by James L. May
“It was—” I shook my head and began again. “Things have developed. The situation—”
“Christ, are you bleeding?”
The wounded hand had come out of my pocket. Drops of my blood were bright on the floor. Somehow the sight focused me. “I need you to tell me what your letter mentioned. What you thought we would find helpful.”
“What happened to the old man?”
“He’s no longer on the case.”
“And you are, in this state?” She was cagey, waiting for me to answer. The swelling in her cheek brightened the eye peering over it. “You’re telling me you’re in charge of finding out who killed Antonov now?”
I’d planned, back when I had ten fingers. The plan specified that I was to go to Veronika Fitneva and get from her the promised information along with a pass through the Herring Gate. What it did not specify was how. Somehow I hadn’t considered that Infosec’s backing might have been the only thing that made her willing to help us. Faced now with a choice between the truth and a lie, I settled on the lie. “That’s right.”
“I see,” she said. “Infosec has delegated its authority to a twenty-year-old student with no Party connections. And in the course of your investigation, you had an accident, and then you thought, ‘Say, I haven’t been to see Veronika Fitneva since she wrote that letter. I’ll just stop by before I get this stitched up, see if she’ll provide me free passage in and out of the kremlin while I’m at it. Won’t take a minute.’”
There was nothing to say to that. We looked at each other, and she pursed her lips. “Let me see your hand.”
Her fingertips were dry and light. The throbbing in my arm made them hard to feel, like being touched through a rubber glove. Even so, I winced.
Her face changed when she saw the finger wasn’t there. She examined the wound, not touching it or the moss Panko had dressed it with. It was like disgust, I thought, the pity that flickered over her features.
“It’s still bleeding,” she said. “Take off your coat and pull up your sleeve.”
I sat down on the barrel she pulled over. Navigating the wounded hand through my coat sleeve proved difficult. Every catch of moss on the wool was agony.
She was staring at my bloody sweater when I looked up, but when our eyes met she shook her head and turned away. “Close your eyes,” she said.
When she told me I could open them again, she was tucking her sweater back into her trousers and holding the blouse she’d been wearing underneath. From a cabinet, she retrieved a small knife. Scoring the fabric first, she ripped a band of cloth three or four inches wide from the garment’s bottom. Without the blouse, her neck emerged naked from the sweater’s collar.
“You did this to yourself?” she said as she wrapped the band around my forearm.
“Yes.”
“The blood on the sweater is yours?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“The old man’s?”
“No. A friend.”
She surveyed her work. She’d tied the cloth in a light knot, just above my wrist. “It will be better than nothing. Just a minute.”
She rummaged in a nearby barrel, coming up with a slat that might have been split from a shingle or an old board. She tied another knot over it, then gave it a dozen hard twists. The cloth tightened, and my hand began to tingle immediately, though the pain didn’t go away. It wasn’t like numbness. The balance I’d skewed by cutting off my finger had been adjusted again.
“Hold this.” While I held the slat with my other hand to keep it from spinning loose, she tied three more knots to fix the whole assembly in place. Then she examined the moss again. “There. That’s the best I can do for you. I can’t tell if it’s stopped the bleeding, but it should be slower, at least.”
“Thank you.”
“You should see a doctor. They say it’s not good to wear one of these too long.”
“Thank you.”
The scent of her body, not quite too faint to notice, rose from inside her sweater. Her breath tickled the hair on my arm. “You’re in some trouble,” she said.
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
I reminded myself that I’d trusted Petrovich too quickly. Her helping me like this didn’t mean she had my best interests at heart. Don’t let my infatuation interfere with the case, the old man had said. But then, I had needed the help, and I would need still more. What option did I have, other than to trust her?
“We lost our permit,” I said slowly. “The investigation—they called it off. There was much more to it than—than I’d imagined. The Chekist who gave us the permit thought Antonov was involved with something with a set of White officers. Petrovich thinks it was connected to those executions the other day somehow. They think—Infosec thinks—I may have had something to do with it, too. That’s why they brought me on the case. To see whether I’d give anything away when Petrovich looked at the clues.”
She was unmoved. “What are you doing here, then?”
“I was sent back to Quarantine Company. My friend—” I indicated my sweater, using the right hand. “The men who did this to him were coming for me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It must be related to Antonov. His name was Foma. They stabbed him with a—with a chisel. We’d switched. He was in the bunk below mine. I—” There was a bubble in my chest that might have broken if I’d gone on.
“So this was your way of getting away from them,” Veronika said. “A few days in the hospital are worth a finger?” When I nodded, she sighed. “And what does any of this have to do with my convincing Kiril to let you use the monks’ gate to get into the kremlin?”
“In and out. It has to be both. The guards at Nikolski, they were … hostile to us already. Then our contact in Infosec had them stop us. He waited for us at the gate, with them. I can’t go in and out through there. They’ll know me, report to him. But the Herring Gate—”
“I see. But they’ll never let you through without a pass, you know. The monks won’t lie. Uttering a falsehood is still a sin, even if it’s lying to our jailers. That and the fish are the only reason main Administration trusts them even to the degree it does.”
