Siberian Red

– everything from his blood type to his choice of cigarettes to the books he checked out of the library. ‘Your investigation is to be conducted in the utmost secrecy. Once you arrive at Borodok, if word leaks out among the prisoners that you are working for the Bureau of Special Operations, I will lose not only Ryabov’s killer but you as well.’
    ‘I may need to involve Major Kirov in this investigation.’
    Stalin spread his arms magnanimously. ‘Understood, and the Camp Commandant has also been instructed to assist you in any way he can. He is holding the body, as well as the murder weapon, until you arrive at the camp.’
    ‘Who is in charge there now?’
    ‘The same man who was running it when you were there.’
    ‘Klenovkin?’ An image surfaced in Pekkala’s mind of a gaunt, slope-shouldered man with black hair cut so short that it stood up like porcupine quills from his skull. Pekkala had met him only once, when he first arrived at the camp.

Having summoned Pekkala to his office
     
     
    Having summoned Pekkala to his office, Klenovkin did not look up when Pekkala entered the room. All he said was, ‘Remove your cap when you are in my presence.’ He then busied himself reading Pekkala’s prisoner file, carefully turning the large yellow pages, each one with a red diagonal stripe in the upper right-hand corner.
    At last, Klenovkin closed the file and raised his head, squinting at Pekkala through rimless spectacles. ‘We have all fallen from grace in one way and another,’ he said. There was a resonance in his voice as if he were addressing a crowd instead of just one man. ‘Having just read your history, convict Pekkala, I see that you have fallen further than most.’
    In those first years of the Bolshevik government, so many of the prison inmates were in Borodok on account of their loyalty to Nicholas II, that the presence of a man with Pekkala’s reputation as the Tsar’s most trusted servant could easily have led to an uprising in the camp. Klenovkin’s solution was to place Pekkala as far away as possible from the other inmates.
    ‘You are a disease,’ Klenovkin told Pekkala. ‘I will not allow you to infect my prisoners. The simplest thing to do would be to have you shot, but unfortunately I am not allowed to do that. Some benefit must be derived from your existence before we consign you to oblivion.’
    Pekkala stared at the man. Even during the months of harsh interrogation leading up to his departure for Siberia, he had never felt as helpless as he did at that moment.
    ‘I am sending you out into the wilderness,’ continued Klenovkin. ‘You will become a tree marker in the Valley of Krasnagolyana, a job no man has held for longer than six months.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because nobody lives that long.’
    Working alone, with no chance of escape and far from any human contact, tree markers died from exposure, starvation‚ and loneliness. Those who became lost, or who fell and broke a leg, were usually eaten by wolves. Tree marking was the only assignment at Borodok said to be worse than a death sentence.
    Provisions were left for him three times a year at the end of a logging road. Kerosene. Cans of meat. Nails. For the rest, he had to fend for himself. His only task, besides surviving, was to mark in red paint those trees ready for cutting by the inmates of the camp. Lacking any brushes, Pekkala stirred his fingers in the scarlet paint and daubed his print upon the trunks. By the time the logging crews arrived, Pekkala would already be gone. The red hand prints became, for most of the convicts, the only trace of him they ever saw.
    Only rarely was he spotted by those logging crews who came to cut the timber. What they glimpsed was a creature barely recognisable as a man. With the crust of red paint that spattered his prison clothes and long hair maned about his face, he resembled a beast stripped of its skin and left to die. Wild rumours surrounded him – that he was an eater of human flesh, that he wore a scapula made from the bones of those who had disappeared in the forest, that he carried a club whose end was embedded with human teeth, that he wore scalps laced together as a cap.
    They called him the man with bloody hands.
    By the time word of his identity leaked out among the prisoners, they assumed he was already dead.
    But six months later, to Klenovkin’s astonishment, Pekkala was still alive. And he stayed alive.
    When a young Lieutenant Kirov arrived to recall