Death in Siberia f-4

by Alex Dryden

  Instinctively, Anna rolled over to her left in order to avoid the burst of gunfire she expected swiftly to follow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MILITSIYA LIEUTENANT ALEXEI Petrov opened the door to his kitchen cupboard at 5.15 in the morning, about the same time he did every day of the year. On this particular morning, from the selection of tins and packets on the eye-level shelf he chose a can labelled ‘ryby’ – fish – the species of which went unidentified. Probably the scrapings from the bottom of the hold in a factory ship up in the Arctic, he thought. The good stuff – the actual fish – they sold abroad.

  Behind him a dented tin kettle half full of water on the gas stove was beginning to simmer and the water was destined for two spoons of loose black tea which waited in a brown china pot on the chipped, faded yellow plastic surface.

  As he waited for the water to boil, he took up a stance by the window that to any observer might have had a strange, unearthly grace about it for a tough, stocky Russian police lieutenant. He looked out at the city from his cramped, one-bedroom, eleventh-floor apartment and was completely, consciously relaxed as he did so. He left his arms hanging loosely by his side, his narrow slitted eyes were focused on nothing, and he maintained a steady, almost imperceptible breathing. It was his moment of calm before the day began. Then his mind went to blank.

  It was what might be called in polite Western circles his morning meditation. But Petrov had actually learned it from his native Evenk grandfather, Gannyka, a nomadic Siberian who’d lived his whole life in a reindeer-hide tent. And now, Petrov had heard just a few days earlier, the old man was dying, in a deer-hide tent just as he had lived.

  It was the second day in June and the sun had already been up since 4 o’clock. With his mind in neutral, he was aware now, through the poisonous yellow smoke that belched from Krasnoyarsk’s smokestacks twenty-four hours a day, that the sun was illuminating the half-dead, polluted city with a dull haze, as if through gauze. He was aware too that the city spread out to the east of where he stood, towards the sun – known as the Eastern Gate to the Evenk people. His meditative consciousness took in the grim industrial surroundings without the judgement or anger, the resentment or bitterness it might otherwise have done.

  Thus, militsiya Lieutenant Alexei Petrov began his day and, from this detached beginning, the day’s events would unfold in whatever way they did without those life-destroying mental compulsions his Slav colleagues seemed to be plagued by.

  Beneath the window, this quarter – his quarter of the city from the point of view of the ment, or cop, that he was – consisted of decayed workers’ blocks from the Brezhnev era that looked like they’d been hurled petulantly on to the cityscape by dysfunctional gods; a few potholed streets, some of which were more hole than street; some broken concrete structures annexed by drug dealers, meths drinkers and various other addicts – they were decaying humans in a decaying landscape, in other words. But as the lieutenant in charge of this quarter, it was his job to know everyone as closely as he possibly could, including each former convict and each dealer or addict, in order to take pre-emptive action where necessary.

  It was a rough place, even by the standards of a rough city. In his quarter, the stall-holders who elsewhere in the city sold newspapers and cigarettes by the packet, or just singly, dared not set up shop for fear of robbery or worse.

  Unfolding in his consciousness, and away now beyond his quarter, the rest of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk smoked incessantly, like an addict itself, from its towering industrial chimneys. And half a mile from the window, the great river glittered as if in anger at the foul factory substances it was forced to ingest. But Alexei Petrov had no critique about all of this, just a blank, calm acceptance.

  He was finally brought back to physical reality by the kettle that had been whistling for some time behind him and he turned and filled the pot.

  At thirty-nine years old, Petrov was of medium height, and an extremely strong and leanly muscled man of mainly native blood. His few Slavic features came from his Slav Russian father, as did his name, but these were almost obliterated by his strong, tribal Evenk ancestry. Certainly, apart from his mother’s and father’s brief union with each other, there may have been other encounters of a sexual kind, casual and violent, between his tribal family and the invading Russians ever since the Czar’s Cossacks surged across Siberia more than three hundred years before. But back then even bands of largely undiscriminating Cossacks might have baulked at a native woman who hadn’t washed for six months. And up until modern times the Evenk could disappear into the vast wastes of their once unpolluted Siberia where no one could follow.

  Petrov had a sculpted, nut-brown face, with high, prominent cheekbones – a feature shared with the Evenk’s genetic relations in Mongolia. His eyes were set well back in his head and there was a kind of imprint in the centre of his forehead that looked like a faint, fleshy medallion. His straight nose and protected nostrils were an Evenki feature and his strong jawline had deterred many a potential antagonist who might otherwise have taken a swing at him. He had black, shiny, cropped hair, which he would have preferred long – over his shoulders – but which his militsiya position, he felt, prevented. His mouth was straight, with slightly prominent lips, and had not quite lost its once prodigious ability to laugh. Regular exposure to humorous situations, however, had hung by a thread for some time now.

