by Sam Eastland
“I don’t want to leave,” he told her, but even as he said the words, his eyes opened and he found himself back in the cafe.
AT FIRST, PEKKALA DID NOT UNDERSTAND.
It was as if his memories of Ilya had all been thrown into the air like confetti and were flickering down around him. So often he had returned to these images, retreating from the world around him, their vividness erasing all the years between that world and this. But now time began to accelerate. All he could do was watch things going by, too fast to comprehend, until at last the strands of memory in which he had cocooned himself began to snap. Finally, when the last strand had broken free, he realized that there could be no going back.
Kropotkin returned. “My cargo is ready,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t stay any longer.”
“I’ll walk you out,” replied Pekkala, rising, his back stooped against the staircase which loomed over their heads.
Outside the cafe, the two men shook hands.
The lunchtime crowd was leaving the cafe. People stood on the sidewalk, buttoning up their coats or lighting cigarettes to keep them company on the walk back to their jobs.
“Good-bye, old friend,” said Kropotkin.
Bruno, the owner, came out with a wet rag and a stub of chalk. “Out of soup!” he announced to them as he passed. He crouched down in front of the menu board and began to erase the word BORSCHT.
As he let go of Kropotkin’s hand, Pekkala thought about the people who had drifted through his life. Their faces shuffling past behind his eyes. Now, to that long line, as if fixing a photo into an album, he added Kropotkin.
“Good-bye,” said Pekkala, but his voice was drowned out by the thudding rumble of a large motorcycle coming up the road.
“Hey!” shouted Bruno.
Pekkala turned to see Bruno waving the wet rag at the motorcycle driver, who was riding his machine almost in the gutter as he swooped past. The rider wore a leather helmet and goggles. To Pekkala, he looked like the head of a giant insect with the body of a man. His arm reached out, as if to snatch the rag from Bruno’s hand.
That’s a stupid prank, thought Pekkala.
But then he realized that the rider was holding out a gun.
What happened next took only seconds, but it seemed to Pekkala that everything had slowed down to the point where he could almost see the bullets leaving the barrel.
The rider began to fire, steadily pulling the trigger as round after round left the gun. His arm swiveled as he aimed, but the sidewalk was so crowded with people leaving the restaurant that Pekkala had no idea who the man was aiming at.
He heard the crash of glass behind him as the window of the Cafe Tilsit shattered. Kropotkin sprang to the side. As Bruno lunged away from the motorcycle, he caught his leg on the menu board. The heavy board flew into the air, spreading like a pair of wings.
Pekkala saw it coming towards him.
That was the last thing he remembered.
THE NEXT THING HE KNEW, A MAN WAS BENDING DOWN OVER HIM.
Pekkala grabbed him by the throat.
The man’s face turned red. His eyes bulged.
“Stop!” shouted a woman’s voice.
Now someone had hold of Pekkala’s hand, trying to prize it off the man’s throat.
Completely disoriented, Pekkala squinted at this pair of hands and followed them to the body of the woman. She was wearing the uniform of an ambulance nurse—gray skirt, white tunic, and white cap with a red cross on the forehead.
“Let go of him!” shouted the woman. “He’s only trying to help you!”
Pekkala released his grip.
The man tipped over backwards and lay gasping on the sidewalk.
Pekkala struggled upright. He realized he was outside the Cafe Tilsit. The sidewalk glittered with broken glass. A body lay under a black sheet, only an arm’s length away. Farther along the pavement, there were two more bodies. Those had been covered, too. Blood had seeped out from under one of the sheets, following the cracks in the pavement like a red lightning bolt.
The man Pekkala had been choking climbed unsteadily to his feet, still holding his throat. He too wore the uniform of an ambulance worker.
Now Pekkala remembered the gun. “Have I been shot?” he asked.
“No,” replied the man hoarsely. “That’s what hit you.”
Pekkala looked at where the man was pointing. He saw Bruno’s menu board.
“You’re lucky,” said the man. “You won’t even need stitches.”
Pekkala put his hand to his face. He felt a ragged tear of skin just below the hairline. When he pulled his hand away, his fingertips were flecked with blood.
Uniformed men from the Moscow Police Department were milling about on the pavement. Their boots crunched on the broken glass. “Can I talk to him now?” one of the officers asked the nurse as he pointed at Pekkala.
“In a minute,” she replied sharply. “Let me bandage him first.”
“How long have I been lying here?” he asked.
“About an hour,” the nurse replied, kneeling beside him and unraveling a roll of gauze to place upon the wound. “We dealt with the most serious cases first. They have already been taken to hospital. You were lucky …”
She was still talking when Pekkala got up and went over to the black sheet lying beside him. He pulled it back. Bruno’s eyes were glazed and open. Then he went over to the other two sheets and pulled them back as well. One was a man and the other was a woman. He recognized neither. He felt a moment of relief that Kropotkin was not among the dead. “I was standing with another man,” he said, as he turned to the nurse.
“Those not injured were sent away by the police,” she replied. “Your friend probably just went home. Only the dead were covered up, so your friend must know you’re still alive.”
