by Sam Eastland
‘When did you realise that the Tsarina wasn’t going to release you, after all?’
‘In 1919, when I heard that she was dead. And even then I hoped that someone might be sent to rescue me. But no one ever did. ’
‘Why did you not say something?’ demanded Kirov.
‘Say what?’ laughed Detlev. ‘That, on the orders of the Tsarina, I had not destroyed the icon, after all, but that I still had no idea where it was? The Tsarina would surely have denied it and who would have taken my word over hers? I am sorry that I lied to you, Inspector. At the time, I didn’t feel as if I had a choice.’
‘You paid for that lie long ago,’ said Pekkala, ‘and I will see to it that you are released.’
‘Thank you,’ said Father Detlev, ‘but I would prefer to stay where I am.’
‘In prison?’ Kirov asked, bewildered. ‘For a crime you didn’t commit?’
‘There was a time when I dreamed of seeing the Church of the Resurrection one last time,’ said Detlev.
Pekkala did not have the heart to tell the priest that the church had been destroyed in a battle that took place on the estate, back in the autumn of 1941.
‘In recent years, however,’ continued Detlev, ‘I have come to believe that there is nowhere else but here for me now. The truth is, I am closer to God in this garden, which I made with my own hands, than I ever was in any church.’
Pekkala thanked him for his time and the two men stood up to leave.
‘Aren’t you curious about where we found the icon?’ asked Kirov, as he gathered the bundle from the table.
‘Beside a corpse, I imagine,’ said Detlev.
‘How did you know that?’ asked Pekkala.
Detlev smiled at him. ‘Because everyone who touches that seems to end up dead before their time.’
As Detlev shook hands with the Inspector, he felt a twinge of guilt, like a pinched nerve in his spine. He had told Pekkala his story, as he promised, but he had not told him all of it. He thought back to that evening, when he and Rasputin had driven back across the estate after the meeting with the Tsarina, the drunken Siberian crashing through the gears of the beautiful car.
Suddenly, Rasputin pulled off the road as if he had lost control of the vehicle.
Detlev cried out and covered his face, convinced they were about to crash.
But there was no sickly thud of engine parts against the nearby tree, nor the glittering spray of shattered glass. There was only the sound of Rasputin, laughing quietly at the sight of the priest, whose arms remained wrapped about his head.
Slowly, Detlev lowered his hands. ‘What’s happening? Why have we stopped?’
‘So that there can be no doubt in your mind about the reason I chose you for this task, Father Detlev.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked the priest.
‘I am referring to a certain file, one with your name on it, safely tucked away, at least for now, within the offices of the Tsar’s Secret Police.’
Detlev’s mouth fell open. ‘That part of my life is over and done with! I made a new start. I am a priest now!’
‘Of course,’ Rasputin lifted one hand in a gesture of conciliation, ‘and we would hate to see any obstacle appear in this new and admirable path on which you find yourself. But a man’s past can come back to haunt him, if he is not careful with the present.’
‘In other words,’ said Detlev, his face reddening, ‘I’m going to prison if I do as you ask, and I’ll go there as well if I don’t.’
‘It’s true you’re bound for a jail cell. There’s nothing you can do about that, but your stay there can be long or brief. The choice is entirely yours, Father Detlev.’
For a moment, Detlev did not speak. ‘Then it appears I have no choice at all.’
‘Now you understand!’ Rasputin slapped him on the back.
‘I never thought that someone as exalted as the Tsarina would stoop so low as to blackmail a servant of God.’
‘She’s not blackmailing you. I am!’ Rasputin grinned at the priest’s naivety. ‘Besides, do you honestly believe that the Tsarina needs your police file as an excuse to throw you in prison? File or no file, she could have you put away for life,’ he said, snapping his fingers in Detlev’s face, ‘as fast as that.’
‘Why have you dragged me into this?’ demanded the priest, a note of pleading in his voice. ‘Surely there are others guilty of far worse deeds than mine, whose secrets you can drag from the shadows?’
‘It wasn’t the fact that you had committed crimes which brought you to my attention,’ explained Rasputin. ‘It’s the specific nature of those crimes.’
