The Red Coffin (3 page)

‘When did you first become interested in these machines?’

As the topic turned to engines, Nagorski began to relax. ‘I got my first look at an automobile in 1907. It was a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, which had been brought into Russia by the Grand Duke Mikhail. My father and he used to go hunting each year, for Merganser ducks up in the Pripet Marshes. Once, when the Grand Duke had stopped by our house in his car, father asked to see the inner workings of the machine.’ Nagorski laughed. ‘That’s what he called them. The inner workings. As if it was some kind of mantel clock. When the Grand Duke lifted the hood, my life changed in an instant. My father just stared at it. To him, it was nothing more than a baffling collection of metal pipes and bolts. But to me that engine made sense. It was as if I had seen it before. I have never been able to explain it properly. All I knew for certain was that my future lay with these engines. It wasn’t long before I had built one for myself. Over the next ten years, I won more than twenty races. If the war hadn’t come along, that’s what
I’d still be doing. But everybody has a story which begins that way, don’t they, Inspector? If the war hadn’t come along …’

‘What did happen to you in the war?’ interrupted Pekkala.

‘I couldn’t get back to Russia, so I enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. There were men from all over the world, caught in the wrong country when the war broke out and with no way to return home. I had been with the Legion almost two years when we came up against tanks near the French village of Flers. We had all heard about these machines. The British first used them against the Germans at the battle of Cambrai in 1917. By the following year, the Germans had designed their own. I had never even seen one until we went into action against them. My first thought was how slowly they moved. Six kilometres an hour. That’s a walking pace. And nothing graceful about them. It was like being attacked by giant metal cockroaches. Three of the five broke down before they even reached us, one was knocked out with artillery and the last managed to escape, although we found it two days later burned out by the side of the road, apparently from engine malfunction.’

‘That does not sound like an impressive introduction.’

‘No, but as I watched those iron hulks being destroyed, or grinding to a halt of their own accord, I realised that the future of warfare lay in these machines. Tanks are not merely some passing fad of butchery, like the crossbow or the trebuchet. I saw at once what needed to be done to improve the design. I glimpsed technologies that had not even been invented yet, but which, in the months ahead, I created in my head and on any scrap of paper I could find. When the war ended, those scraps were what I brought back with me to this country.’

Pekkala knew the rest of that story; how one day Nagorski had walked into the newly formed Soviet Patent Office in Moscow with over twenty different designs which ultimately earned him the directorship of the T-34 project. Until that time, he had been eking out a living on the streets of Moscow, polishing the boots of men he would later command.

‘Do you know the limits of my development budget?’ asked Nagorski.

‘I do not,’ replied Pekkala.

‘That’s because there aren’t any,’ said Nagorski. ‘Comrade Stalin knows exactly how important this machine is to the safety of our country. So I can spend whatever I want, take whatever I want, order whomever I choose to do whatever I decide. You accuse me of taking risks with the safety of this country, but the blame for that belongs with the man who sent you here. You can tell Comrade Stalin from me that if he continues arresting members of the Soviet armed forces at the rate he is doing, there will be no one left to drive my tanks even if he does let me finish my work!’

Pekkala knew that the true measure of Nagorski’s power was not in the money he could spend, but in the fact that he could say what he’d just said without fear of a bullet in the brain. And Pekkala himself said nothing in reply, not because he feared Nagorski, but because he knew that Nagorski was right.

Afraid that he was losing control of the government, Stalin had ordered mass arrests. In the past year and a half, over a million people had been taken into custody. Among them were most of the Soviet high command, who had then either been shot or sent out to the Gulags.

‘Perhaps,’ suggested Pekkala, ‘you have had a change of heart about this tank of yours. It might occur to someone in that situation to try to undo what they have done.’

‘By giving its secrets to the enemy, you mean?’

Pekkala nodded slowly. ‘That is one possibility.’

‘Do you know why it is called the Konstantin Project?’

‘No, Comrade Nagorski.’

