The Secret Speech

  Fraera leaned forward, whispering:

  —Remember, I can touch you, but you must not touch me.

  With that warning she kissed him on the cheek. Tender at first before her teeth gripped his skin, closing tight, digging in, increasing in pressure—drawing blood. The pain was intense. Leo wanted to push her away, but if he touched her, he would be killed. He could do nothing except suffer the pain. Finally, she opened her mouth, stepping back and admiring the bite marks.

  —Maxim, you have your first tattoo.

  With his blood on her lips, she concluded:

  —Free my husband, or I will murder your daughter.

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

  SOVIET TERRITORIAL WATERS

  SEA OF OKHOTSK

  STARY BOLSHEVIK PRISON SHIP

  7 APRIL 1956

  STANDING ON DECK, OFFICER GENRIKH DUVAKIN used the tips of his teeth to pull off his coarse mittens. His fingers were icy numb, slow to respond. He blew on them, rubbing his hands together, trying to restore circulation. Exposed to the biting wind, his face was deadened—his lips bloodless and blue. The outermost hairs in his nose had frozen, and when he pinched his nostrils, brittle hairs broke like miniature icicles snapping. He could tolerate such minor discomforts because his hat was a miracle of warmth, lined with reindeer fur and stitched with the care of someone who appreciated that the wearer’s life might depend on the quality of their work. Three long flaps covered his ears and the back of his neck. The earflaps, tied tight under his chin, gave him the appearance of a child wrapped up against the cold, an effect compounded by his soft, boyish features. The pounding salt air had failed to crack his smooth complexion, while his plump cheeks had proved resilient to poor diet and lack of sleep. Twenty-seven years old, he was often mistaken for younger: a physical immaturity that did not serve him well. Supposed to be intimidating and fierce, he a daydreamer, an unlikely guard on board a prison ship as notorious as the Stary Bolshevik.

  Roughly the size of an industrial barge, the Stary Bolshevik was a workhorse vessel. Once a sea-battered Dutch steamer, it had been bought in the nineteen thirties, renamed and customized by the Soviet secret police. Originally intended for colonial exports—ivory, pungent spices, and exotic fruits—it now ferried men destined for the deadliest labor camps in the Gulag enterprise. Toward the bow there was a central tower four stories high that included living quarters for the guards and crew. At the top of the tower was the bridge where the captain and crew navigated, a close-knit group autonomous from the prison guards themselves, willfully blind to the business of this ship, pretending that it was no responsibility of theirs.

  Opening the door, the captain stepped out from the bridge, surveying the stretch of sea they were leaving behind. He gestured down to Genrikh on deck, giving him a nod and announcing:

  —All clear!

  They’d passed through La Pérouse Strait, the only point on the journey where they neared Japanese islands and risked international contact. Precautions were taken to ensure that the vessel appeared to be nothing more than a civilian cargo ship. The heavy machine gun rigged to the center deck was dismantled. Uniforms were hidden beneath long coats. Genrikh had never been entirely sure why they took such efforts to conceal their true nature from the glance of Japanese fishermen. In idle moments, he wondered if there were similar prison boats in Japan with similar men to him.

  Genrikh reassembled the machine gun, screwing it back together. Rather than the gun pointing outward, he directed the barrel downward at the reinforced steel hatch that led to the hold. Belowdeck, in the darkness, cramped on bunks like matches in a box, was a cargo of five hundred men—the first convict-laden voyage of the year from transit camp Buchta Nakhodka on the south of the Pacific coastline to Kolyma in the north. Though both ports were located on the same stretch of coastline, the distance between them was vast. There was no way to reach Kolyma by land: it was accessible only by plane or ship. The northern port of Magadan served as the entry point for a network of labor camps that had spread like fungal spores up along the Kolyma highway into the mountains, forests, and mines.

