by Sam Eastland
Gorenko climbed up on to the flat section at the back of the tank and opened up the engine grille. He reached his hand into the engine and when he drew it out, his fingertips were smeared with what looked like grease. ‘You know what this is?’
Pekkala shook his head.
‘It’s fuel,’ explained Gorenko. ‘Ordinary diesel fuel. At least that’s what it is supposed to be. But it has been contaminated.’
‘With what?’
‘Bleach. It has destroyed the inner workings of the engine. The whole thing will have to be refitted, the fuel system drained, all hoses and feeds replaced. It needs a complete rebuild. Number 4 was Ushinksy’s own special project. Each of us here had a favourite. We sort of adopted them. And Ushinsky is taking this hard.’
‘Perhaps it was an accident,’ suggested Kirov.
Gorenko shook his head. ‘Whoever did this knew exactly how to wreck an engine. Not just damage it, you understand. Destroy it. There’s no doubt in my mind, Inspectors. This was a deliberate act.’ He jumped down from the tank, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the fuel from his fingers. ‘If you knew how hard he worked on this machine, you’d understand how he feels.’
‘Is he right?’ asked Pekkala. ‘Is the whole project ruined?’
‘No!’ replied Gorenko. ‘In a few months, as long as we can keep working on it, the T-34 should be ready. Even with Nagorski gone, the T-34 will still be an excellent machine, but there’s a difference between excellence and perfection. The trouble with Ushinsky is that he needs everything to be perfect. As far as he’s concerned, now that the Colonel is gone, any hope of perfection is out of reach. And I’ll tell you what I’ve been telling Ushinsky since we first began this project. It would never have been perfect. There will always be something, like the rate of fire in those machine guns, which will just have to be good enough.’
‘I understand,’ said Pekkala. ‘Tell him we took no offence.’
‘If you could tell him yourself,’ pleaded Gorenko. ‘If you could just talk to him, tell him to choose his words more carefully, I think it would really help.’
‘We don’t have time now,’ said Kirov.
‘Call us at the office later,’ suggested Pekkala. ‘Right now, we need to find Zalka.’
‘Maybe Ushinsky was right after all,’ said Gorenko. ‘Now that Nagorski is gone, we could use all the help we can get.’
*
One hour later, Kirov dropped Pekkala at the office.
‘I’ll put in a call to Lysenkova,’ said Pekkala. ‘I need to tell her she can stop searching for those White Guild agents. As of now, all our efforts should be focused on locating Zalka. Get down to the records office and see if you can find out where he lives. But don’t try to bring him in on your own. We should assume that Zalka was the man in the woods. It looks like he had the motive for killing Nagorski, and the fact, that he would have known his way around the facility would explain why Samarin thought someone on the inside was responsible for the murder.’
While Kirov drove to the public records office, Pekkala went up to the office and called Lysenkova. Worried that NKVD might be listening in, he told her they needed to meet in person.
As soon as she arrived, Pekkala explained about the White Guild agents.
‘Did you have any luck deciphering the formula, Inspector?’ asked Lysenkova.
‘That’s the other reason for tracking down Zalka,’ replied Pekkala. ‘If he’s still alive, he may be the only one who can help us.’
Lysenkova stood. ‘I’ll get started right away. And thank you for trusting me, Inspector. There are many who don’t. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumours.’
‘There are always rumours.’
‘Well, you should know that some of them are true.’
Pekkala raised his head and looked her in the eye. ‘I heard that you denounced your own parents.’
Lysenkova nodded. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘Why?’
‘Because my father told me to. It was my only way out.’
‘Out of where?’
‘A place you know well, Inspector. I am talking about Siberia.’
Pekkala stared at her. ‘But I thought they were sent to Siberia because you denounced them. You mean you were already there?’
‘That’s right. My mother had already been sentenced to twenty years as a class 59 criminal.’
‘Your mother? What did she do?’
