by Sam Eastland
‘That depends,’ replied Stalin. ‘If they decide to leave the panels where they are, your orders are to leave them untouched until such time as we can reclaim the ground we have lost. But if you discover that the Fascists have chosen to move those panels to some location of their own, in spite of the damage it might cause, in order to parade the Amber Room before the world as a symbol of our defeat, then I am ordering you to destroy it.’
‘But Comrade Stalin,’ he finally managed to say, ‘you just declared the Amber Room to be an irreplaceable State treasure. Now you are telling me to destroy it?’
‘We must be prepared to sacrifice everything,’ Stalin replied, ‘or else face oblivion. From now on, the only way we can survive is to hold nothing sacred. Besides, I’ll wager that your distaste for the Tsar’s garish displays of wealth is no less strongly felt today than it was when you were in his service. Wouldn’t you secretly welcome the chance to rid this world of such a monument to human excess?’
‘Human excess has many monuments, Comrade Stalin, the gulag at Borodok for one. But even if you were correct in my opinion of the Amber Room, exactly how do you expect me to destroy it?’ asked Pekkala.
‘When the time comes,’ Stalin replied, ‘you will be provided with the means.’
‘And Lieutenant Churikova? Does she know about this order?’
‘She will when you tell her. But you must move quickly, Pekkala. Rather than give this traitor another chance to strike at us again, I have decided to move up the start time for the operation.’
‘By how much?’ asked Pekkala. ‘I thought we still had three days to plan the mission.’
‘Your plane leaves in less than twelve hours.’
In the outer room, Poskrebychev leaned across his desk, his ear almost touching the dust-clogged mesh of the intercom speaker.
At Pekkala’s mention of the gulag at Borodok, which must have struck Stalin like a back hand across the face, Poskrebychev had held his breath, waiting for the eruption of Stalin’s volcanic rage. Poskrebychev had always been mystified by Pekkala, and had never made up his mind whether to respect the Emerald Eye for his suicidal forthrightness or to pity him for the price Poskrebychev felt certain that the Finn would some day have to pay for all his insolence.
But yet another moment passed in which Stalin’s anger failed to ignite, as Poskrebychev felt sure it would have done with anyone other than Pekkala. He wondered if the fairy tales he’d heard as a child, in which the Finns were always vanishing, or casting spells to change the weather, or communing with the spirits of the forest, might have some truth in them. Surely, thought Poskrebychev, Stalin must have been bewitched.
As he heard the door handle turn, Poskrebychev sat back in his chair and busied himself with paperwork.
Pekkala swept by, accompanied by the creak of his double-soled boots and the rustle of his heavy corduroy trousers.
The two men did not exchange words.
Only when Pekkala had gone by did Poskrebychev raise his head. Glancing at the broad shoulders of the Inspector, he wondered if the truth might be simpler than he’d thought. Perhaps what it boiled down to was the fact that Stalin needed Pekkala too much, and so endured a frankness which, Poskrebychev had no doubt, would have cost him his life if he had ever dared to speak those words himself.
Lieutenant Churikova
Lieutenant Churikova had returned to the barracks, from which she and her battalion had departed only a few days before.
When Pekkala found her, she was alone in a dormitory which would normally have housed sixteen people. Pale sunlight shone through the dusty windows, whose frames chequered the dull red linoleum floors.
Churikova had scrounged some blankets, rolling one up as a pillow. The remaining fifteen beds were bare except for thin, horsehair-stuffed mattresses, their blue-and-white-striped ticking stained by the metal springs beneath as the mattresses were turned over each month.
Churikova was folding her clothes. ‘I heard you coming,’ she said, as Pekkala stepped into the room. ‘It’s so quiet in here now. Last night, I heard the footsteps of a mouse as it ran across the floor.’
‘Stalin tells me you volunteered to help bring back Gustav Engel.’
‘Yes. That’s right. I did.’
Pekkala explained Stalin’s instructions.
