The Ice Curtain (8 page)

“No. American assistance means American interference. Think. The IMF is located in Washington. So is the FBI. You want to tell one hand what must be kept secret from the other? There must be
no
mention of the missing stones to
anyone
. Especially not to any Americans. I hope that's completely understood.”

“Yes.” But he thought,
Well, no.
If someone was sending diamonds to America, wasn't it wise to find out who? “Then we're left with Volsky's aide.”

“Keep me informed.”

“Yes, sir.” He'd been dismissed. Levin was out in the hall again and stopped. He'd forgotten to mention the tape.

Chapter 8

The Evidence

Levin parked the Zhiguli in an open-sided metal shed behind his apartment house. He grabbed the copied security videotape from the seat, the Styrofoam container of borscht from
Na Skoruyu Ryku,
and slammed the door shut.

Another 1998.
Levin remembered August of that year only too well. The IMF turning its back to Russia, the wild scramble to withdraw money from banks already emptied by those in the know. The equally mad rush of foreigners to the airport, willing to buy a ticket to anywhere, at any price. The “young reformers” who'd steered the economy to a cliff and then, with an almost drugged stoicism, driven it over the edge.

True, things were different now. Russia owed the IMF billions. They might not wish to see their biggest debtor collapse. If Russia went down, it might take the IMF along.

It was a curious kind of hope.

The back door to his five-story building was protected by two heavy locks and thick steel-plate bearing marks from an arms factory. Levin was amazed the weight didn't pull the door off its hinges. Maybe they were tank hinges.

Inside, the entry was cold and dark. The floor was made from yellow-and-black linoleum, cracked and peeling, gritty with decades of dirt. Light came down from a single fixture up on the third floor. His own floor. His own bulb, too, scavenged from his office. He trudged up the stairs. He could pick out the odors of boiling cabbage, sizzling oil, the heavy smell of lamb.

The building had once been a
kommunalka,
a dingy warren of rooms overcrowded with people and underequipped with plumbing. A contractor had converted it to separate apartments, two to a floor, though the walls were so thin they only suggested privacy. Noises and smells were still community property.

His door was covered with sheet metal bought at an open stall at the building materials market at Kashky Dvor. The bazaar was patrolled by police and run by the Solntsevo
mafiya,
who made sure the goods were the best, and the customer always left happy. It was better than a government seal of approval.

As he grabbed the doorknob, he heard a heavy thump.

“Sasha?”

He opened the door and reached in to feel for the light. He heard a second thump, this time from the small bedroom. He toggled the switch on.

It wasn't the elaborate lair of a New Russian
biznisman
. But it had come a long way from its days as a bleak communal flat. There was a sofa, a low table, a cabinet with a good stereo, a Sony television. The kitchen held pots and dishes, neatly stacked.

And on the floor, a corpse. A tangle of shredded flesh, a protruding bone, strips of metal foil, a spreading stain.

“Sasha!”

The basset hound poked a nose from Levin's bedroom. His tail thumped against the wall.

“What have you done!”

The thumping slowed.

Once, the corpse had been a roast chicken. Levin examined the body with a forensic eye, and concluded there was more to this crime. He placed the container of borscht on the counter, tossed the security tape from
Ekipazh
onto the table, and looked into his bedroom.

Bones littered the floor. The blanket was splotched with grease. He heard a thump from beneath the bed. “Stay there all night,” he said, and left to assemble dinner. It was amazing, when you thought about it. If Levin shared his flat with a person who behaved like this, he'd have him arrested.

Soon, Levin was on the sofa with crackers, cheese, sliced sausage, and a container of borscht. He drank it straight from the cup. Levin picked up the remote control. The television hummed to life. Next, the VCR. The screen glowed blue. He hit play.

A snout intruded in the space between the back of his knee and the sofa, pushing at his leg.

“You're out of prison, but you're still on probation.”

Sasha leaped onto the cushion and curled against Levin.