‘My mother,’ explained Lysenkova, ‘was the only female supervisor on the production staff of the Leningrad Steam Turbine Factory. The factory was to be one of the great industrial triumphs of the 1920s, a place where foreign dignitaries could be brought to show the efficiency of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself had arranged to visit the factory on its opening day. The trouble was that construction had fallen behind schedule, but Stalin still refused to change the date of his visit. So at a time when the factory should have been operational, they had not yet produced a single tractor. In fact, the main construction floor didn’t even have a roof yet. And that was exactly where Stalin had announced he would meet the workers of the factory. So, roof or no roof, that’s where the meeting was held. It was raining the day he arrived. My mother ordered a podium to be built so that Stalin could stand above the crowd and look out over the heads of the workers. There was also a tarpaulin to shield him from the rain. The day before his visit, political advisers had arrived at the factory. Above the podium, they hung a banner.’ Lysenkova spread her arms above her head, as if to frame the text between her hands. ‘“Long Live Stalin, The Best Friend Of All Soviet Workers”. But there was no way to shelter the workers from the rain, so they all stood there getting wet. They stood for an hour and a half before Stalin even arrived. By then, the letters of the banner had started to run. Red ink was dripping off the banner. It made puddles on the concrete floor. When Stalin walked up to the podium, everybody clapped, as the political advisers had instructed them to do. The trouble was, nobody knew when to stop. They all assumed that Stalin would make some gesture, or start talking, or something, anything, to indicate when the clapping should cease. But when the applause started, Stalin just stood there. Of course, it was obvious he must have been furious that the factory was only half built, but he showed no anger. He just smiled at everybody getting soaked. Red droplets fell from the banner. The clapping continued. The workers were too afraid to quit.
‘This went on for twenty minutes. My mother was in charge of the floor. That was her job. Nobody else was doing anything. She began to think it might be her responsibility to get the meeting started. The longer this clapping went on, the more convinced she became that, since no one else was prepared to act, she ought to be the one.’
Lysenkova brought her hands slowly together and then drew them apart and kept them there. ‘So she stopped clapping. That was the moment Stalin had been waiting for, but not so that he could start the meeting. He looked at my mother. That’s all. Just looked at her. Then he got down from the podium, and he and his entourage drove away. No one had said a word. It was still pouring. The letters on the banner had completely washed away. One week later, my mother, my father and I were all shipped out to the Special Settlement of Dalstroy-Seven.’
‘The settlement,’ whispered Pekkala. And then he went blind as an image of that place exploded behind his eyes.
Dalstroy-Seven was a collection of half a dozen log houses, poorly and hurriedly built, bunched at the edge of a stream in the valley of Krasnagolyana.
The site was less than ten kilometres from Pekkala’s camp. He had arrived in the valley five years before. It was early summer then, which gave him plenty of time to work on the cabin before the first snow of autumn appeared. His cabin had been solidly constructed in the style known as zemlyanka, in which half of the living space was underground and the gaps between the logs caulked with mud and grass.
But the inhabitants of Dalstroy-Seven had shown up just after the first frost and there had been no time to build adequate shelters
before the winter set in.
Special Settlement people were a subsection of the Gulag camp system, in which husbands and wives might all be shipped off to different camps, and the children sent to orphanages if they were too young to work. Special Settlements were shipped out to Siberia as complete families, dumped in the forest or out on the tundra and left to fend for themselves until such time as they might be required as labour in the Gulag camps. Until then, the settlements were nothing more than prisons without walls. Sometimes these settlements lasted. More often, when guards arrived to take away the prisoners, all they found were ghost villages, with no trace left of the people who had once lived there.
Dalstroy settlement fell under the jurisdiction of a notorious camp named Mamlin-Three on the other side of the valley. The twenty-odd inhabitants of Dalstroy-Seven were city folk, to judge from the mistakes they made – building the cabins too close to the river, not knowing it would flood in springtime, making their chimneys too short which meant the smoke would blow back into the cabins. With winter already descending, like a white tidal wave sweeping through the valley, the inmates of Dalstroy were as good as dead.