That I hadn’t known. It gave me pause. “Maybe I will be able to get a pass. And if I do—you can convince your Brother Kiril to tell them to let me through?”
“I doubt it.” She leaned back against the worktable as she watched this sink in, her palms against its edge. With her chin she indicated my hand. “I’ve never done that for a real wound before. Mitya and I—my brother—we’d practice tourniquets on each other when we were children. We liked stories about explorers being carried back to camp through the jungle or the tundra after accidents.”
I waited. Cradled in my lap, the stick of its tourniquet protruding awkwardly, my hand was less like itself than ever. I tried to think how to get what I wanted from her.
She said, “We were very close, Mitya and I. We shared a flat as adults. Had all the same friends. When I had translation work, I would always have him read it over when I was done, even though his French was much worse. After they arrested him, I knew it was only a matter of time for me. It was a kind of relief, maybe, when they finally came.”
That flock of birds that were her face had flown up while she spoke, an unreadable cloud. Now, as we watched each other, they settled again into a guarded expression. Above us, a window through the gabled end of the wall let in weak light.
“You cared for Antonov,” I said. “I don’t think you had anything to do with killing him.”
“I’ve been saying that, haven’t I?”
“All I want now is to find out why he died, who killed him. If you know something, you can help me. Infosec had some other motive. You were right to think so. But I don’t.”
She pushed herself away from the table, turned away from me. “I cared for him
. Why should I care about finding anyone? Revenge is for little boys.”
“They came for me once already,” I said. “Please. Whoever’s after me, whoever killed my friend Foma—they can only be trying to hide who killed Antonov. Finding it out is all I can do against them. The hospital will buy me a night. Two at most. It’s my only chance.”
“You’re telling me that if I don’t do what you’re asking, my fine first-aid work will go to waste?” She let out a large breath, then turned to face me again. “All right. All right. Other than not wanting to be involved, I suppose there’s no reason for me not to help. I don’t know whether what I know will do any good for you.”
Looking into her eyes, I could barely distinguish the pupils from her black irises. “Your letter,” I said, my voice catching. “You wrote you had something.”
“Something, yes. It’s less a clue, maybe, than a piece of leverage. Or maybe it is a clue, I don’t know.” She was talking more quickly now, as if, having determined to tell what she knew, she was in a hurry to get it out. “You understand my work assignment? How I got here?”
“We were never sure. That woman Stepnova thought someone, maybe Antonov, had arranged your transfer.”
“‘Arranged my transfer.’ That’s decorous. You’re right, better to bracket the question of how these things are arranged. Looking too close is not very flattering for anyone. What really happened was that a bribe went to someone in Administration, so that even though Boris had bought me from Alexandra Stepnova, I would get a job that made me less available to him and a little more available to Gennady Mikhailovich. Of course, Stepnova was irate when I didn’t go to clean Boris’s house and warm his bed full-time. No one is so irate about corruption as a madam who has made all the proper arrangements.” She smirked. “At any rate, the bribe was a piece from the museum’s collection. I can give you the accession number.”
“Antonov was stealing from the collection?”
“Not him. His boss. A man named Vinogradov.”
“Vinogradov? The museum director? What did he have to do with it?”
Her eyebrows arched, another expression distorted by her bruises. “You know him?”
“I’ve met him. He is—was—part of our investigation.”
“Well, maybe you were onto something, then. He and Gennady Mikhailovich had an arrangement.”
“Which was?”
“My reassignment, for I-don’t-know-exactly-what. A favor to be named later. I got the impression Vinogradov liked having his men owe him. Anyway, he took care of the whole thing, from making the arrangements to providing the bribe.”
“Whom did he bribe?”
“That I can’t say. I don’t think Gennady Mikhailovich knew either. Maybe someone in the Fisheries section.”
“How did you find out about it—the arrangement?”
“Antonov told me. He never said exactly why the deal with the director worried him, but it did. He wanted me to know what Vinogradov had done—a kind of insurance, I suppose. I don’t know how he figured it out, but he was able to tell me the accession number. I was to threaten to take it to someone high up in Administration, in case I ever had to negotiate with Vinogradov on my own behalf.”
“Why would you have had to do that?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Sometimes Gennady Mikhailovich seemed worried that things would sour between them.”
“But you haven’t renegotiated with Vinogradov. Not even when we came to tell you Antonov had been killed.”
“Why would I? There hasn’t been anything to suggest my position was at risk—not yet. Reporting his little misappropriation would make him unhappy with me, for certain. I’d rather not provoke him unless it’s necessary. Should I have risked my position here, just on the chance he was the one who’d hurt Gennady Mikhailovich? Which makes me think: I expect my name to be kept out of it, if you take this to anyone, understand? If anyone asks whether you heard this from me, I’m going to deny it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. My throat felt parched. “I’m grateful.”
“All right, then.” She shoved herself up onto the edge of the table again, sighing. “The accession number is 7-dot-38. That’s all I know. I can’t tell you what it actually is. Who can say what the price for removing a woman from servitude and getting her put into a fish house with a pile of monks’ nets is? I like to think it was a jewel-encrusted crown, but that’s probably not right.”
