Although Major Kirov had been raised in a world in which ghosts were not allowed to exist, he understood what it felt like to be haunted, as he was now, by the absence of Inspector Pekkala.
Far to the east the freezing, clanking wagons of ETAP-1889 crossed the Ural Mountains and officially entered Siberian territory. From then on, the train stopped once a day to allow the prisoners out.
Before the wagons were opened, the guards would walk along the sides and beat the doors with rifle butts, in hopes of dislodging any corpses that had frozen to the inner walls.
Piling out of the wagons, the prisoners inevitably found themselves on windswept, barren ground, far from any town. Sometimes they stayed out for hours, sometimes for only a few minutes. The intervals did not appear to follow any logic. They never knew how long they would be off the train.
During these breaks, the guards made no attempt to keep track of the prisoners. For anyone who fled into this wilderness, the chances of survival were nonexistent. The guards did not even bother to take roll calls when the train whistle sounded for the prisoners to board. By then, most convicts were already huddled by the wagons, shivering and waiting to climb in.
Beside Pekkala stood a round-faced man named Savushkin, who kept trying to make conversation. He had patient, intelligent eyes hidden behind glasses that were looped around his ears with bits of string. He was not a tall man, which put him at a disadvantage when trying to move around the cramped space of the wagon. To remedy this, he would raise his hands above his head, press his palms together, and drive himself like a wedge through the tangled thicket of limbs.
Confronted with Pekkala’s stubborn silence, Savushkin had set himself the task of luring Pekkala into conversation. With the faith of an angler tying one kind of bait after another to his line, Savushkin broached every topic that entered his head, trusting that the fish must bite eventually.
Sometimes Pekkala pretended not to hear. Other times, he smiled and looked away. He knew how important it was for his identity to remain secret. The less he said, the better.
Savushkin did not take offense at his companion’s silence. After each attempt, he would wait a while before trying again to find some chink in Pekkala’s armor.
When Pekkala finally spoke, a bright, clear day had warmed the wagons, melting ice which usually jammed the cracks between the walls. While the wheels clanked lazily over the spacers, their sound like a monstrous sharpening of knives, Savushkin hooked his fish at last.
“Do you want to hear the joke that got me fifteen years in prison?” asked Savushkin.
“A joke?” Pekkala was startled at the sound of his own voice after so many days of silence. “You were sent here because of a joke?”
“That’s right,” said Savushkin.
“Well,” said Pekkala, “it seems to me you’ve earned the right to tell it twice.”
The others were listening, too. It grew quiet in the wagon as they strained to hear Savushkin’s voice.
“Stalin is meeting with a delegation of workers from the Ukraine,” he continued. “After they leave, the Boss notices that his fake mustache is missing.”
“Are you saying that Stalin has a fake mustache?” asked a man standing beside him.
“Now that you mention it,” another voice chimed in.
Savushkin ignored this.
“You can’t tell jokes about Stalin!” someone called from the far end of the wagon. “Not in here!”
“Are you kidding?” shouted Savushkin. “This is the
For a moment after Savushkin had finished telling the joke, there was silence in the wagon.
Savushkin looked around, amazed. “Oh, come on. That’s a good joke! If it was a bad one, they would only have given me ten years!”
At that, the men began to laugh. The sound multiplied, echoing off the wooden boards as if the ghosts of those who had been dumped beside the tracks were laughing now as well.
Turning to look through the barbed wire opening, Pekkala caught sight of a farmer sitting on a stone wall at the edge of a field only a few paces from the tracks. The old man was wearing a sheepskin vest and knee-length felt boots called
As the farmer heard the laughter of the convicts, his eyes grew wide with astonishment. In that moment he had realized that the cargo rattling past him was human and not livestock, as was painted on the cars, just as the prisoner transport vehicles in Moscow were disguised as delivery vans, complete with advertisements for nonexistent brands of beer.
The farmer jumped down from the wall and grabbed an armful of turnips from his cart. He began to jog along the side of the tracks, holding out the turnips.
One of the convicts reached out his hand through the barbed-wire-laced opening and seized one.
More arms appeared, wrists and knuckles traced with blood where the rusty barbs had cut them.
Another hand snatched a turnip from the man’s outstretched hand.
The convicts began to shout, even those who could not see what was happening. The noise took on a life of its own as it spread from wagon to wagon until the roar of their voices drowned out even the sword-clash of the wheels over the tracks. Slowly, the engine pulled ahead.
The old farmer could not keep up.
The turnips spilled from his arms.
The last Pekkala saw of the man, he was standing beside the tracks, hands on his knees, red-faced and puffing milky clouds of breath into the sky.
When the commotion had finally died down, Savushkin made another stab at conversation. “What class of criminal are you?” he asked Pekkala.
“Fifty-nine,” replied Pekkala, remembering the designation he’d been given as part of his cover.
“Fifty-nine! That means you are a dangerous offender! You don’t look like a killer to me.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m so dangerous.”
Savushkin gave a nervous laugh, like air squeaking out of a balloon. “Well, I bet a class 59 has a good tale to tell.”
“Maybe you’ll hear it someday,” replied Pekkala.
“I’ll tell you his story,” said a man pressed up against the wall, “as soon as I remember where I’ve seen him.”
Pekkala glanced at him but said nothing.
The man was shaking with fever. Sweat poured off his face. At some time in his past, he had been cut about the face. Now the white ridges of old scar tissue crisscrossed his cheeks like strands of spiderweb. These wounds had damaged the nerves, leaving a permanently crooked smile, which seemed to mock not only those around him but also the prisoner himself.
Savushkin turned to the man with the knife-cut face. “Brother, you look like you could use a holiday,” he said.
The man ignored Savushkin. His focus remained on Pekkala. “I know I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
The next day, the convict transport pulled into a nameless rail siding in order to let another train pass. This train was heading in the opposite direction. It consisted not of wagons but of numerous flatbeds, all of them stacked with large barrels designed to hold diesel fuel, except that the original fuel markings had been overpainted in bright green letters with the word DALSTROY.
