Quiller Balalaika

17: GULANKA

'Where is your police escort?'

I grunted, shaking my head, pointing to my ears, then to my mouth.

The receiving officer gave a frown, squeezing the whole of his enormous face into it, as mystified as if I'd let forth with a torrent of Italian.

'What do you mean, you clod?' In a cloud of vodka.

I shook my head again, pointing.

He stared at me, then stared down at my papers again, his hands shaking, the split in his thumbnail impacted with grime.

The train stood waiting, a black, rusting barrier against the west, the rails beneath it shining, the mounds of trash between them covered with snow, an acrid reek of excrement drifting from where the contents of a lavatory had been dumped. Overhead the sky was dark, swollen with more snow to come, the only light in it electric, charged with unspent force.

The clock on the platform wall showed noon.

The officer shook my papers out again with a huge raw hand, a forefinger stabbing at the name near the top. Berinov, Dmitri Stanislav. Then he thumped me in the chest. 'You?'

I nodded. I'd asked Mitzi to have the papers made out bearing the forged signatures of a magistrate and a clerk of the court, plus the official stamps and frankings. I'd filled in my own name later, in capitals. The charge on which Berinov, Dmitri Stanislav had been convicted was specified as murder.

'Where is your escort?' the officer asked me again, pointing to one of the policemen standing against the train with his rifle slung.

I looked confused. I'd chosen the deaf-and-dumb act to avoid too many questions. This was nothing more than a cattle drive going on, which I'd expected, but bureaucracy would nevertheless be in charge of things, and papers were papers. He was extraordinarily worried, this huge red-headed man, that I hadn't been correctly presented to him by an escort detailed by the bailiff of the court. It was like watching table manners in a buffalo.

'Clod!' He picked up his pen and dipped it into the encrusted inkwell, scratching his signature at the bottom of the sheet. His desk was a packing crate, once having contained – according to the stencilling – sewer fittings from No. 3 Sanitation Equipment Factory, Smolensk. 'Over there!'

I tapped the papers and looked enquiring.

'What? No, I keep these. Over there!'

Two of the police guards came forward to lead me across to the huddle of prisoners near the front of the train, and I heard the metallic echo of the last of so many doors slamming behind me. I'd listened to them all morning, the first time when I'd left the hotel in the railway worker's clothes Legge had originally provided, complete with a heavy moth-eaten astrakhan hat and hogskin boots, the coat cut out of thick woollen felt, proof against even a Siberian wind-chill. The second time I'd heard a door slam was when I'd got into the taxi, telling the driver to take me to Gorkogo Station in the south-east of the city. The third time was of course when I'd arrived here and sat for half an hour on one of the benches outside, going over the whole thing again and reviewing the few, ineffective alternatives and coming up with the same answer, always the same answer: this was the only chance I'd got of bringing Balalaika home.

Then I'd picked up my duffel bag and walked into the station and that door had slammed too, and the nerves had flickered like iced lightning through the system as I reached the point of no return.

'Got a cigarette?'

A thin man beside me as we stood packed together, tears on his face from the cold, a five-day stubble.

'I don't smoke.'

He turned away.

Gulanka, it said on the weathered board near the rear of the train, the letters scoured by time and the whipping slipstream.

Once he's in there, Mitzi had told me, you won't see him again. No one ever gets out of Gulanka.

Wire mesh, half a mile of it, stretched like a shimmering net across the rocks, bearing a frieze of curved blades glinting like scimitars in the glare of the floodlights, beyond them a cliff, a massif of sheer rock rising to a thousand feet against the arctic night sky, gates swinging open on shrieking hinges, their timbers shaking as the huge locomotive rumbled between them, steam clouding under the lights, and now an outcry from a pack of dogs straining at the leashes of the handlers, their wolvine shapes rearing alongside the carriages, the guards behind them in ranks, rifles slung, and finally whistles blowing, an outbreak of shouted orders, doors slamming back.

We marched – were marched – at the double, our packs of belongings bumping, our boots slipping on the frozen ground, our steaming breath whipped away by the wind coming off the Arctic Ocean.

On each side, mounds of split rock, bare facets of it showing through snow drifts; mining rigs, tools, cranes, crates, trolleys on a single line heaped with shining ore, a timber yard stacked with beams, poles, props, weather-boarding; and then the huts, running in blocks halfway to the massif, their windows dark.

'Over there!'

Boots shuffled, shoulders bumped against the walls; the noisy heaving of lungs as we stood getting our breath back after the running march.

'Don't bunch! One at a time, can't you fucking listen?' Another flash from the camera on the other side of the office.

A man dropped, hitting his head against the corner of a desk, his fur hat coming off to show wisps of greying hair. 'Get him out of here!'

'You, next!' He fished for my papers as I stood forward. 'Berinov, Dmitri Stanislav – is that you?'

'Yes.'

'Yes, officer!'

'Yes, officer.'

His eyes bulbous in the shadow of his peaked cap, the veins broken into a bloodied web across his face, a bottle of vodka on his desk, half empty. 'What work did you do?'

'I was a shipping clerk, officer.'

'So you can read and write?'

'Yes, officer.'

My papers were shaking between his hands as he went on scanning them. 'What else? What other work did you do?'

'A little merchandising.'

His head jerked up. 'You were in the mob?'

'On the fringe.'

'You make much money?'

'I was comfortable.'

A sudden roar of laughter, spittle shining on his stubbled chin. 'Were you now! Then you'll find a slight fucking difference here, my friend. How much did you bring with you?'

'The regulation amount.'

'You sure?'

'Yes, officer.' We'd been body-searched twice, coming through.

He looked down again. 'We've got no use for a clerk here right now. If we need another one I'll send for you.' He scrawled something in red across the papers. 'Meantime, see how you like the mines.'

'Can I ask a question?'

'You can try.'

'There's a friend of mine here, Marius Antanov. Can you tell me which hut he's in?'

'That's none of your business. It's confidential information, and we respect privacy in this place, you understand that? No names, no pack drill. Now get over there.'

'You! Come on, then!'

A guard pushed me between ragged yellow tapes. 'Hold still!'

The camera flashed.

'All right, get over there. Boris! One more for Hut nine – you got room?'

'No, but I'll take him. He can sleep on the floor.'

My watch had stopped, but I judged it to be three or four hours after midnight. Sleep had been difficult: for the first time in five days the floor was no longer rocking. Rumbling through the Urals and then north and east across the steppes and into the mountains of the Siberian Uplands, our main concern had been to keep from freezing: there'd been a dozen cases of frostbite as we'd been herded through the inspection rooms. On the train, to fall sleep had been dangerous unless your body temperature was adequate; survival depended on a minimum of circulation.

This hadn't changed very much: a draught was still slicing across the floor from under the door to the urinals outside, but I'd found some newspaper and blocked at least half of it. The silence was also hard to get used to after the noise of the train, and I lay awake for another hour, listening to the distant voice of warning that hadn't given me any peace since we'd arrived at the camp.

It was the first time I'd taken an uncalculated risk during a mission, and now I knew why the idea had always frightened me: with a calculated risk, when you know most of the data, most of the hazards and the chances of escape, you can keep a modicum of control over the operation. Without that, you're plunging into the labyrinth blind, and may God have mercy on you.

It was something I'd been certain I would never do, however hot a mission was running, however urgent the need, the one thing that as a seasoned professional I would never expose myself to, because of its deadly threat to survival.

The uncalculated risk.

Mea culpa. But stay, be gentle with me, my good friend, grant me your charity, for madness of whatever kind can come upon any man at any time.

Sleep came at last from the shadowed silence of the night, broken only by the distant howling of the wolves across the snow.