Archive 17

KLENOVKIN LAY on the floor of his study, eyes wide and staring at the ceiling. Clutched in his fist was a pistol, smoke still leaking from the barrel. A spray of blood peppered the wall. Beneath it lay the back of Klenovkin’s skull, torn loose by the impact of the bullet and looking almost exactly like the handsome onyx ashtray on his desk, presented to him by Dalstroy for his fifteen years of loyal service.

AS PEKKALA WALKED around the clearing, the circulation slowly returned to his frozen legs and arms. At the edge of the trees, he came across some charred wooden beams. Next he kicked up some old glass jars, twisted by the fire which had consumed the cabin that once stood here.

In that moment, he realized that these were the ruins of his own cabin, where he had lived for years as a tree-marker for the Borodok lumber operation.

These melted shards of glass had once been part of a window in his cabin. Lacking other means, he had collected pickle jars left behind by the logging crews, stacked them on their sides with the mouths facing inward, and then caulked the gaps with moss.

He remembered seeing the northern lights through those makeshift panes of glass; the vast curtains of green and white and pink rippling like some sea creature in the blackness of the ocean’s depths.

Where Sedov lay bleeding, Pekkala recalled lying in the shade to escape the summer heat, chewing the bitter, clover-shaped leaves of wood sorrel to slake his thirst, and how the beds of dried lichen would rustle beneath the weight of his body, with a sound like a toothless old man eating crackers.

His eyes strayed to where his storage shed had been, constructed on poles above the ground to discourage mice from devouring his meager supplies of pine nuts, sunflower seeds, and dried strips of a fish called grayling, which he sometimes caught in the streams that flowed through this valley.

In the decade since he had been here last, a number of young trees had grown around the clearing. The skeletons of brambles lay like coils of barbed wire among the puffed and blackened logs which had been a part of his home. It had taken him weeks to clear this space, and it startled him to see how thoroughly the forest had reclaimed the ground. In a few more years, there would be little to show that this place had been the center of Pekkala’s world, each tree and stone as known to him as the freckles constellationed on his arms.

On the other side of the clearing, Kolchak crouched down before Sedov. He scooped up some snow and touched it against Sedov’s lips.

“I told you it wouldn’t be long before we were living like kings,” whispered Sedov, “but I didn’t think I’d reach the Promised Land so soon.”

Kolchak did not reply. Gently, he patted Sedov’s cheek, then stood and walked away.

Tarnowski pulled him aside and, in an urgent whisper, said, “We can’t just leave him here.”

“And we can’t take him with us,” replied Kolchak. “He would only slow us down.”

“The guards from the camp will find Sedov. You don’t know what they’ll do to him.”

“It doesn’t matter what they do,” Kolchak snapped. “By the time those men get here, Sedov will be dead.”

The Ostyaks beckoned them back to the sleds.

“We must leave,” said one of them. “This is a bad place.” He pointed to the ruins of Pekkala’s cabin. “A bad place,” he repeated.

The last Pekkala saw of Sedov, he was still sitting against the tree. His head had fallen forward, chin resting on his chest. Either he was sleeping or else he was already dead.

They did not stop again until they reached the tracks, arriving at the place where the main line of the Trans-Siberian branched off towards the Borodok railhead.

Kolchak jumped down from his sled. “Now let’s gather what belongs to us and get out of here.”

Still carrying the rifle he had stolen from the camp, Tarnowski stood in the middle of the tracks. Nervously, he looked up and down the rails, which glowed like new lead in the dingy light. “It’s hard to say, Colonel.”

Kolchak joined him on the tracks. “What do you mean? You told me to bring you to the place where the railroad forked down towards the camp. Here is the fork. Now where is the gold?”

Tarnowski scratched at his face, like a man who had stepped into cobwebs. “When we came around a bend in the tracks …”

“Keep your voice down,” hissed Kolchak. “If those Ostyaks learn where you’ve hidden the gold, they’ll leave us behind and steal everything for themselves.”

From then on, the two men held a muttered conversation. “We spotted a small cliff right beside a pond,” Tarnowski continued. “We buried the crates on the other side of that pond. I thought we would be able to see it from here, but it’s been a long time, Colonel. The mind plays tricks …”

“You realize, Lieutenant Tarnowski, that we are almost certainly being followed, by men whose incentive for killing us is that they will lose their own lives if they fail. It will take time to dig up the gold, especially since the ground is frozen. After that, it’s a race for the border. I don’t need to tell you that if they catch up with us again, no one’s going to spare your life this time.”

“It can’t be far, Colonel,” Tarnowski reassured him. “If we send a sled in each direction, one of them is sure to find it. The rest of us can wait here.”

The Ostyaks watched and waited, knowing they were not trusted. The caribou, sensing hostility in the air, shifted nervously in their harnesses.

“All right,” said Kolchak. “Tell the Ostyaks what we’re going to do. I’ll go on one sled and you take the other. If you’re the one who spots the cliff, make sure you travel past it before you order the Ostyak to turn around. Otherwise, you’ll give away the location without even saying a word.”

Climbing on a sled, Kolchak set off to the west along the tracks. Tarnowski turned to the east.

The snow was still falling as they headed out.

The sleds faded into the white, as if cataracts clouded the eyes of those who watched them go.

IN THE COMPOUND of the Borodok camp, the body of Platov still knelt in a puddle of blood.

To Gramotin, staring down at him, the dead man looked like a Muslim kneeling on a red prayer rug.

Gramotin’s face showed a mixture of anger and disgust. He could not make up his mind whether to be angry at the man who had murdered Platov or disgusted at Platov for dying. He rested his hand on Platov’s shoulder, as if to offer consolation.

Unbalanced by the weight of Gramotin’s touch, the corpse keeled over on its side.

Gramotin picked up the rifle, sliding the bayonet out of Platov’s neck. He cleaned the blade by wiping it on the dead man’s coat, then shouldered the weapon and made his way to the commandant’s office.

Gramotin knocked on the door, slamming his fist against the flimsy wooden panels. There was no reply. Gramotin tried the handle, but it was locked. Already out of patience, he raised one boot and kicked in the door.

The first thing Gramotin saw when he walked in was a splatter of blood on the wall. The room smelled of gun smoke. Then he caught sight of Klenovkin’s body, lying stretched out on the floor behind his desk. The pistol was still in his hand. It was obvious that Klenovkin had shot himself.

Gramotin thought he knew the reason why. Lying on Klenovkin’s desk was the empty file belonging to prisoner 4745.

“Pekkala,” muttered Gramotin. He turned his head and spat onto the floor.

He was aware that the convict had escaped, having witnessed it with his own eyes. When the attack began, Gramotin had been up in one of the guard towers. Stepping out onto the walkway, he spotted Pekkala running towards the gates. He raised his rifle and fired at the running man. The first shot missed, which did not surprise Gramotin, since he was a poor shot even on his best days, but the second time he had Pekkala square in his sights. Before he had time to shoot, a bullet had come out of nowhere and struck the butt of his rifle, knocking him off his feet. Gramotin slipped off the walkway and fell into the ditch below. Landing in a dirty heap of snow, he had not suffered any injury, but by the time he crawled out of the ditch, Pekkala and the Comitati were gone.

Since the Comitati had never before attempted to escape, Gramotin immediately reached the conclusion that Pekkala must have engineered the breakout. To cover his tracks, the convict had even gone so far as to break into Klenovkin’s office in order to steal his own file. Having discovered this, Klenovkin must have realized that the blame would fall on him. In desperation, the man had taken his own life.

Now Klenovkin would have to be replaced—the very thing Gramotin had been desperate to avoid.

Melekov had botched his attempt to kill Pekkala.

Klenovkin, too, had bungled.

Even Stalin’s orders from Moscow had failed to end the bastard’s life.

I will have to do the job myself, thought Gramotin. He turned to leave, but then turned back. Bending down, he prised the pistol from Klenovkin’s hand, tucked it into his belt, and strode out of the room.

KIROV ARRIVED at the Kremlin.

The message had said it was urgent.

A guard escorted him to Stalin’s office.

As the outer door opened, Poskrebyshev rose to his feet, with a particular casualness he reserved for men of lesser rank than the generals who usually paraded past his desk on their way to meet with Stalin. “He is expecting you, Major.”

“Thank you,” replied Kirov, handing Poskrebyshev his cap.

“I will require your passbook as well, Major.”

Kirov removed the booklet from the top left pocket of his tunic and placed it on the desk.

Poskrebyshev nodded towards the double doors which led into Stalin’s office. “Now you can go in.”

Stalin was sitting at a table just to the side of the main window, eating a tin of sardines in tomato sauce. The smell of them filled the air, metallic and vinegary. The lid of the sardine tin had been peeled back. It looked like a clock spring, the little key still jutting from the center of the coil. With blunt fingers, Stalin chased the slippery and headless fish out of the sauce and packed them into his mouth.

Kirov waited in silence, his eyes fixed on Stalin’s jaw muscles, which flexed beneath the pockmarked skin.

Stalin sucked the oily fish scales from his fingertips. Then he wiped his hands on a brightly patterned handkerchief which lay across his knee. “Do you know why I sent Pekkala to Siberia?”

“To investigate the murder of Captain Ryabov.”

Stalin picked a fishbone from between his teeth. “And do you know why I took such an interest in the death of this convict?”

“He was a member of the Kolchak Expedition.”

“Correct.”

“I also know that you believed there might be a connection between this man’s death and the discovery that Colonel Kolchak could still be alive.”

Stalin nodded approvingly. “That is all true, Major, but it is only a fraction of the whole picture.”

A look of confusion drifted across Kirov’s face.

“Major Kirov, what I am about to tell you is privileged information. It cannot be discussed outside this room. Do you understand?”

“Of course, Comrade Stalin.”

“The case is more important than you realize. Even Inspector Pekkala was not made aware of its full implications. This is not merely about solving a murder, or tracking down a man I believed I had personally disposed of many years ago.”

“Then what is it about, Comrade Stalin?”

“Gold,” he replied. “Specifically the gold that Colonel Kolchak took with him when he departed from the city of Kazan.”

“But he didn’t take it with him,” protested Kirov. “He left it behind, and then it was picked up by the Czechs and they handed it over to us!”

“The Czechs handed over thirty-seven crates at Irkutsk, but I happen to know that there were fifty crates in that convoy. Thirteen crates are still missing.”

“And how do you know this, Comrade Stalin?”

“We had an informant, one of the groundskeepers on the Imperial estate. He was the one who told us that Kolchak had departed from Tsarskoye Selo, and he even counted the number of boxes on those wagons as they rolled off the grounds of the estate.”

“And you think Kolchak held on to those thirteen crates?”

“I have always suspected it, but as of today I am virtually certain.”

“Then why did the Red Cavalry not find it when they overran the expedition?”

“Kolchak must have hidden it somewhere along the way.”

“Exactly how much gold are we talking about, Comrade Stalin?”

“Each case contained twenty-four bars and each bar weighed half a pood in the old Imperial weight system.”

“How much is that by today’s reckoning?”

“One-half pood is approximately eight kilograms, or eighteen pounds. Twenty-four bars at eighteen pounds each adds up to four hundred thirty-two pounds. Thirteen cases means almost six thousand pounds. That’s two and a half tons of gold.” Stalin spouted these numbers as if he had memorized them long ago. “Not an insignificant amount, you will agree.”

“It is more than a man like me can even dream about,” agreed Kirov, “but why didn’t you tell Pekkala any of this, Comrade Stalin?”

“Because I knew that if I sent him to investigate a murder, he would do anything to solve it. But if I sent him in search of treasure, however valuable, he would tell me to find someone else.”

“Then why didn’t you find someone else, Comrade Stalin?”

“I had a hunch that solving this crime would lead Pekkala straight to Kolchak, who could then be placed under arrest. With the colonel in custody, we would soon learn the location of the missing Imperial Reserves.”

Kirov imagined one of the Butyrka interrogation cells, its floor and walls splashed with Kolchak’s blood.

“Unfortunately,” continued Stalin, “I suspect that Pekkala has managed to find the gold on his own.”

“Then surely that is good news! You can bring him home now.”

With his thumb, Stalin pushed away the half-eaten tin of sardines. “Let me ask you, Major: If Pekkala has indeed located the gold, do you think it is possible that he might have decided to keep it for himself?”

Kirov laughed at the suggestion.

Stalin’s eyes turned glassy. “Comrade Major, do you find this a source of amusement?”

Kirov’s smile vanished like the flame blown off a match. “What I mean, Comrade Stalin, is have you seen the way Pekkala lives? That tiny apartment. The food he eats? The coat he wears? He gets his things from Linsky’s! You could hand Pekkala a whole bar of gold and he’d probably just use it as a paperweight.”

Stalin studied the young major with a mixture of bemusement and respect. “We are talking about more than a single bar of gold, Major Kirov.”

“But we are also talking about Pekkala!”

Stalin made a noise in the back of his throat. “I see your point. Nevertheless, Major, I’ve just received word that Pekkala has escaped from Borodok.”

“Escaped? How can that be? He is not even a prisoner!”

