Archive 17

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the country, Poskrebyshev had just arrived for work.

As he did every day, he entered the Kremlin through the unmarked door that led directly to an elevator, which was also unmarked. This elevator had only two buttons, UP and DOWN, and brought him directly to the floor on which Stalin’s office was located.

Poskrebyshev prided himself on following exactly the same path to work, even down to where he placed his feet, this side or that side of cracks in the pavement.

From the moment Poskrebyshev left the small apartment, which until last year he had shared with his mother, up to the instant he sat down at his desk, he found himself in a pleasant haze of predictability. He liked things to be in their place. It was a trait Poskrebyshev shared with Stalin, whose insistence on finding things just as he had left them was even more acute than his own.

Entering his large, high-ceilinged chamber, Poskrebyshev hung up his overcoat, placed his paper-wrapped lunch on the windowsill, and sat down at his desk.

He noticed, from the tiny green light on the intercom, that the Boss had already arrived. It was not unusual for him to come in early. Stalin often could not sleep and sometimes spent the whole night in his office or wandering the secret passageways that ran between the walls of the Kremlin.

Poskrebyshev’s first task was always to fill in his personal logbook with the time he had arrived. In all the years he’d worked for Comrade Stalin, he had never been absent or late. Even on the day he discovered that his mother had died in her sleep, he left her lying in her bed, made his lunch, and went to work. He did not call the funeral home until he arrived at the Kremlin.

With a movement so practiced it was practically unconscious, he slid open the drawer to retrieve his logbook.

What took place next caught him so completely by surprise that at first he had no idea what was happening. The desk seemed to shudder, as if the Kremlin, perhaps the whole city of Moscow, had been seized in the grip of an earthquake. Then the desk began to move. It slid forward, the sturdy oak legs buckling, and crashed to the ground. Documents, stacked and ready for filing, slid across the floor in a cascade of lavender-colored telegrams, gray departmental reports, and pink requisition slips.

When everything finally stopped moving, Poskrebyshev was still sitting in his chair, still holding on to the drawer.

Then, from somewhere in the rubble of his collapsed desk, the intercom crackled. It was Stalin. “Pos—” he began, but he was laughing so hard that he could barely speak. “Poskrebyshev, what have you done?”

Then Poskrebyshev realized he had fallen victim to another of Stalin’s cruel jokes. The Boss must have come in early and sawed the legs of his desk completely through, so that even the slightest movement would bring the whole thing crashing down.

“Poskrebyshev!” Stalin snorted through the intercom. “You are such a clumsy little man!”

Poskrebyshev did not reply. Setting aside the drawer, he retrieved his phone from the floor and called maintenance. “I need a new desk,” he said.

There was another howl of laughter from the other room.

“He did it again?” asked the voice from maintenance.

This was, in fact, the third time Stalin had sabotaged Poskrebyshev’s desk.

The first time, Stalin had sawed off the legs completely, so that when Poskrebyshev arrived for work, he found that the desk came up only to his knees. The second time, Poskrebyshev walked into his office and saw only his chair. The desk appeared to have vanished until, one month later, he received a letter from the regional commissar of Urga, Mongolia, thanking him for the unusual and generous gift.

“Just get me a new desk,” Poskrebyshev growled into the phone.

When Stalin’s voice crackled once again over the intercom, his laughter had vanished. This sudden disappearance of good humor was another of Stalin’s traits, which Poskrebyshev had learned to endure. “What is the news from Pekkala?” Stalin demanded.

With the toe of his boot, Poskrebyshev pressed down on the intercom button. “None, Comrade Stalin. No word has come from Borodok.”

PEKKALA WOKE UP on a stone floor. He was freezing. As he looked around, he realized he was in a small hut with a low roof made of rough planks and a wooden door which fitted poorly in its frame. Wind moaned around cracks in the door, which was fastened with a wooden block set across two iron bars. In the corner stood a metal bucket. Otherwise, the room was empty.

He realized he must be in one of the camp’s solitary confinement cells, which were perched up on high ground at the edge of the camp, where they were exposed to a relentless freezing wind.

Pekkala climbed stiffly to his feet. His jaw ached where he’d been hit by Tarnowski. With one hand against the wall to steady himself, he walked over to the door.

Peering through the gaps in the wooden planks, Pekkala saw only bare ground scattered with twigs, broken branches, and yellow blooms of lichen like scabs upon the stones. Below, down a narrow, meandering path, lay the tar-paper rooftops of the camp.

He was hungry. By now the shuddering emptiness Pekkala felt in his gut seemed to be permanent. Thinking about food made him remember it was Friday, the day Kirov used to prepare a meal for him before they both left the office for the weekend.

Prior to his instatement as a commissar in the Red Army, and his subsequent appointment as Pekkala’s assistant, Kirov had trained as a chef at the prestigious Moscow Culinary Institute. If the institute had not been closed down and its buildings taken over by the Factory Apprentice Technical Facility, Kirov’s life might have turned out very differently. But he had never lost his love of cooking, and Pekkala’s office became a menagerie of earthenware pots and vases, in which grew rosemary, sage, mint, cherry tomatoes, and the crooked branches of what might have been the only kumquat tree in Moscow.

The meals Kirov cooked for him were the only decent food Pekkala ate. The rest of the time, he boiled potatoes in a battered aluminum pan, fried sausages, and ate baked beans out of the can. For variety, he wandered across the street to the smoke-filled Cafe Tilsit and ordered whatever they were serving that day.

Pekkala hadn’t always been this way. Before the Revolution, he had loved the restaurants in St. Petersburg, and was once a discerning shopper at the fruit and vegetable stalls in the great covered market of Gostiny Dvor. But his years in the Siberian wilderness had taken from him any pleasure in food. To him it had simply become the fuel that kept him alive.

All that changed on Friday afternoons, when their office filled with the smells of roast tetereva wood pigeon served with warm smetana cream, Anton apples stewed in brandy, or tsiplyata chicken in ripe gooseberry sauce which Kirov cooked on the stove in the corner of the room. Pekkala’s senses would be overwhelmed, by cream cognac sauce, the barely describable complexity of truffles, or the electric sourness of Kirov’s beloved kumquats.

Now Pekkala realized he had almost done what, in retrospect, seemed unforgivable, which was to take for granted the tiny miracles which Kirov had laid before him every Friday afternoon. Pekkala swore to himself that if he was lucky enough to get out of this camp in one piece, he would never again make such a mistake.

He noticed a solitary figure making its way up from the camp. A moment later, the wooden post which locked the door slid back and the man walked into the cell.

It was Sedov.

He carried a blanket rolled up under his arm and a bundle of twigs clutched in his other hand. With a smile, he tossed the blanket to Pekkala and dropped the bundle of twigs in the corner.

“How did you get up here without being stopped?” asked Pekkala as he unraveled the blanket, a coarse thing made from old Tsarist army wool, and immediately wrapped it around his trembling shoulders.

“Tarnowski persuaded one of the guards to let me go.”

“Persuaded?”

Sedov shrugged. “Bribed or threatened. It’s always one or the other.” Removing several flimsy matches from his trouser pocket, Sedov tossed them on the ground before Pekkala. “You will need these as well,” said the old man. “They are a gift from Lavrenov.”

“How long am I in for?”

“A week. The usual punishment for brawling.”

“You were the ones who were brawling.”

“But you were the one who got caught.”

“What about Tarnowski?” asked Pekkala.

“When the guards arrived, he told them you had started it. Somebody had to be punished. It just happened to be you.”

“What was the fight about?”

In answer to this, Sedov only smiled. “All in good time, Inspector.”

They know who I am, thought Pekkala.

Klenovkin had been right. Melekov had not waited long to share his latest scrap of information.

“I have brought you a message from Tarnowski. He says you should try not to freeze to death before tomorrow night.”

“Why should Tarnowski care?”

“Because he is coming to see you.”

“What about?”

“Your fate,” replied Sedov. Without another word, he turned and left.

Pekkala listened to the wooden bolt sliding into place, and after that the old man’s footsteps in the snow, as he made his way back to the camp.

Worry twisted in Pekkala’s gut. Whether he lived or died depended entirely on whether the Comitati believed his cover story. Alone in this cell, weak from lack of food, he would be no match for Tarnowski if the man decided to kill him.

Gathering the matches that the Old Believer had thrown before him, Pekkala undid the bundle of firewood and arranged the twigs in a pyramid. Beneath them, he laid out shreds of papery-white birch bark, peeled from the branches with his fingernails.

Of the four matches, one had already lost its head and was nothing more than a splintery toothpick. The next two Pekkala tried to strike against the stone slab of the floor. One flared but died before he had a chance to touch it to the bark. The second refused to light at all.

As Pekkala knelt over the wood with the last match in his hand, a feeling of panic rose up inside him, knowing that the threadbare blanket would not be enough to get him through this night.

When the fourth match flared, he crouched down until his face was only a handsbreadth from the twigs and gently blew on the embers. The birch bark smoldered. Then a tiny flame blossomed through the smoke. He cupped his hands around it, feeding the fire with broken sticks until it had grown big enough to burn on its own. Sitting cross-legged, as close to the heat as he could, Pekkala slowly began to feel warmth spreading through his body.

By the following evening, he had used up the last carefully rationed splinters of his fuel supply.

As he huddled by the glimmering embers of his fire, he heard piano music down in the guardhouse. Although it was poorly played and the piano was badly out of tune, he could still make out the haunting tune of Sorokin’s “Fires on the Distant Plain.”

The door rattled suddenly, startling Pekkala. He had not heard anyone approach. Then the wooden bolt slid back, and Tarnowski entered the cell.

The air seemed to crackle with menace. Pekkala felt it all around him, as if an electric current were passing through his body. If the Comitati had gotten wind of his true purpose here at Borodok, the odds of surviving this meeting would be zero.

Tarnowski reached into his jacket.

Pekkala thought he might be going for a knife, but when the lieutenant removed his hand, he was not holding a weapon. Instead, it was another small bundle of twigs, which he dumped beside the dwindling sparks of Pekkala’s fire.

At the sight of that kindling, the knot of fear in Pekkala’s stomach began to subside. Pekkala knew he wasn’t in the clear yet, but at least he wasn’t fighting for his life.

“I apologize for the unusual way in which I brought you here,” said Tarnowski.

“Brought me here? I am in this place because I tried to break up your fight with Sedov.”

“That is what you and the guards were supposed to think.”

“You mean it was staged?”

“After Melekov informed me of your identity, he mentioned that you didn’t like the way Sergeant Gramotin was treating our Old Believer. I guessed you wouldn’t stand to see him beaten right before your eyes, especially by the likes of me.”

“You have a crude way of getting things done,” said Pekkala.

“Crude, perhaps, but efficient. This is the only place where we could talk without being observed by the authorities. We used to hold meetings in the mine after dark, but after what happened to Captain Ryabov, the guards have been watching the entrance at night.”

“You damn near broke my jaw,” said Pekkala.

“That is something we might have avoided if you’d identified yourself to us when you arrived at the camp.”

“I didn’t know who I could trust.”

“We felt the same way about you, Inspector, when we first learned you were here.”

“And what do you think now?” Pekkala settled a few of the twigs on the fire.

“The fact that you are still alive should tell you all you need to know,” Tarnowski replied.

Soon the wood began to burn. Flames cast their flickering light across the bare stone walls.

“We were surprised to see you back at Borodok.”

“Not as surprised as I was,” Pekkala answered.

“We almost crossed paths here, you know,” Tarnowski continued. “The last survivors of the Kolchak Expedition reached Borodok not long after you did, but by that time you had already been sent into the forest. For a long time, we heard that you were still alive, even though no one had actually seen you. But when a new tree-marker was sent out to take your place, we became convinced you had died. Then new prisoners started showing up at the camp, saying you had been recalled to duty in Moscow. They said you were working for the Bureau of Special Operations, under the direction of Stalin himself. At first, we didn’t believe it. Why would the Emerald Eye put himself at the disposal of a beast like Stalin? But when these rumors persisted, we began to suspect that the stories might be true.”

“The stories are true,” Pekkala admitted. “I was recalled to Moscow in order to investigate the murder of the Tsar. After that, I was given a choice. Either I could come back here to die or I could go back to the job I had been trained to do.”

“Not much of a choice.”

“Stalin is fond of placing men in such predicaments.”

“And if they do not choose wisely?”

“They die.”

“Like a cat with a mouse,” muttered Tarnowski. “And now he has cast you aside once again, as he has done with so many others. This is where we end up and our job becomes to simply stay alive, a task you might find difficult, since there are men who are here in this camp because of you.”

“No.” Pekkala shook his head. “They are here because of the crimes they committed.”

“A distinction which is lost on them, Inspector. But I have passed the word that anyone who lays a hand on you will answer for it with his life.”

“And who will answer for the murder of Captain Ryabov?”

The muscles clenched along Tarnowski’s jaw. “Saving your life and seeking vengeance for his death are not the same thing, Inspector. So many have perished since we came to this camp, I can no longer even remember their names. It would take a hundred lifetimes to avenge them all. And even if I could, what would be the point? The desire for revenge can take over a man’s life.”

“And can also be the end of it,” said Pekkala.

“As you and I have seen for ourselves.”

“We have?”

“Oh, yes, Inspector. You and I have met before.”

Pekkala was startled by the revelation. “You mean at this camp? But I thought—”

Tarnowski shook his head. “Long before that, Pekkala, on a night even colder than this, outside the Hotel Metropole.”

At the mention of that place, memories came tumbling like an avalanche out of the darkness of his mind. “The duel!” whispered Pekkala.

He was sitting at a table in the hotel restaurant, waiting for Ilya to arrive. For his fiancée’s birthday, Pekkala had promised her dinner at the finest place in St. Petersburg.

Large white pillars, like relics from a temple on Olympus, held up the high ceiling, in the center of which was a huge skylight, its view of the heavens obscured by thick swirls of cigarette smoke.

From every corner of the room came laughter, the clink of cutlery on plates, and the dry clatter of footsteps on the tiled floor.

Tuxedoed and ball-gowned couples danced on a raised floor at the far end of the room, to music played by a troupe of gypsies, dressed in their traditional bright, flowing clothes. In front of the musicians stood the most famous singer in St. Petersburg, Maria Nikolaevna. Her quavering voice rose above all other sounds as she sang Panina’s melancholy song “I Do Not Speak to You.”

A high balcony skirted the large rectangular room. Set into the walls along this balcony and interspersed between tropical elephant-ear ferns were rows of doors leading into private rooms known as “Kabinets.” What went on in those cramped spaces, judging from the endless stream of waiters in short white jackets delivering blinis and caviar, as well as the scantily dressed women who flitted like ghosts between the Kabinets, was not difficult to guess.

Now and then, the warmth of the tobacco-fogged air would be disturbed by waves of cold as the double doors to the street were flung open and new customers entered, stamping pom-poms of snow from the toes of their boots and shedding huge sable coats. Immediately, they would be ushered to their tables, leaving behind a glittering dust of frost in the air, as if they had materialized from the haze of a magician’s spell.

Pekkala kept his eyes on the door as he sipped a cup of smoky-tasting tea. He wondered why Ilya was late. She was normally punctual, which was perhaps to be expected from a teacher of young children. Probably the headmistress had kept her behind again to discuss some change in the curriculum, not in spite of the fact that she must have known it was Ilya’s birthday and that Pekkala had made reservations at the Metropole but precisely because of that fact. The headmistress had done things like this before, and now Pekkala clenched his fist upon the tablecloth as he silently cursed the old woman.

Just when he was about to give up and go home, the door opened and this time Pekkala felt sure it must be Ilya. Instead, however, a giant of a man walked into the room, swathed in the uniform of an Imperial cavalry officer. The newcomer removed his cap in the manner of a cavalryman, lifting it from the back and tipping it forward off his head. Briefly, he glanced about to get his bearings, then climbed the stairs and strode along the balcony. The leaves of palm trees brushed against his shoulders, as if bowing to the giant as he passed. He came to a stop outside one of the Kabinets, knocked once, and entered. Late for the party, guessed Pekkala, and for a moment he went back to thinking about Ilya—whether she would like the present he had bought her, a silver dragonfly necklace made by the St. Petersburg jeweler Nijinsky. The necklace had been very expensive, and quietly it galled Pekkala to pay so much for something so utterly impractical.

The wanderings of Pekkala’s mind were halted by the sound of the door to the Kabinet opening again. This time two men emerged—the giant cavalry officer again and a man Pekkala recognized as Colonel Kolchak.

Kolchak was fastening the buttons on his tunic as he descended from the balcony and made his way towards the exit. Glancing across the sea of guests, he caught Pekkala’s eye.

The two men nodded in greeting.

Kolchak’s expression was grim and angry. He muttered something in the ear of the cavalry officer, who then crossed the dining room, sidestepping in the narrow space between tables with an agility surprising for such a heavyset man. He arrived at Pekkala’s table, clicked his heels, and jolted his head forward in a hasty bow. “I am the colonel’s aide-de-camp. He requires your help, Inspector.”

Immediately Pekkala rose to his feet, dropping his napkin on the table. “What is it about?”

“Colonel Kolchak needs you to be his second.”

“His second what?”

“His second in a duel.”

The word took Pekkala’s breath away. “A duel? When? Where?”

“Outside. Now.”

Pekkala hesitated. Although the fighting of duels was legal, as far as he knew, it had been years since one had taken place in the streets of St. Petersburg. In order to make the duel legal, a second was required for each man, and these seconds, if asked, were required by law to witness the event.

“If you don’t mind my asking, Lieutenant, why aren’t you his second in this matter?”

“Because Colonel Kolchak asked for you, Inspector. Now if you will kindly follow me …”

Out in the street, it was snowing. Horse-drawn carriages passed by, wheels purring through the slush.

A staff car, which Pekkala recognized as belonging to Colonel Kolchak, was pulled up onto the curb.

In the road stood a man Pekkala had never seen before. He was of medium height, with short dark hair parted down the middle and a neatly trimmed mustache. The man was in the process of taking off his jacket, which he handed to another man standing beside him.

This second man was gaunt and narrow-lipped. A sheepskin cap was perched high upon his head.

Opposite these two, about twenty paces away, stood Colonel Kolchak. Wobbling on his feet, the colonel was obviously drunk. “Let’s get this over with!” he shouted.

