“Now. Business.”
Guri settled himself onto a stool and nodded Vasin to do the same. He slipped out a large green ledger and, tongue stuck out in concentration, opened it at the last page.
“Your identification please, Comrade? A necessary formality.”
Vasin hesitated for a moment before producing his scarlet KGB ID card. He kept his eyes away from Guri’s. A gesture of tact, allowing the man time to find a suitable face. But when he looked back Guri was carefully copying the details, utterly unimpressed by the sword-and-shield emblem on the little scarlet folder. He returned the card to Vasin with both hands, as if to emphasize its preciousness.
“Get many of my colleagues coming to see you?”
“All my friends appreciate my discretion, friend. But Guri says, we all walk under the same sun. What matter the uniform we wear?”
The Georgian smiled broadly once more and closed the ledger. With the back of his hand he wiped his mouth each way as if he had a mustache, which he did not.
“Please forgive me, but payment here is required in advance. For friends of Masha, a small cash deposit is sufficient. At your discretion.”
Vasin rummaged in his wallet and produced a three-ruble note. The Georgian made no move to take it. Vasin replaced the bill and fished out a twenty-five in its place. As he took the banknote from his new client, Guri rubbed it, instinctively, between thumb and forefinger as though it was a piece of fine cloth. A familiar gesture, to Vasin, from his cop days. The unmistakably crisp smoothness of the government paper: No forger could ever quite match it.
“One final thing please. I think I do not need to explain, as you are obviously a man who knows the world.”
The Georgian lumbered to a corner and picked up a large cardboard box printed with garish Western lettering.
“What’s that?”
“Kotex, for ladies.” They both blushed. “From America. Arzamas is the land of plenty, but some things, only Guri can provide.”
He handed the box to Vasin.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Simply hold the goods please, Comrade.”
Guri took a leather-cased camera from a hook and popped open the cover. An expensive Zenit thirty-five-millimeter, Vasin noted, military-grade. Such a camera would cost him a month’s salary.
“With your permission?”
Vasin indeed understood without having to be told. These photos of customers clutching contraband were Guri’s insurance policy. He stood, trying to compose his face into a suitable mask of disapproval in case the photograph ever found its way into the hands of his colleagues at the kontora. Guri snapped off three frames in quick succession and closed up the camera.
“It is amazing how grateful ladies can be when made a present of such a product. I can sell you a box for…”
“I just want to send a message.”
“Of course. Please, write down where you can be reached. And take note of our line here in the kitchen. It is always staffed. Any special words you might like to use, understandable only to yourselves. Then we do the rest. Discretion is assured. Do you have a message you wish to send now?”
“Yes. For Maria Vladimirovna Adamova.”
Guri bowed to write on a scrap of paper, his pencil poised.
“I need to see her. Tell me what time and where.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing else.”
“Two rubles. Including delivery of reply, of course. I may deduct it from your deposit if that is sir’s wish?”
Vasin was growing weary of the man’s parodic obsequiousness. Guri was a parasite, a capitalist, a speculator. He hated the complicity that the Georgian impudently presumed had grown between them.
“Yes.”
“Very good. Expect a call from the children’s toys department. Or maybe electrical goods. We run a very well-stocked shop.”
As he mounted the steep stone stairs, Vasin felt Guri’s appraising eyes on his back.
V
The Univermag porters fidgeted impatiently by the entrance, waiting for the final lingering shoppers to leave. Vasin spotted his pair of watchers, exposed by the draining-out of the crowd. They did not bother to conceal their relief when he reappeared. One wore brown, the other tweed. The brown was a swarthy forty-year-old bantamweight with scars on his left cheek. The tweed was heavier, a slab-faced man with the complexion of an overboiled dumpling. Both glared openly at Vasin as he passed. His twenty-minute disappearance had been noticed. Worse, Vasin guessed that he had forced the men to overstay their shift. In the police, he had known men to break a suspect’s fingers in their impatience for a confession before dinnertime.
