Dead Men Living

It took them more than an hour to progress into the customs hall. Their luggage was already waiting. The pathologist and forensic scientists had tried to anticipate the equipment they might need, with no way of knowing what would be locally available. Olga said at once, “I’m missing a case. Some saws, spare scalpel blades.”

“You’d better report-” started Miriam, before stopping abruptly, embarrassed.

“We are the police,” Charlie reminded, grinning at her. There was no air- conditioning within the terminal building and Charlie felt his clothes melting around him in the humidity. Already there were a lot of flies and insects.

Resigned, Olga said, “There’ll be no point, will there?”

“None,” said Lestov, positively. “Can you manage without?”

“I’m going to have to, aren’t I?”

Yuri Ryabov, Aleksandr Kurshin and Vitali Novikov were waiting on the outside concourse. The silver-haired, urbanely mannered militia chief, who’d put on his neatly pressed and newest uniform for the occasion, looked curiously at the disheveled although obviously Western-dressed Charlie-particularly at the snowshoes-spread Hush Puppies-and said in Russians, “Who’s that?”

Charlie said, “I’m the British investigator. Everyone able to speak Russian will make it easier to work together.” Charlie wasn’t offended-he never was when somebody underestimated him-but he was surprised at the stupidity. He was sure he’d caught the slight smirk of satisfaction from Kurshin. Charlie was conscious of the intense examination from the third man in the group.

Also in Russian, Miriam said, “And I’m American. Hello.”

Ryabov looked more confused than embarrassed. Gesturing toward three waiting, undesignated cars, the local militia chief said, “You’ll want to settle in, after such a long flight. We’ve booked you into the Ontario.”

First stupid, now clever, thought Charlie, who’d spent the intervening days since first being alerted to the murders preparing himself far more thoroughly than by simply buying a beekeeper’s hat that would be necessary in the summerlike temperatures. In the short time outside the airport terminal he’d already noted the preeminence of horse-drawn transport in his search for nonexistent taxis. And knew the Ontario Hotel, a Canadian joint venture, was a thirty-minute car ride from the Yakutsk town center: effectively they would be as imprisoned as the original Russian exiles.

It was the thin, intense man who at once introduced himself and maintained the aircraft division, hurrying forward to usher Charlie into his car, which Charlie allowed unprotesting but curious, wonderingif Novikov was intended to be his personal jailer. Ryabov shepherded Miriam and Lestov into his vehicle, leaving the remaining Russians to go with the local homicide investigator. Always ready to kiss as well as look a gift horse in the mouth, Charlie said, “Is it always as dark at this?”

“In the proper summer it’s lighter. Maybe for two months of the year.”

The car’s body shell was a Lada but the inside was cannibalized from other vehicles. It smelled of longtime dampness. Charlie said, “You lived here all your life?”

There was a quick look across the car. “Regrettably I was born here.”

Charlie awarded himself ten out of ten again. Sometimes the gods, whoever and from wherever they were, truly smiled. He said, “Until a few days ago I’d never heard of Yakutsk. Or the region.”

“Few people ever have. Or want to.”

Charlie saw the pathologist was white-knuckled from the tightness with which he was holding the wheel. Why, wondered Charlie, had the arrival examination been so equally intense? The man was blinking rapidly and perspiration was bubbled on his upper lip. Charlie moved to speak, but before he could Novikov said, “You have come especially from London?”

The temptation to rush-to try at once to use the advantage of being alone, how he always preferred to be- was enormous, but Charlie held back. “I am permanently based in Moscow.” I hope, he added mentally.

“Officially?” queried the man. Then, just as quickly, he nervously answered his own question. “Yes, of course you must be. The end of the old system, I suppose?”

“It’s a very new arrangement,” agreed Charlie. There were times to push against the tide and times to go with the flow.

“You are the first, under that arrangement?”

“Yes.”

“You must have been special chosen? Have influence maybe?”

The man wanted him to be special. Why? “There were reasons,” he said, seeking another guiding question to fill the emptiness of his reply.

“Are you attached to the British embassy in Moscow?”

“Yes.” Where the hell was this going?

“You must know important people?”

Charlie exaggerated the shrug of apparent modesty, seeing the crack of light in the literal darkness. “I suppose I do. Things are very different in Moscow now: different in Russia.” He gestured to the two cars in front. “Once our being here like this would have been unimaginable.” As it was unimaginable that a British officer was here more than fifty years ago, he thought.

Novikov said, “Very little changes here. Never for the better.”

It was difficult to conceive that what little Charlie could see outside the car could have been worse. The countryside was unlike anything he had seen or experienced before, ever imagined. The stretched-to-the near- horizon twilight was only broken by the stick-drawn blackness of skeletal, leaf-naked trees, a child’s pencil drawing abruptly denied by the suddenly vivid, paint-box colors of rarely seen plants brought to life by the strange thaw. Most difficult of all was to believe that beneath such a barren, infertile moonscape, larger than the entire Indian subcontinent, lay the majority of the world’s reserves of oil, gas, coal, gold and diamonds. Or that for so many Stalin years-and after-men, women and child slaves had little more than their bare hands, and those stick-thin tree branches for pit props, to mine it.

Charlie, with difficulty, remained silent, his foot-throbbing instinct telling him the other man had more to say. But abruptly Novikov had fallen silent, although his hands were still white-knuckled at the wheel and the perspiration still flecked his upper lip.

They entered Yakutsk along the Ploshchad Druzhby. Charlie had read, along with everything else, of the melting effect of brick and concrete houses upon permanently frozen ground but hadn’t anticipated the added effect of the unprecedented thaw. One of Sasha’s English-learning nursery rhyme books had a doggerel about a little crooked man who lived in a little crooked house and Charlie thought it could have been written about this place. Only the wooden buildings lifted free of the ground on stilts had any proper, houselike shape. Everything of brick or concrete was lopsided, tilting this way and that, their walls fissured, cracked and lined like old men’s faces.

Novikov turned on to Prospekt Lenina, pointed to a series of buildings, all close together and said, “My professional opposition.”Outside of each were docile lines of men and women, waiting for admission.

Wrong to appear too ignorant, decided Charlie. “Shamans?”

Novikov nodded. “Healers. And a lot more besides. The local people don’t understand what’s happening with the weather. It should be cold now: minus twenty celcius, at least. Possibly lower. Snow a meter, two meters deep. They think it’s a curse. That the spirits are offended.”

“What will they do to placate them?” asked Charlie.

Novikov humped his shoulders. “There are rituals … offerings …” He caught Charlie’s quick sideways look. “No,” he said, smiling for the first time. “No blood sacrifices. But they’re linking these killings with it. They know it would have been impossible for those bodies to have been where they were. They say spirits put them there, as a warning.”

“Of what?” asked Charlie.

“That’s what they’re asking the shamans to tell them.”

Through the topsy-turvey buildings Charlie occasionally glimpsed the Lena River, which became more visible, muddy, debris-littered and unusually fast, as they began to clear the town. He’d kept a comparison between the number of motorized to horse-drawn vehicles and decided he was right about the choice of the Ontario Hotel.

As they entered the parking lot Charlie said it wouldn’t take him long to unpack and Novikov said he wasn’t in any hurry.

The hotel was properly built for the normal local climate and far better than a lot of hotels in which Charlie had stayed in the Eastern Bloc during his operational days of the Cold War. There was no bribe-prompting hindrance