The Red Coffin

by Sam Eastland

  ‘Well, Pekkala?’ said a voice. Sitting by himself in a chair in the corner of the otherwise empty room was a man of medium height and stocky build, with a pockmarked face and withered left hand. His hair was thick and dark, combed straight back on his head. A moustache sewn with threads of grey bunched beneath his nose. He was smoking a cigarette, of which so little remained that one more puff would have touched the embers to his skin.

  ‘Very well, Comrade Stalin,’ said Pekkala.

  The man stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe and blew the last grey breath in two streams from his nose. ‘What do you think of our Colonel Nagorski?’ he asked.

  ‘I think he is telling the truth,’ replied Pekkala.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ replied Stalin. ‘Perhaps your assistant should be questioning him.’

  ‘Major Kirov,’ said Pekkala.

  ‘I know who he is!’ Stalin’s voice rose in anger.

  Pekkala understood. It was the mention of Kirov’s name which unnerved Stalin, since Kirov was also the name of the former Leningrad Party Chief, who had been assassinated five years earlier. The death of Kirov had weighed upon Stalin, not because of any lasting affection for the man, but because it showed that if a person like Kirov could be killed, then Stalin himself might be next. Since Kirov’s death, Stalin had never walked out into the streets among the people whom he ruled but did not trust.

  Stalin kneaded his hands together, cracking his knuckles one after the other. ‘The Konstantin Project has been compromised, and I believe Nagorski is responsible.’

  ‘I have yet to see the proof of that,’ said Pekkala. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Comrade Stalin? Is there some proof that you can show? Or is this just another arrest, in which case you have plenty of other investigators you could use.’

  Stalin rolled the stub of his cigarette between his fingers. ‘Do you know how many people I allow to speak to me that way?’

  ‘Not many, I imagine,’ said Pekkala. Every time he met with Stalin, he became aware of an emotional blankness that seemed to hover around the man. It was something about Stalin’s eyes. The look on his face would change, but the expression in his eyes never did. When Stalin laughed, cajoled and, if that didn’t work, threatened, it was, for Pekkala, like watching an exchange of masks in a Japanese Kabuki play. There were moments, as one mask transformed into another, when it seemed to Pekkala that he could glimpse what lay behind. And what he found there filled him with dread. His only defence was to pretend he could not see it.

  Stalin smiled, and suddenly the mask had changed again. ‘Not many is right. None would be more correct. You are right that I do have other investigators, but this case is too important.’ Then he put the cigarette butt in his pocket.

  Pekkala had watched him do this before. It was a strange habit in a place where even the poorest people threw their cigarette butts on the ground and left them there. Strange, too, for a man who would never run short of the forty cigarettes he smoked each day. Perhaps there was some story in it, perhaps dating back to his days as a bank robber in Tblisi. Pekkala wondered if Stalin, like some beggar in the street, removed the remaining tobacco from the stubs and rolled it into fresh cigarettes. Whatever the reason, Stalin kept it to himself.

  ‘I admire your audacity, Pekkala. I like a person who is not afraid to speak his mind. That’s one of the reasons I trust you.’

  ‘All I ask is that you let me do my job,’ said Pekkala. ‘That was our agreement.’

  Stalin let his hands fall with an impatient slap against his knees. ‘Do you know, Pekkala, that my pen once touched the paper of your death sentence? I was that close.’ He pinched the air, as if he were still holding that pen, and traced the air with the ghost of his own signature. ‘I never regretted my choice. And how many years have we been working together now?’

  ‘Six. Almost seven.’

  ‘In all that time, have I ever interfered with one of your investigations?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Pekkala.

  ‘And have I ever threatened you, simply because you disagreed with me?’

  ‘No, Comrade Stalin.’

  ‘And that,’ Stalin aimed a finger at Pekkala, as if taking aim down the barrel of a gun, ‘is more than you can say about your former boss, or his meddling wife, Alexandra.’

  In that moment, Pekkala was hurled back through time.

  Like a man snapping out of a trance, he found himself in the Alexander Palace, hand poised to knock upon the Tsar’s study door.

