The Ice Curtain (33 page)

“You mean Hock?” asked Nowek.

“He's at Lefortovo,” said Levin. Moscow's main prison. “Along with Petrov and the . . . with General Goloshev. He's going to stand trial as an accessory to Volsky's murder.”

“Maybe he shouldn't,” Chuchin said with a shrug.

“Chuchin,” said Nowek. “You know what Petrov has admitted. Hock—”

“Excuse me.
You
know your way around mines, but when we speak of cells and jails, forgive me,
I'm
the expert here. I was two tenners
na narakh
.” Twenty years behind the wire. “So Hock is an
accessory
to murder. Is that even a crime? You can't put Russian
murderers
in prison. How long do you think Hock will be there before his friends buy him a key? A week? I say send the bastard back where he came from. Let
them
cut his throat.”

“Eban Hock is the key to our investigation,” said Levin.

“
Fuck
investigations. You already know he's guilty. It only gives the eel more time to slip the hook. I say let his own friends put his head on a pike. They'll do a better job of it.”

Yeltsin's face was animated. He didn't often get the chance to hear someone like Chuchin, and it took years off his face.

“I'm just a pensioner who drives cars and raises flags,” said Chuchin, “but even I know you can catch big fish in muddy waters. You think the cartel wants the world to know how dirty their precious diamonds are? We'll promise to keep it to ourselves, give them Hock, and borrow those diamonds for the fucking bankers to see. And if they don't like the deal,
fuck them
. There's always Mirny Deep to hang over their heads.”

“Go on,” said Yeltsin.

“Let those foreign bastards come look in the Closet. They'll see what they need to see, and then you can pack the diamonds and Hock into one box and kick his ass over the border.”

Give them Hock?
“Why do you think they'll put his head on a pike, Chuchin?” asked Nowek.

“Because when he takes back the diamonds we borrowed,” said Chuchin, “they won't be the
same
diamonds. I'll tell you what I mean. . . .”

When Chuchin was done laying out his idea, Yeltsin looked at Levin, then Nowek, and let out a laugh that was so loud it brought his guards running, fearing the worst.

“No, I'm fine!” he said when he caught his breath. He waved at the door, and a steward brought in glasses of tea, some bread, wild berry preserves, and a silver pot filled with Vologda butter, the finest in the world.

“Tea?” said Chuchin with a look of distaste. “Is someone sick, Mister President?”

Yeltsin looked into his teacup and roared,
“Bring us something proper!”

A frosted bottle was brought in, and glasses all around. “About the diamonds,” said Yeltsin as the glasses were filled with fiery liquid. “We'll do it.”

“There's one matter left,” said Nowek. “The miners of Mirny have been paid with
veskels,
plus a promise of dollars. The dollars are being held in an overseas account.”

“That's completely illegal.”

As if you don't have such accounts,
thought Nowek. But he said, “And that's the last thing we must fix. As part of the arrangement with the cartel, those dollars must be brought home. They must be made available to the miners. It comes to only a few million. It's nothing to London and everything to them.”

“A lot of people haven't been paid,” said Yeltsin.

“This is what Volsky wanted,” said Nowek, wondering whether he'd stepped over an invisible line.

“Can it be done quietly?” Yeltsin looked to Levin.

“The
mafiya
sends money overseas every day,” he said. “And no one hears a thing. I think we can bring some of it back.”

“Then it's done.” Yeltsin held up his glass and said, “To Arkady Volsky, our hearts. To the new Siberian Delegate, our hopes.
Sto lyet!
” A hundred years.

It was a very short toast, shamefully so by Russian standards, but Yeltsin was flagging.

Chuchin, Nowek, and Levin stood with their glasses raised and shouted,

“Sto lyet!”

The business was conducted with the same exaggerated solemnity of a Cold War spy swap. The prison vans. The stony-faced guards. But when Eban Hock passed through the gates at Vnukovo 2 airport, a facility reserved for state visits, and saw the British-registered Hawker jet waiting for him, he knew he was safe. He knew he'd been absolutely right. Warlords, despots, presidents came and went. But the cartel would always stand.

