by Sam Eastland
‘Tell him I’m sorry we argued,’ said Gorenko. ‘Tell him I wish he was here.’
*
They had been driving for twenty-four hours. Kirov and Pekkala worked in three-hour shifts as they travelled towards the Polish border. Maximov sat in the back, his hands cuffed tightly together.
It was Kirov who had insisted on the cuffs.
‘Are you sure that’s necessary?’ asked Pekkala.
‘It’s standard procedure,’ replied Kirov, ‘for the transportation of prisoners.’
‘I don’t blame him,’ said Maximov. ‘After all, I’m not helping you because I have decided that you’re right. The only reason I’m here is to save the life of Konstantin Nagorski.’
‘Whether I trust you or not,’ said Kirov, ‘is not the thing that’s going to change Kropotkin’s mind.’
It was spring now, a season which, at home in Moscow, Pekkala noticed only in the confined space of Kirov’s window boxes, or stuffed into tall galvanised buckets in the open-air market in Bolotnia Square or when the Yeliseyev store set out their annual display of tulips arranged in the shape of a hammer and sickle. But here, it was all around him, like a gently spinning whirlwind, painting the black sides of the Emka with luminous yellow-green dust.
They were fortunate to have missed the time known as the Rasputitsa, when snow melted and roads became rivers of mud. But there were still places where their route dis appeared into lakes, reappearing on the far bank and stubbornly unravelling across the countryside. Out in the middle of these ponds, tilting signposts seemed to point the way into a universe below the water’s edge.
The detours cost them hours, following paths which did not exist on their maps and even those which did exist sometimes ended inexplicably, while according to the map they carried on like arteries inside a human body.
On their way, they flew through villages whose white-picket-fenced gardens flickered past them as if in the projection of a film.
They stopped for fuel at government depots, where the oil-soaked ground was tinted with rainbows. Half-hidden behind heaps of rubber tyres left to rot beside the depot, the milky purple blossoms of hyacinth cascaded from the hedges. The scent of them mingled with the reek of spilled diesel.
Depots on the Moscow highway were a hundred kilometres apart. The only way fuel could be obtained from them was with government-issued coupons. To prevent these coupons from being sold on the Black Market, each one was made out to the individual to whom they were issued. At each depot, Kirov and Pekkala checked to see whether Kropotkin had cashed in any of his coupons. They turned up nothing.
‘What about depots off the highway?’ Pekkala asked one depot manager, a man with a fuzz of stubble on his cheeks like a coating of mould on stale bread.
‘There are none,’ replied the manager, removing his false teeth and polishing them on his handkerchief before replacing them in his mouth. ‘The only way to get fuel is from these depots or through the local commissariats, who issue it for use in farm machinery. If the driver of a heavy truck tried to requisition fuel from a commissariat, he would be turned down.’
Kirov held up the bundle of fuel coupons which the manager had given him to inspect. ‘Could any of these have come from the Black Market?’
The manager shook his head. ‘Either you have a pass book allowing you to requisition fuel for government use, as you do, or you have coupons, like everyone else. Now, if you have coupons, each one has to be matched up with the identity card and driving licence of the person requisitioning the fuel. I’ve been doing this job for fifteen years and, believe me, I know the difference between what’s real and what is fake.’
While the manager filled up their car, Pekkala opened the Emka’s boot and stared at the short-wave radio provided by Gorenko. It was the same type to be used in T-34s, enabling them to communicate with artillery and air support groups out of normal radio range at the front. If the mission was successful, they could use it to transmit a message to an emergency channel monitored by the Kremlin before the forty-eight-hour deadline was up. Otherwise, as Stalin had promised, thousands of motorised troops would be dispatched to the Polish border.
Beside this radio lay the ungainly shape of the PTRD. The more Pekkala stared at it, the less it looked to him like a weapon and more like a crutch for some lame giant. He kept the titanium bullet in the pocket of his waistcoat, fastened shut with a black safety pin.
‘Leave it,’ said Kirov, closing the lid of the boot. ‘It will be there when we need it.’
