PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (4 page)

Shiv opened his coat and removed from a holster in his sport jacket an oiled straight blade nearly twenty centimeters long. He turned it so that the moonlight ran its length. He looked into the mark’s face for fear. Instead he found ridicule.

Timofey said, “You’re threatening me with a knife? I have enough plutonium in my lungs to power a small city for a year, and you’re threatening me with a
knife?”

Shiv placed the shaft against Timofey’s side, hard enough to leave a mark even if it were removed. Timofey acted as if he didn’t feel it. Again something dark passed before Shiv’s eyes.

“Look, this is a high-carbon steel Premium Gessl manufactured by Imperial Gessl in Frankfurt, Germany.
I paid eighty bucks for it. It passes through flesh like water. Just give me the goddamned stuff.”

“No. I won’t do that,” Timofey said primly. “I want thirty thousand dollars. It’s a fair price, I think, and I won’t settle for anything less. I drove here in good faith.”

 

Timofey was the first man Shiv had ever killed, though he had cut a dozen others, plus two women. He wondered if it got easier each time; that’s what he had heard. In any case, this was easy enough. There wasn’t even much blood, though he was glad the mark had driven his own car after all.

Now Shiv sat alone, aware of the hiss of his lungs, and also that his armpits were wet. Well, it wasn’t every day you killed a man. But Timofey hadn’t resisted, it hadn’t been like killing a man. The knife had passed through him not as if he were water, but as if he were a ghost. Shiv sensed that he had been cheated again.

He opened and pushed away Timofey’s brown sports jacket, which even in the soundless dark nearly screamed Era of Stagnation. The canister was there, still strapped to his chest. The configuration of straps, hooks, and buckles that kept it in place taunted Shiv with its intricacy. He couldn’t follow where each strap went, or what was being buckled or snapped. To Shiv it was a labyrinth, a rat’s nest, a knot. To Timofey it had been a topographical equation, clockworks, a flowchart. “Fuck it,” Shiv said aloud. He took the Gessl and cut the thin strap above the cylinder with two quick strokes.

Already the mark’s body was cool; perhaps time was
passing more quickly than Shiv realized. Or maybe it was passing much more slowly: in a single dilated instant he discerned the two cut pieces of the strap hovering at each other’s torn edge, longing to be one again. But then they flew away with a robust
snap!
and the entire assembly lost the tension that had kept it wrapped around Timofey’s body. The effect was so dramatic he fancied that Timofey had come alive and that he would have the opportunity to kill him again. The canister popped open—he now apprehended which two hooks and which three straps had kept it closed—and fell against the gearshift.

Powder spilled out, but not much. Shiv grabbed the canister and shoveled back some of what was on the seat, at least a few thousand dollars’ worth. He couldn’t really see the stuff, but it was warm and gritty between his fingers. He scooped in as much as he could, screwed the cylinder shut, and then dusted off his hands against his trousers. He cut away the rest of the straps, leaving them draped on Timofey’s body. He climbed from the car.

“Good work, lads.”

The two brothers, Andrei and Yegor, each stood nearly two meters tall on either side of their car, which was still parked flush against Timofey’s bumper. They were not twins, though it was often difficult to recall which was which, they were so empty of personality. Shiv, who had called them from the hotel lobby, thought of them as pure muscle. By most standards of measurement, they were of equally deficient intelligence. They spoke slowly, reasoned even more slowly, and became steadily more unreliable the further they traveled from their last glass of vodka. Nevertheless, they were useful,
and they could do what they were told, or a satisfactory approximation of it.

“What do you got there?” said Yegor.

“You wouldn’t understand, believe me.”

It was then that he saw that Andrei was holding a gun at his hip, leveling it directly at him. It was some kind of pistol, and it looked ridiculously small in Andrei’s hands. Still, it was a gun. In the old days, no one had a gun, everyone fought it out with knives and brass knuckles and solid, honest fists, and pieces of lead pipe. You couldn’t get firearms. They never reached the market, and the mere possession of one made the cops dangerously angry. But this was democracy: now every moron had a gun.

“Put it away. What did you think, I was going to cut you out?”

Yegor stepped toward him, his arm outstretched. “Hand it over.”

