by Sam Eastland
Such is the genius of our leader, thought Emil, and I will not betray his faith in me.
In the days ahead, as his laboratory was systematically pulled to pieces, Emil carefully inventoried each part as it was stored away in splintery crates, the fragile silver-lined glass beakers, pipettes and syringes nestled in beds of fresh hay. Then, when his assistants had gone home, Emil opened the crates and removed those components he felt were necessary for continuing his research, replacing them with other obscure and seldom-used pieces of equipment from the massive storerooms at IG Farben.
In the basement of his house, only a short bicycle ride from the Leverkeusen facility, Emil reassembled a miniature laboratory. The tools needed for stabilising the compound were far fewer than had been required at the outset of his research and he had no further need of whiny research assistants. From now on, he would handle things on his own.
When Meinhardt reassigned him to a department specialising in industrial pesticides, with a focus on producing a less caustic powder for the removal of head lice, Emil did not complain. By day, he carried out his duties at Leverkeusen and, by night, he worked in his basement. Meanwhile, Allied bombing raids intensified. The nearby city of Cologne was reduced to rubble. Italy surrendered, and then joined forces with its former enemy. In addition, the Red Army was steadily reclaiming the territory it had lost in 1941.
All this time, Emil waited for the call he knew was coming, which would tell him that he and his creation were needed once again.
He waited a very long time.
8 March 1945
Moscow
‘Who in this world values an icon enough to commit murder in order to get his hands on it?’ Kirov asked Pekkala as they walked out of the Kremlin after their meeting with Stalin.
‘I have an old friend who might be able to answer that,’ replied Pekkala. ‘He works at the Institute of Religion and Atheism in Leningrad. At least, he used to. I haven’t seen or heard from him since the city was besieged back in 1941.’
‘Then how do you know if he is even still alive?’ asked Kirov.
‘I don’t,’ answered Pekkala.
While Kirov returned home to his wife with the unwelcome news that they would now be guarded around the clock, Pekkala climbed aboard a cargo plane loaded with medical supplies bound for Leningrad.
Arriving at an airfield constructed by the German army during their encirclement of the city, which had lasted more than two years and cost the lives of over two million Russian civilians, Pekkala hopped a ride into town. The truck dropped him off on the Nevsky Prospekt. From there, it was only a short walk to the Institute, located in the former Cathedral of Kazan.
He walked across what had once been a green expanse of lawn and was now only a cratered sea of mud. Two long colonnades that extended from the building seemed to Pekkala like the arms of a giant, slowly enveloping him as he approached.
The original blue dome of the cathedral had been painted grey so as not to attract the attention of bombers raiding the city during the siege, and tents of hessian netting, interwoven with scraps of cloth, still obscured the building’s profile from above.
At the Institute, Pekkala soon found the man he was looking for.
Anton Antokolvsky, Director of the Museum, was a frail-looking man with sloping shoulders, a little round chin and eyes so startlingly blue that they seemed like the eyes of a doll. Before the Revolution, Antokolvsky had worked as a teacher of religious studies at the small Tsarskoye Selo school, established by the Tsar for the education of children whose parents worked on the royal estate. It seemed a strange twist of fate for a teacher of religion to have ended up as director of a museum devoted to atheism, but Antokolvsky was not the first person he had known to survive the Revolution by transforming themselves into the inverted image of what they’d been before.
It had been years since they’d last met, but Antokolvsky had not forgotten his old friend, and the two men shook hands as they stood in what had once been the nave of the cathedral.
Pekkala had not visited the building since it had been converted into the Institute of Religion and Atheism back in 1932. The last time he’d set foot in here, the place was still a church. The Institute, with its garish posters mocking the existence of an afterlife and illustrated Bibles placed open under glass like the cracked chests of autopsy cadavers, only seemed to show how the Russian people had traded one faith, one god and one promise of salvation for another. Beneath this veil of cynicism, however, the building still held all the silent dignity of the purpose for which it had originally been built.
