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by Sam Eastland

  Detlev gasped. He shook the bottle and heard its contents slosh about inside. ‘Thank you, Inspector,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

  He considered not opening the bottle and instead keeping it safe upon the shelf until the day might come when its powers would be needed. But then he laughed to himself at such foolishness. I am almost seventy years old, he thought. I have spent more than half my life in Karaganda Prison. There is no better time than now.

  With his thumbnail, Father Detlev carved away the wax around the cork, watching it crumble on to the table. After mouthing a silent prayer of gratitude, he uncorked the bottle, and poured its contents over his head.

  The liquid smelled of flowers, reminding Detlev a little of rosewater, with which his mother used to scent her pocket handkerchiefs. No sooner had this thought entered his head than he began to feel dizzy. And then nauseous. He put the bottle down upon the table. His hands began to tremble. All around him, it grew suddenly dark, as if a storm had swept in from the forest. His breathing became laboured and he tried to sit down, but misjudged the location of the chair and fell upon the floor.

  Convulsions racked the old man’s frame as spasming muscles writhed beneath his skin. A foamy white fluid, like frogspawn, poured from his mouth and his nose. His pupils had contracted into pinpricks. The last thing he saw was the nose of the pig, sniffing at his face.

  For several minutes, Father Detlev’s body twitched uncontrollably, as if it were being subjected to violent electrical charges. Then, at last, he lay still. In his lower legs, a bluish haze appeared beneath the skin. The haze spread through his limbs, until his whole body had turned a smoky, lavender colour.

  Beside him lay Tolstyak the pig, as dead as its owner, pieces of half-chewed straw bristling from its mouth.

  *

  ‘Inspector,’ said Kirov, holding the phone out towards him. ‘A call has come in from Karaganda.’

  Pekkala looked up from his desk, where he was writing a report on his visit to Vyroubova, from which he had only just returned.

  ‘The guard there wants to know if you sent a package to Father Detlev.’

  ‘No,’ answered Pekkala. ‘Why?’

  Kirov pressed the phone back to his ear. ‘He says no. Why do you ask?’

  Pekkala was watching Kirov, trying to figure out the meaning of this call. He saw a shadow pass across the major’s face, and he knew that the news was not good.

  Kirov replaced the receiver. For a moment, he just stared at his desk.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Pekkala.

  ‘Father Detlev is dead.’

  Pekkala set down his pen. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘And how did he die?’

  ‘The guard didn’t want to tell me over the phone.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Kirov shook his head. ‘All he told me was that we’d better come and see for ourselves.’

  *

  ‘Again?’ asked Zolkin. He stooped over the bonnet of the Emka, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and braces stretched tight across his shoulders. In his hand, he held a cloth with which he had been waxing the car.

  At his driver’s urging, Kirov had rented a small garage for the Emka just across the road from their office. At first, the major had refused, saying that the Emka could continue to live in the alleyway outside their building, just as it had always done. But on their next trip to the Kremlin, Zolkin took a detour through the city, and Kirov could not help but notice the cars, many of them Emkas, that had been stripped by gangs of thieves. On some cars even the wheels had been taken, leaving the vehicles balanced on blocks of wood brought along by the thieves for that purpose. Zolkin did not have to say a word. By the end of that day, Kirov had rented the garage.

  It had a rolling steel door which padlocked at the base, and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling inside. There was no window. The walls were painted concrete and the ceiling had been constructed from wood so old that the marks of an adze could be seen where some long-dead carpenter had trimmed the boards. Although it was spartan, even by the standards of Pekkala, Zolkin was content to spend his time there. The rusty, oil-dripping parts which he had scrounged from various junkyards on the outskirts of the city had been installed inside the engine and even Pekkala, who had previously paid little attention to the quality of their transport, remarked that the car was running more smoothly than it had ever done before. Kirov, who had previously been in charge of the car, remarked grumpily that it seemed a remarkable coincidence that Zolkin would have known the exact location of so many of the city’s pillaged Emkas, and wondered if they owed their upgraded performance to some of those other vehicles.

