The Russian Affair (40 page)

“Go on,” he growled to the corporal.

The latter kept his eyes ahead of him and steered around a wall of ice that the snow plow had shoved to one side of the road.

THIRTY-ONE

I
t was only as a private citizen that A. I. Kamarovsky found himself inside the Lenin Library. He’d changed from his winter-weight dark green suit to a dark green suit made of lighter material, but with spring windstorms in mind, he was also wearing his long scarf. A few yards away from him sat a young woman who had, he kept telling himself,
his
eyes. In addition, she wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses, just as he did. To avoid the fuss of borrowing a book from the reference shelves, Kamarovsky had brought one with him. He sat at one of the long tables. Rows of fluorescent tubes bathed the reading room in a sallow light that made him tired and offered no possibility of hiding in shadow should the student happen to turn her head in his direction.

The book was an advance copy of a volume of poetry, sent to Kamarovsky at his request. It was a slim volume, and the cover showed a flock of red birds flying out of a black sun. Why hadn’t they put a hard cover on the first edition? Kamarovsky wondered; this floppy little book couldn’t be displayed upright. Even though it was outside his authority, he resolved to make a telephone call to the state printing office. Why use half measures when it was a matter of lifting a writer out of obscurity?

Before opening the book, Kamarovsky cast a fleeting glance three tables ahead. How pretty she is, he thought, and he was unable to suppress
the joy he felt at the idea that he deserved a lot of credit for that, too. If I were a young man, I’d find it a pleasing prospect to woo this attractive young woman. Even though he regretted that his only possibility of seeing her was to spy on her, there was something thrilling about it. The student had three giant tomes open on the table in front of her. Her pencil flew over her notepad; as she wrote, her glasses would slip down her nose, and with a swift gesture she’d push them back up. She’s inherited my narrow nose, Kamarovsky thought, and so her glasses won’t stay in place. When his daughter grew immersed in a passage in one of her texts, he opened his volume of poetry.

Viktor Ipalyevich Tsazukhin’s legacy comprises thirty years of Soviet lyric poetry and is the expression of an epoch rich in hard-won victories as well as painful losses. Tsazukhin is a man produced by the Revolution …

The Colonel snorted impatiently and flipped the pages to the end of the foreword.

“Where Does Russia Begin?” was the title of the first poem. Kamarovsky was immediately taken with the bright tone, with its direct, emotional appeal. Even though his assessment of the poem was rather blurred, he flattered himself that such verse had been published through his intervention.

What was she working on? He would have been all too happy to take a look at her books. Her decision to major in architecture filled the Colonel with pride. She’s inherited more from me than she’s willing to admit, he thought.
My child
. My child is growing up. Maybe she’ll marry that fellow from Okhotsk she’s been living with for a year. And even if she doesn’t go back with him to his hometown, her profession will take her away from Moscow. They need good architects out in the provinces. If she’s smart—and it goes without saying that she is—she’ll go to one of the newly founded cities in the Tuvan SSR or Kazakhstan. The Colonel’s
eyes skimmed Viktor Ipalyevich’s poem without apprehending its content. So far, there’s nothing out there but a main road, electricity, gas, and water connections, and the CC’s official mandate to build a city. What that city will look like will be up to the architect—namely my daughter. Now, that’s going to require her to be away from Moscow for years, maybe decades. It could even mean that I’ll never see her again in this life. Calm down, he said to himself, shaking his head, she’s barely begun her studies, and you’re already sending her out to raise up cities from the earth. In spite of this insight, he felt a sudden urge to stand up and walk over to her and present himself, a sick, gaunt person, a wearer of eyeglasses, the owner of some not very good teeth, a nervous man in the sixth decade of his life. If nothing in his appearance betrayed the office he discharged, how could she reject him? Didn’t everyone want to have a father? How lovely it would be to discuss architectural topics with her. He was interested to know how she conceived of the building art, what architect or school of architecture most impressed her. Without a doubt, it’s Le Corbusier; she must find his long, generous line simply compelling. The Colonel smiled, realizing that even in his thoughts, he tended to impose things on his daughter. Force of habit, Kamarovsky said to himself, habit of force.