Churikova had continued to fold her clothes as she listened, carefully packing them into a canvas duffel bag, but suddenly she paused. ‘He really means for us to destroy the amber?’
‘Those are his orders, in the event that Engel has decided to move the panels to some place inside Germany. The sooner we can get to Tsarskoye Selo‚ the better chance we have of saving the Amber Room.’
‘When do we leave?’ asked Churikova.
‘Tomorrow. A car will come for you before dawn.’ Pekkala turned to leave.
‘Inspector?’
He paused and looked back. ‘Yes?’
‘Thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘When I volunteered to come on this mission, Comrade Stalin said you’d try to talk me out of it. But you didn’t.’
‘I would have,’ replied Pekkala, ‘if I’d thought it could do any good.’
The sun was not yet up
The sun was not yet up when Kirov drove Pekkala to the airfield.
The props of the twin-engined Lisunov cargo plane were already roaring like thunder.
Since that moment in the office, when Pekkala had spoken of the burden of their fragile lives, it was as if a wall had gone up between them.
Anyone looking at them from a distance, as they got out of the car and, with a stiff formality, shook hands, would have thought that the two men were strangers.
One of the plane’s crew, his body swathed in a fur-lined flight suit, approached the Emka. ‘Inspector?’
‘Yes,’ replied Pekkala. ‘Where is Lieutenant Churikova?’
‘She’s already on board. We take off in two minutes. Follow me.’
Without another word to Kirov, Pekkala set out with the crewman. But halfway to the plane, he stopped.
‘Is something the matter, Inspector?’ asked the crewman.
‘Yes,’ replied Pekkala, as he turned and ran back to the car.
Kirov was already behind the wheel. He had just put the Emka in gear when Pekkala appeared out of the dark and rapped a knuckle on the window.
Kirov rolled down the window. ‘What is it, Inspector?’
‘I was wrong,’ said Pekkala. ‘About Elizaveta. In spite of the risks we take‚ it would be an even greater risk to turn away from something that could bring you happiness, even if you know it might not last. I can’t change what happened to me, but I know what I’d have done if I could. I’d have boarded that train with her back in Petrograd and I would never have looked back. This may be the last order I ever give you, Kirov‚ and it may be the most important. Don’t make the same mistake as I did. Will you promise me that?’
‘Of course, Inspector, but don’t let us speak of finalities.’ He clasped Pekkala’s hand, and suddenly they were not strangers any more. ‘I’ll see you again soon enough.’
‘Inspector!’ The crewman stood in the doorway to the cargo plane. ‘We must leave now!’
Pekkala turned and headed for the plane. This time, he did not look back.
Rather than return
Rather than return to the silence of his office, Kirov went straight to work.
His first stop was the office of municipal police for the 4th Central District of Moscow, within whose boundaries Kovalevsky’s murder had taken place. In order not to draw attention to the significance of Kovalevsky’s death, the case had not been handed over to NKVD. Kovalevsky’s true identity had not been revealed, even to the police or the doctors who pronounced him dead when his body arrived at the hospital. In a city where gunfire was not uncommon, the murder itself had not even been mentioned in the newspapers. Except for the few bystanders who had seen what happened, few people even knew that the killing had
taken place.
When Kirov entered the municipal office, the sergeant on duty took one look at the red stars of a commissar sewn on to the forearms of the major’s tunic and stood to attention, sending his chair scudding back noisily across the wooden floor.
The air smelled heavily of cigarettes and sweat. There was also a stench of vinegar and garlic coming from a jar of pickles the sergeant had open on his desk. As the man rose to salute, he struggled to finish his mouthful.
‘I’ve come about the shooting of Professor Shulepov,’ said Kirov, making sure to use the alias under which Kovalevsky had been living.
‘And where have you come from‚ Comrade Major?’
‘Special Operations.’
The sergeant nodded. ‘I knew there was something about that man.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The one who got killed. He had bullet holes in him.’
‘Of course he did. He was shot to death.’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘I’m not talking about the bullet which finished him off. I’m talking about old scars he had from the ones that didn’t kill him.’
