by James L. May
“You mean to say they were readied for them specially? That would be unheard of! Absurd!”
“Nah. That’s normal. Nothing gets more preparations than the shootings.”
“Fellow I heard it from said they were painted, the coffins. He saw them carried off the train down from Anzer. How do you like that for preparations?”
“I call it perverse, prettying up the box you’re going to drop a man into when you shoot him.”
“I’ll tell you what’s perverse: they painted them inside, not out.”
I couldn’t see the speakers, only the snowy trunks around me. It was getting dark by then. The snow of earlier had stopped, and blue shadows filled up the space between the trees.
As the afternoon wore on, the temperature fell sharply. By the time we began the march back to the kremlin, I could feel my eyelashes freeze together and pull at each other whenever I blinked.
Back at the cathedral, the soup Buteyko returned with was thin and gray. Grinding routine had resumed. Nothing had changed in the time I’d been away. Already the shared meals I’d cooked with Petrovich seemed far away, behind a curtain of anger and fear.
Of course the spoons from Antonov still hung in the interior pocket of my coat. I felt the weight of the food I’d brought back in its several places, too. That, at least, was different. I went looking for Foma, found him sitting on my old bunk, tipping his bowl up with both hands to drink from it.
“Listen,” I said. “I wish you’d give me a break. My time away, it didn’t go well for me. I won’t be going back there.”
He didn’t look up from his meal. “May as well go where you want, if you can get them to give you a transfer.”
“That’s what I mean. There’s no transfer waiting for me. But look.” I took out the spoons. “I got these out of the deal. Little enough. But I’m giving one to you.”
He snorted. “I can still drink from the bowl, can’t I? Don’t need it.”
“No, you take it,” I said. “What would I do with two?”
The answer, of course, was that I would trade the second for something. But that was what I was doing now.
Foma said: “Fine.” He took the metal spoon from me, looked at it. He dipped it carefully into his soup and raised it to his mouth.
“So,” I said. “You and I are friends again? When something doesn’t go well the way this didn’t go well, you need all the friends you can get. The investigation—I’d say it was a disaster.”
He spooned more soup into his mouth, still dubious. “Where’d they have you bunking, then?”
“Company Ten, over across the courtyard above the dispensary.”
“Food all right?”
“Not bad. They get a dry ration,” I said. I’d already given him the spoon. I wasn’t about to share the fish and groats. Not yet, anyway. Let him show some goodwill before I fed him. “It’s good to be able to cook for yourself. While I was there they let me use what was left from what the man who was killed had.”
“Did you some good, if you got two spoons out of it. Can’t have been that bad.”
“Company Ten is better than here. You’re not wrong. But in the end, the business my friend was mixed up in … It would be better for me if everyone forgot I was involved. Do you understand? I don’t need to be hearing about it all the time, in front of everyone.”
He scraped the bowl with his spoon. “Told you you should have stayed.”
“You were right.”
The soup was gritty and tepid, with a tongue-coating, tripe-like flavor. I didn’t like it, but it meant meat somewhere in the stuff’s history. At the other end of the sanctuary, a man’s rough voice sang a song was called “Hot Buns,” about the misfortunes of a private peddler girl. We could hear the laughing and clapping as it finished.
When he was done, Foma licked his spoon clean and put it away in his own coat. “Why’d they need your help, then?” he said. “You have so much experience solving murders?”
“That’s … something I’m wondering about myself.” My thoughts had been returning to the question throughout the day, with my anger against Petrovich rising at intervals. But the prospect of explaining was exhausting, and there was nothing for Foma to do about it, even if I could make myself understood. “The old man I worked with, the detective. I was meant to be doing things for him, things he couldn’t do himself. But—well, there was more to it than that.”
“Like what?”
“It seems they wanted to keep me close to the investigation.”
“What’s ‘close to the investigation’?”
“I don’t know. I suppose they thought I might have something to do with it. I knew the man who died. The old bastard was spying on me.”
When Foma devoted his attention to a thought, he was as intent as someone working a bellows. I watched while he assimilated the idea. “Did you ever figure it out? Who killed your friend?”
“No.”
“What’d he do to get mixed up in bad business?”
“I have no idea. He was only a painter, at the camp museum. It’s where they keep the old icons, the ones that used to belong to the monks. He restored them.”
“What does that mean, ‘restored them’?”
“Cleaned them. Repainted where the paint had come off. Fixed their gesso—the plaster they’re painted on—when it needed it. I seem to have learned as much about it in the past few days as I ever did when he was alive.”
He nodded. “Probably had plenty of them, the monks. Guess there would be a lot of work for you, if you knew how to do it. There you go, Buteyko.”
The section leader had appeared before us carrying two towering stacks of bowls, and we handed ours over to be returned to the kitchen.
“My little granny had a good icon,” Foma continued. “Virgin Mary with the Christ Child. Big, too. Always there in its corner, with a candle in front of it when she could.”
“We were never very devout in my family.”
“Not like my granny, then. Always talking to the priest, she was. She liked to have things done the right way.” He put his hands behind him on the pallet and propped himself up. “When Granddad died she wouldn’t rest until we had a swan brought in.”
