Authors: Mikhail Elizarov
I
WAS EXCLUDED
from the Shironinites’ operation for health reasons. Vyrin fell under the same edict. Although Denis was terribly offended, they didn’t take him either—our enemies knew him by sight. For the same reason they had to do without Sukharev’s strong-arm help—he was often at Margarita Tikhonovna’s place and the Uglies could have caught sight of him. Sasha, Denis and I had to be content with contributing what we could to the theoretical planning of the ambush.
The Uglies’ cars—an old Mazda and an old Opel—were put under constant surveillance. The Vozglyakovs’ motorbike and Ogloblin’s RAF never let the Uglies out of their sight and we learned all their routes off by heart.
The Village Hut—a summer café on the shore of the Urmut reservoir—was a dreary, quiet spot: a sandy yard surrounded by unkempt bushes. The winter pavilion contained a kitchen and a dozen tables and in the yard there were gazebos with gabled roofs on log pillars—the village huts from which the café had got its name. In recent years ownership of the Village Hut had changed hands often. The present owner had turned it into a kebab house. Three people worked there—the cook, his assistant and a waitress who doubled as the cleaner.
The plan was thought through down to the finest detail. An hour before the Uglies arrived, the staff had to be neutralized. Kruchina took on the role of cook, support by Ogloblin and Anna Vozglyakova. Marat Andreyevich and Tanya became a married
couple who happened to drop in when they saw the smoke. Timofei Stepanovich was loitering about outside the hedge, searching for bottles that had been planted in advance. Ievlev was working away with a spade outside the fence, deepening the drain. Especially for the ambush he made ten steel skewers, sharpened the ends himself and added convenient handles, like those on flaying knives. Every possible scenario was worked through for every eventuality, depending on which table our enemies chose to sit at. Who could have known then that this fine-calibrated plan would end in tragedy?…
As soon as the Uglies and their men had got into the cars, of which there were three for some reason—a Mercedes had joined the cavalcade—Sukharev made a call from a public phone in the street to Margarita Tikhonovna, who was sitting by the phone in the first-aid post at the lifeboat station. Svetlana Vozglyakova was on watch outside with the motorcycle. It took her only a few minutes to dash to the Village Hut and pass on the combat alert.
Silent figures in masks crept into the pavilion and tied up the cook, his assistant and the waitress securely. Kruchina, Ogloblin and Anna put on aprons and started preparing for the encounter.
The optimal table was in the central “hut”, which was equidistant from all the participants in the ambush. In order to attract our enemies to it, all the other tables were piled high with dirty paper plates and cups covered in grease spots and ketchup. Skewers were placed there in advance.
There turned out to be nine visitors, one more than had been expected. But even this turn of events had been anticipated. The moment they piled into the yard Ogloblin gave them a welcoming smile and lugged a chair over to the central hut. The chortling, guffawing pack seated itself on the benches along the table, four on each side. The ninth member of the Uglies’ party was seated at the head of the table. It emerged later that he was Girei’s hit man and the Mercedes belonged to him.
The Ugly brothers had not yet been infected with caution. They were satisfied with a genial explanation that the owner was away on business and the previous assistant and waitress had been sacked for negligence, so new ones had been taken on. The older Ugly was then treated to the cook’s obsequious assurances that the meat was the very finest-quality lamb.
About twenty metres away, behind the green hedge, a worker was swinging his spade in a ditch. Kruchina apologized for any noise and gloomily blamed the health inspectors for insisting that he deepen the drainage ditch and run it farther away from the yard. A down-and-out darted into the yard and set his eye on an empty bottle; Kruchina hissed at him and the old man meekly withdrew without his booty. Then the industrious cook set to work at the barbecue. Ogloblin brought mineral water, grape juice, lavash, sliced vegetables, green herbs and a spicy aubergine starter. The customers didn’t drink alcohol on principle, but they happily smoked suffocating hashish.