The driver stopped on the ramp. Hock got out into the chill, gray light of early winter, and walked up the stairs with a lightness of step known only to the truly, reverentially grateful.

He settled himself into his seat as an armored truck pulled up, flanked by motorcycle outriders. He'd told Nowek it would happen, that the diamonds would go to 17 Charterhouse Street, one way or another. Forget the blizzard of criminal cases surrounding Petrov, Goloshev, and Kristall. The stones would go to London the way a ball rolled downhill: by natural law. What was Moscow's law against
that
?

The familiar brown boxes were carried up the steps and into the Hawker. But soon, Hock found cause for surprise.

There were too many of them. He made a quick count, and after the thirty he expected, he sat back in his seat and reevaluated. He'd expected the one million carats. Where were all these
others
coming from? Forty boxes. Fifty. One hundred. More. The chain of bearers seemed endless. They finally stopped at one hundred and nineteen.
Four million carats?

The hatch was sealed. The jet turned west, leaving Moscow's grizzled haze behind, climbing to where the sun burned with the yellow fire of a faultless canary diamond. Four hours later, the jet came to a stop at a private hangar located in a reasonably inconspicuous corner of Heathrow's air cargo facility. Another armored car, another endless procession of boxes. It was the entire picture at Vnukovo 2 run in reverse.

A black Mercedes was waiting for him. Together with the stones, Hock left the airport for Charterhouse Street, a district known in the eighteenth century as the hangout of highwaymen and villains. The procession arrived at Num-ber 17, a six-story building clad in white stone and warm bronze, with stout gates and armed guards pacing the street with drawn guns.

Hock was given a room on the south side of the fifth floor. It had a lovely bank of windows that offered a glimpse of the Thames. While he showered off the accumulated filth deposited by a week in a Moscow cell, the diamond boxes were taken to the sorting rooms on the north side of the building. There, beneath tall windows, in cold, shadowless light, one hundred and nineteen containers were opened and the stones plucked from their foam nests.

One thousand seven hundred pounds, four million carats, of gem rough worth three quarters of a billion dollars had been loaned to Moscow to parade before the IMF auditors. One thousand seven hundred pounds of industrial diamonds, sixty million dollars' worth, and Eban Hock, had been returned.

The bright October light faded to dusk, and streams of traffic glowed like strands of pearls. A yellow crescent moon burned like kerosene. The London sky was soft, almost feminine, compared to the unearthly glint of starlit Mirny.

Two managers from the Russia desk told him the news. “We've lost Russia,” one of them said.

He knew these two men by name. He knew them by type even better. Hock thought of them all as
Jesuits
. Serious, intelligent, iron-gray hair, polished shoes, their faces full of the moral certainty Hock could never afford.

He'd worked with their like in a hundred dismal spots. Sierra Leone. Congo. Angola. Zaire. Moscow. Like missionaries, they lived to impose a kind of order on a chaotic world. Once they'd been adventurous young men in khakis and pith helmets with trains of native bearers and sacks of cash. They'd march off into the bush, unfold their tables, set up their beam balances, and wait for the diamonds to arrive. Their buying table was an altar to something greater, something pure. Something almost like religion.

Now you are one of us. . . .

Tramping through the bush was too dangerous these days. Now the cartel's missionaries floated above the foul streets of Africa, the urine-soaked alleys strewn with garbage, the crushed, immense cities where old cars honked their way through crowds of vendors selling peanuts, pineapples, bright plastic sandals.

Somewhere above the reeking mess there would be a hermetically sealed chamber, an air-conditioned suite, sleek with black leather and chrome, shielded behind thick steel doors, bulletproof glass, security cameras. An outpost not so much of empire, but of order.

