A group of boys — the oldest, about fourteen — learned to work the system. Several joined the line with canisters. When one got gas, he would walk down the line of cars from the back and auction his tin to the highest bidder. Initially I resisted buying from the boys, however, soon I became a loyal customer.
One day I arrived at the station and saw no line. As I drove closer to the pump, I noticed a small handwritten sign posted on it that said No Gas. I had lived in Ukraine long enough to realize that No Gas might mean “gas only under the right circumstances.” I saw a babushka wrapped in a heavy coat inside a kiosk by the pump. I opened the trunk of my car and pulled out a bottle of vodka. I walked over to the kiosk and knocked on the glass. The woman saw me and the bottle. She opened her window.
“Is there any gas?” I asked.
“Is there any vodka?” she countered. We reached a deal. Then I asked the woman how she got her job.
“I bought it, of course. I had to borrow the money.”
“So you pay it back with deals like this?”
“Girl, tell me how else?” Whoever controlled the telephone system likely played by the same rules that had existed under Communism. I was not that interested in Mr. Smith’s story, but he still told me more.
Soon documents lay across the table. We stood side by side as he pieced together a complex puzzle of secret meetings, mostly in overseas locations like Switzerland, where Mr. Smith alleged that foreign company representatives gave more than a million dollars in cash to high-ranking Ukrainian officials in exchange for business support.
“How did you obtain this information?”
“I have my contacts,” he said. “You should investigate this.” I felt suspicious about what he had told me and wondered if Mr. Smith wanted revenge and was trying to use me to get it.
“Do you think this is linked to the coup?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “to regime change. You need political guarantees to do business here, to secure the market. Before independence those guarantees came from politicians in Moscow. Now politicians in Kiev have that power.”
“So did you offer them money?” I asked.
“No. I explained how the deal could help the economy boom and bring more business here,” the man said. “But it was clear they had something of more personal benefit in mind. No one stated this, but they wanted a bribe. Those guys who won the deal must have paid it.”
Mr. Smith had tracked his rivals’ movements throughout the fall. I found this odd, almost obsessive. Inexperienced in business, I wondered if large corporations commonly behaved this way. I left armed with ammunition for an investigative story but felt unnerved. It would be a serious matter to probe allegations of corruption so high up. This encounter reminded me of that sinister undercurrent from my early days in Kiev. Even though Ukraine was independent, the same men remained in power as before.
Days passed. I made a few calls but did little more to substantiate Mr. Smith’s claim. I did not exactly forget what he told me, but focused on other stories instead. This investigation would take time and I wasn’t convinced it was worth the effort or risk.
One morning in mid-February, the telephone rang. The answering machine intercepted the call before I reached the phone. I had just arrived home on a 4 a.m. flight from Crimea and lay tired in bed, still groggy from so little sleep. I heard Mary’s voice over the answering machine. She said something about Vadym Boyko. I managed to grab the phone handset before Mary hung up.
“Have you heard about Vadym?” she said.
“No, what happened?”
“He’s dead.”
Dead? I turned the word over in my mind, stunned by the news but still detached. Sadness had yet to set in. I tried hard to process information that I did not want. Mary told me what she knew. The previous night a journalist friend, Marko, had received a call about a fire in Vadym’s apartment and a dead body. The caller said the body was believed to be Vadym’s and asked Marko to come and identify it. Marko asked a friend, Ilko, to accompany him. In the apartment Marko and Ilko saw Vadym sprawled across the floor, his torso and face were badly burned. The description nearly made me retch. I could not imagine having to view the semi-charred corpse of a friend.
“Who did it?” I asked.
“They say his television set exploded. We’ll get together this morning and see what we can do,” Mary said.
We would meet at New York Marta’s news bureau in the building next door. As I dressed, I thought of Vadym and one of my earliest meetings with him at the Ukrainian State Television and Radio Headquarters. He rushed down the steps, casually elegant: slim, in black jeans and a maroon sweatshirt, with that glossy dark hair. He held a bundle of paper and stopped to show me what it contained.
“There’s more crossed out than left in,” Vadym joked. I did not understand what Vadym meant until I leafed through the bundle. I saw a heavily edited evening newscast script, with large sections of text blacked out.
“At least this guy still has integrity,” Vadym said. “The worst is self-censorship, when a script is handed in and comes back clean.”
I left my building, walked through the courtyard, under the archway, up the street and entered the next building, climbing the stairs in semi-darkness. Dull light filtered in from a window far above.
I entered the news bureau. Some people sat in chairs, others stood, huddled in clusters. Our host, New York Marta, who had recently returned to Kiev, was usually so cheerful and optimistic. She looked sombre now. Mary talked to the friends, Ilko and Marko, who had identified Vadym’s body. Lesyia, sat quietly. She was in shock. She had had the closest relationship with Vadym. Serhyi, one of Vadym and Lesyia’s close friends, who was also an MP, stood near Lesyia.
None of us wanted to be alone. We formed a circle in the main room and exchanged information. No one believed that Vadym had died in an accident caused by an exploding television set. He’d last been seen the day before his death.
Ilko and Marko had arrived at Vadym’s apartment just after firefighters extinguished the blaze. People were already swarming inside his apartment. They touched items that could be evidence and potentially destroyed important clues.
“A crime scene like this should have been sealed off,” Ilko said. But the investigator in charge did not bother to take samples or conduct interviews with friends or neighbours in the building. He stood near the door and told everybody who came in that Vadym, a television reporter and advocate of uncensored, free media, had died in an accident caused when his own television set exploded. Ilko and Marko described the gutted, scorched interior of the apartment. The position of Vadym’s body, the pattern of his burns and the intensity of the fire all suggested a different version of events.
Ilko and Marko questioned neighbours. One had heard a blast from Vadym’s apartment and investigated. He pushed the door open with a ruler because he was afraid that there might be another explosion. This detail troubled Serhyi; he said that Vadym always locked his apartment door. Serhyi felt even more disturbed when firefighters told him they had to break into Vadym’s apartment. This meant that two eyewitness accounts — one from the neighbour and one from the firefighters — were contradictory. The neighbour also said that he saw an athletic blond young man enter Vadym’s apartment. He opened the door with a key. We had half a dozen fragments of information but none fit together in a pattern that made sense.