The rails trembled under Arkady’s back. In a pantomime of neatness, the man folded his knife, picked up his hat and scrambled onto the catwalk. Arkady saw the distant platform numbers change from 2:49 to 2:50, and he turned into the glow of two vertical headlights. Halos spread over the tunnel walls. He felt a wind, air-propelled ahead of the train, and the rails’ moan.
Irina’s hands were limp and hot to the grasp. He had to lift her bodily and twist away from the train to keep from being blinded. He had never been so brightly lit. The last mote in the air stood out. Her arms fell sleepily and he staggered. A scream of locking brakes climbed to a fine peak of metallic hysteria, then abruptly dropped away as the train rushed through.
Arkady pushed Irina onto the catwalk and pressed himself into the wall.
As soon as Levin opened his apartment door, Arkady carried Irina in to a plastic-covered sofa.
‘She was hit on the head or they gave her a shot of something, I haven’t had time to look,’ he said. ‘She’s very hot.’
Levin was in a robe and slippers, pajama bottoms at shanks as sharp as his nose. It was clear that he was debating whether to tell Arkady to go or not.
‘I wasn’t followed,’ Arkady offered.
‘Don’t insult me.’ Levin made his choice, folded his robe, and sat and took Irina’s temperature. Her face was flushed and slack, her Afghan jacket reduced to the scruff and patches it really was. Arkady was embarrassed for her; he hadn’t considered yet what he looked like. Levin held up her right forearm to show a bruise marked by pinpricks. ‘Injections. Sulfazin, probably, from her temperature. A messy job.’
‘She was probably struggling.’
‘Yes.’ Levin’s tone underlined the stupidity of the remark. He struck a match and passed it slowly over her eyes, covering one eye and then the other.
Arkady still felt the afterthrill of near death. The subway train had stopped short of the platform, and by the time the engineers reached it and the platform conductors called the militia, Arkady had carried Irina from the station to his car. Escaped was the description; the word moved inside him like a flywheel out of control. Why would a chief investigator run from the militia? Any more than an unconscious girl should seem so dangerous to Levin? It was a wonderful country where everyone understood secret signs so well.
It took him some time to look clearly at Levin’s flat. He’d never been here before. Instead of comfortable knickknacks, shelves and tables were crowded with lacquered men on chessboards of ivory, teak and colored glass, each board set for a game in progress. Instead of the usual embroidered babushkas nailed to the wall were photos of Lasker, Tal, Botvinnik, Spassky and Fischer, all chess masters, all Jews.
‘If you have any brains, you’ll take her back where you found her,’ Levin said.
Arkady shook his head.
‘Then you’ll have to help me,’ Levin said.
They took her to Levin’s bed, a plain iron cot. Arkady pulled off her boots and helped Levin remove her dress and underclothes. Each article was spongy with perspiration.
Arkady thought of the many times he and Levin had stood over other bodies that were white, cold and stiff. Over Irina, Levin was strangely tentative, ill at ease and trying to disguise the fact. It was the most human Arkady had ever seen him; he was nervous around the living. Because Irina Asanova was very much alive, there was no denying that. Comatose, but hardly cold. She was a feverish pink. Slimmer than Arkady’d expected, her ribs under heavy breasts with oblong areolae, her stomach concave until a rise of thick brown hair. Her graceful legs sprawled. She stared up at Arkady and through him.
While they were covering her in wet towels to bring down her temperature, Levin pointed to the faint blue mark on her right cheek. ‘See this?’
‘An old accident, I suppose.’
‘Accident?’ Levin sneered. ‘Clean up. You can find the bathroom yourself, this isn’t the Winter Palace.’
In the bathroom mirror, Arkady saw that he was covered with dirt, and that one eyebrow was sliced open as if with a razor. After washing, he returned to the living room, where Levin was warming tea on a hot plate. A small cabinet exhibited cans of vegetables and fish.
‘They offered me an apartment with a kitchen or an apartment with a bathroom. For me a bathroom is more important.’ On a long-unused note of hospitality, he added, ‘You want something to eat?’
