by James L. May
This was like that. A false sky covered the sky, the kremlin’s walls turned into incredibly detailed paintings of themselves. Nikolski Gate was a trompe-l’oeil effect, giving only the impression of depth; the zeks murmuring around us, actors. I’ve often noticed this phenomenon of cognition in moments of catastrophe—a feeling of the world becoming less real without any change to the visual field.
Trailed by Razdolski, Basil-the-guard, and the commander who’d swung his baton at me when we first examined the entrance logs, the Chekist came around the corner. He was pulling on his gloves; coming out of whatever warm spot he’d been waiting in had flushed his cheeks, and he looked more boyish than ever.
“Petrovich,” he said without a nod of greeting. “You’re carrying your papers with you? Give them to me.”
“Just a minute,” said Petrovich. I could hear him try to be gruff. My heart had started pounding. “Tell me what’s happened.”
“Don’t be stupid, Inspector.” The glove on the hand he held out was well made, I remember thinking. It fit him well. “Give them to me.”
The guard with the goiter handed over our gate pass, while Petrovich’s tongue moved behind his lips without his saying anything. Finally the old man gave in. “Get them out, Tolya.” I fumbled in my coat for the transfer order, the investigation authorization, and the pass for the Infosec archives. Petrovich took them and handed them on to the Chekist. I almost handed over Veronika’s note, but at the last minute I summoned the presence of mind to keep it back.
When I recall my state of mind, I see I did not fully comprehend what was going on, much as I felt that something terrible was about to happen. It should have been clear enough, I suppose. But the moment seemed to promise anything. Had the investigation into Terekhov’s death paid off? Had Infosec caught the killer by its own efforts? Were we to be issued new authorizations?
The Chekist was looking through the sheaf of documents. As he did, Petrovich found his voice. “This is ridiculous. You haven’t heard our latest progress. We are closing in. Someone thinks we are a threat—there was an attempt on Bogomolov’s life last night!”
The Chekist barely acknowledged me. “Was there? How interesting. I will debrief him on that subject at some later point.”
Petrovich took hold of the younger man’s sleeve. “Listen. There’s more. This business at the Anzer Division warehouse is developing. One of their—”
“Yes,” said the Chekist. “Anzer. You haven’t been outspoken about that connection, have you? All your business about icons and cabinetry and missing supplies—but you left out your traipsing around the warehouse.”
“One of their workers was an urka. Our investigation—”
“Enough!” said the Chekist, cutting him off. “Be silent, Yakov Petrovich. Your investigation, as you call it, is over.” The flames leapt up when he opened the door to the guards’ stove. In one swift motion he tossed in our bundle of papers. “Razdolski will escort you to Company Ten. See that they remain in their cells,” he said to the guard.
Fear somersaulted in my heart. There was a tone in the old man’s voice I had never heard before, not even when he’d been attacked by Golubov’s men. “Do I take it this is—what? A punishment?” he said.
“Just stay in your cell.”
“What is going to happen to us? You’ll send Tolya back to Quarantine and me back to Krimkab? Or you have something else in mind? I’ve done nothing but help you, you devil!”
“Razdolski, take them.” The Chekist began to walk away, but turned back as the guard took the old man’s arm. “You will know, Yakov Petrovich, when I’ve decided to punish you.”
Petrovich didn’t resist as he was led away. I remember walking behind them stunned, as though the false, hard surface the world had turned to face me had suddenly jerked forward and struck me between the eyes. Goitered Vlacic grinned, Razdolski scratched his neck with the hand that wasn’t gripping Petrovich, and the zeks in the line continued to look at anything but us.
In the eyes of Solovetsky, we were no longer investigators.
21
Waiting is the essential activity of prison life. Whatever else you do, in prison you wait.
Sometimes the waiting kills you. But since that can only happen once, and since there is so much more waiting to be done than can be measured by only one of anything, most of the time it doesn’t.
Waiting comes in different textures, different flavors. It is dull, sharp, bitter, glassy, friable. It gags with sweetness. Men choke on terror. They do it while they wait.
You wait to be fed. You wait in lines. You wait for your work assignment, or for the necessary tools to be delivered so that it can begin. You wait for winter to end. You wait to board trains. You wait to move, and you wait to be allowed to stop moving. When winter is over you wait through the summer, anticipating the frost that will kill the mosquitoes. You wait for something, anything, to break the monotony. You wait alone and with others. You wait for the present crisis to blow over; for God’s sake, keep your head down in the meantime. You wait for the end of your sentence, or to see whether there will be tacked on to it, via telegram from some functionary in a distant city, another three years. You wait for punishment, for revenge, for a clue that will tell you how much longer you will be waiting.
I waited on the bed that had been Antonov’s. The straw in its mattress poked at me, the board underneath bruised my hip. Petrovich sat on his own bed, reading Antonov’s old Bible. If I’d swung my legs to the floor, our knees would have collided.
Razdolski had brought us here and seen that we were installed. He’d made a face like he didn’t like us sharing the room—the Chekist had said “cells,” not “cell”—but in the end he left us. Taking a stool from the hallway, he’d gone out to sit on the landing in the staircase. He was still there now.
