by Sam Eastland
When Maximov went off to fetch his car, Kirov turned to Pekkala. “Why don’t we start by arresting that bastard?”
“Arrest him?” asked Pekkala. “On what charges?”
“I don’t know!” spluttered Kirov. “What about cowardice?”
“You seem to have made up your mind about him very quickly.”
“Sometimes a moment is all it takes,” insisted Kirov. “I’ve seen him before, you know. He was sitting at the table that day I went into Chicherin’s restaurant to find Nagorski. I didn’t like the look of him then and I like him even less now.”
“Did you stop to think that maybe he was right?”
“Right about what?”
“About not running into those woods. After all, why did you run?”
Kirov frowned, confused. “I ran because you ran, Inspector.”
“And do you know why I ran,” asked Pekkala, “in spite of the warning Samarin had given us?”
“No,” shrugged Kirov, “I suppose I don’t.”
“Neither do I,” replied Pekkala. “So it is only luck that we are standing here instead of lying in the ground.”
Maximov’s car appeared from behind one of the buildings and made its way towards them.
“I need you to keep an eye on Lysenkova,” Pekkala told Kirov. “Whatever you learn, keep it to yourself for now. And keep your temper, too.”
“That,” muttered the young major, “I cannot promise you.”
WITH PEKKALA IN THE FRONT PASSENGER SEAT, MAXIMOV DROVE along a narrow road leading away from the dreary facility.
“I am sorry about my assistant,” said Pekkala. “Sometimes he does things without thinking.”
“Seems to me,” replied Maximov, “that he is not the only one. But if you are worried about my feelings, Comrade Inspector, you can save yourself the trouble.”
“Where are you from, Maximov?”
“I have lived in many places. I am not from anywhere.”
“And what did you do before the Revolution?”
“The same as you, Inspector. I made a living for myself. I managed to survive.”
Pekkala studied the blur of trees flickering past. “That’s two questions you have avoided.”
Maximov hit the brakes. The tires locked and skidded. For a moment, it looked as if they were going to end up in the ditch, but they came to a stop just before the car left the road. Maximov cut the engine. “If you don’t like me avoiding your questions, maybe you should stop asking them.”
“It’s my job to ask questions,” said Pekkala, “and, sooner or later, you will need to answer them.”
Maximov glared at Pekkala, but as the seconds passed, the anger went out of his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “The only reason I’ve survived as long as I have is by keeping my mouth shut. Old habits die hard, Inspector.”
“Survival has been difficult for all of us,” said Pekkala.
“That’s not what I hear about you. People say you’ve lived a charmed life.”
“Those are merely stories, Maximov.”
“Are they? I just saw you walk out of those woods without so much as a scratch.”
“I was not the only one.”
“I’m sure Captain Samarin would take comfort in that, if he was still alive. You know, when I was a child, I heard that if a Russian goes into the woods, he becomes lost. But when a Finn steps into the forest”—he touched his fingertips together and then let them drift apart, like someone releasing a dove—“he simply disappears.”
“Like I told you. Just stories.”
“No, Inspector,” he replied. “There’s more to it than that. I have seen it for myself.”
“What have you seen?” asked Pekkala.
“I was there, that day on the Nevski Prospekt, where I know for a fact you should have died.”
It was a summer evening. Pekkala had spent the day trying to find a birthday present for Ilya, wandering up and down the arcade of shops in the Passazh—a glass-roofed corridor lined with expensive jewelers, tailors, and vendors of antiques.
For hours, he had paced back and forth in front of the Passazh windows, steeling himself to enter the cramped shops where he knew he would immediately be set upon by salesclerks.
Three times, he had abandoned the arcade and fled across the Nevski Prospekt to the huge produce market known as the Gostiny Dvor. The floors were strewn with sawdust, wilted cabbage leaves, and discarded sales receipts scribbled on cheap gray paper. Trucks pulled up onto the wide cobblestoned delivery area and porters in blue tunics with silver buttons, their hands bound with scraps of cloth as protection against the splintery wooden crates, unloaded vegetables and fruit.