The blue screen went black.

It was the gated entry to
Ekipazh
. The tape was stop-action, the movements jerky, sudden. A small split screen showed a second view taken from a camera Levin hadn't noticed that afternoon. One mounted low, meant to record license plates.

The soundless scene had a dreamlike quality, or perhaps a nightmarish one, since Levin knew what was going to happen.

A lumbering black Chaika appeared in the wide-angle view. The close-up showed an official license plate. The wide-angle shot narrowed to examine the face of the driver, Gavril. The time was shown in small white numbers at the bottom right of the screen.

Where's Nowek?
He wasn't in the car. He hadn't arrived with Volsky, unless he was hiding from the camera.

The basset edged closer to the dinner plate, stretched.

Several more arrivals were recorded, the cars, and the people in them, conforming absolutely to type:
BMW. BMW. Lincoln. Jeep. Mercedes.
Inside each, a New Russian and his expensive girlfriend.

Levin sped through them, then stopped and backed up. A difference. A black Land Rover, tall on its suspension, ready to prowl the Moscow savanna. Inside, a different face. Not Nowek. A foreigner. Levin could tell without knowing how he knew. Maybe it was the lawyer Goloshev mentioned? He jotted down the plate number and let the tape run again.

An empty stretch of tape, a street slowly turning white with snow, and then, the Land Rover. This time, leaving. He checked the elapsed time. Five minutes. It wasn't much of a stay at the fanciest club in Moscow. Perhaps a drop off? The tape rolled on.

Chairman Petrov's Mercedes hurried out through the gates. If the IMF wanted some
real
collateral, the government could seize every official Mercedes in the fleet.

Seven minutes later, a small car turned down the snowy lane. A cab. It left dark tracks in the street. It stopped a respectful distance from the gate. The back door opened.

Levin leaned forward. The security camera didn't zoom. It didn't pan. It didn't budge. It had become a fixed, dead eye. Where were the guards?

A figure approached the gate. He was carrying something under his arm. A newspaper? Levin paused the tape.
Nowek.

He let the tape run. The low camera recorded Nowek's legs. The main screen showed the cab backing away, disappearing down the street, hopping from frame to frame like a flea.

One second, two. Levin was about to press fast-forward when something black hurtled through the low camera's field of view. A black Chaika skidded into view across the small, split screen. Halfway down the lane it slammed into the curb and came to a stop. A person jumped out, then fell. The nightmare accelerated. The driver emerged carrying a shotgun.

Levin held his breath, not even blinking his eyes. One moment Volsky was halfway to his feet. The next, a white flash, a mist expanding from Volsky's body. The next frame, and the Siberian Delegate was down, the gunman standing over him. There was Nowek, running. The weapon rose. Volsky stirred. The barrel pointed back down. Levin watched. Another frame, another flash, another gray cloud streaked with white.

The killer dropped the weapon and ran down the lane. A militia patrol car appeared. He got in. The car vanished.

Nowek held Volsky in his arms. There he remained until the flash of another militia car made him raise his head.

Levin stopped the tape. There had been just two departures since Volsky arrived: Petrov, and the Land Rover. Gavril, the driver found knifed a few blocks away, had to have been in one of them.

He stared at the screen. He didn't know about the lost diamonds, or Volsky's role in their disappearance, or what Golden Autumn might be, if anything at all. But the man the militia arrested for his murder hadn't pulled the trigger.

Levin reached for another cracker. He looked down.
“Sasha!”
The plate was empty. The basset hound was gone.

Chapter 9

The Resurrection

Nowek knew what was coming, but it was still terrifying. Unlike other, simpler nightmares, this one had been real.

It was two years ago, the second warm night of spring. Winter was dying, and mounds of plowed snow had congealed into rock-hard ice that blocked the gutters and drains. The streets flooded, overflowing onto the sidewalks. It was the small town of Markovo, down by the River Lena, in the rundown industrial district called the Black Lung. He was still Mayor Nowek, not that it meant much. Clearly, the man trying to kill him was unimpressed.

