One Night in Winter

At the end of the hall, Colonel Nadaraia, Beria’s chief bodyguard, a small sturdy man with fair hair and slightly bulging eyes, was expecting them. He kissed Kobylov with the camaraderie of drinking partners. ‘Hurry up, Bull,’ he said in their native Georgian. ‘And who’s your ginger friend with the bleeding lip? Hurry up. He’s ready!’

One of Nadaraia’s men was holding open the lift even though a handful of doctors and nurses were waiting to get in. They rode down two levels and when the doors opened, they found another two bodyguards waiting.

‘This way!’ said a third, leading them down a corridor with a blue-tiled floor and through two double swing doors. Kobylov noticed that the deeper they went into the building, the colder the air became, the more acrid the stench of formaldehyde and carbolic soap. Finally, they entered a chilly white-tiled room with channels set in the concrete floor, like an abattoir. One entire wall of steel doors faced the men.

‘Ah, there you are, Sherlock Holmes! What kept you? Solving more cases, you fat fool?’ Lavrenti Beria, wearing a summery cream jacket, a flowery Georgian shirt open at the neck and baggy linen trousers, stood between two white slabs. ‘Don’t you think I’ve got better things to do? My wife’s away in Gagra and I’ve got a new fourteen-year-old girl waiting for me at the dacha.’

‘I apologize, Lavrenti Pavlovich,’ said Kobylov, bowing slightly.

‘Comrade Stalin will want a report tonight. But don’t rush so much, Bull. That’s how we make mistakes. Things take as long as they take.’ Beria glanced at Mogilchuk. ‘What happened to your lip?’

‘I banged it on a door.’

Beria laughed. ‘I can see the imprint of Kobylov’s rings. But don’t blame your subordinates, Bull. It was your theory, right? Professor Schpigelglaz, where are you?’

‘Here!’ trilled an adenoidal voice with a Yiddish accent. ‘Stwaightforward, very stwaightforward, comrades.’ Beria stepped aside to reveal Professor Schpigelglaz, whose angular glasses with huge black frames dwarfed his beaky face. He had a white coat and a cloud of frizzy white hair to match.

The professor was such a wraith that he had been entirely concealed by Beria’s paunchy bulk. ‘Gentlemen, I have something to show you.’

‘Get it right,’ Beria said, ‘and you go back to your cushy sharashka laboratory. Get it wrong and you’ll be hauling logs in the Arctic.’

‘Ach, no danger of that!’ Professor Schpigelglaz seemed delighted to have such an interesting case. ‘May I pwoceed? Now, let’s roll out our young overnight guests. That’s what we call them here – overnight guests.’ He gestured to a hollow-eyed young man who looked as if he had spent too much time in the company of the dead. The assistant opened the steel doors to pull out a metal platform on which lay the waxy naked body of a male red-haired teenager. As the platform came out, wheeled legs dropped down from it, enabling the hollow-eyed young man to push the trolley alongside one of the slabs. Then he and another assistant lifted it on to the slab.

‘Let’s see now, gentlemen.’ Kobylov enjoyed being addressed as a gentleman – the professor talked as if the Revolution had never happened and he and Beria were a pair of aristocratic generals. ‘Who are our overnight guests? Ach ya. Blagov, Nikolasha. Eighteen years old,’ said the professor, reading from a label tied to the big toe.

The body looked to Kobylov as if it had been filleted: jagged red lines – like railways on a map of flesh or a zip made of skin – ran around the hairline of the head and from the throat down the centre of the chest to split at the waist. All was clean and neat – except the jaw and mouth. All the cleaning in the world could not put that together again. The assistants then returned to the steel doors. This time a naked female body was laid on the other slab. Again, a label on the toe.

‘Shako, Rosa. Eighteen years old.’

Beria whistled through his teeth, looking at the teenage girl. ‘Shame we didn’t get to her when she was alive, eh, Bull?’

‘Not my type,’ said Kobylov, grinning. ‘A little dainty for me.’

Beria turned to the professor. ‘Start with the boy,’ he instructed.

‘Ach yes, Lavrenti Pavlovich. Well, it’s quite obvious when you examine the wounds. The boy has a diwect bullet wound fired from a Mauser service revolver. One shot.’ He leaned over Nikolasha’s face. ‘There’s the entwy wound in the mouth which shattered the jaw and passed through the cwanial chamber, causing catastwophic twauma.’ He twisted the boy’s head with its slicked-back red hair, ‘And here’s the exit wound, back of the head. Death instantaneous.’

‘And the girl?’ said Beria.

‘Ach yes, the girl.’ He crossed to the other slab. ‘Here on the right breast, gentlemen, we see a single shot to the heart. Vewy neat. We dug out the bullet. Here it is. You may keep it, dear genewal, as a memento of me, ha ha. Yes, a standard service revolver was used. Mauser. Death also instantaneous.’

‘There it is,’ said Beria.