The Red Coffin (12 page)

Under the glare of an electric light powered by a rattling portable generator, Pekkala and Kirov stood in the pit. At first, the freezing, muddy water had come up to their waists but, with the help of buckets, they had managed to bail out most of it. Now they used a mine detector to search for the missing gun. The detector consisted of a long metal stem, bent into a handle at one end, with a plate-shaped disc at the other. In the centre of the stem an oblong box held the batteries, volume control and dials for the various settings.

After being shown Pekkala’s Shadow Pass, the NKVD guards had supplied them with everything they needed. They had even helped to wheel the generator out across the proving ground.

Slowly, Pekkala moved the disc of the mine detector back and forth over the ground, listening for the sound that would indicate the presence of metal. His hands had grown so numb that he could barely feel the metal handle of the detector.

The generator droned and clattered, filling the air with exhaust fumes.

On hands and knees, Kirov sifted his fingers through the mud. ‘Why wouldn’t the killer have held on to the gun?’

‘He might have,’ replied Pekkala, ‘assuming it’s a “he”. More likely, he threw it away as soon as he could, in case he was caught and searched. Without a gun, he might have been
able to talk his way out of it. But with a gun on him, there’d be no chance of that.’

‘And he wouldn’t be expecting us to search through all this mud,’ said Kirov, his lips turned drowned-man blue, ‘because that would be insane, wouldn’t it?’

‘Precisely!’ said Pekkala.

Just then, they heard a beep: very faint and only one.

‘What was that?’ asked Kirov.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I’ve never used one of these things before.’

Kirov flapped his arm at the detector. ‘Well, do it again!’

‘I’m trying!’ replied Pekkala, swinging the disc back and forth over the ground.

‘Slowly!’ shouted Kirov. As he climbed up off his knees, mud sucked at his waterlogged boots. ‘Let me try.’

Pekkala gave him the detector. His half-frozen hands remained curled around the memory of the handle.

Kirov skimmed the disc just above the surface of the mud.

Nothing.

Kirov swore. ‘This ridiculous contraption isn’t even …’

Then the sound came again.

‘There!’ shouted Pekkala.

Carefully, Kirov moved the disc back over the spot.

The detector beeped once more, and then again and finally, as Kirov held it over the place, the sound became a constant drone.

Pekkala dropped to his knees and began to dig, squeezing through handfuls of mud as if he were a baker kneading dough. ‘It’s not here,’ he muttered. ‘There’s no gun.’

‘I told you this thing didn’t work,’ complained Kirov.

Just then, Pekkala’s fist closed on something hard. A stone, he thought. He nearly tossed it aside, but then, in the glare of the generator light, he caught a glimpse of metal. Working his fingers through the mud, his fingers snagged on what Pekkala now realised was a bullet cartridge. Pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, he held it up to Kirov and smiled as if he’d been a gold digger who had found the nugget that would set him up for life. Pekkala rubbed away the dirt at the end of the casing until he could see the markings stamped into the brass. ‘7.62 mm,’ he said.

‘It could be a Nagent.’

‘No, the cartridge is too short. This did not come from a Russian gun.’

After hunting for another hour, and finding nothing, Pekkala called an end to the search. They clambered out of the pit, switched off the generator and stumbled back through the dark towards the buildings.

The guard hut was closed and the guards were nowhere in sight.

By that time, both Pekkala and Kirov were shuddering uncontrollably from the cold. They needed to warm up before driving back to the city.

They tried to get into the other buildings, but all of them were locked.

In desperation, the two men heaped up several broken wooden pallets which they found stacked behind the Iron House. Using a spare fuel can from their car, they soon had the pallets burning.

Like sleepwalkers, they reached their hands towards the blaze. Sitting down upon the ground, they removed their
boots and emptied out thin streams of dirty water. Then they held their pasty feet against the flames until their flesh began to steam. Darkness swirled around them, as if what lay beneath the ground had risen in a tide and drowned the world.

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Kirov, when his teeth had finally stopped chattering, ‘is why Major Lysenkova is here at all. NKVD has dozens of investigators. Why send one who only investigates crimes within the NKVD?’

