Siberian Red

freezing wind.
    Pekkala climbed stiffly to his feet. His jaw ached where he’d been hit by Tarnowski. With one hand against the wall to steady himself, he walked over to the door.
    Peering through the gaps in the wooden planks, Pekkala saw only bare ground scattered with twigs‚ broken branches, and yellow blooms of lichen like scabs upon the stones. Below, down a narrow, meandering path lay the tar-paper rooftops of the camp.
    He was hungry. By now the shuddering emptiness Pekkala felt in his gut seemed to be permanent. Thinking about food made him remember it was Friday, the day Kirov used to prepare a meal for him before they both left the office for the weekend.
    Prior to his instatement as a Commissar in the Red Army, and his subsequent appointment as Pekkala’s assistant, Kirov had trained as a chef at the prestigious Moscow Culinary Institute. If the Institute had not been closed down and its buildings taken over by the Factory Apprentice Technical Facility, Kirov’s life might have turned out very differently. But he had never lost his love of cooking, and Pekkala’s office became a menagerie of earthenware pots and vases, in which grew rosemary, sage, mint, cherry tomatoes and the crooked branches of what might have been the only kumquat tree in Moscow.
    The meals Kirov cooked for him were the only decent food Pekkala ate. The rest of the time, he boiled potatoes in a battered aluminium pan, fried sausages and ate baked beans out of the can. For variety, he wandered across the street to the smoke-filled Café Tilsit and ordered whatever they were serving that day.
    Pekkala hadn’t always been this way. Before the Revolution‚ he had loved the restaurants in St Petersburg, and was once a discerning shopper at the fruit and vegetable stalls in the great covered market of Gostiny Dvor. But his years in the Siberian wilderness had taken from him any pleasure in food. To him it had simply become the fuel that kept him alive.
    All that changed on Friday afternoons, when their office filled with the smells of roast ‘tetereva’ woodpigeon served with warm Smetana cream, Anton apples stewed in brandy, or ‘tsiplyata’ chicken in ripe gooseberry sauce, which Kirov cooked on the stove in the corner of the room. Pekkala’s senses would be overwhelmed by cream cognac sauce, the barely describable complexity of truffles, or the electric sourness of Kirov’s beloved kumquats.
    Now Pekkala realised he had almost done what, in retrospect, seemed unforgivable, which was to take for granted the tiny miracles which Kirov had laid before him every Friday afternoon. Pekkala swore to himself that, if he was lucky enough to get out of this camp in one piece, he would never again make such a mistake.
    He noticed a solitary figure making its way up from the camp. A moment later, the wooden post which locked the door slid back and the man walked into the cell.
    It was Sedov.
    He carried a blanket rolled up under his arm and a bundle of twigs clutched in his other hand. With a smile, he tossed the blanket to Pekkala and dropped the bundle of twigs in the corner.
    ‘How did you get up here without being stopped?’ asked Pekkala, as he unravelled the blanket, a coarse thing made from old Tsarist army wool, and immediately wrapped it around his trembling shoulders.
    ‘Tarnowski persuaded one of the guards to let me go.’
    ‘Persuaded?’
    Sedov shrugged. ‘Bribed or threatened. It’s always one or the other.’ Removing several flimsy matches from his trouser pocket, Sedov tossed them on the ground before Pekkala. ‘You will need these as well,’ said the old man. ‘They are a gift from Lavrenov.’
    ‘How long am I in for?’
    ‘A week. The usual punishment for brawling.’
    ‘You were the ones who were brawling.’
    ‘But you were the one who got caught.’
    ‘What about Tarnowski?’ asked Pekkala.
    ‘When the guards arrived, he told them you had started it. Somebody had to be punished. It just happened to be you.’
    ‘What was the fight about?’
    In answer to this, Sedov only smiled. ‘All in good time, Inspector Pekkala.’
    They know who I am‚ thought Pekkala. Klenovkin had been right about Melekov. The cook had not waited long to share his latest scrap of information.
    ‘I have brought you a message from Tarnowski. He says you should try not to freeze to death before tomorrow night.’
    ‘Why should Tarnowski care?’
    ‘Because he is coming to see you.’
    ‘What about?’
    ‘Your fate,’