Eye of the Red Tsar (8 page)

Kirov climbed behind the wheel.

Pekkala stared at the corpse in the road. The puddle had turned red, like wine spilled out of a bottle. Then he got back in the car.

They drove on.

For a long time, nobody talked.

None of the roads were paved, and they encountered few cars along the way. Often they sped past horses harnessed to carts, leaving them in clouds of yellow dust, or slowed to navigate around places where puddles had merged to form miniature ponds.

In this wide, deserted countryside, they eventually became lost. The rolling hills and valleys all began to look the same. All road markers had been forcibly removed, leaving only the splintered stumps of posts on which the signs had once been nailed. Kirov had a map, but it did not appear to be accurate.

“I don’t even know what direction we are heading in,” sighed Kirov.

“Pull over,” said Pekkala.

Kirov glanced at him in the rearview mirror.

“If you stop the car, I can tell you where we are going.”

“Do you have a compass?”

“Not yet,” replied Pekkala.

Grudgingly, Kirov eased up on the gas. The car rolled to a stop in the middle of the road. He cut the engine.

Silence settled on them like the dust.

Pekkala opened the door and got out.

All around them, wind blew through the tall grass.

Pekkala opened the trunk.

“What is he doing?” demanded Kirov.

“Just leave him alone,” replied Anton.

Pekkala fished out a crowbar from the tangle of fuel containers, towing ropes, and assorted cans of army rations rolling loose around the trunk of the car.

He walked out into the field and jammed the bar into the earth. Its shadow stretched long on the ground. Then, sweeping his fingers through the grass, he pulled a couple of dusty pebbles from the earth. One of these he laid at the end of the shadow. The other one he put inside his pocket. Turning to the men who waited in the car, he said, “Ten minutes.” Then he sat down cross-legged by the crowbar, resting his elbow on his knee and his chin in the palm of his hand.

Both men stared out the window at the figure of Pekkala, his dark shape like some ancient obelisk out in the blankness of that desolate land.

“What’s he doing?” Kirov asked.

“Making a compass.”

“He knows how to do that?”

“Don’t ask me what he knows.”

“I pity him,” said Kirov.

“He does not want your pity,” replied Anton.

“He is the last one of his kind.”

“He is the only one of his kind.”

“What became of all the people he knew before the Revolution?”

“Gone,” replied Anton. “All except one.”

“She is a beauty,” said the Tsar
.

Pekkala stood beside him on the veranda of the Great Ballroom, squinting in the sunlight of an early summer afternoon
.

Ilya had just led her students through the Catherine Palace. Now the dozen children, holding hands in pairs, made their way across the Chinese Bridge
.

Ilya was a tall woman with eyes the blue of old Delft pottery and dirty-blond hair which trailed over the brown velvet collar of her coat
.

The Tsar nodded approvingly. “Sunny likes her.” That was what he called his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra. She, in turn, had given him the curious name of “Blue Child,” after a character in a novel they’d both enjoyed by the author Florence Barclay
.

Once across the Chinese Bridge, Ilya steered the small but orderly procession towards the Gribok gardens. They were headed for the Chinese Theater, its windows topped with gables like the mustaches of Mongol Emperors
.

“How many of these tours does she give?” asked the Tsar
.

“One for each class, Excellency. It is the highlight of their year.”

“Did she find you sleeping in a chair again, with your feet up on one of my priceless tables?”

“That was last time.”

“And are you engaged to be married?”

Flustered by the question, Pekkala cleared his throat. “No, Excellency.”

“Why not?”

He felt the blood run to his face. “I have been so busy with the training, Excellency.”

“That may be a reason,” replied the Tsar, “but I would not call it an excuse. Besides, your training will soon be complete. Are you planning to marry her?”

“Well, yes. Eventually.”

“Then you had better get on with it before someone else beats you to the finish line.” The Tsar appeared to be wringing his hands, as if tormented by some memory jostled to the surface of his mind. “Here.” He pressed something into Pekkala’s hand
.

“What is this?” asked Pekkala
.

“It’s a ring.”

Then Pekkala realized that what the Tsar had been doing was removing the signet ring from his finger. “I can see what it is,” he said, “but why are you handing it to me?”

