Archive 17 (6 page)

The convicts, those who could see out, stared at the dreary procession of barrels with the dull, uncomprehending expressions of transported cattle.

But Pekkala knew what they contained, and he shuddered as he watched them going by. In certain camps, particularly those which were not proving to be as profitable as expected, men who died were packed into these barrels. Their corpses were doused with formaldehyde and then exported all over the country, to be sold as medical cadavers.

In Siberia, the prisoners said, even the dead work for Dalstroy.

After the transport had passed by, Pekkala caught the smell of preserving fluid, familiar to him from his father’s undertaking business back in Finland, drifting sweet and sickening in the cold air.

The locomotive engine roared as it began to move again, but no sooner were the wagons rolling than there was a great screeching of brakes and the whole convoy lurched to a stop. A few minutes later, the train backed once more into the siding, the wagon doors were opened, and the guards ordered everybody out.

The prisoners found themselves in a desolate field of shin-deep
snow. The freezing wind cut through their clothes, stirring up white phantoms from beneath their feet.

Some prisoners immediately tried to climb into the wagons again, but the guards held them back.

“What happened?” asked Savushkin.

“The brakes are frozen,” said the guard. “The wheels are slipping. The whole train could come off the rails.”

“How long will we be here?”

“Could be an hour,” replied the guard. “Could be more. The last time this happened we were stuck all night.”

“And you won’t let us back inside until morning?” Savushkin asked.

“We have to take the weight off the wheel springs, or else they might snap from the cold when the train gets moving.” The guard gestured towards a stand of pine and birch trees in the distance. “Head over there. The whistle will sound when it’s time to go again.”

Pekkala and Savushkin set off towards the woods.

Several others followed, heads bowed against the gusts and arms folded across their chest, but they soon gave up and returned to the train, where men were building walls of snow as shelter from the wind.

Ahead, in the grove of trees, the bony trunks of birch appeared and disappeared like a mirage among the sheets of snow.

“We’re all going to freeze to death if they don’t let us back on that train by nightfall!” Savushkin had to shout to make himself heard.

Pekkala knew the other prisoner was right. He also knew the guards didn’t seem to care how many people died en route to the camps. He stumbled forward, feeling the heat drain from the center of his body. Already he’d lost sensation in his ears and nose and fingers.

When they finally reached the trees, Pekkala and Savushkin began to dig a hole around the base of a pine tree, where the snow
had drifted chest deep. Protected by its spread of lower branches, they would have a place completely sheltered from the wind.

“I’ll find some fallen branches to lay out on the ground,” Pekkala told Savushkin. “You keep digging.”

Savushkin nodded and went back to work. With his hair and eyebrows rimed in frost, he looked as if he’d aged a hundred years since they left the train.

For the next few minutes, Pekkala staggered through the drifts, gathering deadfall. The branches of the white birch, sheathed in ice, clattered above him like a wind chime made of bones. Arriving back at the hollow with nothing more than a handful of rotten twigs, Pekkala stopped to tear some boughs from a nearby pine tree. While he wrestled with the evergreen branches, he did not hear the person approaching from behind.

“I remember you now,” said a voice.

Pekkala spun around.

The knife-cut man stood right in front of him. “This is the last place on earth I expected to see you, Inspector Pekkala. That’s why I couldn’t place you at first.”

Pekkala said nothing, but only watched and waited.

“I doubt you remember me, but that is understandable,” said the man, brushing his fingertips over his scars. “During my stay in the Butyrka prison, the guards left me with a souvenir I will never forget, just as I have never forgotten that you were the one who arrested me.”

“I have arrested many people,” replied Pekkala. “That is my job.”

The man’s cold-reddened nostrils twitched as he breathed in and out. He did not appear to be carrying a weapon, but that did nothing to comfort Pekkala.

“I don’t know why you are here,” the man continued. “Believe me, it is a comfort to know that you and I are going to the same place, but comfort is not enough, not nearly enough to pay the debt you owe for what you’ve done to me.”

Pekkala dropped the twigs he had been carrying. His frozen hands clenched into fists.