‘A little sugar in the tea, that’s all. How will she be?’
‘Don’t worry about her. She’s young and strong. She’ll feel sick for a day, no more. Here.’ He gave Arkady a tepid cup.
‘So you think it was sulfazin.’
‘You can take her to a hospital if you want to be sure,’ Levin said.
‘No.’
Sulfazin was one of the favorite narcotics of the KGB; he’d no sooner get her to a hospital than a doctor would be calling. Levin knew that.
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t.’ Levin cut him off. ‘The less you say, the better off I’ll be. I’m sure my imagination is adequate; I just wonder if yours is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Arkady, this girl of yours is no virgin.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The mark on her cheek. They had her before, Arkady. They shot aminazin into her years ago.’
‘I thought they stopped using aminazin because it was dangerous.’
‘That’s the point. They deliberately inject it badly into the muscle so that it’s not absorbed. If it’s not absorbed, it forms a malignant tumor, just as it did with her. Wake up. She’s blind in one eye. Whoever cut the tumor cut the optic nerve and left that mark. That’s their mark.’
‘That’s overstating it a little, don’t you think?’
‘Ask her. Talk about blind!’
‘You’re making too much of this. A witness was attacked and I defended her.’
‘Then why aren’t you in a militia station now?’
Arkady went to the bedroom. The towels on Irina were hot; he replaced them with fresh ones. Her arms and legs jerked spasmodically in sleep, a reaction to her change in temperature. He smoothed her forehead, pushing back strands of matted hair. The mark on her cheek was a faint violet cast from the rush of blood beneath the skin.
What did they want? he wondered. From the beginning, they had been there. Major Pribluda to rake up the bodies in Gorky Park. Detective Fet when Golodkin was questioned. The killers in Golodkin’s apartment, the would-be killers in the metro tunnel. Rubber balls, injections, blades – all signatures of Pribluda and the host of Pribludas that was them. Anyway, they would be stationed around her place and by now they would have a list of her friends. They would get tired of watching hospitals, and the idea of Levin the pathologist wouldn’t take much longer to occur to Pribluda. Levin had courage, but when she woke she had to go.
When he returned to the living room, Levin was sedating himself by scrutinizing his chessboards. ‘She looks better,’ Arkady reported. ‘At least she’s sleeping.’
‘I envy her.’ Levin didn’t look up.
‘Would you like to play?’
‘What’s your rating?’ Levin looked up.
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you had one, you’d know. No, thank you.’ That reduced Levin to the demands of hospitality again, however, and thoughts of the woman in his bed who was being searched for. He feigned a smile. ‘Actually, this is quite an interesting situation here. A game played by Bogolyubov and Pirc in ’31. Black’s move, only he doesn’t have one.’
Only in the Army had Arkady been bored enough to play chess seriously, and then his only talent had been for defense. Both sides in this game had castled and White had control of the center, just as Levin said. On the other hand, Arkady noted an absence of game clocks in the apartment, the sign of a soul who preferred leisurely analysis to over-the-board mayhem. Also, poor Levin was fraying at the prospect of a long and nervous night.
‘Do you mind?’ Arkady moved f
or Black. ‘Bishop takes pawn.’
Levin shrugged. PXB.
. . . QXP check! KXQ, N-N5 check! K-NI, NXQ! Black’s knight forked White’s bishop and rook.
‘Do you ever take time to think before you move?’ Levin muttered. ‘There’s a certain pleasure to be found in that.’
B-N3, NXR. Levin pondered whether to take the knight with his rook or his king. Either way the knight was doomed; then Black would have given up queen, bishop and knight in exchange for queen, rook and two pawns. The outcome would depend on White’s ability to bring his bishop back into the game before Black could link his majority of pawns and double his rooks.
‘You’ve only introduced complications,’ Levin said.