  Five hundred was the smallest prisoner cargo Genrikh had ever supervised. At this point in the year under Stalin’s rule the ship would have held four times as many in an attempt to ease the backlog at the transit camps built up over the winter as the zek trains, the prisoner-filled wagons, continued to deliver but the ships remained docked. The Sea of Okhotsk was only passable when the ice floes melted. By October it was frozen again. A mistimed voyage meant being encased in ice. Genrikh had heard of ships that had ventured too late in winter or left too early in the spring. Unable to turn back or reach their destination, the guards had made good their escape, trekking across the ice, dragging sleighs loaded with canned meats and bread while the abandoned prisoners were left in the hold to starve or freeze, whichever came first.

  Today no prisoners would be allowed to starve, or freeze, nor would they be summarily executed, their bodies tossed overboard. Genrikh hadn’t read Khrushchev’s Secret Speech condemning Stalin and the excesses of the Gulags. He’d been too scared. There were rumors that it was designed to flush out counterrevolutionaries, a ploy so that people might let their defenses slip and join in the criticism, only to be arrested. Genrikh wasn’t convinced by this theory: the changes seemed real. The long-established practice of brutality and indifference with no accountability had been replaced by confused compassion. At the transit camp prisoners’ sentences were hastily reviewed. Thousands destined for Kolyma had been suddenly granted their freedom, returned to civilization as abruptly as they’d been taken from it. These free men—since most of the women had been granted freedom in the amnesty of 1953—had sat on the shore, staring out at the sea, each clutching a five-hundred-gram chunk of black rye bread, a freedom ration, intended to sustain them until they reached home. For most, home was thousands of miles away. With no possessions, no money, just their rags and their freedom bread, they’d stared out at the sea, unable to comprehend that they could walk away and not be shot. Genrikh had shooed them from the shoreline, as if they were pesky birds, encouraging them to make the journey home but unable to tell them how that journey was possible.

  Genrikh’s superiors had spent the weeks panicking that they were going to be brought before a tribunal. In an attempt to show how much they’d changed, they had issued extensive reviews and overhauls of regulations, frantic signals to Moscow that they were synchronized with this new fashion for fairness. Genrikh had kept his head down, doing as ordered, never questioning and never offering an opinion. If he were told to be tough with prisoners he’d be tough. If he were told to be nice he’d be nice. As it happened, with his baby face, he’d always been better at being nice than tough.

  After years of shipping thousands of political prisoners convicted under Article 58, men and women who’d said the wrong thing, or been in the wrong place, or known the wrong people, the Stary Bolshevik had a new role—to carry a more select cargo, only the most violent and dangerous criminals, men for whom everyone could agree: there was no question of them ever being released.

  IN THE PITCH-BLACK BELLY of the Stary Bolshevik, among the stinking bodies of five hundred murderers and rapists and thieves, Leo lay on his back, resting on the narrow, rickety top bunk—his shoulder pressed against the hull. On the other side was a vast expanse of sea, a mass of freezing water held back by a steel plate no thicker than his thumbnail.

  SAME DAY

  THE AIR WAS STALE AND PUTRID, boiled by the shuddering coal engine secured in an adjacent compartment. The convicts had no access to the engine, but its heat seeped through the timber partition wall, a crude addition to the ship’s original design. At the beginning of the journey, when the hold had been freezing cold, prisoners had fought for the bunks nearest the engine. Within days, as temperatures soared, those same prisoners were fighting for bunks farther away. Divided into a grid of narrow passageways, with high rows of wooden bunks on eit
her side, the subdeck cargo hold had been transformed into an insect hive, infested with prisoners. Leo had a top bunk, a space he’d fought for and defended, prized for its elevation from the vomit and shit slopping on the floor. The weaker you were, the lower you were—as if they’d been shaken through a filtering process, separating into Darwinian layers. Lanterns that had for the past week emitted a dim, sooty glow—like stars seen through city smog—were now out of kerosene, creating darkness so complete that Leo couldn’t see his hands even as they scratched his face.

