Eye of the Red Tsar A Novel of Suspense

by Sam Eastland

“A rowboat.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just an ordinary rowboat?” The Tsar failed to hide his disappointment.

  “And some oars, Excellency.”

  “Let me guess,” said the Tsar. “You would like two of those.”

  Pekkala nodded.

  “Is that all you want from me?”

  “No, Excellency. I also need a lake to put it in.”

  “Ah,” growled the Tsar, “now that’s more like it, Pekkala.”

  Two days later, just after the sun had set, Pekkala rowed out into the lake known as the Great Pond, at the southern edge of the Tsarskoye Selo estate. Ilya sat in the back of the boat, a blindfold over her eyes.

  It was a cool evening, but not cold. In a month this whole lake would be frozen.

  “How much longer do I have to wear this?” Before he could respond, she asked another question. “Where are we going?”

  He opened his mouth to reply.

  “Is there anyone else in this boat?” she asked. “Why don’t you give me an answer?”

  “I will if you’ll let me,” he said. “The answers are ‘not long,’ ‘not telling,’ and ‘no.’”

  Ilya sighed and folded her hands in her lap. “What if one of my students sees me? They’ll think I’m being kidnapped.”

  “I love you,” said Pekkala. He had meant to save that for later, but it just slipped out on its own.

  “What?” she asked, her voice growing suddenly soft.

  “You heard me.”

  She was silent.

  He wondered if he had made a mistake.

  “Well, it’s about time,” she said, softly.

  “You’re the second person who’s said that to me recently.”

  “I love you, too,” she told him.

  The bow of the rowboat nudged up against the shore of an island called the Hall, which stood in the middle of the Great Pond. A large pavilion had been built on the island, taking up most of its space, so that the pavilion itself seemed to float upon the water.

  Pekkala drew in the oars, droplets falling from the Turk’s head knots which had been laced just forward of the oar grips. Then he helped Ilya out of the boat. She was still wearing the blindfold, but now she no longer complained. Holding her hand, he led her up to the pavilion, under which there was a single table with two chairs. A lantern on the table cast a pool of light around the space, and the backs of the chairs made shadows like the loops of twisted vines.

  Once she was seated, he lifted the silver domes which had been placed over their plates. He had made the meal himself-chicken Kiev, its center stuffed with a knot of butter and parsley, mushrooms stirred into a sauce of cream and brandy, string beans no thicker than a sewing needle, and potatoes broiled with rosemary. The Tsarina had contributed a bottle of Grande Dame Veuve Clicquot. Beside the lantern sat a bowl of perfect apples, which they would eat with cheese for their dessert.

  The plates had been set in silver rings, raising them just above the level of the table, and the meal kept warm by candles placed beneath.

  Now Pekkala removed the candles and the silver rings, so that the plates were resting on the table.

  He breathed in, his eyes scanning the place settings to make certain everything was in perfect order. For the past two days, he had been so busy with the details of this meal that he hadn’t had time to get nervous. But now he was very nervous. “You can take off the blindfold now,” he said.

  She looked at the meal and then at him and then around her at the pavilion, darkness like velvet curtains all around.

  Pekkala watched her anxiously.

  “You did not need to go to all this trouble,” she told him.

  “Well, I know, but-

  “You had me at the first creak of the oars.”

  17

  NOW KIROV HELD THE WOODEN APPLE AS HE DROVE, HIS OTHER hand gripping the wheel. “Isn’t it beautiful!” he exclaimed. “Don’t we live in a wonderful time!”

  The Vodovenko Sanitarium stood by itself on the top of a windswept hill. Only one road led to and from the towering stone structure. The entire hill was stripped of vegetation and all the land around it had been ploughed.

  “Why did they do that?” asked Kirov. “Are they planting crops?”

  It was Anton who replied. “They do that so the footsteps of anyone who escapes can be tracked across the ground.”

  They arrived at a checkpoint at the base of the hill.

  Armed guards inspected their papers, raised the yellow-and-black barrier pole, and allowed them to proceed.