He lowered his head with the idea of plunging into the world of Tsazukhin’s poetry, but a brief, colorful vision made him look up again. It was a patterned blue dress, nothing unusual, but the Colonel thought that shade of blue was familiar. The pattern showed interlocking squares on a dark blue background. A light dress, worn with boots. Apparently, Rosa Khleb had been working in the reading room and was now leaving. She walked without haste, a notepad under her arm, her purse hanging from her shoulder. As far as the Colonel was concerned, her presence in the library aroused no suspicious speculations; the
Moscow Times
didn’t have an archive of its own. He wanted to read another poem; at the same time, he wanted to observe his daughter; and he did neither. To someone who’d spent his whole life gathering and processing information,
an inadvertent stakeout like this presented an opportunity it was impossible to pass up. Kamarovsky watched himself as he closed the book and slipped it into his pocket in a single movement, noiselessly rose to his feet, turned his head so that his daughter wouldn’t recognize him, and stepped out. Rosa chose the way to the main exit, which in that massive building entailed a considerable walk. Kamarovsky stayed close to the wall, pausing in doorways, happy to find that he was still good at the old surveillance game, even though he’d long since delegated such tasks to others. He became so inconspicuous that nobody coming his way so much as looked at him; he was something on the fringes, someone who could observe undisturbed. Rosa entered a wide corridor that was in semidarkness because the electric lights had been switched off at the beginning of spring, and the daylight had yet to reach its full strength. There were many people in the corridor—small groups of students with serious faces, jovial professors, and someone who, in Kamarovsky’s judgment, didn’t belong there. The man wasn’t in the habit of visiting a library; he had no book bag, no writing equipment; he was simply coming that way. Even if his aimlessness hadn’t struck Kamarovsky, there were two other reasons for the Colonel to consider him attentively. For one thing, it looked as though he and Rosa were moving toward each other, and for another, Kamarovsky knew the man. He, too, was practiced in wearing a mask of inconspicuousness; his gait and body language were those of someone who understood how to remain in the shadows. Kamarovsky had a dossier on this man. Many years before, he’d embarked on a career as an opera singer, worn himself out in the provinces, taken to drink, been found guilty of assault in some jealous altercation, and done time for his offense. After his release, he’d been unable to find a job until, surprisingly enough, the Deputy Minister for Research Planning had taken him on as his driver. When Kamarovsky investigated this matter at the time, he’d found that Bulyagkov’s chauffeur was a native Ukrainian distantly related to his employer. Since there was nothing unusual about giving support to a fellow countryman,
Bulyagkov had been allowed to have his way and Anton to remain in his service.

Now Anton was nearing Rosa, taking smaller, slower steps as he approached. While maintaining her loping gait, Khleb took the bag from her shoulder, opened it, pulled out something that looked like a brown envelope, and held it at her side. Now she was even with Anton, and now already past him. She hadn’t altered the rhythm of her steps for a second. Rosa walked on; her light dress swayed around her legs. But it hadn’t escaped Kamarovsky that the brown envelope had changed hands. For a fleeting second, the Colonel had seen the object in Anton’s hand, and then the thing had disappeared into his jacket pocket.

Despite the long decades during which A. I. Kamarovsky had had to do with many different forms of treachery, what he’d just seen briefly took his breath away. In security work, nothing was feared more than the double agent, the person whom you allow to look into your arrangements and who then misuses the knowledge thus gained. Persons of this sort were superior to the average spy and at the same time the most morally reprehensible members of society. Kamarovsky turned his head away as Anton went by but immediately fastened his eyes on him again. Bulyagkov’s driver consulted the signs posted at the next intersection of corridors, but where the man wanted to go was unimportant; in any case, he wanted to go where Bulyagkov was. Kamarovsky was equally uninterested in Rosa’s destination; she’d already done the decisive deed. Oddly, the Colonel didn’t immediately start to ponder his next moves. Instead he mused about his daughter. Incongruous as their worlds might have been, there was at least one good thing about his: He could be close to her from time to time. And this time, Kamarovsky’s unconsummated striving for contact with his daughter had led him to make an interesting discovery, a revelation that threw new light on the Minister for Research Planning’s unexplained illness. The news that Bulyagkov was going to fill in for his boss on the Stockholm trip had set off nothing more than a faint signal, but now all the Colonel’s sirens were wailing. At
this moment, Alexey Bulyagkov was probably on his way to the airport with the freshly stamped divorce certificate in his pocket. Somewhere along the way, there would be a meeting with Anton, who would turn over the brown envelope. Shortly thereafter, the Deputy Minister would climb into the airplane and fly out of Moscow, heading northwest.

