Black Sun

by Owen Matthews

  “Hi.”

  “Hi yourself.”

  He waited for her to continue, but she was back to the formal form of address. Vasin felt obscurely hurt.

  “Aren’t you going to buy the girl an ice cream?”

  The cafeteria overlooked a round, concrete-lined pond, black under the white sky. A few grandmothers sat in the coffee-scented warmth, minding babies in prams who were wrapped like parcels. He bought a couple of ice creams, the forty-eight-kopeck variety he had always loved, a square block of vanilla-flavored cream. They walked on, eating in silence. There was something about eating ice cream in the snow that Vasin had always found pleasingly strange. It was like swallowing winter.

  “Good. Thanks.”

  Maria paused by a rubbish urn to lick the last of the ice cream from its wrapper, then deposited her rubbish like a good citizen.

  “I come here quite a lot. Never with company, though.”

  “You’re lonely?”

  “Always straight to the point. Maybe I always have been. What of it?”

  She stopped and turned toward the maze of birches, her face hidden under her hood. Vasin let the silence between them grow.

  “They’re all crazy. You know that, right?”

  “Who?”

  “The people here in this city. The power they command and the secrets they keep twist them. It’s hard to explain so that you might understand.”

  Not so different from the rest of the world of the nomenklatura—the Soviet elite—Vasin thought. His year in Special Cases had been an education in the distorting power of privilege. How it can corrode men. And women.

  “Was Petrov twisted? Adamov?”

  “My husband is a good man.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Korin told you about Leningrad.”

  “He told me some.”

  “Where were you during the war?”

  “Korin asked me exactly the same question. Does it matter?”

  “Oh, yes. It matters.”

  “Moscow. I was still at school.”

  “So was I, until they closed the schools. No heat, no food, teachers all mobilized; some of my classmates made it out on the boats across the lake. To Ladoga. My father wanted to get me on the transport, but my mother said it was too dangerous. She was right. The Germans dive-bombed one of the ships. The water was full of little kids’ summer hats, floating back to the shore. My friend’s mother saw it. She drowned herself the next day. You didn’t see the war.”

  “No. Not the way you did.”

  “That siren, this morning. Second time in as many weeks, for fuck’s sake. Last time was on the morning Fedya died. I hate it.”

  “Aren’t you used to it by now?”

  “No, because one day it won’t be a drill. I think of that day a lot. The sky filled with bombs tumbling from the bellies of airplanes. Detonations like great doors slamming underground. The hard, solid things of the world, melting. Bricks, weightless, flying upward. Landslides of masonry and plaster. Buildings bursting like paper bags. Fire. Hot wind. Every time I hear that siren I think, This is the day we will all be erased from the world along with our death-breeding city. Every time I hear the siren, you know what I do? I put a pillow over my head and I wait. And then no planes come. Only another day to get through. Thinking about how that fucking siren was probably the last thing that Fedya ever heard.”

  “You don’t go down to the shelter?”

  “I’ll never go into a shelter again in my life. My neighbors hate me for spoiling their quota. Svetlana Ivanovna and her foghorn voice booming in the stairwell, exhorting all comrades to hurry to the basement. She never dares to knock on our door, but I can feel her dirty look as she passes. Her and the old cows muttering at the bread shop. ‘Arrogant little bitch,’ they say. ‘Whatever does the Director see in her?’ Hypocritical, cock-sucking cunts, every one of them.”

  Vasin started involuntarily at the obscenity. Maria’s grimace of hatred turned into the beginning of a smile.

  “I kept some bad company as a kid. It still comes out sometimes.”

  “Sorry. Korin said you met Adamov in Leningrad.”

  “He taught me. Pure mathematics. We both loved numbers. They’re hard, beautiful, concrete things that can’t ever be destroyed. All those infinite patterns, fixed until the end of time. Whether there are people to know it or not. We took comfort.”

  “In each other?”

  “In science. After what we had both been through. But yes. You’re right. We took comfort in one another. I was seventeen when we met. An orphan, by then. Street-smart, but still more kid than woman. Scarecrow, Adamov called me. ‘A pair of big green eyes up top, a pair of tough little fists in the middle, oversize man’s boots down below.’ I nearly punched the old goat when he tried to lay a hand on me.”

  Maria smiled at the memory. Vasin suppressed a smile of his own at the thought of Adamov in the improbable role of old goat.

  “He said, ‘I will look after you.’ And he has been as good as his word. My savior, I thought at the time. Like I told you. He is a good man.”

  “And what happened on the roof of the Kino?”

  “You’re bloody relentless, you know that?”

  “It was pretty memorable. For me, anyway.”

  “What part?”

  There was mischief in her glance. Vasin thought of her hands gripping his face, the smell of her skin, and looked away.

  “You tried to jump. Why?”

  “Maybe I wanted to fly away. Escape.”

  “Is that why you had an affair with Petrov? To escape?”

  Masha turned to Vasin, defiant.

  “You tell me something, then I’ll answer you. Do you think someone killed Fedya?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’ve spoken to his colleagues?”

  “Of course.”

  “To Vladimir Axelrod?”

