The Ice Curtain Read online

  “So how many diamonds did we send those bastards?” asked the Siberian Delegate, Arkady Volsky.

  They stood by a window in the VIP lounge, watching a weary Aeroflot IL-62 being readied for the morning flight to Moscow. Their bags were piled around their boots in a defensive circle.

  Volsky had been appointed by President Yeltsin to keep an eye on Siberia for the Kremlin. Or as Volsky preferred, to keep an eye on Moscow for Siberia. He was Nowek’s boss, his mentor, his friend.

  “Which bastards?” asked Nowek. “The ones in London or Moscow?”

  “Funny. The ones who were supposed to pay my miners.”

  His miners? Nowek thought. “Kristall shipped twelve million carats to Moscow last year,” he said. Kristall was the big Siberian mining company that controlled ninety percent of Russian diamonds. Kristall was to Russia what the diamond cartel in London was to the world. “A third of it was gem quality. The cartel bought all four million carats.”

  “Four million? It’s a mountain of diamonds.”

  “Not even a hill,” said Nowek. “How much do you weigh? Eighty kilos?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Ninety?”

  “It’s not necessary for you to know,” Volsky said testily. He was shorter, heavier, though he lifted weights religiously. It gave him the surprising solidity of a bulldog. “What are you getting at?”

  “Four million carats is eight of you. Or seven. You’ve put on some weight.”

  Volsky looked down at his waist, then up at Nowek to see if it was a joke. You had to be careful with Nowek. “Never.”

  “Easily. You were a coal miner. You still think like one. Diamonds come by the carat, not the ton.” Nowek held up his hands and used a thumb and forefinger from each to form an oval the size of an egg. “Three thousand carats. The Cullinan stone. The largest gem-quality crystal ever found.”

  Volsky’s eyebrows arched again. “That small?”

  “Arkasha,” said Nowek, “a big diamond is still a very small thing.”

  Volsky was a square, bluff man in his late forties. He had the pink face of a serious drinker, webbed with burst veins, and a smooth, thick helmet of silvery blond hair. His fingers were stubby and powerful. Even in his best suit there was no mistaking him for anything but a man who had known hard work.

  Volsky had been a coal miner, a labor brigade leader in the Kuzbass coal region, a union organizer at the rebellious Anzhero mine. His miners had led the nationwide strike that toppled Gorbachev and installed Boris Yeltsin in his place. Yeltsin rewarded Volsky with the office of the Siberian Delegate. It was a big step up from the pits, though Volsky still spoke simply and loud, like a miner shouting Fire in the hole!

  “These four million markovka,” he said, using the Russian word for carrots instead of carat. “What are they worth?”

  A pun in two languages? “You’ve been studying English.”

  “It’s the language of business. It’s practically mandatory,” said Volsky proudly, pleased to be able to surprise Nowek. “So?”

  “In dollars, more than half a billion. Maybe more. I can’t keep track of what that is in rubles these days.”

  “Dollars are good enough.”

  They’re better, thought Nowek. Dollars were the eternal stars. You could navigate by them. Rubles were meteorites, streaks of light, weightless dust. Breathe and they’d blow away.

  “So Moscow sold the cartel half a billion dollars’ worth of diamonds and those mousepricks won’t send a barrel of cold shit to the mines?”

  “Moscow hasn’t sold any to the cartel in almost a year. They’re too busy arguing over price. I don’t know what Kristall ships to Moscow.”

  “I have a colleague who says they’re shipping plenty.”

  It was the first Nowek had heard of it. “A miner?”

  “Let’s just say colleague. The mafiya slits throats for twenty dollars. Just think what they would do for half a billion.”

  Once, Nowek had been a petroleum geologist. In Soviet times, the oil business had been absolutely corrupt. Nowek assumed diamonds worked the same way now. “Which mafiya?” he asked. “The ones on the street or the ones in the Kremlin?”

  Volsky sighed. “It’s a distinction without a difference.”

  Yes, but Nowek was surprised to hear him say it. Volsky was the one with dreams of a better Russia, a Russia of laws. A Russia that might one day actually be normal. It was a dream that was becoming hard to sustain. “Moscow will say they can’t send money to Siberia when they haven’t sold any rough to the cartel,” he said.