Twenty minutes later the kebabs were ready. Kruchina carried five portions to the table, clutching three in a fan shape in his right fist and two in his left hand. Ogloblin walked beside him in his bright apron. Another four huge skewers that looked more like banderillas were protruding from his smoking fists.
A married couple wandered into the yard, but Kruchina immediately shouted at them.
“A private banquet, we’re not serving anyone today!” and smiled enchantingly at the hut with the Caucasian party.
The couple loitered on the spot in bewilderment.
Kruchina repeated his message in a severe voice.
“I told you in plain Russian: we’re closed!”
Anna, who was clearing the next table, set her rag down and picked up an empty skewer. Ievlev was no longer working in the ditch, but lurking behind the bushes with his spade at the ready.
Kruchina and Ogloblin walked up to the table. All nine men sitting there were gazing at them and looking forward to the food.
Kruchina spoke the key words: “
Bon appétit!
”
Three deadly shafts were thrust simultaneously into the bandit seated at the head of the table. The sharp points of two others protruded from the back of next man, and on his chest fat from the chunks of meat mingled with blood, spreading across the white material of his shirt. Ogloblin ran another two through with skewers. Vaulting over the bushes, Nikolai Tarasovich cut down a fourth man with his spade—the left half of the table died in a matter of seconds. The men on the other side didn’t even have time to react. Anna jabbed one of them in the neck with her skewer and Timofei Stepanovich dashed in just in time to crush the back of another man’s head with his mace. Marat Andreyevich dispatched the others with criss-cross slashes of his sabre.
But who could have thought that one of the three skewers with which Kruchina attacked would jam against the table, slowing down the other two so that they didn’t penetrate deeply enough into the body to end the victim’s life. The wounded man was able to whip a pistol out from under his jacket and fire.
Ogloblin fell. Blood gushed out of his head onto the trampled sand in heavy, spasmodic surges. Ievlev swung his spade, severing the hand holding the pistol. Kruchina snarled, driving in the perfidious skewers so hard that the chunks of smoking meat were wodged tight together against the enemy’s chest.
Squatting down, Marat Andreyevich turned over Ogloblin, who was already dead.
“Our reverse namesake is dead… Gone to join Larionov…”
“Why did we have to play this stupid game of honour?” Timofei Stepanovich asked the silence that had descended in a bitter voice.
“We ought to have poisoned them,” said Anna Vozglyakova. “All their lousy lives weren’t worth a single minute of his…”
The operation that began so brilliantly was a disaster. Ogloblin’s death cancelled out everything. Timofei Stepanovich and Ievlev carried Ogloblin to the RAF. Marat Andreyevich and Tanya splashed petrol onto the corpses out of a can. A match was
struck and the bodies sitting at the table burst into stinking flames. A ragged, blue-flame fringe trembled on the pillars of the little hut.
Our enemies no longer existed, but the reading room had lost another cherished member.
S
TILL DROWSY
, I couldn’t tell what had roused me: the phone or the alarm clock. Waking was like coming round after blacking out. I heard steps in the corridor, the gentle clatter of the phone and then Veronika’s voice: “Boys, Fyodor Alexandrovich has been killed!”
Suddenly there was a salty taste in my mouth, as if I’d swallowed slimy blood.
Lutsis walked slowly into the room, pale faced. “Ogloblin’s had an accident…” he said, bewildered.
Vyrin appeared in the doorway.
“Don’t cry, Veronika,” he said, glancing back rapidly into the corridor. “Perhaps it’s not definite? Perhaps he’s just hurt?”
“Marat Andreyevich said he was killed instantly,” said Veronika, wiping away a tear. “They’ve taken him to our place. Now they’re all waiting for Alexei, so he can decide what to do…”
Those were bitter minutes for our reading room. Already washed and dressed in his grave clothes, Ogloblin was turning cold on the deceased Maria Antonovna Vozglyakova’s metal bed, while we, his comrades, discussed the sacrilegious precautions that required us to act immediately. Ogloblin had to disappear for ever, to vanish without trace and never be found. For decency’s sake we spoke of a funeral, but in actual fact we were talking about disposal. Ogloblin could not have a grave.