‘But will it be enough?’ asked Pekkala. The thought that they might already be too late to prevent Kropotkin from driving the tank into Poland echoed through Pekkala’s mind.
At some point in their eighteenth hour on the road, Kirov fell asleep at the wheel. The Emka slid off the highway and ended up in a field planted with sunflowers. Fortunately, there was no ditch, or the Emka would have been wrecked.
By the time the car had stopped moving, its side and windshield were coated with a spray of mud and the tiny pale green tongues of baby sunflower leaves. Without a word, Kirov got out of the car, went around to the back door and opened it. ‘Get out,’ he said to Maximov.
Maximov did as he was told.
Kirov unlocked the cuffs. Then he held out his hand towards the empty driver’s seat.
With Maximov at the wheel and the two investigators pushing with their shoulders against the rear cowlings, they eased the Emka out of the mud and back on to the road.
High above them, vultures circled lazily on rising waves of heat. All around was the smell of this landlocked world, its dryness and its dustiness sifting through their blood, as spiced as nutmeg powder.
From then on, they drove in shifts of two hours each. By the time they arrived at the Rusalka, all three of them had reached the point of exhaustion where they could not have slept even if they’d wanted to.
On the map, the forest resembled a jagged shard of green glass, hemmed in by white expanses indicating cultivated fields. It straddled the Soviet and Polish border, marked only by a wavy dotted line.
The Rusalka lay approximately 200 kilometres due east of Warsaw. Only a handful of villages existed on the Russian end of the forest, but there were, according to Pekkala’s map, several on the Polish side.
Pekkala had studied it so many times that by now the shape of it was branded on his mind. It was as if by knowing its outline he might be better prepared for whatever lay inside its boundaries.
It was late in the afternoon when they reached a tiny village called Zorovka, the last Russian settlement before the road disappeared into the forest. Zorovka consisted of half a dozen thatched-roof houses built closely together on either side of the road running into the Rusalka. Indignant-looking chickens wandered across the road, so unused to traffic that they barely seemed to notice the Emka until its wheels were almost on top of them.
The village seemed deserted except for a woman who was tilling the earth in her garden. When the Emka rolled into sight the woman did not even raise her head, but continued to chip away with a hoe at the muddy clumps of dirt.
The fact that she did not look up made Pekkala realise that she must have been expecting them. ‘Stop the car,’ he ordered.
Kirov hit the brakes.
Pekkala got out and walked over to the woman.
As he crossed the road towards her, the woman continued to ignore him.
Beneath the marks of wagon wheels and horses’ hooves, Pekkala saw the tracks of heavy tyres. Now he knew they were on the right path. ‘When did the truck pass through here?’ he asked the woman, standing on the other side of her garden fence.
She stopped chipping at the earth. She raised her head. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘I am Inspector Pekkala, from the Bureau of Special Operations in Moscow.’
‘Well, I don’t know anything about a truck,’ she said in a voice so loud that Pekkala wondered if she might be hard of hearing.
‘I can see the tyre tracks in the
road,’ said Pekkala.
The woman came to the edge of her fence and looked out into the road. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice almost a shout, ‘I see them, too, but I still don’t know anything about it.’ Then she glanced at him and Pekkala knew from the look on her face that she was lying. And more than this – she wanted him to know she was lying.
A jolt passed through Pekkala’s chest. He looked down at the ground, as if distracted by something. ‘Is he here?’ he whispered.
‘He was,’ whispered the woman.
‘How long ago?’
‘Yesterday, some time in the afternoon.’
‘Was he alone?’
‘I did not see anyone else.’
‘If he is gone,’ asked Pekkala, ‘why are you still afraid?’
‘The others in this town are hiding in their houses, watching us and listening at their doors. If anything happens, they will blame me for talking to you, but I will blame myself if I say nothing.’
‘If anything happens?’ asked Pekkala.
The woman stared at him for a moment. ‘This man who drove the truck, he took somebody with him. Someone from this village. His name is Maklarsky; a forester here in the Rusalka.’
