Russian Roulette (8 page)

The inside of the building didn’t seem to fit what I had seen outside. It was like stepping into a submarine or a ship with no windows, no views. The ceilings were low. It was too warm. Corridors led to more corridors. Doors opened onto other doors. Staircases sprouted in every direction. Students marched past me on all sides, carrying their books and their backpacks, and I forced myself to keep moving, knowing that if I stopped and looked lost it would be a sure way to get myself noticed. It seemed to me that if there were an administrative area, an office with the names of all the people working at the university, it would be somewhere close to the entrance. Surely the university wouldn’t want casual visitors to plunge too far into the building or to take one of the elevators up to the fortieth or fiftieth floor? I tried a door. It was locked. The next one opened into a toilet. Next to it there was a bare room, occupied by a cleaner with a mop and a cigarette.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“The administration office.”

She looked at me balefully. “The next corridor. On the left. Room 1117.”

The next corridor went on for about a hundred meters, but the door marked 1117 was only halfway down. I knocked and went in.

There were two more women sitting at desks that were far too small for the typewriters, piles of paper, files, and ashtrays that covered them. One of the women was plugged into an old-fashioned telephone system, the sort with wires looping everywhere, but she looked up as I came in.

“Yes?” she demanded.

“Can you help me?” I asked. “I’m looking for someone.”

“You need the student office. That’s room 1301.”

“I’m not looking for a student. I need to speak to a professor. His name is Misha Dementyev.”

“Room 2425—the twenty-fourth floor. Take the elevator at the end of the corridor.”

I felt a surge of relief. He was here! He was in his office! At that moment, I saw the end of my journey and the start of a new life. This man had known my parents. Now he would help me.

I took the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor, sharing it with different groups of students who all looked purposefully grubby and disheveled. I had actually been in an elevator before and this old-fashioned steel box, which shuddered and stopped at least a dozen times, had none of the wonders of the escalator on the metro. Finally I found myself on the floor I wanted. I stepped out and followed a cream-colored corridor that, like the ground floor, had no windows. At least the offices were clearly labeled and I found the one I was looking for right at the corner. The door was open as I approached and I heard a man speaking on the telephone.

“Yes, of course, Mr. Sharkovsky,” he was saying. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

I knocked on the door.

“Come in!”

I entered a small, cluttered room with a single square window looking out over the main avenue and the steps that had first brought me into the building. There must have been five or six hundred books there, not just lined up along the shelves but stacked on the floor and every available surface. They were fighting for space with a whole range of laboratory equipment, different sized flasks, two microscopes, scales, Bunsen burners, and boxes that looked like miniature ovens or fridges. Most unnerving of all, a complete human skeleton stood in a frame in one corner as if it were here to guard all this paraphernalia while its owner was away.

There was a man sitting at his desk. He had just put down the phone as I came in. My first impression was that he was about the same age as my father, with thick black hair that only emphasized the round bald patch in the middle of his head. The skin there was stretched tight and polished, reflecting the ceiling light. He had a heavy beard and mustache, and as he examined me from behind a pair of glasses, I saw small, nervous eyes blinking at me as if he had never seen a boy before—or had certainly never allowed one into his office.

Actually, I was wrong about this. He was nervous because he knew who I was. He spoke my name immediately. “Yasha?”

“Are you Mr. Dementyev?” I asked.

“Professor Dementyev,” he replied. “Please, come in. Close the door. Does anyone know you’re here?”

“I asked in the administration room downstairs,” I said.

“You spoke to Anna?” I had no idea what the woman had been named. He didn’t let me reply. “That’s a great pity. It would have been much better if you had telephoned me before you came here. How
did
you get here?”

“I came by train. My parents . . .”

“I know what has happened in Estrov.” He was agitated. Suddenly there were beads of sweat on the crown of his head. I could see them glistening. “You cannot stay here, Yasha,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “My parents said you’d look after me!”

