Red Moth (5 page)

Pekkala opened his identity book and, in the regulation manner, held it up beside his face.

The guard barely glanced at it. ‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ he snapped.

‘I am here to question a prisoner.’

‘The name?’

‘Semykin, Valery.’

‘Wait,’ replied the guard. After consulting a book in which the locations of all prisoners were listed, he picked up the heavy black telephone receiver on his desk. ‘Bring Semykin, Block 4, Cell 6.’

‘Leave Semykin where he is,’ interrupted Pekkala. ‘I will go to him.’

‘Prisoners cannot be visited. They must be brought to one of the holding cells. No exceptions!’

‘I understand,’ said Pekkala, as he slid his pass book across the counter.

The guard snatched up the book and peered inside. It took a moment for the man to realise he was looking at a Shadow Pass. His lips twitched. ‘My apologies, Inspector.’ Carefully, the guard closed the book and returned it to Pekkala.

Another call was made, another guard summoned, who led them directly to Semykin’s cell.

The boots of those guards operating within those parts of the Lubyanka occupied by prisoners had special felt soles, enabling the guards to move silently along the corridors, which were padded with grey industrial carpeting. The walls were also grey, as were the dozens of cell doors which lined each corridor inside this labyrinth.

After his arrest on the Finnish border, Pekkala himself had been prisoner here, before being transferred to the Butyrka prison and from there to Siberia. Even more than the silence of this prison, which seemed to suck the air out of his lungs, it was the smell – of bleach and new paint and the particular sour and metallic reek of sweat from terrified men – which hurled Pekkala back into the waking nightmare of his days inside this place. As Pekkala walked behind the guard, eyes fixed upon the back of his shaved head just visible beneath his cap, he recalled the orders of these men each time they escorted him from his cell. ‘Do not look to the left. Do not look to the right. Fail to obey and you will be shot.’ It was spoken so often that the words seemed to flow together and become meaningless, adding to the feeling of this prison, that all of them, guards and prisoners alike, were trapped in a dream from which they were unable to wake.

With his heartbeat thumping in his temples, Pekkala prayed their stay would not last long, since he knew it was only a matter of time before the memories of his own confinement in this prison overwhelmed him.

At cell 6 of block 4, the guard halted and slid back the bolt. Before he opened the door, he turned to Pekkala. ‘It’s no use, Inspector. You won’t get anything out of him. Valery Semykin is the most stubborn old fool we’ve ever locked up in this place.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Pekkala.

The guard swung the door wide. A waft of stale air brushed past them, tinged with the sour ammoniac reek of an unwashed body.

‘Not again!’ exclaimed the guard.

There was a scuttling inside the little room, whose walls were glossy brown up to waist height and cream white from there to the ceiling. Covering almost an entire wall was a network of hundreds of fingernail-sized speckles, which ranged in colour from black to red. At first, Pekkala couldn’t understand what he was looking at. He could find no pattern in the markings. They appeared to have been applied completely at random. But as he continued to stare, his eyes refocused and he realised he was looking at a painting of several half-dressed people lounging on a river bank, and others standing in the water. One boy had his hands raised to his mouth, as if taking a drink. In the distance, a few small sailing boats scudded about on the river and smoke rose from the chimney of a factory. In that same moment, he grasped that each of those hundreds of spots was made by a fingertip covered in blood.

On the other side of the room, standing with his face against the wall was a burly, thick-necked man. He wore a set of standard prison pyjamas, made from thin beige cotton, the bottoms of which had no drawstring, forcing the man to constantly hold them up with one hand.

Pekkala could see that the man’s fingertips were a mass of unhealed wounds, some of them still bleeding.

‘I warned you not to do this again,’ said the guard. ‘When I come back, you’ll have to clean this up and then I’m going to put you on half rations for a week.’

The man did not reply. He remained motionless, forehead pressed against the wall.

‘Hello, Valery,’ said Pekkala.

Still there was no reply.

‘Why does he not speak?’ asked Kirov.

‘New regulation,’ replied the guard. ‘Prisoners in solitary must face the wall when in the presence of a visitor and may not speak without permission from a member of the Lubyanka staff.’

‘Then would you give him permission?’

