by Sam Eastland
“And what else did they want, these socialists?”
“Gold,” replied Pekkala. “Specifically, the Imperial Reserves which were still being guarded by the Czechs.”
“And what did they do, these Czechs of the Sixth Rifle Regiment?”
“They handed the gold over, along with Admiral Kolchak.”
“Why?”
“The Socialist Center had mined the tunnels around Lake Baikal. If they decided to blow the tunnels, the Czechs would never have gotten through. Handing over Kolchak and the gold was their only hope of reaching Vladivostok.”
“And what became of Admiral Kolchak, the Ruler of Siberia?”
“On January 30, 1920, the admiral was executed by the Bolsheviks.”
“And what of his nephew, the colonel?”
“Red Cavalry finally caught up with him. After a fight lasting three days, survivors of the expedition surrendered. Among the men captured was Colonel Kolchak himself.”
By then, in St. Petersburg, on the other side of the country, Pekkala had also been taken prisoner by the Revolutionaries. Both men ended up in the Butyrka prison, although neither was aware of the other’s whereabouts at first.
“And, of course,” remarked Stalin, “you remember what happened at Butyrka?”
“Remember?” spat Pekkala. “Do you think I could ever forget?”
After months of torture and solitary confinement, prison guards frog-marched Pekkala down the spiral stone steps of the old fortress of Butyrka and into the basement. Knowing that these caverns, which had once boasted one of the world’s finest collections of wines, now served as execution chambers for enemies of the state, he fully expected to be murdered there.
Pekkala felt relieved that his time of suffering was almost over. In something approaching a gesture of compassion, some convicts were even shot before they reached the bottom of the stairs, so as to minimize the terror of their execution. Pekkala found himself hoping that he might merit such a speedy end, but when they reached the bottom of the stairs, the guards brought him to a room already occupied by several men who wore the Gymnastyrka tunics, dark blue trousers and knee-length riding boots of the State Security Troops.
There was also a third man, a barely human figure cowering naked in the corner. The man’s body was a mass of electrical burns and bruises.
This man was Colonel Kolchak.
The sentence was read out by Commissar Dzugashvili, the same man who had been responsible for Pekkala’s weeks of brutal interrogation.
In the final seconds of his life, Kolchak called out to Pekkala, “Inform His Majesty the Tsar that I told them nothing.”
Before the last word had left his mouth, the NKVD men opened fire. The concussion of the gunfire was stunning in the confined space of the cell. When the shooting finally stopped, Dzugashvili stepped forward, stuck the barrel in Kolchak’s right eye and put another bullet into Kolchak’s head.
IT WAS DZUGASHVILI who sat before Pekkala now. Joseph Dzugashvili, who had changed his name to Stalin—Man of Steel—as was the fashion of the early Bolsheviks.
“You know, Pekkala, memory can be deceiving. Even yours.”
“What do you mean?”
Stalin puffed thoughtfully at his pipe. “The man you thought was Colonel Kolchak, the man I also thought was Kolchak, turns out to have been an impostor.”
Although Pekkala was surprised to hear this, he knew it did not lie beyond the bounds of possibility. The Tsar himself had half a dozen look-alikes, who took his place at times of danger and who, in some cases, paid for that occupation with their lives. For someone as important to the Tsar as Colonel Kolchak, it did not seem unlikely that a double had been found for him as well.
“What does this have to do with the murder at Borodok?”
“The victim was a man named Isaac Ryabov, a former captain in the Imperial Cavalry and one of the last survivors of the Kolchak Expedition still in captivity at Borodok. Ryabov approached the camp commandant with an offer to reveal the whereabouts of Colonel Kolchak in exchange for being allowed to go free. But somebody got to him first.”
“Ryabov might well have known where Kolchak was hiding twenty years ago, but the colonel could have gone anywhere in the world since that time. Do you honestly think Ryabov’s information was still accurate?”
