by Sam Eastland
‘And what is that?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Come with me. Let me protect you.’
‘Like you protected Churikova?’
‘What the lieutenant had to offer, she had already bartered away. But you are different, Pekkala. You are famous, far beyond the borders of the country you have called your home, and your skills are valuable, no matter where you go. Besides, you’re not a Russian. You are a Finn, and the Finns are now allies of ours. What I am offering you is a chance to start again.’
Suddenly, like a golem taking shape out of the earth, a figure rose up from the grass behind Engel. It was Stefanov. With two long strides, he crossed the ground between himself and Engel.
Too late, Engel turned, alerted by the sound of footsteps on the road.
There was a sharp crack as the butt of Stefanov’s rifle connected with the side of Engel’s head.
The professor collapsed in a heap into the ditch.
Leaning over the unconscious man, Stefanov removed Engel’s Luger from its holster and tucked it into his belt.
Pekkala, meanwhile, walked over to the place where Lieutenant Churikova had fallen. She lay on her back, returning his stare. A layer of dust had settled on her eyes.
‘I heard what he told you,’ said Stefanov. ‘What are you going to do‚ Inspector?’
‘Do you think you can carry the professor?’
‘Yes. I’m sure of it.’
‘Then you should set off now‚ back towards the Russian lines.’
‘But what about you, Inspector? Aren’t you coming with us?’
‘There is something I must do first‚’ replied Pekkala.
Stefanov pointed towards a hillside in the distance. ‘I’ll wait for you on the crest of that ridge.’
‘Go quickly,’ said Pekkala, ‘someone might have heard the shooting‚ and it’s only a matter of time before they come to investigate.’
Without another word, Stefanov set off towards the east, with the professor slung over his shoulders in the way a man carries a deer that he has hunted down and killed. The going was not hard. He weighed less than Barkat had done.
It took Stefanov about twenty minutes to reach the base of the hill. There, he stepped beneath the canopy of trees and began making his way up to the ridge. The ground was soft and strewn with fallen leaves, causing him to slip and lose his footing several times. The professor groaned as he slowly regained consciousness.
On the crest of the hill, Stefanov found a clearing that looked out over the valley below. Here he stopped to rest, rolling Engel off his shoulders and into a bank of dried moss.
Engel’s eyes fluttered. Lifting himself up on one elbow, he looked around blearily.
‘Do you speak Russian?’ asked Stefanov.
The professor turned to see a man in a tattered German uniform, sitting with his back against a tree, covering him with his own gun.
‘Yes,’ replied Engel. ‘Who are you?’
‘I am Rifleman Stefanov, sole survivor of the 5th Anti-Aircraft Section of the Red Army’s 35th Rifle Division.’
‘You’re the one who came here with Pekkala.’
Before Stefanov could reply, a hollow boom sounded in the distance. Both men turned to see a ball of fire rising from the fields. The flames were capped with thick black smoke, which Stefanov knew must have come from a gasoline explosion. It took only a second’s calculation for Stefanov to realise that the location of the blaze was exactly where he had last seen the Inspector.
Engel had reached the same conclusion. ‘The amber!’ He leaped up from his bed of moss. ‘Does he realise what he’s done?’
‘You can ask him yourself when he gets here, which shouldn’t be long now. Now sit down before I shoot you in the leg. I don’t want to have to carry you all the way to Moscow.’
Stunned, Engel flopped down again on to the ground. The blood had drained out of his face. ‘He did it‚’ muttered the professor. ‘He actually did it.’
They waited.
Stefanov kept his eyes glued to the point on the horizon from which he knew Pekkala would be coming. He stared until his eyes dried out. As the minutes passed, and the Inspector did not appear, he began to worry that something might have gone wrong.
Engel no longer seemed to care what was happening to him. He sat with his face in his hands, elbows resting on his knees, mumbling to himself in words too soft to hear.