“Did you say a swan?”
“Right.” His coarse and dirty hair stood up elaborately. “Our chapel got burned by Reds from the city. No one left to give him a confession. She made me go out to the pond and catch one and bring it into the room with him while he died. Tough to catch. All that hissing, running around on those black feet. Big. The one I finally grabbed got me in the nose with a wing. Bruised across my face for a week, like I’d got hit with a plank.”
“But why bring a swan at all?”
“Gran always said a swan is very like the Holy Spirit. Same as when you get an icon and it heals someone sick. Better than a week of prayers. Christ has mercy on you when you bring it in the room.” My expression must have been doubtful. For a moment, Foma looked embarrassed. “Never heard that about a swan?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to interfere with the reconciliation we were managing. “Well, I told you, we weren’t devout. But Antonov believed in the power of icons. According to him, the Church Fathers said the icon is the symbolic image of Christ, so it doesn’t matter whether it looks the way he really did in life. ‘Not a likeness, but a window on glory,’ he’d say. Why not a swan, in that case? Maybe a bird is as good a window as anything else.”
“Don’t know about that. My little granny always said, ‘A swan’s good as St. Basil for a fever.’”
“There you are. The same thing.”
We sat and watched the activity in the cathedral. Genkin was talking rapidly to two blond Finns over by the next bunk. “Did she want the swan to heal him, then?” I said. “Or to absolve his sins?”
“Eh, well.” Foma stroked his chin and looked off wistfully a
t the walls rising above the bunks on the other side of the chancel. “Granddad was an old man. Had the cough and the fever. Couldn’t recognize us. Not much chance he’d get better. Mostly she was sorry he couldn’t be confessed. Must have figured, swans being holy as they are, it would be good to have one.”
He heaved a breath and lay back on the plank, propping himself on his elbows as though on a wedge. “Dirty thing, that swan, all green round its feathers with scum. We’d pulled the bed over by the stove for Granddad. Swan finally settled on Granny’s linen chest under the window, one leg stuck up funny. Got to have a good look at it, while we waited for him to go. Granny kissing the icon, swan on the chest, and I just sat. Lots of little black scales on their legs, like a snake …” He raised himself and moved his fingers in that way he had, making little pinching gestures to illustrate the smallness of the scales.
Soon it was curfew. As the whistle screamed, I lay down in the bottom bunk, and Foma climbed up to the one that had been mine. Before long the lights had been put out, and the sound of men turning in their beds subsided to scattered snoring and the occasional scratch.
It was fully dark when I heard Foma drop to the floor with a bump.
“Oy, Tolya,” he whispered. “Take your bunk back. I like my bottom one better.”
“That’s all right, Foma. I don’t mind.”
“You take yours back. I want mine.”
Already he was shoving his coat and other little belongings onto the cot. I sat up, and without being able to see each other we maneuvered awkwardly, nearly embracing, until he had lain down. Now I was the one standing and facing him. “Thank you,” I said.
“I like mine better, I tell you.”
Taking my own coat, I climbed up and settled myself again. With the haul of Antonov’s rations secreted about the coat, I couldn’t wear it comfortably when I stretched out. Instead I pulled it over me like a blanket. The sweater I’d acquired, interposed between my jutting bone and the wood beneath me, made a decent hip pillow. I fell asleep quickly once it was all arranged.
Later that night, the sound of killing woke me up.
I had been dreaming. I never remember my dreams, but in this one I rode a horse through the classrooms and halls of my gymnasium in Petersburg. I had never ridden a horse, and never have since. In the dream I gripped its mane and held its giant back between my legs. It galloped easily through doors and around the desks of my teachers.
Then came the point when the dream changed. The horse no longer huffed its regular breaths. Instead, it began to grunt and moan. I felt the sounds vibrate through its ribcage in my groin. The sound of its hooves became a ringing of metal on metal, and it bucked. I woke.
In the dark, I could still hear the dream sounds. Close by, the horse was moaning—no, a shout, but muffled, like a hand being held over someone’s mouth. There was a ding of metal being given a glancing hit. Then a curse, and my cot moved, struck from below.
I groped blindly over the edge, touching flesh moving under cloth before someone struck my hand aside. By this time the others had started waking up as well. I heard Panko above me, high-pitched, alarmed.
“What’s this? Genkin, what’s happening?”
“Shut up, fucking cocksuckers,” said a voice I didn’t recognize.
The muffled shouting came from directly below me.
“Foma!” I yelled.
A fist caught me in the shoulder, then solidly in the chest.
There was the distinct, ringing sound of a hammer striking metal. A solid blow this time. In the darkness the sound was unreal, like someone had brought his work to bed with him and continued it in his sleep.
The person hitting me managed to get an arm across my chest, holding me down easily. The fist of his other arm connected with my ear, my mouth. I tasted blood. The hammer rang out below, four times in rapid succession, and the moaning turned into a rattling gurgle. We heard the sounds of footsteps, many of them, running away.
“Foma,” I cried again.
