Siberian Red

dangerous offender! You don’t look like a killer to me.’
    ‘Maybe that’s why I’m so dangerous.’
    Savushkin gave a nervous laugh, like air squeaking out of a balloon. ‘Well, I bet a class 59 has a good tale to tell.’
    ‘Maybe you’ll hear it someday,’ replied Pekkala.
    ‘I’ll tell you his story,’ said a man pressed up against the wall, ‘as soon as I remember where I’ve seen him.’
    Pekkala glanced at him but said nothing.
    The man was shaking with fever. Sweat poured off his face. At some time in his past, he had been cut about the face. Now the white ridges of old scar tissue criss-crossed his cheeks like strands of spider web. These wounds had damaged the nerves, leaving a permanently crooked smile, which seemed to mock not only those around him but also the prisoner himself.
    Savushkin turned to the man with the knife-cut face. ‘Brother, you look like you could use a holiday,’ he said.
    The man ignored Savushkin. His focus remained on Pekkala. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before.’
    *
     
    The next day, the convict transport pulled into a nameless rail siding in order to let another train pass. This train was heading in the opposite direction. It consisted not of wagons but of numerous flat beds, all of them stacked with large barrels designed to hold diesel fuel, except that the original fuel markings had been overpainted in bright green letters with the word ‘Dalstroy’.
    Dalstroy was the state-owned company which managed resources coming out of Siberia. These included timber, lead and the highly toxic mineral radium which left Borodok each week in containers painted with skull and crossbones. Another discovery in the Borodok mine was crocoite, also known as Siberian Red due to the colour of its beautiful crimson crystals, which could be refined to make chromium. Exposure to Siberian Red was known to be just as lethal to the miners as radium.
    In addition to controlling the resources, Dalstroy also controlled the work force. Ten years before, only 30 per cent had been prison labour. Now it was over 90 per cent. Because Dalstroy only had to pay 10 per cent of its labour force, it had become one of the richest companies in the world.
    The convicts, those who could see out, stared at the dreary procession of barrels with the dull, uncomprehending expressions of transported cattle.
    But Pekkala knew what they contained, and he shuddered as he watched them going by. In certain camps, particularly those which were not proving to be as profitable as expected, men who died were packed into these barrels. Their corpses were doused with formaldehyde and then exported all over the country, to be sold as medical cadavers.
    In Siberia, the prisoners said, even the dead work for Dalstroy.
    After the transport had passed by, Pekkala caught the smell of preserving fluid, familiar to him from his father’s undertaking business back in Finland, drifting sweet and sickening in the cold air.
    The locomotive engine roared as it began to move again, but no sooner were the wagons rolling when there was a great screeching of brakes and the whole convoy lurched to a stop. A few minutes later, the train backed once more into the siding, the wagon doors were opened and the guards ordered everybody out.
    The prisoners found themselves in a desolate field of shin-deep snow. The freezing wind cut through their clothes, stirring up white phantoms from beneath their feet.
    Some prisoners immediately tried to climb into the wagons again, but the guards held them back.
    ‘What happened?’ asked Savushkin.
    ‘The brakes are frozen,’ said the guard. ‘The wheels are slipping. The whole train could come off the rails.’
    ‘How long will we be here?’
    ‘Could be an hour,’ replied the guard. ‘Could be more. The last time this happened we were stuck all night.’
    ‘And you won’t let us back inside until morning?’ Savushkin asked.
    ‘We have to take the weight off the wheel springs, or else they might snap from the cold when the train gets moving.’ The guard gestured towards a stand of pine and birch trees in the distance. ‘Head over there. The whistle will sound when it’s time to go again.’
    Pekkala and Savushkin set off towards the woods.
    Several others followed, heads bowed against the gusts and arms folded across their chest, but they soon gave up and returned to the train, where men were building walls of snow to shelter from the wind.
    Ahead, in the grove of trees, the