Val Karren - The Deceit of Riches

“Ok, thanks. See you then,” and we hung up our telephones.

I flopped on the bed relieved and exhausted with my ears pounding with the sound of adrenaline in my blood stream. My hands and armpits had been sweating and I could feel their cold dampness against the rest of my hot skin. After half a minute, I sighed a huge sigh of relief and then sat up and looked to Sergey for his next instructions.

As if it was déjà vu, I found myself back at the Moscovskiy station just like twenty-four hours earlier at eleven-thirty buying a train ticket to Moscow, but this time I was not in disguise and I was buying a first-class ticket and traveling with three colleagues in a private compartment. We made an unsightly quartet.

Sergey had insisted that I arrive on the train from Nizhniy as I had told Del on the telephone. He was certain that somebody other than Del would be watching for me at the Kazanskiy station where the train would arrive. If I arrived in Moscow without having arrived on the train from Nizhniy then perhaps the meeting would fall through. Sergey also mentioned that if I arrived at Kyivksiy station with the same people around or anywhere near me that stepped out of the train at Kazanskiy, then the entire operation would be blown.

About one hour away from Moscow, Sergey gave me very exact instructions about how to proceed once I stepped off the train. I was to leave the train and the station alone and take the Moscow metro from Kazanskiy to Kyivskaya. From Kievskaya metro station I should cross the street and take the room at the Slavayanskaya hotel that had been reserved for me. He and his agents would meet me in my room later that night. It was imperative that it appear that I was alone as Del would certainly have a team following me to watch and see who was already potentially following me. Sergey warned me that other FSB agents that I did not know and would not recognize would be following me from Kazanskiy station to make sure I didn’t make a change at Byelosrusskaya and head for the airport. If by chance I managed to make it as far as Sheremyetovo Airport, my name had already been alerted to border officials and I would be detained anyway while I tried to board a flight. He assured me again that he was in his control and trying to flee Moscow would be futile. I believed him and was spooked to the point that I decided to follow all his mysterious, nuanced instructions. I thought that this intrigue, cloak & dagger, had all ended at the same time as the Cold War. The words that my half-drunk friend Olya said, back at the disco night at The Monastery rang in my ears. “You think that all departments of KGB just stopped existing? They changed the name to FSB and kept their jobs. That’s it. We still do the exact same thing, Peter.” How right she was!

After the instructions and warnings from my handlers, the three agents somehow evaporated into the Moscow evening. One by one they simply slipped out of our train compartment and before I realized it, I was alone in the cabin, standing in front of the window watching the Moscow suburbs roll slowly by. I let out a huge sigh of relief that they had left me alone for a while, even though I knew that they weren’t far off.

The sun was obviously in the western sky but was still bright and warm. In this pseudo summer warmth and yellow evening light, even the run down concrete apartment blocks on the city’s outskirts looked slightly romantic. The tangle of iron rails and switches on the ground mirrored the tangle of overhead electricity lines as we glided along the shifting metal roadway. The train’s passengers jolted with every pass over a switch which led us closer to that city center, filled with breathtaking cityscapes of both the magnificent and the repugnant.

There is no place in the world I love and hate more than the city of Moscow, and Mother Russia for that matter. Both are filled with the contradictions and contrasts of the Russian soul that can be sincere, compassionate and heartfelt; yet at the same time callous and unmoved by the cruelties which the reality of modern society imposes with indifference to life and decency. There is for me, even as a foreigner, always something very nostalgic about summer evenings in Moscow, even during my first summer in the city before I had memories to even long for. Yet, I too felt that special longing for a more peaceful, stable time that those around me on the deck of the Zhukov remembered and shed tears for when we all sang Moscow’s unofficial anthem while docked up at the northern river station. In the evenings, it seems that one can sense the vastness of Russia and its sky better than during a summer day when the sun is as much a tyrant as was Stalin, and the humidity smothering. Muscovites, as well, are civilized and gracious people, proud of their city, proud of their culture; yet they are the first to tell you everything that is wrong with it, with a sense of shame and helplessness to do anything about it. Moscow, it seems, has a life of its own. It does not draw its energy from united communities of good people but does its best to grind them into the ground every day of their lives. To survive Moscow is to survive anything heaven and hell can conjure up to thwart one’s happiness. It draws in those from the surrounding land yet repels those it has held close to its bosom from childhood. A perfect Moscow evening is to be with friends and remember it the way it was before it became the way it is!

The skyline became more familiar as we came closer to the Kazanskiy station, and the nostalgia was quickly replaced by the anxiety and fear that my short life could still come to a sudden end, even if I was able to succeed in helping the secret police apprehend my friend. Would they really just let me walk away knowing what I already had learned? Would they not just make us both disappear? I tried to push out the image of a bullet in my head, but somehow, I could feel it already lodged in my skull. I unconsciously rubbed the back of my head as I watched the rail lines spread out in preparation to line up next to waiting platforms. The speakers in the corridors of the train car squelched and demanded that all passengers prepare to disembark. Kazanskiy station was the end of the line.

Stepping down from the train car I hesitated for two seconds to glance left to make an inventory of those who would be walking behind me as I turned right and headed for the hall of the station. The crowd bumped and jostled like only crowds in capital cities do. Nobody is really from the capital so nobody really knows each other, and they care even less about who they might offend. Those commuting wanted only to get in and get out as quickly as possible. I felt like a rat fleeing a burning building as we all pushed closer together to fit simultaneously through the exit doors from the platform to the street, circumventing the hall altogether. If anybody from Del’s team had been there to watch for me and to put a tail on me, as Sergey has suggested, I wished them the best of luck for even spotting me in the mosh of heads and shoulders. Somehow though in the crowd I felt safer. I felt less exposed. Maybe in Moscow, I could simply disappear and not be found. As the rush of bodies spilled out onto the pavements in front of Kazanskiy station I gasped for air, stepped quickly to the curb and turned to watch the crowd behind me. I looked to see who might also pause next to a wall, look the other way, tie a shoe or otherwise try to look as if they were paying me no attention. I scanned the faces and shoes of anybody who looked to be a credible tail for my trek across the wide city center. Nobody stood out. Not a soul stopped to look at me, nobody hesitated. The crowd, like a cloud burst of rain, flowed quickly to the gutters and out from under my feet. Soon I was alone with millions of other Muscovites on Komsomolskaya Square, facing the Yarolsavskiy station opposite, looking over the din and chaos of the evening commute. How my stomach growled at me. How dry my throat was! How I wished this all to be just a dream. How I just wanted to sit down for a moment. I pushed on to the metro station.