There was nothing to write the number on, or with. I repeated it to myself: 7.38, 7.38. Once I thought I’d memorized it, I asked: “Do you think Vinogradov could have killed him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why he would have. But Gennady Mikhailovich was worried about something. Maybe it was Vinogradov! Maybe you’ll find out that Antonov incurred a debt on my behalf that he couldn’t pay, and the nefarious museum kingpin had him killed.” She threw up her hands. “Then it would turn out it was my fault he died all along, just like your Petrovich wanted. But I can’t say. I’ve told you everything I know about it now.”
I watched her face. “Why didn’t you want to move into Spagovsky’s place? Why take up with Antonov at all?”
The laugh was the brilliant, warlike one she’d favored us with so freely when we first questioned her. It ended with her tapping her bruised cheek. “Weren’t you there the other night? You know that wasn’t the first beating. Do I have to explain it to you?”
“I was there. I heard.”
I’d made her angry. “Why are you asking, then?”
“When Petrovich and I first talked to you, you said you liked Spagovsky.”
“You think I like being beaten up?”
“I don’t know.”
Those expressions of hers—that flock of birds. They’d have pecked my eyes, if they could. Sometimes when I remember that conversation, it seems like only a series of silent looks, separated by empty sounds. Even missing my finger, even under threat from the chisel that had opened up Foma, there was still a corner of my mind in which how she looked at me was all that mattered.
“All right,” she said at last. “I like him, sometimes. It doesn’t mean I like the beatings. It doesn’t mean I have to like liking him. The fact I like him doesn’t mean I can’t like anyone else. It doesn’t mean I want to be his slave. Antonov … he offered something else. I told you, he was gentle. He was an artist. Why wouldn’t that be appealing? Why shouldn’t I come here and see what happened if I was away from Boris?”
“All right,” I said.
Nothing about her had relented, no part gave in. She spoke more quietly, her voice folded in on itself, but intense. “Gennady Mikhailovich would be the one who this would happen to. It’s what I was telling you about him when I saw you last. He was going to put it before himself, no matter what—the image he wanted to see. Whether it was wrong, or rash, didn’t matter. He was an artist. It was what I liked him for, but you can’t do that here and expect to survive. That’s something to remember.” She’d looked away. When she turned back, she gestured at my hand. “You need to go and have that dealt with. I told you, you’ll lose another finger if you leave the tourniquet on too long. Go see a real medic.”
“The monks at the gate. You’ll talk to Kiril?”
“I can make you no promises. Where should I send word, if he agrees?”
“The infirmary. Not the hospital. The infirmary inside the kremlin.”
“Fine. You should go there right away.”
It was hard making myself stand up from the barrel, but I did. We did not shake hands, did not touch each other again. She stood apart as I left, leaning back against her table, hugging herself.
My hand didn’t feel better. I told myself I was getting used to it.
25
What they say is true: you do feel pain in the missing part. Even now, as I write this thirty years later, the ghost of my
finger throbs. It stabs dully with each heartbeat. My hand with its shortened digit, the stump still pink and raw-looking, lies alongside my pad of paper. A reminder of what survival costs.
I was sufficiently discerning to identify the price, then, and canny enough to pay. Now, I wonder. Has old age dulled my instincts? Life makes demands of those who would avoid being ground to bits in its machinery. Have I deluded myself into believing those demands could be less cruel, less rigorous than they truly are? This writing, the late-night conversations, the pickles shared, all that has transpired since my assignment to this building: have I been the idiot all along? The men at the plant have begun to talk about Vasily-the-tank-commander. Vasily Feodorovich is overstepping the mark, they say. Vasily Feodorovich risks damaging Party unity.
The man himself remains stupid as ever. “Every Party member has an obligation to criticize,” he says. “He criticizes the mistakes of the Party manfully, just as he criticizes his own. You don’t understand, Anatoly Pavelovich, for the very reason that you’ve been kept forcibly out of the vanguard of socialism. Comrade Khrushchev’s speech marks a new era. The time when all that was accepted was toadyism and eyewash is over. What’s needed now is the truth.”
In the spring, shortly after that speech, four young physicists elaborated somewhat on Comrade Khrushchev’s ideas at their local Party meeting in Moscow. They dared describe the scale of imprisonment, of killing. Workers should be armed, they said. Only then could they be sure of protecting themselves from a berserk Party.
These scientists were crucified in the press, fired from their jobs. When I point this out to Vasily, he only says, “Yes, but they didn’t send them to the camps, did they? And in the past what they said would never have been reported. This means there is approval of their ideas at the highest level, even if support can’t be shown openly.”
Vasily Feodorovich is placing his own concerns above the Party’s. Isn’t that the true definition of the Cult of Personality? These remarks are not addressed to me. They are the sort of thing I overhear, one Party member speaking to another. The few of my fellow workers, marginal as I am, who might care to address me, say, Stay away from that one. He’s a danger. The head of wheat that pokes up above the rest of the field gets lopped off.