‘And where is the body now?’
‘I called the hospital myself, a few hours after the shooting, and asked them the same question. They told me it had been cremated.’ The sergeant shrugged. ‘I tell you, Major, it’s as if this whole thing never happened. And there’s more as well.’
‘Yes?’
‘People on the scene told us there had been another man walking with this Professor Shulepov, but by the time we arrived, he had disappeared. Before I could even begin conducting a proper investigation, this little bald man shows up, waving a Kremlin ID card. .’
Poskrebychev, Kirov thought to himself.
‘. . and tells me there’s not going to be an investigation.’
‘May I see your report on the incident?’ asked Kirov.
‘Report! You don’t seem to understand, Major. That man had orders direct from Stalin. There is no report. There will never be a report.’
‘Was anything recovered from the scene?’
‘Officially, no.’
‘And unofficially?’
The sergeant held up a finger, like a man testing the wind. ‘Unofficially‚ I think I can help you.’ Rising from his desk he walked down a short hallway to a room closed with a cage-like metal door. He unlocked the door, entered, and then locked himself in from the inside. A moment later, the sergeant repeated the procedure in reverse and returned to Kirov with a little white cloth bag pulled shut with a red piece of string. Back at the front desk the sergeant opened the bag and poured its contents into his hand. There were six pistol bullets, only one of which had been fired.
‘I should probably have thrown them out,’ said the sergeant, ‘but old habits die hard, you know.’
‘Where were they?’
‘Scattered in the road, about twenty paces from the site where the shooting took place.’
Kirov picked up one of the cartridges and examined it. The markings on the base had been filed off, so he could not tell where it had been made or the precise calibre, although it looked like 9 mm to him. There were other file marks around the rim, as well as the indentations where each bullet had been clamped in a vice. ‘Is this all of them?’
‘Yes. I searched the area thoroughly.’
‘From the number, it almost looks as if the weapon was a revolver.’
‘That was my thought, too, but why go to all the trouble of emptying the cylinder when there was no need to reload and most of the rounds hadn’t even been fired? Strange, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ murmured Kirov, as he replaced the bullets in the cloth evidence bag. ‘May I hold on to these?’
‘Considering they’re from a non-existent investigation, I’d say that little bag of evidence doesn’t exist either. You may as well take it, since there’s nothing to take.’
Kirov put the bullets in his pocket. ‘Thank you, Sergeant.’
On his way to inspect the site where Kovalevsky had been murdered, Kirov stopped off at NKVD headquarters. He made his way down two flights of stairs to the underground firing range in search of the Chief Armourer, Captain Lazarev; a red-faced man with watery blue eyes and pock-marked cheeks, whose frequent laughter sent him into spasms of liquidy coughs from his tobacco-corrupted lungs.
‘I know you,’ said Lazarev. ‘You’re the one who’s got his eye on that woman in the records department, Elizaveta Kapeleva.’
‘Kapanina,’ Kirov corrected him.
‘Yes, well, whatever her name is, you had better grab her while you can. Half of the men in this building have their eyes on her as well.’
‘Thank you, Captain,’ Kirov replied stiffly. ‘I will be sure to follow your advice.’
Lazarev let out one of his gurgling laughs. ‘But I don’t expect you came down here into the bowels of the earth to seek advice on women.’
Kirov handed over the small evidence bag containing the bullets. ‘What do you make of these?’ he asked.
From a pocket in his tattered, oil-stained shop coat, Lazarev produced a surprisingly clean handkerchief, and carefully unfolded it upon a counter top strewn with gun parts. After emptying the bullets out of the bag, he stood the cartridges in a row, as if setting them up for a game of chess. ‘Nine millimetre,’ he said, ‘designed for the Mauser model 1896. The famous broom-handled model. But this is curious.’
‘What is?’
‘These bullets did not fit the standard model, which was 7.63 calibre. The 9-mm were made for export models only.’
‘Where was it exported?’
