by Sam Eastland
‘Rasputin,’ growled Pekkala.
The man stepped forward and fell into Pekkala’s arms.
Pekkala caught the stench of onions and salmon caviar on Rasputin’s breath. A few of the tiny fish eggs, like beads of amber, were even lodged in the man’s frozen beard. The sour reek of alcohol oozed from his pores. ‘You must save me!’ moaned Rasputin.
‘Save you from what?’
Rasputin mumbled incoherently, his nose buried in Pekkala’s shirt.
‘From what?’ repeated Pekkala.
Rasputin stood back and spread his arms. ‘From myself!’
‘Tell me what you are doing out here,’ demanded Pekkala.
‘I was at the church of Kazan,’ said Rasputin, unbuttoning his coat to reveal a blood-red tunic and baggy black breeches tucked into a pair of knee-length boots. ‘At least I was until they threw me out.’
‘What did you do this time?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Nothing!’ shouted Rasputin. ‘For once, all I did was sit there. And then that damned politician Rodzianko told me to leave. He called me a vile heathen!’ He clenched his fist and waved it in the air. ‘I’ll have his job for that!’ Then he slumped down into Pekkala’s chair.
‘What did you do after they threw you out?’
‘I went straight to the Villa Rode!’
‘Oh, no,’ muttered Pekkala. ‘Not that place.’
The Villa Rode was a drinking club in Petrograd. Rasputin went there almost every night, because he did not have to pay his bills there. They were covered by an anonymous numbered account which, Pekkala knew, had actually been set up by the Tsarina. In addition, the owner of the Villa Rode had been paid to build an addition on to the back of the club, a room which was available only to Rasputin. It was, in effect, his own private club. The Tsarina had been persuaded to arrange this by members of the Secret Service, who were tasked with following Rasputin wherever he went and making sure he stayed out of trouble. This had proved to be impossible, so a safe house, in which he could drink as much as he wanted for free, meant at least that the Secret Service could protect him from those who had sworn to kill him if they could. There had already been two attempts on his life: in Pokrovsky in 1914 and again in Tsaritsin the following year. Instead of frightening him into seclusion, these events had only served to convince Rasputin that he was indestructible. Even if the Secret Service could protect him from these would-be killers, the one person they could not protect him from was himself.
‘When I was at the Villa,’ continued Rasputin, ‘I decided I should file a complaint about Rodzianko. And then I thought – No! I’ll go straight to the Tsarina and tell her about it myself.’
‘The Villa Rode is in Petrograd,’ said Pekkala. ‘That’s nowhere near this place.’
‘I drove here in my car.’
Pekkala remembered now that the Tsarina had given Rasputin a car, a beautiful Hispano-Suiza, although she had forgotten to give him any lessons on how to drive it.
‘And you think she would allow you in at this time of night?’
‘Of course,’ replied Rasputin. ‘Why not?’
‘Well, what happened? Did you speak to her?’
‘I never got the chance. That damned automobile went wrong.’
‘Went wrong?’
‘It drove into a wall,’ he gestured vaguely at the world outside, ‘somewhere out there.’
‘You crashed your car,’ said Pekkala, shaking his head at the thought of that beautiful machine smashed to pieces.
‘I set out on foot for the palace, but I got lost. Then I saw your place and here I am, Pekkala. At your mercy. A poor man begging for a drink.’
‘Someone else has already granted your request,’ replied Pekkala. ‘Several times.’
Rasputin was no longer listening. He had discovered one of the salmon eggs in his beard. He plucked it out and popped it in his mouth. His lips puckered as he chased the egg around the inside of his cheek. Then suddenly his face brightened. ‘Ah! I see you already have company. Good evening, teacher lady.’
Pekkala turned to see Ilya standing at the doorway to the bedroom. She was wearing one of his dark grey shirts, the kind he wore when he was on duty. Her arms were folded across her chest. The sleeves, without their cufflinks, trailed down over her hands.
‘Such a beauty!’ sighed Rasputin. ‘If your students could only see you now.’
‘My students are six years old,’ Ilya replied.
