Shadow Pass

“No,” muttered Pekkala. “Of course you don’t.”

“Besides,” continued Kirov, “if we don’t give Major Lysenkova a chance to set things straight with Comrade Stalin, you know what will happen to her.”

Pekkala did know, because the same thing had happened to him during the Revolution, when he was arrested by Bolshevik Guards on his way out of the country. He thought back to the months he had spent in solitary confinement, the endless interrogations during which his sanity had worn so thin he no longer knew what remained of it. And then came the winter’s night when he was delivered, still wearing his flimsy beige prison pajamas, to a railroad siding on the outskirts of Moscow. There, he boarded a train bound for Siberia.

The thing he would always remember was the way people died standing up.

As convict transport ETAP-61 made its way east towards the Borodok Labor Camp, Pekkala abandoned hope of ever seeing home again. The train was over fifty cars long. Each one contained eighty men, crammed into a space designed to hold forty.

It was too crowded for anyone to sit. Prisoners took turns in the middle, where there was body heat to share. The rest stood at the edges. Dressed only in dirty beige pajamas, a few of them froze every night. There was no room for them to fall, so the corpses remained on their feet while their lips turned blue and spiderwebs of ice glazed their eyes. By morning, they were cloaked in white crystals.

With his face pressed to a tiny opening crisscrossed with barbed wire, Pekkala looked out at the cities of Sverdlovsk, Petropavlovsk, and Omsk. Until he saw their names spelled out on blue and white enamel signs above the station platforms, those places had never seemed real. They had existed as locations destined to remain always beyond the horizon, reachable only in dreams. Like Zanzibar or Timbuktu.

The train passed through these cities after dark, in order to hide its contents from the people living there. At Novosibirsk, Pekkala spotted two men illuminated by a glow cast through the open doorway of a tavern. He thought he heard them singing. Snow fell around the men like a cascade of diamonds. Beyond, silhouetted against the blue-black sky, rose the onion-shaped domes of Orthodox churches. Afterwards, as the train pressed on into darkness so complete it was as if they’d left the earth and were now hurtling through space, the singing of those two men haunted him.

Hour after hour, the wheels clanked lazily along the tracks, their sound like a monstrous sharpening of knives.

Only in open country did the engines ever come to a halt. Then the guards jumped down and beat against the outsides of the wagons with their rifle butts, in order to dislodge those who had become frozen to the inner walls. Usually the corpses had to be prized free, leaving behind the imprints of their faces, complete with eyelashes and shreds of beard, in the boxcar’s icy plating.

Beside the tracks lay skeletons from previous convict transports. Rib cages jutted from rags of clothing and silver teeth glinted in their skulls.

PEKKALA SMOOTHED A HAND ACROSS HIS FACE, FINGERTIPS RUSTLING over the razor stubble on his chin. Knowing the fate that lay in store for Major Lysenkova, he realized he could not simply stand by and do nothing to help. “All right,” he sighed.

“Good!” Kirov clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together. “Shall I call her back?”

Pekkala nodded. “But before you go, tell me what you found out about Nagorski’s bodyguard, Maximov.”

“Nothing, Inspector.”

“You mean you didn’t look?”

“Oh, I looked,” replied Kirov. “I searched the police files. I even checked Gendarmerie and Okhrana files from before the Revolution, those that still exist. There’s nothing. As far as I can tell, the first record of Maximov’s existence is the day he was hired by Nagorski. Do you want me to bring him in for questioning?”

“No,” replied Pekkala. “He may be hiding something, but I doubt it has anything to do with our case. I was just curious.”

“Inspector,” said Kirov, “if you want me to catch up with Major Lysenkova …”

Pekkala breathed in sharply. “Yes. Go. When you find her, make sure you let her know that, from this point on, our primary suspect must be that man who escaped through the woods. We’ve already ruled out the regular staff at the facility, and since Samarin believed the NKVD were involved somehow, it seems likely that the man who escaped was working for them. Anything Lysenkova can find out will be useful, but tell her she is not to pursue or arrest any suspects without informing us first.”

“You don’t have to worry about her cooperating, Inspector. After all, you just saved her life.”

While Kirov struggled into his coat, Pekkala took another look at the piece of paper Lysenkova had given him. The writing was blurred, no doubt soaked while Nagorski lay beneath the tank. It was still legible, but only to someone who could decipher the impossible tangle of equations, and Pekkala was not one of those.

Knowing that Kirov might not be back anytime soon, Pekkala went across the road to the Cafe Tilsit, where he always ate lunch when he was in town.

The Cafe Tilsit never closed.

There wasn’t even a lock on the front door.

By night it was the haunt of those who, during the hours of darkness, managed the great engine of the city. There were watchmen and museum guards, soldiers passing through on leave and policemen coming off their shifts. Those were the ones who had jobs. But there were also those who had no place to live, or who were afraid to go home, for reasons known only to themselves. There were the brokenhearted and those who stood upon the precipice of madness and those whose sanity had folded up like paper airplanes.

By day, the clientele was mostly taxi drivers, truckers, and construction workers, ghostly pale under their layers of concrete dust.

Pekkala liked the bustle of the place, the condensation-misted windows and the long, bare wood tables where strangers sat elbow to elbow. It was the strange communion of being alone and not being alone which suited him.

There was no choice of meal and the food was always simple, served up by a man named Bruno, who wrote the menu each day on a double-sided chalkboard which he propped on the sidewalk outside the cafe. Inside, Bruno shuffled from table to table in worn-out felt valenki boots.

Today Bruno had made breaded cutlets, chickpeas, and boiled carrots, served in wooden bowls, his only tableware.

Pekkala ate his meal and read through the headlines of Pravda.

The off-duty taxi driver sitting next to him was trying to read Pekkala’s paper, straining to see it from the corner of his eye. To make it easier for the taxi driver, Pekkala lowered the paper to the table. As he did this, he realized that the man opposite was staring at him.

The stranger had a heavy jaw, a broad, unwrinkled forehead, and once-blond hair which was beginning to turn gray. An odd silveriness glinted in his brown eyes, as in the eyes of a man going blind. He wore the typical clothing of a worker in this city—a short-brimmed wool cap and a double-breasted coat whose sleeves were paneled with leather to make the garment more durable.

To catch a person’s eye in a place like this meant that you either smiled and said hello or looked away, but this man just kept on staring.

“Do I know you?” asked Pekkala.

“You do.” Now the man smiled. “From a long time ago.”

“I know many people from a long time ago,” Pekkala replied, “and most of them are dead.”

“Then I am happy to be the exception,” said the man. “My name is Alexander Kropotkin.”

Pekkala sat back, almost tipping off the bench. “Kropotkin!”

The last time they had seen each other was far from here, in the city of Ekaterinburg, where Kropotkin was chief of police. Pekkala had traveled there to investigate the discovery of bodies believed to be those of the Tsar and his family. Kropotkin had worked closely with Pekkala during the course of the investigation, which had nearly cost both of them their lives. Kropotkin had been in charge of the Ekaterinburg police department before the Revolution, and when Pekkala first met him, after the Communists had seized power, he was still managing to hold on to his job. Pekkala had wondered how long that would last, since Kropotkin, an honest but short-tempered man, had little patience for the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy and the people who enforced it.