The Ice Curtain (20 page)

Chapter 20

The Spear

Levin rose up out of the darkness, the deeps, like a bubble rising through oil. Slowly, slowly, to the light, the air, to a world that only gradually assumed recognizable shape. He rebuilt it detail by detail. A door. A clock. A small plastic radio. The sharp smell of antiseptic. Half his face felt stretched and hot, dangerously thin, a balloon filled almost to bursting. The other half felt nothing at all.

They'd moved him off Hospital 31's busy trauma floor to a recovery area. His new floor was quieter. There were no more screams. Just an annoying American song playing from the bedside radio over and over again. There was a volume knob, but he couldn't reach it.

“Raindrops keep falling on my head. . . .”

He had to think, and think clearly. How had Goloshev known he'd been attacked by
two
flatheads? Had he told him?
No.
From a militia report?
Unlikely.
A witness?
Possibly.
Because he'd arranged it? Four possibilities, two very different implications. For the investigation. For Levin. Most of all, for Sherbakov and Nowek. Levin kept worrying about it like a tongue unable to stay away from a chipped tooth.

Stay away from the Closet!

That had to be a message from Petrov. Yet Goloshev had seemed perfectly willing to pin the loss of all those diamonds on him. If the Toad had sent those two flatheads, didn't that mean he was working for Petrov?

“Nothin' seems to fit . . .”

Either way, he had to get word to Sherbakov, to Nowek, that the man in charge of the entire case might well be working for its principal suspect, that everything about their mission to Mirny might be compromised.

There had to be a telephone on the floor. He tried to move his arm, but it was fastened to the side rail with rubber surgical tubing. He couldn't see out of his right eye. He heard the doorknob rattle, then a voice.

“Wait. This one is due.”

The sallow-faced doctor walked up to the bed and beamed a bright light into Levin's eye.

The room vanished behind blinding sparks, galaxies, rainbows. Levin blinked. His dry lips felt welded shut. His tongue was a swollen sock, a cotton towel rammed into his mouth. Levin recognized the “desert mouth” brought on by the sedative scopolamine. It used to be a common interrogation drug until someone noted that even a willing confessor couldn't get the truth by a thick, dry tongue and parched throat. Not that they were looking for truth.

The doctor placed a tray on the table beside Levin's bed. It contained a syringe and two vials. One filled with scopolamine. The other with Antilurium, its antidote.

The doctor picked it up and jabbed the needle into a bottle of straw-colored fluid. He pulled the plunger down, filling it with sleep, with time. He unfastened the surgical tubing that bound Levin's wrist, the better to allow the free flow of sedative.

The sharp prick of the needle almost made Levin cry out. He fought the impulse. The needle slid deep into his forearm. Levin felt the familiar burning. The pressure behind the syringe flowed through it and into him. Pushing, pushing him back down to that dark, quiet place.

A new voice. “We're ready for you, Doctor.”

“I said I'll be right there.” The needle came out. The doctor stood by, watching.

Levin blinked, fluttered his eye, then closed it.

The doctor left. The door clicked shut.

Levin could feel the deadness. A finger drooped. Another. Sherbakov. Nowek. They had to be warned. He opened his eye.

The rubber tubing had not been refastened. He didn't have much time. His arm was already numb. His fingers were loosening, untying themselves from his bones, dissolving.

As the poison raced for his heart, he clumsily grappled the second syringe from the table. It felt like he was wearing mittens. He brought the needle to his mouth, bit off the cap and spat it out. Light glinted from the sharp tip.

He commanded his thumb to press down on the needle's plunger. A round, milky drop formed. As the ground began to tilt, as he was about to slide off an invisible cliff, down into deep silence, into darkness, he rammed the needle into his belly.

He squeezed the plunger until his fingers no longer obeyed. His arm flopped to his side. The needle, still in him, swayed like a metronome to the beat of his heart.

The pungent aromas of boiling cabbage, frying onions, and meat filled the ground floor of Kristall's headquarters. It reminded Nowek that he hadn't eaten since Irkutsk, that Kirillin hadn't invited him to the company cafeteria.

