Red Icon

by Sam Eastland

  In the split second before Stefan killed Ivanchenko with a single, massive blow to the bridge of his nose, he saw in the doomed man’s expression a look which could have passed for gratitude.

  That night, Stefan prised up the flimsy wooden floorboards in the kitchen to the soft, powdery dirt which lay beneath. There, he dug a shallow grave and buried the man before replacing the boards and tapping the nails back in place with the heel of his boot.

  As soon as the police departed, he imagined in a day or two, and Pekkala had returned from Karaganda, he would approach Pekkala directly, kidnapping the man if necessary, and deliver his terms for handing over Emil and the soman.

  In the meantime, Stefan settled down to wait, subsisting off a case of tinned sardines which was the only food Ivanchenko had in his cupboard. From the front window of the apartment, he could keep an eye upon the building across the street, where Pekkala kept his office.

  While Pekkala underestimated Stefan’s tenacity, believing that surely the Skoptsy assassin would have chosen to flee the city after Kratky’s murder, Stefan, too, had miscalculated the Kremlin’s response.

  When Pekkala arrived back from his journey to Karaganda, along with the Special Operations major who travelled with him, Stefan was alarmed to see the regular police replaced by plainclothes agents, who kept Pekkala’s building under 24-hour surveillance, although they failed to conduct a house-to-house search, which might have resulted in Stefan’s capture.

  Stefan was trapped. If he tried to leave the apartment, the agents would spot him at once. All he could do was draw upon his last reserves of patience, and bide his time until Stalin called off his watchdogs.

  On the afternoon of 12 March, by which time Stefan had been hiding in the apartment for more than a week, the plainclothes agents suddenly departed. Hidden from view by the thick lace curtain which covered the window, Stefan watched the men slip away as quietly as they had appeared. Now, at last, he could get out of this wretched cave, which had been his home far longer than he had anticipated.

  All he had to do now, he thought, was to wait for Pekkala to leave the building at the end of the day. Then he could follow the Inspector to wherever the man lived and there, at gunpoint, if necessary, he could deliver his ultimatum to Pekkala. As long as Emil remained safely hidden in Ahlborn, the threat of the soman’s devastating potential would ensure Stefan’s safety.

  Instead, he was astonished to see a Red Army staff car pull up in front of 22 Pitnikov Street, followed moments later by the Inspector himself, who emerged from the building along with the tall, skinny major from Special Operations, and a woman who appeared to be either the major’s wife or his fiancée, judging from the way they spoke to each other. After a short conversation with Pekkala’s driver, in which Stefan distinctly overheard the word ‘Ahlborn’, Pekkala and the major climbed into the staff car and were driven away, leaving the driver and the woman behind.

  Having heard the word ‘Ahlborn’ and witnessing this sudden departure, Stefan panicked. In his mind, there could only be one reason for this sudden turn of events – Pekkala had somehow discovered where Emil was hiding, and they must now be on their way to apprehend him. Stefan knew that if he did not get there first, and warn his brother, he would have nothing left with which to bargain for the icon.

  In that moment, a desperate idea occurred to him. He stuffed a few cans of sardines into his pockets. Then, slinging his heavy jacket over his arm, Stefan tucked his butcher’s knife beneath the heavy folds of leather and, for the first time in almost a week, stepped out into the alleyway.

  *

  Zolkin and Elizaveta watched the Red Army staff car, bearing Kirov and Pekkala to the Kremlin for their meeting with Stalin, as it reached the end of Pitnikov Street, turned the corner and was gone.

  Now they found themselves awkwardly alone together.

  ‘I’ve never had a bodyguard before,’ said Elizaveta, trying to make conversation.

  ‘And I have never been one,’ Zolkin replied earnestly.

  ‘But you look like a bodyguard to me.’

  Zolkin wore army breeches, tucked into tall black boots, and over an olive cotton shirt he had on a waistcoat of civilian manufacture, which he usually wore under a heavy double-breasted canvas jacket normally reserved for the crews of armoured vehicles. But it was a warm day and Zolkin had left the coat hanging on a nail inside the garage.

