Eye of the Red Tsar (23 page)

Pekkala shrugged.

Anton wagged the wooden spoon at him. “Are you placing me under suspicion?”

Sensing that another fight was about to break out between the brothers, Kirov tried to change the subject. “Don’t you have something else to say?” he asked Anton.

“I already apologized,” replied Anton, shoveling up another mouthful from the pan.

“A public apology! That’s what we agreed.”

Anton groaned. He set the frying pan down on the cobblestones and let the spoon fall with a clatter onto the blackened surface of the pan. “I apologize for calling you a cook. You are a chef. A mighty
chef.”

“There,” said Kirov. “Was that so difficult?”

Anton sucked at his teeth and said nothing.

“What did you make?” Pekkala was peering into the frying pan.

“Chicken with gooseberry sauce!” announced Kirov.

“Where did you find the ingredients for that?” asked Pekkala.

“Our new friend, Mayakovsky,” replied Kirov.

“Make that our only friend,” Anton corrected.

“He says he can get his hands on anything we want,” said Kirov.

Anton looked over his shoulder at Kirov. “Wait a minute. How did you pay for this? I’m the one holding on to our cash.”

“You didn’t wonder about that while you were eating it, did you?” Kirov demanded. “Let’s just say we only have enough fuel coupons to drive most of the way back to Moscow.”

“Damn it!” shouted Anton. “Why don’t we just raid Mayakovsky’s house and take whatever we need?”

“We could,” agreed Pekkala, “but I think he knows more than he’s told us so far. Sooner or later, he’ll come back with more information.”

“We don’t have time for sooner or later,” Anton snapped.

“Rushing through an investigation,” Pekkala said as he bent down and streaked one finger through the sauce in the pan, “is like rushing through a meal…” He tasted the sauce. His eyes closed. “That’s very good,” he muttered. “And besides, with your help, things will go much more quickly.”

“I’m already helping,” said Anton.

“How exactly,” asked Pekkala, “except with eating the food?”

“I’ll help,” Kirov volunteered cheerfully.

“You stick to being a cook,” Anton grumbled.

“The more people we can talk to,” Pekkala pointed out, “the faster this will go.”

Kirov jabbed Anton in the spine with the toe of his boot. “Do you want to go back to steaming open letters?”

“All right!” Anton moaned angrily. “What do you want me to do?”

After assigning each of them a section of the town, Pekkala explained that he needed them to go door-to-door and learn what they could about the night the Romanovs disappeared.

Anton scowled. “We can’t do that! Officially, the Romanovs were executed by order of the government. If word gets out that we’re looking for whoever killed the Tsar and his family—”

“You don’t have to tell them that. Just say there have been some new developments. You don’t have to explain what those are, and most people will be too concerned with the questions you are asking them to think about questions of their own. Ask if they saw any strangers in town around the time the Romanovs disappeared. Ask if any bodies have been found since then. If someone from out of town buried a murder victim in a hurry, it’s unlikely to have stayed hidden from the locals.”

“It’s been a long time since that night,” grumbled Anton. “If they’ve kept their secrets this long, what makes you think they’ll tell us any now?”

“Secrets grow heavy,” Pekkala answered. “In time, the weight of them becomes too much to carry. Talk to people who work out of doors—postmen, foresters, farmers. If anything was going on in the days leading up to the disappearances, they are more likely to know than those who stayed inside. Or you could go to the tavern…”

“The tavern?” Anton brightened.

Kirov rolled his eyes. “All of a sudden, he is willing to help.”

“People are more likely to tell you their secrets there than any other place,” said Pekkala. “Just make sure you stay sober so you can listen to what they are saying.”

“Of course,” said Anton. “What do you take me for?”

Pekkala didn’t answer. He was staring at the frying pan. “Is there any left?” he asked.

“A bit.” Anton handed him the pan.

