Red Icon

by Sam Eastland

  He passed the church where the service for his father had been held. This building showed more damage than any of the others he had seen so far. Of the few artillery shells which had landed in Ahlborn, only this one had done any real harm. The roof tiles of the church hung crooked like a set of rotten teeth. All along the front of the church, the stained-glass windows were smashed in and the lead bands which had held each piece of glass in place sagged like the wet strands of a spiderweb. Through the open door, Emil could see titled pews and hymn books strewn about.

  At that moment, Emil was startled to hear a voice coming from somewhere inside the church where his father was buried. Someone had cried out, not in fear, it seemed to Emil, but in sadness and exasperation. Curious, he walked to the entrance of the church. The smell of old sandalwood incense, sunk into the walls from centuries of use, mingled with the damp odour of the charred roof beams.

  ‘Hello?’ he called into the dark.

  There was a rustling noise, and then the swishing sound of footfalls on stone steps. Someone appeared from a doorway beside the altar, which Emil knew led to the crypt. He remembered helping Stefan to carry his father’s coffin down the narrow staircase to the airless little chamber where the bones of other priests lay in their brittle wooden boxes. Even before Emil could discern the features of the man’s face, he recognised from the silhouette that it was his brother. ‘Stefan?’ he called.

  Stefan stopped in his tracks.

  He had arrived in town only an hour before. When he learned that the Soviet onslaught had failed to materialise and that fighting in the village had been limited to a few small skirmishes between reconnaissance groups on both sides, he had slipped away from the tide of refugees, stolen a rickety bicycle and ridden back to Ahlborn. The first thing he did was to go straight to the church. Ever since leaving the village, he had been tormented by the thought that the icon might have been destroyed in the skirmishes. His first glimpse of the church, with its windows stoved in and door smashed open, seemed to confirm his worst fears. He raced into the building and shoved aside the splintered furniture, until he reached the door which led down to the crypt. In spite of the damage to the interior, at least the building was intact, and he took this as a hopeful sign that the icon might be safe, after all. It never occurred to him that the icon might have been removed from its hiding place. His only fear was that the crypt might have been engulfed in flames, or that its ceiling had collapsed. It was not until he had lit the oil lamp hanging on the wall that the possibility of theft occurred to him. As he stood among the splintered fragments of his father’s coffin, staring down at the brittle, frost-gloved hands of Viktor Kohl, Stefan realised the icon had been stolen. He could not understand why this coffin was the only one that had been opened. It was as if the thieves had known exactly what they were looking for.

  A part of him still refused to believe it. He began to prise the lids from the other coffins, in case, perhaps, he had placed the icon in the wrong one. One by one, he tipped out bodies and skeletons on to the floor, until he was wading through bones and the air was filled with a sweet and sickly-smelling dust which made the oil lamp sputter and clogged his lungs until he could barely breathe.

  The Shepherd was gone.

  Stefan Kohl dropped to his knees, pressed his filthy hands against his face and wept. It was the first time in his life that he had ever been completely without hope. Even lying on the frozen lake, and all around him the snow stained pink with his own blood, the certainty of death had brought with it the comfort of finality. Now he felt neither alive nor dead, but trapped someplace in between. He remembered the words of Belyakina – If The Shepherd is destroyed, then so are we. He had lived with that nightmare ever since, knowing that he alone bore the burden of its safekeeping. And he had failed. There was no chance of finding it again, or so it seemed to him just then, nor was there any possibility of learning who had taken it. From what he had heard, both German and Russian troops had entered the town since he had left. The icon could just as easily have been taken by one side as another. By now, The Shepherd could be a thousand kilometres away in any direction. Even if the icon did show up, some day far into the future, it would doubtless be so heavily guarded that acquiring it again would be impossible. These thoughts raked through his stomach, as if his guts were being sliced with razor blades.

  At that moment, he noticed the leather jacket lying heaped in the corner, with a Red Army pass book sticking out of one pocket, and several battered campaign medals pinned to the chest.

