The Holy Thief (8 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Korolev awoke at five o’clock, as he always did. There were times he wished he could sleep for a few minutes more, but his mother, the tsar’s army, and finally the Red Army, had trained him so that he had no choice in the matter. “God gives to those who rise early,” had been his mother’s mantra, but this particular morning he allowed himself a moment or two to savor the pleasure of the new room.

On the ceiling above him the floral pattern of the moulding was just visible in the pale creamy glow from the streetlamp outside and he found himself smiling with very un-Soviet, very bourgeois, very proprietorial pleasure at the beauty of it. Who else did he know who had a ceiling rose with plaster grapes and flowers and even what looked like apples? No one. Not even the general, he suspected. Nor did the draft from the window that nipped at his nose detract from the comfort of the new bed or the warmth of the quilt that had been loaned to him by Koltsova. A strange woman, her. One moment she’s pointing a gun at his heart and the next thing she’s loading him down with bedclothes. Not from Moscow, of course. Odessa. Everyone knew they were different down there—the Odessians weren’t Ukrainian and they weren’t Russian either. They were just Odessian.

He lay there thinking how curious life was and how, at this particular moment and in this particular place, it had suddenly become quite pleasant. It was only with great reluctance that he reminded himself of the impending lecture. Some preparatory notes would stand him in good stead.

He swung his legs down onto the floorboards, found them cold to the touch, and crossed over to the window to look out. Snow had fallen overnight, sloping up against the wall opposite where the wind had pushed it. A solitary set of footprints marked out the middle of the lane—winter was early this year. The day before had had a bite to it, and the cold season had whispered its arrival in the chill breeze that had slipped through the streets as darkness fell. Personally, he greeted it as an old friend; the first snow was always welcome to him. Winters were hard, of course, but the snow masked Moscow’s imperfections and, at night, silenced the city into a semblance of tranquility. Moscow in winter was a beautiful, hard, breathless place where the only smell was the inside of your coat. He wouldn’t miss the summer and the stench and swelter. How the People smelled in summer. He hoped it wouldn’t be long before soap became a production priority.

His assessment of the snow complete, he turned from the window and knelt beside the bed and, his head upright, crossed himself in the Orthodox way, raised his eyes to heaven and thanked the Lord for allowing him to experience such a beautiful morning in such a fine apartment, then began to say the prayers his mother had taught him, adding, at the end, a plea for the advancement of soap to full production as soon as possible, feeling it his duty, both as a Believer and as a loyal Soviet citizen.

The point of praying to a God that the Party said didn’t exist concerned him momentarily, as it did every morning. But then sometimes, looking back, it was clear that the Party made mistakes. After all, look how they’d nurtured that viper Trotsky for all those years. Perhaps it would turn out they were wrong about God as well. And even if they weren’t, well, it wouldn’t hurt to be on the safe side in the meantime.

Standing stiffly, he began his stretching. Wherever he was, and whatever his schedule for the day, he tried to spend a few minutes exercising. If that meant he had to get up a little earlier, then so be it. He moved on to some light callisthenics, then press-ups and sit-ups, reminding himself to bring his weights over from the old apartment later. He finished his routine with some more stretching and then, slightly out of breath and aware of a pleasant dull tiredness in his muscles, he forced himself to run on the spot for five minutes, the window rattling as his feet made the floorboards bang like drums. Finished, he went through to the kitchen, where he cleaned himself thoroughly at the sink, keeping an eye on the corridor when he washed himself below the waist. The water was surprisingly cold and it was with something of an effort that he resisted vocalizing his body’s shock, but as there was a young girl in the apartment, and he had only just moved in, he thought it best to bear it in silence.

Clean-shaven and his morning rituals over, he put on a vest that had seen better days and went to sit at the writing table. Outside the first cockerel announced the new day, immediately answered by two more nearby. There were regulations about keeping livestock in communal apartments and residential blocks, but many of the new Muscovites were from the country and found ways round the restrictions. Even here, in Kitaj-Gorod, among the Party elite and the bosses, there were chickens pushed into small wooden runs on flat roofs or the corner of a courtyard. Once the winter really bit, they’d be kept inside, stepping over and around their peasant owners, who often slept in shifts.

He opened his notebook and began to write. “Organization.” A disorganized file was not much use, in his opinion. There were times in Petrovka Street when he had to leave the room, so distressed did he become at Yasimov’s sloppy approach to filing. He was certain that his friend’s successful convictions were often not the actual perpetrators, although Yasimov argued that, even if they weren’t guilty of the crime in question, the people he convicted were certainly guilty of something. Korolev shook his head, believing it was Yasimov’s duty to identify the right criminal for the right crime, not just assign the crimes willy-nilly to whichever criminal took his fancy.

“Subsections” was the next thing he wrote. He wrote it underneath “organization,” as “subsections” was itself a subsection. Then, in a column that reached halfway down the page, he added “statements,” “photographs,” “evidence,” “autopsy/medical report (if any),” “fingerprints,” “other forensic data,” “suspects,” “alibis,” “lines of inquiry” and “miscellaneous.” Then he started on his favorite topic: “Purpose.”

In Korolev’s opinion, a good file should be like a mathematical formula from which, provided the necessary information was entered in the correct order, the solution would result as inevitably as night followed day. He was aware that some of his colleagues laughed at him when he said things like this, but it didn’t change his view that the purpose of a file was, as with all police work, to identify and detain the perpetrators of particular crimes, Yasimov notwithstanding. A good file did this by providing a sound basis for logical deduction. A good policeman used the tools at his disposal to pursue criminals and serve them their just desserts and, when the time came, a good prison was one which kept the criminals secured for the period of time the People’s Court determined they were to spend there. This was Soviet logic, beautiful in its simplicity and directness.

