Shadow Pass (3 page)

As the topic turned to engines, Nagorski began to relax. “I got my first look at an automobile in 1907. It was a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, which had been brought into Russia by the Grand Duke Mikhail. My father and he used to go hunting each year, for Merganser ducks up in the Pripet Marshes. Once, when the Grand Duke stopped by our house in his car, my father asked to see the inner workings of the machine.” Nagorski laughed. “That’s what he called them.
The inner workings
. As if it was some kind of mantel clock. When the Grand Duke lifted the hood, my life changed in an instant. My father just stared at it. To him, it was nothing more than a baffling collection of metal pipes and bolts. But to me that engine made sense. It was as if I had seen it before. I have never been able to explain it properly. All I knew for certain was that my future lay with these engines. It wasn’t long before I had built one for myself. Over the next ten years, I won more than twenty races. If the war hadn’t come along, that’s what I’d still be doing. But everybody has a story which begins that way, don’t they, Inspector? If the war hadn’t come along …”

“What did happen to you in the war?” interrupted Pekkala.

“I couldn’t get back to Russia, so I enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. There were men from all over the world, caught in the wrong country when the war broke out and with no way to return home. I had been with the Legion almost two years when we came up against tanks near the French village of Flers. We had all heard about these machines. The British first used them against the Germans at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. By the following year the Germans had designed their own. I had never even seen one until we went into action against them. My first thought was
how slowly they moved. Six kilometers an hour. That’s a walking pace. And nothing graceful about them. It was like being attacked by giant metal cockroaches. Three of the five broke down before they even reached us, one was knocked out with artillery and the last managed to escape, although we found it two days later burned out by the side of the road, apparently from engine malfunction.”

“That does not sound like an impressive introduction.”

“No, but as I watched those iron hulks being destroyed, or grinding to a halt of their own accord, I realized that the future of warfare lay in these machines. Tanks are not merely some passing fad of butchery, like the crossbow or the trebuchet. I saw at once what needed to be done to improve the design. I glimpsed technologies that had not even been invented yet, but which, in the months ahead, I created in my head and on any scrap of paper I could find. When the war ended, those scraps were what I brought back with me to this country.”

Pekkala knew the rest of that story—how one day Nagorski had walked into the newly formed Soviet Patent Office in Moscow with more than twenty different designs, which ultimately earned him the directorship of the T-34 project. Until that time he had been eking out a living on the streets of Moscow, polishing the boots of men he would later command.

“Do you know the limits of my development budget?” asked Nagorski.

“I do not,” replied Pekkala.

“That’s because there aren’t any,” said Nagorski. “Comrade Stalin knows exactly how important this machine is to the safety of our country. So I can spend whatever I want, take whatever I want, order whomever I choose to do whatever I decide. You accuse me of taking risks with the safety of this country, but the blame for that belongs with the man who sent you here. You can
tell Comrade Stalin from me that if he continues arresting members of the Soviet armed forces at the rate he is doing, there will be no one left to drive my tanks even if he does let me finish my work!”

Pekkala knew that the true measure of Nagorski’s power was not in the money he could spend but in the fact that he could say what he’d just said without fear of a bullet in the brain. And Pekkala himself said nothing in reply, not because he feared Nagorski but because he knew that Nagorski was right.

Afraid that he was losing control of the government, Stalin had ordered mass arrests. In the past year and a half, over a million people had been taken into custody. Among them were most of the Soviet high command, who had then either been shot or sent out to the Gulags.

“Perhaps,” Pekkala suggested to Nagorski, “you have had a change of heart about this tank of yours. It might occur to someone in that situation to undo what they have done.”

“By giving its secrets to the enemy, you mean?”

Pekkala nodded slowly. “That is one possibility.”

“Do you know why it is called the Konstantin Project?”

“No, Comrade Nagorski.”

“Konstantin is the name of my son, my only child. You see, Inspector, this project is as sacred to me as my own family. There is nothing I would do to harm it. Some people cannot understand that. They write me off as some kind of Dr. Frankenstein, obsessed only with bringing a monster to life. They don’t understand the price I have to pay for my accomplishments. Success can be as harmful as failure when you are just trying to get on with your life. My wife and son have suffered greatly.”

