Irina wavered on her feet. He was afraid she would fall.
‘So the whole question is, Where is Valerya?’ Arkady went on.
‘How can you do this?’ Irina asked.
‘We are’ – Arkady looked aside and spoke in a different tone of voice – ‘a backward, ignorant people. It seems we always have been. We have strange talents, Irina. At the Law Faculty at the university you had lectures on forensic medicine and were introduced to the work of Professor Andreev. Perhaps you were shown some photos. It is a simple but painstaking method of reconstructing a face from a skull. Not a vague idea of what the face might have looked like or a close approximation, but the face itself. No other country has it. It’s a delicate matter of rebuilding every muscle on the skull, then laying on flesh and eyes and skin. As you know, Andreev is a master, and you must also be aware of his reputation for integrity.’ Arkady removed the lid from the hatbox. ‘You wanted to know where Valerya is.’
‘I know you, Arkasha,’ Irina said. ‘You won’t do it.’
‘Here is Valerya.’
Arkady started to lift the head out of the box. He did it slowly so that Irina could see first above the rim of the box a mass of dark curls entangled in his fingers, then the hair pulling taut between his hand and a rising forehead of fresh-complexioned skin.
‘Arkasha!’ She closed her eyes and covered them with her hands.
‘Take a look.’
‘Arkasha!’ She didn’t take her hands from her eyes. ‘Yes, yes, this is where Valerya lived. Put it back in the box.’
‘Valerya who?’
‘Valerya Davidova.’
‘With . . .’
‘Kostia Borodin and the Kirwill boy.’
‘An American named James Kirwill?’
‘Yes.’
‘You saw them here?’
‘Kirwill was always here hiding. Valerya was here, I wouldn’t come unless she was.’
‘You didn’t get along with Kostia?’
‘No.’
‘What were they doing here in the house?’
‘Making a chest, you know about the chest.’
‘Who for?’ Arkady held his breath when she hesitated.
‘Osborne,’ she said.
‘Osborne who?’
‘John Osborne.’
‘An American furrier named John Osborne?’
‘Yes.’
‘They told you they were making the chest for Osborne?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that all they were doing for Osborne?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ever go into the shed in back of the house here?’
‘Yes, once.’
‘You saw what they brought Osborne from Siberia?’
‘Yes.’
‘Repeat your answer, please. You saw what they brought Osborne from Siberia?’
‘I hate you,’ she said. Arkady turned off the portable tape machine on the bottom of the hatbox and let the head fall back in. Irina dropped her hands. ‘Now I really do.’
Swan entered from outside the door, where he had been waiting.
‘This man will drive you back to town.’ Arkady dismissed her. ‘Stay with him. Don’t go to my apartment; it will be unsafe. Thank you for your help in this investigation. You had better go now.’
He hoped she would understand, and that she would insist on staying. He would take her with him if she did.
She did stop at the door. ‘There’s a story about your father, the general,’ she said. ‘They called him a monster because he took German ears as trophies during the war. No one ever said he showed off a whole head. He was nothing compared to you.’
She walked out. Arkady’s last view of her was in Swan’s car, an ancient Zil sedan, moving up the dirt road.
Arkady went to the back of the house, past the outhouse to the metal shed, which he unlocked with one of the dead men’s keys. As he entered, something brushed against his face, a light cord for a rack hanging from the center of the ceiling. When he pulled the cord, rows of powerful bulbs made the inside of the shed as bright as day. He found a timer on the wall. Turning it, he heard a faint ticking, and noticed an almost imperceptible shift in the rank of lights. The timer would swing the rack almost 180 degrees over twelve hours to simulate the rising and setting of the sun. Another cord rose to two ultraviolet lamps. There were no windows.
The remains of a round brick forge explained the shed’s history. Stacks of molds and iron scrap had rusted together into metal knots. All the usable space was taken up by two cages that ran the length of the shed. Each was partitioned by wood walls into three pens, and each pen had a wooden coop. Wire covered the sides and tops of the cages. At ground level the wire was buttressed by stones and cement so that not even the slimmest and most determined animal could escape.
