by Sam Eastland
It was only now, by the soft light of paraffin lanterns which hung from iron hooks along the walls, that Pekkala got his first look at Churikova’s high cheekbones and eyes the same dark blue as in Delft pottery. As he studied the woman his face grew suddenly pale.
‘Inspector Pekkala, is something the matter?’ asked Kirov.
‘Pekkala?’ echoed Churikova. ‘The Emerald Eye?’
‘Yes.’ Pekkala turned over the lapel of his coat. The jewel winked in its iris of solid gold. ‘That’s what they used to call me.’
‘Then this must be very important.’ As Churikova spoke, she removed her bulky greatcoat, which was standard issue for both men and women in the Red Army. The coats were made of thick olive-brown wool and fastened with black metal buttons, each one emblazoned with a hammer and sickle set inside the outline of a star.
‘It might be important,’ Pekkala told her. ‘And it might mean nothing at all. We are relying on you to tell us.’
The two men sat down opposite Lieutenant Churikova at a rickety table on which a red and white checked table cloth had been laid out, its pattern blotched with stains and cigarette ash.
Kirov removed the painting from the leather briefcase and handed it to her.
‘Where did you get this?’ she asked, as her eyes fanned across the canvas.
Over the next few minutes, Kirov told her everything they knew.
When he had finished explaining‚ Churikova sat back slowly in her chair. ‘What did Semykin have to say about it?’
‘That the painting was basically worthless,’ said Kirov.
A faint smile passed across her lips. ‘Semykin was right. Partly, anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Pekkala.
‘It is worthless as a painting,’ she replied, ‘because it is, in fact, a map.’
‘A map?’ the two men chorused.
‘You must be mistaken,’ said Kirov. ‘I had the canvas X-rayed and even ran it under ultraviolet light in case special inks had been used. We found nothing that looked like a map, Comrade Churikova.’
‘I did not say that it contains a map,’ explained Churikova. ‘The painting itself is the map. This is known as a Baden-Powell diagram. It was named after the British officer Robert Baden-Powell, who sometimes operated as a spy while posing as an eccentric butterfly collector, complete with a pith helmet, butterfly net and sketchbook. He even spied on our own fortress at Krasnoe Selo back in 1886, and escaped with details of our observation balloons and a new type of flare which had just been issued for the Russian military. He often employed the drawings of these butterflies as a way of encoding his information, contained within the wing structure of the butterfly. In the case of Krasnoe Selo‚ the speckles on its wings denoted where guns had been positioned‚ while the lines created the shape of the fortress walls. The next time you see a mad Englishman with a net and a sketchbook full of butterflies, take my advice and arrest him‚ Inspector.’
‘A map,’ whispered Pekkala, as he began to think it through. ‘But who made it? And why? Were the men in that plane picking it up or delivering it?’
‘And why,’ Kirov wondered aloud, ‘in an age of electronic messages, would someone resort to a technique as outdated as this?’
‘Sometimes the simplest techniques are the most difficult to crack,’ Churikova tapped her fingernail upon the crude wooden frame of the painting, ‘and, unfortunately for you, this one is virtually impossible to break. Even if you could decipher the matrix of symbols, you have no way of knowing what those symbols refer to, or where the object is or the scale of the map. It could be the size of something you keep in your pocket or it could be the size of Moscow. Without some pre-existing codex, which would have been agreed upon by the two people sharing the map, there is no way to determine what is hidden in this painting.’ Churikova rose slowly to her feet. ‘Perhaps you can take consolation in the fact that, at the rate the Germans are advancing, the location detailed in this map, wherever it was, is probably behind their lines by now.’
They walked out into the railyard. The Milky Way arched across the sky, like the vapour trail of a plane bound for another galaxy.
‘We can drive you back to your barracks in Moscow,’ offered Kirov.
‘There’s no one there,’ replied Churikova. ‘My whole battalion was aboard that train. I’d rather stay here and wait for the next one.’
