Dalstroy was the state-owned company which managed resources coming out of Siberia. These included timber, lead, and the highly toxic mineral radium which left Borodok each week in containers painted with skull and crossbones. Another discovery in the Borodok mine was crocoite, also known as Siberian Red due to the color of its beautiful crimson crystals, which could be refined to make chromium. Exposure to Siberian Red was known to be just as lethal to miners as the radium.
In addition to controlling the resources, Dalstroy also controlled the workforce. Ten years before, only thirty percent had been prison labor. Now it was over ninety percent. Because Dalstroy had to pay only ten percent of its labor force, it had become one of the richest companies in the world.
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
