by Sam Eastland
“What do you want?” Pekkala demanded.
“Inspector!” The guard had been running. He gasped for breath as he spoke. “The Emperor has sent for you!”
Pekkala lowered the gun.
A few minutes later, buttoning his coat as he ran, Pekkala followed the guard along the gravel path which led to the Alexander Palace. Moonlight turned the lawns of the Tsarskoye Selo estate into vast slabs of lapis lazuli.
The two men raced up the wide stone steps and into the front hall of the palace.
The building echoed with shouts and whispered voices.
A maid of the Imperial household, in her uniform of black dress and white apron, drifted past them like an albatross, one hand held against her mouth to stifle the sound of her crying.
Then Pekkala saw the Empress. Still in her mauve silk nightdress, she darted out of the Imperial bedroom. On slippered feet, the Empress glided towards Pekkala. “You must go to the Emperor at once!”
On her breath, Pekkala smelled the sickly odor of the opium-laced medicine without which Alexandra Romanov could no longer find her way into the catacombs of sleep. “What has happened, Majesty?”
“It is the nightmare,” she hissed.
A moment later Pekkala stood in the doorway to the Tsar’s bedroom.
The Tsar lay spread-eagled on his bed. The sheets had been kicked off. Sweat darkened his nightshirt.
Two nervous doctors hovered in the shadows.
“Pekkala,” groaned the Tsar, “is that you?”
“I am here, Majesty.”
“Get these butchers out of the room.” Feebly he gestured towards the doctors. “All they want to do is turn me into a morphine addict.”
The two men, somber as herons, filed out of the room without even glancing at Pekkala.
“Shut the door on your way out!” the Tsar commanded.
The doctors did as they were told.
Slowly, the Tsar sat up in bed. He was a picture of complete exhaustion. With twitching hands, he reached for the cigarette case which lay beside his bed. It had been fashioned out of solid gold by Michael Perchin, one of the workmasters at the Fabergé factory. The case had been engraved with gentle S-shaped curves, which reminded Pekkala of patterns he had seen as a child, in windblown sand down by the water’s edge at his family’s summer cottage on the Finnish island of Korpo.
From this case, the Tsar removed a cigarette. Each one contained a blend of tobacco prepared for him alone by Hajenius of Amsterdam. The frail rolling papers were emblazoned with a tiny silver double-headed eagle, the crest of the Romanov family.
As Pekkala stared at these objects, flinching momentarily when the Tsar struck fire from a jewel-encrusted lighter, it occurred to him how little they mattered to their owner at that moment. The Romanovs had built a wall of silver, gold, and platinum to keep the world away from them. But the world still found its way in. Like water filtering through cracks in a stone, it would ultimately shatter their existence.
“The Empress mentioned a nightmare,” said Pekkala.
The Tsar nodded, picking a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. He muttered a single word. “Kodynka.”
Then Pekkala understood.
On May 26, 1896, the day of Nicholas’s and Alexandra’s coronation, the Tsar and Tsarina had undergone a grueling five-hour service at the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin. Four days later, as dictated by tradition, the newly crowned couple would proceed to Kodynka field. There they would greet the thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of spectators who had come to wish them well. These spectators would be fed and gifts marking the occasion would be distributed. The Imperial couple would then proceed to the French embassy, where a celebration of unparalleled extravagance had been prepared. This included more than 100,000 fresh roses, which had been brought by express train from France.
The festivities began at Kodynka long before the Imperial couple were due to arrive. At one point, reacting to a rumor that the food tents were running out of beer, the crowd stampeded. More than a thousand people were crushed to death, many of them falling into shallow drainage ditches dug in lines across the field.
As the royal procession began its journey to Kodynka, the dead and dying were loaded onto carts and transported from the field, forming a macabre procession of their own. In the confusion, cartloads of disfigured corpses ended up among the lines of ornate coaches bearing the jewel-encrusted guests who had been invited to the ceremony.