“What is it? What’s happened? What is going on here?” That was Buteyko’s voice. I could hear him stumbling towards us. I’d climbed out of bed and was down on the floor, kneeling by Foma. He was still making sounds. My hands located his face. His lips were moving, and his shoulders jerked.
“Foma, say something,” I said.
“It’s Pavlyuk,” said Genkin’s voice. “What I think is that something’s happened to young Foma Pavlyuk.”
Flecks of something warm hit my face. I could smell that it was blood. When I moved my hands down to it, his chest was wet and hot.
Foma had stopped trying to say anything.
There was more talking. I wondered whether I should do something, slap his cheeks or try to revive him some other way. I touched his face again, but the gesture meant nothing. He twitched a little, but I didn’t think he could tell I was there. Soon he didn’t twitch anymore.
After a long time, Buteyko came back, holding a lamp.
“Dear God,” he said.
I looked at the blood and the expression on Foma’s face a little, but the light made no difference. I’d felt it all for myself already. I didn’t need the image.
23
The sun was beginning to rise as we marched out to the work sites. I recall staring stupidly at a hare that twitched its nose a safe distance from our path, struggling to bring the animal’s name to my mind. Every impression came to me smudged, as if much handled. I had never been more aware of being one of many.
Foma was also one of many, having passed without a ripple from the monotonous throng of the living to the monotonous throng of the dead. Timbering continued without him.
I could not seem to order my thoughts. When the first signal had blown for roll that morning, I still hadn’t slept. Genkin had climbed down from his bunk before anyone else. “I will tell you,” he said when he saw me. “I think you’d better go wash.”
Buteyko had told me to do the same during the night, but I hadn’t. Why had Foma been chosen as a victim? They’d taken nothing from him—he’d had nothing worth stealing. Revenge and competition were other motives, but who would want to revenge himself on Foma? Who was there for him to compete with, and over what? He barely knew anyone outside our platoon. How had he ended on the wrong side of a gang of killers?
No, no one had any reason to do what had been done to Foma. But, after my flight through the woods two nights before, I knew someone was out there who had reason to do it to me. And hadn’t Foma and I switched bunks? Had it really been him they were after?
The question hammered in my head with every pump of my heart. It had not made me anxious to follow Buteyko’s advice. How could I go out alone into the dark to wash? The men who’d opened Foma’s chest were still about somewhere, inside the cathedral with us.
And so I’d spent the night smelling blood as it dried on my hands and shirt.
After the tumult of the murder, it had grown quiet again quickly. Buteyko and a few others had wanted to take Foma’s body outside, but agreed that it couldn’t be done before curfew was lifted in the morning. Instead they carried him to an out-of-the-way vestibule. I didn’t ask whether they’d found the spoon I’d just given him.
Those nearest us must have realized what happened, but it would have been bad policy to show it. Before the light was put out again, I caught a man two rows down staring at me, terrified. He turned over as soon as he saw I’d noticed him. All night I listened for footsteps coming back, hearing only the sounds of a thousand men breathing in their sleep, their bunks creaking as they shifted. Outside, the wind shrieked through the kremlin’s gaps.
Before roll, I had taken Genkin’s advice, scrubbed the dried blood from my hands and face with snow outside. There was not much to do about my clothes. The sweater I’d taken from Antonov’s chest, once gray, had turned brown and sticky. I wondered where they would have dumped Foma�
��s body, but didn’t linger to look for new humps in the snow.
Back inside, Buteyko was talking to one of his superiors, a man I’d seen before but whose name I didn’t know. A woodcarving chisel and a bloody hammer had been found kicked beneath the bunks next to ours. It had taken less than a minute, start to finish, Buteyko explained. They’d held him down, cracked his ribs, and neatly gashed his heart.
“Are they going to do anything about it?” Genkin had asked after the man left.
“He says it’s regrettable.”
Antonov’s murder had only been investigated the way it had because it was unusual—and because, evidently, he was an object of Infosec’s suspicion. But Foma’s death was routine. I wondered dully who’d ordered it, but no one would care. The hands that had staked him could have been any of hundreds. It made no difference.
And so timbering continued. The work assignment that morning had me and Panko stripping some of the logs our team had felled the previous day. We were to use hatchets to remove their branches, preparing them for the bucking team. The old Cossack communicated his sorrow about Foma by nodding whenever he caught my eye, then shaking his head or shrugging.
The sighs, his dull chopping, the occasional crack as he pulled off a small branch—all of it was remote. My mind wasn’t on the work. Panko had to have noticed me idling, but he let me be.
I was in danger. That was certain. Only three nights before—it seemed like a long time now—I’d hesitated to acknowledge the threat posed by the figure that waited for me on the road. The inexact thinking that followed had let my pursuers catch back up to me after I’d put some space between us.
Numb as I was, I would have to be alive to events. I would have to think.
How would Petrovich have advised me? But no. I was still angry. A mistake to model my thinking on the old man’s, when he had been the very one to put me in this situation.
Instead: what would the heroes of my boyhood detektivy have done? How would Sherlock Holmes have reasoned the mystery out? How would Nat Pinkerton, King of Detectives, have chased the culprit down?
