Hot Siberian (35 page)

Should he inform Savich of this suspicion? Nikolai wondered. But if it proved out, wouldn't it be viewed as a blemish for Savich, proof of incompetency that his rivals could use against him? And what would he, Nikolai, get out of it other than being distrusted as a
stukach?
A medal maybe?Shove their medals, Nikolai thought.

Anyway, corruption, maybe not on this grand a scale, but nonetheless corruption, was an unmentioned additional benefit known to come with certain jobs. The fellow who worked in the slaughter house was expected to sell steaks and roasts on the side. What about the caviar packers who had for several years been putting herring labels on tins containing the best beluga so they could ship those tins to the West and pocket the substantial difference? Stealing, great and trivial, was often what made conditions bearable. It had grown into the way of life, and only those who were supposed to get caught got caught.

Thus, Nikolai found it difficult to blame whoever was skimming diamonds from Aikhal. They had to be audacious, crafty, resourceful, and, according to Churcher's numbers, greedy. To be honest, Nikolai thought, he envied them. Would that he were in a position to pull off such a thing. Just one packet of goods such as he'd seen on Churcher's desk would solve everything for him. When was he scheduled to go to Aikhal again? If the Afghanistan emerald drama was only in Valkov's mind, perhaps there'd be a field trip to Aikhal come September. But that was four months away, and even then, when he was in Aikhal, what would he do—sneak around and filch a few carats? It certainly wouldn't be as easy as he'd fantasized, helping himself to all the carats he wanted from the machines.

That thought was the hinge that swung open an obscure gate of his memory, allowing a certain recollection to emerge. It didn't come shooting out and strike him like a bolt. Rather, it swashed oozily around in his head for a moment and then surfaced. He remembered something that had occurred when he was in Aikhal last year, last September. A man, a sharp-faced, wild-eyed sort, had stopped him in the corridor, sort of cornered him and blurted out a string of whispered words so rapidly they didn't make sense. Nikolai had caught only fragments of what the man said, gathered vaguely that it had to do with someone stealing. His thought at the time was that the poor fellow was suffering from being too long in Siberia. There had also been the distraction of the man's terrible breath, a foul combination of alcohol, garlic, and dental caries. Nikolai had silently endured the man to have him sooner gone. He'd immediately forgotten the incident. He wished now that he'd hung on the man's every word, been impressed enough to have arranged to discuss the matter further with him. Why was he wishing that? Nikolai asked himself. What difference would it have made? He had the sensation that his mind was detached, on its own, out of his control, intent on constructing a nefarious recourse. To that end it presented him with another detail of that encounter in the corridor at Aikhal: the man had furtively shoved a sheet of paper in among those Nikolai was carrying. Nikolai hadn't ever bothered to look at it.

Chances were it contained the information that he now admitted he wanted very much to know.

CHAPTER

19

UPON HIS RETURN TO LENINGRAD THAT AFTERNOON, NIKOLAI
went directly to the offices of Almazjuvelirexport. He arrived there just as everyone was leaving for the day. He ran into Valkov, who was on his way out.

“You are on holiday,” Valkov said.

“Which means I can be wherever I want.”

“I suppose.” Valkov exaggerated his indifference. “Were you aware that Savich has been trying to reach you?”

“Really?”

“It appears you've gotten yourself in hot water.”

“Let it boil,” Nikolai quipped.

Valkov decided to smile. “We should get together some evening.” He was always saying that very thing to people he never had any intention of socializing with, as though it camouflaged his dislike.

Nikolai knew that and jumped right on it. “Tomorrow night.We'll have dinner. I'll pick you up at eight.”

“Tomorrow night is impossible,” Valkov said automatically and walked away.

The place was deserted. Nikolai hurried down the hall to his modest office. Nothing was changed, not a speck. The late daylight glancing through the window hit upon the surface of his desk and showed where he'd disturbed the dust last time he'd been there. He went to the gray four-drawer metal filing cabinet in the corner. He knew he needn't bother to look in the top drawer, for that was where he kept, well organized, his scant cull from the thousands of memorandums and bulletins that flowed at him. If anywhere, the single sheet of paper that had now become so important for him to find would be in one of the other three drawers, which were jammed carelessly with all sorts of written and printed material. He had a vague recollection of having deposited whatever he'd brought back from Aikhal in one of those drawers. However, he also had an equally vague recollection that that was one of the times when he'd decided not to add to the accumulation and had just dumped it all into the trash basket.