The guard scowled. ‘And listen to him curse us black and blue? Because that’s what he’ll do, you know, no matter what we throw at him.’

Pekkala waited in silence for the guard to finish his tirade.

‘Suit yourself,’ replied the guard. ‘The prisoner may speak!’

Semykin sighed. His body seemed to slump.

‘Let me know when you’re finished wasting your time on this old fool.’ The guard’s felt-soled boots swished over the carpeting as he made his way down to the end of the corridor.

Slowly, Semykin turned. His face was framed by dark eyebrows, fleshy lips and three days’ growth of stubble. Before entering the Lubyanka, he had been portly, but the sudden loss of weight caused his skin to hang loosely on his frame. His face had the look of a bloodhound stripped of its fur.

‘Pekkala!’ Semykin’s expression showed a mixture of surprise and hostility. ‘What does the great Emerald Eye want with me? And why have you brought this commissar, unless it is to taunt me with something else I might regret‚ apart from finding myself locked up in here.’

Instead of answering the question, Kirov turned to the mass of bloody speckles on the wall. ‘Seurat?’ he said.

Semykin gave a murmur of grudging approval. ‘It is called
Une Baignade
, as well as I can remember it, anyway, since I am allowed no books or pictures. Given the lack of materials, I find the pointillist style most approachable. In here, beauty is worth its weight in blood,’ Semykin held up his shredded fingers, like the paws of a lion whose claws had been torn out, ‘but there is only so much of it one man can spare.’

‘The guard thinks you have gone mad,’ said Pekkala, ‘and it is easy to see why.’

‘But a man who knows he has gone mad is still sane enough to know the difference between madness and a normal mind. So when I agree with that felt-booted philistine, you may take it as proof that I’m still sane.’

‘It doesn’t look that way to me,’ said Kirov.

Semykin folded his arms. Blood continued to drip from his fingertips. ‘Do you even know why I’m in here, Comrade Major?’

‘Not exactly, no,’ admitted Kirov.

‘Tell him, Valery,’ said Pekkala. ‘It is important that he hears it from you.’

‘Very well‚’ said Semykin. ‘I was approached, several months ago, by a certain People’s Commissar of the State Railways named Viktor Bakhturin.’

‘Bakhturin!’ exclaimed Kirov. ‘You certainly know how to pick your enemies.’

‘As I have discovered.’ Semykin glanced around the confines of his cell.

Several times in the past few years, Pekkala and Kirov had crossed paths with Viktor Bakhturin. He was a proud, vindictive, petty man, whose name had come up in connection with several murders. Each case presented a clear triangulation between the victim, the killer and Bakhturin, but there was never enough proof to convict him of actual involvement in the crime. He had also been tied to political denunciations of government officials, which had ended either with the execution of these men, or else their deportation to Siberia.

The previous People’s Commissar of the State Railways had been turned over to NKVD by his own wife for travelling on a rail carriage set aside for transportation of officials on government business in order to travel back and forth from Moscow to his holiday dacha on the Black Sea. Although the practice was widespread and usually ignored by NKVD, the fact that the commissar’s own wife had denounced him caused an embarrassment which could not be overlooked. The commissar received a twelve-year sentence in a gulag on the border of Mongolia.

The reason the commissar’s wife had turned in her own husband was that she suspected him of having an affair. The source of this rumour, which turned out to be false, was believed to be Viktor Bakhturin. At the time, Bakhturin had been a junior commissar of State Railways, but he quickly rose to take the place of the man now in Siberia.

There were other examples. A bank manager, threatened with exposure for offering to loan money to Bakhturin at an interest rate below that set by the government, arrived for work with flowers for his secretary, then locked himself in his office and blew his brains out. An investigation revealed that the manager had initially refused Bakhturin’s application for a loan, on the grounds that he wanted to pay no interest at all. When the manager suggested a compromise between no interest and that which had been established by the government, Bakhturin turned him in for corruption. Convicting Bakhturin of complicity in this crime proved to be impossible because no documentation of the crime could be found and the only witness, the bank manager’s secretary, refused to testify against Bakhturin.

