There were so many people milling about it was impossible to keep track of any single person, and they were of such great variety it seemed a contemporary Noah had scavenged the streets of the endangered city for two of every kind and brought them to this place of relative security, a cross between the Ark and the Tower of Babel. The hubbub, comprised of talking, singing, laughing—indeed, of every sort of human emission—was deafening, and the only impression Chemayev had of the general aspect of the place was derived from the objects that lined the walls. Overflowing bookcases; side-by-side refrigerators; an ornate China closet containing framed photographs; a massive secretary of golden oak; cupboards, reliquaries, travel posters, portraits, a calendar showing the wrong month and a picture of Siberian wheat fields. Items typical of a middle-class apartment. Smoke dimmed the lighting further, creating an amber haze, twisting with slow torsion into a menagerie of shapes that often appeared identifiable—ephemeral omega signs and kabalistic symbols and mutant Cyrillic characters—beneath which the closely packed heads of the party-goers bobbed and jerked. In various quarters couples were dancing, and due to the heat, many—both men and women—had removed their shirts; but because of the overall exuberance and the general lack of attention paid to the topless women, the effect was not truly prurient and had the casual eroticism of a tribal celebration.
Eventually Nataliya and Chemayev forced their way into a large, relatively under-populated room. No more than fifteen or sixteen people standing in clusters, some occupying the grouping of couches and easy chairs that dominated the far end. Nataliya drew Chemayev aside. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “For all I know we’re following Yuri about. Sit down and I’ll try to find him.”
Oppressed, mentally fatigued, Chemayev was in no mood to argue. Once she had left, he collapsed into an easy chair, let his head fall back, and closed his eyes. The workings of his mind were clouded, murky. It was as if the contents of his skull were the interior of a fishbowl that hadn’t been cleaned for weeks, the water thickened to a brown emulsion in which a golden glint of movement was visible now and again. Though not altogether pleasant, it was an oddly restful state, and he became irritated when a man’s voice intruded, telling a story about two young friends who’d come to Moscow from the north. He tried unsuccessfully to ignore the voice and finally opened his eyes to discover that the room had filled with decrepit, ill-clad men and women, typical denizens of the krushovas. The storyteller was hidden among them and his voice—a slurred yet authoritative baritone—was the only one audible.
“There was a special bond between them,” the man was saying. “They were both misfits in the life they had chosen—or, rather, that had chosen them. They were romantics and their circumstance was the very antithesis of the romantic, suppressing the natural expressions of their hearts and souls. Nicolai—the livelier of the pair—he was more grievously affected. He fancied himself a poet. He aspired to be a new Mayakovsky, to give tongue to the millennial monsters taking shape from the funeral smoke of Communism. A talented, personable fellow. Blond, handsome. For all his bloody deeds, he had something inside him that remained untouched. A core of… not innocence exactly, but a kind of youthful arrogance that counterfeited innocence. That made innocence unnecessary. Who knows what he might have achieved in a more forgiving age?”
This reference to someone named Nicolai and the accompanying description charged Chemayev with new anxiety and caused him to shake off his malaise. He sat up and peered about, trying to locate the speaker. An old woman fixed him with a baleful stare, then turned away. Her faded print dress was hiked up in back, revealing a raddled, purple-veined thigh; one of her grimy stockings had sagged about her calf in folds, like a seven league boot.
“The morning in question,” the man went on, “they got up well before dawn and drove to an open market north of the city. You know the sort of place. A muddy field where vendors set up stalls. Farmers selling vegetables and such. An old bus was parked at the edge of the field. It served as an office for Aleksander Fetisov, the small-time criminal they’d been sent to kill. Fetisov had grown dissatisfied with picking up the crumbs that fell from the table of the big shots. He had grand ambitions. But neither his strength nor his ingenuity had proved equal to those ambitions. When he stepped out of the bus with his bodyguards our heroes opened fire from behind the bushes where they had hidden themselves. The farmers ran away.
“Nicolai knelt beside Fetisov’s body. He needed proof that they’d done the job. A watch, a ring. Some identifiable token. As his friend searched the dead man’s clothing Viktor moved up behind him and aimed a pistol at his head. It would have been merciful if he had pulled the trigger right at that second, but he wasn’t committed to the act. He was still trying to think of a way out… even though he knew there was none. He couldn’t understand why Polutin had ordered him to kill Nicolai. But for Viktor, lack of understanding was not sufficient cause to break ranks. In this he differed from Nicolai. And of course, though he couldn’t see it at the time, this was the reason Polutin had ordered Nicolai’s death—he had too much imagination to be a good soldier.”
Bewildered and full of dread, Chemayev stood and began making his way toward the sound of the voice. He knew this story, he was familiar with every detail, but how anyone else could know it was beyond him. The elderly men and women shuffled out of his path clumsily, reluctantly—it seemed he was pushing through a sort of human vegetation, a clinging, malodorous thicket comprised of threadbare dresses, torn sweaters, and blotchy, wrinkled skin.
“Nicolai glanced up from the corpse to discover that his friend had become his executioner. For an instant, he was frozen. But after the initial shock dissipated he made no move to fight or to plead for his life. He just looked at Viktor, a look that seemed fully comprehending, as if he knew everything about the moment. The mechanisms that had created it. Its inevitability. And it was the composition of that look, the fact that it contained no element of disappointment, as if what was about to occur was no more nor less than what Nicolai might have expected of his friend… that was the spark that prompted Viktor, at last, to fire. To give him due credit, he wept profusely over the body. At one point he put the gun to his head, intending to end his own life. But that, certainly, was an act to which he was not committed.”
Standing near the door, his back to Chemayev, the center of the krushova dwellers’ attention, was a squat black-haired man in a blue serge suit. Chemayev stepped in front of him and stared into the unblinking eyes of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, his clothing identical in every respect to that worn by the painted image in the elevator, complete down to the pince-nez perched on his nose and the red blossom in his lapel. Flabbergasted, Chemayev fell back a step.