‘What brings you here?’ Antokolvsky wondered aloud. ‘Glad as I am to see you, Inspector, this does not seem the kind of place to take your fancy.’
After explaining that The Shepherd had been found – a fact which astonished Antokolvsky – Pekkala went on to what he had seen at Karaganda, including the horrific scars on the priest.
‘It sounds like he might have been Skoptsy,’ remarked Antokolvsky, when Pekkala had finished the story.
‘Who?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Not who,’ answered Antokolvsky. ‘What. The Skoptsy were a sect which became active in the Orel region during the second half of the eighteenth century. During the early 1700s,’ he explained, ‘Peter the Great instituted a number of reforms of the Orthodox Church. These changes, which might appear to you or me to be so slight as to be almost irrelevant, such as whether to cross yourself with three fingers or only two, nevertheless created a division between those who were prepared to accept the revisions and those who were not. The people who clung to their traditions became known as the Old Believers. Many of them retreated to the forests of Siberia, rather than submit to the Tsar’s will. But the Tsar pursued them, even into the most remote regions of Siberia, and whole villages were slaughtered, all over a few quibbles in the way that people prayed to God.’
‘Did all of them perish?’ asked Pekkala.
‘No,’ replied Antokolvsky. ‘No matter how many soldiers he sent across the Taiga, Tsar Peter could not find them all. Instead, he declared that, since the Old Believers had fled to Siberia, they should from that moment on consider themselves to be exiled there forever. When Catherine the Great came to the throne, the persecution of the Old Believers was set aside and, in 1905, on the orders of Nicholas II, they were officially freed from their exile. By then, many of the Old Believers had splintered into different groups, as alien to each other as they were to the people who had consigned them to the wilderness. Eventually, some of the survivors began to make their way back into Russian society, although often in secret because, although they were no longer persecuted by the state, they remained outcasts from Russian society, who considered them to be radicals, who had twisted the meaning of the Church in order to suit their own corrupted vision of the world. People were both suspicious and afraid of them, and sometimes with good reason. Among these groups of outcasts were the Khlysty, the Molokans, the Dykobars, but none were as controversial as the Skoptsy.’
‘And you say that Father Detlev was a Skoptsy?’
‘I say he might have been,’ answered Antokolvsky, ‘given what you’ve told me, Inspector. The Skoptsy surfaced during the late 1700s, in a time of great terror and uncertainty in Russia. A plague had swept through Moscow, killing tens of thousands, and the revolt by Pugachev had been ruthlessly suppressed, killing thousands more. The Skoptsy, under their leader Kondratii Selivanov, believed that these were signs of a fast-approaching Day of Judgement, in which only those who stood on the right hand of God would be saved, leaving everyone else to be cast down into Hell.’
‘That sounds like the story of The Shepherd,’ remarked Pekkala.
‘Certainly!’ exclaimed Antokolvsky. ‘The Skoptsy considered that icon to be humanity’s most sacred conduit to God and themselves as the lambs of God, whose sacrifice would purify the world. In imitation of this, and to prove the intensity of their faith, the Skoptsy sought to cleanse themselves with their own blood. Their goal w
as absolute spiritual purity, casting out the beast within themselves, which could be attained only through ritual castration. Within the Skoptsy, there were two levels of commitment. The first was known as the Minor Seal, and involved only partial removal. The second, known as the Major Seal, is what this Father Detlev had endured.’
‘So was it only men . . . ?’ began Pekkala.
‘Oh, no,’ Antokolvsky interrupted. ‘The women, too, were subjected to the ritual, sometimes along with their children, if they had any at the time they joined the sect.’
Pekkala let his breath trail out, trying to keep his mind clear of the horror these self-scarred people brought into his mind. There had been times, during the course of investigations, when he had, even against his will, formed a certain empathy for even the most savage of deeds, but what these Skoptsy had done to each other in the name of worship was beyond his ability to grasp. ‘Surely,’ he whispered, ‘they could not have kept this secret.’
