“What if I am?” Vasili answered cautiously. “Who wants to know, and how come?”
“Gleb Sukhanov, that’s who.” The militiaman straightened his fur cap. The motion seemed to lend him courage. “And he’s the one who asks you things. You don’t ask him. So come along with me, hey?”
After a long pause, Vasili nodded. “All right.” He could have plugged the militiaman with the pistol he’d taken from Grigory Papanin. But then what? He’d have to run off into the taiga. Either they’d catch him or he’d starve. He didn’t want anything to do with Sukhanov or any other Chekist, but you didn’t always get what you wanted. Sometimes you got what you got, and you had to make the best of it.
The militiaman took him into the log-walled town hall. By himself, the man was nothing. He had the Soviet state behind him, though, and his strut said he knew it.
“Here’s the Yasevich item, Comrade,” he said to Gleb Sukhanov.
“Thanks.” The MGB man eyed Vasili with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger air. “What did I tell you when I gave you your replacement documents?”
“You told me to keep my nose clean, Comrade Sukhanov.” Vasili made sure he didn’t come out with Gospodin again. He didn’t want to piss off the Chekist. His tone still quiet, he went on, “That’s what I’ve done.”
“You say so, but I’ve heard different,” Sukhanov said.
“From who?” A split second later, Vasili saw the answer to what he’d said: “From Grigory Papanin? What kind of lies did that motherfucker tell about me?”
“He said you were a violent hooligan. The way he looks these days doesn’t make him seem like a liar.”
“You can say that again!” The militiaman eyed Vasili as if he were a Siberian tiger.
“You know what that was about, Comrade?” Vasili said to Sukhanov. “He didn’t like it that I work harder than he does. He and his punks tried to shake me down. A little while later, I got him by himself and I made him see that that wasn’t such a hot idea.”
“I’m not sure he can see anything out of one eye,” Gleb Sukhanov murmured. “He’s been here for years. Why should I believe somebody the wind blew in with the fallout?”
“Comrade, if Papanin’s been in Smidovich for years, then for years you’ve known what kind of a son of a bitch he is. Am I right or am I wrong?” Vasili knew he was rolling the dice, but he thought the odds were with him. He couldn’t imagine Papanin being smart enough to play the choirboy.
Sukhanov pursed his lips and blew air out through them. The militiaman looked up at the roughly trimmed boards of the ceiling. That told Vasili everything he needed to know.
“Well,” the Chekist began. Then he stopped, as if he’d come out with a complete sentence. He tried again: “That is…” Vasili waited, doing his best to play the respectful subject. At last, the official managed, “His behavior may not always be exemplary, but he is a socially friendly element.”
Vasili had been in the Soviet Union long enough to understand what that meant. Papanin was a thief, with connections to other thieves. “I’m no political myself, Comrade!” Vasili said. “I’m not a zek at all!”
“Yes, we know that,” Gleb Sukhanov replied. “After you…dealt with Papanin, we made inquiries. The corrective-labor system has no record of you.”
“You see?” Vasili said happily.
But Sukhanov held up a hand to show he hadn’t finished. “As far as I can tell, the Red Army has no record of you, either. Given your age, that seems, well, unusual.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth to show how unusual it seemed.
All of a sudden, Vasili wasn’t so happy any more. “I served the Soviet Union,” he said. “My records would be in Khabarovsk.”
“Some of them would. Most of them would, probably. But not all of them,” the MGB man said. “A copy of your service record ought to be on file in Moscow.” He shrugged. “If it is, they haven’t found it.”
“Comrade, I don’t know what to tell you,” Vasili said, fearing anything he did tell Sukhanov would only get him in deeper. He went on, “I’ve done my part ever since I washed up here after the bomb fell. I haven’t had trouble with anybody but that Papanin turd, and he started it.”
“So you say, anyhow.” Out of the blue, Sukhanov switched to Mandarin almost as fluent as Vasili’s: “Do you understand me when I speak this language?”
Vasili was glad he’d wasted time in gambling halls. His face stayed blank in spite of his surprise. “That’s Chinese, isn’t it?” he said. “Traders would come over the Amur and jabber like that. I learned a little of the stuff they’d yell when they got mad. You stupid turtle, that kind of thing.” He put on a Russian accent thicker than the Chekist’s. Still playing dumb, he added, “It’s like mat, isn’t it?”
“It’s not filthy the same way mat is. It’s filthy a different way.” Sukhanov shook his head in annoyance, like a bear batting at a hive when the bees went for his nose and ears. He scowled at Vasili. “You can go. I can’t pin anything on you. You aren’t wrong-Grigory Papanin is a dick with the gleets. But you haven’t got all your cards on the table, either. Not even close.”
“Comrade Sukhanov, who but a fool ever puts any more of his cards on the table than he has to?” Vasili was a great many things. Not even the arrogant Chinese had ever accused him of being a fool.
He won a chuckle from the militiaman, who’d been watching him and the Chekist go back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. “He’s got you there, Gleb Ivanovich,” the fellow said.
“And who asked you?” Sukhanov snapped.
The militiaman deflated like a balloon in a rose bush. Vasili could practically see the poor guy’s balls crawl up into his belly. “Nobody, Comrade. Sorry,” he muttered, staring at the spot on the floor between his shoes.
Everywhere you went, there were important people, and then there was everybody else. There sure had been in Harbin. And there were in Smidovich, too, even if someone important here would have been a nobody anywhere else. An MGB man here was one of the people who gave orders. The town militiaman was one of those who had to take them.
Sukhanov’s gaze didn’t seem so mild and friendly as it had while he was arranging Vasili’s documents. “Yes, you can go,” he said. “But I’ve got my eye on you now.”
Vasili and the militiaman left together. Which was less happy with the world would have been hard to say. Vasili was unhappy with one part of the world in particular: the part named Grigory Papanin.
–
Luisa Hozzel and Trudl Bachman worked a two-man-well, here a two-woman-saw. Back and forth, back and forth. Sooner or later, the damned pine would fall. Luisa hoped it fell sooner. Camp work norms stayed the same no matter how hard it snowed.
And it snowed…more than Luisa had imagined it could snow anywhere. The camp lay at somewhere not far from the same latitude as Fulda. The days here had grown shorter about the same way they did in the town where she’d lived her whole life till the Russians grabbed her.
To her way of thinking, that meant the camp should have had the same kind of weather as Fulda. And it had, during the summer. It got about as hot as Fulda ever did, and about as muggy. There were more mosquitoes here in the course of a day than Fulda saw in a hundred years, but mosquitoes weren’t exactly a part of the weather.
The trouble was, summer here didn’t last. Snow started in October, and kept piling up and piling up. Luisa was convinced this was how the last Ice Age must have started.
As she learned more Russian, and as the woman prisoners from the USSR picked up scraps of German, she got to indulge in the ancient human pleasure of complaining about the weather. Almost without exception, the Russians and other Soviet folk thought that was hysterically funny. Some of them came from places with climates worse than this. All of them knew of such places.
“You hear of Kolyma?” one of the bitches asked in a mishmash of Russian and German.
Luisa’d shaken her head. “What Kolyma? Where Kolyma?”