Like miners emerging from a tunnel deep beneath the ground, Pekkala and Barabanschikov blinked in the glare of sunlight.
Catching sight of Pekkala and their leader, the partisans raised their grizzled paws at them and bared their teeth in smiles, but they regarded Kirov, and the red stars on his sleeves, with undisguised contempt.
The bullet-riddled door opened on the driver’s side. A man in a black leather coat got out and approached Barabanschikov. The driver was short and barrel-chested, his broad face scalpeled with pale creases in the smoke-stained skin.
After exchanging a few words, Barabanschikov turned to Kirov and Pekkala. His face was grim. ‘There’s been another killing,’ he said.
‘Who is it?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Yakushkin, Commander of the Red Army garrison. My men have just found his body. You’d better come quickly.’
Without another word, they all climbed into the back of the truck. Crammed among the partisans, they sped away down the street, careening around piles of bricks, the husks of burnt-out vehicles and the carcasses of horses, still fastened to the traces of wagons they’d been pulling when they died.
Memo: Office of Comrade Stalin, Kremlin, to Third Western Division of Foreign Affairs. December 12th, 1937
You are instructed to prepare documents of voluntary transfer of citizenship from the United States of America to citizenship of the Soviet Union for William H. Vasko. You are authorised to backdate documents to September 1st, 1936. Work is to be carried out immediately by order of Comrade Stalin.
Signed — Poskrebychev, secretary to Comrade Stalin
*
From the office of Joseph Stalin, Kremlin
To Ambassador Joseph Davies, US Embassy, Mokhovaya Street. December 16th, 1937
Ambassador -
On behalf of Comrade Stalin, I am replying to your request for information on the arrest of American citizen William H. Vasko. We regret to inform you that no such American citizen has been arrested. However, the Central Records Office of the 3rd Western Division of Soviet Foreign Affairs indicates that, on September 1st, 1936, a William Vasko voluntarily transferred citizenship from the United States to the Soviet Union. This transfer is a matter of public record and can be accessed through the Central Records Office at any time. As such, if the arrest of Comrade Vasko had, in fact, taken place, it would be a matter for Soviet Internal Security and not for the United States Embassy. However, I have been authorised to inform you that Comrade Vasko is not currently under arrest or in detention at any Soviet facility.
Comrade Stalin expresses his hope that your inquiry into this matter has been resolved and hopes that, in future, your embassy staff will conduct a more thorough investigation into such matters before referring them to the Kremlin.
Signed — Poskrebychev, secretary to Comrade Stalin
The night before, while Kirov and Pekkala made their way towards the safe house, Fyodor Yakushkin, commander of the SMERSH Brigade, had been waiting for his dinner in a dilapidated apartment near the hospital.
A smell of cooking filled the room.
Perched on a chair which was too small for him, Yakushkin rested his fists upon a table set for two. He was a heavy-set man with a bald head and fleshy lips set into a thick, square jaw. Since his belly was too large for him to wear his gun belt comfortably while sitting, he had taken it off and hung it over the back of his chair. Out of habit, he removed his pistol from its holster and laid it within reach on the table. Then he sighed impatiently as he looked around at the blue sponge-printed flower pattern dabbed on to the butter-yellow wall, the delicate curtains and the framed pictures of a squinting, shifty-looking old man and an equally pugnacious old woman in a head scarf. Their stares made him uneasy. Adding to his discomfort was the fact everything around him looked breakable, as if all he had to do was touch the pictures or the curtains and they would come crashing to the floor. This impression of flimsiness included the chair on which he sat. He was afraid even to lean back, in case it collapsed underneath him.
Yakushkin’s mood had been soured even before he arrived by news of Colonel Andrich’s murder. Yakushkin had met with Colonel Andrich on several occasions. He had warned the colonel that a truce with the partisans could never be achieved, but Andrich was determined to succeed. Yakushkin could not help admiring the colonel’s tenacity, even though he was, himself, convinced of the inevitable failure of the mission. As a gesture of goodwill, Yakushkin had even loaned the colonel his own chauffeur, Sergeant Zolkin, along with his beloved American Lend-Lease Willys Jeep.
Now Zolkin was missing, probably lying dead somewhere among the ruins. His jeep had been found, still parked outside the bunker, although so riddled with shrapnel that the motor pool mechanics weren’t sure it would ever run again.
The driver and the Willys Jeep could be replaced, but Andrich could not. As far as Yakushkin was concerned, the blame for these killings lay entirely with the partisans. They had been given a chance for peace, and they had squandered it. From now on, he thought to himself, the partisans will have to deal with us, and we do not negotiate.
Yakushkin was proud of his brigade’s bloody reputation, so much so that when its former commander, Grigori Danek, began to show a change of heart, Yakushkin was forced to take action.
In the old days, Danek had ordered his troops to open fire at the first sign of trouble, and the resulting massacres combined into a tally of butchery unmatched by any other branch of NKVD.
‘The only thing that impresses me,’ Danek had once growled to Yakushkin in one of his vodka-fuelled tirades, ‘is the efficiency with which we dispatch our enemies into the afterlife.’
But with the end of the war now in sight, Danek had begun to see things differently. He believed that the role of SMERSH had to change, and change quickly, before they found themselves scapegoats in the post-war world for all manner of atrocities, even those which they had not actually committed. In a conflict already brimming with horrors, what made SMERSH different was that the blood on their hands came mostly from their own countrymen.
This detail had never bothered Yakushkin, who saw his brigade as an instrument of vengeance for all who opposed Stalin’s will, no matter where they came from.
Danek spoke incessantly of a day of reckoning which he felt must surely come for those who had dispensed this vengeance.
Finally, Yakushkin had heard enough. When he encountered Danek, alone and too drunk to stand in an alley in the city of Minsk, he strangled the commander with his bare hands, employing an efficiency of technique which even Danek might have found impressive if he had not been on the receiving end of it.