  “Maybe.”

  Masha’s face creased in distaste.

  “Axelrod’s a pederast.”Pederast, criminal jargon. Masha spat the word. “I mean literally. He is a homosexual.”

  “How do you know?”

  She stopped walking, her eyes fixed on the snowy ground.

  “Because Fedya was sleeping with him before he started sleeping with me. I told you, this place is full of deviants. If you think someone poisoned Fedya, start by asking his jealous lover boy.”

  Masha turned abruptly and walked away.

  IV

  Vasin picked up his watchers once more, striding nonchalantly out the front door of the kontora without a sideways glance. Like dutiful dogs, the pair slipped into position behind him as he walked to the Institute. A mist was thickening, and the sky promised a new snowfall.

  Vasin watched Adamov and his acolytes file out of the lecture theater. The Director’s eye slid over Vasin’s shabby civilian raincoat without noticing him. Axelrod trailed the group, walking alone. He and Vasin spotted each other at the same moment. To Vasin’s surprise, Axelrod pushed his way back through the crowd of young scientists. He was agitated.

  “Major, I need to talk to you in private. I didn’t know where to find you so I called the State Security headquarters and…”

  “They said they’d never heard of me.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m only a visitor here. But, Doctor, I was about to say just the same to you. We need to talk.”

  Axelrod’s office was lined with orderly files and dominated by an outsize blackboard, which was covered in calculations. Nervously he swept a pile of papers aside and plumped a large ring binder marked TOP SECRET on the desk. On the cover the date—25 OCTOBER 1961—was stamped in thick black ink.

  “Major, this is the latest design of RDS-220. We get a new ve
rsion every week, updated with all the new parameters. Every department’s work, summarized, so everyone knows what everyone else is doing—the engineers, the metallurgists, the meteorologists.”

  Axelrod began to leaf through the pages covered in figures, graphs, and engineering blueprints. “Here, the conventional explosives experts and the fission boys. And of course Adamov’s team, all the new yield projections of the main thermonuclear device…”

  “Axelrod, are you crazy? This is classified!”

  “So what? You could never understand a word of it.”

  Axelrod registered Vasin’s look and paused.

  “Oh. Sorry. Was that impolite? I do that sometimes. I’m rude to people, without meaning to be.”

  “No, you’re right. There’s nothing here I would understand. Go on.”

  Flustered, Axelrod resumed his search and smoothed the file flat on the table.

  “Right here, the section on the casing is, was, Petrov’s work. It’s all gone. He rewrote it.”

  “Who?”

  “Adamov did, just days before the test. He’s reconfigured the whole damn apparatus.”

  “Aren’t engineers always changing things? Why do I need to know this?”

  Axelrod snatched at his rumpled hair in a gesture of confusion.

  “Because the casing is everything Fyodor worked for. We debated its composition for months. Fyodor was passionate, adamant. And now that he’s gone, his work has gone too.”

  “And you find this sinister?”

  “No, I find it suspicious. You do not?”

  “You are accusing Professor Adamov of being somehow complicit in Petrov’s death because of a disagreement over”—Vasin gently closed the folder and pushed it back across the table—“metallurgy?”

  Axelrod deflated.

  “I accuse nobody.”

  Vasin paused. What Axelrod was saying might be important. But first he had to test if Masha was telling the truth about his relationship with Petrov. Gently, though. He didn’t want to spook Axelrod into silence. But if what Masha said was true, it was the moment to put Axelrod on the hook.

  “Before we discuss this further there is something I wish to raise with you. As I said, I actually came here to speak to you, Dr. Axelrod. I have some questions about your relationship with Petrov. Your close friendship.”

  Some men were hard to read, their countenances stone. Axelrod’s was an open book. Alarm passed across his grief-stricken face. Ask any interrogator—sitting is an eloquent business. Suspects sit according to the guilt they carry, though not always, as Vasin had learned, the guilt that you are looking for. They would sprawl and straddle, fidget, cross and uncross their legs. What they never, almost never, did was sit in a posture that was finite and irreducible, not a muscle stirring. Yet here was Axelrod, frozen to the spot as though posing for a photograph. His long-fingered hands lay immobile on his thighs, his whole body suddenly halted in its small motions. But his was not the stillness of calm, it was the paralysis of fear. When he spoke, Axelrod’s lips barely moved.

  “My close friendship?”

  “Is that not an accurate description?”

  Axelrod went pale. Vasin pressed on, choosing his words delicately.

  “Intimate friends.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Relax, Comrade. I don’t care about Article 121. We leave locking up people like that to the cops. If you ask me, it’s a pointless task.”

  Axelrod found motion, suddenly, like a paused film set once more to run. He sat forward, and his hands leapt at each other like a pair of fighting animals.

  “It’s an outrageous insinuation. You have no proof.”

  “Forgive me, Doctor, but that is not an answer.”

  “The suggestion is disgusting. Offensive. Who told you such a thing?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “There are many here with grudges. Men become obsessed.”

  “Are you saying someone is pursuing a vendetta against you?”

