by Alex Dryden
She shook her empty glass at him peremptorily. He stood and took it and filled his own too. At this point, he withdrew the present he’d brought for her from the pocket of his leather jacket. It was another bottle, but unlike hers it was expensive vodka. She seized it in her thin claw-like hands and her eyes again showed him a deep appreciation. Then she thrust it down the side of the armchair where she was sitting. ‘I’ll keep this one for myself, Alexei,’ she said.
‘That’s what it’s for,’ he answered, suppressing a grin. ‘Just for you.’
She settled herself back into the chair and sipped delicately from the glass.
‘So, then. This too-healthy woman somehow finds Zhenya down at the market,’ she continued, ‘as if she’d been looking for just anyone at all. But it’s convenient for the job she was looking for, this block, wasn’t it? Just two streets away from the docks.’
‘She was looking for a job at the docks?’ he asked, and she laughed scornfully at his deduction.
‘You detectives!’ she exclaimed. ‘No, she was trying to get work at Igarka! In the lumber mills. Zhenya got it all out of her, her qualifications as a mill operator, her papers to say she knew how to service the saws up there. But take a look at her hands!’ Demidova exclaimed, as if Anna Resnikov were in the room with them. ‘They were strong, certainly, but they weren’t worked, if you know what I mean. How does a woman who wants a shitty apartment to stay in for a few roubles a night afford hands like that, Zhenya thought. And why does a woman like that want to work in those saw mills?’
‘I see,’ Petrov said, though he wasn’t sure he did.
‘I see you want to know her name,’ Demidova stated.
‘Well…’ Petrov demurred.
‘She called herself Valentina Asayev,’ Demidova said triumphantly, as if she were placing a winning poker hand on the table – but also with enough scepticism in her voice to suit the plot structure of an entire series of Brazilian soaps. ‘But those bastards don’t know that.’
‘The MVD don’t know?’
‘Of course not. Only Zhenya and I know.’
Petrov sipped his vodka. She wanted to lead him on to questions, but he knew to be patient again. She would beat about the bush as long as he followed her by the nose, but if he sat and waited, her eagerness to tell everything would soon overcome her.
‘But we all thought that couldn’t be her real name,’ Demidova said finally and in a defiant tone of voice.
‘Oh?’ Petrov said.
‘We saw – Zhenya and I – that she wasn’t who she said she was, that’s all, so her name was doubtless false too.’
‘Maybe she was just hiding from her husband,’ Petrov ventured. ‘That would be reason enough to conceal who she was. Maybe her husband is a violent man, maybe he tried to kill her.’
‘She looked like she could kill ten husbands,’ Demidova replied dismissively.
‘And the foreigner too?’ Petrov asked. ‘You think she killed him?’
‘No. Not the foreigner, not that Zhenya and I believe, anyway.’ She paused. ‘She was a Russian all right, no doubt of that. From the west around Moscow. She was educated too. But I tell you…’ Then she grabbed Petrov’s wrist with surprising force and pierced his eyes with her own copper ones. ‘… she was Russian, but she smelled of foreign countries,’ she said.
CHAPTER NINE
THE ROSSIYA HEAVED sluggishly away from the dockside at just after ten o’clock in the evening. The old ship was only five hours late departing. Not bad timing, Anna Resnikov considered. It was something of a miracle the vessel worked at all.
A raging orange and purple Siberian sunset still coloured the sky to the west, out beyond the Ural Mountains, and the drizzle clouds had disappeared leaving a clear sky in which stars had slowly begun to appear.
She stood on her own at the guard rail, the blue quilted jacket tugged around her neck and her feet cold through the boots she’d bought. The temperature had dropped with the ship’s departure and it had turned icy again, maybe down to a few degrees below zero, but something in the air told her that the brief, hot Siberian summer down here was not far away.
She stayed on deck as the light faded and, looking down vertically at the ship’s side, she watched the rusted hull of the Rossiya wallow for a moment as if unsure if it could still float after the long winter, then slip away from the quay into the fast-moving current.
