The Red Coffin (20 page)

‘The settlement,’ whispered Pekkala. And then he went blind as an image of that place exploded behind his eyes.

Dalstroy-Seven was a collection of half a dozen log houses, poorly
and hurriedly built, bunched at the edge of a stream in the valley
of Krasnagolyana.

The site was less than ten kilometres from Pekkala’s camp. He
had arrived in the valley five years before. It was early summer
then, which gave him plenty of time to work on the cabin before
the first snow of autumn appeared. His cabin had been solidly
constructed in the style known as
zemlyanka
, in which half of
the living space was underground and the gaps between the logs
caulked with mud and grass.

But the inhabitants of Dalstroy-Seven had shown up just
after the first frost and there had been no time to build adequate
shelters before the winter set in.

Special Settlement people were a subsection of the Gulag camp
system, in which husbands and wives might all be shipped off
to different camps, and the children sent to orphanages if they
were too young to work. Special Settlements were shipped out
to Siberia as complete families, dumped in the forest or out on
the tundra and left to fend for themselves until such time as they
might be required as labour in the Gulag camps. Until then, the
settlements were nothing more than prisons without walls. Some
times these settlements lasted. More often, when guards arrived to
take away the prisoners, all they found were ghost villages, with
no trace left of the people who had once lived there.

Dalstroy settlement fell under the jurisdiction of a notorious
camp named Mamlin-Three on the other side of the valley. The
twenty-odd inhabitants of Dalstroy-Seven were city folk, to judge
from the mistakes they made – building the cabins too close to the
river, not knowing it would flood in springtime, making their
chimneys too short which meant the smoke would blow back into
the cabins. With winter already descending, like a white tidal
wave sweeping through the valley, the inmates of Dalstroy were
as good as dead.

Pekkala saw himself as he was then, a barely human presence
draped in the rags he had worn into the forest, staring at them
from his hiding place: a rocky outcrop that looked down upon the
valley where they had been abandoned with no instructions other
than simply to survive until the spring.

He stepped back into the shadows, knowing there was noth
ing he could do for them. He did not dare to show himself, since
he was well beyond the boundaries of the Borodok camp, of
which he was officially an inmate. With the task of marking trees
for cutting, he was allowed to roam within the borders of the
Borodok sector, but never beyond. If news reached Borodok that
he had been seen in an area designated for Mamlin-Three, on
the other side of the valley, they would send in troops to execute
him for the crime of trespassing.

Unlike the camp at Mamlin-Three, Borodok was a full-scale
logging operation, processing trees from the moment they were
cut until they emerged as kiln-dried boards, ready to be shipped
to the west.

What went on at Mamlin-Three was kept a secret, but
Pekkala had heard on his arrival at Borodok that to be a prisoner
at Mamlin was considered worse than death. That was why
convicts bound for that place were never told where they were
going until the moment they arrived.

Pekkala’s only company in this forbidden zone had been a
man who had escaped from the Mamlin-Three camp. His name
was Tatischev, and he had been a sergeant in one of the Tsar’s
Cossack regiments. After his escape, search parties had combed
the forest but never found Tatischev, for the simple reason that he
had hidden where they were least likely to search – within sight
of the Mamlin-Three camp. Here, he had remained, scratching
out an existence even more spartan than Pekkala’s.

Pekkala and Tatischev met twice a year in a clearing on
the border of the Borodok and Mamlin territorial boundaries.
Tatischev was a cautious man, and judged it too dangerous to
meet more often than that.

It was from Tatischev that Pekkala discovered exactly what
was happening at Mamlin. He learned that the camp had
been set aside as a research centre on human subjects. Low-
pressure experiments were carried out in order to determine the
effects on human tissue of high-altitude exposure. Men were
submerged in ice water, revived and then submerged again to
determine how long a downed pilot might survive after ditching
in the arctic seas above Murmansk. Some prisoners had anti-
freeze injected into their hearts. Others woke up on operating
tables to find their limbs had been removed. It was a place of
horrors, Tatischev told him, where the human race had sunk to
its ultimate depths.

On the third year of their meetings, Pekkala showed up at
the clearing to find Tatischev’s marrowless and chamfered bones
scattered about the clearing, and metal grommets from his boots
among the droppings of the wolves who had devoured him.

Pekkala returned to Dalstroy-Seven at the end of winter.
The snow had already begun to melt. Two nights before, he had
awakened to what he thought was the sound of ice breaking in
the river, but as the sharp cracking noise echoed through the
forest, Pekkala realised that it was gunfire coming from the direc
tion of the Dalstroy-Seven settlement.

