by Sam Eastland
‘And what is that?’
‘For me, the day I became Professor Shulepov, my only way out was a Browning 1910.’
‘I am glad you didn’t take it,’ said Pekkala.
‘So am I,’ agreed Kovalevsky. ‘And whatever skills I possess, outdated though they might be, are now at your disposal. All I ask in exchange is the chance to go back into hiding.’
‘You have my word, old friend.’
‘How long do we have to prepare?’
‘Three days.’
‘Very well. That should be enough time. Tomorrow, I will begin making preparations,’ said Kovalevsky. ‘I will need information about precise troop displacements, as well as aerial reconnaissance photographs showing what roads and bridges might still be open.’
‘I’ll make sure you get them.’
‘We will need money,’ Kovalevsky continued, ‘and not standard currency. Gold coins will work best, preferably German, French or British.’
‘I’m sure some can be found.’
‘Concealed compasses.’
‘NKVD has some which fit inside standard Red Army tunic buttons.’
‘And we will need vials of potassium cyanide, one for each person, in case we are captured.’
To this, Pekkala only nodded, recalling the thin glass containers, each one containing about a teaspoonful of the poison. The vial itself was stored in a brass cartridge, which could be unscrewed in the middle. NKVD issued these vials in sets of three, laid out in blue velvet in a small leather-bound case, exactly the same kind one might find in a jeweller’s shop for displaying a wedding ring or a set of pearl earrings.
The vials came with no instructions for use, unlike almost everything else issued by NKVD, even down to shoelaces and torches. Each person to whom the poison was issued had the choice of precisely where and how to store the means of suicide. One popular method was to have a vial sewn into the collar of a shirt, in the place where the collar stay would normally go. This was a place where a person under arrest was unlikely to be searched. Once the vial had been placed in the mouth, the user only had to bite down gently and the poison would be released, causing death in less than four seconds.
Pekkala had been issued a set of vials, but he had never carried them. No one had ever insisted, or even asked him why, which was fortunate, because he would have found it difficult to explain. It wasn’t the fear of taking his own life at a time when his death would otherwise be certain. The method was simple. The poison was quick. For Pekkala, that was the real danger of owning the cyanide vials. What Pekkala truly feared was that the darkness in his mind might one day become unendurable and he would give up his life with no more effort than a shrug.
Although he carried a revolver, the fact that he had been trained in its use and had seen for himself the terrible damage it worked upon the human body, had built a kind of mental barricade against any instinct to point the Webley at himself. So far, the barricade had held. No one, not even Kirov, was aware that such thoughts had ever entered Pekkala’s head, because there were no witnesses to the times Pekkala had sat at the bare table in his apartment in the middle of the night, the brass-handled gun placed before him, fists clenched tight against his chest, while the demons in his skull chanted their anthems of despair.
‘Did you hear me, Pekkala?’ asked Kovalevsky.
‘Potassium cyanide. Yes.’ Pekkala paused to glance up at the searchlights, tilting back and forth across the night sky, like giant metronomes marking time for the movement of the planets. He thought back to the Northern Lights he’d often seen draped across the heavens as a boy. It appeared on nights of bitter cold, when frost would beard the inside of his bedroom windows. He would lie bundled in his blankets, staring through the ice-encrusted glass at the curtains of green and pink and yellow, billowing out in the darkness. These searchlights, too, were beautiful in their way. It was possible to forget, even if only for a moment, the grim fact of their purpose.
Pekkala’s dreams were interrupted by the sound of a car backfiring in the street.
Both men flinched and Kovalevsky, tripping on the sidewalk, would have fallen if Pekkala had not reached out and caught him.
‘It’s all right!’ laughed Pekkala. ‘I’ve got you.’
Kovalevsky slipped through his arms and collapsed in a heap on the pavement.
