22
“I WOULDN’T ASK IF I could travel on my own,” Jim said, leaning against the front of the car with Murat and chewing more mulch. The clock had just struck four; the morning’s first commuters—old ladies from the far suburbs, mostly, who had things to sell and wanted to get a good position in the underpasses—had just started oozing with morning sluggishness out of the station. “My passport doesn’t work.”
He explained Trudy’s trick. Murat nodded knowingly. “Governments,” he spat.
“I can pay you. Not right now, but when this is over.” He winced internally to hear himself say this, thinking how many times and to how many people he had promised the same. “I will pay you. No matter what I have to do.”
Murat looked at him with a mixture of warmth and menace. “I told you,” he said quietly. “No payment. Not between us. You are under our protection. It’s normal. Besides, you are giving Fadlan the chance to fight the Russians. He hates his government as much as you hate yours. He will thank you.”
“The Russian government?” Jim asked. “I thought we were going to find one person.”
Murat grinned wickedly and made a clicking sound as he opened his door and motioned for him to do the same. Katya was asleep against the window, a peaceful little drool running down the side of her face. She awoke when they shut the doors.
“So? You’re feeling better?” Murat asked Katya. “You’re ready to go home?”
“I am coming with you,” she said firmly.
Murat shook his head definitively. “No. No, she will go home. We’re going to fight,” he explained, rubbing his hands together as his smile broadened and his eyes glowed with the thrill of promised violence. “This is no place for a woman. You can see Dzheem after.”
Katya looked at all three of the men with contempt and disbelief. Before she could start to protest, Jim held up his hands and smiled as disarmingly as he could.
“Look,” he said in English, “maybe it would be better if you stayed here. I don’t like their reasoning either.” He jerked a thumb toward the front seats and lowered his voice confidentially. “They’re more comfortable with you at home, and I need them to get to your grandfather. And I will, I promise. I’ll get to him and bring him home to you. But if I don’t . . . If something happens and you don’t hear from me, say, by tomorrow morning, you need to call Amina Haddad at the American embassy. Here’s her card.”
Katya kept her hands in her pockets. “Why do I need to call her?”
“Why? I . . . if I can’t find him, or something happens, she knows about him. And about me, and Anatoly Vorov, and even you.”
“Yes, I’m sure she does. But what will she do for me?”
“She knows all about him,” Jim said, knowing as soon as he said it how weak it sounded. His calculus said that Mina represented American officialdom, therefore she was helpful; shamefully, he had never considered what she might want from Katya.
“I don’t want to get my grandfather back just to give him away to the Americans. To anybody. Do you understand? You do know who he is.” It fell between a statement and a question.
Jim nodded.
“Your friend from the embassy told you?”
He nodded again.
“She spies on my family, and you want me to run to her, begging for help? No. Thank you, Jim; I know you mean the best for me and my family, but no. I cannot. Afterward, Grandfather turned down everybody, every request, money, gifts, cars, apartments, travel, all, all, all, everything. All just to be himself. To try to be free, and not free like you said we would be free, but free as a person. As a man. Do you understand? Now, you think perhaps your embassy friend will help me find him, only to return him to where he was? No, of course you don’t. You are not so naïve; you know what she would want.”
“I just thought she could help you. Maybe give you some options.”
“You mean help me to get out of Russia, is that what you thought? I should tell you that the smiling wolf man offered this, too. If I help him, he will give me a visa to go wherever I want to go. Everybody thinks we all always are for sale, and we all would do anything just to go out from Russia. But this is my home. Whatever happens, I am Russian.” She glared at Jim defiantly, tears welling in her eyes as she pressed a clenched fist to her chest. “I am part of everything here and it is part of me. Would you want to leave your home so easily? If you did not absolutely have to?”
“No,” he agreed automatically. And then he thought of his parents, his father pottering and bent as he cleaned up the dinner dishes and his mother sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea, going over the books. He thought of them with a clarity and intensity that nearly poleaxed him, almost knocked him to the ground in homesick wonder and pain. The only one who could give the restaurant a future was freezing to death outside a train station in Moscow, new tears gluing his eyelashes together but too proud to cry properly. “No, I wouldn’t,” he said again, this time meaning it.
Katya nodded; she saw something in his eyes forbidding conversation.
