Eye of the Red Tsar

by Sam Eastland

  An old shack stood in the middle of this field, a tin chimney leaning drunkenly out of its roof.

  Anton turned his map one way and then another, struggling to get his bearings. “It’s over by that house, I think.”

  The car’s springs creaked as it lumbered over the bumpy ground. When they reached the far end of the field, the three men got out and started looking for the mine shaft.

  It did not take them long to find it. The shaft was little more than a hole in the ground, about five paces wide, above which perched a rusted metal pulley. Clumps of luminous green grass hung over the edges of the hole. The first section of the mine shaft had been neatly bricked, like the sides of a well. Beneath that was bare rock and earth, from which tiny rivulets of water seeped down into the black. Bolted to the walls on either side were two rusted iron ladders. Most of the rungs were missing. The bolts which held the ladders to the wall were loose. There was no hope of using them to get down into the mine.

  “Are you really going down there?” asked Kirov. “It’s pitch-black.”

  “I have a flashlight,” said Anton. He removed it from the glove compartment of the car. The flashlight had a leather casing around its metal frame and a goggle-eyed crystal for its lens. He slung it from a cord around his neck.

  Searching for a way to lower Pekkala into the shaft, Anton examined the pulley. The twisted threads of cable wound onto it were rusted together, beads of water resting in places where oil still clung to the metal. Sticking from the side of the drum was a large, two-man hand crank for raising and lowering the cable into the mine shaft. He took hold of the crank, pulled it, and the lever snapped off in his hands. “So much for that,” he muttered.

  But Kirov was already removing a length of hemp rope from the trunk of the car, which had been placed there in case the vehicle broke down and needed to be towed. He looped one end around the Emka’s bumper, then walked to the edge of the pit and threw the rest of the coil down into the shaft.

  The three men listened as the rope unraveled into the darkness. Then they heard a wet slap as it reached the ground.

  Pekkala stood at the edge of the pit, the rope in his hand. He seemed to hesitate.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Anton asked.

  “Give me the flashlight,” Pekkala said.

  After Anton had handed it to him, Pekkala leaned back on the rope, testing its strength. The hemp creaked around the bumper but held firm. While Kirov lifted the rope, so that it would not drag at the edge of the mine shaft, Pekkala stepped to the edge, then leaned out backwards over the emptiness. With his hands white-knuckled around the line, he stepped down into the shaft. In a moment he was gone.

  The two men on the surface watched the flashlight’s glow yawing back and forth across Pekkala’s chest, one moment illuminating his feet, then the rope, then the slippery sides of the mine shaft. The light grew smaller and smaller, and the sound of Pekkala’s breaths faded to a hollow echo.

  “He looked afraid,” said Kirov.

  “He is afraid,” replied Anton.

  “Of the bodies?”

  “The bodies don’t scare him. It’s being closed in that he can’t stand. And he’ll never forgive me for that.”

  “Why is it your fault?”

  “It was a game,” said Anton. “At least it started out that way. Once, when we were children, we went to a place our father had made us promise never to go. Deep in the woods behind our house, there was a crematory oven which he used for his funeral business. It had a tall chimney, as tall as the tops of the trees, and the oven itself was like a huge iron coffin built up on a pedestal of bricks. On those days when he used the oven, I would go to my bedroom window and see smoke rising above the tops of the trees. Our father had described the oven to us, but I had never seen it for myself. I wanted to, but I was far too scared to go alone. I persuaded my brother to come with me. He would never have gone otherwise. He was too obedient for his own good, but he is younger than me, and at that age I was able to convince him.

  “It was an autumn day when we went to see the oven. We knew no one would miss us. We often disappeared for hours at a time.

  “The ground was hard. The first snow had fallen, just a dusting of it, collecting in the shells of dried-out leaves. We kept looking back, expecting to see our father coming down the trail behind us, but after a while we realized we were alone.

