Shadow Pass

“What did you do?” asked Pekkala.

“I confronted him. I said how dangerous it was to keep information from Stalin. He told me to keep my mouth shut. That was when I decided to quit, and in return he saw to it that I couldn’t find another place to do my work. No one would employ me. No one would even come close! Except them.” He jerked his chin towards the leeches in the pool.

“But you said you still do research,” said Pekkala.

“That’s right.”

“And what happens to your work?”

“It piles up on my desk,” retorted Zalka bitterly. “Page after page, because there is nothing else I can do with it.”

“That reminds me.” Pekkala removed the equation from his coat pocket. “We were wondering if you could tell us what this is. It may have something to do with Nagorski’s death.”

Carefully, Zalka took the brittle paper from Pekkala’s hand. He stared at it intently as the meaning unraveled in his head. At one point he laughed sharply. “Nagorski,” he muttered and kept reading. A moment later, he raised his head. “It is a recipe,” he told them.

“A recipe for what?”

“Oil.”

“That’s it?” said Kirov. “Just oil?”

“Oh, no,” replied Zalka, “not just oil. Motor oil. And not just any motor oil, either. This is a special low- viscosity motor oil for use in the V2 engine.”

“And are you sure this is Nagorski’s writing?”

Zalka nodded. “Even if it wasn’t, I could still tell this belonged to Nagorski.”

“Why?”

“Because of what’s not there. See?” He pointed to a batch of figures. The numbers seemed to gather around his fingertip like iron filings around a magnet. “The polymer sequence is interrupted at this point. He left it out on purpose. If you tried to recreate this formula in a lab, all you’d get would be sludge.”

“Where is the rest of the formula?”

Zalka tapped a finger against his temple. “He kept it in his head. I told you he didn’t trust anyone.”

“Could you complete these equations?”

“Of course,” replied Zalka, “if you gave me a pencil and ten minutes to work out what’s missing.”

“What’s the point of low-viscosity motor oil?”

Zalka smiled. “At thirty degrees below zero, normal motor oil will begin to thicken. At fifty degrees below zero, it becomes useless. What that means, Inspectors, is that in the middle of a Russian winter, you can have an entire army of machines which suddenly come to a stop.” He held up the piece of paper. “But that wouldn’t happen with this oil. I’ll give Nagorski this much. He was certainly planning for the worst.”

“Is this formula valuable enough for someone to have killed him over it?” asked Pekkala.

Zalka narrowed his eyes. “I don’t think so,” he said. “This simply represents a design decision. The recipe itself is not unknown.”

“Then why keep it a secret?”

“It’s not the formula he was trying to keep secret. It’s the decision to put it to use. Look”—Zalka sighed again—“I don’t know why Nagorski was murdered, or who did it, but I can tell you that he must have known the person who killed him.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he never went anywhere without a gun in his pocket and that means he didn’t just know the person who killed him. He must have trusted them to let the killer get that close.”

“Who did Nagorski trust?”

“As far as I know, there is only one person who fits that description, and that’s his driver, Maximov. Nobody got to Nagorski without getting past Maximov, and believe me, nobody got past Maximov.”

“We have spoken with Maximov,” said Pekkala.

“Then you’ll know Nagorski didn’t hire him for his witty conversation. He hired Maximov because the man used to be an assassin.”

“A what?”

“He was an agent for the Tsar,” explained Zalka. “Nagorski told me so himself.”

“That would explain why he didn’t answer any of my questions,” said Pekkala, and suddenly he remembered something Rasputin had once told him, on that winter’s night when he came knocking on the door.

“There are many others like us,” Rasputin had said, “each one entrusted to a different task—investigators, lovers, assassins, each one a stranger to the other. Only the Tsar knows us all.” At the time, Pekkala had thought it was just the ramblings of a drunk, but now he realized that Rasputin had been telling the truth.

“It also explains why there was nothing on him in the old police records,” mused Kirov.

The door opened. The nurse came in with a tray, on which sat a plate covered by a metal dome.

“Ah, good!” Zalka held out his arms.

The nurse handed him the tray. “Just the way you like it,” she said.

Zalka set the tray carefully on his lap and removed the metal dome. A puff of steam wafted up into his face and he breathed it in as if it were perfume. On the plate was a slab of roasted meat, around which a few slices of boiled potato and carrot had been strewn like an afterthought. Zalka picked up a knife and fork from the tray and sawed off a slice of the meat. Beneath the surface, it was almost raw. “They feed me here,” he told them. “Red meat every day. I have to get the blood back in me somehow.”

The investigators turned to leave.

“The T-34 will not save us, you know,” said Zalka.

Both men turned around.

“That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” asked Zalka, talking as he chewed. “Nagorski has you all convinced that the T-34 is a miracle weapon. That it will practically win a war on its own. But it won’t, gentlemen. The T-34 will kill hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands. What Nagorski or any of those insane scientists he’s got working for him won’t admit is that it’s just a machine. Its vulnerabilities will be found out. Better machines will be built. And the men who used it to kill will themselves, eventually, be killed. But you mustn’t worry, detectives.” He busied himself sawing off another piece of meat.

“With a forecast like that,” muttered Kirov, “why wouldn’t we be worried?”

“Because the only people who can destroy the Russian people”—Zalka paused to pack another slab of meat into his mouth—“are the Russian people.”

“You may be right,” said Pekkala. “Unfortunately, we are experts at that.”

PEKKALA BREATHED IN DEEPLY AS THEY STEPPED OUTSIDE THE BUILDING, trying to clear the sour reek of the bathhouse from his lungs.

“I thought we had him,” remarked Kirov.

Pekkala nodded. “So did I, until I saw that leg brace.”

“Trailing suspension arms,” groused Kirov. “Concentric double coil springs. Leading bogies. It all sounds like nonsense to me.”

“It’s poetry to Zalka,” replied Pekkala, “just as caviar blinis are poetry to you.”

Kirov stopped abruptly. “You just reminded me of something.”

“Food?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. The day I went into that restaurant to fetch Nagorski for questioning, he was eating caviar blinis.”

“Well, that’s very helpful, Kirov. Perhaps he was shot by a blini.”

“What I remembered,” persisted Kirov, “was a gun.”

Now Pekkala stopped. “A gun?”

“Nagorski was carrying a pistol. He gave it to Maximov for safekeeping before he left the restaurant.” Kirov shrugged. “It might mean nothing.”