“Is anyone missing?”
“No, and no one seems to have been anywhere near Nagorski when he died.” Kirov turned his attention to the rain cape, whose dips and folds crudely matched the contours of a human body. “But she’s wrong about this being an accident.”
“I agree,” replied Pekkala, “but how have you reached that conclusion?”
“You had better see for yourself, Inspector,” replied Kirov.
Grasping the edge of the cape, Pekkala drew it back until Nagorski’s head and shoulders were revealed. What he saw made him draw in his breath through clenched teeth.
Only a leathery mask remained of Nagorski’s face, behind which the shattered skull looked more like broken crockery than bone. He had never encountered a body as traumatized as the one which lay before him now.
“There.” Kirov pointed to a place where the inside of Nagorski’s skull had been exposed.
Gently taking hold of the dead man’s jaw, Pekkala tilted the head to one side. In the glare of the work light, a tiny splash of silver winked at him.
Pekkala reached into his pocket and brought out a bone-handled switchblade. He sprung the blade and touched the tip of it against the silver object. Lifting it from the rippled plate of bone, he eased the fleck of metal onto his palm. Now that he could see it clearly, Pekkala realized that the metal wasn’t silver. It was lead.
“What is it?” asked Kirov.
“Bullet fragment.”
“That rules out an accident.”
Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, Pekkala placed the sliver of lead in the middle and then folded the handkerchief into a bundle before returning it to his pocket.
“Could it have been suicide?” asked Kirov.
“We’ll see.” Pekkala’s focus returned to the wreckage of Nagorski’s face. He searched for an entry wound. Reaching under the head, fingers sifting through the matted hair, his fingertip snagged on a jagged edge at the base of the skull where the bullet had impacted the bone. Pressing his finger into the wound, he followed its trajectory to an exit point on the right side of the dead man’s face, where the flesh had been torn away. “This was no suicide,” said Pekkala.
“How can you be sure?” asked Kirov.
“A man who commits suicide with a pistol will hold the gun against his right temple if he is right-handed or against his left temple if he is left-handed. Or, if he knows what he is doing, he will put the gun between his teeth and shoot himself through the roof of the mouth. That will take out the dura oblongata, killing him instantly.” He pulled the rain cape back over Nagorski’s body, then wiped the gore from his hands on a corner of the cape.
“How do you get used to it?” asked Kirov, as he watched Pekkala scrape the blood out from under his fingernails.
“You can get used to almost anything.”
They left the warehouse just as three NKVD guards arrived to take charge of Nagorski’s corpse. Standing in the dark, the two men turned up the collars of their coats against a spitting rain.
“Are you certain Major Lysenkova didn’t spot the bullet wound in Nagorski’s skull?” asked Pekkala.
“She barely glanced at the remains,” replied Kirov. “It seemed to me that she just wants this case to go away as fast as possible.”
Just then, a figure appeared from the darkness. It was Maximov. He had been waiting for them. “I need to know,” he said. “What happened to Colonel Nagorski?”
Kirov glanced at Pekkala.
Almost imperceptibly, Pekkala nodded.
“He was shot,” replied the major.
The muscles twitched along Maximov’s jaw. “This is my fault,” he muttered.
“Why do you say that?” asked Pekkala.
“Yelena—Mrs. Nagorski—she was right. It was my job to protect him.”
“If I understand things correctly,” replied Pekkala, “he sent you away just before he was killed.”
“That’s true, but still, it was my job.”
“You can’t protect a man who refuses to be protected,” said Pekkala.
If Maximov took comfort in Pekkala’s words, he gave no sign of it. “What will happen to them now? To Yelena? To the boy?”
“I don’t know,” replied Pekkala.
“They won’t be looked after,” insisted Maximov. “Not now that he is gone.”
“And what about you?” asked Pekkala. “What will you do now?”
Maximov shook his head, as if the thought had not occurred to him. “Just make sure they are looked after,” he said.
A cold wind blew through the wet trees, with a sound like the slithering of snakes.
“We’ll do what we can, Maximov,” Pekkala told the big man. “Now go home. Get some rest.”
“That man makes me nervous,” remarked Kirov after the bodyguard had vanished back into the dark.
“That’s part of his job,” replied Pekkala. “When we get back to the office, I want you to find out everything you can about him. I asked him some questions and he avoided every one of them.”
“We could bring him in for questioning at Lubyanka.”
Pekkala shook his head. “We won’t get much out of him that way. The only time a man like that will talk is if he wants to. Just find out what you can from the police files.”
“Very well, Inspector. Shall we head back to Moscow?”
“We can’t leave yet. Now that we know a gun was used, we have to search the pit where Nagorski’s body was found.”
“Can’t this wait until morning?” moaned Kirov, clutching his collar to his throat.
Pekkala’s silence was the answer.
“I didn’t think so,” mumbled Kirov.
Pekkala woke to the sound of someone banging on the door.
At first, he thought it was one of the shutters, dislodged by the wind. There was a snowstorm blowing. Pekkala knew that in the morning he would have to dig his way out of the house.
The banging came again, and this time Pekkala realized someone was outside and asking to come in.
He lit a match and set the oil lamp burning by his bed.
Once more he heard the pounding on the door.
“All right!” shouted Pekkala. He fetched his pocket watch from the bedside table and squinted at the hands. It was two in the morning. Beside him he heard a sigh. Ilya’s long hair covered her face and she brushed it aside with a half-conscious sweep of her hand.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Someone’s at the door,” Pekkala replied in a whisper as he pulled on his clothes, working the suspenders over his shoulders.
Ilya propped herself up on one elbow. “It’s the middle of the night!”
Pekkala did not reply. After doing up the buttons of his shirt, he walked into the front room, carrying the lamp. Reaching out to the brass doorknob, he suddenly paused, remembering that he had left his revolver on the chest of drawers in the bedroom. Now he thought about going to fetch it. No good news ever came knocking at two in the morning.
The heavy fist smashed against the wood. “Please!” said a voice.
Pekkala opened the door. A gust of freezing air blew in, along with a cloud of snow which glittered like fish scales in the lamplight.
Before him stood a man wearing a heavy sable coat. He had long, greasy hair, a scruffy beard and piercing eyes. In spite of the cold, he was sweating. “Pekkala!” wailed the man.