by Sam Eastland
Entering the Tsar’s study, Pekkala found him sitting in a chair by the window. He was relieved that the Tsar did not get up. In Pekkala’s experience, if the Tsar remained seated when he entered the room, the meeting would go well. If the Tsar rose to his feet, however, Pekkala could be sure that the man’s temper had already been lost.
Beside the Tsar’s chair stood a small table, on which a candle burned. This was the only light source in the room, and in that glowing pool, the Tsar seemed to float like a mirage.
With his soft blue eyes, the Tsar regarded Pekkala. “I have decided that the title of Special Investigator lacks”—he twisted his hand in the air, like the claw of a barnacle sweeping through an ocean current—“the gravity of your position. There are other special investigators in my police force, but there has never been a position quite like yours before. It was my grandfather who created the Gendarmerie and my father who established the Okhrana. But you are my creation, for which I have also commissioned an appropriate symbol of your rank.”
It was then that the Tsar presented Pekkala with the medallion which would soon earn him the title “Emerald Eye.”
The Tsar rose from his chair and, taking the badge from its velvet cushion, pinned it to the cloth beneath the right lapel of Pekkala’s jacket. “As my personal investigator, you will have absolute authority in the fulfillment of your duties. No secrets may be withheld from you. There are no documents you cannot see upon request. There is no door you cannot walk through unannounced. You may requisition any mode of transport on the spot if you deem it necessary. You are free to come and go where you please and when you please. You may arrest anyone who you suspect is guilty of a crime. Even me.”
“Excellency …”
The Tsar held up a hand to silence him. “There can be no exceptions, Pekkala. Otherwise it is all meaningless. I entrust you with the safety of this country and also with my life and the lives of my family.” The Tsar paused. “Which brings us to the contents of this box.”
From a large mahogany case beside his chair, the Tsar removed a brass-handled Webley revolver.
“It was given to me by my cousin George V.”
Pekkala had seen a picture of them together, hanging on the wall of the Tsar’s study—the King of England and the Tsar of Russia, two of the most powerful men in the world. The two men looked almost identical. Their expressions were the same, the shapes of their heads, their beards, their mouths, noses, and ears alike. Only their eyes showed any difference—the King’s looked more round than those of the Tsar.
“Go on.” The Tsar held out the gun. “Take it.”
The weapon was heavy but well balanced. Its brass grips felt cold against Pekkala’s palm. “It is very fine, Excellency, but you know how I feel about gifts.”
“Who said anything about a gift? That and the badge are the tools of your trade, Pekkala. I am issuing them to you the same as any soldier in the army is issued what he needs for his work.”
NOW KIROV CLOSED HIS FINGERS around the badge. “I will take good care of it until you return, Inspector.”
“The Webley is in my desk drawer,” added Pekkala, “although I know you are more partial to your Tokarev.”
“Is there nothing more I can do, Inspector?”
“There may well be,” he replied, “but I won’t know until I get to Borodok.”
“How will I stay in contact with you?”
“By telegram through the camp commandant, Major Klenovkin. He will make sure I receive any messages.”
The two men shook hands.
“I will see you on the other side,” said Kirov, giving the traditional farewell.
“Indeed you will, Major Kirov.”
As Pekkala made his way across the rail yard, heading towards the group of convicts, he was spotted by the train’s chief engineer, a man named Filipp Demidov.
Demidov was the brother of Anna Demidova, lady-in-waiting to the Tsarina Alexandra, who had been murdered in July of 1918 by agents of the Bolshevik Secret Service, the Cheka, in the same executions which claimed the lives of the Tsar, his wife, and his five children.
Several years before her death, Anna Demidova had secured for her brother a post as the Tsar’s chauffeur, a job he held until the staff at Tsarskoye Selo was dismissed in March of 1917. Immediately afterwards, Demidov went to work for the State Railways and had been with them ever since.
