On the map the forest resembled a jagged shard of green glass, hemmed in by white expanses indicating cultivated fields. It straddled the Soviet and Polish border, marked only by a wavy dotted line.
The Rusalka lay approximately two hundred kilometers due east of Warsaw. Only a handful of villages existed on the Russian end of the forest, but there were, according to Pekkala’s map, several on the Polish side.
Pekkala had studied it so many times that by now the shape of it was branded on his mind. It was as if by knowing its outline he might be better prepared for whatever lay inside its boundaries.
It was late in the afternoon when they reached a tiny village called Zorovka, the last Russian settlement before the road disappeared into the forest. Zorovka consisted of half a dozen thatched-roof houses built closely together on either side of the road running into the Rusalka. Indignant-looking chickens wandered across the road, so unused to traffic that they barely seemed to notice the Emka until its wheels were almost on top of them.
The village seemed deserted except for a woman who was tilling the earth in her garden. When the Emka rolled into sight the woman did not even raise her head, but continued to chip away with a hoe at the muddy clumps of dirt.
The fact that she did not look up made Pekkala realize that she must have been expecting them. “Stop the car,” he ordered.
Kirov hit the brakes.
Pekkala got out and walked over to the woman.
As he crossed the road towards her, the woman continued to ignore him.
Beneath the marks of wagon wheels and horses’ hooves, Pekkala saw the tracks of heavy tires. Now he knew they were on the right path. “When did the truck pass through here?” he asked the woman, standing on the other side of her garden fence.
She stopped chipping at the earth. She raised her head. “Who are you?” she asked.
“I am Inspector Pekkala, from the Bureau of Special Operations in Moscow.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about a truck,” she said in a voice so loud that Pekkala wondered if she might be hard of hearing.
“I can see the tire tracks in the road,” said Pekkala.
The woman came to the edge of her fence and looked out into the road. “Yes,” she said, her voice almost a shout, “I see them, too, but I still don’t know anything about it.” Then she glanced at him, and Pekkala knew from the look on her face that she was lying. And more than this—she wanted him to know she was lying.
A jolt passed through Pekkala’s chest. He looked down at the ground, as if distracted by something. “Is he here?” he whispered.
“He was.”
“How long ago?”
“Yesterday. Sometime in the afternoon.”
“Was he alone?”
“I did not see anyone else.”
“If he is gone,” asked Pekkala, “why are you still afraid?”
“The others in this town are hiding in their houses, watching us and listening at their doors. If anything happens, they will blame me for talking to you, but I will blame myself if I say nothing.”
“If anything happens?” asked Pekkala.
The woman stared at him for a moment. “This man who drove the truck, he took somebody with him. Someone from this village. His name is Maklarsky—a forester here in the Rusalka.”
“Why would he kidnap somebody?” asked Pekkala.
“At first the driver said he just wanted some fuel for his truck. But the thing is, we are only allowed so much every month from the local commissariat. We only have one tractor in this village and what they give us isn’t even enough to keep it running. The amount of fuel he wanted was more than we draw in a month. So we told him no. Then he asked for someone to show him the way to the border. The Rusalka is patrolled by Polish cavalry. Our own soldiers come through here sometimes, once a month or so, but the Poles ride through that forest almost every day. The woods are full of trails. It’s easy to get lost. We told him he should go back out to the Moscow Highway and cross the border into Poland from there. That was when the driver pulled a gun.”
“What did he look like?” asked Pekkala.
“Broad shoulders, a big square face, and a mustache. He had blond hair turning gray.”
“His name is Kropotkin,” said Pekkala, “and he is very dangerous. It is very important that I stop this man before he crosses into Poland.”
“He may have done that already,” said the woman.
“If he had,” said Pekkala, “we would know about it.”
“This man said that people would come looking for him. He said we should keep a lookout for a man with a black coat, who wore a badge shaped like an eye on his lapel.”
Pekkala turned up the collar of his coat. “He meant this.”
“Yes,” said the woman, staring at the Emerald Eye. “He told us if we kept quiet, he would let his hostage go. But I didn’t believe him. That is why I’m talking to you now. The others are too scared to speak with you. My name is Zoya Maklarskaya and that man I told you about is my father. The decision is mine whether talking to you now will do more harm than good.”
“We will do what we can to bring your father back,” said Pekkala.
The woman nodded at the churned-up road. “Those tracks will lead you to him, and you had better leave now if you want to find him before nightfall. Once the dark has settled on that forest, even the wolves get lost in there.”
As Pekkala turned, he saw a face in the window of a house, sliding back into the shadows like a drowned man sinking to the bottom of a lake.
IN FADING LIGHT, THEY FOLLOWED KROPOTKIN’S TRACKS INTO THE forest. The ranks of trees closed around them. Sunset leaned in crooked pillars through the branches, lighting clearings where blankets of grass gleamed as luminously as the emerald in Pekkala’s gold-framed eye.
The road itself appeared to mark the border.
On one side, they passed wooden signs written in Polish, indicating that they were traveling right along the edge of the two countries. On the other side, nailed to trees, were metal plaques showing the hammer-and-sickle emblem of the Soviet Union. From beneath the signs, where the nails had pierced the bark, white trickles of sap bled down to the ground.
From his hours of staring at the map, the Rusalka compressed in Pekkala’s mind until he had convinced himself that such a monster of a tank could never hide for long.
But now that they were in it, bumping along over washboard roads, eyes straining to follow the snakeskin trail of Kropotkin’s tire tracks, Pekkala realized that a hundred of those tanks could vanish in here without a trace.
Pekkala was overwhelmed by the vastness of these woods. His memories of the great cities Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev all began to feel like a dream. It was as if the only thing that existed on this earth, that had ever existed, was the forest of Rusalka.
When the sunlight had finally gone, the darkness did not seem to settle from above as it did in the city. Instead, it rose up from the ground, like a black liquid flooding the earth.
They could no longer see the truck’s wheel marks, and it was too dangerous to use the Emka’s headlights when Kropotkin might be waiting for them around every bend in the road.
They steered the Emka off the road, cut the engine, and climbed stiff-legged from the car. The dew had settled. Wind blew through the tops of the trees.
“We’ll start looking again as soon as it is light,” said Pekkala. “As long as it’s dark, Kropotkin can’t risk moving either.”
“Can we make a fire?” asked Kirov.
“No,” replied Pekkala. “Even if he couldn’t see the flames, the smell of smoke would lead him right to us. We will all take turns standing guard. I’ll take the first watch.”