Archive 17 ip-3

by Sam Eastland

  Colonel Kubanka’s daily commute to the Ministry of Armaments should not have taken him past Tuzinkewitz’s home, but Kubanka made a wide detour to ensure that it did.

  The noise, as the front and rear wheels of Kubanka’s Mercedes collided with the pothole, was like a double blast of cannon fire. It actually shook the loose panes of glass in Kirov’s window. No one could sleep through that, especially not a man like Tuzinkewitz, who still suffered from flashbacks of the war, in which he had been repeatedly shelled by Austrian artillery in the Carpathian Mountains. Tuzinkewitz, rudely jolted from his dreams, would rush to the window, fling back the curtains and glare down into the street, hoping to spot the source of this noise. By then, Kubanka’s car had already turned the corner and disappeared and Tuzinkewitz found himself staring down helplessly at the pothole, which returned his stare with a cruel, unblinking gaze.

  It was driving Tuzinkewitz mad, slowly but with gathering speed, exactly as Kubanka intended. Kirov saw the proof of this each day in the strain on Tuzinkewitz’s meaty face as it loomed into view out of the stuffy darkness of his bedroom.

  When this daily ritual had been completed, Kirov turned and smiled towards Pekkala’s desk, but the smile froze on his face when he saw the empty seat. He kept forgetting that Pekkala was gone. Even stranger than this, he sometimes swore he could feel the presence of the inspector in the room.

  Although Major Kirov had been raised in a world in which ghosts were not allowed to exist, he understood what it felt like to be haunted, as he was now, by the absence of Inspector Pekkala.

  Far to the east the freezing, clanking wagons of ETAP-1889 crossed the Ural Mountains and officially entered Siberian territory. From then on, the train stopped once a day to allow the prisoners out.

  Before the wagons were opened, the guards would walk along the sides and beat the doors with rifle butts, in hopes of dislodging any corpses that had frozen to the inner walls.

  Piling out of the wagons, the prisoners inevitably found themselves on windswept, barren ground, far from any town. Sometimes they stayed out for hours, sometimes for only a few minutes. The intervals did not appear to follow any logic. They never knew how long they would be off the train.

  During these breaks, the guards made no attempt to keep track of the prisoners. For anyone who fled into this wilderness, the chances of survival were nonexistent. The guards did not even bother to take roll calls when the train whistle sounded for the prisoners to board. By then, most convicts were already huddled by the wagons, shivering and waiting to climb in.

  Beside Pekkala stood a round-faced man named Savushkin, who kept trying to make conversation. He had patient, intelligent eyes hidden behind glasses that were looped around his ears with bits of string. He was not a tall man, which put him at a disadvantage when trying to move around the cramped space of the wagon. To remedy this, he would raise his hands above his head, press his palms together, and drive himself like a wedge through the tangled thicket of limbs.

  Confronted with Pekkala’s stubborn silence, Savushkin had set himself the task of luring Pekkala into conversation. With the faith of an angler tying one kind of bait after another to his line, Savushkin broached every topic that entered his head, trusting that the fish must bite eventually.

  Sometimes Pekkala pretended not to hear. Other times, he smiled and looked away. He knew how important it was for his identity to remain secret. The less he said, the better.

  Savushkin did not take offense at his companion’s silence. After each attempt, he would wait a while before trying again to find some chink in Pekkala’s armor.

  When Pekkala finally spoke, a bright, clear day had warmed the wagons, melting ice which usually jammed the cracks between the walls. While the wheels clanked lazily over the spacers, their sound like a monstrous sharpening of knives, Savushkin hooked his fish at last.

  “Do you want to hear the joke that got me fifteen years in prison?” asked Savushkin.

  “A joke?” Pekkala was startled at the sound of his own voice after so many days of silence. “You were sent here because of a joke?”

  “That’s right,” said Savushkin.

  “Well,” said Pekkala, “it seems to me you’ve earned the right to tell it twice.”

  The others were listening, too. It grew quiet in the wagon as they strained to hear Savushkin’s voice.

