James Siegel - Deceit

AnnaGraham.

I had to sound it out like that.

AnnaGraham… AnnaGraham… AnnaGraham… whispering it out loud before I finally understand that I was whispering something else.

Anagram.

Anagram.

Anagram.

I stopped whispering.

I was struck dumb by what I’d refused to see.

Anagrams.

I knew all about anagrams, didn’t I?

My bomb-throwing anti-abortion pediatrician-or was it obstetrician , I forget-had fed me plenty of anagrams in his pathetic attempt to throw me off the scent.

They weren’t any match for this intrepid reporter.

I’d cracked them all.

Except, oh yeah, he wasn’t actually real.

After certain inconsistencies were discovered in a recent story this paper ran about a pediatrician and anti-abortion terrorist, we conducted an exhaustive investigation. We must regretfully inform our readers that Mr. Valle, the author of this story and a reporter for this newspaper for a period of more than five years, was found to have fabricated significant particulars of this article. In addition, he is now suspected to have fabricated all or parts of fifty-five other stories. When this became known to us, Mr. Valle was immediately terminated, subject to future penalties and possible prosecution. We have also announced the resignation of our long-time senior editor, and have instituted some significant changes within our system that we hope will prevent this kind of journalistic fraud from ever happening again. We apologize to all of our readers who put so much faith in our integrity.

Fifty-six stories.

Including one about a group of struggling actors in L.A. who rented themselves out for con jobs.

And one about a crazy fad called Auto Tag.

And one about a doctor I met in the ruins of a destroyed town.

Where the doctor fed me anagrams.

Okay, Anna.

I’ll go where you want me to go.

Anna Graham.

Hamnaagran.

Gramahanna.

Man. Gram. Ana. H.

I furiously worked at it. It consumed the entire afternoon-or was it the morning? It was hard to tell without a window.

I couldn’t unravel it. The letters stuck together, clammed up, and refused to speak to me.

Then.

Anna had two names.

Of course.

It took me less than ten minutes to take that second name apart and put it back together again. In psychotropic time, the blink of an eye.

AOL: Kkraab.

The anagram that Anna had wanted me to see.

Rearrange the letters of AOL: Kkraab and you suddenly have it right there in front of you.

I’d already gotten there first. When I’d found Benjy’s primer. It was in case I didn’t get there first.

Karabolka.

That night I’d went and found a computer in the nurse’s station.

I’d tooled around the Net. I’d found all the appropriate sites.

Half of them were in Russian.

Karabolka, after all, was a Russian name.

It’s time you heard the story.

Why not?

It’s past due.

The story Benjy must’ve heard.

And the plumber.

And the man who’d wandered dazed and disoriented into Littleton three years ago, and whoever else had popped to the surface that day, rescued from one kind of oblivion only to be thrust into another.

Not exactly a bedtime story, not unless you want to scare someone half to death.

The kind you tell only over campfires in a pitch-black wood.

A true Brothers Grim .

The epilogue the 499th had been waiting for.

Hiroshima Redux.

Except no one knew.

No one.

It was a big, fat secret.

Shhhhhh…

First off, it was Karabolka .

Just one word-Benjy had no talent for syntax. It must’ve sounded like someone’s name to him.

The name for hell on earth. For purgatory. For whoops .

The name of a Russian town.

A Russian town situated just upwind from a Russian city that had no name.

A city that never appeared on any map.

Never.

Not one.

You could search and search and you would never, ever find it. It was invisible to the mapmakers of the world. McMillans would’ve never heard of it.

No one dared breathe a word.

It was built in the Ural Mountains by walking skeletons from the gulag. They were its very first casualties, thrown into open pits after they died from malnutrition and TB and general beatings, then sprinkled over with lime. Just like the Nazi Einz gruppen had done to the Russians at Babi Yar and Stalingrad and Minsk in the Great Patriotic War.

This nameless city would serve one purpose and serve one god.

The great God of Plutonium.

That’s it.

It was one note, one track-a one-trick pony ridden into oblivion.

Mother Russia’s illegitimate child.

It had no name; it was Secret with a capital S .

Its secret nuclear lab churned out secret plutonium.

Its secret nuclear workforce dumped secret radioactive waste into secret storage tanks.

Its secret police watched over 80,000 secret citizens.

What was the very first whisper of this secret?

The smoke.

Lots and lots of it.

Long, thick, twisting plumes of it, like braids of a babushka’s hair.

That’s what it looked like to the people in the town of Karabolka.

Tartars, most of them, part of the ethnic soup Stalin liked to stir to a slow boil, occasionally skimming the fat off and dumping it somewhere in Siberia.

The Tartars came out of their houses and stared at the smoke billowing out from the tree line downwind from them.

Forest fire, they thought.

A huge, hellacious inferno of a forest fire.

But a forest fire.

They didn’t know what it really was because the secret city was so secret that they had no idea it was there.

None.

They had no clue there was a massive atomic city sitting just twenty-two miles away from them in a deep dark wood.

That the forest fire wasn’t a forest fire.

They couldn’t know that the cooling system of the secret nuclear reactor in the city with no name had unaccountably shut down.

That the heat had ballooned in a storage tank filled with toxic radioactive sludge.

That it had finally and irrevocably blown sky-high.

That it had exploded with the power of seventy tons of TNT.

Of four Chernobyls.

Of ten Hiroshimas.

That it had torn the roof off the storage building and sent radioactive debris hurtling miles into the atmosphere.

They only knew what their eyes told them.

By the next morning, thick orange-black soot covered everything in Karabolka.

Every single thing.

That’s when a squad of Red Army soldiers showed up and sealed off half the town.

The Tartar half.

No one in. No one out.

Because there were really two Karabolkas. The Tartar Karabolka and the native Russian one.

The native Russians were told the truth. They were immediately evacuated in long black lorries. They never came back.

The Tartars were told a lie.

They remained.

Once there were two villages. One village where they always told the truth. Another village where they always lied.

Crude oil had seeped into the groundwater. This was the lie the Tartars were told.

That’s why their cows and sheep and pigs and horses were all dead or dying.

That’s why their well water tasted like metal.

That’s why orange-black soot covered everything.

That’s why the Red Army was there.

Crude oil.

Someone had to clean it up.

They’d been elected.

The Red Army soldiers marched them out to the fields, where they ripped potatoes and carrots and yams out of the ground with their bare hands and buried them in long pits.