The Girl from Junchow

by Kate Furnivall

  “How far now?” Maksim Voshchinsky asked.

  “Another few miles,” Igor offered from the front seat. There were beads of sweat on the back of his neck. He was nervous.

  Alexei gave Lydia a nod. “The route we’re taking will take longer. But it’s safer.”

  She said nothing. She’d been silent since they’d set off, hunched into her corner, unresponsive and mute. It annoyed Alexei. He’d had to stand his ground with Maksim to win her this place in the car, and a little politeness wouldn’t have come amiss. Sometimes, like today, he couldn’t work her out. Shouldn’t she be pleased, maybe even impressed, and certainly grateful, at the prospect of where he was taking her this afternoon? But no. Silent and sullen. Tawny eyes refusing to meet his. All she did was cling to the side window with a fixed stare as though memorizing the route. Maybe she was. That thought worried him.

  Or was it fear? It surprised him that it hadn’t occurred to him before. Was his sister frightened? He felt an odd rush of tenderness toward her despite her withdrawn manner because he knew fear was something Lydia would never admit to. She’d rather bite her tongue off first.

  “Lydia,” he said in an attempt to draw her out of her isolation, “the truck took the prisoners to the hangars early this morning. It hasn’t returned yet, so we believe Jens is actually there right now.”

  She dragged her face from the window and frowned at Maksim. “Did your vory men follow it?”

  “Da, of course.”

  “What if they were spotted?”

  “Hah! They were not spotted.”

  “But if they were, there will be soldiers and police waiting for us.”

  He laughed, a rich amused sound that warmed the chill interior of the car. “My men are vory. Thieves. Harder to trace than shadows in snow. You understand?”

  She nodded. But Alexei was not sure she did. She didn’t realize exactly how these men functioned or that they were outside the normal margins of society. To her they were just criminals. It was clear she didn’t trust them, and he was surprised she hadn’t insisted on dragging that oaf Popkov along too. When it came to watching her back, that filthy Cossack was the one she relied on, God only knows why.

  “No action today,” he reminded her. He was wary of what she might do. “We’re going out there to observe. Nothing more.”

  “I know.”

  “Just don’t expect too much.”

  “I expect nothing.”

  “That’s a good place to start,” Maksim chuckled.

  She turned her attention back to the window. They had left the streets of the city behind, passing the foul-smelling Red Hercules rubber factory some time back and were driving north of Moscow. Huddles of wooden izbas, peasant cottages with a cow tethered at the front and dense rows of vegetables at the rear, popped up at intervals and broke the monotony of the flat and featureless landscape. The road ran straight as a prison bar across it. At one point a group of women were washing their bedsheets in the river and looked up with a moment’s interest. Otherwise there was nothing, not even other traffic, just the spiny edge of the pine forest that blocked out the horizon on both sides.

  The car stopped.

  “Out,” Igor ordered.

  They all climbed out onto the empty windswept landscape, except the driver, and the car swerved off the deserted road onto a patch of rough ground, where the driver promptly began to remove a wheel.

  “Now what?” Maksim demanded.

  “Over there.” Alexei indicated a darker shadow tucked among the trees. It was a small covered army truck.

  This was a point where the pines looped close to the road and a single track dirt trail cut through the tall willowy trunks. The track was obviously well used, and heavy wheels had gouged deep ruts into its frozen surface.

  Maksim’s eyes narrowed into slits. “This is as far as I go.”

  Alexei nodded and draped a rug over the older man’s shoulders, then climbed into the Soviet army vehicle he had stolen the previous night and tried the engine. It started on the first time. Satisfied, he gunned it to full throttle.

  “You can wait here if you prefer,” he called out to Lydia.

  “No.”

  “Then get in.”

  She scrambled up beside him on the front bench and Igor jumped up after her. Alexei kicked the truck into gear.

  Forty-nine

  “RELAX, LYDIA, ENJOY THE RIDE.” HE GRIPPED THE steering wheel as it was almost jolted out of his hands and the truck bounced its way across a narrow ditch.