“Prisoner or not, he has disappeared, along with several men who were once part of the Kolchak Expedition. I am concerned that returning to Borodok has had a greater effect on Pekkala than I anticipated. His allegiances, the old and the new, have been brought into conflict. He may not want the gold for himself, but he has fallen in with people who do, one of whom, I fear, may be the colonel himself. Pekkala’s wish to deny me what is mine may be as strong as their desire to possess it.”

“You speak as if he has already betrayed you, which I refuse to believe he has done. The answer is simple, Comrade Stalin. Inspector Pekkala has been kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped?” Now it was Stalin’s turn to look surprised.

“Yes, undoubtedly. And who is in charge of rescuing him?”

“Assuming you are correct, as of this moment, you are.”

“Me?” spluttered Kirov. “But how on earth am I supposed to track him down?”

Stalin smashed his fist on the desk. “I don’t care! I want to know what happened to my gold! And when you find that Finnish sorcerer, kidnapped or otherwise, you will remind him that his duty is to the future, not the past.”

“If you truly want him found, why not send a company of soldiers? Why not a whole army? What good can I possibly do?”

“Precision is required here, Major Kirov. Sending an army after half a dozen men is like trying to remove a splinter from your eye with a pitchfork.”

“But Comrade Stalin, surely there must be people closer to the scene—”

“The reason I am sending you,” interrupted Stalin, “is the same reason I sent Pekkala after Kolchak. He knows you. He trusts you. He will think twice before he tears your head off. And if I am right that Inspector Pekkala has chosen to forget his duties, you may be the only person on this earth who can remind him what they are. And as for an army, you may have one if you want. By the time you walk out of this room, you will be able to have anything you desire.” Stalin breathed in sharply and unleashed a deafening shout. “Poskrebyshev!”

A moment later the double doors opened. The bald man appeared and clicked his heels.

“Do you have Major Kirov’s papers?”

Poskrebyshev held up the red identification booklet.

“Bring it to me.”

In a few strides, Poskrebyshev had crossed the room. He laid the passbook down on Stalin’s desk.

“Pen,” said Stalin.

Poskrebyshev lifted one from the top pocket of his tunic and handed it over.

Stalin opened the booklet, scribbled his signature inside, then held it out to Kirov.

Kirov saw that a page had been added to his identification book. His heart stumbled in his chest as he read what was written inside.

THE PERSON IDENTIFIED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS ACTING UNDER THE DIRECT ORDERS OF COMRADE STALIN.

DO NOT QUESTION OR DETAIN HIM.

HE IS AUTHORIZED TO WEAR CIVILIAN CLOTHES, TO CARRY WEAPONS, TO TRANSPORT PROHIBITED ITEMS, INCLUDING POISON, EXPLOSIVES, AND FOREIGN CURRENCY. HE MAY PASS INTO RESTRICTED AREAS AND MAY REQUISITION EQUIPMENT OF ALL TYPES, INCLUDING WEAPONS AND VEHICLES.

IF HE IS KILLED OR INJURED, IMMEDIATELY NOTIFY THE BUREAU OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS.

“Congratulations,” said Stalin. “You are now the holder of a Shadow Pass.”

Finding himself suddenly too nervous to speak, Kirov made do with a salute and turned to leave.

“Before you go …”

Stalin’s voice stopped Kirov in his tracks.

“Let me make one thing very clear, Major. If you fail to bring Pekkala back alive, I will not hesitate to call in others who will certainly bring him back dead. Now go, and find him quickly, any way you can.”

WHILE THEY WAITED for the others to return, the two remaining Ostyaks drove their sleds back into the forest, out of sight of the tracks.

There, the caribou gathered beside a rocky outcrop and began to gnaw upon the brittle moss which grew in black scabs on the stone.

As Pekkala watched them eat, he remembered the taste of that moss. Only in winter, when he had completely exhausted his food supplies, did he resort to eating it. Mixing the brittle flakes with snow, he boiled them down until they disintegrated into a gelatinous black mass. Its taste was bitter, and the consistency so slimy that he often could not keep it down. He hoped it would not be their meal tonight.

It was getting dark now and Pekkala set about gathering wood for a fire, prising dead branches from the frozen ground. The flames would act as a beacon to ensure that the returning sleds did not overshoot them in the dark. Any smoke from the fire would be hidden in the snow clouds, so they would not be spotted from the camp.

The Ostyaks, meanwhile, took up their antique flintlock rifles. Moving on large round snowshoes made from bent willow and laced with honey-colored bands of animal gut, they vanished into the forest in search of food.

Only minutes had gone by when Pekkala heard the muffled crack of gunfire. When the Ostyaks reappeared, one of them was carrying two dead rabbits, their long ears clutched in his fist.

With the help of some gunpowder emptied from a bullet cartridge, Pekkala soon had a fire going. Pine branches crackled and white smoke bloomed from the skeletal branches of white birch.

AS SOON AS HE DEPARTED from the Kremlin, Kirov drove straight to his office, gathered up a few things for the journey, then traveled to the railway junction where he had last seen Pekkala.

His hastily conceived plan was to climb aboard the first train headed east and not to stop until he reached the camp at Borodok. Once there, he would commandeer whatever men and supplies were available and set out in search of the men who had kidnapped Pekkala.

Arriving at the station, Kirov was dismayed to find no trains at the platform. At first, the whole place appeared deserted, but then the door to the guard shack opened and a man in dark blue overalls stepped out to meet him.

It was Edvard Kasinec, master of the V-4 junction.

“When is the next train leaving?” asked Kirov.

“Not for another three days,” Kasinec replied, “but you must understand, Comrade Major—the only passengers who go through here are convicts bound for Siberia.”

“I realize that. Siberia is where I need to go.”

“Major, I assure you there are more comfortable ways to get there than in the wagons of a prison transport.”

“My destination is a prison. Borodok, to be precise.”

Kasinec’s eyebrows arched with surprise. “What could possess a man to go there of his own free will?”

Kirov was only halfway through his explanation when Kasinec, hearing Pekkala’s name, ushered him into the station house.

The place was crowded with radio equipment, well-thumbed books of timetables, and requisition slips impaled on long metal spikes. Kasinec went over to the far wall, where a large map showed the rail system for the entire country, the tracks laid out in red like the arteries of an animal stripped of its flesh.

Kasinec’s finger traced along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, through towns whose names had been smudged into illegibility by the constant jab of fingerprints, until it branched off and dead-ended just north of the border with China. “Here,” he said, tapping his fingernail against a patch of green, surrounded by a chalky whiteness on the map. “This is the Valley of Krasnagolyana.”

For the first time, as Kirov stared at the map, he understood the enormity of the task he had been given. Stalin had demanded the impossible. “It can’t be done,” he muttered. “I might as well give up before I start. How can I possibly track down anyone in that wilderness?”

“On the contrary,” Kasinec told him, “these men should be easy to find. If they have escaped from Borodok, they’ll naturally head towards China. Once they have crossed the border, they will be out of reach of Soviet authorities. If they head in any other direction, they will remain in Russia and it would only be a matter of time before they were recaptured.”

“So they head east,” said Kirov. “That narrows it down, but you have not exactly pinpointed their route, stationmaster.”

“Indeed I have. These men will follow the railroad.”

“Even if they are traveling on foot? What about the other roads?”

“That’s the thing, Major. In that part of the country, there are no other roads, especially at this time of the year. But the tracks of the Trans-Siberian are always kept open, no matter what the season or the weather.” Now he pointed to a red dot, which marked the next station on the eastbound route, some distance from the place where the Krasnagolyana railhead joined with the main route of the Trans-Siberian. The name of this place was Nikolsk, and it stood just to the west of a town named Chita. Here, the Trans-Siberian Railroad split in two. The north fork, which remained within the boundaries of Russia, made a wide arc through the towns of Nerchinsk, Belogorsk, and Khabarovsk before dropping south again to reach the port of Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean. The other rail line dipped into China, cutting through the town of Harbin before crossing into Russia once again and terminating, like the northern fork, at Vladivostok.

“This is not only the quickest way for them to reach China.” Kasinec traced his finger along the southern branch. “It is, for all practical purposes, the only way.”

Kirov realized that everything the stationmaster had said made sense. He was still by no means convinced that intercepting Pekkala’s kidnappers could be accomplished, but the task no longer seemed to lie beyond the bounds of possibility.

“How long will it take them to reach Nikolsk?” asked Kirov.

“From Borodok? Five days, maybe, if they are traveling on foot. If they have sleds or skis, it could be only half that time.”

Kirov walked to the door and looked out over the empty rail yard. “And no train for three days.”

“That is correct, Comrade Major.”

“And three days from now, if I do climb aboard that train, how long will it take to reach Borodok?”

“A week at least, more likely two. And Borodok has its own rail line which branches off the Trans-Siberian. No trains are scheduled to arrive in Borodok for another month. The best they could do is drop you at the railhead and you could make your way on foot to the camp, although I expect you might freeze to death first.”

Kirov felt a weight settle on his heart, as if someone were kneeling on his chest. “So it cannot be done after all.”

“I did not say that, Comrade Major.”

Kirov spun around. “Then what are you saying?”

“I do have one idea. But what I have in mind requires knowing friends in high places.”

Kirov tapped the passbook in his chest pocket. “If my friends were any higher, Comrade Kasinec, they would die from lack of oxygen.”

IT WAS AFTER DARK when Sergeant Gramotin and the six guards he had ordered to accompany him trudged out of the camp.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” asked one of the guards. “Going after those savages at night?”

Gramotin did not reply. He was so disgusted with the way his men had behaved when the attack broke out that he could not bring himself to answer their stupid questions. If they had performed as Gramotin had trained them, not a single convict would have escaped and the Ostyaks would now be lying dead in a heap in the middle of the compound. Instead, his men had fled en masse to the guardhouse and barricaded themselves inside. He would have liked to execute the whole lot of them on the spot, and except for the fact that this would have required at least two of the guards to help him with the paperwork afterwards, since Gramotin could not read or write, he would have killed them all by now.

For Gramotin the only bright spot in this otherwise shameful and disastrous day was that Klenovkin had shot himself. Dead men made excellent scapegoats, and now the blame for the escape could rest entirely with Klenovkin. Had he lived, the commandant would have wasted no time blaming someone else for the catastrophe and Gramotin knew full well that it would have been him.

Gramotin realized, however, that this did not let him off the hook entirely. As sergeant of the guard, he was obliged to account for his actions. In his mind Gramotin had already voyaged ahead to the hearing which would undoubtedly take place. The first question they would ask, those stone-faced functionaries of the Dalstroy inquiry board, would be if he had made any attempt to pursue the men who escaped. If his answer was no, the inquiry would convict him of negligence. That would be the end of his career and probably his life as well.

This was why Gramotin had decided to set out now, even though he had serious doubts as to whether he and his men were any match for the combined force of those sunburned, reindeer-herding primitives and the tattooed Comitati, whom he despised every bit as much as they loathed him.

After an hour of marching, they came to the place where the Ostyak sleds had turned into the woods. The snow was deeper here and the going made harder for Gramotin by two ammunition bandoliers he carried crisscrossed over his chest. By holding a candle lamp in front of him, he was able to see the sled tracks, even though they were now almost covered by the falling snow.

After a few dozen paces, Gramotin stopped to catch his breath. “All right,” he wheezed, “two minutes’ rest, but no more.” It was at this point that Gramotin realized he was alone.

The other guards were still back on the road.

Gramotin raised the lantern. Shadows seesawed through the trees, obscuring his view of the soldiers. “What’s wrong?” he shouted. “Why have you stopped?”

“You can’t expect us to chase them into the forest,” called one of the guards.

“And in the middle of the night,” another man chimed in.

“That is exactly what I expect! If we wait until morning, they’ll be too far away to catch. Now then! Who is with me?”

The only reply he received was the sound of wind through the tops of the trees, like static on a radio.

Cursing wildly, Gramotin made his way back to the road and discovered, to his astonishment, that his men had disappeared. Their footsteps in the snow showed that they were already on their way back to camp. “Bastards!” he howled into the dark.

The darkness swallowed his words.

In that moment, he realized how much he missed Platov. “Platov would have stayed with me,” muttered Gramotin. When he thought of the dead man, kneeling in a pool of his own blood, tears flooded into Gramotin’s eyes. Angrily he wiped them away with the rough wool of his glove. I will kill them for this, he decided. I will kill them all, guards and prisoners alike, starting with Inspector Pekkala.

Alone, he turned and trudged back up the trail, following the Ostyaks, the frail glow of his lamp growing fainter as the trees closed up around him.

KIROV’S EMKA SKIDDED to a halt outside the control room of Afanasiev airport, a small installation reserved for military flights.

He had followed Stationmaster Kasinec’s directions to the nearest airfield, only a five-minute drive north of the V-4 railway station.

“I will notify the airfield you are coming!” Kasinec had shouted as Kirov got into his car. “I’ll tell them you are bound for Vladivostok!”

Out on the runway, a plane had just taxied into position, ready for takeoff. The machine was painted green, with red stars on its wings and tail. It had a long cockpit canopy to accommodate both a pilot and a navigator/gunner.

Kirov cut his engine, bolted from the car, and ran inside the control room.

The traffic controller sat behind a radio, mouse-eared by a large set of headphones. “Are you Kirov?”

“Yes,” he gasped.

“He’s waiting for you,” shouted the controller. “Go!”