“And I will! Of course I will!” He tried to smile at me, but he was full of nervous energy and he was allowing his different thought processes to tumble over each other. “Sit down, Yasha, please.” He pointed to a chair. “I’m sorry, but you’ve taken me completely by surprise. Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Can I get you something?” Before I could answer, he snatched up the telephone again. “There’s somebody I know,” he explained to me. “He’s a friend. He can help you. I’m going to ask him to come.”

He dialed a number, and as I sat down facing him, uncomfortably close to the skeleton, he spoke quickly into the receiver.

“It’s Dementyev. The boy is here. Yes . . . here at the university.” He paused while the person at the other end spoke to him. “We haven’t had a chance to speak yet. I thought I should let you know at once.” He was answering a question I hadn’t heard. “He seems all right. Unharmed, yes. We’ll wait for you here.”

He put the phone down and it seemed to me that he was suddenly less agitated than he had been when I’d arrived—as if he had done what was expected of him. For some reason I was feeling uneasy. From the look of it, Professor Dementyev wasn’t pleased to see me. I was a danger to him. This was my parents’ closest friend, but I was beginning to wonder how much that friendship was worth.

“How did you know who I was?” I asked.

“I’ve been expecting you ever since I heard about what happened. And I recognized you, Yasha. You look very much like your mother. I saw the two of you together a few times when you were very young. You won’t remember me. It was before your parents left Moscow.”

“Why did they leave? What happened? You worked with them.”

“I worked with your father. Yes.”

“Do you know that he’s dead?”

“I didn’t know for certain. I’m sorry to hear it. He and I were friends.”

“So tell me . . .”

“Are you sure I can’t get you something?”

I had eaten and drunk everything I wanted at Kazanskiy station. Really what I wanted was to be away from here. I have to say that I was disappointed by Misha Dementyev. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but maybe he could have been more affectionate, more like a long-lost uncle or something? He hadn’t even come out from behind his desk.

“What happened?” I asked again. “Why was my father sent to work in Estrov?”

“I can’t go through all that now.” He was flustered again. “Later—”

“Please, Professor Dementyev!”

“All right. All right.” He looked at me as if he was wondering if he could trust me. Then he began. “Your father was a genius,” he began. “He and I worked here together in this department. We were young students, idealists, excited. We were researching endospores . . . and one in particular. Anthrax. I don’t suppose you know very much about that.”

“I know about anthrax,” I said.

“We thought we could change the world . . . your father in particular. He was looking at ways to prevent the infection of sheep and cattle. But there was an accident. Working in the laboratory together, we created a form of anthrax that was much faster and deadlier than anything anyone had ever known. It had no cure. Antibiotics were useless against it.”

“It was a weapon.”

“That wasn’t our intention. That wasn’t what we wanted. But—yes. It was the perfect biological weapon. And of course the government found out about it. Everything that happens in this place they know about. It was true then. It’s true now. They heard about our work here and they came to us and ordered us to develop it for military use.” Dementyev took out a handkerchief and used it to polish the lenses of his glasses. He put them back on. “Your father refused. It was the last thing he wanted. So they started to put the pressure on. They threatened him. And that was when he did something incredibly brave . . . or incredibly stupid. He went to a journalist and tried to get the story into the newspapers.

“Of course, he was arrested at once. I was here, in the laboratory, when they marched him away. They arrested your mother too.”

“How old was I?” I asked.

“You were two. And—I’m sorry, Yasha—they used you to get at your parents. That was how they worked. It was very simple. If your parents didn’t do what they were told, they would never see you again. What choice did they have? They were sent to Estrov to work in the factory. They were forced to produce the new anthrax. That was the deal. Stay silent. And live.”

So everything—my parents’ life or non-life in that remote village, the little house, the boredom, and the poverty—had been for me. I wasn’t sure how that made me feel. Was I to blame for everything that had happened? Was I the one who had destroyed their lives?

“Yasha . . .” Dementyev stood up and came over to me. He was much taller than I had expected now that he was on his feet. He loomed over me. “Were you inoculated?” he asked.

I nodded. “My parents were killed when they escaped. But they stole a syringe. They injected me.”