“Kolchak,” said Pekkala, “let us talk this through. I beg you to reconsider the challenge you have brought against this man.”

Kolchak turned to him and laughed. “You are talking to the wrong man, Pekkala. I am not the one who asked to fight a duel.”

“But what is this about?”

Kolchak shook his head and spat into the snow. “Nothing that matters to me.”

Realizing this was the only answer he was going to get, Pekkala approached the other men.

The gaunt figure in the sheepskin cap came out to meet him. “I am Polivanov,” he said.

“And who is he?” Pekkala nodded towards the gentleman with the mustache.

“That is Maxim Alexeyevich Radom,” answered Polivanov. “It is he who has brought the challenge against Colonel Kolchak.”

“But why?”

“This is a point of honor,” Polivanov replied. “I am acting as his second. Am I to understand that you are the second for Colonel Kolchak?”

“I …” began Pekkala. “Yes, I am but …”

From the pockets of his coat, Polivanov removed two revolvers. Holding them by the barrels, he held the weapons out towards Pekkala. “Choose, please.”

“What?”

Polivanov leaned towards Pekkala and lowered his voice. “You must select a gun, sir.”

“Are you sure this can’t be stopped?” pleaded Pekkala.

“Quite sure,” replied Polivanov.

Hesitantly, Pekkala reached out and took one of the pistols. He could tell from the weight that it was fully loaded.

Polivanov measured out twelve paces. At each end he drew a line with his heel in the wet snow.

Maxim Radom walked forward to the line which had been drawn for him. Clasped in one hand was a crumpled piece of paper. Wearing only a shirt above his waist, Radom shuddered with the cold.

Now Kolchak advanced to his line. He held out his hand to Pekkala. “Give me the gun,” he ordered.

Reluctantly, Pekkala handed him the weapon. “Colonel, I beg you to reconsider. What honor can there be in gunning down another man?”

Kolchak did not reply. Instead he opened the cylinder, cocked the revolver, and peered down the barrel at his opponent. Then he spun the cylinder, holding it up to his ear, like a burglar listening to the tumblers of a safe. With a jerk of his wrist, Kolchak closed the cylinder. “Stand aside,” he told Pekkala, and suddenly he did not sound drunk anymore.

Once more Pekkala turned to face the two strangers, still convinced that there might be a way to end this without bloodshed. But there was something about the way they stood, and the grim formality of their expressions, which made Pekkala realize that he was part of something he could not prevent.

Radom unfolded the piece of paper in his hand. “Colonel Kolchak,” he announced in a loud but shaking voice, “I will read the charge against you.”

“Go to hell!” snarled Kolchak. “Do you want to kill me or don’t you?”

Radom flinched, as if the colonel had just spat in his face. With trembling fingers, he attempted to fold up the paper again, but instead he dropped it in the snow. For a moment he stared at it and seemed to be contemplating whether there was more dignity in bending down to retrieve the note or in leaving the paper where it lay.

Before he could make up his mind, Kolchak’s voice thundered once more through the darkness. “Who’s first?”

“The choice is yours,” answered Radom.

In that moment, Pekkala no longer felt the freezing air blowing in off the Neva River. Nor could he hear the sound of laughter and music from inside the Metropole. Even the drifting snowflakes seemed to pause in their descent.

Kolchak examined the revolver in his hand. He turned it one way and then another and the glimmer of the streetlamps winked off its blued-steel barrel. Then, casually, he raised the gun and pulled the trigger.

The sound was flat and brittle, like that of someone breaking a dry stick across their knee.

Maxim Alexeyevich Radom stood perfectly still.

Kolchak missed, thought Pekkala. Thank God, the man is too drunk to shoot straight. Now surely they will call the whole thing off.

Another moment passed before Pekkala realized that he was mistaken.

Radom’s neat dark hair stuck up on one side, like a shard of black glass. Slowly, the man raised his arms out to the side, like someone about to set out across a tightrope. He took one careful step backwards. Then he fell into the slush, the gun tumbling out of his hand.

Pekkala and Polivanov both ran to help the injured man, but there was nothing they could do.

Radom had been shot just above the left eye. His skull had been cracked open and the scalp folded back upon itself. Steam drifted from the hole in Radom’s head.

Radom was still alive but his breathing had become a deep, guttural snore. It was a sound Pekkala had heard before, and he knew that the man had only minutes left to live.

At that moment, the double doors of the Metropole flew open and a woman ran out into the street. Her hair was a dark, tangled mass. She was wearing only a silk negligee, and as she passed through the lamplight, the gossamer fabric seemed to disappear like smoke, leaving her naked in the freezing air.

Stumbling barefoot through the snow, she made her way to where Radom had collapsed. With a wail she sank down next to him, pressing her hands against his bloody face.

Kolchak had not moved since he fired the revolver. Now he shook his head and tossed the gun away.

The lieutenant emerged from where he had been waiting in the shadows and the two men climbed into Kolchak’s car.

That was when Pekkala caught sight of Ilya coming down the road.

He ran to meet her.

“Why is that man lying here?” Her cheeks were rosy in the cold.

“We should go.” Gently he took her by the arm.

“What about the Metropole? What about our dinner?”

“Some other time,” Pekkala replied.

“What happened?” She was staring at the woman in the negligee.

“Please,” whispered Pekkala. “I promise I will tell you later.”

Sitting behind the wheel, the lieutenant started up the car.

Hearing the noise of the engine, the woman in the negligee raised her head. She caught sight of Kolchak in the backseat of the car and let out a scream of sadness and rage.

The car pulled out into the road and drove past, showering them all with icy water.

Pekkala glimpsed a match flaring in the car as Kolchak lit himself a cigarette.

As they passed, the driver turned towards Pekkala.

That man was Lieutenant Tarnowski.

Their eyes locked, and then the car was gone, and the glittering frost which filled the air seemed to close up around it, as if it had never been there.

Kolchak’s duel was the last one ever fought in St. Petersburg. Two days later, the Tsar outlawed this barbaric ritual.

AFTER TARNOWSKI, there were no more visitors.

It was hunger which preoccupied Pekkala now, no matter how hard he tried to steer it from his mind.

On his fifth day in solitary, Pekkala spotted a cockroach scuttling across the floor. The thumb-sized, amber-colored insect reached the far wall and began to move along it.

Without another thought, Pekkala lunged across the floor and caught it. With nausea rising in his throat, he crushed the cockroach in his fist and ate the mash of legs and shell and innards, mixed with the gray-brown silt, like the ashes from a crematory oven, which he had clawed up from the floor along with the insect.

Pekkala felt no revulsion, knowing that in the Gulags, only those who were prepared to set aside all pretense of dignity would go on living.

To take his mind off the fact that he was starving, he focused his thoughts on the murder of Ryabov. Since arriving at the camp, he had been presented with several possibilities, all of which appeared to circle around the truth. But none of them, as far as Pekkala was concerned, pointed directly at it. Commandant Klenovkin was convinced that the killing had been carried out by the Comitati. Melekov blamed Sergeant Gramotin. The Comitati themselves seemed resigned to their gradual extinction in this place, at the hands of whoever dared to challenge them. For Tarnowski, the killer and his reasons hardly seemed to matter anymore. The only thing they had left to believe in was that their leader would one day return to set them free.

Pekkala admired the Comitati for the depth of their faith, but for that same reason he also pitied them. Even if Kolchak had promised to return someday, Pekkala did not believe that the colonel would keep his word. Although Pekkala had not been well acquainted with Kolchak, he knew precisely the kind of man the Tsar would have chosen for such an important task. Kolchak may have selected the men under his command for their loyalty to him, but the Tsar had picked Kolchak for his ability to carry out the mission, no matter what the cost in human life. That mission was to transport the gold. For such a task, cold blood, not compassion, was required. Once his soldiers had fallen into captivity, Kolchak would have weighed the risks of trying to free them and realized that the odds were too great. What the men under Kolchak’s command had never been able to accept was that they were, in the eyes of their leader, expendable.

The mission had failed. The gold had fallen into the hands of the enemy. The Tsar was dead. The war was over. For Colonel Kolchak, these bitter truths would have been harder to accept than the loss of his soldiers.

One thing continued to puzzle Pekkala more than anything else. After holding out for so many years, why had Captain Ryabov suddenly approached the Commandant in order to bargain for his freedom with information too old to be of any probable use? Even if he did possess some scrap of useful knowledge, why would he choose this time to betray the colonel?

Perhaps Commandant Klenovkin was right, and the captain had finally grown tired of waiting. But what Pekkala did not believe was Klenovkin’s claim that time and hardship had simply caused Ryabov to crack. Something specific had pushed Ryabov over the edge, perhaps a horror he had glimpsed on the horizon or else an event from his past which had finally caught up with him. If the latter was true, then the answer might lie in the contents of Ryabov’s file—if only the missing pages could be found.

The time had come to bring Kirov onto the case. All Pekkala had to do now was wait until they let him out of this cell.

At dawn on the seventh day, Gramotin and Platov came to fetch him. In their heavy greatcoats, they were sweating by the time they had trudged up the hill.

Pekkala was sitting with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest, clinging to the tiny pocket of warmth he had created under the threadbare blanket.

“Get up,” ordered Gramotin.

“Time to get back to work,” added Platov.

Stiffly, Pekkala rose to his feet, and the two guards walked him down towards the camp.

Halfway there, Platov tripped Pekkala, sending him sprawling on the muddy path.

Rolling over onto his back, Pekkala found himself staring down the muzzle of Gramotin’s rifle.

“We heard about you,” Gramotin said.

“Heard you were a detective,” Platov chimed in.

“That’s right.” Pekkala tried to stand but Gramotin swung his rifle butt into Pekkala’s shin and knocked him down again.

“We also heard that the Comitati want you to stay in one piece,” continued Gramotin. “We have learned, over the years, to get along with those gentlemen, which sometimes means granting them a wish or two, but the next time you see a fight, Inspector, you stay out of it. If I have to come all this way again to fetch you down from solitary, no matter what the Comitati want, I swear you’ll never make it to the bottom of the hill. Understand?”

Pekkala nodded, gritting his teeth from the pain in his bruised shin.

By the time they reached the camp, a large truck had arrived in the compound.

The canvas flaps had been thrown back and a group of hawk-eyed women were climbing down into the slush. Even more than their gender, it was the colors of their clothes which set them apart from the dreary world of Borodok. To Pekkala, they looked like tropical birds which had been blown off course from their migrations and ended up in a place where their survival would depend on a miracle.

“Hello, my darlings!” Gramotin called to them.

“I’ll see you later,” said a woman with a tobacco-husky voice. As she spoke, she drew apart the lapels of her heavy coat and swayed her hips from side to side.

“I love it when the whores come by.” Platov was grinning. “But look at the line already.”

At the camp hospital, the queue of men stretched halfway round the building. The hospital windows, lacking glass, were made from opaque panels of pressed fish skin, and they wept with condensation. Out of the back door of the hospital, the sick were being moved to other parts of the camp. Two hospital orderlies carried out one man on a stretcher. The sick man’s face was gray with fever. He seemed oblivious to what was happening, as the orderlies parked his stretcher in the woodshed beside the main building. Even though he did not fit inside the shed, the orderlies left him there, bare feet jutting out into the snow.

The two guards walked Pekkala to the kitchen.

Melekov met Pekkala in the doorway. With arms folded across his chest and a large wooden spoon clasped in each fist, he eyed Pekkala disapprovingly.

As soon as they were both inside the kitchen, Melekov launched into a scolding. “What did you think you were doing getting involved in a fight with the Comitati? If you want to get yourself killed, there are much simpler ways of going about it!” As if to emphasize his point, Melekov walked over to his cutting board. The huge slab of wood had been worn down smoothly in the middle, like a rock pool formed by centuries of dripping water. Melekov scrubbed it at the end of each shift and treated the wood twice a month with special almond oil which he kept just for that purpose.

Pekkala thought it was one of the most accidentally beautiful things he had ever seen.

Heaped on the board now was the skinned leg of a goat, pale and bloodless, filmed with a strange shimmer of colors that reminded Pekkala of opals. “Much easier ways to die!” Melekov shouted, cleaving through sinew and gristle with his monstrous carving knife. “Well, don’t just stand there, convict. You have to bring the commandant his breakfast.” He nodded towards a tray which had been covered by a dish towel.

Pekkala went over to pick it up.

“Wait!” Melekov shouted.

Pekkala froze in his tracks.

Melekov stabbed a piece of goat meat with his butcher knife and raised it to his lips. With cruel precision, his pasty white tongue slithered out. Goat blood trickled down his wrists.

Pekkala watched in pleading silence.

Just before the meat disappeared into Melekov’s mouth, he gave the blade a sudden flick, which sent the little cube flying across the room. It bounced off Pekkala’s forehead, falling to the dirty concrete floor. With a speed that surprised even himself, Pekkala dropped to his knees. Snatching up the meat, he swallowed it without chewing. By the time the gristly knot of flesh had made its way down his throat, his eyes were watering. “Thank you,” he managed to whisper.

Carrying the tray, Pekkala walked across the compound. Inside Klenovkin’s office, he laid the breakfast tray before the commandant.

“There is only so much I can do for you!” Klenovkin barked at him. “If you will insist on breaking the rules of this camp and getting yourself thrown into solitary—”

Pekkala didn’t let him finish. “I need to send a telegram to Moscow.”

Klenovkin snatched up a piece of paper and one of his needle-sharp pencils, then slid them both across the desk. “Get on with it,” he muttered.

Pekkala scribbled out a message——

FIND MISSING CONTENTS OF RYABOV FILE STOP SEARCH ARCHIVE 17 STOP PEKKALA

He handed the paper to Klenovkin. “This must go out straightaway.”

Klenovkin took the piece of paper and stared at it. “But why is this even necessary? I told you the Comitati were responsible. As far as I’m concerned, the only reason you’re here is to pick out which one of them did it. Now, what I suggest you do is arrest them all and be done with it. The only telegram you should be sending to Moscow is to announce that the case has been closed.”

“I do not share your certainty, Commandant.”

“But they are the only ones who stand to benefit from Ryabov’s death!”

“On the contrary. You have made no secret of your hatred for these men. What better way to be rid of them than to kill one man and blame the others for his murder? In a single act you could sweep all of them away.”

Klenovkin smashed his fist down on the table. “I will not stand to be accused!”

As if propelled by some invisible current of air, the pencil Pekkala had been using began to roll.

Both of them watched it gathering speed until it tipped off the end of the desk and fell with a rattle to the floor.

Deliberately, Pekkala bent down, picked up the pencil, and placed it back where it had been before. “I have not accused you of anything. I am merely showing you that the situation is more complicated than you imagine. I am beginning to think that the reason for his death might lie outside this camp.”

“And you hope to find the answer in this Archive 17?”

“With your permission, Camp Commandant.”

“Very well,” he replied gruffly. “I will allow it to go through.”

When Pekkala had gone, Klenovkin sank back into his chair. His heart was beating so quickly that he felt as if he were being rhythmically punched in the throat.

Sergeant Gramotin poked his head around the door. “I heard shouting. Is everything all right, Commandant? Has that prisoner been causing any trouble?”

Klenovkin grunted. “Any trouble? At the moment, he is causing all the trouble.”

“I can take care of that, Commandant.”

Klenovkin sighed and shook his head. “Patience, Gramotin. The bastard is protected. At least, he is for now.”

RETURNING TO THE KITCHEN, Pekkala set to work delivering the thin vegetable broth known as balanda, which was served to the miners for their midday break.

The soup was carried in buckets which fastened with a wooden lid and a toggle on a piece of string; Pekkala hauled the buckets on a cart made out of rough planks. Its wheels yawed on gap-toothed hubs. A horse that used to pull the kitchen cart had died of exhaustion one week before Pekkala arrived at the camp. Without another animal to take its place, Pekkala strapped himself into the leather harness and struggled across the compound, his sweat mixing with the sweat of the horse whose bones had long since been sucked hollow by the camp inmates.

Arriving at the entrance to the mine, Pekkala called into the darkness and listened to his voice shout back to him. Then he waited, hypnotized by the tiny swaying flames of lanterns along the tunnel wall.

“A MESSAGE!” Poskrebyshev burst into Stalin’s office, brandishing a telegram. “A message from Borodok!”

Stalin held out his hand. “Give it to me.” He snatched the telegram from Poskrebyshev, placed it carefully on the desk in front of him, and stared at the piece of paper. “Archive 17,” he muttered.

“What exactly is in Archive 17, Comrade Stalin?”

“Old files, misplaced files, files out of order, files incomplete. Archive 17 is the graveyard of Soviet bureaucracy. The question is what does Pekkala hope to find there?”

“He is looking for the file on a man named Ryabov,” said Poskrebyshev, trying to be helpful.

“I know what he is looking for!” Stalin shouted. “I mean what does he hope to find on Ryabov, assuming anything can be located. The question was rhetorical. Do you know what ‘rhetorical’ means, Poskrebyshev?”

Poskrebyshev did not answer directly, in case that question might also have been rhetorical. He continued to puzzle over Stalin’s fixation with this dead prisoner. The discovery that Kolchak might still be alive seemed to have disrupted the order of Stalin’s universe in ways that even the outbreak of war had not achieved. It was as if Stalin had remained locked in a private war with the Tsar, even though Nicholas II had been dead for years. He would not rest until every last vestige of that defunct civilization had been trampled into dust. Of the old guard, only Pekkala had escaped Stalin’s wrath, but for how much longer, Poskrebyshev did not dare to guess, as long as this case remained unsolved.

THERE WAS A THUNDEROUS KNOCKING on the door of Kirov’s office.

Kirov stood up from his desk and strode across the room. Opening the door, he found himself looking at a corporal of the NKVD, smartly dressed in an olive tunic, deep blue trousers, and black boots. The man’s cap was tucked under his left arm. He saluted and held out a brown envelope. “Telegram for you, Major.”

“All right,” said Kirov, taking the envelope and haphazardly returning the salute.

“Have you taken over from Inspector Pekkala, Comrade Major?” asked the corporal.

“Of course not!” replied Kirov. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s just that you’re wearing his coat.”

