by Sam Eastland
‘And how long is that?’ asked Pekkala, staring at the corpse, whose legs remained pincered, as if still around the body of the horse. Water dripped from the thawing clothes, its sound like the ticking of a clock.
‘Just until morning,’ said his father.
His father’s preparation room was in the basement. That was where Pekkala spent the night, sitting on a chair, back against the wall. A paraffin lamp burned with a steady flame upon the table where his father kept tools for preparing the dead – rubber gloves, knives, tubes, needles, waxed linen thread and a box containing rouges for restoring colour to the skin.
Pekkala had forgotten to ask his father if he was allowed to fall asleep, but now it was too late because his parents and his brother had all gone to bed hours ago. To keep himself busy, Pekkala thumbed through the pages of the book they had found in the Jew’s saddlebag. The letters seemed to have been fashioned out of tiny wisps of smoke.
Pekkala set the book aside and went over to the body. Staring at the man’s pinched face, his waxy skin and reddish beard, Pekkala thought about the spirit of the Jew, pacing about the room, not knowing where it was or where it was supposed to be. He imagined it standing by the brass-coloured flame of the lamp, like a moth drawn to the light. But maybe, he thought, only the living care about a thing like that. Then he went back and sat in his chair.
He did not mean to fall asleep, but suddenly it was morning. He heard the sound of the basement door opening and his father coming down the stairs. Pekkala’s father did not ask if he had slept.
The Jew’s body had thawed. One leg hung off the preparation table. His father lifted it and gently set it straight beside the other. Then he uncoiled the leather bridle from around the Jew’s hands.
Later that day, they buried him in a clearing on the side of a hill, which looked out over a lake. His father had picked out the place. There was no path, so they had to drag the coffin up between the trees, using ropes and pushing the wooden box until their fingertips were raw from splinters.
‘We had better make it deep,’ his father said as he handed Pekkala a shovel, ‘or else the wolves might dig him up.’
The two of them scraped through the layers of pine needles and then used pickaxes to dig into the grey clay beneath. When at last the coffin had been laid and the hole filled in, they set aside their shovels. Knowing only the prayers of a different god, they stood for a moment in silence before heading back down the hill.
‘What did you do with his book?’ asked Pekkala.
‘His head is resting on it,’ replied his father.
In the years since then, Pekkala had seen so many lifeless bodies that they seemed to merge in his mind. But the face of the Jew remained clear, and the smoke-trail writing spoke to him in dreams.
‘I don’t know how you do it,’ Kirov said again.
Pekkala did not reply, because he did not know either.
Flames snapped, flicking sparks into the blue-black sky.
The two men huddled together, like swimmers in a shark-infested sea.
*
As Kirov drove the Emka through the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate, with its ornamental battlements and gold and black clock tower above, Pekkala began to do up the buttons on his coat in preparation for the meeting with Stalin. The Emka’s tyres popped over the cobblestones of Ivanovsky Square until they reached a dead end on the far side.
‘I’ll walk home,’ he told Kirov. ‘This might take a while.’
At a plain, unmarked door, a soldier stood at attention. As Pekkala approached, the soldier slammed his heels together with a sound that echoed around the high brick walls and gave the traditional greeting of ‘Good health to you, Comrade Pekkala.’ This was not only a greeting, but also a sign that Pekkala had been recognised by the soldier and did not need to present his pass book.
Pekkala made his way up to the second floor of the building. Here, he walked down a long, wide corridor with tall ceilings. The floors were covered with red carpeting. It was, Pekkala could not help noticing, the same colour as arterial blood. His footsteps made no sound except when the floorboards creaked beneath the carpet. Tall doors lined the walls of this corridor on either side. Sometimes, these doors were open and he could see people at work in side large offices. Today all the doors were closed.