A few minutes later, as the Emka pulled out on to the road, Pekkala glanced back at the station. In the darkness, he could just make out the silhouette of Churikova. She stood alone in the middle of the deserted railyard, staring up at the stars as if to decipher the meaning of their placement in the universe.
Rifleman Stefanov breathed in sharply
Rifleman Stefanov breathed in sharply and sat up, pushing aside the olive-brown rain cape he had been using as a blanket. His back ached sharply from lying in the foxhole. Barkat’s voice had woken him.
On the other side of the clearing, the gun-loader was moaning about the lost love of a woman named Ekaterina, whom he confessed was actually one of his cousins. ‘I was going to marry her!’ he announced.
‘You can’t do that!’ shouted Ragozin, who had left behind a wife and three children when he enlisted. He always seemed to be on the verge of hysterics, when he was not actually hysterical.
‘Can’t do what?’ asked Barkat. He was frying bread in a blackened mess kit full of bacon grease‚ which he had collected over several weeks.
‘Marry your cousin is what! You’ll end up with maniacs for children.’
‘I don’t think the correct word is “maniac”,’ said Stefanov.
‘Well, forgive me, Professor!’ Ragozin rolled his hand in mock obeisance.
‘I can think of better uses for the word maniac,’ replied Stefanov.
‘I’m not going to marry her now,’ said Barkat. With the point of a bayonet, he poked the bread around the pan, chasing the bubbles of boiling bacon grease. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘I used to worry that my wife couldn’t manage without me.’ Ragozin sighed and rubbed his face. ‘Now I worry that she can. They’re all long gone,’ he muttered. ‘Yours. Mine.’ He wagged a finger in Barkat’s direction. ‘His sister or whoever she is. Every day that goes by is one step away from being able to pick up where we left off. Eventually, we’ll all reach a point where we can never pick things up. We’ll have to start again from scratch.’
At that moment, they heard a rumble of thunder in the distance.
‘Oh, no, not rain,’ groaned Ragozin. ‘We’ll drown in these foxholes if it pours.’
‘It can’t be rain,’ Stefanov countered. ‘The sky is clear.’
‘He’s right,’ said Barkat.
The three men looked around in confusion.
‘There!’ Stefanov pointed towards the north, where a wild, flickering light danced along the horizon.
‘They’re bombing Leningrad,’ Ragozin muttered sadly. ‘That poor city. They used to love my radio broadcasts.’
On the ride back to Moscow
On the ride back to Moscow, Pekkala remained silent. Ahead of them, the converging headlights of the Emka seemed to burrow the dirt road from the black cliff face of the night.
‘Inspector,’ asked Kirov, ‘why did you seem so nervous back there?’
‘The last time I saw eyes that colour was at the train station in Petrograd, back in 1917.’
‘Your fiancée.’
Pekkala nodded.
Kirov was in no mood to commiserate. ‘I don’t understand you, Inspector. For nine years, you lived like a savage! Nine years of Siberian winters! By every law of nature, you should be dead by now. Sometimes I think the reason Stalin gives you the worst assignments is not only because no one else can solve them, but because nobody else could survive them. And, in spite of all you have endured, it is the eyes of a woman that defeat you.’
To this‚ Pekkala only shrugged and looked the other way.
They were back inside the city
limits now, racing along the unlit streets.
‘Shall I drop you at your apartment, Inspector? We could both use some sleep, you know.’
‘No. We must keep working.’
‘But you heard what the lieutenant said. Without the codex, deciphering the map becomes impossible.’
‘Virtually impossible. That is what she said.’
With a sigh, Kirov turned down a potholed street which ran beside the Dorogomilovsky market and began the familiar bumpy ride towards their office.
It was after midnight. The market stalls were empty. A few tattered awnings flapped in the cold, damp breeze. In the distance, the pale sabres of searchlights from anti-aircraft batteries stationed in the Kuskovo Park scratched restlessly against the night sky.
Minutes later, they were trudging up the stairs to the fifth floor, the soles of their boots rasping against the worn wooden steps.