‘Kovalevsky?’ Slowly, as if he were still in that dream of himself, long ago, with the Northern Lights pulsing in the sky, Pekkala realised what had happened. It was no car backfiring. Instinctively, he reached for his Webley, fingers clawing across his chest, but the weapon wasn’t there. He had left it at the office. Stumbling back against the wall of a house, Pekkala searched the darkness for a shooter. People continued to make their way down the street, silhouettes as black as blindness. Pekkala knew from experience that it took three shots before most people even realised that a gunfight had broken out. Unless the gun was visible, most people passed off the sound of the first shot as a door slamming. Or a car backfiring. Nobody was running. Nobody cried out. A man sidestepped the place where Kovalevsky lay, glanced down at the still form and kept on walking.
Pekkala knelt down beside Kovalevsky, rolled the man over and stared into his face, which had become a mask of blood.
Kovalevsky had been hit in the throat. He was already dead.
‘Help me!’ Pekkala called out to the shadows walking by.
At first, nobody stopped.
‘Let him sleep it off,’ advised one man.
‘Please!’ yelled Pekkala. ‘Will somebody find the police?’
Only then did the flow of passing figures seem to ripple. Voices echoed through the night. Shadows converged around the dead man. Arms reached out. Shouts turned to screams. At last, a police car arrived.
Two hours later, Pekkala was back in his office. As he explained to Kirov who Kovalevsky had been and why he had gone to meet with the former tsarist agent, diluted splashes of the teacher’s blood dripped from the heavy wool of his coat, dappling the floor.
‘It could have been a stray shot,’ Kirov suggested. ‘A soldier on patrol could have misfired his weapon. It could have been an accident, Inspector. These things do happen.’
‘No,’ whispered Pekkala. ‘It was no accident. The traitor must have followed me.’
‘But even if you’re right, Inspector, why would they have gone after Kovalevsky? As far as the rest of the world is concerned, he’s just a harmless school master named Shulepov. Nobody knows his real identity. Nobody who’d want to kill him, anyway.’
Pekkala did not reply. Gently, as if to wake the man from sleep, Kirov reached out and touched Pekkala’s shoulder. ‘Inspector.’
Pekkala started, his eyes wild, as if in that moment he no longer recognised his colleague. It lasted only a second. ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘All these years, I had thought Kovalevsky’s bones had turned to dust. I had only just gotten used to him being alive again. And now. .’ Pekkala shook his head and his voice trailed away into silence.
‘Perhaps Elizaveta and I can cook you a meal tonight, Inspector,’ Kirov said. ‘It’s late, but there’s still time. Wouldn’t that be better than going back to your apartment alone?’
‘Don’t you see, Kirov? I have to be alone. And so should you.’
Kirov’s face paled in confusion. ‘I don’t understand, Inspector. I thought you liked Elizaveta.’
‘I do! And I know you do, as well. That’s why I’m saying you should stay away from her. Look at what happened this evening. It could just as easily have been me who was shot. Or it could have been you lying there in the gutter with your throat torn out. Our lives are too fragile to be shared, especially with those who love us. I learned that lesson a long time ago, Kirov, but by the time I had figured it out, I was in a rail car full of convicts crossing the Ural mountains into Siberia. And then it was too late. If you do love her, Kirov, or if you even think you could, don’t do to her what I did to my fiancee when I kissed her goodbye at the Leningrad stat
ion and promised we still had a future.’
The phone rang.
‘Answer it,’ ordered Pekkala.
Kirov picked up the receiver. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Right away.’ Then he hung up and looked at Pekkala.
‘Stalin?’
Kirov nodded. ‘He says he wants to see us right away.’
They spoke no more about Elizaveta.
As they left the room, Pekkala picked up the gun belt from where it lay on his desk. He strapped it on beneath his coat as he made his way downstairs, following the Morse-code trail of Kovalevsky’s blood which he had left upon the worn-out wooden steps.
With no idea how far he had to go
With no idea how far he had to go before he reached the Russian lines, Stefanov made his way towards the east. Still carrying the body of his friend, he tramped along roads whose yellow dust settled on his clothes and in the corners of his eyes. Hour after hour, the only sound he heard was of his footsteps and bumblebees and the thud of distant cannon fire. It was hot. The sky gleamed pitiless blue.