As Kirov ran out to the plane, the pilot leaned out of the cockpit and pointed to a fur-lined flying suit draped over the wing. “Put it on and get in.”

Kirov did as he was told. The suit smelled of old tobacco smoke, and its cuffs and elbows were tarnished black from use. He climbed into the rear seat of the plane, which faced towards the tail.

“Buckle your straps!” shouted the pilot.

The straps lay on the seat, tangled like a nest of snakes, and Kirov was still trying to figure out how they worked when the engine roared and the plane lurched forward.

Seconds later, they were climbing steeply into the night sky.

“POSKREBYSHEV!”

“Damn,” muttered the secretary. He had been almost out the door when Stalin’s voice crackled through the intercom. The Boss had already made him stay late and now Poskrebyshev wondered if he would be here all night, as had happened many times before. Cautiously, he pressed the intercom button. “Yes, Comrade Stalin?”

“How many bars of gold do you think a man could carry?”

Poskrebyshev had no idea. He had never seen a bar of gold before. He imagined them to be small and thin, like slabs of chocolate.

“Poskrebyshev!”

“I would say …” He paused. “Twenty?”

“You idiot! No one can carry that much.”

Poskrebyshev tried to imagine why on earth Stalin would be asking him such a question. Most of the time, even when Stalin’s ideas struck him as insane, Poskrebyshev was still able to glimpse some logic behind the insanity. This was, for Poskrebyshev, the most frightening aspect of working for Stalin—that the musings of the great man, even though they sometimes filled his mind with terror at their implications, were nonetheless easy to follow. But this Poskrebyshev could not fathom, and as innocent as the act of carrying a bar of gold might seem to be, he knew that what lay at the end of Stalin’s train of thought was blood and pain and death. All he could hope for was that it might not be his own. “Ten!” Poskrebyshev blurted out. “I meant to say ten bars.”

A sigh drifted over the intercom. “Go home. You are no help at all, Poskrebyshev.”

Poskrebyshev gestured rudely at the intercom. Then he went home for his supper.

IT WAS AFTER DARK WHEN Kolchak’s sled returned from the east, having found nothing that resembled the cliff Tarnowski had described.

Grim and silent, Kolchak remained on the tracks, staring into the darkness while he waited for Tarnowski to come back.

At last Tarnowski appeared. He and the Ostyak were half frozen. Together with the reindeer, they looked more like ghosts than living things under their crust of snow. Tarnowski stumbled off the sled and collapsed by the fire, where his clothes immediately began to steam. “I found it!” he said, the words barely decipherable through his locked jaw and chattering teeth.

For the first time Pekkala had seen, Lavrenov smiled. In that moment, the years of prison life, which had drained the blood from his face, deadened his eyes, and creased his skin like a blunt knife drawn through butter, all fell away. For a moment, he looked young again.

Kolchak pulled Tarnowski aside. “Did you do as I told you? Did you travel past the place before you turned around?”

“Yes, just as you ordered, Colonel. The Ostyaks do not know where it is hidden.”

“All right,” he said, releasing his grip upon Tarnowski’s arm. Then he nodded with approval. “Very good, Lieutenant.”

The Ostyaks brought out the rabbits they had shot. Keeping one for themselves, they handed the other to Kolchak.

The Ostyaks skinned their rabbit. Slicing the flesh from its bones, they ate it raw, tearing at the rose-colored meat.

Kolchak watched them with a combination of hunger and disgust.

Seeing that the colonel was about to give up and go hungry, Pekkala borrowed a knife from one of the Ostyaks and used it to cut two wide strips of bark from a white birch tree. He curled one of them to form a cylinder and laced it together with the piece of string which served as a belt for his quilted trousers. He sewed the other piece of bark around the base to form a container and filled it with snow. Next Pekkala gathered some stones from the railroad tracks and put them in the fire. When the stones were hot, he scooped them from the flames and let them fall into the container, immediately plunging his hand into the snow to stop the skin from burning. In a couple of minutes, the snow in the container had melted. By shifting the stones back and forth from the fire to the snow, Pekkala was able to boil the water in less than half an hour. When the meat was cooked, Pekkala divided it among the four men. They sat by the fire, puffing clouds of steam as they devoured the scalding shreds of flesh.

From the other side of the fire, the Ostyaks watched and whispered to each other.

After the meal, Kolchak leaned over to Pekkala. “You are shivering,” he said.

Pekkala nodded. Even this close to the fire, he had to clench his teeth to stop them from chattering. The quilted telogreika jacket he had been issued was already several generations old when he arrived at Borodok. It had been repaired so many times that there were more patches showing than original cloth. These telogreikas were efficient only until they got wet. After that the only hope was to dry them over a fire or to wait for a layer of ice to form over the outer surface of the cloth, which would then act as a windbreak. Pekkala’s jacket was so old that neither option worked. The cotton padding had been soaked and dried so many times that it no longer retained the heat of his body. In his daily life at the camp, Pekkala had always been able to retreat to the kitchen and warm up next to the stove, but this journey had chilled him to the bone.

“Here,” said Kolchak, unbuttoning his own jacket and handing it to Pekkala. “Take it, Inspector. It’s the least I can do in exchange for a cooked meal in this wilderness.”

“Much as I would like to, I cannot accept it.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll just end up freezing instead.”

“Look!” Kolchak opened the flap of his jacket, revealing a fur vest he was wearing underneath. “I will be fine, and I need you alive, Pekkala. There are too few of us left as it is.”

Gratefully, Pekkala traded garments. He had not even done up the buttons before he felt the warmth trickling through his veins.

“Don’t worry, Pekkala,” said Kolchak, slapping him on the shoulder, “it won’t be long before you’re wearing decent clothes again, sleeping in a bed instead of on the ground, and eating with a knife and fork, all in the company of friends.”

Pekkala nodded and smiled, but the mention of friends sent a wave of sadness through his mind as he thought of Kirov and the potted plant jungle he had made of their office, the meals he had prepared each Friday afternoon, the pleas for Pekkala to buy his coats from any other place but Linsky’s. It twisted in him like a knife that he had never been able to thank Kirov for the time they’d spent working together.

Pekkala was jolted from these thoughts by one of the Ostyaks, who approached him wearing the blood-smeared pelts of the rabbits tucked into his belt. The man squatted down beside Pekkala and picked up the container he had used for boiling the meat. “You made this?” he asked, carefully shaping the unfamiliar words with his thin and sunburned lips.

Pekkala nodded.

“Where did you learn how?” asked the man.

“I taught myself. I had to. I used to live here.”

“Lived? In the camp?”

“No,” explained Pekkala, taking in the forest with a sweep of his arm. “Here.”

The Ostyak smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No man lives here.”

Pekkala pressed the flat of his hand upon the pelt he had cut from the rabbit. Then he raised his arm, like a man about to take an oath, showing his palm and fingers red with the gore of the dead animal. “Do you remember me now?” he asked. “I used to be the man with the bloody hands.”

For a moment, the Ostyak only stared at him. Then he made a noise in his throat, got up, and walked away. The Ostyak sat down among his friends and they began another whispered conversation, glancing now and then towards Pekkala.

He wished he could explain to them that the one man they really had to fear was nowhere near this forest.

How distant Stalin must seem to them, thought Pekkala. How safe they must feel in their hideaways out on the tundra, with only wolves and each other for company. But Stalin would learn of their betrayal, and he would bring his vengeance down upon them. Perhaps not for a year, or several years, but he would never forget. And what the Ostyaks could not fathom, even in their nightmares, was that Stalin would hunt them to extinction. He would tear their world to pieces, rather than let them go free.

At last, the exhaustion of the day began to overtake him. As Pekkala’s eyes drooped shut, the last thing he saw was a gust of sparks from the fire, skittering away across the snow as if some phantom blacksmith were hammering hot steel upon an anvil.

ALL NIGHT, Gramotin marched through the forest.

It was no longer snowing. The moon appeared through shredded clouds, filling the forest with blue shadows.

When the candle burned out in Gramotin’s lantern, he threw it away and pressed on, following the blurred furrows of the Ostyak sleds, which he found that he could see by moonlight.

As Gramotin scrambled through the drifts, his energy began to fade. From his pocket, he removed a paika ration he had taken from the kitchen the day before. Gnawing into the tough, gritty bread, he felt guilty. The truth was, although Gramotin stole these rations all the time, normally he never actually ate them. Instead, he would give them out to those convicts whose conduct irritated him less than usual on that particular day.

Gramotin’s reasons for handing out the bread were complicated, even to himself. In his years as a sergeant of the guards at Borodok, he had learned that the best way to rule effectively over the prisoners was to be known as a man who could, on occasion, exhibit faint signs of humanity, instead of living as a sadist every minute of his life. These acts of generosity, small as they were, gave the inmates of Borodok hope that if they did as they were told, they might, as a bare possibility, receive treatment slightly less than barbaric.

Ruling over the guards was a more complicated proposition. Kindness did not work on them. They were like a pack of dogs who would obey Gramotin as long as they felt he was more dangerous than they were. The minute they saw any weakness in him, they would either close in for the kill or else abandon him completely, as they had done back on the road.

It was the first time they had ever challenged his authority. Clearly, they did not expect him to return, or else they would never have taken such a risk. Gramotin knew that the only way to win back their respect was to do the one thing they refused to do themselves.

The fact that he might become lost did not bother Gramotin. Neither did he dwell upon the fact that the Comitati would probably butcher him when he finally caught up with their group. The only thing Gramotin cared about now, as he stumbled onward into the darkness, was his reputation.

SEDOV WAS HAVING a dream.

In it he was a child again, reliving the moment when his mother caught him hiding in the woodshed and eating a pot of homemade plum jam which he had stolen from the cupboard. The theft had been spontaneous and the young Sedov realized only once he got to his hiding place that he had nothing with which to eat the jam. So he used his fingers, which soon became a sticky mass of tentacles.

From the pocket of her apron, his mother whipped out the large handkerchief which she always kept ready for such occasions, licked at it ferociously, and advanced upon him, saying, “You mucky boy!”

Sedov winced while his mother scraped away the jam stains around the corner of his mouth.

“Who is going to want that jam,” she shouted, “after you have been sticking your dirty hands in it?”

“Some other mucky boy, I suppose.”

Now, in this dream, Sedov was back in the woodshed and his mother was scrubbing away at his face with her coarse, spit-dampened handkerchief. “Stop it!” he protested. “I can wipe my own face!”

Waking with a shudder, Sedov was amazed to find himself still breathing.

It was morning. The sun had come out, glistening on the ice-sheathed branches of the trees.

A large dog was standing right in front of him. It had been licking his face. It had a shiny black nose and a long, narrow muzzle which was white around the sides and brown along the top. Its ears were thickly furred and set well back on its head. It was the eyes which most impressed Sedov. They were a warm yellow-brown and looked intelligent.

The dog seemed as startled as Sedov. It jumped back and growled at him from a safe distance.

Sedov noticed three more dogs lurking about at the edge of the clearing. Then it dawned on him that these were not dogs at all. They were wolves.

“Mother of God,” he whispered to himself.

The wolf, whose raspy tongue had translated in Sedov’s dream into the handkerchief of his long-dead mother, took another step back and growled at him again, jowls quivering above its teeth.

The other wolves stepped nervously from side to side, whining as they waited to see what would happen next.

Sedov knew he did not have the strength to fight them off. He doubted he could even stand. All he could manage was to raise one hand and feebly shoo them away.

No sooner had Sedov’s hand flopped back into his lap than the wolves turned and fled into the forest. In a matter of seconds, they had vanished among the trees.

Sedov had not expected such a good result and, in spite of his predicament, allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation. It was then that he heard the creak of footsteps in the snow. Looking up, he glimpsed what appeared to be a snowman dressed in rags, struggling towards him with a rifle slung across its back.

The man stopped in the clearing. His gaze wandered from the ruins of Pekkala’s cabin, to the hoof marks of the reindeer, to the canary-yellow patches in the snow where men and animals had relieved themselves.

When he finally noticed Sedov, the man let out a cry. As he struggled to remove his rifle, he tripped and tumbled over backwards. Instead of scrambling to his feet again, he just lay there, panting clouds of vapor, overcome with exhaustion.

“Gramotin?” croaked Sedov.

Gramotin lifted his head. Frozen breath had turned his hair into a mane of frost. “Sedov? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Where are the others?”

“Gone.”

Gramotin clambered up until he was resting on his knees. “And they left you?”

“I am wounded,” explained Sedov.

From the trees above, water dripped from melting icicles, sprinkling like diamonds upon Gramotin’s head.

“They shouldn’t have left you.” Gramotin’s voice rose with indignation. He limped over to Sedov and flopped down beside him.

“A wolf licked my face,” remarked Sedov. “I thought it was a dream.”

“A wolf?” Gramotin looked around nervously.

“Where are the other guards?”

Gramotin leaned over and spat. “There are no others. Only me. The rest all ran away.”

“Cowards,” muttered Sedov.

