Shadow Pass (12 page)

The two men waited until Major Lysenkova had left the building.

“What did you find out?” Pekkala asked Kirov.

“What she said about the scientists is correct. They have all been accounted for by the guards at the time Nagorski died. During work hours, guards are stationed inside each of the facility
buildings, which means that the scientists were also able to account for the whereabouts of the security personnel. Samarin was on his usual rounds this morning. He was seen by all of the staff at one time or another.”

“Is anyone missing?”

“No, and no one seems to have been anywhere near Nagorski when he died.” Kirov turned his attention to the rain cape, whose dips and folds crudely matched the contours of a human body. “But she’s wrong about this being an accident.”

“I agree,” replied Pekkala, “but how have you reached that conclusion?”

“You had better see for yourself, Inspector,” replied Kirov.

Grasping the edge of the cape, Pekkala drew it back until Nagorski’s head and shoulders were revealed. What he saw made him draw in his breath through clenched teeth.

Only a leathery mask remained of Nagorski’s face, behind which the shattered skull looked more like broken crockery than bone. He had never encountered a body as traumatized as the one which lay before him now.

“There.” Kirov pointed to a place where the inside of Nagorski’s skull had been exposed.

Gently taking hold of the dead man’s jaw, Pekkala tilted the head to one side. In the glare of the work light, a tiny splash of silver winked at him.

Pekkala reached into his pocket and brought out a bone-handled switchblade. He sprung the blade and touched the tip of it against the silver object. Lifting it from the rippled plate of bone, he eased the fleck of metal onto his palm. Now that he could see it clearly, Pekkala realized that the metal wasn’t silver. It was lead.

“What is it?” asked Kirov.

“Bullet fragment.”

“That rules out an accident.”

Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, Pekkala placed the sliver of lead in the middle and then folded the handkerchief into a bundle before returning it to his pocket.

“Could it have been suicide?” asked Kirov.

“We’ll see.” Pekkala’s focus returned to the wreckage of Nagorski’s face. He searched for an entry wound. Reaching under the head, fingers sifting through the matted hair, his fingertip snagged on a jagged edge at the base of the skull where the bullet had impacted the bone. Pressing his finger into the wound, he followed its trajectory to an exit point on the right side of the dead man’s face, where the flesh had been torn away. “This was no suicide,” said Pekkala.

“How can you be sure?” asked Kirov.

“A man who commits suicide with a pistol will hold the gun against his right temple if he is right-handed or against his left temple if he is left-handed. Or, if he knows what he is doing, he will put the gun between his teeth and shoot himself through the roof of the mouth. That will take out the dura oblongata, killing him instantly.” He pulled the rain cape back over Nagorski’s body, then wiped the gore from his hands on a corner of the cape.

“How do you get used to it?” asked Kirov, as he watched Pekkala scrape the blood out from under his fingernails.

“You can get used to almost anything.”

They left the warehouse just as three NKVD guards arrived to take charge of Nagorski’s corpse. Standing in the dark, the two men turned up the collars of their coats against a spitting rain.

“Are you certain Major Lysenkova didn’t spot the bullet wound in Nagorski’s skull?” asked Pekkala.

“She barely glanced at the remains,” replied Kirov. “It seemed to me that she just wants this case to go away as fast as possible.”

Just then, a figure appeared from the darkness. It was Maximov. He had been waiting for them. “I need to know,” he said. “What happened to Colonel Nagorski?”

Kirov glanced at Pekkala.

Almost imperceptibly, Pekkala nodded.

“He was shot,” replied the major.

The muscles twitched along Maximov’s jaw. “This is my fault,” he muttered.

“Why do you say that?” asked Pekkala.

“Yelena—Mrs. Nagorski—she was right. It was my job to protect him.”

“If I understand things correctly,” replied Pekkala, “he sent you away just before he was killed.”

“That’s true, but still, it was my job.”

“You can’t protect a man who refuses to be protected,” said Pekkala.

If Maximov took comfort in Pekkala’s words, he gave no sign of it. “What will happen to them now? To Yelena? To the boy?”

“I don’t know,” replied Pekkala.

“They won’t be looked after,” insisted Maximov. “Not now that he is gone.”

“And what about you?” asked Pekkala. “What will you do now?”

Maximov shook his head, as if the thought had not occurred to him. “Just make sure they are looked after,” he said.

