No doubt now. The man knew he was spotted, that two men, probably policemen, were moving toward him.
“Now,” Tkach said to Zelach.
“My food,” Zelach whined.
Tkach tried to push past a fat man who stood between him and Zelach and as he did so Volovkatin stood, dropped his cigarette holder and took a quick step toward the rear door.
“Where are you going?” Tkach heard one of the women ask Volovkatin.
He didn’t answer and Zelach, who was closer to him than Tkach, looked around for an open table on which to place his food.
“Get him,” called Tkach past the fat man.
Zelach looked back at Sasha, looked down at his food and shrugged.
“Drop it,” Tkach shouted. “Get him.”
Volovkatin had his hand on the door and was starting to open it when Zelach, who could not handle two ideas at the same time, finally dropped his plate and glass in the middle of the nearest table. The kvass spilled on a matronly woman who got up screaming. Tkach managed to get past the fat man but Zelach was still closer to the suspect who was now going through the rear door. Zelach made a lunge past the table at the closing door but he was too late. Zelach turned the handle on the closed door as Tkach leaped over a fallen chair and joined him.
“Locked,” Zelach sighed.
They had worked their way back out of the store with Zelach pausing to retrieve his kotleta from in front of the matronly woman who cursed him and demanded money to clean her dress. He shoved the meat pie into his mouth and followed Tkach toward the street where, after fifteen minutes of searching the area, they failed to find Volovkatin.
“Two rubles,” Tkach said as he looked across his desk.
Zelach looked at him blankly. Two rubles was far too modest a bribe for keeping quiet about the disaster Zelach had caused.
“For the food,” Tkach explained, seeing Zelach’s confusion.
Zelach understood and reached into his pocket with enthusiasm to find the money which he quickly turned over to Tkach.
“What are you writing?” Zelach asked. “What are you going to say?”
“I’m going to lie,” whispered Tkach. “I’m writing lies because both of us will look like fools if I write the truth.”
“Good,” said Zelach blowing a puff of air in relief as a pair of detectives moved around the desk talking about someone named Linski.
And so Sasha Tkach finished the report, read it, realizing full well that it was unconvincing. He considered their next step. He would probably do what Zelach had suggested, but he doubted that they would catch Volovkatin who probably had false identity papers and was on his way to the Ukraine. Most likely, if he were a reasonably clever and careful criminal, “Volovkatin” was probably not his real name and he was on his way somewhere with his own quite legal identification papers. The report Tkach has just written would surely go to the KGB and there would surely be hell to pay for letting an economic criminal get away.
Tkach signed the report and handed it to Zelach to sign. Zelach read it.
“Looks good,” Zelach said with a grateful smile.
“It’s terrible,” said Tkach.
As he took the signed report back, a clerk came down the aisle between the desks and paused at Tkach’s desk to drop off a file and a note. He recognized the neat handwritten notes as soon as he opened the file.
The note said that Tkach was to replace Inspector Karpo in the investigation of the young men who were intimidating visitors to the USSR Economic Achievements Exhibition. Not only was he to investigate but he was to go undercover that afternoon and evening as an ice cream salesman, which meant that his daughter Pulcharia would be asleep when he got home and his wife Maya would be up to remind him that he had been promised a regular day schedule when the strong-arm case ended.
“Good news?” asked Zelach.
“Wonderful,” Tkach sighed sourly.
“I’m glad,” said Zelach. “You want to get something to eat?”
FIVE
THE NAME SIBERIA MEANS “sleeping land” and for more than a thousand years while the rest of Europe and Asia were developing a history most of Siberia slept. Beneath the sleeping giant whose five million square miles could swallow all of the countries of Western Europe and could hold almost two countries the size of the United States lay vast riches including coal, oil, iron, gold, silver and diamonds. On the sleeping giant’s back grew millions of square miles of timber in the sprawling taiga, the forests which even today serve as massive havens for wolves, tigers and bears who have never experienced civilization and know nothing of its existence. Other animals, fox, mink, sable, roamed and multiplied and still roam wild.