“Looks like we’ve both been let down.” Although Gramotin would never have admitted it, he was glad to have run into Sedov, as opposed to any of the others. Tarnowski either would have killed him by now or would have died trying and Lavrenov would be wheedling some deal to save his life. Pekkala, being a Finn, would probably have vanished like a ghost. But Sedov was not like those men. There had always been a certain gentleness about him, which Gramotin could not help admiring, even as he despised this fatal weakness in Sedov’s character. Men like Sedov did not usually last more than a few months in the camp. The ones who tended to live longest were men more like himself, who showed a minimum of compassion for those around them and who lied and cheated and stole. If they did not arrive at Borodok that way, they soon learned how to behave that way if they wanted to survive. Sedov had been the exception. Not only had Sedov endured, but he had never lost that fundamental goodness which he brought with him to the camp. It was not in Gramotin’s nature to tolerate goodness. At Borodok, it represented a useless appendage, like that of an animal doomed to extinction, and it was in Gramotin’s nature to attempt to beat it out of Sedov, year after year, with a relentless cruelty that astonished even himself.

Sitting there beside this wounded man, who neither groveled for his life nor used up his last breath to kill another human being, Gramotin experienced remorse. This had never happened to him before and it immediately plunged him into a state of great confusion. He felt an overwhelming urge to perform some act of kindness, however small, to atone for all the suffering he had caused.

Gramotin considered apologizing to Sedov, but the idea struck him as absurd. Then he toyed with the notion of abandoning his search for Pekkala and carrying Sedov back to the camp hospital. But this idea Gramotin also cast aside, knowing that even if Sedov did recover from his injury, which looked doubtful, he would be shot for attempting to escape.

As Gramotin pondered this, he pulled a loaf of paika bread from his pocket, broke off a piece and pressed it into Sedov’s mouth. Then he bit off a slab for himself.

For a while, there was no sound except the two men chewing on the stale bread.

“I need you to do me a favor,” said Sedov.

“I just did,” mumbled Gramotin, his mouth still full of bread.

“A bigger favor.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I need you to shoot me.”

Gramotin turned and stared at Sedov.

“You’ve shot plenty of people before,” Sedov reasoned.

“Not like this.” Hurriedly, Gramotin stood, leaning on his rifle as if it were a walking stick. “I have to go.”

“What if the wolves come back?”

For a moment, the permanent rage which had molded itself into the contours of Gramotin’s face completely vanished. Instead, he just looked terrified. From his pocket, he removed the gun he had taken off Klenovkin’s body. Tossing it into Sedov’s lap, he turned and quickly walked away. Although he knew that Sedov would not use that gun to harm him, it dawned on Gramotin that, if the positions had been reversed, he would have used whatever bullets remained in that pistol to shoot Sedov dead, wolves or no wolves. He would not have been able to help himself. This, too, was in his nature.

Gramotin had not gone far when he heard the flat crack of a pistol back in the woods. He paused, wondering whether to go back and retrieve the gun. Remembering the wolves, he decided against it and pushed on.

Three hours later, beside the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Gramotin found the Comitati encampment from the night before. They had not been gone long. Their fire was still smoking. Now that Gramotin had stopped moving, his sweat immediately began to cool. He could feel the warmth being stripped from his body, like layers peeled off an onion. Without a second thought, Gramotin threw himself down on the smoldering ground and lay there, fingers dug into the ashes, warming himself. Minutes passed. The heat fanned out across his ribs like a bird spreading its wings. Only when he could smell the wool of his coat beginning to singe did he finally get to his feet. He slapped the embers from his clothes and scrambled up the embankment to the track.

The sight of these rails brought back to Gramotin memories of the Revolution, when he had fought first against the White Army of Admiral Kolchak, then against the Czech Legion, and finally against the Americans of the ill-fated Siberian Expeditionary Force. Of these three, it was the Czechs who had left him with the deepest mental scars. They had commandeered trains, fitted them with guns, blast shields, and battering rams, bestowed on them heroic names, then rode the tracks to Vladivostok, destroying everything in their path. Gramotin himself had taken part in an ambush against one of these armored convoys. Crouching with a dozen comrades in hastily dug foxholes, he had fired an entire machine-gun belt at a Czech locomotive, christened the ORLIK in large white letters painted on its front, and barely left a blemish on its steel hide. And then that train, without even bothering to slow down, had turned its guns upon the place where Gramotin was hiding with his men and chopped the earth to pieces. All Gramotin could do was cower in his hole and wait for the shooting to stop. It was over in less than a minute.

For a while, the only sound was the groaning of the wounded.

Then, to his horror, Gramotin heard a shriek of brakes in the distance. The metal beast reversed until it came level with the place where the Czechs had been ambushed.

Seeing men jump down from the train, Gramotin grabbed the nearest body from among his bullet-riddled comrades and hid himself beneath the bloody corpse.

With pistols in their hands, the Czechs searched among the dead, shooting the wounded and emptying their pockets of anything that caught their eye. Gramotin trembled uncontrollably as one man, wearing a heavy turtleneck sweater and a sleeveless leather jerkin which came down to his knees, pulled aside the body under which he had been hiding.

Too terrified to run, Gramotin lay there with his face pressed against the earth, waiting for a bullet in the head.

But the bullet never came.

Ransacking the corpse, the Czech gathered up cigarettes, papers of identification, a compass, and a small linen bag containing shreds of dried salmon, but he did not touch Gramotin.

There was no doubt in Gramotin’s mind that the man could see him breathing. He had no idea why his life had been spared. In years to come, this strange act of kindness so tormented Gramotin that there were times he wished he had been killed along with the rest.

When the Czechs finally left, Gramotin walked among the bodies and discovered he was the only survivor.

As evening fell on that day of the ambush, Gramotin glimpsed the smokelike shadows of wolves approaching through the forest. Climbing a tall pine tree, he clung to the prickly branches, sap gluing his hands to the bark, while the wolf pack feasted on the dead.

All night, the sound of powerful jaws crunching cartilage and bone echoed in Gramotin’s skull. When morning came, the wolves were gone, leaving behind an abattoir of human flesh.

Three days later, Gramotin was picked up by a band of Cossacks patrolling the tracks, by which time he had become so deranged that they had no choice except to tie him up. The Cossacks slung him over a packhorse and, when they came to the nearest village, dumped him in the middle of the street and kept on riding. Rolling in the mud, Gramotin raged and spat until at last the villagers knocked him out with a wooden mallet. It was a week before the villagers dared to untie him and another week before he spoke in any language they, or even he, could understand.

A thousand times since then, that Czech locomotive had ridden through his dreams. These days, even the sound of a train in the distance conjured from Gramotin’s mind horrors so vivid that he could not tell which ones were real and which ones his crippled brain had conjured into life.

Standing on these tracks again filled Gramotin with such dread that it took all of his resolve not to turn tail and run back to camp.

The Ostyaks had been here. Gramotin could see the hoof marks of their animals. But the sleds seemed to have gone off in more than one direction. Those who had headed west, back into Russia, were none of his concern. Pekkala and the Comitati would be heading towards China, and they were the ones he was after. Turning to the east, Gramotin set off walking down the tracks.

AS THE PLANE MADE ITS way towards Siberia, Kirov stared at moonlight glimmering off the wings.

What if I can’t find Pekkala? he wondered. What if I do find him but it’s too late and those bastards have killed him? What will happen to this country without the Emerald Eye? What will happen to me? Kirov’s fists clenched as he thought of what a poor student he had been. I could never keep up with Pekkala’s logic, he told himself. Things that made perfect sense to him were total mysteries to me. I must have been a constant disappointment. I should never have pestered him so much about those clothes he wears. Please let me find Pekkala, Kirov prayed to the outlawed gods. Please let me bring him home safe.

This wandering through the labyrinth of his mind was interrupted by the voice of the pilot, exploding through the headset as if the words had been uttered by God. “What are you going to do when you reach Vladivostok?”

“I will commandeer a train and make my way to Nikolsk.”

“Nikolsk is west of Vladivostok,” said the pilot. “We will fly right over it on our way there.”

“But the nearest landing field is at Vladivostok,” replied Kirov. “At least that’s what I was told.”

“That is correct, Comrade Major. Nevertheless, you will lose valuable time.”

“I am aware of that,” retorted Kirov irritably, “but unless you can set this thing down on the train tracks …”

“No, that is impossible. The landing gear would break and there are telegraph wires running alongside the tracks.”

“Then we have no choice except to head for Vladivostok!” Satisfied that they had now reached the end of this pointless conversation, Kirov let his gaze drift to the darkness below. Rivers, reflecting the moon, cut through the black like silver snakes. Far away, almost lost on the horizon, he glimpsed a tiny cluster of lights from some remote village, and they seemed so frail in that vast sea of ink that Kirov felt as if he had trespassed into a place where all that he held sacred counted for nothing anymore.

“We might not have to land the plane.” The pilot’s words rang crackling and metallic through the headset.

“What?”

“Do you see those straps hanging down by your seat?”

Barely able to move inside the cocoon of the sheepskin-lined flight suit, Kirov leaned forward and squinted into the seat well. “Yes, I see them.”

“I must ask you to buckle them on.”

“Why? What are they for?”

“Your parachute,” replied the pilot, “for when you jump out of the plane.”

Ten hours later, after two refueling stops, the plane banked lazily to circle the railway junction of Nikolsk at an altitude of seven hundred feet. Kirov slid back the rear section of the cockpit canopy. With the deliberate and clumsy movements of a child just learning to walk, he climbed out onto the wing, keeping a firm grip on the rim of the canopy.

The pilot’s jaunty explanation of how to bail out of a moving aircraft had done nothing to inspire confidence in Kirov. “I can’t do this!” he shouted into the wind.

“We have been over this a dozen times, Comrade Major. It’s just like I told you. Wait until I tip the plane and then let go.”

“I don’t care what you told me. Don’t you dare tip this plane!”

“Are you ready?”

“Definitely not!”

“Remember to count to five before you pull the rip cord!”

It’s simple, Kirov told himself. You just have to let go. For a moment, he thought he could do it. Then, through watering eyes, he stared past the wing to the tiny junction below him. Around it, for as far as he could see, snow-covered woods fanned out in all directions. At that moment his courage failed him completely. “I’m getting back in!” he shouted.

The words had not even left his mouth when the plane’s right wing dipped sharply and Kirov’s legs swept out from under him. For a second, his fingers maintained their grip on the cockpit rim. Then he tumbled howling into space. All around him were the roar of the plane’s motor and the rushing of the air. Without counting to five, or any other number, Kirov slapped his hand against his chest, gripped the red-painted oblong metal ring and pulled it as hard as he could.

In a thunder of unraveling silk, the chute deployed.

As the canopy came taut, Kirov experienced a jolt which seemed to dislodge every vertebra in his spine.

Seconds later, he emerged into a strange and peaceful silence. Drifting through space, he had no sensation of falling.

By now, the plane was no more than a speck against the eggshell sky, droning like a mosquito as it headed on towards its next refueling stop.

A hundred feet below him, Kirov could see the rail yard of Nikolsk. There was only one building, with a tar-paper roof, a chimney in the middle, and rain barrels beneath each corner gutter. Next to it stood a jumbled heap of firewood almost as big as the building itself.

The main track ran directly past the building. Opposite lay a siding, which curved in a long metal frown across a clearing littered with buckets, spare railroad ties, and stacks of extra rail. At one end sat an old engine, with sides reinforced by layers of riveted steel so that it resembled a giant sleeping tortoise. At the rear and on both sides of the train, gun turrets bulged like frogs’ eyes. Painted on it, in large white letters, was the name ORLIK. At first, the engine appeared to be nothing more than a relic, but then Kirov noticed that there was smoke coming from its stack. As he watched, a man climbed down from the engine and began to make his way across the siding.

Kirov called to the person, who spun around, searching for the source of the noise. Kirov called once more, and only then did the man raise his head, staring in amazement up into the milky sky.

Lulled by his dreamlike descent, Kirov was now startled to see treetops flashing past as the ground seemed to rise up to meet him. His foot touched the roof of the station house. With long, dancelike steps, he bounded over the shingles, finally coming to a halt only an arm’s length from the edge.

Kirov gave a triumphant shout, only to be swept off the roof a second later when his chute billowed past him in the breeze.

He came down hard on the ice-patched ground and lay there in a daze, the wind knocked out of him.

A face, festooned with tufts of unkempt beard, appeared above him. “Who are you?” asked the man.

At first, Kirov did not reply. He sat up and looked around. After so many hours in the air, he found the solidity of the earth beneath his aching rear end overwhelming.

The man crouched down. Along with a set of dirty overalls, he wore a thick fur vest with the hair turned out, giving him an appearance so primitive that Kirov wondered if he had fallen not only through space but also, perhaps, through time.

“I saw the plane. Has it crashed?”

“No. I jumped.”

The man looked at his desolate surroundings, as if he might have missed something. “But why?”

“I’ll explain everything,” replied Kirov. “Just let me get up first.”

The man helped Kirov out of his parachute harness. Then the two of them gathered the chute and, not knowing what else to do with it, stuffed the silk in one of the empty rain barrels.

“My name is Deryabin,” said the man as they made their way towards the station house.

“Kirov. Major Kirov. Where are the others?”

“What others?”

“Is there no one else here?”

“Let me put it this way, Comrade Major: You have just doubled the population for the entire district.”

The station house was a one-room building, with bales of hay stacked three high around the outside walls for winter insulation. The shutters had been welded closed by snow whipped up from passing trains.

