‘You don’t look like you think it’s good news.’
‘Well, how am I supposed to look?’
‘Would you like to know her name?’
‘Yes! Of course I would.’
‘Her name is Elizaveta Kapanina. She works in the records office at NKVD headquarters.’
‘And where did you find this woman?’
‘At the records office!’ Kirov raised his hands and let them fall heavily on to the table. ‘Where do you think I found her?’ He shook his head. ‘I knew you wouldn’t handle this well.’
‘I’m handling it just fine,’ Pekkala replied testily. ‘I just didn’t think. .’
‘What? That I’d ever find anybody?’
‘That’s not what I meant. I just didn’t think you were looking for anyone to be with.’
‘I wasn’t,’ said Kirov. ‘It simply happened.’
‘Well, congratulations. When do I get to meet her?’
‘The answer is soon, and you’d better be nice.’
‘Of course I’ll be nice. I’ll be my usual self.’
‘No you won’t, Inspector! Your usual self is exactly what I am afraid of.’
‘I’ll be nice,’ muttered Pekkala, retrieving his spoon from the bowl. ‘Now can I finish my soup?’
After their meal, Kirov and Pekkala drove across town and soon reached the gates of Lubyanka. In tsarist times the building had been one of the grand hotels of Moscow, but during the Revolution, its suites were converted into cells and its broom closets into punishment cells known as chimneys, where prisoners were forced to stand hunched over for days on end, their foreheads leaning against metals grilles behind which burned powerful light bulbs which were never turned off.
The guard, recognising Pekkala’s Emka, swung the gates open to let them pass.
Kirov parked inside the high-walled courtyard, whose pale yellow walls reflected the morning sun.
As he strode towards the entrance, Pekkala paused to look up at the window openings, which had once offered some of the finest views in Moscow. The windows themselves were long gone, replaced by long metal awnings which drooped like sleepy eyelids, cutting out all but the faintest of daylight seeping in from the world outside.
Inside, Pekkala and Kirov signed their names in the vast entry book, on which all other spaces but the ones in which they wrote their names were concealed by a heavy metal plate.
The guard behind the desk was new, his expression fierce and focused. He had not yet acquired the slightly dazed look of the other Lubyanka guards who, like the prisoners they oversaw, passed their days in such stifling routine that their senses grew dull to everything but pain.
Pekkala opened his identity book and, in the regulation manner, held it up beside his face.
The guard barely glanced at it. ‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ he snapped.
‘I am here to question a prisoner.’
‘The name?’
‘Semykin, Valery.’
‘Wait,’ replied the guard. After consulting a book in which the locations of all prisoners were listed, he picked up the heavy black telephone receiver on his desk. ‘Bring Semykin, Block 4, Cell 6.’
‘Leave Semykin where he is,’ interrupted Pekkala. ‘I will go to him.’
‘Prisoners cannot be visited. They must be brought to one of the holding cells. No exceptions!’
‘I understand,’ said Pekkala, as he slid his pass book across the counter.
The guard snatched up the book and peered inside. It took a moment for the man to realise he was looking at a Shadow Pass. His lips twitched. ‘My apologies, Inspector.’ Carefully, the guard closed the book and returned it to Pekkala.
Another call was made, another guard summoned, who led them directly to Semykin’s cell.
The boots of those guards operating within those parts of the Lubyanka occupied by prisoners had special felt soles, enabling the guards to move silently along the corridors, which were padded with grey industrial carpeting. The walls were also grey, as were the dozens of cell doors which lined each corridor inside this labyrinth.
After his arrest on the Finnish border, Pekkala himself had been prisoner here, before being transferred to the Butyrka prison and from there to Siberia. Even more than the silence of this prison, which seemed to suck the air out of his lungs, it was the smell — of bleach and new paint and the particular sour and metallic reek of sweat from terrified men — which hurled Pekkala back into the waking nightmare of his days inside this place. As Pekkala walked behind the guard, eyes fixed upon the back of his shaved head just visible beneath his cap, he recalled the orders of these men each time they escorted him from his cell. ‘Do not look to the left. Do not look to the right. Fail to obey and you will be shot.’ It was spoken so often that the words seemed to flow together and become meaningless, adding to the feeling of this prison, that all of them, guards and prisoners alike, were trapped in a dream from which they were unable to wake.
With his heartbeat thumping in his temples, Pekkala prayed their stay would not last long, since he knew it was only a matter of time before the memories of his own confinement in this prison overwhelmed him.
At cell 6 of block 4, the guard halted and slid back the bolt. Before he opened the door, he turned to Pekkala. ‘It’s no use, Inspector. You won’t get anything out of him. Valery Semykin is the most stubborn old fool we’ve ever locked up in this place.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Pekkala.
The guard swung the door wide. A waft of stale air brushed past them, tinged with the sour ammoniac reek of an unwashed body.
‘Not again!’ exclaimed the guard.
There was a scuttling inside the little room, whose walls were glossy brown up to waist height and cream white from there to the ceiling. Covering almost an entire wall was a network of hundreds of fingernail-sized speckles, which ranged in colour from black to red. At first, Pekkala couldn’t understand what he was looking at. He could find no pattern in the markings. They appeared to have been applied completely at random. But as he continued to stare, his eyes refocused and he realised he was looking at a painting of several half-dressed people lounging on a river bank, and others standing in the water. One boy had his hands raised to his mouth, as if taking a drink. In the distance, a few small sailing boats scudded about on the river and smoke rose from the chimney of a factory. In that same moment, he grasped that each of those hundreds of spots was made by a fingertip covered in blood.
On the other side of the room, standing with his face against the wall was a burly, thick-necked man. He wore a set of standard prison pyjamas, made from thin beige cotton, the bottoms of which had no drawstring, forcing the man to constantly hold them up with one hand.
Pekkala could see that the man’s fingertips were a mass of unhealed wounds, some of them still bleeding.
‘I warned you not to do this again,’ said the guard. ‘When I come back, you’ll have to clean this up and then I’m going to put you on half rations for a week.’
The man did not reply. He remained motionless, forehead pressed against the wall.
‘Hello, Valery,’ said Pekkala.
Still there was no reply.
‘Why does he not speak?’ asked Kirov.
‘New regulation,’ replied the guard. ‘Prisoners in solitary must face the wall when in the presence of a visitor and may not speak without permission from a member of the Lubyanka staff.’
‘Then would you give him permission?’
The guard scowled. ‘And listen to him curse us black and blue? Because that’s what he’ll do, you know, no matter what we throw at him.’
Pekkala waited in silence for the guard to finish his tirade.
‘Suit yourself,’ replied the guard. ‘The prisoner may speak!’
Semykin sighed. His body seemed to slump.
‘Let me know when you’re finished wasting your time on this old fool.’ The guard’s felt-soled boots swished over the carpeting as he made his way down to the end of the corridor.