Eye of the Red Tsar (31 page)

When the guards released Pekkala, he dropped to his knees in the dirt
.

By the light of a caged bulb, he saw someone cowering in the corner. The figure barely looked human, more like some pale and unknown creature
fished up from the bowels of the earth. The man was naked, legs straight out in front, hands covering his face. His head had been shaved and he was covered with bruises
.

As Pekkala looked around, he realized that others stood hidden in the shadows. All wore the Cheka uniform of olive brown tunics and blue trousers tucked into knee-length boots
.

One of the men began to speak
.

Pekkala instantly recognized Stalin’s voice
.

“Maxim Platonovich Kolchak…”

Kolchak? thought Pekkala. Then, as he stared at the creature, he began to see the cavalry officer’s face beneath the mask of bruises
.

“You,” Stalin continued, “have been found guilty of counterrevolutionary activity, theft of government property, and abuse of rank and privileges. You are hereby condemned to death. You no longer exist.”

Kolchak raised his head. As his eyes locked with Pekkala’s, the creature tried to smile. “Hello, Pekkala,” he said. “I want you to know I have given them nothing. Tell His Excellency…”

The roar of gunshots was deafening in the cramped space of the room
.

Pekkala pressed his hands against his ears. Concussion waves passed through his body
.

When the fusillade had stopped, Stalin stepped forward and fired point-blank into Kolchak’s forehead
.

Then Pekkala was dragged to his feet and frog-marched back up the stairs
.

By the time Pekkala arrived in the interrogation room, Stalin was already there. As before, the briefcase lay on the table, a box of Markov cigarettes beside it
.

“It’s just as Kolchak told you,” said Stalin. “We knew all along that the Tsar had given him the task of removing the gold to a secure location, but Kolchak gave us absolutely nothing. It is almost incredible, considering what we put him through.” He opened up the red box of Markovs, but this time he did not offer one to Pekkala
.

“But how long had Kolchak been here?” Pekkala asked
.

Stalin picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. “Since long before we got our hands on you, Inspector.”

“Then why did you want his name from me? Everything you did”—he tried to stop his voice from cracking—“it served no purpose at all.”

“It depends on how you look at it,” replied Stalin. “You see, it is useful for us to know the point at which men like yourself can be broken. And it is equally important to know that there are others, men like Kolchak, who cannot be broken at all. Personally, what gives me the greatest satisfaction is that now you know what kind of man you are.” He tapped the ash off his cigarette onto the floor. “The kind who can be broken.”

Pekkala stared in disbelief at Stalin, whose face appeared and disappeared in cobras of tobacco smoke. “Go ahead,” he whispered
.

“Excuse me?”

“Go ahead. Shoot me.”

“Oh, no.” Stalin drummed his fingers on the briefcase which contained the relics of Pekkala’s life. “That would simply be a waste. Someday we may need the Emerald Eye again. Until then, we will send you to a place where we can find you if we need you.”

Six hours later, Pekkala climbed aboard a train bound for Siberia
.

ALEXEI STARED in disbelief. “Considering all that my family has done for you, this is how you choose to repay us?”

“I am sorry, Excellency,” said Pekkala. “I am telling you the truth. We are in danger here.”

“I see no danger,” said Alexei, rising to his feet. “All I see is a man I once thought I could count on, no matter what.”

JUST BEFORE SUNRISE, Kirov wandered into the kitchen. The imprint of a tunic button, with its hammer and sickle design, was molded into his cheek where he had slept upon it. “I should have taken over from you hours ago,” he said. “Why did you let me sleep?”

Pekkala barely seemed to notice Kirov. He stared at the Webley, lying on the table in front of him.

“When do we leave for Moscow?” Kirov asked.

“We don’t,” replied Pekkala. He explained what had happened in the night.

“If he won’t go willingly,” said Kirov, “I have the authority to arrest him. We’ll take him to Moscow in handcuffs if we have to.”

“No,” said Pekkala. “He has been living in fear for so long now that he has forgotten how it is to live any other way. He has fastened onto the idea of his father’s gold as the only way he can protect himself. There’s no point trying to force him into changing his mind. I just need time to reason with him.”

