Eye of the Red Tsar (27 page)

“Are you saying we can’t trust him anymore?” asked Kirov.

“We never could,” Pekkala answered.

“There is something we would like to know,” said Stalin. “Eventually you will tell us. The only variable in this equation is what remains of you, physically and spiritually, by the time you have answered the question.”

Pekkala felt almost relieved that the process had begun. Anything was better than the agony of standing hunched inside that chimney of a cell. It was the curve of the ceiling which terrified him most, as if the room were slowly caving in. Every time he thought of it, fresh sweat beaded on his face
.

“Fortunately,” continued Stalin, “we only have one question for you.”

Pekkala waited
.

“Would you like a cigarette?” Stalin asked. From his trouser pocket, he removed a red and gold box with the word MARKOV on the cover
.

Pekkala recognized them as the brand which Vassileyev used to smoke
.

“The former director of the Okhrana was kind enough to leave behind a considerable supply in his office,” explained Stalin
.

“Where is he now?”

“He is dead,” said Stalin matter-of-factly. “Do you know what he did? When he knew we were coming to arrest him, he filled his artificial leg with explosives. Then, in the police van on the way to this prison, Vassileyev set off the bomb. The axle of the van ended up on the roof of a two-story building.” Stalin laughed softly. “Explosives in a wooden leg! I can’t deny he had a sense of humor.”

He held out the box of cigarettes, awkwardly rotating his wrist so that the white sticks faced Pekkala
.

Pekkala shook his head
.

Stalin snapped the box shut. “In the days ahead, I ask you to remember that my first offer to you was one of friendship.”

“I won’t forget,” said Pekkala
.

“Of course you won’t. That famous memory of yours would not allow it. That is why I am confident that you will be able to answer my question.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Where are the Tsar’s reserves of gold?”

“I have no idea.”

Stalin breathed out quietly, his lips slightly pursed, like someone learning to whistle. “Then it must be wrong, what I have heard.”

“What did you hear?” With each passing minute, that strange lightness which was the certainty of death filled more and more of Pekkala’s body. By the time they get around to killing me, he thought, there will be nothing left to feel the pain
.

“I heard that the Tsar trusted you,” said Stalin
.

“With some things.”

Stalin smiled faintly. “Pity,” he said
.

Two weeks later, Pekkala was dragged out of his cell and returned to the interrogation room. He had to be carried, because he could no longer
walk. The tops of his toes were burned raw on the carpet as the guards hauled him along, each with one of Pekkala’s arms hooked over his shoulder
.

Released by the guards, Pekkala walked the last few paces to his chair in the interrogation room. Trembling like a man with a high fever, he sat down and tried to keep his balance. His feet were swollen to twice their normal size, the nails blackened from blood which had congealed beneath them. He could not lift his hands above his shoulders. He could no longer breathe through his nose. Every few breaths, he would cough violently, his knees drawn up towards his chest. Blue flashes arced across his vision, accompanied by pain like a spike driven into his skull
.

Stalin was there. “Now would you like a cigarette?” He asked it in that same, half-timid voice
.

Pekkala opened his mouth to speak, but started coughing again. He managed only to shake his head. “I don’t know where the gold is. I am telling you the truth.”

“Yes,” replied Stalin. “I am now convinced of that. What I would like to know instead is this: Who did he trust with the task of removing the gold?”

Pekkala did not answer
.

“You do know the answer to this,” Stalin told him
.

Pekkala remained silent. Dread came loping like a black dog down the tunnels of his mind
.

“When this is over,” said Stalin, “and you reflect on what will happen to you now, you may regret that perfect memory of yours.”

LATER THAT EVENING, Pekkala sat in the front room, with his back against the wall, legs stretched out across the bare floorboards. The
Kalevala
lay on his lap.

Kirov came in, carrying a pile of wood for the fire. He dumped it with a clatter on the hearth.

“No sign of Anton?” asked Pekkala.

“No sign,” replied Kirov, slapping the wood dust off his palms. He nodded towards the
Kalevala
. “Why don’t you read me some of your book?”

