Trans-Siberian Express (20 page)

Gripping the metal handle with both hands, he wedged one of his feet against the door jamb and tugged. Still the door would not move. He stepped back, pushing his bruised and frozen fingers into the waistline of his pants for warmth. He kicked at the door and hammered on it with his fists.

“Open the damned door,” he shouted, knowing that his voice would be lost in the din.

With a great effort, ignoring the cold and pain in his hands, he calmed himself. After all, sooner or later someone would have to pass through the stuck door.

But after a few minutes, the cold proved too much for him. His lips chattered, his shins trembled. The cold seemed to seep into his nerve ends and bone marrow. Finally he yielded to the discomfort and let himself into the carriage he had just left, searching for the attendant while he warmed his frozen hands on the coals of the samovar.

The attendant was nowhere to be seen in the crowded passageway and the group bunched around the chess game were chattering noisily. Farmer, the British diplomat, emerged from the crowd and came toward him.

“He’s done it again, old chap. Simply marvelous.” He looked down at Alex’s hands. “I say, how did you do that?”

“The damned door is locked in the carriage ahead.”

“Now there’s a mystery, old boy.”

The diplomat went out and looked curiously at the face of the door, bending down and feeling below the handle. Then he came back inside. “There’s no triplock there,” he reported. “Only a keyhole.”

“The mechanism may have frozen,” Alex volunteered, rubbing the blood back into his fingers.

“The best way to cope with this part of the world, old boy, is to suspend your sense of Western logic,” Farmer said, puffing delicately on his cigarette, and blowing the smoke upward from a puckered lower lip. His eyes crinkled and the bow tie jumped below his Adam’s apple as he talked. He looked a lot like Basil Rathbone, Alex thought, comforted by his easy self-assurance. The man was a calming influence. Alex felt his anxiety diminish. Surely, Anna Petrovna was back in their compartment, perhaps anxious about his own whereabouts.

“The Russians are a mass of contradictions.” Farmer was warming up to his subject. “Capable of all sorts of excesses. When they are joyous, it is an endless banquet. When they are sad, it’s a massive state of depression. When they are angry, it’s a tantrum. Everything is an excess. Love. Hate. Suspicion. When it comes to suspicion, they are absolutely beyond comprehension. They think of themselves as a healthy body about to be besieged by a pack of enemy viruses. Don’t you think so?”

Is he trying to tell me something? Alex wondered. Or trying to get me to tell him something? Looking up, he saw an attendant coming toward them, a fat, almost slovenly creature with a morbid look about her. He felt his moment of closeness with the diplomat pass.

“The door to the next carriage is stuck,” Alex told her, in as neutral a tone as he could manage.

The attendant looked at them both, tight-lipped and contemptuous.

“How do you know?” she asked with a sneer.

“Try it yourself.”

She watched them for a moment, then stepped outside and tried the door. Returning, she looked at Alex and shook her head, as if he were a child who had broken it deliberately.

“She is rather annoyed with us,” the diplomat said. “She thinks we did it to confound her.”

As he spoke they felt the train begin to slow down as they reentered the carriage. Within a few moments it was clanking to a crawl.

“A country stop,” the diplomat said. “Probably for less than five minutes.” The sour-looking attendant bore down on them, a toolbox swinging in her hand. They followed her into the space between the carriages as the train continued to slow, edging its way through the taiga. Watching over the woman’s head, Alex could not make out any breaks in the trees. Then, as if it were an apparition, a dimly lit platform came into view. Huddled there was a single female figure, wrapped in a heavy coat with the collar drawn over her ears and a kerchief on her head wound under her chin. As the train passed, her face was briefly illuminated. She looked cold and lonely. Then Alex’s car went by, but he could still look back and see her, an unvanquished figure in the emptiness. She is Siberia, he thought, the image of her imprinted on his mind.

As the train stopped, the woman attendant grabbed her toolbox and swung herself to the ground, opening the outside door to the next carriage and hoisting herself up. Alex and the British diplomat followed.