  Two steel doors at the entrance to Vodovenko swung open. The Emka rolled into a courtyard.

  The walls of the sanitarium seemed to lean out over them. In front of each window, secured by bolts a hand’s length from the wall, large metal plates blocked any view.

  Kirov cut the engine.

  They had not expected the silence, but it was not the silence of an empty place. Instead, it seemed as if everything contained within that massive building was holding its breath.

  At the front desk, an attendant reexamined their documents. He was a wide-faced man with a tangle of red hair and rust-colored freckles constellationed on his cheeks. His nose had been broken and healed crookedly. The attendant pulled out a file and slid it across the counter.

  Pekkala saw a photograph of a haunted-looking man stapled at the top left corner, and a name written across the top-Katamidze.

  The attendant picked up a phone and ordered the patient to be brought to a secure room.

  Pekkala wondered what he meant by secure, in a place which was already a prison.

  “You will need to surrender your weapons,” the attendant told them.

  Two Tokarevs and the Webley clanked down on the countertop.

  The attendant behind the desk looked at the Webley. He glanced at Pekkala but said nothing. The guns were placed in a metal cabinet. Then the attendant walked around to a set of metal doors, slid back a dead bolt, and nodded for them to go through.

  Pekkala turned to Anton and Kirov. “Wait here,” he said.

  Anton looked relieved.

  “I don’t mind coming in,” said Kirov. “I would actually-”

  “No,” said Pekkala.

  Anton tapped Kirov on the shoulder. “Come on, Junior Man. Let’s go outside and you can smoke that fancy little pipe of yours.”

  Kirov glared at him, but did as he was told.

  When Pekkala stood on the other side of the armored door, the attendant followed him in and dead-bolted it with a key which he kept on his belt.

  With his first step into the corridors of Vodovenko, Pekkala began to sweat. It started with the floors, which were covered with thick gray felt. They drank up the noise of their footsteps and seemed to leach from their bodies even the patient drumming of their hearts. Flooding his senses were the smells of coal tar soap, of food boiled into a pulp, of excrement. Fusing it all together was the distinctive reek of sweat from people living in fear.

  The corridors were lined with doors. Duck-egg blue paint clung in layers to the metal. All of them were closed and each had an observation slit, covered with a slide. Beneath the observation slit, like an unsmiling mouth, each door also had a slot for passing through food.

  Pekkala stopped. His legs refused to move. Perspiration dripped off his jawline. His breath felt hot as cinders in his throat.

  “Are you all right?” asked the attendant.

  “I think so,” replied Pekkala.

  “You have been here before,” the attendant said. “Here or some place like it. I know the look you people get when you come back.”

  The attendant led him to a room two stories underground. It had a low ceiling, barely a handsbreadth above the top of Pekkala’s head. A metal chair stood in the exact center of the room. It was anchored to the concrete floor with L-shaped brackets, through which bolts had been driven into the floor.

  The only light in the room came from the ceiling directly above the chair, where a naked bulb hung
in a metal cage.

  A man sat in the chair, chained by each wrist to the forward legs. He was a tall man, and the way he had been chained caused him to stoop over in a manner which reminded Pekkala of a sprinter crouched before the beginning of a race.

  Dirty, graying hair stuck out on the sides of his head, leaving a wide sweep of baldness in between. His ears were large, as was his soft, round chin, speckled with a two days’ growth of beard. The man’s eyes, set into a shallow brow, were as smoky blue as those of a newborn baby.

  Katamidze wore the same beige cotton pajamas which Pekkala had worn at the outset of his journey to the Gulag. He recalled the humiliating thinness of the cloth, the way it stuck to the backs of his legs when he sweated, and the perverse absence of a drawstring, so that a prisoner had to hold up his pants all the time.

  “Katamidze,” said the attendant, “I have someone to see you.”

  “This isn’t my usual cell,” replied the man.

  “Now then, Katamidze,” crooned the attendant. “Do you see the man I’ve brought to meet you?”

  “I see him.” His gaze fixed on Pekkala. “So you are the Emerald Eye?”

