The Domino Game (20 page)

Four weeks ago he had given Zalisko his address in Mira and Zalisko had passed it on to his wife on her next visit. Just that morning she had come to Samara again and Zalisko, after seeing her, had returned to the cell with a grim expression to deliver her report. She had gone to the building in Mira, trying to locate Natalia, but the apartment was empty, the other flats cleared out as well, the whole building deserted apart from the superintendent, who claimed to know nothing… only that the woman and her daughter had gone weeks before, leaving no forwarding address.

After that, Zalisko’s wife had tried the first of the telephone numbers he had given her for Vari but that had proven useless as well. As the wife of a man who had made a career outside the law, perhaps not surprisingly, she had hesitated for several days before calling the other. When she did she placed the call from a booth in the shopping center beneath Revolution Square and gave a fictitious name, but Mr Vlasenko was not there, she was told. He had left the service. No longer worked for the FSB. Could someone else help, perhaps?

She had rung off quickly and stood there for a moment wondering what else she could do to help her husband’s friend, since that seemed the Christian thing, then commonsense had prevailed and she had realized that there could be only trouble at the end of that path, so she had turned away and lost herself in the crowd and put the whole thing out of her mind once and for all.

So Nikolai had come to the end now.

Natalia’s parents, like his own, had both died years ago, before Larisa was born. He had no brothers or sisters, no other family that were in any way close. Natalia had a younger sister living in Latvia somewhere, but they had hardly ever communicated and he had no idea where to reach her. There were friends, of course, and perhaps some of them knew something of where Natalia and Larisa might be, but without any access to a telephone now, his only means of contact was by mail and so far all the letters he had written had gone unanswered. Most likely, he surmised, because they had never been allowed to reach their destinations. Perhaps there was something more Zalisko’s wife might be able to do. Perhaps if he gave her more names and numbers the next time she visited. Perhaps. That was all that was left now.

His former life was slipping away from him. He could almost feel it running through his fingers, its last threads becoming finer and more tenuous every day.

He had been sentenced to twenty years and now, after just a few months, he was already facing a second trial, for murder. The fact that it had been self-defense and never would have happened were it not for the guards’ implicit involvement in the episode was beside the point. Nikolai understood how things worked now. He would be found guilty and a second sentence would be layered on the first. And then, if he were to survive, in all probability it would happen again.

So there was no future other than survival, and Zalisko was right. In order to survive he needed to make his statement. To reinvent himself within this brutal new world.

It was with that realization that he drew the book of sketches from Zalisko’s hands and made his choice.

16

Perhaps it was
the heat and the fumes, or the trauma of being bound there, together with Florinskiy, in that small dark space somewhere beneath hell on earth and whatever lay beyond, reliving the awful torment of memory. Whatever it was, something had finally caused Nikolai’s brain to turn off, making the shock so much greater when the sudden noise dragged him awake. For a moment he was lost; had no idea where he was, then someone outside switched on a light and the tiny incandescent seams filtered down again through the nail holes above his chest and everything came back to him.

From beyond the walls of the coffin he heard the sound of a steel door ringing shut then footsteps followed by voices, incoherent at first, becoming clearer as they drew near.

He snared a breath and held it, trying to remain perfectly still. Could it be time? Had he been in here an hour already?

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the voices, separating one from another, counting four, maybe five in total. Then they were right there, around him, and a single voice was taking charge, the tiny shafts of light his only connection with the world beyond, now irritatingly interrupted by a shadow – of an arm, he assumed – waved above the coffin to emphasize direction.

“Two either side. That’s it… you. The trolley, move it up. Now push… harder.”

Around him Nikolai felt the coffin moving. Groaning forward along the timber bench. He held his breath and braced his palms flat against the sides while the voice from outside came again, thick with exasperation this time.

“You fools!”

The edge of the bench had become a fulcrum now with the top end of the coffin tipping across it. Beside him Nikolai could feel Florinskiy’s body slumping backwards under its dead weight, his own involuntarily starting to follow. What if the casket fell to the floor? Split open against the concrete? He fought back the panic and tried to brace himself harder against the sides of the box but the sweat of his palms was as slick as axle grease against the smooth timber surface.

“Get the trolley in place first!” The voice again. “How stupid are you? Don’t you understand? Get it up again. Use your brains. You must have some for Christ’s sake! Here, lean on it. Like this.”

The coffin lurched back again, levelling itself. Nikolai felt a clutching in his gut. His neck and face were wet with perspiration. And for some reason every sound had now become curiously exaggerated, each beat of his heart as deep and hollow as the throb of a drum beneath water; each shallow pull of his breath as loud in his ears as the sound of a rasp dragged across steel. Beneath him there was a sudden shudder as something connected with the bench below, then the box was sliding forward again, on an even plane this time.