The next day, Pekkala made his way there.

Seeing no smoke from the chimneys, he went down to the
settlement. One after the other, he opened the doors and stepped
into the dark.

Inside the cabins, people lay strewn around the room like dolls
thrown by an angry child. A gauze of frost covered their bod
ies. They had all been shot. The cratered wounds of bullet holes
stared like third eyes from the foreheads of the dead.

With hands rag-bound against the cold, Pekkala gathered up
a few of the spent cartridges. All were army issue, all less than a
year old, matching in year and make. Then Pekkala knew that
guards from the Mamlin-Three camp must have carried out the
killing. None of the nomad bands in this region would have had
access to such recent stocks of ammunition. Pekkala wondered why
the guards would have bothered to come all this way to liquidate
the settlement when the winter would have killed them anyway.

He touched the emaciated and stone-hard cheek of a young
woman who had died sitting by the stove. It seemed she had been too
weak even to get up from the chair when the killers burst into the
cabin. In the billowing heat of his breath, the white crystals melted
from her hair, revealing red strands, like shreds of copper wire. It
was as if, for one brief moment, life had returned to the corpse.

Two weeks later, when spring floods swept through the valley,
the buildings and all they had contained were swept away.

‘How did you manage to escape?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Just after we finished building our shelters,’ replied Lysenkova, ‘my father sat me down and made me write out a statement that he had killed two guards on our way out to the settlement. The truth was, two guards had gone missing, but they ran away on their own. No one in our group had killed them. We didn’t have any paper or pencils. We used a piece of birch bark and the burned end of a stick. I was ten, old enough to know that none of what I was writing was true. I asked him if he wasn’t going to get in trouble if somebody believed what I was writing and he said it didn’t matter. “What are they going to do?” he asked. “Send me to Siberia?”’

‘How well do you remember your father?’ asked Pekkala.

Lysenkova shrugged. ‘Some things are clearer than others. He had gold teeth. The front ones, top and bottom. I remember that. He had been kicked by a horse when he was young. Every time he smiled, it looked as if he had taken a bite out of the sun.’

‘What happened after you wrote the letter?’

‘He took me through the woods to the gates of the Borodok camp. We barely spoke on that journey, even though it took several hours to reach the camp. When we got to Borodok, he stuffed a knotted handkerchief in my pocket and then he knocked on the gate. By the time the guards opened up,
he had disappeared back into the woods. I knew he wasn’t coming back. When the guards asked me where I’d come from, I showed them the letter I’d written. Then they brought me into the camp.

‘On my first night there, I took out the handkerchief he had given me. When I undid the knot, I saw what I first thought were kernels of corn. But then I realised they were teeth. His gold teeth. He had pulled them out. I could see the marks of pliers in the gold. They were the only things of value he had left. I used them to buy food in the camp in those first months. I would have starved to death without them.

‘Eventually, I found a job delivering buckets of food to the workers who processed logs for the camp lumber mill. The job entitled me to rations and that is how I survived. After five years, they sent me back to Moscow to live in an orphanage. I don’t know what happened to my parents, but I know now what my father knew back then, which was they had no chance of coming out alive.’

As her words sank in, Pekkala finally understood why the inhabitants of Dalstroy-Seven had been executed. Lysenkova’s father had given his daughter a way out, but only at the cost of his own life. What Lysenkova’s father had not reckoned on was that the camp authorities decided not only to punish him, but to obliterate the entire settlement. By the time the runaway guards were caught, the liquidations had already been carried out.

‘So you see, Inspector,’ said Lysenkova, ‘I have learned what it takes to survive. That includes not caring about rumours. But I wanted you to know the truth.’

As he walked her to the door, Pekkala knew there was no point in telling the Major what he’d seen. She already knew what she needed to know, but he was glad they had chosen to help her.

A bell rang.

Pekkala sat up in bed, blinking the sleep from his eyes. He sat there, dazed and just as he had convinced himself that he had dreamed the sound of the bell, it came again, loud and clattering. Someone was down in the street. There were buzzers for each apartment. Every time this had happened in the past, the person pressing the bell had either pressed the wrong one or was looking to be let into the building after locking themselves out.

He grunted and lay back down, knowing that whoever it was would try another buzzer if they got no answer from him.

But the bell rang again and kept ringing, someone’s thumb jammed against the buzzer. The spit dried up in Pekkala’s mouth as he realised that there had been no mistake. The persistent ringing of a doorbell in the middle of the night could only mean one thing – that they had finally come to arrest him. Not even a Shadow Pass would save him now.

