Shivering as if he were cold, Pekkala put his hands in his trouser pockets. In his right hand, he took hold of the switchblade.
‘Chilly today, isn’t it?’ asked Rusak. ‘Well, don’t you worry, pal. You’ll soon be warm again.’
As Rusak spoke, Pekkala heard the unmistakable rustle of a pistol being drawn from its holster. In that moment, Pekkala stopped thinking. He pulled the knife out of his pocket, pressed the round metal button on the side, releasing the blade, and swung his arm around.
Rusak had no time to react. The knife struck him on the side of the head and the blade vanished into his temple. The rat man’s face showed only mild astonishment. His right eye filled with blood. He dropped the revolver, took one step forward and then fell into Pekkala’s arms.
Pekkala laid him down. Then he set his boot on Rusak’s neck, pulled out the blade and wiped it on the dead man’s coat. For a moment, Pekkala waited, watching and listening. Satisfied that they were alone, he folded the blade shut and returned the knife to his pocket.
He took hold of Rusak by the collar of his tunic and dragged him down the alley. Rusak's boots laid a trail though the glittering black coal dust. Ten paces further on, Pekkala came to a place where the brick wall was recessed, forming a space like a room with three sides and no roof. Judging from stains on the brick, the space had once been used to store garbage ready for collection. Now it was filled with half a dozen bodies, some soldiers and some civilians. They had all been shot in the back of the head and piled on top of each other. Their faces were shattered, the corpses wet from the rain.
Pekkala dumped Rusak on the pile. Then he took a few steps backwards, as if expecting Rusak to rise from the dead, before he turned and ran.
At the safe house, he met up with Barabanschikov. It turned out that the partisan leader had also been stopped at a police roadblock on the other side of town, but had managed to talk his way out of it.
‘You ran into the wrong people, that’s all,’ said Barabanschikov. ‘It was just bad luck that you were arrested.’
‘Maybe so,’ replied Pekkala, ‘but I’ll need more than luck to survive.’ From that day on, he carried the shotgun in his coat.
Memo: Joseph Stalin to Henrik Panasuk, Lubyanka. December 11th, 1937
Liquidation of prisoner E-15-K to be carried out immediately.
*
Memo: Henrik Panasuk, Director, Lubyanka, to Comrade Stalin. December 11th, 1937
In accordance with your instructions, prisoner E-15-K has been liquidated.
‘The Rasputitsa will come early this year,’ said a voice behind Pekkala.
Pekkala was startled at first, but then he sighed and smiled. ‘There is only one person who can sneak up on me like that.’
‘Luckily for you, that person is your friend.’
‘Good morning, Barabanschikov.’
Almost hidden among the skeleton-fingered branches of a Russian olive tree, Barabanschikov sat on an upturned bucket. He wore fingerless wool gloves and a cap pulled down over his ears. Lying across his lap was a Russian PPSh sub-machine gun fitted with a 50-round drum magazine. Such weapons, once almost impossible to obtain, were now commonplace among the partisans. Barabanschikov had been sitting there long enough that a fine layer of snow had settled upon his shoulders. The former school teacher had long ago given up shaving and a dark beard covered his face. His eyes, once patient and curious as he gazed across the rows of desks each morning while his students pulled notebooks from their satchels, had taken on a burning intensity brought on by malnourishment, insomnia and prolonged fear. Those children he once taught might not have recognised him at all, but for the gold-rimmed glasses he still wore.
Cupping his gloved hands to his mouth, Barabanschikov puffed warm breath on to his frozen fingers. ‘Have you found out yet who did the killings in the bunker?’
‘Not yet,’ replied Pekkala, ‘but I am working on it.’
Barabanschikov reached down and gently patted Pekkala’s face, the rough wool of his glove snagging against Pekkala’s three-day growth of stubble. ‘You had better work fast, my old friend. There has already been a gunfight between a Red Army patrol and a group of partisans searching for whoever killed their leader. Two partisans are dead. Three soldiers are wounded. We are fast approaching the moment when nothing can prevent an all-out war between us and the Red Army. In the war we have fought until now, all we had to do was survive until the Red Army pushed back the invaders. But the storm that is coming is not like any other they have seen. You know Stalin. You know what he is capable of doing. And unless you do something to stop this, he will annihilate us all.’
