Ask No Mercy

by Martin Österdahl

  As a Tatar, Pashie had to work twice as hard as the other girls to prove she was good enough. The conflicts among Russia’s ethnic groups were deep-rooted and could be traced far back in time. The Russian Tatars, Genghis Khan’s distant relatives, had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the Second World War and had been almost entirely exterminated during Stalin’s purges.

  Pashie’s ancestors were from the Crimean Khanate on the Black Sea. Her father was dark-skinned, but her mother’s half-Russian ancestry had given Pashie lighter skin as well as her striking green eyes. Pashie reflected positive perceptions of Tatars well: she was honest, hardworking, determined. Under her olive skin and black hair and worn clothes was the soul of a true nomad. She had taken the name Pashie after the Russian word for Easter (pasja) because she had been born on Good Friday twenty-five years ago. Her real name was Elza.

  “We have had a number of unpleasant incidents with nationalists in the area around the university,” said Mishin.

  The image of the blood in Pashie’s bathroom sink appeared in Max’s mind again. As did the thought of Ilya’s enormous body. The individual who had kidnapped Pashie could very well have been a man like Ilya. Max imagined how she would have tried to defend herself against him. Nowhere to run. No one to hear her scream. No one would ever ask any questions.

  Mishin got up to leave.

  “This came in the mail today,” he said, handing the envelope to Max. “It seems Pashie wanted you to have it.”

  On the outside of the envelope were Max’s name and home address in Stockholm. The name of the street was misspelled, and Pashie had transposed numerals in the postal code. She had even forgotten to write Sweden. It was no wonder the postal service hadn’t known what to do with it.

  It wasn’t like Pashie to be so careless. She knew the address; she had spent several nights there. And why hadn’t she used Vektor’s address, which she certainly knew by heart?

  “Return to sender.” The envelope had come from the university and had been returned to the Department of Economics. Max opened the envelope and removed the book Paradigm Shift Next: Foreseeing the Future in the Information Technology Revolution by John B. Colsanto.

  He hadn’t expected a romantic novel.

  “How’s it going?” asked Sarah when Max called her.

  “Someone has abducted Pashie. Or worse.”

  Once again, he reported what he had seen in Pashie’s home: the mess, the overturned furniture, the computer and notes that had been burned.

  “Shit, Max. I’m so sorry.”

  Max nodded to himself in the silent room.

  “Max?”

  “Sorry, my mind drifted.”

  “Just let me know if you need anything.”

  “Thanks. I have Ilya helping me. But if there’s any change in the situation, I’ll let you know.”

  When he hung up, a feeling of loneliness he knew all too well washed over him.

  Max knew exactly when he had first felt this loneliness, which had never really left him. It had been on Swedish Flag Day—the evening of June 6, 1982. That was the day his father, Jakob Anger, had died. That was when his sleeping problems had started.

  In the big shared living room in the dormitory in Saint Petersburg, he could feel the cold surrounding his body just as it had every evening during the winter following his father’s death.

  Max remembered how he had stood at the window of his childhood room and searched beyond the mirror image of his own face, beyond the snow-laden trees. But he had never found anything. Nevertheless, he had stood there every evening and looked.

  His mother, Josefin, had come into the room and looked at him with a worried expression, but she said nothing about what was no longer out there; she only said good night. After she left him, Max had placed the palm of his hand on the wall, felt the cold coming in from outside. He had held his hand there so long that the cold had crept along the bone in his arm, like blood poisoning rushing toward his heart.

  Josefin had gotten Max to promise that he would always look forward, no matter what happened. “Don’t dig in the past; do the best you can with what you have. Let the cause of your father’s mood swings and drinking rest with his soul.”

  But Max could never forget how his father’s face had sometimes twisted with rage. He could never forget his father’s black looks and wrinkled brow when his rib cage collapsed as though all the air had left him.

  One night while his father was still alive, Max had been awakened by a crash on the basement stairs. He tiptoed out into the hall and stood there and listened.

  He didn’t want to walk down the stairs and see his father in the little office where he sat night after night, reading and writing letters. Didn’t want to see his father in his blind-drunk state; only wanted to make sure that he was okay and would be able to get back on his feet.

  Jakob Anger had been breathing hard and was repeating two names to himself over and over again, like a mantra.

  Wallentin. Borgenstierna. Wallentin. Borgenstierna.

  Max got off the sofa where he had been sitting with Mishin and went into his bedroom. He looked at the empty bed, at the books and papers spread around the room.

  Then he turned to the wall with the slips of paper on it. Right next to Pashie’s name, he put up two new slips. One bore the text “Margarita Yushkova. St. Petersburg GSM—unknown sponsor, thousands of millions.” On the other he had written “St. Petersburg Times—Domashov.”

  He knew he was getting closer to Pashie, but it was going much too slowly.

  Max walked to the window, placed his palm against the glass to feel the cold coming in from outside.

  Saint Petersburg was bathed in a darkness so thick the streetlights could barely illuminate the Griboyedov Canal and Kazan Cathedral in the background. It was no doubt ten degrees below zero tonight.