Pekkala saw himself as he was then, a barely human presence draped in the rags he had worn into the forest, staring at them from his hiding place: a rocky outcrop that looked down upon the valley where they had been abandoned with no instructions other than simply to survive until the spring.
He stepped back into the shadows, knowing there was nothing he could do for them. He did not dare to show himself, since he was well beyond the boundaries of the Borodok camp, of which he was officially an inmate. With the task of marking trees for cutting, he was allowed to roam within the borders of the Borodok sector, but never beyond. If news reached Borodok that he had been seen in an area designated for Mamlin-Three, on the other side of the valley, they would send in troops to execute him for the crime of trespassing.
Unlike the camp at Mamlin-Three, Borodok was a full-scale logging operation, processing trees from the moment they were cut until they emerged as kiln-dried boards, ready to be shipped to the west.
What went on at Mamlin-Three was kept a secret, but Pekkala had heard on his arrival at Borodok that to be a prisoner at Mamlin was considered worse than death. That was why convicts bound for that place were never told where they were going until the moment they arrived.
Pekkala’s only company in this forbidden zone had been a man who had escaped from the Mamlin-Three camp. His name was Tatischev, and he had been a sergeant in one of the Tsar’s Cossack regiments. After his escape, search parties had combed the forest but never found Tatischev, for the simple reason that he had hidden where they were least likely to search – within sight of the Mamlin-Three camp. Here, he had remained, scratching out an existence even more spartan than Pekkala’s.
Pekkala and Tatischev met twice a year in a clearing on the border of the Borodok and Mamlin territorial boundaries. Tatischev was a cautious man, and judged it too dangerous to meet more often than that.
It was from Tatischev that Pekkala discovered exactly what was happening at Mamlin. He learned that the camp had been set aside as a research centre on human subjects. Low-pressure experiments were carried out in order to determine the effects on human tissue of high-altitude exposure. Men were submerged in ice water, revived and then submerged again to determine how long a downed pilot might survive after ditching in the arctic seas above Murmansk. Some prisoners had anti-freeze injected into their hearts. Others woke up on operating tables to find their limbs had been removed. It was a place of horrors, Tatischev told him, where the human race had sunk to its ultimate depths.
On the third year of their meetings, Pekkala showed up at the clearing to find Tatischev’s marrowless and chamfered bones scattered about the clearing, and metal grommets from his boots among the droppings of the wolves who had devoured him.
Pekkala returned to Dalstroy-Seven at the end of winter. The snow had already begun to melt. Two nights before, he had awakened to what he thought was the sound of ice breaking in the river, but as the sharp cracking noise echoed through the forest, Pekkala realised that it was gunfire coming from the direction of the Dalstroy-Seven settlement.
The next day, Pekkala made his way there.
Seeing no smoke from the chimneys, he went down to the settlement. One after the other, he opened the doors and stepped into the dark.
Inside the cabins, people lay strewn around the room like dolls thrown by an angry child. A gauze of frost covered their bodies. They had all been shot. The cratered wounds of bullet holes stared like third eyes from the foreheads of the dead.
With hands rag-bound against the cold, Pekkala gathered up a few of the spent cartridges. All were army issue, all less than a year old, matching in year and make. Then Pekkala knew that guards from the Mamlin-Three camp must have carried out the killing. None of the nomad bands in this region would have had access to such recent stocks of ammunition. Pekkala wondered why the guards would have bothered to come all this way to liquidate the settlement when the winter would have killed them anyway.
He touched the emaciated and stone-hard cheek of a young woman who had died sitting by the stove. It seemed she had been too weak even to get up from the chair when the killers burst into the cabin. In the billowing heat of his breath, the white crystals melted from her hair, revealing red strands, like shreds of copper wire. It was as if, for one brief moment, life had returned to the corpse.
Two weeks later, when spring floods swept through the valley, the buildings and all they had contained were swept away.