  “Yes,” said Pekkala.

  “Prove it,” said Katamidze.

  Pekkala turned up his lapel. In the glare of the metal-caged bulb, the emerald flashed.

  “They told me you were dead.”

  “A slight exaggeration,” replied Pekkala.

  “I said I’d only speak to you.” Katamidze looked at the attendant. “In private.”

  “Very well,” said Pekkala.

  “I am not authorized to leave you alone with the patient,” the attendant protested.

  “I won’t talk to anyone but the inspector,” said Katamidze. After he had finished speaking, his mouth continued to move, but without making any sound.

  Pekkala watched the words which formed upon the prisoner’s lips and realized that Katamidze was repeating the last few words of every sentence, like an echo of himself inside his head. He also noticed that the right ankle and left wrist of the prisoner were badly swollen where he had been chained to the wall of his cell.

  “It’s against regulations,” the attendant persisted.

  “Go,” replied Pekkala.

  The attendant looked as if he were about to spit on the floor. “Fine, but this man is classified as dangerous. Stay away from him. I won’t be held responsible for what he’ll do to you if you come too close.”

  When the two men were finally alone, Pekkala sat down on the floor with his back to the wall. He did not want Katamidze to feel as if he were being interrogated.

  “What season is it now?” asked Katamidze.

  “Nearly autumn. The leaves are beginning to turn.”

  A smile flickered across Katamidze’s face. “I remember the smell of the leaves on the ground after the first frost. You know, I had begun to believe them when they told me you were dead.”

  “I was, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Then you should thank me, Inspector Pekkala, for bringing you back from the world of the dead! And now you have something to live for.”

  “Yes,” said Pekkala, “I do.”

  Ilya and Pekkala stood on the crowded railway platform of the Nikolaevsky station in Petrograd.

  It was the last week of February 1917.

  Entire army regiments-the Volhynin, the Semyonovsky, the Preobrazhensky-had mutinied. Many of the officers had already been shot. The clattering of machine-gun fire sounded from the Likjeiny Prospekt. Along with the army, striking factory workers and sailors from the fortress island of Kronstadt began systematically looting the shops. They stormed the offices of the Petrograd Police and destroyed the Register of Criminals.

  The Tsar had finally been persuaded to send in a troop of Cossacks to battle the Revolutionaries, but the decision came too late. Seeing that the Revolution was gaining momentum, the Cossacks themselves had rebelled against the government.

  This was the point at which Pekkala knew he had to get Ilya out of the country, at least until things quieted down.

  Now the train was ready to depart, heading east towards Warsaw. From there it would travel to Berlin and on to Paris, which was Ilya’s final destination.

  “Here,” said Pekkala, and reached inside his shirt. He pulled a leather cord from around his neck. Looped into the cord was a gold signet ring. “Look after this for me.”

  “But that was going to be your wedding ring.”

  “It will be,” he replied, “and when I see you again, I’ll put on that ring and never take it off again.”

  The crowd ebbed and flowed, as if a wind was blowing them like grain stalks in a field.

  Many of those fleeing had come with huge steamer trunks, sets of matching luggage, even birds in cages. Hauling this baggage were exhausted porters in their pillbox hats and dark blue uniforms with a single red stripe, like a trickle of blood, down the sides of their trousers. There were too many people. Nobody could move without shoving. One by one, passengers abandoned their baggage and pressed forward to the train, tickets raised above their heads. Their shouts rose above the panting roar of the steam train as it prepared to move out. High above, beneath the glass-paned roof, condensation beaded on the dirty glass. It fell back as black rain upon the passengers.

  A conductor leaned out of a doorway, whistle clenched between his teeth. He blew three shrill blasts.

  “That’s a two-minute warning,” said Pekkala. “The train won’t wait. You have to go, Ilya.”

  The crowd began to panic.

  “I could wait for the next train,” she pleaded. In her hands, she clutched a single bag made out of brightly patterned carpet material, containing some books, a few photographs, and a change of clothes.

  “There might not be a next train. Please. You must leave now.”

  “But how will you find me?”

