by James L. May
“Yes, you. You must have some reaction. Yakov Petrovich says you are capable of assisting intelligently with his investigations.”
I could have told him that seeing Terekhov’s slack face and seeping brains had brought my stomach into my throat. No, the reaction is not exactly nausea, I could have explained, since, there in my throat, my belly is still twisting with hunger.
But that was not a reaction anyone had any interest in.
“No,” I said. “No, I can’t think what it’s about. It—it must mean he was connected to Antonov somehow. I wouldn’t have said so. I believed him when he said he wasn’t, this morning.”
This time, I noticed, the Chekist had prepared for his time out of doors by donning a thick wool coat. Had the leather jacket been left back in his cabin? His expression was remote, heavy, one hand moving slowly over his smooth chin. Meanwhile Razdolski had moved up to stand behind me, the way he had before I’d been punched the day before. I kept myself from looking over my shoulder to see how close he was.
“This is not living up to the reference Petrovich furnished you with, Prisoner Bogomolov. He said you were clever. You must have more thoughts than this. Nothing seems significant about his having been found so close to the shore? Antonov was found in the water as well.”
Yes, I was right: this theatrical approach was a threat. But what did he want from me? “I don’t know. I couldn’t say. If the body was moved—”
“You sound upset. You were more self-possessed looking at your friend yesterday.”
“I’m only hungry. I can’t seem to think …”
Petrovich interrupted, sparing me further questioning. He was still kneeling by the body. “His buttons are crooked.”
The Chekist turned. “What?” Petrovich didn’t answer, instead indicating Terekhov’s shirtfront. I felt relief. Something about Petrovich’s observation had disrupted the other man, unbalanced him. “Well, and?”
“Let’s see,” said Petrovich. He opened Terekhov’s shirt. Beneath a surprisingly thick mat of fur, a mess of welts showed on the dead man’s chest. “Someone gave him a beating before he died. Meant it, too. This wasn’t any tickling with a feather. Help me undress him, Tolya.”
I had the impression the Chekist was about to object, but he didn’t. Terekhov was less stiff than Antonov had been, and his clayey skin still felt lukewarm. We were able to remove his coat, shirt, and trousers without much difficulty. Despite what the Chekist had said about my agitation, it was easier to bring myself to touch Terekhov’s body than Antonov’s. Once we’d examined him, however, I felt my hands shaking. Bruises like the ones on his chest covered much of the body. Cigarettes had burned angry red eyes, some still blistered, into his skin.
“Whoever did this was in no hurry,” said Petrovich. “They worked him over. Somewhere they had the leisure to take off his shirt, burn him with their cigarettes. Killed him with that blow to the back of the head, put his clothes back on—always hard to do with a corpse, no wonder they fouled the buttons. Then they dump him here. Leaves us with three questions. What were they trying to find out from him that they needed to torture him? That’s one. Where did they do it? That’s two. And three: what, if any, is the connection to Antonov’s death?”
“They were both killed the same way,” said the Chekist shortly.
“Apparently. But there are differences as well,” said Petrovich. We all regarded Terekhov. Where it wasn’t bruised, his naked body looked blue. The bandage I’d noticed on his knuckles that morning had been lost, and you could see old scabs on his hand. Petrovich sniffed and resumed. “They didn’t mark his face, did they? If they were going to kill him, I don’t see the point in covering up the damage.”
“Who can say?” said the Chekist.
“Anyway,” said Petrovich, rising. “It’s as I said before. The first thing we need to do is find out when he was last seen at the alabaster workshop. Tolya and I can go there now.”
“No,” said the Chekist.
“What do you mean, no?”
“Your contributions to this side of the investigation need only be forensic. I will handle Terekhov. The two of you will continue looking into Antonov’s circumstances.”
“You can’t be serious! This is a major lead. The man was killed not eight hours after he talked to us. He may have been killed because he talked to us. Someone may have seen us go to him. Or there was something he told us worth killing over, something we didn’t recognize. It’s clearly a part of the case!”
