Siberian Red

moments passed before he realised that the someone should be him. ‘Come in!’ he shouted.
    Gramotin stuck his head into the room. ‘What are you doing in here?’
    ‘I am the new Commandant.’
    ‘The hell you are,’ said Gramotin.
    Melekov nodded towards the phone. ‘Go ahead. Call the Kremlin. Ask them.’
    Nervously, Gramotin licked his lips. He realised Melekov must be telling the truth, for the simple reason that Melekov lacked the imagination, not to mention the audacity, to conjure a lie of such proportions. ‘All right,’ said Gramotin, ‘then I suppose you’d better tell me what I’m to do with the body of our former Commandant.’
    ‘Where is he now?’
    ‘In the freezer.’
    Melekov thought for a second. ‘Put him in a barrel. Ship him out.’
    Gramotin could not help but be impressed. ‘You cold-blooded bastard,’ he said.
    Melekov ignored the compliment. ‘And when you’re finished,’ he continued, ‘you can take the rest of the day off.’
    Gramotin nodded respectfully. This might work out after all, he thought.
    ‘What was it like out there?’ asked Melekov.
    ‘Out where?’
    ‘In the forest of Krasnagolyana. They say that place is haunted. You were out on your own a long time. Did you see anything?’
    ‘Nothing at all, Commandant.’
    *
     
    A retired middle-school biology teacher was fishing for carp with a bamboo pole off a bridge over the Novokislaevsk River north of Moscow. No sooner had he begun than he snagged his hook on the bottom and had to cut the line. He tied on a new hook and, a few minutes later, snagged that one as well. When the same thing happened a third time, the teacher swore magnificently, threw down the pole and waded out into the lazy current, determined to retrieve his lost hooks.
    As he reached down into the murky water, his fingers swept through the weeds and brushed against the soft pulpiness of rotten wood. It was only when his fingers touched the buttons of a coat that he realised that he had in fact been touching hair and the skin of a decomposing face.
    The teacher staggered backwards out of the stream and stood dripping on the bank, wondering what to do next. He knew he ought to call the police and let them see to it, but as a teacher of biology he was curious to see for himself what he had only read about in books. After looking around to make sure he was alone, he waded back into the water and wrestled the body up on to the bank. Streams of dirty water poured from the dead man’s pockets, sleeves and trouser legs.
    The corpse was that of a man who appeared to have been lying in the water quite some time. His skin had turned a washed out greyish-white and his eyes had seemingly flattened out and sunk back into the skull. He was wearing a heavy black coat with wide lapels.
    Crouching over the body, the professor grasped the man’s jaw, opened the mouth and looked inside. Then he fetched a little stick, got down on his hands and knees and poked around in the man’s ears. He touched the dead man’s eye and pinched his cheek and flexed all the joints of his fingers.
    His curiosity now satisfied, the teacher ran off to find a telephone and call the police, but not before he had retrieved his hooks from where they had snagged in the man’s clothing.
    Police identified the man as Vojislav Kornfeld, a known nkvd assassin. His body was taken to a morgue on Lominadze Street, where the doctor on duty found no signs of injury to the body. No trauma. No defensive wounds. No poison detected in his system. Although water was present in his lungs, the absence of lactic acid in his blood seemed to rule out drowning.
    The cause of death was listed as ‘undetermined’.
    Further inquiries by the Moscow police yielded no results.
    After six weeks, his body was cremated and the ashes scattered in a vacant lot behind the abandoned Skobelev hotel.
    *
     
    On a bright winter’s morning at the Borodok railhead, a shipment of fifteen tons of lumber from the valley of Krasnagolyana was loaded on to flatbeds, headed for the west. Included in the shipment were a dozen oil barrels stencilled in bright green letters with the name Dalstroy.
    Packed into one of these barrels was former Camp Commandant Klenovkin, hands folded on his chest and knees drawn up to his chin. Jostled by the movement of the train, Klenovkin’s hair waved back and forth like seaweed in the tide of preserving fluid. Sealed in the darkness of that iron womb, the expression on his face was