Red Moon Read online

  My father didn’t look well himself. Normally very confident, even swaggering, he seemed lost, older than his fifty-five years. “Let me get you some tea,” I said.

  “What I need is vodka.” That, like the kiss, was also strange: My father only drank vodka when forced to, never by choice.

  Nevertheless, he followed me to a table where a pretty nurse tended a pot. “How long is Vladimir supposed to stay here?”

  “They’re running more tests. If they don’t find anything new, he will go home tonight.” He practically gulped the tea and slammed down the cup. “I’ll tell him you said hello.” He did not offer to take me to him.

  At that moment a pair of younger officers, a colonel and major, both in their thirties, appeared. “Good morning, General!” one of them addressed my father, though with nothing like the deference one would expect from a relatively junior officer. Then I realized why: The young colonel was Yuri Gagarin, our country’s first man in space, a bright-eyed, handsome man whose most notable trait was his small stature. He barely came up to my chin, and I am not tall.

  Introductions were made, and I learned that the taller, dark-haired, hawk-nosed and almost aristocratic major was named Ivan Saditsky.

  It was a brief encounter. Gagarin and Saditsky were on their way out of the hospital. In moments they were gone, and so, with another hug, was my father.

  He had barely disappeared around the corner when Filin emerged from his room, papers in hand. Artemov was not with him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize you were finished.”

  “I’m not.” He waved the papers. “There’s so much noise here today.”

  “And important visitors.” I told him about my brief encounter with the famous Gagarin.

  “Here to check on Korolev, no doubt.”

  “Is there any word on his condition?”

  He grunted. “No. By my count, he’s been in surgery for five hours.”

  Five hours seemed like a long time for a routine procedure. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He told me last week it was a polyp. He’s lucky if that’s all it is, since he’s been working himself to death. He spent time in the camps, too, you know.”

  Before I could say more, the door to the operating chamber opened. A man in a bloody surgeon’s gown came out. “Dr. Cherbakov,” Filin said, turning toward him.

  Cherbakov ignored him, speaking instead to the pretty nurse who had been serving tea. “Call Katayev again. I need him.” The nurse reached for the telephone and began to dial.

  “Why is this is taking so long?” Filin asked Cherbakov, who was lighting a cigarette with trembling hands.

  “There are some complications.”

  “What kind?”

  “A tumor. Where is he?” Cherbakov was more interested in the nurse than in Filin.

  The nurse said, “There’s no answer.”

  “Damnit, I’ve got a man on the table!”

  “He had to drive in from his cottage—”

  As Cherbakov turned away, Filin grabbed his arm. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m calling in a specialist.” He tugged his arm free and headed to the theater door.

  “I’m not through talking to you!”

  “Talk to him.” Cherbakov nodded at a man in a gray suit, the hospital administrator, who had suddenly appeared and was now urgently conferring with the nurse.

  Before Filin could say anything, the administrator approached him. “You’re Comrade Korolev’s associate? You should know that the original operation was a success. The polyp was removed.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  The administrator was sweating. “A tumor was discovered. The size—” He turned to the nurse, who held up both fists. “—Well, very large. That was successfully removed by Dr. Cherbakov and the patient is stabilized.”

  “So far, I’ve heard nothing but good news.”

  “Unfortunately, the patient continues to hemorrhage.”

  “How badly?”

  The administrator hesitated a moment too long. Filin got red in the face. “You’re telling me Korolev is in there bleeding, and we’re waiting an hour for this specialist?”

  “The government always wants us to call in a specialist in these cases. I can show you the document.”

  “Fuck your document. That won’t save you.”

  “Katayev is the deputy minister of health. He’s Brezhnev’s personal surgeon.”

  “If he’s that good, he should have been doing the operation in the first place!”

  With the administrator warned, and the potential accusation stated, an agitated Filin returned to where I was standing, helpless. “Remember what you’ve seen and heard,” he told me. “You are my witness.”

  The telephone rang at the nurse’s station. The nurse answered it, handed the phone to the administrator, who then ran to the door of the operating theater. A moment later he emerged with Cherbakov, just as a very polished man of fifty, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a French suit, arrived from down the hallway.

  Filin rose and joined the three men. “Are you Katayev?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the new man answered, handing his overcoat to the administrator. From that point on, he completely ignored Filin. “Where are the X rays?”

  “Inside,” Cherbakov said.

  “I’ll scrub.” He slapped Cherbakov on the back. “Don’t worry, children,” Katayev said. “Your savior is here.”

  Filin followed them into the theater, leaving me alone with the administrator and the nurse. Both of them looked at me with a mixture of fear and anger: Until a few moments ago, I was just another worker. Now they had to worry about what I might say.

  Minutes later, looking paler than he had when he went in, Filin burst out of the operating theater. The door flew open far and long enough for me to see, inside, a mass of bloody linens and discarded plasma bags piled to overflow in one corner. The floor was slippery with blood.

  The patient, of course, was in the glass-walled chamber beyond, hidden by sheets, assistants, and support gear.

  I realized that Filin had walked completely past me, completely past the worried administrator and nurse. A moment later Cherbakov emerged, immediately lighting a cigarette. His hands shook even more.