“Yes. A part of the case for which I bear responsibility, first and last. Don’t forget who you are working for, Yakov Petrovich. Anything you discover serves the goals of Infosec. Your instructions are to forget about Terekhov, regardless of whatever sort of lead you think this is, and report whatever you learn about Antonov to me.”
Petrovich fumed, moving his wrinkled lips in anger. He seemed to be on the point of saying something back to the Chekist, before he stopped himself. After a moment of sour-looking reflection, he turned to me instead: “At least we will finish investigating the scene. Tolya, I’ll handle things here. You look to see whether you can discover signs of the body being dragged in through the snow. You’ll need to walk a circle around the body—say a hundred paces out.”
That was a surprise. “You want me to find footprints?”
The old man rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, I know what I said before. But the snow isn’t so disturbed here in the forest. Maybe you’ll find out what direction they brought him from. Look for blood, signs of dragging. Anything like that. A wide circle, understand? The further out you go, the more likely you’ll find something we haven’t covered up by walking around already. Go on, get moving.” I spared a glance for the Chekist, but he was watching Petrovich and didn’t say anything. In fact I was glad to be released—glad not to stay there and try to justify my inclusion in the investigation, or to get involved in whatever struggle was going on between the two of them.
I began by going Petrovich’s recommended hundred paces back up the path we’d come down. The ground beneath the trees here was smooth and flat, interrupted only in places by stones and old stumps. The trees were dense. I could sometimes make out the others grouped around the body, but mostly I lost them among the trunks. Taking my time with the search did not help me uncover anything. The snow on the stones lay undisturbed; the stumps were gray, cut long before. Soon enough my circuit brought me out of the trees and down to the shore. The Chekist was right—Terekhov’s body truly was close to the sea, close enough that the water’s edge laid a chord across the circle I’d been tracing. Petrovich had said Infosec was concerned about Antonov being found in the bay, and the questions he’d asked Terekhov at the Chekist’s behest had been about an escape plot. Was that what the Chekist had expected me to have ideas about, back in the clearing? It was bewildering.
Regardless, there was no sign of a body being moved here either. When I’d come full circle and reached the path again without finding anything, I could only conclude that Terekhov had been brought in along the path, the same way we’d come.
Back in the clearing with Terekhov’s corpse, Petrovich and the Chekist seemed to have finished whatever remained of their examination of the scene. Having seen me coming, they stood waiting by the still-naked body. Razdolski and the other guard had taken seats on a log.
“Nothing,” I said.
“All right,” said Petrovich.
The Chekist nodded as well. “Then the two of you are to continue your investigation into Antonov’s death. You’ll continue working your way down the list of persons of interest. Meanwhile I will investigate Terekhov’s killing.”
“And if any more of the men we interview come up dead?”
“Then I will issue instructions for handling the matter in due course. Just do your job, Yakov Petrovich.”
The old man made a gesture of begrudging acceptance. “You haven
’t heard yet what we found out about the women we talked about earlier.”
“You haven’t found anything conclusive?”
“Not yet.”
“Then you can brief me on the matter tomorrow.”
Petrovich spent another few minutes complaining about what had happened to us at Nikolski that morning. That seemed to engage the Chekist’s interest a little, though in the end he only agreed to speak to the gate commander when he next passed through. Razdolski and the other guard sat in silence. The sound of Razdolski scratching himself—his chest, his neck, his thigh—was audible in the quiet forest.
The big guard had never paid me any attention before, not even when his explicit job was to watch me. But this time, I thought his and his partner’s eyes were on me. I was glad when we left.
13
Back at the cell, we finally ate. A cold meal: it was too late to cook, the afternoon’s supply of peat having been used up. Each of us had been provided a pound loaf of black bread that morning. The old man fretted his, tearing one end to bits with gnarled fingers. I stopped before I’d eaten half of mine, having decided to allow myself a bite out of the beet in Antonov’s chest as well. What remained I broke in two, putting the pieces in the usual spot in the lining of my coat. The pound loaf was better than the half we’d gotten in Quarantine. I told myself I wasn’t hungry enough to care about errant crumbs, but not one of the fragments that fell around Petrovich’s boots escaped my notice.
