“You know that I do not, Major. But don’t let me stop you. We all know how much you enjoy your drink.”
With a sigh, Kuznetsov looked upward, as though seeking divine help to control his irritation. Evidently he didn’t find it.
“We were just talking about Comrade Khrushchev’s speech last week,” interrupted Vasin. He felt all eyes upon him. His desire to bait Efremov was uncontrollable. It was as if they had recognized each other as heirs to some ancient feud. Flushed with drink, Vasin plunged on.
“His address to the Twenty-Second Party Congress was brilliant. Don’t know about you, Efremov, but I was inspired.”
“All the General Secretary’s speeches are inspiring. Naturally.”
Vasin shifted on his plush chair, positioning himself for a better thrust. There was no mistaking the menace in Efremov’s tone.
“You read the speech in full in Pravda, of course. I’m sure you have been following the reports on the Congress every day as closely as I have, Comrade Major. The Comrade General Secretary’s attack on the Cult of Personality. We know he has confided such thoughts to the Party before, privately. But now he says it in public. Brilliant. In a word.”
Efremov did not reply. His stillness had become chilling.
“Cult of Personality” was Khrushchev’s code for Stalinism. I am a fool, Vasin thought fleetingly, to make this fight public. But Zaitsev’s words about traitors at the top of the Party had stung him. And the sight of Efremov’s smug face made him reckless. He craved the bright colors that came with passion, the glorious release of it. And he wanted to humiliate the man, rub his nose in the fact that he and his thuggish boss were on the wrong side of history.
“The Comrade General Secretary personally condemned all the facilitators of the excesses of those days. He named them all: Voroshilov. Molotov. Malenkov. Bulganin. Kaganovich. All those who allowed the senseless slaughter of so many innocent comrades during the years of repression. Of course he did not need to mention our own Yezhov. Yagoda. Beria. They have already been justly executed for their crimes. The honor of the Party could not be clean, he said, without admitting the mistakes of the past. You surely agree with Comrade Khrushchev, Major?”
Vasin had named the closest allies of Stalin, and three heads of the kontora who had masterminded the worst of the Purges, and themselves been consumed by them. Men who had once been Zaitsev’s chiefs.
Efremov took a long moment before replying.
“It seems, Comrade Vasin, that you are a man with progressive views on these matters,” he said. “I find myself wondering if you truly belong in our service. Some among us have come to believe that maybe you aren’t really one of us at all.”
Vasin looked around the table for support, or at least understanding. Kuznetsov’s face was flushed, his mouth pursed as though he were about to explode. His wide eyes were silently begging Vasin to shut up. Shubin stared in simple fascination, as though Vasin had produced a frog from his mouth. Kesoyan’s smile had become tight as a dog’s bottom.
“My views are as progressive as the Party’s. And the kontora’s, therefore. Naturally.”
Efremov abruptly stood. For an irrational second Vasin thought the man might be about to come round the table and strike him, but then he saw Zaitsev plowing through the crowd toward them with the unstoppable purpose of a tractor. Beside him was a figure swathed in violent pink chiffon. A woman, as squat and square-faced as the General himself, with her hair piled into the shape of a motorcycle helmet.
They all stood to attention. A memory of the lined face of the old mess sergeant who had shown him the ropes before his first drinks party at the KGB Officers’ Club in Moscow flashed into Vasin’s mind. “Brother officers don’t salute each other in the mess, sir. You’re fucking brothers.” Vasin kept his hands by his sides.
Zaitsev’s fleshy mouth worked as though he were chewing on something unpleasant as his disapproving eye flicked from one man to another before settling back on Vasin. Mrs. Zaitsev’s face mirrored her husband’s sour disappointment with humanity in general, and these specimens in particular. Her lip curled as she took in Vasin’s bruised eye, his crumpled uniform and grubby collar, eyeing him like a delinquent son dragged home from the drunk tank.
“S prazdnikom,” the General grunted. “Congratulations on the holiday.”
They returned the greeting in absurd unison.
Zaitsev swayed a little as he stood squarely before them, his powerful arms loose by his sides like a boxer’s. Belatedly, Vasin realized that the man was drunk. As some men may be seen to be in love, so Zaitsev seemed to be possessed by a deep and awesome hatred. For him.
“Vasin.”
He spat the word to rhyme with “fuck you.”
“Sir?”
“Find somewhere else to chase around rail yards and jump on signal gantries,” Zaitsev growled. Rudely, he had used the familiar form of address. “What the devil were you doing?”
“Following my Socialist duty, sir. At speed.”
Zaitsev was an enemy to jokes, feeling an energy in them beyond his control. Fury rose on his mottled cheeks like spreading ink. Vasin hastily continued.
“I was pursuing a suspicious character who threatened one of your witnesses, sir.”
Drink had rolled Zaitsev’s syntax back into the South Russian farmyards of his youth.
“My office has complied with all your idiot demands. Stop wasting our time.”
Vasin made his drink-addled brain focus. Perhaps Zaitsev wanted him gone so desperately that he would give up some evidence. The kontora’s painstaking digest of Petrov’s laboratory reports—the ones Axelrod insisted had been doctored.