While Levin thought out his move, Arkady dipped into a book-shelf, coming up with a collection of Poe. Soon enough, he saw that Levin had fallen asleep in his chair. At 4 a.m., he went down to his car, drove it around the block to find if he was being watched, and returned to Levin’s apartment. He couldn’t wait any longer. He dressed Irina in her damp clothes, wrapped her in a blanket and carried her down. Driving, the only people he saw were road crews ‘storming’ for May Day. A single man on a steamroller directed four women pouring warm tar. When he had crossed the river and was within two blocks of Taganskaya, he got out, walked alone the rest of the way to his apartment, and went through every room to be sure it was empty. Returning to the car, he drove to the apartment, switching his engine and headlights off as he turned into the courtyard. He carried Irina upstairs, laying her on the bed, undressing her and covering her with Levin’s blanket and his own overcoat.
He was about to go out to move the car again when he saw that her eyes were open. Her pupils were dilated and the whites were tinged red. She didn’t have the strength to move her head.
‘Idiot,’ she said.
Chapter Thirteen
It was raining. The floors creaked idly. In the apartments above and below, Arkady heard the occasional footfall of housecleaning. On the hall stairs, the sideways climbing of an old woman. There had been no knocks at the door, no phone calls.
Irina Asanova lay facing him, her skin was wan as ivory now that her fever was broken. He was still in his clothes. At first he’d tried to find some other place to curl up, but there were no chairs or sofa, not even a rug, and in the end they’d shared the bed. Not that she’d known or that it mattered. He lifted his watch. 9 a.m. Slowly, so as not to wake her, he rose and walked down in stockinged feet to the side of a window and looked down into the courtyard. No face looked up. He’d have to move her, but he didn’t know where. Not her place. Hotels were out of the question; it was illegal to take a hotel room in your own city. (What good reason could a citizen have for not being home?) Something would turn up.
Four hours’ sleep was enough. The investigation carried him along. He felt it rising like the bulk of a wave, bearing him, bones and body, in rumpled clothes.
The girl clutched her blanket against her cheek, good for another four hours of deep sleep, he guessed. He’d be back by then. It was time to see the general.
Enthusiasts Road, where prisoners used to start their journey to Siberia on foot, went by the Hammer and Sickle tractor works to Route 89, a truck run of narrow concrete, flat mud countryside and villages set as close to the ground as potatoes east all the way to the Urals. Arkady drove forty kilometers before turning north on a macadam road toward a village called Balobanovo, past figures sowing okra and beans, and fields of uniformly brown cows, then on a dirt road through woods so dense that drifts of snow untouched by the sun blanketed the ground. Between branches he could see the river Kliazma.
At an iron gate he got out and walked the rest of the way. No cars had been through recently. In the middle of the road, last year’s grass stood dead and tall. A fox dashed almost under his feet and he braced automatically for the general’s dogs, but the woods were silent except for the drizzle of rain.
After ten minutes’ walk, he came to a two-story house with a steep metal roof. On the other side of the circular yard, he knew, was a long stairway going down to the riverbank where there was – had been, at least – a dock with a skiff and, anchored well into the stream, a float on orange oil cans. There had also been peonies in wooden buckets along the dock, and a tub of ice manned by two aides-de-camp in white jackets and white gloves. For parties, Chinese lanterns would hang over the dock and be strung all the way up the stairs, a trail of moons rising straight to the sky. Their reflections in the water would bob like luminous sea creatures attracted to the music.
He looked up at the house. Ferrous stains reached from the gutters to the ground. A banister leaned from the steps. Weeds flourished in the yard around a rusted garden table and an empty rabbit pen. Crowding around the house and the lawn, staggering at all angles, were gaunt pines and elms gone wild in decay, adding more finishing touches to an atmosphere of total desolation. The only sign of life was a string of dead hares, flayed blue and black-red.
His knock was answered by an old woman, whose stupefaction turned into a poisonous glare and a twist in the blot of lipstick that was her mouth. She wiped her hands on a greasy apron. ‘Surprise,’ she said in a voice slurred by vodka.
Arkady stepped in. Sheets covered the furniture. The curtains were as gray as shrouds. An oil portrait of Stalin hung over the fireplace, which reeked of damp ashes. There were dried boughs, bottles of faded paper flowers, a gun rack with a Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle and two carbines.
‘Where is he?’ Arkady asked.