At the end of the corridor, another soldier greeted him and opened the double doors to Stalin’s reception room. It was a huge space, with eggshell-white walls and wooden floors. In the centre of the room stood three desks, like life rafts in the middle of a flat calm sea. At each desk sat a man, wearing a collarless olive-green tunic in the same style as that worn by Stalin himself. Only one man rose to greet Pekkala. It was Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s chief secretary: a short, flabby man with round glasses almost flush against his eyeballs. Poskrebyshev appeared to be the exact opposite of the stripped-to-the-waist, muscle-armoured workers whose statues could be found in almost every square in Moscow. The only thing exceptional about Poskrebyshev was his complete lack of emotion as he escorted Pekkala across the room to Stalin’s study.
Poskrebyshev knocked once and did not wait for a reply. He swung the door open, nodded for Pekkala to enter. As soon as Pekkala walked into the room, the secretary shut the door behind him.
Pekkala found himself alone in a large room with red velvet curtains and a red carpet which lined only the outer third of the floor. The centre was the same mosaic of wood as in the waiting room. The walls had been papered dark red, with caramel coloured wooden dividers separating the panels. Hanging on these walls were portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin, each one the same size and apparently painted by the same artist.
Close to one wall stood Stalin’s desk, which had eight legs, two at each corner. On the desk lay several files, each one aligned perfectly beside the others. Stalin’s chair had a wide back, padded with burgundy-coloured leather brass-tacked against the frame.
Apart from Stalin’s desk, and a table covered with a green cloth, the space was spartanly furnished. In the corner stood a large and very old grandfather clock which had been allowed to wind down and was silent now, the full yellow moon of its pendulum at rest behind the rippled glass window of its case.
Comrade Stalin often kept him waiting, and today was no exception.
Pekkala had not slept, having arrived back in the city only an hour before. He had reached that point of fatigue where sounds reached him as if down the length of a long cardboard tube. His only nourishment in the past fifteen hours had been a mug of kvass, a drink made from fermented rye bread, which he’d bought from a street vendor on his way to the meeting.
The vendor had handed Pekkala a battered metal cup filled with the sudsy brown drink, scooped from a cauldron kept warm by coals glowing in a grate beneath. As Pekkala raised the drink to his lips, he breathed in its smell like burnt toast. When he had finished, he turned the mug upside down, as was customary, emptying out the last drops and handed it back. Just as he was doing so, he noticed a small stamp on the bottom of the cup. Looking closer, he saw it was the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs, a sign that it had once been in the inventory of the royal family. The Tsar himself used to drink from a cup like this, and Pekkala thought how strange it was to see this fragment of the old empire washed up outside the Kremlin like the flotsam of a shipwreck.
The Tsar was sitting at his desk.
The dark velvet curtains of his study, drawn back to let in the light, gleamed softly around the edge, like the feathers on a starling’s back.
Lifting the heavy mug to his lips, the Tsar drank, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. Then he set the mug down with a satisfied grunt, picked up his blue pencil and began to tap out a rhythm on a stack of unread documents.
It was the autumn of 1916. After taking over command of the military, the Tsar had been spending most of his time behind the stockade fence of Army Headquarters at Mogilev.
In spite of the Tsar’s having taken command, the Russian Army continued to suffer more and more d
evastating defeats on the battlefield.
The blame for this had fallen as heavily on the Tsarina as it had done on the Tsar. A rumour had even surfaced that the Tsarina, without consulting the Russian High Command, had begun secret peace negotiations with Germany using one of her German relatives as an intermediary. The rumour spread, threatening the Tsar’s credibility as commander of the military.
On a rare visit to Petrograd, the Tsar had summoned Pekkala to the palace and ordered him to conduct an investigation to determine whether the rumour was legitimate.
Pekkala had known from the start that something was not right. Although the details of the investigation itself were to be kept secret, the Tsar had widely publicised the fact that he had ordered the investigation. News of Pekkala’s work even appeared in the papers, a thing the Tsar rarely allowed.
It did not take Pekkala long to discover that the rumour was, in fact, true. The Tsarina had, through an intermediary in Sweden, made contact with her brother, the Grand Duke of Hesse, who was then serving as a high-ranking officer in the German Army. A visit by the Grand Duke had taken place, as near as Pekkala could reckon, some time in February of 1916.
Pekkala was not surprised to learn of the Tsarina’s meddling. She had kept up a constant barrage of letters to the Tsar while her husband was in Mogilev, insisting that Rasputin’s advice on military affairs should be followed, and that anyone who disagreed with it should be sacked.
