“Four seven four five!”
Pekkala’s heart lurched as the barracks door flew open and a guard walked in, calling out Pekkala’s prison number.
It was still the middle of the night.
Awakened from his waltzing trance, Larchenko tottered back to his chair by the door.
“Four seven four five!” the guard called out again.
Pekkala climbed out of his bunk and stood at attention, bare feet cringing against the cold floorboards.
The guard’s flashlight sliced through the musty air of the bunkhouse, until it finally settled upon Pekkala. “Put your boots on. Come with me.”
Pekkala wedged his feet into the wooden-soled boots he had been issued and clumped after the guard. As he emerged into the Siberian night, the first breath felt like pepper in his lungs.
He followed the guard across the compound until they reached the commandant’s office.
“In there,” said the soldier, and without another word he trudged back to the guardhouse.
While Pekkala was being marched across the compound, Commandant Klenovkin had been watching.
Ever since Klenovkin had learned that Pekkala would be handling the investigation, he’d been dreading this meeting with his former prisoner.
When Klenovkin had mentioned the murder of Ryabov in his weekly report, he’d had no idea that Stalin would come to hear about it, much less put Pekkala on the case. Nothing good can come of this, he thought, as anxiety twisted in his gut. One way or another, those White Russians of the Kolchak Expedition had been the source of all his troubles. As soon as they arrived, they had formed themselves into a gang which virtually took over the camp, and even though most of them had died from the usual effects of overwork, malnutrition, and despair, the few who remained continued to exert a powerful influence.
Klenovkin blamed the White Russians for the fact that he had never received the recognition he deserved. All the commandants who had started out at the same time as he did were senior consultants for the Dalstroy company. They lived in comfort in the great cities-Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad. They ate their lunches in fine restaurants. They took their holidays at resorts on the Black Sea. Klenovkin had none of these luxuries. The nearest restaurant, a rail station cafe serving kvass and smoked caribou meat, was more than eight hundred kilometers away.
The only sign Klenovkin had ever received from Dalstroy that they appreciated him at all was an ashtray, made of pinkish-white onyx, which he had been awarded for fifteen years of service to the company. And he did not even smoke.
The way Klenovkin saw it, he had been left here to rot among these Siberians-
But it was impossible. What held him back was not the guards and the stockade fence but paperwork, quotas, and fear. As far as Klenovkin was concerned, he was as much a prisoner as any convict in the camp.
But now, perhaps, all that was going to change.
As much as he had hoped never to set eyes on Pekkala again, Klenovkin knew that if anyone could get to the bottom of Ryabov’s murder, it would be the Emerald Eye.
So Klenovkin had made up his mind to endure the presence of the unearthly Finn, who had somehow survived in a place where death had been a virtual certainty.
However, thought Klenovkin, addressing the voices in his head, which had been clamoring at him ever since he’d learned that Pekkala was on his way, I am not simply going to grovel at the feet of a man who was once my prisoner. I must maintain some shred of dignity. I will remind him, in no uncertain terms, that I command at Borodok. The Emerald Eye can do his job, but only as my subordinate. I will be in charge.
The commandant looked out at the statues in the compound, hoping to match the seriousness on the faces of those workers with a steely expression of his own.
When the concrete sculpture had arrived, six years ago, Klenovkin assumed that he was at last being recognized for his years of loyal service to Dalstroy. No other camp had statues like this, and even if the motto did not seem entirely relevant to men imprisoned at a Gulag, nevertheless it was a sign to Klenovkin that he had not been forgotten.
Klenovkin had the statues installed in the center of the compound. The work had barely been completed when he received an inquiry from the University of Sverdlovsk, asking if he had by any chance seen a statue of a man and a woman which had been commissioned as the centerpiece of the university’s new Center for Medical Studies. Apparently the statues had been placed on the wrong train and nobody seemed to know where they were.
Klenovkin never answered the letter. He tore it up and threw it in the metal garbage can beside his desk. Then, overcome with paranoia, he set the contents of the garbage can on fire.
In the years which followed, Klenovkin had often found inspiration in the determined faces of that nameless man and woman.
Today, however, the hoped-for inspiration was not there. Windblown snow swirled through the compound, filling the eye sockets of the half-naked figures so that they seemed to stagger blindly forward into the storm.
Klenovkin was snatched from his daydream by the sound of the outer door creaking open. Hurriedly, he returned to his desk, sat down, and tried to look busy.
Pekkala stepped into the warm, still air of the commandant’s waiting room. A lamp was burning on a table. In the corner, a potbellied iron stove sighed as the logs crumbled inside it. Beside the stove, another guard, wearing a heavy knee-length coat, sat on a rickety chair with his boots up on the windowsill. Pekkala recognized this man as the same one who had opened fire on the prisoners when they first arrived at the Borodok railhead. The guard stared sleepily at Pekkala, his eyes as red in the lamplight as the sun on a Japanese flag.
“Send him in!” Klenovkin’s muffled voice reached through the office door.
The guard did not bother to get up. He merely nodded in the direction from which the voice had come and then went back to staring at the lamp.
Crossing the bare floor, Pekkala knocked on Klenovkin’s door, his knuckles barely touching the wood.
“Enter!” came a muffled voice.
Inside Klenovkin’s office, Pekkala breathed the smell of the soapy water which had been used to clean the room. In the coppery light of a lantern, he could make out the streaks of a cleaning rag on the glass panes, like mare’s tail clouds in a windy sky.
Klenovkin was sitting at his desk, sharpening pencils.
“Camp Commander,” said Pekkala, as he quietly closed the door.
“I am busy!” Klenovkin turned the pencils in the tiny metal sharpener, letting the papery curls fall into his ashtray. When, at last, he had finished this task, he brushed the shavings into his hand with a precision that reminded Pekkala of a croupier at a roulette wheel, hoeing in chips across the green felt table. Not until Klenovkin was satisfied that every fleck of dirt had been removed did he finally raise his head and look Pekkala in the eye.
