Black Sun

by Owen Matthews

  When had he and Vera stopped talking? Parenthood had tipped over the rhythm of their lives in all the usual superficial ways. But in fundamental ways too. And it had never righted itself. Vasin remembered a line from a Mayakovsky poem: the boat of love smashed on the shore of daily life.

  It was not as though Vera was unhappy, or at least, no more discontented than she had a right to be, than anyone else seemed to be. Vasin had concluded early on that unhappiness was inevitable in any human relationship—unhappiness suffered and unhappiness inflicted. He had never taken it personally. It was, evidently, a law of nature. The sadistic inclinations of Vera’s supervisor at work, the lack of emulsion paint in the hardware shops, the crowds on the rush-hour trolleybuses, all these blended with her discontent with his own personal slovenliness, the child’s laziness and sleeplessness, the neighbors’ noisy radio. All these were simply the rhythms of life. Vera’s slow-burning eyes, nightly censuring male insufficiency across the dining table, were things simply to be borne. Just as his colleagues’ philistine disdain for culture was a thing to be borne, his boss’s contempt for rules and procedures, some suspects’ stubborn refusal to accept that fate had ordained them to be victims. Lives were imperfect; wives were imperfect. How foolish his unmarried colleagues were to be afraid of loneliness.

  But there was something deeper. Vera had no interest in changing what was around her. Worse, she had no concept that the world could be changed.

  Vasin did.

  That stubborn streak of righteousness he had inherited from his mother. Not rebelliousness, but rather its opposite, a dogged insistence at taking the system at its word. “Citizen, we have the right!” had always been his mother’s favorite phrase. Vera had no such faith. She trudged irritably through a bleak world where hardship could be overcome only by moments of luck and acts of low cunning.

  Yes, Vasin realized with devastating clarity that his wife was cynical, and that she was stupid. He had felt a nerve in his head tighten. His usual misery had uncoiled with its inevitable routine. “You are naïve,” she would sneer. “You would rather be right than get ahead.” Vasin longed to retaliate, to fling back his own contempt. But he knew that this would mark a defeat for him, that any reconciliation would be only on her terms. And this he would not allow. Because he knew that he was right. Or at least, that right existed, somewhere, if he could only find it.

  Naïve? Perhaps. Vera’s words had stung because they were true. Every day of his career as a policeman he saw his colleagues framing witnesses, pinning spare crimes that had been bouncing around the books onto hapless suspects, driving practiced fists into soft bellies, scrambling at the end of every quarter to round up some likely patsies to fill the crime-statistics quotas. He knew all this, and knew it to be wrong, a travesty of Soviet justice.

  But a weasel thought had sneaked into his mind.

  What if crookedness was the way the system was meant to work? They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work, his colleagues were always joking. What if his job were to pretend to protect the people, to act a bit part in a giant parody of police work?

  Vasin had never thought to call such thoughts political until his friend Arvo did. Arvo Janovich Laar was an Estonian, but the son of a Bolshevik hero, so it was all right. Laar was the uncomplaining butt of constant joshing about his countrymen’s supposed timidity and phlegm. He had a singsong Baltic accent that their fellow detectives never tired of imitating.

  “Hey, Laar! Heard the latest one? Russian gets on a bus in Estonia. Asks if it’s far to Tallinn. Driver says, ‘No-sir. Not-far at-all.’ They drive for an hour. The Russian guy asks again, ‘Is it far to Tallinn?’ Pig-fucker driver answers, ‘It is-now.’ ” Uproarious, locker-room laughter. Even Arvo would join in. But he knew, and they all knew, that what the laughter really said was that Balts were sneaky, defeated, Russia-hating little assholes.

  The bullying drew them together, though Vasin knew it and didn’t like it. Their outcasts’ friendship had been assigned to them by the group, like the roster of a detective team. Vasin and Laar, the weirdos. But Arvo was easy to like, counter-stereotypically cheerful and essentially optimistic. Vasin recognized something of Arvo in himself. His refusal to bend before the crowd. A core of pride.