Kirov glanced at his sleeve and then down at his chest, as if he could not figure out how he had come to be wearing Pekkala’s overcoat. He had only tried it on to see how it felt, just for a minute, to see if it was comfortable. Kirov had often made fun of this coat, along with every other piece of Pekkala’s clothing. None of it was remotely in style, not surprising since Pekkala bought his clothes from a place just down the road called Linsky’s. Its shop window boasted mannequins with mismatched limbs, lopsided, grassy wigs, and haughty stares which seemed to follow people in the street. Kirov had known people who not only wouldn’t shop there but crossed the road rather than catch the eye of one of Linsky’s mannequins.

Linsky’s prided itself on the durability of its clothing. The sign above the door read THE LAST SUIT YOU’LL EVER NEED. This was an unfortunate choice of words, since Linsky’s was best known for providing clothes for bodies at funeral viewings. “Linsky’s!” Kirov used to announce with mock solemnity, before adding the slogan, “Clothes for Dead People!”

But when he actually tried on the coat, Kirov could not help admiring its construction. The tightly woven wool was so thick it seemed almost bulletproof. The pockets had been lined with moleskin for warmth and there were other, strangely shaped pockets on the inside, whose existence Kirov had not known about and whose purpose remained a mystery to him.

“What makes you think this is Pekkala’s?” demanded Kirov.

The corporal pointed hesitantly at the collar of the coat.

Kirov’s hand drifted up to the place. Unsure where to keep Pekkala’s badge of office, he had simply returned the Emerald Eye to its original place beneath the lapel. “You can go now,” muttered Kirov.

Hurriedly, the man saluted and left, steel-shod boots clattering away down the stairs.

Back in the office, Kirov opened the telegram. “Archive 17? What the hell is that?” Immediately, he sat down at his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed a number. “Hello? Yes. Hello. This is Major Kirov from Inspector Pekkala’s office. Yes, I am looking for the file of a man named Ryabov. Captain Isaac Ryabov. File number is 4995-R-G. Good. Yes. I’ll stay on the line.” Kirov breathed out slowly while he waited, allowing the black receiver’s mouthpiece to slide under his chin. He tilted back in the chair and put his heels up on Pekkala’s desk.

A moment later, a voice came back on the line.

“I know, I have the file,” said Kirov. “I’m looking at it now, but it contains only one page!” He picked up the sheet and wagged it in the air. “There must be something missing. According to this file, there is no record of a Captain Ryabov before March of 1917. In other words, as far as we know, he did not exist before the Tsar stepped down from power. Well, I know that can’t be right. I’ve been told it might be in Archive 17, so if you could just connect me with them … What? Are you serious? There isn’t even a telephone? Yes, I could fill out a written request, but how long would it take to process? I don’t think you understand. I don’t have a month to get this done. I could see to it myself? Today? Very well. Where is it located? I didn’t know there was a government building on Zelionka Street. I thought those were all abandoned warehouses. Yes, I’ll be there when it opens.” With a dry click, the line disconnected.

A few minutes later, wearing his uniform, complete with polished boots, dress cap, and Tokarev automatic in a holster at his belt, Major Kirov set off to find Archive 17. Tucked under his arm was the file of Captain Ryabov.

In order to save time, he took a shortcut across the sprawling Bolotnia Market, where old women in muddy-hemmed dresses hawked jars of gooseberry jam and gap-toothed men with bloodhound eyes chanted the price of potatoes.

He stopped to ask directions from a young boy in a floppy, short-brimmed cap, who sat behind a table on which a pile of dead rabbits lay stretched as if stolen from their lives in the moment of leaping to freedom.

“Zelionka Street? There’s nothing but ghosts in those old buildings.”

“Nevertheless,” replied Kirov, “it is where I need to be.”

The boy pointed in the direction Kirov was headed.

Kirov nodded thanks, took one step, then stopped and turned to face the boy again. “Why aren’t you in school?” he asked.

The boy laughed. “And why are you looking for ghosts, Comrade Major of the NKVD?” With that, the boy picked up one of the dead rabbits and, taking hold of one paw, flapped it up and down to say good-bye.

Still clutching the file, Kirov arrived at Archive 17 of Internal Security just as the clerk was unlocking the door to a dingy, windowless, and flat-roofed building which stood between two empty warehouses.

The clerk was a small, aggressive-looking man with a thin mustache and narrow shoulders. He wore an overcoat with a scarf neatly tied around his neck and an old-fashioned round-topped hat, the likes of which Kirov had not seen since before the Revolution. Although the man was obviously aware of Kirov’s presence, he ignored the major while he unlocked the door. Finally, just before he disappeared inside, he turned and spoke to the major. “Wherever you think you are, I can assure you this is the wrong place.”

“Archive 17,” Kirov said quickly to avoid having the door shut in his face. The clerk seemed ready to barricade himself inside the building.

“You have come to the right place,” the man replied abruptly, “but these archives are reserved for Internal Security. A person like you can’t come in here.”

“I am Major Kirov, with Special Operations.”

“Oh,” muttered the clerk. “Then I suppose you can come in, after all. I am Professor Braninko, the guardian of Archive 17.” Reluctantly, he motioned for Kirov to enter.

Inside the archive, Kirov was startled to see, among the hundreds of wooden filing cabinets lining the walls, statues of soldiers in outdated military uniforms, as well as busts of men with gruff faces and wide, unseeing eyes. In the center of the room lay a huge severed hand, held out as if waiting for giant coins to be placed in its palm.

“This place used to be a sculpture studio,” Braninko explained. “Some of these have been here since the Revolution. When they moved me in here fifteen years ago, they couldn’t be bothered to clear out the statues.”

“Couldn’t you get rid of them yourself?”

Braninko laughed. “Young man, they are made of bronze! It would take a dozen men to lift any one of these statues. Besides, I have grown used to them.”

Kirov stopped before a larger-than-life statue of a man wearing the cocked hat of an admiral. “Do you know who they are?”

“No idea,” replied Braninko. “To me, these statues are like the bones of dinosaurs. They may once have ruled the earth, but all that remains of them now are harmless, empty shells.” He hung his overcoat upon the outstretched finger of the hand, exchanging it for a heavy gray shawl-collared sweater which fastened with wooden toggles up the front. “Of course, a day might come when the titans of our own generation are hidden from the light in dusty rooms. Until that time, these relics will be my companions.”

“It smells of smoke in here,” remarked Kirov.

“Yes. Those are the Okhrana files. During the Revolution, the headquarters of the Tsar’s Secret Police was burned by … by …” He seemed to have lost his train of thought.

“By Revolutionaries?” suggested Kirov, hoping to steer the man back on course.

“You can call them that if you want to!” blustered Braninko. “Vandals are what I call them! Hoodlums! Destroying a place of records is inexcusable. Information does not care whose side it’s on. Information is what helps us to make sense of the world. It points us to the truth. Without it, we are at the mercy of every self-serving liar who comes along. Believe me, Comrade Major, when you find yourself talking to a man who keeps the truth from you and tells you it’s for your own good, you are dealing with a common criminal! Fortunately, they destroyed only a portion of the files. Those that could be salvaged were brought here to Archive 17, still smelling of smoke, I’m afraid.”

“I am looking for the file on Captain Isaac Ryabov, of the Imperial Cavalry. Is it possible that his documents survived the fire?”

“I’m afraid not, Major. Everything from the letter K onwards in the Okhrana files was destroyed. But I see you already have a file on this man.”

Kirov handed it over.

“Only one page?” asked Braninko, when he had looked inside the folder.

“There’s no information on Captain Ryabov from before the Revolution. I thought it might simply be missing from the file, and I was informed that I might find the information here.”

“As I said, Major, everything beyond the letter K went up in smoke.” Braninko continued to study the contents of the folder. “I see here that Captain Ryabov was transferred to Borodok.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

Braninko cleared his throat. “Major, I don’t know how familiar you are with the Gulag system, but I can tell you that Ryabov won’t be coming back from there.”

“You are quite right, Professor. Captain Ryabov has been murdered.”

“Ah.” Braninko went back to studying the sheet.

“Is there nothing you can do to help?”

The professor shook his head. “I’m sorry, Major.”

Kirov sighed with disappointment.

“Unless …” said Braninko.

“Unless what?”

“There are some other documents.” The professor spoke quietly, as if afraid the statues might be listening.

“Well, what are we waiting for? May I see them?”

“No. That’s the problem. You may not.”

“But why not?”

“There exists a set of papers known as the Blue File.”

“I have never heard of it.”

“Few people have. The contents of the file are secret. Even the existence of the file is classified information.”

“What’s so special about it?”

“The Blue File contains the names of spies who operated within the Okhrana.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” protested Kirov. “Back then all Russian spies operated within the Okhrana. They were part of the Tsar’s Secret Service. They answered to the Okhrana.”

“You misunderstand me, Comrade Major. The Blue File does not contain the names of Russian agents who spied for the Okhrana. These were agents who spied on the Okhrana.”

Kirov blinked. “You mean to tell me there were agents who spied on our own Secret Service?”

Braninko nodded.

“But the Secret Service controlled all spying operations!” protested Kirov. “Who would these agents answer to?”

“To the Tsar,” replied Braninko. “And only to the Tsar.”

Kirov was stunned. “And the Okhrana did not know about this?”

“That is correct. Even the great Chief Inspector Vassileyev was unaware of it.”

“Then why was the file discovered at Okhrana headquarters?”

“It wasn’t,” Braninko explained. “This file was found in a locked desk in the Tsar’s study. In the chaos of the Revolution, he forgot to dispose of the documents. Either that, or he could not bring himself to destroy them.”

“Why is it called the Blue File?”

“The entries are written in blue pencil. It is the Tsar’s own writing.”

“And who else knows about this file?”

“Let me put it this way, Major—I have taken a great risk by even informing you of its existence.”

“But Ryabov might be in there!”

“Once again, Major, there is that possibility, but let me ask you something. What is it exactly that you need to know?”

“I’m not sure,” replied Kirov. “If Inspector Pekkala were here …”

Braninko breathed in sharply. “Pekkala?”

“Yes,” answered Kirov. “He and I work together.”

Braninko’s head tilted a little to the side, like that of a curious dog. “You work with the Inspector?”

“I am also an inspector, you know.”

“I didn’t say an inspector,” replied Braninko. “I said the Inspector.”

“All right, then,” muttered Kirov. “I work with the Inspector, and if he were here—”

“Why isn’t he here?” interrupted Braninko. “He would be allowed to see the Blue File.”

“Why would you let him see it and not me?”

Braninko paused before he answered. “Do you remember what I said about men who hide the truth?”

“You called them common criminals.”

“Correct, and the only defense against them is men like Inspector Pekkala. No matter what the regulations called for, I would never do anything to hinder one of his investigations.”

“Comrade Braninko, this is his investigation.” Kirov went on to explain Pekkala’s mission to Borodok. “Now can you help me or not?” he asked when he had finished.

“Follow me,” replied Braninko.

At the back of the old sculpture studio, a massive safe stood in the corner of an otherwise empty room. After opening the safe, Braninko removed a drawer which had been removed from a desk. The drawer was made from some exotic wood, inlaid with ornate flower patterns done in ebony and mother-of-pearl.

“As you see,” Braninko told Kirov, “they took it straight from the Tsar’s study. These documents have never been integrated with those of our own Intelligence Service.” Turning to the file, Braninko began sifting through the documents. “Here it is!” he exclaimed, hauling out an envelope. “Ryabov, Isaac; assigned to the Kolchak Expedition.”

The younger man felt his heart jolt. “Now we can find out what this man was doing before the Revolution.”

“It won’t be that easy, Major. There is a good reason NKVD has so little information on this man. Isaac Ryabov is a cover name. Unlike in Okhrana and NKVD archives, the real identities of agents working secretly for the Tsar were never written down. When Nicholas II died, the names of these men died with him. All we have left are the clues remaining in the Blue File, but if there is anyone on earth who could make sense of them, it would be Inspector Pekkala.”

Kirov stared at the Tsar’s handwriting, precise and ornate. The faded blue pencil resembled the veins in an old person’s hand. “May I borrow this, professor?”

“For Inspector Pekkala—of course.” Braninko handed him the time-brittled paper.

The two men walked out into the sculpture studio.

Once more Kirov breathed in the smell of that long-extinguished fire which had consumed Okhrana headquarters.

Braninko sat down on the huge severed hand, looking like some tiny helpless creature resting in the palm of a capricious god as he waited for his fate to be decided.

“There is something I don’t understand,” Kirov told him. “Why does our government choose to keep the Blue File secret? The Okhrana is gone forever. The men whose names are in that file are either dead or in exile. The information it contains should no longer be considered classified.”

Braninko smiled, raising his hands and resting them upon the fingertips of the great bronze hand. “My dear Comrade Major,” he said, “the reason for keeping the Blue File secret has nothing to do with what it contains. The very fact that there was once a group of men who spied upon those whose job it was to spy on others is, in itself, a dangerous thing. It might lead people to wonder if there is another such file kept, perhaps, by our own government and hidden away in the desk of some untouchable man. The best secret, Comrade Major, is not one whose answer is hidden from us by the strongest lock and key. The best secret is one which nobody even knows exists.”

As soon as he was outside the archive, Kirov ducked into one of the abandoned warehouse buildings. With his back against a cold brick wall, he opened the Kolchak Expedition file. It contained three sheets of paper. Each was embossed with the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs.

From the Tsar’s handwritten notes, Kirov learned that an Okhrana agent had been wounded in an attack on a house in St. Petersburg where a convicted murderer had been hiding. The murderer, whose name was Grodek, had been a notorious terrorist before the Revolution.

Kirov had learned about this mission from Pekkala, who had been a part of it. But what Kirov read next, even Pekkala didn’t know.

Rather than return the wounded agent to active duty, the Tsar had secretly ordered the man’s name to be placed on the list of those who had died in the attack. In the meantime, the agent was brought to a clinic on the grounds of the Ekaterinburg estate. There he was tended to by the Tsar’s own doctor until he had recovered.

The Tsar then summoned the agent and gave him a choice. Either he could return to the ranks of the Okhrana and the report of his death would be attributed to a bureaucratic mix-up, or he could agree to work as an agent for the Tsar, and only for the Tsar, taking part in missions so secret that not even his own intelligence service would be informed.

The agent had required no persuasion. He readily agreed and, soon after, was given a new identity as a cavalry officer with the cover name of Isaac Ryabov.

There followed a list of several missions undertaken by Ryabov, ranging from payoffs made to women made pregnant by Rasputin to the assassination of a Turkish diplomat suspected of involvement in smuggling stolen Russian steam turbine technology out of the country.

The last entry in the file detailed how the Tsar had appointed Ryabov to the cavalry brigade of Colonel Kolchak, only days before the expedition departed for Siberia. Ryabov’s orders were to report back not only on the whereabouts of the brigade but also on the location of where the Romanov gold was hidden.

Ryabov had been the Tsar’s insurance policy against Kolchak running off with the treasure.

Kirov had no idea whether this file would provide Pekkala with the information he was looking for, but Braninko had been right when he said that if anybody could make sense of the contents, it would be Pekkala.

Stashing the pages in the pocket of his tunic, Kirov ran back towards his office. Within the hour, he had telegraphed his findings to the camp commander at Borodok.

WHILE PEKKALA WAS AWAY DELIVERING soup to the miners, Melekov sat alone in the kitchen, on a rickety wooden chair, reading a scrap of newspaper that he had peeled off the carcass of a frozen pig which had arrived that morning on the train.

Gramotin walked in from the compound. Instead of ignoring Melekov, as he usually did, he sauntered over to the cook and slapped him on the back.

“What do you want?” asked Melekov, without looking up from his paper.

“Nothing,” replied Gramotin. “Nothing at all.”

Which was, of course, a lie.

Ever since Gramotin’s last meeting with the camp commandant, dark thoughts had entered the guard’s mind. Klenovkin was usually upset about something or other—Dalstroy was continually demanding higher quotas, providing him with fewer guards and cutting salaries at random—but this was the first time Gramotin had seen the commandant so unhinged by a single prisoner. And to learn that this convict Pekkala was the source of Klenovkin’s distress had fixed in Gramotin’s mind only one possible course of action.

He needed to get rid of Pekkala.

This decision was not made out of any particular love for Klenovkin, but rather because Gramotin had, over the years, created a fine-tuned balance between himself and the commandant.

At the heart of this arrangement was the fact that Klenovkin could not run this camp without Gramotin’s particular talent for hostility. No one could stay as permanently angry as Gramotin. It was a gift which amazed even Gramotin himself.

Klenovkin had learned to leave all matters of camp discipline entirely to Gramotin’s discretion, in return for which Gramotin could do whatever he wanted without fear of repercussions.

It was the kind of life Gramotin had always dreamed of living, and the only thing that had worried him until now was that someone might see through his mask of rage to the pride he took in his work and the contentment it afforded him each day.

But if Klenovkin really did fall apart, instead of merely threatening to as he did at least once every week, Dalstroy would replace him. If that happened, Gramotin knew he’d have to start from scratch grooming a new commandant. It was a task which might take years.

And suppose, Gramotin asked himself, this new man does not appreciate my particular talents? He might change things around, or even transfer me to another camp. The idea left Gramotin nauseous with anxiety.

He could not allow it to happen. The sooner Pekkala was dead, the quicker things could go back to the way they’d been before. Besides, this prisoner made him uneasy in a way no other convict had. Looking Pekkala in the eye felt like staring down the barrel of a gun.

Killing a prisoner was easy, but disposing of Pekkala had to be done without implicating the commandant. The safest way to accomplish that was to make sure Klenovkin knew nothing about it. At the same time, Gramotin would have to avoid bringing down a Dalstroy board of inquiry upon himself. Someone else would need to be the instrument of Pekkala’s doom. After many hours of plotting, Gramotin believed he’d at last found a perfect candidate.

“You don’t want anything?” Melekov narrowed his eyes with suspicion. “Then what are you doing here?”

“I just wanted to see how you are enjoying your last few days in the kitchen.”

“Last days?” Melekov laughed. “What are you talking about?”

Gramotin shrugged. “I hear you are going to be replaced.”

The blood drained out of Melekov’s face. “By whom?”

“That prisoner Klenovkin sent to work in here, 4745, the one who delivers his breakfast.”

“But that’s ridiculous!” spat Melekov.

“Is it? Why do you think Klenovkin sent someone to work with you in the kitchen? Has he ever done that before?”