In the silence that followed, Detlev found it difficult to breathe.
‘Are you beginning to understand me, Father Detlev?’
‘I am,’ he answered quietly. ‘You need me to go back to work.’
‘Precisely!’ boomed the Siberian. He started up the car, and pulled out on to the road again. ‘Just follow my instructions,’ he told the priest, ‘and this will all be over soon.’
‘And when the truth comes out,’ asked Detlev, ‘as it surely must some day? What then?’
Rasputin laughed. ‘There is no truth in Russia! Only rumours backed up with the threat of violence.’
Now, as Detlev watched Pekkala and Kirov make their way among the leafless apple trees towards the mud-splashed car that would take them back to Moscow, he began, very quietly, to laugh. ‘You were wrong, Siberian,’ he muttered. ‘There is truth in this place, after all.’
*
The three men drove back towards Moscow, with Zolkin singing loudly as he swerved around the potholes in the road. Kirov and Pekkala remained silent, lost in thought.
As Pekkala mulled over his conversation with the priest, he kept returning to the moment when Detlev had described handing over the icon to the pale-faced man. If they were ever to trace the path of the icon from the time of its disappearance to the day it was uncovered in the crypt, they would have to find the solution to a riddle which Detlev himself had been unable to solve – what happened to the stranger on the Potsuleyev Bridge?
If, at that moment, Pekkala could have travelled back through time to a lonely, snow-bound road in the winter of 1922, he would have learned the answer to his question.
2 January 1922
Near the village of Markha, west of the city of Irkutsk, Siberia
The stranger was running down the middle of the road. His half-frozen feet splashed in the thick slush which the Siberians call schoom. In spite of the cold, his face was red with exertion and his lungs whistled with every gasping breath he took.
Following him along the otherwise deserted road was a black car, its wipers sweeping jerkily across the windscreen, clearing the fat flakes of snow which drifted down on to the glass.
The man stumbled. He sprawled face down, sending up a spray of icy water, then scrambled to his feet and kept on running.
The car maintained its speed just behind him, making no attempt to overtake the man or block his path. On one side of the road was forest, waist deep in drifts of snow. On the other side, just visible through a screen of trees, a frozen lake spread out towards the horizon.
The stranger’s pace began to falter. His arms flailed like broken wings. The rhythmic puffing of condensed air from his shattered lungs rose like a Morse-code signal endlessly repeated into the sky. Just when it seemed that the running man could go no further, he swerved and threw himself at the tall bank of ploughed snow on the side of the road. He clambered over the dirty, hard-packed chunks of ice and grit and rolled down the other side. A moment later, he was up again and heading for the lake.
The car’s brakes squealed as it came to a stop. The rear door opened and a passenger climbed out. He wore the close-fitting brownish-olive uniform of an officer in the Bolshevik Secret Police, known as the Cheka. He was of medium height, with thin legs tucked into knee-length boots, narrow shoulders and a face so frighteningly gaunt that, when his eyes were closed, he more clo
sely resembled a corpse laid out for a wake than someone whose heart was still beating. Leaving the door open, he set off after the fugitive.
The Cheka officer moved in slow, loping strides towards the lake, his left hand clutching a peculiar wooden holster attached to his belt, to stop it from bouncing against his thigh.
The stranger had already reached the ice, which was covered by a layer of ankle-deep snow. Half blind with fear, he headed for the jagged silhouette of pine trees on the far shore, where the sunset was a smear of red against the clouds. As he ran towards the centre of the lake, he could hear the dry, splintering sound of the ice giving way beneath his feet. Even though his instincts screamed at him to stop, he kept on going, knowing there was nowhere else to go but onward.
For a while, the Cheka officer kept up the pace, but when he began to hear the same sound of cracking ice beneath him, he came to a panicky halt, as if poised at the edge of a cliff.
The only sounds then, reaching across the terrible white silence of that landscape, were the footsteps of the running man and the hollow scraping of his breath.