Mombassa, Moscow, Mirny. They were all outposts. All messy spots where the natives were free to lie, to steal, to wage war in whatever horrible form they wished, so long as the cartel ended up with the rough. It always came down to that. The natives did the work and the dying. The cartel got the rough.

We've lost Russia.
Apparently, the natives had decided the old rules no longer applied. They might have said,
We've lost gravity
. The ball no longer rolled downhill.

Hock let the curtain fall shut and went to the door and locked it. He picked up the wet towels, the filthy clothes he'd worn in Moscow, and placed them in a plastic bag someone had thoughtfully left.

The cartel was more than just a business, more than a profession. It was a faith, a religion that offered the world but demanded in return both loyalty and results. What was one without the other?

He walked to the bath, switched on the light above the washbasin, plugged it, and ran the water scalding hot. It wasn't quite boiling. He watched it fill.

Russia was Africa with snow. The cartel had always played it masterfully, and easily. Mirny might have enough gems to drown London in diamonds, but Moscow could be bought for pennies. Now something had changed. Now
Russia
was playing the
cartel
. Russia, a vast clock slowly unwinding, its gears slipping, its springs rusted. Russia, a consignment shop, not a nation, where everything was for sale on the cheap.
Nowek.
Could one man have found a billion-dollar key and, instead of trading it for pennies, stayed to rewind the clock?

He stared at his reflection in the mirror. They'd left him with a toiletries kit. Soaps. Colognes. A toothbrush. A simple, old-fashioned straight razor. He pulled it out and tested the blade against the edge of his thumb.

A red thread of blood welled up.

He plunged his right hand into the scalding water and grimaced with the pain. Looking down, his hand seemed to branch off at a ridiculous angle, no longer part of his body at all. A refracted object. The pain eased, and he pulled his hand out and dried it with a snowy-white towel that was almost impossibly thick. He pulled a wooden chair next to the sink, folded the towel neatly across its ladder back, and sat down.

Grasping the blade in his left hand, he drew it slowly, deeply, surely across the burned, red flesh of his right wrist, pressing down hard enough to make certain.

The hot water in the sink instantly swirled red as his heart pumped, pumped, pumped. There was no pain, only a slight stinging where the razor had done its work. He looked up into the polished mirror. As he stared, tendrils of steam rose from the water, misting the bright glass, obscuring his face, his eyes, one green, one blue, now gray, now both lost behind a curtain that reminded him of an aurora, shimmering, dancing in the black winter skies of Mirny. A curtain of ice, of fire, of spectral light. Shimmering, fading, then gone.

Chapter 32

Hope Is a Diamond

The old Siberian Traders' Guild on Gorky Street was a jewel of a building on the Irkutsk riverfront. Made of soft, honeyed sandstone flecked with bright mica, a hundred winters had rounded its edges until it looked like a melting ice cream cake. The walls hadn't felt a paintbrush in half a century. Its pale, dusty pinks, its parchment yellows, its faded creams glowed warmly in the cold, slanting light of an October morning.

The office of the Siberian Delegate was on the second floor. You could see the Angara River through its tall windows of arched glass. Nowek sat at the desk and watched gunmetal-gray water sweep north. He still thought of it as Volsky's desk.

There was a faint ringing. The fax machine began to buzz.

Chuchin poked his head in. “It's time to go, Mister Mayor.”

“I'm not the mayor,” said Nowek. “And there's a fax coming.”

“You want to be late meeting your own daughter?”

If she'll be there at all.
Galena was coming in today from America. He hoped. “Are the flags up?”

“Pah,” said Chuchin, and disappeared.

The machine hummed, then beeped. A page fell out as a second page began to print. Then his telephone rang. Typical. Nothing had happened all morning, and now that he needed to leave, the world wanted to speak with the new Siberian Delegate.

He snatched the page and picked up the heavy black phone. “Delegate Nowek listening.”

“Colonel Izrail Levin speaking.”

Nowek looked at the time. Nine-fifteen in Irkutsk. Four-fifteen in Moscow. “You're up early.”