“As soon as I have all I require, General. The laboratory report, specifically. From our deceased comrade’s workstation. That is the evidence I am missing.”
Zaitsev’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“Report to my office. Tomorrow.”
The General turned unsteadily, and his wife shot a parting glance of outrage, as though Vasin had somehow insulted them.
* * *
—
Kuznetsov was furiously silent as they wove unsteadily across the empty city. He sat hunched forward over the wheel, wrestling it like an enemy. His face lit and went out again under the sodium street lamps.
“Don’t be angry with me, friend.”
Kuznetsov sighed demonstratively. The elation of the drink and the unaccustomed liberation that Vasin had felt while provoking Efremov remained like a glow inside him.
“So why are you snorting like a bull? Did I say the wrong thing?”
“Where do I start?”
“That’s a start. Human words, better than farmyard noises.”
Kuznetsov turned the wheel violently, throwing Vasin against the door. He accelerated to dangerous speed down the final stretch of boulevard to his apartment and braked wildly to a halt, almost demolishing an innocent apple tree. Vasin wished someone had thought of installing some kind of restraining belts in cars, like on airplanes.
“Do you think nobody else has a mind of their own except for you? You come in here, jerk the kontora around, pull Efremov’s tail, mock every damn thing you like. Telling him about Yezhov and Beria? That’s the new Party line, so I say what I like to whomever I like?”
Kuznetsov’s face was livid in the lights of the dashboard.
Vasin, to his shock, saw a tear spill down his handler’s face. He was no longer angry, but distraught.
“Old man, I’m so sorry if I…”
“You realize that your freedom comes at a price? Every word you say means a word someone else cannot say. For you, it’s just some kind of fucking game. You screw with Zaitsev, with Efremov, he’s going to screw with someone, anyone but you. It’s time for you to go home, Vasin. You don’t fucking live he
re.”
Kuznetsov flung open the door, then slammed it behind him so hard that it sprang back from its latch.
Vasin followed him inside in shamed silence. He caught up with his roommate as he struggled with the door lock. Inside the apartment, the phone was ringing. Kuznetsov dived inside and snatched up the receiver at the seventh ring.
He turned to Vasin accusingly.
“It’s for you.”
Vasin took the telephone and turned his back on Kuznetsov. Who knew his number here?
“Hello?”
A chirpy female voice with a strong Central Asian accent announced that the comrade’s order of an electric train set had arrived and could be picked up at the toy counter of the Univermag at ten tomorrow morning.
CHAPTER NINE
SATURDAY, 28 OCTOBER 1961
TWO DAYS BEFORE THE TEST
I
Over breakfast Kuznetsov was torpid and hungover, his usual bonhomie strained. He gestured wordlessly to a pot of oats he was stirring on the stove when Vasin staggered into view in the kitchen door, spooned the porridge into two bowls on his guest’s nod, then busied himself with making tea.
“I’ll take the tram to the kontora if you’ve got somewhere to be.”
Kuzentsov stood, straightening with difficulty as though he bore the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“No, Comrade. You’re no trouble at all.”
After a courteous pantomime in front of the shower, Kuznetsov finally agreed to go in first. As he listened to the water gushing, Vasin realized how badly he needed a friend, even if no friend in this strange place could ever be a confidant.
Tugging their crumpled and cigarette-scented uniforms into place, side by side in front of the hall mirror, Vasin and Kuznetsov exchanged an involuntary frown that restored some of the previous evening’s complicity. They both looked like they had been dragged through a hedge.
“To the dragon’s den, Comrade?”
“If I must.”
“Oh ho-ho. You fucking must.”
* * *
—
As Vasin made his way upward through the levels of the kontora’s headquarters, he sensed heads turning in his wake. His notoriety in this little world was spreading. So that’s the guy from Moscow. Vasin walked as tall as the lingering pain in his groin allowed and presented himself to Zaitsev’s bleary-eyed secretary. He had a vague memory of the woman whirling in a drunken dance in the arms of some broad-shouldered ape the night before. All the resentment the woman felt for the rigors of the coming workday was distilled in her voice.
“Yes?”
“General Zaitsev asked for me.”
The secretary nodded him into a chair and frowned, evidently considering whether this disheveled man was of a rank to be offered tea. She probably needed one herself, so didn’t bother asking. Returning from the kitchen with two cups, she put one in front of Vasin and sipped her own noisily. Around them, the headquarters ground into reluctant life. Trolleys of documents rumbled past the door. Gossiping voices reached them from the smoking area of the stairwell. In an unbidden impulse of solidarity, the secretary slid open a desk drawer, fished out a plastic bag of sugared orange slices, and held it out to Vasin, drawing his attention with a brief shake. They sat on, wrapped in their separate silences.
Zaitsev’s arrival was heralded by a heavy stamping and puffing, like the appearance of a troll in a kindergarten play. But when the General strode in, Vasin saw that his usually ruddy face was grayish, creased with worry lines and the assorted tooth marks of age and booze. A monstrous hangover had not mellowed his habitual fury with the world. Efremov followed, irritatingly crisp and energetic. The secretary, casting a pitying glance at Vasin, scooped up the day’s files and followed her boss into his office.