‘There’s only one possibility,’ answered Pekkala. ‘NKVD must think one of their own people is responsible.’

‘But that doesn’t explain why Major Lysenkova would be in such a hurry to wrap up the investigation.’

Pekkala balanced the gun cartridge on his palm, examining it in the firelight. ‘This ought to slow things down a bit.’

‘I don’t know how you can do it, Inspector.’

‘Do what?’

‘Work so calmly with the dead,’ replied Kirov, ‘especially when they have been so … so broken up.’

‘I’m used to it now,’ said Pekkala, and he thought back to the times when his father would be called out to collect bodies which had been discovered in the wilderness. Sometimes the bodies belonged to hunters who had gone missing in the winter. They fell through thin ice out on the lakes and did not reappear until spring, their bodies pale as alabaster, tangled among the sticks and branches. Sometimes they were old people, who had wandered off into the forest, gotten lost and died of exposure. What remained of them was often scarcely recognisable beyond the scaffolding of bones they left behind. Pekkala and his father always brought a coffin with them,
the rough pine box still smelling of sap. They wrapped the remains in a thick canvas tarpaulin.

There had been many such trips, none of which plagued him with nightmares. Only one stuck clearly in his mind.

It was the day the dead Jew came riding into town.

His horse trotted down the main street of Lappeenranta in the middle of a blizzard. The Jew sat in the saddle in his black coat and wide brimmed hat. He appeared to have frozen to death, his beard a twisted mass of icicles. The horse stopped outside the blacksmith’s shop, as if it knew where it was going, although the blacksmith swore he’d never seen the animal before.

No one knew where the Jew had come from. Messages sent to the nearby villages of Joutseno, Lemi and Taipalsaari turned up nothing. His saddlebags contained no clues, only spare clothing, a few scraps of food, and a book written in his language, which no one in Lappeenranta could decipher. He had probably come in from Russia, whose unmarked border was only a few kilometres away. Then he got lost in the woods, and died before he could find shelter.

The Jew had been dead for a long time – five or six days, thought Pekkala’s father. They had to remove the saddle just to get him off the horse. The hands of the Jew were twisted around the bridle. Pekkala, who was twelve years old at the time, tried to untangle the leather from the brittle fingers, but without success, so his father cut the leather. Since the Jew’s body was frozen, they could not fit him in a coffin. They did their best to cover him up for the ride back to Pekkala’s house.

That evening, they left him on the undertaking slab to thaw, so that Pekkala’s father could begin the work of preparing the corpse for burial.

‘I need you to do something for me,’ his father told Pekkala. ‘I need you to see him out.’

‘See him out?’ asked Pekkala. ‘He’s already out.’

Pekkala’s father shook his head. ‘His faith holds that the spirit lingers by the body until it is buried. The spirit is afraid. It is their custom to have someone sit by the body, to keep it company until the spirit finally departs.’

‘And how long is that?’ asked Pekkala, staring at the corpse, whose legs remained pincered, as if still around the body of the horse. Water dripped from the thawing clothes, its sound like the ticking of a clock.

‘Just until morning,’ said his father.

His father’s preparation room was in the basement. That was where Pekkala spent the night, sitting on a chair, back against the wall. A paraffin lamp burned with a steady flame upon the table where his father kept tools for preparing the dead – rubber gloves, knives, tubes, needles, waxed linen thread and a box containing rouges for restoring colour to the skin.

Pekkala had forgotten to ask his father if he was allowed to fall asleep, but now it was too late because his parents and his brother had all gone to bed hours ago. To keep himself busy, Pekkala thumbed through the pages of the book they had found in the Jew’s saddlebag. The letters seemed to have been fashioned out of tiny wisps of smoke.

Pekkala set the book aside and went over to the body. Staring at the man’s pinched face, his waxy skin and reddish beard, Pekkala thought about the spirit of the Jew, pacing
about the room, not knowing where it was or where it was supposed to be. He imagined it standing by the brass-coloured flame of the lamp, like a moth drawn to the light. But maybe, he thought, only the living care about a thing like that. Then he went back and sat in his chair.

