Chernobyl Murders (31 page)

Pavel and Nikolai discussed the ramifications of KGB methods as they sat in a shiny black Volga parked up the street from Aunt Magda’s house.

“So,” said Nikolai, “you’re saying there’s no point placing microphones or even reading the mail because guilty people won’t say anything to begin with?”

“Right,” said Pavel. “Our work in the Pripyat post office was a waste of time.”

“Then there’s no point to any of this.” Nikolai motioned with his hand at the dashboard of the Volga and at his new suit of clothes.

“What we’re doing here is as useless as reading those idiot peasants’

letters.”

“Would you rather be back in the post office?” asked Pavel. “Or worse yet, getting a fatal dose of radiation hunting down idiots stu-pid enough to stay in Pripyat?”

“No,” said Nikolai. “I’m simply bored. And I’m really hungry.

I think the iodine we took increases appetite. Do you smell food?

Someone’s cooking somewhere.”

“My sister-in-law’s probably cooking an elaborate dinner for my wife right now,” said Pavel.

“How far away is your sister-in-law’s place?” asked Nikolai. “If we get a break, we could go for a bite, and you and your wife …”

Pavel waved dismissively. “Not a chance. Anyway, I don’t smell food. All I smell is the newness of the car and perhaps your foul breath.”

“Careful,” said Nikolai. “We carry pistols now. In the post office all we did was throw crumpled letters at one another.”

“I wonder if anyone will ever be allowed back in Pripyat,” said Pavel.

“A tragedy,” said Nikolai. “Banners for May Day prepared, and no one to use them. Maybe the whole thing was a conspiracy planned in Moscow. A big distillery hidden among the reactors at Chernobyl to keep employees happy, and Moscow destroyed it as part of their campaign against alcoholism.”

Pavel shook his head, smiled, and resumed staring at the house.

“I wonder how long we’ll have to sit here. This so-called subversive Juli Popovics hasn’t made a move. You’d think she’d at least give us an opportunity to drive about occasionally.”

“We’d have the opportunity if we were following Detective Horvath. Of course, we wouldn’t be able to use a Volga.” Nikolai looked out the back window. “Where do you think his tail is today?”

“Could be the van down the block,” said Pavel.

“Such strange methods, not identifying the agents assigned to Detective Horvath. What if something happens and we start shooting one another? And Horvath’s a strange one. Did you see the way his mouth moved when he was walking into the house earlier? My mother always said men who talk to themselves have a second soul that refuses to die, like a devil.”

“You should tell Major Komarov you think Detective Horvath is a devil, Nikolai.”

Nikolai shook his head. “He’d put us back in our Moskvich, return our contaminated clothes, and send us to Pripyat. I’m content to stay here. Besides, your wife is nearby.”

“Don’t keep reminding me,” said Pavel.

Nikolai laughed. “At least you have someone. I wonder what became of my date from last weekend in Pripyat. I hope she got out all right. Young and firm, not yet fattened up.”

Pavel frowned at Nikolai, then sneered.

“Sorry, Pavel. By the way, what does your wife think of all this?”

“She thinks something’s wrong. She says it’s strange we should be rewarded for running away from Pripyat. Everyone else working for Komarov knows more than we do. It might be more dangerous than we’ve been led to believe.”

“Look,” said Nikolai. “Detective Horvath is leaving. Too bad Juli Popovics isn’t going with him.”

Detective Horvath drove past them and turned north to the main highway.

“He didn’t even look at us,” said Nikolai.

“He doesn’t have to,” said Pavel. “He knows we’re here. It’s the others he’s watching for.”

While Nikolai and Pavel watched, the van down the street followed Detective Horvath’s Zhiguli at a careful distance. Now they were alone, two PK agents in their shiny Volga, wearing business suits and carrying brand new Makarov 9mm pistols in leather shoulder holsters still aromatic from the tanning mill.

Even though technicians were seen waving Geiger counters above vegetables at local markets and canned goods were running out, television broadcasts showed films of people swimming in the Pripyat River. Another film showed a woman milking a cow with a soldier checking the milk with a dosimeter and the camera zoom-ing in to show the low radiation count. Everything was fine. Or was it? For example, why had Kiev Party officials, having taken their children out of school early the previous week, not yet returned from southern regions?