Inside the vast, cold, echoing hall of the Gostiny Dvor, surrounded by vendors chanting out their lists of goods and the soft murmur of footsteps shuffling through the sawdust, Pekkala sat on a barrel in a cafe frequented by the porters, sipping a glass of tea and feeling his heart unclench after the stuffiness of the Passazh.
The last train to Tsarskoye Selo would be leaving in half an hour. Knowing that he could not go home empty-handed, he steeled himself for another trip to the Passazh. It’s now or never, Pekkala thought.
A minute later, on his way out of the hall, he noticed a man standing by one of the pillars at the exit. The man was watching him and trying not to make it obvious. But Pekkala could always tell when he was being watched, even if he could not see who was doing the watching. He felt it like static in the air.
Pekkala glanced at the man as he walked past, noting the stranger’s clothing—the knee-length coat made of wool and gray like the feathers of a dove, the out-of-fashion Homburg hat, rounded at the top and with an oval brim that sheltered his eyes so that Pekkala could not see them. He had an impressive mustache, which grew down to the line of his jaw, and a small, nervous-looking mouth.
But Pekkala was too preoccupied with Ilya’s birthday present to think much more about it.
Outside, the evening sky, which would not darken until midnight at this time of year, shimmered like an abalone shell.
He had almost reached the exit when he felt something nudge him in the back.
Pekkala spun around.
The man in the Homburg hat was standing there. He was holding a gun in his right hand. It was a poorly made automatic pistol, of a type manufactured in Bulgaria, which often showed up at crime scenes, since it was cheap and easy to purchase on the black market.
“Are you who I think you are?” asked the man.
Before Pekkala could come up with a reply, he heard a loud clapping sound.
Sparks erupted from the barrel of the gun. The air became hazy with smoke.
Pekkala realized he must have been shot, but he felt neither the impact of the bullet nor the burning, stinging pain which, he knew, would quickly change to a numbness radiating through his whole body. Astonishingly, he felt nothing at all.
The man was staring at him.
Only then did Pekkala notice that everything around him had come to a standstill. There were people everywhere—porters, shoppers with string bags, vendors behind their barricades of bright produce. And all of them were staring at him.
“Why?” he asked the man.
There was no reply. A look of terror spread across the man’s face. He set the gun against his own temple and pulled the trigger.
With the sound of that gunshot still ringing in Pekkala’s ears, the man fell in a heap into the sawdust.
Then, where there had been silence only seconds before, a wall of noise surrounded him. He heard the guttural cries of panicked men shouting useless commands. A woman grabbed him by the shoulders. “It’s Pekkala!” she shrieked. “They’ve killed the Emerald Eye!”
Carefully, Pekkala began to undo his coat. The act of unfastening the buttons felt suddenly unfamiliar, as if this was the first time he had ever done such a thing. He opened his coat, then his waistcoat, and finally his shirt. He prepared himself for the sight of the wound, the terrible whiteness
of punctured flesh, the pulsing flow of blood from an arterial break. But the skin was smooth and unbroken. Not trusting his eyes, Pekkala ran his hands over his chest, certain that the wound must be there.
“He’s not hurt!” shouted a porter. “The bullet did not even touch him!”
“But I saw it!” shouted the woman who had grabbed Pekkala’s shoulders.
“There is no way he could have missed!” said the porter.
“Perhaps the gun wasn’t working!” said another man, a fishmonger in an apron splashed with guts and scales. He bent and picked up the weapon.
“Of course it works!” The porter gestured at the dead man. “There is the proof!”
Around the head of the corpse grew a halo of blood. The Homburg lay upturned beside him, like a bird’s nest knocked out of a tree. Pekkala’s eyes fixed on the tiny bow of silk used to join the two ends of the leather sweatband.
“Let me see that—” The porter tried to take the gun from the fishmonger.
“Be careful!” snapped the fishmonger.