“I understand,” said Pekkala.

“Do you?” asked Nagorski, almost pleading. “Do you really?”

“We have both made difficult choices,” Pekkala said.

Nagorski nodded, staring away into the corner of the room, lost in thought. Suddenly, he faced Pekkala. “Then you should know that everything I’ve told you is the truth.”

“Excuse me, Colonel Nagorski,” said Pekkala. He got up, left the room, and walked down the corridor, which was lined with metal doors. His footsteps made no sound on the gray industrial carpeting. All sound had been removed from this place, as if the air had been sucked out of it. At the end of the corridor, one door remained slightly ajar. Pekkala knocked once and walked into a room so filled with smoke that his first breath felt like a mouthful of ashes.

“Well, Pekkala?” said a voice. Sitting by himself in a chair in the corner of the otherwise empty room was a man of medium height and stocky build, with a pockmarked face and a withered left hand. His hair was thick and dark, combed straight back on his head. A mustache sewn with threads of gray bunched beneath his nose. He was smoking a cigarette, of which so little remained that one more puff would have touched the embers to his skin.

“Very well, Comrade Stalin,” said Pekkala.

The man stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe and blew the last gray breath in two streams from his nose. “What do you think of our Colonel Nagorski?” he asked.

“I think he is telling the truth,” replied Pekkala.

“I don’t believe it,” replied Stalin. “Perhaps your assistant should be questioning him.”

“Major Kirov,” said Pekkala.

“I know who he is!” Stalin’s voice rose in anger.

Pekkala understood. It was the mention of Kirov’s name which unnerved Stalin, since Kirov was also the name of the former Leningrad Party Chief, who had been assassinated five years earlier. The murder of Kirov had weighed upon Stalin, not because of any lasting affection for the man but because it showed that if a person
like Kirov could be killed, then Stalin himself might be next. Since Kirov’s death, Stalin had never walked out into the streets, among the people whom he ruled but did not trust.

Stalin kneaded his hands together, cracking his knuckles one after the other. “The Konstantin Project has been compromised, and I believe Nagorski is responsible.”

“I have yet to see the proof of that,” said Pekkala. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Comrade Stalin? Is there some proof that you can show? Or is this just another arrest? In which case, you have plenty of other investigators you could use.”

Stalin rolled the stub of his cigarette between his fingers. “Do you know how many people I allow to speak to me that way?”

“Not many, I imagine,” said Pekkala. Every time he met with Stalin, he became aware of an emotional blankness that seemed to hover around the man. It was something about Stalin’s eyes. The look on his face would change, but the expression in his eyes never did. When Stalin laughed, cajoled, and if that didn’t work, threatened, it was, for Pekkala, like watching an exchange of masks in a Japanese Kabuki play. There were moments, as one mask transformed into another, when it seemed to Pekkala that he could glimpse what lay behind. And what he found there filled him with dread. His only defense was to pretend he could not see it.

Stalin smiled, and suddenly the mask had changed again. “ ‘Not many’ is right. ‘None’ would be more correct. You are right that I do have other investigators, but this case is too important.” Then he put the cigarette butt in his pocket.

Pekkala had watched him do this before. It was a strange habit in a place where even the poorest people threw their cigarette butts on the ground and left them there. Strange, too, for a man who would never run short of the forty cigarettes he smoked each day. Maybe there was some story in it, perhaps dating back to his days as a bank robber in Tblisi. Pekkala wondered if Stalin, like
some beggar in the street, removed the remaining tobacco from the stubs and rolled it into fresh cigarettes. Whatever the reason, Stalin kept it to himself.

“I admire your audacity, Pekkala. I like a person who is not afraid to speak his mind. That’s one of the reasons I trust you.”

“All I ask is that you let me do my job,” said Pekkala. “That was our agreement.”

Stalin let his hands fall with an impatient slap against his knees. “Do you know, Pekkala, that my pen once touched the paper of your death sentence? I was that close.” He pinched the air, as if he were still holding that pen, and traced the air with the ghost of his own signature. “I never regretted my choice. And how many years have we been working together now?”

