by Sam Eastland
“I drove here in my car.”
Pekkala remembered now that the Tsarina had given Rasputin a car, a beautiful Hispano-Suiza, although she had forgotten to give him any lessons on how to drive it.
“And you think she would allow you in at this time of night?”
“Of course,” replied Rasputin. “Why not?”
“Well, what happened? Did you speak to her?”
“I never got the chance. That damned automobile went wrong.”
“Went wrong?”
“It drove into a wall.” He gestured vaguely at the world outside. “Somewhere out there.”
“You crashed your car,” said Pekkala, shaking his head at the thought of that beautiful machine smashed to pieces.
“I set out on foot for the Palace, but I got lost. Then I saw your place and here I am, Pekkala. At your mercy. A poor man begging for a drink.”
“Someone else has already granted your request. Several times.”
Rasputin was no longer listening. He had discovered one of the salmon eggs in his beard. He plucked it out and popped it in his mouth. His lips puckered as he chased the egg around the inside of his cheek. Then suddenly his face brightened. “Ah! I see you already have company. Good evening, teacher lady.”
Pekkala turned to see Ilya standing at the doorway to the bedroom. She was wearing one of his dark gray shirts, the kind he wore when he was on duty. Her arms were folded across her chest. The sleeves, without their cuff links, trailed down over her hands.
“Such a beauty!” sighed Rasputin. “If your students could only see you now.”
“My students are six years old,” Ilya replied.
He waggled his fingers, then let them subside onto the arms of the chair, like the tentacles of some pale ocean creature. “They are never too young to learn the ways of the world.”
“Every time I feel like defending you in public,” said Ilya, “you go and say something like that.”
Rasputin sighed again. “Let the rumors fly.”
“Have you really crashed your car, Grigori?” she asked.
“My car crashed by itself,” replied Rasputin.
“How,” asked Ilya, “do you manage to stay drunk so much of the time?”
“It helps me to understand the world. It helps the world to understand me as well. Some people make sense when they’re sober. Some people make sense when they’re not.”
“Always speaking in riddles.” Ilya smiled at him.
“Not riddles, beautiful lady. Merely the unfortunate truth.” His eyelids fluttered. He was falling asleep.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” said Pekkala. He grasped the chair and jerked it around so the two men were facing each other.
Rasputin gasped, his eyes shut tight.
“What’s this I hear,” asked Pekkala, “about you advising the Tsarina to get rid of me?”
“What?” Rasputin opened one eye.
“You heard me.”
“Who told you that?”
“Never mind who told me.”
“It is the Tsarina who wants you dismissed,” said Rasputin, and suddenly the drunkenness had peeled away from him. “I like you, Pekkala, but there is nothing I can do.”
“And why not?”
“Here is how it works,” explained Rasputin. “The Tsarina asks me a question. And I can tell from the way she asks it whether she wants me to say yes or no. And when I tell her what she wants to hear, it makes her happy. And then this idea of hers becomes my idea, and she runs off to the Tsar, or to her friend Vyrubova, or to whomever she pleases, and she tells them I have said this thing. But what she never says, Pekkala, is that it was her idea to begin with. You see, Pekkala, the reason I am loved by the Tsarina is that I am exactly what she needs me to be, in the same way that you are needed by the Tsar. She needs me to make her feel she is right, and he needs you to make him feel safe. Sadly, both of those things are illusions. And there are many others like us, each one entrusted to a different task—investigators, lovers, assassins, each one a stranger to the other. Only the Tsar knows us all. So if you have been told that I wish you to be sent away, then yes. It is true.” He climbed unsteadily out of the chair and stood weaving in front of Pekkala. “But it is only true because the Tsarina desired it first.”
“I think you’ve preached enough for one night, Grigori.”
Rasputin smiled lazily. “Good night, Pekkala.” Then he waved at Ilya, as if she were standing in the distance and not just on the other side of the room. As he moved his hand back and forth, a bracelet gleamed on his wrist. It was made of platinum and engraved with the royal crest: another gift from the Tsarina. “And good night, beautiful lady whose name I have forgotten.”