The first known Siberians lived 40,000 years ago. For more than 32,000 years the descendants of these first aboriginal tribes spread throughout Siberia, cultivated cattle, used tools made of bronze and copper, began settlements; then, about 1,000 B.C., Mongol tribes began to move upward from China bringing iron tools, introducing agriculture and war. From the northwest the Huns began to move downward through Siberia pushing both the Mongol tribes and the aborigines into less hospitable parts of the sleeping giant.
The Huns gradually lost control and abandoned their Siberian settlements or mixed with the Mongols and aborigines. By the thirteenth century, Siberia was a storybook land of small multiracial tribes, states and small kingdoms scratching to stay alive on the back of the slowly waking sleeping giant.
And then Ghengis Khan rode into the vastness with an alliance of Mongols and Tartars who, even after Khan’s death, dominated not only most of Asia including parts of China and India, but all of Siberia, all of Russia and much of Western Europe beyond Hungary right up to the gates of Vienna. But Khan’s empire was too vast and eventually broke into powerful khanates, the largest of which, the Golden Horde of the Tartars, controlled both upper Russia and all of Siberia.
The Mongol/Tartar occupation united Russians for the first time. They had a common enemy, and the Russian princes who existed as Tartar puppet rulers put aside their major differences and united with Moscow as their focus. In 1380 a force of Russians marching under the banner of the principality of Moscow defeated the Tartars in the battle of Kulikovo. Russians throughout the divided land began to declare loyalty to Moscow. In 1430 the united Russians pushed the Tartars back behind the Volga. And then, in the middle of the sixteenth century, Czar Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible, finally drove the last of the Tartars beyond the Ural mountains and into Siberia.
The Siberian Tartar Khan, Ediger, fearing a Russian invasion of his land, petitioned Ivan to make Siberia a Russian province and commit the Czar to support Ediger against his tribal enemies. In return, Ediger promised to deliver one sable skin for each of his male subjects. The Czar agreed.
In spite of the agreement, Ediger was soon overthrown by a rival, Kuchum, who hated the Russians, denied the agreement, murdered the Russian ambassador to Siberia, refused to pay taxes and moved his capital further east, away from Russia, to Kashlyk near present-day Tobolsk.
The Czar, fearing that he could not win a major war in Siberia against Kuchum, enlisted the aid of the enormously wealthy Strogonov family, a powerful, independent merchant clan whose territory covered much of the land on the broad western slopes of the Ural mountains. The Strogonovs were summoned to Moscow and given by the Czar Ivan a deed to most of Siberia. All they had to do was take it from the Tartars and hold it.
The Strogonovs found a mysterious cossack, Ermak Timofeyevich, to head the expedition against Kuchum. Ermak took seven years to raise and train an army of 540 men, mostly fellow cossacks and mercenaries. The Strogonovs ordered an additional 300 of their own men to join them and, outnumbered by more than sixty to one, Ermak and his well-armed band crossed the Urals and attacked.
The Tartar hordes who had only a few flint rifles and fought mostly with bows and arrows were driven back. In less than a year Ermak was on the Tura River sailing toward Kashlyk. In a final major battle, Kuchum’s army attacked and was defeated. Ku
chum and his allies fled deep into the wilderness.
Ermak occupied Kashlyk and proceeded to clear large areas of Siberia forcing the local tribes to declare loyalty to the Czar. Ivan the Terrible declared Ermak “the Conqueror of Siberia” and sent regular Russian army troops to join him and secure the territory for the Strogonovs.
A year later, in 1854, a vengeful Kuchum ambushed Ermak who, weighed down by his heavy armor, drowned in the battle. Ivan sent further troops who routed the last of the Tartar resistance.
With the death of Ermak and the end of Tartar resistance, the vastness of Siberia opened to adventurers and Russian mercenaries who rushed in, conquering villages, towns and tribes, laying claim to territories in the name of the Czar.
The tide was halted to the south with resistance by the Chinese who fought against Russian expansion into their country. Peace was achieved and the southern Siberian border established. To the east the Russians continued to expand their territory. Under a merchant, Gregori Shelekhov, Russia developed a plan to include much of North America, the Hawaiian islands and the entire Pacific coast of America all the way to Spanish California. By 1812 Shelekhov and his partner Baranov had almost achieved their goal.
