by Sam Eastland
Above him stood Tarnowski. With fists clenched, he circled the old man like a boxer waiting for his opponent to raise himself up before knocking him down once more.
Pekkala remembered what Klenovkin had said about the Comitati turning against each other. From what he could see, it appeared to be the truth.
Sedov climbed shakily to his feet. He was upright for only a second before Tarnowski smashed him again in the face. Sedov spun as he tumbled, his teeth limned in red, but no sooner was he down than he began to get up again.
“Stay down,” muttered Pekkala.
Melekov grunted in agreement. “They never learn. I told you.”
As he watched the Old Believer struggle to his feet, Pekkala could stand it no longer. He walked towards the door which led out to the compound.
“What are you doing?” barked Melekov.
“Tarnowski’s going to kill him.”
“So what if he does? He’ll kill you as well if you get in his way.”
Pekkala did not reply. Opening the flimsy door, he strode into the compound and pushed his way into the circle where the fight was taking place.
Tarnowski was just about to strike the old man another blow when he caught sight of Pekkala. “Get out of the way, kitchen boy.”
Pekkala ignored him. Turning to help the injured man, he was astonished to see that the place where Sedov had been lying was now empty. The only thing remaining was some splashes of blood in the snow. The Old Believer seemed to have vanished into the crowd.
“Look out!” shouted a voice in the crowd.
Glancing at the blur of dirty faces, Pekkala caught sight of Savushkin.
Too late, Pekkala spun around to meet Tarnowski.
That was the last thing he remembered.
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the country, Poskrebyshev had just arrived for work.
As he did every day, he entered the Kremlin through the unmarked door that led directly to an elevator, which was also unmarked. This elevator had only two buttons, UP and DOWN, and brought him directly to the floor on which Stalin’s office was located.
Poskrebyshev prided himself on following exactly the same path to work, even down to where he placed his feet, this side or that side of cracks in the pavement.
From the moment Poskrebyshev left the small apartment, which until last year he had shared with his mother, up to the instant he sat down at his desk, he found himself in a pleasant haze of predictability. He liked things to be in their place. It was a trait Poskrebyshev shared with Stalin, whose insistence on finding things just as he had left them was even more acute than his own.
Entering his large, high-ceilinged chamber, Poskrebyshev hung up his overcoat, placed his paper-wrapped lunch on the windowsill, and sat down at his desk.
He noticed, from the tiny green light on the intercom, that the Boss had already arrived. It was not unusual for him to come in early. Stalin often could not sleep and sometimes spent the whole night in his office or wandering the secret passageways that ran between the walls of the Kremlin.
Poskrebyshev’s first task was always to fill in his personal logbook with the time he had arrived. In all the years he’d worked for Comrade Stalin, he had never been absent or late. Even on the day he discovered that his mother had died in her sleep, he left her lying in her bed, made his lunch, and went to work. He did not call the funeral home until he arrived at the Kremlin.
With a movement so practiced it was practically unconscious, he slid open the drawer to retrieve his logbook.
What took place next caught him so completely by surprise that at first he had no idea what was happening. The desk seemed to shudder, as if the Kremlin, perhaps the whole city of Moscow, had been seized in the grip of an earthquake. Then the desk began to move. It slid forward, the sturdy oak legs buckling, and crashed to the ground. Documents, stacked and ready for filing, slid across the floor in a cascade of lavender-colored telegrams, gray departmental reports, and pink requisition slips.
When everything finally stopped moving, Poskrebyshev was still sitting in his chair, still holding on to the drawer.
Then, from somewhere in the rubble of his collapsed desk, the intercom crackled. It was Stalin. “Pos—” he began, but he was laughing so hard that he could barely speak. “Poskrebyshev, what have you done?”
Then Poskrebyshev realized he had fallen victim to another of Stalin’s cruel jokes. The Boss must have come in early and sawed the legs of his desk completely through, so that even the slightest movement would bring the whole thing crashing down.