“Unless you speak Finnish, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Read some anyway.”

“I doubt you will find this on your list of texts approved by the Communist Party.”

“If you won’t tell, then I promise that neither will I.”

Pekkala shrugged. “Very well.” He opened the book and began to read, the Finnish words rolling like thunder in his throat and cracking off the roof of his mouth like the snap of lightning in the air. Although he read from this book all the time, he rarely spoke its text out loud, and it had been years since he’d had the chance to speak his native tongue. Even his brother had abandoned it. As he read now, it sounded both distant and familiar, like a memory borrowed from another person’s life.

After a minute, he stopped and looked up at Kirov.

“Your language,” Kirov said, “sounds like someone prying nails out of wood.”

“I’ll try to find some way to take that as a compliment.”

“What did it mean?”

Pekkala’s gaze returned to the book. He stared at the words and slowly they began to change, speaking to him in the language Kirov could understand. He told Kirov the story of the wanderer Väinämöinen and his attempts to persuade the goddess Pohjola to come down from the rainbow where she lived and join him in his travels. Before she would agree, Pohjola gave Väinämöinen impossible tasks to perform, such as tying an egg into a knot, splitting a horsehair with a dull knife, and scraping birch bark from a stone. While performing the final task, which was to make a ship out of wood shavings, Väinämöinen gashed his knee with an axe. The only thing which would stop the bleeding was a spell called the Source of Iron, and Väinämöinen set out to find someone who knew the magic words.

“Are they all as strange as that?”

“They are strange until you understand them,” replied Pekkala, “and then it is as if you’ve known them all your life.”

“Did you ever read that story to Alexei?” asked Kirov.

“I read him some, but not that one. To hear of a spell like that would have given him hope where there was none.” As he spoke these words, Pekkala could not help wondering if his own hopes for finding Alexei alive were as hollow as a spell to stop the boy’s bleeding.

EARLY THE NEXT morning, someone knocked on the front door. “Mayakovsky!” groaned Kirov, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “I hope he’s brought more than potatoes.”

“That’s not Mayakovsky,” Pekkala said. “He always comes through the courtyard.” He got up and stepped over Anton, who had returned sometime that night.

Opening the door, he found Kropotkin waiting on the other side. The police chief wore his blue service tunic, but had left all the buttons undone. His uniform cap was nowhere in sight and his hands remained tucked in his pockets. His straight combed hair and squared-off jaw gave him the appearance of a boxer dog.

Kropotkin was the most slovenly-looking policeman Pekkala had ever seen. The Tsar would have fired him on the spot, thought Pekkala, for daring to appear like that.

“A call came in for you last night,” said Kropotkin.

“Who from?”

“The asylum at Vodovenko. Katamidze says he has remembered something you asked him about. A name.”

Pekkala’s heart slammed in his chest. “I will leave immediately.”

“I already told your Cheka man,” he said. “I met him at the tavern last night. I gave him the message, but I thought he might be too drunk to understand me. I thought I’d better come by this morning, just to be sure you got the news.”

“I’m glad you did,” said Pekkala.

Kropotkin rattled the change in his pockets. “Look, Pekkala, I know we didn’t get off to a good start, but if there is anything I can do to help you, you know where to find me.”

Pekkala thanked him and closed the door.

Anton was still asleep, wrapped in a blanket.

Pekkala took one corner of the blanket and heaved it upwards.

Anton rolled out onto the floor cursing. “What’s going on?”

“Katamidze! The telephone call from Vodovenko! Why didn’t you tell us last night?”

Anton struggled upright, bleary-eyed. “I was going to tell you in the morning.” Just above the velvet curtains, bolts of sunlight slanted through the windows, illuminating dust which spiraled slowly through the air. “But I guess it is the morning, so I’m telling you now.”

“We should have been on the road hours ago.” Pekkala grabbed Anton’s clothes off the floor and threw them in his face. “Get dressed. We’re leaving now.”

