After Tarnowski, there were no more visitors.
It was hunger which preoccupied Pekkala now, no matter how hard he tried to steer it from his mind.
On his fifth day in solitary, Pekkala spotted a cockroach scuttling across the floor. The thumb-sized, amber- colored insect reached the far wall and began to move along it.
Without another thought, Pekkala lunged across the floor and caught it. With nausea rising in his throat, he crushed the cockroach in his fist and ate the mash of legs and shell and innards, mixed with the gray-brown silt, like the ashes from a crematory oven, which he had clawed up from the floor along with the insect.
Pekkala felt no revulsion, knowing that in the Gulags, only those who were prepared to set aside all pretense of dignity would go on living.
To take his mind off the fact that he was starving, he focused his thoughts on the murder of Ryabov. Since arriving at the camp, he had been presented with several possibilities, all of which appeared to circle around the truth. But none of them, as far as Pekkala was concerned, pointed directly at it. Commandant Klenovkin was convinced that the killing had been carried out by the Comitati. Melekov blamed Sergeant Gramotin. The Comitati themselves seemed resigned to their gradual extinction in this place, at the hands of whoever dared to challenge them. For Tarnowski, the killer and his reasons hardly seemed to matter anymore. The only thing they had left to believe in was that their leader would one day return to set them free.
Pekkala admired the Comitati for the depth of their faith, but for that same reason he also pitied them. Even if Kolchak had promised to return someday, Pekkala did not believe that the colonel would keep his word. Although Pekkala had not been well acquainted with Kolchak, he knew precisely the kind of man the Tsar would have chosen for such an important task. Kolchak may have selected the men under his command for their loyalty to him, but the Tsar had picked Kolchak for his ability to carry out the mission, no matter what the cost in human life. That mission was to transport the gold. For such a task, cold blood, not compassion, was required. Once his soldiers had fallen into captivity, Kolchak would have weighed the risks of trying to free them and realized that the odds were too great. What the men under Kolchak’s command had never been able to accept was that they were, in the eyes of their leader, expendable.
The mission had failed. The gold had fallen into the hands of the enemy. The Tsar was dead. The war was over. For Colonel Kolchak, these bitter truths would have been harder to accept than the loss of his soldiers.
One thing continued to puzzle Pekkala more than anything else. After holding out for so many years, why had Captain Ryabov suddenly approached the Commandant in order to bargain for his freedom with information too old to be of any probable use? Even if he did possess some scrap of useful knowledge, why would he choose this time to betray the colonel?
Perhaps Commandant Klenovkin was right, and the captain had finally grown tired of waiting. But what Pekkala did not believe was Klenovkin’s claim that time and hardship had simply caused Ryabov to crack. Something specific had pushed Ryabov over the edge, perhaps a horror he had glimpsed on the horizon or else an event from his past which had finally caught up with him. If the latter was true, then the answer might lie in the contents of Ryabov’s file-if only the missing pages could be found.
The time had come to bring Kirov onto the case. All Pekkala had to do now was wait until they let him out of this cell.
At dawn on the seventh day, Gramotin and Platov came to fetch him. In their heavy greatcoats, they were sweating by the time they had trudged up the hill.
Pekkala was sitting with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest, clinging to the tiny pocket of warmth he had created under the threadbare blanket.
“Get up,” ordered Gramotin.
“Time to get back to work,” added Platov.
Stiffly, Pekkala rose to his feet, and the two guards walked him down towards the camp.
Halfway there, Platov tripped Pekkala, sending him sprawling on the muddy path.
Rolling over onto his back, Pekkala found himself staring down the muzzle of Gramotin’s rifle.
“We heard about you,” Gramotin said.
“Heard you were a detective,” Platov chimed in.
“That’s right.” Pekkala tried to stand but Gramotin swung his rifle butt into Pekkala’s shin and knocked him down again.
“We also heard that the Comitati want you to stay in one piece,” continued Gramotin. “We have learned, over the years, to get along with those gentlemen, which sometimes means granting them a wish or two, but the next time you see a fight, Inspector, you stay out of it. If I have to come all this way again to fetch you down from solitary, no matter what the Comitati want, I swear you’ll never make it to the bottom of the hill. Understand?”
Pekkala nodded, gritting his teeth from the pain in his bruised shin.
By the time they reached the camp, a large truck had arrived in the compound.
The canvas flaps had been thrown back and a group of hawk-eyed women were climbing down into the slush. Even more than their gender, it was the colors of their clothes which set them apart from the dreary world of Borodok. To Pekkala, they looked like tropical birds which had been blown off course from their migrations and ended up in a place where their survival would depend on a miracle.
“Hello, my darlings!” Gramotin called to them.
“I’ll see you later,” said a woman with a tobacco-husky voice. As she spoke, she drew apart the lapels of her heavy coat and swayed her hips from side to side.
“I love it when the whores come by.” Platov was grinning. “But look at the line already.”
At the camp hospital, the queue of men stretched halfway round the building. The hospital windows, lacking glass, were made from opaque panels of pressed fish skin, and they wept with condensation. Out of the back door of the hospital, the sick were being moved to other parts of the camp. Two hospital orderlies carried out one man on a stretcher. The sick man’s face was gray with fever. He seemed oblivious to what was happening, as the orderlies parked his stretcher in the woodshed beside the main building. Even though he did not fit inside the shed, the orderlies left him there, bare feet jutting out into the snow.
The two guards walked Pekkala to the kitchen.
Melekov met Pekkala in the doorway. With arms folded across his chest and a large wooden spoon clasped in each fist, he eyed Pekkala disapprovingly.
As soon as they were both inside the kitchen, Melekov launched into a scolding. “What did you think you were doing getting involved in a fight with the Comitati? If you want to get yourself killed, there are much simpler ways of going about it!” As if to emphasize his point, Melekov walked over to his cutting board. The huge slab of wood had been worn down smoothly in the middle, like a rock pool formed by centuries of dripping water. Melekov scrubbed it at the end of each shift and treated the wood twice a month with special almond oil which he kept just for that purpose.
Pekkala thought it was one of the most accidentally beautiful things he had ever seen.
Heaped on the board now was the skinned leg of a goat, pale and bloodless, filmed with a strange shimmer of colors that reminded Pekkala of opals. “Much easier ways to die!” Melekov shouted, cleaving through sinew and gristle with his monstrous carving knife. “Well, don’t just stand there, convict. You have to bring the commandant