  It was his Russian father who had ruthlessly tried to Russian-ise him, ashamed perhaps that he had taken a native woman for a wife, and trying to compensate by beating the nativeness out of their son. When his father had finally sent his wife back to her own people – reindeer herders and fishermen way up beyond the Arctic Circle, north of one of the villages called Potapovo – he’d had Alexei’s papers changed. He’d claimed a Kazakh mother for him instead. At least the Kazakhs had a nation of their own and a useful one – after all, the Russians used Kazakhstan to test their nuclear bombs. But to Petrov’s father, the Evenk people had nothing; no country, no polity – no possessions – and as far as Alexei’s father was concerned, they therefore could not have any meaningful identity at all.

  And so Alexei Petrov the police lieutenant was a man caught between two worlds and he floated in the melange they both created. One world was ancient, deeply traditional and governed by the spirits of nature; the other was violent, atavistic and responsible for much of the charnel house of recent Russian history that had laid the land and its own people to waste.

  But in the mirror in his bathroom, Petrov the Russian thought he looked pretty good in his military-style police lieutenant’s uniform. He certainly looked tough and was known for being so in his quarter. Now ready for work, he wore the uniform, except for the jacket. That was hanging on a chair, impeccably cleaned and pressed, with its shining buttons and twin shoulder insignia of two yellow stars and a yellow dot on grey, all of which was bordered with neat red lines.

  It was his nomadic ancestry that had made him naturally as strong as he was. But he had complemented that by rigorous training since his early youth. Now, aside from his sometimes strenuous police duties as an operativnik – detective – he played squash three times a week and ran half-marathons at weekends when he wasn’t on duty. He had even been a member of the national militsiya long-distance running team in his twenties and was given a trial for the Olympics sixteen years before, back in the middle of the 1990s.

  But since his wife had died of some officially ‘mysterious illness’ two years before, which he suspected – no, which he knew – had been caused by a radiation leak at the military facility outside the city where she’d worked as a laboratory assistant, he had taken even greater care to look and to be fit. And sometimes he was ashamed of this, as if nowadays he were looking after himself in order to find another woman. Was it possible to betray the dead? Absolutely, was his resolute, Evenk conclusion. And betraying both the living and the dead was anyway a signature feature of the people who ruled Russia, the Kremlin’s spy elite.

>   While he waited for the tea to brew, he looked out of the window again – his mind now at rest in observance – and watched the icy river, swollen by melted snow from Mongolia to the south, that wound its way fifteen hundred miles to the north and into the Arctic seas.

  In Siberia, he thought, as he often did with a certain morbid regularity, the bones of the dead millions still waited for the crimes committed against them to be acknowledged, let alone waited for a decent burial. The latter would never happen – he was sure of that, it was impossible now anyway. But, who knew, perhaps one day there would be a regime in Moscow that at least recognised the enormity of the country’s crimes against its own citizens. His own people, the Evenk, were merely an afterthought in Moscow’s mass murders, an almost accidental appendix, the swishing of the old Soviet monster’s tail.

  He doubted, however, that an actual apology would ever intrude into the thoughts of the average state official in the twenty-first-century Kremlin, even for the Siberian slaughter of its own people, the Russians themselves.

  He turned back to the kitchen counter and opened the can of fish which turned out to be an indistinguishable, rust-coloured mush. He thought that the contents were most likely a bouillabaisse of fishes’ heads, tails and arseholes. Whatever it was, it was all mixed up with a thick, gluey tomato-like sauce. Then he spread half the contents on to some black bread and poured the brewed tea into a chipped mug. As he was poised to take the first sip of the day, his mobile phone screamed into the silence inside his head.

  ‘Da?’

  Young Corporal Temov was at the other end, finishing the night shift at the station.

  The thought flashed across Petrov’s mind that soon his subordinate – a pale 23 year old with an ambitious urge to please his masters – would be promoted to his own level, and then, sometime in the future, above him.

  At thirty-nine and with his general diligence and recognised crime-solving skills, Petrov knew that he should have been at least a militsiya major by now. But he also knew that it wasn’t just his ethnicity that stood in the way. He was guilty of an even worse offence against the state than that. He was guilty of avoiding becoming part of the ‘corruptocracy’ – the venal system that stretched from the top of the Kremlin to the lowliest traffic cop ruled supreme in all of Russia’s law enforcement agencies. In the myriad law and spy organs that sought to control, suppress, grow fat and, very occasionally, solve crimes in the country, there was no one who was more distrusted by the spy elite than a straight cop or a clean security officer – if you could find one. There was no one who came under more suspicion. Until he took his first bribe, Petrov knew he would remain forever a lieutenant.

  Over the phone Temov reeled off the night’s events in Petrov’s quarter of the city; the new drunk-tank occupants, the knifings, the overdoses, the thieving, the accidental or not-so-accidental deaths. He sounded bored, or maybe just tired from the shift. But he had left the best until last. There had been a murder reported, Temov told him, unable to suppress some excitement in his voice. The report had come in just five minutes earlier at 5.47. The dead body was at a block not far from Petrov’s own apartment. And according to the anonymous caller, there was ‘something odd’ about the murder victim. But then the anonymous caller had rung off quickly from what was found to be a public phone. A public phone in his quarter that actually worked, Petrov noted with some surprise.

  Corporal Temov suggested that he could pick up the lieutenant in a squad car and they could both go together.