“Ahhh.” The voice. Illumination thickened with sarcasm. “So, you manage it after all. Congratulations, all of you. Your future prospects are unlimited. Your horizons boundless. Who knows where you may go from here. But for now just try and keep the damn thing on the trolley until you get it into the truck. Okay?”

They were moving now. Nikolai could feel the tight vibration of the trolley’s wheels against the concrete floor below while above him the strands of light that played over his chest seemed to be following, jostling to keep up. Then his brain split apart with a sudden, jarring crash as the end of the casket nearest his head slammed into what felt as though it could have been a stone wall, but was probably the door to the loading dock. And now the light was trailing away and falling behind. Strangely enough the darkness felt soothing and suddenly Nikolai realized why. Over the last nine years darkness had been his only refuge from the torture of reality. His only escape.

When Zalisko had finished the first tattoo there had been just one tower on the cathedral at the center of Nikolai’s chest: a single tower standing for a single conviction. Since then six more had been added, the first by Zalisko following his conviction over the incident in the bathhouse, the rest by other artists Nikolai had encountered along the way – at the prison colony at Perm where they had taken him after the first two years at Samara, then at the camp at Pechora in the north where he had almost died one winter of pneumonia, and now finally, here at Novokuznetsk, where the last two towers had risen. Six more towers with a death head inscribed for each as a symbol of the lives they represented. Only two of the killings had been classified as murder and for each of those another six years had been added to the original sentence for treason. It would have been more on the outside, of course, but life within the system was acknowledged as having a lesser value. He had accepted the judgments of the prison courts without dispute since that was what they had been. Murder. Pre-emptive strikes against others who, given the chance, would have thought nothing of taking his own life first, but murder none the less. The other killings had been a matter of defense – either his own or that of someone else – and for those the extra sentences had been lighter. A year here, three there, but by then what did the time matter since all the numbers added up to one single inescapable truth. The system owned him now and there were only two possible ways out. Death or escape.

It was Florinskiy who persuaded him of that.

He was a neat, quiet, educated man. A professor of physics who one autumn afternoon, while Gorbachev was still struggling with his initial reforms, had returned early to his apartment to find his wife in their bed with her lover. In a sudden fit of uncharacteristic rage he had killed them both with his bare hands and a strength that until then he had never realized that he possessed, after which he had quietly turned himself in to the police to admit his crime and accept his fate.

Florinskiy had been almost seventy when Nikolai had been allocated the bunk above him in the common cell at Novokuznetsk. Both kept to themselves but over time they had developed something of a tentative friendship that had its turning point one night during the early stages of the old man’s tuberculosis.

Just a few days previous, the cell had received its newest inmate, a pale and scrawny teenager whose arms crawled with the tattoos of spiders that marked him as an addict. Too stupid to comprehend the risks, or perhaps just too desperate to even weigh them, the young thug had crept from his mattress in the night, presumably to try and scavenge what he could, whether money or drugs, to feed his habit. He had been on his knees beside Florinskiy, rummaging through the battered cardboard box he kept beneath his bunk when the old man had woken with a start and, despite his age and condition, had instinctively gone on the attack.

The young hoodlum, though stunned, had recovered quickly and unsurprisingly had proved much stronger. Within seconds he had the advantage, clamping his fingers around the old man’s throat, pushing him back against his thin pillow and choking the air from his ruined lungs. Florinskiy would have died within seconds if no one had intervened.

At the time there were twenty-four prisoners in the cell. The following morning when they were led out to the yard for their ten minutes of daily exercise two of them remained in their bunks: Florinskiy, quietly wheezing in his sleep; and in the opposite corner, on the upper tier, the young hoodlum with the spider tattoos, his eyes open and glazed, staring wide at the ceiling, his neck twisted aside at a grotesquely inhuman angle.

When the other twenty-two were questioned none admitted the slightest knowledge of what might have occurred although the head
Blatnoy,
the last to be interviewed, offered the most creative supposition.

Shrug. “Perhaps he fell out of the bunk.”

“Then how come he was on the bunk when we found
him?”

A pause. Consideration. Another shrug. “I dunno. Maybe the fall didn’t kill him. Maybe he climbed back up again.”

“With a broken
neck?”

A dismissive wave. “Addicts. They’re crazy men. Crazy men don’t even know when they’re dead. You don’t believe me? Then what about Rasputin?” Followed by a change of subject. “You know, I’ve been thinking. I could really use a cell phone. You know anyone who could help?”

In the end the prison authorities had been content to record it as an accident. Not because they believed for a moment that it was, but simply to avoid the tiresome harassment of taking the matter further. As a consequence Nikolai’s tattoo had remained unchanged. No new tower and not even a further skull to mark another life taken since, the way he had come to see things now, neither the act nor the life qualified for any recognition. As far as he was concerned what he had done was of no more significance than treading on a cockroach.