The electric clock on the wall ticked past 0900. Masha would be waiting for him at the Univermag in an hour. When he thought of Masha, Vasin recognized the same vertiginous feeling he had once had with Katya Orlova, a sense of inexorability, of being drawn into something disastrous by a force stronger than his reason. Except that with Katya the force had been black and nihilistic. With Masha, Vasin felt a deep and genuine impulse of protection. She needed someone to save her—or so she had said. But save her from what? Her lover, Petrov? He was dead. From her trapped life of privilege? From Adamov, the loveless old man to whom she was bound in ways he struggled to understand? Just what he could do to save her, Vasin could not say. But he also knew that he needed her. Masha was hiding something crucial from him. Vasin felt it. She knows something. She fucking knows.
“Comrade Major?” The secretary replaced the handset on her desk. “The General will see you now.”
* * *
—
Zaitsev’s office was bigger than Vasin remembered it, large enough for a regimental dance. The General himself hunched at one end of the long conference table like a plump rat on a raft, watching his visitor cross the acre of parquet with bloodshot eyes. Gesturing Vasin to sit, Zaitsev crammed back the sleeve of his tunic and twisted his wrist around as if it were someone else’s. The dial of an old steel watch returned his stare.
“We have reached an end to your antics, Major Vasin. Efremov?”
The adjutant, with the mocking formality of a waiter, handed Vasin a fat gray file.
“The summary of the laboratory records,” said Efremov flatly. He paused to amplify his disapproval of the hours wasted at the visitor’s caprice. “Now you have everything.”
Vasin eyed his two colleagues warily, unwilling to believe that they had decided to grant his request. Though of course they had not spoken to Axelrod. The kontora men had no idea that the thallium Petrov had supposedly signed out and used to kill himself would have disappeared of its own accord through the black magic of radioactive decay.
Vasin struggled to keep the triumph out of his face.
He began leafing through the thick stack of papers he had glimpsed on the first day. Each contained a long list of dates, names, chemicals, and quantities. The cover noted that this was the fourth copy of four.
“You will note that all the reagents Comrade Petrov signed for are underlined in lead pencil,” continued Efremov. “The thallium is in red. Each notation is cross-referenced with the experiments undertaken, including how much thallium was actually used. Over three weeks, the Comrade Doctor signed for some two thousand milligrams more than appear to have been used in the tests undertaken by his laboratory. The evidence is clear, Comrade Major. Petrov signed for and stole a classified element, and poisoned himself.”
Vasin’s mind raced.
“Thanks. But why…”
“Why have we decided to give you the file?” Efremov exchanged a private glance with his boss before continuing. “Because of your unique talent for disruption. Your breathtaking insubordination. You are a loose cannon, Vasin, and your activities will no longer be tolerated. Therefore—you win. You have everything. And now, you must go.”
A rumble escaped from Zaitsev, like a rockfall inside his capacious chest.
“Before we waste any more time on you, these findings clearly confirm that Petrov’s death was suicide. Very clearly. My final report will be ready this afternoon. I expect you to endorse it. There’s a train to Gorky leaving at 1800. And you will be on it.”
Vasin leafed on to the end of the kontora’s summary of the laboratory data, considering his next move.
“I can sign your report right now, General.”
“Good.”
Zaitsev pushed back his chair and stood. A thought crossed his mind.
“And what of your report, Major Vasin?”
“I am afraid that my investigation still has some unanswered questions. Suicide comes in many forms, General. But you have my word. I will file my final report via the proper channels—”
<
br /> “Fuck your mother in her channels, Vasin.” Zaitsev’s fist thudded on the table. Not for the first time, Vasin was grateful that he was not facing this man in a soundproof interrogation cell.
Vasin got to his feet and stood to attention.
“Do I have permission to leave, Comrade General?”
Efremov smoothly approached Vasin and stood uncomfortably close, his lanky height towering over him.
“You haven’t understood, Comrade. If you agree to leave tonight, we give you the report at the station. The moment your boots are off the platform, I’ll hand it to you. You have our word.”
Vasin looked from Efremov to the General and back again. Both had smirks smeared across their faces.
“Understood.”
“Good.” Zaitsev’s mouth was curled in a wet smile of satisfaction at having outplayed his adversary.
“But I cannot be on tonight’s train.”
“Why the fuck not?” The General’s smile had abruptly withered into a flabby scowl.
“Because Professor Adamov himself has requested an interview with me at ten this evening, after the device has been readied for transportation. But I need the report now.”
Vasin knew that without the kontora’s painstaking cross-referencing he would have no chance of checking it against the Institute’s original records. He prayed that Axelrod was right. If the records had been doctored, Vasin would have the proof he needed that Petrov was indeed murdered. And that could buy him some more time to find out who really had done it. If Axelrod was wrong, he would be out of time, and out of town.
“Categorically denied.”
“General Zaitsev, I plan to show Professor Adamov your findings this evening so that he can confirm your assessment. And then the case will be closed.”
“Efremov can bring it to your rendezvous with the Professor.”
“No. We will meet alone. The Professor insists. I will take the file with me now.”
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