My heart was still pounding when I awoke. My shoulders and neck were stiff. I felt more exhausted than when I had gone to sleep. At last I got up and drew the curtains just enough not to burn my retinas. Six floors beneath me Tverskaya was astream with vehicles, clogged in one direction with honking traffic. I let my body go through the motions of employing the toilet and showering. Under the pummel of the hot water, I thought about the two young guys, Gibkov and McGinnis, who were going to take over the work of managing the Varandey project after we were done. I’d liked them for not being sewn out of L-Pet’s adulterated cloth. I’d had the impression they’d liked me too, for my directness and expertise. Now they would no doubt view me as just another old hypocrite. I was already adjusting myself to the loss of esteem, the downgrading of expectation.
In the dimly lit mirror above the mini-bar I watched my hands shake as I looped a tie around my neck, cinched it up, and folded down the collar. I stirred my soluble crystal Nescafé and drank it down beside the nightstand, where Mama’s documents still lay. Daylight touched the mimeographed signatures of those who’d signed Florence’s prison sentence. I was surprised to see that, aside from Bykov’s and Antonov’s, there were three other names—though not so surprised when I gave it some thought. The bowels of hell were nothing if not the precinct of bureaucratic order. I instantly beheld an image of these pages moving from desk to desk, making their way up the chain, farther and farther away from my mother’s cold jail cell, acquiring more patina of officialdom with each signature and stamp. It was likely that the figures who’d signed this order, which had so clemently committed my mother to seven years of hard labor, had never even laid eyes on her. I rested my cup down on the page, pleased with the brown coffee ring it left when I picked it up again—my very own rubber stamp added to the three official seals of the NKVD. What a lust for procedure all these tidy forms were meant to convey! And all the while: splintered allegiances, private agendas, mutual loathing. What unanimity, or, to borrow the NKVD’s own language, “identical-mindedness,” these neat ranks of signatures suggested. But that too was a falsehood. The NKVD was cannibalizing itself even as it set its teeth on the world outside. How had my mother known—in this deep circle of Hades—to sic those two dogs, Antonov and Bykov, upon each other? To pry apart their loyalties just as they had tried to pry apart hers and Essie’s? Was she studying their tricks even as they worked her over? Or had she simply seen beyond the obvious: that nobody was invulnerable. That there were no united fronts. That it was rot all the way through—the rot of fear and envy.
And now another image of orderly signatures struck me. Instinctively, my eyes went to my computer case, sitting half forgotten on the carpet in a slanting rectangle of light from the curtains. I went over to it and removed from the briefcase the sheaf of documents connected to the joint venture. It was part of the “welcome packet” I’d had to read on starting the Varandey terminal project. Composed in a slick PR style by Continental’s press department, it was intended for the oil trade journals that exist to cover such things. I had opened it and closed it the day they’d given it to us. Now I pulled the papers out of the folder one by one. I scanned the pages: orderly, dull corporate prose, unshadowed by any hint of internal discord. I knew my plan was delirious, but my fingers would not stop their busy turning. They leafed to the end of a long-winded mission statement, on the final page of which I discovered at long last, toward the bottom, a list of signatures. They were arrayed in two pillars: Russians on the right, Americans on the left, like dancers at a debutante ball. My own name appeared toward the middle of the American column, above my vague title: “Director of Project Services.” On the right were Mukhov’s, Serdyuk’s, and Kablukov’s names and signatures. And directly beneath Kablukov’s half-literate chicken scrawl, a neat, slightly right-tilting, unflamboyant, but nevertheless magisterial signature I had not seen before. Underneath it was typewritten “A. Kozlovsky, Head of Foreign Partnerships.” I had never laid eyes on the man. Whoever he was, he’d been too otherwise occupied to favor us with his presence in our mahogany conference room. Evidently, he was one of those faceless executives every company has, across whose desk documents must pass on their mysterious way up, to be approved at the very top before being sent down again. I knew that there weren’t very many people in the chain above the Boot. Yet this Kozlovsky fellow’s name was beneath Kablukov’s, signifying his higher status. There were no mistakes made when it came to where a name fell on a page. Mistakes regarding lives lost, fathers killed, mothers imprisoned—sure. But the placement of signatures on a document—never.
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BY NINE I WAS at L-Pet headquarters, hoping not to be spotted by anybody from our project, anyone who would want to walk with me to the conference room for our concluding meeting. I found the elevator blessedly empty and rode it as far as it would take me, to the twenty-first floor. I could taste the acid washback from the instant coffee sloshing around in my empty stomach. Thanks to the crystals of sweetened caffeine, my hands were no longer shaking, though I was jittery in other ways, prepared to wander the labyrinths of L-Pet until somebody pointed me to A. Kozlovsky’s office.