Ask No Mercy

by Martin Österdahl

  Pashie lifted her face to the sky. The raindrops covered her face and shimmered in the moonlight.

  It used to be said, thought Lazarev, that we punished the ideological heretics much more harshly than the Christian heretics. That was entirely logical. It was more difficult to be merciful to people who didn’t understand reason than poor wretches who were of weak faith. The truth of Soviet doctrine had been scientifically proven.

  This, Tatar whore, is the end for those who do not listen to reason. Ask no mercy. To those who betray Mother Russia, no mercy will be shown.

  60

  “Are you okay?” asked Ilya. “Ready to go?”

  In the wake of the break-in at the hotel, they had concluded that the car was the safest place right now. They had checked out of the hotel and tossed Max’s things in the trunk.

  “I’m ready,” said Max.

  They drove toward the Baltic Point and the marine center. The traffic was heavy; they had managed to hit rush hour precisely. Dusk settled slowly on Saint Petersburg, and with it came the usual fog.

  While Ilya drove, Max scanned their environment for the black Mercedes. There were numerous black vehicles on the road; it was impossible to differentiate between them. It seemed that not only Ilya’s jeep but all the vehicles at which Max directed his searching gaze were being driven aggressively.

  And suddenly Max knew where he had seen the face in the picture before.

  Jakob Anger hadn’t been driving a Mercedes on the sixth of June 1982. He had been driving a white Volvo 140 when he had dropped off Max and his mother at the salon in the newly built shopping center in Älmsta. He had driven on to a workshop in Norrtälje and had intended to run an errand in Stockholm afterward. What exactly he had been planning to do in Stockholm, neither Max nor his mother had known, nor would they ever find out.

  Max hated the smells of the salon. The smell of shampoo, the smell of fresh-ground coffee in the percolator that always seemed to be sputtering forth more black coffee, the smell of newly washed hair, and the smell of burnt hair. Max’s mother needed to run errands herself that afternoon, and she had left Max and the salon in the hands of Greta, a temporary hire.

  Max refused to sit in the salon with a woman he didn’t know. The compromise he and his mother reached was that Max would sit at a café table outside with a few issues of Buster and the sports section from that day’s Dagens Nyheter.

  While Max’s mother was gone, an odd visitor came to the salon, a middle-aged man who had come to see Greta. He was large and dressed in a navy-blue polo shirt and gray pants, and he spoke with a strange accent. The man gave Greta flowers and a wrapped package. They went into the room behind the salon, where there was a kitchenette and a restroom, and closed the door.

  Max made an effort to avoid thinking about what was going on behind the door and concentrated on the NHL statistics in the sports section.

  A while later, they both came out. The man sat down in a leather-upholstered chair in front of the mirror. In complete silence, Greta worked on his hair, which was thick and coarse. After Greta finished, he left.

  The wait for Max’s mother to return felt endless. The salon closed, but Greta couldn’t leave Max there by himself, and Max felt terribly abandoned. Why hadn’t she come back? Had she forgotten him?

  Finally his mother came back. But when she returned, she was a different person. Her body and her clothes were the same as before, but Max saw in her face that she had been lost forever. It was as though the cancer that would eventually take her life had begun growing in her on that day in June when Max was thirteen years old.

  She had hugged him hard, but Max hadn’t been able to get himself to hug her back. She told Max what had happened, what he had already known. His father had gotten the car serviced. After he left, the car’s brakes hadn’t worked. He’d been driving fast. He’d died instantly.

  No one was ever charged with a crime. The authorities noted that the car was old and determined that the crash should be regarded as an accident, but Max had never believed this. There hadn’t been anything wrong with the brakes earlier in the day, and the mechanic had disappeared without a trace. But why would anyone want to kill his father?

  Sitting in the jeep now, Max twitched; his longing for benzo was stronger than ever. Should he tell Ilya what he had just recalled? He looked at Ilya, who passed a tractor-trailer with a grim expression and barely avoided a large pothole. Would Ilya believe him? Or would he just think this was the kind of thing that happened when Max wasn’t taking his blue pills anymore?

  Ilya turned off at an exit marked only with the number 23, and gravel replaced the asphalt. It had become completely dark. Max felt the wind against the windshield growing in strength, a wind out of the east that might soon reach gale force. To their right was the surging Baltic, its waves breaking across the beach. One moment blinking lighthouses lit up the area; the next everything lay in blackness.

  A large industrial area stretched off to their left, dimly lit by widely spaced streetlights. They saw gray silhouettes of roofs against a black sky. Brick chimneys stuck up above the roofs here and there, leaning in various directions, and from their mouths white smoke rose toward the sky.

  The Colony Field, thought Max. Like a chameleon, dressed up as warehouses and hangars. A beast that could die and then live again later, depending on which way the wind blew.

  Ilya switched off the headlights, slowed, and parked next to the roadway.

  “Do you see the light from the little windows right under the roof? The building straight ahead?”

  He pointed at a hangar building next to the big marine center.

  Max nodded.

  “That’s where I saw them go in.”

