ITwas like holding a chunk of ice against his ear. Zeldovich stood in the bleak emptiness of the Shimanovsk station, listening to the crackling sounds of merged voices. The KGB troops were blocking the engine’s way again and, from where he stood waiting for the connection to be made, he could see the engineer muttering to himself, occasionally shaking his fist at the guards. Then the voice of Bulgakov came through, distorted by the static, but familiar to Zeldovich. He had used the special military line, the privacy worth the distortion in sound caused by the security scrambler.
“Zeldovich here,” he said. “I am in Shimanovsk.”
“Shimanovsk?”
“Siberia. Near the Amur.”
He had no need to offer further landmarks. The Amur was the dividing line between the Soviet Union and China. He could sense the tension at the other end of the line.
“Grivetsky is dead.”
“My God!”
“You must come at once.”
“How did he die?”
“I cannot explain. Please. I am on the ‘Russiya.’ We are one day out of Khabarovsk.”
There was a jet airport at Khabarovsk where military aircraft could land.
“And Dimitrov?”
Bulgakov was well aware of Zeldovich’s connection to the General Secretary. He felt a slight difficulty in speaking. His throat constricted. It was the moment of decisiveness.
“Dimitrov is dying.”
“Will you repeat that?”
“Dimitrov is dying.”
“And Grivetsky is dead?”
“Yes.”
There was a brief pause. Zeldovich was willing to bet that the Marshall was evaluating the link between the two men, speculating on the consequences.
“I will meet the train at Khabarovsk.”
The connection was immediately broken. Zeldovich continued to hold the earpiece to his ear, pleased with his decision.
Dimitrov was dying. The doctor had confirmed it. Each man must chart his own course through the thicket, Zeldovich thought, sensing that he had taken the only turn in the road available to him. The death of Dimitrov would have meant the death of Zeldovich, unless he had acted in his own interest. He put the earpiece in its cradle and moved quickly toward the waiting train. At his signal, the troops boarded their carriage and the train began to move, the wheels turning slowly over the rails.
Satisfied that the doctor and Mrs. Valentinov were well guarded, Zeldovich made his way into his own compartment and dropped into the chair. He was exhausted, and feeling that sense of rootlessness that had gripped him at the beginning of the journey. He poked under his bunk and found a bottle of vodka. He took a long drink, feeling the heat in his chest. He took a cigar from the case in his inner pocket. It had been Grivetsky’s cigar case, and it had fallen to the floor as Grivetsky stumbled, his fingers gripping his mortal wound. Zeldovich puffed deeply, watching the smoke jet from his mouth, filling the air around him. He felt calmer now, his thoughts clearer, less agitated.
It was beyond his conception to think of life without Dimitrov. For thirty years now, he had been the moon to Dimitrov’s earth. For them death had had no meaning, except as a method of eliminating rivals. In that context death had many forms. It was removal from the power structure, by banishment, by intimidation, by humiliation, by ridicule, and, only as a last resort, as he had eliminated Grivetsky, by stifling life itself. Not that he personally had always been the instrument of these political murders. He had only carried out three or four over a period of thirty years, which was not a bad record considering the number of people who had had to be removed from Dimitrov’s path. This did not include, of course, the contrived “legal” deaths of persons by accidental means, death by third parties, in prisons, in hospitals. Dimitrov himself had been a pall bearer in a number of funerals of men who had been eliminated by his own order. And yet even these orders had been oblique, never direct, since the suggestion of elimination was all that Zeldovich had ever needed.
If there were accusatory whispers, Dimitrov would put them to rest by invoking the specter of Stalin.
“Thank God we have seen the last of those methods,” he would say and all in earshot would nod in agreement, their innards congealed with fear.
The process of elimination earned them, in those later years, long stretches of calm. Dimitrov had, at last, reached the pinnacle of unassailability, and although Zeldovich still stood as a symbol of implied terror, they both knew that that period had passed. Few dared to offer opposition, except in the most subtle ways, and differences of opinion were usually allowed as a kind of escape valve for bruised egos.
