Trans-Siberian Express (2 page)

Alex’s father had actually returned to Siberia years later, where he served as an interpreter with General Graves’ American expeditionary force in Vladivostok. So it had passed down through the blood, a genetic yearning to rediscover some link to the beginning. Now Dimitrov was using his roots to put him on ice, literally, to keep him under their thumb until the time came, perhaps, to blow him out like a candle. He would be Dimitrov’s health insurance until the meeting. And then? What would it matter by then?
Fait accompli!
A few million Chinks atomized, the China question solved. Even Dimitrov would not want to live beyond that. Only a dying man could bring himself to such a decision. If only Alex could wash his suspicions from his mind. But even that would not help. Dimitrov sensed his knowledge, and that was enough.

“Siberia is a great immensity,” Dimitrov had said at lunch, his eyes peering from under thick, shaggy eyebrows. “Cold, wonderfully cold.”

“I’ll wear the fur-collared coat and hat that you gave me,” Alex said stupidly. Perhaps he should have insisted more forcefully on flying home. Or demanded that they let him talk to the President. But that would have confirmed what Dimitrov suspected. They would never let him go. Not now! Maybe not ever.

“And keep your balls warm,” Dimitrov warned with mock seriousness, his eyes twinkling, his famous charm called into action.

Still, Alex could detect in Dimitrov’s manner the usual anxieties aroused by the departure of a trusted doctor.

“I could stay longer if you wish,” Alex had said when Dimitrov had first suggested the trip. He was deliberately trying to frighten his patient, a lapse of ethics that he would not have thought possible a few weeks before.

“But you have already said I am in remission,” Dimitrov said, with great seriousness, almost a trace of alarm. Alex watched the deep eyes above the high cheekbones, seeing the fear.

“At the moment.”

“So I am still a time bomb?”

“Let’s not talk of bombs,” Alex had replied, regretting it instantly. If Dimitrov understood, his expression did not reveal it. But Alex knew that the information had been transmitted.

“Well then,” Dimitrov said, clearing his throat. “What is your best guess?”

“I have told you”—Alex paused—“I do not guess.”

“Days, weeks, months?”

Alex sighed. Again this interrogation about time. But he could not bring himself to lie despite his own sudden thirst for survival.

“The average is six to nine months, but some have lived as long as five years.” He watched Dimitrov’s eyebrows twitch.

“And the short side?”

“Days. Perhaps weeks.”

“Days?”

“I am not God,” Alex said testily. It could spring anytime, this leopard of a disease, he thought. It could spring from behind a rock and sink its teeth into the jugular.

Dimitrov was silent for a long time.

“Well, I will know where to find you,” he said at last.

“No doubt about that,” Alex said cautiously. “That is, if your trains run on time.”

“You will be amazed at what you will see,” Dimitrov said, his spirits brightening for a moment, then faltering again. “But Siberia is also a dangerous place. Like your West years ago.”

“Now you’re worrying about my health.”

“It is of some importance,” Dimitrov said grudgingly, averting his eyes. “You are, after all, the medical magician. I have a vested interest.”

“What can happen to me in a week on your great Trans-Siberian Railroad? Your tourist brochures are quite ecstatic about it,” Alex taunted.

“Anything can happen.” Dimitrov’s eyes narrowed.

“I’ll watch out for the food and the cockroaches,” Alex said.

“And the jackals.”

“On the train?”

“They are everywhere,” Dimitrov said quietly.

“I shall be as close as your phone, Comrade Dimitrov,” Alex said, tired of sparring.

“There is no phone on the train,” Dimitrov said, brightening again. “But there are eighty stops.” He smiled and shook his head, tapping a finger on his desk.

“It is too close to the Chinks,” he said. “They are like a fish bone in the throat.”

“Who?”

“The Chinks.”

The older man stroked his chin, then seemed to notice Alex again.

“You will enjoy it.”

“If you say so.”

When Alex had detected the first signs of a remission of the disease, confirmed both in tests and in the sudden explosion of energy in Dimitrov, he had noted an immediate surge of comings and goings in the dacha. When officials and military men were with Dimitrov, Alex was politely accompanied to other parts of the dacha, usually to the medical facility which had been installed in one wing. At first he was only mildly curious about the sleek Chykas pulling up the frozen gravel road, the sudden beefing up of the military, the appearance of increasing numbers of heavyset men in civilian dress, tense and alert, looming in every corner. It was of no concern to him, he told himself. His business was only with Dimitrov’s bloodstream.

