by Sam Eastland
‘Your belt is upside down,’ said Pekkala, as he walked out of the building.
Kirov glanced down at the brass buckle, whose cut-out pattern of a five-pointed star emblazoned with a hammer and sickle was indeed facing the wrong way. ‘I’m still half asleep,’ he muttered under his breath as he undid the belt and strapped it back on the right way.
‘Is it the Kremlin?’ asked Pekkala.
‘This time of night,’ replied Kirov, ‘it is always the Kremlin.’
‘When does Stalin expect us to sleep?’ grumbled Pekkala.
‘Inspector, you lie on the floor in your clothes, occasionally lapsing into unconsciousness, and in between you memorise railway timetables. That does not count as sleep. Where was it this time? Minsk? Tbilisi? Were all the trains running on time?’
‘Vladivostok,’ replied Pekkala as he walked towards the Emka, buttoning his heavy wool coat against the chill of that damp night. ‘Change at Ryazan and Omsk. And my trains are always on time.’
Kirov shook his head. ‘I can’t decide if it’s genius or madness.’
‘Then don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Decide,’ replied Pekkala as he climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door. Once inside the Emka he breathed the musty smell of the leather seats, mixed in with the reek of Kirov’s pipe tobacco.
Kirov slipped behind the wheel, put the car in gear and they set off through the unlit streets.
‘What does he want?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Poskrebychev said something about a butterfly.’
Poskrebychev, Stalin’s personal secretary, was a small, slope-shouldered man, bald on top and with a band of thinning hair worn like the leafy garland of a Roman emperor. Poskrebychev, who wore round glasses almost flush against his eyeballs, was rarely seen without his dull brownish green uniform, the short mandarin collar buttoned tight against his throat as if it was the only thing to stop his head from falling off. Unremarkable as he was in his appearance, Poskrebychev’s position as assistant to the Supreme Leader of the Soviet Union had placed him in a position of extraordinary power. Anyone who wanted to see Stalin had to deal first with Poskrebychev. Over the years, this influence had earned him countless enemies, but none who were prepared to act on it, and risk losing an audience with Stalin.
‘A butterfly?’ whispered Pekkala.
‘Whatever it is, Inspector, it must be important. He has asked to meet with you alone.’
For a while, neither of them spoke. The headlights of the Emka carved a pale tunnel through the night, the sifting rain like veils of silk billowing past them in the darkness.
‘I heard on the radio that Narva fell to the Germans today,’ remarked Kirov, anxious to break the silence.
‘That’s the third city in less than a week.’
In the distance, over the slate rooftops, gleaming like fish scales under the blue-black sky, Pekkala could see the domes of St Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin. All across the city, the skeleton claws of searchlights raked the sky for German bombers.
Earlier that day
Earlier that day, the surviving members of the 5th Anti-Aircraft Section of the Red Army’s 35th Rifle Division had been ordered to take up defensive positions on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo. After two months of fighting, the section had been reduced to four men, one Maxim machine gun and a single 25-mm anti-aircraft piece which was towed by a ZiS-5 army truck.
For weeks, they had travelled across a landscape which the war had laid open like a medical cadaver. Death was everywhere, lying crumpled in the ditches of Osmino, floating lazily and bloated in the lake by Kikerino and pecked by ravens in the barley fields of Gatchina. Along this route, most of their vehicles had either broken down or were reduced to smouldering heaps by the strafing runs of Messerschmitts.
In charge of the section was Commissar Sirko, a career officer with small, hostile eyes, a shaved head and two rolls of fat where his neck joined the back of his skull.
Second in command was Sergeant Ragozin, whose deep and reassuring voice did not belong with the bony, pinch-faced man who owned it. Lacking any military bearing, Ragozin fitted like a scarecrow into the baggy riding breeches and flared-waist tunic which made up his military uniform. Ragozin had been a radio announcer in his other life and ran a Sunday evening music show on Moscow Radio. During the 1930s, as the list of approved songs shrank, grew and shrank again without any pattern Ragozin could understand, he resorted to playing the same handful of tunes over and over until finally, in 1938, the authorities ran him off the air. Convinced that he would soon be denounced for anti-Soviet sentiments, he did the only patriotic thing he could think of and enlisted in the Russian Army just as the war broke out.
