Siberian Red

fabric seemed to disappear like smoke, leaving her naked in the freezing air.
    Stumbling barefoot through the snow, she made her way to where Radom had collapsed. With a wail she sank down next to him, pressing her hands against his bloody face.
    Kolchak had not moved since he fired the revolver. Now he shook his head and tossed the gun away.
    The Lieutenant emerged from where he had been waiting in the shadows and the two men climbed into Kolchak’s car.
    That was when Pekkala caught sight of Ilya coming down the road.
    He ran to meet her.
    ‘Why is that man lying here?’ Her cheeks were rosy in the cold.
    ‘We should go.’ Gently he took her by the arm.
    ‘What about the Metropole? What about our dinner?’
    ‘Some other time,’ Pekkala replied .
    ‘What happened?’ She was staring at the woman in the negligee.
    ‘Please,’ whispered Pekkala. ‘I promise I will tell you later.’
    Sitting behind the wheel‚ the Lieutenant started up the car.
    Hearing the noise of the engine, the woman in the negligee raised her head. She caught sight of Kolchak in the back seat of the car and let out a scream of sadness and rage.
    The car pulled out into the road and drove past, showering them all with icy water.
    Pekkala glimpsed a match flaring in the car as Kolchak lit himself a cigarette.
    As they passed, the driver turned towards Pekkala. That man was Lieutenant Tarnowski.
    Their eyes locked, and then the car was gone, and the glittering frost which filled the air seemed to close up around it, as if it had never been there.
    Kolchak’s duel was the last one ever fought in St Petersburg. Two days later, the Tsar outlawed this barbaric ritual.

After Tarnowski, there were no more visitors.
     
     
    After Tarnowski, there were no more visitors.
    It was hunger that preoccupied Pekkala now, no matter how hard he tried to steer it from his mind.
    On his fifth day in solitary, Pekkala spotted a cockroach scuttling across the floor. The thumb-sized, amber-coloured insect reached the far wall and began to move along it.
    Without another thought, Pekkala lunged across the floor and caught it. With nausea rising in his throat, he crushed the cockroach in his fist and ate the mash of legs and shell and innards, mixed with the grey-brown silt, like the ashes from a crematory oven, which he had clawed up from the floor along with the insect.
    Pekkala felt no revulsion, knowing that, in the gulags, only those who were prepared to set aside all pretence of dignity would go on living.
    To take his mind off the fact that he was starving, he focused his thoughts on the murder of Ryabov. Since arriving at the camp, he had been presented with several possibilities, all of which appeared to circle around the truth. But none of them, as far as Pekkala was concerned, pointed directly at it. Commandant Klenovkin was convinced that the killing had been carried out by the Comitati. Melekov blamed Sergeant Gramotin. The Comitati themselves seemed resigned to their gradual extinction in this place, at the hands of whoever dared to challenge them. For Tarnowski, the killer and his reasons hardly seemed to matter any more. The only thing they had left to believe in was that their leader would one day return to set them free.
    Pekkala admired the Comitati for the depth of their faith, but for that same reason, he also pitied them. Even if Kolchak had promised to return some day, Pekkala did not believe that the Colonel would keep his word. Although Pekkala had not been well acquainted with Kolchak, he knew precisely the kind of man the Tsar would have chosen for such an important task. Kolchak may have selected the men under his command for their loyalty to him, but the Tsar had picked Kolchak for his ability to carry out the mission, no matter what the cost in human life. That mission was to transport the gold. For such a task, cold blood, not compassion, was required. Once his soldiers had fallen into captivity, Kolchak would have weighed the risks of trying to free them and realised that the odds were too great. What the men under Kolchak’s command had never been able to accept was that they were, in the eyes of their leader, expendable.
    The mission had failed. The gold had fallen into the hands of the enemy. The Tsar was dead. The war was over. For Colonel Kolchak, these bitter truths would have been harder to accept than the loss of his soldiers.
    One thing continued to puzzle Pekkala more than anything else. After holding out for so