“If she is who you think would help me, then I will come with you. I will not have my grandfather left to governments. Not yours and not ours and not anybody’s.” She stared levelly at Jim, challenging him to challenge her. Kaisa never would have done that.
She looked past Jim to Murat in the driver’s seat, and strapped herself in. To certain Russian drivers, buckling a seat belt constituted a grave insult, implying one does not trust the driver with his life; fortunately, Murat seemed to take it in stride. He looked at Jim with a resigned twist of the mouth, but his eyes twinkled and he cracked an imaginary whip.
Fadlan brought his open palm slowly, tenderly toward the side of Katya’s face, as his own characteristically grave expression melted into a tender smile, a benediction from some forgotten god spending the last ember of his power. In a tear-tightened voice he spoke to Murat in their own language, touched the corners of his eyes with his fingertips, licked them, and returned to his silent watching.
“His daughter,” Murat explained, cutting a glance at Fadlan to see if he objected. “She was a doctor in Kazan in 1991. He was outside the hospital, on the main square, throwing stones at soldiers, yelling, shouting. No guns.” He raised a finger in the air and stared at Katya and Jim until each of them nodded their understanding. “No guns. We are warriors, but this was a peaceful demonstration. We all agreed to leave our guns at home. The soldiers, the Russians, they shot anyway. In the air, just to frighten us, they said. They meant to hurt no one, they said. It was our fault, they said. One shot in the air went through a hospital window.” Katya gasped and took Fadlan’s weathered, scarred old hand in hers. “One shot. I have been shot six times—six!—and still walk the earth. But just one. In the throat, straight through. Her life bled from her in her own operating room. There was no trial. Afterward. Nothing. They told him it was his fault for shouting. Shouting at tanks and pimply little pizda soldiers with guns. His fault.”
Fadlan patted Katya’s hand four times, then four times, then four times again, replaying in his mind the one-loaf-two-loaves-three-loaves-eat! game he played with his daughter when she was a girl. Then with a last mournful sigh he released her hand and returned to the world.
“FOURTEEN HOURS,” Murat said jubilantly, smacking the steering wheel as they drove out of the station, turning south on Leningradsky Prospekt. “We will stay off main roads where we can, so perhaps longer. But we will be there tonight.”
A troubling thought occurred to Jim: he would have to cross an international border with a passport that said he was a pedophile rapist. His stomach flopped into his throat. “I have a problem with my passport,” he said to Murat.
Murat laughed uproariously, then translated Jim’s comments into Tatar for Fadlan, who smiled sadly and shook his head. “Nobody will see your passport,” Murat said, smiling at Jim in the rearview mirror as he maneuvered between two army trucks, one loaded with fresh-faced recruits whose faces betrayed assumed confidence and real terror, the other with barrels emblazoned with biohazard symbols.
“You have money?” Murat asked. “How much?” Jim held up a fan of American hundreds, fifties, and twenties ($580) and a small brick of rubles. “Fine. At each crossing we will give the guards a present. They will have a good evening out with their wives, and we can cross while they tie their shoes. Maybe a little beer money for any policeman who stops us. Of course, your passport will remain in your pocket.”
The road out of the city was pleasantly empty, while traffic backed up for miles in the other direction. Moscow’s rush hours lasted from about seven a.m. until noon and again from four until ten in the evening; between the two, the lunch crowds clogged the city center’s roads. Past the Garden Ring, Ryazansky Prospekt grew increasingly bleak, as the late-nineteenth-century broad granite buildings gave way to naked cinder-block towers that wept puffy caulk around each window and sat haphazardly in scrub fields like sandcastles on a deserted beach. The twisted hulk of a car burned black and furious in front of one building as a half dozen teenage boys in tracksuits cackled maniacally and threw bottles at passing cars. At first Jim felt they were leaving the twentieth century the farther they got from Moscow’s center, but now he saw they were leaving something more elemental behind. This area had an apocalyptic wildness that made even Fadlan’s jaw clench and his eyes dart. The only signs of commerce were vodka kiosks and squatter stands: tables covered with plastic sheeting holding off-brand Chinese cigarettes, single socks, copper wire, and flimsy household goods (soft aluminum screwdrivers and hammers, electric kettles bound to short or explode within a week, plastic plates with bluebirds frolicking in sunshine).