‘Konstantin is the name of my son, my only child. You see, Inspector, this project is as sacred to me as my own family. There is nothing I would do to harm it. Some people cannot understand that. They write me off as some kind of Dr Frankenstein, obsessed only with bringing a monster to life. They don’t understand the price I have to pay for my accomplishments. Success can be as harmful as failure when you are just trying to get on with your life. My wife and son have suffered greatly.’

‘I understand,’ said Pekkala.

‘Do you?’ asked Nagorski, almost pleading. ‘Do you really?’

‘We have both made difficult choices,’ said Pekkala.

Nagorski nodded, staring away into the corner of the room, lost in thought. Then suddenly he faced Pekkala. ‘Then you should know that everything I’ve told you is the truth.’

‘Excuse me, Colonel Nagorski,’ said Pekkala. He got up, left the room and walked down the corridor, which was lined with metal doors. His footsteps made no sound on the grey industrial carpeting. All sound had been removed, as if the air had been sucked out of this place. At the end of the corridor, one door remained slightly ajar. Pekkala knocked once and walked in to a room so filled with smoke that his first breath felt like a mouthful of ashes.

‘Well, Pekkala?’ said a voice. Sitting by himself in a chair in the corner of the otherwise empty room was a man of medium height and stocky build, with a pockmarked face and withered left hand. His hair was thick and dark, combed straight back on his head. A moustache sewn with threads of grey bunched beneath his nose. He was smoking a cigarette, of which so little remained that one more puff would have touched the embers to his skin.

‘Very well, Comrade Stalin,’ said Pekkala.

The man stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe and blew the last grey breath in two streams from his nose. ‘What do you think of our Colonel Nagorski?’ he asked.

‘I think he is telling the truth,’ replied Pekkala.

‘I don’t believe it,’ replied Stalin. ‘Perhaps your assistant should be questioning him.’

‘Major Kirov,’ said Pekkala.

‘I know who he is!’ Stalin’s voice rose in anger.

Pekkala understood. It was the mention of Kirov’s name which unnerved Stalin, since Kirov was also the name of the former Leningrad Party Chief, who had been assassinated five years earlier. The death of Kirov had weighed upon Stalin, not because of any lasting affection for the man, but because it showed that if a person like Kirov could be killed, then Stalin himself might be next. Since Kirov’s death, Stalin had never walked out into the streets among the people whom he ruled but did not trust.

Stalin kneaded his hands together, cracking his knuckles one after the other. ‘The Konstantin Project has been compromised, and I believe Nagorski is responsible.’

‘I have yet to see the proof of that,’ said Pekkala. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Comrade Stalin? Is there some proof that you can show? Or is this just another arrest, in which case you have plenty of other investigators you could use.’

Stalin rolled the stub of his cigarette between his fingers. ‘Do you know how many people I allow to speak to me that way?’

‘Not many, I imagine,’ said Pekkala. Every time he met with Stalin, he became aware of an emotional blankness that seemed to hover around the man. It was something about Stalin’s eyes. The look on his face would change, but the expression in his eyes never did. When Stalin laughed, cajoled and, if that didn’t work, threatened, it was, for Pekkala, like watching an exchange of masks in a Japanese Kabuki play. There were moments, as one mask transformed into another, when it seemed to Pekkala that he could glimpse what lay behind. And what he found there filled him with dread. His only defence was to pretend he could not see it.

Stalin smiled, and suddenly the mask had changed again. ‘Not many is right. None would be more correct. You are right that I do have other investigators, but this case is too important.’ Then he put the cigarette butt in his pocket.

Pekkala had watched him do this before. It was a strange habit in a place where even the poorest people threw their cigarette butts on the ground and left them there. Strange, too, for a man who would never run short of the forty cigarettes he smoked each day. Perhaps there was some story in it, perhaps dating back to his days as a bank robber in
Tblisi. Pekkala wondered if Stalin, like some beggar in the street, removed the remaining tobacco from the stubs and rolled it into fresh cigarettes. Whatever the reason, Stalin kept it to himself.