“I'll meet you outside the hotel in a few minutes,” said Larisa. “Your colleague is in there.” She pointed out a small door tucked behind the hanging waterfall of crystals, then left to retrieve her coat.

Nowek went to free Chuchin. Thousands of diamond-shaped prisms streamed down from the high atrium, like big raindrops frozen in the flash of a strobe. They shifted in currents of air, sending patterns of refracted color across the balconies, the floor, the walls. Nowek touched one. Not crystal. Not even glass. What else would a Russian company that mines a quarter of the world's diamonds use? Plastic.

A small camera stared down from above an unmarked door. A red light glowed below the black lens. He pushed inside.

“It's about time,” said Chuchin with as much dignity as a man with bound wrists could muster. His face was flushed red. He perched on a bare wooden bench. A braided cord bound his hands together. It was looped through a steel ring set into the wall. The geometry forced his body into what had to be a deeply uncomfortable position. Not that it showed. With his dark sunglasses still on, Chuchin looked like royalty surveying a room of commoners. He even had a smoldering cigarette pinched between his yellowed fingers. A Marlboro at that. “Did I miss lunch?” Chuchin asked.

“We had to restrain him,” the guard apologized. He sat behind the desk. A row of small televisions was mounted on one wall. The dirty window behind him was filtered by steel bars. “We couldn't let him wander around the building. There are diamonds here. You understand.”

“Perfectly,” said Nowek.

“You'll sign for him?” The guard spun a thick bound notebook around and offered a pen.

Nowek hesitated, considering. “If he's willing to reform.”

“Pah,” Chuchin snorted. “I've been places where sitting in a warm room was something worth slitting a throat for. This is a vacation. Forget lunch. Bring me a bowl of
balanda
and I'll stay all night.” It was a prisoner's soup made with subtle hints of vegetables, distant memories of meat.

“You'll have to earn your
balanda,
zek,” said Nowek as he signed, then tossed the pen to the desk. “Vacation's over.”

Outside, a high cloud layer veiled the sun.

Chuchin looked up and sniffed. “I smell snow.”

“Kirillin said a storm is due in tonight.”

“I met him. One look was all it took to know that you can forget about seeing that underground mine. What did he say?”

“That we're leaving tomorrow morning for Moscow.”

Chuchin seemed surprised. “How did you convince him?”

“It wasn't hard. He was talking to someone at the Kremlin when I walked in. They're issuing a decree tomorrow to strip me of my title. If I'm still here, he'll arrest me. Us.”

“You think Kirillin scared Levin away?”

Nowek thought about young Sherbakov. “I hope so.”

Chuchin reached into his jacket and took out his cigarette lighter. It was made from a machine gun cartridge. Chuchin smoked enough to let the dying embers of one cigarette light the next, so it was rarely needed. “Take it.”

“I don't smoke.”

“You don't drink, either. Sometimes I wonder if you're even Russian. I've had it ever since I was
na narakh
.” Behind the wires. The gulag. “And I'm still breathing. It's for luck.”

Once, Nowek thought he might learn enough to clear Volsky's name, maybe enough to find out who had taken those diamonds and though it was a very long shot, return them in time. Now his aims were simpler: to leave Mirny alive, to somehow evade the Moscow militia long enough to find Levin. And if he couldn't? How long would he stay alive before he was found dead? What was the current word for it?
Suicided?

He took the butane lighter, pulled the nose cap off and thumbed the wheel. A spark, a tiny blue flame. Fragile like a man. Temporary, easily blown out. He snapped it shut and slipped it into his parka. “Thank you, Chuchin.”

“Don't lose it.”

They continued across the open square, heading for the dingy hotel. A stand of slim birches huddled together at the base of Lenin's black marble bust. Their trunks were secured with wire and stakes to keep them upright. They looked like shackled prisoners caught out on a forced march, swaying, an instant away from collapse, too stubborn to die.

The Hotel
Zarnitsa
appeared to have struck some invisible reef and foundered, sinking slowly into the eternal frost that lived a few meters under the earth. The front facade was cracked, grimy concrete. Entire panels had come loose and remained attached only by habit. The stairs leading up to a pair of glass doors tilted wildly.

