Shadow Pass

“I want you to do nothing.” He gestured towards the door, beyond which lay the vast expanse of Russia. “Let them believe what they want to believe.”

“That the bullet disappeared?”

The Tsar picked up the piece of lead and dropped it in the pocket of his waistcoat. “It has disappeared,” he said.

“YOU WERE THERE?” ASKED PEKKALA.

“I happened to be passing through the marketplace,” Maximov replied. “I saw the whole thing. I’ve always wondered how you managed to survive.”

“Later on,” replied Pekkala, “when you have answered some of my questions, perhaps I can answer some of yours.”

The cottage belonging to Nagorski was of the type known as a dacha. Built in the traditional style, with a thatched roof and shuttered windows, it had clearly been here many years longer than the facility itself. Perched at the edge of a small lake, the dacha was the only building in sight. Except for a clearing around the cottage itself, dense forest crowded down to the water’s edge.

It was still and peaceful here. Now that the clouds had cleared away, the surface of the lake glowed softly in the fading sunlight. Out on the water, a man sat in a rowboat. In his right hand he held a fishing rod. His arm waved gently back and forth. The long fly line, burning silver as it caught the rays of the sunset, stretched out from the tip of the rod, curving back upon itself and stretching out again until the speck of the fly touched down upon the surface of the lake. Around the man, tiny insects swirled like bubbles in champagne.

Pekkala was so focused on this image that he did not see a woman come around from the back of the house until she stood in front of him.

The woman looked very beautiful but tired. An air of quiet desperation hung about her. Tight curls waved across her short, dark hair. Her chin was small and her eyes so dark that the blackness of her irises seemed to have flooded out into her pupils.

Ignoring Pekkala, the woman turned to Maximov, who was getting out of the car. “Who is this man,” she asked, “and why is he so filthy dirty, as well as being dressed like an undertaker?”

“This is Inspector Pekkala,” Maximov answered, “from the Bureau of Special Operations.”

“Pekkala,” she echoed. “Oh, yes.” The dark eyes raked his face. “You arrested my husband in the middle of his lunch.”

“Detained,” replied Pekkala. “Not arrested.”

“I thought that was all cleared up.”

“It was, Mrs. Nagorski.”

“So why are you here?” She spat out the words as if her mouth was filled with shards of glass.

Pekkala could tell that a part of her already knew. It was as if she had been expecting this news, not just today but for a very long time.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked hoarsely.

Pekkala nodded.

Maximov reached out to lay his hand upon her shoulder.

Angrily, she brushed his touch away. Then her hand flew back, catching Maximov across the face. “You were supposed to take care of him!” she shrieked, raising her fists and bringing them down hard against his chest with a sound like muffled drumbeats.

Maximov staggered back, too stunned by her fury to resist.

“That was your job!” she shouted. “He took you in. He gave you a chance when no one else would. And now this! This is how you repay him?”

“Mrs. Nagorski,” whispered Maximov, “I did everything I could for him.”

Mrs. Nagorski stared at the big man as if she did not even know who he was. “If you had done everything,” she sneered, “my husband would still be alive.”

The figure in the boat turned his head to see where the shouting had come from.

Pekkala could see now that it was a young man, and he knew it must be the Nagorskis’ son, Konstantin.

The young man reeled in his line, set the fishing rod aside and took up the oars. Slowly, he made his way towards the shore, oars creaking in the brass wishbones of the oarlocks, water dripping from the oar blades like a stream of mercury.

Mrs. Nagorski turned and walked back towards the dacha. As she climbed the first step to the porch, she stumbled. One arm reached out to brace herself against the planks. Her hands were shaking. She sank down on the steps.

By then Pekkala had caught up with her.

She glanced at him, then looked away again. “I always said this project would destroy him, one way or another. I must see my husband.”

“I would not advise that,” replied Pekkala.

“I will see him, Inspector. Immediately.”

Hearing the determination in the widow’s voice, Pekkala realized there was no point in trying to dissuade her.

The rowboat ground up against the shore. The boy hauled in his oars with the unconscious precision of a bird folding its wings, then stepped out of the tippy boat. Konstantin was head and shoulders taller than his mother, with her dark eyes and unkempt hair that needed washing. His heavy canvas trousers were patched at the knees and looked as if they had belonged to someone else before they came to him. He wore a sweater with holes in the elbows and his bare feet were speckled with bug bites, although he did not seem to notice them.

Konstantin looked from face to face, waiting for someone to explain.

It was Maximov who went to him. He put his arm around the boy, speaking in a voice too low for anyone else to hear.

Konstantin’s face turned pale. He seemed to be staring at something no one else could see, as if the ghost of his father were standing right in front of him.

Pekkala watched this, feeling a weight settle in his heart, like a man whose blood had turned to sand.

WHILE MAXIMOV DROVE MRS. NAGORSKI TO THE FACILITY, PEKKALA sat with her son at the dining table in the dacha.

The walls were covered with dozens of blueprints. Some were exploded engine diagrams. Others showed the inner workings of guns or traced the crooked path of exhaust systems. On shelves around the room lay pieces of metal, twisted fan blades, a slab of wood into which different-sized screws had been drilled. A single link of tank track lay upon the stone mantelpiece. The room did not smell like a home—of fires and cooking and soap. Instead, it reeked of machine oil and the sharply pungent ink used to make the blueprints.

The furniture was of the highest quality—walnut cabinets with diamond-paned glass fronts, leather chairs with brass nails running like machine gun belts along the seams. The table at which they sat was far too big for the cramped space of the dacha.

Pekkala knew that the Nagorski family had probably belonged to the old aristocracy. Most of these families had either fled the country during the Revolution or been swallowed up in labor camps. Only a few remained, and fewer still had held on to the relics of their former status in society. Only those who had proved themselves valuable to the government were permitted such luxuries.

Nagorski may have earned that right, but Pekkala wondered what would become of the rest of his family, now that he was gone.

Pekkala knew that there was nothing he could say. Sometimes, the best that could be done was just to keep a person company.

Konstantin stared fiercely out the window as the last purpling twilight bled into the solid black of night.

Seeing the young man so locked away inside his head, Pekkala remembered the last time he had seen his own father, that freezing January morning when he left home to enlist in the Tsar’s Finnish Regiment.

He was leaning out the window of a train as it pulled out of the station. On the platform stood his father, in a long black coat and wide-brimmed hat set squarely on his head. His mother had been too upset to accompany them to the station. His father held up one hand in a gesture of farewell. Above him, bent back like the teeth of eels, icicles hung from the station house roof.

Two years later, left to run the funeral parlor alone, the old man suffered a heart attack while dragging a body on a sled to the crematorium that he maintained some distance into the woods behind their house. The horse that usually hauled the sled had slipped on the ice that winter and was lame, so Pekkala’s father had tried to do the work himself.

The old man was found on his knees in front of the sled, hands gripping his thighs, chin sunk onto his chest. Slung across his shoulders were the leather traces normally worn by the horse for inching the sled along the narrow forest path. The way he knelt gave the impression that his father had just stopped for a moment to rest and would, at any moment, rise to his feet and go back to hauling his burden.

Although it had been his father’s wish that Pekkala enlist in the Regiment, rather than remain at home to help with the family business, Pekkala had never forgiven himself for not having been there to pick the old man up when he stumbled and fell.

Pekkala saw that same emotion on the face of this young man.

Suddenly Konstantin spoke. “Are you going to find who murdered my father?”

“I am not certain he was murdered, but if he was, I will track down whoever is responsible.”

“Find them,” said Konstantin. “Find them and put them to death.”

At that moment, headlights swept through the room as Maximov’s car pulled up beside the house. A moment later the front door opened. “Why is it so dark in here?” Mrs. Nagorski asked, as she hurried to light a kerosene lamp.

Konstantin rose sharply to his feet. “Did you see him? Is it true? Is he really dead?”

“Yes,” she replied, tears coming at last to her eyes. “It is true.”

Pekkala left them alone to grieve. He stood on the porch with Maximov, who was smoking a cigarette.

“Today is his birthday,” said Maximov. “That boy deserves a better life than this.”

Pekkala did not reply.

The smell of burning tobacco lingered in the wet night air.

PEKKALA RETURNED TO THE ASSEMBLY BUILDING, THE FLAT-ROOFED brick structure which Ushinsky had christened the Iron House. Engines hung in wooden cradles against one wall. Against the other wall, the bare metal shells of tanks balanced on iron rails, rust already forming on the welding joints, as if the steel had been sprinkled with cinnamon powder. Elsewhere, like islands in this vast warehouse, machine guns had been laid out in a row. Arching high above the work floor, metal girders held the ceiling in place. To Pekkala, an air of lifelessness hung about this place. It was as if these tanks were not pieces of the future but fragments from the distant past, like the bones of once-formidable dinosaurs waiting to be reassembled by archaeologists.

A table had been cleared off. Engine parts were strewn across the floor where NKVD men had set them hurriedly aside. On the table lay the remains of Colonel Nagorski. The bled-out tissue seemed to glow under the ruthless work lights. Lysenkova was spreading an army rain cape over Nagorski’s head, having just examined the body.

Beside her stood Kirov, the muscles drawn tight in his face. He had seen bodies before, but nothing like this, Pekkala knew.

Even Lysenkova looked upset, although she was trying hard to conceal it. “It’s impossible to say for sure,” the commissar told Pekkala, “but everything points towards an engine malfunction. Nagorski was out testing the machine on his own. He put the engine in neutral, got out to check something, and the tank must have popped into gear. He lost his footing and the tank ran over him before the engine stalled. It was an accident. That much is obvious.”

Kirov, standing behind her, slowly shook his head.

“Have you spoken to the staff here at the facility?” Pekkala asked Lysenkova.

“Yes,” she replied. “All of them are accounted for and none of them were with Nagorski at the time of his death.”

“What about the man we chased through the woods?”

“Well, whoever he is, he doesn’t work here at the facility. Given the fact that Nagorski’s death is an accident, the man you chased was likely just some hunter who made his way onto the grounds.”

“Then why did he run when he was ordered to stop?”

“If men with guns were chasing you, Inspector Pekkala, wouldn’t you run away, too?”

Pekkala ignored her question. “Would you mind if I examine the body?”

“Fine,” she said irritably. “But be quick. I am heading back to Moscow to file my report. Nagorski’s body will remain here for now. Guards will be arriving soon to make sure the corpse is not disturbed. I expect you to be gone when they arrive.”

The two men waited until Major Lysenkova had left the building.

“What did you find out?” Pekkala asked Kirov.

“What she said about the scientists is correct. They have all been accounted for by the guards at the time Nagorski died. During work hours, guards are stationed inside each of the facility buildings, which means that the scientists were also able to account for the whereabouts of the security personnel. Samarin was on his usual rounds this morning. He was seen by all of the staff at one time or another.”

“Is anyone missing?”

“No, and no one seems to have been anywhere near Nagorski when he died.” Kirov turned his attention to the rain cape, whose dips and folds crudely matched the contours of a human body. “But she’s wrong about this being an accident.”

“I agree,” replied Pekkala, “but how have you reached that conclusion?”

“You had better see for yourself, Inspector,” replied Kirov.

Grasping the edge of the cape, Pekkala drew it back until Nagorski’s head and shoulders were revealed. What he saw made him draw in his breath through clenched teeth.

Only a leathery mask remained of Nagorski’s face, behind which the shattered skull looked more like broken crockery than bone. He had never encountered a body as traumatized as the one which lay before him now.

“There.” Kirov pointed to a place where the inside of Nagorski’s skull had been exposed.

Gently taking hold of the dead man’s jaw, Pekkala tilted the head to one side. In the glare of the work light, a tiny splash of silver winked at him.

Pekkala reached into his pocket and brought out a bone-handled switchblade. He sprung the blade and touched the tip of it against the silver object. Lifting it from the rippled plate of bone, he eased the fleck of metal onto his palm. Now that he could see it clearly, Pekkala realized that the metal wasn’t silver. It was lead.

“What is it?” asked Kirov.

“Bullet fragment.”

“That rules out an accident.”

Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, Pekkala placed the sliver of lead in the middle and then folded the handkerchief into a bundle before returning it to his pocket.

“Could it have been suicide?” asked Kirov.

“We’ll see.” Pekkala’s focus returned to the wreckage of Nagorski’s face. He searched for an entry wound. Reaching under the head, fingers sifting through the matted hair, his fingertip snagged on a jagged edge at the base of the skull where the bullet had impacted the bone. Pressing his finger into the wound, he followed its trajectory to an exit point on the right side of the dead man’s face, where the flesh had been torn away. “This was no suicide,” said Pekkala.

“How can you be sure?” asked Kirov.

“A man who commits suicide with a pistol will hold the gun against his right temple if he is right-handed or against his left temple if he is left-handed. Or, if he knows what he is doing, he will put the gun between his teeth and shoot himself through the roof of the mouth. That will take out the dura oblongata, killing him instantly.” He pulled the rain cape back over Nagorski’s body, then wiped the gore from his hands on a corner of the cape.

“How do you get used to it?” asked Kirov, as he watched Pekkala scrape the blood out from under his fingernails.

“You can get used to almost anything.”

They left the warehouse just as three NKVD guards arrived to take charge of Nagorski’s corpse. Standing in the dark, the two men turned up the collars of their coats against a spitting rain.

“Are you certain Major Lysenkova didn’t spot the bullet wound in Nagorski’s skull?” asked Pekkala.

“She barely glanced at the remains,” replied Kirov. “It seemed to me that she just wants this case to go away as fast as possible.”

Just then, a figure appeared from the darkness. It was Maximov. He had been waiting for them. “I need to know,” he said. “What happened to Colonel Nagorski?”

Kirov glanced at Pekkala.

Almost imperceptibly, Pekkala nodded.

“He was shot,” replied the major.

The muscles twitched along Maximov’s jaw. “This is my fault,” he muttered.

“Why do you say that?” asked Pekkala.

“Yelena—Mrs. Nagorski—she was right. It was my job to protect him.”

“If I understand things correctly,” replied Pekkala, “he sent you away just before he was killed.”

“That’s true, but still, it was my job.”

“You can’t protect a man who refuses to be protected,” said Pekkala.

If Maximov took comfort in Pekkala’s words, he gave no sign of it. “What will happen to them now? To Yelena? To the boy?”

“I don’t know,” replied Pekkala.

“They won’t be looked after,” insisted Maximov. “Not now that he is gone.”

“And what about you?” asked Pekkala. “What will you do now?”

Maximov shook his head, as if the thought had not occurred to him. “Just make sure they are looked after,” he said.

A cold wind blew through the wet trees, with a sound like the slithering of snakes.

“We’ll do what we can, Maximov,” Pekkala told the big man. “Now go home. Get some rest.”

“That man makes me nervous,” remarked Kirov after the bodyguard had vanished back into the dark.

“That’s part of his job,” replied Pekkala. “When we get back to the office, I want you to find out everything you can about him. I asked him some questions and he avoided every one of them.”

“We could bring him in for questioning at Lubyanka.”

Pekkala shook his head. “We won’t get much out of him that way. The only time a man like that will talk is if he wants to. Just find out what you can from the police files.”

“Very well, Inspector. Shall we head back to Moscow?”

“We can’t leave yet. Now that we know a gun was used, we have to search the pit where Nagorski’s body was found.”

“Can’t this wait until morning?” moaned Kirov, clutching his collar to his throat.

Pekkala’s silence was the answer.

“I didn’t think so,” mumbled Kirov.

Pekkala woke to the sound of someone banging on the door.

At first, he thought it was one of the shutters, dislodged by the wind. There was a snowstorm blowing. Pekkala knew that in the morning he would have to dig his way out of the house.

The banging came again, and this time Pekkala realized someone was outside and asking to come in.

He lit a match and set the oil lamp burning by his bed.

Once more he heard the pounding on the door.

“All right!” shouted Pekkala. He fetched his pocket watch from the bedside table and squinted at the hands. It was two in the morning. Beside him he heard a sigh. Ilya’s long hair covered her face and she brushed it aside with a half-conscious sweep of her hand.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Someone’s at the door,” Pekkala replied in a whisper as he pulled on his clothes, working the suspenders over his shoulders.

Ilya propped herself up on one elbow. “It’s the middle of the night!”

Pekkala did not reply. After doing up the buttons of his shirt, he walked into the front room, carrying the lamp. Reaching out to the brass doorknob, he suddenly paused, remembering that he had left his revolver on the chest of drawers in the bedroom. Now he thought about going to fetch it. No good news ever came knocking at two in the morning.

The heavy fist smashed against the wood. “Please!” said a voice.

Pekkala opened the door. A gust of freezing air blew in, along with a cloud of snow which glittered like fish scales in the lamplight.

Before him stood a man wearing a heavy sable coat. He had long, greasy hair, a scruffy beard and piercing eyes. In spite of the cold, he was sweating. “Pekkala!” wailed the man.

“Rasputin,” growled Pekkala.

The man stepped forward and fell into Pekkala’s arms.

Pekkala caught the stench of onions and salmon caviar on Rasputin’s breath. A few of the tiny fish eggs, like beads of amber, were lodged in the man’s frozen beard. The sour reek of alcohol oozed from his pores. “You must save me!” moaned Rasputin.

“Save you from what?”

Rasputin mumbled incoherently, his nose buried in Pekkala’s shirt.

“From what?” repeated Pekkala.

Rasputin stood back and spread his arms, “From myself!”

“Tell me what you are doing out here,” Pekkala demanded.

“I was at the church of Kazan,” said Rasputin, unbuttoning his coat to reveal a blood-red tunic and baggy black breeches tucked into a pair of knee-length boots. “At least I was until they threw me out.”

“What did you do this time?” asked Pekkala.

“Nothing!” shouted Rasputin. “For once, all I did was sit there. And then that damned politician Rodzianko told me to leave. He called me a vile heathen!” He clenched his fist and waved it in the air. “I’ll have his job for that!” Then he slumped into Pekkala’s chair.

“What did you do after they threw you out?”

“I went straight to the Villa Rode!”

“Oh, no,” muttered Pekkala. “Not that place.”

The Villa Rode was a drinking club in Petrograd. Rasputin went there almost every night, because he did not have to pay his bills there. They were covered by an anonymous numbered account which, Pekkala knew, had actually been set up by the Tsarina. In addition, the owner of the Villa Rode had been paid to build an addition onto the back of the club, a room which was available only to Rasputin. It was, in effect, his own private club. The Tsarina had been persuaded to arrange this by members of the Secret Service, who were tasked with following Rasputin wherever he went and making sure he stayed out of trouble. This had proved to be impossible, so a safe house, in which he could drink as much as he wanted for free, meant that at least the Secret Service could protect him from those who had sworn to kill him if they could. There had already been two attempts on his life: in Pokrovsky in 1914 and again in Tsaritsyn the following year. Instead of frightening him into seclusion, these events had only served to convince Rasputin that he was indestructible. Even if the Secret Service could protect him from these would-be killers, the one person they could not protect him from was himself.

“When I was at the Villa,” continued Rasputin, “I decided I should file a complaint about Rodzianko. And then I thought—no! I’ll go straight to the Tsarina and tell her about it myself.”

“The Villa Rode is in Petrograd,” said Pekkala. “That’s nowhere near this place.”

“I drove here in my car.”

