Child 44

by Tom Rob Smith

  The man dropped onto his hands and knees, crawling after her. Part of his earlobe hung loose, dangling from a flap of skin, his expression twisted with anger. He lunged for her ankles. She managed to keep out of reach, barely, outpacing him until she backed into a tree trunk. With her brought to a sudden stop he caught up, took hold of her ankle. She slashed at his hand, jabbing and cutting. He grabbed her wrist, pulling her toward him. Face-to-face she leaned forward, trying to bite his nose. With his free hand he clasped her neck, squeezing, keeping out of her reach. She gasped, trying to break free, but his grip was too strong. She was suffocating. She threw her weight sideways. The two of them tumbled—rolling in the snow, over and over each other.

  Inexplicably he let go, releasing her neck. She coughed, catching her breath. The man was still on top, pinning her down, but no longer looking in her direction. His attention was on something else, something to the side of them. She turned her head.

  Sunken into the snow beside her was the naked body of a young girl. Her skin was pale, almost translucent. Her hair was blonde, almost white. Her mouth was wide open and had been stuffed with dirt. It formed a mound, rising above her thin blue lips. The girl’s arms and legs and face appeared to be uninjured, covered in a light layer of snow which had been disturbed when they’d rolled into it. Her torso had been savaged. The organs were exposed, ripped, torn. Much of the skin was missing, cut away or peeled back, as though her body had been attacked by a pack of wolves.

  Ilinaya looked up at her pursuer. He seemed to have forgotten about her. He was staring at the girl’s body. He began to retch, doubled over, and was sick. Without thinking she put a consoling hand on his back. Remembering herself, remembering who this man was and what he’d done to her, she pulled her hand away, got up, and ran. This time her instincts didn’t let her down. She broke through the edge of the forest, running toward the station. She had no idea if the man was chasing her or not. This time she didn’t scream, didn’t slow down, and didn’t look back.

  MOSCOW

  14 MARCH

  LEO OPENED HIS EYES. A flashlight blinded him. He didn’t need to check his watch to know the time—arresting hour, four in the morning. He got out of bed, heart pounding. In the dark he staggered, disoriented, bumping into one man, pushed to the side. He stumbled, regained his balance. The lights came on. Adjusting to the brightness, he saw three officers: young men, not much older than eighteen. They were armed. Leo didn’t recognize them but he knew the kind of officers they were: low-ranking, unthinkingly obedient, they’d follow whatever orders they’d been given. They’d be violent without hesitation: any slight resistance would be answered with extreme force. They gave off a smell of cigarette smoke and alcohol. Leo supposed these men hadn’t been to bed yet: drinking all night, staying up for this assignment. Alcohol would make them unpredictable, volatile. To survive these next few minutes Leo would have to be cautious, submissive. He hoped Raisa understood that as well.

  Raisa was standing in her nightclothes, shivering but not from the cold. She wasn’t sure whether it was shock or fear or anger. She couldn’t stop shaking. But she wouldn’t look away. She wasn’t embarrassed; let them be embarrassed at their violation, let them see her crumpled nightdress, her untidy hair. No, they were indifferent: it was all the same to them, part of their job. She saw no sensitivity in these boys’ eyes. They were dull: flicking from side to side like a lizard—reptilian eyes. Where did the MGB find these boys with souls of lead? They made them that way, she was sure of it. She glanced at Leo. He was standing with his hands in front, his head dropped in order to avoid eye contact. Humility, meekness: maybe that was the smart way to behave. But she didn’t feel smart right now. There were three thugs in their bedroom. She wanted him defiant, angry. Surely that was the natural reaction? Any ordinary man would feel outrage. Leo was political even now.

  One of the men left the room, to return almost immediately holding two small cases:

  —This is all you can take. You can carry nothing on your person except your clothes and your papers. In one hour we leave whether you’re ready or not.

  Leo stared at each case, canvas stretched tight over a timber frame. They offered a modest space, enough for a day trip. He turned to his wife:

  —Wear as much as you can.