Pekkala sat down beside his brother on the stone step. There was no chicken left, but by working the wooden spoon around the edges of the pan, he gathered up some of the sauce and a single jade green gooseberry which his brother had been too full to eat. The still-warm, buttery sauce, flecked with chopped parsley and thickened with fried bread crumbs, crunched between his teeth. He tasted the sweetness of onion and the earthiness of simmered carrots. Then he let the gooseberry rest on his tongue, and slowly pressed it against the roof of his mouth until the firm round edges gave way, almost like a sigh, spilling warm, sharp-tasting juice into his mouth. Saliva welled up from under his tongue, and he sighed, recalling winters in his cabin in the Krasnagolyana forest when his only food for days on end had been boiled potatoes and salt. He remembered the silence of those nights, a stillness so complete that he could hear the faint hiss which he could only detect when there were no other noises. Often, in the forest, he had heard it: there were times in the winter months when it seemed almost deafening to him. When he was a child, his father had explained that it was the noise of his blood moving through his body. That silence, more than any barbed-wire fence, had been his prison in Siberia. Even though Pekkala’s body had left that prison behind, his mind had remained trapped inside it. Only now, as these tastes formed unfamiliar arcs across his senses, did he slowly feel himself emerging from his years as a convict.

Following his arrest at the Vainikkala railway station, Pekkala was transported to the Butyrka prison in Petrograd. The Webley and his copy of the
Kalevala
were handed over to the authorities. He was told to sign a huge book containing thousands of pages. The book had a steel plate covering everything except the space for him to write his name. From there, guards brought him to a room where he was made to strip and his clothes were taken away
.

Alone, Pekkala paced nervously around the small room. The walls were painted brown up to chest height. Above that, to the high ceiling, everything was white. The light in the room came from a single bulb above the door, covered with a wire cage. The room contained no bed or chair or any other furniture, so when Pekkala grew tired of pacing, he sat on the
floor with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up to his bare chest. Every few minutes, a peephole in the door scraped open and Pekkala saw a pair of eyes looking in at him
.

It was while he waited naked in the cell that prison guards, searching his clothes, discovered the emerald eye beneath the lapel of his coat
.

Over the weeks that followed, in those few times when his head was clear enough to think straight, Pekkala would ask himself why he had not thrown away the badge which revealed his identity. Perhaps it was just vanity. Perhaps he imagined he would one day return to serve in his former capacity. Perhaps it was because the badge had become a part of him and he could no more be separated from it than he could be parted from his liver or his kidneys or his heart. But there was another possibility for why he had held on to the badge, and it was that part of him had not wanted to escape. Part of him knew his fate had become so entwined with that of the Tsar that even his freedom could not sever the bond
.

As soon as the Butyrka prison staff realized they had captured the Emerald Eye, Pekkala was separated from the other prisoners and brought to a place known as the Chimney
.

They led him to the cell and shoved him inside. Pekkala tumbled down one step into a space the size of a small closet. The door clicked shut. He tried to stand, but the ceiling was too low. Black-painted walls sloped above him, lower at the back and curving to a point just above the door. The space was so narrow that he could not lie down, nor could he stand except hunched over. A bright bulb glared down from a wire mesh cage, so close to his face that he could feel its heat. A wave of claustrophobia washed over him. His jaw locked open and he gagged
.

After only a few minutes, he could not take it anymore and banged on the door, asking to be released
.

The peephole slid back. “The prisoner must be silent,” said a voice
.

“Please,” Pekkala said. “I can’t breathe in here.”

The peephole clanged shut again
.

Before long, his back spasmed from bending over. He let himself slide
down the wall, pressing his knees against the door. This helped for a few minutes, but then his knees cramped. He soon discovered that there was no position in which he could get comfortable. There was no air. Heat from the lightbulb pulsed against the back of his head and sweat poured down his face
.

Pekkala fully expected to die. Before that, he knew, he would be tortured. Having reached this inevitable conclusion, he was filled with a curious sensation of lightness, as if his spirit had already begun a slow migration from his body
.

He was ready for it to begin
.

THE THREE MEN spread out through the town.

Kirov took the houses on the main street. He made sure he had pages in his notebook. He sharpened two pencils. He combed his hair and even brushed his teeth.

Anton caught up with him as he was shaving, using the mirror of the Emka so that he could see what he was doing.