‘I admire your audacity, Pekkala. I like a person who is not afraid to speak his mind. That’s one of the reasons I trust you.’

‘All I ask is that you let me do my job,’ said Pekkala. ‘That was our agreement.’

Stalin let his hands fall with an impatient slap against his knees. ‘Do you know, Pekkala, that my pen once touched the paper of your death sentence? I was that close.’ He pinched the air, as if he were still holding that pen, and traced the air with the ghost of his own signature. ‘I never regretted my choice. And how many years have we been working together now?’

‘Six. Almost seven.’

‘In all that time, have I ever interfered with one of your investigations?’

‘No,’ admitted Pekkala.

‘And have I ever threatened you, simply because you disagreed with me?’

‘No, Comrade Stalin.’

‘And that,’ Stalin aimed a finger at Pekkala, as if taking aim down the barrel of a gun, ‘is more than you can say about your former boss, or his meddling wife, Alexandra.’

In that moment, Pekkala was hurled back through time.

Like a man snapping out of a trance, he found himself in the
Alexander Palace, hand poised to knock upon the Tsar’s study
door.

It was the day he finally tracked down the killer Grodek.

Grodek and his fiancée, a woman named Maria Balka, had
been found hiding in an apartment near the Moika Canal.
When agents of the Tsar’s secret service, the Okhrana, stormed the
building, Grodek set off an explosive which destroyed the house
and killed everyone inside, including the agents who had gone in
to arrest him. Meanwhile, Grodek and Balka fled out the back,
where Pekkala was waiting in case they tried to escape. Pekkala
pursued them along the icy cobbled street until Grodek tried to
cross the river on the Potsuleyev bridge. But Okhrana men had
stationed themselves on the other side of the bridge, and the two
criminals found themselves with nowhere left to run. It was at
this moment that Grodek had shot his fiancée, rather than let her
fall into the hands of the police. Balka’s body tumbled into the
canal and disappeared among the plates of ice which drifted out
towards the sea like rafts loaded with diamonds. Grodek, afraid
to jump, had tried to shoot himself, only to discover that his gun
was empty. He was immediately taken into custody.

The Tsar had ordered Pekkala to arrive at the Alexander
Palace no later than 4 p.m. that day, in order to make his report.
The Tsar did not like to be kept waiting, and Pekkala had raced
the whole way from Petrograd, arriving with only minutes to
spare. He dashed up the front steps of the Palace and straight to
the Tsar’s study.

There was no answer, so Pekkala knocked again and still there
was no answer. Cautiously, he opened the door, but found the
room empty.

Pekkala sighed with annoyance.

Although the Tsar did not like to be kept waiting, he had no
trouble making others wait for him.

Just then, Pekkala heard the Tsar’s voice coming from the
room across the hall. It belonged to the Tsarina Alexandra
and was known as the Mauve Boudoir. Of the hundred rooms
in the Alexander Palace, it had become the most famous,
because of how ugly people found it. Pekkala was forced to
agree. To his eye, everything in that room was the colour of boiled
liver.

Pekkala stopped outside the room, trying to catch his breath
from all the rushing he had done to be on time. Then he heard
the voice of the Tsarina and the Tsar’s furious reply. As their words
filtered into his brain, he realised they were talking about him.

‘I am not going to dismiss Pekkala!’ said the Tsar.

Pekkala heard the faint creak of the Tsar’s riding boots upon
the floor. He knew exactly which pair of boots they were – they
had been specially ordered from England and had arrived the
week before. The Tsar was trying to break them in, although his
feet were suffering in the meantime. He had confided to Pekkala
that he had even resorted to the old peasant trick of softening new
boots, which was to urinate in them and leave them standing
overnight.

Now Pekkala heard the Tsarina speaking in her usual soft
tone. He had never heard her shout. The Tsarina’s low pitch
always sounded to him like a person uttering threats. ‘Our friend
has urged us,’ she said.