The water was numbingly cold. Nowek scrambled to rise, but then something slammed against his head and he was under. Gelatinous bubbles streamed from his lips, his nose. Nowek managed to get a hand beneath him. He clawed at the boot on his chest. Struggling only used up his air faster.

The puddle was barely half a meter deep. Not much compared with Lake Baikal, or the River Lena, or even a bathtub. But plenty enough to drown in.

One minute, maybe two. How long can you hold your breath? There are scientific terms for what is about to happen, but what it comes to is this: a desperate brain steps up to the roulette wheel and plays the odds. Open your mouth and you might die, keep it shut and you
will
. And so there's just one last bet to make, and it's almost never a good one.

An involuntary gasp. A slug of water rushed down Nowek's throat. It filled his chest with cold weight. He tried to spit it out. More water flooded in. The gag reflex was uncontrollable. With each spasm, his lungs grew heavier, colder. He was drowning. His ears roared. His forehead burned.

Nowek woke with a gasp, his face soaking wet with
real
water. He panicked. His heart stumbled. The harsh glare of a white bulb burning behind heavy glass poured down into his eyes. Gray concrete everywhere. Ceiling. Floor. Walls. A black scrawl:
TECHNOROCK RULES!
A cell. His. He looked up. A militiaman held an empty bucket. A single drop formed at the lip, quivered, fell.

“Impossible.” A voice from out in the hall. “He belongs to us.”

“Not anymore. Here.”

“So what? It's our prison.”

“I don't want your prison. I'm taking your prisoner.”

A pause, then “Major Levin, it's not even nine o'clock. Contract Murders hasn't talked to him yet.”

“They can talk to him at the Lubyanka. We're taking Nowek to our P-4 facility. Maybe you've heard of it.”

“Never.”

“Let's just say that when something sinks to P-4, it never rises. You can come and see it yourself if you'd like. I'll give you a private tour.”

Nowek listened for an answer.

“On your feet.” A boot prodded Nowek.

Major Levin.
Nowek burned the name into his memory, husbanding the information.
And from the Lubyanka.
That made Levin FSB, or whatever they were calling themselves this week.

A youngish man with stylishly long blond hair, dark eyes, and a dark mustache appeared at the door. He was dressed in a suit, but no tie. He looked at Nowek. “Okay? Let's go.”

Nowek's pants were brown with dried blood. It flaked off as he bent a knee to stand. He held his hands out in front and the militiaman snapped the heavy cuffs back on. Nowek's leg ached badly. He could scarcely put weight on it.

“What happened to his leg?” asked Levin.

“We didn't do it.”

As Nowek limped down the corridor, a prisoner grabbed the bars with both hands and thrust his face, his tongue, his lips, into the gap. “Give me your boots, cookie. You won't need them now.”

The militia sergeant waited at the stairs. He tossed a sheaf of official-looking papers at Nowek.

He stopped. Was he supposed to pick them up?

“Keep moving. You belong to Major Yid now.”

Two militiamen in winter greatcoats waited at the top of the stairs. One carried a leather-wrapped truncheon, a
demokratizer,
sent by a police organization in America. Who said humor was dead?

The front door to Gagarinsky Detention Facility 3 opened, and Nowek caught sight of the street beyond. He stopped, staring. The normal world. One day in Gagarinsky 3 and he'd already lost his sense of connection to it.

The snow was gone. Monday morning traffic choked the streets. It was warm enough to smell the rankness coming from the back of an open prisoner van. Its blue lights flashed. A small white car, a Zhiguli, was parked in front of it. A thin young man with unruly red hair sat in front.

Nowek paused, savoring the normal world, the light, the air. What was P-4, if not a hole in the world?

“What are you looking at?” one of the militiamen asked.

“The snow is gone. It's not winter yet.”

“The flowers will be out before you see daylight again.”