Pekkala remembered that Kropotkin had been on his way to pick up cargo for his truck. It didn’t surprise him that he had not waited. When they’d said their good-byes, there had been a finality in Kropotkin’s voice which told Pekkala that the two of them would never meet again. Kropotkin was probably on the road by now, driving to Mongolia for all Pekkala knew.
“Do you have a description of the gunman?” he asked.
The officer shook his head. “All we know is that it was a man on a motorcycle. He drove by so quickly that nobody got a good look at him.”
While the nurse was bandaging his head, Pekkala gave a statement to the policeman. He sat on the curb, the soles of his shoes two islands in a puddle of Bruno’s blood. There was not much he could tell them. It had all happened so quickly. He recalled the rider’s face hidden behind the goggles and the leather helmet.
“What about the motorcycle?” asked the policeman.
“It was black,” he told the officer, “and bigger than most I have seen on the streets of this city. There was some writing on the side of the fuel tank. It was silver. I couldn’t tell what it said.”
The policeman scribbled down a few words on a notepad.
“Do you know who he was shooting at?” Pekkala asked.
“Hard to say,” replied the policeman. “A lot of people were standing here when he rode by. He might not have been aiming for anyone in particular.”
The nurse helped Pekkala to his feet. “You should come with us to the hospital,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “There’s someplace else I need to be.”
She rested her thumb against the skin just under his right eyebrow. Then she opened his eye and shone a small penlight against his pupil. “All right,” she told him reluctantly, “but if you have headaches, if you get dizzy, if your eyesight becomes blurred, you should get to a doctor immediately. Understand?”
Pekkala nodded. He turned to the ambulance man. “I’m sorry,” he said.
The man smiled. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll leave you to fix yourself.”
PEKKALA WALKED THE REST OF THE WAY TO HIS OFFICE. HIS HEAD hurt like a hangover and the smell of the gauze, as well as the di
sinfectant used to clean the wound, made him queasy. Once inside the building, he went into the ground-floor bathroom, removed the bandage, and washed his face in the cold water. Then he climbed up the stairs to his office.
He found Kirov sweeping the floor. “Inspector!” he said, when Pekkala had entered the room. “What on earth happened to you?”
Pekkala explained.
“Do you think he was aiming for you?” asked Kirov, bewildered.
“Whether he was or not, he came pretty close to finishing me off. How many people have I put behind bars, Kirov?”
“Dozens.” He shrugged. “More.”
“Exactly, and any one of them could have come after me, if they were even trying. The police are investigating it. They said they’d get in touch if they learn something.” Now Pekkala paused. “There is something I need to tell you, Kirov.”
Without a word, Kirov set the broom against the wall and sat down at his desk. “Inspector, I have been thinking …”
“I’ve been thinking as well,” replied Pekkala. “About rules. At the Lubyanka today, I broke every one I ever taught you. If you need to file a report on my conduct, I will support your decision.”
Kirov smiled. “Not every rule, Inspector. You once told me to do only what I can live with. That was what you did back at the prison, and it is what I’m doing now. Let’s not speak of reports. Besides, if Nagorski’s killer is still out there, there is plenty of work to be done.”
“I agree.” Pekkala walked to the window and looked out over the rooftops of the city. The gray slates gleamed like copper in the evening sunlight. “They may have their confession, but they don’t have the truth. Not yet.” Then he breathed in and sighed, and his breath bloomed gray against the glass. “Thank you, Kirov.”
“And Major Lysenkova won’t be taking all the credit.” Kirov folded his arms and slumped in his chair. “What a bitch.”
“Because she happened to take advantage of you more effectively than you took advantage of her?”
“It’s not like that!” protested Kirov. “I was really beginning to like her!”
“Then she really did take advantage of you,” said Pekkala.
“I don’t see how you can be so jovial,” huffed Kirov. “I almost shot you today.”
“But you didn’t, and that is reason enough to celebrate.” Pekkala slid open a drawer of his desk, hauling out a strangely rounded bottle wrapped in wicker and plugged with a cork. It contained his supply of plum brandy, which he obtained in small quantities from a lovesick Ukrainian in the Sukharevka market. But as with many things in that market, he traded rather than paid. The Ukrainian had a girlfriend in Finland. He had met her when he worked on a trading ship in the Baltic. She wrote to him in her native language and Pekkala translated the letters in exchange. Then, while the Ukrainian poured out his heart, Pekkala wrote a translation for the Finnish girl. For this, and for his discretion, he received half a liter every month.
“The Slivovitz!” exclaimed Kirov. “Now that’s more like it!” He picked two glasses off the shelf, blew the dust out, and set them down before Pekkala.
Into each glass Pekkala poured the greenish-yellow liquid. Then he slid one over to Kirov.
In a toast, they raised their glasses to the level of their foreheads.
As he drank, a taste of plums blossomed softly in Pekkala’s head, filling his mind with the ripe fruit’s dusty purpleness. “You know,” he said, after the fire had left his breath, “this was the only liquor the Tsar would touch.”
“It seems unpatriotic,” replied Kirov, his voice gone hoarse from the drink, “to be Russian and not to like a drop of vodka now and then.”