“Who's been to bed? I just came from the concluding ceremonies. I thought you'd like to know how it all went.”

The IMF's inspection team had spent the previous day counting diamonds in the Closet. “So?”

“There's an American expression.
The check is in the mail.
You've heard it?”

No, but he understood it. Nowek let his breath out. Russia had run right up to the edge of a chasm far deeper than the
karir,
the open pit, up in Mirny. “Then we dodged the bullet.”

“This time. Did you read the fax I sent? You should.”

Nowek picked up the first page.

Mister Delegate:

You see how our positions have reversed? I pulled you from a cell and now I have to be polite. I'm writing because there are drums being beaten in the Kremlin, and you should know what they mean. It's about our new President Putin (yes, I know the election is still months away, but it's going to be a coronation, not an election). Putin feels the regions are growing too powerful. He's setting up six more Delegates for all of Russia. A few might actually be honest. They will all be under his thumb, even you. As Siberian Delegate, you will have to be the President's man. After everything I can say that I know you a little, and so you may want to think about whether you want to be
this
President's man. By the way, a clipping came from the Foreign Press desk. I'm sending you a copy.

Levin

The second fax sheet. Nowek found it on the floor.

(NY, Oct. 19, 1999) The William Goldberg Diamond Corporation, renowned for cutting numerous majestic stones, including the
Premier Rose
and the
Guinea Star,
announced the purchase of a magnificent piece of rough: a 48.90-carat octahedron with the obvious Russian name of
Zvyezda Nadezhde,
or
Star of Hope.
The sale was private and the purchase price was not revealed, but seven figures would be in line for a flawless crystal of such size. According to the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the stone is “the largest, most perfect single crystal diamond we have graded as of the date the report was issued.” The report went on to say “Its condition, with points and edges undamaged by the usual extraction and sorting processes, suggests new mining technologies, long rumored to be under development in Russia, may have borne fruit.”

“Any idea where the diamond came from?” asked Levin.

Seven figures?
Larisa Arkova and her daughter had left Moscow for Stockholm the day before Hock had been returned to London. He had no idea where they'd gone from there, and if he did, he wouldn't have told a senior officer in the FSB's Investigations Directorate. “If it's a Russian diamond,” said Nowek, “it probably came from Mirny.”

“I thought you'd say something like that. And the rest?”

“You mean about our new President? You're suggesting I quit?”

“God knows if you do, Putin will pick someone worse. But you have to be realistic. You won't be able to steer your own course for long.”

“Realism is overrated. At least in Russia. What about you? You're staying on, aren't you?”

“I don't have to work with him. I just investigate official corruption. I'll
always
have something to do.”

Chuchin poked his head in. He was wearing his dark glasses and heavy felt jacket. “You want her to stand in the cold?”

Nowek said, “I'm supposed to protect Siberia from the kind of people you investigate. I'll keep busy. But thanks for the warning.”

“Don't mention it. I mean that literally. Not to anyone. Winter's coming back. Even in Moscow. Sometimes I wonder if it ever left.”

Nowek knew what Levin meant. “If you want to understand winter, come to Siberia.”

“No thank you. Did I tell you about my new dog?”

“Another basset?”

“Feliks is still a puppy, but from his paws he's going to be a big one. You have my number. Call if you get in over your head, Mister Delegate. Or should I say,
when
?”

“I won't wait so long next time.” Nowek hung up and grabbed his coat.

Outside it was cold enough to kill, but not yet cold enough to freeze the Angara. A hundred rivers small and large flow into Lake Baikal, but the Angara is the Sacred Sea's one outlet, and the surging water seemed sure of itself, impatient and unstoppable.

Two flags snapped straight out from their poles on the brisk wind. The white, blue, and red of the Russian Federation, and the Siberian banner. White for the sky and snow, green for the
taiga
.

