Disposable Asset Page 15

  Ravensdale went inside. He crunched down a shaded path, past empty fast food stands, an ornamental fountain, a small dilapidated Ferris wheel. Built in 1931 as the city’s second ‘Park of Culture and Rest’, the retreat during spring and summer was dazzling emerald, the color of Sofiya’s eyes. Now it was buried beneath several centimeters of pristine snow. Narrow trails wound through thick, heavily shadowed woods of birch, maple, and elm.

  Reaching the deserted central pavilion he paused again, squaring his shoulders, taking the lay of the land. A nearby Holiday Inn, white lit with green, towered over the treetops. But within the park was no sign of another living soul. In a small chess corner cloaked by snow-leaning branches, a handful of tables featuring built-in chessboards stood empty. A lone ivory clock left behind looked forlorn.

  Dry branches rustled behind him; Ravensdale turned. ‘Black?’ asked Andrew Fletcher.

  Ravensdale nodded.

  ‘You sure? The Marriott’s staked top to bottom.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Let’s walk.’

  They walked: through patchwork shadow, straining to hear indications of human presence nearby. With the naloxone still lingering in his system, Ravensdale’s opiate receptors remained blocked. He felt hypersensitive, tetchy. Even the wind stung.

  ‘Like old times,’ said Fletcher, less sardonically than one might have expected. ‘Saw your strelka in the news. So where’s our girl?’

  Ravensdale made a two-fingered gesture: a bird flying away.

  Creases of irony around Fletcher’s mouth deepened. ‘Tsoi double-crossed us.’

  ‘No, she did it on her own. She’s good.’

  Distractedly, Fletcher took out a pack of cigarettes – Merit Lights, his old brand; did anyone, Ravensdale wondered, ever really quit smoking? – and lit one, puffing hard, inexpertly evening out the burn. ‘So we’re fucked.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Honor dictates that he repay his debts. This afternoon I conducted mokriye dela—’ wet affairs – ‘on his behalf. At great personal risk, in such a way that the muzhik on the street can vouch that he wasn’t involved. He owes me.’

  ‘Honor among thieves.’ Fletcher sounded skeptical.

  ‘His man is in Petersburg, trying to make things right. I suggest we join him.’

  ‘Why?’

  Ravensdale looked at him narrowly. Tamped down his temper. For too long had the man held himself above the fray, letting others make the sausage. ‘Whatever it takes, eh, Andy?’

  ‘That’s right. But what good will it do to have us there?’

  Ravensdale grinned darkly. ‘Because by now she’s realized that you used her. She’ll want payback. And that, my friend … that is how we are going to get her.’

  SOUTH OF NEVSKY, SAINT PETERSBURG

  Knocks thundered, jarring her from sleep.

  Suddenly, she was upright in bed, ready to bolt. By then Mariya was out of her chair and the visitors were announcing themselves: ‘Sledkom! Open up!’

  Through the open doorway, Mariya’s eyes found hers. The old woman gestured down the hall, toward the rear of the cottage, and called in a cracked voice: ‘I’m not decent.’

  Cassie stole into the moonlit hallway, nightgown shushing around her ankles. At the far end, she faced a choice between a laundry nook and a closed door. The door led to a large closet, jammed with rolled-up and haphazardly piled carpets. Atop the nearest heap lay a half-unrolled kilim. She stepped forward, shut the door, clambered on to the kilim, and began to wind herself inside.

  ‘Yes?’ she heard the old woman say.

  ‘Have you seen this girl?’

  Cassie kept turning inside the kilim, pinning her arms tightly against her sides. She moved until she could go no farther. Then she could only wait, inhaling the odors of mothballs and slightly rotten fabric, feeling rough bristles against her cheek.

  ‘Take your foot out of my door,’ Mariya was saying.

  ‘Answer the question first.’

  ‘Are you NKVD? Because—’

  ‘Madame, you are speaking with a Senior Investigator of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Might I recommend that it would be in your best interest—’

  ‘My best friend’s son is an attorney. And his sister-in-law is a respected journalist. Might I recommend that it would be in your best interest to take your foot from my door.’

  A long, fraught pause. Then came the sounds of boots cracking against wood, a door bursting open. Mariya gasped. Someone laughed crudely. Footsteps pounded into the cottage.