“It is a possibility which I cannot afford to overlook.” Stalin removed his pipe and laid it in the ashtray on his desk. Then he sat back and touched his fingertips together. “Do you suppose Colonel Kolchak has ever forgiven the Czechs for handing over his uncle to be executed?”
“I doubt it. From what I knew of Kolchak, forgiveness did not strike me as being one of his virtues. Personally, I think the Czechs had no choice.”
“I agree.” Stalin nodded. “But as far as Colonel Kolchak is concerned, the legion’s job was to protect his uncle as well as the gold. Whether every last one of them died fulfilling that duty would be irrelevant to a man like him.”
“And how do you know what he thinks?”
“I don’t. I am only telling you what I would think if I were Colonel Kolchak. And I am also telling you that when a man like Kolchak gets vengeance on his mind, he will set fire to the world before he can be satisfied.”
“Even if Kolchak can be found,” said Pekkala, “surely he does not pose a threat. He is only one man, after all.”
“I take no comfort in that. One person can still be dangerous. I know, because I am only one man and I am very dangerous. And when I see in another man those qualities which I also recognize within myself, I know that I cannot ignore him. You and I have a strange alliance, Pekkala. In our thinking, we are opposites in almost every way. But the one place where our ideas intersect lies in the struggle for our country to survive. It is the reason you did not die that day in the basement of Butyrka prison. But Kolchak is not like you. And that is why I put him to death—or attempted to, anyway.”
“If this is simply a vendetta against a man you tried and failed to kill, send one of your assassins to find him. I could be put to better use on other cases.”
“You may be right, but if my instincts are correct that Kolchak poses a threat to this country—”
“Then I will bring him to justice,” interrupted Pekkala.
“And that is why I’m sending you instead of somebody else.” As Stalin spoke, he slid Ryabov’s file across the desk towards Pekkala. Inside that folder would be every scrap of information Soviet Intelligence had managed to accumulate on Ryabov—everything from his blood type to his choice of cigarettes to the books he checked out of the library. “Your investigation is to be conducted in the utmost secrecy. Once you arrive at Borodok, if word leaks out among the prisoners that you are working for the Bureau of Special Operations, I will lose not only Ryabov’s killer but you as well.”
“I may need to involve Major Kirov in this investigation.”
Stalin spread his arms magnanimously. “Understood, and the camp commandant has also been instructed to assist you in any way he can. He is holding the body, as well as the murder weapon, until you arrive at the camp.”
“Who is in charge there now?”
“The same man who was running it when you were there.”
“Klenovkin?” An image surfaced in Pekkala’s mind of a gaunt, slope-shouldered man with black hair cut so short that it stood up like porcupine quills from his skull. Pekkala had met him only once, when he first arrived at the camp.
Having summoned Pekkala to his office, Klenovkin did not look up when Pekkala entered the room. All he said was, “Remove your cap when you are in my presence.” He then busied himself reading Pekkala’s prisoner file, carefully turning the large yellow pages, each one with a red diagonal stripe in the upper right-hand corner.
At last Klenovkin closed the file and raised his head, squinting at Pekkala through rimless spectacles. “We have all fallen from grace in one way or another,” he said. There was a resonance in his voice as if he were addressing a crowd instead of just o
ne man. “Having just read your history, convict Pekkala, I see that you have fallen further than most.”
In those first years of the Bolshevik government, so many of the prison inmates were in Borodok on account of their loyalty to Nicholas II that a man with Pekkala’s reputation as the Tsar’s most trusted servant could easily have led to an uprising in the camp. Klenovkin’s solution was to place Pekkala as far away as possible from the other inmates.
“You are a disease,” Klenovkin told Pekkala. “I will not allow you to infect my prisoners. The simplest thing to do would be to have you shot, but unfortunately I am not allowed to do that. Some benefit must be derived from your existence before we consign you to oblivion.”
Pekkala stared at the man. Even during the months of harsh interrogation leading up to his departure for Siberia, he had never felt as helpless as he did at that moment.
“I am sending you out into the wilderness,” continued Klenovkin. “You will become a tree-marker in the Valley of Krasnagolyana, a job no man has held for longer than six months.”