  Climbing stiffly to his feet, Stefan went over to the jacket and lifted it off the floor. The medals pinned to its chest clunked together with a dull sound. He removed the pass book and saw that it belonged to Antonin Proskuryakov, a captain in the 4th Guards’ Kantemirovskaya Armoured Division. There was also a set of papers, granting Proskuryakov three weeks’ leave at the time and permission to travel by whatever means he could acquire to his home in the city of Noginsk.

  For a brief moment, the possibility that he might find this man flickered to life in Stefan’s mind, but just as suddenly it died away again. The jacket was no guarantee that this Proskuryakov had discovered the icon. In all likelihood the man is dead, thought Stefan. Why else would he have left his jacket, his medals and all his papers behind?

  You could spend the rest of your life searching for the thief, Stefan thought to himself, and have nothing to show for it at the end. He just had to face the fact that there was nothing to be done.

  Stefan let the heavy coat slip from his grasp. After replacing his father’s remains in his coffin, he picked up the lamp and turned to leave, kicking his way through remaining hollow skulls and crooked hoops of pelvic bones until he reached the stairs. Each step he took towards daylight seemed to hammer home the certainty of his loss. A long, deep moan escaped his lips. It was a sound he’d never heard before, as if the dead had snatched his breath away and now were calling out to him with his own voice.

  He had almost reached the top of the stairs when he saw a figure standing in the doorway to the church. It looked like Emil, although Stefan could not fathom why his brother would be here. After their last meeting, Stefan had never expected to see him again. I must be mistaken, he thought, or else hallucinating, but the closer he came to the man, the more certain he was that the person waiting for him in the doorway was indeed his older brother. It was Emil who spoke first. ‘The last time we met, you told me you would always be here to help.’

  ‘Yes.’ Stefan nodded, still confused.

  ‘Well, brother,’ Emil said, ‘I need it now.’

  The two men left the ruins of the church and made their way towards Stefan’s house. Emil explained his situation.

  As Stefan listened to his older brother, a plan of his own began to emerge which, if it worked, might save them both from ruin. Stefan said nothing of the icon. He had never trusted anyone with that secret and he wasn’t about to start now.

  That night, over a meal of smoked pork and pickled eggs, Stefan agreed to cross the border into Russia and to make contact with scientists at the chemical research facility in Sosnogorsk. For this, Emil provided him with the address of a professor named Arbusov, whom he had known before the war, as well as a vial of the soman, which would serve as his credentials to the Soviets.

  To guard against the possibility that it might be found in a search, Emil transferred the liquid into a metal flask, once owned by his father, which had contained holy water brought back from a pilgrimage to Lourdes.

  Stefan promised to return as quickly as he could and the two men agreed that Emil should wait here at the house.

  The following morning, Emil saw him to the door. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told his brother.

  Stefan looked surprised. It was the first apology he had ever received from his brother and he didn’t even know what it was for.

  ‘I can’t pretend to understand the choices you have made,’ explained Emil, ‘but I see now that I should, at least, have tried.’

&
nbsp; Carrying the identity papers of Antonin Proskuryakov, which he had retrieved along with the captain’s medal-festooned jacket from the crypt, Stefan Kohl set out towards Moscow. Later that day, he flagged down a cart driven by a Russian Army private named Elias Matorin, who was too struck by the sight of Stefan’s awards to notice that the officer wore a muddy pair of civilian trousers.

  Matorin was a gentle, wistful-looking man with callused hands from years of riding horses and fingers made crooked by arthritis. Before the Revolution, he had served as one of the guards at the Winter Palace. Because of their burgundy-red tunics and gold sashes, they had been known as the Gilded Regiment. On that day in October of 1917, when the palace was stormed by revolutionary soldiers, Matorin had barely escaped with his life. He travelled far from Petrograd and, when he married ten years later, even his wife did not know about his past. Matorin lived quietly and, until the war broke out, he had been a chef at a tavern on the road between Salavat and Kumertau, down near the border of Kazakhstan. In spite of his age, Matorin had been called up in the spring of 1942 and had worked in an army field kitchen ever since.

