The Tool & the Butterflies Page 9

He sat there, pale and angry, looking into Alevtina’s eyes, harshly and fixedly. Captain Vorontsova easily withstood his gaze, thinking that she could make a good officer out of this kid. “He’s got tenacity, perfect English, plus his looks—he could really do some wheeling and dealing!”

  Captain Alevtina Vorontsova decided on the spot to recruit her black-eyed lover … what was the harm in mixing business and pleasure? He would finish his studies soon, then two years of training and he’d be a junior lieutenant. If they whisked him away for “illegal” work abroad, then she’d get a promotion out of it. It would take a while, but she was in no hurry …

  “Deal!”

  “Huh?” The recruiter was still lost in contemplating Iratov’s prospects.

  “Two grand a month and two pumps a week! Just don’t forget that I’m still in school! I’m on the dean’s list!”

  “Good for you!”

  “Free access to Sheremetyevo Airport, none of your guys trying to pinch me! I know that isn’t your turf, but you’ll set it up … and access to the duty-free store!”

  “You’ve got some nerve!” Alevtina said, throwing up her big hands in surprise, like a penguin trying to fly. “Think you’re a real badass now?” She was actually prepared to accept that transaction; she was just acting tough for show. She didn’t answer yet, just smoked another cigarette down to the filter, hit the button on her Japanese-made tape player, and let Vladimir Vysotsky accompany her—“I will spread out the fields for loooooovers!” She nodded her large head. “De-e-al.” She pursed her meaty lips like the pope’s nose and made a smooching sound. “Ready to get to work? Locked and loaded? Get in that bed and serve the Motherland!” She went over to the two-person sofa bed, moving like a hippo. “Let them sing, sleeping or waaaaaaaaking!”

  “You got your pump for today! Second one on Friday! Money tomorrow!” Iratov put on his corduroy jacket and headed for the hills.

  “Where you going, bitch?” Vorontsova snapped out of her reverie, raced toward the door, nearly face-planted, stayed on her feet, and burst out into the stairwell, but her minion in the motorcycle gloves was already turning the corner …

  Neither of them broke the agreement. Without fail, the student brought in the currency and hit the target punctually. He was allowed into the duty-free store, and soon Iratov was dressing the entire Moscow Architectural Institute. In one year, the young man made so much money that, by Soviet standards, he would be set for life. Through some mystical means, he managed to find time for his studies and his final project … He was simultaneously developing contacts in the shadow economy, where he dealt in metals and stones. Even then, Iratov knew not to keep his wealth in paper money.

  Alevtina aged rapidly during that time and ballooned until she looked like a police officer straight out of Saltykov-Shchedrin. Her fat-choked heart turned into a money-grubbing muscle, and her enormous body grew greedier and greedier for the pleasures of the flesh. The officer’s mind was as clear as ever, though, and her thoughts were sharp.

  One time, when they were sitting in the safe house and Alevtina had already gotten her monthly gifts, she suddenly started talking in a folksy way, like she was Iratov’s grandmother.

  “Well, well, my dearie,” she began. “I brought you a little something, betcha can’t guess what it is!”

  “I don’t know,” the speculator answered discontentedly. “Your present will probably put me on the hook for a mil. I don’t like presents!”

  “Oh no, my sweetums!” Captain Vorontsova scooched over. “I’m cutting your taxes.” Iratov looked at her suspiciously. “What I’m offering you is … well, it’s nothing special … it’s a new life!” She neighed with laughter.

  “With you?”

  “We’ll see how things go from there. What you’ve been doing so far is just small potatoes—or small tzimmes, as Zanis would say.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A Latvian guy who works for my unit. He’s a hard worker, like you, not scared of firing-squad offenses … but he isn’t such a love machine …” She broke into laughter again, sounding just like a bittern.

  “Get back to the big tzimmes.”

  She gave Iratov a harsh look, like a true officer, and began delivering her business proposal.

  “You’re a sharp guy! You can handle complex systems—” Iratov was certain that he was about to face a firing squad. He interrupted her to save his life.