‘Why would he kidnap somebody?’ asked Pekkala.
‘At first the driver said he only wanted some fuel for his truck. But the thing is we are only allowed so much every month from the local commissariat. We only have one tractor in this village and what they give us isn’t even enough to keep it running. The amount of fuel he wanted was more than we draw in a month. So we told him no. Then he asked for someone to show him the way to the border. The Rusalka is patrolled by Polish cavalry. Our own soldiers come through here sometimes, once a month or so, but the Poles ride through that forest almost every day. The woods are full of trails. It’s easy to get lost. We told him he should go back out to the Moscow highway and cross the border into Poland from there. That was when the driver pulled a gun.’
‘What did he look like?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Broad shoulders, a big square face and a moustache. He had blond hair turning grey.’
‘His name is Kropotkin,’ said Pekkala, ‘and he is very dangerous. It is very important that I stop this man before he crosses into Poland.’
‘He may have done that already,’ said the woman.
‘If he had,’ said Pekkala, ‘we would know about it.’
‘This man said that people would come looking for him. He said we should keep a look out for a man with a black coat, who wore a badge shaped like an eye on his lapel.’
Pekkala turned up the collar of his coat. ‘He meant this.’
‘Yes,’ said the woman, staring at the emerald eye. ‘He told us if we kept quiet, he would let his hostage go. But I didn’t believe him. That is why I’m talking to you now. The others are too scared to speak with you. My name is Zoya Maklarskaya and that man I told you about is my father. The decision is mine whether talking to you now will do more harm than good.’
‘We will do what we can to bring your father back,’ said Pekkala.
The woman nodded at the churned-up road. ‘Those tracks will lead you to him,’ she said, ‘and you had better leave now if you want to find him before nightfall. Once the dark has settled on that forest, even the wolves get lost in there.’
As Pekkala turned around, he saw a face in the window of a house, sliding back into the shadows like a drowned man sinking to the bottom of a lake.
*
In fading light, they followed Kropotkin’s tracks into the forest. The ranks of trees closed around them. Sunset leaned in crooked pillars through the branches, lighting up clearings where blankets of grass gleamed as luminously as the emerald in Pekkala’s gold-framed eye.
The road itself appeared to mark the border.
On one side, they passed wooden signs written in Polish, indicating that they were travelling right along the edge of the two countries. On the other side, nailed to trees, were metal plaques, showing the hammer and sickle emblem of the Soviet Union. From beneath the signs, where the nails had pierced the bark, white trickles of sap bled down to the ground.
From his hours of staring at the map, the Rusalka compressed in Pekkala’s mind until he had convinced himself that such a monster of a tank could never hide for long.
But now that they were in it, bumping along over washboard roads, eyes straining to follow the snakeskin trail of Kropotkin’s tyre tracks, Pekkala realised that a hundred of those tanks could vanish in here without trace.
Overwhelmed by the vastness of these woods, Pekkala’s memories of the great cities of Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev all began to feel like a dream. It was as if the only thing that existed on this earth, and had ever existed, was the forest of Rusalka.
When the sunlight had finally gone, the darkness did not seem to settle from above as it did in the city. Instead, it rose up from the ground, like a black liquid flooding the earth.
They could no longer see the truck’s wheel marks, and it was too dangerous to use the Emka’s headlights when Kropotkin might be waiting for them around every bend in the road.
They steered the Emka off the road, cut the engine, and climbed stiff-legged from the car. The dew had settled. Wind blew through the tops of the trees.
‘We’ll start looking again as soon as it is light,’ said Pekkala. ‘As long as it’s dark, Kropotkin can’t risk moving either.’
‘Can we make a fire?’ asked Kirov.
‘No,’ replied Pekkala. ‘Even if he couldn’t see the flames, the smell of smoke would lead him right to us. We will all take it in turns standing guard. I’ll take the first watch.’
While Pekkala stood guard, Maximov and Kirov lay down in the cramped space of the car, Maximov in the front seat and Kirov in the back.
