The Mask of Atreus (37 page)

"So," Deborah prompted, "this weapon . . . ?"

"You just can't leave it alone, can you?" said Cerniga.

"I just thought that if I knew what you thought was going on," said Deborah, "I could help."

"Like you helped those two stiffs back in Palmetto?" said Keene.

Deborah looked down again. When Cerniga spoke, it was in a dry, mechanical voice.

"Based on the lighting pattern in the room behind the bookcase," he said, "we figure the display case with the body and grave goods was about seven feet by three, about the size of a funeral casket. We also think it was free-standing, and though the body itself would only be twelve inches or so deep, it almost certainly wasn't at floor level. If we assume it was 312

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about three and half feet high, that means we're looking at about seventy cubic feet of concealed space under the body. It's a lot of room in which you could conceal any number of significant weapons."

"And we're not talking about a box of pistols," said Keene with grim relish.

"We think," said Cerniga, his voice still containing no emotion other than a hard, even ruthless frankness, "the weapon is closer to the WMDs we never found in Iraq. It originated in Nazi Germany in the last year of the war and was smuggled out using the fake antiquities as a cover. We know the German nuclear program was fairly advanced, but it seems unlikely that they had material to make some kind of bomb, though that is not to say that they didn't have materials that may have been subsequently turned into a device of some kind, what they call a dirty bomb, maybe."

"If there is radioactive material in the crate," said Deborah quietly, "it is screened so perfectly that the radiation has been absolutely contained. If it had leaked even a tiny amount, the C-14 testing would have detected a massive elevation of radioactive particles."

She was still trying to pretend that this was an exchange of ideas rather than a kind of punishment for her former actions and inactions.
You want to know what's going on?
Cerniga seemed to be saying.
Here it is. And if it scares you to death,
you've no one to blame but yourself
.

"We are inclined to think the weapon is chemical or--

more likely--biological," Cerniga said. "The Nazis conducted extensive research on the subject."

In the concentration camps,
she thought, suddenly feeling that old hollow in her gut.

"Smallpox would do nicely," Keene suggested, smirking at her. "A stockpile of that, or some nasty flu strain, maybe a few vials of bubonic plague . . ."

Deborah lowered her eyes again, but only for a moment.

"Did Richard know?" she said.

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"He had absolutely no idea," said Cerniga. "He thought he was about to announce one of the great archaeological discoveries of the century, thought he was going to put your museum on the map and become a national hero to the people of Greece."

This was good news, but in Cerniga's mouth it just made him sound stupidly unrealistic.

"Like you," said Cerniga, as if she might have missed the point, "he had no clue what was going on."

"He thought it was about art and history," said Keene, grinning frankly in her face so that she looked down again.

"Can you believe that?"

"What about the Russian?" said Deborah. "The note he was carrying suggests--"

Cerniga cut her off with a shout of fury.

"What the hell do you think this is?" he said, his face suddenly red and throbbing. "You think we want to pick your brains like you're some kind of goddamned expert, some genius who can do our job for us? The Russian, as I have told you about fifty times now, is irrelevant to this inquiry."

"I just thought--" she began, feeling dwarfed by his anger.

"Don't," he said. "Or at least go back to your books and do your thinking there. You aren't a suspect anymore, OK? As far as I'm concerned, you're no more than an obstruction. Get out of our way, and stay out. Take a holiday."

"Hey," said Keene, nastily upbeat, "why not go to Russia?"

"Whatever," said Cerniga. "Just don't let me see you around here until this is all wrapped up. Got it?"

Mute, Deborah nodded.

CHAPTER 65

It was raining in Red Square. Deborah had been in Moscow for two days, and it had rained so unrelentingly that it had become impossible for her to imagine the city without the gray skies, the damp trees, the shining stone pavements, and glistening minarets.

Two days
.

It was completely insane, she knew. She should never have come. Having barely been out of the States in the last decade she had launched into two completely unplanned trips to Europe in as many weeks. She couldn't afford it and would be paying the whole ridiculous jaunt off for the rest of the year and well into the next. Greece had been expensive, but newly capitalist Russia had it beat by a mile: by a thousand miles. Why in God's name had she come?