‘That is correct,’ said Antokolvsky. ‘Unlike the Khlysty or the Molokans, who bear no outward signs of their religion, the mutilations carried out by the Skoptsy often caused changes in their complexions and their facial structures.’
‘What kind of changes?’ asked Pekkala.
‘It was said that their eyes became glassy and lifeless, and that their skin grew unnaturally soft and pale.’
‘Like wax,’ said Pekkala, remembering the face of the man who had attacked him with the butcher’s knife in the alley behind the Gosciny Dvor. ‘But Father Detlev’s complexion was not unusual.’
‘It all depends on when the operation was performed,’ explained Antokolvsky. ‘If the individual had already reached adulthood by the time the ritual was performed, the side effects were not as noticeable. Whatever the outward signs, the extremity of their methods could not stay hidden forever, and even the more tolerant views of Catherine the Great could not support such acts of mutilation. On Catherine’s orders, the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church conducted an inquiry and it was determined that the Skoptsy were not criminal, only misguided. The Church believed that these people had, by castrating themselves, doomed their own faith to extinction. As a result, only the leaders of the movement were punished, with floggings and exile to Siberia.’
‘And Catherine the Great thought that would be the end of them?’ asked Pekkala.
‘She did, but she was wrong. The Skoptsy order clung to life for another hundred years, until they were finally run to ground by the Bolsheviks. It is said that Dzerzhinsky himself killed the last of them, back in the winter of 1922, but judging from this priest you found, they may not have been extinct, after all.’
The two men stepped out into the shelter of the colonnade.
‘I was surprised to learn,’ said Pekkala, ‘that a former man of God was working here.’
Antokolvsky smiled. ‘Between you and me, old friend, my faith is still alive and well.’
‘So the Skoptsy are not the only ones to have gone into hiding.’
‘We all wear masks, Inspector, and what better place for me to wear my own than here in this temple of the unbelievers? The existence of the Institute is the only reason they have not torn this cathedral to the ground. You and I may never live to see it, but this place will be a church again some day. You mark my words, Inspector.’
‘Does it not worry you,’ asked Pekkala, ‘that those who might come here to pray will never realise which side you fought for?’
‘If the price of my faith is to be damned by the very people whose church I helped to save, then I am prepared to pay it. I think you’ll find the same was true for Father Detlev.’
‘But how did Rasputin know where to find him?’ Pekkala wondered aloud. ‘Unless perhaps their meeting was only a coincidence.’
‘I doubt that very much,’ replied Antokolvsky. ‘Rasputin was well known to have had dealings with the Khlysty, a sect closely allied to the Skoptsy.’
Pekkala knew about these accusations, which had first been levelled at Rasputin by Sofia Tyutcheva, a governess to the daughters of the Tsar. Although Rasputin denied membership of the cult, he could not deny his dealings with its adherents, nor the fact that many of his own teachings echoed the Khlysty beliefs.
‘The Khlysty,’ continued Antokolvsky, ‘were outlawed, just like their Skoptsy cousins. There is no doubt that members of these groups often turned to each other for mutual support. Knowing the Skoptsy’s obsession with The Shepherd, Rasputin could easily have used it to broker a deal between them and the Tsarina.’
‘But why choose them?’ asked Pekkala.
‘What better guides across the murky frontiers of that war,’ replied Antokolvsky, ‘than those who had spent centuries living in the shadows, especially when they could be bought with something other than money?’
‘And why would they have murdered Father Detlev, as it now seems increasingly likely that they did? Why kill such a harmless old man who was, after all, one of their own?’
‘Remember you are dealing with people for whom secrecy has been the only guarantee of survival. Detlev told you his story. Unwittingly or not, he put you on the trail that led you here. That may have been enough to seal his fate.’
‘And mine, as well, perhaps,’ added Pekkala, ‘if I don’t find the man who killed him.’
‘Be careful,’ warned Antokolvsky. ‘The Skoptsy creed is written in blood.’