Although Viktor Bakhturin had consistently eluded prosecution, his brother, Serge, who was also an official in the State Railways, had not proved to be as lucky. It was well known that Serge’s position in the State Railways had been arranged for him by his brother and, no matter how incompetent and corrupt Serge had proved himself to be, all attempts by officials of the State Railways to dislodge him from his position had been unsuccessful due to Viktor’s influence with the minister of Transport.

It was Pekkala who finally brought down Serge Bakhturin.

He had been working on a case which involved the deliberate duplication of bills of lading, which allowed railcars loaded with black-market goods from China, Poland and Turkey to be transported into and then across the Soviet Union. The railcars used in this scheme were special heated wagons known as
teplushki
which, once sealed, could not be opened until they reached their final destination, in order to maintain temperature control.

Pekkala’s investigation traced the issuing of the duplicated bills of lading to Serge’s office, and interviews with railway personnel who were also convicted in the scheme confirmed what Pekkala had suspected from the start, which was that Serge himself made sure that the wagons carrying these black-market goods were diverted, before they reached their destinations, to railyards whose workers were complicit in the scheme. There, the wagons were unloaded and promptly reassigned to other transport jobs. Meanwhile, when the original train convoys arrived at their end-points, the number of wagons and their contents matched all bills of lading.

It was a lucrative business, but also complicated to maintain, since it involved the disappearance of dozens of wagons at any one time and even though this disappearance was temporary, the discovery of even one wagon, loaded with silk, opium or alcohol, would likely have unravelled the entire operation.

The fact that Serge had been issuing false bills of lading for over three years by the time he was caught led Pekkala to believe that greater minds than Serge’s were behind the scheme. Although Pekkala had suspected Viktor’s involvement from the start, he was never able to prove anything.

The charges against Serge were very serious, and it was only by thanks to Viktor’s intervention that he did not find himself transported to Siberia, or even executed. Instead, Serge received the very mild sentence of two years without hard labour, to be served at the Tulkino Prison in Kotlas. Tulkino was a place known for the leniency that could be purchased by its wealthier inmates, and Viktor wasted no time procuring better treatment for his incarcerated brother.

Although Pekkala’s investigation put a stop to the black-market wagons, at least temporarily, he had made a permanent enemy of the People’s Commissar of State Railways, who would not soon forget the sight of his brother behind bars.

‘How exactly did you get on the wrong side of this man?’ asked Kirov.

‘Bakhturin had a painting,’ explained Semykin, ‘which he had personally removed from the house of a railway official in Poland after the invasion of 1939. It was a painting by the Polish artist Stanislaw Wyspianski. He showed me a photograph of it and asked if I would sell it for him. I agreed, on condition that he obtained papers which legalised his ownership of the painting. While these were being drawn up by the Department of Cultural Affairs, I contacted someone I thought would be interested, a government minister named Osipov. Osipov was so taken with the picture I showed him that we agreed on a price before the painting had even touched our hands. When I told Bakhturin what I thought I could get for the painting, he was very pleased. But when the painting arrived . . .’ His voice trailed off.

‘What?’ demanded Kirov. ‘What happened? Was it a fake?’

‘Technically, it was a copy. Not a fake.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Wyspianski always signed his work, but he had the eccentricity of signing the back, not the front. So when I looked at the photo and saw that the work was not signed, that did not trouble me, because I assumed that the work had been signed on the back.’

‘But it wasn’t signed?’ asked Kirov.

Semykin shook his head. ‘Someone had simply made a copy of a Wyspianski painting. He often made several paintings based on the same subject matter and I had assumed this was simply part of a series. Whoever this artist was, he or she wasn’t trying to fool anybody. If they had been creating a forgery, they would have put Wyspianski’s name on the back.’

‘If they had done that, would you still have known it was a fake?’

‘Of course!’ Semykin replied indignantly. ‘To tell which art is real and which is not, that’s what I have been put on earth to do.’

‘That much the Inspector did tell me,’ said Kirov.

Semykin gave a snort of satisfaction. ‘Why else would you be here? And why else would I be here if not because I informed Bakhturin that his painting was a copy and that I would have to renegotiate with Osipov?’

‘And did you renegotiate?’