“Ilya,” she said, more with pity than with indignation.
“Then good night, beautiful Ilya.” Rasputin spread his arms and bowed extravagantly, his greasy hair falling in a curtain over his face.
“You can’t go out there now,” Pekkala told him. “The storm has not let up.”
“But I must,” replied Rasputin. “I have another party to attend. Prince Yusupov invited me. He promised cakes and wine.”
Then he was gone, leaving a stench of sweat and pickled onions hanging in the air.
Ilya stepped into the front room, her bare feet avoiding the slushy puddles which had oozed out of Rasputin’s boots. “Every time I’ve seen that man, he has been drunk,” she said, wrapping her arms around Pekkala.
“But he’s never as drunk as he appears,” replied Pekkala.
Two days later, Pekkala arrived in Petrograd just in time to see Rasputin’s body fished out of the Malaya Neva River, near a place called Krestovsky Island. His corpse had been rolled in a carpet and shoved beneath the ice.
Soon after, Pekkala arrested Prince Yusupov, who readily confessed to murdering Rasputin. In the company of an army doctor named Lazovert and the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovitch, first cousin of the Tsar, Yusupov had attempted to murder Rasputin with cakes laced with arsenic. Each cake contained enough poison to finish off half a dozen men, but Rasputin ate three of them and appeared to suffer no ill effects. Then Yusupov poured arsenic into a glass of Hungarian wine and served that to Rasputin. Rasputin drank it and then asked for another glass. At that point Yusupov panicked. He took the Browning revolver belonging to the Grand Duke and shot Rasputin in the back. No sooner had Dr. Lazovert declared Rasputin dead than Rasputin sat up and grabbed Yusupov by the throat. Yusupov, by now hysterical, fled to the second floor of his palace, followed by Rasputin, who crawled after him up the stairs. Eventually, after shooting Rasputin several more times, the murderers rolled him in the carpet, tied it with rope, and dumped him in the trunk of Dr. Lazovert’s car. They drove to the Petrovsky Bridge and threw his body into the Neva. An autopsy showed that, even with everything that had been done to him, Rasputin died by drowning.
In spite of Pekkala’s work on the case, and the proven guilt of the participants, none of his investigation was ever made public and none of the killers ever went to prison.
When Pekkala thought back on that night when Rasputin had appeared out of the storm, he wished he’d shown more kindness to a man so clearly marked for death.
UNDER THE GLARE OF AN ELECTRIC LIGHT POWERED BY A RATTLING portable generator, Pekkala and Kirov stood in the pit where Nagorski’s body was found. At first the freezing, muddy water had come up to their waists, but with the help of buckets, they had managed to bail out most of it. Now they used a mine detector to search for the missing gun. The detector consisted of a long metal stem, bent into a handle at one end, with a plate-shaped disk at the other. In the center of the stem, an oblong box held the batteries, volume control, and dials for the various settings.
After being shown Pekkala’s Shadow Pass, the NKVD guards had supplied them with everything they needed. They had even helped to wheel the generator out across the proving ground.
Slowly, Pekkala moved the disk of the mine detector back and forth over the ground, listening for the
sound that would indicate the presence of metal. His hands had grown so numb that he could barely feel the metal handle of the detector.
The generator droned and clattered, filling the air with exhaust fumes.
On hands and knees, Kirov sifted his fingers through the mud. “Why wouldn’t the killer have held on to the gun?”
“He might have,” replied Pekkala, “assuming it’s a ‘he.’ More likely, he threw it away as soon as he could, in case he was caught and searched. Without a gun, he might have been able to talk his way out of it. But with a gun on him, there’d be no chance of that.”
“And he wouldn’t be expecting us to search through all this mud,” said Kirov, his lips turned drowned-man blue, “because that would be insane, wouldn’t it?”
“Precisely!” said Pekkala.