Once inside the office, Kirov turned on the light switch but nothing happened.
Pekkala waited in the hallway, the painting tucked under his arm, listening to the metronomic click as Kirov flipped the switch impatiently back and forth. ‘Must be our turn for a black-out,’ he grumbled.
There had been several of these in the past weeks, mostly at night, rolling like waves of darkness across the city. Initially, the Moscow authorities denied the existence of any black-outs. These denials only led to speculation that these electricity failures were the work of German spies. Since then, the official line had been changed to assure the people of Moscow that all black-outs were deliberate, but nobody believed that, either.
While Kirov lit an oil lamp, Pekkala cleared away every scrap of paper on the large notice board which covered one wall of their office, leaving behind a constellation of drawing pins in the cork backing.
Then Pekkala cleared everything off his desk except for the painting, the oil lamp and a roll of waxy baker’s parchment which Kirov sometimes used for baking piroshky.
Kirov lit a fire in the old iron stove in the corner of their office and lit the samovar to boil water for tea. For a while, the only sound was of the kindling, spitting as it burned inside the stove.
Hunched over his desk, Pekkala laid a piece of parchment paper over the canvas. Then, using a pencil, he traced every line on the painting, including the tree branches in the background and the flecks of colour which had been daubed across the wings of the moth. He handed the tracing to Kirov. ‘Pin this on the wall,’ he said.
After that, Pekkala made a tracing only of the background, leaving the double-heart shape of the moth as a blank in the centre of the picture. This, too, went up on the wall.
Next, Pekkala traced only the lines within the wings of the moth. ‘Pin this.’
Then he traced only the flecks and followed it with a sketch containing just the horizontal lines, and another with only verticals. All of these, he pinned up on the wall. Finally, when Pekkala could think of no other way of breaking down the framework of the picture, he stood back and surveyed the now-crowded cork board. The strange, skeletal images seemed to flutter through the air, brought to life by the motion of the oil lamp’s flame.
‘Do any of those look like a map to you?’ he asked Kirov, who had retreated to the chair behind his desk and now sat with his heels up on the blotter.
‘Honestly? No.’
Behind him, faint breaths of steam seeped from the brass samovar’s spout, as if it too were considering the situation.
Pekkala went over to the bookcase, from which he retrieved a folded map of the entire country. ‘Is this the only one we’ve got?’
‘We’d have room for more if you would get rid of those railway timetables,’ replied Kirov.
It was true, the twenty-four volumes did take up half the shelf, but Pekkala chose to ignore the comment. He spent a minute unravelling the map which, like some complicated piece of origami, at first resisted all attempts at being unfolded. Having finally completed the task, Pekkala laid the chart on the floor and stood in the middle of it like a giant, one foot in the Ukraine and the other in Siberia, peering down at the arteries of rivers – the Volga, the Dnieper, the Yenisei – and at the dense muscularity of the Ural and Stanovoy mountains. ‘Somewhere,’ he muttered, ‘the lines on that wall overlap with the contours on this map.’
‘If what’s hidden is even in Russia. And even if it is‚ you’ll never find it, because the lines in that painting might represent a single street in a village so small it isn’t even listed.’ With that pronouncement, Kirov got up from his chair and headed over to the samovar, whose steady jet of steam had travelled to the window, painting it with beads of condensation. Then he set about preparing tea. From the window sill, between two kumquat trees whose orange fruit stood out against the blackness of the night beyond the windowpane like meteors hurtling to earth, Kirov fetched out an old tin, containing his precious supply of tea, from which he selected a pinch of black crumbs and sprinkled them into the samovar. ‘Not much left,’ he muttered, peering at the dwindled contents of the tin.
The dealers in the market had taken to shrugging their shoulders when Kirov chanted out the names of teas – Mudan, Jin Zan, Karavan – whose abundance he’d once taken for granted.
While the tea brewed, both men stood before the wall of sketches.
