lacked. In one corner was a chipped ceramic stove, unlit, clearly not original to the space. A widening scorch mark spread like a stain across the wooden floor beneath it. The chimney had been arranged so as to vent, not through the roof, but out a window, with a plank cut to shape to hold the pipe in place.