The engines were built by Vickers in the early twentieth century at the British industrial town of Barrow-in-Furness, according to a proud bronze plate at the stern. They rattled every rivet and clattered the metal sheets of the deck, shaking chains and davits, stanchions and guard rails. Their loud throb made it seem as if the ship had some kind of shaking sickness. In the beginning there had been the steady, insistent thumping of the old 1913 engine. The crosshead, four-stroke cycle diesel wasn’t up to much any more in terms of speed and probably never had been. It could propel the Rossiya at five knots at the most, and only more than that with the aid of the strong current. But its deafening cacophony was, if anything, worse than it had ever been in its long history. The resulting, incessant throbbing of the ship invaded Anna’s every thought. It jarred every inch of the metal decks and companion ways, shuddered the guard rails and the narrow sheet-iron passages that made up the claustrophobic internal parts of the ship. The tortured movement of ancient, riveted metal made her feel as if she were being shaken herself. The ship’s cargo and fittings all became the engine’s dissonant orchestral accompaniment. Finally the grumpy vessel settled a little nervously, it seemed to Anna, into the centre of the river just as true night fell.
As she stood on the deck watching the last of the light, her immediate thoughts concerned the foreman Ivan. He was the imminent threat. She knew that from his remarks at the hiring office. After her encounter with him her priority on the Rossiya must be to keep well clear of him.
But then there were the other, for the time being more distant, threats too that had accumulated since the MVD raid. She had to assume the Interior police would find the name Valentina Asayev, her forged alias, in connection with the block and Zhenya’s apartment, and eventually they would find her name on the Rossiya’s manifest.
Despite the extreme, last-minute tensions of her departure, however, the upside was that she had what she wanted – the job at the saw mills and principally the journey towards them. She had no intention of remaining in Igarka for any length of time. It all depended on whether she could make it to the lumber town before the MVD caught up with her. And she also wondered what her watchers would do now that she had disobeyed Miller’s orders. They were certain to follow, that was her only conclusion.
But it was Ivan she would have to deal with first. She knew he would come for what he wanted in return for getting her hired. Now it was more imperative than ever to avoid his attention, and Ivan was not just invasive and potentially dangerous to her, he was also too curious about her by far.
She hadn’t seen the foreman since she’d boarded the ship and she wondered where below decks she could put her bedroll for the night without him finding and bothering her. To hide herself among the other female hands hired for Igarka’s lumber mills was the obvious choice. But even going down to the women’s section – simply a freight hold in the bowels of the ship – wouldn’t stop a man like him, for whom power was simply an invitation to abuse it. She wondered just how aggressive he might become, and how – now she was on the ship – she could most effectively deal with him.
Finally she turned from the guard rail and faced to the north where the river led and where her mission lay. As the ship passed Ennolaevksy, Dodonovo and Komonovo in the brief few hours of darkness, she remained on deck – out of sight, she hoped. She looked almost blindly into the near-darkness towards the Arctic until the early tinge of dawn began to appear to the east.
Then she turned from the night’s greying end ahead of the ship, picked up her bag and went below.
The permanent noise of the ship Ross
iya became unnoticeable after the initial twelve hours on board. But in that early dawn it wouldn’t let her rest and, in the vast silence of the Siberian wilderness around the ship, it was as if the Rossiya was the landscape’s lone and angry presence; a minotaur in the unending cave of Siberia.
During the few hours before breakfast, the first thing she had done was to conceal the gun and the ammunition in the latrines. She needed to keep it in the women’s quarters, where she was most likely to have to retrieve it quickly and then, while the other women were sleeping, she found an old disused and blocked pipe, stuffed with wire and rubble and some old rags. She emptied it, placed the wire four feet inside, then the gun and ammunition, finally filling the remaining hole with the rubble and rags. On top of it all she stuffed a few sanitary towels.
