Gennady Filshin sat on an aluminum bench in Lakewood High School’s warm pool building. Profligate, this keeping the water so warm, but offering his children such luxury made him happy.
His wife Natasha, and Alexander, their toddler son, were singing ‘motorboat’, a song the American high schoolers running the class had taught them. Mother and son giggled and put their chins in the water to blow bubbles.
He wondered at the American children who had to be coaxed into the water by their parents. If the children of this suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio couldn’t appreciate such prosperity, he knew the children of Kiev could. Unbelievable, how different this pool was from the crumbling concrete cold-water monster where he had learned to swim.
The lives of these children were filled with so much good. They never questioned their right to such riches. He wondered, if he should he be happy that his own children were growing up expecting such wealth, or sad that they would never really appreciate it.
The main pool was almost Olympic-sized and steel-sided. Four sets of steel ladders for the kids to climb out on and not a speck of rust anywhere. Diving boards and platforms stood unused at a separate pool. Computerized scoreboards lined the walls opposite a huge spectator gallery that he had never seen filled to capacity.
He breathed in moist, chlorine-tinged air and decided he should be happy. How could such wealth be wrong when it was lavished on children?
“Look, Papa,” his wife squealed and laughed. “Look, Sasha is swimming.” The boy proudly made motorboat sounds, sputtered, and failed to reach his mother’s arms, but by the time she fished him out, he was laughing again.
Yes, happy, and proud that one of his own babies would grow up expecting the world’s riches to be laid at his feet.
Natasha looked like a young girl playing in the water, not like the mother of four, with three almost-grown children. Alexander, Sasha, was the happiest of all their children. Their love child, conceived as the American dream finally took root in Filshin’s little immigrant family. Alexander was their America baby. Their gift to this new country. Symbol of everything good that had happened to them here.
America had been good to all his children. His daughters were graduate students in piano and violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music and would become music teachers, perhaps even performers. The youngest still played viola in the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra where world-famous conductors, like Ya Ya Ling and Kurt Masur sometimes spent a Saturday afternoon making music with the young people.
His other son, Misha, was also making the most of the opportunities offered by his adopted homeland. He was enrolled in pre-med at Case Western Reserve University. Filshin’s own mother had been a doctor. If she could have seen the tools this new doctor would have available to him, she too would have pronounced such riches good.
As accomplished as their children were, he and Natasha hadn’t done badly either. Natasha, a programmer for a big Cleveland bank, finally had work that paid her fairly, according to her ability and her disciplined work habits. No more convoluted Bolshevism. ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ sounded good on paper, but in the rapidly privatizing real world back home, the nomenklatura, the ex-KGB and the former Communist party officials always ended up needing so much more than the rest of the Russian people.
Times had been hard in Russia, but Americans had helped. Filshin had hooked up with a team of engineering consultants from Blue Sky who were helping the Russian Army and the Georgian Ministry of the Environment clear away orphan radiation sources, lost or forgotten nuclear materials, abandoned near former Soviet military bases.
Scientists and engineers in Russia were a dime a dozen. What had set Filshin apart were his English and his connections with former party aparatchniks. The job itself had been mostly handholding. Sitting in meetings assuring the Americans that work would be done to their specifications. No off-spec Russian ingenuity. The Americans had liked that. Russian engineers, used to inadequate funding and outdated equipment, often made do with shortcuts that Americans felt compromised quality.
Filshin had learned what they required, and he had made it so. OJT… On the Job Training, the Americans called it. Filshin called it JPL… Just Plain Lucky… Lucky to meet the right people in the right place at the right time. Blue Sky management saw that he was a quick study, efficiently adapting their amazing environmental technologies for use by Russian subcontractors.
In the west, orphan radiation sources, abandoned x-ray machines, and oil drilling equipment were confined to special landfills. But Stalin, in his hurry to defeat the US, had given little thought to the disposal of radioactive materials. They were useless for creating nuclear bombs and Soviet restrictions on travel kept people from accidentally wandering into danger. With the breakup of the Soviet Union all that changed. Hundreds of radioactive caches dotted the countryside. From abandoned piles of radium-emitting night vision gun sights to single radiation sources buried under a soccer field or thrown into forests on the edge of nowhere, they needed to be found and cleaned up.
