The Beast in the Red Forest (13 page)

‘The Rasputitsa will come early this year,’ said a voice behind Pekkala.

Pekkala was startled at first, but then he sighed and smiled. ‘There is only one person who can sneak up on me like that.’

‘Luckily for you, that person is your friend.’

‘Good morning, Barabanschikov.’

Almost hidden among the skeleton-fingered branches of a Russian olive tree, Barabanschikov sat on an upturned bucket. He wore fingerless wool gloves and a cap pulled down over his ears. Lying across his lap was a Russian PPSh sub-machine gun fitted with a 50-round drum magazine. Such weapons, once almost impossible to obtain, were now commonplace among the partisans. Barabanschikov had been sitting there long enough that a fine layer of snow had settled upon his shoulders. The former school teacher had long ago given up shaving and a dark beard covered his face. His eyes, once patient and curious as he gazed across the rows of desks each morning while his students pulled notebooks from their satchels, had taken on a burning intensity brought on by malnourishment, insomnia and prolonged fear. Those children he once taught might not have recognised him at all, but for the gold-rimmed glasses he still wore.

Cupping his gloved hands to his mouth, Barabanschikov puffed warm breath on to his frozen fingers. ‘Have you found out yet who did the killings in the bunker?’

‘Not yet,’ replied Pekkala, ‘but I am working on it.’

Barabanschikov reached down and gently patted Pekkala’s face, the rough wool of his glove snagging against Pekkala’s three-day growth of stubble. ‘You had better work fast, my old friend. There has already been a gunfight between a Red Army patrol and a group of partisans searching for whoever killed their leader. Two partisans are dead. Three soldiers are wounded. We are fast approaching the moment when nothing can prevent an all-out war between us and the Red Army. In the war we have fought until now, all we had to do was survive until the Red Army pushed back the invaders. But the storm that is coming is not like any other they have seen. You know Stalin. You know what he is capable of doing. And unless you do something to stop this, he will annihilate us all.’

‘That’s why I have brought in some help,’ said Pekkala. ‘Come inside, Barabanschikov. It’s time you met the commissar.’

Kirov looked around him blearily. It was dark in the room. Only a few chinks of daylight worked their way in through gaps in the boards which had been nailed over the shutters. For a moment, he stared in confusion at the greatcoat which had been draped across him. Then he pushed it away, stood up and began slapping at his clothes, hoping to dislodge the lice which he felt sure had taken up residence in his uniform.

Having finished this frantic ritual, Kirov fished out a box of matches and lit the lantern. It was only then that he realised there were two men sitting at the table, both watching him intently.

One of them was Pekkala.

The other, Kirov had never seen before. With rags for clothes offset by an oddly dignified pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, he looked like a shipwrecked millionaire.

‘This is Major Kirov,’ said Pekkala.

‘And I,’ said the stranger, ‘am Andrei Barabanschikov. So, Commissar, you are here to help us catch a killer.’

‘That’s right,’ replied Kirov.

‘It seems to me that you need look no further than the ranks of your own people.’

Kirov bristled at the remark. ‘Why would you say that?’

‘From what I hear, the man who killed Andrich and those partisans was wearing a Red Army uniform.’

‘It was probably stolen.’

‘Perhaps,’ admitted Barabanschikov, ‘but then there is the matter of your survival,’ said Barabanschikov. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as unusual? The only person I can think of who might hesitate to kill a Russian commissar,’ he paused, ‘is another commissar.’

‘I did not come here to solve your murders, Comrade Barabanschikov, or to become one of your victims, either,’ Kirov pointed at the tear in his tunic where the bullet had gone in. ‘As far as I’m concerned, if Stalin has given the order to lay down your weapons, then that is exactly what you should do. This is simply a choice between life and death.’

‘Enough!’ shouted Pekkala. ‘If even you two can’t see eye to eye, then what hope is there of peace?’

‘But we do agree,’ insisted Barabanschikov. ‘About one thing, at least. The major is correct that this is indeed a choice between life and death. But what he does not seem to understand is that the choice is ours to make, not theirs.’

Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of a heavy diesel engine and a squeak of brakes in the alleyway behind the house.

‘They’re here,’ announced Barabanschikov.

‘Major Kirov,’ said Pekkala as he rose from his chair, ‘I would like for you to meet some friends of mine.’

Parked in the alley was a German military Hanomag truck, with SS number plates and a black and white Maltese cross painted upon each door of the driver’s cab. Its windscreen had been cracked into a spray of the silver lightning bolts, still tinted with the blood of the driver whose head had collided with the glass when an ambush ran it off the road the week before.