“Poskrebyshev!” Stalin snorted through the intercom. “You are such a clumsy little man!”
Poskrebyshev did not reply. Setting aside the drawer, he retrieved his phone from the floor and called maintenance. “I need a new desk,” he said.
There was another howl of laughter from the other room.
“He did it again?” asked the voice from maintenance.
This was, in fact, the third time Stalin had sabotaged Poskrebyshev’s desk.
The first time, Stalin had sawed off the legs completely, so that when Poskrebyshev arrived for work, he found that the desk came up only to his knees. The second time, Poskrebyshev walked into his office and saw only his chair. The desk appeared to have vanished until, one month later, he received a letter from the regional commissar of Urga, Mongolia, thanking him for the unusual and generous gift.
“Just get me a new desk,” Poskrebyshev growled into the phone.
When Stalin’s voice crackled once again over the intercom, his laughter had vanished. This sudden disappearance of good humor was another of Stalin’s traits, which Poskrebyshev had learned to endure. “What is the news from Pekkala?” Stalin demanded.
With the toe of his boot, Poskrebyshev pressed down on the intercom button. “None, Comrade Stalin. No word has come from Borodok.”
PEKKALA WOKE UP on a stone floor. He was freezing. As he looked around, he realized he was in a small hut with a low roof made of rough planks and a wooden door which fitted poorly in its frame. Wind moaned around cracks in the door, which was fastened with a wooden block set across two iron bars. In the corner stood a metal bucket. Otherwise, the room was empty.
He realized he must be in one of the camp’s solitary confinement cells, which were perched up on high ground at the edge of the camp, where they were exposed to a relentless freezing wind.
Pekkala climbed stiffly to his feet. His jaw ached where he’d been hit by Tarnowski. With one hand against the wall to steady himself, he walked over to the door.
Peering through the gaps in the wooden planks, Pekkala saw only bare ground scattered with twigs, broken branches, and yellow blooms of lichen like scabs upon the stones. Below, down a narrow, meandering path, lay the tar-paper rooftops of the camp.
He was hungry. By now the shuddering emptiness Pekkala felt in his gut seemed to be permanent. Thinking about food made him remember it was Friday, the day Kirov used to prepare a meal for him before they both left the office for the weekend.
Prior to his instatement as a commissar in the Red Army, and his subsequent appointment as Pekkala’s assistant, Kirov had trained as a chef at the prestigious Moscow Culinary Institute. If the institute had not been closed down and its buildings taken over by the Factory Apprentice Technical Facility, Kirov’s life might have turned out very differently. But he had never lost his love of cooking, and Pekkala’s office became a menagerie of earthenware pots and vases, in which grew rosemary, sage, mint, cherry tomatoes, and the crooked branches of what might have been the only kumquat tree in Moscow.
The meals Kirov cooked for him were the only decent food Pekkala ate. The rest of the time, he boiled potatoes in a battered aluminum pan, fried sausages, and ate baked beans out of the can. For variety, he wandered across the street to the smoke-filled Cafe Tilsit and ordered whatever they were serving that day.
Pekkala hadn’t always been this way. Before the Revolution, he had loved the restaurants in St. Petersburg, and was once a discerning shopper at
the fruit and vegetable stalls in the great covered market of Gostiny Dvor. But his years in the Siberian wilderness had taken from him any pleasure in food. To him it had simply become the fuel that kept him alive.
All that changed on Friday afternoons, when their office filled with the smells of roast tetereva wood pigeon served with warm smetana cream, Anton apples stewed in brandy, or tsiplyata chicken in ripe gooseberry sauce which Kirov cooked on the stove in the corner of the room. Pekkala’s senses would be overwhelmed, by cream cognac sauce, the barely describable complexity of truffles, or the electric sourness of Kirov’s beloved kumquats.
Now Pekkala realized he had almost done what, in retrospect, seemed unforgivable, which was to take for granted the tiny miracles which Kirov had laid before him every Friday afternoon. Pekkala swore to himself that if he was lucky enough to get out of this camp in one piece, he would never again make such a mistake.