To spite Cerniga? To take his and Keene's sarcastic advice seriously, as if that would wipe from her mind the contempt with which they had called her a fool and an amateur? Or to drive other images from her mind . . .?

The dead Greeks, their eyes open . . .

Or just to hide her head a continent away?

That last was closest
.

But there were still questions to be asked. Cerniga said it wasn't about archaeology. He said it wasn't about the Russian, wasn't about Magdeburg. But there was something else; she was sure of it. She couldn't say if he didn't know or just wasn't telling, but there was
something else,
something no one had said yet, something at the heart of this whole tragic farce. She had felt it from the start, that sense that the dog tracks she was following belonged to a wolf or something 315

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larger and stranger, something she wouldn't recognize till she rounded the corner and found it watching her. So she had come to Russia. In spite of pocketbook and common sense, she had come, determined to follow the tracks a little farther, till they faded away completely or showed her the beast.

Yesterday she had done three things after her endless flight. She had booked a hotel room at the Belgrade by the Garden Ring and only one stop on the metro from the Kremlin itself. She had visited the Pushkin Museum and stared, drained and bewildered, at Priam's Treasure, the hoard of ancient artifacts which Schliemann unearthed in Troy and smuggled back to Germany a hundred years ago. What it meant to her present quest she was still unsure, though it suggested that the death of a former Soviet agent a block from the Atlanta museum on the night it was relieved of its own collection of Trojan war memorabilia was no coincidence. That Richard's trove was all fake did not take away from the fact that both collections had been in Berlin in 1945 as the Russians banged on the door with their tanks, and both had been spirited away.

The third thing she had done was to call Alexandra Voloshinov, the dead Russian's daughter. In fact she had called twice. The first time a man had answered, had professed not to understand her, and hung up. The second time the woman herself had answered but had been no more forthcoming, though she had taken Deborah's number at the hotel in case she changed her mind.

This morning, she had called.

"My husband does not like me to talk about my father,"

she said. "His work, I mean. But I will meet with you."

They were to meet here in Red Square itself, flanked by the elaborately antique GUM department store and, as if in pointed contrast, the tomb of Lenin, behind which were the redbrick walls of the Kremlin. Deborah hugged her inadequate coat to her ribs and stared southeast to where the massive and whimsical onion domes of Saint Basil's gleamed red 316

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and gold through the rain. She found a tingle of excitement at being here in this place impossible to suppress. She was just old enough to remember what the Soviet Union had meant to America in the seventies and eighties, even if much of her sense of the Cold War menace and competition had more to do with hackneyed movies and largely meaningless sports rivalries. Even though it was the middle of summer, a part of her had been surprised to find the square not covered in snow, the same part, perhaps, that had been startled by the familiar icon of McDonald's beside a building whose austere stone facade still wore the emblem of the crossed hammer and sickle. She knew that the Soviet Union was gone, but it lingered so palpably in the wet air that the trappings of Western democratic capitalism seemed like Christmas decorations that would be glumly taken down in a matter of weeks.

Alexandra Voloshinov was heavy, like her father, fortyfive or so, and pale, her face blank and a little hard. Her eyes were dark and cautious, and never quite locked with Deborah's, as if she was looking for someone else. She wore a long dark coat and a pale blue head scarf. Deborah who had, for no good reason, expected someone younger, stepped to move out of her way, muttering apologies, before she realized who she was.

"Deborah Miller?" said the woman. Her voice was flat, her face showing no emotion, no politeness or greeting.

"Yes," said Deborah, smiling, "you must be Alexandra."

"Sergei Voloshinov was my father," she said, as if making a fine distinction. "Why have you come?"

Deborah, who had been buoyed by the fact that the woman had agreed to meet her, felt deflated. The Russian still didn't want to talk, didn't want her here at all.