How long was the trip from Gagarinsky to the Lubyanka? Long enough to recall Volsky's words shouted from the shower, to remember Galena's message waiting for him at the music store
Melodiya,
to hear the music rising from an ancient LP. The blast of a shotgun, and words whispered through melting snow and blood.

Idi k'gorizontu . . .
Go to the horizon.

Once, Nowek had been a geologist. A geologist is accustomed to chaos, to fragments. The world is like an old building remodeled so many times that nothing makes any sense. The basement is on top, the windows are in the floor, the attic is buried below your feet. A geologist looks at chaos, at nothing. But sometimes if he looks long enough, chaos becomes order, nothing becomes something.

But not all the time. A well-ordered life, a friend, an obligation, meaning, hope. Try putting those pieces back together. Stare all you like. A life can shatter and stay shattered.

The van tipped down. Soon, it came to a stop. The door opened. They were in an underground garage.

The young red-haired officer was carrying a suitcase. Nowek recognized it as his own. His possessions. They really were going to make him vanish down the hole of P-4. What would his daughter say when she found out her father no longer existed?

Levin joined them. “You can walk?”

“Yes.” But then Nowek put too much weight on his injured leg and almost fell. The FSB major helped him to the elevator bank. Nowek scanned the buttons. They were at P-1. The last button at the bottom was labeled P-4.

“My name is Major Levin. I'm with the FSB Directorate of Investigations.”

“Levin's not a name I would expect to hear in the Lubyanka,” said Nowek. “At least, not on this side of the bars.”

“Times have changed. Nowek is also an unusual name. It's Polish?”

“Siberian.”

“That used to be the same as Russian.”

“Only in Moscow.”

Levin raised his eyebrows, then nodded at his colleague. “This is Lieutenant Sherbakov. Give him your hands, please.”

Nowek held the cuffs up, and watched in astonishment as Sherbakov unlocked them and took the heavy steel rings off.

Levin pressed five. The elevator began to rise.

“We're not going to P-4?”

“P-4 is dead records storage.” He nodded at Nowek's suitcase. “Nothing is missing. You can check.”

Floor three. Sherbakov handed him his suitcase. “I hope you don't mind. I drove your machine around the block a few times,” he said. “It's a Pentium. Where did you get it?”

“A friend gave it to me.”

“You want to sell?”

Sell? It seemed like an odd question to ask a man whose wrists were still red with cuff marks. “Am I under arrest?”

Sherbakov was about to answer, but Levin spoke first.

“That depends.”

Nowek opened his suitcase. It was intact. Fresh pants, a shirt. His shoes, the laptop computer Sherbakov had admired. He looked at Levin. “Why did you take me away from the militia?”

“You're innocent, aren't you?”

“When did that make a difference here?”

Levin smiled. “We'll discuss the details of your situation after you change.”

Nowek felt certain they would. The FSB didn't rescue accused murderers out of kindness. Were they trying to reassure him into a confession? “I didn't kill Volsky.”

“We know that.”

Nowek waited, and when there was no amplification, he said, “You
know
?”

The elevator stopped. The doors opened onto a hallway.

No one moved. Finally, Nowek said, “Then I'm free to go?”

“That also depends. The washroom's the second door on the right,” said Levin.

A lot of things seemed to depend on something, but what? Nowek went in. Sherbakov followed. Nowek walked to the window.

“You could speed up the machine if you partitioned your hard drive,” Sherbakov said. “And don't stand too close to the window.”

“Don't worry. I won't jump.” Nowek let the tap run hot, and scrubbed the crusted blood from his hands, from beneath his fingernails, from his cheeks. The white porcelain swirled with Volsky's blood. It ran dark, then pale, then fainter, then clear.

“If you did, it would be much more efficient.”

Nowek looked up into the small mirror. “If I jumped?”

“If you partitioned your drive. I could do it. Programs here, files there. I could make it really
scream
.”