What did surprise Pekkala was to learn that the Tsar had known about the Grand Duke’s visit all along. Nicholas had even met with the Tsarina’s brother, probably in the very room where Pekkala and the Tsar were meeting now.
Once he had concluded the investigation, Pekkala made his report. He left nothing out, even those facts of the case which incriminated the Tsar himself. Immediately afterwards, Pekkala unfastened the emerald eye from the underside of his lapel and laid it on the Tsar’s desk. Then he drew his Webley revolver and set it down beside the badge.
‘What’s this?’ demanded the Tsar.
‘I am offering my resignation.’
‘Oh, come now, Pekkala!’ growled the Tsar, flipping his pencil into the air and catching it. ‘Try to see this from my point of view. Yes, I admit we discussed the possibility of a truce. And yes, I admit this was done in secret, without the knowledge of the Russian High Command. But damn it all, Pekkala, there is no truce! The negotiations fell apart. I knew the Russian people wanted answers about whether these rumours were true. That’s why I put you on the case – to set their minds at ease. The thing is, Pekkala, the answers they wanted were not the ones I knew you’d find.’
‘And what would you have me do now, Majesty, with the information I have uncovered?’
‘What I would have you do,’ replied the Tsar, tapping the point of his pencil against Pekkala’s revolver, ‘is get back to work and forget about this whole investigation.’
‘Majesty,’ said Pekkala, struggling to remain calm, ‘you do not employ me to provide you with illusions.’
‘Quite right, Pekkala. You provide me with the truth, and I decide how much of it the Russian people need to hear.’
Pekkala was beginning to wonder if Stalin might keep him waiting there all day. To pass the time, he rocked gently back and forth on the balls of his feet, scanning the wall behind Stalin’s desk. From previous visits, Pekkala knew that hidden somewhere in those wood panels was a secret door, impossible to see until it opened. Behind the opening stretched a low and narrow passageway, lit with tiny light bulbs no bigger than a man’s thumb. The floor of this passageway was thickly carpeted, so that a person could move without making any sound. Where it led to, Pekkala had no idea, but he had been told that this whole building was honeycombed with secret passageways.
Finally, Pekkala heard the familiar click of the panel’s lock releasing. The wooden slab swung outward and Stalin emerged from the wall. At first, he did not speak to Pekkala, or even look at him. His habit was to stare into every corner of the room, searching for anything that might be out of place. Finally, his gaze turned to Pekkala. ‘Nagorski died in an accident?’ he snapped. ‘Do you expect me to believe that?’
‘No, Comrade Stalin,’ replied Pekkala.
This seemed to catch him by surprise. ‘You don’t? But that’s what I read in the report!’
‘Not my report, Comrade Stalin.’
Muttering curses under his breath, Stalin sat down at his desk and immediately fished his pipe out of the pocket of his tunic.
Pekkala had noticed that Stalin tended to smoke cigarettes when not in his office, but normally stuck to smoking a pipe when he was in the Kremlin. The pipe was shaped like a check mark, with the bowl at the bottom of the check and curved over at the top. It had already been stuffed with honey-coloured shreds of tobacco. Each time Pekkala saw Stalin smoking his pipe, the pipe itself looked new and Pekkala suspected that he did not keep them long before replacing them.
From a small cardboard box, Stalin fished out a wooden match, the splintery sticks rustling together as he pinched one from the box. Stalin had a way of lighting these matches which Pekkala had never seen before. Grasping the match between his thumb and first two fingers, Stalin would flick the match with his ring finger across the sandpaper strip. This never failed to light the match. It was such an unusual method that Pekkala, who did not smoke, had once bought a box of matches and spent an hour over his kitchen sink, trying to master the technique, but succeeded only in burning his fingers.
In the stillness of the room, Pekkala heard the hiss of the match, the tiny crackle of the tobacco catching fire and the soft popping sound as Stalin puffed on the end of the pipe. Stalin shook out the match, dropped it in a small brass ashtray, then sat back in his chair. ‘No accident, you say?’