Pekkala remembered now that the Tsarina had given Rasputin a car, a beautiful Hispano-Suiza, although she had forgotten to give him any lessons on how to drive it.

“And you think she would allow you in at this time of night?”

“Of course,” replied Rasputin. “Why not?”

“Well, what happened? Did you speak to her?”

“I never got the chance. That damned automobile went wrong.”

“Went wrong?”

“It drove into a wall.” He gestured vaguely at the world outside. “Somewhere out there.”

“You crashed your car,” said Pekkala, shaking his head at the thought of that beautiful machine smashed to pieces.

“I set out on foot for the Palace, but I got lost. Then I saw your place and here I am, Pekkala. At your mercy. A poor man begging for a drink.”

“Someone else has already granted your request. Several times.”

Rasputin was no longer listening. He had discovered one of the salmon eggs in his beard. He plucked it out and popped it in his mouth. His lips puckered as he chased the egg around the inside of his cheek. Then suddenly his face brightened. “Ah! I see you already have company. Good evening, teacher lady.”

Pekkala turned to see Ilya standing at the doorway to the bedroom. She was wearing one of his dark gray shirts, the kind he wore when he was on duty. Her arms were folded across her chest. The sleeves, without their cuff links, trailed down over her hands.

“Such a beauty!” sighed Rasputin. “If your students could only see you now.”

“My students are six years old,” Ilya replied.

He waggled his fingers, then let them subside onto the arms of the chair, like the tentacles of some pale ocean creature. “They are never too young to learn the ways of the world.”

“Every time I feel like defending you in public,” said Ilya, “you go and say something like that.”

Rasputin sighed again. “Let the rumors fly.”

“Have you really crashed your car, Grigori?” she asked.

“My car crashed by itself,” replied Rasputin.

“How,” asked Ilya, “do you manage to stay drunk so much of the time?”

“It helps me to understand the world. It helps the world to understand me as well. Some people make sense when they’re sober. Some people make sense when they’re not.”

“Always speaking in riddles.” Ilya smiled at him.

“Not riddles, beautiful lady. Merely the unfortunate truth.” His eyelids fluttered. He was falling asleep.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” said Pekkala. He grasped the chair and jerked it around so the two men were facing each other.

Rasputin gasped, his eyes shut tight.

“What’s this I hear,” asked Pekkala, “about you advising the Tsarina to get rid of me?”

“What?” Rasputin opened one eye.

“You heard me.”

“Who told you that?”

“Never mind who told me.”

“It is the Tsarina who wants you dismissed,” said Rasputin, and suddenly the drunkenness had peeled away from him. “I like you, Pekkala, but there is nothing I can do.”

“And why not?”

“Here is how it works,” explained Rasputin. “The Tsarina asks me a question. And I can tell from the way she asks it whether she wants me to say yes or no. And when I tell her what she wants to hear, it makes her happy. And then this idea of hers becomes my idea, and she runs off to the Tsar, or to her friend Vyrubova, or to whomever she pleases, and she tells them I have said this thing. But what she never says, Pekkala, is that it was her idea to begin with. You see, Pekkala, the reason I am loved by the Tsarina is that I am exactly what she needs me to be, in the same way that you are needed by the Tsar. She needs me to make her feel she is right, and he needs you to make him feel safe. Sadly, both of those things are illusions. And there are many others like us, each one entrusted to a different task—investigators, lovers, assassins, each one a stranger to the other. Only the Tsar knows us all. So if you have been told that I wish you to be sent away, then yes. It is true.” He climbed unsteadily out of the chair and stood weaving in front of Pekkala. “But it is only true because the Tsarina desired it first.”

“I think you’ve preached enough for one night, Grigori.”

Rasputin smiled lazily. “Good night, Pekkala.” Then he waved at Ilya, as if she were standing in the distance and not just on the other side of the room. As he moved his hand back and forth, a bracelet gleamed on his wrist. It was made of platinum and engraved with the royal crest: another gift from the Tsarina. “And good night, beautiful lady whose name I have forgotten.”

“Ilya,” she said, more with pity than with indignation.

“Then good night, beautiful Ilya.” Rasputin spread his arms and bowed extravagantly, his greasy hair falling in a curtain over his face.

“You can’t go out there now,” Pekkala told him. “The storm has not let up.”

“But I must,” replied Rasputin. “I have another party to attend. Prince Yusupov invited me. He promised cakes and wine.”

Then he was gone, leaving a stench of sweat and pickled onions hanging in the air.

Ilya stepped into the front room, her bare feet avoiding the slushy puddles which had oozed out of Rasputin’s boots. “Every time I’ve seen that man, he has been drunk,” she said, wrapping her arms around Pekkala.

“But he’s never as drunk as he appears,” replied Pekkala.

Two days later, Pekkala arrived in Petrograd just in time to see Rasputin’s body fished out of the Malaya Neva River, near a place called Krestovsky Island. His corpse had been rolled in a carpet and shoved beneath the ice.

Soon after, Pekkala arrested Prince Yusupov, who readily confessed to murdering Rasputin. In the company of an army doctor named Lazovert and the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovitch, first cousin of the Tsar, Yusupov had attempted to murder Rasputin with cakes laced with arsenic. Each cake contained enough poison to finish off half a dozen men, but Rasputin ate three of them and appeared to suffer no ill effects. Then Yusupov poured arsenic into a glass of Hungarian wine and served that to Rasputin. Rasputin drank it and then asked for another glass. At that point Yusupov panicked. He took the Browning revolver belonging to the Grand Duke and shot Rasputin in the back. No sooner had Dr. Lazovert declared Rasputin dead than Rasputin sat up and grabbed Yusupov by the throat. Yusupov, by now hysterical, fled to the second floor of his palace, followed by Rasputin, who crawled after him up the stairs. Eventually, after shooting Rasputin several more times, the murderers rolled him in the carpet, tied it with rope, and dumped him in the trunk of Dr. Lazovert’s car. They drove to the Petrovsky Bridge and threw his body into the Neva. An autopsy showed that, even with everything that had been done to him, Rasputin died by drowning.

In spite of Pekkala’s work on the case, and the proven guilt of the participants, none of his investigation was ever made public and none of the killers ever went to prison.

When Pekkala thought back on that night when Rasputin had appeared out of the storm, he wished he’d shown more kindness to a man so clearly marked for death.

UNDER THE GLARE OF AN ELECTRIC LIGHT POWERED BY A RATTLING portable generator, Pekkala and Kirov stood in the pit where Nagorski’s body was found. At first the freezing, muddy water had come up to their waists, but with the help of buckets, they had managed to bail out most of it. Now they used a mine detector to search for the missing gun. The detector consisted of a long metal stem, bent into a handle at one end, with a plate-shaped disk at the other. In the center of the stem, an oblong box held the batteries, volume control, and dials for the various settings.

After being shown Pekkala’s Shadow Pass, the NKVD guards had supplied them with everything they needed. They had even helped to wheel the generator out across the proving ground.

Slowly, Pekkala moved the disk of the mine detector back and forth over the ground, listening for the sound that would indicate the presence of metal. His hands had grown so numb that he could barely feel the metal handle of the detector.

The generator droned and clattered, filling the air with exhaust fumes.

On hands and knees, Kirov sifted his fingers through the mud. “Why wouldn’t the killer have held on to the gun?”

“He might have,” replied Pekkala, “assuming it’s a ‘he.’ More likely, he threw it away as soon as he could, in case he was caught and searched. Without a gun, he might have been able to talk his way out of it. But with a gun on him, there’d be no chance of that.”

“And he wouldn’t be expecting us to search through all this mud,” said Kirov, his lips turned drowned-man blue, “because that would be insane, wouldn’t it?”

“Precisely!” said Pekkala.

Just then they heard a beep—very faint and only one.

“What was that?” asked Kirov.

“I don’t know,” replied Pekkala. “I’ve never used one of these things before.”

Kirov flapped his arm at the detector. “Well, do it again!”

“I’m trying!” replied Pekkala, swinging the disk back and forth over the ground.

“Slowly!” shouted Kirov. As he climbed up off his knees, mud sucked at his waterlogged boots. “Let me try.”

Pekkala gave him the detector. His half-frozen hands remained curled around the memory of the handle.

Kirov skimmed the disk just above the surface of the mud.

Nothing.

Kirov swore. “This ridiculous contraption isn’t even—”

Then the sound came again.

“There!” shouted Pekkala.

Carefully, Kirov moved the disk back over the spot.

The detector beeped once more, and then again, and finally, as Kirov held it over the place, the sound became a constant drone.

Pekkala dropped to his knees and began to dig, squeezing through handfuls of mud as if he were a baker kneading dough. “It’s not here,” he muttered. “There’s no gun.”

“I told you this thing didn’t work,” complained Kirov.

Just then, Pekkala’s fist closed on something hard. A stone, he thought. He nearly tossed it aside, but then, in the glare of the generator light, he caught a glimpse of metal. As he worked his fingers through the mud, they snagged on what he now realized was a bullet cartridge. Pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, he held it up to Kirov and smiled as if he were a gold digger who had found the nugget that would set him up for life. Pekkala rubbed away the dirt at the end of the casing until he could see the markings stamped into the brass. “7.62 mm,” he said.

“It could be a Nagent.”

“No. The cartridge is too short. This did not come from a Russian gun.”

After hunting for another hour and finding nothing, Pekkala called an end to the search. The two men clambered out of the pit, switched off the generator, and stumbled back through the dark towards the buildings.

The guard hut was closed and the guards were nowhere in sight.

By that time, both Pekkala and Kirov were shuddering uncontrollably from the cold. They needed to warm up before driving back to the city.

They tried to get into the other buildings, but all of them were locked.

In desperation, the two men heaped up broken wooden pallets which they found stacked behind the Iron House. Using a spare fuel can from their car, they soon had the pallets burning.

Like sleepwalkers, they reached their hands towards the blaze. Sitting down upon the ground, they removed their boots and emptied out thin streams of dirty water. Then they held their pasty feet against the flames until their flesh began to steam. Darkness swirled around them, as if what lay beneath the ground had risen in a tide and drowned the world.

“What I don’t understand,” said Kirov, when his teeth had finally stopped chattering, “is why Major Lysenkova is here at all. NKVD has dozens of investigators. Why send one who only investigates crimes within the NKVD?”

“There’s only one possibility,” answered Pekkala. “NKVD must think one of their own people is responsible.”

“But that doesn’t explain why Major Lysenkova would be in such a hurry to wrap up the investigation.”

Pekkala balanced the gun cartridge on his palm, examining it in the firelight. “This ought to slow things down a bit.”

“I don’t know how you can do it, Inspector.”

“Do what?”

“Work so calmly with the dead,” replied Kirov. “Especially when they have been so … so broken up.”

“I’m used to it now,” said Pekkala, and he thought back to the times when his father would be called out to collect bodies which had been discovered in the wilderness. Sometimes the bodies belonged to hunters who had gone missing in the winter. They’d fallen through thin ice out on the lakes and did not reappear until spring, their bodies pale as alabaster, tangled among the sticks and branches. Sometimes they were old people who had wandered off into the forest, gotten lost, and died of exposure. What remained of them was often scarcely recognizable beyond the scaffolding of bones they left behind. Pekkala and his father always brought a coffin with them, the rough pine box still smelling of sap. They wrapped the remains in a thick canvas tarpaulin.

There had been many such trips, none of which plagued him with nightmares. Only one stuck clearly in his mind.

It was the day the dead Jew came riding into town.

His horse trotted down the main street of Lappeenranta in the middle of a blizzard. The Jew sat in the saddle in his black coat and wide-brimmed hat. He appeared to have frozen to death. His beard was a twisted mass of icicles. The horse stopped outside the blacksmith’s shop, as if it knew where it was going, although the blacksmith swore he’d never seen the animal before.

No one knew where the Jew had come from. Messages sent to the nearby villages of Joutseno, Lemi, and Taipalsaari turned up nothing. His saddlebags contained no clues, only spare clothing, a few scraps of food, and a book written in his language, which no one in Lappeenranta could decipher. He had probably come in from Russia, whose unmarked border was only a few kilometers away. Then he got lost in the woods, and died before he could find shelter.

The Jew had been dead for a long time—five or six days, thought Pekkala’s father. They had to remove the saddle just to get him off the horse. The hands of the Jew were twisted around the bridle. Pekkala, who was twelve years old at the time, tried to untangle the leather from the brittle fingers, but without success, so his father cut the leather. Since the Jew’s body was frozen, they could not fit him in a coffin. They did their best to cover him up for the ride back to Pekkala’s house.

That evening, they left him on the undertaking slab to thaw so that Pekkala’s father could begin the work of preparing the corpse for burial.

“I need you to do something for me,” his father told Pekkala. “I need you to see him out.”

“See him out?” said Pekkala. “He’s already out.”

Pekkala’s father shook his head. “His people believe that the spirit lingers by the body until it is buried. The spirit is afraid. It is their custom to have someone sit by the body, to keep it company until the spirit finally departs.”

“And how long is that?” asked Pekkala, staring at the corpse, whose legs remained pincered, as if still around the body of the horse. Water dripped from the thawing clothes, its sound like the ticking of a clock.

“Just until morning,” said his father.

His father’s preparation room was in the basement. That was where Pekkala spent the night, sitting on a chair, back against the wall. A paraffin lamp burned with a steady flame upon the table where his father kept tools for preparing the dead—rubber gloves, knives, tubes, needles, waxed linen thread, and a box containing rouges for restoring color to the skin.

Pekkala had forgotten to ask his father if he was allowed to fall asleep, but now it was too late—his parents and his brother had all gone to bed hours ago. To keep himself busy, he thumbed through the pages of the book they had found in the Jew’s saddlebags. The letters seemed to have been fashioned out of tiny wisps of smoke.

Pekkala set the book aside, got up, and went over to the body. Staring at the man’s pinched face, his waxy skin and reddish beard, Pekkala thought about the spirit of the Jew, pacing about the room, not knowing where it was or where it was supposed to be. He imagined it standing by the brass-colored flame of the lamp, like a moth drawn to the light. But maybe, he thought, only the living care about a thing like that. Then he went back and sat in his chair.

He did not mean to fall asleep, but suddenly it was morning. He heard the sound of the basement door opening and his father coming down the stairs. His father did not ask if he had slept.

The Jew’s body had thawed. One leg hung off the preparation table. His father lifted it and gently set it straight beside the other. Then he uncoiled the leather bridle from around the Jew’s hands.

Later that day, they buried him in a clearing on the side of a hill, which looked out over a lake. His father had picked out the place. There was no path, so they had to drag the coffin up between the trees, using ropes and pushing the wooden box until their fingertips were raw from splinters.

“We had better make it deep,” his father said as he handed Pekkala a shovel, “or else the wolves might dig him up.”

The two of them scraped through the layers of pine needles and then used pickaxes to dig into the gray clay beneath. When at last the coffin had been laid and the hole filled in, they set aside their shovels. Knowing only the prayers of a different god, they stood for a moment in silence before heading back down the hill.

“What did you do with his book?” asked Pekkala.

“His head is resting on it,” replied his father.

In the years since then, Pekkala had seen so many lifeless bodies that they seemed to merge in his mind. But the face of the Jew remained clear, and the smoke-trail writing spoke to him in dreams.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Kirov said again.

Pekkala did not reply, because he did not know either.

Flames snapped, flicking sparks into the blue-black sky.

The two men huddled together, like swimmers in a shark-infested sea.

AS KIROV DROVE THE EMKA THROUGH THE KREMLIN’S SPASSKY GATE, with its ornamental battlements and gold and black clock tower above, Pekkala began to do up the buttons on his coat in preparation for the meeting with Stalin. The Emka’s tires popped over the cobblestones of Ivanovsky Square until they reached a dead end on the far side.

“I’ll walk home,” he told Kirov. “This might take a while.”

At a plain, unmarked door, a soldier stood at attention. As Pekkala approached, the soldier slammed his heels together with a sound that echoed around the high brick walls and gave the traditional greeting of “Good health to you, Comrade Pekkala.” This was not only a greeting but also a sign that Pekkala had been recognized by the soldier and did not need to present his pass book.

Pekkala made his way up to the second floor of the building. Here, he walked down a long, wide corridor with tall ceilings. The floors were covered with a red carpeting. It was, Pekkala could not help noticing, the exact same color as clotted arterial blood. His footsteps made no sound except when the floorboards creaked beneath the carpet. Tall doors lined the walls of this corridor. Sometimes these doors were open and he could see people at work inside large offices. Today all the doors were closed.

At the end of the corridor, another soldier greeted him and opened the double doors to Stalin’s reception room. It was a huge space, with eggshell-white walls and wooden floors. In the center of the room, like life rafts in the middle of a flat, calm sea, stood three desks. At each desk sat one man, wearing a collarless olive-green tunic in the same style as that worn by Stalin himself. Only one man rose to greet Pekkala. It was Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s chief secretary, a short, flabby man with round glasses almost flush against his eyeballs. Poskrebyshev appeared to be the exact opposite of the stripped-to-the-waist, muscle-armored workers whose statues could be found in almost every square in Moscow. The only thing exceptional about him was his complete lack of emotion as he escorted Pekkala across the room to Stalin’s study.

Poskrebyshev knocked once and did not wait for a reply. He swung the door open, nodded for Pekkala to enter. As soon as Pekkala walked into the room, the secretary shut the door behind him.

Pekkala found himself alone in a large room with red velvet curtains and a red carpet which lined only the outer third of the floor. The center was the same mosaic of wood as in the waiting room. The walls had been papered dark red, with caramel-colored wooden dividers separating the panels. Hanging on these walls were portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, each one the same size and apparently painted by the same artist.

Close to one wall stood Stalin’s desk, which had eight legs, two at each corner. On the desk lay several files, each one aligned perfectly beside the others. Stalin’s chair had a wide back, padded with burgundy-colored leather brass-tacked against the frame.

Except for Stalin’s desk, and a table covered with a green cloth, the space was spartan. In the corner stood a large and very old grandfather clock which had been allowed to wind down and was silent now, the full yellow moon of its pendulum at rest behind the rippled glass window of its case.

Comrade Stalin often kept him waiting, and today was no exception.

Pekkala had not slept, having arrived back in the city only an hour before. He had reached that point of fatigue where sounds reached him as if down the length of a long cardboard tube. His only nourishment in the past fifteen hours had been a mug of kvass, a drink made from fermented rye bread, which he’d bought from a street vendor on his way to the meeting.

The vendor had handed Pekkala a battered metal cup filled with the sudsy brown drink, scooped from a cauldron kept warm by coals glowing in a grate beneath. As Pekkala raised the drink to his lips, he breathed in its smell, like burnt toast. When he had finished it, he turned the mug upside down, as was customary, emptying out the last drops, and handed it back. Just as he was doing so, he noticed a small stamp on the bottom of the cup. Looking closer, he saw it was the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs, a sign that it had once been in the inventory of the royal family. The Tsar himself used to drink from a cup like this, and Pekkala thought how strange it was to see this fragment of the old empire washed up outside the Kremlin like the flotsam of a shipwreck.

The Tsar was sitting at his desk.

The dark velvet curtains of his study, drawn back to let in the light, gleamed softly around the edge, like the feathers on a starling’s back.

The Tsar lifted the heavy mug to his lips, his Adam’s apple bobbing while he drank. Then he set the mug down with a satisfied grunt, picked up his blue pencil, and began to tap out a rhythm on a stack of unread documents.