  Volsky shrugged. “Let them. I have a plan.”

  It better be a good one. Winter was coming, and the lowest temperature in history, minus one hundred sixty degrees, had been recorded near the diamond mines. “So?”

  “We’re meeting Yevgeny Petrov, the chairman of the State Diamond Committee. They call him Prince of Diamonds for a reason. He controls the state diamond stockpile. It’s a real mountain of gems.” He gave Nowek an impish grin. “He’s going to sell some and send the money to my miners. It’s simple.”

  Nowek thought that what seemed simple in Irkutsk might not seem that way in Moscow. “How will you make him do it?”

  “First I’ll use reason,” said Volsky. “But if reason doesn’t work, I have other tools of persuasion.”

  “A club?”

  “The President. My miners handed him his job in ninety-one. That’s why I have a direct number to the Kremlin duty desk today. I even have my own password. Maybe you forgot?”

  “It’s his memory I worry about.” Yeltsin was fast becoming an invisible man. The papers were full of rumors that he wasn’t even alive. “I hear he’s not in such good shape.”

  “I don’t care if he’s made of wax. He’s still President and if he says do something, Petrov will obey.” Volsky looked out the window, too, then said, “Galena is really coming back home next week?”

  “She can’t stay in America. Her visa runs out. Besides, she’s only eighteen,” said Nowek. But he didn’t sound convinced. “I want to be back in time to meet her plane.”

  “Don’t worry. You will be.”

  Nowek turned. “Not you?”

  “I’m going up to Mirny with my pockets full of Petrov’s money, or with his head. It will be up to him which. I’ve never been there. It should be interesting.”

  Desperate. Dismal. Marooned. These were the words that came to Nowek’s mind when he thought of Mirny. Not interesting. “You’re not giving Petrov much time to be reasonable, Arkasha.”

  “I gave the miners my word.”

  Nowek knew there was no arguing. Once Volsky said he would do something, Nowek had never known him to back away. Volsky could be maddeningly evasive. But heaven help anyone who stood between him and his word. You might as well stand in front of the Trans Siberian Express and try to flag it down with a handkerchief.

  “Relax,” said Volsky with a smile. “I know what I’m doing. Besides, three days in Moscow is long enough. More and we both might contract some disease.”

  Nowek knew his friend wasn’t speaking about the flu. Moscow wasn’t another city so much as a black hole, a whirlpool that drew in Siberia’s wealth and magically made it disappear. Moscow, florid with corruption, radioactive with greed.

  They watched a fuel truck rumble up to the old jet. A worker got out and tugged a hose from a reluctant reel. He was smoking a cigarette, but out of respect for the fuel left it burning on the truck’s fender. A breeze sent it into a rain puddle.

  Volsky saw Nowek was preoccupied. He thought he knew his friend’s mind. Sometimes he did. “You’ve talked with Galena?”

  “By electronka.” E-mail. “I asked what she missed from Siberia. You know what she said? Get serious.”

  “It’s not easy growing up without a mother.”

  Nowek didn’t need reminding that it was right here, at this very airport, that he’d last seen his wife alive. Nina had boarded a plane bound for Moscow. It went down twenty-seven
minutes later. Years later, the potato field still reeked of jet fuel and burned plastic.

  “You know,” Volsky continued, “if you decided to go . . .”

  Nowek looked up. “Where?”

  “To America. With Galena. Live a normal life. I could help.”

  “No thanks,” said Nowek. “What would I do there? I’m a troublemaker. There are no troubles in heaven. Only money. Everything in America is about money.”

  “Everything is about money here, too, Gregori.”

  “Yes. But we still tell ourselves it’s not.”

  The window dripped with condensation. Its edges were alive with mold, the panes fogged. Nowek cleared a circle in the glass. A face appeared in the cockpit windows, peering up at the leaden sky.

  “About your diamond figures,” said Volsky. “They’re reliable?”

  “They’re reliable estimates. We know how many gem diamonds ended up in London last year because the cartel published the figures. No one knows how many were really mined.”

  “Petrov knows.”

