None of those at the grave edge appeared aware of Denebin’s stiffening, all too distracted by the constant, arm-waving effort to disperse the persistent mosquitoes and midges, despite Kurshin lighting a cordon of ineffective repellent candles. Charlie’s hands and arms were ablaze from bites, but he rigidly held himself against warding them off, not wanting to attract the scientist’s attention.
Within minutes he was glad he’d endured the torture. At the crater’s edge of the fifth section Denebin actually grunted as he stooped abruptly, troweling debris into his agitated sieve. From where Charlie stood the shell casing was obvious, and in the few seconds it took Denebin to bag it, Charlie decided it had not been from a 9mm bullet but a much smaller caliber.
It was turning out to be another good day, Charlie thought, although maybe not for the worried British military attache, Colonel Gallaway, in faraway Moscow. Not his problem, Charlie decided. His job was to determine the circumstances and, he hoped, establish the facts, not pretty them up. Behind the forensic scientist the rest of the group waved and slapped and Charlie wondered what, apart from insect bites, they were gaining from just standing there.
Quietly, slowly, Charlie eased himself away. It was a moonscape,empty kilometer after empty kilometer of treeless, stunted scrubland. In a few places-other, smaller craters-the rare warmth was making mist that hung, wraithlike. A place of far too many ghosts, thought Charlie: of three in particular, but of hundreds more. But where had Gulag 98 been in which they had been kept, when they had been pitifully alive?
The killings, he supposed, would have been a day very similar to this. Not as warm but summer, the ground softening. Vehicles, although not many: a truck, perhaps. A car. Two at the most, as few witnesses as possible. It would have been during the half-light of day. The killers would have needed to see what they were doing, choose their spot, and the insects had been swarming in the daytime heat, like now, to clog the mouths and throats after the executions. There would have been panic. And fear. A lot of fear. Don’t do this! This is madness! Let’s talk about it! For God’s sake! English voices-hysterical voices-in a land that had never heard English. No time to dig. Get it over with as quickly as possible. Get away. The explosions-there would have been several, from the amount of metal Denebin had collected-would have been deafening. No turning back after that. All argument, all pleas, ended by the explosions. They would have been manacled. Immobilized. Frightened people killing frightened people. But why? What could this desolate, pitiless land of ghosts have or possess to justify the ritual, cold-blooded execution of these three unknown, apparently unmourned people?
Not the land-the place-itself, Charlie decided. It would have been someone who was here, in Gulag 98. Maybe more than one. A group, like he was a reluctant part of a group now, men-maybe women, too-with a secret.
He had to examine that speculation further, justify the reasoning. He’d seen the bodies, each of them naked. Hand and ankle cuff marks, clearly visible. Shattering bullet wounds to the back of the head. But that was all. No sign whatsoever-no bruises or burns or cuts-of torture. And men prepared to kill would have been as prepared to torture if the victims had possessed a secret. So why hadn’t they? Because they didn’t have to, Charlie answered himself. The executioners knew the secret: what there was to gain. But didn’t want to share what was big enough, rewarding enough, to kill for. They’d known each other, victims and killers. Would have used firstnames when they pleaded, calling upon friendship, acquaintanceship. Charlie was sure he had a picture, but it was misted, much more deeply obscured than the occasionally shrouded expanse across which he was looking, seeking but still not finding what he had expected to see. The foundation marks of buildings, perhaps, even those built on stilts. Certainly evidence of proper graveyards.
He turned, surprised at how far he’d wandered on feet that normally cautioned against such excess. Denebin was clambering from the grave, tidily winding up his marking tapes and retrieving the securing pegs, when Charlie got back to them. He was in time to hear the forensic scientist say, “There’s very little. Too much time has elapsed from the bodies being discovered. Animals have been there, disturbing it all.”
“But there are some things?” questioned Charlie. “I saw you collecting samples.”
“Things I need to look at more closely,” said the scientist, vaguely.
“Do we have to talk about it here!” protested the arm-flailing Miriam. She’d suffered more than anyone, with just chiffon scarves to wrap around her head and face. “I’m being eaten alive. I want to get back to the hotel, clean up.”
“Of course,” agreed the attentive Lestov, at once.
“I’ll need until tomorrow to get any opinion of what I’ve got,” said Denebin, awkwardly.
“We’re meeting Valentin Polyakov in the morning,” reminded Miriam.
“Another busy day then,” said Charlie, brightly. No one acknowledged him, already hurrying back toward the waiting vehicles.
It had been Novikov’s idea that they meet at the town’s museum, but the man wasn’t there when Kurshin dismissively dropped him off, so Charlie went inside. The museum was far more a monument to Russian persecution of Russian than Charlie had expected, whole rooms given over to photographs and paraphernalia recording the establishment of the vast penal colony. The photographs were almost uniformly of lines of dead-eyed, despair-crushed, barely human figures, the bechained walking dead, men, women and even children. It was from a variety of the pictures that Charlie believed he’d answered one question and gotten a pointer to another.
The gulags were regimented, haphazardly wire-fenced, with corner-placed watchtowers, some tilted like the subsiding buildings of today. There were lists of the minimally subsistence diets upon which the exiles and prisoners had been expected to survive, and occasional names, particularly of political figures purged during and even after the Stalin era. Charlie was intrigued several times to see a photograph of a gaunt-featured man with the same name as the chief minister with whom he had an appointment the following day.
Charlie was standing in front of an exhibition of prison camp equipment-chain-linked manacles, hand and ankle cuffs, actual posts against which prisoners were tied for execution, punishment whips and guard batons-when the tall, thin doctor found him.
“What you expected?” asked Novikov.
“Far more.”
“Still want to go for a drive?”
“As much as ever.”
They were driving north again, Charlie recognized. Deciding after the family encounter it was safe to try to guide the conversation, Charlie said, “What was your father’s supposed crime?”
“Just being a doctor,” said Novikov, simply. “Doctors were regarded as dangerous intellectuals, especially those who weren’t members of the Communist Party, which my father refused to join.” He snorted a laugh. “Being a doctor got him sent here and then saved him. Once he arrived, he only had to live in Gulag 98 for a few months. Even when he was inside, he didn’t have to do any manual labor in the mines. That’s why he trained me. Made me study basic forensics, later. That again was for necessity, to make myself as indispensable as possible. I can’t ever return permanently to Moscow, of course. Anywhere else in Russia, for that matter.”
“Why not?” Charlie frowned.
“The system,” said Novikov. “People sent here were automatically stripped of their citizenship: lost their Russian nationality. So have their descendants. You need established residency in a Russian city to be allowed to leave here and you can only get that by getting away from here to establish residency. Which you can’t do without an internal passport, which none of us is allowed to hold. We’re imprisoned here as effectively as anyone in Stalin’s day.”