It was the autumn of 1916. After taking over command of the military, the Tsar had been spending most of his time behind the stockade fence of army headquarters at Mogilev.

In spite of the Tsar’s having taken command, the Russian army continued to suffer more and more crushing defeats on the battlefield.

The blame for this had fallen as heavily on the Tsarina as it had on the Tsar. A rumor had even surfaced that the Tsarina, without consulting the Russian High Command, had begun secret peace negotiations with Germany, using one of her German relatives as an intermediary. The rumor spread, threatening the Tsar’s credibility as commander of the military.

On a rare visit to Petrograd, the Tsar had summoned Pekkala to the Palace and ordered him to conduct an investigation to determine whether the rumor was legitimate.

Pekkala had known from the start that something was not right. Although the details of the investigation itself were to be kept secret, the Tsar had widely publicized the fact that he had ordered the investigation. Information about Pekkala’s work even appeared in the newspapers, a thing the Tsar rarely allowed.

It did not take Pekkala long to discover that the rumor was, in fact, true. The Tsarina had, through an intermediary in Sweden, made contact with her brother, the Grand Duke of Hesse, who was serving as a high-ranking officer in the German army. A visit by the Grand Duke had taken place, as near as Pekkala could reckon, sometime in February of 1916.

Pekkala was not surprised to learn of the Tsarina’s meddling. Alexandra had kept up a constant barrage of letters to the Tsar while her husband was in Mogilev, insisting that Rasputin’s advice on military affairs should be followed and that anyone who disagreed with it should be sacked.

What did surprise Pekkala was to learn that the Tsar had known about the Grand Duke’s visit all along. Nicholas had even met with the Tsarina’s brother, probably in the very room where Pekkala and the Tsar were meeting now.

Once he had concluded the investigation, Pekkala made his report. He omitted nothing, not even those facts he’d uncovered which incriminated the Tsar himself. Once he’d finished, Pekkala unfastened the Emerald Eye from the underside of his lapel and laid it on the Tsar’s desk. Then he drew his Webley revolver and set it beside the badge.

“What’s this?” demanded the Tsar.

“I am offering my resignation.”

“Oh, come now, Pekkala!” the Tsar growled, flipping his pencil into the air and catching it. “Try to see this from my point of view. Yes, I admit we discussed the possibility of a truce. And yes, I admit this was done in secret, without the knowledge of our High Command. But damn it all, Pekkala, there is no truce! The negotiations fell apart. I knew the Russian people wanted answers about whether these rumors were true. That’s why I put you on the case—to put their minds at ease. The thing is, Pekkala, the answers they wanted were not the ones I knew you’d find.”

Sunlight illuminated the gilded titles of leather-bound volumes on the bookshelves. Pekkala studied them before speaking.

“And what would you have me do now, Majesty, with the information I have uncovered?”

“What I would have you do,” replied the Tsar, tapping the point of his pencil against Pekkala’s revolver, “is get back to work. Forget about this whole investigation.”

“Majesty,” said Pekkala, struggling to remain calm, “you do not employ me to provide you with illusions.”

“Quite right, Pekkala. You provide me with the truth. And I decide how much of it the Russian people need to hear.”

PEKKALA WAS BEGINNING TO WONDER IF STALIN MIGHT KEEP HIM waiting there all day. To pass the time, he rocked gently back and forth on the balls of his feet, his eyes on the wall behind Stalin’s desk. From previous visits, Pekkala knew that hidden somewhere in those wooden panels was a secret door, impossible to see until it opened. Behind the opening stretched a low and narrow passageway, lit with tiny lightbulbs no bigger than a man’s thumb. The floor of this passageway was thickly carpeted, so that a person could move the length of it without making any sound. Where it led to, Pekkala had no idea, but he had been told that this whole building was honeycombed with secret passageways.

Finally, he heard the familiar click of the panel’s lock releasing. The wooden slab swung outward and Stalin emerged from the wall. At first he did not speak to Pekkala, or even look at him. His habit was to stare into every corner of the room, searching for anything that might be out of place. Finally, his gaze turned to Pekkala. “Nagorski died in an accident?” he snapped. “Do you expect me to believe that?”

“No, Comrade Stalin,” replied Pekkala.

This seemed to catch the dictator by surprise. “You don’t? But that’s what I read in the report!”

“Not my report, Comrade Stalin.”

Muttering curses under his breath, Stalin sat down at his desk and immediately fished his pipe out of the pocket of his tunic.

Pekkala had noticed that Stalin smoked cigarettes when not in his office, but normally stuck to smoking a pipe when he was in the Kremlin. The pipe was shaped like a check mark, with the bowl at the bottom of the check and curved over at the top. The pipe had already been stuffed with honey-colored shreds of tobacco. Each time Pekkala saw Stalin smoking his pipe, the pipe itself looked new, and Pekkala suspected that he did not keep them long before replacing them.

From a small cardboard box, Stalin fished out a wooden match. He had a way of lighting these matches which Pekkala had never seen before. Grasping the match between his thumb and first two fingers, he would flick the match with his ring finger across the sandpaper strip. This never failed to light the match. It was such an unusual method that Pekkala, who did not smoke, had once bought a box of matches and spent an hour over his kitchen sink trying to master the technique, but succeeding only in burning his fingers.

In the stillness of the room, Pekkala heard the hiss of the match, the tiny crackle of the tobacco catching fire, and the soft popping sound as Stalin puffed on the end of the pipe. Stalin shook out the match, dropped it in a small brass ashtray, then sat back in his chair. “No accident, you say?”

Pekkala shook his head. Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, he stepped forward to the desk, laid the cloth in front of Stalin, and carefully unfolded it.

There, in the center of the black handkerchief, lay the tiny sliver of lead which Pekkala had removed from Nagorski’s skull.

Stalin bent forward until his nose was almost touching the desktop and peered intently at the fragment. “What am I looking at, Pekkala?”

“Part of a bullet.”

“Ah!” Stalin gave a satisfied growl and sat back in his chair. “Where did you find it?”

“In Colonel Nagorski’s brain.”

Stalin nudged at the fragment with the stem of his pipe. “In his brain,” he repeated.

From his pocket, Pekkala removed the empty gun cartridge that he and Kirov had found in the pit the night before. He placed it before Stalin as if he were moving a pawn in a chess game. “We also recovered this from the scene. It is from the same gun, I am almost certain.”

Stalin nodded with approval. “This is why I need you, Pekkala!” He opened the gray file and plucked out the single sheet of paper it contained. “The NKVD investigator who filed this report said that the body had been thoroughly examined. It says so right here.” He held the paper out at arm’s length so he could read it. “No sign of injury prior to being crushed by the tank. How could they have missed a bullet in his head?”

“The damage to the body was considerable,” offered Pekkala.

“That’s a reason, not an excuse.”

“You should also know, Comrade Stalin, that the bullet did not come from a Russian-made gun.”

Almost before the words had left Pekkala’s mouth, Stalin smashed his fist down on the desk. The little cartridge jumped, then rolled in a circle. “I was right!” he shouted.

“Right about what, Comrade Stalin?”

“Foreigners carried out this murder.”

“That may be so,” replied Pekkala, “but I doubt they could have done so without help from inside the country.”

“They did have help,” replied Stalin, “and I believe the White Guild is responsible.”

Pekkala’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Comrade Stalin, we have spoken about this before. The White Guild is a sham. It is controlled by your own Bureau of Special Operations. How could the White Guild be responsible when you are the one who created it, unless you are the one who ordered Nagorski’s death?”

“I know perfectly well,” replied Stalin coldly, “who summoned the White Guild into being, and no, I gave no command for Nagorski to be liquidated.”

“Then surely the Guild poses no threat to us.”

“There have been some new developments,” muttered Stalin.

“And what are they?” asked Pekkala.

“All you need to know, Pekkala, is that our enemies are attempting to destroy the Konstantin Project. They know that the T-34 is our only chance of surviving the time that is coming.”

“I don’t understand, Comrade Stalin. What do you mean by ‘the time that is coming’?”

“War, Pekkala. War with Germany. Hitler has retaken the Rhineland. He has forged a pact with Japan and Italy. My sources tell me he is planning to occupy parts of Czechoslovakia and Austria. And he won’t stop there, no matter what he tells the rest of the world. I have received reports from Soviet agents in England that the British are aware of German plans to invade their country. They know that their only chance of preventing invasion is if the Germans become involved in a war against us. Germany would be bogged down in a war to the east as well as to the west, in which case it might not have the resources to invade Britain at all. British intelligence has been spreading rumors that we are planning to launch a preemptive strike against Germany through southern Poland.”

“And are we?”

Stalin got up from his desk and began to pace around the room, the report still clutched in his fist. The soft soles of his calfskin leather boots swished across the wooden floor. “We have no such plan, but the Germans are taking these British rumors seriously. This means they are watching us for any signs of provocation. The slightest hostile gesture by us could bring about a full-scale war, and Hitler has made no secret of what he would like to do with the Soviet Union. If he has his way, our culture will be annihilated, our people enslaved. This entire country would become a living space for German colonists. The T-34 is not merely a machine. It is our only hope for survival. If we lose the advantage this tank can give us, we will lose everything. As of this moment, Pekkala, you are in charge of the investigation. You will replace this”—he squinted at the name on the report—“Major Lysenkova.”

“If I could ask, Comrade Stalin—”

“What?”

“Why did you assign her to the case at all?”

“I didn’t,” replied Stalin. “The guard in charge of security at Nagorski’s facility put in a call to her directly.”

“That would be Captain Samarin,” said Pekkala.

“Samarin had to call NKVD,” continued Stalin. “He couldn’t have called the regular police, because secret facilities are out of their jurisdiction. It had to be handled by Internal Security.”

“I realize that,” persisted Pekkala, “but my understanding is that Captain Samarin specifically requested Major Lysenkova.”

“Maybe he did,” replied Stalin impatiently. “Just ask him yourself.”

“Captain Samarin is dead, Comrade Stalin.”

“What? How?”

Pekkala explained what had happened in the woods.

Stalin returned to his seat. Resting in the chair, his back seemed unnaturally straight, as if he wore a metal brace beneath his clothing. “And this fugitive, the one you chased through the woods, has still not been located?”

“Since the death has been declared an accident, Comrade Stalin, I assume they have called off the search.”

“Called it off,” muttered Stalin. He picked up Lysenkova’s report. “Then it may already be too late. For this major’s sake, I hope not.” He let the paper fall onto the desk.

“I will speak to the major,” said Pekkala. “Perhaps she can help us with some answers.”

“Suit yourself, Pekkala. I don’t care how you do it, but I want the man who shot Nagorski before he goes and kills somebody else I cannot do without. In the meantime, no one must know about this. I do not want our enemies to think that we have faltered. They are waiting for us to make mistakes, Pekkala. They are looking out for any sign of weakness.”

PEKKALA SAT ON THE END OF HIS BED.

In front of him, on a small collapsible table, lay his dinner—three slices of black rye bread, a small bowl of Tvorok cheese, and a mug of carbonated water.

Pekkala’s coat and shoulder holster lay draped over his bed rail. He wore a pair of heavy corduroy trousers, their color the same deep brown as a horse chestnut, and a sweater of undyed wool, the color of oatmeal.

His residence was a boardinghouse on Tverskaia Street—not a particularly safe or beautiful part of town. In spite of this, over the past few years the building had become overcrowded. Workers had flooded out of the countryside, looking for jobs in the city. These days, it was not unusual to find a dozen people crammed into a space which, under normal circumstances, would barely have suited half that number.

His one-room apartment was sparsely furnished, with a fold-up army cot, which took up one corner of the room, and a collapsible table at which he ate his meals and wrote up his reports. There was also a china cabinet, slathered with many layers of paint, its current incarnation being chalky white. Pekkala had no china, only enameled cups and saucers, and only a couple each of those, since he rarely had any guests. The remainder of the cabinet was taken up with several dozen cardboard boxes of .455-caliber bullets belonging to the brass-handled Webley he wore when he was on duty and for which ammunition was difficult to come by in this country.

Pekkala had survived on so little for so long that he could not get used to doing otherwise. He lived like a man who expected at any moment to be given half an hour’s notice to vacate the premises.

Tucking a handkerchief into his collar, Pekkala brushed his hands against his chest and was about to begin his meal when a floorboard creaked in the hallway. He froze. A moment later, as he heard a knocking on his door, an old memory flickered to life in his head.

He stood outside the Tsarina’s Mauve Boudoir, his hand raised to rap on the door.

To the Alexander Palace maids, passing by with bundles of laundry, or trays of breakfast china, or feather dusters clasped like strange bouquets of flowers, he seemed to be frozen in place.

At last, as if the strength required for knocking on that door was more than he possessed, Pekkala sighed and lowered his hand.

Ever since the Tsarina had sent for him that morning, Pekkala had been filled with uneasiness. Alexandra usually stayed as far away from him as she could get.

Pekkala did not know why she disliked him so intensely. All he knew was that she did and that she made no secret of it. His only consolation was that he was far from alone in finding himself out of favor with her.

The Tsarina was a proud and stubborn woman who made up her mind very quickly about people and rarely changed her opinion afterwards. Even among those whom she tolerated, very few could count themselves as friends. Aside from Rasputin, her only confidante was the pouty, moonfaced Anna Vyrubova. For both of them, remaining in the Tsarina’s good graces had become a full-time job.

Now she had summoned Pekkala, and he had no idea what she wanted. Pekkala wished he could turn and walk away, but he had no choice except to obey.

As he raised his hand again to knock on the door, he caught sight of a sun wheel carved into the top of the doorframe. This crooked cross, its arms bent leftwards until it almost, but not quite, formed a circle, was the symbol the Tsarina had chosen as her own. It could be found carved into the doorframes of any place she had stayed for any length of time. Her life was filled with superstitions, and this was only one of them.

Knowing there was nothing to be gained by postponing this meeting any longer, Pekkala finally knocked.

“Come in,” ordered a muffled voice.

The Mauve Boudoir smelled of cigarettes and the dense fragrance of pink hyacinth flowers, which grew in planters on the windowsills. The lace curtains, a mauve color like everything else in the room, had been drawn, turning the light which filtered into the room the color of diluted blood. The dreary uniformity of its furnishings and the fact that the Tsarina never seemed to open the windows combined to make the space unbearably stifling to Pekkala.

Adding to his discomfort was the presence of an entire miniature circus made out of thin strands of glass, gold filigree, and pearls. There were more than a hundred pieces in all. The circus had been specially commissioned by the Tsar from the workshops of Karl Fabergé; it was rumored to be worth the lifetime salaries of more than a dozen Russian factory workers.

The fragile figures—elephants, tigers, clowns, fire-eaters, and tight-rope walkers—were balanced precariously on the edge of every flat surface in the room. Pekkala felt as if all he had to do was sigh and everything would come crashing to the floor.

The Tsarina lay on an overstuffed daybed, her legs covered by a blanket, wearing the gray and white uniform of a nurse of the Russian Red Cross. Ever since casualties had first started pouring back from the front in the late summer of 1914, the Great Hall of the Catherine Palace had been turned into a hospital ward and the Tsarina and her daughters had taken on the role of nurses to the wounded.

Soldiers who had grown up in thatch-roofed, dirt-floored Izba huts now woke each day in a room with golden pillars, walked across a polished marble floor, and rested in linen-sheeted beds. In spite of the level of comfort, the soldiers Pekkala had seen there did not look comfortable at all. Most would have preferred the more familiar surroundings of an army hospital instead of being showcased like the glass circus animals, as the Tsarina’s contribution to the war.

There were times when, in spite of her hostility towards him, Pekkala felt sorry for the Tsarina, particularly since war had broken out. No matter how hard she worked, her German background had made it almost impossible to make any gesture of loyalty to Russia without the gesture backfiring upon her. In trying to ease the suffering of others, she had succeeded only in prolonging it for herself.

But Pekkala had come to realize that this might not have been entirely by accident. The Tsarina was drawn towards suffering. An odd nervous energy surrounded her whenever the topic turned to misfortune. Attending to the wounded had given new purpose to her life.

Now, with Pekkala standing before her, the Tsarina gestured towards a fragile-looking wicker chair. “Sit,” she told Pekkala.

Hesitantly, Pekkala settled onto the chair, afraid that its legs would collapse under his weight.

“Pekkala,” said the Tsarina, “I believe we have gotten off to a bad start, you and I, but it is simply a matter of trust. I would like to trust you, Pekkala.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

“With that in mind,” she said, her clasped hands pressing into her lap as if she had a cramp in her stomach, “I would like for us to work together on a matter of great importance. I require you to conduct an investigation.”

“Of course,” answered Pekkala. “What do you need me to investigate?”

She paused for a moment. “The Tsar.”

Pekkala breathed in sharply. “I beg your pardon, Majesty?” The wicker seat creaked beneath him.

“I need you,” she continued, “to look into whether my husband is keeping a mistress.”

“A mistress,” repeated Pekkala.

“Yes.” She watched him closely, her lips tight in an awkward smile. “You know what that is, don’t you?”

“I do know, Majesty.” He also knew that the Tsar did, in fact, have a mistress. Or, at least, there was a woman who had been his mistress. Her name was Mathilde Kschessinska and she was the lead dancer of the Imperial Russian Ballet. The Tsar had known her for years, since before his marriage to the Tsarina, and had even bought her a mansion in Petrograd. Officially, he had broken off ties with her. Unofficially, Pekkala knew, the Tsar kept in contact with this woman. Although the full extent of their relationship was unknown to him, he knew for certain that the Tsar continued to visit her, even using a secret door located at the back of the Petrograd mansion so that he could enter undetected.

Pekkala had always assumed that the Tsarina knew everything about this other woman. The reason for this was that he did not believe the Tsar to be capable of keeping any secret from his wife. He lacked the necessary guile, and the Tsarina was far too suspicious to allow an affair to continue undetected.

“I regret,” said Pekkala, rising to his feet, “that I cannot investigate the Tsar.”

The Tsarina appeared to have been waiting for this moment. “You can investigate the Tsar,” she told him, as her eyes lit up. “The Tsar himself gave you the right to investigate anyone you choose. That is by Imperial Decree. And what is more, I have the right to order this investigation.”

“I understand, Majesty, that technically I am permitted—”

“Not permitted, Pekkala. Obliged.”

“I understand—” he continued.

She cut him off again. “Then it is settled.”

“Majesty,” pleaded Pekkala, “what you ask, I must not do.”

“Then you refuse?” she asked.

Pekkala felt a trap closing around him. To refuse an order from the Tsarina would amount to treason, the penalty for which was death. The Tsar was at army headquarters in Mogilev, halfway across the country. If the Tsarina wished it, Pekkala could be executed before the Tsar even found out what was wrong.

“You refuse?” she asked again.

“No, Majesty.” The words fell like stones from his mouth.

“Good. I am glad we are finally able to see”—the Tsarina held out her hand towards the door—“eye to emerald eye.”

THE KNOCKING CAME AGAIN, BUT THERE WAS SOMETHING UNUSUAL about it. The knuckles were striking far too low against the door.

At first Pekkala could make no sense of it, but then he smiled. He stepped over to the door and opened it just as the child on the other side was about to knock again. “Good evening, Talia.”