‘How did you manage to escape?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Just after we finished building our shelters,’ replied Lysenkova, ‘my father sat me down and made me write out a statement that he had killed two guards on our way out to the settlement. The truth was, two guards had gone missing, but they ran away on their own. No one in our group had killed them. We didn’t have any paper or pencils. We used a piece of birch bark and the burned end of a stick. I was ten, old enough to know that none of what I was writing was true. I asked him if he wasn’t going to get in trouble if somebody believed what I was writing and he said it didn’t matter. “What are they going to do?” he asked. “Send me to Siberia?”’
‘How well do you remember your father?’ asked Pekkala.
Lysenkova shrugged. ‘Some things are clearer than others. He had gold teeth. The front ones, top and bottom. I remember that. He had been kicked by a horse when he was young. Every time he smiled, it looked as if he had taken a bite out of the sun.’
‘What happened after you wrote the letter?’
‘He took me through the woods to the gates of the Borodok camp. We barely spoke on that journey, even though it took several hours to reach the camp. When we got to Borodok, he stuffed a knotted handkerchief in my pocket and then he knocked on the gate. By the time the guards opened up, he had disappeared back into the woods. I knew he wasn’t coming back. When the guards asked me where I’d come from, I showed them the letter I’d written. Then they brought me into the camp.
‘On my first night there, I took out the handkerchief he had given me. When I undid the knot, I saw what I first thought were kernels of corn. But then I realised they were teeth. His gold teeth. He had pulled them out. I could see the marks of pliers in the gold. They were the only things of value he had left. I used them to buy food in the camp in those first months. I would have starved to death without them.
‘Eventually, I found a job delivering buckets of food to the workers who processed logs for the camp lumber mill. The job entitled me to rations and that is how I survived. After five years, they sent me back to Moscow to live in an orphanage. I don’t know what happened to my parents, but I know now what my father knew back then, which was they had no chance of coming out alive.’
As her words sank in, Pekkala finally understood why the inhabitants of Dalstroy-Seven had been executed. Lysenkova’s father had given his daughter a way out, but only a
t the cost of his own life. What Lysenkova’s father had not reckoned on was that the camp authorities decided not only to punish him, but to obliterate the entire settlement. By the time the runaway guards were caught, the liquidations had already been carried out.
‘So you see, Inspector,’ said Lysenkova, ‘I have learned what it takes to survive. That includes not caring about rumours. But I wanted you to know the truth.’
As he walked her to the door, Pekkala knew there was no point in telling the Major what he’d seen. She already knew what she needed to know, but he was glad they had chosen to help her.
*
A bell rang.
Pekkala sat up in bed, blinking the sleep from his eyes. He sat there, dazed and just as he had convinced himself that he had dreamed the sound of the bell, it came again, loud and clattering. Someone was down in the street. There were buzzers for each apartment. Every time this had happened in the past, the person pressing the bell had either pressed the wrong one or was looking to be let into the building after locking themselves out.
He grunted and lay back down, knowing that whoever it was would try another buzzer if they got no answer from him.
But the bell rang again and kept ringing, someone’s thumb jammed against the buzzer. The spit dried up in Pekkala’s mouth as he realised that there had been no mistake. The persistent ringing of a doorbell in the middle of the night could only mean one thing – that they had finally come to arrest him. Not even a Shadow Pass would save him now.
Pekkala dressed and hurried down the stairs. He thought about that suitcase Babayaga kept ready in the corner of her room and he wished he had packed one for himself. Reaching the dingy foyer, lit by a single naked bulb, he unlocked the main door. As he grasped the rattly brass door knob, a hazy calculation which had been forming in his mind now came into perfect focus.
He would probably never know what line he’d crossed to bring this down upon himself. Perhaps it was one too many questions that day he followed Stalin through the secret passageways. Perhaps Stalin had decided he should never have revealed what happened to the White Guild agents and was now in the process of covering all trace of his mistake.
