A quiet followed Adamov’s words. It seemed that the whole dark world inside the Professor had collapsed into a silence so deep that all future words would die in it. Vasin could think of no argument to set against the Professor’s despair. To mention his own survival, Masha’s, seemed trivial compared to the void that Adamov had conjured.
Masha moved toward her husband.
“Yura.” She threaded her arm into his. “Free yourself from your cruel logic for a second. There is another logic.”
Adamov tried to push her away, but Masha only entwined herself more tightly.
“Remember what you said to me in Leningrad. When I was just a young scarecrow, and you an old goat? The goal of science is not universal truth. Instead, you said that the goal of science is the gradual removal of prejudices. A modest but relentless goal. You said that bit by bit, generation by generation, science frees men from their susperstitions. And as they lose their prejudices, men see that the human world is not the center of the cosmos. Remember?”
“I remember.” Adamov’s voice had softened. “I remember, Masha.”
“You said, the discovery that the earth revolves around the sun convinced men that the earth was not the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes showed them that disease was not a punishment from God. Evolution, which showed humans that they are not some separate and unique creation of God but an animal like the rest. Remember? You said that a lot. ‘We are all animals, like the rest.’ Not gods but walking apes.”
“Apes that are bent on killing each other, child. That’s the point. That is our nature. As we have discovered in this bloody century.”
“No. No, Yura. Our nature is to learn. To change. And you have spent your life creating a machine, your device, which shows men that they have finally the means in their hands to destroy themselves. Killing may be in our nature. Killing ourselves is not. It’s the opposite of nature. Remember what Korin used to say—about that American who invented the first bomb? Oppenheimer? His new promised land where weapons would become too terrible to use? So. You reached it. You brought us all to the border of this land. After your bomb, there will be no others. But only you can bring this story to an end. Don’t you see? Korin was right. Nothing can be allowed to stand in your way. Nobody. Not Petrov, not Axelrod. And Korin gave his own life for it. For you. The last blood to be spilled. Listen to Vasin. We must save ourselves. Save you. So that your precious bomb is finally tested. And then your work will be done.”
Masha ran her hand over her husband’s bowed head. Adamov said nothing.
“Maybe you will come to love me as much as you loved your bombs.”
Adamov looked slowly up at his wife.
“A clever one you are, Masha. Korin always said so.”
Adamov’s eyes moved from his wife’s face across the carnage around him. Korin’s powerful body crumpled beside the control panel. The barometric chamber with its empty window. The three spent cartridge cases glinting dully on the floor. Then he nodded, not meeting Vasin’s eye, and stood.
“Perhaps I will do as you say.”
Vasin ran through the plan that he had formulated in his mind, trying to find fault with it. He knew how the kontora functioned: the excitement over finding an apparently real American spy with an operating secret radio would eclipse any minor inconsistencies. He faced Adamov squarely, putting all hesitation from his mind.
“Go. Now. Professor, get to your office. Don’t let anyone see you going there. Take a back staircase. Call Axelrod’s home number. The call will be logged. You are anxious. Don’t leave until someone comes up and tells you what happened here. And when they talk to you, the men from the kontora, don’t play dumb. You are racked by guilt that you did not see Korin for what he was. Talk to them as you talked to me. Arrogantly. You are a cloud dweller. You are a man who holds the defense of the Motherland in his hands. You are above these sordid stories. Got it?”
Adamov nodded, straightening up. He smoothed his tunic, keeping his eyes on Vasin as he worked through the story in his head, like a long equation. After a few moments, he grunted, and continued with his train of thought. Eventually he nodded once again, more to himself than to Vasin.
“A fantastical story from a paranoid mind. But it will serve. For their paranoid little minds.”
Adamov’s old, imperturbable grandeur had begun to flow back into him. There was a plan to be followed. Steps to be taken. Order would be imposed once again on a world that had momentarily flown apart into a blizzard of disconnected fragments.
“Come, Maria.”
“Maria Vladimirovna will join you. You will wait together in your office. But go separately. Make sure nobody sees you on your way.”
Somewhere deep in the building a door slammed.
The three of them froze, brought abruptly back into the present danger. There was no further noise, only a suddenly oppressive sense of urgency.
“Professor, go. Masha, stay here for a moment.”
Adamov’s mouth gave the faintest twitch to hear Vasin address his wife so familiarly. He looked from her to Vasin and back again, but his proud face betrayed nothing. Adamov nodded formally to both of them and stalked out of the laboratory.
VII
Maria and Vasin listened to Adamov’s footsteps as they receded down the hallway. When the silence had closed about them once more, she turned to Vasin. Her face was spattered with Korin’s blood. Vasin fished for a handkerchief and passed it to her. It was warm from the heat of the gun in his pocket.
Masha leaned on the console, examined her reflection in the glass of the dials, and slowly wiped off the gore.
“Better?”
“Better.”
He put out his hand and covered hers. Masha’s knuckles lay under his palm like a small, trembling animal.
“You love him.”
Her face tightened into a small smile. She pulled her hand away.
