by James L. May
Vinogradov himself sat at a wide desk, on which papers had been marshaled into neat stacks and arranged, along with a few bibelots, around a central blotting pad. Behind him, a window looked out on the dark bay. I’d passed a steaming samovar in the hall, and he held a cup of tea and a saucer.
“So. Bogomolov.” He indicated the folding metal chair in front of him. “Tell me again what the number was.”
“7.38. The card in your catalog says it refers to a pair of silver rizi. Icon covers.”
He blew on his tea. “Is that right? And what is your interest in them? Earlier you were asking about requisitioned icons.”
“I have it on good authority those rizi are not to be found in the museum.”
His eyes narrowed. “When an item leaves the collection, either because of damage or for any other reason, its card is removed.”
“But not if you don’t want it known that it’s gone.”
“What do you mean to say?”
“You traded them away. To someone who could arrange a work transfer for a woman named Veronika Fitneva. A favor for Gennady Antonov.”
The china clinked as Vinogradov slowly put the cup and saucer down. “I see,” he said. His face expressed nothing, as though everything in it had been arranged to balance around the square of mustache on his upper lip. “When we spoke on Kostrihe, you seemed to suggest I was a suspect in Antonov’s death. Am I to take it that you are presenting these purportedly missing items from the collection as some kind of evidence against me?”
“You’re still a suspect. But no, that isn’t what this is.” I took a breath. Petrovich knew where I was, I reminded myself. It was go forward, or return to the infirmary and die. “What it is, is a threat.”
So much, after all of my straining and thinking, for modeling myself on literary detectives. With this I removed myself from their side of the page. Blackmail existed in the America of Nat Pinkerton, the London of Sherlock Holmes, true, but it was not a tool put to use by protagonists. Rather than a detective, a blackmailer was most likely to be a murderer—or, indeed, a victim. I could remember more than a few publications in which the investigator uncovered a killer, only to overflow with forgiveness when it was proved that the unfortunate had committed her crime (it was usually a woman) against a base extortionist. Pinkerton’s visage, with its broken nose framed by its medallion at the top of the page, stared down in disapproval at creatures like myself.
But what, really, was the appeal of such a story? Surely that the reader enjoyed two dark secrets for the price of one? In order to be forgiven, after all, the killer must endure the very fate she killed to avoid. Her first shameful crime must be exposed (at least to the reader) to expiate her later one. Perhaps Pinkerton had more in common with the blackmailers than I’d have liked to believe when I was a boy.
“From you,” I continued. “I need a pass that will allow me and my partner to move freely in and out of the kremlin. And a safe place to sleep. Tonight, maybe tomorrow. If I don’t get those things from you, I’ll tell Infosec I know the number of certain items misappropriated from the museum collection. I imagine their audit will turn up others in addition to 7.38.”
His face didn’t change. “I understood you to be conducting your investigation under Infosec’s authority already.”
“We were. We’ve … fallen out of favor. The pass we were relying on is no longer current.”
“Why would they change their attitude towards you? Something you did?”
“It doesn’t matter. What you need to understand is what I am telling you will happen with these rizi, if you don’t do what I say.”
The cup and saucer clattered as Vinogradov slapped his palm down on the surface of the desk.“Yes. You are making a threat, you tell me. I have chosen not to eject you from my office immediately. Do me the courtesy in return of explaining the situation I find myself in. I want to know why you are no longer working for Infosec.”
I could see the intensity in his expression now. It seemed best to answer. “Something we found out, maybe. The truth is, we don’t know. They didn’t explain, so now finding out is part of the case. The best guess is that we turned something up that someone with pull didn’t like. Someone who could have our patron take us off the case.”
“Then you are still pursuing the killer? But without any official sanction.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I tried to think of how much to reveal at this point. “Certain signs indicate the murderer doesn’t like how much we’ve found out so far. Whoever he is, we already know he’s capable of violence. If we’re going to be secure, we need to finish the case.”
“And you are still working with the man who sent you to me before.”
“That’s right. Yakov Petrovich. His name goes on the pass along with mine.”
Strange, the sorts of things you remember about such a moment. Vinogradov held my life in his hands. He might very well have destroyed me. My threat had been real, but it was hardly so dangerous that I could be sure of him. He could have refused. And I? I’d have died.
And yet, when I look back on that hour spent in his office, what I see in my mind’s eye is the painting that leaned with the others against his filing cabinets. Cubist, modern, brown: aggressively not one of Antonov’s icons, but somehow reminiscent of them. My glance kept returning to it. Behind its refractions and doublings was a face, certainly. The reflected and re-reflected features—multiple eyes, multiple nostrils, a bouquet of narrow mustaches—had a familiar molded quality to them. But this was only on the left side. On the right, curves and rounded surfaces arced through every plane that could be imagined out of the flatness of the canvas. Light coming from all directions at once glinted on some hard substance that could not have been flesh.
I never saw the piece again, after that night. It is certainly beyond my examination now. But I believe the painting was of Vinogradov, half his face obscured by something—a plate, perhaps—he held up to cover it.