As Alex hit the ground, his attention was caught by a sudden movement up ahead. A robed figure half-jumped, half-fell from one of the carriage entrances and began moving hesitantly toward the little shack that served as the station. Anna Petrovna, he thought, his heart jumping as he ran toward the faltering figure. He could hear his shoes pounding the hard ground. Faces in the lighted restaurant carriage turned toward him, gaping.

As he ran, he saw another figure leap from the train and begin running toward the robed woman, who had paused, holding fast to a strip of metal fencing. “Anna Petrovna,” he cried, but the words were swallowed even as uttered them. It was not Anna Petrovna. He recognized, instead, the sick woman he had treated on the train.

When he reached her, she had already collapsed in her husband’s arms and was gasping for breath.

“I was only gone a moment,” Ginzburg cried.

“You had better get her aboard,” Alex commanded. She had a raging fever.

The wheels of the train were already turning as he hoisted himself aboard and helped Ginzburg lift the woman into the carriage. Together they laid her gently in the bunk. Alex felt her pulse, a faint beat against his fingers, and put his head against her chest.

“She is leaving us,” he said.

“Please, Vera!” Ginzburg cried, pulling her to him, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I can’t bear it.”

The woman opened her eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, her face ashen as life left her.

“Vera,” Ginzburg pleaded, “forgive me. Forgive me.” The words seemed an incantation.

“I am not a Jew,” the woman gasped, lurching forward, the last tremor of life departing as her head fell back.

The coming of death was a common experience for Alex, but it never failed to stir him. His first impulse was to place the blame, to establish Ginzburg’s guilt for this death that might have been avoided. But the man knew his own guilt, and his agony was beyond simple grief. He was moaning now, an incoherent Hebrew prayer.

Alex lifted Vera’s limp arm to confirm her death officially, then, in a practiced gesture, he pushed her lids down over the staring eyes. He touched Ginzburg’s shoulder, then backed out of the compartment. Tania was waiting in the passageway.

“Mrs. Ginzburg has died,” he told her. “What must be done? I don’t know how you handle these things here.”

“They’ll remove the body at Novosibirsk.”

“Tough go,” the diplomat said. He had also been waiting in the passageway. Then he paused. “Jews?”

“Yes,” Alex replied. It seemed too complicated to explain.

“It never ends for them.”

“If I’m needed, Tania, let me know,” Alex said. “It’s best that Mr. Ginzburg be left alone for awhile.”

“Of course.”

He made his way back to his compartment. It was dark, but he could tell by the faint aroma of the familiar perfume that Anna Petrovna had returned.

ZELDOVICH’S
impatience had turned to frustration and instead of giving him a lift, the quantities of vodka he had consumed only depressed him more. He sat in the chair of his compartment only a few feet from Dr. Cousins, but still he had not obtained the information that he required. To make matters worse he had to share the compartment with Yashenko, who rarely talked except in the line of duty.

Zeldovich shook his head, rolled a swalllow of vodka on his tongue, and cursed his fate, his age, his vulnerable position. Soon I will be fifty, he told himself, feeling the vodka slide down the back of his throat. He had fastened himself to Dimitrov twenty years ago, had lapped at his ass like a groveling dog to prove his loyalty, had groped to the stratosphere of power, always at Dimitrov’s beck and call. Self-pity washed over him like a hot wave.

“Can we trust him?” That was Dimitrov’s refrain, to which he returned whenever a new face appeared in the picture. “Can we trust him?” It was Zeldovich’s job to find out—to make the judgment, and to be right. So far he always had been, and he had built his little empire, a KGB within the KGB, on the corpses of a thousand careers. He was the most feared man in the Soviet bureaucracy. Dimitrov had never called him anything but Zeldovich, as if he had no Christian name, no personality of his own. Fyodor Petrovich, you bloody bastard—that’s also my name, he had wanted to scream. How he hated that man to whom he owed everything!

“Can we trust him, Zeldovich?”

“No.”

“Then dump him somewhere.”

“Of course.”

The rivers flowed with the blood they had shed, and now the bastard was going to abandon him to the vultures who would pick his carcass and leave his bones in the desert. He had watched Dimitrov’s energy wane, the once ruddy face turn pale, the strong, well-fleshed frame begin to wither.

It was Zeldovich who had arranged for the tests, confounding the doctors and clinicians so that they could never trace the true identity of the patient.