“These scientists are hard to love. Every day they see perfection. And I was very imperfect.”
“Not as perfect as an equation?”
“Right.”
“Is anyone?”
She shrugged and raised her green eyes to Vasin’s, steady and appraising.
“And Fyodor? He didn’t compare you to the perfection of the universe?”
“Fyodor. He was a mistake.”
“Your imperfection.”
“My animal nature, Adamov would have said. But for a while I thought I loved him. Very much.”
“Adamov never knew?”
“I would have told him if I thought he would care.”
“Why wouldn’t he care?”
“That was a worldly matter. And he doesn’t like the world much. He loves his bombs more than any human being alive.”
“More than you?”
Masha gave a snort of impatience.
“You don’t understand him. Or me. He is the greatest man I have ever met. Or you have ever met, of that I’m certain. His mind—his mind is occupied with higher things. Beautiful things. Changeless things. That’s why I love him, if that’s what you’re asking. Adamov is a great man. He is my great man. You know the thieves’ code. Don’t be afraid. Don’t ask for anything. Don’t trust anyone. And don’t give up your own.”
“Bombs are higher things than people?”
“Vasin, spare me your philosophizing. Adamov might need higher motives for whatever he does. Korin too. All that endless talk about the end of war, forever. Those speeches he gave you, and me. I understand, they needed that philosophy in order not to have to murder the humanity in themselves every day. To justify their work to themselves. I just want Adamov alive. And myself alive. And you gave us that, tonight. Now. You almost took it away from us when you shot Korin. But then you gave it back. Nobody will ever know. But I will
know.”
“Are you trying to thank me?”
“Yes. Yes, I am, Vasin. You’re brave. You make your own choices. Not many men I know can say that about themselves. Not even him.” Masha gestured to Korin’s corpse with a flick of her head. “Korin was a prisoner all his adult life. The knowledge in his head. In his hands. He never had a chance to choose another path. The State would never have let him.”
“So he served.”
“He served, and he’s serving still. Korin will take all the lies, all the murder onto himself from the grave. He’ll even serve you.”
“Me?”
“The great investigator uncovers a spy in Arzamas. Don’t say that won’t bring you glory, over at your kontora.”
“If you think…”
“No. I don’t think anything. You didn’t bring Axelrod here for glory. You did it because Korin asked you to. Because he and Adamov took you into their confidence. They spoke to you like an intelligent man. And you chose to hear them. And believe them. And act. That’s freedom, no?”
Vasin thought of the crushed heap of clothes in the chamber that had once been Axelrod, and said nothing.
“Listen to me, Vasin. All the rest…the glory? That’s just the world. The mad world. Korin always used to say that rewards and punishment are the same. A test of vanity. Or of strength. Sent by God. Crazy old bastard. So let’s say that Korin sent you a test. Luckily for you, God chose vanity.”
“If the kontora believes us.”
“If they believe you. You’re the one who’s going to be doing most of the talking, Comrade Major.”
Masha put her hand on Vasin’s arm. Slight and fragile as she was, she was now the strong one. The moment when he had cradled her limp body in his arms on the roof of the Kino seemed unimaginably distant.
“It’ll be okay, Vasin. I believe in you.”
Maria was about to walk out of his life. Their time was up. Mechanically, he raised his watch but could make no sense of the dial.
Vasin looked back at Masha’s face. Her gaze had sharpened, and he saw that her thoughts were already striding away from him into her own private future.
“I’m glad. Glad that we are guarded by honest men.”
Masha turned and walked out of the laboratory without looking back.
VIII
In the dim silence, Vasin listened to a dull magnetic buzz that hummed through the building. The gunsmoke had dispersed, leaving a sharp smell of cordite that mingled with the hall’s faint aroma of animal feces and engine oil. The pain in the back of his head, forgotten in the heat of the moment, returned with almost paralyzing force. He touched the rising swelling, sticky with blood. Good, he thought. Evidence. His blood would be on the fire axe too, and the floor. Nobody can hit himself on the back of the head.
Vasin settled himself on a stool beside Korin’s cooling body and tried to concentrate on the performance that lay ahead. A landscape of deceit spooled out before him like a film that he would have to edit, carefully splicing in his fictions to arrive at this final scene of destruction. The endless patterns of intrigue joined and re-formed in his mind’s eye until he lost the thread and pressed his fingers against his eyes. Absurdly, he thought of Kuznetsov, who had trusted Vasin’s word that he would not discharge his weapon. Another promise broken—not that it would matter if his story held together. But would Kuznetsov himself believe his fantastical story? Of all the kontora men in Arzamas, it was his handler’s ironic, skeptical glance that he could not quite imagine facing down as he spun his tale. But neither could Vasin imagine Kuznetsov suddenly discovering righteous indignation. He’d purse his lips, nod his beard in acknowledgment of the incomprehensible loops that life spun about him.