  ‘You can’t be serious about driving all the way back to Karaganda!’ protested Zolkin, pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead. ‘I’ve just finished cleaning the car. Look at how it shines!’ He gestured pitifully at the gleaming radiator grille. ‘It took me two days to scrape away the mud!’

  ‘It can’t be helped,’ Pekkala told him gently.

  Zolkin sighed and shook his head. ‘When do we leave, Inspector?’

  ‘Immediately,’ said Kirov, and as he spoke, he noticed, on the otherwise bare walls, a heavy sailcloth flap hanging by two iron rings from an iron hook embedded in the concrete wall. ‘What is that thing?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, that!’ Zolkin squinted at the canvas, as if he had just noticed it himself. ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Major, that is my bed.’

  ‘Your bed?’ Kirov echoed, his voice rising in disbelief.

  ‘It’s a hammock,’ explained Zolkin, as he lifted one of the rings, stretched it over to the other wall and replaced it on a second hook. Now they could see it clearly. The ends of the canvas had been fitted with strings, attached by brass grommets and woven together to form a mesh which came together around the anchoring ring. To illustrate, Zolkin hopped up into the hammock, rolling his body into the envelope of dirty white cloth. Then he grinned down at the two men.

  ‘But why are you sleeping in here?’ demanded Kirov? ‘I found you a place at the Lubyanka barracks.’

  ‘With all due respect, Major,’ said Zolkin, ‘it’s hard to get a good night’s sleep at Lubyanka.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Kirov. ‘Is it too noisy?’

  ‘No,’ replied Zolkin, ‘it’s the silence that keeps me awake.’

  *

  When the Emka pulled up once again before the gates of Karaganda, it was in even worse condition than after its previous trip. All trace of Zolkin’s hand-polished wax finish had been obliterated in a pointillist spray of multi-coloured filth. Having been ordered by Kirov to stop his complaining, Zolkin had begun speaking to himself in his native Ukrainian dialect, but after the windscreen was cracked by a stray pebble thrown up from the wheels of a passing army truck, the driver had lapsed into such a menacing silence that both Kirov and Pekkala felt obliged to engage him in conversation, since he now seemed on the verge of total madness.

  While Zolkin was left to contemplate his misfortune, Warder Turkov escorted Kirov and Pekkala to the prison morgue.

  It was a single-storey building just behind the prison hospital, which doubled as a place where services were held for the dead, as well as a crematorium, its underground vent pipe emerging in the forest just beyond the prison wire. Having risen into the air, the cremation ash sometimes blew back over the prison, covering everything with a fine greyish-white powder, known to the inmates as ‘dead man’s snow’.

  On their way, Turkov explained about the package, and why he had assumed it was a gift from Pekkala. He struggled to describe what he had found in Detlev’s hut when making his rounds the following morning.

  ‘I knocked on the door and there was no answer,’ said Turkov, still clearly upset by what he had witnessed. ‘I knew that Father Detlev sometimes slept in late, so I was about to walk on and leave the old man in peace when I smelled something peculiar. It reminded me of freshly cut grass. I opened the door and there
he was. Him and his pot-bellied pig.’

  ‘They were both dead?’ asked Kirov.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ confirmed Turkov. ‘And then I started to feel ill.’

  ‘It is a natural response,’ Pekkala tried to reassure him.

  ‘That’s not what I mean, Inspector. The smell, whatever it was. That’s what made me feel ill. By the time I arrived at the prison hospital, I could barely walk. My vision was blurred. But the doctor gave me a shot,’ Turkov continued, ‘and in an hour or two, I was fine again.’

  ‘Was there any sign of violence on Detlev’s body?’ Pekkala asked the prison guard.

  ‘Not that I could see,’ replied Turkov.

  By now, they had passed through the double steel doors of the morgue and were in a low-ceilinged hallway. To the left was a small room filled with metal chairs, where funerals were held for the dead inmates. Beyond, through another steel door, was the mortuary itself.

  ‘I’ll leave you here,’ said Turkov. ‘I have seen what you’re about to see, and once is more than enough.’