She nodded toward the library. ‘Tell him I need more money,’ she said loudly. ‘And a woman to help out, but, first, money.’
Arkady pulled free of her fingers and went to a door built under the stairway to the second floor.
The general was in a wicker chair by a window. Like Arkady, he had a narrow, handsome face, but the skin had gone taut and translucent, the eyebrows white and untrimmed, the hair a white fluff around a high forehead knotted by veins at the temples. His frame sank within a loose peasant shirt, pants and oversized boots. His hands, pale as cream paper, rubbed a long wooden holder which had no cigarette.
Arkady sat down. There were two busts in the library, one of Stalin and the other of the general, both cast from shell casings. A framed panel of red felt displayed rows of medals, including two Orders of Lenin. The felt was dusty, the photographs on the walls were obscured by a haze of dirt, and dust collected in the folds of a divisional flag nailed to the wall.
‘So it’s you,’ the general said. He spat on the floor, missing a ceramic bowl filled almost to the brim with brown scum. He waved his cigarette holder. ‘Tell the bitch if she wants more money to go into town and make it on her back.’
‘I came to ask you about Mendel. There’s something I have to be certain of.’
‘He’s dead, that’s certain enough.’
‘He won his Order of Lenin for killing some German raiders near Leningrad. He was a close friend of yours.’
‘He was a piece of shit. That’s why he went into the Foreign Ministry. All they take is thieves and shit, all they’ve ever taken. Another coward, like you. No, better than you. He wasn’t a total failure. It’s a new world, and turds float down. Go home. Sniff after that silly cunt you married. You still married?’
Arkady took the general’s holder and put a cigarette in it. He put one in his own mouth, lit both and gave back the holder. The general coughed.
‘I was in Moscow for the October reunion. You could have come around and seen me then. Belov did.’
Arkady studied one of the clouded photographs. Was it of men dancing, or hanging? Another one was of a freshly turned garden or a mass grave. It had been so long that he’d forgotten.
‘You there?’
‘I’m here.’
For the first time the general turned his face to Arkady. There was little left in it. Muscles worked like wires directly between skin and bone. The black eyes were blind, milky with cataracts. ‘You’re a weakling,’
he said. ‘You make me sick.’
Arkady looked at his watch. The girl would be waking in a few hours, and he wanted to pick up some food before getting back to Moscow.
‘Heard about the new tanks? Tried to show them off for us. Fucking limousines. That’s that asshole Kosygin for you. Designed by plant directors. Plant directors! One runs a nuclear reactor; let’s put in atomic shells. One makes lemonade; let’s put in chemical war sprayers. Another makes air conditioners; let’s air-condition the damn thing. You make toilets, we’ll put in toilet seats. More useless shit than a luxury cruiser, as if we were going to be impressed! No, you build a tank with as little as possible to go wrong, and if it does go wrong you can fix it on the run. Just like Mikoyan built his planes, a good team with one brain at the top. But they kept heaping shit on us like fruit on a grave. They’re all soft now. You still have that stupid moon-calf look about you?’
‘Yeah.’
The old man shifted, hardly disturbing the clothes hanging on him.
‘You could have been a general by now. Govorov’s boy commands the whole Moscow Military District. With my name you could have risen faster. Well, I knew you didn’t have the balls for an armored command, but at least you could have been one of those assholes in Intelligence.’
‘What about Mendel?’
‘You just don’t have it. A weak sperm or something. I don’t know.’
‘Did Mendel shoot the Germans?’
‘Ten years you don’t come here, and then you ask about some coward in his grave.’
Cigarette ash dropped on the general’s shirt. Arkady leaned forward and pinched an ember.
‘My dogs are dead,’ the general said angrily. ‘They were out in the fields and came across some assholes in bulldozers. The bastards shot them! Peasant bastards! What are bulldozers doing out here? Well, the whole world . . .’ He made a fist, a white knob. ‘Everything going to seed. Dung beetles. Rotting. Listen, the flies!’
They sat quietly, the general’s ear tilted to the rain. A bee was trapped between the second and third panes of the window, but it was stiff on its back.