  “Don’t they have guards on patrol?” she demanded. “Snipers in the trees?”

  “Of course. That’s why we’re in an army truck. No one will take any notice of it.”

  “And what happens when we get there?”

  “We’re not driving up to the front door and knocking on it politely, if that’s what you mean. Don’t worry.”

  “I am worried.”

  Alexei glanced at his sister’s face. This wasn’t the Lydia he’d traveled halfway across Russia with. That Lydia would have been brimming with excitement.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked quietly.

  “Chyort! What do you think is the matter with me?” She blinked hard and stared ahead through the windshield. “It’s this insane driving.”

  “You said you wanted to see the layout of where Jens Friis is working?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then hold on tight.”

  At that moment he swung the heavy wheel, both arms working hard, and abandoned the graveled track.

  “This way.” Igor indicated off to the right.

  The side window was caught by a low branch, and Lydia flinched violently at the crack it made. She was jumpy as hell. For half a mile he concentrated on nothing but wrestling the damn truck through the trees, avoiding gullies and mounds of packed snow that formed traps that wouldn’t melt till spring.

  “What’s the matter, Lydia?” he asked again when he struck a stretch where the terrain grew smoother.

  Her hands were huddled like little corpses in her lap, unmoving and stiff. “Let’s focus on our father,” she murmured in a low voice. “And this crazy ride.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “It is.”

  “Are you all right? Has something happened?”

  “I’m fine.”

  One of her gloved hands crept off her lap and settled in the valley between his thigh and hers. It curled up there as if needing warmth. He stamped on the brake pedal to avoid a jagged stump and jinked the truck so that its wheels slid into a sideways skid. One fender brushed along the length of a bough that was draped in icicles and gave off a noise like the rattle of buckshot.

  “Alexei, do you have any idea where the hell we’re going?”

  For a split second their eyes met, and he knew she wasn’t talking about the forest.

  “How about to the top of the tree?”

  She smiled.

  He looked away quickly and just missed crunching into a blackened pine trunk.

  “IS THIS IT?”

  “Yes. This is as far as we go. The rest is on foot.” Alexei was pushing to move on fast.

  They clambered out of the truck, the air bone-white with a mist that twisted in and out of the trees like beckoning fingers. Igor threw a canvas pack on his back.

  “It’s just up ahead,” he said.

  They moved off in single file, keeping close to the dark trunks. In this mist it would be easy to lose touch. The remnants of the snow were heaped into hunched shapes by the wind, and underfoot the cracking of brittle pine needles betrayed their movements. Alexei slipped the gun out of his pocket.

  “Sentries?” Lydia whispered.

  He nodded. “They patrol the forest in pairs. But the guards are cold and bored, and after months of tedium they expect to find nothing, so they pay scant attention to what is in the forest. They spend more time patrolling the complex itself.”

  “Alexei, why did Maksim come? It’s a bitterly
cold day and he looks ill. Even back there in the car it could be dangerous for him if he’s found and questioned. It wasn’t necessary.”

  “Yes, it was. To remind his vory who is their pakhan.”

  “To remind the thieves? Or to remind you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  It wasn’t a question he chose to answer. Instead he silenced her by placing a finger to his lips, so that they crept forward more cautiously, Lydia right on his heel. Igor watched the rear. The forest ended abruptly, switching within the space of ten paces from its own private twilight to an open expanse of slippery white sky. An area the size of a village had been flattened within the heart of the forest, an efficient clearing of timber to carve out a rectangle that was hidden from view by a brick wall erected around its perimeter. Ten meters high and topped with razor wire, while around its base more strands coiled like a sleeping spiny serpent.

  “Not very welcoming,” Lydia whispered in Alexei’s ear.

  He grimaced. “It’s not meant to be.”

  “So how do we get in?”

  “We don’t.”

  “I thought we were here to observe the complex they’ve built. That’s what you said.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But the wall hides it all from view. I can’t see anything.”