  Cassie went cold.

  If they had dogs, she thought, she was finished.

  They thudded through the house, audibly overturning the mattress on the bed, the damask chair in the parlor. Books were swept from shelves. A piece of china shattered, very high and clear. The door to the closet creaked open. Something solid – the stock of a gun? – thumped into the kilim just beside Cassie’s left ear. A mote of dust came free, tickling her nose. She bit the inside of her lip venomously.

  The door creaked closed. Footsteps pounded away. The nascent sneeze prickled and itched in her nostrils; she fought it down.

  ‘Next time,’ a sarcastic voice told Mariya, ‘don’t fuck with us. Or you’ll be sorry.’

  Boots tromped from the cottage. Moments later, an imperious thudding sounded on the next door down the block. ‘Sledkom! Open up!’ This time, it seemed, the homeowner obeyed without complaint.

  Half a minute passed.

  The closet door creaked open again.

  ‘All clear,’ said Mariya, and Cassie sneezed explosively.

  ULITSA VARVARKA, MOSCOW

  Sofiya Kirov looked desolately out the window, at a vacant lot nine flights below.

  Beneath moonlight, snow blew in a lacy haze. A gray cat trotted along a splintered fence-top. A rusty shovel abandoned after some abortive attempt at construction leaned up against the fence, beside a cracked plastic child’s sled. Otherwise, there was nothing to see.

  She let the curtain fall closed again. A surreptitious tug, and the sash came free. Negligently, she twisted her wrist, gathering the ribbon up into her hand.

  The door remained closed, the deadbolt locked.

  Abstractedly, she wandered back to the bed. Spilling down again, she hid the sash beneath her body. A desiccated, despairing exhalation for the benefit of any hidden cameras. Woe is me, helpless woman.

  She closed her eyes. Concealing the action beneath her body, she fed the sash up into the loose-hanging gray sleeve of the zek’s uniform.

  When the moment came, she vowed, she would do it.

  For Dima.

  But she did not let herself think of Dima.

  Instead, she thought about the man who brought her food: two solid meters of muscle sheathed in fat. He held himself in an alert, tense, vigilant way that threatened physical violence. A red dragon tattoo wound around a throat which looked tough as gristle. Strangling the man with the sash would not be easy.

  Still, she thought, it was preferable to the other option: taking the light bulb from the goose-necked lamp, shattering the glass, and using that to slit his jugular. Easier to strangle the life from a man, she guessed, than to slash it away. In point of fact, she had never done either. She had come into the FSB via a desk job, working white collar crime. Upon showing an unexpected flair for seduction – first with her boss, and then with her bosses’ boss – she had been promoted to field operations. Then she had been filched by counter-intelligence. In the years since, she had tumbled many a worthy adversary into bed, but nowhere along the line had she taken a man’s life.

  But when the moment came, she would do it.

  For Dima.

  But she did not let herself think of Dima.

  She had not let herself think of Dima since the day, eleven months before, that she had bundled him up and headed out to the playground and heard the black van pulling into the lot and, glancing over, felt a whisper of the old apprehension, and then dismissed it – a woman in her circumstances h
ad never been entirely free of apprehension – and gone back to enjoying the fresh air, to watching her son move a Tonka truck around the cold sandbox, to appreciating the lengthy hours of good sunlight even in February. And so they had surrounded her, silent and stealthy as death itself, until at last she’d realized what was happening, but by then it had been too late, and they had picked her up, clamping the sweet-smelling rag across her nose and mouth, carrying her bodily, kicking and biting, to the black van; and she had heard Dima screaming, and it had been at that moment that she had started shutting down, she had started dying, and now she did not think of Dima, now she never let herself think of Dima at all.

  And all through the half-day flight which had followed, hooded and handcuffed on the cold steel floor of what seemed like a cargo plane, she had not thought of Dima. All through the ensuing UAZ ride over wild mountainous terrain, as the temperature plummeted to depths that killed men like insects, she had not thought of Dima. Eventually, they had taken off the black hood, because by then it had no longer mattered. By then there had been nothing to see except mountains and night. Then they had reached a valley filled with derricks and searchlights, guard towers and animal pens and motor pools, escarpments and ditches, latrines and barracks and guard houses. Two Kamov Ka-60s resting on a helipad near a huge drum of pressurized avgas; a Mil Mi-28 circling overhead, searchlight arcing. Being dragged over the threshold, through the gate, taking stock of her surroundings, she had understood immediately where they had brought her. This was the very essence of Nowhere. This was the place she would die.