  They found themselves alone together one afternoon in an office that smelled of stale tobacco smoke and disinfectant, spilled booze and vomit, the after-murmurs of a recent party that they had missed. Gingerly, as though unwrapping contraband, Arvo ventured a joke of his own.

  “An Estonian goes to the polling place, prepared to vote. He is handed an envelope and told to put it in the ballot box. But instead of following instructions, he starts to open the envelope. ‘What are you doing?’ yells the woman. ‘I just wanted to see who I was voting for,’ replies the Estonian. ‘You imbecile! Don’t you know this is a secret ballot?’ ”

  Vasin had quickly hoisted a smile, but Laar spotted it for a false flag.

  “What? Not funny?”

  “It’s funny, Arvo.”

  Laar had looked at him for a long moment, opening his mouth just wide enough to let the point of his tongue caress his upper lip. Then he closed it and allowed a further pause for uncomfortable thoughts.

  “You’re a believer, Vasin.”

  “In God?”

  “No! For heaven’s sake. I mean…a believer in…the order of things. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad someone is. I admire you for it. You believe that things should be as they should be, not as they are. That things can be done properly. Will be done properly, one day. You can’t laugh at the system because you believe in it.”

  Vasin set down his paper coffee cup and thought, Yes, I do.

  It had never properly occurred to him that there were people, respectable people, who did not believe.

  “You think our bosses believe in anything apart from collecting kickbacks from the Chechens and the Armenians and the Tambov boys?”

  Vasin was shocked. Not that he hadn’t heard the rumors about their boss. Of course he had. But to hear his friend discuss them so casually seemed a sacrilege against the gravity of the accusations.

  “You’re saying that it’s true? Have you reported it?”

  Laar sat back with a sigh.

  “And what would be the point of that? To do my duty as a citizen, and get myself reassigned to Syktyvkar?”

  Laar drained his cup of thin police coffee before continuing.

  “You know what I can never understand about you Russians? You love anarchy, each one of you. I know you fuckers. You all have rebel souls. Every one of you wants to screw the system. But together, you have a terror of chaos. You’ll go to any lengths to prevent it. I always wondered why. Perhaps because you know yourselves too well. You know what you’ll do if suddenly nobody is watching over you with a stick. That’s my profound thought for the day.”

  Vasin thought about that term, rebel souls, for days, in the queue at the bread store, in the line at the cafeteria, in the scrum of commuters as they positioned themselves to fight their way onto the Number 31 trolleybus home. Rebels? These?

  But at the same time, what were these cancerous secret doubts that were eating away at Vasin’s righteous heart? He searched inside himself for a cool-headed voice that would explain the gap between the sordid daily necessity and the far, shining vision. But as the days went by Vasin began to feel the vision slipping too far away to be grasped, into the realm of myth. He remained convinced that belief was the only gravity that could hold his contradictory world of duty and lies together. But he was no longer sure he had preserved enough of it to make the center hold.

  Two years after his conversation with Arvo and newly recruited to the KGB, he’d met Katya Orlova. It felt like justice. “Frustrated salaryman seeks his nemesis, sex-starved Juno preferred. Gods’ wives only.” Vasin had embarked on the affair in the certain kno
wledge that there was no possible universe in which it could have a good ending. He felt like an alcoholic reaching for the bottle he knew would kill him. As Katya’s monumental breasts smothered him in bed, Vasin experienced for the first time the abandon of self-destruction. It was like a coming of age: After this, there could be no redemption. Because he had finally become a faithless man, and deserved none.