  He leaned back against one of the pine trunks, merging his silhouette with its rough bark. “You will,” he promised.

  “TIME TO GO, LYDIA.”

  Alexei looked up. His sister was still peering intently through Zeiss binoculars high up in one of the pine trees, a good fifteen meters off the ground. She looked small up there in the shadows of the canopy, and he could tell by the concentration on her face how much she wanted to stay.

  “Lydia,” he said quietly, aware of how sound carried in the heavy damp air.

  She removed the binoculars with reluctance. “Bring me down.”

  Igor played out the rope and dropped her down from her perch so fast that Alexei was surprised her legs didn’t break as she hit the ground. She handed the binoculars back to Igor.

  “Spasibo,” was all she said.

  She’d been surprised by Igor. By the way he’d looped a strap of leather between his ankles and around one of the narrow trees that was set back from the forest’s edge. Using the foot strap and another one between his wrists, he shinned up the trunk as fast as a polecat, his plump stocky legs pumping away with unexpected muscles. Lydia had watched, mouth open, astonished. Alexei had smiled. He’d seen it before in the streets of Moscow at night. That’s how Igor scaled the drainpipes of apartment houses. Once up in the canopy he’d hooked a rope from his backpack over a branch and rigged up a sling on a simple pulley. So now Lydia had seen over the wall, exactly as he’d promised.

  “It’s a hangar,” she said, keeping her voice low.

  “A massive one.”

  “What’s in it?” Her eyes were huge, shining with the excitement he’d expected to find earlier. This was more like Lydia. “And what do you think all the sheds are for?”

  “The sheds are for storage of equipment. We’ve watched them haul machinery on carts over to the hangar.”

  “There are some big containers outside it. What are they?”

  “They look like gasoline tanks to me. And the brick shed over to the right is the guardhouse.”

  She nodded, her hat tumbling off. She jammed it back on. “I spotted that, the soldiers, coming and going in and out of it. Dogs as well.”

  “It’s an interesting complex they’ve constructed here. A vast expanse of open space sliced out of a forest and walled in for secrecy. What the hell are they up to in there?”

  “A new kind of airplane?”

  “Maybe. But Jens is not—”

  Her fingers gripped his wrist, so hard they seemed to drill into the nerves, but he barely noticed. Her face was as white as the mist that draped itself over her shoulders.

  “I saw him,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “I saw Papa.”

  “No, Lydia, Jens would be inside working. They wouldn’t be allowed to wander around at will, and anyway”—he gave a small snort of impatience—“you’d be unlikely to recognize him after all these years.”

  “I tell you I saw him.”

  “Where?”

  “Through the binoculars. He was sitting on a bench beside the big hangar.”

  “You’re imagining things.”

  “It was him. I know it was.”

  Alexei left it there. Why argue the point? If she wanted so badly to believe she’d seen her father, then let her believe it.

  “Come on,” he said in a brisk voice, and removed his wrist from her grasp. “Let’s get moving. Igor has finished packing away the rope.”

  The wind was picking up, snatching at the branches, stealing through the mist. As they set off in single file once more, keeping close, Lydia cast one last glance back at the perimeter wall and whispered, “He had a woman sitting next to him, Alexei. Her hand was in his.”

  THEY ALMOST STUMBLED OVER THE BODIES.

  “Alexei!”

  Lydia had seized the back of his coat with a force that almost choked him. As he swung around he was astonished to see a knife in her hand. Where the hell had that come from?

  She’d stepped on an arm.

  “Down!” he breathed.

  He yanked her into a crouch at the base of a tree. Igor had flattened to the ground. The lack of undergrowth in the pine forest made movement easier but was no damn use when you needed cover. He held her down, and under his palm on her back he could feel her heart racing. He waited ten minutes, gun in hand. Then another ten. No sign of any movement, no flicker of branches or flutter of birds. No sound, just a raw silence. They didn’t speak, not even a whisper, but Alexei made hand signals to Igor, then crawled away on his belly and elbows.

