by Sam Eastland
When the handprints were seen to match, Anton confessed, but he also protested that it was only a small amount of money.
The amount did not matter. By the codes of the Finnish Guards, within whose barrack walls no doors were locked and no keys were kept, any theft was punished by demotion from the ranks. When Anton returned from his hearing with the Commander of the regiment, his bags had been packed already.
Two senior officers walked Anton to the gates of the barracks. Then, without a word of good-bye, they turned their backs on him and returned inside the compound. The gates were closed and bolted.
On his first full day as a cadet, Pekkala was summoned to the office of the Commandant. He did not yet know how to present himself to a senior officer, or how to salute. Pekkala worried about this as he walked across the parade square. Platoons of new recruits shambled past him as they learned to march, flanked by shrill-shrieking drill sergeants who cursed them and their families back to the dawn of time.
In the waiting room, a tall, immaculately dressed guard was waiting for Pekkala. The guard’s clothes were of a lighter shade than those of the recruits. Over his tunic he wore a belt whose heavy brass buckle was stamped with the double-headed eagle of the Tsar. A short-brimmed cap covered half of his face.
When the guard raised his head and looked him in the eye, Pekkala felt as if lights were shining in his face.
In a voice barely above a whisper, the guard instructed Pekkala to keep his back straight and his heels together when he stood before the Commandant.
“Let’s see you do it,” said the guard.
Pekkala did the best he could.
“Don’t bend over backwards,” the guard told him.
Pekkala couldn’t help it. All of his muscles were locked so tight he could barely move.
The guard pinched the gray cloth at the tips of Pekkala’s shoulders, straightening the rough wool tunic. “When the Commandant speaks, you must not answer ‘yes, sir.’ Instead, you only say ‘sir.’ However, if the answer to his question is no, you may say ‘no, sir.’ Do you understand?”
“Sir.”
The guard shook his head. “You do not call me sir. I am not an officer.”
The rules of this strange world raced around in Pekkala’s brain like bees shaken from a hive. It seemed impossible that he would ever master all of them. At that moment, if someone had offered him the chance to go home, he would have taken it. At the same time, Pekkala was afraid that was exactly why the Commandant had called for him.
The guard seemed to know what he was thinking. “You have nothing to fear,” he said. Then he turned, and knocked on the door to the Commandant’s office. Without waiting for a reply from inside, he opened the door and, with a jerk of his chin, showed Pekkala that he was to enter.
The Commandant was a man named Parainen. He was tall and thin, with jaw and cheekbones so sharply angled that his skull seemed to be made of broken glass. “You are the brother of Anton Pekkala?”
“Sir.”
“Have you heard anything from him?”
“Not lately, sir.”
The Commandant scratched at his neck. “He was due back with us a month ago.”
“Due back?” asked Pekkala. “But I thought he had been expelled!”
“Not expelled. Rusticated. That’s not the same thing.”
“Then what does it mean?” asked Pekkala, and then he added, “Sir.”
“It is only a temporary dismissal,” explained Parainen. “If it happened again, the expulsion would be permanent, but in the case of a cadet’s first offense, we tend to show leniency.”
“Then why hasn’t he returned?”
The Commandant shrugged. “Perhaps he decided that this life was not for him.”
“That can’t be right, sir. It’s all he wanted in the world.”
“People change. Besides, now you are here to take his place.” The Commandant rose to his feet. He walked over to the window, which looked out over the barracks to the town beyond. The gunmetal gray of a winter’s afternoon lit his face. “I want you to know that you will not be held accountable for what your brother did. You will be given the same chances as anybody else. If you fail, as many do, you will fail on your own terms. And if you succeed, it will be because of what you did and no one else. Does that sound fair to you?”
“Sir,” said Pekkala. “Yes, it does.”
In the weeks that followed, Pekkala learned to march and shoot and to live in a place where there was no such thing as privacy except in those thoughts which he kept locked inside his head. Within the confines of the Finnish Regiment barracks, thrown in among young men from Helsinki, Kauhava, and Turku, it was almost possible to forget that he had left his native country. Many had never dreamed of any other life except to become members of the Finnish Guards. For some, it was a family tradition dating back generations.
Sometimes, Pekkala felt as if he had woken up and found himself clad in the skin of a different man. The person he had been was receding into the shadows like the dead, whose final journeys he had overseen at home.
One day, all that changed.
WITH THE BARREL OF ANTON’S GUN DIGGING INTO HIS TEMPLE, Pekkala slowly closed his eyes. There was no terror in his face, only a kind of quiet anticipation, as if he had been waiting for this moment for a long time. “Go ahead,” he whispered.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor. It was Kirov, the young Commissar. “That policeman has run away,” he said as he walked into the room. He stopped when he saw Anton’s gun aimed at Pekkala’s head.
With an unintelligible curse, Anton released his grip on his brother’s throat.
Pekkala rolled away, choking.
Kirov stared at them in amazement. “When you are done brawling, Commander,” he said to Anton, “would one of you mind explaining to me why the hell your brother is making everybody so nervous?”