In his days as a chauffeur, Demidov had often seen Pekkala coming and going from meetings with the Tsar. He had, on occasion, driven Pekkala into the city of St. Petersburg in the Tsar’s Hispano-Suiza Alfonso XIII sedan. Once, by accident, he had even sat down next to Pekkala at the restaurant where the inspector used to take most of his meals—a rough and simple place called the Cafe Tilsit, where customers ate from earthenware bowls at long, bare-wood tables.
Demidov, who had a good memory for faces, had used the occasion to make a careful study of the inspector. Seeing the Emerald Eye among these common criminals overrode all his instincts of self-preservation. He climbed down from the engine and strode quickly across to Pekkala.
“Demidov!” he gasped, instantly recognizing the former chauffeur.
“Inspector,” replied the chief engineer, “you must come with me at once.”
What Demidov hoped to accomplish with this meeting, Pekkala had no idea, but it was too late now, as the last of the convicts were already climbing on board. There was no way he could join them without drawing attention to himself. So, rather than jeopardize his cover, Pekkala followed Demidov into the shadows.
“The prisoners aboard this train are going to their deaths.” Demidov’s hoarse whisper cut through the frosty air. “I can’t let that happen to you.”
“I cannot explain to you why,” replied Pekkala, “but one way or another, I must get aboard that train.”
Demidov’s back straightened as he realized his mistake. “My God, what have I done?”
“Nothing that cannot be fixed.”
“Whatever it takes,” Demidov vowed, “consider it done, Inspector.”
By the time ETAP-1889 finally departed, the sun had already set. Pekkala stood with Demidov at the engine controls as the great cyclopic eye of the locomotive’s headlight carved out a path through the darkness.
The convoy was more than fifty wagons long. Each had been designed to hold either forty men or eight horses, after the pattern used by the French army during the Great War. The French wagons had occasionally held as many as sixty men, but the wagons of ETAP-1889 now contained eighty men each, which meant that for the entire ten-day journey to Siberia everyone would be forced to stand.
“Where is the next station?” Pekkala had to shout to make himself heard above the rumble of the locomotive.
“There’s a switching junction called Shatura, about ten kilometers down the line, but we aren’t due to stop there.”
“Is there any way you can halt the train at that junction?”
Demidov thought for a moment. “I could tell them our brakes are overheating. That would require a visual inspection of the wheels. The process would take about twenty minutes.”
“Good,” said Pekkala. “That is all the time I need.”
THE MASTER OF THE V-4 station, Edvard Kasinec, had been informed earlier that day to expect the arrival of a special prisoner for convoy ETAP-1889. The convoy would be passing through Sverdlovsk, Petropavlovsk, and Omsk, destined for the Valley of Krasnagolyana, in the farthest reaches of Siberia.
Sometimes, through the frosted windows of his office, Kasinec would study the procession of convicts as they were herded at bayonet point into the wagons, wearing nothing but the flimsy cotton pajamas issued to them in the prisons of Butyrka and Lubyanka. Kasinec would try to pick out those he imagined might survive the ordeal that lay ahead. A few might even be lucky enough to return home one day. It was a little game he played to pass the time, but he never played it with convoys traveling as far as the Valley of Krasnagolyana. Those men were bound for camps whose na
mes were spoken only in whispers. They were never coming back.
It had saddened him to learn that this special prisoner was none other than Inspector Pekkala of the Bureau of Special Operations. Kasinec was old enough to remember the days when Pekkala had served as personal investigator to the Tsar. To think of that famous detective packed inside a freezing cattle wagon like a common criminal was almost more than Kasinec could bear.
There had been so many thousands, tens of thousands, who had passed through here on their way east, and Kasinec had been grateful for the fact that they would only ever be numbers to him. If there had been names, he would have remembered them, and if he had remembered them, the space they would have occupied inside his head might have driven him out of his mind. But he would never forget the name of Pekkala, whose Emerald Eye had snagged like a fishing lure trolling through his brain.
Kasinec’s orders were to wait until Pekkala had boarded the train, and then to communicate by telegram with some man at the Kremlin named Poskrebyshev to confirm that the prisoner had been delivered.