‘Before I had the chance an old colleague of mine, Professor Urbaniak‚ summoned me to the Catherine Palace. The poor man had been given the impossible task of packing away the hundreds of art works on display there before the Germans arrived. He knew it couldn’t be done in the time he had been given, so he asked me to help him prioritise which treasures should be transported first. The rest, we knew, might have to be left behind. It was a grim task, I assure you, like being forced to choose which of your friends should live and which of them should die.’

‘And when you returned from the palace,’ asked Kirov, ‘what happened with the Wyspianski painting?’

‘I had been hoping that Bakhturin might decide to forget the whole thing, but the commissar had other ideas. He ordered me to keep my mouth shut about the Wyspianski being a copy. He told me to sell it to Osipov as authentic, even to fake Wyspianski’s signature on the back if I thought that would bring in the money.’

‘And you refused?’

‘Naturally. And then Bakhturin had me arrested.’

‘On what charge?’ demanded Kirov.

‘Trying to sell forged works of art.’

‘But you were trying
not
to sell it!’

‘A subtlety which was lost upon the court, their minds no doubt swayed by the fact that the man who brought charges against me was a Senior People’s Commissar.’

‘You are lucky to be alive,’ said Kirov. ‘How long will you be here?’

‘My sentence is five years. In my business, you must often ask yourself – what is the price of integrity? And now I know. Five years in solitary confinement. Which brings me back to my original question. What are you doing here and what do you want with me?’

This time, it was Pekkala who answered. ‘I need you to look at something and tell me what you think.’

‘And why should I help you –’ he flipped his hand with irritation, spattering Kirov’s tunic with blood – ‘or anyone else out there?’

‘I had anticipated that your country’s gratitude might not be enough to win you over.’

‘Which I accept as proof of your own sanity!’ blustered Semykin.

Pekkala held up the paper-wrapped parcel, which he had removed from the briefcase before entering the cell. ‘In recompense for your help‚ I have brought you this. To examine. For two minutes.’

Semykin eyed the package suspiciously. ‘Well, what is it?’

‘First, you will help, then I’ll show you what is underneath this paper.’

‘For a Finn, you bargain a lot like a Russian.’

‘Your people have taught me a few things.’

It became very still in the room.

Semykin gave a low growl. ‘Very well,’ he whispered. ‘What do you need me to do?’

Kirov handed him the leather briefcase.

Semykin sat down on the bench and carefully wiped his bloody fingers on the knees of his prison pyjamas. After opening the brass latch, he slid out the painting of the moth. The first thing he did was to study the back of the canvas. ‘Ostubafengel,’ he said, reading out the word which had been written on the reverse. He began to work his thumbs along the wooden stretcher as if searching for some hidden defect in the wood. Afterwards, with equal care, Semykin slowly raked his nails across the canvas, eyes closed with concentration while he listened to the sound they made. Only then did he turn the painting over and examine the picture itself. ‘It is curious,’ he said. ‘The canvas was made in haste, but the painting itself shows considerable precision. The pattern on the wings was made with a brush containing only a few strands of hair. The painter would have had to use a large magnifying glass, like the kind employed by those who tie flies for trout fishing. It is not a forgery, if that is what you’ve come to ask me, or if it is, then I have never seen or heard of the original, but if you’re here to ask me what it’s worth, I’m afraid this briefcase is more valuable than its contents.’

‘What about the artist?’ asked Kirov. ‘Have you ever heard of anyone named Ostubafengel?’

Semykin shook his head. ‘But that doesn’t mean he or she isn’t out there somewhere. Sounds like one of those complicated Habsburg names to me. Hungarian perhaps. Where did it come from?’

Pekkala told him the story.

‘Then it is obviously worth something,’ said Semykin, ‘but its value does not lie in the painting itself. That much I can tell you for certain.’

‘Do you think there may be a message hidden inside the frame?’ asked Kirov.

Semykin shrugged. ‘Possibly. Or else there might be something underneath the paint. An X-ray might reveal it, or ultraviolet light perhaps.’ He tilted the painting on its side and squinted along the flat surface of the canvas, like a man taking aim down a gunsight. ‘But I doubt you will find anything. The paint is very thin, and I don’t believe there is anything beneath it. The trouble is, once you start ripping it apart, the painting itself will be destroyed. Is that a risk you are prepared to take?’

‘Not yet,’ replied Pekkala.

‘Two men died to protect this painting,’ protested Kirov. ‘They obviously thought it was valuable.’