  Finally Katayev glided out, shaking his head and snapping his fingers to the administrator. “My coat.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to my cottage.”

  “What about your patient?” the administrator pleaded, with a sidelong glance at me. “Aren’t you going to operate?”

  “I don’t operate on dead men.”

  Then he plucked the cigarette from Cherbakov’s shaking hands, and walked away.

  After the disturbing scene with the doctors concerning the fate of Sergei Korolev, I moved around Filin’s hospital room, bundling up his papers. “Should I take these back to the office?”

  “Yes,” he said, numbly, like a man who had been struck.

  “Would you like me to call a doctor for you?”

  “Those butchers! No!” For a moment he looked lost. “Yuri, what are we going to do without him?”

  “Is he really dead?” It was a stupid thing to say, but that’s what came out of my mouth.

  “You heard the big specialist.” Filin lowered himself to his bed, making himself even smaller. “And he wasn’t even sixty!”

  “Who will tell the people at the bureau?”

  “Not me,” he said, swinging his legs up on the bed and lying flat on his back, arms over his face. “His family is around somewhere. It will be up to them, and the Central Committee.” Every facet of Korolev’s life and work was a State secret. “Fifty-nine years old!”

  “You’re sure you’ll be all right? Is your family coming to visit you?” I knew Filin had a wife and son, though I had never met them.

  “They’ll be coming to get me out of this place tonight, if I have anything to say about it!” Suddenly he reached out, to
ok my hand, and looked into my eyes. “You were my witness, Yuri.”

  “Yes, I was right there—”

  “There are going to be a lot of questions. I’ll have to answer them, and you have to stand by me.”

  I had no idea of what he was talking about. “Yes.”

  It wasn’t until I drove away from the hospital that I realized the significance of Filin’s obsession with Korolev’s age. He, too, was fifty-nine.

  Back in Kaliningrad, after a miserably slow drive, I returned the car and carried Filin’s papers upstairs. It was getting dark—on those short winter days the sun would set at four in the afternoon. The main administration building seemed deserted, a disappointment: I was hoping to see what Korolev’s death would mean. But the news had not spread, and I certainly wasn’t going to be its messenger.

  I returned to Bauman via the train and the metro, and a cold walk in the dark to what would be a lonely weekend, since Marina had gone off to visit her parents in Orel.

  I shared a flat on October Street with three other students. One of my roommates, a dark, good-looking Georgian named Lev Tselauri, and I went out to a movie on Saturday night, a film about the Great Patriotic War—not that we cared: It was just a way to get out of the two-room flat. The rest of the weekend we studied, since we both had an exam on Monday morning.

  There was no mention of Korolev’s death—or existence, for that matter—on Saturday, not in the papers or on the radio.

  Sunday morning, however, the headlines in Pravda and Izvestiva proclaimed the death of the great hero. Not on the front page, but inside, filling pages three and four. It was Lev who showed me. “Is this where you’re working? At Korolev’s bureau?” he said.

  Technically, my place of work was a secret, identified only by a mailbox number. But Lev knew that my particular mailbox dealt with manned spacecraft and interplanetary probes. It was pointless to deny it, and I didn’t.

  “That means we’re rivals.” Lev had told me weeks ago of his assignment to a different design bureau, this one known only as Number 52 and concentrating on, I assumed, missiles or aircraft. This was the first I’d heard that my country had a second bureau for spacecraft.

  Rivals.

  On Monday, Lev and I caught a bus on Spartak Street, hoping to connect with one moving north and west on the Ring Road to Leningrad Prospect. Our exams would take place at the Ilyushin aircraft bureau. The bus was a better choice than the metro, given the time we would have to spend walking between stations. And even during the October 1964 coup, when Khrushchev was forcibly retired and tanks could be seen at most downtown intersections, the buses still ran on time.

  Today, however, with the temperatures below freezing and half a meter of snow on the ground, the bus simply stopped in front of the Dynamo Stadium on Leningrad Prospect.

  I was jammed in the back, standing next to Lev, when we heard someone up front say, “Christ, what’s wrong now?”

  “Roadblock,” the driver said.

  Lev shouted, “Get your fat ass out there and tell them to open it!” He grinned with the knowledge that the driver would never know who had said this.

  I looked out the window and immediately saw the reason for the delay. A stream of military trucks was flowing out of the old Central Airport and turning south onto Leningrad Prospect, presumably headed for Red Square, less than three kilometers away. First built when the Tsar was in power and now surrounded by military design bureaus, airplane factories like Ilyushin and Sukhoi, as well as the sprawling Moscow Aviation Institute, Central was all but useless as an airport now. Its proximity to Red Square made it a good place to land troops for parades, however.

  “Has there been another coup?” Lev said.

  I finally realized the cause of the traffic jam. “It’s Korolev’s funeral. We could be stuck here all morning.” Polished green trucks rolled past, with parade troops huddled in their open backs. An occasional Zil or Mercedes limousine roared down the VIP lane in the center of the prospect. I was beginning to see how important Korolev had been.

  “Oh, yes, your great genius is dead. You should transfer to my organization right now if you want to put the first man on the Moon.”