“Why not?”
“Because nobody lives that long.”
Working alone, with no chance of escape and far from any human contact, tree-markers died from exposure, starvation, and loneliness. Those who became lost, or who fell and broke a leg, were usually eaten by wolves. Tree marking was the only assignment at Borodok said to be worse than a death sentence.
Provisions were left for him three times a year at the end of a logging road. Kerosene. Cans of meat. Nails. For the rest, he had to fend for himself. His only task, besides surviving, was to mark in red paint those trees ready for cutting by the inmates of the camp. Lacking any brushes, Pekkala stirred his fingers in the scarlet paint and daubed his print upon the trunks. By the time the logging crews arrived, Pekkala would already be gone. The red handprints became, for most of the convicts, the only trace of him they ever saw.
Only rarely was he spotted by those logging crews who came to cut the timber. What they glimpsed was a creature barely recognizable as a man. With the crust of red paint that spattered his prison clothes and long hair maned about his face, he resembled a beast stripped of its skin and left to die. Wild rumors surrounded him—that he was an eater of human flesh, that he wore a scapular made from the bones of those who had vanished in the forest, that he carried a club whose end was embedded with human teeth, that he wore scalps laced together as a cap.
They called him the man with bloody hands.
By the time word of his identity leaked out among the prisoners, they assumed he was already dead.
But six months later, to Klenovkin’s astonishment, Pekkala was still alive. And he stayed alive.
When a young Lieutenant Kirov arrived to recall him back to duty with the Bureau of Special Operations, Pekkala had been living in the forest for nine years, longer than any other tree-marker in the history of the Gulag system.
TUCKING RYABOV’S FILE into his coat, Pekkala turned to leave.
“One more thing before you go,” said Stalin.
Pekkala turned again. “Yes?”
Reaching down beside his chair, Stalin picked up a small shopping bag and held it out towards Pekkala. “Your clothes for the journey.”
Pekkala glanced inside and saw what at first appeared to be some dirty, pinkish-gray rags. He lifted out the flimsy pajama-type shirt and recognized a standard prison-issue uniform. A shudder passed through him as he thought back to the last time he had worn garments like this.
At that moment, the door opened and Poskrebyshev walked in. He advanced two paces, stopped, and clicked his heels together. “Comrade Stalin, I beg to report that Poland has surrendered.”
Stalin nodded and said nothing.
“I also beg to inform you that the Katyn Operation has begun,” continued Poskrebyshev.
Stalin’s only reply was an angry stare.
“You asked me to tell you …”
“Get out,” said Stalin quietly.
Poskrebyshev’s heels smashed together once more, then he turned and left the room, closing the double doors behind him with a barely audible click of the lock.
“The Katyn Operation?” asked Pekkala.
“It would have been better for you not to know,” Stalin replied, “but since it is too late for that, let me answer your question with a question of my own. Suppose you were an officer in the Polish army, that you had surrendered and been taken prisoner. Let us say you had been well treated. You had been housed. You had been fed.”
“What is it you want to know, Comrade Stalin?”
“Say I offer you a choice: either a place in the Red Army or the opportunity to return home as a civilian.”
“They will choose to go home,” said Pekkala.
“Yes,” replied Stalin. “Most of them did.”
“But they will never arrive, will they?”
“No.”
In his mind, Pekkala could see those officers, bundled in the mysterious brown of their Polish army greatcoats, hands tied behind their backs with copper wire. One after the other, NKVD troopers shoved them to the edge of a huge pit dug into the orangey-brown soil of a forest in eastern Poland. With the barrels of their guns, the NKVD men tipped off the caps of their prisoners, sending them into the pit below. As each Polish officer was shot in the back of the head, he fell forward into the pit, onto the bodies of those who had been killed before.
How many were there? Pekkala wondered. Hundreds? Thousands?
By nightfall, the pit would be covered up.
Within a few weeks, tiny shoots of grass would rise from the trampled soil.
One thing Pekkala had learned, however. Nothing stays buried forever.