The air inside the station house was rank and musty. To Kirov, it smelled like the locker room of the NKVD sports facility where he had done some of his basic training.

A bunk stood at one end, its rope mattress sagging almost to the floor. Beside the stove, which dominated the center of the room, two chairs were set out, as if the man had been expecting company. The far wall of the house was completely hidden behind a barricade of canned goods, still in their cardboard cases, with their names—peas, meat, evaporated milk—accompanied by manufacture dates more than a decade old.

The first thing Deryabin did when he entered the house was to empty his pockets onto a table beside the door. Fistfuls of what looked to Kirov like large fish scales were already heaped upon the bare wood. To these the man now added another pile. They jingled as he let them fall.

“What are those things?” asked Kirov.

“Money,” replied Deryabin.

“Doesn’t look like any currency I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s because I ran it over with the train. I take all the one-kopek coins I can get my hands on, flatten them out, and the Ostyaks turn them into jewelry.”

“Ostyaks?”

“They live in the woods. Trust me, you don’t want to meet them. They live to the west of here, over in District 5, where the prison camps are located. Once a month, the Ostyaks show up here with dried salmon or reindeer meat and I trade these coins for it.”

“Couldn’t you just use coins to pay for the stuff?”

“They prefer to trade. For them a kopek is just a kopek. But run it over with a train and you’ve got yourself a work of art. I can tell you are not from Siberia.”

“No. Moscow.”

“I almost went there once,” he said thoughtfully.

They sat down by the stove. From a battered copper kettle, Deryabin poured some tea into an even more battered aluminum cup and handed it to Kirov. “So to what do I owe the honor of your visit, Comrade Major Kirov?”

“Several men have escaped from the Borodok camp.”

“I can’t say I blame them. I’ve heard what goes on in that place.”

“The convicts are headed this way. They have a hostage with them. I must try to intercept these men before they cross the border into China. Can that train outside do anything more than roll back and forth over your wages?”

“That train,” Deryabin replied indignantly, “is the most famous engine on the whole Trans-Siberian Railroad! The Czechs used it to transport their men all the way from Ukraine to Vladivostok. Did you see the armor on her sides? She was a nightmare to the Bolsheviks.”

“But does it run?” demanded Kirov.

“It certainly does, thanks to me. Five years ago, the authorities in Vladivostok had it shunted out here to my station. They dropped it off and told me it was my responsibility. They didn’t say why. Didn’t say how long. They just dumped it and rode back to the coast. They probably thought she would just rust away to nothing, but I made sure that didn’t happen. I’ve been looking after her ever since.”

“What about those?” asked Kirov, nodding towards the gun turrets. “Are they still operational?”

“You could blast a platoon off the map with those,” replied Deryabin, “and the authorities in Vladivostok kindly left me with enough ammunition to do exactly that. As for the rest of the train, I could drive the Orlik to Moscow. And when I got there, Comrade Major”—he leveled a finger at Kirov—“I’d teach you Muscovites a thing or two!”

“And I look forward to that, Comrade Deryabin.” Kirov’s temper was beginning to fray. “But right now I need to borrow your train, and I need you, as well, to drive it.”

“You’ve got some nerve! You can’t just fall out of the sky and then start ordering me around.”

“Actually, that is exactly what I can do. Falling from the sky is an experience I have no intention of repeating, but I had to get to Nikolsk as quickly as possible—”

“If you were in such a damned rush to get to Nikolsk,” Deryabin interrupted, “why didn’t you just parachute in there?”

Kirov felt his stomach flip. “Are you telling me this isn’t Nikolsk?”

Deryabin led Kirov over to a map identical to the one he had seen in Moscow nailed up on the wall. Deryabin pointed to a circle, some distance to the west of Nikolsk. “Here is where we are.”

“You mean this station isn’t even on the map?”

“Yes, it is.” He tapped at the black dot.

“But you drew that in yourself!”

“I had to,” replied Deryabin. “It wasn’t there before.”

“Then where the hell is this place?” shouted Kirov.

“Welcome to Deryabinsk, Comrade Major!”

Kirov shook his head in disbelief. “You named it after yourself?”

“Why not?” Deryabin shrugged. “I had to call it something. It didn’t have a name before.”

Struggling to contain himself, Kirov returned to business. “How far is Borodok from here?”

“I don’t know exactly. It’s not on the map, either, but Nikolsk is ten kilometers to the east, so you are that much closer than you thought when you dropped in here. The railhead leading into the Valley of Krasnagolyana is about twenty kilometers to the west. From there it can’t be far to Borodok.”

“Good!” Kirov rose to his feet. “There’s no time to waste. Let’s go!”

“Not so fast,” said Deryabin.

“There isn’t much time. We must leave now.”

Deryabin folded his arms. “Not before we have discussed my terms.”

With that, Kirov’s patience disintegrated. He grabbed Deryabin by the collar of his boiler suit and dragged him out of the house. Dumping the man in a heap in the snow, Kirov fetched out his passbook, opened it, and waved the Shadow Pass in Deryabin’s face. “These are my terms!” He rummaged in his pockets, fished out a handful of change and sprinkled it over the man. “This is your compensation! Now, you can stay here if you want, but I am taking that train.”

“You don’t know how to drive a train!” laughed Deryabin.

“You go forwards. You go backwards. How hard can it be?”

“Very hard!” replied Deryabin, realizing that Kirov was serious. “Very hard indeed! Requiring months of training! The Orlik is not just any train. It has eccentricities!”

Ignoring Deryabin’s pleas, Kirov set off towards the Orlik, whose engine chuffed patiently, as if anxious to be in motion. Reaching the locomotive, he climbed up the short metal ladder to the driver’s space. There, in the cold and oily-smelling compartment, he was faced with a bewildering array of levers, buttons, and dials showing steam pressure, oil temperature, and brake capacity. Hanging from the ceiling was a greasy chain with a wooden handle whose paint had been almost completely worn away. Grasping the handle, Kirov pulled down hard and a deafening hoot shook the air. Now Kirov studied the controls, wondering which to touch first. He grasped one well-worn lever and turned it.

The Orlik shuddered. Steam poured out from its sides, enveloping the compartment in a sweaty fog.

Hurriedly, Kirov turned the lever back to the way it had been before. Then he took hold of another lever, but before he had a chance to pull it, Deryabin had climbed aboard.

“All right! I’ll drive the train! Just get out of the way, Muscovite!”

Two minutes later, the Orlik was on the move.

Deryabin stood at the controls, adjusting levers, his hands such a blur of precision that Kirov was reminded of an orchestra conductor. From time to time Deryabin would rest the heel of his palm upon the metal wall of the compartment, rap a knuckle on the small round window of a gauge, or brush his fingertips across the levers, as if to feel a pulse coursing beneath the steel.

Kirov stood behind him, backed up against the sooty metal wall of the compartment. Coal used to power the engine was contained in a tender attached to the back of the locomotive, and its black dust glittered in the hot, damp air. On the gridded metal floor, melting snow had formed puddles which trembled with the force of the engine, making patterns in the water like Damascus on a Cossack sword.

Deryabin stooped down and opened the door to the train’s furnace, revealing a red blaze which looked to Kirov like the inside of a miniature volcano. Then Deryabin pushed past him and opened the gate to the tender. Nuggets of coal the size of apples rolled out onto the floor of the engine compartment.

“Let me tell you something a man like you will never understand,” shouted Deryabin. “When you work on a machine and you live with that machine, you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you. And one day you realize that the machine is more than just the number of its parts. There is life in it! Like there is life in you!” To emphasize his words, Deryabin jabbed a finger against Kirov’s chest, leaving an inky smudge against the cloth of his tunic.

Kirov swatted his hand away. “Have you not realized yet that I am a Major of the NKVD?”

“And have you not yet realized that you are in the wilderness, where a man’s rank is judged by his ability to stay alive and not by the stars on his sleeve?”

Kirov was too stunned to reply.

Deryabin snatched up a shovel and handed it to Kirov. “Make yourself useful, Comrade Major of the NKVD!”

Obediently, Kirov began shoveling coal into the furnace. Before long, he was drenched in sweat. When he leaned out of the compartment, the moisture froze into scabs of ice across his forehead.

The Orlik was gaining speed now, hammering along the tracks.

With a flick of his foot, Deryabin kicked the door of the furnace closed. He turned to Kirov. “She’s had enough!” He snatched the shovel from Kirov’s hand and tossed it into the corner.

“Is everyone out here as crazy as you?” yelled Kirov.

“Of course,” replied Deryabin serenely. “That’s how you know you’re from Siberia!”

Until now, Kirov had been completely preoccupied with getting to Pekkala before his kidnappers led him across the border into China. Now that he was finally close, the dangers that lay ahead were rapidly coming into focus. He hoped that the mere presence on the tracks of an armored train would be enough to persuade the kidnappers to abandon their hostage, but there was no way of telling what such desperate men might do. As for the convicts, he did not care if they escaped. His only purpose now was to bring Pekkala back alive. With fear prickling his skin, Kirov took out his gun and made sure it was loaded.

THE MOMENT PEKKALA OPENED his eyes he sensed that something was wrong.

Kolchak lay asleep nearby, his beard a mass of icicles.

Pekkala nudged him with his boot.

Kolchak’s eyes flipped open. Breathing in sharply, he sat up and looked around. “What is it?”

“They’re gone,” whispered Pekkala.

Kolchak followed his gaze to where the Ostyaks had been sleeping. They had vanished, along with their sleds.

Both men clambered to their feet.

“They left some time ago.” Pekkala pointed to where snow had partially filled the indentations of their bodies.

“How is it possible we did not hear them?”

“They never make a sound except on purpose.”

“But why?” In a gesture of angry confusion, Kolchak raised his hands and let them fall again. “I promised them gold! Their work was practically done. What on earth could have possessed them to vanish in the middle of the night?”

Pekkala was not sure. Perhaps they had finally realized the trouble they would bring upon themselves by helping the prisoners escape. That may have been the reason, but Pekkala couldn’t help remembering the look on the Ostyak’s face when he realized he’d been talking to the man with bloody hands. Klenovkin’s words came back to him. “They fear almost nothing, those Ostyaks, but believe me they were petrified of you.”

By now, the other Comitati were awake, shrugging off the cloaks of snow which had blanketed them in the night.

“What if they have gone ahead to take all the gold for themselves?” asked Lavrenov, wringing his bony hands.

Tarnowski shook his head. “They don’t know where it is. I made sure of that.”

“And what if they have gone to turn us in and collect some kind of reward?” Lavrenov seemed on the verge of panic.

“Then they’d be signing their own death warrants!” Tarnowski replied. “Without them, we would still be in the camp! They’re gone. That’s all we need to know. What we have to do now is carry on without them. When we have found the gold, we will build our own sleds to transport it across the border. From here on, all we have to do is keep to the tracks. Where the line divides ahead, the south fork will bring us safely into China.” Tarnowski slapped him on the back. “All you have to think about is how you’ll spend the Ostyaks’ share of the gold!”

Within minutes, they were on the move again.

The sun was out now, blazing so harshly off the snow that the men placed their hands over their eyes, peeping like terrified children through the cracks between their fingers.

Whirlwinds of snow, solemn and graceful, wandered across their path.

Not long afterwards, they found themselves in the shadow of a cliff. Beyond it, on the other side of the tracks, lay the frozen pond Tarnowski had been searching for the previous night.

“This is the place!” shouted Tarnowski. “I told you it was here.”

All of them broke into a run, floundering out across the pond. After crashing through a forest of tall reeds, they entered a clearing where Tarnowski and Lavrenov immediately kicked aside the covering of snow and began scraping at the ground. But the soil was frozen solid. The crates might as well have been encased in stone.

Tarnowski sat back, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “It’s no use. We’ll have to make a fire to soften the ground. We buried shovels on top of the crates. If we can get to those, it won’t take long to get the gold out of the ground.”

“The smoke will be visible,” said Pekkala.

“We can’t afford to wait for dark,” replied Kolchak. “Everything must happen now.”

After gathering fallen branches, they heaped the deadfall over the place where the crates had been buried. Using scrolls of birch bark peeled from the nearby trees, they soon had a fire burning. Then they stood back, watching nervously as the smoke climbed up into the sky.

LOOKING LIKE A CREATURE sculpted from ice and soot, Gramotin wandered through the forest. The trees seemed to be closing in on him. I’ve been out here too long, he thought. I think I am losing my mind.

In the distance, Gramotin saw what he thought at first was a cloud drifting in from the east, but soon he realized it was smoke. Why they would have stopped and made a new camp again so soon after leaving the old one, Gramotin had no idea. They must think no one is following them, he told himself. And to light a fire in broad daylight struck him as an arrogance which could not go unpunished. Encouraged, Gramotin pressed on, the weight of his rifle and ammunition bandolier dragging on his shoulder blades.

Later, when he paused to catch his breath, he noticed a pack of wolves skulking among the trees, their fur a grayish-purple haze against the maze of birches. A jolt of fear passed through him, but he choked it down. Hoping they would keep their distance, he quickened his pace. After that, whenever Gramotin stopped, the wolves stopped. When he moved on, they followed. Each time, the gap between him and the wolves grew smaller.

