by Sam Eastland
At that moment Pekkala heard someone enter the kitchen—the creak of the spring on the outer door and then the gunshot slam of the inner door being closed.
Realizing he was trapped, he darted to the end of the freezer and hid behind the pig carcasses. On his way he yanked the dirty pull string of the light. The freezer was plunged into a coffin-like darkness, but seconds later the sharp glare of a flashlight burst like an explosion in the cramped space.
Pekkala glimpsed the unmistakable silhouette of Melekov. He immediately began to calculate how much trouble he might actually be in. He hadn’t actually eaten anything, so perhaps Melekov would let him off. He could say he found the door open and went in to see if any food had been taken. It was a flimsy excuse, but the only one he could come up with. It would all depend on what mood Melekov was in. He might laugh it off, or he might decide to make life difficult.
Knowing there was still a chance he could escape detection, Pekkala remained silent while Melekov’s footsteps scuffed slowly across the concrete floor and the flashlight beam played across the carcasses, making them seem to twitch as if there was still life in them.
Pekkala’s lungs grew hot as the air in them became exhausted. He could only last a few more seconds before breathing out, at which point Melekov would surely see his breath condensing in the cold.
He heard another footstep, then another. Just when Pekkala had made up his mind to step out into the open and surrender, he heard a dull thump and, in the same moment, the blade of a long butcher knife pierced the meat of the carcass next to him. The point jammed to a halt against the pig’s ribs, only a hand’s width from Pekkala’s throat. Then the knife disappeared again, back the way it came, like a metal tongue sliding into a mouth.
“Melekov!” shouted Pekkala, still blinded by the flashlight and holding up his hands to shield himself. “It’s me!”
“You walked into my trap,” snarled Melekov.
“This was a trap? For me? But why?”
Melekov’s only reply was a bestial roar. He raised the butcher knife, ready to strike again.
Pekkala jumped to the side, crashing into a shelf as the blade glanced off the wall, leaving a long silver stripe through the frost. Bowls of food tumbled from the racks. Jars of pickled beets smashed in eruptions of ruby-colored juice and cans of army-issue Tushonka stew clattered across the floor.
Snatching up one of the heavy cans, he hurled it at the silhouette.
Melekov howled with pain as the can struck him full in the face. The flashlight fell from his grasp.
Pekkala dove to grab it, turning the beam on his attacker.
With one hand, Melekov covered his face. Blood poured in ribbons from between the fingers. His other hand still gripped the knife.
Intent on disarming the cook, Pekkala grabbed a frozen pig’s heart off the shelf and pitched it as hard as he could.
The rock-hard knot of meat bounced off Melekov’s face. With a wail of pain, he tumbled back among the bowls of guts and dropped the knife.
By the time Melekov hit the ground, Pekkala had already snatched up the weapon. “Why on earth are you trying to kill me?” he demanded.
“I figured it out,” groaned Melekov.
“Figured what out?”
Melekov clambered up until he was resting on his knees. Dazed from the fight, his head bowed forward, as if he were a supplicant before the slaughtered pigs. “Klenovkin is going to give you my job.”
“I don’t want your damned job!”
“It doesn’t matter what you want or do not want. In this camp, Klenovkin decides our fates. And where will I be if he throws me out? This isn’t like Moscow, where a man who loses his job can walk across the road and find another. There are no other jobs for me here. I’m too old to be a guard. I have no training for the hospital. If Klenovkin wants to replace me, I’ll have no place to go.”
“Even if I did want the job, did you ever stop to think that Klenovkin could never hand it to a prisoner? Dalstroy wouldn’t let him. The company would never trust a convict with their food.”
“I didn’t think of that.” Melekov raised his head sharply. “None of this was my idea.”
Pekkala threw the knife away across the floor. “Just get up!”
Gingerly, Melekov dabbed his fingers against his nostrils. “I think you broke my nose,” he muttered bitterly.
“Whose idea was this, Melekov?”