Crowded into the back were the truck’s new owners: an assortment of heavily armed men, most of them bearded, their hair long and unkempt. They were armed with weapons of all types – German Mausers, Russian Mosin-Nagants and Austrian Steyr-Mannlichers. Others had no guns at all, but carried butcher’s knives, sledgehammers and hatchets. Their clothing was equally varied. One had crammed himself into the silver-buttoned tunic of a Ukrainian Nationalist policeman, the black cloth gashed across the back where its former occupant had been hewn down with the same axe carried by the man who wore it now. Others were swathed in the dappled camouflage smocks of Waffen SS soldiers, or the deer-brown wool of greatcoats scavenged from the graves of Polish soldiers. They wore bullet-punctured helmets, cloth caps snatched from the heads of men as they begged for their lives or braided garlands of twigs which they carried on their heads like crowns of thorns. One was barely in his teens, a
gymnastiorka
tunic hanging scarecrow-like from narrow shoulders and a sub-machine gun monstrous-looking in his arms. Beside him stood an older man, his face pockmarked and ears so whittled down by frostbite they looked as if they had been chewed by a dog. This man carried no weapon at all, but only a stick carved from white birch. There was no glint of kindness in their eyes, nor of any emotion that could have brought about a moment’s hesitation in the furtherance of butchery.

Like miners emerging from a tunnel deep beneath the ground, Pekkala and Barabanschikov blinked in the glare of sunlight.

Catching sight of Pekkala and their leader, the partisans raised their grizzled paws at them and bared their teeth in smiles, but they regarded Kirov, and the red stars on his sleeves, with undisguised contempt.

The bullet-riddled door opened on the driver’s side. A man in a black leather coat got out and approached Barabanschikov. The driver was short and barrel-chested, his broad face scalpeled with pale creases in the smoke-stained skin.

After exchanging a few words, Barabanschikov turned to Kirov and Pekkala. His face was grim. ‘There’s been another killing,’ he said.

‘Who is it?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Yakushkin, Commander of the Red Army garrison. My men have just found his body. You’d better come quickly.’

Without another word, they all climbed into the back of the truck. Crammed among the partisans, they sped away down the street, careening around piles of bricks, the husks of burnt-out vehicles and the carcasses of horses, still fastened to the traces of wagons they’d been pulling when they died.

The night before, while Kirov and Pekkala made their way towards the safe house, Fyodor Yakushkin, commander of the SMERSH Brigade, had been waiting for his dinner in a dilapidated apartment near the hospital.

A smell of cooking filled the room.

Perched on a chair which was too small for him, Yakushkin rested his fists upon a table set for two. He was a heavy-set man with a bald head and fleshy lips set into a thick, square jaw. Since his belly was too large for him to wear his gun belt comfortably while sitting, he had taken it off and hung it over the back of his chair. Out of habit, he removed his pistol from its holster and laid it within reach on the table. Then he sighed impatiently as he looked around at the blue sponge-printed flower pattern dabbed on to the butter-yellow wall, the delicate curtains and the framed pictures of a squinting, shifty-looking old man and an equally pugnacious old woman in a head scarf. Their stares made him uneasy. Adding to his discomfort was the fact everything around him looked breakable, as if all he had to do was touch the pictures or the curtains and they would come crashing to the floor. This impression of flimsiness included the chair on which he sat. He was afraid even to lean back, in case it collapsed underneath him.

Yakushkin’s mood had been soured even before he arrived by news of Colonel Andrich’s murder. Yakushkin had met with Colonel Andrich on several occasions. He had warned the colonel that a truce with the partisans could never be achieved, but Andrich was determined to succeed. Yakushkin could not help admiring the colonel’s tenacity, even though he was, himself, convinced of the inevitable failure of the mission. As a gesture of goodwill, Yakushkin had even loaned the colonel his own chauffeur, Sergeant Zolkin, along with his beloved American Lend-Lease Willys Jeep.

Now Zolkin was missing, probably lying dead somewhere among the ruins. His jeep had been found, still parked outside the bunker, although so riddled with shrapnel that the motor pool mechanics weren’t sure it would ever run again.

The driver and the Willys Jeep could be replaced, but Andrich could not. As far as Yakushkin was concerned, the blame for these killings lay entirely with the partisans. They had been given a chance for peace, and they had squandered it. From now on, he thought to himself, the partisans will have to deal with us, and we do not negotiate.

Yakushkin was proud of his brigade’s bloody reputation, so much so that when its former commander, Grigori Danek, began to show a change of heart, Yakushkin was forced to take action.

In the old days, Danek had ordered his troops to open fire at the first sign of trouble, and the resulting massacres combined into a tally of butchery unmatched by any other branch of NKVD.

‘The only thing that impresses me,’ Danek had once growled to Yakushkin in one of his vodka-fuelled tirades, ‘is the efficiency with which we dispatch our enemies into the afterlife.’

But with the end of the war now in sight, Danek had begun to see things differently. He believed that the role of SMERSH had to change, and change quickly, before they found themselves  scapegoats in the post-war world for all manner of atrocities, even those which they had not actually committed. In a conflict already brimming with horrors, what made SMERSH different was that the blood on their hands came mostly from their own countrymen.

