The Russian Affair (20 page)

Leonid felt like having a drink. He made sure the pistol was securely stowed away and stepped into a corner bar. It was furnished in the style of a yurt: Larch poles ribbed the ceiling, giving the impression of a tent; pelts and art objects adorned the walls; only the bare concrete floor broke the illusion. The waitress, who was wearing a yellow silk jacket, offered the guest a seat at a table already occupied by a family. Leonid wanted to sit by himself and said that he’d be glad to wait until one of the smaller tables was free. There was no bar, so he leaned against the wall and ordered vodka; then, sipping his drink, he looked around him.

Although it was a workday, people had dressed up for their restaurant visit. There seemed to be about as many Nivkhs as nonnatives of the island; at one table, for example, there was a Russian family, and some Koreans were sitting at the one behind it. An older man turned his daughter’s wheelchair around and pushed it toward the exit. Leonid signaled to the waitress that he’d take over their table, but just as he reached it, he collided with someone who’d had the same idea. It was a woman, and she was rubbing her shoulder.

“Forgive me, I didn’t see you.”

“I’ve been waiting longer than you.”

“Certainly.” He turned away.

“Is anybody with you?” Leonid shook his head. The woman pointed to the only other chair. “Well, then …”

She looked older than he and was wearing black trousers and a red jacket with darts that combined with her pinned-up hair to produce a somewhat insolent effect. He noticed the man’s wristwatch on her arm. They took their seats, and Leonid looked around for a menu. “There are only three dishes,” she said. She opened her jacket, revealing a collarless
lab coat underneath. “Smoked fish, smoked meat, and smoked whale. Everything’s too highly seasoned, but it’s edible.”

“You come here often?” The pistol was pressing against his chest, but he didn’t trust himself to transfer the weapon inconspicuously to another pocket.

“When I have to eat fast. The hospital’s only a block away.”

“That’s where you work?” The lab coat wasn’t right for a nurse.

“Alas, it is.” She looked over at the waitress, who came smiling to their table. “The Number One,” the woman said.

“For me, too,” said Leonid, falling in with the company. “And tea.”

“How do you know what the Number One is?”

“Well, you surely didn’t order whale, did you? What do you do in the hospital?”

“I’m a butcher,” she answered, adding, when he stared at her in surprise, “under the circumstances, what I do can’t be called surgery.”

“You’re a surgeon?”

“A visiting surgeon. In a few months, I can go back home.”

“Where’s that?”

“Yakutia.”

“In eastern Siberia? And you’re looking forward to that?”

“It’s cold,” she said, “but our hospitals aren’t as prehistoric as the ones here.” She exchanged her knife and fork. “In Yakutsk, I work as a doctor should. Here I’m glad for a day when chickens don’t stray into the operating room.”

Their food arrived. When the woman tucked in hungrily, Leonid saw that she was left-handed. “You’re not from here,” she said.

“How can you tell?”

“You have the big-city look.”

He cast his eyes down. “What does the big-city look like?”

“It looks like you know better. About everything.” She chewed. “Moscow, Leningrad?”

“Moscow. You’re eating too fast.”

“I know, it’s not becoming.” She drank some tea. “I’m Galina Korff.”

He took his first bite. “An unusual name.”

“Believe it or not, my grandfather was the last governor-general of Sakhalin.”

“So how did you wind up in Siberia?”

“How, indeed. We had a revolution. After that, governors weren’t very popular.” She looked at her watch. “My whole family was exiled.”

“You were allowed to study at a university even though your grandfather was a counterrevolutionary?”

“Only a smug, arrogant Muscovite would ask such a question.” She wiped her mouth. “Incidentally, what you’re eating there is whale meat.” She stood up. “I have to get back.”

He put down his fork. “You perform operations at this hour?”

“The electricity’s more reliable at night.” She buttoned up her jacket. “During the day, the lights flicker constantly. Sometimes we have to run the heart-lung machine by hand.”

“You’re exaggerating, right?”

“Of course. What’s your name?”

“Leonid Nechayev.” He pushed his plate away. “Are you here every evening?”

“Why do you ask that? You want to flirt with me?”

He wiped his greasy mouth on the back of his hand. “What makes you think that?”

“You’re the type,” Galina said. “What do you do?”

