The Twelfth Department

CHAPTER FORTY

It wasn’t just the heat that made Korolev sweat as he walked to the car-it was also the presence of the envelope hidden under his jacket. He hadn’t seen any of Zaitsev’s goons since Dubinkin’s encounter with Svalov in the park-but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Yesterday they’d been open about following him, but today they might have decided to be invisible, and Korolev had tailed enough people to know if the job was done well he wouldn’t spot them until it was too late. With that in mind, the report felt like a ticking bomb; he needed to put it somewhere safe-fast.

It was only when he had the car moving that he allowed himself to take a quick look in the mirror. No one was visibly following him and the street seemed empty enough. He should have been reassured-but instead he felt as though an invisible band were tightening around his chest, making each breath a battle. He found himself moving his shoulders, trying to shake some of the tension from them, trying to breathe more slowly as he did so, remembering that Yuri’s life was at stake. It wasn’t often that anger calmed him, but today seemed to be the exception.

As he drove, he ran over the events of the previous week, trying to put everything in its right place and to make sense of it all. A pattern was forming, most certainly. Of course, a few pieces of the puzzle were still missing, but the shape of the thing was becoming clear. And when, or rather if, he came up with the full picture, his guess was he’d know which of the two colonels was most likely to provide him and Yuri with a way out of this mess.

* * *

He parked at the back of Shtange’s building. He hadn’t bothered to look at this man Bramson’s file earlier, but he needed to now. And he wanted to see if he could find a safe place to leave the report while he was at it.

“Comrade Captain,” Kuznetsky said, when he opened the door to Shtange’s apartment.

“Is Sergeant Slivka here?”

“She called in half an hour ago-she’s been at the tram depot talking to drivers. To see if anyone had come across that Priudski fellow.”

Korolev handed him the keys to the car. “Go and find her-I need to talk to her. Take the car. I parked it around the back.”

“At your command, Comrade Captain.” The Militiaman hesitated.

“Well?” A thought occurred to Korolev. “You can’t drive?”

“No, Comrade Captain, I can drive all right. I just thought you’d want to know, the doctor’s wife came with some French gentlemen-not long after you left. They took most of the doctor’s belongings away with them. Lieutenant Dubinkin said it was all right, but I thought I’d tell you anyway.”

“Everything?”

“There wasn’t much. His books were already gone, of course, but she took what was left-they’d a car. The Comrade Lieutenant said the books were currently under investigation by another department, but that he’d put in a request for her. She wasn’t happy about that, I can tell you. Also there was a coat of hers missing. She wasn’t happy about that either.”

“A coat?” Korolev said, curious. “Did she say what kind of coat?”

Kuznetsky took his notebook out of his pocket. “I made a note. A long black overcoat. French. Large padded shoulders. Four buttons. Why would they only pad the shoulders? You’d get no warmth from padded shoulders on their own.”

“Decadent capitalist fashion, Kuznetsky. Not something that should bother the likes of us. What was Comrade Dubinkin doing here? I thought he’d gone about some business for us.”

He was supposed to be at the Lubyanka, as it happened, searching out Priudski’s file.

“He came back about ten minutes after you left. He was looking through the files.”

Which he was entitled to do-but why? What had he been looking for?

“Thank you, Kuznetsky,” Korolev said, expecting him to leave, but the Militiaman showed no inclination to do so.

“Something else as well?”

“That thing you asked me to do, Comrade Captain.”

Korolev had almost forgotten that earlier he’d asked Kuznetsky to talk to the local telephone switchboard and the one for Leadership House.

“I remember-the telephone exchanges.”

“I’d a bit of trouble there, I have to tell you. So, in the end-well-I had to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.”

The Militiaman looked remorseful, guilty, and frightened all at the same time.

“Someone you shouldn’t have?”

“I don’t know what came over me, Comrade Captain.”

“You pretended to be me?”

“No, Comrade Captain. Worse still.”

Perhaps it was his nerves, but the logical answer left him trying to suppress appalled hilarity.

“Not Dubinkin?”

Kuznetsky nodded, his head dropping.

“Anyway, the thing is, Comrade Captain, both Dr. Shtange’s number and Professor Azarov’s are restricted-as in, not all operators are permitted to connect them and there’s a procedure when they do. If I hadn’t pretended to be the Comrade Lieutenant then how would I have found out what calls they’d made?”

“You could have asked him to make the call himself.”

This seemed to be something Kuznetsky hadn’t considered-he put a hand to his forehead as if he’d been struck. Korolev felt like shaking him-this was the last thing he wanted to deal with on this of all days.

