11

KIROV ’S VOICE SNAPPED PEKKALA BACK TO THE PRESENT.

“What about Grodek?” asked Kirov. “What became of him?”

“When Okhrana agents surrounded the safe house, a gunfight broke out. The Okhrana found themselves under fire from weapons they themselves had supplied to Grodek. After the battle, of the thirty-six members of the terrorist cell, the Okhrana found only four survivors among the dead. Grodek was not one of them, and neither was Maria Balka. The two of them had simply disappeared. That was when the Tsar sent for me, with orders to arrest Balka and Grodek before they had the chance to kill again.” He let out a long sigh. “And I failed.”

“But you did find him!”

“Not before he had killed again. I tracked them down to a small lodging house on Maximilian Lane in the Kasan district of Petersburg. The owner of the house had remarked on the difference in age between the woman and the man. He assumed they were simply having an affair, a thing proprietors of places like that are sometimes obliged to overlook. But they kept bringing boxes into their room, and when the owner asked what was in them, Balka told him it was only books. Now people who are having an affair do not spend their days shut away and reading books. That was when the landlord notified the police. Soon we had the house surrounded. I waited at the back of the house. Okhrana agents went in the front, expecting that Balka and Grodek would try to leave through the rear, where I would apprehend them.

“Unfortunately, having been trained in police work, Grodek noticed the agents moving into place. When the agents kicked down the door to the room, they set off a bomb which tore away the whole front of the building. Grodek had made it, killing the same people who had trained him in the art of bomb making. We lost four agents and sixteen civilians in the blast. I myself was knocked almost unconscious. By the time I got up, Balka and Grodek were running out of the back of the building.

“I chased them along Moika Street, by the banks of the Neva. It was the middle of winter. The streets were ankle deep in slush, and snow had piled up on the sides of the road. I could not get a clear shot at them. Eventually, Balka slipped. She must have broken her ankle. I caught up with them on the Potsuleyev Bridge. Police were coming from the other way. There was no cover. I had them in my sights. They had no place to go.” Pekkala paused. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “And what I saw next, I have never been able to get out of my head. They stopped at the crest of the bridge. I could hear the police shouting at them from the other side. Balka was obviously hurt. Grodek had been alternately carrying her and dragging her for several blocks, and he had become exhausted. It was clear that they couldn’t go on. I called to them. I said it was time to give up. Grodek looked at me for a long time. Balka stood beside him with her arm over his shoulder. Then Grodek embraced her, lifted her up and set her on the stone rail of the bridge. The water below was choked with ice. I told him there was no escape that way.”

“What did he do?” asked Kirov.

“He kissed her. And then he pulled a gun and shot her in the head.”

Kirov rocked back. “He shot her? I thought he was in love with her.”

“I did not understand how far he was prepared to go. Maria Balka fell into the river and drifted under the ice.”

“And Grodek? Did he surrender?”

“Only after he had failed to kill himself. He put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger, but the cylinder had jammed.”

“Why didn’t he jump?” Kirov asked. “He might have been able to escape.”

“Grodek was afraid of heights. Even though the distance to the water was only three or four times the height of a man, Grodek became paralyzed by fear. He tried to rush past me, and I knocked him out with the butt of my gun. It put a gash in his forehead. For the entire length of his trial, he refused to wear a bandage. The scar, with its line of dark stitches, looked like a purple centipede crawling up into his hairline. Every day as he left the proceedings on the way back to his holding cell, Grodek would shout to the journalists who had gathered outside the courthouse that the police had tortured him.”

“And Balka? What happened to her body?”

“We never found it. In the winter that river runs fast below the ice. The current must have carried her out into the Baltic Sea. I had a team of divers search that river more than a dozen times.” Pekkala shook his head. “She had vanished without a trace.”

“And Grodek? After what he had done, why did they put him behind bars? Why did he not receive the death penalty?”

“He did, at first, but the Tsar overruled the decision of the judges. He believed that Grodek had been a pawn, first of his father and then of Zubatov. Grodek was still a young man. In a different world, the Tsar felt, it might have been his own son facing execution. But it was clear to the Tsar that Grodek could never go free. So he was locked up for the rest of his life with no chance of parole in the Trubetskoy Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress.”

“But I thought all prisoners were released during the Revolution.”

“Political prisoners, yes, but even the Bolsheviks would have known better than to set free a man like Grodek.”

“What made Grodek so different from the other killers they set free?”

Pekkala thought for a moment before answering.

“Almost anyone,” said Pekkala, “can be driven to kill if the circumstances are forced upon them. But there is a difference between those people who react to situations and those who create the situation for which murder is the outcome. Those are the ones we have to fear, Kirov, because they enjoy the act of killing. And in all my years as a detective, I never met a killer who enjoyed what he did more than Grodek.”

The fire wheezed and crackled.

“Where will you go when you are free?” asked Kirov.

“ Paris,” he replied.

“Why there?”

“If you have to ask that question, you have never been to Paris. Besides, I have unfinished business there.” It felt strange to think of the future. Each time he watched the sun go down in the valley of Krasnagolyana, he knew he had outpaced the odds of his survival. He had measured his survival in increments of days, not daring to hope for more. The idea that he might stretch those increments from days to weeks, to months and even years, filled him with confusion. It took Pekkala a moment to realize that what he was feeling was actually hope, an emotion he had once believed that he would never feel again.

At last, Kirov ’s breathing grew heavy and deep.

Lightning flashed in the distance.

Pekkala slipped away into the river of his dreams, while thunder rolled across the clouds.