How long did he have before the kontora began to intensify its surveillance? He’d already outstayed Zaitsev’s deadline. Vasin was somewhat protected from the official KGB men by the dangerous mystique of Special Cases. Masha and Axelrod were cloud dwellers, ordinarily beyond the reach of the likes of Zaitsev. But who would protect them all from the irregulars, brutes like Sailor? He felt the realm of the possible tightening around him. The goons of the local kontora would not dare to stop him in his duties. But soon their oppressive presence would grow so confining that he would no longer be able to move, to work.
The test was in three days. If he hadn’t found out who killed Petrov by then, he probably never would—or rather, it would no longer matter. If RDS-220 was successful, Adamov, Axelrod, and Korin would all be heroes, whisked off to Moscow to be loaded with medals and then on to some luxurious Party sanatorium for a well-earned holiday. If not, they’d all end up in some extended kontora purgatory where Petrov would be the least of their problems. Or Arzamas and the rest of the USSR would be reduced to a prairie of radioactive dust. With a wince, Vasin quickened his step. But he could not outpace the familiar Volga that followed him down Engels Prospekt at a slow, menacing crawl.
He thought of another solitary supper at the station buffet, but felt too exhausted. As he mounted the stairs to the apartment, he prayed that Kuznetsov would not be at home. He opened the door softly, noticed his handler’s overcoat lying crumpled on the floor below the coat hook, and cursed silently. He crept down the corridor without switching on the light. But within a step of his bedroom door Kuznetsov tugged open his own, throwing his stocky shadow over Vasin like a net.
“Got you!”
Vasin turned wearily.
“Busy day, actually. Didn’t want to wake you.”
“It’s seven thirty. It’s the provinces, but even our bedtime is later than that. You need to get ready!”
Kuznetsov stood in service breeches and stockinged feet, his unruly hair plastered into place with oil.
“Earth calling Sputnik.” As if to demonstrate what he meant, Kuznetsov pulled his braces up over his shoulders with a snap of elastic.
“Ready for what?”
“Don’t you have Chekists’ Day in Moscow?”
Of course. The anniversary of the founding of the Soviet secret police. The red-letter day when every KGB man in the country got good and drunk. No wonder the goons at the Univermag had been impatient to get to the celebrations.
“Fuck.”
“I’m excited, too.” Kuznetsov struggled to button the top button of his collarless uniform undershirt. “My feelings, exactly. An evening in the refined company of our comrades and brothers-in-arms. Come on. We have twenty minutes to get to the Officers’ Club for the big banquet.”
Vasin sank back against his bedroom door and gently banged his head twice on the flimsy wood. Kuznetsov’s big laugh was more sympathetic than mocking.
“Before you ask, yes, you have to go. The brass want to keep you close. Especially with most of the kontora busy filling their bellies. What would Vasin get up to if we let him out from under our eye? they’re
thinking. Nothing good. Just explaining, Comrade. Full dress uniform. Decorations, for those who have them. Two minutes and I’m out the door.”
* * *
—
The KGB Officers’ Club was a neoclassical barn, a Stalinist parody of a porticoed manor house. Kuznetsov parked his jeep diagonally across a curb and jumped out, gesturing at Vasin to follow. Every window was brightly lit, and the sound of a brass band spilled onto the street. The main reception room was a sea of dark uniform green, interspersed with the candy-colored evening dresses of the kontora wives.
Vasin and Kuznetsov paused at the door.
“Christ.”
“We don’t mention Him around here, friend.” Kuznetsov intercepted a white-jacketed waiter and grabbed two vodkas from a silver tray. They knocked the drinks back simultaneously and exchanged a grin of mutual sympathy. Vasin was glad of his companion’s humor. He exhaled loudly, like a swimmer about to take a plunge.
“Is there a Mrs. Zaitsev?”
“Oh, my word, yes. Just you wait.”
They both laughed indecorously loudly, drawing glances.
