76. CHILD 44

Tom Rob Smith 2008

This suspense thriller debut novel set in Totalitarian Stalin-era Russia opens up in 1933 with a disturbing scene of poverty-stricken brothers Andrei and Pavel snaring a cat for food. Twenty years later, we meet Leo Stepanovich Demidov, a decorated MGB agent who suffers an explusion when he refused to denounce his wife Raisa as a spy, and transferred from Moscow to small town Voualsk where he discovers a gruesome pattern of child serial killing, the heart of the novel. As he works with reluctant militia officer Nesterov to solve the murders, the true nature of his relationship with his wife Raisa also unravels. It is a fast paced, action-packed page turner that is immensely satisfying.
'Since Maria had decided to die her cat would have to fend for itself. She'd already cared for it far beyond the point where keeping a pet made any sense. Rats and mice had long since been trapped and eaten by the villagers. Domestic animals had disappeared shortly after that.'(opening lines)

'The traitor had escaped. Leo was to blame. He'd given this man, a stranger, the benefit of the doubt. He'd presumed he was innocent; the kind of mistake a novice might make. Better to let ten innocent men suffer than one spy escape. He'd disregarded a fundamental principle of their work: the presumption of guilt.'(44)

'The duty of an investigator was to scratch away at innocence until guilt was uncovered. If no guilt was uncovered then they haven't scratched deep enough. '(46)

'Though he never said as much, he was uncomfortable making an arrest without more evidence. Of course that was a qualm he'd lived with throughout his professional life. He'd made many arrests knowing only the citizen's name and address and the fact that someone mistrusted them. A suspect's guilt became real as soon as they became a suspect. As for evidence, that would be acquired during their interrogation.'(47)

'Even though it had been his place of work for the past five years, Leo had never felt comfortable in the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the MGB...An invisible borderline existed around the building... There was no chance you could be found innocent inside these walls. It wasn't an assembly line of guilt. Perhaps the Lubyanka hadn't been constructed with fear in mind, but fear had taken over all the same, fear had made this former insurance office its own, its home.'(79)

'Leo had heard of prisoners who lay abandoned for weeks and doctors who served no other purpose than the study of pain. He taught himself to accept that these things existed not just for their own sake. They existed for a reason, a greater good. They existed to terrify. Terror was necessary. Terror protected the revolution. Without it, Lenin would've fallen. Without it, Stalin would've fallen.'(80)

'In the one hundred and forty articles of the criminal code Leo had just one article to guide him, a subsection defining the political prisoner as a person engaged in activity intended to: Overthrow, subvert, or weaken the Soviet Power. And that was more or less it: an elastic set of words stretching to accommodate anyone from top-ranking Party officials to ballet dancers to musicians to retired cobblers. Not even those who worked within the Lubyanka's walls, not even those who kept this machinery of fear ticking, could be certain that the system they sustained would not one day swallow them too.'(81)

'Only children still believe in friends, and only stupid children at that.'(107)

'An officer must train his heart to be Cruel. Cruelty was a virtue. Cruelty was necessary. Aspire to cruelty! Cruelty held the keys that would unlock the gates to the perfect State.'(114)

'Leo couldn't sleep. He lay awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to the slow breathing of his wife... She was an unsettled sleeper. Was that enough reason to denounce her? He knew it was. He knew how it could be written up: Unable to rest easy, troubled by her dreams: my wife is clearly tormented by some secret.

'How different was he from the man he considered his moral opposite-- Vasili Nikitin? Was the difference merely that Vasili was senselessly cruel while he'd been idealistically cruel? One was an empty indifferent cruelty while the other was a principled, pretentious cruelty which thought of itself as reasonable and necessary. But in real terms, in destructive terms, there was little to separate the two men.'(211)

'The problem with becoming powerless, as you are now, is that people start telling you the truth. You're not used to it, you've lived in a world protected by the fear you inspire. But if we're going to stay together, let's cut the deluded romanticism. Circumstance is the glue between us. I have you. You have me. We don't have very much else. And if we're going to stay together, from now on I tell you the truth, no comfortable lies-- we're equal as we have never been equal before.'(225)

'How may other incidents have been covered up? Our system is perfectly arranged to allow this man to kill as many times again and again, and we're going to keep arresting the wrong people, innocent people, people we don't like, or people we don't approve of, and he's going to kill again and again.'(287)

'In many ways Nesterov had collected this information in a comparable frame of mind. At first he'd tried to dismiss the similarities: the ground-up material stuffed into the children's mouths, whether officers called it soil or dirt, the mutilated torsos. But the points of similarity were too striking. There was the string around the ankles. The bodies were always naked, the clothes left in a pile some distance away... They'd been solved by blaming drunks or thieves or convicted rapists-- undesirables, to whom any allegation would stick.'(314)

'Yet why wouldn't the wounds heal? Why couldn't he move on as he'd moved on from his decision to the MGB? He'd been able to swap devotion to the MGB with another cause, devotion to this investigation. But he had no one else to love; there'd never been anyone else. The truth was that he couldn't let go of the small hope, the fantastical notion that maybe, just maybe, she could love him for real.'(339)

'Your mother and I considered very carefully the contents of this letter. it contains everything we wanted to say to you but were unable to for one reason or another. It contains all the things we should've spoken about a long time ago.'(356)

Grand Central mass market Edition 2009
493 pages
Book owned
Great review from Random Ramblings here.