  ‘Appearances count for a lot in your new line of work,’ she said encouragingly.

  It was true, his thickly muscled arms and bear-like shoulders did much to conceal the gentleness of his nature.

  ‘Then let us set off on our first mission together,’ announced the sergeant.

  ‘And what is that?’ asked Elizaveta.

  ‘To bring you home!’

  Zolkin fished a bundle of keys from his pocket and jangled them in his hand. ‘I’ll just pull the car out,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ said Elizaveta. ‘It’s only a five-minute walk.’

  Zolkin paused, the keys still clutched in his hand. ‘Walk?’

  ‘Unless that is somehow beneath you,’ replied Elizaveta.

  ‘It’s just that, once you’ve been a driver, going anywhere on foot just seems a waste of time. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to get there more quickly? The Emka is ready to go!’ He made a hopeful gesture towards the garage.

  ‘No,’ Elizaveta told him flatly. ‘Now close that place up and come with me.’

  With a groan of resignation, Zolkin set his shoulder to the heavy wooden door, which rolled across the front of the garage. It fastened with a huge bronze padlock, the key for which was on the bundle which Zolkin carried with him everywhere.

  Turning the corner of Pitnikov Street, they set off down Trubnaya Street. Zolkin plodded along behind Elizaveta, looking like a scolded dog.

  After a while, Elizaveta stopped and turned. ‘Are you going to drag your heels all the way there?’

  ‘It just seems proper,’ Zolkin said defensively. ‘I am your bodyguard, after all.’

  Elizaveta rolled her eyes. ‘For goodness’ sake, Zolkin, stop fussing and walk here beside me!’

  Zolkin did as he was told and they continued for a while without speaking.

  As people passed them on the street, Elizaveta noticed how others moved aside to let them pass, readily giving ground before the imposing bulk of Zolkin. Zolkin himself seemed completely unaware of the deference they showed to him.

  It was rarely the case that anyone stepped aside for Elizaveta, as she was neither tall nor imposing. Even with her husband, the effect wasn’t quite the same. If people did give ground to him, it usually seemed to be because of his uniform, rather than his physical presence. Elizaveta couldn’t help enjoying this new and powerful sensation, even if it was for all the wrong reasons.

  Zolkin still hadn’t said a word.

  ‘What is on your mind?’ Elizaveta asked at last.

  ‘I was thinking,’ Zolkin replied eventually, ‘that since you probably won’t be wanting the car at all, I might as well just drain the oil and remove the battery while your husband and the Inspector are away.’

  ‘Then we wouldn’t be able to go on the picnic,’ said Elizaveta.

  ‘What picnic?’ asked the driver.

  ‘The one I have planned for tomorrow.’ The thought had only just occurred to her, but it already seemed like a good idea. ‘I have two friends where I work, in the records office on the fourth floor of Lubyanka. One is Corporal Koroleva and the other, whom I would like you to meet, is Sergeant Gatkina.’

  ‘What’s she like?’ asked Zolkin.

  ‘Oh, you’ll see,’ she answered vaguely. In truth, Sergeant Gatkina was no great beauty. Elizaveta knew of lotteries, down on the third and second floors, for when and if Gatkina ever smiled. She chain-smoked rough machorka cigarettes from dawn to dusk, which had given her a voice as gravelly as a tiger’s, if such an animal had ever spoken Russian. Her hair was a thicket of grey brambly curls and the
colour of her eyes was unknown to almost everyone, so fiercely did she squint at the world. As if that were not enough, she had a habit of stubbing out her cigarettes as if breaking the neck of some small animal that had strayed into her clutches.

  This fearsome reputation had served to ward off even the most determined of suitors.

  Gatkina may have given the impression that she was content to keep the world at arm’s length, but in truth she was lonely – terribly lonely – and would gladly have put away the armour of her gruffness if someone could be found to remove it.