"I'm trying to understand what happened to your father because I think it is relevant to the death of another man."

"But you are not police."

"The other man was a close friend of mine."

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The woman considered this, her handbag clasped in front of her broad stomach like a shield.

"Police say he went into bad part of town. He was robbed. That's all."

"I don't think that's true."

"Mrs. Miller," began the Russian.

"Miss," Deborah corrected, smiling.

The Russian paused, and then her face cracked briefly into an echoing smile.

"Not married," she said. "Probably, good idea."

"For now," said Deborah, "definitely a good idea."

The Russian woman nodded and, without warning, took her arm, and began to lead her toward Saint Basil's.

"My father," she said, not looking at her now, "was . . . He did not think well."

"He was . . . mentally unbalanced?"

Alexandra considered this and grinned bleakly.

"Crazy," she said. "My father was crazy."

Deborah could not think of a way to respond, so she let the woman talk.

"My mother died six years ago," she said. "He was very sad for a long time. He did not eat. He did not go out. He had nothing to do except sit in his apartment. After a year or two, he went . . ."

She gestured vaguely with her hand, but the gesture conveyed not so much sadness as exasperation.

"He became interested in his old work. Too interested. Always reading about it. Always talking about it. To everyone!

Me, my family, people who worked in stores and restaurants, people in the park. Anyone. Always the same:
he was proud
Russian, he worked for his country, he knew its secrets, he did
not trust Americans and British, but he did not trust old Soviet
government either! They were liars and killers. But what we
have now? Hamburgers and street gangs, fancy clothes and
mafia while the poor still starve like they did under Stalin and
under the tsars
. . . Always the same. All the time."

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The voice hardened as she spoke the litany she had doubtless heard a thousand times.

"He was crazy old man," she said. "Everyone angry with him. Everyone laugh at him. Now he is dead, and it is good. For him. For my family. For me."

She said it as if daring Deborah to disagree.

"Why did he go to America if he hated it so much?"

"Because he was crazy." She shrugged. "I don't know."

"Could he have been pursuing some old case, back from his days in the MVD?"

"Pursuing?"

"Chasing," Deborah said. "Investigating. Trying to learn more about something from the past."

"Maybe," said the dead man's daughter, without curiosity.

"He fill books with writing about work, but I did not look at them."

"Do you still have them, these books?"

"At my home," she said. "Boxes and boxes. They cleaned out his apartment and send me his boxes. What do I do with them? Why I want them?"

"Could I see them?"

Alexandra looked at her.

"Your friend who died," she said. "A lover?"

The candor of the question made Deborah laugh.

"More like a father," she said.

The Russian frowned and considered for a moment.

"OK," she said, staring directly ahead, "you can see."

They traveled on the metro, Deborah mimicking the woman and handing her handfuls of coins which she sifted without comment or amusement. From time to time Deborah found herself gazing rapt at the relief carving and mosaics that decorated the older stations: Ukrainian farmers, their arms laden with wheat sheaves, embracing Russian tractor manufacturers who carried wrenches, images of Lenin in high oratorical mode, elegant carvings of triumphal Soviet infantry and 319

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tanks. It was, as she had felt in Greece, another world altogether.

"You said your father lived in Magdeburg," Deborah prompted as soon as they were out in the open again. Alexandra showed no willingness to speak in the crowded confines of the train.

"MVD headquarters in East Germany," she said. "My father was . . . positioned there as a young man."

"In the fifties?"

"Yes."

Deborah frowned. It made no sense to her. Why would the Germans have tried to send the body to a town which would fall to the Russians and become part of the Soviet empire? Magdeburg was southwest of Berlin, but not far enough from the Polish border to be considered in any way safe, and certainly nowhere near the considerably safer haven of Switzerland. Anyway, if Tonya's story was true, the Americans had hit the German convoy a long way south of Magdeburg. Which left one disconcerting alternative high on the list of possibilities: Cerniga was right. There was no connection. Whatever the Russian letter had referred to, it wasn't the convoy which Andrew Mulligrew had attacked.