Free The Ice Curtain by Robin White

Bank had left a few accounts behind and Levin stubbornly tracked them down. A few small depositors actually got some money back, and Levin became “Fuck You Levin,” a populist hero.
    Levin passed the Old Arbat. It might be Sunday morning, but the daily coal miners’ rally was getting under way. They’d descended on Moscow from the catastrophically dreary coal cities of the Kuzbass. Their pockets were empty. They vowed to stay put until someone filled them. Levin thought they might as well leave now. The government’s pockets were empty, too.
    He turned left and entered a maze of small streets whose general trend was in the direction of the Kremlin.
    He checked the time.
Almost eleven-twenty.
Would the powerful chairman of the State Diamond Committee be punctual? An even more interesting question: Why send Levin out on a Sunday morning to interview him about a murder that should be in the hands of the militia, a murder with a suspect already in a cell?
    The Zhiguli rattled by Manezh Plaza, the mayor’s new shopping mall where fat, balding thugs wearing leather by the meter paraded with tall blondes wearing leather by the scrap. In other words, a New Russian sort of place. Here, just one block from Lenin’s Tomb, were stores with names like
Eleganza, Prestige
. Even
Vendetta
. The churches might be half-empty, but the shops were filled with customers anxious to buy something, anything, expensive.
    There were times Levin missed the Communists.
    Levin turned onto Elyenka Street and entered the heart of Moscow’s governmental district, all but abandoned for the weekend. The five-story buildings were painted in pastels and soot. The Kremlin walls loomed at the end. Snow still hid in their shadowed cornices.
    He steered left onto Ulitsa Razina. The offices of GOKHRAN, the state repository for treasure, were out near the monument commemorating the Battle of Borodino. But beneath this street, buried under ten meters of concrete, reinforced with steel and stiffened with the bones of the men who dug it, was the treasure itself. Here, comfortably close to the Kremlin, safe behind steel doors proof against even a nuclear blast, was the complex of tunnels and vaults known as the Closet.
    Built by the Tsars, expanded under the Soviets, the Closet was filled with gold bars, ingots of platinum, carved panels of solid amber, Fabergé eggs, looted art, and heaps of precious stones; a thieves’ cave scaled for an empire. Above it stood an ornate masonry building with walls the color of thin tomato soup, the headquarters to the State Diamond Committee.
    The building also dated from Tsarist times. The keystones above the north-facing windows still showed the old double eagle. The tall arched panes on the second floor had been ruthlessly bricked over in the interests of security. Steel bars covered most of the main entrance as well as all the first-floor glass. The effect was an elegant old dowager held hostage, blindfolded and gagged.
    The parking area in front was chained off. There was a red-striped kiosk for a guard, and a sign warning that deadly force was authorized. Levin pulled up to the chain, rolled down his window, and flashed his official identity card. It carried the red diagonal slash of the FSB. “Major Levin. Investigations Directorate. I’m here to meet Chairman Petrov. Where should I park?”
    The guard palmed the ID and trudged back to his kiosk.
    Levin straightened his blue tie in the cracked rearview mirror. With the gray suit and denim shirt, it gave him the raffish,
mafiya
look so fashionable in Moscow these days.
    Levin had arrived in the first class of recruits following the collapse of the Soviet Union; a period known as the Bakatin Interregnum. Bakatin, the first post-Soviet head of the KGB, splintered the all-powerful security agency into five bite-size services, then handed over total authority to the President. He ordered probes into past misdeeds of the KGB, fired