  When he stopped to pick up the captain, Matorin had been returning from the front line with six empty soup urns.

  It was an hour’s ride back to the field kitchen and Matorin was glad of the company.

  The cart rattled along over the empty road and the two men sat side by side, squinting in the jungly sunlight coming down through the overhanging branches of the trees.

  When Stefan said that he was heading home on leave, Matorin got tears in his eyes. He had never been granted a furlough and he missed his wife. Matorin wondered how she was getting on without him, and he worried she was getting on just fine. ‘I would like very much to go home,’ he told the officer.

  Stefan put his arm around Matorin’s shoulder. ‘You will,’ he said, and then he knifed the old man through the heart, so savagely that the blade came out through his back. Matorin fell back among the empty soup urns. The reins slipped from his grasp. Feeling the traces go slack, the horses shambled to a stop. Stefan dragged Matorin into the woods, stripped the body and put on the old man’s clothes, after washing the blood from his tunic in a stream. Matorin’s threadbare gymnastiorka bore no rank or insignia, which was common among front-line troops. Lastly, Stefan put on the leather jacket and buttoned it up to the throat. There was no time to bury the body, which lay spread-eagled on its back, the dappled shadows playing across Matorin’s dingy undergarments.

  As Stefan climbed back on to the cart, he noticed an old Nagant revolver tucked under the seat. Its narrow, curved handle had been thickly wrapped with black cloth electrical tape. Matorin had done this because, with his arthritic hands, he had been unable to grip the gun properly. Stefan checked that the Nagant was loaded, spun the chamber and then tucked the gun into his pocket.

  Even with the horse and cart, his journey to Moscow took longer than he had expected. The roads were jammed with military traffic and many checkpoints had been set up along the way. Some of these he was able to detour around. At others, he took his chances, using the papers which had been issued to Captain Proskuryakov. Stefan’s luck changed when he reached a railhead near the city of Brasovo. By then, it was already 17 February. A train had just pulled in, carrying wounded from the front. Abandoning the cart, he showed his papers to a doctor on the train and explained that he was trying to get home on leave. Impressed by the captain’s Order of the Red Banner medal, the doctor allowed him to climb aboard.

  On 19 February 1945 Stefan Kohl finally reached Moscow. Arriving at the Saratovsky Station on the southern outskirts of Moscow, he crossed the Moskva River on the Krasnocholsk Bridge. From there, he made his way to the Taganskaya Square and followed the long Taganskaya Boulevard until he found the cemetery.

  He was looking for Argamak, the Skoptsy gravedigger he had met when he passed through the city years before.

  Stefan had no doubt that when Soviet authorities learned of his brother’s work at IG Farben, they would leap at the chance to acquire the skills of such a valuable scientist. Emil’s idea had simply been to trade his skills for a place in the Russian scientific community, but Stefan also saw an opportunity for himself.

  Discovery of The Shepherd would quickly reach the ears of Joseph Stalin and the icon would soon find its way to Moscow. All Stefan had to do was make it a condition of Emil’s transfer to the Soviets that they deliver the icon to him first. The Communists would not hesitate to exchange what to them was a worthless relic of a failed religion for a weapon of such devastating power.

  But first he had to get their attention. For that, Stefan needed a place to lie low until he could broker the deal.

  There was only one person whom he knew he could turn to for help, and that was Argamak.

  At the edge of the cemetery, Stefan found the gravedigger’s hut, looking much the same as it had done before, with its heaps of firewood outside and damaged tombstones propped against the wall.

  But the man he found inside, dozing in the bed, was not Argamak.

  ‘He died two years ago,’ explained the man, blinking the sleep from his eyes. He pulled his suspenders up over a shirt almost as dirty as the one Argamak had worn, and lit the samovar for tea. ‘My name is Bersin. I took his place. Were you a friend of his?’