“Six. Almost seven.”

“In all that time, have I ever interfered with one of your investigations?”

“No,” admitted Pekkala.

“And have I ever threatened you, simply because you disagreed with me?”

“No, Comrade Stalin.”

“And that”—Stalin aimed a finger at Pekkala, as if taking aim down the barrel of a gun—“is more than you can say about your former boss, or his meddling wife, Alexandra.”

In that moment Pekkala was hurled back through time
.

Like a man snapping out of a trance, he found himself in the Alexander Palace, hand poised to knock upon the Tsar’s study door
.

It was the day he finally tracked down the killer Grodek
.

Grodek and his fiancée, a woman named Maria Balka, had been found hiding in an apartment near the Moika Canal. When agents of the Okhrana stormed the building, Grodek set off an explosive which destroyed the house and killed everyone inside, including the agents who had
gone in to arrest him. Meanwhile, Grodek and Balka fled out the back, where Pekkala was waiting in case they tried to escape. Pekkala pursued them along the icy cobbled street until Grodek tried to cross the river on the Potsuleyev Bridge. But Okhrana men had stationed themselves on the other side of the bridge, and the two criminals found themselves with nowhere left to run. It was at this moment that Grodek had shot his fiancée rather than let her fall into the hands of the police. Balka’s body tumbled into the canal and disappeared among the plates of ice which drifted out towards the sea like rafts loaded with diamonds. Grodek, afraid to jump, had tried to shoot himself, only to discover that his gun was empty. He was immediately taken into custody
.

The Tsar had ordered Pekkala to arrive at the Alexander Palace no later than 4 p.m. that day, in order to make his report. The Tsar did not like to be kept waiting, and Pekkala had raced the whole way from Petrograd, arriving with only minutes to spare. He dashed up the front steps of the Palace and straight to the Tsar’s study
.

There was no answer, so Pekkala knocked again. Still there was no answer. Cautiously, he opened the door, but found the room empty
.

Pekkala sighed with annoyance
.

Although the Tsar did not like to be kept waiting, he had no trouble making others wait for him
.

Just then, Pekkala heard the Tsar’s voice coming from the room across the hall. The chamber belonged to the Tsarina Alexandra and was known as the Mauve Boudoir. Of the hundred rooms in the Alexander Palace, it had become the most famous, because of how ugly people found it. Pekkala was forced to agree. To his eye, everything in that room was the color of boiled liver
.

Pekkala stopped outside the room, trying to catch his breath from all the rushing he had done to be on time. Then he heard the voice of the Tsarina and the Tsar’s furious reply. As their words filtered into his brain, he realized they were talking about him
.

“I am not going to dismiss Pekkala!” said the Tsar
.

Pekkala heard the faint creak of the Tsar’s riding boots upon the floor
.
He knew exactly which pair of boots they were—they had been special-ordered from England and had arrived the week before. The Tsar was trying to break them in, although his feet were suffering in the meantime. He had confided to Pekkala that he had even resorted to the old peasant trick of softening new boots, which was to urinate in them and leave them standing overnight
.

Now Pekkala heard the Tsarina speaking in her usual soft tone. He had never heard her shout. The Tsarina’s low pitch always sounded to him like a person uttering threats. “Our friend has urged us,” she said
.

At the mention of “our friend,” Pekkala felt his jaw clench. That was the phrase the Tsar and the Tsarina used between themselves to describe the self-proclaimed holy man Rasputin
.

Since his first appearance in the court of Tsar Nicholas Romanov, Rasputin’s hold upon the Imperial Family had grown so strong that he was now consulted on all matters, whether about the war, which was now in its second year and moving from one catastrophe to the next, or about appointments to the Royal Court, or about the illness of the Tsar’s youngest child, Alexei. Although it was officially denied, Alexei had been diagnosed with hemophilia. Injuries which would have been laughed off by any healthy boy confined him to his bed for days at a time. Often he had to be carried wherever he went by his personal servant, a sailor named Derevenko
.