The Ice Curtain (12 page)

“We're all loaded up!” came the call from below.

“Well,” said the foreigner. “Now what?”

There was a long silence, then Anton said, “Throw him over the yard wire. Twenty thousand volts. People fry trying to steal copper cable all the time. No one will wonder.”

“Gentlemen, I'm looking for a solution. Not a light show.”

Bezdomov felt a surge of hope. “I knew you'd understand.”

“You've made an honest mistake, Senior Engineer Bezdomov,” said Eban Hock. “You were just looking for a warm place to rest? I think we can accommodate you.”

Chapter 12

The Eternal Ice

Like Rome, Irkutsk is a city of hills, though you can live here all your life and hardly notice them. But then Rome was never buried by an ice sheet nine kilometers thick. When the last glacier retreated, it left behind hills barely high enough to contain the swift Angara River. The hills of Irkutsk aren't dramatic, but like the people who live among them, they're survivors.

Cemeteries occupied the high ground. One was still called Jewish Hill, though it had been paved over in Soviet times and turned into an amusement park. To this day you can still walk twenty paces away from the big Ferris wheel at the top and be surrounded by old gnarled trees, mushrooms, and mossy headstones capped with pebbles.

The Orthodox Church fared better under the Soviets, and so the graveyard beside the Church of Our Savior remained sacred ground. It was here Nowek brought Volsky home.

It was a clear, bitter morning, the last Saturday of September. Last night's snow dusted the hard ground. The winter sun was dazzling. A glittering “white frost” was in the air. The tiny crystals flashed with prismatic fire.

The Angara swept north through the city from nearby Lake Baikal. This morning it was covered in “water smoke”; thin fog spawned when cold water met even colder air. It made the gray river look like it was boiling.

The Church of Our Savior had three bell towers painted in bright green, fiery red, and rich gold. The nineteenth-century French aristocrat who proclaimed Irkutsk the Paris of Siberia described them as embroidered cantaloupes. To Nowek, they were colorless as a faded photograph, gray as the river.

He listened to sweet, resonant music rising from within the church. It was the “Canon for Repentance.” Nowek's mother had insisted he attend the Polish Catholic church on Kirov Square. But then she found his father and a young voice student together, superimposed, on a couch. It wasn't the first time, but it was the last. She left Irkutsk for Leningrad, and a few years later, Leningrad for a cancer ward.

Nowek stopped attending masses, but he still was drawn to the church by those deep, rich voices. If heaven existed, Nowek hoped his mother would be listening to music exactly like this.

“You'll never find out who did it,” said Chuchin. He had Nowek's suitcase resting against his leg. A fresh Prima dangled from his lips.

“Maybe.” Nowek was still wearing the clothes he'd changed into at the Lubyanka, though in deference to the cold Chuchin had come up with a proper winter hat of dark wool karakul.

“Even if they do you'll never learn who ordered it.”

“Probably.”

“What's amazing is that they let you leave Moscow.”

“Definitely.”

“Pah.” The Prima flared, glowed. The raw, unfiltered cigarette smelled even more toxic than usual.

Chuchin's leather jacket was new, but the rest of his outfit was so old it seemed more like skin than clothes. An ancient gray wool hat, heavy felt welder's pants, scuffed work boots. His face was weathered and lined, his fingers cured yellow with nicotine. He turned sixty this year and looked older. He wore cheap plastic sunglasses tinted absolute black. Chuchin had been a citizen of the gulag for twenty years, and two decades of felling trees and trekking across fields of blinding white snow had seared his eyes.

When he did take them off, a surprise: his eyes bore a distinct, Mongolian fold. Chuchin was Slav enough to let you know he was up to something, and Asian enough to keep you guessing what it was. He'd been Nowek's official driver in Markovo. When Nowek lost his job as mayor, he'd followed him to Arkady Volsky, and to Irkutsk.

Chuchin said, “The militia came to your office yesterday.”

“What for?”

“What else? You. I said I was just a pensioner. I go where they tell me, I raise flags and sweep floors. What could I know?”

A lot.
When it came to knowing things, Chuchin was an acknowledged master. He carried a map of the world in his head, remarkably wrong at the rim, dead right at the center. Still, Nowek doubted the local police had been convinced any more than he believed the Moscow militia had given up on rearresting him.