“Well, no, but …”

“And why do you think he has that convict delivering his breakfast instead of you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it! That convict goes into his office. Every day. Did you ever go into his office?”

“No,” admitted Melekov.

“And they talk. I’ve heard them. Did you ever talk to Klenovkin?”

“Of course!”

“In an actual conversation?”

“Well, no, I wouldn’t say that exactly.”

“Pekkala is going to replace you. And do you know why?”

Melekov shook his head. He looked miserable.

“So Klenovkin doesn’t have to pay you!” announced Gramotin. “And, of course, he doesn’t have to pay the convict either. Think of how much money he will save Dalstroy. He’s been after a promotion for years and this time he might just get it!”

“That bastard!” The scrap of newspaper fell from Melekov’s hands. “But what am I supposed to do?”

“That’s your problem,” spat Gramotin. “At least, it will be if that prisoner isn’t stopped.”

“Stopped? What do you mean?”

Gramotin slapped him on the back of the head. “I mean prevented from taking your job! And what could possibly prevent him?” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Perhaps an accident. So many accidents can happen in a kitchen.”

“Yes,” agreed Melekov. “Many things can go wrong.…”

“And the sooner the better, my friend, before things start going wrong for you.”

POSKREBYSHEV KNOCKED ONCE and, without waiting for a reply, walked into Stalin’s office. He held up a sheet of yellow telegraph paper. “Major Kirov has sent a reply to Borodok.”

Stalin looked up blearily from the file he had been reading. “When was it intercepted?”

“Less than an hour ago, by NKVD signals headquarters in Omsk.”

Stalin held out his arm and snapped his fingers. “Give it to me.”

Poskrebyshev handed over the transcript, then stood back while Stalin squinted at the tiny print.

“The Blue File!” he bellowed. “Of course! I should have known.”

“What is the Blue File, Comrade Stalin?”

Stalin ignored him. “How did Pekkala know to look in Archive 17?” he wondered aloud. “How did he know that the Blue File had even survived?”

Poskrebyshev did not reply, fearing another lecture on the word rhetorical.

“This Captain Ryabov must have been a special agent of the Tsar. That proves he did not trust Kolchak. And he was right! In such a situation, no one can be trusted.” Resting one elbow on the desk, Stalin placed his forehead against his palm. “I should never have sent Pekkala back to Borodok. He must have known all along what this was really about.”

“Is Pekkala in danger, Comrade Stalin?”

Stalin brushed away the words as if they were flies buzzing around his head.

“What about Savushkin, the bodyguard you sent to protect him?”

“Pekkala might have won him over,” answered Stalin, still talking more to himself than to Poskrebyshev. “After all, Savushkin volunteered to work with Pekkala. I should have taken that into consideration.”

“Won him over? But why, Comrade Stalin, and with what?”

“Threats. Bribes. Some act of Finnish sorcery! And as for why, perhaps Pekkala’s loyalties to the past are stronger than I thought. I see now that Pekkala has been hiding. All this time, he has concealed himself in a disguise of incorruptibility. They were good at disguises, those agents of the Tsar. Vassileyev taught them well. But now I see Pekkala as he really is. He can no longer hide from me!”

“Comrade Stalin,” Poskrebyshev pleaded with him, “there is no evidence to suggest that what you are saying is true.”

“Evidence!” Stalin roared. “The evidence was right under our noses the whole time, hidden away in Archive 17. And that is where it should have stayed. Who is in charge there? Who is responsible for releasing the information?”

“That would be Professor Braninko.”

“Get me Kornfeld. Tell him he has work to do.”

PEKKALA STOOD at the entrance to the mine, waiting to deliver the soup ration.

At last a man appeared, ghoulish in his coating of radium. When he caught sight of Pekkala, he raised his hand in greeting.

“I brought your soup,” said Pekkala.

“Don’t you recognize me?” asked the stranger.

“I’m sorry, Zeka, I do not,” replied Pekkala, using the common name by which prisoners addressed each other. The stranger’s face was so caked in yellowy powder that it reminded Pekkala of masks he once saw used by a troupe of Japanese Kabuki actors at the Aksyonov Theatre in St. Petersburg.

“It’s me!” The prisoner slapped his hands against his chest, sending puffs of yellow dust into the air. “Savushkin!”

Pekkala leaned forward, squinting. “Savushkin?” The man who stood before him now bore no resemblance to the friend he had made on the journey to Siberia. Savushkin’s shirt was open at the neck, revealing flesh stretched so tightly against the collarbone it looked as if the slightest movement would cause his skin to tear like wet paper.

The smile on Savushkin’s face faltered. He gathered up a bucket in each hand. The wire-bale handles dug into his raw, chapped skin. “I know my task is to protect you, Inspector, but they are making it very difficult. I’m trying. Believe me, I’m still trying.”

Overcome, Pekkala reached out and set his hands on Savushkin’s shoulders. “Don’t worry about me. Look after yourself. I’ll do what I can to get you transferred from the mine.”

“No.” Savushkin shook his head. “People will only get suspicious. Solve the case, Inspector, as quickly as you can. Then we can both get out of here.” Carrying the buckets, he disappeared into the tunnel, his shadow lumbering across the walls, giant and grotesque in the lamplight.

Pekkala looked at his hands. His palms and fingertips were chalky white where they had touched Savushkin’s jacket. Shaken, he made his way back across the compound.

Outside the kitchen, Gramotin was waiting for him. “The commandant wants to see you.”

Pekkala nodded.

“I’m watching you, convict,” said Gramotin.

“I know,” replied Pekkala.

“THIS JUST ARRIVED for you,” said Klenovkin, holding out a telegram.

It was from Kirov.

Pekkala studied the faint gray letters fanned out across the flimsy sheet of paper.

RYABOV IS COVER NAME FOR AGENT LISTED IN BLUE FILE AS KILLED DURING ARREST OF GRODEK BUT SURVIVED STOP

Pekkala stopped reading. The Blue File. This was the first time he had heard a mention of it since before the Revolution. He hadn’t even known the Blue File was still in existence, although it didn’t surprise him to learn that the Tsar had failed to destroy it, as he should have done, in those final days of his captivity at Tsarskoye Selo. The Tsar had been such a meticulous keeper of records that getting rid of anything he’d written down would have gone against every instinct he possessed.

Pekkala gave a quiet grunt of admiration that Kirov had managed to track down this information in the labyrinth of Archive 17, especially since that meant dealing with Professor Braninko, its notoriously uncooperative curator.

Even more astonishing than the mention of Grodek was the fact that one of the Okhrana agents on that mission had survived. Until now, he had believed they were all dead.

“What’s the matter?” asked Klenovkin. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

On a clear winter’s day, a car filled with heavily armed Okhrana agents raced through the streets of St. Petersburg.

Pekkala was crammed in beside a young officer whom he had never met before. The task of the Okhrana agents was to clear the ground floor, not thought to be occupied, and make their way swiftly up to the apartment rented by Grodek and his mistress.

“Do you think he will come quietly?” asked the officer.

“No,” replied Pekkala. He did not believe it would be possible to arrest Grodek without sustaining casualties. Neither did he believe that Grodek would allow himself to be taken alive.

As they spoke, the young officer was loading his Nagant pistol. When the wheels of their car bounced over a pothole, a bullet slipped from the officer’s fingers and fell into the seat well below. The men were too closely packed for him to bend down to retrieve it. The Okhrana agent swore quietly at his own clumsiness. Then he glanced across at Pekkala.

“Last year,” the officer explained, “one of my colleagues closed a car door on my fingers.” He held up his hand as proof.

Pekkala could see that the man’s thumb and index finger had been deformed by the bone not setting straight.

“The doctors tell me I have nerve damage,” continued the officer. “Sometimes I can’t help dropping things.”

“I see,” said Pekkala.

“To tell you the truth, Inspector, I am also a little nervous.”

Before Pekkala could reply, they rounded a corner and Grodek’s house slid into view.

The officer closed the cylinder of the revolver and placed it in the holster strapped under his armpit. “Well,” he told Pekkala, “I will see you on the other side.”

The three cars screeched to a halt outside Grodek’s house. The Okhrana agents piled out immediately and began battering down the door.

As they had planned in advance, Pekkala moved to the rear of the building, in case Grodek tried to escape along the canal path. He took cover behind a stack of crates containing salt used for preserving fish which were caught in the summer months at the mouth of the Neva River. In winter, due to ice, none of the boats could get up the river. At that time of year, the whole wharf was deserted.

Once the agents were inside, they raced up the stairs to Grodek’s apartment on the second floor.

From his hiding place, Pekkala heard a heavy, muffled thump inside the building. The windows seemed to ripple. This was followed a fraction of a second later by a concussion which threw him off his feet. Jets of fire belched out of the windows. Glass sprayed over the street. Dazed and lying on his back, Pekkala watched a door sail over his head and into the canal.

Grodek had planted a bomb. Only seconds before the blast, he and his mistress, Maria Balka, had managed to escape through a side window.

By the time Pekkala got back on his feet, the two fugitives were already running away down the street.

After a chase, Pekkala caught up with Grodek and arrested him, but not before Maria Balka met her death in the icy waters of the Moika canal. Her own lover had killed her rather than let her fall into captivity.

Having witnessed the devastation caused by the bomb blast, Pekkala did not even consider that any of the Okhrana agents could have survived the explosion. When Chief Inspector Vassileyev confirmed that all of the agents had perished, he was only reporting what Pekkala already knew. Or thought he knew.

The agents who died that day were all strangers to Pekkala. All except the young officer, whose name he’d never learned. And afterwards, Pekkala had done what Vassileyev had taught him to do with memories of the dead: He’d filed them away in the great archive deep in the labyrinth of his mind, and left them there to fade like photographs abandoned in the sun.

NOW PEKKALA WONDERED if the young officer had died, after all.

“I need to see Ryabov’s body again,” he told Klenovkin.

“What? Now?”

“Yes!”

“But what if Melekov is still in the kitchen?”

“He won’t be. Melekov goes back to bed as soon as his shift is finished.”

Klenovkin’s eyebrows bobbed up in surprise. “Back to bed? He’s not allowed to do that in the middle of the day!”

“Nevertheless …”

“That lazy Siberian piece of …”

“Please, Commandant. It is crucial that I see the body immediately.”

Leaving Kirov’s telegram on the desk, the two men made their way to the kitchen.

Klenovkin opened the freezer with his master key.

Inside, at the back, Pekkala pushed aside the wall of vodka crates. Ryabov’s corpse was still there, lying on the floor under a tarpaulin.

Crouching down, Pekkala pulled back the tarp, whose ice-encrusted contours retained the shape of Ryabov’s face.

The shadows made it difficult to see.

“Do you have a match?” Pekkala asked.

Klenovkin pulled a box from his pocket and handed it down.

Pekkala struck a match and held it close to Ryabov’s hand. In the quivering light, he glimpsed the crookedly healed thumb and index finger of the Okhrana officer he had met years ago, on their way to the Moika Canal. As a pawn in this game of trust between Kolchak and the Tsar, agent Ryabov had played his role through to the end.

For a long time, Pekkala stared into the dead man’s face—the alabaster skin, sunken eyes, and blue-black lips. He could not shake the feeling that he was staring at himself. “See you on the other side,” he murmured, and his breath uncoiled like silk into the still and frozen air.

“What?” asked Klenovkin. “What did you say?”

“I knew this man,” Pekkala replied. “I thought he had died long ago.”

“Well, he’s dead now, anyway.” Klenovkin tapped Pekkala on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”

On their way back to Klenovkin’s office, Pekkala tried to fathom why on earth Vassileyev would have lied to him about this officer having survived the blast.

The answer soon became clear when Pekkala read the remainder of the telegram.

RYABOV COMMISSIONED BY TSAR TO MONITOR

KOLCHAK EXPEDITION STOP ACTIVITY OF AGENT

RYABOV NOT DISCLOSED TO OKHRANA STOP

The reason Vassileyev had not told Pekkala that there were survivors from the bomb at Grodek’s house was that he did not know of any. But the Tsar had not only lied to his own director of intelligence. He had lied to Pekkala as well.

The Tsar’s story had been very specific. He had told Pekkala that the precise location of the gold would be known only to Colonel Kolchak and his uncle, Admiral Alexander Kolchak of the Tsar’s Pacific fleet in Vladivostok. Even the Tsar himself was not to be told. There was good reason for this. Although the Tsar was confident that Kolchak could evade any attempt at capture by the Red Guards, the Tsar was equally certain that he himself would soon fall into captivity. And the first thing his captors would want to know was the location of the Imperial Reserves. Unless the Bolsheviks could be convinced that the Tsar didn’t know the whereabouts of his gold, they would resort to whatever means necessary to acquire that information.

For the Tsar, the trick would be in persuading these captors of his ignorance before they even asked the question.

Now, years later, an idea began to surface in Pekkala’s mind. At first it seemed so sinister that he felt sure this couldn’t be the answer. But the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that it was true. The Tsar must have known that if Pekkala were arrested, he would be interrogated using whatever means the Bolshevik Security Service, known as the Cheka, thought necessary. For a man like Pekkala, in the hands of the Cheka, torture was a guarantee. The Bolsheviks would realize, as they beat and starved and questioned him, that Pekkala was telling the truth when he said that neither he nor the Tsar was aware of the gold’s hiding place.

Except it wasn’t the truth. It was a lie, but one that Pekkala had believed.

There was only one catch. For the Tsar’s plan to work, Pekkala would have to be caught.

It was the Tsar who had provided Pekkala with the means of escaping the country—forged papers, rail tickets, even the route he should take to avoid capture. But Pekkala never made it. At a small railway station on the Russo-Finnish border, with freedom almost within his grasp, Pekkala had been hauled off a crowded train by Bolshevik Revolutionary Guards. From there, he had begun his journey to Butyrka prison, and eventually to Borodok.

He had always wondered how the Revolutionary Guards singled him out so effectively. Now he knew.

The only way the Tsar could have guaranteed that Pekkala would be arrested was by revealing the information of his escape route to the enemy.

In this way the Tsar and his family would be spared the same fate as Pekkala. There would be no point in interrogating the Romanovs for information which they didn’t have.

The facts were inescapable.

The Tsar had betrayed him, his most trusted servant, who in return had trusted the Tsar with a devotion far beyond the value of his life.

It was an ingenious and intricate plan. Not surprisingly, the Tsar had calculated almost every detail, but the one thing he had not anticipated was that Kolchak might actually be caught. Or that the members of the Romanov family might be herded to the city of Ekaterinburg and, on a sultry August night in 1918, butchered in the basement of the Ipatiev house.

The knowledge that the Tsar had, in those final days of their acquaintance, offered him up as a sacrifice struck Pekkala like a hammer to his skull.

“Well,” demanded Klenovkin. “Do you have your answer?”

“I have an answer,” replied Pekkala. “But it was not the one I’d been expecting.”

As soon as Pekkala had left the room, Klenovkin began to pace like a cat trapped in a cage. He had read the telegram as soon as it came through but wasn’t able to make head or tail of it. And what did Pekkala mean, wondered the commandant, when he said it wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting? Klenovkin could not help but fear the worst. Pekkala was refusing to accept his theory about the Comitati. “And who else is there to accuse, but me?” he asked himself. Already, in feverish dreams, he had found himself before a board of inquiry, accused of Ryabov’s murder. To this imaginary jury he had pleaded his case, but was always found guilty.

“It’s time I took matters into my own hands,” he muttered to himself. Seating himself at his desk, Klenovkin took out a piece of paper and furiously scribbled a note.

PROFESSOR BRANINKO HAD FALLEN asleep as he sat at his desk, consolidating dusty files for the archives.

A banging on the metal door startled him awake. He breathed in sharply, rose stiffly to his feet, and straightened his tie as he walked towards the door.

The knocking came again.

Braninko knew who it was. Major Kirov had come to return the file he borrowed.

In the brief time he’d spent with Kirov, Braninko had been impressed by the young officer’s willingness to listen to the outbursts of an old man who had no one else to talk to except the unblinking statues of old generals and politicians. Before Kirov, there had been no visitors for several weeks, and after he left, there were unlikely to be others for a while.

As he made his way towards the door, the knocking continued.

“I heard you the first time,” muttered Braninko, but he was not angry. In fact, he was looking forward to seeing Kirov again. Of course, it would not be appropriate to appear too enthusiastic. He would maintain his usual reserve, but this time, he decided, he might at least offer the major a cup of tea. He had a kettle in the back room, and a few old tin cups, which he hoped were clean enough to use. As he opened the door, Braninko was trying to remember if he had any sugar left to sweeten the tea. He had just enough time to realize that the person outside was not Kirov before the air seemed to catch fire all around him.

The next thing Braninko knew, he was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling of the archive. Someone had seized his ankles and was dragging him across the floor towards the back of the building. He could not understand what was happening. The only clear thought in the old professor’s head was that it felt undignified to be hauled around like this. With a feeble, barely conscious gesture, he reached up to adjust his tie, which suddenly felt too tight around his throat.

The man who was dragging him wore a dark hat and a coat which came down below his knees. Both were civilian garments. It occurred to Braninko to inform him that only government personnel were allowed in Archive 17.

What is wrong with me? Braninko wondered. His stomach felt strangely empty and he experienced a terrible thirst, as if he were lost in a desert.

At last the dragging stopped. The man let go of Braninko’s feet and the professor’s heels struck the floor hard.

Braninko was relieved to be lying still. He felt dizzy and sick. He glanced at his palm and realized he was covered with blood. Only now did it dawn on him that he had been shot. Tugging at the buttons of his vest, he pulled the cloth away and saw the deep red marks of two bullet holes punched through the fabric of his shirt.

The man turned around and looked at Braninko. He was narrow-faced, with a black mustache tinged gray along the edges. He wore thick corduroy trousers and a short double-breasted wool coat.

Although such clothes were common in the streets of Moscow, Braninko had no difficulty identifying this man as a member of NKVD. It was not the clothes, but how the stranger wore them—with no regard for comfort, all the buttons fastened, and the lapels stitched into place, rather than being allowed to rest naturally against the collarbone.

“Who are you?” As the professor spoke, a thread of bloody saliva trickled from his mouth.

“My name is Kornfeld,” replied the man. Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped the perspiration from his cheeks. “You are heavier than you look, old man.”

“Why have you done this to me?”

“It is my job.”