‘That is a lesson I have already been taught,’ said Pekkala, tracing a finger across the old scar on his forehead.
11 March 1945
Karaganda Prison
Warder First Class Turkov selected a brass key from the dozens he kept on a large iron ring. Inserting the key into a battered metal door, he stepped into a musty, darkened room and locked himself inside.
Feeling around in the blackness, he located the light switch. Three powerful bulbs crackled into life, illuminating the dreary chamber. The room had a tall ceiling and no windows. It had once been the power plant, whose massive, wood-fired boiler heated the entire prison, but the camp’s engineers had replaced it with a number of smaller boilers and wood stoves, which heated separate buildings at Karaganda.
Although the room still smelled of smoke and engine oil, the place had been converted, a number of years ago, into a place of execution.
A large grid-iron scaffold had been erected in the centre of the room. A narrow staircase climbed up to a platform roughly three times the height of a man above the ground. On the platform was a bar from which the noose would be suspended. There was also a large lever, reaching up from the base of the platform to the height of a man’s waist. At the moment of execution, the bar would be pulled back, opening a trapdoor through which the prisoner would fall to his death.
The prison only carried out about three executions a year, for punishments such as killing a fellow inmate, grievous injury to a guard, or a third attempt at escape. The executioner, Carl Levitsky, a precise and humourless man with a bald head and bushy grey eyebrows, took a solemn pride in his profession.
At first, Turkov had kept his distance from Levitsky, convinced that only the most twisted of minds could follow such a calling.
As time passed, however, Turkov began to appreciate the skill and precision that the executioner brought to his work. The night before a man was to be hanged, Levitsky would come to the isolation cell where the condemned was fed his last meal. Sliding back a peephole in the door, he would judge the man’s weight and height and only then would he construct the noose. Levitsky’s aim was to cause a minimum of suffering to those whom he dispatched from this world. For this, he had compiled charts showing exactly how far a man had to fall in order to cleanly sever the third vertebra, killing the condemned man instantly. If the rope was too long, the drop could sever the man’s head from his body. Too short, and a man could take minutes to die.
As Turkov watched the executioner go about his work, he came to understand that Levitsky’s attention to detail served to cause a minimum of suffering to t
hose he dispatched from this world and his original revulsion for the man transformed into a kind of awe.
Levitsky knew nothing of this, because Turkov rarely spoke to him. In the beginning, Turkov had been too disgusted to make the man’s acquaintance and now he was simply too humbled.
It was required that a warder be present beside Levitsky when the executions were carried out, to assist in unbolting the floor if the drop handle should ever fail. The bolts could be drawn back very quickly, but it was a two-man job and, although the drop handle had never failed, Levitsky insisted on the presence of a warder at his side, just in case.
The role of executioner’s assistant was not a popular one at Karaganda, mostly because executions took place on the stroke of midnight, but Turkov often volunteered for the job.
His fellow guards considered him a morbid follower of death, but Turkov never saw it that way. To him, it was a privilege to watch such a master at work.
A hanging had been scheduled for that night, and this time the Chief Warder had not even asked for volunteers. He had simply appointed Turkov.
The man due to be hanged was an embezzler named Klebnikov. The money he had stolen from the State Tobacco Monopoly was never recovered. Klebnikov claimed that it had all been gambled away, but from the first day he arrived at Karaganda, rumours began to circulate that the embezzler Klebnikov had hidden it somewhere. Some prisoners became fixated on the idea that he still had access to a fortune. With petty bribes, they attempted to draw his secret out of him, and when that did not work, they tried to frighten him into giving it up. Eventually, inevitably as far as Turkov was concerned, the death threats began to emerge. Fearing for his life, Klebnikov decided to act first. With a knife fashioned out of a tiny triangle of metal from a used tin can, which was then fitted into the wooden stem of a broken toothbrush, Klebnikov murdered a fellow prisoner by jamming the blade into the man’s throat and severing the carotid artery. His pleas of self-defence were met with stony silence by the members of the prison tribunal, and a date of execution was set.