The Body Outside the Kremlin

by James L. May

  I stuttered the name: Kologriev.

  I’d learned the secret of Antonov’s killer, and I’d told it. What happened after was out of my hands.

  Petrovich, moving at a slower pace than Vinogradov, only came on the scene later, once I’d been taken off to the hospital. As a result we missed each other. The old man and I didn’t meet again until two months had passed. By then Vinogradov had made my assignment to the museum official, and I’d been transferred back to Company Ten. As it turned out, solving the case had come with more benefits than just saving my skin from Kologriev.

  My new cell was in the company’s second dormitory, which faced the kremlin wall, rather than the courtyard. Two sets of stairs and a hallway separated it from the one Petrovich and I had shared. The new cell, much larger, bedded six. I remember best a loud-voiced Romanian named Byrsan, who wore an embroidered shirt every Sunday evening. I never knew any of them well.

  I’d been there for five days when Petrovich came to me. A pot of groats for my lunch was bubbling on the cell’s stove when he appeared in the door. Never a careful shaver, he now appeared to have given in to haphazardness altogether. Hair bristled at different lengths on his cheeks. The unkempt mustache hung over his lips.

  “Anatoly Pavelovich,” he said, crossing the threshold. “They told me I might find you here.”

  He must have timed the visit carefully. I’d soon decided I preferred not to compete with my cellmates for time at the stove. Thus it was two in the afternoon, well after the time most zeks cooked their midday meal.

  I limped over to shake his hand. After my time in the water, my feet had blistered, swollen, and finally begun to rot. Frostbite’s final toll amounted to four toes and a half, along with a hunk of my right heel.

  “You’re well, I hope?” he said. “Happy to see you’d received your transfer here. Still dangerous in Quarantine, eh? This was probably the best outcome for you.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Vinogradov’s taken care of you. Good friend to have, that one.” Underneath his gruffness was a whine. His way of talking was the same but with something perfunctory about it, like a man no longer convinced by his own personality. When I didn’t say anything, he went on. “Been thinking. Antonov’s body. Remember I wanted the remains accessible? Thought I might need to look at them again. Didn’t need to in the end, but I thought I might.”

  “I remember.”

  “Yes. Well. What happened to him after that? The Chekist had him left out somewhere to freeze, but I never heard of him being taken care of after everything was over.” He made a weak gesture, as though he’d been planning some confident motion of the hand, only to think better of it at the last moment. “Wouldn’t be the first time they lost track of someone dead, eh? Accidentally, I mean. But someone should see he gets buried. Properly, you know. Antonov—Gennady Mikhailovich deserves that much from us, doesn’t he? Wouldn’t want to be left out in the snow myself. You’ve come up in the world and I’ve sunk down somewhat, but we’re still his friends. We made a good team for him before.”

  My pot needed stirring. “You needn’t worry,” I said, stepping over to it. “He’s been buried.”

  “Oh.” When I looked back, the focus had faded from his features. The blur that had been his face could have belonged to any unkempt, hungry old man, with eyes of any color at all.

  “The Chekist took care of the body shortly after they sent Kologriev off. It wasn’t too public, but Vinogradov heard.”

  “Oh.”

  I knew already: the Chekist had dropped Petrovich, and his position in KrimKab was tenuous. All because he’d defied Infosec to proceed with the investigation, its outcome notwithstanding. That was my doing. The missing toes and finger aside, he was right: my position had improved, and his had gotten worse.

  Embarrassment, I think it was, that made me explain. I didn’t want to share my groats. I gave him talk instead.

  “Vinogradov was irate, actually. It was part of Infosec’s saving face. They insisted the requisition was entirely legitimate. Do you see what I mean? Officially, it was declared a matter of a routine order, only subject to interference by an urka with corrupt, reactionary tendencies. No one can prove Kologriev’s misinformation was what made them shoot those Whites. Even you and I, knowing what we know, I don’t think we could prove it. As long as the coffins were delivered to the cemetery with bodies in them, it would make things all right. In someone’s eyes, at least.”