Then she had lain on a wooden bench in a large open area in the hold, a cargo space which had its hatch all but battened down at night, as if its human cargo were prisoners, not paid workers. But the other women seemed to know it was reserved for them and so she’d followed their lead. In that early morning, she’d hardly slept. Whether she expected Ivan to come for her, or whether it was the tension of the mission that was now properly emerging into its grim reality which kept her awake, she wasn’t sure. But at least she hadn’t seen Ivan.
As she lay on the hard surface, her bedroll beneath her, she felt the fetid warmth of the other female bodies stacked so tightly on the benches and on the floor that there was hardly room to move once everyone had fallen asleep.
When she woke after a fitful, dawn sleep early on the first morning on the ship, she slipped off the bench. The sun had been up for a while. The smell in the hold was rank. She picked her way among the still-sleeping bodies, opened the hatch, then went through a metal door and up some metal steps out on to the deck. She leaned on the guard rail, breathed the clean air, and watched the sun soaring in the sky across eastern Siberia from the Pacific two thousand miles away.
As the light illuminated the Yenisei Basin and the unimaginable vastness of Siberia, it was hard to believe she was heading somewhere more desolate than the scene in front of her.
Yazaevka, Porog, Mamatovo… In the expanding dawn the ship was passing a few small fishing villages which were not even on the map – just settlements of scattered wooden houses in each, dotted on the banks. A small boat with an outboard might come out and try to sell something, but the Rossiya wasn’t stopping except at certain designated places on the route. Sometimes the river widened to half a mile across, sometimes sheer cliffs rose up on either side of it and when they did, the water rushed with greater speed through the narrows. The trees on the eastern bank – pines, spruce and fir – stretched away to the horizon while the flat, western bank was almost bare as far as the Ural Mountains, which rose between the river and Moscow. Ahead of the ship there was still a thousand miles to the Arctic Circle.
It was at around midday when she saw Ivan. The deck was busy with other hired workers eating bread and chicken, smoking cheap Russian cigarettes, or drinking beers and playing cards. But she spotted Ivan easily. He was watching her intently as before, a slight smile on one side of his mouth. When he saw her looking at him he came over at once and gave her the same leering smile he’d made at the hiring office.
He said nothing at first, stood almost limply. But then suddenly he sprang forward at her. With one hand he took a mobile phone out of his jacket pocket, with the other he swiftly snatched the cap off her head. Then he took a picture of her with the phone. As he looked at the picture, he laughed at the angry look that crossed her face.
Only a great effort of self-control, once again, prevented her from getting up off the deck with all the speed and strength she possessed and throwing him and the phone over the rails.
Instead, she quietly picked up the cap he’d dropped beside her and put it back on. Be passive, she told herself. Be like the others. But even in her old clothes and with her dishevelled, dirty appearance, she knew she couldn’t be quite like them. Something of her health and strength set her apart. She could not disguise that.
She looked away from the bulk of Ivan’s body that stood between her and a thin sun. But he wasn’t going to leave.
‘Why are you on your own?’ he said aggressively.
She didn’t reply.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘the others all know each other. Why not you?’ His tone of voice was somewhere between a plaintive question and an angry accusation.
‘Maybe they work up in Igarka every year,’ she replied, looking at him at last. ‘I’ve never worked up there.’
‘Why not? What brings you here for work?’
She shrugged.
‘Where have you worked before?’ he insisted again, even more aggressively this time.
She stiffened. ‘What are you,’ she snapped back and looked him directly in the face, a challenge. ‘OMON?’
He laughed. ‘Would that bother you?’ Through his chipped and yellowed teeth he chanted in a sing-song voice the motto of the Otryad Militsii Osobogo Naznacheniya, another of Russia’s nastier internal security police forces. ‘We show no mercy and expect none!’ he sang. Then he laughed his huge and unpitying laugh.
She said nothing.