He noticed a solitary figure making its way up from the camp. A moment later, the wooden post which locked the door slid back and the man walked into the cell.
It was Sedov.
He carried a blanket rolled up under his arm and a bundle of twigs clutched in his other hand. With a smile, he tossed the blanket to Pekkala and dropped the bundle of twigs in the corner.
“How did you get up here without being stopped?” asked Pekkala as he unraveled the blanket, a coarse thing made from old Tsarist army wool, and immediately wrapped it around his trembling shoulders.
“Tarnowski persuaded one of the guards to let me go.”
“Persuaded?”
Sedov shrugged. “Bribed or threatened. It’s always one or the other.” Removing several flimsy matches from his trouser pocket, Sedov tossed them on the ground before Pekkala. “You will need these as well,” said the old man. “They are a gift from Lavrenov.”
“How long am I in for?”
“A week. The usual punishment for brawling.”
“You were the ones who were brawling.”
“But you were the one who got caught.”
“What about Tarnowski?” asked Pekkala.
“When the guards arrived, he told them you had started it. Somebody had to be punished. It just happened to be you.”
“What was the fight about?”
In answer to this, Sedov only smiled. “All in good time, Inspector.”
They know who I am, thought Pekkala.
Klenovkin had been right. Melekov had not waited long to share his latest scrap of information.
“I have brought you a message from Tarnowski. He says you should try not to freeze to death before tomorrow night.”
“Why should Tarnowski care?”
“Because he is coming to see you.”
“What about?”
“Your fate,” replied Sedov. Without another word, he turned and left.
Pekkala listened to the wooden bolt sliding into place, and after that the old man’s footsteps in the snow, as he made his way back to the camp.
Worry twisted in Pekkala’s gut. Whether he lived or died depended entirely on whether the Comitati believed his cover story. Alone in this cell, weak from lack of food, he would be no match for Tarnowski if the man decided to kill him.
Gathering the matches that the Old Believer had thrown before him, Pekkala undid the bundle of firewood and arranged the twigs in a pyramid. Beneath them, he laid out shreds of papery-white birch bark, peeled from the branches with his fingernails.
Of the four matches, one had already lost its head and was nothing more than a splintery toothpick. The next two Pekkala tried to strike against the stone slab of the floor. One flared but died before he had a chance to touch it to the bark. The second refused to light at all.
As Pekkala knelt over the wood with the last match in his hand, a feeling of panic rose up inside him, knowing that the threadbare blanket would not be enough to get him through this night.
When the fourth match flared, he crouched down until his face was only a handsbreadth from the twigs and gently blew on the embers. The birch bark smoldered. Then a tiny flame blossomed through the smoke. He cupped his hands around it, feeding the fire with broken sticks until it had grown big enough to burn on its own. Sitting cross-legged, as close to the heat as he could, Pekkala slowly began to feel warmth spreading through his body.
By the following evening, he had used up the last carefully rationed splinters of his fuel supply.
As he huddled by the glimmering embers of his fire, he heard piano music down in the guardhouse. Although it was poorly played and the piano was badly out of tune, he could still make out the haunting tune of Sorokin’s “Fires on the Distant Plain.”
The door rattled suddenly, startling Pekkala. He had not heard anyone approach. Then the wooden bolt slid back, and Tarnowski entered the cell.
The air seemed to crackle with menace. Pekkala felt it all around him, as if an electric current were passing through his body. If the Comitati had gotten wind of his true purpose here at Borodok, the odds of surviving this meeting would be zero.
Tarnowski reached into his jacket.
Pekkala thought he might be going for a knife, but when the lieutenant removed his hand, he was not holding a weapon. Instead, it was another small bundle of twigs, which he dumped beside the dwindling sparks of Pekkala’s fire.