  “There was a bend in the trail and then the oven was suddenly in front of us. It was smaller than I’d thought it would be. And the area around it was very tidy. Wood for the fuel had been neatly cut and stacked. The ground was even swept, and my father had left a broom to prop open the oven door. Even though the sun was out, the oven stood beneath the trees and it seemed dark in there, and cold.

  “I took the broom and opened the door to the oven. Inside, I saw a long tray, like the frame of a stretcher. The chamber was gray with dust, but it had been swept as clean as it could be.

  “That sort of thing mattered to my father. Even though nobody else ever came to the oven, as far as he knew anyway, he needed the place to be orderly and dignified.

  “Almost as soon as we arrived, my brother wanted to go back. He was sure our father would figure out that we’d been here.

  “That was when I suggested that one of us should go inside the oven, just to see what it was like.

  “At first my brother refused.

  “I called him a coward. I said we would draw straws for it. I told him if I was willing to do it, he should be willing, too.

  “Eventually, I got him to agree.”

  “And Pekkala drew the short straw?” asked Kirov.

  “He thought he did,” replied Anton. “The truth is, after I saw that he had drawn the long straw, I squeezed it so hard between my fingers that it broke in half, so what he drew was only half the proper length.

  “I told him he couldn’t back down or else he’d spend the rest of his life knowing that he’d proved himself to be a coward.

  “He crawled into the oven. I made him go headfirst. And then I closed the door on him.”

  “You did what?”

  “It was only going to be for a second. Just to give him a scare. But there was a spring lock on the door and I couldn’t get it open. I tried. I honestly did. But I wasn’t strong enough.

  “I could hear him shouting and banging on the door. He was trying to get out. I panicked. I ran home. It was getting dark. I arrived home just as my mother was putting supper on the table.

  “At the supper table, when my parents asked me where my brother was I said I didn’t know.

  “My father was looking at me. He must have known I was hiding something.

  “Hold out your hands, he said, and when I held them out he grasped them hard and stared at them. I remember he even lowered his face to my fingertips and smelled them. Then he ran out of the house.

  “I watched the lantern he was carrying disappear down the trail towards the oven.

  “An hour later he was back with my brother.”

  “What happened to you then?” asked Kirov.

  “Nothing,” replied Anton. “My brother said he had shut the door on himself. Of course, it wasn’t even possible to lock that door from the inside. My father must have known it, but he pretended to believe my brother. All he did was make us swear never to go back to the oven.”

  “And your brother? He never took revenge for what you’d done?”

  “Revenge?” Anton laughed. “His whole life since he joined the Finnish Regiment has been vengeance for what happened between us.”

  “I would have killed you,” said Kirov.

  Anton turned to look at him. His face was layered in shadow. “That would have been less cruel than what my brother did to me.”

  HALFWAY DOWN THE MINE SHAFT, PEKKALA CLUNG TO THE ROPE.

  It was cold down there and damp and musty-smelling, but the sweat was coursing off his face. The walls appeared to spin around him, like a whirlpool made of stone. Memories of being in
the oven swirled inside his head. He remembered reaching out into the darkness, his fingers brushing against the blunt teeth of the burner nozzles which hung from the ceiling of the oven. He had pressed his hands against them, as if to stop the flames from shooting out. At first, he had tried not to breathe the smell in, as if his lungs might filter out those particles of dust. But it was no use. He had to breathe, and as the air grew thin inside that metal cylinder, Pekkala had to fill his lungs as deeply as he could, and all the while that smell poured into him, sifting through his blood like drops of ink in water.

  Pekkala looked up. The mouth of the mine shaft was a disk of pale blue surrounded by the blackness of the tunnel walls. For minutes, he fought against the urge to climb out again. Waves of panic traveled through him, and he hung there until they subsided. Then he lowered himself down to the mine floor.

  His feet touched the ground, sinking into decades of accumulated dust. Pieces of rotting wooden support beams, toothed with nails, littered the floor.