  Tonight was the seventh day at sea. Leo had counted the days as carefully as he could, making the most of infrequently permitted toilet visits in order to regain some sense of time. On deck, with a mounted machine gun directed at them, prisoners queued to use the hole intended for the anchor, a drop straight into the ocean. Trying to maintain balance on the choppy seas, whipped by icy winds, squatting and shuffling, the process became an awful pantomime. Some inmates, unable to queue, lost control of their bowels, soiling themselves, lying in their own excrement, waiting until it was crust before they started moving again. The psychological importance of cleanliness was self-evident. A person could lose their sanity after only seven days down here. Leo comforted himself that these conditions were temporary. His primary concern was maintaining his edge. Many prisoners had been weakened by months in transit, their muscles softened by inactivity and poor food, their minds softened by the prospect of ten years working in the mines. Leo exercised regularly, keeping his body taut and his mind focused on the task at hand.

  After Leo’s encounter with Fraera on the excavated grounds of the Church of Sancta Sophia he’d returned to the hospital to discover that Raisa had survived surgery and that the doctors were confident of a full recovery. Waking up, her first question had been about Zoya and Elena. Seeing how pale and weak she was, Leo had promised that he was concentrated entirely on his kidnapped daughter. Listening to him explain Fraera’s demands, Raisa had merely said:

  Do whatever it takes.

  FRAER A HAD GAINED CONTROL of a criminal gang. As far as Leo could tell she was no torpedy, no mere foot soldier—she was the avtoritet, the leader. Members of a criminal gang, the vory, were typically contemptuous of women. They wrote songs about their love for their mother, they killed each other over insults to their mothers, but nurtured no belief in women being equals. Somehow the wife of a priest, a woman who’d spent her life in her husband’s shadow, assisting his career, had managed to penetrate the vorovskoi mir. Even more astounding was that she had risen to the top. Fraera was integrated into their rituals: her body covered with tattoos, her birth name tossed aside and replaced with a klikukha, a vory nickname. Sheltered within the highly secretive vorovskoi mir, her operations were probably funded by pickpockets and black market trade. If revenge had been her intention from the outset then she’d chosen her allies well. The vory gangs were the only organizations the State had no control over. There was no chance of infiltrating their ranks: it would take too much time— requiring an officer to spend years undercover, to murder and rape in order to prove themselves. It wasn’t that the State couldn’t find a suitable candidate but rather that they had always considered the vory an irrelevance. These gangs were motivated by their own internal, closed system of loyalty and reward. None of the gangs had ever shown any interest in politics, until now, until Fraera.

  Had Fraera’s demand—the release of her husband—come before her murders, it might have been achievable. The penal system was in upheaval following Khrushchev’s speech. Regarding Lazar’s twenty-five-year sentence, Leo could have applied for a special dispensation, a dismissal or an early parole. The complication would have been Khrushchev’s renewed antireligious campaign. However, after the murders there was no chance of negotiating for Lazar’s release. No deal would be struck. Fraera was a terrorist, to be hunted down and killed irrespective of whether or not Zoya had been taken hostage. Fraera’s gang had been classified as a counterrevolutionary cell. To make matters worse, she’d made no attempt to curtail her bloodlust. In the days directly after Zoya’s kidnapping Fraera’s men had murdered several officials—men and women who’d served under Stalin. Some had been tortured as they’d tortured others. Faced with a reflection of their own crimes, the upper echelons of power were terrified. They were demanding the execution of every member of Fraera’s cell and every man and woman who aided them.

  Fortunately Leo’s boss, Frol Panin, was an ambitious man. Despite the KGB and the militia launching the largest manhunt Moscow had ever seen, they’d found no trace of Fraera and her gang. Clamorous calls for their capture were answered with failure. The press reported nothing of these events, opting for celebrations of industrial statistics on the days after the most shocking of executions, as if these numbers might dampen the rumors sweeping the streets. Officials were moving their families out of the city. A surge in holiday requests had been submitted. The situation was intolerable. Coveting the glory of being the one who snared Fraera, the mantle of a heroic monster slayer, Panin saw Lazar as bait. Since they couldn’t arrange for him to be released through normal channels, without admitting the State could be held to ransom, the only option was to break him out. Panin had hinted that their project had powerful supporters and was proceeding with the tacit consent of those in charge.