  “Let’s do it the usual way. I’ll give you a bigger cut! How much do you need?”

  “Come on, don’t be scared! You’re no coward! And I’m not talking about a dead-end job here!”

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  “Well …” Then Alevtina came out with it, imparting what she was expecting of him, a young, promising, college-educated man with full proficiency in a foreign language. “You will become a lieutenant and have control of your own life!” The captain produced a small red object from her uniform pocket. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Your KGB badge!”

  “And do you know that this badge opens every door in the USSR, even in the f’ing Baltics?”

  “I’d gathered …” Iratov answered, realizing what she was getting at. He hadn’t expected this at all. He was ready for anything except her trying to recruit him. “But I want to be an architect! I studied … dammit, you’re out of your fucking mind!”

  “But you’re a currency speculator!” Alevtina said angrily. “Plus, being an architect is a fabulous cover.”

  “That’s beneath me, working for a bunch of spooks! I read samizdat copies of Solzhenitsyn and Efraim Sevela! I am an anti-Soviet speculator undermining the economic progress of the communist system … not a KGB officer!”

  “Not for a bunch of spooks—for the Motherland!” Captain Vorontsova hissed. “See the difference? Read what you like! Read the Kama Sutra for all I care! Then practice on me!”

  Iratov downed some cognac and had a stiff think, while Captain Vorontsova watched him affectionately. He really was handsome. Vrubel’s demon! She had the great artist’s ceramic in her collective apartment and another demon head at her dacha.

  “I have to think about it.”

  “You do that,” Alevtina answered, sadly, because she had no husband or children after devoting her whole life to the Motherland … oh, how her heart ached! “Is three days enough?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what I like to hear. Now how about my ‘pump’ for today?” She hiked her uniform skirt up to her chin, got on all fours, and rested her elbows on the sofa …

  All through the next day, Iratov’s brain was burning, like a grenade had gone off in his head. No matter how hard he strained, he could not gather the thoughts he needed. By evening, the flame had waned; dawn broke in Iratov’s skull, and he realized that he needed help. He went through everyone he knew, from store managers to businessmen, but he couldn’t think of anyone who could snatch him from the clutches of the KGB. Refusing the offer to become a spook would be a brief prelude to prison.

  By the following evening, a desperate decision came all on its own, and by midnight, it had firmly convinced Iratov that it was both right and inevitable. That same night, he visited the luggage rooms of Moscow’s four major train stations, where he picked up six suitcases.

  The architecture student loaded everything he had amassed into the trunk of his Zhiguli, parked it in Lubyanka Square at seven in the morning, approached a massive door, and rang the bell. An instant later, a soldier rounded the corner, his insignia identifying him as a warrant officer in the Internal Troops, accompanied by two subordinates. The door still hadn’t opened, though.

  “You can’t park your vehicle here!”

  “I’m here to turn myself in,” Iratov declared. His face was still pale, but his eyes burned with masculine decisiveness.

  “Parking here is still prohibited! We are impounding the vehicle and arresting you.”

  “Well, that’s why I came!”

  The door
opened, and a young major leaned halfway out and dismissed the guards with a careless flick of his pale wrist.

  “Please come in, Comrade Iratov.”

  That was a cute trick to play—it usually worked, especially on the youngsters—but the speculator knew it well. They just ran the plates on his Zhiguli. Simple as that.

  “Thank you.”

  They took him up to the fourth floor in the elevator and pointed to the corridor leading to the right. The major followed, guiding him with crisp commands.

  “Bear right. Straight. Bear right.”

  Iratov had never seen internal architecture like this. This was more than corridors veering to the left or right; it was like some kind of labyrinth. Anyone finding themselves in this building for the first time would be uneasy, to say the least.

  “Stop!” the major said, either asking or ordering. “Here we are, Mr. Iratov.”

  A minute later, Iratov was sitting across from a small man: lieutenant colonel’s uniform, the face of a little beast, and the eyes of a fish. Despite his repellant appearance, the lieutenant colonel gave him a welcoming smile from the other side of a huge table with a black intercom panel on the right side. That’s how people smile just before they knife somebody in a dark alley … There was also a metal cage containing a chair with a collapsed seat.