Hope was a diamond, a great blue gem tucked away in a museum. Hope was a jet touching down in Mirny, filled with dollars transferred from a bank on the Cayman Islands. And hope was a 48-carat crystal tucked into the head of a stuffed bear. Maybe it would take a thousand years to make Russia a normal place. Maybe Moscow would
never
join the civilized world. But if there was any place big enough for hope, Siberia was surely it, wasn't it?

Chuchin pulled up in the white Toyota. The Land Cruiser was looking frail. Nowek wondered whether it could live through another winter. Whether
he
could live as the new Siberian Delegate, working for a President who didn't mind the company of spies and thieves, and perhaps preferred them. He got in and they headed off for the airport.

Chuchin lit a cigarette. In deference to Nowek and despite the cold, he opened his window. “The call. It wasn't good news?”

“What do you think? It was from Moscow.”

Chuchin offered a sympathetic, understanding nod. “Well, you'd better get used to them.”

Nowek had uncovered one deal with the Devil. He'd smashed it by making one of his own. Mirny's miners would live, but only because its diamonds would keep going to the cartel. Nowek was the Siberian Delegate, but only so long as he agreed to be the new President's man. Nowek was Siberia's
kryusha
. Its “roof.” He could keep it dry when it rained. He could keep the Devil from the door, but only by doing his bidding.

They turned onto Derzhinsky Street, then up the access road to the terminal. Nowek could see Yuri's old hangar. He wondered what the difference between one million carats and
nearly
one million would mean for him. Was skimming a few thousand carats from the back of Kristall's jet legal? Was it right?

Once, Nowek would have had an answer. Now it took a genius to figure out what was right. Or a fool to ask. Winter was back, and what worked seemed to be all that counted. Was this what being Delegate meant? No certainty, no right, no wrong?

Was that a country worth fighting for? Worth
living
in?

Chuchin said, “There she is.”

Galena stood outside the terminal hall despite the wind and cold. She wore a long camel coat, boots with high heels. She seemed astonishingly tall, topped with a flame-red wool beret that only made her dark hair look like sable. She had a wrapped package under her arm. It was large, but thin.

Nowek thought,
She found it
.

She saw the Land Cruiser, and waved, girlishly.

Chuchin pulled over. Nowek was out before they stopped. He took her in his arms. Two workers passed, their expressions said,
He's lucky!
He felt a quick, shivering shock, like diving into cold water. She wasn't a child. She was a woman, and despite too much lipstick, a disturbingly beautiful one. “I thought you might not come.”

“I can't believe I'm here, either. Careful,” she said, holding her package up for Nowek.

He took it. “The Dvo(breve)rák A Minor?”

She nodded. “It wasn't that hard to find. America is filled with music. Even old music.” She looked around, clearly distressed. “I'd forgotten how everything is so gray.”

Nowek smiled. “Only on the outside.” He stood, quietly drinking her presence in. Her eyes were his. Dark, dark blue. The blue of Baikal. Her hair, that was Nina's. She put her cheek up to be kissed, and he saw the earrings. Diamonds. They were at most a quarter of a carat. Pinpricks, compared with the gems he'd seen flash from the walls of the Ninth Horizon. It stirred up a ghost of the old fear he'd had for her safety, and also the anger. “The diamonds. They're the ones . . .”

“Uncle Arkasha sent. I'll wear them forever. For him.” She turned and the diamonds caught the sun, flashing fire. “Diamonds are forever. Isn't that what they say?”

Nowek thought, gray sky, gray buildings, gray people. A bleak, desperate country that could fall backward, stumble ahead, collapse entirely, and most likely all three. But standing here next to Galena, he was filled with a delirium of color, with faith, with unreasonable hope. “It's too soon to tell.”

Galena rolled her eyes, exasperated. “What's
that
supposed to mean?”

Chuchin honked the horn. Nowek had left the door open. There was no one more Siberian, and
he
was getting cold.

Nowek put his arm around her shoulders. “Let's go before Chuchin freezes,” he said, “and I'll tell you the whole story.”