Eye of the Red Tsar

9

ANTON GLANCED AT THE WHITE FACE OF HIS OVERSIZED WRISTWATCH and leaned his head out the window. “Ten minutes!” he shouted.

Pekkala climbed to his feet. The shadow of the crowbar had drifted to the right. He withdrew the second pebble from his pocket and laid it at the end of where the shadow had now reached. Then he dug his heel into the dirt and carved a line between the two pebbles. Positioning himself at the end of the second shadow, he held his arm out straight along the line he had dug in the sand. “That way is to the east,” he said.

Neither man questioned this result, conjured from thin air with skills beyond their reckoning, a thing both strange and absolute.

Having driven all day, stopping only to refuel from one of several gas cans they carried in the trunk, they stopped that night under the roof of an abandoned barn.

They parked the Emka on the dirt floor of the barn, to keep it out of sight in case this place was not as empty as it seemed. Then they lit a fire on the floor, feeding the flames with wooden planks prised out of old horse stalls.

Anton opened up a can of army ration meat with the word TUSHONKA stamped on the side. With a spoon pulled from his boot, he took a mouthful, jammed the spoon into the can, and passed it on to Kirov, who gouged out a clump of meat and packed it into his mouth, then turned and spat it out.

“This is atrocious!”

“Get used to it,” Anton told him. “I have three cases of the stuff.”

Kirov shook his head violently, like a dog shaking water from its fur. “If you’d thought to bring some decent food, I would gladly have cooked it for us.”

Anton pulled a flask from his pocket. It was made of glass wrapped in leather and had a pewter cup which fitted to the bottom of the glass. He unscrewed the metal cap and took a swig. “The reason they shut down your cookery class-”

“Chef! A school for chefs!”

Anton rolled his eyes. “The reason they closed it, Kirov, was because there isn’t enough decent food left in this country to make a proper meal. Trust me, you’re better off working for the government. At least you won’t starve.”

“I will,” said Kirov, “if I have to keep eating this.” He held the can out to Pekkala. “What did the Tsar like to eat?”

Up in the rafters, pigeons peered down at the men, flames reflected in their wide and curious eyes.

“Simple food mostly,” replied Pekkala. “Roast pork. Boiled cabbage. Blinis. Shashlik.” He remembered the skewers of meat, red peppers, onions, and mushrooms, served next to beds of rice and washed down with heavy Georgian wine. “I’m afraid you might have found his tastes a little disappointing.”

“On the contrary,” said Kirov, “those meals are the hardest to make. When chefs meet for a meal, they choose the traditional recipes. The mark of a good chef is whether he can create a simple meal and have it taste the way everyone expects it to.”

“What about cooks?” asked Anton.

Before Kirov could reply, Anton tossed the flask into his lap.

“What’s in here?” Kirov eyed the flask as if it were a grenade about to blow up in his face.

“Samahonka!” said Anton.

“Home brew,” muttered Kirov, handing back the flask. “You’re lucky you haven’t gone blind.”

“I made it in my bathtub,” said Anton. He took another drink and put the flask back in his pocket.

“Aren’t you going to offer some to your brother?”

Anton lay back, resting his head on the secret report. “A detective is not allowed to drink when he’s working. Isn’t that right, brother?” He pulled his heavy greatcoat over him and curled up in a ball. “Get some rest. We still have a long way to go.”

“I thought we were just stopping here for a meal,” said Kirov. “You mean we’re spending the whole night? On this bare floor?”

“Why not?” Anton muttered through a veil of fading consciousness.

“I used to have a bed,” said Kirov indignantly. “I used to have a room to myself.” He pulled the pipe from his pocket. With jerky and impatient hands, he stuffed it with tobacco.

“You’re too young for a pipe,” said Anton.

Kirov held it out admiringly. “The bowl is made from English briar wood.”

“Pipes are for old men,” yawned Anton.

Kirov glared at him. “Comrade Stalin smokes a pipe!”

But the comment was lost on Anton. He had fallen asleep, his steady breaths like the sound of a pendulum swinging slowly through the air above them.

Pekkala dozed off, hearing the click of Kirov ’s teeth on the pipe stem and breathing the smell of Balkan tobacco, which smelled to him like a new pair of leather shoes when they’re just taken out of the box. Then Kirov ’s voice jolted him awake.

“I was wondering,” the young man said.

“What?” growled Pekkala.

“If it is the Romanovs down at the bottom of that mine, those bodies have been lying there for years.”

“Yes.”

“There will be nothing left of them. How can you investigate a murder when you have no remains to investigate?”

“There is always something to investigate,” replied Pekkala, and as he spoke these words the face of Dr. Bandelayev rose from the darkness of his mind.

“He is the best there is,” Vassileyev had told Pekkala, “at a job no sane man would ever want to do.”

Dr. Bandelayev was completely bald. His head resembled a shiny pink lightbulb. As if to compensate, he sported a thick walrus-like mustache.

On a hot, muggy afternoon in late July, Vassileyev brought Pekkala to Bandelayev’s laboratory.

There was a smell he recognized instantly-a sharp, sweet odor that cut right through his senses. He knew it from his father’s basement, where the work of undertaking was carried out.

Vassileyev held a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. “Good God, Bandelayev, how can you stand it in here?”

“Breathe it in!” ordered Bandelayev. He wore a knee-length lab coat embroidered in red with his name and the word OSTEOLOGIST. “Breathe in the smell of death.”

Vassileyev turned to Pekkala. “He’s all yours,” the Major said, his voice muffled by the handkerchief. Then he strode out of the room as quickly as he could.