  “How much do you have?” the beast inquired in a quiet voice.

  “Excuse me?” Iratov was confused at first.

  “What’s the total, in those suitcases?”

  “Suitcases?” Here was a trick Mr. Iratov didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine how they had managed to move his car so quickly, not to mention search it. It had been seven minutes, tops. They hadn’t even arrested him yet! “I … I don’t know the exact amount …”

  “Your best estimate, please.”

  “Eight hundred thousand, maybe more …”

  “In rubles?”

  “Foreign currency.” The lieutenant colonel noticeably tensed up. He pressed a button on the intercom and issued his instructions.

  “Stenographer and all material evidence pertaining to the Iratov case, immediately.” Apparently, they had been keeping tabs on him for some time, but, clearly, Vorontsova had been true to her word, and she’d been covering for him as best she could.

  Full name, where and when, come on, you’re a Communist Youth League boy, hundreds of questions in the first thirty minutes. They brought in the suitcases and counted the money until the next morning. The lieutenant colonel kept looking at Iratov the whole time, like he was scanning his brain.

  “I came to turn myself in, honest! I—”

  “Hold on there!” the man-fish-beast interrupted. He continued staring in silence, sipping black tea from a glass in a silver holder with an engraving of Felix Dzerzhinsky.

  “Eight hundred twenty-three thousand, sir,” they reported.

  “Rokotov was shot for a million …”

  “But I came forward voluntarily!” Iratov exclaimed nervously. “And Rokotov was back when Khrushchev was in power! These days you get eight years, but I came forward voluntarily—”

  “Relax, Mr. Iratov. We’ll set everything straight. The fact that you came forward voluntarily is good, but one way or another, you’ll have to do some time. Precisely how much is entirely up to you. By the way, where did you get the nickname Yakut? You don’t look like a northerner to me. Now please step into the cage!”

  “I have access to information that I am prepared to trade for my freedom,” the confessed speculator declared, deciding to take a new tack.

  The escort guard pushed Iratov into the cage and cuffed one of his hands to a metal loop.

  “Very interesting, please continue!”

  “Do I have a guarantee?”

  “Is your watch new?” the colonel asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Is it a Rolex?”

  “It’s a Schaffhausen … almost new.” He automatically looked at this left hand and noticed that the handcuffs had cracked the glass, and the gold band was all scratched.

  “There you go, it has a lifetime guarantee! But only in Switzerland …”

  Iratov didn’t want to go to prison, though he’d imagined it many times. His whole life down the tubes … Time to take a risk. He stood up straight.

  “You won’t give me more than eight years. I’ll keep my information to myself!” he announced.

  What came next was a long and torturous palaver, complete with threats that his parents would not be spared, that the Politburo intended to revive good old Mr. Khrushchev’s practice of taking dickwads like him and smearing brilliant green dye on their foreheads … They kept him in a cold cell, turned on a klaxon so he couldn’t sleep, and informed him a week later that they had arrested his mother and father, and his mom was on the verge of a heart attack. They even brought his old sexual partners from the institute in for questioning. The chicks came in with no makeup and their hair done like old Bolsheviks, with their Communist Youth League pins on over their push-up bras. They maintained, each more adamantly than the last, that they had no idea he was secretly involved in currency speculation. Katya, the volleyball player, stated that she didn’t even know who Iratov was; sure, she’d seen him on campus a few times, but she spent all her time practicing. Shevtsova, the Communist Youth League secretary, furrowed her Party brows and muttered between her teeth that she herself had suspected Arseny of criminal activity for some time. She had received some signals, and they were preparing a response … Another dozen or so chicks made similar statements, but he just smiled slightly, studying his bedmates, knowing full well that, underneath those dowdy Soviet dresses and blouses, their pliant tits and tushies were ready to be stripped of the high-class Italian lingerie gifted to them by a criminal named Iratov. You could have asked the investigator to undress this whole Communist Youth League bordello, and all those young ladies would have been sent up the river along with him for incitement to commit a crime. Well, that would make his time in prison much more pleasurable. Iratov didn’t wish the girls ill, though, so he kept quiet. What can you do with these women? They’re all whores! You can’t expect a whore to be faithful!