On March 30, 1867, the Czar, fearing that he could not control the vast eastern lands, decided to pull back, and sold the American territory and Alaska to the United States for $7,200,000 in gold. The Czar had even been willing to throw in a good part of Siberia for the gold but the Americans showed no interest.
And so Siberia, fed over the years by forced immigrations of peasants, criminals and political dissidents, survived as part of the Russian state in spite of rebellions, successful attacks by the Japanese in 1918, and occupation by the White Russian army under Admiral Kolchak following the Revolution. It wasn’t till 1923 that Siberia was finally unified under the Soviet government.
The first person Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov met in Tumsk after the small plane landed was Miro Famfanoff, the local MVD officer, who informed his visitors proudly that the temperature was -34 degrees centigrade and that Ermak himself, whose statue stood before them in the town square, was reported to have spent three days in the town in the summer of 1582.
Rostnikov had nodded, pulled his wool cap more tightly over his ears and tightened around his neck the red scarf Sarah had made for him two years ago. Sokolov touched his mustache which had already stiffened in the frost and Karpo looked at Famfanoff, a heavily bundled-up overweight man in his forties with a face turned red probably not as much by the frigid air as by vodka.
“You should wear a hat,” Famfanoff suggested to Karpo nervously.
Karpo nodded and looked around the town square where Famfanoff had led them. The statue of Ermak in armor, right hand raised, pointing into the wilderness, stood in the center of the square. Around him were houses, about a dozen of them, most of them made of wood, spread out in no particular order. The town consisted of a concrete structure with a metal tower on a slope to the right, which Rostnikov assumed was the weather station; a collapsing wooden church, obviously not in use, with part of the cross on its spire missing and its windows glassless and yawning; a wide log building with a broad cedar door; and another concrete building to the left which they were about to pass. Set back on the slope not far from the weather station stood three more wooden houses about thirty yards apart.
“This way. This way,” Famfanoff said, pointing to the right at a two-story wood building. He trudged through the snow and urged them to follow him. They formed a line behind the man, Karpo first, followed by Sokolov and Rostnikov in the rear.
Rostnikov glanced to his left at the lopsided concrete building over whose door was a faded wooden plank with “The People’s Hall of Justice and Solidarity” painted in red letters. A curtain parted slightly in the window of the Hall and Rostnikov saw the frightened face of an old man.
“I don’t live here in the village,” Famfanoff said when they were inside the two-story wooden building. “Our office is Agapitovo. I’m responsible for periodic visits and responses to calls from the south. Kusnetsov is responsible for the north. I don’t live here.”
“But other people do,” said Rostnikov. “And after we eat I would like to know about them.”
“I am at your service,” said Famfanoff.
Famfanoff escorted the visitors into the wooden building and up to the second floor where there were three small bedrooms each furnished with a military cot. Rostnikov asked for the smallest because it faced the square. No one objected. Rostnikov’s room contained a wooden chair and a small white metal cabinet with drawers that was meant to serve as a dresser. Sokolov and Karpo had similar furnishings. The bathroom in the hall was the only other room on the floor.
The house, Famfanoff explained as he stood in the doorway while Rostnikov took off his coat and unpacked his bag, was built by government fur traders in the last century but the last Mongols had long since moved beyond the massive forest, the taiga, which almost reached the town. When the traders left, the Navy moved the first weather station into the house and only recently, about five years ago, the new concrete weather station had been completed. Since then, the building they were in had been maintained by Mirasnikov, the janitor at the People’s Hall of Justice and Solidarity which served as a town hall, recreation center, meeting ground and office space for Tumsk.
Rostnikov nodded as Famfanoff, his coat open to reveal a less-than-clean MVD uniform underneath, reached into his pocket for a foul-smelling papirosy, a tube cigarette which he lit without pausing in his banter.