  It was the day he finally tracked down the killer Grodek.

  Grodek and his fiancée, a woman named Maria Balka, had been found hiding in an apartment near the Moika Canal. When agents of the Tsar’s secret service, the Okhrana, stormed the building, Grodek set off an explosive which destroyed the house and killed everyone inside, including the agents who had gone in to arrest him. Meanwhile, Grodek and Balka fled out the back, where Pekkala was waiting in case they tried to escape. Pekkala pursued them along the icy cobbled street until Grodek tried to cross the river on the Potsuleyev bridge. But Okhrana men had stationed themselves on the other side of the bridge, and the two criminals found themselves with nowhere left to run. It was at this moment that Grodek had shot his fiancée, rather than let her fall into the hands of the police. Balka’s body tumbled into the canal and disappeared among the plates of ice which drifted out towards the sea like rafts loaded with diamonds. Grodek, afraid to jump, had tried to shoot himself, only to discover that his gun was empty. He was immediately taken into custody.

  The Tsar had ordered Pekkala to arrive at the Alexander Palace no later than 4 p.m. that day, in order to make his report. The Tsar did not like to be kept waiting, and Pekkala had raced the whole way from Petrograd, arriving with only minutes to spare. He dashed up the front steps of the Palace and straight to the Tsar’s study.

  There was no answer, so Pekkala knocked again and still there was no answer. Cautiously, he opened the door, but found the room empty.

  Pekkala sighed with annoyance.

  Although the Tsar did not like to be kept waiting, he had no trouble making others wait for him.

  Just then, Pekkala heard the Tsar’s voice coming from the room across the hall. It belonged to the Tsarina Alexandra and was known as the Mauve Boudoir. Of the hundred rooms in the Alexander Palace, it had become the most famous, because of how ugly people found it. Pekkala was forced to agree. To his eye, everything in that room was the colour of boiled liver.

  Pekkala stopped outside the room, trying to catch his breath from all the rushing he had done to be on time. Then he heard the voice of the Tsarina and the Tsar’s furious reply. As their words filtered into his brain, he realised they were talking about him.

  ‘I am not going to dismiss Pekkala!’ said the Tsar.

  Pekkala heard the faint creak of the Tsar’s riding boots upon the floor. He knew exactly which pair of boots they were – they had been specially ordered from England and had arrived the week before. The Tsar was trying to break them in, although his feet were suffering in the meantime. He had confided to Pekkala that he had even resorted to the old peasant trick of softening new boots, which was to urinate in them and leave them standing overnight.

  Now Pekkala heard the Tsarina speaking in her usual soft tone. He had never heard her shout. The Tsarina’s low pitch always sounded to him like a person uttering threats. ‘Our friend has urged us,’ she said.

  At the mention of ‘our friend’, Pekkala felt his jaw muscles clench. That was the phrase the Tsar and the Tsarina used among themselves to describe the self-proclaimed holy man Rasputin.

  Since his first appearance in the court of the Tsar, Rasputin’s hold upon the Imperial Family had grown so strong that he was now consulted on all matters, whether about the war, which was now in its second year and moving from one catastrophe to the next, or about appointments to the Royal Court, or about the illness of the Tsar’s youngest child, Alexei. Although it was officially denied, the you
ng man had been diagnosed with haemophilia. Injuries which would have been laughed off by any healthy boy confined Alexei to his bed for days at a time. Often, he had to be carried wherever he went by his personal servant, a sailor named Derevenko.

  The Tsarina soon came to believe that Rasputin held the cure to Alexei’s disease.

  Disturbed by the power Rasputin held over the royal family, the prime minister, Peter Stolypin, had ordered an investigation. The report he delivered to the Tsar was filled with stories of debauchery in Rasputin’s Petrograd apartment and secret meetings between the Tsarina and Rasputin at the house of her best friend Anna Vyrubova.

  The Tsarina was not well-liked among the Russian people. They called her Nemka, the German Woman, and now that the country was at war with Germany, they wondered where her own loyalties lay.

