Archive 17

In a cave, deep underground, lit by the greasy flame of a kerosene lamp, the man knelt in a puddle, his empty hands held out as if to catch drops of water which fell through the cracks in the ceiling. He was badly wounded, with deep cuts across his chest and arms. The homemade knife with which he had attempted to defend himself lay out of reach behind him. Head bowed, he stared with a look of confusion at his own reflection in the puddle, like a man who no longer recognized himself.

Before him stretched the shadow of the killer who had brought him to this place. “I came here to offer you a reason to go on living,” the killer said, “and this is how you repay me?”

With fumbling, blood-smeared fingers, the man undid the button on his shirt pocket. He pulled out a crumpled photograph of a group of soldiers on horseback, dense forest in the background. The men leaned forward in their saddles, grinning at the camera. “They are my reason for living.”

“And now they will be your reason for dying.” Slowly, the way people sometimes move in dreams, the killer stepped behind the man. With movements almost gentle, he grasped the man by his short and filthy hair, pulling his head back so that the tendons stood out in his neck. Then he drew a knife from the folds of his clothing, cut the man’s throat, and held him like a lover while his heart bled dry.

“POSKREBYSHEV!” THE VOICE OF JOSEPH STALIN EXPLODED THROUGH the wall.

In the adjoining room, Stalin’s secretary sprang to his feet. Poskrebyshev was a short, round-faced man, bald except for a fringe of gray which arced around the back of his head and resembled the wreath of a Roman emperor. Like his master, he wore trousers tucked into black calfskin boots and a plain mandarin-collared tunic in precisely the same shade of brownish green as the rotten apples that two neighborhood bullies, Ermakov and Schwartz, used to hurl at him from their hiding places along the young Poskrebyshev’s route to school.

Since the war had broken out, one month before, there had been many such outbursts from the man Poskrebyshev referred to as Vozhd. The Boss.

On September 1, 1939, as part of a secret agreement between Germany and Russia, buried in a peace treaty signed between the two countries and known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Germany had invaded Poland.

Justification for the invasion had been provided by a staged attack on a German customshouse called Hochlinde and on the Gleiwitz radio substation. Thirteen inmates from Oranienburg Concentration Camp, believing that they had been chosen to take part in a propaganda film designed to improve relations between the Germans and the Poles, were trucked towards Hochlinde under cover of darkness. All were dressed in Polish army uniforms. The inmates had been convinced that they were to enact a meeting between German and Polish troops, somewhere in the forest on the border between the two countries.

The plot of the film would be simple. At first both sides, each mistrustful of the other, would draw their weapons. For an agonizing moment, it would seem as if a gunfight might actually break out. But then the men would recognize their common ground as human beings. The guns would be lowered. Cigarettes would be exchanged. The two patrols would part company and melt back into the forest. Upon completion of the film, the inmates had been promised, they would be sent home as free men.

As they neared Hochlinde, the trucks pulled over and the prisoners shared rations with a squad of SS guards accompanying them. Each prisoner was also given what he was told would be a tetanus shot, as a matter of standard procedure. The syringes were not filled with tetanus vaccine, however. Instead, the men were injected with prussic acid. Within minutes, all of them were dead.

Afterwards, the bodies were loaded back onto the trucks and the convoy continued to the vicinity of Hochlinde, where the corpses were dumped in the woods and shot with German weapons. The bodies would later be exhibited as proof that Polish soldiers had launched an attack on German soil.

Meanwhile, at the Gleiwitz radio station, an officer of the SS named Naujocks, with the help of a Polish-speaking German, interrupted regular radio transmission to announce that Gleiwitz was under attack by Polish troops.

Within hours, German planes were bombing Warsaw. On the following day, German panzers rolled across the Polish border.

Two weeks later, in accordance with the secret clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Russian army began its own invasion from the east.

Even though the obliteration of Polish forces had been virtually guaranteed from the beginning, the slightest setback—a temporary withdrawal, a mistimed attack, supplies sent to the wrong location—sent Stalin into a rage.

And that rage fell first upon Poskrebyshev.

“Where is he?” Stalin’s muffled voice boomed from behind the closed doors of his study. “Poskrebyshev!”

“Mother of God,” muttered Poskrebyshev, the sweat already beading on his forehead. “What have I done now?”

The truth was, Poskrebyshev knew exactly what he had done. He had been dreading this moment for a long time, and now, it seemed, his crimes had finally caught up with him.

Upon being made Stalin’s personal secretary, the highest appointment a man like Poskrebyshev could ever hope to hold, the first thing he had done was to forge documents of transfer for Comrades Schwartz and Ermakov, the two bullies on whom he had sworn to take vengeance one day. Stamped with a rubber facsimile of Stalin’s signature, the documents ordered the immediate dispatch of these two men, one an electrician and the other a roof tiler, from their hometown in a cozy suburb of Moscow to the port of Archangel, high in the Soviet arctic. There, construction had begun to transform the frozen wasteland around the port into a modern military base for Soviet navy personnel and their families. The construction was expected to take many years. In the meantime, conditions for the workers on this project would be primitive in the extreme.

Why such documents would have emerged from the office of Stalin himself was a question nobody would ever dare to ask. This was the perfect symmetry of Poskrebyshev’s revenge, executed more than thirty years after the events which had set it in motion.

In the weeks and months that followed the transfer of Ermakov and Schwartz to the arctic, Poskrebyshev would often stop in at the Kremlin’s meteorological office and inquire about weather in Archangel. Thirty below. Forty below. Even fifty below, on occasion. The worse the conditions, the more convinced Poskrebyshev became that there was indeed justice in the world for people like himself, a thing which had seemed impossible back in those days when the rotten apples, pulpy and reeking of vinegar, had splattered against him by the dozen.

At first his scheme had seemed foolproof, but as time went by, Poskrebyshev came to realize that there was no such thing. He resigned himself to the fact that, sooner or later, he would be found out.

The double doors flew open and Stalin burst into the outer office.

In this waking nightmare, it seemed to Poskrebyshev as if Stalin, dressed in his brownish-green tunic, had transformed into one of those apples so expertly thrown by Comrades Schwartz and Ermakov.

“Where is he?” screamed Stalin, as he stomped up to Poskrebyshev. “Where is that blackhearted troll?”

“I am here, Comrade Stalin,” replied Poskrebyshev, his eyes bulging with fear.

Stalin’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

“I am here, Comrade Stalin!” shouted Poskrebyshev, his voice raised to a bellow of blind obedience.

“Have you completely lost your mind?” demanded Stalin, resting his knuckles on Poskrebyshev’s desk and leaning forward until their faces were only a handsbreadth apart. “I am looking for Pekkala!”

“You have found him,” said a voice.

Poskrebyshev turned. He saw a man standing in the doorway to the outer office. Neither he nor Stalin had heard him enter the room.

Pekkala was tall and broad-shouldered, with a straight nose and strong white teeth. Streaks of premature gray ran through his short dark hair. His eyes were marked by a strange silvery quality, which people noticed only when he was looking directly at them. He wore a knee-length coat made of black wool, with a mandarin collar and concealed buttons which fastened on the left side of his chest. His ankle-high boots, also black, were double-soled and polished. He stood with his hands tucked behind his back, the shape of a revolver in a shoulder holster just visible beneath the heavy cloth of his coat.

Stalin’s anger dissipated as abruptly as it had appeared. Now a smile crept over his face, narrowing his eyes. “Pekkala!” he said, growling out the name. “I have a job for you.”

As the two men disappeared into Stalin’s office and the door closed quietly behind them, the residue of fear in Poskrebyshev’s brain was still too powerful to let him feel relief. Later, perhaps, that would come. For now, all he experienced was the luxury of drawing in breath, and an overpowering curiosity to know the weather forecast for Archangel.

STALIN, SITTING AT HIS DESK in a leather-backed chair, carefully stuffed his pipe with honey-colored shreds of Balkan tobacco.

There was no chair on the other side of the desk, so Pekkala had to stand while he waited for the man to complete his ritual.

During this time, the only sound in the room was the dry rustle of Stalin’s breathing as he held a match over the pipe bowl and coaxed the tobacco to burn. Once this had been accomplished, he waved the match and dropped the smoldering stick into a brass ashtray. The soft, sweet smell of the tobacco drifted about the room. Finally, Stalin spoke. “I am sending you back to Siberia.”

The words struck Pekkala like a slap in the face. At first, he was too shocked to reply.

“Although not as a prisoner,” continued Stalin. “Not officially. There has been a murder in your old camp. Borodok.”

“With respect, Comrade Stalin, there must be murders in that place every day of the week.”

“This one has caught my attention.” Stalin seemed preoccupied with the ashtray, moving it from one side of his desk to the other and then back to its original place. “Do you remember Colonel Kolchak?”

“Of course I remember him!”

Stalin’s words threw Pekkala back to a dreary, rain-soaked night in March of 1917, just before the Tsar stepped down from power.

He was woken by the sound of horses passing on the gravel road outside his bedroom window. During his years as Special Investigator for the Tsar, Pekkala had lived in a small cottage on the grounds of the Imperial estate, known as Tsarskoye Selo, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Living near the old Pensioners’ Stables, Pekkala was used to the noise of horses moving by, but not at this time of night.

Peering through the curtains, Pekkala glimpsed a shadowy procession of wagons, three in all, each one weighed down by wooden boxes with rope handles which resembled ammunition crates. He counted twenty-five boxes on each wagon.

One of these wagons had split a wheel, dumping its cargo. Now soldiers milled about, stacking the heavy boxes at the side of the path. Others were busy trying to remove the wheel so they could rig it with a spare.

Pekkala opened the door and stepped out into the dark.

“There you are!” said a voice. “Sorry to have woken you.”

Pekkala turned to see a man wearing a close-tailored uniform and moving with the slightly bowlegged gait of a cavalry officer. His face was fierce and thin and dominated by a rigidly waxed mustache. Pekkala instantly recognized Colonel Kolchak, a man whose social standing in the ranks of Russian nobility, combined with an utter ruthlessness of character, had won him favor with the Tsar.

Finding Kolchak here, amid all of these boxes, Pekkala suddenly realized what he was looking at. Now that the Revolution had begun, the Tsar’s gold was being evacuated to a place of safety. The task had been given to Colonel Kolchak, who, in the company of fifty handpicked men, would transport the treasure to Siberia.

Kolchak’s orders, Pekkala knew, were to follow the route of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and link up with his uncle, Alexander Vassileyevich Kolchak, an admiral in the Tsar’s Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok, who would then take charge of the gold. The admiral was forming an army of anti-Bolshevik forces. Rumors swirled that he planned to declare independence for the whole of Siberia.

The order to begin transporting the gold should have been given weeks, if not months before, but Pekkala had seen for himself that, in spite of all the warning signs that the Revolution would soon overwhelm them, the Romanovs had chosen to believe such a thing was impossible. Now, Revolutionary Guards were in control of St. Petersburg: It was only a matter of time before they advanced on Tsarskoye Selo.

“Heading out?” asked Kolchak, as he shook Pekkala’s hand.

“Soon,” replied Pekkala. “All I have to do is pack my bag.”

“Traveling light,” remarked Kolchak. He was trying to sound jovial, but the anger at this delay penetrated his voice.

“Not so for you,” replied Pekkala, as he glanced at the wagons.

“No indeed,” sighed Kolchak. With a sharp command, he sent the two good wagons on ahead, remaining behind to oversee the repair of the third.

Another hour passed before the broken wheel had finally been replaced. As two soldiers heaved the crates back onto the wagon, one of the rope handles broke. The box slipped from their hands, spilling its contents of gold ingots onto the ground.

“Damn you!” Kolchak shouted at the soldiers. Then he turned to Pekkala. “I am supposed to bring all this to the other side of the country. How can I possibly accomplish my task if these carts can’t even make it off the grounds of the Imperial estate?”

“You have much work ahead of you,” agreed Pekkala.

“What you are witnessing,” Kolchak said brusquely, “is final proof that the world we know is coming to an end. Men like us must now look to our own survival.”

As the last wagon trundled away into the dark, Kolchak climbed back onto his horse. “We must learn to be patient,” he told Pekkala. “One day we shall have our vengeance for what these bastards are about to do with everything we love. This fight isn’t over, Pekkala.”

“AND DO YOU REMEMBER what became of the Kolchak Expedition?” asked Stalin.

“I do,” replied Pekkala. “Almost as soon as the expedition was under way, Kolchak learned that an informant had betrayed him to the Bolsheviks. Guessing that Kolchak would head for the territory held by his uncle, the Bolsheviks sent their own cavalry to intercept the expedition before it reached Siberia. Once Kolchak realized that he was being followed, and since the wagons which transported the gold were slowing down his progress, he decided to leave the gold behind in the city of Kazan as he passed through there on his way to Siberia. The gold was later removed from its hiding place by the anti-Bolshevik forces of the Czechoslovakian Legion, who were also on their way to Vladivostok.”

Stalin nodded. “Go on.”

“In the winter of 1918, Czech Legion troops under the command of General Gaida had joined with the admiral’s White Russian Army. In the spring of 1919, they launched an offensive against the Reds from their base in Siberia.”

“But the offensive stalled out, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” agreed Pekkala, “and by November of that year, the admiral was forced to abandon his capital at Omsk. All through that winter, Czech and White Russian troops retreated east towards Vladivostok. There they hoped to board ships which would take them out of the country. They had captured a number of trains, some of them specially armored, and were traveling along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. By January of 1920, they were still nowhere near the coast. Seeing that his situation was hopeless, Admiral Kolchak stepped down from power. From then on, he was placed under the protection of the Sixth Czechoslovakian Rifle Regiment, under General Janin. The Czechs became responsible for the safety of the admiral as they continued their journey to Vladivostok.”

“And what happened then?”

“You know what happened, Comrade Stalin. Why are you asking me now?”

Stalin slowly rolled his hand before his face. “Humor me, Pekkala. What happened next?”

“Very well,” sighed Pekkala. “When the Czech train convoy reached the city of Irkutsk, they were stopped by armed members of the Socialist Political Center, who demanded that they hand over Admiral Kolchak in return for being allowed to pass through.”

“And what else did they want, these socialists?”

“Gold,” replied Pekkala. “Specifically, the Imperial Reserves which were still being guarded by the Czechs.”

“And what did they do, these Czechs of the Sixth Rifle Regiment?”

“They handed the gold over, along with Admiral Kolchak.”

“Why?”

“The Socialist Center had mined the tunnels around Lake Baikal. If they decided to blow the tunnels, the Czechs would never have gotten through. Handing over Kolchak and the gold was their only hope of reaching Vladivostok.”

“And what became of Admiral Kolchak, the Ruler of Siberia?”

“On January 30, 1920, the admiral was executed by the Bolsheviks.”

“And what of his nephew, the colonel?”

“Red Cavalry finally caught up with him. After a fight lasting three days, survivors of the expedition surrendered. Among the men captured was Colonel Kolchak himself.”

By then, in St. Petersburg, on the other side of the country, Pekkala had also been taken prisoner by the Revolutionaries. Both men ended up in the Butyrka prison, although neither was aware of the other’s whereabouts at first.

“And, of course,” remarked Stalin, “you remember what happened at Butyrka?”

“Remember?” spat Pekkala. “Do you think I could ever forget?”

After months of torture and solitary confinement, prison guards frog-marched Pekkala down the spiral stone steps of the old fortress of Butyrka and into the basement. Knowing that these caverns, which had once boasted one of the world’s finest collections of wines, now served as execution chambers for enemies of the state, he fully expected to be murdered there.