When half an hour had gone by and Pekkala had still not arrived, Stefanov climbed to his feet. ‘We have to go back.’
Slowly, Engel raised his head. ‘Back there? To the truck?’
‘I’m not leaving him.’
‘Are you insane?’ Engel demanded. ‘We can’t go back. It won’t be long before the whole countryside is crawling with German soldiers looking for that convoy.’
‘I thought you would be glad of that,’ replied Stefanov.
‘You don’t understand,’ Engel told him. ‘I already sent a telegram to Berlin, telling Hitler that the panels are now safely in our possession and on their way to Königsberg, where they will wait until construction of the Linz museum has been completed. That amber was my responsibility. Hitler will kill me himself when he learns what has become of it. Take me to Moscow. I have all the information Stalin needs to know about art acquisitions by the German Army in the Soviet Union. Just get me out of here before those horsemen come looking for us!’
Stefanov pointed to the cloud of smoke, which now had almost disappeared into the sky. ‘Not without Pekkala.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ snapped Engel.
‘But not out of bullets!’ replied Stefanov, waving the Luger in his face.
The two men clambered down the slope, the professor stumbling over roots and mud in his polished knee-high boots. Running the rest of the way to the place where Engel’s convoy had been halted, they covered the distance in less than twenty minutes.
By the time they reached the truck, the fire had almost burned out. The spilled fuel had ignited, wrenching the vehicle apart. The windscreen had melted out and only springs remained of what had been the seats. The doors had been blown off completely. One of them lay in the ditch and the other was nowhere to be seen. The rear section of the truck was only a skeleton now, its wooden floorboards and its canvas roof incinerated in the blaze. The grass on either side of the road had been scorched down to the bare earth. It continued to smoulder, smoke drifting across the ground.
‘Where are the remains of the amber?’ asked Stefanov.
‘Destroyed,’ Engel replied bitterly. ‘What did you expect?’
‘But there’s no trace of it, or the panels. Wouldn’t there be something left?’
‘Not after a fire like this,’ Engel told him. ‘The panels were made of wood which had been treated with linseed oil to make it weatherproof. Linseed oil is highly flammable and amber itself is a resin, with a melting point under 400 degrees Fahrenheit. This fire must have burned at twice that heat. And amber isn’t like glass or precious metals, which would leave a residue. It burns away to nothing. It’s gone, Rifleman Stefanov‚ along with your beloved Inspector Pekkala‚ who is probably on his way back to Moscow, intending to blame you for this.’
‘No.’ Stefanov was staring at something on the ground. ‘He’s lying over there.’
In front of the truck lay a body, which had been caught in the blast and consumed. Only a husk of flesh and bones remained, the legs shrivelled to sticks inside the carbonised leather of the boots. Soot covered the carcass like a layer of black velvet.
‘How do you know that’s him?’ asked Engel, unwilling to approach the incinerated corpse.
Stefanov bent down and rummaged in the brittle fans of what had been a rib cage.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Engel, his voice filled with revulsion.
Stefanov gasped, his fingers searing as they closed around the object of his search. Out of the ashes, he lifted the frame of a revolver. Its handle had remained intact due to the fact that the grips wer
e made of solid brass, which had not melted. The cartridges contained in the cylinder had ruptured, skewing the barrel. But there was no mistaking Pekkala’s Webley. ‘The vapours from the gasoline must have exploded before he had a chance to get clear.’ Then he reached into the coat pocket and removed the scorched remnant of Pekkala’s NKVD pass book. ‘It is him,’ whispered Stefanov. ‘This proves it absolutely.’
‘There’s nothing you can do for him now,’ said Engel. ‘We have to go now, or you and I will both be wishing we had died in this fire.’
This time‚ the two men were in agreement.
Stefanov tucked the burned pass book into his chest pocket. Then he jammed the ruined Webley into his belt. He nodded towards the Russian lines, somewhere far to the east. ‘After you,’ he said.
