The door was double-locked, of course, and the old Soviet's impulse was to ignore the visitor—a brat selling cookies, most likely, or a cheaply dressed fanatic handing out religious leaflets. But the knock was repeated, then again more loudly, and finally a familiar voice boomed through. "Ivan Fyodorovich! Ivan Fyodorovich!"
Cherkassky cocked his head. His pinched-in face stretched outward just a notch, and for a second he nearly smiled.
So—Gennady was coming out of his week-long sulk and was ready to resume his role of clown and figurehead and scientist and payer-out of bribes. This was a relief, though it only confirmed what Cherkassky had long known: that people, however whipped and humiliated and badly used, would come limping, crawling back to the life they knew, because being mortified, spat upon, was less appalling than the chore of finding a different life.
Cherkassky smoothed his shirt and headed for the entryway, determined to be as conciliatory and gracious as his old comrade would let him be. Opening the door, he slightly raised his hands in a gesture that was for him expansive, and said, "Gennady Petrovich, how good to see you up and out."
Markov stood in the doorway and did an absurd little pantomime of a man just freed from prison or the hospital, flared nostrils gulping in air, fat spread arms embracing the landscape, wattly chin quivering as it turned up toward the sky.
Reassured by these fresh signs of buffoonery, Cherkassky said, "Come in, come in. Tell me how you have been."
"How I have been?" said Markov, when he'd moved into the living room and settled deeply into the softest chair. "I've been drunk. I've been weeping. I've been angry. Maybe I am better now."
Cherkassky studied him. But Markov didn't want to be studied, and a buffoonish yet melancholy grin was as good a mask as any. The thin man said, "Maybe?"
Markov shrugged, lightly drummed his fingers on the chair arms.
Cherkassky studied him some more. He wanted to be delicate but he did not believe in coddling. He said, "So you are ready to get back to work?"
Markov flashed a bland and fleeting smirk, and shrugged again.
Cherkassky squirmed in response. He was accustomed to hearing Markov talk too much, blab out whatever was on his mind or in his sloppy sentimental heart. These inscrutable smiles, these stubborn silences unsettled him, as Markov knew they would.
"A new shipment needs preparing," Cherkassky said. "Libya. Twenty kilos, oxide form. Sent in pigment canisters. You can do?"
Yet again the fat man shrugged and smiled. Yes, he could do it. Take metallic plutonium, bind it to oxygen with strong acid and electric current. Easy, if you knew how. And that was his edge. He was on terms with the atom. Plutonium—people feared it like they feared whatever they did not understand. Science fiction and propaganda made them think it was much more mysterious and dangerous than it was. In fact you could carry plutonium in your briefcase; you could hold it in your hand. Do anything but breathe it in. Markov's special knowledge made him serene; his serenity made the other man fretful and fidgety.
Cherkassky leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. Uncertainty was poison to him; he felt he had to test Markov somehow, elicit some reaction he could read. Sucking in his face, he said, "Now that you are back, Gennady, there is some bad news I must tell you."
Markov sat with the stony calm of someone who's already heard the worst news he will ever hear, been visited by a calamity that could not be topped.
"The woman is alive," Cherkassky said.
This took a moment to sink in. Markov's eyes went soupy, and he stared unseeing through the picture window at the still canal and the mint-green house beyond it. The woman? Alive? Impossible. "Ludmila?"
Cherkassky blinked. His eyebrows crept together but his voice was less suspicious than confused. "Ludmila?"
Markov scratched his belly, dragged his tongue along his flubbery lips. "I only mean," he said, "what woman? What woman is alive?"
Cherkassky turned away. Too late, he realized that opening this subject had been a mistake, that Markov's goading passivity had pushed him toward a misplay. He steeled himself and said, "The woman that Lazslo was supposed to kill."
Lazslo. The name itself, in memory, had taken on for Markov an echo of the mythic, nearly the sacred. He hid his deep offense at Cherkassky's mention of it. He hid, as well, the unexpected ambivalence he felt at learning that his nephew's last squeeze was still alive. She was dangerous, of course, an awful liability; yet she was also a link to the dear passionate departed. Lazslo had desired her, and part of Markov was glad she still existed. He said, "Never the boy was meant to be a killer. I told you that, Ivan."