  Exactly how Vera had found out, he didn’t know. The bitches’ coven of the kontora wives had woven a sticky web of rumor that had spun quickly across the Moscow phone system to reach Vera’s ears. As he knew it would be, this was Vasin’s grand debacle. The moment of weakness that he sensed Vera had been waiting for all her life. The moment that she and her mother had secretly known would come: all that was rotten and duplicitous about Vasin had finally been confirmed. At last! We knew all along what you were. Finally, his behavior had met their low expectations. And of course, what Vasin hated most was that they were right. His own weakness, his pathetic lust and lack of self-control, had given this crowing chorus of frustrated women the justification they needed to pull his life apart. A just fate had come for him, even if it never seemed to come for anybody else. And it came in the form of his wife, transformed by his own folly from a lonely, silly woman into a righteous avenger.

  How ironic that Vera’s revenge should break over his head while he was here, in Arzamas, the assignment that was testing his faith in himself as an agent of justice to the breaking point. Efremov was right. Vasin did think that he knew better, that his precious right to get to the truth trumped everything else. And Maria was right. He’d spared her from the asylum, then come to her to present the bill. And Vasin knew that he was not a righteous man. Thanks to Vera, all Arzamas might soon know it too.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THURSDAY, 26 OCTOBER 1961

  FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE TEST

  I

  When Vasin woke, the morning light was already streaming through the orange nylon curtains. Yesterday’s sleet and snow showers were a memory. A bold autumn sun glittered on rows of brand-new apartment windows, shiny as mirrors. From somewhere down the street came the babble of a radio. Vasin was alone in the apartment. Kuznetsov had left some buckwheat porridge on the stove, fruit compote in the refrigerator.

  In the bathroom the freshly painted pipes shivered slightly when he turned the tap. The showerhead dangled a tantalizing thread of scalding hot water, then abruptly burst into full steaming force. Arzamas water had a peaty aroma to it. Vasin scrubbed himself, for the fourth or fifth time since he had returned home the previous evening, praying that the invisible contagion of Petrov’s apartment had not entered him. Once again he cursed Efremov. The dud gas mask had been a terrifying warning about how his life could be effortlessly destroyed by the secret poisons of Arzamas. And again he replayed Efremov’s words about Vera in his head, their tone, the cast of Efremov’s narrow face, his contempt for Orlov and his ignorance of the hidden power that Special Cases wielded. Even if the local kontora forbore to take his life, did they possess the knowledge that could destroy his career?

  Vasin was scared. Frankly, scared.

  In any other circumstances, he would have taken Zaitsev’s advice and cleared out of town. Not even his own curiosity about what the hell they were covering up would have held him here. Efremov might well guess the truth about Katya Orlova. In any case Vera herself would blurt it to someone else soon enough. Vasin was trapped in this accursed city. A bomb of his own making was ticking under his life. Staying on was a risk. But cracking the Petrov case was also his only lifeline. Orlov, it was clear, had sent him to Arzamas because the old man’s instinct had smelled the possibility of netting a golden fish. And finding that fish was Vasin’s only chance to ever protect himself from the wrath of Orlov that he felt brewing on the future’s horizon like a gathering storm.

  * * *

  —

  Vasin repeated the dry-cleaning routine he’d used the previous day to shake off his watchers. Once again he was lucky, a bread truck this time, beeping its horn impatiently outside the service gate of the kontora headquarters as he slipped out of the back door. Not a circumstance to be relied upon, and a violation of the basic rule of countersurveillance. People notice patterns. A stranger wandering through the courtyard will be ignored. See him twice, and you remember you’ve seen him before. Same went for the stationmaster, wide-eyed with nervousness when Vasin appeared in his office a second morning in a row. Vasin mouthed a silent prayer to the God he didn’t believe in that Orlov would have something for him.

  But the line to Gorky didn’t connect.

  Vasin dialed the four-digit code again and again, only to hear a continuing dial tone. He tried the time-honored Soviet technological fix of first resort, banging the receiver on the side of the heavy steel box. For good measure he tried the second resort, too, which was swearing in an angry whisper.

  By the time the line finally connected it was a quarter past ten. Fifteen minutes late.

