Shishkin did as he was told and Korolev, his hand moving to the man’s elbow, guided him. One or two of the workers looked as though they wanted to prevent them leaving but the bible reader shook his head, and they backed away.
Outside the cold was like a slap in the face and it seemed to unnerve Shishkin, who turned as if to make his way back in, but the bible reader took his other arm and walked with them. Men and women spilt out of the hostel behind them and followed in silence, ignoring the drifting snowflakes. The only sounds were the wail of a far-off factory whistle and the crunch of feet as they made their way towards the waiting car. Shishkin’s head was bowed and Korolev could feel the sobs that spasmed through him.
‘What will happen to me, holy father?’ he whispered to the bible reader, who looked at Korolev for his reaction. Korolev was careful to give none.
‘Put yourself into the hands of the Lord, Vanya. Pray to him and the Virgin and the saints. Pray for forgiveness and I will pray for you as well. We all will.’ His voice was very quiet, and Korolev hoped the uniforms couldn’t hear.
When they reached the car, the uniforms put Shishkin onto the back seat and sat on either side of him – the boy looked small between them. Korolev turned to the priest, maintaining a neutral expression.
‘Thank you, Comrade. Your assistance was most useful. We’ll commend your actions to the director.’
The bible reader took Korolev’s offered hand, perhaps wondering how Korolev could do that if he didn’t have his name. But Korolev didn’t want to know the priest’s name – he just wanted to go home and put this day behind him.
Chapter Two
Maybe the pot-holes the car had bounced over on the way had shaken the youngster’s brain awake, but by the time they brought Shishkin back to Petrovka Street, his memory had returned to him. He’d cursed himself, sobbed, banged his head with his hands, and Korolev had taken the confession that tumbled out of the boy, stopping him every now and then to clarify a point. It was a depressing tale and when it was finished the boy rubbed at his blood-crusted sleeves and asked himself the question Korolev wanted to put to him: ‘Why?’ And the answer eluded them both. Yes, he’d wanted a job at the rubber factory, but not enough to kill his own brother. But he remembered killing him all right, and so Korolev wrote it all down and then handed the confession to him to sign. And Shishkin signed it – tears blurring the ink. Korolev patted the youth’s shoulder and then had the uniforms take him down to the cells.
It hadn’t been a difficult case, but Korolev felt satisfaction that they’d resolved it so quickly as he began to put the file in order for the procurator’s office. But the sense of pleasure at a job well done disappeared when the page he was holding started to rustle loudly. He quickly placed it on the surface of his desk, holding it flat and pushing down, staring at his whitening knuckles, knowing that this was the only way he could stop his hands shaking. It was just that everything was on top of him all of a sudden, he reassured himself, that was all. It had been a long winter, and the Lord knew even the bravest got low during the winter months. And when had he last breathed easily? He remembered a time long before, a summer’s day, lying beside a river, his arm around Zhenia, and Yuri sleeping beside them in the shade of the tree. When had that been? The divorce had come through more than two years ago, and they hadn’t been happy like that for a good time before it. And his son had been small, very small, and his hair still baby soft. Three years ago, maybe?
‘Damn,’ he breathed, realizing it had been five years at least, and Yasimov looked up in surprise from the report he was writing. Korolev made himself smile, feeling it stretch his mouth taut. Yasimov returned it, giving him a small nod of appreciation.
‘For a moment there, Lyoshka, I was wondering how they’d break the news to the family. You handled it well.’ Yasimov stretched back, releasing a contented sigh. ‘I tell you what, though – a scrape that close makes the air smell sweet.’
‘Yes,’ Korolev agreed, thinking that the air would smell even sweeter if he could get a good night’s sleep. It had got to the stage recently when he’d wondered whether there was any point in taking off his clothes at night, so little time did he spend in his bed. But tonight he’d get eight hours, do some washing, eat some hot food.
‘To kill your own brother,’ Yasimov said, shaking his head.
‘Alcohol has no family,’ Korolev replied, reaching for another file he was working on.
‘Still, nothing is all bad, you know,’ Yasimov said, looking as though he was contemplating stopping off somewhere on the way home.
‘I can’t disagree with that,’ Korolev said. ‘The world wasn’t made in black and white.’
Not at all, he thought to himself; it was mainly grey, the grey of twilight, the grey of the night’s beginning.
Korolev’s nerves had settled by the time he walked down the wide steps of 38 Petrovka Street and began to make his way home through the still-busy streets of Moscow. He took the longer way, heading towards the Kremlin and through Red Square, passing the recently installed red star that topped the Spassky Tower and glowed like a bright beacon of hope against the black sky above it. It reassured him for a moment, and he felt a surge of pride that he was fortunate enough to be a Soviet citizen, living in the capital of a country that was leading the world by example. But then he remembered the fear throughout the city, particularly amongst Party members. The works meetings in Petrovka Street were no longer the calm affairs of six months before, but instead had become steadily more and more hysterical. Activists denounced each other for lack of vigilance, for concealing class origins, for having been former Mensheviks or, even worse, supporters of the exiled Trotsky. And every now and then one of his colleagues would disappear.
Korolev kept his head low, sat at the back and was grateful that he’d never joined the Party. But even non- Party members weren’t safe – the State expected complete loyalty from all of its citizens and, while he’d fought with the Red Army during the Civil War and had supported the Revolution for twenty years now, Korolev still had allegiances to individuals and beliefs that would put him at risk if they ever came to light.
As it had turned out, however, that icon business he’d been involved with the previous year, the most blatant example of his divided allegiances, had ended up working in his favour in unexpected ways. The matter remained top secret, which was probably just as well from Korolev’s point of view, but the injuries he’d suffered in the course of the investigation pointed to it having been a dangerous matter, on top of which Korolev now wore on his chest a mysterious Order of the Red Star that he was forbidden to discuss. According to Yasimov, most people thought he’d uncovered a counter-revolutionary plot and had personally assisted the NKVD, or the Chekists as they were commonly known after an older acronym, in the violent suppression of the conspiracy. It was almost true, after a fashion, but no one in Petrovka Street except for his boss knew the real story, and even Popov didn’t know all of it.
Still, for the moment at least, the dark red enamelled star that General Popov had ordered he wear on his chest while on duty, whether in uniform or not, had created a bubble around Korolev, and even around Yasimov. Korolev wasn’t complacent, though, far from it. After all, if some of his actions during the icon affair ever became public, they’d result in his immediate reacquaintance with the interior of a Lubianka cell. So for the foreseeable future he wanted to keep well clear of anything connected with the Chekists until they forgot he’d ever existed. And, until he was confident they had, he’d carry on keeping a small packed suitcase in his bedroom wardrobe just in case they came for him one night with a one-way ticket for Siberia.
Korolev found himself at the door of the building he lived in on Bolshoi Nikolo-Vorobinsky and began to kick the snow from his boots before opening the heavy front door, light spilling out into the lane as he did so; and as if to remind him that his concerns weren’t just groundless paranoia, he caught sight of the red seal that had been applied to Kotov’s apartment door by State Security only the previous week and which swung gently in the resulting draught. Poor Kotov had been an administrator with a government ministry until his arrest, but he’d had the nervous stoop and grey pallor of a condemned man for the best part of a month before it. Now he and his wife had disappeared and the only trace of their passing was that damned red seal that would swing there till the apartment was cleared and reallocated. Korolev reminded himself that he was alive, climbing the stairs to an apartment which he shared with the beautiful Valentina Nikolaevna, and by anyone’s standards he was a lucky man. He had to