But the flags,
thought Nowek. Volsky had insisted on flying two in front of his office. One, the white, blue, and red of Russia. The other, the Siberian flag, green below for the endless taiga, white above for the snow. “They took you at your word?”

“They're militia,” said Chuchin, as though that should explain everything. “If they were smarter they'd be
mafiya
. Though they're good enough at avoiding trouble when it bites them on the ass.”

“You're worried about something, Chuchin?”

“You haven't said why they let you go.”

“I'm innocent. How could they hold me?”

Chuchin peered at him from behind his dark lenses.

Nowek glanced back at the church and saw a young priest hurrying from the monastery. The black wings of the priest's
ryasa
flapped in the wind. His beard was full and long.

The priest bustled up, waving impatiently to the driver sitting on his rusty bulldozer. It chuffed sooty exhaust, the dented blade rose. Lengths of chain dangled from it. They drew taut, and Volsky's plain wood coffin, suspended on iron hooks, floated up from the back of an open truck, into the air.

“It's good,” said Chuchin. “Just a simple machine made for work. He'd like that.” He saw Nowek looking back to the street. “You're expecting someone?”

Nowek saw just the militia jeep and a dark Volga sedan. The governor of Irkutsk, the mayor, the head of the All-Siberian Reform Party, they all should be here. Volsky hadn't just fought for them. He'd died for them. Where were they now? “They've forgotten him already.”

Chuchin shrugged. “They didn't want to get close and risk catching the same disease.”

“He was murdered for speaking the truth. It's not catching.”

Chuchin replied with a cloud of smoke.

The wind carried it to Nowek's face. He waved it away. “There was a fire in the Lubyanka that smelled better than that.”

“Go back and breathe the KGB's air then.”

“It's the FSB now.”

“Different name,” Chuchin said with a snort. “Same smell.” He sucked it down to ash and ember, then flicked it away.

The young priest hurried over to them. He wasn't dressed for the cold. Clearly, a very quick service was in the works. “The
Metropolit
sends his—”

“Choirboy,” Chuchin interrupted. “What's the matter? He's too busy praying with his
mafiya
friends this morning?”

Nowek glared Chuchin silent, then said to the priest, “Forgive my driver. He's not himself. There's no reason to wait.”

The priest waved to the bulldozer driver. The engine chugged. The treads slipped, then dug into the half-frozen earth. The bulldozer began to move.

Chuchin picked up Nowek's bag. “So much for speaking the truth.”

“You have something against priests now?”

“I'm Russian,” said Chuchin. “I have something against everybody.”

They walked slowly behind the bulldozer, across a low shoulder of open ground dusted with gray snow. The ground was still bare beneath the trees. Ahead, the view opened to the Angara River. The river smoke was barely ten meters deep. The wind ripped holes in it, revealing plates of thin, new ice spinning north.

The bulldozer headed for a cluster of white birches and a mound of fresh, dark earth.

Chuchin said, “What will you do about Galena?”

“I told her to stay.”

“For once she'll be happy to obey.” Chuchin took another drag, let it out, then said, “You know, just because they let you leave Moscow doesn't mean they won't throw you to the wolves later on. What did the militia want from you, anyway?”

“To send me back to Moscow.” He felt the cold of the frozen earth coming through the soles of his shoes. Siberia on the cusp of winter. He should be in boots, not shoes. “But they won't. Not while I'm still needed.”

“For what? You don't work for Volsky. Neither do I.”

“You can work for his replacement.”

“Never. I'd rather hang for being loyal than be rewarded as a weasel.” Then “Who will it be?”

“Why should you care? You'll be hanging.”

“I still have standards.”

Nowek waved away the foul smoke. “Not many.”

“Smoking is cheaper than eating. So? Who is it?”

Nowek drew in a long breath, and let it out slowly. It was snatched from his lips by the brisk wind. “Me.”

Chuchin looked at Nowek long, hoping it was a joke, afraid it might not be. “You
agreed
?”

“I made a deal.”

“With the devil. Which one, Mister Mayor?”

“You saw the car parked behind the militia jeep?”

“Black Volga, killer plates from the Interior Ministry.”
Killer plates
put the occupants above local law. The term was quite literally true: a car with killer plates could run over a squad of grandmothers and drive away. “The engine is leaking oil badly.” Chuchin screwed up his face. He looked like he'd bitten into something sour. “I can't believe you're working for the KGB.”