Pekkala felt relieved that his time of suffering was almost over. In something approaching a gesture of compassion, some convicts were even shot before they reached the bottom of the stairs, so as to minimize the terror of their execution. Pekkala found himself hoping that he might merit such a speedy end, but when they reached the bottom of the stairs, the guards brought him to a room already occupied by several men who wore the Gymnastyrka tunics, dark blue trousers and knee-length riding boots of the State Security Troops.

There was also a third man, a barely human figure cowering naked in the corner. The man’s body was a mass of electrical burns and bruises.

This man was Colonel Kolchak.

The sentence was read out by Commissar Dzugashvili, the same man who had been responsible for Pekkala’s weeks of brutal interrogation.

In the final seconds of his life, Kolchak called out to Pekkala, “Inform His Majesty the Tsar that I told them nothing.”

Before the last word had left his mouth, the NKVD men opened fire. The concussion of the gunfire was stunning in the confined space of the cell. When the shooting finally stopped, Dzugashvili stepped forward, stuck the barrel in Kolchak’s right eye and put another bullet into Kolchak’s head.

IT WAS DZUGASHVILI who sat before Pekkala now. Joseph Dzugashvili, who had changed his name to Stalin—Man of Steel—as was the fashion of the early Bolsheviks.

“You know, Pekkala, memory can be deceiving. Even yours.”

“What do you mean?”

Stalin puffed thoughtfully at his pipe. “The man you thought was Colonel Kolchak, the man I also thought was Kolchak, turns out to have been an impostor.”

Although Pekkala was surprised to hear this, he knew it did not lie beyond the bounds of possibility. The Tsar himself had half a dozen look-alikes, who took his place at times of danger and who, in some cases, paid for that occupation with their lives. For someone as important to the Tsar as Colonel Kolchak, it did not seem unlikely that a double had been found for him as well.

“What does this have to do with the murder at Borodok?”

“The victim was a man named Isaac Ryabov, a former captain in the Imperial Cavalry and one of the last survivors of the Kolchak Expedition still in captivity at Borodok. Ryabov approached the camp commandant with an offer to reveal the whereabouts of Colonel Kolchak in exchange for being allowed to go free. But somebody got to him first.”

“Ryabov might well have known where Kolchak was hiding twenty years ago, but the colonel could have gone anywhere in the world since that time. Do you honestly think Ryabov’s information was still accurate?”

“It is a possibility which I cannot afford to overlook.” Stalin removed his pipe and laid it in the ashtray on his desk. Then he sat back and touched his fingertips together. “Do you suppose Colonel Kolchak has ever forgiven the Czechs for handing over his uncle to be executed?”

“I doubt it. From what I knew of Kolchak, forgiveness did not strike me as being one of his virtues. Personally, I think the Czechs had no choice.”

“I agree.” Stalin nodded. “But as far as Colonel Kolchak is concerned, the legion’s job was to protect his uncle as well as the gold. Whether every last one of them died fulfilling that duty would be irrelevant to a man like him.”

“And how do you know what he thinks?”

“I don’t. I am only telling you what I would think if I were Colonel Kolchak. And I am also telling you that when a man like Kolchak gets vengeance on his mind, he will set fire to the world before he can be satisfied.”

“Even if Kolchak can be found,” said Pekkala, “surely he does not pose a threat. He is only one man, after all.”

“I take no comfort in that. One person can still be dangerous. I know, because I am only one man and I am very dangerous. And when I see in another man those qualities which I also recognize within myself, I know that I cannot ignore him. You and I have a strange alliance, Pekkala. In our thinking, we are opposites in almost every way. But the one place where our ideas intersect lies in the struggle for our country to survive. It is the reason you did not die that day in the basement of Butyrka prison. But Kolchak is not like you. And that is why I put him to death—or attempted to, anyway.”

“If this is simply a vendetta against a man you tried and failed to kill, send one of your assassins to find him. I could be put to better use on other cases.”

“You may be right, but if my instincts are correct that Kolchak poses a threat to this country—”

“Then I will bring him to justice,” interrupted Pekkala.

“And that is why I’m sending you instead of somebody else.” As Stalin spoke, he slid Ryabov’s file across the desk towards Pekkala. Inside that folder would be every scrap of information Soviet Intelligence had managed to accumulate on Ryabov—everything from his blood type to his choice of cigarettes to the books he checked out of the library. “Your investigation is to be conducted in the utmost secrecy. Once you arrive at Borodok, if word leaks out among the prisoners that you are working for the Bureau of Special Operations, I will lose not only Ryabov’s killer but you as well.”

“I may need to involve Major Kirov in this investigation.”

Stalin spread his arms magnanimously. “Understood, and the camp commandant has also been instructed to assist you in any way he can. He is holding the body, as well as the murder weapon, until you arrive at the camp.”

“Who is in charge there now?”

“The same man who was running it when you were there.”

“Klenovkin?” An image surfaced in Pekkala’s mind of a gaunt, slope-shouldered man with black hair cut so short that it stood up like porcupine quills from his skull. Pekkala had met him only once, when he first arrived at the camp.

Having summoned Pekkala to his office, Klenovkin did not look up when Pekkala entered the room. All he said was, “Remove your cap when you are in my presence.” He then busied himself reading Pekkala’s prisoner file, carefully turning the large yellow pages, each one with a red diagonal stripe in the upper right-hand corner.

At last Klenovkin closed the file and raised his head, squinting at Pekkala through rimless spectacles. “We have all fallen from grace in one way or another,” he said. There was a resonance in his voice as if he were addressing a crowd instead of just one man. “Having just read your history, convict Pekkala, I see that you have fallen further than most.”

In those first years of the Bolshevik government, so many of the prison inmates were in Borodok on account of their loyalty to Nicholas II that a man with Pekkala’s reputation as the Tsar’s most trusted servant could easily have led to an uprising in the camp. Klenovkin’s solution was to place Pekkala as far away as possible from the other inmates.

“You are a disease,” Klenovkin told Pekkala. “I will not allow you to infect my prisoners. The simplest thing to do would be to have you shot, but unfortunately I am not allowed to do that. Some benefit must be derived from your existence before we consign you to oblivion.”

Pekkala stared at the man. Even during the months of harsh interrogation leading up to his departure for Siberia, he had never felt as helpless as he did at that moment.

“I am sending you out into the wilderness,” continued Klenovkin. “You will become a tree-marker in the Valley of Krasnagolyana, a job no man has held for longer than six months.”

“Why not?”

“Because nobody lives that long.”

Working alone, with no chance of escape and far from any human contact, tree-markers died from exposure, starvation, and loneliness. Those who became lost, or who fell and broke a leg, were usually eaten by wolves. Tree marking was the only assignment at Borodok said to be worse than a death sentence.

Provisions were left for him three times a year at the end of a logging road. Kerosene. Cans of meat. Nails. For the rest, he had to fend for himself. His only task, besides surviving, was to mark in red paint those trees ready for cutting by the inmates of the camp. Lacking any brushes, Pekkala stirred his fingers in the scarlet paint and daubed his print upon the trunks. By the time the logging crews arrived, Pekkala would already be gone. The red handprints became, for most of the convicts, the only trace of him they ever saw.

Only rarely was he spotted by those logging crews who came to cut the timber. What they glimpsed was a creature barely recognizable as a man. With the crust of red paint that spattered his prison clothes and long hair maned about his face, he resembled a beast stripped of its skin and left to die. Wild rumors surrounded him—that he was an eater of human flesh, that he wore a scapular made from the bones of those who had vanished in the forest, that he carried a club whose end was embedded with human teeth, that he wore scalps laced together as a cap.

They called him the man with bloody hands.

By the time word of his identity leaked out among the prisoners, they assumed he was already dead.

But six months later, to Klenovkin’s astonishment, Pekkala was still alive. And he stayed alive.

When a young Lieutenant Kirov arrived to recall him back to duty with the Bureau of Special Operations, Pekkala had been living in the forest for nine years, longer than any other tree-marker in the history of the Gulag system.

TUCKING RYABOV’S FILE into his coat, Pekkala turned to leave.

“One more thing before you go,” said Stalin.

Pekkala turned again. “Yes?”

Reaching down beside his chair, Stalin picked up a small shopping bag and held it out towards Pekkala. “Your clothes for the journey.”

Pekkala glanced inside and saw what at first appeared to be some dirty, pinkish-gray rags. He lifted out the flimsy pajama-type shirt and recognized a standard prison-issue uniform. A shudder passed through him as he thought back to the last time he had worn garments like this.

At that moment, the door opened and Poskrebyshev walked in. He advanced two paces, stopped, and clicked his heels together. “Comrade Stalin, I beg to report that Poland has surrendered.”

Stalin nodded and said nothing.

“I also beg to inform you that the Katyn Operation has begun,” continued Poskrebyshev.

Stalin’s only reply was an angry stare.

“You asked me to tell you …”

“Get out,” said Stalin quietly.

Poskrebyshev’s heels smashed together once more, then he turned and left the room, closing the double doors behind him with a barely audible click of the lock.

“The Katyn Operation?” asked Pekkala.

“It would have been better for you not to know,” Stalin replied, “but since it is too late for that, let me answer your question with a question of my own. Suppose you were an officer in the Polish army, that you had surrendered and been taken prisoner. Let us say you had been well treated. You had been housed. You had been fed.”

“What is it you want to know, Comrade Stalin?”

“Say I offer you a choice: either a place in the Red Army or the opportunity to return home as a civilian.”

“They will choose to go home,” said Pekkala.

“Yes,” replied Stalin. “Most of them did.”

“But they will never arrive, will they?”

“No.”

In his mind, Pekkala could see those officers, bundled in the mysterious brown of their Polish army greatcoats, hands tied behind their backs with copper wire. One after the other, NKVD troopers shoved them to the edge of a huge pit dug into the orangey-brown soil of a forest in eastern Poland. With the barrels of their guns, the NKVD men tipped off the caps of their prisoners, sending them into the pit below. As each Polish officer was shot in the back of the head, he fell forward into the pit, onto the bodies of those who had been killed before.

How many were there? Pekkala wondered. Hundreds? Thousands?

By nightfall, the pit would be covered up.

Within a few weeks, tiny shoots of grass would rise from the trampled soil.

One thing Pekkala had learned, however. Nothing stays buried forever.

“You have not answered my question,” said Stalin. “I asked what you would do. Not they.”

“I would realize I had no choice,” replied Pekkala.

With a scythe-like sweep of his hand, Stalin brushed aside Pekkala’s words. “But I did give them a choice!”

“No, Comrade Stalin, you did not.”

Stalin smiled. “That is why you have survived, and why those other men will not.”

As soon as Pekkala had departed, Stalin pushed the intercom button. “Poskrebyshev!”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin.”

“All messages between Pekkala and Major Kirov are to be intercepted.”

“Of course.”

“Whatever Pekkala has to say, I want to read it before Kirov does. I want no secrets kept from me.”

“No, Comrade Stalin,” said Poskrebyshev, and a fresh coat of sweat slicked his palms.

The intercom button stayed on, whispering static into Stalin’s ears. “Is there anything else, Poskrebyshev?”

“Why do you let Pekkala speak to you that way? So disrespectfully?” Over the years, Poskrebyshev had advanced to the stage where he could occasionally express an unsolicited opinion to the Boss, although only in the most reverent of tones. But the way Pekkala talked to Stalin caused Poskrebyshev’s bowels to cramp. Even more amazing to him was the fact that Stalin let Pekkala get away with it. In asking such a question, Poskrebyshev was well aware that he had overstepped his bounds. If the answer to his question was a flood of obscenities from the next room, he knew he would have only himself to blame. Nevertheless, he simply had to know.

“The reason I endure his insolence—unlike, for example, yours, Poskrebyshev—is that Pekkala is the only person I know of who would not kill me for the chance to rule this country.”

“Surely that is not true, Comrade Stalin!” protested Poskrebyshev, knowing perfectly well that whether it was true or not, what mattered was that Stalin believed it.

“Ask yourself, Poskrebyshev—what would you do to sit where I am sitting now?”

An image flashed through Poskrebyshev’s mind, of himself at Stalin’s desk, smoking Stalin’s cigarettes and bullying his very own secretary. In that moment, Poskrebyshev knew that, in spite of all his claims of loyalty, he would have gutted Stalin like a fish for the chance to take the leader’s place.

ONE HOUR LATER, as the last rays of sunset glistened on the ice-sheathed telegraph wires, Pekkala’s battered Emka staff car, driven by his assistant, Major Kirov, pulled into a rail yard at mile marker 17 on the Moscow Highway. The rail yard had no name. It was known simply as V-4, and the only trains departing from this place were convict transports headed for the Gulags.

However miserable the journey promised to be, Pekkala knew it was necessary to travel as a convict in order to protect the cover story that he had fallen out of favor with Stalin and received a twenty-year sentence for unspecified crimes against the State.

Major Kirov pulled up behind some empty freight cars, cut the engine, and looked out across the rail yard, where prisoners huddled by the wagons which would soon be taking them away.

“You can still call this off, Inspector.”

“You know that is impossible.”

“They have no right to send you back to that place, even if it is to carry out an investigation.”

“There is no ‘they,’ Kirov. The order came directly from Stalin.”

“Then he should at least have given you time to study the relevant files.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Pekkala answered. “The victim’s dossier is incomplete. There was only one page. The rest of it must be lost somewhere in NKVD archives. As a result, I know almost nothing about the man whose death I am being sent to investigate.”

The train whistle blew, and the prisoners began to climb aboard.

“It is time,” said Pekkala. “But first, there is something I need you to look after while I’m gone.” Into Kirov’s hand Pekkala dropped a heavy gold disk, as wide across as the length of his little finger. Along the center was a stripe of white enamel inlay, which began at a point, widened until it took up half the disk and narrowed again to a point on the other side. Embedded in the middle of the white enamel was a large round emerald. Together, the elements formed the unmistakable shape of an eye.

Pekkala had already been working for two years as the Tsar’s Special Investigator when the Tsar summoned him one evening to the Alexander Palace, his residence on the Tsarskoye Selo estate.

Entering the Tsar’s study, Pekkala found him sitting in a chair by the window. He was relieved that the Tsar did not get up. In Pekkala’s experience, if the Tsar remained seated when he entered the room, the meeting would go well. If the Tsar rose to his feet, however, Pekkala could be sure that the man’s temper had already been lost.

Beside the Tsar’s chair stood a small table, on which a candle burned. This was the only light source in the room, and in that glowing pool, the Tsar seemed to float like a mirage.

With his soft blue eyes, the Tsar regarded Pekkala. “I have decided that the title of Special Investigator lacks”—he twisted his hand in the air, like the claw of a barnacle sweeping through an ocean current—“the gravity of your position. There are other special investigators in my police force, but there has never been a position quite like yours before. It was my grandfather who created the Gendarmerie and my father who established the Okhrana. But you are my creation, for which I have also commissioned an appropriate symbol of your rank.”

It was then that the Tsar presented Pekkala with the medallion which would soon earn him the title “Emerald Eye.”

The Tsar rose from his chair and, taking the badge from its velvet cushion, pinned it to the cloth beneath the right lapel of Pekkala’s jacket. “As my personal investigator, you will have absolute authority in the fulfillment of your duties. No secrets may be withheld from you. There are no documents you cannot see upon request. There is no door you cannot walk through unannounced. You may requisition any mode of transport on the spot if you deem it necessary. You are free to come and go where you please and when you please. You may arrest anyone who you suspect is guilty of a crime. Even me.”