  “The Comrade Chief Engineer is in a meeting.” Orlov’s secretary delivered the bad news with the usual tart satisfaction. “You’ll have to wait till the next train.”

  So funny.

  “I am afraid there will be no next train. Can you tell the Comrade Engineer that there is an emergency? Eight locomotives are about to collide.”

  “Wait.”

  Vasin could imagine the secretary’s sour moue as she took her time sauntering over to the conference room.

  At length Orlov came on the line.

  “Eight locomotives?”

  “Sir.”

  “Well. We must take steps to avoid such an eventuality. Interesting news. On your request.”

  The background cacophony on the line suddenly broke into their conversation. Two husky male voices began speaking over Orlov.

  “…and I said to that cow, I’m sick of the fucking sight of you. Every day I come home and there you are, sitting on the sofa like a sack of potatoes. And she says, If you’d stop drinking that crap you might appreciate me more. And I said, I drink crap for economy’s sake, woman! Save money for your extravagances….”

  “Fuck off the service line now!” Orlov’s voice was at its most commanding. “Bosses are talking.”

  “Okay, okay! Calm down, bitches!”

  The interrupting voices went silent with a click, leaving only the usual background of low chatter.

  “Your sharp nose has not failed you. I have had some responses from the archives. About the derailment back in ’thirty-seven.”

  A pause as Orlov spoke aside. Clearing the room, Vasin guessed.

  “It seems that Party A, repeat, Party A, was punished for his role in the accident after an anonymous denunciation. From a colleague at the same depot. The Kharkov depot. This source appears in the files under the name Kukushka. The Cuckoo. Yes. And further inquiries have established that the true identity of this source was indeed Party P. Repeat, Party A.V.P. Who was at the time Party A’s immediate subordinate at the depot. Repeat back to me what I have told you.”

  Orlov’s words came over the antique phone line like an old gramophone record, a voice from the past.

  “Party A was punished as a result of a denunciation from Party P, senior.”

  “Exactly. There is more. After Party A’s imprisonment, his wife divorced him.” Orlov was now evidently reading from a document. His voice droned matter-of-factly. “She wrote a letter to the court accusing her husband of anti-Soviet activity. She saved herself. Spoke against him at the trial. Later married a…yes. An Army officer.”

  “This is remarkable information, sir.”

  “Indeed. Indeed. Though not an entirely unusual situation. Given the, er, state of the railways during that period. But. It is clear that Party P has much forgiveness to ask of his old comrade.”

  “How do you wish me to proceed, Co
mrade Chief Engineer?”

  Abruptly, the other faint voices on the line went dead. A loud series of fast clicks replaced the hubbub, ominous in the sudden electronic quiet. Orlov, his voice almost drowned by the clatter, spoke loudly and emphatically.

  “Proceed with your usual discretion. Be careful that nobody knows the target of your inquiries. You will take no action and you will report your findings only to me. Only to me. You will take steps to ensure that the local branch remains in ignorance. But find out everything. We must avoid any further derailments.”

  “Yes, sir. But, General. May I ask, why am I really here?”

  A sigh on the line like wind singing in the wires.

  “Comrade, are you scared?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That means you have knowledge. Only a fool would not be, if what we suspect is true.”

  In his sudden anguish Vasin abandoned all pretense of coded speech.

  “They have threatened me, sir.”

  “Who?”

  “The local kontora. They’re very serious. Sent me into a radiation zone.”

  “No, you allowed yourself to be sent.”

  “As you say, sir. But I just want to ask—is there anything you have not told me? About Arzamas? That I should know?”

  Orlov’s tone hardened.

  “Take care that your fear does not make you foolish.”

  “Sir, if an accident should occur, I want you to know that Major Efremov of State Security…”

  “Major Efremov will doubtless be in charge of the investigation into your death. I will be in charge of recommending you for a posthumous decoration. And it will be one that does honor to your many talents. Your wife and child will be well taken care of by the State. You have my word on that.”