The Ice Curtain (22 page)

Developments?
Levin thought,
Sherbakov.

“I went into your office safe. Materials were needed for the investigation.” Goloshev leaned close. “I found the letter. I had to give it to them, Levin. I had no choice.”

Letter?
Levin glanced at the third man.

“He's no friend. He had the doctor give you something to clear your mind. A lot of it. If you don't start—”

The bald man touched Goloshev's shoulder. The Toad immediately stopped talking.

He outranks Goloshev,
thought Levin.

The stranger reached into his jacket. “We have a lot to talk about, Major Levin. Shall we begin?”

Levin's heart jumped. But the stranger held out his identity card, not a pistol. Levin's ID carried the single red stripe of state security. This card had
three
stripes: the white, blue, and red of the flag of the Russian Federation.

He leaned close, his voice a hoarse, smoker's rasp. “I'm Chernukhin. I'm with the Presidential Security Service. Your commander found a document in your safe.” He reached into his other pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “I won't waste time reading every word. I think you'll understand the situation quickly enough.” With that, Chernukhin began to read.

The Office of Internal Audit and Inspection wishes to express its gratitude for your assistance in our efforts to assess the current Russian situation. As suggested, we will brief bank officers in charge of Russian accounts to make certain your information is considered in their deliberations and decisions. We recognize your help could not have come without risks, both personal and professional. It is our belief and our hope that these risks will prove small in comparison to the ultimate goal of a Russia free from the yoke of official corruption.

“Enough?” Chernukhin let the letter flutter down onto Levin's chest. He peered down, his pale blue eyes bright as polished steel. “In ten days, President Yeltsin will hold talks with representatives of the IMF. It seems you've been talking with them already. You are going to tell us all what you said.”

Who wrote that letter?
Levin's eyes darted between Chernukhin and Goloshev for an answer. His thinking was like a leaf caught in a gale.

The crescents under Chernukhin's eyes were shadowed, almost purple. “Now I have several questions, and I want you to answer them all in the greatest detail. Is this understood?”

Levin felt something inside his brain pry open his mouth and spit out the word, “Yes.” What had they given him?

“Let's begin with your two
elektronka
. These messages were encrypted. The code is nothing we've ever seen. It's better than the nuclear codes the President carries around. I know because the person who created them told me. It's impossible to break. Who gave it to you? The Americans?”

His tongue was being pulled by strings in someone else's hands. He took a breath and said, “Sherbakov.”

Chernukhin looked at the Toad.

“His assistant. A lieutenant. He's a kid.”

Chernukhin took Levin by the shoulder and shook him. “Do you want to see your country go through another 1998? If it happens, who will get it in the neck first? Bankers. The media. Academics. In short, Jews. How much do the Americans know about the Closet? Where did that encryption program come from?”

“Sherbakov.”

“Fuck.”
Chernukhin slapped the side of Levin's bed with his open palm, then looked up at the doctor and said, “This isn't working. Give him more.”

The doctor stood at Levin's side. He was frowning.

“What's wrong?” asked Chernukhin.

“I have enough scopolamine, Sodium amytal, and Pentothal to make a horse recite Pushkin. But you can't just use one after the next. They're like colors. Throw them all together and you don't get a rainbow, you get mud. His system must be flushed.”

“How long will it take?” asked Chernukhin.

“Tomorrow morning should be enough.”

Levin felt a tear form in the corner of his good eye. He wanted to tell them something, anything, but the truth they refused to accept.

“Levin, this is serious,” said Goloshev. “Maybe you can clear it up with a few words. I know if you were yourself, this would be a joke. Try hard and tell them the truth. You have to.”

Chernukhin leaned close to Levin. “We have something in common. Like you, I have a nickname. I'm known as the Cleaner. I make sure there's no dirt for the President to step in. Right now, that's you. You're a traitor. I don't need to give you chances, but I will. How much do the Americans know? What did you tell them? Is it
Israel
that you're working for? They're clever with computers. They have a big diamond industry. Is that it, Levin? Have you sold your country to the kikes?”

We don't want kike money!

Levin had no answer, truthful or otherwise. He shivered. The sweat poured out of his brow and trickled down his neck.

“Where did you send those two messages!”

Now he did have an answer. “Sherbakov.”

The Cleaner turned his back to him and said to the doctor, “Eight o'clock. We'll open his head like a chestnut.”