Pekkala’s career began with a horse.
Midway through their training in the regiment, cadets were brought to the stables for instruction in riding.
Although Pekkala knew well enough how to handle a horse which had been hitched to his father’s wagon, he had never ridden in the saddle.
The idea did not trouble him. After all, he told himself, I knew nothing about shooting or marching before I came here, and those things have not been more difficult for me than they were for anybody else.
The training went smoothly at first, as recruits learned to saddle a horse, to mount and dismount, and to steer the animal around a series of wooden barrels. The horses were themselves so familiar with this routine that all Pekkala had to do was not fall off.
The next task was to jump a horse over a gate set up in a large indoor ring. The Sergeant in charge of this exercise was new to his job. He had ordered several strands of barbed wire to be stretched across the top of the gate and nailed to the posts at either end. It was not enough, he told the assembled cadets, simply to hang on to a horse while it performed tasks it could just as easily have accomplished without a rider.
“There needs to be,” he told them, pleased at the boom of his voice within the enclosed space of the ring, “a bond between horse and rider. Until you can demonstrate this to me, I will never permit you to be members of this regiment.”
As soon as the horses saw the glint of barbs along the top of the gate, they grew nervous, shying and sidestepping and clanking the bits with their teeth. Some refused to jump. Rearing up before the wire, they threw the cadets who rode them. Pekkala’s horse turned sideways, slammed its flank into the gate, and sent Pekkala flying. He landed on his shoulder, rolling on the hard-trampled ground. By the time he got to his feet, covered with flecks of old straw, the sergeant was already making marks in his notebook.
Only a few animals made it across the first time. Most of these were injured by the wire, which cut them on their shins or on their bellies.
The sergeant ordered the cadets to try again.
An hour later, after several attempts, only half o
f the class had succeeded in getting their horses to jump the gate. The ground was sprinkled with blood, as if a box of red glass buttons had been tipped over.
The cadets stood at attention, holding the reins of their trembling horses.
By now, the sergeant realized he had made a mistake, but there was no way for him to back down without losing face. His voice was shredded from all the shouting he had done. Now, when he yelled, his shrillness sounded less like a man in charge than like someone on the edge of hysterics.
Each time a horse collided with the gate—the hollow boom of the animal’s side connecting with the wooden planks, the scuffling of hooves and the grunt of the rider falling hard—the remaining horses and cadets would flinch in unison as if an electric current had arced through their bodies. One young man wept silently as he waited for his turn. It would be his sixth attempt. Like Pekkala, he had not cleared the gate even once.
When it was time for Pekkala to try again, he swung himself up into the saddle. He looked over his horse’s head and at the distance between them and the gate. He could see gashes in the lower planks, where hooves had torn into the wood.
The sergeant stood off to one side, notebook at the ready.
Pekkala was about to dig his heels into the horse’s side and begin another run towards the gate. He had no doubt that he would be thrown; he was resigned to it. He was ready and then suddenly he was no longer ready to ride his horse against that gate, with its garland of bloodied iron barbs. As fluidly as he had climbed into the saddle, he climbed back down again.
“Get back on your horse,” said the sergeant.
“No,” said Pekkala. “I will not.” From the corner of his eye, Pekkala saw what looked to him like relief in the eyes of the other cadets. Relief that this could not go on, and relief that they would not be held responsible if it did not.
This time, the sergeant did not scream and curse as he’d been doing all day long. As calmly as he could, he shut his notebook and slid it into the top pocket of his tunic. He tucked his hands behind his back and walked over to Pekkala, until their faces almost touched. “I will give you one more chance,” he said, his raw voice no stronger than a whisper.
“No,” Pekkala said again.
Now the sergeant came even closer, bringing his lips to Pekkala’s ear. “Listen,” he said, “all I am asking of you is to attempt your jump. If you fail, I will not hold it against you. I will even end the day’s exercise after your jump. But you will get on that horse, and you will do as you are told, or I will see to it that you are washed out of the cadets. I will personally walk you through the gates and see them bolted at your back, just as they were for your brother. That’s why it will be easy for me, Pekkala. Because people are expecting you to fail.”
At that moment, a tremor passed through Pekkala. It was the strangest thing he had ever felt, and he was not the only one to feel it.
Both Pekkala and the sergeant turned at the same time, and saw a man standing in the shadows, near the stable entrance to the ring. The newcomer wore a dark green tunic and blue trousers with a red stripe running down the side. It was a simple uniform, and yet the colors seemed to vibrate in the still air. The man was not wearing a hat. Because of this they could see clearly that it was the Tsar himself.
A SMALL FIRE CRACKLED IN THE GRATE OF THE POLICE CHIEF’S OFFICE.
“Detective?” Kirov paced the room, raising his hands and letting them fall again. “Do you mean your brother worked for the Tsar’s Secret Police?”
Pekkala sat at the desk, reading through the muddy brown case file with its red stripe running diagonally across the page. Written in black on the red stripe were the words VERY SECRET. The word secret alone had lost all meaning. These days, everything was secret. Carefully, he turned the pages, his face only a hand’s length from the desk, so lost in thought that he did not seem to hear the Commissar’s ranting.