  “So how many of them, Yakut?” the lieutenant colonel inquired.

  “How many … what?”

  “How many have you poked?”

  “A lot of them, sir,” the prisoner confessed. “A lot.” They slowly and methodically pumped him for information but weren’t offering anything in return, hoping that, sooner or later, the tried-and-true methods would loosen the student’s tongue. But a week passed, then another, then a whole month, and the speculator still wouldn’t talk.

  Then they unexpectedly offered him his freedom—if his information proved truly significant. The lieutenant colonel gave him his word of honor.

  Iratov waited that proposition out, too, despite how thin and red-eyed his windowless torments had left him. They didn’t shave his head, leaving him with long hair, which was soon infested with lice. The bloodsuckers tortured the student far more than the nighttime alarms. It was as if they were scurrying over his exposed brain and sinking their little teeth into his heavy thoughts.

  “Come on already, Iratov,” sighed lieutenant colonel Ivanov. “What do you know?”

  So Arseny told them about Vorontsova. When, where, what currency, how the aging captain had induced him to enter a sexual relationship with her. He related every detail, omitting nothing, dreaming of freedom. His tale of Alevtina’s exploits was recorded, chapter by chapter, with exacting care. They let him read it and make corrections, which he initialed, and when there was nothing more to tell, the lieutenant colonel inquired whether or not that was everything. Iratov nodded with a sigh.

  “Yes, every last bit of it.”

  The wind of freedom, its marvelous scent, banged against the barred windows.

  “Well, that’s good.” The colonel looked pleased for some reason. He pressed a button on the intercom. “Send Captain Vorontsova in, please,” he instructed.<
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  Alevtina entered the office in her full dress uniform: white shirt, tie, state medals on her chest.

  “Comrade Lieutenant Colonel of the Committee for State Security of the Union of—”

  “No need for that, Alevtina, it’s just us. Is the shop in order?” Mr. Ivanov asked, then answered himself. “It is, I know it is. Have a seat.”

  She looked at Iratov like he was some pathetic animal in a cage—why’d the shameless critter have to bite his mama?—then turned her monument-still face to the lieutenant colonel.

  “He didn’t work out!” Vorontsova admitted with chagrin. “Yakut here refused to work with us. An incorrigible subversive and a hardened criminal, at such a young age! The Central Committee’s decision to reinstate firing squads was well-timed! How’s the family, Mr. Ivanov?”

  “Thank you for your kind interest, Alevtina!” the lieutenant colonel said pleasantly. “Well now, your testimony has been included in the case file, Comrade Captain. The audio recordings you have presented make it abundantly clear that this young man, Arseny Andreivich Iratov, born 1960, does not love the Motherland, and thus refused to help us expose enemies of the Soviet Union—quite the contrary, he disseminated anti-Soviet literature and repeatedly attempted to bribe a KGB agent, i.e., you. American currency was received from you against signed receipt three months ago. He has robbed the law-abiding Soviet peoples of one million dollars. He did knowingly undermine the economic might of the USSR! Sign here, please.” He made a checkmark on the paper, and Vorontsova scribbled her signature there. “Well, everything is perfectly clear here. The investigation is concluded!” Then he turned to Iratov’s cage. The young man sat there, as still as an embalmed corpse. “Maybe they will shoot you after all, if they get tough and charge you with undermining the economic might of the USSR!” He turned back to the witness. “You really ought to come work with us, Alevtina!”

  “Thank you for saying so, Comrade Ivanov! But I can’t. I’m used to being on the ground. I’ve learned to dig out those weasels like a truffle pig! And it makes me so happy!”

  “Then you are dismissed, Comrade Captain. Thank you for your service!” said the lieutenant colonel, starting the standard call-and-response.