Shadow Pass (17 page)

“Not well at all.”

“Then I think, Inspector Pekkala, that this investigation really has nothing to do with me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It is about you, Inspector Pekkala.” She got up and walked to the open window. Outside, in the garden, a breeze rustled the willow branches. “What do you think the Tsar will do when he finds out you have been investigating him, especially on a matter such as this?”

“He will be furious,” answered Pekkala, “but the Tsarina has ordered the investigation. I cannot refuse the order, so the Tsar can hardly blame me for coming here to speak with you.”

She turned and looked at him. “But he will blame you, Pekkala, for the simple reason that he cannot blame his wife. He will forgive her anything, no matter what she does, but what about you, Pekkala?”

“Now I am worried for both of us.”

“You shouldn’t be,” she replied. “I will not be hurt by this. If the Tsarina had wanted me out of the way, she would have seen to that a long time ago. It is you she is after, I’m afraid.”

Her words settled on him like a layer of dust. Everything she said was true
.

During the course of their conversation, it became clear to Pekkala that Madame Kschessinska was, in almost every way, the polar opposite of the Tsarina. For the Tsar to have fallen in love with a woman like Kschessinska seemed not only plausible but inevitable
.

“Thank you, Madame Kschessinska,” he said as she walked him to the door
.

“You must not worry, Inspector,” she replied. “The Tsarina may try to feed you to the wolves, but from what I know about you, you may be the one who ends up eating the wolf.”

One week later, Pekkala presented himself once again at the Tsarina’s study door
.

He found the Tsarina exactly as he had left her, lying on the daybed. It was almost as if she had not moved since they’d last parted company. She was knitting a sweater, the needles clicking rhythmically
.

“I have concluded my investigation,” he told her
.

“Yes?” The Tsarina kept her eyes on her knitting. “And what have you discovered, Inspector?”

“Nothing, Majesty.”

The click of the knitting needles came abruptly to a stop. “What?”

“I have discovered no irregularities.”

“I see.” She pressed her lips together, draining the blood from the flesh
.

“In my opinion, Majesty,” he continued, “everything is as it should be.”

Her eyes filled with hate as she absorbed the meaning of his words. “You listen to me, Pekkala,” she said through clenched teeth. “Before he died, my friend Grigori made clear that there is a time of judgment coming. All secrets will be laid bare and for those who have not followed a path of righteousness, there will be no one to whom they can turn. And I wonder what will happen to you on that day.”

Pekkala thought about Rasputin after the police had pulled him from the river. He wondered what the Tsarina would have said about the day of judgment if she could have seen her friend that day, lying on the quayside with a bullet in his head
.

The Tsarina turned away. With a swipe of her hand, she dismissed him
.

After that, Pekkala sometimes came across Madame Kschessinska, buying food in the Gostiny Dvor market or shopping on the Passazh. They never spoke again, but they always remembered to smile
.

A
S OFTEN HAPPENED, BY THE TIME
P
EKKALA HAD FINISHED HIS TEA
, Babayaga had already fallen asleep, chin resting on her chest and breathing heavily.

He left the room, closing the door quietly behind him. In the
hallway, he took off his shoes and carried them, so as not to wake the others on his floor.

The next morning, when Pekkala walked into his office, Kirov was already there.

So was Major Lysenkova.

Kirov stood beside her, holding out his kumquat plant in its rust-colored earthenware pot. “You should try one!” he urged.

“No, really,” replied Lysenkova, “I would rather not.”

Neither of them had seen Pekkala come in.

“You may never see another,” persisted Kirov. Sunlight through the dusty window glinted off the waxy green leaves.

“I wouldn’t mind that at all,” Lysenkova answered.

Pekkala shut the door more loudly than usual.

Kirov jumped. “Inspector! There you are!” He hugged the plant to his chest as if trying to take cover behind it.

“What can we do for you, Major Lysenkova?” asked Pekkala, taking off his coat and hanging it on the peg beside the door.

“I came here to ask for your help,” said Lysenkova. “As you might have heard, the Nagorski case has been reopened, and I am no longer in charge.”

