coat climbing from the Packard. It took him only a second to realize that this man was none other than Stalin himself.
Immediately, Kasinec’s hands began to shake.
Stalin crossed the station yard and climbed the three wooden steps to the balcony where Kasinec was waiting.
Kasinec saluted, fingertips quivering against his temples.
“What happened?” asked Stalin, a halo of breath condensing around his head. “Why didn’t he get aboard the train with all the other prisoners?”
“I don’t know,” stammered Kasinec.
“He’s vanished,” muttered Stalin, more to himself than to the stationmaster. “We’ll never find him now.”
“Actually, Comrade Stalin, we
“Found him? But you just told me he wasn’t aboard the train!”
“That’s not exactly true, Comrade Stalin. He’s just not among the prisoners.”
“Then where the hell is he?”
“According to the message from Shatura, he appears to be driving the train.”
Stalin shuddered, as if an electric current had just traveled through his body. He snatched the telegram from Kasinec’s hand, read it through, then crumpled the paper and flung it into the darkness. Turning away from the stationmaster, Stalin fixed his gaze upon a point in the distance where the rails appeared to converge.
“Pekkala, you son of a bitch!” he roared, his voice like thunder in the still night air.
When the train stopped at Shatura, a guard who had climbed down onto the tracks in order to relieve himself was astonished to see a prisoner walking towards him. Instantly, he swung the rifle off his back and aimed it at the convict.
But the prisoner neither raised his hands in a gesture of surrender nor tried to run away. Instead, he only held a finger to his lips, motioning for the guard to be silent. This so astonished the guard that he actually lowered his gun. “If you are who I think you are,” he whispered, “our orders were to put you on wagon number 6, back at the V-4 station.”
“Why does it matter which wagon I get on?”
The guard shook his head. “Those were the orders from stationmaster Kasinec.”
“Can you get me in there now?”
“Not without making them suspicious. The only time we move people is if a fight has broken out.”
“Will that not do for a reason?”
The guard studied Pekkala uneasily. “It would, but you don’t look as if you’ve been in a fight.”
Pekkala sighed as he realized what must happen now.
After a moment’s hesitation, the guard lifted his rifle, turning the butt end towards Pekkala. “Travel well, Inspector.”
“Thank you,” said Pekkala, and then everything went black.
He regained consciousness just as the door to wagon #6 was slammed shut. His lips were sticky with blood. Tracing his fingertips cautiously along the bridge of his nose, Pekkala was relieved to feel no jagged edge of broken bone.
In those first hours of the journey, the cramped space of the wagon remained silent, leaving each man alone with his thoughts.
As frost began to form across the inside of the wagon walls, Pekkala felt a slow fear creeping into the marrow of his bones. And he knew it would stay there, like the frost, which would not melt until these wagons rolled back empty to the west.
By dawn of the next day, the convoy had reached Sarapaul Station. Through the barbed-wire-laced opening that served as a window, Pekkala saw the platform jammed with soldiers on their way to man the border in the west. In their long, ill-fitting greatcoats, with pointed
Morning sun sliced through rust holes in the metal roof, flooding the wagon with spears of golden light. As Pekkala raised his head to feel the warmth upon his face, he realized that this simple pleasure had already become a luxury.
Kirov sat at his desk, writing a report. The only sound in the room was the rustle of his pen nib across the page.
The sun had just risen above the rooftops of Moscow. Specks of dust, glittering as they drifted lazily about the room, reminded him of the smoke particles he had once seen under a microscope in school as his teacher explained the phenomenon of Brownian Motion.
Suddenly Kirov paused and raised his head, distracted by a noise from the street below-a jangling of metal against stone.
Kirov smiled. Setting aside his pen, he got up and opened the window. The frigid air snatched his breath away. Just beneath him, hanging from the gutter, icicles as long as his arm glowed like molten copper in the sunlight. Kirov leaned out, five stories above the street, and craned his neck to get a better view.
Then he saw it-a black Mercedes sedan making its way along the cobbled road. It was in poor repair, with rust-patched cowlings, a cracked headlight and a rear windshield fogged as if by cataracts. The jangling noise emanated from its muffler, which had lost a retaining bracket and clanked against the cobbles, sending out a spray of sparks at every dip in the road.
In the center of the street lay a huge pothole. Some months ago, a construction crew on a mission whose purpose remained a mystery had removed some of the cobblestones. The workers never returned, but the pothole remained. There were many such craters in the streets of Moscow. People grumbled about getting them fixed, but the possibility of this actually happening, the mountains of paperwork that would be required to set into motion the appropriate branches of government, stood as a greater obstacle than any of the potholes themselves.
Most people just learned to live with them, but not Colonel Piotr Kubanka of the Ministry of Armaments. He had appealed, to every office he could think of, for the roads to be repaired. Nothing had been done, and his increasingly angry letters were filed away in rooms which served no other purpose than to house such impotently raging documents. Finally, in desperation, Kubanka had decided to take matters into his own hands.
Across the road from Kirov’s office stood a tall, peach-colored building which was the home of the Minister for Public Works, Antonin Tuzinkewitz, a thick-necked man as jowly as a walrus and responsible for, among other things, the filling in of Moscow’s potholes. This minister was best known not for his public works, but for the facts that he rarely got out of bed before noon and that the primordial roar of his laughter as he returned in the early hours of the morning from the Bar Radzikov could be heard more than a block away.
Colonel Kubanka’s daily commute to the Ministry of Armaments should not have taken him past Tuzinkewitz’s home, but Kubanka made a wide detour to ensure that it did.
The noise, as the front and rear wheels of Kubanka’s Mercedes collided with the pothole, was like a double blast of cannon fire. It actually shook the loose panes of glass in Kirov’s window. No one could sleep through that, especially not a man like Tuzinkewitz, who still suffered from flashbacks of the war, in which he had been repeatedly shelled by Austrian artillery in the Carpathian Mountains. Tuzinkewitz, rudely jolted from his dreams, would rush to the window, fling back the curtains and glare down into the street, hoping to spot the source of this noise. By then, Kubanka’s car had already turned the corner and disappeared and Tuzinkewitz found himself staring down helplessly at the pothole, which returned his stare with a cruel, unblinking gaze.
It was driving Tuzinkewitz mad, slowly but with gathering speed, exactly as Kubanka intended. Kirov saw the proof of this each day in the strain on Tuzinkewitz’s meaty face as it loomed into view out of the stuffy darkness of his bedroom.
When this daily ritual had been completed, Kirov turned and smiled towards Pekkala’s desk, but the smile froze on his face when he saw the empty seat. He kept forgetting that Pekkala was gone. Even stranger than this, he sometimes swore he could feel the presence of the inspector in the room.