“Excellency …”

The Tsar held up a hand to silence him. “There can be no exceptions, Pekkala. Otherwise it is all meaningless. I entrust you with the safety of this country and also with my life and the lives of my family.” The Tsar paused. “Which brings us to the contents of this box.”

From a large mahogany case beside his chair, the Tsar removed a brass-handled Webley revolver.

“It was given to me by my cousin George V.”

Pekkala had seen a picture of them together, hanging on the wall of the Tsar’s study—the King of England and the Tsar of Russia, two of the most powerful men in the world. The two men looked almost identical. Their expressions were the same, the shapes of their heads, their beards, their mouths, noses, and ears alike. Only their eyes showed any difference—the King’s looked more round than those of the Tsar.

“Go on.” The Tsar held out the gun. “Take it.”

The weapon was heavy but well balanced. Its brass grips felt cold against Pekkala’s palm. “It is very fine, Excellency, but you know how I feel about gifts.”

“Who said anything about a gift? That and the badge are the tools of your trade, Pekkala. I am issuing them to you the same as any soldier in the army is issued what he needs for his work.”

NOW KIROV CLOSED HIS FINGERS around the badge. “I will take good care of it until you return, Inspector.”

“The Webley is in my desk drawer,” added Pekkala, “although I know you are more partial to your Tokarev.”

“Is there nothing more I can do, Inspector?”

“There may well be,” he replied, “but I won’t know until I get to Borodok.”

“How will I stay in contact with you?”

“By telegram through the camp commandant, Major Klenovkin. He will make sure I receive any messages.”

The two men shook hands.

“I will see you on the other side,” said Kirov, giving the traditional farewell.

“Indeed you will, Major Kirov.”

As Pekkala made his way across the rail yard, heading towards the group of convicts, he was spotted by the train’s chief engineer, a man named Filipp Demidov.

Demidov was the brother of Anna Demidova, lady-in-waiting to the Tsarina Alexandra, who had been murdered in July of 1918 by agents of the Bolshevik Secret Service, the Cheka, in the same executions which claimed the lives of the Tsar, his wife, and his five children.

Several years before her death, Anna Demidova had secured for her brother a post as the Tsar’s chauffeur, a job he held until the staff at Tsarskoye Selo was dismissed in March of 1917. Immediately afterwards, Demidov went to work for the State Railways and had been with them ever since.

In his days as a chauffeur, Demidov had often seen Pekkala coming and going from meetings with the Tsar. He had, on occasion, driven Pekkala into the city of St. Petersburg in the Tsar’s Hispano-Suiza Alfonso XIII sedan. Once, by accident, he had even sat down next to Pekkala at the restaurant where the inspector used to take most of his meals—a rough and simple place called the Cafe Tilsit, where customers ate from earthenware bowls at long, bare-wood tables.

Demidov, who had a good memory for faces, had used the occasion to make a careful study of the inspector. Seeing the Emerald Eye among these common criminals overrode all his instincts of self-preservation. He climbed down from the engine and strode quickly across to Pekkala.

“Demidov!” he gasped, instantly recognizing the former chauffeur.

“Inspector,” replied the chief engineer, “you must come with me at once.”

What Demidov hoped to accomplish with this meeting, Pekkala had no idea, but it was too late now, as the last of the convicts were already climbing on board. There was no way he could join them without drawing attention to himself. So, rather than jeopardize his cover, Pekkala followed Demidov into the shadows.

“The prisoners aboard this train are going to their deaths.” Demidov’s hoarse whisper cut through the frosty air. “I can’t let that happen to you.”

“I cannot explain to you why,” replied Pekkala, “but one way or another, I must get aboard that train.”

Demidov’s back straightened as he realized his mistake. “My God, what have I done?”

“Nothing that cannot be fixed.”

“Whatever it takes,” Demidov vowed, “consider it done, Inspector.”

By the time ETAP-1889 finally departed, the sun had already set. Pekkala stood with Demidov at the engine controls as the great cyclopic eye of the locomotive’s headlight carved out a path through the darkness.

The convoy was more than fifty wagons long. Each had been designed to hold either forty men or eight horses, after the pattern used by the French army during the Great War. The French wagons had occasionally held as many as sixty men, but the wagons of ETAP-1889 now contained eighty men each, which meant that for the entire ten-day journey to Siberia everyone would be forced to stand.

“Where is the next station?” Pekkala had to shout to make himself heard above the rumble of the locomotive.

“There’s a switching junction called Shatura, about ten kilometers down the line, but we aren’t due to stop there.”

“Is there any way you can halt the train at that junction?”

Demidov thought for a moment. “I could tell them our brakes are overheating. That would require a visual inspection of the wheels. The process would take about twenty minutes.”

“Good,” said Pekkala. “That is all the time I need.”

THE MASTER OF THE V-4 station, Edvard Kasinec, had been informed earlier that day to expect the arrival of a special prisoner for convoy ETAP-1889. The convoy would be passing through Sverdlovsk, Petropavlovsk, and Omsk, destined for the Valley of Krasnagolyana, in the farthest reaches of Siberia.

Sometimes, through the frosted windows of his office, Kasinec would study the procession of convicts as they were herded at bayonet point into the wagons, wearing nothing but the flimsy cotton pajamas issued to them in the prisons of Butyrka and Lubyanka. Kasinec would try to pick out those he imagined might survive the ordeal that lay ahead. A few might even be lucky enough to return home one day. It was a little game he played to pass the time, but he never played it with convoys traveling as far as the Valley of Krasnagolyana. Those men were bound for camps whose names were spoken only in whispers. They were never coming back.

It had saddened him to learn that this special prisoner was none other than Inspector Pekkala of the Bureau of Special Operations. Kasinec was old enough to remember the days when Pekkala had served as personal investigator to the Tsar. To think of that famous detective packed inside a freezing cattle wagon like a common criminal was almost more than Kasinec could bear.

There had been so many thousands, tens of thousands, who had passed through here on their way east, and Kasinec had been grateful for the fact that they would only ever be numbers to him. If there had been names, he would have remembered them, and if he had remembered them, the space they would have occupied inside his head might have driven him out of his mind. But he would never forget the name of Pekkala, whose Emerald Eye had snagged like a fishing lure trolling through his brain.

Kasinec’s orders were to wait until Pekkala had boarded the train, and then to communicate by telegram with some man at the Kremlin named Poskrebyshev to confirm that the prisoner had been delivered.

On receiving the instructions from Poskrebyshev, Kasinec had protested that he had never actually seen the Emerald Eye before. Few people ever had, since his picture had never been published.

“How will I even know it is him?” he asked.

Poskrebyshev’s voice crackled down the phone line. “His prison number is 4745.”

Kasinec breathed in, ready to explain that the numbers inked onto those flimsy prison clothes were often so blurred as to be illegible, but Poskrebyshev had already hung up. Following his orders, Kasinec had notified the guards to keep an eye out for prisoner 4745 and to make sure he was placed aboard wagon #6.

Kasinec stood on the platform, studying the number of each convict who boarded the train. But none of these men was Pekkala. He held up the transport as long as he could, until the switching junction in Shatura called and demanded to know what had become of ETAP-1889. Finally he gave the order for the convoy to proceed. Then, with a quiet satisfaction, Kasinec sent a telegram to Poskrebyshev, informing him that prisoner 4745 was not aboard the train.

Kasinec guessed there would be hell to pay for this and also that he would be the one to pay it, but it comforted him to know that the great inspector had somehow found a way to beat the odds.

It crossed Kasinec’s mind that the stories he had heard about Pekkala might be true—that he was not even a man but rather some kind of phantom, conjured from the spirit world by the likes of Grigori Rasputin, that other supernatural in the service of the Tsar.

ONCE MORE, THE DOUBLE DOORS of Stalin’s office flew open and Stalin appeared, waving a flimsy piece of telegram paper, his lips twitching with anger. “This message just arrived from the master of the V-4 station, saying that Pekkala was not aboard the train!”

“Would you like me to try to find him?” Poskrebyshev rose quickly to his feet.

“No! I must handle this myself. Have the car brought around. I will be leaving immediately. Fetch me my coat.”

Poskrebyshev crashed his heels together. “At once, Comrade Stalin!”

KASINEC WAS STANDING on the steps of a flimsy wooden structure grandly named the Central Convict Transport Administration Facility, puffing on a cigarette, when an American-made Packard limousine arrived at the station yard. Its cowlings had been splashed with perfect arches of grayish-black mud as it traveled the unpaved Moscow Highway. To the stationmaster, those muddy arches made the machine appear less like a car than a giant bird of prey, swooping out of the evening shadows and intent on tearing him apart.

Kasinec sighed out a lungful of smoke. He had seen this before—desperate people trying to bid one last farewell to friends or family members who had ended up on prison transports. There was nothing Kasinec could do for them. He kept no records of the names of prisoners. By the time convicts arrived at V-4, they had already been transformed into numbers and Kasinec’s only job was to see that the tally on his list matched the total of the prisoners boarding the train. When the train was full, the list would be handed to the chief guard accompanying the transport and Kasinec never saw them again.

Just then, the air was filled with the loud clatter of the telegraph machine in his office spitting out a message. The people in that car would have to wait. Kasinec flicked his cigarette out over the muddy station yard and walked inside to read the telegram.

Emerging a few moments later with the telegram still clutched in his fist, Kasinec saw a man in a fur-collared coat climbing from the Packard. It took him only a second to realize that this man was none other than Stalin himself.

Immediately, Kasinec’s hands began to shake.

Stalin crossed the station yard and climbed the three wooden steps to the balcony where Kasinec was waiting.

Kasinec saluted, fingertips quivering against his temples.

“What happened?” asked Stalin, a halo of breath condensing around his head. “Why didn’t he get aboard the train with all the other prisoners?”

“I don’t know,” stammered Kasinec.

“He’s vanished,” muttered Stalin, more to himself than to the stationmaster. “We’ll never find him now.”

“Actually, Comrade Stalin, we have found Inspector Pekkala.” Kasinec held up the telegram, which had just arrived from the switching junction at Shatura, twenty kilometers to the east.

“Found him? But you just told me he wasn’t aboard the train!”

“That’s not exactly true, Comrade Stalin. He’s just not among the prisoners.”

“Then where the hell is he?”

“According to the message from Shatura, he appears to be driving the train.”

Stalin shuddered, as if an electric current had just traveled through his body. He snatched the telegram from Kasinec’s hand, read it through, then crumpled the paper and flung it into the darkness. Turning away from the stationmaster, Stalin fixed his gaze upon a point in the distance where the rails appeared to converge.

“Pekkala, you son of a bitch!” he roared, his voice like thunder in the still night air.

WHEN THE TRAIN STOPPED AT Shatura, a guard who had climbed down onto the tracks in order to relieve himself was astonished to see a prisoner walking towards him. Instantly, he swung the rifle off his back and aimed it at the convict.

But the prisoner neither raised his hands in a gesture of surrender nor tried to run away. Instead, he only held a finger to his lips, motioning for the guard to be silent. This so astonished the guard that he actually lowered his gun. “If you are who I think you are,” he whispered, “our orders were to put you on wagon number 6, back at the V-4 station.”

“Why does it matter which wagon I get on?”

The guard shook his head. “Those were the orders from stationmaster Kasinec.”

“Can you get me in there now?”

“Not without making them suspicious. The only time we move people is if a fight has broken out.”

“Will that not do for a reason?”

The guard studied Pekkala uneasily. “It would, but you don’t look as if you’ve been in a fight.”

Pekkala sighed as he realized what must happen now.

After a moment’s hesitation, the guard lifted his rifle, turning the butt end towards Pekkala. “Travel well, Inspector.”

“Thank you,” said Pekkala, and then everything went black.

He regained consciousness just as the door to wagon #6 was slammed shut. His lips were sticky with blood. Tracing his fingertips cautiously along the bridge of his nose, Pekkala was relieved to feel no jagged edge of broken bone.

In those first hours of the journey, the cramped space of the wagon remained silent, leaving each man alone with his thoughts.

As frost began to form across the inside of the wagon walls, Pekkala felt a slow fear creeping into the marrow of his bones. And he knew it would stay there, like the frost, which would not melt until these wagons rolled back empty to the west.

By dawn of the next day, the convoy had reached Sarapaul Station. Through the barbed-wire-laced opening that served as a window, Pekkala saw the platform jammed with soldiers on their way to man the border in the west. In their long, ill-fitting greatcoats, with pointed budyonny caps upon their heads, they boarded wagons no different from the one in which Pekkala was riding. Blankets, rolled and tied over their shoulders, gave to these soldiers the appearance of hunchbacks. Their long Mosin-Nagant rifles looked more like cripples’ canes than guns.

Morning sun sliced through rust holes in the metal roof, flooding the wagon with spears of golden light. As Pekkala raised his head to feel the warmth upon his face, he realized that this simple pleasure had already become a luxury.

KIROV SAT AT HIS DESK, writing a report. The only sound in the room was the rustle of his pen nib across the page.

The sun had just risen above the rooftops of Moscow. Specks of dust, glittering as they drifted lazily about the room, reminded him of the smoke particles he had once seen under a microscope in school as his teacher explained the phenomenon of Brownian Motion.

Suddenly Kirov paused and raised his head, distracted by a noise from the street below—a jangling of metal against stone.

Kirov smiled. Setting aside his pen, he got up and opened the window. The frigid air snatched his breath away. Just beneath him, hanging from the gutter, icicles as long as his arm glowed like molten copper in the sunlight. Kirov leaned out, five stories above the street, and craned his neck to get a better view.

Then he saw it—a black Mercedes sedan making its way along the cobbled road. It was in poor repair, with rust-patched cowlings, a cracked headlight and a rear windshield fogged as if by cataracts. The jangling noise emanated from its muffler, which had lost a retaining bracket and clanked against the cobbles, sending out a spray of sparks at every dip in the road.

In the center of the street lay a huge pothole. Some months ago, a construction crew on a mission whose purpose remained a mystery had removed some of the cobblestones. The workers never returned, but the pothole remained. There were many such craters in the streets of Moscow. People grumbled about getting them fixed, but the possibility of this actually happening, the mountains of paperwork that would be required to set into motion the appropriate branches of government, stood as a greater obstacle than any of the potholes themselves.

Most people just learned to live with them, but not Colonel Piotr Kubanka of the Ministry of Armaments. He had appealed, to every office he could think of, for the roads to be repaired. Nothing had been done, and his increasingly angry letters were filed away in rooms which served no other purpose than to house such impotently raging documents. Finally, in desperation, Kubanka had decided to take matters into his own hands.

Across the road from Kirov’s office stood a tall, peach-colored building which was the home of the Minister for Public Works, Antonin Tuzinkewitz, a thick-necked man as jowly as a walrus and responsible for, among other things, the filling in of Moscow’s potholes. This minister was best known not for his public works, but for the facts that he rarely got out of bed before noon and that the primordial roar of his laughter as he returned in the early hours of the morning from the Bar Radzikov could be heard more than a block away.

Colonel Kubanka’s daily commute to the Ministry of Armaments should not have taken him past Tuzinkewitz’s home, but Kubanka made a wide detour to ensure that it did.

