Chernobyl Murders (6 page)

Hungarian was barbaric.

On a warm July day, Mihaly got off at Juli’s stop so he could walk her home. On a hot August day, he came to her apartment.

They sipped wine and made love. The next time Mihaly came to her apartment, he told her he was married and had two daughters.

Juli didn’t want to hurt Mihaly or his wife and daughters. She kept trying to convince herself she needed Mihaly only for the moment.

Another man would appear, and Mihaly would remain a good friend. But now, after he’d been gone three weeks on summer holiday, she knew differently.

When Juli paused at the entrance to the laboratory building before going down the stairs, she looked out to the southeast where the red and white reactor stacks pierced the sky. Today was Monday, and she knew Mihaly was back to work, had taken the earlier bus as usual. Tonight, after a three-week absence, he would catch her bus and she would see him again.

By applying herself to her work, Juli made the morning go by quickly. She turned off the overnight counters, did her calcula-tions, removed the counting tubes from the tombs, and sent them up the dumbwaiter to be refilled with fresh samples. After lunch, she would busy herself again—new samples into the tombs, voltages set, samples logged, tombs closed, overnight counts started. But for now, the moles were out of their hole for lunch.

Juli sat alone at a table near the windows until a lab technician who worked on the main floor joined her. The technician’s name was Natalya, a plump girl with a loud voice. Juli might have gotten up to leave, but it was obvious she had just started eating.

Natalya placed a large brown bag on the table and began empty-ing out food, making their table look like a table at a street market.

Bread, cheese, two tomatoes, a large cucumber, cookies, cake. Besides speaking in a loud voice, Natalya spoke with her mouth full, which resulted in the occasional flight of a crumb of food across the table.

“I’m so hungry,” said Natalya. “Even if my work is not strenu-ous, I still get hungry as a bear. You have so little, Juli. A simple sandwich, and look at my lunch. I went across the Belorussian border to shop at farm markets and bought too much. One of these days, for sure, I’m going on a strict diet before I explode.” Natalya swung her arms outward to portray the great explosion. “Perhaps I should try one of those American movie-star diets. Did I tell you the Odessa Bookstore on the north side of town has a stock of American magazines?”

“No,” said Juli. “What kinds of magazines?”

“Celebrity magazines,” said Natalya. “I can’t bring them to work anymore. The chief technician says they’re distracting. She caught me looking at Bruce Springsteen. The Frank Sinatra of the eighties. Am I right?”

“Each generation has its idols.”

“So, who is your idol, dear Juli?”

“I don’t have an idol.”

“What about your boyfriend? Couldn’t he be considered your idol?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“No? A pretty girl like you with no boyfriend? It’s shameful we have boys around here instead of men. The real men are married.

Here, when the boys aren’t drinking vodka, they hover over their books and calculators. I prefer older men. I’m waiting for a widower who needs a helpmate to cook meals and send him off to work so I can relax.” Natalya sighed. “But if I’m home all day watching television and reading magazines, I’ll eat myself into an early grave.

You’re lucky to have been born thin, Juli. All the women in my family are heavy. None of the diets I’ve tried do any good. So I might as well enjoy it while I can.”

They ate, silent except for explosive crunches as Natalya munched her cucumber. After she finished that, Natalya polished off the cookies and cake. Then she leaned across the table and whispered.

“Did you hear the latest joke circulating up here?”

“Here” meant the main floor, as opposed to the basement or sub-basement. Gossip from the facility entered the building by way of the main floor, where workers had contact with drivers who brought in samples and reactor personnel who sometimes visited.

Juli leaned close to Natalya, hoping the joke would not be overheard.

Even Natalya’s whispering was loud.

“Is it the one,” asked Juli, “about the reactor inspector who wears gloves even in the summer?”

“This joke is much better,” said Natalya. “The head of the SSNI in Moscow receives an invitation for delegations of Soviet reactor safety engineers to visit U.S. facilities and study reactor safety principles. The U.S. official says they can visit any reactor they like in the United States. The SSNI head makes his selections and, a few days later, hands his list to the U.S. official. ‘Everything looks fine except for one thing,’ says the U.S. official. ‘What?’ asks the SSNI head. ‘You’ve said you wish to send your Chernobyl engineering staff to Three Mile Island. Don’t you realize,’ asks the U.S. official, ‘we had an accident there in the seventies?’ ‘Of course,’ says the SSNI head. ‘But Three Mile Island is more than adequate for Chernobyl engineers, because at Three Mile Island you had only one accident!’”

