The Secret Speech Read Online Free PDF Page A

smelled it on his breath. Better not to have any, better to be nervous—it showed he took the job seriously. Suren reached for the bottle of kvass. A nonalcoholic rye bread brew: it would have to do.
    In his haste, his coordination shaky from alcohol withdrawal, he upended a tray of steel letter molds. The tray fell from the desk, emptying its contents, the individual letters scattering across the stone floor.
    Clink Clink
    His body went rigid. No longer in his office, Suren was standing in a narrow brick corridor, a row of steel doors on one side. He remembered this place: Oriol Prison, where he’d been a guard at the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. Forced to retreat from the rapidly approaching German army, he and his fellow guards had been ordered to liquidate the inmate population, leaving behind no sympathetic recruits for the Nazi invaders. With the buildings being strafed by Stukas and panzers within shelling distance, they’d faced the logistical conundrum of eliminating twenty cells crowded with hundreds of political criminals in a matter of minutes. They didn’t have time for bullets or nooses. It had been his idea to use grenades, two dropped into each cell. He’d walked to the end of the corridor, pulled back the small steel grate, and tossed them in—
clink, clink
—the sound of the grenade casing on a concrete floor. He’d slammed the grate shut so that they couldn’t be tossed out, running back down the corridor to get away from the blast, imagining the men fumbling for the grenades, their filthy fingers slipping, trying to throw them out of the small barred window.
    Suren placed his hands tight over his ears as if this could stop the memory. But the noise continued, louder and louder, grenades on the concrete floor, cell after cell.
    Clink Clink Clink Clink
    He cried out:
    —Stop!
    Removing his hands from his ears, he realized someone was knocking on the door.

13 MARCH
    T HE VICTIM’S THROAT HAD BEEN SAVAGED by a series of deep, ragged cuts. There were no injuries above or below what remained of the man’s neck, giving the contradictory impression of frenzy and control. Considering the ferocity of the attack, only a small amount of blood had spread right and left from the incisions, pooling into the shape of fledgling angel wings. The killer appeared to have knocked the victim to the floor, pinned him down, continuing to slash, long after Suren Moskvin—aged fifty-five and the manager of a small academic printing press—had died.
    His body had been found early this morning when his sons, Vsevolod and Akvsenti, had entered the premises, concerned that their father hadn’t come home. Distraught, they’d contacted the militia, who’d found a ransacked office: drawers pulled out of the desk, papers on the floor, filing cabinets forced open. They’d concluded that it was a bungled robbery. Not until late in the afternoon, some seven hours after the initial discovery, had the militia finally contacted the homicide department headed by former MGB agent Leo Stepanovich Demidov.
    Leo was accustomed to such delays. He’d created the homicide department three years ago using the leverage he’d gained from solving the murders of over forty-four children. Since its conception the department’s relationship with the regular militia was fraught. Cooperation was erratic. The very existence of his department was considered by many militia and KGB officers to imply an unacceptable degree of criticism of both their work and the State. In truth, they were correct. Leo’s motive in forming the department was a reaction against his work as an agent. He’d arrested many civilians during his previous career, arrests he’d made based upon nothing more than typed lists of names passed down from his superiors. In contrast, the homicide department pursued an evidential truth, not a politicized one. Leo’s duty was to present the facts of each case to his superiors. What they did with that truth was up to