“I did hear that,” said Pekkala.

“In fact, I have been told that you and Major Kirov will be running the investigation from now on.”

“We are?” asked Kirov, as he replaced the plant on the windowsill.

“I was just about to tell you,” explained Pekkala.

“The truth is,” said Lysenkova, “I never wanted it in the first place.”

“Why is that?” asked Pekkala. “You seemed pretty certain before.”

“I was certain about a number of things,” replied Lysenkova, “and it turned out I was wrong about all of them. That’s why I need your help now.”

Pekkala nodded, slightly confused.

“I need to keep working this case,” she said.

Pekkala sat down in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “But you just said you didn’t want to be working it in the first place.”

Lysenkova swallowed. “I can explain,” she said.

Pekkala held open his hand. “Please do,” he said.

“Until yesterday,” she began, “I’d never even heard of Project Konstantin. Then, when Captain Samarin called, informing me that Colonel Nagorski had been killed, I told him he must have dialed the wrong number.”

“Why did you think that?”

“I am, as you know, an internal investigator. My task is to pursue crimes committed inside the NKVD. I was explaining that to Samarin when he told me he believed someone in the NKVD might actually be responsible for Nagorski’s death.”

Pekkala’s focus sharpened. “Did he say why?”

“The location of the facility is a state secret,” continued Lysenkova. “According to Samarin, the only people who had access to that information and who might have been able to infiltrate the facility were NKVD. We didn’t have time to discuss it any further. He told me to get out there as quickly as I could. At that point, I realized I didn’t have any choice, even though this was nothing like the cases I normally handle. I deal in cases of corruption, extortion, bribery, blackmail. Not murders, Inspector Pekkala. Not bodies that have been ground up by tank tracks! That’s why I didn’t spot the bullet fragment you pulled out of his skull.”

“I don’t understand, Major. You say you never wanted the case, and it sounds to me as if you got your wish, but now you want to keep working on it?”

“I don’t want to, Inspector. I
have
to. It’s only a matter of time before I’m accused of counterrevolutionary activity for coming to the wrong conclusion about Nagorski’s death. The only chance
I’ve got is to remain on the case until it is solved, and the only person who can make that happen is you.”

Pekkala was silent for a while. “I understand,” he said finally, “but I will have to speak with Major Kirov here before making any decision.”

“I realize we did not get off to a good start, but I could be useful to you.” Her voice had taken on a tone of pleading. “I know how the NKVD works, inside and out. Once you start investigating them, they will close ranks and you’ll never get a word out of them. But I can and I will, if you’ll let me.”

“Very well.” Pekkala took his feet off the desk and stood up. “We will let you know our decision as soon as we can. Before you go, Major, I do have one question to ask you.”

“Of course, Inspector. Anything.”

“What do you know about the White Guild?” asked Pekkala, as he walked her out into the hall.

“Not a great deal, I’m afraid. It’s some kind of top secret department in the Bureau of Special Operations.”

“Have you heard them mentioned recently?”

“Special Operations is a tribe of phantoms, Inspector. You ought to know that, since you’re one of them. Where I come from, nobody even speaks their name.”

Pekkala sighed. “Thank you, Major.”

“Oh, I almost forgot—” From her pocket, Lysenkova removed a stained and tattered piece of paper. “Consider this a peace offering.”

Pekkala squinted at the document. At first glance, what he saw looked to him like Arabic writing on the page. Then he realized it was actually scientific equations, dozens of them, completely covering the paper. “Where did this come from?”

“I found it in Nagorski’s pocket.”

“Do you have any idea what it means?”

“None,” she told him.

“Does anyone else know about this?”

She shook her head.

He folded up the page. “I appreciate this, Major.”

“Then I will hear from you?”

“Yes.”

She paused, as if there might be something else to say, but then she turned away and walked back down the stairs.

Kirov came and stood beside Pekkala. They listened to her footsteps fading away.

“I never thought I would feel sorry for that woman,” Kirov said.

“But you do.”

“A little.”

“From the way you were talking to her, I’d say you felt more than a little sorry.”