This detail had never bothered Yakushkin, who saw his brigade as an instrument of vengeance for all who opposed Stalin’s will, no matter where they came from.

Danek spoke incessantly of a day of reckoning which he felt must surely come for those who had dispensed this vengeance.

Finally, Yakushkin had heard enough. When he encountered Danek, alone and too drunk to stand in an alley in the city of Minsk, he strangled the commander with his bare hands, employing an efficiency of technique which even Danek might have found impressive if he had not been on the receiving end of it.

In the days that followed, Yakushkin himself was put in charge of leading a thorough investigation into Danek’s murder, which naturally produced no results. The lack of reaction from Moscow was Yakushkin’s first real sign that Danek’s change of heart had come under unfavourable scrutiny from someone other than himself.

As the natural choice to succeed Danek, Yakushkin proved so successful that he had recently been informed of his transfer to headquarters in Moscow, to take effect as soon as this current task had been completed. For Yakushkin, this was a chance of a lifetime. Nothing could be allowed to prevent it, even if that meant the death of every partisan in Ukraine.

Such lofty goals do not come cheap to those who set them, and Yakushkin’s nerves were strained almost to breaking point.

The one thing which gave him comfort was the smell of food coming from the kitchen around the corner. Nurse Antonina was making
tsapkhulis tsveni
, a stew made with  
myslyvska
sausages, apples, canned beans, eggplant and dried chilli peppers – all of which he had brought her as a gift the day before, with the understanding that they would be used to prepare a meal of which she would be allowed to eat a small portion. Yakushkin’s mouth flooded with saliva as he smelled the cardamom and pepper with which the sausages had been seasoned.

Since Yakushkin had begun paying visits to Antonina, the nurse had prepared several memorable meals: partridge in sour cream, venison with cranberries and
khachapuri
cheese bread. Of course, he had been obliged to supply the ingredients for these as well. A nurse at a field hospital could hardly be expected to find enough butter, eggs and meat to feed herself, let alone a man with such an appetite. But for someone of Yakushkin’s rank, these things were not hard to come by. It was finding someone to prepare them which provided the greater challenge.

Yakushkin listened to Antonina’s footsteps as she moved around the kitchen, the soft knocking of a wooden spoon against the sides of the stew pot as she stirred the meal and her humming of a tune he had not heard since childhood and whose name he’d never known.

It was past Yakushkin’s normal dinner time, but it had taken much longer than expected to oversee the clearing-out of munitions from the bunker where Andrich had been killed. By the time he arrived on Antonina’s doorstep, she had already gone to bed, but since Yakushkin had no intention of leaving without supper, he cajoled her into preparing a meal.

Yakushkin would have settled for a bowl of
kasha
, but instead Antonina had insisted on making a stew, which was taking forever to prepare, using all the ingredients he had given her.

Now Yakushkin wished he hadn’t come at all. In the hour he’d spent waiting, his stomach had become an empty chasm. When he got hungry like this, he became irrationally bad-tempered. His bodyguard, Molodin, knew to carry food on him at all times for just such occasions. The careers and even lives of men had been saved by Molodin’s quick thinking, as he pressed into the commander’s hand an apple, or a scrap of sweet
churchkhela
, made from rendered grape juice, flour and chopped walnuts, or a two-day-old
vareniki
dumpling stuffed with pickled cabbage, carefully saved in Molodin’s handkerchief.

Too irritated to sit still, Yakushkin got out of his chair and strode to the top of the stairs. The staircase descended to a narrow hallway, at the end of which was a door leading out to the street. Antonina’s apartment had no rooms on the ground floor, which was taken up by another apartment. ‘Molodin!’ he boomed.

The front door opened and, a moment later, Molodin himself appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He was a slight but agile man, with a pale, angular face, neatly shaved head and eyes the milky green colour of opals. Draped across his shoulders was a rain cape, in whose folds the sleet clustered like frog spawn. Slung across his chest beneath the cape, Molodin carried a PPSh sub-machine gun. ‘Is everything all right, Commander?’ he asked, and, as he spoke, his hand appeared from beneath his dripping rain cape. Pinched between his fingers was a piece of cheese, which he had been saving for his own breakfast. ‘Something to eat, perhaps?’

‘Keep it!’ Yakushkin smiled down at him. ‘I can’t steal another man’s meal!’ The truth was, Yakushkin would gladly have eaten Molodin’s last crumb of food, but he did not like the look of that cheese, cracked and yellowed like an old toenail, or the unwashed hand which held it out to him.

Molodin nodded, relieved not to be parting with his rations.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Yakushkin. ‘There’ll be plenty to eat when we get to Moscow.’