‘They did not die protecting the painting,’ countered Semykin. ‘The reason they died was to protect its secret. Whatever that secret is lies beyond my expertise. I’ve told you everything I can.’

‘And if an X-ray turns up nothing,’ said Kirov, ‘we will be right back where we started.’

‘There is someone else you could take this to,’ suggested Semykin.

‘And who is that?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Her name is Churikova. Polina Churikova. Until the war broke out, she was a student at the Moscow State Institute of Art. She spent the summer of 1940 as my assistant. Her speciality was forensics.’

‘But specialising in forensics makes her a student of crime, not of art,’ said Pekkala.

‘Actually,’ Semykin told him, ‘it made her a student of both. The business of art forgery is extremely lucrative. It is also more widespread than most people can imagine. It’s possible, for example, that up to a third of the paintings in the world’s great art museums could be fakes. By making a chemical analysis of a painting, using microscopic portions of the paint, the wood, the canvas and so on, those trained in forensics can determine whether an art work is authentic. But Polina Churikova was not only my student. She was also my friend. She was the only person who came to visit me before I began serving my sentence here at Lubyanka.’

‘When was that?’

‘Only a few weeks ago.’

‘And do you know where we can find her now?’

Semykin shrugged. ‘Ask the Red Army. When Churikova came to see me, she was in uniform, like everybody else. At the time, she said she was stationed in Moscow, but where she might be now is anybody’s guess. She told me she had joined the Army Signals Branch in late June, right after the Germans attacked, and subsequently became a cryptographer. Apparently, she has already made a name for herself by breaking something called the Ferdinand Cipher, which the Fascists were using to communicate between Berlin and their front-line headquarters.’

‘How does someone who studies forensics end up as a cryptographer?’ asked Kirov.

‘The two fields are quite similar,’ explained Semykin. ‘Forensics taught her to uncover things that lay hidden in works of art in order to determine whether they were originals or fakes. The forger will always leave traces, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose. Now, instead of paintings or sculptures, she finds what has been hidden in the labyrinth of words and numbers.’

‘What makes you think she can help us?’ asked Kirov.

‘I make no guarantee that she can, only that when two people look at a work of art, they rarely see the same thing. That is what makes it art.’

‘This is all very well,’ grumbled Kirov, ‘except her location is as much of a mystery as this painting!’

‘Solve one,’ Semykin told him, ‘and you may solve the other. For that, you must rely on your own art, Comrade Commissar.’

‘Thank you‚ Semykin‚’ said Pekkala‚ as he handed over the first paper-wrapped package. ‘We appreciate your assistance.’

Then he and Kirov waited while Semykin carefully untied the string. After folding back the layers of archival tissue, he gasped, as the face of the fiery-eyed saviour came into view. ‘Now this . . .’ murmured Semykin, ‘
this
is authentic.’ As carefully as if it was a newborn infant, Semykin lifted the icon from its cradle of brown paper. Touching only the outermost edges of the frame, he held it up and sighed with admiration. ‘Is it Balkan?’

‘So I’m told,’ said Pekkala.

‘Late thirteenth century? Early fourteenth?’

‘Somewhere around there.’

‘Tempera on wood. Notice the asymmetrical nose and mouth, the deep furrows on his brow and the way this white lead backing brings to life the greenish ochre of his skin. The tension! The expressivity!’ Suddenly a look of consternation swept across Semykin’s face. ‘Wait,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve seen this before somewhere.’ Sharply, he raised his head and stared questioningly at Pekkala. ‘Haven’t I?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Pekkala. ‘You have seen it hanging on the wall of the Museum of the Kremlin, and you will find it there again when you get out of here, Valery.’

Semykin’s eyes bulged. ‘You
took
this from the Kremlin Museum?’

‘Borrowed it,’ Pekkala corrected him.

‘Then see that it finds its way home,’ said Semykin as he carefully rewrapped the icon, ‘before Fabian Golyakovsky has a heart attack.’

‘It may be too late for that,’ muttered Kirov.

‘I may have lost faith in the country that owns this work of art,’ Semykin told them, ‘but the art itself is sacred, and will remain so, long after you and I and the butchers of Lubyanka have turned to dust.’