An image barged into Gramotin’s head of his old platoon, lying strewn and half devoured on the ground. A blinding anger flared inside him. He unshouldered his rifle, hooked his left arm through the leather strap, and braced his hand against the forward stock. Closing his left eye, he squinted down the notches of the gun sight and picked out the lead wolf. At this range, he thought, even a lousy shot like me can’t miss. To calm himself before pulling the trigger, Gramotin breathed in the comforting smell of armory oil sunk into the wooden stock and the familiar metallic reek of gunpowder from the breech of the Mosin-Nagant.

But then Gramotin hesitated, knowing that the men he was pursuing would be close enough to hear the gunfire. Even though the group had split up, they still outnumbered him. His only chance would be to catch them by surprise. Slowly, he lowered the gun. When the notched sights of the rifle slid away from the wolf’s face, Gramotin realized the animal was staring right at him. It seemed to be mocking the sergeant’s presence, as if daring him to pull the trigger.

Gramotin reshouldered his gun and moved on.

Soon afterwards, as he rounded a bend in the tracks, a cliff rose up to his left. To his right, across a frozen pond, the smoke he had seen earlier was rising through the forest canopy. Leaving the path of the railroad, Gramotin scrabbled up the sloping ground beside the cliff until he reached a clearing near the precipice. Then he got down on his belly and crawled the rest of the way, dragging his rifle by its strap. From here, the footprints of the Comitati were clearly visible crossing the snow-covered pond. In the trees on the other side, Gramotin could just make out a group of men standing beside a fire.

As quietly as he could, Gramotin slid back the bolt of his gun.

UNABLE TO WAIT any longer, Tarnowski waded into the flames, scattering the burning branches and emerging seconds later with two shovels. In their years beneath the ground, roots had taken hold of the handles. Now they clung like skeletal hands to the wood.

Kolchak reached out for one of the shovels.

With a smile, Tarnowski held it out of reach. “Allow us, Colonel.”

“By all means, gentlemen!” Kolchak stepped aside.

Tarnowski and Lavrenov, each now armed with a shovel, marched into the smoke and began chiseling out clods of earth still crystallized with frost. Lavrenov’s shovel, weakened by its years under the earth, broke almost immediately. But this did not slow him down. Grasping the metal blade of the shovel, he dropped to his knees and attacked the frozen ground.

Now that the two men were occupied with digging, Kolchak turned to Pekkala. “Walk with me,” he said.

They strolled out onto the surface of the frozen pond.

“How does it feel to be free?” asked Kolchak.

“I’ll tell you when I know,” said Pekkala.

“There is something else I wanted you to know as well. Even though that gold is almost in our grasp, our work is not yet done.”

“Yes. We have to get across the border.”

“I am talking about more than that. What I mean is that you and I still have important roles to play in the shaping of our country’s future.”

“Once we cross the border, this will not be our country anymore.”

“That is precisely why we will be staying only as long as it takes to acquire weapons. We will then be returning to Russia and, within six months, my uncle’s dream of an independent Siberia, which he died trying to fulfill, will be a reality.”

Pekkala was thunderstruck. Kolchak had gone completely mad. “An independent Siberia? With what ghost army are you planning this invasion? Or are we to manage this just by ourselves?”

“Not ghosts, Pekkala. Refugees.” Kolchak’s voice was trembling with energy. “Just across that border there are more than two hundred thousand men who fled Stalin’s Russia. They are soldiers and civilians who had made lives for themselves in Siberia, but who were forced to flee into China during the Revolution rather than surrender to the Reds. I am talking about the Izhevsk Rifle Brigade, the Votkinsk Rifle Division, the Komuch People’s Army, and my uncle’s own Siberian Provisional Government troops. Some of them took their families with them.”

“And haven’t they made new lives for themselves?”

“Of course, but they have kept alive the dream of returning to their native country. They all want the same thing, Pekkala—to return home to the richest land in all of Russia.”

“Even if what you say is true,” replied Pekkala, “and these refugees were prepared to fight, what makes you think you could defeat the Red Army?”

“The Russian military is busy in Poland. Soon, if the rumors in Shanghai are true, it will be defending its borders against Germany. They will have neither the time nor the resources to stand up to us.”

“And suppose you did take Siberia? What then?”

“Then we form an alliance with Germany. The land west of the Ural Mountains will belong to them, and everything to the east will belong to us.”

“What makes you think the Germans would agree to this?”

“They already have,” explained Kolchak. “Their diplomatic representatives in China have promised to recognize us as a legitimate government as long as we can reclaim Siberia, which means that Japan will automatically recognize our new frontier as well.”

“And which country is providing the weapons for this adventure?”

“The men I’m speaking of are not concerned with politics.”

“You mean you are dealing with gunrunners.”

“Call them whatever you want, Pekkala. Even as we speak, there are two ships moored in a cove in the Sea of Okhotsk, loaded with rifles, machine guns, even a few pieces of artillery. All we have to do is pay for them. And when we get across the border into Russia, what we do not have—more guns, food, horses, whatever the gold has not bought—we’ll take from those who try to stop us.”

Even though Pekkala had now recovered from his initial shock, he was still astounded at the audacity of Kolchak’s plan. Under any other circumstances, such an insurrection could not stand a chance against the massed forces of the Soviet military, which Stalin would not hesitate to use if he felt that his power was threatened. But Kolchak’s timing had placed him in the center of a chain of events which might soon engulf the whole world. If his prediction of a German invasion was correct, Stalin might not be able to prevent a determined opponent from occupying Siberia. No one would understand this better than Stalin himself, whose own party had come to power in the closing stages of the Great War, when the Tsar’s army was crippled by defeats against Germany. Had the Bolsheviks chosen any other moment, their own uprising might never have succeeded, but with a combination of ruthlessness and popular support, they had taken over the whole country.

“I was right about you,” said Pekkala. “You didn’t come back for these men. You came back for the gold, and the reason they are free is because they are the only ones who knew where to find it. They believed in the oath you swore to them.”

“The oath was to the mission!” Kolchak howled.

“The mission failed. It’s over.”

“Not yet, Pekkala. I know I can’t bring back the Tsar, but I can use his treasure to build a new country, one that is not founded on the values of his enemies.”

“With yourself as emperor?” Before Kolchak had time to answer, Pekkala continued. “You may have calculated the cost of this new country in gold bullion, but what about the cost in human life?”

“I will not lie to you,” Kolchak replied. “We have many scores to settle with those who fought against my uncle in the winter of 1918 when he was trying to liberate this country. Even those who stood by and did nothing will receive the punishment they deserve. Thousands will die. Maybe tens of thousands. Numbers do not matter. What matters is that they are swept aside until all that remains of them is a footnote in the history books.” He gripped Pekkala’s arm. “Blood for blood! Those are the words on which the new Siberia will be founded.”

Pekkala pointed at the trees, where Lavrenov and Tarnowski were still digging. “What about those two men who have remained loyal to you? Have they learned about this plan of yours? All I heard them talk about was building mansions for themselves in China. Do they know you are leading them straight back into another war?”

“Not yet,” admitted Kolchak. “After what happened when I tried to explain things to Ryabov—”

“You mean you told Ryabov?”

“I tried to!” Kolchak’s voice rose in frustration. “He was the senior officer among the Comitati. I thought I owed it to the man to tell him first. I had imagined that after so many years in captivity, he would be glad to learn that the thieves who had stolen his freedom would pay for that crime with their lives.”

“What happened instead?”

“He told me he wouldn’t go through with it. He didn’t even hesitate. I explained that he could stay behind in China. I said I didn’t care whether he came or not. But that wasn’t enough for Ryabov. He insisted that enough lives had been lost on account of the gold. I told him it was about more than treasure. It was about eliminating Stalin and the Communists. If there is one thing I have learned in my years of exile it is that the only way to get rid of a monster is to create an even bigger monster. After that, it’s just a matter of seeing who bleeds to death first.”

“And what did Ryabov say to that?”

“He said he would refuse to give up the location of the gold. After all, the Comitati were the only ones who knew where it was, since I had left before they buried it. Ryabov told me that the men in Borodok had learned to trust him. Everything they had lived through, he had also endured. Ryabov was certain they would listen to him before they listened to me.”

“And you believed him?”

“I wasn’t sure, but I couldn’t take the chance that he was right. That night, when he came to the mine, I thought he had come to speak with me, perhaps to try and talk me out of it. I didn’t realize that he was there to meet Klenovkin. He didn’t expect to find me outside that cave where I’d been hiding, deep inside the mine. Tarnowski and the others had warned me to stay put, but I couldn’t stand it, cooped up in there like some animal in a cage made out of stone. So I had taken to wandering those tunnels at night, anything but stay holed up in that cave. That’s when I discovered Ryabov. I could tell he was surprised to see me. I tried again to reason with him, but he told me his mind was made up. He was putting a stop to the escape. I reminded him of how long he had struggled to ensure the survival of our men so that one day they might find their way out of this camp.”

“And what was his reply?”

“He said their freedom, and his own, would not be worth the countless thousands we’d leave butchered in our path.”

At last, the mystery of Ryabov’s death became clear to Pekkala. He realized he had misjudged the murdered officer.

“Pekkala, I did not want to kill him, but when he told me that Klenovkin would be there any minute, thinking perhaps that I would see the situation as hopeless and surrender, I knew I didn’t have any choice except to silence him for good.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a shout from the men who were digging. An arm rose from the smoke, the fist clutching a bar of gold. Tarnowski staggered out, half blinded, and laid the ingot down at Kolchak’s feet. Then he turned and went back to his digging.

Slowly, Kolchak bent down and picked up the bar, whose surface was hidden by a residue of dirt which had leached through the wooden crate over time. Kolchak rubbed it away with his thumb, revealing the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs. Then he glanced at Pekkala and smiled.

“Those men deserve to be told,” said Pekkala, nodding towards Lavrenov and Tarnowski, “and told now.”

“They will be, as soon as they have finished.”

“Have you considered the possibility that they might not want to go through with it?”

“Of course,” replied Kolchak. “That’s why I am telling you first. These men know that you were trusted by the Tsar. If you are with me, they will be as well. Think of it, my friend. We won’t just be living like kings. Kings are what we will be!”

But all Pekkala could think about was the lives which would be lost if he stood by and did nothing. He remembered the Tsar, driven to the brink of madness by the dead from the Kodynka field, the men and women he believed he could have saved whirling in a ceaseless and macabre dance inside the white-walled palace of his skull.

It took both men to raise the first crate from the ground. As they lifted it, the rotten wood gave way. With dull, metallic clanks, ingots tumbled out into the snow. Other crates followed quickly, wrenched from the dirt and dragged clear of the steaming ground.

“Did it not occur to you,” asked Pekkala, “that I might agree with Ryabov?”

Kolchak laughed, certain that Pekkala must be joking. “We are all of us entitled to vengeance, but none more than you, Pekkala.”

“Vengeance has become the purpose of your life, Kolchak, but not of mine.”

Kolchak’s smile faded as he grasped that Pekkala was serious. “I trusted you! I broke you out of that prison. I gave you the coat off my back—and this is how you repay me? The Tsar would be ashamed of you.”

“The Tsar is dead, Kolchak, and so is the world in which he lived. You cannot bring it back by spilling blood. If you have your way, the rivers of Siberia will soon be choked with corpses. And if Germany invades in the west, millions more people will die. By the time your vengeance has been satisfied, Russia will cease to exist. Your uncle did not die for that.”

Kolchak’s eyes glazed with rage. “But you will, Inspector Pekkala.”

Almost too late, Pekkala saw the knife. He grabbed Kolchak’s wrist as the weapon flickered past his face.

With his other hand balled into a fist, Kolchak struck Pekkala in the throat, sending him down in a heap onto the trampled snow.

While Pekkala fought for breath, Kolchak raised the blade above his head, ready to plunge it into the center of Pekkala’s chest.

WHEN THE TWO MEN EMERGED onto the ice, Gramotin could scarcely believe his good luck. Shielding his eyes with one dirty hand, he strained to make out who they were. Even though their faces were unclear, he could still see the numbers painted in white on their faded black jackets. One of them was 4745. “Pekkala,” he muttered to himself. The other, he decided, must be Lavrenov, since he was neither bald nor the size of Tarnowski.

Lavrenov and Pekkala seemed to be involved in a heated conversation. Pekkala, who did most of the talking, even grabbed Lavrenov by the arm.

With trembling fingers, Gramotin slid back the bolt of his rifle and double-checked that he had a round in the breech.

Now the two men appeared to be arguing.

The next thing Gramotin saw was that Pekkala had drawn a knife. Suddenly, Pekkala struck Lavrenov, who fell in a heap in the snow. As Pekkala prepared to finish off the wounded Lavrenov, Gramotin felt a sudden rush of pity for the man, to have come this far only to be killed by the very person who had convinced him to escape in the first place.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Gramotin lined up the sight, right in the center of Pekkala’s back, and pulled the trigger. The gun stock bucked into his shoulder. After so much time spent with no other sound but his own breathing, he was deafened by the noise of the gunshot. It echoed back and forth between the forest and the cliff, as if guns were firing from all directions. For a moment, Gramotin lost sight of the men, but when he raised his head above the sights, he saw that Pekkala was down and a splash of blood had darkened the snow beside the fallen man.