“It’s a gift, Pekkala, but it is also a warning. This is no time to hesitate. When you are married, you will need a ring to wear. This one, I think, will do nicely. She will need a ring as well, but that part I leave to you.”

“Thank you,” said Pekkala
.

“Keep it somewhere safe. There! Look.” He pointed out the window
.

Ilya had seen them standing in the window. She waved
.

Both men waved back and smiled
.

“If you let her get away,” the Tsar said through the clenched teeth of his grin, “you’ll never forgive yourself. And neither will I, by the way.”

ANTON GLANCED AT the white face of his oversized wristwatch and leaned his head out the window. “Ten minutes!” he shouted.

Pekkala climbed to his feet. The shadow of the crowbar had drifted to the right. He withdrew the second pebble from his pocket and laid it at the end of where the shadow had now reached. Then he dug his heel into the dirt and carved a line between the two pebbles. Positioning himself at the end of the second shadow, he held his arm out straight along the line he had dug in the sand. “That way is to the east,” he said.

Neither man questioned this result, conjured from thin air with skills beyond their reckoning, a thing both strange and absolute.

Having driven all day, stopping only to refuel from one of several gas cans they carried in the trunk, they stopped that night under the roof of an abandoned barn.

They parked the Emka on the dirt floor of the barn, to keep it out of sight in case this place was not as empty as it seemed. Then they lit a fire on the floor, feeding the flames with wooden planks prised out of old horse stalls.

Anton opened up a can of army ration meat with the word TUSHONKA stamped on the side. With a spoon pulled from his boot, he took a mouthful, jammed the spoon into the can, and passed it on to Kirov, who gouged out a clump of meat and packed it into his mouth, then turned and spat it out.

“This is atrocious!”

“Get used to it,” Anton told him. “I have three cases of the stuff.”

Kirov shook his head violently, like a dog shaking water from its fur. “If you’d thought to bring some decent food, I would gladly have cooked it for us.”

Anton pulled a flask from his pocket. It was made of glass wrapped in leather and had a pewter cup which fitted to the bottom of the glass. He unscrewed the metal cap and took a swig. “The reason they shut down your cookery class—”

“Chef! A school for chefs!”

Anton rolled his eyes. “The reason they closed it, Kirov, was because there isn’t enough decent food left in this country to make a proper meal. Trust me, you’re better off working for the government. At least you won’t starve.”

“I will,” said Kirov, “if I have to keep eating this.” He held the can out to Pekkala. “What did the Tsar like to eat?”

Up in the rafters, pigeons peered down at the men, flames reflected in their wide and curious eyes.

“Simple food mostly,” replied Pekkala. “Roast pork. Boiled cabbage. Blinis. Shashlik.” He remembered the skewers of meat, red peppers, onions, and mushrooms, served next to beds of rice and washed down with heavy Georgian wine. “I’m afraid you might have found his tastes a little disappointing.”

“On the contrary,” said Kirov, “those meals are the hardest to make. When chefs meet for a meal, they choose the traditional recipes. The mark of a good chef is whether he can create a simple meal and have it taste the way everyone expects it to.”

“What about cooks?” asked Anton.

Before Kirov could reply, Anton tossed the flask into his lap.

“What’s in here?” Kirov eyed the flask as if it were a grenade about to blow up in his face.

“Samahonka!” said Anton.

“Home brew,” muttered Kirov, handing back the flask. “You’re lucky you haven’t gone blind.”

“I made it in my bathtub,” said Anton. He took another drink and put the flask back in his pocket.

“Aren’t you going to offer some to your brother?”

Anton lay back, resting his head on the secret report. “A detective is not allowed to drink when he’s working. Isn’t that right, brother?” He pulled his heavy greatcoat over him and curled up in a ball. “Get some rest. We still have a long way to go.”

“I thought we were just stopping here for a meal,” said Kirov. “You mean we’re spending the whole night? On this bare floor?”

“Why not?” Anton muttered through a veil of fading consciousness.

“I used to have a bed,” said Kirov indignantly. “I used to have a room to myself.” He pulled the pipe from his pocket. With jerky and impatient hands, he stuffed it with tobacco.

“You’re too young for a pipe,” said Anton.

