The Red Coffin (16 page)

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 Labour Camp, Pekkala abandoned hope of ever seeing
home again. The train was over fifty wagons long. Each one con
tained 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 pyjamas, 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 spider
webs of ice glazed their eyes. By morning, they were cloaked in
white crystals.

With his face pressed to a tiny opening criss-crossed 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 ortho
dox churches. Afterwards, as the train pressed on into darkness
so complete it was as if they’d left 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 prised free, leaving behind the imprints of their faces, complete
with eyelashes and shreds of beard, in the wagon’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, Pekkala realised 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 fetch 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 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. You just saved her life, after all.’

While Kirov struggled into his coat, Pekkala took another look at the piece of paper Lysenkova had given him. The writing was blurred from having been 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 any time soon, Pekkala went across the road to the Café Tilsit, where he always ate lunch when he was in town.

The Café 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 broken-hearted and those who stood upon the precipice of madness and those whose sanity had folded up like paper aeroplanes.

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 condensationmisted 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 by a man named Bruno, who wrote the menu each day on a double-sided chalk board which he propped up on the pavement outside the café. Inside, Bruno shuffled from table to table in worn-out felt
valenki
boots.

Today, Bruno had made breaded cutlets, chick peas and boiled carrots, served in wooden bowls, which were 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 realised 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 grey. He wore the typical clothing of a worker in this city – a short-brimmed wool cap and double-breasted coat whose sleeves were panelled 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.’ 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 travelled 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 come to 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 him.

The taxi 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.

‘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. But this is where I come when I’m in town,’ said Kropotkin, glancing warily into his bowl, ‘no matter what Bruno serves up.’

‘This was one of the Tsarina’s favourite 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 four 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 behaviour 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 subject of a fairy tale. The truth, if there even was such a thing any more, lay somewhere in between.

‘The last time we spoke,’ Kropotkin said 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 towards himself.

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.’

‘Listen to you!’ laughed Kropotkin. ‘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 thought he had. But now, with Kropotkin’s words ringing in his ears, Pekkala realised 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?’ asked Kropotkin. ‘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,’ smiled Kropotkin, ‘look for me at the café 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 the mention of those words, Pekkala tumbled into the past, like a man falling backwards off a cliff.