On receiving the instructions from Poskrebyshev, Kasinec had protested that he had never actually seen the Emerald Eye before. Few people ever had, since his picture had never been published.
“How will I even know it is him?” he asked.
Poskrebyshev’s voice crackled down the phone line. “His prison number is 4745.”
Kasinec breathed in, ready to explain that the numbers inked onto those flimsy prison clothes were often so blurred as to be illegible, but Poskrebyshev had already hung up. Following his orders, Kasinec had notified the guards to keep an eye out for prisoner 4745 and to make sure he was placed aboard wagon #6.
Kasinec stood on the platform, studying the number of each convict who boarded the train. But none of these men was Pekkala. He held up the transport as long as he could, until the switching junction in Shatura called and demanded to know what had become of ETAP-1889. Finally he gave the order for the convoy to proceed. Then, with a quiet satisfaction, Kasinec sent a telegram to Poskrebyshev, informing him that prisoner 4745 was not aboard the train.
Kasinec guessed there would be hell to pay for this and also that he would be the one to pay it, but it comforted him to know that the great inspector had somehow found a way to beat the odds.
It crossed Kasinec’s mind that the stories he had heard about Pekkala might be true—that he was not even a man but rather some kind of phantom, conjured from the spirit world by the likes of Grigori Rasputin, that other supernatural in the service of the Tsar.
ONCE MORE, THE DOUBLE DOORS of Stalin’s office flew open and Stalin appeared, waving a flimsy piece of telegram paper, his lips twitching with anger. “This message just arrived from the master of the V-4 station, saying that Pekkala was not aboard the train!”
“Would you like me to try to find him?” Poskrebyshev rose quickly to his feet.
“No! I must handle this myself. Have the car brought around. I will be leaving immediately. Fetch me my coat.”
Poskrebyshev crashed his heels together. “At once, Comrade Stalin!”
KASINEC WAS STANDING on the steps of a flimsy wooden structure grandly named the Central Convict Transport Administration Facility, puffing on a cigarette, when an American-made Packard limousine arrived at the station yard. Its cowlings had been splashed with perfect arches of grayish-black mud as it traveled the unpaved Moscow Highway. To the stationmaster, those muddy arches made the machine appear less like a car than a giant bird of prey, swooping out of the evening shadows and intent on tearing him apart.
Kasinec sighed out a lungful of smoke. He had seen this before—desperate people trying to bid one last farewell to friends or family members who had ended up on prison transports. There was nothing Kasinec could do for them. He kept no records of the names of prisoners. By the time convicts arrived at V-4, they had already been transformed into numbers and Kasinec’s only job was to see that the tally on his list matched the total of the prisoners boarding the train. When the train was full, the list would be handed to the chief guard accompanying the transport and Kasinec never saw them again.
Just then, the air was filled with the loud clatter of the telegraph machine in his office spitting out a message. The people in that car would have to wait. Kasinec flicked his cigarette out over the muddy station yard and walked inside to read the telegram.
Emerging a few moments later with the telegram still clutched in his fist, Kasinec saw a man in a fur-collared coat climbing from the Packard. It took him only a second to realize that this man was none other than Stalin himself.
Immediately, Kasinec’s hands began to shake.
Stalin crossed the station yard and climbed the three wooden steps to the balcony where Kasinec was waiting.
Kasinec saluted, fingertips quivering against his temples.
“What happened?” asked Stalin, a halo of breath condensing around his head. “Why didn’t he get aboard the train with all the other prisoners?”
“I don’t know,” stammered Kasinec.
“He’s vanished,” muttered Stalin, more to himself than to the stationmaster. “We’ll never find him now.”
“Actually, Comrade Stalin, we have found Inspector Pekkala.” Kasinec held up the telegram, which had just arrived from the switching junction at Shatura, twenty kilometers to the east.
“Found him? But you just told me he wasn’t aboard the train!”
“That’s not exactly true, Comrade Stalin. He’s just not among the prisoners.”
“Then where the hell is he?”
“According to the message from Shatura, he appears to be driving the train.”