Just then they heard a beep—very faint and only one.
“What was that?” asked Kirov.
“I don’t know,” replied Pekkala. “I’ve never used one of these things before.”
Kirov flapped his arm at the detector. “Well, do it again!”
“I’m trying!” replied Pekkala, swinging the disk back and forth over the ground.
“Slowly!” shouted Kirov. As he climbed up off his knees, mud sucked at his waterlogged boots. “Let me try.”
Pekkala gave him the detector. His half-frozen hands remained curled around the memory of the handle.
Kirov skimmed the disk just above the surface of the mud.
Nothing.
Kirov swore. “This ridiculous contraption isn’t even—”
Then the sound came again.
“There!” shouted Pekkala.
Carefully, Kirov moved the disk back over the spot.
The detector beeped once more, and then again, and finally, as Kirov held it over the place, the sound became a constant drone.
Pekkala dropped to his knees and began to dig, squeezing through handfuls of mud as if he were a baker kneading dough. “It’s not here,” he muttered. “There’s no gun.”
“I told you this thing didn’t work,” complained Kirov.
Just then, Pekkala’s fist closed on something hard. A stone, he thought. He nearly tossed it aside, but then, in the glare of the generator light, he caught a glimpse of metal. As he worked his fingers through the mud, they snagged on what he now realized was a bullet cartridge. Pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, he held it up to Kirov and smiled as if he were a gold digger who had found the nugget that would set him up for life. Pekkala rubbed away the dirt at the end of the casing until he could see the markings stamped into the brass. “7.62 mm,” he said.
“It could be a Nagent.”
“No. The cartridge is too short. This did not come from a Russian gun.”
After hunting for another hour and finding nothing, Pekkala called an end to the search. The two men clambered out of the pit, switched off the generator, and stumbled back through the dark towards the buildings.
The guard hut was closed and the guards were nowhere in sight.
By that time, both Pekkala and Kirov were shuddering uncontrollably from the cold. They needed to warm up before driving back to the city.
They tried to get into the other buildings, but all of them were locked.
In desperation, the two men heaped up broken wooden pallets which they found stacked behind the Iron House. Using a spare fuel can from their car, they soon had the pallets burning.
Like sleepwalkers, they reached their hands towards the blaze. Sitting down upon the ground, they removed their boots and emptied out thin streams of dirty water. Then they held their pasty feet against the flames until their flesh began to steam. Darkness swirled around them, as if what lay beneath the ground had risen in a tide and drowned the world.
“What I don’t understand,” said Kirov, when his teeth had finally stopped chattering, “is why Major Lysenkova is here at all. NKVD has dozens of investigators. Why send one who only investigates crimes within the NKVD?”
“There’s only one possibility,” answered Pekkala. “NKVD must think one of their own people is responsible.”
“But that doesn’t explain why Major Lysenkova would be in such a hurry to wrap up the investigation.”
Pekkala balanced the gun cartridge on his palm, examining it in the firelight. “This ought to slow things down a bit.”
“I don’t know how you can do it, Inspector.”
“Do what?”
“Work so calmly with the dead,” replied Kirov. “Especially when they have been so … so broken up.”
“I’m used to it now,” said Pekkala, and he thought back to the times when his father would be called out to collect bodies which had been discovered in the wilderness. Sometimes the bodies belonged to hunters who had gone missing in the winter. They’d fallen through thin ice out on the lakes and did not reappear until spring, their bodies pale as alabaster, tangled among the sticks and branches. Sometimes they were old people who had wandered off into the forest, gotten lost, and died of exposure. What remained of them was often scarcely recognizable beyond the scaffolding of bones they left behind. Pekkala and his father always brought a coffin with them, the rough pine box still smelling of sap. They wrapped the remains in a thick canvas tarpaulin.
There had been many such trips, none of which plagued him with nightmares. Only one stuck clearly in his mind.
It was the day the dead Jew came riding into town.