He waggled his fingers, then let them subside on to the arms of the chair, like the tentacles of some pale ocean creature. ‘They are never too young to learn the ways of the world.’
‘Every time I feel like defending you in public,’ said Ilya, ‘you go and say something like that.’
Rasputin sighed again. ‘Let the rumours fly.’
‘Have you really crashed your car, Grigori?’ she asked.
‘My car crashed by itself,’ replied Rasputin.
‘How,’ asked Ilya, ‘do you manage to stay drunk so much of the time?’
‘It helps me to understand the world. It helps the world to understand me as well. Some people make sense when they’re sober. Some people make sense when they’re not.’
‘Always speaking in riddles.’ Ilya smiled at him.
‘Not riddles, beautiful lady. Merely the unfortunate truth.’ His eyelids fluttered. He was falling asleep.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ said Pekkala. He grasped the chair and jerked it around, so the two men were facing each other.
Rasputin gasped, his eyes shut tight.
‘What’s this I hear,’ asked Pekkala, ‘about you advising the Tsarina to get rid of me?’
‘What?’ Rasputin opened one eye.
‘You heard me,’ said Pekkala.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Never mind who told me.’
‘It is the Tsarina who wants you dismissed,’ said Rasputin, and suddenly the drunkenness had peeled away from him. ‘I like you, Pekkala, but there is nothing I can do.’
‘And why not?’
‘Here is how it works,’ explained Rasputin. ‘The Tsarina asks me a question. And I can tell from the way she asks it whether she wants me to say yes or no. And when I tell her what she wants to hear, it makes her happy. And then this idea of hers becomes my idea, and she runs off to the Tsar, or to her friend Vyrubova or to whomever she pleases, and she tells them I have said this thing. But what she never says, Pekkala, is that it was her idea to begin with. You see, Pekkala, the reason I am loved by the Tsarina is that I am exactly what she needs me to be, in the same way that you are needed by the Tsar. She needs me to make her feel she is right, and he needs you to make him feel safe. Sadly, both of those things are illusions. And there are many others like us, each one entrusted to a different task – investigators, lovers, assassins, each one a stranger to the other. Only the Tsar knows us all. So if you have been told that I wish you to be sent away, then yes. It is true.’ He climbed unsteadily out of the chair and stood weaving in front of Pekkala. ‘But it is only true, because the Tsarina desired it first.’
‘I think you’ve preached enough for one night, Grigori.’
Rasputin smiled lazily. ‘Good night, Pekkala.’ Then he waved at Ilya, as if she were standing in the distance and not just on the other side of the room. As he moved his hand back and forth, a bracelet gleamed on his wrist. It was made of platinum, and engraved with the Royal crest: another gift from the Tsarina. ‘And good night, beautiful lady whose name I have forgotten.’
‘Ilya,’ she said, more with pity than with indignation.
‘Then good night, beautiful Ilya.’ Rasputin spread his arms and bowed extravagantly, his greasy hair falling in a curtain over his face.
‘You can’t go out there now,’ Pekkala told him. ‘The storm has not let up.’
‘But I must,’ replied Rasputin. ‘I have another party to attend. Prince Yusupov invited me. He promised cakes and wine.’
Then he was gone, leaving a stench of swe
at and pickled onions hanging in the air.
Ilya stepped into the front room, her bare feet avoiding the slushy puddles which had oozed out of Rasputin’s boots. ‘Every time I’ve seen that man, he has been drunk,’ she said, wrapping her arms around Pekkala.
‘But he’s never as drunk as he appears,’ replied Pekkala.
Two days later, Pekkala arrived in Petrograd just in time to see Rasputin fished out of the Malaya Neva River, near a place called the Krestovsky Island. His corpse had been rolled in a carpet and shoved beneath the ice.