The noise, as the front and rear wheels of Kubanka’s Mercedes collided with the pothole, was like a double blast of cannon fire. It actually shook the loose panes of glass in Kirov’s window. No one could sleep through that, especially not a man like Tuzinkewitz, who still suffered from flashbacks of the war, in which he had been repeatedly shelled by Austrian artillery in the Carpathian Mountains. Tuzinkewitz, rudely jolted from his dreams, would rush to the window, fling back the curtains and glare down into the street, hoping to spot the source of this noise. By then, Kubanka’s car had already turned the corner and disappeared and Tuzinkewitz found himself staring down helplessly at the pothole, which returned his stare with a cruel, unblinking gaze.

It was driving Tuzinkewitz mad, slowly but with gathering speed, exactly as Kubanka intended. Kirov saw the proof of this each day in the strain on Tuzinkewitz’s meaty face as it loomed into view out of the stuffy darkness of his bedroom.

When this daily ritual had been completed, Kirov turned and smiled towards Pekkala’s desk, but the smile froze on his face when he saw the empty seat. He kept forgetting that Pekkala was gone. Even stranger than this, he sometimes swore he could feel the presence of the inspector in the room.

Although Major Kirov had been raised in a world in which ghosts were not allowed to exist, he understood what it felt like to be haunted, as he was now, by the absence of Inspector Pekkala.

FAR TO THE EAST the freezing, clanking wagons of ETAP-1889 crossed the Ural Mountains and officially entered Siberian territory. From then on, the train stopped once a day to allow the prisoners out.

Before the wagons were opened, the guards would walk along the sides and beat the doors with rifle butts, in hopes of dislodging any corpses that had frozen to the inner walls.

Piling out of the wagons, the prisoners inevitably found themselves on windswept, barren ground, far from any town. Sometimes they stayed out for hours, sometimes for only a few minutes. The intervals did not appear to follow any logic. They never knew how long they would be off the train.

During these breaks, the guards made no attempt to keep track of the prisoners. For anyone who fled into this wilderness, the chances of survival were nonexistent. The guards did not even bother to take roll calls when the train whistle sounded for the prisoners to board. By then, most convicts were already huddled by the wagons, shivering and waiting to climb in.

Beside Pekkala stood a round-faced man named Savushkin, who kept trying to make conversation. He had patient, intelligent eyes hidden behind glasses that were looped around his ears with bits of string. He was not a tall man, which put him at a disadvantage when trying to move around the cramped space of the wagon. To remedy this, he would raise his hands above his head, press his palms together, and drive himself like a wedge through the tangled thicket of limbs.

Confronted with Pekkala’s stubborn silence, Savushkin had set himself the task of luring Pekkala into conversation. With the faith of an angler tying one kind of bait after another to his line, Savushkin broached every topic that entered his head, trusting that the fish must bite eventually.

Sometimes Pekkala pretended not to hear. Other times, he smiled and looked away. He knew how important it was for his identity to remain secret. The less he said, the better.

Savushkin did not take offense at his companion’s silence. After each attempt, he would wait a while before trying again to find some chink in Pekkala’s armor.

When Pekkala finally spoke, a bright, clear day had warmed the wagons, melting ice which usually jammed the cracks between the walls. While the wheels clanked lazily over the spacers, their sound like a monstrous sharpening of knives, Savushkin hooked his fish at last.

“Do you want to hear the joke that got me fifteen years in prison?” asked Savushkin.

“A joke?” Pekkala was startled at the sound of his own voice after so many days of silence. “You were sent here because of a joke?”

“That’s right,” said Savushkin.

“Well,” said Pekkala, “it seems to me you’ve earned the right to tell it twice.”

The others were listening, too. It grew quiet in the wagon as they strained to hear Savushkin’s voice.

“Stalin is meeting with a delegation of workers from the Ukraine,” he continued. “After they leave, the Boss notices that his fake mustache is missing.”

“Are you saying that Stalin has a fake mustache?” asked a man standing beside him.

“Now that you mention it,” another voice chimed in.

Savushkin ignored this.

“You can’t tell jokes about Stalin!” someone called from the far end of the wagon. “Not in here!”

“Are you kidding?” shouted Savushkin. “This is the only place where I can tell a joke about him!” He paused and cleared his throat before continuing. “Stalin calls in his chief of security. ‘Go and find the delegation!’ says the Boss. ‘One of the workers has stolen my mustache.’ The chief of security rushes out to do as he is told. A while later, Stalin realizes he has been sitting on his fake mustache, so he calls back his chief of security and tells him, ‘Never mind. I found my mustache.’ ‘It’s too late, Comrade Stalin,’ says the chief. ‘Half the workers have already signed confessions that they stole it and the other half committed suicide during interrogation.’ ”

For a moment after Savushkin had finished telling the joke, there was silence in the wagon.

Savushkin looked around, amazed. “Oh, come on. That’s a good joke! If it was a bad one, they would only have given me ten years!”

At that, the men began to laugh. The sound multiplied, echoing off the wooden boards as if the ghosts of those who had been dumped beside the tracks were laughing now as well.

Turning to look through the barbed wire opening, Pekkala caught sight of a farmer sitting on a stone wall at the edge of a field only a few paces from the tracks. The old man was wearing a sheepskin vest and knee-length felt boots called valenki. A horse and cart had been tied to a tree beside the wall, and the back of the cart was filled with turnips scabbed with clumps of frozen earth. The farmer had laid out a red handkerchief on the snow-topped wall and was sitting on the handkerchief. This gesture, in spite of its uselessness in fending off the damp and cold, struck Pekkala as strangely dignified. In one hand, the man held a small jackknife and in the other hand he held a piece of cheese. He was chewing away contentedly, eyes narrowed in the rush of wind as railcars clattered past, filling the air with a glittering veil of ice crystals.

As the farmer heard the laughter of the convicts, his eyes grew wide with astonishment. In that moment he had realized that the cargo rattling past him was human and not livestock, as was painted on the cars, just as the prisoner transport vehicles in Moscow were disguised as delivery vans, complete with advertisements for nonexistent brands of beer.

The farmer jumped down from the wall and grabbed an armful of turnips from his cart. He began to jog along the side of the tracks, holding out the turnips.

One of the convicts reached out his hand through the barbed-wire-laced opening and seized one.

More arms appeared, wrists and knuckles traced with blood where the rusty barbs had cut them.

Another hand snatched a turnip from the man’s outstretched hand.

The convicts began to shout, even those who could not see what was happening. The noise took on a life of its own as it spread from wagon to wagon until the roar of their voices drowned out even the sword-clash of the wheels over the tracks. Slowly, the engine pulled ahead.

The old farmer could not keep up.

The turnips spilled from his arms.

The last Pekkala saw of the man, he was standing beside the tracks, hands on his knees, red-faced and puffing milky clouds of breath into the sky.

When the commotion had finally died down, Savushkin made another stab at conversation. “What class of criminal are you?” he asked Pekkala.

“Fifty-nine,” replied Pekkala, remembering the designation he’d been given as part of his cover.

“Fifty-nine! That means you are a dangerous offender! You don’t look like a killer to me.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m so dangerous.”

Savushkin gave a nervous laugh, like air squeaking out of a balloon. “Well, I bet a class 59 has a good tale to tell.”

“Maybe you’ll hear it someday,” replied Pekkala.

“I’ll tell you his story,” said a man pressed up against the wall, “as soon as I remember where I’ve seen him.”

Pekkala glanced at him but said nothing.

The man was shaking with fever. Sweat poured off his face. At some time in his past, he had been cut about the face. Now the white ridges of old scar tissue crisscrossed his cheeks like strands of spiderweb. These wounds had damaged the nerves, leaving a permanently crooked smile, which seemed to mock not only those around him but also the prisoner himself.

Savushkin turned to the man with the knife-cut face. “Brother, you look like you could use a holiday,” he said.

The man ignored Savushkin. His focus remained on Pekkala. “I know I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

The next day, the convict transport pulled into a nameless rail siding in order to let another train pass. This train was heading in the opposite direction. It consisted not of wagons but of numerous flatbeds, all of them stacked with large barrels designed to hold diesel fuel, except that the original fuel markings had been overpainted in bright green letters with the word DALSTROY.

Dalstroy was the state-owned company which managed resources coming out of Siberia. These included timber, lead, and the highly toxic mineral radium which left Borodok each week in containers painted with skull and crossbones. Another discovery in the Borodok mine was crocoite, also known as Siberian Red due to the color of its beautiful crimson crystals, which could be refined to make chromium. Exposure to Siberian Red was known to be just as lethal to miners as the radium.

In addition to controlling the resources, Dalstroy also controlled the workforce. Ten years before, only thirty percent had been prison labor. Now it was over ninety percent. Because Dalstroy had to pay only ten percent of its labor force, it had become one of the richest companies in the world.

The convicts, those who could see out, stared at the dreary procession of barrels with the dull, uncomprehending expressions of transported cattle.

But Pekkala knew what they contained, and he shuddered as he watched them going by. In certain camps, particularly those which were not proving to be as profitable as expected, men who died were packed into these barrels. Their corpses were doused with formaldehyde and then exported all over the country, to be sold as medical cadavers.

In Siberia, the prisoners said, even the dead work for Dalstroy.

After the transport had passed by, Pekkala caught the smell of preserving fluid, familiar to him from his father’s undertaking business back in Finland, drifting sweet and sickening in the cold air.

The locomotive engine roared as it began to move again, but no sooner were the wagons rolling than there was a great screeching of brakes and the whole convoy lurched to a stop. A few minutes later, the train backed once more into the siding, the wagon doors were opened, and the guards ordered everybody out.

The prisoners found themselves in a desolate field of shin-deep snow. The freezing wind cut through their clothes, stirring up white phantoms from beneath their feet.

Some prisoners immediately tried to climb into the wagons again, but the guards held them back.

“What happened?” asked Savushkin.

“The brakes are frozen,” said the guard. “The wheels are slipping. The whole train could come off the rails.”

“How long will we be here?”

“Could be an hour,” replied the guard. “Could be more. The last time this happened we were stuck all night.”

“And you won’t let us back inside until morning?” Savushkin asked.

“We have to take the weight off the wheel springs, or else they might snap from the cold when the train gets moving.” The guard gestured towards a stand of pine and birch trees in the distance. “Head over there. The whistle will sound when it’s time to go again.”

Pekkala and Savushkin set off towards the woods.

Several others followed, heads bowed against the gusts and arms folded across their chest, but they soon gave up and returned to the train, where men were building walls of snow as shelter from the wind.

Ahead, in the grove of trees, the bony trunks of birch appeared and disappeared like a mirage among the sheets of snow.

“We’re all going to freeze to death if they don’t let us back on that train by nightfall!” Savushkin had to shout to make himself heard.

Pekkala knew the other prisoner was right. He also knew the guards didn’t seem to care how many people died en route to the camps. He stumbled forward, feeling the heat drain from the center of his body. Already he’d lost sensation in his ears and nose and fingers.

When they finally reached the trees, Pekkala and Savushkin began to dig a hole around the base of a pine tree, where the snow had drifted chest deep. Protected by its spread of lower branches, they would have a place completely sheltered from the wind.

“I’ll find some fallen branches to lay out on the ground,” Pekkala told Savushkin. “You keep digging.”

Savushkin nodded and went back to work. With his hair and eyebrows rimed in frost, he looked as if he’d aged a hundred years since they left the train.

For the next few minutes, Pekkala staggered through the drifts, gathering deadfall. The branches of the white birch, sheathed in ice, clattered above him like a wind chime made of bones. Arriving back at the hollow with nothing more than a handful of rotten twigs, Pekkala stopped to tear some boughs from a nearby pine tree. While he wrestled with the evergreen branches, he did not hear the person approaching from behind.

“I remember you now,” said a voice.

Pekkala spun around.

The knife-cut man stood right in front of him. “This is the last place on earth I expected to see you, Inspector Pekkala. That’s why I couldn’t place you at first.”

Pekkala said nothing, but only watched and waited.

“I doubt you remember me, but that is understandable,” said the man, brushing his fingertips over his scars. “During my stay in the Butyrka prison, the guards left me with a souvenir I will never forget, just as I have never forgotten that you were the one who arrested me.”

“I have arrested many people,” replied Pekkala. “That is my job.”

The man’s cold-reddened nostrils twitched as he breathed in and out. He did not appear to be carrying a weapon, but that did nothing to comfort Pekkala.

“I don’t know why you are here,” the man continued. “Believe me, it is a comfort to know that you and I are going to the same place, but comfort is not enough, not nearly enough to pay the debt you owe for what you’ve done to me.”

Pekkala dropped the twigs he had been carrying. His frozen hands clenched into fists.

“Do you have any friends, Inspector? Any still alive?” The man was taunting him. “They’re all gone, aren’t they, Inspector? They left you here to wander in the wilderness, the last of your kind on this earth.”

It flashed across Pekkala’s mind that his whole life had come down to this.

Suddenly, the prisoner threw up his arms and fell backwards. His legs had been pulled out from under him. In the next instant, a creature emerged from the ground. Scuttling like a giant crab out of the earth, Savushkin set upon the man.

With arms flailing, he rained down blows upon the convict, who fought back with equal ferocity, clawing at Savushkin and tearing the shirt from his back, but it did nothing to prevent the hammer strikes of Savushkin’s fists.

“Enough!” shouted Pekkala, sickened by the sound of breaking bones and teeth as the man’s face caved in.

Savushkin did not seem to hear. In a frenzy he continued his attack, smashing his torn knuckles against the prisoner’s battered face.

“Stop!” Pekkala set his hand upon Savushkin’s shoulder.

Savushkin whirled around, teeth bared and his eyes gone wild. For an instant he did not even seem to recognize Pekkala.

“It’s done,” whispered Pekkala.

Savushkin blinked. In that moment he returned to his senses. He stepped back, wiping the blood from his hands.

The knife-cut man was barely recognizable. He coughed up a splatter of cherry-red blood, which poured down the sides of his mouth. Seeing the color of that blood, Pekkala knew the sphenopalatine artery had been severed. There was nothing that could be done for him. His eyes rolled back in his head. A moment later, he shuddered and died.

“I think it’s time I introduced myself,” said Savushkin. “And as a friend,” he added.

“You have already proven that,” replied Pekkala.

“Not exactly, Inspector. I am Lieutenant Commissar Savushkin of the Bureau of Special Operations. I would shake your hand, but”—he held up his battered fists—“perhaps some other time.”

“Special Operations?” asked Pekkala. “I don’t understand. Why are you on the train?”

“I was assigned to protect you. Comrade Stalin himself gave the order. No one else knows I am here, not the guards on the train or even the commandant of Borodok. You almost gave me a heart attack when you didn’t show up at the station. I thought I would be traveling all the way to Siberia for nothing. I kept thinking you must be in disguise. Until the moment I set eyes on you, it never occurred to me you would be hiding in plain sight.”

Hearing those words, Pekkala thought back to his days of training with Chief Inspector Vassileyev, head of the Tsar’s Secret Police.

Vassileyev drilled into Pekkala’s mind the importance of blending into different surroundings in order to carry out an investigation. To train Pekkala in the “Art of Disappearance,” as he called it, Vassileyev constructed a series of elaborate games which he referred to as “Field Exercises.”

Every Friday morning, while the streets of St. Petersburg bustled with people on their way to work, Vassileyev would vanish into the crowds. One hour later, Pekkala himself would set out, with the task of tracking down his mentor. Each week Vassileyev would choose a different part of the city. Sometimes he walked along quiet mansion-lined streets. Other times he chose one of the bustling markets. His favorite location, however, was the slums which bordered the northeast end of the city.