Stalin shuddered, as if an electric current had just traveled through his body. He snatched the telegram from Kasinec’s hand, read it through, then crumpled the paper and flung it into the darkness. Turning away from the stationmaster, Stalin fixed his gaze upon a point in the distance where the rails appeared to converge.
“Pekkala, you son of a bitch!” he roared, his voice like thunder in the still night air.
WHEN THE TRAIN STOPPED AT Shatura, a guard who had climbed down onto the tracks in order to relieve himself was astonished to see a prisoner walking towards him. Instantly, he swung the rifle off his back and aimed it at the convict.
But the prisoner neither raised his hands in a gesture of surrender nor tried to run away. Instead, he only held a finger to his lips, motioning for the guard to be silent. This so astonished the guard that he actually lowered his gun. “If you are who I think you are,” he whispered, “our orders were to put you on wagon number 6, back at the V-4 station.”
“Why does it matter which wagon I get on?”
The guard shook his head. “Those were the orders from stationmaster Kasinec.”
“Can you get me in there now?”
“Not without making them suspicious. The only time we move people is if a fight has broken out.”
“Will that not do for a reason?”
The guard studied Pekkala uneasily. “It would, but you don’t look as if you’ve been in a fight.”
Pekkala sighed as he realized what must happen now.
After a moment’s hesitation, the guard lifted his rifle, turning the butt end towards Pekkala. “Travel well, Inspector.”
“Thank you,” said Pekkala, and then everything went black.
He regained consciousness just as the door to wagon #6 was slammed shut. His lips were sticky with blood. Tracing his fingertips cautiously along the bridge of his nose, Pekkala was relieved to feel no jagged edge of broken bone.
In those first hours of the journey, the cramped space of the wagon remained silent, leaving each man alone with his thoughts.
As frost began to form across the inside of the wagon walls, Pekkala felt a slow fear creeping into the marrow of his bones. And he knew it would stay there, like the frost, which would not melt until these wagons rolled back empty to the west.
By dawn of the next day, the convoy had reach
ed Sarapaul Station. Through the barbed-wire-laced opening that served as a window, Pekkala saw the platform jammed with soldiers on their way to man the border in the west. In their long, ill-fitting greatcoats, with pointed budyonny caps upon their heads, they boarded wagons no different from the one in which Pekkala was riding. Blankets, rolled and tied over their shoulders, gave to these soldiers the appearance of hunchbacks. Their long Mosin-Nagant rifles looked more like cripples’ canes than guns.
Morning sun sliced through rust holes in the metal roof, flooding the wagon with spears of golden light. As Pekkala raised his head to feel the warmth upon his face, he realized that this simple pleasure had already become a luxury.
KIROV SAT AT HIS DESK, writing a report. The only sound in the room was the rustle of his pen nib across the page.
The sun had just risen above the rooftops of Moscow. Specks of dust, glittering as they drifted lazily about the room, reminded him of the smoke particles he had once seen under a microscope in school as his teacher explained the phenomenon of Brownian Motion.
Suddenly Kirov paused and raised his head, distracted by a noise from the street below—a jangling of metal against stone.
Kirov smiled. Setting aside his pen, he got up and opened the window. The frigid air snatched his breath away. Just beneath him, hanging from the gutter, icicles as long as his arm glowed like molten copper in the sunlight. Kirov leaned out, five stories above the street, and craned his neck to get a better view.
Then he saw it—a black Mercedes sedan making its way along the cobbled road. It was in poor repair, with rust-patched cowlings, a cracked headlight and a rear windshield fogged as if by cataracts. The jangling noise emanated from its muffler, which had lost a retaining bracket and clanked against the cobbles, sending out a spray of sparks at every dip in the road.
In the center of the street lay a huge pothole. Some months ago, a construction crew on a mission whose purpose remained a mystery had removed some of the cobblestones. The workers never returned, but the pothole remained. There were many such craters in the streets of Moscow. People grumbled about getting them fixed, but the possibility of this actually happening, the mountains of paperwork that would be required to set into motion the appropriate branches of government, stood as a greater obstacle than any of the potholes themselves.