Power sources were the most dangerous. The Soviets had used the heat from radioactive decay to power radio communications on Stalin-era construction projects. No one knew where they all were, but their high temperature, in excess of 400º C, kept most people away. Smaller radiation sources were harder to contain. Cesium pellets were used as nifty hand warmers in the coat pockets of border guards. Metallic devices were scavenged and sold as scrap.
Filshin believed in the work and he liked the American scientists and engineers helping to clean up the mess. It had taken courage to quit a secure Russian government job to become a freelance engineer, but he never regretted the move. Not until he worked for Michael Usher.
It took less than a week to develop an active dislike of the man.
Coworkers claimed Usher worked for the CIA. He never learned if that was true, but if he hadn’t already known from working with the Blue Sky engineers that all Americans weren’t like Usher, he would never have brought his family here. Better they should starve in Russia.
He wondered if Usher cared about anything besides money? Had he never opened a novel? Read a story by Flaubert or Tolstoy? A Goethe poem? Or attended a classical concert or an opera where Blue Sky wasn’t a corporate sponsor?
Sometimes Filshin felt like Faust in the Goethe play. In his hurry to provide his family with the riches America had to offer, Filshin had made a deal with the devil and his name was Michael Usher.
Usher had arrived in Georgia muttering about inadequate Russian security. The Russians had tried to explain how the Russian Army kept civilians out, but Usher hadn’t listened. To him it made no difference that the radiation sources they dealt with couldn’t be used to build weapons. Day and night he complained about security, saying they should hire specialists. He knew somebody at KBR or at Booz Allen Hamilton.
Because of Filshin’s knowledge of English, he was assigned to address the man’s concerns. They got on well enough, and Usher promised him a permanent job with Blue Sky once he learned how Americans did things. He had tempted him. Usher told him he could fix the paperwork. Get him a guest worker visa or whatever they called it, so Filshin’s family could live in America while he worked in Georgia. “You scratch my back, Gennady, and I’ll scratch yours. That’s how things are done back home.”
In spite of his personal dislike of the man, Filshin had said, yes, and he never regretted it, until like Faust’s devil, Usher called, waking Filshin from his American dream and demanding payment.
He had a job for Filshin. Undercover, but sponsored by the CIA. Filshin was to handle it alone, hiring local talent with money funneled through a Cayman Islands account. There would be no official help from the Americans if he were caught.
By then Filshin had been in the US long enough to know Americans respected the law. What Usher was proposing was illegal. Filshin said, no. Two months later Usher found out that Natasha’s Latvian father had applied for a visa to imm
igrate to the US. If Filshin didn’t do the job, Usher would give American Consular officers and Russian authorities evidence from American-held Nazi archives showing Natasha’s father had been a German collaborator. That meant he wouldn’t be able to come to America or remain in Kiev.
Filshin knew it couldn’t be true. His father-in-law had been seventeen when the war ended. No one would believe he had been a collaborator, would they? Were people that gullible?
Yes. He had read of cases where both Americans and Russians used faked documents to deport or imprison people. By the time the fakery was exposed, his father-in-law could be dead.
The devil had won.
But Filshin wasn’t about to risk his own life getting Usher’s ‘job’ done. He had four children, a wife, and a father-in-law to support, and criminals in eastern Europe had organized and become even more dangerous since his emigration.
He knew some quiet, respectable Russians who needed money. They had a cousin on a Russian freighter that sometimes docked in Cleveland. Losing some paperwork, removing a few radioactive waste barrels from a Blue Sky storage site and repainting them to look like they came from an eastern European power plant wasn’t difficult.
He rented a fishing boat and helped load the barrels onto the freighter in the middle of Lake Erie himself. There, JPL, Just Plain Lucky came to his rescue again. Homeland Security checked for radiation on ships entering the US, but rarely checked those sailing out down the St. Lawrence Seaway. If inspectors armed with radiation detectors later boarded her in the Atlantic or in the Baltic Sea, the ship’s manifest, a cargo of x-ray machines bound for St. Petersburg, would provide ample cover. Once the barrels were in Russia, it was even easier. He hadn’t needed to go there at all.
He had also hired a headhunter to find another job. Michael Usher could find someone else to carry out his dirty work. Filshin wasn’t Blue Sky executive material after all.
