The Bloody Meadow

Chapter Three

The Central Airport’s administrative buildings, workshops and hangars were surrounded by a thick white mist and Moscow felt a long way away. Korolev had been driven here at breakneck pace on the icy roads by Todorov, the young Chekist, fog notwithstanding. Now, in contrast, everything was still and silent except for the low murmur of conversation from two mechanics, one of them female, who were refuelling the tiny aeroplane that was taking off for Odessa in less than half an hour.

‘A Kalinin K-5,’ a voice behind him said and Korolev turned to see a burly figure dressed in an ankle-length fur coat. The man’s black eyes were the only visible part of him, what with his round fur hat and turned-up collar, but Korolev had the impression of intense watchfulness all the same, as if he were being assessed for some reason. ‘It’s a good plane. Still, best to dress up warm, Comrade – the cabin is heated, but all the same it can get cold up there.’

Korolev turned to examine the aircraft once again. It didn’t look very solid, but that was surely a good thing if it was meant to fly up to the heavens.

‘I don’t know much about them,’ he said, conscious of a certain skittishness in his lower stomach.

‘Oh, you don’t need to worry. She’s a beauty, I fly this route seven or eight times a year. She’s always on time, more or less.’

The fur hat slapped the aircraft’s flank appreciatively as if it were a trusted charger, and its thin metal skin responded with a wobbly boom.

‘She has a top speed of nearly two hundred kilometres an hour – can you imagine? And she’ll take us all the way to Kursk in one go. We’ll be in Odessa in the early afternoon if the wind is behind us and they refuel quickly. There are sometimes delays, of course.’ The man shrugged his shoulders and Korolev nodded his understanding. There were often delays, but even the possibility of being in Odessa within seven hours was astonishing. It had taken him nearly a month to get back from Odessa when he’d been discharged from the army in ’twenty-two, and that must be more or less the same distance. He put a gloved hand to one of the struts and pulled – it seemed sturdy.

‘It doesn’t look like much,’ Korolev said. ‘I mean – to go so fast and up so high.’

‘She’s reliable,’ the hat said firmly. ‘The new planes may be quicker and bigger, but this one’s never let us down. Am I right, Antonina Vladimirovna?’

‘You are indeed, Comrade Belakovsky.’ The young mechanic smiled – white teeth flashing in the light from a lantern. It occurred to Korolev that the girl was perhaps too young for such a responsible job.

‘You should make a film about her,’ she continued.

Belakovsky laughed, revealing a pock-marked nose and a scrubby salt and pepper moustache that nestled under widely spaced nostrils. Korolev thought he recognized the fellow from a newspaper, or perhaps a newsreel, and held out his hand in greeting.

‘Korolev,’ Korolev said. ‘Alexei Dmitriyevich. Moscow CID.’

‘Nice to meet you, Comrade Korolev. Belakovsky, Igor Zakharovich. And what takes you to Odessa?’ Korolev was considering how to respond when a officious-looking woman in a thick padded coat came out of the terminal building.

‘Comrade Belakovsky? Comrade Korolev? We must weigh you now.’ She waved them towards the doorway.

‘The plane can only carry so much weight, Korolev,’ Belakovsky explained, seeing his surprise.

Sure enough, inside the terminal a pilot in a long leather flying coat was standing on some scales with a canvas postal bag in one hand and a half-smoked papirosa in the other.

‘One hundred and six kilos,’ said the female clerk, writing it into a ledger. ‘You’re putting on weight, Anton Ivanovich.’

‘It’s the post,’ the pilot answered gruffly, sucking on the paper tube of the cigarette, and Korolev was sure his voice was slurred. He certainly looked the worse for wear. At least his colleague, a younger fellow with a clean shirt poking out from his fur collar, had bothered to put a razor to his chin. Unless, of course, he didn’t yet have to shave – it was possible, he supposed. The boy was very young – but surely there would be exams and so on. They wouldn’t let just anyone fly such a valuable piece of machinery, would they?

The passengers lined up and Korolev saw that he was in privileged company. A short, round-chested officer with a general’s insignia on his collar and a cluster of medals visible underneath his open greatcoat was next in line. Belakovsky took Korolev’s arm.