In the area between the two cages was a bench cross-hatched with blood and fish scales. Arkady found a prayer book beneath the bench. He imagined the dissimilar pair of James Kirwill and Kostia Borodin guarding and feeding their secret, Kirwill praying for divinity while Kostia chased snoopers.
He entered a pen and collected fine hairs from the wire and droppings from the ground.
Back in the house, he filled his extra evidence bag with items from the footlockers. As he put the bag on the table, he knocked over the hatbox and the head inside rolled out. It was a hinged plaster head without eyes, brows or mouth, without any particular features at all, merely paint and the roughest shape of a face and a wig. It was the dummy Andreev used for teaching. As Arkady lifted the head back in, the halves of its face swung open and showed the narrow inner leer of the skull.
Andreev’s reconstruction of Valerya’s head was now no more than flesh-colored dust and the smell of burning hair at Iamskoy’s dacha. Andreev had confirmed that Iamskoy himself had called about the head and sent over the pocked man to get it. In a way, the destruction of Andreev’s masterpiece had liberated Arkady; only then did he think of using a dummy. He never could have shown Irina the real head, just as he knew she couldn’t look at it. Desperate, he’d had a brilliant idea. He had fooled her. Saved her and lost her.
Entering the Ukraina lobby, Arkady saw Hans Unmann leaving the elevator. Arkady sat in a lobby chair and picked up a discarded newspaper. He’d never actually seen Osborne’s co-conspirator before. The German was a scarecrow, thin-mouthed and bony, with blond hair cut close under his hat. The kind of man who instinctively stares down the next person in his path, he was too much a thug to be as dangerous as Osborne or Iamskoy. When he passed, Arkady dropped the newspaper and squeezed into the elevator.
He’d expected to find the airline office vacant, so he was surprised to find Detective Fet sitting at a desk and aiming a pistol at him.
‘Fet!’ Arkady laughed. ‘I’m sorry. I’d completely forgotten about you.’
‘I thought you were him coming back,’ Fet said. He was trembling so much that he had to put his gun down with both hands. His steel-rimmed glasses sat on a face bleached by fear. ‘He was waiting for you. Then he got a phone call and ran out. He gave me my gun back. I would have used it.’
Transcripts and tapes were strewn around upended chairs and open drawers. How long ago was it, Arkady asked himself, that he and Pasha and Fet had childishly luxuriated in this office? It was Iamskoy who’d set them up here. Was there a microphone? Was someone listening now? No matter; he didn’t plan to stay long. He sorted through the mess on the floor enough to satisfy himself that all the transcripts and tapes of Osborne and Unmann were gone, all but the one reel Arkady had kept of the February 2 Osborne-Unmann call.
‘He barged in here and took over.’ Fet gained in heat and color. ‘He wouldn’t let me leave. He thought I’d warn you.’
‘You wouldn’t have done that.’
Among the debris, Arkady found one of the blue books of airline schedules left behind by the office’s previous inhabitants. The book was current. All international flights left Moscow from Sheremetyevo Airport, and the on
ly plane leaving on May Day Eve was a night flight by Pan American. Osborne and Kirwill would be on the same plane.
And there was an open package from the Ministry of Trade, from Yevgeny Mendel. Inside was a photocopy of the citation won by his father, the coward, and to settle any doubts, also a tediously full report of old Mendel’s heroism signed and dated June 4, 1943. No wonder Unmann had only ripped open the package, glanced at it and tossed it aside, as Arkady was going to do until he recognized on the last page, despite the smudges of time and the indistinctness of the ministry’s copying machine, the bold signature of the investigating officer, Lieut (j.g.) A. O. Iamskoy. There, an Order of Lenin bought and sold in a charnel house, in the world capital of charnel houses that was Leningrad during the war! The young Northern Army junior lieutenant Andrei Iamskoy – he couldn’t have been twenty – had known the young American Foreign Service Officer John Osborne more than thirty years ago, known him and protected him even then.
‘You haven’t heard,’ Fet said tentatively.
‘Heard what?’
‘The prosecutor’s office sent out an all-city alarm for you an hour ago.’
