Eye of the Red Tsar

by Sam Eastland

  “A call came in for you last night,” said Kropotkin.

  “Who from?”

  “The asylum at Vodovenko. Katamidze says he has remembered something you asked him about. A name.”

  Pekkala’s heart slammed in his chest. “I will leave immediately.”

  “I already told your Cheka man,” he said. “I met him at the tavern last night. I gave him the message, but I thought he might be too drunk to understand me. I thought I’d better come by this morning, just to be sure you got the news.”

  “I’m glad you did,” said Pekkala.

  Kropotkin rattled the change in his pockets. “Look, Pekkala, I know we didn’t get off to a good start, but if there is anything I can do to help you, you know where to find me.”

  Pekkala thanked him and closed the door.

  Anton was still asleep, wrapped in a blanket.

  Pekkala took one corner of the blanket and heaved it upwards.

  Anton rolled out onto the floor cursing. “What’s going on?”

  “Katamidze! The telephone call from Vodovenko! Why didn’t you tell us last night?”

  Anton struggled upright, bleary-eyed. “I was going to tell you in the morning.” Just above the velvet curtains, bolts of sunlight slanted through the windows, illuminating dust which spiraled slowly through the air. “But I guess it is the morning, so I’m telling you now.”

  “We should have been on the road hours ago.” Pekkala grabbed Anton’s clothes off the floor and threw them in his face. “Get dressed. We’re leaving now.”

  Kirov appeared out of the kitchen. “Fried army meat for breakfast!” he announced.

  Pekkala pushed past him and out into the courtyard.

  Kirov watched him go, the smile fading from his face. “What’s going on?” Then he turned to Anton and asked again, “What’s the matter?”

  Anton was pulling on his boots. “Get in the car,” he said.

  Ten minutes later, they were on the road.

  Driving south to Vodovenko, they passed through the village of the temporary lie. The barrier was down over the road but they found the guardhouse locked and unmanned.

  After moving the barricade, they continued on and soon found themselves on the main street. The place was deserted, as if the population had abruptly fled, leaving behind shops whose windows brimmed with bread, meat, and fruit. But when Pekkala got out of the car to have a closer look, he realized that everything behind the glass was made of wax.

  They stopped at the little railway station and looked off down the empty tracks, which trailed out to the horizon. A broom stood propped against one of the support columns of the station house roof.

  None of them spoke. The emptiness of the place seemed to command their silence.

  Pekkala thought back to the faces he had seen when they passed through before. He remembered the fear hidden behind the masks of their smiles.

  They got in the car and drove on.

  Later that day, when they pulled into the courtyard at Vodovenko, the red-haired attendant came out to meet them.

  “You’re too late,” he said.

  Pekkala climbed out of the car, his hip joints sore from sitting cramped inside the Emka. “What do you mean we are late?”

  “Not late.” The attendant shook his head. “Too late.”

  “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure. A suicide, we think.”

  The three men did not bother to sign in and the attendant did not ask for their weapons. They hurried through the armored door and down the corridors until they came to a room whose floor and walls up to chest height were plated with white tiles, like those inside a shower. Four large lights hung down from the ceiling. It was the mortuary.

  Katamidze’s body lay on a metal-topped table, half covered with a cotton blanket. The photographer’s lips and eyelids and the tip of his nose had turned a mottled blue, but the rest of his skin looked as pale as the tiles on the walls. His feet, which were facing the door, stuck out from under the blanket. Attached by wire to the big toe of his right foot was a metal disk on which a number had been stamped. The nails had turned a yellow color, like the scales of a dead fish.

  Anton leaned against the wall by the door, his eyes fixed on the floor.

  Kirov followed behind Pekkala, too curious to be appalled.

  “Poison,” said Pekkala.

  “Yes,” agreed the attendant.

  “Cyanide?”

  “Lye,” said the attendant.