“Where are you going?” asked Kirov.

“To the tavern,” replied Anton. “That’s where people tell their secrets. Why dig them out of their houses when they can come to me there?”

Pekkala decided to follow up on Nekrasov’s story about the militia stealing from the baskets of food delivered by the sisters of the Sverdlovsk convent. He wondered if the nuns had actually seen the Romanovs during their captivity. Perhaps they’d even spoken to the family. If that was true, they would have been the only people outside the militia or the Cheka to do so.

His route to the convent took him around the edge of town. Determined to question as many people as he could along the way, he stopped at several houses. No one came to the door. The owners were home. They simply refused to answer. He could see one old couple, sitting in chairs in a darkened room, blinking at each other while the sound of his fist on their door echoed about the house. The old couple did not move. Their brittle fingers, draped over the armrests of their chairs, hung down like pale creeper vines.

Finally, a door opened.

A wiry man, his pocked face covered by an unkempt white beard, asked Pekkala if he’d come to buy some blood.

“Blood?” asked Pekkala.

“From the pig,” replied the man.

Now Pekkala could hear a gurgling squeal, coming from somewhere behind the house. It rose and fell like breathing.

“You have to cut their throats,” the man explained. “They have to bleed to death or the meat doesn’t taste right. Sometimes it takes a while. I drain the blood into buckets. I thought that’s what you wanted.”

Pekkala explained why he was there.

The man didn’t seem surprised. “I knew you’d come looking for the truth sooner or later.”

“What truth is that?”

“That the Romanovs weren’t all killed the way the papers said they were. I saw one of them the night after they were supposed to have been executed.”

“Who did you see?” Pekkala felt a tightness in his chest, hoping this might lead him to Alexei.

“One of the daughters,” the man answered.

Pekkala felt his heart sink. Like Mayakovsky, this old man had convinced himself of something Pekkala knew to be false. He could not understand it.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” asked the man.

“I don’t think you are lying,” said Pekkala.

“It’s all right. The Whites didn’t believe me, either. One of their officers came to my house, right after they chased the Reds out of town. I told him what I’d seen and he said straight up that I must have been dreaming. He told me not to mention it to anyone, unless I wanted to end up in trouble. And when I heard him threaten me like that, I was more certain than ever that I’d seen one of the daughters after all.”

“Where was she when you saw her?” asked Pekkala.

“Down at the railroad yard in Perm. That’s the next stop after Sverdlovsk on the Trans-Siberian. I used to be a coupler down there.”

“A coupler?”

The man made two fists and fitted his knuckles together. “A coupler makes sure the right cars are joined to the right engines. Otherwise a load of goods which has come all the way from Moscow will find itself going back the way it came instead of heading out to Vladivostok. The night after the Romanovs disappeared, I was coupling up carriages on a train bound for the east. We were trying to clear out the railyard before the Whites arrived. Trains were coming through at all hours, not on the usual schedule. Night trains are mostly all freight, but this one had a passenger car—the only one on the train. There were black curtains pulled across the windows and the carriage had a guard at each end with a rifle and a bayonet. That’s where I saw her.”

“You went inside the train?”

“Are you kidding? Those bastards with the long knives would have skewered me!”

“But you said there were curtains over the windows. How did you see her?”

“I was walking down on the tracks beside the carriage, checking the wheels like we’re supposed to do, and one of the guards jumps down into the gravel. He points his gun at me and asks me what I’m doing. So I tell him I’m a coupler, and he yells at me to get lost. He didn’t know what a coupler was either, so I says to him, ‘Fine, I’ll get lost and when the engine pulls out, you’ll be left standing here on the siding. If you want to leave when the rest of the train does,’ I tell him, ‘you’d better let me do my job.’”

“And did he?”

“He got right back on the train and then I hear him yelling at somebody else who’d come to ask what all the fuss was about. You see, whoever was in that carriage, they didn’t want anybody getting off and they didn’t want anybody getting on. But as I was walking back to couple up the car, one of the curtains moved aside”—he made the motion of parting the curtain—“and I saw the face of a woman looking down at me.”