To make matters worse, the Imperial couple were persuaded to continue with their schedule and attend the French embassy gathering.
Although guests at the party remarked on the obvious distress of the Emperor and his bride, the image of the pair waltzing, surrounded by thousands of bouquets of roses, remained in the minds of the Russian people. The royal couple had danced while their subjects were dying. And for a couple who were every bit as superstitious as the people whom they ruled, the omen seemed clear from the start.
“In my dream,” the Tsar told Pekkala, “I am at the French embassy, greeting the guests. But there are no ambassadors, no heads of state, no cousins who are kings. Instead, it is the dead from the Kodynka field. They trail their blood into the hall and the orchestra plays and they cling to each other with their mangled fingers and dance on their shattered limbs, staring into each other’s faces with their bulging eyes.”
“The dead are dancing?”
“All around me. The music never stops.” The Tsar inhaled on his cigarette. A moment later, two gray jets of smoke streamed from his nose. “And they are laughing.”
“But why?”
“Because they don’t know they are dead.” The Tsar swung his legs down from the bed and walked over to the window. Drawing back the curtains, he stared out at the velvet sky.
“Why did you send for me, Majesty?” asked Pekkala. “You know I can’t protect you from your dreams.”
“That may be true,” replied the Tsar, “but with all that Finnish witchcraft in your blood, I thought perhaps you might be able to tell me what it means.”
He already knows, thought Pekkala, only he cannot bring himself to say the words. That is why the dream comes back to him and why he will run from it for the rest of his life, scattering gold and jewels in its path in the hope of distracting the beast which is pursuing him. But the beast does not care about his treasure, and it will hunt him down and kill him in the end.
“FOUR SEVEN FOUR FIVE!”
Pekkala’s heart lurched as the barracks door flew open and a guard walked in, calling out Pekkala’s prison number.
It was still the middle of the night.
Awakened from his waltzing trance, Larchenko tottered back to his chair by the door.
“Four seven four five!” the guard called out again.
Pekkala climbed out of his bunk and stood at attention, bare feet cringing against the cold floorboards.
The guard’s flashlight sliced through the musty air of the bunkhouse, until it finally settled upon Pekkala. “Put your boots on. Come with me.”
Pekkala wedged his feet into the wooden-soled boots he had been issued and clumped after the guard. As he emerged into the Siberian night, the first breath felt like pepper in his lungs.
He followed the guard across the compound until they reached the commandant’s office.
“In there,” said the soldier, and without another word he trudged back to the guardhouse.
WHILE PEKKALA was being marched across the compound, Commandant Klenovkin had been watching.
Ever since Klenovkin had learned that Pekkala would be handling the investigation, he’d been dreading this meeting with his former prisoner.
When Klenovkin had mentioned the murder of Ryabov in his weekly report, he’d had no idea that Stalin would come to hear about it, much less put Pekkala on the case. Nothing good can come of this, he thought, as anxiety twisted in his gut. One way or another, those White Russians of the Kolchak Expedition had been the source of all his troubles. As soon as they a
rrived, they had formed themselves into a gang which virtually took over the camp, and even though most of them had died from the usual effects of overwork, malnutrition, and despair, the few who remained continued to exert a powerful influence.
Klenovkin blamed the White Russians for the fact that he had never received the recognition he deserved. All the commandants who had started out at the same time as he did were senior consultants for the Dalstroy company. They lived in comfort in the great cities—Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad. They ate their lunches in fine restaurants. They took their holidays at resorts on the Black Sea. Klenovkin had none of these luxuries. The nearest restaurant, a rail station cafe serving kvass and smoked caribou meat, was more than eight hundred kilometers away.
The only sign Klenovkin had ever received from Dalstroy that they appreciated him at all was an ashtray, made of pinkish-white onyx, which he had been awarded for fifteen years of service to the company. And he did not even smoke.
