by Ben Creed
Contents
Dedication
Act 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Act 2
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Act 3
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Act 4
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Act 5
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Coda
Chapter 46
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Copyright
‘If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.’
Fyodor Dostoevsky
‘Man is wolf to man.’
Title of gulag memoir by survivor Janusz Bardach
1
Saturday 13 October, 1951
They lay as straight as scaffolding, stark in the glare of the train engine’s headlight. A quintet of bodies on the snowy tracks, parallel and neat. Feet together, arms straight, with their heads turned delicately to one side. As though Death had asked them all to form an orderly queue, and each damned soul had politely obliged him.
Revol Rossel, lieutenant in the Leningrad militsiya, drew on his cigarette, blew out a ring of grey smoke and observed the crime scene from a distance with studied impassivity. It was a habit now, that face. An expression that so far, even though he was thirty-four years old, had kept him out of the camps. ‘Every man must have one face for the world and another for himself, Revol,’ his father had once told him, with a stoic wink. At the time, neither his father nor Rossel had properly understood what a sound piece of advice this was, the kind that could help any Soviet citizen live a little longer. Especially one who lived in Leningrad, a city for which Stalin was known to harbour misgivings.
As Rossel watched on from the front passenger seat of the Moskvich, he could hear the car’s engine wheezing. Away to the left and across a deep field of snow, a black steam engine wheezed and stood still. Behind the engine and its cargo, the track was flanked by trees for kilometre after kilometre but here, before him, it was crossed by another line of rails, forming a small clearing.
‘Come on, then, gentlemen. Time for us to take our bow.’
The car doors beat a tattoo of slams as Rossel and his fellow cops got out. They moved together, lifting their knees high to make progress in the deep drifts. Under their regulation coats, sporting the insignia of their respective ranks in the militia, they wore a variety of pullovers, trousers and thick underwear. Standard uniform alone was no match for a winter’s night. A few hours ago, the radio had said it was minus twenty-seven. ‘Cold enough to turn good hot Russian piss into icicles,’ as Sergeant Grachev had put it the last time he had regaled them all with another story of how he had slaughtered members of the 33rd Waffen SS en route to Berlin.
Next to the steam engine stood two men, frozen and forlorn. Rossel looked to the right at the second track. It met the main line at a forty-five-degree angle, turned and ran parallel for a few dozen metres, merged at a points system and veered off again into the pines.
One of the two men next to the train moved forward to meet them – the train driver, Rossel guessed. He wore a thick, quilted coat over his overalls and a large fur hat that seemed to almost swallow up a shrunken head, and he reeked of burnt coal.
‘What kept you?’ the driver grumbled.
Rossel ignored the question and looked over him at the other man, from the local militia. This must be the one who had phoned in. He was short and thin and looked like a frightened animal – in his early twenties, practically a boy. The youngster and the driver had sullen faces. They’d been quarrelling, no doubt about it. Rossel guessed the driver had wanted to shunt the corpses out of the way, to hell with it, and get going again; the lad would have been too terrified to touch a thing – a policeman from the sticks refusing to budge until someone else took command.
‘What kept you, eh?’ repeated the train driver.
Rossel looked at him and returned fire. ‘Driving nearly fifty kilometres at four in the morning in a blizzard so thick it would turn a snow fox blind. That may have had something to do with it,’ he said.
It had been snowing for three days and it was only mid-October. Nothing like it since the winter of ’42, according to survivors of the Siege of Leningrad. Once the militia officers had got outside the city, it had been more like skiing than driving.
Rossel’s men drifted off to look closer at the crime scene, peering at the corpses one by one but not touching them.
‘What happened?’ Rossel asked the driver. They were only a few hundred metres away from the vast shoreline of the already partially frozen Lake Ladoga. Rossel wondered if the bodies were ice fishermen; sometimes they’d sit and drink for hour after hour. Then they had wandered onto the tracks, clinging to each other to stay upright, before freezing to death . . .
‘They were on the line, already like that,’ said the driver. ‘The snowplough went through yesterday but just in case I was going at a crawl. I saw them right enough.’
‘The penalty for lying to officers of . . .’
The driver spat and shook his head. ‘Go and have a proper look, gundog. You’ll see.’
The locomotive’s engine hiccupped and shuddered.
‘What are you carrying?’ asked Rossel.
‘Coal. Scrap metal. Twenty wagons.’
A good thing the train had stopped, then. There wouldn’t have been much left of the bodies if that lot had thundered over them.
‘Is this a main line? Why didn’t anyone find the bodies earlier?’
‘The last passenger trains stop at eleven, if they haven’t iced up – the new diesels can’t handle this cold,’ the driver replied, rubbing his eyes. ‘I was the first of the freights tonight. Some idiot overloaded a wagon at the depot and it tipped. Held me up for more than two hours.’
He muttered something about boilers and valves and made as if to go without wishing to demean himself by asking permission. Rossel shrugged and the driver vanished behind the engine’s headlight.