Leonid noticed that the people at the next table were pricking up their ears. He reached the waitress before Galina did and paid the check. “If you permit me, I’ll walk along with you,” he said. They left the eating place together. It was a friendly night, and contrary to his usual custom, the captain felt lighthearted. “Which direction?” he asked.

Galina stood still and said, “First you have to tell me what you are.”

“I’m an army officer. Stationed in the south, in Korsakov.” He scrutinized her to see whether this admission put her off.

“You’re wearing a wedding ring, Leonid,” Galina said, and started walking up the hill. He remained at her side. With every step, the pistol beat against his chest.

Metallic noises indicated that the men outside were busy with the salvage equipment; a steel hawser was being secured to the cutter’s hull. Captain Nechayev’s hand was still on his weapon. He wanted to hold Galina Korff’s face in his memory, but try though he might, it faded. In his imagination, Galina’s features were replaced by Anna’s—her cheekbones, her nose. Galina’s lips were more scornful, her eyes more mysterious.

They went down the ship’s rope ladders. Leonid had Likhan Chevken go first; behind them, the third man in their team provided security for the inspection. They reached a bulkhead with a sign that read
CARGO HOLD. NO SMOKING
. Leonid wondered what could be flammable in there. Peering through the hatch, he saw that the storage space contained scrapped motors; diesel oil and gasoline formed shiny puddles. The last bulkhead was locked with steel wire and the room sealed with a leaden plate.

“According to your bill of lading, you’re carrying nothing but scrap metal,” Leonid said to the ship’s captain. “Why is this area locked up?”

“That’s how the shipowner wanted it.”

“I’m officially breaking this leaden seal.” Leonid told Chevken to approach; the Nivkh was holding a bolt cutter at the ready.

“Without my consent.”

“Your protest is duly noted.” Leonid gave Chevken a sign. One clip sufficed to sever the wire, and the sergeant opened the bulkhead.

“After you,” said Leonid to the captain. The latter made no move to turn on the lights. Leonid asked Chevken for a flashlight and stepped
through the doorway. This hold smelled not of iron and oil but of wet newsprint. He switched on the overhead lights. Except for three pallets stacked with cardboard boxes, the room was empty.

“That’s all there is, Comrade,” said the captain, trying to play down the discovery.

“Open them.”

Chevken unclasped his knife and cut through the straps around one of the boxes. He pulled out an illustrated magazine and handed it to the captain. The magazine’s name wasn’t written in the Cyrillic alphabet; a girl lounged under the letters. A quick flip through the magazine left Leonid in no doubt as to its contents. He found a red and blue pennant on the back cover.

“From Denmark,” he said, as if that explained everything.

The ship’s captain reiterated his assertion that he’d had no knowledge of the content of those boxes and that they were the shipowner’s responsibility. Leonid chastised the captain for neglecting his oversight duties and called upon him to follow along voluntarily to the commander’s office; otherwise, Leonid said, he would have to place him under arrest. The contraband would be confiscated. In his secret heart, Leonid regretted not having brought more men with him; in the face of any genuine resistance, he and his team would be seriously outnumbered.

He heard the sound of footsteps on metal, and the officer who was directing the salvage appeared in the hold. Leonid was informed that the cutter had been tied up and made fast, and that the operation must begin at once. Leonid left a man behind to guard the contraband and, accompanied by the captain, left the bowels of the ship.

The sky had cleared, but the wind was blowing as hard as ever. The cutter was surrounded by inflated buoys, and his men were circling it in their rubber dinghies.

“We have to start! The tide’s lifting the ship!”

And in fact, with a harsh, grating sound, the cutter went into motion. Although she seemed at first even closer to capsizing, she quickly righted
herself, and her dripping bow sprang out of the water. The dinghy drivers sped toward the cutter’s stern. Leonid saw one of them bellow into his walkie-talkie; three hundred feet away, somebody started the winch. Thick steel cables rose slowly through the sea-spray, winding around the hull from both sides, stiffening, and pulling taut. The cutter was shaken by tremors, there was a shrieking and roaring of metal, but nothing moved.

“Hold that tension!” shouted the man in the dinghy.

“Two more waves,” Chevken said to Leonid. “Look over there—the Brothers are already going under.”

In fact, only the noses of the black, ship-wrecking rocks could still be seen. The cutter settled down, the vibrations slowed and dwindled, and ropes and air cushions produced stability.

