Page 53 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Not people, men. Fifty-three men. No.’ By itself, his hand came up to the scar on his jaw. He pulled it away.

Shenkov turned his shirtsleeves back for him.

‘Thank you,’ Valery whispered.

Shenkov stepped back. ‘Let’s go.’ He didn’t say another word about what he thought of the tattoos or the bomb. Valery had a feeling that Shenkov was one of those people who had to think about things for some time before he decided whether he was angry or not. Valery wished he’d just be furious right now. If people like that did decide to be angry, it wasn’t a sudden brief storm. It was white-hot rage, tempered in the heart of a blast furnace, and it never cooled.

There was no heating, and because he’d acclimatised to the steamy temperature inside the cubicle, the air in the outer changing room felt frozen. He’d come in just his shirt.

‘If they’re doing human trials, they are,’ Valery said at last. ‘Resovskaya told me Moscow is behind the village project. This kind of thing is so secret that you’ll end up dead in the forest yourself if anyone realises you’re looking into it.’

‘Taking kids cannot be in their mandate.’

‘But if you ring Moscow to check, then it’s clear you know about something you shouldn’t and you still end up dead in the forest.’

Shenkov took his coat off and put it over Valery’s shoulders. Valery looked up at him. It didn’t mean for a second that they were all right, however desperately he wanted it to; it was just that Shenkov was involuntarily courteous. ‘If someone dies on a trial like this, how do they get rid of the bodies? You said skin blocks alpha radiation, but bodies rot; they must become radioactive. What’s the procedure? Do they burn them?’

‘No. That would be radioactive smoke, so …’ He couldn’t think properly. All his thoughts were roiling too much. Something deep in him was burning hot. He couldn’t touch it, but the heat and the shame powering off it were so intense they were distorting everything else. ‘Shenkov, clearly no one gives a damn what’s radioactive or where, or who gets a face full of it. For all I know they stick them in an incinerator next to the school.’

Shenkov ignored him. ‘If you had radioactive bodies to dispose of here, how would you do it? As close to safely as you could.’

‘Safely? Lead-lined coffins, buried in the forest to be away from town, but away from the most radioactive band too, for the safety of the workers. No digging the soil by hand even so. Bring in a machine. Bury them deep, fill the graves with concrete to stop any chance of water contamination, get out.’

‘So that would mean transporting bodies in lead-lined coffins, digging machinery, and a concrete truck.’

‘Yes, which is why I doubt they’re doing it like that. It would be expensive.’

Shenkov glanced down at him. ‘They probably feel the same about people’s safety as we do. They are probably doing everything they can to lessen the exposure to their workers.’

‘Within the bounds of the funds available to them,’ Valery said, frustrated. ‘Dr Resovskaya cares about people normally, but here she’s not allowed to, so she had to send students out into a radioactive forest knowing full well they’re being exposed to a lot more than they know. If she’s running this trial – or whoever is – how it should be isn’t the same as what they’re able to do.’

‘All you’re saying is that we can’t find them. I’m saying that what I can do is track every concrete truck, digger, and heavy transport lorry that comes in and out of City 40.’

Valery shook his head. ‘Say you do find this lab, say you do walk in and take away some or all of their test subjects, and say one of them is this missing boy Pyotr and you save his life, and it’s all heroic and great. Then what? You’ll be shot as soon as Moscow hears about it.’

‘A child is missing and a man is dead.’ Shenkov didn’t raise his voice, but he did hone it.

Horribly, that ground against the iron part of Valery’s soul. He struggled not to snap. ‘Do you know how many children die in labour camps every day? Or on the prison trains? There are carriages full of mothers with babies. Not a lot of them last the whole ten weeks to Siberia, I tell you. Men like you put them there, with none of this moral outrage you’re aiming at me now. Life is cheap. At least whoever’s on this trial is dying usefully.’

‘And you think it should be like that, do you?’

‘No! But you won’t change it by dying too.’

Something icy and frightening flitted through Shenkov’s eyes. Valery didn’t know for sure what it was, but he could guess.

Big, strong men projected a sacred innocence on to weaker people – on to women and children, and sawdust-fragile biochemists. They had to. It was what stopped them hurting anyone when their tempers were frayed. And of course it was a fairy tale. Women and children could be just as cruel and bloodthirsty as anyone else. But, you couldn’t be Shenkov’s size and believe that. So, the Shenkovs of the world told each other the fairy tale, and everyone else played along, because they wanted not to be killed in a moment of impatience.

Being told flat out that it was all nonsense must have felt like being told everyone had been lying always.

Valery was pretty sure that was why men throttled women when they found they weren’t perfect saints. There was nothing wrong with not being a perfect saint. Except, there was if you were part of what sounded like a big conspiracy to make out that you were the very Madonna. The rage was the smashing of the fairy tale.

He could see it smashing in Shenkov now. He wondered if he was about to die.

‘Confirm whether it’s polonium or not,’ was all Shenkov said, and then vanished down the corridor to the KGB office.

When Valery had been an undergraduate, Dr Resovskaya used to play a game with all the students in his class. She would put random things in a spectrometer – iron, copper, nitrogen, mustard gas, salt – and then hand out ration stamps as prizes if anyone could guess what the substance was just from reading the spectrograms. It had been Valery’s favourite thing for ages. He had been good at it, and even now, he associated the spectrometer with free dinners.

All a spectrometer was, was a collection of prisms and lenses that cast a good clear rainbow on to some film, and a little chamber into which you fed a sample. The chamber heated up, and then you fired light through it. Once you’d done that, the rainbow would change, very subtly. There would appear distinct lines across the spectrum. Each set of lines – and this was Valery’s favourite thing about all science ever, his own field be damned – corresponded to an element. If there was helium in the sample, it drew itself a sparse pattern that was heavier towards the violet end of the spectrum. If there was oxygen, a more complicated pattern, heaviest in the green. Iron, a much bulkier element, etched a whole chaos across the rainbow that was densest in the blue. Every element had its colour, and no two colours were the same. The explanation was a convoluted thing to do with electron shells and dispersion of light, but the fact remained: put any substance at all into the spectrometer, fire its torch, and what you got on the other side was a rainbow photograph, full of lines that showed up every element in it. By looking at how much there was of each, how blurred and complicated the lines, you could judge what the substance was. This was how astronomers could tell the composition of stars; and it was how you could tell if there was polonium in a blood sample. Polonium drew its spectrograph line in a fine shade of violet, and Valery knew it very well indeed.