  Gently, Pekkala set his hand on Katamidze’s face and lifted one of the eyelids. The whites of the dead man’s eyes had turned red from burst blood vessels. Examining the area around the eyes, Pekkala noticed a faint blush extending from the cheekbone up to the line of the forehead. He traced his fingers down the side of the man’s neck, probing the flesh. When he reached Katamidze’s larynx he traced his finger over fragile horseshoe-shaped bone. It gave under gentle pressure, indicating that it had been crushed. “Whoever killed him,” he said, “held on to his throat until he was sure Katamidze would not survive, but it was not strangulation that killed him. Where was he found?”

  “In his cell,” replied the attendant.

  Pekkala jerked his head towards the door. “Show me,” he said.

  The attendant led them to Katamidze’s cell.

  “Where do you use lye in this building?” asked Pekkala, striding ahead.

  “In the gardens sometimes.” The attendant’s legs were shorter than Pekkala’s. He was struggling to keep up with Pekkala. “We use it to clear out the drainpipes a couple of times a year.”

  “Was he dead when you found him?”

  “Almost. I mean he died before we had a chance to unlock him.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No. I mean …”

  “What do you mean?” demanded Pekkala.

  The attendant became flustered. “For God’s sake, his insides were burned out. Whatever he tried to say, the poor bastard was too far gone for us to understand. Here. This is the place.”

  An orderly was mopping out the room. The air was thick with the smell of bleach, mingled with a reek of vomit and the piercing bitterness of lye. The cell had no windows, only a metal cot which folded up into the wall. There was no other furniture. A chain bolted into the wall hung down to the center of the cot. An iron cuff dangled from the chain.

  Pekkala lifted the chain, then let it fall again. The metal links rattled against the wall. “He was locked to this?”

  Anton’s breathing had grown shallow. Suddenly, he left the room; his hurried footsteps faded away down the corridor.

  The attendant watched him go. “Some people have no stomach for a place like this,” he said.

  Kirov remained where he was, peering over Pekkala’s shoulder.

  “All inmates are locked to their bunks after lights-out,” the attendant explained. “During the day, the beds are folded up and the cuffs are released.”

  “What happens to the prisoners then?”

  The orderly continued swabbing the floor as if the men were not there.

  “Prisoners are allowed out for fifteen minutes a day. The rest of the time, they sit on the floor, or they walk around their cells.”

  “So you think he drank the lye before you chained him up for the night?”

  The attendant nodded. “Yes. That’s the only possibility.”

  Pekkala brought his face close to the attendant’s. “You know damned well this was no suicide.”

  The orderly’s mop came to a sudden halt. From the twisted gray strands, sudsy water sluiced across the floor.

  “Out,” said the attendant.

  The orderly dropped his mop and scurried out of the room.

  “Somebody gripped Katamidze’s neck,” Pekkala said.

  “He scratched at himself. He was out of his mind.”

  “There were other marks. Pressure marks. Somebody had him by the throat. His esophagus was damaged.”

  “The lye …”

&nbs
p; “Something had been pushed down there, probably a funnel of some sort. Then the lye was emptied into his stomach.”

  The attendant had begun to sweat. He set his hand against his forehead and looked down at the floor. “Look, Inspector, in the end, does it really matter if he killed himself or not?”

  “Of course it matters!” shouted Pekkala.

  “What I mean is,” explained the attendant, “this is a house of madmen. Fights break out. Feuds go on which have no end and no beginning. These men have been removed from the world so that they can no longer be a danger to society, but that does not stop them from being a danger to each other. There is only so much we can do—”

  “Why did you try to persuade me it was suicide?”

  “A suicide”—the attendant’s hand flowed outwards, as if to ease the words out of his mouth—“requires only an internal investigation. But a murder needs a full-blown inquiry. Inspector, you know what that means. Men who are innocent, who are only trying to do a difficult job, will find themselves condemned as criminals. If there was any way that we could keep this quiet—”

  “Were any intruders reported in the building?”