  Pekkala let go of the rope and kneaded the blood back into his hands. Then he took hold of the flashlight and shone it into the darkness.

  The first thing he saw was a section of ladder which had fallen to the ground. It stood propped against the wall, the rusted metal glistening black and orange.

  The space was wide here, but the way into the belly of the mine soon narrowed to a point where the tunnel split into two and pairs of rusty iron rails curved into blackness. Both of the tunnel entrances were blocked by walls of rock. Pekkala knew that mines were sometimes closed before they had been completely dug out. The miners had probably collapsed the tunnels on purpose, to protect whatever minerals remained in the ground in case they ever returned. The wagons which had run along these rails were parked in an alcove. Their sides showed dents from hard use, the metal smeared with whitish-yellow powder. Pekkala felt a tremor of pity for the men who had worked in these tunnels, starved of daylight, the weight of the earth poised above their crooked backs.

  Pekkala played the flashlight around this stone chamber, wondering where these bodies were. It occurred to him that perhaps his brother had been wrong. Perhaps the madman had worked in this mine years before and had invented the whole story, simply to get attention. This train of thought was still unraveling in his head, when he turned, sweeping the beam into the darkness, and realized he was standing right beside them.

  They lay as they had fallen, piled in a grotesque heap of bones and cloth and shoes and hair. There were multiple corpses. In such a jumble of decay, he could not tell how many.

  He had come down on one side of the mine opening. The bodies must have landed on the other side.

  As the flashlight’s beam wavered, like a candle flame boxed by the wind, Pekkala’s instincts screamed at him to get out of this place. But he knew he couldn’t leave, not yet, even with fear sucking the breath out of his lungs.

  Pekkala forced himself to hold his ground, reminding himself that he had seen many bodies in the past, plenty of them in worse condition than these. But those corpses had been anonymous to him, in death as they had been in life. If this sad tangle of limbs did indeed belong to the Romanovs, then this was unlike anything he’d witnessed before.

  A sound startled him, echoing off the stone walls. It took Pekkala a moment to realize that it was his brother’s voice, calling down from above.

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Yes,” he called up.

  There was a long pause.

  “And?” his brother’s voice came down.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Silence from above.

  Pekkala turned back to the bodies. Down here in the mine, the process of decomposition had been slowed. The clothing was largely intact and there were no flies or other insects, whose larvae would have eaten the corpses down to the bone if the bodies had been left above ground. Neither was there any evidence of rats or mice having gnawed upon the dead. The depth of the mine and the vertical entrance had prevented them from reaching the bodies. He did not know what had been mined here. Whatever it was might also have had a preserving effect.

  The victims appeared to be partially mummified. Their skin had turned a greenish brown, nearly translucent, drawn tight over the bones and filmed with mold. He had seen corpses like this before—people frozen in ice or buried in soil with a high acid content, like peat bogs. Pekkala also recalled a case in which a killer stuffed a body up a factory chimney. Over the years in which the victim remained hidden, the body became smoked to the consistency of shoe leather. It was remarkably well preserved, but as soon as police removed it, the corpse decayed at an astonishing rate.

  While these bodies remained intact in their present state, he knew that they would also deteriorate very quickly if any attempt was made to move them above ground. He was glad that the decision had been made to leave them here until a properly equipped removal team could be brought in.

  At first, Pekkala touched nothing.

  On the top of the pile was a woman, lying on her back with her arms thrown out to the sides. From the way she had landed, Pekkala judged that the fall would probably have killed her, but he could see clearly that she’d been dead before she fell. Her skull had been shattered by a bullet between the eyes and the base of the nose, penetrating that part of the brain known as the dura oblongata. The woman would have died instantly. Whoever did this, Pekkala realized, had known exactly what they were doing. But there was more to it than simply knowing how to kill a person. As Vassileyev had drilled into him, the way a murder was committed told a great deal about the killer. Even in cases in which bodies were horribly mutilated, usually with knives, most murderers avoided harming the faces of their victims. Those who used guns to kill their victims usually shot them several times, and most often aimed at the chest. In cases where a pistol was used by someone inexperienced with firearms, the bodies often showed multiple and random impact wounds, the shooters having underestimated how inaccurate those weapons were. Pekkala knew of people who had escaped from shots unleashed at almost point-blank range by untrained marksmen.

