Dead Men Living

killing frightened people. But why? What could this desolate, pitiless land of ghosts have or possess to justify the ritual, cold-blooded execution of these three unknown, apparently unmourned people?

Not the land-the place-itself, Charlie decided. It would have been someone who was here, in Gulag 98. Maybe more than one. A group, like he was a reluctant part of a group now, men-maybe women, too-with a secret.

He had to examine that speculation further, justify the reasoning. He’d seen the bodies, each of them naked. Hand and ankle cuff marks, clearly visible. Shattering bullet wounds to the back of the head. But that was all. No sign whatsoever-no bruises or burns or cuts-of torture. And men prepared to kill would have been as prepared to torture if the victims had possessed a secret. So why hadn’t they? Because they didn’t have to, Charlie answered himself. The executioners knew the secret: what there was to gain. But didn’t want to share what was big enough, rewarding enough, to kill for. They’d known each other, victims and killers. Would have used firstnames when they pleaded, calling upon friendship, acquaintanceship. Charlie was sure he had a picture, but it was misted, much more deeply obscured than the occasionally shrouded expanse across which he was looking, seeking but still not finding what he had expected to see. The foundation marks of buildings, perhaps, even those built on stilts. Certainly evidence of proper graveyards.

He turned, surprised at how far he’d wandered on feet that normally cautioned against such excess. Denebin was clambering from the grave, tidily winding up his marking tapes and retrieving the securing pegs, when Charlie got back to them. He was in time to hear the forensic scientist say, “There’s very little. Too much time has elapsed from the bodies being discovered. Animals have been there, disturbing it all.”

“But there are some things?” questioned Charlie. “I saw you collecting samples.”

“Things I need to look at more closely,” said the scientist, vaguely.

“Do we have to talk about it here!” protested the arm-flailing Miriam. She’d suffered more than anyone, with just chiffon scarves to wrap around her head and face. “I’m being eaten alive. I want to get back to the hotel, clean up.”

“Of course,” agreed the attentive Lestov, at once.

“I’ll need until tomorrow to get any opinion of what I’ve got,” said Denebin, awkwardly.

“We’re meeting Valentin Polyakov in the morning,” reminded Miriam.

“Another busy day then,” said Charlie, brightly. No one acknowledged him, already hurrying back toward the waiting vehicles.

It had been Novikov’s idea that they meet at the town’s museum, but the man wasn’t there when Kurshin dismissively dropped him off, so Charlie went inside. The museum was far more a monument to Russian persecution of Russian than Charlie had expected, whole rooms given over to photographs and paraphernalia recording the establishment of the vast penal colony. The photographs were almost uniformly of lines of dead-eyed, despair-crushed, barely human figures, the bechained walking dead, men, women and even children. It was from a variety of the pictures that Charlie believed he’d answered one question and gotten a pointer to another.

The gulags were regimented, haphazardly wire-fenced, with corner-placed watchtowers, some tilted like the subsiding buildings of today. There were lists of the minimally subsistence diets upon which the exiles and prisoners had been expected to survive, and occasional names, particularly of political figures purged during and even after the Stalin era. Charlie was intrigued several times to see a photograph of a gaunt-featured man with the same name as the chief minister with whom he had an appointment the following day.

Charlie was standing in front of an exhibition of prison camp equipment-chain-linked manacles, hand and ankle cuffs, actual posts against which prisoners were tied for execution, punishment whips and guard batons-when the tall, thin doctor found him.

“What you expected?” asked Novikov.

“Far more.”

“Still want to go for a drive?”

“As much as ever.”

They were driving north again, Charlie recognized. Deciding after the family encounter it was safe to try to guide the conversation, Charlie said, “What was your father’s supposed crime?”

“Just being a doctor,” said Novikov, simply. “Doctors were regarded as dangerous intellectuals, especially those who weren’t members of the Communist Party, which my father refused to join.” He snorted a laugh. “Being a doctor got him sent here and then saved him. Once he arrived, he only had to live in Gulag 98 for a few months. Even when he was inside, he didn’t have to do any manual labor in the mines. That’s why he trained me. Made me study basic forensics, later. That again was for necessity, to make myself as indispensable as possible. I can’t ever return permanently to Moscow, of course. Anywhere else in Russia, for that matter.”

“Why not?” Charlie frowned.

“The system,” said Novikov. “People sent here were automatically stripped of their citizenship: lost their Russian nationality. So have their descendants. You need established residency in a Russian city to be allowed to leave here and you can only get that by getting away from here to establish residency. Which you can’t do without an internal passport, which none of us is allowed to hold. We’re imprisoned here as effectively as anyone in Stalin’s day.”

“So everyone who ever came here was known: recorded somewhere?”The town was falling away in the semidarkness, more moonscape stretching out in front of them.

Novikov nodded, recognizing the reason for the question. “In theory. Somewhere in Moscow, I suppose.”

“What about here? Were there registers?”

“Again, in theory. Aleksandr Andreevich asked the chief minister after the bodies were found. Polyakov said there weren’t any archives, not any longer. That they’d been destroyed when we got our limited autonomy. And don’t forget millions were sent here. Died here. It would have needed a warehouse as big as Yakutsk itself.”

After the previous day there was no love lost between this man and Olga Erzin. No need, then, to circumvent. “Anything from today’s examination?”

The pathologist shook his head. “She tried to get me to agree that some grazes on the woman’s hands and on the American’s right forearm were defense injuries, where they tried to fight off whoever killed them. But I wouldn’t. It doesn’t fit, with the close range at which they were shot in the back, not the front, of the head. I believe they’re scratches from pitching forward into the grave. Frozen as it was, it would have been like hitting concrete.”

Charlie thought so, too. It led perfectly to one of the questions he believed he’d virtually resolved. “The restraint bruising, to the wrists and ankles? It’s very even, isn’t it? And totally encircling, without any interruption. Normal handcuffs wouldn’t leave a band like that, would they? There’d have been gaps.”

Novikov regarded him curiously. “I suppose so,” he allowed, doubtfully. “There could have been some sideways lividity, joining up the gaps. What’s the significance?”

“In the museum photographs the wrists are completely enclosed by a U-shaped band that goes under the wrists. The encirclement is completed by the straight bar that slots in at the top to be ratcheted down tightly to grip every part of the wrist.”

“I still don’t understand the importance.”

“It would be the sort of prison equipment available at Gulag 98, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” Novikov agreed at once. “Of course it would.” Just as quickly he said, “I understand things were found at the grave?”

“What?” demanded Charlie, questioning instead of answering.

“I don’t know,” said the other man. “When he came to collect the woman on their way back, Lestov said Lev Fyodorovich wanted to use what laboratory facilities I have. I had to warn them I didn’t have much.” He hesitated. “I thought you might know what it is he wants to examine or test.”

“Denebin wouldn’t say,” said Charlie, moving easily on to his other query. “Have you managed to establish the weight of the bullets?”

Novikov smiled. “There’s a slight variation between them. The one that killed the Englishman was ten grams, the one I recovered from the American-which was more damage-was just over nine. Does that tell you anything?”

“It might, if there was the third bullet for comparison,” said Charlie. And he was sure there was. The uncertainty was whether Denebin would admit to finding it.