For a brief moment, it appeared as if the Cheka officer had decided to let his prisoner escape. Then he unbuckled his belt and slid off the bulky wooden holster. Opening the top, he removed a broom-handled Mauser pistol. With movements slowed by freezing fingers, he fitted the butt of the pistol into a locking mechanism located at the forward end of the holster. Tucking the stock into his shoulder, he took aim, drew three deep breaths and on the third breath paused and squeezed the trigger.
The snap of the bullet echoed across the lake.
The spent brass cartridge spun up into the air and then fell, disappearing as the hot brass melted through the snow.
The Cheka officer squinted through the haze of cordite smoke. For a second, he thought he had missed. But then the man slowed and stopped. He bent until his hands were resting on his knees and finally collapsed into the snow.
The officer buckled up his belt and, with the gun still in his hand, took one hesitant step towards the man he had just shot.
‘Commander Dzerzhinsky!’ shouted a voice.
The gunman turned and looked back at the road. There, by the edge of the lake, stood his driver and bodyguard, an ex-bare-knuckle boxer named Pevsner.
‘It’s not worth it, Commander,’ Pevsner called out. ‘The ice is too thin and the man is obviously finished.’
‘How can you be sure?’ replied Dzerzhinsky, his voice travelling cleanly through the winter stillness.
‘If the bullet did not kill him,’ said Pevsner, ‘the cold most certainly will.’
Dzerzhinsky stared doubtfully at the still form of his victim. He took aim with the gun again, but then thought better of it. ‘Not worth another bullet,’ he muttered to himself, then turned and headed back across the ice, replacing the gun inside its hollow wooden stock.
‘That’s the last of them,’ Dzerzhinsky remarked to Pevsner as he climbed into the car. Before he drew his legs in, he tapped his boot heels together, dislodging clumps of snow that had gathered on the soles. The sharp sound echoed through the empty forest, carried away by the cold wind blowing through the treetops.
‘What was his name?’ asked the driver.
‘Kohl,’ answered Dzerzhinsky. ‘Stefan Kohl. One of those Volga River Germans we told to go home at the start of the war. Seems like this one didn’t get the message.’ He hawked and spat, as if to say the words had left a bad taste in his mouth. Then he slammed the door shut. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, ‘before we freeze to death as well.’
With a series of turns, some of which threatened to strand it in the snow banks, the car headed back in the direction from which it had come. After a while, the headlights came on and their beams carved a path through the frost-glistening air.
As the Emka ...
As the Emka rattled back towards Moscow, Kirov finally gave voice to the thing which plagued both of their minds. ‘We’ll never find out who that stranger was,’ he said. ‘Everyone who might have known – the Tsar, the Tsarina, Rasputin – they’re all dead.’
‘Not quite everyone,’ replied Pekkala.
‘Then who?’ asked Kirov.
‘Vyroubova,’ he said. ‘Anna Alexandrovna Vyroubova.’
‘But she fled the country years ago. Who knows where she is hiding now?’
‘I do,’ answered Pekkala. ‘Finding her is not the hard part, Major Kirov. It’s getting her to talk that will be difficult. For that, I’ll need to pay a visit to the country of my birth.’
Not long after this, Pekkala found himself in a two-seater Polikarpov Po-2 biplane as it droned through the morning mist, barely sixty feet above the ground, near the Russo-Finnish border east of the town of Lappeenranta.
The plane was piloted by a frail and serious-looking woman named Marina Popova. Even in the plane, she wore a skirt along with clunky black boots that came up almost to her knees and a gymnastiorka tunic festooned with medals.
Popova was on loan from a squadron of women pilots who specialised in bombing German front-line positions at night. For this, they had been equipped with hopelessly outdated planes, so slow and ponderous that they were normally reserved for crop dusting.
The fact that the Polikarpov’s top speed was slower than the stalling speed of German planes sent out to intercept them meant that the Po-2s were actually very difficult for the enemy to shoot down. Added to this was the pilots’ tactic of cutting their engines as they neared the German lines, so that they glided in over their targets, with only the sound of the wind whistling through their wing struts. This eerie noise had earned them the name of ‘Night Witches’.
