“Not like this. Not this much.”
“I don’t understand. The oil’s contaminated? Pig is selling contaminated oil?”
“No. You’re right. You still don’t understand. You don’t understand how evil he is. He’s putting it there on purpose. He’s not selling the oil. He’s using it to hide the radiation inside.”
“That’s it? That’s all he’s doing? Selling radioactive material? So they can poison someone? Like Litvinenko in London and the Polonium 210? The oligarchs are out to take over the world. Communism was out to communize it, religion to deify it, capitalism to capitalize it and scientists to quantify it. You’ve heard the joke about the definition of perestroika right? Where one man is demonstrating the meaning of the term to another? The man has two pails. One pail is empty and the other is full of potatoes. He pours the potatoes from one pail into the other, very satisfied with what he is doing. ‘But nothing has changed,’ complains the other man. ‘No, but what a noise it makes,’ says the first. That’s all this is. Noise. Not much different than you buying and selling contraband in the Deficit Exchange Club. It’s got nothing to do with us. Let them fight it out. All we have to do is keep out of the way. Tell him we don’t give a shit and he’ll leave us alone.”
“Do you know what a ‘dirty bomb’ is?” Magda asked. “We can’t leave this alone. We have to speak up. You want me to bury my head where yours is? And Pig knows it. I wish you could see him right now. He’s fucking purring, like a cat with a ball of yarn. He’s got us exactly where he wants us.”
“I can’t just go wandering around the camp asking people if they happened to see any illegal radioactive material lying around. I’ll look like that little bird in the book. You know, the one that goes around asking everyone, “Are you my mother?’”
“Nietsche’s Being and Nothingness?” Magda offered.
“No, that’s what it’s called, Are You My Mother? It’s the first book I ever read. My mother taught me.”
“You’re making progress. You’re talking about her now at least.”
“A long time ago, before my Dad was sent away to the camps for finding the wrong elephant, he took me to the Moiseyev Ballet. They had a special dance where two bears would come dancing onstage, locked together in a bear hug. Everyone knew the animals were fake; the fun was in watching a pair of dancers in bear costumes fighting to get loose from each other. At the end, after the wild, orgiastic climax, however, came the truth, a truth that left us gasping in shock: it wasn't two dancers at all, but only one, on all fours, in a trick costume. The attacks on Kolya, the sicknesses in the Clinic, confusion in the labs: they’re all one, part of the same game, a game potentially worse than the 9-11 attacks in New York.”
“I think you’re exaggerating more than a little bit.”
“You think so, do you? Do you know what a dirty bomb is?”
“Something that doesn’t explode so much as give off a lot of radiation? From what I understand, it wouldn’t kill all that many people even if it went off.”
“That’s right, it’s not really a bomb at all, it’s a radiation dispersal device. Most analysts believe that only a dozen or two people would die at most from the explosion of a dirty bomb. Take a dirty bomb of ten pounds of explosives and a pea-sized amount of Cesium 137. Not very big at all. Explode it on Manhattan Island. How many people die? Like we said, not many. But it would cause a huge effect on the economy and the living conditions of the contaminated area. It’s the terror, the disruption, the fear, not the casualties. Everything would shut down, the whole economy, transportation, medical services.
Radioactive dust will settle on people, roads, buildings. Winds will spread it even more. The sewer system and rivers more yet. Millions of people will panic trying to leave the area. How many accidents get caused? How many people die because they can’t deliver medicine, food or water? What’s the logistical plan for relocating so many people in such a short time? Remember Hurricane Katrina? This would be worse because people would be panicked. Environmental regulations require contaminated areas to be cleaned. 9-11 proved terrorists could destroy buildings in the middle of a city. With a dirty bomb, they could force us to do it ourselves on an even bigger scale. Decontaminating such large areas would be impossible. We’d have to demolish and abandon those parts of the city at our own expense. It’d cost trillions. The cost of blood tests for each person in the area alone would be prohibitive. The hospitals would be overwhelmed and shut down health care for all other reasons.
“In that incident in Brazil, decontamination took six months. The radioactive material created five thousand cubic meters of waste. More than a hundred thousand people demanded screening. Gross domestic product dropped twenty percent. The Chernobyl accident happened in the Soviet Union a year earlier. Again, not many people died outright. Decades later, the place is still abandoned, no one can live there. We tried cleaning it up for years and eventually just gave up.
“Put one on Manhattan. Another couple in Manchester, Milan and Marseilles. Maybe another couple in Mumbai, Manila and Moscow. What do you think would happen then? Still think this has nothing to with us? That it’s just noise that comes from pouring one bucket into another?
“That Pig is going to leave you alone knowing you know this?”
“He doesn’t know we know.We’re safe here.”