‘Comrade Korolev, you must meet Stepan Pavlovich. You’ll have read his articles in Izvestia. Lomatkin – the journalist? Comrade Lomatkin, this is Korolev from Petrovka Street. A detective, I’m guessing.’

Korolev shook the hand of a thin young man, handsome in a bookish sort of way, who looked slightly nervous. Perhaps it was his first time flying as well.

The next fellow on the scales had Party cadre written all over him – a pale ascetic-looking fellow in a long brown coat that looked even more military than the general’s. He stood unsmiling, a small leather suitcase in his hand.

‘Seventy-five kilos, Comrade Bagraev,’ the weigher said. ‘Captain Korolev, please.’

Korolev walked over and took his turn on the scales, sucking in his breath. He hadn’t had time to pack anything more than his arrest bag but, still, he wasn’t a small man.

‘Ninety-one kilos,’ the clerk said, and Korolev could see the Party bigwig’s disapproval as he stepped down. It didn’t seem to matter that Korolev was a good four inches taller than him, the fellow clearly had him marked down as some sort of speculator, well fed on contraband butter.

‘What happens if there’s too much weight?’ Korolev asked Lomatkin in a quiet voice, so as not to be overheard by the disapproving Bagraev.

‘At this time of year they have to be careful with ice building up on the wings.’

Korolev looked out through the nearest window at the aeroplane and imagined it caked with ice.

‘What happens then?’ he asked and Lomatkin shrugged in a manner that left Korolev in no doubt that too much ice wasn’t a recipe for a long life.

When all the passengers had been weighed and their names checked off, the younger pilot and the clerk examined the ledger and the latter flicked balls back and forth on an abacus. Their faces were grave and Korolev felt every one of his ninety-one kilos, bag included.

‘Captain Korolev?’ a voice asked. He looked round to see blue eyes in a pale pudgy face only a few centimetres away from his own. Korolev nodded and the man held out a thick envelope.

‘Goldberg. Colonel Rodinov sent me with a package for you. To read on the plane. Please sign this receipt.’

Korolev signed with the pen the Chekist handed him and accepted the offering, feeling its weight, thinking someone must have worked like a dog to get it ready.

‘Captain Korolev, would you come forward please?’ the weighing clerk asked and he caught the tail of a smug glance from the Party bigwig, but Goldberg, assessing the situation in an instant, walked across to the clerk and whispered in her ear. The clerk asked a question, her face seeming to lose a little colour, and the Chekist nodded.

‘Excuse me, Captain Korolev, I made a mistake,’ the clerk said, her voice uncertain, and looked down at the list again. ‘Comrade Bagraev, please – could I ask you come to the desk?’

The Party boss shot Korolev a look of irritation and walked brusquely over to the clerk, his whole demeanour expressing impatience.

‘What is the meaning of this? I’m due in Kursk this afternoon on Party business of the highest importance-’ Bagraev began, but his protest was interrupted by Goldberg tugging his sleeve. Bagraev looked at him in annoyance but stopped speaking. Goldberg leant in close and whispered once again. It was interesting to Korolev to see how quickly the irritation disappeared. Bagraev’s mouth opened as though to speak and hung there for a moment, making him look like a beached fish. He darted a look at Korolev, nodded sharply to the Chekist, then turned to walk out of the building without another word.

Goldberg came back. ‘Is there anything else I can assist with?’

‘No,’ Korolev said, conscious that everyone in the building was looking at him. ‘You’ve been more than helpful already, Comrade.’

‘A pleasure,’ Goldberg said in his quiet voice. ‘You’ll be met by Major Mushkin at the airport. The colonel asked me to tell you that he expects to hear from you this evening – the major will arrange the call. Enjoy the flight.’ He touched a finger to his hat in salute and turned to leave.

Outside the fog still lingered as the passengers walked across the packed snow towards the aeroplane. At first Korolev thought the bone-shuddering noise came from the Kalinin’s single engine, but then, through the mist, dark shadows came in a line from the left, accelerating as their propellers struggled to lift them into the sky. The roar of engines felt solid – as though someone were pushing at his chest – and even Korolev recognized that the fuselages belonged to bombers. They came past, one after the other, a chain of fat black silhouettes, their propellers creating a snowstorm that forced Korolev to look through squinted eyes.