  He looked at me uncomprehendingly, foggily. I concluded lamely: “They buried him in one of the coffins.”

  “Ah,” the old man said. The sound was strangled. “Yes. Yes. Saving face.”

  We were quiet. The December wind rushed by outside the cell’s single window. “Maybe he’d have liked the idea,” I said hopelessly. “Surrounded by the paintings that way.”

  Petrovich stood for a moment, looking at the floor. When he looked up, he was grimacing. An attempt at a smile.

  “That’s something I taught you, then. You’re keeping track of all the little bits of information that come your way now, aren’t you? Never know when you’ll get to use them.” I nodded. “You weren’t there when they finally found that bastard Kologriev, eh?” he went on. “Too bad. You deserved it. Nothing more satisfying than seeing them take your man into custody.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  The gnarled fingers picked at his sleeve. “He didn’t try to run, you know. Just curled up by a stove in the corner of the ship’s mess. No one expected him to stay on the boat. Took some time to find him. He must have been cold, eh?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Must have been.”

  Petrovich gazed at me for another moment. “I still picture you turning Antonov over onto his back by his ankles,” he said. “You told me he was a lever … What kind was it?”

  “A lever of the second class.”

  After he left, I finished cooking and ate my meal. We would nod if we saw each other in the dormitory, but it didn’t happen often. After our week of partnership, Yakov Petrovich was no longer part of my life.

  That January there was an outbreak of typhus in the kremlin, and I heard he’d died.

  Even so, our case kept unspooling its consequences.

  Kologriev gave up his side of the story under interrogation. No, call it what it was: he gave it up under torture. Everyone knew what went on in the basements he toured.

  By his account, the idea to smuggle the icons off the island had been Antonov’s. In fact, Gennady Mikhailovich had approached him at the time of the first requisition order. Naturally Antonov wanted to keep the icons from being broken up for their wood. A buyer had already been arranged. Antonov offered Kologriev two-thirds of the proceeds from their sale if he would make arrangements for their delivery in secret to Kem. (Later Vinogradov admitted to me that he feared he himself had given Antonov the idea of suborning Kologriev. The two had discussed bribery when the requisition first came through, though Vinogradov’s goal in broaching the subject was to keep the icons in the collection, not remove them from it.)

  It was a deal Kologriev could accept. His then-boss Prokupin took no interest in what happened to the icons. Collecting them for boards had amused him for the way it insulted the church, but afterwards he lost interest. Kologriev had found it easy to “lose” the pieces in the warehouse, and his criminal contacts put him in touch with the mate of the Gleb Boky, a man who possessed both access to the mainland and a flexible attitude towards camp rules. The two soon reached an agreement.

  That first time they’d hidden the icons in a shipment of processed lumber, among the boards. The buyer’s agent, for whom neither Kologriev nor the first mate could give a name, had delivered payment on the spot. The mate took his cut, then duly conveyed the remainder back to Antonov and Kologriev.

  Thus thirty-eight icons were spirited off the island and delivered to Kem, before Petro
vich and I ever entered the case. It was done smoothly, profitably, calmly.

  In the year that followed, problems arose.

  First, the buyer objected to the condition in which his purchases had reached him. Evidently the paint of certain panels had suffered scrapes, likely as a result of their being stacked up against one another. Kologriev wasn’t able to say how the message had reached Antonov, but it had, and the restorer was irate. He would not, he declared, participate further in any scheme that might allow harm to come to the sacred works of art. Moreover, the buyer refused to pay full price for damaged goods.

  Kologriev reassured him as best he could: next time they’d do better. Soon afterward, however, Prokupin lost his position. The replacement of the Bolshevik’s neglect and inattention by Zhenov’s system of careful record keeping and audits made everything more difficult.

  Kologriev’s solution was ingenious. But, it had to be admitted, sending the icons to the cabinetry workshop to be hammered into coffins seemed at least as serious a threat to their integrity as stacking them up had been. Antonov, then, could not know what the plan entailed. At the same time, Kologriev was mindful that delivering the paintings in the best possible shape would maximize his profits. Without explaining why, he suggested to Antonov that there might be some extramural restoration work to be done. He should prepare what he needed and wait for word.