In the first month of these Field Exercises, Pekkala failed consistently to locate Vassileyev. There were times when the chief inspector would be standing almost in front of him and still Pekkala could not see through the disguises. Once, Pekkala hired a droshky to transport him around the district, thinking he would have a better chance of spotting Vassileyev if he moved more quickly through the streets. In desperation, Pekkala explained his predicament to the driver. Caught up in the game, the old man whipped up his horse and Pekkala spent the next two hours clinging to the sides of the open carriage while they careened through the streets in search of Vassileyev. In the end, confounded once again, Pekkala climbed down to pay the driver.

“You have already paid for the ride,” said the old man.

Pekkala, wallet in hand, glanced up to see what the driver meant and only then realized, to his dismay, that the old man was, in fact, Vassileyev.

After these humiliating defeats, the two men would walk back to Okhrana headquarters. Along the way, Vassileyev would explain the tricks of his craft. Considering that Vassileyev had lost part of his right leg to an anarchist bomb years ago and now stumped about on a wooden prosthesis, Pekkala was amazed at how quickly the man could move.

“Merely throwing on a new set of clothes is not enough,” explained Vassileyev. “Your disguise must have a narrative, so that people will be lured into the story of your life. Once they become lost in fathoming the details, they will fail to see the magnitude of your illusion.”

“Couldn’t I just wear a hat?” asked Pekkala.

“Of course!” replied Vassileyev, oblivious to Pekkala’s sarcasm. “Hats are important. But what kind of hat? No single article of clothing more quickly places you in whatever bracket of society you want to occupy. But hats alone are not enough. First you must find yourself a cafe.”

“A cafe?”

“Yes!” insisted Vassileyev. “Watch the people going past, the people sitting around you. See the clothes they wear. See how they wear them. Pay close attention to their shoes. Gentlemen of the old school will lace their shoes in straight lines across the grommets. The rest will lace diagonally. Once you have chosen your character from among them, do not go out and buy yourself new clothes. Find yourself a shop or an open-air market where they sell used garments. Every city has one on the weekends. That is the place to choose your second skin.

“Do people look healthy?” continued Vassileyev. “Do people look sick? To give the appearance of living an unhealthy life, rub cooking oil on your forehead. Sprinkle the ashes of cheap tobacco in your pockets so that the smell of it will hang about you. Stir a pinch of ash into your tea and drink it. Within a week, your complexion will grow sallow. Dab a piece of raw onion in the corners of your eyes. Put a coat of beeswax on your lips.” As he spoke, he scraped away a crust of grime from the corners of his mouth, which had given the droshky driver the appearance of a man whose days of hard work in the open air should have been behind him, but were not.

“Change your stride!” ordered Vassileyev, cracking Pekkala on the shin with his heavy walking stick.

Pekkala cried out in pain and hopped along beside the chief inspector. “You can’t expect me to do that every time I go undercover!”

“No.” Vassileyev held up a one-kopek coin. “All you need is this. Put the coin inside your shoe, beneath your heel, and it will alter the way you walk. Soon you will not even think about it anymore. And that is the whole point. Put too much effort into it, and people will suspect. It must appear natural in its abnormality!”

Vassileyev’s lectures were filled with such apparent contradictions that Pekkala began to feel as if he would never master the subtle skills which Vassileyev was trying to teach him.

Then, one day, only minutes after he had arrived in the marketplace chosen for that week’s Field Exercise, Pekkala spotted Vassileyev. The old man was wearing a short double-breasted wool coat and sitting on an upturned barrel with a porter’s trolley beside him.

“How did you do it?” asked Vassileyev, as they sat down to lunch at one of the market restaurants, its floor strewn with sawdust and the tables covered with brown paper.

“I don’t know,” Pekkala replied honestly. “I wasn’t even concentrating.”

Vassileyev thumped Pekkala’s back. “Now you understand!”

“I do?”

“Our life’s work is to sift through the details,” his mentor explained. “And yet sometimes we must learn to ignore them, so that the bigger picture comes into focus. Do you see now?”

“I am beginning to,” he answered.

For their final exercise, Vassileyev promised Pekkala his hardest task yet.

That day, as he wandered up and down Morskaya Street, Pekkala studied the faces of everyone he passed, searching for some chink in the armor of their disguises. But he found nothing.

Then, just as he was about to give up, he spotted Vassileyev. The man had been sitting on a bench the whole time. Pekkala had walked past the bench at least a dozen times and never even seen Vassileyev. It was as if he had become invisible.

But the most incredible thing about it was that Vassileyev had not put on any disguise at all. He had simply been himself. And Pekkala, searching for anyone but the man he recognized, had failed to see him.

“Sometimes,” said Vassileyev, “the most effective place to hide is in plain sight. Only when you have learned to conceal yourself are you ready to see through the disguises of others. The most dangerous thing is not the face that remains hidden”—Vassileyev passed a hand before his eyes—“but what hides behind that face.”

“I DIDN’T THINK I’d ever need a bodyguard,” said Pekkala.

As Savushkin pulled on his torn shirt, he looked down at the mangled corpse. “Neither did I, until now.”

“What enemies did you make to draw such a wretched assignment as this?”

Savushkin’s face brightened. “No enemies at all, Inspector. I volunteered for this!”

“Volunteered? But why?”

“For the chance to tell my children I once served beside the Emerald Eye.”

“I’m glad you are here, Savushkin.”

Savushkin grinned, but then his face became serious. “A word of advice, Inspector. In the days ahead do not place your faith in anyone. Anyone! Do you understand?”

“I think I can trust you, Savushkin. You just saved my life, after all.”

Before Savushkin could reply, the urgent wail of the locomotive’s whistle summoned them back to the train.

The two men watched as the wagon doors slid open and prisoners began to climb aboard.

“Looks like we’re not spending the night here after all,” remarked Savushkin, as he kicked a blanket of snow over the body which lay at their feet.

They raced across the field, waving and shouting.

“Why,” asked Pekkala, fighting for breath as the cold air raked at his throat, “did you keep asking me who I was if you already knew?”

“It gave me an excuse to stay close to you,” gasped Savushkin. “Besides, I knew they were safe questions to ask.”

“And how did you know that?” asked Pekkala.

“Because you’d never have told me, Inspector.”

They climbed aboard just as the train began to move.

The railroad siding slipped away into the grainy air. In the distance the grove of trees seemed to disintegrate, atom by atom, until it too was gone.

If anyone even noticed the absence of the knife-cut man, nobody mentioned it. With a shuffling of feet, the space he had once occupied was filled, as if he’d never been there at all.

As wagon #6 swayed rhythmically from side to side, with the clatter of its wheels like a heartbeat echoing across the countryside, the atmosphere inside it was almost peaceful.

“POSKREBYSHEV!”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin.”

“Have there been any messages from Pekkala?”

“No, Comrade Stalin. He has not yet arrived at the camp.”

“You must keep me informed, Poskrebyshev.”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin.” Poskrebyshev stared at the gray mesh of the intercom speaker. Some of the tiny holes were clogged with dust. There had been a particular tone in Stalin’s voice just then, an anxiety almost bordering on fear. I must be mistaken, he thought.

TEN DAYS AFTER its departure from Moscow, ETAP-1889 passed through the town of Verkneudinsk.

This was the last civilian outpost before the train’s course diverted from the Trans-Siberian Railroad onto a separate track that would bring it to the Borodok railhead.

Peering through the opening, Pekkala spotted two men standing outside a tavern which adjoined the Verkneudinsk station. Faintly, he heard the men singing. Tiger stripes of lamplight gleamed through bolted window shutters, illuminating the snow which fell around them.

Afterwards, while the train pressed on into a darkness so utter it was as if they’d left the earth and were now hurtling through space, the singing of those two men haunted him.

The following morning, the train arrived at Borodok.

One final time, the prisoners climbed from their wagons, past shouting guards and dogs on choke-chain leashes, and were herded into a lumberyard where thousands of logs had been stacked as high as double-storied houses, waiting to be shipped to the west on the same train which had delivered the prisoners. The air smelled sour from the wood, and piles of shredded bark steamed in the cold, melting the snow around them.

In one corner of the yard, behind a wire fence, stood a mountain of metal fuel drums, each one marked DALSTROY.

Pekkala wondered if those drums were already full, with dead men tucked like fetuses inside, or if they had been set aside for the prisoners who stood around him now.

A guard climbed up on top of the log pile. “There are many rules at Borodok!” he shouted, hands cupped around his mouth. “You will know what they are when you have broken them.”

The convicts stared at him in silence.

“Now strip!” commanded the guard.

Nobody moved. The convicts continued to stare at the guard, each one convinced that he must have misunderstood. The temperature was below zero and all they had on was the same threadbare pajamas in which they’d first boarded the train.

Seeing that his words had no effect, the guard drew a pistol from a holster on his belt and fired a shot into the crowd.

The entire group flinched. With the blast still echoing around the lumberyard, prisoners ran their fingers across their faces, down their chests and out along the branches of their arms, searching for the wound which every man felt certain he’d received.

Only then did someone cry out, a sound more of surprise than pain.

The crowd parted around one man, whose hands were clutched against his neck. With wide and pleading eyes, he turned and turned in the space which had been made for him.

Nobody stepped in to help.

Seconds later, the convict dropped to his knees. Slowly and deliberately, he lowered himself onto his side. Then he lay there in the dirty snow, blood pulsing out of his throat.

The guard called out again for everyone to strip. This time, there was no hesitation. Filthy garments slipped to the ground like the sloughed-off husks of metamorphosing insects.

While this was going on, three trucks pulled up at the entrance to the lumberyard.

Following another order shouted by the guard, the naked prisoners formed a line. With shoulders hunched and fists clenched over hearts, they filed past the trucks one by one. From the first vehicle, each man received a black hip-length jacket called a telogreika. Sewn into the jackets were long, sausage-shaped lines padded with raw cotton. From the second truck, prisoners received matching trousers, and from the third boots made of rubberized canvas. None of the clothing was new, but it had been washed in gasoline to kill the lice and strip away some of the dirt.

The guards who threw this clothing from the trucks had no time to think of sizes. Prisoners exchanged garments until they found what fit them, more or less.

It began to snow. Large flakes, like pieces of eggshell, settled on their hair and shoulders. Before long, a blizzard was falling sideways through the air.

In ranks of three, the convicts set off walking towards the camp, leaving behind the man who had been shot. He lay upon the dirty snow surrounded by a halo of diluted blood.

A short distance away, Borodok’s tall stockade fence of sharpened logs loomed from the mist like a row of giant teeth.

The gates were opened, but before the prisoners could enter, a man with a bald head and a jagged-looking tattoo on his hand rode out on a cart piled with emaciated corpses. Wired around the left big toe of each body was a small metal tag. Together, they flickered like sequins on a woman’s party dress. The cart was a strange-looking contraption, its wheel spokes twisted like the horns of a mythical beast and its flared wooden sides decorated with red and green painted flowers foreign to Siberia. The horse that pulled this cart wore a white mane of frost, and long white lashes jutted from its eyelids like ivory splinters. The tattooed man did not even glance at the convicts as his cart jostled out into the storm.

Then the prisoners marched into the camp.

Once they were inside the stockade fence, the only view of the outside world was the tops of trees in the surrounding forest. Beyond the barracks, administrative building, kitchen, and hospital, the camp dead-ended against a wall of stone. There, on rusted iron stakes, snarls of barbed wire fringed the rock where a mine shaft had been cut into the mountain.

The center of the compound was dominated by the statues of a man and a woman, mounted on a massive concrete platform. The man, stripped to the waist, held a book in one hand and a blacksmith’s hammer in the other. The woman clutched a sheaf of wheat against her concrete dress. Both of them were frozen in midstride as they headed towards the main gates of the camp.

Engraved into the base were the words LET US HEAL THE SICK AND STRENGTHEN THE WEAK!

The statue had not been there on his last visit to the camp. Pekkala wondered where it had come from and what it was doing there. He wondered, too, what possible comfort a Gulag prisoner could draw from such an exhortation.

Like giants bound upon some journey without relevance to man, the statues appeared to stride past the barracks huts, whose tar-paper roof tiles winked like fish scales in the sunset.

The prisoners were ordered straight to their barracks, which were large, single-room buildings with bunk beds fitted one arm’s length apart. Bare wooden planks made up the floors and ceiling. The heating in the barracks came from two woodstoves, one at either end. Prisoners measured their seniority in how close they slept to those stoves. The room smelled of smoke and sweat and faintly of the bleach used to wash down the floors once a month. The barracks were guarded at night by an old soldier named Larchenko, who sat on a chair by the door reading a children’s book of fairy tales.

Having eaten his rations, which consisted of a scrap of dried fish wedged between two slices of black bread, Pekkala found himself in a bunk near the center of the main barracks block.

After the long journey, the convicts were too exhausted to talk. Within minutes, most of them were asleep.

Sometime in the night, Pekkala woke to see a figure shuffling about between the rows of beds which lined the walls.

It was the guard, Larchenko.

At first Pekkala thought he must be looking for something, the way the soldier moved so carefully across the splintery wooden boards. One of Larchenko’s arms was held out crookedly, as if it had been broken and then anchored in a cast. Blinking the sleep from his eyes, Pekkala lifted his head to get a better view.

In the darkness of the barracks, Larchenko was still nothing more than a silhouette, turning and turning like a clockwork ballerina in a jewelry box.

Then suddenly Pekkala understood. The man was dancing. His crooked arm was held about the waist of an imaginary partner. In that instant, the clumsy, swaying movements translated themselves into a waltz. Pekkala wondered who she was, this ghost of past acquaintance, and which orchestra’s music echoed in the ballroom of his skull.

A memory, shrouded until now in darkness, came hurtling like a meteor into the forefront of Pekkala’s mind.

The door of his cottage flew open.

It was the middle of the night.

By the time the Imperial Guard’s eyes had accustomed themselves to the dark, he was already looking down the blue-eyed barrel of Pekkala’s Webley revolver.

“What do you want?” Pekkala demanded.

“Inspector!” The guard had been running. He gasped for breath as he spoke. “The Emperor has sent for you!”

Pekkala lowered the gun.

A few minutes later, buttoning his coat as he ran, Pekkala followed the guard along the gravel path which led to the Alexander Palace. Moonlight turned the lawns of the Tsarskoye Selo estate into vast slabs of lapis lazuli.

The two men raced up the wide stone steps and into the front hall of the palace.

The building echoed with shouts and whispered voices.

A maid of the Imperial household, in her uniform of black dress and white apron, drifted past them like an albatross, one hand held against her mouth to stifle the sound of her crying.

Then Pekkala saw the Empress. Still in her mauve silk nightdress, she darted out of the Imperial bedroom. On slippered feet, the Empress glided towards Pekkala. “You must go to the Emperor at once!”

On her breath, Pekkala smelled the sickly odor of the opium-laced medicine without which Alexandra Romanov could no longer find her way into the catacombs of sleep. “What has happened, Majesty?”

“It is the nightmare,” she hissed.

A moment later Pekkala stood in the doorway to the Tsar’s bedroom.

The Tsar lay spread-eagled on his bed. The sheets had been kicked off. Sweat darkened his nightshirt.

Two nervous doctors hovered in the shadows.

“Pekkala,” groaned the Tsar, “is that you?”

“I am here, Majesty.”

“Get these butchers out of the room.” Feebly he gestured towards the doctors. “All they want to do is turn me into a morphine addict.”