Pekkala looked around the laboratory. Although one wall of windows looked out onto the main quadrangle of the University of Petrograd, the view had been blocked by shelves of glass jars containing human body parts, preserved in a brownish fluid that looked like tea. He saw hands and feet, the raw ends frayed, with stumps of bone emerging from the puckered flesh. In other jars, coils of intestine wound together like miniature tornadoes. On the other side of this narrow corridor, bones had been laid out on metal trays, looking like puzzles which had been abandoned.

“Indeed they are puzzles!” said Bandelayev, when Pekkala mentioned this to him. “All of this, everything I do, is the discipline of puzzles.”

In the days ahead, Pekkala struggled to keep up with Bandelayev’s teaching.

“The stench of a rotting human is no different than that of a dead deer lying by the side of a road,” said Bandelayev, “and that is why I don’t believe in God.” The doctor spoke quickly, his words sticking together, depriving him of breath until he was forced to pause and gasp in a lungful of fresh air.

But there was no fresh air in Bandelayev’s lab. The windows remained closed, and plumber’s tape had been used to seal them.

“Insects!” said Bandelayev, by way of explanation. “This is not merely a shop of rotten meat, as some of my colleagues have described it. Here, all facets of decay are controlled. One fly could ruin weeks of work.” Bandelayev did not like to sit. It seemed an act of laziness to him. So when he lectured Pekkala, he stood behind a tall table littered with bones, which he would lift from their trays and hold out for Pekkala to identify. Or he would plunge his hand into a jar and remove a pale knot of flesh, commanding Pekkala to name it, while brown preserving fluid ran the length of his fingers, trickling down his sleeve.

Once, Bandelayev held up a skull pierced through the forehead by a small, neat round hole, the result of a bullet fired point-blank into the victim. “Do you know that in the summer months, blowflies will settle on a body in a matter of minutes. They will concentrate in the mouth, the nose, the eyes, or in the wound.” Bandelayev stuck his pinkie into the hole in the forehead. “In a few hours, there can be as many as half a million eggs laid on the corpse. In a single day the maggots which hatch from these eggs can reduce a full-grown man to half his body size. In a week”-he jerked his head to the side, a movement he used for emphasis but which appeared more like an involuntary nervous twitch-“there might be nothing left but bones.”

Having seen many bodies laid out on his father’s marble work slab, Pekkala was not squeamish. He did not flinch when Bandelayev thrust a lung into his hands or handed him a box of human finger bones. The hardest part for Pekkala, accustomed to his father’s quiet reverence for the bodies in his care, was Bandelayev’s total disregard for the people whose corpses he alternately pulled apart and reassembled, allowed to rot or pickled in preserving fluid.

His father would not have liked Bandelayev, Pekkala decided. There was something in Bandelayev’s breathless enthusiasm which would have struck his father as undignified.

When Pekkala mentioned that his father had been an undertaker, Bandelayev seemed equally unimpressed. “Quaint,” the doctor said dismissively, “and ultimately irrelevant.”

“And why is that?” asked Pekkala.

“Undertaking,” said Bandelayev, “is the creation of an illusion. It is a magic show. Make the dead appear at peace. Make the dead appear asleep.” He glanced at Pekkala, as much as if to ask-and what could be the point of that? “Osteology is the exploration of death.” Bandelayev wrapped his lips around those words as if no person could resist the urge to pull apart a corpse with bare hands and a blade.

“Alive,” he continued, “you are of little interest to me, Pekkala. But come back to me dead, and then I promise you we will become properly acquainted.”

Pekkala learned to differentiate between the skulls of women-narrow mouth, pointed chin, streamlined forehead, sharp edges where the eye sockets met the forehead-and the skulls of men, immediately identifiable by the bony bump at the base of the skull.

“Identity!” said Bandelayev. “Sex, age, stature.”

He made Pekkala chant it like a spell.

“The external occipital protuberance!” announced Bandelayev, as if introducing a dignitary to a gathering of royals.

Pekkala learned to tell the forward-angled teeth of an African from those of a Caucasian, which grew perpendicular to the jaw.

He studied the zigzag lines of cranial sutures, rising like lightning bolts over the dome of a skull, while Bandelayev leaned over his shoulder, muttering, “What is it saying? What is it telling you?”

At the end of each lesson, Bandelayev assigned Pekkala books by such men as the Roman Vitruvius, from which he learned that the length of a person’s outstretched arms corresponded to his height and that the length of a hand corresponded to one-tenth of a body’s length.

Another day, Bandelayev sent him home with a translation of the thirteenth-century Chinese doctor Sung Tz’u’s book, The Washing Away of Wrongs, in which the devouring of a body by maggots was described in language Pekkala had previously thought was reserved only for religious rapture.

Soon the reek of death no longer bothered him, even though it lingered in his clothes long after he had left Bandelayev’s laboratory.

Throughout the weeks they spent together, Bandelayev returned over and over to the question “What is it saying?”

One day, Bandelayev was teaching a lesson on the effect of fire upon a corpse. “The hands will clench,” he said, “arms bend, knees bend. A body on fire resembles the stance of a boxer in a fight. But suppose you find a body which has been burned but discover that the arms are straight. What does that say?”

“It says,” answered Pekkala, “that perhaps his hands were bound behind his back.”

Bandelayev smiled. “Now you are speaking the language of the dead.”

To Pekkala’s surprise, he realized that Bandelayev was right. Suddenly from every jar and tray, voices seemed to clamor at him, telling the story of their deaths.