The way Klenovkin saw it, he had been left here to rot among these Siberians—chaldons, as they called themselves. To Klenovkin, they were all the same—a dirty and suspicious people. They trusted nobody except their own kind. I could live a dozen lifetimes here, thought Klenovkin, and I would still be a stranger to them. Every time he heard that train departing from the Borodok railhead, it was all he could do not to run down there and jump aboard.
But it was impossible. What held him back was not the guards and the stockade fence but paperwork, quotas, and fear. As far as Klenovkin was concerned, he was as much a prisoner as any convict in the camp.
But now, perhaps, all that was going to change.
As much as he had hoped never to set eyes on Pekkala again, Klenovkin knew that if anyone could get to the bottom of Ryabov’s murder, it would be the Emerald Eye.
So Klenovkin had made up his mind to endure the presence of the unearthly Finn, who had somehow survived in a place where death had been a virtual certainty.
However, thought Klenovkin, addressing the voices in his head, which had been clamoring at him ever since he’d learned that Pekkala was on his way, I am not simply going to grovel at the feet of a man who was once my prisoner. I must maintain some shred of dignity. I will remind him, in no uncertain terms, that I command at Borodok. The Emerald Eye can do his job, but only as my subordinate. I will be in charge.
The commandant looked out at the statues in the compound, hoping to match the seriousness on the faces of those workers with a steely expression of his own.
When the concrete sculpture had arrived, six years ago, Klenovkin assumed that he was at last being recognized for his years of loyal service to Dalstroy. No other camp had statues like this, and even if the motto did not seem entirely relevant to men imprisoned at a Gulag, nevertheless it was a sign to Klenovkin that he had not been forgotten.
Klenovkin had the statues installed in the center of the compound. The work had barely been completed when he received an inquiry from the University of Sverdlovsk, asking if he had by any chance seen a statue of a man and a woman which had been commissioned as the centerpiece of the university’s new Center for Medical Studies. Apparently the statues had been placed on the wrong train and nobody seemed to know where they were.
Klenovkin never answered the letter. He tore it up and threw it in the metal garbage can beside his desk. Then, overcome with paranoia, he set the contents of the garbage can on fire.
In the years which followed, Klenovkin had often found inspiration in the determined faces of that nameless man and woman.
Today, however, the hoped-for inspiration was not there. Windblown snow swirled through the compound, filling the eye sockets of the half-naked figures so that they seemed to stagger blindly forward into the storm.
Klenovkin was snatched from his daydream by the sound of the outer door creaking open. Hurriedly, he returned to his desk, sat down, and tried to look busy.
Pekkala stepped into the warm, still air of the commandant’s waiting room. A lamp was burning on a table. In the corner, a potbellied iron stove sighed as the logs crumbled inside it. Beside the stove, another guard, wearing a heavy knee-length coat, sat on a rickety chair with his boots up on the windowsill. Pekkala recognized this man as the same one who had opened fire on the prisoners when they first arrived at the Borodok railhead. The guard stared sleepily at Pekkala, his eyes as red in the lamplight as the sun on a Japanese flag.
“Send him in!” Klenovkin’s muffled voice reached through the office door.
The guard did not bother to get up. He merely nodded in the direction from which the voice had come and then went back to staring at the lamp.
Crossing the bare floor, Pekkala knocked on Klenovkin’s door, his knuckles barely touching the wood.
“Enter!” came a muffled voice.
Inside Klenovkin’s office, Pekkala breathed the smell of the soapy water which had been used to clean the room. In the coppery light of a lantern, he could make out the streaks of a cleaning rag on the glass panes, like mare’s tail clouds in a windy sky.
Klenovkin was sitting at his desk, sharpening pencils.
“Camp Commander,” said Pekkala, as he quietly closed the door.
“I am busy!” Klenovkin turned the pencils in the tiny metal sharpener, letting the papery curls fall into his ashtray. When, at last, he had finished this task, he brushed the shavings into his hand with a precision that reminded Pekkala of a croupier at a roulette wheel, hoeing in chips across the green felt table. Not until Klenovkin was satisfied that every fleck of dirt had been removed did he finally raise his head and look Pekkala in the eye.