He looked at the picture of her on his phone. ‘Maybe up in Igarka I’ll say you’re my woman,’ he said insolently, and then stared at her face in the flesh. ‘And maybe you will be. Look,’ he said again, demanding her attention, ‘a woman like you will need protection up there. It’s a rough place, believe me.’ When again she refused to reply, his impatient expression hardened. ‘What makes you so tough? You think you can ignore me maybe. I can fire you at the next stop, if I choose. At Yeniseiysk or Vorogovo or Bakhta. Easy. You’re off the ship.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that.’
‘Then I’ll have to find work somewhere else, won’t I,’ she replied, looking at him for the first time.
‘What work? Where have you worked before, then?’ he said.
‘Bratsk. Where I was born.’
‘In the mills there?’
‘Yes, the mills. Other odd jobs. Whatever I could get. I’m not idle. My parents died when I was young. I know how to look after myself. What does it matter to you?’
He leaned over her and again she could smell the alcohol on his breath. ‘You’re too good to be doing this, that’s why.’ He paused. ‘I can see it,’ he hissed.
Her heart missed a beat.
He tossed the phone in his hand a few times, as if to taunt her with the picture on it, and then he walked away.
CHAPTER TEN
ALEXEI PETROV’S MOTHER was an uncomplicated, tribal and deeply traditional woman. She’d raised four children in the far north, doing the work of men as well as women, herding reindeer in summer and winter, the sacred animals that kept the tribe alive with their skins and meat, hair and bones. They were sacred beasts, deeply honoured in life as well as in death. But his father was a very different creature. Petrov Senior had been a minor Russian state official from Moscow with burning communist sympathies who was sent out to Siberia at the end of the 1940s. For some time before he’d been assigned to a place that only the most fevered Party enthusiasts would ever want to visit, let alone live. Stalin had ordered the development of huge military-industrial complexes throughout the region, including the highly secret Krasnoyarsk B complex. Though it officially didn’t exist, it was hollowed out of a mountain near the city, and it was the place where Alexei’s wife had died from a radiation leak in the 1990s. A laboratory assistant who was forgotten by all but Alexei Petrov.
But back in that long distant past, his father had fallen foul of Stalin’s final purge in 1953 and was given ten years in the camps. He was released early, in a general amnesty after Stalin’s death and thanks to Khrushchev’s thaw, having served just two years. Still buried alive in the wilderness up in the northern reaches of the Yenisei River, however, and without the necessary papers to travel elsewhere in the Soviet Union, let alone the money to do so, Pet
rov Senior had worked in various menial industrial jobs – little more than slave labour in themselves – in the Arctic city of Norilsk, until he’d met and married Petrov’s mother in 1972.
By then he was in his mid-fifties and she was twenty-three years old. He was a former zek – a convict – though he still retained his loyalty to the Communist Party, an institution that, in his eyes, could do no wrong. She was the daughter of reindeer herders and fishermen who went back tens of generations living in the same vast wilderness, unknown and fearful to anyone else, but to her own tribe a home where every tree and rock and river were known as if they were objects in a family living room.
After the brief marriage, Petrov’s father had finally managed to make his way south to Krasnoyarsk and, due to the lack of people willing to move to Siberia to become police officers, he’d eventually found his way into the militsiya, his slate wiped clean by a needy recruiting officer desperate to fill quotas.
His marriage to Petrov’s mother had lasted less than two years, in which time Petrov was born.
From his mother and grandfather, Petrov had learned that the Evenk people occasionally helped Russian convicts when they escaped from the gulag, as well as befriending the freed who, having nowhere else to go, were still all but slaves. Perhaps his father had simply used his mother to get out of the bitter north, Petrov had often thought in his thirty-nine years. His father was certainly far older than his mother, more than double her age. From Petrov’s knowledge of both his parents, there seemed to be little in common between them and Petrov Senior was able to use all the power of the State as well as his new policeman’s role, to keep his son with him and evict his mother back to the Siberian tundra and taiga ‘where she belongs’.