Your guards wait, too, in prison. Their hats wait, their belts wait. Their fists and weapons wait.
After what had happened, I couldn’t say what waited for us. Though I tried to put it from my mind, what the Chekist had said—“You will know when I punish you”—skittered fearfully along my spine, over my ribs. I raised my head and watched Petrovich turn a page. Antonov’s Bible was dense and black.
“What should we do now?” I said.
“There’s nothing to do.”
“There must be something. He said we had three more days.”
Petrovich did not look up. “No good asking,” he said in a low voice.
“But the two of you had an understanding, didn’t you? What did he say to you when you first arranged this?”
“Nothing that makes it a good idea to harass him.”
The old man didn’t want to talk. And maybe he was right: for all my jangling anxiety, the food problem made more urgent claims on my attention. I climbed off the bed and opened Antonov’s chest.
Even in the best case, of my merely being sent back to Quarantine Company, what had happened was not good. To return in the Chekist’s bad graces, and without Petrovich being in a position to do much for me, was essentially worse than never having left at all. I’d need to take as large a share of Antonov’s rations with me as possible, simply to break even. I could improve my nutrition for the next three weeks that way, if I was sparing. But it would mean making arrangements to keep my bounty from being taken from me, whether by stealth or by violence. Violence seemed more likely. Hoarding calories invited danger.
I’d moved a few things in the chest around, mainly the food, but the arrangement inside was mostly the way Antonov had packed it. Spoons, bowl, safety razor, and soap atop a little pile of clothing. The dried greens wrapped in a towel. I rubbed the wool of his green sweater between my finger and thumb.
He’d been kind to me, Antonov. He’d taken pity on me, that night in the museum, offering me the patronage I’d come looking for—that’s what I’d told Veronika. He’d treated me to seve
ral of his eccentric conversations, provided some fish and part of an onion. Then he’d died, a murder victim. The investigation that followed seemed to have been about everything in his life but him. Passing back and forth from side to side of the kremlin wall, following figures down one snowy road after another, asking question after question—so far it had told us exactly nothing about the man.
But then, my chief concern had always been the investigation’s effect on my prospects for survival. Justice for Antonov—it was secondary, at best. Why should I have expected to learn about him?
I tried a few ways of distributing rations around my coat, moving them between the two pockets and the hole torn in its lining. It appeared I could take either the potatoes or the groats without making it obvious that I carried something. Not both.
Petrovich had put aside the Bible, laying it on the windowsill next to his chess set.
“Did you ever play chess with Gennady Antonov?” I said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He huffed in amusement. “Said he had a distaste for moving ‘the little idols’ around in their different directions. That was precisely the phrase he used. I remember it. It was a competition to see who could tie the tightest knot on the board, he said. ‘There ought to be something in another man’s strategy to make it worth so much effort to perceive. But men’s strategies always disappoint.’” He shrugged. “Always talked as though his preferences were religious scruples. Who knows, maybe they were.”
“What’s going to happen to us, Yakov Petrovich?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think?”
He shook his head. “They didn’t send us to a penal cell right away. Maybe that’s a good sign.”
Despite the chill this remark gave me, I was able to kill an hour dozing. When I woke up, I tried again.
“Shouldn’t we try to explain what we’ve found out to the Chekist? This afternoon, in front of all those people, he wasn’t about to listen to you. Like Golubov. Maybe he’d be more reasonable if you went to his place and explained.”
Petrovich was sitting back against the wall with his eyes closed. His wrinkled face looked dead. Only the mustache was lively, with its crazed hairs vibrating as he breathed in and exhaled. “It wouldn’t do any good.”
“But the note from Veronika, what Golubov just told us about Kologriev—we’re making progress for the first time. I was chased! You said it yourself this morning, that’s a sure sign we’re on the right path. If we stop now—”
“It’s not us stopping. We’ve been stopped.” He opened his good eye and squinted at me with it. “You don’t want to go back to Company Thirteen. I don’t blame you. But you should see that that’s the best thing that could happen now.”
“What you said before, about the penal cell—is the Chekist going to punish us? Why would he?”
“I don’t know. And anyway, there’s nothing I can do.”
“I don’t believe that. We should make him understand how we’ve advanced the case.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “Do you know what I was doing before they sent me here, Tolya?”
“You’d retired, hadn’t you?”
“I retired fourteen years ago. I was last a policeman in 1912. Do you know what I was doing when they came to take me away? I was shouting at my daughter’s children, because their noise kept me from reading stories from the morning’s paper for a second time. My daughter had twice already made her usual suggestion. Maybe I’d enjoy getting out of the apartment and taking a long walk? I’d refused because of the pain in my joints, and because I had no one to visit. Now she sends me money and hopes no one in her building remembers I was sent off to prison. She leaves it out of her letters, but I can tell things are not going well for her with the building manager. Or at work either. You expect too much of me.”
This was said with his usual matter-of-factness. Except for a certain clipped manner, he might have been talking about a witness in a case he was working, one he did not have much respect for. It was like watching someone smash his hand against the edge of a table to demonstrate that it was numb.