At the mention of ‘our friend’, Pekkala felt his jaw muscles
clench. That was the phrase the Tsar and the Tsarina used among
themselves to describe the self-proclaimed holy man Rasputin.

Since his first appearance in the court of the Tsar, Rasputin’s
hold upon the Imperial Family had grown so strong that he was
now consulted on all matters, whether about the war, which was
now in its second year and moving from one catastrophe to the
next, or about appointments to the Royal Court, or about the ill
ness of the Tsar’s youngest child, Alexei. Although it was officially
denied, the young man had been diagnosed with haemophilia.
Injuries which would have been laughed off by any healthy boy
confined Alexei to his bed for days at a time. Often, he had to be
carried wherever he went by his personal servant, a sailor named
Derevenko.

The Tsarina soon came to believe that Rasputin held the cure
to Alexei’s disease.

Disturbed by the power Rasputin held over the royal family,
the prime minister, Peter Stolypin, had ordered an investigation.
The report he delivered to the Tsar was filled with stories of
debauchery in Rasputin’s Petrograd apartment and secret
meetings between the Tsarina and Rasputin at the house of her
best friend Anna Vyrubova.

The Tsarina was not well-liked among the Russian people.
They called her Nemka, the German Woman, and now that the
country was at war with Germany, they wondered where her
own loyalties lay.

After reading the report, the Tsar ordered Stolypin never to
speak to him again about Rasputin. When Stolypin was shot
by an assassin named Dimitri Bogrov at an opera house in
Kiev, dying five days later, the lack of concern shown by the Tsar
and Alexandra was enough to cause a scandal in the Russian
court.

When the assassin Bogrov was arrested, he turned out to be a
paid informant of the Okhrana. Lawyers at Bogrov’s trial were
not permitted to ask whether there had been any connection
between Bogrov and the Romanov family. Less than a week after
Stolypin’s death, Bogrov himself was executed.

From then on, Rasputin’s meetings with the Tsarina continued
unopposed. Rumours of infidelity spread. Although Pekkala him
self did not believe that they were true, he knew many who did.

What Pekkala did believe was that the Tsarina’s anxiety over
her son’s precarious health had pushed her to the brink of her own
sanity. In spite of all the riches of the Romanovs, there was no
cure their money could have bought. So the Tsarina had turned
to the superstitions which now so governed her life that she
existed in a world seen only through a lens of fear. And somehow,
through that lens, Rasputin had taken on the presence of a god.

The Tsar himself was not so easily convinced, and Rasputin’s
influence might have faded if not for one event which secured for
him the loyalty of the entire royal family, and also sealed his fate.

At the Romanovs’ dreary hunting lodge of Spala, the young
T sarevich slipped getting out of the bath and suffered a haemor
rhage so severe that the doctors told his parents to make prepara
tions for a funeral.

Then a telegram arrived from Rasputin, assuring the Tsarina
that her son would not die.

What happened next, even Rasputin’s harshest critics were
unable to deny.

After the arrival of the telegram, Alexei began, quite suddenly,
to recover.

From that point on, no matter what Rasputin did, he became
almost untouchable.

Almost.

Rasputin’s excesses continued, and Pekkala had quietly dreaded
the day when he might be summoned by the Tsar to investigate
the Siberian. One way or the other, it would have been the end
of Pekkala’s career, or even of his life, just as it was for Stolypin.
Perhaps for that very reason, or because he preferred not to know
the truth, the Tsar had never placed upon Pekkala the burden of
handling such a case.

‘Our friend,’ snapped the Tsar, ‘would do well to keep in mind
that I myself appointed Pekkala.’

‘Now, my darling,’ said the Tsarina, and there was the rustle
of a dress as she moved across the floor, ‘no one is suggesting that
you were wrong to have appointed him. Your loyalty to Pekkala
is beyond reproach. It is Pekkala’s loyalty to you that has come
into question.’