Northwest of Kiev on the road from Korosten, a busload of Chernobylites had spent two days on their journey because of various complications. When they piled out of the bus and saw bread, sausage, and tea being served by young men and women from a Kiev komsomol, one old man, unable to control himself, stuffed food into his coat pockets until he resembled a circus bear. The old man had a thin face, reminding Lazlo of his father. When the man finished stuffing his pockets and retreated to the dark side of the bus to eat, Lazlo recalled stories his father had told him and Mihaly about Stalin’s 1932 famine. His father going on about the devil Stalin, his mother stopping his father when he began recounting the tale of the little boy who failed to show up to school one day. The boy, it was later discovered, had died and been pickled in a jar by his parents.

As Lazlo stood near his car, his hands deep in his pockets to ward off the evening chill, he wondered if Juli would have been better off going with the people who brought her from Pripyat. She could have disappeared and become an anonymous victim forced to leave home. But she was in Visenka with the KGB watching her in an obvious way, while they watched him in a not-so-obvious way.

Several hundred meters down the road, a van sat at the side of a gasoline station closed for the night. The van’s side door was out of his view, and he was certain peepholes were most likely drilled in the side of the van to coincide with the stenciled markings of a construction collective. Obviously the KGB either suspected Mihaly of sabotage, or because he was dead they assumed he would make a convenient scapegoat.

Stash, one of Lazlo’s militiamen, ran up. “A car just arrived from the north with a pregnant woman! They say she needs medical attention! She’s gotten out of the car and …”

“Give them directions to hospital and let them through,” said Lazlo.

After Stash ran back to the car, Lazlo could see the woman was quite far along and had to be helped back into the car by a concerned-looking young man. If only Juli Popovics had a husband.

Instead of being watched by the KGB, she would be simply another woman passing through the roadblock. But she had no husband.

Except for her aunt who provided a temporary home, she had no one.

She was beautiful, attractive, alone, and constantly on his mind.

It was different with Tamara. Although Tamara was a friend and lover, she had her literary magazine and her literary friends.

He admired Tamara, enjoyed being with her. But so did other men.

Everything was different when it came to Juli Popovics. Crazy. He was going crazy. First he thinks Tamara is different; next he thinks Juli is different. What was going on?

Last week he drove Juli to Visenka. Last week he visited to inquire about her hospital tests. Yesterday he spent the afternoon with her. Yesterday he kissed her, and in accepting his kiss, she drew him to her like one of the howling dogs left behind by the Chernobylites.

He was hers. Even now, forty kilometers away, he was hers. Had he, after the explosion at Chernobyl, purposely sought out Mihaly’s lover? If he could not have Nina, could he at least have Juli?

Insane brooding fool. Instead of accepting what life offers he plays mind games. Lazlo took his hands from his pockets, rubbed them together, and went to join his men at the roadblock.

Stories told by refugees, taken one at a time, might or might not be true. But when stories repeated themselves, they became believable.

Livestock being herded south shot by soldiers. Dogs running after buses. A radius ranging from twenty to fifty kilometers contaminated. Fire still burning at the reactor, and radiation still being released.

Another Chernobyl accident in 1982 covered up. Speculation about whether Pripyat residents would ever be allowed to return.

Speculation made people do strange things. In one car, all but the driver were drunk. Even a boy of eight or nine was drunk, having been urged to drink red wine and vodka because of the rumor this would protect him from radiation.

Lazlo and his men had interviewed refugees for several days. At first, his men shook their heads and even smiled in reaction to the stories. Then they became tired of hearing the same things over and over. Tonight, Lazlo noticed his men looked worried. Would there be a shift in the wind? If the fire was still burning and there was a shift in the wind …

A little before midnight, Stash summoned Lazlo to a car stopped in the northbound lane. “It’s a time warp,” said Stash. “An old Zil limousine from the Khrushchev days.”

The huge old Zil rumbled loudly through a bad muffler. When he approached the car, Lazlo noticed the grill and front bumper missing and recalled seeing the car before, recalled parking near it somewhere in Kiev, somewhere at night.

