Shadow Pass (22 page)

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
.

“H
OW DID YOU MANAGE TO ESCAPE
?”
ASKED
P
EKKALA
.

“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?”