The two men, somber as herons, filed out of the room without even glancing at Pekkala.

“Shut the door on your way out!” the Tsar commanded.

The doctors did as they were told.

Slowly, the Tsar sat up in bed. He was a picture of complete exhaustion. With twitching hands, he reached for the cigarette case which lay beside his bed. It had been fashioned out of solid gold by Michael Perchin, one of the workmasters at the Fabergé factory. The case had been engraved with gentle S-shaped curves, which reminded Pekkala of patterns he had seen as a child, in windblown sand down by the water’s edge at his family’s summer cottage on the Finnish island of Korpo.

From this case, the Tsar removed a cigarette. Each one contained a blend of tobacco prepared for him alone by Hajenius of Amsterdam. The frail rolling papers were emblazoned with a tiny silver double-headed eagle, the crest of the Romanov family.

As Pekkala stared at these objects, flinching momentarily when the Tsar struck fire from a jewel-encrusted lighter, it occurred to him how little they mattered to their owner at that moment. The Romanovs had built a wall of silver, gold, and platinum to keep the world away from them. But the world still found its way in. Like water filtering through cracks in a stone, it would ultimately shatter their existence.

“The Empress mentioned a nightmare,” said Pekkala.

The Tsar nodded, picking a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. He muttered a single word. “Kodynka.”

Then Pekkala understood.

On May 26, 1896, the day of Nicholas’s and Alexandra’s coronation, the Tsar and Tsarina had undergone a grueling five-hour service at the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin. Four days later, as dictated by tradition, the newly crowned couple would proceed to Kodynka field. There they would greet the thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of spectators who had come to wish them well. These spectators would be fed and gifts marking the occasion would be distributed. The Imperial couple would then proceed to the French embassy, where a celebration of unparalleled extravagance had been prepared. This included more than 100,000 fresh roses, which had been brought by express train from France.

The festivities began at Kodynka long before the Imperial couple were due to arrive. At one point, reacting to a rumor that the food tents were running out of beer, the crowd stampeded. More than a thousand people were crushed to death, many of them falling into shallow drainage ditches dug in lines across the field.

As the royal procession began its journey to Kodynka, the dead and dying were loaded onto carts and transported from the field, forming a macabre procession of their own. In the confusion, cartloads of disfigured corpses ended up among the lines of ornate coaches bearing the jewel-encrusted guests who had been invited to the ceremony.

To make matters worse, the Imperial couple were persuaded to continue with their schedule and attend the French embassy gathering.

Although guests at the party remarked on the obvious distress of the Emperor and his bride, the image of the pair waltzing, surrounded by thousands of bouquets of roses, remained in the minds of the Russian people. The royal couple had danced while their subjects were dying. And for a couple who were every bit as superstitious as the people whom they ruled, the omen seemed clear from the start.

“In my dream,” the Tsar told Pekkala, “I am at the French embassy, greeting the guests. But there are no ambassadors, no heads of state, no cousins who are kings. Instead, it is the dead from the Kodynka field. They trail their blood into the hall and the orchestra plays and they cling to each other with their mangled fingers and dance on their shattered limbs, staring into each other’s faces with their bulging eyes.”

“The dead are dancing?”

“All around me. The music never stops.” The Tsar inhaled on his cigarette. A moment later, two gray jets of smoke streamed from his nose. “And they are laughing.”

“But why?”

“Because they don’t know they are dead.” The Tsar swung his legs down from the bed and walked over to the window. Drawing back the curtains, he stared out at the velvet sky.

“Why did you send for me, Majesty?” asked Pekkala. “You know I can’t protect you from your dreams.”

“That may be true,” replied the Tsar, “but with all that Finnish witchcraft in your blood, I thought perhaps you might be able to tell me what it means.”

He already knows, thought Pekkala, only he cannot bring himself to say the words. That is why the dream comes back to him and why he will run from it for the rest of his life, scattering gold and jewels in its path in the hope of distracting the beast which is pursuing him. But the beast does not care about his treasure, and it will hunt him down and kill him in the end.

“FOUR SEVEN FOUR FIVE!”

Pekkala’s heart lurched as the barracks door flew open and a guard walked in, calling out Pekkala’s prison number.

It was still the middle of the night.

Awakened from his waltzing trance, Larchenko tottered back to his chair by the door.

“Four seven four five!” the guard called out again.

Pekkala climbed out of his bunk and stood at attention, bare feet cringing against the cold floorboards.

The guard’s flashlight sliced through the musty air of the bunkhouse, until it finally settled upon Pekkala. “Put your boots on. Come with me.”

Pekkala wedged his feet into the wooden-soled boots he had been issued and clumped after the guard. As he emerged into the Siberian night, the first breath felt like pepper in his lungs.

He followed the guard across the compound until they reached the commandant’s office.

“In there,” said the soldier, and without another word he trudged back to the guardhouse.

WHILE PEKKALA was being marched across the compound, Commandant Klenovkin had been watching.

Ever since Klenovkin had learned that Pekkala would be handling the investigation, he’d been dreading this meeting with his former prisoner.

When Klenovkin had mentioned the murder of Ryabov in his weekly report, he’d had no idea that Stalin would come to hear about it, much less put Pekkala on the case. Nothing good can come of this, he thought, as anxiety twisted in his gut. One way or another, those White Russians of the Kolchak Expedition had been the source of all his troubles. As soon as they arrived, they had formed themselves into a gang which virtually took over the camp, and even though most of them had died from the usual effects of overwork, malnutrition, and despair, the few who remained continued to exert a powerful influence.

Klenovkin blamed the White Russians for the fact that he had never received the recognition he deserved. All the commandants who had started out at the same time as he did were senior consultants for the Dalstroy company. They lived in comfort in the great cities—Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad. They ate their lunches in fine restaurants. They took their holidays at resorts on the Black Sea. Klenovkin had none of these luxuries. The nearest restaurant, a rail station cafe serving kvass and smoked caribou meat, was more than eight hundred kilometers away.

The only sign Klenovkin had ever received from Dalstroy that they appreciated him at all was an ashtray, made of pinkish-white onyx, which he had been awarded for fifteen years of service to the company. And he did not even smoke.

The way Klenovkin saw it, he had been left here to rot among these Siberians—chaldons, as they called themselves. To Klenovkin, they were all the same—a dirty and suspicious people. They trusted nobody except their own kind. I could live a dozen lifetimes here, thought Klenovkin, and I would still be a stranger to them. Every time he heard that train departing from the Borodok railhead, it was all he could do not to run down there and jump aboard.

But it was impossible. What held him back was not the guards and the stockade fence but paperwork, quotas, and fear. As far as Klenovkin was concerned, he was as much a prisoner as any convict in the camp.

But now, perhaps, all that was going to change.

As much as he had hoped never to set eyes on Pekkala again, Klenovkin knew that if anyone could get to the bottom of Ryabov’s murder, it would be the Emerald Eye.

So Klenovkin had made up his mind to endure the presence of the unearthly Finn, who had somehow survived in a place where death had been a virtual certainty.

However, thought Klenovkin, addressing the voices in his head, which had been clamoring at him ever since he’d learned that Pekkala was on his way, I am not simply going to grovel at the feet of a man who was once my prisoner. I must maintain some shred of dignity. I will remind him, in no uncertain terms, that I command at Borodok. The Emerald Eye can do his job, but only as my subordinate. I will be in charge.

The commandant looked out at the statues in the compound, hoping to match the seriousness on the faces of those workers with a steely expression of his own.

When the concrete sculpture had arrived, six years ago, Klenovkin assumed that he was at last being recognized for his years of loyal service to Dalstroy. No other camp had statues like this, and even if the motto did not seem entirely relevant to men imprisoned at a Gulag, nevertheless it was a sign to Klenovkin that he had not been forgotten.

Klenovkin had the statues installed in the center of the compound. The work had barely been completed when he received an inquiry from the University of Sverdlovsk, asking if he had by any chance seen a statue of a man and a woman which had been commissioned as the centerpiece of the university’s new Center for Medical Studies. Apparently the statues had been placed on the wrong train and nobody seemed to know where they were.

Klenovkin never answered the letter. He tore it up and threw it in the metal garbage can beside his desk. Then, overcome with paranoia, he set the contents of the garbage can on fire.

In the years which followed, Klenovkin had often found inspiration in the determined faces of that nameless man and woman.

Today, however, the hoped-for inspiration was not there. Windblown snow swirled through the compound, filling the eye sockets of the half-naked figures so that they seemed to stagger blindly forward into the storm.

Klenovkin was snatched from his daydream by the sound of the outer door creaking open. Hurriedly, he returned to his desk, sat down, and tried to look busy.

Pekkala stepped into the warm, still air of the commandant’s waiting room. A lamp was burning on a table. In the corner, a potbellied iron stove sighed as the logs crumbled inside it. Beside the stove, another guard, wearing a heavy knee-length coat, sat on a rickety chair with his boots up on the windowsill. Pekkala recognized this man as the same one who had opened fire on the prisoners when they first arrived at the Borodok railhead. The guard stared sleepily at Pekkala, his eyes as red in the lamplight as the sun on a Japanese flag.

“Send him in!” Klenovkin’s muffled voice reached through the office door.

The guard did not bother to get up. He merely nodded in the direction from which the voice had come and then went back to staring at the lamp.

Crossing the bare floor, Pekkala knocked on Klenovkin’s door, his knuckles barely touching the wood.

“Enter!” came a muffled voice.

Inside Klenovkin’s office, Pekkala breathed the smell of the soapy water which had been used to clean the room. In the coppery light of a lantern, he could make out the streaks of a cleaning rag on the glass panes, like mare’s tail clouds in a windy sky.

Klenovkin was sitting at his desk, sharpening pencils.

“Camp Commander,” said Pekkala, as he quietly closed the door.

“I am busy!” Klenovkin turned the pencils in the tiny metal sharpener, letting the papery curls fall into his ashtray. When, at last, he had finished this task, he brushed the shavings into his hand with a precision that reminded Pekkala of a croupier at a roulette wheel, hoeing in chips across the green felt table. Not until Klenovkin was satisfied that every fleck of dirt had been removed did he finally raise his head and look Pekkala in the eye.

Even though Pekkala had not seen Klenovkin in many years, the commandant’s features had been etched into his brain. Time had rounded the edges of Klenovkin’s once-gaunt face. The dark hair Pekkala remembered had turned a grayish white. Only the man’s gaze, menacing and squinty, had not changed. “Prisoners must remove their caps when they are in my presence.”

“I am no longer your prisoner.”

Klenovkin smiled humorlessly. “That is only partly true, Inspector. You may be running this investigation, but I am running this camp. As long as you are wearing the clothes of an inmate, that is how you will be treated. We wouldn’t want that guard out in the waiting room to become suspicious, would we?”

Slowly, Pekkala reached up to his cap and slid it off his head.

“Good.” Klenovkin nodded, satisfied. “I must admit, Pekkala, I do find this meeting somewhat ironic. After all, following our last meeting, I did my best to kill you.”

“And failed.”

“Indeed, and thus the irony that I am now expected to assist you in whatever way I can. Bear in mind, however, that I may be the only help you get. As for that gang of White Russians, of which Captain Ryabov was a member, I wouldn’t expect much from them.”

“And why is that?”

“Because they have gone mad. The years at Borodok have worn away their minds as well as their bodies. Now they speak of a day when they will be rescued from this place and sent to live like kings in some faraway land.” Klenovkin rolled his eyes in mocking pity. “They really believe this! They are fanatics, tattooing their bodies with the symbols of their loyalty to a cause that no longer exists. These men have nothing left but hope, for which they no longer require proof or logic or even reason to support their beliefs. They even have a name for the dwindling ranks of their disciples. They call themselves Comitati—whatever that means.” Then he laughed. “It is a word that has no meaning, for men who serve no purpose.”

But that word did have a meaning, and the mention of it made Pekkala’s blood run cold. The Comitatus was an ancient pact between warriors and their leader, in which men swore never to leave the battlefield before their leader, and the leader swore in return never to abandon those who followed him. As each swore allegiance, the man and the oath became one and the same. Together, those who had made the pact formed a band known as the Comitati. Now Pekkala knew why these men had never given up the fight. They were waiting for Kolchak to return and fulfill the oath he had taken.

“In a way,” continued Klenovkin, “they have already been rescued. Their minds escaped from this camp long ago. The only sane thing left for them is to surrender to their madness. The one man among them who had any grip on reality was Ryabov, and that, I think you will find, is the reason he is dead.”

“How many of these Comitati were originally sent to Borodok?”

“There were about seventy of them in the beginning.”

“And how many remain?”

“Three,” replied Klenovkin. “There is a former lieutenant named Tarnowski, and two others—Sedov and Lavrenov. In spite of how many have died over the years, Ryabov was the first to be murdered.”

“Has his body been preserved?”

“Of course.”

“I need to see the remains,” said Pekkala. “Preferably now.”

“By all means,” replied Klenovkin, rising to his feet. “The sooner you can deliver to Stalin whatever it is that he wants from these men, the quicker I can be rid of them. And of you as well, Inspector.”

Heaving on a canvas coat, thickly lined with coarse and shaggy goat fur, Klenovkin led Pekkala out of the office.

Shivering in his prison jacket, Pekkala followed the commandant to the camp kitchen, which had been closed down for the night.

Inside, at the back of the building, stood a large walk-in freezer, its door fastened shut with a bronze padlock as big as a man’s clenched fist.

Removing a key from his pocket, Klenovkin unfastened the padlock and the two men stepped inside.

Klenovkin turned on an electric light. One bare bulb glimmered weakly from the low ceiling. Frost which had coated the thin glass shell of the bulb immediately melted away. By the time the droplets reached the floor, they had frozen again and crackled on the ground like grains of unboiled rice.

On one side of the freezer, pig carcasses dangled from iron hooks. On the other stood slabs of pasty white beef fat and stacks of vegetables which had been boiled, mashed, and pressed into bricks.

A wall of splintery wooden crates lined the back of the freezer. The crates were filled with bottles, each one marked with a yellow paper triangle, indicating Soviet army–issue vodka.

On the floor, behind the barricade of vodka crates, lay a dirty brown tarpaulin.

“There he is,” said Klenovkin.

Pekkala knelt down. Pulling aside the brittle cloth, he stared at the man whose death had brought him to Siberia.

Ryabov’s skin had turned a purplish gray. A dark redness filled the lips and nostrils and the dead man’s open eyes had sunk back into his skull. His open mouth revealed a set of teeth rotted by years of neglect.

Ryabov’s throat had been cut back to his spine, as if the murderer had wanted not simply to kill him but had attempted to remove his head as well.

The huge amount of blood which had flowed from Ryabov’s severed jugular had formed a black and brittle crust over the dead man’s chest.

At least it had been quick, Pekkala noted. From a wound like that, Ryabov would have bled out in less than thirty seconds.

The hands of the dead man had been wrapped in strips of rag, a common practice among prisoners to protect against the cold. Pekkala peeled back the layers of filthy cloth. It was not easy. Ice had bonded the strips so solidly together that Pekkala’s fingernails tore as he prised away the layers. At last the skin was exposed, revealing the image of a pine tree which had been crudely etched on the tops of Ryabov’s hands using a razor blade and soot.

“The mark of the Comitati,” observed Klenovkin.

Pekkala set his fingertips against the edges of the wound in the dead man’s neck. The skin was curved back on itself, a sign that the blade used to kill Ryabov had been extremely sharp.