‘No parachutes?’ Pekkala had asked, as he climbed into the forward of the two cockpits. The pilot and the passenger sat in separate compartments, each one open to the air, rather than sitting side by side.
‘There’s no point,’ replied Popova. ‘We fly so low that the chute would never open in time.’
‘Exactly how low will we be travelling?’ asked Pekkala, as he tried and failed to hide his consternation.
The answer to this soon became apparent as Pekkala stared out through a pair of fur-trimmed goggles at the haze of the propeller only an arm’s length in front of him and the tops of the pine trees so close to the fixed wheels of the Polikarpov that they seemed to be bouncing along the roof of the forest.
Just over the Russian side of the border, the plane landed in a forest clearing which had been paved with a corduroy road of felled trees. With his spine shaken by the landing, Pekkala emerged from the cockpit and stood back while the Polikarpov taxied about, revving its engine for take-off. Soon it had vanished into the clouds and Pekkala found himself alone.
But his solitude did not last long.
A man soon appeared at the far end of the clearing. He was tall and thickly bearded, and his dirty skin glistened as if it had been smeared with motor oil. Slowly, he raised one hand.
Pekkala raised his own hand in reply. A guide had been arranged for him through the Bureau of Special Operations in Moscow, but he had no idea whom to expect, and wasn’t even sure if this was the right person.
The man did not come out to meet Pekkala. Instead, he stepped backwards into the shadows and waited.
Pekkala set off towards him, treading carefully over the uneven ground.
At last he reached the cover of the trees. Face to face with the man, Pekkala was surprised to discover that the stranger wore his clothes inside out.
Noticing the look of confusion on Pekkala’s face, the man explained. ‘When you get where you are going, you don’t want to look like a man who’s been wandering in the woods.’
Seeing the wisdom in this, Pekkala stripped down to his underclothes, pulled his trousers and his coat inside out and dressed himself in the fashion of his guide.
When this strange ritual had finally been completed, the man introduced himself. ‘My name is Hokkanen,’ said the man. ‘I deserted from the Finnish Army in the winte
r of 1940. Now I am an errand boy for the Bureau of Special Operations. One day, I know, I will outlive my usefulness. Whenever I am summoned to this clearing, I wonder if they’ve sent someone to kill me.’
‘Not this time,’ replied Pekkala.
Hokkanen nodded. ‘Try to keep up,’ he said, ‘and tread quietly if you want to stay alive.’
For several hours, the two men headed west, skirting the edge of a great swamp, where thickets of frozen bulrushes, each with its own skullcap of snow, swayed and rattled in the frost-glittering air.
Pekkala marvelled at how little sound Hokkanen made as he travelled through the forest. He moved with a strange and cautious tread, placing the tips of his toes upon the earth before allowing the rest of his foot to make contact with the ground.
Eventually, they came to a long, straight, empty road.
‘We have crossed the border now,’ said Hokkanen. ‘This is as far as I go.’
Reaching into his pocket, Pekkala pulled out a small leather bag containing gold coins and tossed it to the guide. Hokkanen tucked it away in his shirt without examining the contents.
‘Aren’t you going to count it?’ asked Pekkala.
‘If I don’t show up to lead you back to the airfield,’ he replied, ‘you’ll know that it wasn’t enough.’ Then he pointed to the south. ‘That way is Lappeenranta. I will see you here again in three days’ time. If you’re late, I’ll leave without you.’ Then he turned and walked back among the trees, moving with his careful, deer-like steps until he had faded away among the bony ranks of birches.
Finding himself alone again, the first thing Pekkala did was to put his clothes back on the right way around.
It had been a long time since he had last set foot in Finland. Even though the trees on one side of the border looked much the same as the trees upon the other, nevertheless, Pekkala felt in his chest the strange, gyroscopic balance of knowing he’d returned to the place where he was from. In spite of that, he knew he could not stay. The course of his life had steered him to a different land, and had given him purpose there and he knew that what a person does, not where they do it, is the thing which makes them who they are. One day, perhaps, Pekkala would return for good, but that day had not yet come. For now, in many ways, he was more of a stranger in this place than if he’d never been here at all.