  Inside the mortuary, they were met by a slim, dignified man wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and an apron made of brick-red, rubberised cloth over his suit, along with a pair of gloves, made from the same material as the apron, which came up almost to his elbows. He introduced himself as Dr Tuxen. ‘I hope you both have strong stomachs,’ he said.

  With those words, he turned and pulled the handle of a large metal drawer, one of several which were set into the wall. The drawer slid out, revealing a body draped with a white cloth. Grasping the sheet with both hands, he carefully folded it back, disclosing the head, shoulders and stomach of the dead man.

  In spite of the doctor’s warning, both men flinched at the sight of what had happened to the priest.

  The skin of the corpse was a vivid bluish grey. Detlev’s lips had turned almost black and his swollen tongue lay wedged between yellowed teeth. A silver crucifix, attached by a leather cord around his neck, gleamed in the morgue’s pale electric light. A huge Y-shaped scar criss-crossed his chest where it had been opened for autopsy, the interior organs examined and the chest cavity closed up again.

  ‘What did this?’ asked Pekkala.

  ‘Poison,’ replied Tuxen, ‘although which one I’m not entirely certain. It was not ingested as food. I can tell you that for certain. The manner of death bears a strong resemblance to exposure to lethal gases of the type used during the last war.’

  ‘Then shouldn’t we be wearing gas masks?’ Kirov asked nervously.

  ‘There is no need to worry, Comrade Major,’ said the doctor. ‘The body and the area where it was found have been sprayed with a solution of sodium hydroxide. Fortunately, we have such chemicals on hand for cleaning out the drains in this prison. The sodium hydroxide neutralised the chemicals which killed Father Detlev.’

  ‘How was the poison delivered?’ asked Pekkala.

  ‘In this,’ replied Dr Tuxen, holding up the small, grey metal flask, whose label identified it as holy water from Lourdes. ‘It appears to have entered his bloodstream through direct contact with his skin.’

  ‘Was anyone else affected?’ asked Pekkala.

  ‘Only the warder who found him. Luckily for Turkov, by the time he showed up the vapour released from the liquid had largely dissipated. I was able to treat him with an injection of atropine, which we use here during surgery for normalising a patient’s heart rate. The warder’s exposure was very slight, and I am confident that he will make a full recovery.’

  ‘You say this is one of the gases used during the war?’ asked Kirov.

  ‘I said it resembled one,’ replied the doctor, ‘but what killed Father Detlev is unlike anything I’ve seen before. I was an army doctor during the war and treated, or attempted to treat, many cases of gas poisoning. Chlorine, for example, is primarily a choking agent. It is inhaled, which then causes the kind of frothing at the mouth you see here, but with chlorine, there is a specific tarnishing effect on anything silver and, as you can see, the crucifix around his neck, which is made of silver, remains bright. Phosgene, too, produces many of the same symptoms, but the effects are delayed by several hours. Although it would almost certainly have proved fatal in the end, Detlev should have been alive when the warder came to check on him. In addition, I have run a chemical analysis of the fluid in the lungs, which indicates strong traces of ethanol and phosphorus, neither of which are components of chlorine or phosgene.’

  ‘What about mustard gas?’ asked Pekkala.

  Dr Tuxen shook his head. ‘I thought of that, but the effects of mustard are also delayed, even more so than with phosgene. In addition, those who have been exposed to mustard gas show blistering of the skin, which is not the case here. This man appears to have died almost instantly, leading me to believe that whatever killed him attacked his nervous system, as opposed to the mucous membranes of his lungs and eyes, which is a characteristic of the other compounds. In addition to the ethanol and phosphorus, I have detected traces of sodium and chlorine, the combination of which sets it apart from any of the lethal gases of the Great War. What we are dealing with here is something new. New to me, at any rate.’

  ‘Do you still have the box in which it was mailed to him?’ asked Kirov.

  Dr Tuxen nodded towards the counter.

  In spite of the doctor’s confidence that all of the chemicals had been neutralised, Kirov still didn’t dare touch anything. ‘This was mailed from Office 24 in Moscow,’ he remarked as he examined the box. ‘I can make out the postmarks.’

