PEKKALA WENT BY HIMSELF TO THE NAGORSKI HOUSE. THE SAME guard let him in at the entrance gate of the facility.
Before turning down the road which led to Nagorski’s dacha, Pekkala stopped his car outside the main facility building. Inside, he found Gorenko sitting on a bullet-riddled oil drum, thumbing through a magazine. The scientist’s shoes were off and his bare feet rested in the sand which had poured out of the barrel.
When he saw Pekkala, Gorenko looked up and smiled. “Hello, Inspector!”
“No work today?” asked Pekkala.
“Work is done!” replied Gorenko. “Only two hours ago, a man arrived to transport our prototype T-34 to the factory at Stalingrad.”
“I didn’t realize that the prototype was ready.”
“It’s close enough. It’s like I said, Inspector. There’s a difference between excellence and perfection. There will always be more things to do, but Moscow obviously felt it was time to begin mass production.”
“How did Ushinsky take it?”
“He hasn’t come in yet. Being the perfectionist that he is, I doubt he will be very pleased. If he starts talking crazy again, I’ll send him straight to you, Inspector, and you can sort him out.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Pekkala. “In the meantime, Professor, the reason I’m here is that I’m trying to find out about a gun belonging to Colonel Nagorski. It was a small pistol of German manufacture. Apparently he carried it with him all the time.”
“I know it,” said Gorenko. “He didn’t have a holster for the thing, so he used to keep the gun in the pocket of his tunic, rattling around with his spare change.”
“Do you know where it came from? Where he got it?”
“Yes,” replied Gorenko. “It was a gift from a German general named Guderian. Guderian was a tank officer during the war. He wrote a book about tank warfare. Nagorski used to keep it by his bedside. The two of them met when the German army put on a display of armor in ’36. Dignitaries from all over the world were invited to watch. Nagorski was very impressed. He met Guderian when he was there. Obviously, the two of them had plenty in common. Before Nagorski returned home, Guderian gave him that pistol as a gift. Nagorski always said he hoped we’d never have to fight them.”
“Thank you, Professor.” Pekkala walked to the door. Then he turned back to Gorenko. “What will you do now?” he asked.
Gorenko gave him a sad smile. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose this is what it is like when you have children and they grow up and leave the house. You just have to get used to the quiet.”
A few minutes later, Pekkala pulled up to the Nagorski house.
Mrs. Nagorski was sitting on the porch. She wore a short brown corduroy jacket with the same mandarin collar as a Russian soldier’s tunic and a faded pair of blue canvas trousers of the type worn by factory workers. Her hair was covered by a white headscarf, decorated along the edges with red and blue flowers.
She looked as if she’d been expecting someone else.
Pekkala got out of the car and nodded hello. “I am sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Nagorski.”
“I thought you were the guards, come to throw me out of my house.”
“Why would they do that?”
“The question, Inspector, is why wouldn’t they, now that my husband is gone?”
“Well, I have not come to throw you out,” he said, trying to reassure her.
“Then what brings you here?” she asked. “Have you brought me some answers?”
“No,” replied Pekkala, “I have only brought questions for now.”
“Well,” she said, rising to her feet, “you had better come inside and ask them, hadn’t you?”
Once they were inside the dacha, she offered him a place in one of two chairs which faced the fireplace. Wedged under the iron grating was a bundle of twigs wrapped in newspaper, and balanced on the blackened iron bars of the grate stood a tidy pyramid of logs.
“You can light that,” she said, and handed him a box of matches. “I’ll get us something to eat.”
As he struck a match and held it to the edges of the newspaper, Pekkala watched the blue glow spread and the printed words crumble into darkness.
On the hearth she laid a plate with slices of bread fanned out like a deck of cards. Beside it, she placed a small bowl made of tin which was heaped with flakes of sea salt, like the scales of tiny fish. Then she sat down in the chair beside him.
“Well, Inspector,” she said, “have you learned anything at all since we last spoke?”
Her bluntness did not surprise him, and at this moment Pekkala was grateful for it. He reached down and picked up a piece of bread. He dipped a corner of it in the flakes of salt and took a bite. “I believe that your husband was killed with his own gun.”
“That thing he carried in his pocket?”
“Yes,” he replied with his mouth full, “and I am wondering if you know where it is.”
She shook her head. “He used to put it on the bedside table at night. It was his most prized possession. It’s not there now. He must have had it with him when he died.”
“There’s nowhere else it could be?”
“My husband was precise in his habits, Inspector. The gun was either in his pocket or on that table. He didn’t like not knowing where things were.”
“Did your husband have any meetings scheduled on the day he was killed?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t have told me if he did, unless it meant that he would be coming home late, and he didn’t say anything about that.”
“So he did not talk about his work with you.”
She waved her hand towards the T-34 blueprints plastered across the walls. “It was a combination of him not wanting to talk and me not wanting to listen.”
“When he left here on that day, was he alone?” asked Pekkala.
“Yes.”
“Maximov did not drive him?”
“My husband usually walked to the facility. It had started out sunny, so he set off on foot. It’s only about a twenty-minute walk and the only exercise he ever took.”
“Was there anything unusual about the day?”
“No. We had an argument, but there’s nothing unusual about that.”
“What was it about, this argument?”
“It was Konstantin’s birthday. The argument started when I told my husband that he shouldn’t be spending the whole day at work when he should have stayed home with his son on his birthday. Once we started shouting at each other, Konstantin got up and left the house.”
“And where did your son go?”
“Fishing. That’s where he usually goes to get away from us. He is old enough now that he does not have to tell us where he’s going. I wasn’t worried, and later I saw him out in his boat. That’s where he was when you arrived with Maximov.”
“I assume he can’t go into the forest because of the traps.”
“There are no traps here, only in the woods surrounding the facility. He’s perfectly safe around the house.”
“Did Konstantin ever accompany his father to the facility?”
“No,” she replied. “That was one of the few things my husband and I agreed upon. We did not want him playing around where there were weapons being built, guns being fired and so on.”
“This argument you had about the birthday. How did it resolve itself?”
“Resolve?” She laughed. “Inspector, you are being far too optimistic. Our arguments were never resolved. They simply ended when one of us couldn’t take it anymore and got up to leave the room. In this case, it was my husband, after I had accused him of forgetting Konstantin’s birthday altogether.”
“Did he deny it?”
“No. How could he? Even Maximov sent Konstantin a birthday card. What does that tell you, Inspector, when a bodyguard takes better care of a young man than his own father does?”