  “Stalin is meeting with a delegation of workers from the Ukraine,” he continued. “After they leave, the Boss notices that his fake mustache is missing.”

  “Are you saying that Stalin has a fake mustache?” asked a man standing beside him.

  “Now that you mention it,” another voice chimed in.

  Savushkin ignored this.

  “You can’t tell jokes about Stalin!” someone called from the far end of the wagon. “Not in here!”

  “Are you kidding?” shouted Savushkin. “This is the only place where I can tell a joke about him!” He paused and cleared his throat before continuing. “Stalin calls in his chief of security. ‘Go and find the delegation!’ says the Boss. ‘One of the workers has stolen my mustache.’ The chief of security rushes out to do as he is told. A while later, Stalin realizes he has been sitting on his fake mustache, so he calls back his chief of security and tells him, ‘Never mind. I found my mustache.’ ‘It’s too late, Comrade Stalin,’ says the chief. ‘Half the workers have already signed confessions that they stole it and the other half committed suicide during interrogation.’ ”

  For a moment after Savushkin had finished telling the joke, there was silence in the wagon.

  Savushkin looked around, amazed. “Oh, come on. That’s a good joke! If it was a bad one, they would only have given me ten years!”

  At that, the men began to laugh. The sound multiplied, echoing off the wooden boards as if the ghosts of those who had been dumped beside the tracks were laughing now as well.

  Turning to look through the barbed wire opening, Pekkala caught sight of a farmer sitting on a stone wall at the edge of a field only a few paces from the tracks. The old man was wearing a sheepskin vest and knee-length felt boots called valenki. A horse and cart had been tied to a tree beside the wall, and the back of the cart was filled with turnips scabbed with clumps of frozen earth. The farmer had laid out a red handkerchief on the snow-topped wall and was sitting on the handkerchief. This gesture, in spite of its uselessness in fending off the damp and cold, struck Pekkala as strangely dignified. In one hand, the man held a small jackknife and in the other hand he held a piece of cheese. He was chewing away contentedly, eyes narrowed in the rush of wind as railcars clattered past, filling the air with a glittering veil of ice crystals.

  As the farmer heard the laughter of the convicts, his eyes grew wide with astonishment. In that moment he had realized that the cargo rattling past him was human and not livestock, as was painted on the cars, just as the prisoner transport vehicles in Moscow were disguised as delivery vans, complete with advertisements for nonexistent brands of beer.

  The farmer jumped down from the wall and grabbed an armful of turnips from his cart. He began to jog along the side of the tracks, holding out the turnips.

  One of the convicts reached out his hand through the barbed-wire-laced opening and seized one.

  More arms appeared, wrists and knuckles traced with blood where the rusty barbs had cut them.

  Another hand snatched a turnip from the man’s outstretched hand.

  The convicts began to shout, even those who could not see what was happening. The noise took on a life of its own as it spread from wagon to wagon until the roar of their voices drowned out even the sword-clash of the wheels over the tracks. Slowly, the engine pulled ahead.

  The old farmer could not keep up.

  The turnips spilled from his arms.

  The last Pekkala saw of the man, he was standing beside the tracks, hands on his knees, red-faced and puffing milky clouds of breath into the sky.

  When the commotion had finally died down, Savushkin made anot
her stab at conversation. “What class of criminal are you?” he asked Pekkala.

  “Fifty-nine,” replied Pekkala, remembering the designation he’d been given as part of his cover.

  “Fifty-nine! That means you are a dangerous offender! You don’t look like a killer to me.”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m so dangerous.”

  Savushkin gave a nervous laugh, like air squeaking out of a balloon. “Well, I bet a class 59 has a good tale to tell.”

  “Maybe you’ll hear it someday,” replied Pekkala.

  “I’ll tell you his story,” said a man pressed up against the wall, “as soon as I remember where I’ve seen him.”

  Pekkala glanced at him but said nothing.

  The man was shaking with fever. Sweat poured off his face. At some time in his past, he had been cut about the face. Now the white ridges of old scar tissue crisscrossed his cheeks like strands of spiderweb. These wounds had damaged the nerves, leaving a permanently crooked smile, which seemed to mock not only those around him but also the prisoner himself.