Back inside the office, Pekkala busied himself straightening piles of papers which had slid in miniature avalanches across the surface of his desk.

“What’s bothering you, Inspector?” Kirov wanted to know. “You never tidy up your desk unless something is bothering you.”

“I am not certain about taking her on,” replied Pekkala.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” replied Kirov. “If Captain Samarin was right that the NKVD were involved, we’ll never get to the bottom of this without her working on the case.”

“Your willingness to work with Major Lysenkova wouldn’t have anything to do with …”

“With those eyes?” asked Kirov. “Those …”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Inspector.”

“No,” muttered Pekkala. “Of course you don’t.”

“Besides,” continued Kirov, “if we don’t give Major Lysenkova a chance to set things straight with Comrade Stalin, you know what will happen to her.”

Pekkala did know, because the same thing had happened to him during the Revolution, when he was arrested by Bolshevik Guards on his way out of the country. He thought back to the months he had spent in solitary confinement, the endless interrogations during which his sanity had worn so thin he no longer knew what remained of it. And then came the winter’s night when he was delivered, still wearing his flimsy beige prison pajamas, to a railroad siding on the outskirts of Moscow. There, he boarded a train bound for Siberia.

The thing he would always remember was the way people died standing up
.

As convict transport ETAP-61 made its way east towards the Borodok Labor Camp, Pekkala abandoned hope of ever seeing home again. The train was over fifty cars long. Each one contained eighty men, crammed into a space designed to hold forty
.

It was too crowded for anyone to sit. Prisoners took turns in the middle, where there was body heat to share. The rest stood at the edges. Dressed only in dirty beige pajamas, a few of them froze every night. There was no room for them to fall, so the corpses remained on their feet while their lips turned blue and spiderwebs of ice glazed their eyes. By morning, they were cloaked in white crystals
.

With his face pressed to a tiny opening crisscrossed with barbed wire, Pekkala looked out at the cities of Sverdlovsk, Petropavlovsk, and Omsk. Until he saw their names spelled out on blue and white enamel signs above the station platforms, those places had never seemed real. They had existed as locations destined to remain always beyond the horizon, reachable only in dreams. Like Zanzibar or Timbuktu
.

The train passed through these cities after dark, in order to hide its contents from the people living there. At Novosibirsk, Pekkala spotted two men illuminated by a glow cast through the open doorway of a tavern. He thought he heard them singing. Snow fell around the men like a cascade of
diamonds. Beyond, silhouetted against the blue-black sky, rose the onion-shaped domes of Orthodox churches. Afterwards, as the train pressed on into darkness so complete it was as if they’d left the earth and were now hurtling through space, the singing of those two men haunted him
.

Hour after hour, the wheels clanked lazily along the tracks, their sound like a monstrous sharpening of knives
.

Only in open country did the engines ever come to a halt. Then the guards jumped down and beat against the outsides of the wagons with their rifle butts, in order to dislodge those who had become frozen to the inner walls. Usually the corpses had to be prized free, leaving behind the imprints of their faces, complete with eyelashes and shreds of beard, in the boxcar’s icy plating
.

Beside the tracks lay skeletons from previous convict transports. Rib cages jutted from rags of clothing and silver teeth glinted in their skulls
.

P
EKKALA SMOOTHED A HAND ACROSS HIS FACE, FINGERTIPS RUSTLING
over the razor stubble on his chin. Knowing the fate that lay in store for Major Lysenkova, he realized he could not simply stand by and do nothing to help. “All right,” he sighed.

“Good!” Kirov clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together. “Shall I call her back?”

Pekkala nodded. “But before you go, tell me what you found out about Nagorski’s bodyguard, Maximov.”

“Nothing, Inspector.”

“You mean you didn’t look?”

“Oh, I looked,” replied Kirov. “I searched the police files. I even checked Gendarmerie and Okhrana files from before the Revolution, those that still exist. There’s nothing. As far as I can tell, the first record of Maximov’s existence is the day he was hired by Nagorski. Do you want me to bring him in for questioning?”