“We, huh? Thank you very much. When the Oracle shipped out a few extra packages from the warehouse to his family in Teesside, Pig knew. When Kolya was sitting in the office waiting for the document thief, they knew exactly what day he wouldn’t be there and broke in to take them. You went to the pig catcher, opened it up and drew off a sample didn’t you? Then, you came here. To talk to a physicist. Twice. Don’t kid yourself. Pig knows. I just figured something out. Why Pig hates me so much. ‘Cause I’m a physicist. It has nothing to do with the gulag or me being a whore. He’s scared of me. Scared ‘cause I’m one of the few people here who has the background knowledge to figure out what he’s doing. Yeah, we’re safe. Safe the way tuna fish is safe in the can.”
“And you still want to do this, knowing it’s not safe?”
“Sometimes you just got to unbuckle your pants and go looking for trouble,’” Magda quoted.
Snow looked at her, puzzled. “The Buddha?”
“Zorba the Greek.”
After he left, Snow struggled through the ice and slush back to his porta-cabin in the camp, passing Pig’s closed circuit cameras, let himself in the unlocked door, and sat stroking Scrotum’s belly, looking out the window and saying nothing a habit of his when he didn’t have anything to say. He was trying to think of Noyabrsk – of Kolya and Pig and Magda and terrorism and radiation – but his real thoughts were obsessed with depression, in the way subtitles roll along the bottom of the CNN screen. CNN: just as useless and soul destroying as depression. He tried reaching for his apathy, but it wasn’t there. What had Magda done to him?
“Cesium 137, hmm?” he finally said to the blissfully unaware cat. “Too bad we can’t put that in our mouth and eat it,”
“Where is Pig getting this stuff? The Cesium 137? It’s not something you can just go down to the Walmart and pick up. Or order online. There have to be controls.”
They were back in Snow’s porta-cabin, whispering, Magda and Snow, the lights kept down low, although there was no reason to think they were being watched.
“Barely. It’s use is fairly common. Like you said, it’s used in well-logging instruments for petroleum drilling all over the world. Hospitals use it in cancer therapy machines and blood stabilizers. Once it’s out there, no one controls those. Wait, are you seeing a connection here?”
“Oil wells? Hospitals? No.”
“Who has authority to purchase equipment for those two functions here, in this camp? Who orders the medical equipment? Who orders the drilling supplies?”
“I don’t know? The warehouse? The Oracle?”
“He just stores them. Who would be able to authorize either pur
chase and make it legitimate?
“Pig? The Doctor –“
“You can stop right there. No need to continue the list. Like I said, it’s not two bears dancing, it’s one. How much do you want to bet there’ve been orders put in for far more drilling and medical equipment than this camp needs? That the equipment is being re-routed, broken down and the cesium removed, then sold on the black market? The shit’s water soluble. All you’d have to do is dissolve it in a liquid, then think of a way to transport it unseen to where someone’s waiting. Precipitate it out and they’ve got their Cesium 137.”
“The pipeline. Using the pig to separate off a small batch of oil with the cesium dissolved in it. It travels all the way through Europe, right through Customs, with no one ever knowing. From there, you could even package it up as cases of motor oil and send it anywhere in the world. Listen to us. This is ridiculous. Who’d believe us? It sounds like a James Bond novel.”
“Proof. We need proof. We need purchase orders. Invoices. Orders showing where each batch of oil in the pipeline got sent. Records of who bought it and when. Pity we don’t know anyone with access to the records, huh?”
“They’re missing. Stolen. They made sure of that.”
“But everything’s backed up isn’t it? Electronically and in the archives? It has to be. It’s an international regulatory standard for the ISO certifications. If someone knew exactly what they were looking for…”
“Someone, huh?”
Someone found what Snow told them he was looking for…….. Since Snow (or Kolya, when he wasn’t busy dying and able to come into work) was the one who assigned the identifying numbers to document in the first place, he knew roughly where everything should be: the purchase orders for medical and drilling equipment, the lab reports on each batch of oil sent down the pipeline, invoices stating who each shipment was being sent to and for how much. It was a simple matter to flip through each section in sequence and note which numbers were missing and write them down. With the numbers safely written down on a notebook in his pocket, he walked over to the Archives Section and spoke to someone there. Someone got him to fill out the appropriate form. No one questioned his right to access them. He was simply filling in misplaced records. Someone went and accessed the missing records and made copies for him. Someone dutifully filed the originals back where they belonged and logged the fact that new copies had been made and distributed to Document Control.
And someone noted all this and told Pig, who had put a flag on the files in question to see if someone every showed up and showed an interest in them.
At two thirty in the morning, Snow suddenly woke. That wasn’t unusual. He often woke up near that hour, his mind churning, unable to shut off the what-ifs, the accusing voices that somehow always found a way to make things his fault. What was unusual was that he’d gone to bed feeling good. And woke up that way. There were no voices echoing round his head this morning. So what had woken him? Scrotum was perched comfortably on top of his chest. Nothing unusual there. He had to pee. That was it. It wasn’t Scrotum, but his bladder that had woken him. Without bothering to put on a robe or slippers (right! As if a cowboy would be caught dead in either), he padded along the trailer wall to the bathroom. He could see his breath rising in the frigid air. The first tinkle splashed back at him. The toilet bowl had frozen over. Stuffing his bare feet into a pair of felt overboots, he cracked open the closed door and went outside for a whiz. Scrotum jumped off the bed to join him.