“But what have I done to deserve it?” Braninko had trouble breathing, as if someone were kneeling on his chest.

“The only thing I can tell you is that you have upset someone very important.”

“The Blue File,” whispered Braninko. “Is that what this is about?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“I was helping with an investigation.”

“I have no interest in what you were doing.”

“The man I was helping is Inspector Pekkala, and you will answer to him for what you’ve done to me—you and whoever sent you on this butcher’s errand.”

From the pocket of his coat, Kornfeld removed a Browning automatic pistol. “You may be right, Professor, but he will have to find me first.”

“Oh, he will find you,” Braninko replied angrily, “and sooner than you think. By the time you leave this building, the Emerald Eye will be upon you.”

Kornfeld did not appear to be listening. Instead, he busied himself with checking the number of rounds in the Browning’s magazine.

Observing the casual efficiency of his executioner, Braninko abandoned all hope. The old man gazed around the room, his eyes flickering across the faces of the statues which had kept him company all these years. He thought about the papers on his desk, which still needed sorting, and of his cat, on the windowsill at home, watching for him to return, and of all the important and unfinished business of his life which swirled around him like a cloud of tiny insects, then suddenly scattered and lost all meaning. Reaching into the blood-drenched pocket of his vest, Braninko removed a spindly iron key and held it out towards the man who was about to kill him. “Please lock the door on your way out.”

Kornfeld took the key from Braninko’s outstretched hand. “Of course,” he said. Then he shot the old man twice in the head and left his body lying on the floor.

On his way out, Kornfeld locked the door behind him. With unhurried steps, he crossed the street, pausing only to drop the key down a storm drain before he disappeared into the chaos of the Bolotnia Market.

THAT MORNING BEFORE DAWN, ONE of the camp’s generators had caught fire, sending a cloud of thick, oily smoke unraveling into the clouds. The snow that fell from the sky was tinged with soot, adding to the sense of desolation hanging over the Valley of Krasnagolyana.

Arriving at the kitchen, Pekkala discovered that Melekov had left the freezer door open. Pekkala called Melekov’s name, but there was no reply.

He must have gone to watch the generator burn, thought Pekkala.

Knowing that Melekov would soon return, and unable to resist the temptation of helping himself to the best food in the camp, Pekkala slipped into the freezer.

By the light of the single bulb, hanging like a polyp from the metal ceiling of the freezer, Pekkala surveyed the bowls of offal, like coils of slippery orange rope, the white bricks of tallow fat, and the huge and severed tongues of cows. At the back of the freezer, four pig carcasses hung from gaff hooks, their skin like pink granite and glittering with frost.

At that moment Pekkala heard someone enter the kitchen—the creak of the spring on the outer door and then the gunshot slam of the inner door being closed.

Realizing he was trapped, he darted to the end of the freezer and hid behind the pig carcasses. On his way he yanked the dirty pull string of the light. The freezer was plunged into a coffin-like darkness, but seconds later the sharp glare of a flashlight burst like an explosion in the cramped space.

Pekkala glimpsed the unmistakable silhouette of Melekov. He immediately began to calculate how much trouble he might actually be in. He hadn’t actually eaten anything, so perhaps Melekov would let him off. He could say he found the door open and went in to see if any food had been taken. It was a flimsy excuse, but the only one he could come up with. It would all depend on what mood Melekov was in. He might laugh it off, or he might decide to make life difficult.

Knowing there was still a chance he could escape detection, Pekkala remained silent while Melekov’s footsteps scuffed slowly across the concrete floor and the flashlight beam played across the carcasses, making them seem to twitch as if there was still life in them.

Pekkala’s lungs grew hot as the air in them became exhausted. He could only last a few more seconds before breathing out, at which point Melekov would surely see his breath condensing in the cold.

He heard another footstep, then another. Just when Pekkala had made up his mind to step out into the open and surrender, he heard a dull thump and, in the same moment, the blade of a long butcher knife pierced the meat of the carcass next to him. The point jammed to a halt against the pig’s ribs, only a hand’s width from Pekkala’s throat. Then the knife disappeared again, back the way it came, like a metal tongue sliding into a mouth.

“Melekov!” shouted Pekkala, still blinded by the flashlight and holding up his hands to shield himself. “It’s me!”

“You walked into my trap,” snarled Melekov.

“This was a trap? For me? But why?”

Melekov’s only reply was a bestial roar. He raised the butcher knife, ready to strike again.

Pekkala jumped to the side, crashing into a shelf as the blade glanced off the wall, leaving a long silver stripe through the frost. Bowls of food tumbled from the racks. Jars of pickled beets smashed in eruptions of ruby-colored juice and cans of army-issue Tushonka stew clattered across the floor.

Snatching up one of the heavy cans, he hurled it at the silhouette.

Melekov howled with pain as the can struck him full in the face. The flashlight fell from his grasp.

Pekkala dove to grab it, turning the beam on his attacker.

With one hand, Melekov covered his face. Blood poured in ribbons from between the fingers. His other hand still gripped the knife.

Intent on disarming the cook, Pekkala grabbed a frozen pig’s heart off the shelf and pitched it as hard as he could.

The rock-hard knot of meat bounced off Melekov’s face. With a wail of pain, he tumbled back among the bowls of guts and dropped the knife.

By the time Melekov hit the ground, Pekkala had already snatched up the weapon. “Why on earth are you trying to kill me?” he demanded.

“I figured it out,” groaned Melekov.

“Figured what out?”

Melekov clambered up until he was resting on his knees. Dazed from the fight, his head bowed forward, as if he were a supplicant before the slaughtered pigs. “Klenovkin is going to give you my job.”

“I don’t want your damned job!”

“It doesn’t matter what you want or do not want. In this camp, Klenovkin decides our fates. And where will I be if he throws me out? This isn’t like Moscow, where a man who loses his job can walk across the road and find another. There are no other jobs for me here. I’m too old to be a guard. I have no training for the hospital. If Klenovkin wants to replace me, I’ll have no place to go.”

“Even if I did want the job, did you ever stop to think that Klenovkin could never hand it to a prisoner? Dalstroy wouldn’t let him. The company would never trust a convict with their food.”

“I didn’t think of that.” Melekov raised his head sharply. “None of this was my idea.”

Pekkala threw the knife away across the floor. “Just get up!”

Gingerly, Melekov dabbed his fingers against his nostrils. “I think you broke my nose,” he muttered bitterly.

“Whose idea was this, Melekov?”

Reluctantly, the cook shook his head. “If I tell you …”

“Give me the name,” growled Pekkala.

“Gramotin,” he replied in a whisper.

Pekkala breathed out slowly. “Did he say why?”

Melekov shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. From now on, my life’s worth even less than yours, and yours wasn’t worth much to begin with.”

Pekkala realized that the time was fast approaching when he would either have to leave this camp or risk becoming the subject of his own murder investigation.

In the meantime, Ryabov’s death remained unsolved.

That thought sent a familiar shudder through his bones.

This was not the first time Pekkala had failed to close a case.

Pekkala and the Tsar stood on a balcony outside the Alexander Palace. It was an early-summer day, the sky powder blue and pollen lying luminous and green upon the puddles of a rainstorm from the night before.

“A man has been found dead,” said the Tsar. “He was a courier for the Turkish embassy.”

“Where was the body found?” asked Pekkala.

“It was pulled from the water just beneath a bridge over the Novokislaevsk River, north of Moscow.

“Their ambassador asked for you by name. Given the value of our relationship with that country, I could hardly refuse.”

“I will begin immediately.”

“Of course, but do not exhaust yourself with this inquiry.”

Pekkala glanced at the Tsar, trying to fathom the meaning of his words.

“What I am telling you,” Nicholas Romanov explained, “is that this is ultimately a matter for the Turks to unravel. It is not our job to oversee their diplomats. Look around, see what you can find, and then move on.”

Pekkala’s preliminary inspection of the body revealed no marks which would suggest a violent death. The dead man was fully clothed but did not appear to have drowned. Pekkala quickly ruled out suicide, since the drop would not have killed or even injured him.

Every day, during that first week of the investigation, Pekkala returned to the bridge and stood looking down into the water as he attempted to compose in his mind not only the reason for this man’s death but the questions which might lead him to the answer.

He stood among fishermen, who dangled bamboo poles above the water, smoked their pipes, and talked about the body. They had been the first to find it and barraged Pekkala with questions about the case.

But Pekkala had questions of his own. “Could the body have drifted here from somewhere upstream?” he asked.

“This is a lazy old river,” one of them replied. “Somebody threw him off the bridge. Where he fell is where he sank and where he sank is where we found him.”

“Do you fish here every day?”

“This time of year we do. Carp, pike, dace. They’re all down there in those weeds.”

“Then they knew you would find him. In fact, somebody wanted you to find him.”

“Unless,” suggested another fisherman, “they didn’t know the area and were just getting rid of the body.”

Pekkala shook his head. “This was done by a professional. The dead man is a message. But about what? And to whom?”

“That would be your job, Inspector,” said the fisherman.

After one week, without explanation, the Tsar called Pekkala off the case and did not assign a new investigator to take over.

Ever since, Pekkala had been haunted by his failure to arrest the killer. He felt an obligation to the victim, as if they’d formed a partnership between the living and the dead. Since that day, like stones in his pockets, he had carried the unanswered questions of that murder.

THE NEXT DAY MELEKOV SHOWED up for work in the kitchen with a bandage on his face and two black eyes.

The two men did not speak about what had happened the day before.

Pekkala was just finishing his breakfast duties, when Tarnowski, Lavrenov, and Sedov barged into the kitchen.

Melekov, with a mound of fresh dough balanced in his hands, stood paralyzed with fear.

Tarnowski grabbed the cook and pushed him to his knees. The dough fell with a splat onto the floor.

At the same time Lavrenov produced a leather cord from his sleeve, looped it around Melekov’s neck, and began to strangle him.

Melekov’s face turned purple. His eyes bulged. Feebly, he clawed at the leather cord which had sunk into the soft flesh of his throat.

“Enough!” Pekkala shouted.

Lavrenov, his teeth bared with the effort of strangling Melekov, glanced first at Pekkala and then towards Tarnowski.

Tarnowski jerked his chin.

Lavrenov let go of the cord.

With a gasp, Melekov collapsed onto the floor.

“We weren’t going to kill him,” explained Sedov.

“Just teach him a lesson is all,” said Lavrenov.

Tarnowski went to Melekov and rolled the man over with his boot. “I told you to leave him alone.”

Melekov nodded weakly, his hands pressed to his throat.

“Now get out,” Tarnowski ordered the cook. “Come back in half an hour.”

Crawling on his hands and knees, Melekov departed from the kitchen.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Pekkala told them. “We had already made our peace.”

“With him, perhaps,” replied Tarnowski, “but what about the next one? And the one after that? Because, believe me, there will be more, which is why I have come here to make you an offer.”

“What kind of offer?”

“The chance to save your life.”

“How?”

“By getting out of here,” said Tarnowski.

“You mean escape? What makes you think I’d stand a better chance than anybody else who’s tried to leave this place?”

“Because we are coming with you,” replied Sedov.

Lavrenov nodded in agreement. “We have a plan. If it works, we’ll soon be living like kings.”

“That doesn’t sound like a plan,” answered Pekkala. “It sounds more like a fantasy.”

“It is indeed a fantasy,” Tarnowski agreed, “but one a man can bring to life with pockets filled with gold.”

“What gold?” demanded Pekkala.

“The last of the Imperial Reserves,” whispered Lavrenov.

Pekkala stared at the men with a look of pity on his face. “I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, but the Imperial Reserves are long gone. The Czechs handed them over to the Bolsheviks at Irkutsk, in exchange for being allowed to pass through the Lake Baikal tunnels, which the Reds would have destroyed otherwise. By the time this occurred, you were already in prison. Perhaps nobody ever told you—”

“We know about the Czechs,” Sedov interrupted. “We know how they betrayed us and that they gave everything they had to the Bolsheviks.”

“The thing is,” said Lavrenov, “they didn’t have it all.”

“That is a secret we have kept for many years,” Tarnowski said, “but the time has come for you to know the truth.”

“Colonel Kolchak had told us that the safest place for the gold was in the hands of his uncle, Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who had gathered together an army of anti-Bolshevik forces,” Sedov told Pekkala. “Getting to them meant crossing the entire length of Russia, but if we could do it, not only would the gold be safe but we would also be out of danger. You see, we made that journey as much for ourselves as for the Tsar. By the time we reached the city of Kazan, we had crossed almost half the country, but the Red Cavalry was catching up with us. We knew we’d never make it if we tried to hold on to the gold.”

Lavrenov picked up the story. “We made the decision to hide the Imperial Reserves in Kazan. The Czech Legion was behind us, but moving along the same route and heading in the same direction. They were a much stronger force than our own, over thirty thousand men. If only we could have linked up with them, we would have been safe from the Reds, but the Reds had positioned themselves between our two forces. If we had stayed where we were and waited for the Czechs to catch up with us, the Reds would have finished us off long before the Czechs arrived to help. We managed to get word through to the Czechs about where the gold was hidden and they picked it up when they passed through Kazan.”

“You say they didn’t have it all. What happened? Did you spend it along the way?”

“Some of it,” admitted Tarnowski. “At almost every town we came to, the locals demanded bribes or tried to overcharge us for food or feed for our horses. We had used up three crates of gold by the time Colonel Kolchak declared that from then on, we would simply take what we wanted. But those three cases were only a fraction of what was missing from the Imperial Reserves that the Czechs handed over at Irkutsk.”

“You mean they just left the rest of the gold behind in Kazan? Is that it?”

Tarnowski shook his head. “What happened was that at the last minute the colonel decided we should take some of the gold with us. His uncle was expecting that gold and Kolchak was afraid to come to him empty-handed. We were moving more quickly when we pulled out of Kazan, but still not quickly enough. The Reds caught up with us. What happened after that was a slaughter.”

“But how did you manage to prevent them from capturing it?” asked Pekkala.

“When we realized the Reds were only a day or two behind us,” continued Lavrenov, “we sent Colonel Kolchak on ahead. At first he did not want to go, but we knew what would happen if the Bolsheviks got hold of him. We begged the colonel to save himself, and finally he agreed.”

“Before he left,” said Sedov, “he swore that he would not abandon us, and in return each man who stayed behind took an oath that we would never give up the location of the gold. That night, once we were sure that the colonel had gotten away safely, we buried the crates in the woods beside the railroad, not two days’ march from this camp.”

“How can you be certain it’s still there?”

“If it had been found,” replied Lavrenov, “word would have reached us by now.”

Pekkala realized he was right. If that gold had been discovered, Stalin would have made sure that the whole country knew about his final triumph over the Tsar. He also knew the area where the Comitati had buried those crates. It was as wild and inhospitable a place as any he had seen. Once the gold was underground, no one would have stumbled upon it by accident, even if trains passed by not more than a stone’s throw away.

During his years as a tree-marker in the Valley of Krasnagolyana, the railroad had marked the northern boundary of the Borodok timber-cutting region. Beyond it lay a region assigned to another camp, a notorious place called Mamlin-3, where experiments were conducted on human subjects. To be caught outside this region meant certain death.

If the wind was right, Pekkala could hear the sound of the Trans-Siberian Express passing through the forest. Sometimes, overcome by loneliness, he would trudge through the woods on his homemade snowshoes until he reached the tracks. There, standing at the edge of his world, he waited for the train to go by, just to catch a glimpse of another human being.

The railway guards aboard the train would shoot at Pekkala if they saw him, whether on orders or for sport he did not know, so he always stayed hidden, eyes fixed on the stuttering images of passengers staring bleary-eyed out at the impenetrable wilderness of Siberia, unaware that the wilderness was staring back at them.

“The next day,” said Tarnowski, “the Reds attacked. The battle took place almost within sight of this valley. We held out for three days, but they outnumbered us by four to one. We knew we couldn’t win, but still we made them pay for every inch of ground. By the time it was over, of the two hundred men in the expedition, there were only seventy of us left. The Reds marched us straight to Borodok and we have been here ever since. Since the Bolsheviks found no gold, they concluded that we must have left it all with the Czechs.”

“And now your idea is to reclaim it?”

“Exactly,” replied Sedov.

“But this time,” said Lavrenov, “we are keeping it for ourselves.”

“That gold belongs to us now,” muttered Sedov. “God knows, we have earned it.”

“A hundred times over,” agreed Lavrenov.

“Where will you go once you’ve escaped,” asked Pekkala, “assuming you can even make it through the gates alive?”

“The border with China isn’t far from here,” Sedov told him. “Once we cross over, we’ll be safe.”

“But until then, you’ll be in the country of the Ostyaks. How do you plan to get past them when no other prisoner has ever succeeded before?”

“The colonel will take care of us,” Sedov answered. “We have waited many years, but at last the day of our deliverance is near.”

“Are you insane?” stammered Pekkala. “Now, listen to me, for the sake of your lives. I admire your loyalty to Colonel Kolchak. No one could have asked from you more than you have already given. But that loyalty has not been repaid. The colonel is gone. He has been gone for a long time. Even if he’s still alive, a fact of which I am by no means certain, whatever special powers you have granted him will not persuade the Ostyaks. Those men out there will kill you. They do not care about your faith, in God or anyone else. They care about the bread and salt Klenovkin gives them in exchange for your frozen corpses.”

Sedov only smiled and shook his head.

“Soon you’ll understand,” said Lavrenov. “Just wait until you set eyes on the gold.”

“I already have,” said Pekkala.

It was a Sunday afternoon in August.

Pekkala had been sitting at his kitchen table, trying to read the newspaper. On either side of him lay large bowls filled with ice. In spite of this effort to cool himself down, he was still drenched in sweat. The newspaper stuck to his damp fingers. The ticking of the clock in the next room, which under normal circumstances he only noticed if it stopped, now seemed to be growing louder, as if a woodpecker was tapping against his skull.

At the moment when it seemed as if his mood could not get any worse, he received a summons to the Alexander Palace. The message was delivered by a horseman from the Royal Stables. Dressed in a white tunic with red piped collar and cuffs, the rider appeared so dazzling in the glare of sun off the crushed stone pathway that Pekkala wondered if he might be hallucinating.

The summons caught Pekkala by surprise, since he had thought the Romanovs were away at their hunting lodge in Poland until the end of the following week. They seemed to have perfectly anticipated the heat wave, which had clamped down on St. Petersburg less than a day after the royal train departed for the west.