“And why do you believe you are in need of a safe place to sleep?”
“I was transferred back to Company Thirteen. Last night there was an attempt on my life there. I expect another tonight.”
He paused, thinking, then said: “Won’t you be missed in Thirteen, if you aren’t there at curfew?”
“No. I’m meant to be in the infirmary. But staying there isn’t safe either. They’ve found me already.”
“The infirmary? Are you ill?”
Yes. A plate, hiding a human face. Something ceramic, flat, and round. Or was it flat? The bristling perspectives made flatness hard to tell from depth. Perhaps it was a plate—perhaps an earthen bottle.
I took my bandaged hand from where I’d been holding it in my lap. Placed on the desk in front of us, it looked misshapen, swollen with wrappings and lopsided without its finger. “No, not ill,” I said. “Desperate.”
Vinogradov looked, then took up his tea again. “This is the result of the attempt on you?” he said over the rim of the cup.
“No,” I said. “Self-inflicted. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to get away from them, to come to you with this, if I’d been confined to Quarantine. Luckily for me, my work group was using hatchets today.”
“You are very determined.” He sat back in his chair. Light from the alcove lamp glinted in his glasses’ lenses. “But coming to me is not without its risks. I am one of the parties of suspicion in the case. What will happen to you if I prove, after all, to have been Antonov’s murderer? I would have to be the one behind your attackers as well, wouldn’t I? In that case, you would seem to be putting your head into the lion’s mouth.”
The cold one feels in moments like this, I’ve been told, comes from the hormone adrenaline. I tried to ignore it, and watched his face instead. He gave nothing away.
“I am assuming,” I said, “that if you killed Antonov, o
r had him killed, you’ll simply refuse my offer. In that case I’ll go to Infosec with the information I have about your missing silver rizi and do what I can to have you sent off to a penal cell. You will continue with whatever strategies you’ve already put into motion to rub me out. You wouldn’t want me to be done in here, since it would be too easy to trace back to you.” That wire of cold adrenaline moved into my chest, inexorable as logic. “However, if you do decide to mislead me, there’s little I can do. Then it will be Petrovich who goes to Infosec, with news of my death to add to our information about the rizi.”
Vinogradov pursed his lips minutely. “A very comprehensive account. You aren’t reluctant to carry out such a daring plan? By your account, there is significant personal risk.”
“There’s nothing daring about it. It’s the safest bet I can think of to make. If there were a better one, I’d make that. But the probability of my surviving the night is worse in any other situation. It would be stupid not to face the risk.”
He laughed, a neat, bloodless ha. “Both determined and admirably pragmatic,” he said. He picked up a pile of envelopes, which he began sorting deliberately. Something warned me not to interrupt, and it continued for some time. Eventually he opened a drawer and deposited the greater part of the stack inside, arranging the remaining three or four letters in a neat stack on the edge of his blotter. The face that looked up at me was hard.
“I have not agreed that there is anything at stake in item 7.38 beyond a mislaid bit of cataloging, of course. But you are correct that I would prefer not to have attention directed to our operations here. I suppose no group head wishes to have his work checked by Infosec. At the same time, I have no desire to set myself at cross-purposes with my colleagues in that section. That is what I would seem to be doing, if I were to grant your investigation my authorization after they’d withdrawn theirs. Why should I choose the difficulty of helping you over the difficulty of being harassed by you?”
I exhaled. This I was prepared for. Petrovich and I had discussed the plan at length in between visiting Zhenov and coming here, and had dwelt on this moment. If it came to Vinogradov asking what was in it for him, the old man said, then I had come through the dangerous part of the conversation. There was a ready answer.
“Because I can help you protect the rest of your collection,” I said.
“Protect it? What does it need protection from?”
“The icon requisition I was asking about—it was the second you’d had to fill, wasn’t it? There’s something suspicious about them. If you do nothing, the time may come when you find yourself having to fill a third, fourth, and fifth.”
Vinogradov absorbed the idea silently. He said: “We spoke the other day about the missing gold leaf.”
“Yes. That focused our attention on it. Antonov had left the kremlin under your orders to recover it when he was killed. But there’s more to it than that.” The chair creaked under me as I leaned forward. “You’ve heard about the executions?”
“Ivanov has just informed me of it. According to him, they are saying it was an escape plot.”
“Right. And the plotters—the supposed plotters—were all White Army officers, and all acquainted with a man named Valery Zhenov.”
“Zhenov …”
“He signed your most recent requisition order. He’s Anzer Division’s subcommandant for supply. He operates a warehouse outside the kremlin, and sent the icons from there up to the cabinetry workshop.”
“I recognize the name. What do these friends of his have to do with my icons?”
“The coffins for the execution were built on Anzer by special order of Infosec. Where do you think they got the boards?”
At that his face finally moved more than a fraction of an inch. “Coffins?”
“Right. The requisition only made it through Administration because they needed them ready for the men they were going to take out to the cemetery. Zhenov doesn’t seem to have known anything about who was going to be shot. But he’s connected to the icons in two ways, you see? Either he’s lying, or someone else is up to something.”