“What do you think about Terekhov?” I asked. “It’s surprising, isn’t it? After we talked to him this morning, I’d have sworn he had nothing to do with Antonov.”
Petrovich grunted, not looking up. “Nothing surprises me.”
The maddening black snowfall of bread continued. After a moment of watching it accumulate, I tried again. “I don’t see why the Chekist doesn’t want us to ask questions about him. It’s all part of one case. How can we ask people about Antonov without asking about Terekhov?”
That got a reaction. “Our friend wants to wrap the case up quickly, whether we find the killer or not. Yesterday he actually seemed to care about coming up with the truth. Today, not as much. We’ve got less time than I thought.” He sounded more petulant than usual, sour rather than gruff. “Need to start casting a wider net. Time for a visit to the sauna.”
The word disagreed with everything I knew about Solovetsky. When I was a boy, my father had sometimes taken me with him on his regular visits to the steam room at the neighborhood’s public bath. I had memories of peering through white clouds at the men around us—sweat covering my body, a towel wrapped around my waist, tile slick and unaccustomed against my skin. Sometimes the heat had made me nauseous. But on Solovetsky, maybe a sauna would be more like the one I’d once used on a hiking expedition with the Academy of Uncertain Arts and Ephemeral Sciences. That had been a rural affair, wooden walls and benches blackened by the smoke that was allowed to fill the room while it heated.
Even that seemed wrong. A sauna combined concepts of leisure and extremity in a way that did not belong on the island. Here we schemed and plotted to experience moderation.
“What does it mean?” I asked “‘The sauna?’”
“It means we’re going somewhere I didn’t want to have to go.”
“Is it for division commanders?”
He barked a laugh. “What, do you picture them whipping themselves with birch sticks to relax? That’s not the way things work. Here, to relax, they whip us. No, it’s not a proper sauna. Only a place where one of my old friends can be found. I don’t know whether he’ll have anything useful, but sometimes when you’re under pressure, taking a shot in the dark is worth it.”
“All right,” I said. “But who are you talking about?”
“One of the most useful things a detective can do is know the local criminals. My friend is an old urka.”
The urki were “legitimate thieves,” career criminals who lived by their own code of conduct. There was already a distinction between “politicals,” and zeks who’d committed more ordinary crimes. The difference between run-of-the-mill criminals and the urki was something else again. To be an urka meant not only to commit crimes, but to be committed to crime as a mode of existence. Imprisonment, for them, was only one of the stages of life, the way childhood or marriage were for others. They had their own culture, their own rules. The first of these was to take every opportunity to rob and terrorize those who were not members of their criminal community. Finding yourself in a cell or barracks dominated by them was bad. They would play cards with their neighbors’ belongings as stakes. Any objection you might make to finding you’d lost your coat in a bet made by someone else was likely to be answered in a way that left you pissing blood.
“But why is it called ‘the sauna’?” I asked.
“Long story. The men there—they don’t work. It’s a kind of protest. Or you’d call it a strike, maybe.”
“A strike?” I had never heard of such a thing on Solovetsky. It sounded as farfetched as a sauna itself. “But they’d never allow it! Any zeks who announced a strike would be dragged to Sekirnaya immediately. That’s if they weren’t shot on the spot.”
“They didn’t announce it. Not exactly. There are parties in Moscow who wouldn’t like to hear they’d been rounded up. The way I understand it, the ideological line is that urki are ‘socially close.’ Stealing, murdering—just misdirected class warfare, if you aren’t part of the bourgeoisie. Our gangsters are only an eyelash away from being heroes of the working class. They can get away with a lot, if they only come up with a story that doesn’t make it look like they’re going against the state. You’ll see.”
As he stood, Petrovich dusted the crumbs he’d allowed to fall into his lap up into one palm and rolled them up, popping the resulting marble into his mouth “Come on,” he said around the bread.
