by Sam Eastland
A few seconds later, they passed beneath the Orlov gates and out on to the main road.
The last Stefanov saw of Tsarskoye Selo was the roof of the Catherine Palace, its grey tiles shimmering through the mist‚ just as it had been when he fled with his father from the tidal wave of revolution.
Later that day
Later that day, Pekkala reported back to Stalin. ‘I spoke to Semykin. The person we’re looking for does, in fact, appear to be the same Gustav Engel who is mentioned in your file.’
Stalin opened his mouth to speak.
‘There’s more, I’m afraid‚’ said Pekkala. ‘A special task force has been created by the SS for the purpose of removing thousands of art works from the countries occupied by Germany.’
‘I am already aware of that,’ replied Stalin. ‘Since we last spoke, I have learned from one of our agents in the Red Orchestra network, a woman who is based in Königsberg, that, two weeks ago, Gustav Engel gave the order for the Seckendorff Gallery, which is the largest gallery at the Castle, to be cleared and repainted in order to make room for the Amber Panels, which they plan to display there until such time as the museum in Linz has been completed. Engel spent the past two weeks at Königsberg, supervising the refurbishments and yesterday, according to our agent, departed from Königsberg in a truck which had been specially outfitted to transport the panels back to Königsberg. According to the agent, Engel is the lynchpin to Rosenberg’s entire operation in the East and the Amber Room is their top priority.’
‘The German army is already at the gates of Leningrad. We cannot stop them from reaching the Palace . . .’
‘That is true,’ agreed Stalin, ‘but maybe we can put a stop to Gustav Engel.’
‘How is that possible?’
‘It is possible,’ replied Stalin, ‘because I am sending you to get him.’
At first, Pekkala was too stunned to reply. ‘I am not an assassin,’ he finally managed to say.
‘I am not asking you to kill him, Pekkala. I want you to bring him back to Moscow.’
‘And what would be the point of that? If we got rid of him, they would just appoint somebody else.’
‘That is where you are wrong, Pekkala. The Nazis chose Engel precisely because nobody else knows what he knows. With Engel at their head, this organisation will systematically rob our country of its cultural heritage, after which, if we can’t find a way to stop them, they’ll destroy whatever is left. Engel compiled the list of what they’d steal, what they’d ignore and what they would destroy. I need to know what’s on that list, Pekkala, along with the name of the traitor who’s been helping him. Gustav Engel can provide that information, and he will, if you can bring him to me. We can’t save everything, but we can at least deprive them of the treasures they have come to steal. Thanks to you and Major Kirov, we have identified the perpetrator of what may still become the greatest theft in history‚ unless you bring the criminal to justice.’
‘And the fact that he’s behind enemy lines . . .’
‘That is merely an obstacle to be overcome, as you have overcome other obstacles in the past. You are the perfect choice for this task. After all, you know the layout of that palace and, according to your file,’ Stalin lifted up a tattered grey envelope, ‘you even speak German.’
‘That was part of my training with the Okhrana, but, Comrade Stalin, even if it was possible to arrest Engel and to bring him back to Moscow‚ is there enough time to accomplish the mission?’
‘Yes, if we move quickly. It will take Engel a week to travel from Königsberg to the Catherine Palace. When he discovers the wallpaper instead of the panels, he may be convinced that the amber has been removed. Then, again, he may not. In either case, Engel is likely to remain at Tsarskoye Selo until he has conducted a thorough search. This will give you time to apprehend him and then to smuggle him back across our lines.’
‘I can find my way around the palace, Comrade Stalin, but whatever advantage that affords me is lost by the fact that I don’t know what this man Engel looks like.’
‘I have not forgotten this detail, and neither has Lieutenant Churikova. That is why she will be coming with you to the palace.’
‘You cannot ask her to take on a mission like this!’
‘I didn’t have to,’ replied Stalin. ‘She volunteered.’
‘When?’