He pulled open the second drawer down, removed everything from it, every scrap, piled it on his desk. He went through all that carefully and then got into the disordered contents of the next drawer. About halfway through that pile he came upon it. Hidden appropriately between printouts showing the gem quality yield from the Aikhal installation last year. It was an ordinary work report. Scrawled on the back of it was “Prague: Konviktska 16/ Potlaska 34” and “Paris: 131 rue de Paradis,” apparently three addresses. Also “Kislov,” which Nikolai took to be a name, perhaps the name of the fellow who had slipped this information to him.

To check on that, Nikolai went to the nearest computer in the accounting office just down the hall. He asked the computer for the listing of personnel assigned to Aikhal, and on the display screen appeared names in alphabetical order. If indeed that fellow had been Kislov, Nikolai thought, he'd phone him at the installation on some pretense and possibly get more out of him. Nikolai skipped quickly to the Ks. There was no Kislov listed. He asked the computer if it had anything ever on Kislov. It told him in a few words that Kislov, Josep, had accidentally frozen to death last January 12, New Year's Eve. (Not divulged was that Kislov's sister in Ulyanovsk, when notified, had wanted nothing to do with his remains. So the body, in a heavy plastic bag, had been placed in a wire basket and horizontally suspended from the understructure of the installation, close up and in a spot where even the highest leaping wolves couldn't get to it. There it had remained, like a side of meat frozen through, until just a week before, when the ground was believed to be sufficiently thawed. Still, the two men assigned to do the burying had to chip and hack after digging down less than a foot. They considered it a waste of energy and left Kislov's corpse shallowly covered, susceptible to sniffs even a mile away.)

Nikolai got a shiver.

Something told him not to believe the word “accidentally.”

He asked the computer if it had anything on the addresses, the two in Prague and the one in Paris. They meant as much to it as they did to him. What nebulous leads they were, Nikolai thought. Not much to go on but better than nothing.

He went home. Lev and his most recent pretty Finn, Ula, weren't there, but the remnant odor of their lovemaking was distinct and not unpleasant in the air. After about forty breaths, Nikolai became acclimated to it, couldn't smell it anymore. It caused him to think differently of those times Archer had dropped by at Vivian's apartment shortly after he and Vivian had made a lot of love. Archer, amiable as ever though hurting each time he inhaled.

The light was on in the kitchen. Nikolai went in. He felt the teakettle. The burner beneath it wasn't on but the kettle was still warm. Lev and Ula must have left only a short while ago and apparently they'd be returning soon, for Ula's handbag was on the table with an exposed pink lipstick and several other messy-looking makeup items out of it. Nikolai had thought he'd discuss with Lev what he was getting into. Lev, with his black-market dealings in hard currency, knew a bit about the underside of things. No doubt he'd try to dissuade Nikolai, and that would be a turnabout after all the times Nikolai had urged Lev not to take such dangerous chances. When Lev found out how determined he was he'd do the next-best concerned thing: contribute helpful suggestions. And the more he suggested the more likely it was he'd want to take part. Sharing the risk would lighten it.

Nikolai waited an hour and a half. He changed, packed a few things, and took a flight back to Moscow. During the two-hour layover there he sat on a hard, ass-shaped plastic seat in the waiting area not really reading
On the Eve
but rather trying to adjust to the sense that he'd entered another dimension from which he was viewing everything slightly off-register. It was, he realized, a symptom of his now being committed to thievery, albeit secondhand. It was like being on the way to the front of a personal war. Better not to think of Vivian so much, he told himself. She might be an imperiling distraction. Wouldn't that be ironic—if at a crucial moment he got killed because his mind was on her.