Reluctantly, the cook shook his head. “If I tell you …”
“Give me the name,” growled Pekkala.
“Gramotin,” he replied in a whisper.
Pekkala breathed out slowly. “Did he say why?”
Melekov shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. From now on, my life’s worth even less than yours, and yours wasn’t worth much to begin with.”
Pekkala realized that the time was fast approaching when he would either have to leave this camp or risk becoming the subject of his own murder investigation.
In the meantime, Ryabov’s death remained unsolved.
That thought sent a familiar shudder through his bones.
This was not the first time Pekkala had failed to close a case.
Pekkala and the Tsar stood on a balcony outside the Alexander Palace. It was an early-summer day, the sky powder blue and pollen lying luminous and green upon the puddles of a rainstorm from the night before.
“A man has been found dead,” said the Tsar. “He was a courier for the Turkish embassy.”
“Where was the body found?” asked Pekkala.
“It was pulled from the water just beneath a bridge over the Novokislaevsk River, north of Moscow.
“Their ambassador asked for you by name. Given the value of our relationship with that country, I could hardly refuse.”
“I will begin immediately.”
“Of course, but do not exhaust yourself with this inquiry.”
Pekkala glanced at the Tsar, trying to fathom the meaning of his words.
“What I am telling you,” Nicholas Romanov explained, “is that this is ultimately a matter for the Turks to unravel. It is not our job to oversee their diplomats. Look around, see what you can find, and then move on.”
Pekkala’s preliminary inspection of the body revealed no marks which would suggest a violent death. The dead man was fully clothed but did not appear to have drowned. Pekkala quickly ruled out suicide, since the drop would not have killed or even injured him.
Every day, during that first week of the investigation, Pekkala returned to the bridge and stood looking down into the water as he attempted to compose in his mind not only the reason for this man’s death but the questions which might lead him to the answer.
He stood among fishermen, who dangled bamboo poles above the water, smoked their pipes, and talked about the body. They had been the first to find it and barraged Pekkala with questions about the case.
But Pekkala had questions of his own. “Could the body have drifted here from somewhere upstream?” he asked.
“This is a lazy old river,” one of them replied. “Somebody threw him off the bridge. Where he fell is where he sank and where he sank is where we found him.”
“Do you fish here every day?”
“This time of year we do. Carp, pike, dace. They’re all down there in those weeds.”
“Then they knew you would find him. In fact, somebody wanted you to find him.”
“Unless,” suggested another fisherman, “they didn’t know the area and were just getting rid of the body.”
Pekkala shook his head. “This was done by a professional. The dead man is a message. But about what? And to whom?”
“That would be your job, Inspector,” said the fisherman.
After one week, without explanation, the Tsar called Pekkala off the case and did not assign a new investigator to take over.
Ever since, Pekkala had been haunted by his failure to arrest the killer. He felt an obligation to the victim, as if they’d formed a partnership between the living and the dea
d. Since that day, like stones in his pockets, he had carried the unanswered questions of that murder.
THE NEXT DAY MELEKOV SHOWED up for work in the kitchen with a bandage on his face and two black eyes.
The two men did not speak about what had happened the day before.
Pekkala was just finishing his breakfast duties, when Tarnowski, Lavrenov, and Sedov barged into the kitchen.
Melekov, with a mound of fresh dough balanced in his hands, stood paralyzed with fear.
Tarnowski grabbed the cook and pushed him to his knees. The dough fell with a splat onto the floor.
At the same time Lavrenov produced a leather cord from his sleeve, looped it around Melekov’s neck, and began to strangle him.
Melekov’s face turned purple. His eyes bulged. Feebly, he clawed at the leather cord which had sunk into the soft flesh of his throat.
“Enough!” Pekkala shouted.
Lavrenov, his teeth bared with the effort of strangling Melekov, glanced first at Pekkala and then towards Tarnowski.
Tarnowski jerked his chin.
Lavrenov let go of the cord.
With a gasp, Melekov collapsed onto the floor.