“You are pushing too hard,” he told Dimitrov in his bedroom one night. Alex had almost pushed his way in insisting on admittance. Exhausted, Dimitrov was propped against the pillows.

“It is a question of time,” he had replied weakly.

“Don’t think about it.”

“That is all I think about.”

“Even if you were well, all this activity would exhaust you,” Alex had said sternly.

“There is something I must do before I—” The words trailed off. Remembering what he had heard at the White House, Alex felt the sense of imposed deadline, so incongruous, even demeaning. He watched the gray-faced older man fight the heaviness in his lids, then finally slip into a deep sleep. Papers and maps slid to the floor beside the bed. Bending, Alex had gathered them up and placed them on a nearby table. His eye caught the designations on them—“Peoples’ Republic of China.”

In the light of the bedlamp, the details of the map were clearly visible in a circle of yellow light. “Missile Disposition,” he read. The words were written across the white edge of the map. Not without a tug of guilt, he puzzled over a series of random “X” marks on the China side, then, bending to explore further, he read the words, scrawled in pencil, but quite legible: “First strike potential destruct.” Then he shrugged, turned off the light and tiptoed from the room, past the brawny, expressionless guards who eyed him with contempt.

That had been the beginning of his suspicions. But what did I do to betray my knowledge? he had wondered, sitting in the soft interior of the big Zil. “How do they know that I know?”

“We must go,” Zeldovich said.

Alex grabbed his bookbag of medical journals and followed. The brief blast of biting cold that cut through them as they left the car subsided quickly as they entered the crowded room where a loudspeaker crackled. He could barely make out the words: “Trans-Siberian, ‘The Russiya’—” The crowd—old men with deeply rutted faces, huge-bosomed mothers in thick coarse coats with children clustered around them, men squatting over outsized bundles—stirred and gathered their belongings. Then they began to line up at the gates where a hard-eyed train agent looked over their papers.

“Please wait here,” Zeldovich ordered, leaving Alex standing near a snack counter where a red-faced woman dispensed an unappetizing variety of chicken and a greenish beer.

The loudspeaker crackled again, barely audible over the sudden whistle of the wind outside: “Trans-Siberian Express, Track Four, leaving—”

Alex strained to hear, then looked at his watch. It was 4:30. The train was scheduled to leave in half an hour.

Watching the line as it threaded its way slowly through the checkpoint, Alex noticed the arrogance of the train agent, a ruddy-faced Slav who looked over the papers contemptuously, sneering into each person’s face. Seated on either side of him two of the men who had been in the Chyka also reviewed the papers, checking information against lists on clipboards. To one side Alex saw Zeldovich and the station master in close conversation, looking toward him.

The line moved ponderously. The heavy winter clothing everyone wore made the group look nondescript, an amorphous glob with sexual and class distinctions blurred. Most of the passengers accepted the agent’s intimidation with resignation and humility. Alex could see the fear in their eyes as they stepped forward. One couple was shunted aside and interrogated by one of the men from the Chyka. Others stepped forward and would not be stared down. An attractive young woman actually opened her heavy coat, putting her hand on her hip and straightening to show her breasts, subtly challenging the power of the three men. Even from a distance, Alex could see she was forcing the men into a special kind of submission. She passed through, dignity intact, the long coat flowing behind her as she walked toward the train.

“When the others have moved through, you will go,” Zeldovich’s flat voice said. Alex hadn’t seen the man come up behind him.

“This is one big pain in the ass,” Alex said in English, knowing it would annoy Zeldovich, who spoke only Russian. The past six weeks had made them mutually antagonistic. Zeldovich, the fawning flunky, disgusted him.

They stood for a while watching the line. Suddenly a deep voice boomed out over the din. A tall man was confronting the train agent, pulling rank, demanding speed. He seemed vaguely familiar. Alex had seen him at Dimitrov’s dacha.

“Yes, General,” he heard the train agent say, his voice high-pitched and suddenly obsequious. The agent clicked his heels, indicating that he had once been a soldier. Satisfied that he had won his point, the tall general slowly lit a cigar, surely a Havana, and passed through the gate.