  ‘I’ll walk,’ Petrov told him. ‘Meet me there. Seal it off.’

  Petrov sat in the kitchen for a moment longer. For some reason – perhaps the old man’s imminent death – his mind turned back to his grandfather, Gannyka, dying in a reindeer-hide tent up above the Arctic Circle. He automatically looked across at the window-sill where he kept the deer-hide drum the old man had given him as a child and which he hadn’t touched in years. A magic drum, an Evenk tambour, Gannyka had told him, made from the wood of a tree struck by lightning, and then stretched with deerskin. It was made from the same tree from which Gannyka had made his own shaman’s drum, back in the 1930s. Petrov stood and walked to the window. He picked up the small drum and turned it over in his hands. Then he began to tap a rhythm that scattered the layer of dust from the drum-skin into the rays of sunlight. He decided then that he would like to see his grandfather for one last time before the old man died.

  He returned to the table, finished his tea and smeared the rest of the fish mush on to another slice of black bread. He washed his hands carefully, buttoned up his jacket, put on his militsiya cap and took the urine-stained and stinking elevator to the foot of the building.

  The walk itself was just a little over ten minutes away from the street exit from his block and he arrived before Temov had time to scream up in a cop car with its light flashing.

  There was a small throng of people outside the chipped concrete entrance to the block. They were babas with their black shawls and shopping bags, a few very young and unwashed children, a couple of youths who stared at the ground, kicked chips of concrete, and kept their hands in their pockets.

  ‘Where?’ Petrov asked quietly and to the group in general.

  One of the babas pointed silently behind her into the alley where the trash was kept and, mostly, left to rot.

  Then Temov ran up behind him and seemed to be about to push the placid little circle of residents back as if they were fomenting a dangerous public riot. But something in his lieutenant’s quiet demeanour pre-empted his carefully learned officious arrogance.

  ‘Get some tape,’ Petrov told him.

  Temov walked back to the car.

  The block was not far from the great river’s dock area, just a street or two away from the river, in fact, in Sverdlovsk Street. It was much like Petrov’s own block, badly built of poor materials, dilapidated further by the extreme temperatures which in winter could reach minus forty-five degrees centigrade or more, and littered around its edges with the detritus of its chemically unhinged inhabitants.

  He walked down the damp alley next to it. It had started to drizzle and he now wished he’d brought his coat. Down here in the dark warren of the blocks, he hadn’t even noticed the sun had disappeared.

  When he reached the end, just before the overflowing trash cans blocked the path, he saw the body. It was the corpse of a man, lying face up.

  Petrov knelt down beside the dead man. He studied him patiently and with care, as if he might suddenly pop back to life.

  Despite the dirt on it, the body was well dressed, Petrov noted first of all, and therefore the man could not be from around here. That was certain. He peeled back the man’s upper lip. Foreign dental work, he noted. A rich Russian, then. Then he placed his right hand behind the man’s neck, between it and the concrete. There was a bullet hole, the shot fired from close up – he could feel the hole and the burn marks around it. An assassination, by the look of it. The Krasnoyarsk mafiya doing its night work. They’d shot him in the back of the neck, then left him face up away from the crime scene in someone else’s trash alley. Sometime during the night. Forensics would know when.

  Petrov turned around, still kneeling, to look behind him.

  For some reason that he couldn’t explain to himself, he wanted to know if he was being observed. But there was no one. All he heard was Temov’s commanding arrogance from around the corner at the far end of the alley. Now, without Petrov’s influence, all his official state aggression appeared to have been released.

  Petrov turned back to the corpse. He slid his hand under the man’s raincoat and into an expensive-looking tweed jacket and took out an air ticket; it was for a seat on board the flight from Norilsk up beyond the Arctic Circle to Krasnoyarsk. It was from the previous afternoon. He then rooted further down into the pocket and brought out a passport, which was protected in a black leather wallet. He slipped it out of the wallet and looked at the cover of the passport and saw at once that it wasn’t Russ
ian. The man was a citizen of the European Union, apparently. Then he flicked to the end page. This made him pause again. The assassin’s victim was a foreigner, that was certain. But he was also a professor. He mentally noted the name of the man, Gunther Bachman, and his country of origin, Germany. A professor? Well, in Germany everyone called themselves Herr Doktor or Herr Professor, didn’t they?’

  So that was what was ‘odd’ about the corpse, he thought. A well-off foreigner in a back alley of Krasnoyarsk’s most unpleasant, filthy and poverty-stricken quarter. He put the passport back into its leather wallet and then returned it and the air ticket to the pocket of the man’s tweed jacket.

  If whoever had killed Bachman had left the passport, there must be a reason. They could have got good money on the black market for it. Perhaps, then, whoever killed him didn’t have the wherewithal to deal with a foreign passport, had nowhere to fence it – that was the simplest explanation. So maybe it wasn’t a mafiya murder after all. The mafiya would know how to make good money from a European Union passport. Perhaps instead it was some opportunistic delinquent who had killed the German professor. Perhaps Bachman had been unlucky enough to wander off the beaten track, then been mugged and casually killed. A delinquent, perhaps, who imitated the style of the mafiya.