Shiv nodded his head, as if in agreement, but he kept the canister clutched to his stomach. “All right, you’ve got the drop on me. I admit it. I’ll put it in writing if you like. They’ll be talking about this for years. But you’re not going to be able to move it on your own.”

“Why not?” said Andrei. He raised the gun with both hands. The hands trembled. For a moment, Shiv thought he could see straight down the barrel. “You think we’re stupid.”

“If you want to show me how smart you are, you’ll put down the fucking gun.”

“I don’t have to show you anything.”

“Listen, this is plutonium. Do you know what it is?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Do you know what’s it’s used for?”

“I don’t got to know. All I got to know is that people will buy it. That’s the free market.”

“Idiot! Who are you going to sell it to?”

“Private enterprise. They’ll buy it from us just like they’d buy it from you. And did you call me an idiot?”

“Listen, I’m just trying to explain to you”—Shiv thought for a moment—“the material’s radiological properties.”

Shiv was too close to be surprised, it happened too quickly. In one moment he was trying to reason with Andrei, intimidate him, and was only beginning to appreciate the seriousness of the problem, and had just observed, in a casual way, that the entire time of his life up to the moment he had stepped out of Timofey’s car seemed equal in length to the time since then, and in the next moment he was unconscious, bleeding from a large wound in his head.

“Well, fuck you,” said Andrei, or, more literally, “go to a fucked mother.” He had never shot a man before, and he was surprised and frightened by the blood, which had splattered all over Shiv’s clothes, and even on himself. He had expected that the impact of the shot would have propelled Shiv off the bridge, but it hadn’t. Shiv lay there at his feet, bleeding against the rear tire. The sound of the little gun was tremendous; it continued roaring through the woods long after Andrei had brought the weapon to his side.

Neither brother said anything for a while. In fact, they weren’t brothers, as everyone believed, but were stepbrothers, as well as in-laws, in some kind of complicated way
that neither had ever figured out. From Yegor’s silence, Andrei guessed that he was angry with him for shooting Shiv. They hadn’t agreed to shoot him beforehand. But Yegor had allowed him to carry the gun, which meant Andrei had the right to make the decision. Yegor couldn’t second-guess him, Andrei resolved, his nostrils flaring.

But Yegor broke the long silence with a gasped guffaw. In the bark of his surprise lay a tremor of anxiety. “Look at this mess,” he said. “You fucking near tore off his head.”

Andrei could tell his brother was proud of him, at least a bit. He felt a surge of love.

“Well, fuck,” said Yegor, shaking his head in wonder. “It’s really a mess. How are we going to clean it up? It’s all over the car. Shit, it’s on my pants.”

“Let’s just take the stuff and leave.”

Yegor said, “Go through his pockets. He always carries a roll. I’ll check the other guy.”

“No, it’s too much blood. I’ll go through the other guy’s pockets.”

“Look, it’s like I’ve been telling you, that’s what’s wrong with this country. People don’t accept the consequences of their actions. Now,
you
put a hole in the guy’s head,
you
go through his pockets.”

Andrei scowled but quickly ran his hands through Shiv’s trousers, jacket, and coat anyway. The body stirred and something like a groan bubbled from Shiv’s bloodfilled mouth. Some of the blood trickled onto Andrei’s hand. It was disgustingly warm and viscid. He snatched his hand away and wiped it on Shiv’s jacket. Taking more care now, he reached into the inside jacket pocket and
pulled out a gold-colored money clip with some rubles, about ten twenty dollar bills, a few tens, and a creased five. He slipped the clip and four or five of the twenties into his pocket and, stacking the rest on the car’s trunk, announced, “Not much, just some cash.”

Yegor emerged from the car. “There’s nothing at all on this guy, only rubles.”

Andrei doubted that. He should have pocketed all of Shiv’s money.

“I wonder what the stuff’s like,” said Yegor, taking the closed canister from Shiv’s lap.

He placed it next to the money and pulled off the top, revealing inside a coarse, silvery gray powder. Yegor grimaced. It was nothing like he had ever seen. He wet his finger, poked it into the container, and removed a fingerprint’s worth. The stuff tasted chalky.

“What did he call it?” he asked.

“Plutonium. From Bolivia, he said.”