We took what seats we could find in the Vozglyakovs’ small sitting room—some at the table, some on the ancient sofa with a
leather back, draped with a tapestry showing deer and the lacy spiderwebs of doilies. Outside it was already dark. The three branches of the ceiling lamp, curved like cows’ horns, shed a bony yellow light.
Ogloblin’s dog Latka, a decrepit old Alsatian, prowled round the table, breathing in through her black nose the still-imperceptible smell of the corpse and breathing out a pitiful whimpering. Although Anna had lit the small Dutch stove built into the wall, I felt as cold as if I had walked down into a damp limestone basement.
Who could have supposed then that the bullet which shattered Ogloblin’s head would strike all the Shironinites in a murderous ricochet? At first the situation seemed clear, although tragic: through some misunderstanding, outsiders who had nothing to do with the Books had set their sights on us. To avoid the bloody events coming to the attention of the council or the militia, we had to dispose of the only clue that betrayed our involvement in the slaughter—Ogloblin’s body.
The question was where and how to bury Fyodor. The Vozglyakovs were intending to do it in their own yard, in the shaft of a dried-out well. This idea had to be rejected. The relationship between Ogloblin and Anna was no secret. We understood the eldest Vozglyakova sister’s feelings very well, and that only made Marat Andreyevich’s justly spoken words even more painful for us.
“Anyuta,” he said, “you must have been seen together. It could be anyone—your colleagues at work, or Fyodor’s friends. We can’t exclude the possibility of someone coming to search your place. And if, God forbid, you come under suspicion, the police will rake through everything here…”
“And what do you suggest?” Anna asked in a faltering voice. “Dissolving Fyodor in acid? Dismembering him and feeding him to the pigs?”
“Don’t say that!” said Tanya, putting her arm round her friend’s shoulders.
Margarita Tikhonovna didn’t participate in the discussion, but sat at one side, remaining silent. The countdown to the deadline that the doctors once set her had begun long ago. She had become thin and drawn, and all the intensity of her will was directed inward, at her organs invaded by metastases. Every time she overcame an attack of pain, she wiped lemon-coloured sweat that looked like pus off her forehead and temples with a crumpled handkerchief. Meeting her eyes just once, I shuddered at that slithering gaze filled with pity and exhausted, powerless love. Looking round at the depleted reading room, Margarita Tikhonovna seemed to see the terrible marks of her own fatal malady on every one of us. There were thirteen of us left…
“I suggest we cremate Fyodor,” said Kruchina, getting up from the table. “In my foundry,” he explained morosely. “We’ll put the body in the cupola. The temperature there is fifteen hundred degrees, everything will burn up without leaving a trace… Well, now, that seems like a beautiful funeral to me,” he said and turned away. “Only we have to hurry. The second shift ends soon. If all the cast iron is smelted, they’ll stop the cupola. And tomorrow’s Sunday—we’d have to wait another day…”
“And how do you imagine doing it?” Timofei Stepanovich asked warily. “There are men in the foundry.”
“It’s a small section. One cupola’s being overhauled, the other’s serviced by four pourers and a melter. I’ll distract them,” Igor Valeryevich reassured us. “I’ll find something to talk about.”
“What about the charger?” I asked, recalling a word forgotten since the days of my institute practical work.
“There’s Uncle Yasha. He’s put away his half-litre a long time ago and he’s asleep. But the breakers-out will come for the third shift. They’ll be sober. We’d better hurry.”
“Wait,” Timofei Stepanovich persisted. “I can’t see how you’ll get the body in without being spotted!”
“There’s a nursery school on the other of side of our fence. My workers moonlight; they cast graveyard crosses to sell. You
know, I don’t object. They’ve got families to feed, they’re paid a pittance, and they’re not really stealing anything; they make them out of waste… Anyway, they drop the castings over the fence on a rope into that nursery school and pick them up after the shift… So we’ll do it the other way round, taking the body into the plant…”
Vyrin looked at his watch.