Pekkala dressed and hurried down the stairs. He thought about that suitcase Babayaga kept ready in the corner of her room and he wished he had packed one for himself. Reaching the dingy foyer, lit by a single naked bulb, he unlocked the main door. As he grasped the rattly brass door knob, a hazy calculation which had been forming in his mind now came into perfect focus.

He would probably never know what line he’d crossed to bring this down upon himself. Perhaps it was one too many questions that day he followed Stalin through the secret passageways. Perhaps Stalin had decided he should never have revealed what happened to the White Guild agents and was now in the process of covering all trace of his mistake.

The reason he would never know was because he knew he would not live long enough to find out. They had already exiled him to Siberia once. They would not do the same again. There was no doubt in Pekkala’s mind that he would be shot against the wall of the Lubyanka prison, probably before the sun came up today. Suddenly, he realised that he had resigned himself to this a long time ago.

Pekkala opened the door. He did not hesitate. They would only have kicked it down.

But there was no squad of NKVD men, waiting to take him away. Instead, there was only Kirov. ‘Good evening, Inspector,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Or should I say good morning? I thought this time I’d come and visit you.’

Before the expression could change on Kirov’s face, Pekkala’s fist swung out and knocked him in the head.

As if executing part of a complicated dance, Kirov took one step sideways, then one step backward and finally sprawled on the pavement.

A moment later, Kirov sat up, rubbing the side of his face. ‘What was that for?’ A thin thread of blood unravelled from his nose.

Pekkala was just as surprised as Kirov by what had happened. ‘What are you doing here in the middle of the night?’ he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

‘Well, I’m sorry to have interrupted your sleep,’ Kirov replied, climbing to his feet, ‘but you told me …’

‘I don’t care about my sleep!’ snarled Pekkala. ‘You know what it means, coming to my door in the middle of the night!’

‘You mean you thought …’

‘Of course that’s what I thought!’

‘But Inspector, nobody’s going to arrest you!’

‘You don’t know that, Kirov,’ snapped Pekkala. ‘I’ve tried to teach you how dangerous our job can be, and it’s time you learned that we have as much to fear from those we’re working for as from those we’re working against. Now don’t just stand there. Come in!’

Blotting his nose with a handkerchief, Kirov entered the building.

‘Do you know this is the first time I’ve seen your apartment? I never understood why you chose to live on this side of town.’

‘Hush!’ whispered Pekkala. ‘People are sleeping.’

When they finally reached the apartment, Pekkala put water on to boil for tea, cooking it on a small gas Primus stove which he lit with a cigarette lighter. The blue gas flame flickered beneath the battered aluminium pot. He sat down on the end of his bed and pointed to the only chair in the room, inviting Kirov to sit. ‘Well, what have you come to tell me?’

‘What I came to tell you,’ replied Kirov, as he looked around the room with undisguised curiosity, ‘is that I have found Zalka. At least I think I have.’

‘Well, have you found him or haven’t you?’

‘I went to the address you gave me,’ explained Kirov. ‘He wasn’t there. He moved out months ago. The caretaker said Zalka had gone to work at the swimming pool near Bolotnia square.’

‘I didn’t know there was a swimming pool there.’

‘That’s the thing, Inspector. There isn’t one. There used to be. The pool was part of a large bathhouse which got closed down years ago. Then the building was taken over by the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Science.’

‘So the caretaker must have been wrong.’

‘Well, I put in a call to the Institute, just to be thorough. I asked if they had anyone named Zalka working there. The woman at the other end told me the names of all employees at the institute were classified and hung up on me. I tried calling them back but no one would answer the phone. But what would he be doing at a Medical Institute? He’s an engineer, not a doctor.’

‘We’ll find out first thing in the morning,’ said Pekkala.

Kirov stood and began to pace around the room. ‘All right, Inspector, I give up. Why on earth are you living in this dump?’

‘Have you considered that perhaps I choose to spend my money on other things?’

‘Of course I’ve considered it, but I know you don’t spend it on clothes or food or anything else I can think of, so if it doesn’t go on rent, where does it go?’

It was a while before Pekkala answered.

In the silence, they could hear the rustle of water boiling in the pot.

‘The money goes to Paris,’ he said finally.

‘Paris?’ Kirov’s eyes narrowed. ‘You mean you’re sending your wages to Ilya?’

Pekkala got up to make the tea.