Hearing this, Pekkala felt a burning in his chest. He had never
done anything remotely disloyal. He knew this and the Tsar knew
this. But in that moment, Pekkala felt the bile rise in his throat,
because he knew that the Tsar could be persuaded. The Tsar liked
to think of himself as a decisive man, and in some things he was,
but he could be made to believe almost anything if his wife had
decided to convince him.

‘Sunny, don’t you understand?’ protested the Tsar. ‘Pekkala’s
loyalty is not to me.’

‘Well, don’t you think it should be?’

‘Pekkala’s duty is to the task I gave him,’ replied the Tsar, ‘and
that is where his loyalty belongs.’

‘His duty …’ began the Tsarina.

The Tsar cut her off. ‘Is to find out the truth of whatever
matter I place before him, however unpleasant it might be to
hear it. Such a man strikes fear into the hearts of those who
are sheltering lies. And I wonder, Sunny, if our friend is not
more worried for himself than he is for the wellbeing of the
court.’

‘You cannot say that, my love! Our friend wishes only for the
good of our family, and of our country. He has even sent you a
gift.’ There was a rustling of paper.

‘What on earth is that?’

‘It is a comb,’ she replied. ‘One of his own, and he has suggested
that it would bring you good fortune to run it through your hair
before you attend your daily meetings with the generals.’

Pekkala shuddered at the thought of Rasputin’s greasy hair.

The Tsar was thinking the same thing. ‘I will not take part
in another one of Rasputin’s disgusting rituals!’ he shouted, then
strode out of the room and into the hallway.

There was nowhere for Pekkala to go. He only had one choice
and that was to stay where he was.

The Tsar was startled.

For a moment, the two men stared at each other.

Pekkala broke the silence, saying the first thing that came into
his mind. ‘How are your boots, Majesty?’

The Tsar blinked in surprise. Then he smiled. ‘The
English make wonderful shoes,’ he said, ‘only not for human
beings.’

Now the Tsarina appeared in the doorway. She wore a plain,
white floor-length dress, with sleeves which stopped at the elbows
and a collar that covered her throat. Tied around her waist was
a belt made of black cloth, which had tassels at the end. Around
her neck, suspended on a gold chain, she wore a crucifix made
of bone which had been carved by Rasputin himself. She was a
severe-looking woman, with a thin mouth downturned at the
edges, deep-set eyes and a smooth, broad forehead. Pekkala had
seen pictures of her just after she was married to the Tsar. She
had seemed much happier then. Now, when her face was relaxed,
lines of worry fell into place, like cracks in a pottery glaze. ‘What
do you want?’ she demanded of Pekkala.

‘His Majesty asked me to report to him at four p.m. precisely.’

‘Then you are late,’ she snapped.

‘No, Majesty,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I was on time.’

Then the Tsarina realised he must have heard every word she
said.

‘What news of Grodek?’ asked the Tsar, hurriedly moving to
a new topic.

‘We have him, Majesty,’ answered Pekkala.

The Tsar’s face brightened. ‘Well done!’ The Tsar slapped him
gently on the shoulder. Then he turned to walk away down the
hall. As he passed by his wife, he paused and whispered in her
ear. ‘You go and tell that to your friend.’

Then it was just Pekkala and the Tsarina.

Her lips were dry, the result of the barbiturate Veronal, which
she had been taking in order to help her sleep. The Veronal upset
her stomach, so she had resorted to taking cocaine. One drug led to
another. Over time, the cocaine had given her heart trouble, so
she began taking small doses of arsenic. This had tinted the skin
beneath her eyes a brownish green and also caused her sleepless
ness, which put her right back where she started. ‘I suffer from
nightmares,’ she told him, ‘and you, Pekkala, are in them.’

‘I do not doubt it, Majesty,’ he replied.

For a moment, the Tsarina’s mouth hung slightly open as she
tried to grasp the meaning of his words. Then her teeth came
together with a crack. She walked into her room and closed the
door
.