Read an Excerpt
1
VorkutLag 51, 22 November 1963
The news came over Soviet State Radio Mayak, blaring in the empty officers’ mess as Vasin sat at a plain wooden table, eating alone.
“Comrade radio listeners. We have interrupted our broadcast because of a distressing report we have just received from New York.”
Vasin looked up abruptly at the bulky speaker, as if at a television.
“It has been officially announced that US President John Kennedy has died in a hospital after having been the victim of an attack by, it is supposed, persons from extreme right-wing elements. US President John Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally fell under the bullets of assassins while driving in an open car through the streets of Dallas. There were three shots. One of the bullets struck the President in the head . . .”
The report might have come from the moon, or some other distant planet of warmth and light. Somewhere, beyond hundreds of kilometers of tundra and boreal forest, there was a world where great events happened. Vasin understood the words of the news bulletin, but his mind could not put images to them, or meaning. He tried to turn his attention back to his cabbage soup but found his appetite had vanished.
For nearly a year, the VorkutLag 51 Strict Regime Penal Colony had been Vasin’s kingdom—and his personal calvary. The American spy Oleg Morozov had been arrested and executed. Morozov’s unwitting protector General Ivan Serov was removed from his post as the head of Soviet military intelligence and expelled from the Party. All thanks to KGB Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Vasin. But to accomplish his last mission Vasin had broken rules, burned bridges—even committed what some would call treason.
What his boss, General Orlov, head of the KGB’s secretive Special Cases Department, did call treason.
As Vasin had always feared, Orlov’s revenge had been particularly exquisite. He had sent his rebellious subordinate to VorkutLag. Not as an inmate—General Orlov had at least spared him that—but as a camp commandant. The promotion was in reality a prison sentence. In this frozen world two hundred kilometers north of the tree line and four days by train from Moscow, Vasin felt more of a prisoner than the convicts under his charge.
In its heyday in the 1940s, VorkutLag had been a vast archipelago of coal mines and penal colonies that spread hundreds of kilometers across the swath of barren Arctic scrubland. Over the years of Stalin’s rule some eighteen million Soviet citizens, most of them political prisoners, had passed through the gulag system—six hundred thousand of them in Vorkuta alone. At least a million and a half had perished. But on Stalin’s death ten years before, the new Party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, had ordered the political prisoners freed. Now, VorkutLag was, for the most part, a wasteland of empty barracks crumbling into the swamps of the Pechora Basin. The coal mines around the city of Vorkuta itself remained open but were now manned by free laborers lured to the Arctic by the promise of high wages and long vacations in the south. Of the once vast camp complex that surrounded Vorkuta only Camp 51 and a handful like it remained, each housing some five hundred of the most violent criminals in the Soviet Union.
Vasin was the ghost-king of a ghost-camp, a vestige of a vanished prison empire clinging to the edge of the world. A place so remote that in winter the sun deigned to shine for only the briefest of spans before abandoning Vorkuta to its blue bowl of near-perpetual Arctic night.
Outside the officers’ mess, a muffled klaxon wailed. A haggard woman in a gray smock and grimy apron approached Vasin—Tatiana, the commander’s bufetshitsa, his personal cook and maid. Moving carefully, she placed a china cup of steaming tea on the table and a saucer with two chocolates and a slice of lemon arranged on it. Vasin pushed away his chipped soup bowl and sipped the tea without looking up.
Shadows of black-clad prisoners flitted past the windows as they hurried to the evening roll call. Draining his tea, Vasin stood wearily. He joined a dozen officers in the vestibule as they chatted and laughed coarsely. To a man, they ignored their commandant as he tugged on his heavy sheepskin coat and buckled his pistol belt.
For all the attention his subordinates paid him, Colonel Vasin might have been made of cabbage steam and cigarette smoke.
2
The stumpy steam locomotive pulling a small train of prison wagons arrived from the Vorkuta railhead late. It plowed laboriously through the snowdrifts that obscured the branch line, the camp’s only link to the outside world. The region had been battered for days by the scything winds of an Arctic ice storm that hurled freezing shards sharp as ground glass into Vasin’s face while he tramped out into the goods yard to receive the convoy. The prisoners were unloaded one by one from the individual wire cages in the cars and led, heads down with their hands cuffed behind their backs, into the disinfection barrack.