The laughter of happy children, the warm air, and the evening sunshine streaming through the pool’s skylight conspired to put him to sleep. He dreamed of wading upstream through the Inguri River in Georgia. He followed warm water to a radioactive thermocouple that had set the river on fire, only now he was standing on a dock along the burning Cuyahoga River and his own personal devil, Michael Usher, was beckoning him onto a powerboat.
A cool draft of air woke him. Someone had opened a door and his beeper was vibrating.
Cold Russian fatalism crawled up his back like a snake.
He didn’t need to see the Berlin area code to know it was Michael Usher calling from a pay phone at the other end of the city from his apartment. Filshin had given him his barrels in a German-owned landfill in the middle of Poland. What could he want now?
He waved to his wife. “I’ve got to go,” he told her in Russian. “Business. Here are the car keys.” He waved them at her and placed them on her towel. “I’ll get a cab.”
The devil had won. He hoped to hell he could keep Natasha from ever meeting him in person. That was the only reason he was returning the call.
He walked to the pay phone at the front of the high school building where Natasha wouldn’t spot him on her way out to the parking lot.
He heard traffic in the background when Usher answered. He glanced at his watch. Midnight in Berlin.
“What were you thinking?” Usher said.
“I am doing dirty work for you,” Filshin told him. “Now be leaving me alone. I am looking for work with new company. Blue Sky and me isn’t working out. Is not good fit.”
“ ‘Is not good fit!’ Have you gone crazy?”
“I was telling you, would be bad to be doing this thing.”
“Bad? I’ll give you bad! You didn’t do the job right, you jerkoff. A Polish official found the barrels. He’s threatening to expose us.”
“Not ‘us’, Mr. Usher. He threatens you and company Filshin will not be working for much longer. Everything you are doing, you are making worse. Worse for me. Worse for you. Worse for Poland. Worse for America.”
“Shut up and listen, you fuckwad. There’s a package on its way to you. With pictures and instructions. You caused this problem. You’re going clean it up by eliminating that trouble-making Pollack.”
Did Usher expect him to murder someone now?
“It’s no more than he deserves,” Usher said.
“If you want to be killing someone, go and kill him yourself, Mr. Usher.”
“You’re forgetting Natasha’s father. You know what’s lying on my desk?”
“So what? He was boy. Only seventeen.”
“The Justice Department has deported people that were only sixteen. What do you think the Russians will do when they see the papers? Or the Ukies for that matter?”
Who knew? Technically Natasha’s father was Latvian, but he had left Latvia so long ago, he only spoke Russian. In 1948 he was declared an enemy of the people and sent to Siberia. He didn’t have many friends among Kiev’s Russians, nor its Ukrainians. Technically even Natasha, who had been born in Siberia years later, was also ‘an enemy of the Russian people’. Her family had needed decades to quasi-rehabilitate themselves and get permission to move to Kiev.
“They will see is forgery.” Filshin bluffed. “They are not being so naïve like Americans, paying thousands for fake Nazi garbage.”
“Why don’t I call your wife and see how she feels about it? I wonder…will Natasha agree with your decision?”
Filshin could have killed Usher then. Natasha wouldn’t want to take any chances with her father. Filshin couldn’t put her in such a position.
“No. Don’t call. I will be taking care of problem.”
“Yourself. No proxies this time. Do the job right, and do it yourself. He’s in Prague. Be there by the end of the week. I’ll set it up. I don’t want him leaving Prague again.”
What had he expected? When you did business with the devil, the deal didn’t end with a friendly acquisition or merger.
In Russia Filshin had done what he had to to survive, no matter how much he had hated it. In Cleveland he had been able to get back to that other JPL, Just Plain Living. Or so he thought. He saw now, he was still trapped. If Usher went down, he would take Filshin with him.
And Natasha would file for divorce.
She wouldn’t stand for anything illegal tainting their perfect new life in America.
What if Usher pressured her to do something illegal?
He couldn’t let him get any closer to his family, Filshin decided. Even if it meant divorce, the best way to keep Natasha safe was to tell her the truth. She needed to know what a snake Usher was and stay away. He would tell her about his deal with the devil and that would give her time to warn her father. Natasha’s sister was living in Toronto and that was only a five hour drive from Cleveland. If her father moved there, Usher’s threat would be neutralized.
He walked back through the school building and waited at the pool entrance for the swimming lesson to end.
6 Berlin