  That someone could be Zolkin, thought Elizaveta. He would not be deterred by the things which drove others away. It was Zolkin’s sheer obliviousness that gave her hope. In the past, she had even considered Pekkala as a possible partner for the sergeant. But she quickly abandoned the idea. No matter how lonely Gatkina might be, it would be simply cruel to inflict upon her the eccentricities of the Inspector. What could you say about a man who prefers to sleep on the floor? Elizaveta wondered to herself, and who, according to her husband, cried out in his sleep in his strange and guttural native tongue, as if he was pursued by wolves across the landscape of his dreams? No, thought Elizaveta. I will spare my beloved and misunderstood boss the impossible task of loving a man like Pekkala.

  It was true Zolkin did have some unusual habits of his own. After all, he lived in a garage and spent his nights in a hammock, hanging from the ceiling like a silkworm in a cocoon. But those were matters of practicality, she persuaded herself, not facets of the man’s true nature.

  ‘Where will we go on this picnic?’ asked Zolkin, his mood brightening at the thought. ‘What will we have to eat?’

  This isn’t about food! Elizaveta wanted to yell in his ear. This is about love! But she simply shrugged and said, ‘Let’s let Sergeant Gatkina decide.’

  By now, they had turned off Trubnaya Street and were walking along Pushkarev Street. It was much quieter here and, except for a few passers-by, they had the pavement to themselves.

  One man emerged from an alleyway, carrying a brown leather coat over his arm, and walked in their direction. He was tall and muscular, much like Zolkin himself, and Elizaveta found herself wondering which one of them would give way to the other. She became so curious about it that she even stepped a little to the side, forcing Zolkin into the man’s path, so that one of them would have to step out into the street in order to get by. She felt a little wicked to be conducting such an experiment, but no harm would be done, after all.

  Other than this man, the street was empty.

  As the stranger approached, he cast a glance at Elizaveta.

  Elizaveta caught his eye. Defiantly, and to her own surprise, she returned his stare, a thing she would never have done if she were on her own.

  Zolkin was paying no attention. Instead, he was carrying on about the food he would like for the picnic.

  Just when it seemed as if the two men would collide, the other man stepped out into the road.

  A faint, but satisfied smile crept across Elizaveta’s lips.

  In that moment, the man appeared to stumble. Perhaps he had caught his foot amongst the cobblestones which lined the gutter.

  Elizaveta felt a sudden stab of guilt, knowing she had caused this little incident.

  The man tipped to the side and his coat, which had been neatly folded over his arm, wafted up in Zolkin’s face.

  The driver shied away, eyes closed and lips pressed tight together.

  Elizaveta saw a flash of silver, which she took to be sunlight off a cufflink of the stranger’s.

  Then the man regained his footing and Elizaveta sighed with relief, glad that he had not ended up sprawled in the street on her account.

  She walked on a couple of paces. Then, conscious that Zolkin was no longer beside her, she turned. Her first thought was that Zolkin had stopped to have a word with the stranger, but what she saw when she turned made her face go numb with fear.

  Zolkin stood on the pavement, one hand held against his neck. Blood was squirting from between his fingers. His face bore an expression of complete surprise.

  ‘What happened?’ she gasped.

  Slowly, Zolkin dropped to his knees and, with his one free hand, groped across the pavement until he sat down with his back against the wall of a house.

  The stranger crouched down in front of Zolkin, reached into the driver’s waistcoat pocket and removed his set of keys and fuel-ration booklet. Then he stood and walked calmly towards Elizaveta, one hand held out as if to comfort her. His face was ghostly pale, like flesh preserved in formaldehyde.

  A wave of terror swept across her mind. ‘What happened?’ she asked again, but even as she spoke, she saw the man slide a long butcher’s knife back into the folds of his coat.

  Elizaveta tried to cry out, but she found that she could barely speak, and there was no one else around.

  Then the stranger laid her out with a single punch, the way he had learned to drop horses, focusing his power a hand’s breadth beyond the place where he knew that his fist would connect. He had never hit a woman before and even though he could easily have killed her, he was careful not to do so. So little of his strength went into knocking her out that it almost felt gentle to him. He caught her as she tumbled to the ground. Leaving the driver to bleed to death, he bundled the woman into the boot of the Emka and set off towards Ahlborn, determined to arrive before Pekkala.