‘What for?’
‘For murder. A body was found in a museum off Serafimov. A lawyer named Mikoyan. Your fingerprints were found on cigarettes there.’ Fet picked up the phone and started dialing. ‘Maybe you want to speak to Major Pribluda?’
‘Not yet.’ Arkady took the phone away and returned it to its cradle. ‘Right now you’re the forgotten man. It’s often the forgotten man who becomes the hero. In any case, it’s the forgotten man who lives to tell the tale.’
‘What do you mean?’ Fet was confused.
‘I want a head start.’
Savelovsky Station was ordinarily for commuters – the contented clerks and good citizens of life. This train was special, and the commuters avoided as pariahs its crowd of passengers. They were laborers, all signed to a three-year contract for work in the northern mines, some within the Arctic Circle. They would work in steam and ice, would haul ore on their backs when carts shattered from the cold, would be killed by blasting, mine collapses or hypothermia, or they would kill somebody else for a pair of boots or gloves. When they arrived at the mine, their internal passports would be taken away so that there could be no second thoughts. For three years they would disappear, and for some of them this was fine.
Arkady fit in with the workers. He shuffled along in the crowd, holding on to his evidence bag with one hand, his other on the gun in his pocket. On the train he moved with the flow into a compartment already filled with men and the stink of sweat and onions. A dozen faces studied him. They were the same tough and homely faces as on the Politburo, but roughed up and down the street a bit. They sported bruises and unusual scars, their knuckles and collars were dirty, and they carried their possessions in bundles. Basically they were criminals, men wanted for violence or theft in one town instead of the whole country. Little fish who thought they were escaping through the holes of the great socialist net, only to be funneled into socialist mines in the north. Tough fish, urkas, brothers, hard cases, men with tattoos and knives. To them a stranger was shoes, a coat, maybe a watch. Arkady claimed a space on the lower bunk.
A solid rank of militiamen pushed the last workers onto the train. The air in the compartment was unbreathable, though Arkady knew he’d get used to it. Conductors began running up and down the platform outside, eager to get this special train under way and out of their station. An all-city alarm might close the roads, airports and ordinary trains to an escaping man, but this was a whole train of escaping men. Through the compartment window, Arkady saw Chuchin, the chief investigator for Special Cases, argue with a chief conductor. Chuchin showed the chief conductor a photograph. All he had to do was look in the compartment. The chief conductor kept shaking his head. Chuchin waved militiamen onto the trains. In the next compartment someone began singing, ‘Farewell, Moscow, farewell love . . .’ To be pushed along the platform by militiamen was one thing; to be rousted from their compartments on their own special train was something else. Threats and curses delayed the progress of the search: ‘You can’t bother me, I’m already on the way to hell!’ Instead of leaving their seats, they spat on the militiamen. Ordinarily, something a militiaman would reply to with a club, but contract workers were given special considerations; it was understood that saints didn’t volunteer for three years in hell. Besides, the militiamen were outnumbered. They never reached Arkady’s compartment; the militia were horselaughed off the cars. The chief conductor brushed Chuchin aside, and again the other conductors did their pantomime run up and down the platform. The train heaved, and Chuchin and the chief conductor slid by. The metal canopies of the platforms gave way to smokestacks and the double-beaked fences of defense factories, the terrain of northern Moscow. The train was still gathering speed when it reached the next commuter station, not slowing for the safely disdainful looks of the commuters there, rolling with a will right by a platform of militia, sounding its locomotive horn. Farewell, Moscow. Arkady took a deep breath; the air wasn’t so bad after all.
The train was special too, the oldest and dirtiest the Ministry of Transport had been able to dig up. The compartment had been gutted and vandalized so many times and so long ago that there was nothing left to deface or steal. Besides, there was barely room to move. Fifteen men on four hard wooden bunks and the floor, each elbow lodged against a neighbor’s. The train conductor had locked himself into his own end compartment for the duration of the trip. This was hardly the fastest way to Leningrad. The Red Arrow Express left from Leningrad Station and took half a day. This train, on the local track from Savelovsky Station, hauling its ancient cars of what the magazines called rehabilitated workers, would take twenty hours. The conductor had his own samovar, hard rolls and jam in his haven. In Arkady’s compartment they broke out cigarettes and vodka. The ceiling filled with smoke. Someone told him to drink, and he drank and offered a cigarette in return.