  “Your organization.”

  Lev gave me a sly look, then touched a finger to the tip of his nose. “Number 52. Ask around.”

  Suddenly the bus lurched back to life, to scattered, sarcastic applause.

  With the delay, however, we were late for our exams. Strangely, our proctor was more frantic than we were. “Ribko, what are you trying to do to me?”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. “A man was just here looking for you. State Security.” Typically for a Russian, the proctor made it seem as though I was doubly at fault, not only for the tardy bus, but because I had kept a security official from handing out some no doubt well-deserved punishment.

  “Do I take the test or not?”

  “Yes. He said he’d be back, so don’t mess around.” He actually slapped the papers down in front of me. Lev gave me a sympathetic look, and took a seat as far away from me as he could.

  I was too shaken—State Security, for me?—to concentrate on my test at first. But my five years of training at Bauman paid off. Pretty soon I was solving equations faster than I could write the answers.

  I returned the test before the time was up. The proctor accepted it, then nodded me toward a door where a tall State Security type in glasses and black overcoat waited. “Your Uncle Vladimir wants to see you.”

  My father had told me once that Uncle Vladimir did not work out of the dreaded Lubiyanka but from the fourth floor of the building behind the Belorussia Station. That is where my escort delivered me.

  There is a saying that fat men are graceful; if so, Uncle Vladimir was an exception. He wasn’t hugely fat like Nero or some mountainous caesar—just round, like a pink, hairless bear, and about as coordinated. If there was a glass of water on a desk, he was sure to knock it over. His office had to have been the despair of the housekeeping staff. God, not they, only knew how many important files had been ruined, or lay cemented together, on Uncle Vladimir’s desk.

  Not that he was untidy; far from it. He dressed better than any Russian I knew, and was obsessively neat about his person. I would almost say he was fastidious, as much as any man in his business could be. In that he was a Nefedov, like my mother.

  As I arrived, he closed a red-colored file that was open in front of him and removed his glasses. I think it hurt his face to smile, but he tried. He did not rise: Though he and my father had little in common, both were more reserved than the average Russian man. “How was your test?”

  “I passed it.”

  “You don’t have many more to go before you get your degree.”

  “Half a dozen, I think.” He nodded, as if processing the data, so I asked, thinking of his recent hospital stay, “How are you feeling?”

  Uncle Vladimir seemed surprised by the question. “As good as I ever do this time of year.” He changed the subject without protest from me. “How do you like your job in Korolev’s organization?”

  “Well, I’m not doing the work I was trained for. But I hope to get a position in the spring.”

  He tapped on the red folder. “You can have one now.”

  “There are no vacancies.”

  When Uncle Vladimir managed a smile, it was only with his eyes. “Korolev is gone: That’s one vacancy.”

  I didn’t know how to react to a statement like that. I liked Uncle Vladimir and felt comfortable with him. I had even tried to model myself on him, to be as cultured, well-read, informed, interested in the world. I felt I could be irreverent with him on our infrequent family occasions, but not here. So I said nothing, and he went on, more seriously: “Korolev’s death has upset many of our leaders, notably Ustinov. This doctor, Cherbakov, turns out to be a regular butcher. What he was doing operating on the chief designer no one understands. Who hired him? What really killed Korolev?”

  “I assume someone
will do an autopsy.”

  “They cremated him. Hard to do an autopsy on a pile of ashes.” Uncle Vladimir consulted another file. “It seems his death couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Americans just made a two-week-long space-flight. Apparently they put one of their Geminis together with the other—”

  “They made a rendezvous. Not a docking.”

  Uncle Vladimir nodded. “Good, you follow these things. Ustinov and the others are afraid that because Korolev is dead, the Americans will beat us to the Moon.”

  “I thought we were far ahead of them.”

  “Not by much, and not for long. Yuri, our leaders are worried. ‘He who controls the high ground of space controls the world.’ Do you know who said that?”

  “Lenin?”

  “Lyndon Johnson. The same ruthless bastard who killed Kennedy so he could become President. Imagine what he would do to us if he could put his missiles on the Moon.”

  Even then I knew that Mr. Johnson already had quite a few missiles much closer to Moscow than the Moon, but, again, I kept my mouth shut.

  Uncle Vladimir folded his fat hands on that red folder. “I’ve been asked to find a volunteer for a special mission inside the space program. Specifically, inside Korolev’s organization.”

  I had trouble understanding what he wanted. My confusion must have been obvious. “Yuri, I want you to start looking around at Korolev’s bureau. Keep notes. Report to me.”

  “Become a spy?”

  “Think of it as being a criminal investigator.”

  “Why me? I’m an engineer, not an investigator.”

  Uncle Vladimir tapped the folder. “Because of your technical training. And because I can trust you.” Only then did I realize that the red folder on his desk was my personal State Security file.

  “All right.” I saw nothing wrong with helping a criminal investigation into Korolev’s death. Filin would approve. “When do I start?”

  “As soon as you go back to Kaliningrad. Your boss, Dr. Filin, will be informed that you are to be promoted to engineer in his section. Try to act surprised.”