Soon after, Pekkala arrested Prince Yusupov, who readily confessed to murdering Rasputin. In the company of an army doctor named Lazovert and the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovitch, first cousin of the Tsar, Yusupov had attempted to murder Rasputin with cakes laced with arsenic. Each cake contained enough poison to finish off half a dozen men, but Rasputin ate three of them and appeared to suffer no effects. Then Yusupov poured arsenic into a glass of Hungarian wine and served that to Rasputin. Rasputin drank it and then asked for another glass. At that point, Yusupov panicked. He took the Browning revolver belonging to the Grand Duke and shot Rasputin in the back. No sooner had Dr Lazovert declared Rasputin dead than Rasputin sat up and grabbed Yusupov by the throat. Yusupov, by now hysterical, fled to the second floor of his palace, followed by Rasputin, who crawled after him up the stairs. Eventually, after shooting Rasputin several more times, the murderers rolled him in the carpet, tied it with rope and dumped him in the boot of Dr Lazovert’s car. They drove to the Petrovsky bridge and threw his body into the Neva. An autopsy showed that, even with everything that had been done to him, Rasputin died by drowning.
In spite of Pekkala’s work on the case, and the proven guilt of the participants, none of his investigation was ever made public and none of the killers ever went to prison.
When Pekkala thought back on that night when Rasputin had appeared out of the storm, he wished he’d shown more kindness to a man so clearly marked for death.
Under the glare of an electric light powered by a rattling portable generator, Pekkala and Kirov stood in the pit. At first, the freezing, muddy water had come up to their waists but, with the help of buckets, they had managed to bail out most of it. Now they used a mine detector to search for the missing gun. The detector consisted of a long metal stem, bent into a handle at one end, with a plate-shaped disc at the other. In the centre of the stem an oblong box held the batteries, volume control and dials for the various settings.
After being shown Pekkala’s Shadow Pass, the NKVD guards had supplied them with everything they needed. They had even helped to wheel the generator out across the proving ground.
Slowly, Pekkala moved the disc of the mine detector back and forth over the ground, listening for the sound that would indicate the presence of metal. His hands had grown so numb that he could barely feel the metal handle of the detector.
The generator droned and clattered, filling the air with exhaust fumes.
On hands and knees, Kirov sifted his fingers through the mud. ‘Why wouldn’t the killer have held on to the gun?’
‘He might have,’ replied Pekkala, ‘assuming it’s a “he”. More likely, he threw it away as soon as he could, in case he was caught and searched. Without a gun, he might have been able to talk his way out of it. But with a gun on him, there’d be no chance of that.’
‘And he wouldn’t be expecting us to search through all this mud,’ said Kirov, his lips turned drowned-man blue, ‘because that would be insane, wouldn’t it?’
‘Precisely!’ said Pekkala.
Just then, they heard a beep: very faint and only one.
‘What was that?’ asked Kirov.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I’ve never used one of these things before.’
Kirov flapped his arm at the detector. ‘Well, do it again!’
‘I’m trying!’ replied Pekkala, swinging the disc back and forth over the ground.
‘Slowly!’ shouted Kirov. As he climbed up off his knees, mud sucked at his waterlogged boots. ‘Let me try.’
Pekkala gave him the detector. His half-frozen hands remained curled around the memory of the handle.
Kirov skimmed the disc just above the surface of the mud.
Nothing.
Kirov swore. ‘This ridiculous contraption isn’t even …’
Then the sound came again.
‘There!’ shouted Pekkala.
Carefully, Kirov moved the disc back over the spot.
The detector beeped once more, and then again and finally, as Kirov held it over the place, the sound became a constant drone.
Pekkala dropped to his knees and began to dig, squeezing through handfuls of mud as if he were a baker kneading dough. ‘It’s not here,’ he muttered. ‘There’s no gun.’
‘I told you this thing didn’t work,’ complained Kirov.
Just then, Pekkala’s fist closed on something hard. A stone, he thought. He nearly tossed it aside, but then, in the glare of the generator light, he caught a glimpse of metal. Working his fingers through the mud, his fingers snagged on what Pekkala now realised was a bullet cartridge. Pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, he held it up to Kirov and smiled as if he’d been a gold digger who had found the nugget that would set him up for life. Pekkala rubbed away the dirt at the end of the casing until he could see the markings stamped into the brass. ‘7.62 mm,’ he said.