Andrei reached in, took a pinch of the powder, and placed it on the back of his left hand. He then closed his right nostril with a finger and brought the stuff up to his face. He loved doing this. From the moment he had pulled the gun on Shiv he had felt as if he were in Chicago or Miami. He sniffed up the powder.

It burned, but not in the right way. It was as if someone—Yegor—had grabbed his nostril with a pair of hot pliers. The pain shot through his head like a nail, and he saw stars. Then he saw atoms, their nuclei surrounded by hairy penumbrae of indeterminately placed electrons. The nuclei themselves pulsed with indeterminacy, their
masses slightly less than the sum of their parts. Bombarded by neutrons, the nuclei were drastically deformed. Some burst. The repulsion of two highly charged nuclear fragments released Promethean, adamantine energy, as well as excess neutrons that bounced among the other nuclei, a cascade of excitation and transformation.

“It’s crap. It’s complete crap. Crap, crap,
crap!”

Enraged, Andrei hoisted the open container, brought it behind his head, and, with a grunt and a cry, hurled it far into the night sky. The canister sailed. For a moment, as it reached the top of its ascent beyond the bridge, it caught a piece of moonlight along its sides. It looked like a little crescent moon itself, in an eternal orbit above the earth, the stuff forever pluming behind it. And then it very swiftly vanished. Everything was quiet for a moment, and then there was a distant, voluptuous sound as the container plunged into the river. As the two brothers turned toward each other, one of them with a gun, everything was quiet again.

Anzhelika, 13

 

Thickened by a myopia left undiagnosed, a mist gauzed the small town, rounding the forms of the low, pale concrete buildings and the naked trees. The trees’ branches were brown, smelling of color in a shadowed, variously grayed landscape. Patches of mud rose from the depths of the snow and ice. The horizon loomed, a wall only a few paces ahead. A truck drifted down the street, powered by a breeze. Otherwise, the town’s capacity for motion was lost. The smoke from a chimney froze, curled like a beckoning finger.

The girl, Anzhelika (the stress rested on the penultimate syllable), was entirely enveloped in warmth, more warmth than could have been latent within her ragged coat. The heat dampened her hair and the hollows under her arms. This odd, close nimbus, which had swelled around her in the course of the day, was composed of two envelopes, the innermost a soundless vacuum. The outer envelope had been fed on the squeal of desks swinging open on their hinges, the dull, brute clatter of shoe leather in a hallway, and the brassy din of a schoolyard. She heard the clamor only at a distance. Her own shoes, loosely wrapped in oversized galoshes, pressed silently into the tender late-winter road, leaving a precise record of the weight she brought to this world.

Little Kolya was playing with some boys in the gaping
alleyway between two houses, poking a stick at something in an oily puddle. He was ten years old, the son of Aunt Olya and Uncle Fedya, who lived in the front room. Anzhelika occasionally watched over him when Aunt Olya was out, and even helped him once with his mathematics homework, though she was not good at sums at all. He had paid close, devoted attention, contemplating every question at length. Anzhelika had liked being in that room, working at Uncle Fedya’s rolltop desk alongside the dark mahogany wardrobe that had been constructed in Vilna in 1879, according to an inscription inside the mirrored door. Kolya had showed the inscription to her; it was the year of Comrade Stalin’s birth. The room smelled sweetly of the polish with which Uncle Fedya cleaned his boots.

That was last year. Yesterday she had passed Kolya playing in this same alleyway, a favorite place for the neighborhood boys, and when he saw her he had smiled, but not at her. A meteor had whistled by her right ear twenty seconds later. It landed on the ice ahead and skidded to an impact against a smaller stone, propelling it forward against some pebbles, propelling them in turn, a cascade of insults. She had walked on, hunched in her coat.

Today she expected the same rock to whistle by at exactly the same distance and velocity, and with the same melody. As she waited for it, she understood that the warmth that surrounded her had the character of an expectation, an intimate connection to something that was about to happen, born at the moment of the First Bulletin. Incomprehensible and unexplained, the bulletin had set off the ticking of a clock. The entire world heard it.

Even though the missile was never launched and she reached the door to the house unmolested, the sense of imminence never left her, it remained a warm, abiding presence through the rest of the day. She sought to capture and interrogate it, but after a hurried mental chase it eluded her around a rock and under a floorboard. The clock kept ticking.