It was ten after four in the morning when Czech State Airlines Flight 312 landed him at Ruzne Airport, Prague. First thing after coming out of passport control he exchanged some of his money for korunas. He hadn't made a hotel reservation. A tourist folder he'd read on the plane gave the Intercontinental an A-deluxe rating, so he had a taxi take him there. He walked into the lobby and to the registration counter as though he expected to be expected. The registration clerk recognized the hundred-koruna look in his eyes and cordially accepted his hundred-koruna handshake and only minutes later Nikolai was the registered occupant of a front room on the sixth floor. He hung his jacket and tie in the lonely closet, took off his shoes and paired them partly under the foot of the bed, zipped open his suitcase but did not remove anything from it. Needing, for ease, to get more acquainted with the space that now contained him, he went around opening drawers. There was no hospitality really in the blankness of the hotel stationery or down the printed laundry checklist that included every possible wearable, soilable, washable thing. The almost-used-up message pad in the bedstand drawer was accompanied by a stubby pencil, entirely pointless, worn down to its wood.

Nikolai called on a reserve of spirit to counter depression. He stood at the window and saw dawn getting underway, the sky steel-blue to mauve, rather funereal. “Prague,” Nikolai said aloud disdainfully, and drew the drapes. He went to the bed and dropped himself face up across it. Perhaps, he thought, he should remain awake, take the day that was almost already here. He reached for the room-service menu, held it above him. It seemed that every other word was “dumplings.” He chose sleep.

Six hours later he came awake, sharp-minded, all at once awake again. He couldn't remember if he'd dreamed or not, but from the tension in his shoulders and neck he thought he must have had a bad one. He used the bathroom, then ordered from room service. Coffee for two, sweet rolls for one. A fresh shirt and a fresh pair of socks picked him up a bit. The coffee that was brought was Turkish, boiled strong, with the grains left in the bottom of the server. Three fast cups of it went right to Nikolai's nerves and made his hands and feet have to be doing something. His tongue was still finding grains of the coffee in his mouth when he was in the elevator going down to the lobby.

He learned from the concierge that Konviktska Street was eleven blocks away. The concierge marked the way on a city map, then sold it to him. Nikolai paused outside the hotel entrance to estimate the mood of the sky. It was solidly clouded, undecided whether to rain. He set off along the Dvorakova Embankment with the Vltava River on his right. The river looked indolent, had a sour, ocher cast. At the Manesur Bridge he turned his back to the river, dodged across six lanes of malicious traffic, and entered Staré Město, the Old Town. Obeying the map, he had no problem finding Konviktska Street, and only an idiot could have missed number 16. There were five black-and-white police cars parked diagonally to the curb in front of it, and several prominent signs prohibited any other vehicle from even stopping there momentarily.

Nikolai was perplexed. Why would this Kislov fellow have given him the address of the central police station? Were all five stories of this gray stucco-and-stone building occupied by the police? Evidently so. Even the adjacent building was allied to it in a medical way, for a police ambulance van had just gone in there. It was not inconceivable, of course, that a Czech policeman or two could be mixed up with pushing along contraband diamonds from Aikhal. However, if that was the case, what was he supposed to do, walk in there and randomly pick someone out and follow him around on the hope that he'd make a revealing move? Shit, Nikolai thought, he could still be at that a year from next Christmas.

He stood across the street from the police station for quite a while, mulling over how to deal with it. He sort of half settled on the premise that Kislov had noted that address only so he'd know where to go if he needed help. That was more palatable than admitting to such an early, easy defeat. Anyway, he still had the other address. He consulted the map for Potlaska Street.

At that moment an older man came out of Konviktska 16. There was no reason why Nikolai should have especially noticed him. He was just an average-looking, slow-moving Czech burdened by seventy years of dumplings on his bones. He came across Konviktska and passed so close by Nikolai could have heard him wheeze. Even if the man had stopped and introduced himself as Chief Medical Examiner Sikma, it wouldn't have been meaningful.

The street index on the reverse side of the map told Nikolai that the coordinates for Potlaska were G and 4. Nikolai found it in District 8, the Karlin District, which from the hotel was quite a way downriver in the opposite direction. He took a taxi, and during the ride, somewhat mesmerized by the to and fro of a garish plastic Saint Somebody suspended from the rear-view mirror, it hit him that he was acting absurdly, on impulse, driven beyond logic by his need to have and keep Vivian. All that would come of this Prague escapade was the lesson that mere wanting and trying wasn't enough. He should have been born one of the naturally rich or at least the only son of a capitalist with a fortune so vast it was impossible to deplete.