  He glanced behind him. One of the officers was watching, smoking.

  —Can you wait outside?

  —Don’t waste time making requests. The answer to everything is no.

  Raisa got changed, sensing this guard’s reptile eyes roaming over her body. She wore as many clothes as she could reasonably manage: layers on top of layers. Leo did the same. It might have been comical, in other circumstances, their limbs swollen by cotton and wool. Dressed, she grappled with the question of what, of all their belongings, they should bring and what they were forced to leave behind. She examined her case. It was no more than ninety centimeters wide, maybe sixty centimeters high and twenty centimeters deep. Their lives had to reduce to fit this space.

  Leo knew there was a chance they’d been told to pack merely as a way of being moved without any of the emotional fuss, the struggle which came with the realization that they were being sent to their deaths. It was always easier to move people around if they clung to the notion, no matter how small, that they were going to survive. However, what could he do? Give up? Fight? He made several quick calculations. Precious space had to be wasted with the inclusion of The Book of Propagandists and The Short Course of the Bolshevik Party, neither of which could be abandoned without it being construed as a subversive political gesture. In their current predicament such recklessness was nothing less than suicidal. He grabbed the books, putting them in the case, the first objects either of them had packed. Their young guard was watching everything, seeing what went in, what choices they made. Leo touched Raisa’s arm:

  —Take our shoes. Pick the best, one pair each.

  Good shoes were rare, tradable, a valuable commodity.

  Leo gathered up clothes, items of value, their collection of photos: photos of their wedding, his parents Stepan and Anna but none of Raisa’s family. Her parents had been killed in the Great Patriotic War, her village wiped out. She’d lost everything except the clothes she’d been wearing. With his case full, Leo’s eyes came to rest on the framed newspaper clipping hanging on the wall: the photo of himself, the war hero, the tank destroyer, the liberator of occupied soil. His past made no difference to these guards: with the signing of an arrest warrant every act of heroism and personal sacrifice had been made irrelevant. Leo took the clipping out of the frame. After years of carefully preserving it, revering it on the wall as though it were a holy icon, he folded the newspaper down the middle and tossed it inside the case.

  Their time was up. Leo shut his case. Raisa shut hers. He wondered if they’d ever see this apartment again. It was unlikely.

  Escorted downstairs, all five of them crammed into the elevator, pressed together. There was a car waiting. Two of the officers sat in the front. One sat in the back, his breath stinking, sandwiched between Leo and Raisa:

  —I’d like to see my parents. I’d like to say good-bye.

  —No fucking requests.

  FIVE IN THE MORNING and the departure hall was already busy. There were soldiers, civilian passengers, station workers all orbiting the Trans-Siberian express train. The engine, still clad in armor plating from the war, was embossed on the side with the words HAIL TO COMMUNISM. While passengers boarded the train, Leo and Raisa waited at the end of the platform, holding their cases and flanked by their armed escort. As though they were infected with a contagious virus, no one approached them, an isolated bubble in a crowded station. They’d been given no explanation, nor did Leo bother asking for one. He had no idea where they were going or who they were waiting for. There was still a chance they’d be sent to different Gulags, never to see each other again. However, this was unmistakably a passenger train, not the zak cars, the red cattle trucks used to transport prisoners.
Was it possible they were going to escape with their lives? There was no doubt that they’d been lucky so far. They were still alive, still together, more than Leo had dared to hope for.

  After Leo’s testimony he’d been sent home, placed under house arrest until a decision could be made. He’d expected it to take no more than a day. On the way to his apartment, on the fourteenth-floor landing, aware that he still had the incriminating hollow coin in his pocket, he had tossed it over the side. Maybe Vasili had planted it, maybe not. It no longer mattered. When Raisa had arrived back from school she’d found two armed officers outside their door; she’d been searched and ordered to remain inside. Leo had explained their predicament: the allegations against her, his own investigation and his denial of the charges. He hadn’t needed to explain that their chances of survival were slim. As he’d talked she’d listened without comment or question, expressionless. When he’d finished her response had taken him by surprise:

  —It was naïve to think this wouldn’t happen to us too.