A cold wind blew through the wet trees, with a sound like the slithering of snakes.

“We’ll do what we can, Maximov,” Pekkala told the big man. “Now go home. Get some rest.”

“That man makes me nervous,” remarked Kirov after the bodyguard had vanished back into the dark.

“That’s part of his job,” replied Pekkala. “When we get back to the office, I want you to find out everything you can about him. I asked him some questions and he avoided every one of them.”

“We could bring him in for questioning at Lubyanka.”

Pekkala shook his head. “We won’t get much out of him that way. The only time a man like that will talk is if he wants to. Just find out what you can from the police files.”

“Very well, Inspector. Shall we head back to Moscow?”

“We can’t leave yet. Now that we know a gun was used, we have to search the pit where Nagorski’s body was found.”

“Can’t this wait until morning?” moaned Kirov, clutching his collar to his throat.

Pekkala’s silence was the answer.

“I didn’t think so,” mumbled Kirov.

Pekkala woke to the sound of someone banging on the door
.

At first, he thought it was one of the shutters, dislodged by the wind. There was a snowstorm blowing. Pekkala knew that in the morning he would have to dig his way out of the house
.

The banging came again, and this time Pekkala realized someone was outside and asking to come in
.

He lit a match and set the oil lamp burning by his bed
.

Once more he heard the pounding on the door
.

“All right!” shouted Pekkala. He fetched his pocket watch from the bedside table and squinted at the hands. It was two in the morning. Beside him he heard a sigh. Ilya’s long hair covered her face and she brushed it aside with a half-conscious sweep of her hand
.

“What’s going on?” she asked
.

“Someone’s at the door,” Pekkala replied in a whisper as he pulled on his clothes, working the suspenders over his shoulders
.

Ilya propped herself up on one elbow. “It’s the middle of the night!”

Pekkala did not reply. After doing up the buttons of his shirt, he walked into the front room, carrying the lamp. Reaching out to the brass doorknob, he suddenly paused, remembering that he had left his revolver on the chest of drawers in the bedroom. Now he thought about going to fetch it. No good news ever came knocking at two in the morning
.

The heavy fist smashed against the wood. “Please!” said a voice
.

Pekkala opened the door. A gust of freezing air blew in, along with a cloud of snow which glittered like fish scales in the lamplight
.

Before him stood a man wearing a heavy sable coat. He had long, greasy hair, a scruffy beard and piercing eyes. In spite of the cold, he was sweating. “Pekkala!” wailed the man
.

“Rasputin,” growled Pekkala
.

The man stepped forward and fell into Pekkala’s arms
.

Pekkala caught the stench of onions and salmon caviar on Rasputin’s breath. A few of the tiny fish eggs, like beads of amber, were lodged in the man’s frozen beard. The sour reek of alcohol oozed from his pores. “You must save me!” moaned Rasputin.

“Save you from what?”

Rasputin mumbled incoherently, his nose buried in Pekkala’s shirt
.

“From what?” repeated Pekkala
.

Rasputin stood back and spread his arms, “From myself!”

“Tell me what you are doing out here,” Pekkala demanded
.

“I was at the church of Kazan,” said Rasputin, unbuttoning his coat to reveal a blood-red tunic and baggy black breeches tucked into a pair of knee-length boots. “At least I was until they threw me out.”

“What did you do this time?” asked Pekkala
.

“Nothing!” shouted Rasputin. “For once, all I did was sit there. And then that damned politician Rodzianko told me to leave. He called me a vile heathen!” He clenched his fist and waved it in the air. “I’ll have his job for that!” Then he slumped into Pekkala’s chair
.

“What did you do after they threw you out?”

“I went straight to the Villa Rode!”

“Oh, no,” muttered Pekkala. “Not that place.”

The Villa Rode was a drinking club in Petrograd. Rasputin went there almost every night, because he did not have to pay his bills there. They were covered by an anonymous numbered account which, Pekkala knew, had actually been set up by the Tsarina. In addition, the owner of the Villa Rode had been paid to build an addition onto the back of the
club, a room which was available only to Rasputin. It was, in effect, his own private club. The Tsarina had been persuaded to arrange this by members of the Secret Service, who were tasked with following Rasputin wherever he went and making sure he stayed out of trouble. This had proved to be impossible, so a safe house, in which he could drink as much as he wanted for free, meant that at least the Secret Service could protect him from those who had sworn to kill him if they could. There had already been two attempts on his life: in Pokrovsky in 1914 and again in Tsaritsyn the following year. Instead of frightening him into seclusion, these events had only served to convince Rasputin that he was indestructible. Even if the Secret Service could protect him from these would-be killers, the one person they could not protect him from was himself
.

