by Sam Eastland
In the café, the two men found a place away from the crowded benches, sitting at a small table tucked away beneath the staircase to the second floor. Here, they knew no one would overhear them.
Bruno, the chef, had made borscht. He ladled the soup like torrents of blood into the wooden bowls in which all meals were served.
‘I have thought a lot about our last conversation,’ said Pekkala, as he spooned up the ruby-coloured soup.
‘I hope you have forgiven me for speaking as bluntly as I did,’ replied Kropotkin. ‘It is in my nature, and I cannot help it.’
‘There is nothing to forgive. You mentioned the possibility of disappearing.’
‘Yes,’ replied Kropotkin, ‘and I realise I was wrong to have suggested it.’
The words struck Pekkala. It was the last thing he had expected Kropotkin to say.
‘This is not a time for running,’ continued Kropotkin. ‘What good can we do if we simply allow ourselves to fade away?’
Pekkala gave no answer. His head was spinning.
Kropotkin ate as he spoke, slurping his soup off the spoon. ‘The truth is, Pekkala, I had hoped we might find a way to work together, as we did back in Ekaterinburg.’
It took Pekkala a moment to understand that Kropotkin was asking for a job. All that talk about disappearing had been nothing more than words. He did not blame Kropotkin. Instead, Pekkala blamed himself for believing it. At the time, Kropotkin may have meant what he was saying. He might even have gone through with it, but that was then, and now he believed something else. The long days of driving back and forth across this country have caught up with him, decided Pekkala. He is looking back on his days in the police and wishing things could be the way they used to be. But the world he is remembering has gone for good. It may never have existed in the first place. Besides, Pekkala told himself, the reason he was dismissed from the force would prevent him from ever being reinstated, no matter how many strings I tried to pull. ‘I can’t,’ said Pekkala. ‘I’m sorry, Kropotkin. It is not possible.’
When Kropotkin heard this, the light went out of his eyes. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He glanced around the room. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, Pekkala. I am due to pick up some cargo on the other side of town and I need to find out if it is ready for loading on to my truck.’
‘Of course,’ Pekkala assured him. ‘I’ll be here when you get back.’
While he waited for Kropotkin to return, Pekkala felt as if he were waking from a dream. Suddenly, he felt ashamed, deeply ashamed, that he had even considered abandoning his post and leaving Kirov to face the consequences. He thought about Ilya, and as her face shimmered into focus in his mind, he experienced a strange hallucination.
He was standing on the platform of the Imperial Station at Tsarskoye Selo. Ilya was with him. Winter sunlight on the plastered brickwork glowed like the flesh of apricots. It was her birthday. They were heading into Petrograd for dinner. He turned to speak to her and, suddenly, she disappeared.
Next, Pekkala found himself at an iron gate, an ornate bronze wreath bolted to the railings, just outside the Alexander Palace. It was a place he knew well. He often met Ilya here, after she had finished classes for the day. Then they would walk out across the grounds together. The following year, the Tsarina and her daughters would stand at this gate and plead with the palace guards to remain loyal as soldiers of the Revolutionary Guard advanced upon Tsarskoye Selo. But that was still to come. Now Pekkala saw Ilya walking towards him, still carrying her text books, feet crunching on the pale carpet of gravel. Pekkala reached out to open the gate and this time it was he who disappeared.
Now he stood at the dockside in Petrograd, watching the Tsar’s yacht, the Standart, pulling up to the quay. Sailors threw their mooring lines, the ropes weighted at the ends with huge monkey-fist knots. Dozens of signal flags hung from the halyard lines, so gaudy that together they looked like the laundry of court jesters hung out to dry. Again, Ilya was with him, a breeze stirring her white summer dress about her knees. He wore his usual heavy black coat on the excuse that he’d heard some rumour of a cold front approaching. The truth was he wore the coat because, even in this weather, he did not feel comfortable in anything else. They had been invited on board for dinner, the first time the Romanovs had asked them as a couple. Ilya was very happy. Pekkala felt uneasy. He did not care for dinner parties, especially in the confines of a boat, even if it was the Royal Yacht. She knew what he was thinking. He felt her arm across the back of his waist.
‘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 café.
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 realised 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 to his feet, back stooped against the staircase which loomed over their heads.
Outside the café, the two men shook hands.
The lunchtime crowd was leaving the café. People stood on the pavement, buttoning up their coats or lighting cigarettes to keep them company on the walk back to their jobs.
‘Goodbye, old friend,’ said Kropotkin.
Bruno, the chef, 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 shuffled behind his eyes. Now, to that long line, as if fixing a photo into an album, he added the picture of Kropotkin.
‘Goodbye,’ 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 by. 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 realised 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 swivelled as he aimed, but the pavement 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 Café 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, hinges 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 prise 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 – grey skirt, white tunic and
a 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 pavement.
Pekkala struggled upright. He realised he was outside the Café Tilsit. The pavement was covered with broken glass. A body lay under a black sheet, only an arm’s length away. Further 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 was also wearing 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 and 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.
It was the nurse who answered. ‘About an hour,’ replied the nurse, kneeling beside him and unwinding 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, neither of whom he recognised. 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 Kropotkin had not waited. When they said their goodbyes, 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 kerb, 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?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Hard to say,’ replied the policeman. ‘There were a lot of people 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 disinfectant 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 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 only to do 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 grey 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 grey against the glass. ‘Thank you, Kirov,’ he said.
‘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 love-sick 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 litre 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 Pekkala 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 Legion, 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 realised they were being watched. The Tsar had been standing in the shadows.