“No.” Anton sat by the fire, hands stretched out towards the flames. “He did not work for the Okhrana.”
“Then who did he work for?”
“I told you. He worked for the Tsar.”
They spoke of Pekkala as if he was not in the room.
“In what branch?” asked Kirov.
“He was his own branch,” Anton explained. “The Tsar created a unique investigator, a man with absolute authority, who answered only to himself. Even the Okhrana could not question him. They called him the Eye of the Tsar and he could not be bribed, or bought or threatened. It did not matter who you were, how wealthy or connected. No one stood above the Emerald Eye, not even the Tsar himself.”
Pekkala looked up from his reading. “Enough,” he muttered.
But his brother kept on talking. “My brother’s memory is perfect! He remembered the face of every person he’d ever met. He put the devil Grodek behind bars. He killed the assassin Maria Balka!” He pointed at Pekkala. “This was the Eye of the Tsar!”
“I’ve never heard of him,” said Kirov.
“I don’t suppose,” said Anton, “that they would teach cooks about the techniques of criminal investigation.”
“A chef!” Kirov corrected him. “I was training to be a chef, not a cook.”
“And there’s a difference?”
“There is if you’re a chef, which I would have been by now if they hadn’t closed the school.”
“Well, then, Comrade Almost-Chef, the reason you don’t know about him is because his identity was suppressed after the Revolution. We couldn’t have people wondering what had happened to the Eye of the Tsar. It doesn’t matter. From now you can simply refer to him as the Eye of the Red Tsar.”
“I said enough!” growled Pekkala.
Anton smiled and breathed out slowly, satisfied with the effect of his tormenting. “My brother possessed the kind of power you see once in a thousand years. But he threw it all away. Didn’t you, brother?”
“You go to hell,” said Pekkala.
The sergeant sprang to attention.
The cadets, in a single motion, crashed their heels together in salute. The sound echoed like a gunshot through the horse ring.
Even the horses became strangely still as the Tsar walked out across the ring to where the men were standing.
It was the first time Pekkala had ever seen the Tsar. Recruits in training did not usually set eyes on him until the day of their graduation, when they would parade before the Romanov family in their new, fine-cut gray uniforms. Until then, the Tsar remained distant.
But there he was, without his usual bodyguards, without an entourage of officers from the regiment—a man of medium height, with narrow shoulders and a tight stride, placing one foot directly in front of the other as he walked. He had a broad, smooth forehead, and his beard was close-trimmed and sculpted on his chin in a way which gave his jaw a certain angularity. The Tsar’s narrowed eyes were hard to read. His expression was not unkind, but neither was it friendly. It seemed to hover between contentment and the desire to be somewhere else.
More of a mask than a face, thought Pekkala.
Pekkala knew he was not supposed to look directly at the Tsar. In spite of this, he couldn’t help but stare. It was like watching a picture come to life, a two-dimensional image suddenly emerging into the third dimension of the living.
The Tsar came to a stop before the Sergeant and offered a casual salute.
The Sergeant returned the salute.
Now the Tsar turned to Pekkala. “Your horse seems to be bleeding.” He did not raise his voice, but still it seemed to carry through the wide space of the training ring.
“Yes, Excellency.”
“It looks to me as if most of these animals are bleeding.” He looked at the Sergeant. “Why are my horses bleeding?”
“A part of the training, Excellency,” the Sergeant replied breathlessly.
“The horses are already trained,” replied the Tsar.
The Sergeant spoke at the ground, not daring to raise his head. “Training for the recruits, Excellency.”
“But the recruits are not bleeding.” The Tsar ran his hand through his beard. His heavy signet ring stood out like a knuckle made of gold.
“No, Excellency.”
“And what seems to be the trouble with this particular recruit?” asked the Tsar, casting a glance at Pekkala.
“He refuses to jump.”
The Tsar turned to Pekkala. “Is this true? Do you refuse to go over that gate?”
“No, Excellency. I will go over the gate, only not on this horse.”
The Tsar’s eyes opened wider for a moment, then returned to their normal squint. “I’m not sure that’s what your Sergeant had in mind.”
“Excellency, I will not continue to injure this horse in order to prove that I am capable of doing so.”
The Tsar took one long breath, like a man preparing to dive underwater. “Then I regret that you find yourself in a dilemma.” Without another word, the Tsar walked past Pekkala and down the line of horses and riders standing at attention. The only sound was of his footsteps.
When the Tsar’s back was turned, the Sergeant raised his head and looked Pekkala in the eye. It was a stare of pure hatred.
The Tsar continued past the gates, where he paused to study the bloody strands of barbed wire.
When he reached the far end of the ring, he spun on his heel and faced the soldiers again. “This exercise is finished,” he said. Then he stepped back into the shadows and was gone.
As soon as the Tsar was out of sight, the Sergeant snarled at Pekkala, “You know what else is finished? Your life as a member of this Regiment. Now return to the stables, brush down your horse, wipe the saddle, fold the blanket, and get out.”