Siberian Red

‘Are you Kirov?’
    ‘Yes,’ he gasped.
    ‘He’s waiting for you,’ shouted the controller. ‘Go!’
    As Kirov ran out to the plane, the pilot leaned out of the cockpit and pointed to a fur-lined flying suit draped over the wing. ‘Put it on and get in.’
    Kirov did as he was told. The suit smelled of old tobacco smoke, and its cuffs and elbows were tarnished black from use. He climbed into the rear seat of the plane, which faced towards the tail.
    ‘Buckle your straps!’ shouted the pilot.
    The straps lay on the seat, tangled like a nest of snakes, and Kirov was still trying to figure out how they worked when the engine roared and the plane lurched forward.
    Seconds later, they were climbing steeply into the night sky.
    *
     
     ‘Poskrebyshev!’
    ‘Damn,’ muttered the secretary. He had been almost out the door when Stalin’s voice crackled through the intercom. The Boss had already made him stay late and now Poskrebyshev wondered if he would be here all night, as had happened many times before. Cautiously, he pressed the intercom button. ‘Yes, Comrade Stalin?’
    ‘How many bars of gold do you think a man could carry?’
    Poskrebyshev had no idea. He had never seen a bar of gold before. He imagined them to be small and thin, like slabs of chocolate.
    ‘Poskrebyshev!’
    ‘I would say . . .’ he paused. ‘Twenty?’
    ‘You idiot! No one can carry that much.’
    Poskrebyshev tried to imagine why on earth Stalin would be asking him such a question. Most of the time, even when Stalin’s ideas struck him as insane, Poskrebyshev was still able to glimpse some logic behind the insanity. This was, for Poskrebyshev, the most frightening aspect of working for Stalin – that the musings of the great man, even though they sometimes filled his mind with terror at their implications, were nonetheless easy to follow. But this Poskrebyshev could not fathom, and as innocent as the act of carrying a bar of gold might seem to be, he knew that what lay at the end of Stalin’s train of thought was blood and pain and death. All he could hope for was that it might not be his own. ‘Ten!’ Poskrebyshev blurted out. ‘I meant to say ten bars.’
    A sigh drifted over the intercom. ‘Go home. You are no help at all, Poskrebyshev.’
    Poskrebyshev gestured rudely at the intercom. Then he went home for his supper.
    *
     
    It was after dark when Kolchak’s sledge returned from the east, having found nothing that resembled the cliff Tarnowski had described.
    Grim and silent, Kolchak remained on the tracks, staring into the darkness while he waited for Tarnowski to come back.
    At last Tarnowski appeared. He and the Ostyak were half frozen. Together with the reindeer, they looked more like ghosts than living things under their crust of snow. Tarnowski stumbled off the sledge and collapsed by the fire, where his clothes immediately began to steam. ‘I found it!’ he said, the words barely decipherable through his locked jaw and chattering teeth.
    For the first time Pekkala had seen, Lavrenov smiled. In that moment, the years of prison life, which had drained the blood from his face, deadened his eyes‚ and creased his skin like a blunt knife drawn through butter‚ all fell away. For a moment, he looked young again.
    Kolchak pulled Tarnowski aside. ‘Did you do as I told you? Did you travel past the place before you turned around?’
    ‘Yes, just as you ordered, Colonel. The Ostyaks do not know where it is hidden.’
    ‘All right,’ he said, releasing his grip upon Tarnowski’s arm. Then he nodded with approval. ‘Very good, Lieutenant.’
    The Ostyaks brought out the rabbits they had shot. Keeping one for themselves, they handed the other to Kolchak.
    The Ostyaks skinned their rabbit. Slicing the flesh from its bones, they ate it raw, tearing at the rose-coloured meat.
    Kolchak watched them with a combination of hunger and disgust.
    Seeing that the Colonel was about to give up and go hungry, Pekkala borrowed a knife from one of the Ostyaks and used it to cut two wide strips of bark from a white birch tree. He curled one of them to form a cylinder and laced it together with the piece of string which served as a belt for his quilted trousers. He sewed the other piece of bark around the base to form a container and filled it with snow. Next Pekkala gathered some stones from the railroad tracks and put them in the fire. When the stones were hot, he scooped them from the flames and let them fall into the