Pekkala shook his head. Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, he stepped forward to the desk, laid the cloth in front of Stalin and carefully unfolded it.
There, in the centre of the black handkerchief, lay the tiny sliver of lead which Pekkala had removed from Nagorski’s skull.
Stalin bent forward, until his nose was almost touching the desk top, and peered intently at the fragment. ‘What am I looking at, Pekkala?’
‘Part of a bullet.’
‘Ah!’ Stalin gave a satisfied growl and sat back in his chair. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘In Colonel Nagorski’s brain.’
Stalin nudged at the fragment with the stem of his pipe. ‘In his brain,’ he repeated.
Now, from his pocket, Pekkala removed the empty gun cartridge that he and Kirov had found in the pit the night before. He placed it before Stalin as if he were moving a pawn in a chess game. ‘We also recovered this from the scene. It is from the same gun, I am almost certain.’
Stalin nodded with approval. ‘This is why I need you, Pekkala!’ He opened the grey file and plucked out the single sheet of paper it contained. ‘The NKVD investigator who filed this report said that the body had been thoroughly examined. It says so right here.’ He held the paper out at arm’s length so he could read it. ‘No sign of injury prior to being crushed by the tank. How could they have missed a bullet in his head?’
‘The damage to the body was considerable,’ offered Pekkala.
‘That’s a reason, not an excuse.’
‘You should also know, Comrade Stalin, that the bullet did not come from a Russian-made gun.’
Almost before the words had left Pekkala’s mouth, Stalin smashed his fist down on the desk. The little cartridge jumped and then rolled in a circle. ‘I was right!’ he shouted.
‘Right about what, Comrade Stalin?’
‘Foreigners carried out this murder.’
‘That may be so,’ replied Pekkala, ‘but I doubt they could have done so without help from inside the country.’
‘They did have help,’ replied Stalin, ‘and I believe the White Guild is responsible.’
Pekkala’s eyes narrowed in confusion. ‘Comrade Stalin, we have spoken about this before. T
he White Guild is a front. It is controlled by your own Bureau of Special Operations. How could the White Guild be responsible when you are the one who created it, unless you are the one who ordered Nagorski’s death?’
‘I know perfectly well,’ replied Stalin coldly, ‘who summoned the White Guild into being, and no, I gave no command for Nagorski to be liquidated.’
‘Then surely the Guild poses no threat to us.’
‘There have been some new developments,’ muttered Stalin.
‘And what are they?’ asked Pekkala.
‘All you need to know, Pekkala, is that our enemies are attempting to destroy the Konstantin Project. They know that the T-34 is our only chance of surviving the time that is coming.’
‘I don’t understand, Comrade Stalin. What do you mean by “the time that is coming”?’
‘War, Pekkala. War with Germany. Hitler has retaken the Rhineland. He has forged a pact with Japan and Italy. My sources tell me he is planning to occupy parts of Czechoslovakia and Austria. And he won’t stop there, no matter what he tells the rest of the world. I have received reports from Soviet agents in England that the British are aware ofGerman plans to invade their country. They know that their only chance of preventing that is if the Germans become involved in a war against us. Germany would be tied down in a war to the east as well as to the west, in which case they might not have the resources to invade Britain at all. British Intelligence has been spreading rumours that we are planning to launch a pre-emptive strike against Germany through southern Poland.’
‘And are we?’
Stalin got up from his desk and began to pace around the room, the report still clenched in his fist. The soft soles of his calfskin leather of his boots swished across the wooden floor. ‘We have no such plan, but the Germans are taking these British rumours seriously. This means they are watching us for any signs of provocation. The slightest hostile gesture by us could bring about a full-scale war and Hitler has made no secret of what he would like to do with the Soviet Union. If he has his way, our culture will be annihilated, our people enslaved and this entire country turned into a living space for German colonists. The T-34 is not simply a machine. It is our only hope for survival. If we lose the advantage this tank can give us, we will lose everything. As of now, Pekkala, you are in charge of the investigation. You will replace this,’ he squinted at the name on the report. ‘Major Lysenkova.’