“The royal family has returned from Spala?” he asked the horseman.

“Only the Tsar. He came back early.”

“Any idea what this is about?”

The man shook his head, then saluted and rode away. Horse and rider seemed to merge in the heat haze, until they appeared to have transformed into a single creature.

Pekkala did not keep a horse, nor did he own a car or even a bicycle, so he walked to the Alexander Palace. The route took him along the edge of Alexander Park. There was no shade along this stretch, since the trees originally planted here obscured the Tsarina’s view of the park from the room where she took breakfast every morning, so she’d had them all cut down.

Head bowed in the heat, Pekkala resembled a man who had lost something small on the ground and was retracing his steps to find it. The blood pounded behind his ears as he walked, stamping out a rhythm in his brain. Pekkala thought of stories he had heard about birds in the city of Florence which, driven mad in the summer heat, flew straight into the ground and killed themselves. He knew exactly how they felt.

When, at last, Pekkala reached the Alexander Palace, he paused beside the Tsukanov fountain, mesmerized by the glittering cascade of water.

The Tsarina had commissioned it from the architect Felix Tsukanov, who specialized in fountains and had been making the rounds of royal enclaves in Europe. These days it was no longer fashionable to have a palace without one of his creations.

The centerpiece was a large, tulip-shaped structure, from which the water spouted in three directions at once, falling into a waist-deep basin decorated with mosaics of koi fish.

The Tsar had confided in Pekkala that he hated the fountain. It was noisy and garish. “And what is a fountain for, anyway?” the Tsar had declared in exasperation. “The horses won’t even drink from it!”

Pekkala stood at the edge of the fountain, droplets splashing against his shirt and face. If he had given any thought to what he did next, he never would have done it. Before he knew what was happening, he had climbed into the fountain, without pausing to remove his clothes. He even kept his shoes on. As if compelled by forces beyond his control, he lowered himself into the water until he was sitting on the bottom and the water rippled above his head.

He remained there, eyes open, a pearl necklace of bubbles slowly escaping from his lips. It occurred to him that he had discovered the real purpose of this fountain.

There was no time to return to his cottage, change clothes, and make his way back to the palace. A summons from the Tsar required immediate action. And the Tsar, being the Tsar, had probably calculated exactly how long it should take Pekkala to walk the distance.

With as much dignity as he could manage, Pekkala clambered out of the fountain and made his way up the staircase to the palace balcony. With each footstep, water squelched from his shoes.

It was only when Pekkala reached the top of the stairs that he realized the Tsar was sitting on the balcony overlooking the front courtyard and must have witnessed the whole thing.

Pekkala walked over to the table where the Tsar was sipping tea in the shade of a large umbrella. He had been out on his horse and still wore tan riding breeches, along with brown knee-length leather boots. The Tsar had taken off his riding coat, revealing maroon suspenders that stretched over the shoulders of his white, collarless shirt. He seemed completely untroubled by the heat.

“Majesty,” said Pekkala, and bowed his head in greeting.

“Good afternoon, Pekkala. I would offer you something to drink, but you seem to have taken care of that all by yourself.”

In the moment of silence that followed, Pekkala heard the faint tap-tapping of water as it dripped from his sleeves and splashed on the yellowish-white stone of the balcony. The droplets sank into the stone, as if even the rock was thirsty in this heat.

“What brings you back from Spala, Majesty?”

The Tsar smiled mischievously. “Lena has brought me back.”

Pekkala had never heard of anyone named Lena before, at least in connection with the Tsar. As far as he knew, the only woman besides his wife for whom the Tsar harbored any affection was the prima ballerina of the Imperial Russian Ballet, Mathilde Kschessinska. “I look forward to meeting her, Majesty.”

The Tsar, who had been sipping his tea, burst out laughing. The delicate porcelain cup slipped from his fingers, fell to the ground and shattered musically on the stones. “Lena is not a woman!” said the Tsar. He glanced at the broken cup and seemed to be contemplating whether or not to bend down and pick it up.

Pekkala knew that the smashed cup would be swept up by the palace staff and deposited on a garbage heap near the gardener’s compost pile, close by the palace but hidden from view by a line of tall juniper bushes. No matter how slight the chip or blemish, any piece of imperfect crockery from the royal household was immediately taken out of circulation and could never be used again, by the Romanovs or anyone else. It was one of the quirks of the Tsarina that such a policy had gone into effect. To Pekkala it seemed wasteful, but even if he had been offered any of these slightly damaged saucers, bowls, or plates, he would not have wanted them, preferring wooden bowls and metal enamelware cups.

The same was not true of Mr. Gibbs, the English tutor of the Romanov children, who had been discovered one night, sitting in the middle of the crockery pile and hunting for pieces he could use.

“If Lena is not a woman …” began Pekkala.

“Lena is a place!” explained the Tsar, rising to his feet. “Come with me and I will show you.”

Mystified, Pekkala followed the Tsar down the long central hallway of the palace.

One of the housekeepers stuck her head out of the doorway of the kitchen, stared at the wet footprints on the polished wooden floor, then glared, beady-eyed, at Pekkala.

Arriving at the door to his gun room, the Tsar fished out a key and unlocked it. Unlike the other rooms in the palace, the gun room door was double-thick and reinforced with metal panels.

Inside, the walls were covered with rifles held in place by velvet-padded racks. Some of the guns dated back to the sixteenth century, while others were modern hunting rifles equipped with telescopic sights. The room had no windows, only a table in the center, covered with green felt, where the Tsar laid out and inspected his weapons before putting them to use on hunting trips or in clay pigeon tournaments.

The Tsar closed the door behind them, locked it from the inside, then turned and winked at Pekkala. “Almost there,” he said. Advancing to the center of the room, he grasped one corner of the table and motioned with his chin for Pekkala to pick up the other end. Together, they moved the table aside.

Then the Tsar rolled up the carpet which lay beneath the table, revealing a trapdoor in the floor.

“Lena is down there?” asked Pekkala.

“No,” replied the Tsar, “but what is down there came from Lena.”

Then, suddenly, Pekkala understood. The Tsar was talking about the Lena mine. It was one of the richest sources of gold in the country, and notorious for the harsh conditions under which the miners worked. In 1912 the workers had gone on strike, demanding better conditions. Rather than give in to their demands, the Tsar had sent in a regiment of Cossacks. By the time the strike was finally called off, hundreds of miners had been cut down by the Cossacks’ swords.

Pulling on a brass ring set flush into the floor, the Tsar opened the trapdoor and led Pekkala down a tightly spiraled stone staircase, lit by small electric bulbs. The air was cool and damp and hard to breathe. At last, deep underground, they arrived at an unpainted metal door set straight into the rock.

There was no lock on this last door, only a metal bolt, which the Tsar slid back with a dull clank. Then he pushed the door open, revealing a chamber of darkness so complete it felt to Pekkala like a patch of blindness in his eye. The Tsar gestured for Pekkala to enter. “After you,” he said.

Pekkala froze. He could not bear confined spaces, especially when they were unlit.

“Go on!” urged the Tsar.

Hesitantly, Pekkala stepped into the black. His breathing became shallow. It felt to him as if the floor was crumbling away beneath his feet.

At that moment, the Tsar flipped a switch and the room was suddenly flooded in light.

Pekkala found himself in a chamber ten paces wide by twenty paces long. The ceiling was so low that he could touch it easily by raising his hand above his head. The floor was dirt and the walls themselves were chipped out of the bedrock on which the palace had been built. Of this space, only a small fraction remained empty. The rest, from floor to ceiling, was completely filled with gold. Reflected in the glow of lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, the air itself seemed filled with a trembling fire.

The gold had been molded into large ingots, each one roughly the length of a man’s forearm. The only variation was in the finish of the metal. Some were polished smooth and brilliant, while others looked as if they had been wrapped in yellow velvet. All of the ingots were stamped with the double-headed Romanov eagle, in addition to weight and purity marks and the letter L in a circle, denoting its source as the Lena goldfields.

Pekkala noticed that each stack of gold contained exactly the same number of ingots and that the ingots themselves had been placed, one on top of the other, with a precision that reminded him of pictures he had seen of ancient Peruvian stonework, fitted together so closely that not even a sheet of paper could be slid between them.

“Another shipment arrived today,” the Tsar told him. “That’s why I came back from Spala. I needed to be here to meet it.”

Pekkala turned and looked at him. The sight of this immense fortune, scraped from the darkness of the earth by slaves and returned to that same darkness by an emperor, filled him with profound uneasiness.

“Few people have set eyes on this treasure,” the Tsar confided. “Few people ever will.”

Pekkala spread his arms, taking in the contents of the room. “But, Excellency, how much gold does one man really need? What do you intend to do with it?”

“Do with it?” This question caught the Tsar by surprise. “I possess it. That is what you do with treasure.” Seeing the lack of comprehension in Pekkala’s face, he tried a different tack. “Think of it as my insurance against a world of instability. Say something were to happen to this country, a disaster of biblical proportions. This gold would help to see me through. And my family. And you, of course.” He smiled and added hastily, “What would I do without my Emerald Eye?”

“And the people of Russia?” Pekkala pressed. “What are they to do when this disaster hits?”

The Tsar rested his hand upon the shelf of gold. The feel of the metal seemed to comfort him. “As my wife is fond of saying: On the day of judgment, only the chosen will be saved.”

LISTENING TO THE COMITATI speak of their deliverance, Pekkala began to think Commandant Klenovkin might have been right. The years in prison had worn through the fabric of their collective sanity. And even if the gold was real, Pekkala felt sure these men would never live to see it.

He thought of a prophet named Wovoka, a Paiute Indian of the American West who, faced with the annihilation of his way of life, began to speak of a day when all the whites would disappear and the Indians’ shattered civilization would be made whole again if only they would take part in the Ghost Dance. The prophecy spread swiftly from tribe to tribe. Wearing buckskin clothes decorated with the most powerful symbols of their tribe, the dancers assured themselves that even bullets could not penetrate their sacred ghost shirts. But when, in the winter of 1899, soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry unleashed their Gatling guns upon the Sioux at a place called Wounded Knee, the dead fell in heaps upon the frozen ground.

Pekkala wondered if Kolchak had become, for the last remaining men he had abandoned in this camp, an illusion which would lead them to their deaths, as it had already done, Pekkala now felt certain, for the murdered Captain Ryabov.

THE NEXT DAY, at noon, Pekkala made his way across the compound, struggling under the weight of soup rations as he carried them up to the mine.

Arriving at the entrance, he called into the dark and waited.

A cold and musty breeze blew past him from the gullet of the mine. It stank of metal, dirt, and sweat.

Eventually, he heard footsteps. Then a man appeared out of the shadows, a pickax slung on his shoulder. It was Lavrenov.

“Put down those buckets,” he said, “and follow me.”

“In there?” Pekkala hesitated. “Why?”

“You ask a lot of questions, Inspector—too many, as far as I’m concerned. Now some of them are going to be answered.”

With his eyes on the huge, arcing blade of the pickax, and certain by now that Lavrenov was unwilling to take no for an answer, Pekkala placed the soup cans beside the wall of the tunnel and followed him into the darkness. He felt like an insect which had strayed into a spider’s lair.

The entrance to the mine was lit by kerosene lamps, but farther in, the light source came from bulbs strung like Christmas lights along a sagging electrical cable.

The deeper they traveled into the mine, the narrower the tunnel became. The dirt floor angled downwards into the earth, spliced with puddles and tiny streams which glimmered eerily when their footsteps broke the surface.

Pekkala struggled to understand why the Comitati would bring him to this place. What strange rituals, he wondered, do these men perform down in the bowels of the earth?

In spite of the cold, Pekkala began to sweat. His breathing grew shallow and fast. He thought of the mountain of rock above him. Unable to shake from his head the thought of it all collapsing on top of him, he stopped and lurched against the wall, as if the ground had suddenly shifted.

Lavrenov went on a few paces, then halted. “What is the matter with you?”

“Give me a second.” Claustrophobia swirled inside Pekkala’s brain. He felt as if he were choking. “Keep going,” ordered Lavrenov.

They passed intersections in the tunnel system from which new passageways branched off at angles, some climbing and some descending. Handcarts filled with chalky slabs of radium ore stood parked against the walls. In the distance Pekkala could hear the sound of rusty wheels turning and the clink of metal on stone. Now and then he caught a glimpse of silhouettes, as men moved about in the shadows.

They reached a place where the tunnel was blocked by wooden pallets and metal-reinforced buttresses which propped up the ceiling.

Lavrenov twisted his body around the barricade of pallets and slithered into the darkness. “This way!” his voice hissed out of the black.

“Why is the passage blocked?”

“Last month this tunnel caved in. It leads to the part of the mine where they dig out Siberian Red.”

“What’s to stop the tunnel from caving in again?”

“Nothing.”

Forcing himself onward, Pekkala angled past the crooked beams.

Just ahead the tunnel turned sharply to the right. As soon as they rounded the corner, Pekkala noticed a faint glow, which seemed to be coming out of the wall.

Suddenly, Pekkala realized why Lavrenov had brought him here. They must have dug a way out, he told himself. Even if it took years, these men are stubborn enough to have done it.

Lavrenov came to a halt and Pekkala found himself opposite a small opening which led into a naturally formed cave. The space inside was large, more than twice the height of a man, and filled with ancient pillars formed out of sediment drips coming down from the ceiling. Pillowed hummocks of stone bristled with crystals of Siberian Red. Some were short and sharp, like barnacles on the hull of a shipwreck. Others resembled bouquets of glass flowers. All of them were tinted the color of fresh blood. The space served as a storage room for handcarts which had broken down. Inside, a few of the wrecked contraptions stood against the wall. Scattered on the ground lay the shattered tusks of stalactites and stalagmites which had been broken to make room for them. Against the far side of this strange temple, perched upon a tongue of stone as pale as alabaster, a battered miner’s lamp illuminated the chamber.

Now another possibility occurred to Pekkala. Perhaps the prisoners had not dug their way out, after all. Maybe they didn’t need to. Is it possible, he wondered, that in their years of toiling in the bowels of the earth, the Comitati had discovered some naturally occurring cave network which provided them with an exit into the forest, somewhere outside the walls of Borodok? Pekkala remembered stories he had heard about the caves of Altamira in northern Spain where, in 1879, a girl walking her dog had stumbled upon the entrance to a system of connecting caverns that stretched deep beneath the ground. In the largest of these caves, she’d found paintings of animals—bison and ibex—which, like those who painted them, had vanished from that countryside millennia before.

Lavrenov gestured into the cave. “After you, Inspector.”

Ducking his head, Pekkala stepped into the room. The lamplight shuddered. The air smelled rank. Shadows writhed like snakes across the floor.

Turning back, he saw that Lavrenov was not behind him.

His heart slammed into his throat.

In that moment, he heard a voice whisper his name.

“Who’s there?” asked Pekkala.

A hand reached out and brushed against his leg.

Pekkala shouted with alarm. Stepping back, he noticed a figure sitting in an alcove formed inside the stone.

The presence of this huddled shape reminded him of tales he had heard about ancient and mummified corpses discovered in caves such as this, creatures whose careless wanderings had brought them here to die before their species ever dared to rule the earth.

Pekkala’s eyes darted among the scaffolding of pillars. He was certain now that he’d been led into an ambush. In his terror, he glimpsed his own desiccated body, sleeping through millennia.

“Tarnowski?” he called. “Sedov, is that you?”

The figure emerged from its hiding place in the wall, as if the rock itself had come to life. Even through the matted beard and filthy clothes, Pekkala recognized a man he had long since consigned to oblivion.

It was Colonel Kolchak himself.

The colonel spread his arms and smiled, revealing strong white teeth.

“You!” Pekkala finally managed to say, and suddenly all the years since the night outside his cottage when he had last set eyes on Kolchak crumpled together like the folds of an accordion, so that it seemed as if no time had passed between that moment and this.

“I told you we would meet again someday, Pekkala. Many times during my long exile in Shanghai, I imagined this reunion. I had hoped it would be in more luxurious surroundings, but this will have to do, at least for now.”

“But how did you get here?” asked Pekkala, bewildered. “Is there a tunnel to the forest?”

The colonel laughed. “There is nothing beyond this cave but solid rock. If there had been a way in or out of here other than the main entrance to the mine, I would have made use of it by now. I have been down here for almost a month, eating stale bread from your kitchen and drinking your pine needle soup.”

“A month?”

“That was not my intention,” admitted Kolchak. “I had arranged to spend only a few days inside the camp while we made final preparations for the escape. It almost never happened. Then one of my own men betrayed me. At least, he tried to. There was a price to pay for that.” To emphasize his words, Kolchak drew a long, stag-handled knife from under his jacket. Its massive bowie blade glimmered in the lantern light.

“You killed Ryabov?” gasped Pekkala. “Your own captain?”

“I had no choice.”

“But why would he have betrayed you?”

“What does it matter now? He is dead.”

“It matters a great deal,” insisted Pekkala, “to me and to your men.”

“He went over to the enemy. That is all you need to know. My friend”—a tone of warning had entered Kolchak’s voice—“just be glad you’re coming with us.”

From the tone of those words, Pekkala realized it was the only answer he was going to get. “What caused the delay in your plan?” he asked.

“After Ryabov’s body was found,” Kolchak replied, “the camp was locked down. Guards were doubled. Curfews were put in place. And then, when I learned you had returned to Borodok, I did not dare to make a move until I knew why you were here. Now the time has finally come for us to break out of this place.”

“Break out? I am still trying to understand how you broke in!”

“The Ostyaks arranged it. They have agreed to help us get across the border into China.”

“But the Ostyaks have never helped convicts before.”

“That is because no prisoner has ever been able to offer them a decent bribe, something better than the bags of salt and army bread paid out by the camp commandant for delivering the bodies of those who attempted escape.”

“What did you offer?”

“A share of the gold,” answered Kolchak. “Which we will pick up from its hiding place on our way to the border. Of course, before any of this could happen, they first had to get me inside the camp, so that I could organize the breakout of however many men remained from the expedition. I had no idea so few were left. I wish I could have come sooner, but it took me many years to find out where the men were being held and longer still to lay out the plans for escape. I am glad their days of suffering at Borodok will soon be at an end.”

“How did you manage to get inside the camp?”