There were no passengers, only a driver. The man had a black beard and mustache, and his hair was thinning. He looked Middle Eastern and had a familiar face. The man switched off the ignition, and the Zil’s engine coughed and sputtered to a stop.

“Where are you going?” asked Lazlo.

“One goes where one must in the dark of night when a friend beckons.”

“What?”

The bearded man continued. “Friends, bodies separate but joined at the head, brain juices mingling. Borscht.”

Then Lazlo recalled where he’d seen the man. Club Ukrainka.

One of Tamara’s poet friends. He leaned close to the Zil’s window.

“An admirer of the poet Vasyl Stus sent me,” said the bearded man. “Vasyl Stus from the labor camp I am not, but if I dare …”

“No poems now. Tell me what you came to say.”

“It’s Tamara,” whispered the man. “She’s at the club. She wants you there.”

“Is she all right?”

“I don’t know. She appears normal, although Tamara is by no means a normal person. She said to find you and bring you to her.”

“I have my own car. I’ll drive. You can follow if you like.”

After he directed Stash to take charge at the roadblock, Lazlo sped off in the Zhiguli. Behind him, the Zil tried to keep up. And behind the Zil, its headlights illuminating the Zil’s smoky exhaust, was the van from the closed gasoline station.

Club Ukrainka was quiet. Tamara sat at her usual table in the corner, alone, the candle on the table unlit. She wore no makeup and did not stand to cheerfully call Lazlo to her table. A glass of red wine stood before her. He ordered the same and sat across from her, moving the unlit bottled candle aside. She looked tired as she sipped her wine. She pulled the shawl she wore tightly about her.

“Something is wrong,” said Lazlo.

When the bartender brought his wine, Lazlo noticed even he sensed Tamara’s anxiety.

Tamara waited for the bartender to leave before speaking. “The KGB picked me up this morning. They questioned me all day and let me go only two hours ago.”

“What did they want? Did they hurt you?”

Tamara took a gulp of wine, put the glass down, brushed her hair from her forehead. “I thought it would be about the writers’

union Chernobyl articles again, but it wasn’t. They wanted to know about you, Laz. How often you come here, what we talk about. They wanted to know what we talked about last weekend when we were together. I said it was none of their business. They said by the end of the day, I would not only tell them what we talked about, I would tell them what we did.”

Tamara wiped at her eyes. “And I told them, Laz. I told them what we did. I told them about the dinner you made. I told them we danced. I told them everything, because we did nothing wrong.

They said if I didn’t cooperate, we’d both be in trouble. The main interrogator was kind at first. A handsome young man simply doing his job. I was wrong to cooperate, Laz. They hinted about my sanity being in question. They had copies of the literary review and pointed out articles they insisted were anti-Soviet. I didn’t want to go to the psychiatric hospital, Laz. I didn’t want to be made into a crazy woman …”

“Tamara, if you’re trying to apologize, it’s not necessary. You did the right thing. With these fools it’s best, if you have nothing to hide, to simply tell everything.”

“But they wanted me to say things about you.”

“Like what?”

“The young man kept referring to what you did when you weren’t with me. He wanted me to agree you and your brother and his lover …”

“Juli Popovics?” asked Lazlo.

Tamara tried to smile. “It was funny in a way. His name was Brovko, Captain Brovko. At the same time he’s implying conspiracy at Chernobyl, he’s trying to make me jealous. I said you told me about Juli Popovics yourself and I didn’t think it at all unusual for a friend of your brother to come to Kiev and …”

“And they didn’t hurt you during the questioning?”

“Except for helping me into the car, they didn’t touch me. In the end they simply wanted me to agree your trips to the Chernobyl region were mysterious. I told them because your brother lived there, it was obvious they were trying to create crimes where none existed.

Brother visits brother, and the KGB breaks wind.”

“They don’t like being made to look foolish, Tamara.”

“What should I have done, Laz?”

“Told them the truth and not volunteered your own opinions.

Said whatever you had to in order to protect yourself. Describe this Captain Brovko.”