“What do you think the Comrade Lieutenant would make of you pretending to be him?”

“I think he wouldn’t be happy,” Kuznetsky said, his face looking as if it had been whitewashed.

Korolev forced himself to relax. “I suspect you’re right. So we’d best forget about this little inquiry of yours then-people might misconstrue your intentions. Understood?”

“Yes, Comrade Captain.”

“But Kuznetsky, before we forget completely, who did they call?”

Kuznetsky swallowed and his eyes managed to focus on Korolev. He took his notebook from his pocket.

“Professor Azarov made two calls on the morning of his death. The first to a Colonel Zaitsev at the Lubyanka just after nine o’clock and a second to the Bersenevka Militia Station at 11:05.”

The second phone call would have been Galina Matkina calling to report the professor’s murder. As for the first, Korolev opened his mouth to say something and then thought better of it. There were times when it was best to think carefully before you said or did anything and this was one of them.

“Also, someone telephoned Dr. Shtange from the Azarov apartment on Tuesday morning-at eight o’clock.”

Korolev decided not to say anything about this piece of information either. Colonel Zaitsev and his men were still investigating the Azarov murder at that stage, but they’d left the apartment by then, hadn’t they? Or had they?

“What about Priudski’s phone?”

“Four outgoing calls to the same number at a quarter past eleven, a quarter past twelve, at twenty to two and at three-thirty. Also a call to Petrovka at half past one.”

Korolev had made the 1:30 call-to talk to Popov.

“Do we know whose number the other one is?”

Kuznetsky’s misery seemed to deepen. “I called the number and asked who it belonged to, but they told me to mind my own business.”

“Did you say who you were?”

“No. But they’ll only have to call the operator to find out where the call came from.”

“I see. The Comrade Lieutenant’s friends, do you think?”

Kuznetsky really did look as if he were having the worst of days.

“Kuznetsky, we’ll keep quiet about this. If it blows up, which I don’t think it will-well, I asked you to make the calls and I’ll square it with the powers that be, all right? As it happens, this is very useful information. Just keep quiet about it for the present.”

“Of course, Comrade Captain.”

Kuznetsky looked relieved. He tore the pages from his notebook and handed them to him.

“You asked about calls from this number as well.” Kuznetsky nodded to the telephone on Shtange’s desk.

“Go on.”

“Two-one to the doctor’s wife in Leningrad on Monday evening and one to the Commissariat for Health on Monday afternoon.”

Nothing odd there at least.

“Thanks, Kuznetsky. Now, go and find Slivka.”

Korolev followed the youngster to the door, thinking about the professor’s call to Zaitsev and wondering what might have been said in it. As for Priudski’s calls-they’d no doubt been to his NKVD handler, whoever that was. Maybe he’d worked for Zaitsev’s Twelfth Department-which would explain Korolev’s reception at the institute, as well as the colonel’s showing up at Azarovs’ apartment later that afternoon.

* * *

When Kuznetsky had left, Korolev locked the apartment’s newly repaired door, took the report from under his arm, and walked through to the study. He sat down at Shtange’s desk and placed the envelope in front of him. He looked at it for a moment, reached forward to open it, then paused, pushed back his chair and pulled out the bottom drawer of the desk. There was a cavity beneath it. It would do. Temporarily at least.

Satisfied he had somewhere to hide the document quickly if needed, he slipped the report out of the envelope and ran his finger along its edge-some of the blood-browned pages were stuck together and couldn’t be unstuck, at least not without ripping them, but they were relatively few-and mainly at the beginning, where it seemed Dr. Shtange had written an introduction. The name of the person to whom that introduction was addressed was obscured, but it was someone familiar with the institute-“as you indicated,” “as you are aware” … It seemed clear from its blunt findings that the report had never been intended for general circulation.

The report was divided into four parts. The first section concerned the scientific basis of the research being undertaken by the institute and, to judge by the notes in the margin, Azarov had taken exception to many of the points made. The next was entitled “Procedural Failures and Inconsistencies” and Azarov had scribbled on much of this as well. The third part, by far the shortest, was entitled “Ethical Considerations,” while the fourth and last of the main sections covered “Financial Irregularities.”

Finally there was a brief conclusion. In Shtange’s opinion, Korolev read, Azarov should be replaced and the institute’s research restricted to the few areas where progress was achievable-and even then a complete overhaul of the research methodology would be necessary. It seemed Shtange considered that nearly all the work done up until this point had been an expensive waste of time.