While Kamarovsky was making deductions, while his every conclusion was laying open the next question, he reached the exit and went down the grandiose outer staircase. Whether it was because he’d been walking so fast, or because inexplicable little wheels that had hitherto spun independently in his mind had suddenly meshed and made sense and he’d become overexcited—for whatever reason, as he went down the stairs of the Lenin Library, Kamarovsky’s head suddenly sank, his jaw dropped, his muscles failed at their tasks. He still had the presence of mind to reach into the pocket where he’d put the tablets, but at that same moment, he felt his hand go limp and knew it would remain powerless, stuck inside his jacket pocket. In a last effort to retain his composure, the Colonel turned in the direction of his office, which was only a few streets away. If he could only reach that address, the people there would know what to do. A grand mal seizure had surprised him at work more than once. His colleagues would carry him into the quiet room normally used as an intimidation cell. He’d lie there, mute and motionless; often he’d start to regain consciousness after a few minutes, but there had also been a few times when he hadn’t come to for as long as ten hours. Waking up in that oppressively small room had always reassured him; in the small space contained within its four walls, the panic of losing himself and the shock of feeling strength and control suddenly flow out of him became bearable and, before long, subsided. In such cases, he’d swallow a tablet while still on his back, wait a little while for it to take effect, and then go back to work.

In the moments when the weakness was spreading through all his limbs, while his convulsing muscles were still trying to jolt themselves into action, Kamarovsky felt something strike against his hip: Viktor
Ipalyevich’s book of poems. Even though his reason was already fleeing away and his thoughts becoming silhouettes, the Colonel retained the idea that the operation he most urgently needed to undertake would necessarily involve the Tsazukhin family. His knees buckled, and since he was incapable of extracting his hand, which was like a wedge inside his pocket, he couldn’t break his fall and landed directly on his shoulder. He was aware of a hollow thud, and his head snapped backward. Good thing I have my hat on, the Colonel thought from out of nowhere, and then he saw himself rolling down several steps; what a joke, what a joke, ah, what a joke.

People didn’t notice the accident until the older man was fully horizontal, his fall having come to a stop in the middle of the stairs. He lay with one arm flung out and the other hand in his pocket; his hat had slipped down and was hiding his face. Someone observing him from above might have thought he was in the classic orator’s pose, except that he was delivering the oration while lying down. The circle of people around him grew tighter. A policeman reached the spot and waved to colleagues in an official car. Behind the policemen, an attractive woman in a blue dress appeared. Her face showed concern and skepticism and the pang of thoughts in turmoil. She didn’t participate in the discussion about the cause of the accident or wait for medical help to arrive; she took the measure of the man in the dark green suit one last time, as though she were charged with ordering his coffin, and then she quickly left the square in front of the Lenin Library.

THIRTY-TWO

A
nna had told Petya that on a day like this, you had to go to a park, and she’d chosen the Arkhangelskoye Estate. It was no surprise to discover that thousands of other people had conceived the same idea. As she and her boy turned off the street and walked down to the lower-lying gardens, they discovered a sea of colors—bright hats, vivid shirts, checkered blankets, and baby carriages. People hungry for sunshine had flocked to the park; they were lying about on its lawns or strolling along its paths or laughing, eating, and sleeping in boats afloat on the lake. It was only when Anna, on her way to the children’s play area, reached the triple-spiral staircase with the café that she grasped the real reason why she was there. She’d returned to the place where she’d received the first, decisive information about how everything fit together.