The building was just inside the kremlin gate, one of two against the northern wall. Around one side, a sunken stairway led down to a door. Snow lay on the steps in undisturbed piles, where it gave Petrovich some trouble.
“These aren’t nice men,” he remarked as I helped him. “One of the reasons they get away with what they’re doing is that they’re a hard bunch. While we’re here, I do the talking, understand?” He sounded nervous.
The opened door breathed an assault at us, the stale air warm and suffocating. It was like stepping into the bottom of a laundry sack. Undershirts and pants crammed the low-ceilinged place. Only as your eyes became accustomed to the gloom did you perceive the bodies behind the dirty clothes.
We’d interrupted a palpable boredom. Men lay on cots, propped arms on tables, leaned against walls, or stuck their legs out across the floor. These were the urki, thirty-five or forty of them, a whole platoon or more. This was the sauna, then: with every one of them undressed and lounging, they looked ready for an afternoon in the steam room. How could they get away with it during working hours? The room was too crowded for me to take in every corner, but there was no sign of the heaps of clothing the men would have produced if they’d simply disrobed. Somehow they’d gotten rid of them entirely.
I wondered whether their “losing” their things had something to do with the urki’s undeclared strike, but the inquiring glance I directed at Petrovich was ignored. Glances slid over us from every direction, none quite willing to offer acknowledgment by resolving itself into a stare. From somewhere a voice said “Oy, Boris,” and a bare-chested man rose from his card game by the door.
“I’m looking for Golubov,” said Petrovich.
Boris was a lean, hard-looking man. On his chest were tattooed two large, intricately drawn stars, one at the top of each pectoral muscle. “What do you want?” he said in a high, reedy voice.
“Tell him it is Yakov Petrovich, from Odessa.”
After a moment of consideration, Boris moved his head minutely, flicking his eyes towards the back of t
he room. One of his cardplayers headed off in that direction.
Light only entered the basement through a few small windows up at ground level. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I began to notice Boris’s other tattoos. A devil grinned on his ribs, and I glimpsed spades on the knuckles of both hands. And so, too, for the other men lolling around us: every one of them half dressed, but three-eighths clothed in ink. I’d known already, from my time in Kresty, how the elaborate code of tattoos could indicate an urka’s rank, criminal specialty, or even the details of his biography. An inverted cross might signify a housebreaker, a series of interlocked circles could mean their wearer had been betrayed to the police by a woman. I’d never seen the system on such full display, however. In the sauna, no one’s markings had to peek out from beneath sleeves and collars. Here, when a man crossed his bare feet in front of him, the bells on them rang.
Oddly enough, the effect of all this was only to intensify the boredom we’d disturbed by entering. The dancing girl whose breasts stared out from a man’s thigh: boredom pointed her nipples. The half-human wolf-beast on someone else’s neck: its snarl expressed boredom, too. Almost every tattoo was done in the same blue-black ink. Yes: with their white pants and shirts and the scribbling on their skins, the urki wore a kind of uniform. They’d dyed themselves with insignia and talismans: stars and crosses, arrows, daggers, dots and dragons, skulls. How was this any different than the medals worn under the tsar by my father’s staid and respectable superiors in the civil service? Too profuse and detailed to be taken individually, as a mass these inked symbols, like those molded ones, were monotonous and senseless—the boring marks of boredom.
What was it that bored the men so? And, of course, again: why were none of them dressed?
There was little time to consider. The cardplayer had returned, catching Boris’s eye.
“Where’s Golubov?” said Petrovich.
Ignoring him, the man gave Boris a gesture with his chin. Without another word, Boris stepped over and struck Petrovich in the jaw. The old man fell like a dropped sack, and Boris fell on him, continuing to punch. I stepped forward—cried out, I think. There was time to see blood in Petrovich’s face. Then I was slammed down. A dirty cement floor slapped the air from my lungs. My arms were gripped. A knee ground itself into my back.