Outside, the gas flares were lighting up the processing facility, the uneven orange glare helping him pick his way to an unmarked snow bank, the gases expanding in the cold air as the flames heated them up. The smell of rotting cabbage filled the air. Tracing his name in a steaming arc of yellow into the snow bank, the burning combustion of the flare, shrill and insistent as a jet engine reving for take-off, made sure Snow never heard the click of the cabin door as it locked firmly behind him. He was trapped outside in the sub-zero weather in his underwear.
His first thought was how embarrassing it was going to be when someone came out and found him in his gaunche.
His second thought was that didn’t remember setting the lock on his door.
Snow’s third thought is that it is not outside the realm of possibility that he was about to freeze to death.
His fourth thought is that he didn’t much care.
Luckily, Scrotum did. He went leaping through the snow and out the camp into town, not stopping until he reached Magda’s place, where he immediately set about yelping the strange baby-crying cat dirge that makes one teeth ache like chewing on tin foil. Magda took one look at Scrotum caterwauling outside her door, put on her winter clothing and rushed back behind the cat to Snow’s porta-cabin.
NOW
Of the six people grouped together in the Camp medical clinic (Snow, Kolya, Arkady, the Doctor, Magda, and Pig), five were still alive, one was clinically dead, one was dying of radiation poison, one was dying of life, and the other four were alive and well. For the moment, anyway.
Days had passed like a column of prison coats marching in a work brigade at a labour camp and there was still no change in Snow’s medical condition. During all those days and weeks, Magda had refused to cut her hair, Russian superstition holding that it was bad luck to shave or cut your hair when a family member was in bad health. After President Yeltsin had had triple bypass surgery, for example, his wife had signalled the nation that the operation was a success by getting her hair done. So, for now, Magda’s hair remained wild and uncut. Snow felt like more than family to her by now.
“Why did you do this to him?” Magda demanded of Pig. Her consternation revealed itself one star at a time.
“Me?” Pig sneered back, radiating hate, paranoia and distrust like a wood stove. “Why did it have to be anyone? Maybe he did it to him himself.”
“What are you saying? Fill your boots, man.”
“That it wouldn’t be a surprise if he stepped out in the cold in his underwear on purpose. Everyone knows he hasn’t been well.”
Looking at Pig, Magda decided he looked like a fat grub. The image gave her a secret strong enough to sustain the conversation. “The psychiatrist has him on medication. Counselling. He was depressed, not suicidal. He has comfortable rolling around inside his depression, not looking to die.”
“That’s not what I hear,” Snow threw back in her face. “And I have the security tapes to prove it. He walked right out into the middle of traffic and nearly got himself flattened by a transport truck the other day. Maybe he decided to let the cold finish what the truck wouldn’t.”
“No, someone did this to him,” Magda insisted, looking straight at Pig. If you listened long enough and hard enough people would tell you more than even they thought they knew.
Pig remained silent an impressive ten seconds while he mulled the accusation over. “Really? Tell me where you were when this happened,” he finally demanded. “Who’s your alibi? You were the one who found him. What were you doing there in the middle of the night? Not selling yourself, the security tapes make that clear. Who’d want you anyway? You only showed up just before you sounded the alarm. So what were you doing there suddenly in the middle of the night? Except maybe trying to kill the foreigner. You waited until he was almost gone, then sounded the alarm in order to give yourself a defence.”
“Alibi?” Magda asked, trying to buy time, but Pig wasn’t selling time. And Magda wasn’t selling alibis. Not today anyway. She smiled enigmatically and kept quiet. Pig saw that Magda knew how to deal with the police. Or soldiers anyway. Guards. What to do at an interrogation. Keep your mouth shut. He let her stew in the silence a little longer. When she still didn't answer, he complimented her. "I commend you. Most people always say something eventually. But you? No. You know how to take a grilling. I guess you learned that in the gulag, didn’t you, zek?”
“That’s not all I learned.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, shalava?”
Pig had j
ust called her a “dirty slut.” Magda ignored the slur. Something else she’d learned in the camps was that when you asked a question, all you got was the answer to the question, not the truth. If you wanted the truth, it was better to shut up, watch and listen. Instead of answering, she busied herself fussing with Snow’s bedding.
Finally, Pig gave up waiting for an answer. “Fuck it, shalava,” he said. “I don’t need your testimony. What the hell would you know about pipeline distribution anyway? The only thing you’re good at distributing is women’s diseases through your stable of whores.”
Magda smiled inwardly. Pig seemed unaware he’d just confirmed her suspicions about the reason why someone had tried to take out Snow. And that she wasn’t just sitting around waiting for him to come out of the coma, that she’d taken action based on the conversations they’d had before Snow’s “accident.” She glanced at the clock on his bedside, wondering how many times the hands would have to rotate before they got what they wanted, before they could act.
We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -
fawning half-men for him to play with.
The whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
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