Ben jerked his head to one side, breaking the spell, and shuddered as he descended the steps. I lingered by the cylinder even as Breaker stalked down the aisle to pull us out of there.
“It’s nuts!” I said as I joined Ben. We reclaimed our loads and ran awkwardly to the vault door in our plastic suits, the albums heavy as bricks. Ben managed to hold on to his stack and touch his plastic-sheathed cranium with a finger, screwing his hand back and forth. “The whole damned century was nuts, Hal!”
We descended sixteen floors. Delbarco went first, scouting the platform overlooking the loading dock, then waved us through the door. We walked between the shattered aquariums and looked down over a milling crowd of NYPD officers and firemen. Through the doors, I saw fire engines and police cars in broken echelon, lights blinking.
Someone—probably on our side—had called out all the city watchdogs.
“Just play it cool,” Delbarco said, as we stripped off our isolation suits. “Let Agent Breaker do the talking.”
“Friends, you need to get out of here,” Breaker called out over the crowd. “This building is still contaminated.” Wearing a plastic isolation suit gave him some authority. A few broke for the door. The firemen donned their oxygen masks.
“Follow me,” Delbarco said. “I don’t think they’ll shoot with the City’s Finest watching.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Ben muttered.
We walked through the crowd. Halfway out the door, I grabbed a fireman’s arm. “There are kids on the eighth floor,” I told him. “They’re hungry, and they need medical attention. You can go in there—we did. Please go get them.”
The fireman stared at my suit. “Easy for you to say. It’s contaminated, buddy.”
“They’re just kids!” I shouted.
He waved me off.
Mingling with the men and women in police uniforms and emergency gear, I spotted a few men in casual clothes, no more than six or seven. They watched us closely. Some carried pistols, others, small boxes.
Ben froze.
“Come on,” I said, and tugged at him, but he was unshakable. I followed his line of sight and saw a trim man in his middle seventies, wearing Dockers, a black windbreaker, and a stoic expression. He folded his arms and stood in the middle of the crowd as if no one else mattered.
“Forget him,” Breaker said to Ben in a harsh whisper. “We need to get out of here before they cut through the confusion and bring up reinforcements.”
The man in the black windbreaker stared Ben down, then spat on the concrete.
We were hustled with our photographic treasures into the cars waiting in the wide alley. Weaving through the fire trucks and police cruisers, we drove down the alley.
No one followed.
“Was that Stuart Garvey?” I asked Ben, as the flashing and blinking lights grew small behind us.
He nodded, then leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
Delbarco made a call on a satellite phone. She did not sound happy with what she was told. When the call was finished, she, too, closed her eyes and rested her head on the window.
We left the city and transferred to a caravan of Suburbans in New Jersey.
Ben switched on his seat light an hour or so later and lifted one of Mrs. Golokhova’s albums into his lap. The truck’s big tires hummed on the highway. “We should have taken all of them,” he said. “It would have been worth the risk. Christ, the history she must have pasted in here.” He flipped a few pages, squinting at the snapshots.
I pictured Mrs. Golokhova in her husband’s special asylum, living out her madness, with plenty of time on her hands, and these albums as her special task.
A few minutes later, Ben whistled. “Jackpot,” he said.
He held the page up for my inspection. A crinkle-cut black-and-white photograph—a home snapshot, judging by the trimmed edges and lighting—showed a middle-aged Joe Stalin, easily recognizable, hair graying with dignity. He stood with his arm around the shoulder of a doctor in a white lab coat, wearing pince-nez. Stalin smiled broadly, contemplating a brave future. The date neatly penned below was 4.vi.38.
He did resemble the man in the tank.
“He’d already killed millions,” Ben said, voice tinged with that odd wonder that comes over male historians when they contemplate vast atrocities. “He wiped out the Soviet military leadership. He’s going to make a pact with Hitler to gain some time, then Hitler will invade Russia. In the next ten years, almost thirty million people will die, some say fifty million, some say more. Do you think he was undergoing Golokhov’s treatments by then?”
I had no answer. I just stared at the picture, memorizing the second man’s features. Pleasant, mousy even, with soft eyes and a beaky nose.
Two middle-aged guys being chummy.
Most of the trip to Florida is a blur. I don’t know what finally happened to the steel Gulag. I’ll probably never know whether Ben was simply imagining things.
But the man in the tank, if he had any mind left at all, was suffering. If the stamped tag was any guide, he had been suffering for more than fifty years.
35
PORT CANAVERAL, FLORIDA • AUGUST 17
We could see the Lemuria from the balcony of our hotel suite. It was hard to miss, four gleaming high-rise towers arranged from bow to stern on a white cruise ship almost two thousand feet long. In the deep-water port, the ship had come about over the last ten minutes, using bow and stern thrusters, making ready to put out to sea. Through a small pair of stabilized binoculars I could peer a little ways into the shaded entrance to the marina deployed between the ship’s massive twin hulls. Yachts drifted in and out of this portal like little butterflies flitting through a house’s open back door.
In its presumptive way, the Lemuria was about as ugly as anything I had ever seen go to sea. No doubt the views from the seven hundred condos were spectacular. Rich folks, I thought with a twinge. All with enough money and not enough time to spend it. Lots of potential investors.
Perhaps Golokhov had struck a real gold mine.