A few miles farther, though, and the city fell away entirely. A few American-style suburban developments—ersatz brick houses, bland and identical, clustered around a single roadway and blocked by a guard-house watching over a two-story-high steel gate—made only the most perfunctory incisions in the thick pine forest encroaching on the roadway. Eventually even those disappeared: who would want to live in such places, anyway? Europeans would have looked on them with aesthetic disdain; most Americans to whom they would appeal—corporate-suburban types—would probably be too scared to bring their families over in the first place. And as for Russians, why pay all that money to live where nobody can see you paying all that money? The exclusivniy places were mostly in central Moscow; villages were for dachas and grandparents.
Outside Moscow’s orbit, entire towns looked deserted. They drove through countless villages consisting of a single main street with a crumbling hotel, a dilapidated food store, a traffic circle with a patch of trees, and a statue of Lenin, and just off that main drag, streets of izbas—pre-Soviet wooden houses—without windows or doors, with hunks of wood missing, either sold or burned. Whenever they slowed in a town they attracted hostile stares: two swarthy, thuggish men in the front seats; a swarthy bespectacled one in the back, next to a beautiful, blond Russian. Everyone knew she was kidnapped, or a whore, or they had hooked her on drugs, or she liked mingling with blackasses, in which case she deserved what she got. Nothing good could have produced that configuration of people.
They stopped to stretch and eat at a ramshackle collection of tin-roofed stalls just outside Tula. Fadlan and Katya were both snoring heavily; Jim could neither sleep nor unclench his jaw. He and Murat got out of the car, shutting their doors gently behind them. Jim bought a couple of sausages and a sack of hard rolls; Murat hitched up his trousers and swaggered over to the largest, farther stall, whose owner he seemed to know and which sold a baffling array of stuffed animals, homemade pies, and used-car parts. The owner, a middle-aged woman with oversized glasses, a wiry perm, and pursed lips who would not have looked out of place at a university library, embraced Murat heartily, shoving a glass of tea and a cigarette into his hands. Jim ambled down toward the toilets, his hands in his pockets.
When he cleared sight of the car he pulled out his phone and called Mina’s cell number.
“Haddad,” she mumbled sleepily, “consular.”
“Mina, it’s me,” Jim whispered.
Her voice sparked to life. “Jim! Where are you! What happened! I thought . . . My God, Jim, are you calling from custody? Have you been charged? Do you need a Russian lawyer?”
“I’m not in custody, Mina, I’m fine. I’m sorry I didn’t come out of the apartment, but I’m fine.”
“You weren’t in your apartment. I checked.”
Jim skirted the implied question. He figured it was better she not know about Murat and his family unless she had to. “Why did you think I was in custody? Whose custody?”
“After the shooting the police went door-to-door in the building. They searched every apartment. I thought they must have found you.”
“You saw the body when you came in?”
“Of course I did. At first I thought it was you. Why do you think I pounded so hard? God, Jim, you . . . you at least could have let me know. Even if you didn’t want to come in, you could have said something so I would have known you weren’t dead.”
“Or worse.”
“Exactly. Or worse.”
“Did they take anyone else?”
“From the apartment search? Like who?”
“Come on, Mina. Stop.” He could feel her searchlight turned on, even now, probing him to see who in the building he was concerned about, who he knew. “Did they or didn’t they?”
“Not that I know of, no. We had a peeper sent out. He said there was no neighborhood canvas.”
“Is that normal?”
“When they’re looking for the person who was supposed to be shot instead of the shooter it is. This morning I heard the investigation was put under the direct supervision of someone at the Interior Ministry rather than the city police or the prosecutor’s office. You’ve made some powerful enemies. And I’m not even talking about Trudy, who’s ready to release your passport details.”
“At least I’m doing something right.”
“You know, your need to set things right is going to get you hurt. It was an extraviolent search. Doors were kicked in, noses were broken. Especially on the sixth floor. Not a door left intact. Come to think of it, that’s your old floor, isn’t it? You should have come in. Where are you?”