“We weren’t going to kill him,” explained Sedov.
“Just teach him a lesson is all,” said Lavrenov.
Tarnowski went to Melekov and rolled the man over with his boot. “I told you to leave him alone.”
Melekov nodded weakly, his hands pressed to his throat.
“Now get out,” Tarnowski ordered the cook. “Come back in half an hour.”
Crawling on his hands and knees, Melekov departed from the kitchen.
“You didn’t need to do that,” Pekkala told them. “We had already made our peace.”
“With him, perhaps,” replied Tarnowski, “but what about the next one? And the one after that? Because, believe me, there will be more, which is why I have come here to make you an offer.”
“What kind of offer?”
“The chance to save your life.”
“How?”
“By getting out of here,” said Tarnowski.
“You mean escape? What makes you think I’d stand a better chance than anybody else who’s tried to leave this place?”
“Because we are coming with you,” replied Sedov.
Lavrenov nodded in agreement. “We have a plan. If it works, we’ll soon be living like kings.”
“That doesn’t sound like a plan,” answered Pekkala. “It sounds more like a fantasy.”
“It is indeed a fantasy,” Tarnowski agreed, “but one a man can bring to life with pockets filled with gold.”
“What gold?” demanded Pekkala.
“The last of the Imperial Reserves,” whispered Lavrenov.
Pekkala stared at the men with a look of pity on his face. “I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, but the Imperial Reserves are long gone. The Czechs handed them over to the Bolsheviks at Irkutsk, in exchange for being allowed to pass through the Lake Baikal tunnels, which the Reds would have destroyed otherwise. By the time this occurred, you were already in prison. Perhaps nobody ever told you—”
“We know about the Czechs,” Sedov interrupted. “We know how they betrayed us and that they gave everything they had to the Bolsheviks.”
“The thing is,” said Lavrenov, “they didn’t have it all.”
“That is a secret we have kept for many years,” Tarnowski said, “but the time has come for you to know the truth.”
“Colonel Kolchak had told us that the safest place for the gold was in the hands of his uncle, Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who had gathered together an army of anti-Bolshevik forces,” Sedov told Pekkala. “Getting to them meant crossing the entire length of Russia, but if we could do it, not only would the gold be safe but we would also be out of danger. You see, we made that journey as much for ourselves as for the Tsar. By the time we reached the city of Kazan, we had crossed almost half the country, but the Red Cavalry was catching up with us. We knew we’d never make it if we tried to hold on to the gold.”
Lavrenov picked up the story. “We made the decision to hide the Imperial Reserves in Kazan. The Czech Legion was behind us, but moving along the same route and heading in the same direction. They were a much stronger force than our own, over thirty thousand men. If only we could have linked up with them, we would have been safe from the Reds, but the Reds had positioned themselves between our two forces. If we had stayed where we were and waited for the Czechs to catch up with us, the Reds would have finished us off long before the Czechs arrived to help. We managed to get word through to the Czechs about where the gold was hidden and they picked it up when they passed through Kazan.”
“You say they didn’t have it all. What happened? Did you spend it along the way?”
“Some of it,” admitted Tarnowski. “At almost every town we came to, the locals demanded bribes or tried to overcharge us for food or feed for our horses. We had used up three crates of gold by the time Colonel Kolchak declared that from then on, we would simply take what we wanted. But those three cases were only a fraction of what was missing from the Imperial Reserves that the Czechs handed over at Irkutsk.”
“You mean they just left the rest of the gold behind in Kazan? Is that it?”
Tarnowski shook his head. “What happened was that at the last minute the colonel decided we should take some of the gold with us. His uncle was expecting that gold and Kolchak was afraid to come to him empty-handed. We were moving more quickly when we pulled out of Kazan, but still not quickly enough. The Reds caught up with us. What happened after that was a slaughter.”
“But how did you manage to prevent them from capturing it?” asked Pekkala.