“We need to leave now,” protested Kirov. “It’s for his own good.”

“Putting a man in handcuffs and telling him you’re doing him a favor is not going to convince him. He must go willingly or he might do something rash. He might try to escape, in which case he could get hurt, and with his hemophilia, any injury might prove life-threatening. He might even try to hurt himself. Even if we did get him to Moscow, he might refuse to accept the amnesty, in which case they would execute him just to save themselves the embarrassment.”

Kirov sighed. “Too bad we can’t uproot the whole city of Moscow and bring it here. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about transporting him.”

Pekkala stood abruptly. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said, and dashed out into the courtyard.

Kirov went to the doorway, bewildered. “What’s not a bad idea?”

Pekkala grabbed the bicycle leaning up against the wall. Tendrils of dried pond weed still clung to the spokes.

“What did I say?” Kirov asked.

“If we can’t bring him to Moscow, we can bring Moscow to him. I’ll be back in one hour,” Pekkala said, mounting the bicycle.

“Remember, that thing doesn’t have any brakes,” Kirov warned, “and the back tire is flat, as well!”

Pekkala wobbled out into the street, on his way to Kropotkin’s office. His plan was to put in a call to the Bureau of Special Operations in Moscow and instruct them to send out a platoon of guards to ensure the safety of the Tsarevich. Even if the guards left at once, he estimated that it would take several days for them to arrive. In the meantime, they would keep Alexei hidden in the Ipatiev house with as many police as Kropotkin could spare stationed outside. Pekkala would use the days between now and then to give the Tsarevich a chance to talk, and for Pekkala to regain his trust. By the time the escort arrived from Moscow, Alexei would be ready to go with them.

Pekkala pedaled as fast as he could. Without brakes, when he came to corners, he dragged his toes over the cobblestones in an attempt to slow down. Racing down narrow side streets, his senses filled with the tar-like smell of laundry soap, of ashes scraped from stove gratings and smoky tea brewed up in samovars lingering in the damp morning air. In picket-fenced gardens, he glimpsed bony stands of white birch, their coin-shaped leaves flickering silver to green and back to silver like sequins on a woman’s party dress.

He was so preoccupied that he did not notice the narrow road ended in a T. There was no chance to take the corner, or even to slow down, and there, spreading out in front of him as he emerged from the side street, was the familiar sapphire blue expanse of the duck pond.

Pekkala leaned hard on the handlebars. Jamming one heel into the ground, he skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, barely an arm’s length from the water.

When the dust settled, Pekkala saw a woman, standing among the reeds on the opposite bank of the pond. She held a large basket, which was filled with gray teardrop-shaped husks. She wore a red headscarf, a dark blue shirt rolled up to the elbows, and a brown ankle-length dress whose hem was slick with mud. The woman stared at him. She had an oval face with eyebrows darker than her streaked blond hair.

“My bicycle,” explained Pekkala. “No brakes.”

She nodded without sympathy.

There was something familiar about the woman, but Pekkala could not place her. So much for perfect memory, he thought. “Excuse me,” he asked her, “but do I know you?”

“I don’t know you,” replied the woman. She went back to picking through the reeds.

Yellow monarch butterflies flew around her, their bobbing movements like those of paper cutouts dangled from pieces of thread.

“What are you gathering?”

“Milkweed,” the woman answered.

“What for?”

“They pack it into life jackets. I get good money for this.” She held up one of the gray husks and crushed it in her fist. Feathery white seeds, light as a puff of smoke, drifted out across the water.

In that instant, he remembered her. “Katamidze!” he shouted.

Her face turned red. “What about him?”

“The photograph.” In the box of reject pictures, Pekkala had seen her just as she was now, by the side of this pond, that silver cloud like the ghostly blur of a face in the moment it was captured on film.

“That was a long time ago, and he said they were purely artistic.”

“Well, it certainly had a—” He thought about the pink splotched cheeks of the nuns. “A certain quality.”

“It wasn’t my idea to pose naked.”

Pekkala breathed in sharply. “Naked?”