  She had been dragged to an office in the prison camp’s center. Two caged light bulbs flickering in the ceiling; a dinged-up metal desk set diagonally in one corner. Atop the desk, a photograph of a cadaverous white-blond man, in full ceremonial military garb and red beret, standing beside Russia’s president. Small windows set high in three of the four walls. In the fourth wall, above the desk, the mounted head of a small animal. Not a sheep, not a goat … Her gorge had hitched convulsively. Gray, shrunken, with wispy withered hair, the human head had lost both gender and age; it might have belonged to man or woman, adult or child.

  The door leading outside had opened again, letting in the rattling whine of a generator. Slowly, the man had paced into the center of the office. White-blond hair standing on end; thin, petulant mouth. He had worn a greatcoat over what looked like pajamas. But his military bearing had been flawless, his professionalism undeniable. He’d absorbed Sofiya for a moment in silence. Then he’d reached out a hand, and she’d managed not to flinch. Gently, he had rotated her face, first left and then right. Standing straight, he had considered her down the aquiline line of his nose.

  ‘Welcome,’ he had said.

  And all during the months of hell that had followed, she had not thought of Dima. As she’d learned to recognize the eager expression on the white-blond man’s face which presaged another round of pytka, she had not thought of Dima. Every time he’d taken out the bottle of conductive lanolin used to intensify the electric current, the splints used to create a flawless and finely-hewn agony, the splintery board and bucket of ice-cold water used to simulate the experience of drowning, she had not thought of Dima. Eventually, she had signed the confession that he kept waving in front of her. There had been no point in resisting further. She had already died inside. Then the torture had ended, and she had joined the regular prison population: a different kind of torture. Fourteen-hour days of hard labor, mining ore by hand, inhaling punishing lungfuls of dust, digging with crude pickaxes the same mass graves they would end up inhabiting.

  And even when the flight to Siberia had occurred in reverse – when they had taken her from the barracks in the middle of the night, hooded her and cuffed her, and loaded her on to another cold steel floor of another cargo plane – even as she had been unloaded here in Moscow, driven in darkness and syrupy fear through silent late-night streets, stuffed into the cramped grimy apartment under armed guard – even through this she had not allowed herself to think of Dima. Even as a glimmer of hope had returned – they would not have brought her here, after all, just to murder her; not when murder had been so easy, such a natural consequence of everyday life, in the camps—

  (unless they wanted to make an example of you, show off your ruin, this new Vozhd)

  (so you’d best get yourself out of here, my dear, and not wait around to see)

  —even then she had not thought of Dima.

  And she would not think of Dima now.

  She would think only of the sash in her sleeve. The corded muscular neck with the dragon tattoo. The amount of pressure which might prove necessary.

  She would think now of death, not of life.

  Death, so that at last there could be life again.

  Opening her eyes, she stared at the ceiling, and clutched the sash tightly, and waited eagerly for the chance to commit her first murder.

  TEN

  SOUTH OF NEVSKY

  At a few minutes past noon, the old woman fixed a simple lunch of buns, mushrooms, and the thick noodle soup called tokmach.

  As they ate at the kitchen table, the radiator twanged, the radio murmured. A dog barked on the street outside. A garbage truck farther up the block went noisily about its rounds. It was the soundtrack, thought Cassie, of a normal life. If she didn’t watch herself, she would relax into it, letting down her guard – the very mistake she’d made with Quinn.