‘After you left to find Semykin, Kirov drove her back to the Kremlin.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘She told him to. When they arrived at the barracks where Churikova’s company had been quartered, in the hopes of finding someone, anyone, remaining from her signals unit, they found the place deserted. Everyone she had worked with died aboard that train when it was bombed. When Kirov asked Churikova where she wanted to go, she asked to return to the Kremlin. She returned to this office and offered to help in any way she could. I admire this woman, Pekkala. Without her, the task becomes impossible. She knows this. That’s why she volunteered, and why you should be grateful for her assistance.’
‘Send me,’ Pekkala told him. ‘Send Kirov, if you have to, but . . .’
‘But not Polina Churikova?’ Leaning back in his chair, Stalin folded his hands across his stomach. ‘I wonder if that’s really who you’re trying to save.’
‘What do you mean, Comrade Stalin?’
‘Is it her, or is it someone she reminds you of?’
Pekkala felt the breath catch in his throat.
‘I have seen pictures of Comrade Simonova. The resemblance is uncanny, don’t you think? How difficult it must have been to say goodbye to her, that night she boarded the train.’
‘Leave her out of it.’
‘I have, Pekkala. Have you?’
Pekkala stood there in silence. The room was spinning around him – the red curtains, the red carpet – like a whirlpool filled with blood. ‘How on earth do you expect me to get through the German lines, with or without Churikova?’
‘You will require help, of course. Unlike the rest of the population, I do not believe you can simply vanish into thin air and reappear at the location of your choice.’
‘But you don’t know who the traitor is,’ replied Pekkala. ‘It could be someone from the staff who packed up the treasures at the Catherine Palace. Or from NKVD. Even someone from inside the Kremlin. If word gets out about this mission, the Fascists will be waiting for us when we arrive.’
‘I have considered that,’ said Stalin, ‘and I agree that we must choose someone unconnected with our current operations who can spirit you and the lieutenant through the lines.’
‘But the only people who possess those kinds of talents are already working for NKVD.’ He thought of Zubkov, the Tsar’s old Moscow bureau chief for the Okhrana, who had slipped back and forth between countries, both during and after the last war, aided by the ghost-like figures of the Myednikov Special Section.
‘I know what you’re thinking, Pekkala. You’re thinking that if the Bolshevik Secret Service hadn’t hunted down and killed every member of Myednikov Section, including Myednikov himself, those men might have proved very useful at a time like this.’
Pekkala remembered the head of the Bolshevik Secret Service, a Polish assassin named Felix Dzerzhinsky. He was a thin, humourless man with a sharp face and permanently narrowed eyes, who had personally sent thousands of people to their deaths.
‘The fact is,’ said Stalin, ‘Dzerzhinsky was not quite as efficient as he claimed to be.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Pekkala.
‘Not all of Myednikov’s men are dead. One of them survived, an old friend of yours called Shulepov.’
‘You must be mistaken, Comrade Stalin, I know of no one by that name.’
Stalin smiled. ‘Of course not. Shulepov is the name he has used since the Revolution. You might know him better as Valeri Nikolayevich Kovalevsky.’
Pekkala blinked, as if a handful of dust had been thrown into his eyes. ‘That can’t be true. Valeri Kovalevsky has b
een gone for years.’
As Pekkala spoke the dead man’s name, the face of his old friend loomed into the forefront of his mind.
In the Tsar’s Secret Service
In the Tsar’s Secret Service, Pekkala and Kovalevsky had both trained under the guidance of Chief Inspector Vassileyev.
But within days of completing their course of instruction, Kovalevsky disappeared. One day he was there, in the stuffy, stone-walled basement of Okhrana headquarters where Vassileyev conducted his lessons, and the next he was gone, without a word of farewell or forwarding address.
‘What has happened to him?’ asked Pekkala, staring at Kovalevsky’s empty desk.
‘He has been chosen for Myednikov’s Special Section,’ replied Vassileyev.
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Most people haven’t,’ said Vassileyev, and he went on to explain.
The Myednikov section trained men for duties so secret that their very existence was denied. They lived in the twilight of Russian society, without recognition, without family contact, without even their own names to track the passing of their lives.
‘What are these men? Assassins?’