“Lads, it’s three minutes to nine already…”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Svetlana asked nervously. “It’s night out there!”
“That’s right,” Veronika put in despairingly. “You’re too late!”
“Girls, Annushka, Svetlana, Veronika, my darlings,” Tanya sighed agonizingly. “You have to understand that Fyodor’s dead; you can’t bring him back! And he has to be buried!”
“And another thing…” Igor Valeryevich said and paused for a moment. “I can’t take everyone. Three at the most. Otherwise the group will be too noticeable. I’ll go in through the checkpoint.”
I sensed that the time had come to draw a line under the discussion. Before the sisters could protest I said firmly:
“I agree with Igor Valeryevich. We have to set off immediately. Ievlev, Dezhnev and I will go to the funeral…” The eldest Vozglyakova sister shuddered and lowered her head. “Everyone else has one minute to say goodbye to Fyodor Alexandrovich…”
Ogloblin was carried to the RAF on a blanket. Ievlev took the wheel, with Kruchina beside him to show him the way. I sat by the corpse’s head, beside gloomy Marat Andreyevich.
The sad journey took forty minutes. Then the minibus stopped near the nursery school. It was already completely dark and the bushes with branches poking through the hole of the wire-mesh fencing looked like shaggy black shadows rearing up from the ground. We waited until there was no one at all in the street and climbed out of the minibus.
Kruchina whispered: “The last play area on the left. Hide behind the wooden pavilion there. I’ll whistle to you.” And he strode off towards the plant.
In the distance I heard ‘Evenings near Moscow’ as rendered by a ragged, drunken choir. The blanket immediately moved back into the RAF. Eventually the group of tipsy companions moved on. Marat Andreyevich and Nikolai Tarasovich lugged Ogloblin out again. The body had stiffened up enough for us to carry him in a vertical position, arm in arm, like a dummy, which made our job a little bit easier. From a distance the standing figure looked like someone who was alive.
We slipped in through the little gate and quickly turned left onto a path. The crunching gravel gave way to soundless asphalt. The wind blew grating sand out of a sandpit with collapsed sides, swings creaked like a ship’s rigging. I went first and Dezhnev and Ievlev followed me, carrying their dead burden.
We waited behind the pavilion for the agreed signal. Eventually there was a brief whistle, repeated three times. Ievlev cautiously tumbled Ogloblin over the fence and Kruchina caught him in his arms. Then we scrambled over too.
A long blank wall—Igor Valeryevich said that was the canteen— and clumps of nettles mixed with burdock concealed us on both sides. We crept along the fence behind the shop, the laboratories and the boiler room and came out into an alley that led to the office block. At the entrance there was a massive structure shaped like a hammer and sickle, and the board of honour was attached to the curve of the sickle. Almost immediately I spotted the enamel oval with Igor Valeryevich’s face on it. In the photo he was about ten years younger than he was now, with a slightly thinning thatch of tousled hair.
The workshops stretched on one after the other—the assembly shop, the machine shop, the die-forging shop—tall brick buildings looking like aircraft hangars, roofed with duraluminium.
“They’ve been idle for years,” Igor Valeryevich explained. “Our foundry’s the only one that’s working at full capacity. All
those men they let go! There were more than two thousand of them, and now you’re lucky if you can find a couple of hundred. Everything’s neglected. See those bushes? They used to be trimmed like poodles, and now they’ve run wild. I remember in the flower beds they used to plant out Lenin in daisies…”
The cast-iron workshop was the last one. For the first few minutes of our journey we could see two black chimneys above the roofs. Smoke was creeping out of one of them in bluish curls.
“That’s good,” Igor Valeryevich told us encouragingly. “We’re not too late.”
We stopped at metal gates that were standing open. From a space that we couldn’t see yet came clanging and rumbling and the warm, sourish smell of burned earth.