  They sat in silence and waited. Max was lost in thoughts about what he’d learned in the course of the last twenty-four hours—about the Goose, the Butcher of Nawzad, and the Shutul Ravine, about Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto. About the collage he had put up on the wall in his hotel room, the sheets of paper that lay in his suitcase in the trunk. All of them except one.

  What have I dragged you into, Pashie?

  Pashie had once told him about the time when Moscow had decided to send workers to exploit the natural resources of the Barents Sea and the Siberian swamps. The army had been tasked with moving one million people to an island in the middle of a gigantic wetland in northern Russia—men, women, fathers, mothers, grandparents, an entire nation drawn from the empire’s own population.

  All of them had died. Za chto? For what reason?

  In the spring, when the swamps and marshlands had begun to thaw, bodies had floated to the surface everywhere. Even today, nomadic tribes there were still reporting discoveries of mass graves exposed by early-summer landslides. The graves of thousands of Soviet citizens. In most cases the bodies weren’t even buried subsequently; they still covered the ground on the islands of the Barents Sea. Because the temperatures seldom rose above freezing, they continued to lie there, some of the bodies sitting up, perfectly preserved, frozen manifestations of one of the greatest crimes ever committed against members of the human race.

  They sat there, waiting for an explanation. Za chto?

  The explanation sometimes presented had something to do with the collective. The individual’s will and desire to live were of little value to Stalin. He wished to strip human life of its value systematically. It was said that Russians had found being sent to prison preferable to being sent to a work camp. It was the isolation of these camps that destroyed human beings’ hope most effectively. In the camps there was no you, no I, no death, no life.

  That was what he had been like, the man who had refused to trade a German officer for his own son. The man who had considered the Goose his most beloved son.

  Max looked into the light from the hangar.

  Are you in there, you devil?

  They took turns keeping watch. No matter how much Max would have liked to, they couldn’t just storm in; they wouldn’t be able to sav
e Pashie if they died trying to get to her. They needed to get a decent overview of the facility.

  In the morning, Ilya jabbed him with his elbow. “Someone’s coming,” he hissed.

  A city taxi approached and stopped outside the hangar. One of the rear doors opened, and a young man got out. He paid the taxi, which then left. The man took out a cell phone and made a call. He was holding an envelope.

  “I recognize that guy,” said Ilya.

  Double doors for motor vehicles opened, and the man started walking toward the hangar building. A young, skinny body, greasy hair.

  The envelope. What could it contain?

  Photographs. When Max realized who the young man was, it was as if he had received an electric shock. The envelope contained photographs of a prominent Russian professor that were definitely not intended for the magazine Nash Sovremennik.

  Stockholm, January 1944

  Carl was sitting in a car at the intersection of Eriksdalsgatan and Vickergatan, waiting for Tatyana. I can see it clearly now, he thought once again when he saw her walking toward the car. Not just around her middle. Her cheeks were a little rounder, and her thin lips had become fuller.

  “What is it that’s growing in me and making me look like this?” she had said when she was standing in front of the mirror one morning.

  Her brown hair had more color and luster. Her energy level and mood shifted.

  Seeing the first signs of a new life growing inside the woman he loved had a dramatic effect on Carl. It was as though all the other priorities of his life—his friends, his social life, his work—had suddenly taken a step back. Now something else filled the innermost space of his thoughts: Tatyana’s transformation and the life she was carrying.

  It was here, in the Eriksdal area, that their Russian friends congregated now that the church on Birger Jarlsgatan was no longer safe. They had come in contact with a theater group that was planning to open an outdoor theater in the Eriksdal area, on the bay Årstaviken. Tatyana was involved not only in a winter bazaar to help refugees from Russia and the Baltic states but also in the work of the theater, and she saw this as an opportunity for her to start over. When the child was born and Europe was at peace, she would be able to devote herself to her true calling. She dreamed of opening up Chekhov’s world to the relatively impoverished Stockholmers who lived in the areas around the outdoor theater.

  Carl opened the passenger-side door. They were in the middle of a real Swedish winter; it was fifteen degrees below zero and deep snow lay on the ground. It wasn’t easy for her to maneuver through the snow on the sidewalks in her elegant high-heeled leather boots.

  She looked serious when she got in the car.

  “Someone’s following me,” she said.

  Carl was convinced that Hedin still had men watching them.

  “Yes,” he said. “It may be that they’re not going to leave us alone yet.”

  “No, you don’t understand. You know Triin, the woman from Estonia I told you about? She said she’s seen a man here in the area several times. She heard him speaking Russian.”

  “Stockholm is full of people who speak Russian.”

  Tatyana laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “You have to listen to me,” she said. “I saw him today, how he was looking at me outside the theater. I know that look; it’s the look my husband used to give me.”

  “Hedin has said that the apartment on Norra Bantorget is the best place for them to keep us safe,” said Carl, starting the car.

  Tatyana took a deep breath.

  “I don’t think the Swedish authorities have any idea what the consequences are going to be. There’s an escape plan for him.”

  “Impossible. He’s locked up in our most secure prison.”