  You’re out there somewhere, Pashie. You must be. And I don’t intend to rest until I’ve found you.

  Stockholm, June 1943

  Carl stopped outside the church. Took some deep breaths to calm his heart. His body was trembling as it always did when he was about to meet Tatyana.

  Between their short meetings in the church, they stayed in touch by writing letters that passed between them through Father Stefan and Wallentin. Their meetings were chaotic; sometimes Tatyana was so nervous and in such distress that there were few words exchanged, only looks. Sometimes there was a little more time, and they could be constructive and make plans. They talked about life at the embassy, trying to find something that Carl could take with him to his contacts to make it possible for her to defect.

  The letters from Tatyana came more and more often. Got longer and longer. He was amazed by the courage in her letters, amazed at how revealing and detailed they were. From her protected position behind her pen, she dared to tell him more. She avoided anything that had to do with her husband. It was as though he didn’t exist.

  Tatyana described the trees that grew in what she called the black earth. She suffered from extreme homesickness—not for Moscow, which she hated, but for the peaceful life in the Ukrainian countryside, for her life as a girl in the village community outside the city of Bayrak, where you could play with puppies and kittens before the famines made them all disappear.

  She asked many questions in her letters. She wanted to know more about Carl’s family, about their relation to the old Russia, the Russia of the czar. What was it like then? Was it true that ordinary people had lived in misery, as slaves of the nobility?

  She wanted to learn about his friends and asked whether he had women friends, not out of jealousy or any kind of suspicion but to try to understand how they lived, the Swedish women whose lives were so different from hers and who might someday be her friends. She was also interested in Carl’s work, in the life of a prosecutor and how the Swedish system of justice worked.

  Carl was more than happy to tell her about these things.

  As the exchange of letters intensified, a bond grew be
tween them. Carl often received three or four letters from Tatyana between meetings in the church.

  Today they were to have their first meeting at which Father Stefan would not be present. Carl had been given a key to a side entrance.

  He walked along the center aisle between the pews and looked at the low double doors that led to rooms only the priests were permitted to use. The doors on the right led to the sacristy. The center doors—the royal doors—led to the holiest room of all, the room in which the altar stood. The door on the left led to a little room, the prothesis, a forbidden space. This was where he was to meet her.

  Carl pushed gently on the painted doors, bowed his head, and entered.

  Before a little table on which there were silver cups and silver plates, her back to him, sat Tatyana.

  “They say women are not permitted to be in here,” she said, turning to Carl. “Only men of the correct faith.”

  “I don’t believe in God,” said Carl.

  “I know few God-fearing men. Far too few.”

  She was dressed in a simple gray cotton dress. A flower-patterned scarf covered much of her face. The strength in her gaze took his breath away. It disarmed him and simultaneously filled him with new strength.

  She stood up and went over to him.

  “You told me that your paternal grandfather lived in Saint Petersburg,” she said. “Does that city really exist?”

  He felt so light-headed. Every breath required an effort. Had it been a mistake to come here? Was there someone behind the iconostasis, watching them?

  She came closer.

  “Until I have seen that city with my own eyes, I will believe that it exists only in legends.”

  Carl took her hands, realized that it was now or never. He had to find out everything about this woman. He could no longer lie to himself. He didn’t just want to help her defect; he wanted to make her his.

  The first kiss made his whole body burn with a fire hot enough to consume them both.

  FRIDAY, MARCH 1

  22

  Max poured sugar in his tea to get rid of the metallic taste in his mouth. His head was heavy from the benzo he had taken, and he had stood in a hot shower for over half an hour before he had been able to get his body going at all.

  With his cup in his hand, he walked over to the wall where he had put up the slips of paper. Let his gaze wander from note to note, starting with Borgenstierna. Paused at the company name Brice & Stadthaller and the journalist Domashov. He needed to arrange a meeting with them, find out what they had discussed with Pashie. As a journalist, Domashov was probably used to deflecting people from the truth, but Max hoped he could find out what had really been going on. In the military he had learned to tease the smallest secret out of people. But the instruction had actually begun earlier.

  During Max’s childhood, his father had invented various games they had played on Arholma and the surrounding islands. These were games such as Repetition, We Know Everything, Fast Fire, Isolation, Stress Position, Sleep Adjustment. Later in life Max realized these were interrogation techniques used by the military.

  One foggy November morning, Max had accompanied his father and two friends to the eastern side of Ovanskär. His father’s friends wanted to see whether the long-tailed ducks had come in with the fog, and the boat’s pilot had seen that some driftwood had been washed ashore on the eastern side of the island, wood that would be good to have during the winter.

  The large amount of driftwood quickly made the men forget the birds. After they had loaded as much as they could, they built a fire. The men talked excitedly about a woman who had seen a diver climb out of the water on Villösan, just beyond Arholma. She had been certain that the diver had not come from the base on the North Point, that he was not Swedish.

  “If you had seen the diver, Max,” his father had asked, “what would you have done?”

  Papa’s friends fell silent and looked at Max. The way they looked at him made him uncomfortable.

  “I don’t know,” he said quietly.