“Do you have any friends, Inspector? Any still alive?” The man was taunting him. “They’re all gone, aren’t they, Inspector? They left you here to wander in the wilderness, the last of your kind on this earth.”

It flashed across Pekkala’s mind that his whole life had come down to this.

Suddenly, the prisoner threw up his arms and fell backwards. His legs had been pulled out from under him. In the next instant, a creature emerged from the ground. Scuttling like a giant crab out of the earth, Savushkin set upon the man.

With arms flailing, he rained down blows upon the convict, who fought back with equal ferocity, clawing at Savushkin and tearing the shirt from his back, but it did nothing to prevent the hammer strikes of Savushkin’s fists.

“Enough!” shouted Pekkala, sickened by the sound of breaking bones and teeth as the man’s face caved in.

Savushkin did not seem to hear. In a frenzy he continued his attack, smashing his torn knuckles against the prisoner’s battered face.

“Stop!” Pekkala set his hand upon Savushkin’s shoulder.

Savushkin whirled around, teeth bared and his eyes gone wild. For an instant he did not even seem to recognize Pekkala.

“It’s done,” whispered Pekkala.

Savushkin blinked. In that moment he returned to his senses. He stepped back, wiping the blood from his hands.

The knife-cut man was barely recognizable. He coughed up a splatter of cherry-red blood, which poured down the sides of his mouth. Seeing the color of that blood, Pekkala knew the sphenopalatine artery had been severed. There was nothing that could be done for him. His eyes rolled back in his head. A moment later, he shuddered and died.

“I think it’s time I introduced myself,” said Savushkin. “And as a friend,” he added.

“You have already proven that,” replied Pekkala.

“Not exactly, Inspector. I am Lieutenant Commissar Savushkin of the Bureau of Special Operations. I would shake your hand, but”—he held up his battered fists—“perhaps some other time.”

“Special Operations?” asked Pekkala. “I don’t understand. Why are you on the train?”

“I was assigned to protect you. Comrade Stalin himself gave the order. No one else knows I am here, not the guards on the train or even the commandant of Borodok. You almost gave me a heart attack when you didn’t show up at the station. I thought I would be traveling all the way to Siberia for nothing. I kept thinking you must be in disguise. Until the moment I set eyes on you, it never occurred to me you would be hiding in plain sight.”

Hearing those words, Pekkala thought back to his days of training with Chief Inspector Vassileyev, head of the Tsar’s Secret Police.

Vassileyev drilled into Pekkala’s mind the importance of blending into different surroundings in order to carry out an investigation. To train Pekkala in the “Art of Disappearance,” as he called it, Vassileyev constructed a series of elaborate games which he referred to as “Field Exercises.”

Every Friday morning, while the streets of St. Petersburg bustled with people on their way to work, Vassileyev would vanish into the crowds. One hour later, Pekkala himself would set out, with the task of tracking down his mentor. Each week Vassileyev would choose a different part of the city. Sometimes he walked along quiet mansion-lined streets. Other times he chose one of the bustling markets. His favorite location, however, was the slums which bordered the northeast end of the city
.

In the first month of these Field Exercises, Pekkala failed consistently to locate Vassileyev. There were times when the chief inspector would be
standing almost in front of him and still Pekkala could not see through the disguises. Once, Pekkala hired a droshky to transport him around the district, thinking he would have a better chance of spotting Vassileyev if he moved more quickly through the streets. In desperation, Pekkala explained his predicament to the driver. Caught up in the game, the old man whipped up his horse and Pekkala spent the next two hours clinging to the sides of the open carriage while they careened through the streets in search of Vassileyev. In the end, confounded once again, Pekkala climbed down to pay the driver
.

“You have already paid for the ride,” said the old man
.

Pekkala, wallet in hand, glanced up to see what the driver meant and only then realized, to his dismay, that the old man was, in fact, Vassileyev
.

After these humiliating defeats, the two men would walk back to Okhrana headquarters. Along the way, Vassileyev would explain the tricks of his craft. Considering that Vassileyev had lost part of his right leg to an anarchist bomb years ago and now stumped about on a wooden prosthesis, Pekkala was amazed at how quickly the man could move
.

