“But it was the ninth level that terrified my mother the most. There, you lived among wild beasts that gorged themselves on human hearts.”
The cruelty of telling this to a child wasn’t lost on Arkadin. He was absolutely certain that if his mother had been Ukrainian she’d have told him the same folktale.
“I used to laugh at her story-or at least I tried to,” Devra said. “I struggled against believing such nonsense. But that was before a number of those levels of hell were visited on us.”
Arkadin felt her presence inside him all the more deeply. The sense of wanting to protect her seemed to bounce around inside him, increasing exponentially as his brain tried to come to terms with what the feeling meant. Had he at last stumbled across something big enough, bright enough, strong enough to put his demons to rest?
After Marlene’s death, Icoupov had seen the writing on the wall. He’d stopped trying to peer into Arkadin’s past. Instead he’d shipped him off to America to be rehabilitated. “Reprogrammed,” Icoupov had called it. Arkadin had spent eighteen months in the Washington, DC, area going through a unique experimental program devised and run by a friend of Icoupov’s. Arkadin had emerged changed in many ways, though his past-his shadows, his demons-remained intact. How he wished the program had erased all memory of it! But that wasn’t the nature of the program. Icoupov no longer cared about Arkadin’s past, what concerned him was his future, and for that the program was ideal.
He fell asleep thinking about the program, but he dreamed he was back in Nizhny Tagil. He never dreamed about the program; in the program he felt safe. His dreams weren’t about safety; they were about being pushed from great heights.
Late at night, a subterranean bar called Crespi was the only option when he wanted to get a drink in Nizhny Tagil. It was a reeking place, filled with tattooed men in tracksuits, gold chains around their necks, short-skirted women so heavily made up they looked like store mannequins. Behind their raccoon eyes were vacant pits where their souls had been.
It was in Crespi where Arkadin at age thirteen was first beaten to a pulp by four burly men with pig eyes and Neanderthal brows. And it was to Crespi that Arkadin, after nursing his wounds, returned three months later and blew the men’s brains all over the walls. When another crim tried to snatch his gun away, Arkadin shot him point-blank in the face. That sight stopped anyone else in the bar from approaching him. It also gained him a reputation, which helped him to amass a mini real estate empire.
But in that city of smelted iron and hissing slag success had its own particular consequences. For Arkadin, it was coming to the attention of Stas Kuzin, one of the local crime bosses. Kuzin found Arkadin one night, four years later, having a bare-knuckle brawl with a giant lout whom Arkadin called out on a bet, for the prize of one beer.
Having demolished the giant, Arkadin grabbed his free beer, swigged half of it down, and, turning, confronted Stas Kuzin. Arkadin knew him immediately; everyone in Nizhny Tagil did. He had a thick black pelt of hair that came down in a horizontal slash to within an inch of his eyebrows. His head sat on his shoulders like a marble on a stone wall. His jaw had been broken and reconstructed so badly-probably in prison-that he spoke with a peculiar hissing sound, like a serpent. Sometimes what he said was all but unintelligible.
On either side of Kuzin were two ghoulish-looking men with sunken eyes and crude tattoos of dogs on the backs of their hands, which marked them as forever bound to their master.
“Let’s talk,” this monstrosity said to Arkadin, jerking his tiny head toward a table.
The men who’d been occupying the table rose as one when Kuzin approached, fleeing to the other side of the bar. Kuzin hooked his shoe around a chair leg, dragged it around, and sat down. Disconcertingly, he kept his hands in his lap, as if at any moment he’d draw down on Arkadin and shoot him dead.
He began talking, but it took the seventeen-year-old Arkadin some minutes before he could make heads or tails of what Kuzin was saying. It was like listening to a drowning man going under for the third time. At length, he realized that Kuzin was proposing a merger of sorts: half Arkadin’s stake in real estate for 10 percent of Kuzin’s operation.
And just what was Stas Kuzin’s operation? No one would speak about it openly, but there was no lack of rumors on the subject. Everything from running spent nuclear fuel rods for the big boys over in Moscow to white slave trading, drug trafficking, and prostitution was laid at Kuzin’s doorstep. For his own part, Arkadin tended to dismiss the more outlandish speculation in favor of what he very well knew would make Kuzin money in Nizhny Tagil, namely, prostitution and drugs. Every man in the city had to get laid, and if they had any money at all, drugs were far preferable to beer and bathtub vodka.
Once again, want never appeared on Arkadin’s horizon, only need. He needed to do more than survive in this city of permasoot, violence, and black lung disease. He had come as far as he could on his own. He made enough to sustain himself here, but not enough to break away to Moscow where he needed to go to grab life’s richest opportunities. Outside, the rings of hell rose up: brick smokestacks, vigorously belching particle-laden smoke, iron guard towers of the brutal prison zonas, bristling with assault rifles, powerful spotlights, and bellowing sirens.
In here he was locked inside his own brutal zona with Stas Kuzin. Arkadin gave the only sensible answer. He said yes, and so entered the ninth level of hell.
Thirty-One
WHILE ON LINE for passport control in Munich, Bourne phoned Specter, who assured him everything was in readiness. Moments later he came in range of the first set of the airport’s CCTV cameras. Instantly his image was picked up by the software employed at Semion Icoupov’s headquarters, and before he’d finished his call to the professor he’d been identified.
At once Icoupov was called, who ordered his people stationed in Munich to move from standby to action, thus alerting both the airport personnel and the Immigration people under Icoupov’s control. The man directing the incoming passengers to the different cordoned-off lanes leading to the Immigration booths received a photo of Bourne on his computer screen just in time to indicate Bourne should go to booth 3.
The Immigration officer manning booth 3 listened to the voice coming through the electronic device in his ear. When the man identified to him as Jason Bourne handed over his passport the officer asked him the usual questions-“How long do you intend to remain in Germany? Is your visit business or pleasure?”-while paging through the passport. He moved it away from the window, passed the photo under a humming purple light. As he did so, he pressed a small metallic disk the thickness of a human nail into the inside back cover of the passport. Then he closed the booklet, smoothed its front and back covers, and handed it back to Bourne.
“Have a pleasant stay in Munich,” he said without a trace of emotion or interest. He was already looking beyond Bourne to the next passenger in line.
As in Sheremetyevo, Bourne had the sense that he was under physical surveillance. He changed taxis twice when he arrived at the seething center of the city. In Marienplatz, a large open square from which the historic Marian column ascended, he walked past medieval cathedrals, through flocks of pigeons, lost himself within the crowds of guided tours, gawping at the sugar-icing architecture and the looming twin domes of the Frauenkirche, cathedral of the archbishop of Munich-Freising, the symbol of the city.