His horse trotted down the main street of Lappeenranta in the middle of a blizzard. The Jew sat in the saddle in his black coat and wide-brimmed hat. He appeared to have frozen to death. His beard was a twisted mass of icicles. The horse stopped outside the blacksmith’s shop, as if it knew where it was going, although the blacksmith swore he’d never seen the animal before.
No one knew where the Jew had come from. Messages sent to the nearby villages of Joutseno, Lemi, and Taipalsaari turned up nothing. His saddlebags contained no clues, only spare clothing, a few scraps of food, and a book written in his language, which no one in Lappeenranta could decipher. He had probably come in from Russia, whose unmarked border was only a few kilometers away. Then he got lost in the woods, and died before he could find shelter.
The Jew had been dead for a long time—five or six days, thought Pekkala’s father. They had to remove the saddle just to get him off the horse. The hands of the Jew were twisted around the bridle. Pekkala, who was twelve years old at the time, tried to untangle the leather from the brittle fingers, but without success, so his father cut the leather. Since the Jew’s body was frozen, they could not fit him in a coffin. They did their best to cover him up for the ride back to Pekkala’s house.
That evening, they left him on the undertaking slab to thaw so that Pekkala’s father could begin the work of preparing the corpse for burial.
“I need you to do something for me,” his father told Pekkala. “I need you to see him out.”
“See him out?” said Pekkala. “He’s already out.”
Pekkala’s father shook his head. “His people believe that the spirit lingers by the body until it is buried. The spirit is afraid. It is their custom to have someone sit by the body, to keep it company until the spirit finally departs.”
“And how long is that?” asked Pekkala, staring at the corpse, whose legs remained pincered, as if still around the body of the horse. Water dripped from the thawing clothes, its sound like the ticking of a clock.
“Just until morning,” said his father.
His father’s preparation room was in the basement. That was where Pekkala spent the night, sitting on a chair, back against the wall. A paraffin lamp burned with a steady flame upon the table where his father kept tools for preparing the dead—rubber gloves, knives, tubes, needles, waxed linen thread, and a box containing rouges for restoring color to the skin.
Pekkala had forgotten to ask his father if he was allowed to fall asleep, but now it was too late—his parents and his brother had all gone to bed hours ago. To kee
p himself busy, he thumbed through the pages of the book they had found in the Jew’s saddlebags. The letters seemed to have been fashioned out of tiny wisps of smoke.
Pekkala set the book aside, got up, and went over to the body. Staring at the man’s pinched face, his waxy skin and reddish beard, Pekkala thought about the spirit of the Jew, pacing about the room, not knowing where it was or where it was supposed to be. He imagined it standing by the brass-colored flame of the lamp, like a moth drawn to the light. But maybe, he thought, only the living care about a thing like that. Then he went back and sat in his chair.
He did not mean to fall asleep, but suddenly it was morning. He heard the sound of the basement door opening and his father coming down the stairs. His father did not ask if he had slept.
The Jew’s body had thawed. One leg hung off the preparation table. His father lifted it and gently set it straight beside the other. Then he uncoiled the leather bridle from around the Jew’s hands.
Later that day, they buried him in a clearing on the side of a hill, which looked out over a lake. His father had picked out the place. There was no path, so they had to drag the coffin up between the trees, using ropes and pushing the wooden box until their fingertips were raw from splinters.
“We had better make it deep,” his father said as he handed Pekkala a shovel, “or else the wolves might dig him up.”
The two of them scraped through the layers of pine needles and then used pickaxes to dig into the gray clay beneath. When at last the coffin had been laid and the hole filled in, they set aside their shovels. Knowing only the prayers of a different god, they stood for a moment in silence before heading back down the hill.
“What did you do with his book?” asked Pekkala.
“His head is resting on it,” replied his father.
In the years since then, Pekkala had seen so many lifeless bodies that they seemed to merge in his mind. But the face of the Jew remained clear, and the smoke-trail writing spoke to him in dreams.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Kirov said again.
Pekkala did not reply, because he did not know either.