  They’d sat in their apartment, expecting the MGB to come at any minute. Neither of them had bothered to cook; neither of them had been hungry even though the sensible thing to do would’ve been to eat as much as possible in preparation for what might lay ahead. They hadn’t gotten undressed for bed, they hadn’t moved from the kitchen table. They’d sat in silence—waiting. Considering they might never see each other again, Leo had felt an urge to talk to his wife: to say things that needed to be said. But he’d been unable to formulate what those things might be. As the hours passed he’d realized this was the most time they’d spent together, face-to-face, uninterrupted, for as long as he could remember. Neither of them had known what to do with it.

  The knock on the door hadn’t come that night. Four in the morning had passed, there’d been no arrest. As it had approached midday the following day, Leo made breakfast, wondering why they were taking so long. When the first knock on the door finally came, he and Raisa had stood up, breathing fast, expecting this to be the end, the arrival of officers collecting them, splitting them apart and taking them to their separate interrogations. Instead it was some trivial matter: a changing of the guards, an officer using their bathroom, questions about buying food. Perhaps they couldn’t find any evidence, perhaps they’d be cleared and the case against them would collapse. Leo had only flirted with these thoughts briefly: accusations never collapsed through lack of proof. All the same, a day became two days, two days became four days.

  A week into their confinement, a guard had entered the apartment, ashen-faced. Seeing him, Leo had been certain their time had finally come, only to listen as the guard announced, in a voice trembling with emotion, that their Leader, Stalin, was dead. Only at this moment had Leo allowed himself to contemplate whether or not they might just have a chance of surviving.

  Able to gather the vaguest details of their Leader’s demise—the newspapers had been hysterical, the guards hysterical—all Leo could piece together was that Stalin had died peacefully in his bed. His last words had purportedly been about their great country and their great country’s future. Leo hadn’t believed it for a second, too schooled in paranoia and plot not to see the cracks in the story. He knew from his work that Stalin had recently arrested the country’s foremost doctors, doctors who had spent their entire working lives keeping him well, as part of a purge of prominent Jewish figures. It struck him as no coincidence that Stalin had died of apparently natural causes at a time when there were no expert medical professionals to identify the source of his sudden sickness. Morality aside, the great Leader’s purge had been a tactical error. It had left him exposed. Leo had no idea whether Stalin had been murdered or not. With the doctors locked up that certainly gave any would-be assassins a free hand to do as they pleased, which was to sit back and watch him die, safe in the knowledge that the very men and women who could stop them were behind bars. Having said that, it was just as possible that Stalin had fallen ill and no one dared contradict his orders and release the doctors. If Stalin had recovered they might have been executed for disobedience.

  This skulduggery was of little importance to Leo. What was important was that the man was dead. Everyone’s sense of order and certainty had dissolved. Who would take over? How would they run the country? What decisions would they make? Which officers would be in favor and which would be out of favor? What was acceptable under Stalin might be unacceptable under new rule. The absence of a leader would mean temporary paralysis. No one wanted to make a decision unless they knew their decision would be approved. For decades no one had taken action according to what they believed was right or wrong but by what they thought would please their Leader. People had lived or died depending on his annotations on a list: a line against a name saved a person, no mark meant they were left to die. That was the judicial system—line or no line. Closing his eyes, Leo had been able to imagine the muted panic within the corridors of the Lubyanka. Their moral compass had been neglected for so long that it spun out of control: north was south and east was west. As for questions of what was right and wrong—they had no idea. They’d forgotten how to decide. In times like these the safest course of action was to do as little as possible.