‘Come on, Comrade,’ someone shouted in his ear, and pushed him towards the plane. ‘The imperialists will think twice about attacking us now we have bombers.’

It was the young pilot, and Korolev nodded, knowing what terrible weapons such planes could carry, and followed the boy up the steps to the cramped cabin. The pilot turned and gave him a blanket from a pile.

‘Here you are, Comrade.’ He looked at Korolev’s well-worn coat and handed him a second.

Korolev settled into his seat and looked out as part of the wing dropped down at the back and the plane juddered forward, turning to the left. He could see burning oil drums marking a way forward across the flattened snow and he made the sign of the cross in his pocket, feeling his stomach squirm as the plane bounced along, slowly picking up pace. Surely only birds and the Lord belonged above – if only he could have taken the damned train instead. The window offered him a distorted reflection that gave him no comfort – his face looked as pale as a choirboy’s surplice and as miserable as a bereaved mother.

‘Christ protect me,’ Korolev muttered as the plane lurched into the air before landing again with a solid bump and a worrying slide. He was thankful no one could hear him with all the racket. Finally, with the engine whining like an angry swarm of giant hornets, the plane soared upwards and the lights disappeared into the mist.

For a while they flew in a grey world, completely alone, as the plane hauled itself upward, metre by metre, the pressure in Korolev’s ears building as he desperately tried to swallow, before, eventually, they left the milky sea beneath them and he saw a splash of blue sky to the left, which slowly grew so that the dawn sun shone into the cabin, bathing the other passengers in gold. Korolev could see the suburbs of Moscow far beneath him, or at least the rooftops, and a frozen curve of the Moskva River where the morning mist had cleared a thousand feet below. He glanced away from the window and caught Lomatkin looking over at him. Korolev nodded back with what he hoped was polite enthusiasm, but he didn’t like this flying one bit. Not one tiny little bit.

After a few minutes of gritting his teeth so hard he thought there was a chance they might crumble to dust, Korolev decided it would be best to occupy his mind. His gaze fell on Goldberg’s thick envelope and he opened it.

Whoever had prepared the papers had fixed a photograph of Lenskaya to the first page and he quickly replaced it in the envelope, although not before taking a quick squint at it. She was unsmiling in the picture, looking to the side and downwards, her dark hair held back with a ribbon. Pretty, clearly, and there was a certain sexuality about her that was unusual for an official picture. Still, he knew better than to rely on impressions created from a photograph. Whoever had said the camera never lied – well, they’d been lying.

Reading through her Party record he decided that, if nothing else, she must have been tough. An orphan who’d battled her way into the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Party, then the State Film School, and finally the Party itself. Impressive. What was more, her professional career had been exemplary – each teacher, each project leader, each professor, each department head had congratulated her in the most flattering terms. ‘A comrade of the highest moral integrity and the greatest technical proficiency’ was the evaluation of some film director he’d never heard of. He turned a page and came to a sudden stop when Belakovsky’s name caught his eye. He looked up, but Igor Zakharovich, hatless now, was paying no attention to him, being more interested in what was passing beneath them. Korolev returned to the papers – praise, of course, this time for her invaluable assistance on a fact-finding mission to the United States of America two years before. Belakovsky had headed a delegation from the Main Directorate of the Cinematic and Photographic Industries – GUKF for short – and now Korolev remembered where he knew the man from. Belakovsky was the GUKF chairman, no less. An interesting coincidence that he should be on the same plane. Korolev looked at Belakovsky once again, curious. Lenskaya had been admitted to the Moscow orphanage in ’twenty-three at the age of twelve. That was her first bit of luck, as back then most orphans had had to take their chances on the streets. The Lord alone knew how many citizens had died in the course of the Civil War and the famines and diseases that had come with it. Twice as many as in the German War, they said. Maybe more still. And the State had struggled to cope with the aftermath. Still, she must already have been able to read and write, as one of her first acts of political usefulness had been to assist in the teaching of the younger children, and perhaps that had given her the roof over her head that many in the same position had struggled to find.