Natalya laughed so hard Juli thought she would tip over backward in her chair. Several people at other tables turned and smiled.

At one table, a man Juli had never seen before took out a notebook, wrote something in it, then put the notebook back in the pocket of his lab coat.

For a moment Juli considered warning Natalya about the recent memo condemning “malicious gossipmongering.” But Natalya would probably say something worse. Besides, the joke would spread throughout the facility by quitting time. Better to let the matter rest despite the man in the lab coat.

“Funny, yes?” said Natalya.

“Yes,” said Juli. “But now I’ve got to get back to work.”

As she left the cafeteria, Juli noticed the man in the lab coat tug at his earlobe. And while going down the stairs to the basement, she wondered if Natalya might be part of the head office’s underground network. If the joke was a test, it wouldn’t work because, since Aleksandra’s disappearance, Juli never repeated these jokes to anyone, except Mihaly.

All afternoon, while inserting Geiger tubes of various sizes into the tombs, Juli imagined each symbolized a night she and Mihaly would spend together. By the time she finished work, she had accumulated over fifty nights with Mihaly, fifty nights she wished might come true.

Juli rushed from the locker room in the basement so she could be first at the bus stop. She stood alone in the sun while others waited in the shade of the building. Being first in line guaranteed entry into the first bus for Pripyat, the bus she and Mihaly always took.

As the bus approached in a shimmer of heat, she wondered if it was full, if it would pass by like it once had with Mihaly onboard. No.

Mihaly would make up an excuse, tell the driver he had business at the low-level laboratory, and get off. But what if Mihaly was not on the first bus?

When the bus wheezed to a stop, Juli got on, walked slowly down the aisle, but did not see Mihaly. For an instant she imagined what had happened. Mihaly on holiday with his family at his boyhood home near the Czech border, reminders of his duties as father and husband everywhere. Mihaly taking another bus so he would not have to face her. Then a newspaper lowered at the back of the bus, and Mihaly, looking like a boy who has done something deli-ciously evil, grinned at her. She closed her lips tightly to keep from laughing, walked to the back of the bus, and sat next to Mihaly so abruptly he barely had time to remove his briefcase.

A few seats ahead, Juli saw a woman turn to look at her. The seat next to the woman was empty. Juli took a section of Mihaly’s newspaper, and they both held newspapers up before them. When the bus was through the gate, moving along on the road to Pripyat, the noise of the rear engine allowed them to speak without being overhead. They spoke softly in Hungarian.

“How are things on the farm?” asked Juli.

“Fine,” said Mihaly. “How are things here?”

“The usual. No radiation releases.”

“Good. How about the weather?”

“Hot and dry.”

“Same as the farm, hot and dry except for all the wine my brother and I drank.”

“Is your family well?”

“Yes. How about yours?”

“Don’t be cute. You know I have no family here.”

“What about the grass, then? Has it taken over?”

“The other day in the courtyard, it grabbed my ankles and dragged me into the bushes.”

Mihaly rattled his newspaper section and made an evil smile.

“And what did the naughty grass do to you in the bushes?”

“I can’t tell you. There’s a crackdown on gossipmongering.”

“If you don’t tell, I’ll brood like my bachelor brother.”

After making sure her newspaper section shielded them, Juli turned and softly bit Mihaly’s ear. They kissed, and her arms grew tired holding up the newspaper.

Before the bus entered Pripyat, the guard finally made his way to the back. After checking their identity cards, the guard returned to the front of the bus, and Juli and Mihaly left the newspapers in their laps. Beneath the newspapers they touched one another gently. Because Juli had changed into shorts, Mihaly was able to caress her intimately.

“Will you get off at my stop tonight, Mihaly?”

“I can’t, not on my first day back. Is your roommate still working at the department store Wednesday evenings?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I missed you, Juli. I’m not joking.”

“It’s hard to tell when you are and when you aren’t.”

“It’s my protection. I can make up the world as I go along.”

“Am I in this made-up world?”

“You and me and the wild grass.”

“Where is everyone else?”

“A parallel world. I’ve left a duplicate of myself there.”

