“I’ve got some documents to show you.”
“I’m sorry,” Katinka said, suddenly scared and vigilant, “I don’t know you. I’ve got to—” She pressed the button for the first floor but the man held the door.
“I’m Apostollon Shcheglov,” he said, as if expecting her to know the name, which meant “goldfinch.”
“I’m late. I must rush,” she insisted, pressing the button again and again.
“Better to sing well as a goldfinch than badly as a nightingale,” he said, quoting the Krylov fable.
Katinka stopped and stared at him.
Shcheglov’s smile was adorned by two gold teeth.
“Do you remember who said that to you?” he asked. “Let me give you a clue: Utesov and Tseferman.”
Of course, it was Kuzma’s weird good-bye.
“We archivists all know one another. We’re a secret order. Come on,” he said, showing her a well-lit corridor of solid concrete. “This is one of the safest places in the world, Katinka, if I may call you that. This is where our nation’s history is protected.”
Still feeling nervous, Katinka allowed herself to be led. They came to a white steel door like the entrance to a submarine or a bomb shelter. Shcheglov turned a large chrome wheel, opened three different locks and then tapped a code into an electronic pad. The door shifted sideways and then slid open: it was about two feet thick. “This can withstand a full nuclear assault. If the Americans attacked us with all their H-bombs, you and I, the President in the Kremlin and the generals at headquarters would be the only people left alive in Moscow.”
Another reinforced door had to be opened like the first. Katinka glanced behind her. She felt horribly vulnerable—suppose Kuzma had been caught giving her the documents and the KGB had forced him to lure her here?
Still humming, Shcheglov entered a small office to one side, always holding a tune at the back of his throat. His desk was tidy, stacked with files, but the expansive table in front of it was covered in a colored relief map, showing valleys, rivers and houses, peopled by tin soldiers, cannons, banners and horses, all exquisitely painted.
“I made and decorated every one of them myself. Would you like me to show you? Are you in a hurry?”
Katinka had never been in such a hurry. Satinov was dying, taking Sashenka’s secret with him, and she had to get to him fast. But suppose this archive rat had the documents she needed? She knew that top secret and closed files were stored down here and he must have asked her to follow him for a reason. She decided to humor him.
“I’d love to see more of your toy soldiers,” she said.
“Not toys. This is a historical re-enactment,” he insisted, “precise in every detail, even down to the ammunition in the cannons and the shakos of the Dragoons. You’re a historian, can you guess the battle?”
Katinka circled the table as Shcheglov bounced on his yellow plastic toes with pleasure.
She noted the Napoleonic Grande Armee on one side and the Russian Guards Regiments on the other. “It’s 1812 of course,” she said slowly. “That must be the Raevsky Redoubt, Barclay de Tolly’s forces here, Prince Bagration here facing French Marshals Murat and Ney. Napoleon himself with the Guard here. It’s the Battle of Borodino!” she said triumphantly.
“Hurrah!” he cried. “Now let me show you where we keep our documents.” He opened a further steel door into a subterranean hall stacked with metal cabinets holding thousands upon thousands of numbered files. “Many of these will still be closed long after we’re dead. This is my life’s work and I wouldn’t show you anything that I felt undermined the security of the Motherland. But your research is just a footnote, albeit a very interesting footnote. Please sit at my desk and I’ll show you your materials.”
“Why are you helping me?” she asked.
“Only as a favor to a respected comrade archivist—and uncle. Yes, Kuzma’s my uncle. We archivists are all related: my father works at the State Archive and my grandfather before him.”
“An imperial dynasty of archivists,” said Katinka.
“Between ourselves, that’s exactly how I see it!” Shcheglov beamed, gold teeth flashing in the electric light. “You’re not to copy anything even into a notebook. Remember, girl, none of this is ever to be published. Agreed?”
Katinka nodded and sat at his desk. He took a shallow pile of beige files off a shelf, opened a file, licked his finger and turned some pages.
“Scene one. A list of one hundred and twenty-three names—each with a number—signed by Stalin and a quorum of the Politburo on nine January 1940.”
Katinka’s heart raced. A deathlist. Shcheglov hummed as he ran his finger down the list.
She noted the list was addressed to Stalin and the Politburo and signed in a tiny, neat green ink by
Shcheglov’s finger traveled to the scrawls around the typed names:
And most decisively:
“So they were sentenced,” she said, “but were they all…?”
“Scene two.” Shcheglov slid the document across the desk with a flourish, turned back to the shelf, hunted around for a few moments and then presented a scuffed memorandum, bearing in its careless scrawl and clumsy blotting the grinding boredom, stained desks, greasy fingers and the rough routine of prisons.
The 123 names on the list were typed below. Sashenka and Vanya were near the top. A bunch of more than a hundred blotched, crumpled chits—pro-forma memoranda with the names and dates filled in—was held together by a thick red string pushed through a hole in the sheaf.
Her hands shaking, Katinka found Vanya Palitsyn’s chit.
Katinka felt herself in the presence of evil and nothingness. She was not crying, she was too overwhelmed for that. Instead she felt dizzy and faint.
The other chits were the same. She could only think that every scrap, so sloppily filled in, was the end of a life and a family. She could barely bring herself to look at Sashenka’s—but then she started to turn the pages too fast, almost tearing them.
“I can’t find her,” she said, her voice shaking.
Shcheglov looked at his watch. “We haven’t got long before my colleague returns. Now we go back over six months to how the case began. Take a look at this. Scene three.”
He placed a yellowing piece of paper before her, headed in black type—OFFICE OF J. V. STALIN. Its entire surface was covered in squiggles and shading in thick green and red crayon, doodles of wolves and apparently random words. But Stalin’s secretary had annotated the exact date and time:
Katinka looked into the bottle-thick, greasy lenses of Shcheglov’s spectacles, which reflected her own anxious eyes, then down at the papers before her. Slowly, she started to piece together the drama of the night that