  “Not even Petrov. By law, Kristall reports only total diamond production. Gem quality and industrial. The gems sell for a lot. The industrials for a little. You see the problem?”

  “Fuck.” Volsky grunted. “If no one knows how many good ones actually come out of the ground, anyone with access . . .”

  “Exactly.” Access was what Russian politics was all about. From access came influence, from influence control, and from control? Plunder. “Your miner friend says gem diamonds are being shipped to Moscow? Petrov can—”

  “Skim off as many good ones as he pleases. And nobody said anything about a miner friend.”

  “Fine. Just so you know that when it comes to how many stones were mined, it all depends on your assumptions.”

  Volsky snorted. “It doesn’t pay to make assumptions when it comes to Moscow. These days, nobody has any fucking answers.”

  “In Russia, answers can be harder to find than diamonds.”

  “I’ll tell that to Petrov.”

  A flashing beacon began to strobe from the wings of the jet.

  “Amazing,” said Volsky. “They’re going to be on time.”

  “It doesn’t pay to make assumptions about Aeroflot, either.”

  “They’re better now.”

  “Russian Darwinism,” said Nowek. “The survival of the luckiest. You know what Americans call it? Aeroflop.”

  “Shto?”

  “Flop. It means disaster in the international language of business.”

  A tinny loudspeaker announced the morning Moscow flight.

  Volsky grabbed his suitcase and hefted the strap onto his broad miner’s shoulder. “Be honest. Could Aeroflot get any worse?”

  Nowek had to smile. BE HONEST: COULD I DO ANY WORSE? was the slogan Volsky had suggested for Nowek’s campaign for mayor of Markovo. It had proven popular. Nowek won the election. But not durable. Russia’s economic collapse in 1998 had claimed millions of victims. Nowek had been one of them.

  Volsky flashed their official passes to a bored clerk. They walked through the control gate, through a grimy hallway and out into the rain. They skirted a Brownian mass of passengers pushing their way to the plane. The boarding stairs were blocked by a wet, grim stewardess who allowed the Siberian Delegate and his assistant in ahead of the herd.

  “Petrov has a lot of power,” said Nowek as they stooped to enter the musty cabin. “You don’t become chairman of the State Diamond Committee without friends.”

  “No. Petrov has collaborators. I have friends.”

  The rising scream of four jet engines drilled through the cold rain. They dumped their bags in the open compartment in the tail, and found their seats in front. The passengers filled the cabin with the smell of wet wool, cigarettes, dried fish.

  The stewardess slammed the hatch shut. The engines roared, the brakes squealed, and the IL-62 trundled off to the long, concrete runway. The engines roared again, louder. A lurch and the big jet began to roll, accelerating, the seams in the concrete a fast staccato, then silence as the ground fell away.

  Noisy, inefficient, and cursed with an unquenchable thirst for fuel, the 62 was graceful in its way. The four engines at the tail and slender fuselage gave it the appearance of a long-necked goose in flight. And it was fast: they chased the morning westbound at better than 800 kilometers an hour.

  Cities, islands of gray concrete in a green, rolling sea, fell beneath the wing. Novosibirsk, Roschino, Bolshoye Savino. Nowek peered down through the scratched plastic porthole as a low, sinuous hump of hills appeared. The Ural Mountains, dividing Asia and Europe. They weren’t much to see from the ground. They were even less impressive from above.

  “You were once a geologist. Tell me about diamonds.”

  Nowek looked up. “How much do you want to hear?”

  “I’ll say when to stop.”

  Nowek shifted in the seat. “Pure carbon exists in just three states: graphite, amorphous, and diamond. The first two are almost worthless. The last is not. What makes a jewel instead of something you put in a pencil is the environment of extreme heat and pressure found deep inside the earth. Okay so far?”

  “Keep going.”

  “On their way to the surface, most diamonds burn up. Those that survive take on trace elements from the surrounding rock. These give color to the pure crystals. Nitrogen makes a clear diamond yellow. Boron turns it blue. Greens have been irradiated. Reds are very rare. No one knows what turns a diamond red. Reds are mysterious.”

  “Maybe to you.”