“The only time the Ostyaks come to Borodok is to deliver the dead to Klenovkin’s door and to pick up their payment for each body. They had noticed that the men who took away the corpses all had tattoos of a pine tree on their hands, just as I have on mine. Since that is the symbol we chose for our journey to Siberia, I knew those men must be survivors of the expedition. Just before you arrived at the camp, a group of men had tried to escape. Before long, they, like all the others, had perished in the forest. When the Ostyaks found some of the corpses, they brought them to the camp and unloaded them at the feet of the Comitati, who were waiting to take them away. Except one of those bodies was still breathing.” Kolchak tapped a finger against his chest. “As soon as Tarnowski and the others realized what was happening, they carried me out of sight to the generator shed, where the bodies of the dead are stored. That night, after dark, they brought me to the safety of this mine. I have been here ever since, waiting for the right moment to escape.”

“But how will the Ostyaks know when you are ready?”

“They have been watching this camp from the forest. That fire in the generator shed yesterday morning was the signal that we are ready to go.”

“I was sure you had been killed,” said Pekkala. “When I learned that you might still be alive, I thought I must be dreaming.”

“Survival has been difficult for both of us,” replied Kolchak, “and we are not yet out of danger. We have much to discuss, old friend, but it will have to wait until we’re safe.”

“And how long will that be?”

“We leave tomorrow at first light. When the moment arrives, you will know, but you will have to move quickly in order not to be left behind. If you are delayed, we can’t afford to wait for you.”

As the shock of seeing Kolchak began to wear off, Pekkala’s thoughts turned back towards the gold. Stalin must have known all along about the missing Imperial Reserves, he told himself. That’s why he sent me here. He knew that my acquaintance with Kolchak from before the Revolution would lure the colonel out into the open. Once Kolchak had been found, the gold would not be far away. Ryabov was not the pawn in this game, thought Pekkala. I was.

Bile spilled into the back of his throat as he realized he had been played by Stalin, just as the Tsar had used him, and both times because of this gold.

Pekkala suddenly remembered a conversation he’d had with Rasputin many years before. Pekkala sometimes had difficulty in deciphering the musings of the Siberian holy man and even when Rasputin did manage to make himself understood, Pekkala often found it hard to take him seriously. But this time Pekkala wished he had listened more closely.

It was evening. Pekkala walked along a tree-lined boulevard on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Heat from that summer day still lingered in the air.

Following the odor of frying garlic, Pekkala made his way to a club known as the Villa Rode.

Pekkala was looking for Rasputin, who could be found at this place almost every evening. He did not normally seek out the Siberian mystic. In fact, Pekkala usually went out of his way to avoid Rasputin, but he was the only person that Pekkala knew he could talk to about what he’d seen earlier that day.

The Villa Rode was popular with the St. Petersburg elite because it did not close until sunup. When the famous Streilna restaurant, which resembled a miniature palace made of ice in the middle of Petrovsky Park, shut its doors at two a.m., followed by the Koupeschesky casino club at three a.m., those who were still conscious and had money in their pockets paid a visit to the Villa Rode.

The building’s wooden plank exterior was badly in need of paint. Inside, the rooms were cramped, the tables small and rickety, and the acoustics notoriously strange. It was sometimes possible to hear the whispered conversation of a couple on the other side of the room while having to almost shout to be understood by someone sitting at the same table.

Through the open windows of the Villa Rode came the sounds of laughter and piano music. A deep and slightly drunken voice crooned Sorokin’s song, “As long as I can see the flame, out there in the darkness, I know that I am still alive.”

The Villa Rode had become Rasputin’s favorite haunt for the simple reason that he never had to pay for anything when he was there. His bill was handled by the Tsarina Alexandra from an account set up specially to pay for his food and drink, as well as to cover the costs of the broken chairs, tables, china, and windows which were often the result of his evening entertainment.

Rasputin had been thrown out of so many places that restaurant owners were given a special number to call if they needed him removed from their premises. Once the call had been made, an unmarked car would be dispatched and Rasputin would be hauled away by agents of the Okhrana operating under the direct orders of the Tsarina. Fetching Rasputin was said to be one of the worst duties an Okhrana agent could be assigned. Chief Inspector Vassileyev, head of the St. Petersburg Bureau, reserved it for those men under his command who required an extra dose of humiliation.

Just when it seemed as if the city might be running out of places for Rasputin to disgrace himself, the owner of the Villa Rode, a somber-looking man named Gorokhin, hit upon a brilliant plan which assured him a steady source of income from the coffers of the Romanovs, as well as the gratitude of the Tsarina.

Gorokhin offered to build an extension onto the Villa Rode. This extra room would be for Rasputin alone. It could not be accessed by regular patrons, nor would Rasputin ever be asked to leave the extension, no matter what he did inside it.

No sooner had Gorokhin made his offer than a team of builders arrived from the palace of Tsarskoye Selo to begin construction of the extension. It was completed in forty-eight hours, and since then Rasputin had made it his own.

That night, Gorokhin recognized Pekkala at once, and correctly guessed that he had come to see Rasputin. He led Pekkala out the back of the restaurant, passing through a neglected garden thick with tangled bushes. The air was heavy with the smell of lavender and honeysuckle. At last they arrived at a plain, low-roofed hut which adjoined the Villa Rode.

No noise came from behind the pine door. Nor was there any light glimmering through the shuttered windows.

“Are you sure he’s here?” Pekkala asked.

“He kicked the door down on his way in this morning,” replied Gorokhin. “I had to put up this new one. There have been several visitors since then, but Rasputin himself has not emerged.”

“Is he alone?”

“I doubt it.”

“Thank you,” said Pekkala.

Gorokhin nodded and left.

Pekkala opened the door and walked inside. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and alcohol and the ash of coarse Khorizki tobacco, which Rasputin preferred to the more expensive Balkan cigarettes smoked by his benefactor, the Empress.

The only light came from a single candle melted onto the head of a small brass Buddha. The melted wax had trickled down, coating the belly of the statue.

Searching the gloom, Pekkala could make out a large couch and a low table strewn with bottles. On an upholstered stool sat a man who was definitely not Rasputin. This stranger wore a black wool coat with a velvet collar and clutched a round-topped Homburg hat. His thin-soled shoes were narrow in the toe and highly polished. The man did not glance up at Pekkala, but stared at the floor with a grim expression on his face.

Pekkala had seen that look before, from people who had been caught red-handed at some illegal activity but were too dignified, or too afraid, to run away.

Opposite the man, slumped on a couch with legs spread and bare feet resting on the table, was Rasputin. He wore a silk robe with a Japanese kimono pattern and a belt like a bell-ringer’s rope. “Pekkala,” he said, and the name seemed to crack from his lips like a tiny spark of electricity. Haphazardly, Rasputin began to rearrange his clothes. “Has Chief Inspector Vassileyev finally sent you to arrest me or else”—he gestured vaguely at the man huddled across the table—“is it this gentleman you’ve come to put in chains?”

The man still refused to look up, as if by remaining motionless he might escape detection.

“I am not here to arrest either of you.”

“Thank God for that,” sighed the man in the black coat.

Rasputin lifted one finger and wagged it at the man. “You can go now—and be sure to thank God for that, as well.”

Obediently, the man stood. From the inside pocket of his coat, he removed an envelope and placed it on the table, between Rasputin’s large and hairy feet. “So we have an understanding?”

Rasputin laughed. “I understand you, but that does not mean we understand each other. Come back tomorrow. Bring another envelope.”

“Not without some kind of guarantee,” protested the man. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“You will,” Rasputin told him, “and that is all you’ll dream about.”

Too indignant to reply, the man stormed out of the room.

The candle flame shuddered as he passed by and the face of the little Buddha appeared to be laughing at him.

“What was that about?” Pekkala asked Rasputin.

“He is a representative for a jeweler in Petersburg. He is hoping to have a royal warrant bestowed upon his company.”

“And why is he asking you for that?”

“Because he can’t ask anyone else! Least of all the Romanovs.”

“I don’t understand.”

“And that is why I love you, Pekkala.” Rasputin sat forward, lifting his bare feet from the table and planting them firmly on the floor. He picked up the bribe, index finger shuffling through the bills as he counted them. Then he tossed the money back onto the table. “You see, Pekkala, you can’t just ask for the royal warrant. You have to be given it. If you do ask for it, there’s no chance at all of receiving one. Instead, you must give the impression that you would accept it if offered, but that in the meantime, you do not expect anything. That’s the way things work.”

Pekkala did not know much about royal warrants, but the strange logic of wanting but not daring to show the want or not asking in the hopes of receiving was familiar to him from other aspects of the royal family. It was the way that they maintained their grip upon those levels of Russian society which fanned out around the Romanovs like ripples from a stone thrown in a pond.

“He wants me to convince the Tsarina,” continued Rasputin.

“And you think you could?”

Rasputin breathed out sharply through his nose. “Please, Pekkala. Of course I could! The question is, will I?”

“And what is the answer?”

“I don’t know yet, and that is what infuriates him.”

“He would be even more infuriated if he knew you will be giving away his money to the next sad face that walks into the room.”

Rasputin laughed. “I give away my money because it buys me something far more valuable than cash.”

“And what is that?”

“Loyalty. Affection. Information. Everything I would have spent it on except this way I also earn friends. That’s something he will never figure out.”

“Did you really think I had come to arrest you?”

“Of course not! I can’t be arrested. Not in here. And probably not anywhere. Not even by you.”

“I would not put that to the test.” Pekkala went over to the table, found another candle, this one jammed into a wicker-covered Chianti bottle, and lit it.

With enough light now to see around the room, he looked at the flimsy sheets of silk which had been draped across the walls, the mud-caked Berber carpet on the floor, and what he at first thought was broken glass but which he realized was actually money. There were shiny coins everywhere, tossed like offerings to a fountain in every corner of the room.

“Why are you here, Pekkala?” asked Rasputin, and as he spoke he stretched out one leg, nudging aside the bottles on the table with a big yellow-nailed toe, searching for one that might have some drink left in it. “Has something caused the Emerald Eye to blink? What could it be? Not the sight of blood. You have already seen too much of that. It would not be threats. Those do not seem to bother you. No. It is something for which you were unprepared.”

“The Tsar sent for me today. There is a room beneath the palace—”

Before Pekkala could finish, Rasputin clapped his hands and roared with laughter. “Of course! I should have guessed! The Tsar has been worshipping his gold again, and it was your turn to take part in the ceremony.”

“Ceremony? What do you mean?”

Rasputin’s smile revealed a mixture of pity and amusement. “Poor Pekkala! Without me here to guide you, how would you ever understand? You see, the Tsar has already exhausted all the solitary pleasure he can take from his hoard of treasure. What he needs is an audience. What satisfies him now is the look on the face of someone setting eyes for the first time on those bars of gold. What he wants, what he needs, Pekkala, is to see the flash of envy in their gaze. It destroys them. It ruins their lives. They never recover from the shock of that longing. And no matter how much they beg him for another glimpse of that gold—and believe me they do beg—those doors will remain closed to them forever.”

“I do not envy him because of what I saw today.”

“Of course you don’t! You are not like the others. The Tsar has failed to tempt you with his Fabergé eggs, his Amber Room, and the artwork on his walls. So now he has laid down his trump card, the thing which never fails.”

“But it has failed. When I looked at that pile of gold, all I could think about was the suffering of those miners. He sent in the Cossacks to kill them!” Pekkala’s voice rose in anger. “All those men wanted was the chance to work in safety, and he would not even give them that.”

Rasputin’s eyes seemed to flicker in the candlelight. “But many things are valuable precisely because they are the product of pain. Think of the pearl. It begins as a grain of sand. Imagine the agony of the oyster as that tiny piece of stone digs into the soft flesh of the creature, like a knife stabbing into your brain! So the oyster surrounds the pearl with its own living shell until at last it becomes what we value, enough to kill the oyster for it anyway—the same way the Tsar is prepared to kill his miners. The truth, Pekkala, is that beauty on this earth is set aside for the enjoyment of the few and comes at the cost of the suffering of the many. That is true for many things besides gold and pearls. It is true for the Tsarina, for example, although most of that suffering is her husband’s. Your eyes have been opened, Pekkala. You used to see the Tsar as a victim of circumstance, secretly longing to be like any other man, like a god who wishes to be mortal. You blamed the world of extravagance into which he had been born. You blamed the need of all rulers to appear larger than life, in their manner, in their wealth, in their surroundings. You even blamed his wife, I expect. Everybody else does. But the one person you could not bring yourself to blame was the Tsar himself, and so I say again—it has not failed.”

“You can be very cruel, Grigori.”

“Not as cruel as the Tsar,” he replied. “He knew that the one thing you would respect in him was the secret disregard for all his wealth, because that was the only way for you to see yourself in him. And why else would you agree to serve a man unless you held the same things to be sacred? What the Tsar did today was to show you his true face, and in that moment the man you thought you knew turned out to be a stranger.” Rasputin leveled a long, bony finger at Pekkala. “I warn you, my friend, that treasure is cursed. Even those you trust with your own life will betray you if you come between them and that gold.”

“Have you seen it?” asked Pekkala.

“Of course!” Rasputin lifted his hands and let them fall again upon the couch, sending up tiny puffs of dust from the crushed velvet. “I enjoyed the experience immensely, because I have discovered that my greatest source of pleasure is neither money nor the women who traipse into my life and get exactly what they’re looking for and who will one day swear they’ve never met me.”

“Then what is it, Rasputin?”

“What this twisted brain of mine can no longer do without”—Rasputin tapped a finger against his forehead—“is to stand at the edge of the abyss, not knowing which way I will fall.”

Six months later, the St. Petersburg police pulled Rasputin’s body from the freezing waters of the Neva River. At the spot where he had touched his forehead on that night Pekkala came to see him, Rasputin’s murderers had put a bullet through his skull.

THERE WAS A SCUFFLING in the tunnel outside, followed by a shout and a strange crunching sound, like someone biting into an apple.

Kolchak moved over to the entrance, the knife still in his hand. “Lavrenov, what’s happening?”

“I found someone prowling around.”

Kolchak and Pekkala stepped into the tunnel.

In the middle of the narrow passageway, a man lay on his back, nailed to the earth by Lavrenov’s pickax. The man was still alive, spluttering as he struggled for breath.

“He must have followed us,” Lavrenov said.

Kolchak fetched the lantern from the cave.

Pekkala stifled a gasp as the light touched the dying man’s face.

It was Savushkin, his bodyguard. Helplessly, the man stared at Pekkala.

Knowing there was nothing he could do, Pekkala struggled to contain his emotions as he watched Savushkin’s last breath trail out.

“Bury him,” ordered Kolchak.

“Yes, Colonel.” Lavrenov set his foot against Savushkin’s chest, and wrenched out the pickax blade.

Kolchak turned to Pekkala. “Go now,” he said gently, “before anyone notices you’ve been gone. And do not worry, my friend. It is all in motion now.”

“KORNFELD SAYS THE TARGET HAS been liquidated.”

Without looking up from his paperwork, Stalin grunted in acknowledgment.

“There is something else, Comrade Stalin—a new development at Borodok.”

The paper shuffling came to an abrupt halt.

“Another telegram has arrived,” continued Poskrebyshev.

“From Kirov or Pekkala?”

“Neither. It’s from Camp Commandant Klenovkin, and addressed to you, Comrade Stalin.” Poskrebyshev handed over the message.

BEG TO REPORT INSPECTOR PEKKALA OVERHEARD DENOUNCING COMMUNIST PARTY AND MAKING THREATS AGAINST COMRADE STALIN STOP BELIEVE PEKKALA PLANNING UPRISING IN CAMP STOP HAS FALSELY ACCUSED ME OF INVOLVEMENT IN CRIME STOP LONG LIVE THE PARTY STOP LONG LIVE COMRADE STALIN STOP KLENOVKIN COMMANDANT BORODOK

Stalin sat back heavily in his chair. “Denouncing me? An uprising?”

“Has this been confirmed?” asked Poskrebyshev.

“There is no time to waste on confirmations,” Stalin snapped. “The prisoners will flock to him. The uprising could spread to other camps. If Pekkala isn’t stopped, this could turn into a national emergency.” He sat forward, wrote something on a pad of yellow note paper, and handed the note to Poskrebyshev. “Send this to Klenovkin. Tell him to carry out the order and to report back to me immediately afterwards.”

Poskrebyshev blinked in surprise when he saw what Stalin had written. “Do you not wish to verify the camp commandant’s message before such drastic action is taken?”

“What reason could this man Klenovkin have for sending me a pack of lies?”

“And what could Pekkala possibly have to gain by turning on you now?”

“More than you know! More than you could possibly realize!” With wild eyes, Stalin glared at Poskrebyshev. “Now send the message, and when I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.”

Poskrebyshev lowered his head in surrender, as if it was his own doom and not Pekkala’s which had just been sealed. “Yes, Comrade Stalin,” he whispered.

When Poskrebyshev had gone, Stalin walked to the window. He lit himself a cigarette and looked out over the city. As smoke flooded into his lungs, smoothing out the ragged edges of his mind, the memory of Pekkala was already fading from his thoughts.

EVER SINCE SENDING the telegram detailing Pekkala’s nonexistent threats against Stalin, Klenovkin had been poised over the telegraph, waiting for a reply. He waited for so long that he had dozed off. When the device finally sprang to life, the commandant was so startled that he backed away from it as if a growling dog had crept into the room.

As soon as Klenovkin read the telegram, he sent for Gramotin.

While he waited, Klenovkin paced around his study, rubbing his hands together in satisfaction. For the first time in as long as he could remember, something was going his way. This would, he knew, be the springboard to greater things. The meteoric rise he had always imagined he would make through the ranks of the Dalstroy Company had finally begun.

At last Gramotin appeared.

“Read this.”

“Liq …” The telegram trembled between Gramotin’s fingers as he struggled to pronounce the words. “Liquiday. Liquidate.”

“Idiot!” Klenovkin snatched the message back and read it out himself. “Now,” he said when he had finished, “do you understand what must be done?”

“Yes, Comrade Klenovkin. First thing in the morning?”

Klenovkin paused. “On second thought, wait until he has finished his breakfast duties.”

“So we can keep him working to the very end.”

“My thoughts, exactly, Sergeant.”