‘Asia. Africa. Some of them went to South America. There were a number of them around during the Revolution, but it is now considered somewhat obsolete by our own military, and certainly in the 9-mm version. Our own Tokarevs and Nagants take 7.62 cartridges. What makes this interesting — ’ with one finger, Lazarev pushed over one of the bullets, like a man tipping over his king as he conceded defeat — ‘is that these rounds have been modified.’
‘I noticed that as well,’ remarked Kirov. ‘But why would someone go to all this trouble?’
‘To make them fit another gun, of course,’ replied Lazarev.
‘A German gun?’ Kirov’s suspicion, from the moment he had learned about the shooting, was that the murderer was either a German agent, or else had been supplied by them.
Lazarev screwed up his face. ‘These days, anyone who has got their hands on a German gun, say a Luger or a perhaps Walther, is probably a soldier who’s been at the front. And anyone who has snatched up a German pistol is almost certain to have found ammunition as well. This is more complicated, because these bullets,’ he gestured at the cartridges laid out before him, ‘would not require modification to be used in the guns I have mentioned.’ Slowly, he shook his head. ‘No. Your weapon is not a Luger, or a Walther, and definitely not a Mauser.’
‘A Browning?’
‘No!’ shouted Lazarev. ‘That takes a short 9-mm cartridge.’ He picked up one of the bullets and held it in front of Kirov’s face. ‘Does this look short to you?’ Without waiting for an answer, Lazarev continued. ‘This is something else. Something more peculiar. I wish I could be of further help to you, Major, but in order for me to do that, you will have to bring me a few more pieces of the puzzle.’
After a three-hour flight
After a three-hour flight from Moscow in the unheated cargo bay of the Lisunov, Pekkala and Lieutenant Churikova landed at an airfield in Tikhvin, east of Leningrad. A truck was waiting for them at the side of the runway. Its windscreen had been smashed out and the driver wore a pair of motorcycle goggles to protect his eyes from the mud and grit which had splattered the upper half of his body. ‘Get in the back,’ he told them, ‘unless you want to look like me.’
‘Where are we going?’ asked Pekkala, struggling to speak since his jaw was almost frozen shut.
‘To the town of Chertova, but we had better be quick. I knew where the front w
as when I left this morning, but I’ve no idea where it is now.’ As the driver spoke, he removed the goggles, revealing pale moons of skin around his eyes. He licked the dirt off the lenses, spitting after each swipe of his tongue over the glass, then fitted the goggles back on to his face.
Hurriedly, Churikova and Pekkala piled into the back of the truck.
The driver battened down the canvas flap and soon they were on the move again.
‘What happens when we get to Chertova?’ asked Churikova, once they were under way. She had tried during the flight to question Pekkala about the plan for getting them behind the German lines, but the noise in the cargo plane, not to mention the cold, had prevented any kind of conversation.
From the pocket of his coat, Pekkala removed his orders of transport. ‘According to this, we are being delivered to the headquarters of the 35th Rifle Division, which must be based in Chertova. Once we arrive, a Colonel Gorchakov of Glavpur, Military Intelligence, will provide us with further instructions.’
‘But how will he get us through the lines?’ Churikova pressed him.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Pekkala. ‘At this point, I doubt that he knows, either.’
On the outskirts of Chertova, the truck pulled over beside a cemetery. The driver got out and undid the canvas flap. ‘We’re here,’ he said.
There was no sound of birds or barking dogs, or the bumblebee droning of tractors in the fields beyond the town. All they could hear was the rumble of artillery in the distance.
Pekkala peered out across the graveyard. ‘Military Intelligence?’
‘Come see for yourself,’ said the driver, his face expressionless behind the mud-splashed goggles.
Leaving Churikova in the back of the truck, Pekkala jumped down into the mud and followed the driver out into the cemetery. As Pekkala trudged along, he looked out over the crooked ranks of gravestones. Some bore the tilted cross of the Orthodox Church, others were topped by ancient weeping angels made of concrete. The oldest were nothing more than blunted slabs of stone, leaning at odd angles like the teeth of hags.