‘The Germans already have maps of our country,’ remarked Kirov. ‘Maybe, instead of trying to figure out where this map is supposed to be, we should be asking ourselves what they need a map of that they don’t already possess.’
Kirov’s words snagged like a fish hook, trolling through Pekkala’s brain. ‘So what this is,’ he began, advancing to the wall and touching his fingertips first against one tracing and then another, ‘is of a place for which there was no map before.’
‘Or else a place that has been changed,’ suggested Kirov.
‘The layout of a fortress, perhaps, just like the one drawn by the British spy.’
‘Perhaps,’ agreed Kirov, ‘but what fortresses exist in the path of the German advance?’
‘None,’ admitted Pekkala.
The two men sighed as their train of thought ground to a halt.
The tea had brewed by now. From the drawer of his desk, Kirov brought out two tea glasses, each one nestled in a brass holder. He poured a small amount of tea into each one and added some boiling water to dilute the strong mixture, which would otherwise have been too bitter to drink.
Reaching across the map, he handed one glass to Pekkala.
‘No sugar?’ asked Pekkala.
‘We have run out of that, as well,’ Kirov replied gloomily.
As Pekkala breathed in the smell of the tea, its smoky odour reminded him of his cabin in Siberia, where, in the winter, he sometimes returned from hunting so frozen that he would curl up in his fireplace and warm himself by lying in the embers.
When the sun came up three hours later, splashing like molten copper across the slate rooftops of Moscow, Kirov and Pekkala were still staring at the wall, as helpless as they’d been when they first set eyes upon the painting.
‘There must be some way of looking at them which we haven’t tried yet,’ said Pekkala.
Kirov tilted his head to the side and blinked at the wall.
‘I doubt you have found the solution,’ said Pekkala.
‘I wasn’t looking for one,’ replied Kirov. ‘I am simply too tired to hold my head up straight.’
Equally exhausted, Pekkala let his eyes droop shut for a moment. All the maps he’d ever seen crowded into view inside his skull. The lines of streets, the paths of rivers and the thumbprint contours of mountains flickered behind his eyes like a pack of shuffled playing cards. ‘Go home, Kirov,’ he said. ‘Get some sleep.’
Kirov was too tired to argue. ‘Very well, Inspector. But what about you?’
‘I’m not tired,’ lied Pekkala.
‘I’ll be back in a few hours.’
Pekkala listened to the heavy tread of Kirov’s boots as he made his way downstairs. Then came
the bang of the heavy door at the front of the building and finally the rumble of the Emka as its engine sprang to life.
For a moment, Pekkala stared longingly at a chair in the corner. Two years before, Pekkala had salvaged the chair off the street after spotting it lying in the snow outside the Hotel Metropol. Before the Great War, the hotel had been famous as a meeting place for gamblers, spies and black market millionaires. Pekkala himself had often met there with the former Moscow Bureau Chief of the Okhrana, a fleshy man named Zubatov. Although Zubatov had been forced out of his position in 1903 by Interior Minister Vyachyslav von Plehve, he continued to work for the Okhrana as a field agent. He often smuggled himself into neighbouring countries with the help of a shadowy branch of the Okhrana, known as the Myednikov Section, who specialised in infiltrating foreign Intelligence networks. Using a variety of disguises and forged identities, Zubatov would hunt down any plots which might endanger the life of the Tsar. Rarely did he return without news of some conspiracy. His paranoia proved infectious, and it wasn’t long before he had convinced the Tsarina to order the construction of hidden passageways within the Catherine and Alexander Palaces. These tunnels emerged in groves of trees outside the buildings themselves or even beyond the grounds of the estate. But it did not stop there. At Zubatov’s urging, secret hiding places were built in all the residences at Tsarskoye Selo. Behind invisible doors, staircases carved out of the bedrock led to rooms deep beneath the ground. In these tomb-like chambers, members of the Romanov family, and anyone who worked for them, could vanish from the guns and knives of those who might come to do them harm.
