Garlinski found his gaze drawn to the scars on the sergeant’s knuckles, but he could make nothing of them and soon turned his attention to the sight of the people walking in the streets, passing through the cones of street-lamp light, still bundled in their winter scarves and furs.
The car pulled in to the Lubyanka courtyard.
Garlinski climbed out and looked around. He had heard that Lubyanka was once a fashionable neo-baroque building and it was still possible to see how grand it must have been before the Revolution. Now the windows were covered by angled metal shields, which prevented anyone from looking out, and strong lights glared down from the rooftops, obscuring his view of the sky.
A shudder passed through Garlinski. Even though he knew that he was being welcomed as a hero for his many years of service to the Soviet cause, the Lubyanka was still a place of nightmares for anyone who knew its history.
‘Where do I go?’ asked Garlinski.
‘I’ll walk you in,’ said the sergeant.
They entered the building and Garlinski was made to sign a register. The page on which he wrote was partially covered by a heavy metal screen, which hid all but the space in which he wrote his name.
‘This way.’ The sergeant beckoned for Garlinski to follow him.
The two men made their way downstairs and along a narrow corridor lined with pale green painted doors. Along the way, they passed two guards, with a prisoner shuffling along between them.
The prisoner, a young man with coal-black hair and narrow eyes, immediately turned to face the wall as Garlinski and the sergeant walked by.
There was complete silence in the corridor. Even the floor on which they walked had been covered with thick grey carpeting which dampened the sound of their footsteps.
Garlinski wanted to ask how much further they would have to go but the quiet was so threatening and profound that he did not dare to speak.
At the end of the corridor, they came to another door, which was made of dark, heavy panels and had a slightly arched top.
‘It’s the old wine cellar,’ whispered the sergeant, as he reached into his pocket for the key. ‘The men who worked at this place, back when it was still an insurance company, kept a king’s ransom in bottles down here for entertaining their wealthy clients. That’s all gone now, though, men and bottles both.’ He swung open the door and gestured grandly. ‘After you, Comrade Garlinski.’
Garlinski stepped inside. The ceiling of the room was arched and the walls were made of brick. The floor had been laid with tiles and there were shallow gutters running along the edges of the floor. He wondered why a wine cellar needed gutters. He looked around for furniture, but there was none. Not even a chair in which to sit.
He turned to ask the sergeant if they were in the right place.
The last clear thing Garlinski saw was the fist of the sergeant, knuckles spider-webbed with scars, as it slammed into his face.
He sprawled on to the floor, nearly blinded by the pain. Blood from his broken nose poured down the back of his throat and, propping himself up on one elbow, he retched as he struggled to breathe. Dimly, Garlinski watched as the sergeant removed his tunic and belt and hung them on the door handle. Then the man rolled up the sleeves of his thin, brown cotton shirt, the armpits of which were already darkened with sweat.
The sergeant’s smile had vanished. His face now appeared almost blank, as if he were only half aware of what he was doing. He reached down, took hold of the front of Garlinski’s coat and hauled him to his feet.
‘Wait!’ called Garlinski, peppering the sergeant’s face with blood. ‘There must be some mistake. I am a hero of the Soviet Union!’
Without a word of explanation and, using nothing more than his fists, the sergeant beat Peter Garlinski to death, as he had done countless others in the past.
He left the body lying on the floor, removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood off his hands. He studied a few new cuts on his knuckles. It was always their teeth that caused those.
Then he put on his tunic and belt and departed from the room, leaving the door open.
A few minutes later, two men dragged away Garlinski’s body, while a third mopped down the floor with a bucket of soapy water. Bubbles, poppy red, sluiced along the gutters and were gone.
In the dove-grey light of dawn, with darkness still clinging to the western sky, Pekkala and Kirov set off towards Berlin.
Although it was still cold, the breeze blowing up from the south was not as bitter as it had been the night before. Slowly, as they marched along, the warmth returned to their bones. They thought longingly of food they did not have and of the wheezy stove and battered chairs at their office on Pitnikov Street.
‘I knew it wouldn’t work,’ said Kirov.
‘What wouldn’t work?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Me giving you orders.’
‘Maybe you should have tried a little harder,’ suggested Pekkala.
Kirov turned to him. ‘Do you mean it might have worked?’
Pekkala thought about this for a moment. ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘but it would have been interesting to watch.’
They soon came across a railway track, which appeared to be heading directly towards the city. They followed it, timing their strides to the laddering of sleepers and smelling the oily creosote with which the wooden beams had been painted.
Through eyes bloodshot with fatigue, Pekkala watched the rails flow out on either side of him, like streams of mercury, converging in the distance. His memory tilted back to when he’d walked along another set of tracks which had been sutured across the earth.
In that moment, the mildness of that spring morning peeled away, leaving behind a world of bone-white snow and ice-sheathed trees and silence so profound that he could hear the rush of blood through his own veins. The cold slammed into his bones, and his heart seemed to cower behind the frail cage of his ribs.
He was back in Siberia again.
The tracks which he recalled were those of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which skirted the edge of the valley of Krasnagolyana, home to the labour camp of Borodok.
For much of the year, what few wagon trails criss-crossed that lonely forest lay deep beneath the snowdrifts or else were so clogged with mud that no one, not even the long-legged reindeer, could make their way along them.
During those seasons, the railway became the only means of crossing this vast landscape. It marked the boundary of Pekkala’s world. The land he roamed belonged to the Gulag of Borodok, whose trees he marked for cutting with red paint. Beyond the tracks lay the territory of Mamlin Three, another camp, where experiments were carried out on behalf of the Soviet military. At Mamlin, inmates were submerged in icy water until their hearts stopped beating. Then they were resuscitated with injections of adrenalin administered directly into their hearts. The procedure was repeated, with longer and longer intervals between the stopping of the heart and the adrenalin injections until, finally, the patient could not be revived. These experiments were designed to replicate the conditions of pilots brought down in the sea. Other tests, using extremes of high and low pressure, produced a steady flow of cadavers, which were packed into barrels of formaldehyde and sent to medical schools all across Russia.
For Pekkala, to walk across those tracks meant certain death if he was ever caught. But he was drawn to them in spite of the danger. At night, he stood back among the trees, while the carriages of the Trans-Siberian Express rattled past. He caught glimpses of the passengers, bundled in coats and asleep or staring out into the darkness with no idea that the darkness was staring back at them.
Until that memory finally stuttered to a halt, like a film clattering off its spool, he could not bring himself to step beyond the confines of the rails.