  After reading the report, the Tsar ordered Stolypin never to speak to him again about Rasputin. When Stolypin was shot by an assassin named Dimitri Bogrov at an opera house in Kiev, dying five days later, the lack of concern shown by the Tsar and Alexandra was enough to cause a scandal in the Russian court.

  When the assassin Bogrov was arrested, he turned out to be a paid informant of the Okhrana. Lawyers at Bogrov’s trial were not permitted to ask whether there had been any connection between Bogrov and the Romanov family. Less than a week after Stolypin’s death, Bogrov himself was executed.

  From then on, Rasputin’s meetings with the Tsarina continued unopposed. Rumours of infidelity spread. Although Pekkala himself did not believe that they were true, he knew many who did.

  What Pekkala did believe was that the Tsarina’s anxiety over her son’s precarious health had pushed her to the brink of her own sanity. In spite of all the riches of the Romanovs, there was no cure their money could have bought. So the Tsarina had turned to the superstitions which now so governed her life that she existed in a world seen only through a lens of fear. And somehow, through that lens, Rasputin had taken on the presence of a god.

  The Tsar himself was not so easily convinced, and Rasputin’s influence might have faded if not for one event which secured for him the loyalty of the entire royal family, and also sealed his fate.

  At the Romanovs’ dreary hunting lodge of Spala, the young T sarevich slipped getting out of the bath and suffered a haemorrhage so severe that the doctors told his parents to make preparations for a funeral.

  Then a telegram arrived from Rasputin, assuring the Tsarina that her son would not die.

  What happened next, even Rasputin’s harshest critics were unable to deny.

  After the arrival of the telegram, Alexei began, quite suddenly, to recover.

  From that point on, no matter what Rasputin did, he became almost untouchable.

  Almost.

  Rasputin’s excesses continued, and Pekkala had quietly dreaded the day when he might be summoned by the Tsar to investigate the Siberian. One way or the other, it would have been the end of Pekkala’s career, or even of his life, just as it was for Stolypin. Perhaps for that very reason, or because he preferred not to know the truth, the Tsar had never placed upon Pekkala the burden of handling such a case.

  ‘Our friend,’ snapped the Tsar, ‘would do well to keep in mind that I myself appointed Pekkala.’

  ‘Now, my darling,’ said the Tsarina, and there was the rustle of a dress as she moved across the floor, ‘no one is suggesting that you were wrong to have appointed him. Your loyalty to Pekkala is beyond reproach. It is Pekkala’s loyalty to you that has come into question.’

  Hearing this, Pekkala felt a burning in his chest. He had never done anything remotely disloyal. He knew this and the Tsar knew this. But in that moment, Pekkala felt the bile rise in his throat, because he knew that the Tsar could be persuaded. The Tsar liked to think of himself as a decisive man, and in some things he was, but he could be made to believe almost anything if his wife had decided to convince him.

  ‘Sunny, don’t you understand?’ protested the Tsar. ‘Pekkala’s loyalty is not to me.’

  ‘Well, don’t you think it should be?’

  ‘Pekkala’s duty is to the task I gave him,’ replied the Tsar, ‘and that is where his loyalty belongs.’

  ‘His duty …’ began the Tsarina.

  The Tsar cut her off. ‘Is to find out the truth of whatever matter I place before him, however unpleasant it might be to hear it. Such a man strikes fear into the hearts of those who are sheltering lies. And I wonder, Sunny, if our friend is not more worried for himself than he is for the wellbeing of the court.’

  ‘You cannot say that, my love! Our friend wishes only for the good of our family, and of our country. He has even sent you a gift.’ There was a rustling of paper.

  ‘What on earth is that?’

  ‘It is a comb,’ she replied. ‘One of his own, and he has suggested that it would bring you good fortune to run it through your hair before you attend your daily meetings with the generals.’

  Pekkala shuddered at the thought of Rasputin’s greasy hair.

  The Tsar was thinking the same thing. ‘I will not take part in another one of Rasputin’s disgusting rituals!’ he shouted, then strode out of the room and into the hallway.

  There was nowhere for Pekkala to go. He only had one choice and that was to stay where he was.

  The Tsar was startled.

  For a moment, the two men stared at each other.