  *

  Meanwhile, in Stefan’s plainly furnished house in Ahlborn, Emil Kohl paced like a cat in a cage. His nerves were strained to breaking point. He had been there for over a month and, although he had anticipated that it would take some time for Stefan to make contact with Professor Arbusov, his Soviet counterpart in the field of organophosphate chemistry, he had not imagined ever having to wait this long.

  Ever since his brother had left for Russia, Emil’s mind had been plagued with doubts.

  He wondered if Stefan had been arrested, or even killed, or if by accident or out of curiosity he had opened the vial of soman, in which case he would have died on the spot, taking with him anyone who happened to be standing nearby. There was a third possibility, which was that Stefan had simply abandoned him to his fate. As the days wore on, this last option began to seem increasingly likely.

  Emil cursed himself for having placed his faith in his younger brother. The more he thought about it, the more insane it seemed that he should have trusted him at all.

  It was cold in the house. Even a small fire would have made a difference, but Stefan had warned him against lighting one, since the smoke would let people know he was there. His brother had left him with plenty of food, but almost all of it was meat. The man was a butcher, after all. The meat had been smoked with a variety of woods – oak, maple and alder – and hung in blackened strips from racks in the kitchen. The smell of it, which Emil had initially found pleasant, if a little overpowering, had now suffused into his clothes, his hair and his skin. He tasted the smoke every time he took a breath, and its stench had become nauseating.

  The day after Stefan left for Moscow, Emil had been woken by the ear-splitting roar of engines. As his eyes snapped open, his first thought was that a tank was coming through the wall. He screamed, tipped himself on to the floor and crawled under the bed, just as six Messerschmitt 262 jet fighters screeched past at treetop level, heading east on their morning patrol. The whole house shook. The windows rippled as if the glass had turned to water. The vibration was still shuddering in his bones as he slithered out from beneath the bed and rushed to the window, just in time to see the planes pass out of sight, leaving behind oil-black trails of exhaust. He had heard about the new jet planes and recognised their Jumo engines from classified documents he had seen from a project designed to produce synthetic fuel. There was also the sound they made; not the buzz-saw hum of a propeller plane, but something that sounded to Professor Kohl more like a hive full of angry bees. There had been much talk, not only at IG Farben but in the press as well, of secret new �
�revenge’ weapons soon to be unleashed upon the Allies, which would turn the tide of the war. From the first mention of these Vergeltungswaffen, Professor Kohl had assumed that the Sartaman Project would feature prominently in this new arsenal of destruction. But now the fading rumble of the 262s seemed to drive home the fact that he, and his inventions, had been left out of the Führer’s grand equation.

  The planes returned a little over an hour later and this time Emil got a better look at their grey, shark-like silhouettes, the black German crosses almost hidden among blooms of camouflage paint, like giant, sooty fingerprints.

  Two hours later, they flew past again and a third time before the sun went down, causing the house to tremble as if caught in the grip of an earthquake.

  These regularly scheduled tremors became a daily fixture in Emil’s existence. He grew to anticipate them, becoming more and more agitated as the time for their arrival drew near. And if they were late, even by a few minutes, he found himself with his nose pressed to the window, peering up through the trees to catch a glimpse of them as they flew past.

  This, combined with inactivity and loneliness, was driving Kohl close to distraction, but still he did not dare go outside.

  As the days passed, and the time allotted for his leave expired, Emil began to dwell upon the fact that his absence would, by now, have been reported. The disappearance of an IG Farben chemist, particularly one with his level of expertise and having been involved in such delicate work, would not be a matter for the bumbling municipal police. The matter would be handed over to the Secret State Police. It was only a matter of time before the Gestapo came knocking at his door and once they got their hands on him, all chance of escape would be lost.

  I can’t just sit here waiting to be arrested, thought Emil, staring out of the window at the dirt road lined with pine trees, which was his only view from the front of the house. From the back, all he could see was a small overgrown yard, filled with firewood and bordered by a tall stockade fence.