  No explanation was ever found for what Antonov did next. Instead of waiting for word, he took gold leaf and other supplies from his own desk as soon as the requisitioned icons had been collected. Reporting to Vinogradov that they’d been stolen, he acquired a pass out of the kremlin, ostensibly to investigate. Then he presented himself at the Anzer warehouse, demanding to see Kologriev.

  He must have assumed he would be able to see to any necessary repairs, then report to Vinogradov that he’d been able to recover the majority of the supplies. Should it have been surprising that this appearance had not been reported to Petrovich and myself in our inquiries at the warehouse? Whether through bribery or intimidation, Kologriev had the men he worked and lived with under his thumb—that had long been clear.

  At any rate, he and Antonov met. The urka could only conceal for so long the fact that the pieces had already been sent to the cabinetry workshop. When Antonov learned what lay in store, their partnership at once dissolved. He announced that he would rather have the whole affair exposed than to see his icons hammered into boxes. He intended to go to Vinogradov immediately, that night, and confess all.

  Kologriev, for his part, did not waste any words announcing his intentions. Instead he simply waited for his erstwhile partner to turn away, then hit him in the base of the skull with a pry bar. Once he was sure Antonov was dead, he waited for darkness, then dragged the body to the bay and threw it in the water.

  It was not what Kologriev had planned, of course. It was hurried, it was a risk. But perhaps Antonov’s fate was already sealed. Perhaps it had been ever since it proved necessary for payment to be made on delivery in Kem, instead of being sent by mail to Antonov himself. After that, it was only a matter of time before Kologriev figured out a way to remove the restorer from the loop. By the time he killed him, he’d already given Antonov’s name to the Chekist as a conspirator in the rumored escape. Details of this part of his scheme were never revealed to us. Infosec proved reluctant to discuss with Vinogradov or me exactly how Kologriev’s status as an informant had allowed him to defraud the camp authorities. Instead, they pressed us to fill in a different gap: who was the final buyer for the stolen icons to have been? The concern was less to punish this individual, assumed to be a foreigner anyway, than to discover how Antonov had made the arrangements. It suggested a much freer channel of communication with the mainland than they liked.

  In fact, Vinogradov had been able to tell me immediately what the channel was. “I am afraid I facilitated the arrangement myself,” he said with a small frown. The museum, as an independently administered entity within the camp, came with a number of privileges for its director, of the same kind as those enjoyed by grander creatures, company commanders or production-section coordinators. One of these was the right to send and receive sealed mail, bypassing the censors’ normal review. Vinogradov had permitted several of his favored subordinates, Antonov among them, to include in his packets letters of their own. It was a courtesy: he had not insisted on reading what they sent.

  Thus negotiations for the illicit sale of his collection had been carried out directly under his nose, even with his assistance—naturally not a fact he was anxious to have widely known. He needed to be seen to make inquiries.

  And so I was sent to Veronika.

  This was February, four months since I’d last seen her. Vinogradov would have given me a pass to the fishery earlier, if I’d asked. Something had stopped me.

  “Anatoly Pavelovich,” she exclaimed when I found her. She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. It was longer than it had been, I thought. She was thinner. “I never heard from you. I thought—” She trailed off. Whatever she’d thought, she didn’t say it.

  The sea was frozen solid, and out on the ice two gatherings of bearded men bustled with ropes, visible sign of nets moving beneath the surface. The monks were fishing. We leaned on the fishery railing and watched them, bundled against the wind, while I explained a little of what Vinogradov and I had learned. Of course, she had no idea who the buyer had been.

  “Maybe you overheard a word or two about his contacts,” I said. Vinogradov had emphasized the desirability of telling Infosec we’d found out something new, whether it had anything to do with the smuggling or not. “Any name might help. Someone among the Germans, maybe. He mentioned once there were respectable collectors in Germany.”

  “I don’t know any Germans.” The sky that day was unseasonably clear and blue. The wintry sun shone on the monks, and she laughed shrilly, happily. “Having once kept a secret from you, I suppose now you’ll never again believe I’m innocent of these schemes.”