  Once, she had lived for almost a year at a home in South Orange, New Jersey. Her foster parents there, Maddie and David Gunther, had been warm and funny; she a software engineer, he a real estate dealer. Their home had been a study in fawn-colored suburban generic, with beige carpeting, taupe Formica countertops, and plastic slip-cases covering the furniture. Some of Cassie’s warmest post-Daddy mem-ories involved sitting with the Gunthers on those dryly crackling plastic slip-cases, talking about SATs and extra-curriculars and student loans. Tedious things. But also comforting things. Normal things. Then one night Maddie had worked late; David had put down more wine than usual over dinner and developed a case of wandering hands. The next morning Cassie had crept out of the house before sunrise, heading to the bus station and New York City. Lesson learned. For her, there was no such thing as normality. Everything she cared for slipped right through her fingers …

  ‘Like old times,’ said Mariya around a mouthful of bun. She waved into the kitchen corners, where fragments of broken china still waited to be swept up. ‘Never thought I’d miss it. I lived in fear of it; we all did. The knock at the door, the jackbooted thugs. The Black Marias – that’s what we called the vans that brought you to the camps. But let’s be honest. Even then we got a thrill out of it – bucking the system.’

  Plumbing hissed behind walls; the radio droned soporifically. Cassie picked up a third bun, bit into heavy potato filling.

  ‘I re-copied The Master and The Margarita by hand, my dear, no fewer than six times. Bitched about every word, too. That cheap carbon paper; ruined everything it touched. But nobody was holding a gun to my head.’ A phlegmy chortle. ‘To this day, I bet, I could quote you the entire book without getting a single word wrong. “Didn’t you know that manuscripts don’t burn?” Oh, but life is funny. I couldn’t tell you what we had for breakfast this morning. But could I recite that book in its entirety, although I haven’t read it for forty years? No question.’

  The old woman paused. Absently, she lit a Djarum Black. When she spoke again, her voice was lower and slower. ‘It was Ivan who got me into it.’ She rubbed dry lips with one gnarled thumb. ‘Always one to tip over the apple cart, my Ivan. Well, but it was only the right thing to do. You cannot imagine, I suppose, a state that bends over backwards to ruin the best of its own people. But we lived it. Every day.’ She chased a black grin with a drag from the cigarette.

  ‘Needless to say, my parents didn’t approve of the match. Here I was, a cultured lady of the city; I fancied myself Kitty Alexandrova. Ivan was a troublemaker. A rapscallion. And a hu
mble farmboy to boot, who grew up working a kolkhoz. But I married for love, of course. Never any question in my mind but that I would marry for love. Not that there weren’t times I didn’t regret it. Flat on my back in Vosturallag, one night, on a cold dirty cot, getting raped by a guard … And then, just a few weeks later, realizing that I was late. Uvy.’ She shrugged and for a moment seemed about to laugh. ‘Having the baby would have improved my life in the camp. The father might have taken me under his wing, finding me softer work. Sometimes women with child, mamki, were even given amnesties. But I did not want to have the wrong baby, for the wrong reasons, by the wrong father. I wanted to wait for Ivan. Sometimes you don’t realize, when you’re young, that a chance only comes around once in life. It’s my greatest regret, never having had children.’

  Cassie said nothing.

  ‘Going through official channels to end the pregnancy was out of the question. My request might have been denied. Even if the authorities granted it, the father might have interfered. So in the end I took it upon myself. Brave, but foolish. I was young. Thought I knew everything. A handful of nails, a moment of determination, and—’ The cigarette moved eloquently. ‘There was a great deal of internal bleeding. I barely survived. But in the end, it did the trick.’ Another shrug. ‘You did what you had to do.’

  Quiet, except for the murmuring radio, an advertisement now for auto insurance.

  ‘Most of them, you know, were absolutely innocent. Not me. But most of the others. You could get thrown into the camps for telling a joke, for hearing a joke, for thinking of a joke. For saying that the sky was blue, that up was not down. If your neighbor wanted to fuck your husband and wanted you out of the way – watch out! One morning you would wake up and find yourself accused. The question of guilt was determined by the fact of your arrest. That’s how Beria put it, and he should have known. And if you tried to argue, there was evidence of sedition. Off you went! And if you could not adjust, if you could not endure, you perished. Simple as that. No place for weakness. The labor was back-breaking: timber and coal. The diseases were terrible. The food was never enough. You were reduced to eating rats and garbage. You could shit yourself to death as easily as breathe. Dokhodyagi, they called us, the walking dead. Whatever principles one had, they vanished in a heartbeat. You turned against each other.’