In a tiny, windowless room
In a tiny, windowless room on the fourth floor of NKVD Headquarters, three women sat on empty filing crates, drinking tea out of green enamel mugs.
‘Of course he hasn’t called you!’ exclaimed Corporal Korolenko, stamping one foot and grinding her heel into the floorboards, as if to crush an insect which had strayed into her line of sight. ‘I saw what he did, down there in Lubyanka Square. He kissed you and then he turned around and ran away! What did you expect?’
‘Shut up, Korolenko!’ bellowed Sergeant Gatkina, waving her hand through a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘If your brains were the size of your backside, you would be running this country by now. But you know nothing.’ She leaned across and bounced her fingertips off the corporal’s forehead. ‘Nothing!’ she said again. Turning her back on the bewildered corporal, Gatkina leaned towards Elizaveta, who sat very still on her crate, mug of tea clutched in both hands, looking frail and worried. ‘Now, my dear,’ said Gatkina, in a very different voice from the one she had used on the corporal, ‘what you need to do is make piroshky.’
‘Pastries?’ Elizaveta’s voice quavered between fear and confusion.
‘Yes!’ Gatkina was deafening in the cramped space. ‘I like the ones filled with green onion and egg, or salmon and rice if you can get it.’
‘But why?’
Gatkina raised one finger. ‘It is a test. You make the piroshky and, while they are still warm, you put them in a bag with a thermos of tea and you bring them to this major. Tell him you have brought this meal but that you cannot stay. Sergeant Gatkina, the bitch that is me, has ordered you back to work.’
‘I give him the pastries and then I leave?’
‘Yes.’ Gatkina paused. ‘And maybe no.’
‘Comrade Sergeant, I do not understand you at all.’
‘You tell him you have to go, yes?’
Elizaveta nodded.
‘And if he says thank you and goodbye, then you know it is finished. But if he asks you to stay, because no man with a heart would just say goodbye to a woman who has brought him fresh piroshky, then you know you are not finished, after all.’
Kirov sat in his office
Kirov sat in his office, a stack of untouched field reports laid out in front of him. He had tried to keep busy, hoping that the drudgery of paperwork would keep him from focusing on Pekkala and his own helplessness. He expected, at any minute, to receive news of the Inspector’s death. Every time the door closed down in the lobby, adrenalin cut through his stomach as if he had been slashed with a razor. He kept checking the telephone to make sure it was working. His loud, frustrated sighs stirred the dust that pirouetted through the air in front of him.
His gloomy thoughts were interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps climbing the stairs. As Kirov listened, each monotonous tread of those hobnailed boots became like a kick in the face.
He stared at the door, half hoping that the person would find himself mistaken, turn around and go back down the stairs, and the other half wanting to get it over with and hear the news now instead of later. The one certainty in Kirov’s mind was that the news would not be good.
The person stopped.
Seconds passed.
Kirov remained at his desk, his hands beginning to sweat. At the first knock, he launched himself out of his chair and strode across the room towards the door.
He had no sooner opened it when he felt himself shoved violently backwards into the room. Kirov tripped on the carpet and fell and by the time he realised that his visitor was Victor Bakhturin, he was already face to face with Bakhturin’s Tokarev automatic.
Bakhturin was breathing heavily from his walk up the five flights of stairs. ‘Why the hell do you have to live up in the clouds?’ he barked.
‘If you’re going to shoot,’ replied Kirov, ‘get on with it.’
‘I’m not going to shoot you!’
Kirov stared at the gun. ‘It looks that way to me.’
‘I’m protecting myself,’ Bakhturin explained gruffly, ‘so that I get a chance to talk to you before you pull a gun!’
‘Then may I get up off the floor?’
‘Yes.’ Bakhturin hesitated. ‘As long as you understand that I have not come here seeking vengeance for what happened to my brother.’
‘You haven’t?’ Kirov climbed to his feet, dusted off his elbows and kicked the carpet back into place.