  “Our security is designed to keep people in, not to keep them out.”

  “So you are saying that anyone could walk in here and gain access to the inmates?”

  “They’d have to get past me first,” the attendant replied, “or whoever else was on duty.”

  “And is the front desk ever unattended?”

  “Not officially.”

  “What does that mean?” Pekkala snapped.

  “It means that sometimes we have to answer the call of nature, if you know what I mean. Or we step out for a cigarette. Or we go to the cafeteria to grab a bowl of soup. If no one’s at the desk, all a person has to do is ring the buzzer and we come and get them.”

  “But if no one was here, they could get hold of a key.”

  The attendant shrugged. “Not officially.”

  “In other words, yes.”

  “There is a whole cabinet of entrance keys. Everyone who works in the asylum has one. They pick up the key when they arrive and they drop it off again when they leave. Each person’s key hangs on a peg with a number which corresponds to that person.”

  “And is the cabinet locked?”

  “Officially …”

  “Don’t.”

  “It should be, but sometimes it isn’t. But look, it’s like I said, this place is meant to keep people inside. An inmate trying to escape has to get out of his cell, which is locked, and through this door, which is also locked. People don’t break into asylums.”

  “Do you know of anyone here who might have hated Katamidze enough to kill him?”

  “Inspector, the inmates in this place do not need a reason for killing. That’s why they are in Vodovenko. And if you are telling me he was strangled, why go to the trouble of pouring lye down his throat?”

  “To make it look like the work of a madman,” Pekkala answered, “so that no one would suspect a person from outside the asylum.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler to believe that it actually was someone in here?”

  Pekkala thought of Occam’s razor. “It might be simpler, but it wouldn’t be the truth. He had something to tell us, and somebody got to him first.”

  Pekkala went out into the corridor.

  The attendant followed him. He caught Pekkala’s sleeve. “Why would someone from outside break into this place and kill a wretch like Katamidze?”

  “He knew a name.”

  “Just a name? He died for that?”

  “He would not be the first,” said Pekkala. Then he started walking for the door.

  On Pekkala’s seventy-fifth day in the Butyrka prison, two guards strapped him to a plank. They tilted him so that his feet were above the level of his head and threw a wet towel over his face. Then one of the guards poured water onto the towel until he could not breathe and his mind became convinced that he was drowning.

  He did not know how long this went on.

  He had fallen into a place inside his mind which he had not known existed until that moment. With everything they had done to him until then, his conscious mind had balanced the information they were looking for against the pain they were causing him. His task became to keep the scales from tipping. But as he drowned beneath the towel, the scales disappeared completely and something unconscious took over. A terrible blackness, tinged with dusty red, spread out like a cloud through his brain and he no longer knew who he was, or what he cared about. Nothing mattered except staying alive.

  When they removed the towel from his face, he spoke the name they had been asking. He had not intended to say it. The name almost seemed to speak itself.

  Pekkala was returned to his cell immediately.

  When the cell door closed, Pekkala wept. He held his hand over his mouth to stop the noise. Despair opened like a chasm before him. Tears ran over his knuckles. When the crying stopped, he realized he was going to die.

  The following day, when the guards arrived, he allowed himself to be guided past the corridor of chimney cells until they reached an empty room. The floor was wet. The space could not have been more than a few yards wide and long, but it seemed so vast after living in the chimney that Pekkala’s first reaction was to press himself up against the wall, as if he had been led to the edge of a cliff.

  The guard handed Pekkala a piece of bread, then shut the door.

  Pekkala took a bite of the bread and spat it out again. The bread gets worse and worse, he thought.

  Then water started spraying out of a hole in the wall.

  Pekkala screamed, dropped to the floor, and curled up in a ball.

  The water kept spraying.

  It was warm.

  After a while, he raised his head. All he could see was the water spraying down on him. The piece of bread bubbled in his hand, and then he realized it was soap. He rubbed it all over his face.

