“The men of the Kolchak Expedition have also managed to escape.”
For the next few seconds only a faint rustling could be heard, which neither Stalin nor Klenovkin realized was, in fact, the sound of Poskrebyshev’s breathing as he eavesdropped on the conversation.
“It is all Pekkala’s fault,” protested Klenovkin. “He made threats against you, Comrade Stalin!”
“Threats.” Stalin echoed the word. Until that moment, he’d seen no reason to doubt the camp commandant’s words, but now suspicions were gathering, like storm clouds in his mind. “What did he say exactly?”
Klenovkin was not prepared for this. He had assumed that the mere mention of a threat against the leader of the country would be enough. “What exactly?” he stammered. “Grave threats. Serious allegations, Comrade Stalin.”
There was another long pause. “Pekkala never made any threats, did he?”
“Why would you say such a thing?” pleaded Klenovkin.
“It occurs to me now, Klenovkin, that Pekkala has stood before me many times, wearing that English cannon he keeps strapped against his chest, and I have never had cause to fear him. If Pekkala wanted to kill me he would do it first and talk about it afterwards. It is not in his nature to make threats. In short, Commandant, I suspect you are lying to me.”
Klenovkin’s whole body went numb. The thought of continuing this deception seemed beyond any willpower he possessed. It was as if Stalin were staring straight into his soul. “There were no threats,” he confessed.
“Listen to me carefully.” Stalin sounded eerily calm. “I want you to take out the file of Inspector Pekkala.”
Klenovkin had expected Stalin to rage at him, but the softness in his leader’s voice caught him by surprise. In his desperation, he took this as a sign that he might still come through unscathed. Sliding open his desk drawer, he removed Pekkala’s file. “I have it here-Prisoner 4745.”
“Now I want you to take out his information sheet.”
“I’ve got it. And what next, Comrade Stalin?”
“I want you to destroy it.”
“Destroy it?” he croaked. “But why?”
“Because as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Inspector Pekkala was never there”-Stalin’s voice was rising now-“and I will not have the Kremlin embroiled in some Dalstroy inquiry into your failure to carry out your duties! Now burn the sheet, and this time there will be no delay.”
Stunned, Klenovkin took out his cigarette lighter and set fire to the corner of the paper. The document burned quickly. Soon all that remained was a fragile curl of ash, which Klenovkin dropped into the green metal garbage can beside his desk. “It’s done,” he said.
“Good! Now-”
There was a sharp click. The line from Borodok went dead.
“Poskrebyshev,” said Stalin.
Poskrebyshev held his breath and said nothing.
“Poskrebyshev, I know you are listening.”
Clumsily, Poskrebyshev snatched up the receiver and fumbled as he pressed it against his ear. “Yes, Comrade Stalin!”
“Get me Major Kirov.”
Klenovkin lay on the floor of his study, eyes wide and staring at the ceiling. Clutched in his fist was a pistol, smoke still leaking from the barrel. A spray of blood peppered the wall. Beneath it lay the back of Klenovkin’s skull, torn loose by the impact of the bullet and looking almost exactly like the handsome onyx ashtray on his desk, presented to him by Dalstroy for his fifteen years of loyal service.
As Pekkala walked around the clearing, the circulation slowly returned to his frozen legs and arms. At the edge of the trees, he came across some charred wooden beams. Next he kicked up some old glass jars, twisted by the fire which had consumed the cabin that once stood here.
In that moment, he realized that these were the ruins of his own cabin, where he had lived for years as a tree-marker for the Borodok lumber operation.
These melted shards of glass had once been part of a window in his cabin. Lacking other means, he had collected pickle jars left behind by the logging crews, stacked them on their sides with the mouths facing inward, and then caulked the gaps with moss.
He remembered seeing the northern lights through those makeshift panes of glass; the vast curtains of green and white and pink rippling like some sea creature in the blackness of the ocean’s depths.
Where Sedov lay bleeding, Pekkala recalled lying in the shade to escape the summer heat, chewing the bitter, clover-shaped leaves of wood sorrel to slake his thirst, and how the beds of dried lichen would rustle beneath the weight of his body, with a sound like a toothless old man eating crackers.
His eyes strayed to where his storage shed had been, constructed on poles above the ground to discourage mice from devouring his meager supplies of pine nuts, sunflower seeds, and dried strips of a fish called grayling, which he sometimes caught in the streams that flowed through this valley.
In the decade since he had been here last, a number of young trees had grown around the clearing. The skeletons of brambles lay like coils of barbed wire among the puffed and blackened logs which had been a part of his home. It had taken him weeks to clear this space, and it startled him to see how thoroughly the forest had reclaimed the ground. In a few more years, there would be little to show that this place had been the center of Pekkala’s world, each tree and stone as known to him as the freckles constellationed on his arms.
On the other side of the clearing, Kolchak crouched down before Sedov. He scooped up some snow and touched it against Sedov’s lips.
“I told you it wouldn’t be long before we were living like kings,” whispered Sedov, “but I didn’t think I’d reach the Promised Land so soon.”
Kolchak did not reply. Gently, he patted Sedov’s cheek, then stood and walked away.
Tarnowski pulled him aside and, in an urgent whisper, said, “We can’t just leave him here.”
“And we can’t take him with us,” replied Kolchak. “He would only slow us down.”
“The guards from the camp will find Sedov. You don’t know what they’ll do to him.”
“It doesn’t matter what they do,” Kolchak snapped. “By the time those men get here, Sedov will be dead.”
The Ostyaks beckoned them back to the sleds.
“We must leave,” said one of them. “This is a bad place.” He pointed to the ruins of Pekkala’s cabin. “A bad place,” he repeated.
The last Pekkala saw of Sedov, he was still sitting against the tree. His head had fallen forward, chin resting on his chest. Either he was sleeping or else he was already dead.
They did not stop again until they reached the tracks, arriving at the place where the main line of the Trans- Siberian branched off towards the Borodok railhead.
Kolchak jumped down from his sled. “Now let’s gather what belongs to us and get out of here.”
Still carrying the rifle he had stolen from the camp, Tarnowski stood in the middle of the tracks. Nervously, he looked up and down the rails, which glowed like new lead in the dingy light. “It’s hard to say, Colonel.”
Kolchak joined him on the tracks. “What do you mean? You told me to bring you to the place where the railroad forked down towards the camp. Here is the fork. Now where is the gold?”
Tarnowski scratched at his face, like a man who had stepped into cobwebs. “When we came around a bend in the tracks …”
“Keep your voice down,” hissed Kolchak. “If those Ostyaks learn where you’ve hidden the gold, they’ll leave us behind and steal everything for themselves.”
From then on, the two men held a muttered conversation. “We spotted a small cliff right beside a pond,” Tarnowski continued. “We buried the crates on the other side of that pond. I thought we would be able to see it from here, but it’s been a long time, Colonel. The mind plays tricks …”
“You realize, Lieutenant Tarnowski, that we are almost certainly being followed, by men whose incentive for killing us is that they will lose their own lives if they fail. It will take time to dig up the gold, especially since the ground is frozen. After that, it’s a race for the border. I don’t need to tell you that if they catch up with us again, no