There was no mention of Lenskaya’s parents, though, or where she’d come from, or indeed where she’d acquired her education, and no information as to how she’d ended up in a Moscow orphanage, and that bothered him. After all, if she was able to help teach other children how to read and write, she’d surely have been able to tell the orphanage about her past. He made a mental note to ask Yasimov to look into it. Perhaps the Party record had been cleaned up to remove an embarrassing detail. She’d had a powerful friend – and such things were not uncommon. It might be nothing, but it would be worth looking into if this turned out to be more than just another suicide.

He turned to the next document. The author’s name and its recipient were blacked out, but it was a report on the film that Lenskaya had been working on when she died. He skipped through the background on the film director Savchenko – he wasn’t so uncultured that Savchenko’s reputation as a premier artist of Soviet cinema was unfamiliar to him. But here was another interesting thing – Savchenko was one more person who’d recently returned from Hollywood. He checked the dates. More interesting still, they’d all been there at the same time. Savchenko had tried to make some socialist cowboy film, or so Babel had told him once. It had been a failure, and he’d come back to Moscow with his tail between his legs. It was a reasonable assumption therefore that this film, The Bloody Meadow, was an attempt by Savchenko to re-establish his socialist credentials.

Of course, the subject matter of the film was tricky: the murder of the ten-year-old Pioneer Pavlik Morozov by his family when he betrayed them as wreckers was an event that could be looked at in different ways. As far as the Party was concerned, the message was clear – even the youngest citizen owed loyalty not to themselves or their family, but only to the State and the Party – even to the point of death. Some citizens, however, and Korolev was one of them, might just harbour the suspicion that the brat had got what was coming to him. So it would be important for the director of such a film to make sure that the correct message was received by all, and that might be a difficult proposition. It seemed this was also the opinion of the author of the report. Concerns have been raised at the highest levels which have led to constructive criticism being passed on to Nikolai Sergeevich Savchenko by GUKF Director Belakovsky and others in explicit and forthright terms. Such criticism has resulted in the reshooting of several scenes and the hiring of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel to assist in rewriting parts of the scenario to place the political aspects of the case at the heart of the film. However, it would appear that N.S. Savchenko has persisted in his failure to address the Morozov incident correctly and has proved unable to show it as an unequivocal example of selfless socialist heroism. Furthermore the changes made by I.E. Babel have not reflected the direction required by the Party. Instead the story is fragmented, portrays sympathy to the traitors and appears ambivalent about Soviet Power. Comrade Belakovsky has made repeated efforts to persuade N.S. Savchenko of the necessity of developing the film within the bounds of socialist realism rather than bourgeois concepts of dramatic and psychological drama. It is to be feared that, following his visit to the United States, N.S. Savchenko is no longer capable, or willing, to portray the murder of Pavlik Morozov within the correct socialist parameters.

Korolev let out a quiet whistle. He didn’t understand exactly what this fellow was going on about, but he understood enough to work out that Savchenko was in trouble up to his neck, as was Korolev’s friend Babel. Korolev pulled out his notebook and made some notes, not convinced any of this was relevant to the case, but not prepared to discount it either. If whoever had written the report was of the opinion that Savchenko’s approach to the film was causing concern amongst Party members involved in the production, then that meant there had been tension, and possibly fear, amongst the cast and crew. If criticism like this was being voiced publicly, it could be as lethal as an aimed bullet. And if the girl had been the subject of criticism, it could be the reason for her suicide.

There was more to be read, including a brief note on Babel, which he took a moment to peruse, pleased to see that Ezhov himself considered the writer politically reliable, if recently unproductive, but by now the aircraft’s vibration was beginning to make him feel unwell and so he returned the papers to the envelope and turned to look out of the window, not without a further twinge of nervousness.

They were flying over a forest that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see but at such low altitude that Korolev was able to make out individual branches, and the snow that weighed them down. The sense of speed was quite terrifying as the long shadow of the aeroplane raced across the snow-dusted treetops in the flat winter sun. They were following a long straight road which was completely deserted until a cart drawn by two horses appeared beneath them. Korolev caught a glimpse of the terrified face of the peasant as he turned to see what devil was pursuing him, and how the horses seemed to lift in their traces as the plane roared over them. And then they were gone, vanished far behind them.

Soviet Power, Korolev thought to himself. It had a way of coming up on you when you least expected it.