  “Fyodor and I are young…were young. We had authority above many who are more senior, but less able. I am speaking of jealousy, Major. Evil tongues. Malicious gossip. Such malicious filth in people’s minds. My God, to accuse us of such revolting deviancy.”

  It was not the first time Vasin had seen a man drawing strength from the passion of his denial. Axelrod, a moment ago startled as a rabbit, had found the mettle to raise his voice. He stood, abruptly, tipping his chair onto the floor.

  “If you came here to threaten me, Major, with some ridiculous inventions for your own purposes, I can only say that I refuse to play your foolish games. I protest in the most adamant terms!”

  Axelrod’s passion petered out, battered flat against the rock of Vasin’s silence. Slowly the investigator half-stood, finding a higher perch on the corner of the desk, and crossed his arms over his chest. Axelrod’s eyes traveled across his face, looking to see if his performance had been believed. Involuntarily, the scientist’s hands sought each other once more and clasped tight for comfort. He glanced down at the upturned chair, decided against stooping to pick it up, then faced his accuser once more. God, thought Vasin. So it’s true. He felt an involuntary surge of pity for this evidently brilliant, brittle man, whose weakness had placed him suddenly in Vasin’s power. And yet, Axelrod was clearly a man who held secrets. Perhaps the secret of Petrov’s death.

  Vasin made his face benevolent.

  “Do you have a girlfriend, Doctor? If you will forgive the personal question.”

  “My fiancée is in Moscow.”

  “Well then. Malicious rumors. Anyway—like I said, I don’t care. And you are right—I don’t have any proof about your personal inclinations or about your relationship with Petrov. Yet.”

  Vasin let the last syllable hang in the air for a moment. He continued, leaning forward, his voice low.

  “All I care about is finding out who killed Petrov.”

  “As do I.”

  “We see eye-to-eye, Comrade Doctor. And I need someone inside the Citadel. Please. Sit down.”

  Axelrod fumbled to right his chair.

  “You want me to become your informer?”

  “My guide. We have the same goal in this, we agree.”

  Axelrod nodded bleakly.

  “You want to put me on the hook?”

  Vasin had always found the colloquialism for being recruited by the KGB imprecise. The kontora liked to land its fish immediately, with a single violent jerk. Then they would leave them to gasp, drowning in the air. Perhaps, then, they might agree to gently release the fish back into the water to swim a little longer, as far as the line would allow. The hook was already set deep in Axelrod’s throat, even if he didn’t yet realize it.

  Vasin weighed his sympathy for this floundering, flawed man against his hard investigator’s instinct. The policeman won. He decided to let Axelrod flap around a little more.

  “You are not on the hook if you have nothing to hide, Comrade.” Vasin repeated the old secret policeman’s lie too easily for his own liking. “I am only asking you to help find the answers you seek yourself. You came to me voluntarily, remember?” Vasin placed a palm on the classified folder in front of them. “You wanted me to understand something about metallurgy. Start there. Guide me in terms an idiot could understand. Why should I care that Adamov changed Fyodor’s casing? Why did you want to tell me about it?”

  A nervous smile flicked across Axelrod’s face. Vasin had seen it before. The face of a man who has been momentarily dangled over the precipice and then hauled back by firm hands into the warm embrace of collaboration. The brief storm of alarm, the terror of discovery, had passed. Now Vasin gently released Axelrod back into his natural element, his deep sea of numbers.

  “Where do you want me to st
art?”

  “Start with how the bomb works?”

  “It’s basically very simple. You are familiar with the concept of an atom?”

  Axelrod evidently found it hard to judge where the limits of a layman’s ignorance could lie. Vasin nodded gravely.

  “At the center of every atom is a nucleus made of two kinds of particles, protons and neutrons. A different number of protons makes a different element. Hydrogen, one proton. Helium, two. And so on. And around every nucleus are concentric rings of electrons, like little moons circling around a planet. When the electrons move from atom to atom, that’s called electricity.”

  Vasin half-expected Axelrod to ask whether he had heard of electricity.

  “Most atoms are stable, meaning the nucleus has an equal number of protons and neutrons. But some elements, especially the heavy ones, have an unbalanced number of neutrons. Nature abhors disequilibrium, so they spit out their spare neutrons, naturally. When neutrons move, that’s called radiation. If you leave a radioactive element alone, it will spit out all its spare neutrons and eventually become inert. We call that radioactive decay, so over time, uranium 235 will eventually turn to lead.”

  “Uranium what?”

  “Two thirty-five. It’s a kind of uranium. A heavy metal. Most uranium is pretty stable and barely radioactive. But about half of one percent of naturally occurring uranium has a different number of neutrons from the normal sort. That’s called uranium 235. It’s more radioactive. And very unstable, because when you add just one more neutron, it becomes uranium 236. And that atom is too heavy to exist, so its nucleus immediately splits in half, into barium and krypton. When the nucleus splits, that’s called nuclear fission. It releases enormous amounts of energy. Uranium fission, for instance, produces about eighty-three terajoules per kilogram.”

  “That is a lot?”

  “Compared to oxidizing hydrocarbons, I mean, compared to burning coal? About twenty-five million times more energy, roughly.”