  I shrugged. The sun glittered in her eyes, and they gave back a black reflection of the day, the way an animal’s do. I suppose she saw that I did not really care what I was asking her.

  “So,” she said. “This is how it is for you now, is it? You’re the museum director’s man-of-all-work?”

  Yes: she knew that there was nothing I wanted from her. But still there was something in her voice, in her manner.

  “Mostly I’m in the archives,” I said. “Some date or other is always missing from the catalog.”

  “But you track down other loose ends, too. You got his icons back for him. Anyone would respect you as a tracker-down of ends, after that.”

  I didn’t correct her about what had happened to the icons, how they had been buried. And there was no point pretending I didn’t understand what she meant. I was wearing a new watch cap, a new coat—both provided by Vinogradov. “That’s right.”

  The monks’ raised voices drifted towards us from over the ice.

  “I heard they’d ended up in the bay. They say someone jumped in after.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “That would have to have been you, wouldn’t it?”

  “It turned out all right,” I said.

  I hadn’t jumped in after, of course: I’d gone for the rail to escape Kologriev, with the coffin falling in behind. But it was true that I’d saved it. And that had been the right choice: if I hadn’t endured the water as long as I did to keep the coffin afloat, the mate would have denied us our proof. While Kologriev and I gasped and struggled, he had been stowing the remaining coffins away in the Gleb Boky’s belly, just as I feared. When they came for him, he was urging the captain to launch despite the disruption, desperate to make his escape to the mainland.

  Veronika watched me, waiting for me to say more. At last she looked down.

  “I don’t need to know all the details,” she said. “You say you caught the murderer. Fine, I’m happy
you did. But these coffins you say you found … Tell me, did I misjudge him?”

  “Misjudge him? Antonov?”

  “Yes, yes.” She sounded exasperated. “It would be a misjudgment, wouldn’t it? You aren’t telling me everything about the plot. Fine. But even so, I can see there would have been no way to get the paintings off the island if those executions hadn’t happened at the right moment.” Her voice could change so quickly. It trembled now between emotions, from frustration to sorrow. Or was it to pleading? “Did Antonov know what would happen to those men? Did he have a part in it?”

  “You mean, was he ready for them to die to save his icons?”.

  Veronika shook her head, a quick, tight shake. “Just tell me.”

  How had the smuggling depended on the executions? Vinogradov and I had not been able to sort it out entirely ourselves. Kologriev, obviously, had set himself up as an informant. It was only in such a position that he could have arranged for the executions to take place at the time he needed them to. Given this, we reasoned that he must also have been the one behind Petrovich’s and my investigation authorization being revoked at the crucial moment. He’d have said—what? Something about my untrustworthiness, no doubt, and about our clumsy investigation threatening to throw the conspirators’ suspicion on him.

  But why had he ever been believed? Knowing, as we did, that any information he’d provided had been pure fiction, it was easy for us to ask. But you could ask equally: what reason did they have not to? From the Chekist’s perspective, at worst a few reactionaries would be disposed of. A reformed urka, coming to them with information about a plot among the Whites? As a story, it was irresistible. What a success to report for the project of SLON!

  He must have been talking to the Chekist and Infosec for a long time, then, long enough for the narrative he’d fed them to be well established. Since the victims had all been associates of Zhenov’s, we hypothesized that his tale had involved a plan hatched at Zhenov’s gatherings, with the military men planning to seize supplies and cross the ice as soon as it became solid enough to walk on. How Kologriev had accounted for his knowledge of these meetings was as unclear as everything else. (For instance: how had he transported the painted coffins from the train to his warehouse, and thence to the ship? With Zhenov absent on Anzer when the shipment took place, he might simply have relied on the executioners to be too intent on covering their work with dirt to notice anything else, and never delivered them to the cemetery.) He could, of course, have claimed they’d recruited him, knowing he’d managed to pull off escapes in tsarist camps. He had not implicated Zhenov, but that might simply have been a matter of it being more convenient to continue with a known supervisor, one who’d proved exploitable already.