“Merely throwing on a new set of clothes is not enough,” explained Vassileyev. “Your disguise must have a narrative, so that people will be lured into the story of your life. Once they become lost in fathoming the details, they will fail to see the magnitude of your illusion.”

“Couldn’t I just wear a hat?” asked Pekkala
.

“Of course!” replied Vassileyev, oblivious to Pekkala’s sarcasm. “Hats are important. But what kind of hat? No single article of clothing more quickly places you in whatever bracket of society you want to occupy. But hats alone are not enough. First you must find yourself a cafe.”

“A cafe?”

“Yes!” insisted Vassileyev. “Watch the people going past, the people sitting around you. See the clothes they wear. See how they wear them. Pay close attention to their shoes. Gentlemen of the old school will lace their shoes in straight lines across the grommets. The rest will lace diagonally. Once you have chosen your character from among them, do not go out and buy yourself
new clothes. Find yourself a shop or an open-air market where they sell used garments. Every city has one on the weekends. That is the place to choose your second skin
.

“Do people look healthy?” continued Vassileyev. “Do people look sick? To give the appearance of living an unhealthy life, rub cooking oil on your forehead. Sprinkle the ashes of cheap tobacco in your pockets so that the smell of it will hang about you. Stir a pinch of ash into your tea and drink it. Within a week, your complexion will grow sallow. Dab a piece of raw onion in the corners of your eyes. Put a coat of beeswax on your lips.” As he spoke, he scraped away a crust of grime from the corners of his mouth, which had given the droshky driver the appearance of a man whose days of hard work in the open air should have been behind him, but were not
.

“Change your stride!” ordered Vassileyev, cracking Pekkala on the shin with his heavy walking stick
.

Pekkala cried out in pain and hopped along beside the chief inspector. “You can’t expect me to do that every time I go undercover!”

“No.” Vassileyev held up a one-kopek coin. “All you need is this. Put the coin inside your shoe, beneath your heel, and it will alter the way you walk. Soon you will not even think about it anymore. And that is the whole point. Put too much effort into it, and people will suspect. It must appear natural in its abnormality!”

Vassileyev’s lectures were filled with such apparent contradictions that Pekkala began to feel as if he would never master the subtle skills which Vassileyev was trying to teach him
.

Then, one day, only minutes after he had arrived in the marketplace chosen for that week’s Field Exercise, Pekkala spotted Vassileyev. The old man was wearing a short double-breasted wool coat and sitting on an upturned barrel with a porter’s trolley beside him
.

“How did you do it?” asked Vassileyev, as they sat down to lunch at one of the market restaurants, its floor strewn with sawdust and the tables covered with brown paper
.

“I don’t know,” Pekkala replied honestly. “I wasn’t even concentrating.”

Vassileyev thumped Pekkala’s back. “Now you understand!”

“I do?”

“Our life’s work is to sift through the details,” his mentor explained. “And yet sometimes we must learn to ignore them, so that the bigger picture comes into focus. Do you see now?”

“I am beginning to,” he answered
.

For their final exercise, Vassileyev promised Pekkala his hardest task yet
.

That day, as he wandered up and down Morskaya Street, Pekkala studied the faces of everyone he passed, searching for some chink in the armor of their disguises. But he found nothing
.

Then, just as he was about to give up, he spotted Vassileyev. The man had been sitting on a bench the whole time. Pekkala had walked past the bench at least a dozen times and never even seen Vassileyev. It was as if he had become invisible
.

But the most incredible thing about it was that Vassileyev had not put on any disguise at all. He had simply been himself. And Pekkala, searching for anyone but the man he recognized, had failed to see him
.

“Sometimes,” said Vassileyev, “the most effective place to hide is in plain sight. Only when you have learned to conceal yourself are you ready to see through the disguises of others. The most dangerous thing is not the face that remains hidden”—Vassileyev passed a hand before his eyes—“but what hides behind that face.”