by James L. May
“Ever meet her?”
“No, never. He would sometimes ask for a pass through Nikolski, and I assumed it meant they had arranged a liaison. It was not the sort of thing he and I discussed.” He turned to me. “Perhaps, now that I have written you your pass, you will be willing to tell me how you learned about my involvement in their arrangement?”
I cut Petrovich a look to let him know he should keep his mouth shut. “That’s not part of the deal,” I said.
Vinogradov frowned, but nodded. “I should not be surprised that Antonov left a record somewhere. He certainly knew the collection well enough to notice anything missing, if he’d cared to look. And I begin to suspect that I understood his motivations less well than I’d thought.”
“That’s between you and your memory of Antonov,” said Petrovich. “For us, only one more thing. That list of icons you two disagreed about. The ones you had him make that you were going to fulfill the requisition with.”
“Yes,” said Vinogradov. “You found it in his desk.”
“Tolya says you were correcting him—that he’d added valuable pieces to the list, things you weren’t willing to let go.” Vinogradov nodded. “So you crossed those out and added things you didn’t care for as much instead. What did he say about it?”
“Nothing I remember.”
“He didn’t argue? Try to explain what he’d been thinking?”
“No. I had been surprised at a number of his choices. I recall bringing the list with my alterations out to him at his desk. I believe I explained my aggravation at having had to tutor him on his own subject. I’d have preferred to be able to rely on his expertise.”
“You’re saying he was cowed?” said Petrovich. “He said nothing back?”
“No,” said Vinogradov. “Nothing.”
29
To reach the Herring Gate, at the north end of the western wall, you turned left from the museum’s doors. The cathedral was a white presence on the other side of the courtyard, its burnt towers only half there through the snow that had begun to fall.
“You were quiet in there,” said Petrovich.
“My hand hurts,” I said. “I didn’t get any bread this morning.”
Our boots squeaked on the path. “I didn’t think going back to letting me do all the talking was what you had in mind when you explained your plan,” said Petrovich.
“You didn’t seem to like what I said to Zhenov.”
“You were a little harsh. But you’ve handled Vinogradov with the right touch. Seems he almost trusts us. We’ll see how much good it does, but it’s better than I’d hoped.”
I recognized the tone, avuncular and teacherly, from before. But knowing he had been the slug who betrayed me gave his words a rotten, saccharine sound. “It’s already done us good. I got the pass.”
“You’ve done a lot. But we’re still a long way from solving this case. I can’t do the rest on my own.”
“I came to you yesterday, remember? You were the one who wanted to continue sitting in the KrimKab office until they’d finished me off and arrived to put a knife in you.”
The old man sighed. “Tolya, I am trying to help. You came to me for my experience. I’ve seen young men in your state before. Maybe not with the self-amputation, granted. But police work means late nights, stresses. Time away from the family. Danger. A green officer isn’t always ready for it. I see it in you. Feel you’re at your limits, don’t you? Your friend, your finger, your exhaustion. But you’re young, strong. You’ll keep working, same as my young men on the force kept working. You’ve got reserves you don’t know about.” His voice hardened. “So find a little blood in yourself and buck up. Otherwise it will only be me working this case for us. Frankly, I doubt that will go well. I need you. Neither of us can stop now.”
A little blood in myself. I considered informing him I’d found some yesterday, using a hatchet. But he was right. It cost me another sick moment to let myself admit it.
“The supplies,” I said through a dry throat. “You asked Vinogradov about them. What were you trying to find out?”
“Good,” he said. “You’re with me.”
“Tell me about the supplies.”
He made a noise in his throat. “I don’t know what I was trying to find out. Not exactly. Only it occurred to me last night. Alcohol, gold leaf: those make sense. But why take three ounces of turpentine? Who here has a use for it, outside of that museum?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. Something to ponder on.”
We’d arrived. The gate was down a short alley from the courtyard. Before we approached, Petrovich asked to examine the document Vinogradov had given us. It looked different than the one from the Chekist. That had been a printed form, multiply stamped, signed and initialed in six separate places. Vinogradov, as we’d seen, had only torn a page from a notebook and written a short note on it. At the bottom, beneath his signature, was the stamp we’d watched him use. It read “Solovetsky Museum of Anti-Religious and Historical Exhibits” in indigo ink—nothing more.
“What are we going to do if they don’t let us through?” said Petrovich.
“What do you mean? You said Veronika sent word.”
“She did.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
“Maybe nothing. We’ll see.”
A shaft through the wall, with a set of studded wooden doors at the end: that was the Fish Gate. Its arch was so low that standing was impossible. Only with difficulty did Petrovich move through in the necessary crouch.
A monk waited in the dark space beneath the wall, seated on a stool and wrapped in a heavy blanket. The man was ancient, even older than Petrovich. He had a finely drawn, even noble-looking face. But the teeth in his thin beard had rotted away, leaving brown stumps behind. Instead of a greeting, he made the sign of the cross over us both, but his expression was fearful. When I made to hand him our authorization from Vinogradov, at first he waved it away.