“Good evening, Comrade Pekkala.”

Before Pekkala stood a girl about seven years old, with plump cheeks and a dimple in her chin, wearing a khaki shirt and dress and the red scarf of a Young Pioneer around her neck. In a fashion popular among girls in the Communist Youth Movement, her short hair had been cut in a straight line across her forehead. Smiling, she gave him the Pioneer salute: the knife edge of her outstretched hand held at an angle in front of her face, as if to fend off an attack.

Conscious of how much he towered over the girl, Pekkala got down on one knee so they were looking each other in the face. “And what has brought you here this evening?”

“Babayaga says you are lonely.”

“And how does she know that?”

The child shrugged. “She just does.”

Pekkala glanced back at his dinner—the lumps of bread and the bowl of watery cheese. He sighed. “Well, Talia, it just so happens that I could use a little company right now.”

Talia stepped back into the hall and held out her hand for him to take. “Come along, then,” she said.

“One moment,” Pekkala said. He pulled on his coat which, although it had been cleaned, still looked the worse for wear after his journey across the proving ground.

Joining the girl out in the corridor, Pekkala caught the smell of evening meals—the fug of boiled potatoes, fried sausages, and cabbage.

They held hands as they walked down the pale green hallway with its ratty carpet to the apartment where Talia lived with her grandmother.

Until six months ago, Talia had lived with her parents in a large apartment in what had once been called the Sparrow Hills district of the city but had since been renamed Lenin Hills.

Then, one night, NKVD men arrived at their door, searched the house and arrested her parents. Until the time of their arrest, both had been model Communists, but now they were classed as Type 58. This fell under the general heading of “Threat to National Security” and earned them each a sentence of fifteen years at the Solovetsky Labor Camp.

The only reason Talia and her grandmother even knew this much was because Pekkala, having been their neighbor for several years, agreed to make inquiries on their behalf. As for the precise nature of the parents’ crime, even the NKVD records office could not tell him. Stalin had confided in Pekkala that even if only two percent of the arrests turned out to be warranted, he would still say it had been worth arresting all the others. So many people had been brought in this past year—over a million, according to the records office—that it was not possible to keep track of them all. What Pekkala knew, and what he could not bring himself to tell the grandmother, was that more than half of those people arrested were shot before they ever boarded the trains bound for Siberia.

Their family had once been farmers in the fertile Black Earth region of the Altai Mountains. In 1930, the Communist Party had ordered the farm to be merged with others in their village. It was called “collectivization.” The running of this collectivized farm, or kolkhoz, had then been given over to a party official who, with no farming experience of his own, ran the collective into the ground in less than two years. The collective broke up and Talia’s family had drifted, as had many others, to the city.

They began working for the Mos-Prov plant, which supplied most of the electricity to Moscow. The husband-and-wife team immediately joined the Communist Party and rose quickly through its ranks. Before their arrest, they had been rewarded with special rations like extra sugar, tea, and cigarettes, tickets to the Bolshoi Theater and trips to the Astafievo resort outside the city.

According to Babayaga, the father had often spoken about the merits of perekovka: the remolding of the human soul through forced labor in the Gulag system. Pekkala wondered what he thought now that he was in one. Like many good Communists, the man probably believed that he and his wife were simply victims of some bureaucratic error which would soon be corrected, at which time they could return to their old lives; any suffering he endured now would be rewarded on some distant day of reckoning, when errors were set straight.

Although the parents might have been innocent of any charges brought against them, it did not mean that they had been arrested by mistake. They might have been denounced by someone who wanted their apartment or who envied their marriage or whose seat they had taken on the bus which brought them to work. The accusations were seldom investigated and even the most preposterous stories served as justification for arrest. One man had been arrested for blowing smoke rings which, in the eyes of his accuser, seemed to bear a resemblance to the outline of Stalin’s face.

Pekkala suspected that the reason for their imprisonment had nothing to do with them at all. It was probably only the result of quotas imposed upon the NKVD, ordering them to arrest so many people in each district per month.

It was after the parents went away that Talia came to live with her grandmother. The girl’s real name was Elizaveta, although she never used it and had chosen for herself instead the name of a witch from an old Russian fairy tale. The witch lived in the forest, in a house which turned round in circles at the top of two giant chicken legs. In the fairy tale, the witch was cruel to children, but Pekkala knew the little girl was lucky to have a woman as kind as Babayaga looking after her. Talia seemed to know it, too, and her name became a joke they shared between them.

The first thing Pekkala noticed when he walked into their apartment was what Babayaga called a Patriotic Corner. Here, portraits of Stalin, as well as pictures of Lenin and Marx, were on display. Other pictures, of men like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and Pyatakov, had been removed after the men in question were accused of counter-revolutionary activity and liquidated.

The Stalin corner was always on display, but in a closet by the bathroom the grandmother kept small wooden paintings of saints. Each icon had little wooden doors which could be opened so that the icons could stand on their own. The wooden doors were inlaid with pieces of mother-of-pearl and curls of silver wire which looked like musical notes in the black wood.

Following their arrests, Talia’s parents had been dismissed from the Communist Party and her membership in the Young Pioneers revoked. In spite of this, she continued to wear her uniform, although only inside the building where she lived.

“Here he is, Babayaga,” announced the little girl, swinging the door to their apartment wide.

Babayaga sat at a bare wood table. In one hand, the old woman held an outdated copy of Rabotnitsa, the women’s journal of the Communist Party. In her other hand, she clasped a pair of nail scissors. Her eyes squinting with concentration, she cut out pieces of the paper. In front of her, strewn across the table, were dozens of tiny clippings. “Now then, Pekkala,” she said.

“What are you cutting?”

Babayaga nodded at the clippings. “See for yourself.”

Pekkala glanced at the neat rectangles. On each, he saw the word Stalin, sometimes in large print, others in letters almost too small to read. Nothing else had been cut out—only that one word. “Are you making a collage?” he asked.

“She’s making toilet paper!” trilled Talia.

The woman put down her scissors. Neatly, she folded the newspaper. Then, with crooked fingers, she gathered up the clippings. Rising from the table, she went over to a wooden trunk in the corner. It was the kind of trunk which might have stored blankets in the summer months, but when Babayaga opened the lid, Pekkala realized that it was entirely filled with paper clippings of Stalin’s name.

“I heard a story,” said Babayaga, as she tossed the clippings in, letting them fall like confetti from her fingertips. “A man was arrested when the police came to search his house and found a newspaper in the toilet. Stalin’s name was in the paper, of course. It is on every page of every paper every day. But because Stalin’s name was on the paper, and because”—she twisted her hand in the air—“of the purpose of the paper, they arrested him. Sent him to Kolyma for ten years.” She smiled at Pekkala, folds of skin crimping her cheeks. “They won’t get ahold of me that way! But just in case”—she pointed to a laminated cardboard suitcase by the door—“I always keep a bag packed. If they do find a reason, at least I’ll be ready to go.”

What saddened Pekkala about this was not that Babayaga kept the suitcase ready but that she believed she would live long enough in custody to make use of whatever it contained.

“I understand,” he said, “why you might want to cut Stalin’s name from the paper, but why are you saving all the clippings?”

“If I throw them away, I could get arrested for that, too,” she replied.

Talia sat between them, doing her best to follow the conversation. She looked from Babayaga to Pekkala and then back to Babayaga again.

Once or twice a week, the old woman sent for Pekkala, knowing that he lived alone.

Babayaga was lonely, too, but less for human contact than for the days before the Revolution, when the world had made more sense to her. Now she lived like an overlapping image seen through a pair of broken binoculars—half in the present, half in the past, unable to bring either into focus.

“Off you go now.” Babayaga rested her hand on her granddaughter’s forehead. “Time for bed.”

When the little girl had gone, Pekkala sat back in his chair. “I have a present for you, Babayaga.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out two small votive candles and set them down in front of her. He had bought the candles at the Yeliseyev store on his way home that day, knowing that she liked to burn them when she prayed beside her icons.

Babayaga picked one up, smelled it, and closed her eyes. “Beeswax,” she said. “You have brought me the good ones. And now I have a present for you.” She went into the kitchen, which was separated from the living room only by a curtain of wooden beads, and reappeared a moment later with a battered brass samovar. Steam puffed from the top as if from the smokestack of a miniature train. She returned to the kitchen to fetch one glass in an ornate brass holder and a small, chipped mug, which Pekkala recognized from its pattern of interwoven birds and flowers to have been made by the old firm of Gardner’s. The firm had been founded in Russia by an Englishman, and Pekkala had not seen or heard anything of it since the Bolsheviks took over. The mug was quite likely, he imagined, Babayaga’s most treasured possession. She set before him a dish of rock sugar and another dish in which lay the twisted black grains of smoked tea. Laying out the tea was done as a gesture of politeness, allowing the guest to strengthen the tea if he thought it was not brewed correctly. But, out of politeness, Pekkala did not touch it. He merely bent down and breathed in the slightly tarlike scent of pine-smoked tea, which he doubted Babayaga could afford.

She poured him a cup, taking the strong-brewed tea from the pot at the top of the samovar and diluting it with the water stored in the lower section. Then she handed it to him. “That glass belonged to my husband,” she said.

She told him that every time, and every time Pekkala took the glass from her with the reverence it deserved.

Babayaga produced a lemon from the pocket of her apron, and a small silver knife, with which she carved a slice and held it out to him, her thumb pressing the sliver to the blade. And when he had taken it, she held the blade in the steam coming out of the samovar, so that the silver would not tarnish from the lemon juice.

“The Tsar was very fond of pine-smoked tea,” said Pekkala, squeezing the lemon into his drink.

“Do you know what people say, Inspector? Those of us who can still remember the way things used to be? They say the spirit of the Tsar sees through that emerald eye of yours.”

Pekkala reached up to his collar. Slowly, he folded it back. The eye came into view like that of a sleeper awakening. “Then he must be looking at you now.”

“I should have worn a nicer dress.” She smiled and her face turned red. “I miss him. I miss what he meant to our people.” Then her smile suddenly vanished. “But not her! Not the Nemka! She has much to answer for.”

Pekkala traveled to the mansion of Mathilde Kschessinska. He did not present himself at the front door, which might have drawn attention. Instead, he went around to the quiet street at the back of the mansion and let himself in through the gate which the Tsar himself used when he came to visit Madame Kschessinska.

The private door, just beyond the gate, was overgrown with ivy, making it difficult to spot. Even the brass doorbell had been overpainted green to camouflage it.

Pekkala glanced back to the street, to see if anyone had seen him come in, but the street was empty. A rain shower had passed through about an hour before. Now a pale blue sky stretched overhead. He pressed the doorbell and waited.

It was only a few seconds before Madame Kschessinska appeared. She was short and very slight, with a softly rounded face and bright, inquisitive eyes. Her hair was wrapped in a towel in the manner of a turban and she wore a man’s silk brocade smoking jacket, which probably belonged to the Tsar. “I heard the gate creak,” she began, but then she breathed in sharply, realizing it was not the Tsar. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“Madame Kschessinska,” he said, “I am Inspector Pekkala, the Tsar’s personal investigator.” He reached up to his lapel and turned it over, revealing the badge of his service.

“The Emerald Eye. Nicky has often spoken about you.” Suddenly she looked afraid. “Oh, no. Has something happened? Is he all right?”

“He is perfectly well.”

“Then what brings you here, Inspector?”

“May I come in?”

She hesitated for a moment, then swung the door wide and stood back.

Pekkala followed her into a well-lit house, on whose walls hung numerous framed programs and posters from the Imperial Ballet. In the front hall, peacock feathers sprouted from a brass umbrella holder like a strange bouquet of flowers. Tucked in among the feathers, Pekkala noticed one of the Tsar’s walking sticks, throated with a band of gold engraved with the Imperial crest.

They sat in her kitchen, which looked out onto a small garden where a willow tree draped its leaves over a wooden bench.

She served him coffee and toast with apricot jam.

“Madame Kschessinska,” Pekkala began, but then words failed him and he gave her a desperate look.

“Inspector,” she said, reaching across the table and touching the tips of her fingers to the gnarled bumps of his knuckles, “whatever this is, I am not in the habit of killing messengers who bring bad news.”

“I am glad to hear you say it,” replied Pekkala. Then he explained why he had come. When he got to the end of his story, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped drops of sweat off his forehead. “I am so sorry,” he said. “I would never have troubled you with this if I could have found a way to refuse.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kschessinska. “She knows about me. She has known about me for years.”

“Yes, I believe she does. It is also a mystery to me.”

For a moment, Kschessinska seemed lost in thought. Then she brushed her hand across her mouth as an idea occurred to her. “How well do you get along with the Tsarina?”

“Not well at all.”

“Then I think, Inspector Pekkala, that this investigation really has nothing to do with me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It is about you, Inspector Pekkala.” She got up and walked to the open window. Outside, in the garden, a breeze rustled the willow branches. “What do you think the Tsar will do when he finds out you have been investigating him, especially on a matter such as this?”

“He will be furious,” answered Pekkala, “but the Tsarina has ordered the investigation. I cannot refuse the order, so the Tsar can hardly blame me for coming here to speak with you.”

She turned and looked at him. “But he will blame you, Pekkala, for the simple reason that he cannot blame his wife. He will forgive her anything, no matter what she does, but what about you, Pekkala?”

“Now I am worried for both of us.”

“You shouldn’t be,” she replied. “I will not be hurt by this. If the Tsarina had wanted me out of the way, she would have seen to that a long time ago. It is you she is after, I’m afraid.”

Her words settled on him like a layer of dust. Everything she said was true.

During the course of their conversation, it became clear to Pekkala that Madame Kschessinska was, in almost every way, the polar opposite of the Tsarina. For the Tsar to have fallen in love with a woman like Kschessinska seemed not only plausible but inevitable.

“Thank you, Madame Kschessinska,” he said as she walked him to the door.

“You must not worry, Inspector,” she replied. “The Tsarina may try to feed you to the wolves, but from what I know about you, you may be the one who ends up eating the wolf.”

One week later, Pekkala presented himself once again at the Tsarina’s study door.

He found the Tsarina exactly as he had left her, lying on the daybed. It was almost as if she had not moved since they’d last parted company. She was knitting a sweater, the needles clicking rhythmically.

“I have concluded my investigation,” he told her.

“Yes?” The Tsarina kept her eyes on her knitting. “And what have you discovered, Inspector?”

“Nothing, Majesty.”

The click of the knitting needles came abruptly to a stop. “What?”

“I have discovered no irregularities.”

“I see.” She pressed her lips together, draining the blood from the flesh.

“In my opinion, Majesty,” he continued, “everything is as it should be.”

Her eyes filled with hate as she absorbed the meaning of his words. “You listen to me, Pekkala,” she said through clenched teeth. “Before he died, my friend Grigori made clear that there is a time of judgment coming. All secrets will be laid bare and for those who have not followed a path of righteousness, there will be no one to whom they can turn. And I wonder what will happen to you on that day.”

Pekkala thought about Rasputin after the police had pulled him from the river. He wondered what the Tsarina would have said about the day of judgment if she could have seen her friend that day, lying on the quayside with a bullet in his head.

The Tsarina turned away. With a swipe of her hand, she dismissed him.

After that, Pekkala sometimes came across Madame Kschessinska, buying food in the Gostiny Dvor market or shopping on the Passazh. They never spoke again, but they always remembered to smile.

AS OFTEN HAPPENED, BY THE TIME PEKKALA HAD FINISHED HIS TEA, Babayaga had already fallen asleep, chin resting on her chest and breathing heavily.

He left the room, closing the door quietly behind him. In the hallway, he took off his shoes and carried them, so as not to wake the others on his floor.

The next morning, when Pekkala walked into his office, Kirov was already there.

So was Major Lysenkova.

Kirov stood beside her, holding out his kumquat plant in its rust-colored earthenware pot. “You should try one!” he urged.

“No, really,” replied Lysenkova, “I would rather not.”

Neither of them had seen Pekkala come in.

“You may never see another,” persisted Kirov. Sunlight through the dusty window glinted off the waxy green leaves.

“I wouldn’t mind that at all,” Lysenkova answered.

Pekkala shut the door more loudly than usual.

Kirov jumped. “Inspector! There you are!” He hugged the plant to his chest as if trying to take cover behind it.

“What can we do for you, Major Lysenkova?” asked Pekkala, taking off his coat and hanging it on the peg beside the door.

“I came here to ask for your help,” said Lysenkova. “As you might have heard, the Nagorski case has been reopened, and I am no longer in charge.”

“I did hear that,” said Pekkala.

“In fact, I have been told that you and Major Kirov will be running the investigation from now on.”

“We are?” asked Kirov, as he replaced the plant on the windowsill.

“I was just about to tell you,” explained Pekkala.

“The truth is,” said Lysenkova, “I never wanted it in the first place.”

“Why is that?” asked Pekkala. “You seemed pretty certain before.”

“I was certain about a number of things,” replied Lysenkova, “and it turned out I was wrong about all of them. That’s why I need your help now.”

Pekkala nodded, slightly confused.

“I need to keep working this case,” she said.

Pekkala sat down in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “But you just said you didn’t want to be working it in the first place.”

Lysenkova swallowed. “I can explain,” she said.

Pekkala held open his hand. “Please do,” he said.

“Until yesterday,” she began, “I’d never even heard of Project Konstantin. Then, when Captain Samarin called, informing me that Colonel Nagorski had been killed, I told him he must have dialed the wrong number.”

“Why did you think that?”

“I am, as you know, an internal investigator. My task is to pursue crimes committed inside the NKVD. I was explaining that to Samarin when he told me he believed someone in the NKVD might actually be responsible for Nagorski’s death.”

Pekkala’s focus sharpened. “Did he say why?”

“The location of the facility is a state secret,” continued Lysenkova. “According to Samarin, the only people who had access to that information and who might have been able to infiltrate the facility were NKVD. We didn’t have time to discuss it any further. He told me to get out there as quickly as I could. At that point, I realized I didn’t have any choice, even though this was nothing like the cases I normally handle. I deal in cases of corruption, extortion, bribery, blackmail. Not murders, Inspector Pekkala. Not bodies that have been ground up by tank tracks! That’s why I didn’t spot the bullet fragment you pulled out of his skull.”

“I don’t understand, Major. You say you never wanted the case, and it sounds to me as if you got your wish, but now you want to keep working on it?”

“I don’t want to, Inspector. I have to. It’s only a matter of time before I’m accused of counterrevolutionary activity for coming to the wrong conclusion about Nagorski’s death. The only chance I’ve got is to remain on the case until it is solved, and the only person who can make that happen is you.”

Pekkala was silent for a while. “I understand,” he said finally, “but I will have to speak with Major Kirov here before making any decision.”

“I realize we did not get off to a good start, but I could be useful to you.” Her voice had taken on a tone of pleading. “I know how the NKVD works, inside and out. Once you start investigating them, they will close ranks and you’ll never get a word out of them. But I can and I will, if you’ll let me.”

“Very well.” Pekkala took his feet off the desk and stood up. “We will let you know our decision as soon as we can. Before you go, Major, I do have one question to ask you.”

“Of course, Inspector. Anything.”

“What do you know about the White Guild?” asked Pekkala, as he walked her out into the hall.

“Not a great deal, I’m afraid. It’s some kind of top secret department in the Bureau of Special Operations.”