Now Pekkala turned his attention to the man’s clothes. The padded coat and trousers had been washed so many times that the original black color had been bleached to the same dirty white shade as the snow which piled up on street corners in Moscow at the end of winter. The buttons had been replaced with pieces of wood hand-carved into toggles, and there were many repairs in the cloth, each one meticulously stitched with whatever fabric had been available. Searching the pockets of Ryabov’s jacket, Pekkala found nothing but black crumbs of Machorka tobacco, the only kind available to Gulag prisoners. It was made from the stems as well as the leaves of the plant and produced a thick, eye-stinging cloud that could be inhaled only by the most desperate and hardened smoker.

“Where was the body found?” Pekkala asked.

“At the entrance to the mine. I discovered it myself when I went there to speak with him.”

“Why were you there and not in your office?”

“When he first came to me, saying he knew where to find Colonel Kolchak, I told Ryabov I didn’t believe it. Kolchak is dead, I told him. But he insisted he had proof that the colonel was still alive, and he was so convincing that I thought I should at least hear what he had to say.”

“And what did Ryabov want in exchange for this information?”

“He didn’t say. He refused to talk in my office, because he didn’t want to risk being overheard, so we set up the meeting for that night in one of the mine tunnels. It’s not difficult for the prisoners to sneak out of their barracks at night. The entrance to the mine shaft is not guarded and the tunnels are not patrolled at night. We had set a time, just after midnight. By the time I got there, Ryabov had already been killed.”

“I was told you’d found the murder weapon.”

Without removing his hands from the warmth of his pockets, Klenovkin nodded towards an object lying on a nearby crate.

Pekkala saw it now—a crude homemade stiletto, whose finger-length blade had been fashioned from a piece of iron railing. The handle was a split piece of white birch, into which the railing had been inserted and string wrapped tightly around the wood to hold it in place. The tight coils of string were coated with a lacquer of dried blood. “This was made by a prisoner,” said Pekkala.

“It was lying right next to the body,” explained Klenovkin. “There’s no doubt this was the murder weapon.”

Pekkala said nothing, but he knew that the weapon which had killed Ryabov was no prison-made contraption. One glance at the blade told him that.

Prison knives were fashioned to be small, so that they could be easily concealed. He had seen lethal weapons constructed from pieces of tin can no larger than a thumbnail and fitted into the handle of a toothbrush. The weapon Klenovkin claimed he had found beside the body was a type used for stabbing, not cutting.

The blade which had cleaved apart Ryabov’s throat was wide and sharp enough to sever the jugular with one stroke. This was evident in the clean edge of the wound, showing that the killer had not required multiple strokes of the blade to accomplish his task.

“It proves the Comitati were involved,” continued Klenovkin.

“And how have you reached that conclusion?”

Only now did Klenovkin remove a hand from its fur-lined cocoon. One finger uncurled towards the dead man. “The Comitati did this, because no one else would have dared to lay a hand on Ryabov.”

“But why do you think they were the ones who murdered him?”

“I have considered this, Inspector, and there is only one possible answer. I first assumed that he was trying to secure the release of his men along with himself. What else is there to bargain for? But the more I thought about it, the clearer it became. Ryabov had no intention of escaping with the others. The only freedom Ryabov desired was for himself. He had finally seen the Comitati for what they really are—a clan of painted madmen clinging to a prophecy which becomes more and more improbable with every passing year. Ryabov had at last reached the correct conclusion—that unless he did something to help himself, he would die here in the camp.”

“Why do you think he would come to you now, after all these years of silence?”

“I believe their tight-knit group had been whittled away until those few who remained had finally begun to crack. Ryabov was prepared to abandon their old loyalties. The others were not. If you want to find the man who killed Ryabov, you need look no further than the men he used to call his comrades.”

After closing up the freezer, the two men walked out of the kitchen.

Under the glare of the camp’s perimeter lights, sheets of newly formed ice glistened in the compound yard. Beyond the tall stockade fence, the sawtooth line of pine trees stood out against the velvet blue night sky.

“If he was so desperate to escape,” asked Pekkala, “then why did he not simply attempt to leave on his own? He had learned to survive here in the camp. He could have found a way out and then, surely, he could have endured conditions in the forest long enough to make it across the border into China, which is less than a hundred kilometers from here.”

“The answer to that, Inspector, is the same as why you never escaped, in spite of the fact that you lived beyond the gates of this camp, with no guards to oversee your every move. Even if Ryabov could have made it through the forest on his own, he would never have gotten past the Ostyaks.”

“Do you mean to say they are still out there?” Pekkala asked Klenovkin. “I thought you would have driven them away by now.”

“On the contrary,” remarked the commandant. “They are more powerful than ever.”

Beyond the gates of Borodok lay the country of the Ostyaks, a nomadic Asiatic tribe whose territory extended for hundreds of kilometers around the camp.

At the time of the foundation of Borodok and its sister camp, Mamlin-3, on the other side of the Valley of Krasnagolyana, an uneasy truce had been established between these nomads and the Gulag authorities. The valley would belong to the Gulags and the taiga—that maze of rivers, forests, and tundra which made up so much of Siberia—would remain off limits. The camp’s perimeter fence had been built as much to keep the Ostyaks out as to keep the prisoners in.

The Ostyaks butchered any convict found upon the taiga. The corpse was then delivered to the camp. Pekkala had heard rumors of bodies returned only after their palms and cheeks had been cut away and eaten.

So violent were these Ostyaks in tracking down those who sought to trespass on their land, and so difficult was the terrain, that, during Pekkala’s years as a convict, not a single successful escape had ever been recorded.

On their visits to Borodok, the Ostyaks traded with the guards, exchanging the pelts of ermine, mink, and arctic fox for tobacco. As a result, some men wore greatcoats lined with furs more precious than anything which ever trimmed the robes of kings and queens.

Occasionally, in winter, a time when his work as a tree-marker would bring him to the outer fringes of the valley, Pekkala had seen the Ostyaks slaloming between the trees on sleds whose iron runners hissed like snakes across the snow. Other times, they seemed to be invisible, and all he heard was the clicking hooves of the lightning-antlered caribou which hauled their sleds and the sinister metallic chant of harness bells.

Up close, Pekkala had only once ever seen them.

Halfway through his first year as a tree-marker, two men appeared one day outside his cabin. They were on their way to Borodok with a sled carrying some men who had escaped from the camp. Whether the Ostyaks had killed them or simply found their frozen bodies out on the taiga, Pekkala could not tell. The rigid, naked corpses lay heaped upon the sled, seeming to claw the air like men snatched from their lives in the midst of grand mal seizures.

At first Pekkala thought these Ostyaks meant to add him to their pile of dead, but all they did was stare at him in silence. Then they turned abruptly and continued their journey.

They never came near him again.

“Those heathens are more useful to me than any of the guards in this camp,” continued Klenovkin. “Over the years, there have been many escape attempts from Borodok, but no one has ever gotten past the Ostyaks, for one very simple reason: I pay them. In bread. In salt. In bullets. I reward them well for every corpse they bring me.”

“But couldn’t Ryabov have bribed them?”

Klenovkin laughed. “With what? The Ostyaks may be savages, but they are also crafty businessmen. They deliberately miscount those bodies they bring me, hoping I am too genteel to stand out in the cold and count the dead. Then, when I catch them in their deception, they grin like imbeciles, throw up their hands, and act like schoolchildren. They have no respect for Soviet authority. As far as the Ostyaks are concerned, the only difference between me and the frozen bodies they bring in is that I have something to trade and those dead men did not. Otherwise, they would never set foot in the Valley of Krasnagolyana, because they say those woods are haunted.”

“By what?”

Klenovkin smiled. “By you, Inspector! Back in the days when you lived out in the forest, they came to believe that you were some kind of monster. And who can blame them? What was it the loggers used to call you—the man with bloody hands? After Stalin recalled you to Moscow, I had a hard time convincing the Ostyaks that you had actually gone. They still believe your spirit haunts this valley. I told you, Inspector, they are a primitive and vicious people.”

“They are just trying to make sense of the things we have brought to their world,” said Pekkala, “and when I see men with their throats cut like the one lying in front of me, I have trouble making sense of it myself.”

“But you will make sense of it,” Klenovkin replied. “That’s why Stalin gave you the job.”

“I may not be able to complete this task alone,” said Pekkala. “I will need to keep in touch with my colleague in Moscow.”

“Of course. That has all been arranged. I have placed you in a job which will allow us to meet on a regular basis without arousing the suspicion of the inmates.”

“What job is that?”

“You will be working in the kitchen. From now on, you will bring me my breakfast each morning. At that time we can discuss any developments in your investigation.”

“I am to be your servant?”

“Try to set aside your dignity, Pekkala—at least if you want to stay alive. And remember to keep your mouth shut when you’re around the head cook,” added Klenovkin. “His name is Melekov and he is the worst gossip at Borodok. Whatever you say to him will find its way into the ears of every convict in this camp.”

By now, the first eel-green glimmer of dawn showed in the sky.

“Good luck, Inspector,” said Klenovkin, as he turned to leave. “Good luck, for both our sakes.”

BACK IN MOSCOW, Kirov woke with a start.

He had fallen asleep at his desk. Blearily, he stared at the earthenware pots arranged upon the windowsills. His plants—herbs and cherry tomatoes and a beloved kumquat tree—dappled the darkness with their leaves.

Groaning as he rose to his feet, Kirov stepped over to the wall and flipped on the lights. Then he strolled around the room, hands in pockets, while the last veils of sleep were lifted from his mind. He paused to admire Pekkala’s desk, on which the file belonging to the dead captain Ryabov was neatly flanked by pens, a ruler, and a pencil sharpener. It did not usually look so tidy. Normally, the arrangement of Pekkala’s possessions seemed to follow some path of logic known only to himself. And yet somehow, in defiance of reason, Pekkala always seemed to know where everything was. Unlike Kirov, Pekkala never had to hunt about for his keys, or his wallet or his gun.

The day before, in a moment of fastidiousness, Kirov had tidied Pekkala’s desk. Now it looked smart. Efficient. And completely wrong. Kirov wished he hadn’t touched anything, and he looked forward to the day when Pekkala would return and rearrange everything to its naturally shambolic state.

Kirov wondered how long it would be before Pekkala sent a telegram, asking for assistance. He hoped it would be soon. Ever since the inspector had gone away, Kirov’s life had become a dreary procession of paperwork, solitary meals, and doubts about his own abilities to function in the absence of Pekkala.

Kirov sat down in Pekkala’s chair. Like a mischievous schoolboy sitting at the teacher’s place, he knew he was trespassing but, also like a mischievous schoolboy, he did it anyway. Then he stared at the phone on Pekkala’s desk. “Ring, damn you,” he said.

THE INTERCOM CLICKED ON.

“Poskrebyshev!”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin.”

“Any word from Pekkala?”

“Nothing yet, Comrade Stalin.”

“Are you certain that all transmissions have been intercepted?”

“Comrade Stalin, there have been no transmissions between Kirov and Major Pekkala.”

“Doesn’t that seem strange to you, Poskrebyshev?”

“I am sure he will communicate with Major Kirov when he has something to report. He only just arrived at the camp.”

“I may have been wrong to put my faith in him.”

“In Pekkala? Surely not …”

Without another word, the intercom clicked off.

There is that tone again, thought Poskrebyshev. What can be worrying him? A sense of foreboding clouded Poskrebyshev’s mind. This was not the first time he had witnessed Stalin’s moods as they began to swing erratically. In the past, bouts of good humor would be suddenly and inexplicably replaced by fury, frustration, and paranoia. And the results had always been deadly. In 1936, when Stalin had become convinced that officers in the Soviet army were about to overthrow him, he had initiated a policy of arrests and executions which wiped out most of the officer corps, leaving the Red Army virtually stripped of its High Command. These purges, which had begun before and continued long after Stalin’s attack on the army, caused a death toll that ran into the hundreds of thousands.

Nervously, he glanced towards Stalin’s office. A storm is brewing, Poskrebyshev decided, and when it hits, it’s going to come right through those doors.

THE SUN HAD JUST RISEN above the tree line as the new prisoners of Borodok assembled in the compound to receive their work assignments.

Some convicts were assigned to logging operations, but most, including Savushkin, went directly to work in the mines which harvested crystals of Siberian Red, as well as the radium used to illuminate the hands of military watches, compasses, and aircraft dials.

As Klenovkin had promised, Pekkala found himself detailed to the camp kitchen, which had, until that moment, been run entirely by one man. His name was Melekov. He had short gray hair and skin as pale as a plucked chicken.

There was no time for introductions. Pekkala went immediately to work handing out breakfast rations to men who had lined up outside the kitchen window. Each received one fist-sized loaf of bread known as a paika and a cup of black tea, served from one of three huge metal tubs. The cups were chained to these tubs, so the men had to drink the tea quickly before handing the mug to the next in line.

In spite of the cold outside, the kitchen grew so hot from the bread oven that Melekov stripped down to his shorts and a filthy undershirt. In this unofficial uniform, together with a pair of army boots which were missing their laces, he stamped about the kitchen barking orders.

“Rejoice!” commanded Melekov. “Rejoice that you are working here with me. I control the food, and food is the currency of Borodok. The value of everything which can be bought or sold is measured in those rations of bread you are handing out. And the source of all rations”—he jabbed a thumb against his chest—“is me!”

As these words filtered into his brain, Pekkala stood in the kitchen doorway, reaching mechanically into burlap sacks containing paika rations and pressing the loaves into the workers’ outstretched hands. He had to look carefully at those hands, because Melekov had instructed him to give two rations of paika to the three remaining Comitati, all of whom were identifiable by the pine trees tattooed on their hands.

“Those men are dangerous,” Melekov explained, leaning over Pekkala’s shoulder. “Do not speak to them. Do not even look at them.”

“But there are only three of these men in the whole camp. Why is everyone so afraid of them?”

“Let me explain it this way,” replied Melekov. “If you beat a man to the ground in order to teach him a lesson and all he does is get back on his feet and keep on fighting, what does that tell you about this man?”

“That you have not taught him anything.”

“Exactly!”

“But what lesson would you be trying to teach with such a beating?”

“That the only way to survive in this camp is to live by its rules. There are the rules of the Dalstroy Company, the rules of the commandant, the rules of the guards, and the rules of the prisoners. All of them must be obeyed if you want to go on breathing in Borodok, but the Comitati have never learned to obey. That is why, out of the dozens who were sent to this camp, so few of them are left. But those few are not ordinary men.”

“What do you mean?”

“No one can find a way to kill them! That is why the Comitati always get an extra bread ration, and if there’s anything else they want, just give it to them and keep your mouth shut. And stay out of the freezer!” Melekov added as an afterthought. “If I catch you in there, stealing food meant for Klenovkin or the guards, I’ll hand you over to them. Then you’ll learn what pain is all about.”

As Pekkala handed out bread to the shadows of men filing past, he failed to notice the pine tree tattoo of a huge bald man, whom he immediately recognized as the driver of the cart loaded with bodies which had passed them on their way into the camp. The bald man grabbed Pekkala by the wrist, almost crushing the bones in his grip, until Pekkala handed over an extra ration.

The man let go, grunted angrily, and stepped away.

“Didn’t you listen to a word I said?” asked Melekov, who had been watching. “That is Tarnowski, the worst of all the Comitati and the last man you want to upset, especially on your first day in the camp!”

Next in line was Savushkin. “How are they treating you?” he whispered.