Juli tickled Mihaly on his inner thigh, and he coughed to cover his laughter.

“Not tonight, then?” she asked. “Not even a walk?”

“Wednesday. I’ll arrange a late night Wednesday.”

Before the bus reached her stop, Juli told Mihaly the joke Natalya had screamed in her face at lunch. Mihaly nodded. “I heard it this afternoon, but I didn’t want to ruin it for you. It’s all over the facility.

The engineers added a new ending. After Chernobyl’s engineers leave for the United States, Pravda’s diplomacy page features the story. The headline reads, ‘Chernobyl Engineers Permitted Inside Three Mile Island Containment Building for Firsthand Look.’”

The bus was at Juli’s stop. When she got off and looked back, Mihaly grinned at her with his eyes crossed and his nose pressed to the bus window.

4
Major Grigor Komarov of Branch Office 215 of the Special Department of the Soviet Committee of State Security—the KGB—stood at his office window. He admired Kiev’s greenery, dark and thick beneath the morning sky. Because his window faced west, the window was relatively clear. This afternoon, with the sun in the west, streaks left by inept window washers and the previous evening’s rain would glare like graffiti. He stared at the horizon in the direction of the GDR and East Berlin a thousand kilometers away, where he was stationed before being sent to Kiev. Major Komarov had fond memories of his years in East Berlin, years replete with hard work and hard play. And the women … ah, those fine German women.

A blonde walking below on the boulevard triggered Komarov’s memory of an especially fine woman, a blonde named Gretchen he had used several times to compromise Western diplomats. Beautiful Gretchen, the most productive KGB operative in Berlin. But this was long ago when he was younger. Long ago when using Romeo agents for sexual blackmail was still effective. In the modern liber-ated world of Western decadence, the blackmailed chap simply asks for extra copies of the photographs for his friends.

In the old days, male Romeo agents seduced secretaries of em-bassy officials, while female Romeo agents seduced the officials themselves. Agents like Gretchen who could turn a penis into a Siberian fencepost. Of course some Romeo agents, Komarov wished he could forget. Not only the men. He hated men who became Romeos. But there was a woman named Barbara, half-Russian half-Hungarian. If only he could forget the humiliation suffered because of the dark-haired witch during his first week of field training. If only the new recruit had been intelligent enough to realize Barbara’s seduction was a traditional “safe” house hazing in which veteran agents bust through the door when the newcomer’s trousers are down around his ankles.

To help him forget the hazing incident, Komarov took out his wallet, carefully opened the “secret” compartment behind the bills, and removed a tattered photograph. This was Gretchen. Nothing else remained of Gretchen because, back in the GDR, after he’d gotten beyond being a fresh recruit, he’d used Gretchen as a stepping-stone. He had not wanted to do it. He had agonized over it.

But it was necessary. Whereas he wished he could have killed Barbara the Hungarian, he had instead killed Gretchen.

All plans consist of logical steps. In order to create a trail of evidence leading to Captain Sherbitsky, who had been in a high position in the GDR for a decade, two comrades needed to be eliminated. First, a fellow agent named Pudkov; next, Gretchen. Finally, by hunting down and killing Sherbitsky, Komarov gained admira-tion from his superiors. The fabrication of a double homicide fueled by jealousy, and the successful capital punishment of the pseudo murderer, created the atmosphere leading to Komarov’s captaincy a year later.

Komarov kissed Gretchen’s photograph, feeling the warmth of it and smelling the leather from his wallet. After returning the photograph to his wallet and the wallet to his pocket, he looked out the window again. He leaned forward, facing north instead of west. Here, a hundred kilometers away, beyond the widening of the Dnieper River, lay the Chernobyl Nuclear Facility operated by the Ministry of Energy. Since his transfer to Kiev ten years earlier, counterintelligence at Chernobyl had been his assignment. Instead of recruiting Westerners, instead of the hard work and hard play of his Berlin years, his work now consisted of monitoring hundreds of workers and thousands of relatives and friends of workers at Chernobyl. Each month he reported his findings to Deputy Chairman Dumenko, head of KGB operations in the Ukraine. Dumenko was Komarov’s link to Moscow. Dumenko’s position was one Komarov felt he deserved after his years of loyal service—a position of authority instead of playing nursemaid to a bunch of technical types at the Chernobyl facility.