“No, no,” he said. “Nikolski for the laity. Not here.”
“Brother Kiril was to have arranged for us to be let through,” I said. “Kiril, who works at the fishery.”
“It’s a sin to lie. My door is pledged to brothers.”
“I’m not lying, and there’s no need for you to lie to anyone either. We’re allowed in and out of the kremlin as we like. See? These are our authorization papers.” The tunnel was not bricked. The raw stones of the wall hung around our shoulders, huge and cold. “Kiril spoke to you, didn’t he?”
The old monk looked sullenly at Vinogradov’s note for another minute, but at last he took it. His thin lips moved as he mumbled over the thing until, rising and shaking his head, he pulled a large key from the pocket of his robe.
With the gate thrown open, you could see through to the bay, with the horizon and the sky gray and indistinct behind it. I stepped through and straightened up, Petrovich following. The door boomed shut.
We were out. The snow here moved differently than it had in the kremlin.
“The girl was as good as her word,” said Petrovich, clearing his throat. “I have to say, I’m a little surprised.”
“What?”
“We need to talk to her again.”
“She’s saved us. Both of us. It was only what she gave me about the missing rizi that made Vinogradov do what we wanted.”
“You have another lead in mind for us to follow, then?”
In truth, the course I’d charted for this new stage of the investigation proceeded only to the edge of the kremlin’s walls. Between my exhaustion and hunger, I’d barely given a thought to what we should be doing next. “Kologriev,” I said, for lack of any other idea. “We can confront him with what we’ve learned. What Golubov told us, and the bribe from Vinogradov.” It sounded lame, even to me.
“Hard to put any pressure on him that
way. He’s only going to say he refused. He has nothing to hide.”
“I just talked to Veronika. That would be a waste of time as well.”
He watched me with all his blue-eyed sharpness. “Listen, Tolya. I noticed you left her out of the story you told Vinogradov. I understand: you’re grateful to her. But what she told you—it hardly advances the case, does it? She gave you exactly nothing that would help us discover who killed Antonov.”
“Say what you mean, Yakov Petrovich.”
“Her note promised something we could use. She’d have known revealing Vinogradov’s bribe wouldn’t have kept me from going to Spagovsky.” Out in the bay, the wind slid tiny ripples over the water’s smooth surface, their movement deadened by particles of ice. “There’s something she’s still not telling.”
“She didn’t have to help me.”
“To you it looks that way. To me, frankly, it looks like she told you just enough to make you go away, the way she’s been doing all along. I’ve told you from the start, she’s a canny woman. She knows how to play a man.”
I shook my head, but it brought me up short. From the start Veronika and I had struggled over how much she’d say—how much I would be willing to make her say. And she’d had the better of it—of me—throughout, ever since she’d first caught me staring at her. Had our wrestling gone on, even yesterday, as I threw myself on her mercy? I’d let myself believe it hadn’t, that it had ended when she told me about her brother.
Another mistake of the literary model, perhaps. Sherlock Holmes made it easy to believe in understanding. Hadn’t we figured each other out? I’d taken it for a process of deduction, each of us following a trail of clues that proved the other could be trusted. That is not far from the schema of the mystery story, always finally a tale of insight. Holmes, after all, never fails to know the mind of his criminal by the end of the case.
Or do I portray myself as more high-minded than I truly was? Pinkertons provided more than just cerebral thrills. After he’d finished off the foreign hordes or scar-faced hoods who menaced them, dames regularly swooned into the arms of the King of Detectives. You experienced it all along with Nat. You turned your face manfully away from the frippery of romance with him—nevertheless, you were aroused. Over those pages, a boy could dream his dreams of the love of beautiful women, embarrassing and incomplete, with nothing to challenge the fantasy.
Perhaps I only trusted Veronika because it flattered my childish vanity to believe she’d warmed to me.
Those are not the dreams of a zek. A zek must learn to dream of bread. What was it Petrovich had said? Investigations were a matter of finding out secrets, and then using them. Nothing else. Veronika hoarded her secrets like the rest. She had used one secret to deflect me from another.
I pictured her bruised face as it had looked while she wrapped the tourniquet around my arm. She and Mitya would practice tourniquets on each other when they were children, she’d said.
“All right,” I said to Petrovich.
My voice sounded strained. Snow continued to fall around us, each flake a coordinate in a billowing grid. It came to me that they defined a manifold. The term was a modern one, but it encompassed such non-Euclidean spaces as Lobachevsky had explored in his imaginary geometry. Movement within a distorted manifold of three dimensions would not be the same as within our usual Euclidean space. A straight path walked over the ground, I reflected, would veer and bend wildly in the ideal realm laid over the island by the falling snow.
At the fishery Brother Kiril was making marks in a ledger when we came into the main building. Recognizing us, he smoothed his beard down over his filthy robe. When I thanked him for arranging things at the gate, he only shook his head. With some reluctance, he led us down a set of stairs and beneath the porch that jutted out from the front of the fishery to the pier.
There Veronika was at work, stirring a giant pot over a low fire. The overhanging porch provided some shelter and caught the smoke. For a dozen feet out from shore, the water was a frozen white sheet.
