Owen Matthews - Black Sun

Vasin stood and shook Adamov’s papery hand. Masha walked them to the door, moving slowly as though with infinite weariness.

“My thanks for your time, Comrade Adamova.”

Maria’s eyes wandered slowly around Vasin’s face.

“How fortunate to be guarded by honest men.”

The door shut behind him with a heavy thud.

Vasin and Efremov stepped out into the empty street. A shower had passed, and the wet tarmac shone in the streetlights like a policeman’s plastic cape. A wintry smell rose off the bare earth of the municipal flower beds and freshly planted linden trees on the avenues. In the waiting car the driver’s face was illuminated by the pale yellow light of the dashboard.

“Satisfied, Vasin?”

“Satisfied. Thanks for the lift, Efremov.”

The adjutant opened the car door and motioned Vasin inside.

“Think I’ll go home on foot. Clear my head.”

Vasin turned so that the wind would be at his back and began walking before Efremov could stop him. The domestic hour, after dinner and Good Night, Children on the television. The hour of tea and vodka, arguments and lovemaking. The windows of most of the apartments were illuminated with warm yellow light.

In Moscow, Vera would be on the phone to her girlfriends. Vasin could imagine his wife’s gossipy voice, see the thin stream of cigarette smoke curling out of the kitchen window. Nikita would be sleeping, calm, in his narrow bed under the bookshelf. By day the boy’s face was usually anxious. Admonitions, scolding, advice, the poor kid lived his life advancing doggedly into a daily blizzard of instruction. Only when he slept did his features relax. Nikita was an obliging child, eager to please. But there was no pleasing Vera. “Next time you will do even better,” she would tell the boy. “Higher, higher, and ever higher!” Somewhere else in the world, she believed, there was always a child who was better than her own.

Vasin’s thoughts paced in cramped circles. Arguing voices, call and answer, like a ritual song. Guilty, Vasin stood in the center of a wheeling parade of sins summoned by his wife Vera’s rage. Here, the vodka. There, his mistress.

“How could you?” Vera had screamed. “With her ?”

From the next room, the thump of piano scales as Nikita desperately hammered arpeggios to drown his parents’ arguing voices.

“You bastard !” Vera had added, perhaps for the neighbors’ benefit.

Out in the world, criminals, hard men, begged for Vasin’s mercy. In his own home, he hung his head like a defendant before a People’s Court, searching the parquet in vain for crumbs of forgiveness.

Vasin, he thought, your life is ridiculous.

He reached the end of a long boulevard. Like all the streets of Arzamas, it seemed to terminate in a park. Beyond, he guessed, was the forbidden perimeter with its guard towers, dogs, and barbed wire that he had crossed by train the previous day.

Vasin was ravenous. At a tiny cafeteria by the train station, he bought himself a plate of sausages and a mug of watery beer. The other customers were workingmen in overalls and greasy caps, but the place exuded none of the underworld squalor of similar establishments in Moscow. Vasin leafed through General Zaitsev’s copy of Krokodil as he stood by his tall, rickety table. A witty dispatch from the Kharkov Tractor Works, whose male-voice choir had just won an all-Union singing competition. By half past ten he was the last customer. The burly waitress began scooping the remaining sausages out of their steaming water and tipping them, wriggling like live things, into a jar. Her own family’s dinner, doubtless.

“We’re closing, Comrades,” she chirped to the empty room.

“Tell me, pretty one,” Vasin called, raising his voice against the clatter of pans and swish of water. “Where does a man go to get a drink at this time of night?”

“The Café Kino, of course.” The woman looked him up and down in frank appraisal and cocked a flirtatious eyebrow. “But you should watch out. There might be pretty girls there.”

Vasin badly wanted to speak to somebody. A stranger would do. A stranger would be better, in fact. And he needed a drink.

“You’ve earned it, you brave boy.” Katya Orlova’s words, as she sloshed out brandy from her husband’s crystal decanter. He thought of her pendulous breasts, her rouged mouth, her desperate sexual hunger.

What the hell were you thinking? The boss’s wife ?

Vasin faced the spitting wind and retraced his steps toward Lenin Square. In front of the glass facade of the Kino Moskva the tramlines gleamed. A light burned in the vestibule, and from a basement came the faint sound of chatter and music. There would be cognac. And girls. This, thought Vasin, could end badly. He went in.

The Café Kino occupied a large, dimly lit basement. In one corner a dozen young people had pulled chairs into a circle and were talking loudly over the din of swooping, rhythmic music. It sounded like—could it be?—American rock-and-roll. Thrilling. Semilegal. A couple of the customers glanced at Vasin’s uniform as he hung his mackintosh and cap. Vasin saw no fear in their eyes, only distaste. He settled onto a stool at the long bar and ordered Armenian cognac.

“Unusual music.”

The barman was an indigenous Siberian. His flat, Oriental face was expressionless.

“Rei Charlz,” he said. “  ‘Hit road, Dzak.’ The kids bring their records in. Mo-town .”

In Moscow, Vasin had seen bootleg copies of foreign discs cut onto the celluloid of old X-ray sheets. “Bone discs,” the young people called them. Each cost a month’s student stipend. But the records scattered over the far end of the Kino’s bar were originals, in brightly colored sleeves that spoke of America and unattainable luxury.

A couple stood to dance in front of a small, empty stage. The girl’s hair was done up in a beehive and the young man’s was glossy with cream. They performed a kind of half-squatting dance.

“Da Tvist,” explained the barman, unprompted, as a new song came on. “Chabi Cheka.”

He pronounced the last word like “che-ka,” the first Bolshevik secret police, now slang for the KGB. Was the man being sarcastic? But the barman’s face was blank. Vasin took his cognac to a table in an empty corner.

Pizhony, they called these kids in Moscow. The stylish ones. The term mixed contempt and envy. Plain working people would travel specially to gawp at the pizhony preening up and down Gorky Street in their polka-dot dresses and sharp suits on a Saturday night. Vera hated them. “Today he dances jazz,” she quoted from a Pravda editorial. “But tomorrow he will sell his homeland.”

So this was Petrov’s world. French books, American Motown music, pizhony for friends. The handsome only son of Academician Petrov had moved from the bubble world of Politburo compounds around the dacha village of Zhukovka to the still more isolated cloud dwelling of Arzamas. When he died, the young man had left a great future behind him.

Very senior people were taking a close interest in the circumstances of Fyodor’s untimely death. General Orlov had spelled that much out in his cluttered Moscow office.

“We have made a promise to the Comrade Academician to get to the truth of the matter,” Orlov had said, his face cracking into a toadlike grin. “I told him we would put one of our best men on the case. Our very best man.”

Orlov was stating a fact. Vasin was one of the best investigators in the kontora . He knew this because he had been so hated for so long. In his ten years at police headquarters, Vasin had acquired a reputation for maddening tenacity. A towering sense of righteousness inherited from his mother. A faith in science from his father. Put together they had made Vasin a brilliant detective—as well as a giant pain in his colleagues’ backsides. Honesty was an unusual quality in a police officer, and certainly not a career-advancing one. At least until Vasin’s work had caught the watchful eye of the kontora .