But age and rumors of Dimitrov’s illness had resurrected the smoldering ashes of ambition. Dimitrov, with his infallible sense of his own power, could detect the striving for power among those around him.
“My life is your ransom, Zeldovich,” Dimitrov had told him. “You will be their first course at my funeral.”
“They will choke on me,” he had said, and Dimitrov had laughed at his bravado.
Zeldovich knew that Dimitrov resented his need of him. And he was often abused, credited by Dimitrov with a capacity for cruelty that he did not feel was justified. He would characterize himself more accurately as a professional, whose job was to protect the goals of the state, as embodied by Dimitrov. It had been hard for him to bear being ridiculed by Dimitrov, and made the subject of his sarcasm.
Why was he thinking these thoughts now? Zeldovich wondered. Dimitrov would forgive him. It was not, at least in Zeldovich’s mind, a betrayal. Surely Dimitrov would understand that he had had to find some way to survive. Besides, he knew that Zeldovich was totally without commitment to anything beyond the person of Dimitrov. He had no interest in ideology. Lenin was merely a statue. Marx was a book. Communism was simply the approved doctrine. The party was nothing more than an organization, as were the Army, the KGB and the myriad of other agencies, too numerous to ever remember. Dimitrov was the only object, person, ideology, that had given any meaning whatsoever to his life. Dimitrov and he had discussed what would happen after his death, the adulation, the memorials. “If I do not stop the Chinks they will piss on my grave. History will destroy me for my lack of courage,” Dimitrov said.
Zeldovich felt his resentment engulf him like a wave. How dare Dimitrov be mortal, a rotten lump of flesh? It is you who are betraying me, Comrade Dimitrov, he railed, feeling the acid rise in his chest, the anger trigger the explosion inside of him. He puffed deeply on the cigar, annoyed at his own search for justification.
Zeldovich stood up and paced the compartment. Was it his own survival that really mattered? he wondered. Death was so commonplace an incident in his world that it hardly seemed worth fearing. There was no God, no unknown, nothing to fear. There was only nothingness, wasteland, like this bleak country. The mind grew blank. The body cold. And that was that.
He felt the wheels begin to slow beneath his feet. Through the window, he could see a faint glow of lights and figures moving like phantoms along the tracks. Shielding his eyes, he could make out squat forms moving slowly, shovels and brooms on their shoulders, a work gang of babushkas.
Then the wheels clanked to a halt, the din of movement receding as the great train stood silent in the glow of the station. He read the faded letters on the sign that hung from the eaves of a dilapidated wooden station. Belgorsk. It held no meaning for him. He could make out only a few odd-shaped houses where weak lights glowed. In a nearby window a woman was filling a samovar while a man in woolen underwear sat at a table drinking from a large cup. They seemed familiar, like his own mother and father, whom he had not thought about for years. Zeldovich flicked a cigar ash to the floor.
A sharp knock on the compartment door startled him. His fingers automatically went to the butt of the gun tucked in his belt.
“Sir?” a woman’s voice said. He recognized it as that of the younger attendant and opened the door. She stood, puffy-eyed, in the passageway, holding out a small brown envelope.
“A message,” she said, obviously curious. Taking it from her, he slammed the door and tore the envelope open.
“Call at once. D.”
He could imagine Dimitrov lying in his bed in helpless uncertainty, his strength and confidence ebbing, his paranoia mounting. He smiled as he imagined the man suffering, thrashing in frustration. Grivetsky’s confirmation of arrival in Chita had not come. The American doctor had not called again. He could see Dimitrov reaching for the telephone, stirring the flunkies on his staff, none of whom dared to imagine his consternation, his mounting frustration. He looked at the message again.
“Call at once. D.” Then he tore it up and flung the pieces against the window like confetti.