commandant, Priabin, in the matter, and in himself. The accident has become a suspicious circumstance in Priabin's eyes, one in which your son is—'
'My son was not involved!' Rodin shouted. His free hand trembled, plucking at the comforter. His reactions confused him. They were muddied, stirred up like a pool by Serov's words. He tried to analyze his emotions, but was unpracticed.
He looked at the photograph on his bedside table, ornately framed in silver. A snowbound Moscow park, a handsome young woman in a tailored suit exposed by her open fur coat, fur boots on her feet, but a fashionable felt hat rather than one of fur on her dark hair. A pram, and a child in it. He had taken that snapshot himself. Had Valery been a disappointment to him since then? No, no, only when he had begun to grow, attended school, was too much and too long under his mothers influence…
He regained control, and snapped: 'Get to the point, Serov. Are you suggesting my son has been insecure?'
'The word I would choose is — indiscreet, comrade General.'
'Then?'
'Your son has interested the KGB. I would rather they did not talk to him.'
'You attracted the KGB's attention by staging that accident.'
'We had to kill the actor, a queer — your son's friend. He knew too much and he was being asked about
'Serov, you're impertinent — insubordinate.' Rodin began to feel breathless. He pressed his free hand on his chest, hard. And calmed himself. Valery's actor friend — the words hurt like a physical pain. Valery blabbing to his circle about
'General, I apologize. It was my professional anxiety.' The voice did not soothe, but seemed confidently silky with threat. To Valery? The man would not dare.
'Yes, Serov, yes.' His voice was high.
'The accident was designed to stop the leak. To warn others.'
'Yes.'
'Your son must go on leave.' Rodin felt himself led along a dark path, his guide a creature determined to rob him. 'If he is not here, then all the gaps will be stopped up. There will be no further leaks.'
'But you say my son told — the actor?' He was floundering now, he realized. Serov had assumed control of the conversation. His own authority seemed to have vanished. 'Everything?'
'Oh, nothing of the detail, General, we're sure of that. After all, he doesn't know very much, does he?'
'Of course not.' He felt his son's safety, and his villainy, working deeper and deeper into him.
'General?'
'I–I will speak to my son in the morning,' he managed to say.
'I recommend—'
'I will speak to him in the morning!' Rodin bellowed in an irate voice, thrusting the receiver back onto its rest.
Dmitri Priabin yawned and rubbed his cheeks, then replaced his hands on the steering wheel. He was tired from lack of sleep after the emotions he had endured. He could not fend off those glimpses of the past hours that flickered in his imagination. Zhikin's wife, in particular. He had watched her staring at him as her face crumbled into grief and she began crying in a way that seemed to make her ache. Ugly, mouth open, eyes blind, twisting her apron.
The children had been taken by a neighbor. He'd seen to that before breaking the news of Viktor's death. After a while, she seemed to have forgotten his very presence, as if tied to her chair in a stiff, unmoving posture; staring into a storm that made her eyes stream.
Eventually, he had left her, patting her hand, mumbling justice, revenge, which she heard as little of as she had his earlier sympathy. He'd told her nothing of his suspicions — knowledge, he corrected himself — but he'd wanted her to know something would happen, something would be done to balance things. Then his flat, and sleeplessness; crowding fears, dim futures. The dangerous path — he knew about Rodin and the little actor. Rodin knew he knew. An ugly, dark standoff.
But he had to go on with it.
He opened the car door. Morning leaking into the sky. The wind chilled through him at once. He crossed the yard at the rear of the KGB's Tyuratam building toward the central garage. Rodin's narrow, somehow naked features were vivid in his mind, tempting and threatening, as he bent his face away from the wind and hunched into his overcoat. Would he have told his father? What did the GRU know, how much had he told them about his conversation, his slip of the tongue, in Priabin's office?
Rodin knew. He cleared his throat with what might have been a growl. Concentrate on that, not your own skin, he told himself. Remember they killed Viktor — whatever else, they did that.
He banged open the judas door of the garage, startling one of the mechanics.
'Well?' he snapped. They'd been working on the Zil all night, presumably. His jaw worked, masticating emotion like hot food. Revenge? No, just making things come out right. 'Well, Gorbalev?' he snapped, more impatiently, catching sight of one of the forensic officers leaning out of the driver's seat of the wrecked car as it rested on a hydraulic ramp in the center of the untidy, oil-stained floor of the garage. 'Anything? How did they arrange it?'
Gorbalev seemed to study Priabin for a moment, then he climbed slowly out of the car, his long legs seeming to hamper his movements, as if the dimensions of the Zil were those of a child's kiddie car.
'Colonel,' he greeted Priabin, who was still posed in the doorway, the cold flowing in behind him. 'There's nothing on the car,' he added. 'Sorry.'
'Nothing?' His voice turned at once from disappointment to temper. 'What the hell—?'
'We've been thorough. Everyone has,' Gorbalev replied evenly, adjusting his glasses, taller by several inches than Priabin. 'There's nothing here. But, come upstairs — Zhikin's body.' He appeared almost ashamed. Priabin looked at the car, glaring at its stained, dented hood and empty windshield. Through that—
He shuddered and followed Gorbalev out of the garage, along green-painted corridors, through frosted glass doors into the main building. To the first floor.
Viktor's body, lying on a table. He winced in anticipation, but there had not yet been a full postmortem. The scarred, hair-covered upper torso had not been cut, damaged by the pathologist. Zhikin's grimly blank face had been cleaned of glass. The smell of carbolic soap and disinfectant might have been emitted by the gray skin of the corpse.
'Here,' Gorbalev said, pulling the covering green rubber sheet back from the lower part of the body.
Flat stomach, black hair massed around the limp penis, new and old marks on the thighs and shins. Blue stains, like old ink at the knee and ankle of the right leg. An arm was damaged, too, the bone breaking through the gray skin just where the faint line of an old suntan ringed the upper arm. Above the right knee, there was a red welt, indented with what might have been heavy finger marks. On impact, the steering wheel had impressed itself heavily into the flesh.
'What?' Priabin mumbled, suddenly disoriented, frightened by the body and its distance and lifelessness.
'Ignore the arm. Knee and shin and ankle. All those breaks and wrenches and twists could have been caused by the crash or…' Priabin looked at him but said nothing. Viktor Zhikin was too much like Anna like this, the scene too much like that scene, when he had been summoned to formally identify her body. Zhikin's body was too real, too heavy, like hers had been. Solidly dead. Gorbalev continued: 'I think his leg was broken in these places and wrenched out of shape, just to keep the accelerator of the car jammed down hard. The thigh could have been wedged under the steering wheel, explaining the mark above the knee.'
Priabin looked up from the bruises and from his memories. He was puzzled, but anger was beginning even before he understood the reason for it.
He looked wildly at Gorbalev, then blurted out: 'Before or after he was dead?' It seemed essential that he know.
Gorbalev took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief; waited for the question to go away, or to make sense.
'I — before,' he said eventually, unnerved by Priabin's damp-eyed, bright stare. Priabin sensed himself