  Pekkala broke the silence, saying the first thing that came into his mind. ‘How are your boots, Majesty?’

  The Tsar blinked in surprise. Then he smiled. ‘The English make wonderful shoes,’ he said, ‘only not for human beings.’

  Now the Tsarina appeared in the doorway. She wore a plain, white floor-length dress, with sleeves which stopped at the elbows and a collar that covered her throat. Tied around her waist was a belt made of black cloth, which had tassels at the end. Around her neck, suspended on a gold chain, she wore a crucifix made of bone which had been carved by Rasputin himself. She was a severe-looking woman, with a thin mouth downturned at the edges, deep-set eyes and a smooth, broad forehead. Pekkala had seen pictures of her just after she was married to the Tsar. She had seemed much happier then. Now, when her face was relaxed, lines of worry fell into place, like cracks in a pottery glaze. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded of Pekkala.

  ‘His Majesty asked me to report to him at four p.m. precisely.’

  ‘Then you are late,’ she snapped.

  ‘No, Majesty,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I was on time.’

  Then the Tsarina realised he must have heard every word she said.

  ‘What news of Grodek?’ asked the Tsar, hurriedly moving to a new topic.

  ‘We have him, Majesty,’ answered Pekkala.

  The Tsar’s face brightened. ‘Well done!’ The Tsar slapped him gently on the shoulder. Then he turned to walk away down the hall. As he passed by his wife, he paused and whispered in her ear. ‘You go and tell that to your friend.’

  Then it was just Pekkala and the Tsarina.

  Her lips were dry, the result of the barbiturate Veronal, which she had been taking in order to help her sleep. The Veronal upset her stomach, so she had resorted to taking cocaine. One drug led to another. Over time, the cocaine had given her heart trouble, so she began taking small doses of arsenic. This had tinted the skin beneath her eyes a brownish green and also caused her sleeplessness, which put her right back where she started. ‘I suffer from nightmares,’ she told him, ‘and you, Pekkala, are in them.’

  ‘I do not doubt it, Majesty,’ he replied.

  For a moment, the Tsarina’s mouth hung slightly open as she tried to grasp the meaning of his words. Then her teeth came together with a crack. She walked into her room and closed the door.

  ‘You ask for proof that the T-34 has been compromised?’ asked Stalin. ‘All right, Pekkala. I will give you proof. Two days ago, a German agent tried to purchase design specifications of the entire Konstantin Project.’

  ‘Purchase them?’ asked Pekkala. ‘F
rom whom?’

  ‘The White Guild,’ replied Stalin.

  ‘The Guild!’ Pekkala had not heard that name in a long time.

  Some years before, Stalin had ordered the formation of a secret organisation, to be known as the White Guild, made up of former soldiers who had remained loyal to the Tsar long after his death and were committed to overthrowing the Communists. The idea that Stalin would create an organisation whose sole purpose was to topple himself from power was so unthinkable that none of its members ever dreamed that the whole operation had been controlled from the start by the NKVD’s Bureau of Special Operations. It was a trick Stalin had learned from the Okhrana; to lure enemies out of hiding, persuade them that they were taking part in actions against the state, and then, before the acts of violence could take place, to arrest them. Since the White Guild came into existence, hundreds of anti-Communist agents had met their deaths by firing squad against the stone wall of the Lubyanka courtyard. ‘But if that’s who they were dealing with,’ said Pekkala, ‘then you have nothing to worry about because you control the Guild. It is your own invention, after all.’

  ‘You are missing the point, Pekkala.’ Stalin scratched at the back of his neck, fingernails rustling over the smallpox scars embedded in his skin. ‘What worries me is that they even know the T-34 exists. The only time a secret is safe is when no one knows there is even a secret being kept.’

  ‘What happened to the German agent?’ asked Pekkala. ‘May I question him?’

  ‘You could,’ replied Stalin, ‘but I think you would find it a very one-sided conversation.’

  ‘All right,’ said Pekkala, ‘but at least we were successful in preventing the enemy from acquiring the information.’

  ‘That success is only temporary. They will come looking again.’