Orlov glanced at Zoshchenko, who smiled slyly back while waiting for Avvakum to recover her senses. A decade in an impoverished scientific backwater had turned Lara Avvakum into the perfect candidate for the job. She had both the ability and, more important, the incentive to succeed.
‘Would you like to see where you’re going to be working?’
‘ Da. ’
Orlov opened his briefcase and pulled out an eight-by-ten photograph of a large, nondescript industrial building. A flag bearing the conglomerate’s logo fluttered from a pole mounted on the
parapet. Below the flag, a string of large black letters spelled out the name VIO FINPROM.
‘I admit, it’s not the most elegant building I own, but the renovations are going quite well and security is excellent. It was built back in the time of Stalin; Gipromez used to design metallurgical facilities there. It’s on Prospekt Mira, about thirty minutes away from the center of Moscow. Your apartment is just a few Metro stops away, but we’ve arranged for you to have a car as well – a Saab.’
Avvakum stared at the photograph but saw her new life instead. Here she was, hurtling across European Russia in a supersonic jet. Ahead lay an apartment, a paying job, a new car, and the culture of Moscow.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, barely able to speak. She felt as though her life had just been saved.
20
Ann Arbor, Michigan
The sun beat down on the cab of Bud Vesper’s Caterpillar E120B excavator. Even with the windows open, the temperature inside the cab was a good ten degrees hotter than the ninety-five predicted by the cute weathergirl on the local news.
Yesterday the chairman of the University of Michigan’s physics department and several other dignitaries stood on the manicured lawn behind West Engineering and Randall. They wore unblemished white hard hats, and each was armed with an engraved bronze shovel. They broke ground with great ceremony, each turning a spadeful of sod to celebrate the construction of the modern addition that would join together the two old buildings.
Today the steel bucket mounted on the end of the Cat’s hydraulic arm bit out thirty times more earth than those ceremonial shovels each time it tore into the ground. After moving several tons of dirt and clay, Vesper called for Darrell Jones, the surveyor on his crew, to check the depth on the cut he was working on.
Jones motioned that they had reached the specified depth, so Vesper started cutting the next section.
Fifteen minutes into the new cut, Jones walked over with a story pole – an eight-foot metal ruler with markings accurate to a tenth of an inch. Attached to the pole was an electronic target that emitted a loud tone when struck by the oscillating laser on the surveyor’s transit. Jones held the pole vertical; the laser line was just shy of the target.
Jones motioned for Vesper to dig a little farther. As the bucket deftly peeled away another few inches of earth, Jones signaled for Vesper to stop as a strange object caught his eye.
Vesper had exposed a sixteen-inch-long piece of something. Jones dug around the edges of the object, which felt soft and rubbery.
‘I hope this isn’t some damn utility line,’ Jones groused.
He gripped the object with both hands and pulled. It easily sprang loose, and Jones quickly realized that it was a human arm.
‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ!’ he yelled.
‘Hey, Darrell,’ Vesper called out from the excavator.
‘Bud!’ Jones screamed, still bug-eyed and frantic. ‘Bud, somebody’s fuckin’ arm is in the goddamn hole!’
‘Easy, Jones, easy. Say again?’
‘There is a fuc-king arm,’ Jones replied, enunciating each syllable with deliberate precision, ‘in the god-damn hole.’
Vesper looked down into the excavation and saw an arm lying right where Jones had left it.
‘I ain’t no gravedigger,’ Jones complained.
Vesper shook his head in disgust, knowing that this discovery could set his project schedule back worse than a month of heavy rain. He pulled a phone off his hip and called Fred Murrow, the university’s project manager for this job.
‘Hey, Fred,’ he said sarcastically when the other man came on the line, ‘guess what I just dug up?’
‘Don’t tell me you hit the steam tunnel.’
‘No, we’re well clear of that. Guess again.’
‘Bud, I don’t have time for this. What the hell did you hit?’
‘I didn’t hit nothing, Fred. I dug up somebody’s fucking arm. I looked at all the as-built drawings for this site, and I don’t remember seeing the word cemetery anywhere.’
‘All right, Bud. Just sit tight. I’ll make a few calls and then I’ll be right down.’
21
Ann Arbor, Michigan
‘Hey, Darrell, you ready to go back to work?’
Darrell Jones walked over to where Bud Vesper sat in the excavator and hesitantly peered down into the pit. ‘Did they get all those dead fuckers out of the hole?’
‘After knocking my schedule off by a week, they better have. Fuckin’ med school.’
‘Med school?’
‘Yeah. Up until the late 1800s, the med school had a couple of buildings down here. The Gross Anatomy building stood right about where we were digging.’
‘That arm I found looked a lot fresher than the 1800s.’
‘It wasn’t. The university sent a pathologist down here to collect what we’d found. He told me the reason we didn’t find bones was that the parts were too pickled to rot and buried too deep for anything to eat ’em. The guy also said that back then there were rumors about the med school robbing fresh graves to get their cadavers. He assured me that they don’t do it like that anymore.’
‘I should hope the fuck not!’
‘Anyway, they’re all gone now and on their way to a decent burial.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ Jones said as he picked up his story pole and began climbing down into the hole.
By midafternoon Vesper had widened the excavation along the side of West Engineering, but as he dug closer to the old building, he began to encounter construction debris.
‘I’d like to beat the crap out of the guy who left all this shit down here,’ Vesper said as he pulled out another bucketful of shattered bricks.
Vesper lowered the hydraulic arm back into the hole. When it hit bottom, a loud hollow sound echoed from below. Jones quickly motioned for him to pull out. Vesper parked the bucket off to the side, shut the Cat down, and walked over to the edge of the hole.
‘What the hell did I hit now?’
‘Beats me, Bud, but it sure sounded funny.’
‘Might be a branch off the steam tunnel. What’s the invert elevation?’
Jones placed his story pole down in the hole and eye-balled the depth.
‘It’s about thirteen off the original grade.’
‘Too deep for a tunnel. What the…’ Vesper thought for a moment as he looked at the masonry, trying to