“When we realized the Reds were only a day or two behind us,” continued Lavrenov, “we sent Colonel Kolchak on ahead. At first he did not want to go, but we knew what would happen if the Bolsheviks got hold of him. We begged the colonel to save himself, and finally he agreed.”
“Before he left,” said Sedov, “he swore that he would not abandon us, and in return each man who stayed behind took an oath that we would never give up the location of the gold. That night, once we were sure that the colonel had gotten away safely, we buried the crates in the woods beside the railroad, not two days’ march from this camp.”
“How can you be certain it’s still there?”
“If it had been found,” replied Lavrenov, “word would have reached us by now.”
Pekkala realized he was right. If that gold had been discovered, Stalin would have made sure that the whole country knew about his final triumph over the Tsar. He also knew the area where the Comitati had buried those crates. It was as wild and inhospitable a place as any he had seen. Once the gold was underground, no one would have stumbled upon it by accident, even if trains passed by not more than a stone’s throw away.
During his years as a tree-marker in the Valley of Krasnagolyana, the railroad had marked the northern boundary of the Borodok timber-cutting region. Beyond it lay a region assigned to another camp, a notorious place called Mamlin-3, where experiments were conducted on human subjects. To be caught outside this region meant certain death.
If the wind was right, Pekkala could hear the sound of the Trans-Siberian Express passing through the forest. Sometimes, overcome by loneliness, he would trudge through the woods on his homemade snowshoes until he reached the tracks. There, standing at the edge of his world, he waited for the train to go by, just to catch a glimpse of another human being.
The railway guards aboard the train would shoot at Pekkala if they saw him, whether on orders or for sport he did not know, so he always stayed hidden, eyes fixed on the stuttering images of passengers staring bleary-eyed out at the impenetrable wilderness of Siberia, unaware that the wilderness was staring back at them.
“The next day,” said Tarnowski, “the Reds attacked. The battle took place almost within sight of this valley. We held out for three days, but they outnumbered us by four to one. We knew we could
n’t win, but still we made them pay for every inch of ground. By the time it was over, of the two hundred men in the expedition, there were only seventy of us left. The Reds marched us straight to Borodok and we have been here ever since. Since the Bolsheviks found no gold, they concluded that we must have left it all with the Czechs.”
“And now your idea is to reclaim it?”
“Exactly,” replied Sedov.
“But this time,” said Lavrenov, “we are keeping it for ourselves.”
“That gold belongs to us now,” muttered Sedov. “God knows, we have earned it.”
“A hundred times over,” agreed Lavrenov.
“Where will you go once you’ve escaped,” asked Pekkala, “assuming you can even make it through the gates alive?”
“The border with China isn’t far from here,” Sedov told him. “Once we cross over, we’ll be safe.”
“But until then, you’ll be in the country of the Ostyaks. How do you plan to get past them when no other prisoner has ever succeeded before?”
“The colonel will take care of us,” Sedov answered. “We have waited many years, but at last the day of our deliverance is near.”
“Are you insane?” stammered Pekkala. “Now, listen to me, for the sake of your lives. I admire your loyalty to Colonel Kolchak. No one could have asked from you more than you have already given. But that loyalty has not been repaid. The colonel is gone. He has been gone for a long time. Even if he’s still alive, a fact of which I am by no means certain, whatever special powers you have granted him will not persuade the Ostyaks. Those men out there will kill you. They do not care about your faith, in God or anyone else. They care about the bread and salt Klenovkin gives them in exchange for your frozen corpses.”
Sedov only smiled and shook his head.
“Soon you’ll understand,” said Lavrenov. “Just wait until you set eyes on the gold.”
“I already have,” said Pekkala.
It was a Sunday afternoon in August.
Pekkala had been sitting at his kitchen table, trying to read the newspaper. On either side of him lay large bowls filled with ice. In spite of this effort to cool himself down, he was still drenched in sweat. The newspaper stuck to his damp fingers. The ticking of the clock in the next room, which under normal circumstances he only noticed if it stopped, now seemed to be growing louder, as if a woodpecker was tapping against his skull.