Lavrenov, meanwhile, had scrambled away into the trees. Gramotin’s mind was in an uproar. His whole body trembled and a cackling, nervous laugh escaped his lips. He had done it. He had killed Pekkala.

This laughter ceased abruptly as it occurred to Gramotin that he needed the inspector’s body as proof of what he had done. Without it, doubt would be cast upon his story. Determined to kill as many of the Comitati as he could, and force the rest to leave Pekkala’s corpse behind, Gramotin began to fire round after round into the smoke. When the rifle’s magazine was empty, he rolled over onto his back and removed a handful of bullets from his bandolier.

As he hurriedly reloaded the rifle, Gramotin heard a noise which, at first, he mistook for thunder—although in the middle of winter that would have been unlikely. Perhaps it is an avalanche, he thought. The mysterious sound grew, filling the sky, vibrating the ground beneath his shoulder blades until, suddenly, Gramotin realized what it was. Immediately, old nightmares reared up in his mind and a choking sensation clamped down on his throat. Squinting into the distance, he spotted a train approaching from the east.

It took a moment before Gramotin was able to comprehend that, in fact, the arrival of this train was the best thing that could possibly happen to him. It meant that help was on the way. All trains on the Trans-Siberian carried a contingent of armed guards. These men would assist him in rounding up the last of the Comitati. For certain, they would be amazed to find him there, a solitary warrior, having pursued these escaped convicts across the taiga before cornering them in the forest. They, not he, would be the ones to tell the story of his heroic journey. He no longer needed to concern himself with any Dalstroy board of inquiry. They would not be punishing him. Instead, they would shower him with honors. There would be a promotion. That much was certain. Master Sergeant Gramotin. They might even make him an officer. There would also be a medal. But which one? Hero of the Soviet Union, perhaps. All he had to do was go down there and tell that train to stop.

WHEN THE NOISE of the first gunshot echoed through the trees, Pekkala dove for cover into the frozen reeds.

Tarnowski was waiting for him on the other side, a rifle in his hand. “The colonel?”

Through the brittle screen of rushes, both men looked out onto the pond. Kolchak’s open eyes stared blindly back at them. A round had hit him in the shoulder, leaving a gaping tear just under the right armpit as the bullet left his body.

Pekkala glimpsed a muzzle flash from the cliff, just as another round slammed into the ice on the pond, filling the air with a strange popping sound, like the cork coming out of a champagne bottle.

Pekkala and Tarnowski crawled back among the trees, where they found Lavrenov hiding in the hole from which they had dug out the crates. “Where’s the colonel?” he asked.

“They got him with the first shot,” replied Pekkala.

Bullets hacked through the branches above them, showering the men with pine needles.

“There must be a dozen of them out there,” whimpered Lavrenov, “to judge from all that fire.”

“But who are they?” asked Pekkala.

“Whoever they are,” Tarnowski answered, “they’re using army rifles.”

Pekkala realized that their situation was hopeless. The others knew it, too. No one had to say the words. He could see it on their faces.

He looked at the gold bars, which lay strewn across the scorched and trampled ground, and thought of how close he and the Comitati had come to living out their lives as free men. Tarnowski was right. There would be no prisoners this time.

With his eyes fixed on the luster of the ingots, Pekkala fell backwards through time, to when he had last seen this treasure.

Deep beneath the Alexander Palace, hidden in the stone vault of his treasure room, the Tsar placed his hands against the neatly stacked bars of the latest gold shipment from the Lena mines.

To Pekkala, he looked like a man trying to push open a heavy door, as if that wall of gold would give way into another room, or perhaps another world.

“Excellency,” whispered Pekkala.

The Tsar turned suddenly, as if he had forgotten he was not alone. “Yes?”

“I must he getting back.”

“Of course.” The Tsar nodded his approval. “Be on your way, old friend.”

Pekkala began to climb the winding stone staircase which led to the ground floor of the palace. After a few steps, he paused and looked back.

The Tsar stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at him.

“Will you be staying, Majesty?” inquired Pekkala.

“You go on ahead, Pekkala,” said the Tsar. “I have yet to count the shipment. Every bar must be accounted for. This is a task I trust to no one else.”

“Very well, Majesty.” Pekkala bowed his head and turned away. He continued up the narrow stone stairs. Just as he reached the main hall, he heard the Tsar’s voice calling to him from the bowels of the earth.

“Remember, Pekkala! Only the chosen will be saved.”

Pekkala did not reply. Silently he walked along the hall, where his own wet footsteps still glistened on the polished floor, and out into the pitiless heat of that August afternoon.

FAINTLY IN THE DISTANCE, Pekkala heard the sound of a locomotive. Moments later, the three men glimpsed the dull gray snout of an armored engine barely visible among the ranks of pines.

Lavrenov began to panic. “Those men up on the cliff were only keeping our heads down until the reinforcements arrived. There’s no way out of this. We’re as good as dead.”

“Just try to take one with you,” said Tarnowski.

Both men seemed resigned to their deaths.

“You could run,” Pekkala suggested quietly.

Tarnowski shook his head. “With those men after us, how far do you think we would get?”

“Once they set eyes on the gold, they won’t be thinking about anything else.”

“You talk as if you aren’t coming with us.” Tarnowski was staring at him.

“Stalin might be persuaded that your freedom is the price to be paid for getting his hands on the gold, but my escape brings him no such reward. If I go with you, he will pursue us to the ends of the earth.”

Lavrenov gripped Tarnowski’s arm. “Let’s do what he says and get out of here now.”

“What about the gold?” For the first time, Tarnowski seemed completely overwhelmed. “You can’t expect us just to leave it all here, not after what we’ve been through.”

“Not all of it,” replied Pekkala. “How much gold does one man really need?”

THE TRAIN WAS CLOSE NOW.

Worried that he might not reach the locomotive before it passed, Gramotin lumbered down the steep slope. Half running, half falling, swamped with snow, he tumbled out at last onto the rails.

The engine slowed as it rounded a curve on the tracks. Then its motor roared, regaining speed and trailing a cloud of snow dust which rose like wings behind the train.

Gramotin raised his rifle above his head and began waving his arms back and forth, all the while shouting at the top of his lungs to attract the attention of the driver.

The engine changed pitch suddenly. The great machine was slowing down. They had seen him. The sound of brakes filled the air with a ringing clash of steel.

As the train came to a stop, Gramotin stared in awe at the overlapping plates of armor, the heavy machine guns jutting from their turrets and the ice-encrusted battering ram mounted in front of the driver’s compartment. Painted on the front of the engine, he glimpsed a name in large white letters. Even though Gramotin could barely read or write, it took him only a moment to spell out the word ORLIK.

Gramotin swore he must be dreaming, but the shaking of the ground beneath his feet proved otherwise. “No,” he mumbled. “Not you. Not again!” He could almost hear the terrible clanking rattle of the Czech machine guns as they strafed the foxholes where he lay with his platoon. He flinched as he recalled the whip-crack sound of bullets passing just above his head. He smelled pine sap from the gashed trees, mixing with the burnt-hair reek of cordite from the guns. He pressed his hands against his ears, trying to block out the terrible noise of bullets striking bodies, like that of a cleaver hacking into meat. Gramotin closed his eyes as tightly as he could, in a last, desperate attempt to banish these visions from his skull, but when he looked again, the train was even closer than before.

Convinced that his nightmares had finally sprung to life, the sergeant turned and fled.

“GO!” SAID PEKKALA. “There isn’t much time.”

Lavrenov did not hesitate. Snatching up a gold bar in each hand, he vanished into the forest.

But Tarnowski had not moved.

“You must leave now!” urged Pekkala.

“I saw what happened,” said Tarnowski, “out there on the pond. Kolchak was going to kill you.”

Pekkala nodded. “If it hadn’t been for that gunman on the cliff …”

“That gunman didn’t shoot the colonel. I did.”

The revelation stunned Pekkala. “But why?” he demanded.

“I heard what he was planning to do,” explained Tarnowski. “I don’t care if Kolchak wanted a fight with Stalin. Unlike you and Captain Ryabov, I have no love for Russia or mankind. This whole country can go up in flames as far as I’m concerned.”

“Then why did you ever become a soldier?”

“Because I was good at it! War was my job, just as police work was yours, and I expected to be paid for doing it. I am owed, Pekkala, not only for the expedition but for every day I spent at Borodok, especially since we never should have been there! If the colonel hadn’t insisted on bringing an entire wagonload of treasure with us when we departed from the city of Kazan, instead of leaving all three wagons behind as we should have done, we could have outrun the Bolsheviks. At least we would have saved ourselves. Instead, I ended up in Borodok, along with the rest of Kolchak’s men. My share of the gold is fair wages for spending half my life in that hellhole. And I’ll be damned if Kolchak was going to spend it on another war.”

“Then take what you can and go now!” pleaded Pekkala.

Tarnowski nodded once. “Very well, Inspector, and thank you. Perhaps one day I’ll see you on the other side.”

Without another word, Pekkala turned and set out across the frozen pond towards the tracks. Behind him, hidden in the canopy of pines, he heard the dull ring of gold bars knocking together. After that came silence.

The train had stopped beside the cliff. The locomotive stamped and snorted, like a bull getting ready to charge. Then it belched out a cloud of steam as the driver released pressure from the engine.

Twenty paces away, Pekkala stood on the tracks, waiting to see what they’d do.

Now a man emerged from the haze. He was tall and thin, with a particular loping stride.

Only when Kirov stood right in front of him did Pekkala believe his eyes. “Kirov!” he shouted.

“Inspector,” said Kirov, trying to hide his astonishment at the sight of Pekkala’s filthy clothes, scruffy beard, and uncombed hair. “Where are the kidnappers?”

“Kidnappers?” asked Pekkala.

“The men who took you hostage when they escaped from the camp.”

“Ah, yes,” Pekkala replied hastily. “They fled when they saw the train coming.” Now Pekkala raised his head and squinted at the top of the cliff. “And where are the soldiers who kept them pinned down?”

“There are no soldiers, Inspector. Only me, and the driver of the train.”

“But somebody was shooting at us.”

“We did see a man on the tracks, but he ran away when we slowed down. Whoever he was, the train must have scared him off.” Kirov nodded towards Kolchak, whose body still lay sprawled upon the frozen pond. “Who is he?”

“That,” replied Pekkala, “is Colonel Kolchak, the last casualty of a war which ended twenty years ago. And from what I hear, Stalin intends to make a casualty of me as well.”

“That will be true for both of us, Inspector, if we do not bring him the thirteen cases of gold he says are still missing from the Tsar’s Imperial Reserves.”

“Thirteen?”

Kirov nodded. “That’s what he said. Five thousand pounds of it in all.”

Stalin has somehow miscalculated the amount, thought Pekkala. “How did he come up with that number?”

“They had an informant,” explained Kirov. “A groundskeeper at Tsarskoye Selo. He saw Colonel Kolchak departing from the estate and even managed to count the number of crates on the wagons Kolchak brought with him.”

As Pekkala thought back to that night, he suddenly grasped what must have happened. The groundskeeper had not realized that the third cart had broken down. He had only watched the first two carts departing. By the time the third had been repaired, the groundskeeper was already on his way to report what he had seen. Stalin must be under the impression that there were fifty cases in all, when in fact there were seventy-five. There were not thirteen cases missing. There were thirty-eight. Subtracting the three cases that Kolchak used for bribes along his route, that still left thirty-five cases of gold, and not five thousand pounds but more than thirteen thousand.

“Those cases are down there in the woods,” said Pekkala. “I will go and fetch them now.”

“Let me help you, Inspector.”

“No.” Pekkala held up one grubby hand. “As the Tsar once said to me, this is a task I trust to no one else.”

The poor man has been driven insane, Kirov thought to himself, but he smiled gently and rested a hand upon the shoulder of Pekkala’s dirty coat. “Very well, Inspector,” he said comfortingly. “If you insist.”

It took Pekkala two hours to carry the ingots from the forest. In that time, he barely spoke, methodically shuffling back and forth between the train tracks and the clearing.

Kirov and Deryabin watched Pekkala struggling under the weight of the ingots, which he carried three at a time. The only assistance Pekkala accepted was for the two men to take the gold from his hands and stack it inside the train compartment.

“Why won’t he let us help him?” asked Deryabin, when Pekkala had once more disappeared through the reeds and into the clearing on the other side.

“Don’t ask me why he does what he does,” replied Kirov, “because, believe me, I don’t know. Most of the time only Pekkala knows what he is doing, but that was enough for the Tsar, and it is enough for Stalin as well, so it will have to be enough for you and me, Comrade Deryabin.”

When the thirteen cases of gold, three hundred twelve bars in all, had been delivered to the train, Pekkala returned one last time to the frozen pond and dragged the body of Colonel Kolchak to the tracks, leaving a bloody trail through the snow. With Kirov’s help, the two men laid Kolchak inside the tender where the reserves of coal were kept.

The rest of the gold, more than five hundred bars, Pekkala left behind in the forest. In time, the Ostyaks would find it—a gift from the man with bloody hands.

“Inspector,” said Kirov, “we have a long journey ahead of us, but before we go, I have a little gift for you.” From the pocket of his tunic, Kirov removed the Emerald Eye and placed it in Pekkala’s hand.