“Or you’ve discovered a coincidence.”
“But there’s still more. Infosec was pushing us to connect Antonov to this escape plot as well. We were given a list of sources to follow up on when we began our investigation. Every one of them was rounded up among the supposed escapees.” I paused to consider how much of Petrovich’s secret I wanted to reveal. “And my partner and I know that Infosec had Antonov under surveillance before he died as well. It has to have been that they thought he was involved.”
Vinogradov sniffed. “Antonov part of an escape? I hardly find that believable.”
“I agree. In fact, we weren’t able to verify his connection to anyone on the list. Infosec may have been wrong. But just the fact that they suspected him connects him to the icons in a second way. It connects him to them as coffins, just like Zhenov.”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “That is strange. I wouldn’t have expected it.”
Vinogradov sat, still undecided, his doll’s-head considering atop its gray shirt. I had one more piece of evidence to push him with. But I hesitated, thinking of Veronika. “There’s more. Antonov … preserved the accession number of those rizi. He did it because he thought you might be moved to revoke the woman Fitneva’s transfer, or maybe to do something else against him. Something was making him cautious. At least he thought he had a reason to mistrust you. Maybe you have a better idea what it is than I do. To me it suggests he was up to something you wouldn’t have liked.”
“Perhaps,” he mused. “But tell me: how did you come to learn this suspect accession number recorded by Antonov?”
The man was perceptive; he’d put his finger on just what I wished to hold back. And the temptation was there, I could feel it: to give Veronika up would show I was on his side, an ally. That was what I needed, wasn’t it?
But I could still see her face, features flying. And she had helped me, when I had no one else.
“That is my affair,” I said.
“If you insist,” said Vinogradov after a moment. “Exactly what is it you are suggesting, then?”
“I don’t know. Not exactly. But there is something off about these requisitions.”
More silence. Vinogradov’s black eyes didn’t leave my face. Finally he said: “All right. I will write the pass in the morning. Tonight you may sleep here, in the museum. We cannot make you very comfortable, but I don’t imagine you will mind.”
There were not many details to iron out. I’d left it with Petrovich that I’d come to tell him the results myself, so he could be sure nothing had happened to me. He was to have checked at the infirmary in the meantime as well, to see whether Veronika had sent word that we could use the monks’ gate.
Vinogradov promised that he and Ivanov would wait in the museum until I returned. As we went out through the sanctuary, I mentioned my worry about being recognized down in the courtyard, and he beckoned to Sewick. “Lend Bogomolov your coat and hat, Johan Martinovich,” he said.
“My coat? Now then—well, I mean to say, I don’t see—”
“You’ll have it back shortly,” said Vinogradov. “Do as I say.”
With the green collar turned up around my ears and the cap pulled down, I felt safer, but still I did my best to skulk around the edges of the yard. Alleys, walls, high windows, and snow. There were fewer men on the paths now. I passed two, but neither seemed to look at me. Nativity I gave a wide berth, as well as the infirmary.
Petrovich was waiting for me at the door to Company Ten. “Tolya!” he said. His gravelly voice quavered. “You were gone a long time. What happened?”
“It’s all right. I’m staying there. I found out what Item 7.38 is. A pair of silver rizi.”
“That’s good. We can proceed, then. There was a note from Fitneva at the infirmary. She says the Fish
Gate is all right.”
The guard on the door watched while I explained the rest. It didn’t take long. We agreed he would meet me at the museum in the morning, and I left.
Sewick accepted his clothing back resentfully. The leading questions he asked about my conversation with Vinogradov were, I thought, cursory, and he left as soon as I made it clear I wouldn’t say anything. Soon Ivanov and the director appeared out of the latter’s office. They nodded good night and departed down the stairs, taking the lamp and locking me in behind them.
Alone, finally, but blind, I felt my way around the sanctuary, stumbling among the desks. The windows were shut. Twice I checked to be sure Ivanov had turned the outer door’s key, then put two chairs in front of it for anyone who came in in the dark to stumble over. I’d watched Vinogradov himself lock the doors to his office and the storage area. When I was sure the sanctuary was secure as it could be, I lay down next to Gennady Antonov’s desk. In the cold, pregnant blackness of the museum, I pillowed my head on a stack of books I’d come upon as I ran my hands over the museum’s surfaces.
I cradled my wounded hand to my chest, protecting it as best I could from whatever I might do to it in my sleep.
28
What I feared has come to pass. Just as I have achieved a measure of safety in my story, today I find that the book itself, and I the author, are in danger. It is a disaster.
Last night I laid down my pen and fell into bed. Slept. Dreamed. Awoke sweating, tangled in sheets, the sun in my face. Rode the bus to the plant as usual. It was as we filed in that I began to hear the news, first-shift men muttering it to the arrivals as they clocked in. The talk was of the morning’s meeting of the Party bureau.
Vasily Feodorovich has been purged from the Communist Party.