It was an odd thing to say in the Lubyanka, where experts in screams had always found work. Sometimes he missed the old days when irony still had a purpose, when it still had a bite, when the world was terrible, but at least it made sense.

Nowek piled the bloodstained clothes on the floor tiles. He kicked them away and put on fresh pants, a clean shirt, socks, his Nikes. The air was deliciously steamy. He smelled cleaner. His leg was purple with bruises. It throbbed, but he could walk. He was innocent. He was free, but not too free. It all depended.

Sherbakov knocked, then opened Levin's door. He didn't follow Nowek in.

Levin had a small office with one window facing a broad, open square. On the far side, Nowek spotted
Detsky Mir
. The world's largest toy store. Levin sat behind a cluttered desk. Two file cabinets, one gray, the other black. A picture of an old woman hugging Levin was mounted on the wall. Her face was radiant with unabashed pride. There was a plastic dog with a pivoting whip of a tail on his desk. Levin motioned for Nowek to sit. Two files were open on his desk.

Nowek could see a photo clipped to the one on top. His.

“This is your first visit to Moscow in some time,” said Levin.

“I try to avoid it.”

“The file says the last time you were here was when the Oil and Gas Ministry accused you of selling state secrets to the foreign press. You were fired.”

“It was an oil spill, not a secret. I said it would happen and it did. Nothing was sold. A journalist interviewed me. He was doing his job. I thought I was, too. The Oil and Gas Ministry disagreed.”

“Butting heads is your pattern.” Levin turned a flimsy page, translucent as onion skin. “As mayor of Markovo, you accused high officials of making improper deals with a foreign oil company.”

“They weren't in Markovo for oil. I thought they should be.”

“Again, removed from your position as mayor.”

“The Irkutsk Prosecutor General was removed from his position to a prison cell. He's still there.”

“Then, after Markovo, you joined Delegate Volsky's staff.” Levin looked closely at something on the page, then up at Nowek. “What amazes me is that every time you get into trouble, powerful people end up in prison and you rise. What's your secret?”

“Sometimes things work the way they should.”

Levin peered.
Sometimes things work the way they should.
It was more or less what he'd said to Petrov. Maybe the exact words.

“Now I have a question for you,” said Nowek. “If you know I'm innocent, why did you bring me here?”

Levin refocused. “I said you didn't shoot Delegate Volsky. I didn't say you were innocent. You were his colleague.”

“And he was my friend. It's not a crime.”

“Don't be so sure. You wrote a report for him on mining operations in Mirny.”

“Volsky wasn't killed over a report.”

“No. Most probably it was over the diamonds themselves. What was your purpose in coming to Moscow?”

The diamonds themselves?
“Delegate Volsky was going to meet with Chairman Petrov of the State Diamond Committee.”

Levin flipped a flimsy page and pretended to read, letting the silence ripen. Then “To report on conditions in Mirny?”

“Yes, but also to . . .” He stopped. He was going to say
force,
but thought better of it. “. . . to urge Petrov to send money to the miners so they can make it through the winter.”

“Maybe he was more interested in the diamonds.”

“Arkasha wouldn't know a diamond from a piece of glass.”

Levin tossed the file to his desk. “You were a geologist.”

“A
petroleum
geologist.”

“Why did Volsky need diamond production figures?”

“To know how many diamonds Kristall shipped to Moscow so that he would know how much money the miners were owed.”

“Four million carats. It's correct, by the way. How did you obtain the figure? It's supposed to be a state secret.”

“Only in Russia. The cartel publishes accurate numbers on the Russian diamonds they buy. I found it there.”

“You received no help from Volsky's associate in Mirny?”

“No.”
Careful.
“I used nothing from Mirny.”

“I'm confused. Why would Volsky ask you to hunt for something when he could pick up a phone and find out himself?”

“I don't know.”

“He told you nothing about his contact in Mirny?”

“He called him his
colleague,
that time was running out and he'd given his word to bring the miners what they were owed.”