Free Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland

the click of Kirov’s teeth on the pipe stem and breathing the smell of Balkan tobacco, which smelled to him like a new pair of leather shoes when they’re just taken out of the box. Then Kirov’s voice jolted him awake.
    “I was wondering,” the young man said.
    “What?” growled Pekkala.
    “If it is the Romanovs down at the bottom of that mine, those bodies have been lying there for years.”
    “Yes.”
    “There will be nothing left of them. How can you investigate a murder when you have no remains to investigate?”
    “There is always something to investigate,” replied Pekkala, and as he spoke these words the face of Dr. Bandelayev rose from the darkness of his mind.
     
     
    “He is the best there is,” Vassileyev had told Pekkala, “at a job no sane man would ever want to do.”
    Dr. Bandelayev was completely bald. His head resembled a shiny pink lightbulb. As if to compensate, he sported a thick walrus-like mustache
.
    On a hot, muggy afternoon in late July, Vassileyev brought Pekkala to Bandelayev’s laboratory
.
    There was a smell he recognized instantly—a sharp, sweet odor that cut right through his senses. He knew it from his father’s basement, where the work of undertaking was carried out
.
    Vassileyev held a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. “Good God, Bandelayev, how can you stand it in here?”
    “Breathe it in!” ordered Bandelayev. He wore a knee-length lab coat embroidered in red with his name and the word
OSTEOLOGIST.
“Breathe in the smell of death.”
    Vassileyev turned to Pekkala. “He’s all yours,” the Major said, his voice muffled by the handkerchief. Then he strode out of the room as quickly as he could
.
    Pekkala looked around the laboratory. Although one wall of windows looked out onto the main quadrangle of the University of Petrograd, the view had been blocked by shelves of glass jars containing human body parts, preserved in a brownish fluid that looked like tea. He saw hands and feet, the raw ends frayed, with stumps of bone emerging from the puckered flesh. In other jars, coils of intestine wound together like miniature tornadoes. On the other side of this narrow corridor, bones had been laid out on metal trays, looking like puzzles which had been abandoned
.
    “Indeed they are puzzles!” said Bandelayev, when Pekkala mentioned this to him. “All of this, everything I do, is the discipline of puzzles.”
    In the days ahead, Pekkala struggled to keep up with Bandelayev’s teaching
.
    “The stench of a rotting human is no different than that of a dead deer lying by the side of a road,” said Bandelayev, “and that is why I don’t believe in God.” The doctor spoke quickly, his words sticking together, depriving him of breath until he was forced to pause and gasp in a lungful of fresh air
.
    But there was no fresh air in Bandelayev’s lab. The windows remained closed, and plumber’s tape had been used to seal them
.
    “Insects!” said Bandelayev, by way of explanation. “This is not merely a shop of rotten meat, as some of my colleagues have described it. Here, all facets of decay are controlled. One fly could ruin weeks of work.” Bandelayev did not like to sit. It seemed an act of laziness to him. So when he lectured Pekkala, he stood behind a tall table littered with bones
,
which he would lift from their trays and hold out for Pekkala to identify. Or he would plunge his hand into a jar and remove a pale knot of flesh, commanding Pekkala to name it, while brown preserving fluid ran the length of his fingers, trickling down his sleeve
.
    Once, Bandelayev held up a skull pierced through the forehead by a small, neat round hole, the result of a bullet fired point-blank into the victim. “Do you know that in the summer months, blowflies will settle on a body in a matter of minutes. They will concentrate in the mouth, the nose, the eyes, or in the wound.” Bandelayev stuck his pinkie into the hole in the forehead. “In a few hours, there can be as