19
Sabotage
“It’s not so much a matter of murder,” Uncle Vladimir said, pausing as he split a log with an ax, cleanly, smoothly. “Now it’s sabotage.”
He handed the pieces to me; I was collecting them for a fire at his dacha here on the west side of Moscow, near Petrovo-Dalniye.
I had telephoned him upon returning to my one-room flat in Kaliningrad, in a new building about halfway between the main entrance to the bureau and the train station at Podlipki. (Yes, I had my own telephone by that point.) On the bus ride back from Chkalov, I had realized, yet again, that as a spy for State Security, I was a failure, if not an outright liability. What, for example, was I supposed to report from my latest “encounter” with Artemov? That he was happy about someone else’s death? Did that make him Korolev’s murderer? Filin had been happy about the dead American astronauts, too. And so, to my shame, had I.
I was hoping Uncle Vladimir would release me from service, that he would let me concentrate on being a good engineer for the bureau, and on being a much better boyfriend to Marina.
All he did was invite me to his dacha the next day.
Several of the people who lived in my new building had cars of their own, storing them in sheds in what was supposed to have been park land just down the street. So I was able to beg a ride as far as downtown Moscow that Sunday morning, to the Arbat, where I could catch the train as far as Usovo, the end of the line, where Uncle Vladimir met me himself. Dressed more casually than I’ve ever seen him, he was driving his own car.
His three-room dacha, gray, weathered, pieced together from available boards and planks, sat in a birch forest near the Iskra River. Through the bare trees I could see other, similar structures — and several that did not look pieced together, but rather designed and constructed. As if Uncle Vladimir was the piggy with house of sticks, while down the lane lived a piggy in a house of bricks.
As a further surprise, there was a woman staying with him. Katya Pershina was her name, and she was, I judged, in her middle thirties, with a quick, easy smile. She was tall — taller than I, and even taller than Uncle Vladimir, with the regal bearing of a Scandinavian film star. Perhaps it was her pale blue eyes, which looked through me with almost complete disinterest. She was clearly no stranger to Uncle Vladimir and his ways. “I’m going down to the village,” she said after we had been introduced. “Hope to see you later, Yuri.”
Uncle Vladimir said nothing about her, but merely led me outside, where he had been chopping wood.
“Sabotage?” I said, sounding even stupider than I felt.
“It’s happened,” he said, violently cleaving another log. “When Korolev was alive, we had a suspicious series of accidents. A whole spacecraft getting dropped from an airplane, a self-destruct signal coming out of nowhere.”
“ ‘Those responsible have been punished,’ ” I said, not thinking.
Uncle Vladimir looked at me. “Yes. As a matter of fact, they were.” Chunk went another log. “The lucky ones are probably doing the very same thing today that I am, though in a much colder place.
“The more we looked into your bureau and its ministry, and their relationships with the military, the more suspicious it all became. There has been a pattern of failure over the past year, wouldn’t you say?”
“It would be hard to find any successes at all,” I said.
“Yes. And because of the nature of your space business, it’s the Korolev organization which cuts across all of it. You’re here in Moscow, you’re at the factories, you’re at the launch center, the tracking sites.”
“And Artemov goes to all of them.”
“Artemov. Or someone close to him.” Finished with his task — actually, he’d done an amazing amount of work for a man his size — he set the ax aside and picked up the last of the firewood himself. “Who’s to say it’s only Artemov, hmmm?”
I followed him to the door.
“Pasternak lived over there, did you know that?” he said, gesturing with the ax. He smiled. “And now Khrushchev does.”
Katya returned not long after that, and we had a pleasant meal in front of a very warm, noisy fire. I could not figure out her relationship with Uncle Vladimir, whether they were lovers or just good friends. I had never seen my uncle with a woman, but, given the few times I had seen him, period, that was not surprising.
My uninformed guess was that Katya worked in State Security, and when she slipped effortlessly into perfect English (singing along with some music Uncle Vladimir was playing — Shirley Bassey?), I felt sure they were colleagues at the very least.
Eventually I had to be taken back to the train. As Katya said goodbye, she happened to add: “I completely forgot to ask. You must know Marina Torchillova. A wonderful girl. Say hello to her from me.”
On the drive to the station, while I was thinking that over, Uncle Vladimir gave me my orders: to watch for any sabotage, any sign of “wrecking.” He gave me a special phone number to call, an escalating series of codes. “You’re between the condition we call Scorpion 2, which is the presence of enemy agents in a closed area.” Scorpion 1, I learned, was the mere suspicion of enemy activity.
Enemy activity. Uncle Vladimir also told me that I might not be dealing with mere “anti-socialist” forces, but with our country’s main enemy — the CIA itself.
Thus ended my Sunday in the country, which began with my simple hope to give up a career as a snitch and ended with my enrollment as a full-fledged antisaboteur and Cold Warrior.
As the gateway to dacha country, where all the Kremlin bigshots had their places, the Usovo Station had one of the best markets in the entire USSR. Waiting for the train back to the Arbat, I strolled through them, happening upon one selling flowered-silk scarves. Since it was Sunday night and the grandmother running the kiosk was anxious to get home, I was able to buy one for only two rubles. Grandmother even tied the scarf in a ribbon for me.
The purchase encouraged me to change my travel plans. Once back in Moscow, I chose not to continue on to Kaliningrad, but instead took the metro to the Bauman area, heading for Marina’s flat. Since I was fortified with a proper gift and charged with a personal mission from Katya Pershina, I felt justified in calling on Marina without warning.
It had been a strange time for the two of us. Between Marina’s studies and working trips, and my own six-day-a-week schedule at the bureau, we had barely seen each other, no more than twice a month. Well, we had spent one glorious weekend alone in my new Kaliningrad flat, bare floors and all, in August, where we reached a truce about my “cosmonaut career,” which had progressed not one centimeter since spring.
At other times we would go out, see a film or a concert, as if we were second-year students, then find some semiprivate place to make love. She seemed to need it as much as I did; when one night we wrapped ourselves in our coats and made love on the snowy grounds of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, I realized that both of us had completely lost our sense of shyness. Perhaps our decency, too.
As I walked up the steps to Marina’s building, I could actually feel my excitement growing, like a hunger.
The key lady this Sunday evening was an older man, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, judging from the medals he wore on his olive jacket. “Stop right there,” he ordered.
I told him I was just going up to see Marina Torchillova.
“She’s not in.”
“You must keep a pretty good eye on the girls to know that.” There were probably two hundred of them living in that building.