  He smiled faintly, reaching up and running his fingers through her hair. “Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s what I’m good at.”

  “How will I know where you are?”

  “Wherever the Tsar is, that’s where I’ll be too.”

  “I should stay with you.”

  “No. Absolutely not. It’s too dangerous now. When things settle down, I will come for you, and I will bring you back.”

  “But what if they don’t settle down?”

  “Then I will leave this place. I will find you. Stay in Paris if you can, but wherever you are, I will find you. Then we will start a new life. One way or the other, I promise we will be together soon.”

  The roar of those who could not get aboard had risen to a constant shriek.

  A pile of luggage stacked too high suddenly lurched and fell. Fur-coated passengers went sprawling. The crowd closed up around them.

  “Now!” said Pekkala. “Before it’s too late.”

  “All right,” Ilya said at last. “Don’t let anything happen to you.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” he told her. “Just get aboard the train.”

  She moved away into the sea of people.

  Pekkala remained where he was. He watched her head above the others. When she was almost at the carriage, she turned and waved to him.

  He waved back. And then he lost sight of her, as a tide of people poured past him, pursuing the rumor that another train had pulled in at the Finland station on the other side of the river.

  Before he knew it, he had been swept out into the street.

  Pekkala ran around the side of the station, and from a street just off the Nevski Prospekt, he watched the train pulling out. The windows were open. Passengers leaned out, waving to those they had left behind on the platform. The carriages rattled past. Then suddenly the tracks were empty and there was only the rhythmic clatter of the wheels, fading away into the distance.

  It was the last train out.

  The next day, the Reds set fire to the station.

  18

  “WHAT IS IT YOU WANT TO TELL ME, KATAMIDZE?”

 
; “I know where they are,” he replied. “The bodies of the Romanovs.”

  “Yes.” Pekkala nodded. “We have found them.” For the moment, he said nothing about Alexei.

  “And did you find my camera?”

  “Camera? No. There was no camera in the mine shaft.”

  “Not in the mine shaft! In the basement of the Ipatiev house!”

  Pekkala’s face went suddenly numb. “You were in the Ipatiev house?”

  Katamidze nodded. “Oh, yes. I’m a photographer,” he said, as if that would explain everything. “I’m the only one in town.”

  “But how did you come to be in the basement?” According to Anton, that was where the bodies of the guards had been found. Pekkala tried to sound calm, even though his heart was racing.

  “For the portrait!” said Katamidze. “They called me. I have a telephone. Not many people in town have one of those.”

  “Who called you?”

  “An officer of the Internal Security, the Cheka. They were the ones guarding the Tsar and the family. The officer said they wanted me to take a formal portrait, to prove to the rest of the country that the Romanovs were being well treated. He said it was going to be published.”

  “Did he give his name?”

  “No. I didn’t ask. He just said he was Cheka.”

  “Did you know the Tsar was staying at the Ipatiev house?”

  “Of course! Nobody saw them, but everyone knew they were there. You can’t keep a secret like that. The Guards built a temporary fence around the house and painted the windows so that no one could look in. Afterwards, they tore the fence down, but when the Romanovs were there, if you so much as stopped and looked at the place, the soldiers would pull a gun on you. Only the Red Guards came and went. And I got the call! A portrait of the Tsar. Imagine it. One minute I am taking pictures of prize cows and farmers who have to pay me in apples because they don’t have the money for a picture, and then next minute I am photographing the Romanovs. It would have made my career. I planned on doubling my fees. The officer said to come right over, but it was already after dark. I asked if it couldn’t wait until morning. He said he had just received orders from Moscow. You know how those people are. You can’t get them to do anything but, when they want something, it all has to happen yesterday. He told me there was a room in the basement which had been cleared out and that this would be a good place for taking the family portrait. Fortunately, I knew that the Ipatievs had electricity in their house, so I would be able to use my studio lights. I barely had time to pack. There’s all sorts of things involved. Tripod. Film. I had just received a new camera. Ordered it from Moscow. Only had it for a month. I would like to have it back.”