Molodin smiled gratefully although, in truth, he detested city life, and would never have set foot in Moscow unless ordered to do so.

‘Go on!’ Yakushkin waved him away cheerfully. ‘Back to work!’

‘Yes, Commander,’ replied Molodin, as he returned to his post outside the front door.

With his mood somewhat restored, Yakushkin returned to the little dining room. Easing himself back into the flimsy chair, Yakushkin picked up the knife, and examined the cutting edge, turning it in the light of an oil lamp in the middle of the table. Then he wiped the blade on his trouser leg and returned it to its place. After that, he repositioned his gun beside the knife, as if it were a piece of cutlery essential to the meal.

‘It’s almost ready,’ Antonina called to him from the next room. ‘It took a little longer than I expected.’

‘I will miss your cooking when I’m transferred to Moscow.’

‘You don’t have to miss it. You don’t have to miss anything at all.’

Yakushkin gave a nervous laugh. Antonina had made no secret of the fact that she wanted to accompany him to Moscow. He was her ticket out of this godforsaken place, for which her skill in the kitchen was not the only talent she seemed willing to provide. And now she spoke of Moscow as if he had already agreed to take her there, which he most definitely had not.

It was common practice for women to accompany high-ranking officers in the field, although spouses left at home were kept as ignorant as possible of the existence of these campaign wives. But Yakushkin didn’t have a wife at home and he didn’t want one out here either, especially one sporting a black eye; the result, she had told him, of trying to restrain a delirious patient at the hospital. What Yakushkin wanted was a decent cook, who would place his meal upon the table and then leave him to eat it in peace, rather than engage in banter whose horizontal outcome was never in serious doubt.

Antonina’s smiling face appeared around the corner, her forehead glistening with sweat from working over the stove. ‘Won’t it be nice to have a family to come home to in Moscow?’

‘A family?’ he spluttered. ‘Well, I don’t know . . .’

‘You seem so uneasy, my love,’ she said. ‘Do you not enjoy our time together?’

‘Of course I do!’ Yakushkin gazed disconsolately at the empty plate. For pity’s sake, he thought, just bring out the food and stop talking.

‘When will we be leaving for Moscow?’

We, he thought. There is no we. The moment was fast approaching when Yakushkin would need to explain this to Antonina, but he had delayed this conversation for as long as possible, because he was in little doubt as to how disappointed she would be. And disappointed women were rarely good cooks. ‘It all depends upon those blasted partisans,’ he told her. ‘If things go the way they seem to be headed, my soldiers will soon be killing them in the hundreds.’

‘How could that be, after everything we have endured together in this war against the Fascists?’

‘I have asked myself that same question many times, darling. But as with everything in war, the answer is seldom what it should be. I believe these partisans, living behind the lines, have become infected with ideas that do not correspond to those of Comrade Stalin and the Central Committee. The simplest thing would be for them all to lay down their guns, come out of their forest lairs and place their collective fate in the hands of the Soviet Union, as it was before the war began. But it appears from recent events that this isn’t what they want.’

‘Then what do they want?’

Yakushkin shrugged. ‘I’m damned if I know. I don’t think they know either. And they just killed Colonel Andrich, the only man who might have had a clue.’

‘You really think the partisans killed him?’

‘Certainly. Who else?’

‘But what about the partisan leaders who died with him?’

‘They were leaders, yes, but each of his own tiny kingdom. Every partisan band has its own allegiance, and its own ideas about the future of their country. The only dream they have in common is to live in some fantasy of a world that never existed and never will. Hiding out in the woods for all those years has given them an illusion that such fantasies are possible. Whoever murdered the colonel and the others must have been convinced that this future did not include cooperating with the Soviets. The colonel was their best, perhaps their only hope. If Andrich had lived another month, he might have been able to win over enough of the Atrads that all the others would have followed. Instead, he was butchered by the very people he was trying to help. And now,’ Yakushkin clenched his fists and held them out, ‘the partisans and the Red Army are like two trains, racing towards each other on the same track. And I tell you, Antonina,’ He drew his fists together, cogging the knuckle bones, ‘those trains are about to collide.’

Just then, Yakushkin heard a noise somewhere behind him. It was a faint scuffling sound, but unmistakable. Turning suddenly, his hand reached out for the gun. But there was only the wall and a chest of drawers. He blinked in confusion. ‘Is someone else here?’ he asked.

‘Somebody else? Besides your bodyguard, you mean?’

Yakushkin pointed at the chest of drawers. ‘What is behind that wall?’

‘The next door neighbour’s apartment, but I think it’s empty now. Why?’

Yakushkin shook his head. ‘I thought I heard someone.’

‘This old house is full of noises,’ she told him. ‘It’s probably just the storm outside.’

More likely a rat, Yakushkin thought to himself.

At that moment, the door opened downstairs as Molodin stepped in out of the rain, closing the door behind him.