“Have you heard them mentioned recently?”

“Special Operations is a tribe of phantoms, Inspector. You ought to know that, since you’re one of them. Where I come from, nobody even speaks their name.”

Pekkala sighed. “Thank you, Major.”

“Oh, I almost forgot—” From her pocket, Lysenkova removed a stained and tattered piece of paper. “Consider this a peace offering.”

Pekkala squinted at the document. At first glance, what he saw looked to him like Arabic writing on the page. Then he realized it was actually scientific equations, dozens of them, completely covering the paper. “Where did this come from?”

“I found it in Nagorski’s pocket.”

“Do you have any idea what it means?”

“None,” she told him.

“Does anyone else know about this?”

She shook her head.

He folded up the page. “I appreciate this, Major.”

“Then I will hear from you?”

“Yes.”

She paused, as if there might be something else to say, but then she turned away and walked back down the stairs.

Kirov came and stood beside Pekkala. They listened to her footsteps fading away.

“I never thought I would feel sorry for that woman,” Kirov said.

“But you do.”

“A little.”

“From the way you were talking to her, I’d say you felt more than a little sorry.”

Back inside the office, Pekkala busied himself straightening piles of papers which had slid in miniature avalanches across the surface of his desk.

“What’s bothering you, Inspector?” Kirov wanted to know. “You never tidy up your desk unless something is bothering you.”

“I am not certain about taking her on,” replied Pekkala.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” replied Kirov. “If Captain Samarin was right that the NKVD were involved, we’ll never get to the bottom of this without her working on the case.”

“Your willingness to work with Major Lysenkova wouldn’t have anything to do with …”

“With those eyes?” asked Kirov. “Those …”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Inspector.”

“No,” muttered Pekkala. “Of course you don’t.”

“Besides,” continued Kirov, “if we don’t give Major Lysenkova a chance to set things straight with Comrade Stalin, you know what will happen to her.”

Pekkala did know, because the same thing had happened to him during the Revolution, when he was arrested by Bolshevik Guards on his way out of the country. He thought back to the months he had spent in solitary confinement, the endless interrogations during which his sanity had worn so thin he no longer knew what remained of it. And then came the winter’s night when he was delivered, still wearing his flimsy beige prison pajamas, to a railroad siding on the outskirts of Moscow. There, he boarded a train bound for Siberia.

The thing he would always remember was the way people died standing up.

As convict transport ETAP-61 made its way east towards the Borodok Labor Camp, Pekkala abandoned hope of ever seeing home again. The train was over fifty cars long. Each one contained eighty men, crammed into a space designed to hold forty.

It was too crowded for anyone to sit. Prisoners took turns in the middle, where there was body heat to share. The rest stood at the edges. Dressed only in dirty beige pajamas, a few of them froze every night. There was no room for them to fall, so the corpses remained on their feet while their lips turned blue and spiderwebs of ice glazed their eyes. By morning, they were cloaked in white crystals.

With his face pressed to a tiny opening crisscrossed with barbed wire, Pekkala looked out at the cities of Sverdlovsk, Petropavlovsk, and Omsk. Until he saw their names spelled out on blue and white enamel signs above the station platforms, those places had never seemed real. They had existed as locations destined to remain always beyond the horizon, reachable only in dreams. Like Zanzibar or Timbuktu.

The train passed through these cities after dark, in order to hide its contents from the people living there. At Novosibirsk, Pekkala spotted two men illuminated by a glow cast through the open doorway of a tavern. He thought he heard them singing. Snow fell around the men like a cascade of diamonds. Beyond, silhouetted against the blue-black sky, rose the onion-shaped domes of Orthodox churches. Afterwards, as the train pressed on into darkness so complete it was as if they’d left the earth and were now hurtling through space, the singing of those two men haunted him.

Hour after hour, the wheels clanked lazily along the tracks, their sound like a monstrous sharpening of knives.

Only in open country did the engines ever come to a halt. Then the guards jumped down and beat against the outsides of the wagons with their rifle butts, in order to dislodge those who had become frozen to the inner walls. Usually the corpses had to be prized free, leaving behind the imprints of their faces, complete with eyelashes and shreds of beard, in the boxcar’s icy plating.

Beside the tracks lay skeletons from previous convict transports. Rib cages jutted from rags of clothing and silver teeth glinted in their skulls.

PEKKALA SMOOTHED A HAND ACROSS HIS FACE, FINGERTIPS RUSTLING over the razor stubble on his chin. Knowing the fate that lay in store for Major Lysenkova, he realized he could not simply stand by and do nothing to help. “All right,” he sighed.

“Good!” Kirov clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together. “Shall I call her back?”

Pekkala nodded. “But before you go, tell me what you found out about Nagorski’s bodyguard, Maximov.”

“Nothing, Inspector.”

“You mean you didn’t look?”

“Oh, I looked,” replied Kirov. “I searched the police files. I even checked Gendarmerie and Okhrana files from before the Revolution, those that still exist. There’s nothing. As far as I can tell, the first record of Maximov’s existence is the day he was hired by Nagorski. Do you want me to bring him in for questioning?”

“No,” replied Pekkala. “He may be hiding something, but I doubt it has anything to do with our case. I was just curious.”

“Inspector,” said Kirov, “if you want me to catch up with Major Lysenkova …”

Pekkala breathed in sharply. “Yes. Go. When you find her, make sure you let her know that, from this point on, our primary suspect must be that man who escaped through the woods. We’ve already ruled out the regular staff at the facility, and since Samarin believed the NKVD were involved somehow, it seems likely that the man who escaped was working for them. Anything Lysenkova can find out will be useful, but tell her she is not to pursue or arrest any suspects without informing us first.”

“You don’t have to worry about her cooperating, Inspector. After all, you just saved her life.”

While Kirov struggled into his coat, Pekkala took another look at the piece of paper Lysenkova had given him. The writing was blurred, no doubt soaked while Nagorski lay beneath the tank. It was still legible, but only to someone who could decipher the impossible tangle of equations, and Pekkala was not one of those.

Knowing that Kirov might not be back anytime soon, Pekkala went across the road to the Cafe Tilsit, where he always ate lunch when he was in town.

The Cafe Tilsit never closed.

There wasn’t even a lock on the front door.

By night it was the haunt of those who, during the hours of darkness, managed the great engine of the city. There were watchmen and museum guards, soldiers passing through on leave and policemen coming off their shifts. Those were the ones who had jobs. But there were also those who had no place to live, or who were afraid to go home, for reasons known only to themselves. There were the brokenhearted and those who stood upon the precipice of madness and those whose sanity had folded up like paper airplanes.

By day, the clientele was mostly taxi drivers, truckers, and construction workers, ghostly pale under their layers of concrete dust.

Pekkala liked the bustle of the place, the condensation-misted windows and the long, bare wood tables where strangers sat elbow to elbow. It was the strange communion of being alone and not being alone which suited him.

There was no choice of meal and the food was always simple, served up by a man named Bruno, who wrote the menu each day on a double-sided chalkboard which he propped on the sidewalk outside the cafe. Inside, Bruno shuffled from table to table in worn-out felt valenki boots.

Today Bruno had made breaded cutlets, chickpeas, and boiled carrots, served in wooden bowls, his only tableware.

Pekkala ate his meal and read through the headlines of Pravda.

The off-duty taxi driver sitting next to him was trying to read Pekkala’s paper, straining to see it from the corner of his eye. To make it easier for the taxi driver, Pekkala lowered the paper to the table. As he did this, he realized that the man opposite was staring at him.

The stranger had a heavy jaw, a broad, unwrinkled forehead, and once-blond hair which was beginning to turn gray. An odd silveriness glinted in his brown eyes, as in the eyes of a man going blind. He wore the typical clothing of a worker in this city—a short-brimmed wool cap and a double-breasted coat whose sleeves were paneled with leather to make the garment more durable.

To catch a person’s eye in a place like this meant that you either smiled and said hello or looked away, but this man just kept on staring.

“Do I know you?” asked Pekkala.

“You do.” Now the man smiled. “From a long time ago.”

“I know many people from a long time ago,” Pekkala replied, “and most of them are dead.”

“Then I am happy to be the exception,” said the man. “My name is Alexander Kropotkin.”

Pekkala sat back, almost tipping off the bench. “Kropotkin!”

The last time they had seen each other was far from here, in the city of Ekaterinburg, where Kropotkin was chief of police. Pekkala had traveled there to investigate the discovery of bodies believed to be those of the Tsar and his family. Kropotkin had worked closely with Pekkala during the course of the investigation, which had nearly cost both of them their lives. Kropotkin had been in charge of the Ekaterinburg police department before the Revolution, and when Pekkala first met him, after the Communists had seized power, he was still managing to hold on to his job. Pekkala had wondered how long that would last, since Kropotkin, an honest but short-tempered man, had little patience for the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy and the people who enforced it.

Kropotkin reached across to shake Pekkala’s hand.

“What brings you to Moscow?” asked Pekkala.

“Well, as you can see”—he gave an awkward laugh—“I am no longer a chief of police.”

The taxi driver was still trying to read Pekkala’s paper.

Pekkala could feel the man’s breath on his cheek. He picked up the paper and handed it to the taxi driver.

The driver grunted thanks, took the paper, and resumed slurping his soup.

Pekkala turned back to Kropotkin. “What happened? Were you reassigned? Did you quit?”

“Dismissed,” answered Kropotkin, “for striking the district commissar.”

“Ah,” Pekkala nodded slowly, not entirely surprised that Kropotkin would do such a thing. He seemed the type to dispense justice with a truncheon rather than with a court case.

“I’m better off now,” said Kropotkin. “No more petty officials to deal with! I came here and trained as a heavy machinery operator at the Moscow Technical Institute. I can operate pretty much anything now. Heavy transport vehicles. Tractors. Bulldozers. Cranes.”

“And which one did you choose?” asked Pekkala, intrigued.

“I drive a Hanomag from one end of this country to the other.”

Pekkala had heard about the Hanomags. These German-made trucks were capable of moving vast amounts of cargo. In the past few years, with huge road-building projects under way, trucking routes had opened up all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the Polish border to Siberia.

“Most of the highways in this country are still made out of dirt. As long as there’s a road, I’ll drive on it. When I’m in town this is where I come,” Kropotkin said, glancing warily into his bowl, “no matter what Bruno serves up.”

“This was one of the Tsarina’s favorite meals,” said Pekkala.

“This!” Kropotkin held up his fork, on which he had speared a chunk of meat whose origin appeared suspicious. “Well, I find that hard to believe.”

“She once ate chicken cutlets twice a day for a month,” said Pekkala.

Kropotkin stared at him for a moment. Then he laughed. “With all the beluga in the world to choose from, you are telling me she ate chicken cutlets all day long?”

Pekkala nodded.

Kropotkin shook his head. “No, Pekkala. That cannot be true.”

Like many others, Kropotkin had created for himself an image of the Romanovs which existed only in his head.

Pekkala wondered what Kropotkin would have thought of the drearily furnished rooms in the Alexander Palace, where the Romanovs lived at Tsarskoye Selo. Or of the Tsar’s three daughters, dressed as they always were in identical clothes—one day in striped sailor’s shirts, another day in blue and white polka-dot dresses—or of the Tsarevich Alexei, who once ordered a company of soldiers to march into the sea? Which would have offended him more: the behavior of the little prince or that of the soldiers, who strode into the waves with the obedience of clockwork toys?

For the new generation of Russians, Nicholas Romanov had been transformed into a ghoul. But for men like Kropotkin, whose loyalties belonged to a time before the Revolution, the Tsar and his family were the subjects of a fairy tale. The truth, if there even was such a thing anymore, lay somewhere in between.

“The last time we spoke,” said Kropotkin with a smile, “you said you were leaving the country.”

“Yes,” said Pekkala, “that had been my intention.”

“There was a woman, wasn’t there?” asked Kropotkin.

Pekkala nodded. “She is in Paris. I am in Moscow. Many years have passed.”

Kropotkin pushed away his half-finished bowl of food. “It’s stuffy in here. Will you walk outside with me?”

Pekkala, too, had lost his appetite.

As they stood up from the table, the taxi driver reached across, hooked one dirty thumb over the lip of Kropotkin’s bowl and dragged it back towards him.

The two men stepped out into the street. A fine rain was falling. They turned up the collars of their coats.

“Still working for them?” asked Kropotkin.

“Them?”

He jerked his chin towards the domes of the Kremlin, visible above the rooftops in the distance. “Special Operations.”

“I do the same work as I have always done,” replied Pekkala.

“No regrets?” asked Kropotkin, walking with his hands shoved in his pockets.

“About what?”

“About staying here in this country. About not leaving when you could.”

“This is where I belong,” replied Pekkala.

“Let me ask you, Pekkala. Do you stay because you want to? Or because you have to?”

“Well, if you are asking me whether I could simply depart on the next train out of Russia, I admit that might prove complicated.”

Kropotkin laughed. “Listen to you! Listen to the language you are using. You couldn’t get out of here even if you wanted to.” Now he stopped and turned to face Pekkala. “You and I are the last of the old guard. This world will never see the likes of us again. We owe it to ourselves to stick together.”

“What are you trying to say, Kropotkin?”

“What if I told you I could help you escape?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do, Pekkala. You understand exactly what I’m saying. I drive my truck all over Russia. I know the highways of this country like the creases in my palm. I know roads that aren’t even on the map, roads that wind back and forth across borders because they are centuries older than the borders themselves. I know where there are checkpoints and where there aren’t.” Removing one hand from the pocket of his coat, he clasped Pekkala by the arm. “I can get you out of here, old friend. The time must come when you will have to choose between the actions that your job requires and what your conscience will allow.”

“So far,” said Pekkala, “I have been able to live with myself.”

“But when you do come up against that wall, remember your old friend Kropotkin. With my help, you can start your life over and never look back.”

In that moment, Pekkala did not feel Kropotkin’s grip upon his arm. Instead, it seemed to him as if a hand were clasped around his throat. He had resigned himself to staying here. At least, he’d thought he had. But now, with Kropotkin’s words ringing in his ears, Pekkala realized that the notion of escape was still alive in him. He knew that Kropotkin’s offer was genuine, and that the man could do what he promised. All Pekkala had to do was say the words.

“Are you all right, brother?” Kropotkin asked. “Your hands are shaking.”

“What would I do?” asked Pekkala, as much to himself as to Kropotkin. “I can’t just start all over.”

Kropotkin smiled. “Of course you could! People do it all the time. And as for what you would do, there isn’t a police force in the world that would turn down the chance to have you work for them. If you ask me, Pekkala, the people who are running this country don’t deserve the loyalty of a man like you.”

“The people I investigate would be criminals no matter who was in charge of this country.”

Kropotkin stopped. He turned and faced Pekkala, eyes narrowed against the spitting rain. “But what if the people who are running the country are the greatest criminals of all?”

Pekkala heard the aggression in Kropotkin’s voice. From anyone else, it might have come as a surprise. But Kropotkin was in the habit of speaking his mind, with little thought to how his opinions were received, and Pekkala felt glad that there was no one else around. Words like that, in a place like this, could get a man in trouble.

“Ask yourself, Pekkala, how can a man do good when he is surrounded by those who do not?”

“That,” replied Pekkala, “is when good men are needed the most.”

A look of sadness passed across Kropotkin’s face. “So your mind is made up?”

“I am grateful for your offer, Kropotkin, but my answer will have to be no.”

“If you change your mind,” said Kropotkin, “look for me at the cafe where we ate our lunch.”

“I will,” said Pekkala. “And thank you.”

Kropotkin hooked his thumb under the watch chain attached to his waistcoat button. He lifted the watch from his pocket, glanced at it, and let it slip back into the pocket. “Time to hit the road,” he said.

“I hope we will meet again soon.”

“We will. And in the meantime, Inspector, God protect us both.”

At those words, Pekkala tumbled into the past, like a man falling backwards off a cliff.

“God protect us!” wept the Tsarina. “God protect us. God protect us.”

Early one morning in January of 1917, in the crypt of the private Fyodorov chapel, the body of Rasputin was laid to rest.

The only people present were the Tsar, the Tsarina, their children, a priest, and Pekkala, who was there for security, since the service was being held in secret.

After the discovery of Rasputin’s corpse in the Neva River, the Tsarina had ordered that Rasputin should be buried in his home village of Pokrovskoye, in Siberia. The minister of the interior, Alexander Protopopov, persuaded her that the current hostility towards Rasputin, even in death, would guarantee that his body would not make the journey successfully, so she decided to bury him in secret on the grounds of the Tsarskoye Selo estate.

It was an open-coffin service, but Rasputin’s face had been covered with a white cloth. This was to hide the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, which no amount of undertaker’s skill could obscure.

This bullet hole had been made by a different weapon than the other three found in his body. It was Chief Inspector Vassileyev who had alerted Pekkala to the discrepancy. “We have a big problem,” he said.

“That Rasputin was shot by more than one gun?” asked Pekkala. They already had two men in temporary custody. Prince Felix Yusupov had immediately confessed to the crime, along with the army doctor named Lazovert. There were other suspects, including the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovitch, but it was the Tsar himself who made clear to the Okhrana investigators, Pekkala included, that none of these men would ever be brought to trial. Given this fact, the number of bullet holes in Rasputin’s body hardly seemed to matter.

“It’s not simply that two weapons were used,” Vassileyev told Pekkala. “It is the type of gun which caused this.” He pressed a finger to his forehead, where the bullet had entered Rasputin’s skull. “Our chief medical examiner has determined that the head wound was made by a soft-sided bullet. Every type of gun firing that caliber of bullet uses a hard copper casing. Every type except one.” Now Vassileyev pointed at Pekkala’s chest, where his revolver rested in its shoulder holster. “Take that out.”

Confused, Pekkala did as he was told.

Vassileyev took the gun, opened the chamber, and emptied the large .455-caliber bullets out onto the table.

“Do you mean somebody thinks I played a part in this?” asked Pekkala.

“No!” growled Vassileyev. “Look at the bullets! Soft-sided. The only weapon commonly available in this size and with this kind of ammunition is the British Webley revolver, the same kind the Tsar gave to you as a present, and which he received from his cousin King George of England.”

“The British murdered Rasputin?”

Vassileyev shrugged. “They had a hand in it, Pekkala. That much is almost certain.”

“But why?”

“They were not fond of Rasputin. It was on that lunatic’s insistence that several British advisors were sent home in disgrace.”

“Is that why the investigation has been halted?”

“Halted?” Vassileyev laughed. “The investigation was never begun. What I’ve just told you will never be written in the history books. In the future, Inspector, they will not squabble over who killed Rasputin. Instead, they will be asking, ‘Who didn’t?’ ”

Throughout the brief service, Pekkala stood by the half-open door of the church, looking out across the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo. The smell of sandalwood incense blew past him and out into the freezing air.

It was cold in the chapel. No fires had been lit. The Romanovs stood in fur coats while the priest read the eulogy. Throughout this, the Tsarina wept, a lace handkerchief clenched in her fist and pressed against her mouth to hide her sobbing.

Glancing back from the door, Pekkala watched the daughters lay a painted icon on Rasputin’s chest. The Tsar and Alexei stood off to one side, grim-faced but detached.

“Where is the justice in this?” shrieked the Tsarina, as the lid of the coffin was closed.

The priest stepped back in alarm.