  Lazar was a convict in the Kolyma region, Gulag 57. Escape was considered impossible. No one had ever succeeded. Security at many of the Gulags was little more than their location: there was no means of surviving outside the compound. The chances of traversing the vast and unforgiving terrain on foot were negligible. If Lazar went missing he would be declared dead. With Panin’s help, it was a simple matter to get into the Gulag, fabricating the necessary paperwork, positioning Leo as a prisoner. Getting out, however, would not be so easy.

  Vibrations raced through the hull. The ship’s bow veered to the side. Leo sat bolt upright. They’d hit ice.

  SAME DAY

  GENRIKH RUSHED FORWARD, peering over the side. A sunken mass of ice slowly passed by, its pinnacle no larger than a car, the majority of its bulk underwater appearing as a vast dark blue shadow. The hull appeared intact. There was no shouting from the prisoners down below. No water was leaking in. Feeling sweat under his reindeer fur, he signaled to the captain that the danger had passed.

  In the first voyages of the year the bow occasionally knocked against remnants of the ice mass, collisions that made an ominous noise against the aging hull. In the past these collisions used to terrify Genrikh. The Stary Bolshevik was a sickly vessel: no good for trade or commerce, suitable only for convicts—barely able to cut a path through water let alone brush aside ice. Built for a speed of eleven knots, the coal-fired steamer never managed much above eight, puffing like a lame mule. Over the years the smoke coming from the single funnel, located toward the stern, had turned darker and thicker, the vessel moved slower while the creaking had become louder. Yet despite the ship’s worsening health Genrikh had gradually lost his fear of the sea. He could sleep through storms and hold down meals even when plates and cutlery clattered from side to side. It wasn’t that he’d grown brave. Another more pressing fear had taken its place—a fear of his fellow guards.

  On his first voyage he’d made a mistake that he’d never been able to put right, one that his comrades had never forgiven. During Stalin’s reign the guards frequently colluded with the urki—the career criminals. The guards would organize a transfer of one or two female prisoners into the male hold. Sometimes the women’s cooperation was bought with false promises of food. Sometimes they were drugged. Sometimes they were dragged, fighting and screaming and shouting. It depended on the tastes of the urki, many of whom enjoyed snuffing out a fight as much as sex. Payment for this transaction was information on the politicals—convicts sentenced for crimes against the State. Reports of things said, conversations overheard, information that the guards could translate into valuable written denunciations when the ship reached land. As a small bonus the guard
s took final turns with the unconscious women, consummating an allegiance as old as the Gulag system itself. Genrikh had politely declined to join in. He hadn’t threatened to report them or shown any disapproval. He’d merely smiled and said:

  Not for me.

  Words that he’d come to regret more bitterly than anything he’d ever done. From that moment he’d been shunned. He’d thought it would last a week. It had lasted seven years. At times, trapped on board, surrounded by ocean, he’d been mad with loneliness. Not every guard joined in the rapes all of the time, but every guard joined in some of the time. However, he was never offered the chance to put good his mistake. The initial insult stood uncorrected since it didn’t express a preference such as: he didn’t feel like it today but a gut reaction: this is wrong. On occasion, pacing the deck at night, longing for someone to talk to, he’d turned to see the other guards gathered away from him. In the darkness all he could make out were their smoldering cigarettes, red butts glowering at him like hate-filled eyes.

  He’d stopped worrying that the sea might0 swallow this ship or that ice might rip the hull. His fear had been that one night he’d fall asleep only to wake, his arms and feet held fast by the other guards, dragged, as those women were dragged, fighting, screaming, thrown over the side, falling into the black, freezing ocean where he would splash helplessly for a minute or two, watching the lights of the ship grow smaller and smaller.

  For the first time in seven years those fears no longer troubled him. The entire guard contingent of the ship had been replaced. Perhaps their removal had something to do with the reforms sweeping the camps. He didn’t know. It didn’t matter: they were gone, all of them, except for him. He’d been left behind, excluded from their change in fortune. For once, exclusion suited him just fine. He found himself among a new group of guards none of whom hated him, none of whom knew anything about him. He was a stranger again. Anonymity felt wonderful, as if he’d been miraculously cured of a terminal sickness. Presented with an opportunity to start afresh, he intended to do everything in his power to make sure he was part of the team.