Red Moth (8 page)

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, 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.

Pekkala returned to the estate one evening to find the Tsar’s horse tied to a fence post outside his cottage and the Tsar himself emerging from the front door.

‘Pekkala! I have left you a present inside.’

‘That is very kind of you, Majesty.’

The Tsar smiled. ‘You might not think so when you see where I have left it.’

‘It’s not in the cottage?’

‘It’s underneath the cottage,’ replied the Tsar, untying the horse and climbing into the saddle, ‘in your own private sanctuary from the madmen of this world.’

Pekkala did not reply.

‘I know how you feel about confined spaces,’ the Tsar told him, ‘and that you have no intention of going down into that hiding place if you can help it.’

‘That would be correct,’ replied Pekkala.

‘So, as a reward, or call it a challenge if you like, I have gone down there myself and left you a bottle of my finest slivovitz plum brandy. All you have to do is go and get it.’

The construction of these hideaways did little to quell Zubatov’s fears.

Although many of Zubatov’s contemporaries believed him to be paranoid, the Okhrana had learned that it was better to err on the side of caution, in case the failure to report a legitimate threat would recoil upon their heads.

Inevitably, word would reach the Tsar.

Then the Tsar would summon Pekkala.

‘Go to Moscow,’ he would say. ‘See what Zubatov has dreamed up this time.’

Zubatov insisted that all his meetings take place face to face, since he did not trust the phone system. As head of the Okhrana, Zubatov had tapped every phone exchange in the country, so there was good reason for his lack of faith.

‘Will I find him at the Metropol?’ asked Pekkala, his eyes glazing at the thought of another long train ride from St Petersburg.

‘Of course,’ replied the Tsar. ‘That’s the only place where he feels safe, although I’m damned if I know why.’

‘It’s because the anarchists also meet there, Excellency. They like the food too much to blow it up and Zubatov is convinced they are planning to turn it into their headquarters some day.’

The Tsar laughed. ‘I know what you think of Zubatov, Pekkala, but please don’t judge him too harshly. After all, he’s only trying to save my life.’

But Pekkala knew this wasn’t quite true. Zubatov’s greatest fear was not the death of the Tsar, but rather the removal of the Tsar from power. In Zubatov’s cold thinking, the Tsar himself could be replaced. But if the Tsar stepped down from power, Zubatov knew exactly who would seize control in the name of Revolution. Most of these men and women he knew by name, having spent his career trying to kill them.

In 1917, when the Tsar abdicated the throne, Zubatov’s nightmare came true. After dinner with his family, Zubatov excused himself from the table and went out onto the balcony of their Moscow apartment to smoke a cigar. When the cigar was finished‚ instead of returning inside‚ he leapt to his death into the street below.

Although the chair’s tapestry upholstering was faded and torn, Pekkala had immediately recognised the ornate woodwork on its arms as being the same type which once graced the lobby of the Metropol.

True to their word, the Bolshevik Central Committee had taken the hotel over as their headquarters during the 1920s, during which time most of its original furnishing, including the crystal chandeliers, polished brass and navy-blue carpeting, had lapsed into disrepair. Now that it had been converted once again into a grand hotel, frequented by foreign diplomats, journalists and actors, the original, dilapidated furniture often found its way out into the street.