Even though Pekkala had not seen Klenovkin in many years, the commandant’s features had been etched into his brain. Time had rounded the edges of Klenovkin’s once-gaunt face. The dark hair Pekkala remembered had turned a grayish white. Only the man’s gaze, menacing and squinty, had not changed. “Prisoners must remove their caps when they are in my presence.”
“I am no longer your prisoner.”
Klenovkin smiled humorlessly. “That is only partly true, Inspector. You may be running this investigation, but I am running this camp. As long as you are wearing the clothes of an inmate, that is how you will be treated. We wouldn’t want that guard out in the waiting room to become suspicious, would we?”
Slowly, Pekkala reached up to his cap and slid it off his head.
“Good.” Klenovkin nodded, satisfied. “I must admit, Pekkala, I do find this meeting somewhat ironic. After all, following our last meeting, I did my best to kill you.”
“And failed.”
“Indeed, and thus the irony that I am now expected to assist you in whatever way I can. Bear in mind, however, that I may be the only help you get. As for that gang of White Russians, of which Captain Ryabov was a member, I wouldn’t expect much from them.”
“And why is that?”
“Because they have gone mad. The years at Borodok have worn away their minds as well as their bodies. Now they speak of a day when they will be rescued from this place and sent to live like kings in some faraway land.” Klenovkin rolled his eyes in mocking pity. “They really believe this! They are fanatics, tattooing their bodies with the symbols of their loyalty to a cause that no longer exists. These men have nothing left but hope, for which they no longer require proof or logic or even reason to support their beliefs. They even have a name for the dwindling ranks of their disciples. They call themselves Comitati—whatever that means.” Then he laughed. “It is a word that has no meaning, for men who serve no purpose.”
But that word did have a meaning, and the mention of it made Pekkala’s blood run cold. The Comitatus was an ancient pact between warriors and their leader, in which men swore never to leave the battlefield before their leader, and the leader swore in return never to abandon those who followed him. As each swore allegiance, the man and the oath became one and the same. Together, those who had made the pact formed a band known as the Comitati. Now Pekkala knew why these men had never given up the
fight. They were waiting for Kolchak to return and fulfill the oath he had taken.
“In a way,” continued Klenovkin, “they have already been rescued. Their minds escaped from this camp long ago. The only sane thing left for them is to surrender to their madness. The one man among them who had any grip on reality was Ryabov, and that, I think you will find, is the reason he is dead.”
“How many of these Comitati were originally sent to Borodok?”
“There were about seventy of them in the beginning.”
“And how many remain?”
“Three,” replied Klenovkin. “There is a former lieutenant named Tarnowski, and two others—Sedov and Lavrenov. In spite of how many have died over the years, Ryabov was the first to be murdered.”
“Has his body been preserved?”
“Of course.”
“I need to see the remains,” said Pekkala. “Preferably now.”
“By all means,” replied Klenovkin, rising to his feet. “The sooner you can deliver to Stalin whatever it is that he wants from these men, the quicker I can be rid of them. And of you as well, Inspector.”
Heaving on a canvas coat, thickly lined with coarse and shaggy goat fur, Klenovkin led Pekkala out of the office.
Shivering in his prison jacket, Pekkala followed the commandant to the camp kitchen, which had been closed down for the night.
Inside, at the back of the building, stood a large walk-in freezer, its door fastened shut with a bronze padlock as big as a man’s clenched fist.
Removing a key from his pocket, Klenovkin unfastened the padlock and the two men stepped inside.
Klenovkin turned on an electric light. One bare bulb glimmered weakly from the low ceiling. Frost which had coated the thin glass shell of the bulb immediately melted away. By the time the droplets reached the floor, they had frozen again and crackled on the ground like grains of unboiled rice.
On one side of the freezer, pig carcasses dangled from iron hooks. On the other stood slabs of pasty white beef fat and stacks of vegetables which had been boiled, mashed, and pressed into bricks.