‘The only thing that surprised me when I heard that Serge had died was that he’d managed to survive for as long as he did. Don’t misunderstand me‚ Major‚ I loved my brother very much‚ but the truth is I have been preparing myself for his untimely death for so long that it is almost a relief not to have to worry about it any more.’
‘Then why are you here, Bakhturin?’
‘I heard that Pekkala has been lost behind enemy lines.’
‘He is not lost!’ Kirov shot back. ‘He knows where he is! It’s just that we don’t. That’s all.’
‘Do you still think he might be alive?’
‘I am sure of it, and I have no interest in hearing otherwise until somebody shows me the proof!’
‘I admire your stubbornness, Major. Believe me, I do. But you and I both know that he is never coming back.’
‘If you came here to tell me that,’ snapped Kirov, ‘then you have wasted your time.’
‘That is not the reason for my visit.’ From his pocket, Bakhturin removed an envelope and laid it on the desk in front of Kirov. ‘This is.’
Unable to hide his curiosity, Kirov snatched up the envelope. Inside, he found papers signed by Chief Clerk Yuri Tomilin of the People’s Commissariat for Justice, commuting the sentence of Valery Semykin to time already served. The documents were countersigned by Anton Markovsky, Director of the Recording Office of Lubyanka Prison. ‘He is being released?’ asked Kirov.
‘Even as we speak,’ replied Bakhturin.
Kirov put down the document. ‘Why have you done this?’
‘Call it a peace offering. Now that the Emerald Eye is gone, you and I must look to the future.’
‘When I know that he is gone, I’ll look. In the meantime, I will wait.’
‘My friend,’ said Bakhturin, an unfamiliar tone of gentleness suddenly present in his voice, ‘only a miracle can save Pekkala, and you must resign yourself to that.’
When Bakhturin had gone, Kirov remained at his desk, arms folded resolutely across his chest, resigned only to the miracle he felt certain would occur.
Less than an hour
Less than an hour after his release from solitary confinement, Valery Semykin approached the doors of the Museum of the Kremlin. His beige prison pyjamas had been exchanged for a set of clothes that did not belong to him, as well as a pair of shoes that did not fit, which caused him to limp over the cobblestones.
From the moment he left Lubyanka, Semykin had thought of nothing else but wandering the halls of the museum and reacquainting himself with the works of art which he had worried he might never see again. But when he finally reached the doors, some force beyond all reckoning compelled him to continue on his way.
All through that day and on into the evening, Semykin walked and walked, as blocks of flats gave
way to single-storey houses which in turn gave way to thatched-roof peasant huts.
By then, he’d tossed away the shoes that did not fit. Barefoot now, and with the cool autumn air like electric sparks across his wounded fingertips, Semykin pressed on down the wide roads lined with poplars. As gusts of wind shook loose the yellow leaves, he raised his hands to catch the ones that tumbled past his face.
Only when the light was gone and stars winked from the darkness did Semykin turn at last, and head for home.
One week later
One week later, Obersturmbannführer Gustav Engel passed safely through the Russian lines in the company of Rifleman Stefanov, who immediately exchanged his German uniform for the clothes of a Red Army soldier.
Within hours, they were on a transport plane to Moscow, where Engel was delivered to NKVD Headquarters. They had not even entered the building before an unmarked car pulled up to the kerb and two men wearing the dark brown, knee-length double-breasted jackets popular with Special Operations commissars emerged. One of the men flashed a Kremlin Security pass at the NKVD escorts, who immediately relinquished their prisoner. Engel’s demand to know where he was being taken was met only with silence as the two men handcuffed him, put him in the back seat of the car and sped away.
By the time Stefanov fully grasped what had just taken place, the NKVD escorts had disappeared into the building and he found himself alone on the sidewalk. Not knowing what else to do, he entered the headquarters and cautiously approached the duty sergeant at his desk in the main hallway.