“General Grivetsky,” Zeldovich mused, his forehead lined with a frown. He seemed momentarily confused, surprised at the general’s presence.

“I saw him at the dacha,” Alex said, hoping to contribute to his displeasure.

“You are mistaken,” Zeldovich mumbled.

“Bullshit,” Alex said in English, under his breath.

He had grown used to their odd little lies by now, their automatic need to mask the obvious.

“He is a great hero of the Red Army,” Zeldovich said suddenly, recovering his Russian sense of hyperbole. It was part of their syndrome to create celebrities. Worker heroes were everywhere, decorated for making cheese well or sweeping streets thoroughly. Even the train agent wore a medal. Railway work was quite an important profession in the Soviet Union, Dimitrov had said, cataloguing all the benefits—higher pay, early retirement, and a string of enviable privileges.

His encounter with the general had served only to increase the train agent’s arrogance toward those still in line. Next was a smallish man, squat, who moved with a pronounced waddle. Alex watched, his doctor’s mind suddenly analytical. The man’s shoulders and arms were too big for his stumpy torso. He had probably developed them to compensate for the lower parts of his body, the muscles of which seemed badly atrophied. But the power in the shoulders and arms was ummistakable. The man could surely crush the train agent’s head like an overripe melon.

When the man did not produce his papers fast enough, the agent railed at him in an obvious attempt to reassert his importance.

“Goddammit, you slow nitwit, you’re holding up the line.”

Unruffled, the squat man moved deliberately, taking out his wallet in his own good time. For once the train agent had chosen someone who was not easily intimidated, someone used to little pyrrhic victories and silent rebellions.

The train agent took the passport angrily, shouted out the man’s name, “Godorov,” then let the passport drop to the stone floor at his feet.

The squat man looked at it for a moment, then slowly—painfully, Alex was certain—bent to retrieve it. As the man knelt at the train agent’s feet, reaching with gnarled stubby fingers for the passport, Alex suddenly expected the train agent to kick the man in the head. But the blow did not come. The agent, perhaps conscious that his intimidation had failed, turned his venom on the next in line. A couple in their middle thirties, whose fear seemed to sweat through their heavy clothing, sprang forward, cringing and obsequious. The agent smiled tightly as he looked at their papers. Grist for his mill, Alex thought, noting that the man had a Semitic look about him.

The train agent brushed the couple to one side as he threw their papers on the table and called for the next passenger. The couple, their faces ashen now, stood nervously watching the papers.

Alex turned away in disgust and saw that Zeldovich was no longer watching the line but scanning the interior of the station. The men who had accompanied them from Dimitrov’s dacha were ranged around the edges of the waiting room. Hard-eyed and constantly on the alert, they made clumsy attempts at casualness that could not conceal their professionalism.

“Dimitrov takes no chances,” Alex said.

“Not with you.”

Turning back to the line, Alex searched among the faces for Westerners. A little woman, wearing a pink coat and an absurd white bunny hat, stood talking nonstop to a tall man in a bowler hat. He had bent slightly to catch her words, and had been trapped in the endless stream. Alex smiled. She was the only bit of brightness in the drab scene.

A tall sandy-haired man reached the checkpoint. He tapped his foot impatiently while his papers were scrutinized. When he had been cleared, he started toward the train, turning once to lift his fist in what Alex suspected was an obscure obscenity.

The line continued to move forward and the loudspeaker crackled additional warnings. Crowds of babushkas, strong, dull-eyed older women carrying brooms, moved ponderously toward the tracks. They were everywhere, these grandmotherly types in heavy shoes and bulky clothing, breathing vapor, their heads swathed with faded kerchiefs. They were visible all over the Soviet Union, sweeping the streets, repairing the highways, working around Dimitrov’s dacha, sprouting everywhere like ancient weeds.

The last couple, fat Russians dragging a small boy, passed through the gateway.

“Now,” Zeldovich said.

Alex picked up his bookbag of medical journals. The rest of his baggage was already loaded onto the train. The station master waved Alex through the gate while the train agent turned back to the tearful Jewish couple who cowered, eyes lowered, beside the table. Up close, the agent’s cruelty was almost tangible, and Alex stared at his heavy back, the thick neck muscles, the skin red as borscht. The woman’s eyes met Alex’s briefly, then darted away, perhaps frightened by his foreignness. For a foreigner to appear sympathetic, he surmised, would only make matters worse.