Owen Matthews - Black Sun

Adamov nodded, straightening up. He smoothed his tunic, keeping his eyes on Vasin as he worked through the story in his head, like a long equation. After a few moments, he grunted, and continued with his train of thought. Eventually he nodded once again, more to himself than to Vasin.

“A fantastical story from a paranoid mind. But it will serve. For their paranoid little minds.”

Adamov’s old, imperturbable grandeur had begun to flow back into him. There was a plan to be followed. Steps to be taken. Order would be imposed once again on a world that had momentarily flown apart into a blizzard of disconnected fragments.

“Come, Maria.”

“Maria Vladimirovna will join you. You will wait together in your office. But go separately. Make sure nobody sees you on your way.”

Somewhere deep in the building a door slammed.

The three of them froze, brought abruptly back into the present danger. There was no further noise, only a suddenly oppressive sense of urgency.

“Professor, go. Masha, stay here for a moment.”

Adamov’s mouth gave the faintest twitch to hear Vasin address his wife so familiarly. He looked from her to Vasin and back again, but his proud face betrayed nothing. Adamov nodded formally to both of them and stalked out of the laboratory.

Maria and Vasin listened to Adamov’s footsteps as they receded down the hallway. When the silence had closed about them once more, she turned to Vasin. Her face was spattered with Korin’s blood. Vasin fished for a handkerchief and passed it to her. It was warm from the heat of the gun in his pocket.

Masha leaned on the console, examined her reflection in the glass of the dials, and slowly wiped off the gore.

“Better?”

“Better.”

He put out his hand and covered hers. Masha’s knuckles lay under his palm like a small, trembling animal.

“You love him.”

Her face tightened into a small smile. She pulled her hand away.

“These scientists are hard to love. Every day they see perfection. And I was very imperfect.”

“Not as perfect as an equation?”

“Right.”

“Is anyone?”

She shrugged and raised her green eyes to Vasin’s, steady and appraising.

“And Fyodor? He didn’t compare you to the perfection of the universe?”

“Fyodor. He was a mistake.”

“Your imperfection.”

“My animal nature, Adamov would have said. But for a while I thought I loved him. Very much.”

“Adamov never knew?”

“I would have told him if I thought he would care.”

“Why wouldn’t he care?”

“That was a worldly matter. And he doesn’t like the world much. He loves his bombs more than any human being alive.”

“More than you?”

Masha gave a snort of impatience.

“You don’t understand him. Or me. He is the greatest man I have ever met. Or you have ever met, of that I’m certain. His mind—his mind is occupied with higher things. Beautiful things. Changeless things. That’s why I love him, if that’s what you’re asking. Adamov is a great man. He is my great man. You know the thieves’ code. Don’t be afraid. Don’t ask for anything. Don’t trust anyone. And don’t give up your own.”

“Bombs are higher things than people?”

“Vasin, spare me your philosophizing. Adamov might need higher motives for whatever he does. Korin too. All that endless talk about the end of war, forever. Those speeches he gave you, and me. I understand, they needed that philosophy in order not to have to murder the humanity in themselves every day. To justify their work to themselves. I just want Adamov alive. And myself alive. And you gave us that, tonight. Now. You almost took it away from us when you shot Korin. But then you gave it back. Nobody will ever know. But I will know.”

“Are you trying to thank me?”

“Yes. Yes, I am, Vasin. You’re brave. You make your own choices. Not many men I know can say that about themselves. Not even him.” Masha gestured to Korin’s corpse with a flick of her head. “Korin was a prisoner all his adult life. The knowledge in his head. In his hands. He never had a chance to choose another path. The State would never have let him.”

“So he served.”

“He served, and he’s serving still. Korin will take all the lies, all the murder onto himself from the grave. He’ll even serve you.”

“Me?”

“The great investigator uncovers a spy in Arzamas. Don’t say that won’t bring you glory, over at your kontora .”

“If you think…”

“No. I don’t think anything. You didn’t bring Axelrod here for glory. You did it because Korin asked you to. Because he and Adamov took you into their confidence. They spoke to you like an intelligent man. And you chose to hear them. And believe them. And act. That’s freedom, no?”

Vasin thought of the crushed heap of clothes in the chamber that had once been Axelrod, and said nothing.

“Listen to me, Vasin. All the rest… the glory? That’s just the world. The mad world. Korin always used to say that rewards and punishment are the same. A test of vanity. Or of strength. Sent by God. Crazy old bastard. So let’s say that Korin sent you a test. Luckily for you, God chose vanity.”

“If the kontora believes us.”

“If they believe you. You’re the one who’s going to be doing most of the talking, Comrade Major.”

Masha put her hand on Vasin’s arm. Slight and fragile as she was, she was now the strong one. The moment when he had cradled her limp body in his arms on the roof of the Kino seemed unimaginably distant.

“It’ll be okay, Vasin. I believe in you.”

Maria was about to walk out of his life. Their time was up. Mechanically, he raised his watch but could make no sense of the dial.

Vasin looked back at Masha’s face. Her gaze had sharpened, and he saw that her thoughts were already striding away from him into her own private future.

“I’m glad. Glad that we are guarded by honest men.”

Masha turned and walked out of the laboratory without looking back.

In the dim silence, Vasin listened to a dull magnetic buzz that hummed through the building. The gunsmoke had dispersed, leaving a sharp smell of cordite that mingled with the hall’s faint aroma of animal feces and engine oil. The pain in the back of his head, forgotten in the heat of the moment, returned with almost paralyzing force. He touched the rising swelling, sticky with blood. Good, he thought. Evidence. His blood would be on the fire axe too, and the floor. Nobody can hit himself on the back of the head.

Vasin settled himself on a stool beside Korin’s cooling body and tried to concentrate on the performance that lay ahead. A landscape of deceit spooled out before him like a film that he would have to edit, carefully splicing in his fictions to arrive at this final scene of destruction. The endless patterns of intrigue joined and re-formed in his mind’s eye until he lost the thread and pressed his fingers against his eyes. Absurdly, he thought of Kuznetsov, who had trusted Vasin’s word that he would not discharge his weapon. Another promise broken—not that it would matter if his story held together. But would Kuznetsov himself believe his fantastical story? Of all the kontora men in Arzamas, it was his handler’s ironic, skeptical glance that he could not quite imagine facing down as he spun his tale. But neither could Vasin imagine Kuznetsov suddenly discovering righteous indignation. He’d purse his lips, nod his beard in acknowledgment of the incomprehensible loops that life spun about him.

He thought of Masha, her physical presence, trotting up flights of stairs and peering around corners as she made her way through the deserted building to join her husband. And he thought of her words. You make your own choices, she had said. But Vasin could think of no point where he had been offered any real choice. Since he came to Arzamas he had been like a wanderer in a dream, pulling aside one curtain only to reveal another two steps behind it. And for all the secrets that he had uncovered, about Korin and Adamov in the Gulag, about Petrov and the bomb, about the forbidden loves of Masha and Axelrod, he nonetheless sensed endless acres of veiled, forbidden knowledge still surrounding him, stretching into darkness.