He thought of Masha, her physical presence, trotting up flights of stairs and peering around corners as she made her way through the deserted building to join her husband. And he thought of her words. You make your own choices, she had said. But Vasin could think of no point where he had been offered any real choice. Since he came to Arzamas he had been like a wanderer in a dream, pulling aside one curtain only to reveal another two steps behind it. And for all the secrets that he had uncovered, about Korin and Adamov in the Gulag, about Petrov and the bomb, about the forbidden loves of Masha and Axelrod, he nonetheless sensed endless acres of veiled, forbidden knowledge still surrounding him, stretching into darkness.
Vasin felt loneliness seating itself beside him like a companion who doesn’t need to speak. He would never see Masha again. The only person who had ever called him brave, or probably ever would. What had he wanted from her? To make her his mistress? To escape with her into a different future from the one that the world had prescribed for both of them? Now that she was gone, Vasin realized with a sharp pang that, yes, that was the secret his own heart had kept veiled, even from himself.
There had been a clarity to Masha, an animal single-mindedness that Vasin found obscurely shaming. Her childhood suffering, the violence that she had inflicted on others to survive, the ruthlessness with which she had used and deceived him in defense of her Adamov. Even the addled moment when she decided to destroy herself: all these were impulses of absolute, fearless resolution. Masha had been a mirror upon which Vasin’s life had been violently dissected. And he could find no absolutes to put opposite her own. His own life had been a series of useless efforts, each driven by the material dictates of the little world that surrounded him, or the pathetic impulses of his body. But Masha was the one who truly did not live by lies.
In a few minutes, from the moment that he picked up the telephone and invited the world to burst in on his silence, Vasin would be irretrievably plunged back into the tangled unhappiness of his own life. And he realized that perhaps unhappiness was the one state he truly deserved. He was not a cloud dweller, but a swamp dweller. There were no pure universes of numbers in his life, no eternal truths to discover. Just existence, with its daily compromises. But at least, here in Masha’s death-dealing city, he had touched a different world. A world from which Vasin had brought away a lie of his own, the falsehood of Korin’s espionage, to add to all the rest of the lies in the basements of the kontora. But this would be his lie. A good lie. And Vasin would share this secret with Masha, and with Adamov, and it would bind them together forever. A secret that he would know, and Masha would know, but that the kontora would never know. Which felt almost like a victory. And that gave him strength.
In front of Vasin was a telephone, its wire linked to other wires that spread across the secret city and out across the great Soviet empire like an infinite web. Vasin waited for another minute, feeling time run around him like a stream.
Then he picked up the receiver, and dialed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MONDAY, 30 OCTOBER 1961
THE DAY OF THE TEST
Vasin glanced at the clock on Zaitsev’s wall.
10:35.
An hour to the test.
Up in Olenya, snow would be swirling in the monstrous draft of the Tupolev bomber’s propellers as the pilots prepared to taxi for takeoff. The military’s top brass would be there, shivering in the Arctic wind. Korin’s loading team would be huddled in the lee of their fuel truck, watching the plane’s run with hard, unimpressed stares. The Sailor might even be among them, chewing on an unlit papiros cigarette in the slanting morning light.
There was a gentle knock on the door of Zaitsev’s office. Hesitantly, Efremov entered, bearing an armful of dossiers. The adjutant’s former cold hauteur had dissolved into nervous hesitation.
“Major? The documents you requested.”
Vasin gestured to the sea of paper that already covered the General’s conference table. Reverently, as though they were sacred objects, Efremov placed the files with the rest.
“Vasin. I just wanted to say…”
“Make it brief, Efremov.”
&n
bsp; Vasin was now the spy catcher. The bloodied executioner. He was now a man with no time to spare for the likes of Efremov.
“I wanted to congratulate you, Comrade. Wanted to say that I was always on your side. You should know that it was Zaitsev who insisted on placing obstacles…”
“Anything else?”
Efremov’s angular face had gone pale. He drew himself up and saluted. Vasin returned the salute with a casual flick of the hand.
“One thing before you go. Kuznetsov was an excellent choice as my handler. Helped me a lot. I’m recommending him to the higher-ups for promotion. A posting to fraternal Cuba, we’re thinking. I knew you’d want to congratulate him before he goes.”
* * *
—
General Zaitsev himself was off supervising the search of Korin’s barrack. The last twenty-four hours had drained him of his habitual choler like a bloodletting, leaving only pale nervousness behind. In the cold light of the previous dawn, as Zaitsev and Vasin had faced each other on the steps of the Institute, the old brute had looked deflated. A spy. Oh yes. A real American spy in the heart of Arzamas. And Zaitsev had failed to discover him. The knowledge of his impending disgrace had punctured the General like a balloon. Zaitsev’s enormous uniform seemed to hang on him like a sack. And in his eyes, when they met Vasin’s, was pure, animal fear.
Vasin had called Orlov at home from the secure line in Zaitsev’s office, which by the unspoken right of victory had temporarily become his own. It had been half past five in the morning, but Orlov was already awake. Or perhaps still awake. Vasin had communicated only the essentials. Colonel Korin, a spy and double murderer. Religious fanatic. Secret radio. Shot dead. Requesting instructions.
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