Shadow Pass

“I understand,” said Pekkala. “Tell him we took no offense.”

“If you could tell him yourself,” pleaded Gorenko. “If you could just talk to him, tell him to choose his words more carefully, I think it would really help.”

“We don’t have time now,” said Kirov.

“Call us at the office later,” suggested Pekkala. “Right now, we need to find Zalka.”

“Maybe Ushinsky was right after all,” said Gorenko. “Now that Nagorski is gone, we could use all the help we can get.”

ONE HOUR LATER, KIROV DROPPED PEKKALA AT THE OFFICE.

“I’ll put in a call to Lysenkova,” Pekkala told him. “I need to tell her she can stop searching for those White Guild agents. As of now, all our efforts should be focused on locating Zalka. Get down to the records office and see if you can find out where he lives. But don’t try to bring him in on your own. We should assume that Zalka was the man in the woods. It looks like he has the motive for killing Nagorski, and the fact that he would have known his way around the facility would explain why Samarin thought someone on the inside was responsible for the murder.”

While Kirov drove to the public records office, Pekkala went up to the office and called Lysenkova. Worried that NKVD might be listening in, he told her they needed to meet in person.

As soon as she arrived, Pekkala explained about the White Guild agents.

“Did you have any luck deciphering the formula, Inspector?” asked Lysenkova.

“That’s the other reason for tracking down Zalka,” replied Pekkala. “If he’s still alive, he may be the only one who can help us.”

Lysenkova stood. “I’ll get started right away. And thank you for trusting me, Inspector. There are many who don’t. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors.”

“There are always rumors.”

“Well, you should know that some of them are true.”

Pekkala raised his head and looked her in the eye. “I heard that you denounced your own parents.”

Lysenkova nodded. “Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

“Because my father told me to. It was my only way out.”

“Out of where?”

“A place you know well, Inspector. I am talking about Siberia.”

Pekkala stared at her. “But I thought they were sent to Siberia because you denounced them. You mean you were already there?”

“That’s right. My mother had already been sentenced to twenty years as a class 59 criminal.”

“Your mother? What did she do?”

“My mother,” explained Lysenkova, “was the only female supervisor on the production staff of the Leningrad Steam Turbine Factory. The factory was to be one of the great industrial triumphs of the 1920’s, a place where foreign dignitaries could be brought to show the efficiency of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself had arranged to visit the factory on its opening day. The trouble was that construction had fallen behind schedule, but Stalin refused to change the date of his visit. So at a time when the factory should have been operational, they had not yet produced a single tractor. In fact, the main construction floor didn’t even have a roof yet. And that was exactly where Stalin had announced he would meet the workers of the factory. So, roof or no roof, that’s where the meeting was held. It was raining the day he arrived. My mother ordered a podium to be built so that Stalin could stand above the crowd and look out over the heads of the workers. There was also a tarpaulin to shield him from the rain. The day before his visit, political advisors had arrived at the factory. Above the podium, they hung a banner.” Lysenkova spread her arms above her head, as if to frame the text between her hands. LONG LIVE STALIN, THE BEST FRIEND OF ALL SOVIET WORKERS. But there was no way to shelter the workers from the rain, so they all stood there getting wet. They stood for an hour and a half before Stalin even arrived. By then, the letters of the banner had started to run. Red ink was dripping off the banner. It made puddles on the concrete floor. When Stalin walked up to the podium, everybody clapped, as the political advisors had instructed them to do. The trouble was, nobody knew when to stop. They all assumed that Stalin would make some gesture, or start talking, or something, anything, to indicate when the clapping should cease. But when the applause started, Stalin just stood there. Of course, it was obvious he must have been furious that the factory was only half built, but he showed no anger. He just smiled at everybody getting soaked. Red droplets fell from the banner. The clapping continued. The workers were too terrified to quit.

“This went on for twenty minutes. My mother was in charge of the floor. That was her job. Nobody else was doing anything. She began to think it might be her responsibility to get the meeting started. The longer this clapping went on, the more convinced she became that since no one else was prepared to act, she ought to be the one.”

Lysenkova brought her hands slowly together and then drew them apart and kept them there. “So she stopped clapping. That was the moment Stalin had been waiting for, but not so that he could start the meeting. He looked at my mother. That’s all. Just looked at her. Then he got down from the podium, and he and his entourage drove away. No one had said a word. It was still pouring. The letters on the banner had completely washed away. One week later, my mother, my father, and I were all shipped out to the Special Settlement of Dalstroy-7.”

“The settlement,” whispered Pekkala. And then he went blind as an image of that place exploded behind his eyes.

Dalstroy-7 was a collection of half a dozen log houses, poorly and hurriedly built, bunched at the edge of a stream in the valley of Krasnagolyana.

The site was less than ten kilometers from Pekkala’s camp. He had arrived in the valley five years before. It was early summer then, which gave him plenty of time to work on the cabin before the first snow of autumn appeared. His cabin had been solidly constructed in the style known as Zemlyanka, in which half of the living space was underground and the gaps between the logs were caulked with mud and grass.

But the inhabitants of Dalstroy-7 had showed up just after the first frost, and there had been no time to build adequate shelters before the winter set in.

Special Settlement people were a subsection of the Gulag camp system, in which husbands and wives might all be shipped off to different camps and the children sent to orphanages if they were too young to work. Special Settlements were shipped out to Siberia as complete families, dumped in the forest or out on the tundra, and left to fend for themselves until such time as they might be required as labor in the Gulag camps. Until then, the settlements were nothing more than prisons without walls. Sometimes these settlements lasted. More often, when guards arrived to take the prisoners away, they found only ghost villages, with no trace left of the people who had once lived there.

Dalstroy-7 settlement was under the jurisdiction of a notorious camp named Mamlin-3, on the other side of the valley. The twenty-odd inhabitants of Dalstroy-7 were city folk, to judge from the mistakes they made—building the cabins too close to the river, not knowing it would flood in springtime, making their chimneys too short, which meant the smoke would blow back into the cabins. With winter already descending like a white tidal wave sweeping through the valley, the inmates of Dalstroy-7 were as good as dead.

Pekkala saw himself as he was then, a barely human presence draped in the rags he had worn into the forest, staring at them from his hiding place, a rocky outcrop that looked down upon the valley where they had been abandoned with no instructions other than simply to survive until the spring.

He stepped back into the shadows, knowing there was nothing he could do for them. He did not dare to show himself, since he was well beyond the boundaries of the Borodok camp, of which he was officially an inmate. With the task of marking trees for cutting, he was allowed to roam within the borders of the Borodok sector, but never beyond. If news reached Borodok that he had been seen in an area designated for Mamlin-3, on the other side of the valley, they would send in troops to execute him for the crime of trespassing.

Unlike the camp at Mamlin-3, Borodok was a full-scale logging operation, processing trees from the moment they were cut until they emerged as kiln-dried boards, ready to be shipped to the