Late in the afternoon, Stefanov took a short cut across an open field. The grass was as tall as his knees and flecked with wildflowers. Burrs clung to his trouser legs.
In the middle of the field, beside an old zinc cattle trough which was overflowing with algae-covered water, he came across a crop of blackberries, like tiny knotted fists. Laying Barkat’s corpse upon the ground, he plucked the berries from the shelter of their spear-point leaves and stuffed them into his mouth. Purple juice ran down his lip. And afterwards, he sank his hands into the trough, ladling aside the green ooze of the algae, and drank.
Stefanov was just about to set off, having lifted Barkat once again on to his shoulders, when he heard a sound he felt certain must be thunder. It can’t be, he thought. But the thunder grew louder and more deafening until he could feel its vibration in the ground beneath his feet. At that moment, three German Stuka dive-bombers flew over the ridge, one after the other, heading west. Fixed landing gear jutted from their bellies like the extended talons of huge hunting birds and thick lines of exhaust soot trailed back along the fuselage, which was painted with tiger stripes of grey and yellow.
The Stukas flew so low that Stefanov could see their pilots, heads cocooned in leather flight helmets. One, with goggles pulled down over his eyes, glanced down at Stefanov. Sunlight winked off the lenses, as if sockets of that pilot’s eyes were crammed with diamonds.
Stefanov knew that there was nowhere for him to run. Since they had already seen him, there was no point even in taking cover, so he just stood there, looking up at the planes, with Barkat draped over his shoulder, the man’s long arms dangling in the tall grass.
Whether the men in those planes took pity on him, or else were low on fuel or ammunition, Stefanov could only wonder.
The Stukas continued on their way. In a moment, all Stefanov could make out were their hunchbacked silhouettes and a faint blur of smoke in the sky.
Arriving at the far end of the field, Stefanov discovered six freshly dug graves. Jammed into the dirt at the head of each grave was a Russian Mosin-Nagant rifle, its bolt removed, rendering it useless. The wooden stock on one rifle had burned away and its leather sling hung blackened like a dead snake from the swivel.
Robbers had dug up the bodies.
The dead lay with earth-filled mouths, purple lips drawn back and dimpled fingertips like badly-fitting gloves. Their boots and their watches were gone, and their pockets had been turned inside-out.
Moving on, Stefanov experienced the unmistakable sensation of having crossed an invisible border between the world of men and that of monsters, and every step he took now carried him deeper into the country of the beast.
Even though he was not sure why he continued to carry Barkat, or even why he had begun carrying him in the first place, it never occurred to Stefanov to abandon his old friend. His mind had fixed itself upon some path beyond his reckoning and he could no more question it than glimpse where it might end.
As he neared the Russian gun pits, Stefanov picked up the scent of machorka, its smell like damp leaves smouldering in the rain.
During those last moments, with a dozen weapons aiming at his heart as he walked into a Soviet encampment on the outskirts of the town, Stefanov was more afraid than in all the time he’d spent behind the lines. By this time, a downpour was pelting the road into mud.
The first building he reached was a schoolhouse which had been converted into a field hospital. Peering through the shark’s teeth of a broken window pane, Stefanov watched a doctor, stripped to the waist, operating on a man laid out on two school desks. Behind them, a black slate chalk board still showed a lesson in arithmetic.
In the school yard at the back of the building, Stefanov found an army cook, sitting in a horse-drawn food wagon. Rain popped off the wagon’s canvas roof. Stefanov realised he was hungry. Gently, he laid Barkat down and reached behind him for his mess kit. It was only when his fingers grasped at nothing that he remembered he had left all his equipment in the bunker.
The cook nodded towards a pile of field gear which had been removed from wounded soldiers before bringing them inside. From the soggy tangle of belts, canteens and ammunition pouches still crammed with bullets, Stefanov scrounged up a mess tin.
