Mountain of the Dead Read online

“Rock bottom is a solid foundation on which to rebuild one’s life.”

  “Now I know why people hate writers.”

  “Who hates writers?”

  “So this guy we meeting, what’s his deal?”

  “His name’s Vasily Popov,” I said. “He was a younger friend of Igor Dyatlov. He’s interviewed a number of the volunteers who’d participated in the search-and-rescue operation, and the officials in the following investigation. He started a foundation to keep alive the memories of the nine hikers. He doesn’t believe the complete Dyatlov criminal case file has been released to the public, and he’s been petitioning the regional authorities for years to declassify the rest of it.”

  “He having any luck?”

  “They say there’s nothing more to declassify.”

  “You believe that?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  John Lennon came over the radio through a sieve of static, and we traveled for several minutes listening to “Hey Jude” minced with electrical interference. In the distance a massive, unfinished TV tower rose into the gloomy sky. Construction on it stagnated with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it now held the pejorative title as the world’s tallest abandoned structure, sometimes colloquially referred to as Suicide Tower given the number of people who have plummeted to their deaths from the top.

  Initially my girlfriend, Denise, was going to accompany me to Russia to interview Vasily Popov, and she had mentioned the Suicide Tower factoid while she’d been researching Yekaterinburg, and what we were going to do in here in our downtime. She’d been over the moon about the trip, gushing about all the different restaurants and museums the city had to offer. She’d been especially excited to see the ballet, which was performed in one of the oldest theater houses in the country.

  She was dead now. She had died seven months ago.

  And a day didn’t go by that I didn’t blame myself for her death.

  “Ugly just got uglier,” Disco said, referring to the endless rows of monotonous prefabricated blocks the color of cigarette ash springing up all around us. “Looks like one big public housing project.”

  “Was at one time,” I said, taking another sip of whiskey. “Communism, remember?”

  “Don’t seem like nothing’s changed.”

  He was right, for it almost appeared as though the last twenty-five years hadn’t happened, that the country was still trapped in the twentieth century, buckling beneath the weight of a flawed ideology.

  “Hey—lá bas,” Disco said, pointing out his window at a tall blonde woman wearing a white fur cap, a matching coat, and knee-high leather boots. She stood before a derelict stall buying boiled corn from a toothless man. “Where else in the world would you see that?”

  “How’s that any different than some tall blonde buying a hotdog from a New York City street vendor?”

  “It just is.”

  “Trust you?”

  “Trust me.”

  The taxi meandered down several smaller streets of post-Soviet dilapidation before the driver slowed to squint through the windshield, searching for street numbers. Twenty feet later he stopped out front of a crumbling pre-revolutionary building.

  I tucked the flask back into my pocket, paid the fare, and got out. Standing on the sidewalk, Disco and I looked up through the lazy snowflakes at the looming structure. Back in the day it would have been grand, likely the home to wealthy merchants or industrialists, or perhaps senior Communist Party officials. Yet between then and now it had suffered serious neglect. Moreover, someone at some point had thought it a wise idea to paint the entire second-story façade with a mural, and not a very aesthetically pleasing one, as it depicted smokestacks against an overcast sky.

  “Hmmm,” Disco said, summing up what I was thinking.

  Next to the building’s entrance a metal intercom box protruded from the brick wall. The only name written in English was VASILY POPOV, and next to that, DYATLOV MEMORIAL FOUNDATION. I pressed the corresponding button.

  “Da?” a rough voice barked over the loudspeaker.

  “Hi, it’s—”

  “Number two. Ground floor. To the left.”

  An obnoxious drone sounded.

  “Friendly guy,” Disco said, pushing open the unlocked door.

  We stepped into a once-magnificent lobby. The paint on the fourteen-foot ceiling and moldings was scabbed and peeling, the marble floors chipped and scuffed, and the elaborate staircase to the second floor in need of a new coat of stain. The decaying grandeur, however, lent the space an air of nefarious charm, as though the end of the world had come and gone, and Disco and I were the last men standing in the ruins of a once-grand civilization.