The Tsar took hold of his wife’s arm. “It’s over,” he told her. “There is nothing more we can do.”

She collapsed into his arms and sobbed against his chest. She began her chant again. “God protect us. God protect us.”

Pekkala wondered what that meant for the man in the box, whose brains had been blown through his skull.

As the Romanovs left the church, Pekkala stood outside the door to let them pass.

The Tsarina swept past him, then stopped and turned. “I’ve been meaning to thank you,” she whispered, “for keeping us safe here on earth. Now I have two guardians. One here and one who’s up above.”

Looking into the Tsarina’s bloodshot eyes, Pekkala remembered what Rasputin had told him, that night he came in from the cold.

“You see, Pekkala,” he had said, “the reason I am loved by the Tsarina is that I am exactly what she wants me to be. Just as she needs me now to be beside her, the time will come when she will need me to be gone.”

Once more, the Tsar took hold of his wife’s arm. “Our friend is gone now,” he murmured in her ear. “We should be going too.”

There was an expression on his face which Pekkala had never seen before—some blur of fear and resignation—as if the Tsar had glimpsed, through some tear in the fabric of time, the specter of his own fast-approaching doom.

PEKKALA WATCHED AS KROPOTKIN CROSSED THE ROAD, DISAPPEARING in the misty veils of rain.

Then he went back to his office.

An hour later, when Kirov had still not returned, he began to grow nervous. There had been so many arrests this past year that no one could feel safe, no matter what rank they held or how innocent they were. The way Pekkala saw it, the same idealism that made Kirov a good upholder of the law also made the young man vulnerable to how randomly enforced that law could be. Pekkala had seen it before—the stronger the convictions, the greater the distance between the world as these people envisioned it and the world as it really was.

At the same time, Pekkala knew that Kirov might take it as a lack of confidence if he went searching for him now.

So Pekkala continued to wait in the office, as evening shadows crept about the room. Before long, he found himself in total darkness. By now, there was no point in heading home for the night, so he propped his feet up on the desk, folded his hands across his stomach, and tried to fall asleep.

But he couldn’t.

Instead, he paced around the room studying Kirov’s potted plants. Now and then, he paused to pick a cherry tomato or to chew on a basil leaf.

Finally, with an hour still to go before the sun came up, he put on his coat and left the building.

It was a long walk to Kirov’s apartment, almost an hour through the winding streets. He could have made the journey in ten minutes by taking the subway, but Pekkala preferred to remain aboveground in spite of the fact that there were no reliable maps of the city. The only charts available for Moscow showed either what the city had looked like before the Revolution or what the city was supposed to look like when all of the new construction projects had been finished. Most of these had not even begun, and there were whole blocks which, on these maps, bore no resemblance to what actually stood on the ground. Many streets had been renamed, as had entire cities around the country. Petrograd was Leningrad, Tsaritsyn was Stalingrad. As the locals said in Moscow, everything was different but nothing had really changed.

Pekkala was walking along the edge of Gorky Park when a car pulled up alongside him. Before the car, a black GAZ-M1 saloon, had even stopped, the passenger-side door flew open and a man jumped out.

Without thinking about it, Pekkala moved.

By the time the man’s feet were on the pavement, he was already looking down the blue-eyed barrel of Pekkala’s revolver.

The man wore round glasses, balanced on a long, thin nose. Beard stubble made a blue haze on his pasty skin.

To Pekkala, he looked like a big pink rat.

The expression of angry determination on the man’s face gave way to stunned disbelief. Slowly, he raised his hands. “You are going to wish you hadn’t done that, Comrade,” he said quietly.

It was only now that Pekkala got a good look at him. Even though he wore plain clothes, Pekkala knew immediately—the man was NKVD. It was the way he carried himself, his look of perpetual disdain. Pekkala had been so worried about Kirov being hauled in on some random charge that he had not stopped to consider the same thing might happen to him. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Put that down!” snapped the man.

“Give me an answer,” replied Pekkala calmly, “if you want to keep your brains in your head.”

“Are you licensed to carry that antique?”

Pekkala set his thumb on the hammer and pulled it back until it cocked. “I’m licensed to use it too.”

Now the man shrugged his right shoulder, revealing a gun in a holster tucked under his armpit. “You’re not the only person with a gun.”

“Go ahead,” replied Pekkala, “and let’s see what happens next.”

“Why don’t you just show me your papers!”

Without lowering the Webley, Pekkala reached inside his coat, removed his pass book and held it out.

“You’re NKVD?” asked the man.

“See for yourself.”

Slowly, the rat man took it from his hand and opened it.

“What’s taking so long?” said a voice. Then the driver of the car climbed out. “Svoloch!” he shouted when he saw Pekkala’s revolver, and struggled to draw his own gun.

“Don’t,” said Pekkala.

But it was too late. The man’s Tokarev was now aimed squarely at Pekkala.

Pekkala kept his own weapon pointed at the rat man.

For a moment, the three men just stood there.

“Let’s just all of us calm down and see what we’ve got here,” said the rat man, as he opened Pekkala’s identification book.

A long period of silence followed.

“What’s the matter?” demanded the driver, his gun still aimed at Pekkala. “What the hell is going on?”

The rat-faced man cleared his throat. “He’s got a Shadow Pass.”

The driver looked suddenly lost, like a sleepwalker who had awakened in a different part of town.

“It’s Pekkala,” said the rat-faced man.

“What?”

“Inspector Pekkala, you idiot! From Special Operations.”

“It was your idea to stop!” complained the driver. Uttering another curse, he stuffed his gun back into its holster as if the weapon had drawn itself against his wishes.

The rat-faced man closed Pekkala’s ID book. “Our apologies, Inspector,” he said as he handed it back.

Only now did Pekkala lower his gun. “I’m taking this car,” he told them.

The driver’s face turned pale. “Our car?”

“Yes,” replied Pekkala. “I am requisitioning your vehicle.” He walked around to the driver’s side.

“You can’t do that!” said the driver. “This car belongs to us!”

“Be quiet, you idiot!” shouted the rat man. “Didn’t you hear me? I said he had a Shadow Pass. We can’t detain him. We can’t question him. We can’t even ask him the bloody time of day! He is licensed to shoot you and no one’s even allowed to ask him why he did it. He’s also permitted to requisition anything he chooses—our weapons, our car. He can leave you standing naked in the street if he wants to.”

“It pulls a little to the left,” said the driver. “The carburetor needs adjusting.”

“Shut up and get out of his way!” the rat-faced man yelled again.

As if jolted by an electric shock, the driver tossed Pekkala the keys.

Pekkala got behind the wheel. The last he saw of the two men, they were standing on the sidewalk, arguing. He drove the rest of the way to Kirov’s apartment on Prechistenka Street. Then he just sat in the car for a while, hands still on the wheel, trying to stop breathing so hard.

“When guns are drawn,” said Chief Inspector Vassileyev, “you must never show fear. A man with a gun aimed at you is more likely to pull the trigger if he sees you are afraid.”

At the end of every day of his training with the Tsar’s Secret Police, the Okhrana, Pekkala would report to Vassileyev. The procedures Pekkala learned from other agents transformed him into an investigator, but what he learned from Vassileyev saved his life.

“Surely,” argued Pekkala, “if I show I am afraid, I would be less of a threat to someone with a gun.”

“I am not talking about what should happen,” replied Vassileyev. “I am talking about what will happen.”

Even though the chief inspector always seemed to talk in riddles, Pekkala looked forward to the time he spent with Vassileyev. His office was small and comfortable, with lithographs of hunting scenes and antique weaponry hung on the walls. Vassileyev spent most of his time here, poring over reports and receiving visitors. As a younger man, he had gained a reputation for going about the city on foot, often in disguise. It was said that no one could hide from Vassileyev in Petrograd, because he knew every corner of the city. Those days came to an end one day as he was walking down the steps of the police building in order to meet the head of the Moscow Okhrana, who had just arrived by car. Vassileyev had almost reached the vehicle when a bomb, thrown through the window on the other side, exploded. The Moscow chief was killed instantly and Vassileyev sustained injuries that put him behind a desk for the rest of his career.

“The person who lives without fear,” continued Vassileyev, “does not have long to live. Fear sharpens the senses. Fear can keep you alive. But learn to hide it, Pekkala. Bury fear deep someplace inside you, so your enemies can’t see it in your eyes.”

WHEN, AT LAST, HIS BREATHING HAD RETURNED TO NORMAL, PEKKALA left the keys in the glove compartment, got out of the car, and walked across the street to Kirov’s building.

It had been freshly painted a cheerful shade of orange. Large windows, trimmed in white, looked down on the tree-lined avenue.

Pekkala knocked on the door to Kirov’s apartment, then took two steps back and waited.

After a minute, the door opened a crack and Kirov peered from inside. His eyes were squinty and his hair stuck up in tufts. Behind him, on the walls, were dozens of awards and certificates from various Communist youth organizations. Kirov had been collecting these certificates of merit since he was five years old, when he had won a prize for a week of community service in the Young Pioneers. After this, he had gone on to win awards for best orienteering, best science experiment, best tent-pitching. Each certificate bore a hammer and sickle nestled between two sheaves of wheat. Some of the certificates had been ornately hand-lettered. Others were no more than scrawls. But all of them had been framed, and they hung from every vertical surface in his apartment. “What are you doing here?” asked Kirov.

“Good morning to you too,” replied Pekkala. “Get dressed. We have to go.”

“Where?”

Pekkala held up the piece of paper Lysenkova had given him. “To talk to the scientists at the facility. Maybe they can decipher this. There may be a link between the equation and the man who escaped, but we won’t know until we understand what’s written here.”

“Who is that?” asked a woman’s voice from inside the apartment. “Is that Inspector Pekkala?”

Kirov sighed heavily. “Yes.”

“So that’s why you didn’t come back!” spluttered Pekkala. “Damn it, Kirov, I thought you’d been arrested!”

“Arrested for what?” asked Kirov.

“Never mind that now!”

“Aren’t you going to let him in?” asked the woman.

Pekkala peered into the room. “Major Lysenkova?”

“Good morning, Inspector.” She was sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in a blanket.

Pekkala gave Kirov a withering stare.

Lysenkova got up from the table and walked toward them, bare feet padding on the floor. As she approached, Pekkala realized she wasn’t wearing anything beneath the blanket. “Major Kirov told me the good news,” she said.

“Good news?” asked Pekkala.

“That you’ve allowed me to keep working on the case,” she explained. “I’ve already gotten down to work.”

Pekkala mumbled something unintelligible.

“I found some more information on the White Guild,” said Lysenkova.

“You did? What did you find out?”

“That they’re gone.”

“Gone?” asked Pekkala.

“Finished. They were closed down a few weeks ago. All their agents got reassigned.”

“Do you think you might be able to find out where they are now?”

“I can try,” she said. “I’ll start on it as soon as I get back to NKVD headquarters.”

Ten minutes later, the Emka pulled up to the curb. Kirov sat behind the wheel. His hair was wet and neatly combed.

Pekkala climbed in and slammed the door. “Kremlin,” he said.

“But I thought we were going to talk to those scientists out at the facility—”

“There’s something I need to do first,” replied Pekkala.

Kirov pulled out into the road. “I made us some lunch,” he said, “in case we’re gone all day.”

Pekkala stared out the window. Sunlight flickered on his face.

“I take it you disapprove, Inspector,” said Kirov.

“Of what?”

“Of me. And Major Lysenkova.”

“As long as our investigation is not obstructed, Kirov, it’s not for me to say one thing or another. After all, my own adventures in that field would not stand up to any test of sanity.”

“But you do disapprove. I can tell.”

“The only advice I have for you is to do what you can live with. The further you go beyond that point, the harder it is to return.”

“And how far have you gone, Inspector?”

“If I ever get back,” Pekkala answered, “I will be sure to let you know.”

“I CAN’T TALK NOW, PEKKALA,” GROWLED STALIN, AS HE STOOD up from his desk. “I’m on my way to the daily briefing. The Germans have moved into Czechoslovakia, just as I told you they would. It has begun, and we still don’t have the T-34.”

“Comrade Stalin, what I need to ask you is also important.”

Stalin pressed his hand against a panel in the wall and the trapdoor clicked open. “Well, come on, then!”

“In there?” asked Pekkala.

“Yes! In here. Hurry up!”

He followed Stalin into the secret passageway, his stomach knotting as he ducked into the shadows.

Once they were both inside, Stalin pulled a metal lever in the wall and the door swung silently shut.

A line of weak electric bulbs lit the way, trailing into the darkness.

As soon as the trapdoor shut, Stalin set off through the tunnel.

Pekkala had to struggle to keep up, painfully stooped so as not to bang his head on the wooden beams which crossed the ceiling.

Doors appeared out of the gloom, each with its own opening-and-closing lever. The rooms to which they led were marked in yellow paint. It smelled dusty in the passageway. Now and then, he heard the murmur of voices on the other side of the wall.

By now, he was fighting against panic. The low ceiling seemed to be collapsing in on him. He had to remind himself to breathe. Each time they came to a door, he had to struggle against the urge to open it and escape from this rat tunnel.

They came to an intersection.

Pekkala looked down the other passageways, the pearl necklace of bulbs illuminating dingy tunnels leading deep into the heart of the Kremlin.

Stalin swung to his right and immediately began to climb a flight of stairs. He paused halfway up to catch his breath.

Pekkala almost ran into him.

“Well, Pekkala,” Stalin wheezed, “are you going to ask me this question of yours or are you just keeping me company?”

“The White Guild is finished,” said Pekkala.

“That does not sound like a question.”

“Is it true? Has the White Guild been shut down?”

Standing above him on the stairs, Stalin loomed over Pekkala. “The operation has been terminated.”

“And its agents have been reassigned?”

“Officially, yes.”

“Officially? What do you mean?”

This time Stalin did not reply. He turned and continued up the stairs. Reaching the top, he set out along another passageway. The floor was lined with dark green carpet, the center of which had been worn down to the ridging underneath.

“Where are those agents?” asked Pekkala.

“Dead,” replied Stalin.

“What? All of them?” The sound of water gurgling in pipes rushed past Pekkala’s ears.

“Last month, over the course of a single night, the six agents were tracked down to their lodgings in various parts of the city. It was a professional job. Each one was executed with a shot to the back of the head.”

“Do you have any suspects?”

Stalin shook his head. “In his final report, one of those agents stated that he had been approached by some people wishing to join the Guild. One week later, the agents turned up dead. The names these people used turned out to be fake.”

“Whoever these people were,” said Pekkala, “they must have discovered that Special Operations controlled the White Guild. They found out who the Special Operations agents were and killed them.”

“Correct.”

“What I don’t understand, Comrade Stalin, is why you think the Guild might be involved in the Nagorski killing, when you have just told me you closed it down before he died.”

“I did close down the Guild,” said Stalin, “but I am afraid it has come back to life. The Guild was once a trap for luring enemy agents in, but these people, whoever they are, have now turned it against us. I think you’ll find they are the ones who killed Nagorski.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this, Comrade Stalin?”

Stalin threw a lever, which lay flush against the wall. The door swung open.

Beyond lay a room with a huge map of the Soviet Union on the wall. The heavy red velvet curtains had been drawn. Pekkala had never seen this place before. Men in a variety of military uniforms sat around a table. At the head of the table was one empty seat. There had been a murmur of talk in the room, but as soon as the door opened, it fell silent. Now all of the men were watching the space from which Stalin was about to emerge.

Before entering the room, however, Stalin turned to Pekkala. “I did not tell you,” he said quietly, “because I hoped I might be wrong. That does not seem to be the case, and it’s why I am telling you now.” Then he stepped into the room. A moment later, the door closed softly behind him.

Pekkala found himself alone in the passageway, with no idea where he was.

He retraced his steps to the stairs, then went down to the intersection. Before he reached it, all the lights went out. He realized they must have been on a timer, but where the switch was for that timer, Pekkala had no idea. At first, it was so dark inside the corridor that he felt as if he might as well have been struck blind. But slowly, as his eyes grew used to the blackness, he realized he could make out thin gray bands of light seeping under the bottoms of the trapdoors spaced out along the passageway.

He could not read the yellow writing on the doors, so, sliding along with his back to the wall, he picked the first door he came to. Groping, he found the lever and pulled.

The trapdoor clicked open.

Pekkala heard the sound of heels upon a marble floor and knew instantly that he had emerged onto one of the main corridors of the Palace of Congresses, which adjoined the Kremlin Palace where Stalin’s office was located. He stepped through the opening and almost collided with a woman wearing the mouse-gray skirt and black tunic of a Kremlin secretary. She was carrying a bundle of papers, but when she saw Pekkala appear like a ghost out of the wall, she screamed and the papers went straight up into the air.

“Well, I should be going,” said Pekkala, as the documents fluttered down around them. He smiled and nodded good-bye, then walked quickly away down the corridor.

“YOU FORGOT YOUR GUN AGAIN, DIDN’T YOU?” ASKED PEKKALA, as they drove towards the Nagorski facility.

“No, I didn’t forget,” replied Kirov. “I left it behind on purpose. We’re only going to talk to those scientists. They won’t give us any trouble.”

“You should always bring your gun with you!” shouted Pekkala. “Pull over here!”

Obediently, Kirov brought the car to a halt. Then he turned in his seat to face Pekkala. “What’s up, Inspector?”

“Where is that lunch you made us?”

“In the trunk. Why?”

“Follow me,” said Pekkala, as he got out of the car. From the trunk, Pekkala removed the canvas satchel containing two sandwiches and some apples. Then he stalked into the field beside the road, pausing to snap off a dead branch, about the size of a walking stick, from a tree beside the road.

“Where are you going with our food?”

“Stay there,” Pekkala called back. After he had gone a short way into the field, he stopped. He jammed the branch into the ground, then removed an apple from the lunch bag and skewered it onto the end of the branch.

“We were going to eat that!” shouted Kirov.

Pekkala ignored him. He returned to where Kirov was standing, drew his Webley from its holster and handed it, butt first, to Kirov. Then he turned and pointed towards the apple. “What we will be doing—” he began, then flinched as the gun went off in Kirov’s hand. “For goodness sake, Kirov! Be careful! Take time to aim properly. There are many steps involved. Breathing. Stance. The way you grip the gun. It’s going to take some time.”

“Yes, Inspector,” replied Kirov meekly.

“Now,” said Pekkala, returning his attention to the apple. “What? Where’s it gone? Oh, damn! It’s fallen off.” He strode back towards the stake, but had gone only a few paces when he noticed shreds of apple peel scattered across the ground. The apple appeared to have exploded, and it was a few more seconds before Pekkala finally got it into his head that Kirov had hit the apple with his first shot. He spun around and stared at Kirov.

“Sorry,” said Kirov. “Did you have something else in mind?”

“Well,” growled Pekkala, “that was a good start. But you mustn’t get your hopes up. What we want is to be able to hit the target not just once, but every time. Or almost every time.” He fished another apple from the bag and stuck it on the end of the stick.

“What do you expect us to eat?” asked Kirov.

“Now don’t go blasting away until I get back there,” ordered Pekkala as he strode towards Kirov. “It is important to make a firm platform with your feet, and to grip the gun tightly but not too tightly. The Webley is a well-balanced weapon, but it’s got a hard kick, much greater than the Tokarev.”

Casually, Kirov raised the Webley and fired.