Gun loader Corporal Barkat, a strawberry farmer from the Ukraine, was a slope-shouldered man with a bulging Adam’s apple, nervous, effeminate hands and a hacking laugh which made him sound as if he were trying to cough up a fish bone.
The last and lowest-ranking member of the squad was Rifleman Stefanov. His tasks were to maintain the weapons, drive the truck and monitor the radio, which left very little for the others to do except complain and eat their rations.
Stefanov was a heavy-set man, whose shoulder blades hung like the yoke of an ox across his back. His hair, which normally grew thick and curly, had been shaved in the manner of all Red Army soldiers. This baldness made his large, round eyes seem big as saucers, and gave him the indignant expression of a baby owl which had been pushed out of its nest. Like Ragozin and Barkat, Stefanov was not a career soldier. He had been called up in the first week of the war. Since then, it had occurred to Stefanov that even if this wasn’t his first job, it would most likely be his last. The gentle, quiet Rifleman had little to say for himself, so little in fact that the other members of the section wondered if he was mentally impaired. Stefanov knew exactly what they thought of him, and he let them go on thinking it rather than explain the complicated past which had forced him to take up this silence as a barricade against their curiosity.
Instead, he had embraced the strange companionship that men often have with machines, most particularly the ZiS-5 truck, with its wooden slatted sides and headlights which goggled from their wheel cowlings, giving the vehicle a haughty, academic look. The twenty-five side vents on its hood, which resembled a line of dominoes forever falling backwards but never collapsing completely, were so familiar to him now that they seemed to have been scored into his flesh.
No sooner had the men taken up their assigned position on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo than they heard the whine of a small aircraft engine.
‘There it is!’ shouted a voice. A moment later, Barkat came loping across the ground and skidded to a stop in front of Stefanov. He pointed to the sky above the Catherine Palace. ‘It’s some kind of reconnaissance plane. Just a little thing buzzing about.’
Now Stefanov caught sight of the machine. It was a Stork. He had only seen pictures of them before. The plane banked sharply, and seemed to be lining up to fly directly over the palace and across the grounds of the Alexander Park. If Stefanov’s guess was right, the Stork would pass directly over their gun position. He turned to Barkat. ‘Ready the weapon!’ he shouted.
Barkat ran to the 25-mm, whipped off the oil-stained canvas tarp which had been laid over it for camouflage, and flipped up the large circular gunsight.
While Barkat checked the ranging mechanism, Stefanov sprinted to the foxhole of Sergeant Ragozin, who was sleeping under his rain cape. ‘Sergeant‚ you must get up!’
‘Is it supper time?’ asked Ragozin, as he pulled aside the cape and rose blearily to his feet. The ground had left a crackled imprint on his skin, like the glaze on an earthenware pot.
‘We’ve spotted a German reconnaissance plane‚’ Stefanov told him.
‘My God! At last a target we can hit!’ Ragozin staggered over to the gun and took his place beside the spare ammunition, ready to reload the 25-mm the second it ran out of ammunition. Still half asleep, he op
ened a waterproof storage can and lifted up a belt of ammunition. The heavy brass cartridges hung across his forearms like the carcass of a snake.
‘Where is Commissar Sirko?’ asked Ragozin.
‘He went to find something to drink!’ Barkat shouted in reply.
Although Stefanov had fired the weapon many times, he had never managed to actually shoot down a plane. The months he had spent training on that gun, which travelled on a small four-wheeled platform, had proved to be useless. His private fantasy of painting one white band after another down the barrel, each one indicating a downed enemy plane, had begun to seem ludicrously far-fetched. There was only one thing at which he had become an expert and that was digging foxholes.
But now, as he watched the Stork begin its run over the palace grounds, Stefanov realised that this might be his chance to alter that record of failure. In a matter of seconds, just as he had predicted, the plane would pass directly overhead. With his heart thundering in his chest, he chambered a round into the breech and squinted through the spider web of the gunsight.
‘Range six hundred metres,’ said Barkat, down on one knee beside him and adjusting the elevation of the gun. ‘Six hundred and closing.’