Kirov held it out admiringly. “The bowl is made from English briar wood.”

“Pipes are for old men,” yawned Anton.

Kirov glared at him. “Comrade Stalin smokes a pipe!”

But the comment was lost on Anton. He had fallen asleep, his steady breaths like the sound of a pendulum swinging slowly through the air above them.

Pekkala dozed off, hearing the click of Kirov’s teeth on the pipe stem and breathing the smell of Balkan tobacco, which smelled to him like a new pair of leather shoes when they’re just taken out of the box. Then Kirov’s voice jolted him awake.

“I was wondering,” the young man said.

“What?” growled Pekkala.

“If it is the Romanovs down at the bottom of that mine, those bodies have been lying there for years.”

“Yes.”

“There will be nothing left of them. How can you investigate a murder when you have no remains to investigate?”

“There is always something to investigate,” replied Pekkala, and as he spoke these words the face of Dr. Bandelayev rose from the darkness of his mind.

“He is the best there is,” Vassileyev had told Pekkala, “at a job no sane man would ever want to do.”

Dr. Bandelayev was completely bald. His head resembled a shiny pink lightbulb. As if to compensate, he sported a thick walrus-like mustache
.

On a hot, muggy afternoon in late July, Vassileyev brought Pekkala to Bandelayev’s laboratory
.

There was a smell he recognized instantly—a sharp, sweet odor that cut right through his senses. He knew it from his father’s basement, where the work of undertaking was carried out
.

Vassileyev held a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. “Good God, Bandelayev, how can you stand it in here?”

“Breathe it in!” ordered Bandelayev. He wore a knee-length lab coat embroidered in red with his name and the word
OSTEOLOGIST.
“Breathe in the smell of death.”

Vassileyev turned to Pekkala. “He’s all yours,” the Major said, his voice muffled by the handkerchief. Then he strode out of the room as quickly as he could
.

Pekkala looked around the laboratory. Although one wall of windows looked out onto the main quadrangle of the University of Petrograd, the view had been blocked by shelves of glass jars containing human body parts, preserved in a brownish fluid that looked like tea. He saw hands and feet, the raw ends frayed, with stumps of bone emerging from the puckered flesh. In other jars, coils of intestine wound together like miniature tornadoes. On the other side of this narrow corridor, bones had been laid out on metal trays, looking like puzzles which had been abandoned
.

“Indeed they are puzzles!” said Bandelayev, when Pekkala mentioned this to him. “All of this, everything I do, is the discipline of puzzles.”

In the days ahead, Pekkala struggled to keep up with Bandelayev’s teaching
.

“The stench of a rotting human is no different than that of a dead deer lying by the side of a road,” said Bandelayev, “and that is why I don’t believe in God.” The doctor spoke quickly, his words sticking together, depriving him of breath until he was forced to pause and gasp in a lungful of fresh air
.

But there was no fresh air in Bandelayev’s lab. The windows remained closed, and plumber’s tape had been used to seal them
.

“Insects!” said Bandelayev, by way of explanation. “This is not merely a shop of rotten meat, as some of my colleagues have described it. Here, all facets of decay are controlled. One fly could ruin weeks of work.” Bandelayev did not like to sit. It seemed an act of laziness to him. So when he lectured Pekkala, he stood behind a tall table littered with bones
,
which he would lift from their trays and hold out for Pekkala to identify. Or he would plunge his hand into a jar and remove a pale knot of flesh, commanding Pekkala to name it, while brown preserving fluid ran the length of his fingers, trickling down his sleeve
.

Once, Bandelayev held up a skull pierced through the forehead by a small, neat round hole, the result of a bullet fired point-blank into the victim. “Do you know that in the summer months, blowflies will settle on a body in a matter of minutes. They will concentrate in the mouth, the nose, the eyes, or in the wound.” Bandelayev stuck his pinkie into the hole in the forehead. “In a few hours, there can be as many as half a million eggs laid on the corpse. In a single day the maggots which hatch from these eggs can reduce a full-grown man to half his body size. In a week”—he jerked his head to the side, a movement he used for emphasis but which appeared more like an involuntary nervous twitch—“there might be nothing left but bones.”