  “Red diamonds. The crystals get caught up in flows of lava that erupt at the surface in a kind of volcano of diamond.”

  “Grisha, this is just rocks. . . .”

  “So are diamonds. That’s the secret the cartel doesn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Fascinating. Now tell me what I need to know.”

  “Take a lump of coal, squeeze it with tremendous pressure, bake it under extreme heat, blast it to the surface, and dig it up and it becomes something you put in a vault, not a furnace.”

  “Thank you. Now what about our diamonds?”

  “Discovered in northern Yakutia in 1947. The Mirny mine was opened in fifty-four. Siberia is the number-two producer of diamonds in the world. More than South Africa.”

  It aroused Volsky’s competitiveness. “Who’s first?”

  “Australia by weight, Botswana by value. Siberian diamonds go straight to Moscow, to Petrov. He’s supposed to sell them to the highest bidder. That’s always been the cartel. Now they want to pay us less and so nothing has been sold. No one can force Petrov to act. He’s under nobody’s thumb.”

  “He’s under the President’s thumb.”

  “Maybe.” Nowek had his doubts. In a bankrupt country where influence came from money, who had more power? A sick President or a man who controlled billions?

  “So all our gem diamonds go to the cartel?”

  “Everyone’s gem diamonds end up there. They control ninety percent of the world trade. When Mirny was discovered, the cartel’s stock went down twenty-five percent overnight. They flew to Moscow the next day because they were afraid we would flood the market, drive down prices, and break the cartel.”

  “So then why aren’t they afraid of us now?”

  “It’s a good question. You should ask Petrov.”

  “I will.” Volsky turned away. In a minute he was snoring softly.

  Four, five, six hours. It was already time for dinner by Nowek’s watch when the roar of the engines quieted to a whisper, and the airliner tilted steeply down. The stewardess reappeared and busied herself with powder and lipstick at a mirror.

  Outside Nowek’s porthole, a deck of clouds swiftly rose up to meet them. The jet slipped through into gray, bumpy murk. Lower, lower, the view below darkened, then cleared, revealing rich green earth, almost wild-seeming, with only the occasional dacha, surrounded by summer gardens gone fallow.

  Ahead, the dark spires of Moscow pi
erced a smoky horizon, ominous and black in the smudged light. City of Dead Souls.

  The old terminal at Moscow’s Shermetyevo I Airport was part circus, part mob. Traders from the south in Italian clothes, gangsters from the west in leathers, northerners already in fur. Western tourists with backpacks and running shoes, homing beacons for pickpockets, thieves. A poster showed a busty blonde wearing an old leather aviator’s helmet and nothing else. An advertisement for a club. Across the top, in block letters: YOU WILL DO IT TONIGHT.

  “The Kremlin sent a car. It’s probably at the VIP terminal,” said Volsky as they pushed through the crowds. “I’ll wait. You go look.”

  Nowek found a uniformed guard and asked for directions. He got a cold look for an answer. Either Nowek already knew where VIPs should go, or there was no reason for him to know.

  Outside, a fine mist fell from pearl-gray clouds. Taxis dove and darted, ignoring Nowek and Volsky, competing for foreign passengers. Mercedes sedans floated by on invisible currents, the biznismen within hidden behind tinted glass, shepherded by Jeep Cherokees bristling with gun barrels.

  A loud blaat, followed by a crunch, then the almost musical tinkle of a shattered taillight lens, made them turn and look.

  A big black dinosaur of a car, a Chaika 10, backed up, disengaged from a cab’s rear bumper, and rolled forward again in a cloud of blue oil smoke. You could hear each beat of its engine.

  “Brezhnev’s ghost,” said Nowek. The Chaika looked like an American car from the fifties with prominent fins and a toothy grille.

  “I wonder who . . .” Volsky began, but he stopped when the Chaika rolled up to the curb and stopped. The driver got out, put a blue flasher on the roof and turned it on.

  He was young, dressed in a leather jacket and an officer’s wide-brimmed cap. A long dark ponytail dangled from beneath it, halfway down his back. “Gentlemen! I’m Gavril.”

  “So what?” said Volsky.

  “I’m your driver. This is your car. Chairman Petrov sent me.”