Sweat slicked Stefanov’s forehead. He wiped his torn and dirty sleeve across his face. ‘Set at two hundred.’
‘That’s too close!’ replied Barkat.
The plane had cleared the roof of the Catherine Palace and was now flying across the Alexander Park. Gracefully, it dipped its wings from side to side as its occupants gazed down upon the grounds.
‘Set it anyway!’
‘Setting at two hundred,’ confirmed Barkat.
Behind him, Stefanov heard the soft, metallic rustle of Ragozin adjusting his grip on the belt of spare ammunition.
The plane dipped into the loop of the gunsight. For a second, Stefanov was struck by how much it looked like one of those gangly, long-legged insects which used to stray into the webs of spiders in the woodshed by his house. He pulled the trigger.
Stefanov’s body shook at the first clanking bang of the 25-mm. Tracer bullets, one for every five live rounds, arced into the sky. Out of the corner of his eye, Stefanov saw the long‚ spent cartridges spitting in flickers of brass from the ejection port. On the other side of the barrel, the belt of ammunition slithered into the gun.
‘Hit!’ shouted Barkat. ‘Hit! Hit!’
‘Shut up!’ bellowed Stefanov, although he could barely hear himself over the roaring of the gun.
At that moment, the plane appeared overhead, as if out of nowhere. The shadow of its wings raced past them. Stefanov leaned back until he almost tipped over, catching a glimpse of the black crosses on the undersides of its wings before the machine continued on towards the north.
Only now did Stefanov let go of the trigger.
Ragozin was busy reloading the gun, trying not to burn his fingers on the hot metal of the breech.
Stefanov turned to Barkat. ‘Did I really hit it?’
‘Yes!’ Barkat replied excitedly. ‘Right in the engine. The wing, too, I think.’
As the two men spoke, a strange odour filtered down from above. To Stefanov, it smelled like burnt sugar.
Ragozin stopped what he was doing. ‘That’s glycol,’ he said. ‘Engine coolant. He won’t get far now.’
‘I said you hit it in the engine!’ Barkat slapped Stefanov on the arm.
Stefanov stood up from the crouch of his firing position. His hands were trembling. Then, without another word, he turned and started running through the woods, heading in the direction of the plane.
Barkat and Ragozin were too startled even to speak. They just watched him go, his stocky legs pumping, until he had vanished among the trees.
‘What was that about?’ asked Ragozin.
‘I think,’ replied Barkat, ‘he has gone to finish the job.’
Ragozin did not reply to this. Something had caught his attention. He stepped out into the open expanse of the Alexander Park and stood with his hands on his hips, gazing into the distance.
‘What is it?’ asked Barkat.
Ragozin turned around, a look of astonishment on his face. ‘I knew he hit the plane a couple of times, but I wondered where the rest of those bullets were going.’
‘What are you saying?’ demanded Barkat.
‘Stefanov just shot the windows out of the Catherine Palace!’
Barkat walked out and stood by Ragozin. At the far end of the park, he could see the gaps of shattered windows. Jagged shards remaining in the frames winked at him as they caught the sun. ‘Well,’ said Barkat, ‘he didn’t break all of them‚ anyway.’
At a flat-out run, Stefanov cleared the grounds of the estate. A few soldiers from the battery, concealed in their leafy, camouflaged hideouts‚ had seen the plane take fire as it flew over the park, but had been unable to join in the attack due to the positioning of their guns. Now, as they watched him sprinting by, the soldiers made no move to stop him‚ knowing that a man moving at that pace must be bound upon some vital task.
But Rifleman Stefanov did not even know where he was going. The only clear thought in the shambles of his brain was to find the plane he’d just shot down. He wasn’t even certain that he had shot it down. Perhaps it had only been damaged and would still be able to return to the German lines. Could a plane continue flying without engine coolant? Stefanov had no idea.
After leaving the grounds of the estate, Stefanov continued down the long road leading north. He was no longer sprinting now, but still moving as quickly as he could, searching the fields which stretched out on either side of the road for any sign of a forced landing. At the same time, he scanned the horizon for any telltale signs of smoke, in the event that the plane had crashed and burned.