“You still know police work,” I said. “Look at how much I’ve learned, just working with you for five days. And about Golubov—you were right, we only had to get him alone. We’re closer than we’ve ever been!”
He closed his eye. “Don’t say I’ve taught you.”
“Well, you have. Of course you have. And the Chekist isn’t stupid. He knows your value, whatever else may be. He wants to find the killer, doesn’t he?”
“He wants an investigation. He’ll carry it out however seems best to him. You’ve been arrested once. You ought to understand that it’s dangerous to tell them you don’t want to go along with how they do things.”
“Veronika Fitneva will never talk to him,” I said.
“She’s barely talked to us.”
“She wants to tell us something.” He shrugged but didn’t say anything.
“Well, fine. But tell me the truth, Yakov Petrovich. Do you think he’ll be able to solve the case?”
A moment passed before he said: “I don’t know.”
“You can’t tell me you’re satisfied with that—with the possibility Antonov’s murderer might go free. That’s not to mention poor Nail Terekhov.”
“No one here is free.”
But his gruff voice was quiet. I thought he might be coming around. “I’m worried about being on the Chekist’s bad side. And I do want to stay in Company Ten. You’re right about that. It’s been good for me to be here, to have my own bed and dry ration. But it’s more than that. Antonov was my friend. If we even understood what made the Chekist give up on us, I might be as discouraged as you are. But as it is, don’t we owe it to him—owe it to the dead—to try to go on? The Chekist would listen to you, if you’d just explain it all to him.”
Did I believe what I was saying? Only an hour before I’d been reflecting that such considerations were peripheral, secondary. But as the words left my mouth, I think I did believe we owed something to the dead. Hunger and fear will make you believe anything.
Petrovich pushed his body painfully to the edge of the bed and stood. He gestured impatiently for me to hand him his cane. I did.
“I need the lavatory,” he said.
He still hadn’t come back when the bell began to toll. A church sound, a steeple-and-spire sound. I associated it with the city, with distance. If someone had asked me, I’d have guessed the monastery’s bells had melted when the cathedral towers burned in ’23. But something rang through the island’s early arctic twilight.
“What is it?” I asked Petrovich as he limped back into the room.
“Early curfew. They are calling the men in from work.”
I went to the window. Outside the sun was setting rapidly, but this was different from the usual steam whistle that signaled curfew. “What does it mean?”
His voice was quiet, still grating. “Last time, they rounded up a dozen prisoners and took them out to the graveyard to be shot.”
The bell continued to peal. Five times, then six. I told myself the icy tendril that curled in my gut was only a product of the general circumstances. Executions were always alarming, and any zek would be jumpy after an encounter like the one we’d had with the Chekist. I had already been afraid. If my body’s reflex reaction to new stimulus was more fear, it only meant my nervous system was working properly, not that things had grown more dangerous.
(But how to be sure? a voice in my head answered back. Where was the guarantee the two things weren’t connected?)
Petrovich didn’t say any more. The bell went on, reverberating through the empty dormitory, a dome of sound that covered the kremlin. The pealing, repeated and repeated, grew monotonous.
Gradually the sound of men arriving reached us in our high cell. Th
eir shuffling echoed up the stairs like water rising around the bell’s pilings of sound, until drips of conversation, of throat clearing, of boot removal, along with the minor adjustments of furniture as it was sat on, flipped from background to foreground and submerged the ringing.
Petrovich and I sat and waited.
At last it stopped. Still we waited.
There were five at first. We became aware of them when someone down the hall cried out that everyone should look outside. In the twilight below us they were only shapes, and we couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing. But our view of the courtyard was good. Our two neighbors from across the hall, men I’d seen before but hadn’t been introduced to, joined us at the window.
The number swelled as men were pulled from the dormitories. Each door they went to spilled forth a new figure, stumbling between the men who’d gone in to fetch him. Once they came out with three at once, one member of the group holding the door for the others, allowing light from inside to paint shadows of their legs across the snow.
I couldn’t look away from the window. The breath rasped in my throat as I watched to see whether they would come to the door of Company Ten.
There was a period of milling about in a crowd—I thought there were fifteen or so down there, the guards indistinguishable from their victims in the oncoming blue darkness. Then someone marshaled them into a group and marched them off.
They had not come for us. They had not come for me.
Instead of towards Nikolski, they headed to the Holy Gate. We could see them waiting while the bars were unchained and raised, the doors pushed open. Then the group disappeared behind an angle of the wall, leaving the emptiness and the darkening blue snow of the courtyard behind.
As I was to learn later, this was standard procedure. I’ve mentioned that the rule was for the Holy Gate to be kept barred, haven’t I? An exception was made for the larger sorts of execution. It had been the main gate for the monks, and it was closer to the graveyard than Nikolski. The effect of funneling regular daily traffic through the smaller gate was to constrict it, to choke and slow the flow of prisoners so it could be monitored and controlled. During roundups like the one that had unfolded below us, however, with everyone consigned to his cell or barracks, no one else would be going in and out. Why not relax?