“That old man Mayakovsky bought the pictures, every one of them. Then he started selling them off to the soldiers. Reds when they were here, Whites when they marched in. Mayakovsky didn’t care, as long as they paid. Maybe you bought one.”

“No.” Pekkala tried to reassure her. “I only heard about them.”

She hugged the basket to her chest. “Well, I guess everyone has heard about them.”

“You were standing right there.” Pekkala pointed at her. “Right there where you are now.”

“Oh, that picture.” She lowered the basket again. “I remember now. He said he wasn’t happy with it.”

“How well did you know Katamidze?”

“I knew him,” she began, “but not the way people say I did. He’s gone, you know. He doesn’t live here anymore. He lost his mind. That night he went to photograph the Tsar. He said he saw them slaughtered right before his eyes. I found him hiding in his attic, talking some gibberish about how he’d come face-to-face with the Devil.”

“Have you told this to anyone else?”

“When the Whites were here, they came to my house. But by then Mayakovsky had sold them some pictures. I never told them I’d seen Katamidze that night, and they never asked me about it. All they wanted to know was where they could get some more photos.”

“What happened to Katamidze after you found him in the attic?”

“He was in a bad state. I told him I would send for a doctor. But before I could do anything to help him, he ran out of the house. He never came back. A couple of years later, I heard that he had ended up in prison.”

“This person he came face-to-face with…”

“Katamidze said he was a beast on two legs.”

“But a name. Did Katamidze hear a name?”

“He said that when the Tsar saw this man, he called out a word. Then they got into an argument, but Katamidze didn’t know what it was about.”

“What word did the Tsar call out?”

“Nothing that made any sense. Rodek. Or Godek. Or something.”

Pekkala felt suddenly cold. “Grodek?”

“That’s it,” said the woman, “and then the shooting started.”

A suffocating weight bore upon Pekkala. With his pulse thumping in his neck, he rode back to the Ipatiev house, arriving in the courtyard just as Anton carried out a handful of dishes to wash at the pump. He had taken off his tunic. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up and his suspenders stretched across his shoulders.

As Anton cranked the squeaky iron pump handle, a gush of water spilled out on the cobblestones, bright as mercury in the night. He sat on an upturned bucket and began to scrub the dishes with an old brush, its bristles splayed out like the petals of a sunflower. He glanced up just in time to see his brother bearing down on him. But it was too late. Pekkala towered over Anton, his face contorted with anger.

“What’s the matter with you?” Anton asked.

“Grodek,” snarled Pekkala.

Anton’s face turned suddenly pale. “What?”

Pekkala lunged at him, grabbing Anton by his shirt collar. “Why didn’t you tell me it was Grodek who murdered the Tsar?”

The dish slipped from Anton’s hands. It shattered on the stones. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You send me to look for a murderer and all the while you know exactly who it is. I don’t care how much you hate me, you still owe me an explanation.”

For a moment, Anton’s face remained a mask of surprise. He seemed about to deny everything. Then, suddenly, he faltered. With the mention of that name, a scaffolding of lies collapsed inside him. The mask he had been wearing fell away. In its place was only fear and resignation. “I told you we should have left.”

“That is not an answer!” Pekkala shook his brother.

Anton did not resist. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“Sorry?” Pekkala let go of his brother and stood back. “Anton, what have you done?”

Wearily, the older man shook his head. “I would never have dragged you into this if I had known about our father sending you to join the Finnish Regiment. All this time I thought it was you who made that choice. I have spent years hating you for something that wasn’t your fault. I wish I could go back and change things. But I can’t.”

“I thought Grodek was in prison. He was supposed to be in there for life.”

Anton stared down at the cobblestones. All his energy seemed to have gone out of him. “When the Petrograd police barracks were stormed, back in 1917, the rioters burnt all the records. Nobody knew who was in jail for what, so when they took over the prison later that same day, they decided to release all the prisoners. As soon as Grodek got out, he joined the Revolutionary Guard. Eventually, he was recruited by the Cheka. When he heard that a group of Cheka were being assigned to guard the Romanovs, he volunteered for the job. I only found out who he was when we arrived here in Sverdlovsk. I had never met him before then.”