The militia jeep parked at Larisa's apartment building. He followed her in. There was enough snow to leave footprints and it was falling more heavily by the minute.

“You won't meet Liza. She eats her lunch at school. It's nearby.” She led him up the broken steps to the front door. The building was elevated above the ground to keep it from melting the underlying permafrost. Nowek saw that the buzzer was by the name
ARKOV
. Her husband. “How did you meet Hock?”

She inserted one key, turned the lock, then another key, a second lock, and the heavy wooden door opened. “Kristall sent some representatives to South Africa to negotiate an assistance package. I went along as translator.”

“His Russian seems good enough.”

“We didn't know.”

“Besides, it was a chance to travel?”

“Of course.”

The lobby was marred with graffiti on the walls. The floors were filthy with ancient grime, glittering with shards of broken vodka bottles. The elevator door opened onto black space. “Vandals. Does Kirillin know?”

“There is no crime in Mirny.”
She said it with Kirillin's Yakut accent. She started climbing the stairs. The dim light of the impending storm filtered down from a skylight. All the fixtures had been stripped of bulbs. The third-floor corridor was floored in chipped vinyl. She unlocked her door.

Even before he walked into her flat, Nowek knew what it would be like. Outside, Russia can seem like an old silent movie, a bleak world where the skies, the buildings, even the people are gray. But inside is another world, another universe exploding with warmth, with life.

Larisa's flat burst with unexpected color: the bright spines of books, German magazines, gorgeous Oriental scarves draped over battered furniture, posters from an exhibition of French Impressionists, photographs of children at play in snow.

Nowek felt instantly at home. He'd grown up in this room, or one so much like it the differences didn't matter. The kitchen table served as living room, dining room, recreation area. There would be a toilet behind one door. A small bedroom behind another. An oversize closet where the babies would sleep.

Nowek could close his eyes, reach for anything and find it. His father's enormous black piano would have gone over there on that wall, far from both window and radiator, where Larisa had a couch and a coffee table with an arrangement of silk flowers faded to delicate ivory. The only jarring note was the computer and monitor on Larisa's desk.
That
was something Nowek's father would have thrown out the window.

She put a kettle on to boil for tea while he settled himself on her couch. There was a picture of her daughter, Liza, standing against a stand of deep green pines, a dark blue sky, a few white clouds. A cool day in late spring. She had a halo of golden-blond hair, tousled by wind. She was wearing a thick red jacket and holding a long pencil. Her face was illuminated by light, confident of a future that would be wonderful. Looking at her, Nowek could see why Larisa would do anything to make it so. He'd felt the same way about Galena. He still did.

Larisa melted some butter in a pan and began to chop some mushrooms for sautéing. From the tiny white refrigerator came a jar of cream cheese. From a cabinet, a tin of Kamchakta crab and a sack of kasha. The kasha went into a pot to cook. The crab was mashed into the cheese, then she tossed the mushroom caps into the sizzling butter.

A woody, nutty smell filled the apartment. When the pan turned dark, when the first smoky wisps began to rise, she removed it from the heat and began stuffing the caps with cheese and crab.

Dishes magically assembled themselves under her hands. “You'll never get mushrooms like these in a restaurant.”

He joined her at the small kitchen table and took a bite of the buttery cap, the rich crab, the cream cheese. It melted to rich velvet in his mouth. “You're a good cook.”

“I don't get to show off much.”

“Maybe you and Liza could join your husband.”

“Mirny is still better than Africa.” Larisa popped a mushroom cap into her mouth. She chewed, then said, “Your daughter in America. You could join her, too.”

He'd be lucky to leave Moscow. “It's not my plan.”

“I would go like that.” She snapped her fingers.

“What's stopping you from leaving Mirny?”

“You need money to leave. A lot.”

“You really don't believe in those overseas dollars?”

“I see the statements every month like everyone, but so long as diamonds aren't being sold, they'll never be real.”

“Maybe they are being sold. All those dollars might be real. Everyone in Mirny should be able to buy a ticket out.”

“It's like talking about a world neither of us will ever see.”

“What kind of world were the people at the ore plant looking for?”

“What did Director Kirillin say?”

“That four drunks were responsible.”

“
One
man was responsible. A boy, really. But he wasn't alone. It was practically the whole
shakta
. And some from the plant, too. One man planned it. The blood is on his name.”

