Pekkala glanced at the two disheveled men. Both were as plastered in filth as he was. One wore what had once been a white lab coat. The other had a brown wool coat with a fur collar which was also painted with mud. But neither of them was Nagorski.
“Are you the doctor?” asked the man in the filthy lab coat. He had a big, square face, with a thick crop of bristly gray hair.
Pekkala explained who he was.
“Well, Inspector Pekkala,” said the gray-haired man, spreading his arms wide, “welcome to the madhouse.”
“An investigator already,” snorted the other, a short, frail-looking man with a complexion so pale that his skin looked like mother-of-pearl. “You people don’t waste any time.”
“Where is the colonel?” asked Pekkala. “Is he hurt?”
“No, Inspector,” the gray-haired man replied. “Colonel Nagorski is dead.”
“Dead?” shouted Pekkala. “How?”
The men exchanged glances. They seemed reluctant to speak.
“Where is he?” demanded Pekkala. “In the tank?”
It was the gray-haired man who finally explained. “Colonel Nagorski is not in the tank. Colonel Nagorski is under the tank.”
His companion pointed at the ground. “See for yourself.”
For the first time, standing beside the T-34’s track, Pekkala noticed a cluster of fingertips, pale dimples rising just above the surface of the water. As his eyes struggled to see into the murky water, he spotted a leg, visible only from the knee down. At the end of this limb, which seemed to have been partially torn from the body, Pekkala could make out a distorted black shoe. It appeared to have split at all its seams, as if forced on someone with a foot much too large for the shoe. “That is Nagorski?” he asked.
“What’s left of him,” replied the gray-haired man impassively.
No matter how many times Pekkala looked down upon the dead, the first sight of a corpse always stunned him. It was as if his mind could not bear to carry the burden of this moment and so, time after time, erased it from his brain. As a result, the initial shock never lessened in intensity.
What struck Pekkala was not how different the dead appeared but how much alike bodies became, no matter if they were man or woman, old or young, when the life had left them. The same terrible stillness surrounded them, the same dull eyes, and eventually, the same piercing sweet smell. Some nights, he would wake with the stench of the dead flooding his nostrils. Staggering to the sink, he would wash his face and scrub his hands until the knuckles bled but still the smell remained, as if those corpses lay about the floor right beside his bed.
Pekkala crouched down. Reaching out, he touched Nagorski’s fingertips, his own hand forming a reflection of the one which lay submerged beneath the muddy water. The image of Nagorski returned to him, blustery and sweating in the interrogation room of the Lubyanka prison. There had seemed to be something indestructible about him. Now Pekkala felt the cold skin of the dead colonel radiating up through his arm, as if his own life were being drained out through his pores. He pulled his hand away and rose, forcing his thoughts to the work that lay ahead. “Who are you two?” he asked the men.
“I am Professor Ushinsky,” explained the one with the gray hair. “I am responsible for developing armaments here at the facility. And this”—he gestured to the man in the brown coat—“is Professor Gorenko.”
“I am the drive-train specialist,” explained Gorenko. He kept his hands inside his pockets. His shoulders were trembling with the cold.
“How did this happen?” asked Pekkala.
“We aren’t sure.” Gorenko tried to wipe some of the mud from his coat but succeeded only in smearing it into the wool. “This morning, when we reported for work, Nagorski said he would be working on number 3.” With knuckles blue from cold, he rapped on the side of the tank. “This is number 3,” he said.
“The colonel said he would be working by himself,” added Ushinsky.
“Was that unusual?”
“No,” replied Ushinsky. “The colonel often carried out tests on his own.”
“Tests? You mean the tank is not finished yet?”
Both men shook their heads.
“There are seven complete machines at the facility. Each one has been equipped with slightly different mechanisms, engine configurations, and so on. They are constantly being tested and compared to each other. Eventually, we will standardize the pattern. Then the T-34 will go into mass production. Until then, the colonel wanted to keep everything as secret as possible.”
“Even from you?”
“From everyone, Inspector,” replied Gorenko. “Without exception.”
“At what point did you realize that something had gone wrong?”
“When I stepped outside the main assembly plant.” Ushinsky nodded towards the largest of the facility buildings. “We call it the Iron House. It’s where all the parts for the tanks are stored. There’s so much metal in there, I’m surprised the whole structure hasn’t sunk beneath the ground. Before I went outside, I’d been working on the final drive mechanism. The single straight reduction gears have armored mountings at each side of the tail …”
As if he could not help himself, Gorenko’s hands drifted up to the chest of his coat and began scraping once more at the mud embedded in the cloth.
“Will you stop that!” shouted Ushinsky.
“It’s a brand-new coat,” muttered Gorenko. “I only bought it yesterday.”
“The boss is dead!” Ushinsky grabbed Gorenko by the wrists and pulled his hands away. “Can’t you get that into your thick skull?”
Both men appeared to be in shock. Pekkala had seen behavior like this many times before. “When did you realize that something had gone wrong?” he asked patiently, trying to steer them back on track.
“I was out smoking my cigarette—” said Ushinsky.
“No smoking in the factory,” interrupted Gorenko.
“I can do this by myself!” shouted Ushinsky, jabbing a finger against Gorenko’s chest.
Gorenko staggered backwards and almost lost his footing. “You don’t have to be like that!” he snapped.
“And I noticed that number 3 was half sunk in the mud,” continued Ushinsky. “I thought—look what the colonel’s gone and done. He’s buried the machine. I assumed he had gotten it stuck on purpose, just to see what would happen. That’s the kind of thing he’d do. I waited to see if he could get it out of there, but then I began to think that something might have gone wrong.”
“What gave you that idea?” asked Pekkala.
“To begin with, the engine wasn’t running. Nagorski wouldn’t have cut power to the motor under those circumstances, not even for an experiment. The whole tank could sink into this mud. If water flooded the engine compartment, the entire drive train could be ruined. Even Nagorski wouldn’t take a chance like that.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. The turret hatch was open, and it was pouring. Colonel Nagorski would have closed the hatch. And, finally, there was no sign of him.”
“What did you do then?”
“I went in and fetched Gorenko,” said Ushinsky.
Gorenko took this as a sign that he could speak at last. “We both went out to take a look,” he explained.
“First we checked inside the tank,” Ushinsky said. “It was empty.”
“Then I spotted the body lying under the tracks,” added Gorenko. “We ran and found Captain Samarin, the head of security. We all came back to the tank and Samarin told us to stay here.”
“Not to touch anything.”
“Then he went to call the ambulance.”
“And we’ve been here ever since,” said Gorenko, hugging his arms against his chest.