Pekkala sat on the hood of the Emka, feeling the warmth of the engine, which sighed and clicked as it cooled, like the irregular ticking of a clock.
After years spent in the constant rolling thunder of underground trains snaking their way beneath the pavements of Moscow, the clunk of water pipes in his apartment, and the distant clattering of trains pulling into the Belorussian station, the stillness of this forest unnerved Pekkala. Old memories of his time in Siberia come back to haunt him as he stared helplessly into the dark, knowing that Kropotkin could come within a few paces before he’d be able to see him.
Beads of moisture gathered on his clothes, transforming the dull black of his coat into a cape of pearls which shimmered even in this darkness.
After a while, the back door of the Emka opened and Kirov climbed out. The windows of the car had turned opaque with condensation.
‘Has it been three hours already?’ asked Pekkala.
‘No,’ replied Kirov. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’ He came and stood beside Pekkala, hugging his ribs against the cold. ‘How much time do we have left?’
Pekkala checked his pocket watch. ‘Fourteen hours. By the time the sun comes up, we’ll only have a couple left.’
‘Would it really be enough to start a war?’ asked Kirov. ‘One tank, driven by a lunatic? Even if he does manage to kill a few innocent people, surely the world would come to its senses in time …’
Pekkala cut him off. ‘The last war was started by a lunatic named Gavrilo Princip. The only thing he used was a pistol, and all he had to do was kill one man, the Archduke Ferdinand.’
‘An archduke sounds pretty high up.’
‘He may have had an important title, but was Ferdinand important enough to bring about the deaths of over ten million people? You see, the war began, Kirov, because one side wanted it to begin. All that side needed was a big enough lie to convince its own people that their way of life was being threatened. The same is true today, and so the answer is yes. One lunatic is more than enough.’
*
The car door opened.
Pekkala felt a rush of cold brush across his face, sweeping away the stale air inside the Emka. He had been asleep, legs twisted down into the seat w
ell and head resting on the passenger seat. The Emka’s gear stick jabbed into his ribs. His neck felt like the bellows of a broken accordion.
Someone was shaking his foot.
It seemed to Pekkala as if he had only just closed his eyes. He couldn’t believe it was time to go back out on watch again.
‘Get up, Inspector,’ whispered Kirov. ‘Maximov is gone.’
Kirov’s words jolted him awake. He scrambled out of the car. ‘What do you mean he’s gone?’
‘I finished my watch,’ explained Kirov. ‘Then I woke up Maximov and told him it was his turn to go on. I got up a few minutes ago to take a piss. That’s when I noticed he was gone.’
‘Perhaps he’s nearby.’
‘Inspector, I searched for him and found nothing.’
Both men stared out into the dark.
‘He’s gone to warn Kropotkin,’ muttered Kirov.
At first, Pekkala was too shocked to reply, stubbornly refusing to believe that Maximov had deserted them.
‘What should we do?’ asked Kirov.
‘We won’t find them in the dark,’ replied Pekkala. ‘Not out here. Until it gets light, we wait for them to come to us. But as soon as it is light enough to see, we will go looking for them.’
A short distance up the road from where the Emka had been parked, they set up the PTRD anti-tank rifle in the ditch and covered it with a camouflage of pine branches. In addition, each of them carried a bottle filled with the explosive mixture. The greasy liquid sloshed inside its glass containers.
They spent the rest of the night huddled in the ditch, watching the road. In the plunging darkness, their eyes played tricks on them. Phantoms drifted in among the trees. Voices whispered in the hissing of the wind, then suddenly were gone and had never been there at all.
In the first eel-green glimmer of dawn, they saw something coming towards them.
It did not seem human. The creature loped like a wolf, keeping to the edge of the road.
Slowly, Pekkala reached up to the edge of the ditch and eased his gun out of its holder.
Kirov did the same.
Now they could see it was a man, and a moment later, they recognised the bald head of Maximov. He ran with a long, steady stride, hunched over, his arms hanging down at his sides.