“It's
FSB
. He's a lieutenant who works for a major named Levin. Levin is keeping the militia off me. I think I can trust him.”

Chuchin raised an eyebrow. “They say Siberian tigers are rare. You could put this Levin behind glass and charge admission.”

“It's complicated.”

“It's simple. Volsky is dead. You're still breathing. Take his job and you take on his enemies.” Chuchin looked back at the Volga. “What does the KGB want?”

“Volsky was going to Mirny. I'm going in his place.”

“Alone?”

“You want to come?”

“I've seen snow, thank you. Why Mirny?”

“Volsky was murdered over diamonds. Mirny is where they come from. I know Volsky was in touch with someone there. He called him his colleague. I'm going to find him.”

“For the glory of the KGB?”

“No,” said Nowek flatly. “For Volsky.”

The bulldozer clanked to a stop, blade raised high. The two groundsmen swung the coffin around to line up with the rough hole. The priest began reading from a prayer book, his back to the wind and the water. He finished, then said,
“Mir prachu tvayemu.”
Peace upon your dust. He looked at Nowek and cleared his throat.

Nowek walked to the front of the earth-moving machine and gripped one of the cold, rusty chains that held Volsky's coffin.

The open grave was lined with giant crystals of ice. Soft, feathery, white as eiderdown. Moisture had risen from the river, settled into the hole, and frozen where it touched the ground.

Both ice and diamonds grew in response to changes in temperature. The slower the change, the larger the crystal. The process inside Volsky's open grave had been slow. The crystals were extravagantly big. Nowek thought,
Fifty, sixty carats
at least. They looked terribly fragile. A warm breath would shatter them.

“Arkasha,” he said softly, “I wasn't going to say anything this morning. What for? Maybe it would have made no difference if we had been together. Maybe we'd
both
be dead. I don't know. But now they've blessed your dust, so your soul is safe enough.”

The young priest shivered and wrapped his
ryasa
around his shoulders against the biting chill.

Nowek ignored him, and continued to speak softly, softly. “You once said we'd look out for each other. You kept your word. You also promised you would help the miners. Whatever it took.” The ground seemed to tilt. He grabbed the chain to steady himself. “I want you to know, I will keep your promise for you. Whatever it takes. And though it's a little late, I'll keep mine, too.” He looked up and nodded.

With a clank of a clutch, the bulldozer blade began to drop.

Nowek guided Volsky down, down, into the soft bed of crystals, down into the eternal ice. When the coffin bottomed, he unfastened the iron hooks and pulled the chains up hand over hand. They rattled against the coffin. His palms were rust red.

“There aren't many people in this world worthy of trust,” Nowek said as the distant voices from the church climbed higher into the air, then, from beneath the trembling alto came a low, powerful bass. The voice of the river.

“Today there's one less.”

The first shower of dirt thundered against the wooden coffin. The next was softer. Nowek couldn't hear the third at all.

On the way back to the battered white Land Cruiser, Chuchin said, “So how soon do we have to leave?”

Nowek took him by the shoulder. “The diamond company will send a plane to meet us tomorrow. Thank you, Chuchin.”

“I'm not busy. What now?”

“My apartment. I want to see my father.”

The trauma surgeons at Moscow's Municipal Hospital Number 31 were experts when it came to bullet wounds, picking bomb shrapnel, stitching knife slashes. When a businessman ended up on the wrong side of a deal and couldn't afford the gleamingly expensive American Medical Center, Number 31 was where he would hope the ambulance drivers would go. Sometimes it was a matter of luck. Levin was lucky. Not once, but three times.

He woke up on the street, covered in blood, cold, his body rigid, his face a shell, a mask. He forced himself to move. First an arm, then a leg. He pushed himself upright and felt cold air on the bare, raw skin of his back. He could see with only one eye. He didn't know why, and that was luck paying its first call.

If he'd known his right eye was attached only by a slender, violet thread of optic nerve, he might have given up, sat down, and quietly frozen to death. Instead, Levin found Sasha, carried him to the front door of his apartment building, and collapsed.

Luck came again. A neighbor's daughter had a fight with her boyfriend and returned home early. She found Levin clutching the broken body of a dying dog, screamed, ran upstairs, and called 02.