On hands and knees, Kirov sifted his fingers through the mud. “Why wouldn’t the killer have held on to the gun?”
“He might have,” replied Pekkala, “assuming it’s a ‘he.’ More likely, he threw it away as soon as he could, in case he was caught and searched. Without a gun, he might have been able to talk his way out of it. But with a gun on him, there’d be no chance of that.”
“And he wouldn’t be expecting us to search through all this mud,” said Kirov, his lips turned drowned-man blue, “because that would be insane, wouldn’t it?”
“Precisely!” said Pekkala.
Just then they heard a beep—very faint and only one.
“What was that?” asked Kirov.
“I don’t know,” replied Pekkala. “I’ve never used one of these things before.”
Kirov flapped his arm at the detector. “Well, do it again!”
“I’m trying!” replied Pekkala, swinging the disk back and forth over the ground.
“Slowly!” shouted Kirov. As he climbed up off his knees, mud sucked at his waterlogged boots. “Let me try.”
Pekkala gave him the detector. His half-frozen hands remained curled around the memory of the handle.
Kirov skimmed the disk just above the surface of the mud.
Nothing.
Kirov swore. “This ridiculous contraption isn’t even—”
Then the sound came again.
“There!” shouted Pekkala.
Carefully, Kirov moved the disk back over the spot.
The detector beeped once more, and then again, and finally, as Kirov held it over the place, the sound became a constant drone.
Pekkala dropped to his knees and began to dig, squeezing through handfuls of mud as if he were a baker kneading dough. “It’s not here,” he muttered. “There’s no gun.”
“I told you this thing didn’t work,” complained Kirov.
Just then, Pekkala’s fist closed on something hard. A stone, he thought. He nearly tossed it aside, but then, in the glare of the generator light, he caught a glimpse of metal. As he worked his fingers through the mud, they snagged on what he now realized was a bullet cartridge. Pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, he held it up to Kirov and smiled as if he were a gold digger who had found the nugget that would set him up for life. Pekkala rubbed away the dirt at the end of the casing until he could see the markings stamped into the brass. “7.62 mm,” he said.
“It could be a Nagent.”
“No. The cartridge is too short. This did not come from a Russian gun.”
After hunting for another hour and finding nothing, Pekkala called an end to the search. The two men clambered out of the pit, switched off the generator, and stumbled back through the dark towards the buildings.
The guard hut was closed and the guards were nowhere in sight.
By that time, both Pekkala and Kirov were shuddering uncontrollably from the cold. They needed to warm up before driving back to the city.
They tried to get into the other buildings, but all of them were locked.
In desperation, the two men heaped up broken wooden pallets which they found stacked behind the Iron House. Using a spare fuel can from their car, they soon had the pallets burning.
Like sleepwalkers, they reached their hands towards the blaze. Sitting down upon the ground, they removed their boots and emptied out thin streams of dirty water. Then they held their pasty feet against the flames until their flesh began to steam. Darkness swirled around them, as if what lay beneath the ground had risen in a tide and drowned the world.
“What I don’t understand,” said Kirov, when his teeth had finally stopped chattering, “is why Major Lysenkova is here at all. NKVD has dozens of investigators. Why send one who only investigates crimes within the NKVD?”
“There’s only one possibility,” answered Pekkala. “NKVD must think one of their own people is responsible.”
“But that doesn’t explain why Major Lysenkova would be in such a hurry to wrap up the investigation.”
Pekkala balanced the gun cartridge on his palm, examining it in the firelight. “This ought to slow things down a bit.”
“I don’t know how you can do it, Inspector.”
“Do what?”
“Work so calmly with the dead,” replied Kirov. “Especially when they have been so … so broken up.”
“I’m used to it now,” said Pekkala, and he thought back to the times when his father would be called out to collect bodies which had been discovered in the wilderness. Sometimes the bodies belonged to hunters who had gone missing in the winter. They’d fallen through thin ice out on the lakes and did not reappear until spring, their bodies pale as alabaster, tangled among the sticks and branches. Sometimes they were old people who had wandered off into the forest, gotten lost, and died of exposure. What remained of them was often scarcely recognizable beyond the scaffolding of bones they left behind. Pekkala and his father always brought a coffin with them, the rough pine box still smelling of sap. They wrapped the remains in a thick canvas tarpaulin.
There had been many such trips, none of which plagued him with nightmares. Only one stuck clearly in his mind.
It was the day the dead Jew came riding into town.
His horse trotted down the main street of Lappeenranta in the middle of a blizzard. The Jew sat in the saddle in his black coat and wide-brimmed hat. He appeared to have frozen to death. His beard was a twisted mass of icicles. The horse stopped outside the blacksmith’s shop, as if it knew where it was going, although the blacksmith swore he’d never seen the animal before.
No one knew where the Jew had come from. Messages sent to the nearby villages of Joutseno, Lemi, and Taipalsaari turned up nothing. His saddlebags contained no clues, only spare clothing, a few scraps of food, and a book written in his language, which no one in Lappeenranta could decipher. He had probably come in from Russia, whose unmarked border was only a few kilometers away. Then he got lost in the woods, and died before he could find shelter.
The Jew had been dead for a long time—five or six days, thought Pekkala’s father. They had to remove the saddle just to get him off the horse. The hands of the Jew were twisted around the bridle. Pekkala, who was twelve years old at the time, tried to untangle the leather from the brittle fingers, but without success, so his father cut the leather. Since the Jew’s body was frozen, they could not fit him in a coffin. They did their best to cover him up for the ride back to Pekkala’s house.
That evening, they left him on the undertaking slab to thaw so that Pekkala’s father could begin the work of preparing the corpse for burial.
“I need you to do something for me,” his father told Pekkala. “I need you to see him out.”
“See him out?” said Pekkala. “He’s already out.”
Pekkala’s father shook his head. “His people believe that the spirit lingers by the body until it is buried. The spirit is afraid. It is their custom to have someone sit by the body, to keep it company until the spirit finally departs.”
“And how long is that?” asked Pekkala, staring at the corpse, whose legs remained pincered, as if still around the body of the horse. Water dripped from the thawing clothes, its sound like the ticking of a clock.
“Just until morning,” said his father.
His father’s preparation room was in the basement. That was where Pekkala spent the night, sitting on a chair, back against the wall. A paraffin lamp burned with a steady flame upon the table where his father kept tools for preparing the dead—rubber gloves, knives, tubes, needles, waxed linen thread, and a box containing rouges for restoring color to the skin.
Pekkala had forgotten to ask his father if he was allowed to fall asleep, but now it was too late—his parents and his brother had all gone to bed hours ago. To keep himself busy, he thumbed through the pages of the book
