Page 54 of The Half Life of Valery K

It was there.

The KGB office was locked for the weekend by the time he got the results, so he stayed in the lab to soak up the human voices before everyone left. He could give Shenkov the envelope on Monday.

‘Valery,’ said Dr Resovskaya just as the last of the students left. It made him jump, because her office had been empty for hours already and he couldn’t tell where she had appeared from. He spun around. She was looking into the spectrometer. ‘Why are you running polonium-contaminated human blood through the spectrometer?’

Valery swore silently at the desk. He hadn’t yet moved the sample from the spectrometer chamber. It had been next on his list. ‘Shenkov gave me some blood from the dead man in the morgue. He’s full of polonium.’ He tried to hold the accusation well away from his voice.

‘What’s Shenkov doing giving blood samples to you? What about the coroner?’

‘The coroner said the man died of a heart attack, which is rubbish. He died of radiation poisoning; his organs are sludge.’ Valery wished he could think of a way out. If he said nothing about it, she would assume he was up to something stupid. ‘He was injected with it. Is this part of your human trial?’

‘Valery, you didn’t ask me that, and you certainly aren’t going to say it to Shenkov. I will not have the KGB jack-booting through my bloody trial.’

‘Elena, are you kidnapping people?’ Valery asked softly. ‘You have that boy, don’t you, Pyotr?’

‘Listen to me carefully,’ she said. She rested her knuckles on the tabletop. They were beginning to twist from arthritis. It looked painful. ‘If you give this report to Shenkov, and Shenkov throws everyone out of that village and destroys my trial in a fit of self-redemptive righteousness, that will have been a political decision on your part. You will have taken it upon yourself to disrupt what is probably the most urgent and important clinical trial in the Soviet Union. As you are aware, politics and science are incompatible fields. The last person doing your job here decided to try to combine them. Unfortunately, when Moscow became aware of it, that person was committed to an asylum and diagnosed with schizophrenia.’

‘I see,’ Valery said.

‘I’m not threatening you, I’m just warning you what will happen.’ She sighed. ‘All of this is classified. You never ran that blood, you did not use this spectrometer, and the man in the morgue died of a heart attack, which is why the coroner said he did. You understand?’

He nodded.

Resovskaya lifted her hands, something like an apology. ‘Tell Shenkov you were wrong. Make him believe it, Valery.’

Valery smuggled the octopus into his own apartment on the eleventh floor to have some company in the screaming quiet. The octopus liked the television – it danced when the news jingle came on – so Valery decided once and for all that it was staying. It was a waste of electricity if he kept the television on for himself all day, but in the name of cephalopodal happiness, it was legitimate. The news had been on for an hour or so when the octopus crept out of the tank, stole the remote from him, and changed the channel. He had been feeling hollowed out, but it made him laugh.

17

Tattoos

Kolyma, 1957

After Valery had detonated the bomb, and after the camp administrator had decided for reasons of his own to do nothing about it but take Valery on as a science tutor, the morning felt unreal. It was still dark; embers from the explosion were still floating in the air, and ash had already coated the verges of the muddy path and the side of the administration building. He could feel the heat of the fire burning, even from so far off. The guards must have decided to let it go down by itself.

He didn’t know where to go. He hadn’t planned this far. He had thought that somebody would have taken him away and shot him by now, and far from being happy to be alive, he was just paralysed by the deviation from the schedule. Slowly, he became aware that the scar on his jaw was aching, that he was too cold standing still, that the rough stitching on the back of the camp-provided coat was scraping his neck – all the stupid human things he had expected not to bother with again.

Two men with tattoos prowled across from the Vory side of the camp. He watched them without moving, because Vory never bothered to talk to political prisoners. They were the gentlemen here: better barracks, better food, lighter duties. People like Valery were invisible to them, unless you lost to them at cards.

But they stopped by him.

‘You did that?’

‘Yeah,’ he said quietly. He didn’t sound like himself. He couldn’t tell why.

‘Dima wants to see you.’

Dima was the camp’s Vory godfather. It was always Dima, never Dmitry. He had a full tailcoat of tattoos and he stood in the way that bears do when they aren’t sure if they want to eat you or not yet, one shoulder dropped, but he had a soft voice.

‘Huh,’ he said when his men brought Valery into the criminal barracks. He said it as if Valery was not at all what he had expected. ‘I heard you were a professor, in your first life.’

‘Yes,’ said Valery, who was sure that he was going to die. Maybe one of the men he’d killed had been a Vor. Maybe it had been someone important. The men who had brought him in here were stony and he couldn’t tell. One had tattoos right down one side of his face, playing cards and teardrops, and other images too faded for Valery to make out. ‘Chemistry.’

Around them, the barracks was significantly nicer than the one Valery had destroyed. There were little lamps everywhere, with funnels made from pipes soldered onto bulbs that held kerosene, the fumes burning with gentle blue flames. People were better dressed, too, with proper coats and boots and jumpers. Nobody looked like they were starving. There was even a loaf of bread sitting on a side table. It would have gone in ten seconds in the other barracks. Valery swallowed hard. He had been hungry for months, almost not in a way he noticed now; but he did notice how badly it slowed him down, and how much weight he had already lost.

He’d thought when he first arrived that the criminals-at-law were healthier because they were just better at stealing. It had been a revelation when he realised that prison ordnances allowed them more food. They were less harmful elements to society, said the rules, than the political prisoners. If you’d been a career thief and ended up with a ten-year sentence here, the administration put you on lighter duties than someone who’d been arrested for speaking English too well.

There was a smell of pine needles in here. Needle-gathering was one of the softest labour details. Someone, God knew why because it was the least scientific thing Valery had heard in his life, had decided that stewing pine needles into a sort of foul medicinal soup was a good way to get vitamin C into prisoners. It wasn’t, so Valery always quietly poured his into a hedge, but pine duty existed all the same, and there were always men crossing to and fro between the camp and the forest carrying hessian sacks for it. As if Christmas were this morning over and someone had just taken out the tree, the whole floor was littered with needles.