  We followed Vasily Popov’s directions to the end of a narrow hallway, where the man—tall and broad-shouldered, his posture stooped—awaited our arrival in his doorway. Dark hawkish eyes behind half-rimmed Ben Franklin glasses scrutinized our approach. Carelessly sweptback salt-and-pepper hair and shoddy stubble framed an equine face with a beak nose and a downturned mouth. He wore an ill-fitted black suit, an open-collared ruby-colored shirt, and deerskin moccasins.

  Stopping before him, I held out my hand. “Mr. Popov? I’m Corey Smith.” For someone in his seventies, he possessed a firm grip. “This is my friend, Disco Brady.”

  Vasily Popov’s uninviting eyes flicked over Disco. “You never said you were bringing someone,” he said, his accented words laced with asperity.

  “I couldn’t lose him in the airport.”

  Vasily Popov glared at me, unappreciative of the humor, and for a bizarre moment I thought he might turn us away. But then he led us to a wood-paneled living room. Spacious and high-ceilinged, it nevertheless felt crowded due to the teeming bookcases and stodgy furniture, which included a massive oak desk sheathed with books and papers and folders. A large mullioned window looked onto the white-frosted street. The air reeked of stale cigar smoke.

  “Sit,” Vasily Popov said, gesturing toward a button-tufted leather sofa.

  We sat.

  He eased himself into a dark-wood armchair with an athletic grace that belied his years and retrieved a half-smoked cigar from the ashtray on the coffee table between us. He struck a match and rotated the stogy, toasting the foot until it lit. He puffed quickly, the tobacco crackling loudly in the silence.

  “You may call me Vasily,” he said around a mouthful of pungent smoke.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” I said.

  “It took you a long time to come to Russia. And time is not something I have in great abundance.” He paused contemplatively, then tapped his head. “Glioblastoma. I’ve been granted six months to live. If I make it a year, I’ll be considered lucky.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, the platitude the only thing I could think of. He had told me during our email correspondence he was terminally sick, but he had not mentioned any specifics.

  “I’m seventy-three years old,” Vasily said dismissively. “I’m happy to have lived so long. Not everyone can say this. My friend Igor had barely lived three weeks into his twenty-third birthday.” He paused again, as if reflecting on this, then puffed some more.

  From my pocket I withdrew my digital voice recorder and the list of questions I had made the night before. I held up the device. “Do you mind if I record our conversation?”

  “Immortalize me, please.”

  I pressed Record and placed the recorder on the coffee table. I looked at Vasily, wondering how to start the interview. He looked back at me, waiting. I unfolded my list of questions but didn’t ask any of them, deciding a conversational approach would better suit the man. “You’ve spoken to some of the family members of the hikers over the years,” I said. “The search-and-rescue and subsequent investigation must have been a very difficult time for them.”

  “All they knew was that their children were dead,” he said, “and the authorities weren’t telling them anything that made sense.”

  “What were they saying?” Dis
co asked.

  Vasily studied him through a veil of sapphire smoke. “Where are you from, Mr. Brady?”

  “Louisiana,” he replied proudly. “Born and raised.”

  “New Orleans?”

  “A little place called Disco.”

  Vasily raised a tufted eyebrow. “You were named after your hometown?”

  “My real name’s Richard.” Re-shard.

  “Parlez vous Francais?”

  “Mais oui, bien sûr!”

  “My wife was from France,” Vasily told us. “She didn’t care much for Russian, so we spoke mostly English or French.”

  “Did you live overseas?” I asked.

  “England. We both taught at Cambridge for ten years or thereabouts.” Sadness flickered in his dark eyes, gone just as quickly as it had revealed itself. “I was saying…?”

  “The authorities,” I replied.