Korolev turned back to the beginning and began to discover exactly what the institute had been up to. Telepathy, it seemed, had indeed been one area of research-although Shtange considered that there was no scientific basis for it and the results, so far, had produced nothing to change his mind. Korolev was curious as to what “re-education and mental manipulation of enemies” might be, and discovered the aim was to scrub enemies’ minds of counterrevolutionary bias and to replace it with pro-Soviet thinking. Shtange set out the means by which Azarov had attempted to cleanse the subjects’ minds and it was a disturbing list-surgery, electricity, a surprising variety of drugs, sensory deprivation, fear-the list went on and on.

Some of Shtange’s summaries set Korolev’s hair on end:

Surgery has certainly succeeded in erasing counterrevolutionary thinking, but only by erasing all mental processes permanently. In other cases, surgical intervention left subjects physically or mentally incapacitated-sometimes both. On several occasions surgical experimentation has resulted in the death of the subject on the operating table. There is no evidence that any of the professor’s surgical techniques have resulted in material progress, despite claims to the contrary.

Electrical treatment had been more effective in Shtange’s view-“Subjects’ memories have been erased, along with preconceptions of behavior and thought, when repeated high-voltage electrical shocks to the cortex have been administered for sustained periods.” The problem was putting the correct thinking back in, it seemed, and Shtange recommended this as one of the few areas where further research might be undertaken-although he referred the reader to reservations that he would address later on in the report.

By this time, however, Korolev was feeling sick to his stomach. It was clear to him that, in among all the medical jargon and bureaucratic dodging, these brain doctors had been doing things that human beings shouldn’t damned well do to other human beings. And what was more, he couldn’t help but remember the small beds he’d seen at the institute. Had these rats been opening up the heads of youngsters? Electrocuting children? The orphanage director had said many of the boys had come back from the institute with small scars on their cheeks-was this the explanation? He thought of the scar on Goldstein’s face and the terrible thought occurred to him that his Yuri was, likely as not, in the hands of people who’d something to do with this. He gritted his teeth and read on.

Now Shtange was talking about new methods for recovering information from “reluctant” sources. All those methods that had been attempted for “re-education” had also been tried for this purpose, as well as more traditional methods of torture. Because that’s what they’d been doing-torturing those who’d been held there. Korolev remembered the strange cells and their prison stench. If he’d ever had any doubt as to what the place had been for, this report explained it to him in detail. And alongside each of Shtange’s negative comments, Azarov had written a defense. In some places his writing was illegible-written with a hand so heavy it had torn the paper. But in others some sort of logic was apparent-if logic was possible from such a man.

And so it went on, and on, and on. Anything that could be done to mine a man’s mind, to change it, stretch it, or compress it-had been tried. Thankfully the scientific basis of most of what the professor had attempted had been questioned by the doctor. The section that covered research irregularities was almost unreadable, as the professor-at least, Korolev presumed it was the professor-had scribbled out entire paragraphs. But from what Korolev could make of it, there was an established way of doing these things, and the professor had done it the wrong way-stumbling around looking for a quick solution, rather than taking it step by step. When Shtange had moved on to ethical irregularities, the professor’s notes had seemed calmer-“Bourgeois Morality!” he’d written beside a paragraph in which Shtange had questioned the use of humans for such research. “Necessary sacrifices for the greater cause of socialism,” had been his comment when Shtange had questioned the deaths of so many of the subjects. And beside the paragraph that had confirmed Korolev’s worst fears-children had indeed been used and in nearly every aspect of the research-Azarov had written a brief defense in the margin: “Children have proved the most pliant research subjects-great progress has been made thanks to their inclusion in experimental activities.”

Korolev put his hand over his mouth when he read this, his stomach plummeting. He swore to himself that if the professor hadn’t already been dead then he himself would have done the job. Cheerfully.

But it was the section that dealt with financial irregularities that caught Korolev’s particular attention-unaccounted-for expenditures, inflated prices paid for basic equipment, salaries paid to nonexistent employees. In Shtange’s opinion, the institute’s budget had been stripped of large quantities of the foreign currency allocated to it for the purchase of equipment, books, periodicals, and any number of other items from abroad-and irregularities were apparent in every aspect of the finances. Shtange had no idea who was stealing from the NKVD on such a scale, but considered it imperative that it was investigated immediately.

But the professor knew, because he’d written one name, over and over again, beside each allegation.

Zaitsev.

Zaitsev.

Zaitsev.