“When I was at the Villa,” continued Rasputin, “I decided I should file a complaint about Rodzianko. And then I thought—no! I’ll go straight to the Tsarina and tell her about it myself.”

“The Villa Rode is in Petrograd,” said Pekkala. “That’s nowhere near this place.”

“I drove here in my car.”

Pekkala remembered now that the Tsarina had given Rasputin a car, a beautiful Hispano-Suiza, although she had forgotten to give him any lessons on how to drive it
.

“And you think she would allow you in at this time of night?”

“Of course,” replied Rasputin. “Why not?”

“Well, what happened? Did you speak to her?”

“I never got the chance. That damned automobile went wrong.”

“Went wrong?”

“It drove into a wall.” He gestured vaguely at the world outside. “Somewhere out there.”

“You crashed your car,” said Pekkala, shaking his head at the thought of that beautiful machine smashed to pieces
.

“I set out on foot for the Palace, but I got lost. Then I saw your place and here I am, Pekkala. At your mercy. A poor man begging for a drink.”

“Someone else has already granted your request. Several times.”

Rasputin was no longer listening. He had discovered one of the salmon eggs in his beard. He plucked it out and popped it in his mouth. His lips puckered as he chased the egg around the inside of his cheek. Then suddenly his face brightened. “Ah! I see you already have company. Good evening, teacher lady.”

Pekkala turned to see Ilya standing at the doorway to the bedroom. She was wearing one of his dark gray shirts, the kind he wore when he was on duty. Her arms were folded across her chest. The sleeves, without their cuff links, trailed down over her hands
.

“Such a beauty!” sighed Rasputin. “If your students could only see you now.”

“My students are six years old,” Ilya replied
.

He waggled his fingers, then let them subside onto the arms of the chair, like the tentacles of some pale ocean creature. “They are never too young to learn the ways of the world.”

“Every time I feel like defending you in public,” said Ilya, “you go and say something like that.”

Rasputin sighed again. “Let the rumors fly.”

“Have you really crashed your car, Grigori?” she asked
.

“My car crashed by itself,” replied Rasputin
.

“How,” asked Ilya, “do you manage to stay drunk so much of the time?”

“It helps me to understand the world. It helps the world to understand me as well. Some people make sense when they’re sober. Some people make sense when they’re not.”

“Always speaking in riddles.” Ilya smiled at him
.

“Not riddles, beautiful lady. Merely the unfortunate truth.” His eyelids fluttered. He was falling asleep
.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” said Pekkala. He grasped the chair and jerked it around so the two men were facing each other
.

Rasputin gasped, his eyes shut tight
.

“What’s this I hear,” asked Pekkala, “about you advising the Tsarina to get rid of me?”

“What?” Rasputin opened one eye
.

“You heard me.”

“Who told you that?”

“Never mind who told me.”

“It is the Tsarina who wants you dismissed,” said Rasputin, and suddenly the drunkenness had peeled away from him. “I like you, Pekkala, but there is nothing I can do.”

“And why not?”

“Here is how it works,” explained Rasputin. “The Tsarina asks me a question. And I can tell from the way she asks it whether she wants me to say yes or no. And when I tell her what she wants to hear, it makes her happy. And then this idea of hers becomes my idea, and she runs off to the Tsar, or to her friend Vyrubova, or to whomever she pleases, and she tells them I have said this thing. But what she never says, Pekkala, is that it was her idea to begin with. You see, Pekkala, the reason I am loved by the Tsarina is that I am exactly what she needs me to be, in the same way that you are needed by the Tsar. She needs me to make her feel she is right, and he needs you to make him feel safe. Sadly, both of those things are illusions. And there are many others like us, each one entrusted to a different task—investigators, lovers, assassins, each one a stranger to the other. Only the Tsar knows us all. So if you have been told that I wish you to be sent away, then yes. It is true.” He climbed unsteadily out of the chair and stood weaving in front of Pekkala. “But it is only true because the Tsarina desired it first.”