Red Moth

As they walked across the courtyard

As they walked across the courtyard to their car, a van arrived at the Lubyanka. These vehicles, which shuttled inmates to and from the prison, were camouflaged to look like delivery trucks. Painted on their sides were advertisements for non-existent bakeries, cigarette companies and distillers of vodka. Inside, in spaces barely big enough to hold a human being, the inmates were packed in side by side, bent double, shackled by the wrists to bars fixed at floor level against the walls of the truck so that the prisoners had to ride with their heads forced over to the level of their knees.

Only the most oblivious of Muscovites believed that these vans actually contained what their cheerful logos promised. By seeking to hide their real cargoes as they careened through the streets of Moscow, the illusion they created became even more sinister than the truth.

‘Are you all right, Inspector?’ asked Kirov, as they climbed into the car.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Pekkala.

‘You don’t look well. You’re sweating.’

With a swipe of his palm, Pekkala smeared the moisture from his forehead. ‘I can’t stand it in there.’

‘Is there any way to get Semykin released, Inspector?’

‘Probably, but as miserable as Semykin might be inside that cell, he is still safer there than out walking the streets of this city.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘As you yourself mentioned, Semykin has a talent for choosing his enemies. Bakhturin is one of the worst. Our visit to Semykin will not have gone unnoticed by the commissar. As soon as word gets out to him, you can be sure Bakhturin will pay us a visit. And as for Semykin, he wouldn’t last a week outside that prison cell, as long as Bakhturin is watching. And if we successfully petitioned for Semykin’s release, how long do you think it would take for Bakhturin to conjure up another reason to have him arrested?’

‘I did not think of that,’ whispered Kirov.

‘And here is something else you did not think about,’ continued Pekkala. ‘Bakhturin would see to it that Semykin did not go back to prison. At best, he would find himself on a train bound for the east. At worst, the Lubyanka guards would drag him down into the basement, and you and I both know what happens there. There are worse things than sitting in prison. Five years might seem like a very long time to Semykin, but it is one of the shortest sentences given out to convicts at the Lubyanka. You know as well as I do that there are men who’ve been behind those walls for ten or fifteen years or even longer.’

A long silence followed, in which each man retreated into his thoughts.

For Pekkala, the sight of Semykin, soaked in his own blood inside that windowless cell, had brought back memories whose vividness had failed to dull with time. Nor could he find a way to frame within the scaffolding of words what his own time in prison had done to him. The truth was that he did not know the answer. Although he could remember every detail of his life in the service of the Tsar, in those memories he no longer recognised himself. It was like looking at the anonymous photographs he saw heaped upon tables in the Sukharevka market, along with the chipped plates and mismatched cutlery which were all that remained of those who had been swept away by the Revolution.

It was Kirov who broke the silence. ‘Do you think you would have survived,’ he asked, ‘if Stalin had forced you to serve out your full sentence?’

Pekkala shuddered as an image returned to him, of a man he had known in the forest. His name was Tatischev, and he had once been a sergeant in the Tsar’s Zaporozhian Cossacks. After his escape from a nearby camp, which was known as Mamlin-Three, search parties had combed the forest looking for him. But they had never found Tatischev, for the simple reason that he had hidden where they were least likely to search — within sight of the Mamlin-Three camp. Here, he had remained, scratching out an existence even more spartan than Pekkala’s.

Pekkala and Tatischev met twice a year in a clearing on the border of the Borodok and Mamlin territorial boundaries. Tatischev was a cautious man, and judged it too dangerous to meet more often than that.

It was from Tatischev that Pekkala discovered exactly what was happening at Mamlin. He learned that the camp had been set aside as a research centre on human subjects. Low-pressure experiments were carried out in order to determine the effects on human tissue of high-altitude exposure. Men were submerged in ice water, revived and then submerged again to determine how long a downed pilot might survive after ditching in the arctic seas above Murmansk. Some prisoners had antifreeze injected into their hearts. Others woke up on operating tables to find their limbs had been removed. It was a place of horrors, said Tatischev, where the human race had sunk to its ultimate depths.

To Pekkala, the old Cossack Tatischev had seemed indestructible, but on the third year of their meetings, Pekkala showed up at the clearing to find Tatischev’s marrowless and chamfered bones scattered about the clearing, and metal grommets from his boots among the droppings of the wolves who had devoured him.

‘Maybe I could have survived after living that long in the forest,’ said Pekkala, ‘but I doubt I would have wanted to.’