occur to someone in that situation to undo what they have done.”
“By giving its secrets to the enemy, you mean?”
Pekkala nodded slowly. “That is one possibility.”
“Do you know why it is called the Konstantin Project?”
“No, Comrade Nagorski.”
“Konstantin is the name of my son, my only child. You see, Inspector, this project is as sacred to me as my own family. There is nothing I would do to harm it. Some people cannot understand that. They write me off as some kind of Dr. Frankenstein, obsessed only with bringing a monster to life. They don’t understand the price I have to pay for my accomplishments. Success can be as harmful as failure when you are just trying to get on with your life. My wife and son have suffered greatly.”
“I understand,” said Pekkala.
“Do you?” asked Nagorski, almost pleading. “Do you really?”
“We have both made difficult choices,” Pekkala said.
Nagorski nodded, staring away into the corner of the room, lost in thought. Suddenly, he faced Pekkala. “Then you should know that everything I’ve told you is the truth.”
“Excuse me, Colonel Nagorski,” said Pekkala. He got up, left the room, and walked down the corridor, which was lined with metal doors. His footsteps made no sound on the gray industrial carpeting. All sound had been removed from this place, as if the air had been sucked out of it. At the end of the corridor, one door remained slightly ajar. Pekkala knocked once and walked into a room so filled with smoke that his first breath felt like a mouthful of ashes.
“Well, Pekkala?” said a voice. Sitting by himself in a chair in the corner of the otherwise empty room was a man of medium height and stocky build, with a pockmarked face and a withered left hand. His hair was thick and dark, combed straight back on his head. A mustache sewn with threads of gray bunched beneath his nose. He was smoking a cigarette, of which so little remained that one more puff would have touched the embers to his skin.
“Very well, Comrade Stalin,” said Pekkala.
The man stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe and blew the last gray breath in two streams from his nose. “What do you think of our Colonel Nagorski?” he asked.
“I think he is telling the truth,” replied Pekkala.
“I don’t believe it,” replied Stalin. “Perhaps your assistant should be questioning him.”
“Major Kirov,” said Pekkala.
“I know who he is!” Stalin’s voice rose in anger.
Pekkala understood. It was the mention of Kirov’s name which unnerved Stalin, since Kirov was also the name of the former Leningrad Party Chief, who had been assassinated five years earlier. The murder of Kirov had weighed upon Stalin, not because of any lasting affection for the man but because it showed that if a person like Kirov could be killed, then Stalin himself might be next. Since Kirov’s death, Stalin had never walked out into the streets, among the people whom he ruled but did not trust.
Stalin kneaded his hands together, cracking his knuckles one after the other. “The Konstantin Project has been compromised, and I believe Nagorski is responsible.”
“I have yet to see the proof of that,” said Pekkala. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Comrade Stalin? Is there some proof that you can show? Or is this just another arrest? In which case, you have plenty of other investigators you could use.”
Stalin rolled the stub of his cigarette between his fingers. “Do you know how many people I allow to speak to me that way?”
“Not many, I imagine,” said Pekkala. Every time he met with Stalin, he became aware of an emotional blankness that seemed to hover around the man. It was something about Stalin’s eyes. The look on his face would change, but the expression in his eyes never did. When Stalin laughed, cajoled, and if that didn’t work, threatened, it was, for Pekkala, like watching an exchange of masks in a Japanese Kabuki play. There were moments, as one mask transformed into another, when it seemed to Pekkala that he could glimpse what lay behind. And what he found there filled him with dread. His only defense was to pretend he could not see it.
Stalin smiled, and suddenly the mask had changed again. “ ‘Not many’ is right. ‘None’ would be more correct. You are right that I do have other investigators, but this case is too important.” Then he put the cigarette butt in his pocket.
Pekkala had watched him do this before. It was a strange habit in a place where even the poorest people threw their cigarette butts on the ground and left them there. Strange, too, for a man who would never run short of the forty cigarettes he smoked each day. Maybe there was some story in it, perhaps dating back to his days as a bank robber in Tblisi. Pekkala wondered if Stalin, like some beggar in the street, removed the remaining tobacco from the stubs and rolled it into fresh cigarettes. Whatever the reason, Stalin kept it to himself.
“I admire your audacity, Pekkala. I like a person who is not afraid to speak his mind. That’s one of the reasons I trust you.”
“All I ask is that you let me do my job,” said Pekkala. “That was our agreement.”
Stalin let his hands fall with an impatient slap against his knees. “Do you know, Pekkala, that my pen once touched the paper of your death sentence? I was that close.” He pinched the air, as if he were still holding that pen, and traced the air with the ghost of his own signature. “I never regretted my choice. And how many years have we been working together now?”
“Six. Almost seven.”
“In all that time, have I ever interfered with one of your investigations?”
“No,” admitted Pekkala.
“And have I ever threatened you, simply because you disagreed with me?”
“No, Comrade Stalin.”
“And that”—Stalin aimed a finger at Pekkala, as if taking aim down the barrel of a gun—“is more than you can say about your former boss, or his meddling wife, Alexandra.”