  In these circumstances the case of Leo Demidov and his wife, Raisa Demidova, which had no doubt proved divisive, inflammatory, and problematic, was best shunted to the margins. That’s why there’d been the delay. No one had wanted to touch it: everyone was too busy repositioning with the new power groups in the Kremlin. To complicate matters further, Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s closest aide—and if anyone had poisoned Stalin, Leo suspected it was him—had already assumed the mantle of Leader and dismissed the notion that there was a plot, ordering the doctors to be released. Suspects released because they were innocent—who’d heard of such a thing? Certainly Leo couldn’t remember any precedent. In these circumstances prosecuting a decorated war hero, a man who’d made the front page of Pravda, without any evidence, might be deemed risky. So, on the sixth of March, instead of a knock on the door bringing news of their fate, Leo and Raisa had been granted permission to attend the State funeral of their great Leader.

  Still technically under house arrest, Leo and Raisa and their two guards had dutifully joined the crowds, all of them making their way toward Red Square. Many had been crying, some uncontrollably—men and women and children—and Leo had wondered if there was a person in sight, out of all the hundreds of thousands gathered in their collective grief, who hadn’t lost some family or friend to the man they were apparently mourning. The atmosphere, fraught, charged with an overwhelming sense of sadness, perhaps had something to do with an idolization of this dead man. Leo had heard many people, even in the most brutal of interrogations, cry out that if only Stalin knew about the excesses of the MGB he would intervene. Whatever the real reason behind the sadness, the funeral had offered a legitimate outlet for years of pent-up misery, an opportunity to cry, to hug your neighbor, to express a sadness that had never previously been allowed to show itself because it implied some criticism of the State.

  The main streets and the State Duma had been packed so tight with people that it was hard to breathe, moving forward with as little control as a rock caught in a rockslide. Leo had never let go of Raisa’s hand and although shoulders pressed into him from all sides he’d made sure they weren’t pulled apart. They’d quickly been separated from their guards. As they’d neared the square the crowd contracted further. Feeling the squeeze, the mounting hysteria, Leo had decided enough. By chance, they’d been pushed to the edge of the crowd and he’d stepped into a doorway, helping Raisa out of the crowd. They’d sheltered there, watching as the streams of people continued past. It had been the right decision. Up ahead, people had been crushed to death.

  In the chaos they could’ve attempted escape. They’d considered it, debated it, whispering to each other in that doorway. The guards accompanying them had been lost. Raisa had wanted to run. But running would’ve given the MGB all the reason they
needed to execute them. And from a practical point of view they had no money, no friends, and no place to hide. If they’d decided to run Leo’s parents would’ve been executed. They’d been lucky so far. Leo had staked their lives on braving it out.

  THE LAST OF THE PASSENGERS had finished boarding. The stationmaster, seeing the uniforms clustered on the platform by the engine, was holding the departure for them. The train driver leaned out of his cabin, trying to figure out what the problem was. Curious passengers were stealing glances out of windows at this young couple in some sort of trouble.

  Leo could see a uniformed officer walking toward them. It was Vasili. Leo had been expecting him. He’d hardly miss the opportunity to gloat. Leo felt a flicker of anger but it was imperative he keep his emotions under control. There was, perhaps, a trap still to be set.

  Raisa had never seen Vasili before but she’d heard Leo’s description of him:

  A hero’s face, a henchman’s heart

  Even at a glance she could tell there was something not quite right about him. He was handsome, certainly, but he was smiling as though a smile had been invented to express nothing other than ill will. When he finally reached them she noticed his pleasure at Leo’s humiliation and his disappointment that it wasn’t greater.

  Vasili widened his smile:

  —I insisted that they wait, so I could say good-bye. And explain what has been decided for you. I wanted to do it personally, you understand?

  He was enjoying himself. As much as this man appalled Leo, it was stupid to risk angering him when they’d survived so much. In a voice barely audible he muttered:

  —I appreciate that.

  —You’ve been reassigned. It was impossible to keep you in the MGB with so many unanswered questions over your head. You’re going to join the militia. Not as a syshchik, not as a detective, but as the lowest entry position, an uchastkovyy. You’ll be the man who cleans the holding cells, the man who takes notes—the man who does as he’s told. You need to get used to taking orders if you’re to survive.