  “That’s right, the authorities.” He nodded. “The gist of their theory was this: One of the hikers left the tent to urinate, or to have a cigarette. Probably Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles, as he’d been found wearing the most clothing, including his felt boots. An overpowering gust of gale-force wind blew him down the mountainside. The others heard his shouts and slashed through the tent in their haste to help him. But the blizzard conditions prevented anyone from climbing back up the slope and finding the tent again.”

  “Don’t sound convincing to me,” Disco said.

  “It’s not, really,” I said. “The members of the Dyatlov group were experienced hikers. If one of them was blown down the mountain, they wouldn’t all charge down after him or her, especially half-dressed and without boots. Anyway, it’s what the head of the search operation wrote in one of his radiograms to Ivdel. It was also the view taken by the first book written on the incident, Of the Highest Degree of Complexity.”

  “Strange name for a book,” Disco remarked.

  “There is no direct translation for ‘complexity’ in Russian,” Vasily said. “The title simply refers to the route the Dyatlov group took to reach Mount Ortoten. It was ranked a Category III, the highest level of difficulty at the time. Also it’s no surprise that Yuri Yarovoi, in his book, blamed the wind. The authorities made him rewrite the manuscript to suit their liking.”

  “How did the hikers die in the first version?”

  “Nobody knows,” I answered. “Yarovoi died in a car crash in 1980. All his research and notes were lost.”

  “Lost?” Vasily said. “Or purposely destroyed?”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Yarovoi had been an official photographer during the search for the hikers and the subsequent investigation. He would have had firsthand insight into what happened to them. His colleagues say he was extremely upset with the snow job the authorities did on his book, and he was shopping the original manuscript to foreign publishers when he died.”

  “You’re saying you think he was murdered?”

  “Why not?” Vasily stabbed out the cigar in the ashtray. “This is not America, Mr. Smith. Those in power here routinely use homicide to silence journalists and critics and anybody else who pose a threat to their rule.”

  “But what information could Yarovoi have had that was so sensitive? The authorities ended up releasing the criminal case file in 1990. There was no smoking gun in it.”

  Vasily snorted. “You think they kept the file locked away in a classified archive for thirty years for no reason? Of course there was a smoking gun in it.”

  “But I’ve read it. All of it. Unless there are some missing papers…?”

  “I haven’t spent the last two decades trying to get the government to release a few missing papers, Mr. Smith. I’ve been trying to get them to release the real case file.”

  “The real case file?” I shook my head. “I don’t understand—”

  “After the fall of the Soviet Union, during glasnost, much of the Stalin archive was being released, and those in power had to give the public something regarding the Dyatlov incident. But the real file? No.” He got up, went to the busy oak desk, and returned with a Bible-thick dossier. He whacked it on the coffee table with a decisive thump. “This is the criminal case file that you have, that I have, that everyone has. Look there.” He pointed to the date written on the front of it. “This marks when the criminal investigation was opened. February 6, 1959. Less than a week after the hikers had died—and more than a full week before anyone suspected they were missing or something was wrong.”

  ⁂

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “Say that again?”

  “The Dyatlov group wasn’t supposed to send a telegram from Vizhay to the university, to let everyone know they were okay and on their way home to Sverdlovsk, until February 12. Only when this date passed did their families and friends begin to worry and demand a search operation.” Vasily pointed to the dossier. “But the criminal case file is dated February 6, 1959. Which means the authorities started investigating the hikers’ deaths before anyone suspected they were missing or something was wrong.”

  “It must be a typo,” I said.

  “Perhaps if that date was only mentioned once. But there is a record in the file of an interview between the police and the director of Vizhay, who spoke with the Dyatlov group on their expedition. It was conducted on February 6. Furthermore, the first investigator, Vladimir Korotaev, was only on the case for two days, until February 28, before the lead prosecutor Lev Ivanov took charge. Yet in an interview many years later Korotaev mentioned he was in charge of the investigation for twenty days. This would mean he was actually on the case since—”

  “February 6,” I said, taking this in. “So Korotaev was conducting an unofficial investigation before the official one was launched?”