The other one, the youngster from the local cop shop, looked up at him, awaiting orders. He was only a private.
‘Where is everyone?’ Rossel asked him.
‘Arrested.’
‘I mean your colleagues. Why are you here alone?’
The lad looked down at the snow.
You’re joking.
‘All of them?’
A nod.
Well, fuck your mother. The MGB were sweeping through the ranks of the militia like a scythe through a wheat field. The military, the police, the Chekists’ own ranks . . . Where terror reigned, it often reigned most cruelly among men and women unwise enough to have put on a uniform. An entire station, though, even if it was just a provincial outpost? The militia existed to keep some
measure of public order but social discipline was mostly enforced elsewhere. The unions, the factory floor, the people’s courts, even the criminal underworld – all were in competition for the loyalty of the Soviet citizen. Being a policeman was a simple job that recruited people with a simple attitude to justice, and therefore had a high number of thugs in its ranks. Counter-revolutionary sedition was hardly their forte.
Rossel looked back at the bodies and tried to bring his thoughts into line.
The driver of a standard night-time freight train stops because there is something on the track. He jumps down to have a look. He suspects fallen trees, or cargo spilled from some other train. But it isn’t.
He radios to the next station; the station calls the local police. Except there aren’t any apart from this pathetic specimen, who – although he’s been denying it – calls the first Leningrad militia headquarters whose number he can see on the wall. And Sergeants Grachev and Taneyev, doing their turn on the night shift, call me. And because Sergeant Grachev is a bastard who only plays it by the book when he can cause maximum disruption, he gets Captain Lipukhin out of bed, too, knowing he will have a head like industrial glue.
More than fifty kilometres outside our jurisdiction, in the middle of nowhere. The local militia purged by the MGB.
Rossel knew better than to ask why. Stick to the crime.
He left the wretched private and stomped over to his men, staggering a little where the plough had made fresh peaks of the snow. He reached Captain Ilya Lipukhin first.
‘What have we got, boss?’
Captain Lipukhin stared back at him through melancholic, bloodshot eyes. As so often these days, the breath of Rossel’s superior stank of cheap vodka.
‘Murder,’ he said. ‘Maniac.’
And vomited.
2
‘Number one. Frozen solid – and I mean solid. Right the way through, I reckon. Like the clumps of bread they used to give us in the 8th Guards. Fucking teethbreakers.’
Sergeant Grachev brushed the snow off the body and tapped it with his gloved knuckles to underline the point.
‘Face removed, some of the teeth taken out. Or smashed out. Hands cut off.’
At the sight of the corpse’s cheerful, toothless grin, Captain Lipukhin turned away, coughed furiously and heaved again. Rossel guessed he’d managed to puke up a fair amount of alcohol already. Lipukhin’s little weakness was getting bigger by the day.
‘Look at what she’s wearing,’ Grachev continued. ‘She looks like a Snow Queen. But the gown isn’t frozen. This bitch has been dressed by somebody after she was killed.’
Too small. Too thin. It wasn’t her. Just as always, relief swept through Rossel in an intense but fleeting wave. Every female corpse might be Galya until he knew it wasn’t. Until he was certain.
He leaned over and stared at the girl’s red velvet dress. Grachev was right. It looked expensive.
‘What’s that in her throat?’ He pointed. ‘An icicle?’
A long and thin frosted object stuck out of the corpse’s larynx. Grachev took off a glove and tapped it before quickly putting it back on again.
‘Glass,’ he said.
Grachev bent closer, turned his head sideways. His cap slid off, revealing his scarred and shaven skull.
‘Hollow. A glass tube.’ He glanced across at the other four bodies. ‘Different size tubes but they’ve all got them, Comrade Lieutenant.’
Rossel straightened himself and clapped his hands together to warm them.
‘Pity they aren’t icicles, Sergeant. If that was so, all available evidence would be pointing directly at the magic powers of the Snow Queen and our case would be closed. Comrade Taneyev?’
Sergeant Taneyev, their old-timer, only a few weeks from his pension, stepped forward. The flash of his camera flared as he took a portrait or two of the unknown icy aristocrat. Hands by her sides, her body perpendicular to the track, her head exactly in the middle of the rails.
Rossel took out another cigarette – a Belomorkanal papirosa – twisted the cardboard tube at one end that served as a crude filter and lit the rank tobacco at the other.
‘Number two,’ said Grachev, replacing his cap as they shuffled to the next corpse and sweeping the snow off the body. ‘A priest. Also frozen solid. I reckon they all are. No face, teeth bashed in, fingers snipped. And – well, look at that.’
Rossel took an extra hard drag.
The priest’s throat and chest had been opened and the voicebox pulled out. It lay on the victim’s neck, next to a large gold cross, with the robes covering the rest of the body. Above the faceless skull sat a black cylindrical hat. Again, the body was at right angles to the track but in this case the head had been set on the rail. To which it was probably now stuck.