Three men caught Vasin’s attention as they clambered out of the rearmost car, reserved for the convoy’s guards. Two of them were uniformed KGB officers, a captain and a senior sergeant. The third wore a padded black prison uniform but walked free, uncuffed. The senior KGB officer approached Vasin through the swirling snow.
“Urgent orders for the commander,” the man shouted over the wind. “Concerning a special prisoner.”
“I’m the commander.”
The Captain, his pale face pinched with the cold, handed over a heavy attache case secured by two wired lead seals. Vasin tugged off one mitten with his teeth and struggled with the fastenings. Bared to the wind, his hand went instantly numb. Inside the case was a slim and expensive leather document folder with a combination lock. Chalked on the cover were two words: nikita’s birthday.
Nikita. The fourteen-year-old son Vasin had left behind in Moscow. Whatever was inside the file could only be a message from his old boss, General Orlov. Vasin struggled and failed to keep the anger out of his voice.
“Follow. Bring your prisoner with you.”
3
In the welcome heat of his office, Vasin turned the dials on the lock to his son’s birthday—17/08—and the mechanism snapped open. Inside was an envelope addressed to him, marked eyes only in Orlov’s looping handwriting. Vasin had to fight down a desire to throw the letter into the stove. Nonetheless, for perhaps the thousandth time since he arrived in VorkutLag, Vasin forced himself into obedience. He opened the note.
My dear Sasha. I hope you are keeping well in your new home. I am entrusting you with a delicate and most important mission. Keep this prisoner safe, comfortable, and alive at all costs. Secrecy is essential. Wait for my further orders—nobody else’s. The two escorting soldiers must be eliminated immediately. You will find the discreet means to accomplish this inside this case. Your official report of the escorting officers’ deaths will serve as acknowledgment that you have received and understood. Yu. O.
Vasin looked up at the Captain sharply. A flash of recognition: he’d seen this man before in Orlov’s Special Cases offices on the ninth floor of KGB headquarters in Moscow. Vasin rummaged in the briefcase and his fingers closed around two small, cold metal cylinders taped to the bottom. The officer’s pale blue eyes were on him.
“We were told to expect a written acknowledgment that the orders have been received, Comrade Colonel.”
“Of course.”
Vasin breathed deep. Orlov had ordered him to kill this man. Did Vasin dare defy him? Did the visitor from Moscow have orders to eliminate him if he refused to cooperate? Vasin knew his old boss all too well. If these men were not to be his executioners, someone else would be. And the message of the combination, Nikita’s birthday, could not be clearer.
Vasin collected himself. “Captain, why don’t you invite your comrade up here to have a drink. You’ve both had a long journey.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“Cuff the convict to a radiator in the corridor, tell the duty sergeant to enter him on the books as a trusted prisoner, and find him a cot downstairs in the administration building.”
Vasin waited a moment for the man to leave, then picked up the attaché case. Turning to the bookshelf behind his desk where he kept his private vodka supply, he slipped the two cold steel capsules into the palm of his left hand. Then he took down three grubby shot glasses and a bottle of Stolichnaya.
4
The camp doctor, a cadaverous drunk, lurched unsteadily in Vasin’s office doorway. His lab coat was stained, and his eyes were bloodshot from a hangover that looked like it had been ongoing for years.
“Morning, Comrade Colonel. The two escort officers from Moscow are dead. Both suffered fatal cardiac infarction in the night.”
Vasin pursed his lips in a struggle to keep emotion out of his face.
“Both of them?”
After years in the gulag system, nothing seemed to surprise the doctor. He merely shrugged.
“Both. Shall I draw up the death certificates?”
“Do that, Comrade Doctor.”
As the door closed, Vasin slumped back in his chair. He tried to picture the faces of the dead officers he’d drunk with only the previous night, but they were already indistinct in his memory. The men had blank, hard faces, like those of all Orlov’s thugs from the ninth floor. Unlovable men, though wives and children as yet oblivious to their coming loss probably did love them. Vasin would never know. Two bodies now lay in the camp morgue, dead by his hand, on Orlov’s orders. He felt nothing but a numbed revulsion. Vorkuta’s biting frosts had turned him cold. Vasin had forgotten a language he had once known, the moral vocabulary of a distant, normal world that had faded from his memory.
Orlov had been right, as usual. The poison was discreet.