  “If we pretend that Hans-Göran here is the frogman who has just come ashore on Villösan,” Papa said, patting his friend on the shoulder, “what would you say to him?”

  “I would ask him if he was lost,” Max said.

  Papa and his friends laughed.

  “Okay. No doubt he would say to you, in excellent standard Swedish, something like he needed chanterelles to make soup. And then?”

  “I would ask a question to find out if he really was from here.”

  “What question?”

  “I would ask whether he knew who had won the race in Hallstavik the previous day, Rospiggarna or Masarna.”

  “Why would you do that?” Papa asked with a smile. “Wouldn’t you be giving him a fifty percent chance of answering correctly?”

  “No, because everyone knows the speedway season ended in September.”

  Papa’s smile became broader, and his friends looked appreciatively at Max from the other side of the fire. Papa bent over his duffel bag.

  “It isn’t your birthday until tomorrow, but I want to give you this,” he said.

  From the duffel bag, he took a shining hunting club.

  “It’s heavy, but soon you will be strong enough to swing it. Perhaps next summer we can hunt seals together.”

  Max looked at the club that now lay on his lap. He understood that the seal hunt was to prepare him for something else, for what the men had been talking about, for what lay beyond the Baltic Sea, beyond the ice floes and the seals.

  There and then he had realized that one day he would be at war with the land to the east.

  Max hurried down the stairs, carrying the book from Pashie in a bag. He passed Strebor, who was sleeping in the security-guard office at the entrance to the dormitory, and couldn’t help wondering what he took that made him sleep so well. Vodka? The “little water,” as the Russians called it.

  As quickly as his leaden body permitted, he walked across the university campus to the library. The seal hunt and the games of his childhood had been preparation. These things had guided him during his childhood, even after his father had died, and had made him choose the military life.

  Now all he had learned would help him find Pashie. But what if it was something about that same background that was responsible for her having disappeared now?

  23

  Vladislav Bagayev squeezed the cuckoo clock one last time and then set it on the desk. The rector’s assistant, Katya, had called and asked him to come by and pick up an important item. Even though he had been on his break, he had rushed upstairs to the rector’s office. He knew how it worked: if he did a good job, if he let people order him around, he might be admitted to the university one day. Mishin had encouraged him to improve his knowledge of Russian literature and history, so he took every opportunity to better himself. One day he would have the chance to get a real education and a prestigious job. He knew it. He could not afford to lose the opportunity to make a good impression on the rector.

  “Are you the intern?” Katya had asked. “This is a gift from the university’s sponsors. For the room the Swedes are renting. Carry it downstairs carefully.”

  Now the gift was on the desk here in Pashie’s office. The cuckoo clock was ticking so loudly that it echoed in the empty space. Max Anger was a nice guy and had bought a bracelet from him, but Vladislav hadn’t seen much of him since. Max had called this morning and said he would come by sometime after lunch.

  Vladislav settled down behind Pashie’s desk. It was easier to read here than out in the reception area where he usually sat. Despite the loud ticking of the cuckoo clock.

  If he concentrated, he could get in a whole hour of reading before the clock struck two.

  Max leaned against the back of his chair, which wasn’t particularly comfortable. It was very quiet in the library reading room; most people were probably still on their lunch breaks. He rubbed his neck and then turned his attention to his reading material.

&
nbsp; In his book Paradigm Shift Next: Foreseeing the Future in the Information Technology Revolution, John B. Colsanto had described the mechanisms of historical paradigm shifts that were relevant to what was happening today. This was a reminder to the reader that answers to the questions of the future could often be found in historic events.

  Max went over the passages next to which Pashie had written comments with a pencil. In the book’s fifth chapter, she had drawn a little triangle around the page number 44. At each corner of the triangle, she had written a word: “money,” “technology,” “politics.”

  Forty-four? thought Max. As in 1944? Consciously or coincidentally?

  Later in the book, next to a passage about government expenditures for defense, Pashie had written “the Shutul Ravine” and “the Colony Field.”

  Colsanto believed that the growth of the Swedish economy was clearly connected to the fact that the country had successfully maintained a policy of neutrality at any price and managed to stay out of the Second World War. In the section dealing with Sweden and the war, Pashie had written “Max” on one page and then, on the next page, “Max,” “Max,” “Max,” “Max.”

  Max stopped reading at the sight of his name. What did Pashie mean? Had she found something she thought was connected to him? Or a connection to what he had been doing in the evenings and on weekends?

  Had his research on 1944 pointed her in this direction in some way? And what direction was it, anyway? Once, not so long ago, Pashie had jokingly, flirtatiously said, “I’ll do anything you ask me to, Max.”

  What had he asked her to do?

  Max continued looking through the book. Colsanto devoted a chapter to Stalin’s insane plans to build enormous canals and dams. In the margin next to the passage about Stalin, Pashie had written “Nature has made certain mistakes we Bolsheviks must correct.”

  Another Stalin paraphrase.

  Max looked at his watch. Wasn’t it any later than that? He felt as though he had been sitting there reading all day. He put the watch to his ear to see whether it had stopped.