Taneyev stepped forward again and pressed the shutter without warning. The flash went off right in their faces, the flare made worse as it rebounded off the pure white ground. The other three sprang away, temporarily blinded, Sergeant Grachev spewing curses.
‘Taneyev, you clumsy prick. Who do you think you are? Sergei fucking Eisenstein?’
Rossel sank to one knee in the deep snow and tried to blink away the imprint of his own blood vessels on his pupils, wondering how Sergeant Taneyev had survived three decades in the militia without someone arranging some sort of accident or denouncing him to the MGB.
He looked back at the train. Its headlight was still shining fiercely and behind it was only darkness. That seemed to be the choice he was facing – searing light or total blackness. Rossel was not normally a religious man – the opposite, in fact. The teachers at the state orphanage in Kostroma had made sure of that. Taught him to worship only Marx and Lenin, after the secret police had come for his parents. In his teenage years he had even been a member of the League of the Militant Godless, and there was nobody more radically atheist than those lunatics. ‘The struggle against religion is the struggle for the Five-Year Plan!’ – the slogans were etched onto his brain. But there was something about this crime scene, much more than any other he had witnessed – the fastidious arrangement of the figures on the track; the primordial bleakness of the surrounding landscape and the incessant, banshee murmur made by the wind coming off Lake Ladoga. Deep drifts, darkness and dead bodies. It all brought back any number of memories from the siege of Leningrad. And of his sister, Galya, whose face he had last glimpsed fading into a blizzard many years ago. The lieutenant felt the urge to cross himself.
The officers regrouped, drawn together by the next corpse. It was wrinkled all over, like it belonged to an old man.
‘Number three,’ Grachev resumed. ‘As you can see, this one’s completely naked. Similar treatment, but with some additional work. I cleared the snow around him a bit and found some delicacies. That’s his heart, I reckon.’ He pointed to the brown lump next to the body. ‘And those other things next to the heart are his balls. His prick’s still on, though. Lucky devil!’
All the corpses lay over both sets of tracks where they ran side by side. In three cases the heads lay on the rails; in the other two, they lolled between them.
Rossel stepped away from body number three and took a look around, inwardly berating himself for his carelessness. Bleary with sleep and cold, he’d assumed he was on his way to some sort of stupid accident. Alcohol to blame, nine times out of ten. And if the secret police had been involved, well, the worst it could have been was an execution. In those cases, you made it your job to blunder all over the crime scene and ask all the wrong questions, or none at all. Cart the poor sods off and invent a cause of death.
But there was no blood. The faces were a mess but there did not seem to be any exit wounds, so there had been no shots to the back of the head, secret police-style. No rope binding the hands or feet.
Maniac. Maybe Lipukhin was right.
The cops had all left clear sets of footprints from the car to the railway but none of them had checked to see if there were any other traces of the person, or persons, who h
ad brought the bodies to their resting place. Rossel looked the other way, across the open ground to the forest on the other side of the tracks, along the main line and the secondary line. Where did that lead, anyway? But there were no footprints, no scars in the snow that a dragged corpse might have made, no tyre tracks.
‘When did it stop snowing?’
Rossel’s voice stopped his men as they were settling down to corpse number four. They looked at one another.
‘It was snowing when I went on shift,’ said Grachev. ‘After that I was head down in paperwork. Seemed to be snowing the whole time, though.’
Paperwork? From eight in the evening until two in the morning? Rossel doubted it. Sergeant Grachev preferred to concentrate on his smoking, and on keeping a weather eye out for any prostitutes brought into the station he could rape.
‘It was snowing when I went to bed,’ said Lipukhin. ‘About . . .’ he faltered. ‘About ten.’
Rossel saw Grachev and Taneyev smirk. About ten when you slid under the table, comrade?
So, none of them had any idea. Best guess was that the snow had stopped sometime between two and four. But it had been coming down for most of the early winter, coming down like God wanted to bury the world and never see it again. Here it was up to their thighs. You could rake enough powder over your tracks and wait for the weather to do the rest. The five bodies lying on the railway lines near Lake Ladoga might as well have fallen out of the sky.
The fourth corpse was also male. But it looked like the body of a younger man – more muscle definition, no sagging flesh. Perhaps as young as twenty but no more than forty, Rossel thought. It was naked and mutilated like the third except that, as Grachev said with a malevolent grin, ‘both prick and balls are in place this time. And look at that girth, in this temperature, too. If there’s pussy in Heaven those bitches are going to get themselves nice and wet when this fine young gallant turns up.’
Last one. Rossel lit another papirosa from the remnants of his previous one and double-pinched the cardboard filter.
‘Oh shit,’ said Grachev. ‘Oh fuck.’
Rossel looked across at the sergeant kneeling over the corpse, saw him brush a clump of snow off its head and point at it.