  Killings carried out by skilled gunmen were usually classified as executions. These, too, left a particular signature. Between a man’s ears at the back of the head was a small knot of bone—the external occipital protuberance. Executioners were taught to press the muzzle of their guns exactly over that place, allowing them to kill with a single shot. Pekkala had seen many such executions, carried out by both sides during the opening stages of the Revolution. The killers left their victims facedown in fields, in ditches, or in banks of snow, hands tied behind their backs, their foreheads blown away by the exiting bullet.

  One reason for this method was that executioners did not have to look into the faces of their victims. But whoever killed this woman had stood directly in front of her. Pekkala knew that such a method required a particular coldness of blood.

  Already, in his mind, he began to draw a portrait of the killers, assuming there had been more than one. They were almost certainly male. Women were not usually employed in execution teams, although there were exceptions to this. The Reds had made use of women in their death squads, and these particular women had proven to be more bloodthirsty than any of their male counterparts. He recalled the Bolshevik assassin Rosa Schwartz, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of former Tsarist officers. After her killing spree, she was declared a national hero and toured the country as “Red Rosa,” carrying a bunch of roses and wearing a white dress, like a virgin on her wedding day. Another detail which pointed towards these killers being men was the fact that the skulls all bore exit marks, indicating the use of a large-caliber pistol. Women, even those in death squads, tended to use guns of small caliber.

  Now Pekkala examined the clothing, bringing the flashlight close to the woman’s body so that he could examine the material of her clothes. The first thing which caught his eyes was the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons on her dress, which must once have been red but now appeared as a blotc
hy pink. His heart sank. These were the garments of wealthy people. Otherwise those buttons would have been made of bone or wood. Long, clumped strands of hair draped over the clothing.

  On the bared arms, he could see where fat deposits had turned into adipocere, the soapy, grayish-yellow substance known as grave wax.

  He saw shoes, the leather crimped and twisted, the tiny nails which had once held them together jutting now like little teeth from the soles. Again he felt the weight of growing certainty. This was not the footwear of a laborer, not the type that one would find out in the countryside and far too elegant for the wilds of Siberia.

  At that moment, the flashlight shuddered and died.

  The darkness that enveloped him was so complete it seemed to him that he had suddenly gone blind. Pekkala’s breathing grew rapid and shallow. He fought against the panic which swirled around him like a living thing.

  Swearing, he shook the flashlight and the light popped back on again.

  Wiping the sweat from his face, Pekkala returned to his work.

  Having examined all he could without disturbing the scene, he now reached out and touched what lay before him.

  The tips of his fingers were shaking.

  He tried to maintain emotional distance from the corpses, as Dr. Bandelayev had taught him. “Think of them as puzzles, not as people,” the doctor had said.

  Working his hands in under the back of the woman, fingers inching between the layers of damp and moldy cloth which separated the corpses, he lifted her body. The weight of it was still significant, unlike the corpse he’d pulled from the chimney, which had felt so light it reminded him of a Japanese lantern.

  As he shifted the body to the floor, so that he could lay the corpses side by side, the woman’s skull snapped off the spine. It rolled off the other side of the pile and cracked against the stone floor with a sound like a dropped earthenware pot. He walked around the side of the pile and retrieved the skull, lifting it gently from the ground. It was there, in the beam of the flashlight, that he saw the sleeve of a man’s garment, a shriveled hand hanging from it like the claw of a bird.