“Damn it, Kirov!” raged Pekkala. “You’ve got to wait until you’re ready!”

“I was ready,” replied Kirov serenely.

Pekkala squinted at the stake. All that remained of the second apple was a cloud of white juice, diffusing in the air. Pekkala’s mouth twitched. “Stay there!” he said and went back into the field. This time he pulled the branch up, walked several paces farther back and stuck it into the ground. Then he took a sandwich wrapped in brown wax paper from the bag and jammed it onto the stick.

“I’m not shooting my sandwich!” shouted Kirov.

Pekkala wheeled. “You won’t? Or you can’t?”

“If I hit that,” said Kirov, “will you stop bothering me?”

“I certainly will,” agreed Pekkala.

“And you will admit that I’m a good shot?”

“Don’t push your luck, Comrade Kirov.”

Three minutes later, the Emka was back on the road.

Pekkala slumped in the back, arms folded across his chest, feeling the warmth of the gun’s cylinder radiating through his leather holster.

“You know,” said Kirov cheerfully, “I have a certificate of merit from the Komsomol for target practice. It’s hanging on my wall at home.”

“I must have missed that one,” mumbled Pekkala.

“It’s in the living room,” said Kirov, “right next to my music award.”

“You got an award for music?”

“For my rendition of ‘Farewell, Slavianka,’ ” replied Kirov. He breathed in, stuck out his chest, and began to sing, glancing in the mirror at his audience. “Farewell, the land of the fathers …”

One raised eyebrow from Pekkala shut him up.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE ECHOED AROUND THE BUILDINGS OF THE Nagorski facility.

In the confined space of the Iron House, the percussion of each shell tangled into a continuous, deafening snarl. To Pekkala, at the entrance, it was as if the air itself were being torn apart. Beside him stood Kirov. The two men waited while the metal snake of bullets uncoiled from its green ammunition box, spitting a shower of flickering brass from the ejection port of the machine gun. Just when it seemed as if the sound would never end, the belt ran out and the gunfire ceased abruptly. Spent cartridges rang musically as they tumbled to the concrete floor.

Gorenko and Ushinsky set the gun aside, climbed to their feet, and removed the cup-shaped noise protectors from their ears. A hazy wreath of gun smoke hung about their heads.

The weapon was aimed at a pyramid of hundred-liter metal barrels. The diesel fuel these barrels once contained had been replaced with sand to absorb the impact of the bullets. Now gaping tears showed in the metal and sand poured in streams from the holes, forming cones upon the floor like time marked in an hourglass.

Gorenko held up a stopwatch. “Thirty-three seconds.”

“Better,” said Ushinsky.

“Still not good enough,” replied Gorenko. “Nagorski would have been breathing down our necks—”

“Gentlemen.” Pekkala’s voice resonated through the girders which supported the corrugated iron roof.

Surprised, both scientists wheeled around to see where the voice had come from.

“Inspector!” exclaimed Ushinsky. “Welcome back to the madhouse.”

“What are you working on here?” asked Kirov.

“We are testing the rate of fire of the T-34’s machine guns,” replied Gorenko. “It’s not right yet.”

“It’s close enough,” said Ushinsky.

“If the colonel was alive,” insisted Gorenko, “he’d never let you say a thing like that.”

Pekkala walked over to where the scientists were standing. He removed the paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and held it out towards the two men. “Can either of you tell me what this means?”

Both peered at the page.

“That’s the colonel’s writing,” said Ushinsky.

Gorenko nodded. “It’s a formula.”

“A formula for what?” asked Pekkala.

Ushinsky shook his head. “We’re not chemists, Inspector.”

“That kind of thing is not our specialty,” agreed Gorenko.

“Is there anyone here who could tell us?” asked Kirov.

The scientists shook their heads.

Pekkala sighed with annoyance, thinking that they had come all this way for nothing. “Let’s go,” he told Kirov.

As they turned to leave, the scientists began a whispered conversation.

Pekkala stopped. “What is it, gentlemen?”

“Well—” began Ushinsky.

“Keep your mouth shut,” ordered Gorenko. “Colonel Nagorski may be dead, but this is still his project and his rules should be obeyed!”

“It doesn’t matter now!” yelled Ushinsky. He kicked an empty bullet cartridge across the floor. It skipped over the concrete, spinning away among the sleeping hulks of half-assembled tanks. “None of it matters now! Can’t you see?”

“Nagorski said—”

“Nagorski is gone!” bellowed Ushinsky. “Everything we’ve done has been for nothing.”

“I thought the Konstantin Project was almost finished,” Pekkala said.

“Almost!” replied Ushinsky. “Almost is not good enough.” He waved his arm across the assembly area. “We might as well just throw these monsters on the junk heap!”

“One of these days,” Gorenko warned him, “you’re going to say something you’ll regret.”

Ignoring his colleague, Ushinsky turned to the investigators. “You’ll need to speak with a man named Lev Zalka.”

Gorenko looked at the ground and shook his head. “If the colonel heard you say that name …”

“Zalka was part of the original team,” continued Ushinsky. “He designed the V2 diesel. That’s what we use in the tanks. But he’s been gone for months. Nagorski fired him. They got into an argument.”

“An argument?” muttered Gorenko. “Is that what you call it? Nagorski attacked him with a wrench! The colonel would have killed Zalka if he hadn’t ducked. After that, Nagorski said that if anyone so much as mentioned Zalka’s name, they would be thrown off the project.”

“What was this fight about?” asked Pekkala.

Both scientists shrugged uneasily.

“Zalka had wanted to install bigger turret hatches, as well as hatches underneath the hull.”

“Why?” asked Kirov. “Wouldn’t that make the tank more vulnerable?”

“Yes, it would,” replied Gorenko.

“But bigger hatches,” interrupted Ushinsky, “would mean that the tank crew had a better chance of escaping if the engine caught fire or if the hull was breached.”

“Colonel Nagorski refused to consider it. For him, the machine came first.”

“And that’s why your test drivers have been calling it the Red Coffin,” said Pekkala.

Gorenko shot an angry glance towards Ushinsky. “I see that someone has been talking.”

“What does it matter now?” growled Ushinsky.

“Are you certain this is what Nagorski and Zalka were arguing about on that day?” asked Pekkala, anxious to avoid another argument between the two men.

“All I can tell you,” Gorenko replied, “is that Zalka left the facility that day. And he never came back.”

“Do you have any idea where we could find this man?” asked Kirov.

“He used to have an apartment on Prechistenka Street,” said Ushinsky, “but that was back when he worked here. He may have moved since then. If anybody knows what that formula means, it’s him.”

When Pekkala and Kirov left the building, Gorenko followed them out. “I’m sorry, Inspectors,” he said. “You’ll have to forgive my colleague. He loses his temper a lot. He says things he doesn’t mean.”

“It sounded like he meant them to me,” Kirov pointed out.

“It’s just that we had some bad news today.”

“What news is that?” asked Pekkala.

“Come. Let me show you.” He led them around to the back of the assembly building to where a T-34 had been parked at the edge of the trees. The machine had a large number 4 painted on the side of its turret. Pekkala’s eye was drawn to a long, narrow scrape, which had cut down to the bare metal. The silver stripe passed along the length of the turret, neatly bisecting the number. “They brought it back this morning.”

“Who did?” asked Pekkala.

“The army,” Gorenko replied. “They had it out on some secret field trial. We weren’t allowed to know anything about it. And now it’s ruined.”

“Ruined?” asked Kirov. “It looks the same as all the others.”

Gorenko climbed up onto the flat section at the back of the tank and opened up the engine grille. He reached his hand into the engine and when he drew it out, it was smeared with what looked like grease. “You know what this is?”

Pekkala shook his head.

“It’s fuel,” explained Gorenko. “Ordinary diesel fuel. At least that’s what it is supposed to be. But it has been contaminated.”

“With what?”

“Bleach. It has destroyed the inner workings of the engine. The whole thing will have to be refitted, the fuel system drained, all hoses and feeds replaced. It needs a complete rebuild. Number 4 was Ushinsky’s own special project. Each of us here had a favorite. We sort of adopted them. And Ushinsky is taking this hard.”

“Perhaps it was an accident,” suggested Kirov.

Gorenko shook his head. “Whoever did this knew exactly how to wreck an engine. Not just damage it, you understand. Destroy it. There’s no doubt in my mind, Inspectors. This was a deliberate act.” He jumped down from the tank, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped the fuel from his fingers. “If you knew how hard he worked on this machine, you’d understand how he feels.”

“Is he right?” asked Pekkala. “Is the whole project ruined?”

“No!” replied Gorenko. “In a few months, as long as we can keep working on it, the T-34 should be ready. Even with Nagorski gone, the T-34 will still be an excellent machine, but there’s a difference between excellence and perfection. The trouble with Ushinsky is that he needs everything to be perfect. As far as he’s concerned, now that the colonel is gone, any hope of perfection is out of reach. And I’ll tell you what I’ve been telling Ushinsky since we first began this project: It would never have been perfect. There will always be something, like the rate of fire in those machine guns, which will just have to be good enough.”

“I understand,” said Pekkala. “Tell him we took no offense.”

“If you could tell him yourself,” pleaded Gorenko. “If you could just talk to him, tell him to choose his words more carefully, I think it would really help.”

“We don’t have time now,” said Kirov.

“Call us at the office later,” suggested Pekkala. “Right now, we need to find Zalka.”

“Maybe Ushinsky was right after all,” said Gorenko. “Now that Nagorski is gone, we could use all the help we can get.”

ONE HOUR LATER, KIROV DROPPED PEKKALA AT THE OFFICE.

“I’ll put in a call to Lysenkova,” Pekkala told him. “I need to tell her she can stop searching for those White Guild agents. As of now, all our efforts should be focused on locating Zalka. Get down to the records office and see if you can find out where he lives. But don’t try to bring him in on your own. We should assume that Zalka was the man in the woods. It looks like he has the motive for killing Nagorski, and the fact that he would have known his way around the facility would explain why Samarin thought someone on the inside was responsible for the murder.”

While Kirov drove to the public records office, Pekkala went up to the office and called Lysenkova. Worried that NKVD might be listening in, he told her they needed to meet in person.

As soon as she arrived, Pekkala explained about the White Guild agents.

“Did you have any luck deciphering the formula, Inspector?” asked Lysenkova.

“That’s the other reason for tracking down Zalka,” replied Pekkala. “If he’s still alive, he may be the only one who can help us.”

Lysenkova stood. “I’ll get started right away. And thank you for trusting me, Inspector. There are many who don’t. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors.”

“There are always rumors.”

“Well, you should know that some of them are true.”

Pekkala raised his head and looked her in the eye. “I heard that you denounced your own parents.”

Lysenkova nodded. “Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

“Because my father told me to. It was my only way out.”

“Out of where?”

“A place you know well, Inspector. I am talking about Siberia.”

Pekkala stared at her. “But I thought they were sent to Siberia because you denounced them. You mean you were already there?”

“That’s right. My mother had already been sentenced to twenty years as a class 59 criminal.”

“Your mother? What did she do?”

“My mother,” explained Lysenkova, “was the only female supervisor on the production staff of the Leningrad Steam Turbine Factory. The factory was to be one of the great industrial triumphs of the 1920’s, a place where foreign dignitaries could be brought to show the efficiency of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself had arranged to visit the factory on its opening day. The trouble was that construction had fallen behind schedule, but Stalin refused to change the date of his visit. So at a time when the factory should have been operational, they had not yet produced a single tractor. In fact, the main construction floor didn’t even have a roof yet. And that was exactly where Stalin had announced he would meet the workers of the factory. So, roof or no roof, that’s where the meeting was held. It was raining the day he arrived. My mother ordered a podium to be built so that Stalin could stand above the crowd and look out over the heads of the workers. There was also a tarpaulin to shield him from the rain. The day before his visit, political advisors had arrived at the factory. Above the podium, they hung a banner.” Lysenkova spread her arms above her head, as if to frame the text between her hands. LONG LIVE STALIN, THE BEST FRIEND OF ALL SOVIET WORKERS. But there was no way to shelter the workers from the rain, so they all stood there getting wet. They stood for an hour and a half before Stalin even arrived. By then, the letters of the banner had started to run. Red ink was dripping off the banner. It made puddles on the concrete floor. When Stalin walked up to the podium, everybody clapped, as the political advisors had instructed them to do. The trouble was, nobody knew when to stop. They all assumed that Stalin would make some gesture, or start talking, or something, anything, to indicate when the clapping should cease. But when the applause started, Stalin just stood there. Of course, it was obvious he must have been furious that the factory was only half built, but he showed no anger. He just smiled at everybody getting soaked. Red droplets fell from the banner. The clapping continued. The workers were too terrified to quit.

“This went on for twenty minutes. My mother was in charge of the floor. That was her job. Nobody else was doing anything. She began to think it might be her responsibility to get the meeting started. The longer this clapping went on, the more convinced she became that since no one else was prepared to act, she ought to be the one.”

Lysenkova brought her hands slowly together and then drew them apart and kept them there. “So she stopped clapping. That was the moment Stalin had been waiting for, but not so that he could start the meeting. He looked at my mother. That’s all. Just looked at her. Then he got down from the podium, and he and his entourage drove away. No one had said a word. It was still pouring. The letters on the banner had completely washed away. One week later, my mother, my father, and I were all shipped out to the Special Settlement of Dalstroy-7.”

“The settlement,” whispered Pekkala. And then he went blind as an image of that place exploded behind his eyes.

Dalstroy-7 was a collection of half a dozen log houses, poorly and hurriedly built, bunched at the edge of a stream in the valley of Krasnagolyana.

The site was less than ten kilometers from Pekkala’s camp. He had arrived in the valley five years before. It was early summer then, which gave him plenty of time to work on the cabin before the first snow of autumn appeared. His cabin had been solidly constructed in the style known as Zemlyanka, in which half of the living space was underground and the gaps between the logs were caulked with mud and grass.

But the inhabitants of Dalstroy-7 had showed up just after the first frost, and there had been no time to build adequate shelters before the winter set in.

Special Settlement people were a subsection of the Gulag camp system, in which husbands and wives might all be shipped off to different camps and the children sent to orphanages if they were too young to work. Special Settlements were shipped out to Siberia as complete families, dumped in the forest or out on the tundra, and left to fend for themselves until such time as they might be required as labor in the Gulag camps. Until then, the settlements were nothing more than prisons without walls. Sometimes these settlements lasted. More often, when guards arrived to take the prisoners away, they found only ghost villages, with no trace left of the people who had once lived there.

Dalstroy-7 settlement was under the jurisdiction of a notorious camp named Mamlin-3, on the other side of the valley. The twenty-odd inhabitants of Dalstroy-7 were city folk, to judge from the mistakes they made—building the cabins too close to the river, not knowing it would flood in springtime, making their chimneys too short, which meant the smoke would blow back into the cabins. With winter already descending like a white tidal wave sweeping through the valley, the inmates of Dalstroy-7 were as good as dead.

Pekkala saw himself as he was then, a barely human presence draped in the rags he had worn into the forest, staring at them from his hiding place, a rocky outcrop that looked down upon the valley where they had been abandoned with no instructions other than simply to survive until the spring.

He stepped back into the shadows, knowing there was nothing he could do for them. He did not dare to show himself, since he was well beyond the boundaries of the Borodok camp, of which he was officially an inmate. With the task of marking trees for cutting, he was allowed to roam within the borders of the Borodok sector, but never beyond. If news reached Borodok that he had been seen in an area designated for Mamlin-3, on the other side of the valley, they would send in troops to execute him for the crime of trespassing.

Unlike the camp at Mamlin-3, Borodok was a full-scale logging operation, processing trees from the moment they were cut until they emerged as kiln-dried boards, ready to be shipped to the west.

What went on at Mamlin-3 was kept a secret, but Pekkala had heard on his arrival at Borodok that to be a prisoner at Mamlin was considered worse than death. That was why convicts bound for that place were never told where they were going until they arrived.

Pekkala’s only company in this forbidden zone had been a man who escaped from the Mamlin-3 camp. His name was Tatischev, and he had been a sergeant in one of the Tsar’s Cossack regiments. After his escape, search parties had combed the forest but never found Tatischev, for the simple reason that he had hidden where they were least likely to search—within sight of the Mamlin-3 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 center 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, Tatischev told him, where the human race had sunk to its ultimate depths.

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.

Pekkala returned to Dalstroy-7 at the end of winter. The snow had already begun to melt. Two nights before, he had awakened to what he thought was the sound of ice breaking in the river, but as the sharp cracking noise echoed through the forest, Pekkala realized that it was gunfire coming from the direction of the Dalstroy-7 settlement.

Now, seeing no smoke from the chimneys, he made his way down to the settlement. One after the other, he opened the doors and stepped into the dark.

Inside the cabins, people lay strewn around the room like dolls thrown by an angry child. A gauze of frost covered their bodies. They had all been shot. The cratered wounds of bullet holes stared like third eyes from the foreheads of the dead.

With hands rag-bound against the cold, Pekkala gathered up a few of the spent cartridges. All were army issue, all less than a year old, matching in year and make. Then Pekkala knew that guards from the Mamlin-3 camp must have carried out the killing. None of the nomad bands in this region would have had access to such recent stocks of ammunition. Pekkala wondered why the guards would have bothered to come all this way to liquidate the settlement when the winter would have killed them anyway.

He touched the emaciated and stone-hard cheek of a young woman who had died sitting by the stove. It seemed she had been too weak even to get up from the chair when the killers burst into the cabin. In the billowing heat of his breath, the white crystals melted from her hair, revealing red strands, like shreds of copper wire. It was as if, for one brief moment, life had returned to the corpse.

Two weeks later, when spring floods raged through the valley, the buildings and all they had contained were swept away.

“HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO ESCAPE?” ASKED PEKKALA.

“Just after we finished building our shelters,” replied Lysenkova, “my father sat me down and made me write out a statement that he had killed two guards on our way out to the settlement. The truth was, two guards had gone missing, but they ran away on their own. No one in our group killed them. We didn’t have any paper or pencils. We used a piece of birch bark and the burned end of a stick. I was ten, old enough to know that none of what I was writing was true. I asked him if he wasn’t going to get in trouble if somebody believed what I was writing and he said it didn’t matter. ‘What are they going to do?’ he asked. ‘Send me to Siberia?’ ”

“How well do you remember your father?”

Lysenkova shrugged. “Some things are clearer than others. He had gold teeth. The front ones, top and bottom. I remember that. He had been kicked by a horse when he was young. Every time he smiled, it looked as if he had taken a bite out of the sun.”

“What happened after you wrote the letter?”

“He took me through the woods to the gates of the Borodok camp. We barely spoke on that journey, even though it took several hours to reach the camp. When we got to Borodok, he stuffed a knotted handkerchief in my pocket and then he knocked on the gate. By the time the guards opened up, he had disappeared into the woods. I knew he wasn’t coming back. When the guards asked me where I’d come from, I showed them the letter I’d written. Then they brought me into the camp.

“On my first night there, I took out the handkerchief he had given me. When I undid the knot, I saw what I first thought were kernels of corn. But then I realized they were teeth. His gold teeth. He had pulled them out. I could see the marks of pliers in the gold. They were the only things of value he had left. I used them to buy food in the camp in those first months. I would have starved to death without them.