“Well enough so far,” replied Pekkala, quickly pressing an extra paika ration into Savushkin’s outstretched hands.

“They have made it difficult for me to keep an eye on you,” continued Savushkin, “but not impossible. You might not see me, but I will try to be there when you need my help.”

Before Pekkala could thank Savushkin, the next man in line took his place.

When he had finished handing out the rations, Pekkala, who had not yet been given any food for himself, swiped his wetted thumb around the inside of the large aluminum bowl which had contained the bread. Dabbing up the crumbs, he popped them in his mouth and crunched the brittle flakes.

Although this yielded barely a mouthful, Pekkala knew that from now on he would have to take food wherever he could find it.

He already knew the grim equation of the quota system at these camps. If a man completed his daily workload, he would receive one hundred percent of his food ration. But if he failed to meet this quota, he received only half of his food. The following day, he would be too weak to carry out his tasks, and so his ration would be short again. Inevitably, the man would starve to death. The only sure means of survival was to break the rules and avoid getting caught. Prisoners referred to this as “walking like a cat.”

After the rations had been distributed, Pekkala sat down with Melekov at the little table in the corner to eat their own breakfasts. Pekkala was permitted to take a single paika ration, while Melekov, still wearing only shorts and undershirt, devoured a bowl of boiled rye mixed with dried apples and pine nuts.

While Pekkala ate, he paused to watch an old man dragging a sledgehammer out across the camp. The man came to the edge of a sheet of ice which had formed in the yard. He raised the hammer and brought it smashing down, slowly breaking up the ice.

Two guards approached the old man. Laughing, they bowed to him and crossed themselves. Pekkala recognized the taller of the two guards as the man he had seen in Klenovkin’s office, the same one who had shot the prisoner dead when they first arrived at the railhead.

“That big one is Sergeant Gramotin,” explained Melekov. “During the Revolution, he was involved in battles against the Whites and the Czech Legion up and down the Trans-Siberian Railroad. People say he lost his sanity somewhere out there on those tracks. That’s another person you should do your best to avoid.” As he spoke, Melekov wolfed down his breakfast, his face only a handsbreadth above the wooden bowl. “Most of the guards in this camp are sadists and even they think Gramotin is cruel. Lately, he’s been worse than I’ve ever seen before, on account of the fact that six prisoners escaped from the camp last month. Some of them were found by the Ostyaks—”

“Dead?”

“Of course they were dead! And lucky for the convicts that they froze to death before the Ostyaks found them. But a few of those prisoners are still missing and Gramotin will take the blame if they can’t be accounted for.”

“Do you think they got away?”

“No,” growled Melekov. “They’re lying out there somewhere in the valley, frozen solid as those statues in the compound.”

“If they’re dead, then what is Gramotin worried about?”

“Dalstroy wants those bodies. They make good money selling corpses, provided the wolves or the Ostyaks haven’t eaten too much of them by the time they get back to camp.”

“Who’s the other guard?” asked Pekkala.

“His name is Platov. He’s Gramotin’s puppet. He does whatever Gramotin does. Gramotin doesn’t even have to prompt him. If Gramotin whistles the first notes of a song, Platov will finish it for him.”

It was true. When Gramotin bowed, Platov immediately did the same. When Gramotin laughed, Platov’s laughter was only a second behind.

“And the old man they are tormenting?”

“That is Sedov, another Comitati. But you don’t have to worry about him. He won’t cause you any trouble. They call Sedov the Old Believer because, even though religion has been banned in the camps, he refuses to give up his faith.”

First Gramotin, and then Platov, unshouldered their Mosin-Nagant rifles and began to prod the convict with fixed bayonets.

“Dance for us!” shouted Gramotin.

“Dance! Dance!” echoed Platov.

“Dancing is a sin in the eyes of God!” Sedov shouted at them. “Didn’t anyone tell you?” shouted Gramotin. “God has been abolished!”

Platov cackled, jabbing Sedov so violently that if the man had not stepped backwards, the bayonet would have run him through.

“You may have abolished God,” retorted Sedov, “but one day He will abolish you as well.”

Melekov shook his head, a look of pity on his face. “Sedov has forgotten the difference between this life and the next one. Gramotin will kill him one of these days, just like he killed Captain Ryabov, that man we’ve got lying in the freezer.”

“Gramotin killed Ryabov?”

“Sure!” Melekov said confidently. “Ryabov thought it was his job to look after the other Comitati, since he was the highest-ranking officer among them, but it proved to be a hopeless task. One after the other, most of them died. There was nothing he could do. That’s just the way things are in these camps. People say it pushed Ryabov over the edge, not being able to save them. The rumor is that he finally just snapped.”

“And did what?”

“He went up against Gramotin one too many times. That’s how you end up in the freezer, while Klenovkin tries to figure out whether anyone will buy a body whose head is practically cut off.”

SWATHED IN the hand-me-down clothes of a dead prisoner, and with a beard quickly darkening his cheeks, Pekkala had become invisible among the similarly filthy inhabitants of Borodok.

But he knew this couldn’t last. If he was to solve the murder of Ryabov, he would have to learn, from the Comitati themselves, everything they knew about the killing. Pekkala’s only chance was to win their confidence. But he would have to move carefully. If the Comitati learned of his true purpose, or even if they became suspicious, he would never leave Borodok alive.

While he waited for the right moment to break cover, Pekkala studied them from a distance.

Lavrenov was a tall, thin man with feverishly glowing eyes and cheeks hollowed out by years of Gulag life. “That one deals in everything,” Melekov told Pekkala. “From tobacco, to razor blades, to matchsticks, Lavrenov can get his hands on whatever you want, as long as you can pay for it. And, somehow, he can still keep out of trouble.”

Sedov, the Old Believer, could not. He was small, wiry, and muscular, with the scars and crumpled cheekbones of a man who had been beaten many times. Most prisoners kept their hair short, as a precaution against lice, but Sedov’s was long and plaited with dirt, as was his unkempt beard. A broken, slightly upturned nose and twisted lips had given him a permanent expression of bemusement, as if recalling some private joke. This, in combination with a stubborn, almost suicidal refusal to conceal his religious faith, made him a perfect target for Gramotin. Daily, the sergeant sent the old man skittering across the ice-patched compound, while he taunted the convict, chanting scraps of outlawed prayers.

But the man Pekkala watched most closely was Lieutenant Tarnowski. Now the ranking member of the Comitati, Tarnowski enforced its violent reputation. At those rare times when words alone proved unsuccessful, Tarnowski carried out his threats with a relish that seemed to rival even that of the guards.

On Pekkala’s fifth day at the camp, after the rations had been distributed, he sat down as usual with Melekov at the little table in the corner to eat breakfast.

On the floor beside Melekov’s chair was a battered metal toolbox, which he used to carry out repairs around the camp. Whenever anything mechanical broke down—phones, alarms, clocks—the guards would send for Melekov.

“What is it this time?” Pekkala nodded towards the toolbox.

“Guard tower phones are down again.” As Melekov spoke, he removed a hard-boiled egg from the jumble of pickled beets, cheese, bread, and scraps of cold meat which filled his bowl. Gently, he rolled the egg between his palms, until the shell was mosaicked with cracks. “The batteries that power the ringers keep freezing. I hate going up and down those ladders. They shouldn’t make me do it. I’m a wounded veteran, you know.” He pointed to his thigh, where an X-shaped scar was visible just below the tattered edge of his shorts. “I’ll tell you how I got it.” Melekov breathed in deeply, ready to begin his story.

In that moment, Pekkala saw his chance. “Instead of telling me how you received that wound, how about I tell you instead?”

“You tell me?” Melekov’s breath trailed out.

Pekkala nodded. “I’ll tell you what it is and where you got it and what you used to do before you came to Borodok.”

“What are you,” grunted Melekov, “some kind of fortune-teller?”

“Let’s find out,” replied Pekkala, “and if I’m right, you can give me that egg you were about to eat.”

Eyeing Pekkala suspiciously, Melekov laid the egg down on the table.

As Pekkala reached out to take it, Melekov’s hand slapped down on top of his.

“Not yet! First, you can tell me my fortune.”

“Very well,” said Pekkala.

Cautiously, Melekov removed his hand.

“That scar was made by a bayonet,” began Pekkala.

“Perhaps.”

“To be specific, it was the cruciform bayonet of a Mosin-Nagant rifle, standard issue for a Russian soldier.”

“Who told you?” demanded Melekov.

“Nobody.”

The two men stared at each other for a moment, waiting for the other to flinch.

Slowly, Melekov folded his arms across his chest. “All right, convict, but where was I when I received the wound?”

“The branches of the X are longer at the lower edges of the scar,” Pekkala went on, “which means that the bayonet thrust was made from below you, not above or at the same level, which would be more usual. This means you were either standing on a staircase when it happened …”

Melekov smiled.

“Or on the top of a trench.”

The smile broadened, baring Melekov’s teeth.

“Or,” said Pekkala, “you were riding a horse at the time.”

The smile dissolved. “Bastard,” whispered Melekov.

“I haven’t finished yet,” said Pekkala. “You are a Siberian.”

“Born and bred here,” Melekov interrupted. “I’ve never been anywhere else.”

“Your accent puts you east of the Urals,” Pekkala continued, “probably in the vicinity of Perm. You are old enough to have fought in the war, and from the cut of your hair”—he nodded towards Melekov’s flat-topped stand of gray bristles, in the style known as en brosse—“I am guessing that you did.”

“Yes, that’s all true, but—”

“So you were a Russian soldier, and yet you have been wounded by a Russian bayonet. Therefore, you were wounded by one of your own countrymen.” Pekkala paused, studying the emotions on Melekov’s face, which passed like the shadows of clouds over a field as the cook relived his past. “You did not receive your wound during the war, but rather in the Revolution which followed it.”

“Very good, convict, but which side was I fighting for?”

“You were not with the Whites, Melekov.”

Melekov turned his head and spat on the floor. “You’ve got that right.”

“If you were,” said Pekkala, “you would more likely be a prisoner here than someone who is on the payroll. And I have not seen you speaking to the Comitati, which you would do if you were one of them.”

Melekov held out his fists, knuckles pointing upwards. “No pine tree tattoos.”

“Exactly. Which means you fought for the Bolsheviks, and because you were a horseman, I believe you were in the Red Cavalry.”

“The Tenth Brigade …”

“You were injured in an attack against infantry, during which one of the enemy was able to stab you with a bayonet as you rode past. A wound like that is very serious.”

“I almost died,” muttered Melekov. “It was a year before I could even walk again. I could not even leave the hospital because the leg kept getting infected.”

“And since you’ve already told me that you’ve never left Siberia, that must be where you were injured. I believe you must have been fighting against the forces of General Semenov or Rozanov, the White Cossacks, who waged their campaigns in this part of the world.” When Pekkala had finished, he slumped in his chair, feeling the tingle of sweat against his back. If even one detail was wrong, the minutes he had spent unraveling the mystery of Melekov’s crucifix scar would do more harm than good.

For a long time Melekov was silent, his face inscrutable. Then, suddenly, he stood. His chair fell over backwards and landed with a clatter on the floor. “Every last word of what you’ve said is true!” he shouted. “But there is one more thing I’d like to know.”

“Yes?”

“I would like to know who the hell you really are, convict.”

This was the moment Pekkala had been waiting for. If Klenovkin had been right that Melekov was the worst gossip in the camp, all Pekkala had to do was speak his name, and it would not be long before the Comitati knew that he was here. “I was known as the Emerald Eye.”

Melekov’s eyes opened wide. “Do you mean to tell me you are the tree-marker who lasted all those years and then suddenly disappeared? But I thought you were dead!”

“Many people do.” Pekkala’s fingers inched forward, reaching like the tentacles of an octopus until they closed around the egg.

This time Melekov did nothing to prevent him.

The cracked shell seemed to sigh in Pekkala’s grip. Hunched over the table, he plucked away the tiny fragments, which fell to the table like confetti. He sank his teeth through the slick rubbery white and bit into the hard-boiled yolk.

AT SUNRISE THE NEXT DAY, the gates of Borodok swung open and a band of heavily armed men entered the compound. They were short and swathed in furs, their wide Asiatic faces burned brick red by the wind.

The men brought with them a sled pulled by reindeer, on which lay half a dozen bodies, each one solid as stone.

Melekov and Pekkala stood in the doorway of the kitchen, handing out rations.

“Ostyaks,” whispered Pekkala.

“That must be the last of the prisoners who tried to escape before you arrived at the camp. Gramotin will be happy now. Or at least less miserable than usual.”

One of the fur-clad men set aside his antiquated flintlock rifle and stepped into Klenovkin’s office. The others glanced warily at the camp inmates who had paused in the breadline to witness the spectacle. A minute later, the Ostyak emerged from Klenovkin’s hut, carrying two burlap sacks stuffed full as pillows.

The bodies were dumped off the sled. Borodok guards opened the gates and the Ostyaks departed as suddenly as they had arrived, leaving behind the grotesquely frozen corpses.

“Come on, Tarnowski!” Gramotin shouted at the convicts. “You know what to do. Find your men and put these carcasses beside the generators. I want them thawed out by the end of the day.”

Taking hold of frozen limbs as if they were the branches of a fallen tree, the Comitati carried the corpses over to a building where the electrical generators were housed.

“Why does he force the Comitati to do that job?” Pekkala asked Melekov.

“Force them?” Melekov laughed. “That job is a privilege. The Comitati fought for it until no one else would dare take it from them, not even Gramotin.”

“But why?”

“Because the generator room is the warmest place in this camp. They take their time laying out those bodies, believe me, and thaw themselves out a little as well.”

“What’s the reason for thawing out the bodies?”

“It’s the only way they can get them into the barrels.”

By the time the Comitati reappeared, the breadline had begun to move again, but no sooner had Pekkala begun distributing the rations than a fight broke out among the prisoners.

Pekkala had been so focused on handing out the bread that he did not see who started it.

Those convicts not involved fell back from the commotion, leaving an old man, whom Pekkala immediately recognized as Sedov, down on one knee and wiping a bright smear of blood from his nose.

Above him stood Tarnowski. With fists clenched, he circled the old man like a boxer waiting for his opponent to raise himself up before knocking him down once more.

Pekkala remembered what Klenovkin had said about the Comitati turning against each other. From what he could see, it appeared to be the truth.

Sedov climbed shakily to his feet. He was upright for only a second before Tarnowski smashed him again in the face. Sedov spun as he tumbled, his teeth limned in red, but no sooner was he down than he began to get up again.

“Stay down,” muttered Pekkala.

Melekov grunted in agreement. “They never learn. I told you.”

As he watched the Old Believer struggle to his feet, Pekkala could stand it no longer. He walked towards the door which led out to the compound.

“What are you doing?” barked Melekov.

“Tarnowski’s going to kill him.”

“So what if he does? He’ll kill you as well if you get in his way.”

Pekkala did not reply. Opening the flimsy door, he strode into the compound and pushed his way into the circle where the fight was taking place.

Tarnowski was just about to strike the old man another blow when he caught sight of Pekkala. “Get out of the way, kitchen boy.”

Pekkala ignored him. Turning to help the injured man, he was astonished to see that the place where Sedov had been lying was now empty. The only thing remaining was some splashes of blood in the snow. The Old Believer seemed to have vanished into the crowd.

“Look out!” shouted a voice in the crowd.

Glancing at the blur of dirty faces, Pekkala caught sight of Savushkin.

Too late, Pekkala spun around to meet Tarnowski.

That was the last thing he remembered.