‘Certainly,’ replied Vassileyev. ‘They are killers when they need to be. But that’s not all they are. As part of Myednikov’s Section, Kovalevsky will be trained to move unnoticed through the streets of this city, and of all the cities of the world. In London, New York, Rome and Paris, there are apartments where the rent is always paid but no one ever seems to come or go from them. The addresses are known only to Myednikov and it is there that his men will find not only food and shelter but also money, weapons, passports and everything they need to change identities as easily as snakes can shed their skins. They are travellers through all the walls and wires of the world, thrown up by the governments to offer the illusion of safety. For men like you and me, the bars of such cages will hold. But they cannot stop Myednikov, or anyone who’s trained by him. He is like the boatman on the river Styx. There are journeys all of us will make some day, but not without a guide to bring us to our final destination. For some of us, those guides are Myednikov’s men.’
‘Will I ever see him again?’ asked Pekkala.
‘It is doubtful,’ replied Vassileyev. ‘You may pass an old man in the street, or sit beside a soldier on a train or drop a coin into the hand of a beggar, and any one of them might be your old friend Kovalevsky. You will never know, unless he’s there to save your life, or else to end it.’
In later years, after Pekkala took up his duties as the Tsar’s Personal Investigator, he would hear an occasional rumour about the man known to have been Myednikov’s finest pupil. Once‚ the Tsar confided to Pekkala that Kovalevsky had arrived in a fishing boat in the city of Trondheim in Norway, to rescue an Okhrana agent whose cover had been blown.
‘And he had even filled the boat with fish,’ laughed the Tsar, ‘which he managed to sell at a profit!’
In another story, which took place at the Hôtel Président in Paris‚ Kovalevsky had appeared, wearing the short red tunic of a bell boy, at the door of a Spanish diplomat, who had been acting as a courier of military secrets between a Russian agent and the government of Japan. When the diplomat opened the door, Kovalevsky sprayed the man in the face with potassium cyanide, using a woman’s perfume vaporiser. The poison constricted the blood vessels supplying oxygen to the brain, causing immediate loss of consciousness and death within two minutes. The lethal vapour ensured that the diplomat would not survive, but it also put Kovalevsky himself at risk of exposure to the cyanide. Anticipating this, Kovalevsky had brought with him an antidote, which consisted of a vial of amyl nitrate and two syringes, one containing sodium nitrite and the other containing sodium thiosulphate.
After inhaling the vial, Kovalevsky stabbed himself in the chest with the two syringes, staggered out of the service entrance to the hotel, dropping his red tunic along the way, and vanished into the crowds along the Champs-Elysées. By the time the diplomat was discovered dead on the floor of his room, the effects of the cyanide had worn off, leaving no trace. An autopsy showed the only likely cause of death to be a heart attack.
After the storming of the Winter Palace by Red Guards in October of 1917, Kovalevsky disappeared, probably on the orders of Myednikov himself.
Soon afterwards, the roster of Myednikov’s agents was discovered in the infamous Blue File, which contained documents kept by the Tsar for his personal use, whose contents had been known only to him. Within the Blue File, Bolshevik agents discovered the names and covers of operatives working under the highest levels of secrecy, including Myednikov’s men. With their identities revealed, members of the organisation were quickly tracked down and liquidated by the newly formed Bolshevik Secret Service, the Cheka. Its director, Felix Dzerzhinsky, personally undertook the hunt for Kovalevsky.
Dzerzhinsky was so determined to catch and kill the man he considered to be the most dangerous of all Myednikov’s agents that when a Bolshevik operative stationed in Paris reported that a waiter at the famous Brasserie Lipp bore a resemblance to Kovalevsky, whom the agent had known as a child, Dzerzhinsky had the waiter gunned down in the street without conducting any further investigation as to the waiter’s identity.
Dzerzhinsky had risked an international incident, which could have pulverised the already fragile relationship between France and the fledging Soviet government. But Dzerzhinsky’s instincts turned out to be correct. French authorities, while expressing their displeasure at a targeted killing on their own soil, conceded that Kovalevsky’s expertise could have posed a serious threat to the new Russia. Kovalevsky’s death was officially confirmed and his file was sent to the warehouse known as Archive 17, the graveyard of Soviet Intelligence.