“Eventually, I found a job delivering buckets of food to the workers who processed logs for the camp lumber mill. The job entitled me to rations and that is how I survived. After five years, they sent me back to Moscow to live in an orphanage. I don’t know what happened to my parents, but I know now what my father knew back then, which was they had no chance of coming out alive.”

As her words sank in, Pekkala finally understood why the inhabitants of Dalstroy-7 had been executed. Lysenkova’s father had given his daughter a way out, but only at the cost of his own life. What Lysenkova’s father had not reckoned on was that the camp authorities decided not only to punish him but to obliterate the entire settlement. By the time the runaway guards were caught, the liquidations had already been carried out.

“So you see, Inspector,” said Lysenkova, “I have learned what it takes to survive. That includes not caring about rumors. But I wanted you to know the truth.”

As he walked her to the door, Pekkala knew there was no point in telling the major what he’d seen. She already knew what she needed to know, but he was glad they had chosen to help her.

A BELL RANG.

Pekkala sat up in bed, blinking. He sat there, dazed, and just as he had convinced himself that he had dreamed the sound of the bell, it came again, loud and clattering. Someone was down in the street. There were buzzers for each apartment. Every time this had happened in the past, the person pressing the bell had either pressed the wrong one or was looking to be let into the building after locking themselves out.

He grunted and lay back down, knowing that whoever it was would try another buzzer if they got no answer from him.

But the bell rang again and kept ringing, someone’s thumb jammed against the buzzer. The spit dried up in Pekkala’s mouth as he realized that there had been no mistake. The persistent ringing of a doorbell in the middle of the night could mean only one thing—that they had finally come to arrest him. Not even a Shadow Pass would save him now.

Pekkala dressed and hurried down the stairs. He thought about that suitcase Babayaga kept ready in the corner of her room and he wished he had packed one for himself. Reaching the dingy foyer, lit by a single naked bulb, he unlocked the main door. As he grasped the rattly brass doorknob, a hazy calculation which had been forming in his mind now came into perfect focus.

He would probably never know what line he’d crossed to bring this down upon himself. Perhaps it was one too many questions that day he followed Stalin through the secret passageways. Perhaps Stalin had decided he should never have revealed what happened to the White Guild agents and was now in the process of covering all traces of his mistake.

The reason he would never know was because he knew he would not live long enough to find out. They had already exiled him to Siberia once. They would not do the same again. There was no doubt in Pekkala’s mind that he would be shot against the wall of the Lubyanka prison, probably before the sun came up today. Suddenly he realized that he had resigned himself to this a long time ago.

Pekkala opened the door. He did not hesitate. They would only have kicked it down.

But there was no squad of NKVD men, waiting to take him away. Instead, there was only Kirov. “Good evening, Inspector,” the young man said cheerfully. “Or should I say good morning? I thought this time I’d come and visit you.”

Before the expression could change on Kirov’s face, Pekkala’s fist swung out and knocked him in the head.

As if executing part of a complicated dance, Kirov took one step sideways, then one step backward, and finally sprawled on the pavement.

A moment later, he sat up, rubbing his jaw. “What was that for?” A thin thread of blood unraveled from his nose.

Pekkala was just as surprised as Kirov by what had happened. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

“Well, I’m sorry to have interrupted your sleep,” Kirov replied, climbing to his feet, “but you told me—”

“I don’t care about my sleep!” snarled Pekkala. “You know what it means, coming to my door in the middle of the night!”

“You mean you thought …”

“Of course that’s what I thought!”

“But, Inspector, nobody’s going to arrest you!”

“You don’t know that, Kirov,” snapped Pekkala. “I’ve tried to teach you how dangerous our job can be, and it’s time you learned that we have as much to fear from those we’re working for as from those we’re working against. Now don’t just stand there. Come in!”

Blotting his nose with a handkerchief, Kirov entered the building. “Do you know this is the first time I’ve seen your apartment? I never understood why you chose to live on this side of town.”

“Hush!” whispered Pekkala. “People are sleeping.”

When they finally reached the apartment, Pekkala put water on to boil for tea, cooking it on a small gas Primus stove which he lit with a cigarette lighter. The blue flame flickered beneath the battered aluminum pot. He sat down on the end of his bed and pointed to the only chair in the room, inviting Kirov to sit. “Well, what have you come to tell me?”

“What I came to tell you,” replied Kirov, as he looked around the room with undisguised curiosity, “is that I have found Zalka. At least I think I have.”

“Well, have you found him or haven’t you?”

“I went to the address you gave me,” explained Kirov, undeterred by Pekkala’s tone. “He wasn’t there. He moved out months ago. The caretaker said Zalka had gone to work at the swimming pool near Bolotnaya Square.”

“I didn’t know there was a swimming pool there.”

“That’s the thing, Inspector. There isn’t one. There used to be. The pool was part of a large bathhouse which got closed down years ago. Then the building was taken over by the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Science.”

“So the caretaker must have been wrong.”

“Well, I put in a call to the institute, just to be thorough. I asked if they had anyone named Zalka working there. The woman at the other end told me the names of all institute employees were classified and hung up on me. I tried calling them back, but no one would answer the phone. But what would he be doing at a medical institute? He’s an engineer, not a doctor.”

“We’ll find out first thing in the morning,” said Pekkala.

Kirov stood and began to pace around the room. “All right, Inspector, I give up. Why on earth are you living in this dump?”

“Have you considered that perhaps I choose to spend my money on other things?”

“Of course I’ve considered it, but I know you don’t spend it on clothes or food or anything else I can think of, so if it doesn’t go on rent, where does it go?”

It was a while before Pekkala answered.

In the silence, they could hear the rustle of water boiling in the pot.

“The money goes to Paris,” he said finally.

“Paris?” Kirov’s eyes narrowed. “You mean you’re sending your wages to Ilya?”

Pekkala got up to make the tea.

“How did you even find out where she lives?”

“That’s what I do,” replied Pekkala. “I find people.”

“But Ilya thinks you’re dead! As far as she knows, you’ve been dead for years.”

“I realize that,” muttered Pekkala.

“So who does she think the money is coming from?”

“The funds are channeled through a bank in Helsinki. She believes it is being provided through the will of the headmistress of the school where she taught.”

“And what does the headmistress have to say about this?”

“Nothing.” Pekkala sprinkled a pinch of black tea into the pot. “She was shot by Red Guards the day before I left Tsarskoye Selo.”

“But why, Inspector? Ilya is married! She even has a child!”

Pekkala crashed the pot down onto the stove. Hot tea splashed on his shirt. “Don’t you think I know that, Kirov? Don’t you realize I think about that all the time? But I do not love her out of hope. I do not love her out of possibility.”

“Then what is driving you to this madness?”

“I do not call it madness,” said Pekkala, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Well, I do!” Kirov told him. “You might as well be throwing your money into the fire.”

“It is mine to throw,” replied Pekkala, “and I don’t care what she does with it.” He set about brewing a fresh pot of tea.

THE TWO MEN STOOD OUTSIDE THE INSTITUTE OF CLINICAL AND Experimental Science. The windows of the old bathhouse had been bricked up and the bricks painted the same pale yellow color as the rest of the building.

“Did you bring your gun this time?” asked Pekkala.

Kirov held open one flap of his coat, showing a pistol tucked into a shoulder holster.

“Good,” said Pekkala, “because you might need to use it today.”

They had arrived at the institute just after eight in the morning, only to find that it did not open until nine. In spite of the fact that the building was closed, they could hear noises inside. Kirov banged on the heavy wooden door, but no one answered. Eventually, they gave up and decided to wait.

To pass the time, they ordered breakfast in a cafe across the road from the medical institute. The cafe had only just opened. Most of the chairs were still upside down on top of the tables.

The waitress brought them hard-boiled eggs, black rye bread, and slabs of ham, the edges still glistening with the salt used to cure the meat. They drank tea without milk from heavy white cups which had no handles.

“Waiting for the Monster Shop to open up?” asked the woman. She was tall and square-shouldered, with her hair pulled back in a knot and arching eyebrows that gave her a look of critical appraisal.

“The what?” asked Kirov.

The woman nodded towards the institute.

“Why do they call it that?” asked Pekkala.

“You’ll see for yourself if you go in there,” said the woman as she headed back into the kitchen.

“The Monster Shop,” muttered Kirov. “What kind of a place deserves a name like that?”

“I’d rather we didn’t find out on an empty stomach,” replied Pekkala as he gathered up his knife and fork. “Now eat.”

Minutes later, Kirov set down his knife and fork loudly on the edges of his plate. “There you go again,” he said.

“Mmm?” Pekkala looked up, his mouth full.

“You’re just … inhaling your food!”

Pekkala swallowed. “What else am I supposed to do with it?”

“I’ve tried to educate you”—Kirov sighed loudly—“but you just don’t seem to take any notice. I’ve seen the way you eat those meals I cook for you. I’ve tried being subtle.”

Pekkala looked down at his plate. The food was almost gone. He was pleased with the job he had made of it. “What’s the problem, Kirov?”

“The problem, Inspector, is that you don’t savor your food. You don’t appreciate the miracle”—he picked up a boiled egg and held it up—“of nourishment.”

“It’s not a Fabergé egg,” said Pekkala. “It’s just a regular egg. And besides, what if someone hears you going on like that? You are a major of the NKVD. You have an image to uphold, which doesn’t include the loud and public adoration of your breakfast!”

Kirov looked around. “What do you mean ‘if someone hears me’? So what if they can hear me? What are they going to think—that I can’t shoot straight?”

“All right,” said Pekkala, “I admit I owe you an apology for that, but—”

“Forgive me for saying so, Inspector, but this talk about upholding an image—it’s no wonder you never get any women.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“The fact that you are asking me this question …” He paused. “That’s the answer to your question.”

Pekkala wagged his fork at Kirov. “I’m going to eat my breakfast now, and you can just carry on being strange if you want. The miracle of nourishment!” he sputtered.

After their meal, they left the cafe and walked across the road to the institute.

Kirov tried to open the door, but it was still locked. Once more, he pounded on it with his fist.

Finally the door opened just enough to let the head of an elderly woman appear. She had a big, square face and a blunt nose. A heavy, acrid smell, like sweat or ammonia, wafted out of the building. “This is a government institute!” she told them. “It is not open to the public.”

Kirov held out his NKVD pass book. “We are not the public.”

“We are exempt from routine inspection,” protested the woman.

“This is not routine,” said Pekkala.

The door opened a little farther, but the woman still blocked the entrance. “What is this about?”

“We are investigating a murder,” said Pekkala.

The color ran out of her face, what little had been there to begin with. “Our cadavers are supplied to us by the Central Hospital! Every one of them is cleared before—”

“Cadavers?” interrupted Pekkala.

Kirov winced. “Is that what that smell is?”

“We are looking for a man named Zalka,” Pekkala said to the woman, ignoring Kirov.

“Lev Zalka?” Her voice rose as she spoke his name. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

At last, she allowed them to come in, and they stepped into what had once been the main foyer of the bathhouse. Tiles covered the floors and huge pillars supported the roof. To Pekkala, it looked more like an ancient temple than a place where people went to swim.

“I am Comrade Doctor Dobriakova,” said the woman, nodding at them. She wore a starched white jacket, like those worn by doctors in the state hospitals, and thick, flesh-colored tights which made her legs look like wet clay. She did not ask them their names, but wasted no time before ushering them down the long main corridor. In rooms leading off on either side, the two inspectors saw animals in cages—monkeys, cats, and dogs. From those rooms came the odor they had smelled in the street—the sour reek of animals in captivity.

“What happens to these animals?” asked Kirov.

“They are used for research,” replied Dr. Dobriakova without turning around.

“And afterwards?” asked Pekkala.

“There is no afterwards,” replied the doctor.

As she spoke, Pekkala glimpsed the pale hands of a chimpanzee gripping the bars of its prison.

At the end of the corridor, they arrived at a door, painted cornflower blue, on which Pekkala could still read the word BATH, painted in sunflower yellow. Here, Dr. Dobriakova turned and faced them. “It does not surprise me,” she said in a low voice, “to learn that Comrade Zalka is involved in something illegal. I have always suspected him as a subversive. He is drunk most of the time.” She breathed in, ready to say more, but paused when she saw the two men draw their guns. “Do you really think that’s necessary?” she asked, staring at the weapons.

“We hope not,” replied Pekkala.

The woman cleared her throat. “You should prepare yourself for what you see in here,” she said.

Before either could ask why, Dr. Dobriakova swung the door wide. “Come along!” she ordered them.

They entered a high-roofed chamber, in the center of which was a swimming pool. Above it, supported by pillars like the ones they had seen when they first walked in, was a balcony that overlooked the pool. The warm, damp air smelled musty, like dead leaves in the autumn.

The water in the pool was almost black, not clear or glassy green, the way Pekkala had expected it to be. And in the middle of this pool was the head of a man, floating as if detached from its body.

The head spoke. “I was wondering when you would show up.” Then he held up a bottle and, with the other hand, twisted out a cork. As he did so, the bottle’s paper label, bearing the bright orange triangle of the State Vodka Monopoly, came unstuck from the glass and slithered into the pool. The man took a long drink and smacked his lips with satisfaction.

“Disgraceful!” hissed Dr. Dobriakova. “It’s not even lunchtime and you are already halfway through a bottle!”

“Leave me alone, you freak of nature,” said the man.

“You must be Professor Zalka,” interposed Pekkala.

Zalka lifted the bottle in a toast. “And you must be the police.”

“What are you doing in there?” asked Kirov.

At that moment, the blue door opened and a woman in a white nurse’s uniform walked in. She stopped, surprised to see two strangers in the bathhouse.

“These men are from the government,” explained Dr. Dobriakova. “They are investigating a murder, in which this imbecile”—she jabbed a finger towards Zalka—“has been involved!”

“We merely want to speak with Professor Zalka,” said Kirov.

“You don’t look as if you came to talk,” replied Zalka, nodding at the guns.

Pekkala turned to Kirov. “I guess we can put these away.”

The inspectors holstered their weapons.

“Your time is up, Lev,” said the nurse.

“And I was just getting comfortable,” he grumbled, as he made his way towards the edge of the pool.

“Why is that pool so dark?” Kirov asked Dr. Dobriakova.

“The water is maintained with the correct balance of tannins for the research subjects.”

Kirov blinked at her. “Subjects?”

Zalka had reached the edge of the pool, where the water was only knee-deep. At first glance, his pale and naked body appeared to be covered with dozens of gaping wounds. From these wounds oozed thin trickles of blood. It took a moment for Pekkala to realize that the wounds were actually leeches which had attached to his body and hung in bloated tassels from his arms and legs. As he floated in the shallow water, Zalka began plucking the leeches from his skin and throwing them back into the center of the pool. They landed with a splat and vanished into the murky liquid.

“Careful!” warned the nurse. “They are delicate creatures.”

“You are a delicate creature,” replied Zalka. “These”—he snatched another leech from his chest and flung it into the pool—“are the inventions of the same twisted god that invented Dr. Dobriakova.”

“As I’ve told you many times already, Comrade Zalka,” replied Dr. Dobriakova, going red in the face, “leeches play a valuable role in medical science.”

“So will you when they lay you out on an autopsy slab.”

“I should dismiss you!” shouted the doctor, rising up on the tips of her toes. Her voice echoed around the pillars. “And if I could find anyone else who would do this work, I certainly would!”

“But you won’t dismiss me,” smirked Zalka, “because you can’t find anyone else.”

Dr. Dobriakova’s mouth was open, ready to carry on the fight, when Pekkala interrupted.

“Professor Zalka,” he said, “we have a serious matter to discuss with you.”

“By all means,” replied Zalka.

Pekkala turned to see the nurse holding out a tangle of metal hoops and leather straps, which he realized was a leg brace.

“That’s yours?” asked Kirov.

“Unfortunately, yes,” replied Zalka. “The only time I don’t think about it is when I’m floating in this pool.”

“How long have you worn a brace?” asked Pekkala.

“Since July 10, 1914,” replied Zalka. “So long ago that I can’t even remember what it feels like to walk without it.”

Pekkala and Kirov looked at each other. Whoever they had chased through the forest on the day Nagorski died, it wasn’t Lev Zalka.

“How do you remember the date so precisely?” asked Pekkala.

“Because the day I strapped on that contraption was exactly one month after a car lost control in the French Grand Prix, then skidded off the track and right into the side of me.”

“The 1914 Grand Prix,” said Pekkala. “Nagorski won that race.”

“Of course he did,” replied Zalka. “I was his chief mechanic. I was standing at our pit stop when the car slammed into me.”

Now Pekkala remembered that Nagorski had mentioned the accident in which his chief mechanic had been badly hurt.

“If you wouldn’t mind helping,” said Zalka, his arms still raised towards them.

While Pekkala and Kirov supported him, the nurse handed Zalka a towel, which the crippled man wrapped around his waist. Then, with Zalka’s arms around their shoulders, they walked him to a chair. Once he was seated, the nurse gave him the brace, and he went through the process of strapping it to his left leg. Where the leather straps crossed over, the hair on Zalka’s leg had been worn away, leaving pale stripes in the flesh. The muscles of his withered thigh and calf were barely half the size of those on his right leg.

Dobriakova stood back and watched, arms folded. Her face was set in a frown which seemed permanently carved into the corners of her mouth and eyes.

Where the leeches had been on Zalka’s arms and chest, his skin showed grape-sized bull’s-eye welts. In the center of each one was a tiny red dot, where the leech had been attached. All over his body, like freckles, were the marks where other leeches had dug into his skin.

“Are you ready for your meal now?” asked the nurse.

Zalka looked up at her and smiled. “Marry me,” he pleaded.

She gave him a swat on the head and went out through the blue doors.

“Inspectors,” said Dobriakova, scowling at Zalka, “I’ll leave you to question this criminal!”

When she had gone, Zalka sighed with relief. “Better you with your guns than that woman with her moods.”

“Zalka,” asked Kirov, his voice a mixture of awe and disgust, “how can you do this?”

“Do what, Inspector?” replied Zalka.

Kirov pointed at the dingy water. “There! That!”

“Healthy leeches require a living host,” explained Zalka, “although preferably one who’s not intoxicated. As I tend to be these days.”

“I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about you!”

“I don’t have many options for employment, Inspector, but for one hour a day in the pool I make as much as I would in a nine-hour shift at a factory. That is, if I could get work at a factory. What I make here gives me enough time to carry on with my own research, a line of work for which I am, at the moment, tragically undercompensated.”

“Aren’t you worried about catching some kind of disease?”

“Unlike humans,” said Zalka, “leeches don’t carry disease.” He reached around to the back of his head, where he discovered another leech buried in his hair. As he slid his thumbnail under the place where the leech had attached itself to his skin, the leech curled around his thumb. He held it up admiringly. “They are very deliberate creatures. They drink blood and they have sex. You have to admire their sense of purpose.” Now his face became suddenly tense. “But you did not come to talk about leeches. You came to talk about Nagorski.”

“That is correct,” said Pekkala, “and until two minutes ago, you were our prime suspect for his murder.”

“I heard about what happened. I’d be lying if I told you I was sad to hear he’s gone. After all, it’s because of Nagorski that I have to bleed for a living, instead of designing engines, which is what I should be doing. But I’m better off now. The way Nagorski treated me was worse than anything those leeches ever did.”