She had tied her hair up in a brown scarf. In my memory, a dark curl hangs prettily out from beneath it beside her face, but whether that image is taken from reality or my desires is hard to say. To be on the safe side, you should picture no curl, only the tight kerchief, severe and dull. I am certain that was there.
After a vaguely disapproving clearance of his throat, Kiril left us. Veronika glared at Petrovich, then turned to me. “Here you are. Both of you. Frankly, bringing the old man makes me suspect I’m going to be sorry I didn’t let you bleed all over the floor,” she said. “Are you going to make me sorry? Maybe now that you no longer need my help, you’ve returned to pretending I killed Gennady Mikhailovich.”
“Yakov Petrovich thinks you still know something you haven’t told me,” I said.
Petrovich chuckled, a sound like pebbles rattling. “Yes. Who killed Antonov isn’t something we pretend to know. Not yet.” He raised his cane, looked at its head as though it were a curiosity that had just caught his attention. It was a performance, a piece of acting done for effect. He could be good at that, when he wanted to be. “But the reason we’re here is that I was a detective for a long time. After you’ve done the job for thirty or forty years, you start to notice that when something connects all your subjects, except for just one of them that’s left out—well, it pays to search for that final link in the chain. In this case it’s the icon requisition I spoke to you about the other day. Seems to be connected to everyone around Antonov. Everyone but you, that is.”
Veronika gave him an icy look. To me she said: “Things must have gone well for you after we spoke, for you to arrive here once again. I see someone bandaged you up properly.”
“Nothing does any good if we don’t solve the case,” I said. “Those men are still after me.”
She gave the concoction in her pot a vigorous stir. It smelled of tar. Fragments of bark floated in the dark brown liquid. “If I wasn’t at least neutral towards your solving this idiotic ‘case,’ I wouldn’t have prevailed on Kiril to let you use their gate. I don’t see why you ought to be so suspicious of me.”
“Just answer his questions,” I said.
“Oho! Is that how things are to be now?” she said. “By doing you a favor, have I licensed you to be hard with me?”
“The icons,” said Petrovich. “You still insist you don’t know anything about their requisition? When we got your note, I thought you might want to share something about them. Maybe something dubious you learned through Antonov.”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that.” Both of them looked to me. She was right, I was hard. My face felt like stone. “It was what I told Bogomolov yesterday. About Vinogradov, the accession numbers.”
“Of course. Probably you saved Tolya’s life. He’s grateful, and so am I. I’d have been sorry to see him killed. My question is, why didn’t you tell us before?”
Between her eyes, the crease deepened. “What do you mean?”
“What was it about the accession number that made it so important to you to withhold it? Why not come out with it to start with? We could have been friends instead of enemies.”
“It would have meant giving up a bit of knowledge that might have been useful to me. And I thought you were slugs. What was the benefit going to be to me, or to Gennady Mikhailovich posthumously, if I shared all my secrets with Infosec?” She pursed her lips. “Even if there had been a benefit: to hell with the Cheka, and with SLON.”
“Perfectly reasonable. But in that case, what changed? Why tell it to Tolya yesterday?”
“You’d already extorted it out of me, hadn’t you? I was ready to talk when I sent the note.” She glanced at me again, wary. “And it looked like Bogomolov was on his last legs. My heart isn’t a stone.”
He chuckled again. “You are ready with the most plausible-sounding stories. But the fact is, I don’t belie
ve you. Tell her what we know about the coffins, Tolya.”
My voice sounded like someone else’s. Veronika listened. Petrovich had told her about the requisition order five days ago, but the icons having been knocked together into coffins surprised her. When I explained how Zhenov was connected to both the coffins and the executed men they filled, her face stiffened.
“What do you think this has to do with Gennady Mikhailovich?” she asked at the end.
“The men they shot. They said they were planning an escape.” I looked over at Petrovich. My tone was even. “And Infosec had Yakov Petrovich helping them investigate Antonov for involvement with an escape. He didn’t know that’s what they were doing at the time, but they thought he had something to do with it. You see what it means? The icons and the executed men. They both go through Antonov. And he was out of the kremlin looking for missing repair supplies for icons when he was killed.”
Even if I’d aimed to say less, I think I would have had to go on the way I did, just to watch the knowledge progress across her face. She had noticed the change in the way I was talking as well: she listened guardedly, attentively, and then with dawning horror. Her pink nostrils flared. It was like watching a heavy curtain blown by the approach of a storm.
Yes, I watched her closely. But, then, how can I still be uncertain about that lock of hair?
I said: “The escape and the icons are connected. The missing supplies. Something about all of that got him killed.”
She shut her eyes for a long time. I was about to say something else—whether it was going to be consoling or bitter, I don’t recall—when she swore. “Fuck.”
Petrovich gave one of his laughs. “You do know something about it, then.”
When she opened her eyes they were dry. “Damn it. An ‘escape attempt.’ That is the right term. I don’t know what it should have had to do with the Whites you mention. Anything I try to do here comes out wrong.”