  Savushkin turned to the man with the knife-cut face. “Brother, you look like you could use a holiday,” he said.

  The man ignored Savushkin. His focus remained on Pekkala. “I know I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

  The next day, the convict transport pulled into a nameless rail siding in order to let another train pass. This train was heading in the opposite direction. It consisted not of wagons but of numerous flatbeds, all of them stacked with large barrels designed to hold diesel fuel, except that the original fuel markings had been overpainted in bright green letters with the word DALSTROY.

  Dalstroy was the state-owned company which managed resources coming out of Siberia. These included timber, lead, and the highly toxic mineral radium which left Borodok each week in containers painted with skull and crossbones. Another discovery in the Borodok mine was crocoite, also known as Siberian Red due to the color of its beautiful crimson crystals, which could be refined to make chromium. Exposure to Siberian Red was known to be just as lethal to miners as the radium.

  In addition to controlling the resources, Dalstroy also controlled the workforce. Ten years before, only thirty percent had been prison labor. Now it was over ninety percent. Because Dalstroy had to pay only ten percent of its labor force, it had become one of the richest companies in the world.

  The convicts, those who could see out, stared at the dreary procession of barrels with the dull, uncomprehending expressions of transported cattle.

  But Pekkala knew what they contained, and he shuddered as he watched them going by. In certain camps, particularly those which were not proving to be as profitable as expected, men who died were packed into these barrels. Their corpses were doused with formaldehyde and then exported all over the country, to be sold as medical cadavers.

  In Siberia, the prisoners said, even the dead work for Dalstroy.

  After the transport had passed by, Pekkala caught the smell of preserving fluid, familiar to him from his father’s undertaking business back in Finland, drifting sweet and sickening in the cold air.

  The locomotive engine roared as it began to move again, but no sooner were the wagons rolling than there was a great screeching of brakes and the whole convoy lurched to a stop. A few minutes later, the train backed once more into the siding, the wagon doors were opened, and the guards ordered everybody out.

  The prisoners found themselves in a desolate field of shin-deep snow. The freezing wind cut through their clothes, stirring up white phantoms from beneath their feet.

  Some prisoners immediately tried to climb into the wagons again, but the guards held them back.

  “What happened?” asked Savushkin.

  “The brakes are frozen,” said the guard. “The wheels are slipping. The whole train could come off the rails.”

  “How long will we be here?”

  “Could be an hour,” replied the guard. “Could be more. The last time this happened we were stuck all night.”

  “And you won’t let us back inside until morning?” Savushkin asked.

  “We have to take the weight off the wheel springs, or else they might snap from the cold when the train gets moving.” The guard gestured towards a stand of pine and birch trees in the distance. “Head over there. The whistle will sound when it’s time to go again.”

  Pekkala and Savushkin set off towards the woods.

  Several others followed, heads bowed against the gusts and arms folded across their chest, but they soon gave up and returned to the train, where men were building walls of snow as shelter from the wind.

  Ahead, in the grove of trees, the bony trunks of birch appeared and disappeared like a mirage among the sheets of snow.

  “We’re all going to freeze to death if they don’t let us back on that train by nightfall!” Savushkin had to shout to make himself heard.

  Pekkala knew the other prisoner was right. He also knew the guards didn’t seem to care how many people died en route to the camps. He stumbled forward, feeling the heat drain from the center of his body. Already he’d lost sensation in his ears and nose and fingers.

  When they finally reached the trees, Pekkala and Savushkin began to dig a hole around the base of a pine tree, where the snow had drifted chest deep. Protected by its spread of lower branches, they would have a place completely sheltered from the wind.

  “I’ll find some fallen branches to lay out on the ground,” Pekkala told Savushkin. “You keep digging.”

  Savushkin nodded and went back to work. With his hair and eyebrows rimed in frost, he looked as if he’d aged a hundred years since they left the train.