“I knew your father had been working on an antidote. Thank God! But I guessed it the moment I saw you. Otherwise you would have been dead a long time ago.”

“My best friend died,” I said.

“I’m so sorry. Anton and Eva—your parents—were my friends too.”

We fell silent. He was still standing there, one hand on the back of my chair.

“What will happen to me?” I asked.

“You don’t need to worry anymore, Yasha. You’ll be well looked after.”

“Who was that you called?”

“It was a friend. Someone we can trust. He’ll be here very soon.”

There was something wrong. Things that he’d told me just didn’t add up. I was about to speak when I heard the sound of sirens, police cars approaching, still far away but drawing nearer. And I knew instantly that there was no friend, that Dementyev had called them. It wasn’t detective work. I could have asked him why my parents had been sent to live in Estrov while he had been allowed to stay here. I could have played back the conversation he’d had on the telephone, how he had referred to me simply as “the boy.” Not “Yasha.” Not “Anton’s son.” The people at the other end knew who I was because they’d been expecting me to show up, waiting for me. I could have worked it out, but I didn’t need to. I saw it all in his eyes.

“Why?” I asked.

He didn’t even try to deny it. “I’m sorry, Yasha,” he said. “But nobody can know. We have to keep it secret.”

We. The factory managers. The helicopter pilots. The militia. The government. And Dementyev. They were all in it together.

I scrabbled to my feet—or tried to. But Dementyev was ahead of me. He pounced down, his hands on my shoulders, using his weight to pin me to the seat. For a moment his face was close to mine, the eyes staring at me through the thick lenses.

“There’s nowhere you can go!” he hissed. “I promise you . . . they won’t treat you badly.”

“They’ll kill me!” I shouted back. “They killed everyone!”

“I’ll talk to them. They’ll take you somewhere safe.”

Yes. I saw it already. A prison or a mental asylum, somewhere I’d never be seen again.

I couldn’t move. He was too strong for me. And the police cars were getting closer. We were twenty-four floors up, but I could hear the sirens cutting through the air. And then I had an idea. I forced myself to relax.

“You can’t do this!” I exclaimed. “My father gave me something for you. He said it was very valuable. He said if I gave it to you, you’d have to help me.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s in a bag. It’s in my pocket!”

“Show me.”

He let go of one of my shoulders . . . but only one of them. I still couldn’t wrench myself free. I was sitting down. He was standing over me and he was twice my size.

“Take it out,” he said.

The police had turned into the main university drive. If I had looked out the window, I would have been able to see them. I heard car doors slam shut.

Using my one free arm, I drew out the black bag that my mother had given me. At least Dima and his friends hadn’t stolen it when they took my money. I placed it on the desk. And it worked just as I’d hoped. Dementyev still didn’t let go of me, but his grip loosened as he reached out and opened the bag. I saw his face change as he tipped out the contents.

“What—” he began.

I jerked myself free, throwing the chair backward. As it toppled over, I managed to get to my feet. Dementyev swung around but he was too late to stop me from lashing out with my fist. I knocked the glasses off his face. He fell back against the desk but still he didn’t release me. I needed a weapon and there was only one that I could see. I reached out and grabbed the arm of the skeleton, wrenching it free from the shoulder. The hand and the wrist dangled down, but I hung on to the upper bone, the humerus, and used it as a club, smashing it against Dementyev’s head again and again until, with a howl, he fell back. I twisted away. Dementyev had crumpled over the desk. There was blood streaming down his face.

“It’s too late,” he snarled. “You won’t get away.”

I snatched back the jewelry and tumbled out of the office. There was nobody outside. Surely someone must have heard what had happened? I didn’t want to know. I ran to the elevator. It was already on the way up and it took me a few seconds to work out that the police were almost certainly inside, traveling toward me. And I might have been caught standing there, waiting for them! I continued down the corridor and found a fire exit—twenty-four flights of stairs. I didn’t stop until I reached the bottom, and it was only then that I realized I was still carrying the skeleton’s arm. I found a trash can, pulled out some loose papers, and dropped the arm in.