Siberian Red

guard that he actually lowered his gun. ‘If you are who I think you are,’ he whispered, ‘our orders were to put you on wagon number 6‚ back at the V-4 station.’
    ‘Why does it matter which wagon I get on?’
    The guard shook his head. ‘Those were the orders from stationmaster Kasinec.’
    ‘Can you get me in there now?’
    ‘Not without making them suspicious. The only time we move people is if a fight has broken out.’
    ‘Will that not do for a reason?’
    The guard studied Pekkala uneasily. ‘It would, but you don’t look as if you’ve been in a fight.’
    Pekkala sighed as he realised what must happen now.
    After a moment’s hesitation, the guard lifted his rifle, turning the butt end towards Pekkala. ‘Travel well, Inspector.’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Pekkala, and then everything went black.
    He regained consciousness just as the door to wagon no. 6 was slammed shut. His lips were sticky with blood. Tracing his fingertips cautiously along the bridge of his nose, Pekkala was relieved to feel no jagged edge of broken bone.
    In those first hours of the journey, the cramped space of the wagon remained silent, leaving each man alone with his thoughts.
    As frost began to form across the inside of the wagon walls, Pekkala felt a slow fear creeping into the marrow of his bones. And he knew it would stay there, like the frost, which would not melt until these wagons rolled back empty to the west.
    By dawn of the next day, the convoy had reached Sarapaul Station. Through the barbed-wire-laced opening that served as a window, Pekkala saw the platform jammed with soldiers on their way to man the border in the west. In their long, ill-fitting greatcoats, with pointed Budenny caps upon their heads, they boarded wagons no different from the ones in which Pekkala was riding. Blankets, rolled and tied over their shoulders, gave to these soldiers the appearance of hunchbacks. Their long Mosin-Nagant rifles looked more like cripples’ canes than guns.
    Morning sun sliced through rust holes in the metal roof, flooding the wagon with spears of golden light. As Pekkala raised his head to feel the warmth upon his face, he realised that this simple pleasure had already become a luxury.
    *
     
    Kirov sat at his desk, writing a report. The only sound in the room was the rustle of his pen nib across the page.
    The sun had just risen above the rooftops of Moscow. Specks of dust, glittering as they drifted lazily about the room, reminded him of the smoke particles he had once seen under a microscope in school, as his teacher explained the phenomenon of Brownian motion.
    Suddenly, Kirov paused and raised his head, distracted by a noise from the street below – a jangling of metal against stone.
    Kirov smiled. Setting aside his pen, he got up and opened the window. The frigid air snatched his breath away. Just beneath him, hanging from the gutter, icicles as long as his arm glowed like molten copper in the sunlight. Kirov leaned out, five storeys above the street, and craned his neck to get a better view.
    Then he saw it – a black Mercedes sedan making its way along the cobbled road. It was in poor repair, with rust-patched cowlings, a cracked headlight and a rear windshield fogged as if by cataracts. The jangling noise emanated from its muffler, which had lost a retaining bracket and clanked against the cobbles, sending out a spray of sparks at every dip in the road.
    In the centre of the street lay a huge pothole. Some months ago, a construction crew‚ whose purpose remained a mystery‚ had removed some of the cobblestones. The workers never returned, but the pothole remained. There were many such craters in the streets of Moscow. People grumbled about getting them fixed, but the possibility of this actually happening, the mountains of paperwork that would be required to set into motion the appropriate branches of government, stood as a greater obstacle than any of the potholes themselves.
    Most people just learned to live with them, but not Colonel Piotr Kubanka of the Ministry of Armaments. He had appealed, to every office he could think of, for the roads to be repaired. Nothing had been done, and his increasingly angry letters were filed away in rooms which served no other purpose than to house such impotently raging documents. Finally, in desperation, Kubanka had decided to take matters into his own hands.
    Across the road from Kirov’s office stood a tall, peach-coloured building which was the home of the