“The weather station was built under the direction of the Permafrost Research Center in Igarka,” he said. “It’s on steel beams hammered deeply into the ground. The permafrost softens every summer to about six feet down. The stilts have to go down twenty, thirty feet maybe. Before they came up with the idea of beams all the buildings had to be wood or they would sink into the ground in the summer. Even those would start to sag after four or five years. The wooden houses of Tumsk have all been reinforced with steel beams. You may have noticed that the People’s Hall sags. It was shored up by some steel beams about a dozen years ago but, if you ask me, it was too late. It should probably come down or be abandoned like the old church. One of these summers both of them will collapse. No doubt of it. It should come down, but no one seems interested enough in it to make a decision. I tell you, Inspector, Tumsk is a dying town, a dying town.”
Rostnikov walked to the window and looked out at the white square, the buildings with smoke coming from their chimneys and the white expanse behind the village leading to the forest. Then he looked at Ermak’s statue which, now that he looked at it carefully, seemed to tilt slightly to the right.
“The statue, is that mounted on a steel beam?”
“I think so,” said Famfanoff with a shrug.
In the window of the People’s Hall of Justice and Solidarity, the old man looked out and up at Rostnikov from the parted curtains. Their eyes met and the old man stepped back letting the curtains fall back across the window. Rostnikov moved the single chair near the window and sat looking out.
“You want my theory?” Famfanoff asked as Rostnikov turned back into the room which was rapidly filling with the smoke and smell of the policeman’s ropey cigarette.
“Da, kane-shna, of course,” said Rostnikov as he moved the chair closer to the window.
“A bear,” said Famfanoff pointing at Rostnikov with his cigarette. “Commissar Rutkin was killed by a bear.”
“Are there many bears around here?” asked Rostnikov.
“Not many, but some,” said Famfanoff confidentially and quietly, probably, Rostnikov thought, to keep the bears from hearing. “And tigers. There are still tigers. And wolves, of course wolves, a great many of them. I, well, not I exactly, but Kustnetsov had to kill a tiger just three years ago. Of course that was four hundred kilometers north of here but it was a tiger and I’ve seen bears many times, believe me.”
“I believe you,” said Rostnikov.
“I will consider your bear theory. Is someone getting us something to eat?”
“To eat? Yes, of course. Mirasnikov’s wife. She’s the wife of the janitor in the People’s Hall of Justice,” said Famfanoff. “She’ll keep the house warm. Plenty of firewood.”
“You have files on everyone in town, everyone who lives in town?” Rostnikov asked, looking up at the policeman who appeared to be waiting for an invitation to sit, though there was nowhere to do so but the cot and the single chair on which Rostnikov sat. Rostnikov didn’t want to prolong the visit.
“Yes, of course, Comrade,” Famfanoff said. “I’ll get them for you. You want them all? Even the sailors in the weather station?”
“All,” he said. “How many are there?”
“Let me see. Fourteen, fifteen, if you don’t count the few Evenks who wander through and you don’t count me, and you shouldn’t count me. I don’t live here. That doesn’t mean I’m not a real siberyaki, a devoted Siberian who takes pride in the rigors of the land of my fathers.” Famfanoff straightened his tunic, looked down the small corridor and then moved toward Rostnikov and spoke softly. “However, as a matter of fact, Commissar Rutkin before his untimely death indicated that he would recommend a transfer for me someplace a bit larger, possibly Irkutsk where my loyalty, my knowledge of Siberia could be put to better use. I have a wife, a child and perhaps …”
“After the investigation is complete, assuming your cooperation is thorough and efficient, I will make the recommendation,” Rostnikov agreed.
Famfanoff beamed and clutched the cigarette in his teeth in a grin.
Rostnikov doubted that the dead commissar would have made such a promise to the slovenly and probably less-than-competent policeman. Famfanoff was probably where he belonged. For once the system had not failed. In a larger MVD unit he would probably have trouble surviving. Rostnikov had not lied. He wanted and needed the man’s loyalty and cooperation. He would write the letter of recommendation, certain that it would have no effect because he lacked the power Famfanoff believed him to possess.
A Cold Red Sunrise Page 6