  “Is there any other explanation? And then there is this.” He opened the dossier and slipped out the top page. He set it on the coffee table.

  Disco and I leaned forward to read it, but it was written in Russian.

  Vasily said, “It’s a telegram sent on May 9, 1959, from the Assistant Procurator General in Moscow to Lev Ivanov, requesting ‘Case No 3/2518-59 related to the deaths of student group.’ But the criminal case file that was released for public consumption, this one”—he poked the dossier—“was never given a case number. Which means there are two files. The original still held by the authorities, and the doctored one we have here.”

  “So what’s in the original file they don’t want anybody to see?” I asked.

  “The truth of what killed the Dyatlov group, of course.” The drone of the intercom buzzer sounded. “Ah,” he said, standing. “Now I wonder who that could be?”

  CHAPTER 4

  NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959

  EIGHT DAYS TO LIVE

  The three-hundred-kilometer train ride from Sverdlovsk had taken more than ten hours, and it was early morning, the sun not yet up, when the Dyatlov group arrived at the cold and huddled mining town of Serov. They filed out of their carriage with their bulky rucksacks and unwieldy skis, stretching and yawning. The temperature must have been negative twenty.

  “So what do we do now?” Kolya asked, watching the platform fill up with all the other disembarking passengers. The train that continued to Ivdel didn’t arrive until late afternoon.

  “There must be a museum around,” Zina said, appearing bright and full of energy despite the poor sleep she would have managed in her cramped seat. “Or a metallurgy plant.”

  “Are you kidding?” Rustem grumbled. “I’m going to fall asleep on my feet. We need to rest somewhere for a few hours—proper rest where we can stretch out.”

  A murmur of agreement followed.

  Igor tried the glass entrance to the train station. It was locked. He spotted a worker inside and banged on the glass. He steepled his hands beside his cheek in imitation of sleep; the worker shook her head and moved on.

  “Great work, Igor,” Rustem said. “Your ugly face scared her away.”

  “I guess we’re
waiting here,” Kolya said. He set his skis and rucksack next to the wall and slumped down next to them.

  The rest of the group followed suit, except for Georgy, who, ever the entertainer, took out his mandolin and strummed a song while doing a little jig. With his narrow face and satellite ears he looked ludicrous. Passersby nodded or smiled at him.

  “If you’re going to make a fool of yourself,” Lyuda said in her no-nonsense fashion, “you may as well make some money for us while you’re at it.”

  “You’re right!” Georgy said, plopping his felt hat on the ground, upturned, like a busker’s.

  Nobody dropped money in it—except Blinov. He and his ski group had been in a carriage at the far end of the train, and they just now reached the middle of the platform. They were embarking on a journey similar to the Dyatlov groups’, only not as far north.

  “Thanks, Blinov,” Georgy said, bending over to pluck the one kopek coin from the hat. “But keep it. Buy your boyfriend something special.”

  Everybody burst out laughing. Blinov patted Georgy on the shoulder good-naturedly and said, “How are you fellows going to pass this miserable day?”

  “Excuse me,” Lyuda said pointedly.

  “Fellows and ladies,” Blinov amended.

  “Find somewhere to sleep,” Igor answered. “How about you?”

  “Perhaps we can find a pub that will be open.” He turned to his group. “Good idea, fellows?”

  They grinned and nodded, though Kolya could see the coldness in their eyes, the tiredness in their faces, and he knew they would be searching for a warm place to rest as well.

  Igor said, “We would have been happy to join you, but we’ve agreed to neither drink nor smoke on this trip.”

  Blinov raised his eyebrows. “Whatever for?” Then he saw the strident look Lyuda and Zina were giving him, and he said, “Ah, yes. Well, whatever is best for all, yes? All right, Igor,” he added. “See you back here at six thirty. Don’t lead your comrades too far astray in search of shelter. If you freeze to death, it will be up to me to figure out how to get your frozen butts back to Sverdlovsk.”