As their fingers closed on the gun, it went off. The bullet smacked into a pyramid of potatoes.
The two men yelped and dropped the gun.
“Enough!” growled Pekkala.
They stared at him with bulging eyes, as if he were a statue come to life.
Pekkala picked up the gun and put it in his pocket. “Go find me the police,” he said quietly.
The two men, released from his freezing stare, scattered.
Later that night, having made his report to the Petrograd police, Pekkala found himself in the Tsar’s study.
The Tsar sat behind his desk. He had been going through papers all evening, reading by the light of a candle set into a bronze holder in the shape of a croaking frog. He insisted on reading all official documents himself and used a blue pencil to make notes in the margin. It slowed down the process by which any matters of state could be accomplished, but the Tsar preferred to handle these things personally. Now he had set aside his documents. He rested his elbows on the desk and settled his chin upon his folded hands. With his soft blue eyes, the Tsar regarded Pekkala. “Are you sure you are all right?”
“Yes, Majesty,” replied Pekkala.
“Well, I’m not, I don’t mind telling you,” replied the Tsar. “What the hell happened, Pekkala? I heard some madman shot you in the chest, but the bullet vanished in midair. The police checked out the gun. Their report indicates that it is functioning perfectly. All of Moscow is talking about this. You should hear the absurdities they’re uttering. They believe you’re supernatural. By tomorrow, it will be all over the country. Any idea who this man was? Or why he was trying to kill you?”
“No, Majesty. He was carrying no identification. His body had no distinctive marks, no tattoos, scars, or moles. All the labels had been removed from his clothes. Nor does he match the description of anyone currently wanted by the police. It is likely we will never know who he was, or why he attempted to kill me.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” said the Tsar. He sat back in his chair, letting his eyes wander across the gold-leafed titles of the books upon his shelves. “So we’ve got no answers at all.”
“We do have one,” replied Pekkala, placing something on the desk before the Tsar—a crumpled knot of gray the size of a robin’s egg.
The Tsar picked it up. “What’s this? Feels heavy.”
“Lead.” The candle flame trembled. A thread of molten wax poured into the frog’s open mouth.
“Is this the bullet?” He studied it with one eye closed, like a jeweler studying a diamond.
“Two bullets fused together,” replied Pekkala.
“Two? And where did you get them?”
“I removed them from the skull of the dead man.”
The Tsar dropped the bullets back onto the desk. “You could have told me that before.” He took out a handkerchief and wiped his fingers.
“While the police were examining the gun,” explained Pekkala, “I decided to examine the body. It was not the gun that malfunctioned, Majesty. It was the bullet.”
“I don’t understand.” The Tsar frowned. “How does a bullet malfunction?”
“The bullet he fired at me contained the wrong amount of gunpowder. The weapon was of poor quality, as was the ammunition that came with it. When the gun discharged, the cartridge ejected, but it only drove the bullet into the barrel, where it became stuck. Then next time he pulled the trigger, a second bullet smashed into the first …”
“And both bullets went into his head at the same time.”
“Precisely.”
“Meanwhile, the world thinks you’re some kind of sorcerer.” The Tsar brushed his fingers through his beard. “Have you informed the police about this discovery of yours?”
“It was late by the time I had finished my investigation. I will inform the Petrograd chief first thing in the morning. He can then make an announcement to the public.”
“Now, Pekkala.” The Tsar rested his fingertips on the desktop, like a man about to begin playing a piano. “I want you to do something for me.”
“And what is that, Majesty?”
“Nothing.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I want you to do nothing.” He gestured towards the door, beyond which lay the vast expanse of Russia. “Let them believe what they want to believe.”
“That the bullet disappeared?”
The Tsar picked up the piece of lead and dropped it in the pocket of his waistcoat. “It has disappeared,” he said.
“YOU WERE THERE?” ASKED PEKKALA.
“I happened to be passing through the marketplace,” Maximov replied. “I saw the whole thing. I’ve always wondered how you managed to survive.”