Kirov appeared out of the kitchen. “Fried army meat for breakfast!” he announced.

Pekkala pushed past him and out into the courtyard.

Kirov watched him go, the smile fading from his face. “What’s going on?” Then he turned to Anton and asked again, “What’s the matter?”

Anton was pulling on his boots. “Get in the car,” he said.

Ten minutes later, they were on the road.

Driving south to Vodovenko, they passed through the village of the temporary lie. The barrier was down over the road but they found the guardhouse locked and unmanned.

After moving the barricade, they continued on and soon found themselves on the main street. The place was deserted, as if the population had abruptly fled, leaving behind shops whose windows brimmed with bread, meat, and fruit. But when Pekkala got out of the car to have a closer look, he realized that everything behind the glass was made of wax.

They stopped at the little railway station and looked off down the empty tracks, which trailed out to the horizon. A broom stood propped against one of the support columns of the station house roof.

None of them spoke. The emptiness of the place seemed to command their silence.

Pekkala thought back to the faces he had seen when they passed through before. He remembered the fear hidden behind the masks of their smiles.

They got in the car and drove on.

Later that day, when they pulled into the courtyard at Vodovenko, the red-haired attendant came out to meet them.

“You’re too late,” he said.

Pekkala climbed out of the car, his hip joints sore from sitting cramped inside the Emka. “What do you mean we are late?”

“Not late.” The attendant shook his head. “Too late.”

“What happened?”

“We’re not sure. A suicide, we think.”

The three men did not bother to sign in and the attendant did not ask for their weapons. They hurried through the armored door and down the corridors until they came to a room whose floor and walls up to chest height were plated with white tiles, like those inside a shower. Four large lights hung down from the ceiling. It was the mortuary.

Katamidze’s body lay on a metal-topped table, half covered with a cotton blanket. The photographer’s lips and eyelids and the tip of his nose had turned a mottled blue, but the rest of his skin looked as pale as the tiles on the walls. His feet, which were facing the door, stuck out from under the blanket. Attached by wire to the big toe of his right foot was a metal disk on which a number had been stamped. The nails had turned a yellow color, like the scales of a dead fish.

Anton leaned against the wall by the door, his eyes fixed on the floor.

Kirov followed behind Pekkala, too curious to be appalled.

“Poison,” said Pekkala.

“Yes,” agreed the attendant.

“Cyanide?”

“Lye,” said the attendant.

Gently, Pekkala set his hand on Katamidze’s face and lifted one of the eyelids. The whites of the dead man’s eyes had turned red from burst blood vessels. Examining the area around the eyes, Pekkala noticed a faint blush extending from the cheekbone up to the line of the forehead. He traced his fingers down the side of the man’s neck, probing the flesh. When he reached Katamidze’s larynx he traced his finger over fragile horseshoe-shaped bone. It gave under gentle pressure, indicating that it had been crushed. “Whoever killed him,” he said, “held on to his throat until he was sure Katamidze would not survive, but it was not strangulation that killed him. Where was he found?”

“In his cell,” replied the attendant.

Pekkala jerked his head towards the door. “Show me,” he said.

The attendant led them to Katamidze’s cell.

“Where do you use lye in this building?” asked Pekkala, striding ahead.

“In the gardens sometimes.” The attendant’s legs were shorter than Pekkala’s. He was struggling to keep up with Pekkala. “We use it to clear out the drainpipes a couple of times a year.”

“Was he dead when you found him?”

“Almost. I mean he died before we had a chance to unlock him.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No. I mean…”

“What do you mean?” demanded Pekkala.

The attendant became flustered. “For God’s sake, his insides were burned out. Whatever he tried to say, the poor bastard was too far gone for us to understand. Here. This is the place.”

An orderly was mopping out the room. The air was thick with the smell of bleach, mingled with a reek of vomit and the piercing bitterness of lye. The cell had no windows, only a metal cot which folded up into the wall. There was no other furniture. A chain bolted into the wall hung down to the center of the cot. An iron cuff dangled from the chain.