Planned the operation?
It was very different from drunks stealing a truck. And
shakta
meant
mine shaft.
The open pit was universally called
karir
. “What happened?”

“They took a Belaz and decided to stop at Fabrika 3 on their way. They were going to stage a protest against the company. They ran over a gas line. There was a spark. Thirty from the
shakta
died. Another dozen from the plant. Some right away. They were the luckiest. The driver the company assigned to you? Vadim? His wife wasn't so lucky.”

So she had found a way to leave Mirny. Though not the way Nowek had imagined. What had Volsky said?
They're murdering them.
He felt like he was standing on the rim of something important. Like the open pit itself. “It's safe to tell me all this?”

She put down her fork, then reached across the table and took Nowek's hand. “Just don't bring it up with Boyko.”

Her slender fingers were warm from the tea. “Why not?”

“His son was driving the Belaz.”

“Boyko's
son
?”

A horn sounded from out on the snowy street.

“Don't worry.” She stroked the back of his fingers lightly, casually. “He's not your problem.”

“Who is?”

She made a movement with her other hand, sweeping it in an arc, as though the very air swarmed with malevolent spirits.

Chapter 22

The Diamond Line

Nowek paused in the entry to Larisa's building, looking out on the dim street. Full dark came on fast at sixty-two degrees north latitude. The streetlamps were already on at three in the afternoon. They cast circles of sulfurous light that swirled with cold, fine snow. He put his parka hood up. In the time it took to hurry between Larisa's door and the waiting van, its fur ruff frosted white.
His son.
He slid the door open and got in.

The pit boss said, “Fucking snow. When winter starts early, it stays late.”

Boyko drove off before Nowek got the side door closed. The wheels skidded, then caught, throwing him back against the seat. He could see in the rearview mirror that Boyko's hair was matted and greasy, his face smudged. There were stains on his clothes that might be red hydraulic fluid, or not. He looked like he'd spent the afternoon asleep under a bridge and had gotten up hungover and mad.

“I thought you were used to winters in Mirny.”

Boyko's prominent brow was beaded with sweat. “You spend a day picking a boy out of a pulley and we'll see what you're used to.”

Sherbakov.
“Did you find out what happened to him?”

“I already told you. He died. You and Mine Director Kirillin had a useful discussion?”

“He did most of the talking.”

“That's Kirillin. So what did he say?”

“There's been a change in my plans. I'm leaving tomorrow morning.”

“You'll be lucky to get out of Mirny, Delegate Nowek.”

As the van bounced along the rutted road, the last gray light drained from the sky. The blocky, cubic shape of the ore plant appeared on the horizon, golden in sodium security lights.

“So,” said Boyko. “That's Fabrika 3. The biggest building in town. Built in 1984. It swallows boulders of ore from the mine, breaks them into three hundred–millimeter chunks in a tumbler, grinds the chunks to eighteen-millimeter pebbles, sifts the pebbles for diamonds, and shits the tailings out the side.” The headlights struggled through the slanting snow. “The sifting is done in stages. First centrifuges, then media cyclones, vibration tables, and grease traps.”

The snow was mesmerizing in the headlights. It swept across the beams in wind-driven diagonal streaks, suggestive of furious forward speed. Like Gogol's troika, striking sparks as it hurtled across the snow. Russia, the envy of the world.

The van lost traction and started to skid sideways. Boyko wrestled it back onto the road. “The grease traps catch nearly all the diamonds in the pebble stream. Diamonds hate water but they stick to grease like glue. We boil the grease and skim it like soup. The diamonds sink to the bottom. The girls in the diamond line pluck them out with gloves and drop them into lockboxes. The last stage is the X-ray sorting hall. Trust me, you don't want to go there.”

“Your driver Vadim. Didn't his wife work on the diamond line?”

“Ask Kirillin. You have some other questions?”

“One. Is there going to be anything to see at the ore plant?”

“Broken kimberlite and machines, and the machines won't be running. They're holding the next shift back until you're out.”

“Then there's no reason to go.”

Boyko looked alarmed. “Everything's been prepared.”

“That's another reason not to go. Then there's you. My wife died in a plane crash four years ago. I can't look at the mountain where it happened. Leading a tour there would be out of the question.”

There was a pause, then “I'm sorry, but why tell me?”

“Your son, Boyko. I know what happened to him.”

The pit boss blinked, surprised. “Kirillin told you?”