The cook handed him a slice of brown bread. Then he ladled some cabbage soup out of a large enamel-lined canister. Hot, greasy liquid dripped down the metal sides.
Rain fell through the hole in Barkat’s chest, splashing off the school yard underneath.
‘Mother of God,’ said the cook.
Stefanov sat on the concrete and drank the soup, using the bread to wipe out the insides of the mess tin.
The cook watched him from under the wagon’s canvas roof. The horse stared at him too, water dripping from its chin.
Artillery thudded in the distance.
Two medical orderlies appeared in the doorway at the top of the steps. Seeing Barkat, the medics hurried down to help him but they were not even at the bottom of the stairs before they realised the man was dead. They glanced back at Stefanov, confusion on their faces. ‘Are you hurt?’ asked one of the medics.
Stefanov did not reply, because he wasn’t sure.
‘Don’t touch him,’ whispered the other medic.
The two men walked back up the steps and shut the door behind them.
Stefanov lay down on the ground next to Barkat. He put his arm across Barkat’s chest, as if to shield him from the rain. Threads of consciousness snapped one by one in silent, dusty puffs inside his brain. And then he was asleep.
It was the middle of the night
It was the middle of the night when Pekkala arrived at the Kremlin.
Poskrebychev was still at his desk. He jerked his head towards the double doors. ‘The Boss is waiting.’
Stalin’s room was dark, except for the lamp at his desk. The Boss sat in his red leather chair. In front of him lay an ashtray, overflowing with crumpled cigarette butts. Another one, still burning, lay wedged between his fingertips. ‘I heard what happened to Kovalevsky.’
‘Let me go after them‚’ said Pekkala. ‘Let someone else arrest Engel. Give me a week and I’ll track down whoever murdered Kovalevsky.’
‘I don’t care who murdered Kovalevsky.’ Stalin inhaled deeply. The tip of the cigarette glowed fiercely in the gloom.
‘But I do!’ Pekkala exploded. ‘Kovalevsky was my friend!’
‘What would your friend say about the thing you’ve just proposed?’
‘He would say nothing. He’s dead.’
Stalin sat forward suddenly‚ grinding out his cigarette into the hammered brass ashtray. ‘Exactly! He does not care who killed him. He does not care whether revenge comes now or later or if it never comes at all. The dead do not seek vengeance. That is a curse the living heap upon themselves.’
‘I am seeking justice, not vengeance.’
‘I wonder if you know the difference any more.’
�
��Without Kovalevsky, the mission-’
Stalin slammed his fist on to the desk. ‘The mission has already begun! We must assume that whoever killed Kovalevsky was either sent by the traitor in our ranks or else is the traitor himself. I agree with you that finding this person is important, but not enough to call you off the case. That is why I am assigning the task to Major Kirov. He will remain here in Moscow and investigate Kovalevsky’s murder, while you and Lieutenant Churikova pursue Engel.’
In spite of the fact that Kirov would be sorely missed‚ Pekkala knew that Stalin had made the right decision to divide the team‚ in order that both Engel and his accomplice here in Moscow could be pursued simultaneously.
‘A plane has been allocated to bring the two of you from Moscow to an airfield near the front‚’ continued Stalin. ‘Once you arrive, you will be handed over to Glavpur, Military Intelligence. They will do what they can to see you through the German lines. I know what I am asking of you, Pekkala. Even with Kovalevsky’s help, this would have been the most difficult task I had ever set before you. But we can beat them, Pekkala, because they have already made a fatal mistake.’
‘And what was that?’
‘When they shot Kovalevsky, they did not kill you, too.’ With his elbows on the desktop, Stalin folded his hands together, fingertips pressing down on knuckles. ‘When you return to Moscow with your prisoner, you will have done more than simply help to stop the robberies of Gustav Engel and his kind. Your actions in the coming days will fill their hearts with doubt and fear, because they will know that nowhere is safe for them and that, even when our country appears on the verge of collapse, we are still striking back in any way we can.’
‘What if Engel has already discovered the amber?’