  “They’re going to free him. Carl, they call him the Goose not only because of his appearance but because everything runs off his back. He’s so close to Stalin it makes no difference what you do.”

  He shook his head. “What is it you’re saying?”

  “This is what Hedin and the others realized when they arrested us,” said Tatyana. “They panicked. Suddenly this affair became a completely different and much bigger matter. That’s why they kept me there and interrogated me.”

  Carl looked past her beseeching eyes, out at the winter sidewalk and the bare trees, down toward the parks Lilla Blecktornsparken and Stora Blecktornsparken. What Tatyana had told him was absurd.

  “And what does all this mean?” was all he could get out.

  “You have to warn them. The Soviet Union is not going to let him waste away in a Swedish prison. I don’t know what they’re planning, but I know there’s nothing Stalin wouldn’t do. The escape plan threatens not just us but all of Stockholm, perhaps the whole country.”

  TUESDAY, MARCH 5

  61

  Ilya was driving as fast as he could, but they soon found that they’d become snarled in rush-hour traffic; if anything, the morning version was worse than the afternoon’s. While they were stuck in a line of cars behind a big truck that was belching out exhaust and waiting to cross the bridge Birzhevoy Most, Max tried to reach Mishin on the phone, without success.

  “He’s not answering.”

  “They can’t have him yet,” said Ilya. “We still have time.”

  “We’re stuck here.”

  “It’ll loosen up soon.”

  Ilya always saw opportunities, never admitted defeat. If you were still alive, you could affect the outcome, and no one was better at pushing things in his direction than Ilya. But this time he didn’t sound convincing.

  Max saw a subway station down the street.

  “I’ll call you when I get to Mishin.”

  Max slammed the car door behind him, ignoring Ilya’s muffled shouts. Ilya didn’t want him running around on the streets by himself, but he had no choice now. Max had to get to Mishin in time, and they couldn’t abandon the jeep on the street.

  He ran down the steps to the subway, paying no heed to Ilya’s persistent honking.

  Down in the station, he looked around. There were long lines at the ticket windows.

  In Russia the barriers were wide open until you went through, but if you didn’t put a token in on your way, a barrier shot out and slammed into your thigh no matter how fast you were. Max knew this from subway experiences during his months as a student in Moscow.

  He got a running start from the stairs and leaped over the barrier when he got to it. He cleared it with a healthy margin.

  On the escalators leading down to the platform, he pushed his way through masses of people. Several shoved him back. Some shouted after him. A guard blew his whistle.

  “You, there! Stop!”

  Max climbed over the handrail and ran down the slick surface between the escalators.

  A subway train was at the platform with its doors open. Max threw himself in just before they closed. Soon he would be on his way to the Vyborgskaya station, which was near where Mishin lived.

  When the train was underway, Max checked his phone. No messages. He tried calling Mishin again but got no answer.

  The short subway journey seemed to take an eternity. Max drummed on the windows of the sliding doors. As soon as they opened, he rushed out of the subway car and toward the exit.

  He knew Mishin’s address but had never been there, and he wasn’t able to find the apartment building until he’d asked an elderly couple for directions. When he finally got to the building, the street door was standing open. He ran up the stairs and banged on the door of Mishin’s apartment.

  “Mishin!”

  No answer. He pounded the door harder.

  “Afanasy!”

  Still no answer. Max couldn’t hear anything from inside the apartment. It was completely silent in the stairwell.

  Tell me you’re in there.

  It was twenty past eight. Could Mishin still be in bed asleep? He hammered the door again, even harder now.

  “Mishin! Open the door!”

  The do
or to the neighboring apartment opened. An old woman stuck her head out. She was at least ten years older than Mishin and looked at Max with sleepy eyes.

  “Do you know where your neighbor is?” asked Max.

  “What time is it?” asked the woman.

  “Twenty past eight.”

  The woman smiled. Her wrinkles turned her eyes into narrow slits.

  “Then you’ll find him down at the river.”

  That’s right. Mishin and the walruses.

  The Neva River was closer to the marine center than he was now. He ran down the stairs and called Ilya on the way.

  “Where are you?”

  “Still stuck in traffic.”

  “Can you turn around?”

  “Why in the hell should I turn around?”

  “Mishin is close to where you are, I think. A place where old people go and take ice baths in the river. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes, I know—it’s in the wrong fucking direction!”

  “Tell me how to get there and meet me there.”

  62

  Nestor Lazarev walked down the slippery steps of the wooden stairs to the lower section of the riverbank. He hadn’t failed to note that the number of people dedicated to this tradition had grown in recent years, since glasnost and perestroika, when science and reason had been replaced by insanity.

  Before the revolution, many Russians of strong faith had been committed to performing the ice-bath ritual every year on the nineteenth of January, Epiphany. Even the damned czar had participated.

  This heresy from the backward-looking. He had heard that as many as twenty thousand residents of the city had bathed in the ice on Epiphany last year. Twenty thousand people he would be happy to put on a train to Siberia, where they could splash around in ice water until their inner organs stopped working.