Vasin picked up the telephone handset on his desk and ordered the special prisoner be brought up from the cell where he had spent the night. As he waited, Vasin flipped through the man’s file. Lazar Samuilovich Berezovsky, born in Rostov-on-Don in March 1910. Convicted in May 1963 for large-scale financial fraud, illegal commercial speculation, handling smuggled goods and black-market foreign currency, plus membership in a criminal organization. Sentence: fifteen years of hard labor.
A gangster, then. To be precise, evidently a gangster’s koshelek: literally a purse, a crime gang’s moneyman. But there was no clue in the file as to why Orlov would send him to Vorkuta. Or why this man merited such deadly precautions to protect the fact of his presence.
A knock on the door interrupted Vasin’s reading. Without waiting for his commander’s permission, the duty sergeant barged in leading the handcuffed prisoner.
“Com’ Colonel, Convict S-8859.”
Berezovsky was a tall, well-built man with a week-old beard and with his thinning hair neatly cut, not close shaven—which meant he hadn’t come from inside the gulag system. He was fit and could not yet be forty, though the date of birth listed in the file put him as over fifty.
The man stood upright and impassive as he waited for his handcuffs to be removed, fixing Vasin with deep-set, black eyes. Once the sergeant had left them Berezovsky rubbed his wrists and looked around Vasin’s office with normal human curiosity. No sign of tattoos on his hands, no sullen hangdog subordination typical of a convict. He stared at Vasin with a frank directness no real con would ever dare. Definitely no jailbird, then. And maybe no gangster, either.
“You have something to tell me, prisoner? A message?”
Berezovsky narrowed his eyes.
“No message. Just a question. My escort?”
“Dead, both of them. Terrible accident.”
The prisoner nodded slowly and relaxed, taking a seat without permission.
“Good,” he said. “Good. You have an accounting department here, I presume?”
Vasin blinked in surprise, momentarily unsure of how to react to the man’s confident authority.
“Because you are an accountant.” Vasin gestured to the personnel file lying open on his desk. “Supposedly.”
The prisoner returned his gaze but did not answer.
“How old are you, Prisoner Berezovsky?”
“Fifty-three years, eight months, and nine days old, Colonel.”
“Very good. From Stavropol, correct?”
“Rostov-on-Don. Sir.”
Vasin flipped the file shut. He closed his eyes for a long moment. Orlov. The boss and his fucking lethal games.
“You going to tell me what this is about, Berezovsky? Not that your name is Berezovsky, of course.”
The prisoner did not break eye contact.
“Colonel, I understand you have some instructions from Moscow concerning how I am to be treated here? We will both be better off if you just follow them. Continue to follow them, I should say.”
There was an edge of knowing complacency in the man’s tone that caught on something deep inside Vasin. Do what you’re told. Don’t ask questions. The injunctions that had kindled fury in him from his early boyhood. Vasin stood, abruptly, savoring the sudden look of consternation in Berezovsky’s face. Being manipulated by Orlov was bad enough. But to be told what to do by a damn convict was too much for what remained of Vasin’s fractured ego. This place might be a shithole at the end of the earth. But this shithole was Vasin’s kingdom. A little, miserable world where Orlov had allowed him a tiny measure of power. A power that he had been provoked into exercising, the feelings of Orlov’s precious pet prisoner be damned.
“Ladno, molchi dalshe, golubchik,” grunted Vasin, slipping into the rough jargon spoken by prisoners and guards alike. “Fine, keep your silence, little pigeon.”
He slammed his palm on a buzzer on his desk.
“Wait. Commander, I’m kontora. Kontora, you hear?” The kontora: literally, “the office.” The KGB’s jargon for itself.
Vasin felt his face tighten. Did this man imagine that he had any love left for the fucking kontora? The duty sergeant appeared at the door.
“You rang, respected Comrade Colonel?” A bad running joke among Vasin’s staff, taking the piss out of their boss from Moscow by addressing him with exaggerated pre-Revolutionary formality.
“Yes. Punishment block for this man until I tell you to let him out.”
Both commander and sergeant turned to the prisoner, who remained defiantly seated. The sergeant shot his boss an uncomprehending look.
“Fine, Vasin. Have it your way.” Berezovsky raised a peremptory hand to wave the minion away. His familiar tone and sheer chutzpah stunned both officers. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Vasin hesitated for a second, utterly confounded. A word from the commander could cast this man into a nightmare world of violence, hunger, rape, and degradation. But Berezovsky remained utterly cool.
Are you one of them, Vasin? was the man’s unspoken question. Or one of us?
“Leave us, Sergeant.”