‘Comrade Stalin,’ said Pekkala
‘Comrade Stalin,’ said Pekkala, ‘Valeri Kovalevsky was assassinated on the orders of Dzerzhinsky himself. You know that as well as I do.’
‘What I know,’ replied Stalin, ‘is that when Dzerzhinsky ordered the murder of an innocent Frenchman and had him liquidated in broad daylight on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, he made the biggest mistake of his career.’
‘You mean that waiter wasn’t Kovalevsky after all?’
‘He was not,’ Stalin confirmed. ‘The mistake almost cost Dzerzhinsky his career. If the truth had become known, it would have created such an uproar that Lenin would have been forced to replace him. In all probability, Dzerzhinsky himself would have been shot. The only thing he could do was to claim that Kovalevsky was actually dead. Dzerzhinsky couldn’t even take the chance of continuing to search for Kovalevsky in secret. The only thing Dzerzhinsky could do was to close the file on him. That’s how Kovalevsky got away!’
‘And how do you expect to find him now, after all these years?’ asked Pekkala.
‘He has already been found,’ replied Stalin, ‘hiding in the last place Dzerzhinsky would ever have looked for him.’
‘And where is that?’
But Stalin was enjoying Pekkala’s helplessness too much to give him the answer just yet. ‘If you had known that Dzerzhinsky would not rest until he tracked you down and killed you, where would you have gone?’
‘As far away from him as I could.’
Stalin raised one stubby finger. ‘Exactly! That is what you would do. It is what I would do, as well. It is also what Dzerzhinsky thought your friend would do. He used to pace up and down in my office, shaking his bony fist as he swore to track down Kovalevsky. He became consumed with the hunt. That is why, when that Cheka agent came to him with some theory that a man he hadn’t seen in twenty years was working in a café in Paris, Dzerzhinsky didn’t take the time to check the man’s story. Instead, Dzerzhinsky had his hand on the phone receiver, ready to dispatch every assassin in the Cheka to France, before the agent had even left the room. Kovalevsky’s genius was that he understood Dzerzhinsky even better than Dzerzhinsky understood himself. That is why Kovalevsky did not travel to Tahiti, or Easter Island or an
y of the other places where Dzerzhinsky had imagined he might be. This man, who could have vanished to the farthest corners of the world, did not even leave the country. Kovalevsky did the thing Dzerzhinsky never considered. He stayed right here in Moscow.’
‘Hide in plain sight,’ muttered Pekkala, recalling one of the maxims of their former teacher, Vassileyev.
‘Kovalevsky became a teacher of history at Moscow School No. 554. He coaches the cross-country running team. He sits on the boards of nutrition and community service. Three times, he has been awarded the Teacher of the Year Prize, as voted by the student body.’
‘All under the name of Alexander Shulepov,’ said Pekkala.
Stalin nodded. ‘And‚ as Alexander Shulepov, he would have lived out his life as a model Soviet citizen, except . . .’
‘Except what, Comrade Stalin?’
‘Except that Professor Shulepov is accustomed to spending his lunch breaks asleep at his desk, a ritual he observes with impressive regularity, making sure to delegate a student to wake him up in time for the next class. Unfortunately for the Professor, he sometimes cries out in his sleep. And what he happened to cry out one day was the name of Myednikov. What he didn’t realise was that the student who had come to wake him was already standing in the room. The student said nothing to Professor Shulepov but, being curious, mentioned the name to his parents when he returned home that day. The father, now an executive at the Moscow City Gas Works, was a former member of the Cheka and had heard that name before. Suspecting that it might be valuable information, he reported it immediately to my office. Poskrebychev himself took down the details, including a request for promotion from his current place of work in the suburbs to the Central Office of Gasprom. The enterprising man had even picked out an apartment block, where he hoped that suitable lodgings would be made available to him as soon as he received his promotion.’