The man with the bottle was an Ossetian, like Stalin – squat and dark, with the same sort of brows, mustache and beetle eyes.
‘Sometimes they put informers on these trains, you know,’ he told Arkady. ‘Sometimes they still try to catch you and bring you back. What we do is catch the informer and slit his throat.’
‘There are no informers on this train,’ Arkady said. ‘They don’t want you back. You’re going right where they want you to.’
The Ossetian’s eyes glittered. ‘Fuck your mother, you’re right!’
The wheels measured the afternoon and evening. Iksa, Dmitrov, Verilki, Savelovo, Kalazin, Kasin, Sonkovo, Krasnii Cholm, Pestovo. There was no point in not drinking. They were leaving not just a day but three years behind. Better straight alcohol than vodka. These were talented eyes and hands, and how many languages? It was a multinational compartment. An Armenian embezzler – a description redundant to some. A pair of highwaymen from Turkistan. A snatchman from Mary’s Grove. A gigolo from Yalta with sunglasses and a tan.
‘What are you hiding in your coat?’ the gigolo demanded.
Arkady had the bag of material taken from the cabin, his gun, his own ID and that of the KGB officer Kirwill had beaten to death. Nobody would have dared ask Kirwill that question; it was one that a hunter asked his prey.
‘A collection of tiny pricks from the Black Sea,’ Arkady answered.
He drank chifir. Chifir was tea concentrated not twice or ten times but twenty times. In the camps a starving man could work three days straight on a few cups of chifir. Arkady had to stay awake. The moment he was asleep he would be robbed. His skin became clammy with adrenaline; his heart seemed to expand. Yet he had to think calmly. Someone had killed Misha. Unmann, the scarecrow? Arkady had just missed him twice. Why a homicide alarm, though? Why would Iamskoy chance bringing in the militia? Unless the prosecutor had already cleaned up the cabin where the Gorky Park victims had lived. Unless he felt sure that his investigator would die trying to escape arrest. Or that he coul
d be declared insane at once. Maybe he already was.
His heart was pouring out more blood than his veins could handle, so he drank some more vodka to open them. Someone had a transistor radio that reported May Day preparations in Vladivostok.
‘The iron mines aren’t so bad,’ a veteran said. ‘If you work in the gold mines, they stick a vacuum cleaner up your ass when you come out of the mine.’
There was a bulletin on May Day preparations in Baku.
‘My home,’ the Ossetian told Arkady. ‘I murdered someone there. It was purely by accident.’
‘Why tell me?’
‘You have an innocent face.’
May Day preparations from around the world. The night outside was overlaid by reflections of the compartment. Arkady opened the pane a crack; he could smell fields plowed black and loamy from the winter’s snows.
He missed Misha already. The curious thing was that he could hear his friend’s voice as if he were still alive and commenting on the characters on the train: ‘Now, this is what Communism’s all about, getting people together. It’s a little bit like the United Nations; you just don’t get to change your clothes as often. Now, the Armenian, there’s a man who’s going to lose weight. Or he could just split in half like an amoeba and become two Armenians. He’d get double pay. I wouldn’t put it past an Armenian. Look at the gigolo. We have discussed Hamlet, we have discussed Caesar, we are looking at a man who has the last tan of his life. Now, that’s tragedy. Arkasha, won’t you admit now it’s all a little crazy?’
The vodka ran out. When the train stopped for water at a small town – nothing more than a station and a single lit street – the workers came off the train and broke into the town store while a pair of local militiamen stood by helplessly. When all the looters were back on, the train continued.
Kaboza, Chvojnaja, Budogosc, Posadnikovo, Kolpino. Leningrad, Leningrad, Leningrad. The morning sparks of commuter trains ran on converging wires. Dawn was mirrored by the Gulf of Finland. The train entered a city of briefcases and canals, a gray city to red eyes.