‘It could be a Nagent.’
‘No, the cartridge is too short. This did not come from a Russian gun.’
After hunting for another hour, and finding nothing, Pekkala called an end to the search. They clambered out of the pit, switched off the generator and stumbled back through the dark towards the buildings.
The guard hut was closed and the guards were nowhere in sight.
By that time, both Pekkala and Kirov were shuddering uncontrollably from the cold. They needed to warm up before driving back to the city.
They tried to get into the other buildings, but all of them were locked.
In desperation, the two men heaped up several broken wooden pallets which they found stacked behind the Iron House. Using a spare fuel can from their car, they soon had the pallets burning.
Like sleepwalkers, they reached their hands towards the blaze. Sitting down upon the ground, they removed their boots and emptied out thin streams of dirty water. Then they held their pasty feet against the flames until their flesh began to steam. Darkness swirled around them, as if what lay beneath the ground had risen in a tide and drowned the world.
‘What I don’t understand,’ said Kirov, when his teeth had finally stopped chattering, ‘is why Major Lysenkova is here at all. NKVD has dozens of investigators. Why send one who only investigates crimes within the NKVD?’
‘There’s only one possibility,’ answered Pekkala. ‘NKVD must think one of their own people is responsible.’
‘But that doesn’t explain why Major Lysenkova would be in such a hurry to wrap up the investigation.’
Pekkala balanced the gun cartridge on his palm, examining it in the firelight. ‘This ought to slow things down a bit.’
‘I don’t know how you can do it, Inspector.’
‘Do what?’
‘Work so calmly with the dead,’ replied Kirov, ‘especially when they have been so … so broken up.’
‘I’m used to it now,’ said Pekkala, and he thought back to the times when his father would be called out to collect bodies which had been discovered in the wilderness. Sometimes the bodies belonged to hunters who had gone missing in the winter. They fell through thin ice out on the lakes and did not reappear until spring, their bodies pale as alabaster, tangled among the sticks and branches. Sometimes they were old people, who had wandered off into the forest, gotten lost and died of exposure. What remained of them was often scarcely recognisable beyond the scaffolding of bones they left behind. Pekkala and his father always brought a coffin with them, the rough pine box still smelling of sap. They wrapped the re
mains in a thick canvas tarpaulin.
There had been many such trips, none of which plagued him with nightmares. Only one stuck clearly in his mind.
*
It was the day the dead Jew came riding into town.
His horse trotted down the main street of Lappeenranta in the middle of a blizzard. The Jew sat in the saddle in his black coat and wide brimmed hat. He appeared to have frozen to death, his beard a twisted mass of icicles. The horse stopped outside the blacksmith’s shop, as if it knew where it was going, although the blacksmith swore he’d never seen the animal before.
No one knew where the Jew had come from. Messages sent to the nearby villages of Joutseno, Lemi and Taipalsaari turned up nothing. His saddlebags contained no clues, only spare clothing, a few scraps of food, and a book written in his language, which no one in Lappeenranta could decipher. He had probably come in from Russia, whose unmarked border was only a few kilometres away. Then he got lost in the woods, and died before he could find shelter.
The Jew had been dead for a long time – five or six days, thought Pekkala’s father. They had to remove the saddle just to get him off the horse. The hands of the Jew were twisted around the bridle. Pekkala, who was twelve years old at the time, tried to untangle the leather from the brittle fingers, but without success, so his father cut the leather. Since the Jew’s body was frozen, they could not fit him in a coffin. They did their best to cover him up for the ride back to Pekkala’s house.
That evening, they left him on the undertaking slab to thaw, so that Pekkala’s father could begin the work of preparing the corpse for burial.
‘I need you to do something for me,’ his father told Pekkala. ‘I need you to see him out.’
‘See him out?’ asked Pekkala. ‘He’s already out.’
Pekkala’s father shook his head. ‘His faith holds that the spirit lingers by the body until it is buried. The spirit is afraid. It is their custom to have someone sit by the body, to keep it company until the spirit finally departs.’