The double doors made an air-lock entry. The inner door was also made from glass. It was attached to a weight and a pulley. You pushed it open, the weight rose. You let go and the weight fell, slamming the glass panel shut with enough force to make you wonder why it hadn't shattered long ago.

Inside, the lobby was dim. Two women sat at the reception desk behind thick glass panels, watching a small television. There wasn't enough work for one. Why two?

There was a guard, of course. Usually, their main function was to protect the exclusive franchise of the house prostitutes. This one was cut from the common pattern of square shoulders, heavy torso, leather jacket. His hair was trimmed very short, his temples shaved. He sat at a low table, legs apart.

The dining room was brightly lit and booming with loud, excited voices, punctuated by laughter. Nowek listened. A foreign voice. He walked to the doorway and was immediately blocked by a middle-aged woman with a clipboard in one hand and a soiled napkin in the other. The hostess.

“You can't come in unless you're on the list.”

“I am. My name is Nowek.” Her minor rudeness made him feel better. Almost at home. In Russia, keeping people out is the primary task of a “hostess.” Her black hair was alloyed in silver, her bosom the prow of an icebreaker. She wore a red vest and a red skirt, a snowy-white blouse. The toes of her shoes were so sharply pointed they looked dangerous.

“I will check. Wait.” She went to her table and called the front desk. A glass bowl half filled with red-and-white striped candies was on her desk. Chuchin reached for them but she shot him a fierce look that stopped him cold.

Nowek scanned the dining room. Several men were eating and drinking together. A large table in the center was threatened by a lurid chandelier made from the same plastic crystals he'd seen at the headquarters building. To one side a stuffed bear reared up, claws extended, slightly more welcoming than the hostess. Waitresses in short black skirts and spotless white blouses floated by the tables with full pitchers of water, impervious to eye contact, deaf to all requests.

The hostess opened her notebook and used a stub of a pencil to write in a name. She snapped it shut. “One of you is Nowek.” It wasn't a question. More of an accusation.

“I am.”

“Come with me.” She turned without wondering whether Nowek might follow.

He didn't.

On the far side of the room, walled off on three sides by ornamental screens, a smaller, private party was eating. Or drinking. Nowek couldn't see everyone at the table. The view was blocked.

“Over
here,
” the hostess said impatiently.

A man in the uniform of the militia, a colonel, no less, was offering a toast. His arm was outstretched, a glass tumbler in his hand. Seated next to him was a man in a poorly cut business suit, his face already pink and rapt with interest as the militia officer spoke. A foreigner sat next to him. He wore a casual sport coat and no tie. What was it called? A blazer? The skin of his face was deeply tanned.

Nowek walked over. The colonel sputtered on for a moment after he saw Nowek, then let his arm with its brimming glass of vodka slowly sink to the table.

Nearer, Nowek could see around the decorative screen and into the partitioned space.

A plate of pickles, onions, and carrots was on the table, flanked by more plates of cheese, salami, and bread. A silver bowl sparkled with the fat black marbles of expensive caviar. Two bottles of vodka stood guard beside it, along with pitchers of untouched fruit juice. And one more guest, a woman.

It was Larisa Arkova.

The world outside his window was pitch dark, but Levin was wide awake. He put the used syringe back on the table in time for the night nurse to find it. He listened as she made her final rounds. His ears were acutely tuned. Approaching feet, the slight rattle of a knob. The tiny squeak his door made just as it was opened.

He closed his left eye and relaxed. The room light went on with a sharp snap. The night nurse didn't bother checking Levin's pulse. Apparently that was secondary. She tugged on the rubber restraints. Left arm, right. Both ankles. Soon the lights snapped off, the door shut. Levin opened his eye.

The room was lit by a sliver of yellow light coming in beneath his door. He kept listening. There was a narrow window of opportunity between the night nurse's last check and the arrival of the morning staff. When he heard the nurse shuffle by his room, when he heard her chair squeal as she settled back into it at her station at the end of the hall, he twisted his right arm, exposed the slipknot, threw off one restraint, another, and pushed himself up.

His head swam. Levin fought it by staring at the bar of light beneath the door. His horizon. At first it tipped, tumbled. But then it steadied and stopped. Blood returned to his head.