Careful.
Nowek could see Boyko's hands clenched on the steering wheel. His scarred knuckles were white. “No.”

“I didn't think so. You asked to see the ore plant? You're going to see it. Let no one say we denied you a thing.”

Except understanding. A son dead. Trapped in Mirny. And Boyko still could use the word
we
. How could he remain so loyal? Was it habit? Or fear? Nowek watched the snow beat against the windshield. “What was his name?”

A longer pause, then “Alexei. He died on his birthday. He was twenty-one for just two hours.”

“I have a daughter. She's eighteen. She's in America.”

“I already know. Be glad. At least she's safe.”

You know?
“I thought so,” Nowek said. “Then someone sent her a pair of diamond earrings. The note inside said
From Siberia's eternal frost
.”

“Then we're the same.” Boyko turned. “They've got you by the balls, too.”

“Who is it, Boyko? Who sent her those diamonds?”

The only answer came from the dry, cold snow hissing against the windshield like poured sand. A gust of wind rocked the van.

Were he and Boyko really so similar? Nowek thought,
Yes, except your son is dead and Galena is alive.
The same, except that you've given up, and I have not. He wondered whether the van was bugged, and decided it no longer mattered. “Tell me about your son.”

“Alyosha?” Boyko's chest heaved. He swiped his mouth with the back of his jacket. “Everything we did, it was for him. Coming here. Staying here. So what if the whole country was fucked? We had something to point to. We had a reason. He would live a better life.”

Nowek could feel something building up in Boyko. He didn't speak, he didn't want to stop it, to get in its way.

“He wasn't a miner. That was okay. Three generations breaking rocks is enough. Alyosha had a mind. He could do anything.”

“In Mirny?”

“That was my mistake.” Boyko's face grew stony, even more impassive. “Last year, when there was still money, we could have left Mirny. But where could we go that was better?”

“I can think of a lot of places.”

Boyko didn't seem to hear. “We had our apartment, a small dacha. Our greenhouse grows melons sweeter than any from Astrakhan. There's practically no crime. Unspoiled nature. Where could you find that in Russia? I figured that so long as we had something the world was willing to buy, we'd ride out the storm.”

“Diamonds.”

“You asked about Moscow? They turned their backs on us and they still expected us to work around the clock. They still expected our diamonds to show up every week. How long could that go on?”

It was the same question Volsky had asked. “So Kristall started sending them junk instead.”

“When you hand your wallet over to a thief and then he demands your wife, what are you going to do? It was rape. The company determined that we could make our own way without Moscow. If they wouldn't send us rubles, someone else would send us dollars.”

“The cartel.”

“Only we were wrong. We were just changing one thief for another. It's almost funny. Before, when we were slaves to Moscow we were more free. Now that we're free of them, we're slaves.”

Nowek thought it sounded like something Chuchin might say. “Slaves can't leave. But miners can. Why don't they?”

“You know what my Alyosha wanted? A new computer. I would find him up in the middle of the night, working on the old one. Who knows what he was up to? My son could really use his head.”

“Kirillin said he was drunk the night he took the Belaz.”

“He was a safety supervisor. He'd no more drink on duty than piss in my pocket.” Boyko had both hands on the wheel, his grip so tight he might have expected it to fly off into the snowy night. His voice was even, controlled. “Maybe it was my fault. I told him the company would stand behind us. I told him to wait, that Kristall was beginning a new chapter. It would give us everything we were owed.”

“But they didn't.”

“Not fast enough. My Alyosha wasn't patient. It's why he liked computers. Push a button and something happens
now
.” Boyko stopped, took a deep breath. “I had to choose. Blood, or company.” He turned and looked straight at Nowek. Sweat glistened on his face, though it was cold enough to see his breath.

“You chose Kristall?”

“My second mistake,” said Boyko.

A white glare swam out of the darkness ahead. A double halo of approaching headlights. Someone was leaving the ore plant. Not a Belaz. The lights were too low. Boyko pulled over to let them pass, pausing at the foot of a bridge.

Nowek looked down. A fast-moving stream ran beneath the bridge. White steam rose from it. Thanks to permafrost, streams weren't rare in Siberia. But a
warm
stream had to be coming from beneath the permafrost layer, down deep where the rocks become hot to the touch. “You're pumping a lot of water out of Mirny Deep.”

“I told you it would flood if we didn't.”

“You also said the
shakta
was abandoned.”