At that moment all conversation was interrupted by a majordomo flinging open the double doors to the ballroom, where a buffet would be waiting.
“Comrade Officers, dinner is served!”
It was not quite a stampede, but came close. Vasin was nearly knocked off his feet by a refrigerator-size woman who had actually hitched up her long skirts in the race for dinner. A colonel hurried in her wake, clutching their two glasses. The room emptied faster than if someone had shouted “Fire!” By the time Vasin and Kuznetsov succeeded in squeezing their way through to the devastated buffet, most of the platters of delicacies had been picked clean. Only a tangle of severed pink claws testified to vanished Volga river crabs. The black caviar sandwiches had gone, leaving only red. Pineapple heads lolled, bodyless.
“Khan Mamai and the Golden Horde have been through,” Kuznetsov laughed. Nonetheless they loaded their plates with mushroom pies, chicken vol au vents, salami sandwiches, and piles of pink sliced ham. The drinks they had downed as they waited for the scrum to thin had warmed Vasin and sharpened his appetite. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
“You don’t do too badly,” Vasin replied, smiling through a mouthful of pie. “For provincials.”
The band, reassembled in the corner of the ballroom, struck up a ragged fanfare. Quiet spread through the company. A group of loudly chatting subalterns, the last to notice that the official part of the evening was beginning, were shushed into silence. A line of waiters, each bearing a tray of shot glasses, filed into the room as neatly choreographed as a corps of ballet dancers. The bulky figure of General Zaitsev, drink in hand, lumbered into view on a podium at the end of the room.
“Comrades!” There was no microphone, but Zaitsev had the impressive parade-ground bellow of the Revolutionary generation, for whom such fripperies had been unnecessary to rouse the masses. “On this day of glorious memory, we gather to honor those who have preceded us.”
Vasin felt the familiar sensation of swooning backward into himself. A conditioned reflex of every Soviet citizen, to switch off one’s eyes and ears during moments of orchestrated boredom, to turn inward. A way to be alone, even in a crowd. The booze helped him think of nothing. He swam weightless in the swelling warmth of vodka and the rising and falling burble of Zaitsev’s words. Only a pause in the General’s monologue broke his reverie.
“But today is also a day to look forward. Those in this city who work in peace and security thanks to our efforts will soon demonstrate a device that will once and for all establish our superiority over the Imperialist enemies beyond our borders. That battle will be over. But on that day another battle will begin. A battle with the enemies within our nation.”
A tremor ran though the audience. Glances were exchanged, nodding listeners nudged into attention.
“Yes, Comrades. There are some in this nation who say that there are no more enemies. There are those who hold our work in the Committee for State Security in contempt. Say that we are butchers. Mock us not just in their kitchens, but even in the highest councils of the land. To those saboteurs, to those traitors, I say: The time will come when we, the guardians of State Security, will turn to restoring ideological discipline in our own nation. And it will come soon.”
The silence was electric. Vasin struggled to believe what he had just heard. Had Zaitsev just publicly called the leaders of the nation traitors?
“To our heroic Soviet Motherland!”
Everyone drank a sip, by a tradition known to every man and woman in the room, ready for the customary second toast.
“And to our Service, ever vigilant in the defense of her borders and in the hunt for her enemies!”
This time the glasses were tipped all the way. Vasin felt his toes curling up inside his boots as he rocked backward, on the verge of losing balance. Steady, man.
An excited buzz of conversation broke out as Zaitsev stepped down from the podium. The band struck up an incongruously frivolous up-tempo polka, shattering the tension, and his fellow Chekists began to steer their wives onto the dance floor. With Zaitsev making his backslapping progress across the room in his direction, Vasin turned to find Kuznetsov gone. He’d missed the speech.
He found his handler near the bar huddled at a table with three fellow officers, cognac and vodka bottles arrayed in front of them.
“Ah! Our Government inspector. Vasin, come join us. Our colleagues have been dying to meet you.”