“He had his reasons,” said Pekkala, and decided to leave it at that.
Pekkala stood out in the wide expanse of the Alexander Park.
It was an evening in late May. The days had grown longer, and the sky remained light long after the sun had gone down.
The pink and white petals of the dogwood trees had fallen, replaced by shiny, lime-green leaves. Summer did not come gradually to this place. Instead, it seemed to explode across the landscape.
After a long day in the city of Petrograd, Pekkala would finish his supper and walk out on the grounds of the estate. He rarely encountered anyone else this time of night, but now he saw a rider coming towards him. The horse ambled lazily, its reins held slack, the rider slouched in his saddle. He knew instantly from the man’s silhouette that it was the Tsar. His narrow shoulders. The way he held his head, as if the joints of his neck were too tight.
At last, the Tsar came up alongside him. “What brings you out here, Pekkala?”
“I often walk in the evenings.”
“I could get you a horse, you know,” said the Tsar.
And then the two men laughed quietly, remembering that it was a matter of a horse which had first brought them together. In the course of Pekkala’s training with the Finnish Regiment, he had been ordered to jump his horse over a barricade on which the drill instructor had laced a coil of barbed wire. By the time the exercise was halfway through, most of the animals were bleeding from cuts to their legs and bellies. Blood, bright as rubies, speckled the sawdust floor. When Pekkala refused to jump his horse, the drill instructor first threatened, then humiliated him, and finally attempted to reason with him. Pekkala had known before he said a word that a refusal to carry out an order would mean being thrown out of the cadets. He would be on the next train home to Finland. But it was at this point that the sergeant and cadets realized they were being watched. The Tsar had been standing in the shadows.
Later, when Pekkala led his horse back to the stables, the Tsar was waiting for him. One hour later, he had been transferred out of the Finnish Regiment and into a special course of study with the Imperial Police, the State Police, and the Okhrana. Two years and two months from that day when he led his horse out of the ring, Pekkala pinned on the badge of the Emerald Eye. Since that time, he had always preferred, whenever possible, to travel on his own two feet.
That spring evening, the Tsar removed a pewter flask from the pocket of his tunic, unscrewed the cap, took a drink, and handed the flask to Pekkala.
That was the first time he ever tasted Slivovitz. The aftertaste reminded him of a liquor his mother used to make from a distillation of cloudberries, which she gathered in the forest near their home. They were not easy to find. Cloudberries did not always grow in the same place year after year. Instead, they sprouted unexpectedly, and for most people, finding them was so much a matter of chance that they often did not bother. But Pekkala’s mother always seemed to know from one glance at the undergrowth exactly where cloudberries would be growing. How she knew this was as much a mystery to Pekkala as the Tsar’s reasons for making him into the Emerald Eye.
“It is my wedding anniversary tomorrow,” remarked the Tsar.
“Congratulations, Majesty,” replied Pekkala. “Do you have plans to mark the occasion?”
“That is not a day I celebrate,” said the Tsar.
Pekkala did not have to ask why. On the day of the Tsar’s coronation in May 1896, the Tsar and Tsarina sat for five hours on gold and ivory thrones while the names of his dominion were read out—Moscow, Petrograd, Kiev, Poland, Bulgaria, Finland. Finally, after he had been proclaimed The Lord and Judge of Russia, bells rang out across the city and cannon fire echoed in the sky.
During this time, a crowd of half a million had gathered on the outskirts of the city, at a military staging area known as Khodynka field, with a promise of free food, beer, and souvenir mugs. When a rumor spread that the beer was running out, the crowd surged forward. More than a thousand people—some said as many as three thousand—were trampled to death in the panic.
For hours afterwards, carts loaded with bodies raced through the streets of Moscow, while their drivers searched for places where the dead could be kept out of sight until the wedding cortege had passed. In the confusion, some of those carts, with the legs and arms of the dead lolling
out from under their tarpaulin covers, found themselves both ahead of and behind the royal procession.
“That afternoon,” the Tsar told Pekkala, “before the wedding ceremony began, I drank a toast to the crowd on Khodynka field. That’s the last time I ever touched vodka.” Now the Tsar smiled, trying to forget. He raised the flask. “So what do you think of my alternative? I have it sent to me from Belgrade. I own some orchards there.”
“I like it well enough, Majesty.”
“Well enough,” repeated the Tsar, and he took another drink.
“It wasn’t your fault, Majesty,” said Pekkala, “what happened on that field.”
The Tsar breathed in sharply. “Wasn’t it? I have never been sure about that.”
“Some things just happen.”
“I know that.”
But Pekkala could tell he was lying.
“The trouble is,” continued the Tsar, “that either I am placed here by God to be the ruler of this land, in which case the day of my wedding is proof that we are living out the will of the Almighty, or else”—he paused—“or else that is not so. Do you have any idea how much I would like to believe you are right—that those people died simply because of an accident? They haunt me. I cannot get away from their faces. But if I believe it was just an accident, Pekkala, then what about everything else which happened on that day? Either God has a hand in our affairs or he does not. I cannot pick and choose according to what suits me best.”