Vyrin, a Russian defector, is discovered and fatally poisoned by secret service agents. Kalitin, a 70-year old chemist who also had escaped to the West after the collapse of the USSR and now lives a secluded life in the former GDR, is invited to join the investigative team. The choice is unsurprising: Kalitin was one of the Soviet Union’s top experimental scientists and the developer of Neophyte, an “untraceable” terribly lethal poison. But someone leaks information about Kalitin’s involvement in the Vyrin inquiry, and the Russian authorities, newly apprised of his whereabouts decide to silence him. Ruthless military officer Shershnev is dispatched with a colleague on a mission to kill Kalitin using the very same poison developed by the chemist in his USSR days.
Sergei Lebedev’s Untraceable has the trappings of a spy thriller and is not short of incident – there is a harrowing and exciting description of a hunt for lab monkeys after an experiment gone wrong, as well as a quasi-farcical account of the assassins’ trip to the sleepy village where Kalitin hides. However, the novel’s focus is on the psychological and moral make-up of the protagonists, both of them cynical, single-minded tools of the regime. On the one hand there is Kalitin, who defected out of disappointment at the fall of the USSR rather than out of any sense of guilt or moral duty, and who, now diagnosed with cancer, dreams of a return to his past in the lab. On the other hand there is Shershnev, a human killing machine, who has trained himself to subsume any feelings which can get in the way of a mission.
Untraceable largely shifts between the points of view of these two characters. Towards the end, however, Lebedev introduces another player in the dramatis personae: Travniček, a pastor who has had past brushes with the Soviet secret service, and who provides a ray of hope and redemption in an otherwise bleak worldview. By his own account, Travniček is neither hero nor saint, but in this moral swampland, his valiant attempts to do right by his parishioners – including Kalitin – makes of him a character worthy of a Graham Greene novel.
Lebedev’s novel, partly inspired by the Skripal
case, is topical and engaging. The cover
of the edition I read, portraying a shadowy figure shrouded in mist, seems to
reflect the ethical ambiguity of the world in which the novel’s characters work
and live. The exquisite English translation by Antonina
W. Bouis is readable and idiomatic, while retaining a lyrical and
poetic feel.
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