  ‘Yes,’ Stefan answered in a daze. He knew that he should have taken it into account, but Argamak had seemed so indestructible that this news of his death still managed to catch him by surprise.

  ‘Funny you should come looking for him now,’ said Beresin. ‘A letter just arrived for him.’ He nodded to an envelope, which had been pinned to one of the bare planks that made up the wall of the hut. You might as well have it. It’s no good to him and it’s no good to me, either, since I never learned to read.’

  Stefan took the letter from the wall. He sat down by the stove and read the words of Prison Warder First Class Feodor Turkov, describing the visit of Inspector Pekkala and his assistant, Major Kirov of the Bureau of Special Operations.

  ‘I was told to notify you if ever something happened,’ wrote Turkov. ‘I hope this piece of news is worth reporting, as there has been no other since I came to Karaganda years ago.’

  As Turkov went on to describe how the icon of The Shepherd was now in the hands of Inspector Pekkala, Stefan knew he’d have to change his calculations.

  The day after his arrival in the city, Stefan mailed the bottle, with its cheerful depiction of Lourdes, to Father Detlev’s address. He knew from his brother’s descriptions exactly what kind of a death awaited the old priest. But he didn’t care. Detlev had committed the unforgivable sin of aiding those who sought to put an end to the Skoptsy faith. For men like that, thought Stefan, no manner of ending was too cruel.

  When Pekkala learned of Detlev’s murder, it would not take the Inspector long to grasp that somebody out there wanted the icon back, nor to understand what could be offered in return. It would then be a simple matter of making contact with Pekkala, and making clear the terms of his proposal.

  Knowing that it would take several days for the package to reach Karaganda, Stefan decided to keep Pekkala’s office under observation until then. It was not hard to learn the great Inspector’s whereabouts. He accomplished this by striding into NKVD headquarters and announcing to the clerk at the front desk that he had an urgent message for the Inspector, direct from General Voroshilov at the front, which had to be delivered at once. Cowed by the mention of the general, and intimidated by the array of battered medals on this dirt-spattered ‘Frontovik’, the clerk hurriedly wrote out the address of Pekkala’s office and handed it over.

  *

  Right about the time when Stefan knew that the soman would have reached the priest, Pekkala abruptly departed from Moscow, bound, presumably, for Karaganda. This caught Stefan completely by surprise. It was a long, hard journey to the prison and Stefan had assumed that Pekkala would simply receive a report about what had happened to Father Detlev, rather than need
to examine the murder scene first-hand.

  With Pekkala out of the city, Stefan saw his chance to break into the Inspector’s Pitnikov street office and steal the icon now, rather than wade through the dangerous business of a negotiation. By the time Pekkala returned, Stefan and the icon could be far away from Moscow. After that, a message mailed to the Inspector, giving Emil’s whereabouts and explaining his brother’s intention to defect, would accomplish the rest of what he had set out to achieve.

  But it all went terribly wrong. Not only did Stefan fail to locate the icon, but he was forced to kill a man named Kratky who appeared at the office after he had broken in. Kratky’s body was discovered and the place was soon crawling with police. Stefan knew that he had squandered his advantage, but he couldn’t leave Moscow yet, not without the icon. He had come too far to turn back now.

  Stefan broke into a ground-floor apartment across the road from Pekkala’s building. It was a dingy little dwelling, accessed through a door halfway down a narrow alleyway. The tenant was a former pilot named Felix Ivanchenko, who had broken his back in crash landing a Sturmovik the year before. Although he made a partial recovery, Ivanchenko was discharged from the service and left to subsist on a meagre pension. This basement was the only thing he could afford.

  When Ivanchenko returned from spending the afternoon at the library, where he often whiled away the afternoons, reading through old periodicals, Stefan grabbed him as he walked through the door. One look at Stefan, and Ivanchenko was in no doubt about what would become of him. He made no attempt to resist.