  He found tracks, a number of them. And he found bodies, four of them. All in Red Army uniforms. Covered in blood. He scoured the area minutely, weaving between trunks, studying the high branches, but could spot no one. No one alive, that is, no one whose breath shuddered white trails into the mist. When he returned to Lydia she hadn’t moved a muscle, as if the icy air around her had frozen and trapped her there. But as soon as he nodded at her, she sprang to her feet in a low crouch.

  “Look,” she whispered.

  Her gaze was fixed on one of the dead soldiers. He was young and slumped in a sitting position against a pine, legs stiff in front of him, his eyes wide open and staring directly at her. Glassy, useless, sky-blue eyes. His throat had been cut from ear to ear like an extra-wide smile under his chin, and his life had spilled out over his army greatcoat by mistake, except this had been no mistake.

  “There are others,” Alexei murmured in her ear, and held up four fingers.

  She slid a hand across the white skin of her own throat and raised an eyebrow. He nodded. All with smiles under their chins. He saw her flinch and feared she would freeze, her body go rigid. He’d seen it happen. Shock did strange things to a person. He was prepared to throw her over his shoulder if necessary, but when he started to move off, she tucked in behind him like a shadow. Once again Igor brought up the rear, small eyes darting from tree to tree.

  It was only when they reached the army truck that Lydia asked quietly, “Who did it? Who killed them?”

  Alexei was certain he knew, but something in him was reluctant to tell his sister.

  “Alexei,” she insisted.

  “It’ll be Maksim. Watching our backs. That’s what a good pakhan does for his men.”

  “But you said the army patrols worked in pairs. And were not thorough in checking the forest. So why were there four soldiers?”

  Alexei stamped the snow off his boots and swung up into the truck. “Isn’t it obvious?” he scowled.

  “Not to me.”

  “We were betrayed.”

  “Betrayed? But who knew we were coming here today?”


  “Only us.”

  THE OLD BLACK BONE-SHAKER WAS STILL THERE ON THE TRACK. Relief hit Alexei like a slap in the face, and until that moment he hadn’t realized that a part of him had been doubting Maksim Voshchinsky. Fearing that he’d gone. But why would he do that when he’d just proved himself ruthless and thorough in protecting their backs? Alexei and Lydia resumed their earlier positions on the backseat, and Alexei greeted Maksim with a grateful bear hug. The older man smelled of brandy but his skin felt brittle and cold, as though he’d been out in the wind.

  “Good to see you safe, my son,” Maksim smiled.

  “Thank you, father.”

  Lydia reached across Alexei and picked up one of Maksim’s hands. She removed the glove and lifted the plump hand to her lips, pressing a kiss on its veined flesh.

  “Spasibo, pakhan,” she murmured.

  The leader of the vory v zakone withdrew his hand with a chilly smile that went nowhere near his eyes.

  “Alexei,” he said, “control your sister.”

  THE ROOM SMELLED OF BLOOD. METALLIC AND SALTY AND sticky as tar in the nostrils. Alexei stood just inside the door, heart pumping, seeking the source of the smell. He had accompanied Lydia into her house and up the narrow stairs. Something was wrong and he was determined to find out what. But on the top landing waited a thin man with suspicious eyes and a receding hairline, wearing a red armband that declared him to be the head of the Housing Committee. He blocked their path.

  The man puffed out his weedy chest. “Comrade, there’s a stain on the floor outside your room. Please clean it up.”

  Lydia blinked as though she hadn’t heard properly at first, then let out a gasp and pushed past, rushing to her door.

  The man bit his lip, annoyed. “It looks like blood,” he shouted after her.

  It was blood. And in the room there was more. The big woman, the one from the train—what was her name? Elizaveta?—was standing by the bed. She’d lifted her head to see who had burst in without knocking first and her pale eyes were hard and angry. Beside him Lydia was quivering like a small animal.