He did not mean to fall asleep, but suddenly it was morning. He heard the sound of the basement door opening and his father coming down the stairs. Pekkala’s father did not ask if he had slept.

The Jew’s body had thawed. One leg hung off the preparation table. His father lifted it and gently set it straight beside the other. Then he uncoiled the leather bridle from around the Jew’s hands.

Later that day, they buried him in a clearing on the side of a hill, which looked out over a lake. His father had picked out the place. There was no path, so they had to drag the coffin up between the trees, using ropes and pushing the wooden box until their fingertips were raw from splinters.

‘We had better make it deep,’ his father said as he handed Pekkala a shovel, ‘or else the wolves might dig him up.’

The two of them scraped through the layers of pine needles and then used pickaxes to dig into the grey clay beneath. When at last the coffin had been laid and the hole filled in, they set aside their shovels. Knowing only the prayers of a different god, they stood for a moment in silence before heading back down the hill.

‘What did you do with his book?’ asked Pekkala.

‘His head is resting on it,’ replied his father.

In the years since then, Pekkala had seen so many lifeless bodies that they seemed to merge in his mind. But the face
of the Jew remained clear, and the smoke-trail writing spoke to him in dreams.

‘I don’t know how you do it,’ Kirov said again.

Pekkala did not reply, because he did not know either.

Flames snapped, flicking sparks into the blue-black sky.

The two men huddled together, like swimmers in a shark-infested sea.

As Kirov drove the Emka through the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate, with its ornamental battlements and gold and black clock tower above, Pekkala began to do up the buttons on his coat in preparation for the meeting with Stalin. The Emka’s tyres popped over the cobblestones of Ivanovsky Square until they reached a dead end on the far side.

‘I’ll walk home,’ he told Kirov. ‘This might take a while.’

At a plain, unmarked door, a soldier stood at attention. As Pekkala approached, the soldier slammed his heels together with a sound that echoed around the high brick walls and gave the traditional greeting of ‘Good health to you, Comrade Pekkala.’ This was not only a greeting, but also a sign that Pekkala had been recognised by the soldier and did not need to present his pass book.

Pekkala made his way up to the second floor of the building. Here, he walked down a long, wide corridor with tall ceilings. The floors were covered with red carpeting. It was, Pekkala could not help noticing, the same colour as arterial blood. His footsteps made no sound except when the floorboards creaked beneath the carpet. Tall doors lined the walls of this corridor on either side. Sometimes, these doors were
open and he could see people at work in side large offices. Today all the doors were closed.

At the end of the corridor, another soldier greeted him and opened the double doors to Stalin’s reception room. It was a huge space, with eggshell-white walls and wooden floors. In the centre of the room stood three desks, like life rafts in the middle of a flat calm sea. At each desk sat a man, wearing a collarless olive-green tunic in the same style as that worn by Stalin himself. Only one man rose to greet Pekkala. It was Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s chief secretary: a short, flabby man with round glasses almost flush against his eyeballs. Poskrebyshev appeared to be the exact opposite of the stripped-to-the-waist, muscle-armoured workers whose statues could be found in almost every square in Moscow. The only thing exceptional about Poskrebyshev was his complete lack of emotion as he escorted Pekkala across the room to Stalin’s study.

Poskrebyshev knocked once and did not wait for a reply. He swung the door open, nodded for Pekkala to enter. As soon as Pekkala walked into the room, the secretary shut the door behind him.

Pekkala found himself alone in a large room with red velvet curtains and a red carpet which lined only the outer third of the floor. The centre was the same mosaic of wood as in the waiting room. The walls had been papered dark red, with caramel coloured wooden dividers separating the panels. Hanging on these walls were portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin, each one the same size and apparently painted by the same artist.

Close to one wall stood Stalin’s desk, which had eight legs, two at each corner. On the desk lay several files, each one
aligned perfectly beside the others. Stalin’s chair had a wide back, padded with burgundy-coloured leather brass-tacked against the frame.

Apart from Stalin’s desk, and a table covered with a green cloth, the space was spartanly furnished. In the corner stood a large and very old grandfather clock which had been allowed to wind down and was silent now, the full yellow moon of its pendulum at rest behind the rippled glass window of its case.