  For the next few minutes, Pekkala staggered through the drifts, gathering deadfall. The branches of the white birch, sheathed in ice, clattered above him like a wind chime made of bones. Arriving back at the hollow with nothing more than a handful of rotten twigs, Pekkala stopped to tear some boughs from a nearby pine tree. While he wrestled with the evergreen branches, he did not hear the person approaching from behind.

  “I remember you now,” said a voice.

  Pekkala spun around.

  The knife-cut man stood right in front of him. “This is the last place on earth I expected to see you, Inspector Pekkala. That’s why I couldn’t place you at first.”

  Pekkala said nothing, but only watched and waited.

  “I doubt you remember me, but that is understandable,” said the man, brushing his fingertips over his scars. “During my stay in the Butyrka prison, the guards left me with a souvenir I will never forget, just as I have never forgotten that you were the one who arrested me.”

  “I have arrested many people,” replied Pekkala. “That is my job.”

  The man’s cold-reddened nostrils twitched as he breathed in and out. He did not appear to be carrying a weapon, but that did nothing to comfort Pekkala.

  “I don’t know why you are here,” the man continued. “Believe me, it is a comfort to know that you and I are going to the same place, but comfort is not enough, not nearly enough to pay the debt you owe for what you’ve done to me.”

  Pekkala dropped the twigs he had been carrying. His frozen hands clenched into fists.

  “Do you have any friends, Inspector? Any still alive?” The man was taunting him. “They’re all gone, aren’t they, Inspector? They left you here to wander in the wilderness, the last of your kind on this earth.”

  It flashed across Pekkala’s mind that his whole life had come down to this.

  Suddenly, the prisoner threw up his arms and fell backwards. His legs had been pulled out from under him. In the next instant, a creature emerged from the ground. Scuttling like a giant crab out of the earth, Savushkin set upon the man.

  With arms flailing, he rained down blows upon the convict, who fought back with equal ferocity, clawing at Savushkin and tearing the shirt from his back, but it did nothing to prevent the hammer strikes of Savushkin’s fists.

  “Enough!” shouted Pekkala, sickened by the sound o
f breaking bones and teeth as the man’s face caved in.

  Savushkin did not seem to hear. In a frenzy he continued his attack, smashing his torn knuckles against the prisoner’s battered face.

  “Stop!” Pekkala set his hand upon Savushkin’s shoulder.

  Savushkin whirled around, teeth bared and his eyes gone wild. For an instant he did not even seem to recognize Pekkala.

  “It’s done,” whispered Pekkala.

  Savushkin blinked. In that moment he returned to his senses. He stepped back, wiping the blood from his hands.

  The knife-cut man was barely recognizable. He coughed up a splatter of cherry-red blood, which poured down the sides of his mouth. Seeing the color of that blood, Pekkala knew the sphenopalatine artery had been severed. There was nothing that could be done for him. His eyes rolled back in his head. A moment later, he shuddered and died.

  “I think it’s time I introduced myself,” said Savushkin. “And as a friend,” he added.

  “You have already proven that,” replied Pekkala.

  “Not exactly, Inspector. I am Lieutenant Commissar Savushkin of the Bureau of Special Operations. I would shake your hand, but”-he held up his battered fists-“perhaps some other time.”

  “Special Operations?” asked Pekkala. “I don’t understand. Why are you on the train?”

  “I was assigned to protect you. Comrade Stalin himself gave the order. No one else knows I am here, not the guards on the train or even the commandant of Borodok. You almost gave me a heart attack when you didn’t show up at the station. I thought I would be traveling all the way to Siberia for nothing. I kept thinking you must be in disguise. Until the moment I set eyes on you, it never occurred to me you would be hiding in plain sight.”

  Hearing those words, Pekkala thought back to his days of training with Chief Inspector Vassileyev, head of the Tsar’s Secret Police.

  Vassileyev drilled into Pekkala’s mind the importance of blending into different surroundings in order to carry out an investigation. To train Pekkala in the “Art of Disappearance,” as he called it, Vassileyev constructed a series of elaborate games which he referred to as “Field Exercises.”