He looked again at the notes he’d made and wondered whether the skills he hoped to teach the cadets might possibly be used against innocent people. Yagoda had gone too far, that was clear, but the Central Committee had removed him. The Party had to take the utmost care to protect the State, of course, but within reason, and the expectation was that things would be different under Ezhov. However, now there were rumors that Ezhov had declared, on taking up his new position, that it would be better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy go free—that “When you chop wood, chips fly.” Korolev sighed and stood up from the table, imagining a host of innocent chips on a sawmill floor. Still, his filing techniques, clear and logical as they were, should operate to protect the innocent, or so he reassured himself.

With this happier thought in mind he put on the rest of his clothes. The image of the indiscriminate axe wouldn’t leave him, but he did his best to brush it aside and, putting his notes in his briefcase, closed the apartment door quietly behind him.

He’d just succeeded in clicking the lock gently shut when he heard a cough behind him and turned to see a bundle of black woolen shawl on three legs swaying precariously from side to side. On closer examination, one of the three legs turned out to be a walking stick.

“So you’re the
Ment
?”

“
Ment?
That’s not a very polite way to refer to a Militiaman, Citizeness.”

“What are you going to do, arrest me? I’m eighty-three years old and, anyway, I’ve been to prison before. It’s not so bad. They feed you quite well and the conversation is entertaining. Quite intellectual sometimes.”

Korolev looked for a means of escape, but she had the corridor blocked and, other than standing his ground, the only option was to retreat into the apartment, which he didn’t have time to do. He pointed to his watch.

“Excuse me, Citizeness, I’ve no intention of arresting you, but I do have to go to work.”

“Work, is it? Well listen here, Mr.
Ment
, what I want to know is this—how did you manage to get an elephant up these old stairs? I found it difficult enough to get up them myself. The elephant must have had a terrible time.”

“An elephant?”

“Exactly, an elephant. Which reminds me of a story about sheep. Have you heard it? Some sheep tried to cross the border to Finland. ‘Why are you running away to Finland?’ the border guard asks. ‘It’s the NKVD,’ the sheep say. ‘Comrade Stalin has ordered them to arrest all the elephants.’ ‘But you aren’t elephants,’ the guard says. ‘We know,’ say the sheep, ‘but try telling that to the Chekists.’ It’s a good one, isn’t it?”

It was also the joke that had cost Mendeleyev a stretch in the Zone and Korolev put a finger to his lips, looking over his shoulder to get the point across. The old woman scowled in response, but said nothing.

“My exercises,” Korolev said, changing the subject as realization dawned, “that was what the noise was. I apologize if I woke you.”

“Woke me? My dear Mr.
Ment
, you woke the whole damned house and half the damned street. Can’t you go to an athletics club or a gymnasium if you must undertake these dreadful exercises? I thought the Judgment Day had finally come, but then I reminded myself that God was a fiction of primitive man’s imagination and concluded it was elephants. I’m sorry it wasn’t—they’d make interesting neighbors. I believe they mate for life, like swans.”

“I apologize again, Citizeness. Allow me to introduce myself, Captain Alexei Korolev of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Division.”

“Yes, so I believe,” the old woman said, condescension coloring her voice. “Maria Lobkovskaya. I live below you, although if you do too many more of your exercises you’ll probably come through the ceiling and end up living downstairs too.” She regarded him with a keen eye. “You look like an honest fellow, for a policeman, and not bad looking. Why aren’t you married?”

“I was married, Citizeness, but it ended.”

“It was different in my day. You married for life, like the elephants. Now you sign a form and it never happened. Anyway, you must be on your way. You have work to do. All those hooligans on the street and you standing around talking to old women.”

Outside the air was fresh in the early light and his breath came out in a fog as thick as cigarette smoke. The temperature made him feel awake and strangely cheerful. He was glad he had his greatcoat to keep the chill off and that his feet were warm inside his
valenki
and, most of all, that there was no one else on the streets as yet. The only sounds as he walked along were the soft crunch of snow underfoot and an occasional early-morning voice from an open courtyard. He found himself humming the tune from the “March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys,” and the humming soon turned into quiet singing.

“We’ll grasp, discover and attain it all,
The cold North Pole and the clear blue sky.
When our country demands that we be heroes,
Then heroes we will become.”

As he sang, his feet swung to its rhythm. He looked quickly at his watch—he had to pick up the report for Gregorin from Petrovka Street and he decided, having plenty of time, to walk past the Kremlin and see it in its first snowy coat since the spring.

In the end, the lecture went well. Colonel Gregorin met him inside the surprisingly plain entrance to the NKVD training school—there was no furniture apart from a metal table, and paintings of Dzerzhinsky and Stalin were the only decorations on the white walls, apart from the mandatory Red Flag. One of the two burly-looking sentries had given him a speculative look that had seemed more than a little hostile, so he was pleased Gregorin had been prompt in receiving him. He followed the colonel through a pair of large wooden swing doors into a wide corridor, along which hung revolutionary slogans on black canvas banners. “Catch up and overtake the West!”; “Defend against the enemy within!” and “Make way for women!” although he noticed that in fact there were very few women among the students flowing back and forth from room to room, in an unhurried but purposeful rhythm that made it seem as though walking along the corridor was all they did all day.

The high-ceilinged lecture room itself was a little disorientating. He had to lean backward to see the students on the highest level of the wooden semi-circles, which reached up almost to the light fittings. At each desk a young face sat, scrubbed and grave above a spotless cadet uniform. He turned to Gregorin, who pointed him toward a wooden lectern, where, after taking a moment to open his notes and a further nod from the colonel, he began to speak.