‘How did you even find out where she lives?’.

‘That’s what I do,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I find people.’

‘But Ilya thinks you’re dead! As far as she knows, you’ve been dead for years.’

‘I realise that,’ muttered Pekkala.

‘So who does she think the money is coming from?’

‘The funds are channelled through a bank in Helsinki. She believes they are being provided through the will of the headmistress of the school where she taught.’

‘And what does the headmistress have to say about this?’

‘Nothing,’ replied Pekkala, as he sprinkled a pinch of black tea into the pot. ‘She was shot by Red Guards the day before I left Tsarskoye Selo.’

‘But why, Inspector? Ilya is married! She even has a child!’

Pekkala crashed the pot down on to the stove. Hot tea splashed on his shirt. ‘Don’t you think I know that, Kirov? Don’t you realise I think about that all the time? But I do not love her out of hope. I do not love her out of possibility.’

‘Then what is driving you to this madness?’

‘I do not call it madness,’ said Pekkala, his voice barely above a whisper.

‘Well, I do!’ Kirov told him. ‘You might as well be throwing your money into the fire.’

‘It is mine to throw,’ replied Pekkala, ‘and I don’t care what she does with it.’ He set about brewing a fresh pot of tea.

The two men stood outside the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Science. The windows of this old bathhouse had been bricked up and the bricks painted the same pale yellow colour as the rest of the building.

‘Did you bring your gun this time?’ asked Pekkala.

Kirov held open one flap of his coat, showing a pistol tucked into a shoulder holster.

‘Good,’ said Pekkala, ‘because you might need to use it today.’

They had arrived at the Institute just after eight in the morning, only to find that it did not open until nine. In spite of the fact that the building was closed, they could hear noises inside. Kirov banged on the heavy wooden door, but no one answered. Eventually, they gave up and decided to wait.

To pass the time, they ordered breakfast in a café across the road from the Institute. The café had only just opened. Most of the chairs were still upside-down on top of the tables.

The waitress brought them hard-boiled eggs, black rye bread and slabs of ham, the edges still glistening with the salt used to cure the meat. They drank tea without milk from heavy white cups which had no handles.

‘Waiting for the Monster Shop to open up?’ asked the woman. She was tall and square-shouldered, with her hair pulled back in a knot and slightly arching eyebrows that gave her a look of critical appraisal.

‘The what?’ asked Kirov.

The woman nodded towards the Institute.

‘Why do they call it that?’ asked Pekkala.

‘You’ll see for yourself if you go in there,’ said the woman as she headed back into the kitchen.

‘The Monster Shop,’ muttered Kirov. ‘What kind of a place deserves a name like that?’

‘I’d rather we didn’t find out on an empty stomach,’ replied Pekkala as he gathered up his knife and fork. ‘Now eat.’

A few minutes later, Kirov set down his knife and fork loudly on the edges of his plate. ‘There you go again,’ he said.

‘Mmm?’ Pekkala looked up, mouth full.

‘You’re just … inhaling your food!’

Pekkala swallowed. ‘What else am I supposed to do with it?’

‘I’ve tried to educate you.’ Kirov sighed loudly. ‘But you just don’t seem to take any notice. I’ve seen the way you eat those meals I cook for you. I’ve tried being subtle.’

Pekkala looked down at his plate. The food was almost gone. He was pleased with the job he had made of it. ‘What’s the problem, Kirov?’

‘The problem, Inspector, is that you don’t savour your food. You don’t appreciate the miracle,’ he picked up a boiled egg and held it up, ‘of nourishment.’

‘It’s not a Fabergé egg,’ said Pekkala. ‘It’s just a regular egg. And besides, what if someone hears you going on like that? You are a major of the NKVD. You have an image to uphold, which doesn’t include the loud and public adoration of your breakfast!’

Kirov looked around. ‘What do you mean, “if someone hears me”? So what if they can hear me? What are they going to think – that I can’t shoot straight?’

‘All right,’ said Pekkala, ‘I admit I owe you an apology for that but …’

‘Forgive me for saying so, Inspector, but this talk about upholding an image – it’s no wonder you never get any women.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘The fact that you are asking me this question …’ he paused, ‘is the answer to your question.’

Pekkala wagged his fork at Kirov. ‘I’m going to eat my breakfast now, and you can just carry on being strange if you want. The miracle of nourishment!’ he spluttered.

After their meal, they left the café and walked across the road to the Institute.

Kirov tried to open the door but it was still locked. Once more, he pounded on it with his fist.