Sam Eastland - Archive 17

The smile on Savushkin’s face faltered. He gathered up a bucket in each hand. The wire-bale handles dug into his raw, chapped skin. “I know my task is to protect you, Inspector, but they are making it very difficult. I’m trying. Believe me, I’m still trying.”

Overcome, Pekkala reached out and set his hands on Savushkin’s shoulders. “Don’t worry about me. Look after yourself. I’ll do what I can to get you transferred from the mine.”

“No.” Savushkin shook his head. “People will only get suspicious. Solve the case, Inspector, as quickly as you can. Then we can both get out of here.” Carrying the buckets, he disappeared into the tunnel, his shadow lumbering across the walls, giant and grotesque in the lamplight.

Pekkala looked at his hands. His palms and fingertips were chalky white where they had touched Savushkin’s jacket. Shaken, he made his way back across the compound.

Outside the kitchen, Gramotin was waiting for him. “The commandant wants to see you.”

Pekkala nodded.

“I’m watching you, convict,” said Gramotin.

“I know,” replied Pekkala.

“This just arrived for you,” said Klenovkin, holding out a telegram.

It was from Kirov.

Pekkala studied the faint gray letters fanned out across the flimsy sheet of paper.

RYABOV IS COVER NAME FOR AGENT LISTED IN BLUE FILE AS KILLED DURING ARREST OF GRODEK BUT SURVIVED STOP

Pekkala stopped reading. The Blue File. This was the first time he had heard a mention of it since before the Revolution. He hadn’t even known the Blue File was still in existence, although it didn’t surprise him to learn that the Tsar had failed to destroy it, as he should have done, in those final days of his captivity at Tsarskoye Selo. The Tsar had been such a meticulous keeper of records that getting rid of anything he’d written down would have gone against every instinct he possessed.

Pekkala gave a quiet grunt of admiration that Kirov had managed to track down this information in the labyrinth of Archive 17, especially since that meant dealing with Professor Braninko, its notoriously uncooperative curator.

Even more astonishing than the mention of Grodek was the fact that one of the Okhrana agents on that mission had survived. Until now, he had believed they were all dead.

“What’s the matter?” asked Klenovkin. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

On a clear winter’s day, a car filled with heavily armed Okhrana agents raced through the streets of St. Petersburg .

Pekkala was crammed in beside a young officer whom he had never met before. The task of the Okhrana agents was to clear the ground floor, not thought to be occupied, and make their way swiftly up to the apartment rented by Grodek and his mistress .

“Do you think he will come quietly?” asked the officer .

“No,” replied Pekkala. He did not believe it would be possible to arrest Grodek without sustaining casualties. Neither did he believe that Grodek would allow himself to be taken alive .

As they spoke, the young officer was loading his Nagant pistol. When the wheels of their car bounced over a pothole, a bullet slipped from the officer’s fingers and fell into the seat well below. The men were too closely packed for him to bend down to retrieve it. The Okhrana agent swore quietly at his own clumsiness. Then he glanced across at Pekkala .

“Last year,” the officer explained, “one of my colleagues closed a car door on my fingers.” He held up his hand as proof .

Pekkala could see that the man’s thumb and index finger had been deformed by the bone not setting straight .

“The doctors tell me I have nerve damage,” continued the officer. “Sometimes I can’t help dropping things.”

“I see,” said Pekkala .

“To tell you the truth, Inspector, I am also a little nervous.”

Before Pekkala could reply, they rounded a corner and Grodek’s house slid into view .

The officer closed the cylinder of the revolver and placed it in the holster strapped under his armpit. “Well,” he told Pekkala, “I will see you on the other side.”

The three cars screeched to a halt outside Grodek’s house. The Okhrana agents piled out immediately and began battering down the door .

As they had planned in advance, Pekkala moved to the rear of the building, in case Grodek tried to escape along the canal path. He took cover behind a stack of crates containing salt used for preserving fish which were caught in the summer months at the mouth of the Neva River. In winter, due to ice, none of the boats could get up the river. At that time of year, the whole wharf was deserted .

Once the agents were inside, they raced up the stairs to Grodek’s apartment on the second floor .

From his hiding place, Pekkala heard a heavy, muffled thump inside the building. The windows seemed to ripple. This was followed a fraction of a second later by a concussion which threw him off his feet. Jets of fire belched out of the windows. Glass sprayed over the street. Dazed and lying on his back, Pekkala watched a door sail over his head and into the canal .

Grodek had planted a bomb. Only seconds before the blast, he and his mistress, Maria Balka, had managed to escape through a side window .

By the time Pekkala got back on his feet, the two fugitives were already running away down the street .

After a chase, Pekkala caught up with Grodek and arrested him, but not before Maria Balka met her death in the icy waters of the Moika canal. Her own lover had killed her rather than let her fall into captivity .

Having witnessed the devastation caused by the bomb blast, Pekkala did not even consider that any of the Okhrana agents could have survived the explosion. When Chief Inspector Vassileyev confirmed that all of the agents had perished, he was only reporting what Pekkala already knew. Or thought he knew .

The agents who died that day were all strangers to Pekkala. All except the young officer, whose name he’d never learned. And afterwards, Pekkala had done what Vassileyev had taught him to do with memories of the dead: He’d filed them away in the great archive deep in the labyrinth of his mind, and left them there to fade like photographs abandoned in the sun .

Now Pekkala wondered if the young officer had died, after all.

“I need to see Ryabov’s body again,” he told Klenovkin.

“What? Now?”

“Yes!”

“But what if Melekov is still in the kitchen?”

“He won’t be. Melekov goes back to bed as soon as his shift is finished.”

Klenovkin’s eyebrows bobbed up in surprise. “Back to bed? He’s not allowed to do that in the middle of the day!”

“Nevertheless …”

“That lazy Siberian piece of …”

“Please, Commandant. It is crucial that I see the body immediately.”

Leaving Kirov’s telegram on the desk, the two men made their way to the kitchen.

Klenovkin opened the freezer with his master key.

Inside, at the back, Pekkala pushed aside the wall of vodka crates. Ryabov’s corpse was still there, lying on the floor under a tarpaulin.

Crouching down, Pekkala pulled back the tarp, whose ice-encrusted contours retained the shape of Ryabov’s face.

The shadows made it difficult to see.

“Do you have a match?” Pekkala asked.

Klenovkin pulled a box from his pocket and handed it down.

Pekkala struck a match and held it close to Ryabov’s hand. In the quivering light, he glimpsed the crookedly healed thumb and index finger of the Okhrana officer he had met years ago, on their way to the Moika Canal. As a pawn in this game of trust between Kolchak and the Tsar, agent Ryabov had played his role through to the end.