Gramotin nodded, impressed. “Dalstroy will be proud of you.”

“Indeed they will,” agreed Klenovkin, “and it’s about time, too.”

THE OLD GUARD, Larchenko, sat in his chair by the door, chin on his chest, snoring. His rifle stood propped against the wall.

Nearby, Pekkala lay in his bunk, haunted by the death of Savushkin. He inhaled the musty, used-up air of dreaming men and listened to the patient rhythm of their breathing.

Unable to sleep, Pekkala climbed out of his bunk and walked over to the window. His felt boots made no sound as they glided across the worn floorboards. With the heel of his palm, he rubbed away the frost that had gathered on the inside of the glass.

Soon it would be dawn.

Pekkala had made up his mind to lie low when the breakout began. As Kolchak had said, they would not wait for him if he was delayed in the confusion.

There had been no time to reflect upon his brief meeting with the colonel. He continued to be baffled by the colonel’s choice to return, in spite of the overwhelming risks involved. At the same time, Pekkala felt a surge of guilt that his own faith in this man had not matched that of the soldiers he had left behind in Siberia. Pekkala was glad that the magnitude of the Comitati’s endurance would at last be repaid with their freedom.

And as for Stalin, he decided, the payment for his treachery would be the knowledge that Kolchak had slipped from his grasp yet again, along with the last of the Imperial gold reserves. When the time came, Pekkala decided, he would simply deny that he had known anything about Kolchak’s plans.

Although Pekkala had solved the murder of Ryabov, it troubled him that he had never learned the motive for Ryabov’s betrayal of the colonel. He realized now that he might never know. Whatever Ryabov’s purpose, he had taken his reasons to the grave.

With shark-gray clouds hanging on the red horizon, Pekkala made his way over to the kitchen as usual in order to prepare the breakfast. The oven was on and the bread was baking inside. Melekov was nowhere to be seen. He often went back to his quarters for an extra half hour of sleep, leaving to Pekkala the job of removing the loaves just before the kitchen opened for breakfast. It was so quiet out on the compound that Pekkala began to wonder if the escape had already taken place. When the bread was done, Pekkala took the pans from the oven and tipped the paika rations out into the battered aluminum tubs from which they would be served.

He had just completed this task when Melekov burst into the kitchen. “You have to get out of here!” he hissed. “They’re going to kill you.”

“Who is?” demanded Pekkala.

“On Klenovkin’s orders, you are to be shot as soon as the prisoners have gone to work this morning.”

Pekkala wondered if Klenovkin had found out about the escape. If that was true, he would not be the only one to die. “Who told you this?”

“Gramotin did. Only a few minutes ago.”

“Damn it, Melekov! Did you not stop to wonder if this might just be another of his lies?”

“He said that orders had come in from Moscow last night. Klenovkin even showed him the telegram. Stalin himself wants you dead!”

Pekkala’s mind was racing. If Stalin had indeed ordered the execution, his only hope of survival would be to escape with the Comitati. Even if the telegram was just a story concocted by Gramotin, Pekkala knew he would be dead before the lie had been discovered. It took him only a second to realize he had no choice except to run.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked Melekov. “If what you say is true, do you realize what your life would be worth if they found out I’d heard it from you?”

“You could have killed me, that day in the kitchen. Maybe you should have, but you didn’t. I pay my debts, Pekkala, and this one is paid. Now move quickly. I know a place where you can hide.” The cook beckoned for Pekkala to follow, spun around and found himself face-to-face with Tarnowski, who had appeared in the doorway to the kitchen.

Before Melekov had a chance to react, Tarnowski laid him out with a fist to the side of the head. Melekov sprawled unconscious on the floor.

“Time to go, Pekkala,” said Tarnowski.

Suddenly, a wall of darkness seemed to rise from the entrance to the camp. A tremor passed through Pekkala. The ground shook under his feet. Then a flash as bright as molten copper burst through the narrow gap between the gates, which tore loose from their iron hinges, scattering the links of chain which had held them shut.

“Head straight through the entrance,” ordered Tarnowski. “Don’t stop for anything. I’ll meet you on the other side.”

Without a word, Pekkala set off running across the compound. In between clouds of smoke, he glimpsed the Ostyaks milling about just outside the gates. They had brought sleds, four that Pekkala could see, each one harnessed to a single caribou.

Guards spilled out of the watchtowers. None of them made any attempt to open fire on the Ostyaks. Instead, they scrambled down their ladders and bolted for the safety of the guardhouse.

On the other side of the compound, Pekkala caught sight of Lavrenov. Kneeling in front of him was one of the guards, whom Pekkala recognized as Platov, the man they called Gramotin’s puppet. On his way to the guardhouse, Platov had slipped on the ice and dropped his rifle.

Before Platov could get back on his feet, Lavrenov had snatched up the gun, with its long, cruciform bayonet, and now aimed it squarely at the guard. “Which god are you praying to now?” screamed Lavrenov, as Platov raised his hands desperately to shield his face. “Haven’t you abolished all of them?”

Pekkala lost sight of the two men as he ran past the bronze statue. At that moment, he spotted a guard up on the walkway between the towers. This one had not fled like the others. Instead, he took aim at Pekkala. As the man raised the gun to his shoulder, Pekkala realized it was Gramotin.

He heard the gun go off, brittle and echoing across the compound, and then came a dull clang as the bullet struck the statue of the woman.

Then another shot rang out, this one from the other side of the compound.

Gramotin’s legs slipped out from under him. He tumbled from the walkway into the ditch below.

As Pekkala sprinted through the gates, an Ostyak grabbed him by the arm. The stocky man, his wide face powdered with smoke, steered Pekkala towards one of the sleds. As Pekkala crouched on the narrow wooden platform, he stared through the jagged teeth of splintered wood, all that remained of the gates, at men running about in the compound. Half-dressed, disoriented prisoners poured from the barracks. The commandant’s quarters looked deserted, although Pekkala knew Klenovkin must be in there somewhere.

The Ostyaks drifted in and out of the thick smoke. The fur on their coats stood up like that of angry cats. They were busily setting fire to the stockade fence, whose tar-painted logs quickly began to burn.

Now Lavrenov emerged from camp. Immediately he took his place on one of the sleds. Crouching there, he stared back at the camp, amazed to be outside the prison walls at last.

Bullets snapped over their heads. Through the windows of the guardhouse, camp guards fired blind into the haze. Pekkala heard the clunk of rounds striking the gateposts and the spitting whine of bullets as they ricocheted off stones in the road.

Sedov lurched through the smoke. He stumbled, righted himself, then stared in confusion at a tear which had appeared in his jacket, the white fluff of raw cotton spattered with his blood. A stray bullet from the guardhouse had caught him in the back, the round passing through the top of his shoulder.

Lavrenov and Pekkala helped him to a sled.

At last Kolchak and Tarnowski arrived, each carrying rifles they had taken from the guard towers.

Now the four Ostyaks climbed onto their sleds, stepping roughly on the men who lay clinging to the wooden platforms.

Huddled at the feet of his driver, Pekkala heard the crack of whips. As the sled lunged forward, he dug his fingers between the boards and held on tight. Soon they were moving fast, the metal runners of the sled hissing as they raced across the ground. Through a blur of snow dust, Pekkala could just make out the other three sleds traveling behind. The hooves of the caribou clicked as they galloped and the frost-caked harnesses shuddered with the motion of their bodies.

Pekkala’s bare hands were beginning to freeze, so one at a time he tucked them inside the sleeves of his quilted jacket. Soon, he felt the burning pain in his fingertips as his nerves began to revive.

The breakout had happened so quickly that Pekkala was uncertain how much time had passed since he left the barracks, but it did not seem like more than a few minutes. The sun was up now. Ice crystals glistened in the trees.

He wondered how long it would be before Klenovkin sent out a search party. Knowing that the Ostyaks were involved, the Borodok guards would be unlikely to venture out beyond the camp anytime soon.

Only now was Pekkala able to focus on Stalin’s execution order. Assuming it was true, the day might never come when he would comprehend what path of twisted logic had led Stalin to turn on him without warning. Pekkala had seen things like this before, when hundreds, even thousands of men had gone to their deaths against the wall of Lubyanka prison, shouting their loyalty to the man who had ordered them shot.

Pekkala felt lucky to be alive, even if it meant he would spend the rest of his life on the run. He did not care about the things he’d leave behind—the tattered clothes and well-thumbed books, the meager bank account. But he wondered how Kirov would do. They will tell him I was a traitor, thought Pekkala. They will never let him know the truth about my leaving. There was so much he had not yet taught the young investigator. Feelings of regret rained down upon him. I was stingy with my knowledge, Pekkala thought. I was impatient. I demanded perfection instead of excellence. I could at least have smiled a little more.

Lost in these thoughts, Pekkala was caught by surprise when the sled turned sharply and began to follow a winding path up through the woods. The caribou struggled over the rising ground, the smell of its sweat mixed with the leather of the harness straps and the rank odor of the unwashed men.

By now, the cold had worked its way into Pekkala’s feet and across his shoulder blades. He could feel the remaining warmth in his body retreating deeper inside.

The Ostyaks halted in a clearing deep inside the forest. The men jumped down from their sleds, stamping the crust of snow from their legs.

The sun had slid behind the clouds. Now it began to snow.

Pekkala heard the noise of a stream somewhere nearby flowing beneath the ice. Chickadees sang in the branches of the trees and it was not long before the fearless, bandit-masked birds arrived to inspect the strangers. Like little clockwork toys, they hopped along the backs of the animals.

Sedov was lifted from his sled. The silhouette of his body, outlined in blood, remained on the rough wooden planks. Pekkala and Lavrenov laid him down in the snow, but he began to choke, nostrils flaring as he struggled to breathe. Instead they sat him with his back against a tree. Helplessly, they watched the wounded man, knowing that the help he required was beyond any skills they possessed.

KLENOVKIN CRAWLED OUT from under his desk, a pistol clutched in his hand. When the attack began, the commandant had been asleep in his office, head on his desk with a pile of requisition slips for a pillow. Jarred awake by the noise, he first thought that there had been an explosion in the mine. His semiconscious brain was already composing the damage report he would have to make to Dalstroy when, arriving in the outer office, he saw the main gates ripped from their mountings and Ostyaks waiting on the other side. At that point, Klenovkin grabbed his gun off the bookshelf, locked the door, and took cover beneath the desk, determined to shoot anyone who tried to get in.

But no one did.

Now the shooting had stopped. The camp was silent again.

Zebra stripes of sunlight gleamed through the shuttered windows.

Relieved as Klenovkin was to have been left alone by the Ostyaks, he could not help feeling a certain indignation that none of the guards had come to rescue him.

He could not fathom why the Ostyaks had mounted an assault on the camp. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He wondered what offense, conjured from their primitive and superstitious minds, had sent them on the warpath. In spite of what had happened, Klenovkin was not overly concerned. The camp guards, with their superior firepower and Sergeant Gramotin to lead them, would certainly have fought off any Ostyaks who managed to enter the camp. Nor did he worry about any prisoners attempting to escape, especially when there were Ostyaks around.

The sooner he made his way out to the compound, the fewer questions would be raised about his actions during the attack. Anxious to give the impression that he had been in the thick of the fighting, Klenovkin removed a bullet from his gun, detached the round from the brass cartridge and poured the gray sand of gunpowder into his palm. Then he spat on the powder, stirred it into a paste with his finger and daubed the mixture on his face.

Still cautious, Klenovkin climbed to his feet and peered between the shutters. The damage was worse than he’d thought.

Pale shreds of wood, all that remained of the gates, lay scattered across the compound. The two guard towers had burned and collapsed. One of the barracks was also on fire. Tar paper blazed on its roof, shingles curling like black fists in the heat. In an effort to stop the blaze from spreading, a couple of prisoners were shoveling snow up onto the roof, which seemed to have no effect at all.

Other prisoners had gathered at the cookhouse, where Melekov, refusing to alter his habits, was now handing out the breakfast rations.

In the center of the compound, a guard was kneeling on the ground, a rifle, with bayonet attached, propped against his shoulder.

Klenovkin looked closer, and recognized Platov, that idiot lapdog of Gramotin. The first thing he would do when he embarked on his inspection tour was to tell that lazy fool to get up and go back to work. But then he noticed that the rifle wasn’t resting against Platov’s shoulder as he had first imagined. In fact, Platov had been stabbed through the throat with the bayonet, which now protruded from the back of his neck. Platov was dead, propped up by the rifle, which had prevented him from falling.

No one had touched the body.

The spit dried up in Klenovkin’s mouth. Turning from the window, he picked up the phone and dialed the guardhouse. “This is Klenovkin. What is the situation?” Hearing the reply, he suddenly appeared to lose his balance and grabbed hold of the corner of his desk. “They what? All of them? With the Ostyaks? And Pekkala, too? Are you certain of this? Who has gone after them? What do you mean, nobody? You were waiting for my orders? Do you honestly think you need my permission to chase after escaped prisoners? I don’t care if the Ostyaks were with them! Get after them now! Now!” Klenovkin slammed down the receiver.

As the full measure of this disaster became clear to him, all the strength seemed to pour from his body.

He would be held responsible. His career was finished. Dalstroy would have him replaced. And that was the least of his worries. These were not just any prisoners. These were the Comitati, and for their escape he would answer directly to Moscow. His only chance was to blame Pekkala, in the hopes of deflecting Stalin’s fury.

Klenovkin slid the phone into the center of his desk. After breathing in and out several times, like a runner preparing for a race, he dialed the Kremlin.

Time slowed to a crawl as he listened to the click and crackle of the empty line. Vaguely, he recalled the night before, when his promotion through the ranks of Dalstroy had seemed a certainty. Last night felt like a dream, borrowed out of someone else’s life. Now a great spiraling darkness appeared in front of him, and Klenovkin felt himself drawn helplessly into its vortex. Finally he heard the distant purr of the telephone ringing in Moscow.

“Kremlin!” barked Poskrebyshev.

“This is Commandant Klenovkin.”

“Who?”

“Klenovkin. Commandant of the camp at Borodok. You gave me this number.”

“Ah. Borodok. Yes. You are calling to confirm that the liquidation of Pekkala has been carried out.”

“Not exactly.” Klenovkin inhaled, ready to explain, but before he had the chance a new voice broke in on the line.

“Put him through,” Stalin ordered.

Klenovkin felt as if the air had been punched out of his lungs.

Poskrebyshev pressed a button on his telephone, transferring the line to Stalin’s desk. But the secretary did not hang up as he should have done. Instead, he placed the receiver gently on his desk, then bent forward until his ear was almost pressed against it. His teeth gritted with concentration, Poskrebyshev strained to hear what was being said.

“Has Pekkala been executed,” demanded Stalin, “or hasn’t he?”

Klenovkin knew that the next words out of his mouth would change his life forever. As he tried to compose himself before delivering the answer, he stared at the white cloud of a snow squall riding in over the valley in the distance. It occurred to him that with a snowstorm coming in, all trace of the escape would be wiped clean and the prisoners would vanish forever in the taiga.

“Klenovkin? Are you there?”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin.”

“What has become of Pekkala?”

“I beg to report that the inspector escaped before I had a chance to carry out your orders.”

“Escaped? When?”

“This morning.”

“But you received my instructions last night! He should have been shot within five minutes of your reading the message!”

“I decided to wait until morning, Comrade Stalin.”

“And what purpose could that possibly have served?” spluttered Stalin.

Ransacking his mind, Klenovkin could no longer reconstruct the train of thought in which postponing Pekkala’s execution had seemed such a good idea to him only a few hours before. “There is more, Comrade Stalin.”

“More?” he bellowed. “What else have you bungled, Klenovkin?”

“The men of the Kolchak Expedition have also managed to escape.”

For the next few seconds only a faint rustling could be heard, which neither Stalin nor Klenovkin realized was, in fact, the sound of Poskrebyshev’s breathing as he eavesdropped on the conversation.

“It is all Pekkala’s fault,” protested Klenovkin. “He made threats against you, Comrade Stalin!”

“Threats.” Stalin echoed the word. Until that moment, he’d seen no reason to doubt the camp commandant’s words, but now suspicions were gathering, like storm clouds in his mind. “What did he say exactly?”

Klenovkin was not prepared for this. He had assumed that the mere mention of a threat against the leader of the country would be enough. “What exactly?” he stammered. “Grave threats. Serious allegations, Comrade Stalin.”

There was another long pause. “Pekkala never made any threats, did he?”

“Why would you say such a thing?” pleaded Klenovkin.

“It occurs to me now, Klenovkin, that Pekkala has stood before me many times, wearing that English cannon he keeps strapped against his chest, and I have never had cause to fear him. If Pekkala wanted to kill me he would do it first and talk about it afterwards. It is not in his nature to make threats. In short, Commandant, I suspect you are lying to me.”

Klenovkin’s whole body went numb. The thought of continuing this deception seemed beyond any willpower he possessed. It was as if Stalin were staring straight into his soul. “There were no threats,” he confessed.

“Listen to me carefully.” Stalin sounded eerily calm. “I want you to take out the file of Inspector Pekkala.”

Klenovkin had expected Stalin to rage at him, but the softness in his leader’s voice caught him by surprise. In his desperation, he took this as a sign that he might still come through unscathed. Sliding open his desk drawer, he removed Pekkala’s file. “I have it here—Prisoner 4745.”

“Now I want you to take out his information sheet.”

“I’ve got it. And what next, Comrade Stalin?”

“I want you to destroy it.”

“Destroy it?” he croaked. “But why?”

“Because as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Inspector Pekkala was never there”—Stalin’s voice was rising now—“and I will not have the Kremlin embroiled in some Dalstroy inquiry into your failure to carry out your duties! Now burn the sheet, and this time there will be no delay.”

Stunned, Klenovkin took out his cigarette lighter and set fire to the corner of the paper. The document burned quickly. Soon all that remained was a fragile curl of ash, which Klenovkin dropped into the green metal garbage can beside his desk. “It’s done,” he said.

“Good! Now—”

There was a sharp click. The line from Borodok went dead.

“Poskrebyshev,” said Stalin.

Poskrebyshev held his breath and said nothing.

“Poskrebyshev, I know you are listening.”

Clumsily, Poskrebyshev snatched up the receiver and fumbled as he pressed it against his ear. “Yes, Comrade Stalin!”

“Get me Major Kirov.”