  ‘Office 24 is just down the street from NKVD headquarters,’ said Pekkala.

  ‘Perhaps that’s why Turkov believed the package came from you,’ replied the doctor.

  ‘But who would want to poison this old man?’ asked Kirov.

  ‘Wherever it came from,’ said Pekkala, ‘it looks as if we have a bigger problem on our hands than the murder of a single individual.’

  ‘I am forced to agree,’ said the doctor. ‘If whoever made it has been able to mass produce the compound, it could wipe out an entire city in a matter of minutes if it was properly delivered to its target and in great enough concentration.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Pekkala, ‘we should return to Moscow at once and report our findings to the Kremlin.’

  ‘You had better take these with you,’ said Tuxen, holding out two syringes. ‘They are filled with atropine, and you may need them if you’re going after the person who did this to Father Detlev.’

  ‘Exactly how are we to use it?’ asked Kirov.

  ‘If you come into contact with this substance, or if you are even in its presence, you must immediately administer the full dose contained in one of these syringes.’

  ‘You mean, I just stick myself in the arm with it?’ Kirov winced at the sight of the long, capped needles.

  ‘Not in the arm, Major.’ Tuxen rested a finger against Kirov’s chest. ‘You must inject yourself in the heart. That is why the needles are so long.’

  While Kirov stared queasily at the needles, Pekkala reached over and took them from the doctor’s hand.

  ‘There is one other thing,’ said Dr Tuxen. ‘It may have nothing to do with this man’s murder, but I think it’s something you should know about.’ Taking up the ends of the sheet that still covered the lower half of Father Detlev’s body, Dr Tuxen removed the cloth completely.

  Pekkala breathed in sharply when he saw what had been done to Father Detlev. The priest had been castrated. His organs had been completely removed. All that remained of his manhood was a small hole in the flesh, surrounded by a white haze of scar tissue.

  ‘In the war,’ said Dr Tuxen, ‘I treated men who had been wounded in the groin. In a number of cases, it became necessary to perform surgery not unlike what you see here. But in the case of this man, I can find no evidence of any injury which would have necessitated such radical amputation. The wound is old. If I had to guess, I’d say it healed up decades ago.’ He covered up the body once again.
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br />   ‘Are they the result of some kind of torture?’ Kirov wondered aloud.

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ answered Tuxen. ‘This is the work of a surgeon, or at least someone acquainted with performing the procedure. Whoever did this intended that Father Detlev should survive, and with a minimum of damage to the rest of his body. With no other obvious signs of trauma, I am left with the impression that Father Detlev submitted to this operation willingly, although why on earth a man would agree to such a thing is beyond me. As the doctor here, I’ve treated many men who went through torture, and in spite of all the terrible things I have seen, not one of them resembled this.’

  ‘Was it mentioned in his prison file?’ asked Pekkala.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Tuxen, ‘although the record was filled out long before I ever came to Karaganda and judging from the dust, no one had touched the file for years.’

  ‘And you’ve never had cause to examine him before?’

  ‘I treated him for colds and other minor ailments, but nothing that required a full examination. Bear in mind, gentlemen, this is a prison hospital and not some private clinic. Given how many people I must care for, and what few medicines I have to cure the sick, a man is lucky if he receives any treatment at all. Whatever his reasons, Father Detlev kept them to himself.’

  ‘Why would someone murder that old man?’ asked Kirov as the two men left the mortuary building.

  ‘To answer that,’ replied Pekkala, ‘we will first have to learn who created the weapon that killed him.’

  15 May 1944

  German High Command Headquarters, Rastenburg, East Prussia

  As the armoured Mercedes, model 770k, passed through the third and final checkpoint of the Wolf’s Lair compound, each one of which was protected by a fence of electrified wire, Professor Otto Meinhardt looked out at a row of simple wooden huts, surrounded by several massive concrete bunkers, all of them camouflaged with amoeba-shaped splotches of paint, and he wondered if this was going to be his last day on earth.