  Water sluiced over his body and ran away black with dirt, down a hole in the corner of the room. Pekkala climbed to his knees and stayed under the stream of water, chin against his chest, hands resting on his thighs. The falling water thundered in his ears.

  Eventually, there was a squeaking sound and the water shut off.

  Dressed in his soaked pajamas, Pekkala stumbled into the hall. In spite of the shower, dried blood crusted around his nostrils. Its metallic taste lingered in the back of his mouth.

  “Hands behind your back,” the guard told him.

  “Step to the left, step to the right,” said Pekkala.

  “Shut up,” said the guard.

  Pekkala and the two guards walked down a corridor until they came to a heavy iron door studded with rivets. The door was opened. A smell of damp air wafted into Pekkala’s face. Then the two guards hauled him down a long spiral staircase lit by bulbs in metal cages.

  The basement, thought Pekkala. They are taking me down to the basement. Now they are going to shoot me. He felt glad that he would not have to go back into the chimney. His soul had all but vanished now. His body felt like a small and leaky boat, almost sunk beneath the waves.

  “ARE YOU SURE?” KIROV ASKED, AS HE STEERED THE EMKA THROUGH the gates of Vodovenko.

  “They are calling it a suicide,” said Pekkala. “But that’s not what it was.”

  “We should get out of Sverdlovsk,” Anton warned. “We should leave now. We shouldn’t even go back to collect our stuff.”

  “No,” replied Pekkala. “We will proceed with the investigation. We are getting closer now. The killer can’t be far away.”

  “But shouldn’t we at least find a more secure location than the Ipatiev house?” asked Kirov.

  “We need him to think we are vulnerable,” Pekkala answered. “If whoever killed the Romanovs knows we are closing in on him, then he knows he can no longer hide. It will be only a matter of time before he comes looking for us.”

  IT WAS MORNING.

  Pekkala sat by the wat
er pump on an upturned bucket, the Webley resting by his foot. A hand-sized mirror, made of polished steel, was propped in the crook of the pump handle. Pekkala was shaving, a dingy froth of soap upon his face and the blade rustling faintly as it carved across the contours of his chin.

  He’d slept only a couple of hours. After their return from Vodovenko, the three men had agreed to stand watch in turns throughout the night and every night from then on until the investigation was complete.

  Suddenly, a face peeked around the corner of the courtyard wall.

  Pekkala reached for the gun.

  The face ducked out of sight. “It’s only me!” called a voice from behind the wall. “Your old friend, Mayakovsky.”

  Pekkala set the gun back down. “What do you want?” he asked.

  Cautiously, Mayakovsky stepped back into the courtyard. In his arms, the old man carried a basket made from woven bulrush stalks. “I bring gifts! These are some things which Kirov has requested.” Mayakovsky looked at the gun. “You are a little jumpy today, Inspector Pekkala.”

  “I have reason to be jumpy.”

  “Shaving, I see. Yes. Good for the nerves. Yes.” Mayakovsky gave a nervous laugh. “Occam would be pleased.”

  “What?” asked Pekkala.

  “Occam’s razor.” He pointed at the blade in Pekkala’s hand. “The simplest explanation that fits the facts …”

  “… is usually right,” said Pekkala. He wondered where Mayakovsky had bartered for that piece of knowledge. “What brings you here?”

  “Ah, well, you might say it is Occam who brings me here, Inspector Pekkala.”

  Pekkala scraped the razor down the length of his throat, then whipped the soap off the blade and pressed the cutting edge to his skin.

  Mayakovsky placed the basket on the doorstep and sat down beside it. “My father was a handyman for the Ipatiev family. I used to wait here for him when I was a child, as he finished up his work for the day. I swore that someday I would buy this place. In the end, of course, the house could not be bought. And who would have wanted it anyway, after the things that happened here?”

  “The house you have seems big enough,” said Pekkala.