‘That’s why I have brought in some help,’ said Pekkala. ‘Come inside, Barabanschikov. It’s time you met the commissar.’
*
Kirov looked around him blearily. It was dark in the room. Only a few chinks of daylight worked their way in through gaps in the boards which had been nailed over the shutters. For a moment, he stared in confusion at the greatcoat which had been draped across him. Then he pushed it away, stood up and began slapping at his clothes, hoping to dislodge the lice which he felt sure had taken up residence in his uniform.
Having finished this frantic ritual, Kirov fished out a box of matches and lit the lantern. It was only then that he realised there were two men sitting at the table, both watching him intently.
One of them was Pekkala.
The other, Kirov had never seen before. With rags for clothes offset by an oddly dignified pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, he looked like a shipwrecked millionaire.
‘This is Major Kirov,’ said Pekkala.
‘And I,’ said the stranger, ‘am Andrei Barabanschikov. So, Commissar, you are here to help us catch a killer.’
‘That’s right,’ replied Kirov.
‘It seems to me that you need look no further than the ranks of your own people.’
Kirov bristled at the remark. ‘Why would you say that?’
‘From what I hear, the man who killed Andrich and those partisans was wearing a Red Army uniform.’
‘It was probably stolen.’
‘Perhaps,’ admitted Barabanschikov, ‘but then there is the matter of your survival,’ said Barabanschikov. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as unusual? The only person I can think of who might hesitate to kill a Russian commissar,’ he paused, ‘is another commissar.’
‘I did not come here to solve your murders, Comrade Barabanschikov, or to become one of your victims, either,’ Kirov pointed at the tear in his tunic where the bullet had gone in. ‘As far as I’m concerned, if Stalin has given the order to lay down your weapons, then that is exactly what you should do. This is simply a choice between life and death.’
‘Enough!’ shouted Pekkala. ‘If even you two can’t see eye to eye, then what hope is there of peace?’
‘But we do agree,’ insisted Barabanschikov. ‘About one thing, at least. The major is correct that this is indeed a choice between life and death. But what he does not seem to understand is that the choice is ours to make, not theirs.’
Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of a heavy diesel engine and a squeak of brakes in the alleyway behind the house.
‘They’re here,’ announced Barabanschikov.
‘Major Kirov,’ said Pekkala as he rose from his chair, ‘I would like for you to meet some friends of mine.’
Parked in the alley was a German military Hanomag truck, with SS number plates and a black and white Maltese cross painted upon each door of the driver’s cab. Its windscreen had been cracked into a spray of the silver lightning bolts, still tinted with the blood of the driver whose head had collided with the glass when an ambush ran it off the road the week before.
Crowded into the back were the truck’s new owners: an assortment of heavily armed men, most of them bearded, their hair long and unkempt. They were armed with weapons of all types — German Mausers, Russian Mosin-Nagants and Austrian Steyr-Mannlichers. Others had no guns at all, but carried butcher’s knives, sledgehammers and hatchets. Their clothing was equally varied. One had crammed himself into the silver-buttoned tunic of a Ukrainian Nationalist policeman, the black cloth gashed across the back where its former occupant had been hewn down with the same axe carried by the man who wore it now. Others were swathed in the dappled camouflage smocks of Waffen SS soldiers, or the deer-brown wool of greatcoats scavenged from the graves of Polish soldiers. They wore bullet-punctured helmets, cloth caps snatched from the heads of men as they begged for their lives or braided garlands of twigs which they carried on their heads like crowns of thorns. One was barely in his teens, a gymnastiorka tunic hanging scarecrow-like from narrow shoulders and a sub-machine gun monstrous-looking in his arms. Beside him stood an older man, his face pockmarked and ears so whittled down by frostbite they looked as if they had been chewed by a dog. This man carried no weapon at all, but only a stick carved from white birch. There was no glint of kindness in their eyes, nor of any emotion that could have brought about a moment’s hesitation in the furtherance of butchery.