The approaching vehicle was a militia patrol. Shadowy faces in the dashboard light. Then it was gone, heading back to town.

Boyko threw the van into gear and steered out onto the tracks left by the militia.

The ore plant loomed out of the night, floating above the tundra, bathed in beams of bright yellow light swirling with snow. Closer, Nowek could see that its windowless skin was made from sheets of corrugated steel. Soot painted one vertical wall in long black scabs that fanned out from ground zero.

The road curved. Nowek could no longer see the damaged wall. They came to a high steel gate and stopped. He put his hand to the window. A faint but definite throb. Something was making the glass vibrate, in and out of phase. Some big turning machinery. They hadn't stopped everything for his visit to Fabrika 3.

Boyko rolled down his window. Fine snow blew in as he pulled a card from his pocket and swiped it through a reader. The gate began to open. He drove through and immediately came to a stop at a second barrier. The outer fence had already closed. The inner one remained locked. They were trapped between the two.

“Both gates are never open at once. We call it the Dead Zone.”

“A gate wouldn't stop a Belaz.”

“A Belaz can climb a thirty-percent grade with a hundred tons of ore in back.” He used his card again. A green light flashed on, a warning tone sounded, and the inner gate began to move. “Alyosha could have taken the whole building down if he wanted to.”

“What stopped him, Boyko?”

The gate was open. The beeping continued.

“He was your son.”

“That's right.
My
son. Someone handed your daughter diamond earrings? They burned my Alyosha like bacon. Volsky sent your daughter to heaven? My son had to die to get there.”

Nowek felt the cold flood in through the window. It cut right through his parka and lodged in his ribs like a knife. “I never told you Volsky arranged Galena's visa.”

“Listen,” said Boyko. “If the computer inside the plant doesn't read my card in five minutes, an alarm goes off. Where is Boyko? You don't think someone is watching? Someone is
always
watching. What do you want from me, Delegate Nowek?”

“The truth. You didn't leave Mirny when you could. Kristall is selling off diamonds to the cartel. They're keeping the miners like prisoners. Your son wanted to do something about it. Volsky wanted to do something about it, too. You didn't help your son. You made some bad choices. Maybe it's time to make a good one.”

“And cut my own throat?”

“No,” said Nowek. “And stand by your son.”

They didn't move. The gate beeped impatiently. The green light flashed.

Boyko took a long, long breath, and let it out slowly. He held up his hand, short, powerful fingers stretched straight and taut. They tensed, curled into a claw, a fist. Just when Nowek thought Boyko would hit him, the pit boss slammed his fist down onto the steering wheel so hard it made the van shake.

“Fuck.”

Boyko jammed his boot down onto the accelerator. The van skidded, gripped, jerked into motion. Instead of going straight to the ore plant, he turned right.

“They'll shoot me,” said Boyko. “Maybe first they will beat me. People work. We mine ore. We deliver diamonds. Not to Moscow . . .”

“To Irkutsk. To Golden Autumn.”

“On paper we're rich. All those dollars, just waiting for us at the end of the rainbow. It's all a fantasy. But when reality looks like
this,
fantasies look good. We know the system was invented to pick our pockets. We know we're just the fools at the end of the line. What do we do? Nothing.”

“Your son tried to do something.”

“Yes, he did,” said Boyko. “And I'm proud.”

A dirt road circled Fabrika 3. Security lights bathed every square meter of its skin. Curtains of snow billowed through the yellow beams. Cameras on poles peered down. But the island of light was surrounded by more than double fences. It was surrounded by darkness, too.

They came around to the side of the building that was scorched. Boyko turned away from it, bounced off the road, onto the open marsh. The van lurched over uneven ground.

It came at them unexpectedly, a ruined concrete building, small, barely a shack. There was a metal door set in one side. The roof was partly collapsed under a pile of junked steel beams and crumpled metal. Boyko urged the van over a pair of deep ruts. The van tipped down, then up. The headlights swirled with confetti snow.

They stopped on a giant wheel half sunk into the ground. Twenty blackened bolts orbited a charred cinder of an axle. A ladder, its rungs and railings distorted by intense heat, draped down to the ground from a platform that projected from a shattered, glassless cab. The number 7530 could still be read on its side.

Not a junk pile. A burned Belaz.

Boyko switched off the engine, but left the lights and wipers on.

“Volsky told me that the miners were being murdered,” said Nowek. “The fire was no accident.”