“Wait,” said Kruchina and disappeared into the workshop.
“Seryozha, come here!” we heard his voice boom menacingly.
“Greetings to the top brass!” replied a voice from the rumbling depths. “Has something happened?”
“Yes it has!”
I had the feeling that the invisible Seryozha had been grabbed by the sides of his chest.
“I understand everything!” Kruchina roared. “The pay’s bad! Inflation! I’m a fucking liberal! But there are some people you just can’t talk to nicely! You’re like pigs—you shit where you sleep! Didn’t I warn you not to get involved with that cocksucker from the trade union! Did I or didn’t I? What are you nodding at? Are you aware that Garkusha’s going to show up here any time now?”
“What of it?”
“I’ll tell you what! They’ll press criminal charges! Shat yourself, have you? That’s right! That’s the healthy body’s natural reaction.”
“But Igor Valeryevich! We just wanted to do everything right! To tell the truth!”
“A dick’s sprouted where the truth used to be!”
“But Igor Valeryevich! Seryozha pleaded tearfully. “I won’t do it again! I’ll eat dirt!”
“You’ll eat shit! For breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea! Get into that lab now! And not a sound out of you! Until I call you!”
A minute later Kruchina stuck his head out and whispered to us.
“Bring Fyodor in…”
We walked in under the smoky, gloomy vaults. The floor in the workshop seemed to be made of earth, its firm bed only showing through here and there in fragments of cast-iron slabs. The two black columns of the cupolas towered right up to the ceiling, with the lattice-work terraces of the charging platforms attached to them. Below them lay ten moulds retaining the imprint of a cross—a graveyard of emptiness tipped over onto its back.
Igor Valeryevich cast a glance at some doors in the distance, behind which the production shift had probably hidden, and gestured for us to hurry. Dezhnev and Ievlev lugged Ogloblin over to a cupola. The steep, almost vertical steps were too narrow for two men and Ievlev carried the body up to the charging platform on his own. We climbed up after him. The blazing, rectangular charging hole of the furnace breathed out a stifling heat. The seething magma droned; it was so piercingly bright that it hurt our eyes.
“Will it definitely work?” Marat Andreyevich whispered. “What if the cupola gets plugged, they dismantle it brick by brick and find some bones or a skull?”
“Impossible. He’ll burn up instantly.”
Dezhnev and I supported Ogloblin by the legs while Ievlev and Kruchina guided him. The body dived in through the charging hole and disappeared into the flames. The blast of heat that it raised splashed into our blazing faces. There was a smell of scorched rags and red-hot frying pans.
“What now?” Marat Andreyevich asked with a dry throat. “Do we go?”
“What for?” Igor Valeryevich asked in surprise. “Now we have to pour the iron. I’ll go and call those knuckleheads…”
They soon came back. Walking at the front was the melter Seryozha, a man about thirty years old with a ruddy, womanish face. The four lanky pourers tramped along raggedly behind him, swaying like feather grass.
Seryozha wiped his crimson forehead with his sleeve and said resentfully:
“I don’t really understand it, Igor Valeryevich. Why am I last in line?”
He’d realized that the danger had passed and was venting his injured feelings. Noticing us, he nodded cautiously in greeting and looked at Kruchina.
“They’re with me,” his boss said.
“Ah…” said Seryozha, meekly accepting the explanation.
As he walked past some sacks dumped against the wall, he suddenly leaned down to one of them and shouted.
“Uncle Yasha, come on, get up! You’re fucked now! Know what you’ve done? Get up, I said!”
The sack jumped up and turned out to be a dishevelled little man
“What’s up?”
“I’ll tell you! You slept through charging time!”
The rudely roused Uncle Yasha fluttered his coal-black eyelashes and tumbled back down onto the floor.
“And now what?”
“I’ll tell you that too. You’ve frozen the second cupola! I’ve called in the boss—see? Now how are you going to break out the scum? With your prick? They’ll put you in jail!”