Florinskiy, though, regarded his intercession as something more: an act of honor, or friendship perhaps. So, on the old man’s initiative, the relationship between the two grew stronger with Florinskiy making it the mission of his last few months on earth to devise a scheme for Nikolai’s escape. After weeks of consideration, he had come to Nikolai one day and laid it all out with a conspiratorial grin. By then the old man had lost a third of his weight and was little more than a frail ghost; his face was a pallid gray, his stubbled skin sunken and caved against the bones of his face. When he spoke it was only with the greatest effort, the words falling out between the strains of his wet cough, but his faded blue eyes, Nikolai noticed, were bright with enthusiasm and purpose.

“I have it, my young friend.” He laid a trembling hand on Nikolai’s forearm. “I have it all worked out. I really don’t know why it took me so long: I should have seen it well before now. It’s simple really. You gave me my life so now I will give you my death.”

Survival. That was all that had mattered until now.

It had become a way of life and to sustain it Nikolai had sealed himself within the walls of his own fortified existence but Florinskiy had unexpectedly led him to the parapet and forced him to consider that there was still the possibility of a world beyond.

At night he lay awake in the darkness allowing himself for the first time in years to imagine Natalia and Larisa… where they might be and what might have become of them. Exposing himself to the unbearable pain of the possibilities and wondering whether there might still be a way back to them. A bridge across the river of years that had flowed between them and, beyond that, something more. Something that until now he hadn’t even imagined might be possible.

Retribution.

Over the days that followed a strange thing happened. The images from the past became clearer while the pain they carried began to recede, leaving in its place a curious anticipation. Then, while Florinskiy grew weaker, Nikolai felt the anticipation begin to galvanize into resolve. After all, what was there to be afraid of any longer? Perhaps it was possible. Perhaps he was stronger than he had thought. Perhaps there was a way back.

Throughout the final three weeks of Florinskiy’s life they had planned and re-planned each step as though the future of both their souls now rested in the balance of the outcome.

Surprisingly, money was the least of the problems. In order to support himself over the years, Florinskiy had parlayed his intellectual skills into a talent with cards then taken his enterprise a step further by setting up as a money lender within the cell, providing low interest loans to the
Blatnyie
to assist them in the financing of their prison operations. As a result he now claimed outstanding receivables of almost two hundred thousand rubles – nearly seven thousand US dollars – a staggering amount.

“Safer with them than with me,” he chuckled as he explained the arrangement to Nikolai. “They’re my bank, you see. And now it’s time to make a withdrawal.”

“But you’re Jewish,” Nikolai responded when the old man told him of the deal he had made.

“So?” Florinskiy shrugged. “You think God won’t forgive me for this? You must be practical Nikolai. We are dealing with bureaucrats here. These are little men but they understand power. The Orthodox Church has more power than we Jews, so,” he tossed his hands apart, “we rent a priest. It’s a good investment, that’s all. At least this way we can be sure we’ll both get on the train “

In exchange for their commitment to meet his needs Florinskiy had agreed to write off the whole of the
Blatnyie’s
debt, while their true costs had been only a fraction of the amount owed: twenty thousand for the priest; ten for the prison permit to remove the body and another ten, more or less, for the freight to Tula. The old man had cast his hands in the air at Nikolai’s protest.

“Phsst! Don’t worry. It’s only money, and when I’m dead they’d get to keep it all anyway. Better to cash in what I can now and play on their sense of honor. They do have one, you know.” After that he’d split the seam of his mattress, pulled out a sheaf of dirty notes and counted them into Nikolai’s hands. Another thirty thousand, give or take. “Now with this you must handle Borisov,” the old man had lectured. “Because without him we have nothing, you understand?”

Nikolai understood.

He had had little to do with the doctor since that first day at Novokuznetsk. There was no doubt that Borisov still despised Nikolai, but that was of little consequence. The question was whether he still feared enough.

In fact it had been surprisingly easy.

Borisov had listened in silence while Nikolai had explained what was required. For just the briefest moment he thought he saw a curious expression shade the doctor’s face, as if his mind, in its recesses, was computing some complex equation, then the look passed and Borisov regarded his hands, folded before him, at the edge of his battered wooden desk. When he looked up at Nikolai his gaze was even.

“Let me think about it,” he had said. “Come back tomorrow and I will give you my answer.” Then he had called abruptly across Nikolai’s shoulder. “Guard! Take him back. I will need to see him again in twenty-four hours.”

A day later the price was the only outstanding issue. Nikolai had started at ten thousand; Borisov at thirty. They had met at twenty – eight hundred US, give or take – and Nikolai had counted off ten as a deposit.