It was twenty minutes later that Stefanov spotted the Stork, pulled up beside a small hangar at the edge of a grass strip runway.
Gasping for breath, he stepped off the road, clambered through a ditch choked with wildflowers, and stumbled out on to the runway.
Several soldiers were gathered in a circle.
Stefanov walked straight towards them. For the first time, he wondered what had become of the pilot and suddenly imagined himself meeting the man, perhaps even shaking his hand and introducing himself as the one who had brought him down. No, Stefanov reconsidered. He couldn’t shake the hand of a Fascist. The commissar might hear about that.
Stefanov walked past the Stork, which stood between him and the cluster of men. He was impressed that the pilot had managed to land it safely. Bare metal showed along the cowling where rounds had hit their target. Stefanov counted only three holes and felt momentarily ashamed at such a small number, considering that he had fired off a belt of 120 bullets. It does not matter, he consoled himself. One hit or a hundred hits is all the same, as long as the plane is brought down.
The soldiers, noticing Stefanov’s approach, all turned to stare at him.
It was only now that Stefanov caught his first glimpse of two bodies stretched out on the ground.
The breath caught in his throat.
‘Where did you come from?’ asked one of the soldiers.
Stefanov did not reply. He pushed his way through until he was standing right over the dead men. Both had been shot in the head. Their faces were disfigured in a way that reminded Stefanov of two broken earthenware pots. He stared at the uniforms of the two men, the grey-blue tunic of the Luftwaffe officer and the field-grey tunic of the man who, by the silver lightning bolts at his collar, Stefanov recognised as SS. Lying on the chest of the SS man was a leather briefcase, spattered with blood. ‘Why did you do it?’ asked Stefanov. He looked at the men who stood around him. ‘Did they refuse to surrender?’
‘We didn’t kill them,’ said one. ‘That SS officer took one look at us and then he shot the pilot of his plane.’
‘He did what?’ The sweat was starting to cool on Stefanov’s back. He felt numb and dazed, as if he had been sleepwalking and had woken up in an un
familiar place. ‘Why would he do such a thing?’
‘That’s what we’d like to know,’ replied the soldier, ‘especially since, right afterwards, he blew his own brains out. Our officer thinks it has something to do with whatever’s in that briefcase. He’s gone to find a commissar who can take charge of it.’
The mention of the commissar seemed to snap Stefanov out of his trance.
‘Who are you, anyway?’ asked the soldier.
‘Nobody,’ replied Stefanov. ‘I’m nobody.’ He walked out of the circle of men and back across the airfield. After clambering back over the ditch, he reached the road and started retracing his steps towards the Catherine Palace. At first he only walked, but after a minute, Stefanov began to run again.
As the Emka rolled beneath the archway
The Emka rolled beneath the archway of the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate‚ with its ornamental battlements and gold and black clock tower looming from the misty night. Arriving at a dead end on the far side of Ivanovsky Square‚ Kirov parked the car and turned to Pekkala.
‘I’ll wait here for you, Inspector.’
‘Get some sleep,’ replied Pekkala as he climbed out of the Emka. He made his way to an unmarked door, which was guarded by a soldier. As Pekkala approached, the soldier slammed his heels together with a sound that echoed around the high brick walls and gave the traditional greeting of ‘Good health to you, Comrade Pekkala!’
This was not only a greeting, but also a sign that he had been recognised by the soldier and did not need to present his identity book.
Unlike the glittering emerald which had guaranteed Pekkala’s authority during the time of the Tsar, his ranking in the Soviet State consisted of a single piece of paper contained within his pass book. This book was the size of a man’s outstretched hand, dull red in colour, with an outer cover made from fabric-covered cardboard in the manner of an old school text book. The Soviet State seal, cradled in its two bound sheaves of wheat, had been emblazoned on the front. Inside, in the top left-hand corner, a photograph of Pekkala had been attached with a heat seal, cracking the emulsion of the photograph. Beneath that, in pale bluish-green letters, were the letters NKVD and a second stamp indicating that Pekkala was on Special Assignment for the government. The particulars of his birth, his blood group and his State identification number filled up the right-hand page.