“Here she comes!” Leonid heard someone cry out. “She’s climbing, climbing …” The rubber dinghy drove off, made a loop, and approached the stern again. Many voices shouted, “There it is,” and at the same time, the dinghy driver steered his boat back around to avoid being rammed by the upward-lurching cutter.

Chevken came up to Leonid as he leaned on the railing. “We’re afloat.”

“Well done!” Leonid shouted before turning around. Just as he did so, the captain of the cutter tried to make his way to the helm stand. “Where do you think you’re going?” Leonid asked.

Chevken stood in Leonid’s way. “He has to take the helm,” the Nivkh explained in an undertone. “He can use the rudder to help us with the salvage.” The cutter was shaken by a jolt as the winch pulled her in the desired direction. “We still have to get through the Brothers without wrecking the ship.”

“Shall I start the engine?” the sea captain asked. He waited until Leonid took his hand off his weapon.

“Start it,” Leonid said. Then he turned to the rail and cursed the day when such a landlubber as he had been saddled with such a command.

TWELVE

L
eonid and the major were leaning over the opened box. “What shall we do with the contents?”

“Get rid of them,” said Leonid’s commanding officer, lost in thought.

Leonid noticed a mended area on the shoulder of his superior’s uniform. Did the major do his own sewing? “Get rid of everything?”

“What do you mean?”

“We let the men divide up one of the boxes of Japanese belt buckles we seized. And the same with the razor blades.”

The major went to his desk. “But this stuff isn’t razor blades or Malayan whiskey.”

“So we burn it?”

“I wonder …” The major pulled his uniform straight. “Do you know the little teahouse on the road to Kholmsk?” Leonid had heard of it. “Have you ever been there yourself?” The captain answered in the negative. “Many of the men drive there in the evenings. That has to stop.”

“You want us to close the teahouse on the road to Kholmsk?”

“A teahouse is a teahouse. On the other hand …” The major sat down with a sigh; the complexity of the problem exhausted him. “Prostitution is forbidden. Pornography is likewise forbidden. I wonder which of them does more harm.”

“There have been several accidents on the way back from Kholmsk,” Leonid replied. “The road goes through the mountains, and the men are drunk when they drive home.”

“Exactly.” The major’s face lit up. “Do you think the men would go to the little teahouse less often if we …” He waved his hand toward the box. Leonid’s expression indicated a cautious affirmative. The major raised his chin. “Place a box next to the drink machine. Make sure that each man takes only one magazine. I don’t want anybody trafficking in this stuff. And now send me the captain.” He took hold of the cutter’s documents and extracted her commander’s identification papers. “A Kyrgyz. I could have guessed.”

Back in his office, Leonid gave orders for the deployment of the fork-lift truck. The pallets, together with their load of boxes, were transported from the ship to a land carrier, handed over to the members of a second unit, and by them conveyed to the incinerator. Leonid had his men cast every box, except for one, into the fire. Before anyone had taken a look inside the boxes, they disappeared into the flames and were burned up within minutes.

After lunch, the sergeant informed him that the surviving box had been placed, as ordered, next to the drink machine, and that an hour had passed before the first soldier noticed it. Shortly after that, the sergeant reported, the “special consignment” was completely depleted. He inadvertently gave himself away when he declared he hadn’t expected Danish girls to be so scrawny.

Leonid concluded that this was the right evening to take another trip to the island’s capital city. Since his meeting with Galina, he’d been in the yurt-restaurant twice and waited for her to come in, but in vain. By now, almost half a year had passed; the surgeon had probably completed her work in the hospital and gone back home.

Leonid reserved a vehicle from the motor pool. It had been dark for a long time when his duty day ended. He brushed off the better of his two uniforms, put on a clean shirt, and polished his boots. He agreed to take
along two soldiers on the condition that they would have to get back to the base on their own. The two young fellows were eagerly looking forward to the binge they were about to embark on. The weather was horrible; some lower stretches of the road were mud wallows, and at higher elevations, in the mountains, it was snowing hard. As they were finally descending into the valley, Leonid almost drove into a stalled truck. The driver was trying in vain to lever his vehicle’s wheel and axle out of the mud. The captain, delighted not to be carrying a towing rope—soiling his going-out uniform was not to be thought of—happily offered the driver a ride to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.