At the sight of that kindling, the knot of fear in Pekkala’s stomach began to subside. Pekkala knew he wasn’t in the clear yet, but at least he wasn’t fighting for his life.
“I apologize for the unusual way in which I brought you here,” said Tarnowski.
“Brought me here? I am in this place because I tried to break up your fight with Sedov.”
“That is what you and the guards were supposed to think.”
“You mean it was staged?”
“After Melekov informed me of your identity, he mentioned that you didn’t like the way Sergeant Gramotin was treating our Old Believer. I guessed you wouldn’t stand to see him beaten right before your eyes, especially by the likes of me.”
“You have a crude way of getting things done,” said Pekkala.
“Crude, perhaps, but efficient. This is the only place where we could talk without being observed by the authorities. We used to hold meetings in the mine after dark, but after what happened to Captain Ryabov, the guards have been watching the entrance at night.”
“You damn near broke my jaw,” said Pekkala.
“That is something we might have avoided if you’d identified yourself to us when you arrived at the camp.”
“I didn’t know who I could trust.”
“We felt the same way about you, Inspector, when we first learned you were here.”
“And what do you think now?” Pekkala settled a few of the twigs on the fire.
“The fact that you are still alive should tell you all you need to know,” Tarnowski replied.
Soon the wood began to burn. Flames cast their flickering light across the bare stone walls.
“We were surprised to see you back at Borodok.”
“Not as surprised as I was,” Pekkala answered.
“We almost crossed paths here, you know,” Tarnowski continued. “The last survivors of the Kolchak Expedition reached Borodok not long after you did, but by that time you had already been sent into the forest. For a long time, we heard that you were still alive, even though no one had actually seen you. But when a new tree-marker was sent out to take your place, we became convinced you had died. Then new prisoners started showing up at the camp, saying you had been recalled to duty in Moscow. They said you were working for the Bureau of Special Operations, under the direction of Stalin himself. At first, we didn’t believe it. Why would the Emerald Eye put himself at the disposal of a beast like Stalin? But when these rumors persisted, we began to suspect that the stories might be true.”
“The stories are true,” Pekkala admitted. “I was recalled to Moscow in order to investigate the murder of the Tsar. After that, I was given a choice. Either
I could come back here to die or I could go back to the job I had been trained to do.”
“Not much of a choice.”
“Stalin is fond of placing men in such predicaments.”
“And if they do not choose wisely?”
“They die.”
“Like a cat with a mouse,” muttered Tarnowski. “And now he has cast you aside once again, as he has done with so many others. This is where we end up and our job becomes to simply stay alive, a task you might find difficult, since there are men who are here in this camp because of you.”
“No.” Pekkala shook his head. “They are here because of the crimes they committed.”
“A distinction which is lost on them, Inspector. But I have passed the word that anyone who lays a hand on you will answer for it with his life.”
“And who will answer for the murder of Captain Ryabov?”
The muscles clenched along Tarnowski’s jaw. “Saving your life and seeking vengeance for his death are not the same thing, Inspector. So many have perished since we came to this camp, I can no longer even remember their names. It would take a hundred lifetimes to avenge them all. And even if I could, what would be the point? The desire for revenge can take over a man’s life.”
“And can also be the end of it,” said Pekkala.
“As you and I have seen for ourselves.”
“We have?”
“Oh, yes, Inspector. You and I have met before.”
Pekkala was startled by the revelation. “You mean at this camp? But I thought—”
Tarnowski shook his head. “Long before that, Pekkala, on a night even colder than this, outside the Hotel Metropole.”
At the mention of that place, memories came tumbling like an avalanche out of the darkness of his mind. “The duel!” whispered Pekkala.
He was sitting at a table in the hotel restaurant, waiting for Ilya to arrive. For his fiancée’s birthday, Pekkala had promised her dinner at the finest place in St. Petersburg.
Large white pillars, like relics from a temple on Olympus, held up the high ceiling, in the center of which was a huge skylight, its view of the heavens obscured by thick swirls of cigarette smoke.