For a moment Pekkala stared at the badge, which unblinkingly returned his gaze from the safety of his grubby palm. Then, very carefully, Pekkala pinned it to the lapel of his coat.

In the engineer’s compartment, Kirov sat down on the bars, which formed a low bench against the rear wall. He leaned back and folded his arms. “Deryabin!”

“Yes?”

“It is time to go.”

“But where?”

“Still think you could teach those Muscovites a thing or two?”

“Damned right I could!”

Seated on his makeshift throne of gold, Kirov gestured casually towards the west. “Then roll on, Engine Master. We are bound for Moscow. Show us what the Orlik can do.”

TOO EXHAUSTED TO GO ON, Gramotin stood beside the tracks, crying out in terror and confusion.

The Orlik had caught up with him at last.

Looking down from the engineer’s compartment, Pekkala noticed what appeared to be a person in military uniform, although he could not be quite sure. This wretch’s clothing appeared to be both singed and frozen at the same time. The helpless creature stood with its mouth open, caught up in a cyclone of whirling snow which vortexed around him as if it were a living thing. Whoever it was, Pekkala pitied him for having gone astray in such a wilderness.

As the train passed by, the two men locked eyes. In that moment, each one recognized the other.

“Gramotin!” exclaimed Pekkala.

The sergeant’s screaming ceased abruptly as he gaped at prisoner 4745—the man he could have sworn he had just killed.

And then the train was gone.

Gramotin waited until the Orlik had vanished into the distance. Then, after swearing a silent oath never to mention what he had just seen, he tottered back onto the tracks and kept walking.

Six days later, the Orlik rolled into Moscow’s Central Station.

HIGH ABOVE THE KREMLIN, thunderhead clouds drifted across the pale blue sky.

From his office window, Stalin gazed out across the rooftops of the city. He never placed himself directly in front of the glass. Instead, he leaned into the thick folds of the red velvet curtain, preferring to remain invisible to anyone who might be looking from below.

Pekkala stood in the center of the room, breathing in the honeyed smell of beeswax polish and the leathery reek of old tobacco smoke.

He had been there for several minutes, waiting for Stalin to acknowledge his presence.

Finally, Stalin turned away from the window. “I realize you must be upset. I might have overreacted.”

“You mean by ordering me to be shot?”

“However”—Stalin raised one finger in the air—“you must admit my instincts were right about the gold. Ingenious, Pekkala, allowing yourself to be taken hostage by the Comitati, in order to locate the treasure. A pity those two men managed to escape.”

“A small price to pay.”

“Yes,” Stalin muttered absentmindedly.

“You seem restless today, Comrade Stalin.”

“I am!” he agreed. “Ever since I walked in here this morning, I’ve had the feeling that the world was somehow out of balance. My mind is playing tricks on me.”

“Is there anything else, Comrade Stalin?”

“What? Oh, yes. Yes, there is.” Lifting a file from the stack laid out on his green blotter, he slid it across to Pekkala. “For the successful completion of this case, congratulations are in order. These are your award papers. You are now a Hero of the Soviet Union.”

“That will not be necessary, Comrade Stalin.”

Stalin’s jaw clenched, but then he sighed with resignation. “I knew you wouldn’t take it, and yet I have a feeling you do not intend to leave here empty-handed.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Pekkala, “I do have one request.”

“I thought as much,” growled Stalin.

“It concerns a man named Melekov.”

IN THE OUTER OFFICE, Poskrebyshev was relishing Stalin’s discomfort.

The previous night he had experienced an epiphany. When it came to him, he was hovering in that space between waking and sleeping, when the body seems to translate itself, molecule by molecule, into that swirling dust from which the universe is made.

The idea appeared in Poskrebyshev’s head so completely that it seemed to him at first as if there was someone else in the room explaining it to him. The drifting of his consciousness halted abruptly. Suddenly wide awake, Poskrebyshev sat up in bed and fumbled about in the dark for a pencil and piece of paper, afraid that if he did not write it down his plan might escape unremembered into the mysterious realm from which it had appeared.

Poskrebyshev had been thinking about the apparently limitless enjoyment Stalin took in humiliating him. He had always assumed that this was simply a thing he was required to endure. There could be no consideration of revenge. Stalin’s sense of humor did not extend to laughter gleaned at his own expense. The only way Poskrebyshev could ever achieve any kind of satisfaction was if Stalin did not know a joke was being played on him.

Which is impossible, he told himself.

It was at this moment that the angels spoke to Poskrebyshev, or if they were not angels, then some other supernatural voice—Lenin, or Trotsky perhaps, calling to him from beyond the grave—since it hardly seemed possible to him that he could have come up with such a brilliant plan all on his own. In its deviousness, it even surpassed the revenge he had taken on Comrades Schwartz and Ermakov, currently residing in Archangel.

Arriving early for work the next morning, Poskrebyshev carefully rearranged the contents of Stalin’s office. Chairs. Carpets. Ashtrays. Pictures on the wall.

As Poskrebyshev was well aware, Stalin liked everything to be in its proper place. He insisted upon it to such a degree of obsession that, the previous week, when a member of the Kremlin cleaning crew had switched his pipe rack from one side of the desk to the other, Stalin had the woman dismissed.

The brilliance of Poskrebyshev’s revenge consisted in shifting these objects only millimeters from their original position. No one looking at them would be consciously aware that anything was out of the ordinary. Subconsciously, however, the cumulative effect would be devastating.

It would not be permanent, of course. When Stalin had gone for the day, Poskrebyshev would put everything back in its proper place. He would do this not to relieve Comrade Stalin of his suffering but to confound him even further as to the source of his anxiety.

Now, as Poskrebyshev eavesdropped on Stalin’s conversation with Pekkala, he experienced a warmth of satisfaction he had never felt before and clenched his teeth to hide the sound of cackling which threatened to burst from his mouth.

A few minutes later, when Pekkala emerged from Stalin’s office, Poskrebyshev busied himself with paperwork. He expected Pekkala to walk straight past without acknowledging him, as most people did. Instead, the investigator paused. Reaching across Poskrebyshev’s desk, he repositioned the intercom a finger’s breadth to the right of where it had been before.

“What are you doing?” asked Poskrebyshev.

“Comrade Stalin seems particularly agitated today.”

Poskrebyshev looked at the ugly black box, as if by force of will he might return the object to its original position. Then, slowly, he raised his head until he was staring at Pekkala. Could he possibly have figured it out? wondered Poskrebyshev. What are you thinking? asked the voices in his head. It’s Pekkala. Of course he has figured it out! A sense of imminent doom surrounded Poskrebyshev, but only for a moment, because he noticed Pekkala was smiling.

“And how is the weather in Archangel today?” asked the inspector.

By the time Poskrebyshev remembered to breathe, Pekkala had already gone.

MELEKOV HAD JUST FINISHED INSTALLING a new phone in the commandant’s office. His hands were sticky from the electrical tape he had used to bind the wiring. As he wiped his fingertips on his shirt, Melekov looked around the room. Most of Klenovkin’s possessions had already been stolen by various guards who came to see the bullet hole, almost hidden by the peacock fan of blood which had sprayed across the wall.

Now the bullet hole had been repaired and the blood had been painted over, although, Melekov noted, both were still visible if he stared at the place for a while.

With a few minutes to spare before he had to be back at the kitchen, Melekov sat down in Klenovkin’s chair and put his feet up on the desk. Then, from his trouser pocket, he pulled out a cheese and cabbage sandwich.

Halfway through his first mouthful, the telephone rang, shattering the quiet of the room.

Caught by surprise, Melekov leaped out of his chair, which tipped over backwards and crashed to the floor.

Immediately, the phone rang again, its deafening clatter filling the air.

Melekov snatched the receiver out of its cradle and pressed it to his ear.

“Hello!” called a voice at the other end. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Yes …”

“Who are you?” demanded the voice.

“Who are you?” asked Melekov.

“This is Vladimir Leonovich Poskrebyshev. I am calling from the Kremlin with a message for somebody named Melekov. Do you know him?”

“I am him.”

“Well, as of this moment, Comrade Melekov, you are the temporary commandant of the Borodok Labor Camp.”

Melekov felt his heart clench, like a little half-inflated balloon grasped in the hand of an angry child. “Commandant?”

“Temporary Commandant,” Poskrebyshev corrected him. “Although, the way things work, it might be years before Dalstroy finds a replacement.”

“When do I begin?”

“You have already begun! The appointment is effective immediately. Congratulations. Long live the Motherland.”

“Long live—” Melekov began.

But Poskrebyshev had already hung up.

Melekov replaced the phone receiver. Silence had fallen once more upon the room. He placed the chair upright and sat down again at the desk. His desk. Slowly, he laid his hands flat upon the surface. With fingers spread, Melekov stretched out his arms and slid his palms across the wood, as if to anchor himself to the world.

There was a heavy knocking on the door.

Melekov waited for someone to do something and moments passed before he realized that the someone should be him. “Come in!” he shouted.

Gramotin stuck his head into the room. “What are you doing in here?”

“I am the new commandant.”

“The hell you are,” said Gramotin.

Melekov nodded towards the phone. “Go ahead. Call the Kremlin. Ask them.”

Nervously, Gramotin licked his lips. He realized Melekov must be telling the truth, for the simple reason that Melekov lacked the imagination, not to mention the audacity, to conjure a lie of such proportions. “All right,” said Gramotin, “then I suppose you’d better tell me what I’m to do with the body of our former commandant.”

“Where is he now?”

“In the freezer.”

Melekov thought for a second. “Put him in a barrel. Ship him out.”

Gramotin could not help but be impressed. “You cold-blooded bastard,” he said.

Melekov ignored the compliment. “And when you’re finished,” he continued, “you can take the rest of the day off.”

Gramotin nodded respectfully. This might work out after all, he thought.

“What was it like out there?” asked Melekov.

“Out where?”

“In the forest of Krasnagolyana. They say that place is haunted. You were out on your own a long time. Did you see anything?”

“Nothing at all, Commandant.”

A RETIRED MIDDLE-SCHOOL BIOLOGY TEACHER was fishing for carp with a bamboo pole off a bridge over the Novokislaevsk River north of Moscow. No sooner had he begun when he snagged his hook on the bottom and had to cut the line. He tied on a new hook and, a few minutes later, snagged that one as well. When the same thing happened a third time, the teacher swore magnificently, threw down the pole, and waded out into the lazy current, determined to retrieve his lost hooks.

As he reached down into the murky water, his fingers swept through the weeds and brushed against the soft pulpiness of rotten wood. It was only when his fingers touched the buttons of a coat that he realized that he had in fact been touching hair and the skin of a decomposing face.

The teacher staggered backwards out of the stream and stood dripping on the bank, wondering what to do next. He knew he ought to call the police and let them see to it, but as a teacher of biology, he was curious to see for himself what he had only read about in books. After looking around to make sure he was alone, he waded back into the water and wrestled the body up onto the bank. Streams of dirty water poured from the dead man’s pockets, sleeves, and trouser legs.

The corpse was that of a man who appeared to have been lying in the water quite some time. His skin had turned a washed-out grayish white and his eyes had seemingly flattened out and sunk back into the skull. He was wearing a heavy black coat with wide lapels.

Crouching over the body, the professor grasped the man’s jaw, opened the mouth, and looked inside. Then he fetched a little stick, got down on his hands and knees, and poked around in the man’s ears. He touched the dead man’s eye and pinched his cheek and flexed all the joints of his fingers.

His curiosity now satisfied, the teacher ran off to find a telephone and call the police, but not before he had retrieved his hooks from where they had snagged in the man’s clothing.

Police identified the man as Vojislav Kornfeld, a known NKVD assassin. His body was taken to a morgue on Lominadze Street, where the doctor on duty found no signs of injury to the body. No trauma. No defensive wounds. No poison detected in his system. Although water was present in his lungs, the absence of lactic acid in his blood seemed to rule out drowning.

The cause of death was listed as “undetermined.”

Further inquiries by the Moscow police yielded no results.

After six weeks, his body was cremated and the ashes scattered in a vacant lot behind the abandoned Skobelev hotel.

ON A BRIGHT WINTER’S MORNING at the Borodok railhead, a shipment of fifteen tons of lumber from the Valley of Krasnagolyana was loaded onto flatbeds, headed for the west. Included in the shipment were a dozen oil barrels stenciled in bright green letters with the name DALSTROY.

Packed into one of these barrels was former Camp Commandant Klenovkin, hands folded on his chest and knees drawn up to his chin. Jostled by the movement of the train, Klenovkin’s hair waved back and forth like seaweed in the tide of preserving fluid. Sealed in the darkness of that iron womb, the expression on his face was almost peaceful.

One week later, Klenovkin’s barrel arrived at the Center for Medical Studies of Sverdlovsk University, where it was immediately assigned to a newly arrived medical intern for use as a cadaver. Having collected the barrel from the shipping department, the intern loaded it onto a handcart and proudly wheeled it across to the laboratory where he and his classmates would soon begin dissections. He even took the long way around, so that everyone could see. The barrel was heavier than he’d expected. By the time he reached a deserted courtyard on the outskirts of the campus, the intern needed a rest. Propping the handcart against a wall, he lit himself a cigarette and sat down on an empty concrete platform, placed there many years ago for a statue which never arrived.