“Later on,” replied Pekkala, “when you have answered some of my questions, perhaps I can answer some of yours.”
The cottage belonging to Nagorski was of the type known as a dacha. Built in the traditional style, with a thatched roof and shuttered windows, it had clearly been here many years longer than the facility itself. Perched at the edge of a small lake, the dacha was the only building in sight. Except for a clearing around the cottage itself, dense forest crowded down to the water’s edge.
It was still and peaceful here. Now that the clouds had cleared away, the surface of the lake glowed softly in the fading sunlight. Out on the water, a man sat in a rowboat. In his right hand he held a fishing rod. His arm waved gently back and forth. The long fly line, burning silver as it caught the rays of the sunset, stretched out from the tip of the rod, curving back upon itself and stretching out again until the speck of the fly touched down upon the surface of the lake. Around the man, tiny insects swirled like bubbles in champagne.
Pekkala was so focused on this image that he did not see a woman come around from the back of the house until she stood in front of him.
The woman looked very beautiful but tired. An air of quiet desperation hung about her. Tight curls waved across her short, dark hair. Her chin was small and her eyes so dark that the blackness of her irises seemed to have flooded out into her pupils.
Ignoring Pekkala, the woman turned to Maximov, who was getting out of the car. “Who is this man,” she asked, “and why is he so filthy dirty, as well as being dressed like an undertaker?”
“This is Inspector Pekkala,” Maximov answered, “from the Bureau of Special Operations.”
“Pekkala,” she echoed. “Oh, yes.” The dark eyes raked his face. “You arrested my husband in the middle of his lunch.”
“Detained,” replied Pekkala. “Not arrested.”
“I thought that was all cleared up.”
“It was, Mrs. Nagorski.”
“So why are you here?” She spat out the words as if her mouth was filled with shards of glass.
Pekkala could tell that a part of her already knew. It was as if she had been expecting this news, not just today but for a very long time.
“He’s dead, isn’t h
e?” she asked hoarsely.
Pekkala nodded.
Maximov reached out to lay his hand upon her shoulder.
Angrily, she brushed his touch away. Then her hand flew back, catching Maximov across the face. “You were supposed to take care of him!” she shrieked, raising her fists and bringing them down hard against his chest with a sound like muffled drumbeats.
Maximov staggered back, too stunned by her fury to resist.
“That was your job!” she shouted. “He took you in. He gave you a chance when no one else would. And now this! This is how you repay him?”
“Mrs. Nagorski,” whispered Maximov, “I did everything I could for him.”
Mrs. Nagorski stared at the big man as if she did not even know who he was. “If you had done everything,” she sneered, “my husband would still be alive.”
The figure in the boat turned his head to see where the shouting had come from.
Pekkala could see now that it was a young man, and he knew it must be the Nagorskis’ son, Konstantin.
The young man reeled in his line, set the fishing rod aside and took up the oars. Slowly, he made his way towards the shore, oars creaking in the brass wishbones of the oarlocks, water dripping from the oar blades like a stream of mercury.
Mrs. Nagorski turned and walked back towards the dacha. As she climbed the first step to the porch, she stumbled. One arm reached out to brace herself against the planks. Her hands were shaking. She sank down on the steps.
By then Pekkala had caught up with her.
She glanced at him, then looked away again. “I always said this project would destroy him, one way or another. I must see my husband.”
“I would not advise that,” replied Pekkala.
“I will see him, Inspector. Immediately.”
Hearing the determination in the widow’s voice, Pekkala realized there was no point in trying to dissuade her.
The rowboat ground up against the shore. The boy hauled in his oars with the unconscious precision of a bird folding its wings, then stepped out of the tippy boat. Konstantin was head and shoulders taller than his mother, with her dark eyes and unkempt hair that needed washing. His heavy canvas trousers were patched at the knees and looked as if they had belonged to someone else before they came to him. He wore a sweater with holes in the elbows and his bare feet were speckled with bug bites, although he did not seem to notice them.