“You have not answered my question,” said Stalin. “I asked what you would do. Not they.”
“I would realize I had no choice,” replied Pekkala.
With a scythe-like sweep of his hand, Stalin brushed aside Pekkala’s words. “But I did give them a choice!”
“No, Comrade Stalin, you did not.”
Stalin smiled. “That is why you have survived, and why those other men will not.”
As soon as Pekkala had departed, Stalin pushed the intercom button. “Poskrebyshev!”
“Yes, Comrade Stalin.”
“All messages between Pekkala and Major Kirov are to be intercepted.”
“Of course.”
“Whatever Pekkala has to say, I want to read it before Kirov does. I want no secrets kept from me.”
“No, Comrade Stalin,” said Poskrebyshev, and a fresh coat of sweat slicked his palms.
The intercom button stayed on, whispering static into Stalin’s ears. “Is there anything else, Poskrebyshev?”
“Why do you let Pekkala speak to you that way? So disrespectfully?” Over the years, Poskrebyshev had advanced to the stage where he could occasionally express an unsolicited opinion to the Boss, although only in the most reverent of tones. But the way Pekkala talked to Stalin caused Poskrebyshev’s bowels to cramp. Even more amazing to him was the fact that Stalin let Pekkala get away with it. In asking such a question, Poskrebyshev was well aware that he had overstepped his bounds. If the answer to his question was a flood of obscenities from the next room, he knew he would have only himself to blame. Nevertheless, he simply had to know.
“The reason I endure his insolence—unlike, for example, yours, Poskrebyshev—is that Pekkala is the only person I know of who would not kill me for the chance to rule this country.”
“Surely that is not true, Comrade Stalin!” protested Poskrebyshev, knowing perfectly well that whether it was true or not, what mattered was that Stalin believed it.
“Ask yourself, Poskrebyshev—what would you do to sit where I am sitting now?”
An image flashed through Poskrebyshev’s mind, of himself at Stalin’s desk, smoking Stalin’s cigarettes and bullying his very own secretary. In that moment, Poskrebyshev knew that, in spite of all his claims of loyalty, he would have gutted Stalin like a fish for the
chance to take the leader’s place.
ONE HOUR LATER, as the last rays of sunset glistened on the ice-sheathed telegraph wires, Pekkala’s battered Emka staff car, driven by his assistant, Major Kirov, pulled into a rail yard at mile marker 17 on the Moscow Highway. The rail yard had no name. It was known simply as V-4, and the only trains departing from this place were convict transports headed for the Gulags.
However miserable the journey promised to be, Pekkala knew it was necessary to travel as a convict in order to protect the cover story that he had fallen out of favor with Stalin and received a twenty-year sentence for unspecified crimes against the State.
Major Kirov pulled up behind some empty freight cars, cut the engine, and looked out across the rail yard, where prisoners huddled by the wagons which would soon be taking them away.
“You can still call this off, Inspector.”
“You know that is impossible.”
“They have no right to send you back to that place, even if it is to carry out an investigation.”
“There is no ‘they,’ Kirov. The order came directly from Stalin.”
“Then he should at least have given you time to study the relevant files.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Pekkala answered. “The victim’s dossier is incomplete. There was only one page. The rest of it must be lost somewhere in NKVD archives. As a result, I know almost nothing about the man whose death I am being sent to investigate.”
The train whistle blew, and the prisoners began to climb aboard.
“It is time,” said Pekkala. “But first, there is something I need you to look after while I’m gone.” Into Kirov’s hand Pekkala dropped a heavy gold disk, as wide across as the length of his little finger. Along the center was a stripe of white enamel inlay, which began at a point, widened until it took up half the disk and narrowed again to a point on the other side. Embedded in the middle of the white enamel was a large round emerald. Together, the elements formed the unmistakable shape of an eye.
Pekkala had already been working for two years as the Tsar’s Special Investigator when the Tsar summoned him one evening to the Alexander Palace, his residence on the Tsarskoye Selo estate.