Kuznetsov clapped a strong arm around Vasin’s shoulders, as though his quarry might make a break to escape, while another man whipped a chair away from a neighboring table.
“Vasin, meet Kesoyan. Oskolkov. Shubin.”
To Vasin’s embarrassment, Kuznetsov’s companions stood for the introductions.
“Kesoyan.”
The slight Armenian major with a fastidiously trimmed mustache gave him a comradely handshake of quite vicious respectability.
“And I’m Oskolkov, sir,” a young lieutenant privately explained, just as respectfully, peering over Kesoyan’s shoulder. But Oskolkov was evidently not in the handshaking class: Kesoyan had done it for both of them.
“Shubin!”
A ruddy farmboy’s face incongruous over his major’s bars. Shubin shook his welcome across the table and grinned with drunken bonhomie. Amid a hospitable reshuffling of chairs, a round of drinks was poured and knocked back.
“We’ve been discussing the news,” said Shubin.
“Front page of the Red Star,” chipped in Kesoyan.
Vasin spread his hands.
“Oh, you know what Moscow is like. We’re the last to hear everything. I come here to get up to speed.”
His feeble joke earned him a round of smiles.
“We launched a nuclear-armed ballistic missile from a submarine,” Shubin said proudly. “It was fired from a Project 629 boat from underwater. Detonated perfectly over Novaya Zemlya. Imagine, launching a missile from underwater!”
Vasin’s blank response prompted Shubin to lean forward to explain further.
“It’s a new era, Major. Sea-launched ballistic missiles mean we can attack the enemy from beneath any ocean. Completely undetectable. The Yankees have never managed it. This will have them shitting in their cowboy hats.”
“That’ll teach Kennedy to meddle in Berlin,” Kesoyan chipped in. “Or Cuba. Confusion to the capitalists!”
They drank once more.
“Comrade Shubin is a great seaman,” added Kuznetsov. “Takes great pride in the achievements of our glorious Soviet Navy.”
“Major Kuznetsov is teasing me, Vasin. Next thing he’s going to say is that I was assigned to submarines because of seasickness. Not true. Like most things Kuznetsov says.”
“Nonsense. I have the greatest admiration for your nerves, Shubin. Couldn’t do it myself. Cooped up in a steel tube with a hundred men, deep under the ocean. And a nuclear reactor just a couple of bulkheads away. And nuclear warheads too. Like being locked in a bunker, but with the radiation on the inside instead of out. You heard about that accident on that sub, K-19, where the reactor sprang a leak? The sailors nicknamed the boat Hiroshima.”
Kuznetsov, carried away with his own speech, failed to notice his companions straightening their backs at the arrival of an outsider.
“Me, I’d be out of the first hatch, take my chance swimming with the sharks.”
Behind Kuznetsov’s chair, Major Efremov gently cleared his throat.
“May I join you, Comrades?”
Oskolkov was the first to jump to his feet.
“Sit, please.” Efremov placed his hands on both of Kuznetsov’s shoulders, as if to hold him down, though he had shown no sign of stirring. “Glad to see you have been making our esteemed colleague from Moscow welcome.”
Vasin looked up at Efremov’s narrow inquisitor’s face. He was sober; conspicuously so. Somewhere on his prudent little journey to power, Efremov had taught himself to smile. It was an underhand weapon to use on people, rather like silence on the telephone, but effective. Efremov smiled now, a thin smirk. Though he outranked nobody still seated at the table, his presence caused every man to stiffen and compose his face. Theirs was the quiet not of insolence, but of fear.
Efremov sat in the lieutenant’s vacated chair, and with a sideways glance indicated that Oskolkov could get lost. The adjutant’s yellowed gaze settled on Vasin with an air of informed suspicion. Vasin could still see the smirk he wore as he’d emerged from Petrov’s radioactive apartment.
“Damn glad you joined us, Efremov. Drink?” Kuznetsov picked out a half-full cognac bottle from the collection that had gathered on the table.
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