“Whoever has this disease is a cooked goose,” one of the doctors had told him, not daring to inquire about the patient’s identity, not even daring to think the unthinkable. And then this Kuznetzov had turned up and, for the first time in twenty years, Dimitrov had kept his own counsel. Doesn’t he trust
me
anymore? Zeldovich wondered, jealous and uncertain. But whatever the doctor had done, whatever magic potion he had poured into Dimitrov’s bloodstream, it had done the trick. The eyes glistened again with their old fire. The color rose in the cheeks.

The question that ate at Zeldovich, like acid in his entrails, was: For how long? How much time did Kuznetzov’s magic potion provide for General Secretary Dimitrov? He had tried to pry the answer out of the doctor, but with no success. And that was only the first question. As Zeldovich knew, all questions were open-ended, leading only to other questions. That had been the prime discipline of the KGB, drummed into his brain when he was a young agent. Answers lead only to other questions. Other questions lead only to more answers and other questions. And there was this mysterious matter with Grivetsky, mysterious only because it had been made a mystery. He could easily surmise Grivetsky’s mission. But why had Dimitrov kept the confidence from him?

In one way, all the questions were the same. At their core was fear, blind, raging fear. Dimitrov had begun it. He had taunted Zeldovich with the possibility.

“What will become of you, Zeldovich, if I were to check out?”

“Check out?”

“Croak.”

“God knows,” he had replied, the possibility beginning to reveal itself in Dimitrov’s glazed look.

“God knows? Zeldovich, we buried Him long ago.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Take a gun to your head, Zeldovich,” Dimitrov had said, watching him, as if he were jealous of his health. “They will tear you apart like an overcooked chicken.”

“Well then, you had best not check out.”

Dimitrov had nodded. “I am not over yet.”

But Zeldovich had developed strategies for survival before. He had an instinct for it, and he would find a way to survive after the old man’s death. He had already toyed with a thousand different ways. When he had first pieced together the nature of Dimitrov’s illness, he had pondered the idea of killing him. It would be quite simple, a vial of poison dumped into his soup, a little change in his medicine dosage. The problem was deciding in advance who would be the winners in the contest for succession. Then he would simply confront them and put his plans on the table.

But whom could he trust? And, besides, as Dimitrov’s killer he would be a pariah. Even if his faction won out, they would eliminate him as quickly as the other side would. He needed something far more subtle, a scheme that would leave him straddling all camps, a centipede with one foot in every territory.

In trying to assemble the pieces floating in his head, he had decided that, like Dimitrov, he was running a race against time and he could hear the pendulum banging on the sides of his brain. He sensed that the most important starting point for his own campaign of survival was to know exactly how long Dimitrov would live, a timetable locked in the mind of the American doctor. Such knowledge was a golden nugget, valuable enough, perhaps, to buy back his own life.

And then there was Grivetsky. The general had come to the dacha more often lately, always arriving under the tightest security. Zeldovich had begun to wonder if Bulgakov knew about these visits. He dared not ask Dimitrov, but he filed the information for future use.

The reason for these meetings with Grivetsky was perfectly transparent, of course, at least to Zeldovich.

“Do they think I will actually negotiate with the Chinks?” Dimitrov had said to Zeldovich more than once. “What fools!” Zeldovich himself had no such illusion, but he knew that the other members of the Politburo, as well as Bulgakov, believed it.

“I will make a Chinese stew, before that moment ever comes.”

No, Grivetsky’s mission was plain. But knowing that secret was useless until he also knew the timetable. He had only one-half the puzzle. When he knew what the American doctor knew, he could present both halves of the puzzle in a neat package to Bulgakov and somehow receive amnesty in return.

“You must arrange for the doctor’s return to America,” Dimitrov had ordered. He had not even looked up from his desk, although Zeldovich had sensed a hesitation. “By train.”

“Train?” Zeldovich was alert.

“To the East,” Dimitrov had continued.

“The East?”

“The Trans-Siberian,” Dimitrov had said, looking up at last. “It is my gift to him.”

“That trip, a gift? I see.” The doctor was, after all, of Siberian extraction. “He has done wonders for you, Comrade.”