Jim took a deep breath and looked around. A crumbling, minor Russian road; rows of stunted trees that waved feebly, like broken hands, at passing cars; a dozen dilapidated stalls selling beer, canned meat, cigarettes, electrical goods, deflated and probably spoiled homemade baked goods under plastic tarps; a toilet that was little more than a roof over an open ditch. He was further from his world than he had ever been. He had no idea where he was. He was nowhere. “I’m nowhere,” he said. “I’ll tell you later.”
“Later?” Mina repeated, her voice honed to scalpel sharpness. “Have you lost your mind? As we speak, probably, they’re sending the tax police over to the Memory Foundation. The prosecutor is also probably at work right now, revoking the Foundation’s charter. By this afternoon, tomorrow if the courts are busy, everyone who works there will have their visas revoked. At best, that is; they’ll probably also see the inside of a Russian interrogation chamber. I hope you didn’t have any friends there, because you certainly don’t now. Want to hear more?”
“Always.”
“The four men you spoke to? The survivors? They’ve all been arrested on corruption charges.”
“Corruption?” Jim asked. “How can anyone . . .”
“They took bribes, probably. Either from the wrong donor, or they refused to share the wealth. Given their age, we’re guessing the former—keeping it all for yourself is a young man’s habit. You have to think you’re immortal. We’re not sure who paid them off yet, but we’re still digging. They’re all four retired army, but apparently they all did some investigative work for the Interior Ministry.”
“Investigating what? What does that mean?”
“Well, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. No way they were actual detectives. An investigator’s license opens a few doors, makes travel easier, forestalls questions, especially around military installations. Someone trusted them with something. We think they’re smuggling, but we don’t know what.”
“Do people count as contraband?”
“What do you mean?”
“You figure it out. You’re the one who mentioned the black box. What about the Willows?”
“They’re here. The Russians want them. They want you, too, and they think we’ve got you. By this afternoon you’ll be on RTR. Name and picture. An American spy loose in Russia. Still want to tell me you’re nowhere?”
RTR was the most popular of an ever-growing number of government-run television stations: if Jim’s name and picture were going out on their afternoon news, his passport’s validity would be the least of his problems.
“Can’t you stop them?” he asked, more urgently than he wanted to.
“If you come in now, before the Willows give them Anatoly Vorov’s name, then yes. Probably. The Russians know the Willows didn’t think of this on their own, but they don’t know who hired them. Yet. They’re going crazy trying to find out who the inside man is: someone in the government must have helped Vorov. My guess is Interior, given what happened with your investigation, but I don’t know for sure. But that’s who they want: they want their own. There’s room for negotiation, but Jim—I cannot stress this enough—we need you here, in the flesh, in the room. You’ll be debriefed by the Russians, but then you can go home. Probably. If they find you, it won’t be so easy.”
“Mina, let me ask you something: how can you promise that if I come in they’ll just let me go?”
He heard the click of the pen against her teeth.
“Are you there?”
“Yes, Jim, I’m here.”
“Did you hear my question?”
“I did.”
“You didn’t answer because you can’t, right?”
“Jim, I want you to listen to me. The Willows told us where Anatoly Vorov lives.” Jim’s heart sank: it was the one thing he hoped he’d be able to trade for safe passage home. “He has a house in Peredelkino, just outside Moscow. We are going to trade that information to the Russians for whoever is in the room at the time. If you want to take advantage of that largesse, you must get here, and get here soon. If you aren’t here by the time they come to meet with Trudy, you will find yourself very alone. Am I clear?”
Jim figured that with traffic, he was four, maybe five, hours away from Moscow: too far away to get back in time. And either he knew something Mina didn’t—Vorov’s real location—that he would be able to trade for consideration in a few hours, or he was fleeing the country on a doctored passport and was about to be a notorious rapist and spy. What he felt now was not desperation or fear, but the energizing, spark-in-the-heart rush that accompanies kickoff or shuffle. He had never played for stakes this high before, but he had played enough to know that it was all—everything, always—a game. “Clear, Mina.”
“So I can expect you within the hour?”
“Can you trace this phone?”
“Excuse me? Jim, what does that have to . . .”
“Can you or can’t you?”
“Yes, Jim. We can. We can trace phones.”
“Good. I’m turning it off now, but I’ll call you later. Be sure you can trace, on a map, where I’m calling from.”
She was still talking when he snapped the phone shut.